The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (8 page)

And over the management of these students, the faculty, equally heterogeneous, would, within the year, become embroiled, with each other, with the student-body, or with the President or trustees. A scandal could be counted on that would cause a liberal lady somewhere to strike the college from her will: a pregnant girl, the pilfering of reserve books from the library, the usual plagiarism case, alleged racial discrimination, charges of alcoholism or homosexuality, a strike against the food in the dining-room, the prices in the college store, suppression of the student paper, alleged use of a course in myth to proselytize for religion, a student demand that a rule be laid down, in the handbook, governing sexual intercourse, if disciplinary action was to be taken against those who made love
off
the college premises and were observed by faculty-snoopers. No truly great question had ever agitated the campus since the original days of the founder, but the ordinary trivia of college life were here blown up, according to critics, out of all proportion. There had been no loyalty oath, no violation of academic freedom, but problems of freedom and fealty were discovered in the smallest issue, in whether, for example, students in the dining-hall, when surrendering their plates to the waiters, should pass them to the right or the left, clockwise or counterclockwise; at an all-college meeting, held in December of this year, compulsory for all students, faculty, and administrative staff, President Maynard Hoar had come within an ace of resigning when his appeal for moderation in the discussion had met with open cat-calls from the counterclockwise faction.

Thus the college faced every year an insurrectionary situation; in the course of twelve years it had had five presidents, including the founder, who was unseated after only eleven months of service. During the War, it had nearly foundered and been saved by the influx of veterans studying under the GI bill and by the new plutocracy of five-percenters, car-dealers, black-market slaughterers, tire-salesmen, and retail merchants who seemed to Jocelyn’s presidents to have been specially enriched by Providence, working mysteriously, with the interests of the small college in mind. These new recruits to the capitalist classes had no educational prejudices, were extremely respectful of the faculty, to whom they sent bulky presents of liquor or perfume, as to valuable clients at Christmas-time; they came to the college seldom, sometimes only once, for Commencement, passed out cigars and invitations to use the shack at Miami or Coral Gables
any time at all
—this benign and preoccupied gratitude, tactfully conscious of services rendered, extended also to friends and roommates of the poorer sort. Several years after graduation, little shoals of Jocelyn students would still be found living together co-operatively, in Malibu or St. Augustine—occasionally with an ex-teacher—sharing a single allowance under the bamboo tree.

Hence, though the college was in continual hot water financially, it had inevitably grown accustomed to close shaves and miraculous windfalls. Only the bursar seriously worried about balancing the budget, and his worries were accepted tolerantly—this was his
métier.
The faculty now took it for granted that fresh students would appear every fall out of nowhere, from the blue sky of promoters’ ventures, a strange new race, or stock issued by a wildcat bank, spending what would appear to be stage-money; and the yearly advent of these registrants in defiance of the laws of probability created in the staff a certain sense of displacement or of nonchalance or autarchic license, depending on the individual character. Careless of the future, fractious, oblivious of the past, believing that the industrial revolution was an actual armed uprising of the nineteenth century, that oranges grew in Norway and fir-trees on the Nile, these sons of shortages and rationing seemed to have sprung from no human ancestry but from War, like the dragon’s teeth sown in the Theban meadow. And the faculty which was teaching them their Cadmean alphabet fell to some extent under their influence; they too became indifferent to the morrow and forgetful of past incentives. There was a whiff of paganism in the air, of freedom from material cares that evoked the South Sea islands even in the Pennsylvania winter; more than one faculty-member, washed up on this coral strand, came to resemble, in dress and habits, the traditional beachcomber of fiction.

But the absence of pressure from without, the unconcern of parents and inertia of alumni groups, produced at the same time an opposite and corrective tendency. The faculty contained a strong and permanent minority of principled dissenters, men and women whose personal austerities and ethical drives had made them unacceptable to the run of college presidents and who had found the freedom of Jocelyn both congenial and inspiriting. If beachcombers had come to rest here, so had a sect of missionaries, carrying the progressive doctrine from Bennington, Bard, or Reed, and splitting here at once, like the original Calvinist college, into a new group of sects and factions. From its inception, the college had been rent by fierce doctrinal disputes of a quasi-liturgical character. Unlike the more established progressive colleges, which lived, so to speak, on the fat of their original formula, without questioning its content, Jocelyn had attracted to itself a whole series of irreconcilables, to whom questioning was a passion, who, in the words of Tolstoy,
could not be silent.
Beginning with the founder’s time, Jocelyn had served as a haven, like the early Pennsylvania country itself, with its Moravian and Mennonite and Hutterite and United Brethren chapels, its Quakers and Shakers and Anabaptists, for the persecuted of all tendencies within the fold of educational reform, and each new wave of migrants from the centers of progressive orthodoxy wished to perpetuate at Jocelyn the very conditions from which they had fled—thus the Bennington group assailed the Sarah Lawrence group and both assailed Dewey and Columbia, i.e., the parent-movement. Those who did not subscribe to any item of the progressive creed tended nevertheless to take sides with one faction or another for temperamental reasons; Aristotelians in philosophy joined with the Theatre myth-group to fight the Social Sciences.

An unresolved quarrel between the sciences and the humanities was at the bottom of every controversy, each claiming against the other the truer progressive orthodoxy, the words,
scholastic, formalistic, scientism, positivistic,
being hurled back and forth in the same timbered hall that had shivered to
Petrine, pseudo-Protestant, Johannean, Romanizing
in the days of the Mercersburg controversy, when a schism in the Lancaster synod had broken the old college asunder. It was the perennial quarrel, in short, between Geneva and Heidelberg, between Heidelburg and Augsburg, none the less passionate for the smallness of the arena and the fact that nobody cared, beyond the immediate disputants, how the issues were resolved. To whom did it matter, certainly not to the students, whether the college were to drop the term
progressive
and substitute
experimental
on page three of the catalogue? Yet to these men of conscience and consistency the point was just as cardinal as the spelling of
catalogue
(
catalog
?)
.
Under the pretense of objectivity was a fighting word or spelling to be lowered from the masthead and a flag of truce run up? The defenders of the progressive citadel were always on the lookout for a semantic Trojan horse in any seemingly harmless resolution introduced by the enemy. And quite correctly so, for the enemy was cunning. Who would have suspected that a motion to drop the old engraved Latin diploma and replace it with a simple printed certificate, in English, announcing that the holder had completed the course of studies, concealed an entering wedge for a movement to bring Latin back into the curriculum? Many of the ultra-reform party had voted Aye to this suggestion, not seeing the infernal conservative logic behind it, which was that the college had no right to bestow a Latin diploma on a student incapable of reading it, and hence did not really rank with the old conferrers of the sheepskin but in a separate class, along, it was suavely argued, with the trade schools and hairdressing colleges, which made no pretenses to Roman universality, to the
nihil humani a me alienum
implicit in the traditional scroll.

Blandness and a false show of co-operation, discovered the ultras, were the characteristic revisionist subtleties—agreement and a
reductio ad absurdum,
the dangerous methods of the Greeks. Your true classicist would not argue in favor of the spelling,
catalogue
; rather, he would concur with the simplified spelling and move that the whole catalogue be revised in this spirit, with
night
becoming
nite, right, rite,
and so on, merely for the sake of consistency, at which point some burning-eyed and long-repressed progressive fanatic would pop up to agree with him, wholeheartedly, enthusiastically (“Let us break, in one stroke, with the past”), and the fat would be in the fire; the faculty, that is, exhausted by these shifts and reversals, would vote to leave things as they were. The experienced parliamentarians quickly learned the trick of party regularity, that is, to vote the opposite of the enemy, whatever the merits of a motion, but this rule was not foolproof against a devious opponent, who could suddenly change his position and throw the whole meeting into confusion. And despite a great deal of coaching, the honest and sincere doctrinaires of both sides tended, in the heat of debate, to take individualistic stands and even, in moments of great excitement, to make common cause with each other.

Nowhere did Jocelyn’s faculty show its coat of many colors more bewilderingly than in the discussion, which took place every fall, of the winter field-period. According to the orthodox view, which had been carried here from Bennington, the field-period was the crux of the whole progressive system: the four weeks spent by the student
away
from the college in factory, laboratory, newspaper plant, publishing firm or settlement-house were the test of his self-reliance and his ability to learn through
doing
; the measure of the success of the field-period was the measure of the success of the college. The ideas of the founder and of Dewey, Pestalozzi, and Montessori here coalesced. However, in the course of years, modifications of the original program had been permitted to creep in, concessions to practicality or to humanitarian sentiment. Some employers were steadily enthusiastic about hiring Jocelyn students for the allotted four weeks in February, others not so much so, owing to certain dire experiences which had created an unfortunate “stereotype” in the employer mind. Volunteer work, of course, was usually available, either in the social-service agencies, or in the wrapping department of commercial firms, but for poor students on scholarships, counting on a warm college room, and a regular job waiting on tables or running the college switchboard, it was often a cruel hardship to be turned out in February to work, gratis, in a strange city and pay for meals and a furnished room. Moreover, volunteer work was open to two objections: either it was “made” work, answering the telephone, running errands, taking notes at rehearsals, and hence of no social utility; or it involved scabbing—some employers, it was discovered, actually laid off workers in the February slack season, counting on the yearly migration of progressive students to keep the wheels turning at a slower pace. Thus the practice of allowing the student, under certain circumstances, to write an academic paper or note-topic and even in rare cases to be housed in a college dormitory during the free month slowly grew to be tolerated, and with tolerance came abuses, so that the “pure scholarship” or “regressive” party could claim that the field-period had ceased to fulfill its function and therefore ought to be abolished.

The extremists of the progressive side found nothing to criticize in this statement; either a return to first principles or no field-period at all was the slogan that governed their voting, and here they were in conflict with the moderates of their own tendency, who felt obliged to defend the field-period as it had actually evolved, abuses, academic papers and all, against this two-pronged attack, to show how, in certain circumstances, the preparation of a note-topic might contribute to self-development, in short, to invoke the arguments of traditionalist education and disparage the very axioms on which Jocelyn was founded. The whole question was further complicated by a material factor: one of Jocelyn’s great attractions for its faculty was precisely the winter field-period, the four free recuperative weeks in deadly February which could be spent in travel, literary composition, private research, or simply in rest and enjoyment. The less scrupulous of both sides, therefore, making up every year a plurality, voted shamelessly for any motion that would save their precious vacation. Those who went so far as to admit that the student got nothing from the field-period justified it on the grounds that
some
hiatus was necessary for a faculty drained to the lees by the exactions of individual instruction. “I don’t care what you call it,” declared Ivy Legendre of the Theatre (Theater?) Department, in her deep, bellicose, lesbian voice. “Call it Faculty Rest or Florida Special, if you want, but get the little bastards out of my yellow hair.” Mrs. Masterson of the Psychology Department, a spinsterish, anxious little widow with a high, thin voice, had compiled some very interesting figures on the relation of rest-periods to efficiency in factory work which she proffered to the faculty as relevant to the “vital discussion we are having”—it was this same little lady who had made a comparative study of the wages of teachers and garage-attendants in her busy Hudson coupé.

Henry Mulcahy, naturally, had electioneered for the field-period with white, bitter, tight-drawn lips, smiles of commendation for its supporters, glances of hatred for its enemies. Though he did not believe at all in learning through doing or the instrumental approach, he felt the issue as an extremely personal one and quarreled with his friend, Alma Fortune, who deprecated the field-period on principle; he was persuaded that she was trying maliciously to snatch from him a long-held, inalienable possession. To him it was an issue of immediate loyalty or disloyalty, and when he spoke, hissingly, of “the enemies of the field-period,” it was as though the vacation were a person under threat of physical attack. He was everywhere at once during the crucial period, behind the scenes caucusing with the scientists whom he had despised but with whom he now discovered more than one common aim, in corridors buttonholing middle-of-the-roaders, on the telephone, in a sibilant whisper, lest the party-wire be listening, at the door of the faculty meeting, adjuring, fortifying, counting the number present in the chamber and how they were likely to vote. When it was over and the faculty voted, as usual, for the field-period loosely construed, he had an exalted sense of public service, as if by superhuman effort and by not counting the cost to self, he had averted from the college a danger of which it was largely unconscious.