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.

To Long Prevail

Sometime in 1987, only a few years after the beginning of her presidency at Stockton, Vera King Farris produced a confidential report for the Board of Trustees. The report appears to have had two objectives, to record what the President had been accomplishing in her work, and, secondly, to respond to a number of problems arising from an investigation then underway into some financial dealings of the college.

These two halves of the document are very different indeed, and may have been intended originally to be two entirely separate documents. The first, called “Accomplishments at Stockton State College since April 7, 1986,” was probably meant to be an annual report to the Board. It is comprised of quite an impressive list of the array of initiatives then under way, many prompted, I would imagine, by the President herself. Taken in isolation this document would suggest a college moving forward in some quite impressive ways.

But, there is that parenthetical subtitle to this section: “(Initiation of Prosecutor’s Investigation)”, which certainly leaves a disquieting impression. Further, this section of the report ends:

It would be naïve to conclude that the prosecutor’s investigation had no effect on our college, yet it would be wrong to conclude that it impeded or weakened the college and its ability to move forward, to plan, grow and prosper. In fact, the investigation proved to be an effective acid test of the college’s management, strength and vitality. Tested by it, I believe we have stood up quite well, professionally and personally, and will continue to do so.

This seems a somewhat odd statement to me. The acid test metaphor is perhaps understandable given Farris’s science background, but it seems very reductive, in the degree to which it reduces the college’s functions to the response made to the investigation. One would imagine that in actuality the first part of the report, detailing all the accomplishments, would have been a much better test of the vitality of the college.

So this document seems to me to have a tragic feel to it. It seems to be very revealing of Vera King Farris and her presidency. She accomplished many great things and she was in many ways an asset to the college, but her insecurities about her position as President and the degree to which she believed that there were underhanded opponents among the faculty who were out to get her, created a climate of distrust that in the end led in exactly the opposite direction of the one she intended.

The college’s “management, strength and vitality” became connected to the strength of her position, and the more she seemed to want to build management, the more she invited opposition to grow. In the end, the very opposition that she believed was lurking in the wings did seem to materialize. Faculty members who may have opposed different policies of hers, but who might have supported others, ended up being implacably opposed to her. Distrust of the administration grew to unfortunate levels, and some of the residual effects of this are still to be found at the college, though to a diminishing degree.

The second part of the document, then, entitled “Suggestions for Handling the Prosecutor’s Report,” has an entirely different flavor to it than the first. This was the document that produced the firestorm when it was leaked to the faculty. In some ways it was understandable that she should have produced a document communicating what she felt the Board should be doing in response to the investigation, but it was the nature of this response that was a little disturbing.

I don’t want to rehash the document except to say that it outlined four different responses that the administration could make to the prosecutor’s report. The odd aspect to this, as Ken Tompkins outlined at the time in his own reading of the document, was that she believed the response to the report needed to revolve, not around dealing with the problems arising from the investigation – things like falsified invoices, misuse of the President’s discretionary fund, and reimbursement for travel by private organizations – which from this distance at least don’t seem of earth-shattering magnitude – instead, they needed to revolve around difficulties at the college with certain oppositional faculty members.

Why a problem of administration needed to be solved by an approach to handling faculty is a mystery, except that President Farris may have believed that the information that reached the press and which led to the investigation may have been leaked by a faculty member; this seems unlikely, as Ken pointed out at the time, and it was probably the case that it was leaked by someone within the administration and only then led to demands among faculty that it be investigated. As such, she may have wanted to avoid a recurrence of such demands, but a more appropriate method of assuring this might have been to clean up the accounting practices in Administration and Finance – which she, no doubt, was already doing.

President Farris outlined four such approaches for the administration in response to the report: essentially carry on as if nothing was occurring, which she rejects out of hand; “search and destroy” the mischief makers, which she rather less quickly dismisses as inappropriate; compromise with the adversarial group, which she also believes would be unproductive; and, finally, “develop a long-term strategy and plan for the health and vitality of the college,” which she supports.

On the face of it, this would be fine, but for the fact that the long-term strategy is not framed in terms of the initiatives and other accomplishments outlined in the first part of the document, but is rather focused on management of disgruntled faculty. As Ken pointed out, it was a question of divide and rule, classifying faculty into groups and trying to isolate those who were ill-disposed towards the administration, while rewarding those who were supportive. This was clearly problematic at many levels (again, as Ken shows very well), and the manner in which it was dependent upon a rather severe classificatory system is particularly disconcerting.

The President divided the faculty into those who were always rabidly and irrationally opposed to her, those who supported her, and those who were “skeptical” or ambivalent (though still somewhat suspicious about administration in general). As Ken noted in his reading, “[The President was] seeing each of us [the faculty] as simple, rather single-minded individuals…. But,” he continued, “clearly, each of us is a complex of opinions and visions. On some issues, I can easily – even eagerly – support the administration. On other issues, I adamantly disagree. On still others, I couldn’t care less. Simplification, like the President’s, is not only incorrect, it is evident of a serious flaw.”

This seems like an important lesson for any administrator to take note of; one perhaps that can be matched by the corresponding realization (that faculty sometimes miss) that not all members of an administration speak with one voice, even in authoritarian regimes.

The unfortunate consequence of this classificatory system was that it tended to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Those who were considered opponents were treated in a different fashion to those who were considered supportive, and so their opposition to the President did indeed become increasingly intransigent over the years. The result of this was that it did seem to be the case that the faculty was left speaking with one voice, with those who may have supported other mediating courses less willing to speak up, while the administration also was left taking its lead from the very top.

This was very unfortunate in the grand scheme of things, both for Vera King Farris’s Presidency, which, as I mentioned, did witness many considerable achievements, and for the college, as a climate of distrust grew throughout these years.

Ken ended his own analysis with a very powerful paragraph, one that, it seems to me at least, was both very accurate, and, in one aspect at least, wrong. It reads:

It is distressing to read the President’s words in this document. It is even more troublesome to comprehend that she believes them. It is, finally, tragic that she does not understand that her strength lies in her ability to accept genuine differences from all parts of the college. Without that strength she cannot fight off our mutual enemy – ignorance – and without the eager acceptance of those differences she cannot long prevail.

One is left saying, with Ken, if only she had been able to accept those differences; what a college she might then have helped create! But, the real tragedy may be, contra Ken, that where a climate of distrust is created one may still be able to prevail for a significant amount of time. After all, 1987, when this document was created, was only four years after the beginning of her Presidency. She would be the longest serving President, thus far anyway, remaining in office till 2003.

Tempest at Stockton

I have just finished teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest for close to the 50th time -- perhaps more. I'm not exactly sure because I have been teaching full-time for 45 years. Trained as a Medievalist, I early on got selected to teach Renaissance literature because "the two time periods are so close" and because I had had a few graduate courses in Renaissance and 17th c. literature.

I'm not at all complaining; teaching Shakespeare has been one of the highlights of my career. Some terms he is easier to teach than Chaucer. As I said, I finished the term -- as most everyone does -- with "The Tempest".

Students like to end with this play because the previous play is King Lear and they really struggle with that terrifying and difficult play. So The Tempest seems to bring us back to the light.

Much has been written about whether or not Shakespeare meant Prospero's island to suggest the New World. Those who support this interpretation refer to William Strachey's account of being shipwrecked in the Bermudas that Shakespeare probably knew about (there is a new book -- Hobson Woodward's A Brave Vessel -- which examines, again, all of the relevant documentation of Strachey's adventure).

I assume that the play could easily portray common Renaissance views about the New World whether Shakespeare knew of Strachey's account or not. Those views saw the New World as a "new Eden" and part of it's attraction was that English citizens could themselves become new by casting off old values and taking on new identities in America. The Virginia Company certainly made that argument though it was frequently couched in economic terms.

One of the most famous sections of the play is the speech by Gonzalo which considers what it might be like to create a new society and what that society might value and reject. Here is the speech:

GONZALO: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,--


ANTONIO: He'ld sow't with nettle-seed.


SEBASTIAN: Or docks, or mallows.


GONZALO: And were the king on't, what would I do?


SEBASTIAN: 'Scape being drunk for want of wine.


GONZALO: I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;--


SEBASTIAN: Yet he would be king on't.


ANTONIO: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning.


GONZALO: All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.


SEBASTIAN: No marrying 'mong his subjects?


ANTONIO: None, man; all idle: whores and knaves.


GONZALO: I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.

Gonzalo argues for a kind of confused -- Gonzalo is old and can be excused his rambling -- communism reminescent of More's Utopia. "All things in common", "riches, poverty,/And use of service, none; contract, succession,/Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;" -- nothing that would mark class or rank.

What is important here -- as I read it -- is the ironic switch where young men -- Antonio and Sebastion -- refuse to throw off old, European values (they show only mocking interest in Gonzalo's speech and are at that moment planning the murder of Alonso, the King of Naples in a seizure of power). Stereotypically, one would expect the elderly not to accept such radical change and the youth to eagerly seek it. This is the opposite of what happens in this scene.

What does this have to do with the Book that we are co-editing and, even more importantly, what does this have to do with the early days of Stockton?
Be patient.

I think I have mentioned that Wes Tilley called me in March of 1970 and asked: "Would you like to come to New Jersey and build a college?" That question has haunted me for 40 years. Few of us get asked and fewer still get the opportunity to actually do it. I did.

In a sense, it is the implied question in Gozalo's opening statement

"Had I plantation of this isle...."

"If I owned this land this is what I would do" is not logically far from the question Wes Tilley asked me. The thing that strikes me over and over is not the creation of the College but how quickly we made conservative changes and that the effort was primarily (but not exclusively) led by the faculty.

This was brought home to me today when I reviewed a section of a video recording recently produced by the staff of the College of a discussion held in 1995 on the early days of the institution. I was particularly struck by a four minute segment featuring Bill Gilmore -- he taught American history and studied colonial literacy and reading habits -- remembering what brought him to the College in 1970. The video can be seen HERE (13 minutes into the video)

Gilmore reviews a set of early ideas -- General Studies, faculty building book and media collections, interdisciplinary courses, etc. -- but what interests him most is the equality of the faculty to each other. He sees this idea as truly radical. He also notes -- accurately -- that it didn't last.

The connection between Stockton and The Tempest seems clear -- at least to me. There was much about our early ideas that, to a conservative mind, were chaotic, silly, subversive, dangerous and even, perhaps, immoral. Those of the Founding Deans who came up with these ideas then found it strange and unexpected that young faculty wanted early to overthrow these ideas with their own (usually more conservative). Gilmore is right that many things we thought up didn't survive but not because of executive fiat, senior faculty power grabs, political threats or community pressures. From my perspective, some faculty seemed to want to recreate their graduate experiences ideologically, structurally, politically and culturally. Like Antonio and Sebastion, they carried with them old fears, old patterns and old structures and like in The Tempest it was the older Founding Deans who thought the unthinkable.

A Little Help From My Friends

Dan Moury visited the College last week (he's on the right); it was the second time he had returned since he left in 1975. Dan was the first Dean of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics Division (NAMS) and is the other surviving Founding Dean.

Dan and I came to work at the College on July 1st, 1970; we were both interviewed and hired in March of that year. As I said, he and I are the only surviving Deans from a large group of the first administrative staff.

It was writing for the Book that brought Dan back. When I initially found him -- on Facebook, of all places -- he admitted that he hadn't thought much about Stockton since he had left but was delighted to reminisce about his days here, his faculty and his innovative designs for science labs.

He was here for four days meeting friends, former faculty, Rob and me and the President. You could see the delight he experienced as the past became real again from chatting about his life then and since. For example, I sat in on his meeting with the President and someone who didn't know either might think that they were old friends. The conversation went something like this:

Dan: In the 1980s I was VP of Academic Affairs at X College.
President Saatkamp: Did you know Joe Smith who was the President at X College.
Dan: Yes, I had known Joe for many years having met him when he ran X Foundation.
President Saatkamp: Yes, that was where I met him.
Dan: After that, I moved to Y Foundation.
President Saatkamp: Oh, I know the president of that Foundation; it was Bob Green.
Dan: Yes, Bob and I taught together as young chemists at Z college.

Well, you get the picture. They seemed to know everyone in the South who ran a college or a foundation. You'll notice that I couldn't, as they say, "get a word in edgewise".

After leaving Stockton, Dan has -- unlike me -- taught and administered a number of institutions in the South. He worked at Tusculum and at Pfeiffer and was the head of at least one Southern Association of Colleges. Our paths diverged when he left Stockton; I returned to teaching and he went on to other administrative tasks.

Through all of his life -- which has had plenty of serious illnesses -- he has maintained a positive outlook and a strong sense of humor.

I wasn't there but, apparently, he had a wonderful five hours with what is left of the First Cohort who were in NAMS. A few of them told me that the evening was frank, sentimental, uplifting and memorable. There has always been a special connection among members of NAMS and it can be traced to a specific decision Dan made in the Summer of 1971.

The College provide money to bring in the Co-Ordinators to organize teaching, courses, schedules and other academic concerns. All of us but Dan did exactly that. We chose a weekend, brought the Co-Ordinators to the area, paid for motels, meals and transportation. Dan decided, however, to bring his WHOLE faculty to the area for two weeks. They worked daily on academic matters and spent the evenings and weekends playing softball, at picnics, at the beach and other social activities.
The result was that NAMS faculty had a solidarity of purpose, real connections to each other and to the mission of the College that lasted for decades. No other division was as close as NAMS and, because of this, it avoided conflicts, personality clashes and shifting missions.

That basic decision for all to spend the time together made all the difference.

It seems to me that having left the College until a week ago, has made Dan a somewhat larger-than-life memory in the minds and hearts of those who stayed. He wanted to meet up one more time with his faculty and they wanted to renew their affection toward him.

It was good for all of us to meet. Dan was deeply moved by being here. I was equally moved by seeing him again given that only two of us have survived. And his faculty went back over their lives together almost 40 years ago. It doesn't get much better for colleagues and friends.

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)

Forks and Cedars

Rob posted a picture of the Groundbreaking Ceremony for the College below; the event took place on Dec 9, 1970. In a follow-up article written on Dec 10, 1970, it was noted that a cedar tree that had been saved from the bulldozer had been planted to commemorate the event.

In looking at the picture, I can see in the very right horizon a tiny sliver of the main lake (just under and to the left of the drooping flag on the right edge of the photo) we have on campus so the lake was on the left of the platform party.

I note this here because for forty years I have maintained that the Groundbreaking Ceremony was held quite a distance away from the lake; there is, however, no way that the photograph "works" at the site that have been advocating for four decades. So, I am determined to find the actual site or someplace near where the site -- because of the view of the lake -- would have to have been shot from.

There is a wide grassy area near the end of the lake that is a likely candidate. It is just outside of the original buildings and would have been a natural spot for the groundbreaking. The problem is where on the grassy area would the platform have stood?

In back of the platform there is an oak tree that has a fork partly up the trunk (I’ve marked this in red) so I thought I would look for an forked oak near the grassy area. Most of the oak trees near the area are either (1) too young or (2) don't have a fork. One, however, does; it is large and exactly in the place one would expect given the geography of the black and white photo.

Here is a photo of that tree with the fork marked with red as I marked the original.

This suggests, at least to me, that the area below this tree is where the platform stood. All of the details in the original photo sufficiently match this site to make it very likely that here is where the Groundbreaking Ceremony took place. Oh, yes. This site is about 50 feet from the corner of one of the original buildings.

But what about the tree planted at the same time. Here is the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin article describing it.

Dr. Richard E. Bjork, college president, turned over the first spadeful of soil. He then broke tradition by following the groundbreaking by taking part in a tree-planting.

He said the young cedar was ‘snatched from the jaws of a ground-clearing bulldozer’ and symbolized the institution’s concern with ecology and the environment.

So, 40 years later, where is this cedar snatched from the jaws of a bulldozer?

The exact site is, today, unknown though I have a strong guess. First is would not have been far from the Groundbreaking Ceremony site – no one is going to walk far on a December day to watch a tree be planted. Exactly opposite from where the platform probably was is a single cedar on a grassy plot. It is a dozen feet from a nearby stand of oaks and pines. I’m convinced this is the same tree planted after the Groundbreaking Ceremony. Here’s a picture:

I think, then, that we can fairly safely claim that we know about where the Groundbreaking Ceremony was held and where the cedar they planted is. I sure hope the College permanently marks both so that 40 years from now someone isn’t going to have to repeat my work. We move forward in small steps.

What Have We Done?

Yesterday was a day for considering the history of the college once again, but also for learning more about one of the initiatives of the last twenty years that has had a great impact on the college and its reputation in New Jersey.

Our meeting with Dave Taylor, the first Chair of the Stockton College Board of Trustees, occurred today, and it was a wonderful occasion. Dave came to the college with his wife, Beni, and Ken and I joined them and the President for a very pleasant lunch. This was a great deal of fun, and Dave Taylor had an excellent memory for all the events that occurred so long ago. Ken had sent Herman a picture (at right) of the ground-breaking ceremony, which he had added to his office computer's screen saver. It pictured Dave sitting alongside other members of the platform party, while Hap Farley, then the State Senator representing Southern New Jersey (who had been a strong advocate of bringing the College to the region), was speaking. Dave laughed about Hap and indicated that he had to persuade the Senator to do a number of things and it was always a tough call for him to make – the Haphazard of being the Chair of the Board at the time, I injected to a general groan of displeasure!

Many other things were learned during lunch, which I think Ken will have honed in on, during his interview with Dave, later in the day (the audio of this will be uploaded to the volume web site in the near future).

The President also recounted one story that Elizabeth Alton had recounted in her book on the early years at Stockton. Apparently, when she observed all the students and faculty entering the Mayflower Hotel for the beginning of the first term, some of them a little more ragged and hippy-ish than would have been to her taste, she thought to herself, “My goodness, what have we done?”

After lunch, we decided that although we should take Dave around the Campus Center, Beni would not be up to clamoring through the construction site. So we took her to the balcony at the end of F-wing to view the building, and then we all accompanied her to look at the new extension to the Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center in the library. She and I then remained there to talk with Gail Rosenthal, Director of the Center, while Herman, Dave, and Ken wondered off to inspect the progress of the construction.

I cannot comment on the trip around the Campus Center, but you can read about the building in a previous entry here. I can report, however, that Dave Taylor seemed bowled over by the growth of the college and all that had been created since he left the Board after 12 years service in 1981. I believe that he felt that his work had reaped great benefits for South Jersey, and that were he to comment in the vein of Elizabeth Alton it would have been a more positive exclamation: “My goodness, look what has been achieved!”

But, Beni Taylor and I were to learn another couple of uses for this phrase. We listened to Gail recount the origin of the Resource Center and all the work that has occurred there, particularly the work focusing on the many survivors from the Holocaust in the South Jersey region.

We also watched a 10-minute NBC supported documentary called, “Rails of the Holocaust: A Journey to Stockton College.” This covered the recent expansion of the Center, the creation of a sculpture at the new entrance, and the endeavor to secure some rails from Poland – rails that had been used to carry the cattle-cars that had transported so many of the victims of the Holocaust to Auschwitz, where most of them would be exterminated at the hands of the Nazis.

The great accomplishment in the establishment of this architectural memorial to the Holocaust could easily inspire the positive exclamation, “Look what we have achieved!” Stockton, after all, has been in the forefront of educating residents of New Jersey about the horrors of the Holocaust and the ever-present and continuing danger of genocidal outbreaks occurring around the world.

Of course, what this Resource Center memorializes can only inspire a negative exhortation about human history – “What have we done?” indeed! But as Dave and Beni wandered back down the corridor of the college they had helped to create, the more positive meaning for the phrase came back to the fore, and an overall feeling of purpose and accomplishment prevailed.