Learning from Students

In the College of Arts and Sciences, we are unceasingly focused on the student experience and in searching for ways to offer the very best educational opportunities for our 22,000 majors and for the tens of thousands more who enroll in our courses. Nothing is more important to me and to our faculty, who are some of the world’s best educators. Yet a great challenge for any dean who leads a college as large and complex as Arts and Sciences is finding ways to stay in touch with students, to understand what they are truly experiencing in the classroom and on campus, and to learn from them about where we are doing well and how we might improve.

Over the past two years, I have had the good fortune to meet on a bi-weekly basis with a group of undergraduate and graduate students who together form the Arts and Sciences Advisory Council for Students (ASACS). I look forward to these meetings because I consider these generous students as being among my greatest campus resources. I have learned from them about the challenges they face as they navigate our large, complex, and intellectually demanding university, just as they have also shared with me their joy in returning to campus after the pandemic, their excitement about the research opportunities in which they are immersed, and their enthusiasm for the communities with which they have engaged, both on and off campus. They are unsparingly tough critics and they are wise counselors. They have demonstrated a quick wit and an equally swift and keen sense of justice. 
 

Among the topics the students have shared with me are their concerns about student mental health, their ideas about new modalities for learning in the post-Covid era and the ways technology is shaping their educational experiences, and about how we can better help students understand the value of a liberal arts education at this juncture of the 21st century. They have proven to be outstanding consultants and sympathetic listeners. They have demonstrated an impressive ability to quickly absorb complex information about the College and to engage as advisors in ways that I find both meaningful and deeply valuable. As a representative sample of our UW students, they make me proud, and they give me tremendous hope. 

One of these outstanding students, Hayden Goldberg, is featured in the June 2023 issue of the College's Perspectives newsletter. Hayden served as chair of ASACS for two years and graduated this June with degrees in political science and economics. As I’ve told Hayden, I feel certain he will one day find himself in a significant leadership position — president of the United States doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to me after spending two years in meetings with him — and I very much hope he will, because we need people like Hayden and other brilliant students from the College of Arts and Sciences to guide us into and through the challenging times ahead. They are our hope, they are our future. 

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