Wisconsin Experimental College

Abstract

In 1927 Alexander Meiklejohn founded the Experimental College (Ex-college) at the University of Wisconsin. It was a program that strived to provide an education that would enrich students and create citizens. It threw contemporary structure aside and challenged higher education. There were no formal grades and the faculty lived in the same building as the students. Its uniqueness attracted adversity and in 1932 cost cuts shut it down. The program itself only lasted five years but the philosophy behind it persists in learning communities throughout the country.

Wisconsin Experimental College

In the mid-1920s was undergoing a new wave of criticism. Abraham Flexner had started printing his critiques the decades prior and in response visionaries of higher education were immerging. The traditional student had reached the average age of 18-22, and the curriculum has been broken up into courses for credit hours that add up to a major and a degree. While this set up sounds similar to what we see now, one of the defining differences is that, at this point in history, there are no general education requirements. This caused several critics to question the purpose and practicality of college. Some claimed that college had no purpose aside from preparing for graduate school and that young men who were interested in work would be wasting their time in a university.

Alexander Meiklejohn was one of the most exciting visionaries of the time. He decided to address the issues in American higher education with a food metaphor. He called the contemporary learning model the cafeteria education. Allowing students to choose their own food is not going to ensure that they have a healthy diet. They quickly end up with too much protein and not enough vitamins. He decided to start an experimental college to work on reforming the education model. It was a lack of funding and the young, ambitious, and new President of the University of Wisconsin Glenn Frank that convinced Meiklejohn to associate his experiment with an institution.

Meiklejohn aimed to change more than just the curriculum; he was challenging the entire setup and structure of higher education. He believed that college should engage students as citizens so they could participate in democracy, but he believed that higher education did just the opposite and in actuality was fostering apathy and indifference. “Envisioning a small college where instructors and students would be colleagues, Meiklejohn proposed a school in the nature of an experiment where traditional notions of curriculum standards and teaching methods would be abolished in favor of an integrated study of various subjects taught in the style of the Greek philosopher Socrates.” (Abler, 2002) He wanted students and faculty to interact as peers, so he made his college residential. The faculty and the students lived together in their own building on campus. Unfortunately, this kept female students from participating since co-ed living was not an option for the students. This arrangement created a relationship between faculty and students that Meiklejohn believed was directly responsible for the success of his ‘experiment.’ He said, “The college, we have said, intends, by using scholarship–its fruits or processes or both of these—to so cultivate and strengthen the intelligence of a pupil that he may be ready to take responsibility for the guidance of his own behavior.” (Meiklejohn, 1932)

This community focused on the students’ first two years study, and learned about civilizations. The first year was dedicated to ancient Athens and the second year to modern English or American culture. “Both years involved intense scrutiny of all imaginable aspects of society: architecture, philosophy, politics, justice systems, geography, sculpture and painting, law, science, money and banking, war, social inequality, marital institutions, education, medicine, evolution and downfall of the society-if it could be named, chances are it was integrated into the Ex-College curriculum.” (Abler, 2002) In order to accomplish this, the year was broken down into six week sections that were each lead by a faculty member. There were four or five class sessions, several smaller group meetings, and at least one individual meeting between the faculty member and the student happened every week. The faculty member taught the subjects they knew as they pertained to the civilizations being studied and the students did extensive reading and produced a paper concerning the subject matter of each six week session. In addition to these papers there were two major project papers. At the end of the sophomore year there was an essay on The Education of Henry Adams, and the summer after the Freshman year was a ‘regional study’ that, “Was an extensive study of an American community, often the student’s hometown or some other area with which he was familiar. The project was intended to integrate the knowledge and special insight that the student had gained in his year of societal study by applying that perspective to an actual community.” (Abler, 2002) These major projects often extended beyond these guidelines and included the students’ commentary about the society as well as the Ex-college.

From the beginning, Meiklejohn had several issues that he felt were going to be difficult for the Ex-college. The first of which was student responsibility. He worried that students at age 18 were not ready to bear the burden of being peers with faculty. There was always the concern that without explicit rewards and punishments students would not behave like adults or complete their work. External observers were also eager to contribute to this criticism. They believed that their continual food fights and disregard for quite hours were evidence of their inability to handle the responsibility of the work as well as the freedom of the environment. Despite that, they did manage to be successful. As one alumni put it, “If you wanted to goof off, you could. But I think that there was probably less of that then might have been expected because the majority of them were serious students who went along with what the general intent of the place was.” (Abler, 2002)

Secondly, Meiklejohn worried about the demand on faculty. He strived to hire faculty from outside the college for several reasons. Mainly he wanted teachers who would be willing to experiment and were not attached the standard of how things were, but also he wanted faculty with fewer ties to the University of Wisconsin in hopes that it would mean fewer obligations. He knew that incorporating such intensive involvement with students would consume time and energy and he was afraid that it would be too arduous for the professors. This concern came true in many ways. Despite being hired by Meiklejohn for the Ex-college, the faculty understandably still had obligations to the university and living on campus gave them no escape from these burdens. Everyone’s exhaustion is one of the reasons that the experiment was so easy to end. (Meiklejohn, 1932)

Next he worried about the criticism of non-expert teaching by the faculty. In order to cover the range of subjects that the program did with the staff available, faculty members were going to have to do some teaching outside the field of their degrees. Meiklejohn decided to accept this issue for what it was, but not to fix it. He believed that if there were more faculty and the sessions were shorter than six weeks he would be sacrificing the mentorship and extensive engagement that the program was all about. He also believed that the faculty learning along side the students would not only strengthen their bond, but also the students’ ability. If the faculty were extended just past their comfort zone, there was more assurance that they were working with students to ask the critical questions instead of just telling students their already formed critical assessments. (Meiklejohn, 1932)

In a different form of assessment, Meiklejohn’s final concern was in reporting student achievement. The majority of student work was out of class reading and class participation. Occasionally there would be a quiz, but they were infrequent and there were no tests. While there were regular papers, they were graded subjectively. Meiklejohn stood behind the belief that the relationship between the faculty member and the student would provide enough information for assessing their performance. In these small classes and individual meetings it was readily apparent which students had adequately prepared and which ones had not. (Meiklejohn, 1932)

Meiklejohn’s last two concerns dealt more with concern over the criticism he expected to receive as opposed aspects of the college that he believed were troubled. He was certainly justified in addressing them because, as predicted, they came up. Unfortunately there were several problems that he did not consider that eventually brought about the end of the Ex-college. The first of these was a lack of enrollment. Meiklejohn’s model flourished as a small college, so he never worked to expand it and a steady decline in enrollment gave the program the appearance of being unsuccessful. In addition to this, an increasing number of the students applying were from out of state. Fewer and fewer Wisconsin students were electing to take part in the experiment. In the end it became hard to justify a program that was losing students and potentially alienating in-state students. (Abler, 2002)

Alienation was happening in other ways as well. Faculty and students from the institution felt that the Ex-college was excluding itself from the university as a whole. Since Meiklejohn’s original plan was to be a separate college, it is easy to understand that it may have had difficulty integrating into the rest of the university. While the program had difficulty integrating, the students did not. The Ex-college did not teach any trade or professional classes, so students were involved with the rest of the college for any courses they took that counted toward their major. The Ex-college was also deficient in teaching languages and sciences yet expected the students to be well versed in them. Additionally, the students were regularly involved in campus organizations, and often in leadership roles. Justified or not, the sentiment existed and the appearance of exclusion may have attracted extra critics.

It is possible that Meiklejohn’s liberal use of the term ‘experiment’ gave President Frank a limited view of the Ex-college. Whatever caused it, “President Frank spoke of the College as a temporary establishment, a testing ground for ideas on educational reform, rather than a legitimate institution of learning.” (Abler, 2002) This in conjunction with a need to make funding cuts during the depression brought an end to Ex-college. In the 1931-1932 school year Meiklejohn stopped accepting new freshman and after five years the Experimental College was closed. Meiklejohn continued to teach for the University of Wisconsin in philosophy and eventually left to start an adult learning center in California that was based on the same principles as the Ex-college.

Despite the Experimental College being shut down, Meiklejohn’s revolutionary ideas persisted in higher education. They persisted in his students who today, in their nineties, continue to gather as alumni in testament to the strength of the experience he created. In education, he inspired others to question the standard of curriculum and value the liberal arts education. The Ex-college foreshadowed, “both in duration and intent many experimental colleges of the 1960’s.” (Cohen, 1998) In more current ways, “More than five hundred colleges and universities now offer some type of ‘learning community’ in which students take two or more courses as a group.” (Smith, 2003) His concepts have been brought to successful fruition across the nation and are enriching students. A recent National Survey of Student Engagement found that, “participation in learning communities was positively related to diversity experiences, student gains in personal and social development, practical competence, general education, and overall satisfaction with the undergraduate college experience.” (Smith, 2003)

Alexander Meiklejohn has been partnered with John Dewey and Abraham Flexner for the impact he has had on higher education. He dedicated his life to putting his philosophies to the test and improving the methods that we use to teach students. His philosophies offered us an original way to consider the student and the process of learning.

References

Abler, E. (2002). The Experimental College Remembering Alexander Meiklejohn and an Era of Ideas Archive: A Journal of Undergraduate History 5, 50-75 Accessed December 4, 2006. http://uwho.rso.wisc.edu/Archive/Erin%20Abler%20volume%205.pdf

Cohen, A. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Meiklejohn’s Influence at UW-Madison. Accessed December 4, 2006. http://www.wisc.edu/ils/Meiklejohn.html

Meiklejohn, A. (1932). The experimental college. New York: Harper. Accessed December 4, 2006. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?type=header&id=UW.MeikExpColl&isize=M

Smith, B. (2003). Learning communities and liberal education. Academe 89, 14-18.

Stuart Wells, A. Oakes, J (1996). Extra Issue: Special Issue on Sociology and Educational Policy: Bringing Scholarship and Practice Together. Sociology of Education, 69, Accessed November 27, 2006 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-0407%281996%2969%3C135%3APPOSRE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L