At Wesleyan, students don’t have a shortage of opportunities to reach out to the Middletown and Middlesex County communities. From volunteer work to work-study to clubs, a significant portion of the extracurricular life at Wes is geared toward connecting students to people off campus.
The University has worked to build the bridge between the Wesleyan and Middletown communities by having students break out of the bubble, but what has proven more rare is members of the outside community breaking in.
The Wesleyan Institute for Lifelong Learning (or WILL), founded in 2009 out of the Susan B. and William Wasch Center for Retired Faculty, brings members of the greater community to Wesleyan for non-credit courses. The director of both WILL and the Wasch Center is Professor of Psychology Emeritus Karl Scheibe. The Wasch Center has been in operation for 10 years and provides office space for retired faculty members. Additionally, it offers a number of other lectures and educational programs.
“Halfway through our history we decided, ‘Why don’t we have an adult education program that would make use of the talents of the retired faculty members and others that are qualified, to offer short, non-credit courses to the people of the Middletown community?’” Scheibe said.
Wesleyan is not the only university to offer an educational program for community members; many universities offer similar programs. However, those courses are often for credit and can be expensive, attributes are not in keeping with WILL’s goals.
“Frankly, I want to give credit to a program founded at Trinity College called the Academy of Lifelong Learning,” Scheibe said. “Why reinvent the wheel? It seemed like a program that we could do, in the way they were doing it, and maybe even better. We started modestly, compared to them: five or six courses a semester, compared to their dozen or so. But this semester we have eight courses, plus a one-time all-day program.”
The courses themselves, whose subjects this semester range from Matisse to personal finance to geology, strive to cultivate an intimate learning experience that is representative of a liberal arts college like Wesleyan. One course typically has a class size of eight to 15 students and meets three or four times over the course of about a month for an hour and a half each session. Prices range from $70 to $125.
The styles of the courses vary, with some lecture and discussion-based classes and others involving active participation by students. For example, a popular past course was on reading and writing poetry.
“It was a practical kind of course in that you weren’t just sitting there and listening,” Scheibe said. “You were there to write things yourself and show your poetry to people in the class. A course like that requires a small number.”
Initially, establishing a student base was the biggest challenge WILL had to face. The Advisory Board for the Wasch Center was unsure how to market such a unique program like this to the greater community.
“The answer was, you print a brochure, you go to the dentist’s office or a ball game, and you leave a brochure,” Scheibe said. “You distribute them anywhere where people might gather: the chamber of commerce downtown, churches, libraries, or senior centers. We distribute these wonderfully designed brochures all over the place, which we include with a registration form. And that’s our bread and butter; that’s our major marketing implement.”
The brochures, in addition to spreading the word about WILL through various local newspapers, have ultimately proven successful in building up a student base. The program has an email list of around 1700 students who have taken courses, are interested in taking courses, or have been adopted from other mailing lists. Enrolled students are drawn not only from the Middletown community, but also come from as far south as the shoreline, as far north as Hartford, as far east as New London, and as far west as New Britain.
These students, now quite familiar with the program and its possibilities, are able to provide feedback and input on interesting ideas for future courses.
“Our idea was to make the courses easy, short, make them answer to the interests of those in the community, and to take the pressure off, both for the student and for the faculty member,” Scheibe said. “This program was a measure to see what happens if you let things take their own form and function by the expressed preferences and choices of people in the community.”
At the heart of the program is the fact that these courses are non-credit and, as a result, put less stress on both students and faculty. The goal of WILL, after all, is learning for the sake of learning.
“Our first principle is that understanding and appreciation are ends in themselves, of intrinsic background,” reads WILL’s website as part of their motto.
“The word ‘intrinsic’ is very important because the idea is, you’re not taking these courses because you expect them to get you anywhere; you’re taking them because you’d like to find out something you didn’t know before, or you’d like to have an experience talking about something you never had before,” Scheibe said.
It’s evident that the WILL program benefits the faculty (and retired faculty) of Wesleyan as much as it benefits the community itself. Just as students are able to learn without worrying about how this should help them in earning a degree or making a grade, professors are able to teach what interests them without worrying about their jobs. Professor of Government John Finn, for example, is teaching a course next semester on making the perfect omelet. As a certified culinary expert, why shouldn’t he have the opportunity to relay this passion for breakfast food to students outside of the classes he teaches in his department?
If Wesleyan students have the desire to branch out even further than their current class schedule for the intrinsic value of learning new things, WILL is available to them—even though the program is more geared toward an older demographic.
“If you want to take a course on the perfect omelet or you want to take a course because you’re interested in Matisse or detective novels, they’re there,” Scheibe said. “A Wesleyan student could fit it into his or her schedule; it’s perfectly possible. That would be kind of nice; why not? Classes generally meet in the late afternoon or evening. And I realize that Wesleyan students are very busy, but these courses don’t take a long time—there are no papers to write and generally nothing massive to read.”
Still, the emphasis for WILL is involving community members with Wesleyan’s campus and its resources. The courses are an opportunity not only for students to re-enter a “student” mindset, but for faculty members to exercise their abilities even after retirement.
“A lot of people are put off by Wesleyan—this entity that they’ve never been able to enter that they know is a pretty special place in a variety of ways,” Scheibe said. “There have been a lot of expressions of appreciation from people in the community to be able to do that with ease and comfort.”
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