Flowers: Our Innovative Education
This section of the site explores the many ways in which a Kirkland education pushed the boundaries of traditional liberal arts pedagogy. Click on this title for an example:
Other topics in this area are, or could be:
- Senior Projects
- Evaluations
- Winter Study
- Leave of Absence
- Independent Study
- Core Curriculum
To suggest another topic or contribute an article, please email the editors.
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Kirkland College 
I’m working on the evaluations page, but there are so many other topics to write about!
Jo
I was torn whether to contribute to Flowers, which speak to “our innovative education” or Fruit, which concern “our lasting impact”.
I guess it doesn’t matter, as what I have to say concerns both.
While Kirkland should be remembered for its unique contribution to women’s education, as I’ve said before, it should be lauded just as much for its educational outlook, an outlook just as beneficial to the men like me who studied there, as for the women.
If the house of my intellectual education was purchased with a down payment from the generous scholarship help that Hamilton gave me, the actual rooms in the house were built and furnished by Kirkland professors, particularly my mentors in the field of intellectual history, in the order in which I met and learned from them, Peter Marcy, Jerry Townshend, David Miller, and Esther Barrazone.
These rooms remain warm, vibrant, and energy-filled to this day, no more so than when I sit down with four undergraduate students at Norwich University where I teach as an adjunct in political science every week for a three hour class on the issues of war and peace. I attempt, at every turn, to inculcate the values of the Kirkland approach, facilitative, egalitarian, challenging, and skeptical. As a result of these newest interchanges in the Kirkland tradition, I now add rooms and warmth to my own house and begin to furnish the “digs” of other young people.
Thank you, Kirkland.
Lars Nielsen
Hamilton (and Kirkland) 1977
Lars,
Many thanks for initiating a heartwarming conversation that includes the male perspective on Kirkland College. Coordinate education, mostly disappearing from the landscape, clearly included men. You have started a valuable and important discussion of the impact of coordinate education and of Kirkland’s philosophy and approach on both student bodies. It’s a piece of the Kirkland story, I hope other Hamiltonians ( Kirkletonians? ) will help tell .
Thanks,
Judy