AWP

Rob and I have begun to notice that there are some documents that are more primary, more basic, more foundational than others (this is true of pictures as well; for example, the Groundbreaking picture is certainly more important, more absolute, more fundamental than, say, Pres, Bjork at Stockton’s very first basketball game.)

We have mentioned before that there is a sequence of documents beginning with the 1965 Call to Action, the 1970 Educational Policies Committee Report and the 1974 Self-Study Report that form a basis for viewing the College as it was formed.

However, there is one set of documents that seem to precede all others in terms of pedagogical vision. That is a set of 30+ titles officially called the Academic Working Papers -- colloquially referred to as AWP. Rob and I have named these as “foundational documents” in that there aren’t any below them in significance and influence.

When the Deans arrived on July 1, 1970 a few of the AWPs were written or in outline form. Our task was to revise and flesh out these documents as we discussed them and the ideas they represented. For example, as the first Dean of General Studies, I saw that there were two AWPs that dealt with my Division: (1) AWP2 which was titled “General and Liberal Studies” and (2) AWP9 which was a description of the Division of General Studies. Neither had been written until my Division -- like all of the other Divisions -- became part of the debate about the structure of the College; I wrote the first version as a result of these wide-ranging discussions. I then shared it with the other Deans and the discussion started again. It took us most of the summer of 1970 to write the 30 original AWPs.

There is, however, no doubt but that the most important of these documents was AWP1 entitled simply “General Principles”. It was written on Dec 26, 1970 by the first Academic VP, Wes Tilley. It reflects the long and sometimes difficult discussions of all of us during the summer of 1970. Tilley could have written it before we arrived and it would have dominated and shaped the subsequent discussion. Instead, he waited until the discussion was almost finished and then produced a document that summarized our best and most innovative thinking.

The “We” of AWP1 carries serious weight because the ideas it contains really were OUR ideas. This gave the document an importance and validity that it wouldn’t have had had Tilley established the general principles before we arrived.

Fundamentally, we argue that the heartbeat of a college is dialogue and that the better and wider the dialogue, the better the education. The concept that all voices have importance and must be heard is central to the dialogue we envisioned.

Dialogue, however, demands facts, proofs, questions, answers and principles; perforce, then, dialogue accompanies and follows learning.

AWP1 reveals the fact that the founding Deans were uncomfortable (some of us were downright aggressive on our opposition) to traditional barriers or walls or boundaries of colleges, departments, disciplines and services generally offered at mainstream institutions. We wanted to shatter those limitations. AWP1 mentions erasing the traditional, definitional lines between the classroom and extra-curricular activities. We tried very hard to think about a college where there wasn’t classroom life and outside-the-classroom life. Once again, all things fed into the dialogue and flowed back into all things from the dialogue.

Perhaps one of the most innovative ideas is Principle 6. It suggests that all things at the College -- including the buildings and facilities -- come out of the College’s educational objectives. This, it claimed, was the opposite of what most educational institutions did. We hope to have an essay in the book about this.

Clearly, one of our early concerns was whether students could make informed choices about their curriculum. This was particularly true in General Studies. I had decided early on that there should be no restrictions in the GS curriculum and that students should follow their interests if the courses were offered. The counter argument -- mostly from First Cohort faculty -- was that we would, say, be graduating students who never had a math course or a history course or an accounting course. Exactly! Actually, when you think about it, American colleges graduate students all the time ignorant of wide areas of the college’s offerings. I prevailed for a year or so but eventually the faculty -- under a new Dean of General Studies -- voted in restrictions. Students were required to have two arts & humanities courses, two science courses, two social science courses, etc.

Such requirements are what the “educational establishment” prefers -- they provide work for graduate students and young faculty -- and we insisted on breaking the power of that establishment whenever we could.

The other issue that played a part in whether students could make such choices was our rejection of the in loco parentis concept. Other institutions saw themselves as standing in the place of parents; rules -- and there were lots of them -- were formulated AS IF the college was parental. The culture of the new colleges started in the late 1960 - 1970 period rejected this practice universally and Stockton was no exception. There were all sorts of support services in traditional schools that we had no intentions of creating at Stockton (actually, years later, we did create them but that is another story).

President Bjork was a strong advocate of NOT being in loco parentis. He argued against such services as psychological counseling and health services.

These proposals were radical in 1970; from the long historic perspective of today though, they are not very shocking or different. Applying these ideas at the beginning, however, was a very different thing.

(To be cont’d)