Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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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

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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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' Now really, Mr. , that ' s an extraordinary statement, isn ' t it? So begins the typical Satterthwaitean parry, which makes many s+udents enemies at first sight, while it leaves others with the impression of having encountered the paradigm of an intellectual rigor all too rare amid the emotional and intuitive flabbiness of the humanities at Haverford. In the classroom, Alfred Satterthwaite does not suffer fools gladly. His approach is that of a fastidious and even sarcastic intellectual aristocrat. If his sarcasm often clears the air for more coruscating discussion and provokes the student to greater precision of thought and expression, it can also have the deleterious effect of stifling the groping or ina ' -ticulate sudent who might have valuable contributions to make. Mr. Satterthwaite ' s talents, indeed, are far more suited to the small seminar than to the large class, where his contempt may lead him to squander class time on moralistic digressions and irrelevant anecdotes. In the seminar, however, not only his keen analytic mind but also his peculiar gifts for precise formulation and catalysis come into play, stimulated by the opportunity for direct and extensive intellectual battle with the individual student. To be perfectly frank, however, Mr. Satterthwaite is a truly great teacher, if at all, only in a limited, but perhaps all too rare, sense. For him, the real teaching takes place outside the classroom. He tends to choose his small circle of student friends from among the academically and creatively talented ; and al- though this coterie is limited, he spends virtually unlimited time and energy on its members, and treats them on nearly the same basis as his friends and colleagues. The kind of friendship Mr. Satterthwaite extends to his student acquaintances is one of the most valu- able experiences made peculiarly possible by Haverford ' s small size. For those who have belonged to his circle, the many evenings spent in the Satterthwaite study have been as rewarding an element in the educational experience of Haverford as anything in the strictly academic program. The atmosphere CHEZ Satterthwaite, the all-pervasive odor of woodsmoke and sherry, the serenity which is an almost artistic projection of an imperfect but resilient agnostic truce in cognizance of chaos, has become for these students an anchor-point in the frequently confusing intellectual and human flux they encounter, particularly in their first two years here. This is largely the result of Mr. Satterthwaite ' s belief that informal contact with students affords him the opportunity to influence the growth of the individual student as an entire human being as well as an intellect. It is quite clear that Mr. Satterthwaite envisions this as a kind of educaional experience for himself as well, both on a strictly intellectual and on a personal level. It is, for him, a means of keeping his mind open and constantly re-examining his own opinions and convictions. He respects even intellectual positions which diverge violentjy from his own, so long as they are intelligently supported. This does not mean that he lacks strong commitments of his own. Indeed, his very desire to involve himself personally with student friends springs from moral convictions concerning his role as a teacher. Although he does not assume intellectual superiority ovei his proteges, he feels that his wider experience with human problems enables him to give the student an objective, yet highly sensitive, perspective on him- self which the student, in his youthful subjectivity, can seldom attain by himself. He never shies away from the self-imposed responsibility of helping the student as best he can. even with the most delicate or dangerous personal problems. His personal life, both as agent and as advisor, is intimately bound up with his critical study of human situations analyzed in literature, to a degree rare in academicians. Yet for all the shrewdness of his psychological insight, his moral position tends to be conservative, sometimes even to the point of puritanism; it is never, however, based on uncriticized prejudice, but is rather rationally de- duced from a keen sense of the responsibility of all for all. It would be unfair to stress only the intellectual nature of Mr. Satterthwaite ' s personal involvement with students. His willingness to devote himself, with deeply felt concern, to their problems and to their individual growth, is the product of an innate generosity which quite transcends even his own rigorous sense of moral responsibility. Those who know him for any length of time become increasingly aware of the spontaneity with which he assumes what others might see as burdens on the privacy of his family life. And, for all the theoretical rigor of his moral position, it is consistently tempered by charitable for- giveness toward the shortcomings of others. 18