Standard IV
Programs and Instruction
Andrew Shennan
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Standard IV |
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Programs and Instruction |
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Andrew Shennan |
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Programs
The overall structure of a Wellesley B.A. is essentially the same as it was at the last reaccreditation: that is, it requires a minimum of 32 units of academic work, a number of distribution or other special course requirements, and the completion of a major (consisting of at least eight units of work, including two units of advanced work). However, during the 1990s a number of changes within this overall structure were accomplished as a result of a multi-year curriculum review process.
Majors
The range of majors available to students has continued to grow, though the rate of growth in the 1990s has slowed somewhat from that of the previous decade. In 1998-99 there are 31 departmental majors and 20 interdepartmental majors, as compared to 28 departmental and 16 interdepartmental majors in 1988-89, and 25 departmental and 5 interdepartmental majors in 1978-79. In the last decade, international relations, Russian area studies and Latin-American studies have been introduced as interdepartmental majors; women's studies has been converted from an interdepartmental to a departmental major; Japanese grew from a program to a department, and a new category of so-called structured individual majors (e.g. comparative literature, peace and justice studies) has emerged. (This arrangement allows students to design their own concentration within certain parameters established by the directors of the major). There are also currently 27 minors. It should be noted that this expansion of available concentrations has been achieved in a decade of little or no growth in the size of the faculty. The expansion has been made possible by the willingness of individual faculty members to reach outside departmental affiliations and establish collaborative teaching and advising relationships with colleagues in other departments.
While the eight course minimum for a major has been retained, most majors now require at least nine or ten courses. This has long been true in many science majors, but in recent years a number of the larger humanities and social science departments and programs (including American studies, economics, English, international relations, philosophy, political science, religion and sociology) have raised the minimum requirement above eight courses in order to increase the depth or rigor of their majors. In at least some cases, this change reflected a concern that the eight course minimum was encouraging students to elect two majors rather than concentrate on one. (The percentage of Wellesley students double majoring has, indeed, been high - around 30 per cent - for much of the past decade.)
Like most similar institutions, Wellesley has faced the challenge of maintaining the integrity of traditional departmental majors while being responsive to the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields. Inevitably, in a faculty of our size there can be a tension between departmental needs and priorities, on the one hand, and the needs of interdisciplinary programs, on the other. In recent years, several departmental visiting committees have called attention to that tension.
The College's response over the past decade has been supportive, but cautiously so, of interdisciplinary programs. Without changing an institutional structure built around departments, the administration has facilitated the development of new interdepartmental majors in emerging fields and has encouraged faculty initiatives in interdisciplinary teaching. In the last year, it has also streamlined the administration of several interdepartmental majors by lodging them within departments, where appropriate.
This gradualist approach is sometimes frustrating to faculty members whose intellectual orientation is fundamentally interdisciplinary or who teach in areas where student interest has increased dramatically in recent years (international relations is the best example of such a field). There is a sense that the College has not yet determined a long-term strategy for dealing with profound shifts in the organization of academic disciplines. On the other hand, the pragmatism of the past decade has allowed for continued innovation and an expansion of the opportunities available to our students.
The College Curriculum
In 1998, as in 1989, Wellesley is prescriptive enough to believe that every student should be required to take certain kinds of courses, but at the same time allows students as much latitude as possible in selecting the courses they take to fulfill these requirements. Curricular debate at Wellesley in the past decade has been continual, but it has not generally challenged this fundamental balance between strong guidance and personal choice. The discussion has tended to focus on which skills, disciplines or experiences are so integral to a liberal arts education that they should be required of every student, or whether the balance between guidance and choice, or between the breadth of a student's education and its depth, should be tipped a little this way or that. "Structured choice" has remained the underlying principle.
Most of the reform that has occurred since 1989 is the product of a major review of the curriculum that the faculty undertook between 1993 and 1996. This effort followed on the heels of a more circumscribed but still substantial review of academic programs and policies undertaken in 1990-91 by the academic planning task force of the Committee for Wellesley in the '90s (C90s). In many areas, the C90s report did indeed shape policy over ensuing years, but not with respect to the curriculum. Most of the curricular reform proposals that the academic planning task force made were either not pursued or were voted down in Academic Council. A sense that some of the academic planning task force proposals deserved closer attention than they had received, combined with the fact that a comprehensive reassessment of the curriculum was long overdue, led the dean of the College to launch such a reassessment in 1993.
The curriculum review was a long and complex process, surely one of the most thorough in the college's history. To place the outcomes of this process in their proper perspective, it would be helpful to summarize its course.
The genesis of the review lay in a curriculum retreat in June 1993, in which fifteen faculty members and the deans came together to address two basic questions: What would be an ideal liberal arts education? How did Wellesley's curriculum correspond to that ideal? This particular group concluded that the lack of a common academic experience was a grave deficiency in the current curriculum. They were not able to persuade the faculty as a whole on that issue, but the retreat, nonetheless, produced two significant outcomes.
First, the common experience concept inspired an experimental interdisciplinary program for first-year students. This program, entitled INCIPIT (Introduction to Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Problems and Intellectual Tools), was developed with funding from the NEH, NSF and FIPSE. It attempted to integrate aspects of humanities, social science and natural science disciplines into a year-long study of fundamental intellectual issues relating to the self, the social and the global. It replaced another interdisciplinary first-year program, the Cluster, which had been introduced in 1984 and was offered into the early 1990s. Both programs were team-taught and stressed collaborative teaching and learning, but the Cluster was more thematically focused (its themes, which changed from year to year, included, for example, "the Age of Columbus" and "Human Identity and the Body") and less self-consciously innovative in terms of teaching format. Under both programs, students lived together in the same residence halls. INCIPIT was taught twice, in 1995-96 and 1996-97, but has not been offered since then.
The 1993 curriculum retreat also provided a model for the larger discussion about the curriculum that was about to get under way. In the following semester, the two questions which had been raised at the retreat were presented again, this time to the faculty as a whole. After a series of wide-ranging discussions, the dean established five task forces to do the essential groundwork of the curriculum review, that is to gather information about curriculum reviews at other institutions, organize a faculty dialogue about liberal arts education at the end of the twentieth century, gather data on the curricular choices that Wellesley students make, as well as on their academic strengths and weaknesses. The task forces addressed five areas of concern: degree requirements, pedagogy, technology in the curriculum, interdisciplinary learning and teaching, and common experience. Every member of the faculty was invited to participate in the task forces' work, and most faculty members (more than 150 in all) chose to do so. While the faculty naturally took the lead in this review, students served on task forces, attended presentations by task force members and contributed to a lively electronic debate about curricular issues. The task force chairs also solicited the views of Wellesley alumnae, via meetings with focus groups and a survey mailed to all alumnae.
After more than a year of work, the five task forces produced a set of preliminary reports (Spring 1995). Since each task force had been encouraged to develop its own charge and to manage its review in the way that its members found most congenial, the resulting reports were naturally heterogeneous. Some contained quite detailed recommendations, while others sought simply to clarify a set of alternatives or to offer informed reflections on the current state of affairs. To draw together these efforts into a reform proposal, the dean invited thirty faculty members to form into an ad hoc "overlap group". This overlap group met in the summer of 1995 and presented its report to the faculty at the beginning of the following academic year. The overlap group report, which may, therefore, be regarded as the distillation of two years' review of the curriculum, proposed four major sets of reform:
This report was presented to the faculty not as a set of proposals for legislative change but as a working document, to be amended in light of further discussions. In the Fall of 1995 the forum for these discussions was a series of open meetings at which faculty had an opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of each of the overlap group's proposals. As a result of those meetings, certain of the overlap group proposals (notably, the 34 unit degree, the calendar changes and the Dartmouth transcript proposal) were shelved, while others were brought forward to Academic Council. In the end, four major changes were voted on and approved.
The first was a recasting of distribution requirements, in order to reflect changes in the substance and method of academic disciplines, to express our revised conception of the general elements of a liberal arts education, and to provide our students with more useful intellectual guidance. The old distribution categories, which had been in place at Wellesley for decades, were the traditional ones of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Each of these categories was essentially defined in terms of a group of academic departments. The new categories divide courses in terms of their substance or methodology rather than departmental provenance. Thus, three categories have been replaced by eight: languages and literature; visual arts, music, video, film and theatre; social and behavioral analysis; epistemology and cognition; ethics, religion, and moral philosophy; historical studies; natural and physical science; mathematical modeling and problem solving in the natural sciences, mathematics and computer science. This is a less drastic revolution than it may at first appear: the total number of courses that students are required to take remains unchanged (nine), and the new categories are clustered in such a way as to preserve roughly the old balance between science, social science and humanities. The preservation of this balance was generally regarded as desirable in view of enrollment data suggesting that around 50 per cent of Wellesley students elect no more than the minimum number of required science courses and that social science departments account for a disproportionate share of total student elections (in recent years 43 per cent). Nonetheless, the new distribution categories represent a significant break from past practice.
Second, the faculty decided to revise a multicultural requirement that had been in place since 1990 (the genesis of which was discussed at length in our 1989 self-study). This requirement was established as an expression of the faculty's conviction that every student's academic program should contain at least one course that dealt with the experience of "non-western" societies or cultures and/or the issues of racism and discrimination. Five years later, the rationale for this requirement was still accepted by a majority of the faculty, but there was considerable dissatisfaction with its implementation. Students were presented with a long, and lengthening, list of multicultural courses with which they could fulfill the requirement. The issue of which courses were included or excluded became a divisive one, and the list itself seemed to obscure the purpose of the requirement, at least in the minds of many students. The new requirement addresses these shortcomings by eliminating the list of approved courses and placing the onus on the student -- in consultation with her advisors -- to identify a course that meets the requirement and then justify her choice in writing. The aim of the new requirement is to encourage our students not just to take a multicultural course but to reflect on the purpose and meaning of the requirement.
The third reform was an innovation that had been recommended by the academic planning task force and a number of other committees over the years: the introduction of a quantitative reasoning (QR) requirement. This new requirement has two distinct components: a basic skills component which consists of a QR assessment exam taken by all entering students and a required course in elementary QR for those who do not demonstrate adequate facility; and a college-level component, which requires all students to take a course focussing on the analysis and interpretation of data. Support for this requirement came from all sections of the faculty, not just from scientists and quantitative social scientists. It reflected a consensus that our students need these basic and more advanced skills not just to perform well in other areas of the curriculum or to be successful professionally, but simply to be well-educated citizens in a technologically sophisticated society.
Finally, the faculty voted to introduce half-unit courses, thus breaking with the college's practice of assigning one unit of credit to each course. Though this is, in itself, a relatively minor, technical modification (not even unprecedented, since the faculty had already voted in 1993 to give 1.25 units of credit to certain science and language courses), it carries a significant symbolic weight. The expectation is that in time this change will bring a flexibility which will have beneficial effects throughout the curriculum -- making possible specialized courses such as honors seminars or other "capstone" experiences for majors, encouraging more course offerings during January wintersession, facilitating fieldwork or other out-of-class learning.
Even without an increase in the number of units required for the degree, this new curriculum (which went into effect with the entry of the class of 2001) is more rigorous than the old one. The list of requirements is as follows:
After a decade rich in curricular self-study, where do we now stand?
The curriculum review has produced a variation on the traditional Wellesley theme. In certain respects we have tightened and updated our requirements. But at the same time we have tried to place slightly more weight on the advising role of faculty and import greater flexibility into the curriculum (via the .5 unit courses). Some faculty members believe that our requirements hem our students in too closely, but most seem comfortable with the amended balance between intellectual guidance and student autonomy. It is obviously too soon to judge the impact of this new curriculum on student learning. Evaluating the results of the review is a major challenge still ahead, and the College has work to do before it can claim to have satisfactory evaluation procedures in place.
The course of the curriculum review raises some questions about our deliberative processes. Plainly, this was a very protracted process. Its duration in part reflected the prior experience of the C90s academic planning task force. The fate of this earlier review (which had recommended many of the changes that the overlap group later endorsed but saw few of its proposals implemented) encouraged a cautious strategy on the part of those leading the curriculum review. This caution may also be explained, more broadly, in terms of the prevailing culture of consultation and consensus-building at Wellesley.
It is also a fact that the curriculum review made little headway on certain issues that were initially identified as critical -- for example, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, first-year and senior-year experiences, the common experience ideal as well as the problems of grade inflation and a compressed academic calendar. Some of these issues (for example, the 34 unit degree or the required "capstone experience") appear to have been resolved by default, in the sense that no further action on them has been proposed or undertaken. (It should be noted that the inauguration in 1997 of an annual one-day conference showcasing student research - the Ruhlman Conference - has raised the profile of senior thesis work and may encourage more seniors to opt for that kind of capstone experience.) Other issues, however, have received on-going attention since the end of the curriculum review. One case in point is the class schedule. As a result of continuing concerns that too many of our courses meet in a handful of prime time slots and that we do not make sensible use of the entire work week, a new task force was convened in the Spring of 1998 to study this thorny issue.
We have also continued our rethinking of the first-year experience. In recent years, first-year advising has passed through several incarnations (see Advising below), and the College's interdisciplinary program for first-year students has disappeared from the curriculum. The Cluster was an innovative experiment that appeared to have run out of energy after more than a decade in operation. Its replacement, the still more innovative and experimental INCIPIT, lasted only two years and was controversial from the outset. Faculty critics argued that the course was unrealistically ambitious - both in terms of content and method - especially as a program designed for first-year students. Although the program gained in coherence and effectiveness over time, it was clearly, even after two years, a work-in-progress. The experience of INCIPIT highlights two facts. The first is the significant disagreement within the faculty as to the value and relative priority to be attached to interdisciplinary programming. The second, perhaps still more serious, is the College's failure to convert a major and well funded innovation into a regular part of the curriculum. On the specific issue of first-year programming, the College is still considering which direction to take.
To put the foregoing discussion of curriculum writ large into its proper perspective, we should note that most curricular change at Wellesley, as elsewhere, occurs incrementally and, as it were, invisibly, as departmental curricula evolve from year to year, in response to shifts in their fields, in personnel, or in student interest. In recent years the most oft-debated aspect of this incremental change has been the College's effort to diversify course offerings in order to encompass areas or issues neglected in the existing curriculum. The administration has sought to address such gaps via the funding of new chairs or the approval of tenure-track searches in fields that are under-covered (such as South Asia and Latin America). In addition, individual departments have not infrequently used leave replacements to offer courses in areas not usually covered. Overall, this continuing effort has met with mixed reviews. Many - especially students but not only students - feel that the diversification has progressed too slowly; others - especially but not exclusively faculty - are concerned about the effects of such diversification on established areas of the curriculum. The fact that this debate has been occurring at a time of little or no growth in the overall faculty size has intensified feeling on both sides.
On a happier note, the most recent round of department and program visiting committees (16 in the past four years) has provided reassuring testimony to the strength of our curriculum and to our departments' responsiveness to evolutions in their fields. These outside visitors have been full of praise for the quality and range of course offerings at Wellesley.
Research Centers
One of the distinctive characteristics of Wellesley is that it is an undergraduate institution which also houses a number of centers for specialized research. The Child Study Center, which is directed through the psychology department, serves both as a preschool and as a laboratory for early childhood research. The Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies sponsors research on women's psychological development and on the prevention of psychological problems (in addition to providing psychological counseling for Wellesley students). The Center for Research on Women conducts scholarly and policy-oriented research on a range of issues related to women's experience. Collectively, these centers have compiled a long and distinguished research record, are important for Wellesley's external reputation, and embody the College's concern for the status and lives of women everywhere.
In our 1989 self-study, we noted the efforts that had been made to integrate the centers more closely with the rest of the College and to support their development and mission. In recent years, the College has renewed these efforts. In 1994 the president appointed a multi-constituency committee of trustees, faculty, administrators and students to review the relationship of the Stone Center and the Center for Research on Women to the College and to one another. This committee found a continuing confusion, both within the College and outside, as to the relationship between the two centers and a continuing perception that the centers were peripheral to the core educational mission of the College. In 1995, the committee recommended that these problems could best be addressed by forming a consortium (the Wellesley Centers for Women), with a single executive reporting to the dean of the College and a single advisory committee. Under this arrangement, approved by the president and the Board of Trustees, each center retains its own endowment and pursues its own mission and research agenda but within a more streamlined organizational structure.
Change in the centers' relationship to the educational mission of the College has been slow but steady as a result of this reorganization. A few faculty members locate their research projects at the centers. Many students work as research assistants on projects at the centers, and a small but increasing number of centers researchers are teaching courses at the College. How far this integration will go is as yet unclear.
Inter-institutional programs
As the College has striven to keep its faculty size constant and at the same time to provide a diversified and expanded curriculum, Wellesley (like most of its peers) has recognized the potential of inter-institutional cooperation to help square this circle. For thirty years Wellesley has had an exchange with M.I.T., whereby Wellesley students may register for M.I.T. courses (and vice versa). More limited exchange programs were instituted in the 1980s with Brandeis University and Babson College.
A 1995 study of these exchanges, written by a member of the Wellesley faculty, highlighted their value to our students, but noted certain disturbing trends in their operation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of Wellesley students registering for M.I.T. courses fell almost without interruption. In 1984-5 there were 491 Wellesley registrations at M.I.T., while in 1993-4 there were just 193. (Over the same period M.I.T. student registrations at Wellesley fell even more dramatically.) A combination of factors seem to account for this decline. Some reflect well on Wellesley: for example, the expansion of our programs in computer science and cognitive science has reduced the necessity to study off-campus. Other factors such as changes in M.I.T.'s degree requirements and the tighter schedules of students who need to work more hours for pay may be beyond the College's control. In certain areas of the curriculum, the M.I.T., Brandeis and Babson exchanges continue to provide invaluable opportunities: M.I.T. courses are important for architecture and geology majors, for example, and Brandeis courses are essential for those who want to study Arabic. To quote the 1995 study: "the numbers served are not large, but the program may nonetheless be vitally important to the students who do participate."
There is continuing interest at Wellesley in revitalizing or developing these inter-institutional links. Two areas that have often been mentioned as likely ones for new initiatives are international relations (a major in which student interest has grown exponentially) and instruction in languages such as Korean not offered at Wellesley. The reconfiguration of the Office of the Dean of the College in 1995, which made inter-institutional cooperation a key part of the dean's portfolio, suggests that the administration places a high priority on fostering such links. So, too, do the Trustees.
Scholarship and Research
Wellesley College faculty undertake creative activity within the classroom on an ongoing basis. With the introduction of a four-course teaching load in 1989 (a decision discussed in our last Reaccreditation self-study), faculty have gained more time to spend learning and applying new pedagogic strategies and techniques. The creative activity includes the development of new courses or modification of existing courses using the latest media and technological tools, or using other innovative approaches to teaching, sometimes involving two or more faculty from the same or different departments ("Propaganda and Persuasion in the Twentieth Century," INCIPIT, "the Art and Science of Multimedia"). Faculty develop tools for teaching, such as HyperChinese, that are used both on and off our campus.
The College's Committee on Educational Research and Development awards funds to support the development of experimental courses (e.g. "the Art and Science of Multimedia," "Introduction to the Study of Conflict," "Justice and Peace," minicluster of biological sciences and chemistry), travel to teaching-related conferences (e.g. women of color writers conference, Mathematica 3.0 workshop, northeast Japanese language pedagogy workshop), as well as "quick fix" grants for small instructional innovations. Grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have funded creative activity in the classroom in the sciences at both the introductory and advanced level. The development of new or modified courses to fulfill the new quantitative reasoning requirement has also been funded by the HHMI grants.
Support of experimental courses is for one year only. This has led to a hesitancy among many faculty to develop new courses that will immediately disappear from the curriculum.
Faculty collaboration in the classroom has also been fostered by a series of summer seminars, originally funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, but funded internally since 1993. These seminars, ranging in topic from "the art of the book" to "the origins of the universe," bring together up to 10 faculty from a wide range of departments who are paid a stipend to study a topic of mutual interest. New courses have resulted from some faculty seminars, while other seminars have given faculty new tools or materials to incorporate into existing courses.
Faculty research involving student co-investigators takes place during the academic year, during wintersession, and during the summer. In each of the last ten years between 450 and 550 students elected courses numbered 350 (research or individual study), and 360/370 (senior thesis research/ senior thesis). Summer research programs, involving between 50 and 80 students, are located in the Science Center, and, recently, in other areas of the college through a small new program of grants for multicultural summer research projects. In addition, faculty often support student summer research projects through grants of their own. The programs in the Science Center are supported by both internal and external funds, with the chemistry and biological sciences departments running National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduate programs during the last 10 years. Science faculty also designed and staff a mentoring program for minority students in their first and second years at Wellesley. Students in this program work in the laboratory with faculty members throughout the academic year, and receive a stipend.
The Ford Foundation undergraduate initiative provided support over an eight-year period (1987-1995) for hundreds of students involved in special student/faculty collaborations, honors seminars, and travel to academic conferences. The success of the program was evaluated by a survey administered to those who had received support through the grant. The survey verified that the project had benefited both students and faculty participants in encouraging them to be close partners in the academic enterprise within and beyond the college. Since the grant expired, we have increased the internal funding available for student/faculty collaborations and travel for students to academic conferences. Some recent gifts to the college have been earmarked specifically for these purposes, and we continue to seek additional funds. A new grant from the National Science Foundation under its Awards for the Integration of Research and Education (AIRE) is enabling us to extend the involvement of students in faculty research into the social sciences.
Faculty research, both with and without student involvement, has become increasingly important at Wellesley, as at many comparable liberal arts colleges, in the last 15 years. It was not necessarily one of the goals of the 1989 course load reduction to increase faculty research activity. On the contrary, the main thrust of the course load reduction was to allow faculty to fulfill their research aspirations and to remain excellent teachers and student advisors. While it is notoriously difficult to measure research accomplishments and impossible to assign perceived effects to individual causes, some encouraging developments can be noted. Members of the Committee on Faculty Appointments (CFA) have observed that the research portfolios of recent tenure cohorts are uniformly stronger than those in the past, while teaching quality remains very high. The director of sponsored research reports that faculty seem to win as many external research grants as in the past, despite general reductions in available funds.
In 1994 a principal investigator's handbook was prepared and issued by the director of sponsored research and the post-award grants administrator. This handbook describes in detail the College's expectations for faculty researchers. Faculty play important roles on the institutional review board, which oversees research with human subjects, and the institutional animal care and use committee. Rigorous justification and documentation are required of all faculty members who wish to perform experiments involving humans or animals. Research protocols are reviewed annually.
Between 1989-90 and 1996-97, the College doubled the dollar amount of internal faculty research awards. Faculty research support endowments were developed during the last capital campaign for the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Wellesley's sabbatical leave program, a significant example of the support of faculty scholarship, is among the most generous of which we are aware. Faculty are eligible to apply for a semester leave after six semesters of teaching, or a year leave after six years of teaching. They are required to do a "strenuous search" for outside funding (usually defined as submitting three grant proposals to funding agencies) in order to receive a fully funded leave (100% of salary and benefits). Faculty may also choose to take a leave at half salary and benefits; no "strenuous search" is required in this case. Tenure-track faculty are also eligible for a year of leave after the first multi-year reappointment. "Early" leaves are funded in the same way as sabbatical leaves.
During the last ten years the College has increased internal support for the research of new faculty members through a program of start-up funds. For new faculty in the sciences, amounts of up to $40,000 have been awarded. Smaller amounts are also made available to faculty in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to these funds each new faculty member is provided with a computer workstation appropriate to her/his particular research and teaching requirements and maintained and upgraded regularly by the College.
This high level of support has helped Wellesley to hire and retain some of the most promising young scholar-teachers, and has contributed crucially to the academic distinction of the faculty as a whole. In the past several years, however, some have wondered aloud whether we can continue to afford this level of institutional support of faculty research, especially as external funding becomes more difficult to secure and as the cost of other faculty benefits, particularly the cost of leave policies including parental leave, rises.
Instruction
Class Size and Enrollment
Everyone recognizes that small class size is essential for the high-quality, personalized instruction which Wellesley aspires to give its students. One of the major concerns raised by the College's decision to lower the normal faculty teaching load from five to four courses was that this change would increase class size. In fact, as the College reported in its five year interim report to NEASC (August 1994), the average class size did increase from 18 to 20 as a result of the 12 per cent reduction in course sections after introduction of the four-course load. But this modest increase in average class size seemed well within a tolerable range, and still seems so. In recent years, the average class size at the grade I (introductory) level has ranged from 22 to 24 students per section, from 18 to 20 at the grade II (intermediate) level, and from 12 to 14 at the grade III (advanced) level. While there are more courses enrolling 30-40 students than was the case a decade ago, there remain very few courses with an enrollment over 50 - partly because some departments (e.g. biological sciences) have broken large grade I courses into smaller sections and partly because departments with high enrollments at the 200-level have generally capped them at 25-40.
While the overall picture is reassuring, there are some significant variations in class size which should be noted. In the humanities the average class size at the grade I level has ranged recently from 14 to 20, as compared to 27 to 32 in social science courses and 22 to 34 in math and science courses. (This variation between humanities fields and others reflects, in part, the necessarily small size of introductory language sections and writing courses.) At the grade II level, the average in the humanities has been 15-17, in math and science 16-20, and in social science 20-24. Enrollment patterns since 1992 do not substantiate the often expressed fear of inexorable growth in social science elections (a concern voiced, for example, in the C90s academic planning task force): in the last five years the distribution of elections by division has remained fairly static. But the enrollment figures do show enrollments growing very significantly in a handful of departments (most of which are indeed in the social sciences).
These fluctuations in student election and average class size raise an important issue: Have the cap on faculty FTE instituted after the C90s report and the increasing proportion of tenured to untenured faculty created a structural constraint impeding our ability to respond to the inevitable fluctuations in students' academic interests and preferences? It is certainly not easy to shift faculty resources from one year to the next or even over three- or five-year periods. Some would argue that this limited flexibility is a good thing, because the fluctuations may themselves be temporary or because there may be certain intrinsic principles relating to a liberal arts curriculum that should limit the size of any single department or require the staffing of other departments at a minimum level for viability. Others worry, though, that the increasing appeal to students of pre-professional education puts a small liberal arts college at a competitive disadvantage owing to limitations in the scope of its curriculum.
Evaluation of Teaching
As an institution, Wellesley remains committed to excellence in instruction. In an informal way faculty think and talk about teaching continually. This culture of teaching is bolstered by a range of formal policies which are intended to monitor the quality of instruction and encourage improvement and innovation in teaching.
Characteristic is the system of student course evaluation. Students complete evaluations of every course that they take every semester, and the statistical data generated by these evaluations form an important part of each faculty member's permanent record and are considered - both at the departmental level and at the level of the deans and the Committee on Faculty Appointments - in all decisions relating to reappointment, tenure and promotion. Ever since the student evaluation questionnaire (SEQ) was introduced at Wellesley in 1971, it has been subjected to almost continual review. Within the past decade, for example, it has been reviewed by the Educational Research and Development Committee, the Committee on Faculty Appointments, an outside institutional research consultant hired by the dean of the College, a curriculum review task force, and most recently by the faculty director of the Learning and Teaching Center. The issue at stake in these reviews has not been the desirability of student evaluation of teaching per se - which the faculty has always strongly endorsed - but the suitability of the existing instrument: Were we posing the right questions to students? Were quantitative data more or less useful than qualitative evaluation (i.e. student letters)? Should evaluation happen in every course every semester, and should student evaluations serve a developmental as well as an evaluative purpose? The incessant, sometimes heated, debate over such issues has, in a sense, been itself a manifestation of the Wellesley culture of teaching.
The SEQs are supplemented by faculty class visits, which have also been much discussed over the past decade. Class visits (that is, visits by tenured faculty to untenured colleagues' classes or by full professors to associate professors' classes) were introduced at Wellesley in the late 1960s. Departmental procedures governing the observation of untenured faculty members' teaching by their senior colleagues vary (which is itself one of the major sources of concern), but they are all governed by the college's Articles of Government, which require class visits in the first year of an initial appointment and three further visits in the year preceding reappointment or tenure decisions. These visits (like the SEQs) have always been viewed as having more than a purely evaluative purpose; they are supposed to act as a vehicle for giving feedback and guidance for improving teaching. In 1992-93 the same outside consultant hired by the dean of the College to examine the SEQ system also examined the class visit system and found much skepticism about the effectiveness of the class visit as a developmental tool. The conclusion of this report recommended that developmental and evaluative processes should be more clearly separated - for example, by making class visits during the first year entirely developmental or by promoting other means of development such as mentoring programs, assistance from teaching experts outside the department, etc. While some of these steps were taken (for example, the introduction of a successful mentoring program for untenured faculty), the debate about the fairness and validity of class visit reports continued.
Building on all this prior work, in 1997-98 the director of the Learning and Teaching Center coordinated a further review of both class visits and student evaluations. In the spring of 1998 five proposals were brought to Academic Council:
Sense-of-the-meeting votes indicated strong faculty support for all these proposals, except the third. Thus for a three-year trial period beginning in September 1998 the following changes will be instituted:
These recent reforms constitute the most significant reworking of our teaching evaluation procedures in many years. We are hopeful that they will finally put to rest certain persistent problems, although we will obviously only know for sure by careful
monitoring and evaluation of their impact. Meanwhile, the Learning and Teaching Center sponsors a growing portfolio of programs to support faculty in the refinement of their teaching skills (see below).
Advising
Another subject of on-going discussion in the 1990s has been the advising system. One of the
explicit assumptions made by the College administration and accepted by the faculty at the time of the switch to the four-course load was that faculty members were expected to "assume responsibility for advising first-year students and sophomores, majors in one's own department and in related interdepartmental programs" (Final Report of the Four Course Load Assessment Advisory Committee, 1992). Many Wellesley faculty had been performing these roles long before the four-course teaching load was introduced. But in the early 1990s there was an increasing interest in formalizing the advising system, particularly first-year advising. One reason for this emphasis on advising was the sense that entering students were coming to Wellesley from more diverse backgrounds and were more diversely prepared for college-level work than ever before, and as a result the College had to provide more systematic guidance. In the early 1990s the College phased in a new, dormitory-based first-year advising program. Faculty members formed into advising teams and these teams were assigned to individual dormitories. Though this system was more effective than its predecessor (random assignment of first-year students from a variety of dorms to a first-year advisor), it was neither uniformly popular with the faculty nor successful from the students' perspective. In 1997-98, after an extensive review of the first-year experience conducted under the A.C.E./Kellogg project on leadership and institutional transformation, yet another advising program was introduced. Under the new system, first-year students select an advisor from among those faculty members teaching them in their first term at Wellesley. Whether or not this particular advising system succeeds, its introduction suggests that the College is still struggling for the best way to implement the philosophy popularized by Professor Richard Light, director of the Harvard assessment seminars (and now a Wellesley trustee): "...Students who get the most out of college, who grow the most academically, and who are happiest, organize their time to include interpersonal activities with faculty members, or with fellow students, built around substantive, academic work."
Perhaps the flux in the advising system reflects the fact that, to judge by enrolled student surveys, our students are less satisfied with this aspect of their academic experience than with other aspects. We have thought a great deal about the reasons for this dissatisfaction, but have not yet reached definite conclusions. Is it in fact entirely an academic issue or a facet of a broader problem of student social life at Wellesley? If the latter, what would be the proper role of faculty in addressing it? Some believe that we could do more to create non-course-related academic exchange between faculty and students, but others are skeptical about the feasibility or even appropriateness of that.
Learning and Teaching Center
While the advising system has been in flux, the College has made significant investments in initiatives to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The most important of these is the creation of the Learning and Teaching Center (LTC), which was recommended by the C90s report in 1992 and began operation in 1992-93. As its title suggests, this center was envisaged as a resource which would both provide academic assistance to students and support innovation and improvement in teaching. This was an ambitious vision, and in its five years of operation the LTC has largely fulfilled its dual function.
On the student services side, the LTC coordinates extensive programs of peer advising and tutoring. It appoints and trains a group of academic peer tutors who provide a variety of services, beginning with an important role in orienting first-year students to Wellesley. During drop-in hours and scheduled appointments throughout the year, peer tutors provide individual support, helping students assess study skills, improve study strategies, understand the academic life at Wellesley and make use of other sources of academic support on campus. The center also coordinates services for students with documented learning disabilities.
On the faculty side, the LTC sponsors regular "shop talks" in which members of the faculty or staff discuss pedagogical issues, share information about teaching resources, technological innovations, etc. The center provides facilities to videotape classes if faculty members so request; it pairs faculty with teaching partners to work on improving teaching outside of usual, formal evaluative channels; and it plays an important part in new faculty orientation and training throughout the first year at the College.
Admissions and Retention
Admissions
Wellesley's admissions program is organized to attract and matriculate the most academically able group of young women from across the country and from around the world. Each year students apply from all 50 states, and international students typically make up between 3-6% of each entering class. Wellesley currently has approximately 10 full scholarships to award to international students each year from a pool of 400 students where approximately 200-300 applicants need financial aid. However, increasing the number of scholarships for international students is a fund-raising priority, and a planned gift from a generous alumna has been designated for this purpose. Wellesley is committed to admitting domestic students and permanent residents, being "financial aid blind" in the process and meeting 100% of demonstrated need; at Wellesley, merit is the only factor considered in admission and financial need is the only criterion for aid. In 1995, Wellesley undertook a self-study on financial aid, and as a result, rededicated itself to its need-blind policy including having enough financial aid dollars for wait-listed students who would be admitted.
The Board of Admission at Wellesley is composed of faculty, administrators, and student representatives. Board members choose students who will benefit from and contribute to the type of education offered at Wellesley. Consideration is given to strong academic achievement as well as creativity and high motivation. Admission decisions are never made on the basis of a single factor. Instead, each part of the application contributes to a well rounded appraisal of a student's strengths and is useful in attempting to predict whether Wellesley will be the right place for her to continue her education. In selecting candidates for admission, the Board considers a number of factors, including: high school record(s); difficulty of curriculum; rank in class; letters of recommendation; essay; SAT-I and SAT-II scores or ACT scores; extracurricular activities; leadership; special or unusual talent; and staff or alumnae interview.
Over the past nine years the applicant pool has grown by over 30%. Most of this increase occurred from 1992 to 1994, with a leveling off or slight decline since then. (Please refer to Chart 1.) This pattern is similar to the trend for women applicants at other COFHE institutions, particularly selective universities. Wellesley receives over 20,000 inquiries a year from high school seniors, and over 3,000 young women apply for the 585 spots. As Wellesley has become more selective, admitting approximately 42% of the pool versus 50% of the pool in 1988, the quality of the pool as measured by standardized tests has improved. The combined SAT scores went from 1226 in 1988 to 1328 in 1995 . (Please refer to Chart 2.) Before the recentering of the SAT, the combined scores of the matriculating students had increased by more than 50 points.
The ALANA applicant pool has grown by 55% over this time period where 39% of the Class of 2001 were ALANA students, of which 24% were Asian American. Wellesley's incoming classes are diverse in ethnicity and race as well as language. The first-year class typically has 28-31 different languages being spoken at home. Wellesley has had approximately 150 transfer applicants for 30 spots a year. In addition, the Davis Scholar Program for Continuing Education, a program designed for women over 25 years old who are returning to college for their degrees, has typically had between 83 and 155 applications for 30-40 spots over the past five years. This applicant pool has declined in the last year, and we are monitoring it closely.
Wellesley is now undertaking an admissions marketing study to address the changing patterns of college attendance: what are the historical trends and driving forces in admissions and what patterns can be discerned in applications to women's colleges and to Wellesley in particular? How have recent changes in financial aid policies at other institutions affected Wellesley's applicant pool and yield? The College is working with a market research firm conducting telephone interviews with secondary school juniors, seniors, and admitted students, as well as parents and guidance counselors. In addition, focus groups with students and parents will assess their perceptions of Wellesley. An analysis of competitors will also be included. Wellesley hopes to examine the College's perceived strengths and weaknesses as well as its competitive positioning in order to develop new marketing strategies with which to enter the next century.
Student Persistence and Graduation Rates
Persistence is defined as the percent of students who return for their sophomore year at Wellesley. Since 1988, Wellesley's student persistence rate fluctuated between a low of 91% for the class entering in 1991 to a high of 97% for the class entering in 1995; rates tended to hover around 94% and 95%. Graduation rates tell us the percent of students from each entering class who receive a Wellesley degree four, five and six years after entry. Wellesley's five-year graduation rate varies from year to year but ranges between a low of 82% for the cohort entering in 1991 to a high of 93% for the cohort entering in 1984. Five-year graduation rates tend to cluster around 85% and 86%.
Wellesley was interested in understanding the factors associated with persistence and graduation rates. In particular, we wanted to understand which students were more likely to leave Wellesley and when they were most likely to leave. The Office of Institutional Research conducted a comprehensive study in 1996 to address these questions. The study included ten cohorts of students and these analytic components:
These findings emerged from the study:
Wellesley's persistence and graduation rates appear reasonably good. The majority of students who withdraw from Wellesley transfer to other institutions to complete their education. It would be difficult to attempt to retain high GPA, non-aided students if, as we suspect, Wellesley was never their first choice of school. Lower GPA students who leave after the first year, however, might be retained with more academic support.
One issue that arose in the study was the lack of information on when and where students transfer. While the Dean of Students' Office tracks students' requests for recommendations from the class deans (for transfer purposes), no office at the college is responsible for following-up with students to learn their destination. Some students voluntarily inform Wellesley of their new school; most do not. The College will institute a more formal method of tracking and interviewing students who leave Wellesley to attend another institution.
Academic Standards and Credit
As the admissions statistics cited above show, Wellesley students are typically highly motivated and extremely able. Once here, they are held - and hold themselves - to a high academic standard. Those who experience academic difficulties or have non-academic problems that interfere with their academic work have access to assistance from a number of sources - from their professors, faculty advisors, the Learning and Teaching Center, and, above all, their class deans. The latter play a critical role in advising such students and directing them to the resources that they need. The records of students not in good academic standing are reviewed at the end of each semester by the Academic Review Board, the committee responsible for monitoring each student's academic progress and sanctioning exceptions to the College's academic policies.
Wellesley's grading practices have been the subject of considerable faculty discussion in recent years. Particularly concerning to many are the long-term upward trend of the grades and some significant variations between grading patterns in different departments. Without resolving this problem, or even resolving whether it is a problem, the College has articulated a set of concise and consistent definitions which explain to students what our grades mean. These definitions are published each year in the College catalog.
The College's policy on granting credit for work taken other than at Wellesley is relatively liberal. We allow up to 8 units of advanced placement credit to be applied to the degree (although many departments exclude AP credits from counting towards their major or minor and, beginning in Fall 1999, AP credits may also not be applied to distribution requirements). In order to receive credit for courses taken in summer school (no more than 4 units of credit) or at institutions outside the Twelve College Exchange or Wellesley's list of approved foreign programs, students apply to the registrar who, in consultation with department chairs, evaluates and approves student applications. The College permits students to earn up to 16 units of credit from non-Wellesley sources.
The College does not, however, grant academic credit for internships or community-service learning. Students are sometimes able to arrange with a faculty member to take a unit of 350 work (research or individual study) based on internship or other non-classroom experience. In such cases, the student is expected to produce a piece of substantial academic work in order to receive credit.
In the mid 1990s, as part of the curriculum review, the degree requirements task force examined the College's policies on transfer and AP credit. Its findings allayed the apprehensions of some faculty that the College's policy is too lax. The task force compiled a detailed statistical profile of one class (1993) and found that the average student graduated with 28.65 credits for Wellesley courses and 4.54 credits from other sources. 161 students (out of 614) received some transfer credit, while 155 received credit for coursework taken at foreign institutions (31 of whom attended one of the Wellesley-administered programs). 265 students had some AP credit, but only 27 received as much as a semester's credit and none received a year's credit. (Interestingly, students who counted at least one AP credit graduated on average with about one more total unit of credit than students who did not receive AP credit - a statistic which perhaps corroborates a widespread impression of our students' diligence.) 90% of students took at least four years to graduate, and almost half earned more than the required 32 units of credit.
One aspect of the College's policy on academic credit that has received particular scrutiny is that of experiential learning. The administration and some faculty are clearly interested in adding more community-based learning to our tradition of closed classroom learning, and a faculty fellows program has been instituted, in association with the Center for Work and Service, to explore opportunities in this area.
Projections
1. After a period of continually rethinking our programs, it will be important to monitor the results of the various changes we have made. Some of this work will be done on an on-going basis by standing committees such as the Committee on Curriculum and Instruction and the Committee on Faculty Appointments. If past experience is any guide, we will also need to create special ad hoc committees to review particular aspects of the curriculum or of our programs and procedures. To perform such a review effectively, it is likely that we will have to incorporate new (to us) methods of assessing student learning. We are committed to becoming better informed about what, how, and how much our students learn while they are at Wellesley.
2. Any increase in the size of the faculty in the years ahead is likely to be modest. We will thus continue to face the hard challenge of subtracting from the curriculum in order to add to it. Where the new curricular growth will occur is naturally hard to predict with precision. But it seems clear that one area likely to receive increased resources, an area touching on many different disciplines, is global education. A recent report by the president's global education advisory committee (GEAC) argued for increased attention to globalization for two main reasons: first, to ensure that our education reflects the changing world in which our students will live and work (e.g. the globalization of cultural forms, global capital flows, global information flows, transnational labor migration, global environmental change, new forms of regional and international governance); and second, to reflect the increasingly international character of our faculty and student body. To implement the GEAC's vision of a "globalized" Wellesley, the College will need to take some, at least, of the following steps: increasing the enrollment of international students (in part through an expansion of the financial aid budget allotted to international students); creating new opportunities for students to intern or study abroad; raising endowed funds for new faculty positions in emerging fields not currently covered at Wellesley or in already heavily over-subscribed fields of study .
3. One of the main competitive advantages of a small, first-rate college like Wellesley is its capacity to bring students and faculty together in effective and satisfying advising and mentoring relationships and to offer students opportunities for collaborative research with faculty. A number of recent innovations, such as the Ruhlman Conference and the extension of the Science Center summer research programs to other areas of the curriculum, have exploited this advantage to good effect. In the future, we expect the College to develop further innovations to enrich the collective intellectual life in two related ways: a) by strengthening faculty-student mentoring relationships and extending them to greater numbers of students in a greater variety of settings and formats; and b) by bringing the concept of community out of its isolation in residential, extracurricular and "social" life and integrating it more directly into the learning process.
4. More broadly, Wellesley is eager to experiment with pedagogical techniques and philosophies that challenge or expand our concept of the liberal arts. For example, we will look for ways to support faculty who experiment with modes of collaborative learning or who reach outside the classroom to engage students in the problems of the world around them. We are also very aware of the need to continue to encourage creative and innovative use of instructional technology. At the same time, we recognize the need to encourage innovation without undermining areas of established strength or marginalizing pedagogies or disciplines that have long been, and will doubtless long remain, fundamental to the liberal arts at Wellesley.
5. The excellent instructional resources, small class size, and first-rate faculty that we prize so highly naturally come at a high price. In the past several years, the Administration has made an effort to educate faculty and staff about our financial condition and highlight areas where our expenses are particularly high. This effort to develop a stronger and more widely shared understanding of our financial situation and of our institutional philosophy with respect to resource allocation will continue to be necessary
The College is again considering a revised weekly course schedule during the first semester of 1998-99.
Though the College did not adopt the Dartmouth transcript, it did change the manner in which it calculates Latin Honors. Beginning with the class of 2001, an average of 3.60 will be required for cum laude (formerly 3.33), 3.75 for magna cum laude (formerly 3.67), 3.90 (unchanged) for summa cum laude.
This change only applied to the advising of traditional-aged students. The advising of students in the Davis Scholar program for continuing education has followed a team-based model for the past five years.
A ten-year look at graduation rates requires that we look at classes entering 1983 through 1992.
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