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Mystical Transition. It was certainly a different way to start a college. When the students and teachers arrived, Chancellor McCoy got them together in the camp's main meeting room, told them where they would sleep and eat, and urged them not to make too much litter. Then he walked out. They had no organization. They had no curriculum. Completely the opposite of the typical college experience in which you are presented, on arriving, with a series of established slots, and told to decide which one you will wedge yourself into for the next four years. Here the only thing on the agenda for ten days was a lot of encounter sessions.
They spent the night sitting on the floor, from right after supper until 2 a.m., hashing out how they would arrive at decisions about the curriculum. There were contingents that wanted a majority vote and some that wanted to elect a permanent leader and a representative body, but finally these ideas were thrown aside and the group decided to reach decisions only by consensus—that is, no decision would be made until it actually pleased everybody.
These kids were so excited about the prospect of working out their own destiny as a group, instead of having it all done for them as it had been by their parents and high school teachers, that they couldn't even go to sleep. "That meeting was like a mystical transition," says
Physics Professor Paul Cornell. "There were no longer any adversaries, no longer any need for ego because we were all together."
As Coed Revalee Maase puts it: "When I was in high school, I smoked a lot of grass. Everybody did. But up here I've lost the need—I'm on the best high I've ever had, just working with these kids. It's so intensive, we've been getting to know each other so well that we lose all sense of time."
The source of all this friendliness was the encounter sessions. Everybody attended three a day. They sat in a circle for hours scrutinizing each other. They asked mean, menacing questions like, "Why are you being such a phony, Janet?" They aired sentiments like, "Ann, I love you no matter how s—y you are." They cried and constantly embraced one another for saying something that was especially hard to say. The faculty members had to participate in the same way—be completely frank about how they saw themselves in life, about their personal backgrounds, divorces and problems with their wives.
The group sessions were a good way to start. But you have to be young to take it. George Armacost, 65, the about-to-retire president of the sponsoring University of Redlands, came out to the camp one evening and started talking like a normal college administrator until one of the kids cut him off: "C'mon, George, get with it." It was the first time a Redlands student had ever called him George. He was still up at 4 a.m., banging away on his portable typewriter, setting down his reaction to the experience. He didn't quite understand his new college, but it was making him think. Whether his new students will think as deeply as they feel remains to be seen. It should be quite a year.