Tuesday, December 7, 2010

10 Things Everyone Should Know About the Early College

In my judgment one of the sad facts about the College is that we have not passed on the early culture or, at least, the best parts of that early culture. Because we haven’t done so, faculty joining the College from the mid-1980s until today have had to “invent” a culture and, as might be expected, that culture reflects graduate experience at major universities.

Thus, there is a reason for us early folk – those who came here at the beginning and into the 1970s – sensing that we are more like those major universities each day.

Let me hasten to add that some of the ideas we had when the College opened were not good ones. Perhaps the best example, was the idea that we would not have a remedial writing program here; instead, each faculty would teach writing in the context of their courses. In a sense we would not have a “writing problem” because all of us had a writing problem and we would deal with it individually.

All of this made sense in the months before we opened but, in practice, and given the types of students who came here, it was a bad idea. By 1975 we had a full-blown writing program.

Still many of our ideas were good ones; at least I thought so then and still do. It is those ideas that haven’t been passed on and, thus, few faculty know about them today. I hope in this brief listing of the 10 things everyone should know about to, at the very least, suggest that there are reasons why we are the way we are.

Finally, in case you are wondering why some of the ideas are still not part of our culture, I blame the early faculty. A few simply did not accept the innovations we had put in place and wanted to replicate their graduate experience.

Grass

The original plan for the College was to use grass only on athletic fields. The campus was supposed to have been planted with native plants and grasses found in the Pine Barrens. In a recent email exchange with Richard Schwartz – the first College Planner – he confirmed this plan.

Had we followed the original plan, we would not now have constant mowing – usually outside my classroom windows while I am teaching – and the resultant noise and pollution. I am uncertain why we moved so quickly to planting grass but it was everywhere around the original buildings by 1974.

Modular Construction

Given the pervasive modular construction of public (and private) buildings today, the fact that the College is constructed of modular metal panels comes as no surprise. In 1971, however, using them here was noteworthy if not unique.

First of all, the buildings were designed using a “5 foot open module”. This means that anything inside the building can be changed easily. It also means that the metal used to construct the buildings was available in standard sizes; comparatively little cutting or welding was necessary thus speeding the construction process.

But there was another reason – a more subtle one – for modularity. As Richard Schwartz describes it:

….the physical plan had to meet the educational criteria, in both site and building development. Stockton’s educational plan was based on academic divisions rather than traditional departments. Therefore individual buildings for departments were not considered, and all of the building units were designed to be part of one continuous facility, with each multi-use wing or pod, connected to a central spine or gallery.

This means that our buildings can respond quickly to changes in pedagogical design and purposes. The Founders envisioned an institution that would change its curricular direction as needed and do so quickly. For example, as computer technology advanced, the College could construct labs in a variety of configurations. No one department or division had control over space as is so often the case in older institutions.

An even better example would be the open science lab concept which the College started with in 1971. This idea was very new – as far as I know it was only used at one other college in the US;  there would be one big room for all science labs. A chemistry class might meet there in the morning and in the afternoon a physics class might use it. Each class could set up the lab space needed by moving lab tables and by plugging into gas/electric/water receptacles in the floor.

It sounded wonderful but, unfortunately, it didn’t work in practice. There were safety concerns, some experiments had to be left for long periods of time, equipment storage became a major problem and setting up took time out of the class.

Finally, the overall College design had a “street” (commonly called the Gallery) with classroom wings off from that. This street would be a place to meet, buy things, eat and commune. It would remain but all other buildings inside could be shaped according to academic needs.

No Chairs

There is a simple reason why the institution has no departments and departmental chairs; the Founders had had bad experiences with them. Each of us had had chairs – in the 1960s they had both budget and hiring/firing power – who abused their power. We openly sought for other ways of organizing faculty. We were, of course, not the first college to experiment with not having department chairs but we were the first in New Jersey.

Basically, we thought chairs could undemocratically influence the pedagogy, the level of faculty competence, would exacerbate class differences to control and would favor some faculty over others. We had real-life experiences to confirm these fears.

By creating elected co-ordinators we could produce a rather powerless office in which all members of a program would serve, we could instill in programs a democratic decision making process, we would eliminate favoritism and rank differences by insisting that all faculty work together for the common good. At the same time we shifted power up to the dean’s level to whom we gave budget and hiring/firing power.

It seems to me that recent suggestions to change this arrangement to Department chairs would vastly move the College into the problems we worked so hard to avoid. Some programs at the College already act like departments by allowing the co-ordinator to make unrestricted and un-reviewed decisions. That is never tolerated in other programs who see the value in the original arrangement.

Scattered Offices

The recent wondering about why faculty offices were not clustered around disciplines – as they are at other colleges – almost convinced me to write a general note to the faculty explaining why. Again, it was not an accident.

The Founders’ thinking was that the natural tendency for faculty is to group by discipline (or by the closest distance to mail and copy machines). Given our insistence about innovation and change, we decided that we would have “scattered offices” where faculty would be grouped by the variety of disciplines and not by one. Thus, in my first faculty office in H-Wing there was a senior psychologist next to me with a nurse on the other side. Across the hall, was a real estate expert, a very young mathematician and the nearest LITT person was well down the hallway.

I have always relished the many discussions – and a few arguments – that took place as we shared our perspectives on classroom problems, administrative actions and student silliness. More importantly, we found a community of folks whose similarities vastly outweighed their few differences.

In spite of the distances that faculty might have to walk to get mail or make copies, I suggest that this is a practice worthy of strong opposition whenever someone who doesn’t understand attempts to change it.

Choice

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I had two choices – Music Appreciation or Art Appreciation – in four years. The rest of the courses I took both in the English Department and in general education were chosen for me on a mimeographed piece of paper. The Founders – once again – were determined to give students as many choices as possible. Also, again, we didn’t invent this idea; it was very current in the new colleges that were popping up almost every year between 1965 and 1975. One other factor, at least, was an influence as well. Students had just been allowed to drink at 18 and were going off to Viet Nam to fight. Our thinking was that if they could drink and risk dying for us, they could certainly choose among a panoply of courses.

Choice was critical for the General Studies course offerings. In the programs, we left it up to those trained in the discipline to determine which courses students needed and in which sequence.

We never kidded ourselves, however, that students would arrive at the College prepared to make intelligent choices. Thus, teaching students how to choose was a central requirement for faculty preceptors. We thought that – through questions and discussion – students could be guided to identify their interests, their goals and their abilities and from those could be guided into appropriate choices.

Precepting Was Teaching

For the Founders, it followed, therefore, that precepting was a critical and central activity and should be part of the faculty load. We envisioned preceptors seeing their students whenever there was a need; faculty would be available to assist students in whatever issues they faced at whatever time of the day – within reason, of course.

Precepting, we insisted, was advising only when students needed to actually choose courses. For example, a freshman arriving might be challenged by the question “What do you REALLY want to do?” The student might answer that she had always wanted to be a physician. Fine, we might respond, but do you know what courses you will need to take to become a physician? Do you know how long it will take and how much money you will have to borrow? Perhaps, the Preceptor might assign readings to get at answers for these questions. Perhaps, the Preceptor might know a newly-minted MD for the freshman to talk to, etc.

Today, I doubt that discussions like these often take place. Precepting tends to be a review of program requirements (originally our Preceptees were NOT assigned to us on the basis of their interests and our discipline as they are now). We can, if asked, provide answers about how to dodge and weave through other College issues – financial aid, General Studies requirements, etc. But it is infrequent for Preceptors that I have talked to be asked about personal problems, cultural issues, Greek Life and all of the other concerns that students have.

Faculty got credit for one teaching hour per year – one course for the four years. Once again, faculty perceived their lives as being totally devoted to students and so pushed hard for this system to be converted into the present system of advising. We have, in the past, required students to see us; now, of course, that expectation has been abandoned and it is possible for students to attend the College without ever having seen a Preceptor.

No Privilege

It is no accident that there are no faculty parking lots, faculty dining hall and other evidence of faculty rank and favoritism. The Founders saw that privilege leads to class and class leads to inequity, deference, status and, ultimately, resentment. We have managed since the beginning to keep privilege out (mostly) though every once in a while someone suggests how nice it would be if faculty had their own dining room.

We came to this conclusion as part of the insistence on democracy and equality that we laid down in 1970. Once again, we didn’t invent such ideas; they were in the air and water in the 1960s. Those of us who regularly protested for both the Civil Rights and Anti-Viet Nam War movements were more than suspicious of those in power who had information the rest of us didn’t.  As a digression, there is a direct correlation between personal computers produced in the late 1970s and the rejection of a special class of information holders of the same period.

There are concomitant practices to all of this; not only don’t we have special faculty dining rooms but we are universally not called Dr. or Prof., all have the same size offices and furniture, all teach in similar classrooms and all have to follow the same procedures (generally) that students do.

No In Loco Parentis

One of the distinct aspects of the earliest Stockton – very few, if any, colleges asserted such a policy at the time – was the rejection of in loco parentis. When I say “rejection” I mean just that. The first President was adamant that the College was not going to act like a parent to students who could drink, vote and fight in Viet Nam as adults. He said this at a time when most institutions were developing strong programs to support student life – psychological counseling, health care, financial advising, Greek Life, career counseling and other services performed by parents or high schools at home.

Bjork’s thinking was clear: students were defined as adults in the larger society so the College necessarily had to reflect that definition in its policies and practices as other community agencies (e.g., police departments) also had to do.

Frankly, the Founders and the early faculty didn’t see the implications of this policy at first. Some faculty and all students – and their parents – immediately raised questions. The College’s Admissions staff began to hear complaints from parents of prospective students that not having such services as the other State colleges was a “deal breaker” in selecting a college.

Many of the early policies were changed by faculty as I have said; this policy is an example of the market place and its wider community having a powerful influence on an early idea. Within a year or so after the opening in 1971, the College was hiring Student Affairs staff.

January Term

A January Term was not, of course, a new idea in 1971. Other colleges (e.g., Dartmouth) scheduled their courses this way. For us, it offered both students and faculty an opportunity to shape intensive courses off campus (January was an ideal time to fly to Europe), to create very focused courses (e.g., a study of one playwright’s play culminating in attending a NY city performance) or to invent a totally new course (e.g., The Block – oppressed sub-cultures of the central city)

The January Term was a critical aspect of the whole General Studies effort because it encouraged new course design – especially courses with some “risk”, moved faculty into teaching outside of their disciplines, offered the opportunity to add activities away from the campus and, for students, confirmed “engagement”.

Sadly, faculty did not like this arrangement having been used to the post-holiday time off, needing to attend professional meetings frequently held at this time and, basically, refusing to grab the opportunity to develop new courses.

The January Term was gone by 1973.

No Grades

The Founders’ rejection of traditional grades was based on research that argued that very precise calculating of GPAs and other ways of numerically assessing student performance created enormous stress on students. Tragically, in some cases, this stress led to suicide. Also, our distrust of much of higher education practices in 1970 eventuated in our rejections of A – F grades. Most of the new colleges of the late 1960s – e.g., Hampshire – had also rejected grades so the possibility was in the air.

Rejecting traditional grades was relatively easy; replacing them with some other notation was hard. Some colleges simply had Pass/Fail or Pass/No Record. This latter arrangement appealed to us and after much debate we chose it. Our variation was H – S – N. The “H” was for outstanding work. The “S” was for satisfactory work. The “N” meant no grade would be recorded for failure.

This arrangement, too, became very unpopular with faculty. What if, they asked, there was a student who wasn’t doing outstanding work yet the work was better than satisfactory. Didn’t we need something (e.g., a “B” in the traditional system) between H and S? Wouldn’t students, they asked, be troubled with this system because they would go from a high school record of A – everyone knew its meaning – to an H which no one knew what it signified? What if, they asked, graduate schools rejected our students because they couldn’t exactly interpret what our grades meant?

The compromise proposed by the faculty was to have the students choose. For example, a student might chose A – F for courses in her major but chose H – S – N for her General Studies course. That compromise was accepted and was offered for many years until the College simply discontinued H – S – N totally because no student had chosen it.

Final Observations

I have argued for many years – indeed, I argued in the 1970s – that we needed to test these ideas for, say, a period of five years. If, after that time, members of the community (mostly faculty) still wanted to change these original policies, so be it. But, I argued, to abandon them within a few months of the College opening and, seemingly, merely because they were different from our undergraduate experiences seemed hasty and unwarranted.

Most of the aspects I’ve written about here were gone by 1975 at the latest. Most, not all, were rejected by the faculty. Most, in my opinion, had some merit and should have been modified but not abandoned. Most faculty at the College now know little about them; they should because these 10 things were part of what made us distinctive and unique.

Finally, a central document in our thinking was a small booklet entitled The Hazen Report (1968). Briefly, this report examined the situation of the American College Student in 1968 and found genuine problems. It also argued that American higher education was rapidly changing and a new university was being born which so radically different that present institutions needed to change to meet the new student, new faculty and new academic culture. The Report deserves a new reading.

1 comment:

  1. I graduated from stockton in 1974 in applying to grad school there was no problem having indiana university excepting the h-s-n system into getting excepted in fact since i had all but 2 h's they said my gpa was high enough so that i didn't have to take gre. During my stay at stockton the faculty was young,bright, dedicated to teaching everything you could hope for in a college.

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