The Dalton Brawl

What do TV Host David Susskind, Commentary Magazine Editor Norman Podhoretz, Actor Eli Wallach, Critic Alfred Kazin, Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and a covey of New York's richest lawyers and brokers have in common? For one thing, they all spend as much as $3,000 a year to send their children to Manhattan's private Dalton School. For another, they have lately turned their intellectual ferocity to intramural school brawling.

At issue is the future of a school as famous as its parents: Dalton is the most progressive of the city's chic schools and the most chic of the city's progressive schools. Since it opened in 1919, Dalton has let children set their own pace through a curriculum rich in art and music. In the post-Sputnik 1960s, though, Dalton's board joined the national clamor for more academic rigor and became ever more eager for a school that could push children into high-prestige colleges. To tighten up, the board of trustees picked a stubborn new headmaster in 1964. As it turns out, Donald Barr may now be too stubborn to survive.

Free-Choice Shtik. A former assistant dean at Columbia University's engineering school, Barr arrived at Dalton with a dim view of "orthodox" progressive education's emphasis on emotional development. Bumptious and bright, by turns pompous and ingenuous, Barr implemented the trustees' decisions to make Dalton's all-girl high school coed and to more than double the size of the school, to 1,000. The expansion permitted seven kinds of science, ten languages, 20 English courses. "My shtik" Barr said, "is freedom of choice for the students whenever possible."

Though Barr was nominally opposed to "the crude lash of competition," he sent his own four sons to the fiercely competitive Horace Mann School, and chipped away at Dalton's progressivism by installing tests to supplement written evaluations of students. In an opinionated article several years ago, he flayed teen-age sex ("robots in heat") and roasted permissive parents. "The trouble with many children," he declared, "is that their fathers are mothers and their mothers are sisters."

Barr is sincerely concerned that today's students are so distracted by political activism and youth cultism that academic work is being slighted. His remedy is more adult models ("happy, controlled, competent people"). "What students need," he once wrote, "is something to rebel against that is worthy of their respect--even of healthy and manageable fear."

Such notions, though, did Barr no good in the new era of the Woodstock Nation and its admiring Dalton parents. As one Dalton mother said of her nine-year-old, "he's not our son; he's our friend." Barr was so out of it that he even tried to ban blue jeans and long hair on boys. While teaching a course on Marxism, he actually started wearing an American-flag pin on his lapel. When Barr began referring to staying after school as "detention," one father growled, "Will the children be allowed one phone call to their lawyers?"

Plots and Plots. Last year, Barr expelled five sixth-graders, four for what he labeled "extortion," the fifth for stealing $15 from a teacher in order to meet the alleged junior extortionists' demands. As some parents saw it, this was a case for psychiatry, not punishment. They were aghast when Barr reportedly chortled to a school assembly, "I guess we got rid of those little gangsters, didn't we?" In a showdown board meeting last November, a faction of anti-Barr trustees asked for the headmaster's head. Eventually they were mollified by the appointment of an evaluation committee, and two months later, the board voted unanimously to keep Barr on.

Even so, Barr's supporters suspected his critics of plotting to fill two board vacancies with anti-Barr members, who would then swing a new vote to kick him out. Three weeks ago, the supporters mailed each parent a 21-page memo fingering Psychiatrist Myron Hofer, president of the P.T.A., as a chief anti-Barr plotter. Since Hofer represented the P.T.A. on the board, the memo urged parents to vote him out of office and thus oft7 the board.

Two weeks ago, a traumatic P.T.A. meeting ensued. Dr. Hofer, who once staged drug seminars at Dalton, was more or less accused of condoning pot for students. His defenders accused Barr of keeping black and Puerto Rican students out of the school. When Barr wandered in, his mawkish remarks about his uncertain future at the school drew catcalls ("Where'd you leave Checkers?"). One of his defenders received a Nazi salute. The combatants almost reeled back to their chauffeured limousines double-parked outside the school.

Last week Dr. Hofer's fate (and indirectly Barr's) was put to a mail poll umpired by no less than the Honest Ballot Association, which usually keeps things clean in union elections. Although the results are binding on no one, the parents voted 435 to 300 against Hofer. Mercifully, spring vacation began the next day. Barr vanished to heal his wounds on a two-week Caribbean cruise. But with national politics in a lull, Dalton's activist parents are sure to resume their new recreation of baiting or boosting Barr when the beleaguered headmaster returns.

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