College Offers Mini-Courses for Far-Flung, Nostalgic Alumni

As Columbia College students reluctantly settle back in from spring break, they might be surprised to hear that their predecessors are eagerly signing up for a chance to revisit the Core Curriculum.

The Columbia College Alumni Association launched a program last spring to offer to alumni clusters of classes based on Columbia courses including Contemporary Civilization, Literature Humanities, Art Humanities, Music Humanities, and Frontiers of Science.

Each mini-course is more than simply a Sparknotes-style refresher. Rather than following curricula prescribed by their on-campus colleagues, faculty members work specifically to apply the texts they teach to today’s society. According to Executive Director of Alumni Affairs Ken Catandella, one of the program’s key organizers, a given class might “take Hobbes, Voltaire, and Plato, and apply them to the free market economy.”

“The mini-courses try to take the essence of the core and apply it to the reality of the world for alumni,” Catandella said.

Organizers see this approach as an important tool in making courses designed for college freshmen relevant to more seasoned learners.

“Their [alumni’s] perspective on life when they read these materials is a little bit different, because they’ve been out of school and have actually had more real life experience,” Executive Assistant of Alumni Affairs Mia Gonsalves explained.

The program began two years ago, when three brief core reviews were offered at a Columbia College reunion. The enthusiastic response led to the creation of mini-courses last spring. The sessions are currently offered in New York and Washington, D.C., and an abbreviated, one-class pilot program is being planned for Chicago this spring. More cities may soon follow.

Deborah Martinsen, associate dean of Columbia College and lecturer for one such course, attributes the alumni demand for mini-classes to what she calls “Core nostalgia” and “Core envy.” The latter, she said, expresses the sentiments of alumni members’ friends and spouses, who complain they lack the critical-thinking skills the Core is designed to impart.

Currently, the program is open to all CC alumni, who are also free to sign up their spouses and friends. Martinsen noted that her last class included a wide range of “alumni from the class of 1951 to the class of 2005.”

Catandella also proposes another reason for alumni interest in the mini-courses—that they provide intellectual engagement with the academic interests of today’s undergraduates.

“They [alumni in the program] feel connected to what the students are doing currently,” he said, citing the offering of recent Core addition Frontiers of Science, which was not available to many of the alumni involved in the program.

Unlike those taught in Hamilton, the mini-courses are a veritable bargain—$150 for three sessions, which typically include a small meal. In the midst of the Capital Campaign, the major CC fundraising drive launched last fall, organizers said they hope that the program will also encourage donations.

“This really is a relational activity, although I suspect that happy alums and engaged alums are more likely to be donors,” Catandella said. “In that respect, I imagine it’s connected. It’s not really an outcrop of the campaign.”

The often-bimonthly sessions last two hours each and typically occur in the evenings at the volunteered offices of alumni participants. Much like Core classes taught at the University, classes consist of small groups of 20 to 25 alumni.

While the classes will not count toward any degree or certificate, Catandella said alumni receive a different sort of compensation.

“When alumni are able to be challenged again by the Core Curriculum at the place in their lives that they are today,” he explained, “there is a real sense of coming home, intellectually coming home.”

news@columbiaspectator.com