SCARLET AND BLACK

Thursday. May 19, mo

Liberating Liberal Art‘s?"

A Century Without Change

By TOM GREENFIELD

Every so often the tube runs a ten
year old appeal for kids to stay in high
uchool. A clean cut dude walks by this
corner where a group of kids are pitch-
ing pennies. Grimly, he shakes his head
and says. “Dat cudda bin me dere a few
years ago. But i stuck it out. i got my
diploma and now i got a good paying
job,” Leaping into his ’58 Impala, he
whips off to the horizon as the words
“Stay in School" stare down at you for
five seconds.

At Grinnell, we feel we have placed a
thousand miles between ourselves and
the high school penny-pitchers. They are
16 and cannot read, we are 18-21 and 3F
tend a college whose student body and
faculty are “equal to the best colleges
in the country.“ But the penny-pitchers
are catching up to Grinnell. The large
universities — for all their red-tape,
insensitivity, shon-sightedness and all
around blah -— have opened their doors
wider. A recent sociological survey
showed that "oodles" of former ’58 Im-
pala owners » as well as a few penny-
pitchers .. are in the schools and get-
ting the B.A. The university schools are
getting bigger and are piling a larger
percent of Impala owners and penny-
pitchers into the outside world, In fact.

ou will live to see the day when the

.A. assumes the status 01' minimum re-
quired education, which the high school
now holds. (Some of you who are not
female or i—F may miss out on this
treat, but the rest of society will see the
day come to pass.)

What does this have to do with Grin-
nell? Well, Grinnell has a problem.
How do you attract the best people in
the country (facility and students) when
you are doing exactly what you were
doing loo years ago. Here are some of
the hassles: 1) it's getting hard to at-
tract good students for 31/, hills a year
when large universities will sock the
ILA. to them for 1000, mo, or even less
in many cases;

2) it’s hard to attract a Shakespeare
expert who has no one to talk to and
nothing to read within a. radius of 250
miles;

3) it's now hard to attract the Mid-
west students who want quality educa-
tion without extensive travel. Modern
transportation -— air transport, cheap
buses, lots of cars and good roadways,
and student halt-lure (big business’ hu-
mane pimp of the college community)—
has eliminated much of the transporta-
tion pain of the past.

Grinnell’s going to collapse in 10 years.
How can we get away with charging 3500
per annum for a lousy n. A. when, by
late, the kids on the corner pitching pen-
nies will be third year college students
who quit because they couldn't hack
genetics or Yeats? The answer is, you
can’t — not for very long anyway. The

college will, sooner or later, have to
meet the needs of an elite student body
and elite faculty (if it desires to charge
an elite tuition.)

The needs of u college community of
superior students and superior fncuify
can lbe met, i believe, with n program
which will train MA‘s, MAT’S, MFA’S.
and MS‘s. This will require an enormous
library, five year residence (with per-
haps a mandatory 12 months on leave)
and graduate lab and Fine Art! facilities.
A 3500 dollar per year B. A. will not sat-
isfy superior students any longer. Grin-
neli will soon lose the Iltile brothers of
the few superior students it now has.
consequently, superior professors will
not come out to the middle 0‘ Iowa to
teach a second-rate student body.

Money, of course, stands in the way.
But if Grinnell were to offer an experi»
mental program to some of its benefac-
tors, it might get some backing for at:
least a trial run of building a new con
cept of training the country’s cream. (if
Grinnell could get money for the ridi—
culous politics conference, certainly we
can find someone to blow the wad on a
ﬁveyear program.)

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice to act on
something useful before Harvard did —-
just once?

ﬂ

Gray Before Their Time

By ED HIRSCH

It is my contention that the “Grinnell
experience" is a logical exercise in
denying creativity as long as the edu-
cational system exists in its present
institutional form. It doesn't take a
freshman long to learn the ways of life
in the Grinnell game. First of all there
is a professor who sits elevated at the
front of the classroom and then there
are students who sit below in neat
rows, pencils deftly poised. The pmfes-
sor then speaks. Pencils begin to fly as
pearls of wisdom drop from the lead
er's mouth. Later there will be a test
and a certification that the student
“knows" the material 2.5 well or 3.0
or whatever his particular talents rec-
ommend.

After one year at Grinnell my imme-
diate reaction is that the system or the
people within the system are in serious
need of change if education is to be
come relevant. As long as there is a
professor judging a student by dan-
gling a grade over his head (Grinnell
terms put it more humanely) there can
be little real communication between
professor and student. This system has
been indoctrinated as the best of all pos-
sible worlds so well that students ac-
tually believe education consists of
memorizing the professor's concepts
and applying them to his general ques-

 

Best of Luck
G raduates!

H amman's A pparei

Former Prof Comments—

Eastman Calls for Action

(Editors note: The following is an
excerpt from a letter written by Mr.
George Eastman, Assoc. Prof. of social
Foundations, State Uruverslty of New
York at Buffalo. Mr. Eastman was an
Instructor in Grinnell‘s Education De-
partment two years ago. Dated 28
October, 1968, and addressed to Kath<
leen Shea, Secretary of the Curricu~
rum Committee, this letter is unfor-
tunately just as relevant today as it al-
ways has been, and perhaps always
will be. The letter is reproduced with
the consent of the author.)

I believe that college and university
education, and, by extension, elementary
and secondary schooling, is dangerously
anachronistic, What your student com-
mittee ought to do is to throw oft -
insofar as possible —— your prior and
current conditioning and, Cartesianlike,
try to begin de hove. Ask yourself, what
do you really want to do, what to know
about, what excites you, absorbs you,
makes you happy? Do you know? You
will iind it dilﬁcult to answer these
questions. and the very difficulty attests
to the success with which your educa-
tion has led to self-alienation, Educac
tion is synonymous with coming to know
and to accept one's self. This means
that the first task of a college, espe-
cially, must be to help its students to
iind out what i8 years of exposure to a
particular society and its institutions had
made of them. You realize that up un<
til it or 15 you are largely unconscious of
what you are and how you get that way.
Yet you cannot be said to have free

z:

lion at the semester’s end. This con-
stitutes comprehension of the material,

Education too often is Characterized
by two separate entities (student and
professor) rather than two people interA
relating. Literature, for example, is a
medium which demands a response not
only as a literary critic, but as a man.
There is a need to discuss content as
well as structure Often there is a need
for a poem to be responded to emo~
tionally all well as intellectually.
What poet writes primarily for lit-
erary critics? I would contend that
the purpose of the English department
is more than the molding 0i 8 literary
critic: it is the development of an in
dividual to whose life literature applies.

it doesn’t take long for a student who
wants specific educational opportunities,
which Grinnell does not organizationally
oiier, to learn that Grinnell will not ex-
tend its concept of a liberally educated
student very far. Thus a student who
wants a truly creative and individual
program finds that the system will not
meet his personal needs. He is left with
the altematives of: 1) going elsewhere;
2) staying and bending his ideas of what
he should be leanung to what Grinnell
thinks he should be learning, or 3) at-
tempting to go through the system and
learn what he feels he must at the ex-
pense of What he is being taught. in
other words he can play the game just
enough.

The point is that a student should be
able to decide what he needs to learn
with the help at Grinnell, rather than
because of the orders of Grinnell. He
should be able to learn What he feels
is necessary with the guidance of Grin-
nell, rather than in spite of Grinnell. .
As the institution presently exists the ,
to not the case. ,

(him to change — to become other than
you are — unless you know what you are
to begin with. So one question is: What
kind of college program (elementary
and high school and graduate school)
will enable me to gain critical self-
insight —- will enable me to find out who
the hell i am? ‘
STUDENT CURRICULUM noise
COMMITTEE MATERIAL

The reason that i had to take such ex-
treme action and resign from the nave
man Committee (faculty curriculum
committee) is that it was not just lgnon
ant of alternative educational philosov
phies, but positively resisted and 0p~
posed consideration of them. There is no
reason, for example, why 6, C. could
not begin an experimental college track
with absolutely no requirements, such
that a student might after a year or
perhaps two years, or perhaps six or
seven years, trike qualifying exams and
on that basis be awarded the "Great
Pumpkin Diplomat". There is no reason,
for another example, why group therapy
can not be made part of the educational
program, with course work and dormla
tory (and vacations) experience being
seen as lab situations where one ap—
proaches life with a bold, open»minded
experimentalism.

But G. C. has found a sure thing in
imitating a model of ivy-league educa-
tion that had its prime just prior to
World War ll, and the predominantly
well—heeled middlerclass parents wanl
their children to he products of a sure
thing — a sure means of moving ever up-
ward on the social ladder — excelsiori
Yes, even given a conservative reac-
tionary Board of Trustees, and a con.
servative President, and a controlling
iaculty clique whose scli-proiectiveness
verges on paranoia, there is hope Vir-
ginia. There is no Santy, but there is
hope at Grinnell. Why?

Eventually G.C. must give in, and must
adopt itself to the changed mentality
and ethos of the oncoming generations
of both Students and faculty, This is
your role — to bring pressure upon the
existing sources of power in the College
in order to move them toward genuinu
policy changes. By pressure I mean,
iirst, helping the student body to real-
ize they are being exposed to an educac
tion that seeks to submerge the self
into a model of corporation men and
women — men who will dutifully raise
profits and women who will dutifully
raise children to emulate their daddies.
Second, to organize, on your own, and
demonstrate in downtown Grinnell,
around Leggett‘s and Stauss‘ homes, all»
night vigils, put ads in the Grinnell l-ler-
nld Register. Third, do not demonstrate
and argue for the elimination of anything
without having a well worked out, ieasi~
ble alternative that can immediately rc—
place it.

So, Kathleen, I would urge your com-
mittee to adopt a radical stance: recog-
niw the Policy and Curriculum Commit-
tee report for what it is — the rankest
kind of academic tokenism; and advance
yourself some genuine policy and currir
culum alternatives. Listen to yourselves
for a change. Have your committee walk
down to Arbor Lake or drive out to
Rock Creek lake and listen — listen to
your own hearts and minds —- and do
your thing; for man, so long as he’s
estranged from himself, is among the
walking dead — the ambulatory corpse:
so readily absorbed into our techno-
rocioeconomic structures.

George Eastman . ' '
~ Assoc. Prod. of Social erndatiol

 

