University of Louisville - Thoroughbred Yearbook (Louisville, KY)

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who spent almost five years teaching English courses on the Belknap campus. Tom McPaul, a member of the theatre arts and speech department, explores the stars during presentations. The “revolutionaries” them- selves chose to participate in the program for a variety of reasons. Several came to try it, they said, in hopes they would dis- astronomy cover what they wanted as a major. Many came just to explore some- thing new, while a few who had visited Belknap campus came to escape the “rigid, impersonal academic atmosphere” they found at the main campus. Despite the no-exam, no-grade 18 policy, Professor Mel Greer, as well as several of the students themselves, feel they are doing as well and possibly even better than they would be doing on Belknap’s campus. “If you take somebody and make them special, tell them they are special, and if they feel they are special, they'll perform better than if they felt they were average,” said Greer. “And our students are special.” Becky Harlege, a symposium freshman who lives in the dorms on the East Campus, explained that the big part students can take in their own education helped their performance, as well as the small interest groups and the regular conferences with one of the five instructor- counselors. She added, though, that one of the biggest factors was the close-knit feeling for each other which runs through the group. “It's a whole different atmos- phere here than on the main campus. | know juniors who take all their courses at Belknap and then come out here to the library to study because of the friend- ship feeling,” she said. Her “friendship feeling’”’ is one reason she thinks most of the students don’t feel the isolation of the East Campus. Originally, isolation was the problem the administrators feared most. To combat this, they planned shuttle buses to the main campus and Oxmoor Center, as well as placed an emphasis on the excellent outdoor recreational facilities such as tennis courts, soccer fields, and basketball and volley- ball courts. Schlesinger Film Festival pre- sentations are screened on the campus, as well as the Civili- zation film series. Lectures, de- bates, plays, dances, and the special interest groups take up a large amount of the remaining time, as well as concerts by the music school students who share the East Campus with the symposium students. However, a few students still feel the isolation, although they would rather stay at the East Campus than transfer to Belknap. Dorm life, too, is a bit dif- ferent from dorm life on Belknap. The rooms are more spacious than any of the four under- graduate dorms on the main cam- pus, and the close-knit feeling

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grating knowledge rather than segregating compartments of knowledge into isolated courses. This has resulted in, among other things, the presentation of the play “Everyman” by a group of symposium students, a field trip to experience pol- lution in Louisville, and a bus trip to an Indianapolis art museum. The program is so new that it is still in the experimental stage. During the first semester, several students felt that the program leaned too heavily in the humanities direction, and this semester more social and natural science topics have been injected into the program. The program is bent toward exploring the liberal arts world through discussions, with the hope of finding some partial answers to today’s crises. In contrast to Belknap, where stu- dents set out with a schedule and hope to find classes that fit it — regardless of what they are — the symposium students have a say in what they want to learn and experience. Time is set aside for special interest groups, ranging in everything from yoga to photography. They are usually l@d by one of the five instructors or a student staff member. The instructors themselves do not limit their teacher-student relationship to their chosen fields. Joel Gwinn, a physicist, conducted a group in photo- graphy, while Mel Greer, former chairman of the philosophy department, leads a yoga group during lunch time. Ray Bixler, psychologist and symposium co- ordinator, reviews students’ Eng- lish papers. Greer verbalized the senti- ments of the other four mem- bers when he said that he had learned not only from the other instructors but from his students during his first attempt at team- teaching unstructured courses. The teachers not only lead the interest groups, but try their hand at one another’s fields. Gwinn analyzes poetry which would normally have been the exclusive field of Elaine Wise,

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carries over into the dorm. Few people use the shuttle service because many of the students have their own cars and are willing to take other students to the centers. Becky admitted that as on Belknap, there is a division be- tween dorm students and those who commute , but the difference is much less marked. “There’re still freshmen here who are into the high school thing, but the smaller numbers here make us all a lot closer,” she ex- plained. Next year presents a strange problem to these freshmen who will most probably have to adapt to the more rigid Belknap structure as sophomores. They fear they will feel restrained and stifled after a year of exper- iencing symposium freedom. Last year one of the big re- servations about the freshman experiment concerned the hard- ship on those East Campus stu- dents who might want to join fraternities or sororities. This has turned out to be an un- warranted fear, primarily be- cause most of the symposium students have opted away from the Greek system. One student explained the majority position. “Why should we need a fraternal system when we can find friendship here just by living?” 19