 |
 |
 |
 |
| ||||
|
 |
|
 |
The World, in St. Paul When Krista Goff arrived at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., four years ago, her passport was all but empty. The Seattle native had been out of the United States just once, and that was to visit nearby Canada. But during her junior year, she spent a semester abroad in the former Soviet Union, splitting her time between Siberia and St. Petersburg, where she lived with an Armenian community. Her interviews with them, conducted in Russian, formed the basis for the honors thesis project on transnational identity that the triple major in Russian, history, and Russian, Central, and Eastern European studies wrote her senior year. During her final semester this past spring, Goff co-organized a conference on Central Asia that brought five scholars to Macalester to demystify the little-known region. You believe her when she says, "I've never felt limited here, ever."
In spite of its small size, Macalester promises its students no less than the world. The school was founded by Minnesota's first state superintendent of education in 1874 to provide a midwestern alternative to elite East Coast colleges. Since the mid-1970s, though, the school has emphasized internationalism, multiculturalism, and service to society. (One of its most famous graduates is United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, class of '61 and a native of Ghana.) Today, students must take at least one course each in international affairs and U.S. cultural diversity to graduate. A whopping 18 percent of the college's students come from abroad, representing 86 countries and speaking at least 80 languages. (They're drawn, in part, by Macalester's generous financial aid, which for international students averages almost $26,000 off the $34,000 price tag.) The school also enrolls a high percentage of American students who've studied overseas--at international schools, for example, or through the United World College system, a group of international boarding schools that sends so many graduates to Mac that the cliquishness of the UWC crowd is a perennial topic of discussion. (This may be because Macalester doesn't have any fraternities or sororities to complain about.) More than half of Mac students study abroad for a semester or more, and many others escape Minnesota's frigid January with department-led study trips organized around topics like the geology of volcanoes in Costa Rica and black culture in Paris.
Global. Signs that the college celebrates multiculturalism abound on its compact campus, located in a leafy residential neighborhood 4 miles from downtown St. Paul. The powder-blue flag of the United Nations flies from the same pole as the Stars and Stripes in the center of the school, and the food in the cafeteria is organized geographically, with different stations serving cuisine of the "East" (noodles and wraps), "West" (American sandwiches), "North" (roast beef and vegetables), and "South" (curries and Latin American dishes). But here, embracing internationalism goes beyond ethnic eats. Professors strive to get students to make connections between what's happening abroad and life in the United States while Mac's busy community-service center helps more than half of the college's students volunteer with organizations dealing with local versions of international issues like poverty, immigration, and underemployment. These lessons in globalism seem to stick. "When I first got to Macalester, I [thought], 'If this isn't a load of Kumbaya bulls - - -, I don't know what is. When [these students] come back for their fifth reunion, they'll be investment bankers,'" says Duchess Harris, an associate professor and chair of the American studies department. "[But] these people come back, and they've changed the world." Discussions about changing the world begin as early as freshman year. Simone King, an African-American student from Staten Island, N.Y., and last year's student government president, recalls hanging out with other freshmen during her first weekend on campus. The international students in the group quickly plunged into sophisticated political conversation, discussing brain drain in developing countries, the treatment of women worldwide, and how to create unity among African nations. "I wasn't prepared," says King. "I didn't know the issues. So I did a lot of listening. But then I realized, I've got to catch up, because I've got to play a part in this." That semester, King, a 2004 graduate now earning a master's degree in international studies and diplomacy at the London School of Economics, spent extra time reading up on current events "just so I could have conversations with other people."
Macalester students' heightened sensitivity to political issues--and the ease with which they discuss them--is evident in just about any class on campus. One spring morning, for example, history Prof. David Itzkowitz asks students in The Victorians, a seminar he teaches with English Prof. Robert Warde, to consider whether Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "A Study in Scarlet" exhibits Victorian-era values. "It shows their fascination with violent crime," says a woman sitting next to Itzkowitz at the large table around which the entire class--eight students and two profs--is gathered. "But there's a lot of nationalism going on here. [The crimes involve] Americans, Germans. So it's not English." "Is there a politics to this book?" Itzkowitz probes. "It's anti-Mormon," suggests another student. "They're depicted as sexually depraved. That's very Victorian--to vilify people they don't understand." Macalester often feels more like a research institute bent on solving the world's problems than a college catering to undergraduates. While the cultural hippie look holds sway here--a blond in a salwar kameez, the long tunic and loose pants worn by Indian and Pakistani women, doesn't elicit stares--the men with Prince Valiant haircuts and women with dreadlocks are fresh-scrubbed and earnest. And the quiet campus, which features century-old stone structures and modern glass-walled buildings arranged around three quadrangles, is as immaculately maintained as an embassy compound. Motivate. This think-tank atmosphere is further promoted by the school's emphasis on individualized learning. Self-motivated students tackle honors theses, independent study projects, and research underwritten by college grants. Brady Foreman, a class of 2004 geology major from St. Paul, doesn't believe he could have written his honors thesis, a geochemical analysis of 80 million-year-old volcanic ash beds in Montana, anywhere else. For starters, Foreman's topic grew out of an informal visit that his adviser, geology department Chairman Ray Rogers, paid him at a dinosaur dig site. Rogers was in Montana on unrelated business and remembered that the then sophomore from his department was at the dig, "so he stopped by," Foreman says. "We kind of noticed [the ash beds] . . . and decided it might be a cool project to work on." Back at Mac, more professors helped Foreman find funding to return to Montana to collect ash samples and later taught him new methods of analyzing them. Foreman doesn't think this could have happened at a larger school.
Still, Macalester is not as inclusive as it would like to be. "There's a lot of talk of Macalester students being really open-minded," says Kramer Lawson, a senior economics and political science major from Seattle, "but in practice they're open-minded to a lot of politically radical ideas and not really open-minded when it comes to considering a moderate point of view." In spring 2003, for example, the Macalester Republicans, a group of just eight to 10 regular members, organized a cookout of "freedom dogs" on campus to demonstrate support for the war in Iraq. Posters made to advertise the event disappeared from a campus resource room and were mysteriously replaced with antiwar fliers; once the cookout began, war protesters who had erected a "peace camp" tent city in front of the student center abandoned their sleeping bags to picket the tiny barbecue. Yet Lawson would enthusiastically recommend his college to other conservatives. For one thing, he says, most faculty members welcome different points of view. "I've had a couple of professors in the political science department, which has a pretty liberal tilt, say, 'I'm glad you were in the class because it enriched the debate and made things more interesting.'"
Another, more surprising, deficiency for a school that so celebrates cultural diversity is the relative scarcity of American minorities, who make up just 10.5 percent of the student body. The campus is less diverse now than it was in the 1970s. Restoring a racial mix has been a focus of student activism in recent years, and administrators have invested in several initiatives designed to increase Macalester's appeal. These include a brand-new academic department called American Studies: Comparative Racial Formations that studies racial identity in the United States, and the Lealtad-Suzuki Center, which opened in 2002 and runs programs that provide structured opportunities for students and faculty to talk about race. This commitment to multiculturalism may already be paying off. The admissions office expects the class entering this fall to be among the most diverse in 30 years, with more than 20 percent of the students American minorities, including 7 percent African-Americans. But between save-the-world projects, dorm-room debates, and conferences on international affairs, do Macalester students ever switch off? On one of the first warm days of the year, some lanky guys play Frisbee on the central quad. But it soon becomes clear that at Macalester the lines between work and fun blur. The guys are seriously discussing their recent applications for research funding. "I don't know if they liked all of my proposal," says one as he casually executes an under-leg toss, "but I'm pretty confident that they'll go for part of it."
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright 2004 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. Reprinted with permission. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
