Dear Department Chairs, Please remember to use the template pictured above for your 2014-2015 course listings. Each departmental menu will then be incorporated into the Willard College Course Menu which we will be sending out to all incoming Willard students. The Menu will be large format, colorful, easy to read, and laminated for easy cleaning. Please remember to give your courses titles and descriptions that our students will find appetizing.
Best, President Henry Cotton
Attention all Willard College faculty
This is a reminder that the Willard College Career Development Office is officially out of bounds for faculty, whether tenured, on a tenure trailway, or on the FlexFaculty program. The director of the CDO, Dr. Joe Francq, reports that students looking for post-college career opportunities can barely get through the door, much less make appointments with counselors or get on the computers. He has also reported faculty smoking and apparently drinking on the premises.
On a related note, contracts for the 2014-2015 academic year have been delayed at the printers. They will be available by mid-September. If you have received a verbal commitment for the coming year, please consider that as a firm promise from this institution.
Sincerely, President Henry Cotton
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
Please answer the following essay prompts. The Willard College Dean of Admissions, Dr. Leonard Primple, will use your answers to assess your application file.
Dear Willard Community,
We regret to inform you that the previously contracted commencement speaker, Herbert Kutschbach, will not be available. Since agreeing to speak at our commencement, his health has deteriorated, making travel from Bolivia to the United States extremely difficult. The good news is that we will be sticking with the Triumph of the Will theme, even as we search out a new commencement speaker.
Meanwhile, I should like to remind everyone that the scheduled daily drills and rehearsals are continuing. Please block out 3pm-6pm and be dressed out and ready to go. As all faculty are required to participate, classes normally held at those hours have been cancelled for the remainder of the semester. Rehearsals and drills will also take place on Saturdays and Sundays.
By now, you have received the three 3-ring binders with the choreography, music, costumes (including costume changes), instructions for handling the torches, and for those deemed in need of trimming their weight, a diet plan. You should memorize those parts that have been highlighted in yellow; yellow highlighter indicates the portion of the plan that are specific to your part. Your costumes have already been purchased, an expense that the college will absorb until the cost (including tax, shipping and a nominal handling fee) has been deducted from your next pay check.
I don’t need to remind the Willard College faculty and staff that this program means a great deal not only to the college, but to Associate Provost for Admissions, Curtland Schickel, Provost Gauleiter, the Board of Trustees, and me.
I’ll see you out on the football field soon.
Best, President Henry Cotton
Willard College is proud to announce that we continue to follow national trends in raising the ratio of tenured faculty to students, increasing our part-time and adjunct’s contribution to work-load streams, improving the depth of our administrative and professional staff coverage, doubling expenditure per student-athlete while holding cost per student-academic steady, and moving our price point upward in a trajectory ahead of national averages. Although we did not make into the Delta Cost Project at the American Institutes for Research, due to a clerical oversight, our own research suggests that Willard College would have been a stand out institution. No doubt the report would have lauded our innovative FlexFax Teams, our Tuition Reconfiguration Package, our warm embrace of MOOCs, and many other bold steps into the 21st century.
As president of this institution, there is no greater pride I can feel than knowing that students, staff, and faculty, are ready to make the kinds of sacrifices necessary to keep Willard College at the front of the middle of the line.
Best wishes, President Henry Cotton
Faculty, Please remember that you are expected to march in the upcoming commencement ceremonies and that you must purchase your Willard College-approved apparel from the bookstore by the end of the month. It is critically important that we present a unified Willard brand to our graduating seniors and their fee-paying parents. Marching in step is all the more important this year because of our innovative commencement program.
As you know, the search for a commencement speaker who can direct the audience toward the Willard experience, hit the ten “Willard Way” themes, and reinforce our price point, is never easy. After an exhaustive search by one of the nation’s top speaker engagement firms, Spotlight Speakers and Entertainment, we have secured the services of the one the world’s greatest film-makers, Herbert Kutschbach. The last surviving member of Leni Riefenstahl’s film crew, Mr. Kutschbach will reflect on his early path-breaking work. To close the loop between his address and the graduation ceremonies, the theme of this year’s commencement will be “Triumph of the Will at Willard College: Achieving Excellence after Graduation.” At the speaker’s recommendation, the commencement will be held at night, with each procession participant carrying a torch!
Obviously, we do not want to see any of the sorts of displays by malcontents that marred last year’s events. And to make sure the procession goes off without a hitch, there will be weekly practices, starting next week. Please keep an eye out for announcements of the schedule as it may require rescheduling class-time with seniors.
With deep gratitude,
President Henry Cotton
Willard College 