2022-2023 Highlights

A&S faculty and staff spent the year supporting, teaching, mentoring, inspiring and exhorting a student body that in spring 2023 numbered 6,723 undergraduates (the largest ever) and 362 graduates. Faculty worked together to prepare approximately 1,500 undergraduates and 127 graduates to walk at Commencement.

Faculty continued doing high-quality research, winning external grants, and building new collaborations across the globe and within W&M. We allocated around $250,000 internally this year to support faculty research and events via the Faculty Grants Fund.

In addition, 202 faculty-generated proposals that requested $72 million in support were submitted to external funding agencies. During the same period, new awards and yearly increments to existing awards totaled $32 million; of this amount, $522,000 came in the form of 10 external student and faculty fellowships.

The A&S hub for mentored research, applied learning and internships, The Charles Center, has been working to identify and remove barriers to student access to internships and other applied learning opportunities. In collaboration with A&S faculty and numerous offices across campus, they created two pilot internship courses for summer 2023. These courses offer students a path to receive both academic credit and funding for internships and enable tracking of student internship participation.

The Charles Center supported 41 internships in summer 2023, including 22 Freeman Intern Fellowships in Asia, 11 Woody interns in Museum Studies, 7 City Research Scholars (2 interns with the City of Williamsburg and 5 interns with area nonprofits), and 1 Grimsley Journalism Fellow.

During the 2022-2023 year, our new Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) launched two new programs: 

• Fall 2022: Insights from Within (IfW), an internally focused initiative that fosters conversations led by members of our community and/or A&S alumni to further DEI goals.
• Spring 2023: A&S DEI Spring Speaker Series, which brings transformational organizations and/or speakers to our community with the goal of exploring shared values around DEI.

A goal of A&S is to continue to reflect our community value of belonging by cultivating the diversity of faculty and staff. In support of faculty hiring, the Dean’s office collaborated closely with our University Human Resources partner to provide vice-deans, chairs, directors, and search committee chairs with EEO data and recruitment support for all tenured or tenure-eligible searches. Anchored by targeted interventions described in the Faculty Hiring Pilot (i.e., implicit bias training and evaluation of inclusive teaching expertise for prospective hires) and, the enthusiastic support of our faculty community, these efforts resulted in an exceptionally diverse group of new faculty hires. Of full-time faculty hires, 52.6% identified as people of color (includes American Indian, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic) and 57.9% identified as female.

The past academic year has been a time of change and growth for Graduate A&S. The A&S faculty, with the approval of the Provost and President, allowed each graduate program to determine its own Graduate Record Exam (GRE) requirements. All subsequently voted to eliminate it, with a majority allowing the optional submission of scores. This aligns William & Mary with the growing number of institutions that do not require the GRE for admission. Graduate A&S also saw the birth of a new doctoral program in Data Science, currently housed within the Applied Science Department. The first cohort of Data Science doctoral students will matriculate in fall 2023.

The Graduate Research Symposium returned this year with a new collaborative twist, showcasing undergraduate Honors projects alongside the work of graduate students. The inaugural Graduate & Honors Research Symposium (GHRS) brought together more than 160 emerging scholars at W&M.