Wesleyan 2020

The following was sent to the Wesleyan community on February 18, 2010.

Dear Friends:

Since my return to Wesleyan in 2007, alumni have often asked me why our endowment no longer ranks among the largest of small liberal arts schools. In the early 1980s, our endowment was roughly equal to those of Amherst and Williams, and now it is less than half theirs. “What happened,” I’ve been asked again and again. And, “What are you doing about it?”

The story is simple, and it’s not a tale of poor investment decisions. Our investment returns since the 1980s have been about average for our peer group of colleges and universities. Wesleyan’s best-performing peers benefited from much greater giving to their endowment and compounding of those gifts in strong equity markets. The choices we made about how to deploy our capital, however, were skewed. We spent too much and saved too little.

Our institution today is financially sound. Still, it has become clear that we need to take a fundamentally different approach in order to build our reserves and have maximum flexibility for future initiatives. For that reason, last semester we decided to change significantly the ratio of spending to investing at Wesleyan. We have reduced our spending draw from the endowment. Furthermore, where we typically spent 75% of the money we raised annually, our policy now is to save and invest most of these funds. Next year, for example, our goal for the annual fund, which provides for operating expenses, is only 29% of our total fundraising goal, down from about 40%. We are able to invest more because we have reduced our expenses and have a balanced budget. You can learn more about the history of Wesleyan’s endowment at this website.

We are rebalancing our spending and saving in other ways as well. We are taking advantage of improved markets to refinance our debt to stabilize annual interest payments. We have reduced the administrative staff by about 10 percent, and we are implementing numerous measures that will cut our base budget spending by about $25 million. In the coming years, we hope to triple the endowment for financial aid, adding the equivalent of 400 new scholarships, which will enable us to direct more of our annual operating funds toward enhancing education at Wesleyan.

We have hired 25 faculty members, and even as we secure our future financially, we are developing new curricular programs. Applications have soared by 30 percent in the last two years—students across the nation and around the world see Wesleyan as the exciting school all of us know it to be.

We will be discussing these developments with the Board of Trustees next week, and it will be my pleasure at that time to announce that two trustee families have pledged a total of $22 million, mostly to support financial aid endowment. We will celebrate their thoughtful generosity, which marks an important step in building a stronger economic foundation for the university.

With respect to performance and resources, we’ve been punching above our weight for a long time, and we’ll continue to do so. But with the help of the extended Wes family, we are also on track to create a sustainable economic context for the educational dynamism and practical idealism that have long characterized Wesleyan University.

Michael S. Roth
President

After the Thanksgiving break it will seem like a mad dash until the end of the semester. Suddenly those term papers loom large for students, while for faculty the grading that has piled up has to be completed before the final rush of exams and essays. It’s not the best time to think about long-term planning, but I thought I might provide an update on some of the activities over the last few months that have given feedback on Wesleyan 2020.

Throughout the semester I have been talking with alumni across the country to discuss our thinking about the next ten years at Wesleyan. Many of these meetings have led to interesting discussions that will have an important impact on how we develop our plan. The most substantial, sustained conversation about strategy took place at the Board retreat in October (see the previous post and the draft Strategy Map).

During Homecoming-Family Weekend I had the opportunity to meet with the Alumni Association Executive Committee, the Athletic Advisory Council and the Admissions Volunteer Council. All groups had read Wesleyan 2020 and had some good questions about subjects such as co-curricular learning and about selectivity (to take just two prominent examples). I also met with a group of parents and alumni to hear whether their concerns and ambitions were reflected in our strategies for the future. Our discussion emphasized the happy balance at Wesleyan between intellectual rigorousness and community engagement. We talked about the highly individualized nature of a student’s education at Wes, and how that made it even more important to give students a context of intellectual and personal support in which they can thrive.

At all our panels we spent a considerable amount of time discussing communications. There was widespread agreement that our student and faculty achievements should be more widely disseminated, and that expanding recognition of Wesleyan as an extraordinary institution would bring many benefits. We must seize the opportunities to get our message out, as many of our individual students and alumni have already done so successfully.

I will continue to meet with student leadership groups around the plan, and in January I will begin a series of discussions with faculty about the three overarching goals. Meanwhile, the Board has created Working Groups that will be developing metrics so that we can assess our performance in each of the three key areas. This should be a fruitful process that in the end will help Wesleyan realize its potential more consistently and in the most compelling ways.

I have been receiving much feedback on Wesleyan 2020, and I am grateful for it. Earlier this month the Wesleyan Board of Trustees met, and along with faculty, staff and student representatives, spent two days thinking about a strategy map for Wesleyan. It was an intense and engaging process, as we discussed values and attributes we thought essential to the university’s character, and then considered themes for future planning in light of these attributes.

We used a “Balanced Scorecard” method, which means that whatever we came up with had to fit on one page! This turned out to be a useful crystallization process, and we took some of our stories and themes and tried to boil them down into a few words. Although we are still refining the strategy map we came up with, Board Chair Joshua Boger and I thought we could share it now:

View a larger version (Updated, November 20, 2009.)

One of the first things we did at the retreat was to talk in small groups about the university’s “core purpose.” Our excellent facilitator, Bink Garrison, gave us some examples of how statements of purpose should reach beyond the specific operations of an organization, but still be tangibly connected to it. You’ll see that the statement that most participants liked best is: “To provide a transformative liberal arts education that inspires a lifelong commitment to learning, leadership, and service.” I look forward to discussing with alumni groups, and with the campus constituencies, what we mean by “transformative,” and how we can create this “lifelong commitment.”

In subsequent meetings, the Board will be developing measures for many of the strategies called out on the map. This will be a real challenge, but by doing so we will be better equipped to align our resources in support of what is most important for Wesleyan’s future.

Dear friends,

What follows are my preliminary thoughts on planning, prepared this summer. This draft is my response to the discussions we have already had about possible initiatives at Wesleyan as well as to some of the achievements of my predecessors.

Shortly after I began my presidency at Wesleyan in the summer of 2007, I focused on enhancing our financial aid support. In the fall of that year I proposed to the Board that we reduce required student loans by about 35% and eliminate loans for our most needy students. I also described to the Board in the first months that I did not think that Wesleyan should pursue the creation of a new University Museum, and that we would stop our planning in this regard. We continued to focus fundraising efforts for new facilities in the Life Sciences.

In the fall of 2007 I asked the faculty to make brief proposals as to what we might accomplish should we be able to raise additional resources to support the academic program. We received more than 50 proposals, and senior staff, faculty, and student representatives reviewed them. I decided to focus on five major areas:

1. University-wide curricular reform: improve first-year program; capstone experiences; increase research support for students and faculty; develop multi-disciplinary or extra-departmental courses for second- and first-year students.
2. Internationalization: increase numbers of international students and broaden the global reach of curriculum.
3. Civic engagement: integrate service learning and political education opportunities, as well as curricular and co-curricular offerings.
4. Creative campus: enhance creativity and deepen capacity for innovation throughout the curricular and co-curricular offerings.
5. College of the Environment: develop a flexible multi-disciplinary environmental studies program in a Wesleyan “college” context.

Together with 6. Enhanced financial aid and 7. Investing in the sciences, these have been the major areas for discussion in the last year or so, despite the challenging economic climate. In regard to investing in the sciences, a major change in our planning has been to shift our objective from the complex in the life sciences (budget of $160 million) to just one phase of the project that would still be a significant improvement in our facilities.

These seven areas of focus have been incorporated into what follows. I have tried to frame them within contexts that should allow various sectors of the Wesleyan community to discuss how we envision the evolution of the distinctive educational experience we offer.

I hope to gather feedback on the ideas proposed in this document, and to develop a framework for the future that will allow us to make significant decisions about the allocation of resources in the next several years. We will organize discussions by faculty, students and staff on campus, as well as sessions with alumni and parents around the country. We will post revisions and substitutions to this document online in an effort to gather our best thinking about how to support what is distinctive and admirable about Wesleyan. In early October the Board of Trustees (along with faculty, student and staff representation) will discuss a broad map of who we are and where we are going that should inform our ongoing discussions. I hope to bring a document reflecting all these conversations to the Board in late May.

Thank you in advance for helping to think about Wesleyan’s future over the next decade. Together, we can make our university an even better exemplar of the educational values and vision that have made us a leader in the liberal arts.

Sincerely,

Michael S. Roth
President

Read the draft…