Education: Black Mountain’s Tenth

Progressive education’s most famous outpost, little Black Mountain College (TIME, June 19, 1939) in North Carolina’s Craggy Mountains, is now ten years old. Of its founders there remained on the spot last week only a dog, a housekeeper, a librarian and three professors. But they, their associates and 57 students (now mostly girls) buzzing about the sleek, modernistic study hall and the small outlying dormitories were continuing to make Black Mountain one of the most unorthodox and interesting of U.S. educational institutions.

Black Mountain cannot give degrees because its bank account is not big enough to meet State requirements (it has no endowment); neither is its library (only 10,000 books). But the college, believing that no sheepskin can civilize a cultural wolf, is unconcerned about a degree’s cash or glamour value. Black Mountain aims to give an education in the art of living. Its double emphasis is on the student’s individuality and on the fact that he is inevitably a member of a social group. Thus, he may study whatever courses he pleases, but he must also make practical contributions to the life of the college community. Tuition, board and lodging are $1,200 a year, but half the students are on partial scholarships. Graduation is based on an examination in the candidate’s major field, given by a visiting specialist.* Black Mountain’s 230 alumni have made a good showing in graduate study at major universities, in work at teaching, music, journalism. More than one in 20 are officers in the U.S. armed forces.f

Social Life. Black Mountain’s faculty of 20 includes a batch of noted European refugees, such as Artist Josef Albers of the Bauhaus (TIME, Dec. 19, 1938), and New Dealish Americans such as Econo mist Clark Foreman.

In social studies Black Mountain, instead of expecting students to decant social knowledge from the cobwebbed classics, encourages them to moonshine their own product from the process of living together in a closely knit community. Students help the faculty’s Board of Fellows run the college.

Voluntary student-faculty agreements replace rules of curriculum and conduct. Typical agreement: boys and girls stay out of one another’s bedrooms except to visit the sick. Another: on entering the Senior Division, each student contracts with the faculty to do a certain scholastic job (reading, laboratory, thesis) chosen by him with faculty advice.

Everybody gets physical exercise by helping to run a 146-acre college farm. Recently the college opened on the campus a little mica mine from which the students are producing for the U.S. Government. The students and faculty built Black Mountain’s only notable building, the local stone-and-transite study hall in which each Mountaineer has a private study cubicle. Bedrooms hold three or four students each. Food is simple and self-served. Except on Saturday nights, everybody wears work clothes.

Mr. Wunsch. Drafted for the sixth successive year as Black Mountain’s Rector (chief but not full-time executive) is softspoken, stocky William Robert (“Bob”) Wunsch. A top-flight drama teacher and coach, he is one of the mountaineers whom John Andrew Rice (TIME, Nov. 23, 1942), led in revolt from standard education a la Rollins College, Florida.

Some day, Wunsch hopes, Black Mountain will have 125 students. He has reason to think the college may be able to afford that many. Grey-haired Facultyman Fritz Hansgirg has applied for a patent for his new method of getting magnesium out of North Carolina’s olivine-rich mountains. He has assigned to Black Mountain one fifth of his patent rights. Last week Hansgirg, who helped Henry J. Kaiser set up his carbo-thermic magnesium process, was all smiles, setting up a baby pilot plant in his baby laboratory.

*Among occasional examiners: Princeton’s Robert Ros’well Palmer, Harvard’s Marcel Breuer, Yale’s Charles Frederick Tucker Brooke. t One of two who died in the war was Lieut. Derek Bovingdon, son of the dancing economic analyst (TIME, Aug. 9) recently Dies-bombed out of a Federal job.