JERRY FRIEDBERG, given a terminal appointment by the political science department, discusses the controversy surrounding his firing.
During my first two years at Davis, I was an often excited, frequently argumentative, and sometimes stimulating Assistant Professor, generally a toughie in the classroom. I published three journal items, one of which had been written before coming to UCD. With the help of University funds for faculty research and a grant from the American Philosophical Society, I worked on making a publishable book of my Ph.D. thesis, Marxism in the United States: John Spargo and the Socialist Party of America. At the end of my second year here, I went from Step I to Step II on the Assistant Professor scale, as is normal after two years. At the same time, in June 1966, I left Davis to spend the summer and one quarter of sabbatical leave in the East, a total of six months for final research and writing on my book.
During those six months, I completed all my research, enlisted the help of my former professors at Harvard in initiating contact with Harvard University Press, and saw my manuscript through the Press’s first (“house”) reading. I returned to Davis having received a strong indication of interest in my book, together with suggestions for revisions, mostly formal and all minor, after which Harvard University Press wanted the book back for the second “outside” scholarly reading and anticipated publication.
At the same time, those six months marked a turning point in my life. In the company of friends concerned with new developments in education, removed from Davis and from immersion in my previous roles, and with considerable time for reflection, I came to feel keenly that much of my life as a student and later as a teacher had been hollow. I returned to Davis in December with a strong sense that much had to be changed if my own continuing educational experience were to become the vital, exciting, growing experience I felt it could be.
In the weeks just before the beginning of the Winter 1967 quarter I spent much time with people in Davis and the bay area who were involved in educational innovation. One long-time educational pioneer exposed me to gestalt approaches developed by Fritz Perls, while another brought me to theories of self-appropriated learning developed by Carl Rogers. Putting these and other new things together with reflection on my own education, I began to see and feel more clearly directions for my future teaching-learning experience.
My own education had been most satisfying when it had involved a sense of personal growth, developing the knowledge and capacity for living a more rewarding life in a more satisfying world. That kind of education, it seemed to me, had taken place most vitally and lastingly when motivated more by genuine involvement and interest and less by fear and guilt. I had felt fewer scars and greatest positive growing when I had been excited by a sense of relevance to my life and concerns, when I had wanted to learn, rather than when I had been moved mostly by requirements, economic considerations, and fixation upon punishments and rewards.
I did not know then, as I entered the Winter 1967 quarter, that there is a large body of research, dating back many years and rapidly growing, supporting these feelings of mine about optimum conditions for learning. Nor did I have a clear idea of how these orientations were to be implemented in my own teaching.
I suggested that the reading lists and syllabi I offered were intended to be helpful but not binding so that we could feel more free to explore in terms of genuine interests and would feel less obligated to hew to a pre-structured plan. I indicated that I was little interested in thinkers, theories, and traditional or new problems simply on the basis of intellectual curiosity or presumption of worthwhileness by virtue of tradition or authority. Rather, I wished to explore by virtue of our sense of relevance to our lives and our real concerns. I suggested that we leave the conventional classroom, with its neat parallel rows of linked seats all facing backs of heads and the figure at the podium, for some setting less bare, less ascetic, less impersonal, and less obviously designed for and conducive to an authoritarian process. And I suggested that we compel one another’s interest not by quizzes, assignments, mid-terms, and such but by sharing suggestions, concerns, and excitements.
I still had to face the problem of grades. Education in terms of personal growth, it seemed to me, can be discussed, described, and even evaluated, as is done in a number of colleges and universities through comments in depth by student and teacher; but such complex growth processes cannot be meaningfully graded with conventional number and letter systems. If a quiet, easily intimidated student begins to experience, express, and explore in stumbling, inarticulate, but vital ways, has he learned more or less than the highly verbal, energetic student who absorbs factual material and fields classroom situations and exams with well-practiced ease? Which learning process gets an A- and which the C+?
But even assuming that I could know precisely what learning and growing is taking place, and could rate these processes with comparative letters or numbers, I would still feel another, even more serious objection to grading would remain unmet. Grading forces people to do things that otherwise they might not, things that are not felt to be exciting or interesting or even profitable in-the-long-run, but are done because they are compelled. Students feel forced to “cram”, and the very word “study” frequently connotes an onerous burden rather than the wonderful, difficult love affair that study can be. In short, grading all too often presses people to do the wrong things (cramming, psyching the prof, playing classroom games) for the wrong reasons (pursuit of the grade rather than love of learning) at the wrong times (by pre-structured timetables rather than by interest and self-disciplined design.) Years of such experience do damage to us as learners, as people.
Finally, it seemed to me, then, that my ideas of relevance, freedom, and responsibility in education would be hollow were I to add, “Of course, I will grade each of you at the end of the quarter on the basis of how much I think you have learned of what I think you ought to learn.” In order to avoid the game called “psyching out the prof,” to benefit from and to experience real freedom to explore and express, I felt it was necessary to abandon this ultimate symbol and reality of coercion, grading by authority. Given the rest of the University’s structure and the students’ desire to get credit for what we were doing, however, grades, clearly had to be resubmitted. For the time being, I suggested we put the matter aside, to be decided toward the end of the quarter by each group as a whole.
Looking back upon that first quarter of our experiment, I see how little I knew, how little I myself had been prepared for such learning, and how little I was able to help compared to what I now know can be and is being done.
Still, while initial experiences were difficult, threatening, frustrating, and upsetting, some were also beautiful – beautiful because somehow, out of the chaos and problems, we did manage to help one another to deal with the situations that arose.
One class mandated me to make my old lecture notes available in the the library. I had doubts. Without the pressures of exams and grades, would students find my notes interesting and helpful, or turgid, weak when examined on paper, and a bore? And would having my notes on reserve not encourage students to fall back into the underline-memorize-regurgitate - with-a-few-clever-changes syndrome that I had mastered so well myself in college? Still, we tried it, and toward the end of the quarter reviewed the experience: some had found the notes a bore, and others had found them interesting and helpful, as one girl put it, “especially because I didn’t have to do it.”
Another class decided to meet once a week, in the evening, at my home, to benefit from an informal atmosphere and from meetings which did not have to end at a pre-defined hour. The third group, unable to find an agreeable evening for meeting, decided to meet at additional times, and eventually was meeting for five rather than the originally scheduled three hours per week, talking over lunch trays about the relation between personal values and social science.
At about the middle of the quarter I was approached by the University of Saskatchewan with a job offer and asked for recommendations. I gave conventional references, but it occurred to me that those who really knew me best and could indicate just what I was and was doing were my students. The people in Canada accepted my idea, so I gave all my students addressed envelopes with which they could, if they wished, send unsigned statements to those considering me for a position. Those statements, by no means all favorable, formed a composite picture which impressed me deeply with its honesty and accuracy. The unsigned carbons are still available for reading by anyone who is interested.
Several days later, Dr. Zetterbaum informed me that the Dean of the College of Letters and Science was “adamantly opposed” to my proposal of evening classes, since UCD is largely a day school, and students are not used to, and complain about, night classes. I pointed out that most students I was then working with preferred open-ended night classes to whoops-the-bell-is-ringing day classes, and that I, as a faculty member had the right and indeed the obligation to present meaningful educational experiences to students even if this upset some of them initially. Dr. Zetterbaum replied that I would have to convince the Dean of that, and the matter ended there.
But we did not end our discussions about my new approach to teaching. The basic question that troubled him, as I came to understand it, was this: granted that what I was doing was worthwhile, was it political science, did it belong in a political science department, and, for that matter, was it properly part of higher education? I argued that no less political science was being learned in my classes, rather more in fact, it seemed to me, than the little generally learned in my previous experience with more conventional classes. I showed him the carbons of the students’ statements which had been sent to Canada, and invited him to speak with my students and visit my classes as he wished. This he did, taking considerable chunks of time from his much-pressed schedule to speak with graduate and undergraduate students of mine and to visit with one class for its last two meetings of the quarter. Throughout the following months, I was impressed by Dr. Zetterbaum’s expenditure of time, energy, and effort toward exploring our differences fair-mindedly and with integrity.
At this time, I was advised in confidence, by someone in position to speak with authority, that the amount of time I was putting into teaching and student affairs would more likely hurt than help me with regard to promotion and tenure. His own experience on faculty committees reviewing recommendations for promotions and tenure had been that, by and large, the effective criterion for judgment was the candidate’s publication record. Since I had published three items in the journals and had a book in progress, I did not feel I was personally in jeopardy, but I decided I had better discuss my changed attitude toward publishing with my chairman.
I was no longer willing, I explained to Dr. Zetterbaum, to accept having to publish as part of my duties, an obligation to which I was committed. Instead, I would publish, little, nothing, or a lot, depending upon my estimate of worthwhileness from case to case. (This was a matter quite distinct from my commitment to research: I was and am involved in research, now focused on contemporary utopian thought and efforts at building intentional communities.) At that moment, I said, I felt that my time was being spent more profitably with students and others on a personal learning-teaching basis than working on the business of publishing. In sum, while I could not promise whether or how much I would publish, I asked that my record, decently respectable up to that point, simply be judged empirically as time passed.
I don’t think many people understood my commitments in this matter. Some thought I had forsworn publishing, and this impression still persists despite my best efforts at clarification. One difficulty may be that for academic professionals, publishing is part of a way of life, part of a larger commitment to a more complex and comprehensive pattern of norms and values. By questioning the “publish or perish” dictum, I was also challenging the larger pattern and the assumptions underlying it.
This challenge, and the difficulties others had in coming to grips with it, were increased by my simultaneous challenge to the grading system. Students in my winter courses, facing with me the necessity of having conventional grades at the end of a very different learning experience, discovered something increasingly understood in pioneering programs and schools across the country and, to some extent, in new University of California programs: the deepest and most meaningful learning, in which subject matter and personal growth are intertwined, cannot be summarized with a conventional grade. We decided, finally, upon self-grading accompanied by discussion of the total experience. Many students said that making that decision, and the discussions that followed, were as important as learning experiences as any other part of our quarter together.
Before the spring quarter began, however, I was invited to visit the University of Saskatchewan at Regina. During the break between quarters, I spent some five days talking excitedly with people there who seemed to want me not in spite of, but in part because of, my unconventional approach to education. It was an exhilarating experience, so different from the interviewing I had done three years before when I had gotten my position in Davis. Then the talk had been mostly of teaching loads, salaries, fringe benefits, living conditions, requirements for promotion, and such. Now, at Saskatchewan, the talk was mostly of new educational opportunities, possibilities, of experimental basic questions of freedom and responsibility, potentials for joining in one another’s teaching and learning experiences, and such. I left Regina with an informal offer in hand and much to think about.
At that time it was known that a number of UCD faculty members most identified with teaching concerns and with student life – men like Yehudi Cohen, Jay Ruby, Matt Stolz, and Edgar Friedenberg – were leaving Davis for a variety of reasons, each man having had some difficulty with this institution. Before I had left for Canada, Dr. Zetterbaum had advised me that my contract with UCD was likely to be terminated the following year if I continued my present course. It seemed to me that students and others concerned ought to have the opportunity in at least one case to come to grips with the kinds of issues that would be involved in termination of my contract, and that I would learn much myself from sticking with the difficulties I was like to experience at Davis. Saskatchewan seemed an exciting place, and the position I was offered there was in many conventional and unconventional ways an advance over my position at Davis, but, during the plane trip back to California, I decided to turn down the offer from Regina and stay at UCD as long as I could.
I responded that the first two demands coincided with concerns of my own, and that I thought they could be negotiated in some more or less satisfying way. I did feel a lack of focus in some of the winter experiences, and did want to strive for greater attention to subject matters in spring quarters. As for evaluation, it seems to me that it is desirable, that we need critical feedback from one another if we are to improve, and that teachers and students both need evaluation from one another. Moreover, it seems to me that evaluation is unavoidable, that we get and give it all the time in ways ranging from highly articulate to non-verbal, and that this is especially true in small groups where there is ample opportunity to get to know one’s own and others’ strengths and weaknesses.
With regard to the third demand, grading, I was and am stymied. Given the views on grading which I discussed above, and given also the necessity of operating within the present system, I can find no satisfactory way of handling the problem – no way short of doing what increasing numbers of institutions of higher education across the country are doing, and what is slowly being accomplished here at Davis: namely, moving to reduce the pressure of and eventually to abolish the grading system. On two of the three demands, I told Dr. Zetterbaum in sum, it seemed to me that there was a real possibility of meaningful dialogue between me and the department.
The tenured members of the department had during my absence, done something else: they had contacted the Dean of the College of Letters and Science, and placed the matter before him, without waiting for any discussion with me. I was much upset by this, for it smacked of rule-bound impersonality and a lack of desire for dialogue. But, as I came to realize in the following months, I had failed myself to make sufficient effort at the outset to communicate my concerns to colleagues and to involve them in my searchings. On reflection, I began to understand why this had been so. Until recently, Davis was a place, where faculty by and large did not concern themselves much with one another’s approaches to teaching, and considered such concern the next thing to an invasion of professional privilege. One subject little talked about among faculty generally has been education – our classroom techniques, how they might be improved, educational innovation and experiment elsewhere, possibilities for helping one another to learn and teach better, and so forth. To bring up such matters is to do what is not done, and what may well offend.
Then, too, I was very insecure in beginning explorations whose dimensions I myself did not fully understand, and this insecurity no doubt contributed to my reluctance to bring my new ideas and efforts into what I suspected would be a hostile atmosphere. Looking back now, I wish I had been clearer, more secure, and more politic in what I was doing, and that my colleagues had been more positively concerned with dialogue, so that there might have been more communication during those important first months.
During those first days of the spring quarter, when they were visiting my classes and I was trying to communicate to new students my own still fragile sense of what I was doing, I know that I was far more strident than I would have like to be. My own nervousness and defensiveness was increased, and it was only with difficulty that I sought out those tenured colleagues who I thought might be somewhat open to talking about the issues to engage them in conversation. I had the feeling that many of them were engaged in a pro forma exercise, going through the motions of fairness with their minds made up. Then, too, there was a fine irony in the perfunctory nature of their visits: a sense of professional privilege underlies the laissez faire attitude to teaching with predominates at UCD, and which allows considerable freedom and security for most faculty members in their teaching. The tenured members of my department were caught between their desire to not set a precedent of depth inquiry into and surveillance over their teaching, and their desire to deal with what I was doing.
In all, I managed to talk about the issues with four or five of the nine tenured members of the department. These conversations, generally strained, revealed quickly that differences went far deeper than the three demands which had been expressed. The question really was one of basic orientation toward education and the proper functions of universities, departments and professors. I felt, generally among my tenured colleagues, reactions of restrained outrage. Education, for most of them, it seemed to me had to do mainly with communicating factual knowledge and skills, with training political scientists, with professional conferences and journals, and with objective study disciplined by sanctioned authority. It seemed to me that useful dialogue should be possible between this orientation and my own, focused more upon subject matter in terms of personal relevance and growth, and upon learning in freedom and responsibility – but the atmosphere seemed immediately charged with hostility. At that time, I knew of no other faculty members here at UCD who were experimenting in the directions I was exploring, or who were warmly responsive to and supportive of such explorations. No one in my own department, tenured or not, came forward to express positive interest, much less support. I felt very much alone, apprehensive, and insecure, and these feelings did little to encourage in me moderation and judiciousness vis-a-vis my colleagues. Nor did I understand as well then as I do now the difficulties others had in accepting or even becoming involved with a radical alternative and a demanding controversy.
In my courses, what was initially a difficult delight was giving way to a nightmare. Attempting to continue and improve upon the winter experience, bringing it to 230 students as opposed to 36, I split up the 230 into 17 groups of about 15 each. Optional group meeting times were set for four nights a week, in addition to regular day meeting times. Even at that, there were nights when three or even four groups would be meeting, and, although I was out every night, every regularly scheduled time, and extra meeting times scheduled as we went along, I could be with only some of the groups for all their meetings, and was with some groups for very few of their meetings. Students from the winter quarter distributed themselves in the 17 groups and attempted to help out, and we set up a “feedback session” once a week for people from all groups to come together to share problems and work out ways of coping with them – but the nightmare, for me at least, grew worse.
I found it increasingly difficult to be a non-authoritarian helper in groups with which I met rarely and of which I was not really a part. Without readily available suggestions, guidance, and leadership, many of the groups quickly experienced disillusionment and chaos. In some cases subject matter was all but lost to sight, leaving frustration and guilt in many students. The size, newness, and diffuseness of the problems often left me with a sense of being emotionally overwhelmed.
“At Summerhill”, I wrote to another experimenting professor referring to one successful non-authoritarian school, “one has years, literally, to work out repressions, resentments, and hang-ups .... (and this is) often necessary before any sort of self-regulation of a productive kind is undertaken. How much, how infinitely much more difficult it is in a short, partial experience for people who have been interested in 18-20 years of authoritarian background to bring about meaningful change.”
“The courses I am giving now involve lots of verbal aggressiveness, panicked flights back to the conventional, goofing off and laughing at the scene, tortured attempts to negotiate between 'we ought to be' learning the material” and freedom, etc, etc, etc. Going through it is perhaps roughest on me. In any case, the results often, perhaps even in a majority of cases, are not encouraging in any immediately clear way. Any observer coming in on the scene at any given point is likely to be, to say the least, discouraged. There is even the thought that perhaps more harm is being done than good by virtue of making a laughing stock out of an experience that is put forward as a vital experiment which then falls through, with all the biases and reinforcements that follow.
“Much cause for pause here. Yet, despite all this – and it is, believe me, weighing heavily on me – I remain convinced that there is something here vital enough for enough students so that it makes great sense to continue in this way ...”
Through it all students continued to come to group meetings and feedback sessions, and, in at least some cases, began to cope with the problems and to learn in the process of doing so. In the two groups with which I met at every meeting, we did focus more than the winter groups had upon the subject areas, Modern Political Thought and The American Political Experience. People I had not come to know at all approached me at the end of the quarter to tell me that they had done more reading and gotten more out of this course than in any other simply because nothing had been required and they had been free to learn because they wanted to. One student described reading for this course as the “dessert” he looked forward to after lots of unwanted forced feeding. Somehow, out of the chaos, a substantial number of students came to feel they were having a worthwhile experience. Now I can look back and recognize that the proportion of students who learned and grew with the experience, even directly in terms of the subject matter, was certainly no less than the low proportion realized in most courses in my own experience as student and teacher. But at the time my attention was focused on the large number for whom it was “a bad trip,” and that hurt.
Meanwhile, Dr. Zetterbaum and I – from very different positions, since he certainly did not share my orientations – sought to encourage dialogue in the department. Neither of us met with much success there, but we continued to talk with increasing understanding between ourselves. Probably, he had said, my contract would be terminated when I came up for my next regular review, in fall 1967, just half a year away. I had turned down the offer of a position at the University of Saskatchewan knowing this. Now, in mid-April, Dr. Zetterbaum told me that the tenured members of the department were considering making an earlier decision, not waiting for the regular review but taking an extraordinary action, which they may do at any time. Some were concerned that if they waited until the fall I or others might protest against inadequate notice.
I made a strong plea that the final decision not be made until the regular review time in the fall. My experiment, I said, was a changing one, many new things were happening. I was learning a great deal, and I was still hopeful of some dialogue by which a modus vivendi could be reached. Students, I pointed out, were planning to write critiques of the experience, and these should be of concern in judging what I was doing. Above all, I argued that time was necessary, time for change, for dialogue, for review. Finally, I indicated that I would not consider it any injustice were a decision made on my case as late at December 1967, and that I was prepared to put this in writing to forestall any doubts that any tenured colleagues might have. Dr. Zetterbaum took in all I said, indicated that it would not be necessary for me to put this commitment in writing, and said he would transmit these views to the tenured members of the department.
In my classes, students in all 17 groups responded positively to my request that they write a final course project similar to one which had been done by the winter groups. The four questions asked dealt with 1) evaluating educational experience, 2) the subject matter of the course, 3) the student’s choice of grade and a discussion of that choice, 4) a critique of the course. The papers that were turned in, together with those done during the winter quarter, were and are in my office available for reading by any interested persons. They contain movingly honest accounts of the frustration, chaos, learning, and joy of the experiences we shared last year. They communicate a great deal, too, about student alienation from the dominant patterns of higher education. Excerpts from many of my students’ papers will appear in the Experimental College journal soon to be published. Students and others outside my department have looked at these papers, but to this date no one in my department has expressed to me any interest in glancing through them.
Somehow, in all the pressured turmoil, I managed to find a little time to meet others interested in educational innovation. Slowly I began to realize that much of what I was doing was being done by colleagues in a number of other departments, that getting out of the classroom, having night hours, learning in small groups, exploring subject matter in terms of personal relevance, abandoning authoritarianism in favor of self-direction and assistance, and even in giving blanket or self-chosen grades – that all this was being done elsewhere and did not seem so outrageously shocking to at least some other faculty members.
I began to learn too, of the UC Santa Cruz effort to move away from conventional grading, about UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies in which no grades are given, about the Tussman program at Berkeley, about A.S. Neill’s Summerhill and other non-authoritarian elementary and high schools, about Goddard College’s thirty years of success without grades, and about other such experiments in freedom and responsibility at Antioch, New College, a new campus of the State University of New York, Rutgers University, and the University of the Pacific’s Raymond College in Stockton.
Reflecting on developments here at Davis – the Experimental College, faculty 48’s, the freshman seminar program, liaison committees, educational reform emerging as a primary concern in student life, the Chancellor’s special committee on educational innovation, graduate students beginning to ask for a role in departmental decision making, etc. – I could see UCD beginning, even if very slowly, to explore this new, burgeoning world of educational development. From all this, I took much strength and was encouraged.
I began by taking out a list which I had been carrying around for some time, a list of changes which I wanted to make in my future experimentation in education. As I began going into what I felt I had been learning, Dr. Zetterbaum said that he had something to talk about with me first. The tenured members of the department, he told me, had voted unanimously to recommend that my appointment be terminated, effective June 1968. The decision had been made about a month before, in early May, but he had not felt free to tell me of it while it was going through regular faculty and administrative review. My first reactions were shock and upset.
What upset me most, and still does, was the failure of the department to wait until the regular review time coming in the fall. Despite the fact that I had indicated preference for the regular review time, and had given them assurances that I would take no offense at a six months notice in place of a one-year notice, the tenured members had waited only one month from their first consideration of the matter and demands upon me to vote to recommend termination. They had not even waited for the end of the quarter, to see how, if at all, the experiment had developed, or to read the students’ papers. During the one month they had waited, few of them had entered into any depth of dialogue with students on the matter. Not one, so far as I can tell, made any effort to explore the literature increasingly available on new approached to education. By and large, they were not attempting to familiarize themselves with new developments in educational philosophy, research, and actual innovation throughout the country, on other campuses of this University, or even in some other departments here at Davis. I had never been given the opportunity to appear before the Budget Committee nor had any but two tenured members of the department ever inquired into what I was doing, why I was doing it, what was happening, and how I and my venture were changing.
The tenured members of the department had acted with no malice or political or other prejudice, so far as I could tell. Nor had they violated rules of procedure or taken their action for light or arbitrary cause. On the contrary, they had given the matter many, many hours or earnest deliberation, many of them, at least, striving to make a fair judgment. What was involved were the honest, deep differences regarding education which I have outlined above. A small but growing number of other UCD faculty members were concerned with educational innovation, and were striving toward opening up alternatives and bringing about change. The tenured members of the political science department, however, even more than many faculty members around them, seemed largely removed from contact with or vital interest in the world of educational innovation, and were deeply immersed in more traditional values and approaches. Ultimately, it was this honest, deep, and sad gulf between worlds that was responsible for my having been fired.
On June 9th I received official notice that my appointment was being terminated – a letter from the Chancellor giving only one reason: “Your published research is not of the amount normally deemed the standard for membership on the University faculty.” There was, for me, much irony in that sentence. If taken seriously, it is simply untrue that publication was the only or even main grounds for termination of my contract. If, on the other hand, the brief letter simply involved a standard working used to give official notice of termination, it is striking that the only reason given in standard notices should be publication. And even at that, the reference is to “the amount” of publication. Routine workings do not develop fortuitously, but reflect deeper realities – in this case, realities that are sad to contemplate.
One other possibility has been suggested to me: publication is given as the only reason so as to protect the long-range interests of the discharged faculty member, who can later go to another university pointing to an improved publications record, even though the real and more damaging reason for his discharge was his failings as a teacher. Perhaps the Chancellor’s office, then, places an erasable mark on someone’s record rather than hurt him more deeply with one indelibly black. If so, one effect is to sweep under the rug and therefore help perpetuate, even if for reasons of good will, bad teaching.
Second, later in the summer, I visited The Esalen Institute for several weeks of sensitivity training, which I had heard about and experienced less deeply during the previous eight months, and which earlier in the summer, I had begun to think about in connection with education. Sensitivity training – developed over the past 20 years first at the National Training Laboratories of Washington, D.C. and Bethel, Maine, and later at many other centers around the nation – basically involves ways of helping us more honestly to get at, confront, express, and deal with things that are difficult for us. After my visit to Esalen Institute, I saw more clearly than ever the possible usefulness of sensitivity training in education. If students and teachers alike could be more free to indicate honestly their boredoms, their enthusiasms, their irritations, their concerns, how much more real and vital learning processes could be. And how much more readily we could go beyond authoritarian roles and game playing to more genuinely helping one another.
At the first meetings of the fall quarter, I told my classes about my educational orientations and the processes that seem to be suited to such orientations, then suggested that some sensitivity training experience might help us to get to know one another more honestly and personally more quickly so that competitiveness and role-playing for them and for me might be reduced. The experience was not required, but nearly everyone participated. It is impossible for me to say exactly what have been the effects of the experience, partly because there are many other factors involved: for example, development of my own experience and ability to help with small group learning, the fact that several students had participated in groups with me last year, and my being with all groups at all their meeting times. What I do know clearly is this: where last quarter in 17 groups it took an average of, say, six or seven weeks before people got over conventional classroom anxieties and fully relaxed, all 7 groups this quarter came to comparable point within about two weeks. And the feedback I have gotten, both directly and indirectly from the students themselves, indicates that the sensitivity training experience was of great help in moving from more traditional training to more personal, honest, non-competitive, self-directed learning.
A number of other changes were made. Looking back to the spring quarter experience, I limited enrollment in fall courses so that, by going to meetings four evenings, four mornings, and three afternoons each week, I could be with all seven groups at all their meetings. Groups this time are limited to 15 each, moving about has been discouraged and in fact has never come up, and auditing has been discouraged to eliminate what had become during the summer a serious disruption of people coming and going. Further, I now have a clearer sense of my own role and less ambiguity with regard to it. I do not have to abandon all leadership to get away from authoritarianism; it is possible to offer non-authoritarian assistance, suggestions, and guidance, to provide knowledge and experience without imposing these by virtue of having sanctioned authority. Teaching becomes a matter of offering, helping, suggesting, and inspiring rather than demanding, requiring, punishing, and stipulating.
To different degrees, and in very different ways, each of the seven groups I am working with this quarter has focused upon the subject matter in relation to our own lives. In many cases not as much material is covered as in more conventional courses – but the feeling I have is that more people are doing more learning in these groups than happened when I was teaching by more conventional means. And one of the things that excites me most is that our learning focuses both on subject matter and on personal growth. For me the two are inextricably interwined.
There remain problems. Neither the students nor I are used to this new approach to education, and the contrast with what goes on predominantly in our lives is so stark as to produce constant strain. I know from these past eleven months of experience that I am a novice. In a way, we are still struggling with the rudiments of freedom and responsibility, and there is much much more to be learned so that we can help one another and ourselves more adequately. Still, the experience so far has been encouraging, and it is good to be building, making mistakes, and growing.
It is worth reiterating, I feel, that the present controversy is not one between bad guys and good guys, and that my firing was not a matter of personalities and ill-will. Mistakes have been made by all parties, and none of us has been entirely without apprehension and defensiveness. The issues revolve, rather, about honest, deep differences of orientation toward the most basic issues in education, and it is these issues which need badly to be explored by people of all persuasions.
I do not feel that all more traditional education is without value and must be junked. Widely different people benefit from widely different approaches, and I am not prepared to say that the right way is at hand, or that there is any one right way. Rather, I would like to see a greater variety of educational alternatives here at Davis. I do see considerable movement in this direction now, and would like to see more. This involves, implicitly, an expansion of tolerance, of openness to differences, even great differences. Hopefully, both those more traditional and those less so will attempt increasingly to understand sympathetically and make room for, if not cooperate with, one another. We have, all of us, a great deal to learn from and with each other.
I am pleased to see increasing number of both students and faculty questioning and exploring, and want to help where I can. I want to be as available as possible to help with and benefit from the increasing dialogue. It seems to me that students properly should know about, and indeed have a voice in, decision-making which vitally affects their lives. I am, then, much pleased to see increasing student participation in departmental decision-making and increasing direct communication between the student body and the Academic Senate.
Finally, I would like to stay at Davis. There are many places closer to the frontier of today’s educational explorations, places which have a warmer welcome for what I am doing, places some of which will be extending offers to me for next year – but these are extraordinary places, run and staffed by and designed for people who already are at the frontier and away from the mainstream. In an important sense, UCD is “where it’s happening,” where a wide variety of people, students and staff, not selected or self-selected for extraordinary educational innovativeness but more representative of United States education generally, are beginning to question, to explore, and to change. Davis for me is a wonderful place, a microcosm of a much larger revolution that is sweeping over society, a campus and a town of people struggling earnestly with difficult challenges. I have come to care deeply for the people and potentials and to feel a meaningfulness in my own activity. In my three and a half years here I have seen a great change, and I expect that there is much more to come.