7p, (first 4 pages bulletin, last 3 pages are a supplement), mimeograph on matte off white papter. Last three pages are a supplement: News Reports on Opening Nights of the 1943-44 Session. first copy with supplement. Staple in top left corner, one horizontal fold.
BLACK MOUNTTAIN COLLEGE COMMUNITY BULLETIN
College Year 11 Bulletin 2
Monday, October 4, 1943
CALENDAR:
There will be a brief meeting of the Faculty this afternoon at 1:10 o’clock in the Round House to hear Clark Foreman’s report on his recent interviews in Washington regarding the Straus Veteran’s Plan.
The Annual Business Meeting of the Faculty will be held tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 o’clock in the Kocher Room. Since the terms of office of Frances de Graaff, Heinrich Jalowetz and Erwin Straus will come to an end, it will be in order to elect two members to the faculty for three year terms on the Board and on member of the faculty, who has not yet been on the Board, for a one-year term. From the members of the Board of Fellows the Faculty will elect a Rector for the 1943-44 session. The last part of the meeting will be devoted to a consideration of catalogue revisions.
There will be a meeting of the Board of Fellows on Thursday afternoon at 1:15 o’clock in Study 10, unless otherwise announced.
The students will meet in the lobby of North Lodge on Thursday evening at 7:00 o’clock.
There will be a program of modern poetry, drama and history by the Summer Quarter Class in Drama Since Ibsen on Saturday evening, October 9. Eric Bentley will act as chairman of the program and make commentaries on contemporary history and literature and illustrate his remarks, with readings from the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sessoon, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, W.T. Audon, Bert Brecht, and W.R. Rodgers. Students will read scenes from “The Private Life of the Master Race”, by Bert Brecht, and unpublished drama. The program will begin at 8:30 o’clock.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Anni Albers article entitled: “Work with Material” will be reprinted in the January member of the College Art Journal.
Josef Albers will leave tomorrow for Greensboro, North Carolina to attend the Founders’ Day exercises at Woman’s College. As part of the day’s program he will talk informally to students and teachers on his art. He will return on Wednesday.
Larry Fox has been ordered to report for his physical examination on October 13. Induction will follow in three weeks.
Fritz Hansgirg has been invited to talk to the Asheville Rotary Club on Thursday, November 4 on “Manosium.”
Edward Lowinsky writes from Berkeley California: “Unfortunately, I am sitting here as on noodles and am still waiting. The transfer from New York to California seems to take some time, and there is nothing one can do to hurry matters a little bit.
Herbert Miller will be a member of the Forum at the Black Mountain Methodist Church on Sunday evening, October 10. He will address the Schoolmasters’ Club at their dinner meeting on Monday evening, October 11 on “Peace Plans.”
Robert Wunsch will leave Lake Eden on Friday afternoon for Chapel Hill to attend the annual conference of Dramatic Directors of North Carolina to be held in the Carolina Playmakers Theatre on Saturday. He has accepted an invitation to address the Annual Dinner Meeting of Delta Kappa Gamma, a national organization of outstanding woman teachers, on “The Teacher’s Place in Post-War Reconstruction” at the George Vanderbilt Hotel in Asheville on Saturday, October 30.
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN- 1943-44 BULLETIN #2- Page Two
NOTES:
The printed Newsletter is sent to all the parent of present students and former students, to graduation examiners, to donors, to the members of the Advisory Board, and to other close friends of the College. The next Newsletter will be published in December.
The weekly Community Bulletin is sent free of charge to all former students new in the military service, to other former students who desire a very close contact with the College and to several parents who have visited the College and have especially requested the Bulletin.
Jack Lipsey and the other members of the colored staff are now comfortably housed in Black Dwarf, in the apartment occupied last session by the Orr family.
The donations from present and former students and their parents and friends in the Student Campaign new totals $1360.75.
Visitor
Last week’s visitor was Lawrence Lieberfeld, a naval architect to the U.S. Maritime Commission in Washington, D.C.
WITH FORMER STUDENTS:
New Addresses:
Pfc. Richard D. Brown, 14101336
809th T.S.S.
A.A.F.T.T.C.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Lieutenant George Hendrickson
D-220 A.A.A. Gun Battalion
Group 507
Long Beach, California
Lt. (j.g.) Bela J. Martin
V F-11
c/o Fleet Post Office
San Francisco, California
EXCERPTS FROM RECENT LETTERS:
Lieutenant George Hendrickson writes from California: “I have been to another school.. this time a review of gunnery plus the use of small arms. Nothing very exciting happened except that I had a finger laid open in bayonet practice and had to have three stitches taken….. It has been with increasing interest that I greet the arrival of the College Bulletins. I do hope that the winter with its struggles and time-consuming tasks won’t stop the publication of it…”
Gisela Kronenberg writes from Cincinnati: “I received today my call to file petition for United States Citizenship on October 5.”
Otis Levy writes from Sheppard Field in Texas: “I’m disappointed about missing BMC on my furlough- you know I flew home by way of the Asheville territory and thought I saw the College, but this was at 1200 feet. I waved just for the heck of it…. I’m looking forward to the next Bulletin. I hope the opening night speeches are included, if only in excerpts.”
Lieutenant Bela Martin is new on the West Coast: “I expect to be here from three to six months before going out again as the squadron must reform with many new pilots.”
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN- 1943-44 BULLETIN #2- Page Three
Herbert Oppenheimer writes from Tennessee: “I may remain in Nashville for another month. There is no explanation. There seldom is such in the Army. I continue to work at the Negro Service Men’s Club. I’ve finished the Ladies Room and am now designing a home made soda fountain and grill… I’ve also done a Music Room for the local Y.M.C.A. and U.S.O. All of these are only designs, and I often wonder if they’ll over get further then the paper. But it’s pleasant work and I’ve had no drill or physical training for the past month.”
WITH FORMER STAFF MEMBERS:
Addresses:
Mrs. Gorman Mattison
416 Monticello Street
Springfield, Missouri
EXCERPTS FROM RECENT LETTERS:
Dorothy Mattison writes from Springfield Missouri: “Whether or not the Bulletin is an essential, regular to the Community- commensurate with time and labor of getting it out, I have never been able to decide. But of the importance of the job it does for ‘civilians’ on the outside I am certain….. This period of transition from one world to another (and believe me, that’s what it is) is difficult. Continuing reports of what you people are doing helps one hand onto the picture of what needs to be done, of the kind of reality that ought to be real even when it isn’t, generally speaking….. My warmest regards to everyone… I am missing the warmth and tolerance of the group which I am increasingly certain is the only one in the world which I am increasingly certain is the only one in the world which could live as closely and understandingly together- any minor and occasional cleavages seemed smaller and smaller at this distance….. This.. does not in any way conflict with the fun of, returning to a sort of ‘domestic’ individualism sometimes desirable for a family which includes children- not of having Boyd happy and interested in the current school regime- nor of Lind’s (and my own!) enjoyment of her attendance at kindergarten.”
REPORT ON THE COMMUNITY WORK PROGRAM:
(September 20 through October 2)
During the first of the two weeks the Summer Quarter was over and most of the work campers and summer students had loft for their homes. Available for work were only a few students staying on for the Fall Quarter an several girls who had come early. The small crew of volunteer workers did a big job of farming, cleaning and moving. They repaired the beef cattle fence and continued work on the hog cross- lot fences. They stored away in the barn left the bean hay which had been on drying racks. They brought from the garden during the week, forty pounds of turnip greens and from the dairy three hundred and thirty-eight quarts of milk. They started the cutting and the shucking of the nine-acre field of corn at Groevestone. They scrubbed studies and distributed furniture. They hauled, within the forty-eight hour limit, a fifty-ton railroad our of stoker coal which picked this week to arrive.
Everyone worked on Saturday and Sunday to clean up rooms and grounds and move beds, mattresses, tables, chairs and trunks to ready up the Lodges for the new session students who had begun to arrive before the textile workers were fully away.
All the new students wont right to work in fine spirit as soon as they arrived. There was still a few acres of corn for them to cut, following the best Black Mountain College introductory procedures.
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN- 1943-44 BULLETIN #2- Page Four
During the first Fall Quarter Week the student and teacher workers built potato storage racks in Penley’s basement and harvested one hundred and fifteen bushels of potatoes. They sorted several hundred bushels of onions from the drying racks and picked five bushels of string beans, two bushels of which they salted down for future use. The farm supplied the kitchen with two hundred and five pounds of dressed pork, three hundred and sixty-eight quarts of milk and eight pounds of butter. They continued help with cover-crop seeding of corn fields and removed one read of racks from the field nearest the Studies Building. They moved the giant woods near the Study Building, repaired chairs at the shop, put a new roof on the music cubicle. They loaded, by hand, fifteen tons of black coal at the College storage yard and distributed it to the bins of the various buildings. They split kindling and started painting the Dining Hall entrance way. They moved the mica industry to the old biology laboratory and architecture from Room 119 to Room 47, formerly Barney Voigt’s bedroom.
MAC WOOD
SUPPLEMENT TO BULLETIN #2 1943-44
NEWS REPORTS ON OPENING NIGHTS OF THE 1943-44 SESSION.
On Monday Black Mountain College began its eleventh year. At the opening meeting on Monday evening Robert Wunsch, the Rector, greeted the community. He talked particularly to the new students. He told them something of the history of Black Mountain College, of the traditions of the institution, and of advantages and responsibilities of the place.
“While we say we are beginning the eleventh year of the College, we are really beginning a new college”, he said. “Here, this evening, we are starting a new institution. I think we must say this to ourselves each year, lost we begin to let the past become the dominant force in our lives; and already there are too many institutions throttled by the dead and departed. Many of the people who helped to make last year what it was have gone; and nearly all of people who started the College have left. On the other hand, there are here this year many new people. An institution, to serve the most people in the best possible way, should take something of the shape of the people who make it up, have a form somewhat organic with their needs, their desires, their beliefs. I do not mean to belittle the people who have gone before us, nor to infer that we should throw them into the discard. What they did and what they said are woven somehow into the texture of the campus, into the texture of the lives of us who are still here. We who know them and believe what they believed will be their spokesmen in this new planning. But there should be a new planning, and everyone should be in on the planning.”
Mr. Wunsch urged the College teachers and students to think of the possibilities of improvement. “It is not, it has never been, and I sincerely hope that it will never be our concern to perpetuate the way of life of yesterday or today. Education at its best—as religion at its best—is always mankind on its knees in a sacred dedication to things as they might be, as they ought to be, in contrast to things as they are.
Mr. Wunsch spoke of the need of the nation and of the world for youth to prepare itself to “defend civilization from barbarism.” The weapons, he said, include “a disciplined and understanding mind, maturity of judgement, high purposes and real bravery. He added: “My welcome, therefore, is not to a life of ease, of endless vacation, but to the opportunity and obligation to grow up, to be adult, to be more adult, to be wisely adult, to take on some of the world’s work, to be strong enough and wise enough to take on some of the world’s work.
He urged the new students to bolster up their basic education, to get, if they had not already gotten them, such fundamentals as the power to read and write and handle simple mathematics. “If you don’t know the meaning of words, you cannot receive any further education conveyed in words.”
Mr. Wunsch spoke of the necessity of everyone in the community to do physical work. “It’s the price we must pay for maintaining this kind of an institution. In most colleges the wealthy students have a corner on the leisure time, while the students who are accidentally born poor have difficulty not only in finding leisure time but in finding time to study. We think this arrangement a deterrent to education. It is bad for a poor students to have to work long and hard while a wealthy student fiddles away his time; it is worse for the wealthy student, particularly when he makes a servant of the poor one. Here we all work, rich and poor, and there’s no distinction.”
Mr. Wunsch spoke of the government of the place and its various organizations. “This is a Democracy, and the will of the people does prevail. It is for that reason that we should all be of good will. In a Democracy you can’t hurt other people and not hurt yourself. The selfishness that keeps you from doing your
SUPPLEMENT TO BULLETIN #2 1943-44- Page Two
Bit can backfire on you. Of course, you can dominate your environment here by being demanding, by being loud, by being generally disagreeable. But you don’t have to shot to be heard at Black Mountain College.”
“Customs makes anything endurable, and we seen adjest to disorder, to disagreeable people, to noise; and perhaps we shouldn’t. In a week I can tell you what kind of a College we are going to have this year: all the signs will be here, written so large a man running can read them. One year we had a beer-drinking college; one year we had a loly-pop sucking college; one year we had a college so determined to go on in spite of all odds that everybody worked to keep it alive; raised money, began to build the Studies Building. Last year was a pigtail year. What kind of a year will this be? I should like to have it an orderly year- with orderly people living in orderly studies and bedrooms and an orderly campus- not in a military sense, but in a beautiful sense.”
Before the address Dr. Heinrich Jalowetz and Frederic Cohen, members of the music faculty, played, as a piano duet, the overture to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
As part of an orientation and planning program the students and teachers of Black Mountain college listened to a series of talks by members of the teaching staff on Tuesday evening in the college dining hall. Among the speakers were Dr. Eric Bentley, instructor of history and dramatic literature, McGuire Wood, instructor of building construction and director of the work-experience program, and Josef Albers, professor of art. They covered the three fields stressed by the college, namely study, work, and living.
Dr. Bentley spoke of the studies at Black Mountain and the place of learning in modern life. “What was progressive yesterday,” he said, “is not progressive today, and luckily our ideas of progressive educations are changing to meet times. Do you expect Black Mountain college to be a rural Greenwich Village or a new Brook Farm? It isn’t. In the fifth year of a second world war we are in no position to claim the Bohemian liberty, the hostility to discipline and routine, of the old progressive philosophy.
“On the contrary you began your career here with a test, a mathematics test to determine if you have the fundamental knowledge to take advanced work where mathematics is needed. You find that we insist on acknowledging of the three R’s. You find that we do not defend Life against books. We send you to your books with the Miltonic reminder that they are the precious life-blood of master spirits. We hope you will help us to build a fine library here from our present modern beginnings.
“What are the possibilities of higher learning in the future? I believe that a synthesis must be attempted between the best in the conservative and the best in progressive programs. We need the discipline, the realism, the efficiency and organization of the older education at its best; we need the democratic ideals, the scientific approach, the liberal humanity of the new. We must learn our facts in history courses as the old regime insisted, but we must give them significance according to the progressive philosophy. In politics we can hold to Jeffersonian ideals, but in our methods we must share the realism of our enemies. It is my hope that the college may achieve a synthesis of modernity and tradition, revolutionary spirit and civilized conservatism, so that we shall ourselves be part of a living tradition. And I emphasize both words: living and tradition. The danger lies in tradition that is not alive and in life that is without cultural tradition.”
SUPPLEMENT TO BULLETIN #2 1943-44- Page Three
“Community worked at Black Mountain College has at least two validities”, said Mr. Wood. “The work we contribute is economically necessary for the survival of the college, and it is a real educational value. One quickly sees the necessity of the work program which replaces any organized athletic activities, one gains in physical ability and stamina. Special skills and manual dexterity are developed. One benefits from working with others in a group for a common goal. Ability to understand and be understood and to work efficiently and well with others is of real value. Much useful information is acquired of farming and forests, of buildings and maintenance and of special industries. But the principal educational value is the development of the habit of combining thought and action. Many people think but don’t do, and other do and don’t think.” Mr. Wood concluded his remarks by giving in some detail the work arrangement of three afternoons a week for each student.
Miss Molly Gregory, instructor of woodworking, outlined the opportunities and responsibilities of the work on the college farm and in the work shop.
Mr. Albers concluded the program of speeches with an illustrated talk. Standing in front of an easel upon which he exhibited caricatures of examples of bad manners he said: “Good taste is an important as a good memory.”
Robert Wunsch, the Rector of the college, acted as chairman of the meeting.
