Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Academic Program
The structure of our academic program is typical for a liberal arts college, though perhaps with more interdisciplinary courses than elsewhere. The broad subject areas are the familiar ones within the liberal arts: natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences, humanities, the arts, and foreign languages. We maintain a four-part distribution requirement and a requirement to major in some discipline or interdisciplinary combination as the means to educate students in breadth and in depth. We offer 12 interdisciplinary concentrations (some of them similar to what are called interdisciplinary minors elsewhere). We also continue to require enrollment in a Winter Study course every year as a way to encourage disciplinary (and pedagogical) experimentation. Other continuing academic opportunities include honors programs, independent study, summer research, study abroad or elsewhere in the U. S., language certificates, and experiential education. We will concentrate here on the most distinctive features of our academic program, on significant changes since the last accreditation review, and our projections for the near future.
Curriculum Changes
While the basic curricular structure has not changed since the last self study, we have launched important innovations. One is the growth of interdisciplinary programs and the concomitant diversification of the curriculum.
The word “programs” covers all curricular entities distinct from “departments.” Like departments, they are groups of faculty members united by common interests and responsibilities, and recognized as such for purposes of academic planning. In our usage “program” necessarily implies the group is interdisciplinary. Examples of longstanding programs at Williams are American Studies, Political Economy, and Environmental Studies. Our programs fall into three categories: those that offer a major; those that offer a concentration, which is an area of focus with fewer required courses than a major; and those that are simply a cluster of courses on a common topic.
In 2001-02, the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) reviewed our programs and concentrations and found that while all of them were rigorous, they lacked common structural guidelines or requirements (CEP document, Feb. 5, 2002, in Team Room). The CEP concluded that a program that offers a major or concentration should be more than a collection of courses from different departments on a common topic. It should be interdisciplinary in the sense of seeking explicitly to relate different disciplinary approaches to the topic. In other words, the unity of the major or the concentration is provided not only by the topic but also by the relationship of disciplines to it.
Therefore the CEP in 2001-02 designed and the faculty approved a common framework for concentrations. First, there must be at least five courses — at least two required or “core” courses and three electives. Second, one of the required courses must be an introductory or intermediate one offered by the program and designed specifically to help meet the program’s goals. Here is where the program’s faculty outline the assumptions, theories, and methods that are brought to the topic, and enable students to bring interdisciplinary thinking to bear on their electives. Third, the second required course must be an interdisciplinary capstone course or shared senior-year experience, such as a required colloquium. The capstone enables students to synthesize, reflect on, and/or apply their interdisciplinary experience in the concentration. Students completing a concentration, then, should have knowledge of the chosen field of study and also of what it means to approach that field from an interdisciplinary perspective. Fourth, students must declare a concentration no later than spring of sophomore year, so they will have time to think carefully and deliberately about how their concentrations are complementing their majors and their other courses. Finally, the faculty determined that the CEP should review all new concentrations after five years, and thereafter every ten years. In setting these guidelines the faculty aimed to bring pedagogical coherence to concentrations, to strengthen the status of interdisciplinary work at the College, and to ensure frequent evaluation.
The new policies have also paved the way for introduction of new programs that offer concentrations. At the time of the last self study there were seven such programs, now there are 12. Most of the new ones were added in the past five years, and there has also been some reorganization within the longer-established programs. The Women’s Studies concentration has been transformed into a Women’s and Gender Studies major. Jewish Studies and Leadership Studies have both been upgraded from curricular clusters to programs with concentrations. African and Middle Eastern Studies and Latin American Studies were brought together with other area studies groups into the International Studies Program. The African American Studies concentration has been expanded and renamed as Africana Studies. The list below shows all our programs; asterisks denote those that are new or fundamentally redefined in the last ten years.
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Programs that offer concentrations Africana Studies* Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Cognitive Science* Environmental Studies International Studies* Jewish Studies* Latina/o Studies* Leadership Studies* Legal Studies* Maritime Studies* Neuroscience Science and Technology Studies |
Programs that offer majors American Studies Comparative Literature Political Economy Women’s and Gender Studies* |
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Clusters (i.e., multidisciplinary programs) Bioinformatics, Genomics & Proteomics* Linguistics* Materials Science Studies Performance Studies* Program in Teaching* |
We regard it as especially noteworthy that several of the changes in recent years have either contributed to or resulted from the diversification of the faculty and the curriculum. Latina/o Studies is a case in point. Since at least 1991, Williams students had expressed a broad-based interest in this subject. In fact, emotions ran quite high on the fits and starts of the Latina/o Studies program throughout the 1990s. On more than one occasion students staged hunger strikes or circulated petitions to demand that the College commit to staffing the program. The faculty also supported the initiative. Starting in 2001 we made a series of five tenure-eligible appointments, each of them with specified teaching responsibilities within the program. The faculty approved the concentration in 2003-04. For 2007-08, there are 31 Latina/o Studies courses in the catalog; some of them are cross-listed in departments and there are other departmental courses that count toward the concentration. The number of student concentrators has increased each year, such that 20 have graduated so far and at least 14 more are in progress.
Recent faculty appointments in other programs have had a similar diversifying effect on the curriculum. For example, we now offer a full two-year sequence in Arabic, taught by two recently appointed faculty in Comparative Literature. Prior to 2005-06, students who wanted to learn Arabic had to content themselves with the one-year Critical Language program, which involved a self-guided course and meeting for two hours each week with a tutor. Students desiring to study Asian American and African American topics also have new opportunities made possible by recent faculty and fellowship appointments in the American Studies and Africana Studies programs. Though no appointments have been made in International Studies, a significant number of faculty in departments are offering courses, and we have formalized several curricular tracks within the concentration, including African Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and South and Southeast Asian Studies.
Diversifying the curriculum is not a new goal. Nor is it just about adding new courses to the area and ethnic studies programs (the Diversity Initiatives Self Study, April 2005, in Team Room, has a specific discussion of courses about diversity; see pp. 47-50). It is a College-wide goal to diversify offerings within departments as well as build strength in interdisciplinary areas. The goal dates back at least two decades and remains an ongoing effort, but the recent expansion of the faculty accelerated the process. In addition to new FTE dedicated to the interdisciplinary programs, some new faculty lines were allocated to departments with “staffing contracts” attached, meaning that the granting of new FTE carried a reciprocal obligation to supply teaching to the programs, or to the tutorial program (see below). The result is that departments no longer feel so strongly that they are compromising their own offerings — especially advanced electives — to staff program courses. In turn, programs with dedicated FTE no longer are as dependent on departments for staffing and thus have more control over their curricular planning. Of course, not all programs have dedicated FTE, and a few still find it difficult to recruit colleagues from departments to teach their required courses.
Projecting into the future, several relatively new programs and many of the older ones are now due for the formal review the faculty mandated. For example, Cognitive Science and Legal Studies are now in their fifth year and thus due for the initial review. The CEP will conduct those reviews internally and has projected a firm schedule (document in Team Room). It has also established guidelines for conducting the reviews that include a report by program faculty and feedback from students (document on guidelines in Team Room). The subsequent ten-year reviews will be conducted more like those of departments, with a self study by the program and a visiting committee of outside scholars.
The faculty mandated the five- and ten-year review cycles for good reason, as few programs have ever been formally reviewed. Only three of the four that offer majors have been reviewed in recent memory, and none within the last decade. Among those that offer concentrations, only Environmental Studies has ever been reviewed. The CEP recognizes this shortcoming and is committed to reducing the backlog. Neuroscience, Biochemistry, and Comparative Literature are among those the CEP has already approached about conducting initial reviews very soon.
Since the last self study we have replaced what had been our Peoples and Cultures requirement, which the faculty had added to the curriculum in 1989. It was intended to help students to understand the cultural diversity of American society and the world, so that as citizens they can respond appropriately to peoples of different social backgrounds and cultural frameworks. Each student must complete one graded semester course primarily concerned with: (a) the peoples and cultures of North America that trace their origins to Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, or the Caribbean; Native American peoples and cultures; or (b) the peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, or the Caribbean.
On the recommendation of the CEP, the faculty has replaced the requirement with the Exploring Diversity Initiative (EDI), effective in 2008-09, which requires students to take at least one course identified as an Exploring Diversity course (supporting documents in Team Room).
Exploring Diversity presents a new way to think about diversity. Most definitively, it is not just about the minority peoples and cultures of North America, or their cultural homelands. Students and faculty alike came to find the “us vs. them” paradigm objectionable. It places too much emphasis on “otherness” and ignores various interesting and important kinds of diversity that exist even within the modern western world. The new requirement represents our dedication to study groups, cultures, and societies as they interact and challenge each other. Students and faculty are encouraged to reflect critically and self-consciously on the multiple approaches that engage these issues. The ultimate aim of the EDI requirement is to lay the groundwork for a life-long engagement with the diverse cultures, societies, and histories of the U.S. and the rest of the world. It is part of our commitment to a curriculum, faculty, and student body that reflect and explore a diverse, globalized world and the multicultural character of the U.S. Cultural diversity remains a major focus, but the initiative acknowledges other kinds of diversity, including economic, political, and religious. In addition, EDI courses require more intentionality, i.e., both students and faculty are required to engage consciously the topic of diversity as a central theme of the course, rather than letting it speak for itself as implicit in course material.
The emphasis on intentionality addresses one frequent complaint about Peoples and Cultures courses — that many of them are ambiguously defined, and students sometimes do not even know why a course qualifies. The call for EDI course proposals (April 3, 2007 memo from Chris Waters, in Team Room) makes it clear students should know why a course is an EDI course, and the faculty member teaching it should be explicit, in the course description, syllabus, and throughout the course itself, of how it will engage with issues of diversity.
While there is no set format or pedagogical approach for EDI courses, the CEP identified possible categories. They are as follows, although it should be stressed that EDI courses do not necessarily have to fit in one of these groups.
- Comparative Study of Cultures and Societies. Courses that focus on the differences and similarities between cultures and societies, and/or on the ways in which cultures, peoples, and societies have interacted and responded to one another.
- Empathetic Understanding. Courses that explore diverse human feelings, thoughts and actions by recreating the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts of a group to imagine why certain beliefs, experiences, and actions emerged within those contexts.
- Power and Privilege. Courses that link issues of diversity to economic and political power relations, investigating how cultural interaction is influenced by various structures, institutions, or practices that enable, maintain, or mitigate inequality among different groups.
- Critical Theorization. Courses that focus on ways scholars theorize the possibilities of cross-cultural understanding and interaction; they might investigate how disciplines and paradigms of knowledge are reconfigured by the study of diversity.
- Cultural Immersion. Courses that immerse students in another culture and give them tools with which to understand that culture from the inside; they might include foreign language courses that explicitly engage in the self-conscious awareness of cultural and societal differences, traditions, and customs.
Students will also be able to fulfill the EDI requirement by enrolling in certain study-abroad programs. By immersing students in foreign cultures, and in many cases increasing language skills, such programs offer a robust way to study cultural diversity. They also rely on particular and contingent circumstances that a student faces in daily life in another culture, rather than relying on the theorized or abstracted engagement with diversity he or she would find in academic coursework.
The Dean of the Faculty has appointed a faculty director of the Exploring Diversity Initiative to work with the CEP to implement the program. This year we will determine the criteria for a study-away program to fulfill the requirement, decide exactly how to treat language courses, and choose the roster of courses that will fulfill the requirement beginning next year. So far, eight faculty members have applied for funding to develop new courses, various faculty have proposed 89 existing courses as qualifying as EDI courses, and the Director has so far given tentative approval to 41 of them. A number of key departments and programs have yet to submit courses for consideration, so the Director will continue working with them to solicit their proposals.
No recent curricular development has been more significant than our expansion of the tutorial program, a feature of our curriculum since 1988. Inspired in large part by Oxford/Cambridge-styled pedagogy, tutorials emphasize close student-faculty interaction and shift much of the responsibility for learning onto students. They are usually limited to ten students. The instructor divides the students into pairs, and meets with each pair every week for roughly an hour. Many instructors begin and end the term with a group seminar, and some hold weekly group meetings of all tutorial members to prepare the students for independent work. But the heart of every tutorial course is the weekly meeting with ongoing pairs of students. In each meeting, one student reads a prepared essay while the other student — and then the instructor — offer a critique. In some subjects, the first student prepares a presentation based on a laboratory exercise or a problem set rather than an essay. In the following week the students switch roles. Typically, a student writes five or six essays (usually four to seven pages long) during the course and offers five or six critiques of his or her partner’s work.
At the time of our last self study, an ad hoc evaluation committee had already concluded that tutorials were a highly successful feature of the curriculum (Report of the Ad Hoc Committee to Evaluate Tutorials, 1997, in Team Room). They were perceived as very rigorous courses and the students who took them gave them higher “educational value” scores than the average of other upper-level courses. A survey of alumni similarly found that 80 per cent of those who had taken tutorials felt that they were “the most valuable” of the courses they took at Williams.
To build on this success, the faculty voted in 2001 to expand the tutorial program, with a particular emphasis on the sophomore year, and to promote it as a signature program of the College (see CEP strategic planning proposal, 2001, in Team Room). The rationale for the expansion was that despite the obvious strengths of the program, not many students were enrolling in tutorials. Fewer than 35 per cent of all students were taking them and the number of tutorial enrollments had declined from an average of 249 per year in 1991-94 to an average of 206 per year in 1995-2001. Nor were they typically accessible to younger students, who could most benefit from early and intense interaction with faculty mentors. The faculty approved a CEP proposal to create incentives for faculty to teach tutorials, especially at the 100- or 200-level, and to enhance the visibility of the program in College literature and rhetoric.
The following table shows that the number of tutorial offerings has in fact nearly tripled since 2001.
| 1998-99 | 26 |
| 1999-00 | 28 |
| 2000-01 | 21 |
| 2001-02 | 33 |
| 2002-03 | 36 (15 [42%] at 100/200 level; 21 at 300/400 level) |
| 2003-04 | 45 (19 [42%] at 100/200 level; 26 at 300/400 level) |
| 2004-05 | 42 (17 [40%] at 100/200 level; 25 at 300/400 level) |
| 2005-06 | 57 (21 [37%] at 100/200 level; 36 at 300/400 level) |
| 2006-07 | 62 (21 [34%] at 100/200 level; 41 at 300/400 level) |
| 2007-08 | 54 (17 [31%] at 100/200 level; 37 at 300/400 level) |
The 62 tutorial courses in 2006-07 were offered by 28 different departments and programs, and there were about 500 enrollments. About 55 per cent of the Class of 2007 took at least one tutorial, which is up by 20 percentage points from the Class of 2001, and 24 per cent of the Class of 2007 took more than one. The decline in 2007-08 in the total number and the decline in the share at the 100- and 200-level are somewhat disappointing, and we are committed to strong effort to bring the numbers up again in the near future. Our goal is to have 100- and 200-level tutorials be around 40 per cent of the total.
We have many testimonials and anecdotal evidence that tutorials are challenging, rewarding, and beneficial to both students and faculty, but our evidence is not limited to that. We also have quantitative evidence from student course surveys (SCS) that students perceived tutorials as having very high educational value and a high quality of instruction (see Christopher Winters’ analysis in Team Room). We report another piece of quantitative evidence below in the section on assessment of student learning. Our appraisal is that tutorials have been highly successful, and we project no significant changes in the program other than the efforts to reverse the slight decline in 2007-08 and to increase the share of tutorials at the 100- and 200-course levels. A major contributing factor to success has been the significant increase in the size of the faculty, which made it feasible to offer so many more small classes. Another is that there is a faculty member who directs the program and works energetically to solicit proposals for new tutorials, awards summer stipends for course development, and hosts events for participating faculty to discuss pedagogical techniques and course formats. A third factor is that “staffing contracts” (described above) now obligate some departments to offer tutorials. That practice has been particularly successful in the case of mathematics and science departments, some of which were initially resistant to using tutorial pedagogy but now do so quite creatively.
We also have moved in recent years to expand significantly the role of experiential learning. In May 2001, the faculty approved a two-part initiative in this respect. Part 1 called for hiring a Coordinator of Experiential Education to promote “learning by doing” within the curriculum. The history and progress of this part are discussed thoroughly on the Experiential Education website and in a status report by the Coordinator in June 2007 (in Team Room). Part 2 called for creation of the Williams in New York program, discussed later in this chapter.
“Learning by doing” has actually been a successful part of our curriculum for quite some time. More and more faculty members are allowing, even challenging, students to use fieldwork to become more personally engaged in their learning. The experiences may involve field research projects in courses or work in community organizations. Some courses include field research or case studies that require prolonged contact with local citizens, nonprofit organizations, or governments. One major, Political Economy, and one concentration, Environmental Studies, actually have required courses (Political Economy 402 and Environmental Studies 302) that involve extensive case studies of public policy issues; in both courses students work in teams. The Williams-Mystic off-campus program, described below, has a large experiential component. The common characteristic of experiential education courses is that instructors provide students with guided opportunities to apply academic concepts to real-world situations, and challenge them to use the experience to think critically about the academic material.
Our approach to experiential learning is inclusive, academically rigorous, and holistic. It incorporates the use of every kind of relevant experiential pedagogy including cooperative, community-based, and problem-based learning. In addition to the Coordinator, one faculty member, designated the Gaudino Scholar, has a special responsibility to encourage students to take on unfamiliar settings and “uncomfortable learning,” with the support of the College’s Gaudino Fund Board (Gaudino Fund). We also encourage students to think of their community service and other work experiences as informal learning opportunities that can help prepare them for experiential learning in courses. We recognize a continuum of experiential opportunities from those involving no formal analysis to those in which formal analysis is of primary importance.
We have made great gains in the past five years. In 2006-07, there were 71 courses involving experiential learning as compared to 40 in 2002-03. The number of experiential independent studies has ranged from 120 to 170 each year. Courses with an experiential component range from those centered on a major fieldwork experience such as the Political Economy and Environmental Studies courses mentioned earlier and Psychology 352, Clinical and Community Psychology (in which students work in mental health organizations) to those involving a small-scale fieldwork experience such as an environmental studies course in which students engage in a one-day community work project as a part of a course exercise. Not surprisingly, most of the growth in experiential teaching has been in the Winter Study Term, the structure of which (one course, 3-1/2 weeks long, pass/fail grading) is more amenable to field work and special projects than spring and fall terms, during which out-of-class work competes with obligations in three other courses plus a wide range of extracurricular activities, including community service.
With the substantial number of experiential offerings, the work of coordination is shifting from primarily promotion and training to include more sustaining and improving existing courses. We project that this will continue in the next few years. In the last 18 months, for example, the Coordinator has worked more with individual faculty who are teaching established experiential courses, facilitating discussions of “What works/What doesn’t,” and developing and distributing information on best practices (Appendix B of report by Paula Consolini, June 18, 2007, in Team Room).
Our appraisal is that we have made great strides with part-time staffing and a modest budget, mostly through extensive collaboration with College departments, programs, and committees, and the leveraging of funds to help pay for ambitious projects. We benefited from external comparisons. A review of similar programming at a range of peer institutions (Table 2 of report by Paula Consolini, in Team Room) reveals the relative effectiveness of our approach. It is noteworthy that our community-based learning opportunities are as substantial as those at some schools in urban settings. Both in relative and absolute terms, our Experiential Education Initiative is getting good results without creating a center or getting hung up on labels.
At least for now, the inclusive strategy seems most appropriate, and we do not project any change in the strategy. It allows faculty to choose the approach and techniques that suit their teaching goals and needs. Partnering with multiple offices, departments, and programs can consume much time but has the advantage of quietly building understanding and trust in the value of this kind of pedagogy. There is still enough skepticism among Williams faculty about experiential-learning-related movements, concepts, and labels (like “service-learning”) that it would be very difficult at this time to organize support for the creation of a separate academic operation. So far, it does not appear to be in the best interest of the initiative or the College to do so.
Looking ahead, we project that the Coordinator will continue to work with other individuals and groups (such as the Winter Study Committee and the Office of Community Engagement) to identify and remove institutional and logistical barriers to the effective use of experiential pedagogy. She will focus on the development of feedback instruments to improve assessment. She is also developing a pilot Web-based experiential learning module for use in some political science and political economy courses. The Experiential Education Initiative and the College as a whole would benefit greatly from the addition of funding spent in a few very targeted ways. Some of these would involve providing more incentives for faculty and students to participate; others would increase student preparation and capacity to learn experientially. All would be valuable supplements to the core work of facilitating the effective use of experiential learning in the curriculum.
Pre-Enrollment Programs for Admitted Students
We have two pre-enrollment programs — Summer Science (SS) and Summer Humanities and Social Science (SHSS), created in 1987 and 2000, respectively. Each is five weeks long and they serve about 35 students combined. Both are described in the Diversity Initiatives Self Study, pp. 21-24 (in Team Room). Both are open to all matriculating African American, Latino/a, Native American, and first-generation-college students with an interest in the areas covered. They are designed to aid in the transition to Williams by offering classes comparable to those that first-years take and by introducing students to the campus and to key faculty and staff. Co-curricular events and activities round out the experience. Upper-class students serve as teaching assistants and/or mentors. These programs tap into the intellectual enthusiasm of entering students and encourage an early interest in research and graduate school, and we project their continuation.
The Director of Institutional Research and the staffs of the two programs are working to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses by comparing the subsequent academic performances of participants to peer-group non-participants, and we expect completion of that evaluation in the near future. SS and SHSS “alumni” report that the programs aided greatly in their transition to Williams, and they have tended to stay connected with the professors they worked with in the summer. We now plan to study whether they do better academically than comparable students who did not participate. We do know that SS has been particularly successful in involving its “alumni” in laboratory research, and several SHSS students have been selected to participate in our other pipeline programs.
Student-Faculty Summer Research Programs
Summer student research opportunities are one of our strongest features and have continued to grow over the past ten years. Each year more than 250 students participate in summer research programs, which have become an integral part of our academic program. One of the useful results of our self study has been to reinforce the prior awareness of their importance and the value of expanding the programs in the arts and humanities.
We have divisional summer research programs open to all students after their first year. Students serve up to ten weeks as research assistants in collaboration with faculty, in return for which they receive a stipend (currently $360/week) plus housing. Financial support for the programs comes from a variety of sources, including unrestricted College funds, external grants to individual faculty, foundation grants, and endowed fellowships provided by donations from alumni, parents, and friends.
The Divisions I/II Summer Research Program covers the humanities and social sciences (“Division I” refers to humanities and “Division II” to social sciences). It was launched in 1997 and modeled on the long-standing Division III program in math and science. A primary goal is to provide students with substantial and significant work that gives them authentic involvement in academic research. Students assist in archival research, data manipulation, statistical analysis, computer programming and modeling, and preparation of course materials and syllabi. Quite often they work as co-authors with faculty on conference papers, journal articles, or book chapters. We do not fund projects that are largely clerical or background work. There are clearly cases where research is best conducted elsewhere (e.g., an archaeological excavation), but we prefer that students spend a substantial amount of time in Williamstown.
We appoint approximately 22 students as research assistants in these Division I/II programs each summer (annual summaries in Team Room). We would like this number to grow. Our economists are the most frequent mentors, and they have found students, particularly those with computing skills, to be a tremendous help in organization of data and econometric analyses. Other social scientists, especially historians, have also participated frequently. Faculty in the humanities, however, have not joined in nearly as often; recently, only two or three participate each year. We want the Divisions I/II Summer Research Program to expand significantly, to come closer to the level of participation in the math and science programs and to grow to the level needed to sustain a Division I/II summer research community, with faculty lectures, poster sessions, and weekly social gatherings. The Dean of the Faculty is committed to work toward these goals.
The corresponding programs in Division III — the natural sciences, mathematics, statistics, and some areas of psychology — are unusually strong, and we believe they are a mark of distinction for Williams from most of our peers and indeed from many universities with much larger enrollments. The number of students participating has grown over the past ten years from an already strong 125 in 1997 to approximately 190 in 2007 (for examples of projects, see Report of Science at Williams, 2006, in Team Room). Many of them were in the summer before their senior year and were beginning honors research, but there was also a large number of rising sophomores and juniors who were getting their first taste of independent research. Typically all but a dozen faculty in Division III participate. While the large majority of the students work on campus, some student-faculty teams work elsewhere, including the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass., Isle Royale in Lake Superior, and a variety of locations for geosciences research.
Some of the students are from other colleges and universities. Students from a variety of institutions do research with mathematics and statistics faculty, and students from Bennett College, a historically black institution in Greensboro, N. C., and from nearby Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts work with biology faculty.
Students’ summer research experiences develop in a relatively relaxed yet focused atmosphere, without the competition of course work to interrupt collaborative efforts between students and faculty. Laboratory, field, and theoretical research projects are supplemented by weekly luncheons sponsored by the Science Center, featuring a member of the faculty lecturing on current research; an annual science division picnic; and a poster session at the end of the summer to present results. Individual departments host additional professional and social gatherings.
The summer research program in the sciences provides opportunities for teaching and mentoring that are intensive and sustained. Students develop a range of skills, from basic competence with lab techniques to the ability to design experiments independently and to assess results critically. They learn not only from faculty but from each other. Students with less experience learn from their more experienced partners; more advanced students reinforce their understanding through the process of teaching younger peers. In addition, the mix of students with different perspectives leads to interesting synergies with respect to creativity.
Creativity is fundamentally important to the scientific process. It affects the questions scientists ask, the experiments they design, the analyses they perform, and the problem-solving approaches they employ in proving new theorems, designing new algorithms, and more generally in all aspects of their work. Students engage in this type of creative work with faculty mentors in the summer program. It would be valuable to measure whether the students are able to engage in their subsequent (academic-year) work more creatively as a result of having had the summer experience. There is only anecdotal evidence at this point, but it suggests that this is, indeed, the case. The emphasis in the self study on creativity has stimulated some of our scientists to think about testing the proposition rigorously.
We do know that the summer research program builds an intellectual community that carries into the academic year. Students share their experiences with those who were not on campus during the summer. Computer Science, for example, devotes the first two colloquia of the year to student-sharing of summer research experiences. In other departments, such as Chemistry and Geosciences, senior honors thesis students may report on summer research in their departmental presentations each fall. Many faculty in Mathematics and Statistics give colloquia during the academic year and often they report on research with students during the previous summer. We also know that during the summer faculty members hear useful observations and opinions from research students about the general strengths and weaknesses of their departments and programs. They also can observe the quality of students’ preparation for research, which provides one informal method of assessment of student learning in regular courses.
The Summer Science Research Program has been growing steadily, and the number of applications for 2007 was the highest ever. We do not anticipate that the number will decline anytime soon, though it is not clear that the program can continue to grow. In addition, the number of younger students — rising sophomores, in particular — and the number of underrepresented minority students that participate have been increasing. We anticipate that by training students early and by increasing our inclusion of underrepresented minority students, we will see these students winning more summer fellowships to participate in prestigious programs outside of Williams.
Two other summer programs are akin to the research-oriented ones. In the Williams Instructional Technology program (WIT), 12 students work with faculty on high-quality Web, video, multimedia, and other curriculum-related projects. They also work on project management, technical writing, and public speaking skills. The College has supported the program out of its own funds after an initial three-year period funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Between 2000 and 2006, WIT students completed 108 projects for 73 faculty members (cf.williams.edu/wit). In the Summer Theatre Lab, 12 students collaborate with professional artists from the worlds of theater, film, and television on innovative projects and original work. Many visiting artists are alumni of the Williams Theatre Department who have gone on to successful careers in the performing arts, and who return to experiment with new dramatic material and with new ways of working. In 2007 the Lab and the Williamstown Theatre Festival (which is independent of the College) have established a collaborative to enhance both organizations (62center.williams.edu/theatre/lab.cfm).
These summer programs for students are a markedly successful feature of our academic program, and we project no significant changes save the energetic effort to increase the numbers in the Division I/II programs.
We have two research programs specifically for students from underrepresented groups, and they differ from the ones just described in that they combine research in summers with research in the academic year. They are the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship (MMUF) and the Williams College Undergraduate Research Fellowship (WCURF) (they are described more fully in the Diversity Initiatives Self Study, pp. 21-24, in Team Room). Our goal in these programs is to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups in graduate school and on college and university faculties. They fund students for two years of faculty-mentored research in lieu of campus and summer jobs. Each program selects five new fellows from the sophomore class, who stay with the program through graduation. Fellows spend the summer after sophomore year in the residential Summer Research Colloquium, learning advanced research techniques and beginning their own research projects. They spend the second summer working more independently but still under the close supervision of a faculty mentor. During the academic year, we fund fellows to spend about eight hours per week on their research projects or work as research assistants for their mentors.
The MMUF and WCURF programs have worked well. In the Fall of 2001, the Provost’s Office evaluated them by interviewing current and past participants. The overall level of satisfaction was high. What emerged as the programs’ greatest strengths were mentoring, encouragement, support, and the opportunity for independent research. Over the past few years, the applicant pool for these programs has improved in quality, as has the work the students produce. While we would like to see more fellows go on to academic graduate school, these programs clearly have positive effects on students’ undergraduate experience. We project a strong effort to expand these two programs in the near future. As described in Organization and Governance, we recently shifted responsibility for them to the Office of Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity, whose goal is to find ways to expand their operation and success, especially among underrepresented constituents such as African American and Latino men.
Off-Campus Programs
Many Williams students choose to study at another college or university in the U.S. or overseas, usually during their junior year. Participation in study-away programs from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s ranged from 26 per cent to 35 per cent of each graduating class, then increased dramatically, first topping 40 per cent for the Class of 1998 and approximating 50 per cent in recent years. The students attend fully accredited foreign universities or select programs from a list of more than 250 approved options. Among them are three Williams programs, located in Mystic, Conn.; Oxford, England; and New York City.
The longest-standing of these is the 30-year-old Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, a one-semester program offered jointly with the Mystic Seaport Museum. Twenty colleges and universities are formally affiliated with Williams-Mystic, which is open to students from all accredited four-year institutions. About 20 enroll each semester. The curriculum is highly experiential and interdisciplinary, focusing on maritime history, marine sciences, literature of the sea, and marine policy. All courses in the 17-week semester integrate academic learning and fieldwork. The program includes an open-ocean voyage on a sailing ship, a seminar along the Pacific Coast, and a Mississippi Delta field seminar.
The program is staffed by two Williams faculty, one of whom serves as Program Director. Though they are resident in Mystic and their appointments are coterminous with the program, both are full-time employees of the College and have professorial appointments in the Biology and Geosciences departments. There are also several adjunct faculty members who are employed part-time by the museum. Program oversight is provided by the Williams-Mystic Council, which meets annually and comprises a number of senior staff members (including the presidents) of both institutions and an array of invited guests (mostly faculty with appropriate expertise and administrative staff). Until recently, the formal agreement between Williams and Mystic Seaport was for five years at a time, but as of 2004 it has an indefinite lifetime.
We have sent 217 students to the program since its inception in 1977, which is many more than any other college (Wellesley is next, with 84), but the average is only about seven students per year. We would like more of our students — perhaps as many as six each semester — to choose it as their study-away experience. It is very rigorous and provides diverse resources absent from our home campus: the huge maritime collections of the Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport, the Williams-Mystic marine science labs, and of course the ocean.
To be sure, Mystic is not as exotic a study-away destination as Italy, Australia, or Spain, among others that our students go to, but part of the difficulty in recruitment also seems to be a matter of perception. Although the Williams-Mystic curriculum includes humanities, social science, and natural science, most Williams students who attend are science majors (over 60 per cent). Most of those (80 per cent) are biology or geosciences majors, and a substantial proportion are environmental studies concentrators. The bias toward science students probably results from the fact that the strongest links between Mystic and the home campus historically have been through faculty members in Biology, Geosciences, and Environmental Studies (even though the founding director was a historian). There is a student perception that maritime studies in general and Williams-Mystic in particular is a largely scientific endeavor. We resist that perception in order to get more non-science students interested, and we will continue in that effort. Ironically, other colleges seem not to have this problem. Among the six other major feeder institutions for Williams-Mystic (in order of student numbers: Wellesley, Middlebury, Smith, Bates, Dartmouth, and Mount Holyoke; 420 students in 26 years), only 30 per cent of the students they have sent have been science majors.
Given our investment in this program, we moved to strengthen the maritime studies curriculum on campus by launching a new Maritime Studies concentration in 2004-05. It requires the four core courses of the Williams-Mystic program plus three courses taught at the main campus, namely an interdisciplinary introductory course, a senior seminar, and an elective. Understanding the oceans is of increasing importance in this era of climate change, sea-level rise, fisheries crises, and the internationalization of the high seas. The Maritime Studies concentration therefore serves those students who return from Mystic with a heightened curiosity about the ocean, and serves also to increase student participation in the study-away program. Finally, the concentration is meant to deepen the relationship between Williams-Mystic and the home campus. Several faculty members now take their classes to Mystic on field trips each year. We also sponsor extracurricular trips to Mystic for students and faculty, as well as a faculty lecture series that further encourages interaction between Mystic and the main campus.
Williams-Mystic is now nearing completion of a $6 million development campaign, the centerpiece of which is a new 8,400-square-foot marine science center. This new lab facility will open in September 2007. It replaces an 800-square-foot cottage that has been used as the program’s marine science laboratory since 1981. We project continued improvement in physical facilities. The next step in the capital renewal plan is to renovate some of the student housing.
Our next oldest program, in cooperation with Exeter College of Oxford University, began in 1985. At the time of our last self study, it was known as the Williams College Oxford Programme (WCOP). It has since been renamed the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford University (WEPO). This change reflects a thoughtful and thorough reorientation of the program in 2003-04 that not only brought Williams into closer cooperation with Exeter but that fundamentally improved the status and experience of our students there. The changes are traced in the WCOP and WEPO directors’ reports spanning the past five years (in Team Room).
While Oxford is only one of many study-abroad options available to Williams undergraduates, it has emerged over the years as perhaps the most prominent single program, with up to 26 students attending each year. Admission is very competitive, and it is not open to students from other colleges and universities. It is also a full-year program, further distinguishing it from the semester-long programs that make up the majority of junior-year options. The Dean of the Faculty and President appoint for a two-year term a resident Faculty Director to manage the program and arrange tutorial instruction for students. There is no set curriculum, so students of all majors can and do participate. Oxford faculty provide instruction, with students electing an average of five sets of tutorials spread among the three university terms. Housing is provided in Williams-owned property two miles from the city center.
The significant change in 2003-04 is a useful illustration of our continuous assessment of the academic program and how we reallocate resources when assessment calls for it. Before then, Oxford designated WCOP participants as associate students, a status that conferred only partial affiliation with the university. That relationship was cost-efficient and sensible for us, since we had invested in our own property and we contracted for teaching independently. But with the rapid increase in the numbers of international students at Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s, and with the rising costs of higher education in the U.K., the university made it increasingly difficult for associate students to use Oxford resources and facilities. It came to prefer a model in which the most serious international students were designated as visiting students at a particular college within the university. As Williams already had a strong affiliation with Exeter, and as our students became increasingly frustrated with their associate status, we saw much to gain from changing the status and in 2003-04 they became visiting students at Exeter. The costs were significant but well worth the value added to students’ experiences.
The change both strengthens the administrative connection between Williams and Exeter and better serves to integrate our students into academic and student life at Exeter and Oxford as a whole. For example, our students no longer have restricted hours of access to the Bodleian Library and its affiliates. They are also entitled to vital university services such as the Counseling Centre, and other university privileges such as the right to play on university sports teams. They are entitled to use all Exeter facilities — from the library, to the Junior Common Room, to the dining hall — virtually without restriction. And they participate fully in all the activities of Freshers’ Week, so they now have the same kind of orientation as do all first-year Oxford students. Perhaps most important, they now have access to departmental lectures and small-group classes in subjects such as economics and mathematics that were previously closed to them. Science students are increasingly able to line up work in faculty labs. Many Oxford tutors feel more of an obligation to teach visiting students than they do associate students, so for this reason, too, the transition has been very successful.
To ensure a high quality of instruction into the future, Williams has worked to create three new faculty positions at Exeter. The first is a fixed-term fellow in English literature, whose salary and benefits are supported with Williams funds. English literature, specifically Shakespeare, has been one of the most popular subjects our students choose to study, and the fellow provides a strong link to Exeter for as many as 18 students each year. The WEPO Director is also able to call on this fellow for advice in placing students in other tutorials in English. The second new faculty position is a junior research fellow in politics (especially international relations, another popular subject area). These two positions are supported by gifts made to Williams and Exeter in tandem. The third is a graduate assistant in economics. All three have come to know our students and program quite well, and they help tremendously in the effort to orient our students to Oxford-style pedagogy and to strengthen the links between Williams and Exeter. Our President and several members of Senior Staff travel to Oxford annually to meet with their Exeter counterparts and to discuss possibilities for further integration and exchange.
Having recently accomplished major improvements in the program, we do not project any significant changes soon. As we ponder the possibility of expanding the College's international presence, the Williams-Exeter program stands as a successful prototype. It provides a top-quality intellectual experience for students and has given rise to synergies with curricular happenings in Williamstown, specifically the tutorial program. The Board of Trustees will hold its biennial retreat in Oxford in January 2008; they will meet with the Rector of Exeter as well as with the program’s co-directors, faculty, and students, and they will discuss how the program might serve as a model for similar programs in other foreign locales.
Our newest study-away program is Williams in New York (WNY), which as mentioned above is one of the two major experiential education initiatives to come out of our strategic planning exercise earlier in this decade. It is a one-semester program that integrates traditional liberal arts scholarship with intensive fieldwork in workplaces around the city. Headquartered at the Williams Club in midtown Manhattan, the program offers four courses built around a curricular theme set by a faculty director. One course is a tutorial in which students do 15 hours of fieldwork and work closely with each other and the Director to reflect on the fieldwork. Its history as a curricular initiative is summarized in Planning and Evaluation, with more details available in a series of memos appended to the Fall 2005 Director’s Report (in Team Room).
Currently approaching its fourth semester of operation, WNY is in the pilot phase of implementation. This phase will last through the 2008-09 academic year, allowing us to experiment with various curricular and practical structures while keeping the program fairly small (eight students per semester). In the first two semesters (Fall 2005 and Fall 2006) the Director was a sociology professor who designed a curriculum that emphasized public affairs. In the third semester (Spring 2007) the Director was an art historian who organized courses around the art and architecture of the city. Each is directing the program for one semester in 2007-08. In 2008-09 the Director will be a faculty member who is a studio artist in the Art Department.
The list of fieldwork sites available to students has grown to include more than 30 workplaces: from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Dodger Theatricals, from the Office of the District Attorney of New York to the New York Sun, from Bellevue Hospital to the city’s Department of Public Health and Mental Hygiene. These are well-established organizations and the students serve as much more than interns. They are participant observers with access to all levels of the organizations.
In addition to fieldwork as a defining element of WNY, alumni involvement is another. Our graduates are eager to engage in the ongoing intellectual work of the College and those in New York play important roles in this program: adjunct faculty for courses, invited speakers, participants in seminars, and fieldwork supervisors. They provide an especially valuable link to the world of work in the city. We emphasize, however, that the alumni are not positioned in this program as conduits to student employment after graduation. WNY is distinctly non-vocational, and for this reason we deliberately use “academic fieldwork” as the rubric to describe the experiential component, rather than “internship.”
In a sense we have been assessing WNY from its start, and we are committed to a formal review in 2007-08. The directors, the Associate Dean of the Faculty, and the Coordinator of Experiential Education have worked to record the experiences of the first few cohorts of students and to establish assessment protocols. One early step was to develop a mission statement that defines the desired learning outcomes (WNY goals document in Team Room). We want students not just to gain insight into urban living, but to enhance the intellectual content of their practical lives, to link theory with practice, and truly to experience the diverse social, ethnic, artistic, and occupational worlds of the city. These are lofty goals, and we have discovered no simple measure of whether we are accomplishing them. But given the small size of this program we have been able to conduct our assessment in dialogue with each student to gain qualitative insights into their progress.
A second step already accomplished in the assessment has been to determine a pre-enrollment readiness profile for each student. This is constructed in large part when students apply to WNY, for the Director gets to know the students through a review of their transcripts, application essays, and personal interviews. Another piece of the profile is provided by an on-line survey, mostly to determine students' goals and expectations at the start of the semester. Finally, the Associate Dean of the Faculty and the Coordinator of Experiential Education interview each applicant personally, using a standardized interview format designed to reveal their academic preparation for the semester: Have they ever lived in a city? Have they ever had a job? Have they ever done fieldwork? Are they confident as public speakers?
With this profile in hand, at the end of the semester the Director can more readily assess each student’s intellectual growth during the semester. WNY thus has generated a capability to assess something like “value added,” though not in any quantitative way. It has added a useful example of assessment of student learning. The Director also interviews and observes students at public presentations during the time in New York. At the end of the term, in addition to a grade the Director produces a comprehensive report, including a confidential portfolio analysis of each student’s progress and comments on what the student gained or failed to gain from the program. Overall, it is clear that many students have gained from the program strong insights into what they might want or not want to pursue as a career, and many clearly benefit from and understand better the notion of academic fieldwork.
As a supplement to the Director’s reports, we are designing a post-enrollment survey to complement the one given at the start of the semester. We will send that survey to all students who have been through the program.
With each passing semester we are presented with new challenges. For example, student interest has been somewhat slow to develop. Despite intensive efforts to publicize the program, for most semesters there have been fewer than a dozen applicants. We need to find a way to boost interest before committing to run the program in perpetuity. We also face financial challenges. WNY is expensive, with a budget (not including faculty compensation, housing, and miscellaneous expenses) exceeding $100,000 each semester, for just eight students. We will almost certainly need to find a way to lower the per-student cost. Our relationship with the Williams Club, which houses the program, is secure, but we are unsure whether it is the best long-term home for the program. And finally, with no local administrative infrastructure, faculty directors are hard pressed to keep up with all the demands of running the program. We will have to solve that problem with on-site staffing.
As far as projections are concerned, as mentioned we will conduct a major review of WNY in 2007-08. We have a grant from the Spencer Foundation to help pay for the assessment of student learning. An ad hoc faculty committee will compile a report with recommendations about the program’s size, permanency, academic scope and curricular structure, administrative structure, location, and other matters. The report will be ready in the spring and reviewed by the CEP, and we expect the faculty to vote at that time on whether to maintain WNY as a permanent program.
Diversity in the Sciences
We have worked for some time to promote diversity of students in the sciences and to retain more underrepresented students beyond the introductory course, and we are committed to vigorous action on this front in the years ahead. We have obtained support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Spencer Foundation to facilitate mentoring relationships and peer support structures, and also to assess our progress in this area. We have gathered and reported annual data on the composition of students at a variety of stages within our science curricula. Comparing enrollment of underrepresented students in science courses to each incoming class as a whole, we can monitor their retention in intermediate courses and as majors. We will continue to monitor student achievement through GPA and measures of leadership within each science major (e.g., participation in research, the honors program, and being an undergraduate teaching assistant). Through student-faculty and student-student partnerships, such as our biomentors program and expanded summer research opportunities for younger students, we will strive to increase the representation of historically underrepresented groups throughout our science departments’ curricula and categories of excellence, including entry into relevant Ph.D. programs. Our goal is for participation in the sciences by members of all racial and socioeconomic groups to reflect their presence in the student body.
We project two major efforts here. One is the cluster of activities of our Team for Diversity in Science. We change the team's membership each year to better disseminate information, access new perspectives, and build alliances throughout the sciences. Current and past members have included the President; the Associate Dean for Institutional Diversity (who is also a faculty member in biology); the Director of the Academic Resource Center; the Director of Science and Technology Advising, faculty members in Mathematics and Statistics, Physics, Psychology, and Chemistry; and students from underrepresented groups who are science majors. To assess our programs more directly and immediately, the team is administering and analyzing surveys of end-of-term Biology 101 students to ascertain the perceived importance of various aspects of the course to their educational experience.
Another effort is our involvement in two national projects that aim to discover and disseminate practices that effect retention and excellence among undergraduate science students from historically underrepresented groups. Since 2005, Williams has been a central player in the Diversity in the Sciences Collaborative, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This consortium has brought together faculty, students, and staff from more than 70 institutions to share data and best practices. In the immediate future will be our participation, just begun, in a study organized by Washington University in St. Louis and Swarthmore College. They invited 15 colleges and universities to participate in the study, which is sponsored by the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation and the Johnson Foundation. The goal is to assess institutional effectiveness in attracting and retaining students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. Attrition from these fields appears to be unacceptably high, even at selective research universities and colleges. The problem is particularly acute among racial and ethnic minority students, students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and women. The project aims to identify which first-year students migrate out of STEM fields and why. Ultimately, the goal is to design, implement, and evaluate ways to reduce such migration.
Award of Academic Credit
The faculty as a whole sets the minimum academic standards for students. The Committee on Academic Standing (CAS) reviews the records of each student who falls below those standards and ensures that all College requirements are met. The voting members of CAS are the Dean of the College, an Associate Dean who is a faculty member, the Director of Admission, and six members of the faculty appointed by the President, acting through the Dean of the Faculty in consultation with the Faculty Steering Committee. All other deans, the Director of the Academic Resource Center, and an additional member of the admission staff attend meetings and serve in an advisory capacity.
The CAS reviews on a case-by-case basis all student petitions to delay or waive any requirements or for other unusual academic activity. It makes a determination for those students not meeting academic standards: the student may receive an academic warning, be placed on academic probation and be assigned to a dean for counseling and support, or be required to resign from the College. This last category takes many forms and can range from the student being required to make up deficiencies before he or she can return to Williams, to receiving counseling, to permanent dismissal. In some cases a student must simply make up deficiencies to return, in others the student must petition the CAS for readmission. The CEP and CAS occasionally recommend changes in requirements, and the faculty approves or rejects the proposals. For example, we no longer accept AP credit as a means to accelerate graduation or to make up a course deficiency. As described above, we are in the process of implementing the new Exploring Diversity requirement. We do not see any other changes in the offing.
Academic honesty and integrity are central in our community. We introduce students to the Honor Code, as described by our Statement of Academic Honesty and accompanying guidelines, in their first days at Williams when the student chair of the Honor System Committee addresses the first-year class and has members sign the Honor Code Pledge. In addition, student members of the Honor Committee meet with each first-year entry to discuss the Honor Code. Until last year, each student had to re-sign the Honor Code Pledge each year and submit the signed statement to the Dean’s Office. Now, students instead must reaffirm their commitment to the Statement of Academic Honesty when registering for courses on-line. We encourage faculty to discuss the Honor Code and how it applies to their course’s assignments at the beginning of each semester.
Alleged violations of the Honor Code are adjudicated by the eight members of the Student Honor Committee, with four faculty and the Dean of the College serving in an advisory capacity. The committee determines the guilt or innocence of the accused student(s) and recommends an appropriate punishment to the Dean of the College. A student can request reconsideration of a case on the basis of substantial new evidence or improper procedures. If granted, the case is reheard in its entirety. The committee’s student members, with advice from the faculty and the Dean, also review and discuss committee procedures periodically and, given evolving technologies, the changing nature of Honor Code violations.
To this point, we have found that the current language of the Honor Code has been sufficient and appropriate for our needs. As described in Chapter 11, in the Spring of 2007 a student group proposed changes to the Honor Committee’s procedures, and the Committee will consider them this year.
All policies and regulations describing College requirements and procedures are described in the Course Catalog, Student Handbook, and College Website. Each student receives a printed copy of the Catalog and Handbook each year.
Assessment of Student Learning
Assessment of student learning at Williams, as at most liberal arts colleges, is based on close student-faculty interaction, careful grading in courses, and course sequences in majors and programs, including capstone courses that require the acquisition of knowledge and skill to progress. Assessment is built into the structure of a Williams education and it is a fundamental responsibility of every teaching faculty member. We operate under the presumption of faculty responsibility and quality: teachers get to know their students well, they know best how to gauge student progress, and they are thoughtful and self-reflective in their evaluation of student performance. The careful assignment of grades is merely an endpoint in a system of assessment whereby faculty measure student progress frequently and provide individualized feedback. Faculty routinely work to enhance student learning in light of scholarly and pedagogical developments within their fields, and use student learning as a gauge of their own effectiveness. They also take seriously students’ own perceptions of their learning experience, as reflected in our mandatory course evaluation surveys, which use quantitative measures and have separate pages for optional written comments.
There is now a push at the national level for quantitative assessment. Everyone in higher education understands there are two basic difficulties in quantitative assessment: first, the ethical and practical barriers to conducting controlled experiments that hold constant the many factors other than teaching that contribute to learning, and, second, the difficulty of measuring “value added” as opposed to outcomes. On the first, there is not much we can do, other than try to imitate an experiment by a statistical analysis that holds selected variables constant and measures the correlation between some measure of teaching and some measure of learning. It is hard to find good quantitative measures of either input or output. On the second difficulty, it is hard to measure quantitatively the “before” state of students’ knowledge.
For these reasons Williams faculty are wary of relying too heavily on quantitative measures. We do use them, but we also rely on our faculty’s judgment. On the question of value added, for example, we believe our basic style of teaching means that faculty often have a good sense of a student’s “before” state, a sense that allows a qualitative assessment of value added that is better than the available quantitative measures and statistical methods.
We do not need to elaborate here our fundamental reliance on knowing our students well and on careful grading. Our faculty are conscious, however, of their obligation to bring to bear external perspectives in assessing learning — external in the sense of coming from outside their own day-to-day teaching experience. In this section we describe our thoughts on such external perspectives, and we mention numerous examples of their importance at Williams. Much of the discussion in the meetings of the Self Study Committee has been about the importance of external perspectives in assessment of student learning.
Because we rely so heavily on faculty ability, experience, and responsibility, we traditionally have not put much emphasis on standardized tests or national survey instruments. We are wary of the notion that “one size fits all” — that any particular survey or test could measure how much our students learn, either in any absolute sense or as compared to students at other colleges or universities. We feel that the national preoccupation with this issue in some respects complicates our ability to focus on the kinds of assessments we believe are most useful.
Already in this section we have described several recent examples of our commitment on assessment. The tutorial program is a case in point. It has proven itself repeatedly over nearly 20 years to be one of our most successful programs, having been reviewed in 1997, then expanded in 2001 as part of a strategic planning exercise, and then re-examined as part of our self study. Time and again students and faculty tell us their experiences with tutorials are unique and outstanding. Students and alumni very often rate tutorials as the most valuable educational experience of their undergraduate careers, and faculty report that students write better, speak better, and think more deeply after taking tutorials.
The success of tutorials is not merely a function of their very small enrollments and the quality of faculty teaching them. We analyzed SCS scores for tutorials in 11 cases in 2006-07 in which the instructor taught both a tutorial and another course (seminar or lecture) with 12 or fewer students. In these matched pairs the SCS score for the tutorial was higher more than half the time on 12 important qualities of teaching (see report by Christopher Winters in Team Room). Students rated the tutorial higher on level of difficulty, amount of workload, and “instructor developed my analytical and/or critical thinking skills” in nine of the eleven pairs. In ten pairs students rated the tutorial higher on “instructor promoted my intellectual engagement with the subject matter of the course,” and “instructor promoted class discussion,” and also rated it higher for two summary ratings of the course, “overall quality of instruction” and “overall educational and intellectual value” (these results for ten pairs are highly significant statistically). We plan to do similar analyses in future years and improve on them, such as by controlling for more factors. Unfortunately, it is hard to get a large sample of matched pairs, because enrollment demands on most departments and programs make it infeasible for many instructors to teach both a tutorial and another small enrollment course.
The evidence from the SCS and interviews of students is all the more noteworthy considering we offer tutorials in such a wide range of subjects, including science and mathematics. It is true these are students’ self-assessments and don’t meet the criterion of objective external measurement that so many desire. However, the selves are intelligent people and quite experienced evaluators, and we are convinced their evaluations are not simply about perception rather than reality. We are confident in our conclusion that tutorials are effective, which is why we devote financial and human resources to them.
Beyond each faculty member’s responsibility to assess learning, it is part of our institutional culture that department and program colleagues meet regularly to update and adjust their curricula, using “curricula” broadly to include requirements, subject matter of courses, pedagogical approaches, and specific assignments. Each department and program engages in assessment to some degree every year in deciding whether to propose changes to the CEP (as discussed in Planning and Evaluation). Most meet frequently to conduct business or simply to talk, and a frequent topic of discussion is the effectiveness of teaching. Some also make use of faculty retreats to assess their collective effectiveness (recently, History, Theatre, Africana Studies). Each year several carry out extensive self studies in preparation for formal reviews, including reviews by external visiting committees. Given the seriousness with which Williams faculty take their teaching, these discussions are fundamentally important in our general approach. However, we admit that the extent and frankness of collective discussion varies from department to department, program to program, and the dialogue sometimes focuses on fairly narrow issues.
As part of the self study the Coordinator and the Associate Dean of the Faculty interviewed 24 department and program chairs about methods of assessment of learning and also about creativity of learning (they received written reports from four other chairs). The chairs reported over and over again how they and their colleagues discuss the effectiveness of teaching many times during the academic year, in a variety of settings, including plenary meetings of the entire group and also discussions with students. They stressed their colleagues’ commitment to this kind of assessment, the value of it, and their follow-up in the form of changes in requirements, designs of courses, assignment of faculty to courses, and mentoring of junior faculty. The self study has served to make many faculty members and other decision makers at the College aware of these efforts and their potential, and we have resolved to publicize them more widely through submissions to the CEP and other groups.
An example is provided by a science department, which used information on the prior knowledge of students to ascertain that its introductory four-course sequence did not work satisfactorily, in the sense that a surprising number of students did not continue on in the field. The faculty responded by altering the sequence, even though it had been their favored approach for many years. Students now perform better in the introductory classes and are being retained in the major. This use of information on students’ prior knowledge is in the same spirit as the use of profiles of applicants to the Williams in New York program, though the information is not as detailed. We see possibilities for other departments and programs to gather information on prior knowledge and then compare the knowledge achieved after a course or set of courses. We don’t believe such a comparison can measure value added quantitatively, but it would give us useful qualitative information. A second example is provided by a humanities department. Partly through their normal ongoing discussion but also partly through a self study to prepare for external review, the faculty decided that that too few of its best majors pursued honors work and also that some honors theses were disappointing. On the basis of continued discussion and student interviews, they concluded they needed to improve advising and to revise some advanced seminars to prepare students better for honors research. A third example is provided by a language department. To assess their students’ learning gains, its faculty use a standardized written test of their own design but based closely on a test developed outside Williams and used by corresponding departments in many institutions. The faculty then follow up with oral proficiency interviews that adhere closely to the protocol of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
Accepting the value of external perspectives, we recognize that “external” can mean several different things: external to the faculty member but internal to the department or program, external to the department or program but internal to the College, or external to the College. Our faculty benefit from external perspectives in various ways. Obviously a major external assessment comes from students, through course evaluation surveys (SCS) and interviews. These we see as very valuable and not to be written off simply because they are self assessments. It is more a problem for us that students essentially always complete the SCS before the course is completed. It is administered in one of the last classes of a course — but that is before students take the final exam or complete the final paper, not to speak of the important fact that a student’s assessment of learning may change in the months, years, and decades after the course is over. Student interviews are only slightly better in this respect — by definition, the opinion is expressed no longer than seven semesters after the course, and typically much sooner.
Faculty who teach students in intermediate and advanced courses provide an external perspective on learning in lower-level courses, as they observe whether students are prepared for the more advanced work. That is a very important form of assessment of student learning within majors. Our scientists note that laboratory sessions offer good opportunities for such observation, and we mentioned earlier a similar kind of assessment that happens in summer research programs.
Another source of external perspective comes from team teaching. Around 19 courses are taught that way in any year. Even if everyone in the team is from the same department or program, each teacher benefits from an external point of view in assessing student learning. Sometimes the team is interdisciplinary, so a teacher benefits from the point of view of a colleague from another department.
In Mathematics and Statistics, faculty members routinely have colleagues look over examinations before giving them. In advanced statistics courses, assignments are typically open-ended, for example in requiring students to choose the best statistical procedure to use to analyze a set of data, so the students’ preparation in lower-level courses becomes apparent. Many departments and programs conduct exit interviews of senior majors, in some cases of all senior majors. These interviews are often concerned primarily with evaluation of faculty, but they certainly also provide useful information about the effectiveness of the department or program as a whole. In courses with labs, getting to know students well is facilitated by close contact in labs, and there is informal conversation during the “waiting time” while experiments run.
Honors presentations and required senior colloquia provide important opportunities for external assessment. Almost all departments and programs require honors candidates to make public presentations, and a few (Mathematics and Statistics, Political Economy, and Theatre) require all senior majors to do so (all environmental studies concentrators do it as part of a core course that some take as juniors). The presentations are open — and announced — to the College community, and all faculty in the department or program are encouraged and often required to attend and ask questions. It is the general practice to make decisions on awarding honors based on several readers’ assessment of the thesis, not just the primary advisor’s. In at least one department three faculty members are involved in addition to the primary advisor. In language departments, honors theses allow the primary advisor and colleagues to assess the mastery of the language as well as literary analysis; for example, Romance Languages requires the thesis to be written in the relevant language.
Students in the Division III Summer Research Program usually make a final presentation to an assembly of peers, faculty, and staff. Environmental Studies students who have received grants for summer research must give a public talk some time in the year following. Division I and II summer students do not do this. We are, in fact, missing a number of opportunities to put student learning on display, which would not only increase opportunities for assessment but would be valuable for their own sake. We see ample opportunities to increase attendance by faculty from outside the student’s major department at honors and colloquium presentations.
On the topic of putting students’ learning on display, we note that few departments and programs invite visiting critics from outside the College — the Art Department is a conspicuous exception — and interviews with chairs and the general discussion during the self study made it clear that faculty see much to be gained from external perspectives but generally would be very reluctant to introduce assessment by evaluators from outside Williams if it affected grading of students. For one thing, our students come to us precisely because they want close contact with their teachers. Our faculty work hard to cultivate mutual trust and respect, and many of them believe that that would be difficult to maintain if more control were given over to external sources. Another reason is that faculty seek to apply consistent grading standards, which is difficult when external evaluators comment on the work of students in a course or over several offerings of a course. Finally, if external evaluators were used, faculty would be anxious to guarantee the quality of the external advice and they naturally would tend to invite external colleagues they know best, which would contribute to some insularity.
An important external measure of student learning is provided by our students’ success in the competition for admission to Ph.D. programs, medical schools, and other professional schools as well as for postgraduate fellowships. For example, more than 50 of our graduates go on to Ph.D. programs in science, mathematics, and economics each year. We also consistently rank high in the number of NSF graduate fellowships. Dozens of our students present their research in conferences each year, and many co-author publications with faculty members in peer-reviewed journals. Each year, we induct many science students (54 in 2006) into Sigma Xi, the national society honoring and encouraging research in the sciences. For an extensive longitudinal report (1966-present) on the rate at which our students go on to receive Ph.D.s in various fields see Christopher Winters’ report of Baccalaureate Origins of Doctoral Recipients in the Team Room.
While these numbers are valuable in assessing student learning in many departments and programs, few departments and programs are assiduous in collecting the information, and collecting it is difficult because so many students do not enter graduate school until several years after graduating. Also, this kind of evidence undoubtedly is selective, because we lack comprehensive information on students who fail to gain admission to graduate school or to win fellowships. One important conclusion from our self study is that departments and programs could do more to collect information systematically from their alumni about activities that reflect on the value of the Williams experience in majors and concentrations. During the self study, many faculty expressed approval of more systematic collection of such data. Our Alumni Relations Office can help with this.
Formal Surveys: A number of College-wide assessment efforts employ externally derived surveys. We have participated and will continue to participate regularly in a number of collective survey efforts that provide feedback to faculty, not just on students’ satisfaction and engagement, but also on their perception of academic progress:
- The Admitted Student Questionnaire is sponsored by the College Board and targets all admitted students. It asks opinions of admitted students on our majors, recruitment literature, financial-aid packages, competition, and more. We will continue to field it annually.
- The Cooperative Institutional Research Program, administered by the national Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), surveys first-years upon entry for longitudinal measures of attitudes, plans, and self-assessments. We will continue to field it annually.
- The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), sponsored by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research in cooperation with the Indiana University Center for Survey Research, assesses the extent to which students engage in good educational practices and what they gain from their college experience. We fielded it in 2005 and plan to do so again in 2007-08. We discuss the 2005 results below.
- As a member of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) we participate in a number of collective data-gathering efforts. They include an annual survey of seniors on their satisfaction with campus services and resources and on post-graduate plans; an alumni survey every four years (the next in 2008-09) that asks questions about satisfaction and connectedness, and collects demographic information; and a survey of parents every four years (the next in 2010-11) that asks about satisfaction and engagement with student progress, and documents how parents pay for college. Finally there is a survey of enrolled students every four years that is COFHE’s version of NSSE and measures student engagement and student progress. We fielded it in 2006-07 and discuss the results below. We will field it again in 2010-11.
National Survey of Student Engagement
The more than 100 items on NSSE each can shed light on a specific aspect of the undergraduate experience. Taken together, groupings of the items are used to create five benchmarks of effective educational practice: level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment (these are NSSE’s terms).
Our use of the 2004-05 NSSE to make peer comparisons was limited by the lack of close peers who fielded the survey that year. Only one institution with which we typically compare ourselves participated. That being said, we still defined three comparison groups of institutions: six private liberal arts colleges (LACs), including the single traditional peer; all participating Bac-LA institutions as defined by the Carnegie Commission; and all participating institutions.
Few meaningful differences appeared between these comparison groups and Williams on the five benchmarks. Two exceptions were that we scored significantly higher than other Bac-LA colleges and the national sample on “level of academic challenge” for both first-years and seniors, and we were significantly higher than the national sample on “enriching educational experiences” for seniors. The lack of other meaningful differences on benchmarks that might have compared Williams favorably comes as something of a disappointment. We will look at these data again this year when we field NSSE again. Communication with a number of COFHE schools and other highly selective private liberal arts colleges assures us that the presence of a much more representative peer group will make this year’s exercise more helpful.
Moving beyond the benchmark level of analysis to a finer-grained one proved more informative. On a number of specific NSSE items we scored significantly better or worse than the comparison groups. Some of the more interesting include:
- Our first-years report making class presentations less often than do those in all three comparison groups. Combined with other findings from COFHE’s senior and enrolled-student surveys that show how important students consider communicating well orally and how perceived learning gains correlate with making formal presentations in class, this evidence suggests that we should consider a new emphasis on in-class oral presentations, especially for first-years. Taken together these data strongly suggest that the area of class presentations and oral communication skills is one that the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) should take up.
- Our students report being assigned a much heavier reading load than at other Bac-LA colleges and the national group. Some 39 per cent of first-years and 50 per cent of seniors report being assigned 20-plus books or book-length reading packs during the year compared to 22 per cent and 34 per cent for other Bac-LA first-years and seniors. Our students also report spending much more time “preparing for class” than those in the comparison groups. These are good indicators that the level of academic rigor we expect of students is high.
- Given this rigor, it is important to note that both our first-years and seniors find that the College is “providing the support [they] need to help them succeed academically.” This result is significantly above the national group.
- More of our first-years report “having had serious conversations with students of a different race or ethnicity other than their own” than at other Bac-LA colleges and the national group.
- A recurring weak point of ours on COFHE surveys proved to be no exception on NSSE: seniors rated the “quality of advising” as significantly lower than did those at the LAC group and the Bac-LA group. Given that we improved our advising system since 2004-05, we will watch this number carefully in this year’s fielding of NSSE.
- NSSE supported findings in COFHE surveys that both our first-years and seniors were more likely than students at other colleges to say they would definitely “do it again…” We consider this question a key measure of overall satisfaction. Some 92 per cent of our first-years and 88 per cent of our seniors say they would choose again to attend Williams.
There were many ways Williams was not meaningfully different from the comparison groups. They are too numerous to list but a few of the more interesting ones are:
- Worked with classmates outside of class to prepare assignments;
- Number of written papers 20 pages or longer;
- Practicum, internship, field experience, co-op experience, or clinical assignment;
- Community service or volunteer work;
- Culminating senior experience (capstone course, thesis, project, comprehensive exam);
- Relaxing and socializing (watching TV, partying, etc);
- Speaking clearly and effectively.
We will monitor all the NSSE results closely in the 2007-08 fielding.
COFHE Enrolled Student Survey: The COFHE enrolled student survey also measures student engagement in the learning process and relies on self-reported gains as an assessment of learning. Assuming self-reported gains are valid indicators, we have analyzed the COFHE data to discover what kinds of things students learn and what are the most important determinants of learning. A summary of our detailed quantitative analysis follows; more details and the statistical methodology, including some limitations in it, are available in the extensive report by the Director of Institutional Research, Christopher Winters, “What Drives Student Learning” (in Team Room).
On average, our students report that their overall academic ability, as they themselves measure it across a list of 27 abilities and skills, gets stronger during their time here. That is reassuring but not very meaningful. It is more useful to group the abilities and skills into subsets and note in which ones students report the greatest gains. Through the statistical technique called factor analysis, we discovered and named five basic types of learning or growth happening at Williams: traditional liberal arts academic ideals, personal understanding and growth, scientific facility, aesthetic and ethical awareness, and teamwork and interpersonal skills. Our students report the greatest advances in the first factor, which includes such gains as thinking analytically and logically, acquiring new skills and knowledge, writing effectively, communicating well orally, and synthesizing ideas and information. They report the least amount of gain in teamwork and interpersonal skills.
We then analyzed the personal characteristics and behavior correlated with this self-reported learning. Some observable variables one might expect to predict learning — GPA, SAT scores, gender, race, citizenship, parental income, etc. — turn out not to be significant. Instead, the key correlates of learning, especially learning in what we think of as traditional liberal arts academic ideals, are how students spend their time and how engaged they are in certain academic activities. Specifically, two types of activity best predict this type of learning — faculty interaction and interactive learning. Students who report interacting with faculty more (collaborative research, advising, social interaction) and who report engaging in interactive forms of learning (writing a thesis, fieldwork, class discussion) also report learning the most. Use of the library, group learning, and use of math, computers, and the scientific method also correlate strongly with self-reported gains in learning.
We recognize the limitations of this kind of quantitative analysis. In addition to the fact that self-reported learning is an imperfect indicator, it is possible that some of the correlation is not due to student time use/engagement causing self-reported learning, but rather to unmeasured characteristics of students that cause both their time use/engagement and their learning. However, we believe the analysis provides supportive evidence that our efforts to expand the faculty and to increase the scope of the tutorial program have had a positive effect on student learning. It also supports our decision to develop the new neighborhood residential life system, one of the goals of which is to provide more opportunities for students to get to know faculty outside their major departments and programs. All three of these decisions in recent years required significant allocation of resources and resulted from collaborative planning and from previous assessments of one kind or another. The analysis also confirms the value of our efforts in experiential education and the summer research programs and provides evidence on which activities negatively influence gains in the traditional liberal arts academic ideals. The most significant of these is involvement in extracurricular groups. This could be an indicator of the detrimental effect of over-commitment to student groups.
Other Assessment Efforts: The CEP spent a great deal of energy in 2006-07 debating how to assess the effectiveness of the writing requirement, and this effort continues in 2007-08. The Dean of the Faculty has designed a survey that will be on the agenda of the CEP early in the year. We discuss in Chapter 6 a recent assessment of our program for identifying and supporting incoming students with inadequate quantitative skills and in Chapter 7 a program to assess our students’ information literacy skills.
Graduate Programs
Williams has two master’s programs, a one-year program in development economics and a two-year program in art history, which offer the degrees of Master of Arts in Policy Economics and Master of Arts in the History of Art. We opened them in 1960 and in 1972, respectively, to build on and to reinforce special strengths. The development economics program builds on the strength of the Economics Department and the experience of many of its faculty in research on and advising of developing economies. The art history program builds on the strength of the Art Department and the presence in Williamstown of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in cooperation with which we offer the program.
The mission of the development economics program is to improve the skills of economic policymakers in developing countries and countries in transition from central planning to a more mixed orientation. There are generally between 20 and 25 students, called fellows, in each class, and typically they have already started on careers of government service in a central bank, a ministry of finance or planning, some other ministry, or a public enterprise. The program has never had preparation of students for further graduate work as a significant goal: a very high percentage of graduates return home and resume government careers. Almost every fellow needs substantial financial aid, which is provided by their employers, international agencies or foundations, or Williams. Alumni have reached very high levels in government service, examples being Prime Minister of Singapore, Finance Minister of Korea, Secretary of the Finance Department of Philippines, interim Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Tanzanian Ambassador to the U.S., Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, Treasurer of Sri Lanka, Finance Minister of Indonesia, and Governor of the Bank of Indonesia (the central bank).
The mission of the art history program (hereafter, the Williams-Clark program) is to offer a solid academic foundation in the discipline, with related practical experiences, so as to prepare students for a variety of roles in the field (principally but not solely academic and museum careers), including preparation for further study and research either in doctoral programs or as independent scholars. The 12 or so students in each class are more varied than those in development economics. Historically a significant number did not major in art history as undergraduates but want to strengthen their knowledge of the discipline before applying for doctoral study. Many have worked in museums between college graduation and graduate work.
Alumni have gone on to Ph.D. programs and to positions in museums. In recent years graduates have taken curatorial or administrative positions at museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, while others have begun doctoral programs at major universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, UC-Berkeley, and NYU. Older alumni have reached major positions in the art world, including directors or senior curators and administrators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, and many others. Others hold senior faculty positions at Notre Dame, Northwestern, Wesleyan, Case Western Reserve, Lafayette, and Vassar, junior faculty positions at such institutions as Bowdoin, Reed, and Carleton, and senior positions in such diverse settings as the art libraries of the National Gallery of Art and Princeton, the conservation labs of the National Gallery of Art and the Intermuseum Conservation Association at Oberlin, and in such major commercial art firms as Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
The development economics program is administered by our Center for Development Economics (CDE). Its Director, a full-time administrator who is not a faculty member, reports to a committee of faculty members in the Economics Department. CDE operations, including assignment of faculty to courses and curricular policy, are coordinated closely with the Economics Department, with that department’s chair having major responsibility. The Director is a vital factor in the assessment of student learning, as he travels extensively in countries from which fellows come, making two or three trips a year, each from three- to six-weeks long and often including visits to 12 to 15 countries. In the process he gathers information that helps faculty in the assessment of learning and the evaluation of the program generally.
The Williams-Clark program flourishes in a cooperative relationship between our Art Department and the Clark, but is a distinct and separate program within the College. While the Clark provides space (including teaching space with computer support), utilities, and library support, Williams administers all student and faculty affairs. The program is administered by a Director, who is a senior member of the Art Department and who reports to the Dean of the Faculty. The Director is responsible for establishing the curriculum and program requirements, and fulfills many of the responsibilities for the graduate students that the Dean of the College does for undergraduates.
Both graduate programs are well integrated into our general operations. With the exception of an occasional visitor, faculty members who teach in the CDE are full-time faculty who also teach economics to undergraduates, and all of them become members of the College’s faculty under the same general procedures, overseen by the Dean of the Faculty and the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, as other faculty. Scholarly expectations equal or exceed those for other faculty. The Williams-Clark program relies somewhat more on faculty who teach only in it and not in undergraduate art courses, but with very few exceptions all its courses are taught by persons appointed to the College faculty under the same procedures. All faculty in both programs are evaluated in much the same ways other faculty members are. In both cases financial control and planning are the responsibility of the Provost.
CDE: The CDE’s academic program includes required work in econometrics, developing country macroeconomics, a writing-intensive course (for most fellows, a tutorial), and a Winter Study Project more intense than the typical one for undergraduates. The writing-intensive course is a recent innovation. Many courses other than the one designated as writing-intensive also require substantial writing. The courses are suitably advanced and specialized, and there is a clear sequence of increasing difficulty. Fellows are not required to do original research, but the program provides every one of them an understanding of the relevant research in the field and also ensures they develop the ability to assess research critically. The depth of faculty and library resources is far beyond what a typical high quality liberal arts college economics department has in “development economics.”
The primary assessment of student learning is made by faculty in courses. Classes are small, faculty members get to know fellows well, and they routinely discuss among themselves how each course and each fellow is doing. At the end of the year the faculty and the Director solicit opinion from fellows, including on the level and pacing of courses, the workload, and specific topics fellows would like courses to cover. We gain external perspective through oral presentations by some fellows, which are attended by faculty other than the advisors of the research being reported.
CDE faculty and the Director are in contact with many alumni and get information about fellows’ accomplishments in their countries. The Director’s extensive travels and contacts make him a conduit for information and feedback from alumni as well as from foreign government agencies, who are the major employers of our graduates, and international institutions, who are major funders of financial aid to fellows. Officials of those governments and institutions regularly make suggestions on the curriculum. For example, alumni and employers have already indicated approval of our decision to add a writing-intensive tutorial course, saying such a course adds greatly to the skills needed in policymaking careers. The program has also received helpful advice from an external advisory committee.
The general success of the CDE program in attracting applicants and external funding for fellows, and in contributing to graduates’ successful careers indicates that fellows learn a great deal in their year at Williams. Alumni are enthusiastic recruiters for us, and we have longstanding relationships with many ministries and central banks that routinely arrange for their employees to come to the program. When we begin to recruit in new countries, where we have no alumni, we find our program being recommended to agencies by persons who know about it, such as officials of the IMF and World Bank, U.S. Treasury advisors to local central banks, and personnel in U.S. embassies.
Our appraisal is that we have taken assessment of student learning seriously and no major gaps require our attention. However, we will consider introducing further external perspectives. For instance, we will soon begin to assess the success of the writing-intensive course by gathering views from current fellows, recent alumni, and employers.
The CDE’s core courses enrich greatly the undergraduate curriculum in economics, as a limited number of undergraduates are permitted to take them — an average of 40 per year. Still more undergraduates interact with Fellows in economics courses that are cross-listed as graduate and undergraduate courses. The CDE has an active program of speakers that benefits undergraduates. The CDE and the Williams Center for Environmental Studies are planning a conference in 2007-08 on the implications of global climate change for developing countries. In 2006-07 the College began to have fellows take several dinners each week in undergraduate dining halls, leading to tables of undergraduates and fellows in Arabic, Russian, and French.
Williams-Clark Program: The Williams-Clark Program’s special features include a graduate seminar in the first year on art history as a discipline (including its intellectual history and challenges to the tradition from recent critical theory); the requirement of an original research paper, on which more below; a European study trip in Winter Study of the first year; and the requirement of reading proficiency in German and one other foreign language. The requirements for specialized knowledge, writing, and oral presentation are far greater than for the typical Williams undergraduate, and the depth and quality of faculty resources exceeds that in art history in a typical high-quality liberal arts college. Students enjoy the use of the superb library of the Clark, one of the foremost art reference libraries in the country.
A special feature is the strong effort at assessment in the spring of the second year, when each student presents a major research paper in a public symposium. In January each student writes a preliminary research paper under faculty supervision, then in the spring the faculty supervisor and the Director and Associate Director, who are faculty members, all work with the student to advise on revisions. At least one first-year student and at least one second-year student also take a role in advising the student. Assessment thus involves the supervising faculty member, two administrative faculty who ensure common standards, and two students who provide peer assessment. The symposium itself is attended by the graduate students and many faculty members, including some who have not taught in the graduate program that year. The papers have on occasion been published in such important journals as The Burlington Magazine, and have often been presented again at discipline-specific conferences like those of the College Art Association and the Renaissance Society of America, or in more specialized symposia organized by museums.
As in the CDE program, the Director, Associate Director, and faculty members maintain contact with alumni, and they also have extensive contacts with museums, other employers, and university graduate programs where alumni work and/or study. Thus they are well informed of graduates’ success in their careers. An annual newsletter includes reports from alumni. The program also maintains an electronic discussion list for alumni, to which 180 people subscribe; it features employment opportunities, calls for papers, and notices of alumni and faculty professional activities. Thus, the Williams-Clark program uses ongoing assessment routines similar to the CDE program.
The exhibitions that some students curate or co-curate are open to the public, providing an additional external perspective.
The Williams-Clark program’s success in attracting applicants and its graduates’ successful careers demonstrate high regard for the learning that takes place in it. Another sign of regard is the substantial amount of money raised in its own annual appeal — more than $140,000 since 2001 and now averaging more than $30,000 annually. The spring symposium adds an unusual and vital specialized assessment. We see no major gaps in assessment that require our attention but of course will continue to monitor closely the adequacy of ongoing assessment practices.
The benefits to the undergraduate program are great. The existence of the program helps the Art Department recruit and retain excellent faculty, and graduate students are often in the same courses as undergraduates. Advanced undergraduates may take graduate seminars with the permission of the instructor. Graduate students often serve as mentors to undergraduates.
Creativity in Student Learning
We paid attention to creativity in the self study because we believe creativity is a special challenge for a college like Williams. We have an obligation to help our graduates cope with and make contributions to a rapidly changing world. We entered the self study process with the view that it would be relatively straightforward, albeit demanding, to document excellence and recent progress in dimensions such as quality of faculty, academic program, diversity, and physical, financial, and technological resources. Those dimensions have been constantly on our minds for many decades. Creativity, on the other hand, seemed less well charted territory. It is a newer concern in liberal arts education generally, and we as a College community had not focused on it in any systematic and comprehensive way. Perhaps we were missing something?
We see many good reasons to study the topic. Our mission and purposes remind us that the Williams experience should equip our graduates to live fuller, more effective lives, and that our greatest mark on the world consists of the contributions they make in their professions, their communities, and their personal lives.
At an intensely practical level, their future economic well-being will depend on their ability to adjust to rapid changes in workplaces. Thinking creatively is one way a person adjusts to rapid change. We are aware of the rapid pace of technological innovation, the increasing pressures on any national or regional economy from global competition, the tendency for workers to change jobs — careers, even — frequently during their lives, and an increasing demand from employers for workers who are able not just to carry out tasks clearly defined by existing technologies and markets but ones also flexible enough to deal with change without high retraining costs.
We also expect our graduates to contribute much more than marketable work to the societies they live in. Changing technology and other forces will also be relevant for governments and nonprofit organizations, which are arenas a large number of our graduates will participate in — as voters, members, and donors, as well as workers. New agendas, new public policies, new scientific knowledge are certain to require new thinking, and creative thinking, on the part of governments and nonprofit organizations. Think of all the different ways the future might unfold for an environmental organization committed to slowing global climate change, for example.
No less important are the less tangible but real personal benefits that result from education, including the moments in education that involve exposure to and practice of creativity. We want to enhance the ability to respond to art and literature, by showing students examples of creativity of artists and writers and by giving them opportunities to be creative in their own learning. We want to help our graduates to see in creative ways their place in the natural world and connections in their social worlds — to understand their place in the world as humans and as individuals, and to be flexible in their delineations of “us” and “our,” for example. Showing students examples of creativity in the natural and social sciences is important in this regard. Most broadly, we have an obligation to help graduates appreciate the great satisfaction of intellectual pursuit — the satisfaction that comes from the Eurekas! and not just from verifying the known answer to a problem that thousands of students have solved before.
It is not just the future experiences of Williams students that are relevant. We can improve the immediate experience of the undergraduate year