The new Board Chair has replaced working groups with task forces, each of which is charged to make recommendations on a particular issue. When the task force makes its recommendations, the task force disbands. Four task forces are currently at work: Core Messaging, Campus Planning, Futures, and Enhancing the Distinctive Educational Experience. Members are appointed by the Board Chair and, depending on the issue and expertise required, may include faculty, staff or students. An important part of the task force’s responsibility is to engage key stakeholders to generate buy‐in, especially when the issue being addressed affects people deeply or impacts a significant percentage of the University’s constituencies. The Governance Committee of the Board continues to focus on developing the pipeline for new trustees.
In Cabinet there have been two organizational changes: the Chair of the Faculty and the Chief Communications Officer now both sit on Cabinet. These changes contribute to awareness of and responsiveness to the concerns and needs of faculty and other constituencies as well as transparency in decision-making at the highest level.
The president is no longer the arbiter of student appeals regarding disciplinary matters. That responsibility was proving quite time-consuming and now rests with a small committee (as advocated by the Wesleyan Student Association) that is chaired by the Vice President for Student Affairs.
Policies and procedures regarding faculty governance are outlined in the Faculty Handbook, which is being reviewed this year. Academic Affairs engaged an emeritus faculty member who had been involved in the last round of significant changes to the faculty governance structure to conduct this review and propose edits to ensure that this document clearly and accurately reflects current policies and procedures. The Faculty Handbook is available online on the Info from the VPAA webpage (http://wesleyan.edu/acaf/vpaa.html). The Info from the VPAA webpage also includes links to a number of other important resources including the current faculty search guidelines, tenure and promotion expectation statements from each department, explanations of the various types of non-tenure-track appointments, and other useful internal documents.
With respect to student governance, the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) has been restructured in several ways since 2012. Some are operational: in lieu of a Coordinator, the WSA now has a Chief of Staff with broader responsibility and now refers to the Executive Committee as the Leadership Board. And its committees were restructured: now there are the Student Life Committee, Academic Affairs Committee, Community and Communications Committee, and Student Budget Committee.
The WSA also restructured to make itself, as a body, more accessible and to center issues of equity and inclusion in its work. To achieve those ends, the Assembly became bicameral: the Senate, which follows the same structure as the WSA always has, and a newly formed House, which intentionally brings in members of the community for issue-based work and projects. The House works through town halls and online organizing. With lower barriers to entry, it aims to make the work of the Assembly easier to engage in for more members of campus. Furthermore, the WSA rolled out a stipend for Senators receiving financial aid to offset the time cost of participation and gain an assembly that more accurately reflects Wesleyan’s diverse student body.
These changes were implemented throughout the 2015-2016 school year and continue to be implemented in the current school year. As such, it is too early to estimate how the changes have impacted the culture and efficacy of the Assembly. The WSA has started to collect data that measures the Assembly’s composition and the impact of its efforts.