Alma Mater: A College Homecoming

by P.F. Kluge and Kluge, P.F. Kluge, P.F.

Book Overview

An alumnus of Kenyon College as well as a faculty member, Kluge presents a knowledgeable examination of the dynamics, character, traditions, tensions, and pretensions of the small, private, and costly... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020148935X
• ISBN13: 9780201489354
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

ACCURATE AND RIGHT-ON

Kluge takes you into the inner workings of a small liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio during the '90's. He looks at the admissions, grades, decisions, teaching expectations/styles,tenures, fraternities, etc., that make this college click and draw in more students. He discusses his contributions and his interaction with other professors and departments. Being a college instructor myself, I found that much of what he expressed so well, could apply to my Micronesian college. Good writer and accurate in his observations and conclusions. I liked it and have recommended it to other professor-types.

Looking back...

This book is a great look at small liberal arts colleges through the eyes of a past graduate returning to teach at his alma mater. The book provides insight into the inner workings of a college both from an administrative and academic point of view. Kluge's reflections are always though-provoking and yet the prose is so wonderfully simple. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

Academia Nuts (and Bolts)

As a professor at a small college (Muhlenberg, in Allentown, PA), I found these descriptions of Kenyon to be instantly transferrable. When Alma Mater was sweeping Muhlenberg a few years ago, my faculty colleagues swore that Kluge must have been hiding behind the drapes, so perfectly did he capture the scene here. Of course, friends on other campuses said the same. Kluge has hit upon something universal about what it means to be a faculty member at a liberal arts college in a book that is at once funny, moving, and spot-on accurate.Every autumn, I make a point of pulling Alma Mater off the shelf to recharge my professorial batteries. In so doing, I remind myself of both the peculiarities and the nobility of this profession. And I remind myself, as well, of what excellent writing sounds like.

Politics, personal dramas and prickly collegiality

Liberal arts colleges evoke a certain image in the American imagination: ivy-laced little cities on a thousand different hills; places rich in tradition, where teachers teach, students learn, and smallness encourages community and accountability. As compared to big research universities, their professors are less likely to be distracted by big-city pretensions and obsequious grad students. The small-college ideal is what much of America likes to think higher education once was and should be again.Kluge, in this touching, sardonic reconsideration of his own alma mater, Kenyon College (the book is essentially a diary of the year he spent back in Gambier, Ohio, as a visiting professor), shows us that the reality of a real liberal arts college -- its ghosts, aspirations, conceits, compromises -- is far more complicated. Its history and traditions are as much a curse as a blessing. The dignified, self-knowing exterior it presents to prospective students and the public may mask self-doubts, intrigues, identity crises. For faculty as well as students, small size and intimacy means academic and cultural debates are more difficult to avoid, the stakes higher, the joys and sorrows more intensely personal.Though not the author's primary purpose, Alma Mater provides a rich and interpretive portrait of contemporary American academic culture. Today a college like Kenyon, isolated though it may be by geography, is awash in the same turmoils as the biggest and most unwieldy Research I institution: race, gender, fraternities, curriculum, faculty roles and rewards, and, as always, money. Just as TV and computers have virtually wiped out traditional regional cultures, so journals, conferences, and faculty mobility assure that professors in vastly different settings will be wrestling with the same ideas, controversies, and alienations.Kluge's vivid, indeed exquisite, writing draws out larger truths behind quotidian events and observations. Office corridors strangely dark and deserted in the middle of a weekday become a metaphor for faculty overspecialization (increasingly treated like free agents, professors ply their little projects in solitude from home) and the consequent loss of campus collegiality and sense of community. Figures at a faculty meeting seem to come from some central casting of academic types and images. And anyone who has taught a college course would empathize with Kluge's take on grading: "Splattering comments on papers, you sense you are working harder on grading than they ever did on writing, that you are obliged to take seriously what they took casually."To his bemusement, Kluge, ultimately discovers he can't go home again. But he gives us a loving and richly detailed portrait of the inner life of a college he still loves, a "good place," and we understand why.

Tough love examination of higher education in the 1990s

Professor Kluge has written a beautifully written and insightful look at the educational process at a small liberal arts college. However, much of what he discusses reflects the tensions and issues which buffet all of higher education in the 1990s -- gender studies, co-education, fund raising, teaching vs. research. He has personalized the story through in-depth profiles of administrators, teachers, and students. Kluge compares his experience in the early 1960s with the life of the college in the 1990s which I think will resonate with other "old grads".