October 12, 1999 

Celebrating the Ultimate Year of the Paracollege 
Sponsored by the St. Olaf Paracollege 
and the Leraas Lecture Fund 

The theme of my remarks tonight is "incidents of learning." It’s a phrase meant to point to the way learning arises out of circumstances that are only partly under the control of the people involved. A curriculum can be planned in minute detail; a syllabus can be planned in minute detail; a lecture can be planned at the level of each specific word. Each of these preplanned forms expresses a coordinated, synthesized, integrated arrangement of meaning in the mind of the planner. And each of these is crucial to the activity of learning. Indeed in the best of circumstances these can be the occasion of sublime inspiration (it is inspiring, for example, to try to comprehend the conception of western human knowledge embodied in the St. Olaf College general education curriculum; and it is inspiring in a completely different way to hear Jonathan Hill lecture about Keats’ ode "To Autumn"). Yet none of these guarantees that any particular curriculum, syllabus, or lecture will be the occasion of meaning making for the particular students who swing within their orbits. Meaning making for students arises accidentally, depending on what they bring into the classroom, and on how the things they bring interact with whatever else is brought into the classroom by teachers and other students. Of course we can prepare for these accidents: we can lay down conditions for them, we can encourage one another to be on the watch for them, and to respect (even treasure) them when they occur, and we can develop ways of relating to each other that increase the chances that incidents of learning will occur. The possibility of these chances—planning for accidents of meaning—is my topic. I am going to proceed by offering some observations about the circumstances surrounding the end of the Paracollege. These will be interspersed with reflections on the things I learned by accident in the Paracollege. I will end by offering some prognostications about what it will be like to be St. Olaf College without a Paracollege. 

It will become evident in an instant that these observations are like a personal confession—a narrative of how my life was shaped by the Paracollege that inhabited St. Olaf College. I think of myself as a poster boy for the claim that the Paracollege was an engine of faculty development, and this is a chance for me gratefully to acknowledge all my debts to particular colleagues and students, and to the architects of the idea of a Paracollege (Wee, the Hellings, Finholt, Fjelstad, Narum, Brown, Gengenbach, and many others). I sometimes say in jest (but it isn’t really a jest) that I learned nearly everything I know about teaching from some Paracollege connection. Indeed I can’t even begin to think about my conduct in a classroom without thinking about the environment of personal development that thrived in the Paracollege. Consider the list of faculty and disciplines I collaborated with in the classroom: Becky Mark, Olivia Frey, Carol Holly, Abby Werlock, Jonathan Hill in English; Jim Farrell, Eric Weitz in History; Alice Hanson in Music. And consider the supremely cost effective faculty development of arranging for 3-4 colleagues to join together in support of the unique educational program of a particular student. I’m thinking here about senior committees generally and oral examinations in particular. Imagine the conversation (inspiring, instructive, revolutionizing) that arose among 3-4 colleagues and a student addressing a concern at the point of intersection of the diverse interests and expertise of the colleagues. To be even more pointed, you should all be so lucky as to sit in on an oral exam with Bruce Nordstrom Loeb to see how your understanding of your own subjects can be transformed by his patient, expert, almost infinitely fertile reflections. Or the same with many others with whom I was privileged to serve on senior committees: Jo Beld, Charlie Wilson, Alice Hanson, Paul Kirchner, Wes Brown, Olivia Frey, Doug Schuurman, Bruce Benson, Carol Holly, Mac Gimse, Paddy Dale, Eric Cole, David Schodt, Matt Rohn, John Poling, Vern Faillettaz, Laurel Carrington, Stock Weinstock-Collins, and others. Where else in routine institutional structure might a member of the faculty have opportunity for significant, substantive collaboration with such a range of colleagues with their energies focused on the well-being of specific students? What else could match that quality of intellectual, pedagogical, and community development? 

Dynamics of Tension between the Ethos of the Paracollege and Ordinary College Learning

Lurking in the background of my topic are some specific questions forced on us by the particular circumstances in our common history at St. Olaf College. The Paracollege is in its ultimate year of a 30 year history. A new initiative called a "Center for Integrative Studies" is in its first year. Many other interdisciplinary programs are thriving and still new ones are emerging. But tonight I will allow my reflection on incidents of meaning to take shape around questions that become increasingly provocative, the more we think about them. They are the questions DeAne raised and Wes Brown reminded us of two weeks ago. 

• What did it mean that for 30 years St. Olaf College chose to be a college with a "Paracollege"?
• Why didn’t the Paracollege survive the departures and retirements of the charismatic founders whose inspirations and reputation insulated the Paracollege against the suspicions of the mainstream of college learning? Why did a "Paracollege" come to seem something the college could not afford (rather than seeming the one thing the college could not do without)?

• Calling Paracollege education "transformative" means that the practices of the Paracollege acknowledged and embraced the power of learning to transform student, teacher, community, and world through the possibility of really novel learning. Expressed as an ideal, we sought something more than transmission of the teacher’s knowledge to the student; we sought the actualization of students, their vigorous engagement in something meaningful to them.
• Calling Paracollege education "student-centered" reflects our insistence both on the importance of the personal development of the student and on the validity of the student’s native curiosity as a starting point for learning, rooted in deep respect for their efforts to construct meaning in the world.
• Calling Paracollege education "interdisciplinary" emphasizes our shared convictions that many really important topics have to be addressed pragmatically with whatever diverse disciplinary tools prove effective in illuminating them; and that the structures of academic disciplines and the guilds that support them are always at risk of becoming institutionally rigid and self-serving.
• Situating Paracollege learning in a community stresses the way we intentionally sought to nurture the kind of community that stimulates learning by dialogue, and that cultivates the personal development of every one of its members through emphatically social as well as through emphatically academic gatherings.

For the Paracollege was always marked by playfulness. It was gay in the pre-Stonewall sense of the word that means cheerful, light-footed, dancing fun. When I arrived, in 1985, Paradinners were extravagant displays of academic humility and humor. Brilliance, cleverness, and erudition were in display everywhere, but any risk that these excellences would puff us up, or intimidate any members of the community was continually offset by self-deprecating, ironic laughter. 

The Paracollege was also marked by an appreciation for intersections, gaps, unmarked territories between established practices. Students and faculty alike ventured into these interstitial spaces out of pure confidence that something valuable was there, and that learning that mattered could arise out of our adventures there. 

There was always room for accidents, there was always space to combine or juxtapose things simply waiting to see what would emerge. There was the pleasure of collaborating without the looming threat of upsmanship within the criteria of accomplishment prevailing in any particular guild at any particular time. There was the shared conviction that teaching mattered, and that good faith reflection on teaching justified meetings of colleagues (and of students). There was the extraordinary involvement of students in the elaboration of theory and practice in the Paracollege, both on a daily basis in tutorials and seminars, and on a larger basis in faculty meetings, in task forces reenvisioning the curriculum, and in programmatic calls for even greater empowerment of students as teachers in their own right. 

Why didn’t the Paracollege continue indefinitely in the pleasure of all these excellences? Two weeks ago, reflecting on the position of this Paracollege within St. Olaf College, Wes Brown was right to dwell on tensions that emerged between the prevailing criteria of excellence in ordinary academic guilds and the criteria of excellence that guided the Paracollege. And he was absolutely right to remind us that any innovation is implicitly a criticism of the status quo, and will consequently be mistrusted as potentially subversive. Part of what I want to do now is to explore these tensions at the level of ideals and principles implied in the teaching practices of the Paracollege, for I think these tensions illuminate the question why it came about that there came a moment in the history of St. Olaf when the judgment seemed sound that the parent institution could afford to do without its experimental subunit. 

In drawing contrasts between the practices and value commitments of the Paracollege and the those of the broader world of liberal arts colleges I am obviously speaking specifically about ideals of the Paracollege. I am well aware that in our efforts to embody those ideals we often fell well short. And I am equally well aware that many colleagues who never taught in the Paracollege shared many of its ideals and in some cases embodied them more faithfully than we in the Paracollege were able to do. Nevertheless I can still identify what was remarkable about St. Olaf as a college that chose for thirty years to have a Paracollege by highlighting differences between the parent institution and the fitful offspring. Reflecting on these differences was always part of the natural relation between the college orthodoxy, and the experimental, alternative, unorthodox unit within. An intentionally "experimental" unit inevitably defines itself in part just by restlessly carrying out the implications of its founding vision, but also in part by restlessly contrasting itself to the orthodoxies of the parent institution and seeking a way forward in and through those contrasts. 

To understand the nature of the tension between the Paracollege ethos and the ethos of its parent institution, I find it useful to reflect on implicit as well as explicit commitments expressed in Paracollege practices. And for now I offer four kinds of implicit commitments: metaphysical commitments (or commitments about what the world is really like); commitments to a theory about rhetoric (or commitments about how different speakers relate to the conventions of language in the academy); theological commitments (or commitments about what human nature is like in relation to God); and political commitments (or commitments about the kinds of actions people should take pursuing the realization of ideal communities). 

Importantly, the practices of the Paracollege implied what I have to call a distinct metaphysical stance. Trusting so much in the validity of learning that arose out of accidental encounters among people, texts, art works, disciplines, and personal experiences, the practice of the Paracollege implied a conviction that the truth about the world is not articulable in strict orders and categories, but is something more fluid, richly textured, profuse, multivalent, and subject to ongoing, delightful interpretations, each one incomplete and begging for further elaboration or dissent. It was a profound accident of learning for me when I heard Patrick Goold (formerly of the philosophy department) explain his reservations about grading. To give grades fairly, he argued, requires prior agreement on measures of performance based on some clear foreknowledge of the subject matter to be approached in, say, a seminar. But declaring in advance the nature of the subject with enough clarity to establish clear grading criteria threatens to foreclose the possibility that the procedures of the class will produce some utterly unexpected discovery. Consequently it delegitimizes the conversational inquiry of students in the process of the class, and may, in the extreme, transform the class from a venturesome, even dangerous exploration, into an artificial exercise. Patrick’s reflection (about which there may well be room for disagreement) forced a transformation in my thinking about course planning and the emergence of meaning in students’ experience. It also, I think, reflected an implicit conviction that the world we seek to know is illimitably mutable. 

A curriculum that cleaves to departmental organizations and the clear articulation of standards based on prior understanding of the subject matter also declares metaphysical principles, such as the principles that the character of reality is ordered; that the basic outline of that order is largely knowable, even known to us; that the order is usefully reflected in the outline of our disciplines, professional guilds, and academic departments. 

Tension between the Paracollege’s love of flux and surprise, and the standard curriculum’s stress on clear categories was inevitable, and it gave rise to many mutual caricatures (of which this, perhaps, is just one more). And living with this tension goes some way towards explaining what it meant for St. Olaf College to be a college with a Paracollege, and why St. Olaf College ultimately decided it could do better without a Paracollege. 

Equally importantly, the practices of the Paracollege implied what I would call a theory of language and rhetoric. Working so hard to include every students’ voice in a seminar, working so hard to include the unique voice and experience of each student in the plan for a concentration, working so hard to develop topics that amplified voices not commonly heard in the academy, invoked a vision of a community of discourse where all manner of voices were heard and learned from. It imagined an ideal where the familiar discourses of the academy were enhanced, enriched, criticized and transformed by validating these previously silenced voices. It was another extraordinary accident of learning for me that in my first years of teaching the Paracollege seminar, "Religion in Life’s Journey," I collaborated with Becky Mark (formerly of the English Department and, to my knowledge, the first gay person to use a chapel talk in Boe Memorial Chapel as the occasion to come out to the St. Olaf Community). By further accident, we carpooled together from Minneapolis, so that each morning before our seminar, we brainstormed about the day’s activities. Becky was resolutely committed to inviting each student to write in a voice that was certifiably the student’s own voice. I was, initially, committed to disciplining each student (and here is a joke on me that some of you will appreciate better than others) to write in a voice like Paul Tillich’s. What the seminar plainly showed was that students can learn more when they are exploring a subject of substantial importance from the standpoint of their own mode of expression. 

By contrast, prevailing practices of discourse in the academy establish standards of diction, evidence, and scholarly decorum that, while they may facilitate the pursuit of truth in some ways, also plainly exclude many kinds of voices, or pressure the newcomer to academe to abandon modes of discourse familiar to her. 

Tension was thus inevitable between the Paracollege’s aspiration to find a way to include every voice and the academy’s insistence on self-described "high standards" for formal discourse. From the standpoint of ordinary college communities, the Paracollege’s inclusivity must have seemed to renounce excellence in favor of normless diversity. And on the other hand, Paracollege practices implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) a critique of the academy’s community of discourse as far too limited, elitest, and exclusionary. 

Once again, the dynamics of this tension help us understand what was elegant and daring about the college that for thirty years chose to include a critical subunit, and how conditions finally developed wherein the college decided it could do better without that unruly subunit. 

Paracollege "Theology"

Now, perhaps most importantly in our unique setting, the practices of the Paracollege implied a distinctive (and I must say unorthodox) theology. Pause for a minute and consider the remarkable trust in students, and optimism about the human condition embodied in Paracollege pedagogy. Seminars declared that every student’s passion to learn validated their contribution to the dialogical progress of the group. Tutorials declared that every student possessed in their native curiosities a valid point of departure for legitimate study. And consider that there were effectively no barriers raised to Paracollege admission: every student was presumed capable of learning in a student-centered setting. Nor were barriers raised in the path of the senior concentration: every student was presumed capable of designing a meaningful, coherent concentration that was at once academically important, true to the character of the college, and an utterly unique expression of the student’s specific interests, convictions, and biography. It was a great accident of learning that in a Paracollege faculty meeting I once heard Jim Farrell say something that he humbly shirks credit for saying, that he sometimes ascribes to Wes Brown, and that Wes two weeks ago credited to George Helling: namely "the student is the locus of integration." That is, no matter how carefully crafted a curriculum, if coherent meanings emerge from the way elements in a curriculum are coordinated, they will emerge in the student’s own, utterly unique experience, or not at all. Meaning is the student’s achievement, and within limits that a community could probably come to agree on, the student’s unique way of doing it is intrinsically worth a teacher’s attention. The theology implied in Jim’s pithy expression, as indeed in Paracollege practices generally, is a theology heavy on the goodness of creation, light on the calamity of fall, a theology fundamentally upbeat about the health of human wills. 

By contrast, a really strenuous, Lutheran theology of the fall stresses the perversely self-serving and self-deceiving character of fallen humans when left to their own devices. And it stresses the need for laws and ordinances that, while they cannot be a vehicle for salvation, can still restrain the excesses of self-will and self-congratulation to which humans are prone. A curriculum that prescribes to students what they need to know comports far better with Lutheran understandings of fall, law, and secular authority, than does a curriculum that trusts in the underlying soundness of students’ educational choices. 

Thus, perhaps even more than in the case of the Paracollege’s distinct metaphysical outlook and rhetorical theory, tension was inevitable between the sanguine theology of Paracollege pedagogy and the Lutheran sensibility of St. Olaf College. 

The Paracollege’s optimism about students’ authority over their own learning must have struck many as a premature pretense of a step into the heavenly kingdom, or a nostalgic pretense of a step back into Paradise. While the implication in the general curriculum that unless students were told exactly what to do they would likely waste their time must have struck many Paracollegians as unduly pessimistic and judgmental. 

Now for a third time, we have a tension whose dynamics illuminate what was noteworthy about the curious reality that St. Olaf, a college of the church, contained a curricular subunit that embodied a heterodox anthropology, and how an underlying discomfort about the subunit reached the point where the college decided it could do better without it. 

Paracollege "Politics"

And finally, the practices of the Paracollege were enmeshed in political developments and processes. From the moment of its founding at the ineffable point where American 60’s student radicalism with its call for "relevance" converged with the Oxbridge tutorial model, there was always a fit between the Paracollege and other apparently subversive movements. Consider the extent to which the Paracollege has nurtured feminist inquiry, feminist students, and feminist pedagogy. The dictum of feminists in the 60’s that the personal is political found an echo in Paracollege practices where the personal became educational, and consequently transformative in the lives of both women and men students. It was an accident of learning that echoes still in my thinking about how to teach when in 1989 I conducted a group tutorial with four Paracollege women pursuing interests in feminist theology. As is so often the case, their stated interest in feminist theology was a proxy for a broad array of perplexity and frustration about sexism and gender in their growing understanding of the culture mediated to them through the academy. They latched onto a reputable sounding field—feminist theology—as the vehicle for exploring the real, as yet not fully articulated, imperatives of learning. Our tutorial was riveting, transformative for all of us, I believe. But the accident of learning came, naturally, by surprise: 

I spent a lot of time in the tutorial drawing from my undergraduate and graduate learning in counseling theory (and this is another joke on me): I listened, affirmed, and reflected back what the women said. Abruptly they protested to me that by simply listening to their courageous, personal reflections, I was preserving a position of power removed from the dialogue of discovery. They challenged me to join with them in reflecting on my own biography and the way my experience intersected with the analyses we were reading together—in other words, to be a whole person in shared exploration with each of them as a whole person. Of course I still struggle to identify the proper balance between sticking to the subject matter, and sharing my own experiences with students, but it was an occasion of learning in this tutorial that crystallized the problem for me. 

Of course there were many other political implications of the practices of the Paracollege. Our teaching and learning responded implicitly to the call for a transformative curriculum from the standpoint of the excluded, following the work of Elizabeth Minnich; and to the call for a connected curriculum from the standpoint of students who deserved to see the real point of contact between the claims of the academy and their own lived experience, following the work of the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing; and to the call for open space in the curriculum so that faculty could develop new ideas within the daily life of the community (rather than seek external resources to leave the community for a time). 

Of course there was always tension between the political issues embedded in our practices and other well documented movements in the broader culture, and it is well to interpret the end of the Paracollege against the backdrop of these movements as well. Here I’m thinking about the general conservatism of American politics and the explicit backlash of conservative commentators against the alleged radicalism of college culture. This backlash took many forms, including the temporary triumph of anti-progressive ideologies in national politics; anti-feminist backlash in workplaces, courtrooms, Hollywood, and conservative religious movements; the assault on "political correctness" (which of course followed the virtual invention of political correctness out of thin air by the opponents of multiculturalism and diversity); the disingenuous plea for "color blind" policies by opponents of affirmative action; the imposition of metaphors derived from the practice of capitalism on nearly every sphere of life (but certainly on the academic sphere, where students and parents demanded marketable value in return for their tuition investment, and colleges were increasingly challenged to run themselves "like businesses"). 

I’m also thinking about the increasing regulation and quantification of life driven by many forces, including economic imperatives that demanded maximal efficiency as a condition for simply keeping afloat; the sheer fact of the existence of technologies that offered the ability to regulate and quantify (and the marketing prowess of their purveyors who imply that without, e.g., the Lawson system, we would not be able to make sound decisions); and the advance of consumer capitalism that makes the accumulation of information about our actions an article of faith. 

Plainly, the Paracollege was drastically simply out of step with each of these movements. And the accumulated effects of these movements also played its part in amplifying the natural tension between St. Olaf College and its Paracollege until the time came that decision makers, in the good faith exercise of their responsibility to make decisions, concluded that whatever value the troublesome subunit offered, the college could no longer afford it when set next to other strategically attractive initiatives. 

This is the time to mourn both for the end of the Paracollege and perhaps for the changed character of St. Olaf College—which will no longer have a "Para-College." The last accident of learning I will describe was a moment of emotion that crept up on me without warning, and that revealed to me in the purest way the depth of my debt to my teacher and student colleagues, and to the communal ethos of the Paracollege over my 15 years. In the spring of 1998, I led a multi-disciplinary seminar about "witch" trials, the historiography of witch trials, and the popular representation of witches as an instance of the construction of gender. Spring 1998, of course, is also the time that the staff plan was promulgated, pronouncing the College’s verdict about the 30 years of being a college with a para-college. As I walked into the seminar room to meet that group of students for the first time after the staff plan was announced, I thought about the pure pleasure of collaborations with students and colleagues that had occurred because of the Paracollege. I thought about the novelty and insight of the students’ work in the seminar. I simply burst into tears. More than any other thing else, the fact that the work and life and end of the Paracollege prompted deep emotion guides me in plotting my own course forward for the time when St. Olaf College will be a college without a para-college. 

Accident Sites at a College Without a Paracollege

And now it is time to share with you a few things about the Center for Integrative Studies, which is my main avenue for keeping faith with at least some of the implied commitments of Paracollege practices. The Center will hardly be a continuation of the Paracollege, for it is not explicitly a commitment to transformative or student-centered learning, and it has no plan for nurturing a social community as the frame for a learning community. Nor will it rely on the community of a specific group of committed faculty. The Center will instead be neutral with respect to teaching philosophy and it will float lightly over the entire faculty, rather than preoccupy a core group of faculty. 

Individualized, Integrative Majors

But the Center will preserve some important Paracollege commitments. Foremost among these is the commitment to allow motivated students to design their own majors. There will no longer be tutorials, and the "theology" of the Center will be more orthodox, insofar as it will require students to present a developed proposal for an individualized major before they begin their work, rather than simply embracing the potential for every student to design a unique program, as the Paracollege did. But students may propose to combine all manner of learning opportunity in their individualized majors: courses and seminars, independent studies and internships, study abroad and experiential learning on campus. Every student proposal will be considered by a faculty review committee, specially recruited for the sake of each unique proposal. Over time, many faculty will be involved in reviewing student proposals, with the effect of keeping faculty more widely aware of the remarkable work students do in individualized majors, and thinking about the frontiers of disciplines and styles of learning. 

Web Portfolios

A further way the Center will preserve some important Paracollege commitments involves an initiative to develop a program of web portfolios in a student-network of linked portfolios. This project is the outcome of a tortured grant proposal procedure that began with DeAne’s very good suggestions for applications of technology enhanced learning in the Paracollege. After undergoing many permutations and near death experiences, the proposal has returned fully funded in part as a project of the Center for Integrative Studies. Students completing individualized majors will be required to maintain "web portfolios" of their work. The impetus for this project lies in a conviction that students must make their own meanings, and that they do this best in the context of a community of learners. New technologies will simply facilitate the pursuit of some familiar ideals. 

A web portfolio is collection of work that a student judges to be exemplary, and illustrative of the unfolding meaning (the collective coherence) of his or her career; the work is stored electronically and presented in a hyper medium with links that demonstrate the student’s understanding of the relationships he or she has built among the many individual achievements. Works of almost any imaginable kind (art, lab reports, film and audio clips, essays) can be included in a web portfolio, and linked together by various protocols such as HTML, the common language of the world wide web. Such a portfolio is both a documentary and a cognitive achievement. As a documentary, it records and organizes significant work throughout students’ careers. As a cognitive achievement, it both nurtures and records students’ efforts to understand the inner relationships of the work they have done. It promotes both retrospective and forward looking reflection on the meaning of their work. It encourages them to notice and cultivate connections within that work. It helps them situate their work in the context of other sites of meaning and debate. And it promotes the construction of translations between diverse modes of presentation and reflection (for example, through the links that could be built from humanities texts to reports of empirical research, or to visual representations). A web portfolio, you could say, is an accident waiting to happen. 

The program of web portfolios will be developed in stages. In the first stage, students will simply maintain separate portfolios that record their own work with internal links. In the second stage, the portfolios of all students pursuing individualized majors will be linked in a student intranet that allows the construction of links among many student portfolios, and that encourages students to locate their own efforts in the context of a specific learning community. These networked portfolios will also allow students to build links to external sites through the world wide web. 

As with any educational initiative involving new technology it is important for participants to place pedagogical goals at the forefront of the program, since there is always some risk that the mere availability of a new technology will highjack the agenda. The Center will focus on the way web portfolios promote four virtues central to our conception of the liberal arts education offered at St. Olaf College, all of which were also guiding principles in the Paracollege. 

First, by permitting students to build links among the several parts of their work, web technology can foster connected learning. In trying to explain the power of metaphor, Aristotle referred to what he called the "genius" of recognizing similarity in dissimilars. The liberal arts have always sought to develop the capacity for recognizing and interpreting unsuspected connections between apparently dissimilar phenomena; in the same vein we seek to remain open to connections among subjects or methods whose relationships may not be guaranteed by institutional structures (like established departments). For example, a student whose literature class read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might find herself thinking in an unexpected way about a unit on genetic engineering in a biology class—and vice versa. Although the college makes no promise of coherence between literature and biology classes, students often discover meaningful connections of their own. And the college can make a commitment to increase the likelihood that students will capitalize on such opportunities when they arise. Web portfolios are a significant way of doing that. 

Second, the program of web portfolios will link all student portfolios in an intranet that allows students to read and view each other’s work, and to build links to other students’ portfolios into their own. The program of web portfolios will thus foster intellectual community in important ways. Because they situate their work in the context of their peers’ work, students will take both their own and their peers’ work far more seriously. Their sense of audience will be augmented, so that they are no longer writing only to meet their course instructors’ expectations, but also writing to say something to a community of fellow learners. 

Third, collecting and linking work from different stages in a student’s career will promote a desirable reflexivity about the unfolding meaning of their education. At its best, liberal arts learning always involves the experience of returning to something learned in the past to reexamine it in light of further learning. Because they are a living archive, web portfolios promote this continuing reflectiveness about the progress of a student’s work. 

Fourth, because web portfolios can include not only internal links, but also links to external sites of meaning and debate on the world wide web, they promote civic bridge-building. A pressing challenge for proponents of liberal arts education, as we in the Paracollege learned only too well, is to demonstrate how discussions on our campuses relate to issues in the wider world. For students, locating their work in relation to other public sites prompts valuable relationships between classroom experiences, and a wider array of personal and public opportunities. 

Linked Courses

A final initiative of the Center for Integrative Studies in which friends of the Paracollege will take special interest involves sponsorship of linked pairs of courses. The pedagogical rationale for linked courses seems clear. When the subject matters of two or more courses taken in a given semester reinforce each other in any way, students are likely to learn more in each course, to take more pleasure in each course, to participate more fully in each course. They are also more likely to incorporate each course successfully in their own emerging understanding of the total meaning of their college careers. Incidents of learning through such pairings truly happen accidentally for some students; we’d like to lay the groundwork for such accidents more intentionally, so that they occur more often. 

In the most interesting model of linked courses, the Center proposes to identify themes appropriate for treatment in intentionally coordinated syllabuses. We would issue calls for proposals from pairs of faculty, not for entirely new syllabuses, but for syllabuses subtly tailored to enhance treatment of a theme already present in existing syllabuses. For example we might invite proposals to tailor a pair of courses to make possible a multidisciplinary approach to the realities of gun violence in American culture. A professor of political science might tailor a course on the American Constitution to include a unit on the second amendment and the controversy surrounding its interpretation in debates about gun control; and a professor of sociology might tailor a course on American families to include a unit on the impact of gun violence on family systems. For students, the pair of linked courses would represent a unique opportunity to gain an informed perspective on a pressing contemporary problem. For faculty the linked courses would be a satisfying teaching experience because of the extra background and motivation of students taking both courses; planning and teaching linked courses would also be an occasion for pleasant, collegial faculty development. 

Once again, in linked courses the opportunities for incidents of learning that stem from the serendipitous convergence of distinct expertise in the faculty and the possibility of unique meaning making among students reflect a continuation of important Paracollege ideals by other means. 

You have all been patient with me beyond what I deserved. I know well the value of an audience in empowering the kind of speech that improves understanding, and you have been the audience that enabled me to come to terms with my own intuitions about how to interpret the end of the Paracollege. 
What I have shown, I hope, is that it was a brilliant thing for St. Olaf College to be a college with a para-college, but that the very distinctiveness of the Paracollege gave rise to circumstances under which its phase-out seemed reasonable. I hope I have also shown the way the practices of Paracollegians produced circumstances that favored accidents of learning. And that even in the next chapters of St. Olaf’s history, we can still prepare for such accidents. The motto for those of us who intend to prepare for and seize such accidents is both a historical reminder, and the metaphor for a state of mind: 

* At registration time each semester, Paracollege students had their registration cards stamped "Paracollege Full Time" by the Academic Coordinator of the Paracollege. This bright red rubber stamp certified that the student, with the sponsorship of the Paracollege, had taken responsibility to arrange for a suitable curriculum with tutors and advisers in the Paracollege, and it authorized students to exit the registration process without formally registering for any set number of courses in the general curriculum. Some thought of it as the educational equivalent of Monopoly’s "get out of jail free" card. Subsequently a likeness of the actual rubber stamp "Paracollege Full Time" was silk screened in red ink on t-shirts worn by friends of the Paracollege. On the occasion of the decision to phase out the Paracollege a black ink version of the shirt was printed in protest and sorrow. The phrase still suggests a commitment to cherished ideals of the Paracollege.