What are the life-giving connections at Wabash College? What are the connections we must provide for and instill in young men for the 21st century?
These pages will show you how connections are established and unfold here at Wabash—stories about students working together, of faculty/student collaborations on research and scholarship, and about the ways staff and alumni mentoring connect our students’ education to the world. You will read about alumni connecting one another to opportunities during their working years and remaining friends long after, and about the remarkable generosity of alumni and friends that supports the work of the Wabash community.
As Wabash’s sixth President George Lewes Mackintosh said, “You are our exhibits; you are our epistles, known and read of all men.” Your lives are the way we get the word out about this remarkable place. One of the simple gifts of a Wabash liberal arts education is the ability to speak. I need to hear your stories; they are vital to our efforts to connect the world to this place.
But I believe there is another connection that is equally vital as we move forward in our mission to educate men to think critically, act responsibly, lead effectively, and live humanely. Our broader purpose amplifies the reach of our mission, the courage of the founders, and the “Wabash Always Fights” attitude that infuses this place.
The spirit of Wabash first drew me to the College when I was a candidate for president: Wabash doesn’t believe it is simply a liberal arts college for men, but the best liberal arts college and education—for men.
I believe it is time for Wabash to get serious about connecting that ambition with our mission: To make Wabash THE liberal arts college for men.
It is an exciting time at Wabash. We are in the process of approving a new master plan that will increase the size of the campus by almost one-third and will provide innovative housing choices.
We have also developed new strategic priorities that include four milestone goals:
1] Demonstrate and articulate the value of a Wabash liberal arts education;
2] Extend the academic and geographic footprint of the College;
3] Emphasize leadership development in each Wabash man; and
4] Enhance the culture of philanthropy.
In these goals you will find the heart of our vision to provide breadth and depth to our students’ experiences—opportunities that young men cannot find at other colleges.
Four initiatives from those goals are already making our case. They combine curricular and co-curricular offerings with immersive experiences, internships on and off campus, and collaborative research. Through them, students are making the connections between their coursework and how best to apply their knowledge, critical thinking, and communication skills to identify and solve problems. They are encountering real-world problems and creating real-world solutions.
Last fall we formalized the College’s Global Health Initiative, in which Professor of Biology Eric Wetzel and others are transforming the lives of our students through global public health education, investigation, and service within cross-cultural exchanges and immersion experiences as far away as Peru and as close as Montgomery County.
You first read about Dr. Wetzel’s program in the Fall 2009 issue of Wabash Magazine when he said, “How best should we lead the bright and full-of-potential young men who are our students into lives in which they learn to ‘act responsibly’ and ‘to live humanely’? I’m confident that having students wrestle with the big issues of global health is one of the ways we can do this. These issues require the input not only of biologists, but economists, political scientists, mathematicians, historians, ethicists, among others. Not only can this be a way for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to act and to live as individuals, but I believe that Wabash College as an institution can accomplish great things—in fact, merciful things.”
The Global Health Initiative also includes internships, a lecture series, an alumni mentorship program, and collaboration with student-driven public health-related projects on campus—all designed to help our students live out our mission while affecting positive change in underserved communities locally and around the world.
The Democracy and Public Discourse Initiative will empower students and the community to work through controversial issues using productive public discourse, an antidote to the polarization and incivility we see too often in public life today. Driven by the Rhetoric Department with participants from across the disciplines, this work is already bearing fruit, as you can read in this issue’s “Learning the Art of Community” on page 30: Those photographs are visual proof of how we can nurture civic leadership in our students through participation in the life of the Crawfordsville community.
The Business and Entrepreneurship Initiative will guide students to connect their liberal arts education to significant experiences in business, entrepreneurship, and public service. This initiative will leverage a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. that will provide access to more than 40 internships each year, the Liberal Arts Bridge to Business, and immersion experiences in marketing, finance, and healthcare professions. We will also create and nurture new partnerships with Crawfordsville and Mont-gomery County and enhance and extend co-curricular offerings available to students from all academic disciplines. The partnerships with the city will produce a physical space downtown where our students and faculty will co-mingle with local economic development professionals in an incubator that will, among other things, help create an economic buzz in the community.
The emergence of digital media is transforming the ways in which we communicate, and the College must consider how best to creatively leverage these exciting possibilities to serve our students and engage the world around us. That is the mission of our initiative in the Digital Arts and Human Values, which is driven by a generous grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The initiative’s goals are to strengthen students’ digital literacy and student and faculty/staff creative relationships through high-impact collaborative practices. We expect that this initiative will help attract students to the fine arts program, extend the College’s outreach through engagement with artists, and promote focused con-versations about vital human issues central to our mission.
These initiatives are just four of the ways we are combining the College’s mission and its ambition, connecting Wabash students to the world, and making strides toward becoming not a liberal arts college for men, but the liberal arts college for men. I look forward to walking with you into this promising future.
Contact President Hess: hessg@wabash.edu