After the class a junior apologized for her classmate's seeming stupidity. "We're just not very familiar with the material," she explained. "He has to help us along." But neither stupidity nor ignorance explain the girl's performance. The problem results directly from Randall's approach.
The point is not, of course, that the girls won't learn from Randall. They will, and have. Rather, Randall's style serves to illustrate the dilemma of a college in transition.
President Ward claims to have heard that the college is changing, but to be unable to detect the change himself. To justify his faith in the school's future, Ward listed several outstanding new teachers. Atop the list was Francis Randall.
President Ward appears not to understand the spirit of the school as his predessesors conceived it. Of course, he has inherited the conflicting demands of theory and necessity, and to some extent the inconsistancies in his argument are excusable. But his conclusions inevitably take the school farther away from its stated ideals.
For example, he says he wants to preserve the traditional image of Sarah Lawrence as a progressive school. At least in part, he maintains, this will assure that "we will get girls who will best profit from our educational system" He calls this process "self-selecting". For this reason he claims to have fought down the trustees's attempt to change the College Catalogue. Yet during Ward's presidency the student body has increased by more than 100 girls, lecture courses have been added, and examinations have been introduced in the lecture courses. Furthermore, Ward expects an eventual increase in both the size of the school and the percentage of lecture courses offered.
Conformity Grows
During his regime an increased political conformity has also been evident among the college's faculty. For years Sarah Lawrence, like Harvard, opposed NDEA loans. This year, over vocal student protest, Sarah Lawrence succumbed to the school trustees and accepted the loan. The Chairman of the music department, who has been at Sarah Lawrence since the McCarthy era, assured us that five years ago the faculty would have rejected the NDEA loan without question, even in its revised form.
However, no change has appeared in the ideal of close faculty-student relations.
Intimacy between student and teacher remains a cornerstone of Sarah Lawrence's educational philosophy. As long as any semblance of a dialogue continues to dominate the school's policy, this will be so. Yet the relationship may be artificial, not to say harmful for both man and girl. As Swados commented, "no teacher can avoid feeling like a stuffed peacock after a while with all those girls sitting at his feet, cherishing every word."
Clearly the teacher's role is more than an educational one. When we suggested to Swados that the teacher serves as a male companion, he exclaimed "Companion, Hell! We're men."
There is a legend at Sarah Lawrence that in the 1940's faculty-student marriages become so common that the college stopped hiring unmarried men. Whether true or not, students were hard pressed to name bachelors on the faculty.
In every possible way Sarah Lawrence encourages free thought and social sophistication. Not only is individual freedom the axis of the educational policy; it is the center of Sarah Lawrence social policy as well. Parietals are more liberal than those of any college in the Ivy League. Men may be in women's rooms until mid-night on weeknights, and until 1:30 on the weekend.
As there are no men in the area, girls are at complete liberty to leave the campus and, indeed, since their classes meet only once a week, girls can easily take three or four day weekends.
But the three-day weekend is no substitute for coeducation. Although nearly two-thirds of the girls abandon the campus every week, their social life is, almost to a woman, frustrating.
By and large the freshmen are not as troubled by isolation as are the seniors. But if there is such a thing as the representative Sarah Lawrence girl, she consider herself fully a woman by her senior year. More likely than not, she has had an affair, perhaps in Europe. It has been said that the industrial revolution emancipated woman economically, and that the contraceptive emancipated her sexually. In terms of creativity and morality, at least, the Sarah Lawrence education emanicaptes the woman intellectually. She fancies herself infinitely closer to Doris Lessing and Simone du Beauvoir than to Jackie Kennedy or Francois Sagan.
Several years ago David Boroff described Sarah Lawrence as a college for the rich, the bright and the beautiful." To an extent, perhaps this description could be verified. But as with any generalization, it ignores the individual. And, at Sarah Lawrence, much as transition clouds the mood, the emphasis remains squarely on the individual student