Auditors are learning and teaching
Alicia Brzycki
Princeton NJ -- An effort to extend the University's resources into the community is paying dividends to students and faculty. Adults enrolled in the Community Auditing Program are providing an education as well as getting one.
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Auditors and students get together most Wednesdays in the Woodrow Wilson School cafeteria. From left are Fred Cantor, Judith Sherman, June Cantor, Laura Kaplan '02, Audrey Grimaldi, Bernardette Arellano '02, graduate student Karin Velez and Rae Horwitz.
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Religion professor Davíd Carrasco gives a lecture on "The Terror of History" in the Judaism section of his "Religious Dimensions in Human Experience" class. A few years ago, he received a note from Sherman recounting her own Holocaust experience.
Touched by the note, Carrasco asked Sherman to share the story of her life as a young girl in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp with the class. She has done so for the past two years -- though not before and not elsewhere.
"Auditors can be learning resources for students," he says. "This is something that is evolving, and that has not really been planned -- but look what a creative response we are having with students and vice versa."
Although community members have been auditing classes for many years, the Community Auditing Program formally was launched in 1999 by Pam Hersh, director of the Office of Community and State Affairs, in consultation with Associate Provost Georgia Nugent and Dean of the Faculty Joseph Taylor.
As part of that program, auditors now must register before the start of each new semester. Registration begins at the Frist Campus Center in early May for the fall semester and in mid-December for the spring semester.
"This effort is in response to the extraordinary demand from the community residents who desire to be part of the educational opportunities on campus," says Taylor.
In spring 2000, 360 auditors participated in the program. The nearly 100 percent increase in enrollment confirms the need to establish a more formal program in order to, as the dean says, "create a more satisfactory experience for auditors, as well as for University faculty, students and staff."
To help this effort along, auditors may now speak with a Community Auditing Program coordinator at 201 Frist Campus Center between 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, or they may call the coordinator at 258-0202.
"We know that in many cases the faculty enjoy the presence of auditors, and in one instance a faculty member has held a special seminar for auditors," Taylor says.
Last fall, Anne Sobel, lecturer in English, arranged a seminar for auditors the day after her undergraduate seminar, "Literature and the 20th Century's Two World Wars: Challenging the Ineffable/Writing the Unspeakable." She would discuss with her auditors the following day what was discussed with her undergraduates the previous one. A creative synergy flowed out of the amalgamation of the two discussions, she says.
"The auditors were incredibly wonderful and extremely well-educated," she says. "They provided perspective in our discussion of World Wars I and II by virtue of having been alive at the time or by having family members who fought in one of the wars. They provided a cultural history and help to preserve it."
This is just the kind of thing Debbie Jacobson '03 is talking about when she reflects on what it's like getting to know the auditors in her classes. "It's like sitting around and talking with your father, uncle or grandmother about their lives," she says. "They provide a way for students to gain life experience vicariously, giving them a sense of having been there, done that."
Jacobson and Karin Velez, a graduate student who also audits classes, get together most Wednesdays with auditors in the cafeteria at the Woodrow Wilson School just to talk. Velez says, "It's nice to be able to talk about subjects outside of class material, or to build on class material."
Velez also finds auditors tremendously supportive of the work students do in the classroom.
"They are very kind and generous about expressing their encouragement and are the first to applaud or to be impressed with presentations," she says. "Having a group of older community members as auditors, adults who are delighted to be in the classroom again and who don't have to be there, who are excited to see a presentation rather than acting like 'ho-hum, it's just another class,' really makes a difference to me."
June Cantor, who has been auditing classes since 1996, is just such a community member. When reflecting on her experience since retiring from teaching third- and fourth-graders in Queens for 28 years, she fondly recalls former Princeton Politics Professor Stephen Cohen. She says he would begin each semester by saying, "Take a look around and notice all the senior people who are here. They're auditors, and they're here by choice because they wish to go on with an education."
Some would say that Cantor -- along with her fellow auditors -- has continued to teach at Princeton as well.
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