US’ Tusculum College looks forward to positive engagement Sri Lanka

Tusculum College in Greeneville Tennessee – the oldest institution of higher education in Tennessee – is excitedly looking forward to contribute positively in strengthening of Sri Lanka in the field of education.

This is what its 27th President (and the first female) Dr. Nancy B. Moody conveyed to visiting Lankan recruiter Padmasena Dissanayake of Scholarships for USA (Pvt) Ltd. (www.scholarshipsforusa.com) at the recent lunch she hosted in his honour.

SUSA, during the recent years, has been the front runner promoting US liberal arts and sciences education in the tiny Indian Ocean island full of brilliant academic stars with an excellent command of English – not only in placing students but initiating over 10 institutional collaborations between its US partners and Lankan institutes of higher education.

With a total commitment to make US education increasingly affordable and accessible to its ever increasing clientele SUSA is currently crisscrossing the US in search of schools that would be perfect fits.

The Lankan visitor was very impressed with the history of Tusculum. A school founded in 1794 – two years before George Washington proclaimed Tennessee State – is also the 23 oldest permanent college in the nation. Among its many other firsts are the first institution affiliated with the Presbyterian Church to admit women and in 1800, the first institution to graduate a black person in Tennessee.

This is also where President Andrew Johnson Museum and Library (1841) houses exhibits and personal artefacts of the Johnson family as well as Andrew Johnson’s personal library (17th President of the US who was the Vice President to Abraham Lincoln and became President after Lincoln was assassinated).

Tusculum College has no less than 10 structures on the National Register of Historic Places. If there is something that never changed through three centuries at Tusculum College is its “commitment to provide a liberal arts education in a Judeo-Christian and civic arts environment,” President Moody explained to the guest.

Dissanayake thanked Dr. Thomas Stein (an old friend from Ohio’s Otterbein days) for his extremely generous financial aid offer and expressed that SUSA was honoured to represent a school with such impeccable record of preparing leaders for three centuries. He conveyed that this would be their first “Southern” school.

He said the past experiences have shown that Lankan students do exceptionally well in small private liberal arts schools such as Tusculum where the student population does not exceed 1,400 (only 1,000 undergraduates) with a student-faculty ratio of 15:1, ensuring close attention and care all the time.

The wooded 140 acres of campus with the Great Smoky Mountains as backdrop is both breathtaking and serene, he added. He was very keen to learn that Tusculum is one of only four colleges in the nation (and the only one in the east) with a focused calendar where students take one class at a time. Dissanayake also conveyed that two excellent students would be arriving soon and expressed confidence that Tusculum would soon be seeing many Lankan faces.

Dissanayake further requested to have Sri Lanka included among Tusculum’s Study Abroad destinations, to which Dr. Tom Stein VP Enrollment Management readily agreed. On possible collaborations President Moody was very interested to hear, as a top Nursing academic, of the possibility of teaming up with a Lankan institute offering 2+2 nursing where the graduates would have so many global offers.