The New Eden

The change on many U.S. campuses this year runs far deeper than the visible cliches of long hair, rock, sex, pot and protest. The old hierarchy of formal education is under attack. Spurred by the "free university" movement (TIME, June 6), more and more campuses seek a new equality between teachers and students. The new vision is a kind of academic Eden where students create their own courses, without grades or formal classes, and the key scene is the group-encounter session that joins teachers and students in working out their hang-ups together.

Appalling? Perhaps. Yet as far back as the 17th century the noted Czech school reformer Johann Amos Comenius wrote: "I seek a method by which the teachers teach less and the learners learn more." Comenius and scores of subsequent idealists argued that formal education suffocates the "need to know" --that the key to authentic learning lies not in numbing young minds with abstract facts, but in freeing the student to study what interests him most: himself and his relation to the world.

Precisely this approach is now being tested in a remarkable experiment run by the otherwise conventional University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif. Somewhat to its own surprise, Redlands has opened a new school this fall called Johnston College that could be a wavelet of the future. Says the brochure: "The touchstone for decision making will be this question: What will most effectively promote the personal and social growth of the individual?"

Johnston College owes much of its philosophy to Pressley C. McCoy, its 43-year-old chancellor, who began resisting academic barriers soon after he got his Ph.D. in political science and communications at Northwestern University. While teaching at Denison University, McCoy realized that departmental boundaries were an obstacle because "to understand communications, my students needed to know sociology, logic, economics and philosophy." As president of the Central States College Association, he later forged a twelve-campus "university" with commonly shared students, labs, computers and libraries. Last year McCoy joined a ten-day encounter group in Georgia--and yearned to adapt the experience to teaching.

McCoy had long pondered "how much your life is governed by feelings. The trick is to make the emotion work for you, instead of against you." McCoy decided that he had learned how to do it in the encounter session: "You need frank feedback on who you are. When you get that, you become so much more honest that you're bound to function better."

At about the same time, the University of Redlands trustees were discussing expansion. Among them was Dwayne Orton, a pioneering educator who helped design IBM's multi-million-dollar-a-year educational program. Anxious to liven up Redlands, Orton persuaded Millionaire James G. Johnston, a retired IBM vice president in his 80s, to contribute his name and $1,750,000 to endow an experimental college. The trustees then hired McCoy to overcome what he defined as the two basic problems in education: rigidity in attitude and rigidity in structure.

In faculty recruiting, says McCoy, "I looked for flexibility, and willingness to interact with the kids, not preach at them." Most of his 17 professors are in their 30s, have top credentials--and uncommonly high motivation. Says Kevin O'Neill, 28, who holds a Ph.D. from Yale and gave up a job teaching philosophy at the University of Texas: "Now we have to prove ourselves as people for a change, which is a joy."

Ten Days in the Woods. As McCoy sees it, the challenge will lie in helping students to solve problems that really concern them. A "test" at Johnston, for example, might be the question: "How would you stop air pollution in Los Angeles?" The students would have a week or two to scout primary sources, gather the facts and work out a solution. Says McCoy: "When you use your whole self solving a problem, it's far more satisfying than sitting in a classroom and regurgitating facts."

What courses will the students actually study? To answer that question, McCoy, his teachers and 181 students (who were screened for psychological stability as well as brains) recently gathered at a church camp in the woods at the foot of the San Bernardino mountains for a ten-day "retreat." Among the course subjects discussed: Is man evolving as an endangered species? Does LSD expand the mind and how? Field trips in environmental appreciation and criticism. Hitchhiking and wilderness exploration as investigations into the nature of self and the universe. Can man survive the death throes of the nation-state?

TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler was on hand at the camp to cover the retreat. His impressions:

The first person I saw was John Watt, an Englishman with history degrees from Oxford, Harvard and Columbia. He's taught at both Harrow arid M.I.T., and at 34 he's ripe to take up a, pipe, a vest, a full professorship and me production of a lot of stuffy articles for learned journals. Instead, he's out here in the sticks wearing funny blue sneakers and shorts, sitting on the ground under a spreading oak, surrounded by young girls with long hair and Levi's.

"I'm a teacher; why should I also be an authority?" he said. "That's no longer the university's job. The kids out of high school today have very different perceptions than kids did ten years ago --they can't learn from an authority any more. So they come here, and they see us as humans; they see us at our weakest and at our strongest."

Just then a pretty girl rushed up, wrapped her arm around him and said: "I don't want to take world religion after all, John. I've already had too much philosophy and religion. More would make me a lopsided person." Watt beamed at the girl, agreed, gave her a little hug, and she pranced off into the forest to find her new boy friend.

Mystical Transition. It was certainly a different way to start a college. When the students and teachers arrived, Chancellor McCoy got them together in the camp's main meeting room, told them where they would sleep and eat, and urged them not to make too much litter. Then he walked out. They had no organization. They had no curriculum. Completely the opposite of the typical college experience in which you are presented, on arriving, with a series of established slots, and told to decide which one you will wedge yourself into for the next four years. Here the only thing on the agenda for ten days was a lot of encounter sessions.

They spent the night sitting on the floor, from right after supper until 2 a.m., hashing out how they would arrive at decisions about the curriculum. There were contingents that wanted a majority vote and some that wanted to elect a permanent leader and a representative body, but finally these ideas were thrown aside and the group decided to reach decisions only by consensus--that is, no decision would be made until it actually pleased everybody.

These kids were so excited about the prospect of working out their own destiny as a group, instead of having it all done for them as it had been by their parents and high school teachers, that they couldn't even go to sleep. "That meeting was like a mystical transition," says

Physics Professor Paul Cornell. "There were no longer any adversaries, no longer any need for ego because we were all together."

As Coed Revalee Maase puts it: "When I was in high school, I smoked a lot of grass. Everybody did. But up here I've lost the need--I'm on the best high I've ever had, just working with these kids. It's so intensive, we've been getting to know each other so well that we lose all sense of time."

The source of all this friendliness was the encounter sessions. Everybody attended three a day. They sat in a circle for hours scrutinizing each other. They asked mean, menacing questions like, "Why are you being such a phony, Janet?" They aired sentiments like, "Ann, I love you no matter how s--y you are." They cried and constantly embraced one another for saying something that was especially hard to say. The faculty members had to participate in the same way--be completely frank about how they saw themselves in life, about their personal backgrounds, divorces and problems with their wives.

The group sessions were a good way to start. But you have to be young to take it. George Armacost, 65, the about-to-retire president of the sponsoring University of Redlands, came out to the camp one evening and started talking like a normal college administrator until one of the kids cut him off: "C'mon, George, get with it." It was the first time a Redlands student had ever called him George. He was still up at 4 a.m., banging away on his portable typewriter, setting down his reaction to the experience. He didn't quite understand his new college, but it was making him think. Whether his new students will think as deeply as they feel remains to be seen. It should be quite a year.

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