Alma Mater: A College Homecoming

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There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Not only students struggle with life in a small private university. Here is an inside view from one who has been on both sides of the divide between faculty and students. One person found this helpful. Used for a class.

Will keep in my collection. Pretty good for Student Development Professional reading. I thought the story line was ok. Not one of my favorite reads, but I'll give it another try when I don't need it for class so there is no pressure in reading. Liberal arts colleges evoke a certain image in the American imagination: 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: 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.

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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: 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. 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.

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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. The institutional depiction that emerges, though unbolstered by explicit social-science theory, is everything the most ambitious anthropologist, or a realistic novelist determined to portray the universal in the specific, might desire. It includes only a few surprises for toilers in academe's groves, but for others--say, prospective undergrads or curious graduates--it is wholly fresh, the very first account of faculty work that turns away from mid-life crises and adultery to classroom scenes, students dropping by to manipulate grades, and "the mind-numbing, migraine-making reading and grading of one, two, and three War and Peace-size piles of student prose.

Novelist Kluge Eddie and the Cruisers , who graduated from Kenyon College in , returned to the campus in Gambier, Ohio, in the s to teach English and fiction writing. He also went to reflect on change and stability at his alma mater.

Here he takes the measure, casually, of a year in the life of Kenyon, critical and yet affectionate in his regard for a rural liberal arts college with a distinguished tradition, especially in letters, formed by John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and others. As a participant and observer, Kluge notes many events, long-term developments and motley details e. This is a chatty, informative portrait that lightly probes the current challenges of higher education--and for a college.

This history of Kenyon College is presented vividly by Kluge, an alumnus as well as a faculty member. This small, private rural college is known for its prestigious literary publication, the Kenyon Review.

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