The current draft of Wesleyan’s NEASC interim report is available for faculty, student, and staff comment through Monday, May 1, 2017. Please use the links on the right to read the draft of each section, then leave comments at the end of any page. Note that there are comments throughout the report where we remind ourselves of data that we will update closer to the actual submission date and there are graphs and charts still to be inserted.
Thank you.
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Institutional Overview
Wesleyan University, founded in 1831, strives to offer its undergraduates a liberal arts education characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. Faculty, staff, and students contribute to a campus atmosphere in which scholarly and artistic achievement is celebrated, differences are welcomed, and intellectual risk-taking is encouraged. The academic community is marked by a high degree of flexibility, combining a strong commitment to disciplinary study with interest in the non-traditional and cross-disciplinary. The presence in a close-knit setting of scholars at all stages of development–including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and a steady stream of short- and long-term visitors–offers undergraduate students a distinctive opportunity to engage in purposeful intellectual discourse and to direct their interests and talents toward the exploration of new ideas and the achievement of defined goals. Wesleyan has long sought to guide but not prescribe the undergraduate experience, in the belief that ownership of one’s own educational journey is the best preparation for the future. Co-curricular activities are part of that journey. Dedicated faculty coaches encourage scholar-athletes to develop their skills and themselves and to benefit from the lessons learned from perseverance and teamwork. The arts are treated here as powerful ways of seeing and knowing the world, and the culture that students make themselves has a vibrancy that energizes the Wesleyan experience for all University stakeholders.
As the current Director of Graduate Studies, I am generally quite pleased with Section I.
I have the following comments:
1] It seems reasonable that the Director of Graduate Student Services, Cheryl-Ann Hagner should be emphasized as a considerable asset to the graduate program. She and her assistant handle all the administrative duties for the academic MA, PhD and BA/MA programs (GLS and the MA in Performance Curation are organized separately and should remain so). In addition, Cheryl acts much like an undergraduate Class Dean, and is an essential resource for our graduate students.
2] The creation of three ‘floating’ stipends by taking them from Chemistry could be better explained. The best view of that Administrative act is to emphasize the fact that there was a spike of retirement among the Chemistry faculty, and thus a temporary imbalance of stipends/FTE. Even if it is not mentioned here, theAdministration should not forget that as Chemistry replaces the retired faculty, pressure on the stipend limits will increase.