Chapter about Knox in "Colleges That Change Lives"

Knox: A College That Changes Lives

On my first visit to Knox in Galesburg, Illinois, twenty years ago I thought, "What a wonderful, charming place to spend four such important years of a young person's life." I was impressed by the faculty, the students, and the cloistered tranquility of a campus of large lawns and great trees. The centerpiece is Old Main, an architectural gem. It is where Abraham Lincoln had to crawl through a window to get to his debate with Stephen Douglas because the speaker's stand had been built too close to the door. He then announced he had been through college.

Another jewel among Knox's many buildings is an oak-paneled library of such charm and grace that one student said it was a major factor in her decision to come to Knox. Except for a large reading room that looks as if it had come straight out of Oxford or Cambridge, the ceilings are low, and the rare-book room, which houses the Finely collection of every important source on the history of the Midwest printed since 1820, is a cozy place that brings to mind art historian Kenneth Clark's comment that "no great thought was ever conceived in an enormous room." (John Huston Finley, who was president of Knox around the turn of the century, was later editor of The New York Times.)

This look of cloistered tranquility is deceptive; Knox has been very active. First off, it has a new curriculum; the student now plans his own education. Moreover, he has to meet a new kind of graduation requirement: He must be able to work effectively, as well as communicate, with people from a wide range of backgrounds. The plan, which surely will influence those of other colleges, was developed with the aid of a $200,000 Mellon Foundation grant.

The college has received a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to start a new major in neuroscience as well as a new faculty position, laboratory expansion, and new science programs for junior high school girls.

Grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are adding to its strengths in science. Grants from the Caterpillar Foundation and the Merck Company Foundation support the development of creative projects and experimental learning programs needed in the new curriculum.

It has invested heavily in renovating and upgrading facilities for the fine arts, the Lincoln Studies Center, the science and mathematics center, and the Black Studies Center. New residential facilities and a new field house have been built.

There are also new centers to expand and support its programs in global study, advanced study and research, career and preprofessional development, teaching and learning, and intercultural life.

In designing his educational plan, the student must include a broad foundation in the liberal arts and some experiential learning such as off-campus study, independent research, or major creative projects. He must also be able to speak and write clearly and persuasively, understand and use mathematical concepts, have a working knowledge of a second language, and use information technology effectively. The new stipulation says the student "must function effectively with persons from a wide range of backgrounds." This requirement will surely boom off-campus and foreign study. Over half of the students now have at least one foreign-study term.

While the speaking requirement is new, there has always been a great emphasis on writing at Knox. Its literary magazine, Catch, offers some proof of its quality. In 2003 it won two top national prizes. One was the Pacemaker Award from the Associated Collegiate Press, and the other was the Association of Writers & Writing Program Directors' prize for content for undergraduate literary magazines.

In the same year, ten faculty published books, a notable number for a college that puts its emphasis on teaching.

At the time of my first visit, African-American students elsewhere were segregating themselves, even at egalitarian Oberlin, but at Knox they told me they were part of one happy family. This is not surprising; Knox was founded in 1837 by abolitionist Congregationalists and Presbyterians and was a station on the Underground Railroad by which slaves fled to freedom. In 1870, the first black in Illinois to get a college degree, Barnabas Root, was a Knox graduate, as was the first black senator from Illinois, Hiram Revels. Knox not only offers a major in Black Studies but is a founding member and hosts the national headquarters of the Association of Black Culture Centers, which leads academic discussion on black culture through its journal.

Knox also has a higher percentage of African-American faculty members—10 percent—than any other college or university.

It also has a program funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education to prepare underrepresented groups for academic careers. Each year, ten freshmen are chosen for whom special career-focused programs and summer research support are provided.

Knox has always admitted blacks and women, and today its 1,350 students come from forty-six states and fifty countries. Fourteen percent are American minorities and 9 percent are international students. Grinnell in Iowa is the only other good college so far from a major city able to boast of such diversity.

When I made my recent second visit, it became clear that of the many powerful attractions of Knox, one is that there is no better college in the country for developing a young mind and character; another is that no college offers better entrées to top professional schools, whether for architecture, art, business, engineering, environmental management, forestry, law, medicine, nursing, or social work.

For the budding scientist or scholar, acceptance at graduate school is just as certain, for Knox is in the top 2 percent of all institutions in the production of men and women who achieve Ph.D.s, and it ranks number eleven in mathematics and the sciences. That too is not surprising; 65 percent of Knox graduates do postgraduate study within five years.

Knox offers so much aid, both need- and merit-based, that fewer than 10 percent pay the full tab. Seventy-three percent of them got need-based aid ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 and another 10 percent got scholarships ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 a year in 2005.

Knox also awards scholarships to outstanding mathematics and chemistry students; to National Merit Scholars; to students with special abilities in the creative arts of writing, music, theatre, and visual art; to junior-college graduates; and—courtesy of Colorado alumni—to residents of Colorado.

In addition, twenty juniors each year are chosen as Ford Foundation Research Fellows and get support for independent research projects. Knox was one of only sixteen colleges in the country chosen for this program to develop future college professors. The program has been so successful that the college has expanded it so that as many as sixty-five juniors now can undertake summer research projects with a faculty mentor.

In fact, there are so many opportunities and so much support that 85 percent of the seniors have produced a creative or research project by the time they graduate.

What makes Knox such a desirable place is very much what makes other colleges in this book the best preparation. This college is educating—not training—people who can think clearly and independently, who have moral compasses, and who can live fully and courageously.

It does this in many ways. First, a sense of high mission is palpable. It is a family in which the teachers acting as parents encourage, push, and support their children.

They told stories of a black student from the inner city who became a campus leader and is now a sociologist, and of a small-town boy who is now getting his Ph.D., but who probably would have fallen through the cracks at a university. Dr. Brenda Fineberg, author of a praised classics text, said that her going to graduate school after graduating from the University of Texas-Austin had been accidental but, "at Knox, it wouldn't have been accidental."

There is equal concern at the other end of the performance spectrum. Failure is not the end. A student cannot fade into the woodwork because he or she has to be involved.

One faculty member who had taught at Trinity in Connecticut said there is much more discussion at Knox because "there's a better mix here. The minorities are not at the bottom here as they were at Trinity. At Trinity there was no discussion because of the social differences. The students are much more involved in their own education here. At Knox, there is no room for pretense, either academically or socially."

A sure test of what faculty and administrators are saying about their college is what the students say, and at Knox they're saying the same things. I talked with students from Spain, Mexico, and China, and with black and white students from diverse backgrounds, and while it may tax credulity, I didn't hear a single discouraging word about the college they had chosen. They all regarded their teachers as their friends and responded with such certainties as "of course!" when I asked if they might have dinner or spend a night at a faculty member's home if they came back in five or ten years. A black student said "the professors have an interest in you, and they don't at Morgan State (an all-black institution in Maryland), where some of my friends go."

Knox also affected their values. A black girl from Chicago said "it broadened my views; the diversity here gave me an appreciation of others." The girl from Mexico called it "a melting-pot experience that makes me more aware and more tolerant." A junior from St. Paul who had one of the research stipends said, "I was so closed-minded when I came, but the experience here and the foreign-study programs have changed all that." A senior history major said of the learning environment, "I look back four years and I can't believe what happened." A sophomore from an all-black high school in a Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C., who plans to go to law school, said he'd had a hard time realizing that there could be so much diversity and so much warmth and acceptance.

The fact that Knox operates under an honor code seemed to these students a most natural thing. How could it be otherwise?

The foreign students dwelt on how different Knox was from their universities. The sophomore girl from Mexico nodded as the boy from Barcelona, a senior majoring in international relations, said; "Here you are challenged and you can excel. At the University of Barcelona you're just a number and all you do is memorize. Here you grow intellectually a lot; you have to do critical thinking; you get a well-rounded view of what the world is like." To which the Mexican girl added that the one-on-one relationships with faculty members is unknown at home, and that there the emphasis is on technology rather than on getting an education.

A Chinese-American senior from Chicago, a chemistry and art history major, said he had picked Knox in the first place because of its strong sense of community—"and I had to feel I was part of the community"—the interaction among students and between students and faculty, and the fact that unlike the universities he visited, Knox would let him have full use of all the scientific equipment. "Knox," he says, "is very conducive to allowing students to pick and choose. You are responsible for what you do and liable for what you don't."

Aside from the preceptorials and the distribution requirements, there is much latitude for students to design their own majors, with faculty guidance, to do independent study, or to do honors work that requires producing a major piece of research or creative work. Currently, 20 percent of the senior class is doing honors work and the college plans to expand it greatly. Honors students get financial help for summer work on their projects.

More than thirty off-campus programs are available to Knox students in Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and South America; in this country there are programs that cover just about every student interest, whether in the humanities, the arts, classics, environment, science, or politics (in a Washington seminar). More than half of Knox students spend from a term to a year in one or more of these projects.

Closer to home, twenty miles from the campus, Knox has something few colleges do: a 760-acre biological field station where the Illinois prairie has been restored to its original state. Slender buffalo grass six feet tall lets in so much sun that near the ground there's a whole lower tier of flowers and other plants up to a foot high. It makes believable the western historians' accounts of riders having to stand up in their stirrups to see across the sea of grass.

How the college is using this expanse of prairie it has brought back to life is another example of its intellectual metabolism. It has developed an off-campus residential study term in which professors from several disciplines will study with students the ecological, historical, and aesthetic qualities of the landscape. The students will live in a refurbished structure that also has laboratories and classrooms. And they will be their own cooks and housemaids as well as stewards of the field station.

That look of cloistered tranquility the campus gives truly is deceptive, for it cloaks a vibrant, endlessly searching community, one that will open new worlds and change you.

Ten years later, seniors were still saying that their experiences at Knox had changed their lives whether they had expected it or not, and it made them sad to leave.

One, a first-generation college student, spoke for several others with his testimony: "I did not come to college expecting it to change my life. I simply wanted to earn a degree that would help me find a career I would enjoy later in life. I chose Knox because the brochures were pretty, the people were nice and it was 2000 miles away from home. But as I sat in commencement last year, looking back on my previous three years while looking forward to my last, tears came to my eyes. I realized then that Knox transformed me.

"The change you make at Knox is slow, thought out, and personalized. Each day you are finding out something new about you or those around you. You learn to work with those who have similar beliefs and those who contradict your entire life philosophy, whether they are from India, New Mexico, or St. Louis. You are an equal with upperclassmen, your professors, administrators, and even the president of the college. I find it is just as hard to say good-bye to those professors who have been my mentors as it is to say good-bye to my closest friends. I am excited as I leave Knox because I know my experiences here will be carried with me for the rest of my life."

A senior girl from Chicago said, "I came here thinking that I already was the person I wanted to be and am graduating knowing that I am the person I always wanted to know. I can now reach outside my comfort zone and examine the world and its problems, critically and analytically. At Knox, students are educated to be the people who make a difference in the world, not the ones who watch people make a difference."

Of all of those who talked about Knox's diversity and sense of community, a gay senior's homage and his thanks were by far the most eloquent. He said, "Simply put, I began college a terrified closet case, and am graduating a proud gay man. Knox provides a comfortable, nurturing environment for GLBT students to find themselves, just as it does for every person who grows here. Some publications tout Knox diversity, but they tend to neglect what makes Knox, in my opinion, a truly diverse community. Every student comes from a unique background, has a different story to tell. It is this wealth of exposure that nourishes students hungry to learn, to step outside their comfort zones."