Knight Ridder Tribune
Liberty, Mo. - Each week in her philosophy class last semester Diana Gaughan had to be sharp. Really sharp.
The sophomore from Versailles, Mo., had to answer all of the professor's questions. She couldn't slack off on the reading, because she was the only student expected to discuss it. And she had to present a polished, cogent essay each week.
Why did all the responsibility fall to her?
Because she was the only student in the class.
Gaughan is one of 42 students enrolled in the Oxbridge Honors Program at William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., and school officials believe the program is unlike any other in the country.
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The students take many of their classes in one-on-one tutorials. They study at Oxford or Cambridge Universities in England in their junior year. And they must pass a comprehensive exam in their major before graduating.
The personal attention, the focus on reading, writing and thinking, the self-directed study and the overseas travel attract some of the region's brightest students to this small Baptist-affiliated college.
Oxbridge alumni say it helped develop them into self-motivated, self-reliant adults who are better readers, writers and thinkers than they would have been if they had taken only traditional American lecture-style classes.
"It was, frankly, phenomenal," said Eric Zahnd, a lawyer at Bryan Cave in Kansas City, Mo., who graduated from Jewell in 1991 and then earned a law degree and a master's degree in philosophy at Duke University. "Oxbridge offered the best of both worlds - the small-college, liberal-arts education with the rigors of an Ivy League school, and the opportunity to spend a year at one of the world's great universities. You add all that together and it seemed like the right thing to do."
Guiding gifted students.
That is just what Gordon Kingsley had in mind when he dreamed up the Oxbridge program back in the late 1970s.
He was a professor at Jewell, and one day he was off by himself at an Illinois state park, pondering what the best undergraduate program might look like. He started sketching the outlines of what would become the Oxbridge program.
In its bare outlines, he recalls, he thought gifted and self-directed students should take two years of American-style education, then spend a year at Oxford, and then return for one more year of tutorial-style education and comprehensive exams.
His graph-paper musings sat in his desk for years, even after he had been chosen as president of William Jewell College in 1980.
Then, people at what was then called the Hallmark Educational Foundation offered to help pay for the best programs at Jewell; Avila College in Kansas City, Mo.; Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Mo., (now Rockhurst University), and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. (The Hallmark Family Foundation continues to support the Oxbridge program.)
Kingsley immediately thought of those pages of graph paper outlining his Oxford idea. He proposed it, and the Hallmark people eventually agreed to support it.
Kingsley took the entire Jewell faculty to England to witness the tutorial teaching style first-hand. They agreed that it should become part of Jewell's offerings.
Eventually, the program expanded to include Cambridge as well as Oxford, and the students began taking tutorial-style classes in their sophomore year, rather than being introduced to it for the first time in England.
Kingsley is pleased to see that the program he started has survived almost a decade after he left the college in 1993.
He admits that some criticize Oxbridge for being "elitist."
"Of course it is," he said. "I want my doctor and my lawyer and my minister to be highly trained. Elitism in higher education - if it means elitism in achievement, and democracy in opportunity - is a good thing, not a bad thing."
Students who are accepted into Oxbridge must have high test scores and good grades.
But they also must show maturity, a deep thirst for knowledge and an ability to be self-starters. They can major in one of seven subjects: English language and literature; history; the history of ideas; institutions and policy; music; molecular biology; and ecology and systematics.
Through the program, alumni say, they learn to think critically, synthesize material quickly, and write clearly and persuasively.
They also gain confidence. They must survive for a year abroad, and learn to state their educated opinions to their professors, one-on-one, week after week.
"Oxbridge taught me to believe in myself, trust my own instincts," said Kristin Dow, director of pastoral services at Northwest Missouri Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center in St. Joseph, Mo., and a 1992 Oxbridge graduate.
She fondly remembers her tutorials with a professor in England.
"She had a little library in the upstairs part of her house. She always had hot mugs of tea," Dow said. "We curled up in these overstuffed chairs in her home and sipped tea and talked about William Butler Yeats and the Romantic poets."
