Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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GENIUS LOCI MARCEL GUTWIRTH The first thing we are compelled to say ahout Haverford is soothing to the local pride — and since the second thing I mean to say is not, let us have it out at once, and then dwell on it for a reassuring moment or two. Haverford has a GENIUS LOCI. This is no small tribute to a college, large or small, young or old. The place has character, and it is a character which manages to mold successfully the generations that pass through it, to permeate the many operations — intellectual, administrative, janitorial — which go into an education. Perhaps the most important element in the Haverford milieu is, quite simply, the physical environment: the quiet beauty of a landscaped English park closed off from the blatancies of the suburban sprawl. In the quietness, of course, lurks a threat, of a diminishing vitality which indeed mars our idealized community. Men who loved nature and cared for their fellows, men like Edward Woolman, a manager, Albert Wilson, a professor, toiled with their own hands to enhance our pleasure in the Nature Walk. Men like Arnold Post poured the same loving care into the thought- ful management of their dahlias as they did into the ordering of Greek aorists in their students ' minds. The knowledge that there is that of God in every man may make at times for a sloppy kind of permissiveness. When it is buttressed by the testimony of trees nobly spaced, as by one who knows nature ' s business and man ' s place in it, it gathers a kind of grandeur, from the surge of nurturing love — compounded of strength and grace — which such an achievement bespeaks. The sense of beauty, alas, stops at the bound- ary of nature. By some tragic flaw in the Quaker tradition, where man is concerned, drabness takes over. This drabness, lavished upon our living and working arrangements at the College, spills over into the minds of students and faculty alike. The spirit of Philistinism is the summation and con- summation of the Haverford education. I am sorry to say. This is the reverse of the Quaker coin, the negative inheritance, the incubus which those few of us who care cannot seem to manage to shake off the student ' s back. Great virtues exist side by side with the atrophy of the sense of beauty, with the adamant prosiness of the Haverford mind. There are impressive feats of intellect, and nowadays an awakened sense of CAUSE, of social obligations running beyond the respectable channels of action — AFSC, the week-end work camp, — skirting, in fact, social disruption and courting jail. Such is the positive Quaker inherit- ance. There is also, rather unexpectedly, and extraordinarily, a truly Saturnalian release of in- ventiveness, grace, and vitality one night in the year — on Class Night. Wit. music, and dance, an outpouring of creativity of soul. mind, and body sometimes occurs on that one occasion which leaves the faculty limp and envious at the thought that so much youthful spirit lurks in the rigid husks that lend themselves patiently to the classroom procedures on every other day of the year. 28

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and the faculty hold him to. To achieve, a student may turn his great ambition and his suppressed capacities for action and self-determination to other areas of concern, particularly extracurricular, but without ever abandoning his basic value in the importance of academic achievement. The Haverford youth is much more intellectually mature than many others his age. But this is not enough. He remains discontent with the academic way of life as his only model. He finds it produces tension, worry, competition, loneliness, and only a partial sense of wholeness and fulfillment. Even Haverford ' s most brilliant seniors (of whom Haver- ford has many more than it is willing to recognize in its awards of departmental and College honors) poignantly express their sense of incompleteness, their sense of alienation from their own emotional and impulse life. They publicly chastise the College for its intransigent and felt punitive demands; they frequently seek to flee the stern career de- cision they have earlier staked out for themselves by flirting with courses and occupational possibil- ities far removed from their vocational interests. In private, they wistfully wish they felt certain that the intellectual ideal they plan to follow in graduate school is the way for them. While basically neither an ebullient and dy- namic extrovert nor a sexclusive and monastic introvert, the Haverford youth of today does seem to be more preoccupied and less playful than those youths of former years. He doesn ' t smile in response to a friendly hello as frequently. Stu- dents say of other students, They aren ' t very friendly. They aren ' t unfriendly either. They just are not with you. Feelings of isolation and loneliness hover close by on the fringes of aware- ness for many. Sucli feelings are always with youth, but they seem to be more frequently ex- pressed today than yesterday. It is easier to feel lonelier on the campus nowadays anyway. Students feel more bottled-up, more pressed upon, less free, less caring about others. They seem to feel un- comfortable in close intimate emotional relation- ships. Friendships are more instrumental and con- venient than bonds of respect and devotion. Love of a woman is not with carefree abandon, but with a stylized tentativeness. The typical student dates only infrequently; he feels his energies ab- sorbed by more pressing duties. Nor does one sense in the student of today that same loyalty and devotion to the College that many alumni seemed to feel when they were students. The College is a place to pass through, not a community to which to become too attached. To experience intimacy not only with one ' s own thoughts and more pre- EXDUGLAS HEATH cious feelings but also with those of another does not seem to be as highly valued. Certainly many students do not have the time and leisure for spontaneity and play, they seldom seem freed from the ever-present shadow of guilt over a paper left undone, an exam yet to take. Perhaps our typical student reflects the temper of an age (or of his faculty) that values intellectualism, ac- celerating specialization, and continuous measure- able achievement. He finds it it safer to play it cool, rather than to allow himself to become en- twined within the emotional life of another person or within the grips of a belief. He remains an observer, not quite willing to commit himself. Paradoxically, the Haverford man ' s reluctance to allow :himself to be drawn into dependent rela- tions with either his friends or his faculty only screens a deeper and less conscious wish to be so involved, to be given affection and respect, con- tinued reassurance and guidance. A student ' s most bitter source of dissatisfaction with his college is that it is not motherly enough! He things (un- realistically so?) its administration wilfully does not understand him, its faculty is indifferent to him, and its cooks don ' t feed him properly. A Haverford student consciously values his free- dom and autonomy. He prizes the lack of group and social pressure to make him into that which he is not. He values personal integrity and in- dividuality and the opportunity to express what he is, although he may not know what he is. He knows that he does not have to appear what he isn ' t — except to appear, if he can ' t be, an individualist knowing what he is. But once he lets you know him, he is, in fact, the real person he is trying to appear to be. He turns out to be a delightfully shy and warm person almost at home with his intellectual talents but less sure what to do with his more sensitive and affectionate feelings. 27

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The soccer field too, the stage, the orchestra pit manage to capture their share of the student ' s vital commitment to the arts — so all is not lost. Perhaps in fact the student makes a shrewd investment of his vital energies for those occasions which call upon him to ACT. In that sense the Haverford education is successful heyond its own wildest dreams. Art is a DOING, and there may he poetry enough for a husy, uncomplicated soul in the geo- metric design searingly carried out of a goal shot by Hogenauer from a ball passed by Brinton, who himself received it from Oyelaran at the other end of the field. But the failure implied by the gap that forever yawns between intellect and sensibility, the fact that these young men seldom allow themselves to be fired by what they come to know, or want to know that by which they are moved, must not cease to disturb us. The same man who strides through his equations like a Caesar faces Emma Bovary or John Donne with the countenance of a sullen juvenile. He will be quick to criticize Julien Sorel for self-centeredness or immaturity, he can come to life to Marxian or Freudian implications of a character ' s actions, and will stalk the life out of any Myth or Symbol hapless enough to fall under his gaze — but to seize the grace, the beauty, the wit alive in a work of art, to wrestle with the Angel is not much in his line. To invite him to do so is to court embarrassment. To expect littl e knots of students to gather under the shade of our oak, beech, and elm, worthy of any Arcadia, and to fall out over the merits of a poem or a novel or a painting, to clash over Picasso or Bacon, for instance, is sheer naivete. Haverford harbors Con- cerns, it does not nurture Ecstasies — or Agonies, for that matter. It has seldom been given to me to see a student so much in love, for instance, that it made a difference. Is love itself a thing of the past? of the future, let us hope, for certainly almost none of my students speak of it, when it comes up in a book or a poem, as something of which they know. In sum, the Haverford man is able, he is serious, he is concerned, he mostly has a berth awaiting him in the tangle of interlocking bureaucracies that has come to represent the World. But can he skip? can he caper? does his heart beat faster as beauty brushes him by? can he love, or does he merely prate gravely about duty and concern? Has Arcadia marked him with her grace, as well as shaped him with her care? This is the question upon which hangs all the rest, this is the one blessing to pray for, if the envious Fairy has stayed the wand from which it was to flow. Fay 29