Mild-Mannered Maverick

A college reunion is inevitably a nostalgic affair, but for many old grads who assembled in the Amherst College chapel one day last week, the reunion brought back more than memories of student high jinks, flunked exams and eccentric professors. In the pulpit, conducting chapel service just as he had done so many times more than 30 years before, stood a bird-like man of 85. Former President Alexander Meiklejohn (pronounced Meekle-john) back at Amherst for an official visit, was the hit of the reunion show --as mild-mannered and spry as ever, but still very much the maverick who stirred up some of the biggest educational storms of the 1930s.

The youngest of eight children of a Scottish immigrant, Alexander Meiklejohn took over Amherst in 1912 after earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell and serving as professor and dean at Brown University. Meiklejohn had already developed some pronounced views on higher education. He detested the chaos of the elective system, deplored the over-specialization of college teachers. "It is through them," said he at his inauguration, "that we attempt to give our boys a liberal education, which the teachers themselves [have] not achieved." Meiklejohn's goal: to give country-clubbish Amherst a stronger taste of intellectual excellence--and a greater sense of educational purpose.

Free Love & Bolshevism. He introduced its first undergraduate course in social science, injected large doses of philosophy into the curriculum. He brought in such men as Poet Robert Frost, Author Stark Young and Critic George Whicher. But in trying to reconstruct the college, he infuriated many oldtimers on the faculty. He also irritated his trustees by completely disassociating himself from fundraising. Finally, in one of the most publicized academic uproars of the time, he was forced to hand in his resignation in 1923. That commencement, 13 students flatly refused to accept their degrees, and eight professors and associate professors quit the college in protest.

No sooner had the Amherst furor died down than the academic world began to hear more from Alexander Meiklejohn. Under the benevolent eyes of the University of Wisconsin's new president, Glenn Frank, he set up a two-year experimental college for men at the university that promised to sweep away all sorts of cherished traditions. The students--all volunteers--heard no formal lectures, got no grades, took no examinations. Instead of studying separate subjects, each isolated from the others, they steeped themselves in a study of Athens' golden age their first year, U.S. industrial civilization the next. The whole idea was to bring all branches of knowledge to bear on one vast subject --to make a college that was a true "community of scholars." But it was all too much for Wisconsin: the college was accused of fostering everything from Bolshevism to free love. After a few years it closed its doors.

Still the Original Facts. From Wisconsin Meiklejohn moved on to San Francisco, where he started a pioneering adult-education program that soon had 300 men and women delving into the great philosophers. With World War II this project, too, melted away, and Alexander Meiklejohn finally retired to his modest house in Berkeley ("a professor's house, you know") to study, play an occasional game of tennis and stroll about the hills. But he had had his effect on U.S. education--in the great-books seminars that sprang up, in the whole effort to cut across academic fields and search for the unity of knowledge, in the trend toward giving college students more independence and in the new interest in liberal education for adults. Last week Amherst found the old pioneer still the philosophical idealist, trying to find "the meaning and purpose of the total human scene." "Courage, beauty, truth, freedom, justice, honesty,'' he once said, "are still the original facts . . . Our modern task is to find them."

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