Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

Page 12 text:

broad capability, few people can reasonably con- sider the formal management of the College monolithic. The atmosphere of this management, however, is decidely friendly. The Administration customarily shows Quaker independence in its decisions. The usual official directive to the College community is signed by just one of several people. The one person is, perhaps with consultation, responsible for the decision involved. This condi- tion represents a rather unequivocal division of authority. Education in America has become the only na- tional institution that forges the parameters of its own integrity. Other social structures (Army. Church, Government, etc.) experience external philosophic and political pressures. Undergraduate education now responds, with respect to its meth- ods and principles, chiefly to the level of scholarly achievement in graduate schools. M.D., L.L.B., and Ph.D. candidates are Academe ' s front-line troops and they determine the training that hordes of collegiate reservists receive. Haverford ' s Adminis- tration acknowledges this chain of educational causality by preserving Haverford as a preparatory school for graduate education. This status seems ideal for the College. Universities in general must subconsciously preen students for the graduate facilities located on campus. In this situation, many institutions through grandiose myopia have under- graduate facilities inferior to their graduate ones. By contrast, Haverford ' s relationship to grad- uate education now is similar to the situation of a first-rate prep-school facing colleges. The natty slogan a concern for quality shows that the Haverford Administration likes the idea cf hand-crafted, forward-looking scholars. Recently- added collegiate bureaucracy suggests, however, Haverford ' s regrettable swerve toward the environ- ment of a thorough, apotheosized Military Acad- emy. The men who, in effect, sail the S.S. Haverford into the future occupy Roberts Hall. With their deathgrip insistence on Quaker officers and a chart-room filled with inner light, this Adminis- tration guides its vessel through endless fund-rais- ing, continually avoiding the perils of foundation grants. The College ' s pre-emininent captain, milk- chocolate in name, is substantial in action. Com- petent first mates choose for him the ship ' s yearly hundred-odd apprentice seamen. One admiral from Japan keeps planning-apparatus, naught-ical com- passes, and foreign-sounding speeches in his cabin. He repeatedly announces his tactical conclusions to the seamen, who generally never learn what cosmology he is using to chart their course. Below decks, a diligent stewardess aids her Southern labor-force toward fulfilling someone ' s vision of a troop-canteen. The learned crew, on watch along the railings of the ship, bounce their opinions off the superstructure ' s armor-plate and hope that some ideas will pierce to the ship ' s internal guidance- system, installed Icng ago by Rufus Jones in metaphysical collaboration with George Fox. But, under continual kamikaze-attacks by liberals, the Administration ' s bulkheads do not fall. Neither does the Administration fire anti- aircraft responses at the student-pilots who harass it. The Administration, like a battleship, is a standing target, while its opponents have flexibility of approach and can drop bombs and leave. This military situation is analogous to gants ' annoying a swimming lion. The Administration ' s deferise, like the lion ' s, has been partially to deny the im- portance of the criticism it receives. Somehow the kamikaze-attacks seem necessary expressions of students who want to smash their bodies on their intellectual aircraft against the world. The Admin- isrative battleship or lion is influenced by these attacks, but rarely forced to negotiate significant self-change. What piques the attackers (and this is an undeniable shortcoming in the defenders ' posi- tion) is the defense inability to counter as decisively as it is attacked. Inevitably, student- pilots and student-gnats are more clever and limber-minded than their targets. Any serious in- tellectual-radical will force himself to assimilate enough education and verbal technique to make this so. This truth (which liberals may hotly dispute) does not in itself suggest which side contends justly. If it is granted that either in- telligence or intellectual achievement is associated with moral truth, then hardly anyone can assert the moral correctness of Haverford ' s Administra- tion pitted against the mental weight of faculty and student protest. An educational environment forces respect for scholarship, and this is one reason campus liberals are listened to much at all. These liberals are, almost by definition, intellect- ually capable, although it must be recognized that not all the most liberal r scholastically superior of them oppose the Administration. Conservative forces in power at Haverford do not generate enough intellectual wattage to answer liberal objections knowledgeably. The liberals, too, do not want intelligent opposition to their ideas (though liberals seem perversely grateful to find refutation) as strongly as they seek the corrective action their ideas demand. The liberal position toward the Administration is, to quote one liberal, If they (Administration) do not change or get

Page 11 text:

ADMINISTRATION Scholarship gives Haverford College its passion- ate, blood-stained veneer. The reality behind this necessary and fulfilled pretention is the Corpora- tion of Haverford College, an American enterprise whose measurable products are words, graduates, and information. This organization ' s function within national context is mostly intangible : Haverford is one of America ' s great psychic broad- casting-stations of symbolic environment and thought. Essentially its residents exist in an intel- lectual orientation sequestered from the. typical corporate world. Although the College maintains a variant of corporate structure (Board of Man- agers, President, etc.), the implications of Haver- ford ' s corporate hierarchy are metamorphosed by its supei vision of the phantom material, education. The College Administration must relate our fluid world of metabolizing minds to the more congealed sensibilities of non-Academe, that coeval kingdom between Railroad Avenue and the intellectual Eden-groves in Bryn Mawr. Only radicals will attack the Administration for Janus-facing two worlds. The College needs its buf- fer between the innocence of scholarship and the unchecked opportunism of the Main Line. The Administration serves as material underpinning for Haverford ' s educational venture : faculty and students operate within a structure that articu- lates them and symbolically guards their status. Within this situation, members of the Administra- tion receive indivdual evaluation from the College community. The Adminisration offers for judg- ment unbelievably diverse collective experience and achievement. Co-operatively they could con- verse in Japanese about the application of inor- ganic chemistry to ping-pong tables on patrol boats beached at Naples. As partial result of this

Page 13 text:

out, they occupy a position indefensible on intel- lectual grounds, and the ultimate result of this condition will be a decrease in Haverford ' s stature as a college. Further argument insists that Quaker piety (but not pietism) has largely disappeared at the College, and that Friends wish to continue in power here mainly for reasons of personal expediency and doctrinal pride. Haverford ' s aca- demic environment would, by this argument, not deteriorate as a result of withdrawal of Quakers from the Administration. Liberals contend that, if appointments to central authority at the College were made on the basis of individual competence, without reference to religion, the number of able candidates for the College ' s administrative posts would immeasurably increase. Haverford would be less restricted in its choice of leaders, and there- fore enjoy more competent administration. Wails and platitudes greet suggestions to the Administration that Friends relax their absolute control of Haverford ' s Corporation and Board of Managers. The Society of Friends has groomed Haverford as its own son, and in return it seems to demand the gratitude of alliance and control. Such protective, possessive exercise of self-assumed social power is perhaps part of the Quaker tradi- tion. A history professor at William Penn Charter School once contended that Quakers held political control of Philadelphia for one hundred twenty-five years after they ceased to be a voting majority; he argued that they accomplished this control by means of their continued position of financial dominance over the city. This argument seemed to indicate that it was a tradition for Quakers to cling to social institutions established according to principles of the Society of Friends. The ques- tion whether Quakers reahze that their achieve- ment in Haverford College will be enhanced, rather than harmed, by a lessening of their clench on the College at a time when it does not profit from their monolithic control, is likely to decide the educational importance of Haverford College in the future. J. B. Sunderman