In Columbia last weekend, I welcomed most of our approximately 280 new residential students to campus for orientation activities. It’s a beautiful number for us: It represents an 11 percent increase over last year and a 64 percent increase over fall 2003 (We’re also expecting a 30 percent increase in course enrollments in our graduate and continuing studies programs this fall). The number 280 represents three years of hard work by everyone at Stephens to get us back in the black and thriving. It represents 280 unique individuals discovering who they want to be in life and where they are headed in this world.
Our chair of the faculty and our Student Government Association president joined me at orientation in delivering pearls of wisdom (hopefully) strung with a common thread (unplanned at the time): Be a part of your community. Show up to class. Get involved. Use our international alumnae network. Study abroad and pay attention to the larger world around you.
Learning these life lessons is hard to assess through exams, but I would argue they are as important, if not more important, as learning the square root of 81 or the difference between "ensure" and "assure."
At the same time our colleges and universities are teaching our young people how to stand on their own and come out from the shelter of their parents, we’re also teaching them to be engaged in community life, how to use their predilection for team-oriented projects to help others.
On many levels, my time here has been about tearing down divides, about exploring the permeability of "boundaries" between Stephens and our Columbia neighbors, most recently in the planning effort guided by our city manager. It’s been about increasing communication and developing symbiotic relationships.
This year, we look farther outward: We are enhancing our students’ global awareness and involvement and our recruitment efforts and intern/career placement internationally. This includes joining 16 other schools in an AAC&U Global Learning and Social Responsibility project designed to integrate today’s global issues into our general education frameworks.
Higher education can’t confine itself to a local level. Richard Levin, president of Yale University, proclaimed in an August 2006 issue of Newsweek: "Of the forces shaping higher education, none is more sweeping than the movement across borders."
He goes on to say that universities are "the primary means of educating the talent required to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. But at the same time, the opening of national borders to the flow of goods, services, information and especially people has made universities a powerful force for global integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical stability."
It is true that some fences make good neighbors, but there are some barriers that serve no good. It is years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of the Cold War, and I think of our 2004 graduate who is finishing a Peace Corps stint in Kazakhstan, where she’s developing programs for the Red Crescent Society. Amanda Haase is soaking up the experience and trying to leave her own legacy in Siberia. Isn’t that what we all hope to do in life? Isn’t that the purpose of being engaged in community?
The best part is that once you are engaged, you typically stay engaged. Take Catherine Withrow, a 2005 graduate, now pursuing her master’s degree through Georgetown University’s program in Argentina.
Her eye-opening entrée to the world came from a study-abroad program. "Ecuador was an incredible adventure that has permanently changed my perceptions about language, culture, politics and development," Cat says.
"During my nine months there, I studied in person sustainable development projects in small Andean villages, saw firsthand how race relations manifest themselves on the coast, and participated in traditional Quechua rituals while visiting indigenous communities in the Amazon … an invaluable set of lessons." |
I learned some lessons of my own after a few weeks in Japan in May. My purpose was to visit our sister colleges to reinvigorate our student exchange programs, but I left with much more. Next week we will welcome 17 students from Japan’s St. Margaret’s College for an intensive American culture program. What courage to wade into a place as foreign as Columbia, Missouri, in the country’s center - foreign and yet open and welcoming. A model for a world with permeable borders, and for all our students.
We tell our incoming students they are not alone, that they are Stephens women, that they are family. We hope to make an impact in each of their lives, but I am looking forward to what they - and all of Columbia’s college students - bring to the melting pot that is our community.
Wendy Libby is president of Stephens College.
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