Micro colleges offer unique educational opportunities. Jacob Hundt of Thoreau College speaks with Oregon Grapevine host Barbara Dellenback about offerings including hands on creativity, critical thinking skills, and group discussions, Micro colleges offerings can include anything from farming techniques, religious studies, philosophy, and the connection between the natural world and cultural lineage.
Barbara Dellenback: From KLCC Media, this is the Oregon Grapevine. I'm Barbara Dellenback. The Oregon Grapevine highlights fresh-pressed conversations with people who are actively and passionately creating the present and future in which they wish to live. Jacob Hundt is executive director of Thoreau College and the Driftless Folk School, one of a series of micro colleges. Thank you so much for being on the Oregon Grapevine.
Jacob Hundt: My pleasure. Thank you, Barbara.
Dellenback: Let's jump into what a micro college is.
Hundt: Micro college is probably a term most people haven't heard, although I would wager they will if they haven't already. It's an idea whose time has come, and it's a word we're using here at Thoreau College in Viroqua, Wisconsin, to describe a growing phenomenon in our time. A micro college, as we define it, is an institution of postsecondary education for college-age students that is humanly scaled, place-based, meaning-centered and built around a curriculum for the whole person. We are one of about half a dozen programs in the United States that could be described that way. Some are 100 years old or older, and some have started in just the last few years. There's also a much wider movement with deep roots in Europe and elsewhere in the world. There are micro colleges in Japan. I've spoken with people in Egypt and across Eastern Europe. It's basically small-scale, community-centered, hands-on, integrated education for college-age young adults.
Dellenback: There's a lot of angst around college conversations, whether it has to do with wanting to go, whether your parents think you should go, or what to do, or, outside the political realm and other issues going on around education, what is the appeal? Who might go there? Who are the students at Thoreau College? Can you make generalizations about who these schools appeal to?
Hundt: There's a broad sense, in the United States and around the world, that something is off about higher education right now. There are political concerns, as you mentioned, and deep concerns about the cost of education and its value as an economic proposition. But at a deeper level, there are questions about what it's for, and about its relationship to evolving technologies. Concretely, the students who come to Thoreau College and these other micro colleges want to engage deeply with the real and with community. Our student bodies range from six to 15 students, so this is a handful of people, and many of the other programs are similar in scale, maybe up to 25 or 30 students. These are very small programs, so everyone knows each other. They're not anonymous, which is certainly a concern in big institutions and in virtually based education today. These are all in-person, embodied, face-to-face, not online, programs, and I think that's a big draw. We have students coming out of middle school, high school and the early years of college in the COVID era, where they did everything online and felt very disconnected from one another and from the physical world. Our programs involve farm work, hands-on homesteading skills, working with animals, gardens and carpentry, and many of the programs, including ours, involve wilderness expeditions: canoe trips, hiking trips. We camp here in Wisconsin in the winter, learning to read the land, know the trees and watch the stars. That engagement with the physical, natural world is a big draw. And deep down, these are places at a scale and orientation where you can talk about the big questions: Why are we here? What's the direction of my life? How should we relate to the major changes, crises and issues of our time? All in a community of people you get to know well, where your voice can be heard and you can explore.
Dellenback: I've mentioned before, and it's a little snide though I don't mean it that way: A student comes home and says to mom, “I'm going to study philosophy,” and the response is, “What are you possibly going to do with a philosophy degree?” Now, obviously, there are many things you can do with a philosophy degree. But say a student comes home and says, “I want to go to this micro college, Thoreau College or Deep Springs or Gutenberg,” and study this seemingly esoteric thing. How do you convince the parent, or the student and their family, that it really does have this value?
Hundt: I think this is a case that gets easier to make every year. First of all, our programs fit in the broad category of a gap program, although we don't use that language as much. It's a time of transition, and it's really education, especially postsecondary education. You come out of high school, you're entering adulthood. This is a period of initiation, a passage to a new phase of life. Both the anecdotal and the more quantitative research show this is incredibly valuable: just taking a pause, taking time to really take stock of who you are, where the world is and where you want to go. This is now widely recognized by colleges, including the most selective and difficult-to-get-into colleges. The Ivy League schools, for example, that have the money to do it will actually sponsor and fund their students to take a gap year, because they see the data. Students who come back after that experience are more likely to graduate in four years, more likely to be engaged, and their grades will be higher. So if all you're concerned about is conventional success, this is still a really good idea. I think this is especially true at our moment because of the rapid change happening in our economy and culture. It's very difficult to know what the world will look like in four years, five years or 10 years, and this is a time to really get centered in yourself. The things you learn in these programs are formative qualities: self-knowledge, communication skills among a small group of people working through conflicts, hands-on practical problem-solving and observation. In the era of artificial intelligence and other digital technologies, this is a time that rewards philosophy: thinking about what consciousness is, what thinking actually is, ethical reasoning, and how we use these powerful tools. We need philosophers more than ever, and we also need people who can do things with their hands. Those are some of the most needed skills. Students who come here learn how to grow food. They learn how to work with power tools. They learn how to change the oil in a car, how to look at a physical problem and work through it with a group of people to solve it. Across a broad range, this is an exceptionally good answer to this precise moment, one that sets a person up to be successful in whatever they choose to do. Our students go on to do all kinds of things. We have students running small businesses. I just met a recent student who's now traveling the country shearing sheep and trimming hooves on pigs. We have students at Harvard. We have students at Oberlin College. We have students working in computers. They're doing everything, and I think the baseline is what's set up by a program like ours.
Dellenback: I need to say, I love some philosophers, so I don't want to come off here as having trashed philosophy. I was just using that as an example. Is there a kind of coalition or consortium, a conversation between different micro colleges, an organization of micro colleges, if you will?
Hundt: That's especially exciting for me, something I've been able to participate in on several levels. As I mentioned, I'd say this term, micro college, is an emergent one. It's something I'm really trying to get out there, and I appreciate this opportunity to talk with your audience about it. People who are excited about this idea in general can also check out my podcast, called Micro College, in which I've interviewed a lot of people thinking about this: people who've started, lead or teach at programs like this, students at programs like ours, and people who've written books about it. So it is a broad and growing movement. There are some emergent coalitions and organizations. The primary one I'd mention right away is the Springboard Foundation, a Massachusetts-based foundation that supports networking and advises people who want to start micro colleges. It's also doing research, comparative and longitudinal, about outcomes. They've put together a couple of white papers on the philosophy and pedagogy, and they're also doing some grant writing and fundraising, which has been very supportive to our program and others. There's a good list of about five or six programs they're directly working with that fit into this category. An important part of our inspiration comes from Deep Springs College, which has been around since 1917. It's a very selective, venerable micro college, about 26 students, in Eastern California, and that's where I went to school. There's a growing organization of about six or so Deep Springs-inspired micro colleges around the country, including in Alaska, Massachusetts and here in Wisconsin. This is a group that now meets annually. And then some of your audience will know about the folk school movement, particularly the original Danish folk high school model, which is well established, going back to the 1800s in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, and elsewhere in the world. These are very similar to micro colleges, and it's now a movement getting organized on a global level beyond Scandinavia. We're participating in that too. There was a meetup in Denmark last summer, and there will be another one next year in the UK. There are educators communicating and writing books and articles about this. So this is a multidimensional model that we're able to participate in in several ways.
Dellenback: There's a lot of conversation about critical thinking, and how kids come out of high school without really knowing what that is because they're so caught up, and teachers are so caught up, in getting them through tests. It's almost as if it's a choice: You can either have fact-based education, so to speak, where you're answering questions, or you can have a more general understanding of how to make decisions, of critical thinking and longer conversations, but those can be complicated, especially in a public school setting. So how do you address that? I'm assuming a lot of the people who come to you might not have those skills. Do they want them?
Hundt: We've been about 25 years now in this era of intense, No Child Left Behind-style standardized testing, reinforced several times by the federal government and by the states, in ways I think are disastrous. And now especially that we have these technologies that can just answer all the questions for us, that's exactly the skill you don't need anymore. What you need is the capacity to tackle things no one knows the answer to, things that are complex and ambiguous and require judgment and nuance. Those are exactly the things not tested by a multiple-choice test. I think that's really core to what we do, and I think we all need to be freshened up on that. Anyone who's come through mainstream education in the last 25 years will need this too. We create real-world situations with conscious, living, engaged people and groups of people. There are animals and plants and weather. There are aspects of the physical, built environment that fall apart, break and need to be adjusted. I'd add the arts to that too, the creative arts. Right now we're here at Thoreau College, and one of our side projects is a Shakespeare festival. When you stage a play, whether it's Shakespeare, improv or something you've written together, you're dealing on multiple levels with qualitative elements, social dynamics and the weather, since it's an outdoor Shakespeare festival. If you're making a sculpture with wood, clay or stone, or working with plant materials, as we often do here, to make baskets or work with fiber from sheep, these are things that don't have one answer. They require complex thinking and comfort with ambiguity, and often, if you're working with people, comfort with conflict and working through differences of opinion and perspective. I think the intensive, hands-on, socially rooted, close relationships we have in a micro college are really ideal for that kind of thing, and much harder to develop in larger institutions or ones more rigidly structured around testing or other measures.
Dellenback: There's a school in Eugene that I know you're familiar with, and some of the listeners are familiar with too: Gutenberg College, which by some definitions could certainly be called a micro college, different from what you're describing in terms of the models involving outdoor work, hands-on work and changing the oil in cars, because Gutenberg, and maybe some others, deals specifically with great books and biblically related thinking. Are there other micro colleges that also focus on a more limited subject matter but still use this model to emphasize critical thinking and community understanding in a smaller group?
Hundt: I'd say, first of all, that what we're doing at Thoreau College, and certainly what's happening at Deep Springs and some of these Deep Springs-inspired institutions, really follows the great books model, an important part of our lineage. That's to say, even though we're not a sectarian institution, not specifically Christian or affiliated with a particular religion or movement, the impulse to ground yourself both in the natural world and in a cultural lineage, and the great books are a great way to do that, is an important part of what we're doing: cultural literacy, engagement with great thinkers and the great conversations happening. I listened to your conversation with the gentleman from Gutenberg College, and I recognized a lot of that impulse. The model of academics we do here is essentially a great books seminar: a small group of people who've read a primary text, talking about it, really treating that book as a primary source, a phenomenon we're seeking to understand in an appreciative, open way, as a group of students of the world. What we add is that we're also engaging with the natural world in that same way. When you stand in front of a landscape, an animal or the stars, you can engage with it in a similar way, based on conversation and real reverence for the phenomenon, whether it's a book, an idea, a work of art or some aspect of the natural world. I'd say there's real alignment there, and our vision includes a broader sense of what education should include, not just books but also the natural world, hands-on experience and social life. The governance of the school is part of our curriculum too. I can share an example from Japan; we've had a couple of students come through this program. It's called Kotawari, an intensive couple of weeks in the summertime. Some of these programs are shorter than a year, a semester or two years. Kotawari says it's inspired by the meditative traditions of Asia and the liberal arts traditions of the West, so the students do contemplative practices, meditation, and they also read works of philosophy and literature, doing it in a context where they're also engaging with agriculture, with the farm and with the natural world. That's the big picture. I get really excited about this idea of the micro college movement. I think the opportunities for a huge variety and diversity of manifestations of this are really great, and I appreciated the highlight of Gutenberg. There's a whole broad micro-college-scale Christian, Catholic and other religious tradition at this scale, and many of them incorporate things beyond books too. Some are engaged with carpentry and building trades and things like that.
Dellenback: Let's go to the folk school tradition for a minute, and what you're doing there too. I know Tarweed, here in Oregon, isn't exactly a place you go for a long period of time. You go because you want to learn about specific basketry, or how to make a spoon, or some other kind of wood carving. But there are, of course, folk schools where you spend more time. How does that work? Is it a year-long program? Is it community-based? What's the overview of that folk school model?
Hundt: I think that's a unique thing we're doing here specifically, and I should set the scene for your listeners who don't know the region. We're located in Viroqua, Wisconsin, in the southwest corner of the state, about two hours west of Madison and about 20 minutes from the Mississippi River. This is hill country called the Driftless Region. It's unglaciated, so while the whole Midwest was bulldozed flat by glaciers several times, this little island in the southwest corner of Wisconsin and neighboring areas of Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois was left distinctive in its geography, and therefore distinctive in its agriculture, culture and biodiversity. Folk schools are rooted in place; they're expressions of the landscape and culture of those places. Here, our place is the Driftless Region. The Driftless Folk School is part of the same nonprofit as Thoreau College, and there's a lot of overlap between the activities. You could say Thoreau College offers semester- or year-long programs for college students, full-time, residential, immersive experiences that include academic elements as well as craft, farm labor and expeditions. The Driftless Folk School is, I think, pretty similar to what you described with Tarweed: usually one- or two-day workshop-based classes for adults of all ages. We're also developing more opportunities for kids, children's classes or family classes. There's also a set of events, barn dances, and a spoon-carving event that happens every year. The Driftless Folk School brings together people from different walks of life across the region who want to learn something hands-on, usually foraging, spoon carving, basketry, making cheese, making soap, timber framing. My contribution is a chicken-butchering class. A lot of it is about how to feed and sustain yourself, green energy, solar panels, building skills, things like that. We have an amazing pool of local and regional instructors who come in on weekends to teach these classes, anywhere from four hours to two days long, usually on Saturday and Sunday. That means Thoreau College students can elect to take those classes as a supplement to what we're doing with them during the week, and we also bring a lot of those folk school instructors in as core parts of the Thoreau College curriculum. There's an intergenerational component, so people of different ages learn together. Otherwise, folk school classes here and around the country don't usually have a lot of people in their teens and 20s, so there's a lot of mixing and mentorship that happens. We're able to support and cultivate people who have these amazing skills and have practiced them to a high level. A couple of people basically make their living teaching between the Folk School and the Thoreau College classes, and that's a real asset. It builds up the resilience of the local community. We're bringing in people from the big cities of the region, Chicago and the Twin Cities, who bring dollars in to support the rural community here, and it helps build a really rich local culture.
Dellenback: In your experience, as it were, not a long... well, there's Deep Springs, which has a long history, but as the history is growing, is the demographic of the student body, both at Thoreau and other places, changing?
Hundt: These are very difficult to compare. People curious about Deep Springs should just do a Google search; you'll see, probably most recently, that the New York Times just ran an article about Deep Springs on the opinion page a couple of weeks ago. It's been featured at some point in the last 30 years by every major media outlet, from “60 Minutes” to the Times of London to the Wall Street Journal, and so on. It has a known place in academia. Students go there for two years on full scholarship and generally transfer, with full credit, to selective schools of all sorts around the world. They get about 800 applicants a year for about 15 positions, so that's a distinctive demographic. Thoreau College and the other newer schools aren't in that role or at that kind of status, and I think that's good. There should be a lot more opportunities for this type of education, and every place expresses it differently. Here in Wisconsin, we're embedded in a dynamic little town. We raise a lot of our own produce, and we have an orchard, vineyards, and a flock of sheep, pigs and chickens. We're engaged with a particular local environment. There are other Deep Springs-inspired schools up in Alaska that have made rural and Native Alaskan students a key part of their demographic, as well as part of their curriculum. They're fishing for herring and learning indigenous languages there in Southeast Alaska, at Outer Coast College, for example. They're reaching different audiences. Here in the Midwest, we're one of the very few, or maybe the only, gap year and micro college program in this region at this point, though more are being explored, and we're helping get some of them started. In general, gap-year programs and unusual educational programs like this have tended to draw people with income and higher-educated parents, people with some opportunity to look outside the box and some security to do that. But we're seeing that our students aren't all drawn from that mold. We have a lot of economic diversity in our applicant pool. We've had students from other countries and from all over the United States. So I'd say part of our mission is to expand the pool of people who can access this and see themselves in a place like Thoreau College.
Dellenback: Really, more to enhance what you're going on to continue doing, to give you a little deeper understanding. Let me ask you this: What inspires you to continue this work, and how did you get to Deep Springs? What started you on this path, and why do you continue to do it?
Hundt: I have a strong sense of vocation around this. I grew up here in rural southwestern Wisconsin, in the Driftless Region, in an environment of people who were thinking about education but also thinking more deeply about the good life: How shall we live? These are basic philosophical questions. We're in a region rich in sustainable agriculture. This is home base for the Organic Valley Farm Co-op, dairy farmers and produce growers thinking about how to steward the land, and how to do it in a way that builds community, relationships, and resilience and wealth in rural communities. I grew up around visionary social entrepreneurs, people who had a lot of agency in building their own lives, and I think I've always sensed that this is one of the outcomes and purposes of education. I knew early on that I had a vocation as a teacher. I love working with young people, especially young adults, people 17 to 25, who I get to know in a really in-depth, long-term way. The program here starts every semester with a weeklong canoe trip or camping trip that I participate in. We have lunch together every single day. We have a couple of meetings a week where we're making decisions, talking about big ideas in philosophy class, working in the garden. These are ways to really go deep in relationship, and in that environment you go into those questions in a way that isn't narrowly transactional, not, “What's on the test? What's the grade going to be?” and then you don't interact again. These are mentorship relationships. They're collaborative, co-creative relationships. They're also friendships that are very valuable to me, and I feel excited every day. Right now we're between programs, and I really miss the students. That ongoing relationship with them, especially those who find their way to a place like this, is just golden and really delightful.
Dellenback: Thank you so much, Jacob Hundt, for explaining a little about micro colleges and for the work you do, and for being on the Oregon Grapevine. I'm grateful, and a little more educated. Thank you.
Hundt: Thank you so much for having me.
Dellenback: You've been listening to KLCC Media's The Oregon Grapevine, fresh-pressed conversations with people who are actively and passionately creating the present and future in which they wish to live.
