The Berea Vision

From its inception, Berea College has been a place where deep commitments have been translated into compassionate action in the service of young women and men, black and white, from many cultures, primarily from the Appalachian region but also far beyond.  Berea’s distinctive and multifaceted mission has always been and will remain firmly rooted in inclusive Christian values such as “the triumph of love over hate, human dignity and equality, and peace with justice.” 1  Hence, Berea was the first interracial and coeducational college in the pre-Civil War South.  Berea’s primary mission is to serve students of “great promise and limited economic means” by providing them with liberal arts and professional educations of the highest quality.  Thus, all students receive a substantial cost-of-education scholarship so that no money from student families is required for tuition.  Our educational community is predicated on the notion that work of all kinds, mental and physical, provides opportunities for furthering a student’s education and personal development.  Therefore, all students work in a campus-based labor department.  Just as one of our institutional goals is to serve others, so too we seek to prepare our students to be “service-oriented leaders for Appalachia and beyond” (Being and Becoming: Berea College in the 21st Century, 2006, p. 62).  Truly, learning, labor, and service are the three pillars upon which Berea’s educational edifice is built.

I. Berea’s Beginnings

In 1855, John G. Fee, the founder of Berea College, and those who assisted him—including Matilda Fee, John A. R. Rogers, Elizabeth Rogers, and others—boldly began to translate their abolitionist principles into a church and then a school perched on a ridge between the Bluegrass farms and the Cumberland Mountains.  Cassius M. Clay gave Fee ten acres of land on which Fee began the Berea settlement.  Fee named the site “Berea” after the Greek town that Paul described as a place where people “received the Word with all eagerness” (Acts 17:11).  Berea’s one-room district school founded in 1855 has evolved into the Berea College we know today, their small congregation’s worship center into the stately Union Church, and their settlement village into the town of Berea, Kentucky, which is still vital and growing.

The foundational motto of Berea’s 1866 catalog and today’s Berea College is that “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth” (Acts 17:26).  Fee believed deeply that all people are equally worthy of education, of personal esteem, of mutual respect, and of diverse collaborations.  He held that, whether black or white, male or female, Southern or Northern, rich or poor, all of us are God’s children and, as such, are deserving of an education that will make our lives more suitable for service.  From the beginning, learning, labor, and service have been the underpinning of a Berea education, whether it be on the elementary, the secondary, or the college level. 2

In the early days, those who taught Berea students in the classroom were the same people who supervised their labor and encouraged them to engage in acts of service both locally and in the mountains.  Thus learning, labor, and service were originally well integrated at the College.  During this period, the image of educating “the head, the heart, and the hands” captured well what it meant to be an educator at Berea. 3  However, over the years learning, labor, and service slowly became segmented into different parts of an increasingly complex institution.  Although Berea has always encouraged intellectual excellence, it has never narrowed its focus to developing intellectual excellence in liberal arts subjects alone.  Therefore, Berea College has taught applied subjects (e.g., education, nursing, and agriculture) throughout all of its history.  Berea has striven to educate “the whole person” by encouraging in each student the self-sufficiency found in working with his or her hands and the strong sense that his or her vocation ought to entail service to others.  The authors of the 1993 preface to the Great Commitments effectively captured this sense that the realms of thought and action should converge here in Berea when it says, “the Berea experience nurtures intellectual, physical, aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual potentials and with those the power to make meaningful commitments and translate them into action” (preface to the Great Commitments).  In this and many other respects, Berea College and we Bereans have often fallen short of achieving our ideals—but we have never lost our collective determination to pursue them to the very best of our abilities.

II. Learning, Labor, and Service at Berea College

William G. Frost, who became President of the College in 1892, brought craftsmen and women from the mountains to Berea and introduced a variety of new labor positions that provided apprenticeships in crafts.  During Frost’s presidency, the labor program began to take on a separate life of its own as Berea tried to employ all of its students in some kind of meaningful labor.  Gradually, a distinct labor program developed with its own learning goals for different student jobs.  In 1908, Professor Miles E. Marsh began to oversee Berea’s ever more numerous labor positions, and in 1914, he was officially appointed Dean of the Labor Program.  By this time, Berea’s students were no longer necessarily mentored in their labor positions by the same people who mentored them in the classroom.  Although Berea College has always tried to educate the whole person, as time passed, the academic program (“the head”), the labor program (“the hands”), and the service and spiritual development programs (“the heart”) simultaneously burgeoned and became distinctly separate institutional entities.  Today, most labor supervisors have little direct contact with the classroom (except for those members of the College Faculty who supervise students).  The spiritual and service dimensions have also been segmented into the Campus Christian Center, the Center for Excellence in Learning Through Service (CELTS), and a variety of other programs.  Thus, over the years, learning, labor, and service have become fairly compartmentalized and sometimes isolated aspects of Berea College and of “the Berea experience” for many students and employees.  A primary aim of the College’s strategic plan, Being and Becoming:  Berea College in the 21st Century (1996), has been to reintegrate these fundamental aspects of our institution and our experience.

Today Berea College depends on College Faculty to provide most of the formal instruction in the classroom, on other employees throughout the institution to provide learning opportunities for students in the labor program, and on yet other employees to guide the spiritual development of students and oversee the service and outreach components of the institution.  This realization led the students, faculty, and staff on the Strategic Planning Committee to develop, in consultation with the broader campus community, four pairs of learning goals for all students and workers at the College.  These are set forth in Being and Becoming as follows:

1. develop the critical intellectual ability to address complex problems from multiple perspectives and nurture moral growth with a commitment to service;
2. understand the relationship between humans and the natural world and consider both the benefits and limitations of science and technology;
3. explore our individual roots and our shared American culture and know and respect cultures from around the world;
4. educate students, faculty, and staff to be creative, independent thinkers and encourage collaboration and teamwork in learning and working (Being and Becoming, p. ii; see pp. 30-34 for a detailed discussion of each learning goal).

These four sets of learning goals represent an application of the Great commitments within the context of our contemporary world.  They are intended to guide the learning and work of all members of the campus community as well as to guide and unify all of the activities of the College, whether academic, extra-curricular, residential, labor, or athletic.  The learning goals, then, should be understood as that toward which we all may teach, and work, and learn, whether we are faculty members, groundskeepers, or student members of the residence hall staff.

However, the reintegration of the learning, labor, and service dimensions of the College has required more than simply sharing four pairs of learning goals.  For several years, all Berea faculty, staff, and students engaged in conversations about how we could more closely link our learning, labor, and service efforts so that students will be treated everywhere as whole persons—not as heads in the classroom, hands in the labor program, and hearts in the service and worship programs of the College.  If we are to reintegrate fully the learning, labor, and service components of “the Berea experience,” each one of us at the College must reconceive and reintegrate our own work.  Many Bereans from all constituencies of the College are now doing so.

1)   Integrating Learning

Increasingly, learning at Berea College involves not only the head, but also the heart and often the hands, even in the formal academic setting of the classroom.  By providing students with both theoretical knowledge and opportunities to apply the knowledge they gain, by encouraging students to work on applied projects outside the classroom, and by relating classroom activities to the service and labor activities in which students are engaged, more and more Berea faculty members are bringing those other aspects of students’ lives into the reflective environment of the classroom.  As a colleague recently observed, “Learning in this context means that the faculty is sensitive to students’ labor and other activities and encourages their integration in the minds of the students themselves.”  While the classroom does and must remain the primary domain of instruction in the traditional disciplines, ideally it is also open to students’ struggles with their faith, their personal development, and their searches for new ways of viewing their vocation or work in the future.  Such a learning environment treats students as whole persons, not just as heads.

2)   Integrating Labor

Many labor program supervisors are striving to fulfill the four pairs of learning goals listed above with the students whom they supervise.  These supervisors are thereby allied in purpose and practice with faculty members who pursue the College-wide learning goals, in addition to their discipline- and course-specific goals, in the classroom.  For example, the concept of “guided learning,” which informs the work of employees and students in the residential life area, is based on several of our learning goals and Great Commitments.  Also, while the labor program has traditionally challenged students’ hands through various forms of physical labor, the labor program is working to challenge and develop students’ heads and hearts as well by providing ever more intellectually and spiritually rich learning and service opportunities.  This is quite different from the primarily physical labor model of Berea’s original labor program.  In the spring of 2001, the Labor Review Team (LRT) provided a report that called for the “Re-visioning,” “Re-vitalizing,” and “Re-structuring” of Berea College’s Labor Program.  In the fall of 2003, the Strategic Planning Committee sent its proposal to the General Faculty for strengthening the Labor Program that confirms and extends the recommendations of the LRT.  The General Faculty passed this SPC revision of the Labor Program on December 11, 2003.  These recommendations stress that the Labor Program should enhance opportunities for students to learn, to engage meaningful work tasks, and, thereby, to serve the community.

3)   Integrating Service

When students engage in service to others, they learn a new way of applying the core values that our Great Commitments and learning goals make central to our community.  Berea’s faith that “God has created of one blood all peoples of the earth” fosters deep and active appreciation for the value of loving and serving others, and of the dignity of all people—whatever their origins or cultural traditions.  By engaging in and reflecting on service to others, our students and we ourselves learn that the more one places one’s time and talent at the service of others, the more fulfilling one’s own life becomes.  This might, at first glance, seem a mere truism.  Yet given the communities from which most Berea students come, our students really do come to learn that there are no magic potions to end the grinding poverty they have experienced personally or have seen in their communities.  Instead, they learn that to improve such circumstances they must put their heads and their hands at the service of their communities.

Directing one’s life and one’s vocation toward the betterment of one’s community—that is, toward the betterment of the common good—is a deeply rooted Berea College value.  Through CELTS, the College is attempting to provide increasing service-learning opportunities for students so that they can absorb this lesson experientially in the midst of an entire community that is dedicated to serving others well.  Service programs then can foster students’ learning and labor just as the academic and labor programs can engage students in service to others.

Being and Becoming offers a vision of a place where learning, labor, and service increasingly converge, a place where any given dimension of a student’s (or a worker’s) experience educates the head and hands and heart.  An idealistic vision?  Yes, certainly—but then, from John Fee’s day to the present, Bereans have always been idealistic.  Our 21st-Century challenge and goal is to educate Berea College students for an information-rich, technology-driven global society in which they may bring their “whole selves”—their integrity, their sense of purpose, and the real and varied knowledge and capabilities they acquire here—to bear on the problems facing their communities and the larger world.  Helping to develop and strengthen the capacities of the “gifted heads, gifted hands, and gifted hearts” of all Berea students and employees has always been and will remain the core enterprise of the College.  Each member of Berea’s College and General Faculties has the great responsibility and the great opportunity to carry forward this historic enterprise.  Thank you for joining other employees at Berea College in undertaking this vitally important mission.

Larry D. Shinn
President
August 2008