Thanks for visiting the President's Web site of Western Connecticut State University.
For more than 100 years, WestConn has been changing people's lives, and I'm excited to be a part of this tradition.
If you would like to learn more about our great university, me, or what I do as president, just click on any of the links.
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James W. Schmotter, President
President's Focus
Hire more full-time professors. Assure that our strategic plan guides the everyday workings of the university. Aspire to our vision: to be an affordable public university with the characteristics of New England’s best small private universities.
Those were some of the points I emphasized at WestConn’s opening faculty meeting, held at the Ives Concert Park on our Westside Campus, to kick off the Fall 2007 semester.
Our Strategic Plan is guiding the development of new academic programs and the reallocation of resources necessary to their success. It is also helping us to address the demands of our increasing enrollment, which has grown faster than that of any of our sister Connecticut State University institutions.
One of the most notable early results of our commitment is the addition of full-time faculty. We recruited five additional professors who began teaching this fall and we will do the same for 2008-2009. At the same time, the state has made a special allocation in this year’s budget to hire five additional new full-time faculty in critical job shortage areas. Thus by a year from now, we will have added 15 full-time tenure-track colleagues and we will continue that augmentation by five hiring more the next year. This means that we will have added, by fall 2009, 20 new faculty members in three years, nearly a 20 percent increase in our tenure-track staff.
Our strategy and vision, as well as assumptions about enrollment growth and academic program priorities, also set the context for our recently completed Facilities Master Plan, which charts the continuing physical development of our two campuses over the next 10 years. Highlights of this plan include placement of the long-awaited new home for our School of Visual and Performing Arts on the Westside campus and the development of a central quadrangle to achieve a stronger sense of academic community at Westside.
On the Midtown campus, the future includes expansion of Berkshire Hall to provide additional health and recreation space as well as renovations to White Hall and Higgins Hall. The Roberts Avenue School, which WCSU will take over in 2009, will be demolished to create additional green space and make the entire central campus a pedestrian zone. To meet our growing need for student housing, new residence halls are slated for both campuses. The needed renovation of our baseball facility is also planned.
The Master Plan is ambitious and will require substantial state support in bonding. Its full completion may well take longer than a decade. However, its unanimous acceptance by the Connecticut State University System Board of Trustees last March sets in motion the next stage of our university’s development. As we proceed, we build upon the decades of progress and growth that began in Old Main and Fairfield Hall in the early 20th century.
I also announced at our opening meeting that we will continue a popular program I started when I joined WestConn three years ago, the President’s Initiatives Fund. Through the fund, we encouraged faculty and staff to submit projects that would enhance the student experience. Nine proposals were chosen and have been accomplished, and we are ready to begin with a new round. In December we will choose new projects that follow the theme of “learning opportunities that differences create.” These differences can involve the human, the intellectual or the geographical perspective, and I know that the creativity of our community will produce transformational ideas, as the first round of grants did.
I am very much looking forward to the promise of the years ahead. Please join all of us as we move forward.
James W. Schmotter
