Draft submitted by Standard 9 Committee: Rachael Barlow (chair), Susanne Fusso, David Winakor, Renell Wynn
Other Contributors: Lisa Brommer (Human Resources), Kevin Butler (Student Affairs), Amanda Daddona (Registrar), Debbie Colucci (Equity and Inclusion), Pat Leone (Communications), Rachel Munafo (Gordon Career Center), Chia-Ying Pan (International Studies), Laura Patey (Student Affairs), Michael Whaley (Student Affairs).
Standard Nine: The institution subscribes to and advocates high ethical standards in the management of its affairs and in its dealings with students, prospective students, faculty, staff, its governing board, external agencies and organizations, and the general public. Through its policies and practices, the institution endeavors to exemplify the values it articulates in its mission and related statements. In presenting the institution to students, prospective students, and other members of the public, the institutional website provides information, including information about student success, that is complete, accurate, timely, readily accessible, clear, and sufficient for intended audiences to make informed decisions about the institution.
INTEGRITY
Description
Wesleyan maintains three handbooks, one each for faculty, students, and staff, that describe policies, procedures, and organizational relationships. All cite the standards of conduct for each group. The remainder of each handbook covers issues relevant to its audience. The faculty handbook discusses university governance (its charter, bylaws, and relationship to the Board of Trustees), faculty governance, and the policies of the Advisory Committee and Academic Affairs. The student handbook describes board memberships and procedures and reminds students about policies ranging from the residency requirement to rules regarding alcohol, drug, and academic integrity offenses. The staff handbook lists policies on hiring, employment, diversity & affirmative action, compensation, leaves, and rules on termination.
The Honor Code governs both undergraduate and graduate students’ academic integrity and is enforced by a student Honor Board under the supervision of the Vice President for Student Affairs. Faculty can report academic integrity violations through the Honor Code Violation Reporting Form. The Code of Non-Academic Conduct governs other aspects of students’ campus life. Regarding research, faculty and students abide by the standards and protocols put forth by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), other departmental ethics committees, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and the Responsible Conduct of Research Plan. Library documentation and its rights management specialist guide faculty and students on copyright issues.
Our Office for Equity and Inclusion (OEI) includes a Vice President for Equity & Inclusion and full-time Title IX and equity positions; it also oversees our pipeline programs (Upward Bound, WesMaSS, Mellon Mays, and McNair) and the Resource Center. OEI works with Human Resources (HR) to implement strategies to increase diversity in staff applicant pools, encouraging all hiring managers to invite a process advocate—staff and faculty volunteers who have been trained by OEI to identify implicit biases—to serve on their search teams. OEI also provides leadership, coordination and oversight of prevention and response and policy and procedures related to identity-based bias, discrimination, harassment and sexual misconduct, assuring that the university complies with state and federal law. Its newly designed web page includes statements on affirmative action and equal opportunity, policies on non-discriminatory and discriminatory harassment and sexual misconduct, and annual reporting of incidents and proceedings regarding Title IX offenses. All employees must complete prevention training for sexual misconduct in compliance with Federal Title IX legislation and Connecticut Public Acts 19-16 and 19-93. Students have access to a student-focused website regarding Sexual Misconduct as well. Lastly, all members of the Wesleyan community can report incidents via the Incident Reporting Form.
Wesleyan University is committed to making our campus and our online presence accessible for all users. We comply with state and federal laws related to accessibility, including Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Our website outlines policies related to digital access, discrimination, and event planning and describes how we provide accommodation for students, faculty, staff, and visitors. All community members—students, staff, faculty, visitors, etc.–can use the Barrier Reporting Form to notify the university about challenges they have faced. Accessibility Services (or Student Academic Resources) also provides extensive information and resources for students, faculty, and families regarding the accommodation process for students, including rights and responsibilities and the various methods for submitting an appeal, grievance, or complaint. A campus-wide Accessibility Committee facilitates communication about accessibility, anticipating and responding to community needs.
Appraisal
Wesleyan continually updates its policies and procedures related to integrity. In 2017, we hired an ombudsperson, an independent and neutral party with whom staff and faculty can speak with a promise of confidentiality. She reports monthly to the Provost and President, summarizing the types of concerns employees raise. Created in 2021 in response to student demand, the Student Ombuds Program serves a parallel function for students.
Prior to the pandemic, Student Affairs implemented an assessment for the student conduct judicial process, asking all students who had been part of a case in the 2018-19 academic year to respond to survey questions about the speed and fairness of their judicial proceedings. The response rate was low (< 35%), making it difficult to interpret the results. The office put this assessment on hold while managing more immediate pressures during the pandemic. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, when we switched abruptly to remote learning, we saw a rise in academic integrity cases, leading some to wonder whether faculty were well-equipped to (1) design assessments that would limit the potential for academic dishonesty and (2) communicate clearly about what constituted dishonesty in the remote environment. While we have stepped away from remote learning as the pandemic has subsided, this challenge will stay with us as we continue to offer remote courses in the summer and winter sessions (see Special Section on Distance Learning).
In 2019, the Board of Trustees revised its Whistleblower Policy; among other things, it now provides a direct line of contact for reporters to contact the Board Audit Committee. Also in 2019, the Board of Trustees passed an updated Incident Reporting Policy. In 2020, in response to revised Department of Education regulations, Wesleyan revised its Sexual Misconduct Policy (and procedures) and launched an education initiative to promote it. As part of the university review of policies and procedures, each fall, the university issues a campus-wide Code of Conduct. This asks employees to review and acknowledge key policies, along with a requirement to report any issues they experience. Since our last re-accreditation, we have updated this Code, promoting it at the presidential level.
TRANSPARENCY
Description
While Wesleyan does maintain some print publications (the alumni magazine, the admissions view book, etc.), we depend primarily on our website to communicate with prospective and current students, alumni, parents, faculty, and staff. Admissions provides a robust set of resources to both attract and educate prospective students. We archive the online University Catalog each year. The Registrar also prints four hard copies, of which the library archives one. WesVising helps incoming students learn about different majors as they register for their first courses. WesMaps helps students identify which courses they want to take each semester. Life @Wesleyan describes the myriad ways students can be involved with activities outside of the classroom. One can find news about faculty research and scholarship, student success, etc., at News@Wesleyan.
Much of our internal communication occurs through email, either through official announcements sent to the on-campus community or the faculty and/or community forums listservs. WesPortal, our Intranet, facilitates the sharing of internal documents and tools including the Code of Conduct. We also distribute information through meetings—faculty meetings two to three times a semester and staff meetings four times a year—and periodic newsletters from various offices (HR, etc.). Best Practices and Project Refresh were two administratively led initiatives that invited staff to provide feedback about university offices and processes. The former solicited suggestions for how to improve how we do business. The latter asked about which policies, procedures, and events Wesleyan should discontinue.
During the pandemic, Wesleyan tried to be transparent about how it planned to keep the university open and its community safe. The administration held regular webinars and town halls. On the Keep Wes Safe website, we maintained a dashboard indicating the current alert level and positivity rate, listed safety guidelines shared upcoming and recorded informational webinars and posted emails from the Pandemic Planning Committee.
Appraisal
We have drastically improved our website’s accessibility in compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WebAIM audited our website and helped run workshops on how to make our web pages accessible in our content management system, Cascade. We now require closed captioning on all public-facing videos. We have shifted the student, faculty, and staff handbooks from pdfs to html. But while most of our website is more accessible, WesMaps, the main vehicle students use to locate courses, is not. We have been using WesMaps for a long time and it shows its age. As a student in a recent survey wrote, “WesMaps has a terrible [User Interface]. Please make it better. It looks like it’s from before the Internet was invented.”
Our curriculum management system, CourseLeaf, produces the online catalog and feeds catalog information to academic unit web pages. Its 2017 implementation streamlined the work of the Registrar, Academic Affairs, EPC, and others. Program and course changes pass through CourseLeaf’s workflow, which documents who made these changes and when, fostering accountability and transparency. With it, we have systematized curriculum development and now can more consistently deliver information about the academic program. As with all software systems, however, there has been a learning curve for administrative assistants and department chairs. Some faculty would like to have a preview/staging-area where they could view catalog changes before publishing them to the website.
We are interested in how to make staff input a more regular part of administrative decision-making. Staff at Wesleyan lack the governance structure used by the faculty to communicate their own concerns, and our most recent “bottom up” approaches, Best Practices and Project Refresh, both ended the year before the pandemic. However, the community town halls the administration hosted during the pandemic, in which staff and faculty were invited to ask questions (and many did), were a sign that the administration wanted to hear from staff. In fact, we are particularly proud of our communication with the campus during this period. In Fall 2020, 91% of faculty rated “communication from the administration” as “good” or “great.” Our students’ ratings for the same item were lower, but still overwhelmingly positive, at 69%.
Finally, we rely heavily on email to communicate. While much of our email communication may be unavoidable, we wonder whether some of it is not. Lacking a strong campus calendar, our listservs distribute a steady stream of announcements about upcoming events and lectures, making it difficult to maintain a holistic view of, and engagement with, campus life.
PUBLIC DISCLOSURE
Description
Wesleyan complies with all state and federal regulations regarding public disclosure. On our Admissions web page, we post information related to the admissions process and various financial information, including the cost of attendance, how to apply for financial aid, basics for financial wellness and our statement on Satisfactory Academic Progress. Admissions also provide information important for transfer students, including application requirements, financing options, and general guidelines for what Wesleyan will accept as transfer credit.
We post Academic Regulations in the university catalog. These include policies about, among others, the credit hour, grading, accepted transfer credit, requirements for academic good standing, and policies for students to submit grade-related grievances. We maintain separate pages devoted to describing our special programs: the Bachelors of Liberal Studies, Graduate Liberal Studies, Graduate Programs, Wesleyan’s Programs Abroad, and the International Student and Scholar Program. WesMaps lists courses offered in a given academic year, as well as those that are not. To keep these lists current, the Registrar shares lists of courses not taught in the previous four years for each unit to review. The current versions of the charter and bylaws are dated March 1, 2019. We publish publicly a list of all of our faculty and members of the Board of Trustees. The Office of Institutional Research (OIR) posts the Common Data Set and other data to comply with the Higher Education Opportunity Act, including graduation and retention rates and students’ post-graduation plans, as reported in the Gordon Career Center’s First Destinations Survey (see Standard 8). All academic departments offering majors post learning goals; these appear in the university catalog for each major under “additional information” and in aggregate on the assessment website.
We update the community on our accreditation status and our self-study processes. In both 2012 and 2021, we posted drafts of our self-studies for community review and input. We have also sought NECHE’s feedback on multiple issues related to potential substantive changes (e.g., the new Bachelors of Liberal Studies, etc.).
Appraisal
The production and dissemination of content on the Wesleyan website is quite decentralized, with a dis-unified strategy for our web presence across departments and programs. This results in content duplication, making the website content-heavy and difficult to keep updated, accurate, and engaging. While we have the best of intentions to disclose fully information that matters to our constituents, we fear that it may get lost in the abundance of information that we share.
In 2020-21, we began requiring all student job descriptions be posted in Handshake, the Gordon Career Center’s career management platform and job board, making it easier for all students to learn about and apply for available opportunities. At the same time, the University’s payroll office implemented a new time recording and attendance system campus wide. While these changes have allowed us to stay in compliance with federal work study program guidelines and create an equitable on-campus job market for students, the technological transition has been difficult for some faculty and staff supervisors of student employees, especially in offices that employee large numbers of students (for example, Student Academic Resources hires over 300 tutors each semester). As the GCC settles into its new role in managing this important aspect of campus life, it is staying in touch with the employers to learn how to streamline the process of posting positions and completing hires.
PROJECTIONS
- Students Affairs will resume its review of the student judicial system, with a focus on raising the response rate of the survey so that the results are suitable for interpretation.
- The Registrar’s Office will continue to pursue strategies that render faculty and staff interactions with CourseLeaf easier. To that end, the Registrar’s Office will continue to work with other offices on campus to decide whether they should develop a staging area where faculty and staff can preview the information the put into CourseLeaf so they can view its appearance before appearing live on WesMaps or in the Catalog.
- University Communications plans to conduct a web audit to inform their vision of a web overhaul and conduct functionality conversations to determine technical requirements, audience engagement and IT integration. Ultimately, it will design a web governance structure for a sustainable web presence with identified roles and responsibilities and report findings and recommendations for a comprehensive web overhaul and web governance structure.