Boiling-Water College

Never has Michigan's tiny Kalamazoo College (enrollment: 750) so aptly embodied one Indian meaning of its namesake city: "boiling water." After 128 tepid years, Kalamazoo this fall cooked up a year-round operation that gives students, at no extra cost, a remarkable range of educational experience in the standard four years before graduation: social work in Africa, fulltime jobs in executive suites or emergency wards, mandatory study at any of three European universities, and regular work at Kalamazoo.

Kalamazoo's plan is an ingenious answer to the economic problems faced by small colleges as enrollment explodes in the 1960's. "We cannot justify letting these facilities stand idle three months a year," says Princeton-educated President Weimer Hicks, 52. "Summer vacations are simply a throwback to the days of an agrarian society." Moreover, says Hicks, year-round college is sound academically: "Is it right for the minds of our students to lie idle three months a year?"

Obsolete Teachers. Instead of the old two-semester system that left summers free, Kalamazoo has a new four-quarter year with short, staggered vacations. In the whole 15-quarter course, the typical Kalamazoo student will now spend only ten on campus. He may use his five quarters off campus as follows:

> Exploring a possible career in the summer after his freshman year. Says Hicks: "A fellow who gets A's in biology begins to think he is well suited to be a doctor. We think he ought to spend a few months in a hospital, see a few dead people, and decide if he still wants to be a doctor."

>Serving others in some Peace Corps-style project, foreign or domestic, during the sophomore year spring quarter. Hicks hopes the experience will "tell students something about the life of service--the broad commitment to something bigger than themselves."

>Living with a foreign family while studying at the universities of Bonn, Caen or Madrid during the junior year's fall and winter quarters. No vacation, the stint involves four daily hours of classroom study, intense language training and a strong dose of cultural shock. "A college can no longer give a broad education in its little oasis," says Hicks. "We're trying to use the whole world as our campus."

>Writing a thesis in the senior year's fall quarter. The object is to show students that they can pursue intellectual interests on their own. "The function of a good teacher is to obsolete himself," says Hicks. "The senior thesis forces him to."

Lost Coasters. What makes Kalama zoo's plan unusual is the new combination of new ideas borrowed from other schools. Kalamazoo's Mixmaster: Dean of Faculty Laurence Barrett, 46, one of Princeton's four original Woodrow Wilson Fellows (with current Princeton President Robert Goheen). By sending one-quarter of its students elsewhere and by expanding its plant, he says, Kalamazoo expects to boost enrollment nearly 50% in four years --and this will actually raise academic standards.

With all tuition income earmarked for faculty pay, Kalamazoo can use its increased income to hire better teachers at bigger salaries. The goal in two years: $17,500 maximum, compared with $13,000 now. This year Kalamazoo has a dozen new teachers, boosting its faculty to 54, and since the students now also take only three courses per quarter, the faculty can teach harder. "If you coast now," says one harried junior, "you're lost."

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