Old Main: Small Colleges in Twenty-first Century America

By Charles Blaich

Hollywood has long created movies that portray the comforting embrace, solid values, and quirky idiosyncrasies of small-town life. Think Hoosiers or It’s a Wonderful Life. While this cinematic theme may remain popular, the populace has gradually moved from its wide middle to the coasts. We have to ask, therefore, whether Americans truly value small towns as places to live and work, or if they’d rather visit the cineplex at the mall; sip a low-fat, no-foam, soy latte; and watch a movie about a small town. Samuel Schuman’s well written book Old Main: Small Colleges in Twenty-first Century America forces us to pose the same question about colleges and universities. When we conceptualize college, we may forever form a mental image of a small campus with a brick Old Main. But how many students and faculty really want to learn and work at such places?

Schuman states that, until recently, small colleges have been the “main thread” of American higher education and argues that, even if this is no longer true, small colleges are still interesting and educationally potent campuses. His rgument is founded on his experience as a small-college faculty member and administrator and is supported by interviews and information that he gathered in site visits to twelve very different institutions. The book documents the historical shift from the early 1800s, when all colleges and universities were small, to higher education modernity,” with its ever-increasing enrollments and concomitantly larger institutions. Schuman describes the fascinating range of missions, levels of prestige, Carnegie classifications, structures, and faculty in his group of small colleges and enlivens his narrative with individual interviews and stories.

I especially appreciate Schuman’s avoidance of the tired “liberal arts college, comprehensive university, research university” analytic box. Nonetheless, I question whether, behind all of the rich variability, the colleges he chooses to examine are joined by anything deeper than their size. Some of the data he uses to make his case that exceptional learning opportunities exist at smaller institutions suggest that they are not.

For example, Schuman uses data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), an annual survey of hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide about student participation in programs and activities. He argues that engagement at colleges in NSSE’s baccalaureate-liberal arts category is generally greater than it is at other kinds of institutions. This argument has two problems. First, although baccalaureate-liberal arts colleges tend to have higher NSSE scores than other kinds of institutions, only five of the colleges in Old Main fall into this category. Indeed, the majority of small institutions are not baccalaureate liberal arts colleges. Second, NSSE scores for each type and size of institution vary considerably. Although scores for small colleges are typically high, a number of small schools have lower scores than the average large institution. In fact, many large institutions outperform small institutions. In essence, from the NSSE perspective, small is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for promoting high levels of student engagement.

In the chapter “The Integrated Campus,” Schuman outlines the many extraordinary opportunities for rich and connected experiences at small institutions. Schuman sees small colleges as places where “physics majors are concert masters, philosophers are quarterbacks, and sometimes quarterbacks are concert masters.” He argues that more opportunities for integration arise at these institutions because of their enormous range of extra and co-curricular programs and small student bodies. Students and faculty members participate in multiple programs, mixing and blending in a way that, Schuman argues, creates a “hothouse atmosphere” in which multitasking students and faculty members can connect a diverse array of experiences. Participation is one thing, but intellectually integrating these activities into a deep understanding of the connecting strands is a greater challenge. Schuman does an able job of demonstrating the range of things that small-college students can do, but he provides little evidence that these institutions are helping students integrate those activities.

Schuman ends the book by introducing reflections on why small is good. He cites the argument made by sociologists Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman in their 1958 book Small Town in Mass Society that “small communities preserved a unique reservoir of values and relationships that remained precious within the large, impersonal world of urban mass culture.” He also includes the thesis of Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s 1973 Small Is Beautiful: “Man is small and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for gigantism is to go for self destruction.” Small-college advocates pick up on these themes when they describe their institutions as being “human scaled.” And yet, as someone who has joyfully taught at a small college for many years, I wonder if small really is the educational scale we prefer. Just as we initially bemoan the introduction of an “everything-under-one-roof, big-box” retailer into our towns and ultimately succumb to its low-price charms, large institutions that offer countless degree programs and extracurricular activities at a comparatively low cost are similarly hard to resist. This is especially true for students who are window shopping for careers and parents who are comparison shopping for bargains. Even at small colleges, the centrifugal force of economic efficiency leads us to outsource our maintenance staff, bookstores, Web portals, and data management systems to large companies and standardized systems.

In the face of these and many other forces that are “supersizing” aspects of higher education, Old Main is an important book for small-college people. It paints a rich picture of the exceptional things that small colleges can do when they are at their best, and in so doing, helps those of us who teach at and value these institutions to work more intentionally toward realizing our potential and making small colleges a more attractive alternative for students and faculty.

Blaich is director of inquiries at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College. His e-mail address is blaich@wabash.edu. 

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