Lisa Hosler remembers crying when Juniata College hired her husband, Jay Hosler, to teach biology.
After living in Columbus, Ohio, where Mr. Hosler was a research fellow at Ohio State University, they both expected to hate life in a central Pennsylvania county that has fewer residents than Ohio State has undergraduates—a county where the public schools close for the first two days of deer season and cream-of-mushroom soup still figures in many recipes. They consoled themselves, Mr. Hosler says, by telling each other they could stand anything for a year.
“Within six months,” he says, “we had decided to stay.”
The college’s 110-member faculty welcomed them warmly. Huntingdon County turned out to have its charms, like Raystown Lake and a country store called Peight’s, where poppy seeds cost a fraction of what you would pay in a supermarket. They had two boys and bought a house. They joined the Stone Church of the Brethren, which adjoins the college’s campus. Jay Hosler says he’s not much of a believer, but he likes singing in the choir, and Lisa Hosler loves cooking for the church’s regular dinners.
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“Wherever we go, we know everybody, and our kids know everybody,” Lisa Hosler says, sliding another in a series of delicious homemade pizzas onto the dinner table. “I’m not leaving. Everything is close.”
Belle and Jim Tuten, the Hoslers’ dinner guests, are Juniata history professors who have brought their two boys along to play with the Hoslers’ boys, meaning that every so often, chaos races through the room and hijacks the conversation. Ms. Tuten says there were 11 babies born to faculty families in 2000, the year the Tutens’ older son, Tom, was born, and when a physics professor holds an annual faculty pig roast after graduation, “There are, like, 30 kids there.”
“We travel as a pack of wolves,” Mr. Hosler says of the faculty, and that’s one of the attractions of the place. The college’s visiting-artist series brings one event a month, and many faculty members attend. “We all put on our Sunday clothes,” he says. For $12, the four Hoslers had front-row seats when the Kronos Quartet played at the college recently, and son Max constructed a whole story about the quartet—in fact, he was so fascinated that they stayed for the second half of the concert even though it was past the boys’ bedtime.
“Not only do you see these things, but you see them with your friends,” Mr. Hosler says. And the next day you talk about whatever you saw. “It’s like chemistry in a little reaction chamber.”
Mr. Tuten puts it another way: “That liberal-arts ethic that we’re teaching, we live out in our community.”
Juniata, a 1,500-student liberal-arts college, was founded in 1876 by the Church of the Brethren but is now independent. It’s well respected but far from wealthy, with an endowment currently around $64-million. Its 110-acre main campus is well tended but without ostentation, except for a 1907 Carnegie Library that is now the college’s art museum. Otherwise the centerpieces are Founders Hall, which just got a makeover that earned it LEED gold certification for sustainability, and the 2002 Von Liebig Center, which provided new facilities for the college’s science departments.
Juniata’s facilities drew praise from employees who responded to The Chronicle’s third annual Great Colleges to Work For survey. They also praised the college for, among other things, its teaching environment, its senior leadership, and its collaborative governance model, as well as its efforts to help employees balance work with family life and its culture of respect and appreciation.
The college occupies a gentle rise above Huntingdon, a town of some 7,000 people in the mountains of central Pennsylvania that has managed to avoid having vacant storefronts downtown, but that also has a Walmart and a constellation of fast-food restaurants down on U.S. 22. Huntingdon has two other big institutions—J.C. Blair Memorial Hospital and a state prison—and is about a 45-minute drive away from either the scholarly and cultural resources of Penn State’s main campus, in State College, or the big shopping mall in Altoona.
“You’re only a native Huntingdonian if your grandfathers went to kindergarten together,” says James Lakso, Juniata’s provost, adding that Huntingdon is “a town with a college, rather than a college town.” Life doesn’t revolve around Juniata. Indeed, this is a fairly conservative county, politically as well as socially, and some local residents regard the college with a measure of mistrust that occasionally finds expression in the Comment Line feature of the newspaper, The Daily News.
“When I first taught my Islam course, I was accused of imperiling my students’ immortal souls” in the Comment Line, Ms. Tuten says. And Mr. Hosler, when he meets people for the first time, often just says he “works up at the college,” rather than saying he’s a neurobiologist.
Even so, school, church, summer activities, and volunteering weave Juniata’s faculty and staff members tightly into the community. Mr. Lakso, who taught economics for 27 years before becoming the provost, is on the hospital’s board, and some Juniata students tutor local schoolchildren. Timothy R. Launtz, the director of public safety and residential life and the quarterback coach for the football team, grew up a couple of blocks from the college and graduated with the Class of 1980. He was an administrator at the prison for 17 years before coming to work at the college, and he was chief of Huntingdon’s volunteer fire company for 14 years.
“Some people in town think we only cater to elite students,” he says, “but we do a really good job with first-generation students.” He also notes that the college’s tradition means it has no fraternities."We want to have a sense of community,” he says.
Indeed, that Brethren tradition seems to underlie a lot of what people say they like about working for Juniata—the respect with which people treat one another, for instance, and a becoming balance of accomplishment with modesty. The college doesn’t aspire to become a hot property in higher education so much as “to be the best Juniata we can be,” as Mr. Lakso, the provost, puts it.
But even the college’s biggest fans concede that it may be a better fit for some than for others. “We don’t have a lot of diversity, racially or ethnically,” says Mr. Lakso. “We’ve tried—I don’t think it was for lack of trying.” Athena Frederick, the registrar, is black. She says that while she has helped minority students deal with several racial incidents, within the campus community, everyone is as warm and open as can be. She also jokes that when her six-member family moved to Huntingdon from Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she had been registrar at Antioch College, they bumped Huntingdon’s black population “up to 3 percent” of the total. It was the lake and its promise of fishing that attracted her husband, she adds.
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Lake or no lake, nearly 96 percent of Huntingdon’s population is white. And families are paramount. Mr. Hosler says that while there’s an active organization for gay students, “our gay friends and colleagues who are happy are in committed relationships.” Ms. Tuten takes the thought one step further: “This is a very difficult place to be single.”
Being part of a couple offers some difficulties of its own, however. Mr. Lakso says Huntingdon doesn’t have a lot of good jobs for spouses. On several occasions, Juniata has let new faculty members split appointments with spouses who were seeking jobs in the same discipline. All but one of the spouses has now been hired for a full-time position, he says. (The couple that is still sharing an appointment prefers the arrangement because it fits their child-care needs.)
There’s a lot to like about working for Juniata, Mr. Lakso says. The president, Thomas R. Kepple Jr., “does a really good job of keeping people informed,” Mr. Lakso says, and “if people have something on their mind, they can say it.” The college also makes a point of minimizing the difference between the highest- and lowest-paid faculty members. He does wish, though, that he could offer faculty members more money for research and conferences. On the other hand, the college has come through the economic downturn without layoffs. Faculty members didn’t get raises last year, but this year they did.
David Hsiung, a history professor, has been at Juniata since 1991, and, like the Hoslers, he didn’t expect to stay. When he was hired, the college had only four outside phone lines, he recalls, and faculty members used Ditto masters to print syllabi and other information for classes.
“But I liked my colleagues, and that kept me from making an all-out search” for a new job, he says. Plus, “the students are good—the best are as good as the best I had as a TA at Michigan.” Mr. Hsiung’s biggest class has fewer than 40 students—it’s the popular “Comics and Culture,” which he offers with Mr. Hosler, the creator of numerous science-themed graphic novels.
Teaching also offers what Mr. Hsiung thinks of as “nonmonetary wages,” like a recent invitation to speak at a former student’s wedding. Joanne L. Krugh, Mr. Lakso’s assistant, makes a related observation: “Working with all the students and the young faculty members really keeps you in tune with what’s going on in the world. These kids keep you young.” Ms. Krugh, a Juniata employee since 1988, has served on the college’s sustainability committee and helps oversee events—as well as a candy bowl that can sometimes be a key aspect of faculty and administrative happiness. It is widely known, for instance, that the provost doesn’t like dark chocolate, so if that’s all you see in the bowl, it might not be a good day to ask him for something big.
There are other advantages to small-college careers, too. Michael D.P. Boyle came to Juniata eight years ago from the Medical College of Ohio, where he taught microbiology and immunology. Here he holds a professorship created by the donors of the college’s new science building to encourage a faculty member to work with students on research. He says he traded the cynicism of graduate students for the enthusiasm of undergraduates, and he especially enjoys seeing “that spark when students see the elegance of an experiment.”
In his previous job, he says, “You felt your sole function was to raise money. You got to the point of thinking, Why the hell am I doing this?” Worse, “in medical schools, it isn’t enough to be successful—you have to have your colleagues fail, as well.” At Juniata, instead of having lunch with colleagues whose failure might benefit him, he’ll find himself enjoying a meal with someone who teaches ceramics or Russian literature.
Mr. Boyle adds that he likes working at a college with Juniata’s sense of self-confidence. “There’s something very central Pennsylvania,” he says, “about living within your means and not trying to be something you’re not.”
