21st Century Frontier

Century At Arizona's Prescott College, fresh man orientation is a trifle more strenuous than listening to a series of welcome speeches. Instead, incoming students, both male and female, strap on 40-lb packs and spend three weeks hiking through dry, bramble-strewn canyons and scrambling down 165-ft. cliffs; for three days, they must live on their own, surviving on nothing but water. In addition, they paddle kayaks and canoes for 95 miles around a wind-chopped lake, struggling to keep afloat during cloudbursts and camping overnight on the rocky shore.

The explanation for Prescott's rigorous "wilderness course," declares the school's president, Ronald C. Nairn, is that "man is a part of nature. Millions of years of his evolutionary history are rooted in life as a hunter, a nomad, an adventurer. Deep facets of personality and emotional needs are tied to his past Urban industrial society increasingly fails to meet these needs." gritty native spirt is only one part Prescott's unique educational program. The college has junked traditional academic departments and installed a system of wide-ranging integrated courses that bridge the gap between humanities and the sciences. The curriculum concentrates on great ideas rather than an accumulation of facts. The object is to help each student create his own world view, relate classroom concepts to his own life and become what one school official calls "a cultural revolutionary."

Unfettered by Tradition. When Prescott opened its doors in 1966, it was conceived as a private, four-year liberal arts college "unfettered by any tradition that would limit its opportunity to relate itself dynamically to the emerging 21st century." That goal was explored at a symposium of 100 educators and businessmen sponsored by the Ford Foundation, resulting in funds for construction of the college's 43 buildings on 640 acres of rolling plain six miles north of Prescott, Ariz. Though present enrollment is only 186, Prescott plans to expand to a maximum of 1,000 by 1978.

All Prescott's students take a heady curriculum in four areas: anthropology; language and literature; civilizations; systems. The language and literature program includes a study of the cinema as well as courses on the Christian tradition and comparative mythology. The study of systems at Prescott starts with an analysis of logic and mathematics, branches off into astronomy physics, chemistry, psychology and political science. The anthropology department deals with man's relationship to his environment, to his culture, and to himself. It ranges from courses in geography and geology to zoology--all backed up by six weeks of field work in the nearby desert. In their first trip to the desert, Prescott students unearthed pueblo ruins left by predecessors of the Hopi Indians in A.D. 1100.

To the Limits. Prescott's most novel enterprise is the outdoor sports program Convinced that students need more than the artificial competition of games Prescott has abandoned traditional team sports. Instead, it has adopted the techniques developed by Outward Bound, an international program of more than 20 wilderness camps that stresses adventure, challenge and sell sufficiency.

The man charged with the job pushing Prescott's students to their physical limits is Roy Smith, 28, a robust English-born mountaineer, who has led students on skindiving trips to the Gulf of California, and on explorations of caves in the Grand Canyon, and organized a student mountain-rescue team. This spring he plans a kayak trip down the Colorado River and eventually hopes to lead an archaeological expedition to Peru and an 1,800-mile journey over Canada's Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean. So far the students have taken enthusiastically to the challenge. "I was really scared, admits Mary Burns, 17, after her rope slipped on a mountain climb, when I made it, I felt awfully proud of myself."

With its low fees (total yearly cost: $2,600) and liberal rules (complete honor system, no dorm curfews for students entertaining dates), Prescott expects little difficulty in filling its classes. A chance to teach in small, informal seminars and high salaries ($14, average) have helped attract a strong and adventurous faculty. Support from Arizona citizens has been building as well; last year, Barry Goldwater donated his personal library to the college At Prescott, says President Nairn, who served as a New Zealand fighter pilot during World War II and holds a Ph. D. from Yale, "we are taking our past concepts of learning and giving them a new focus by which we can come close to the objective of that ancient Chinese aphorism: To have roots but to soar like an eagle.

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