Centrepiece Online | Summer 2011

London Comes of Age

Study abroad is a defining element of a Centre education, with more than 80 percent of students participating in at least one international opportunity. Of the nation’s 3,200 colleges and universities, only two send a higher percentage to study in another country. And it’s all because of London. The cultural shift at Centre that now finds first-year students planning where they’ll study abroad from the moment they arrive on campus really dates to the start of the semester-long residential programs, in London, 21 years ago.

Congratulations, London! You’ve come of age.

Centre had long had a tradition of short study-trips dating to 1969 when a new calendar added a short term that lent itself to travel. Though appreciated as an option, the trips never attracted more than 5 or 6 percent of the student body. The real interest in study abroad at Centre came with the advent of the residential programs in 1990-91.

The College now offers eight semester-long residential programs in six countries, as well as a variety of short-term options across the globe. When the Class of 2011 graduated in May, just over 82 percent had studied abroad at least once; 25 percent had packed their bags two or more times. In the upcoming academic year, approximately 144 students will be abroad in a residential program during one of the long terms.

The “tipping point” came around 2000, when Centre’s international residential offerings reached four, says Milton Reigelman, Cowan Professor of English and since 1998 Centre’s international programs czar. “Study abroad became part of the students’ DNA.”

Centre students actually have to work hard not to study abroad these days. And lack of a passport is no excuse. Since 2010, all first-year students who arrive without a passport receive one free.

Which is not to say it’s always easy. Science students in particular need to plan carefully if they want a long-term experience. Athletes, too, especially those with multi-term seasons, are sometimes torn. But regret later among the few who do not leave Danville is typical.

As a student, Laura Coleman Pritchard ’05 thought she did not want to miss a single softball game or practice but now considers it a mistake not to go abroad.

“Life happens very quickly after graduation,” she says. “Chances to spend months studying in another country just don't present themselves regularly.”

Why does Centre put such emphasis on international study? It is admittedly expensive—though less so in the residential programs—and disruptive to the teams, clubs, and other activities that are fundamental to such a resolutely residential school. Yet Centre considers international awareness and participation so crucial to its mission that it made enhancing global citizenship a keystone of its current strategic plan.

“If the times are unsettled globally and financially, then we really need to educate our students about the larger, unsettled world they live in,” Reigelman says. “It may by now be cliché to say that the world is more connected and interdependent every year, but that doesn’t make it less true.”

To illustrate the importance of study in another country, he relates a story from the recent campus visit of New York Times columnist David Brooks.

“When David Brooks met with some Cento staffers, one of them asked what he thought students should get out of college. He said—as if I’d primed him—that the only guarantee that you’ll be transformed in college is if you study abroad.

“So that’s why we do it,” Reigelman continues. “To transform lives. The London program [in particular] transforms students in part because they expect that things will be about the same, except there’ll be some castles around and people will have funny accents. And so what [cultural researcher] Edward T. Hall calls ‘the hidden language’ of a different culture takes them by surprise.”

In the beginning. When Michael F. Adams was introduced as Centre’s 19th president in December 1988, he ticked off three things that he planned to do. Semester-long programs abroad were on the list. No one dreamt he’d move so fast.

Within the year he had Karin Ciholas, professor of French and German and associate dean at the time, developing Centre’s first residential program overseas. In less than two years, Georgeann Murphy, the drama and English professor tapped to be the first faculty director, and 22 student pioneers were on their way to England. Centre-in-London had begun.

Although it seems impossible to imagine now, a major concern was that students would not want to spend an entire semester—or a year (an early option)—away from their friends and life in Danville. It didn’t help that the first Gulf War broke out in January 1991 just before the second term of Centre-in-London started.

“I stood at the door of the dining hall handing out leaflets and made brochures for England for each table,” recalls Ciholas. “I made crepes in front of the library. I visited dorm meetings and called special meetings.”

And it worked. Ciholas’ enthusiasm—and her creative recruiting—convinced students to sign up.

Michael Aldridge ’93, now executive director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, is grateful that he went to London 21 years ago.

An art major, he says the experience made him “appreciate and try to take advantage of the arts as well as all that travel has to offer in opening up new adventures. . . . My partner calls it ‘dancing life,’ a motto we strive to live up to.”

Another art (and English) major, Ashley Cooper Waechter ’93, loved the participatory aspects of her classes in London.

“I had an art history class at the Tate and saw several Shakespearean plays for an English class,” she says. “As a student, I got to experience unbelievable art, music, theater, and food. We could take weekend trips to Paris, day trips to Bath. My writing assignments were more interesting because I got to experience everything firsthand.”

People often talk about the “transformation” that comes from foreign study as if it is automatic and instant, as if one steps off the plane and the magic immediately falls out of the sky and into one’s head. Certainly seeing some of the world’s vast diversity is important. But real change—transforming change—takes time. It needs to seep in, almost stealthily when one is looking the other way.

“As a person who has done it both ways,” Ciholas notes today, “let me just say that there is no comparison between a four- or six-week program and a residential program. The former is a wonderful learning experience but very close to informed tourism; no one place becomes home. The latter transforms lives in deeper ways. They return telling the next group: ‘The only way you can really grasp what it means for your outlook, for the way you see America, for your intellectual growth is to go yourselves.’”

Home, sweet home. For its first 10 years, the London program was based at Regent’s College in the middle of Regent’s Park, one of London’s eight royal parks. Regent’s initial attraction was that it was already running a program for American college students. Classroom space, a library (of sorts), and a computer lab with terminals for typing papers were in place. (Regent’s also had a pub located in the corridor between the dorm and the library, an unofficial attraction for students from then-dry Danville.) Although Regent’s was a British operation, other American affiliates provided additional faculty, students, and an expectation of a certain level of academic rigor.

A rotating Centre faculty member taught Regent’s classes, open to any student, plus a class open only to Centre students that turned all of London into a classroom. Murphy devised the original “London course” as a series of independent research projects involving specific London sites; students gave their final presentations at places significant to their assignments.

“This worked wonderfully—if somewhat exhaustingly—as we crisscrossed London repeatedly on the days students reported,” Murphy recalls. “One on Keats was delivered in the surgical theater where he had trained as a doctor, another on the stoop of the house where Sylvia Plath committed suicide. One on Churchill was delivered at the foot of Churchill’s statue, with Westminster Abbey in the background, darkness falling, and Big Ben tolling the late hour as this last report of the day finished.”

Murphy also began the tradition—still part of the London program—of regular group meals at some of the many ethnic restaurants for which London is famous.

Mary Robin Spoonamore ’91, who recently opened a popular wine and cheese shop in Danville, remembers two meals in particular. A Russian restaurant near Regent’s College was the first time she’d “encountered ethnic food beyond Asian or Mexican,” she says. And tea at the Hyde Park Hotel, “eating the delicacies, drinking tea, and watching the window as chunky snowflakes fell” became “the quintessential tea experience” of her life.

The program evolves. Regent’s made it possible to start Centre-in-London quickly. But problems with an administration that wanted to run the college as a for-profit business and ongoing issues over inconsistent quality with the academics made it clear Centre needed a new model.

In the spring of 2001, Centre began its own program. Students lived in shared studio flats at Endsleigh Court in Bloomsbury. Classes were taught by two Centre professors—usually an experienced Londoner paired with a London novice, plus the occasional local adjunct—at nearby Birkbeck College, just a stone’s throw from the British Museum. And London would be offered only in the spring. (Students in the fall went to the University of Reading, 40 miles west of central London.)

That first year saw 24 students set off across the ocean with two co-directors: Bruce K. Johnson, an economics professor and London program veteran, and Milton Reigelman, with experience leading other overseas programs, but not in London.

In 2011, the program underwent a further change when students moved to Nido Student Living, a bright blue-green high rise for international university students near King’s Cross. Although Endsleigh Court had been a popular home base, substantial renovations had priced it out of the level of college student residences.

How much?! London is an expensive city. It’s costly to run a program there (hence the intensive 10-and-a-half-week term of recent years, the short spring break, and the encouragement of travel before or after the program instead of during it). To get a handle on the cost of study abroad programs, Centre is one of a dozen schools around the country currently participating in a Mellon grant to determine the true tab of study abroad programs. But Centre has always offered London—and all the residential programs—for roughly the same cost (and financial aid) as a semester in Danville plus an airplane ticket. That the tuition is a relative bargain is one reason the long-term programs have proved so popular.

Students quickly learned that whatever something might cost in dollars was about what it would cost in British pounds—except the exchange rate in the fall of 1990 when the program began was almost $2 to one British pound. Today it’s only a little better at close to $1.60 for a pound. Fortunately there is in London a wealth of opportunities. Part of a London education is finding the ones that best fit a particular budget.

“They say you can never be too rich or too thin; I have seen people who are too thin, but none rich enough to take in all that London has to offer,” says Kim Kelly ’95, now an associate professor at West Virginia University’s pharmacy school in Morgan-town. “I was very much a poor college student, made worse by a terrible exchange rate, but I managed quite well in London. I was able to avail myself of many free museums, spending hours just sitting in front of the Constables. One of my faves is the Hay Wain in the National Gallery, and I would always take a few minutes for the larger-than-life Gainsboroughs.”

Cost was a challenge for Michael DeVore ’99, as well, but he didn’t let it ruin his term. “You just have to know when to be thrifty and when to splurge a little,” he says. His treat: travel, especially a fall break trip backpacking through Prague, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Venice, Pisa, and Cinque Terre.

 “I’d like to say I’ll go back and visit these places again someday,” says DeVore, now a finance consultant with Nationwide Mutual Insurance in Columbus, Ohio. “But if not, I know Centre gave me the opportunity to see them at least once.”

Please Mr. Postman. Among the greatest changes in the London program over the last 21 years are technology and communicating with family and friends back home. In 1990-91, when the program began, there was no Internet. Students talked to their parents on pay phones at the end of the hall, just as at Centre. Unlike Centre, the phone was likely to be answered by an Italian or Spanish student also studying at Regent’s; the delay in transmission coupled with the accents sometimes caused confusion when parents tried to reach their children. Mail from Centre was forwarded to the faculty director every other week or so, making mail distribution a highlight of many group meals.

“My mom sent me cassette tapes sometimes,” recalls Laura Boswell ’94, now a writer in Washington, D.C. “Lynn [Mitchell ’94, her Regent’s roommate] and I had this tiny Boots (London drugstore) boom box that ran on C batteries and played everything a hair too fast, so my mom sounded like a chipmunk.”

E-mail access finally arrived at Regent’s in 1997, about halfway through the fall term. By 2001, Internet cafes with banks of computer terminals were common (Easyeverything, a 24-hour computer cafe about 10 minutes from the student flats at Endsleigh Court, offered about 40 minutes for a pound). Students increasingly brought their own laptops or at least arranged in advance to share with a roommate or friend. Their flats had landlines in the rooms to receive calls, but making external calls required setting up an account with the front office. When Internet access was finally available in the flats, it was better in some than in others (old plaster walls are not conducive to wireless).

By 2011, students brought their own laptops and most had their own mobiles, either British phones acquired soon after arriving or some kind of roaming plan on their America phones, and chatted with their parents and friends in the States—and other Centre abroad programs—with the free Internet program Skype.

Lasting benefits. Students in London this spring were thrilled to be able to attend the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. If they weren’t in Westminster Abbey at least they could join one of the official public celebrations in Hyde Park with 200,000 other happy well-wishers. (And they did tour the abbey earlier in the month as part of a class field trip.)

Rob Edwards ’98 credits his royal moment—albeit a tragic one—with launching his career in writing and public relations. He and his classmates had been in London little more than a week when Princess Diana was killed in a car accident on Aug. 31, 1997.

 “I had interned the summer before London for the Danville Advocate-Messenger,” he says. “They called asking me to write a piece on the American reaction to her death, which helped me land my first job.”

Perhaps the best royal moment of all can be claimed by David Horne ’07, now director of operations for men’s soccer at the University of Louisville. During a group meal at the Albert pub his first week in London, he noticed some Chelsea Pensioners, the retired military sergeants who wear distinctive red uniforms when out in public. Who better to ask for a drink recommendation, he thought. Conversation led to friendship, and eventually he was invited to see the working side of Buckingham Palace by a longtime employee of the palace mailroom and friend of one of the pensioners.

“A little initiative, charisma, and a lot of good fortune landed me a private tour of Buckingham Palace and put Centre College in the official guest book of the royal residence,” he says.

But even those who did not receive an invitation to the palace found their time in London memorable.

“There was no doubt in my mind when the program began that I would apply,” says Jason Horger ’93. “I had never been out of the U.S. before I spent that three-and-a-half months at Regent’s College. And I felt then (as I do now, in advising undergraduate students at the University of Kentucky) that it’s crucial to get as much of a perspective on other lifestyles, cultures, and studies as one can, during university age particularly.”

Elizabeth Trollinger ’11 says her time in London developed her interest in exploring more of the world.

“If I hadn’t studied in London, there’s no way I would have signed up for a Centre-Term trip to Vietnam this past year,” she says. “I wouldn’t have had the resources and knowledge I gained living in London that helped me understand the world in a different way than I did before.”

And it’s not just a transforming opportunity for students. From the beginning, it was expected that the faculty-led programs would be a source of faculty growth as well. For anthropologist Phyllis Passariello, a stand-out moment was hosting pioneering anthropologist Jane Goodall on a visit to the school Passariello’s children attended.

Beth Glazier-McDonald taught biblical history and ideas, world religions, and biblical Hebrew in 2005, when she was a co-director.

“The wealth of resources available in London made all those classes come alive in ways that still inform my teaching,” she says. “We went to the British Museum and the British Library. We attended Friday prayers at the Central Mosque, Sabbath services at a nearby synagogue, and church services at a variety of locations around the city. We also went to the Hindu mandir—the largest outside of India—and a Buddhist temple in Wimbledon. I watched [the students] spread their wings, gain confidence, and see the world with different eyes. And I did a bit of growing and confidence-gaining myself.”

When Georgeann Murphy, Centre’s first faculty director, reflects on the transformative power of her year in London, she notes that for her personally it is where she met the man she would marry. They now live in Durham, N.H., where she is international research coordinator at the University of New Hampshire. But she also saw London work its magic on her students.

“One young woman went from having never read a newspaper to reading three international newspapers a day,” she recalls. “There’s nothing like immersion in a world-class city to open one’s eyes to the fact that one’s perspective has been limited. The end of study is education, and ‘education’ comes from the Latin educere, to lead out. Nothing leads you out of your particular cave better than travel to another country.

“As for London, it is, after all, the capital of the English-speaking world,” she says. “Dr. Johnson had it right: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’”

Centre’s own Dr. (Bruce K.) Johnson amends the sentiment just slightly.

“If I were sentenced to spend the rest of my life entirely within the confines of London Transport’s Zone 1,” he tells his students, “I would never tire of life.”

Many Centre-in-Londoners would agree.

Where in the World

Centre currently offers eight residential study-abroad programs.

London was the first, in the fall of 1990. Next came Strasbourg, France, in 1991. Centre-in-Latin America (now called Centre-in-the-Yucatan and based in Merida, Mexico) followed in 1998. Both Strasbourg and Merida used the London pattern of a rotating Centre faculty member (or, in some cases, two) to teach classes and provide overall guidance for the term. Five more options are based at universities around the world. Reading (England) and Yamaguchi (Japan) were added in 2000, Belfast in Northern Ireland in 2002, Shanghai in China in 2008, and, most recently, Lleida, Spain, in 2009.

Interest in short-term travels has expanded as well, with at least five options offered each year during January and an expanding list of summer and internship possibilities.

London Faculty Directors

90-91 Georgeann Murphy (ENG/DRA)

91-92 Walter Nimocks (HIS)

92-93 Mark Lucas ’75 (ENG)

93-94 Bruce K. Johnson (ECO)

94-95 Phyllis Passariello (ANT)

95-96 Tony Haigh (DRA)

96-97 Tom McCollough (REL)

97-98 Keith Dunn (CHE)

98-99 Patrick Kagan-Moore (DRA)

99-00 Bill Johnston (MAT)

2001 Bruce K. Johnson (ECO), Milton Reigelman (ENG)

2002 Ken Keffer (FRE/GER), Beau Weston (SOC)

2003 Liz Perkins ’74 (HIS), Nayef Samhat (IR/GOV)

2004 Rick Axtell (REL), Steve Beaudoin (HIS)

2005 Larry Bitensky (MUS), Beth Glazier-McDonald (REL)

2006 Stephanie Dew ’89 (BIO/BMB), Bruce K. Johnson (ECO)

2007 George Foreman (HUM), Milton Reigelman (ENG)

2008 Gareth Barkin (ANT), Amos Tubb (HIS)

2009 Liz Perkins ’74 (HIS), Mark Rasmussen (ENG)

2010 Jeff Fieberg ’91 (CHE), Tony Haigh (DRA)

2011 Bruce K. Johnson (ECO), John Kinkade ’95 (ENG)