MESSAGE FROM THE FOUNDING PROFESSOR and Dean

On behalf of the faculty and staff, welcome to the American College of History and Legal Studies.

We are welcoming our second class in our bold new adventure in higher education, and we hope to build on the success of our first group of students, and the lessons learned in 2010-11. Our enrollments have soared because we now have a physical space, faculty in place, and a year of experience. We have a solid foundation on which to move forward. Enrollments are also up because of the generosity and farsightedness of our board of trustees, who decided last May to offer free tuition for this year's junior class. We have always believed that this college offers an extraordinary opportunity. Now it is free for all qualified juniors who are admitted and decide to matriculate at our campus in Salem, New Hampshire.

As was the case last year, all courses will be taught using the discussion method, rather than lectures. For three nights each week students in the American history course will be answering questions put to them based on the assigned reading, which consists of a scholarly monograph, and sections in two textbooks, one of them a free, online Wikitext. In the writing course you will be given a series of exercises and projects of increasing length and difficulty, along with discussions of the writing topics and related subjects.

We aim for excellence in all that we do at ACHLS. Faculty learn from student evaluations of their teaching, and surveys in which favorite and disliked books are identified. The Founding Dean, Lawrence R. Velvel, creator of our parent institution, the Massachusetts School of Law, audits classes, observing the performance of both students and faculty, as do other law school professors. Community college professors, and interested potential students, also sit in on classes.

Our mission is to help each student become a more skilled writer, thinker, and speaker; a more informed citizen; and a better American. That goal for students is true whether they apply to and are accepted at MSL after their junior year, or decide to stay at the college for their senior year and earn a B.A. after completing advanced courses in one of four specialized areas.

Michael B. Chesson
Founding Professor and Dean