II. ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

A. Strengthen the Essential Capabilities

In 1997, Wesleyan's faculty declared that "the task of a liberal education is to instill a capacity for critical and creative thinking that can address unfamiliar and changing circumstances, to engender a moral sensibility that can weigh consequences beyond the self, and to establish an enduring love of learning for its own sake that will enable graduates to refresh their education throughout their lives."

Wesleyan students encounter this educational vision from the day they arrive on campus. They are not just taught, but are engaged by scholar-teachers who expose them to new thinking and develop their talents and proficiencies. The students build an individualized program of study that includes general education expectations in the humanities and the arts, the social and behavioral sciences, and the natural sciences and mathematics, as well as focused studies in majors with strict requirements for completion in the last two years of each student's education. In addition to these conventional approaches to education, the Wesleyan faculty have also organized the curriculum according to "essential capabilities."

In contrast to the general education expectations, which are content-based and focus on broad but discrete areas of knowledge, the essential capabilities are skill-based and generally interdisciplinary. Some, such as critical thinking, are pervasive in our courses and therefore do not lend themselves to particular course labeling. Others, such as reading, which are nearly so, are embedded in other capabilities, such as writing or information literacy. Almost all of the essential capabilities, even those that seem most content based, such as quantitative or ethical reasoning, may be honed in courses that span the curriculum. The former, for example, may be sharpened in courses in mathematics, government, architecture, or music. The latter may be deepened by taking courses in philosophy, literature or biology. Some, such as intercultural literacy, can be pursued in clusters of courses in fields such as anthropology, history, or environmental studies. And yet others, such as the capacity for effective citizenship, may be developed not only in the classroom but also through participation in Wesleyan's highly interactive community and student government. The last two capabilities are particularly important in helping our students learn how to engage diversity in all of its cultural forms, both in the classroom and outside. Most important, taken as a whole and applied to curricular choices, the capabilities enable students to develop a coherent program of study that maximizes their opportunities to fulfill the tasks of a liberal education. (See p. 24 for a list of the capabilities and their definitions.)

Our goal is to employ the capabilities more effectively to strengthen advising, course selection, and curricular planning, as well as to attract students and faculty to Wesleyan. The intent is to insure that the capabilities are a central feature in how students understand their undergraduate education and how curricula respond and remain relevant to a changing world. We have already taken steps in that direction by including a key capabilities report in students' portfolios. We are confident that the remainder of the evolving implementation plan will be creative and transformative.

B. Prepare our Students to Be Engaged in a Global Society

Engagement with the world can take many forms, from international study and increasing the internationalization of the curriculum, the student body and the faculty to volunteer activities and service learning in Middletown.

For many years, Wesleyan has been successfully supporting international studies and intercultural literacy, whether dealing with different cultures outside of the U.S. or within it. We already have in place considerable resources to link students to the world and to teach them to think globally as well as interculturally. The diversity of Wesleyan's student body and our faculty, who come from many ethnic and religious groups and nationalities, is an indispensable asset in this regard. Approximately half of our graduate students are international students whose interactions with undergraduates in the classroom as well as outside enrich the international perspective of our students, faculty, and staff. Our undergraduates include the Freeman Scholars, eighty-eight East Asian students who come to Wesleyan for a full four years, as well as other students who are here from other parts of the world. Faculty members also bring an international perspective to a Wesleyan education, not only because many of them are from or have spent many years in other countries, but because in this age of instant communication and rapid travel, their research is often done as part of international teams whose work is discussed in the classroom.

Study abroad, which enables our students to learn by living in cultures that are different from their own, is another means to strengthen internationalization. At no time has such experience been more important. Our study abroad program is an important contribution to students' education and a great success. Nearly half of our students study abroad -- a larger percentage than most of our peers. And they are spread through more geographically and linguistically diverse parts of the world than are students at peer institutions. Our students are bolder in their willingness to explore the most unfamiliar places in the world.

Upon their return, many of our students apply their newly-acquired knowledge in courses and senior theses that use the foreign languages they have learned. Yet more can and will be done to integrate study abroad with studies at Wesleyan and to facilitate study abroad, especially among science majors and students who believe they may not be able to afford this opportunity. More can also be done to expand internship and service-learning opportunities abroad. The director of international studies will continue to address these issues and to further strengthen the transition of students before they depart and after they return.

Another way to deepen internationalization at Wesleyan would be to increase the number of international undergraduates on campus. Currently international students make up about six percent of Wesleyan undergraduates and 50 percent of Wesleyan graduate students. The financial cost of substantially increasing the proportion of international undergraduates, however, would be considerable, and would limit the opportunity to aid a significantly larger number of other students. Scholarships for a small number of international students, however, may be an attractive opportunity for donors and therefore remains on our priority list.

A lower cost alternative for enhancing internationalization would be to bring to Wesleyan for one-year visits a scholar/teacher from a democratizing country and two of his or her undergraduate students. Such visits would enrich the perspectives of our students and faculty, and potentially help spread democratic values among the next generation of leaders in key countries.

Perhaps the most important way for our students to develop a global perspective and greater intercultural literacy is through their program of studies on campus. Here again, Wesleyan is already well positioned. Our curriculum is rich in courses that help our students to think globally and comparatively, to study other societies in depth, and to learn a second (or third) language – a capability that is central to understanding other cultures. Such courses are an important component of a Wesleyan education and our students are already attracted to them in large numbers. As we implement the updated capabilities, we will identify and highlight these courses so students may enroll in them with greater self-awareness about their role in developing a global and intercultural perspective.

Just as immersion in another culture allows students to broaden their understanding of the world, testing their knowledge through the prism of experience in local settings also enables them to engage with the world close to home. One way to do this is through the newly-founded Service-Learning Center. Giving service to the community through volunteer activities and internships has long been a part of the Wesleyan tradition. What is new about service learning is that it uses these activities as part of a planned curriculum to deepen the student's knowledge of a field of study and capacity for critical thinking. Service-learning opportunities enable our students to link theoretical and applied studies. Most of these studies now take place in nearby communities, but in the future, they could include projects elsewhere in the nation or abroad. To provide a long-term and secure foundation for these activities and to expand these opportunities, we seek an endowment for the new center.

C. Increase Student Participation in Sciences and Build Science Facilities to Accommodate New Needs

The importance of scientific knowledge for developing the leaders and effective global citizens of the 21st century cannot be overstated. In the world our students will inherit, science has emerged as the new lingua franca of economic, political, and military competition.

One of the great strengths of liberal arts institutions is that they attract students with broad interests and help them gain a stronger understanding of the connections between different areas of knowledge. The sciences must be an integral part of this education for several reasons. Scientists approach knowledge in different ways than do artists, humanists, and social scientists. In addition, solutions to some of the world's great problems will require both scientific knowledge and the ability to synthesize that knowledge with other ways of knowing. While some of our students want to pursue scientific studies because they are of primary interest to them, all of our students should acquire a level of scientific knowledge and an awareness of the political, economic, and social policy implications of scientific developments to enable them to make informed and responsible judgments about important issues facing society.

The emphasis of liberal arts colleges on critical learning and gaining a broad education makes them particularly well suited to educating the next generation of scientists. Indeed, they have played a much greater role in the education of scientists than most people realize. While eight percent of students in four-year institutions of higher education are in baccalaureate colleges, liberal arts college graduates comprise 17 percent of the PhDs in sciences. The proportion of scientists who were educated in liberal arts colleges is also way out of proportion to the size and selectivity of these institutions. As the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Thomas Cech, points out, the reasons for this success are linked to the opportunities of liberal arts college students to do more independent research than undergraduates at large research universities, the small scale of these institutions, which facilitates closer interaction with faculty, and the broadening experience of the liberal arts environment, which by stressing "cross-training" in different fields, enhances students' intellectual agility, imaginative capacities, and ability to synthesize different types of knowledge.

Among liberal arts colleges, Wesleyan is already a strong leader in the sciences. We have by far the best science and math faculty among our peers, as measured by their publications, their frequency of citations, and the amount of funded research. Data compiled by the National Science Foundation show that Wesleyan ranks first, even when adjusted for size of the faculty, in federal research funds awarded to support scientific research among the nation's top Liberal Arts Colleges. Our small graduate programs in the sciences make it possible for our faculty to pursue sponsored research and to help undergraduates engage in more complex lab and field research than do undergraduates at peer institutions. And nationally we rank among the top liberal arts institutions in the proportion of science students going on to earn doctoral degrees, including M.D.'s, in scientific fields each year.

The indices of excellence just cited should help us attract and retain more students in the sciences and mathematics. The Dean and the faculty of that division are working with the admission and communications offices on a strategy to make these disciplines more visible to prospective students. Wesleyan's recent admission materials feature student research opportunities in the sciences, campus visits now feature science more prominently, and the communications office is publicizing our faculty and students success in scientific research more widely.

We have also implemented initiatives to keep more students focused on the sciences; for example, we have introduced improvements in the quality and range of general education and introductory courses and we have introduced new courses that bridge the sciences to the social sciences and humanities. These courses, in fields such as environmental studies and bioinformatics, which are cross-disciplinary in the broadest sense, are opening the doors of science to non-science students in sophisticated ways without compromising rigor. The number of these courses has increased significantly and we plan to continue this trajectory in the future.

Our success in attracting and retaining more students in the sciences will have important implications for the future. While we do not yet know the upper limit of our ability to do so, we have modeled our capacity to absorb a 50 percent increase in the proportion of science and math students. Our conclusion is that on the whole, we should be able to staff this increase with our current science faculty.

A significant increase in science majors will necessarily affect the scope of our planned life-science building and our ability to sustain the research and teaching enterprise we value. One of our current science buildings, Hall-Atwater, is nearing the end of its useful life. The building does not support new ways of doing science and major maintenance is becoming increasingly expensive and hard to justify. We propose to plan a facility that will accommodate a 50 percent increase in science majors and a 20 percent increase in science enrollments by non-majors. An investment in new science facilities is necessary to support student learning and sustain the current level of faculty research productivity for the longer term. Without a new building, which will accommodate the science activities that are taking place in the 21st century, we will simply be unable to recruit new science faculty and the research of our current faculty will come to a standstill.

D. Use Advising to Strengthen Curricular Goals

To ensure that we take full advantage of Wesleyan's broad and rich curriculum to meet the academic needs of our students, we have put in place a comprehensive system of academic advising for pre-majors and majors. This system is designed to offer each student a sustained relationship with a faculty member as well as to help that student navigate the curriculum, choose courses that will help the student gain critical capabilities and knowledge, and to select a major area of study. We have made many strides in recent years by enhancing the tools we provide advisors and matching students with advisors from whom they will either take a first-year course or with whom they share intellectual interests. Satisfaction with advising of pre-majors, however, has not reached the level that we would like. We are committed to exploring new opportunities to channel the faculty's and the students' dedication to advising into more productive advising relationships and to put in place long term strategies that prove successful.

E. Improve Curricular Choices and Enhance Faculty Resources

Our curricular renewal initiatives will mean little if our students' curricular choices are unduly constrained. To stay current in newly emerging fields and improve course access, we added 20 positions to the faculty and improved course registration and scheduling. We will continue to assign open faculty lines to high-demand areas, though in developing the curriculum, student demand is only one of several criteria, among them the centrality of a field, the emergence of new fields, and the strength of interdisciplinary connections. These are all the tools at our disposal with current resources to improve course access.

Looking to the future, increasing enrollments and majors in the sciences, which are relatively underutilized, will help reduce the pressure on non-science courses, particularly in the social sciences. Yet several non-science fields are likely to experience increased demand from course choices made by science students. Moreover, the overall shifts in demand will not have a large impact on the fields with highest demand; they are also likely to occur gradually over the next five to seven years; and they will not change the overall ratio of students to faculty, which contributes to course access problems and which shows us at a competitive disadvantage in relation to our peers.

While making the best use of current resources, we anticipate that we will have to add a small number of faculty, particularly in the social sciences, including psychology. The departments with the heaviest unmet demand are psychology, government, and sociology. Our data indicate that neither improved use of current academic resources nor viable reallocations will have sufficient impact to solve the problem. An increase of faculty by approximately eight positions, targeted to a small number of particular fields, will have an impact that will be much larger than a small increase suggests. Such an increase would bring us in line with our peers and would help improve our national rankings in several key areas. Above all, an increase in the size of the faculty would help us enhance students' curricular choices.

F. Add Infrastructure to Support Learning, Teaching and Scholarship

Provide Academic Resources to Support Today's Students

At Wesleyan, as at our peer institutions, there have been significant changes in how students learn. Our students arrive with more technological experience than the previous generation. Not only do they expect to use technology while at work and play, their learning habits have been formed while searching the Web and traveling through cyberspace. In addition, today's students grew up in an environment where a wide range of emotional problems and learning disabilities are diagnosed and individual accommodations prescribed. Taken together, these factors present challenges to our faculty in the classroom and our academic services outside the classroom.

In support of teaching, we have renovated every Wesleyan classroom over the past six years to provide up-to-date technology for teaching. We have Web Tech (trained student support staff) and Learning Object programs (digital resources that support learning) to aid faculty who wish to incorporate new technology into their teaching. Beyond technology, the Fund for Innovation provides generous support for pedagogical innovations and the Center for Faculty Career Development sponsors many activities in support of pedagogy.

Outside of the classroom, Wesleyan also provides a range of academic services to students. The Writing Programs and the Math Workshop are two examples in critical areas. The peer tutoring program is another, as are academic support services for students with learning disabilities and ESL services for non-native speakers. Several programs, such as the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program and the Health Professions Partnership Initiative, are grant-funded and target specific groups, generally underrepresented students. Wesleyan should continue to participate in these programs and seek other grant opportunities, including funding for the McNair Program.

The services of the Student Academic Resources office, such as the writing and math workshops, are for academic enrichment and are not viewed as remedial resources. The staff of the Dean of the College will continue to connect these services to academic events on campus where students can enhance their intellectual pursuits outside of the classroom.

The Dean of the College is working to bring these services together and to have them report to and communicate with offices where they will be most effective. Our goal is to ensure that students know about these services and are encouraged to seek help when appropriate, to share information among the services to support students with multiple needs, and to provide high quality and efficient academic support.

Because in the coming year we will further improve the coordination among these services, it is too soon to tell what additional resources are needed. We do know, however, that the position of Dean of Student Academic Resources is critical in the re-organized Office of the Dean of the College, but it is not yet funded. This is the first and most immediate priority in the Office of the Dean of the College.

Capitalize on Successful Library and ITS Collaboration to Improve Information Literacy Services

Technology over the last fifteen years has revolutionized both the way we access knowledge and the knowledge that is available to us. These developments affect every aspect of our research and teaching lives. "Information literacy" is the term for the knowledge that is now required for the acquisition and evaluation of information. Such literacy is essential to remain a well informed person in the 21st century.

Our library and technology services and our consortial partners at Trinity College and Connecticut College have been working together to improve information literacy among our students and research support for our faculty. We are particularly fortunate in having an outstanding team that can deal with these issues in a creative and integrated way. Their initiatives are increasingly putting us in a leadership position that enhances our academic reputation in this important area. Our goal is to continue on this trajectory.

The collaborations that we have seen among these units will have to be even closer to achieve our information literacy goals. We will have to rethink how the library is configured in physical and virtual space so that the users of the 21st century can best access accurate, comprehensive, and timely information. These are particularly urgent tasks because the cost of information has not declined as much as was once predicted and because the very proliferation of information requires from us a much more sophisticated approach to research and learning.

We have studied Wesleyan's library spaces in light of these issues and of our varied library needs. One of the results is a proposal for an "information commons" to provide an integrated environment for the users of information services. Located within the library, the information commons would be staffed by librarians and ITS professionals, working side-by-side providing reference or technology assistance to patrons. Digital content would be accessed and created in this space. The tools, services, and expertise needed to accomplish true information literacy would be located together, to serve Wesleyan faculty and students.

Implementation of some of tese plans will begin in summer 2005. Other parts will await further discussion, approval, and the availability of funds. The plan can be implemented in several stages so as to keep programmatic disruption to a minimum and to spread the costs over several years.

Enhance the Use of Technology as a Pedagogical Tool

For our students, digital technologies are as natural (and as necessary) as the air they breathe. All expect that Wesleyan will have up to date technology to support their needs and many expect that we will enhance their already sophisticated facility with technology. We have a superb Office of Information Technology Services, which has helped faculty use new electronic tools in the classroom in combination with an electronic Course Management System to change dramatically how many of them teach. We will capitalize on these strengths to facilitate the use of technology in the curriculum. We will also capitalize on it as a point of distinction for Wesleyan by finding ways to receive the national recognition we deserve in this area.

Create a Secure Foundation for the Center for Faculty Career Development

Innovative and inspired teaching and advising are essential to our success in all of our curricular and pedagogical initiatives. The work of our excellent faculty has been helped significantly by the pedagogical and scholarly workshops organized by our new Center for Faculty Career Development. Funded by a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this is a place where faculty can explore pedagogical and scholarly innovations. We plan to identify sources of continuing financing for this important academic center.