June 3, 2003

European Enrollments Up

News from Shaw AFB

Did You Know?

Webster Voices

Featured Faculty

Kampus Kudos

St. Louis Calendar Highlight

Employees of the Month

Service Anniversaries

New Employees

European Enrollments Up

THREE CAMPUSES EXPAND INTO NEW SPACE

High enrollments at the European campuses have prompted the University to take steps to accommodate the growing number of students. The Leiden campus has already physically expanded to relieve the pressure; Vienna will soon get new classrooms by leasing additional space in its existing building; and Geneva is drawing up plans for two new buildings that could be ready for occupancy by August 2005.

According to Bob Spencer, director general, European campuses, European enrollments have risen about 32 percent over the past four years. During the 1999–00 school year enrollments stood at 10,000. Today they are up to 13, 325, exceeding the University’s original projections for the year. Bob says several factors account for the "very solid growth." At the top of his list is "the hard work and coverage" of Webster’s marketing and recruitment staff. But he notes that Webster’s longevity on the continent also counts for a lot. "When you are an upstart institution, people wonder who you are, why you are there and what you are trying to accomplish. When you’ve been around over 20 years, people take you seriously. In each city we’ve become very much a part of the local scene. We’re known. People talk about us and they generally talk about us pretty favorably."

Bob points to the Leiden campus, which repeatedly ranks as one of the top 10 M.B.A. programs in the Netherlands and was recently ranked "Best Value." Geneva’s annual humanitarian conference and Vienna’s Austrian accreditation also help validate Webster in the public mind. Former London director Grant Chapman has left the campus "in great shape, with very good relations with our partners."

Although Bob hesitates to equate European growth with the after effects of September 11, he is willing to say that students’ reluctance to study in the United States may play a small part in the growth spurt. The University has seen a rise in the number of applications from Middle Eastern students, and Bob says, "We’ve had people say they want an American education, but they don’t want to go to the United States." Rather than tie the University’s recent accomplishments to developments on the world stage, Bob prefers to cite the University’s overall excellence for the rise in numbers. "I think we are in a 'success breeds success' situation now."

To meet the needs of students, Webster-Europe continues to hire new faculty members and add academic programs, but "physical expansion is certainly on the front burner," says Bob.

The Leiden campus has rented space directly across the street from its original, "nonexpandable" building. The new space was formerly "a commercial space and now the library and computer labs are over there. It’s really convenient because it’s a narrow European street, so you practically walk out one door and walk into the next without getting wet on a rainy day." In addition, Leiden has opened an office in downtown Amsterdam with a classroom, conference room and office.

In Vienna, the University will "snap up" an additional two wings that have become available in the building it leases. In all, the University will occupy three and a half floors in the building. Vienna has grown about 40 percent in the past two years, and this opportunity comes "just at the right time," says Bob. The new space will be used for classrooms, a computer lab, a media center, and offices.

Geneva is developing plans to add two buildings to the campus, which will house about 50 students and provide new classrooms, offices, and meeting spaces. Bob says, "There’s a terrific housing shortage in Geneva generally, and the low end of the housing market is worse than the high end. Our growth here is limited just by the fact that there’s not enough space to put new students. Trying to increase the undergraduate population by another 20 percent, which would be desirable, is very hard without having control over some available housing."

The canton of Geneva approved two new classroom buildings for Webster in a master plan dating back to 1989, but, because the University needs housing, it is once again seeking official approval for an amended plan. Because the new buildings will also include a multipurpose room, similar to St. Louis’s Sunnen Lounge, as well as three classrooms, three offices, and student activities spaces, Bob expects that the canton will support the change. Following the precedent set in St. Louis with the Webster Village apartments, Bob plans to find an investor and a developer to put up the buildings.

Europe is currently drafting a five-year plan as it looks ahead to the future. "We’re happy, confident, and proud of what we have accomplished over the last three or four years," says Bob. "We don’t want to rest on our laurels, so we are developing a new five-year plan." The four European campuses already host students from 112 nations. "To the degree that Webster worldwide wants to be more international, we’ve sure got that happening in Europe," says Bob. The European plan, he says, will likely call for an enhanced American presence in the years ahead. The document is still in the "blue-sky" phase, but Bob says that the European directors and academic directors are a great team with exciting ideas. "We are typically Webster people who know what uniform we are wearing, but we also know that we are encouraged to think creatively in developing our part of the University. … It is exciting here, and it’s fun to be on a ship that’s moving forward on a good course."

News from Shaw AFB

FROM CLAIRE SHAWHAN, DIRECTOR, SHAW AFB

The Shaw Air Force Base campus near Sumter, S.C., opened its doors in Spring II of 2003 and made history for Webster University by starting the first cohort program for a military campus and the first cohort program in South Carolina. Thirteen students from Becton Dickinson, including the plant manager, enrolled in courses for the M.B.A program at the plant site. Becton Dickinson, or BD, is a medical technology company that manufactures and sells a broad range of medical supplies, devices, laboratory equipment, and diagnostic products. The company started in 1970 with 25 people manufacturing a glass syringe barrel. Today, BD is a very successful and innovative company, producing a wide variety of blood collection tubes. The facility employs more than 750 people and occupies more than 500,000 square feet. The Shaw Air Force Base campus is pleased to provide graduate education for those employees who want an advanced degree.

Did You Know?

Business-School Accrediting Group Adopts New Standards, Providing More Leeway on Faculty Qualifications

FROM THE ONLINE CHRONICLE, APRIL 28, 2003/BY KATHERINE S. MANGAN

Accreditation rule changes recently approved by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business may impact the School of Business and Technology, which is not now accredited by the organization. Below, we excerpt a portion of the original Chronicle story.

Business schools will have more flexibility to determine who is qualified to teach, but also a new burden of proving what students have learned, under new accreditation standards approved on Friday.

The revised standards were the featured attraction at the annual meeting of AACSB International: The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which drew 1,200 participants from 40 countries. The standards were approved overwhelmingly, by a voice vote, despite concerns by some educators that the association had watered them down in order to accommodate the growing number of foreign business schools seeking accreditation.

Many of those business schools—which like others in the association offer both undergraduate and graduate programs—use more part-time professors than would be allowed under current accreditation standards.

Among the major changes:

Instead of prescribing how many full-time, or doctorally trained, professors a business school must have, the new standards require schools to prove that at least three-quarters of the program is taught by faculty members who actively participate in students’ education. A part-time instructor who advises students outside the class and serves on committees could qualify as a "participating" faculty member, while an adjunct who simply shows up to teach a class would not. Under the old standards, at least 75 percent of instruction had to be offered by full-time professors, most of whom were expected to have doctorates. …

The association's director of accreditation, Milton R. Blood, insisted that even though the new standards give business schools more flexibility in hiring, the standards are actually tougher than the old ones.

"Instead of just looking at whether faculty members are full-time or part-time, we want to know how engaged they are in the life of the school," said Mr. Blood.

The revised standards will also help schools that are struggling to recruit enough faculty members with doctorates, he added. While the demand for business education continues to rise, the number of students pursuing business doctorates dropped 19 percent from 1994-1995 to 1999-2000. …

James T. Wright, dean of business at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, said the more flexible standards would allow foreign business schools with different hiring practices to gain accreditation.

"We hire a lot of practitioners as part-time professors to team teach with academically qualified professors," he said. "The new standards recognize that there are a lot of different ways that you can achieve the same results without losing rigor or quality."

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Webster Voices

Last semester Assistant Professor Warren Rosenblum, History, Politics, and Law, taught a class in which seven students researched and developed an exhibition, entitled "From Citizen to Soldier: St. Louisans in the Great War," which will be displayed at the Soldiers Memorial Museum, in downtown St. Louis, beginning June 15. Warren’s commentary about the museum and the class formed the centerpiece of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Memorial Day coverage on May 26. Here’s an excerpt.

If there were an award for most neglected cultural institution in St. Louis, the Soldiers Memorial downtown would be high on the list of nominees. The Memorial was built after World War I to honor "our soldier dead." Over the years, it has become a site of remembrance for all American wars and a repository for artifacts donated by veterans and their families. The limestone building includes two exhibit halls with marble floors and soaring windows. Upstairs are a small wood-paneled auditorium, a tiny library and meeting rooms for veterans’ groups.

One man at the Memorial, Ralph Wiechert, serves as director, preservationist, curator and facilitator of events for veterans’ organizations. With no money for windows that block ultraviolet rays, exhibits must be rotated frequently to prevent the artifacts from being degraded by sunlight.

Since there is no air conditioning, the sweltering exhibit rooms are effectively off-limits in summer. How about concessions? Restrooms? Glossy guides for tourists? Forget it. Only some heroic begging and pleading by Wiechert allowed the Memorial to have its first external cleaning in more than 60 years.

Hidden away in the basement of the Memorial, however, are stories of ordinary St. Louisans in extraordinary times. While preparing an exhibit on World War I, my students and I recently went through boxes and boxes of these materials. There are photos, documents, letters, souvenirs and diaries—donated in the hope that someone, somehow, will inscribe these individual experiences into the larger narrative of the city and the nation. My students wanted to exhibit almost everything they found, and felt indignant that such stories might be lost and forgotten."

Featured Faculty

Daniel Hellinger, professor, History, Politics, and Law, has been named a Fulbright Senior Specialist. This Fulbright program supports previous Fulbright recipients by funding travel for short return visits to overseas host institutions. For three weeks in August, Dan will return to the Instituto de Historia of the Catholic University, Valparaiso, in Chile, where he held a Fulbright appointment in 1991.

Mark A. Beirn, coordinator, Office of Study Abroad, has been elected to the board of directors of the St. Louis Stuttgart Sister Cities Committee. Established in 1965, the Sister City alliance with Stuttgart was the first for St. Louis and has been followed by a succession of ties with cities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.

Bradden Weaver, adjunct professor of international relations, Cha-am campus, spoke at Duy Tan University in Danang, Vietnam, on the subject of "Globalization and Household Poverty in Vietnam." The Cha-am campus and Duy Tan have academic agreements for intellectual exchange."

Kim Kleinman, academic advisor, Academic Advising Center, published an appreciation of Joseph and Nesta Ewan, noted historians and bibliographers of natural history, who "retired" to the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1986 and lived in St. Louis until 1997. The essay appeared in the History of Science Society’s journal, ISIS (vol. 93, no.4, Dec. 2002, pp. 646-648).

Bill Barrett, professor, Electronic and Photographic Media, delivered 10 lectures about the idea of photography from the 10th century till today at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He also attended the Northern Short Course, a conference of the National Press Photographers Association. His photograph of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa was published again in the St. Anthony Messenger (April 2003).

Kathryn Bowers, professor, Music, had her edition of Giovanni Gabrieli’s 19-part Buccinate performed by the Missouri All-Collegiate Choir, the Boston Brass and the Brass Ensemble of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, at the annual Missouri Music Educators conference; she presented a lecture on church anthems from traditional and early American sources for the St. Louis chapter of the American Guild of Organists; she was guest conductor for a performance of the Durufl Requiem, with the St. Peter’s Episcopal Church-Ladue Choir and orchestra.

Mitch Carnell, adjunct professor, Charleston Metro Campus, published an essay about the importance of information sharing in the March 24, 2003, Charleston Post Courier.

Gwyneth Williams, associate professor, History, Politics, and Law, appeared as a discussant on a panel, "Women’s Rights in Theory and Practice," at the Midwest Political Science Association. The papers included such topics as the effectiveness of the women’s movement in Italy; factors influencing the spread of suffrage across various states in the early 1900s; the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on 19th-century political thought; and permissible sex discrimination in employment law.

Linda Holtzman, associate professor, Communications and Journalism, moderated a preview forum, which brought journalists and community leaders together to discuss issues of race and ethnicity in St. Louis; she resumed her contributing position on the KSDK "Media Messages" news segment, reporting on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, family, violence and war in the media.

Keep us posted on your professional activities and send us your story ideas by completing the UFO form.

St. Louis Calendar Highlight

Summer Literature and Art Series

This summer the School of Education presents a series of four talks by children’s book authors and illustrators. The series kicks off on Thursday, June 19, 3–4:30 p.m. in Sunnen Lounge, with Kristen Joy Pratt, author of A Swim through the Sea, A Walk in the Rainforest, and A Fly in the Sky, all books with environmental themes. The talks are free and open to the public.

For more information on St. Louis events, check the online calendar.

Employees of the Month

June 2003

Arita D. Cook, department assistant, Patrick AFB, Fla., and Pat Simons, accounting assistant, Business Office, stand in the spotlight this month.

Arita’s been on the job barely six months, but she’s so good at her job that the regional director asked her to help train more experienced staff members in the Space Coast region in the techniques of student recruitment. According to her nominator, Arita has "tenacious recruiting skills. … Her philosophy is that ‘every telephone call, visit, or interface with a person is an opportunity to garner a student.’" In addition Arita implemented an "innovative filing system where student records are easily understood, records are retrievable, and maintenance is at a minimum."

Pat Simons has worked at Webster for 32 years handling student refunds. She works with students from around the world and processes millions of dollars. She is a quiet teacher, a hard worker, and an inspiration to all those who work with her. Many people nominated her, and all spoke of her patience, her smile, and her kind heart. One nominator says, "Pat Simons has the biggest job to handle in the Business Office: student refunds. This job consumes the office every term for the first three weeks plus. I feel she does an exceptional job of getting the millions of dollars in refund checks out in an extremely prompt fashion. She has to overcome a lot of barriers. … Even with these problems that arise, she still manages to get all the refund checks mailed to the students way before the 14 days allowed by federal guidelines. What I find most exceptional about Pat Simons is she always remains calm and pleasant, not only with fellow coworkers who are constantly lined up at her desk to ask about a student’s refund, but also with the over 80 phone calls per day from students. I have never heard her get upset with any student or coworker. … Pat Simons always comes to work with a sense of humor and a sweet smile for everyone. Even as busy as she is with work, she takes time to be concerned and sympathetic with a coworker’s life. She never makes a person feel stupid for asking a question or making a mistake. She always encourages people. Pat Simons comes to work sick, does not use all of her vacation time even though she’s been here for 30 years and has a lot of benefit time. Just check her track record. I appreciate working with Pat Simons and I most appreciate coming to work and seeing her smiling face."

Employees everywhere are eligible for the monthly Employee Spotlight Award. Using the nomination form is easy!

Service Anniversaries

June 2003

The University extends its appreciation to the following individuals who have ably served the institution for many years:

Jane Kendall, executive secretary, Finance, 10 years.

Dave Garafola, vice-president, Finance, five years.
Mark Neighbors, service clerk, Media Center, five years.
Warren Steward, media specialist, Media Center, five years.
Vince Stovall, bursar, Finance, five years.

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New Employees

A warm welcome to the newest member of the Webster family:

Kimberly D. Richardson, representative, Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, 580-353-5766 or speed dial #6 089, replaces Kimberly Hughes.

To learn more about job opportunities at Webster, go to the Human Resources Jobs site.