Two courses: One reality of the excellent liberal arts college

President Norman Fainstein

President Fainstein has strengthened CC’s financial position, refocused the College on its core educational mission, and led the campus in creating a plan that enhances learning programs, ramps up investment in facilities and increases diversity. Since his arrival in 2001, CC has raised $73.6 million in new gifts and pledges.

Fainstein steps down as president June 30. After a year’s sabbatical, he will return to his primary love, teaching, as a full professor in CC’s Department of Sociology. Here, he reflects on what he truly values — teaching and scholarship.

At least two points of view are essential to understanding a place like Connecticut College.

The most obvious is how we conduct teaching and learning. We engage students in their own learning through small-classroom settings with equally engaged professors, active scholars seeking to involve students in their work. The senior seminar that I am again teaching this semester is representative of how we approach education at the College. We have nine students with backgrounds in sociology, architectural studies, economics and American studies. In one of our remodeled seminar rooms, we have good discussions, view images in several media, and go live on the Web when we want to do something together, like work with a geographical information system that allows us to see data from the 2000 U.S. Census.

The seminar, “City and Society,” explores the relationship between patterns of settlement and the built environment on the one hand and social organization on the other. Its approach is mainly historical. We begin with the emergence of “cities” more than 5,000 years ago. We then trace the development of “urbanism” in Western Europe and (later) North America from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Finally, we examine in detail the particular path of urban development that characterizes the United States. In our last formal reading, we look at contemporary urbanism in Los Angeles and New York in an epoch of globalization and reflect upon various approaches to explaining its character. Throughout, we pay particular attention to major moments of transition in social organization and their concomitant transformations in “real space.” Our interests are at once cultural, visual, aesthetic, political, economic and moral. With regard to the last dimension, we ask ourselves what we most desire in our housing, communities and ecologies and what kinds of societies we would need to establish to lead the good life.

As a senior seminar, the course relies greatly on student preparation and participation. The first half of the semester is devoted to close discussion of readings in urban history and theory. During these weeks each student writes four short “response” papers that analyze the assigned reading and raise issues for class discussions that they help to lead. They also meet with me individually to develop a 20-page research paper that they present to the seminar in draft and final form.

A third element of the course is collective field trips. In February, we visited power loom mills and workers’ housing in Lowell, Mass., the site of a world-famous experiment at building a 19th-century utopian factory town. (The Lowell structures are now incorporated into a National Park.) In April, we traveled to New Haven, where we were hosted by Yale Professor Douglas Rae (whose book we read) and visited various sites of historical importance, examining the latest contested efforts at economic development in the city.

Recently, I participated in a seminar that presented a second, and equally essential, view of small, residential liberal arts colleges like our own. This course was sponsored by the Great Lakes College Association (GLCA), which includes 12 colleges, such as Denison, Kenyon and Oberlin. Each college sent three faculty leaders for a weekend of learning about colleges as multifaceted institutions. One exercise that stretched over three days involved teams of faculty using a sophisticated computer modeling program to design their ideal college. Faculty “designers” quickly learned that colleges are complex business organizations (Connecticut College has a budget of $100 million) and that decisions about enrollment size, faculty and staff salaries, investment in physical plant and the extent of financial aid are all highly interrelated. They also saw that the concerns of different stakeholders tend to emphasize expenditures for some valued goods and to ignore others — a true revelation, many of them told me. Another revelation was how so much of what they wanted to accomplish depended upon alumni support and the endowment resources of the College. Perhaps for that reason, one group simply decided that they would give their model college an endowment of $2 billion, quite a leap from the $160 million average for the GLCA colleges. (As of early March, our own endowment stood at $180 million).

As one of four plenary-session speakers and discussion leaders, I talked about the multiple roles of college presidents and then about how we could best understand presidential leadership. In a lively conversation, we explored what it meant to be a collegial leader and what the role of the faculty should be in addressing institutional challenges — challenges like creating a coherent and cost-effective curriculum in a society were knowledge and culture are increasingly specialized and fragmented or the challenge of building a diverse college community that truly reflects our society and at the same time establishes the unity and common understanding often lacking in that very society.

If my senior seminar provides one perspective on the reality of fine liberal arts colleges today, the GLCA seminar presents a second and equally essential perspective. The challenge for all of us is to hold both perspectives at once as we remain committed to the highest standards of accomplishment, whether in teaching in the classroom and laboratory or in building healthy communities and managing their complex elements.

Norman Fainstein
President