The Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences is deeply concerned by the precedent set by offering classes of 50 students. We believe that any financial savings generated by offering classes of this size will inevitably erode Webster’s well-earned reputation as an institution that puts the individual student at the center of its mission and diminish the ability of faculty members to help each student achieve his or her full potential. More specifically, our concerns have several dimensions:

• Academic Quality. Part of Webster’s stated mission is to transform students for individual excellence. Students in small classes (25 students or fewer) feel more responsibility to engage with the material and take responsibility for their own learning than students in larger classes. Moreover, small classes allow faculty to provide each student with thorough, personalized feedback on their work and progress — the kind of feedback that inspires and enables students to learn and grow. Small classes are the foundation of academic quality.

• Student Engagement. Student engagement is a key to retention and student success. Small classes allow faculty and students to get to know each other and, just as importantly, allow students to connect with each other, both intellectually and socially. These relationships provide a supportive context in which students can do their best work and ensure that students feel connected to the university.

• Meeting the Needs of Our Specific Student Population. Many of our students choose Webster because they know they will be treated as individuals here. Nothing signals that fact more strongly than our small class sizes, and often students come to Webster after attending other schools with much larger classes, having learned that they don’t feel engaged or perform well when they feel invisible and unimportant. For reasons ranging from learning styles to physical or mental health disabilities to the challenges of being first-generation college students, many of our students actually require small classes and personalized attention to succeed.

• Maintaining our Brand. Large classes contradict and undermine Webster’s brand. Currently, we market ourselves (accurately) as an institution where students will find personalized attention and small classes. For example, one of the three primary messages across the top of Webster’s homepage is “Personal Attention,” followed by the explanation that “Webster's small class sizes and attentive faculty provide a rich, personal educational experience that encourages innovation and self-expression.” Versions of this message are duplicated across the university, from admissions materials to individual departments’ characterizations of their programs.

• Keeping Faculty Workloads Fair and Ethical. Larger class sizes inevitably mean more work per course for faculty. Thus, larger class sizes represent a de facto change in course load for full-time faculty — the kind of major change in working conditions that should rightly be discussed by the

Faculty Senate and the administration before being implemented. There is also a danger that the largest courses will be assigned to adjunct faculty, adding to the exploitation of part-time labor at Webster.

As we learned quite emphatically at last week’s Spring Institute, which featured students’ perspectives on what makes Webster student-centered, our ability to provide a personalized education by tailoring classes to their individual needs and by getting to know them both inside and outside of class is a core reason why students choose Webster and why students succeed at Webster. Offering classes larger than 25, both betrays our history as a student-centered institution and undermines our future.

We call attention of our colleagues and the administration to the Workload for Full-Time Faculty Policy Statement in the University Handbook, including the following:

Webster University holds that the individual faculty appointment entails a variety of activities which, ideally, should function interdependently and inseparably. As a consequence, the development of any formula or set of formulas for the precise quantification of faculty workload seems neither feasible nor desirable. However, certain guidelines of a more general nature may be established to insure that faculty workload is distributed equitably and that the individual faculty member's assignments are conducive to the development and maintenance of academic excellence.

And in relationship to class-size and demands on faculty time, the Handbook states:

The size of the classes taught should also be considered. The larger class is not always more demanding than the smaller class; but it does not follow that the question of class size can safely be ignored. In a given institution there will be many generally comparable courses, and for these the difficulty will probably be directly proportionate to the number of students involved.

We recognize that in some limited circumstances course that incorporate larger lecture formats might be justified. We would expect in the case of deviations from the 25 student limit for the university to establish policies about the rationale, and to do so in close collaboration with faculty leadership, including the Faculty Senate, Curriculum Committee, Graduate Council, and Salary and Fringe Benefit Committee.  Such classes also raise issues of class-load and compensation, both for adjuncts and full time faculty that should be subject to similar processes.