Newborn Schools

This week in Sarasota, Fla., a new college called New College starts its first classes, joining the 80 senior colleges founded since World War II that range in fame from Brandeis near Boston down to Yampa Valley College in Steamboat Springs, Colo. The aim of New College is to make Spanish moss the prestige equivalent of New England ivy, and the school starts out with $11 million in cash assets, raised in fund drives, and 115 acres of landscaped bayfront property.

Students will go through a threeyear, eleven-month course of study, with two weeks off at Christmas and in August. The atmosphere will be permissive; students are called "colleagues," and rules are called "expectations." But with most courses in give and take seminars or tutorial sessions, the school hopes to avoid the academic laxness that a free rein might encourage. "It could be Suntan U., but it won't be," says Florida-born George Baughman, 49, who resigned three years ago as vice president for business affairs at New York University to head New College.

A Nutty Enough Staff. A blue-chip board of 25 trustees is composed of rich Floridians, influential laymen (President Henry Chauncy of the Educational Testing Service and Alfred Barr Jr., director of collections for the Museum of Modern Art, for example), and five Congregational ministers, who represent church help in founding the school but who shun any supposition that they should exercise religious control over it. With such impressive auspices, New College persuaded Historian Arnold Toynbee to be visiting professor this winter. He had doubts about the heat, but Baughman astutely pointed out the precedents for intellectual achievement in warm climates: the ancient Greeks and Aztecs.

For its permanent staff, Provost and Dean John Gustad, psychologist and former liberal arts dean at Alfred University, rounded up 21 men "capable enough and nutty enough to help make a curriculum that would last long enough for us to see what was wrong. They had to be willing to walk off the end of the dock with us," says Gustad jovially. Admissions Director Robert Norwine was enticed from Wesleyan University, and he proceeded to choose 97 talented nonconformists from 1,200 freshman applicants. Tuition is stiff ($4,200 a year), but 80% of the students get scholarship aid.

Until January the students will be housed at Landmark, a luxurious Sarasota resort hotel, with a private balcony overlooking the water for every student. When Architect I. M. Pei completes the first phase of a $15 million building program, students will transfer to dorms that are equally inviting. Designed to complement the main building, which is the mansion that once belonged to Circusman Charles Ringling, the low-lying residences are grouped around a central plaza and interior courts. Pairs of students will share carpeted study-bedrooms (with bath) opening onto secluded patios.

With New College at last a reality, President Baughman is floating along on a cushion of enthusiastic adjectives: "Marvelous, exciting, superb, inspiring." And besides, he says, "the acoustic qualities of carpeting bring a whole new dignity to the educational effort."

Plus Quadruplets. Across the nation, the college class of 1968 is a record 20% larger than last year's entering class, and the growth rate is expected to double total enrollment to 9,000,000 by 1980. Colleges everywhere are expanding; junior colleges are rising by the dozen, and at least four new senior colleges besides New College open their doors this fall with a display of innovations to ease the growing pains.

>> Saginaw Valley College in upstate Michigan will start classes for about 100 students in the facilities of another school, Delta College.

>> Florida Atlantic University, a state school built amidst the grass-grown runways of an old bomber base in Boca Raton, will take juniors, seniors and graduate students to absorb part of the overflow from Florida's spate of new junior colleges. The latest electronic teaching aids--including closed-circuit television in every room and study cubicle, as well as a computer-controlled library and information-processing operation--are part of its Learning Resources Center.

>> St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., chartered in 1784, has duplicated itself at a 260-acre campus of rolling wooded hills in Santa Fe, N. Mex. The prescribed curriculum at both campuses is 130 "basic books" of Western thought; each student body is restricted to 300; the faculty is interchangeable under a single president, Richard D. Weigle. Only the architecture is different: something called "modified territorial" in Santa Fe and Georgian colonial in Annapolis.

>> Pitzer College in Southern California joins the five other independent schools allied in the Associated Colleges of Claremont. Privately endowed by Citrus Grower R. K. Pitzer, the college aims to educate women for the traditional professions, with an assist from modern electronic teaching aids. "Rather than let these girls be handicapped by watered-down versions of courses offered to men," says a Pitzer trustee, "we will let them know the cold--and the warm--facts of life."

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