Ideological Undergarments

When considering the contexts in which Stockton was established one immediately thinks of the economic, the social, and the political. Many questions come to mind, therefore, like the following: What was the economic situation of Southern New Jersey at the time and was it likely to be able to support a new college? Would the arrival of such a college help the regional economy grow and in what ways? What was the social situation for the population in southern New Jersey like? Was there a large pool of potential students graduating from high schools who would be drawn to the new college? Finally, regarding the political context, did the coming of a college to southern New Jersey represent the growing political influence of the region in the state? Did that region have sufficient political clout to ensure that the new college would get the resources it needed in the future?  These are all questions that we should considerand no doubt they will all be attended to in the volume. 

However, other questions relating to the context in which a college was founded are those that concern ideology. What ideas did students, faculty, and administrators bring to the college?  What were their expectations about the nature of the society, the direction it seemed to be moving in, and their place in that process? What ideas about education were in place at the time college was established?  How were students, faculty, and administrators viewed?  How did they view each other, based upon what assumptions about the appropriate balance of power that should exist among them? Who did/should education serve? Was it a set of ideas and skills that faculty had mastered and students needed to imbibe? In line with this, was it intended merely to train students for particular vocations, a mechanism for the state to find employees for the positions it needed to have filled – in high schools, in health care, in small and large businesses, etc.? Alternatively, was education a process of expanding the thinking of students, a chance for them to explore a range of opportunities, an extension of their childhood, before the gates of that Weberian “iron cage” clanged shut? Clearly, the former set of questions would be built around a notion of education as very functional and based in current social realities, teaching subservience and usable skills; the latter, by contrast, would be more idealistic in nature, hoping to expand the minds of the students and send them down paths that they might not have even conceived of prior to attending college.

These questions appear to have been on the minds of those who established Richard Stockton College. Different people involved in the attempt to bring a new institution of higher education to South Jersey had different goals. Many of them would have conformed to the more functional vision. If the region was to grow, they may have thought, it would need a college in its midst, both to provide an engine for some of this growth, but also to provide skilled labor for the labor market. One imagines, and it needs to be looked at more closely in order to be substantiated, that the politicians and civic leaders had a pretty clear sense of what a college should be like and how it might fit into the surrounding community. It would be a symbol of growing political power in the southern part of the state, it would contribute to the economy, and it would teach “essential” social values for laborers within the growing labor force. There would not be much desire for a specific kind of liberal education that might be more expansive, and might be more challenging to accommodate in the area (particularly if the values that were imbibed were those of questioning the system, rather than fitting within it). 

But if this was the case, then these political and civic leaders did not get what they intended. For it is clear from the documents that remain from the early days that everyone involved was very much filled with a sense of idealism about education and what it should be achieving for the students. Of course, it is important to recognize that idealism didn’t come in a single guise, and that once idealism became the coin of the realm, debates about what exactly education should be doing and whom it should serve, and how it should achieve these things became highly contentious concerns – and to this I hope to return a little later. 

It should not really be surprising that idealism would have shaped things. The college was being planned at the end of the 1960s and getting established at the beginning of the 1970s. This was a time period that, historically, we would associate with idealism from the optimism of the Kennedy years, to the civil rights movement and the emerging feminist movement. The fact that some of this idealism was being fueled by the discontent embedded in the growing opposition to the Vietnam War, in the increasing radicalism of the Black Power movement, and in the response to the slow down in the American economy bringing Johnson’s “Great Society” to its knees, doesn’t diminish the importance of idealism. Many felt that the importance of educational institutions only grew in light of the growing problems and concerns.  Rightly educated, they might have argued, Americans might not follow leaders into wars in Southeast Asia, a place about which they had very little clear knowledge and understanding; they might learn racial tolerance and support the opening up of opportunities for minorities; and, they would have thought reflexively, education would surely help in bringing the American economy out of the doldrums (though this last response would have taken them down a more functionalist track than some might have been comfortable with). 

What is interesting, though (at least to me), is the origin of some of this idealism. I will just focus on two examples that I think were important to some of those involved in the establishment of Stockton, before discussing (very briefly) the implications of them for Stockton’s early years.

The first is an article first published in the LA Free Press in 1967 by Jerry Farber, now a professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, but then teaching at California State University. The title, one that sits less comfortably now than it may have done at the time, was “The Student as Nigger.” It was then reproduced as the lead essay in Farber’s first book, and became widely recognized and extremely influential. The argument was a simple one – that the status of students, particularly those at his own institution, whom Farber described vividly and sympathetically, could be compared to the status of African Americans. There is an obvious logic to the deployment of African Americans as the benchmark for oppression. It is an oft-repeated strategy for bringing about social change, and was paralleled in the expansion of black radicalism to other movements for social change. One is reminded even, of the movie, “The Commitments,” where the main character explains why his friends should commit themselves to playing Soul music. “The Irish,” he says (and I paraphrase), “are the blacks of Europe; and the inhabitants of Dublin are the blacks of Ireland.” He ends by getting his friends to join him in an incantation of “I’m black and I’m proud.” [Interestingly in transferring the text from the page to the movie screen, the director decided to replace the word deployed in Farber’s title, which Roddy Doyle had used in the novel, with the word “black” – a reflection of the growing squeamishness with regard to the use of this particular epithet]

The point, though (returning from this digression), is that Farber describes students who are completely disenfranchised and forced to respond to the whims of the faculty, who were the equivalent of masters in a Master-Slave relationship – at its best paternalistic, at its worst fundamentally abusive. The only thing such an educational system could be intended to achieve was submissiveness and, in Farber’s view, a robotic quietude (“The Organization Man,” to borrow from William H. Whyte). Clearly, for Farber, higher education had nothing idealistic about it, and it needed to be radically transformed so that it became more focused on the needs and concerns of students as sentient beings and as individuals with rights. This view was clearly likely to be influential at this time among students, who were prone to believe that they had been sold a bill of goods by their elders and that they needed to graduate (the Hoffman movie appearing in the same year as Farber’s essay) from all the hypocrisy they believed was evident in contemporary American society. It certainly fit with a time of turmoil on campuses, from the bombing at the University of Wisconsin, to the riots and strikes at Columbia and Berkeley (among many other universities), the growth of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and finally the shootings at Kent State University. 

What is evident from the documents designing the college and its curriculum is that the administrators establishing Stockton were sensitive to the concerns laid out by Farber. Their college would not be one that reestablished a Master-Slave relationship found at many colleges. It would endeavor to empower students. But, if this was the case, who were these students that they were going to empower? Were they really all idealistic radicals waiting to climb the barricades or storm the ramparts of academe, slaves seeking emancipation with an earnest desire to move from back-of-the-big-house to the mansion itself?

One answer to this question can be found in the second document I want to look at here.  This document provides a more complex view of these students, but in a way still created an imperative for our founders to establish a college that would think expansively about them and not merely provide vocational training. This document is a pamphlet entitled “The Student in Higher Education,” put out (in 1968) by the Committee on the Student in Higher Education, which had been appointed by the Hazen Foundation early in 1966. Joseph F. Kauffman, dean of student affairs at the University of Wisconsin, a college that was witnessing considerable unrest when this document appeared, was chair of the committee and its members included people who were clearly at the forefront of the fields of psychology and education. 

Surprisingly, the committee found that far from being idealistic, the students were losing some of this impulse from their ideological make-up.  A couple of passages are worth quoting at length: 

The members of the Committee are deeply concerned about the waning of idealism which occurs during the young adult years. We share an impression, backed up by some empirical data, that the seventeen-year-old is a hesitant, vulnerable idealist with a great reservoir of generosity and an almost equally great tangle of fears and insecurities. The cynicism he displays is – initially at least – merely a cover for his fragile hopefulness. He is concerned about the “big picture,” the meaning of life, the improvement of the world, and service to mankind. He is curious, reasonably open, and eager to learn, to have new experiences, to think great thoughts and dream mighty dreams.  As the late teen years become the early twenties, he grows more “realistic,” becomes aware of the harsh “necessities” of life, and understands the he must “settle down” and “be Practical.” His intellectual goals and his service-oriented generosity are slowly stifled by the need to compromise with the requirements of the established order.  What was wide open, or at least relatively open, at 17 is firmly closed, in most instances, at 22.

Clearly, the language here is somewhat unsettling, though the pronoun is intended to be gender neutral; but the large majority of students at this time were men, so the fact that this might well have summed up the sensibilities of adolescent boys, rather than the girls, is perhaps not such a concern. The point is, as the document continues to elaborate, that the college years were witnessing a shut down of the idealist impulse and turning students into practical realists: 

This closing off of possibilities and instincts is not caused by the college alone; indeed it probably occurs at a much earlier age among those young people who do not go to college. But the college can and ought to do more to inhibit the closing off process.  Currently, there is little in the young person’s experience with the college social system that gives him any reason to believe there are alternatives. For this reason, the next major step in higher educational reform must be to look for ways in which the total college experience will preserve for an ever-increasing number of American students their youthful idealism, refined and hardened perhaps, by the fires of realism, but not burned out.

This seems strange, at first glance, to imagine that the generation of “Berkeley in the Sixties” (depicted in the documentary by this name) and Woodstock (1969) would have been students who had burned out. But there is a degree to which the protest of student activists was in alignment with some of the concerns of these educational reformers. Perhaps, the reformers might have suggested, if the students were able to sustain their idealism, their sense of possibilities and the expansiveness of their views of the world, then they would not succumb to the “days of rage” or the “chiliasm” of despair; nor would they manifest so much cynicism and/or withdraw into vocationalism and the pursuit of livelihood and profit.

The need for reform and the possibilities for change were clear for these reformers:

This clearly is an extraordinarily ambitious goal. It is a vision of social change and reform that is well calculated to overpower the already hard-pressed administrator and faculty member. But this vision, first seen by American higher education itself, is part of a tradition of idealism which is essential to the genius of American higher education. Moreover, to solve the problems that our complex and dynamic society has generated in the last quarter century will require all the idealism we can muster. The preservation of youthful enthusiasm, which we believe now for the first time is technically possible, may no longer be an option but a necessity, and its decline an unnecessary waste. If this is the case, the argument that such a goal is revolutionary and utopian ceases to be relevant.

This, then, was the ideological context underpinning the work of the founders of Stockton. While many would not have agreed with this need to extend childhood and its idealistic sensibilities further into adulthood, those who were pushing for the establishment of a new state-funded Liberal Arts college in South Jersey seem to have been very much aware of the need to keep this goal in view. But the last sentence from the quote is important to bear in mind, I think. The goal was an idealistic one, it is true, but it was not a revolutionary and utopian idealism that was sought. Indeed, I would hazard to guess that what was being sought here was idealism of the kind embedded in John Dewey’s pragmatism. Idealistic pragmatism appears, on the face of it, to be an oxymoron; but there is a degree to which the philosophical pragmatist feels that the idealistic course, the pursuit of a particular goal, rightly conceived, is also the pragmatic one. [And the influence of Dewey is no doubt what the Committee on the Student in Higher Education was reaching for in its reference to “this vision, first seen by American higher education itself,” a tradition of idealism that “is essential to the genius of American higher education.”]

But in light of this pragmatic core and the desire to not just give voice to student unhappiness, the various different positions taken by the reformers became significant. This was particularly the case as the project itself came to be worked and developed. I will not expand on this right now, but will instead end with one thought: At Stockton, all the main players on the campus were imbued with a clear and distinct sense of idealism; the fact that they were had been given an opportunity to fashion something unique – a college that they could design themselves, serving goals and a mission that they believed in. One could say this about the President, Richard Bjork, the Vice-President, Wes Tilley, the deans, the faculty, and the students. What becomes clear though as the college went through its first decade, however, was that the visions of these different players were not always in alignment. Each party felt it had a clear ideological foundation underpinning its actions; but they did not necessarily recognize this in those other parties with which they had to contend.