In December 1974, only a few years after Stockton had opened its doors, a faculty member, Allen Lacy, published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “What Happened to Erewhon?” The core of the argument, summarized right below the title, was this: “The new colleges of the 1960’s have not realized the utopian goals set by their founders.” Early on in the piece, Lacy elaborated on this argument, writing: “To put it bluntly, no new school has succeeded in realizing the ideals stated in the original rhetoric. I am coming to suspect that the fault lies not in the times, but in the ideals themselves, and in the peculiar nature of new colleges as institutions with utopian blueprints.”
Almost immediately, the reader is left wondering two things: First, did the founders of these colleges have utopian goals and blueprints? And, second, was the brief period between the founding of these colleges and 1974, when Lacy was offering his judgment, sufficient time in which to assess whether or not they had “realized” their goals (utopian or otherwise)?
Perhaps, before dealing with these two questions directly, it is worth taking a moment to outline the argument further. Fortunately, Ken Tompkins has provided me with an excellent synopsis of Lacy’s major points that I do not think I could improve upon:
“His argument in the piece seems clear: (1) new colleges will never stand the weight of conservative, academic culture; (2) new colleges are reverse images of all other institutions; (3) new colleges are not new; (4) educational idealism will get you nowhere; (5) new colleges will let you down – they promise much and deliver little; (6) new colleges offer great possibilities for conflict and for collective disappointment; (7) finally, new colleges offer ‘unusual chances for academic degradation’."
This is a strange mixture of saying that these Utopians haven’t been able to achieve any of their goals because of the nature of “the institutional inevitabilities of higher education,” and saying that they have been placing us in danger of undermining higher education. While it is not impossible to do both of these things (the two positions are not entirely contradictory), it is difficult to imagine that everything good that was suggested by these Utopians was either not new or unable to change anything, whereas everything bad that they initiated was in danger of causing “degradation.”
The long and the short of Lacy’s position appears to be that he just did not like the alternatives these “Utopians” had come up with. As he indicated at the end of the essay, “Were I to help start yet a third new college [he had been a charter member of Kirkland College before coming to Stockton], my advice to the founders would be to forgo excessive claims about the innovational wonders to be achieved, to strive to some extent to be …ordinary! I have a growing hunch that in the ordinary—even, to use a word in disrepute at Erewhon, in the traditional – there is much good to be found, even for Erewhon.”
Erewhon, Erewhon, what is this? Lacy’s mention of this name brings us back to the question of Utopianism. Erewhon refers, of course, to Samuel Butler’s utopian novel by that name, one of many that appeared in the second half of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic. Utopianism was something that captivated many people’s minds at this time. Social theorists, like Butler, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ignatius Donnelly, among others, saw the creation of the literary utopia as a device through which they could excoriate their own society and promote change.
Two more negative visions of utopianism should also be noted. The notion of utopianism was often cause for derision – a dismissive charge made by one theorist against another. Left leaning theorists argued that, instead of taking up a critical posture or recognizing that social change and the conflict that created it was on-going, utopians merely endeavored to invert the present and envisioned a static and unchanging world. In the process they ended up promoting their own highly bureaucratized and regimented world. Those on the right averred that, instead of recognizing that all societies were formed around social inequalities that were nigh on impossible to eradicate (and this was undesirable anyway), the utopian put forward dangerous and fanciful notions that only made things worse. One might suggest that the criticisms proffered by Lacy fit with this last view of Utopianism.
So, we ask ourselves whether any of these descriptions fit the founders of these new institutions. Such people were clearly critical of the society and the educational system of their day, as Lacy himself noted. “Anyone on a university campus in the mid-1960’s,” he wrote, “is familiar with the litany of complaint. Education had become a bureaucratized, impersonal process in which students were stapled, mutilated, and destroyed by aloof administrators. The person was reduced to a Social Security number in the campus computer. The lockstep curriculum was outmoded and rigid, the educational analogue of the industrial assembly line. Faculty members were elite grantsmen-researchers, shamefully delegating undergraduate instruction to exploited graduate assistants. Colleges and universities were perverted by involvement in Cold War geopolitics and easy acceptance of shabby domestic corporate practices.”
Lacy believed that these new educators were given the opportunity to create Nowhere, and they seized this opportunity to do something completely different from that which was being done elsewhere – and at no point does he indicate these people were in any way incorrect in their assessment of the academic landscape. There clearly was a sense that something new or better could be accomplished, but what is clear from looking at Stockton’s early days is that there was never any sense of a unity of vision, right from the outset – a Plan or Blueprint. The founders seemed to have recognized that they could deviate from the norm and make some changes, but they also immediately recognized that they were working with others who didn’t share their vision to the same degree as they. They also recognized that they were part of a state educational system, that they were located in Southern New Jersey (and so would be working with particular kinds of students and in particular kinds of communities), that the labor market and labor relations would have a say in certain areas, and many other things besides. Given that conflict seems to have appeared in different guises very early on, once the doors of the Mayflower Hotel opened, it seems that to suggest that these founders believed that they would create something that would be moved forward simply by consensus around a unified blueprint or plan, when so much about the political and educational landscape at the time was fraught with tension, seems unfair to them and the projects in which they invested their energies.
The left criticism of Utopianism also doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny in terms of the Stockton transcript. Who would the Utopians be? The Board of Directors, the President, the Vice-President, the Deans, the faculty, the students? All of these people had different visions and different goals. They all may have wished to change some of the problems that they saw endemic in academia, but beyond a few ideas that they may have held in common, they do not seem to have been on the same page with regard to the purpose or the method of these things. Take the Collegium, for example. This was a very strange superstructure molded around the preceptorials, with faculty, staff and administrators making up small communities – almost college-like communities without colleges. But the President, Vice-President, the Deans, and faculty all seem to have had different ideas about what the collegium should look like, how devoted faculty should be to their collegia, and whether or not it was to have some formal political role to play. Not surprisingly, the collegium didn’t last for very long. Some would complain they were given up before they had been fully tested; others would argue that they were never workable and needed to be quickly discarded along with some of the other innovations. This was experimentation not with a view to creating Utopia, but rather, in the vein of a Franklin Roosevelt, with a view to determining what might work better than current practice.
Only the third notion of Utopian seems to fully fit the view of Stockton. But, if any such experimentation and tinkering with the system as it then was, is sufficient to dismiss someone as being Utopian, then it covers almost anyone from the most pragmatic to the most idealistic, and applies to anyone who wanted to see some form of change. It reminds one of the dichotomy that Karl Mannheim draws in Ideology and Utopia. The former represents the ideas of that which exists, the status quo; the latter applies to any idea thought up to supplant it. While Mannheim himself (as far as I can remember) was not dismissive of the notion of Utopia, one can see that this kind of duality can very quickly make the notion of change itself suspect, leaving the social being in a position of being forced to accept that which already exists.
As Lacy noted, there are indeed “institutional inevitabilities of higher education,” which put constraints on those who would attempt to build something new. But do these inevitabilities necessarily mean that the endeavor to create something new is a waste of time and energy, and simply hubris. Is it a case of the Nowhere Man not knowing what he is missing, and suggesting that he should take his time and not worry, as the world is at his command? Or are there alternatives, which Nowhere men and their gender-inclusive ilk may lead us to yet? My own view is that even after all the limits of the way in which things developed are taken into consideration, it is still evident that things are done differently (and frequently better) at Stockton than at many other colleges and universities (particularly with regard to the areas of complaint noted in the 1960's). This was not the result of a blueprint being created in the first years; it was rather the product of many different people undertaking, in divergent ways, to right some of the wrongs they themselves had experienced. It was certainly worth the effort.
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