Authors come to campus to lecture on their books. This year the Dean and I held a forum with more than 400 parents and students on alcohol use on campus. A number of colleges are forming parents associations, which give parents additional opportunities to share their wisdom and experience about their careers, sports and volunteer activities, not only with their own children, but with their children's classmates and the faculty as well. A generation ago these suggestions would have been risible, but now they become realistic and exciting possibilities. In a survey by the dean of freshmen this year, over 90 percent of Connecticut College freshmen ranked parents and family members as the people they most admire.
Colleges can connect families and current concerns they share.
LIke many other college presidents in their 40s, I have lived through the many changes on America's campuses in the last twenty-five years, as a student, graduate student, young professor, and now as an administrator. I understand and respect the efforts underway to bring more structure and oversight to a student life, but am uncomfortable with the shift back to in loco parentis, for this mode clearly does not reflect today's parents, their college-age children, the relationship they share, and everything we have learned since the '50s about the importance of encouraging students to make responsible decisions themselves. The rules we internalize, after all, are the ones that save us. Claire L. Gaudiani has been president of Connecticut College since 1988.