A SUMMARY OF INFORMATION ON BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE AS OF JANUARY 1ST, 1954
ORGANIZATION. The ownership of any body is decisive to its qualities and its directions. In American education this College remains unique in its qualities and directions because the Faculty owns the College; the teaching Faculty is the “Corporation”. There is no outside board of trustees, no administration other than by the faculty members or by staff responsible to them, nor is there any endowment fund. The students and faculty are insured of a basic and crucial thing (and one which it is rare for any unit in contemporary society to offer): openness, an openness so complete that no class, meeting, business is, in effect, closed to anyone. This is the Number 1 fact that should be known by all interested persons, prospective students, or otherwise, about Black Mountain College.
FACULTY AND STUDENTS. The second fact of the College is that the Faculty has been increasingly made up of producing professionals. This means that education at Black Mountain is something more than the usual history of a given field of knowledge: it is the actual present practice in the fields of art and learning. Any student is involved, right from the start, in active education. And the result is that any student can learn: the gifted as well as the hindered, the unbegun as well as the exceptional. For the quality of a professional is attention to the use of life, not to talents alone, or mere competence of books; in short, to form- which is never merely (if it ever is) a matter of literacy, no matter how much it is (as it very much is) a matter of intelligence. A student at Black Mountain, therefore, can be expected to be treated as he or she is- as a person, not a record. And to be led out from such a beginning. Knowledge here, like the organization, is open.
CURRICULUM. In a place of such emphasis on the individual, the curriculum is the Faculty and the students, not a list of courses. Even classes are not the set things they are at the average college and university. Nor are there those arbitrary divisions, departments, ranks, differences of pay, titles. There is on law: what the student needs, and what the teacher, because he is a producer in the discipline he teaches, is busy in. What is offered, then, is best made clear by a description of the three “faculties” which make up the College at present:
The resident faculty (see recent announcement of Spring Quarter).
The “Summer Institute of the Arts” faculty (announced each Spring): in the past three years it has included
Painting: Esteban Vincente, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn.
Music: composers Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, and Lou Harrison: performers David Tudor, Irma Wolpe, Seymour Barab, Josef Marx, Abraham Mishkind.
Dance-theatre: Merce Cunningham & Co., Katherine Litz.
Writing: Paul Goodman, Charles Olson.
Science: Hans Rademacher (mathematics), Edgar Taschdijan (agronomy).
Photography: Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel.
Pottery: Peter Voulkos, Warren Mackenzie, Daniel Rhodes, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib.
(3) The Institute Program faculty. These are special institutes held in the Fall and Spring quarters. Last year the Fall one was a “Craft Institute”, with the concentration on pottery, which brought Margurite Wildenhain here from California, Hamada from Japan, and Leach from England; the Spring institute was in “The New Sciences of Man”, and included Robert Braidwood, archeologist, from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Dr. Maria Luise von Franz, psychologist, from Carl Jung’s Institute in Zurich.
CALENDAR OF THE COLLEGE. The College now operates a full academic year divided into three 11-week quarters. The next Spring Quarter opens March 29th and runs through June 12th. The Summer Quarter (with the “Summer Institute of the Arts” included, and available to regular students without additional fee) runs from June 21st to September 4th. The Fall Quarter opens September 20th, and ends December 4th.
ADMISSION AND STANDARDS. Admission to the student body is determined by a committee composed of faculty members and students. There are no fixed regulations concerning age or scholastic background of applicants. Each individual is judged on his or her self; and on whether this College is fit to the applicant’s needs. Customarily the prospective student presents a high school record or transcript of college work (a number of our students are transfers from other colleges who come here to find the combination of individual-plus-professional which the College has been increasingly offering since 1933). Also five references are asked, and health and oculist’s certificates. But what the committee looks for is the use the College may be to the applicant, and if the applicant, by what evidences are then known, can gain from it.
Actually, because the Faculty maintains a monthly review of all student work, entrance is constantly checked by experience on the ground, from the first month on. Grades are given only for purposes of transfer. And continuance at the College rests not at all on grades, but on the judgement of the Faculty as a whole—and as much how it is succeeding with the given student as how the student is doing. In other words, a student of this College can expect, from application on, for as long as he is here, maximum attention to his or her self, rather than to any record he or she wears, on entering, or in course.
GRADUATION. Just as the College regards grades as nothing more than mechanical measures of accomplishment, it regards degrees only as like mechanical evidence of a completion of education. The College is empowered by its charter to grant degrees, and does, if the student wishes. He can receive the usual B.A.; or graduation procedure continue the practice of all the Faculty attending to every student’s education. When a student judges himself ready—and the Faculty agrees—an outside examiner, the professional most competent to examine that student in his field of learning, is brought hre for three days, to test him, by written and oral examinations, both alone with the student and before the full faculty. This unique system of outside examiners has the added advantage that the student, even before he leaves here, has known and has been judged by a person in his own field outside the College. (Examples of outside examiners in the past three years: Professor A.T. Brauer, from the University of North Carolina, in Mathematics; Edward Steichen, in Photography; Paul Goodman, in Writing; Merce Cunningham, in Dance; Jack Tworkov, in Painting).
FEES AND DEDUCTIONS. The fee of $1600 for the year covers room, board, and tuition (all the expenses save personal ones and the small cost of materials used). Any student, however, may apply for a fee reduction. It has been the policy of the College since its founding to make it financially possible, as far as it is able, for any student to come here who wants to come, and whom the College accepts. All financial arrangements are private, in order that there shall be no discrimination of money, just as there are no discriminations of race or creed.
THE PLACE. The College is in Western North Carolina, in a “cove” or valley, in the mountains, six miles from the town of Black Mountain, and fifteen miles east of Asheville. Its 600 acres include, in addition to woodlands and a large farm, 27 buildings; two dormitories; a “Studies Building” designed by A. Lawrence Kocher so that each student has his own individual student or studio; the Dining Hall, where all, faculty and students, eat in common, and which is also the theatre; a Science Laboratory, designed by Paul Williams; the Pottery, built under the direction of Robert Turner; the Music Cubicle, by Paul Beidler; shops; library; faculty homes, etc.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, WRITE THE REGISTRAR.
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE.
BLACK MOUNTAIN, NORTH CAROLINA.
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN
BLACK MOUNTAIN, NORTH CAROLINA
Dreier, Mrs H. Edward
Fort Salonga
Long Island, New York
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN- VOL.11 NOV.2- Issued four times a year in March, May, August, and November, at Black Mountain, N.C. Entered as second-class matter November 4, 1942, at the post office at Black Mountain, N.C. under the Act of August 24, 1912.
4-page booklet folded twice for mailing, matte paper, off-white. Addressed to Dreier, Mrs H. Edward Fort Salonga Long Island, New York. Includes information on the organization of BMC, faculty and students, curriculum, academic calendar, admission and standards, graduation, fees and deductions, location. Instructions to write the registrar for further information.
