Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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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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and capable of infinite variation. The important point is that Haverford. as a result of tensions within its academic attitude, not only includes but actively encourages all four approaches. This diversity enriches the intellectual life of the com- munity immeasurably, even though for each par- ticular student one or more of the particular ap- proaches which exist here may be useless or even harmful. Complaints against the Graduate-School- Type professor, one might observe, are particu- larly common ; however, his usefulness cannot be denied, even though he may have no beneficent effect on most of the students who encounter him, if the College is considered as in any sense designed to produce the swiftest and most fruit- ful intellectual development in the already excel- lent student with a strong sense of purpose, as well as to stimulate and bring out the possibilities of development in every student. Haverford could not exist if all of its professors were like this, but it would be greatly improverished if some were not. I must note, in passing, that the individual faculty portraits which comprise this section of the RECORD were consciously selected in terms of a balance of attitudes toward teach- ing, as well as in terms of the more obvious bal- ances. A further, and less constructive, result of the inner contradiction between Haverford ' s individual- ism and its professionalism has been commented on so vociferously, by faculty and students alike, in recent months that any account of academics at Haverford must deal with it. This is the ac- cusation that something in the Haverford sys- tem saps the student of enthusiasm and personal involvement, both in his academic work and in his personal life. Tremendously excessive polemics have been issued on this subject; after all, there are students here for whom, after three or four years of grueling work, academics are still a source of intellectual excitement, and vitally involved with their larger personal spiritual goals. But the very terms in which the accusation is so often advanced reveal its lamentable truth. Much as one may shudder to hear some of one ' s fellow stu- dents in meeting take a public mind-bath in a cistern of social and ethical cliches, the very simple-mindedness of these utterances betrays a failure to connect the analytical processes of the classroom with the realm of personal aspirations and values. The truly pathetic cases of dissoci- ation of sensibility at Haverford are not the coldly analytical hyper-specialists who win Wood- row Wilsons, but those students who find it necessary to put their guts out on the table in Eng- lish class, or to get up in Meeting and mouth such meaningless platitudes as We tend too often to forget that academics are not an end but a means. Because, plainly, academics ought not to be merely a means but a criticism of ends; true sensitivity is always self-critical, and if a student finds it necessary to retreat from a cold, dry, hostile academic world to a coddled potted palm of sensitivity which would obviously die in the hard light of analysis, his liberal education has failed to create him a sense of the necessary con- tinuum between intellect and emotion. Neither of Haverford ' s basic values, its rigorous intellectuality and its stress on individualistic, ex- perimental search for meaning, can be sacrificed to the other; yet the conflict between the two of them seems to leave all but the students who come here already strong in both intellect and self-knowledge at best confused and unsatisfied. Haverford can be savage to the highly talented student who is still uncommitted, in search of a direction, while it is all-too-easily mastered by the plodding, materialistically-oriented future business- man. To some extent these defects are congenital to an institution devoted to two divergent sets of values ; but to some extent a better balance or integration is possible, and the attempt must be made. Haverford, as a college in transition, must learn how to change without vitiating the good qual- ities of its tradition or of its present atmosphere. It must first realize that it is no longer in a spirit- ual sense a sectarian college, and that the present Quaker stranglehold on the Board of Managers and the Administration must inevitably weaken the College ' s chances for dynamic leadership. The in- delible mark which the Society of Friends can leave on the secular Haverford of the future lies in the tradition of intellectual rigor and individ- ual freedom; to ignore this core, and to preserve the literal dominance of Quakerism and especial- ly of its puritanical tendencies for profane reasons of social pressure and expediency, is to destroy Haverford College. Neither material expansion, nor a continued social and particularly academic lib- eralization, need injure the values of the present Haverford, if conduced with discretion; but, in my frank opinion, every increase in bureaucratic authoritarianism, in supervision of dormitory life, in stringency of such disciplinary regulations as drinking rules, is a signpost on the road to hell. Haverford ' s task is to liberalize without losing intellectual rigor, to expand without becoming impersonal, and to shed the narrow, encysted pat- tern of its sectarian past, without losing the bal- ance of intellectuality and individualism which is the core of its tradition and of its present identity. Alan Williamson