Page 3

In the area of Academic Quality and Innovation, interdisciplinary programs were under development last year involving faculty across campus.  For example: the College of Business and Economics is developing a bachelor’s degree combining study of environmental issues and policy, economic analysis, and business management. This will be one of the first in the country to combine these three areas in one degree.  Another example--many College of Humanities and Social Sciences faculty have drafted a white paper on the “allied health” initiative.

Our Fairhaven College is just one example of how Western is leading necessary changes in higher education today, incubating new ways to promote student learning. I quote from the jacket cover of a new book that addresses the need for transformation in education today, “Fixing College Education: a curriculum for the Twenty-first Century,” by Professor Charles Muscatine of the University of California at Berkeley:

“Fixing College Education predicts new roles for students and faculty, redefines educational breadth and depth, and calls for deeper assessment of learning and teaching. Muscatine highlights the outstanding colleges and universities, including Harvard, Boston University Professor’s Program, and Fairhaven College at Western Washington University,  that already remade their curricula successfully or adopted features like the ones he proposes. Muscatine argues that the new curriculum is better able than the old to produce good scholars and good citizens for the twenty-first century.”

This recognition is one measure of the Western’s success in setting new standards of best practices based on careful experimentation.

Strides were made in our Institutional Research capabilities:  providing a set of wide-ranging indicators for informed and transparent decision making, allowing departments and deans to reach decisions about how to most effectively utilize reduced budgets.  The Graduate School carefully studied four cohorts of Western graduate students to better understand the factors that influence completion rates and time to degree.  With the leadership of the Provost’s Office, we have become a participant in the joint American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (formerly NASULGC) ) national initiative known as the “Voluntary System of Accountability.” 

Next page