John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

I am particularly gratified to serve as provost at this significant period in John Jay College’s history. In the past five years, we have witnessed nothing short of the transformation of the academic enterprise at the college. We have phased-out associate degree admissions, added new liberal arts majors to our curriculum, restructured academic departments, and added one-hundred new, full-time faculty members to the professoriate. With a much expanded faculty, we are now poised to intensify our focus on student success. Whether in the classroom as teachers or outside of it as mentors, our remarkably talented scholar-teachers hold the key to student success. It is our privilege in Academic Affairs to do everything in our power to ensure that faculty and students receive the support they need to teach and to learn effectively.

Our recently completed master plan, John Jay @ 50, provides a roadmap for the next five years as we pursue the college’s goals in five domains of excellence: student success, teaching, scholarship, strategic partnerships, and institutional effectiveness. Our inclusive planning process established institutional consensus around the many objectives necessary to achieve the goals of the Master Plan. With the Master Plan in place, the College is ready to embark upon the self-study phase of our reaccreditation by the Middle States Association in June 2013. Although one purpose of institutional reaccreditation is to hold colleges accountable for meeting a set of higher education standards, the self-study also gives us an opportunity for self-examination and institutional renewal. I embrace the agenda of continuous improvement implied by our master plan and our reaccreditation. As we study ourselves, we learn what we do well and preserve it; more importantly, we discover our weaknesses. As a healthy and evolving institution, we seek to change weakness to strength and to enable our students to grow personally, intellectually, and professionally into graduates who will contribute to the larger community.

Sincerely,
Jane Bowers
Provost
Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs