Academics
Guilford’s legendarily “accepting culture” arises through the incorporation of a number of core tenets that include “diversity, equality, community, stewardship, etc.” The school is “a place where you can express yourself free from judgment,” and “impacts every aspect of your life and continues to carry you as part of its family even after you graduate.” Students are given the opportunity to make all of their own choices, and the school works at “providing support for those decisions,” and heavily promotes the idea “that doing things the hard way is usually worth it.”
The Quaker college is known for being green (to put it mildly), and the administration works to raise “student and individual awareness of the environment and everyday life through education and service learning.” The level of engagement of the students is matched only by the school’s willingness to listen; student involvement is in everything from policy changes to food options, and “can be one person’s efforts or many.” “I know someone who campaigned for getting coffee in the cafeteria’s ice cream selection, and this year we had a trial run that seems to have gone over well,” says a sophomore. Still, a few students do think the administration could let up on “parenting the students.”
Professors are able to “create an environment that invites discussion of materials from different perspectives” that “[pushes] and [supports] you at the same time.” The “intensity of academic learning” means that “your absence in a class does not go unnoticed,” unsurprising at a place where teachers are called by their first name (“which is really awesome”). The small scale class sizes “really allow for individual attention and academic growth.” Most classrooms are arranged with the desks in a circle and the classes are “highly interactive”; every class “is filled with questions for the class to answer, even simple questions.”
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