Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

Alvin P. Sanoff
service activities, at least 25 percent of which must be with
one organization. Projects are approved and monitored
by the college. This orientation to service was also part of
the college’s original mission. “The idea was to encourage
students to give back to society,” says Orr. “It became such a
strong component of the ethic of the college that we decided
to institutionalize it.”
Warren Wilson is an atypical liberal arts college
because of its work component, but even institutions that
seem relatively traditional frequently embrace distinctive
programmatic elements. Oberlin College in Ohio, for
example, includes the nation’s oldest continuously operating
music conservatory, dating back to 1865. It is a true rarity,
a major music school linked with an eminent liberal arts
college. The nation’s first four-year degree program in music
education was established at Oberlin in 1921.
Some CIC colleges and universities combine the
traditional liberal arts with strong professional programs. For
example, the University of Saint Francis in Indiana offers a
comprehensive program in nursing. About 30 percent of the
undergraduates at Saint Francis are enrolled in the program,
which is the largest major on campus. The four-year program
has grown rapidly since it was launched in 1987. Nursing
was a natural fit for the university, whose founders, the Sisters
of St. Francis, see healing as part of their mission.
A number of CIC members also combine the
liberal arts with teacher education. Ohio Dominican
University and Lesley University in Massachusetts, for
example, both consider the training of teachers an integral
part of their mission. About a fifth of the undergraduates
at Ohio Dominican and a quarter of them at Lesley study
to become teachers. Lesley, in fact, began in 1909 as a
“normal school” to prepare kindergarten teachers. President
Margaret McKenna says that undergraduates who want
to teach spend time in area schools as freshmen; in their
sophomore year they already do some teaching. By the time
they graduate, she says, they have spent many hours in four
or five different school settings, so that “when they walk into
their own classroom for the first time they are competent and
comfortable.”
Three Indiana colleges affiliated with “peace
churches”—Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester—blend the
liberal arts with peace studies. At Earlham, courses in peace
and global studies “are scattered throughout the curriculum
so that it is impossible to find your way through without
taking at least one course in this area,” says President Douglas
Bennett. Manchester offered the first undergraduate program
in the interdisciplinary field of peace studies, which includes
coursework in political science, psychology, economics,
philosophy, and religion. Undergraduates at Manchester
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