LiberalArtsOnline Volume 2, Number 6
June 2002
by Joy Castro, Assistant Professor of English and
Charles Blaich, Senior Fellow, Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
Wabash College
Editor's note: The following article was first distributed to nearly 12,000 subscribers at over 500 institutions and organizations in 86 countries on the Tomorrow's Professor Listserv. http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/
Our institution's experimental new program to offer our core course to staff was inspired by two people whose relationships to higher education differ wildly. The first is Earl Shorris, awarded the National Humanities Medal for his founding of the Clemente Course, which in 1995 took a rigorous great books curriculum to New York City's poor and is now flourishing in thirty-two different iterations across North America, including programs in the Cherokee language, in Mayan languages in the Yucatan, and in Yup'ik for Alaskan natives.
Trained at the University of Chicago and a great follower of Robert Maynard Hutchins's precept that the "best education for the best is the best education for all," Shorris has written a book describing the experiment, Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities. Shorris visited our institution, Wabash College, and described the Clemente Course: its high academic standards, its humanitarian goals, its minimal operating costs, and its outstanding level of success in transforming lives.
The other person whose story motivates me is a retired small businessman in the Appalachian highlands of West Virginia, a man who loved learning but eschewed college as something for rich people. After high school, he drove a truck and worked his way up to a white collar and a desk job. An avid reader and ardent conversationalist throughout his working life, he nonetheless maintained that college was just a finishing school for the rich: that smart, shrewd, hardworking people didn't need it. Retiring in his 60s, he enrolled at a public state university-only in order to get the student health insurance, which was less expensive than any he could purchase privately.
But what he found there overwhelmed him with excitement. "I never thought that would be me," he said, referring to the Fall day his philosophy class met on the lawn in small groups to debate medical ethics. "I thought that was for rich kids in movies." When he came for Thanksgiving last year, my father brought his syllabus and his texts. We talked, for the first time in our lives, of our shared passion for what can happen in a classroom of ideas.
While the privilege of knowing my father keeps me aware of the intellectual enthusiasm of many working people, the achievements of Earl Shorris demonstrate the fertile possibilities for expanding education. Shorris's work helps me realize all that can be done, once we decide to do it. Our own program at Wabash is both more modest and less brave than the achievements of these two men, yet it has potential for transforming the way we think about our courses, their possible participants, and their role in building intellectual community on our campuses.
Our core course is a year-long program required of all sophomores called Cultures and Traditions, or C&T. Its structure combines faculty lectures and the occasional film screening with what functions as the heart of the course: discussion groups of fifteen students who meet with faculty every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.
C&T has been flourishing for over 25 years and is a signature course of the college. Faculty sometimes offer C&T at alumni events in different cities so graduates can reconnect to what's being taught now in a course that students remember as a highlight of their education-in large part because of the tremendous sense of intellectual community that stems from having 200 other people reading and discussing the same text at the same time. The course has also built intellectual community among faculty members. Wabash, a liberal arts college for men, has an enrollment of about 850. Of its 80 faculty members, 61% have taught C&T at some point during their careers.
Thus, at any given moment, a significant proportion of our small campus has an intense intellectual experience in common. A student having trouble with the poetry of Li Po or Claude McKay, a Carlos Fuentes story, or the UN Declaration of Human Rights can engage any number of students or faculty members in conversation.
In offering C&T to interested members of the College's staff, we wanted to extend that sense of community even further, hoping it would provide staff with a rich intellectual experience and an inside view of what happens in the classrooms whose functioning their work supports. Indeed, it has had both these results. One staff participant writes:
I have very much enjoyed the Staff C&T course. I've used brain cells that I'm sure thought they were retired! It was challenging but rewarding . . . . I loved it! This brought home to me how Wabash College teaches young men to think (never mind how much they have to read!) . . . . I do think this was worthwhile because it gave us an even better understanding of what goes on in classes; therefore, we are better promoters of Wabash College in particular and a liberal arts education in general.
We hope our staff will form an increasingly large resource for students, offering the possibility of transforming routine, pragmatic encounters (getting lunch, ordering a transcript) into intellectual exchanges, and that we will move toward becoming an entire campus of teacher-learners. An additional goal was to counteract a certain kind of intellectual elitism by helping students see that Ms. X is not only the nice lady behind the counter but also a lively and perspicacious thinker whose views on the gender politics of Equus might differ rather radically from their own.
When we explained the goals of the program to the dean of the college, he guaranteed staff release time for lectures and film screenings. To prevent a financial burden on staff participants, Wabash's new Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, a national center designed to study and advocate for the liberal arts (http://www.wabash.edu/cila), funded the purchase of all course texts. By removing paper and exam requirements, we drastically reduced the time commitments required of both faculty and staff and focused attention instead on reading and discussion.
On our campus, where many faculty and staff have meetings during lunch, the best hour turned out to be from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Staff participants looked forward to C&T discussion as a great way to end the day, saying it was a time when they could recharge, come alive again mentally. They enjoyed being able to digest the discussion, rather than turning their attention directly back toward job tasks.
We wanted to keep the time commitment manageable for faculty, so we asked for four volunteers from the pool of faculty already scheduled to teach C&T: a Monday volunteer, who would teach at five o'clock the material that he or she had taught the sophomores that morning; a Wednesday volunteer; a Friday volunteer; and a substitute. Since the material is still fresh, preparation time is minimal. The commitment is kept to one hour per week per person. Finding enough faculty volunteers was effortless, since the project tapped into existing faculty desire to volunteer time, energy, and expertise to serve the larger community. When we interviewed the four volunteers from last Fall, all said they'd teach it again.
A bond grew up between staff taking the course and faculty teaching it. One faculty member reported, "I've been here nine years. I've known all these people, but never really known them. . . Now we know each other. We tell stories about our families." Faculty members also appreciate the pleasures of teaching voluntary participants who come purely to learn and are thus more open, eager, and forthcoming, and the pleasures of teaching adults who place the texts in a framework of prior life experience. "Some sophomores still exist in a protected little bubble," one faculty member commented, whereas staff members do not: "There's a range of experience. When we did the unit on human suffering, everyone in the adult group had suffered and could relate to the material." Faculty members report an atmosphere of mutual gratitude: "After every class, they thank me, and I thank them." "No question: I think it's wonderful," said one professor. "Frankly, on the days I teach, I look forward to that hour." This enhanced sense of community is no small outcome.
While Wabash has a long, proud history-one of Hemingway's stories mentions Wabash in the same breath as Harvard and Columbia-part of its commitment has historically been devoted to the education of first-generation college students, often farm boys who couldn't have otherwise afforded a private college. Our current dean, a Wabash graduate, is a first-generation college student who grew up on an Indiana farm and still brings apples from his family's orchard into the office. So the commitment to spread and share education-to put into action the belief that the "best education for the best is the best education for all"-is already strong on our campus.
Sharing core courses can transform our campus cultures. Because the material is intellectual, we build community on our campuses while remaining focused on our educational missions. We strengthen ties across campus constituencies and push our institutions further toward becoming places where learning is valued and shared by all, and where the intellectual abilities of everyone are honored.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.