Perlman Learning and Teaching Center

Perlman Learning and Teaching Center

We all live at Carleton: Student and faculty perspectives of Carleton as a residential academic community

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

12:00 – 1:25 p.m.

With panelists:

·  Rob Oden, Carleton College President and Professor of Religion

·  Jay Levi, Assoc. Professor of Anthropology, Director of Latin American Studies

·  Kaaren Williamsen, Director of Gender and Sexuality Center and LGBT Advisor

·  Steve Wisener, Assoc. Director of Residential Life

·  Cathy Yandell, W.I. and Hulda F. Daniell Professor of French Literature, Language and Culture

·  Sara Ganaha '06

Summary and Discussion by Drew Dara-Abrams ‘05

Executive Summary

Panelists discussed how the college can better unite its academic and residential missions with the goal of strengthening both. Oden and Levi spoke of the benefits of a relaxed environment in which students and teachers can interact outside of the classroom. For example, students can learn how professors came to be interested in their subject matter and have a more personal face to put on academics and scholarship. Faculty and staff become role models whether they realize it or not, said Williamsen. They model for students how one can be an adult in the real world.

Other panelists addressed more practical aspects of Carleton as a residential academic community. Yandell described her experiences leading off-campus studies programs. Wisener spoke of the role of Residential Life. Ganaha provided a set of suggestions for simple changes professors could make in their classes to take advantage of the residential side of Carleton.

Rob Oden

·  Both Oden’s undergraduate degrees are from universities with residential colleges, Harvard and Cambridge. He spoke about how these environments made possible regular interaction with faculty members, particularly at meals. “I don’t remember eating any meals as an undergraduate without a faculty member.” The “relaxed conviviality” of sharing meals allowed for “unusually intimate, casual relationships” with faculty. Oden noted that this didn’t work as well at Cambridge as in the U.S. since the Cambridge faculty ate together at the high table.

·  According to Oden, we cannot replicate that at exactly at Carleton for three reasons. First, architectural reasons: At Cambridge and Harvard masters had nice places to live in the middle of residence halls that were an incentive to live on campus; such living spaces do not exist at Carleton. Second, Carleton is lacking in an availability of younger (namely single) faculty who have time to spend with students in residential settings. Third, perhaps Oden’s undergraduate years were a more relaxed era than today; the pace has changed. Oden cited how the academic novels have changed. [Consider the difference between, say, Lucky Jim and Richard Russo’s Straight Man. -DDA]

·  What can we do? The next fundraising campaign is being planned, and one goal is to increase the size of the faculty to create more “sustainable” teaching loads. Oden noted that LTC events bring faculty and staff together to work on these issues. Another current initiative is the Headley House program. “For good or bad, this is my program,” said Oden. Instead of only having speakers come to campus to give a talk, they could “hang out” in Headley House for a few days, a week, or an entire term and have extended conversations with students, faculty, and staff. In particular, the Headley House program will focus on issues of morality and ethics to begin with. [A good example of such a program at a liberal arts college is the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at Claremont McKenna College, which hosts a different speaker for talks and meals four days a week. See www.claremontmckenna.edu/mmca/ –DDA]

·  How can we get people together—especially around food—to talk late into the night?

Jay Levi

·  Levi also spoke of his experiences at Harvard and Cambridge. “This is all sort of a trip down memory lane.” Before transferring to Harvard, he began as an undergraduate at UCLA, which was “good for some stuff,” but big and impersonal. At Harvard, Levi’s adviser invited him to the faculty club on special occasions. Some faculty members also threw open houses—such as one professor’s “open houses to end all open houses”—for other faculty members along with their students. Another opportunity for student-faculty interaction was faculty dinners when students were encouraged to invite faculty members to student residences for dinner and act as their hosts.

·  At Cambridge, Levi regularly ate lunch with faculty members, a time when he felt on the same level as his teachers. Over lunch Levi learned more about faculty members, such as how they originally became interested in their fields of study.

·  A downside to faculty living on campus is that some academics never leave school. Levi remembered a particular music professor in a ratty coat who had spent his entire life in academic settings.

Cathy Yandell

·  An anecdote: The image of a lush fountain in “The Graduate” brought Yandell to Berkeley, where she promptly found the ugly concrete fountain on Sproul Plaza and learned that the fountain in the movie is actually at UCLA.

·  “The authority of those who teach is sometimes an obstacle to those who learn.” On off-campus programs Yandell has found ways around this issue since the environment is new for faculty as well. However, the professor is the one with the language skills, which brings an air of authority. During Yandell’s program in Paris last spring she found a weekend trip out of Paris to be a breakthrough in lessening the barrier between students and faculty. By singing together, eating together, traveling together, “it wasn’t all about me being the Gestapo forcing them to speak French.”

·  “What can we do short of having professors live on campus?” Even in the classroom we can have connections that put authority to the side. For example, students and faculty can collaborate on real-world, non-academic issues such as the presidential election.

Sarah Ganaha

·  Ganaha asked other students, “What defines Carleton as a residential college?” She found that many students want a stronger community and were able to provide some concrete suggestions for faculty members:

·  How well do you know the students in your classes? Get more informed about student life, clubs, and floor activities—much of residential life at Carleton centers around dorm floors. Students want faculty to feel welcome to join in their extra-curricular activities.

·  Do you know students’ names? Consider taking a few minutes at the beginning of the term to have students introduce themselves in class. Not only will this help you learn their names, but it will also help students learn each others’ names. Ganaha spoke of how common it is to sit next to someone for the entire term but never learn their name.

·  Consider changing the class location for a day. Food certainly never hurts either.

·  Students are interested in learning more about what faculty members do outside of class. Ganaha is a biology major and would appreciate learning more about the research her professors do.

Kaaren Williamson

·  “I think of college as a rapid time of growth and development for students.” It’s the first time that students are away from home. “College can be a first chance for students to create a new home for themselves.” Part of this may be creating a new identity. For some students, this home is more open than they are used to and they have more options than previously.

·  Many students stay here over breaks, finding any job that they can, so that they can stay at their new home. They claim Carleton and Northfield as their space, and thus want to defend it. For example, when a conservative Christian speaker was invited to campus a few years ago, some LGBT students felt uncomfortable, thinking that their home was being violated. They forgot that Carleton is home for others as well.

·  Faculty and staff become role models whether they realize it or not. They model for students how one can be an adult in the real world. Especially important for LGBT students is having the opportunity to see that you can be out and live a real life with a career and a home.

Steve Wisener

·  Speaking of his experiences, Wisener said, “I’ve always lived in college housing.”

·  At Carleton, we are intentional about requiring students to live on campus for all four years and to be on a board plan so that they eat in a communal setting. A limited number of students are allowed to live off campus to prevent overcrowding and to give the option of independent living to those who strongly desire it.

·  When asked whether they would like more opportunities for interaction with faculty and staff, students respond that they want to be on their own. However, Wisener has found that at the end of the year when you ask them what their most memorable experiences were, students usually cite times they spent with faculty. And whenever students have the opportunity to invite faculty members to events, they have long lists of professors they would like to host.

·  Students are used to seeing faculty at Dining East (less so in Burton). But in other residential settings students are less accustomed to seeing faculty and staff, and Wisener says that he finds showing up unannounced can be awkward.

·  Common reading discussion during New Student Week are the first opportunity students have to make connections with faculty members and fellow students in an academic context. Students value and remember that interaction.

Discussion

·  Worth considering is the background of adolescence. For a teenager, it can feel out of the ordinary to be with adults. Therefore, to encourage such contact, a feeling of seamlessness is required. Having that connection is especially important for advising to be successful.

·  Most every student arrives at Carleton straight out of high school. Much of how they have learned to interact with adults, their teachers in particular, has come from their (highly structured) high school experience, which I would argue often leaves students feeling less independent and less able to hold their own with adults. The pressure of college admissions has turned much of high school into a process of jumping through hoops, and that mentality cannot simply be dropped the day someone arrives at Carleton. If teenagers must focus on getting the grades, the SAT scores, the resume of mechanical extracurricular activities, etc. to get into selective colleges like Carleton, how do they have time to learn how to interact with adults in the real, unstructured world outside of the closed system of high school? –DDA

·  “A residential college of whom?” The old models did not treat everyone equally.

·  “What about privacy? Where does that fit in?” Faculty need to have their own lives separate from students. At the same time, they can model boundaries for students, sharing their transparent, public lives while simultaneously maintaining their own private lives.

·  The blurring of boundaries can also be problematic for students. Most students live with roommates in dorms on campus. Usually this means that your bedroom, office, storage space, and place to meet with others are all the same room—and you’re sharing it with someone else. Sometimes this contact can be energizing, at other times it can be overwhelming. One thing I have been enjoying about living off campus this year is that I can be more deliberate in the public time I spend with others and the private time I spend alone. –DDA

·  Some faculty members will want to be more involved in students’ lives outside of the classroom than others, and some students will want more interaction with faculty and staff than others. We shouldn’t forget to leave room for personal preference and variation. –DDA

·  Much of this interaction depends upon serendipity, which requires unstructured time.

·  Athletics, student jobs, and departmental work (e.g. serving on committees) all connect students with faculty and staff.

·  Labs and field trips provide an opportunity for more relaxed contact between students and faculty. “There’s nothing magical about our half-day trip” in geology that can’t be done in other departments, said Mary Savina. Perhaps the college could expand the notion of labs to other departments. We think about the “intellectual exercise” of field trips to be visiting the destination, but the process of getting there itself is quite valuable.

·  Carleton is a small college, without graduate students, post-docs, and the various others you would find at a large research university. On the one hand this means that students at Carleton receive the full attention of professors. However, the downside is that the college community is composed of only two distinct groups: 18-to-22-year-old (plus or minus) undergraduates and professors who hold Ph.D.s and are in general well into their career. Moreover, Northfield is a small town without the cafes, bookstores, and nightlife of a university town like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge. The campus is lively because students stay around on weekends and evenings, but at the same time, the options for contact with non-students are limited. I must admit that there have been many times when I’ve searched my mind for some way to have a serious conversation with someone older than 22. -DDA

·  On a related note: Parker Palmer will be coming to campus in the spring (sponsored by the LTC and the Chaplain’s Office) to discuss his book The Courage to Teach.