Expanding the Mind at Off-Campus Settings

Take three dozen USC students, head up the coast to a hotel near the beach, and what do you have?

If you guessed a rowdy, debauched weekend, try again. On this occasion, it was a serious-minded academic retreat focusing on political violence--one of the latest offerings in a program to energize and expand USC’s intellectual life for undergraduates.

The notion of undergraduate intellectual life at USC once could have been a punch line for a joke told by a UCLA booster, but these days it’s regarded as a serious matter on the campus just south of downtown Los Angeles.

Through a program known as the academic culture initiative, USC hopes to foster more informal out-of-class exchanges between professors and undergraduates. The university also is trying to spur more intellectual give-and-take among students.

For students, the main message is “that much of their learning will take place outside of the classroom,” said Mark E. Kann, head of USC’s political science department and director of the initiative.

To make that kind of learning happen, the initiative has subsidized faculty to host dinners for students in their homes or at restaurants. It also has launched book discussion groups, and has sponsored student-faculty get-togethers featuring performances and talks on poetry, jazz and filmmaking.

Earlier this month, the initiative also offered the voluntary weekend academic retreat on political violence at a hotel overlooking a marina in Oxnard. As boats glided by outside the conference room, the students’ eyes--and minds--appeared tightly focused on the discussion topics.

To be sure, the attendees were an especially dedicated group. The weekend program, like most other academic culture initiative offerings, wasn’t part of a formal course and didn’t provide any academic credit.

“Everyone here is here by choice,” said Suzanne Taylor, an occupational therapy major in her junior year, following a Saturday night session that went past 9 o’clock. For learning, she said, “it’s the best environment.”

Robin Romans, director of USC’s main undergraduate honors program, who once helped organize a conference on anarchy, acknowledges that he is diving into irony again in his work with the academic culture initiative. The goal, he said, is to create “a sense of informality through a formal process.”

But, Romans said, that approach probably is what it will take to firmly establish richer intellectual traditions on campus.

Students and faculty alike say they have noticed a general trend toward extracurricular intellectual and cultural pursuits at USC in recent years.

Liliana Loofbourow, a student who last month received one of the Phi Beta Kappa awards that USC gives annually to two top-ranking seniors, said she was disappointed that here was no campus literary magazine when she arrived as a freshman.

Loofbourow decided to help launch one, even though campus administrators were reluctant to provide financial backing, she said.

These days, she said, an array of campus administrators and programs, including the academic culture initiative, provide support for the journal, Palaver.

Loofbourow said other literary and arts-related activities also are on the upswing. Still, she said, there’s room for improvement. Loofbourow--a triple major in psychobiology, music and English--said the school could do a better job of bringing together people from different departments and of spreading the word about cultural programs on campus.

“We have an absolutely phenomenal music school,” she said. “And it breaks my heart that I go to see my friends’ recitals, and there are [just] 12 people there in the audience. It seems to me that there’s still a problem with disseminating information.”

Romans agreed that attendance at special events sometimes falls short. When his honors program, with the help of the academic culture initiative, started offering regular book “salons” for undergraduates, some of the nine initial groups filled all their 12 slots, but a few groups had vacancies and one had just five students.

All the same, Romans said the academic culture initiative has made “very promising first steps.”

The recent weekend retreat at the Casa Sirena Hotel & Marina in Oxnard was run as a pilot project. Kann said he had no idea how many students it might draw.

To fill the 50 slots for undergraduates, the organizers advertised in the campus daily newspaper, and fired off e-mails.

The cost to students--including the hotel room, three meals and a round-trip bus ride--was just $20. USC subsidized the rest.

Other incentives included the two professors leading the discussions, both winners of multiple teaching awards: Kann, and Steven L. Lamy, director of USC’s School of International Relations.

At USC, “lots of people talk about these guys,” said Davin Sweeney, a junior majoring in Spanish and film studies. He said he decided to attend “mostly just to hear what these guys say.”

More than 50 students signed up within a week, but in one of the few kinks in the venture, eleventh-hour cancellations reduced the number of undergraduate attendees to 36.

Still, Kann and Lamy were pleased that the students who showed up included business and science or engineering students along with the expected political science and international relations majors.

At the Saturday afternoon session, Kann quickly traced the nation’s 20th century race riots, touching on outbreaks of such violence in Chicago in 1919, Detroit in 1943 and Watts in 1965.

Then the students were divided into role-playing groups of “commissioners” responsible for determining the causes and solutions of campus violence at such places as Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970.

A key aim of the teaching strategy, Kann said, was to spur students to bounce ideas off one another without risking embarrassment in front of professors.

“What might seem to be a crazy idea could turn out to be a good one,” Kann said.

At the after-dinner session, Lamy pointed out the high toll on civilians taken by modern political violence internationally.

Then he prodded the students with provocative questions about the nation’s current war on terror: What’s the war all about? Why did we choose the military over a peaceful response?

The students’ theories, although mostly unfriendly to the Bush administration, were diverse.

One offered the idea that President Bush “was trying to finish his father’s war in the Middle East.” Some characterized the current campaign as an effort by the to U.S. to cling to its position as the world’s dominant power.

The conversation continued on Sunday’s late-morning bus trip back to USC, though about half the students nodded off.

“They were exhausted,” Kann said with a chuckle. “I hope it was from intellectual stimulation. They slept the sleep of the virtuous.”