The End of Centenary in Paris?

Centenary in Paris has been the first class first-year students take at Centenary since 2014, but the future of CIP is looking uncertain. 

Centenary’s student ambassadors have been told to stop advertising CIP to prospective students, which was the first inkling that the program might not be the same as it was in the past or happening at all in 2027. 

Various faculty and staff members have confirmed that no one entirely knows what CIP will look like in the coming year. Assistant Professor of Education and English Dr. Rachel Johnson says some options that she heard floating around included the possibility of moving the course from the Aug. term to the May term. Another possibility is doing it like the only other school that does a class-wide international trip and making the course semester long during the spring and traveling abroad during spring break.

 Johnson also created and led a new type of first-year Aug. term course this year. Titled “In Search of Tomorrow,” the course worked almost like a regular CIP course, but instead of a trip to Paris in the middle, it involved a two-day trip to New Orleans. The course was designed so that the students who would not have been able to go on the Paris trip could get a similar experience to Paris. An added bonus of this was for the students to earn up to 1500 passport points added onto the limit of 2000 for all other students, giving them more resources to go abroad in the future.

Issabella Berry was one of the students in Johnson’s course, a student who took a gap year and finalized her decision in mid-July and put on the waitlist for CIP. When she found out about Johnson’s course, she enrolled in that instead of being waitlisted for Paris.

Berry found the course both engaging in its topic and helpful in the courses that she is taking during the fall semester. It helped her learn email etiquette and to make sure to go to office hours, saying, “I'm sure you learn this in Paris, but we got more time on campus to do that stuff.” 

These students got more time on campus, but they also got time to explore Shreveport itself. Johnson says although it might not be the same level as going to a country in an entirely different continent, there is still some amount of culture shock while entering into a new city and campus. Johnson wants people to understand that “We can challenge people and get outside of their comfort zone locally.” 

Dr. Jeff Hendricks has been teaching his course “Writing Paris, Writing Home” since CIP’s start in 2014, and he was one of the founding members on the committee in 2013. He had been taking students to Paris on modules since 2002, and in both courses, his goal remains the same: to “shock and awe” students.

Hendricks thinks that “you can basically study the history of Western civilization through Paris; whether that's literature, art, science, business, pretty much anything, Paris has been at the center of so much.” He hopes to introduce students to this different culture so that they can take inspiration from its ideas and bring them back to campus and into their own lives.

Hendricks’ students Myra Hamlin and Lukas Owens praised the trip for opening their minds, with Owens saying it was a “spiritual awakening." Hamlin emphasized the importance that Hendricks put on being open-minded during the trip, saying that it made her focus on “being open to different spaces and seeing what's special about it and why it's important to you and to other people.” 

Centenary is number one in the nation for sending students abroad, and “Culture” has been a part of the TREK program for over thirty years. Not all students are able to do culture modules or an exchange after doing CIP, so this opportunity to have almost all students have an international experience allows students to have that life-changing trip that is the purpose of the culture credit.

Dean of Students Mark Miller says that while he, nor anyone else, knows what exactly the future of CIP will be, it is important to “be open-minded.” Miller says that Centenary has been doing the Centenary in Paris the same way for 12 years now, and it is important to “hold onto all the best things about it and also to see if we can innovate as well.”