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Page 19 text:
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Page 20 text:
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HAVERFORD: EPIPHANIES ACADEME In the last few years, the end of an era has arrived, somewhat awkwardly and undramatically, at Haverford. Whether the occasion was a stu- dent ' s suicide or the latest news from Mississippi, those in the facing benches found that Friendly evasions of theodicy seemed to expire somewhere in a five-foot hiatus of dusty floor. In an unfortun- ate last class before retirement, a respected mem- ber of the Old Guard distinguished true tragedy from the work of certain decadent Southern novelists, while the students, the third genera- tion to discover that there was more sex, more blood, and less affirmation in Shakespeare and in the world. than Victorian positivism was able to account for, callously stared out of the window, hardly bothering to conceal their boredom. Rasselas had gotten tired of the Happy Valley; the en- cysted Haverford of NON DOCTIOR SED MEL- lORE DOCTRINA IMBUTUS, where moral com- placencies preceded inquiry, was no more. The Board of Managers of course refused to issue a death certificate. In the meantime stu- dents and administrators respectively begot the embroys of a gradeless, hyper-individualist Eastern Reed and an impersonal, rule-ridden Little Prince- ton. Thus the present Haverford is a school in transition, rather unsure of its own identity. Its working atmosphere, I would theorize, is the crea- tion of a meeting of minds between the facul- ty and a substantial se gment of the student body over three basic values: a radical ethical individualism, a sceptical and rigorously intellect- ual outlook, and a high valuation on strong, even if narrow, sense of purpose and professional orien- tation. The result of this atmosphere is that academics at Haverford take on some of the qualities of a quest for the Holy Grail; professors deliberately set nearly impossible standards, and then grade students on the degree of their failure to meet them. The principal virtue of this system is that it challenges, and consequently refines, the intellectual powers of the committed and able student more fully and also more quickly than any other system. The inadvertently self-defeating aspect of this system lies in the fact that its inexhaustible demands leave the student who is striving for a rigorous, integrated intellectual view of life confused in the sheer mass of specialized data. Further, they can easily render the ideal of the experimental life, so dearly defended against outside pressure, a purely theoretical matter in the life of the conscientious student. One of Haverford ' s greatest virtues lies in the fact that the student is exposed to his teach- ers at close range, both in small classes and in informal student-faculty encounters. He is fur- ther presented, in his relations with faculty mem- bers, with both a wide range of disciplines and outlooks on life and a wide variety of approaches to the relation between teacherand student. Hav- erford is unusual among American colleges in that it produces no stereotyped method of teaching ; thus the student, who in many other ways may feel pressed into a rigorous academic mold, is in this respect at least abnormally free. He can al- most invariably find some professor whose ap- proach to teaching is highly suited to the stu- dent ' s particular abilities and temperament. This fact is made possible by Haverford ' s size, and made necessary by the tension between individualism and professionalism in Haverford life. Four different approaches to teaching are very common at Haverford (I am speaking here pri- marily of the humanities, with which I am most familiar). There are the austere lecturers, who see teaching as consisting in imparting a par- ticular body of knowledge, and who view the relevance of this knowledge to the particular student ' s intellectual development or practical life as the student ' s own business, not theirs. They would tend to be cold and distant with students, and relate to them only on a classroom-lecture basis ; in evaluating students, they would prefer intellectual mastery of a complex subject mat- ter to premature forays into original thought. There are the easy-going professors, who tend to form informal relationships with all of their stu- dents, and to stress emotive response to material rather than intellectual analysis. Such a professor is likely to be more concerned with broadening his poorest student ' s practical insight into life than with fertilizing the analytical powers of his best student. There are the Graduate- School- Type, or GURU, professors, who are likely to care little about the majority of their stu- dents, or even about their classroom teaching it- self, but rather conceive of teaching as a personal task directed toward a small elite of brilliant students, and as consisting not merely in teaching specific subjects, but in guiding the student ' s entire development as intellect and as human be- ing. There are, fourthly, the Professor-Enthusiasts, who are entirely concerned with their students as individuals, and seek to teach them a view of life or at least to provoke them to personal self-exam- ination. They conceive of teaching in a strictly Socratic sense, and frequently use their subjects as mere springboards for teaching about Life. These portraits are admittedly sterotypes. 16
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