Western Connecticut State University Informations

Western Connecticut State University (also known as Western, Western Connecticut, Western Connecticut State, WestConn, and WCSU) is a public university located in Danbury, Connecticut, United States.

WCSU consists of four schools and one division: the Ancell School of Business (which includes the Justice and Law Administration program), the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Visual and Performing Arts, the School of Professional Studies, and the Division of Graduate Studies.

Founded in 1903, WCSU is part of the Connecticut State University (CSU) system, the primary division of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) system, which includes Eastern, Southern and Central Connecticut state universities; CSCU as a whole consists of those universities in addition to a number of community colleges. Between the four state universities, more than 34,000 students are enrolled, with more than 5,700 students enrolled at Western. (As of the Fall 2016 semester.)

WCSU is home to the Jane Goodall Center for Excellence in Environmental Studies, which is the result of a partnership between WCSU and the Jane Goodall Institute (a private non-profit organization that promotes research, education and wildlife conservation).

The university's Westside campus houses the Ives Concert Park, one of the premier performance venues in the area.

Western is part of the Little East Conference and New Jersey Athletic Conference.

Western was founded in 1903 as a teachers' college, training the primary and secondary school educators for Connecticut's Fairfield County and surrounding areas. The school's name has changed over the years as it has focused on additional areas of study. First named the Danbury Normal School (also known as the Danbury State Normal School), starting in 1937 it was called the Danbury State Teachers College, a name it retained until the late 1950s. The college was renamed Danbury State College in 1959, then Western Connecticut State College in 1967, and finally, in 1983, Western Connecticut State University. In 2011, governance of the university was transferred to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system.

In 1904, 41 students were enrolled in the first classes on campus, the number of enrollments climbing to 362 students by 1912.

In 1968, WCSU's radio station, WXCI (91.7 FM), then going by the call sign WCST and broadcasting with AM transmission, was established.

In 1973 WCST was switched from AM to FM transmission, obtained an FCC license, was renamed WXCI, and went on air under that call sign.

In the early 1980s, WXCI became one of the first FM stations to focus on alternative rock. Throughout the 80s the station was instrumental in promoting the work of a number of contemporary bands and musicians: While the station is perhaps best known for popularizing the English band Duran Duran in the United States, it also helped to familiarize the American audience with other projects and musicians from Great Britain, such as Elvis Costello and Culture Club, and it popularized among residents of the Northeastern U.S. the West Coast punk group Black Flag and the Georgia-based R.E.M., while also providing greater listenership to New York City's Talking Heads. Thurston Moore, a founding member of Sonic Youth, attended WCSU for a quarter during the fall of 1976, though he left afterward.

In 1995, the Jane Goodall Center for Excellence in Environmental Studies (JGC) was founded on campus. The Center is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to environmental stewardship and conservation, and wildlife education and research, being the result of a partnership between Western and the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI). Since the Center's founding, its namesake, primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, has visited Western on at least a dozen occasions to give lectures on the issue of ecology.

The Center has also hosted a number of seminars and public talks by other environmentalist speakers at the university: Notably, Smithsonian ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin and veteran ecologist Thomas Lovejoy spoke at the university in 1998, and in 2013 ocean conservationist Fabien Cousteau presented a public seminar on campus.

In 2005, Western was established by JGI as a "National Center for University Roots and Shoots"; this event resulted in the institution of the eponymous student environmental club, a chapter of the international Roots and Shoots (also known as Jane Goodall's Roots and Shoots), on campus. Roots and Shoots is a subsidiary organization of JGI, and its WCSU chapter is one of only several based in the United States. The club's office, located in the Midtown campus's White Hall, remained the first of its kind between 2005 and 2012; afterwards, the organization's international headquarters was established at JGI's head office in Washington, D.C.

Roots and Shoots serves as, according to the university and the JGC, "a regional and national office of excellence in training university students, faculty and administrators to develop programs for K-12 and college students in local, regional and global conservation."

In 2005, former President Bill Clinton visited WCSU to personally thank students for their fund-raising efforts in the wake of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia: Connecticut students, including WCSU students, raised about $300,000 to fund a 1,500-student school in Sri Lanka; in an address given at the university's Westside campus William O'Neill Athletic and Convocation Center, Clinton thanked students for their efforts and stressed the importance of continuing to provide relief to disaster-stricken areas.

In 2012, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso visited the university for two public talks, speaking on both occasions at the university's O'Neill Center. As a result of his visit, WCSU became home to the Center for Compassion, Creativity and Innovation (also known as, simply, the Center for Compassion), founded in the spirit of Buddhist karuna (compassion) and metta (loving-kindness) as an organization for community engagement and charity work on an on-campus, local, regional, and global basis; the Center promotes, publishes, and disseminates material on the intersection of creativity and compassion, while also sponsoring events, and promoting dialogue and research, related to these themes. Also as a consequence of the Dalai Lama's visit, Western was officially recognized, with then-president James Schmotter's signing of a charter, as a “University of Compassion”—a title it shares with only a handful of other universities, including Stanford—by the Compassion Action Network. Moreover, as a prelude to the Dalai Lama's visit, the Sikyong (president) of Tibet, Lobsang Sangay, lectured at the university's Midtown campus earlier that year.

Western has two campuses, midtown and westside, both located in Danbury. The campuses are three miles (5 km) apart and connected by a university shuttle service.

The midtown campus is the original campus, located on White Street near downtown Danbury and the Main Street Historic District. It is home to the School of Arts and Sciences, School of Professional Studies, and most of the school's administration. Dormitories on this campus include Fairfield Hall, Litchfield Hall, and Newbury Hall. The Midtown student center is located on this campus.

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