ENHANCE OUR
DISTINCTIVE
EDUCATIONAL
PROGRAM

VISION

In 2031 Wesleyan University will be widely recognized for offering a creative, rigorous, pragmatic liberal education that fosters personal development and social responsibility while empowering graduates to shape a changing world. Going beyond the traditional liberal arts college model, the University’s programs, on campus and beyond, will attract accomplished and adventurous learners at various stages in their lives who have an appetite for bold inquiry and creative practice grounded in an inclusive community.

OBJECTIVES AND ACTION ITEMS

  • Strengthen connections between liberal learning and lifelong learning
    • Develop key competencies (expression; quantitative analysis; cultural awareness; spatial reasoning) in students that they can carry with them long beyond graduation
    • Weave civic preparedness into offerings of departments/programs
    • Deepen undergraduate and alumni connection to the career center
    • Develop Wesleyan_Online—a suite of standalone classes and degree-oriented programs

     

  • Further diversity, equity, and inclusion
    • Enhance faculty and staff diversity
    • Improve retention of faculty and staff from underrepresented groups
    • Promote intellectual diversity, freedom of speech, and attentive listening
    • Increase diversity of student applicant pool
    • Build an African Scholars Program that is similar to our Freeman Asian Program
    • Ensure that all students are able to succeed in chosen fields of study
    • Use BA/MA program to increase number of students from underrepresented groups who are accepted into STEM PhD programs
    • Enhance language programs and partnerships for a more global campus

     

  • Stimulate research, pedagogical innovation, and effectiveness
    • Increase number of lecture classes using models that enhance student engagement
    • Support cohort-based interdisciplinary programs
    • Increase the number of independent projects completed by students in the social sciences
    • Complete construction of new Public Affairs Center by 2024 and use new spaces to facilitate curricular innovation
    • Complete new life sciences building by 2026, leverage it for learning and advanced research, and ensure that it serves as a welcoming, campus crossroads
    • Create College of Computational Studies and promote data skills across the curriculum
    • Grow Design and Engineering Program, helping it to achieve departmental/college status, adding two positions in three years and two–three additional positions if enrollments grow

     

  • Strengthen foundation for creative practice
    • Reinvigorate the Center for the Arts as catalyst for producing new creative work
    • Expand Shapiro Writing Center with hires and new programming
    • Expand access to the arts, providing more students with experiences in artistic practice whose effects will persist long beyond graduation
    • Enhance alumni network for Wes Creatives

     

  • Energize distinctive residential and co-curricular learning
    • Facilitate student progress toward residential learning goals
    • Build student cohorts while increasing capacity for independent living
    • Integrate athletics more fully in student life and campus community
    • Support teams and individual students competing at the highest levels

     

Follow Our Progress: Stories of Impact

Professor Martha “Marty” Gilmore blazes new paths for Venus exploration

Martha “Marty” Gilmore, the George I. Seney Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, last spring received news she’s waited her entire career for: NASA selected two Venus missions that she co-developed.

January 18, 2022

All Stories in the Connection

"A place where rich veins of thought and experiment would flourish... for the good of the individual educated, and the good of the world."

 

WILLBUR FISK
Wesleyan’s First President