|
Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
|
Conference on The Future of Liberal Education October
15-16, 2005 |
|
All day Saturday participants heard people talk about liberal arts colleges, their missions, and the challenges they face. This was their chance to here to be creative and design a liberal arts college for the twenty-first century. To inspire the discussion, the three deans who have been leading the Engagement Project offered some provocative models of the future for the liberal arts. Here are the remarks of Dennis Moore, the former Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College at Cornell College. The American College of the Midwest: A Fantasy As you will recall, the point of this recent series of consortial conferences has been to explore ways to engage today's students in the liberal arts. One way to do that is to create a college for today, or tomorrow at the latest. My particular version of such a college is based on old, ever-green ideas offered up by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Phi Beta Kappa address on "The American Scholar" he gave at Harvard in 1837 when he was 34 years old. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was there, called this address our intellectual declaration of independence. Accordingly, Emerson may be regarded as our founding father. His ideas center on the American Scholar as "Man Thinking," which our less gendered age might translate as "Americans thinking," always a hopeful prospect. For those who might like to have an image in mind for this concept I offer a Kemble illustration from the 1884 edition of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It depicts the moment when Huck decides not to turn Nigger Jim in as a runaway slave. "All right then," he says, "I'll go to hell." An excellent logo for our new college. Our challenge, as we all recognize, is to enable students to move past checking off distribution courses from a list to understanding that knowledge can be empowering, and acting on that understanding early and late. Emerson defined his American Scholar to precisely the same end. As some of you may recall, Emerson's scholar is influenced primarily by nature, books, and action. As to the first, Emerson writes: "The ancient precept, 'Know thyself' and the modern precept 'Study nature,' become at last one maxim." Books represent the mind of the past: They are sound resources for science and history, but on the whole "the are for nothing but to inspire." "One must be an inventor to read well," says Emerson. "There must, then, be creative reading as well as creative writing." Finally-and this from one of the best-read men in his generation-books "are for the scholar's idle times." As to action: "Only so much do I know, as I have lived," he writes. "Life is our dictionary." As to the college and its academic operation, his view is this: "Colleges have their indispensable office-to teach elements. But they can only serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame." His idea is that as American scholars we must "take up into ourselves all the ability of the time, all the contribution of the past, all the hopes of the future." We have a duty to speak our minds and change the world for the better in our lifetimes. These are the premises, the vision. Before translating that vision into curriculum I want to take care of some housekeeping matters. First, a disclaimer: Not everyone needs a college education. Bob Dylan the singer-songwriter, August Wilson the playwright, and Domino Harvey the bounty hunter did perfectly well without one. For everyone else, this will be just what the doctor ordered. This new institution will be called the American College of the Midwest, or ACM for short. It will be located on the shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, close to both Milwaukee and Chicago, 150 acres, very attractive. It will be coeducational with 1,500 students and 150 full-time faculty members along with an appropriate number of professional staff, including ten coordinators hired to lead a series of study blocks around the nation and abroad for ACM each year. ACM will receive substantial start-up endowment funding from several sources totaling $150 million, really the minimum to put our money where our mouth is. A former student of mine, currently #4 at Microsoft, has convinced Bill Gates to provide $50 million in return for exclusive beta site rights for the next fifty years. The Mellon Foundation is also providing $50 million, and in return ACM will advise them on small-college academic program initiatives and collaborate with sister colleges for the next hundred years. And I am pleased to say that Grinnell College will provide the final $50 million. Everyone knows that Grinnell has a lot of money, but not everyone knows how generous their board is. The terms of our agreement do not permit me to disclose its specific provisions, but I can tell you that they are very favorable to both institutions. Appropriately enough, we will also be a beta site for the American College Testing Service, which will provide start-up scholarship funding in the amount of $10 million over the next five years. Finally, Angelina Jolie has offered to support study abroad at that same level in return for a steady flow of ACM interns to Third World countries and an honorary degree. Bill and Angelina will sit on our board along with representatives of Mellon, Grinnell, and ACT. Trustee membership will be rounded out by the Poet Laureate of the United States and, representing the Emerson family, the public librarian of Concord, Massachusetts who, I believe, is a Beloit grad. ACM will operate on an eight-month calendar. Students will take two courses every two months for a total of eight each year. Faculty will teach two courses during each of three course blocks and will have one two-month interval for reading and research during the academic year. Classes will meet four days a week, with Wednesdays designated as study and grading days. Speaking of grading: As we know, many students are not really ready for college in their first year. At ACM students will take first-year courses, but they will be pass/fail courses and for most students that year will be archived as what we might call red-shirt academics. They will begin their focused, graded study in the second year, with three years' funding support provided after that. A few true freshmen may petition to have their first-year course on the record, but they, too, will have support for a free fifth year, just like Division I scholarship athletes. The courses during the first year, all required, will include two units in reading and writing and one unit each in human nature, the scientific method, imaginations, decision science, information literacy, and 21st century professions. These courses will be taught by faculty teams across the college and will feature team-developed syllabi focusing on topics such as the U.S. Supreme Court, global warming, Middle Eastern politics, the year 1491, and avian flu. The only common texts will be Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the American Heritage Dictionary on line. There are several reasons for requiring these courses, all excellent selling points for ACM and the embodiment of Emerson's notion of a college's indispensable office. Again: Few students are well decided on an academic major at age 18 and no one should be; taking these first-year course will allow student to begin to sort things out without too much pressure. While the main point of a liberal education is liberal learning, few students understand this for much of their college career, and these courses will introduce the important tenets, characteristics, and benefits of liberal study in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts. For example, the course on 21st century professions will introduce students to the ideals, content, skills, issues, and practice of such undertakings as law, medicine, teaching, politics, social work, not-for-profit enterprise, academic careers, and the arts. All first-year courses will require that, working variously alone, in tutorials, in classroom settings, and in study groups, students read, think, write, and speak every day. In other words, we will front-load the curriculum with structured opportunities to get the most out of an ACM education. And at the end of each year students will submit to their academic advisors extended essays on the state of their liberal education to date. After the first year, students may elect various disciplinary or interdisciplinary majors, minors, and concentrations with no general requirements, but those intending to go on to graduate school or professional study will have the opportunity to take a course split between (1) intensive preparation for the graduate record exam or the professional school entrance exam in a chosen field and (2) to clear their minds, a second reading of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This course will be one proof of the pudding, a bridge between an ACM education and future study or employment. In the interval, students will increase their knowledge and refine their skills while following their interests, playing to their strengths, and claiming their education as Adrienne Rich once famously advised Rutgers' Douglass College women to do. The assumption is that all students will undertake at least one internship, one off-campus study experience, one student-faculty research project, and several intervals of service learning along the way. These undertakings call for substantial logistical support, but student experience in them is utterly reinforcing of larger educational goals. So we build them in. The final essay assignment will ask students not only to sum up their liberal education but to develop and share plans for saving the world, or a small part of it, after graduation. All of this is, I remind you, by way of embodying Emerson's radically student-oriented view of education by nature, books, and action. He had a pantheistic view of nature and a spiritual view of life which are now intellectually out-dated in some quarters, but his affirmation of individual insight, his understanding of the connectivity and process of life, and his optimistic confidence in leveraging human energy for progressive power continue to shine. In his own day he brought the simmering Walt Whitman to a boil, and it's high time that we put his ideas back on the front burner. Welcome to ACM. |
|
Return to: Conference Return to: Engagement Project |
|
|
|