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To begin this chapter, some remarks of Presley McCoy the spring after his dismissal from Johnston, from an interview conducted by Johnston:
A phone call came to me in January of 1968 [from Armacost]...He said, after giving the kind of history you're familiar with as to the Board decision, that the Board wanted this college to be about 600 in size. It was to have its own faculty, its own academic program. It was to be especially concerned about urban problems and international problems and was to be experimental, and those were the three terms he used. He definitely did no use ``innovative'', and I was glad for that because I'd agreed with Laird Stuart's distinction between the two. Innovation to me means chnge, but it does not suggest any systematic attempt to evaluate or to set up controls in evaluation, which introduces a kind of scientific spirit as far as it can be relevant to an undertaking. So I was glad for the term experimental.I realize now in retrospect that when he used the term, it set off a whole different string of associations, perhaps values and intents, than when I used it, and this grew out of our different perspectives, philosophies and experience in education. But my guess is he probably meant by experimental doings something a little differently, but not in terms of controlled experiment or a thorough, systematic attempt to evaluate everything you could attempt to evaluate with outside evaluations, and so on.
Using this definition, Johnston certainly started out not only as an innovative, but as an experimental school.
From the beginning and McCoy's vision, its three main innovations were the egalitarianism of the living-learning community, its T-group devotion to openly discussing process, and its individualized contract plan. By the end of the Pilgrim Pines retreat and the beginning of the first academic year, Johnston had adopted the QFMs as an experiment with a shared learning experience. Soon, Johnston had three Vice-Chancellors (a Trimurti) elected from and by the faculty and serving under the main Chancellor.
[They would share] both administrative details and broad policy objectives of creating, preserving, and destroying, without any consistent identification by any Triumurti with one role.``These three objectives which I take to be chief responsibilities of an chief academic officer,'' according to Ed Williams, ``seem absolute mandates in an experimental school: to find creative ways of meeting hitherto unrecognized needs, to challenge outworn forms and to preserve balance and change.''
Until the enrollment, financial, and political troubles of the late seventies, these three positions remained. I wondered about the any destructions brought about by the Triumurti. The QFMs were one such example, and another is the changing of the Pilgrim Pines retreat into the mid-semester GYST.[SEE FOOTNOTE]
``What was it about the QFM common learning experience, for example, that made you decide to try something new?'' I asked Johnston faculty member Owada. ``Well, first of all there is always the good and the bad about any program. After the third time, a program loses its vibrancy. Though the students are always new, the faculty seem to be able to communicate their lack of excitement to the students. We start to see the bad things, and are ready to try something new to get rid of those.''[20]
In January 1973, Johnston sponsored the National Symposium on Experimenal Higher Education. Johnston itself provided a model for that Symposium, and Johnston faculty's papers provided the beginning of many formal and informal meetings. One presentation was by Johnston faculty Frank Blume, principal researcher in Johnston's 6-year grant from the National Institue of Mental Health.
The research is alongitudinal study at Johnston College to determine (1) the personalitycharacteristics of students when they arrive on an experimental campus, (2) what programs and factors of the collegeenvironment affect them during their college career, (3) what differences of personality, background, and college experiences can be found between those students who achieve success in both academic and personal growth areas and those students who are not as successful in these two areas, and (4) what relationship exists between personal and intellectual growth.[4]
Owada agreed with my reading that the school seems to have been innovating for its first five or six years but then conventionalized itself. The school, and especially the faculty, didn't have the energy to maintain the innovation through the battles with the budget and the University. Additionally, the University took away Johnston's talented full-time grant-writer in 1976. Most self-study up until that point had been funded by grants. Indeed, the disappearance of the innovation came with the disappearance of the self-study, which came with the disappearance of the grants, which came with the disappearance of the grant-writer.
As Noah Wardip-Fruin described in his 1994 commencement address, the essential feature of Johnston is that it is personal, as opposed to institutionalized. This is a strength because when students or faculty have ideas about what to do, that something happens, and the process of realizing that something makes an enormous impact in the education of the individuals as well as in the community. At the same time, this personalization is a weakness because without an individual or a group of individuals, things often do not happen.[25] In a sense then, Johnston not only prepares people to be builders of a new society by giving them the opportunity to see their ideas brought to fruition, but allows each entering class to unfold its own community and its own education. The innovation it can embrace is fundamentally related to the character of the incoming classes, as contrasted to an institution that is itself changing the way its members act.
So then, accepting the responsibility and opportunity the incoming classes have to form their own community and education, the question is whether the process by which programs initiated by those classes or the faculty continues to provide new ways for that process itself to take place. Do their innovations for themselves contribute to the kinds of innovation and the methods for innovation that the next generation of Johnston students will have? This is the essential question of Johnston's innovative character.
My reading is that, considering this definition, Johnston is no longer an innovating institution. The goals students have may be slightly different depending on the students, and this will necessarily influence the way they pursue their educations. Yet, the fundamental requirements for graduation are consistent with the way they have been for fifteen years; the conflicts with Student Life are the same ones that have been happening for fifteen years; the format of classes is very similar to the way it has been for at least fifteen, but really twenty-five, years; the individual faculty continue to listen to the students, and participate in learning activities with them, often derived from curriculum-building ideas, as they have for twenty-five years; the individual students continue to have varying needs, and are meeting the same ones through the graduation and class contracts that they have for twenty-five years.[SEE FOOTNOTE]
In the Johnston College days, the college twice went through thorough self-evaluation in order to be accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, in 1973 and 1977. As a part of this self-evaluation process, faculty member Frank Bluma did exit interviews of every single Johnston graduate during the College's existence.
A 1971 in-house self-evaluation was conducted by 7 students and 6 faculty in June and July. The three parts of each area of this self-evaluation were to be historical summary, problems, recommendations, and action. For example, concerning graduation contracts, the self-evaluation found (among others) the following problems.
Problem: Neither students nor advisors had a full enough understanding of what is involved in writing contracts and graduation from Johnston College.Problem: The Graduation Contract Review Committee has far too much work for the number of members presently involved.
Correspondingly, they suggested a more intense effort during orientation to discuss the contracts, and especially to emphasize the advisor's role; that all advisors and students should sit in on sessions and read many approved contracts; an establishment of a rotating, as opposed to a static, committee.
In my browsing through the archives, I found only a subset of the self-studies Johnston College engaged in. Some representative titles are ``A Survey of the Effectiveness for transfer of Johnston College Academic Records to Undergraduate, Graduate, and Professional Schools'', an October 1971 report by Cynthia Williams, a Johnston student; a 1971 ``Report on Retention''.
Two years ago, the University of Redlands had to go through the ten-year accreditation process. According to the Johnston Director, the accreditation committee was very impressed with Johnston. Johnston students, in talking to the committee, convinced it (either implicitly or explicity) to include in its report to the University that the continuation of the Johnston Center is essential to University.[20]
At the University, each department goes through a self-evalution, on a rotating basis. Since every self-evaluation reveals the need for more faculty positions within the department, these reports are read with a questioning eye by the administration of the University, very conscious of its own tuition-dominated budget. In two years, it will be Johnston's turn for a self-evaluation.
This year, longtime Johnston faculty Frank Blume, whose ``Interpersonal Relations'' class is as close to a staple as Johnston has, conducted a study of cross-cultural learning, in the University as well as in Johnston. His essential question was whether students were able to conceptualize the experiential education they were getting through time abroad.
Johnston's self-evaluative attitude has not completely disappeared. Founding Professor Bill McDonald administers three grants: one, for the Proudian honors society at Redlands; another, the Kathy Green lecture series, which invites Johnston alumns to come talk to current students; and last, Hunsacker funds that come with his Chairmanship of the English Department at Redlands. This year, his Hunsacker money paid for, among other things, two Johnston students to travel to four alternative colleges around the country, and partially payed for the author of this report to fly to Johnston to do research, participate in a January-term class, and write this report. The Hunsacker money is also spent in large part to help University teachers in self-evaluation of themselves through videotaping and reviewing of their classes.
Additionally, the Johnston Director has a small discretionary fund he is excited to share with students and faculty engaging in new programs. But, despite the small-scale self-evaluation that is taking place at the College,[SEE FOOTNOTE] there are still today a number of students who are examining the Center. As long as curious students continue to come to Johnston, that flicker of self-evaluation will remain.