black text on off-white paper, headings include: Negro education, New Community Members, College News, Alumni news
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN
Volume 1 Number 2 Newsletter January 1943
LIBERAL EDUCATION TODAY AS A TOOL OF WAR
As America enters its second year of war, liberal education is faced with the need to reaffirm its beliefs, to examine its fundamentals, to decide whether or not it is of any importance in time of war. In the light of an army policy which believes that the preservation of liberal education and its values demands the temporary suspension of such education, Black Mountain asks whether the successful prosecution of the war does not depend instead upon as completely and deeply educated a people as possible. Realizing the necessity of speed in the war effort, the College yet must question the narrow technical training the government is instituting. It asks whether some knowledge of- and more important, an enormous interest in- the social, psychological, historical, and economic backgrounds to the war; its possible outcomes, the civilizations and cultures out of which it grew, and the people who are fighting it, is not a necessary to a democratic army in a people’s war as engineering and mathematical training. Intentionally or otherwise, the army training plan becomes a regimentation of thinking, a mass-production molding of ideas and personalities, a way of making functional soldier-mechanics instead of thinking men.
Most colleges and universities seem to agree wholly or at least in large measure with the government’s plans. It is primarily outside of the field of education that Black Mountain finds agreement with and support of its ideas. Wendell Willkie’s Duke University speech echoes many things the College has been writing, saying, and living for ten years. “So important,” said Mr Willkie, “are the liberal arts for our future civilization that I feel that education in them should be as much a part of our war planning as the more obviously needed technical training…Furthermore, the men and women who are devoting their lives to such studies should not be made to feel inferior or apologetic in the face of a P-T boat commander or the driver of a tank. They and all their fellow citizens should know that the preservation of our cultural heritages is not superfluous in a modern civilization; is not a luxury… It is what we are fighting for.” Dorothy Thompson’s December 29th column, “On the Value of Useless Knowledge”, is perhaps over-emphatic, but says in substance many of the things in which Black Mountain believes.
The Black Mountain concept of liberal education differs in some ways from the education Willkie and Miss Thompson have spoken of; it is in no sense the exclusively academic education Willkie was defending, or the non-practical, non-specialist education Miss Thompson eulogized. Black Mountain makes academic training only part of its educational theory, and sees non-intellectual
Work and community living as also important in the development of a whole person. It feels that Miss Thompson’s “useless knowledge” is often truly useless unless a student is given some idea of what to do with what he knows. It believes in breadth of curriculum, but at the same time finds necessary discipline in intensive work in a specialized field.
These are, however, minor differences in the discussion of real liberal education versus narrow and specialized training, whether it be technical, vocational, or academic. Black Mountain believes, and has for ten years attempted to realize its beliefs, that only through a truly liberal education can a young person come to any understanding of the complex and chaotic world in which he lives; that only be coming to see the world as a world of people, and by coming to know some of the reasons people agree or disagree, the ways in which they live and work side by side, can a student approach the ideal of a better society. A college must be concerned with scrutinizing the values of modern society and the frameworks through which people see themselves and their world; it must question convention and tradition, be unafraid to condemn or to criticize, be continually in search of the basic, the fundamental, and the real. In time of war, when meaningless verbal symbols are multiplied a hundredfold, when emotionalism tends to replace analysis, when propaganda takes the place of information, and when unconsidered judgements make a thousand intermediate greys black or white, such education is of tremendous importance.
During December, Alfred Kazin, book editor of The New Republic, and author of “On Native Ground”, visited the College and led a discussion on American Writing and the War”. There is a feeling on the part of many writers today, he believes, that it is morally wrong to write anything not directly concerned with the war; that one must write ponderous social novels, discussions of commando tactics, lengthy eulogies of naval victories purporting to be poetry but poetical only in form. Lyric poetry has come to be considered by such writers as somehow treacherous, immoral, “ivory-tower”. In a time when a realization of the potential and very real beauty of the world is more necessary than ever before, we read book after book of factual reportage on this or that area of conflict; we read romantic historical narratives, popularizations of technical problems, discussions of the possibilities of victory by land, by sea, or by air- anything, in fact, to keep us from thinking about what is basic and fundamental to war time as it is to any time: the never-ending, ever changing, eternally important relationship of man to the world in which he lives, to its beauties and its cruelties, to its living people and its cold facts.
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN January 1943
Volume 1 Number 2
Issued four times a year, in November, January, February, and April. Application for entry as second-class matter at the Postoffice at Black Mountain, N.C., under the Act of August 24, 1912, is pending.
Negro education
Another speaker at the College was WA Robinson, the director of the Secondary School Study of the Association of Colleges and Secretary Schools for Negroes. Mr Robinson told of the fight of Negroes for better schools since the Civil War. “While Negro schools have improved tremendously in the period since the war,” he said, “the differential between economic support of white and Negro schools in continualy on the increase, in spite of constitutional guarantees of equal support. The problem becomes a legalistic one, further complicated by the insistence of the Southern voting majority that white superiority be maintained.
“A number of moves are afoot to improve the schools. These have included the Eight Year Study of the Progressive Education Association, the curriculum improvement in the states, the Co-operative College Study, the Southern Association Secondary School Study, the Commission on Teacher Education, and at present the Secondary School Study which I am directing.
Mr Robinson feels that as Negroes become better educated they become more resentful of the implications of racial inferiority. He said; “I think that Negroes will continue to strive for emancipation in America until their emancipation is complete and the Negro’s place as an equal in all matters has been finally established. Historically, this is what every submerged and oppressed minority has done.”
New community members
New faculty appointments since the last Newsletter include: Herbert Miller and Eric Bentley in Social Studies, Anatole Kopp in architecture, and Marianne Kopp in mathematics. Dorothy Trayer was appointed registrar to take the place of Elizabeth Parker, now working at the new Moore General Hospital, Robert Orr replaced Morton Steinau as assistant treasurer, and Margaret Stenderhoff began work as faculty secretary.
Herbert Miller is an internationally known authority on racial, minority, and immigration problems. He is the author of “The School and the Immigrant”, “Races, Nations, and Classes”, and “The Beginnings of Tomorrow”. One of the first outsiders to write about the problems and aspirations of Czechoslovakia, he was a close friend of Thomas G Masaryk, father and first president of the Czechoslovak republic. At Masaryk’s request, Dr Miller revised Czechoslovakia’s Declaration of Independence, and so helped to win international support for the new republic. Before coming to BMC, he taught at Oberlin College, Ohio State University, and Bryn Mawr College. Since he retired from Bryn Mawr in 1941, he has been visiting professor and lecturer at a number of colleges.
His courses for the winter term include an introduction to the scientific study of society and a more advanced study of the sociological makeup of America. On wednesday, January 20, he spoke to the College community on Asia’s part in the war, and in the world after the war. He believes “that the next twenty-five years will bring a greatly deepened sense of values throughout the world: increased ethical and moral values, greater religious freedom, more concern with carrying the benefits of science and technology to all peoples. If we look at Asia, at China, India, and Russia, we can see synthesized there the great values of civilization.
“Speaking sociologically,” he continued, “it is inevitable that we white races are going to have to learn to live in equality with the colored races. The yellow race alone, for instance, is not only approximately equal numerically to the white race, but has the oldest culture in the world, dating back four thousand years. In comparison, European culture is very young, for we can speak of it only in terms of hundreds of years.
“Asiatics have a time sense which the younger cultures lack; they think in terms of tomorrow and a hundred years from now while we suffer from a kind of cultural myopia. A solution of the world’s problems is going to demand the Chinese feeling for ethics, China’s understanding of what it means to live together; India’s spiritual depth and its understanding of the meaning of religion; Russia’s realization of economic and scientific potentialities, and its understanding of the need for economic and political equality.
“If a world as integrated as the world of tomorrow can be said to have a cultural center, I predict that seventy years from now, that center will be in Asia”, Dr Miller said,”for in Asia as nowhere else are the elements of a better and happier civilization.”
Eric Russell Bentley was a visiting teacher during Black Mountain’s summer quarter. An Englishman, educated at Oxford and at Yale, he received his PhD in 1941, winning with his doctoral thesis Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize. He was a member of the faculty of the University of California last year, and has written widely for such magazines as The Partisan Review, The Rocky Mountain Review and the New Mexico Quarterly Review. During the winter quarter he is teaching courses in European history from 1600-1800 and in current affairs, with emphasis on the immediate backgrounds to the present war.
Anatole Kopp was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and at MIT. He is assisting A Lawrence Kocher with architectural work, and with Mr Kocher is giving a course in architectural history. He is also teaching building structures, and stage design, and is directing the construction of four music practice cubicles, being built be advanced architectural students. Marianne Kopp, also a student at the Sorbonne and at MIT, is teaching elementary mathematics.
(The paragraph on Edward Lowinsky in the November Newsletter should have read as follows. The Newsletter apologizes to Dr Lowinsky for the errors in the original paragraph.)
Dr Lowinsky is widely known as a pianist, a musicologist, and a teacher. He studied at the University of Heidelberg, and lived recently in Holland where he was, until the war, a popular lecturer before Dutch musical societies. In 1933, his Book of Children’s Music was published in Denmark, and in 1937 his study of Orlando di Lasso was published in Holland. A new book on Renaissance Music has been accepted for publication by the Columbia University Press. At Black Mountain Dr Lowinsky is working with piano students, teaching music history, and directing the madrigal group. Mrs Lowinsky is teaching violin and viola.
Children in the community include at present Sandra and Larry Kocher, Boyd and Linn Mattison, Jane-Ann and Daniel Orr, Helene Kopp, Eddie Dreier, and Joan Steinau. Quintus Dreier is at the Warren Wilson Junior College in Swannanoa; Joan and her mother will leave as soon as Morton Steainua is settled in his new work.
College news
Courses at the College have been opened to people from the surrounding community at reduced tuition fees. This policy supplements the College’s program of lectures, concerts, and dramatic skits prepared for army camps, hospitals, sanitariums, and other organizations in the neighborhood, and widens the welcome Black Mountain has always had for interested visitors. The part of the College in the recreational program of the new hospital is growing; a number of officers and enlisted men came to the pre-Christmas performance of “Shadow and Substance”, and others have been regularly at Saturday night concerts and dancing.
Plays in rehearsal at the present time are the Owen Davis- Donald Davis dramatization of Edith Whatron’s “Ethan Frome”, and Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid”. Next term will see work started on Maeterlinch’s “The Blue Bird”, to be presented as part of the Asheville Children’s Theatre series. Three scripts were sent to the Carolina Dramatic Association’s annual contest for original plays; they included Erik Haugaard’s full-length “Each Year the Snow Falls”, Otis Levy’s one-act “The Insanity of Love”, and Will Hamlin’s radio script, “Mr Whitcomb and the Horse”.
Concerts during the fall and winter have emphasized music by Mozart, Bach, Brahms, and Schubert. Dr Fritz Hansgirg has played several programs from his large collection of classical recordings; his Hammond organ and Steinway grand are in the Dining Hall and have been used in a number of concerts. The Dining Hall has been repainted, and the instruments stand against a silver cyclorama curtain, which hangs from ceiling to floor at the fireplace end of the Hall.
Black Mountain began its radio series over WWNC on Sunday, January 10. Programs have included music played by Heinrich Jalowetz, Gretel Lowinsky, and Edward Lowinsky, and talks by Kenneth Kurtz and Herbert Miller. A series of dramatic programs is planned for the near future.
Before he left for a CPS Camp in West Compton, New Hampshire, Alex Reed finished the stone “quiet house” he designed and built as a memorial to Mark Dreier. The house was built almost single-handed; Reed cut the wood, laid the stone, and wove the curtains at its windows. He felt that there was much value in doing constructive work during a time of destruction. He means the building to be used a quiet thinking, a place to get away, if only for an hour, from the pressure and busyness of the College.
Student officers for the winter term are: Samuel E Brown jr, student moderator, William McLaughlin, John Swackhamer, and Herbert Oppenheimer.
John Evarts and Bedford Thurman, both in training in Florida, were in the cast of “The Desert Song”, produced at their camp by Joshua Logan, the director of the Broadway show, “This is the Army”, Thurman is now in officers’ training school. Roland Boyden is stationed in Alaska, as a lieutenant (jg) in the Naval Intelligence Service. Anne and Frederick Mangold are in Mexico City; Dr Mangold is attached to the Requirements Division of the Board of Economic Warfare at the American Embassy there.
The YMCA-YWCA annual interracial conference has been invited to meet at the College immediately following the end of the spring term in June. The Textile Workers of America’s Southern Training Conference has also been invited to return to Lake Eden during the summer. It is possible that the College will sponsor a Seminar on American for Foreign Scholars, in co-operation with the American Friends Service Committee; the Seminar would be under the direction of Herbert Miller, who last summer directed the Friends’ American Seminar.
Alumni news
Derek Bovingdon and Barbara Sieck were married January 4, the day Derek graduated from officers’ training school. He is one of a few members of his class chosen to learn to fly the army’s Flying Fortress, and is now in training in New Mexico as a bomber pilot.
Fred Stone and Jane Robinson were married in New York on January 2. Fred is now stationed in New Jersey. When he is transferred, Jane will return to Black Mountain. She has been working in a war plant during the summer and fall.
Mary Rose Riegger married Harold Aks on December 24. After leaving Black Mountain she took secretarial courses in New York and worked this fall as a secretary to a New York doctor.
