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

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no more separate from the mainstream of social experience than any after in the H e evde of the individual such as family life, marriage, the job. or religious dedication .Each is a unique expert and each can invoke m a measure of isolation, but none is outside the realities of living in our civilization. Mount Holyoke, it seems to me. has always offered both faculty and students an abundance of contacts with other aspects of living. In the social sciences ,« ,s virtually impossible to teach the material which is contemporary and constantly changing and be isolated from the academic and social standards of the society at large In this. Mount Holyoke's programs of study and teaching ‘ «h« steadily improving media of communication arc a constant reminder of the practi- cal realities of society. But a college must stick to its central purpose-education. In this, as in one’s future occupation, there grows up in our thinking a tendency to ratify the environ- ment and set it apart. If it were truly isolated, it would be fatal to our endeavors to learn and to teach. . . ... Political Science must today try to un- derstand a world where governments un- dertake a whole host of new tasks; where complex patterns of individual, group and state behavior emerge; and where a large number of new states with very different cultures and political histories lustily demand attention. Older political theories are challenged and new methods of inquiry developed. Removing the scholar from the demands of students and the academic life isolates him from the larger purposes of his life. Removing the teacher from the demands of re- search and its attendant necessities alien- ates him from his own discipline. For it is in the classroom that the scholar searches for the larger context of his own research and learns to integrate his own findings into the vast body of inherited knowledge. Mount Holyoke will change as a result of this explosion of knowl- edge. But I believe that the warmth and civility of this campus can accommodate itself to a new situation which will pre- serve much of the old and add the re- wards to be gained from a faculty com- mitted to the wider world of particular disciplines and lively intellectual produc- tivity. For a liberal education is more than an intellectual capacity, it is a ca- pacity for passion, delight and excite- ment for the world and its people in our daily lives. 28 T. Jean Grossholtz

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It also imposes constraints upon an in- structor. A significant challenge is that of the development of scholarly expertise in an era of constantly increasing special- ization of subject matter. This trend has both good and bad features, but it ap- pears irreversible. It implies increasing difficulty for the instructor in covering a broad course offering in his discipline and at the same time keeping up with the many recent developments in each area. Institutions dedicated to identifying, dis- secting. and even transmitting social change can cope with important changed occurring within their walls and inside American education in general through collaboration of students, alumni, admin- istrators. teachers, and any others who arc anxious to preserve the values of a liberal education. Robert .. Robertson Life on a college campus makes one almost constantly aware of developments taking place in philosophy. This is especially true of a college like Mount Hol- yoke. Students come from all over the United States and bring with them what they learn from friends at- tending other colleges and universities. What is being taught and discussed elsewhere buzzes around my cars. The buzzing has become noticeably more audible with the more selective student body in recent years. It has also been increased by a lowering of the walls of the college. An intcr-collcgiatc community in the Valley is gradually replacing the independent college commu- nity. Developments in philosophy are communicated and preserved in philosophical periodicals. No apparatus, no computers arc needed as in other disciplines to keep abreast of what is being discussed in philosophy. All that is required is leisure to read the contemporary literature. As for drawbacks, the comparatively small size of a college philosophy department should perhaps be men- tioned. and also the comparative absence of graduate students The latter tend to have a feverish interest in what is occurring elsewhere. George Tovey To an instructor in the social sciences, the liberal arts college, compared with the typical large university, offers distinc- tive academic benefits and raises particu- lar challenges. The benefits are the en- vironment of a community of dedicated, capable students, and opportunities for close faculty-student relations, including those engendered by independent and honors projects.

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Your question rephrases an old poser. Can you be a teacher and a scholar at once? To deal first with the college atmosphere in gen- eral,” the answer is: it depends. It depends on what you arc teaching and where your research lies. If you arc fortunate enough (and not all of us in a small liberal arts college are so blessed) to teach in your particular field of interest, then the cross-fire can be valuable beyond measure. The little fact that you discover on one day may shatter the big generalization you were about to make in class on the next. Conversely, the generalizations you make can lead you to new facts. Sometimes they even seem to create facts where they never existed before. But if you arc interested in. say, the river traffic on the Ganges in the nineteenth, and if you have to pronounce on all sorts of things from Boethius to Bolivar on successive Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, then the outlook is far less bright. Until not many years ago, this was the fate (often a welcome and happy one to be sure) of many a small-college, liberal-arts instructor. In History, at least, he was an academic Rufus-The-One-Man-Band. professing Latin American History, Russian History. French History, the History of Science, and so on. Name it; he taught it. Today he seems to be one of a vanishing species. Younger historians want to specialize in their teaching as in their research. 1 think, too, that students arc better enough prepared nowadays, and perhaps enough more sophisticated, so that the necessarily thin intellectual fare our friend had to dispense has lost the nutritive quality it once had. His disappearance front among us will have its good and its bad side. We shall probably see. in the years to conic, more and more overlap between areas of leaching and areas of research. If both arc properly done, then the results can only be beneficial for the reasons suggested above. On the other hand (there is always an other hand in anything having to do with a college) we shall probably lose something, too: a joyousness, a sense of humor, and a touch of humility. John L. Teall