Our goal for the academic planning process is to engage the Wesleyan community in a thoughtful consideration of the challenges we will face in the 21st Century, on a timetable that will inform decisions on priorities for the coming comprehensive campaign. President Bennet inaugurated the planning process in the Fall of 1995, asking faculty, staff, students, and alumni to write two-page papers containing ideas and proposals. Sixty-seven persons wrote essays, which were debated at a Retreat, December 13-14, 1995, attended by 36 faculty, students, trustees, and administrators.

In January a planning group commissioned a set of longer essays that have built on the ideas advanced in the short papers and at the Retreat. Twenty-six faculty and administrators have written essays thus far, and a few more are nearing completion. The essays are at their best in articulating the spirit of the liberal arts and in defining Wesleyan's distinctiveness among our elite competitors. Every essay shows pride in our achievements and commitment to future excellence. The essays are more cautious and circumspect, however, in forecasting the impact of changes in technology, demography, and the global economy on selective liberal arts colleges. Our mission for the Fall semester, therefore, will be to focus campus debate on the strategic implications of the essays for the next quarter-century.

To that end we created a planning group composed of the academic deans (David Beveridge, Alex Dupuy, and Leo Lensing, since succeeded by Michael Roberts) and the faculty chair and vice chair (Ann Wightman and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak) and Richard Boyd. We have scheduled five open meetings of faculty, students, and staff to discuss critical issues raised by the essays. We call these open meetings the Wesleyan Forum. President Bennet will be Convener at all of the meetings, and he will be the Discussant as well at the initial meeting, September 17, which will raise the major questions we must address. The next three sessions are entitled Learning Essential Skills; The Nature and Structure of Knowledge, and the Implications for Departments, Disciplines, and Interdisciplinary Programs; and Wesleyan in the 21st Century: New Challenges, Technologies, Facilities. The fifth session, "Conclusions, Assessment, and Priorities," is scheduled November 12. We will then move into a stage of an intensive assessment, drawing out the lessons we have learned and their implications for other major initiatives, including strategic planning on facilities and communication.

A full schedule of the Forum is available through this web site. You may also access the essays themselves, for reading or downloading, only if you access this website from a computer connected to Wesleyan's network or if you have the proper username and password supplied to you by Wesleyan. You may also send E-mail to us at the Office of Academic Affairs or to the authors of the essays by clicking on the proper button on this web page. Please understand that the authors are not obligated to reply.