Word from the Dean

Welcome to the Indiana Wesleyan University Graduate School.

Graduate-level education is not new at IWU. The first master’s program, The Master of Arts in Theology, was implemented only four years after the official opening of Marion College in 1920. In 1979, master’s programs in Ministerial Education and Community Health Nursing were added, and additional master’s degrees followed in Business (1988), Primary Care Nursing (1994) and Counseling (1995). When IWU was restructured in 2001, three of these master’s programs were grouped in the new College of Graduate Studies, while the others remained with their respective distance programs in the College of Adult and Professional Studies. Our third college, the College of Arts and Sciences, did not have graduate programs at that time.

The first doctoral program, an Ed.D. degree in Organizational Leadership, was started in 2004.

The College of Graduate Studies grew steadily throughout the first decade of the 21st century. During the 2008–2009 academic year, we addressed the questions of why graduate programs were housed in two different colleges, and what structure would best serve all of the graduate programs at IWU. After a thorough examination of other universities with graduate degrees, the decision was made to create and implement a Graduate School at IWU. With this structure, each graduate program is housed in an IWU College or School that is closely related to its discipline, with all of the graduate programs falling under the umbrella of the policies and procedures for graduate-level education that are developed in the Graduate School. This structure was implemented in July 2009.

It has been stated that having high-quality graduate programs is integral to having a premier university. At IWU, the Graduate School is no less responsible for upholding the mission and vision of Indiana Wesleyan University than any other unit. Functionally, it is an umbrella (or halo) organization that has policy-making authority over its constituencies, which include faculty, staff, administrators and students. Based on this foundation, the Graduate School attends to the multifaceted nature of graduate-level education at IWU.

Dr. Jim Fuller
Dean, the Graduate School