Dear alumni & friends,
I wanted to follow up personally on my email from earlier this fall to provide you with additional details on my plans for the upcoming academic year in the College of Letters & Science.
I set four priorities for the college when I became Dean in summer 2020: creating a world-class undergraduate experience; expanding our research excellence; advancing our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and creating state-of-the-art teaching and learning environments. Despite the challenges of recent years, we’ve made remarkable progress in each area, and I want to thank our dedicated faculty, staff, students, and, of course, our alumni and friends for their support in making these ambitions a reality.
With nearly 23,000 undergraduate students, L&S is a big place. Students, especially those from underrepresented and first-generation backgrounds, can easily feel lost as they navigate such a large institution. That’s why I invested in the L&S STEM Scholars program to connect students to research opportunities, mentors, internships and job options. We have a dedicated academic dean, José J. Madera, who serves as our “STEM Dean on call” to discuss academic support, research opportunities, and career paths with our students. We’ve also expanded access to our Center for Academic Excellence and our Summer Collegiate Experience to ensure our students can thrive, thanks to the tremendous work of our new Assistant Dean and CAE Director, Karen Stroud Felton, and the exceptional team in Student Academic Affairs. And our new Instructional Design Collaborative is providing expertise to create powerful learning environments for all our students.
Letters & Science stands second only to the medical school in research awards and expenditures, and our faculty and staff are world leaders launching new startups and winning patents for breakthrough discoveries. Since 2017, we’ve increased our federal research award revenue by nearly 50% and our non-federal award revenue by an astounding 74%. We are continuously expanding our research prowess so that our faculty and students can pursue the curiosity-driven research that makes L&S an innovation leader and UW-Madison #8 in national research rankings for public and private universities. But we can do more, which is why I’ve empowered our research staff to explore new partnerships with public and private institutions to expand what’s possible.
Our primary responsibility as educators is to provide our students with the skills and experiences they need to succeed in today’s world. That means providing training in effective communication, teaching them to think logically and flexibly, showing them how to critically assess immense amounts of data and information, and helping them identify problems and solutions at local, national, and global scales. I launched the Liberal Arts 2030 initiative this year to rethink how the L&S curriculum can achieve these goals. We’ve drawn together expert faculty and staff from throughout the college to consider how a liberal arts education—from data science and economics to literature and languages—can best prepare L&S students to tackle the world’s most pressing issues.
Finally, we’re creating modern teaching and learning environments that will attract top faculty and provide our students with the classrooms and labs they need to be successful. We opened our new Chemistry Tower in January 2022, and this academic year we’re breaking ground on new homes for our School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) and for our humanities departments in Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall. At CDIS, our new major in data science is campus’s fastest-growing major for undergraduate students, and we just launched three new degree programs to address growing demand for these skills. And in Levy Hall, we’ll accommodate the classrooms and offices currently housed in the outdated Humanities Building, as well as new space benefiting additional departments and programs as collaborative partners.
Thank you for supporting our mission and our vision for making Letters & Science a more welcoming, more supportive, and more vibrant place to learn and discover.
On, Wisconsin!
Eric M. Wilcots, Dean
Mary C. Jacoby Professor of Astronomy
College of Letters & Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison