If your college memories are of class work and socializing and how ne”™er the twain did meet, there”™s a new curriculum in town.
Iona College and Brain Nickerson, its new dean for the undergraduate and graduate School of Arts and Sciences, this year embark on a plan to remake college education.
Gone for 150 members of the class of 2013 will be the sharp split between classroom and dorm room, or between lab and baseball diamond. In its place will be “learning community clusters” where common dorm spaces will lose their status as rumpus rooms to become denlike and professor-friendly gathering places. Those initial 150 (of 800-plus in the incoming class) will get company until, ideally, learning and its real-life applications completely entwine the college experience in what Nickerson terms “a holistic approach to education.”
The program is expected to begin slowly and to expand to the remainder of the college in the coming years, harking to the sort of always-engaged academia as practiced, in the popular mindset at least, in centuries passed. (It was the basis for Thomas Jefferson”™s original Academical Village at the University of Virginia, where professors and students lived side by side along four colonnades. It is today in practice successfully at Bucknell University, according to Nickerson.)
The living-and-studying arrangement is intended to foster knowledge of the interrelationships of subjects and “how these relations may be understood” to digest today”™s issues. It is a marked departure from the “get it and forget it” attitude of test-driven academics.
Socializing under such a system will be less scattershot and thereby more constructive, springing from living arrangements that themselves propel thought: a wellness-centric hallway in a dorm, for example, where interest in a study regimen will foster a still greater interest and fuel the same in others.
The results could lead to learning at a party where, in the case of the long-suffering math major, everybody gets the joke about Fermat”™s last theorem and all is well, as opposed to the ill-advised telling of the same joke among the anthro crowd. The message is that it”™s OK to talk about black holes and “Macbeth” at midnight Saturday and not just at 9:15 a.m., MWF.
Even the occasional visitor to North Avenue in New Rochelle has noticed the growth of Iona College. The gate to the one-time commuter school used to sit across the street from New Rochelle”™s Mayflower School. The Mayflower-inscribed lintel is still in place, but you have to crane to see it; the remade grammar school is now the college”™s Murphy Center. What began in 1940 as a small college on the grounds of the older Iona Prep (now on Wilmot Road two miles north) this year is ranked in the U.S. News & World Report college survey No. 30 of 171 colleges whose programs generally end at the master”™s degree level in what the magazine terms the northern region. The ranking is eight spots better than in 2008. Iona has 3,200 undergraduates and a thousand graduate students.
The physical changes at Iona reflect a 15-year push under school President Brother James Liguori to grow the college into first a regional school, then a school whose catchment area was Maine to Washington, D.C., and finally to the national arena to the degree that Nickerson noted several freshmen in site the July day he spoke were in town from the West Coast.
Nickerson”™s wife is Kira and they have an 11-month-old daughter named Arielle. He is an alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science, Iona College (undergraduate degree in political science), Pace University (juris doctor and public administration master”™s degrees) and SUNY Albany”™s Rockefeller College (Ph.D. in school finance and political science).
A person could be forgiven for drawing an analogy between Nickerson and Iona working toward a fusion of social and academic interaction and the fusion of disparate foods in a kitchen. Nickerson is something of the embodiment of the analogy. He spends his personal time in the kitchen fusing the likes of Pan-Asian, Spanish and Mexican foods into a well-rounded, perhaps unexpected, meal.
Paella that would typically be seasoned with saffron, in Nickerson”™s hands is seasoned with ginger. A standard Mexican tortilla might find grilled fish at its center instead of beef.
Whatever garnish you might have thought proper for grilled haddock, Nickerson suggests a compote of chopped mango and orange, ginger and teriyaki sauce. “You can”™t be afraid of failure,” he said, hinting at a familiarity with items that went down the drain before they got down the hatch. He spares his guests his intuitive, at times coconut milk-based creations, experimenting instead on family. “Sometimes I wonder, ”˜What was I thinking?”™”
