The below message was sent to faculty on July 14, 2025.
Dear Colleagues,
I hope the summer is treating you well. Below, please find my response to the 2025 Report from CAP. David Karen and I spoke briefly with CAP about this report last week, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate on all of this work next year.
With thanks,
Wendy
Dear Colleagues,
I write in response to CAP’s Annual Report to the Faculty dated April 11, 2025. I am grateful to the faculty, senior administrators, and staff who worked together on this Committee throughout the year and produced a detailed and comprehensive report.
As I enter my second year at the College, I continue to learn. I read the brief history of CAP in preparing this response and understand its initial charge "to engage academic priorities for the College." I am still reading my way through previous responses and the CAP archives, where I am learning about questions the Committee has asked itself and senior administrators over time related to scope, confidentiality, and collaboration. As I told the Committee this year, I would like them to also have more information about budget, not to inform their decisions but to help them better understand the fiscal contexts in which the College works. Many of the topics covered in earlier reports seem like key issues in both faculty governance and institutional governance, some of which we started to talk about in lunch conversations this past year.
The background data shared in the Annual Report, as well as the ways the Committee collaborated with the Rebalancing Faculty Workload Committee and met twice with Haverford College’s Strategic Personnel and Curriculum Committee (SCPC), were very helpful. I also appreciate the ways CAP streamlined its process around faculty position requests to best support departments and programs.
I accept all of the recommendations CAP made for faculty lines with the exception of the one in the Growth and Structure of Cities. I have spoken with the voting faculty members in Cities about the reasons for that decision.
I appreciate the care that has been taken to think deeply about the needs of departments and programs. As we work to build a collective vision for the College, I look forward to using the insight and expertise of CAP to align departmental goals with both the aspirations and the goals for the College as a whole. Specifically, how can this Committee make recommendations about a range of topics – in addition to faculty hires – that will help us build the liberal arts of the future, enable faculty to be excellent teachers and strong researchers, and prepare our undergraduate and graduate students to enter their lives professional and personally after college/graduate school in the 2030s and 2040s? I look forward to collaborating with this Committee, the faculty more generally, the Interim Provost, and the next Provost on these questions.
I would like to propose two additional areas for future discussion.
First, I encourage the faculty to start to think about substantive and methodological overlap in faculty hires that might lead to additional intellectual gains for the College if faculty think about a cluster of hiring. As many of you know, cluster hires are usually organized around a theme and bring new colleagues to campus at the same time to extend or reimagine core topics in the liberal arts. Cluster hires often get more (and stronger) applications because they demonstrate the College’s commitment to building intellectual life around the cluster theme in research and teaching. I encourage CAP to think with Departments and Programs in the 2025-26 academic year about potential clusters. I will make up to $25,000 from presidential discretionary funds available during the next academic year for CAP to allocate to Departments and Programs that want to explore potential topics for clusters through small gatherings of colleagues from other institutions, speaker series, or other collaborative intellectual work that could inform future clusters. Departments and Programs that apply for and receive permission to hire in a cluster will receive $25,000 annually per cluster for five years for programming related to the cluster and administrative support to make the programs happen. I look forward to discussing cluster hires and/or other ways we can expand the intellectual community on campus in more detail in the fall.
Second, I encourage Departments and Programs to give serious thought going forward to hiring at levels more senior than Assistant Professor. Given the current climate in higher education and limited job market, there may be opportunities for Bryn Mawr, given our well-earned academic reputation and relative institutional capacity, to hire at the Associate or even Full Professor level in innovative ways that could broaden and strengthen individual units and our faculty as a whole. The faculty is in the midst of a generational transition, with a significant number of retirements and Assistant Professor hires in recent years. Hiring a handful of additional senior faculty has the potential to intellectually and administratively strengthen Programs on campus alongside their home Departments (and could be core to clusters).
Thank you again for all of the work that went into this report and the thoughtful consideration of the College and its future. I look forward to our continued work together.
Wendy
Wendy Cadge
President and Professor of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College
101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Pronouns: she/her
brynmawr.edu
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