Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

Page 29 text:

Harry W. Pfund ' s sound, distinguished yet un- stentatious teaching represents part of the groundwork of Haverford ' s environment. He pre- serves for his students the advantages, but not the faults, of disciplined, systematic instruction. Professor Pfund approaches literature by means of close examination and mastery of texts, but his ideal of criticism discards attempts at nine- teenth-century thoroughness. Literature represents to him the inforn.ed study of individual works, their relation to each other, and their synthesis within traditions. He is concerned also with the development of literary criticism, and the various perspectives it has detailed toward German writers. Though he sometimes inspects philological and cultural implications of literature, his chief inter- ests remain works themselves and different inter- pretations of them. In his lectures. Professor Pfund emphasizes the history and chronology of literature. He discusses literature in terms of precise statements and re- liable generalizations. A sober, reasoned mastery of literary history and of specific works character- izes his approach to criticism. In his home near campus, Mr. Pfund conducts classes that are schol- arly, apolitical analogues to former President Roosevelt ' s fireside chats. Professor Pfund ' s dignity and authority are especially impressive in lecture. He sits behind a cardtable covered by a fringed cloth, several filing-folders of notes, and a block of books. Students occupy a semi-circle of furniture in front of him. They listen, take notes, discuss the text, and see at various times dozens of volumes from his upstairs library. His three-hour classes are interrupted once by refreshments, and paced by half-hourly chimes and by a cuckoo-clock. Very rarely lantern-slides divert part of an evening. Mr. Pfund is committed to education of the individual. He teaches books and critisism as req- uisites to cultured life. In his comfortable Whitall office, he typically greets visitors with his brief- case open beside him and his desks stacked with books, spines facing him. His overcoat, cluster of mail, and dossier of transcripts are nearby. Filled bookshelves follow two walls. On these shelves, and in his home, Mr. Pfund collects mostly hardcover books ; his library of German literature seems func- tionally complete. His attention to significant de- tail in choice of books reflects his general principle of careful selection of essentials. In discussing lit- erature, he does not hurry comparisons or force syntheses. In his courses. Professor Pfund ' s pre- cise manner and Olympian wit illumine life and literature for his students and show reasoned con- sistencies between art, fancy, and existence. Through his cordial teaching, his vision of these connections remains for many students a perma- nent discovery. Joel Sunderman 25

Page 28 text:

the classics — nor is there any need at this time to save them, sprung Aphrodite-like from the mal- content r(f. of a mechanistic universe — but in a college like Haverford where some de- partments are weak, others in flux, a department offering a lasting tradition is attractive to some, who, all things being equal, might have majored in something else. Too, the Classics department vigorously proselytizes to win its few converts each year. George Kennedy runs the Classics 19-20 course, a history of Greece and Rome, which has around 89 students and is the second-largest course in the college — next to Freshman English. The end of the course is two-fold. It is designed, first, to pro- vide the non-specialist with what might be his only disciplined look at the achievement of the ancient world and partially to define the at- traction-repulsion inherent in one ' s relationship with a world where one must acknowledge, in opposition to the glory and the grandeur, the animalism that was in Greece, the lust that was Rome. The course is also designed as propaganda to aid the regenerative and reproductive powers of the department, and is aimed at Freshmen and Sophomores in keeping with the propagadistic determination to indoctrinate the young. Out of say 80 students, some two last year majored in classics as a direct result of the 19-20 course, and, from a subversive point of view alone, the course was viewed as a success, although the expenditure in time and effort seems proportionate to that required to get a few Negro children into a southern school. Kennedy is confident that a history course featuring a reading list of Homer, the great tragedians, Aristophanes, Thucydides in the first semester, and the likes of Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus, Seneca in the second will be able to hold its own. Kennedy ' s small classes occasionally get out of hand, taken over by the Bolsheviks in our midst. In a period of lamentable decline in his Homer course, the chariots of Achilles and Hector became Volkswagens. His gestures occasionally go far beyond the duty of the professor. He once tele- phoned me before an exam, which I was due to flunk, to tell me he had raised my grade on an essay and, thus, he announced, to spur me on to an all-night stand. Kennedy shares the latent snobbery of the department and the conviction that classics men go to a different heaven than other people. Comfort, for example, in the midst of a learned essay defining the nature of a study which considers at once the political, economic, social and artistic history of a culture for some reason seen as classical introduced the thought that his field included the study of circumstances evoking emotions too deep for tears, or some such thing, and, to date, although modestly ac- knowledging the possibile reminiscent quality of the phrase, has been unable to bring himself to retract it. George Kennedy, himself, feels that the difference between Greek and other languages is defined by the first sentence in his Greek primer, h H CK a anc i- T ' v ' , the soul is immortal. He has heard that the primers of other languages begin with more trivial utterances. Although known as a liberal, Kennedy is by no means consistent in his position and does not seem to want to be. Often his liberal point of view is more pedagogic and therapeutic in intent than philosophical. He is in favor of the limited elective system at Haverford, and wishes he, him- self, had been urged to take more courses unrelated to the classics, deploring the gaps in his knowledge with the happy confidence of a man who never expects actually to hear the call to take calcu- lus and natural science. He is, he says, experi- mental by nature, but he is probably so more by training. He is willing to see some experimentation with the grading system. He is very disturbed by the 10-13 percent of the student body he thinks is concerned with grades to the decimal point. He has come to favor either four courses per semester or obviating the forty course requirement for graduation, because he thinks it is true 4hat the student is hounded. What is important ulti- mately is not his specific position on various issues but his general conviction that Haverford should be able to take advantage of its small size and be flexible. George Kennedy is not an eccentric man, but he does have highly individualistic opinions. One of his ideas that has been ill-received by his profession is that there is in most civilizations such a thing as a classical stage, and that the field of classics in the West should reject ethnocentric- ity and broaden its base to include a study of all classical civilizations — Indian and Chinese, for example, as well as Latin and Greek. The future western classicist might, as I understand it, have a good knowledge of either Latin or Greek and then a knowledge of the language and culture of at least one other society not directly in the west- em tradition. Bruce Tulloch 24

Page 30 text:

The 1959 yearbook said, On this campus, where almost no one does what anyone ELSE is doing at ANY time, the task of trying to make some sense and intelligible order out of random occurrances must be considered impossible. How more impossible is it to condense four hundred and sixty different individuals into some typical, if not quite real, Haverford student? Whoever the typical Haverford man is, he is something like an intellectual: mentally quick, alert, sharp-witted, critical, and certainly very verbal. He works hard though inefficiently. He is conscientious, competitive, self-driving, and am- bitious, and of course he is bright! He prefers theory, abstraction, and broad generalization to fact, rote learning, and the discipline of detail. Above all else, he wants to be certain that what he thinks about is significant and relevant. In contrast to other college men, the Haverford student is much more reflectively, if not phil- osophically and idealistically, inclined. He values the world of thought much more than the world of action. It is through self-knowledge rather than through action that he seeks his identity. Prag- matic comprises, economic values, . manipulative power and political machinations and complexities scarcely appeal to the Haverford youth. It is through intellectualism and a cultivated coolness that our typical student gains both power and security in his relations with others. He is not afraid to complain, to be sharply critical of any- one and everyone, even of himself, to argue with the most high or even the alumni! More often than not, his words are used like rapiers; his in- tellectual thrusts are refined, pointed, clean, crisp. Students have a marvelous way of using humor and sarcasm to carry on an attack. Their letters to THE NEWS and their frequently epigrammatic comments in Meeting reveal a penetrating wisdom, a sharpness of insight, that is unexpected in most young men. But our students are also studiously irreverent, calculatedly cynical, fearful of senti- mentality, unusually inhibited and restrained. They plan to become lawyers, medical specialists, labora- tory researchers, and scholarly professors, but not commanding figures in industry, driving young junior executives that lead United Fund cam- paigns, nor charismatic politicians. The typical Haverford youth is not a highly masculine assertive male with a deep sense of vital- ity and aggressive drive — marked by dash and adventurousness. He wears his beard almost shyly! He is sensitive, not quite tough, and perhaps more passive, if not less self-sufficient and emotionally independent than many other college males. He is not an earthly, socially initiating, tough-mind- ed, aggressive male of strong passions and au- THE HAVERFORD STUDENT OF 1964 thoritative dominating stature. Nor is he the a- nonymous organization man or the mousey bureau- crat on the way up. Conscious of himself, if not centered in himself, perhaps awkward around others, he does sense a distinctive identity, though he may not know what it is. He is thoughtful, intense, sincere, honest, but too criti- cal of himself. The Haverford student doubts himself in a way many college males do not. He doubts his ability, his values, his feelings. These doubts, not unusual in entering freshmen, become magnified in his early college years as he finds he never does quite well enough. He forgets he compares himself to an unusually talented group of young- sters. What often appears as insufferable vanity ( The College is so good, it can only get worse. ) is only an unconscious defense against a deepen- ing and, for some, devastating lack of self-confi- dence. By identifying with the imagined reputation of the college, he justifies himself publicly, al- though he continues to blame and deprecate him- self privately for not fulfilling his or the college ' s expectations of himself. This obsessive self-doubt breeds guilt and depression; it leads him to ques- tion the worth of his education, of his decision to come to Haverford. He thinks of leaving but can think of no other place as good where he can do better. And since he values doing a mediocre job in an excellent college more than doing an excellent job in only a mediocre college, he re- luctantly stays on. Students do not want Haverford to be any less demanding than it is. They don ' t respect gut courses, although it is clear that given a demand- ing five-course system, they need some. The typical student comes to the college open to the facul- ty ' s intellectual standards ; he accepts many faculty as intellectual models, but he too seldom finds that he develops the level of competence both he 26