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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE ments. With the expected nationwide decline in the number of high school graduates, an outgoing tidal wave, it predicted that Gettysburg would face increasingly severe competition in recruiting the kind of students for whose benefit its academic program was designed. "The challenge of the years ahead," its authors proclaimed, "will be to increase the attractiveness of the College through improved facilities, programs, and financial position so that the College can continue to attract an able student body."134 Charles Glassick came to the presidency with the firm conviction that, along with many similar colleges, Gettysburg faced more than a decade of potentially serious problems rooted in changing demographic patterns over which it had no control. He was equally firmly convinced that Gettysburg could respond most successfully to the situation in which it found itself only by engaging in careful and continuing planning. During his first years in office he convened a fiscal projections planning committee composed of trustees, faculty, administrators, and students. Its charge was to meet periodically and, to the best of its ability, maintain a five-year projection of the College's financial position. In part as a reaction to the president's proposal that enrollment be reduced about 10 percent over a period of several years, the faculty in the fall of 1980 authorized the establishment of a faculty institutional planning committee, which during the next two and one-half years of intensive effort attempted to cover much the same ground as the planning group of twenty years earlier. While it produced no comprehensive report, the findings of its fifteen task forces became available to standing committees and others for eventual disposition. In the spring of 1983 the president established a strategic planning committee, consisting of three elected faculty members and two administrators. Its initial mission was to advise the president on matters relating to "the process of adjusting the College, including its budget, programs and personnel to changed enrollment circumstances," by which was clearly meant enrollment decline.135 In January 1985 Glassick decided that conditions now warranted stating the task of the committee in more positive terms: to recommend "specific actions to be taken to advance the institution toward 134Decade of Achievement: Gettysburg College (1960-1970J, a bulletin issue published in May 1971, can be used together with the 1977 publication as a convenient summary of many aspects of the Arnold Hanson administration. 135In lune 1981 the president named a committee consisting of two trustees, two faculty, and two administrators to draw upon existing documents "to summarize the present and short-term future goals of the institution" in order to prepare an interim planning guide to be used until such time as a more inclusive replacement for the 1972-1982 document could be devised. The statement of purpose which this committee drafted gained faculty and board approval later in the year. Reflecting upon the earlier document in the mid-1980s, President Glassick concluded that it had been a sound and useful guide to him during the first five years of his presidency. 86