In his first year as the University’s sixteenth president, Michael Roth invigorated the Wesleyan community with a series of new initiatives, while simultaneously becoming reacquainted with his alma mater that he left 30 years ago.
“I think the most important thing I had to do this year was to get to know the Wesleyan community, and so I spent a lot of time listening to students, faculty, staff, alumni and parents, about their perception of Wesleyan today and their hopes for Wesleyan in the future,” he said. “I’ve probably had hundreds of meetings…all over the country to learn about where Wesleyan is now and what its greatest challenges are and where the opportunities lie.”
One of Roth’s chief achievements was reviewing faculty input to create a series of five themes that will be implemented in the fall: strengthening the undergraduate experience, internationalization, the “creative campus,” College of the Environment and civic engagement.
For the last few weeks, faculty and staff have been meeting on five committees addressing each of the topics.
“They’ve all been working on identifying proposals and establishing a framework for budget planning, so by commencement I think we’ll have reports from each of these groups,” Roth explained. “University strategic planning can often take years. We tried to do it in a more focused, quicker way, and I’m delighted it’s gone as well as it has.”
Roth said that he also hopes to enhance the co-curricular components of student life. Vice President of Student Affairs Mike Whaley and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Joe Bruno have been discussing ways to connect academics with activities outside of the classroom.
“It has been stimulating to work with [Roth] because he has a range of ideas, but is very willing to listen to the ideas of others,” Bruno said. “He also applies a healthy skepticism to conversations of this type, because he wants to understand proposals fully and to know that the speaker has thought carefully about his or her ideas.”
In perhaps what is his most significant initiative, Roth announced in November that beginning with the class of 2012, first-year students whose total family income is less than $40,000 per year will receive grants as opposed to loans. All other students on financial aid will graduate with a four-year total loan indebtedness reduced by an average of 35 percent. This will cost the university $3.2 million each year.
According to Roth, more students are matriculating who need financial aid.
“In a sense, that’s good because they see Wesleyan as giving robust financial aid and that’s what we were hoping for,” he said. “Fundraising for it is coming along nicely, but there’s a lot more to do. For a school with our size endowment, in order to do that kind of financial aid, we really need to continue to grow our endowment so we can continue giving to students in the future.”
Director of Financial Aid Jennifer Lawton said that Roth’s new loan initiative has received strong support from alums, the Board of Trustees and donors.
“The hope is to reduce packaged loan debt even more in the future and with the interest shown by donors, I think this will become a reality,” she said.
Roth has also focused his energies on fundraising, especially for the endowment.
“With turmoil in financial markets it’s been a difficult year for a lot of people,” he said. “I think the plan from the Board [of Trustee]’s perspective was that in the first year of a president’s tenure you don’t want to have to depend on the president to raise a lot of money from big donors. After all, he or she doesn’t know them yet, but in this case we had to raise money because we needed it for both financial aid and for the facilities projects.”
He said that so far the University has received several million-dollar gifts from first-time donors, although the total amount made through fundraising cannot be reported until the end of the fiscal year.
A bulk of the fundraising money will also go to the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, to be housed in the former Davision Campus Center building and slated to open in the fall of 2009, and the new Molecular Life and Sciences complex, which is tentatively projected for completion in 2015.
As part of watching the University’s cash flow, Roth also asked each of his administrative officials to cut his or her department’s budget.
“I think when you spend money it should be very clearly connected to education and the further away it gets from education, teaching and scholarship, the harder it is to justify the expenditure,” Roth said. “I asked each cabinet member to reduce the budget in their area. We didn’t make all of the cuts. We want to make the ones that don’t have an impact on education.”
Wesleyan Student Assembly President Matt Ball ’08 thinks Roth has also made an impact by increasing the visibility of the president on campus.
“Students have a personal relationship with him and feel like they can relate to him in a way that’s quite rare on college campuses,” Ball said. “There are obviously other more concrete things, but to me his most notable achievement is his responsiveness.”
Roth noted that although he travels during the weekends, he typically spends a lot of time on campus.
“Going to lots of stuff on campus has been exciting,” he said. “I’m just trying to be more open through office hours and the blog, answering e-mails and meeting people outside of office hours. I want to give Wesleyan students the feeling that they can talk to the president about issues that matter to them.”
Roth could also be seen in the classroom this year as the professor of a Film Studies’ course “The Past on Film.”
“Teaching has been a delight,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed it tremendously.”
Next year, Roth will continue to keep his office door open, garnering more input from members of the University community. He also hopes to become a better communicator.
“Sometimes I speak informally,” he said. “I suppose I should be more prudent.”
Vice President and Secretary of the University Peter Patton expressed that it is important to remember that it is Roth’s first year in the position.
“He’s going to be a great Wesleyan president…I think he’s accessible and willing to engage in conversation with everybody about everything,” Patton said. “He is passionate about Wesleyan and its mission and he’s just getting started. It takes a while to get under way here. His major accomplishments will be in upcoming years.“
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