I am delighted to report that the Institute remains a vibrant community dedicated to excellence in clinical education, practice, and research. We have four new students enrolling in fall 2003, bringing our total student body to twenty-six fulltime and four partial enrollment students, an increase of 130% since I became Dean in 1999. Two of our new students are Marriage and Family Therapists and two are Clinical Social Workers.  To meet the increased enrollment in the North, we are adding a new faculty member this fall.

The faculty has developed and integrated into the curriculum an exciting new approach to our "social" perspective. Our curriculum has always included the traditional social work view of understanding the client in his or her social and cultural surround. This new addition seeks to contextualize our theories themselves and to make conscious our socially determined epistemologies, thereby deepening our capacity to critique theory. As part of this curriculum development, we have instituted a new colloquium on epistemology, called the Epistemological Colloquium: Considerations of the Context and Social Construction of Thought, which will be required for first year students and prerequisite to the Research Seminars.

We have also created a Writing Colloquium, required for one year of all students who have finished the major Clinical/Theoretical Colloquium and open to all students in the curriculum-paper-writing phase. This faculty-led writing support group provides students with an on-going sense of community during this transitional phase of the program.

The Institute is committed to increasing our involvement in the larger community. Our contract with the Children’s Bureau of Southern California has been renewed, and we are pursuing ways to increase services to Spanish speaking families and children in Los Angeles under that contract.

I am happy to be part of volume 3 of Clinical Connections in its new life as an online publication. With this format, we will be able to reach out to an even larger community.

I feel deeply gratified by the progress we have made, by the enthusiasm for learning and the morale of the student body, by the support I receive from the dedicated faculty, and by the creative and energetic leadership of the officers and members of the Board of Trustees.