U.S. News & World Report ranks Calvin College #1 overall among Midwest regional colleges in its 2019 Best Colleges Guidebook. This marks the third consecutive year Calvin has topped its category.
Released online today, the report helps prospective students and their families evaluate colleges and universities based on 16 widely accepted indicators of excellence, such as first-year retention rates, graduation rates, and the strength of faculty. The report also takes into account qualitative assessments by administrators at peer institutions.
“Calvin’s mission to equip students to think deeply, to act justly, and to live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world remains our constant source of motivation,” said Michael K. Le Roy, Calvin College president. “It is encouraging when independent sources like U.S. News & World Report recognize the exemplary work of our faculty, staff, and students.”
In addition to sharing the top overall ranking among its peers with Taylor University in 2019, Calvin also garnered U.S. News’ #1 ranking among Midwest regional colleges on its “Best Undergraduate Teaching” list, and appeared in the top five of its lists of “Most Innovative Schools” and “Schools with the Most International Students.”
Calvin was also listed as a “Best Value School” by U.S. News & World Report, and the college’s engineering program received special recognition as one of the best undergraduate engineering program in the country. The college tied for 71st among schools whose terminal engineering degree is a bachelors or masters.
About Calvin College Founded in 1876, Calvin College is a top-ranked, liberal arts college that equips its more than 3,700 students from 45 U.S. states, 65 countries and five Canadian provinces to think deeply, to act justly, and to live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world. Calvin is proud to offer 100+ majors and programs, including graduate-level offerings in accounting, education, and speech pathology and audiology. Calvin students engage in intensive internships, community-based service learning, and significant research that results in publishing and presenting alongside world-class faculty.
And the college’s 400-acre campus, located in the vibrant city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, serves as a launching pad for students who, in any given year, participate in 40 faculty-led off-campus programs on six different continents. Discover more at www.calvin.edu.
About U.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report is celebrating its 85th year as a digital news and information company that empowers people to make better, more informed decisions about important issues affecting their lives. USNews.com focuses on education, health, money, travel, cars, and civic, providing consumer advice, rankings, and analysis to serve people making complex decisions throughout all stages of life. More than 40 million people visit USNews.com each month for research and advice. U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Fifteen inmates in the inaugural Calvin Prison Initiative class earned their associate’s degrees at Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan. (Photo courtesy Calvin College)
A gymnasium filled with moms and dads, sisters and brothers, administrators and teachers. Men seated in a couple of rows, dressed in black caps and gowns. Their smiles only contained by their ears. The room filled with jubilation, and hope.
It’s a familiar scene this time of year. But, not here. At least, not yet.
Peer out a small rectangular window and you quickly realize why. Twenty yards from the podium stands a 20-foot tall fence, wrapped in barbed wire.
Open doors
“We’ve embarked on a lot of firsts these past few years, we know it, those who work here know it, you guys certainly know it,” said Heidi Washington, the director of the Michigan Department of Corrections.
This first? A commencement ceremony inside Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan. And it’s part of another first – the Calvin Prison Initiative—a program that offers 20 inmates each year an opportunity to begin pursuing a bachelor’s degree in ministry leadership. It’s the type of program not happening anywhere else in the state, and in few places across the country. On Monday, 15 students from the first cohort earned their associate’s degrees.
“This first group behind me, literally took the stonings and they made the sacrifices to get this program up and running,” said DeWayne Burton, warden at Handlon Correctional Facility, during Monday’s Commencement ceremony. “Remember, when we started this program there was no manual to refer to. Basically you [graduates] helped us develop a blueprint for how to run a college program inside a prison.”
A blueprint, and a vision
That blueprint was developed through collaboration among Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary faculty and staff, students at Handlon, and leaders in the Michigan Department of Corrections.
That blueprint has unleashed a powerful vision, replacing despair with hope … radical hope.
“We humans are sustained by hope. It is the link between our past and our future, and when there is no future, there is no hope,” said Cheryl Brandsen, provost of Calvin College during the 2018 Commencement Address at Handlon.
“The book of Jeremiah tells the story about a despairing people who had lost hope,” said Brandsen. “Jeremiah wrote them a hard letter: Look, you are going to be here for a long time. 70 years, in fact. Don’t listen to false prophets who are trying to make you feel good by promising a speedy release. It’s not going to happen. So, what should you do? Settle down. Build houses. Plant gardens. Make a life. You will die in captivity but your children will not. Yes, you will weep when you remember your former lives, but don’t weep as those who have no hope. In fact, pray for this strange country, and seek the welfare of this city. I do have a plan for your future that will give you hope. But the plan is not one of going home right now. It is to stay put and prosper. If you know the rest of the story, the exiles did that, they formed new lives in strange places, grasping onto the radical hope that God had in mind: a future for their nation and their children.”
Promoting the welfare of the city
Brandsen then shared a poignant line from Calvin’s new vision statement, approved by the board of trustees earlier this month, which intentionally echoes the Jeremiah passage: “Calvin University will be animated by a Reformed Christian faith that seeks understanding and promotes the welfare of the city and the healing of the world.”
The inmates in the Calvin Prison Initiative program—many of whom are serving life sentences—have now found purpose through a Christ-centered education; they’ve found hope as the antidote to despair.
“I was arrested eight months after graduating from high school,” said Michael Duthler, who provided the student reflection at the ceremony. “I had an idea of what education was but I didn’t connect it to vocation, this idea of being a prime citizen. The two ideas were as far apart as heaven was from earth, but now are very much a part of how I understand my role on earth on my way to heaven. “
And when students like Duthler understand that God’s Kingdom is not confined by anything, that all square inches of creation are in play, it opens doors that aren’t limited by physical space.
“What began for me with an acceptance letter to CPI has formed me into the man who I am today and is inextricably bound with how I see myself in the future, someone who desires to break in God’s Kingdom, be that agent of renewal, to restore shalom, by sharing my education with others, by living out my vocation in a way that glorifies and magnifies God and allows his presence to be known in whatever sphere I touch,” said Duthler.
Living as prime citizens
Living as prime citizens takes courage, and as Duthler says, it is understood and developed within community. He cites examples of professors volunteering to teach two classes (instead of the required one) to allow for more interaction with students, or one professor driving up to Handlon on Christmas Eve to deliver semester grades; he recalls tutors patiently pouring over papers and providing correction or simply words of encouragement; and fellow peers who organize study groups and make themselves available to answer questions and have deep conversations.
“Since you guys have taken the lead, others have followed and guess what, others will continue to follow,” said Burton. “You graduates have also displayed the ethics that support the values that Calvin College has. People look at what you do and not what you say. Values are words, ethics are actions. As you continue to demonstrate values through your actions, the ethical culture at this facility will continue to change. One of the other things you gentleman are displaying is a solid reputation for Calvin College and the Michigan Department of Corrections … If you guys continue with this not only will this program be the best in the country, you guys will be successful and will be the best versions that you can be of yourselves.”
Reimagining what’s possible
While the program was started inside one correctional facility, with one group of men, the vision for its impact goes well beyond the fences of Handlon.
“I was listening to the provost and that wonderful speech,” said Washington. “She talked about how Calvin changed its vision statement and talks about the welfare of the city … and I thought how as the director of the department of corrections I should be concerned about the welfare of the department, the welfare of that city, the big department of corrections. And I’m here to tell you that this department of corrections and this administration is very concerned about that. So, whether it’s the Calvin initiative or the vocational village or the second vocational village or the third one or the many of the other things that we are doing to help people be successful, to help give people hope that there is a future for themselves when they leave here and even if they aren’t leaving here to help make this city a better place, we are committed to doing that, and we are committed to doing that with our partners.”
As the 15 graduates move their tassles from right to left, hear their names read from the podium, shake hands and receive their diplomas, those barbed-wire fences sitting 20 yards to their left are no longer barriers to hope.
“When I think of radical hope I think of you students, perhaps thinking at one time that your current status limited what you hoped for, until now, when the unimaginable is proving itself imaginable,” said Brandsen.
“When I think of radical hope, I think of Warden Burton and other administrators here who had the courage to imagine a different kind of future. ‘Unimaginable, until it isn’t.’”
Calvin College placed second at the 7th Annual Disaster Shelter Design Competition, sponsored by Samaritan’s Purse International, April 19-21, and hosted on John Brown University’s (JBU) Siloam Springs campus. Nine teams from eight universities designed and constructed a rapidly-deployable emergency and disaster shelter, which a panel of judges with expertise in emergency management, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing, evaluated for possible implementation in relief efforts worldwide.
“It was a lot of fun. We got to test our prototype against other schools and other designs, simulate a lot of scenarios, and ultimately we got to see how well our process and ideas came to light in physical form,” said Kyle Sutton, a senior civil-environmental engineering major at Calvin.
Sutton, along with fellow senior civil-environmental engineering majors, Kyra Black, Cameron Carley, and Nate Veldboom, made the 13-hour drive south for the competition. The group, known as Team Dwell, brought with them their handiwork–a project they’ve been working on for their senior design project this year.
The competition scenario they participated in was based on the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015 that affected more than a million people in Nepal. The shelters were required to address the local climate in Nepal, as well as their mountainous terrain, by retaining heat and transporting easily as well as by being water resistant, cost effective and culturally appropriate. The shelters were also required to be able to house a family of four.
“This competition gives Samaritan’s Purse access to some of the region’s most innovative engineers, construction management and architects, as students provide practical solutions to real-world problems,” said Mark Terrill, associate professor of construction management at John Brown University, and competition coordinator. “Not only does the competition combine classroom learning and real-world application, but it’s also really fun to watch.”
Team Dwell (Courtesy Calvin College)
Each team’s disaster shelter prototypes endured durability testing – including earthquake sustainability, heat retention, overnight habitability, wind turbulence, and water resistance. In addition, teams competed in an emergency shelter construction test, where they were evaluated on their ability to quickly design and construct emergency shelters from given materials.
Teams were scored based on their shelter’s performance in individual events and on their presentations detailing their shelter’s schematics, design, and materials. In addition to Team Dwell’s second place overall finish, they also took top honors in the Best Camp Plan, Best Report/Presentation, and Lightest Shelter categories.
A team from LeTourneau University took first place overall and John Brown University took third place. Other universities who participated this year include: Dordt College, Pittsburg State University, Gyeongsang National University, Murray State University, and University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
On Thursday, May 3, Calvin College’s board of trustees unanimously approved Calvin College becoming Calvin University. The move is part of Vision 2030, a statement which provides vision for the college as it fulfills its mission over the next decade.
The shift to university, which was approved during the board’s spring meeting, will happen in 2020 during the 100th-anniversary year of Calvin becoming a four-year college. The board’s decision follows the unanimous endorsement of the college’s faculty senate in late April, marking the culmination of more than nine months of collaborative strategic work taken on by the Calvin community.
“This direction enables us to live into what has already been true about Calvin, and it will better position us for the innovative work that is necessary for the future,” said Michael Le Roy, president of Calvin College. “We see this move providing a great opportunity to introduce more people to Calvin’s distinctive Christian mission.”
Le Roy says the rationale for Calvin becoming a university is strong, including Calvin’s strength, breadth, and depth of its academic programs; new opportunities for academic innovation; and the college’s increasing influence with students and higher education partners around the globe. The college also has a large international student population for whom “university” is more visible and better understood than “college.”
Calvin leaders also see the university structure combined with increased collaboration as creating a more prominent platform for the institution to express its mission through opportunities and innovation within and across disciplines, professional programs, and centers and institutes.
“A move to a university with a liberal arts foundation both names what we already do and liberates us to do that work better,” said Kevin den Dulk, political science professor at Calvin College and executive director of the Henry Institute. “I’m especially enthusiastic about using the university structure to expand our global reach, which is already considerable yet has a lot of room to grow.”
About Calvin College
Founded in 1876, Calvin College is a top-ranked, liberal arts college located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that equips its more than 3,800 students from 45 U.S. states, 60 countries and five Canadian provinces to think deeply, to act justly, and to live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world. Calvin is proud to offer 100+ majors and programs, including graduate-level offerings in accounting, education, and speech pathology and audiology. Calvin students engage in intensive internships, community-based service learning, and significant research that results in publishing and presenting alongside world-class faculty. Discover more at www.calvin.edu
During the Commencement ceremony, President Michael Le Roy recognized the students who received their associate’s degrees. (Courtesy: Arrae Photography)
On Monday, May 21, 2018, 15 inmates from Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility (1728 Bluewater Hwy) in Ionia, Michigan, received an associate’s degree from Calvin College. The students are the first in the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI) program to earn a degree behind bars.
The program, launched in 2015, provides up to 20 inmates each year with an opportunity to begin pursuing a bachelor’s degree in ministry leadership. The partnership between Calvin College, Calvin Theological Seminary, and the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) provides inmates with their only bachelor’s-degree option behind bars in the state. The program, funded entirely by private donations and grants, seeks to improve prison culture and curb recidivism rates by equipping prisoners with an education.
Collaborating for success
“When I did my masters, I did thesis work on how education reduces recidivism. That’s what made me actually pursue trying to get Calvin to be here at the Handlon facility,” said DeWayne Burton, warden of the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility.
“Those partnerships are absolutely essential, critical to our success as a department and to our ability to help create successful people,” said Heidi Washington, director of MDOC.
While the practical examples of success are significant, leaders of the program see the impact being far greater, and in missional alignment with both the college and seminary.
Restoring hope, human dignity
“It fits with the mission. Like every square inch, a prison is certainly a space where God’s light needs to shine,” said Chris DeGroot, co-director of CPI. “We take with us the understanding that everyone is created in the image of God, he wants all people to flourish, and wants justice to happen. So making education possible for the least of these absolutely fits with our Christian calling.”
“This is what we believe Christ calls us to do. It’s a living illustration of our own lives. In our sin, we are without a hope, and yet God out of his abundant grace and love comes to us anyway,” said Todd Cioffi, co-director of CPI.
“There aren’t parts of creation we give up on, that’s not the God we serve,” said David Rylaarsdam, professor of historical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. “We believe all people are made in the image of God. We believe when God’s light shines in the darkest places of life, renewal is possible.”
The Calvin Prison Initiative currently enrolls 55 students. Inmates from any of the 30 men’s prisons in the Michigan Department of Corrections system can apply to the program, and each August about 20 admitted students are transferred to Handlon. To date, more than 30 faculty members and dozens of students from Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary have served in the CPI program. A few professors from other area colleges and universities have also taught courses in the program.
Grateful students
“This program has changed my life. It’s given me an opportunity to be the person I feel like I was always meant to be. College in prison is something that’s becoming almost non-existent. For an institution to come in here and offer a fully accredited bachelor’s degree is unbelievable.” – Dustin
“Everyone wants their humanity affirmed, nobody wants to be judged for the worst of life. We have PhD profs coming in and they’re tutoring us. Only in God’s kingdom.” – Michael
“Every person has the potential to affect, as Kuyper calls it, God or Christ’s every square inch. So we might not be able to change a lot of things, but there’s a sphere of influence that each one of us has.” – Raymond
“Calvin College coming into the Handlon campus, bringing in the CPI program, has been such a tremendous blessing in my life, one that I will be forever grateful for, one that I will be paying forward for the rest of my life.” – Dustin
Calvin College sophomore Pete Ford is on Festival’s student committee and is one of the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing’s five Hudson-Townsend Student Fellows (photo courtesy Calvin College)
Pete Ford graduated from high school in 2014. He took a couple of years off. And, in 2016, he again began exploring the possibility of going to college.
“That opportunity to wander around the campus during the Festival and to see the thought process and the desire to have conversations at Calvin, that’s really the reason I decided to come here,” said Ford, a second-year literature major.
Now, in just two years, Ford has gone from curious observer to helpful guide. Ford was on Festival’s student committee and is one of the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing’s five Hudson-Townsend Student Fellows. One of his responsibilities was getting to know the speakers’ work and helping write bios for the website and program.
Renowned speakers, attentive audience
Those bios highlight a diverse, impressive group of writers, including the likes of Edwidge Danticat, a celebrated Haitian-American author who just won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature; Pulitzer prize-winning poet Marie Howe; New York Times best-selling young adult writer Kwame Alexander, and Peabody Award-winning producer and host of the podcast Strangers, Lea Thau, to name a few.
Lisa Ann Cockrel, director of the Festival of Faith & Writing, is always excited to welcome new faces to Festival. And she says the three-day gathering can have a profound impact on speakers who hang around for a while.
“What I hear from them is a kind of happy shock that a place like this exists. They often comment on the attentiveness of the audiences, the types of nuanced questions people ask about their work, the respectful engagement with faith from lots of different perspectives,” said Cockrel.
Digging deeper
For a number of writers, the Festival provides readers who are uniquely engaged with the spiritual and moral implications of their work.
“When Joyce Carol Oates was here, she told Jennifer Holberg that she can pretty much predict how every book she writes will be reviewed before she writes it. And rarely if ever, do those critics think deeply about faith and religion in her work. But it’s there, even if folks aren’t paying attention to it. And it’s there in the work of many ‘secular’ writers,” said Cockrel.
“A lot of the writers who come here are grateful that there’s a place where we’re thinking about the religious elements in their work and also where that engagement doesn’t come with judgment. Instead, we read with open hearts and a spirit of inquiry. And I think this goes back to the best of the reformed tradition that doesn’t feel like it has to be afraid of the world—a tradition that encourages us to engage other people’s creative literary witness to being alive with curiosity and care because every square inch is God’s.”
And this type of engagement creates a unique dynamic and pushes the writers and readers into spaces oft not explored. In fact, Cockrel said that multiple speakers who have spent 24-plus hours at Festival, have told their audiences they rewrote their presentations after being on campus.
Something about Festival
“There’s something that happens at the Festival of Faith & Writing where we still surprise each other in that space,” said Cockrel. “It’s a place for people to make genuine connections with people around stories and poems that have enlarged their vision of what it means to be human and a person of faith.”
And Cockrel hopes that each and every person who comes to Festival leaves having experienced some moment of communion.
“I think that fundamentally there’s this irony at the center of reading—it’s something you do mostly alone, but yet it is this radical act of seeking communion, because you read to seek connection to something outside yourself, whether that’s another person’s story, or the natural world, or God. And I hope that you could map those kinds of possibilities for connection onto the Festival,” said Cockrel.
Students like Ford have experienced that connection at Festival, and for him, it provided a pivot point in his life, pointing him towards an English major.
“It’s not a conference,” said Ford, “it’s a party where literature is celebrated.”
“That’s what’s great about Festival,” said Cockrel. “You sometimes wander into a talk or reading or interview you aren’t sure you’re interested in … and love it.”
A 90-minute drive … replaced by a single click. Thanks to Google, the course catalog is expanding, and students at three colleges, separated by 100 miles, are learning together.
“This isn’t happening anywhere else on this scale,” said Roman Williams, assistant professor of sociology at Calvin College.
Leading the way
In collaboration with Google, the Michigan Colleges Alliance is piloting the Google Course Share Collaboration, a new approach that aims to expand course options at smaller private colleges, while still retaining the faculty-driven teaching model.
Calvin, Alma, and Albion are participating in the pilot in spring 2018, each offering one course available to all three campuses.
“The whole idea is to offer courses that might not otherwise be offered because they are so specialized that student interest on one campus might not be enough to achieve the desired level of enrollment,” said Williams, who is teaching his Visual Toolkit course on Monday nights to six Alma, seven Albion, and six Calvin students. “Adding compelling technology to the mix amplifies students’ experiences.”
Powered by Google
How it works? Each campus is making a Google Extended Classroom available, complete with Hangouts Meet—Google’s video meeting software—and Jamboard—Google’s 55-inch, 4K interactive display, which is spurring collaboration through linking up digital whiteboards across the colleges. And each student has been given a Chromebook from their respective institution.
“The Jamboard is an interactive whiteboard that you can all share,” said Emma Chung, a junior digital communications major at Calvin who is taking “Media Theory and Culture” via Google Course Share through Albion College. “So, if Albion students are writing on it, we can see what they are writing, kind of like a Google Doc in a portable whiteboard form, but it’s still treated like a whiteboard. It’s pretty neat.”
The classrooms have two large monitors, each showing students from the other two participating colleges. Steelcase, the largest office furniture manufacturer in the world, has also joined the effort, and will be outfitting each classroom with comfortable seating and in helping create collaborative spaces for students to thrive.
Collaborating across colleges
Learning how best to collaborate from a distance takes a little time, says Williams. But, he says that students having the unique experience of helping pioneer a new way of learning, combined with the novelty of working with “cool technology,” are already going a long way in producing higher levels of student participation, engagement, and enthusiasm about these courses.
Students agree.
“I think it’s a really enriching experience. You get a chance to interact with students from another campus that isn’t yours, who you haven’t spent four years with,” said Taylor Hartson, a junior sociology major at Calvin. “It’s also a good experience for people considering going to grad school. ‘How do I interact with strangers for the first time? How do I adjust to a class that isn’t taught in a way that’s the way I’ve been taking the last several years?’”
Hartson, who is taking Williams’ class, is looking forward to more opportunities to hear from classmates representing various disciplines and multiple institutions. “It’s interesting to hear the perspectives of those not in this field on an up-and-coming methodology, to kind of explore that together, to see what it looks like to use this methodology in communications or in biology. It’s cool to hear all these perspectives.”
Opening more options
The pilot program is testing the viability of an academic-resource-sharing model between colleges, giving students and faculty more access to resources. The Michigan Colleges Alliance represents an ideal platform for launching a new course delivery system like this one. The MCA consists of 14 smaller private institutions. But, collectively, the alliance comprises the third largest student body in the state of Michigan.
What Google Course Share allows is for private institutions to keep their student-centered learning and close faculty interaction—hallmarks of the experiences they currently offer—all while expanding their course options for students.
One Calvin student wrote in her reflection after the first class, ‘I LOVE THIS TECHNOLOGY! That’s all I have to say for now. I feel like I’m living in the future.’
“On many levels she is correct,” said Williams, “she is living into the future. Increasingly a company’s workforce is spread across multiple locations and using meeting/collaboration technology like Google’s Jamboard and Hangouts Meet are the norm. A student who experiences a course like the ones we’re offering gains aptitudes and skills for thriving in the global economy.”
Calvin College’s Center for Social Research (CSR) has been tasked by MCA with evaluating the pilot program. Through surveys, focus groups, and research, CSR will provide an evaluation by the end of April 2018. The plan is to publish these results after the final evaluation.
By Matt Kucinski, Calvin College
holeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world. Calvin is proud to offer 100+ majors and programs, including graduate-level offerings in accounting, education, and speech pathology and audiology. Calvin students engage in intensive internships, community-based service learning, and significant research that results in publishing and presenting alongside world-class faculty.
