Intellectual Immersion at Berkeley

What happens when you take one of Berkeley's liberal-minded philosophy professors and give him complete freedom to fashion an experimental liberal-arts program that lets students talk endlessly with talented teachers? Quite naturally, some of California's most pro test-prone, far-out students will sign up. In 1965, when Joseph Tussman started his Experimental College Program, the far-outers soon discovered that Tuss man, former head of Berkeley's philosophy department, had some seemingly square notions--such as that learning involves hard work and that one aim of education is good citizenship. But those who survived the disappointment and the ideal also found that the program was the most rewarding academic experience of their lives.

Started in response to student protests about the impersonality of the multiversity, the Tussman program took 150 freshmen volunteers and isolated them from the rest of the school for two years in a neo-Tudor-style fraternity house. There Tussman, four professors (one each from law, mathematics, political science and poetry) and five graduate assistants led a complete "intellectual immersion." Based loosely on a great-books-oriented program that Tussman studied under Wisconsin's late Alexander Meiklejohn, the first year concentrated on such Greek writers as Homer, Herodotus and Plato, followed by the Bible, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Milton. In the second year, students turned to early American thought, the Federalists and John Locke, moved up to contemporary U.S. writers, ended with urban problems. The program carried credits but no grades or examinations; when teachers decid ed that a student was not benefiting, they simply let him join conventional classes. Of the first 150 students, 60 failed to complete the program.

Daily Journal. Those who stuck it out had little time to loaf. Although the reading list was relatively light, each work was arduously aired at twice-weekly lectures attended by the entire staff and student body. Students voiced their own views at weekly seminars--one guided by a professor, one by a student chairman. All had to complete a paper every two weeks on their latest study, go over it in private tutorials with a professor, also keep a running daily journal of their personal reaction to their studies. The faculty worked just as hard: it met before each lecture to plot a group approach, gave up all research and publishing for two years.

The program nearly collapsed in its first year. Restive students, as well as some of the staff, revolted at the tough regimen and Tussman's rigid concept of a meaningful curriculum. Demanding the right to shape courses to their own interests, some students pleaded for an emphasis on Eastern rather than Western culture. Tussman acidly answered that a student cannot "pick up the wisdom of a foreign culture if he doesn't understand his own." Many of the students took to introspection with drugs, turned up in class turned on--which infuriated Tussman, who feared his project could be killed by a police raid.

Effort V. LSD. The second year went much more smoothly, largely because the dissident teachers, led by Political Theorist Norman Jacobson, decided to bow out. By then, students were beginning to find that Tussman's insistence on turning on by hard intellectual effort was more meaningful than tripping out on LSD. "That second year was exciting," recalls Arthur Schmidt, 20, who is now a junior studying anthropology. "There were times when people were just exploding with ideas." Even some who deeply resented Tussman's no-nonsense ways eventually came close to idolizing him. "He is an authoritarian with infinite patience," says one former student. "His moral sense is almost physical--his presence overcame our skepticism about great men really existing."

Last fall Tussman began another two-year cycle of his program with new students and a different kind of faculty: five philosophy professors from other campuses, including Harvey Mudd College and the University of British Columbia. Two are former Tussman students, who are likely to share his own notions about education. The demand for student power, as Tussman sees it, carries "peer-group consciousness" into the absurdity of a "children's crusade." A college, claims Tussman "must remain in its mood, its state of mind and its morality essentially adult--it has a civilizing mission."

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