Mount Holyoke College - Llamarada Yearbook (South Hadley, MA)

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One day in the late 1980’s you may sit down and reread this copy of Llamarada with your college-age daughter at your side. By then you will view Mount Hol- yoke with a perspective enriched by the experience of the intervening years. By then. too. you may be able to see your college through your daughter's eyes. No one can predict what you will see. Each member of the Class of 1965 has given to and taken from Mount Holyoke ac- cording to her own talents, desires and values; each will enjoy a different life after graduation. Each who has a daughter will know her to be at once like and unlike her mother. Vet, let me ven- ture a few predictions. You will be reminded of: A beautiful campus where each change of season brought new wonders —the lakes and gardens and trees. Buildings, new and old—the noise and mess of construction, the mellowed age of an ivy-covered architectural atrocity, the isolated nooks you sought for study dates, the noisy gathering places. Other students—friends and acquaint- ances from all over the world, their differences in background, their similari- ties in caring about the world of ideas, their enthusiasms and discontents, their congeniality and kindness, their respon- sibility and integrity. Faculty—occasionally dull, usually competent, always dedicated, sometimes exciting, helping you discover and taking pleasure in seeing you develop new in- sights. Ideas, and the connections among them—the curriculum which started your education a course at a time, and the causes, trivial and important, local and national which enlisted your support. Then should come a realization of the extent to which your Mount Holyoke ex- periences helped shape your life. As for your daughter, how will she react? Who knows? No generation ever fully under- stands another. She will probably think your clothes and your taste in dance mu- sic to be quaint. But if she has become like you she will, I hope, sec that the College is always changing to keep abreast of the times, yet is always trying to preserve its enduring values. And she. too. will treasure the wonderful experi- ence it gave her mother and seek the same for herself. Richard Glenn Gel tell

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The term liberal arts invites misunderstanding because of the elu- sive. many-faceted word liberal. In the context of higher education liberal education is not a vague, over-all affair, a bland general dose intended to prevent intellectual vitamin deficiency in all and sundry, and especially suitable for those who have no serious purpose in mind or no mind capable of serious purpose. Neither in this sense is it the opposite of conservative for in many ways a liberal arts education is a profoundly conservative experience which initiates a recipient into the meaning of his culture, and other cultures—as a preparation for his contribution to that culture to the extent of his powers. The best way out is to point out (hat the better term is “liberating. to signify that liberal education is a process designed to go far toward freeing us from ignorance and prejudice to which we are all heir. If we arc all born in chains, how can “going to college” make us free? Is there a scientific formula, a perfect curriculum which will in four years transform us into learned, creative adults? If there arc all the noisy and incessant debate about the proper value of liberal education would cease and all good colleges would follow the grand design. In actuality liberal arts colleges of high quality differ from each other in curriculum and requirements and every college has in the course of its own history changed its mind about the essentials of intellectual salvation. Mount Holyoke is not teaching the same subjects or enforcing the same requirement which it had in the days of its founding by Mary Lyon more than 125 years ago. Mount Holyoke College changed and is changing in many ways from what it was in its beginnings, and continues to be a college in the liberal arts tradition. What docs not change is the liberal approach to learning. The subjects which arc taught and which you will study here must be subjects of inherent importance dealt with for their own sake rather than as tools for a vocation. If you ask plaintively. Hut what can I do with art or history or physics? , you're inviting and will get the liberal answer— What can you do without them? How. without breadth of intellectual experience, are you to live as a civili ed human being? In a liberal community of learning you should comprehend the sort of questions which characterize the vari- ous divisions of learning and see various methods of seeking an- swers. There is no use of saying I'm not a scientist, or I don't like history, or why do I have to read novels? There are not three sepa- rate worlds of learning, those of scientist, artist, and student of society between which no communication can take place—all of them are aspects of the human condition and you are human beings and none of them is or can be alien to you. As interdependent as each of these arbitrary categories of learning are, so too are they independent—by virtue, especially, of the partic- ular way in which each is taught. But method is not the only aspect of teaching; a feeling of being au courant in one’s field is necessary to the professor in order that he may inculcate his students in verve, with self-confidence, with conviction. Docs he possess enough free- dom to study the occurences related to his field which arc happening in the world today? Does he have the time to investigate the ramifi- cations of a current problem which are as indigenous to the human condition as to his own discipline? Whether he docs or not should be of as intense concern to the student as to the professor: for how liberating the liberal arts program is for him has a direct relation- ship to how liberating it will be for us. II

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The ivory tower” idea, that colleges are and want to be private worlds snugly in- sulated from reality, is and ought to be both true and false. College is not a co- coon in which students can spend four years (and faculty members as many as forty) in blessed somnolence, unaware of 'Teal life. It is life and the interaction between the campus and the world around is an essential aspect of it. At the same time the college cannot per- form its essential function without a con- siderable degree of a benign sort of isola- tion. If college people arc incessantly in- volved in a round of overt activity as opposed to the inner activity of the mind, the college cannot be an educational in- stitution. Our society is in desperate need of two sorts of people whom only tine educational institutions can produce. It needs experts of all sorts, shapes, and si es. and it needs an infinite number of liberally-educated, persistently curious, thoughtful and ethically responsible in- dividuals. Somehow, colleges must be a part of the great busy world and yet stand apart from it to understand, evalu- ate and influence it. This is a «difficult dual role to play, but I believe that col- leges such as Mount Holyoke arc carry- ing this dual role with effectiveness and grace. Meri belli E. Cameron College campuses have long been caricatured as re- mote enclaves populated with eccentric, absent-minded professors and irresponsible feather-headed students; a never-never land of impracticably and generalization. It is doubtful this view was ever an accurate one. It certainly is not in 1965! Campuses today arc intri- cately involved in world-wide research and the vast explosion of knowledge; government and foundation grants support widely ranging campus programs of ex- ploration and experimentation; concerns for the plight of one's fellow man elicit unprecedented interest and committment. A college campus is not a world apart. nor can this luxury be permitted those who seek an academic refuge. The complexities of our soci- ety command our attention and insist upon our in- volvement. What better goal for an educational institu- tion than to aid us all in becoming effective, responsi- ble. contributing participants in an exiting century? Rtnh E. Warjel