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

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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

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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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Religion is perhaps rhe single mosl emotionally-charged subject taught on any college campus. The student approaches thcaudy o religion with attitude, and I . shaped Rom « present and future. Anyone teaching religion must remain continually aware of the gap that must be bridged between intellectual understanding and emo- tional acceptance; that lack of emotional acceptance can hamper the development of intellectual understanding; that for many students the information acquired is immediately translated into feelings and that very often objective analysis and assimilation of the material is extremely difficult—if not impossible. Mt. Holyoke, with its unique student body, provides an ideal setting for the teaching of religion, not only in terms of an academic sub- ject. but also in terms of a continual experience with an ever-inclu- sive relevance. There is a day-bv-day attempt to meet the challenges; there is a continual search for new approaches, new concepts, new media of expression, new restatements of the relevance of religious ethics, morals, philosophy. Every new development in the field pro- vides added stimulus to these attempts and this search. Perhaps the single most important result of this ebb and flow, of this intellectual-emotional structure is the growth of sensitivity; sensitiv- ity in the fullest positive sense; sensitivity to one's own attitudes and to those of others. Solomon M. Kaplun. Rabbi In choosing the study and teaching of history as a career one gives one’s self three major concerns: the transmission of general knowl- edge of one’s field, the introduction of selected students to advanced study in it and the continuation of one’s own research. For all of these Mount Holyoke like other strong liberal arts colleges is happily suited. While the study of the human past is a broad field which can be explored in many ways the academic environment seems a pecul- iarly appropriate one in which to do it. Any scholar has moments of frustration from lack of time and mate- rial but these pass. In my own special field of interest—women’s activities and related social and intellectual developments from the American Revolution to 1850—Mount Holyoke is a rewarding place to be. As one who cares deeply for teaching I need hardly add that work with Mount Holyoke students is rewarding also. Mary S. Benson 30