As I take my leave.

On this last day of 2023, I am reflecting on my 11 years at WCSU. This is my last day as provost, and it has been a rewarding and challenging ride. The perfect storms of COVID-19 and the demographic shifts of New England presented abundant challenges to the academic and university planning processes. So have the changing attitudes toward higher education. It has been, well, an interesting time to be in higher education.

For COVID-19, my colleagues and I worked hard to address the needs of our students. We continuously evolved as we learned about online instruction, gaps in technology access, and the financial and emotional strain on everyone. Our responsive approach is something that I am immensely proud of; we worked together to keep education going, under the direst of circumstances. We rose to the challenges we faced with grace if not always with elegance.

The demographic shifts have also been a tremendous challenge and all members of the university community have been trying to find ways to respond. We have launched new academic programs that are focused on regional needs and successfully achieved professional accreditations of nearly every program at the university (all those that have that option), to ensure the quality of the academic experience we offer. We moved many graduate programs online to meet the needs of our students who are largely juggling families and jobs. Our support for students with very different experiences of education has improved and I am proud of the gains we’ve made in student success (despite a few bumps specific to our context).

Like so many campuses, our focus on health and mental health has led to strong enrollments with regional and national accolades for our MS in Applied Behavior Analysis, BS in Nursing, the EdD in Nursing Education. We’ve invested in Public Health, Addiction Studies, and expanded our portfolio of nursing programs to create pathways from community college to the doctorate in nursing practice. All of these are growth areas and all of them are directly responsive to future workforce needs.

Alongside healthcare, our human services programs are also evolving, with social work weaving in important questions of social justice and seeking collaborative partnerships with our criminal justice program as well as our addiction studies program. Education has been rebuilt from elementary education to EdD in Instructional Leadership and our students are achieving successes that are on par with our regional, elite, universities.

Our accredited business programs are thriving as well, with award winning work from the marketing program and steady growth in cybersecurity. Criminal Justice/Justice and Law Administration has created an MS in Homeland Security providing opportunities for advancement for students in business, computer science, and criminal justice. Our STEM disciplines are also evolving with the times, securing accreditation, focusing on how tools and technologies are transforming their work, building in new opportunities to study artificial intelligence, and emphasizing the value of data analytics throughout.

The arts are a point of pride, recruiting from well beyond our region because of their exceptional quality and our access to Broadway. All arts programs at WCSU are focused on top tier professional training, fully preparing our students to work in these competitive and in-demand industries. Their move toward professional degrees (BFA, BM) offers insights into how arts and liberal arts disciplines can thrive in a world that is questioning the value of a liberal arts degree. Our arts programs connect the dots between the breadth of knowledge and habits of mind we expect from a robust undergraduate program and the professional opportunities that our students are aiming for. It is these connections that are helping the arts programs thrive; I am convinced that those “arguments” for value will strengthen the entire liberal arts enterprise at WCSU.

On this last day of my role as provost, it is that argument for the value that I’d like to end with. I began my time at WCSU working with colleagues to transform our general education curriculum. As I leave, that curriculum is about to change again. This change is driven by some gaps in outcomes in the model adopted 8 years ago. It is good to make this next change, but I hope that the innovation and benefits of the recent model are not lost because that model was indeed an argument for the value of a liberal arts degree.

The general education program that I helped to shepherd through our governance processes when I was still serving as dean, argued that there were habits of mind that any liberal arts graduate should cultivate, and these habits could be achieved in any number of disciplines. We abandoned a distribution model in favor of ten competencies with defined learning outcomes. Courses then demonstrated their commitment to meeting the outcomes associated with that competency to qualify for the general education curriculum. Some of it worked; some of it didn’t. What didn’t was not so much a refutation of the model as it was a lack of clarity in those learning outcomes and some unevenness in how they were featured in our courses.

The next iteration of the general education curriculum is keeping some of this approach but ensuring a little more consistency and re-introducing some of the distribution. That’s fine and probably even a good idea. However, when the world attacks “liberal arts” they tend to point to specific disciplines as no longer relevant or meaningful. However, those habits of mind that we had hoped to cultivate are essential and can easily help us refute these “relevancy” and “workforce” arguments.

We all know this: the careers and professions our students are striving for will evolve. We want to prepare them well for the start of their careers, but also for their evolution. Our commitment to cultivating the habits of mind of the liberal arts are the best way to ensure that our graduates will be able to evolve and thrive in a changing world.

What are those habits of mind? Competency in writing, speaking, and quantitative reasoning. Understanding the epistemological positions of science, social science, and humanities so that we can evaluate evidence or arguments with the appropriate questions in mind. And, yes, some understanding of our history and the ethical debates therein, which will necessarily lead our students to deep discussions of our cultural positions and obligations to equity.

These habits of mind can be taught in many ways and in many disciplines, but they must not be addressed superficially. They must be deeply embedded in both the core liberal arts curriculum and in the professional programs to which so many students now gravitate. They must be the point of the undergraduate degree.

This is how I have always seen the liberal arts – not as a buffet, but as a strategy for helping the students we serve defend themselves from nonsensical and dangerous arguments. I see it is a strategy for equity, for social mobility, for a thriving and inventive culture. It is a strategy meant to help all people argue for what is just, no matter what context they inhabit after graduation. It is America’s strategic plan.

Signing off as provost. It’s been a grand adventure, indeed.