Author: By Eric Goldscheider, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, April 4, 1999

Page: L5

Section: Learning

"You know all this stuff, you're just looking at it from down below, I want you to look at it more from up above," she told Liana Charter, a 44-year-old single mother of three who decided last year that it was time to go for a bachelor's degree.

The University Without Walls, or UWW, program on the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts has been serving students like Charter for almost 30 years. It was founded during a tumultuous time on many college campuses, the heyday of the "counterculture," as part of a broader movement to make higher learning more accessible.

Dowling's comment was on a piece Charter read to classmates about her career in data management. At the end of the semester she will submit the finished document as part of a "prior learning portfolio" for college credits.

The point of documenting accomplishments, which all UWW students do in a class called "Writing About Experience," is not so much to explain the things they have done -- though that is part of it -- but to demonstrate learning.

Charter gave a detailed account of how she got turned on to computers in high school and went on to a job as a computer operator for the Coca-Cola Company after earning an associate's degree in 1974. Her journey, including marriage and divorce and a traumatic one-night stint working at Burger King, led to her current job as a production coordinator at Smith College.

Last year a coworker told her about UWW. She applied and was accepted.

By the end of the first year, Charter will have tallied the applicable college credits she earned in her younger days, added in the prior-experience credits awarded for her portfolio, and be in a position to select the courses she'll need to complete her degree. She also will find a faculty member in her field (business administration and information technology) from one of the five colleges in the Amherst, Northampton, and South Hadley area to advise her.

In the writing course, taught at the UWW offices in a farmhouse on the northern edge of the UMass campus, Dowling, 54, challenges her students to put their experiences into "a larger context." She wants them to develop thinking skills in addition to communicating skills.

She praised Charter's writing and the thoroughness of her narrative but challenged her to go back and think about how her story fits in with what has been going on the world for the last 25 years. Charter, she pointed out, has seen the field of data management go from the days of punch cards people were admonished not to "fold, spindle, or mutilate" to the current crop of inter-networked PCs. What does she make of the successive technological revolutions she has witnessed? What kinds of "possibilities and vulnerabilities" do they portend for our society?

Charter is one of the 270 active students enrolled in the University Without Walls in any given semester. By most accounts, coming back to school as an older student is tough.

Carlos Colon, who runs a Spanish/English translating and cross-cultural consulting company in Worcester, got his degree in 1988. "To be honest with you, I was afraid of school," he said of his introduction to the program. "It means you're going to be challenged, buddy, and you maybe can't do it and you're going to have to pay for it."

Colon, 46, was a court interpreter before UWW. "If you work with professional people, it's a little bit embarrassing not to have some kind of education," he said. He not only gained self-confidence and gained credibility in his field, but he learned "how to deliver a message," he said.

When UWW got its start here, according to faculty member Rick Hendra, there were more than 50 programs around the country calling themselves University Without Walls. They came into being as a byproduct of meetings convened by the presidents of several schools, such as Goddard, Antioch, Hofstra, Bard, and Sarah Lawrence. A consortium formed calling itself the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities, which eventually opened an office in Cincinnati. That organization is still there under the name of Union Institute and is accredited to help students design individualized degrees. But, Hendra believes, all the UWWs, except the one here and one at Skidmore College in New York state, have either folded or changed their names.

Ed Harris, 58, who became the director of the UWW in Amherst in 1963, now teaches at the School for New Learning at DePaul University in Chicago. He recalls the early days of the UMass program when he himself was a doctoral student in the education department.

The federal government designated money, $415,000 under the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare, to encourage experimental education. The Ford Foundation augmented that with an additional $400,000. Dwight Allen, then dean of the School of Education, "being of his entrepreneurial nature, said `Sure we'd like to go for some of those dollars,' " recalls Harris.

Seventy-five "graduate students, community members, and some teachers" enrolled in a course in the winter of 1971, the purpose of which was to plan out a UWW program. That year a pilot program admitted 30 students. It was envisioned as a point of access for working people. It coincided with the birth of women's studies and African-American studies departments across the country, which also were designed to make higher education more relevant and welcoming to more people.

"We worked with the registrar to figure out how we were going to document this stuff that went beyond the classroom," said Harris. "We made friends with people in the registrar's office, took them out to lunch, and gave them awards for their cooperation."

They also gained the backing of otherwise traditional and academically conservative faculty in other departments, many of whom had completed their degrees in night school. They didn't seek a lot of outside funding but pursued a strategy of "embedding" the program in the university and state budgets. This, in part, explains the program's durability. "We really played the political game well," said Harris.

The UWW program of the University of Massachusetts has shrunk over the years. When Hendra, 50, came on board, he was in Worcester. That satellite campus, initially based at the Quinsigamond Community College Outreach Center with a mission of reaching Latinos especially and others in Boston and Pittsfield, closed as a result of budget cuts when then-governor Michael S. "Dukakis's `Massachusetts Miracle' imploded in 1989," said Hendra. An effort to start a branch on Cape Cod never got off the ground.

An office with two faculty members is still maintained in Springfield at the Springfield Technical Community College, and Hendra is now trying to get something going in Worcester again. He is a big believer in reaching out to communities under-served by higher education.

There is some question among the current faculty whether branching out at this stage is the most cost-effective way of bringing in new populations. Dowling, the writing teacher, is making a big effort to put material on line, create UWW chatrooms, and design Internet courses. Recently a component was added allowing students from around the state to commute to Amherst one weekend a month in fall and eight Saturdays in spring during their first year and then take courses at other institutions closer to where they live.

"Technology is at a point where we can substitute communication for transportation," said Hendra.

A new initiative in Springfield is designed specifically to attract paraprofessionals in the school system, offering them a chance to earn a bachelor's degree and provisional certification to teach in the elementary schools.

Elaine Anderson, a UWW faculty member involved in that effort, said there is a virtually limitless pool of potential candidates who, with more education, can go far toward alleviating the teacher shortage in Springfield and at the same time help increase diversity among educators in that city.

"Many of these people are already very aware of what happens in the classroom, they've worked their way up from the ground level, and are very committed, but they are missing the theoretical component," said Anderson.

Desiree Parker, 38, who is in the program -- and whose mother got a bachelor of arts degree from the University Without Walls -- said she is doing it primarily because "You don't feel well in this society if you're not educated." She is in the program for reasons of self-development and greater "job autonomy," she said.

Anderson, 64, shares Hendra's commitment to bringing higher education to more communities, but she is not of the generation who came of age intellectually in the late 1960s. "I am a much more structured, analytical believer in the classics," she said. She also thinks UWW might want to think about changing its name, to what she doesn't know, because of the associations it carries of a less disciplined time.

The degree, which is granted by the University Without Walls, might be a hindrance to some graduates because of those associations. "Loosey goosey doesn't sell," she said.

But even though she sees herself as being intellectually more conservative than the roots of the organization she now serves, she says, with a smile, "I have learned to be more flexible in my advancing years."

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