Buncombe County's Eden

Fortnight ago little Black Mountain College, in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, finished its sixth year and laid plans for its seventh. Orthodox educators were surprised at its persistence. Black Mountain resembles no other college in the U. S. It requires no attendance at classes, grants no degrees, has no president, no fraternities, no football team. Thus unencumbered by the machinery of curricular and extracurricular activities, it devotes itself to art, music, dramatics, philosophy and what it calls "community living." Last week, the better to house "community living," the college announced plans for new buildings such as no U. S. campus has seen.

They were designed by famed Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. They will stand on stilts over a lake (see cut), will be modernist in style. Besides classrooms, a library, laboratories, shops, offices, the buildings will include two-room apartments for teachers, rooms for 120 students. Each student will have a private study but share a bedroom. Most unusual aspect of the plans is the buildings' compactness, for compact community life.

Black Mountain College was founded by nine teachers and 19 students, most of whom had been kicked out of or resigned from Florida's Rollins College (TIME, Sept. 4, 1933)-Most notable was Classics Professor John Andrews Rice, brother-in-law of Swarthmore's President Frank Aydelotte and a nephew of South Carolina's U. S. Senator Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith (see p. 15). John Rice was fired by Rollins' President Hamilton Holt because he had cried loudly that Rollins, for all its progressive claims, was full of bunk. To start a bunkless college, Rice and his followers went to the place where the word came from--North Carolina's Buncombe County. There, on a mountainside near the village of Black Mountain, they rented for the college year a Y. M. C. A. summer-conference hotel, a huge white-columned building with a magnificent view of the Craggy Mountains across the Swannanoa Valley. First year, Black Mountain's teachers drew no pay. To help support the college, teachers and students ran a farm, did their own housework (except cooking and dishwashing).

Today Black Mountain College has some 20 teachers, 50 students,*is still poor and happy. Students pay an over-all fee of $300 to $1,200 a year, according to their means (a few pay nothing), are expected to share in the work, whatever they pay. For its new buildings, Black Mountain bought a site at Lake Eden, few miles from its present quarters. It hopes to get gifts to start its project and have at least one building to move into by the fall of 1940.

Each Black Mountain student, with faculty advice, lays out his own course, takes comprehensive examinations when he thinks he is ready to go from the junior to the senior division, where he specializes in one field. To graduate (usually, but not necessarily, after four years), he must pass an examination, given by a professor from another college, in his major field. Although they need not go to classes, most students do. Classes are informal, are often held outdoors. Boys and girls wear shorts or jeans, smoke, call their teachers by their first names.

Most popular professors are Rice, Josef Albert (art) and William Robert Wunsch (dramatics). Professor Rice, a roly-poly man with a small moustache, spectacles and a passion for good talk, gives courses called Plato I and Plato II, but rarely mentions Plato. He assigns no reading to his students, teaches by the Socratic method, expects his students to learn from his questions how to read understandingly.

Small, sensitive Josef Albers came to Black Mountain from the Bauhaus, has remained there despite offers of better salaries from Harvard and other institutions. Less interested in developing his students' artistic skill than their emotional maturity, he says to a girl whose drawings are too prim: "You need to be a little more a naughty lady, nicht wahr?"

Like Oxford's and Cambridge's colleges, Black Mountain is run by the faculty (plus a student representative). They elect a rector to do the "dirty work" of administration each year (this year's rector: Bob Wunsch). In serious crises, such as deciding what to do about a drunk who joined the student body one year, the whole college meets. Black Mountain has only one rigid rule: girls may not visit boys' rooms or vice versa. But girls take their turns pushing a plough, help mend roads, dismantle the stage. Twice a week girls and boys dance after supper in the dining room. Sports are swimming, tennis, games on an athletic field. Last year's athletic budget: $12.80. Evenings, the whole college gathers for a lecture on Brahms or Christopher Marlowe.

Black Mountain's teachers hope that its curriculum teaches at least this much: dissatisfaction with humdrum jobs, humdrum living; that its community life at least shows students how to get along with other people. Still too young to know how its graduates will turn out, Black Mountain points with pride to the fact that they are admitted by graduate schools of top-notch universities, that adults who come to visit the college often stay on for months.

* Most of whom come from the North. Among them have been sons and daughters of Cincinnati's former reform Mayor Murray Season-good, Boston's Porter (Private Schools Handbook) Sargent, U. S. Indian Office's Educational Director Willard W. Beatty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.