The planets are aligned." That's a phrase heard often on campus these days. Attributed to WPI President Edward A. Parrish, it is an apt way of summing up what may well be one of the most important periods in WPI's history, a brief window of time during which an extraordinary confluence of events and activities will provide the university an opportunity to seize the national spotlight and gain widespread recognition for its pioneering efforts in technological education.
The momentum began building during a frenzied month last spring, when five major events brought hundreds of visitors to campus. It has continued into the current year as WPI serves as one of only two institutions across the nation pilot-testing a set of new outcome-oriented criteria for engineering accreditation. And it will be enhanced by an ambitious strategic planning process recently set in motion that will enable the university to chart a new direction for the decades ahead and set the stage for a new capital campaign.
"We have a number of planets lined up right now," Parrish says. "We're turning out the right kind of graduate for today's world. We're way ahead in project-based education and in providing global opportunities. In fact, several major national studies have made recommendations for change in technological education that are already manifested in the educational program we pioneered 25 years ago. Through an ongoing strategic planning process, we have the opportunity to focus on the objectives that will enable us to take advantage of the significant opportunities we have before us and to raise the funds we need to achieve those objectives. Things just don't line up like this every year!"
Here is a review of the highlights of the 1995-96 academic year and a look ahead at what's on tap for the current academic year.
The Year Past
A Month To Remember
They called it "April Madness." In the short span of a month, WPI rededicated a building, observed the centennial of an academic department, welcomed the crew of a space mission, and (in two separate events) celebrated the silver anniversary of its pioneering undergraduate program.
It was a month to glory in WPI's storied past and to gaze into its future.
Nowhere was that more true than at the two events organized to focus attention on the 25th anniversary of the WPI Plan. The first, Project Presentation Day (April 18), gave the WPI community and the companies and organizations that sponsor WPI's student projects a chance to see the remarkable things students accomplish in their three required Plan projects. The more than 250 student presentations (mostly of Major Qualifying Projects) offered a never-before-seen panoramic view of what students can do if given the freedom and the opportunity to spread their intellectual wings.
The second Plan event, Commemoration Day (April 23), was an opportunity to look back and peer ahead. A luncheon brought together the men and women who drafted the Plan, implemented it and evaluated its progress to recall some of the most eventful and important days in WPI's history. In a panel discussion that afternoon, the authors of five invited papers presented their visions of the next 25 years at WPI; David Warsh, syndicated economics columnist for the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, was the keynote speaker. The day concluded with the annual faculty convocation and a gala reception for the WPI community. (For more on the Plan's 25th anniversary and a report on the invited papers, see the October 1996 WPI Journal.)
The centennial of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department was observed on April 19. The department welcomed its alumni and other guests to an open house, a panel discussion and a reception and dinner. The panel, made up of ECE faculty members and alumni, engaged in a spirited debate about where the next 100 years may take the field of electrical engineering. At the dinner, guests enjoyed a talk by William R. Grogan '46EE, dean emeritus of undergraduate studies, who described the early years of the department. (For more on the early history of electrical engineering at WPI, see "An Electric Century" in the Spring 1996 Journal.)
On April 29, the focus was the rededication of Higgins Laboratories. Completed in 1942 as the second home on campus for mechanical engineering (the first was Stratton Hall), the building was completely refurbished and expanded beginning in 1994. Ready for the start of the 1995 fall semester, the all-new Higgins Labs includes a 17,000-square-foot addition that houses classrooms and labs, as well as an elevator and the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for the entire building. Among the new facilities created in the $8.5 million renovation is the Design Studio, a suite of labs and a multimedia classroom that is the centerpiece of a new way of teaching engineering design. (For more on the renovations, see "A Mechanical Marvel" in the Spring 1996 Journal.)
April 10 would have been a remarkable day in Worcester if for nothing more than the storm that left behind 14 inches of snow. But the real excitement at WPI that day was caused by the arrival of eight true heroes. All but one member of the crew of STS-73, the 16-day scientific mission that flew on the space shuttle Columbia in October 1995, came to campus for a day of activities. Among them was Albert Sacco Jr., head of the WPI Chemical Engineering Department and WPI's first faculty astronaut. The day included "Countdown to Tomorrow," a celebration of the Columbia mission and a tribute to the astronauts who made it one of the most successful science missions in NASA's history. (For more on Al Sacco's ride into space, see "Coming Home" in the Winter 1996 Journal.)
Another Silver Anniversary
Just over a quarter century ago, while the university was in the midst of creating the WPI Plan, the Computer Science Department was making its debut. In 1969, long before the age of the personal computer, WPI launched a graduate program in computer science; the undergraduate program began a year later. Since then, the department has built a reputation for excellence in education and research. In 1986 it became one of the first departments in the nation to be accredited by the Computer Science Accreditation Board. In September 1995, the department hosted a 25th anniversary celebration in Fuller Laboratories, its home since 1990, for many of its 2,000 alumni. New Provost Looks To Build on Solid Foundation
John F. Carney II, formerly professor of civil engineering and associate dean for research and graduate affairs at Vanderbilt University, was named WPI's new provost and vice president for academic affairs this spring. Carney succeeded Diran Apelian, Howmet Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who became head of the newly formed Metal Processing Institute, a WPI research group comprising industrial consortia in the areas of aluminum casting, powder metallurgy and semisolid metals processing. William W. Durgin was appointed associate provost for academic affairs, giving him primary responsibility for WPI's academic and research programs. A member of the faculty since 1971, Durgin was most recently dean of graduate studies and research.
Carney sees his role as WPI's chief academic officer as that of building on a solid foundation, one that includes an excellent faculty, outstanding academic and research facilities, a unique project-based undergraduate program, and a global perspective program widely regarded as the leader in global technological higher education. "WPI is a wonderful technological university that doesn't get the national and international recognition it deserves," he says.
Carney's goals for the undergraduate program include trying to expand the benefits of project-based education into the first year, a time when most students spend a great deal of their time taking conventional math, science and engineering courses. He says he would also like to see WPI continue to evolve into a broad-based technological university with programs - such as the existing pre-health and pre-law programs - that will appeal to students who may not be interested in becoming engineers, but who want to be technically literate when they graduate. Such programs may also help WPI increase its enrollment of women.
Carney says he would like to expand the full-time graduate program above its current enrollment of about 400 students, with most of the increase in the master's program. "Industry is interested in hiring students with master's degrees," he says. As an active scholar with more than 140 publications in the field of structural mechanics, including the design of impact attenuation devices for transportation safety applications, he says he would like to see a comparable growth in external support for research and scholarship. "We have a unique project-based undergraduate program with a truly global perspective," he says. "However, a balanced graduate program can make an undergraduate program better. People with vibrant research programs are also, by and large, wonderful teachers because they are staying current in their field. And the university is a much richer place for undergraduates if they have the opportunity to work with graduate students on cutting-edge research."
Having served in academia for more than 30 years, including 15 as a faculty member at the University of Connecticut and two as head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Auburn University in Alabama, Carney says he sees himself as a faculty member first and an administrator second. "This is the first year that I will not be teaching in the classroom," he says. "I know what faculty members go through. I know what it takes to be a good teacher, to do research, to write proposals, to serve on committees.
I think it is important for us to build a system of trust where the faculty and the administration can work together. I think we can make a lot of progress, and I look forward to the challenge."
From the Ground Up
WPI was not just a busy place this year, it was a noisy one, too, at times. Several major construction projects transformed a WPI residence hall, a street and several laboratories. The largest project was the renovation of Sanford Riley Hall, the university's first on-campus residence facility. Completed over the summer, the $3.3 million project restored the building to its original glory and added a host of modern amenities, including new furniture in every room, new energy efficient windows, and an elevator. It was also the first step in a five-year plan to renovate the majority of the university's residence halls. The Ellsworth-Fuller complex is slated to be overhauled next summer.
The physical and psychological gap between the east and west sides of the WPI campus was closed this summer with the conversion of a large section of West Street into a tree-lined pedestrian mall. The centerpiece of the mall is Reunion Plaza; its fountain and stone benches are intended to create a quiet, contemplative space in the center of the now united campus. Also adding measurably to the quality of campus life was the renovation of the Grille, a popular campus dining spot in the Wedge between Daniels and Morgan halls, and the transformation of the campus bookstore under a new owner. Tatnuck Bookseller operates the largest independent bookstore in Massachusetts (on Chandler Street in Worcester) and has provided the WPI community with an online link to its retail outlet.
WPI's academic and research facilities also received a major boost during the year. A new biochemistry laboratory constructed in Goddard Hall will serve the research, student project and teaching needs of this growing academic discipline within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Work continued throughout the year on six major laboratories and supporting spaces in Salisbury Laboratories to be used for research and project work in biology and biotechnology. The $2 million project, funded jointly by WPI and the National
Science Foundation, will result in state-of-the-art laboratories for work in such areas as molecular genetics, invertebrate zoology and bioremediation. A new pyramidal greenhouse atop the building will support work in plant physiology and biotechnology.
A New Satellite Launched
The letters WWW are readily recognized as the initials of the World Wide Web. At WPI, they've also come to stand for the university's campuses - Worcester, Westboro and Waltham. With the opening this fall of its second satellite, WPI now offers graduate courses and continuing education programs at three sites in Massachusetts.
The Waltham campus occupies space in an office building just off Route 128 near a large concentration of high-technology companies. A wide range of graduate and continuing education programs are being offered at the site, including graduate courses and certificate programs in management and computer science, specializing in computer and communications networks, software engineering and interface design, technology marketing and the management of technology. (All can be applied to a WPI graduate degree.) Also offered are professional development seminars and certificate programs in UNIX/C and C++ programming and client-server technology.
The Westboro campus, which opened in 1988, serves a high concentration of technical and management professionals in the Route 495 and Central Massachusetts areas. "Our experience in Westboro," says President Parrish, "confirmed our belief in the demand for WPI's programs in [the Waltham] region."
More Highlights of the Year Past
WPI and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez (UPRM), home to the largest engineering school in Latin America, signed a memorandum of understanding to create a new center for student project work and academic collaboration. The center will be funded by the two universities, Xerox Corp. and the National Science Foundation. The agreement marked the culmination of two years of work by Mohammad Noori, head of WPI's Mechanical Engineering Department, Hamid Davoodi '88, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UPRM, and Mohammad Saffar '89 (Ph.D.), assistant professor of civil engineering at UPRM. It will be an avenue for student and faculty exchanges and joint research projects and graduate programs. Puerto Rico is also home to a WPI student project center.
Agreements were signed for joint programs with two law schools: Suffolk University Law School in Boston and Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H. This endeavor gives students interested in using their engineering or science education as a stepping stone to careers in law (particularly the law of intellectual property) the opportunity to seek early admission to either law school.
WPI was accepted for membership in the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities, furthering its goal of providing graduate training in engineering and science to a larger number of students of color. The consortium provides WPI with greater recognition within the communities of color, helps make its graduate programs financially accessible to more underrepresented minorities, and opens the door to networking with other institutions across the United States.
Norman R. Augustine, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., was the speaker at WPI's 128th Commencement. Augustine was awarded an honorary doctorate, as was Duane D. Pearsall, inventor of the first low-cost battery-powered smoke detector; Howard G. Freeman '40, inventor and founder of Jamesbury Corporation (now Neles-Jamesbury); and Albert Sacco Jr., head of WPI's Chemical Engineering Department and the university's first faculty astronaut.
The Admissions Office had a banner year, with the enrollment of the fifth largest class in WPI history. The Class of 2000 has 689 students, including 152 women and 41 students of color, new records in both of these categories. Planning for the proposed campus center continued during the year. Having developed a program for a combined campus center and recreational facility last year, the Campus Center Committee worked with Stannmar Inc., a design-build firm specializing in athletic facilities, to conduct a study that determined that it is feasible to locate the facility in an expanded and fully renovated Alumni Gymnasium.
WPI was one of eight members of the Colleges of Worcester Consortium to share a $44,880 grant from the Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) to be used to develop comprehensive programs for the prevention of drug use and alcohol abuse and the violence associated with them.
The offices of Multicultural Affairs and Minority Student Affairs were combined into the Office of Minority Affairs and Outreach Programs, which will focus on the recruitment and retention of minority students and coordinating diversity initiatives, among other responsibilities.
The Year Ahead
Accreditation Going
According to PlanThis fall, a team of visitors from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, which accredits engineering programs at the nation's colleges and universities, was on campus to evaluate WPI's programs in civil, chemical, electrical, industrial, manufacturing and mechanical engineering. It is a visit ABET has made periodically for many decades.
This year's visit was a little different, however. After a quarter century that has seen ABET and WPI struggle to measure the university's project-based undergraduate program against the board's traditional accreditation criteria, ABET adopted a sweeping new set of standards that, much like the WPI Plan, emphasize outcomes (what students learn and what skills and qualities they gain) instead of process (what courses and labs they take).
Called Engineering Criteria 2000, the new standards were developed by ABET's Engineering Accreditation Commission (then chaired by WPI President Edward Parrish) with extensive input from various engineering societies and from the businesses and industries that employ technological professionals. The centerpiece of the new criteria, Criterion 3 (see box, next page), is a succinct list of the qualities graduates should take away from their undergraduate education. With a few changes of wording, this set of criteria could easily be a description of the goals of the WPI Plan, notes President Parrish. "The new ABET criteria, along with a number of national studies of the future of engineering education, have indirectly confirmed that the WPI Plan is what this country needs in the way of an educational system."
The new criteria underwent a one-year comment period that led to approval by the full ABET board in November. The criteria will apply to all engineering programs in the nation in the year 2001, following a five-year implementation.
A critical step in implementing the new criteria is a two-year pilot test program, a process in which WPI is playing a critical and highly visible role. In the first year of the test, engineering programs at one private and one state-supported institution (WPI and the University of Arkansas) are being evaluated under the new standards. The University of Arkansas was chosen because it has just begun to develop an outcome-oriented approach to technological education. WPI was selected because, with more than 25 years of experience with the Plan, it has a better feel for outcome-oriented education than perhaps any institution in the nation and has much to teach ABET and its member institutions, notes William W. Durgin, associate provost for academic affairs.
"We volunteered to be accredited under the new criteria and we recognize that we have an important role to play in this process," Durgin says. "ABET has had no experience conducting this outcome-based accreditation. They are looking to WPI for help in developing the accreditation procedure. The results of this experience will become a case study that will be used to train ABET evaluators. This study will also be distributed to every engineering department in the nation to provide guidance for other schools as they come up for accreditation under the new rules. It should also serve as an excellent vehicle for creating national recognition for what WPI has accomplished over the last 25 years."
The ABET accreditation team working with WPI this year is drawn from the Engineering Accreditation Commission itself, whose members normally serve as visiting team chairs. "The idea is to train the team leaders so they, in turn, can train the more that 3,000 men and women who serve on ABET visiting teams each year," Durgin says.
This year's accreditation process is also a learning experience for WPI, he says. "While we've had a great deal of experience delivering an outcome-oriented educational program, we are still gaining experience in measuring those outcomes. This year, to help ABET understand what students accomplish under the Plan, we've selected at least six students in each department and asked them to compile a detailed portfolio illustrating the work they've done in their classes, labs and projects during their studies at WPI. The contents of their portfolios, standing alone, should demonstrate the expected outomes. We'll also be able to present the results of the peer reviews we now do for all three of the required Plan projects.
"To prepare for future accreditation visits, we are now asking all students to compile portfolios of their work at WPI, which will also benefit their career development. We hope to follow these students for the early part of their careers to measure the impact the Plan has on their professional and personal lives. We plan to create a formal system for determining what employers think of our graduates. All of these measures will help us evaluate the success of our undergraduate program and to continually improve it." Fast Track to a Strategic Plan
"Of those to whom much is given, much is required," John F. Kennedy once said. According to President Parrish, the national educational community has given WPI an invaluable gift - the growing conviction that something very much like the WPI Plan is the right approach for the future of technological higher education. That conviction provides the university with a precious opportunity to step into the national spotlight and gain well-deserved recognition as an educational pacesetter. But there is some important work to be done first, Parrish says.
"WPI has a big opportunity right now. A number of national studies of what needs to be done in technological higher education - by the likes of the National Research Council, the American Society for Engineering Education and the National Science Foundation - have pointed in directions that WPI took some 25 years ago. That's good news for us, but we can't simply sit on our record. We have to keep evaluating and improving what we're doing. That requires strategic planning."
This year WPI began work on a new strategic plan. WPI's current plan was completed in 1990, and Parrish says much has changed since its six major goals were formulated. Perhaps most important, WPI continues to face financial constraints, caused principally by a combination of the high cost of operating a technological education program and the escalating cost of providing financial aid to students. These costs combine to continually shrink the pool of operating revenue WPI derives from tuition. "We need to stop doing things as we have for the last 25 years or so," Parrish says, "and come up with some new ways of doing business."
The process of drafting a new strategic plan began over the summer as Parrish and his cabinet (a group of senior administrators), soon joined by the secretary of the faculty and the chair of the faculty Committee on Governance, developed a process for creating the plan and drafted a vision statement for the university. At a retreat this fall, the Board of Trustees also discussed the state of the institution and possible directions for its future. And in October, 60 members of the faculty and administration met in a weekend retreat to discuss ways of bolstering two key elements of the undergraduate program, the Interactive Qualifying Project and the Global Perspective Program, widely considered the elements that give WPI a distinct edge in undergraduate technological education.
"We've had people coming at these issues from many different directions and with different ideas," Parrish says. "What's become clear to me from all of these discussions is that everyone - the faculty, the administration, the students and the trustees - seems to have a shared vision of WPI. There is a consensus about our strengths, our traditions, and our opportunities for the future. That's really important, because it gives us a head start - we don't have to start from scratch. I've proposed an ambitious timeline for creating a new strategic plan. But as I've watched this common vision emerge, I've thought to myself, 'By God, we can do this!'"
The responsibility for guiding the creation of the plan has been turned over to the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, made up of the provost, two academic department heads, six other faculty members, three other members of the administration, one undergraduate student and one graduate student. Stephen J. Weininger, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is the chair. Parrish says the committee will involve many members of the WPI community on study committees that will investigate a wide variety of issues as the planning process moves toward completion in March 1997.
"Before the end of the academic year, we need to settle on our goals and objectives for the next decade," Parrish says. "These will become the basis for the goals of the new capital campaign (see page 18). We can't take too long to complete this process.
If we wait two years to complete our strategic plan, this window of opportunity - this planetary alignment - may pass us by. The time to act is now."
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