[On
12 October 2011, I published an article on ROT about “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” educational
innovators in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. In the introduction to that article, I
likened the Windsor Mountain School, the prep school they established and ran
in Lenox, Massachusetts, to a kind of Black Mountain College for
teenagers. It now occurs to me to
present a history and discussion of the original experiment in educating young
people in this country, and so here is what might be seen as a companion piece
to “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” my profile of Black Mountain College, a short-lived
but powerful exploration of pedagogical ideas and innovations in the middle of
the last century. ~Rick]
In his 1962 book, which he called a critique
of the American college system, Paul Goodman proposed a Community of Scholars, a voluntary association of students and men
and women of learning where the students want to learn and the scholars want to
teach. The community would be independent
of the outside world of compromise and convention, dedicated solely to teaching
and learning, free of the influences of business and commerce, politics and
government, society and social conventions.
The only way Goodman saw for such a community to evolve, though, was
“for bands of scholars to secede and set up where they can teach and learn on
their own simple conditions.”
As Goodman, a writer, political theorist, and
public intellectual, acknowledged in his book’s conclusion, this was the very
origin of the short-lived educational experiment known as Black Mountain
College. In April 1933, John Andrew
Rice, professor of classics at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, was fired for vocally objecting
to some of the policies of college president Hamilton
Holt. The dismissal of other faculty,
Ralph Reed Lounsbury, a professor of American government, and Frederick
Raymond Georgia, a chemistry teacher, followed when they protested the
violation of Rice’s academic freedom, and some other teachers, most notably Theodore
Dreier, a professor of physics,
resigned in support.
(According to independent scholar Mary Emma Harris, chair of the Black
Mountain College Project, the American Association of University Professors
investigated. Despite Rice’s history of
conflicts with the administrations of schools where he’d taught, the AAUP
report essentially vindicated Rice and his followers.) These four men, having engaged in late-night ruminations
on the “ideal college,” decided that this would be the opportune time to launch
such an endeavor, there being so little to lose for the jobless quartet in the
depths of the Great Depression, so over the next two months, the men found a
campus ready for occupancy, drafted a charter and got a certificate of
incorporation, hired faculty and recruited students, and set down the new
school’s educational principles. Thus
was Black Mountain College born near Asheville, North Carolina, in the fall of
1933. In the first term, BMC had 12
teachers (including the original four men) and 22 students on the grounds of the YMCA’s Blue Ridge Assembly (which they had to vacate
every summer when the Y conducted its summer programs).
In 1941, BMC moved to
its own campus on the other side of the valley at Lake Eden where it remained
until the school closed by court order in 1957.
At a time when education in the United States
was becoming standardized and dedicated to training people for professional
careers, Black Mountain College appeared to challenge the status quo. In his introduction to Black Mountain
College: Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts, Mervin Lane asserted that the founders of
Black Mountain “were seekers sensitive to the constrictions of
entrenched, hierarchical, bureaucratic inflexibility. They felt the need for a more cooperative,
co-evolving, independent, experimental approach to learning, liberated from
external pressures and the preoccupation with the apparatus of credentialing.” From its inception, BMC was intended to be a
community, emphasizing the responsibilities each member has to the others. Yet for each scholar to develop
intellectually and artistically, the school’s founders believed that the
students had to be free from coercion and preconditions, from being forced into
a preconceived mold devised by others, so Black Mountain endeavored to assure
that each individual was free to grow and learn in his or her own way, without
being subordinated to the group. As
Martin Duberman put it in Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, his study of the school: “the
student should be placed in competition with himself, not others.” Duberman asserted:
Yet individuals can
be valued for personal traits or talents—intuitiveness, humor, warmth, a sense
of form, color or line—not usually recognized or validated by traditional
academic criteria. Black Mountain at
least tried—though of course often failed—to appreciate the specialness of each
person, and not to judge him narrowly on the basis of how he performed in the
limited context of a classroom setting.
In “Utopia Revisited,” her 1987 Horizon magazine profile of the school, journalist
Marcia Wade characterized the experimental college, where “life was informal,
intense, and spontaneous,” as “a
community of doers and dreamers, ‘built almost entirely of and on ideas and
idealism.’”
Because the student body of BMC was so small
and the student-teacher ratio so low, individuals weren’t lost in a mass of
students as they might be at a large school.
Everyone had the opportunity to stand out and be noticed for talents,
abilities, accomplishments, or efforts. “In
general,” wrote Lane, a former BMC student himself, “the effort of Black
Mountain College is to produce individuals rather than individualists, in the
belief that the individualist is bound to be a misfit in modern life, while, at
the other extreme, the subordination of men and women to a uniform and
consistent pattern of action will inevitably prevent the creation of a better
society than we now have.” No one was
forced to take part in any event or to go along with the majority. The choice of how to proceed in his or her
education was up to each student, and joining a formal program or an informal
one conducted by a faculty member, or one initiated by another student, or
starting one him- or herself was all equally viable. If a student started in one direction and
discovered a more appealing or productive one, changing routes was part of the
BMC learning philosophy. Any time a
student wanted help or guidance, the faculty was there to advise as much or as
little as the student wanted, at any time and in any form the student
needed.
In the 1930s, just as BMC was being founded
in North Carolina, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists were rising in
Germany. (Hitler was elected Chancellor
the same year Black Mountain was founded: 1933.) Artists from the Bauhaus, the progressive art
school founded in 1919 in Weimar, fled the Nazis after the institution was
closed under pressure from Hitler’s government; many came to the U.S. and some
eventually found their way to Asheville and Black Mountain where some enrolled
as students and many more joined the art faculty. Other European refugees from the Third Reich,
such as psychoanalyst Fritz Moellenhoff, neurologist and phenomenologist Erwin
Straus, and Heinrich Jalowetz, a musicologist
and conductor, also came to Black Mountain. Aside from the influx of so many world-class
artists and scholars from Europe, including painter Josef Albers and his wife, Anni, a textile artist and printmaker; architect
(and Bauhaus founder)
Walter Gropius; designer Alvin Lustig; ceramic artist Marguerite
Wildenhain; and designer, photographer, and theater
director Xanti Schawinsky, the Bauhaus influence also lent the school a leftist
bias both culturally and politically.
The Bauhaus artists, quite a few of whom were Jewish but who were nearly
all persecuted for their political beliefs, would make a lasting impression on
Black Mountain College (not to mention the students who went there) that spanned
its short life.
BMC emphasized an interdisciplinary
curriculum “with various means of communications and self-expression—not simply
the verbal—utilized: painting, music, dance, weaving, theater,” reported Duberman. Creative exploration embracing both teachers
and students as a means of learning was common and performance often served as
“an educational method aiming at the interchange between the arts and sciences
and using the theatre as a laboratory and place of action and experimentation,”
wrote RoseLee Goldberg in her book on performance art (the seeds of which were
planted at Black Mountain).
Additionally, BMC tried “to teach method as against content,” its focus
“on process as against results,” recorded Louis Adamic, a former Black Mountain
student. As Albers, who headed the art
department at Black Mountain from 1933 until 1950, phrased the philosophy:
“[A]rt is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT . . . . The performance—how it is done—that is the
content of art.”
Even though none of the four founders of
Black Mountain College were artists or arts teachers, they determined “that the study and practice of art were indispensable
aspects of a student's general liberal arts education.” In the college’s preliminary announcement,
the founders frankly stated: “Although no efforts will be made at first to train professional artists,
dramatics, painting and music will have an important place in the curriculum. We have found that often through working in
one of the arts, students are led to an intellectual awakening more effectively
than in any other way.” The arts were
central to BMC’s educational program, but although many faculty were practicing
artists, quite a few of some renown, and many students went on to become
important American artists in several fields, the teaching and study of the
arts was seen as a way to foster “creativity, independence,
and discipline among” the BMC students. “At
Black Mountain education was to be a preparation for life,” wrote Harris in
The Arts at Black Mountain College.
Despite the emphasis on the arts, there was a
concerted effort to focus equally on the latest ideas in science and the
humanities. The school’s curriculum
included traditional liberal arts courses, such as economics, psychology,
philosophy, Greek, Latin (last three, Rice), English, French, German, government,
public law, history (last three, Lounsbury), chemistry (Georgia), biology,
physics, mathematics (last two, Dreier).
There were, however, no formal departments, no grades, no credit hours,
and so on. In fact, there were no
designations of freshman,
sophomore, junior, or senior years or courses at BMC. The school was divided simply into a Junior
College and a Senior College, with the Junior College constituting a period of
general studies incorporating classes the student and the faculty determined
were important for the student’s introduction to “the various fields of
knowledge” so that he or she could subsequently choose a subject of
specialization in the Senior College.
The student’s individual curriculum was determined in consultation with
the faculty and tailored to each one’s needs and interests—and subject to
variation as those needs and interests changed and developed. The college stressed continuity of learning,
however, in an effort to avoid what student Isaac S. Nakata called
“parochialism,” the student’s program so narrowly focused on one subject or in
one field that the education was fragmented.
The school tried to foster a search for relationships among many
disciplines.
In the Senior
College, promotion to which required passing two days of oral and written
comprehensive exams and the submission of a plan of study, the work would be
concentrated on one main subject with corollary work all supervised by one or
more tutors. It was in the Senior
College that one of the principal innovations of BMC was practiced—projects in
which one or more faculty would work with students, often from disparate
disciplines, to produce a performance, an exhibition, or even an invention to
which all the participants contributed equally according to their (often new-found)
talents and abilities. Architect Buckminster
Fuller, for example, improvised his first geodesic dome out of Venetian blind
slats in the school’s back yard with student Kenneth Snelson (who went on to
become a sculptor) in 1948 and ’49; choreographer Merce Cunningham started a
dance troupe; and composer John Cage staged his first Happening with student
Allan Kaprow (who later used the name for other improvised events). In 1948, Cunningham
and Cage were on the BMC summer school faculty when painter Willem de Kooning
and Fuller were also there, none of them known to the outside world yet. They reconstructed Erik Satie’s 1913
absurdist play, The Ruse of Medusa,
“set in Paris, the day before yesterday.”
The performance, co-directed by Helen Livingston and student Arthur
Penn, featured student Elaine de Kooning (Willem’s wife) as the leading lady,
Fuller as Baron Méduse, choreography by Cunningham, and sets by Willem de
Kooning.
When the student
and the mentors felt she or he’d completed the work outlined in the plan, the
student was examined by scholars from outside institutions whose evaluation was
the main criterion for graduation. Former
student Fielding Dawson laid out the graduation requirements: “After I had
reviewed my first three years, I would be subject to cross examination by the
students, and then, with only the Student Moderator [the students’
representative to the faculty] . . . present, by the faculty. The Student Moderator had the capacity to
tell the faculty they were being too tough.
It was like a trial. The next and
last step was an examination by any person in the world involved in the
particular field.”
At Black Mountain College, students lived in
close association with practicing artists and so learned about “the financial
sacrifices, the commercial aspects such as getting a gallery and selling art,
the politics of publication, and inevitably the necessity of making a decision
for art,” explained Harris. From their
intimate contact with working artists, the notion among new students that
“artists were people who were born with certain kinds of magical qualities that
they knew about from the time they were geniuses at the age of five” was
quickly dismissed. BMC became an
incubator for experimental performance and art, attracting the likes of composers
Lou Harrison and Cage;
writers Goodman and Eric Bentley; choreographer Cunningham; painters Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jacob Lawrence,
and Willem de Kooning; sculptor Richard Lippold; and
architects Gropius and
Fuller, among others who were important figures in the
arts or were soon to become so. Some
students of note, in addition to Elaine de Kooning, included painters Robert de
Niro, Sr. (father of the actor) and Twombly; film director Penn, and writer James Leo
Herlihy.
One principal difference between Black
Mountain College and other U.S. colleges was its institutional structure. Having been born out of a dispute over
academic freedom, BMC was owned
and operated by the faculty and was committed to democratic governance and the
founders agreed that any administrative structure should be nominal with no
trustees, regents, deans, or chancellor to constrain the free exchange of ideas
and methods of learning. The founders “decided to discard the non-professional Board of
Trustees,” establishing instead a Board of Fellows made up mostly of faculty elected
by their peers and one student representative elected by students. There was also
no president in the usual sense, with authority to
hire and fire, as the founders believed that having a strong executive would
violate their principle that the college should be governed jointly by the
faculty and the students. The presiding officer, called a
rector to distinguish the office from a traditional college executive, was
elected for a short period and rotated among members of the faculty. (BMC’s first rector was, of course, John
Andrew Rice.) The duties of the rector, who had
no power beyond persuasion, were only to officiate at meetings and represent BMC before
the public. The responsibilities usually discharged by deans and
other administrators to discuss and
transact business
were performed by
committees of the teaching faculty with student representation. The students had a voice in everything that
affected their academic lives in order to encourage them to take responsibility
for their own educations. “The
College prided itself on the fact that it imposed no rules or regulations of
any kind, but depended on the developing maturity, responsibility, and
self-discipline of its members,” recalled former BMC student Phyllis Josephs
Thomas. “Major problems were taken up
and thrashed out at townhall-like meetings of the entire community.”
Mary Gregory, teacher of woodworking at BMC,
recalled that it was expected that “everyone who joined the community be a
contributor, not a purchaser.“ All the
community’s members were expected to give something of themselves. The college’s library, for example, was made
up of books from the faculty’s personal collections and even students loaned
books. The teachers were also the
school’s fundraisers as well as the students’ instructors and advisers, and
they and the students provided an evening’s entertainment so everyone could
relax and enjoy free time. Students and
faculty who had already spent time at Black Mountain were available to provide
help for the newcomers, to answer questions and provide guidance.
Everyone at
BMC participated in its operation, including farm work, construction projects,
and kitchen duty. One former student
described his routine:
Every
Sunday morning I had to get up and participate in the Work Program . . . . I did a lot of different things. I kept the sewer lines open . . . .
Well
I also worked on the farm.
I also did road
work. I also cut grass; I washed
windows, swept, painted, scraped, fixed roofs, removed hot water heaters,
collected stones, kept fires going, cut down trees—etc.
The distinctions at Black Mountain between
students and faculty were so blurred that it was often impossible to tell the
difference. Both faculty and students
lived on campus and ate in the common dining hall. Paul Goodman felt, “This made for a fuller
life.” In his book on the school,
Duberman explained that “relationships between students and teachers at Black
Mountain were ‘much more human’ than at most places—people tended to meet as
people, rather than as pieces in the ancient mandarin game called ‘Classroom.’” The usual stratifications of “academic caste”
didn’t exist on the BMC campus, and with everyone contributing to facilities
maintenance and no administrative staff visible, many visitors to the college,
which included such figures as John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, May
Sarton, and Thornton Wilder who came to observe the experiment, could be
confused about who ran things. There’s
an anecdote about Eleanor Roosevelt on a tour of BMC: the First Lady approached
a student in the reading room of a classroom building and asked who was in charge
of the school. “I don’t know,” said the
young man, and left the room.
The real disparity between Black Mountain and
its conventional sister institutions, however, was in the very concept of
learning. In Duberman’s words:
The one idea most
commonly agreed upon was that “living” and “learning” should be
intertwined. Education should proceed
everywhere, not only in classroom settings—which in fact, at least as usually
structured, are among the worst learning environments imaginable. A favorite slogan at Black Mountain was that “as
much real education takes place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.”
Every facet of community life was part of a
student’s education and the normal division of “curricular” and “extracurricular,”
the distinction between work in a classroom or work outside it, dissolved. “We wrote stories, poems and plays, we drew,
we painted pictures, made sculptures, threw pots, danced, took photographs,
composed and played music, had softball games in the summer and football games
in the winter and brought the cows in,” recounted a former student.
As Duberman reported further: “Talk was
probably the community’s most characteristic activity. And it wasn’t talk sequestered to classrooms,
or segregated in terms of age and sex. People
constantly dropped into each other’s studies, staff and students interacting
without planning or formality.” Learning
at Black Mountain, with the experience of living closely with the teachers, was
as much about the classes a student took and the instructors taught as by the
faculty’s very presence in the community as working artists, writers, and
scientists. Conversations at dinner,
concerts, lectures, performances, and parties in the evenings and on weekends
were as invaluable as anything that went on in a schoolroom, a studio, or a
lab. Learning simply went on all the
time, whenever the opportunity or impulse arose—and it was part of BMC’s
philosophy that the students would have (or gain) the maturity to capitalize on
those opportunities. “Formal education
was not seen as an end in itself but as one part of the process of life,”
affirmed Harris, “and there was an attempt to break down the distinction
between the formal and the incidental or unintentional modes of education.” To be part of BMC was to be part of a
community—a community of scholars.
BMC
began to get the reputation as “an interdisciplinary educational hide-out,” as
RoseLee Goldberg described it in Performance Art: From Futurism to the
Present. Spending so much time in
the company of practicing artists, writers, and scholars readily engendered improvised
performances. Xanti Schawinsky, the director,
photographer, and artist, for instance, began a “stage studies” project. “This course is not intended as a training
for any particular branch of the contemporary theatre,” Goldberg quoted Schawinsky
as explaining. It was intended to be an
exploration of “space, form, colour, light, sound, movement, music, time, etc.” The project’s first performance was Spectodrama,
“an educational method aiming at the interchange between the arts and sciences
and using the theatre as a laboratory and place of action and experimentation”
in which a group of students from all fields “‘tackled prevailing concepts and
phenomena from different viewpoints, creating stage representations expressing
them.”
Even with its open-learning atmosphere, Black
Mountain College didn’t neglect classroom work or assign it a secondary
position as an aspect of a Black Mountain education. Though there was no formal grading system, required
courses, or college-mandated exams, classes met at regular times in the morning
and evening. (Afternoons were devoted to work programs in maintenance, work on the
college farm, or administration.) A
class might start at 7:30 in the evening but continue till midnight. Then the teacher and students might adjourn
to the dining hall or some other gathering spot and continue the discussion
over coffee and peanut butter sandwiches.
Without a grading system, however, attendance at class was
unenforced. But as one student put it,
the instructor might not appear to care if students didn’t come to class on a
given Tuesday, though “when they came in on Wednesday they wouldn’t know what
anybody was talking about.” The student
continued:
We had to go to
classes or face the wrath of the teacher; there wasn’t any kidding around. The other prevailing faculty attitude was if
you missed my class well fuck you—classes were tough, we couldn’t miss
them—homework, heavy as it was, then doubled . . . it was free of academic
rules and regulations, but that made it worse, the whole burden was on us, and
the faculty maybe getting plastered with us the night before no matter, we had
to produce.
Some of the classes were formal lectures with
regular papers and exams, but every instructor was free to devise her or his
own method of teaching, most preferring some form of small discussion
group. Still others would show pictures
or play music (live or recorded). Diverse
forms of communications and expression, not merely words, were explored. (“Explore” was, of course, a literal
description of the efforts: finding new ways to use various media was a regular
pursuit at BMC. Cage and Cunningham
together created
works using non-instrumental sounds and unconventional movement, for instance, culminating
in 1952’s Untitled Event at Black Mountain.)
It wasn’t uncommon for the occasional
seminar to be jointly taught by three or four instructors, and, as former
student Hannelore Hahn observed:
Anyone could sit
around the seminar table and participate in discussion with the great minds of
renowned persons. No one said you could
not take part because you lacked some previous requirement. Once you had arrived, you were part of the
community in every way. It was up to you
how much or how little you wished to participate.
It was also a frequent occurrence that other
faculty members or their spouses might join the class as students, further
obscuring the boundary between teacher and learner. This atmosphere, open and free-flowing, with
the exchanges of ideas and innovations happening so spontaneously, caused the
faculty to see Black Mountain as their own so that when the school was broke, a
situation that was increasingly prevalent as the years advanced, many continued
to teach without pay just so they could “perfect their arts and to communicate
to their students an excitement about their work.”
In addition to the formal classes and the
informal, sometimes impromptu discussions and bull sessions, there was a
constant flow of guest lecturers and performers, including the likes of
Albert Einstein; Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic; writer,
architect, and social historian Bernard Rudofsky; poet William Carlos Williams; Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian psychologist; and archaeologist and anthropologist
Robert Braidwood. Classes were often
canceled so students and faculty could attend the visitors’ presentations. “One of the college’s greatest strengths was
its ability to let things happen,” affirmed Harris, “not to overprogram and in
so doing limit the chances for spontaneous creative events.”
To its benefit, and the benefit of those who
attended the school, BMC was, in Duberman’s words, “a place distinctive . . .
not in endowment, numbers, comfort or public acclaim, but in quality of
experience, a frontier society, sometimes raucous and raw, isolated and
self-conscious, bold in its refusal to assume any reality it hadn’t tested—and
therefore bold in inventing forms, both in life style and art, to contain the experiential
facts that supplanted tradition’s agreed-upon definitions.” Particularly in the arts, but in other fields
as well, it was an intellectual community that fostered “total freedom to
experiment, to perform, to get feedback”—especially for those working in
experimental forms and trying out innovative notions. Where teachers, Eric Bentley warned, are a
separate caste, “the students continue their high school habit of avoiding
study, boasting of idleness,” but at Black Mountain, the closeness of the faculty
and the students generated the freest exchange of ideas and the most rigorous
edification
it was possible to get on a college campus.
Bentley further observed that BMC students often went beyond the usual
undergraduate level of achievement, sometimes surprising their outside
examiners “not so much by their erudition as by their keen interest in their
fields.” As Hahn described:
The College without
locks and keys, without prerequisites and administrative regulations, was also
like an open dish in the universe. It
allowed ideas, like particles or spores, to fall into it, to develop like
organisms according to their nature, and to attract and to repel. No individual particle, no individual thought
or point of view was to infringe upon or take away freedom from the others.
Boredom, “the great bane of existence” at
traditional institutions, added Hahn, “did not exist at Black Mountain. Nor did it spawn the type of behavior typical
of other schools and in the army, where one yearns for school to be out in
order to loaf or go on binges. School
was never out at Black Mountain.” Former
student Fielding Dawson proclaimed, “Black Mountain worked; it was real” and social
sciences and philosophy teacher Albert William Levi asserted that the college
“is an experiment in that it is itself not so much an answer as a question.”
Life at Black Mountain, however, wasn’t
always idyllic. It sounds, especially in
retrospect, like some kind of intellectual utopia, but there were endemic flaws
that became the fault lines along which the school eventually collapsed. First, its very concept proved a burden. The notion of combining the establishment of
a scholarly community in which all members shared both responsibilities and a
common objective with an environment dedicated to spawning what Duberman
designated “art of the highest excellence” was fundamentally
contradictory. The collective aims of
the first proposition conflicted with the individual creativity necessary for
the second to happen. Duberman observed:
“At Black Mountain, the priorities had been set: individual
‘cultivation’ took precedence over public issues, local or national, and to
achieve status in the community one had to ‘cultivate’ fiercely—to be unusually
original, dynamic, fertile, cogent. For many—those
either without special talent or long trained to believe they lacked
it—terrible insecurity and a deep sense of worthlessness could develop.”
Further, Duberman affirmed, because the
college evaluated students by broader standards than more traditional
institutions, the consequence was that a negative appraisal was more shattering
because the implication was that it was based on a judgment of the whole person
rather than merely some narrow criteria like test scores or writing assignments. As Duberman saw it, disapproval at BMC “was
the equivalent of being labeled an unworthy human being—not merely a poor
student.”
The anarchic administrative structure was
also a difficulty that grew. Making
decisions about running the school by consensus could become time-consuming and
cumbersome, even maddeningly so in the estimation of Mervin Lane. There were committees to handle all aspects
of college life and meetings were endless. Differences in opinion blossomed into volatile
disagreements that resulted in one faculty faction and a coterie of its student
followers bolting. With no rules or procedures in place to guide
any decision, everything that needed doing had to be started from scratch to
devise a process before any action could even be proposed, much less
accomplished. This was exacerbated by
the turn-over of the student body, most members of which stayed for two years
or less. Since everyone had the right to
be heard on any subject, that meant essentially that every decision that was
finally made would have to be re-debated and re-formulated constantly as new
students joined the community. Since the
students far outnumbered the faculty, especially near the end when the staff
was reduced to as few as three teachers, and the students had the right,
through the student moderator, to oppose faculty decisions, they could control
the agenda of every meeting.
Eric Bentley pointed out that one result of
the Black Mountain concept was “sheer disorder,” and eventually, in Duberman’s
opinion, the school devolved into “little more than a group of squabbling prima
donnas.” The more experimental and
innovative the material is, perhaps, the less fragmentary and free the working
method can be. In other words, maybe
anarchy works best when ideas are concrete, but it proves counterproductive if
the ideas themselves are evanescent.
The outside world, which, while being
acknowledged (sometimes grudgingly and even fearfully) was kept at bay from the
cloistered BMC community, also encroached on the uncorrupted atmosphere of
Black Mountain College. One early issue
that tore the school apart was integration.
North Carolina was a segregated state and Black Mountain, even as a
progressive community, would have been in jeopardy if it desegregated its
student body or its staff. The school
tried to sidestep the problem by enrolling two African-American women in the
summer program, but a crisis occurred when some students returning from a visit
to a nearby campus to hear a famous writer were arrested and jailed. Resignations of several faculty ensued and a
number of students withdrew. Later,
World War II took most of the American faculty men as many were drafted and
others left to join the war effort. This
left BMC with an overwhelmingly European and female teaching staff.
The problem that eventually scuttled the BMC
experiment wasn’t academic or political, however. It was financial. With no endowment, the loss of students as
the school became increasingly an arts academy reduced the income to the extent
that the faculty were paid half salaries (sometimes in kind, from products of the
college farm), with the remainder held as a debt against the school. Other debts built up as well, and ultimately,
a judge decreed that the school had to pay up or suspend operations. Burdened with too much debt, Black Mountain
College closed its doors in 1957—and took until 1962 to clear its books. The school existed for only 24 years, but its
influence spread across the country and changed the way many educators thought
about teaching and learning. It has also
remained a Shangri-La in the minds of many teachers, education theorists,
students, and school leaders who harbored the dream that such a place as Black
Mountain could exist again somehow and last beyond the short life that
generated so many extraordinary artists and thinkers. Maybe it’s impossible, a Camelot that just
can’t exist for more than one brief, shining moment—but a lot of people wish it
could.
[Black Mountain College may have extended into my
lifetime, but I was far too young to have ever had any personal contact with
the school or its students and faculty.
Obviously this discussion of the college and its philosophy is based on
research, so, for the curious, I’ll list my principal sources:
Fielding Dawson, The Black Mountain Book
(New York: Croton Press, 1970)
Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972;
reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1993)
RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988)
Paul Goodman, The Community of Scholars
(New York: Random House, 1962)
Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)
Mary Emma Harris, “North Carolina’s Black Mountain College: A
New Deal in American Education,” Artes Magazine 13 Sept. 2010, ,
18 Apr. 2014.
Mervin Lane, ed. Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds: An
Anthology of Personal Accounts
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); including contributions from:
Louis Adamic, “Excerpts from ‘Black
Mountain: An Experiment in Education’”
Eric R. Bentley, “Report from the
Academy: The Experimental College”
Mary Gregory, “Speech Given at Bard
College”
Hannelore Hahn, “Excerpts from a Work
in Progress”
Albert William Levi, “The Meaning of
Black Mountain”
I[saac] S. Nakata, “In That Time Long
Ago”
Phyllis Josephs Thomas, “Looking Back
on the Lee Hall Years”
Marcia J. Wade, “Utopia Revisited.” Horizon
[Tuscaloosa, AL] v. 30, no. 5 (June 1987):13-16
[Some
of these books may still be in print, but they’re all available in libraries
around the country. (The one magazine, Horizon, is certainly available on microfilm in most
large or university libraries.) There’s
also a good deal about Black Mountain College on the ’Net, some of it even
connected to the sources I used, but I found that for the purposes of this
article, I had more than enough material gathered in those dark old days before
the World Wide Web.]
