e. Standard Four – The Academic Program – Accreditation 2022 (2024)

Draft submitted by Standard 4 Committee: Sheryl Culotta (chair), Gloster Aaron, Andrea Patalano, Nicole Stanton, Anna van der Burg, Michael Whitcomb, Andrew White

Standard Four: The institution’s academic programs are consistent with and serve to fulfill its mission and purposes. The institution works systematically and effectively to plan, provide, oversee, evaluate, improve, and assure the academic quality and integrity of its academic programs and the credits and degrees awarded. The institution sets a standard of student achievement appropriate to the degree or certificate awarded and develops the systematic means to understand how and what students are learning and to use the evidence obtained to improve the academic program.

OVERVIEW

When students direct their own education, in consultation with intensively engaged faculty advisors, they learn to think independently, explore questions from multiple points of view, and develop habits of critical thinking that are hallmarks of a liberal education. Wesleyan upholds the principle that student choice fosters the drive to explore freely and seek connections across courses, generating the intellectual excitement that can fuel liberal education as a lifelong pursuit. Wesleyan espouses an open curriculum, admitting students who are poised to thrive in a flexible environment, who are intensely motivated to study broadly and deeply, and who push themselves and their peers to excel beyond what they may have thought possible.

The Wesleyan curriculum challenges students to create their own educational plan. Academic coherence does not rely on a core curriculum or a set of required courses; instead, students propose their academic plan to their faculty advisors and recalibrate it with their advisors each semester as their discoveries lead them to pursue new areas or deepen existing strengths. With the freedom to sample liberally from across the curriculum, students are able to experience the surprise of unexpected ability in fields new to them and to make fruitful connections across subject areas that do not traditionally intersect. This can generate innovative depth of study and new ways of seeing – with students posing questions from one discipline to the assumptions of another.

Our open curriculum proves to be both an asset and a challenge. As an asset, Wesleyan offers a broad range of courses and encourages our students to expand their academic interests through exploration. Because Wesleyan does not have a prescribed core curriculum or distribution requirement this remains a challenge for pre-major advising and for predicting course demand. In the coming year Academic Affairs will collaborate with Student Affairs and Office of Equity and Inclusion to provide additional advising support for pre-majors as we continue to explore ways to balance our course offering with student demand.

DESCRIPTION

Undergraduate Programs

BA degree: Wesleyan University offers 47 majors, 33 minors, and 3 certificate programs in the BA program for an undergraduate population of approximately 3,200 Students.

There are four requirements students must meet to receive the B.A. degree: (1) completion of requirements for a major; (2) completion of 32 course credits, no fewer than 16 of which must be earned at Wesleyan or in Wesleyan-sponsored programs; (3) a cumulative grade average of 74 percent or work of equivalent quality; and (4) at least six semesters in residence at Wesleyan (this is for full-time students for students entering in their first year; students entering as sophom*ore transfers must have at least five semesters in residence at Wesleyan as full-time students; and students entering as midyear sophom*ores or junior transfers must have at least four semesters in residence at Wesleyan as full-time students).

A semester in residence is defined as any semester in which a student (1) attends classes on the Wesleyan campus (during the pandemic, the definition of “on campus” included any Wesleyan courses including those offered remotely), (2) has attempted at least three credits, and (3) received at least one grade.

In fall 2021, there were 3,233 BA students enrolled on campus who hail from 48 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam, and 55 foreign countries. Thirteen percent of BA students are first generation college students and 15% receive Federal Pell grants. Just over half of all BA students are women (56%; 44% men). International students comprise 10.6% of the student body and 31% of all domestic students identify as students of color: 10.6% Latino or Hispanic; 7.9% Asian or Asian American; 7.0% two or more races; 5.3% Black or African American; and 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander). An additional 30 students studied abroad in fall 2021, down from around 190 each fall due to the effects of the pandemic.

BLS degree: The bachelor of liberal studies (BLS) degree was approved by EPC and the faculty in spring 2019. This new degree has four intended audiences: (1) students in our Center for Prison Education (CPE) program who have completed an AA degree through our Middlesex Community College (MxCC) partnership; (2) Wesleyan staff, and domestic partners of Wesleyan faculty and staff; (3) former Wesleyan students who for a variety of reasons were unable to complete the BA degree; and (4) other persons who are unable to commit to completing the residential BA in 8 full-time semesters but otherwise meet our admissions standards (as approved by the faculty, this category is limited to 10 new students per year to ensure that the program does not place a strain on demand for seats in classes).

The BLS provides a more flexible and affordable path to a bachelor’s degree. While students in the BLS have the option to complete one of the 47 BA majors, BLS students may also major in one of three general concentrations: (1) arts and humanities; (2) social and behavioral sciences, and (3) natural sciences and mathematics. The four requirements for completion of the BLS degree are similar to those of the BA: (1) completion of requirements for a major or concentration; (2) completion of 32 course credits, no fewer than 16 of which must be earned at Wesleyan or in Wesleyan-sponsored programs; (3) cumulative grade average of 74 percent or work of equivalent quality; and (4) at least 16 credits earned through Wesleyan courses (may include courses taken via the regular fall and spring semesters, Summer Session, Winter Session, GLS courses taken for undergraduate credit, or the Center for Prison Education).

In March 2020 NECHE approved our substantive change application requesting permission to offer the BLS degree at two new locations–Cheshire Correctional Institution and York Correctional Institution–allowing us to grant a BLS to students enrolled in the Center for Prison Education program at these two institutions. Wesleyan has offered courses through the Center for Prison Education (CPE) program since 2009 and has been in partnership with MxCC since 2016 to offer students at those institutions an AA degree. We awarded the first BLS degrees to CPE students in May 2020.

Graduate Programs

Wesleyan’s PhD and MA programs exist because Wesleyan believes they enhance the undergraduate student experience. They do this by allowing us to recruit more accomplished faculty and by providing additional mentorship and education to undergraduates. An undergraduate might well learn as much about the experience of working in a lab from a graduate student working in the same lab as from the professor. This is why Wesleyan is willing to devote resources to the PhD and MA programs, although they generate no tuition revenue and are expensive to run, since every student receives a stipend.

PhD degree: The doctoral degree is offered in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Music (ethnomusicology), Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, and Physics. Wesleyan’s Music department has a particularly strong international reputation for the quality of its graduate program in ethnomusicology, with many graduates now leaders in the field. All enrolled PhD students receive a stipend, set to $2,980 a month in 2021-22, though Music students receive a bit less. Graduate stipends increase yearly at the same rate as the faculty salary pool. PhD students on stipend are involved in teaching, but generally do not teach their own classes, except for a few in Mathematics. The stipend is intended to allow the student to concentrate on their studies, not as payment for work.

MA degree and BA/MA program: Wesleyan regularly awards MA degrees in the sciences and in music (composition and ethnomusicology). Any other department may award an MA degree in special situations, but that has not happened in the last 10 years. Astronomy, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Music have stand-alone two-year master’s programs for which they recruit outside students every year. These students receive the same stipends as doctoral students, though again Music students receive less. The other science departments occasionally award terminal MA degrees to students who entered as doctoral students, and sometimes for other reasons. For example, it is not uncommon for a Mathematics PhD student to receive an MA in Computer Science along the way to the PhD, thereby improving job prospects.

Wesleyan also has a BA/MA program available only to Wesleyan undergraduates in the sciences. Under this program, a student receives a BA in the 4^th year as usual, and stays an additional year tuition-free to receive an MA in a 5^th year. These students do not receive a stipend in their MA year, but there will be significant financial aid available to cover living costs beginning in 2022-23. Students apply to their department in the fall of their senior year, and should have already begun the project that will become their MA thesis. Departments rank applicants, and there is a faculty admissions committee led by the Director of Graduate Studies to balance the limited number of slots (23 for fall admissions; 1-2 for spring admissions for students who are off-cycle) across departments. A student who does not complete the MA in the 5^th year may have one additional year for thesis writing if necessary.

MALS and MPhil: Wesleyan’s Graduate Liberal Studies (GLS) program, which offers the MALS and MPhil degrees as adult education, was the first of its kind and is still one of the larger GLS programs in existence. The MALS and MPhil are commonly pursued by local K-12 teachers, Wesleyan staff (tuition is waived for staff), and by community members looking to pursue further liberal education. Wesleyan undergraduates may also take GLS courses during their junior or senior years.

APPRAISAL

Undergraduate Programs

BLS Degree:As of fall 2021, the currentBLS student populationconsists of:25 students intheCenter for Prison Education;2 Wesleyan staff;1 former Wesleyan BA student completing a spring course to graduate in May;and1student in the category of “other.”

We have experienceda number ofchallengesas we implement this new degree program. One challenge has been integrating the new program intoall ofour systems. Fitting it into our student information system (PeopleSoft), our academic regulations, has proved more challenging than anticipated.

For the 2020-2021 academic year we were unable to offer federal financial aid to BLS students because staff did not have time availableto go through the application process to gain approval.We began offering federal aid to BLS students as of the fall 2021 term.

When we first implemented the BLS in the Center for Prison Education program and articulated AA transcripts into our system, we discovered that there was a mismatch between Wesleyan’s credit hour andMxCC’scredit hour that led to some courses that had been intended to all be worth one unit of credit being articulated as .75 credits when they transferredin toWesleyan.We worked with the leadership atMxCCto develop a plan and came up with a block articulation policy for the CPE AA.

BA Degree:Wesleyanfaculty and departments are regularly engaged in curricular renewalof the BA degree. Two new minorswere recently approved:Human Rights Advocacy was approved in 20-21,Global Engagement, whichreplacedan older minor inInternational Relations,was approved in19-20,anda new minor in Chemistrywas approved in18-19, as well as two new course clusters:Asian American Studiesin19-20andSustainability and Environmental Justicein18-19.In addition, many majors, minors, and certificates have made changes in recent years,including:Religion, English, Art History, Dance, and Theater, Government, Computer Science, and College of East Asian Studies.

The biggest curricular change in the past few years is the approvalin 2019-2020of a newinterdisciplinaryCollege of Education Studies(CES), whichnow offers a linked major in addition to theexistingminor inEducation Studies.The college is co-chaired by tenured faculty who are appointed in the psychology department and whose research includes education. As of fall 2021, an additional 14faculty members have joined the college as “core” faculty, and9more are considered “affiliates.”CES hired a new tenure-track faculty member, a Provost’s Equity Postdoctoral Fellow, and four per-course visitors (3 of whom were scholars of color).

TheEducation Studieslinked majorconsists of10 credits plus a practicum experience equivalent to at least .5 credit and the fact that this is a “linked major” means that it can only be declared and completed in addition to a primary major.As of fall 2021, there are 88 Education Studies students: 48 linked majors (their other majors represent a range of areas, including American studies, dance, and government, with 16 different majors represented) and 40 minors.In fall 2021,Education Studiesrealized 382 enrollments in its 15classes.

The co-chairs assembled a CES student leadership team of six students to assist with peer advising and help plan events.In 20-21,CES faculty metwith dozens ofWesleyanalumni to solicit their ideas for thenewCollegeandconvened a virtual education summit attended by a dozen alumni who are highly active and influential in the field of education (e.g., Dan Cogan-Drew, Co-Founder of Newsela whose company was valued at $1 billion). Partially as a result of this summit, the CES received $50,000 in seed funding from Richard Segal and $5,000 to support student research from Ilene Rosenthal.In addition, co-chairAnna Shusterman received a 5-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and study the implementation of math games.

At the end of 20-21CESheld a faculty retreat to engage in strategic planning for the College.Thegoals that came out of this retreatinclude hiring additional faculty to continue to expand course offerings to meet student demand,finding a long-term solution to the issue of transportation of students to and from their required practicum placements,streamlining processesrelated to working in schools (e.g., background checks for students, etc.),fosteringgreater research and practice partnerships between faculty, students, alumni, and educators, andexploring the possibility of offering a path to teacher certification within the next five years, potentially as part of a BA/MA.

Summer FYS Program:In response to the Covid pandemic and concerns about yielding a full incoming class, we developed a plan to offer admitted students the opportunity to take a one-credit First Year Seminar online for free over the summer. We ended up offering 15 First Year Seminars (with an enrollment cap of 15 students) and one large lecture course (with an enrollment cap of 75), andall ofthe courses filled.By increasing the enrollment by11in the large course, we met the demand of all incoming students who wanted a spotina summer course.Sincesurvey results indicatedhigh levels of satisfaction with this program—97% forstudentswho participated in this summer pilot program –we offered the program again in summer 2021.

Assuring AcademicQuality:The academic program isoverseen by Academic Affairsincluding the provost, associate provosts and divisional deans;EPC;and the faculty more broadly. Thedepartmental external review processprovides an important external voice in theregular review and oversight, as well, and Academic Affairs has recently committed toperforming additional external reviews to reach the long-termgoalthatall academic units engage in aself studyandexternal review processapproximately once every ten years. For many years,Academic Affairsplanned three external reviews each year (one from each division), but as the number of academic units has grown over the years, and we have added some less traditional units to the list(the library, athletics, Center for the Arts, Continuing Studies,etc),and some years one of the planned reviews falls through due to unforeseen health or other issues,we have realized that if weplan forthreereviewseach year we will never meet our goal of each unit being reviewed approximately every ten years. In summer of 2021Academic Affairsdecided to increase the planned reviews from 3 per year to 5-6 per yearandtoset aside additional funding to support the increased number of reviews.We developedguidelines(link)to guide units through theself studyand review process.(providefull listofpast, current, and upcomingreviews)

The intention is for external reviews to provide the academic unit, Academic Affairs, and EPC with: (1) an overview of the unit’s articulation of its educational objectives, (2) an assessment of its effectiveness in meeting those objectives, (3) the range, balance, and strength of thecurriculum offered with respect to the current state of the discipline, and (4) the unit’s vision for the future.One example of arecentproductive external review process is the 2019-2020 review of the College of East Asian Studies (CEAS). Five years earlier the department of Asian Languages and Literature merged with the East Asian Studies program and the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies to form the College of East Asian Studies. Since that merger, CEAS had near-total turnover among faculty as well as a significant demographic shift among students (from majority white American to majority Asian and Asian-American), which made a deep rethinking of the curriculum and College necessary.

After engaging in athorough self-study processand external review, CEAS implemented the following curricular changes: (1) streamlined concentrations from six to four; (2) changed the premodern requirement from one course on Japan and one course on China to a single “foundations” course that covers Japan, China, and Korea to (a) give students a more coherent experience in the major and (b) enhance the Korean content so it was more co-equal with the other two countries (this course now serves as a large gateway courseand is timed for the second semester first year, concurrent with the canonical timing for declaring the major); (3) changed the timing of the pro-seminar course fromthe spring to thefallofsophom*ore year, immediatelyafter they declare the major which helps with cohort-bonding; (4) increased the methodological training in textual analysis in the pro-seminar; (5) shifted study abroad from a “requirement” to an “expectation” to makethe CEAS major accessible to more students; (6) formalizedacommitment to offering 3+ years of Korean language to create language opportunities for Korean language students that were nearly on par with the Chinese and Japanese language offerings; and (7) developed more pan-Asian courses so there are more courses with Korean content.

Additionally,CEAS made changes to the structure of their faculty appointments. WhenCEAS was firstformedthere were5 language faculty:2 in Chinese, 2 in Japanese, and 1 in Korean. Of those five,onewas an Adjunct Professor, the remaining four were on “visiting” contracts even though they had been teachingat Wesleyanfor many years and were teaching mission-critical courses. Over the course of 6 years all five of those faculty members are nowPoPs, andthere isone AssociatePoPin each language serving as a language coordinator, and two AssistantPoPs(in Japanese and Chinese). We also have a per-course visitor who is supplementing our Korean language as we test the level of student demand for that language andcontinue tobuild up that language program to be on par with the other two.

Outside of the external review process, EPC is regularly involved in curricular review and renewal.Some examples include: (1) in 2018-2019, EPC approved a new cap on the number of credits toward graduation that may come from the category of nonstandard courses, and(2)approved a change to the course repeat policy,and(3) in 2017-2018,EPC determined that“minors”and“certificates”are interchangeable, then in 2019-2020 EPC approved changingthe title ofmost“certificates”to“minors” simply because the term “minor” is well understood but the term “certificate” has more varied meanings outside of Wesleyan.Three certificates remain (applied data science; social, cultural, and critical theory; and writing).

General Education:As a liberal education institution, it is expected that our students graduate with abroad rangeof knowledge across disciplines before concentratinginamajorfieldof interest. Wesleyan’s open curriculum and the absence of a distribution requirement challenges students to create their own expectations for thisbroader knowledgeor general education. Students are expected to have earned at least two course credits in six different departments or programs in each of the three curricular divisions, natural sciences and mathematics (NSM), the social and behavioral sciences (SBS), and the humanities and the arts (HA) by the end of the sophom*ore year. By senior year, students are expected to take one additional course credit in each of the divisions. For the preceding five graduating classes 75% fully met the expectation, 13% completed stage 1 only and 12% fulfilled neither stage of the expectation.

Course Access: The Class of 2025 entered in fall 2021with 916 new students – by far, thelargest class ever to matriculate at Wesleyan. We anticipateissues around course access, as well as residential strains,over the coming four years as this particularly large class moves through theprogram. Academic Affairs is gathering data on the curricular demands and making plans to hire additional faculty to meet the needs of the larger-than-usual student population.

Academic Advising:With Wesleyan’s open curriculum, faculty advising plays an important role in helping to ensureacademic coherenceinindividual student plans.Every student is assigned a pre-major advisor who usually serves as the faculty advisor until the student declares a major (in some cases students may need to switch to a different pre-major advisor, and in some cases the pre-major advisor may become the student’s major advisor). The faculty advisor meets with their advisee each semesterto discuss the student’s academic goals andto review course selectionstoensure that the selections will allow the student to meet their stated goals.

In 2021-2022 theProvostconvened anAd-hoc Advising Task Forceto consider ways to both improve the student advising experience and toensure greater equity in faculty advising loads.The task force is comprised of 11members withrepresentationfrom the faculty, Academic Affairs, Institutional Research, the Registrar’s Office, the Class Deans’ Office, Equity & Inclusion, and Career Services.Student voices have been incorporated via numerous student focus groups.

One concern has been how to offer advising over the summer while the incoming students are making their fall course selections. As of2015theincoming class has engaged in pre-registration for all four fall courses during the month of July. Prior to that, students enrolled in two courses in July, then chose the final two courses in consultation with their advisor during orientation. There was a sense that the uncertainty regarding their courses led to anxiety in the incoming class, so we ran a pilot in which students enrolled in all four courses over the summer. Four-course summer registration became the normal practice in2015, thoughit is still controversial, with manyfacultyconcerned that it leads to poor course selections in some cases, as well as lower enrollments in certain areas, such as the languages. One focus to try to help address these concerns has been to developadditionaladvising resources thatcan bemadeavailable over the summer.

WesVisingis a website with videos and information from departments,similar tothe kind of information students receive if they visit a department at the Academic Forum during new student orientation. This website rolled out in20—and isnowupdated each year. In summer2018we piloted a Summer Advising Guides program in which a group offacultywere paid a small stipend to call a tranche of new students over the summer, but in evaluating the results, we found that there were no significant differences between enrollments of students who were part of the pilot and received advising, and those who were not in the pilot group.

In summer 2021, faculty were asked to advise students virtually over the summer due to the pandemic. Not all faculty reached out to their advisees over the summer, anda number offaculty were distressed to be asked to engage in advising work during their summer when they needed to focus on their research.TheAd-hoc Advising Task Force isreviewingall ofthe previous reports and data, and reaching out to peer institutions, todevelop recommendations to improve the student advising experience, particularly during that first summer and during the first year at Wesleyan.

Special Advising Programs:Bringing theory to PracticeWesMaSSAdvising pilot:Wesleyan received funding from the AAC&U Bringing Theory to Practice initiative to pilot some advising initiatives with a focused group, the Wesleyan Math and Science Scholars program. Different types of advising initiatives were piloted including having a checklist for advisors, training of advisors in metacognitive and growth mindset practices and gratitude discussions with advisees. Many of these practices are still employed when training theWesMaSSadvisors.

Posse Advising: Each year since 2014-2015, Wesleyan has admitted a cohort of Posse veteran scholars. Each Posse class has one Posse faculty mentor as well as a pre-major advisor. Posse mentors receive training and support from the Posse organization on the mentoring process and the unique experiences and needs of our veteran scholars.

Summer Session and WinterSession:Summer Session offers courses in two 4-½ week sessions in June and July.While the program is open to anyone,the vast majority ofSummer Session students are current Wesleyan undergraduates, with a few students from other colleges, and a small number ofPreCollegestudents who take Summer Session courses for credit. Winter Session offers courses in a 2-½ week session in January before the spring term begins. Due to the calendar and the lack of housing for students who are not already housed on campus, Winter Session attracts very few non-Wesleyan students.

The sudden move to a fully online Summer and Winter Session as of summer 2020 led to a tremendous rise in enrollment (63 Summer Session enrollments from 43 students in 2019 compared to 240 enrollments from 191 students in 2020 and 205 enrollments from 157 students in 2021, and 98 Winter Session enrollments in 2020 compared to 253 enrollments in 2021). We are not certain if the level of enrollments will remain quite as high post-pandemic, but we believe that online course offerings during these sessions will allow more students to participate. In October 2021, faculty approved a 3-year pilot to continue to allow Continuing Studies to offer a mix of online and in-person courses in Summer and Winter Session.

Transfer Credit:A student may obtain credit toward the Wesleyan degree for courses taken during the academic year at another accredited U.S. institution or in the summer session of another accredited U.S. or international institution if (1) the courses have been approved in advance by the relevant Wesleyan department, program, or college, and (2) the grades in the courses are C- or better. (Courses taken prior to matriculation do not require preapproval and may include courses taken at an accredited international institution during the academic year.) Departments, programs, or colleges may impose other conditions for the transfer of credit, such as a higher minimum grade, review of coursework, passing a departmentally administered exam, etc. The Wesleyan academic record will not reflect grades earned at another institution; only credits may be transferred. The final amount of credit transferred to the Wesleyan transcript will be determined in accordance with Wesleyan’s policy on transfer credit and the evaluation of the appropriate department. (As a guideline, it should be noted that one Wesleyan unit is equivalent to four semester hours, or six quarter-hours.) Abachelor of arts studentmay post a maximum of two non-Wesleyan credits (2.5 credits with a course that offers a lab) in any given summer. Study-abroad credits earned by students who currently are withdrawn or required to resign will not be accepted.

Athletics: Wesleyan’s Athletics department offers 30 varsity sports (15 men and 15 women), 20 club sports, 12 intramural activities, and a comprehensive physical education curriculum for credit. Approximately 900 Wesleyan students each year participate in various components of the overall program. Wesleyan supports varsity sports for men and women on an equitable basis. Wesleyan is a member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) and shares its premise that athletes are representative of the entire student body and that athletics operates in harmony with the educational mission of the institution. In addition, the department offers a broad range of intercollegiate teams that encourage scholar-athletes to develop their skills and themselves to their full potential and to benefit from the lessons learned from perseverance, competition, sacrifice, and teamwork. Moreover, the department provides a wide array of skill activities that encourage students to develop the habit of leading a healthy andbalanced live. Lastly, as members of the faculty coaches serve as academic advisors to first- and second-year students.

Collections:In addition to a strong general library collection, Wesleyan faculty and students are fortunate to have several unique material and digital collections at their disposal., theDavison Art Center, theWorld Music Archives, and theArchaeology/AnthropologyandCollege of East Asian Studiescollections are key assets for the university and are experiencing greater visibility and integration with the academic program.

Beginning in 2018, the collections were brought together under the library, with the goal of creating a central resource for teaching with objects and supporting better discovery across and within the collections. While improvements to discovery remain elusive, the curators for each collection meet regularly and work together to create, promote, and sustain an articulated set of services for faculty and students across their respective collections. The construction of new office, storage, and teaching spaces for the Davison Art Center in Olin Library, along with an adjoining new gallery, will help raise visibility and expectations for both the DAC and partner collections. The continued growth in use of Special Collections & Archives by students, faculty, and outside scholars, the expansion of interest in the Archaeology/Anthropology collections beyond the expected disciplines, and the pandemic-accelerated adoption of digital facsimiles across all collections together point to a strong interest on the part of Wesleyan faculty and students that will require continued attention and resources.

To meet this interest and to continue to integrate collections fully into coursework, pedagogy, and research, attention will need to be paid to physical infrastructure concerns such as storage and security, as well as teaching spaces and online discovery. This is especially important for the World Music Archives and Archaeology/Anthropology collection. Extending the reach of the collections beyond campus and working with other campus collections (such as theJoe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History) will require adjustments in staffing and budgets.

Integrity in the Award of Academic Credit: The educational policy committee has tasked the divisional academic deans to review courses to ensure they are assigned the appropriate amount of credit. One Wesleyan course credit is worth 4.00 semester-hours or 6.00 quarter-hours. The expectation is that a course awarded one credit requires 120-160 hours of engaged academic work. Based on this assessment the course may be assigned .25, .50, .75 or 1.00 credit. Most Wesleyan courses are worth 1.00 credit. To set a fair time commitment expectation for students, instructors are encouraged to include the following language in their syllabus.“While the exact time commitment for the class will vary individually and over the course of the semester, I recommend that you budget approximately three out-of-class hours for every class hour to complete the reading, assignments, homework, and project. I have designed the class so that it should be feasible to satisfactorily complete the requirements with approximately twelve hours per week of time commitment. If you are spending more time than this on a regular basis, I encourage you to check in with me.”

Partnerships: Wesleyan offersa number ofpartnerships that provide non-matriculated students the opportunity to attend class at Wesleyan on a part-time or full-time basis. Some of these partnerships come at no cost to the student and allow them to take a single course in any given semester. The part-time programs include the high school scholar program designed for local high school juniors and senior, the Middlesex Community College honor program forMxCChonor students and the Trinity/Connecticut/Wesleyan Consortium, a reciprocal program that allows students to attend a single course at one of the other institutions. In addition, students in the visiting international student program and the 12-college exchange program allow students to attend Wesleyan for one or two semesters as full-time students. Both programs have contractual payment agreements with the student’s home institution.

BLS Degree: As of fall 2021, the current BLS student population consists of: 25 students in the Center for Prison Education; 2 Wesleyan staff; 1 former Wesleyan BA student completing a spring course to graduate in May; and 1 student in the category of “other.”

We have experienced a number of challenges as we implement this new degree program. One challenge has been integrating the new program into all of our systems. Fitting it into our student information system (PeopleSoft) and our academic regulations, for example, has proved more challenging than anticipated. For the 2020-21 academic year we were unable to offer federal financial aid to BLS students because staff did not have time available to go through the application process to gain approval, though Wesleyan provided Pell-equivalent scholarships to eligible students that year. We began offering federal aid to BLS students as of the fall 2021 term.

When we first implemented the BLS in the Center for Prison Education program and articulated AA transcripts into our system, we discovered that there was a mismatch between Wesleyan’s credit hour and MxCC’s credit hour that led to some courses that had been intended to all be worth one unit of credit being articulated as .75 credits when they transferred to Wesleyan. We worked with the leadership at MxCC to develop a block articulation policy for the CPE AA degree.

BA Degree: Wesleyan faculty and departments are regularly engaged in curricular renewal of the BA degree. Two new minors were recently approved: Human Rights Advocacy in 20-21, Global Engagement, which replaced an older minor in International Relations, in 19-20, and a new minor in Chemistry was approved in 18-19, as well as two new course clusters: Asian American Studies in 19-20 and Sustainability and Environmental Justice in 18-19. In addition, many majors, minors, and certificates have made curricular changes in recent years, including: Religion, English, Art History, Dance, and Theater, Government, Computer Science, and College of East Asian Studies.

The biggest curricular change in the past few years is the approval in 2019-20 of a new interdisciplinary College of Education Studies (CES), which now offers a linked major in addition to the existing minor in Education Studies. The college is co-chaired by tenured faculty from the psychology department whose research includes education. As of fall 2021, an additional 14 faculty members have joined the college as core faculty, and 9 as affiliate faculty. CES hired a new tenure-track faculty member, a Provost’s Equity Postdoctoral Fellow, and four per-course visitors (3 of whom were scholars of color).

The Education Studies linked major consists of 10 credits plus a practicum experience equivalent to at least .5 credit and the fact that this is a “linked major” means that it can only be declared and completed in addition to a primary major. As of fall 2021, there are 88 Education Studies students: 48 linked majors (these students come with 16 different primary majors) and 40 minors. In fall 2021, Education Studies realized 382 enrollments in 15 classes.

At the end of 20-21 CES held a faculty retreat to engage in strategic planning for the College. The goals that came out of this retreat include hiring additional faculty to continue to expand course offerings to meet student demand, finding a long-term solution to the issue of transportation of students to and from their required practicum placements, streamlining processes related to working in schools (e.g., background checks for students), fostering greater research and practice partnerships between faculty, students, alumni, and educators, and exploring the possibility of offering a path to teacher certification within the next five years, potentially as part of a BA/MA.

Wesleyan’s academic program is overseen by Academic Affairs including the provost, associate provosts, and divisional deans; EPC; and the faculty more broadly. The departmental external review process provides an important external voice in regular review and oversight, as well, and Academic Affairs has recently committed to an increase in the number of annual external reviews to reach the long-term goal that all academic units engage in a self study and external review process approximately once every ten years. For many years, Academic Affairs planned three external reviews each year (one from each division), but as the number of academic units has grown over the years, and we have added some less traditional units to the list (library, athletics, Center for the Arts, Continuing Studies, etc), and some years one of the planned reviews falls through due to unforeseen health or other issues, we have realized that if we plan for three reviews each year we will never meet our goal. In summer of 2021 Academic Affairs decided to increase the planned reviews from 3 per year to 5-6 per year and to set aside additional funding to support the increased number of reviews. We developed guidelines (link) to guide units through the self study and review process. (link full list of reviews)

The intention is for external reviews to provide the academic unit, Academic Affairs, and EPC with: (1) an overview of the unit’s articulation of its educational objectives, (2) an assessment of its effectiveness in meeting those objectives, (3) the range, balance, and strength of the curriculum offered with respect to the current state of the discipline, and (4) the unit’s vision for the future. One example of a recent productive external review process is the 2019-2020 review of the College of East Asian Studies (CEAS). Five years earlier the department of Asian Languages and Literature merged with the East Asian Studies program and the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies to form the College of East Asian Studies. Since that merger, CEAS had near-total turnover among faculty as well as a significant demographic shift among students (from majority white American to majority Asian and Asian-American), which made a deep rethinking of the curriculum and College necessary.

After engaging in a thorough self study process and external review, CEAS implemented the following curricular changes: (1) streamlined concentrations from six to four; (2) changed the premodern requirement from one course on Japan and one course on China to a single “foundations” course that covers Japan, China, and Korea to (a) give students a more coherent experience in the major and (b) enhance the Korean content so it was more co-equal with the other two countries (this course now serves as a large gateway course and is timed for the second semester first year, concurrent with the canonical timing for declaring the major); (3) changed the timing of the pro-seminar course from the spring to the fall of sophom*ore year, immediately after they declare the major which helps with cohort-bonding; (4) increased the methodological training in textual analysis in the pro-seminar; (5) shifted study abroad from a “requirement” to an “expectation” to make the CEAS major accessible to more students; (6) formalized a commitment to offering 3+ years of Korean language to create language opportunities for Korean language students that were nearly on par with the Chinese and Japanese language offerings; and (7) developed more pan-Asian courses so there are more courses with Korean content.

Additionally, CEAS made changes to the structure of their faculty appointments. When CEAS was first formed there were 5 language faculty: 2 in Chinese, 2 in Japanese, and 1 in Korean. Of those five, one was an Adjunct Professor, the remaining four were on “visiting” contracts even though they had been teaching at Wesleyan for many years and were teaching mission-critical courses. Over the course of 6 years all five of those faculty members are now PoPs, and there is one Associate PoP in each language serving as a language coordinator, and two Assistant PoPs (in Japanese and Chinese). We also have a per-course visitor who is supplementing our Korean language as we test the level of student demand for that language and continue to build up that language program to be on par with the other two.

Outside of the external review process, EPC is regularly involved in curricular review and renewal. Some examples include: (1) in 2018-19, EPC approved a new cap on the number of credits toward graduation that may come from the category of nonstandard courses, and (2) approved a change to the course repeat policy, and (3) in 2017-18, EPC determined that “minors” and “certificates” are interchangeable, then in 2019-20 EPC approved changing the title of most “certificates” to “minors” simply because the term “minor” is well understood but the term “certificate” has more varied meanings outside of Wesleyan. Three certificates remain (applied data science; social, cultural, and critical theory; and writing).

As a liberal education institution, it is expected that our students graduate with a broad range of knowledge across disciplines before concentrating in a major field of interest. Wesleyan’s open curriculum and the absence of a distribution requirement challenges students to create their own expectations for this broader knowledge or general education. Students are expected to have earned at least two course credits in six different departments or programs in each of the three curricular divisions, natural sciences and mathematics (NSM), the social and behavioral sciences (SBS), and the humanities and the arts (HA) by the end of the sophom*ore year. By senior year, students are expected to take one additional course credit in each of the divisions. For the preceding five graduating classes 75% fully met the expectation, 13% completed stage 1 only and 12% fulfilled neither stage of the expectation.

The Class of 2025 entered in fall 2021 with 916 new students – by far, the largest class ever to matriculate at Wesleyan. We anticipate issues around course access, as well as residential strains, over the coming four years as this class moves through the program. Academic Affairs is gathering data on the curricular demands and making plans to hire additional faculty to meet the needs of the larger-than-usual student population.

With Wesleyan’s open curriculum, faculty advising plays an important role in helping to ensure academic coherence in individual student plans. Every student is assigned a pre-major advisor who usually serves as the faculty advisor until the student declares a major (in some cases students may need to switch to a different pre-major advisor, and in some cases the pre-major advisor may become the student’s major advisor). The faculty advisor meets with their advisee each semester to discuss the student’s academic goals and to review course selections to ensure that the selections will allow the student to meet their stated goals.

In 2021-22 the Provost convened an Ad-hoc Advising Task Force to consider ways to both improve the student advising experience and to ensure greater equity in faculty advising loads. The task force is comprised of 11 members with representation from the faculty, Academic Affairs, Institutional Research, the Registrar’s Office, the Class Deans’ Office, Equity & Inclusion, and Career Services. Student voices have been incorporated via numerous student focus groups.

One concern has been how to offer advising over the summer while the incoming students are making their fall course selections. As of 2015 the incoming class has engaged in pre-registration for all four fall courses during the month of July. Prior to that, students enrolled in two courses in July, then chose the final two courses in consultation with their advisor during orientation. There was a sense that the uncertainty regarding their courses led to anxiety in the incoming class, so we ran a pilot in which students enrolled in all four courses over the summer. Four-course summer registration became the normal practice in 2015, though it is still controversial, with many faculty concerned that it leads to poor course selections in some cases, as well as lower enrollments in certain areas, such as the languages. One focus to try to help address these concerns has been to develop additional advising resources that can be made available over the summer.

In summer 2018 we piloted a Summer Advising Guides program in which a group of faculty were paid a small stipend to call a tranche of new students over the summer, but in evaluating the results, we found that there were no significant differences between enrollments of students who were part of the pilot and received advising, and those who were not in the pilot group. In summer 2021, faculty were asked to advise students virtually over the summer due to the pandemic. Not all faculty reached out to their advisees over the summer, and a number of faculty were distressed to be asked to engage in advising work during the summer when they needed to focus on their research. The Ad-hoc Advising Task Force is reviewing all of the previous reports and data, and reaching out to peer institutions, to develop recommendations to improve the student advising experience, particularly during that first summer and during the first year at Wesleyan. One initiative the task force is developing is a new pilot that will include advising over the summer, as well as more intensive advising during the academic year, for a group of students who are identified by Admissions as most in need of additional advising.

Wesleyan already offers a number of special advising program for particular populations. Wesleyan received funding from the AAC&U Bringing Theory to Practice initiative to pilot some advising initiatives with a focused group, the Wesleyan Math and Science Scholars (WesMaSS) program. Different types of advising initiatives were piloted including having a checklist for advisors, training of advisors in metacognitive and growth mindset practices and gratitude discussions with advisees. Many of these practices are still employed when training the WesMaSS advisors. In addition, each year since 2014-15, Wesleyan has admitted a cohort of Posse veteran scholars. Each Posse class has one Posse faculty mentor as well as a pre-major advisor. Posse mentors receive training and support from the Posse organization on the mentoring process and the unique experiences and needs of our veteran scholars.

Wesleyan’s Summer Session offers courses in two 4-½ week sessions in June and July. While the program is open to anyone, the vast majority of Summer Session students are current Wesleyan undergraduates, with a few students from other colleges, and a small number of PreCollege students who take Summer Session courses for credit. Winter Session offers courses in a 2-½ week session in January before the spring term begins. Due to the calendar and the lack of housing for students who are not already housed on campus, Winter Session attracts very few non-Wesleyan students.

The sudden move to a fully online Summer and Winter Session as of summer 2020 led to a tremendous rise in enrollment (Summer jumped from 63 enrollments in 2019 to 240 in 2020 and 205 in 2021, and Winter jumped from 98 enrollments in 2020 to 253 in 2021). We are not certain if the level of enrollments will remain quite as high post-pandemic, but we believe that online offerings during these sessions will allow more students to participate. In October 2021, faculty approved a 3-year pilot to continue to offer a mix of online and in-person courses in Summer and Winter Session.

Students may obtain credit toward the Wesleyan degree for courses taken during the academic year at another accredited U.S. institution or in the summer session of another accredited U.S. or international institution if (1) the courses have been approved in advance by the relevant Wesleyan department, program, or college, and (2) the grades in the courses are C- or better. (Courses taken prior to matriculation do not require preapproval and may include courses taken at an accredited international institution during the academic year.) Departments, programs, or colleges may impose other conditions for the transfer of credit, such as a higher minimum grade, review of coursework, passing a departmentally administered exam, etc. The Wesleyan academic record will not reflect grades earned at another institution; only credits may be transferred. The final amount of credit transferred to the Wesleyan transcript will be determined in accordance with Wesleyan’s policy on transfer credit and the evaluation of the appropriate department. (As a guideline, it should be noted that one Wesleyan unit is equivalent to four semester hours, or six quarter-hours.) A BA student may post a maximum of two non-Wesleyan credits (2.5 credits with a course that offers a lab) in any given summer. Study-abroad credits earned by students who currently are withdrawn or required to resign will not be accepted.

Wesleyan offers a number of partnerships that provide non-matriculated students the opportunity to attend class at Wesleyan on a part-time or full-time basis. Some of these partnerships come at no cost to the student and allow them to take a single course in any given semester. The part-time programs include the high school scholar program designed for local high school juniors and seniors, the Middlesex Community College honor program for MxCC honor students and the Trinity/Connecticut/Wesleyan Consortium, a reciprocal program that allows students to attend a single course at one of the other institutions. In addition, the visiting international student program and the 12-college exchange program allow students to attend Wesleyan for one or two semesters as full-time students. Both programs have contractual payment agreements with the student’s home institution.

Wesleyan’s Athletics department offers 30 varsity sports (15 men and 15 women), 20 club sports, 12 intramural activities, and a comprehensive physical education curriculum for credit. Approximately 900 Wesleyan students each year participate in various components of the overall program. Wesleyan supports varsity sports for men and women on an equitable basis. Wesleyan is a member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) and shares its premise that athletes are representative of the entire student body and that athletics operates in harmony with the educational mission of the institution. In addition, the department offers a broad range of intercollegiate teams that encourage scholar-athletes to develop their skills and themselves to their full potential and to benefit from the lessons learned from perseverance, competition, sacrifice, and teamwork. Moreover, the department provides a wide array of skill activities that encourage students to develop the habit of leading a healthy and balanced life. Lastly, as members of the faculty coaches serve as academic advisors to first- and second-year students.

Wesleyan faculty and students are fortunate to have several unique material and digital library collections at their disposal. , the Davison Art Center, the World Music Archives, and the Archaeology/Anthropology and College of East Asian Studies collections are key assets for the university and are experiencing greater visibility and integration with the academic program. Beginning in 2018, the collections were brought together under the library, with the goal of creating a central resource for teaching with objects and supporting better discovery across and within the collections. While improvements to discovery remain elusive, the curators for each collection meet regularly and work together to create, promote, and sustain an articulated set of services for faculty and students across their respective collections. The construction of new office, storage, and teaching spaces for the Davison Art Center in Olin Library, along with an adjoining new gallery, will help raise visibility and expectations for both the DAC and partner collections. The continued growth in use of Special Collections & Archives by students, faculty, and outside scholars, the expansion of interest in the Archaeology/Anthropology collections beyond the expected disciplines, and the pandemic-accelerated adoption of digital facsimiles across all collections together point to a strong interest on the part of Wesleyan faculty and students that will require continued attention and resources.

To meet this interest and to continue to integrate collections fully into coursework, pedagogy, and research, attention will need to be paid to physical infrastructure concerns such as storage and security, as well as teaching spaces and online discovery. This is especially important for the World Music Archives and Archaeology/Anthropology collection. Extending the reach of the collections beyond campus and working with other campus collections (such as the Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History) will require adjustments in staffing and budgets.

Integrity in the Award of Academic Credit: The educational policy committee has tasked the academic deans to review courses to ensure they are assigned the appropriate amount of credit. One Wesleyan course credit is worth 4.00 semester-hours or 6.00 quarter-hours. The expectation is that a course awarded one credit requires 120-160 hours of engaged academic work. Based on this assessment the course may be assigned .25, .50, .75, or 1.00 credit. Most Wesleyan courses are worth 1.00 credit. To set a fair time commitment expectation for students, instructors are encouraged to include language in their syllabus indicating that students should expect approximately three out-of-class hours for every class hour to complete the reading, assignments, homework, and project and that if students are finding the time required much different from that, they should notify the instructor.

Graduate Programs

Departmental graduate programs. The departmental graduate programs are overseen and appraised at multiple levels. Beginning at the highest level, the faculty Educational Policy Committee is the curriculum committee for the entire university, and so receives reports on graduate education and also votes on major graduate curriculum changes. It delegates smaller issues to the Graduate Council, a committee with one representative from each graduate department as well as the Graduate Student Association. The Graduate Council is led by the Director of Graduate Studies, a faculty member appointed by and reporting to Academic Affairs, and the Director of Graduate Student Services, a staff member whose role is analogous to that of a dean of graduate students. Each graduate department has its own graduate committee as well.

Some of the curricular and administrative changes that Wesleyan has made over the last decade through these bodies include:

1. Centralization and standardization of graduate admissions letters through the implementation of Slate (2012-15)

2. The introduction of a graduate concentration in Planetary Science in 2013-14.

3. Establishing a graduate student exit survey beginning in Spring 2015, with a review process.

4. The establishment of 3 floating graduate stipends that departments can apply for when they become available, in Spring 2015. This was a controversial decision by the Provost. It has allowed some additional graduate stipends to go to incoming faculty members and under-resourced areas, but the departments that lost stipends in this reallocation remain unhappy about it.

5. Establishment of clear written standards and timelines for significant milestones (qualifying exams) and graduation, completed by 2019.

6. Significant initiatives to assist with the thesis writing process, beginning in Spring 2014 and continuing today.

7. An ongoing effort to reduce the stress of advisor-advisee relationships through multi-person mentoring committees for each student.

8. The introduction of limited budgetary flexibility around graduate stipends, beginning in 2022-23.

We also note that in the general 10 percent budget cut that was implemented in response to the pandemic in 2020-21, neither the number nor the size of graduate stipends was cut. This was very different from the last budget crisis in 2009-10, when three graduate stipends were permanently cut and faculty were very angry.

Graduate Liberal Studies (GLS). This program is administered by the Director of Continuing Studies, a staff member who reports to Academic Affairs. Faculty oversight has historically come from a faculty advisory board and the Educational Policy Committee. Beginning in 2021-22, faculty oversight of GLS has been strengthened with the addition of a Faculty Director of Continuing Studies Curriculum. We hope this will lead to even better integration between the Wesleyan faculty and the GLS program.

The Graduate Liberal Studies (GLS) program is intended to pay for itself. It hires Wesleyan professors and the occasional outside professor to teach, and charges tuition with some limited financial aid. Enrollments have been declining, something that is being seen in other GLS programs nationally. To combat this challenge, Wesleyan has instituted a number of initiatives and partnerships.

GLS curricular initiatives: (1) Developed a new 6-course non-degree Graduate Certificate in Writing that students can complete on its own or in tandem with an MALS or MPhil degree, (2) Developed a new concentration in Education in Human Development. As a multidisciplinary concentration, ED&HD integrates wide-ranging existing courses in subjects like psychology and education studies into a unified and career-focused academic program. This gives the program’s student population of K-12 teachers a clear indication that the MALS degree is in line with their academic and professional goals. (3) Integrated online courses into the GLS curriculum. While Wesleyan does not offer fully-online MALS or MPhil degrees, we hope to gain distance learners with a plan that allows for a mix of online and in-person courses (a student could complete the degree with 2 summers on campus and the rest of the courses online, for instance). (4) Increased the number of course offerings in the social sciences as we saw more students choosing to concentrate in that area. (5) Discontinued the mathematics concentration as the number of students in that area declined significantly (only two students concentrating in mathematics in 2019).

GLS partnerships: We are partnering with groups such as The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS), Connecticut school districts and superintendents, Alternate Route to Certification programs (ARC), and other programs involving K-12 educators who are a target market for the MALS degree. We recently restructured our Connecticut teacher scholarship program to make it available to a greater number of people (and are seeing an uptick in interest and inquiries). We also created the Education Leadership Fellows (ELF) program for teachers from TABS member schools, involving a stipend and special seminars leading to a Certificate of Education Leadership. Approaching its 4^th year in summer 2022, the TABS ELF program has been very well received by boarding school faculty and administrators and has brought in a significant number of new students, even during the pandemic.

Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP): The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) began in 2010-11 as a post-baccalaureate certificate program. In 2013-14 EPC and the faculty approved an M.A in Curatorial Practice in Performance. There was hope that the M.A. degree would draw more student interest and would allow the program to grow over the years, but the program remained particularly small. The number of students enrolled each year in the certificate program from 2011 through 2016 ranged from 6 to 17 (the highest number of 17 was in the first year of the program), and the number of students enrolled in the MA program from 2015 through 2021 ranged from 3 to 9.

In the summer and fall of 2019, the Provost convened a working group to evaluate the viability of ICPP at Wesleyan. Though many strengths of the program were recognized, Wesleyan made the decision to suspend the 2020 admission process, and in March 2020 announced that the program at Wesleyan would end (and announced the hope that it would be transferred to New York University). ICPP at Wesleyan officially ended when the May 2021 class graduated.

Academic Centers

The Fries Center for Global Studies (FCGS) has two overarching goals: to promote language learning and a culture of multilingualism, and to increase international and intercultural education opportunities. The language goal is supported in a variety of ways including with innovative language pedagogy and use of cutting edge technology, with Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum courses in which faculty members teach stand-alone or companion content courses in languages other than English, and the offering of flexible options for students to study languages beyond those we regularly teach (including 0.5-credit Supervised Independent Language Courses and 0.25-credit online Mango classes). The Center also convenes and hosts a Language Collective (a group of faculty who teach all of the languages on campus, to discuss language pedagogy, language learning, and promotion of languages on campus), provides organizational support for an annual student-run Power of Language conference, and has an on-going Language Data Project (involving collecting, analyzing, and making available data on the degree to which Wesleyan students are studying languages).

The second goal, to increase international and intercultural education opportunities, is supported in a number of ways. Important structural changes include integrating the Office of Study Abroad into the larger team of the FCGS, thus allowing for synergistic interactions among staff promoting on-campus and off-campus international opportunities; creating a full-time Assistant Director of Fellowships to support students applying for national and international fellowships; providing shared office space and unified support for Wesleyan’s 11 Foreign Language Teaching Assistants, who are visiting non-degree-seeking students assisting with language and cultural instruction in many language areas; allowing faculty to participate in FCGS as affiliate faculty members, in order to increase faculty involvement in the Center’s mission; forging and strengthening partnerships with campus units with aligned missions (such as Resource Center, Office for Equity and Inclusion, and Office of International Student Affairs); and creating a redefined position of Global Marketing Specialist to oversee the FCGS and broader university communications around international issues. We have also created the Internationalizing the Curriculum Initiative, in which faculty are given space to learn and discuss how to bring international, transnational, global, and/or decolonizing elements into their courses or departments; we publish the biweekly Wes and the World Newsletter which currently reaches more than 1000 faculty, staff, students, and alums; and we organize an annual, student-run International Education Week events.

Housed within FCGS is the Office for Study Abroad. Wesleyan sponsors three study abroad programs and has consortial arrangements with several other programs. Students also have the opportunity to study abroad through some 115 approved programs in 40 countries, and to petition FCGS for permission to participate in other study abroad programs; 43% of students from the class of 2020 spent a semester or academic year studying abroad.

The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life is the hub of civic engagement at Wesleyan, encompassing academic programs and co-curricular units that interface with the local and regional community. Included under the umbrella of this center is the Center for the Study of Public life (CSPL) which houses a rotating slate of courses, lectures, and research opportunities pertaining to public life. Recently, the University Network for Human Rights has partnered with this center to create a new minor in Human Rights Advocacy (approved for a 3 year trial). There is also a Civic Engagement Minor, designed for students integrating their civic and academic efforts. The Jewett Center for Community Partnerships stewards relationships with local institutions and residents, providing opportunities for students to engage with these off-campus communities. The Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship forges pathways for potential student entrepreneurs in the areas of social change, including a new course, “Startup Incubator.” A new course cluster has emerged from the Sustainability Office called the Sustainability & Environmental Justice course cluster, providing courses about sustainability and reducing carbon footprints. Units that reach into the broader local community include WESU 88.1 FM, a wide variety of Service Learning Courses that provide hands-on experience in the local Connecticut communities and can culminate in a Civic Engagement Certificate for students, and the Center for Prison Education (CPE). The CPE offers courses from Wesleyan and Middlesex Community College in two local prisons. These courses include Wesleyan student teaching assistants, and these courses can count towards an AA from Middlesex and a BLS from Wesleyan.

The Center for the Arts exists to catalyze people’s creativity by engaging them in the dynamic work of diverse artists. Three inter-related activities enable the CFA to realize its purpose: (1) supporting the research, public productions, and in-studio teaching needs of the departments of Art and Art History, Dance, Music, and Theater; (2) leading interdisciplinary collaborations and other initiatives that integrate artists into creative curricular and co-curricular initiatives; and (3) organizing powerful encounters between visiting artists and diverse elements of the Wesleyan community, the greater Middletown community, statewide, and regional audiences.  

In addition to being an essential support partner for students and faculty, the CFA has partnered with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Eiko Otake, Toshi Reagon, and Liz Lerman, galvanized interdisciplinarity in the arts on campus through the Creative Campus Initiative, fostered the profession through the decade-long Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, and recently launched the Embodying Antiracism Initiative funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Over time, the breadth of the mission has allowed the identity and purpose of the CFA to become less apparent and the individual CFA components to become stronger than the whole of the endeavor. As the CFA approaches its 50th anniversary and emerges from several years of leadership turnover and resulting organizational drift, the university commissioned an external review to inform the future of the CFA. The resulting conversations afforded the opportunity for the drafting of a new Campus Arts Plan, which describes the CFA’s next half-century. Portions of the plan address specific physical and technological needs, but the overarching vision is for a conceptual refinement of the CFA program. Ultimately, the plan outlines describes how the future CFA will provide fellowship time and resources for students, faculty, and outside artists. The new CFA will emphasize think-tank style collaborative process over final performance, returning to its conceptual roots in experimentalism.

The Shapiro Center for Writing draws together curricular and co-curricular programs in academic, creative, and public writing. In academic writing, the Center assists professors with writing instruction, administers peer-to-peer mentor and tutor programs for students, and coordinates writing support for multilingual students. In creative writing, the Center plans the Russell House Reading Series for visiting writers, coordinates creative writing courses across campus, and oversees co-curricular events and lends support to student groups. In public writing, the Center administers and supports the Calderwood seminar program.

Working from a new building and with a new organizational structure (including new PoPs in both creative and academic writing), the Center offers a robust set of programs for students and faculty. These include the Writing Workshop, courses in public writing, support for multilingual students, including graduate students, evolving collaborations across campus, increased consultations and course visits, and a significant increase in the number of participants in the faculty seminar on the teaching of writing. Along with continuing these successes, the ongoing integration of Wesleyan’s many programs involving writing remains a primary and ongoing challenge. Efficiency and coordination among offerings will be a key factor in addressing unmet needs, including offering an adequate number of writing-intensive courses from the FYS to the senior capstone. The retention of PoP faculty and of creative writing faculty at all ranks will be another key factor in supporting the primacy of writing across the Wesleyan curriculum.

The Center for the Humanities (CHUM) offers programming on campus that highlights the relevance of work in the humanities to public life. Each year CHUM has a theme, which engages timely issues and urgent concerns of contemporary life, e.g. “Justice and Judgment” (2013), “Mobilities” (2014-15), “Hope and Hopelessness” (2016), “Intellectual Property / Intellectual Piracy” (2017), “Rethinking Necropolitics” (2017), “Corporeal Techniques and Technologies” (2018), “Hyperbole: Sense, Sensation, Spectacle” (2019), “Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures” (2019-2020). Events are free, open to the public, advertised online and through social media, and garner robust audiences. 

The Quantitative Analysis Center (QAC) supports data analysis across the curriculum. Before 2012, the QAC offered one course each fall. That course, now following a flipped-classroom project-based learning pedagogy, is offered every semester (including intersessions), is always overenrolled, and has received attention for attracting a high number of students from underrepresent groups. Since 2012, following the addition of three new full time positions, QAC has developed 28 new courses enrolling approximately 800 students (and will increase further with a recent new faculty hire). QAC has also increased tutoring and course-specific workshops, including offering more than 1500 hours a year of statistical consulting services to thesis writers, faculty-student research projects, and research labs. Notably, the QAC has promoted the development of research labs in areas where lab work is not as common (e.g., https://deltalab.research.wesleyan.edu), increasing opportunities for using statistical computing across the curriculum. Students collaborate with faculty, present their work in professional conferences and co-author papers. At the end of the 2014 academic year, the Data Analysis Minor and the Applied Data Science Certificate were introduced. The first eligible class to complete either program (class of 2016) had 13 students enrolled. The programs quickly gained in popularity reaching 70-80 students for recent senior classes, making the data analysis minor the largest minor on campus. Finally, one example of co-curricular activities organized by QAC is its participation every year in the American Statistical Association sponsored “datafest” event. Wesleyan typically hosts 70-100 students from five different schools. Students in small teams work on data analysis projects over a long weekend supported by QAC faculty and alumni. The teams present their work to a panel of judges (academics, industry professionals, alumni) that award the event’s three prizes.

PROJECTIONS

As part of the latest strategic plan, a number of curricular initiatives are currently in development:

• A new College of Design and Engineering
• A new Interdisciplinary College of Computational Studies (Manolis or Erika Franklin Fowler)
• An expansion of the writing fellows program in the Shapiro Writing Center
• An online Institute for Lifelong Learning which will expand access to a Wesleyan experience to a wider and more diverse group of learners

The Office of Equity & Inclusion is currently developing and expanding programs to support academic success, particularly among underrepresented groups:

• WesMaSS – offering expanded workshops and facilitating conversations around metacognition, belonging, professional development and more to first-year students in STEM whose identities are underrepresented in these fields
• First Things First – offering a summer program as well as academic year workshops and discussion spaces around community building, the university’s “hidden curriculum,” academic and pre-professional opportunities, etc. for incoming FGLI students.
• Proposal to create a new Wesleyan Scholars Institute beginning in 2023, which would offer a 6-week intensive residential academic experience over the summer with two credit-bearing courses (one to develop quantitative skills, one to develop writing skills), tutoring and workshops, and cohort building with the aim to support students from identities that are more likely to struggle academically during their time at Wesleyan