People around the world are paying attention to Alverno's new standards for undergraduate education. Each year, the Institute plays host to about 300 visitors who come from as far away as New Zealand on behalf of institutions as varied as medical schools, K - 12 schools, and community colleges. And internally, the Institute leads the way in innovation. After all, those in charge at Alverno don't simply assess the students -- they continually assess the school itself. They do it by thinking about the increasingly complex world in which their students live and about the skills that will help the women of Alverno navigate that world. "Education has to be related to life," Read says. "It cannot be an abstraction."

Curtis Sittenfeld (csitten@soli.inav.net) writes from Iowa City, Iowa. Learn more about Alverno College on the Web (www.alverno.edu).

Sidebar: Habits of Mind

Sister Joel Read, president of Alverno College for 33 years, takes a simple, straightforward approach to life: She lives in a convent with five other sisters, drives a Chevy Cavalier, and answers her own phone. Read's conversational style is similarly no-nonsense -- even when it means expressing ideas about higher education that some people would rather not hear.

"When I gave talks at other institutions, I'd get the question about how they could do what Alverno does," Read says. "I'd ask them about their sports teams, and they'd tell me about all the people that they involved, the scouts they had all over the country. Then if I asked, 'Why can't you do that for the mind?' -- that would stop the talk.

"There's a coach for everything, from how you move your leg to how you raise your arm. They videotape the athletes; they spend all week analyzing the last game. But institutions don't do that for their students in general -- they just do it for the athletes."

At Alverno (where athletic teams, known as the Inferno, are a modest affair), Read has observed academic breakthroughs as exhilarating as any sports victory. "A freshman came up to me at an event," Read recalls. "She told me she had been in chemistry class, and the professor had done a derivation of a formula. The student said, 'I put my hand up, and I said, "I think there's a way that's even more effective." I walked to the front, did the derivation, explained it, and walked back to my seat.' The student told me, 'A year ago, I would never have done that.'

"It was," Read says, "like she'd had a slam dunk."

Curtis Sittenfield (csitten@soli.inav.net) writes from Iowa City, Iowa. Learn more about Alverno College on the Web (www.alverno.edu).