Throughout their college careers, Elon University students Greg Honan and Cara McClain often discussed the “lacking” intellectual climate on campus.

It wasn’t until last spring, however, that the two decided to take action and shape the intellectual climate themselves.

Now seniors, Honan and McClain have spent the last year speaking with teachers, working with the Student Government Association (SGA) and surveying Elon students to figure out where Elon’s intellectual climate currently stands and how to improve it.

What is “intellectual climate?”

SGA defines “intellectual climate” as “the combination of your academic and your social life,” according to Sarah Paille-Jansa, President of the Class of 2015.

But Tom Mould, director of the Honors Fellows program, Elon professor and member of Elon’s intellectual climate working group, defined it more broadly.

“Intellectual climate to me is the life of the mind,” he said. “It’s not the casual conversations we have on the pathways. It’s the conversations on the pathways that make [us] late for class.”

Mould also said it’s important to remember that intellectual conversations aren’t limited to certain realms of academia. Conversations can be prompted by film, dance, political science, biology or whatever else a student is passionate about.

“This is not some sort of canonical view of higher education that if you’re not discussing some deep philosophical thought, it’s not intellectual climate,” he said. “It’s that self-motivated excitement about discussing ideas. It can happen anywhere. I think our big challenge with this initiative is to define intellectual climate in a way that doesn’t [rule] anybody at Elon out.”

The movement

The intellectual climate movement began in the spring of last year when Honan and McClain reached out to a number of faculty members about the dissatisfying state of the intellectual climate on campus.

They then formed a working group comprised of students, faculty and staff members and talked through possible solutions to the issue.

Welsford Bishopric, SGA president at the time, caught wind of the initiative and established an ad hoc committee (a committee formed for a specific task) to help tackle the intellectual climate problem. Paille-Jansa was elected chair of the committee.

The committee met regularly to discuss intellectual climate and how SGA could approach the issue in a way that didn’t interfere with the already-established working group.

They decided that SGA should release a survey that polled students about their perceptions of intellectual climate and what factors affected those perceptions.

The committee sent out the survey in the fall, and 2,016 students of the 5,599 who make up the undergraduate population took the survey overall.

After that, Honan worked with Jason Husser of the Elon Poll to organize the data and give it meaning.

Survey results

The survey found that 36 percent of students — more than one third of the student body — reported being less than happy with the current intellectual climate.

Twenty percent of freshmen said their intellectual experience has not been what they hoped for, and that number nearly doubled among seniors, at 37 percent.

Only 13 percent of students said they “very frequently” discuss intellectual topics outside the classroom, whereas 46 percent said they “rarely” or “sometimes” do that.

Honan also selected responses from an open-ended prompt that he felt were representative of the population surveyed.

“Elon has failed miserably to engage me intellectually,” a senior said.

“My expectations have not been met,” a sophomore said. “I am constantly disappointed by the standards many professors seem to have for students completing assigned work and the culture of merely doing the bare minimum to achieve an acceptable grade on the part of the students.”

Progress made so far

McClain, Honan and other supporters have already begun making progress.

The working group developed two programs — the Coffee Klatch and a book club — in an attempt to give interested students opportunities to engage in intellectual conversations outside the classroom.

The Coffee Klatch allows interested students to gather in a designated location after speeches and other campus events to discuss what they just learned. A complete schedule of Coffee Klatch events can be found on the “Honors Events” page on the Elon website.

“A number of students go to these various speakers on campus. But then the speaker’s finished, everybody leaves, and often, there’s no continued discussion afterward,” Mould said. “If you don’t discuss it afterwards, you don’t hone that knowledge, and it’s forgotten.”

Another program the working group put into place is a book club. A different book is selected each month, and some free copies are provided to book club members. Students then meet to discuss what they’ve been reading together.

Mould also said the group is trying to find a place where students and faculty can meet up and socialize, all the while engaging in intellectual conversation.

“We’re trying to create these kind of social spaces that lend themselves toward continued conversations,” he said. “It doesn’t all have to be onerous and class-heavy.”

Plus, Paille-Jansa said she believes just getting people to think about it is a step in the right direction.

“The thing about intellectual climate as an idea is when you’ve heard about it, it kind of changes the way you think about your experience here at Elon,” Paille-Jansa said. “At least it did for me. It really changed the way I go about my life. And hopefully it will spread, and more people will be aware of it and thus care about it.”

Room for improvement

Despite the strides that have been made, members and supporters of the movement said they know there’s still a long way to go.

“I think that there is a really underlying negative opinion of the word ‘intellectual’ here,” Paille-Jansa said. “It’s not socially acceptable to value intellectualism as much here. And obviously you can find pockets of that, because I think people are very happy in their respective social groups.”

She explained that she engages in intellectual conversations frequently with her roommates and is very satisfied with the intellectual climate within her group of friends.

“But then when you go out onto campus, you don’t have really intense conversations with people,” she said.

Both Paille-Jansa and Mould said they partially attribute the lack of these conversations on a daily basis to the busy culture at Elon.

“I’m always on my way to a meeting,” Paille-Jansa said. “I don’t have time to sit down with you and discuss whether or not we believe in the existence of a higher power every day.”

Mould agreed and took this observation a step further.

“There’s so much going on. There’s this culture of busy-ness,” he said. “So how do we use what we’ve got and do more with it?”

That question is one the working group is still trying to answer.

Mould also pointed to the lack of diversity on Elon’s campus as a possible contributing factor to the deficient intellectual climate.

“All the research says that if you can have more diverse voices at the table, you will have richer and deeper conversations,” he said. “If there is greater diversity just in living, that is going to inherently prompt more interesting and different kinds of conversations than if there’s such a degree of homogeneity. It’s those points where we don’t agree, that’s where you can open up the doors for some really interesting conversations.”

The solution

Mould said he sees two potential ways to strengthen Elon’s intellectual climate.

On one side, people argue that the key is to recruit students who already care about engaging in intellectual conversations. Others say that with the right culture, Elon should be able to orient students toward intellectualism.

“It’s got to be both,” Mould said. “Fellows programs do a nice job, I think, of recruiting students who may or may not have normally come to Elon University, but how do we support [them] once they’re here? [Another] question [is] how can we identify students who are not in Fellows programs but are interested in these continued conversations?”

He said the Coffee Klatch is one way of giving opportunities to these other students, but the working group is still trying to figure out more.

“I think [the solution] starts with spreading the word and getting students to think about what an intellectual climate is, how colleges are supposed to be intellectual climates and how their experience at Elon could be improved,” McClain said. “I think many students have never thought about it until someone brings it up to them.”

Paille-Jansa expressed the same sentiment in regards to herself.

“It’s not something that I understood until someone said, ‘Sarah, how many times do you talk about childbirth during recruitment?’” she said. “I’m doing research on childbirth, and I’m really invested and very passionate about my research, and I never talked about childbirth. It’s something that I care about more than most things, and it’s not something that I mentioned during a Greek recruitment.”

The future of Elon’s intellectual climate

Mould said he feels good about the progress that has been made so far in the intellectual climate movement.

“In terms of a time frame for results emerging from some of the work on the intellectual climate group, we’ve already seen some. So I hope people feel fairly buoyed and optimistic about the potential for change,” he said. “My sense is that we’ve made some good progress, but we’ve got a lot ahead of us.”

McClain said she’s also hopeful about the future of intellectualism on campus.

“We’ve had a lot of administrative support thus far, and we have amazing students who will continue to work on this next year, so I’m very hopeful,” she said. “When people think of Elon, I want them to think of us as an intellectually rigorous and deeply engaged group of students who care a lot about what we are learning.”

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