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The University of Redlands, founded in 1907 by American Baptists, had ``under the leadership of George Armacost (1945-1970)...reaffirmed its mission as a conservative college with a strong Christian orientation.''[17] [SEE FOOTNOTE] The idea of a new college on the campus of the University of Redlands dates back to at least 1961, when Armacost proposed an innovative cluster college for students of international business. He saw the same potential for expansion that Hampshire's own founding fathers saw in the unprecedented number of college applicants. The idea was not a realistic possibility until 1966, however, when the possibility of a multi-million-dollar grant from James Graham Johnston, a wealthy IBM executive, suddenly brought the idea within reach.
As a beginning model for the new college, Armacost looked to the cluster college model of the nearby Claremont Colleges.
The idea was simple: The University would add units, each with its own academic identity, faculty, student body, governing board and mini-campus. The new colleges would be autonomous in several respects but each would remain under the overarching control of the University President and his Board of Trustees. In this way colleges would be added without diluting the Christian focus of the University.
On the one hand, Armacost clearly wanted an ``innovative'' college. His doctoracl degree, in fact, was from Columbia Teacher's College, and he ``did recognize that more traditional forms `excluded students from classroom decision making' and he hoped to address that wrong''. Yet, as the History notes, he wanted to maintain the Christian foundation of the University. He was convinced, in fact, that Christian values should be the basis for the implicit and explicit philosophy of the new institution (``the `essence' of the Old and New Testaments, not a doctrine''). Thus, to lead the creation of the new college that should have become the distinguishing accomplishment of his presidency, he sought an ``educational visionary, a first-rate diplomat, a solid administrator, an aggressive fund-raiser. He would also, ideally, be a practicing Christian, preferably a Baptist'' The man who was responsible for finding that leader was Dwayne Orton. Orton was the University of Redlands alumnus who had secured the grant from James Graham Johnston, and would become the Chairman of the Johnston Board of Overseers. [SEE FOOTNOTE] The man whom Orton found to carry out Armacost and Johnston's vision was Presley McCoy, and McCoy seemed to Armacost to be just the man for the job. McCoy was a Californian by birth, and grew up in the midwest, the son of a minister. After going to a Baptist College (Denison), he did graduate work at Northwestern in political science, and returned for a few years to teach at Denison. In 1956 he began work eight years of as an administrator within the Danforth Foundation, and five as the head of the Central States College Association. He had met Armocost first in 1962, when McCoy turned down an offer for the position of chair in Redlands' speech department. Yet McCoy turned out to be a real trojan horse, far from what Armacost was looking for and expected. If Armacost had had any idea this man McCoy, whom he was hiring, really was, and what his plans were, McCoy would never have been offered the job. [SEE FOOTNOTE]
The many theoretical differences between the visions of McCoy and Armacost, and the practical differences that therefore ensued, makes up much of the story of the first few years of the college, and that ``groundwork'' is certainly responsible for much of the history that followed. To begin, Armacost was what might be called a more traditional Christian, feeling that the Old and New Testaments should provide the basis for an approach to international studies. On the other hand, McCoy felt that a new approach to personal development, withing a community setting, should be the heart of every education. In offering the job to McCoy, McCoy was certainly under the impression that he was to have free reign to design his own ideal college. Whether it was Orton's intention to give him this impression is unclear, but McCoy explains his memory of the situation in an interview with the authors of the History: ``I would never have taken the job if I had known they just wanted a school of business. That isn't...my strength.''[SEE FOOTNOTE]
Expectedly, the two men's difference in educational vision precipitated a difference of opinion in the structure (or kind of structure) of the institution.[SEE FOOTNOTE] For one, essential to McCoy's vision was the egalitarian nature of his plan. For example, McCoy did not want to solidify the academic program -- even to make a curriculum guide -- before the new students and faculty arrived. Interestingly, it was only through a somewhat late-night-bludgeoning meeting of the University President and Board of Trustees that McCoy and his faculty managed to put off solid decisions on the curriculum until the arrival of the participants.
The next conflict between the University and the Johnsonites was on the matter of faculty appointments. Would Armacost have veto power over McCoy's decisions? Orton put in his best effort to convince Armacost to allow this part of Johnston autonomy, and he and McCoy won out. McCoy would take candidates to meet Armacost as a matter of politeness, but would not necessarily have to follow Armacosts's recommendations about whom to hire.
Similar to the appointment conflicts, conflicts arose in the regulation of student life. McCoy fought desperately to let the students decide their own living arrangements, but Armacost was so against the coed dormitories he feared would inevitably result that McCoy lost out. Not surprisingly, this defeat brought with it for the students an unforgivable resentment of Armacost and the University.
McCoy's ideas about personal development had grown out of his experience of the previous few years when he became familiar with what he called sensitivity training. Sensitivity training was designed to bring about the open discussion of feelings during any formal activity -- policy meetings and classes, for example -- with the goal in mind of making people aware enough of the way they were unconsciously relating to other members of the group that they were able to focus on the issues at hand.[SEE FOOTNOTE] When he was initially introduced to sensitivity training, it had been an incredible relief. Soon after an experience at a discussion group of professional people talking about books on human relationships,
McCoy had what amounted to an affective Cartesian revelation: ``I began thinking, `You know, this is just what goes on in classrooms. We discuss things intellectually because it's safe -- this school of thought, that school of thought -- but as far as any internal commitments are concerned, these are ignored. Feelings have nothing to do with it.' '' He wanted to break into the discussions, to admit that he needed help rather than fine words, but he ``didn't dare because there were all our images to sustain and protect...it was a shame; I think of all the lost opportunities.''
Thus McCoy arrived at his basic formula for a Johnston education. It would begin with students in classes ``devoted to discussing student reaction to class content, and to talking about the class process by means of which content was learned. In this type of class the teacher, like the sensitivity leader, ceases to be simply a figure of intellectual authority and becomes someone who helps the student to express feelings and to find the best individual way to learn.'' McCoy's idea of a Johnston education paralleled his idea of the world as divided into three dimensions, known as the personal/interpersonal, the cultural/intercultural, and the national/international. Only by understanding the inner dimensions could one ever be able to deal maturely with the outer layers. In fact, at one time in the first few years of the College's existence, a faculty member was the Director of the Interpersonal Dimension.[SEE FOOTNOTE]
Whereas Hampshire grouped its faculty together into ``schools'', Johnston chose to avoid any such separation of its faculty. Of course, Johnston's size -- about twenty faculty compared to Hampshire's hundred -- made that decision one with very different implications than the correspoding one at Hampshire. Some of the faculty met before the September start of the schoolyear to lay the foundations for the College.
The faculty have sought two incompatible, perhaps mutually destructive goals: to be ``ready'' for students, they wished to define and prepare a sharp new program; they also wished to work with all the students in planning. They considered no decisions viable until they had been supported by more than guesses and samplings of what students want.[26]
Two of the ideas generated in that faculty meeting were the Quest For Meaning seminar and the general idea of graduation contracts. Both ideas would soon be accepted as policy at the Pilgrim Pines retreat.
Thus, in the Fall of 1969, Johnston College, under the leadership of Chancellor Presley McCoy, officially opened its doors to 182 students and 17 faculty. [SEE FOOTNOTE] The first two weeks of the new year would be be devoted to an introduction to sensitivity training and the construction of the Johnston academic program. [SEE FOOTNOTE]
For those first two weeks, the just-over-200-member community did not spend its time on the University campus. Rather, they rented Pilgrim Pines, a summer camp 15 miles away in the mountains, where they housed themselves up in the cabins. [SEE FOOTNOTE] Additionally, Fourteen National Training Laboratory employees[SEE FOOTNOTE] were hired to facilitate the sensitivity training workshops, which met in T-groups[SEE FOOTNOTE] each morning.
Evenings at Pilgrim Pines were devoted to discussions of the academic and residential policy of the College. One of the early decisions at those meetings was to confirm McCoy's vision of the decision-making process of the group as consensus. University of Redlands President George Armacost, who attended some T-group meetings as well as most, if not all, evening sessions, strongly discouraged the group from the inefficient consensus model. However, the group was full of optimism. The motion to use consensus as the decisionmaking procedure for the community passed. By consensus.
At Pilgrim Pines, the Johnston Community became fully aware of the chasm that separated the University from the College. In large part this was due to a disagreement between McCoy and Armacost concerning a faculty appointment. McCoy had hired a radical, young professor, Jeanne Friedman, who had been arrested the summer before on various charges arising from her protest of research facilities devoted to military research for the Vietnam War. In the process, he had done some impressive armwaving -- for Armacost, hiding Friedman's politics, and for Friedman, hiding how conservative the University that she was being hired by really was. McCoy apparently did not quite realize the implications of hiring someone who later might be (and in fact was) arrested and convicted of several misdemeanors.
The newspapers found out about Friedman's conviction and questioned President Armacost while McCoy simply avoided mentioning the incident to the University President. In front of the main hall at Pilgrim Pines, Armacost confronted McCoy, publicly telling him that Friedman should be fired immediately. McCoy refused to fire her, however, sensing the importance of Johnston keeping its autonomy, and how essential this specific incident was to that autonomy.
The subject areas for the fall were decided at Pilgrim Pines at the first ``curriculum-building'' using an invention of Jeanne Friedman.
Students and faculty wrote their ideas on 3x5 index cards, signed them, and handed them to a small committee which then organized the cards under some general headings. Cards expressing similar interests were then tacked to the walls of the main hall in various locations and community members would circulate among the cards looking for proposals that sounded interesting and seeking out people whose interests paralleled their own. Since each card was signed, exchanges of ideas were easy and soon class groups began to form around a finite number of course proposals. The more popular topics emerged as seminars. Faculty then expressed a willingness to lead such groups, though the topics were often of student proposing. Less popular offerings became tutorials or independent studies, and cards that could not be used at all were saved to be reintroduced as a beginning point for negotiation in the the spring semester.Thus nearly everyone found at least one, and often more, courses that they had helped to create. Consensus, leavened by negotiation and compromise, had easily infiltrated class planning.