Kookie College

Emerson College in Pacific Grove, Calif., is--well, like a college. But not much. Though legally chartered and all that jazz, Emerson shuns entrance exams, grades, degrees and administrators. The result is one of the fresher, if freakier, experiments in U.S. education.

Emerson's goal is to encourage "intense, committed teachers to work with intense, committed students." It presumes that most conventions must be swept aside in the process. No one expects Emersonians to make the scene for a full four years. Nor has the school any established curriculum; a teacher must create his own class. For $300 a quarter (or less if the applicant is short of money), students are prodded to find "new alternatives" in theology, Kierkegaard. Shakespeare and "Now Theater" ("It's like spontaneous").

All this might be tiresomely kookie, were it not for Alvin Duskin, 30, founder and chairman of the Board of Fellows (which he calls "a legal fiction for the benefit of the state"). Duskin looks and acts quite square. His face is scrubbed, his shoes polished, his tie neatly knotted. He has a wife, three children, a house with a maid. But if he is condescending toward "this beatnik thing," Duskin remains a freewheeling teacher.

"Well, let's have--like a class." said Duskin one recent afternoon. Subject: materialism. In ambled Emerson's 13 summer students--mussed boys in need of haircuts (one beard), and ethereal girls in need of bras. Their wan look might have been due to their frugal lunch: beef broth, casaba melon. Duskin snapped them awake: "I don't allow irrelevant statements. Your comments must either advance my thought or contradict it." Firmly in control, Duskin hammered his theme--the dispassion of Homer. "Remember," he said, "Helen makes it in the end. She falls back on Menelaus, and they raise her kid, and even though she's the most beautiful chick in the world, everything's cool."

A Tough Scene. Teacher Duskin started out as a perfectly conventional creep. The son of a San Francisco textile manufacturer, he went from the Marine Corps and Stanford to teaching freshman English at San Francisco State College. "The class was at 8 in the morning, and I discovered that nobody in the department was around that early. I said. 'Why are you policing yourself with this dead-brain text?' I replaced it with the straight Duskin line." But, dumped for having no doctorate. Duskin crept back to Stanford to earn one. He never made it: "You should walk around Stanford some time-it's a tough scene. All these beautiful people with nothing faces. So I quit and came down here to start a college."

The dream was a student-built campus on the Monterey Peninsula, to be called Walden West--"a countermovement to the increasing rigidity and lack of human contact of most undergraduate schools." After a year of planning, recalls Duskin, "I understood that we were mad. We were completely hung up on buildings and floating loans and playing on the guilty consciences of the rich for donations."

Last year Duskin launched Emerson, named for Ralph Waldo, by simply renting a gabled Victorian mansion in Pacific Grove, a dry town founded by Methodists that seems at times as whimsical in its way as Emerson. For example, the municipal code forbids "any person to molest or interfere with the peaceful occupancy of the monarch butterflies on their annual visit to the city of Pacific Grove." Pacific Grove gives Emersonians the butterfly treatment. "They're a little weird," says the chief of police, "but I kind of like seeing them around."

Cleared Throats. Emerson (capacity 50) is totally dedicated to the self-help theory. In 16 months, its eight-man faculty has not had a payday ("The faculty supports the college"). When one highly qualified French teacher complained about dirty classroom windows, she was told: "You know we don't have a window washer here, baby. Wash them yourself." She quit on the spot. Nor does Duskin worry about policing students. Eight of them have set up their pads in a cabin outside town--in what combination he cares not. Says Duskin: "You can't lock girls up at 10:30 p.m. and expect them to understand The Republic." The only athletic endeavor is judo, "a thing of being concerned with your body and what it does." The judo squad calls itself the Transcendentalists, and its motto is: "It's not whether you can win or lose, but whether you can rise above the scene."

Duskin's only rule is that students and teachers must keep him "impressed." One result is ding-dong trade in the attic library, where lights often burn all night. Says one teacher of the Duskin system: "With a cat like that staring down, you know you can talk. It clears the throat."

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