Escape From(m) Freedom

Wes Tilley’s "Examination of the Goals of Stockton College" is a curious piece, but one of great magnitude, I believe, to Stockton. Tilley penned the 73-page manifesto in the Summer of 1973, in the immediate aftermath of having been fired by President Bjork from his position as the founding Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the college.

Having learned this fact, one might be forgiven for assuming, on picking up the document to read, that it would be a political screed, blaming those below him for any failures and criticizing those above him for unsound judgment. This is far from the case, and while there may be a passive aggressive tone at times, and some sniping going on in the text, most of this is not evident to someone like myself who is unfamiliar with some of the targets. Ken, I believe, would recognize some of those caught in the crosshairs, and having known the man at the time, he would be aware of where Tilley’s anger about being removed from his position had carried over into the document.

But from my perspective, as someone who has penned an angry screed or two, this is a very measured piece, a little overbearing sometimes in terms of its language and its resort to theory rather than example to make its case, but very interesting. Tilley was clearly an exceedingly well-informed intellectual who was very self-conscious about what he did, and knew exactly how what he was attempting to achieve at Stockton fit within the American educational landscape. Apparently, his tone in the paper, one in which he defines in great detail every element of the college to see whether it should be considered in one category (e.g., objective) or another (e.g., goal or desideratum), was what he brought to meetings as well. This would have annoyed me to no end, but I am sure I, like the people who worked with him, would have been the better for it.

That said, I want to focus on just one aspect of this document. This fits within the explanation of what Tilley sees as the reasons for the failure of parts of the Stockton experiment. In particular, I want to examine the collegium and preceptorial, both of which were key elements of what Tilley brought to Stockton.

Both of these fit within what Tilley saw as one of the objectives of the college, namely to afford students “a large measure of self-direction” (Tilley draws this from the Prospectus of 1971). They were to be able to create their own courses, and their own curriculum, though the amount of their self-direction (how many courses? How much of the curriculum?) was unspecified. They were to undertake this with their preceptor, who would not merely provide a blueprint for achieving graduation in a particular major as expeditiously as possible, but would rather point students in particular directions based upon deep and philosophical discussion about what they wanted to accomplish. Through the collegium, preceptorial groupings would come together to create community, and also become the foundation for the college’s shared governance – among students, faculty, and administration.

By any measure this was a radical vision, but Tilley is keenly aware of the problems it faced in the educational landscape of the 1970s, and that it would be likely to face for the remainder of the century. He notes that the college had advertized itself as a place where these kinds of institutional arrangements were going to occur in the hopes that it would attract students who yearned for this kind of freedom and faculty who wished to be involved in this kind of close interaction with students in preceptorials. And yet, in neither instance had this occurred. The students didn’t really understand what the point of these preceptorials was, and their understanding of freedom was very different from the one implicit in the preceptorial structure; while many faculty members, for a variety of reasons, came to dislike the preceptorial approach also.

From the student perspective, freedom was clearly important, but this freedom was to be found at a different level from that of self-direction. There were two, somewhat contradictory, elements to this freedom that Tilley observes – though there may be others also I am forgetting. One is that students want to be able to assess whether the faculty are doing their job properly, so that there should be a clear set of objectives in their courses and in their curriculum, and the faculty should help them reach those goals – as quickly (and therefore as cheaply) as possible. The idea of going to a faculty office to shoot the breeze and discuss the larger issues framing the person’s educational career, while it may have been the experience of some and welcomed by many, was often alien to the first-generation college student, whose grasp of academic fundamentals was perhaps not as sound as would be desirable for him or her to take advantage of such interactions to the fullest extent. And where there was a line outside the door with other students waiting to receive the faculty member’s attention, the faculty member may have been less than willing to oblige with such a conversation. The student’s freedom in this process came in his or her ability to assess and evaluate whether the faculty member was providing the kind of positive experience that he or she wanted – the birth of student entitlement, which is a far cry from self-direction.

At the same time, freedom also meant the breaking down of traditional educational markers of excellence and achievement – an erosion of standards. This harks back to the idea then current (mentioned in a previous blog entry) that the student was the “nigger of the world.” What was the wisdom that faculty wished to impart, and really, beyond certain clearly defined (and frequently vocational) skills, what right did they have to suggest that something was better than something else, morally, intellectually, spiritually, etc.? This touches on an underlying crisis that Tilley seems to recognize as being in existence at the time, which revolves around the question of what an educational establishment is trying to accomplish? If it is certain vocational skills, that is all well and good – it can be assessed in accordance with the number of people earning particular credentials and their subsequent success in the job market later. But if there is something more than this, and every Liberal Arts College would suggest that there is, what is that additional element comprised of, and how is it to be measured? In a world where students are going on strike and endeavoring to suggest that their understanding of the world may even be more valuable than that of the professor in his ivory tower, there is a significant problem to be faced – one that comes directly to the fore in the preceptorial.

For if it is true that the student may not be willing to listen, it is also the case that the young professor may be less than willing to speak. The faculty preceptor may have felt, and Tilley believed this to be the case with young faculty, where he or she didn’t believe they had established their legitimacy and didn’t feel comfortable providing much direction for their students. The average age of the faculty was low, owing to the recruiting practices at the new college, and while these faculty may have been open philosophically to the idea of precepting, they may have felt less than comfortable in the fairly confrontational environment prevailing at that time. Meanwhile, those who were older and more comfortable in their view of what was good and bad educationally, regarding what their standards were and what students ought and ought not to be doing, were frequently less committed to preceptorials and were more devoted to the more traditional disciplinary structures. [The youth of the faculty in NAMS, for example, led to a greater sense of commitment to the preceptorial culture, and closer interactions between faculty and students, compared to the situation in ARHU, where there were several older and more firmly established faculty, who, I believe, disliked the preceptorial approach.]

Other reasons could be provided for the failure of preceptorials, but one other aspect worth dwelling on is that, however committed a faculty member may have been to the idea – and there were several who spent hours upon hours working directly with students – this was still uncompensated labor; and this was bound to present problems. If one were to teach three 4-hour courses, and that constituted one’s workload, why would one want to kill oneself doing preceptorials in the way they had been designed? After not too long, one would look at the next office and see that the same commitment wasn’t being put forth there, and yet that other faculty member was receiving the same level of compensation; one would then most likely adjust one’s approach accordingly. Add a union into this mix and the likelihood that the Tilley-inspired preceptorial would survive in any meaningful sense becomes almost non-existent.

The larger philosophical questions remain in place, and these give Tilley’s document a tone of disappointment, in my view, rather than one of anger. The administrators, faculty, and students had been given a rare opportunity to create something new; something that would allow faculty to free themselves of some of the traditional strictures then in place in academe; something that would encourage students to challenge themselves in an educational environment freer and less structured than anything else they were likely to encounter at another college. But, instead of embracing these freedoms, Tilley witnessed all of his innovations, and those of his deans, being rejected piecemeal, and really without any true test being undertaken as to whether they would work.

Perhaps, in the end, it came down to another objective of the college that encompassed two different notions that were sometimes mistaken for each other. This objective was that the college should be both innovative and experimental. For Tilley, the latter, with all its assumptions that one would endeavor to determine whether the experiment was working, was far more preferable than innovation. Innovation was change for its own sake, and something put in place could just as easily be altered in the next wave of innovation. Tilley wrote:

During the past few years, especially since 1968, a number of colleges and universities have dedicated themselves to innovation. Experimentation seems less popular, probably because a good many recent innovations have been undertaken not in the spirit of inquiry, which would mean that they were subject to continual re-examination, but as new dogmas, reflecting the conviction of their sponsors that certain things have been done badly and that they, the sponsors, can do them better.

For Tilley, the spirit of inquiry was important and an experiment needed to be tested rather than put aside in a rush to a new innovative, and dogmatic, approach.

But, while Tilley might come close to blaming particular people who rejected his offerings, he also provided a sense that he felt that this was really a moment in time when things were possible, and that this would not remain the case. The same forces associated with 1968 that he might have felt doomed his project, also made it possible by, to some degree, fostering the notion that a public liberal arts college modeled on the small private institutions was a worthy experiment. In addition, as a new college, Stockton would have some time to do some experimenting before it needed to answer to powerful forces, a Board of Trustees, for example, which might not have the same liberal perspective of the college, and the State, which too might have had different intentions for the institution. The simple question – was a self-directed student necessarily what the State wanted in its workforce? – provides a sense of the problem. The question could be answered affirmatively, of course, but most legislators would have a hard time working through an explanation of why this was actually the case. They were far more likely merely to demand the college be more responsive to the demands of the job market, and not simply turn out free thinking individuals.

Tilley’s penultimate paragraph is worth quoting at length, as it gives a flavor of his sense of the forces impinging on the Stockton experiment:

Finally, if the present paper were extended to questions about the selection and ordering of institutional objectives, it would be necessary to consider the very great changes now occurring in American and other societies, and the consequently changing demands on higher education. For example, the decision of Americans to open the advantages of higher education to all or nearly all citizens was made long ago, but only recently began to create severe problems for the undergraduate curriculum. Now it appears that what a great many students want and need is not academic learning, but vocational training. It seems quite likely that by the end of the twentieth century there will be not more but fewer colleges of the conventional four-year undergraduate kind, and more vocational post-secondary institutions. Yet this development poses a new problem: cut off from the sources of research and study, vocational colleges may well encounter a worse form of the affliction private and state colleges have suffered in the recent past: they will have trouble attracting enthusiastic and capable faculties, and they will find it hard to challenge the more able students as they would be challenged in academically strong institutions. The resulting waste of student abilities, probably intensified by the competition for graduate and professional training, could prove damaging to the society, and would certainly be damaging to the students themselves. It seems, then, that colleges will have to work closely with vocational schools, and probably will do well to work out more flexible patterns of vocationalism, with more varied kinds of academic opportunity available for the greatest number of students. In effect each college would become a university, with component schools ranging from vocational to metaphysical, and students permitted to spend varying length of time in traditional and new kinds of academic study according to their abilities, interests, and needs.

In effect, then, Tilley may have been recognizing that he too might need to propose making the escape from freedom in such a world that he saw emerging. The educational, the social, indeed the American (and later, global) landscapes would be such that those colleges offering the freedoms that he had advocated would become starved for resources because they weren’t meeting what were considered to be the needs of students; such freedoms would be considered unaffordable luxuries, when particular credentials were their keys to a better livelihood. The college would need to branch out and take on new kinds of educational endeavor if it were to keep any of the highly valued, but not easily measured, metaphysical elements from simply withering away.