Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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Twenty-four

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Dining Room and Coop In a college where uniqueness has bred disunity, there is a need for some impersonal factor to bring the students together. In the Dining Room one sees a very strange Haverford College. The men become very different beings while eating. Leaving books, coats, and all protection without the dining room ' s confines, they adjust to the mass media for a half-hour, end then each goes his own separate way. Served food often suited for animals, the stu- dent body become animals themselves. In the dining room, anything goes. Meals are an escape, but unfortunately the visitor to meals cannot realize this. What seems like a group of pigs, throwing their slop around and banging on the tables just to hear the noise and grunt their disapproval bestially, is merely a force of lotus leaves operating, a vogue narcotic which makes life seem just that much easier for a little while. The fine thing is that no one is fooled by what goes on while eating. Somehow the student who throws a loaf of bread the whole length of the hall can, upon leaving dinner, grasp the time concept of T, S. Eliot, totally unaware of the wilted rose garden which he left. We should not be proud of how we eat, nor where we eat. We must, though, understand. The Coop IS the other important unifying force. The relaxation which is found there is not the some as that in the dining room, but of a more civilized sort. This important meeting ground of student- faculty interaction has been the scene of many serious and insignificant intellectual battles, but it is natural, close, and can be important in the growth of a student who earnestly desires to learn of life Twent -three

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Scarcely believable are the phenomenally bene- ficial yet revolutionary changes which have re- cently token place in the composition of the faculty within on atmosphere of artificial tensions and heated controversy. The College during this unusually turbulent four-year period suffered from intra-College squabbling, the loss of the guiding genius of Gilbert White, and a funds drive designed to achieve objectives antithetical to those upheld by the teaching staff. The resulting conflict ap- peared to find o focal point in the matter of the appointment or re-appointment of members of the faculty. Because of the intimate relationship which existed amongst and between the faculty and stu- dents, fostered by the isolated and somewhat self- protective atmosphere of the small and liberal arts college, each individual lost his objectivity when viewing fellow members of the Community, and subjectively judged teachers and colleagues as friends, not professors. First in this conflict which enropt the whole college came the faculty, who, by Gilbert White, (as a mark of his democratness ) had been given committee authority to oversee and perfunctorily confi-rm department appointments. Second came the students, heralded by vociferous English majors (only in the second case prompted by a purgee), who sided with one or the other camps within the faculty, and became even more obnoxious than the faculty (which was quite a feat!) out of ignor- ance of even the basic facts in the case. But though each and every one who partook in the struggle thought himself extremely vital, the college machinery ground out its predeter- mined course. Student opinion, when prompted by a can ' t-toke-it, was categorically disregarded, and proved, much to the naive chagrin of rabble- rousing undergrads, that student opinion wasn ' t worth the bread it was buttered on when it come to evaluating a member of the faculty. And the faculty committee, placed in its position by Gilbert White to safeguard against such abuses as per- petrated by an aspiring department chairman only proved that its services were instrumental to the system. Indeed, when June, 1956, acting as referee, stepped in to stop the fight, it was found, amidst the blood-shed, that System had won a resounding victory over Emotional Attachment. But only the administration, recognizing that student ignorance of basic facts was in large port responsible for the continuation of the battle, could prevent further bloodshed, by instructing students in the ways of the System and the criteria (no matter how arbi- trary) used in evaluating the faculty, something they didn ' t do ' But although ignorance and emotions hod tried to ploy their integral roles in faculty appointments, the record shows that notable — if not outstanding — progress had been made in garnering an excep- tional faculty especially suited to the Haverford system. In the sciences, no less than amazing prog- ress was made: Loewy arrived m a done Biology Department; Lemonick into a Physics Department, (given to playing games on the demonstration table), Williams into the Chemistry Department and Heath into the gut-ridden Psychology Depart- ment. All assumed department chairmanships, and all did a |ob which for outshone the work done by their counterparts in t he social sciences and humanities. And besides these four bright lights, Haverford ' s fortunes shone onto a lower level : the natural sciences got Wisner and Sonter, the social sciences, Muller, and the humanities, MacCaffrey. The losses, when juxtaposed with the gains, found Haverford still well on the winning side. And what of the future? Each year there was a turn-over of approximately 25 per cent in the faculty, and consequently it was difficult to soy from one year to the next where the trouble spots would turn up. But of a few we can now be quite certain: the History Department (which needs at least another MacCaffrey and a half); the Philoso- phy Department (which needs about two more Bennetts); the English Department (which needs another Quinn and perhaps an Ashmead thrown in); and Economics (which needs help). The moral of the story is really quite simple: The savior i n the post has been what the hope in the future must be: not student participation in selecting and reappointing faculty members; and not a faculty banding together to discharge the outcast and retain the friend. It is the young in- tellectual, the Allendorfer, the Roche, the Bell, the Muller, or the Heath (not the tried scholar and antiquated lecturer) who, content to come to Haverford for experience, plans (if he fails to place love of Haverford above financial security) to end his days chairmaning a department at some large, well-paying university. What Haverford thus learned from the chaotic experience of these post four years was that it would draw such men to its fold not through petty squobbling and administra- tive dickering, nor by reform of its component parts, but by preserving — if it couldn ' t improve upon — the Haverford system per se: its intellec- tual vitality proportional only to its age of emo- tional and intellectual maturity and youth in pro- fessorial and ideological endowment. T H O U G H T S O N F A C U L T Y