Into the Streets at Rhodes College & Its Community

Into the streets at Rhodes College is not quite such a threatening thing as it sounds:

Rhodes College's campus in midtown Memphis, Tennessee, has a fence around it - a literal dividing line between the college and the city. But that doesn't mean the 1,700 students at Rhodes live on an island, cut off from the community outside. In fact, just the opposite is true. Rhodes has had remarkable success in cultivating a culture of service and making community-based scholarship a staple of students' lives. 'Service is just what you do - it's the norm. Students pick up on that when they first come to visit,' explains Tiffany Merritt, Rhodes' community service coordinator. Expectations of and opportunities for service are woven into departments, offices, and even into the curriculum itself, which was recently revamped to include skills - such as historical analysis - that can be satisfied in part through service learning.