Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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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

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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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Finally, a word must be said about Mr. Satter- thwaite ' s intellectual position, about the commit- ments which drew him into literary scholarship as a profession. As has been suggested above, he sees literature almost entirely in terms of the light it casts on immediate human experience ; the work he really enjoys, as distinguished from his formal academic obligations, is the analysis of works with strong psychological and moral significance, as, for instance, Donne ' s poems, or THE BROTH- ERS KARAMAZOV. As a Harvard Comparative Literature Ph.D., Mr. Satterthwaite is greatly concerned with par- allels in theme and event between works of various ages and cultures. However, his search for echoes is not merely that of a connoisseur, but rather reflects a concern for historicity, for both con- tinuity and change in the literary treatment of certain central experiences in Western culture. In dealing with particular works, he is more con- cerned with the psychology of plot situations than with overall symbolic and structural pat- terns. Unlike certain critics with less rigorous analytical minds, however, he sees this as a weak- ness in his own approach, and, far from resenting attempts to systematize ' a work, he is very receptive to structural interpretations. In his con- cept of criticism as a discipline, he is intensely concerned with style: he tends to value precision of formulation even above originality of thought. In line with his concern with literature as directly relevant to life, he is unsympathetic to works which are more concerned with recreating the texture of experience than with commenting on it: hence, at times, his seemingly irrational hostility toward Twentieth Century literature. Alfred Satterthwaite finds Haverford ' s size and atmosphere particularly congenial to his approach to teaching. And, conversely, the maintenance of Haverford ' s superiority as a small liberal-arts col- l ege demands the special capabilities of such a professor as Mr. Satterthwaite, however unpopu- lar his approach may be with many of the students who encounter him. Richard Wertime Alan Williamson 19