College of Charleston President Reports on Successful Year

Dear Campus Community, 

We enjoyed another successful year at the College of Charleston, where our students, faculty and staff collaborated on a wide range of scholastic and community-building endeavors in order to deliver on our promise of a unique academic experience.  

Together, our students and faculty worked to add new understanding to our collective knowledge base. One of the best examples of that kind of new scholarship was on full display at this year’s College of Charleston Expo, which served as an opportunity for our students across all disciplines to showcase their research and problem-solving skills. I was amazed at the range of topics and the depth of research and insightful analysis our students were conducting. That is a credit not only to the students, but to their faculty mentors as well. For more than two centuries, this institution has prided itself on academic excellence, and it is gratifying to see our students and faculty not only answer that challenge, but go above and beyond in their academic work.   

During the summer, many of our faculty continue with their research activities and teaching innovations. I am happy to see a group of more than 20 faculty in the liberal arts disciplines, on summer stipends, working on different ideas to innovate the liberal arts at our university. Their ideas cover a wide range, from new academic minors to the incorporation of AI into their teaching to better integration of Coursera micro-credentials into their classwork, to name just a few.   

Of course, our campus – one of the oldest in the nation – also serves as a classroom in its own right, and the Committee on Commemoration and Landscapes did excellent work in producing four new historical interpretative signs to shine a light on untold stories around campus. They also continued to transform Education Center’s room 118, the Septima Clark Memorial Auditorium, into an exhibition space for better understanding Clark’s impact on Charleston and the Civil Rights Movement. This spring, they expanded their commemorative work by celebrating Clark’s legacy through student art, poetry and activism.  

If you want to get the full flavor of all the great things happening on campus, I suggest you peruse The College Today and College of Charleston Magazine, where you will get a multimedia experience that highlights every aspect of campus: our academics; profiles on our students, faculty, staff and alumni; a myriad of campus events as well as our many athletics successes.  

These great things didn’t happen by accident. They happened because our university community cares about making this institution a place that is not only welcoming and inviting, but a setting where people can reach their full potential. I want to thank everyone for their hard work in making this year such a success, and I hope we can use the summer to recharge and then do it all over again! 

Sincerely, 

Andrew 

Andrew T. Hsu, Ph.D.
President
College of Charleston