College for the Broke

In Virginia's tidewater district, 70 mi. from Washington and 20 mi. down the lazy Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg lies quiet old Port Royal, whose 500 inhabitants go about their unimportant affairs in a setting of faded 18th Century elegance. Port Royal has 60 old buildings, most of them built soon after the Revolutionary War. In their shadow there is genteel marketing, churchgoing, scampering of children. Oldsters gabble of huntin' and fishin', aware that nothing much else has happened there since the conflict which they refer to as the War Between the States. Impecunious, somnolent, dignified, Port Royal would be just the place for a company of scholars with little money but much bookish fervor, and last week that was just what began to assemble there.

Financial troubles force students out of college. This in turn forces teachers out of jobs. To bring the outs together a "depression college" was announced last month by Dr. Arthur Cheney Clifton Hill Jr., Dartmouth 1925, economics professor 1927-29 at Springfield College (Mass.), staff member last year at Brookings Institution in Washington, where he took his doctorate in economics. Dr. Hill picked Port Royal for his college chiefly because of its proximity to Washington. It was comparatively simple to arrange leases on Port Royal dwellings, two colonial manors with wooded grounds, the old brick Town Hall and an old bank building. These would serve for students' living and eating quarters, lecture rooms, a theatre and a place for Port Royal College's library of 5,000 borrowed volumes. Townspeople agreed to take in roomers for as little as $2.50 per month. By close figuring, Dr. Hall planned to board his students for 36-c- daily, the cost of U. S. Army rations. The faculty would receive for pay only their room & board. Total cost of attendance would come to only $250, whereas $350 or $400 would be a low fee in an established institution. Like the students and faculty at Commonwealth College in Arkansas (where the fee is $120--TIME, Aug. 29), Port Royalites would clean up their rooms, wait on table, wash dishes, help restore some of the ramshackle buildings.

Last week Dr. Hill sent announcements of Port Royal College to a list of male and female students known to be unable to return to other colleges this year. Freshmen would be accepted only in special cases. Total enrollment would be limited to 100. Port Royal offers no degrees, but will give the usual run of courses, with certificates of work done which, it is hoped, other colleges will accredit. It is planned to have a visiting staff of professors from other institutions, private researchers, politicians, journalists, and government workers involuntarily furloughed from Washington. Port Royal's announcement listed 14 instructors, most of them young. With Port Royal's opening set for Nov. 1, Dr. Hill and his associates busied themselves last week getting ready to receive such students as might come to them as impecunious medieval youths did to Anselm, to John Duns Scotus, to Abelard in the rural oratory he called Paraclete.

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