Faculty Recommend Termination of UWW Program

The Skidmore College faculty Friday afternoon voted to recommend to the administration that Skidmore terminate the College's University Without Walls program, the bachelor's-level distance learning program launched in 1971.

The vote of 106 to 20 (with five abstentions) will be carefully considered by the administration in making its recommendation to the Board of Trustees.

The motion, jointly presented to the faculty by the Committee on Educational Policies and Planning and the Institutional Policy and Planning Committee (IPPC), included a stipulation that the process of termination "extend for a reasonable period of transition to allow currently enrolled students to complete their degree requirements."

In their rationale for the recommendation, CEPP and IPPC said they had unanimously concluded that, "as a matter of educational and institutional policy, the continuation of the UWW program is not in the College's best long-term interests. Closing UWW, while painful and difficult, is appropriate and responsible."

The committees also underscored the important place that UWW has had and will always have in the College's history, the impact it has had on the many exceptional students who have earned Skidmore degrees through UWW over the past four decades, and the importance of "honoring the work of many longtime and dedicated faculty and staff members who have devoted themselves to the program."

Of the approximately 100 students who are currently involved with UWW, 10 are full-time, 30 are part-time, 15 are enrolled in the UWW Antigua Program, and the remainder are working on final projects, catching up on unfinished work, or on leave. Jeff Segrave, dean of Special Programs, said the College is "committed to maintaining the academic excellence of the program for currently enrolled students as they complete their Skidmore degrees."

Skidmore was one of 16 colleges that received funding from the Ford Foundation and U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the late 1960s and early 1970s to create "university without walls" programs aimed at reaching out to non-traditional learners with non-traditional curricula, including the recognition and crediting of lessons learned through life experience. More than 1,400 alumni have used UWW's flexible framework to develop individually tailored undergraduate degree programs.