08254
April 4, 2008

Making it personal

Stillman College prides itself on the one-on-one, personal relationships it builds between students, faculty

by Toya Richards Hill
Presbyterian News Service

TUSCALOOSA, AL – Constance Bayne already has a full-time job in her chosen field waiting for her when she graduates from Stillman College.

The eager 21-year-old intends to go to work for the local newspaper here, a position she landed after one of her Stillman professors helped her get “a foot in the door.”

Stillman College promotes itself as a four-year liberal arts school in a small, nurturing environment. Photo by Joseph D. Williams.

“One of my professors … he introduced me to the former managing editor of the Tuscaloosa News,” Bayne said. That led to freelance work and an internship, she said.

Now, “I will have a full-time job … because of my work with them through the college and from actually that bridge relationship that I have built from here to there,” said Bayne, who hails from Antioch, TN.

It’s a common story you hear over and over again at Presbyterian-founded Stillman College: teacher-student relationships rooted in nurture and support that ultimately lead to success stories just like Bayne’s.

“We have a caring environment, sort of a family environment for our students,” said Charlotte Carter, vice president of academic affairs at Stillman. “We get to know our students on a more personal basis.”

“We know when they are missing classes. We know when something is wrong with them just by looking at the expressions on their faces,” she said. “I think that is a unique characteristic about us.”

With about 1,000 students enrolled on its 105-acre campus, Stillman champions its ability to provide a four-year liberal arts education in an intimate atmosphere that includes student-teacher ratios as low as 14 to 1.

And, as a historically black college and one of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s racial-ethnic schools, Stillman’s environment is especially important for a population that historically, and even presently, has been at a disadvantage, administrators say.

Stillman President Ernest McNealey has been at the helm since 1997. Photo by Joseph D. Williams.

“What schools like Stillman can do so well is to raise the sights of people who may not have ever looked past where they were,” said Ernest McNealey, Stillman’s president. “We provide an elite quality of education for kids who cannot afford one here. It was something we set out to do, and every other day I have a bit of gratification that we are doing just that.”

Nineteen-year-old Ashley Harris said it was important for her to attend a historically black school, where she figured “you will not be a number, you will be a name.”

That, she said, has proven to be the case.

Harris is enrolled in Stillman’s pre-professional program for medicine and intends to go on to medical school once she graduates.

“It is very hard, but you see the teachers here are so great,” she said. “There have been times where I have had a test the next morning and would stop by a teacher’s house and we stayed up until 12 o’clock in the morning as she was helping out and making sure that I was ready for the test.”

“The teachers here really care about you,” said Harris, who calls Loganville, GA, home.

McNealey, who became Stillman’s president in 1997, said improving the quality of professors on the faculty has been one of his main goals.

“At the top of our list was to essentially remake the faculty,” he said. “In addition to hiring a large number of new people, we set higher standards for the ones that we were hiring.”

“And, in addition to that we encouraged them to be active professionals. To teach well, of course, but if you were in the biological sciences … do some research,” McNealey said. “Let’s be full participants in whatever your discipline might be.”

English professor Kathryn Brewer is one of the faculty members who came in during Stillman’s charge to raise the quality of its instructors. Photo by Joseph D. Williams.

Kathryn Brewer, associate professor of English, joined the Stillman faculty in 2002.

“I was interested in teaching in a small liberal arts college where I could make a difference with the students and have smaller classrooms,” she said. “I have been in larger universities where I had 40, 50, 100 students in a literature classroom and I did not feel connected to the students.”

Upon her arrival, “I experienced the most warmth I have ever experienced in my life,” said Brewer, whose specialty is African-American literature.

From a teaching standpoint, she said, “I ask a lot of questions and they (the students) spend a lot of time in my office. I interact with them inside the classroom and outside of the classroom to find out what their needs are.”

“I know what their ability is almost from the first week they come into the classroom and I can work very individually with them,” she said. “They respond very well and they want to excel because most of them want to go to graduate school.”

Brewer also makes a point of taking students to national conferences with her so they’ll have professional-level experiences. “One of the goals in the English department is we want them to see what we do in our profession,” she said.

Sophomore Wesley Hodges from Boligee, AL, intends to make a career in corporate law once he leaves Stillman. Four of his siblings also attended Stillman: a brother who owns his own trucking company, a sister who’s a registered nurse, a sister who’s a pharmacist, and a sister who teaches in Japan.

“When I got here I thought it was going to be a terrible experience,” he said. “I wanted to go to a large school. Small schools were not on my list at all.”

“But after my first week it turned out to be greater than I thought it was going to be, much greater,” said Hodges. Being at a small school “does not matter. That is the biggest thing I have learned since I have been here.”