Washington College Magazine
What Is the Ideal Size for Washington College?
College President Baird Tipson talks with students about their learning experiences, which they say are shaped by caring faculty who help them develop a personalized course of study with field experiences, internships, study abroad and other academic enrichment opportunities that suit their individual needs.
Photo: markswisher.com
The College's strategic plan calls for WC to remain small while enhancing its facilities and its academic and student life programming. Photo: Brian Palmer, Multimedia Production Center
By President Baird Tipson
This is the first in a series of essays in which President Tipson talks about the purpose of the liberal arts and Washington College's approach to educating young people.
When I speak to groups of Washington College alumni, particularly those who graduated before the mid-1990s, I'm almost always asked, "How big is the College now, anyway?" I've come to understand that the question is rarely purely about size; our alumni want to know how much the College has changed since their time, how much continuity they would recognize between the College they knew and the College in the first decade of the 21st century. So hope it will comfort alumni readers to know that our first question is never, "How big should we be?" Our deliberations always begin with a different kind of question: "How can we provide the very best educational experiences to young men and women; how can we prepare them for professional success in an increasingly competitive environment; how can we assist them to become responsible citizens in their local, national and global communities?" Only then do we ask, "What size should Washington College be in order to promote these outcomes most effectively?"
Since its foundation in the earliest years of the American republic, Washington College has never strayed from the belief that the best education is personalized education, by which we mean education offered in an environment that not only enables but virtually forces constant one-on-one interchange between a student and her instructors, her coaches and not least her fellow students. It is no accident that memories of these relationships dominate conversation at alumni gatherings. "How is Professor So-and-So, Coach and-Dean and-Sorority-Sister So-and-So?" When alumni tell me stories, they're rarely about Aristotle or differential equations. They remember late-night conversations, dialogues in a faculty member's office, how their teammates supported them in a difficult situation. used to worry about this; why did alumni seem more interested in Professor So-and-So's funny outfits than in the English literature course he taught?
But I've come to understand that people learn best in situations where what they learn is connected to other people, that students will learn more English literature from an engaged and engaging professor than from a book (or a computer software program). And almost always find that the people who ask about Professor and-So have kept the interest in English literature that he nurtured years ago.
We don't forget our commitment to personalized education when we do our planning. To take one small example, we want all of our academic buildings to be close enough together that a student or faculty member can always walk from any one to any other in the time we allow between classes: ten minutes. We don't want to isolate science majors so far from our theaters, for example, that they won't routinely encounter drama majors and drama faculty. Even our residence halls will remain at most a ten-minute walk from the academic core.
One could take this line of thinking to its extreme and argue, as President James Garfield famously did, that the best possible education would be one faculty member teaching one student (the faculty member in Garfield's case being Williams College President Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and the student on the other). But no one faculty member can conceivably offer the breadth of instruction required for a robust undergraduate education today. College needs a variety of academic departments, each populated by faculty members able to offer both general and specialized courses. It needs to prepare its graduates rigorously in their major discipline so that those who wish to continue their education can compete for places in the finest graduate programs.
I doubt there is a department on campus that would hesitate to argue that an additional faculty member, teaching an additional array of courses, would strengthen the quality of its major. Taking this line of thinking to its extreme yields departments the size of those at Ohio State, whose English Department alone has more members than our entire faculty. Upon reaching that size, and long before it, a college abandons the hope that department members will come to know their majors as whole persons after teaching them in several classes and encountering them frequently in their offices. But what is the right balance between more and more faculty expertise and less and less regular contact with students?
Of course, we don't operate in a financial vacuum. Personalized education is expensive, and we have to pay for it. A college of 500 needs one president, one registrar, one head librarian; so does a college of 5,000. Economies of scale, spreading the fixed administrative costs over more students, makes good business sense. Can College, at about 1,300 undergraduates, afford to forego the additional tuition that an extra 500 students would provide? Other good liberal arts colleges claim to provide a personalized education at 2,000 students or even more.
After much discussion in our recent Strategic Planning process, we have reached the decision that our present size is the right size; we will remain at roughly 1,300 for at least the next five or six years. During that time, we will continue to improve our physical facilities, strengthen our faculty and staff, and continue to attract the strongest students. But because we cannot predict the future, we are allowing for the possibility that the College might someday grow. We have asked our campus Master Planners, the firm of Ayers Saint Gross, to imagine our physical plant needs if we grew to 1,800 and to help us avoid constructing a building or a road that might need to be torn down in ten or fifteen years. Ayers Saint Gross believes that we could accommodate— snugly—a student body of 1,800 on our present campus (recognizing that the land we have recently acquired on the other side of Route 291 provides additional flexibility).
Whether we are a College of 900, as we were a decade ago, of 1300 as we are today and for some years to come, or at some other number in the indefinite future, Washington College's first commitment will remain what it has been for 225 years: to provide the finest possible education in an environment deliberately designed to bring students, faculty and staff together in face-to-face encounters that promote the best possible intellectual and personal growth.
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