Recreating a College by Recreating the Student Experience

Transforming A College:

The Story Of a Little-Known College's

Strategic Climb to National Distinction

George Keller

117 pp. Johns Hopkins University Press (2004), $26.95

The place of a small liberal arts school rests in the quality of student life. The mammoth universities will have facilities as good as those in the small colleges, but the behemoth institutions cannot provide the life style, the nurturing environment…. Elon College knows this and is doing something about it. —President J. Fred Young, Elon College, 1974, quoted in Transforming a College, pp. 7–8

The Creation of an appealing environment for student learning can lead to institutional transformation. This is the message of George Keller's Transforming a College: The Story of a Little-Known College's Strategic Climb to National Distinction, a rather short, highly readable new book. Keller describes how, in only three decades, Elon University evolved from what some would characterize as an afterthought on the higher education landscape in both North Carolina and nationally into a highly regarded institution of higher learning, enrolling students from forty-six states and forty countries. Elon's story provides a number of lessons on the importance of focusing on the student experience as a means of creating real institutional change.

The metaporphosis of Elon College began with a decision by President J. Fred Young to “do something about” the environment for learning at Elon. For him, doing something about Elon's environment meant building a culture that engaged students in their learning. Although the term student engagement was not part of the vernacular in higher education when Young began his tenure at Elon, he understood how student engagement could promote learning and remake a college.

It must be confounding to outsiders of the academy that faculties and administrators encounter so much difficulty when they attempt to define the terms of student engagement. The debate on the ideal composition of a curriculum, for example, has never been and probably never will be settled. At Elon, when the faculty and staff examined student engagement, they directed much of their initial attention to means for connecting students to the institution through activities outside the classroom. They ultimately selected several areas of emphasis that became known as Elon Experiences.

Elon's venues for involvement—internships, volunteer service, leadership development, and study abroad—are now cornerstones of the student experience and have come to define the culture of the insti-tution. These opportunities reinforce and expand on curricular learning, promote experiential learning, and fortify the bonds between Elon students and their col-lege. As Keller describes it, these cornerstone opportunities help sustain a distinctive campus climate, and their effectiveness has been documented through the findings of the National Survey on Student Engagement and by the college's improved retention and graduation rates. In recent years, a fifth Elon Experience, undergraduate research, has been added to the menu of opportunities for students. Together, these five student experiences frame learning at Elon and have created a new paradigm for cocurricular involvement.

These changes are what President Young envisioned when he said, “We chose four values—work, service, leadership, and cultural understanding—and made them the modern college's equivalent of old-time religious inculcation” (p. 21).

Young must have known that engaging students sells. Before long, Elon's campus culture attracted considerable interest among those in and outside of education. Over time, the general college-going public took notice, Elon's identity changed, and it became a “hot college.”

THIS BOOK DEMONSTRATES HOW THE RIGHT KIND OF MARKETING CAN LEAD TO GOOD PEDAGOGY, AND THE RIGHT KIND OF PEDAGOGY CAN LEAD TO GOOD MARKETING.

Three years ago, my neighbor's youngest child selected a college. At the time, his sister was a student at an Ivy League institution with a national reputation. The college he chose to attend was seven hundred miles away and one that I was barely aware of at the time—Elon.

As I was reading Transforming a College, I received a telephone call from a college classmate who was getting ready to take his eldest son on campus tours. He wanted to know what I knew about the college at the top of his list, Elon, a mere eight hundred miles or so from their home in Massachusetts. Based on what I was reading, I was not surprised.

What interested these students in Elon, I discovered, was its beautiful campus; its new academic village, featuring residence halls arranged around a quadrangle and classrooms; and the level to which students seemed to be truly involved in their learning.

In Transforming a College, Keller suggests that establishing a culture of engagement has become a necessary condition for gaining positive public attention. While the traditional connotations of marketing are greeted with derision in higher education, Transforming a College demonstrates how the right kind of marketing can lead to good pedagogy, and the right kind of pedagogy can lead to good marketing.

The Promise of Engagement appeals to students; they want to belong to something. They want to be active and involved. Americans typically understand that undergraduate learning is a product of the full range of collegiate experiences, and Elon has capitalized on this notion. Keller describes nothing that takes place at Elon that couldn't take place elsewhere. In fact, educators can learn from the experience of what is now Elon University that regardless of institutional size, type, or administrative vision, the capacity to change is predicated on the ability of those who seek change to forge collaborative working relationships with a variety of constituencies. One learns from the Elon story that while its metamorphosis began with the vision of one leader, change was accomplished when that leader was able to enlist a cadre of individuals to support that vision.

Transforming a College describes the importance of building Elon Experiences from relationships between students and the worlds of work and civic needs. It also illustrates the importance of collaborative work across campus divisions and of creating an inclusive institutional governance structure. The book describes the myriad ways in which Elon reinforces student involvement in the life of the campus beyond class attendance, assignment completion, and acquisition of course content.

Fortunately for the reader, Transforming a College is not merely a triumphant institutional history in which all of the rough edges have been sanded away. The book is commendable for its honest depiction of institutional development. It is a candid portrayal of a college that prides itself on academic rigor and emphasizes the role of the cocurriculum in student retention and the development of a distinctive campus culture. It demonstrates how institutional leaders can operationalize institutional values in unforced and unambiguous ways. And finally, it gives hope to those of us who aspire to offer students a truly integrated collegiate experience that transcends administrative compartmentalization and bureaucratic inertia.