I keep returning to this issue, intellectual climate, as it is closely related to pragmatic professional concerns or at least premises: that a successful professional writing program may rely upon generating a campus culture more open to, and interested in, writing. And, as the post title suggests, I’ve been thinking about Gladwell’s "tipping point" concept.

Generally, I think we, as academics, look at problems like "intellectual climate" or WAC as caused by systemic conditions (i.e. the way certain types of crime are a product of poverty, racism, etc.). The tipping point theory does not deny this but elaborates upon it, suggesting that while large scale environmental conditions, as well as genetic predispositions, certainly shape our behavior, sometimes seemingly minor details can make the difference between having a predisposition toward a certain behavior and actually acting out that behavior.

So let’s say that one wanted to improved the intellectual/writing culture on a campus. That’s a very vague goal (kind of like "winning the war in Iraq"). It’s certainly an issue of attitude toward, and engagement in, the intellectual opportunities available on campus, both in and out of the curriculum. You would have to think about how you would want to measure the success of any activities. If there’s one thing Gladwell asserts, its that one needs to test and measure one’s hypotheses b/c the answer is rarely what one imagines it will be. That said, here are some guesses based on the principles in his text.

1. "Law of the few" suggests that certain people in any community are more important for spreading messages than others. Gladwell terms these people Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. I won’t go into that, but basically it means that if you want to spread a message and change behaviors among students, then you need to identify key students who will spread the message for you. Fortunately, these people are usually not too hard to find. There are already popular activites on campus and these folks are likely to be in the midst of these spreading information.

Even more generally though…if you want to change the culture of students on campus, then students obviously need to be full partners in that.

2. "Power of Context:" there are two points here. The first is that changes in seemingly minor environmental things can quickly change peoples’ attitudes. The second is the importance of working with relatively small groups of people. On our campus, here’s a couple minor changes we could make.

a. Really focus on the newspaper and literary magazine. If the College poured some resources into these organs for student publication, it might send a message that the institution was really serious about student writing. (again these are just hypotheses; they’d have to be tested.)
b. Redesign the College home page to announce events and link to featured pieces of student (and faculty) writing (every lab computer has the home page set up as the default when the browser opens).
c. Rather than trying to motivate the entire campus, break the student body down into groups of 100-150 (Gladwell provides evidence as to why groups larger than 150 cannot cohere). This could be done through the dorms, but those associations seem arbitrary to me. What makes a little more sense is working through departments and first-year learning communities (the latter b/c first-year students may not have majors and are likely to not be taking major-specific courses even if they do). Many departments at Cortland fall into this number range. Some departments would have to be grouped together. A few would have to find some internal division. However, the idea would be to try to work on building intellectual communities within these groups rather than trying to do it across the campus.

3. "Sticky Messages:" here is where testing your message is paramount. So let’s say I take up point c. above and focus just on undergrads majoring in English. There are around 150 active students in our three majors. I’m going to assume they share some common characteristics, such as some interest and facility in reading and writing. Of course they are also quite diverse, but perhaps no more diverse than a plant with 150 employees working in manufacturing, R&D, sales, marketing, etc.

My general goal is to improve intellectual climate, and I’ve decided that one tangible way I can do that, especially among English majors, is to get them writing, publishing and performing their works, and responding to one another’s texts. My hypothesis is that if I can change the "writing context," then I can perhaps tip our students into new writing practices, which will in turn contribute to shifting the intellectual climate of the campus.

A modest budget is necessary here, but part of Gladwell’s point is that these strategies do not require a tremendous amount of money to carry out. So for example, let’s say I was producing

• a monthly literary magazine produced both in print and online
• a modest monthly writing prize related to the magazine
• a link on the home page to the winner’s piece
• a monthly reading

While all the College students could participate, my idea would be to focus on the 150 English majors. My goal would be to have each student submit something every semester. While we couldn’t afford to put it all in print, we could publish online everything we found acceptable.

Now, the thing is, aside from the home page link, we already do these things…sort of. We have an annual literary magazine. We usually have one reading each semester. We have a writing prize, each semester I think. I suppose my thinking here is that these practices haven’t tipped our community because a)they are too infrequent and b)they seek to address a campus-wide community.

If we focus in on (non Gen-Ed) English classes and English majors in particular, then presumably everyone will know most of the people involved. Writing for the magazine, publishing the magazine, and going to readings become intellectual, community-building activities among a group of people who basically know one another, at least as acquaintances.

We would build some of the writing, editing, and publishing activities into coursework, but part of it would also come out of student group activity, as it already does with our Cortland Writers Assoc.

Well, anyway, this post has gone on long enough.

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