Community College for the Capital

IT IS PROBABLY safe to say that no college has ever been as severely needed nor as eagerly anticipated as Federal City College, which opened in its temporary site, some two blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, in early September.

To say that the nation's capital has long needed a public institution of higher education is to understate the obvious. Before FCC, the only place that many D.C. high school graduates could attend was D.C. Teachers College, which has been dismally unfit for the task, recently running into accreditation problems. Eventually it will be taken over by FCC.

The local private universities and the public institutions in neighboring states have entrance requirements that are too stiff or costs that are too high for most D.C. students--over 90 percent of whom are black and most of whom are poor. And, added to the number who don't go on to college is the large group of people (about 25 percent of each class) that drop out before high school graduation.

FCC administrators realize that they cannot solve these problems overnight. The admissions office received close to 7000 applications for the first year, before it stopped accepting them, and only about 2250 full and part-time students will be able to attend this year. Those accepted were taken on a lottery basis, in keeping with the college's policy of open admissions, and several hundred others who were not accepted were placed in other colleges around the country.

Next year, FCC President Frank Farner, a 39-year-old graduate dean at the University of Oregon, hopes to get funds to take care of almost 5500 students, but it will still be a few years before FCC will be able to accommodate every D.C. high school graduate who wants to attend--which is the college's goal. And it will be a few years after that before FCC will actively be able to go out and recruit students and attempt to teach the large numbers of dropouts, as Farner wants to do.

One difficulty is that FCC was established and is funded by Congress, and nobody knows how willing that body will be to provide large amounts of money to the college. This year, FCC's operating budget is $4.3 million, but next year the budget request will be significantly higher, as FCC seeks money for construction on its permanent site.

The target now is to have one campus completed by June 1972, when this year's class graduates, and construction is expected to cost some $40 million over 3 or 4 years. The college hopes, if funds allow, to be able to build another branch as part of a "new town" in Fort Lincoln Park in the Northeast ghetto. The main site is to be in Mount Vernon Square, which is in the middle of a predominately black district in downtown Washington.

But, even in its temporary location--a drab, block-long building that formerly housed the Securities and Exchange Commission--and with just a fraction of the students that it hopes to eventually have, Federal City College is trying to do some innovative things in education. It is trying to make education relevant to poor blacks who have grown up in a city, to help them use what they have learned, and to learn from their experience.

It is also trying to involve students from the start in all of the decision-making at the college; and throughout the summer, students played a part in planning curriculum, administrative processes, and everything else that affects them.

Over 90 percent of the students at FCC this year are freshmen, and, for the first term, at least, the faculty is offering them 11 so-called core courses. There are also a small number of business classes, and various advanced courses of a more specialized nature for the transfer students. The core courses are inter-disciplinary, within the three areas of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

As such, they are similar in format to Harvard's gen. ed. selections. But, in subject matter and in the methods of teaching, they are quite different. Right now, students are not required to take one core in each of the three areas, but they are "strongly urged" to do so, according to one faculty member.

ALL FIVE social science core courses deal with one or more aspects of the urban environment. Two will be primarily "lab" courses--the "lab" being the surrounding Washington community--in which the students study urban social and political institutions. Individual projects, such as attempts at community organizing, are encouraged.

A team of teachers, consisting of a sociologist, an economist, a political scientist, and maybe a psychologist or historian (although history is officially in the humanities at FCC), conduct the courses. The things they planned to stress, one faculty member said in an interview this summer, were things that were directly related to the student's background. The hope is to make students aware of the problems of the ghetto and able to do something about them.

The method of teaching is also different from the traditional approach. There will be no failing grades given at FCC, only two or three shades of "pass." Lectures will be replaced, as much as possible, by secton-type seminar meetings, and when lectures are held, the hope is to make them "happenings" --movies, debates, discussions between students and faculty members, and the like. Innovation is the key at FC, innovation in terms of involving students more in the process of teaching.

"We want to make education a two-way street," one faculty member said this summer, "we want the students to teach us as much as we teach the students. But mostly we want to get the students to realize that by growing up in an urban environment, they have already learned and expressed a great deal."

The humanities cores, like those in the social sciences, seek to be relevant. One course compares the experience of black Americans to the experiences of other oppressed groups. Students will study revolutionary attitudes of 19th century Europe, revolutionary attitudes in the underdeveloped world, and from both will try to draw parallels and divergences to and from the experience and attitudes of black people in America. There are also various literature, art and music courses, as well as more general studies of contemporary attitudes of black people and of urban life.

AS DISCUSSED this summer, there were two basic problems confronting the innovative faculty, and only time will tell how well they have been solved. First, the incoming students indicated that they were not all that eager to try such new and experimental courses. They wanted the "regular thing," as provost David Dickson said in an interview.

They seemed to be afraid that with the innovative curriculum, they are kind of being used as guinea pigs by the faculty," he said. "They feel that anything new is not as good as the 'regular thing.' We hope that if these courses are good enough the students will want to take them."

He and Farner both emphasized that the students are not at all being used as guinea pigs. In fact, Farner said, "we have a real need to try new things here, but I don't want to let our students down in any way. If a student wants to take business administration or English or philosophy courses, he will be able to."

The faculty plans to constantly meet with students about curriculum, and let them have a major voice as to what is offered. But many feel, as Farner does, that FCC has a real obligation to try new things, and so they are hoping that in time, stu-students will accept the innovative courses.

A second difficulty--and possibly a more significant one--is the lack of preparation that many students are bringing with them to FCC. For them, the college has set up a skills center, which offers non-credit classes in reading, as well as in effective studying and thinking. In the near future, courses in remedial math will also be offered.

The response to the center -- both during the summer and in the first weeks of the term--has been amazing. The director, John Coffey, has said that 71 percent of the incoming class had indicated that they would like to use the center. As Coffey put it, his hope is to "make students find themselves as students at the skills center before they go to the classroom." He said that he and other faculty members "feared that the D.C. school system had not produced students who could utilize a college education."

WITH their college education, FCC students will be better able to work in the Washington community, and this kind of activity is being encouraged at FCC. An act of Congress made the college a land-grant institution, the first such college in the country to be urban-oriented. College officials and students met with community leaders all summer to try to arrange cooperative programs--things like adult classes, and workshops and institutes and such.

The college will try to employ community people and students wherever possible and plans to continue looking for ways to work with and for the community. One suggestion that seems to be highly considered is using FCC faculty members and students as advisers to the community on various topics.

The emphasis at FCC is on serving the community as much as serving the students. The campus, when it is built, will be "no different from the rest of the community," according to Morris Kandle, FCC vice-president for finances and administration. "When a person walks onto our campus," he said this summer, "we want him to feel as if he is walking through his community, that he is not walking into some ivory-towered academic factory." For this purpose, FCC has hired a firm of black architects who have had experience in urban planning and development.

The challenge at FCC, though, is also to make education relevant to its students, to open up to them a world with which they are familiar but up to now have been unable to handle. Associate degrees will be awarded to students completing the first two years of study. Degrees will be given in urbanology, education, nursing and health, and community services. The two-year program, as it is envisoned now, will eventually be open to all graduates of D.C. high schools.

Some requirements--as yet undetermined--will have to be satisfied for advanced degrees (FCC plans to offer both bachelor's and master's programs in the future).

BESIDES involving the students, and making their education relevant, FCC is making it financially possible for students to go to college. Tuition is $75 a term for full-time students, and if a student can not meet that, them the financial aid office will try, and has been trying all summer, to help him, either by jobs or by scholarships and loans.

John Cogdell, the financial aid director, said in an interview that many students who needed financial help, however, were not seeking it out. On their original applications only about one percent of the students had requested aid, as opposed to 10 to 15 percent in most state schools.

He and his staff, he said, were doing all they could to erase misconceptions that students might have about aid (many thought, for instance, of scholarship money as handouts similar to welfare, and felt that by taking loans, they would be in debt to "the man" for life). Cogdell said that he expected a big influx in aid applications in the first couple of months of the year.

There are a lot of things that FCC wants to do and a lot of things it has to do. But probably the most important thing is to make its students want to learn, and let them feel that people are sympathetic to their plight.

"After 12 years in the D.C. public school system," one faculty member said this summer, "many of these kids don't ever want to see a classroom again. But if we make their education relevant, we feel that they will want to learn, and will take part in the teaching process.