The lure of the question, how does the thing work, is one that never loses its charm.
Emma Perry Carr
It is possible for an academic 'course' in a college department to be an institution in itself. The course, like an individual, can acquire a reputation, attract a following, and become a Celebrity. It can do this in an amazingly short time. Students have an uncanny faculty of passing the good word along. They report the matter as explorers report a discovery. The fame of the course can stand out distinctly even above that of the others offered by the same professor; but no course was ever known to attain such distinction without an able Somebody at the wheel.
These Celebrated Courses, strangely enough, are almost never of the species that in men's colleges may be called 'a pipe' and in women's colleges may be called 'a snap.' Knowing what we do of human nature, we must marvel at the fact. An easy course often wins an affectionate and faintly derisory fame as a handy bit of syllabub with which to top off a heavy schedule. But no 'snap course' ever wins a large and permanent following for its pipe-and-snap qualities alone. As a Mount Holyoke official pensively remarked one day, 'the students would rather do some work than be bored.' No matter how labor-saving a course may be, it will not stand high in the halls of Rumor if anyone is able to say, unchallenged, 'You don't get anything out of it.'
One may admonish students that is is their business to put something into the course, then, and thus get something out of it. But their answer to that is the reasonable argument that they could just as well look up the subject in the library without wasting an elective. Students may be capricious as individuals, but their composite judgment is usually fairly sound. In the long run, their magna cum laude is awarded to the finest offerings in the college curriculum. Most of the undergraduates build their programs so as to take in at least several of the courses that are justly celebrated for being superbly taught.
There used to be a school of opinion that discouraged this. You should, it was held, elect your courses according to the abstract subjects regardless of how they were administered. To keep students from 'electing the professors,' sections were shuffled and the dramatis personae changed. You thought that by diligent detective work you had at last wangled for yourself the lifetime privilege of such-and-such a subject under So-and-So - and you woke from this pleasing illusion to find yourself doing work under that printed caption, to be sure, but under So-and-So's worthy colleague, who had been run in without warning.
You felt as a fisherman would feel if he had stood in line for two or three years for the privilege of a fishing trip under the tutelage of Izaak Walton in person, and found himself off on a well-conducted trip, indeed, but with the Compleat Angler left behind.
Nowadays, at least in the advanced subjects, things are ordered better. Especially if you are 'working for honors' you may choose your guides. Any upper-classman with a fair degree of perspicacity can create a work of art for himself when he composes his annual schedule. Every year the latitude of choice may vary. At some times the fields of concentration and their related subjects are hedged about more straitly than at other times. But always there will be a free margin of electives (at least one hopes so) in which a student may find individualities and subjects so foreign to his natural field that they will open to him a new aspect of nature, a new aspect of mankind, or a new aspect of great art.
The basis on which he ought to choose at least one of these free electives is the basis that I shall call intellectual apostolic succession. (Publishers and editors will not be held responsible for the following. It is, to quote Miss Mary Lyon, 'my private, though decided opinion.') Let the student put all his powers of divination on the question of finding among the members of the Faculty one or two or three who stand for some technique or intellectual purpose that he, individually, can greet with high response. Then let him, by hook or if necessary by crook, fit into his program the most celebrated course open to him under that leadership.
And how can he be sure ahead of time? Sometimes by accident, sometimes by very trifling clues. For instance, the basis on which a group of us, once upon a time, chose our 'Major' was partly an impersonal interest in the subject, and partly our good fortune in studying our first year under an instructor who made a Celebrated Course out of her work with freshmen. There was no doubt in the minds of any of us that the department in which Miss --- could do the sort of work she did was the department henceforth to be frequented by us. (She is still making that subject live for students today, and she would not like to have me give her name.)
But one elective that three of us chose outside our major subject we discovered through a quite irrelevant episode. I have mentioned Miss Carrie Harper and her celebrated course in Shakespeare that she gave as long as she lived. That course was known as a terror for the lazy, but we had seen one of Miss Harper's comments on the term paper on our leading literary light, who was in a class ahead of ours,. The comment was this: 'Words to you are fairy gold. Distrust them. In the morning they will prove to be but rubbish.'
Our literary light had been bluffing in that paper, and knew it. She flew about campus showing that comment to congenial minds. We all memorized it. Correctly read aloud it has a swing. A trio of us instantly decided to 'take' Miss Harper, if only to see what she would see on our papers. She said plenty. Our tip was a sound one. Professionally speaking Miss Harper was an educator; personally speaking she gave us a run for our money. Not one of us ever forgot how to copy her intonation when, entering class majestically, she would look out over our heads and announce as if chanting a summons to Urn Burial, 'I shall call the roll.'
There is never any danger that elections will all head one way. There is the personal equation with all its thousand factors to reckon with. For example, again: the very thought of that course in Shakespeare paralyzed another student in our group. She elected instead some work under an equally careful scholar in another field, one of the gentlest of professors, the same who once made the captivating remark about a quiz. At that time the slang term for an unexpected examination was new. This professor had heard the girls talking about 'dropped' or 'sprung' quizzes without exactly grasping the full meaning of the terms. One morning she had announced to her class that there would be a quiz next time, and the class had signed. 'Oh,' said the professor reassuringly, 'it won't be a very hard quiz. It won't be a very long quiz! It will be a sprung quiz!'
A campus should have all kinds - and almost any campus has. I wonder if those who are close to it - those who are actually in the work today - are quite aware themselves what a wealth of opportunity for the individual student has been opened within the curriculum during the past few years. Any one of us could go back and enter as a freshman and pick up all over the place things that we should love to study now. The subjects are growing so fast that any too specific statement made today will be 'yesterday's flowers' tomorrow. That is one reason why, although I am vastly tempted to particularize, I am avoiding the very material I have busily gathered when visiting classes and lectures and laboratories and talking with students and instructors. If I describe one recent laboratory hour with one of the students muttering eagerly to her experiment, 'Oh, come on - react, react, react!' I shall have to describe twenty other laboratory views equally engaging.
If I give a picture of one afternoon in a studio, where students who had taken the courses in the History of Painting and Sculpture were now studying the principles involved by doing some modeling themselves - making their own armatures - taking into consideration what they had worked upon in the study of anatomy - led by a professor who was not simply a critic but a kind of 'working foreman' modeling a figure too - I shall have to take time out to go down to the Music Building and describe a song recital by one who was 'electing' music and 'concentrating' in the Department of French Language and Literature. She had collected a lovely series of French songs, and was singing them not only to those interested in music, but to those who were studying French. And if I take an excursion into one class - for instance, one assembled on a hot wilting day, so hot that it seemed impossible for anybody's eyes to stay open, until in bounced the professor, whacked down her books with a thump and declared, 'John Smith was a most interesting man!' - whereupon the whole sleepy world woke with a start - I shall have to take a trip all around the curriculum, extensive and changing as it is, through the past ten years and the next ten years to come, in order to give a fair picture. It is just as Mr. MacGregor Jenkins says, in his book describing Williams (Sons of Ephraim: The Spirit of Williams College. By MacGregor Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin Company.):
The only way to write a book about a college is to collect your data late in the afternoon, write it at night, and publish it before breakfast the next morning. It might be well to telephone the Williams News Bureau before doing so to learn if anything happened during the night. The trouble with such an undertaking is that the college won't stay still. If the undergraduates are not abolishing, changing, or inventing, the Faculty are. If they are quiet for a few weeks, then the Trustees abolish or change or invent. It is quite hopeless.
No description would do justice to the matter anyway. No printed curriculum or statement prepared by departments can ever suggest the full meaning of any given 'course,' when the right relation is hit upon between learner and thing learned.
Nevertheless, in any Outline of a Campus there should be at least a glimpse of what the departments stand for. Since I am not competent to do that glimpse justice in categorical terms, I should like to present the shadow of a festival procession that was once reflected in Lower Lake. The procession was the work of all the departments and students in the College, and it went walking under the trees in the autumn of our Seventy-Fifth Anniversary. The watchers on the Pageant Field could see it coming down the distant pathway along the edge of the lake, across the bridge, over the brook, and up the avenue to the green. Heralds in Greek wayfaring garb came first, and then 'Seekers after Truth,' each in some particular field of learning - 'personages who in the past more or less remote have been distinguished in this field of knowledge' - or the presentment of the subjects of their research.
First came Biblical History and Literature, represented by Three Magi who had been copied from vase-paintings and coins as to the detail of their costume; and for the Old Testament came the inquisitive Queen of Sheba and her ladies in Oriental scarlet and black and white.
Then arrived the study of Greek under the flag of Hellas: Homer, Helen of Troy, Penelope of Ithaca, Sappho and Pindar and Sophocles, Electra of Mycenae, Antigone of Thebes, and Theocritus.
The Department of Latin was represented by Augustus and Agrippa in Royal Purple, the time 17 B.C., with boys and girls chanting the Carmen Saeculare amid a crowd of Roman citizens.
Mathematics followed with some of its early masters. There was Ahmes, the Egyptian priest with his handbook of arithmetic and geometry; Pythagoras from the sixth century B.C., Eudoxus the geometer, and Euclid; Theon of Alexandria and his daughter Hypatia, herself a teacher of mathematics. There were Arabian, Persian, Hindoo, and Italian mathematicians. There was Napier of Merchiston with 'Napier's Bones' - ivory rods used to simplify calculations; and there was Briggs from the sixteenth century, Savilian Professor at Oxford, calculator of the common system of logarithms; and there was Gerard, the seventeenth-century Dutch mathematician, famous for trigonometry.
Physics and Astronomy had for their legend the statement of Leonardo da Vinci: 'Without experience there can be no certainty.' Their scene dramatized the way in which Primitive Man came into knowledge of the elements. The Fire-Worshipers, the Chaldean Priests, Aristotle, Archimedes with his lever, Hipparchus with his work on Observational Astronomy, and Ptolemy with his belief that the earth was a center, the sun going round it, played their parts first. Then came Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci: 'Had his writings been published, they would have advanced the march of Science by a whole century'; and Copernicus: 'What if the Sun be center of the World?' Galileo, responsible for modern dynamics, 'first revealer of the secrets of the sky,' was followed by Newton with his apple and prism. And after him came Benjamin Franklin, 'representative of an increasing body of observers, finding new wonders to relate to the old.' Then came gifts to humanity made possible by Physics and Astronomy: the 'Aeroplane' (so spelled in the program), the Steam Engine (an elaborate costume), Astronomical Time (with a clock-face and a long pendulum), the Spectroscope, with the colors of the spectrum following it in chiffon, the Telescope, 'searcher of the depths of Space,' and the Cathode Ray Tube. The Telegraph was one of the prettiest dancers of all, with a telegraph pole over her shoulder. At the end of the scene a careful model of the 'Aeroplane' was sent flying over the brook.
The Department of Chemistry began their scene with 'Ancient Theories of Matter,' personified in a tableau of the Old Alchemist searching for the Philosopher's Stone with book and retort. There followed a series of 'Living Pictures': Robert Boyle from the seventeenth century, Lavoisier from the eighteenth, Priestly and Sir Humphry Davy; followed by a Sodium, Potassium, and Chlorine Dance. The Atomic Theory and Dalton's work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came next, with a group of dancers personifying the elements - at first mingling in confused and unrelated groups, but falling suddenly into harmony in order of their atomic weights at the bidding of Mendelejeff in the nineteenth century with his discovery of the Periodic Law. Then came 'Modern Alchemy' - Radium - in a robe of silver rays, and Helium in pale gray. The transformation of Radium into Helium was one of th loveliest moments in the pageant.
The Departments of Geology, Botany, and Zoology put in their appearance with geologic hammer, oak leaves, acorns, butterfly net - and costumes with designs of flowers and animals. Flora presided over a miniature drama of evolution enacted by dancers dressed in costumes with designs to represent the orders of development of plant life. Among the dancers were two Algae, two Fungi, two Ferns, two Pines, and then at last two Orchids in shimmering green and purple and lavender robes to represent Cattleya. Mendel, the Austrian monk, came next into view, walking in his monastic robes meditatively over the bridge, and this scene closed with a zoological procession of Fruit Flies - amazing dancers with long brittle wings, strangely colored eyes, their dance against the autumnal back-drop of Prospect Hill a thing of fantastic lightness.
The Department of English presented the 'joy of all knowledge in the expression of knowledge.' They had copied the groups in an old engraving of 'Rhetoric Enthroned' - and there were actors and actresses representing the Essay, Romance, Epic Poetry, Tragedy, Comedy, Pastoral Poetry, Lyric Poetry, History. Their symbol was a quill, and their legend a saying from Buffon: 'To write well - it is at once to think deeply, to feel vividly, and to express clearly.'
English Literature commenced its pageant with an impersonation of Deor, the Anglo-Saxon Scop. Then came King Arthur and 'his curtayse company,' Robin Hood and his Merry Men, the Canterbury Pilgrims - the Miller, Chaucer himself, the Franklin, the Wif of Bath, and the Yeoman; Spenser's Faerie Queene, characters from the Plays of Shakespeare, and a scene from Comus with all the fabulous animals dancing around the Lady.
Art and Archaeology posed a series of portraits, beginning with Queen Hatshepsut of 1500 B.C., and coming on up through the History of Art with 'Empress Theodora and Lady' from a mosaic in San Vitale Ravenna, a Van Eyck Flemish portrait of Jan and Wife, a Memling portrait of Lady Donne and her Daughter, Holbein's Christina of Denmark, and Leonardo's Beatrice d'Este. Raphael's Portrait of Himself, and Velasquez's Don Balthazar Carlos in Hunting Costume, posed by one of the 'Faculty Children,' were among a series of better-known portraits in a long 'gallery of Masters' up to modern times with the 'Daughters of Sorolla in Valencian Costume.'
The Department of Education brought on a scene: the School at the Court of Gonzago in Mantua, taught by Vittorino da Feltre from 1423 to 1446, 'a landmark of critical importance in the history of classical education . . . the great typical school of the Humanities.' The scene was ushered on by a Color-Bearer and Pages in the dress of princely Italians of the early Renaissance. The pupils were sons and daughters of the noblest Italian families, and there was one little poor boy taught by Vittorino.
The Department of History presented two contrasting types of historian; the story-teller, typified by Herodotus, and the scientific historian, represented by Stubbs. Under their leadership came a scene showing Rome and the Barbarians - Cleopatra and Justinian, Alaric the Visigoth and Brunhilde the Frankish Queen. Then the clash of Church and State - Saint Benedict and the Pope. Then came Thomas a Becket and Cardinal Wolsey, Charles the Great, Frederick Barbarossa, Edward I of England, and Henry of Navarre. England and her Colonies were represented by Queen Elizabeth and Charles I, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Winthrop, and William Penn. Old and New France brought in the figures of Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, and Napolean.
The Department of German with the legend, 'Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst,' presented a scene from Willaim Tell.
The Department of Music had furnished the music throughout the pageant, but for their special scene they brought on a group of English Peasant Maidens for folk-dancing and a band of minstrels with snatches of old glees.
Philosophy and Psychology, with their owl, sacred to Athena, were introduced by Socrates and a band of Athenian youth. Saint Thomas Aquinas, 'the Angelic Doctor,' followed this group, together with other Scholastic Philosophers of the Dominican Order. Then came Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy, and Spinoza and Kant.
Economics and Sociology presented the Evolution of Industrial Society shown in the five Economic Stages: first the stage of Hunting and Fishing: 'The bird is brought to earth by the stone of the cunning man, but the belly of the weak is long empty.' Second came the Pastoral Stage: shepherds playing on their pipes and watching their flock of real sheep.
This flock of sheep, by the way, had been not only an economic but a diplomatic problem. At the dress rehearsal they had escaped from their shepherds and made for the hills, jumping the benches of the Pageant Field in their fright and scramling up teh slope like wild conies, toward Mary Lyon's tomb. After them flew the Department of Economics and Sociology and the campus caretakers - Professor Amy Hewes and Mr. Fox and Bobby Line and Mr. Burnham well to the fore.The great thing was to catch the sheep before the dogs of the town got wind of the insurrection. The sheep were captured, but not without jumpy after-effects. Just how was that flock of sheep to be brought on before the assembled crowds if they acted this way before a mere handful? The problem was cunningly solved. Until the time for their act they were kept hidden in an enclosure by the brook. A generous trail of salt was sown thickly into the grass along their proposed line of march. They were not allowed to eat luncheon just before the event. When they were released, all music stopped and the college held its breath. So did the audience on the hill, when peacefully as in some picture of high pastures, the flock of hungry sheep, noses to the grass, drifted slowly and as a unit along that delicious trail of salt. No member of the audience knew that the salt was there. But the sheep knew. In that manner, with due appreciation of the best traditions of Sociology, Economics, Political Science, and Popular Government, the Pastoral Day was saved. An agriculture scene with harvesters followed the shepherd tableau, and then the Handicraft Scene - guilds in their craft costumes, hand-workers, metal workers, shoe-makers, spinners. Finally came Machine Production: 'And at last shall not man gain freedom from the machine that hat enslaved him?' Steam and Electricity danced that scene to a close.
In striking contrast, out from among the trees came the Department of Romance Languages heralded by Jeanne d'Arc accompanied by pages. Dante and Beatrice represented Italian Literature. Don Quixote and Sancho Pana personified Spanish Literature, and Moliere conducted rehearsals of scenes from three of his plays in the presence of Louis XIV.
Following closely upon all these 'Seekers after Truth,' a long line of Mount Holyoke graduates representing each year since the founding wended its way up the hill. The parts were taken by young alumnae, each young enough to look like a student in the senior class, dressed in costumes from 1837 on. And if anybody thinks that costume for women can be left undescribed in an authentic presentation of an era, that person ought to have been on the Pageant Field that day. A pretty girl in a 'bunnit and shawl' is the same person that she is with a plume and a bustle, but she certainly presents a different spiritual effect to the casual eye.
The pageant was over when the Mount Holyoke alumnae of every era had followed the procession down the field and across the bridge again - retreating into the distance along the far bank of the lake.
And so they have gone on, Our College Departments, in their great Festival Procession - 'Seekers after Truth' with their various subject-matter, their fascinating paraphernalia, their watchwords, their loyalties, their great masters, their investigation of strange phenomena and this world's most cherished lore. The journeys of the mind are too wide and too individually traveled to be presented on a pageant field, or in the pages of a book.But they are not too wide or too high to be loved perennially by young minds that are ready for some portion of the venture. When a gifted scholar in any field succeeds in starting young travelers right royally along some Road of Learning, we get, in college, something that goes far beyond the subject announced in the curriculum. We get that subject plus an array of imponderables - incentives, values, trainings - that will always make the work an Institution within the institution, and the place where it is done into what we have called a Celebrated Course.