Students: You might be glad to know that you aren’t the only ones burning the midnight oil this midterms week. The new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Joe Weixlmann, was also awake into the wee hours of Tuesday morning, finishing a large project.

Weixlmann was working with a group of faculty from the biology department on a grant proposal, racing to make the deadline. Since his recent arrival to Saint Louis University in July 2001, Weixlmann has already entered the trenches to make progress on one of his highest priorities as dean of Arts and Sciences: to help further advance the research and grant profile.

Since 1994, Weixlmann had served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana State University, where he had tremendous success increasing grants and funding. Prior to serving as dean at ISU, Weixlmann was a member of the faculty. He has also taught at the University of Oklahoma and Texas Tech University. He earned master’s and doctorate degrees in English from Kansas State University.

He is originally from Buffalo, New York, where he attended high school and college at Jesuit institutions. Weixlmann said that the opportunity to return to a Jesuit institution was one of the reasons the position at SLU appealed to him.

“I had some expectations about what it might be like to return to a Jesuit university, and my first experiences here have already far exceeded my expectations,” Weixlmann said. He commented that during his first three and a half months on the job he has been greatly impressed by people helping people and modeling the behaviors they espouse.

Weixlmann says that he has seen a lot of evidence that SLU is a special learning environment, including a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about one of the SLU2000 courses in math and computer science.

He also mentioned how impressed he was when he heard about the outreach through the classroom in the Micah House program and how some foreign language classes were using their bilingual skills to help to teach English to non-U.S. natives.

“I’ve seen so many interesting examples of people trying to teach with vision and reach out to the community. Teachers and students are talking about doing thing and actually doing them,” Weixlmann said.

Weixlmann also admitted that he had certain expectations about coming to a university that was financially well-off compared to many public institutions. He said that ISU has done many great things but that they were continually trying to do more with less.

“That is not the situation here,” he said. “One of the attractions of coming here is that this is an institution that wants to grow, especially in faculty.”

Weixlmann explained that while he does not by any means have an open checkbook, the financial resources here leave much more opportunity to do things like develop courses, purchase equipment and other resources, allow sabbaticals and have an overall larger vision for the future.

Weixlmann would, however, like to see certain parts of SLU’s funding increased.

“We, as a college, haven’t generated enough funding for research,” he explained. He said that in the past the College of Arts and Sciences hasn’t been geared toward obtaining direct federal funding for research, and that more and more government money for universities is coming from legislative mandate. “This is a national trend, and we need to be more involved,” Weixlmann said.

“My goal is to increase funding five fold in the next three years. This is not an unrealistic goal, and I anticipate we will even do more than this as we tap into direct federal appropriations,” he stated.

Another issue Weixlmann would like to see addressed is the core curriculum. He said that he has had a lot of experience in planning general education programs at other universities and that his first impression of the Arts and Sciences core curriculum is that it is fundamentally sound.

He would, however, like to see more unity across the various subjects of the core and a stronger focus placed on how various disciplines come together. He also believes that certain goals of the core requirements need to be better articulated and that the core must remain faithful to both tradition and modern aspects of education, such as diversity.

He said that the best core curriculum is one that is coherent and right for a given place at a given time. The Arts and Sciences requirements aren’t wrong, Weixlmann said, but there are many opportunities to improve and build.