Letter From the Dean: At the Intersection of Teaching and Research
At Weinberg College, we cherish our role in advancing Northwestern’s undergraduate mission. We play a crucial part in shaping the University’s enrollment, admitting about half of the 8,000 students that comprise the undergraduate community. Moreover, all undergraduates at Northwestern, including those enrolled outside the College, take our classes and can even ––augment their studies by adding one of our 100 majors or minors. The College’s vibrant intellectual atmosphere influences every undergraduate at the University.
What may be less obvious is our impact on graduate education and research. Our faculty members advise about 1,400 graduate students annually, and our departments and programs oversee, in collaboration with The Graduate School, 25 PhD programs. In addition, our faculty members secure about $100 million annually in external funding, powering research across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Our faculty also collaborate broadly with colleagues at Northwestern’s other schools and, notably, with many research centers and institutes. Such collaborations spread across the country and the globe.
The prowess of our faculty is widely recognized. We are proud of our 56 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and our many recipients of distinguished fellowships: Carnegie, Guggenheim and Mellon; our MacArthur “genius” awards; and, last year, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Extraordinary things happen when undergraduate instruction takes place in the context of such breadth and ambition. Our intellectual community is replenished and refreshed by ideas tested in the competitive arenas of high-level research. Our model of instruction benefits from the inclusion of scholars who are dynamically shaping their disciplines and actively redefining the very frontiers of knowledge. Our community thrives on the creative energy that ignites when students and world-class researchers interact.
This is why I urge all our undergraduates to take advantage of the many research opportunities that come their way. Research is experiential learning in its purest, most powerful form, and helps to develop personal qualities such as curiosity, resilience and a lifelong love of learning.
We are committed to an educational model that joins research and teaching, for the good of our students, our faculty and the world.
Adrian Randolph
Dean, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences