As we complete this 1998 self-study, we close the books on a singularly successful decade in the life of Wellesley College. Among factors that may have contributed to that success is a strongly-ingrained institutional habit of critical self-scrutiny. Since our last reaccreditation, we have undertaken a nearly constant stream of studies and focused investigations of aspects of the College, studies addressing questions related to educational excellence, community coherence, and institutional vitality.
In the service of educational excellence, we have reviewed and substantially revised our entire curriculum and have conducted special studies of global education, instructional technology, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, experiential and service learning, the first-year experience, the development and evaluation of teaching, and several other topics. We have instituted an ongoing program of outside visiting committees to academic departments and programs. We have created an Office of Institutional Research and a Learning and Teaching Center to foster an experimental outlook, respectively, in program design and pedagogy.
Our commitment to community coherence has been supported by multiple studies of student life and of the challenges inherent in multiculturalism and diversity. We have learned much from our home-grown initiatives: the Ruhlman conferences and the creative work of the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, and the Wellesley Centers for Women. Participation in national initiatives has taught us well too: the Hewlett Foundation's "Unity and Pluralism Project" and the American Council on Education-W.K. Kellogg Foundation Project on "Leadership and Institutional Transformation," among many others.
To ensure our continued institutional vitality, we have held ourselves to account for our financial equilibrium through the work of the Task Force on Plans, Priorities and Fiscal Policies and substantial follow-up work on the budget and our cost structure. Our first comprehensive campus master plan since 1921, recently completed, identifies the restoration and ongoing maintenance of our landscape as an urgent priority, a "legacy easily lost," in the words of the master plan.
A Context for Wellesley Today and Tomorrow
As we look to the future, several large socioeconomic trends are going to be factors for our students, as well as both challenges and opportunities for the College as a whole. At least six seem particularly worthy of note.
First is the rapid globalization of the world's economic, political, and cultural systems. The speed with which ideas, people, capital and culture now move from place to place, with the aid of technology, has telescoped time, collapsed space, and erased national borders for international commerce. The people who will effectively manage these new global realities will be those who can move from culture to culture, who can collaborate and communicate with fluency across national, racial, religious, and socioeconomic lines, with knowledge, sophistication, sensitivity, and ease. Two recent reports on global education have laid out in considerable detail the implications of these trends for Wellesley College.
Second is the changing nature of work that accompanies these new global alignments, the shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, and the new competencies that will be most valued. High-level work in the knowledge economy will demand traditional intellectual competencies that are learned nowhere better than in a fine liberal arts education, and also, importantly, newer social competencies: the ability to work in teams, to process and integrate information from many different disciplines, media, and sources, to keep up with rapid changes in computer technologies.
Third, the expanding influence of science and technology will create a growing need for literacy in these specialized realms and for competence and confidence with quantitative concepts and operations. The new quantitative reasoning requirement Wellesley has recently established for all our students is intended to ensure proficiency in quantitative reasoning as both an essential part of a liberal arts education, and an indispensable gateway skill for study and careers in many fields.
Information technology is a special case, and is an area in which the College has advanced rapidly since our last reaccreditation pointed out a deficiency there. The spread of the Internet and the rapid development of telecommunications and computer technologies are driving a process of change that will only intensify the growth of demand for a new kind of technical literacy fully as important as the other liberal arts competencies. We believe that instructional technologies are enhancing teaching and learning at Wellesley, and, because of our strong emphasis on teaching and our manageable size, some of our faculty are among those doing leading-edge work. The April 1998 report of the Task Force on Information Services canvasses where we are now with information technology and identifies goals and needs for the future.
Fourth, demographic changes are converting us into a much more diverse and multicultural nation. In this context, the striking diversity of Wellesley's student body is an important strategic asset that we must work to maintain at a highly volatile time in the nation's commitment to social and racial justice and to the goals of affirmative action. Our students' diversity also creates constant, healthy (but not easily managed) pressure on the College to adapt and change. Some students are demanding that we incorporate the new perspectives and values they bring to college faster than we have so far been able or willing to do. They want changes in the complexion of the leadership of the College, changes in the curriculum, changes in the patterns of resource allocation and in the distribution of power. The student energy around these issues can be a generative force, if we can keep our collective imagination alive as the cultivation of separate identities threatens to snuff it out.
A fifth trend -- another centrifugal force -- is the knowledge explosion, together with disputes over the legitimacy of alternative knowledge claims. The competition for space in the curriculum is increasingly intense and we are challenged as never before to respond to rapid changes in traditional and emerging disciplines, while maintaining the integrity of our liberal arts core. These trends create the urge to expand the faculty in order to cover the newly emerging areas of study students want and need, especially since failing to offer such courses opens the risk of losing the best prospective students to research universities, where students see a rich array of expertise in any area they might want to pursue. We cannot compete on breadth of coverage with research universities, but we must maintain the unsurpassed quality of the undergraduate experience we provide.
Sixth, and finally, is the imperative of finding ways to slow our increasing costs. While Wellesley's price (as distinct from our cost) is at the low end of the COFHE colleges, we are wary of the "sticker shock" experienced at the prospect of a $30,000 comprehensive fee that has grown much faster than the average family's ability to pay. How to restrain price increases during a period of accelerating consumerism and demand for more courses, more services and amenities, and more technology is a vexing problem.
Major Findings of the Self Study
It is axiomatic that our first priority must be to continue recruiting bright, able students and an exceptional faculty of teachers who are also scholars and who provide the rigorous personal instruction that has always been Wellesley's hallmark. The success of highly selective institutions depends on students and faculty who coexist in a symbiotic relationship in which the status of each group affects that of the other. Any decline in the quality of either sets in motion a downward spiral. Continued success depends on maintaining the highest standards possible on both sides of the intellectual partnership.
Recruiting the most accomplished women for the incoming class each year is a daunting challenge, given the relative scarcity of high school seniors for whom a single-sex college is an attractive option. And yet, the various Wellesley constituencies are strongly aligned around the College's core mission and ideals (Standard I), although far from complacent on the adequacy with which we embody those ideals in our everyday interactions. On the question of institutional assessment (Standard II), we are making substantial progress but are mindful still of more work we have to do. Our governance structures (Standard III) would fare poorly against a strict efficiency test but, for the most part, do provide a tolerable balance between collaboration and closure.
The principal academic challenge facing the College over the next decade or more will be how to provide a cost-effective instructional program (Standard IV) that maintains the integrity of our liberal arts core and yet responds adequately to: (a) changes in the various disciplines already represented at the College; (b) the emergence of fields not now covered in our curriculum; (c) changes in interests of current and future students; and (d) competition from research universities in the range and scope of curricular offerings. The gradualist approach we are taking has enabled us, so far, to thread our way through the Scylla and Charybdis of continuity and change. We have navigated those waters reasonably well over the past decade, having engaged in quite a bit of innovation at the margins without undermining our core programs or enlarging the faculty.
We have a generous social contract with our faculty (Standard V) and generally do well in the national competition for new recruits. In any given year and field, we are competing for the few best candidates on the national circuit, so we sometimes come up short. Just as we need to attract the special female high school senior who sees the virtue of an all-women's environment, we need newly-minted Ph.D.s who love to teach and are drawn to an undergraduate setting. The fact that we have no graduate students and a strong emphasis on teaching can make it harder to develop a world-class research career, even with our four-course load and appealing sabbatical leave policy, which certainly help.
Our faculty compensation package is highly competitive and we provide attractive start-up packages (for technology and library resources and, in the sciences, laboratory space and equipment). These are among our expenditures that pay dividends. We will need to continue investing heavily in faculty support to sustain our excellence, and those costs will increase with changes in technology. In the experimental sciences we project particular needs, owing to anticipated retirements and the aging of widely-used and expensive scientific equipment.
In the case of students (Standard VI), we know from recent analyses that our fundamental commitment to admitting students strictly on merit and aiding them strictly on need has served us well. But the financial aid verities are shifting fast; these are uncertain and unstable times. We are going to have to invest heavily in financial aid for the foreseeable future, and to invest strategically. We are currently assessing carefully how to leverage our financial aid dollars most effectively.
This reaccreditation comes at a decisive transition point in our student life programs. Our first new dean of students in 18 years will be reassessing fundamental assumptions about the structure and functions of the division and will be leading a thorough investigation of the quality of life for all Wellesley students. This is an area that survey research identifies as a particular vulnerability for women's colleges. Moreover, the composition of our student body has changed appreciably in the past decade, faster, no doubt than our consicousness has. We invite the reaccreditation team to give this area special scrutiny.
Our library and information resources (Standard VII) have progressed well since the last reaccreditation. The chief challenge now is to find the financial resources to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for increasingly sophisticated, exotic, and costly information services.
Financial pressures related to the physical plant (Standard VIII) are mounting as well. We need to update our policies governing depreciation and debt service and to develop an implementation schedule and budget for the 1998 campus master plan. The master planning process identified many vital improvements that will be necessary to preserve Wellesley's unique landscape, viewed as an integral part of the educational experience we provide, not as simply a nice amenity. As compelling as the case is for the historical, philosophical and pedagogical salience of the landscape -- and its worrisome degradation -- the restoration projects will be a challenge to implement in light of the many competing claims on our resources and attention.
The campus master plan also reviewed several building projects that have been under discussion. Of those, the new campus center is a linchpin project, conceptually and pragmatically, a response to increasingly urgent calls for attention to the fabric of Wellesley's community life. The process of refining the concept of a campus center -- and of related programming in and around it -- can be an opportunity to continue a college-wide dialogue about the kind of community we are and aspire to be and the role that a physical structure can (and cannot) play in the realization of those aspirations.
Although Wellesley has operated in financial equilibrium (Standard IX) over the past decade and has substantially increased the purchasing power of the endowment, the College's cost structure and endowment spending are relatively high. We have almost no flexibility in our operating budget and few inter-institutional collaborations of sufficient weight to dampen our operating costs. We have tried, without notable success, to reduce our costs substantially, and have been fortunate that the strength of our fund raising and of the U.S. economy have carried us so far. But it is unlikely that the current favorable economic climate will last forever and the College is going to have to capitalize on our considerable strengths to identify permanent structural changes in its annual budget. Mobilizing the campus to consider whether we are allocating our resources to support our values - never an easy task - is especially forbidding at a time when our fund raising and endowment appear as strong as they do.
We have good systems in place to ensure that our public disclosure (Standard X) and ethical practices (Standard XI) meet our own standards as well as those of NEASC. We have written an extra chapter, reviewing the situation of our administrative staff, in the belief that this group makes an indispensable contributions to the success of our academic programs.
All told, then, this self-study has provided us a valued opportunity to renew our common bonds and to sketch in more concrete detail the specific programmatic priorities that follow from our collective sense of where we are and want to be. We want to continue to stand for academic excellence above all else, and also to attend especially well to our bonds of community at a time when the complexities and pace of life are pulling us apart.
Summing Up
The past decade has been very good to Wellesley College, and we embark on this new ten-year cycle at a time of major institutional transition. We welcomed a new dean of students, Geneva Walker-Johnson, with the opening of the 1998-99 academic year and, at its end, will celebrate the extraordinary contributions of four key individuals who will complete their work on June 30, 1999: Chair of the Board Gail Heitler Klapper; Dean of the College Nancy Harrison Kolodny; and her two associate deans, Jens Kruse and Lee Cuba. Wellesley approaches the future with the confidence of our current position of fundamental strength -in the quality of our students and faculty and of the learning environment that nourishes their work, in the successes of our alumnae and the credit and loyalty they bring to the College, in the strength of our administrative staff, and the wise counsel and leadership of our Board of Trustees.
In summary, Wellesley College has important work to do locally -- bridging between disciplines and departments; students and faculty; cultural, religious and national identities; between the liberal arts and the new competencies; between knowledge and service -- and equally important work to do extending our global reach. We will need to sustain a sense of innovation and experimentation, even as we constrain our growth in some areas, and we will need to stay true to our deepest values and commitments, even as we adapt to meet a cascade of new challenges.