Mount Holyoke College - Llamarada Yearbook (South Hadley, MA)

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F reedom, as I see it. is a mixture of opportunity and discipline. I regard opportu- nity as a panorama from which one may choose to focus upon a special segment. Hut discipline can become meaningful only if the segment of focus constantly pushes outward again toward panorama. In this way discipline can provide a source for opportunity as much as can opportunity for discipline. l-rccdom seems to me to be a mode of thought. It can be exercised in any environment. Although environment may condition the scope of opportunity, it cannot kill all opportunity. Vision, ingenuity, and perseverance arc the ingredients for achieving freedom under any conditions. Colleges would seem to me more likely than most other environments to tolerate freedom. Mount Holyoke is no exception. And, although we may hope that any college will strive to improve, there is no reason why we should expect it to achieve perfection. Lack of improvement, however, will stem only front lack of vision, ingenuity and perseverance on the part of the college community directed toward upholding a clear concept of the nature of freedom and practicing freedom. There is no substi- tute for individual responsibility in this regard. I lay no blame outside myself for any freedom I do not possess. David Holden

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The place to sec exciting, significant drama « significant plays are being perfornicd-probaWy Be rim or Par. possibly London or New York, probably not South Hadley. The £Tcc to decide What plays are significant and exciting or to w ,, them, is anywhere—Mount Holyoke, even. critic at college strut the plumes and feathers of todays hits. am g the bones of today's failures. Spreading out from here andstretch.ng as far as the historical eye can sec. range the dramas of the past, the perspective of such a scholar is occasionally distorted by hyperopia—a fixation on the distant mountains—it is a far less fata disease that the myopia which knows no past at all. Another remarkable feature of ivory towers, one of value to drama- tist as well as critic, is that their windows arc always ojxn and their doors arc never locked. True, and sadly so. the routine of tower activities often leaves the student little time for gazing from win- dows. let alone taking strolls or vacations. Still, there is a freedom from certain distractions which others must face. The great drama of the present will only find its way to Mount Holyoke by chance of occasional invitation, but its critics and contributors will find their way from Mount Holyoke by purpose and design. They will have left the tower to tramp upon the earth, but they will always remember the view from above. James D. Ellis Art history, like all academic subjects which involve the study of man’s achievements, is by no means an exclusive discipline. To some people, it is of interest primarily because of the record which it provides of the values and aspirations of cultures both similar to and different from our own. To others, its value lies in its investigation of the work of art as a primary object, its expressive power and its relation to the technique which produced it. The best teaching of art history which I have encountered, and which 1 attempt to emulate, uses no specific method, but presents the work of art from a variety of viewpoints. It seems to me that diversity of approach is very significant, be- cause the work of art has as many meanings as there arc people interested in it. Thus, art history may be somewhat more flexible as a discipline than other Hu- manities, but I imagine that this is in part due to its comparative youth as an area of study. In any case, the flexibility of the discipline makes art history for me both the most demanding and the most challenging field of the Humanities. Jean Harris 16

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1 think of myself as trying to teach kno e» much as experience, not technique so much ' “Pa i,y. not habit so much as attitude: an auction and a respect for praiseworthy language, the ability '° c' X and to say. We work at these capacities through a miraculously rich body of literature which of course is a body Of knowledge. But literature is dynamic. « changes with history and accumulated experience, an it is new again any time a new reader picks it up So what matters most is the kind of reader who can com- plete. m the moment of his reading, the dynamic Pro- the endlessly recurrent dialogue between genius and sympathy. Reading and writing are unmistakably a humanity, by definition of that term. All «he Ivclds of study must make themselves humanities, or else we arc all in deep, perhaps fatal, trouble. Teachers of whatever discipline must avoid the temptation to vague ‘philosophizing, to loose and self-indulgent moralizing. But we also need to remember. I think, that our function is not to in- duce to knowing and efficiency but to discrimination and humanity. My own approach to literature may be UK) ethical in emphasis; I often think so. 1 get impa- tient with the complacency ami sclf-gratulalion that creeps into art and artists. Sometimes I think there is UK) much ‘art: Like any other line of study or en- deavor, it is good insofar as it serves the race, and not Ben L. Reid The image of an Ivory Tower for life a Mount Holyoke College is not only de ccptivc. it is deceitful. An apprenticeship in any academic discipline cannot hclj making our contemporary world riche and more meaningful. The student ii “Parties and Politics has no advantage over the student in “Renaissance Po- etry. The one learns the nature of he world by immersing herself in the pre- sent; the other, by an understanding its relation to the past. Fortunately no on: need confine herself to only one perspec- tive. 'Ilie very essence of an education in the liberal arts is the variety of perspec- tive available to all: to understand ti t- molecular structure of matter and the importance of prosody to a full reading of a poem is to understand the relation of the part to the whole, to perceive the basic shapes that order and meaning take in our time. Marjorie Kaufnuv