Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  What the founder had had in mind was a utopian experiment in so-called “scientific” education; by the use of aptitude tests, psychological questionnaires, even blood-sampling and cranial measurements, he hoped to discover a method of gauging student-potential and directing it into the proper channels for maximum self-realization—he saw himself as an engineer and the college as a reclamation project along the lines of the Grand Coulee or the TVA. The women behind him, however, regarded the matter more simply, in the usual fashion of trustees. What they wanted to introduce into their region was a center of “personalized” education, with courses tailored to the individual need, like their own foundation-garments, and a staff of experts and consultants, each with a little “name” in his field, like the Michels and Antoines of Fifth Avenue, to interpret the student’s personality. In the long run, these views, seemingly so harmonious, were found to be far apart. The founder had the sincere idea of running his college as a laboratory; failure in an individual case he found as interesting as success. Under his permissive system, the students were free to study or not as they chose; he believed that the healthy organism would elect, like an animal, what was best for it. If the student failed to go in the direction indicated by the results of his testing, or in any direction at all, this was noted down and in time communicated to his parents, merely as a matter of interest—to push him in any way would be a violation of the neutrality of the experiment. The high percentage of failure was taken to be significant of the failures of secondary education; any serious reform in methodology must reach down to the kindergarten and the nursery school, through the whole preparatory system, and it was noteworthy, in this connection, that the progressive schools were doing their job no better than the old-fashioned classical ones. Indeed, comparative studies showed the graduates of progressive schools to be more dependent on outside initiative, on an authoritarian leader-pattern, than any other group in the community.

  This finding convinced the trustees, who included the heads of two progressive schools, that the founder was ahead of his time, a stimulating man in the tradition of Pasteur and the early vivisectionists, whom history would give his due. He left the college the legacy of a strong scientific bent and a reputation for enthusiasm and crankishness that reflected itself in budgetary difficulties and in the prevalence of an “undesirable” type of student. Despite a high tuition and other screening devices (a geographical quota, interviews with the applicant and with the applicant’s parents, submission of a photograph when this was not practicable, solicitation of private schools), despite a picturesque campus—a group of long, thick-walled, mansarded, white-shuttered stone dwellings arranged around a cupolaed chapel with a planting of hemlocks, the remains of a small, old German Reformed denominational college that had imparted to the secluded ridge a Calvinistic sweetness of worship and election—something, perhaps the coeducational factor, perhaps the once-advertised freedom, had worked to give the college a peculiarly plebeian and subversive tone, like that of a big-city high-school.

  It was the mixture of the sexes, some thought, that had introduced a crude and predatory bravado into the campus life; the glamour was rubbed off sex by the daily jostle in soda-shop and barroom and the nightly necking in the social rooms, and this, in its turn, had its effect on all ideals and absolutes. Differences were leveled; courses were regarded with a cynical, practical eye; students of both sexes had the wary disillusionment and aimlessness of battle-hardened Marines. After six months at Jocelyn, they felt that they had “seen through” life, through all attempts to educate and improve them, through love, poetry, philosophy, fame, and were here, it would seem, through some sort of coercion, like a drafted army. Thronging into store or classroom, in jeans, old sweaters, caps, visors, strewing cigarette-butts and candy-wrappers, they gave a mass impression that transcended their individual personalities, which were often soft, perturbed, uncertain, innocent; yet the very sight of an individual face, plunged deep in its own introspection, as in a blanket, heightened the crowd-sense they communicated, like soldiers in a truck, subway riders on their straps, serried but isolated, each in his stubborn dream, resistant to waking fully—at whatever time of day, the Jocelyn students were always sleepy, yawning, and rather gummy-eyed, as though it were seven in the morning and they unwillingly on the street.

  Yet this very rawness and formlessness in the students made them interesting to teach. Badly prepared, sleepy, and evasive, they could nevertheless be stirred to wonder and pent admiration at the discovery of form and pattern in history or a work of art or a laboratory experiment, though ceding this admiration grudgingly and by degrees, like primitive peoples who must see an act performed over and over again before they can be convinced that some magic is not behind it, that they are not the dupes of an illusionist. To teachers with some experience of the ordinary class-bound private college student, of the quiet lecture-hall with the fair duteous heads bent over the notebooks, Jocelyn’s hard-eyed watchers signified the real. Seeing them come year after year, the stiff-spined, angry only children with inhibitions about the opposite sex, being entrained here remedially by their parents, as they had been routed to the dentist for braces, the wild-haired progressive-school rejects, offspring of broken homes, the sexually adventurous youths looking to meet their opposite numbers in the women’s dormitories, without the social complications of fraternities and sororities or the restraints of grades, examinations, compulsory athletics, R.O.T.C., the single well-dressed Adonis from Sewickley with a private plane and a neurosis, the fourteen-year-old mathematical Russian Jewish boys on scholarships, with their violin cases and timorous, old-country parents, hovering humbly outside the Registrar’s door as at a consular office, the cold peroxided beauties who had once done modeling for Powers and were here while waiting for a screen-test, the girls from Honolulu or Taos who could “sit on” their hair and wore it down their backs, Godiva-style, and were named Rina or Blanca or Snow-White, the conventional Allysons and Pattys whose favorite book was Winnie-the-Pooh—seeing them, the old-timers shook their heads and marveled at how the college could continue but in the same style that they marveled at the survival of the race itself. Among these students, they knew, there would be a large percentage of trouble-makers and a handful of gifted creatures who would redeem the whole; four out of five of these would be, predictably, the scholarship students, and the fifth a riddle and an anomaly, coming forward at the last moment, from the ranks of Allysons or Blancas, like the tortoise in the fable, or the sleeper in the horse-race, a term which at Jocelyn had a peculiar nicety of meaning.

  And over the management of these students, the faculty, equally heterogeneous, would, within the year, become embroiled, with each other, with the student-body, or with the President or trustees. A scandal could be counted on that would cause a liberal lady somewhere to strike the college from her will: a pregnant girl, the pilfering of reserve books from the library, the usual plagiarism case, alleged racial discrimination, charges of alcoholism or homosexuality, a strike against the food in the dining-room, the prices in the college store, suppression of the student paper, alleged use of a course in myth to proselytize for religion, a student demand that a rule be laid down, in the handbook, governing sexual intercourse, if disciplinary action was to be taken against those who made love off the college premises and were observed by faculty-snoopers. No truly great question had ever agitated the campus since the original days of the founder, but the ordinary trivia of college life were here blown up, according to critics, out of all proportion. There had been no loyalty oath, no violation of academic freedom, but problems of freedom and fealty were discovered in the smallest issue, in whether, for example, students in the dining-hall, when surrendering their plates to the waiters, should pass them to the right or the left, clockwise or counterclockwise; at an all-college meeting, held in December of this year, compulsory for all students, faculty, and administrative staff, President Maynard Hoar had come within an ace of resigning when his appeal for moderation
in the discussion had met with open cat-calls from the counterclockwise faction.

  Thus the college faced every year an insurrectionary situation; in the course of twelve years it had had five presidents, including the founder, who was unseated after only eleven months of service. During the War, it had nearly foundered and been saved by the influx of veterans studying under the GI bill and by the new plutocracy of five-percenters, car-dealers, black-market slaughterers, tire-salesmen, and retail merchants who seemed to Jocelyn’s presidents to have been specially enriched by Providence, working mysteriously, with the interests of the small college in mind. These new recruits to the capitalist classes had no educational prejudices, were extremely respectful of the faculty, to whom they sent bulky presents of liquor or perfume, as to valuable clients at Christmas-time; they came to the college seldom, sometimes only once, for Commencement, passed out cigars and invitations to use the shack at Miami or Coral Gables any time at all—this benign and preoccupied gratitude, tactfully conscious of services rendered, extended also to friends and roommates of the poorer sort. Several years after graduation, little shoals of Jocelyn students would still be found living together co-operatively, in Malibu or St. Augustine—occasionally with an ex-teacher—sharing a single allowance under the bamboo tree.

  Hence, though the college was in continual hot water financially, it had inevitably grown accustomed to close shaves and miraculous windfalls. Only the bursar seriously worried about balancing the budget, and his worries were accepted tolerantly—this was his métier. The faculty now took it for granted that fresh students would appear every fall out of nowhere, from the blue sky of promoters’ ventures, a strange new race, or stock issued by a wildcat bank, spending what would appear to be stage-money; and the yearly advent of these registrants in defiance of the laws of probability created in the staff a certain sense of displacement or of nonchalance or autarchic license, depending on the individual character. Careless of the future, fractious, oblivious of the past, believing that the industrial revolution was an actual armed uprising of the nineteenth century, that oranges grew in Norway and fir-trees on the Nile, these sons of shortages and rationing seemed to have sprung from no human ancestry but from War, like the dragon’s teeth sown in the Theban meadow. And the faculty which was teaching them their Cadmean alphabet fell to some extent under their influence; they too became indifferent to the morrow and forgetful of past incentives. There was a whiff of paganism in the air, of freedom from material cares that evoked the South Sea islands even in the Pennsylvania winter; more than one faculty-member, washed up on this coral strand, came to resemble, in dress and habits, the traditional beachcomber of fiction.

  But the absence of pressure from without, the unconcern of parents and inertia of alumni groups, produced at the same time an opposite and corrective tendency. The faculty contained a strong and permanent minority of principled dissenters, men and women whose personal austerities and ethical drives had made them unacceptable to the run of college presidents and who had found the freedom of Jocelyn both congenial and inspiriting. If beachcombers had come to rest here, so had a sect of missionaries, carrying the progressive doctrine from Bennington, Bard, or Reed, and splitting here at once, like the original Calvinist college, into a new group of sects and factions. From its inception, the college had been rent by fierce doctrinal disputes of a quasi-liturgical character. Unlike the more established progressive colleges, which lived, so to speak, on the fat of their original formula, without questioning its content, Jocelyn had attracted to itself a whole series of irreconcilables, to whom questioning was a passion, who, in the words of Tolstoy, could not be silent. Beginning with the founder’s time, Jocelyn had served as a haven, like the early Pennsylvania country itself, with its Moravian and Mennonite and Hutterite and United Brethren chapels, its Quakers and Shakers and Anabaptists, for the persecuted of all tendencies within the fold of educational reform, and each new wave of migrants from the centers of progressive orthodoxy wished to perpetuate at Jocelyn the very conditions from which they had fled—thus the Bennington group assailed the Sarah Lawrence group and both assailed Dewey and Columbia, i.e., the parent-movement. Those who did not subscribe to any item of the progressive creed tended nevertheless to take sides with one faction or another for temperamental reasons; Aristotelians in philosophy joined with the Theatre myth-group to fight the Social Sciences.

  An unresolved quarrel between the sciences and the humanities was at the bottom of every controversy, each claiming against the other the truer progressive orthodoxy, the words, scholastic, formalistic, scientism, positivistic, being hurled back and forth in the same timbered hall that had shivered to Petrine, pseudo-Protestant, Johannean, Romanizing in the days of the Mercersburg controversy, when a schism in the Lancaster synod had broken the old college asunder. It was the perennial quarrel, in short, between Geneva and Heidelberg, between Heidelberg and Augsburg, none the less passionate for the smallness of the arena and the fact that nobody cared, beyond the immediate disputants, how the issues were resolved. To whom did it matter, certainly not to the students, whether the college were to drop the term progressive and substitute experimental on page three of the catalogue? Yet to these men of conscience and consistency the point was just as cardinal as the spelling of catalogue (catalog?). Under the pretense of objectivity was a fighting word or spelling to be lowered from the masthead and a flag of truce run up? The defenders of the progressive citadel were always on the lookout for a semantic Trojan horse in any seemingly harmless resolution introduced by the enemy. And quite correctly so, for the enemy was cunning. Who would have suspected that a motion to drop the old engraved Latin diploma and replace it with a simple printed certificate, in English, announcing that the holder had completed the course of studies, concealed an entering wedge for a movement to bring Latin back into the curriculum? Many of the ultra-reform party had voted Aye to this suggestion, not seeing the infernal conservative logic behind it, which was that the college had no right to bestow a Latin diploma on a student incapable of reading it, and hence did not really rank with the old conferrers of the sheepskin but in a separate class, along, it was suavely argued, with the trade schools and hairdressing colleges, which made no pretenses to Roman universality, to the nihil humani a me alienum implicit in the traditional scroll.

  Blandness and a false show of co-operation, discovered the ultras, were the characteristic revisionist subtleties—agreement and a reductio ad absurdum, the dangerous methods of the Greeks. Your true classicist would not argue in favor of the spelling, catalogue; rather, he would concur with the simplified spelling and move that the whole catalogue be revised in this spirit, with night becoming nite, right, rite, and so on, merely for the sake of consistency, at which point some burning-eyed and long-repressed progressive fanatic would pop up to agree with him, wholeheartedly, enthusiastically (“Let us break, in one stroke, with the past”), and the fat would be in the fire; the faculty, that is, exhausted by these shifts and reversals, would vote to leave things as they were. The experienced parliamentarians quickly learned the trick of party regularity, that is, to vote the opposite of the enemy, whatever the merits of a motion, but this rule was not foolproof against a devious opponent, who could suddenly change his position and throw the whole meeting into confusion. And despite a great deal of coaching, the honest and sincere doctrinaires of both sides tended, in the heat of debate, to take individualistic stands and even, in moments of great excitement, to make common cause with each other.

  Nowhere did Jocelyn’s faculty show its coat of many colors more bewilderingly than in the discussion, which took place every fall, of the winter field-period. According to the orthodox view, which had been carried here from Bennington, the field-period was the crux of the whole progressive system: the four weeks spent by the student away from the college in factory, laboratory, newspaper plant, publishing firm or settlement-house were the test of his self-reliance and his ability to learn through doing; the measure of the success
of the field-period was the measure of the success of the college. The ideas of the founder and of Dewey, Pestalozzi, and Montessori here coalesced. However, in the course of years, modifications of the original program had been permitted to creep in, concessions to practicality or to humanitarian sentiment. Some employers were steadily enthusiastic about hiring Jocelyn students for the allotted four weeks in February, others not so much so, owing to certain dire experiences which had created an unfortunate “stereotype” in the employer mind. Volunteer work, of course, was usually available, either in the social-service agencies, or in the wrapping department of commercial firms, but for poor students on scholarships, counting on a warm college room, and a regular job waiting on tables or running the college switchboard, it was often a cruel hardship to be turned out in February to work, gratis, in a strange city and pay for meals and a furnished room. Moreover, volunteer work was open to two objections: either it was “made” work, answering the telephone, running errands, taking notes at rehearsals, and hence of no social utility; or it involved scabbing—some employers, it was discovered, actually laid off workers in the February slack season, counting on the yearly migration of progressive students to keep the wheels turning at a slower pace. Thus the practice of allowing the student, under certain circumstances, to write an academic paper or note-topic and even in rare cases to be housed in a college dormitory during the free month slowly grew to be tolerated, and with tolerance came abuses, so that the “pure scholarship” or “regressive” party could claim that the field-period had ceased to fulfill its function and therefore ought to be abolished.