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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2009 with funding from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill http://www.archive.org/details/phipsicli1986elon AHi mn ELON COLLEGE PHI PSI CLI 1986 ' ^ 4 -V THE ESSENCE OF ELON Caring. About students. About its image. Caring enough to expand its campus, 4 curriculum, enrollment financial base and expectations of each teacher and student who enters "the golden door." by Bernadette Hearne "I told him he just didn't most without doctoral degrees. Its know what he was talking academic program was said to be Reprinted with permission of the GREENSBORO NEWS AND about. Almost every class I've thin, its demands on students low. RECORD. taken here was better than But changes have occurred. In his. This school is so much the past decade, the percentage of Lauri Crowder, a senior at Elon better than people think." doctoral degrees among Elon's fac- College, knows many people in What Crowder encountered ulty has risen from 30 to 70 per- North Carolina think her school is was an attitude about Elon cent, and those degrees second-rate, but she never expected that has dogged the 2,800-stu- are as likely to be from Harvard, to hear it from a professor at a com- dent liberal arts college near Indiana State, Georgia, Mississip- peting school. Burlington since the 1960's. pi, Ohio or Oklahoma as from the "I decided to go to summer school With justification, Elon offi- University of North Carolina at in Wilmington and be near the cials concede, the school ac- Chapel Hill or Greensboro. beach," Crowder said. "Near the end quired a reputation as an In the past five years, library of the session, this professor started open-door institution that ad- holdings have tripled from 50,000 in on me about why was I wasting mitted anyone with a diploma, to 150,000 volumes. New pro- my time at Elon? That I was too a place that hired its own pro- grams of study include computer smart for Elon. I couldn't believe it." vincial graduates to teach — science, communications and Elon's first master's program in business administration. This fall, the college is installing cable television hookups in every dormitory so students can watch the closed-circuit campus televi- sion station emanating from the sophisticated production facility Elon just built. Microcomputers are plentiful, and students have ready access to them virtually any hour of the day. Construction of a major fine arts center is scheduled to begin this fall. Despite all the investment, Elon's endowment has grown from less than $2 million to nearly $8 million during President J. Fred Young's 1 3-year tenure. Courtyards, a fountain and acres of carefully-tended grounds have replaced parking lots and maintenance depots making Elon's one of the most beautiful cam- puses in the state. Adding to that beauty is the fact that the school's graceful Georgian buildings give no hint of the deferred mainte- nance slowly eating away at so many small colleges. Meanwhile, student enrollment has grown from about 2,000 a dec- ade ago to nearly 3,000 this fall. Applications are up 40 percent in the past three years; rejections have doubled. Ironically, at a time when the number of traditional 18 to 25 year-old students is declining, Elon has succeeded in increasing its en- rollment even as it has tightened its admission requirements. In the past three years, average College Board scores among Elon's freshmen have climbed 50 points with 30 points of the increase com- ing just this year. The college cele- brates its centennial, it intends to reject anyone with less than a 2.0. Nan Perkins, assistant to the president, also is tlie mother of an Elon sophomore. "As a parent, it's very important to me that the word gets out about how good this school is," Perkins said. "We don't need to promote it to attract more students or to show off. We're trying to give it more respectability. Those students in the middle deserve an education that has a respectability, just as the top students do." Elon . promotes itself as a caring place, a college where every student receives personal attention and where every professor is a po- tential friend and mentor. "Now that we're turning more students away, we're getting nega- tive feedback from parents whose children weren't admitted," said Joanne Soliday, the school's direc- tor of admissions. "They say, 'We thought this was a place that cared,' which really translates, "We thought you took anybody." difficult to communicate." had breakfast with the family the When you put yourself up front Former president Danieley is next morning. I don't tell that sto- as a caring institution and you one of those for whom Elon was ry to brag. I tell it because it is this start turning so many down, it's "the golden door." typical of place." "I could not have gone to col- "Caring" is a word used so often lege if this place was not here," at Elon that it almost becomes a Danieley said. "If I hadn't gone to college, I would have ended up in a mill or on a farm. I have so much appreciation for what this place does in the lives of people." "Even now, although none of us knows all of the students, the relationship is very much like that of a family," Danieley said. "The week before classes started this fall, I had a student from La Paz, Bolivia, call me at 10 p.m. from the airport. He said he'd get a hotel room for the night and asked if I could pick him up in the morning. "I told him absolutely not, got out of bed and went to get him. He stayed the night with us and cliche. Administrators use it. Pro- fessors use it. Students use it. Without exception, it seems, every- one agrees that caring is Elon's es- sence and its greatest asset. "I if now you've heard it 1,000 times, but absolute caring really is the nature of this entire institu- tion," said Linda Weavil, a busi- ness administration professor. "Al- most anything I can say is so up- beat it sounds corny, but it really is the truth." Thanks to caring, Elon's stu- dents are, by and large, thrilled with their college experience. Sur- veys of recent graduates show 95 percent would return to Elon if they could relive their college years. Asked what made their time at Elon so fulfilling, 97 percent mention their relationships with their professors. In an unscientific survey of stu- dents encountered on campus, the result was the same. Everyone of them, asked what they liked best about Elon, mentioned personal at- tention from their professors as the primary benefit. But a surplus of care and pro- tection, particularly in relation to their social lives, is also a com- plaint students voice about Elon. "There are times when they're a little too protective," one student said. "They should let us stumble and pick ourselves up a little more often. That's a learning experience too." Young dismisses the complaint saying: "Students on any campus, if you asked them, would say they should be given more freedom. They'd probably even say that in Chapel Hill. That's just students." The essence of caring, Elon offi- cials agree, is personal attention. Providing it, though, isn't always easy at a college where the stu- dent-teacher ratio hovers on the high side at 20-to-l and where the an effective classroom teacher," "For teachers who want to average annual teaching load is Young told the faculty at the teach," White said, "We're about 27 hours. At most colleges, the opening convocation of the the top of the line. Above Elon and average is 24 hours and the 1985-86 school year. "Good a few schools like us, you get into student-teacher ratio closer teaching has been and will con- the research game. That's why to 17 or 18-to-l. tinue to be our most pervasive we're so popular with teachers who "The high ratio and heavy characteristic." really want to teach." Like all teaching load account in large part "Teaching is the first and colleges that emphasize for the college's financial stability," foremost consideration in grant- teaching, though, Elon walks a Young said. "It is made possible, ing promotions and raises," said fine line. To be outstanding, its though, by the college's dedication Chris White, vice-president for teachers must stay current in their to hiring good teachers." academic affairs. "A teacher fields. Research is the best way to "There can be no credibility for who can't teach won't last long stay current, but research and a an Elon faculty member who is not at Elon." heavy teaching load don't mix well. Elon's biggest personnel problem is one shared by countless other colleges. It has only three blacks and one American Indian on its faculty, far too few to adequately balance the faculty or act as role models to the students, 9 percent of whom are black. "I would say that hiring and keeping good minority faculty is our greatest challenge, our most persistent concern," Young said. "We're not satisfied with our re- cord on that point, but we're con- stantly working on it." Ironically, another of Elon's problems is its cost.

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