Standard One: Mission and Purpose
Description
In May 2010, Wesleyan University’s Board of Trustees approved a formal statement of the school’s mission and a planning framework, Wesleyan 2020, for carrying this mission forward in the new century. The University’s Mission Statement – drafted in 2009 with input from faculty, staff, and students – reads as follows:
Wesleyan University is dedicated to providing an education in the liberal arts that is characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. At Wesleyan, distinguished scholar-teachers work closely with students, taking advantage of fluidity among disciplines to explore the world with a variety of tools. The University seeks to build a diverse, energetic community of students, faculty, and staff who think critically and creatively and who value independence of mind and generosity of spirit.
The University’s purposes are reflected in its “scholar-teacher” model, open curriculum, and admission policy.
Wesleyan’s scholar-teacher model is based on the premise that a robust liberal arts education is most effectively provided by instructors who actively contribute to the state of knowledge and practice in their respective fields. This scholarly engagement is understood to promote students’ appreciation of intellectual rigor and the processes that yield new insights, ideas, and expressions, while ensuring that academic curricula respond dynamically to new developments in methods and directions of inquiry and performance. Conversely, the model posits that the fresh perspectives provided by close interaction with undergraduates can lead to new avenues of inquiry and expression. To support its faculty’s complementary pursuits of scholarly engagement and effective undergraduate teaching, the University provides relatively light teaching loads, a generous sabbatical policy, and a program of grants in support of scholarship and pedagogical innovation. In the sciences, graduate programs facilitate the conduct of high-level laboratory-based research that further bolsters the connection between scholarship and undergraduate education.
Wesleyan’s open curriculum replaces traditional curricular “distribution requirements” with “general educational expectations,” allowing students to take an active role in constructing their own academic programs while encouraging them to pursue a suitably broad-based liberal arts education. In making their course selections with the guidance of faculty and peer advisors, students are expected to take at least three courses from at least two different departments in the respective areas of humanities and arts (HA), social and behavioral sciences (SBS), and natural sciences and mathematics (NSM). While fulfilling these expectations is not required for graduation from Wesleyan, some majors and some honors (such as election to Phi Beta Kappa) require their completion.
Finally, the University’s admissions and financial aid policies are designed to facilitate access to a Wesleyan education and promote diversity within the student body.i The University seeks students who have genuine intellectual curiosity, the ability to succeed in a rigorous and well-rounded academic program, and concern for the larger community. Qualities such as a willingness to take intellectual risks, to push boundaries, and to move among remarkably varied communities are particularly sought in the admission process. Once students are accepted for admission, their full financial need is met by the University through a combination of grants, work-study support, and often loans.
Since its adoption in May 2010, Wesleyan 2020 has provided a framework for assessing how Wesleyan has marshaled resources in support of its mission, and in particular for thinking about ways in which the mission can be significantly advanced in the years to come. For example, the University curriculum has been enriched by the launching of the College of the Environment, the Center for the Humanities is being endowed, and students will be given more opportunities for putting their ideals into practice under the auspices of the nascent Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship.ii
Appraisal
Although Wesleyan did not adopt an official statementiii of its mission until 2010, the University has never lacked a sense of mission and purpose. In his 1831 inaugural address, Wesleyan’s first president, Willbur Fisk, insisted that “education should be directed with reference to two objects, the good of the individual and the good of the world.” Fisk argued for two principles that anticipated the University’s present-day commitments: a broad, non-traditional curriculum and an emphasis on students playing an active role in their own education.
Wesleyan’s 11th president, Victor Butterfield (1943–1967), oversaw the implementation of a bold vision of Wesleyan’s future that led to the creation of its first cross-disciplinary colleges and centers, and developed the scholar-teacher model by introducing graduate programs in science and ethnomusicology. In describing Wesleyan’s approach to liberal arts education, Butterfield first invoked “practical idealism,” a term conjoining seeming contradictories, to describe how students might engage ideas in ways that lead to consequential actions when they take their places in the world.
The present mission statement builds on Butterfield’s call for “practical idealism” while recognizing other key institutional values such as intellectual boldness and rigor, student and faculty diversity, independence of mind and generosity of spirit. And in Wesleyan 2020, Wesleyan’s current president, Michael Roth, reaffirms Wesleyan’s commitment to “Butterfield’s vision of a university in which professors are expected to advance their fields through research, publication, and performance, and in which teaching regularly stimulates this productivity,” as well as to his vision of cross-disciplinary inquiry.
Challenges facing Wesleyan in pursuit of its mission include reconciling: (1) the intellectual independence and focus fostered by Wesleyan’s scholar-teacher model with the goal of ensuring that students receive a coherent and comprehensive education in the liberal arts; (2) the need to offer traditional and still vibrant modes of inquiry with the desire to provide new academic offerings that respond to contemporary innovations and concerns; and (3) the resource demands of Wesleyan’s admissions and financial aid policies and the scholar-teacher model with the long-term financial sustainability of the University. As will be discussed in subsequent standards, aspects of these challenges were noted in Wesleyan’s previous self-study, and some progress has been made in addressing them. For example, with respect to the first challenge, departments and programs were asked to provide statements of how they assessed what students learned in their majors, and a pilot program for evaluating the quality of faculty advising was initiated. With respect to the third challenge, the University has made some progress by cutting costs and increasing revenues so as to make it possible to rely less on annual giving and endowment support to fund current operating expenditures. Wesleyan 2020 seeks to build on this progress by focusing the University’s priorities going forward.
Projection
As Wesleyan’s mission statement and the current framework for planning, Wesleyan 2020, were launched together in 2010, it is too early to say how the latter has guided and informed the University’s implementation of the former. Some important initiatives have been realized, such as the College of the Environment, the Allbritton Center for Public Life, and the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. In addition, the University has taken important steps toward increasing the sustainability of its budgetary commitments. But many of the responses to the three challenges noted above are still unfolding, and will need to be reassessed from a subsequent vantage point.
Institutional Effectiveness
Over the years Wesleyan had often described its mission and purposes: for instance, in the introduction to President Bennet’s 1997 paper Wesleyan Education for the 21st Century or implicitly through the list of Essential Capabilities the University has sought to foster. But these did not serve as an official, concise statement designated as Wesleyan's “Mission Statement.” The current mission statement may not yet be widely internalized due to its recent adoption, but it is clearly consonant with Wesleyan traditions.
ii Wesleyan’s colleges and academic centers are so much a part of its identity that they deserve some notice in this standard. They feature collaborative interactions among departments and disciplines that allow students and faculty to discover common grounds among formally distinct fields and methods of inquiry and chart new avenues of intellectual exploration that transcend traditional boundaries. The University played a pioneering role in establishing the cross-disciplinary College of Letters and College of Social Studies in the late 1950s, and has recently expanded its roster of colleges-within-the-college by the creation in 2010 of the College of the Environment (COE). The John E. Andrus Center for Public Affairs (typically shortened to the Public Affairs Center or PAC), founded in the mid-1950s, provided a building and a governance structure to house and promote cooperative efforts among the departments of Economics, Government, History, and Sociology, along with the CSS. The PAC was joined in 1959 by the Center for the Humanities, then by the Center for the Arts, and most recently by the Albritton Center for the Study of Public Life.
Other centers established at Wesleyan serve as the academic homes of specific multi-disciplinary majors or programs, such as the Center for African-American Studies, the Center of the Americas, and the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, or provide platforms for developing specific cross-disciplinary skills and experiences, such as the Quantitative Analysis Center, the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and the Service Learning Center.