THE COLLEGE WITHIN. The most radical educational experiment in Tufts' history was the "College Within," planned in January 1970 by two faculty members (Seymour Simches and Melvyn Feinberg) and a group of students who met informally during the Winter Study Period to discuss academic innovations. It commenced operation in September 1971 and came to an end with the close of the 1976-77

The rationale behind the College Within was that an alternative to the conventional curriculum and undergraduate learning experience was necessary. Traditional methods presumably failed to exploit the intellectual potential of some students and to stimulate their minds. It was felt that they should be allowed to work virtually on their own, without the constraints of scheduled courses, classroom attendance, quizzes, and examinations.

Students enrolling in the program were to be assigned to "modules" (small groups) meeting periodically under the general supervision of a "mentor team" consisting of one faculty member and two graduate students. Each student was to outline one or more proposed projects of their choice, sign a "contract" to complete each within a specified period of time, and receive from one to four course credits each semester for a maximum of one year's enrollment, depending on the magnitude of each project. Because the projects were, ideally, to be interdisciplinary in nature and the work not confined to any one or more conventional fields of concentration, they were usually listed under the rubric of "Plans of Study," and were graded initially under the pass-fail system. The completed contracts were recorded as College Within ("CW") credits on transcripts. Upon completion of each project the students made a presentation to their peers and their work was subject to a detailed written evaluation by their mentor team.

After the general configuration of the College Within was drawn up and circulated to the Tufts community, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Jackson discussed the proposal at a non-legislative open meeting in November 1970, a few days preceding a regularly scheduled meeting. The Liberal Arts and Jackson faculty, by a vote of 54 to 20, established the new program for a three-year trial period, and after great hesitancy and much discussion. The trustee Educational Policy Committee endorsed it in January 1971, subject to the availability of funds. For reasons not clear, the College Within was authorized by the Liberal Arts and Jackson faculty rather than by the Faculty of Arts And Sciences in spite of the fact that both engineering

The operation of the College Within was assured in the summer of 1971 when the Carnegie Foundation awarded a start-up grant of $48,000. The largest segment of it was allocated to departments to pay for replacement of those faculty members serving as mentors in the College Within. Participating faculty were to be relieved of all teaching duties in the regular program, with a three-year commitment to the College Within, with half of their time to be devoted to that and one-half to research and other professional activities. Earlier in the year, ten two-year fellowships for graduate apprentice mentors in the humanities and the social sciences were obtained, financed by a grant from the federal government and intended to provide educational opportunities for minorities planning to teach. These grants were administered through the graduate school. The Carnegie grant funded the apprentice mentors in the sciences, including mathematics.

The university was never able to raise the matching funds required by a $600,000 grant from the Spaulding-Potter Trust, but Tufts did receive a $150,000 grant from its Fund for Innovation. In addition, Tufts assigned $200,000 from the Harriet C. and Ruth S. Haskell Fund for Innovative Education, $20,000 from the estate of Alice R. Nickerson, and $8,840 from the Harriet H. and Charles W. Parmenter Fund for Innovative Education. An interim faculty-administrative council reviewed applications for the first group of students until a regular admissions procedure could be established.

The College Within opened in September 1971 in the west wing of Sweet Hall in space once occupied by the Air Force ROTC unit. Ninety-eight students were enrolled for the first semester, seventy-one for the second. The majority each semester were sophomores, with about twice as many liberal arts men as Jackson women, assigned to six modules ranging from seven to eighteen students each. Four of the six faculty mentors participated for the entire year. An academic profile of students indicated that their grade-point average on entering the program was 2.87, about the same as for all Tufts undergraduates. Forty of the students enrolled for the first semester

The vast majority registered for only one semester although some continued for the entire year. A questionnaire completed by over half of the fifty-two who remained only one semester indicated that in order to meet a variety of specific degree requirements they returned to the conventional curriculum. Eight others confessed that they needed a more highly structured learning experience than the College Within afforded, and did not have the self-discipline necessary for full-time independent study. Several students resigned from Tufts as well as from the College Within. Many had considered the College Within as a sort of way-station before making a final departure. The great majority of students enrolled in each semester of the College Within who earned a "Pass" received credit for the equivalent of a full (four-course) program. Over one-third of the students during the first semester took at least one additional course in the conventional curriculum.

In the fall of 1972 Simches, the director, prepared a detailed report and interim self-examination regarding its first year of operation. It was, he admitted, by no means a record of unqualified success. There was the basic conflict within students themselves over taking charge of one's own education - a highly individualized matter - and at the same time belonging to a community with both intellectual and emotional coherence. The modules into which the students were grouped more or less randomly became the battlegrounds on which this conflict was played out. It was the sense of community and common endeavor that lost out, concerned as the students were with their own projects, usually in no way related to each other. The independence which the students believed they deserved tended to isolate them from the group. Carrying out the interdisciplinary mission of the College Within, with faculty representing the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences and mathematics, threatened to become a casualty, and the proposal to group student projects around a particular theme seemed to be self-defeating. A second major problem had to do with the difficulty in assessing, in more or less traditional academic terms, projects which were so intuitive and even basically ideological or emotional in their character that they departed radically from conventional criteria. This in turn brought a larger conflict between the generally accepted educational goals and programs of a degree-granting institution of

Then there was the problem of admissions. What criteria should be used? The motivation for many students was undoubtedly negative - to escape from the rigors of normal university demands. Then there was the problem of the demands of both time and energy on the faculty and graduate students who were participating. On paper, both were intended to be involved on only a part-time basis. Instead of carrying out the original plan of allowing time for faculty research, departmental needs were often such that most faculty were expected to teach at least one course in the regular program. Many faculty and graduate students spent far more time and effort than was called for. This resulted in a wide range of difference in load as compared with those of their colleagues and peers.

When the enabling act establishing the College Within was adopted by the faculty, it was stipulated that a Board of Visitors evaluate the program during its third full year of operation. An eight-person evaluation team, three of whom came from outside Tufts, was duly appointed by Dean Harleston and made its report at the end of the summer of 1974. Their investigation was painstakingly thorough and generally balanced, with criticisms as well as commendation. By the time the evaluation was made, the College Within had acquired a rather poor image among both students and faculty not directly involved in it. The team hastened to point out that, in its estimation, the College Within was not "a haven in which the incompetent and lazy can get away with slipshod work," as many alleged. The team found that a conscious effort was made to emphasize the interdisciplinary character of the program, but attempting deliberately to provide representation from each of the three basic areas of knowledge was less important than creating congenial mentor teams that could work in harmony.

Tension inevitably existed between the promise of complete freedom and the need for some degree of structure and authority. This was exacerbated by poor communication among as well as within modules and created frustration and uncertainty on the part of both students and faculty as to standards and expectations. This

In the first year, and in subsequent years as well, the promised interaction between the College Within and the rest of the university was minimal. In fact, it operated, as one observer noted, as "a world apart." The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects that had been anticipated were few, the majority focusing on one discipline. In most instances the faculty mentors could claim expertise in only one or two fields, and it became necessary to refer students to other faculty or personnel outside the Tufts community.

Enrollment in the College Within went down steadily, except for a brief period of stabilization in 1973. There had been a 50 percent drop in the fall of 1972, and in the second semester of 1973-74, enrollment had shrunk to thirty-four. There were only twenty by the spring of 1974-75, and the number had dropped even farther in 1975-76, and to less than fifteen in the first semester of the 1976-77 academic year.

Simches had resigned from the directorship of the College Within at the end of the 1973-74 academic year and was replaced by Howard Hunter, chairman of the Department of Religion, who had been a faculty mentor previously and was familiar with the program. He and two other faculty members served as mentors, together with

Not all of the explanation for the drop in enrollment could be found in the lack of faculty support, financing, or the problems of internal operation of the College Within. There was a discernible shift of preference in the student body at large for a more conventional curriculum and more vocationally oriented courses. They came to believe that standard grading was a safer and better route to follow than College Within credit that usually needed explanation to a business, law, medical, or dental school admissions office that was likely to be either mystified by, or frown on, experimental programs. In order to remedy the grading problem, College Within students, beginning in the fall of 1974, were given the option of receiving regular letter grades or taking the work on a pass-fail basis.

There was continued difficulty in recruiting interested faculty, partly for the same reason that there was a comparative lack of faculty participation in the Experimental College; namely, fear that involvement in the College Within would not carry the same weight in making salary, tenure, and promotion decisions as in the regular academic program. Younger untenured faculty in particular were discouraged by their department chairmen from becoming involved in College Within affairs. As a way of encouraging greater faculty participation, the administration committed itself to excusing faculty participants from regular departmental responsibilities. However, that never went into effect. Because of budget cuts, College Within faculty could no longer count on released time. The original plan of having the faculty make a three-year commitment had never actually been put into effect, partly because department chairmen refused to permit College Within faculty to take such prolonged absence from their regular teaching assignments. So the announcement that faculty were committed to only one year in the College Within was largely meaningless.

The charter of the College Within came up for renewal in 1975, and there was widespread feeling that the entire program would be ploughed under. However, a series of changes was made that enabled it to survive for two more years. In order to tie the regular faculty in more closely with the College Within and to provide a greater

Accountability was therefore provided for the first time, with annual reports to be made periodically. After use of the regular grading system was authorized, College Within students were allowed to use credit earned there toward fulfillment of certain foundation, distribution, and concentration requirements if approved by appropriate authorities. College Within students were also permitted to be enrolled for up to two years rather than for one only.

But none of these changes made possible the salvaging of the program. The poor image which it had was made even more negative in 1976 when two members of the Tufts Counseling Center reported in a professional journal that in 1973, of 192 students who had been or were currently enrolled in the College Within by that date, 40 had sought consultation or treatment. Public attention was called to the article by the Tufts Observer, which immediately (and correctly) identified the anonymously described experimental program as that of the College Within. Of the forty who had sought help, twelve (30 percent) were identified as "borderline personalities." These were defined as occupying an area "between neurosis and psychosis." Eight of the twelve withdrew from school, representing a significantly higher proportion of withdrawals than a sample of students enrolled in the regular curriculum.

In assessing the College Within experiment, something must be said on the positive side. It did initiate a series of public lectures and forums which appealed to the greater Tufts community in an effort to break down the wall of isolation that had grown between the College Within and the rest of the Medford campus. There was also ample evidence that some students profited from their College Within experience and achieved some of the basic purposes for which it had been created. Those who were self-directed and could both set and hold to their own objectives found the College Within an exciting alternative to the conventional curriculum. There was indeed occasional integration of two or more ostensibly unrelated disciplines; and opportunity to combine theory and practice with "hands-on" experience in field work. Students discovered how important it was to communicate their research and findings to their peers as well as to their mentors, and many discovered deficiencies in both oral and written expression of which they had previously been unaware.

[] For a perceptive analysis of the reasons for the failure of the College Within and the relative success of the Experimental College, see Helene Aronson and Philip Mirowski, "The Little College That Could," Tufts Magazine 2 (Spring 1984): 32-37.

[] See Malcom O. Slavin and Jonathan Slavin, "Two Patterns of Adaptation in Late Adolescent Borderline Personalities," Psychiatry 39 (February 1976): 41-50.