LiberalArtsOnline Volume 6, Number 6
June 2006
When you think of liberal arts colleges, what images come to mind? Do you imagine scenes from movies like Mona Lisa Smile—an idyllic pastoral setting with ivy-covered brick buildings, a charismatic professor shaping young minds under a gnarled oak, a warm community with charming rituals? Or do you picture squabbling colleagues, endless and pointless committee meetings, and yourself with a headache as you teeter between career demands and student needs? This month's author, Paul Kjellberg, associate professor of philosophy at Whittier College, explores the pitfalls, the successes, and the possibilities of liberal arts college communities. He argues that if we want to ensure their survival, we must nurture their uniqueness and tend them with great care.
--Kathleen S. Wise, editor
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The Liberal Arts College Community
by Paul Kjellberg
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Whittier College
Recent volumes such as Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts College (Koblik and Graubard, Transaction Publishers, 2000) and articles on this site explore questions about the value of the liberal arts in a market economy and its role in a society that some fear has lost its way. Economic factors have forced small liberal arts colleges to confront their market standing and define their niche in ways that move beyond old clichés about "well-roundedness." Looking around at the types of institutions they compete with, community colleges on one extreme and large research universities on the other, the primary difference lies not in the types of courses offered, which are fairly uniform, but in the context in which students take them: a small, unique community. This is why high school seniors choose liberal arts colleges and what they remember as alumni. It involves more than just an intimate environment where people know each others' names and can be "more than just numbers," but also the kind of innovative and individualized programs that such a setting facilitates. [1] Whether or not we think of this community as what we are "selling," it is what our customers are buying. This paper critiques the role of community on our campuses and suggests ways for making our campuses more ideal educational environments.
Though most small colleges, and even many large ones, are quite comfortable talking about their commitment to community, difficulties arise when they try to substantiate it. It is not always easy to point to where the value of community is evident in our curricula. We value it, but we often think of community as happening spontaneously or as being the responsibility of Student Life or Alumni Relations, primarily in the first and last weeks of students' time on campus. But if students come to liberal arts colleges for the unique educational opportunities they afford, and if what is different about those colleges is the communities in which people learn, then one would expect curricula at such institutions to look appropriately different from those at other institutions where community does not play the same role. If community really is an educational resource, we should take pains to leverage it in obvious and effective ways.
As an intellectual community, a college campus should be more than just a collection of intellectuals. That said, we rarely engage as that sort of community as a campus. Faculty members leave campus to attend disciplinary conferences and publish in journals that students or colleagues in other departments rarely read. Staff and administrative offices, though they often provide perfect liberal arts laboratories, remain insulated from academic programs, as do the social, residential, and economic lives of students, which are often breath-taking in their diversity and complexity. Overcoming these invisible walls is a challenge. One way we've tried to create a more connected community at Whittier College is through "paired courses," in which faculty members participate in one another's classes. These classes have coordinated readings and at least one shared assignment. This allows for students to explore the intersection of different disciplinary perspectives and for faculty members to model cross-disciplinary dialogue. This is a good first step that points in the promising direction of an even larger, more integrated discussion.
We should also examine whether the social behaviors and interactions on campus mirror the kind of community we want to exemplify. The college years are crucial in the development of people's values, and it is not just books and classes that make the difference but the relationships that develop along the way. Though obvious, this is a significant point. Among other things, it helps us diagnose one of the vices to which liberal arts education is traditionally and perhaps inevitably liable: elitism. Even if we are intellectually cosmopolitan, it is hard for a small college not to be socially parochial. As a result, students tend to identify as their own, the interests of a comparatively narrow segment of society. The admissions selection process itself suggests to students that they are different from unaccepted applicants, and therefore entitled to the economic and political advantages their education affords.
Elitism can manifest itself in interactions with faculty, administration, and staff, as well as among the student body. I have been pained to see students (not to mention the occasional faculty member) behaving inconsiderately toward the staff in the business office, dining hall, buildings and grounds, and housekeeping. This may just be a holdover from the aristocratic origins of liberal arts education in America, but it is also true that these jobs are just what students see themselves as getting away from by virtue of going to college: they are a built-in "other." If we want our communities to be at the very least inclusive and respectful, we need to make a conscious effort to bring that about.
Fortunately, these challenges can be addressed by thinking about community more deliberately. Thinking of the college as producing not just a certain kind of individual but a certain kind of community brings into clearer focus many traditional liberal arts goals. Writing and critical thinking are easier to operationalize when we think in terms of the requirements for a functioning community. A good writer is not just one who gets A's, but one who uses writing to communicate effectively with an intended audience. Critical thinking is not just the identification of logical fallacies on a test, but a mode of discourse that helps everyone involved achieve a clearer understanding. To the extent that we are able to define these things contextually (writing for successful communication, critical thinking for improved understanding), the more intuitive the standards become. The more we are able to immerse students in environments where these abilities are useful to them, the easier our job will be as teachers.
Earlier I cited the danger of elitism. This potential unintended side-effect of the liberal arts experience, I put it, captures what many of us regret about contemporary America: the absence of a shared community and the tendency of some privileged people to mistake their own interests with those of society as a whole. But if it is true that the communities in which people study crucially influence their development, specifically on who they identify with and how they relate to others, this is cause for optimism because it is something we can affect. Small colleges, often set in small towns, are the ideal places for us to model—individually and institutionally—the kinds of communities we want to promote in the larger world.
To give an example of the sort of model I have in mind, in 1999–2000 Whittier College held a Millennium Series of talks by faculty members on the significance of that point in history from the perspectives of their disciplines. There was dinner beforehand and ample time for discussion afterward. Though we did not reach a conclusion about the significance of the millennium, we were all enriched by the discussion of a diverse, engaged group.
The challenge to the success of the Millennium Series was attendance. We encouraged staff and community members to attend, and some did. But their representation was low, leaving it a predominantly "academic" exercise. Though faculty uniformly enjoyed participation, it was nonetheless added work, requiring the unpaid sacrifice of an additional evening per week. Junior faculty members said they worked as hard on their presentations for the series as on anything else that semester and yet were forced to relegate them to fairly insignificant portions of their personal evaluations and growth plans. Students were enthusiastic, though they said attending took time away from their regular academic work. If we want to encourage community on campus, we should find ways to support it with academic credit and with consideration in tenure and promotion decisions.
The series did illuminate some possibilities for intellectual community on a small campus. Rather than act as collections of isolated scholars, programs, and departments, whole campuses should come together as liberal arts think tanks to explore the kinds of topics that our communities are uniquely suited to examine. Different institutions are naturally suited to different interdisciplinary themes, on which they should speak as authoritatively as do disciplinary associations. Not only could we make progress on questions none of us feel equipped to tackle alone, such as the goals of diversity or the possibility of equitable distribution of opportunities and resources, in the process we would both model and engage students in the kinds of communities we wish to promote.
The liberal arts community is our distinctive educational product. As such, it has served us well. But we have taken it for granted. To survive and to thrive, we need to take responsibility for the communities on our campuses and make them better. In so doing, we have the opportunity not only to strengthen ourselves in the market but also serve our society by setting examples of better ways of being. Our campuses are unique laboratories in which to explore the kinds of communities we want to promote in the world. Let's make the most of them.
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1. In "The Competition for Top Undergraduates by America’s Colleges and Universities," Denise Gater cites small groups, learning communities, freshman cluster courses, freshman interest groups, residential colleges, and specialized residence halls as aspects of the learning "context" colleges and universities market to students (in TheCenter Reports, May 2001, at http://thecenter.ufl.edu/gaterUG1.pdf).
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