A Caring & Celebrative Community: A message from Bill Fox, Dean of Students

I appreciate the opportunity to re-introduce myself by sharing some thoughts with parents and families as we enter spring semester midterms and excitement builds for the many campus activities that occur as the academic year concludes. It is an honor to serve your students as their dean. As you may imagine, I get to know students in a variety of contexts and aim to build relationships over their four-year experience. I coordinate the efforts of our “Student Persistence Team” within the Division of Student Development. As a team of professionals who care deeply about student success, we are focused on creating policies, programs, and practices that produce momentum for degree attainment. We also seek to eliminate barriers to persistence. We support students as they respond to personal and academic challenges, and we celebrate accomplishments along the way.

As an educator, my work is influenced by the contributions of other educators and higher education leaders. I often consider Ernest Boyer’s six principles about community on college campuses as I work alongside your students. How we collectively build a community that is caring and celebrative happens to be top of mind for me as I write to you.

Denison is relational in nature. We know our students well, and we take great pride in the connections we make with one another. One way our community expresses care for one another is speaking up when we sense someone is managing a personal or academic concern and may need some extra support. Most of the time, this is done through a simple caring conversation. Another mechanism we use is our CARE System.

In my role as dean, I help coordinate responses to over 600 formal CARE referrals per year. Our intent is to help connect a student to networks of support, to collaborate on problem-solving, and to empower action to improve the student experience and achieve successful outcomes. Many of the relationships my colleagues and I have with students begin with a referral through the CARE system and grow from there.

The other principle we consider, especially as we approach the latter part of spring semester, is the celebrative nature of our community at Denison. Commencement is getting a bit closer for our seniors, and there is a buzz in the air on the Hill as we all look forward to a season of leadership and academic awards, campus traditions, and student organization events. It is a special time to celebrate our community and our students.

Below are some ways to stay connected to all that is happening on campus, in Granville and in Columbus. March-April-May will fly by. There is so much to do. I encourage students to celebrate our community and engage it in new ways before summer is upon us. There is still time to try something new, meet new people, and explore all that our local area has to offer:

Thanks for reading!