While Bates has offered a three-year option for 40 years, an undergraduate education is hard to speed up, says Hansen. “I think too much in our culture is about doing things faster and simpler and easier. And what we can’t let go of in higher education is that slower is actually better when it comes to learning.”

Hansen joined Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University;  Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on education reform; and Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and former assistant secretary of education under Lamar Alexander. View story from Newsweek, Oct. 26, 2009.

To explore another avenue through which students can play a more engaged role in this initiative, I offered a 2007 Short Term course using peer editing. In this form of collaboration, students form small groups outside class time to share their work through various stages of revision. To guide us we took Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers, which provocatively argues that students of writing can learn more from working with each other than from teachers or experts. Elbow’s method helps aspiring writers tackle the toughest part of writing: actually communicating to their readers, or “getting things inside someone else’s head,” as Elbow puts it.

Participants in our peer editing groups were charged above all to take each other’s writing very seriously, but not to judge it. Readers strove to show not what’s right and wrong, but what they saw, heard, and felt. This sounds easy and even undisciplined, but anyone who tries it will learn otherwise. A formidable task, it exacts generosity and selflessness on the part of readers and courage on the part of writers.

The power of this kind of peer editing comes from the underlying principles of what Elbow calls the “believing game,” best understood as the complement and opposite of critical thinking, or the “doubting game.” A significant intellectual tool and the cornerstone of a liberal arts education, the doubting game orders us to look for the error in each assertion, flexing the firm muscles of debate and argumentation. It also tells us to hold what we often refer to as our subjectivity — our fears and our wishes, preconceptions, experiences, and commitments — to one side.

The believing game is played with different rules. After collecting as many assertions and opinions as possible, the more diverse the better, we consider that each might be true. We rigorously scrutinize them first for their strengths, not their weaknesses. To comprehend those strengths fully, moreover, we try to share the experience of the person who brought the idea forward. The believing game thus asks for the opposite of objectivity, requiring what Elbow calls “not an act of self-extrication, but an act of self-insertion, self-involvement — an act of projection” that expands our frame of reference.

A peer-editing process grounded in believing does not offer shortcuts to producing an elegant essay or a compelling report; if anything, going back to the computer and producing that final version is more complicated and time consuming, because our minds are full of so many more and different ideas and perspectives than we began with. And ultimately we edit and rewrite alone, organizing thoughts, finding words, crafting sentences, and building coherent paragraphs into a cogent argument all by ourselves.

Students in my Short Term course described the peer-editing process as a journey marked by uncertainty, growth, new relationships, and emerging confidence. In a journal entry, Vasey Coman ’10 of Winters, Calif., noted how people voiced frank criticisms with respect: “They were nice about telling me that they could hardly understand entire pieces of my paper!” It was as if “I was their grandmother and they were treating me in the careful, delicate way grandmothers should be treated.”

Sarah Davis ’10 of Great Falls, Va., wrote that “taking more risks and becoming more vulnerable…[is] a messy process. Just like newborn deer, we’re wobbly with our first steps.” But soon, “everyone took it in stride.”

Understandably, students still cared what their teacher thought. Jake Lewis ’09 of Katonah, N.Y., appreciated the group’s progress but worried that “I’m still not going to make the improvements the president/professor wants.”

But ultimately Jake and his peers took responsibility for that final draft. Rachel Kurzius ’10 of Ridgewood, N.J., compared the experience to finding oneself in a “maze with thousands of possibilities for reaching the center…. We all explained our preferred routes, but only the author could really decide which turns to make.”

To guide students through the maze of possibilities within and beyond their disciplines, Bates teachers present an array of intellectual tools. Bates students, in turn, are ready and able to enter into the perspectives of others in order to test, strengthen, and communicate their own ideas.

By Elaine Tuttle-Hansen

Bates and Mount Holyoke colleges have received a grant of $65,000 to fund the development of teaching tools in bioinformatics — the use of computing technology in biological research, such as gene mapping.

The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of digital technology to enrich liberal-arts education, awarded the grant to the two colleges. The funds will support a three-part program that will enable faculty, staff and students from Bates, Mount Holyoke and other schools to develop course modules that make bioinformatics resources accessible to students.

The first part of the program is a two-day workshop at Mount Holyoke in May, in which staff from the National Center for Biotechnology Information will explain the use of existing bioinformatics tools and resources, such as its “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool,” a powerful, very complex search engine used in genomics and other biological research.

A retreat at Bates in June will allow faculty, information-technology staff and students from several schools to adapt information from the NCBI workshop for use in specific courses. The aim is to develop “toolkits” that will introduce such resources as BLAST to undergraduate students.

The third piece in the program is the publication of these teaching tools for broad academic use.

The two colleges applied for $35,000, but NITLE was impressed enough by the proposal that it offered an additional $30,000. Where participation in the Bates retreat program was originally intended to be limited to New England schools, the additional funds have allowed Bates and Mount Holyoke to give it a national scope.

The funding hike “widens the audience and widens the possibility of projects, so it was an excellent development,” says Michael Hanrahan, assistant director and instruction coordinator for Information and Library Services at Bates. “It’s a vote of confidence that speaks well to the combined talent and ability of the technical staffs and faculty” at the two colleges.

The grant comes as Bates plans the creation of a digital imaging center that will serve both the science and visual art curriculums. The center will provide, among other enhancements, highly advanced resources for research and the representation of data in the sciences.

Author of the award-winning book Transforming Knowledge (Temple University Press, 2004), Elizabeth Minnich offers a talk titled From Ivory Tower to Tower of Babel? Liberal Arts Education and the Quest for Shareable Grounds at 4 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 20, in Chase Lounge, Bates College, Campus Avenue.

The visit by Minnich, a senior fellow in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Global Initiatives at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, is sponsored by the Harward Center of Community Partnerships as part of the examination of general education at Bates. The lecture is open to the public at no cost.

In a world in which boundaries of many kinds are ever more permeable, Minnich says, liberal arts institutions such as Bates are asked to do more and more: prepare their students for an increasingly globalized culture and economy; turn “diversity” from a problem into a valued resource; and develop the essential skills of mind and habits of the heart for all these tasks.

Such institutions are also asked to provide a time and place for research and reflection, and support practices of engagement on and off campus in service to the public good. “We cannot keep adding to what we do,” she says. “How, then, are we to locate core commitments that may allow us to create shareable ground that is neither too narrow nor too scattered and superficial?”

Just released in an expanded second edition, Minnich’s Transforming Knowledge received the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Frederick W. Ness Award for “best book in liberal learning” in 1990.

Minnich has served higher education in different roles at a variety of liberal arts institutions as well as through her writing, speaking, special projects, board memberships and consulting. She has published in scholarly journals, serves on the editorial boards of six academic journals and is series editor for The New Academy, a Temple University Press series of anthologies focused on contemporary critical, creative scholarship and teaching.

Her consulting work has taken her to more than 100 colleges, universities and independent schools, and she has worked with the Ford, Kettering and Carnegie foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other philanthropic organizations.

As an academic administrator on the undergraduate level, she has been a dean or director at Sarah Lawrence, Hollins, Barnard and Lang (formerly the New School) colleges. She has also been a dean at Union Institute & University’s Graduate College for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, and has taught at all of these institutions.

Minnich earned her master’s degree and doctorate in philosophy from the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of New School University in New York, where she was teaching assistant for Hannah Arendt. She wrote her dissertation on John Dewey and continues to work on issues of democracy and education, with particular focus on inclusive scholarship, curricula, teaching and institutional practices.

In the most recent edition of The Hidden Ivies:Thirty Colleges of Excellence, Bates is praised for its service-learning opportunities and its consistent top-10 ranking for student participation in international study. It notes that about two-thirds of Bates graduates earn graduate degrees, and includes this summary comment from an administrator on alumni survey findings: “For a college with a long-standing reputation in the sciences, we were surprised to discover we had more graduates whose title was ‘entrepreneur,’ having founded their own businesses, than graduates who were M.D.s”

In the U.S. News & World Report 2003 edition of America’s Best Colleges, Bates is ranked 22nd among 217 liberal arts colleges. The factors the magazine considers include peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and graduation rate performance. This year, U.S. News introduced a new ranking of select schools with outstanding examples of academic programs that lead to student success. In a category called Senior Capstone, Bates ranked eighth: ” . . . these culminating experiences ask students nearing the end of their college years to create a project of some sort that integrates and synthesizes what they’ve learned.”

The only “cool” school from Maine to make the grade, Bates is ranked 45th among the nation’s 50 “coolest colleges” in the October 2002 issue of Seventeen magazine. The Seventeen list features “the 50 schools where girls can get the best college education. We want you to have the knowledge and insight to help make a choice that you can live with for four years—and that unlocks the power an education in the right environment can inspire.” Among those qualities defined as “cool” by the magazine’s editors: “level of professors’ involvement in undergrad work, campus security and easy access to great shopping.” Keeping the audience in mind, they also cited “easy access to great boys.”

The 29th edition of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges leads with this undergraduate’s remarks about Bates: “Batesies make Bates great.” Lauding the faculty, another student said, “You will never meet a more helpful or sincere group of concerned individuals.”

The 2003 Princeton Review: The Best 345 Colleges offers a variety of top-20 lists based on student responses to a series of surveys. The guide’s ratings for Bates include Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates (11th). “The happy students of Bates College agree that ‘Bates is the small academic atmosphere every liberal arts school brags about,’” says the guide, adding, “Students’ primary source of pride is the faculty, which is ‘exceptional. I’m taking introductory classes and my profs are all Ph.D.s from Harvard, Yale and Tufts.’”

The Fiske Guide to Colleges 2003 notes that the Lewiston-Auburn area “provides plenty of internships and part-time jobs, a distinct vocational advantage not always found at such at such small colleges.” The guide’s listing concludes with these quotes from Bates students: “‘Bates has a strong sense of community, and students here look out for one another socially and academically,’ says a political science major. One freshman is sold. ‘It’s a fun place,’ the student says. ‘People just seem happy here.’”

Written by economist Howard Bodenhorn of Lafayette College, the annual study, Economic Scholarship at Elite Liberal Arts Colleges Are Other Economists Paying Attention? measures the influence of 439 economists at the 50 top liberal arts colleges, as identified in U.S. News & World Report. Bodenhorn concluded “Although prominent economists at elite research universities produce the most influential scholarship, economists at the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges make significant contributions to the literature.” Ranking the publication record not by the number or books and articles, but by the frequency with which others cite their work, the study seeks to measure the quality and influence of the department’s scholarly output, rather than its quantity.

David A. Aschauer, the Elmer W. Campbell Professor of Economics at Bates, was the top-ranked full professor among liberal arts colleges. A former Federal Reserve senior economist, Aschauer has taught at Bates since 1989. His teaching and research interests center on macroeconomics, financial markets and public finance.

Associate Professor James W. Hughes, chair of the Bates economics department, ranked ninth in quality-adjusted citations and 11th overall among associate professors. Hughes has taught at Bates since 1992. His research centers on the economic analysis law, labor economics and health economics.

According to Bodenhorn’s findings, the 10 most productive liberal arts economics departments in the 1990s were Wellesley, Bates, Wesleyan, Colby, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Smith, Lafayette and Swarthmore.

The endowed Thomas Sowell Professorship in Economics was made possible though a gift from Bates College trustee and alumnus Joseph T. Willett of the class of 1973 and his wife, Janice. The professorship will bring visiting scholars to Bates for a semester at a time.

“The relentless search for the truth and the courage to express it despite its occasional unpopularity distinguishes Thomas Sowell,” Joseph Willett said as the professorship was dedicated at the college recently. “Sowell’s writing reveals a great and real compassion for people – but one rooted in facts, not merely lofty sentiments.”

Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

“It is a special source of personal gratification that this is all being done at a leading liberal arts college, for these colleges represent, to me, the finest in American higher education,” Sowell said in acknowledging the professorship named in his honor.

Bates College President Donald W. Harward said that establishing the Sowell professorship “will reinforce Bates’ centrality in defining and expressing the value and character of a liberal education, and will take to a new level the college’s quality and commitment to the exchange of ideas and perspectives.”

The economics faculty at Bates College combines a deep commitment to teaching undergraduates with active careers in scholarship. A recent Journal of Economic Education article on economics departments at liberal arts colleges ranked Bates second in the nation on faculty members’ production of high quality scholarly work.

Read the story here.