This year marked the 40th anniversary of the Whittier Scholars Program. The milestone was celebrated with a reunion dinner during Whittier Weekend that brought together former directors, faculty, alumni, and current students who shared stories about the program’s inception, evolution, and accomplishments.
The occasion also established a new tradition: the presentation of the Whittier Scholars Alumni Achievement Award.
The 1960s brought with them a wave of innovation and experimentation and many American institutions of higher education took part by dramatically reinventing their curricula. By the end of the decade, Whittier had introduced its own “new curriculum” which was designed with individualized education at its core. By the mid- 1970s, however, individualized approaches to education were coming under fire for offering too much flexibility.
Suspecting that a better approach to individualized education might be to make it one of two options in a two-track curriculum, Professor Emeritus Dick Archer, who was then a member of the history department, and a team of fellow faculty and students set out to design and propose what would become the Whittier Scholars Program (WSP). In 1978, Whittier implemented the split curriculum students choose from today: the Liberal Arts curriculum and WSP.
For 40 years now, the latter option has given students an opportunity to take responsibility for their own education. And, not surprisingly, it attracted students with a little bit of a rebellious streak, an overachieving work ethic, and abundant curiosity. As a result, the program has taken on an incubator culture—inspiring students to think broadly and innovatively as they develop their educational programs and senior projects.
Current and former directors remember a wide range of unique senior projects where students have successfully merged disciplines such as art projects, novels, short stories, and screenplays. Professor of Political Science Joyce Kaufman, who served as director from 1997 to 2011, recalls one student who adapted J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye into a screenplay simply because it had not been done before. Current director, Professor of English Andrea Rehn, recently worked with a student who combined his love for helping people, with his coursework in math, computer science, and physics, to develop a low-cost prosthetic arm prototype for his senior project.
This “interdisciplinary approach to expertise,” as Professor of Spanish and former director Doreen O’Connor-Gómez describes it, and self-starting spirit make for successful alumni who consistently demonstrate high achievement after leaving Whittier. One such alumna is Vanessa Fiske ’89, director of marketing for Netflix DVD and inaugural recipient of the Whittier Scholars Alumni Achievement Award.
Fiske, who self-designed a European studies major, credits the holistic thinking inculcated throughout her time at Whittier with her success in Silicon Valley. “As a marketing professional you work with finance, operations, engineering, and so on. It’s cross-functional and, a lot of times, international. Your ability to understand how to interact with people across the globe is crucial in my role and I got that foundation here at Whittier.”
That foundation is often laid with the help of devoted professors who contribute to the program as advisors, project sponsors, or council members and maintain a student’s goals and development as the primary focus. English professor emeritus Anne Kiley remembers working with a student who planned on going to medical school. Faced with a choice between a science course that would give him a leg up on medical school or a course in 19th century European novels, the student chose the novel course at the recommendation of his biology professor and Kiley. Years later the student made sure Kiley knew how grateful he was for her advice.
“He didn’t want to just be a doctor, he wanted to be a cultivated human being, and I’m sure he’s a much better doctor for that,” she said.
It is natural, however, for methods and programs to evolve. “What we need to remember is that all things change. It’s not the same Whittier Scholars Program and that’s exactly how it should be,” notes founding director Archer. Indeed, the program is set for a re-imagining in the midst of this transitional era on the Whittier campus. Rehn has a vision for the program in the years ahead.
“Starting this year, every Scholar will maintain a website of their own so that they may collect different aspects of their education and display them,” explains Rehn. In this way, students in the program will not only curate their education but also share their experiences, knowledge, and findings with the public.
WSP will also move to make its experience equally attractive, attainable, and effective for students of all backgrounds. Rehn notes that the very flexibility of designing one’s own education requires that students possess a level of understanding about college that first-generation students or those new to higher education may not have. To that end, she hopes to introduce a new course that will introduce students to the “skills it takes to be a successful Scholar and a successful self-creative person in the world.”
Watch a mini-documentary of the Whittier Scholars Program.
40 Years on the Poet Campus
The Whittier Scholars Program 40th reunion committee is working to raise $40,000 from alumni and friends to strengthen the program and support projects such as the senior project display and archive, off campus experience scholarship, and Scholars mentorship fund. To contribute visit whittier.edu/WSP40.