When Wellesley College embarked on this self-study eighteen months ago, we felt that our principal challenge was to synthesize a very large body of already existing information and evidence about the state of the College. After several years of searching and broad-based review of virtually all aspects of our operation, we saw reaccreditation as an opportunity to take stock and draw together all that we had learned rather than to duplicate work that had already been done.

This sense of reaccreditation's timing within our institutional life-cycle informed our structuring of the self-study. We decided that the critical first stage of collecting, analyzing and synthesizing data could best be done within a Steering Committee, coordinated by the three reaccreditation co-chairs and comprised of faculty members, students, senior administrators, and staff representatives (see list of Steering Committee members below). The charge of this Committee was to generate draft responses to each of NEASC's eleven standards (plus a twelfth standard, on Staff, which we felt the need to add in order to give a full picture of Wellesley at this point in its history). For each standard, one or more authors took responsibility for preparing an initial text, which was then reviewed and re-worked by the Steering Committee (see list of chapter authors below).

The only exception to this procedure concerned Standard One (Mission). There, we decided that the Steering Committee should consult more broadly before producing a preliminary draft. Thus in January 1998 we organized a one-day, all-campus forum (attended by some 300 people) devoted to discussion of our mission. In addition to stimulating an interesting collective conversation, echoes of which are present in this document, the forum had the effect of drawing the attention of the College as a whole to the work of the Steering Committee and to the self-study.

By the later stages of the 1997-98 academic year, the Steering Committee had completed its initial drafting role, and so the second stage in our process - that of consultation - could get under way. Over the next six months, we took our draft chapters to as many different groups as possible, representing all constituencies at the College. The relevant chapters were reviewed by the major committees of Academic Council (Committee on Faculty Appointments, Committee on Curriculum and Instruction, Advisory Committee on Budgetary Affairs), by academic department and program chairs, and by the entire faculty in Academic Council. Chapters were also reviewed by staff members at their Administrative Council and by students in their Senate as well as in dormitory-based meetings. The Board of Trustees was kept informed of the self-study's progress and also reviewed several chapters in draft. Steering Committee members were present at all of these various meetings of faculty, staff, students, and trustees. Throughout this extended phase of consultation, the text of the drafts was posted (in continually updated form) on our Campus-Wide Information Service, and the co-chairs solicited feedback - electronic or otherwise - from all members of the community on all of the standards.

It is fair to say that this consultation produced a great many suggestions for revision and that it had substantially reshaped the document by the time that the Steering Committee began its final review in October and November 1998. What follows thus represents both a lengthy labor of synthesis and drafting on the part of the chapter authors and the Steering Committee and the outcome of an intensive and open review by the College community as a whole. We believe that our self-study has brought into clearer focus the major opportunities and challenges that will merit our sustained attention in the years ahead.

We should add one final note for readers of this document: in order to distinguish descriptive material from our appraisals and projections, we have highlighted the latter sections in bold print.