Carleton College

This article is about the Minnesota college. For the former Carleton College in Ontario, see Carleton University.

Skinner Memorial Chapel, Carleton College

Carleton College is an independent, non-sectarian, coeducational, liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, USA.

The school was founded on November 14, 1866, by the Minnesota Conference of Congregational Churches as Northfield College. In 1871, the name was changed to honor benefactor William Carleton of Charlestown, Massachusetts, who had given US$50,000 to the fledgling institution. The College currently enrolls about 1,900 undergraduate students, and employs 182 faculty members. Its current president is Robert A. Oden.

Defining features

The college campus was begun in 1867 with the gift of two ten-acre parcels, one from Charles Goodsell and the other from Charles Augustus Wheaton.

Several of Carleton's properties deserve some historical recognition. Carleton's Goodsell Observatory, built in 1887, is on the national registry of historic places. The Carleton College Cowling Arboretum, created from lands purchased in the 1920s during difficult financial times by then president Donald J. Cowling, was first called "Cowling's Folly" and, later, his legacy. It consists of approximately 880 acres (3.6 km²) of forest, floodplain, and many miles of trail.

Carleton is nationally recognized as a substantial academic force. It is consistently ranked in the U.S. News and World Report's college rankings within the top five U.S. liberal arts schools. Carleton competes in quizbowl and won the 1999 National Academic Quiz Tournaments undergraduate championship. In 1996, 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2004, the team from Carleton received Best Delegation at the Harvard World Model United Nations competition.

Extracurriculars at Carleton form an integral part of student life. Though the Carleton student body is made up of less than two thousand undergraduates, the school's nearly 150 active student organizations include three theater boards (coordinating as many as ten productions every term), two improv groups and one sketch comedy troupe, seven a cappella groups, four choirs, at least seven specialized instrumental ensembles, five dance interest groups, two auditioned dance companies, seven recurring student publications, and a student-run radio station employing more than 200 termly volunteers. Also, Carleton's Mock Trial team has developed into one of the premier teams in the nation, qualifying for the top national competiton in 2005 and 2006.

Athletics

Carleton has numerous athletic opportunities for students, including 19 varsity teams, 23 club teams, and dozens of intramural teams forming every term. Carleton competes in Division III, meaning it offers no athletic scholarships. Its men's and women's cross country teams are generally strong, with numerous all-Americans and one national championship (men's, 1980) In 2005, the women's volleyball team posted a 22-5 record, a runner-up finish in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC). This was Carleton's first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1985.

Club sports at Carleton are very active; turnout for teams like men's and women's rugby will often exceed 40 players per team. Of the club teams, the student-run Ultimate clubs have had the most competitive success; most notably, the Carleton Ultimate Team (CUT) and Syzygy have been national contenders every year. CUT has qualified yearly for nationals since 1990, and won the National Championship in 2001. Syzygy qualified for nationals fifteen of sixteen years (1989-2002, 2004-2005), winning the National Championship in 2000 and taking second place in 2004.

Carleton built a new Recreation Center in 2001, with a full indoor fieldhouse located above a state of the art fitness center complete with a climbing wall. In 2005, a bouldering wall was added, providing new opportunties for Carleton's climbing community while taking away a raquetball court.

Traditions

Carleton's history has given rise to several notable traditions. Many of these are pranks, such as painting the college's water tower. Most notably, a remarkably accurate likeness of President Clinton was painted the night before his commencement speech in 2000, and repainted very early the following morning. Administrative attitudes toward this particular phenomenon have changed over time. For liability-related reasons, even climbing the water tower is now considered a grave infraction. Streaking also remains a ubiquitous phenomenon, even and most impressively in winter temperatures that average about 15º F (-9º C), and occasionally reach lows around -25º (-32º C).

File:Gould schiller.jpg

President Emeritus Laurence Gould is briefly reunited with the bust of Schiller in this undated archive photo from The Carletonian

More perplexingly, a bust of Friedrich Schiller, known simply as "Schiller," appears frequently, though briefly, at large campus events. The tradition dates back to 1957, when a student appropriated the bust from an unlocked storage area in the new Gould Library, only to have the bust stolen from him in turn, an exchange which soon escalated into a high-profile conflict that eventually took on by necessity a high degree of secrecy and strategy. These days, Schiller's appearance, accompanied by the shouted, "Schiller!", is a tacit challenge to other students to pursue in an attempt to capture the bust (which has, understandably, been replaced at least once. The currently circulating bust of Schiller was retrieved from Puebla, Mexico in the summer of 2003).

Finally, a softball game known as Rotblatt, in honor (or open mockery) of player Marvin Rotblatt, is held every spring. The day-long celebration features free t-shirts and a good deal of requisite drinking, and the number of innings played coincides with the College's current anniversary. In 1997, Sports Illustrated honored Rotblatt in its "Best of Everything" section with the award, "Longest Intramural Event."

Trivia

The nation's oldest student-run pub, The Cave, was founded at Carleton in 1927 in the basement of Evans Hall, and continues to host live music shows and other events several times each week.

The College's format-free student-run radio station, KRLX, founded in 1947 as KARL, was recently ranked by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's ten best college radio stations. KRLX broadcasts continually when school is in session.

The 1991 Pamela Dean fantasy novel, Tam Lin, is set at the fictional "Blackstock College," acknowledged in the afterword by Dean to be based on the Carleton of the early 1970s.

The popular early computer game Oregon Trail was first created, and later developed, by students at Carleton in 1971.

The mother grove of the RDNA or Reformed Druids of North America was founded at Carleton in 1963.

Peter Tork of The Monkees was a student of English at Carleton for three years until he dropped out to pursue music full-time. The gaming area in the student center is called the "Peter Tork Memorial Pinball Area" in his honor.

Notable alumni

See also Category:Carleton College alumni

Thorstein Veblen, class of 1880, American economist and author of The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Pierce Butler, class of 1887, Supreme Court Justice from 1923 to 1939.
Melvin R. Laird, class of 1942, President Nixon's secretary of defense from 1969 to 1973.
Anthony Downs, class of 1952, author of An Economic Theory of Democracy.
Michael Armacost, class of 1958, former ambassador to Japan and the Philippines and president of the Brookings Institution from 1995-2002.
Jack Barnes, class of 1961, the leader of the Socialist Workers Party (USA).
Garrick Utley, class of 1961, correspondent for CNN perhaps best known for his reports related to the 9.11.01 terrorist attacks, majored in political science.
Walter Alvarez, class of 1962, geologist, co-author (with father Luis W. Alvarez) of the theory that an asteroid impact was responsible for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.
Sidney Carne Wolff, class of 1962, director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories and former president of the American Astronomical Society.
Donella Meadows, class of 1963, environmental scientist and author, most notably of Limits to Growth, (1972).
Barrie M. Osborne, class of 1966, producer of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Susan Golding, class of 1967, mayor of San Diego from 1992-2001.
Don Rawitsch, class of 1971, creator of the popular educational computer game The Oregon Trail.
David Welna, class of 1980, chief congressional correspondent for National Public Radio.
Chris Kratt, class of 1992, creator and host of Kratt's Creatures and Zoboomafoo, the popular public television shows for children.
Laura Veirs, class of 1997, singer-songwriter.

Notable faculty

John Bates Clark, a famous American economist, was a professor at Carleton, and taught Thorstein Veblen.
Ian Barbour, professor emeritus, 1989–91 Gifford lecturer on religion and science, and winner of the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Eric Hillemann, archivist at Carleton College, won the Carper Award in 2003. He also coaches the highly-successful Carleton quizbowl team.
Burton Levin, Former United States Consul General to Hong Kong and US Ambassador to Burma from May 1987 to September 1990, is currently the SIT Investment Visiting Professor of Asian Policy.
Laurence McKinley Gould, who was second-in-command to Richard E. Byrd on his first landmark expedition to Antarctica, served as a professor of geology at Carleton and later as College President from 1945-1962.
Paul Wellstone, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota from 1991 until his death in 2002, was a professor of political science at Carleton from 1969 to 1990.
Steven Schier, a frequent media commentator and author, has been a professor of political science at Carleton from 1981 to the present.

Points of interest

External links