Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Overview
This self study comes at a time when the College has used its position of strength to embark on significant change to advance our mission of providing the finest possible liberal arts education.
The degree of that strength is remarkable. Our students have never been more talented and diverse, our faculty more accomplished, our graduates more sought after, our physical plant more solid, and our financial resources more plentiful.
With such favorable conditions comes the responsibility to use them to maximum effect. To ensure that we do so, we set early in this decade a course of deep and widespread change that is now almost fully realized.
In that time we have accomplished the following:
- Expanded the faculty by 15 per cent, making possible a series of curricular innovations.
- Broadened the diversity of the student body. Half of the most recent entering classes qualify for Williams-based aid — up from just over 40 per cent a few years ago. Almost a third of our students identify as U.S. students of color; another seven per cent are non-U.S. citizens.
- Made the College more affordable by reducing, and in many cases eliminating, loan expectations and by expanding to international students our policy of need-blind admission and full, need-based aid.
- Lowered class size and expanded tutorials. Seven years ago just over half our courses had fewer than 20 students; now three-quarters of them do. At the same time we tripled the number of tutorial courses, establishing this form of teaching as a signature of the College.
- Added requirements in intensive writing and in quantitative or formal reasoning.
- Enhanced interdisciplinary teaching and learning, by strengthening existing programs and adding new ones.
- Greatly expanded opportunities for experiential learning — in and near the main campus and farther field, including our pilot program Williams in New York.
- Overhauled life outside the classroom by creating our first administrative positions in support of campus life, building our first real student center, and introducing a new residential-life program designed to increase opportunities for students to get to know peers from other class years and faculty outside their majors.
- Added dramatically to the physical infrastructure that supports teaching and learning. Renovation of our largest residence hall made possible the new residential-life system. In addition to the Paresky (Student) Center, already a hive of new activity, we opened the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, which has transformed those two programs and enabled us to bring to campus a series of world-class performers who, in addition to their main presentations, work with students, faculty, and local residents.
We also have reorganized our administrative structure, especially at the Senior Staff level, to oversee more effectively these new developments and the general running of the College and to bring more focus to our efforts to become a more inclusive community.
More recently, we have established as a central principle of our operations a commitment to their environmental sustainability, have set a specific and ambitious goal for reducing our emission of greenhouse gases, and have begun to put in place the administrative structures required to meet it.
This document presents the reasons behind the changes listed here, along with how they were planned and implemented and early assessments of their effectiveness.
With the exception of our sustainability efforts, which are too new to judge, early indications on almost all other initiatives are positive.
Nonetheless, we face notable challenges in at least three areas:
- Diversity. As described here and even more fully in our Diversity Initiatives Self Study of April 2005, it remains the case that after decades of considerable effort and hard-won progress we have yet to build a campus community that fully includes all its members. Those of certain historically underrepresented groups continue on average to have less positive experiences here. While their experiences are positive by national standards, our own norms compel us to keep pressing for ways to eliminate the unconscious barriers that still exist at the College. We are encouraged at having devised a series of quantifiable measures of inclusion by which to set our course and by new administrative structures that will focus at the highest level our many and disparate efforts in this regard. We will not have succeeded, however, until those measures show that the experience of Williams by members of these groups resemble more those of the community as a whole.
- Residential life. We have expended significant effort to launch a new residential life system designed to enhance the education that takes place outside the classroom. Many of the students experiencing the new neighborhood system have an acute awareness of its cost to them (instead of being able to choose a room for sophomore, junior, and senior year anywhere on campus they must choose from within one of the four neighborhoods) and only a vague awareness of its potential benefits. When the system is fully established, these should include richer and more educational relationships with other students and with faculty and staff. The new system has been in place one year and a rule of thumb among student life professionals nationally is that any fundamental change in residential life typically takes seven years to mature. Nonetheless, we will assess the situation and take the steps needed to make this transition as smooth as possible.
- Sustainability. While dedicated to environmental issues for decades, we now face an exceptional challenge in making our operations truly sustainable. Setting the goal of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to 10 per cent below their 1990 levels and doing so in the face of our expanding campus infrastructure, will call upon us to find new ways to plan, build, and maintain our buildings and to otherwise control our consumption of energy. We are only beginning to envision these new ways of operating and they will require the full commitment, creativity, and flexibility of students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Our dedication to attaining this goal does not blind us to the magnitude of the challenges it represents.
We face these challenges with full faith that the College community will rise to them with the same energy and confidence that has enabled Williams to accomplish so much since the last self study and that has led us to the strong position we find ourselves in today.
Projections: At or near the end of each chapter we highlight projections of College action. Those with the most pervasive effects include the following:
- Launching in 2007-08 of new structures to coordinate more effectively our efforts to make the College community as inclusive as possible;
- Completing in 2008 a master plan for the renewal and enhancement of our recreational and athletic facilities;
- Forming in fall of 2007 a broad-based committee to advise the Vice President for Operations on the most effective steps toward establishing sustainability as a core value of the College and meeting our goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions;
- Completing in 2007 an outside analysis of our budgeting processes;
- Continuing to enhance our efforts to recruit low-income students and to support them while they are here;
- Researching the effectiveness of the new residential life system and make changes as appropriate;
- Successfully complete to full educational advantage the project to renovate and expand classroom and office spaces for the humanities and social sciences and our spaces for the library and educational technology;
- Continue in a variety of forums our beginning discussions of the role of creativity in a Williams education;
- Present at the January 2008 Board retreat the background research conducted on external conditions that could significantly affect College operations by the year 2020.
All these are further elucidated in the text.
top