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Last Updated: Apr 19th, 2006 - 14:40:21 |
This month, the North Florida resident sat at a "towne meeting" held among rows of palm trees as students passed motions to require their friends to take their pants off.
Students were recently planning to use student activity money to build a nacho cheese slip n' slide.
"There's something about New College that has like a buzz," explained Falon Mihalic, 22, an entomology major writing her senior thesis on small-hive beetles. "I know that sounds real airy-fairy, peace and love, man."
New College, a liberal arts school on Sarasota Bay, defies almost every trend in public higher education. The school was recently named the nation's top value among public universities by The Princeton Review college guide.
As one of Florida's 11 public universities, New College is grouped with Florida State, the University of Central Florida and other mega-campuses that rank among the nation's largest. But aside from low in-state tuition, it bears little resemblance to its sister schools, which increasingly focus on graduate programs, growth and what leaders call "workforce development" - preparing students for jobs that fuel the economy.
While other schools' presidents contemplate the pros and cons of growing to 60,000 students, New College students - all 761 of them - take classes without grades and design their own curricula. The school has no football team, but it does have a club that meets "to discuss various conspiracy theories."
On campus, students worry New College's growth strategy, albeit modest, will change the school's character.
"There are signs of us getting closer to being like other state schools," said Mihalic, before jokingly paraphrasing student sentiment. "We're locking our doors, and there aren't as many naked parties."
New College opened as a private school 42 years ago on the former winter estate of circus magnate Charles Ringling, next to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
Since the beginning, the school has had an "open curriculum," meaning no required classes.
The theory was that motivated and smart students would thrive if they designed their academic program and worked on contracts with professors - receiving detailed evaluations instead of grades.
In 1975, the school was absorbed by the state university system as an honors college of the University of South Florida, to protect it from insolvency. In 2001, legislators made it an independent college as part of a reorganization of USF's campuses.
With each change, students and alumni have worried: Would bigger schools swallow it? Standardize its curriculum? Would taxpayers support a school with no grades?
"In essentials, it's changed very little," said Aron Edidin, a 1977 graduate who has taught philosophy on campus for 17 years. "It provides a fabulous undergraduate education for students who are self-directed enough and good enough at sort of making connections with faculty.
"There are students who work better in highly structured arrangements - and this isn't the place for them."
Not all students can handle the freedom, and some think the lack of grades means they can cruise, students say. But the school offers outlets for ideas that might be considered quirky elsewhere.
Take Trevor Caughlin, a 21-year-old biology and environmental studies major from Boise, Idaho. "I was really interested in tropical fruit trees, which isn't the best thing to do in Idaho," he said.
He chose New College after a professor impressed him with a deep, hour-long conversation about plants. As a freshman, he planted 200 trees - ice cream beans, Indian almonds, mulberries, miracle berries - "because I love fruit trees and also, it's a really good way to get people aware of the environment."
Last semester, Caughlin wanted to build awareness of a small orchard of calamondin trees next to the Vstudent center. So he
requested $20 from the student government and baked eight vegan pies using the gumball-sized sour citrus - passing them out in dorms.
"These are things I'd be doing anyway," he said. "But here I can get credit for it."
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