Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

John R. Thelin
over the past half-century in their ability to harmonize
with demographic and economic changes at the national level.
as a group for grants from foundations and federal agencies.
The Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges in
Pennsylvania brought strength in numbers to its six members
by cooperating on professional development programs
for faculty and administrative staff, and by purchasing
commodities and services as a group.
Cooperation also has meant that independent
colleges can work in partnership with adjacent state
universities. In Kentucky, Alice Lloyd College of rural
Pippa Passes arranged with the University of Kentucky to
establish a special house in Lexington that enabled Alice
Lloyd students to take upper-division courses in engineering
and the sciences at the flagship state university and also to
prepare for graduate school. In California and other states,
the articulation between independent colleges and public
institutions includes working with nearby community
colleges in admitting transfer students. Other mixed,
private-public consortia involving CIC member institutions
included the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher
Education, Cooperating Raleigh (NC) Colleges, Hartford
Consortium for Higher Education, and Pittsburgh Council
on Higher Education.
The small independent colleges in the United States
have been remarkable over the past half-century in their
ability to harmonize their broad traditional commitments
to collegiate education with demographic and economic
changes at the national level. They have survived and been
faithful to their missions, successfully weathering an era
that Christopher Jencks and David Riesman called an
“Academic Revolution.” Tending to finances and enrollment
management, although important and necessary, has
not diverted these colleges from their essential, enduring
commitment to undergraduate education and to the liberal
arts. Their distinctive role is aptly conveyed in the titles
of books and articles about the small colleges: “cradles
of conscience,” “models and mavericks,” and “colleges of
character.” In an era of mass higher education, the colleges
and universities belonging to CIC have remained “small by
design” and have proven to be “large in effect.”
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