An interview with John Gardner, initiator of the first-year reform movement
In September, John Gardner visited the Maryville College campus to speak to members of the College’s National Advisory Council and faculty and staff members. FOCUS editor Karen Beaty Eldridge ’94 interviewed Gardner during his recent visit to campus to talk about his inspiration for first-year programs, his own first year in college and his belief in the power of post-secondary education. The interview is transcribed below.
Questions:
- In your bio, you are described as an ‘initiator and scholar of the American first-year reform movement.’ Why are you on this quest?
- I’d like to hear about your first year in college.
- At what point did you look around and notice that few colleges – or no colleges – were doing first-year programming well?
- What were you doing before this?
- Where did this all start?
- Were most of the attendees at that first conference on the first year of college from South Carolina?
- The National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition is in Columbia, S.C., but your Policy Center on the First Year of College is in Brevard, N.C.?
- Why was Maryville selected for that national project, the Foundations of Excellence project?
- To what extent do you hear that this emphasis on the first year of college is coddling? Do you hear from educators who say that they know best, that students need to learn to adapt to educators and not vice versa?
- Do you hear from people who believe in the “sink or swim” approach to education?
- What is the promise of educating mass numbers of students in this country?
FOCUS: In your bio, you are described as an ‘initiator and scholar of the American first-year reform movement.’ Why are you on this quest?
Gardner: Because I’m a child of the 1960s, and I was in college when John Kennedy was in the White House and when Lyndon Johnson initiated the Great Society. And I’m also a child of privilege and I feel that, through the accident of fate, I am much more fortunate than most Americans and I think that we have an enormous distance to travel yet to fulfill the potential of American lives.
And then in many respects, we’ve been moving backwards in the past 20-25 years. I think that one of the keys to reversing that is using higher education more effectively as the primary access route to greater opportunity in American society. And to do that, students have got to be able to get into college and they’ve got to get through the first initial hurdles, and so the first year is an enormous hurdle for a very large proportion of students. So, part of this appeals to my social justice interests and what unapologetically for me is undiluted liberalism and a belief that society can improve its members’ lives.
And the role of government is to do that. Of course, Maryville is not a government-run institution, but it’s an institution that receives a great deal of government money through financial aid for students, so it has to be in keeping with the overall purpose of that money, which is to expand opportunities and get people through this pipeline … Another basis for my work is the fact that I had a miserable first-year experience myself.
FOCUS: I’d like to hear about your first year in college.
Gardner: It was near disaster. I was on academic probation my second semester. My first-semester grades? Three Fs, two Ds and one A. So I am an almost-not-survived-the-first-year-of-college person, and that gave me a tremendous amount of insight into failure – poor transition, depression, homesickness, making a lot of bad choices. I was from an affluent family and was very well prepared, academically – the odds were in my favor. And if I had difficulty adjusting to college, what about people today who are first-generation college students who come from grinding, abject poverty? So I have a lot of empathy for what it’s like to not be successful in college, and I would like all students to have a better experience than I did, initially. The other major learning from my own experience was that the things that turned me around were occurrences of chance – happenstance, serendipity – and were not the result of things that my institution did intentionally for me.
… It’s very clear to me that [Maryville College] is a place that is a lot more intentional than most places that I work with and consult with. And that has great appeal to me. But I went to a college that was not intentional about what it was doing for first-year students, so part of my quest here is to make colleges more intentional.
FOCUS: At what point did you look around and notice that few colleges – or no colleges – were doing first-year programming well?
Gardner: When I got a real job in higher education at a major research university, I had a president who discovered me very early in my career as a young professor, and he gave me some opportunities to provide leadership for my university’s effort to redesign the first year. Once I started doing that, and I had been doing that for several years, I had come to realize that the problems we were dealing with were not unique at all and I said, ‘You know, there have to be more colleges interested in this than just us.’ In the year that I was promoted to full professor, I was the youngest full professor at my university the year I was appointed – I was 36 years old – and I had to decide what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
At a research university, when you give professors tenure and you promote them to a professor of that rank, they can basically do whatever they want for the rest of their lives. Which means they come in in the morning and they either turn the lights on or off. So I decided at that point that I had great potential to give back not only to my own university, but the rest of the country. And I thought, ‘How can I do that?’
In part, I’m a character with a lot of missionary zeal. I stayed in South Carolina for three decades as a part of a grand social experiment for myself to see how I could make a contribution to improving a very poor state’s higher education system and see how, through my work, I could help thousands of beginning college students who didn’t have the breaks in life that I had. But I could not have done this work had I not had a very supportive, tolerant, permissive, encouraging university environment that said ‘Sure, John, go out and do your thing.’ Because universities, particularly research universities, want to have experts in a variety of topics, and you can become an expert as long as it’s about some legal, socially redeeming topic. Generally, universities encourage that, particularly if it brings recognition to them and if it’s related to research and publishing and so on. So, there was a marriage between my intellectual interests, my missionary zeal and the interests of a research university that set out to become No. 1 in the country in terms of being known for its work on the first year.
And if you look at the U.S. News and World Report rankings, you’ll find that we are No. 1. As a matter of fact, we’re No. 1 in two areas: International MBA education and the first-year experience. Those are the two sort of ‘claims to fame’ for the University of South Carolina for its non-academic work. So, how did I get into this? Through a set of life circumstances and life opportunities, but if this president hadn’t opened the door for me, I couldn’t have done this.
FOCUS: What were you doing before this?
Gardner: I was teaching history, I was young in my career and could have gone in any number of ways. My career ended up getting redirected, and my scholarship and writing and so on are not in the field of history at all now, although I think historically because I think about the evolution of the American higher education. My field of research and writings relate the undergraduate student experience and particularly how to change the undergraduate student experience, and I’m here at Maryville now because of the interest in the first year, but I’ve also done a lot of work on the senior-year experience and the process that helps students move out of college because I’m interested in the major transitions that students go through while they’re in college, particularly ones that are stressful and anxiety-provoking and important to society, important to them and families and so on. The two biggies are the transition in and the transition out. Even though colleges pay more attention to the one in than the one out.
FOCUS: Where did this all start?
Gardner: I’ve been on this crusade since the middle of the 1970s. One of the things that I did to really give this whole thing a kick was organizing a series of national and international conferences on the topic of the first-year experience. We organized the first one in 1982 in Columbia, South Carolina. And your president [Gerald Gibson] came to one or more of the early conferences that I did. He was at Roanoke College in Virginia, and so he knew of my work, and people from Maryville eventually started coming over. We did this meeting every year in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1982 until 2000, and then because of the NAACP boycott of South Carolina, we moved the meeting outside of South Carolina. In 25 years, we’ve had over 100,000 people from higher education come to this meeting.
It’s a really simple idea. The idea was, see if you can convene people from all professional roles of higher education to see if they will come together and talk about beginning college students and look at these very fundamental questions: What is the first-year experience? Do you have one? Do you want one? Do you need one? And we set out to raise those questions more than to provide the answers, and that’s a liberal-arts approach. I’m a liberal-arts college graduate, obviously. I learned that what really matters is getting people to think about the questions, so I never tried to roll out a prescriptive model for the first year. I have a lot of beliefs about what works and doesn’t work – I know a lot about that – but I don’t go to a college like Maryville and say, ‘Well, you really ought to do A, B, C and D, here’s the plan, here’s the template, just check off the boxes. I have to get them asking the questions that are meaningful to them. If Maryville College wanted to be more intentional for new students, what would it want to do? What does it think new students need? And how would it do that deliberately? That’s the kind of thinking I try to encourage.
So the idea was to bring educators together and to get them talking about the first year, and you know, much to my astonishment, they’d never done that before. Nobody had organized any conferences on first-year college students before I did. And I’m not a genius, but I noted that nobody was doing this, and I said, you know, it would help me. I was very selfish – I said if I can organize a conference – if I can get 50 people to come to Columbia, South Carolina, and give me some advice – I’d learn but they would all hear the advice, so they’d all benefit, too. It’d be a win-win deal. And so I issued a conference announcement. My goal was to get 50 people; we had 175 for the very first meeting in 1982.
FOCUS: Were most of the attendees at that first conference on the first year of college from South Carolina?
Gardner: Oh, no. As a matter of fact, we had more from north of the Mason-Dixon line. And that was very deliberate. We hosted it in February; I figured if I announced a conference in South Carolina in February, I’d get a lot of snowbirds who would come down, and that’s exactly what happened. The state of New York sent more people than any other state in the country.
The most recent meeting we did like this – the annual February meeting – we had just under 1,400 people, and that was held last February in Phoenix, so this whole thing has snowballed tremendously, and it’s attracted a whole host of commercial vendors and sponsors who are selling all kinds of products now to educators who are trying to work with first-year students. And we do an international meeting every year and we do a lot of stuff now using satellite teleconferences. As a matter of fact, we have thousands of people downlink our teleconferences – far more than those coming in person. We run a publishing house, and thousands of people order our publications every year, so what we did was we started gradually and created a huge publishing dissemination operation that’s based at the University of South Carolina.
FOCUS: The National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition is in Columbia, S.C., but your Policy Center on the First Year of College is in Brevard, N.C.?
Gardner: That’s correct. In 1999, I took early retirement at the age of 55 and decided that I’d go while they still loved me. I’m serious. I see what organizations do to people who stay too long, and knew that I didn’t want that to happen. … I already had more than the minimum amount of time for retirement, which was 30 years; I had 32.
So I thought, ‘Well, where else could I live and how else could I carry on this work if I wasn’t managing this center that I created at the University of South Carolina?’ I could basically do it as a kind of self-employed, independent scholar and do it out of my home, so [my wife and I] thought, ‘Well, where would we like to live? If we could go anywhere in the country or world, where would we want to live?’ So we developed a kind of dream sheet and decided that we wanted to live in a small town, a college town, a college town with a lot of music, near an airport, benevolent climate, a place that didn’t fly a Confederate flag. So we started looking at a couple of different college towns, particularly those that were noted for music.
And Brevard is near an airport, has a benevolent climate, the music festival is there (I’m a trustee there now, by the way), and I got really involved. That was what attracted us, originally, to Brevard, and so we bought a piece of mountain property in Brevard and started building a house and in that process, before we were done there, we were approached by a major foundation – the Pew Charitable Trusts – and asked ‘How would you like to be a candidate for a grant if you could do A, B and C?’ And so we got into conversations with this foundation and they ultimately gave us a grant to set up a new center, which is not what I intended to do in Brevard – I didn’t go up there and intend to be a manager again and create a structure where I had a lot of financial accountability and managerial responsibilities – but when someone offers you a huge amount of money to do some very good work for this country, it’s really appealing. So my wife [Betsy Barefoot] and I created this center that we now have. Betsy is another scholar in this same field. Many would say she’s a better scholar than I am. I’m kind of the salesman for it; she’s more scholarly.
Anyway, we moved to Brevard, and we set up this center and have been operating it now for six years. We got about $7.1 million in grants to make this thing work during that period. And it’s an extension of the work we were in before – it’s all about helping colleges get better at the first year. That’s how we came across Maryville. Maryville was an applicant for a national project that we sponsored because we had a couple of foundation grants to do this project.
FOCUS: Why was Maryville selected for that national project, the Foundations of Excellence project?
Gardner: Well, Maryville was selected because, No. 1., they wanted to be selected. They had to volunteer for that, and that showed some initiative. … I set up a national review board to review these applications and a panel of blind reviewers. And our panel of national reviewers selected these 12 colleges. Now we had developed the criteria – we were looking for certain things at these schools, and Maryville rose to the top in that pool.
Why? Maryville was able to document, in its application, some changes that had been made over the previous decade, recognizing a need to bring about change, and the College was insightful enough and honest enough to relate that story. They were able to persuade us that this was a very intentional place about what they were trying to do. They were also an institution that had been, in some practice, using assessment and assessment data to drive planning and decision-making. This project had a lot of emphasis on assessment, so we wanted to see whether or not the school had some interest in doing that.
A major thing that we were looking at was capacity for change. Can an institution demonstrate that it has a capacity to undertake change successfully? Because again, we had, you know, a gift from the gods – two foundations gave us $2.2 million to do this project – we could only invest it in so many colleges, and we wanted to get as big a bang as possible with someone else’s money. So we looked at a place like Maryville and just concluded that it had a greater capacity to actually take advantage of this. There was greater probability that Maryville would make some changes as a result of being a part of this process.
In this morning’s [NAC] session, Peggy Cowan talked about the process they went through in the Foundations of Excellence and coming up with improvement action plans and then what they’ve actually implemented. That’s what we were trying to predict. We wanted 12 colleges that could develop a plan and then would actually do something with that plan. So I’m sitting there in the audience this morning, saying, ‘Hey, John, we did a good thing. [Maryville] was a good choice. We picked a place that is actually implementing some of what people said they wanted to do.’
It’s relatively easy for some places to come up with good intentions, but to move good intentions into actions is often very difficult because it’s a matter of overcoming tradition, customary ways of doing things, political alliances. Colleges were designed over 1,000 years ago to protect the status quo, to keep the barbarians out and to preserve Judeo-Christian culture. They were not designed, primarily, to be agents of change. But as they evolved, universities rather quickly found themselves in conflict with the Catholic Church because they were generating knowledge and alternative ways to view the world, which generated what you see 1,000 years later, which is a tension between preservation and change. And emulation of the values and the culture versus the impulse to change the values and the culture, so those are really dynamic forces.
By the way, an example of capacity for change is a willingness to be open to alternatives and a willingness to reach out and solicit feedback. And the National Advisory Council is an example of an institutionalized practice here that’s about a decade old now, where this college says once a year to a distinguished panel of people who care about the institution – ‘Let’s focus on this topic. Give us advice. Give us some feedback. Tell us how you think we’re doing.’ That’s very uncommon for colleges. So that’s an example of an institutional practice of behavior that, to me, is an external change agent. I look at that and think, ‘This is a place that has capacity for getting better.’ I just wanted to show you how that guiding principle is illustrated by the very existence of this council that you’re writing about this work today.
FOCUS: To what extent do you hear that this emphasis on the first year of college is coddling? Do you hear from educators who say that they know best, that students need to learn to adapt to educators and not vice versa?
Gardner: That’s a very widespread belief. And this whole movement to do things to improve student retention is viewed by many in the academy as a grand-scale coddling effort. When I get that thrown at me, I just say ‘Yep, you’re right. I acknowledge it. And then I’ll ask my critic to give me an operational definition of coddling. And they generally have to think about that. I end up offering a definition of coddling.
I’ll say ‘If coddling means giving students more attention, more support, more understanding, a more realistic response given who they are in that time of their lives, then yea, I’m guilty as accused. That’s what I do if that’s what you mean by coddling.’
I think when you push people to actually define what is meant by ‘coddling,’ it forces them to open up a little bit and think that through and realize that it’s probably not an accurate or appropriate way of looking at it. The notion of coddling gets confused or intermingled with the perception that we’re lowering standards. And there’s no question – we have lowered standards in that higher education traditionally in the United States was something for the elite and as long as you were trying to run an elite, higher-education model, though that would work very well for the elite, but when you decide as a society that you’re going to run a much more egalitarian form of higher education and where you’re going to provide access to higher education for anybody, you create a different kind of higher education experience, which is what we’ve done. We’ve made going to college in this country a birthright – at least getting into college – not getting through it, but getting into it.
The way I look at this is, it’s taken us 40 years to make this transition to say, ‘OK, access to higher education should not be something just for the privileged, it should be for all who want it.’ And that’s what’s happening now. Now they can walk in the door, so we’ve finished part of this transition as a society, but we haven’t yet fully made the commitment to do what we need to do if we’re going to take on all these students.
FOCUS: Do you hear from people who believe in the “sink or swim” approach to education?
Gardner: Oh, of course! … There are people out there who believe [only the fittest should survive] is a beautiful law of the Creator and that therefore, we should not interfere with the natural law.
My response is that we have plenty of examples in industrialized and post-industrialized societies of governments and other elements of society interfering with the natural course of events and trying to change things. When we adopted the Head Start program we said, ‘OK, we don’t have to accept that 20 percent of our children in this country don’t get breakfast, don’t get enough to eat every day. We could feed the children if we wanted to.’ And when we fed them, they performed better in school.
It’s a matter of making decisions about what are certain minimal levels of sustenance and support that you want your fellow societal members to have and how you’re going to provide that treatment. As a society, we’re very ambivalent about this. We still do believe, greatly, in Darwinism; some definitions and perspectives of Christianity reinforce that, others don’t.
… There’s a part of American society that believes it is natural for some people to be poor and that we should not interfere with that. And the current government is operating on that basis. If the role of government is to give the greatest rewards to those who are the wealthiest, then we’re doing a great job of that. But it won’t always be that way.
FOCUS: What is the promise of educating mass numbers of students in this country?
Gardner: The promise is that these people will be more able to enter and competently participate in a knowledge-based economy. Very few people are going to earn their living literally making things or working in agriculture. They’re going to be working with ideas and information and in order to do that, they’ve got to have post-secondary education.
The promise also is that if they receive a post-secondary education, they’re going to live differently. They’re going to live longer, they’re going to have fewer children, they’re going to stay married longer to the same person, they’re going to be less likely to die of alcoholism or tobacco use. They’re more likely to be elected, they’re going to raise their children differently if they get a college education, they’re going to have different dietary habits, different health maintenance habits. There are enormous differences in the society as a consequence of higher education obtained, so I think the promise of higher education is that you are more likely to be a leader in your community, you’re more likely to live longer, you’re more likely to have a different kind of family life and different life as a consumer, you think differently, there are just huge differences.
And of course, the difference that most students think about (because it’s the only one they really understand when they come in the door) is that college-educated people are going to earn more money – two and a half times the amount of a non-college graduate. And that’s true, but that’s not all the differences that they’re going to encounter. I recognize the importance of the income differential, but I’m also very interested in the other differences that come about as a result of degrees.
