But truly revolutionary ideas require time for reflection, and the Plan has left little extra time for such strategic thinking. Now, though, as the end of the millennium and the 30th anniversary of the Plan's passage approach, WPI believes the time has come to make the time to critically appraise its undergraduate program and to decide whether it will meet the needs of the students of tomorrow as well as it serves the students of today. Already, a large group of faculty members, administrators and students have devoted hundreds of hours to developing a strategic plan to guide WPI well into the 21st century. They have looked at what has been learned, what has been gained, and what has been lost in the last few decades of WPI's history, and have extracted from these lessons the beginning of a vision for the decades ahead. But the process has just begun.
Much work remains.
No doubt, there are battles yet to be waged, time, funds and effort far beyond the accounting yet to be expended, and new heroes yet to be discovered. If history is any guide, WPI will emerge from this process a better institution. It will sit, perhaps a bit more solidly, atop Boynton Hill, and reach, no doubt with a bit more surety and grace, toward the sky. And it will do so, for more than any other reason, because there are still enough people who care.