What’s Next For WCSU?

Preliminary Results Of Community Conversations To Be Released March 5

DANBURY — Community groups, faculty, staff, students, alumni and others who assembled on campus and across Danbury for the past two months have expressed their thoughts and concerns about Western Connecticut State University as part of a “Values and Vision” project initiated by WestConn President Dr James W. Schmotter.

Open sessions allowed everyone to join in structured conversations that centered on questions such as “What is WestConn’s role in the community?” and “What changes in WestConn would you like to see in the next five to ten years?”

Other questions included “When you think of Western Connecticut State University, what comes to your mind first?” “What does WestConn do especially well?” “What about WestConn makes you proud (to go to school here, to work here, to send your son or daughter here, or to have the university in your community)?”

A summary of the answers to these questions and many more will be revealed at a Stakeholders Conference from 9 am to noon on Saturday, March 5, in Warner Hall, on the university’s midtown campus at 181 White Street.

The conference is free and the public is invited to attend.

The data will help shape the university’s future in areas such as academics, community, identity, resources and students.

 “The Values and Vision process is important not only to me as a new president, but to the entire WCSU community and our external stakeholders,” said President Schmotter. “To understand where we are now, and how we should proceed to achieve our great potential, we need to have dialogue about some basic questions: What values matter to us? How do our constituents perceive us? What are we known for? What do we do well? What do we do less than well? What can WCSU become?”

The individuals who comprised the discussion groups took their assignment quite seriously, said Dr Linda Vaden-Goad, dean of WCSU’s School of Arts and Sciences.

“These conversations are giving us a very practical set of ‘fix-its’ for our school, and they have further provided us with ideas for groups that need to be included in ongoing conversations for positive change,” said Dr Vaden-Goad.

Task Force members have been compiling the responses, coding them to identify primary themes, and conducting qualitative analysis of the data. The results will be summarized and presented at the Stakeholders Conference this weekend. It involves a lot of work, but Dr Marcy Delcourt said the group believes it’s an important mission on behalf of WestConn’s new president and the university. Dr Delcort, an education and educational psychology professor at the university, is serving as co-chairman with Dr Schmotter for the project.

“Our job is to make the thousands of units of data useful,” she said. “In order for this project to be successful, we have to code, organize, categorize and refine the data so that it is accessible and useful for President Schmotter’s purposes.” 

As a result of all the effort expended, WestConn will obtain information about its self-identity and how the university is perceived in the region. Additionally, Dr Schmotter believes that by identifying oft-mentioned opportunities and challenges, WestConn will find insight into its future direction.

 “We’ve come a long way since our beginnings as a small, local teachers’ college,” Dr Schmotter said. “What we learn from the Values and Vision conversations will help us determine where the next leg of our collective journey will take us.”