Penguins & Scholars

When Carleton College began to instruct the young of Northfield, Minn, in 1867, its faculty consisted wholly of a stout-souled Dartmouth graduate named Horace Goodhue Jr., who taught 14 classes a day. Nine years later and still not overstaffed, the college lost a good man when Treasurer Joseph Heywood tried to prevent an unauthorized withdrawal from the bank he served as cashier--and was gunned down by Jesse James's boys. If the Congregational college's endowment vanished with the Missouri badman, it did not weigh heavily in his saddlebags; at any rate, Carleton--named first for the town of Northfield, later renamed for Boston Benefactor William Carleton--survived.

Since those penny-poor early days, Carleton has acquired a handful of handsome buildings and a topnotch faculty, today has an enrollment of 1,050 and is generally acknowledged to be one of the country's best private coeducational colleges. But its slim endowment of $8,500,000 places it among the respectable poor of good U.S. educational institutions. Carleton's top professors are paid meagerly, its physics and biology facilities are old and cramped, its students need dormitories, and its only stage is a makeshift affair in a 110-seat basement theater. To mend the bare spots in its academic Mackinaw, Carleton has set itself an enormous task for so small a college: to raise $10 million in the next four years.

Informed Alarm. Last week, running the college with casual, kindly autocracy, waving to undergraduates as he stomped about the campus, Carleton's President Laurence McKinley Gould went about the business of finding the money. His method: to bedevil the rich with reports of the U.S.'s conspicuous complacency--much as Economist Thorstein Veblen (Carleton '80) once hounded them with charges of "conspicuous consumption." A scholar who would be concerned about U.S. educational standards if Russia were inhabited solely by musk oxen, Gould does not hesitate to point with alarm at the Red satellites long after the furor has ceased to be fashionable. Typically, he orates: "We are like penguins wrapped in blubber. We have wrapped ourselves in such a layer of luxury we are virtually impervious to what goes on in the world around us. We may be unable to wake up in time to meet the crisis that Sputnik graphically posed for us."

Iron-grey, burly and vigorous at 62, Larry Gould speaks of penguins--Mrs. Gould and he share their home with a stuffed one--Sputniks and education with more authority than most. A topflight geologist and geographer, he was second-in-command of Admiral Byrd's 1928-30 Antarctic expedition, now heads the U.S. Antarctic program for the International Geophysical Year. Other qualifications for informed alarm: Gould is a trustee of the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, national president of Phi Beta Kappa and a member of the National Science Board.

Inside Criticism. Standards at Carleton are high; each student must take at least two years of English, science and foreign language. There are no soft majors; in mathematics, chemistry and biology, outstanding students do original research. Yet President Gould is a scientist who quotes from Archibald MacLeish's J.B. without making it appear a stunt, and the humanities at Carleton--particularly English, music and history--are if anything better than the sciences.

Carleton is not without its own severe critics. Not long ago the faculty completed an assessment of the college, decided that the cherished 10.5-to-1 student-faculty ratio and 1,000-odd enrollment were wasteful. Result: by 1965, the ratio will be increased to 12.5-10-1 (students will do more independent studying), and the enrollment raised to 1,300.

Carleton students, like their peers across the U.S., are not visibly anguished by issues; said one senior: "If anything bothers the students it's that nothing really does bother them." Yet, says History Professor Catherine Boyd. "I've never had students who worked so hard. We have students who come to us as freshmen and are already working toward a Fulbright." Carleton has few distractions; Northfield is sleepily sedate, and the college bans cars, so socializing is mostly of the walk-and-talk kind. Even the occasional big stomp-and-holler has a cloistered flavor; last year Duke Ellington's band was hired, installed in the only building on campus big enough to hold both musicians and students. After a less-than-frantic first set, the Duke apologized: "The boys never played a chapel before. They're a little tense."

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