Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Preface
We welcomed the self study as a natural part of the culture of reflection and inquiry that we work hard to cultivate at Williams. We aimed for a frank discussion of our achievements, but also of our remaining challenges and opportunities for improvement. The self study seemed an excellent opportunity to reflect on our many initiatives since a period of strategic planning at the beginning of the decade, especially ones concerned with increasing diversity and the design of a new residential life system. It was also a stimulus to begin a discussion of creativity in student learning, a more unusual topic but one we felt presented an important challenge for Williams at this moment in its history.
Our initial plan was to treat diversity, residential life, and creativity in sufficient depth that we could choose the “special emphasis” route recognized by CIHE. That would have had us offset very lengthy treatments of the three topics with substantial reduction in the space given to the myriad of other topics under the standards. After deliberation our committee on the self study decided not to go that route, but rather to treat the standard topics as fully as in the typical self study but also present longer discussions of the three topics than is typical. This change in strategy seemed wise for several reasons.
First, the concern for diversity affects so many parts of Williams that we felt we had to reflect on it under many heads: our mission, planning, governance, faculty, academic program, admissions, student support services, residential life. Therefore, we decided to weave themes of diversity into many different chapters instead of having a single one entitled “Diversity,” as would be called for under the rubric of “special emphasis.”
Second, we found “creativity” a difficult subject to deal with. It is an unusual topic, multidimensional, somewhat contentious, and the fact was that we hadn’t had much systematic conversation about it before our self study. It was new — all the more important, and exciting, for that fact, but new. It was markedly different from diversity and residential life, which had been topics of discussion and policymaking at Williams for years. The committee concluded it would be difficult to have the extent of conversation and research on creativity that would be sufficient for it to qualify as a special emphasis in CIHE’s specialized language. As it happens, we ended up having a fair bit to say about creativity, and it appears as a substantial part of the Academic Program section.
A third reason is that we found ourselves led down another path — assessment of student learning. It became an even more important concern than we anticipated, not only because of happenings on the national scene, which we need not elaborate, but also because we found ourselves eager to learn more about how we do it, and how well we do it, and eager to advance to an outside audience our own ideas and our own confidence in how we do it. The concern for assessment of learning absorbed some of the time that might have gone into research on creativity. We wound up saying much more about assessment than we had originally planned. The results of that, too, are in the Academic Program section.
The result of these decisions is a longer document than we planned at the start, and perhaps one longer than some readers would prefer, but the combination worked well for us and was one of the results of our self study that made it worthwhile. And we did indeed find it worthwhile. We confirmed many of our convictions about our qualities and emerged feeling more confident about them, but we also learned about shortcomings and how we could remedy them. Not all of the shortcomings were new to us, but it was valuable to have to write them down and display them to the outside world. Recognizing and stating them of course led to commitments to action, and we are pleased to be able to display them to the outside world as well.
The Process
President Morton Owen Schapiro and Senior Staff began planning the self study in late Spring of 2006. They discussed general organization and special topics. President Schapiro appointed Roger Bolton, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Research Associate in Environmental Studies, as the Coordinator of the Self Study. Even in those early moments the group recognized the need to reflect seriously on the assessment of student learning.
The group also determined that the Self Study Committee should be a fairly large one, in order to represent a broad range of interests and knowledge. The committee came to include all Senior Staff, some other staff members with specific expertise, a number of faculty chairs of student-faculty committees, one other faculty member, and three students. It was decided to choose students from a list nominated by the Co-Presidents of College Council, with the list limited to sophomores or juniors, so they would be on campus to interact with the Visiting Team in Fall of 2007, and to include students who had been involved in the planning of the new residential life system (the result was that two of the three student members had that experience). See Accreditation Self Study Steering Committee.
Much went on during the Summer of 2006 even though it was not practical for the full committee to meet. Roger Bolton briefed members who knew little about accreditation or self studies. A small subset of the committee met several times during the summer and prepared a detailed outline of the self study report, including assignments to write initial drafts. Bolton visited the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education (CIHE) of NEASC and gained helpful perspective and advice from staff members there. He and Chris Winters, the Director of Institutional Research, attended the workshop on assessment sponsored by the New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN).
During the academic year 2006-07 the committee met every month, to discuss major issues, to monitor the progress in writing initial drafts, and to share information about the approaches other colleges and universities were taking to self study. Assessment of learning was a frequent topic of discussion.
Members of the committee engaged in activities to publicize the process. Bolton gave reports at two faculty meetings, and the first one in particular prompted a vigorous discussion of assessment. He spoke at a weekly lunch meeting of science and mathematics faculty, and succeeded in his effort to provoke discussion of assessment. There was an article in the student newspaper. We set up a Website to convey basic information and to enable viewers to comment; unfortunately, this produced no useful results. Members of the committee participated in a meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy on creativity and joined in two informal discussions — one about assessment and one about creativity — open to the whole faculty; attendance was rather small but the discussion was useful. Bolton reported to a meeting of the College Council, and heard a prolonged discussion. We know that during the year the faculty in many departments and programs had discussions prompted by the self study.
We benefited very greatly from a visit by Robert Froh and Louise Zak of CIHE to campus in October 2006. They spoke to a joint meeting of the Self Study Committee and the Committee on Educational Policy and met individually or in small groups with many members of the committee. Their advice was helpful as we wrestled with the organization of the final document and the attention we should pay to various topics.
A major activity was a series of interviews of department and program chairs by the Coordinator and the Associate Dean of the Faculty. They interviewed 24 chairs (and received written reports from four others) of departments and programs that had either been formally reviewed or had made major curricular changes in the last five years. They focused very tightly on two topics, assessment of student learning and creativity, and were careful not to let the discussion stray from those topics — in other words, the interviews were not about the “whole state of the department,” as one might put it. Many chairs led discussions in their departments or programs to prepare for the interviews, which contributed to publicity and also generated more useful information.
In addition to those interviews, we did a few other pieces of research specifically for the self study. They were quantitative assessments of learning by our Director of Institutional Research, a study of the effectiveness of one of our student support programs, and the testing of a new survey about how effectively we convey information to students. We describe the results in the appropriate sections.
On the actual writing, the committee agreed on a four-step process: first, members of Senior Staff and their assistants wrote the bulk of an initial draft of each chapter (one for each standard); second, the Assistant to the President for Public Affairs (a member of the committee) and the Coordinator, both of whom had extensive editing experience, edited the drafts and in some cases added substantial new material; third, every member of the committee had an opportunity to comment on every chapter; fourth, the two editors revised the chapters accordingly.
This procedure had mixed results. The initial drafts reflected deep knowledge of particular aspects of the College, deeper and more authoritative than any single author or small group could have produced. However, some of them were delayed, simply because the press of other business made it difficult for Senior Staff members and their assistants to complete their assignments. As a result, the two editors had to concentrate much more of their work in the late Spring and Summer of 2007 than they had planned and more than was desirable. The compression of writing, editing, and review in the summer gave committee members less time to read and reflect on drafts than we would have liked.
A possible alternative would have been for a much smaller group to write the initial drafts, though relying on background material, numerical data, College publications, etc. that Senior Staff would provide. That alternative is worth exploring for the next self study.
We acknowledge helpful comments on drafts from Louise Zak at CIHE, who especially prompted the two editors to gather more information and to add more explicit language on projections.
We thank also Sharon Marceau for her many contributions at all stages of the process and the many faculty, staff, and students who supplied ideas, information, and supporting documentation, especially Gayle Barton, Gail Bouknight-Davis, Stephanie Boyd, Gerard Caprio, Heather Clemow, Susan Engel, Ed Epping, Keith Finan, Joyce Foster, Tom Garrity, John Gerry, Wayne Hammond, Ruth Harrison, Skye Johnson, Charles Lovett, David Pilachowski, Doug Schiazza, Marc Simpson, Rick Spalding, Dinny Taylor, Jean Thorndike, Allen White, Chris Winters, and the many chairs of departments and programs who participated in the systematic interviews on assessment and creativity.
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