It takes years for any learning community program to gel in an institution. Remember, we are going up against a 100-year old structure. I have a friend involved in reform calculus who talks about reform vampires. He says, At my college, there always seem to be reform vampires whose skepticism or cynicism about innovation just seems to suck the air about of any new thing we want to try. I think we have to simply acknowledge that there are always going to be reform vampires around us.
Balloons are visible and they are prone to puncture.
Learning Communities as Sandboxes A third metaphor casts learning communities as sandboxes. These are generally wonderfully designed, marvelously taught programs that involve a very small number of faculty members and a very small number of students in the whole institution. They usually begin out of the heroic efforts of a small group of visionaries to embark into interdisciplinary territory and are taught repetitively by those same people year after year. They will probably sustain only as long as the original pioneers have energy for the program or as long as there are supportive administrators protecting or enduring the pioneers. I was visiting one of these programs, a freshman year initiative at a small public college out West a few years ago, and was asking about its long-term prospects.