| Photo by: Bob Rashid |
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When alumni return to campus, as they did in large numbers just a few weeks ago for Homecoming/Reunion Weekend, they often expect to find the College as they remember it. In most cases, however, they soon realize that their alma mater is quite different—a situation that is not all that surprising when you consider that Beloit is a community in which a quarter of the students change every year, where new and returning teachers continually bring fresh perspectives, and where projects, such as the new Center for the Sciences, alter the physical landscape of the campus. New students and faculty, teaching styles, technologies, facilities, grants, resources, and emerging academic frontiers all contribute to the dynamic nature of Beloit College.
Over the past two years, some of the most significant changes at Beloit have occurred within our academic programs. We began reorganizing faculty workloads last year into a 5+1 program, which involves reducing annual teaching loads to five courses plus one additional unit for personal scholarship and student mentoring. Beyond workload adjustments, we have increased the number of faculty by five tenure-track positions, one each in sociology, molecular biology, Japanese language and literature, cognitive science, and international politics. Next fall, when the new science building opens, we will implement a new class schedule, which is designed to improve course availability and use classroom space more efficiently.
We have also enhanced our academic strength through a new teaching fellows program. These outstanding fellows are recently or soon-to-be-awarded Ph.D. degree recipients, seeking their first full-time teaching assignments. Beloit hires them on one-year appointments, with the option for a second year. The fellows are mentored by Beloit College faculty, an arrangement that is critical if they are to realize their potential. Mentoring of this kind is uncommon in graduate schools, a reality that leaves many new faculty members unprepared to teach in their first job.
| Photo by: John Elbers |
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This fall, the first two teaching fellows arrived at Beloit. Mona Jackson (shown at right) is completing her doctoral dissertation at Michigan State University. She specializes in African history and has won numerous distinctions and awards already, including a Fulbright grant for study abroad. Saifuddin Rayyan, from Amman, Jordan, is teaching physics after earning a Ph.D. degree at Virginia Tech, where he received graduate teaching honors in the physics department.
The teaching fellows program at Beloit offers significant benefits to all involved. It is allowing Beloit College to enhance course offerings in history and physics, increase faculty diversity, and maintain an 11:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Beloit also benefits from contemporary perspectives that the fellows share from their recent graduate studies. Likewise, the teaching fellows profit from a period of intense preparation and support from experienced and dedicated teachers and scholars at Beloit. After a year or two of this mentoring process, the College will have directed two new qualified teachers into the academy, enhancing the quality of liberal arts education as a whole and signaling the high teaching standards of Beloit College to other institutions—just one example of Beloit’s role as a leader in engaged learning and in liberal arts education in the United States.
These academic improvements added to our sense of excitement about Beloit this fall, as did the arrival of a talented cohort of new students and 27 new members of the teaching community, along with improvements to the campus landscape. Many of these changes are really an outward sign that Beloit continues its long tradition of offering rigorous academic programs and placing its greatest emphasis where it always has been: on the quality of teaching and academic excellence.
President John E. Burris
