JOCELYN COLLEGE, on this mid-morning in January, as Henry Mulcahy trod softly through its corridors, had a faculty of forty-one persons and a student-body of two hundred and eighty-three—a ratio of one teacher to every 6.9 students, which made possible the practice of “individual instruction” as carried on at Bennington (6:1), Sarah Lawrence (6.4:1), Bard (6.9:1), and St. John’s (7.7:1). It had been founded in the late Thirties by an experimental educator and lecturer, backed by a group of society-women in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati who wished to strike a middle course between the existing extremes, between Aquinas and Dewey, the modern dance and the labor movement. Its students were neither to till the soil as at Antioch nor weave on looms as at Black Mountain; they were to be grounded neither in the grass-roots present as at Sarah Lawrence nor in the great-books past as at St. John’s or Chicago; they were to specialize neither in verse-writing, nor in the poetic theatre, nor in the techniques of co-operative living—they were simply to be free, spontaneous, and coeducational.
What the founder had had in mind was a utopian experiment in so-called “scientific” education; by the use of aptitude tests, psychological questionnaires, even blood-sampling and cranial measurements, he hoped to discover a method of gauging student-potential and directing it into the proper channels for maximum self-realization—he saw himself as an engineer and the college as a reclamation project along the lines of the Grand Coulee or the TVA. The women behind him, however, regarded the matter more simply, in the usual fashion of trustees. What they wanted to introduce into their region was a center of “personalized” education, with courses tailored to the individual need, like their own foundation-garments, and a staff of experts and consultants, each with a little “name” in his field, like the Michels and Antoines of Fifth Avenue, to interpret the student’s personality. In the long run, these views, seemingly so harmonious, were found to be far apart. The founder had the sincere idea of running his college as a laboratory; failure in an individual case he found as interesting as success. Under his permissive system, the students were free to study or not as they chose; he believed that the healthy organism would elect, like an animal, what was best for it. If the student failed to go in the direction indicated by the results of his testing, or in any direction at all, this was noted down and in time communicated to his parents, merely as a matter of interest—to push him in any way would be a violation of the neutrality of the experiment. The high percentage of failure was taken to be significant of the failures of secondary education; any serious reform in methodology must reach down to the kindergarten and the nursery school, through the whole preparatory system, and it was noteworthy, in this connection, that the progressive schools were doing their job no better than the old-fashioned classical ones. Indeed, comparative studies showed the graduates of progressive schools to be more dependent on outside initiative, on an authoritarian leader-pattern, than any other group in the community.
This finding convinced the trustees, who included the heads of two progressive schools, that the founder was ahead of his time, a stimulating man in the tradition of Pasteur and the early vivisectionists, whom history would give his due. He left the college the legacy of a strong scientific bent and a reputation for enthusiasm and crankishness that reflected itself in budgetary difficulties and in the prevalence of an “undesirable” type of student. Despite a high tuition and other screening devices (a geographical quota, interviews with the applicant and with the applicant’s parents, submission of a photograph when this was not practicable, solicitation of private schools), despite a picturesque campus—a group of long, thick-walled, mansarded, white-shuttered stone dwellings arranged around a cupolaed chapel with a planting of hemlocks, the remains of a small, old German Reformed denominational college that had imparted to the secluded ridge a Calvinistic sweetness of worship and election—something, perhaps the coeducational factor, perhaps the once-advertised freedom, had worked to give the college a peculiarly plebeian and subversive tone, like that of a big-city high-school.
It was the mixture of the sexes, some thought, that had introduced a crude and predatory bravado into the campus life; the glamour was rubbed off sex by the daily jostle in soda-shop and barroom and the nightly necking in the social rooms, and this, in its turn, had its effect on all ideals and absolutes. Differences were leveled; courses were regarded with a cynical, practical eye; students of both sexes had the wary disillusionment and aimlessness of battle-hardened Marines. After six months at Jocelyn, they felt that they had “seen through” life, through all attempts to educate and improve them, through love, poetry, philosophy, fame, and were here, it would seem, through some sort of coercion, like a drafted army. Thronging into store or classroom, in jeans, old sweaters, caps, visors, strewing cigarette-butts and candy-wrappers, they gave a mass impression that transcended their individual personalities, which were often soft, perturbed, uncertain, innocent; yet the very sight of an individual face, plunged deep in its own introspection, as in a blanket, heightened the crowd-sense they communicated, like soldiers in a truck, subway riders on their straps, serried but isolated, each in his stubborn dream, resistant to waking fully—at whatever time of day, the Jocelyn students were always sleepy, yawning, and rather gummy-eyed, as though it were seven in the morning and they unwillingly on the street.
Yet this very rawness and formlessness in the students made them interesting to teach. Badly prepared, sleepy, and evasive, they could nevertheless be stirred to wonder and pent admiration at the discovery of form and pattern in history or a work of art or a laboratory experiment, though ceding this admiration grudgingly and by degrees, like primitive peoples who must see an act performed over and over again before they can be convinced that some magic is not behind it, that they are not the dupes of an illusionist. To teachers with some experience of the ordinary class-bound private college student, of the quiet lecture-hall with the fair duteous heads bent over the notebooks, Jocelyn’s hard-eyed watchers signified the real. Seeing them come year after year, the stiff-spined, angry only children with inhibitions about the opposite sex, being entrained here remedially by their parents, as they had been routed to the dentist for braces, the wild-haired progressive-school rejects, offspring of broken homes, the sexually adventurous youths looking to meet their opposite numbers in the women’s dormitories, without the social complications of fraternities and sororities or the restraints of grades, examinations, compulsory athletics, R.O.T.C., the single well-dressed Adonis from Sewickley with a private plane and a neurosis, the fourteen-year-old mathematical Russian Jewish boys on scholarships, with their violin cases and timorous, old-country parents, hovering humbly outside the Registrar’s door as at a consular office, the cold peroxided beauties who had once done modeling for Powers and were here while waiting for a screen-test, the girls from Honolulu or Taos who could “sit on” their hair and wore it down their backs, Godiva-style, and were named Rina or Blanca or Snow-White, the conventional Allysons and Pattys whose favorite book was Winnie-the-Pooh—seeing them, the old-timers shook their heads and marveled at how the college could continue but in the same style that they marveled at the survival of the race itself. Among these students, they knew, there would be a large percentage of trouble-makers and a handful of gifted creatures who would redeem the whole; four out of five of these would be, predictably, the scholarship students, and the fifth a riddle and an anomaly, coming forward at the last moment, from the ranks of Allysons or Blancas, like the tortoise in the fable, or the sleeper in the horse-race, a term which at Jocelyn had a peculiar nicety of meaning.
And over the management of these students, the faculty, equally heterogeneous, would, within the year, become embroiled, with each other, with the student-body, or with the President or trustees. A scandal could be counted on that would cause a liberal lady somewhere to strike the college from her will: a pregnant girl, the pilfering of reserve books from the library, the usual plagiarism case, alleged racial discrimination, charges of alcoholism or homosexuality, a strike against the food in the dining-room, the prices in the college store, suppression of the student paper, alleged use of a course in myth to proselytize for religion, a student demand that a rule be laid down, in the handbook, governing sexual intercourse, if disciplinary action was to be taken against those who made love off the college premises and were observed by faculty-snoopers. No truly great question had ever agitated the campus since the original days of the founder, but the ordinary trivia of college life were here blown up, according to critics, out of all proportion. There had been no loyalty oath, no violation of academic freedom, but problems of freedom and fealty were discovered in the smallest issue, in whether, for example, students in the dining-hall, when surrendering their plates to the waiters, should pass them to the right or the left, clockwise or counterclockwise; at an all-college meeting, held in December of this year, compulsory for all students, faculty, and administrative staff, President Maynard Hoar had come within an ace of resigning when his appeal for moderation in the discussion had met with open cat-calls from the counterclockwise faction.
Thus the college faced every year an insurrectionary situation; in the course of twelve years it had had five presidents, including the founder, who was unseated after only eleven months of service. During the War, it had nearly foundered and been saved by the influx of veterans studying under the GI bill and by the new plutocracy of five-percenters, car-dealers, black-market slaughterers, tire-salesmen, and retail merchants who seemed to Jocelyn’s presidents to have been specially enriched by Providence, working mysteriously, with the interests of the small college in mind. These new recruits to the capitalist classes had no educational prejudices, were extremely respectful of the faculty, to whom they sent bulky presents of liquor or perfume, as to valuable clients at Christmas-time; they came to the college seldom, sometimes only once, for Commencement, passed out cigars and invitations to use the shack at Miami or Coral Gables any time at all—this benign and preoccupied gratitude, tactfully conscious of services rendered, extended also to friends and roommates of the poorer sort. Several years after graduation, little shoals of Jocelyn students would still be found living together co-operatively, in Malibu or St. Augustine—occasionally with an ex-teacher—sharing a single allowance under the bamboo tree.
Hence, though the college was in continual hot water financially, it had inevitably grown accustomed to close shaves and miraculous windfalls. Only the bursar seriously worried about balancing the budget, and his worries were accepted tolerantly—this was his métier. The faculty now took it for granted that fresh students would appear every fall out of nowhere, from the blue sky of promoters’ ventures, a strange new race, or stock issued by a wildcat bank, spending what would appear to be stage-money; and the yearly advent of these registrants in defiance of the laws of probability created in the staff a certain sense of displacement or of nonchalance or autarchic license, depending on the individual character. Careless of the future, fractious, oblivious of the past, believing that the industrial revolution was an actual armed uprising of the nineteenth century, that oranges grew in Norway and fir-trees on the Nile, these sons of shortages and rationing seemed to have sprung from no human ancestry but from War, like the dragon’s teeth sown in the Theban meadow. And the faculty which was teaching them their Cadmean alphabet fell to some extent under their influence; they too became indifferent to the morrow and forgetful of past incentives. There was a whiff of paganism in the air, of freedom from material cares that evoked the South Sea islands even in the Pennsylvania winter; more than one faculty-member, washed up on this coral strand, came to resemble, in dress and habits, the traditional beachcomber of fiction.
But the absence of pressure from without, the unconcern of parents and inertia of alumni groups, produced at the same time an opposite and corrective tendency. The faculty contained a strong and permanent minority of principled dissenters, men and women whose personal austerities and ethical drives had made them unacceptable to the run of college presidents and who had found the freedom of Jocelyn both congenial and inspiriting. If beachcombers had come to rest here, so had a sect of missionaries, carrying the progressive doctrine from Bennington, Bard, or Reed, and splitting here at once, like the original Calvinist college, into a new group of sects and factions. From its inception, the college had been rent by fierce doctrinal disputes of a quasi-liturgical character. Unlike the more established progressive colleges, which lived, so to speak, on the fat of their original formula, without questioning its content, Jocelyn had attracted to itself a whole series of irreconcilables, to whom questioning was a passion, who, in the words of Tolstoy, could not be silent. Beginning with the founder’s time, Jocelyn had served as a haven, like the early Pennsylvania country itself, with its Moravian and Mennonite and Hutterite and United Brethren chapels, its Quakers and Shakers and Anabaptists, for the persecuted of all tendencies within the fold of educational reform, and each new wave of migrants from the centers of progressive orthodoxy wished to perpetuate at Jocelyn the very conditions from which they had fled—thus the Bennington group assailed the Sarah Lawrence group and both assailed Dewey and Columbia, i.e., the parent-movement. Those who did not subscribe to any item of the progressive creed tended nevertheless to take sides with one faction or another for temperamental reasons; Aristotelians in philosophy joined with the Theatre myth-group to fight the Social Sciences.
An unresolved quarrel between the sciences and the humanities was at the bottom of every controversy, each claiming against the other the truer progressive orthodoxy, the words, scholastic, formalistic, scientism, positivistic, being hurled back and forth in the same timbered hall that had shivered to Petrine, pseudo-Protestant, Johannean, Romanizing in the days of the Mercersburg controversy, when a schism in the Lancaster synod had broken the old college asunder. It was the perennial quarrel, in short, between Geneva and Heidelberg, between Heidelberg and Augsburg, none the less passionate for the smallness of the arena and the fact that nobody cared, beyond the immediate disputants, how the issues were resolved. To whom did it matter, certainly not to the students, whether the college were to drop the term progressive and substitute experimental on page three of the catalogue? Yet to these men of conscience and consistency the point was just as cardinal as the spelling of catalogue (catalog?). Under the pretense of objectivity was a fighting word or spelling to be lowered from the masthead and a flag of truce run up? The defenders of the progressive citadel were always on the lookout for a semantic Trojan horse in any seemingly harmless resolution introduced by the enemy. And quite correctly so, for the enemy was cunning. Who would have suspected that a motion to drop the old engraved Latin diploma and replace it with a simple printed certificate, in English, announcing that the holder had completed the course of studies, concealed an entering wedge for a movement to bring Latin back into the curriculum? Many of the ultra-reform party had voted Aye to this suggestion, not seeing the infernal conservative logic behind it, which was that the college had no right to bestow a Latin diploma on a student incapable of reading it, and hence did not really rank with the old conferrers of the sheepskin but in a separate class, along, it was suavely argued, with the trade schools and hairdressing colleges, which made no pretenses to Roman universality, to the nihil humani a me alienum implicit in the traditional scroll.
Blandness and a false show of co-operation, discovered the ultras, were the characteristic revisionist subtleties—agreement and a reductio ad absurdum, the dangerous methods of the Greeks. Your true classicist would not argue in favor of the spelling, catalogue; rather, he would concur with the simplified spelling and move that the whole catalogue be revised in this spirit, with night becoming nite, right, rite, and so on, merely for the sake of consistency, at which point some burning-eyed and long-repressed progressive fanatic would pop up to agree with him, wholeheartedly, enthusiastically (“Let us break, in one stroke, with the past”), and the fat would be in the fire; the faculty, that is, exhausted by these shifts and reversals, would vote to leave things as they were. The experienced parliamentarians quickly learned the trick of party regularity, that is, to vote the opposite of the enemy, whatever the merits of a motion, but this rule was not foolproof against a devious opponent, who could suddenly change his position and throw the whole meeting into confusion. And despite a great deal of coaching, the honest and sincere doctrinaires of both sides tended, in the heat of debate, to take individualistic stands and even, in moments of great excitement, to make common cause with each other.
Nowhere did Jocelyn’s faculty show its coat of many colors more bewilderingly than in the discussion, which took place every fall, of the winter field-period. According to the orthodox view, which had been carried here from Bennington, the field-period was the crux of the whole progressive system: the four weeks spent by the student away from the college in factory, laboratory, newspaper plant, publishing firm or settlement-house were the test of his self-reliance and his ability to learn through doing; the measure of the success of the field-period was the measure of the success of the college. The ideas of the founder and of Dewey, Pestalozzi, and Montessori here coalesced. However, in the course of years, modifications of the original program had been permitted to creep in, concessions to practicality or to humanitarian sentiment. Some employers were steadily enthusiastic about hiring Jocelyn students for the allotted four weeks in February, others not so much so, owing to certain dire experiences which had created an unfortunate “stereotype” in the employer mind. Volunteer work, of course, was usually available, either in the social-service agencies, or in the wrapping department of commercial firms, but for poor students on scholarships, counting on a warm college room, and a regular job waiting on tables or running the college switchboard, it was often a cruel hardship to be turned out in February to work, gratis, in a strange city and pay for meals and a furnished room. Moreover, volunteer work was open to two objections: either it was “made” work, answering the telephone, running errands, taking notes at rehearsals, and hence of no social utility; or it involved scabbing—some employers, it was discovered, actually laid off workers in the February slack season, counting on the yearly migration of progressive students to keep the wheels turning at a slower pace. Thus the practice of allowing the student, under certain circumstances, to write an academic paper or note-topic and even in rare cases to be housed in a college dormitory during the free month slowly grew to be tolerated, and with tolerance came abuses, so that the “pure scholarship” or “regressive” party could claim that the field-period had ceased to fulfill its function and therefore ought to be abolished.
The extremists of the progressive side found nothing to criticize in this statement; either a return to first principles or no field-period at all was the slogan that governed their voting, and here they were in conflict with the moderates of their own tendency, who felt obliged to defend the field-period as it had actually evolved, abuses, academic papers and all, against this two-pronged attack, to show how, in certain circumstances, the preparation of a note-topic might contribute to self-development, in short, to invoke the arguments of traditionalist education and disparage the very axioms on which Jocelyn was founded. The whole question was further complicated by a material factor: one of Jocelyn’s great attractions for its faculty was precisely the winter field-period, the four free recuperative weeks in deadly February which could be spent in travel, literary composition, private research, or simply in rest and enjoyment. The less scrupulous of both sides, therefore, making up every year a plurality, voted shamelessly for any motion that would save their precious vacation. Those who went so far as to admit that the student got nothing from the field-period justified it on the grounds that some hiatus was necessary for a faculty drained to the lees by the exactions of individual instruction. “I don’t care what you call it,” declared Ivy Legendre of the Theatre (Theater?) Department, in her deep, bellicose, lesbian voice. “Call it Faculty Rest or Florida Special, if you want, but get the little bastards out of my yellow hair.” Mrs. Masterson of the Psychology Department, a spinsterish, anxious little widow with a high, thin voice, had compiled some very interesting figures on the relation of rest-periods to efficiency in factory work which she proffered to the faculty as relevant to the “vital discussion we are having”—it was this same little lady who had made a comparative study of the wages of teachers and garage-attendants in her busy Hudson coupé.
Henry Mulcahy, naturally, had electioneered for the field-period with white, bitter, tight-drawn lips, smiles of commendation for its supporters, glances of hatred for its enemies. Though he did not believe at all in learning through doing or the instrumental approach, he felt the issue as an extremely personal one and quarreled with his friend, Alma Fortune, who deprecated the field-period on principle; he was persuaded that she was trying maliciously to snatch from him a long-held, inalienable possession. To him it was an issue of immediate loyalty or disloyalty, and when he spoke, hissingly, of “the enemies of the field-period,” it was as though the vacation were a person under threat of physical attack. He was everywhere at once during the crucial period, behind the scenes caucusing with the scientists whom he had despised but with whom he now discovered more than one common aim, in corridors buttonholing middle-of-the-roaders, on the telephone, in a sibilant whisper, lest the party-wire be listening, at the door of the faculty meeting, adjuring, fortifying, counting the number present in the chamber and how they were likely to vote. When it was over and the faculty voted, as usual, for the field-period loosely construed, he had an exalted sense of public service, as if by superhuman effort and by not counting the cost to self, he had averted from the college a danger of which it was largely unconscious.
In the same way, but on the opposite side of the fence, he had been busy in the undercover campaign against individual instruction, which just at this time was becoming the subject of complaint. On the virtue of small classes, everyone was agreed, but the more controversial part of the Jocelyn program, the so-called major project, or trial major project, had not worked out in practice quite according to Hoyle and was open, in fact, to the same kind of objections that had been made against the winter field-period. In brief, the system was this: the student was supposed to spend one hour a week with a tutor in his major field, this tutorial hour being the center of his education, accounting, theoretically, for one-fourth of his academic work and requiring a minimum of eight hours of preparation. This latter provision, the student, like all students everywhere, interpreted very freely: he put in as few hours as he could get away with. But the practicality of hoodwinking the tutor varied with different departments and thus gave rise to inequalities. For example, in sculpture, music, painting, or drama, and to some extent in physics and chemistry and zoology, the student was obliged to check in with the instructor for the requisite hours of studio or laboratory work and risked academic failure if he were not at least physically on the premises and engaged in a show of work. With the so-called “heavy” reading subjects, the situation was altogether different. A tutor carrying anywhere from six to eleven tutees—for the concentration varied from department to department—was in no position really to check up on how much reading was done, since each advisee or tutee was working, supposedly, in a different corner of a very wide field, a corner chosen by himself in accordance with his special interests. Thus a teacher of philosophy could not keep up with Heraclitus, Popper, Freddy Ayer, Pascal, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and James, say, all in a single week, nor a teacher of literature with Richardson, James T. Farrell, Ben Jonson, Dos Passos, Horace, Zola, Gogol, Longinus on the Sublime. However well or little he had known these authors once, he was simply not up to the detailed questioning and discussion required to keep a student half-way up to scratch. The same was true of history and, to a lesser extent, of economics and political science, whose bibliographies were somewhat shorter. What happened, therefore, in practice was that students with applied art or science majors tended to gold-brick on their reading courses, and students with reading majors neglected their major project in favor of time spent in studio or laboratory in connection with an ordinary course. This difficulty appeared to be inherent in the system and provoked many departmental jealousies, with the scientists and applied-art people taking a superior line (“We can get work from our majors; why not you?”), so that irritation with individual instruction was concentrated largely in the humanistic studies and was tinctured with a sense of being misprized. The students, it was angrily noted, had been made to feel by the whole muscular progressive approach that reading was somehow bad for them and put on very touching and pathetic airs when a solid assignment in history or the novel was set before them.
But this was only one aspect of the question. In principle, the choice of subject within the field was left entirely up to the student. Within the realm of his major interest, he was at liberty to select any writer, period, movement, or phenomenon that struck his personal fancy. He could concentrate narrowly on a single exemplar or range over a whole epoch; he could study monotheism, Egyptian burial customs, Marx, Roman coins, land enclosure, English town life in the sixteenth century, the Maccabeean movement, the treatment of animals in primitive society, the history of absolutism, the phenomenological philosophers, war novels, Polynesian culture-heroes, Kafka, symbolism, naturalism, the rise of mercantilism, Steinbeck—anything he chose. The catalogue, which in some respects had not been altered since the founder’s day, contained an alluring account of this freedom and its practical effects on hitherto unresponsive clay, written up rather in the manner of the old dynamic advertisement, “They laughed at me when I sat down to the piano.” The classic case cited was that of a boy of religious temperament who was sent to Jocelyn after he had flunked out of two other colleges; his only interest was playing the organ in the chapel; after four years at Jocelyn, he was able to graduate, well up toward the middle of his class, having devoted his major project to a study of the influence of organ-music on eighteenth-century poetry. This manuscript, three times rewritten with the help of his tutor, was preserved in the library, together with the thesis of the girl who had come to Jocelyn unwillingly, wanting only to become a vet, and had finally made a niche for herself by comparing the role of the animal-as-magic-helper in Russian and German fairy-tales. Another boy (in this case a highly gifted student), fifteen years old, having an affair with a twenty-year-old girl, did a legendary paper not mentioned in the catalogue on the Older Woman in Stendhal and Benjamin Constant. A girl with a prostitute complex, so she maintained, had been helped to marry by studying her type in Manon.
Other examples, less curious, convinced the average entrant that he was not only going to be encouraged to express his individual bent, but that if he did not already have some personality-defining interest he had better work one up fast. Yet within the first few weeks he discovered that actuality did not jibe with these fancies—to his bewilderment he found himself pursuing a study, say, of Katherine Anne Porter instead of writing the radio serial he had come to college to do. Further and worse, when he went to the library to take out Flowering Judas, he learned from the librarian that all ten copies were out: Mr. Van Tour, his tutor, was giving it in Contemporary Literature, and several of his other tutees were making it their special interest. The librarian kindly offered to lend his personal Modern Library copy (he had done the same thing last year for several of Mr. Van Tour’s students), and he also recommended an article by Mr. Van Tour in Prairie Schooner on “Regional Elements in the Work of K.A.P.”
Were the boy to change to Mr. Furness, he might have the same experience with Kafka; to Dr. Mulcahy, with Joyce. If lucky, last year he might have got old Mr. Endicott, a veteran of the department, now retired, who would let him study anything he pleased and report on it, while the old man smoked his pipe in comfort, with his hearing-aid turned off. Except for certain younger teachers, like Miss Rejnev, who made much of being conscientious, the faculty, in practice, had arrived at a quiet gentlemen’s agreement whereby each teacher offered two or three specialties, a limited choice, or else let the student roam, unsupervised, to some salt-lick of his own choosing. A student who did the latter was likely to get a high mark in Spontaneity but to rank low in Effort, Ability to Use the Tools of the Discipline, and Lack of Prejudice. The better students, in general, adjusted themselves without repining to what the faculty had to offer, pointing out to their juniors that it was better to allow Mr. Van Tour to teach you what he knew than what he didn’t, patently; but the poorer students complained constantly of having to study things in which they were not “interested,” i.e., those who had no real interests and no capacity for absorption but only passing whims with which they quickly grew bored felt genuinely deprived and disenfranchised at having to study a subject which someone else also was studying. They viewed the course of studies as a tray of sweetmeats held out before their greedy and yet suspicious eyes and cried out in fury when the tray was whisked away from them, still gluttonously hesitating, or when they were forced to accept a piece that another child had nibbled.
The effect of these sulky accusations was to make a section of the faculty wish to withdraw from the catalogue all claims to individual instruction and to have advisees in the reading courses double up in the tutorial hour, as they were already doing in sciences and languages, without anybody’s saying anything to forbid it. But this proposal, though practical in one way, was in another sense, as everybody ought to have known, totally fanciful and heedless, since it was obvious that only individual instruction could justify the high tuition, which alone kept the college going. Hence the President and those close to the budgetary problem felt a real choler rise in them when anyone had the temerity to broach such a suggestion. To the men at the helm, in this hour of peril (the President, like all heads of institutions, was addicted to the nautical comparison), this was not a matter for free discussion, but savored, rather, of willfulness or mutiny on the high seas. And his face darkened as he said it; he would entertain no argument on the point. For he not only believed with all his heart in the merits of individual instruction but knew this belief to be necessary to his own and the college’s survival, so that those who questioned it seemed to him true destroyers. The perfect college they hinted at might exist on paper but it would never attract students, for it would have no selling-point, no gimmick, as they said in advertising, which for the unendowed or virtually unendowed college was the very heart, the pump, the ticker.
Therefore, despite personal friendship, President Hoar experienced a nettled impatience with Miss Rejnev and other teachers of her ilk who were too stubbornly principled, on the one hand, and too eager for self-improvement, on the other, not to allow their tutees an absolutely free hand and indulge their own intellectual curiosity on the college time. He would not listen to criticism of the system from people who had no sense of proportion in the application of it; Miss Rejnev, Mrs. Fortune, and certain other members of the Literature department drove themselves too hard out of sheer whimsicality and caprice—some might even call it perversity—and then put the blame on the method, which others could handle with ease. And to a certain extent, President Hoar’s appraisal was correct.
Although it was true that these critics of individual instruction were among the few who practiced it literally, their motives were somewhat dubious—did they really wish to make individual instruction succeed or to show that it could not do so? Second, did they really dislike it as much as they pretended? The fact was, that much as they decried the Jocelyn system as “intolerable” and “intellectually dishonest,” these people were, in their own fashion, extremely happy at Jocelyn, like all people everywhere who are working a little too hard on materials that are new to them. To be allowed, under the cover of duty, to pursue the world’s history down its recondite byways was, for Domna Rejnev, a pure nightly joy, a passion of legitimate conquest, and her students were quick to discover that they could not please Miss Rejnev better than by discovering a wish to study an author she had not read, preferably an old author, in some forgotten cranny of culture. Thus, though she and others like her, themselves trained in the classical order, protested on behalf of the student Jocelyn’s disorganized ways, it was the very lack of organization, the sense of teaching as a joint voyage of discovery or pleasure-trip, that made the college, despite everything that could be said against it, a happy place for its faculty. It was the faculty, paradoxically, that profited most from Jocelyn’s untrammeled and individualistic arrangements, the students being on the whole too disorderly or lazy or ill-trained to carry anything very far without the spur of discipline.
For the faculty, as has been indicated, Jocelyn was by and large lotos-land. Those continuous factional disputes and ideological scandals were a form of spiritual luxury that satisfied the higher cravings for polemic, gossip, and backbiting without taking the baser shape, so noticeable in the larger universities, of personal competition and envy. Here, living was cheap and the salary-range was not great. The headships of departments were nominal, falling, by common consent, to the member with the greatest taste for paper-work. Such competition as there was centered around the tutees. The more ambitious teachers, as everywhere, vied for the better students, partly because these were more interesting and also easier to teach, partly because of vanity, and partly from the more insidious egotism of the Potter’s Hand, the desire to shape and mold the better-than-common clay and breathe one’s own ghostly life into it—the teacher’s besetting temptation, God’s sin, which Christ perhaps redeemed. Yet here, where such proclivities abounded, on account of the creative emphasis and the personal character of the tutorial relation, the danger was so manifest that defenses were erected against it. Strong influences were frowned on, academically, and those who wished to exert them were expected to do so off the premises, to the tinkle of the teacups or the cocktail shaker. In the assignment of tutees, impartiality was the order: anyone who wanted an A student agreed to accept two or three duds into the bargain. Since there were never enough A students to go around, inequities might have resulted, but for the fact that there were certain good-natured and easy-going teachers who, from long habit, preferred the inferior student, like a broken-in pair of shoes, and hence righted the balance—in fact, that diversity of tastes counted on by utopian social theorists to take care in an ideal society of the inevitable shortages of certain consumers’ goods, such as Rolls Royces, rubies, or good women, here operated in practice, so that the majority of teachers were personally content and just enough dissatisfied in conscience to make life worth living. The intellectual scruple substituted for the itch for gain by suggesting new incentives, opportunities for reform and improvement, second chances, either for the self or for the college, reasons, in short, to get up in the morning that seemed to be lacking to the student.
The salary-scale here was significant. It ranged from three thousand to five thousand a year, not much, one would have said, by worldly standards, but adequate to the needs of the “creative” people who, as in most progressive colleges, made up a considerable part of the faculty and had another string to their bow. Most of the instructors were young and unmarried and did not grudge the few settled family men their professorial stipend, which went into bringing up children and not into conspicuous entertaining. Among the older married teachers, there were a number of those husband-and-wife “teams” that progressive colleges like to hire and others, for some reason, do not—for them the double income made a low salary practicable. And even such an instructor as Henry Mulcahy, tortured by debt, doctor bills, coal bills, small personal loans never paid back, four children outgrowing their clothes, patches, darns, tears, the threatening letters of a collection-agency, knew himself well off here in comparison to many an instructor at state university or endowed private college, where a stipend of twenty-five hundred would not be considered too low. Jocelyn, in this respect, followed the progressive pattern of offering a reasonable security to those in its lowest rank, while holding out few prospects of advancement or of juicy plums at the top of the tree. In this way, it had been able to recruit a faculty of poets, sculptors, critics, composers, painters, scene-designers, and so on, without academic experience and without, also, academic ambitions of the careerist sort—as well as beginners in history, science, or philosophy fired with the love of a subject and impatient of graduate-school norms; plus a certain number of seasoned non-conformists and dissenters, sexual deviants, feather-bedders, alcoholics, impostors.
All these, on the instructorial or assistant-professor level, constituted the bulk of Jocelyn’s faculty, which included many transients and floaters, here one year and gone the next. Behind them, on the associate- or full-professor level, was the staple minority of family men, Fathers of the progressive republic, kindly, genial, older statesmen wedded to pipe and tobacco-pouch, steeped in a beneficent content, rather in the Swiss style, fond of bierstube, lieder, mountain-climbing, ice-skating, aperitifs on the plaza of a well-loved foreign town, chary of commitment, generous of praise, prudent, thrifty, foresighted—the best type, in short, of bourgeois summer-wandering scholar who saw events, as it were, three-dimensional, through the broadening stereopticon of travel. Such men had been drawn into the progressive life more or less by accident, through a chance recommendation, a meeting on a promenade deck, a college friendship kept up, and stayed in it partly from habit and partly from that taste for a foreign yet familiar environment that governed their vacation schedules: the scandals and oddities of the successive years at Jocelyn were preserved in their reminiscences like views of the Bay of Naples or, more appropriately, like the graffiti at Pompeii. Unlike their younger colleagues, they were able to find extenuating circumstances for any piece of rascality; seasoning had made them tolerant. Like all long-time residents in an alien environment, they used a double standard, one for themselves and another, more lenient, for the native folkways.
Such a man was Aristide Poncy, professor of French and German, head of the Languages department of the Literature and Languages Division, a Swiss in actual derivation as well as in temperament, brought to America by his parents when he was six years old, educated at Zurich and the University of North Dakota—a middle-aged, fatherly man with large, smooth chaps and an outing taste in dress that suggested Sherlock Holmes. He had been at Jocelyn from the beginning without making an enemy; he taught his pupils, by preference, out of secondary-school textbooks and was himself engaged in a lifelong study of Amiel, on whom he had already published an admirable bibliography and two pertinent articles. None of his students, alas, could be got to share this interest; they preferred to read Sartre and Camus or, rather, to hear about them—he himself had lost patience with the French novel about the time of Maurice Dekobra. Under his multilingual auspices a variety of rather curious younger people had come to teach at Jocelyn. He had perhaps a cantonal prejudice (unconscious) against the French of Paris or even that of Marseilles, so that he had introduced into his division a veritable babel of accents. As assistants and colleagues in French, he had had at various times a Belgian, a German, a Corsican, another Swiss, an Egyptian (who, as he confided to Mrs. Fortune, spoke French “like a native”); this year, under him, were Domna Rejnev, a Russian, and a half-American Turk whom he had met in Istanbul, a Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, a tall, stiff, bearded man with a queer rigid gait who resembled a flat Christ in a primitive, under Byzantine influence, and who was thought by some, for this reason, to be an international criminal. Aristide’s taste for colonial or, as it were, secondary sources of a language extended also to German, which was taught by himself and an Austrian, and to Spanish, by a girl from Peru.
The fact was, Aristide Poncy was a good and innocent man—the father of three little Poncys who all took piano-lessons—whose shrewdness and knowledge of the world applied only to money-matters at home and to the exchange of currency in foreign countries. He had been guilty, as he once confessed to Domna in an undertone, “of many grave mistakes in the judgment of character.” Whenever, during the summer, he took a party of students abroad under his genial wing, catastrophic events attended him. As he sat sipping his vermouth and introducing himself to tourists at the Flore or the Deux Magots, the boys and girls under his guidance were being robbed, eloping to Italy, losing their passports, slipping off to Monte Carlo, seeking out an abortionist, deciding to turn queer, cabling the decision to their parents, while he took out his watch and wondered why they were late in meeting him for the expedition to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Returning home, usually minus one student at the very least, he always deprecated what had happened, remarking that there had been “a little mix-up” or that the Métro was confusing to foreigners.
Was it, Domna Rejnev wondered, as she rapped sharply on the door of his office, this fatal gullibility that had drawn her to him now to unfold Mulcahy’s story, or was it rather his fatherly qualities, his tolerance, experience, and human kindness that made her fear him less at such a moment than she would have feared Howard Furness or Alma Fortune, both friends of the Mulcahys, where Aristide was not? Already, as she hurried through the building, she had begun to have the feeling that the tale she bore was incredible (which, of course, her training reassured her, did not make it any the less true), and she had commenced to rehearse in her own mind, her lips moving swiftly as she climbed the narrow stairs, certain little modifications and additions that would make the President’s guilt more evident to an a-political audience. For there was no doubt that, of all persons she could have chosen, Aristide Poncy was the least qualified to appreciate the nuances of the affair, so that even as she knocked, she hesitated, hearing her superior trill out, “Entrez,” with a wonderful, exhibition r that made her see already his large pink tongue soloing against his red mouth-roof and his large clean white teeth (Aristide spoke French virtuoso-style, like a demonstrator in a department store or a professional diver in slow motion, holding his mouth open to illustrate the mechanics of the production of the various dentals and alveolars). He rose from his desk to welcome her, a busy, energetic man as his office showed, book-lined from floor to ceiling, with a special section for magazines, French, Swiss, and German, and for journals of the trade, yet he was evidently, as he said, très content to see her, eager to show her a new volume on M. de Vogüé which he had just procured from his bookseller with the idea that it might interest her, très content, and, as always, full of restrained anticipation for the good gossip that would follow.
Domna, shown to a chair, assuring him that his pipe did not bother her, felt at the same time a reluctance to begin on her narrative and a queer conviction that with this eager listener she had an absolutely free hand; owing to his personal security and remoteness from political conspiracy, he would accept whatever she told him as an attested marvel. “You don’t say?” he would interject from time to time and sit back to be regaled with the details. This prediction, she remarked to herself parenthetically, while clearing her throat to commence, would hold good for the greater part of the Jocelyn faculty—with two or three exceptions, they would believe anything you told them touching political entanglements. And with this a terrible temptation came to her, who was a model of honesty: why not involve Maynard Hoar? As even Aristide knew, Jocelyn’s “liberal” spokesman had tuned his guitar more than once to the Russian balalaika and was far more guilty, really, than the misled and hapless Mulcahy, who had not known how to disengage himself from an embarrassing commitment. Why not say that Henry, just now, in confessing his Party membership had also implicated Maynard in the Party tie? Easy to assert, in confidence, and no more, in a sense, than the truth. As soon as this devilish idea reached her full consciousness, she expelled it as wicked and useless—it could only end in ineffectuality or in both men’s losing their jobs. Yet the fact that it could have proposed itself to her so readily, easily, and naturally gave her a disturbing shock. What had happened to make her so ready to embark on a course of opportunistic lying? Are we less scrupulous when we plead for others than when we work for ourselves? And how in the course of a few minutes had she come to hate Maynard to the point where she would see him ruined, gladly, and think it a just desert? These questions remained troublingly in her mind, as she began to relate to Aristide, as truthfully as possible, and yet with great anger and conviction, the story of Henry’s dismissal. “You don’t say!” he presently ejaculated. “Incroyable!”