Black Mountain College

Note: this institution is no longer in operation but still serves as an example for the NUC to learn from

Black Mountain College was an experiment in education in the foot hills of North Carolina from 1933 to 1956 that shifted back and forth from liberal arts to fine arts. It had between 20 and 90 students and tackled issues such as race, accessibility, homosexuality, feminism, sex, modern art, etc. For much of its life, the faculty and students jointly ran the college. Its story is a fascinating one.

Excerpts from Duberman, Martin (1973). An Exploration in Community: Black Mountain. Pp. 27, Anchor Books, Doubleday. NY

The justification for a university is that it preserves
the connection between knowledge and the zest of
life, by uniting the young and the old in the
imaginative consideration of learning.
Alfred North Whitehead The Aims of Education, l929

All aspects of community life were thought to have a bearing on an individual’s education- that is, hissic growth, hissic becoming aware of who hesic was and wanted to be. The usual distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it, were broken down. Helping to fight a forest fire side by side with faculty members, participating in a community discussion on whether the dining hall should serve two or three meals on Sundays, discovering that a staff member was homosexual or that married life included arguments as well as (and sometimes during) intercourse, taking part in an improvisational evening of acting out grudges against other community members- all these and a hundred more experiences, most of them the more vivid for being unplanned, contributed at least as much to individual awareness as traditional academic exercises.

This didn’t mean that disparities of age, interest, knowledge and experience between, say, a twenty-year-old and a fifty-year-old weren’t recognized, or that it was thought either possible or desirable to merge all members of the community into some false concord of “buddyhood.” But it did mean that many at Black Mountain believed that differences in age need not preclude communication, that interests could be share, that the perspective of the young also had value. It meant, too, that while information, analytical skills and reason were prized, they were considered aspects, rather than equivalents of personal development; they were not confused, in other words, as they are in most educational institutions- with the whole of life, the only elements of self worthy of development and praise.

It was hoped that a double sense of responsibility would emerge out of the varied contacts and opportunities Black Mountain provided; that which an individual owes to the group of which hesic is a member, and that which he owes to himself sic – with neither submerging the other.

Communities, both past and present are usually adjudged “successful” according to the length of time they last and the elaborateness of the physical plants that they build. Social scientists, as we know, are more given to measurements than evaluations, and the time/edifice measurements are among their favorites. But durability, size, and endowment are coarse, and perhaps wholly irrelevant gauges of an institution’s actual importance for the individuals who come within its orbit. Anarchist communes, often serving only a few months, and during those months often living at the edge of survival, can have a greater impact on the lives of their transient members than, say, an Ivy League college on the undergraduates who reside in it for four uninterrupted years. Impoverishment, of course, hardly guarantees significance; one can emerge as untouched by six weeks in a fly-by-night crash pad in Taos as by a lifetime at Yale.

So much of the wonder of the original community came out of its architecture, which was a matter of pure luck almost… it had a different spiritual character, a different cohesiveness, to use McLuhan’s term, ‘the medium is the message’- the medium of the environment. “Once we were at the new college, although there was still a great deal of intimacy, the faculty were much more separated somehow from the students then before, the fact that living quarters were in entirely different buildings… in Lee Hall they were around the corner, in the same hall, just a different wing.

Lake Eden, moreover, was in the valley, whereas Lee Hall had been above it. As Will Hamlin, a student at the college during both eras, wrote me, “Psychologically, this made a very big difference to some of us. One came up out of the world as it were to Lee Hall; it was an act of decision to go back down into it. The hillside isolation forced people to look at each other, as did the physical unity. Existentially you were faced with yourself and your companions to make a life. In the valley, on the other hand, it was easier to get away; you didn’t have the sense of being apart from others so much; you weren’t so much-therefore- faced with I-thou questions; aloneness was less a fact and certainly less an evident or symbolized fact.

Share