<p>Work/culture:</p>
<p>The work is a lot but what separates HC from other LACs is that there’s a culture at HC where students not only refuse to talk about grades (you see that at a few other top LACs too) but students make an effort to not talk/complain about their work loads which is very unique for East Coast LACs. Rather than engaging in a game of “I have more work than you”, students are generally modest and will play down their studying. My experience is that if kids start going off about the # of deadlines they have, others will either walk away or begin playing an invisible violin in jest. 
While the work can be tremendous (I had less stress and sleepless nights in med school), I can also say that I can only think of just a few times in my life where I had so much fun and felt more engaged… hiking through Vietnam after college for 2 months is one. </p>
<p>Academic culture:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.haverford.edu/publications/Fall%2006/buildingarts.htm[/url]”>http://www.haverford.edu/publications/Fall%2006/buildingarts.htm</a></p>
<p>“A Haughty Indifference to Fashion”
Architectural historian Michael J. Lewis ’79 on the difference between the cultures of Haverford and Williams:</p>
<p>Michael J. Lewis ’79 was an economics major at Haverford, but he now teaches art and architectural history at Williams College. He is the author of The Politics of the German Gothic Revival (1993); Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (2001); The Gothic Revival (2002); and a forthcoming survey history of American art and architecture; he is also a frequent contributor of architectural criticism to journals such as The New Criterion and Commentary. It’s fair to say that Michael Lewis lives for architecture, but he is not at all sure that a new building is the best way to raise Haverford’s arts consciousness.</p>
<p>“I don’t believe the building does it,” says Lewis. “The building is a sign of success. The first line is the faculty, then the students, then the building.” </p>
<p>Lewis’ own aesthetic awakening came in his senior year at Haverford, when he took a course on urban history at Bryn Mawr. Upon graduation, he secured a Fulbright Fellowship to study the reconstruction of Germany after World War II, then earned a Ph.D. in architectural history at the University of Pennsylvania. After returning to Bryn Mawr for two years (1989-91) to teach the very course in urbanism that had sparked his professional interest, he served as a historian at the Canadian Center for Architecture before joining the Williams faculty in 1993. </p>
<p>When he got to Williams, Lewis says he assumed teaching at one highly selective liberal arts college would be pretty much like teaching at another, but he discovered that the cultures of Haverford and Williams were decidedly different, largely owing to their respective heritages. </p>
<p>“I tried doing exactly what had been done to me at Haverford and Bryn Mawr,” Lewis recalls. “I’d come in to class and say something like ‘Frank Lloyd Wright was a bad architect. Flat roofs leak, so that’s bad architecture.’ Then a student would say, ‘But, Mr. Lewis, is architecture just about keeping the rain out or is it about ideal form?’ When I got to Williams and I said ‘Frank Lloyd Wright is a bad architect,’ the students would just look at me and write it down. I could not push their buttons.” </p>
<p>Lewis came to believe that the difference between Haverford and Williams students was not a matter of intellect but of historical roots. </p>
<p>“Haverford and Bryn Mawr, while not religiously Quaker, have inherited the culture of a Quaker meeting house. Any moment, the spirit may move and someone will speak out. Williams is a Puritan culture. When I speak, I am Cotton Mather in his pulpit. There is a tremendous culture here of cordiality, the covenant of the camp. It may be the product of our remoteness. You don’t argue during the day with someone you’re sure to see that night.” </p>
<p>These cultural differences, Lewis suggests, inform the arts consciousness of institutions. </p>
<p>“Haverford is marinated in the Quaker empirical approach to education,” he says. “The arts do not loom large in Haverford’s history.” </p>
<p>Doing research on Haverford architecture, for instance, Lewis ran across minutes of the building of Founders Hall that specified “no showy portico.” </p>
<p>“The Quakers had a haughty indifference to fashion,” Lewis says. “Though Founders Hall was built at the height of the Greek Revival, there is not a bit of that in [it]. It is a farm building writ large.”</p>
<p>cont…</p>