Deep (and Wide) Impact: The Weissman Center Marks 10 Years
By Eric Goldscheider
Ten-year celebrations included a talk by journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault (left), student presentations (center), and (right) a meeting between student grant recipients and Center founder Harriet Levine Weissman ’58 (right).
Photos by Paul Schnaittacher (right); Fred LeBlanc
As the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, its impact as a vibrant hive for teaching, learning, and social action at Mount Holyoke continues to grow. Operating out of a few offices in Porter Hall, the center has insinuated itself into many aspects of academic life on campus, has established bonds with the surrounding community, and promises to be a source of new approaches to creative pedagogy in higher education nationally.
“Our idea was to get our tentacles into as many classrooms, as many faculty gatherings, as many student gatherings as possible, and to really encourage and shape campus conversations,” said Christopher Benfey in a recent interview. Benfey, a respected literary critic and author who is also Mellon Professor of English, codirected the Weissman Center from 2000 to 2004.
Many colleges and universities contain institutions charged with performing some of the tasks that the Weissman Center does, such as bringing speakers to campus, helping students with their writing, and promoting community engagement by placing students in internships and service learning opportunities. But the magic of the Weissman Center is that it has also doggedly and energetically grappled with big-picture questions, such as: What role can a liberal arts education play in building leadership skills? How does one go about broadening students’ perspectives and instilling in them a drive for social relevance? How can educators everywhere prepare women to rise to the highest echelons of their chosen fields by being agents of change? By combining the discrete tasks it performs into a coherent whole, the Weissman Center has become a force for integrative thinking at Mount Holyoke.
Lois A. Brown, who steps down this summer as director after four and a half years, described some of the components of the Weissman Center and the strategies it uses to advance its overarching ideals. The Speaking, Arguing, and Writing (SAW) program prepares a cadre of about forty peer mentors who fan out across campus to work with fellow students, often assisting professors in specially designed speaking- and writing-intensive courses. There is also the Community-Based Learning (CBL) program, which sends Mount Holyoke women off campus in ways that are structured to complement and buttress their coursework. At the end of each academic year, the Weissman Center hosts the Senior Symposium, at which members of the graduating class showcase intellectual passions, independent projects, and scholarly research.
And of course there are free, public events with speakers who are always fascinating and usually famous in their fields. The Weissman Center carefully calibrates these lectures and symposia to tie into the curriculum in as many classes as possible. Featured guests meet with students and faculty in small-group settings, often engaging directly with concerns relevant to what students are working on at the time. Semester and yearlong themes such as “Family Matters,” “Migrations,” and “Geographies of Color” give professors in any department the opportunity to design course offerings or syllabi that relate to the work of the writers, activists, broadcasters, political figures, and artists of many stripes who come to South Hadley in fairly rapid succession each term. These have included leading thinkers like veteran newswoman Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the late literary theorist and activist Susan Sontag, crusading author on public education Jonathan Kozol, writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, and architect Daniel Libeskind.
Before assuming the directorship, Brown, an associate professor of English, turned one of her introductory literature, culture, and critical theory courses into a writing-intensive course. “Peer learners and mentors make safe spaces for sometimes very nerve-racking moments,” explains Brown. Mika Weissbuch ’11 describes becoming a peer mentor as a time of enormous growth. “I learned to really step into my voice and become aware of what I was thinking and why I was thinking that way,” said Weissbuch. Beyond that, she said, “the Weissman Center has been an essential part of my education and informs the work I do in the community ... I have learned the importance of really understanding what others believe before I pass judgment or conjure up suggestions.”
Speaking Up for Women
From its inception in 1999, a guiding principle of the center has been that honing basic oral and written communication abilities is crucial to effective leadership. Concomitant with this were the twin ideas that competent speaking and writing, no matter how elegantly deployed, can be vacuous without a strong foundation in knowledge; and that activism without artful presentation risks being soulless and ineffective. The Weissman Center was born of a marriage between two fledgling initiatives. The SAW program was already experimenting with new ways of teaching written and oral communication, such as role playing, in-character recreations of historical events, debates, and the greater use of oral exams. The big idea linking it to what was then called the Center for Leadership and Public Interest Advocacy was that form and content were inextricably related.
Harriet (in yellow) and Paul (in blue shirt) Weissman listen to a presentation during the center's anniversary celebrations. Photo by Fred LeBlanc
“There was a concern, especially as a women’s college, that we had a particular obligation to teach women to be assertive, to be able to arrive at a position on the basis of knowledge and to argue for it with authority,” said Professor of Philosophy Lee Bowie. “That was much of the motivation from the faculty for the creation of these two programs.” Bowie, whose fields include the philosophy of the mind and of logic, was one of the founding co-directors, along with Eva Paus, an economics professor who now leads MHC’s McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives.
When Benfey and his co-director, Professor of German Studies Karen Remmler, took the reins in 2000, they set out to solidify the bonds between the SAW program and the public events mission of the center. “Our vision was to make the programming an opportunity for people from different walks of life, from different disciplines and professions, to come together and have public conversations around an issue,” said Remmler. She and Benfey organized a yearlong theme, ending in the spring of 2005, called “Water Matters: Survival for the 21st Century.” Including exhibits, it had more than a dozen public events linked to courses with nine professors in five departments. Benfey describes as almost missionary zeal his and Remmler’s drive to have a lasting impact on the campus as a whole. “We wanted to be a force in the classroom, we wanted to be a force in the lives of faculty, we wanted to provoke,” he said.
The SAW program is now headed by Laura Greenfield, who teaches a course each semester designed to educate new peer mentors about underlying theories they can draw on to become effective partners in the learning process. “We look for women who really understand the reciprocal nature of their work,” said Greenfield. A measure of the impact the program has on the college as a whole is that about two dozen faculty offer speaking- and writing-intensive courses each semester that employ a SAW peer mentor. And in the last academic year, nearly 40 percent of Mount Holyoke women used the SAW Center, a drop-in resource located in the library, making more than 1,270 appointments. “That is a phenomenally huge number compared to what I’ve seen at other institutions,” said Greenfield. She is bringing some of the ideas developed in the SAW program into a wider arena by encouraging her students to present papers at professional meetings. In November Mount Holyoke will host “the first and only conference specifically devoted to peer mentoring and writing,” said Greenfield. “We’ll have hundreds of people from across the country and perhaps the world coming to talk about our work.”
Rebekka Lee '04, who is pursuing a master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, looks back at her mentoring experience as an important part of her education. One of the reasons the SAW program has such a great impact is its scale, according to Lee. "So many classes had a writing mentor [that] any student was probably going to have a mentor in at least one class, especially if she started in 2002 or later," she said.
Reaching a Broader Community
Alan Bloomgarden coordinates the Community-Based Learning program, which predated the Weissman Center but is now under its umbrella. This is another way in which the center's reach extends deeply into the college as a whole. There are between twelve and fifteen CBL courses each year, with a total of about 200 students, in which faculty specifically build some form of community engagement into their curriculum.
Also, the center employs community fellows who are paid to work with area organizations through initiatives such as the Holyoke Corps, which works with students in the public schools of an economically stressed city; and Girls Inc., a national nonprofit organization with local chapters that teach life skills to girls. "The most sophisticated and productive conception of CBL is one that involves engaging students in citizenship development and leadership," said Bloomgarden. "The match between the CBL program and the leadership orientation of the Weissman Center is an excellent one because we want students to become change agents."
Emma Fialka-Feldman '11 describes herself as being "passionate about getting more people into leadership [and] a big fan of the Weissman Center... because it challenges students and faculty to think about leadership in holistic ways." She attends all the public lectures and recently took Educational Psychology, a course with a CBL component through which she tutored children and helped out in enrichment programs at the Donahue Elementary School in Holyoke. The experience "really gave me the opportunity to reflect on what we learned in class about what it means to motivate students and what that looks like," said Fialka-Feldman.
Linzy Brekke-Aloise '98 graduated a year before the Weissman Center was formally launched. Today, a professor of early American history at Stonehill College, Brekke-Aloise often speaks with prospective students about MHC. The Weissman Center, she said, is a big selling point. She participated in the discussions in the mid to late 1990s that led to the formation of the center. "There was a very strong [feeling] that one of the benefits of a women's college was the creation of female leaders who are not afraid to speak up and to speak out, but that there needed to be a formal, structured way of promoting that," said Brekke-Aloise. She got to know Harriet Levine Weissman '58, who with her husband, Paul, made a $4 million founding gift, and still views her as a model of the kind of leader the college aspires to produce. "Harriet is a force in public life and an amazing philanthropist," said Brekke-Aloise. "One of the things I find most fascinating about her is that she is genuinely interested in all things Mount Holyoke, a remarkable quality in an alumna who has been graduated for several decades."
Brekke-Aloise is struck by the relevance of the Weissman Center's founding principles to issues facing higher education more generally. "Women are still struggling to feel comfortable and competent making public arguments," she said. "Even in the classroom they want to quietly build consensus rather than say, ‘This is what I think, this is the argument that I want to make.' Women hang back quite a lot." Now that enrollment trends show that women outnumber men in many coeducational institutions, administrators are wrestling with how best to empower women's voices. "Mount Holyoke and institutions like the Weissman Center have a very strong leadership role to play in guiding other institutions of higher learning about how best to educate women," said Brekke-Aloise. "They know how to do it, and in many ways coeducational institutions do not."
Looking back at an illustrious decade of programming and pioneering pedagogy during tenth anniversary celebrations this spring, Harriet Weissman said, "Paul and I are deeply privileged, proud, and honored to have our names attached to the center."
Learn More About the Weissman Center
There’s much more to learn about the Weissman Center’s multifaceted program. Here are a few suggested links to get you started.
• Main Web site Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal
Arts
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/
• The McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/global/
• The Speaking, Arguing, and Writing
(SAW) program
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/11260.shtml
• The Community-Based Learning (CBL)
program
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/11261.shtml
A summer 1999 Quarterly article, “When Thought Leads to Action: Community-Based Learning Translates into Meaningful Projects and Tangible Benefits” by Martha Ackmann, shows what the program was like in its infancy. CBL_Su99QArticle.pdf
• The Senior Symposium program
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/16261.shtml
• Past Weissman Center-Sponsored
Programs
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/11282.shtml
A sampling of past semester- and year-long themes:
“Water Matters: Survival for the 21st Century.”
•Faculty profiles of past and current Weissman Center Directors
