More Dividends Than Expected
A Student's-Eye View of Alumni College
A '28 WIFE AND ALUMNI COLLEGE JUNIOR
MOST of us who have participated in the Dartmouth Alumni College expected an intellectual cold shower. We got it and we're still glowing.
On the physical side, room and board were far better than we'd anticipated. In fact, it's a cheap, fun, New England vacation if anyone cared to so denigrate it. But the real surprise package for us - and I would guess a happy unforeseen result to the College planners, as well - is in the psychological, emotional department. Love, agape, deep friendship, honest-to-God communication, put it as you will, these begin, flourish and last among DAC colleagues. It seems to me we are getting the advantages, with none of the dangerous or disastrous elements, of the currently "in" Sensitivity Seminars, the T(therapy) Groups, the State Department-inspired "leveling" sessions, the "Lemon Eater" weekend talk marathons.
It is not my intention here to propagandize the success of this new (1964) effort on the part of Dartmouth College to offer its alumni and their wives a continuing knowledgeable stake in the thinking of our world today. More and more lucky graduates and their families are accepting this unique opportunity, getting their minds stretched and coming back for more. Read all about it in your favorite Alumni Magazine! Don't just sit there and moulder. Find out about the new Economics and old Benjamin Franklin, the new Physics and old Paul Goodman. It's the greatest thing in adult education since moveable type.
As to creature comforts, they have more bathrooms in the dormitories now. The older you are, the more their number has increased. The campus and environs are more beautiful than you'd remembered. The food is delicious, the "maid" service is good, your kids are kept busy and intrigued with their own programs. There is leisure, sports to suit all tastes, cookouts, banquets. There is the Happy Hour before dinner, which, unlike the customary cocktail party, redounds with productive talk. It's the daily extension of the morning round-table discussions, with more people and a glass in your hand.
It's these hour-and-a-half discussion groups every late morning that lead to my thesis. Here you have a group of twelve or fourteen men and women of varying ages and diverse backgrounds gathered together for five consecutive talk sessions. Then you join another group for the last five work days. (Husbands and wives and other family conclaves are in separate groups unless they request otherwise.) Present each day is a faculty member as referee and summer-upper. Usually he keeps his little hot administrative hands out of the unstructured discussions, the ventilation of ideas, and any controversies that take place. But he doesn't stifle his opinions on the subject. At best, he is one of the group and need only show his position in the dire case of a hitherto-unstoppable bore. Courtesy and a democratic show of "at least let's listen to the guy, even if he's wrong, wrong, wrong" is the usual pattern, except when passionate conviction turns to honest rage.
I used that chic word unstructured up there. Well, the idea is that these small meetings are for talking about the current year's four fields of study, which is a broad panorama itself, heaven knows. Fine, this gives takeoff points. Usually one of lectures you've just listened to enthuses a member to throw a subject into the ring. Nobody tells you what you have to talk about. There are no rules or regulations. The group decides to discuss what is uppermost in their minds. One year most all roads led to Civil Rights and the task of defining some Absolutes in morals. 1967 found black and white America permeating much of our conversation - not to say knock-down-and-drag-outs - and Vietnam, too, was ever-present. True, the majority swings its weight, as always, to begin with. But if the young man in the Bermuda shorts wants to get a plug in for more permissive sex laws or even free enterprise, he can probably do it and still be relevant, even if they'd started out with Dosto-evsky or Scientific Traditions. Being graduates or wives out in the "wide, wide world" for a few years up to umteen, they are not stumbling around between the relevant and the preposterous like drunks clutching a lamppost, as Peter Schrag recently described some university undergraduates in a Seminar. They are grown-up people, a very mixed bag of them, mind- and soul-searching to find answers to the problems that concern us today.
Unlike many of the Sensitivity or T Sessions or Foreign and Civil Service Seminars, et al., these DAC groups are completely voluntary. No one has sent them there for their own betterment or the betterment of their jobs. They weren't even "advised" to go. However, the goal of the above-listed professionally supervised groups — i.e., to help people understand each other and themselves and to break down barriers built up by social, career or order systems — is being reached these August days on the Hanover campus. Not that the results are world-shaking for all the members of a group, or all the groups, all the time. The incidence is very high, nevertheless, in candor, creative thinking, and communication.
Again the definitive word is voluntary in the avoidance of the dangers and disasters of the Sensitivity Sessions in general. At Dartmouth, the participant gives what he wants to according to his needs, his personality, his capacity. He is not made a disputant in any argument generated on purpose to "unlayer" him. He is not badgered to "level," not forced to self-criticism. He is not pushed, as some unfortunate few in the professional groups have been, to where he had to be institutionalized or where he chose to leave life by the "false door," as the Spanish say of suicide. But even with no one pushing them, it is a wonderful thing to see the blossoming of the inner-directed, usually taciturn man or the shy woman. The atmosphere of these meetings;, physically casual and comfortable, stimulated by the morning's brilliant and perhaps disturbing lectures or by an unanswered question of two days ago, leads to the desire to really communicate.
I just looked up that overworked communicate in the Roget to see if I could find a fresher word. I couldn't, but this is what it says in the index! It's an omen. It says, "Communicate — join, tell, give,sacrament." Seriously and certainly, true communication is a holy and a healing rarity. I've kept parts of two letters from old friends on this very point, one sad, one glad. The first: "Damn my age and the gathering gloom. Our days consist of non-communicating episodes and life spaces." The other, although written years ago and about another country, describes my feelings about our Dartmouth sessions: "This two weeks has been a great experience for me. ... No one could ever be the same after even such a short interval of communication with such people. The truth is often harsh, uncompromising, even forbidding, but when it is pursued with people like them, a new spirit permeates the whole, polishing the rough edges, humanizing ideas, and scattering pessimism to the winds. It was exhilarating at the time and leaves an enduring satisfaction."
The lasting friendships and deep affections engendered by these experiences and this closeness are phenomenal. They are better than Hippie love at its ideal. And the manifestations are much more useful than marching around a park, carrying daffodils. Out of this creative communion with other minds, attitudes and emotions comes a growing self-knowledge. You find yourself bringing more honesty and cogency to the questions that beset you. You even find answers. Robert Frost once wrote, "Very few people that leave the good of folkways can keep from getting all mixed up in the mind. We can make raid and excursions into the wild, but it has to be from well kept strongholds."
We cannot with any hope of sanity accept the Jung idea that the step to higher consciousness leads away from all shelter and safety. This is a spiritual false door. Most of us have to have a little steady ground under our feet, a few verities to hearten us when the wind howls and the very stars seem alien. Most of us, I think, go along with this from MobyDick: "Herein we see the rare virtue of a strong vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator, keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O Man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own."
In our days of shunned absolutes, of situational ethics, existentialism, the storms of dissent that flash and reverberate constantly in and around our heads, strongholds are all the more vital to us, and, at the same time, all the harder to define and defend. The Dartmouth Alumni College in general and the talk sessions in particular fill a great need for clarifying cloudy issues, making straight the zigzags in our thinking, and adding joy and sustaining power to our lives.
Good Listeners
On their way to a coffee break between lectures and group classes.
THE AUTHOR: Marion Blyth with her husband, Clark Blyth '28 (left) and Dr. Erwin C. Miller '20 during a break between classes. To attend Alumni College she came all the way from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where Mr. Blyth is Director of the Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales. Mrs. Blyth's interests, according to a '28 survey some years ago, include "writing, the League of Women Voters, and dachshunds." The Blyths, who have also lived in Argentina and the Dominican Republic, have three sons and a daughter.
"Listen, you! Thoreau was not just goofing off. He wanted to live deliberately,to front only the essential facts of life to see what gives, and not, when he cameto die, discover that he had not lived."
The Alumni College faculty, shown at a special panel discussion, included (i tor) Jacob Neusner, Associate Professor of Religion; Arthur Luehrmann Jr.,Assistant Professor of Physics; "Dean" Harold L. Bond '42, Professor of English; and Larry K. Smith, Assistant Professor of History. Thirteen other facultymembers served as leaders of the informal discussion groups.
A typical seminar discussing issues raised in lectures and readings.
The talk went on at Thayer Hall meals and in the dormitories.
