Jim Clowes died before he could accept this year's S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award, but not before he expanded the definition of a college education.
College students go to Europe; Clowes' students started a basketball camp mixing Catholic and Protestant teens in a polarized part of Belfast.
College students intern at newspapers; Clowes' students worked at Real Change.
College students study international affairs. Clowes' students brought to Seattle young dancers from an impoverished township in South Africa.
Clowes died of cancer March 2 at age 46, but his work at the Program in the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) will live on in his students' broadened horizons.
"Jim has a way of making you believe that anything is possible," CHID senior Erin Anderson wrote, "and then forcing you to figure out exactly how to do it on your own."
Hundreds who were affected that way attended Clowes' legendary "last lecture" in November and then his campus memorial service in April. His wife and children will accept the Munro award on his behalf.
Learning through public service — the point of the Munro award — is ingrained in the interdisciplinary, undergraduate Comparative History of Ideas program. Despite the program's theoretical-sounding name, its mission is to test the ideas through encounters with the world in all its troubled splendor.
"The problems Jim asked students to tackle have yet to be solved by the world's brightest minds," said Michaelann Jundt, director of the Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center.
Sometimes the problems are close at hand — Clowes led 80 students through a course called "Rethinking the University" which explored the future of the UW itself. A main theme was a call to reduce students' isolation through more peer mentorships, senior capstone experiences and the like.
So strong was Clowes' commitment to this concept that a James D. Clowes Award for the Advancement of Learning Communities was established to honor those "who transform undergraduate learning by creating or sustaining learning communities among students."
To Clowes, learning communities could not flourish if confined to campus. Even while he was "Rethinking the University," Clowes was sending CHID students to the Eastern Washington town of Wapato to conduct a community oral history project.
But Clowes probably made his strongest mark in expanding the possibilities of study abroad. CHID had programs in Rome, Prague and Berlin, but Clowes felt they did not go far enough.
"I began to wonder how we could call ourselves Comparative History of Ideas," he told an interviewer in 1999, "if our programs were almost exclusively in Europe."
So Clowes went to Cyprus and South Africa, where students could test themes like ethnic conflict in the human hothouses where such issues were most visible. Building such programs was no point-and-click session on Travelocity. In Cape Town, Clowes tracked down NGO leaders, rape crisis-center directors and others to set up internships for his students.
Clowes even transposed the Belfast basketball concept to Africa, drawing more than 1,000 Cape Town youths into a Hope for Hoops program.
"His work dissolved the unfortunate ‘Ivory Tower' stereotype of higher education," said George Behlmer, a history professor who accompanied Clowes to Belfast.
Perhaps an Ivory Tower never would have been a comfortable perch for a boy from Glasgow, Mont., where Clowes grew up. Clowes was a wrestling champ at the University of Montana before heading to the UW for graduate school in the 1980s. Under the guidance of History Professor John Toews, Clowes focused his scholarship on Friedrich Schleiermacher, a 19th century Protestant theologian.
Toews, who heads CHID, hired Clowes as a graduate teaching assistant and later lecturer and associate director.
Toews considers his late colleague a visionary and a national leader in "rethinking the whole nature of undergraduate study through the lens of engaged community learning."
"His experimental fearlessness, expansive visions and remarkable networking abilities," Toews said, "have made him an innovator who has given the idea of service learning a whole new dimension."
