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By
Kala Larson
Harlaxton College Web Design Student
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Lunch time Tuesday in the Refectory; all discussion at the table is about the NCAA basketball tournament final game that took place here on Tuesday morning
between Kansas University and Memphis.
“KU was down with about two minutes to go and then came back and went into overtime,” Ben Heiser recounted after just rolling out of bed for the first time all day. “I didn't go to bed until about 5a.m.”
This is the type of conversation permeating Harlaxton for the past month. The reason is basketball "March Madness." If there were
English students around Harlaxton, conversations might include talk of football (i.e., "soccer") or rugby.
As you wander through the corridors of Harlaxton Manor or the carriage house, the students all around will be talking about trucks, french fries, restroom and highways, not lorries, chips, loos or dual carriage motorways. There are no English students at this pastoral campus in the heart of England.
Harlaxton College consists of 164 students, all of
whom come from various regions of the United States. The college is also mainly run by
nine American professors from five different universities in the Midwest. There are seven British professors teaching at Harlaxton during this spring semester. There are also more than 60 staff members who keep Harlaxton running, all of whom are British natives or immigrants.
The school's motto is, “the British Experience,” even though the majority of people here each semester are American.
“It is interesting that they call Harlaxton 'the British Experience,' because it is like a slice of America set in Britain,” says
Erica Calder, 21, a University of Evansville senior from Orlando, Fla.
Although Harlaxton has been an American-based campus for 17 years, it has not always been that way. According to Jan Beckett, director of academic services, the program changed in
1991.
“The Harlaxton program in the 1980s recruited international students from a variety of countries in the Middle and Far East and Africa, and elsewhere, as
well as those from American institutions,”
Beckett said.
In 1991, Harlaxton introduced its mandatory British Studies course
and ended the option to study here for a full year.
Although all of the students at Harlaxton College are American, many of their new friends across the pond are not. Every weekend, some students
opt to not travel and instead go out in Grantham, a city of about 40,000 people that is 3 1/2 miles northeast of Harlaxton. This usually entails a night out at the Goose bar. There, along with other bars, pubs and clubs, many students talk with the locals and strike up friendships with people who have
grown up all over the United Kingdom.
Jason Mock, 21, a Baker University junior from Baldwin City, Kan., made
multiple friends in town by simply asking where the nearest ATM was, he said.
“I’ve been around the England to places with them, and two of them might
actually come and visit me in the states this summer.”
While some students from Harlaxton make friends with the Grantham locals, many others make friends with people from all over the world while sharing a hostel
room.
Kelly Cyr, 20, a UE sophomore from Southlake, Texas, made friends with a backpacker from Australia while in Valencia, Spain.
“It was really cool to meet someone from a different culture and get the chance
to hang out with him," Cyr said. "That's the cool thing about staying in hostels, is that
everyone is traveling around looking to meet new people.”
Whether Harlaxton College and its students are better off with or without foreign students is a topic that is more than just black and white. Each side of
the situation has its ups and downs. Gordon Kingsley, the
principal of Harlaxton College, said that there are assets and liabilities to having non-American students.
“There would be the benefits of living and working with students from different cultures than our own,” he said.
Kingsley says that those same pros are also cons. Living and working with students from different cultures could cause frustrations to arise from
living with a person whose personal boundaries and lifestyles are completely different than their own.
Kingsley also says that only having American students allows for Harlaxton to offer a wider range of classes and cater to more
students and their area of collegiate concentration.
As the students and faculty of Harlaxton College come and go, what matters in
the end is not just the friendships students make in the first days of the
semester but the sum total of their experience abroad. Some say that being abroad at a school that contains all American students is not the really European
experience. But it is still an experience
they will carry for the rest of their lives.
Whether it’s the American friends they have made or the friends they made with people from all corners of the world,
Calder says, a semester at Harlaxton and all the wonderful places that people traveled will always remain in their memory.
“It is not just about taking in all the sights and the museums,” said Peter Hanscom, 19, a UE sophomore from Frederick, Md. “It’s about taking in the culture as well and meeting new people."
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Kelly Cyr and Maria Gahan in Valencia, Spain with their new Aussie friend, Luke Brown.