The Martin Duberman Reader (7 page)

The BMC community was so small and its intentions as yet so undefined that opinion could be sounded and accommodated with ease. And the enthusiasm that comes with any new venture—especially if touched, as in Black Mountain's case, with the peril and joy of shared experimentation, poverty, and isolation—helped to overcome differences and to encourage generosity toward fellow pioneers. They felt, in those early days, that they were starting life
anew, that in some uncertain way they were part of a revolutionary vanguard.

Within little more than a month, the Black Mountain community had established rough guidelines for governance and some tentative beginnings of a lifestyle. Few wanted more than that. Detailing, most agreed, was best left to the future, after the community had had more chance to formulate and test its purposes. Where and how community organization might require modifying would depend on what needs developed; by keeping structure to a minimum, values would have a chance to shape institutional features rather than, as is more usually the case, the institution molding the values.

This was felt with special force with regard to education, which was, after all, central to Black Mountain's founding and to its sense of common purpose. Their guru, John Dewey, understood that “to arrive at a conclusion was not to arrive at a conclusion, it was to arrive at a pause. And you would look at the pause, you would gaze at the plateau, and then you would see another thing to climb.” Education, in this view, was never completed.

The one most common attitude was that living and learning should be intertwined. All aspects of community life were thought to have a bearing on an individual's education—that is, his or her becoming aware of who they were and wanted to be. Education should proceed everywhere, not only in classroom settings—which, in fact, at least as usually structured, were considered among the worst learning environments imaginable. A favorite slogan at Black Mountain was that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The usual distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it, were broken down. Helping to fight a forest fire side by side with faculty members, participating in a community discussion on whether the dining hall should serve two or three meals on Sundays, discovering that a staff member was a homosexual or that married life included arguments as well as (and sometimes during) intercourse, taking part in an improvisational
evening of acting out grudges against other community members—all these and a hundred more experiences, most of them the more vivid for being unplanned, contributed at least as much to individual awareness and growth as did traditional academic exercises.

This didn't mean that disparities of age, interest, knowledge, and experience between, say, a twenty-year-old and a fifty-year-old weren't recognized, or that it was thought either possible or desirable to merge all members of the community into some false concord of “buddyhood.” But it did mean that many at Black Mountain believed that differences in age need not preclude communication, that interests could be shared, that the perspective of the young also had value. It meant, too, that while information, analytical skills, and reason were prized, they were considered aspects rather than equivalents of personal development; they were not confused, in other words—as they are in most educational institutions—with the whole of life, the only elements of self worthy of development and praise.

A central aim was to keep the community small enough so that members could constantly interact in a wide variety of settings—not only at meals, but on walks, in classes, at community meetings, work programs, dances, performances, whatever. Individual lifestyles, in all their peculiar detail, could thereby be observed, challenged, imitated, rejected—which is, after all, how most learning proceeds, rather than through formal academic instruction. “You're seeing people under all circumstances daily,” as Rice put it, “and after a while you get to the point where you don't mind being seen yourself, and that's a fine moment.”

It was hoped that a double sense of responsibility would emerge out of the varied contacts and opportunities Black Mountain provided: that which an individual owes to the group of which s/he is a member, and that which is owed to oneself—with neither submerging the other. From the beginning Black Mountain emphasized the social responsibilities that come from being part of a community, yet tried to see to it that personal freedom wouldn't be sacrificed to group needs. Rice, for one, liked to stress how different each person
was from every other and how expectations of performance should vary accordingly. In trying to strike a balance between the needs of an individual and those of the group, Rice's instinct was to give preference to the individual.

Adults tended to bring out Rice's peremptory side more than students did. He showed greater patience with twenty-year-olds because he had greater faith in their ability to change, and where growth was possible Rice preferred to issue invitations rather than commands. He realized that many young people had already given up on themselves by the time they reached college. The wreckage could be terrible, the stupefaction total—and for Rice it was always harder to be nice to the stupefied than to the merely stupid, for the stupefied, as he put it, had “collaborated to a certain extent.”

But he tried. He tried hard, because he deeply believed, despite his occasional cynicism to the contrary, that almost every young person could be salvaged. First create a climate of liberty, Rice would say—that is, remove the usual lists of dos and don'ts—and then “surround the person with one invitation after another,” not only invitations to literature, art, music, and the like, but also “to be a good, pleasant, respectable person to have around, and that's a very nice invitation; it's not beyond most people.” It might take a long time before those who'd grown up in a poverty-stricken environment, who'd been severely deprived or damaged, would respond, and some few would never respond, but Rice (like his contemporary A.S. Neill, the founder of the Summerhill School in England) firmly believed that in time the large majority would. His faith was based on the premise that at birth “we are all artists, every one of us: we are free to create the kind of world in which we choose to live, and we're equal in that freedom.” For the artist in each person to develop, freedom from manipulation was a prerequisite; the student should be placed in competition with himself, not others.

In consonance with that philosophy, there were no fixed regulations at Black Mountain—no required courses, no system of frequent examinations, no formal grading. For the first ten days of classes, students were encouraged to “shop around,” to sit in on
classes, sample possibilities, and then decide on a schedule. Responsibility, in other words, was placed on the students themselves for deciding what shape their education would take—though the faculty made itself available for consultation.

Classes at Black Mountain were always small. Every teacher had complete freedom in choosing his classroom methods. Occasionally someone would lecture, but the overwhelming preference was for small discussion groups. There was also greater adherence in the beginning to a prescribed schedule: classes met between eight-thirty and twelve-thirty (usually for an hour) in the morning and again between four and six in the afternoon. The period from lunchtime until four was deliberately kept free so that people could get out of doors. Some would take part in the work program, cutting wood, digging on the farm, helping to improve the college road. There was no organized sports program, but there were tennis courts, an outdoor pool, a small lake on the college property, a fairly well-equipped gym with handball and basketball courts, horses for rent in the village, and everywhere mountain trails for hikes and walks. At about three-thirty every day, most of the community would gather in the huge Lee Hall lobby for tea and talk before resuming classes. An invention of the second or third year was the “interlude”—a periodic announcement, without advance warning, that all classes would cease for a week so that everyone could have a chance to try something they'd had to defer because of lack of time, whether reading George Bernard Shaw, attempting to write poetry, or sitting in the sun.

The arts, it was felt, were essential in developing individuals capable of choosing because “they are, when properly employed, least subject to direction from without and yet have within them a severe discipline of their own.” They taught, in other words, that the worthwhile struggle was the interior one—not against one's fellows but against one's “own ignorance and clumsiness.” The integrity an artist learns when dealing with materials translates into an integrity of relationship with oneself and with other people.

In the spring of 1945, John Wallen, completing his doctorate at Harvard in psychology, arrived to teach at Black Mountain. He was young (twenty-seven) and glad of it, youth being one leg of a trinity completed by “enthusiasm and idealism”; and he'd had enough experience teaching in a traditional university to be pretty much convinced that they were “a dead end as far as making a genuine contribution to the growth of the students is concerned . . . the mechanized, mass-production university system does not have room in it for human values.”

Everywhere, Wallen continued, he'd found segmented specialties, compartmentalized people, and a bureaucratic structure that emphasized grades, requirements, and subject matter at the expense of helping an individual to integrate—make personal sense out of—his experiences. Everywhere he'd found men who prated of democracy while exercising autocratic control, who talked fluently of man's noble potential but in fact doubted its existence. He'd therefore decided, Wallen wrote, that life in a standard university wasn't what he wanted for himself, his wife and baby—or for his students. He wanted to teach at a place that gave actual rather than rhetorical allegiance to individual growth. He'd heard that Black Mountain was such a place.

A successful teacher, in Wallen's view, set in process a cycle of “readjustment and reevaluation” that was lifelong. Which meant, obversely, that a teacher's function was
not
to encourage the mere accumulation of information, nor to decide the comparative value of different kinds of knowledge on the basis of his own rather than the student's needs. The student must not be “drawn aside from real-life experiences and carefully nurtured in a high-pressure, hot-house existence,” for that would separate him from understanding “what creative living can be. Living is an end in itself; all other activities are—to a greater or lesser degree—means to that end. The prime function of knowledge and education, then, is to make living meaningful—both in terms of personal values and of interpersonal relations (if there is any distinction).”

John and his wife Rachel Wallen's initial impressions of the college were very favorable. They liked almost everything they heard: that there was no formal code of rules, the entire community agreeing at the beginning of each year what its guiding principles were to be; and that there were no organized athletics, but instead a work program vital to the college's continued survival—hence
meaningful
work, instilling group responsibility for a common fate. Life and learning were closely integrated, with constant contact between students and faculty; no degrees, no grades, no requirements—“ ‘the student is the curriculum'—and the teacher free to teach what he wants in any way he wants.” The emphasis was on the
person,
with various means of communication and self-expression—not simply the verbal—utilized: painting, music, dance, weaving, theater. “The whole community—college life implies an integration and purpose that is sadly lacking in our culture.”

He wasn't seeking a utopia, Wallen insisted. He was excited at the prospect of “a free, informal, and exploratory setting,” the chance to work “hunches and ideas through in group give-and-take.” Here at last seemed a chance to face the problems that “lie submerged under the morass of accumulated tradition in the wider culture.” “I despise the values underlying our present society,” Wallen wrote his friends, “I am disgusted by the cheap, careless, vulgar uses to which man puts his ‘marvelous' achievements. . . . Somebody wrote that a cynic criticizes out of disillusion while a skeptic criticizes out of a belief in something better. Then I am a skeptic. I have a belief . . . I have a faith.”

Black Mountain had become used to critics (both within and without the community) mocking its ideals. It had not yet had to deal with someone who took those ideals, quite literally, at face value.

The Wallens's stay at Black Mountain has raised some large questions for me. His career there as resident “collective visionary” (the phrase is Arthur Penn's) focuses many of the questions that originally attracted me to a study of the place: Is there a conflict between “individualism” and community? Can an “artist”
survive—would he want to survive—the innumerable petty issues and responsibilities that come with communal living? Can one live fully and well with others and at the same time “produce”? What do people need? Do their needs differ? Does everyone, despite his “neurotic” distancing, want closeness, or is the desire for closeness itself a cultural phenomenon? Would most people seek solitude—along with intermittent contact with a few significant others—if the culture didn't tell them that solitude is the equivalent of disturbance or, alternately, that a capacity for continuous intimacy is the surest gauge of “health”?

Are there specific techniques of “group process” that can be utilized for improving communication—thus detoxifying tensions that arise between people of divergent tastes and goals? Does “honesty” aid in working out aggressions—or does it compound them? Why does anyone want to live in a “community” anyway? Why does the impulse continually reassert itself historically—and with special force in the United States? Is the impulse merely negative, as is often claimed—that is, in the nineteenth century, an “escape
from
industrialization” or today, a retreat
from
materialism and manipulation? Or do people look to communes to satisfy positive yearnings for contact and sharing? If so (or even if not) what kinds of people develop the impulse? Those whose gifts happen to be in the area of personal relationships rather than, say, in composition, color, mechanics or words? Do communities draw people who want to be “nice” and repulse people who want to be “distinctive”? Can (must?) a community serve only one kind of impulse? Is it incompatible with other “drives”—competition, personal aggrandizement, privacy and variety (the last two not necessarily contradictory, if one assumes, as I do, that people can derive special pleasure from alternating between, or even mixing together, supposed opposites)?