The Small College: Another View

COLLEGES have always had their detractors. Ninety years ago, only ten years after my own alma mater was founded, President Gilman, in his inaugural address at Johns Hopkins, roundly dismissed the four-year liberal arts college. It has been buried many times since and by many famous men. But it has steadily refused to die, even at distinguished hands.

The small colleges, one hopes, have learned something under this constant threat of extinction, something besides a stubborn turn for longevity. They should have, for as it was said long ago, when a man is about to be hanged, it concentrates the mind immensely. From their critics the colleges can learn what to renounce, recover, mend, or reaffirm.

They can learn a great deal from thinking on what President Allen Wallis of the University of Rochester says about them in the Atlantic Monthly of last November. He does not expect them to disappear, and he praises the contribution they have made over the past century. He merely denies them any future of real quality. As the century advances, he believes, students seeking a first-rate education will turn, not to them, but to colleges that are integral parts of a university. This will come about because brighter and more serious students, better prepared in improved high schools, will already have had what the colleges have commonly offered in their first two years. They will demand work in at least one subject approaching the graduate level. The faculty that can cope with them must be a faculty of graduate caliber, a faculty the small colleges will not have. These colleges will thus be lacking both the best students and the best teachers.

All this must be scanned. The small colleges have never been preoccupied with the highly gifted alone. In very homely fashion they have been willing to wait for the steady pluggers and late bloomers whom they do not brag about till after these people have become some of their most respected alumni and the best citizens of their community. Even so, they want their fair share of the gifted and the well prepared.

And, perversely enough, they see the same signs of the times that President Wallis sees, but they read them in a different way. Familiar with the squeeze put on them by the improved high schools, the two-year junior colleges, and the down-reaching arm of the graduate schools, they see not just a threat before them but also an opportunity. Their own true function now becomes more possible and more important.

For most of the colleges have always wanted to do a better job in the four years allowed them. They have long desired students who were better prepared. They have wanted freedom from remedial chores, from doing over what should have been done in school. They have hoped for a greater breadth and depth and the chance to offer the exciting challenges of a truly liberal education. The better prepared students now coming to them are exactly what they have been waiting for.

The new condition at last gives the quest for liberal education room enough and time. The four years can be richer and more significant. Our best students, even those in a hurry to get on with a career, have always bewailed the lack of time to think about and savor what they were learning — the time to evaluate, compare, express, and enjoy the falling together of the pieces in liberal studies that foster what someone has happily called the “connecting imagination”

And if there is still some time left over in the four-year undergraduate span, the new explosion of knowledge can fill that very handily. It will also create a deeper need for the kind of minds liberal study should furnish. The student of the humanities and the social sciences will feel a new demand to know more of the natural world in the exciting time when research is on the move and when — so one is told — 90 percent of all the scientists that ever lived are still living. And the scientist will perforce remember, if he checks the human data, that probably 90 percent of all the great artists, composers, philosophers, moralists, and men of letters are now dead, and that a considerable art is involved in bringing them to real life again, the recovery of our humane past being the demanding enterprise it is. The four years of college can more and more become substantial and worthwhile. For the liberal study that is their true stock in trade is no perfunctory appetizer to be got over as fast as possible before the graduate or professional school. They can in themselves be a rich and memorable feast.

One can hope to heaven that all the bright and gifted do not miss this full measure of liberal education, and that they know a lot else before they settle down exclusively with what they will know best. More than ever they need the liberal studies that, as Professor Whitney Oates of Princeton suggests, are “designed to develop in an individual the capacity to survive change,” at a time when colleges are trying to prepare students for careers ten years away that do not now exist.

We believe that even some of the gifted will still prefer to attend small colleges and will be willing to forgo the obvious advantages of the university — the larger libraries, the larger laboratories, the often rewarding pell-mell and multifaceted culture of the crowded campus, the great scholars that for the most part they will see only on a highly limited schedule. They will do this because of their not unsupported hunch that a good small college dedicated to giving a liberal education can probably give one, largely because it can concentrate its whole attention on doing so. This is its specialty and its only business. The whole life of the community bears upon this task.

The gifted will find there full reign to their talents in an encouraging and personal framework of expectation. The small colleges have long had or are developing challenging programs of honors work, independent study, interdisciplinary experiments, and other means of allowing students to go at their true pace. These programs are not, as one fears President Wallis assumes, an evolution toward the graduate pattern. They can, to be sure, make later graduate study much easier because of the methods and habits they teach. But the important point about them is that this deeper penetration in a major field or in related disciplines takes place within a matrix of liberal studies. They thus furnish a pattern of what a man’s life should be till the day he dies — a career in depth within the informing pattern of other interests and pursuits. The small college, by its very structure, has a knack for holding this pattern together.

BUT who will be the teachers? This is the crucial point President Wallis and others would press. And the answer is, many of the first-rate teacherscholars who do it now and more who will come. Those who think otherwise simply fail to reckon the attraction that teaching and life in a smaller community have for some of our ablest men and women, who regard teaching as their first and sine qua non task. They do not hold association with and instruction of students as simply the interruption of their own research or their consulting with industry and government. Teacher-scholars now in university posts are asking some of us to consider them for the next opening we have. Some of them say they are simply tired of “bigness.” Some of them believe in church-related colleges and wish to be identified with them. On this score, the critics of colleges should never underestimate the holding power church colleges have. Excellent teachers, excellent because they are also scholars, turn down repeated offers from the universities because they themselves are dedicated to the religious dimension in education that is honored where they already are.

The colleges, of course, owe such teachers the finest program of research and sabbatical leaves. Our own college has had for twenty years perhaps the most liberal arrangements in the country. It allows any professor wishing to engage in research and writing, upon proper application, to have a year’s leave of absence at full salary every fifth year. It also offers the regular sabbatical. Such a program permits teachers who prefer the small college, away from the great libraries and research centers, to do so without sacrificing their professional life or the opportunity for growth in their own field of learning. It supplies the renewal they need.

President John Millett of the Ohio Board of Regents, who has had experience with all forms of higher learning, knows as well as anyone else that no single kind of institution has a monopoly on good teaching. He has seen many examples of it in the university. Even so, he says, “If we can restate the goals of general education for the last third of the twentieth century, I feel confident that it is the separate liberal arts college which, above all other agencies of higher education, will become the means to the desired end. For it is the separate liberal arts college which remains alone dedicated to the mission of teaching.”

The small colleges have other assets. They can experiment freely, partly because they can admit mistakes and get out of their ruts more quickly and cheaply than larger institutions can. They can resist provincialism by strong programs of visiting lecturers and scholars, by a more than merely adequate bookstore, and by the full use of mechanical aids for libraries and certain forms of instruction. They too can send students abroad. They can enjoy cooperative relationships with other colleges in groups such as the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and the Great Lakes Colleges Association, which enable institutions to do together much they would find it hard to do separately, such as establishing centers overseas and adequate programs of non-Western studies. They can even make the most of some of their old-fashioned practices — if they have retained them — such as chapel and convocations, which bring the whole community together and which, when taken seriously and given care, are as fine instruments for integration as are likely to be devised.

The small liberal arts colleges are much aware of their temptations. Such friends as Earl McGrath and Paul Woodring have warned them that their future lies in doing a few things well rather than many things badly. They must resist pressures toward vocationalism, which is not their role. Departments must be persuaded to offer the best contribution they can give to the liberal education of nonmajors, by first making a critical effort most departments have never made. And the colleges must resist the attempts made to turn them into mere coaching schools for a given graduate department at the expense of liberal education. The best graduate deans are realizing and saying that the greatest gift a college can send the graduate school is a liberally educated person.

The small college has a superb asset, one that is subtle and not easily measured or explained. It answers to one of the deepest human needs, the need for belonging. And the only way to do justice to the sense of community a college can confer is to make an almost preposterous claim for it — namely, that this is something no larger institution, however excellent and richly blessed, can confer in the same measure.

Contrary to some opinion, the small colleges do not merely offer a crutch to the weak or make life deceptively amiable. They are or should be a friendly community, of course, in which both leadership and cooperation can readily be learned. But this very community also exposes its members to one another, and few students can take refuge in anonymity. Faces have names. Weaknesses can be known and corrected, abilities recognized and fostered. A student is made to see the shining margin of possibility. And this is sometimes a great strain — on everybody.

The college asks more of a man than his mind. It proposes to engage his whole being. It directs him to what he can love and honor and serve. It asks him to find himself as a meaningful individual in a meaningful relationship with others. And all this is more than some men want. Colleges that are any good can repel as well as attract, and many will wish no part of this kind of belonging. But some good and gifted men do want it. And those who have come to want it and have known it will remember it all their lives. They will know its power and effect. Colleges, wonderful to say, can even be loved, as Daniel Webster found out long ago.

Because they address themselves to something deep in the constitution of human nature, the small liberal arts colleges will survive and continue to speak to the dynamic spirit of man. Their graduates, in community, have learned something that will give George Orwell’s dehumanized and computer-ridden world of 1984 a bad time. We dare to believe that Rochester and some of the other fine graduate schools will be glad to have some of them around.

For President Wallis’ comments in reply to Dr. Lowry, please see Atlantic Repartee, page 50.