Students from Lafayette College are cultivating new cash crops with subsistence farmers in Honduras, working with hurricane-devastated residents of New Orleans to attract businesses to the area, and drawing up plans to encourage arts-related tourism in their college town.
Such economic and civic engagement would be commonplace at land-grant universities and engineering schools. But it is far less familiar at liberal-arts institutions like Lafayette, which has embraced such work as a way to connect to outside constituencies and to demonstrate the value of a liberal-arts education.
The fledgling but vibrant effort, called the Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project, seeks to apply the breadth and depth of liberal learning to community engagement and economic outreach, by pulling students and faculty members from across departments to collaborate on projects that meet public needs and match civic ambitions. It has won kudos from the likes of former President Bill Clinton and cash from grant makers, such as the Andrew W. Mellon and Walmart Foundations.
The program allows students from disciplines as varied as art and economics to relate classroom lessons to real-world problems, working closely with faculty mentors in a distinctive approach to study.
“When you go off campus, when you have to pack a suitcase to go to Honduras, it adds a richness to the learning environment,” says Daniel H. Weiss, Lafayette’s president.
This kind of engaged scholarship, Mr. Weiss and other supporters believe, can help close the gap between ivory tower and public square, reinvigorating the relationship between higher education and the public.
“Too often there’s a disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and what’s happening out in society,” says Edward J. Kerns, a professor of art and a faculty adviser to the project. “We’ve lost touch with the public.”
Doing such work—which Lafayette hopes to expand to Appalachia and Jamaica—is “part of what it means to be a responsible citizen,” he says.
Taking a Different Approach
Lafayette is not alone in pursuing these types of projects.
A growing number of liberal-arts institutions are going to greater lengths in their outreach. Geography students at Macalester College, in Minnesota, have worked with the state historical society to map changes along a Minneapolis street that has been a magnet for generations of immigrants. Students taking Spanish at Carleton College, another Minnesota institution, serve as mentors to non-English-speaking public-school students. Allegheny College, in the foothills of western Pennsylvania, uses art to promote regional revitalization and beautification.
Like Lafayette, these colleges are part of Imagining America, a consortium that supports campus-community partnerships in the arts and humanities and encourages scholarship that contributes to the public good.
“Campuses shouldn’t have a hold on knowledge,” says Jan Cohen-Cruz, the group’s director and a professor at Syracuse University.
Imagining America’s ideas influenced Gladstone Fluney Hutchinson, an associate professor of economics at Lafayette and a former adviser to the Jamaican government on economic development and finance issues.
Mr. Hutchinson, who is on a three-year leave working in Jamaica as director-general of the country’s Planning Institute, had just finished a stint as dean of studies when he was approached in early 2007 by members of the college’s Engineers Without Borders chapter. (Lafayette is one of a handful of liberal-arts institutions with an engineering program.)
The student-engineers group had built a gravity-fed system to deliver potable water to Lagunitas, a tiny town in the remote Honduran highlands. But members worried that residents, whose meager harvest of corn and beans was barely enough to feed their families, lacked the financial resources to keep the system in good repair, says Joshua H. Smith, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and the group’s adviser. Knowing of Mr. Hutchinson’s interest in development work, they turned to him for help.
The request dovetailed with Mr. Hutchinson’s mounting belief that higher education must do a better job of preparing students to be what he calls global citizens, who use their education to engage with broader societal problems. “I had a sense,” he says, “that higher education needs to do more.”
Reaching an Agreement
Lafayette’s appealing campus is perched along a hillside above this Pennsylvania river town, a world away from Lagunitas. The Honduran village, accessible only by a dusty, pockmarked road that winds through scrubby mountains, is little more than a collection of dirt-floored, single-room homes. Workers typically earn just 50 lempiras, or about $2.60, a day.
“We wanted a way to better our community,” Porfirio Castro, a resident, says in a phone call, speaking through a translator. “But we needed assistance to do it.”
Mr. Castro and a dozen other Honduran farmers eventually decided to work with Mr. Hutchinson and his students, outlining an agreement on a ripped sheet of spiral-bound notebook paper. Endorsed with a line of inked thumbprints, serving as the signatures of the largely illiterate farmers, the dog-eared contract hangs in the student group’s small campus office.
In Lagunitas, and in subsequent projects, the Lafayette students pledged to listen and defer to local needs and priorities, rather than to impose their own solutions. That hasn’t always been easy. “Sometimes I think, ‘I go to college, and I know better than that,’” admits Nan Li, a junior who has worked in Honduras and New Orleans.
For the farmers of Lagunitas, the key was to find a profitable crop that would thrive in the high-altitude climate. Residents had previously tried to grow coffee, but the spindly plants had faltered, mainly because local farmers had little experience cultivating them. This time, the Lafayette group enlisted the help of the Honduran national coffee board, an organization that typically works with established growers, to provide technical advice on a 30,000-plant communal plantation.
The first beans were harvested in the past year, and earlier in the fall, the coffee-board representative who has been working with the Lagunitas farmers traveled to Pennsylvania and New York to network with coffee brokers. The meetings were facilitated by an coffee-shop owner in the college’s Easton, Pa., area, recruited to the project by Mr. Hutchinson.
Over the plants’ roughly 13-year life span, they could yield more than $240,000 in profits for the community, according to estimates by Lafayette economics students. The college group, which spent about $600 on seeds and fertilizer, will receive 10 percent of the profits but plans to put that money toward improvements at a Honduran school, says Richard B. Durham, a senior and the project manager.
In addition to the coffee crop, Lafayette students, who typically visit Honduras over school breaks and during the summer, have helped Lagunitas residents establish a poultry farm, to supply chicken and eggs to local markets, and set up a citrus garden, to diversify villagers’ diets and give the town’s young people practical experience in communal agriculture. They also have designed the village’s first community center, to be built by residents.
More Than ‘Handing Out Blankets’
The projects, however, are about more than good deeds.
“They’re not just handing out blankets,” says Michael A. Kelly, an assistant professor of economics who has advised the group. “There is real learning and teaching going on.”
For example, students involved in the Honduras project spent much of the summer drafting a lengthy academic paper, laying out the economic and sociological theories applied in Lagunitas, to be submitted to the Mellon foundation. Those working in Easton have produced both an economic-impact study, calculating the jobs and spending that could be spun off by arts-related tourism and commerce, and an engineering-design and cost estimate for transforming a former school-cum-municipal building into a cultural center.
Charles Klabunde, a local artist and advocate for the Easton arts project, says the students brought a fresh eye and new ideas. “They didn’t just come up with the same old mashed potatoes,” he says.
Ryan Flaherty is one of three engineering students who spent this past summer drawing up plans to turn the uninspiring office space, where drop ceilings and linoleum tiles obscure the building’s old bones, into a regional arts center, with galleries, an auditorium, and a striking glass entryway. A senior, he was told on a recent job interview that his Easton experience is “exactly what we want” in new hires.
Other students, too, attest to the intellectual impact of the work. Mr. Durham hopes to return to Honduras through a Fulbright grant after graduation. Ting Y. Chiu, a member of the Easton and New Orleans groups, earned a prestigious undergraduate public-policy fellowship at Princeton University this past summer. Another New Orleans team member, Katrina Ladd, a psychology major and a senior, designed an independent-study program based on her experience in the city, looking at the “collective id” and how communities can be brought together around common goals.
“We’re moving the classroom,” says Mr. Kerns, the art professor.
In fact, Jon Martin, a civil-engineering student, says his experience working on sustainable housing in New Orleans is more meaningful because of its real-world impact. “It motivates me more than any grade in a class would,” he says, adding he had just pulled an all-nighter on a community-based project.
With that level of commitment, the number of students involved in all three projects has remained small, about 35 students, out of Lafayette’s student body of 2,400. Participating students vet new members, looking for individuals who will be equally dedicated.
‘Being on the Edge of things’
One recent fall day, students and faculty members from the New Orleans project gathered around a paper-lined work table in the college’s visual-arts building, channeling the Big Easy through a meal of gumbo, po’ boys, and king cake.
The New Orleans effort has had, perhaps, the most moving parts, all centered in the badly battered Lower Ninth Ward. Students are designing prototypes for cost-effective, energy-efficient homes that could replace the thousands that were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by storm and flood. They have broken ground on urban farms and developed a carbon calculator to measure environmental impact in the low-lying area, which is especially vulnerable to climate change. They have advised local entrepreneurs about business start-ups and drafted a plan to attract a supermarket to the neighborhood, its first.
Charles Allen, vice chair of the board of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, says residents have identified a grocery chain and expect to sign an agreement soon. A store could open by next fall.
“We were pretty desperate about getting advice,” says Mr. Allen, who calls the Lafayette students “professional.” “No one else was coming to help us.”
Perhaps the most ambitious effort in New Orleans is to turn an abandoned public school into a community and arts center. Engineering students held a design charrette and drew up architectural plans. A major in international commerce examined the fiscal impact and fund-raising needs. Art students have advised on community-based arts programs, while those studying English have written reports for civic associations, philanthropies, and zoning boards.
One of the intellectual strengths of the Lafayette projects, Mr. Hutchinson argues, is bringing together students from various backgrounds and disciplines, who contribute different skills and can challenge one another’s ideas. Among the Honduras team members, for example, are Mr. Durham, a double major in economics and Spanish, and Hannah Rhadigan, who is earning a degree in studio art. She took her camera to Lagunitas, and her powerful portraits, dignified and haunting, are used to illustrate the effort’s effect in presentations and publications.
Faculty members involved in the projects also clearly relish the opportunity to break out of their academic specialities and work across disciplinary boundaries. Working in New Orleans with Mr. Hutchinson and David A. Veshosky, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, has led Mr. Kerns to examine the role of art in cultural preservation, economic development, and community building, he says.
“We can ask questions that we couldn’t ask alone in our disciplines,” Mr. Kerns says. “There’s nothing more powerful than being on the edge of things.”
Still, Ms. Cohen-Cruz, of Imagining America, notes that many colleges do not recognize the importance of multidisciplinary research or of academic work that happens outside of the classroom or laboratory. In fact, tenure-and-promotion policies can penalize faculty members for pursuing such work.
“Absolutely, people still don’t see the value,” she says. “They don’t like it—they’re afraid it waters down scholarship.”
At Lafayette, however, the benefits of interdisciplinary and community-based learning and research are emphasized in the college’s strategic plan, says Wendy L. Hill, provost and dean of the faculty. Professors are encouraged to team teach—Mr. Kerns, for example, led a course in art, neuroscience, and consciousness with a colleague from the biology department.
And the college has numerous opportunities for students to engage in applied learning. Its “tech clinics” assign groups of students from different majors to specific problems in the community or on campus, such as how to make use of uneaten food at the dining halls. Lafayette’s Landis Center matches students with service-learning opportunities.
Liberal-arts colleges should be good at this type of learning, Ms. Hill argues, because of their mission to turn out students who can think broadly and deeply. “It’s at the core of a liberal-arts education,” she says.
How Lafayette College Pays for Real-World Learning
Lafayette College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project has remained relatively modest in size, anchored in three sites: one local (the college’s hometown, Easton, Pa.), one national (New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward), and one international (Lagunitas, Honduras).
The project does hope to expand, however, to Appalachia and to Jamaica, where its chief faculty adviser, Gladstone Fluney Hutchinson, is on leave to serve as director-general of the country’s Planning Institute.
Likewise, the project’s costs have been minimal. Aside from purchasing basic supplies, such as bricks to build a new community center in Honduras, its main expense has been airfare, Mr. Hutchinson says.
To cover those costs, the project has cobbled together grants from the college with awards from:
Office of the Provost, Lafayette College, $25,000 and $5,000 (separately).
Hunsicker Entrepreneurship Studies program (at Lafayette), $45,000.
Clinton Global Initiative University/Wal-Mart Foundation, $2,500.
Kathryn Wasserman-Davis Foundation, $10,000.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, $10,000.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $20,000.
