THE LESSON OF BLACK MOUNTAIN

...Holt was increasingly annoyed at Rice’s widely reported sarcasm about his fellow teachers and some of the president’s pet projects (e.g., a new chapel...

...The precipitating cause of his resignation was an affair he had engaged in with a student, but he had also accumulated years of bad blood with his colleagues and students...

...Yet the role the couple played illustrates some of the inherent contradictions of the enterprise...

...Reynolds informs us that Holt “liked to mention his innovations as an ‘adventure in education’ and to assert that Rollins had ‘put Socrates on the eight-hour day.’” When he accepted the job at Rollins, Rice believed that Holt was serious about the sort of reform that would turn conventional classes into unstructured, free-wheeling discussions, putting the emphasis on a professor’s gift for personal interaction with his students...

...He detested any and all administrators, and every facet of administrative bureaucracy, reserving special scorn for the registrar, who, according to the influential model of German universities, measured education in “units,” or hours behind a desk...

...I never did learn the Greek alphabet...

...Not that he wanted for educational opportunity...

...he finished a B.A...

...Rice admired Josef Albers’s gifts as a teacher, but was alarmed by his complete indifference to the art of the past and his neglect of artistic tradition...

...Rice was equally contemptuous of academic specialization, with its emphasis on narrowly defined research— another feature of American education that he attributed to German influence...

...Maybe I’d better have you...

...Faculty members fired over the Rice affair and students who left Rollins in protest formed the core of Black Mountain College, which opened in the fall of 1933...

...He had a knack for fund-raising, an abiding faith in public relations and slogans, and a neartotal ignorance of scholarship and the life of the mind...

...As recounted in Katherine Chaddock Reynolds’s new biography, Rice was already a veteran of fifteen stormy years of teaching when he arrived at Rollins in 1930...

...America’s most radical college arose from the ashes of a rebellion on another campus—that of Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida...

...The college evaluated both faculty and students on their “contribution to the community” as much as on their academic performance...

...With his classical training, Rice maintained to some extent the traditional conception of a liberal education...

...John Dewey and progressive education were in the air in the 1920s and ’30s, and Holt determined to put Rollins on the map and ensure its financial stability by making it a center of experimentation...

...Black Mountain, thus, was intended to be a community rather than an institution, run entirely by those who lived and worked together...

...When Rice finally carried a book to completion— after he had left academic life—it was a series of autobiographical reflections, I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century, published in 1942...

...Inevitably, powerful personalities clashed in the absence of a curriculum with actual content...

...Reynolds observes that Albers and Rice both “placed a much higher premium on process than product,” and in the absence of any definite criteria for educational content, conflicts degenerated into matters of individual style and personality, not of substance...

...And Black Mountain lacked a sufficient ethical principle at its center to impose order on these men and make it possible for them to work together in a common enterprise...

...Straus was an older man and an old-fashioned liberal, while Bentley was a young radical with Marxist leanings who openly praised the Soviet Union during World War II...

...But the obstinate Holt was undeterred, dismissing not only Rice but almost everyone who had publicly defended him...

...Yet the history of the college after Rice’s departure demonstrates that strife was endemic to Black Mountain, its controversial founder quite aside...

...Protected by their size, prestige, and money, contemporary institutions can get away with the follies that caused small, poorly funded Black Mountain to crumble...

...THE LESSON OF BLACK MOUNTAIN Liberal Education’s Short-Lived Utopia By R. V. Young Black Mountain College, that utopian experiment in higher education and communal living, lasted only a little more than two decades: from 1933 to 1956...

...Yet the college’s laissez-faire approach to curriculum was a portent of the chaos that now besets us...

...The tacit message of this policy was that no subject or body of knowledge is more important than any other, that there is no particular virtue in the lengthy training and experience required by an academic discipline, and that education is more a matter of heeding one’s whim than of being steeped in the intellectual and moral traditions of one’s civilization...

...He sought to discourage lecturing by invoking the “conference plan” of classes, which involved group discussions and exercises, individual study, and student-teacher huddles, all within a two-hour period...

...The conflicts that currently bedevil our campuses— between democracy and anarchy, intellectual cultivation and vocational training, teaching and publication, the lecture hall and the seminar— all thickened the air at Black Mountain...

...But more significant was the general Black Mountain policy of allowing faculty to teach whatever they wished and students to construct their own curriculum by shopping around in various classes until they found something that engaged and pleased them...

...He would typically attract a following of students who regarded him as a mentor and sage—not just another teacher—and he always had colleagues who valued his intelligence and pedagogical talent enough to overlook his abrasiveness and unreliability...

...A large number of students were on his side, along with a significant portion of the faculty—many of whom were not fond of Rice personally, but who regarded Holt’s actions as high-handed...

...The schism between supporters of Eric Bentley, the historian-turned-drama critic, and those of Erwin Straus, the phenomenological psychologist and philosopher, is a case in point...

...The severe practicality that Albers brought with him from the Bauhaus tended to diminish any real distinction between the fine arts and handicrafts, with Anni Albers embodying the equality of the loom with the easel...

...He moved to Rollins straight from a successful career as a magazine editor and publisher...

...Students, for the most part, follow their own interests, which, when not a matter of sheer educational faddishness, usually lead them to seek degrees that promise high-paying jobs...

...Yet even now, the college continues to fascinate, because so many of the persistent quandaries of academic life converged in that single North Carolina hothouse...

...He’s the most awful pest in the whole lot...

...I learned one phrase in Greek the first year I took the language course...

...Martin Duberman’s book recounts endless turmoil among the faculty during the college’s final, post-Rice decade and a half...

...not fire him...

...Unfortunately, the legacy of Black Mountain lives on in the nation’s colleges and universities, both public and private...

...But monasteries depend for harmony and unity on a shared faith that shapes every aspect of life...

...As for Katherine Reynolds’s book, there is little to say...

...He taught Rice...

...Together, Rice and Black Mountain exemplify the emptiness of liberal idealism when it is unsustained by realistic principles...

...He would not leave without a fight...

...One of Rice’s greatest achievements at Black Mountain was considered to be his luring of the painter Josef Albers and his wife Anni to the campus...

...And this is not the sort of education that any serious country should prize...

...Thus, liberal education gives way to an education in vulgar liberalism, which in turn is replaced by glorified vocational training...

...Reynolds quotes a characteristically outrageous statement by Rice: “If I went into an American institution of higher education to reform it, the first thing I would do would be to shoot the registrar— shoot him...

...At Black Mountain, there was no clear set of shared convictions about education or anything else, so that the tiny community had precious little to give it focus in the face of the tensions that inevitably emerge from a group of strong-willed individuals...

...The mass of accusations leveled against Rice were trivial or easily refuted, and their obvious frivolity and maliciousness succeeded only in diluting what could have been a serious consideration of the teacher’s problematic relationships with his colleagues and students...

...Rice’s neglect of Greek in courses that were, ostensibly, in Greek is telling...

...In Holt’s view, the president was the absolute master of the college, faculty members were employees like any others, and the purpose of faculty committees was to carry out the president’s policies...

...She has done a competent, workmanlike job, telling us as much about John Andrew Rice as anyone will wish to know...

...The subtitle of Martin Duberman’s 1972 book on Black Mountain is significant: An Exploration in Community, not An Experiment in Higher Education...

...Rice ran afoul of the Rollins administration after only three years...

...In this respect, Black Mountain College anticipated the extreme individualism and preoccupation with “diversity” that are so much part of the current scene...

...Though he is important in the history of higher education as the father of Black Mountain, he was not the most distinguished figure to work there: Its last rector, the poet Charles Olson, for example, was far more impressive...

...The question Rice embodies is neverending in higher education: Is great teaching a matter of raising interesting questions and conveying a charismatic personality, or are there disciplinary skills and subject matter that are more important than the individual professor...

...Rice studied Latin, Greek, German, English, and mathematics at the Webb School...

...at Tulane in three years and then went as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, where he earned first-class honors in jurisprudence...

...Eventually, students too were included in the board’s deliberations, and they were also allowed to sit in on general faculty meetings...

...The faculty, Albers among them, became increasingly impatient with what they perceived as Rice’s irresponsibility and indolence in handling his classes and administrative duties, and they tired of his unwarranted contempt for other residents of Black Mountain...

...But neither the dissertation nor the Swift manuscript was ever completed...

...By the time he was hired at Rollins, he had completed everything but the dissertation for a Ph.D...

...When Rice emerged as an acerbic and divisive figure, Holt demanded his resignation...

...Finally, in 1940, Rice was forced out—not only of his position as rector, but of the college itself...

...They were all Rice...

...In its twenty-three years, Black Mountain College attracted a remarkable array of innovative and influential thinkers, artists, and writers, only to collapse in disorder...

...A Black Mountain student would later say, “All his classes were the same...

...The college was, in short, secular liberalism’s version of a religious or monastic community...

...shoot him...

...According to Reynolds, Holt offered Rice the posiition with the comment, “Well, I haven’t got a single liberal on my faculty...

...As a result of the rebellion against rote memorization, today’s students are encouraged to express their opinions and speculate broadly before they have attained the knowledge to make their personal views worthwhile to anyone, including themselves...

...Faculty and students took almost all of their meals together, as education was supposed to take place continually...

...With Aydelotte’s help, Rice induced the American Association of University Professors to investigate what Holt had done, and the drama that followed became one of the most celebrated academic-freedom cases of the century...

...Moreover, Rice’s brother-in-law, Frank Aydelotte, was a well known and highly respected educator, the president of Swarthmore College...

...Rice, however, was not without support within the Rollins community, nor was he without influence outside it...

...The heart of the Black Mountain experiment was its mode of governance...

...University faculties forsake the scholarship of traditional disciplines to pursue their personal agendas, unconstrained by a coherent liberal-arts curriculum...

...He had left the Webb School in Tennessee, the University of Nebraska, and the New Jersey College for Women (affiliated with Rutgers) R. V. Young is professor and director of graduate studies in the English department of North Carolina State University...

...Its founder, John Andrew Rice, was himself a congeries of contradictions...

...Still, some students found him intimidating, even cruel, and fellow faculty members whose teaching he disdained were offended by his sarcasm...

...Yet his case against specialized academic research may be regarded as special pleading, since his own record of scholarship was negligible...

...Faculty members with small children lived in nearby cottages, but most teachers lived along with the students in the same large building that also served for classrooms and administrative offices...

...And he embraced the familiar panacea of “interdisciplinary” learning, which meant the hiring of a “Professor of Books,” a “Professor of Leisure,” and the like...

...Yet Rice is the proper image for the Black Mountain experiment as a whole, in that both he and the institution failed to live up to reasonable expectations for them...

...Hamilton Holt, the college’s president, was in many ways a prototype for today’s academic administrators...

...Rice maintained that tenure, promotion, and other rewards ought to be distributed for performance in the classroom rather than for scholarship and publication...

...When he called the goal of Black Mountain College “education for democracy,” he was recognizing the need for a citizenry widely educated in the virtues of self-control, prudence, and thoughtfulness...

...Holt and Rollins were rightly censured...

...Straus was a man of stiff, Teutonic aloofness, while the rakish Bentley admitted to sleeping with many of his students...

...but he was also opinionated, outspoken, and unwilling to suffer fools gladly...

...He was a classroom teacher of magnetic charm, and he was a witty, engaging conversationalist...

...under duress...

...Reynolds writes that “after the first few years that Black Mountain College was operational, any pretense of a Greek language course was dropped...

...in classics from the University of Chicago and had spent a year in England on a Guggenheim Fellowship, researching a book on Swift...

...No doubt, many students found in Rice’s Socratic seminars an intellectual experience akin to revelation...

...By the spring of 1933, both parties, not surprisingly, had become disillusioned...

...Albers was teaching at the Bauhaus when the Nazis closed it down in 1933, and he shared the austere, functionalist view of Walter Gropius...

...Rice’s reluctance to engage in the gritty, wearisome work of teaching a classical language might have been an individual failure...

...But for Rice, the perennial enemy was the administration...

...Instead, the entire faculty would elect from among themselves a board of fellows, which in turn would choose a rector for the daily running of the college...

...On the other hand, when he was dismissed from Rollins College, the administration was able to quote students who had complained that his classes in Greek were devoted to wide-ranging discussions and personal counseling that had nothing to do with learning the language...

...It is not at all difficult to see in this atmosphere the forerunner of the academic “communitarianism” that now dominates higher education, trumpeting diversity and individual freedom while imposing speech codes and political correctness...

...At the same time, Black Mountain was obsessed with communal living, so much so that a stifling collectivism was encouraged...

...It was to have neither a board of trustees nor a president...

...More important, Rice had been an influential member of committees that challenged Holt on matters of faculty salaries, the place of fraternities on campus, and curriculum...

...Although he knew hardly any English on his arrival, Albers soon became a dominant figure at Black Mountain, and his wife established a rather prominent weaving program there...