Dear President Cotton,

As Chair of the Department of Foreign Modern Languages, and on behalf of the entire faculty, including the remaining tenured professors and our growing force of Flexible Faculty, we are deeply grateful for the investment that Willard College has made to streamlining and modernizing our instructional modalities. As you noted in your memorandum Assessing Assessment, we are moving towards .25 credit courses which, when considered along with the move away from housing the department in a single stationary building, change had to happen, and fast! The mobile classroom-office system generates efficiencies, especially since so few of the faculty require, or are eligible for, the increasingly valuable campus office and classroom space. As we discussed at the meeting last week with you and Provost Gauleiter, being able to provide instructional time while students are being transported from one end of the campus to another, and the ways that this can both backfill interstitial  minutes and also increase credit hour generation , is a model that I hope the rest of the campus can emulate.

Best regards,

Dr. Luce Derangh

Chair, Department of Modern Foreign Languages

P.S. I was thrilled to hear that you and Cheryl Tina had such a nice time in Paris. Sounds like taking an actual French class would have been a waste of time since, as you note, everyone pretty much “speaks English or credit card.” By the way, yes, $350 sounds a bit steep for a cab ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport to downtown. Good thing that was “expense account material!”

Dear Humanities Faculty, My congratulations to the work recently completed by the Assessment Advisory Committee, under the firm guiding hand of Associant Dean Welzr. We are excited to announce the “Scantron Essay” assignment guidelines. While on one hand, it seems incredible that faculty still assign and grade essay assignments, it is more astonishing that until now there was no viable alternative. Our innovation really puts Willard College out in front of the pack in terms of delivering a product that has maximum assessibility and gradibility efficiencies. The concept is so simple. The assignment administrator prepares an essay and then breaks it apart sentence by sentence. Students then must select the correct sentence from a choice of five sentences. The Scantron Essay can be as short as five sentences or as long as five pages! Writing and grading writing have never been so easy.

We are confident that the Willard Scantron Essay will become the premium pre-written essay assignment in higher education.

Sincerely, President Henry Cotton