Draft submitted by Standard 2 Committee: Michael Whitcomb (chair), Demetrius Eudell, Anne Laskowski, Andy Tanaka, Frantz Williams
The institution undertakes planning and evaluation to accomplish and improve the achievement of its mission and purposes. It identifies its planning and evaluation priorities and pursues them effectively. The institution demonstrates its success in strategic, academic, financial, and other resource planning and the evaluation of its educational effectiveness.
PLANNING
Description
Strategic Planning: Wesleyan engages in regular long- and short-term planning that realistically balances institutional aspirations and constraints. The University links its allocation of resources to plan objectives and their demonstrated effectiveness. Employing a flexible planning framework, Wesleyan remains agile and able to adapt to new opportunities or unexpected challenges.
In November 2021, the Board of Trustees adopted Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial as a framework for strategic planning over the next ten years. Drafted by the President and discussed in various fora in spring 2020, this plan reflects the input of faculty, trustees, staff, alumni, and students. In some respects, spring 2020 was a difficult moment in which to think about a new strategic plan. The pandemic had made the future wildly unpredictable, and the university was already anticipating making significant investments in facilities. At the same time, an abrupt change in operations highlighted new opportunities and uncertainty raised the need to strategically allocate funds. To capture forward-thinking ideas and a diverse set of voices, President Roth remotely conducted a series of Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial discussions with constituencies across the university. Those meetings, numbering well over a dozen, had a common framework, sometimes adapted to the interests and expertise of participants, and all ended by asking “If there were one thing to improve (in a particular area), what would it be?” Each meeting began with President Roth proposing that the current plan maintain the three overarching goals from the last strategic plan. The key term of the first goal, “distinctiveness,” tended to generate the most discussion. Faculty focused on the distinctiveness of the curriculum, a natural outcome of Wesleyan’s scholar-teacher model, and envisaged both scholarship and teaching as more collaborative in the future. Staff responded with respect to their own areas: for example, those in Human Resources noted the distinctively welcoming and less hierarchical nature of Wesleyan’s workplace culture while those in Advancement staff were impressed by the distinctive interest among alumni in the power of ideas.
On the basis of these planning discussions, President Roth presented a first draft of Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial to the Trustees over email and encouraged feedback. Based upon their reaction and input from others, President Roth shared a second draft in May of 2021, the key elements of which were presented at the June All-Staff meeting.
President Roth continues to stress that the new strategic plan is a working document that can change over time as new issues or opportunities arise.
Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial begins with a historical view on the progress Wesleyan has made to date. A key theme weaved throughout the plan is the expansive impact Wesleyan has had to-to-date and aims to achieve in the future. The core of the plan is centered around three overarching goals:
- Enhance our distinctive educational program, capitalizing on academic strengths
- Build on our reputation as a leader in pragmatic liberal education
- While enhancing access, make Wesleyan more sustainable through prudent management and diversification of revenue sources
Associated strengths and vulnerabilities are listed for each goal along with a vision statement. Each goal is then linked to key objectives for reaching the goal with specific action items around each key objective outlined.
Under the first goal on enhancing or educational program, we aim to strengthen connections between liberal learning and lifelong learning, further diversity, equity and inclusion, stimulate research, pedagogical innovation and effectiveness, strengthen foundation for creative practice and energize distinctive residential and co-curricular learning. Our key objectives related to our second goal, to build on our reputation, are to highlight what makes Wesleyan distinctive, develop stronger connections between alumni and current campus community, strengthen the reach and predictive power of Admission and emphasize the power of pragmatic learning. Finally, our third goal focused on financial sustainability, has three key objectives which are as follows: reduce reliance on tuition, support financial aid, plan for improvements for a sustainable campus post-science building.
The President’s Office has created a dashboard for tracking progress on specific action items. Each action item is also connected to an appropriate champion of that cause. The plan has overarching metrics which will be viewed on an annual basis with targets established for 5-years and 10-years.
To support the goals outlined in Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial, the University has embarked on a $600 million comprehensive campaign, still in its leadership phase, which will support the following strategic priorities: Access – $200M in endowed and current-use funds, of which at least $100M will be endowment for financial aid; Facilities – $125-150M toward construction and renovation projects that will enable the University to meet academic and programming needs well into the future, while also becoming more energy efficient; Academics – $125-150M to support Wesleyan’s academic core, including endowed and current-use funds for the creation of new interdisciplinary colleges, the addition of faculty positions, and research across the curriculum. The remaining $100-150M of the campaign total will be current-use dollars raised through the Wesleyan Fund to support annual operating budgets.
Academic, Financial and Other Planning: Wesleyan’s other planning activities are informed by and often directly linked to its strategic plan. As described in Standard 7, Wesleyan’s financial planning (broadly defined to include finance, facilities, climate, business continuity planning) is overseen by senior management (including the Executive Budget Committee consisting of the President, Provost and Chief Administrative Officer & Treasurer) and Trustees and is advised by a wide range of University constituents. Both short- and long-term financial planning is regular and informed by models examining both positive and negative assumptions and the results of this planning are regularly discussed among senior leaders and monitored via several KPIs.
The University’s academic planning is overseen by the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost in consultation with faculty governance (especially via the Educational Policy Committee of the faculty; see Standard 3). As described elsewhere in this document(?), pandemic-related responses, including the sudden shift to remote instruction consumed much of energies in recent months, but the lessons carried forward about pedagogy, community, and online instruction continue to inform academic planning. Other examples of academic planning include, but are not limited to the following:
1) The search for a new director of the Center for the Arts has prompted a reconsideration of the structure of the arts center, together with curricular and co-curricular planning. Moreover, in light of a recent self study and external review, the moment is opportune to rethink possible future directions for the arts at Wesleyan. Currently the priorities and the structure of the CFA are under reconsideration with the intent of returning to the original interdisciplinary model. The new focus will reduce external program and concentrate on supporting students in making their projects visible beyond Wesleyan and bringing in artists for longer sustained periods to engage with the Wesleyan community while they create new work. As well, the technical arts staff will be separated from the CFA which will provide more efficient functioning in mounting events. The newly conceived CFA will also provide support and fellowship time to faculty and thus continue its tradition of making Wesleyan a center of artistic and interdisciplinary experimentation for faculty, artists, and students.
2) Wesleyan is also planning to reshape its scholarship and curriculum in light of ongoing changes in the big data landscape and advances in computational and communications technologies. Although many disciplines have data and methods to approach questions related to big data, more robust examination from multiple disciplinary perspectives could increase student and faculty engagement at Wesleyan and lead to more comprehensive understanding of social problems and viable policy responses to them. Consequently, a new institutional framework is being proposed to support and enable multidisciplinary collaboration, advance adoption and utilization of advanced computational/data analysis methods, and foster an environment that supports scholarship and teaching/learning activities by engaging students in collaborative and experiential learning activities.
Building on the groundwork already laid by the QAC, the proposed center would be open to faculty interested in any questions that touch upon areas of computational work. As computation and big data keep evolving, new and unanticipated challenges will arise, and the center would provide a forum to track and examine these changes. Ethical issues that emerge with the use of computation and big data (privacy, security) will be an area of particular interest for the center. Wesleyan would benefit from a formal structure that encourages more interdisciplinary engagement in the use of computational methods to advance human understanding. The goal would be to facilitate robust interaction on core questions that build upon disciplinary strengths, while at the same time establishing interdisciplinary connections. These collaborations would supplement our existing curriculum with complementary structures that promote Wesleyan’s core objectives of interdisciplinary research, faculty/student collaborative engagement and practical idealism.
3) Wesleyan’s Enrollment Management Group, co-chaired by the Vice President & Dean of Admission & Financial Aid and the Senior Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer & Treasurer and consisting of representatives from admission and financial aid, finance, academic affairs, student affairs, and institutional research, is responsible for monitoring, balancing, and planning related to Wesleyan’s study body size, educational capacity, and the institutions’ financial needs. This group meets a few two to three times each term to examine, plan, adjust, and understand actual and projected enrollment patterns. With enrollment data on hand, this group examines and works to ensure that appropriate levels of academic offerings and student services are being offered and sets annual and long-term admission targets with an eye toward the student experience, university capacity, and financial stability.
Appraisal
Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial continues and builds on the objectives and successes of our two previous strategic plans, Wesleyan2020 and Beyond2020. Under these plans, Wesleyan demonstrated strong fiscal responsibility – achieving budget surpluses for decades, while achieving many objectives aligned with our strategic plan, including implementing a new degree — the Bachelor’s of Liberal Studies — new academic programs — including the College of Film and the Moving Image, the College of Educational Studies, Integrated Design, Engineering, and Applied Sciences, and the Fries Center for Global Studies — and with few exceptions, increasing interest in Wesleyan and the number of applicants for admission year-over-year. As with its precursors, the non-prescriptive, flexible nature of Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial will allow the University to respond to internal feedback and external pressures. This type of flexibility allows Wesleyan to experiment without overcommitting. For example, as described in Standard 4, after assessing its viability we closed our Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance after a limited run, but in contrast, have expanded the Center for Prison Education.
Some efforts implemented under our plans have had mixed results. For example, over the past decade we successfully developed a vibrant first-year seminar (FYS) program, offering small classes for incoming first-year students which emphasize writing and focus on interesting topics. The number of FYS classes offered has increased from 24 in FY2013 to 60 in FY2020, and the percentage of first-year students taking at least one FYS course has more than doubled from 40% to 83%. However, as described in Standard 8, recent student survey data suggest that this program’s delivery of writing-intensive instruction may be varied and uneven. As we begin to explore this finding, we are confident that our multi-layered assessments help uncover this type of nuance and allow us to guide informed improvements to our efforts.
The well-established collaboration of our Enrollment Planning Group proved especially useful as Wesleyan navigated the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Frequent communication, revisions of assumptions, and modeling of enrollment behavior allowed us to update our actions to address enrollment, academic and student needs during the pandemic. For example, the Pandemic Planning Committee was given frequent updates – some daily – on the aspects of the institution related to pandemic planning.
Additionally, we continue to reap the benefits of our 2015-16 facilities planning engagement with planning consultants Sasaki. This work reshaped our interaction with campus spaces by transforming formerly wasted empty space into heavily frequented space for collaboration and social interaction (e.g., Science Tower lobby). These vignettes – typically in large open spaces or outdoors, became all the more valuable as social distancing became the norm. Finally, the benefits of our engagement with Sasaki continue as we implement their principles in our renovation of the Public Affairs Center.
EVALUATION
Description
Wesleyan continually collects and employs a wide variety of data and qualitative evidence to evaluate progress toward meeting our strategic objectives, assessing a Wesleyan education, and informing decisions that guide the operation of the University. Many of these efforts are funneled through our administrative offices – primarily the Office of Institutional Research and the Office of the Registrar – but other decentralized evaluation processes exist across the institution, including evaluations conducted by faculty (see Standard 4), by staff within Wesleyan administrative and academic departments (e.g., Admission, University Relations, Student Affairs; see Standard 8 for details), and by ad hoc committees undertaking focused inquiry into campus initiatives, policies, and issues.
Wesleyan conducts regular external reviews of its academic units (departments, programs, and colleges) and limited ad hoc reviews of its administrative units. As detailed in Standard 4, academic units engage in a self-study and review every 10 years. This schedule was disrupted by the pandemic, but an ambitious plan to review six departments in 2022 aims to get the institution back on track. To date, there is not a systematic process for reviewing non-academic offices and programs, although a few ad hoc reviews have occurred. For example, Wesleyan’s Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) underwent an external review in 2019, resulting in a five-year strategic plan which informed ITS annual objectives and key results which are shared with the community. The overall recommendation of the review was to better inform the community of ITS activities and plans, the genesis of the “News from the CIO” e-newsletter that the CIO began publishing in February 2019. Post-COVID, the Library and Academic Affairs plan to launch a strategic planning process involving various campus stakeholders.
The Office of Institutional Research conducts institutional-level data collection and analyses using both quantitative and qualitative information. Its data sources include university records, surveys, interviews, and focus groups, consortial efforts that allow us to compare Wesleyan students’ responses to those from peer institutions and other ad hoc efforts on special issues (Advising, Climate, etc.). IR is responsible for most institutional reporting, including IPEDS, State, AAUP, guidebooks and rankings data collection, and other collections, and monitors and reports on retention and graduation rates, conducts numerous ad hoc analyses to evaluate programs and provide data for decision support. IR regularly analyzes and reports data from student course/teaching evaluations, examining longitudinal trends, factors that correlate with evaluation ratings, and looking for signs of gender and racial bias, and helped develop a new evaluation instrument and helped implement the online collection and reporting of student-athletes’ evaluations of their intercollegiate head coaches.
The Office of Institutional Research also handles most internal and external reporting, including federal and state reporting (e.g., IPEDS, HEOA), guidebooks, and University enrollment projections, teaching evaluation results reporting, and works closely with campus offices to help meet the research and data needs of these departments. Institutional data sources include surveys, internal and external databases, focus groups and interviews, and consortial and other external sources (such as COFHE, the American Talent Initiative, and the AAUP).
The Office of Student Affairs also pulls together evaluation data from its staff. As part of their reflections on the year, student affairs staff are required to describe their major accomplishments and the major challenges they face. Specific units comprising student affairs have their own dashboards and share narratives that describe interesting changes, how they make use of data to inform future work, and recommendations for following year. This information is then used to improve processes and plan for the upcoming year. ADD: Examples of resource allocation decisions based on evaluation. E.g., BA/MA
Appraisal
Wesleyan’s growing desire to bring data to bear in its operational and strategic processes and decision-making has begun to outpace the capacity of the University’s data, reporting, and analysis infrastructure. As a result, Wesleyan has struggled to successfully make data and institutional statistics readily and easily available to those responsible for working with the data and decision-makers alike. This, in turn, has led to an increasingly decentralized approach and a lack of consistency and coordination across efforts. Suffering from frequent turnover and vacancies, the IR office has not been positioned to keep up with the growing demand for reporting, data, and analysis. From June 2015 through September 2021, the IR office had a vacant analyst position for a total of half of the six years (3.2 years) and saw three separate incumbents fill the remaining three years. These staffing challenges combined with our reliance on siloed transactional data sources, increasing reporting demands, lack of strong centralized data governance, and COVID-related disruptions have stalled Wesleyan progress at bringing consistent data and analyses into the hands of operational staff and decision-makers alike.
Adding to this challenge, institutional reporting and analyses are currently conducted using complex transactional data systems that are labor and time intensive and lack conformed reporting definitions and concepts. Additionally, these data structures do not permit the easy integration of information across our siloed data stores. Over the past decade, ITS working with the Registrar, Institutional Research, Admission and Financial Aid, and Finance/HR have invested significant resources (both time and money) toward the development of an integrated, user-friendly, and efficient data infrastructure. These efforts, however, have fallen short due to a lack of expertise (initially), insufficient resources, and the competing priorities placed on staff time.
In fall 2021, Wesleyan began in earnest to begin the search for the replacement for its older ERP systems and is exploring to what extent modern technology will resolve some of the data issues that have slowed our progress in recent years. Additionally, in November 2021, our Chief of Staff & Director of Strategic Planning has begun to reconstitute a group to work on improving our data capabilities. As a first step in this effort, she polled key University offices and data users to examine our current strengths and weaknesses related to collecting, sharing, and analyzing data and to develop a long-term plan for improving our use of data at Wesleyan. [ADD: once available, include some key initial findings here]
Despite these challenges, Wesleyan has continued to successfully fold data and information into its evaluation and decision-making processes (see Standard 8 for examples). Wesleyan’s process for conducting regular external reviews of its academic units presented several challenges. We had not maintained our planned schedule of three units per year, and this frequency proved to be insufficient as the number of academic units grew with the addition of new colleges and centers. Additionally, external reviews lacked a standardization that would provide chairs and administrators with a clear understanding of the process and expectations. In response to this concern, Academic Affairs explicitly outlined the process [link to External Review document] and create the expectation that units would provide updates in their annual report on the findings and results of their external reviews – what they learned and how they have responded. To maintain an “every ten years” cycle of Academic Affairs has increased the number of reviews occurring each year. This new aggressive scheduling, along with increased expectations for the use of data in this process is placing additional demands on our data reporting and analysis infrastructure.
Standard 2 Projections
Wesleyan provides an annual update on the strategic plan. In addition, at about seven years into the strategic plan, Wesleyan 2020, the University conducted a thorough overview of the progress it had made towards achieving its objectives in a 52-page report, Look Back 2020.
ADD: What is plan for (regular) updates on Towards Wesleyan’s Bicentennial