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To outsiders, Greensboro College runs under the radar — a small, genteel campus easy to overlook, if it weren’t for its life-size nativity scene each Christmas.

Yet to the faculty and alumni now confronted with a fiscal crisis that is shaking the Methodist school to its 171-year-old foundation, Greensboro College is a unique institution that must survive.

Though only seven-tenths of a mile from UNCG and its 13,000 undergrads, Greensboro College and its 1,300 students are a world away. But, faculty members and alumni argue, it’s a world to which generations of students attribute their success.

“Yes, we have five colleges and universities in Greensboro, but without one of them, something would be missing from this city,” said Cheryl Brown, a sociology professor at the school. “Greensboro College can’t fail. Because with it goes one of the hearts of Greensboro city.”

As the campus wrestled last week with the layoffs of 10 faculty members, students who chose Greensboro College for its intensely close-knit community wondered how the school would be affected this fall.

“I definitely have a sliver of worry about what’s going to happen,” said Andrew Thomas, 21, who chose the school’s theater program over the larger, more prestigious UNC School of the Arts. “I think Greensboro College is a really special place. It’s unlike anywhere else I’ve been, and I don’t want to see that damaged.”

Thomas, recruited from Hartford, Conn., during his senior year of high school, said he wasn’t sure at first about a school with fewer than 800 full-time undergraduates. But he soon realized that Greensboro College’s size — and the intimate community it creates — is its greatest strength.

“On campus I can pass 15 people on the way to class and know them all,” Thomas said. “I enjoy personal relationships with people, knowing people’s names. You go other places and you just don’t feel quite as at home as you do at Greensboro College.”

Melissa Dvozenja graduated from the school’s theater program last semester and is working on a production of “Candide” at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass. She still exchanges e-mails with students and professors at the school. The campus feels like home and its people like family, she said.

That was brought home for Dvozenja last semester, when a fellow student went through a series of surgeries. Dvozenja would wake up nearly every day to a new e-mail from the school updating all the students, staff and faculty on his condition.

“All that for one student,” Dvozenja said. “That really made us feel connected.”

But it’s not just a cozy, familial environment. The school’s class sizes and its student-teacher ratio of 14 to 1 would be the envy of most high schools. That makes a real difference to both students and professors.

“Because of the size, and because they’re trusted to teach the way they want to, our professors do things you couldn’t do in other places,” Thomas said.

“My French teacher would just say to all of us, 'Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go to the juice shop on the corner.’ And we would take a walk and just spend the class speaking only in French, walking around off campus, which I thought was great and much more effective than memorizing things in a classroom.”

For many students, the school allows personal exploration. At age 18, Lance Wills came to Greensboro College to play football, but destiny had other plans. After he blew out his knee, he found the liberal arts setting a perfect place to cultivate his passion for another field: history.

When school trustee Richard Levy discovered a grant for a history student to travel to Poland for a year, history department chairman Richard Crane encouraged Wills to go because of his high grade-point average as a history major.

Later, at N.C. A&T, Wills’ graduate classes were sometimes as large as 40 students. At Greensboro College, they were 14 to a classroom.

Wills still stays in touch with his undergrad instructors, whom he came to know well and would often visit for discussions in their offices.

“I got a wide range of everything. I wasn’t pigeon-holed in one area,” said Wills, now 24 and about to complete the Greensboro Police Academy in September.

“At a larger university, I don’t think I would have gotten the scrutiny and have been pushed to perform.”

Faculty members agree.

The school’s theater department has only 60 majors. As head of the department, David Schram said he can — and does — get to know each of them personally.

“For a lot of our students, that’s what they want,” Schram said. “They want to be touched, grabbed on the arm and encouraged person-to-person. We know who are in our classes; we know how they’re doing and how to get in touch with them.”

Some of the students who find their way to Greensboro College would be lost in the shuffle at other schools, Schram said.

Not underachievers, he said, just students who want a smaller, more intensive experience. Here they can begin classes in their major right away, their class load can be tailored to their needs, and they can get what’s best for them, not a curriculum designed for thousands of students.

Professors are drawn to Greensboro College for the same reason.

Schram attended the smaller St. Thomas University as an undergraduate before doing graduate work at the University of Florida. He said he appreciates the difference.

“How many heads of departments teach freshmen or nonmajors?” Schram said. “I have that opportunity here, and I think that’s very special. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been here for 20 years — that connection.”

Cal Bond had much the same college experience — undergraduate degree at Amherst College, doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Now a professor of biology and chairman of Greensboro College’s department of natural sciences, there’s no question which he prefers.

“You’re dealing with a class of 20 instead of a class of 200,” Bond said. “I’ve taught classes of 100 or 150. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t see what students can get out of that.”

Bond said he could make more money teaching at nearly any other college in the area. At a research institution such as UNCG or A&T, he might get more time and funding for his study of the cell life of sponges. But after 15 years at Greensboro College, he wouldn’t make the trade.

“At a college this size, teaching is definitely an avocation,” Bond said. “At a larger college or university, teaching is one small part of what a professor does. There’s also pressure to publish, to do research.

“Here we evaluate our faculty first on their success in teaching. And we attract professors who want that to be their first priority.”

Rebecca Klase, a political science professor, is one of a number of the school’s professors whose spouses are on faculty at UNCG or A&T — and make two to three times their Greensboro College salary.

The starting salary for an associate professor at the school is about $38,000, and according to the most recent IRS filings, the top-paid professor on the campus in 2007 earned $102,000.

“I could make more right now teaching public school,” Klase said.

So why does she stay?

She gave the same answer she gets when she asks her students who play on the college football team why, time after time, season after season, they go out and play for the Pride, only to lose. Why?

“I like it here, Dr. Klase.”

For one thing, Klase is paid to teach, not to publish research. So rather than study and write about civics, for example, she obtained a grant to hire students as poll workers for the Guilford County Board of Elections, putting their civic engagement where their mouths were.

“I can stand in front of a classroom all day and tell students. 'It’s good to be a poll worker. It’s your civic duty,’ ” Klase said. “But this is an experience they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

In contrast, her husband, Kenneth Klase, director of the master’s in public affairs program at UNCG, spent two weeks this summer writing a chapter for a new textbook dealing with county budgeting and finance.

“I mean, it’s important. And it’s … interesting,” Rebecca Klase said. “But I like to teach. I like to lend my professional expertise to the community. And that’s a very clear mission with this college. We’re about teaching.”

Some Greensboro College alumni say that focus helped them succeed when they couldn’t elsewhere.

Steve Waters, a 2004 graduate and a student of Klase’s, returned to college at age 40. He planned to take just one course, college algebra, after unsuccessful tries at UNCG and GTCC.

But one course led to another, a major in political science and internships in Washington.

“It was the atmosphere, the professors,” Waters recalled. “It was the first time I had somebody who could actually teach in a way that I could understand. The professors actually cared about your grades.”

When Waters came to Greensboro College, he ran a blue-collar business on West Market Street, Invisible Fence. Now, he operates a political consulting firm in Richmond, Va., that specializes in conservative statewide campaigns. His lobbying clients include the Virginia Wine Growers Association.

“They fostered confidence in me,” Waters said of his professors. “Even after we graduate, we stay in touch. Whenever I come back to Greensboro, I always stop in at Greensboro College.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com