In How College Works, Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs (C&T) argue that “college works when it provides a thick environment of constant feedback, driven by the establishment and maintenance of social relations” (132). They’re particularly interested in how that environment helps students learn the skills of writing, speaking, and critical thinking that are central to a liberal arts education. (Note that they neither include information literacy as a separate skill nor even mention it).

Though each department at Hamilton has its own disciplinary content, all are expected to teach certain core skills: writing, speaking, and critical thinking. Writing, in particular, is deeply embedded in Hamilton’s culture. Students must take several writing-intensive courses to graduate, often beginning at the 100 level. The basic messages about good writing are repeated over the next four years. Writing is not merely an intellectual activity in the curriculum, but a social activity. And, accordingly, students believe the most important factor in learning to write well is good feedback from their professors both written and, especially, face-to-face (106, 140-142).

Similarly, speaking and critical thinking are learned as part of a community. In speaking, short presentations and small efforts, accumulated over years, lead to large gains in skill and confidence. Speaking, too, has value in that it forces the student to be engaged and rewards emotional intensity, traits that assist learning. Critical thinking also demands emotional engagement by exposing the student to new people and ideas. Faculty emphasize critical thinking across the curriculum, with the goal that, like good writing and good speaking, it will become a habit (112-119).

Yet these skills are not learned without a context. C&T argue that the faculty do not need any special expertise in the theory of writing or speaking when the goal is to instill a basic fluency. Skills are learned by learning and doing, rather than by mastering formal rhetoric or technical perfection. Though critical thinking may be more a general than a professional skill, it is still taught and learned in the context of a particular discipline. The key, then, to learning these skills is a teacher who is both competent and who cares, about both their subject and their students. The discipline or program forms the necessary context, but it is the relationships with faculty and peers that are most crucial to learning to write, speak, and think critically (130-131, 133).

Though C&T don’t include information literacy in list of their core skills, it seems to me that the discipline-based learning they celebrate is a model for IL as well. As Barbara Fister’s said in her LILAC 2015 keynote “The Liminal Library,” “…librarians don’t teach students how to be information literate. This isn’t a failing. It’s the nature of the thing we want students to learn. … You learn how information works by encountering, using, and creating it. Having good guides helps, but this kind of learning only happens in the doing of it.”

Jo Becker, writing in Vice:

In every class I've had at Shimer, women have struggled to speak and be heard. I've had classes where students had panic attacks and had to leave. One student, an undocumented Latina woman was called a "wetback" by a professor in casual conversation. Why should anyone pay tens of thousands of dollars into debt only to have their basic humanity disrespected?

I’ve been fascinated with Shimer for the past little while. In large part that’s been due to Adam Kotsko’s blogging. Kotsko is a Shimer professor and believes in the pedagogy and the curriculum. Much of his writing has been about his experience teaching Islam and the Qur’an. So, though I knew Shimer was based on the Great Books tradition, I thought that was balanced by an emphasis on women and minority voices in dialogue with that tradition, and that the culture of the college was in line with that dialogue. I’m disappointed to find out it isn’t so.

Ann Finkbeiner, “The Great Quake and the Great Drowning,” in Hakai:

From the Tolowa people in northern California: one autumn, the earth shook and the water began rising. People began running and when the water reached them, they turned into snakes. But a girl and a boy from the village, both adolescents, outran the water by running to the top of a mountain where they built a fire to keep themselves warm.

The New Yorker article “The Really Big One” touched briefly on the earthquake stories of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous peoples. Finkbeiner’s piece is centered on those same stories. Very much worth reading.

How College Works, by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, is a book about the ingredients of a successful education at a small liberal arts college. The library is, to appearances, largely irrelevant to this education; the authors only mention the library a single time. Moreover, that is a remark in passing: time and space can be flexible at college, as for example how “…the library morphs into a social center” (86). The library is otherwise absent, buildings, collections, and librarians alike. Yet How College Works is worth librarians’ time, and I think a place exists for the library within the authors’ vision of higher education.

The subject of How College Works is upstate New York’s Hamilton College. The authors are, respectively, a sociology professor at Hamilton and an alumnus finishing a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago. The main source for the research is a series of interviews with former students at Hamilton, conducted five to ten years after the student’s arrival. The goal was to allow the students time and space to reflect on their college experiences so that they could identify the elements that significantly affected their lives, whether positive or negative. A second important source for the book is a qualitative, longitudinal study of student writing.

In short, Chambliss and Takacs (C&T) argue that person-to-person relationships are central to the college experience. Healthy relationships, among students and between students and faculty, are a prerequisite to learning. Ten years after students enter, these relationships with peers and with faculty — the long-lasting friendships students made — are what they remembered about their time at Hamilton. These friendships were far more significant than the particulars of any program of study (4-5).

A student does not have to have a large number of friends for their college experience to be a success. Rather, having a few close friends — two or three good friends and one or two faculty mentors — are sufficient but essential (17).

This process of building relationships begins even before classes start. If students miss out early on they’re likely to be at a permanent disadvantage. Where one lives makes a difference, and the “lifestyle integration” that C&T find essential to a successful college experience begin here, with “a selected group of residents, close living around the clock, meeting and interacting with others in a variety of roles, multiple uses of time and space, [and] separation from the rest of the world” (89).¹

If a community of peers is essential to the college experience, so too are relationships with faculty. C&T identify four characteristics of good teachers: they excite the student about the course material, they are skilled and knowledgeable in their discipline, they are accessible, and they are engaging. One of the four can’t be used to differentiate between faculty: at an elite liberal arts college like Hamilton, all the faculty are skilled and knowledgeable. Thus, it’s the other three characteristics that make the difference. Taken together, they represent students’ reaction to teachers. And first impressions are important, for a discipline as much as for a person. An introductory teacher represents a whole field of study to a new student. A good teacher can remake a student’s entire career by drawing them into their field, while a single bad professor can keep a student from ever returning (47, 50-51).²

Close contact with faculty is essential to students’ well-being. Mentoring over the long term, whether from professors or from other figures like athletic coaches, is far more important than formal relationships with an assigned advisor. Good mentoring results in a virtuous cycle of success and attention. But even smaller gestures make significant differences. C&T found that, ten years later, students remembered and valued invitations to professors’ houses. This practice, though, may only be possible at smaller colleges within a particular geography and culture — urban universities, or large land-grant institutions, don’t offer this possibility (55-59).

It turns out that these relationships with peers, with faculty, and with a larger campus community are not merely pleasant, but are essential motivators in the learning process. By their junior years students are focusing on the specifics of their chosen discipline. They need to acquire skills, knowledge, and methods particular to those fields. This requires hard, concentrated work: “tasks [that] must be faced by each individual, and students studying alone seem to perform better than those working in groups.” The student might need to study alone for the deepest learning, but even then the community of peers and mentors provides important support (105-106).

To sum up, Chambliss and Takacs believe that “college works when it provides a thick environment of constant feedback, driven by the establishment and maintenance of social relations” (132). Later I’ll look at how those factors influence several topics covered in How College Works that are of particular interest to librarians: the teaching of skills, the importance of place, and assessment.