Hanover College
Academic Vision Plan
April 4, 2002
Excerpts from the Original Electronic Text at the Hanover College.
A Vision of the Liberal Arts {1} The liberal arts are arts suited for free people. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to enable such people to cultivate humanity, to realize their full potential as human beings and as citizens. Accordingly, the liberal arts are designed to equip individuals to develop and integrate every dimension of their own humanity--physical, intellectual, artistic, ethical, and spiritual--and to understand and respect the humanity of others. Through critical inquiry, analysis, and interpretation, through articulate and respectful argumentation, and through engagement with multiple disciplinary and cultural perspectives, individuals acquire an education that is both ennobling and practical. The liberal arts prepare people to gain command of their thoughts and expression, to lead deliberate, examined lives, to acquire wisdom and moral integrity, and to contribute meaningfully to local and international communities.
{2} Hanover College is a community dedicated to realizing these objectives through disciplined and morally concerned inquiry. Students and professors work together to confront enduring and topical questions and to engage in conversation with others inside and outside the College community. They are sustained by an ethos that combines respect for tradition with a spirit of rational inquiry, discovery, and innovation, an ethos that looks both backward to historical origins and context and forward to the expansion of the boundaries of knowledge and inquiry. The Hanover community cultivates a culture that inspires passion and joy for learning, prizes intellectual and moral integrity, and celebrates quality. Its curricular and co-curricular programs are designed to encourage students to develop and integrate all facets of their lives and to discern and cultivate that which is extraordinary and rare in themselves and others. Providing students with sustained individual attention that both challenges and supports, a Hanover education places singular emphasis on students' independent development. It equips students to be free people, to be creative, inquisitive, discerning, and resourceful human beings, capable of exercising leadership in their communities and professions.
The Academic Vision Plan {3} All elements of the academic program at Hanover College function as a cohesive unit, designed to help students achieve the ends of a liberal arts education. The academic program equips students to realize their potential as human beings and citizens by (1) emphasizing the cumulative development of essential skills, knowledge, and understanding, (2) stressing the importance of curricular and co-curricular integration, (3) encouraging focused inquiry and scholarship, and (4) enabling faculty to work closely with students as partners in a transformed paradigm of teaching and learning. In multiple contexts and in progressive fashion, the curriculum encourages students to acquire the fundamental skills of liberal learning, most notably the skills of effective writing and speaking, critical and scientific analysis and interpretation, and creative and integrative thinking. At the same time the curriculum enables students to acquire essential knowledge and understanding of the core content, questions, and methods of the liberal arts. Hanover's academic programs also encourage deliberate integration, including the integration of learning, the integration of different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, and the integration of academic, personal, and professional lives. Student scholarship is accorded a prominent place in the curriculum because it encourages students to refine and master their ability to analyze and interpret, to discern and judge, and to write and speak with clarity and precision-skills and perspectives vital to attaining wisdom. Finally, a transformed model of teaching and learning affords students and professors with multiple opportunities to engage in inquiry together in a variety of venues: full class discussions, small-group tutorials, intensive retreats and seminars, and one-to-one conferences.
A Challenge from the Start
{4} Hanover students begin with the First-Year Experience, a program designed to draw a sharp distinction between high school and college culture and to integrate students immediately into a rigorous academic environment. It consists of a one-week August Experience, three first-year courses, think tanks, intensive advising, and integrative co-curricular programs. Together these components function to set high expectations and to provide students with a foundation in skills and perspectives essential to the liberal arts. At the heart of the First-Year Experience is a four-part academic program that features intensive training in writing and public speaking skills. Students begin the program in the August Experience by engaging an ancient question-what does it mean to be human-approached through the lens of modern interdisciplinary perspectives. In the Fall and Winter Terms, they immerse themselves in great works of literature and art, returning to the question of human nature in the Spring Term to culminate the First-Year Experience.Lenses of the Liberal Arts
{5} Building upon the First-Year Experience, the Liberal Arts Degree Requirements (LADRs) enable students to hone essential skills, acquire a breadth of learning, gain an understanding of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, and develop the capacity to integrate their learning. In every LADR course, students improve their writing and public speaking skills while acquiring and reinforcing other skills such as their ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, create, and integrate. The breadth of the LADR program enables students to cultivate the physical, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of their humanity. It also ensures that students acquire basic knowledge and understanding of themselves and their world, of human nature and the natural world, of great works of art and literature, of modern society, world languages and world culture, of faith and ethics, and of abstract and formal reasoning. The LADR courses function as introductions to disciplinary perspectives; students learn the distinguishing features of a discipline, especially the ways of knowing within a discipline and the ways of practicing the discipline. The LADR curriculum gives prominent place to integrative and collaborative courses, a feature that distinguishes Hanover's curriculum from those of other liberal arts colleges. Such courses serve multiple purposes. They introduce disciplinary perspectives in juxtaposition to other disciplines, enabling students, together with faculty, to assess similarities and differences in the basic orientations of disciplines and to explore boundaries between disciplines. And of course such courses build students' capacity to integrate learning, an ability that is vital to achieving the objectives of the liberal arts. Meaningful questions and problems are often complex and multi-faceted, bearing the imprint of many smaller questions and problems that emerge from a variety of perspectives. Students will only be able to answer such questions or solve such problems if they possess the capacity to integrate: the capacity to distinguish and define individual parts and show their relationship to the whole, to understand how radically different perspectives relate to each other, and to determine how such perspectives can be brought to bear on problems and questions simultaneously.Focused Inquiry
{6} While the Liberal Arts Degree Requirements both introduce students to numerous disciplines and enable them to integrate a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, the major focuses and develops students' understanding of the foundations of a particular discipline. Majors enable students to understand the epistemologies, the methodologies, the vocabulary, the history of the discipline, and the competing schools of thought within a discipline, and majors also introduce students to technologies that support the discipline. At Hanover, students choose among rigorous liberal arts majors, each providing opportunities for them to engage in independent inquiry, to refine essential skills such as writing and public speaking, and to integrate learning within the major and related disciplines. Consistent with Hanover's commitment to student independence and to curricular flexibility, students may choose interdisciplinary or self-designed majors grounded in a substantial and rigorous disciplinary core. Thus by focusing students' academic experience on a coherent field of disciplined art and inquiry over several years, the major helps students to refine the creative skills and thinking central to that field and to become independent, increasingly sophisticated artists and scholars.Expertise Through Practice
{7} In the major as well as in other contexts, Hanover students have multiple opportunities to engage directly in research, writing, and creative activity and to present their work publicly to the college and to wider communities. Hanover College gives priority to student scholarship because students become mature learners when they actively engage in the practice of a particular discipline and when they see their professors as both practitioners and learners in that discipline. As accomplished scholars and artists, Hanover faculty members introduce students to the liberal arts disciplines and to the international culture of scholarship and art; their goal is to help students themselves become scholars and artists. Such direct and active engagement in the liberal arts disciplines enables students to acquire the skills, knowledge, values, and understanding essential for meeting the objectives of the liberal arts. The ability, for example, to discern quality from mediocrity, authenticity from artifice, and to make judgments about complex and ambiguous problems is vital for the cultivation of wisdom and moral integrity. Such ability is developed through the discipline of scholarly inquiry, through repeated efforts to identify meaningful questions and problems, to collect and evaluate evidence, to develop and articulate convincing interpretations, and to identify and assess alternative positions. Through active scholarship and performance, students come to identify with the tradition of the liberal arts in a more reflective manner, knowing they are part of a wider conversation among scholars and ultimately part of a continuum of conversations reaching across civilizations and extending back to the ancient world.
Reaching Outward and Looking Inward
{8} As students progress through the curriculum and increasingly focus on a major and on specialized scholarly projects, they continue to participate in programs designed to broaden their horizons, programs that encourage integration of all types of learning, that call upon students to apply their talents in new contexts, and that provide opportunities for multiple and varied forms of inquiry. One such program is the Off-Campus Experience. Recognizing that the goals of acquiring a global perspective, of understanding alternative cultures, and of respecting the humanity of others can only be fulfilled through a combination of study and experience, Hanover requires all students to immerse themselves in a culture significantly different than their own, and it provides students with multiple venues for doing so. Another program, The Intensive Inquiry Colloquia, provides students of different majors, professors of different disciplines, and outside experts of different fields with a unique opportunity to retreat to a quiet setting and engage in conversation focused on one or more texts, works of art, or other sources of enduring or ground-breaking quality. Initiated by students or faculty members, the Intensive Inquiry Colloquia are examples of authentic intellectual conversations-conversations that challenge the assumptions of all participants and prize intellectual adventurousness. Another program, the Spring Term, a program born of the 1962 Hanover Plan and recently restored to its original purpose, enables students to concentrate solely on a single course for four weeks. The Spring Term not only provides an opportunity for off-campus travel but it also offers an ideal venue for innovative and experimental courses. In addition Hanover offers the Senior Capstone course, Great Issues, designed to provide seniors with a common interdisciplinary experience. The Senior Capstone is organized around topics of great contemporary importance, enlivened by the presence of a distinguished guest, and designed to enable students to bring four years of varied educational experiences to bear on great issues they will soon confront as citizens and professionals.The Flexible Classroom and a Demanding Education
{9} Undergirding the entire academic program is a new model of teaching and learning, a model that distinguishes Hanover from other liberal arts colleges and that places Hanover students in a better position to realize the objectives of the liberal arts. Whereas traditional classes consist of three or four hours of weekly lectures or large group discussions, which often encourage student passivity, in the Hanover model faculty and students meet in a variety of settings, including full-group meetings (average of fifteen students), small-group tutorials (two or three students), and individual sessions (one-to-one). The Hanover model has a number of advantages. First, it is highly flexible. Rather than assuming that a single classroom structure fits all needs, it enables class structures to fit the needs of individual disciplines, courses, faculty, and students. Thus while an introductory class may have three weekly full-group discussions supplemented by individual sessions, an upper-level seminar may include one weekly full-group session and frequent small-group tutorials, while a research-intensive seminar may structure full-group sessions for the first five weeks of class, individual sessions for the next six weeks, and large-group sessions for the last two weeks. Second, the Hanover model challenges students, requiring them to bear responsibility for their own learning. The weekly assignment for a three-student tutorial, for example, may be for students to research and prepare opposing interpretations of a problem and then in the tutorial present their arguments and engage each other in debate, with the professor listening, evaluating, and occasionally asking questions. In such a scenario, students must construct sophisticated arguments on their own, anticipating criticism and alternative interpretations, and they must rise to the challenge of thinking quickly, analytically, and critically in the spontaneous atmosphere of debate. Third, Hanover's reconstruction of the classroom encourages students' independence and creativity. The small-group tutorials and individual sessions are ideal venues for students to develop independent creative projects, projects that may emerge from a particular class but are shaped by the students' own particular interests and needs. Fourth, the Hanover model enables students to develop essential skills, knowledge, and understanding more rapidly and more effectively. Receiving generous individual attention from professors, students are able, for example, to move quickly from basic proficiency to competency to maturity in writing, public speaking, and research skills, ensuring that, upon graduation, Hanover students will, in the aggregate, be more advanced in those skills than students educated in the traditional model of teaching and learning. Finally, while challenging, the Hanover model also provides students with generous support. The individual sessions in particular provide professors with an opportunity to identify and address students' areas of need. In order to ensure the success of this program, the College is committed to establishing a student/ faculty ratio of 8:1 and an average class size of 15.Preparing for the Rest of Life
{10} The objectives of the liberal arts cannot be achieved in four years; the education that students receive at Hanover College prepares them to fulfill the goals of the liberal arts over the course of their lives, to realize gradually their potential as human beings and as citizens. Although the liberal arts are designed to prepare individuals to develop as human beings and as citizens rather than as professionals in particular careers, a liberal arts education does equip individuals with the kinds of skills and perspectives that all professions prize, skills and perspectives that form the basis of successful careers and that remain essential even as social and professional contexts change. Increasingly, business leaders and employers are recognizing and publicly acknowledging the practical virtues of a liberal arts education. As the economy undergoes restructuring and as institutions and jobs are significantly redefined, there is a greater demand, not for people with narrow technical training, but rather for people who are able to bring multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on problems, who are able make sound judgments based on an understanding of context and implication, and who are able to articulate their positions in a clear and persuasive manner, precisely the qualities that are acquired and refined over the course of a liberal arts education. Based on the conviction that the skills acquired in the context of a liberal arts education have practical career-oriented applications, Hanover College encourages every student to prepare for a career or for further education in graduate or professional schools. Providing students with a range of options, the pre-professional programs are designed to make meaningful connections between the liberal arts and professional careers and to provide students with the technical skills, practical knowledge, and business perspectives essential for specific career paths. Students graduate from Hanover thoroughly grounded in the liberal arts and fully prepared to succeed in a rapidly changing high-technology global economy.A Humane Community
{11} Hanover College seeks to build a community culture consistent with the objectives of the liberal arts, a culture that is intellectually vibrant and exciting, one that inspires individuals to achieve excellence, one that distinguishes and celebrates quality teaching, scholarship, and service. Hanover College strives to create an environment in which students and professors are able to integrate their academic and personal lives, to make meaningful connections between their academic inquiry and their development as human beings, and to provide opportunities for learning and reflection outside the classroom, including opportunities for students and professors to pursue shared interests together. As an essential element in creating an intellectually stimulating culture, Hanover College seeks to build a diverse community composed of citizens of the world, individuals of different perspectives, different interests, and different cultural backgrounds. Hanover College is a community that cultivates humanity, a community that presupposes the dignity, self-worth, and autonomy of all human beings. It seeks to be a community of active and responsible citizens-citizens who have different roles as faculty, students, administrators, staff, trustees, and alumni, but citizens who have rights and freedoms, who participate in democratic decision-making processes, and who accept responsibility for their decisions. Equally important, Hanover strives to create an environment in which students are able to construct their own civil society, a community of varied, overlapping, self-governing student groups mixed with a wide variety of informal student associations and activities. With these objectives to guide the campus community, Hanover prepares students for citizenship and service beyond college, providing them with learning experiences and with opportunities both inside and outside the classroom to serve and lead in various local and international contexts.Aspiring to Excellence
{12} To achieve all of these ends as a College, Hanover seeks to attract quality students and faculty, recognizing that it can succeed only by maintaining a vibrant community that both provides opportunity and inspires support, a community sustained by a dynamic culture that cultivates and celebrates genuine excellence, that recognizes and respects the dignity, humanity, and diversity of individuals inside and outside the college community. No less important, Hanover College also seeks to attract and retain quality staff committed to the liberal arts mission and quality administrators and trustees who, in positions of trust as stewards of the institution, understand the historic mission of the College and its current aspirations and are committed to its support. Equally vital, Hanover seeks to include alumni, staff, and other supporters of the College as active participants in its academic and pre-professional programs as well as ambassadors of the College to wider regional, national, and international communities. Above all, to achieve its objective of being a high quality liberal arts college providing the best possible education to students, deservedly ranking among the premier institutions in the nation, Hanover College seeks to understand and articulate its mission in a wider context. It sees itself as part of a larger liberal arts tradition that transcends the institution, as part of a continuum of conversations dating back to the ancient world and extending across the globe, conversations that seek to promote inquiry, to elevate understanding, and to cultivate wisdom, integrity, and humanity.