Former MC president writes The Essential College

By Professor William Urban

Bruce Haywood, president emeritus of Monmouth College, is remembered for his exceptional speaking and writing skills; these were most evident when speaking about what a college curriculum should be. His ideas, when first voiced in the early 1980s, were so stimulating that they became fundamental both to the graduation requirements that every student is familiar with today and, without this being consciously recognized, for the changes recently adopted by the faculty and trustees. Moreover, his delivery was always superb.

Those skills are much in evidence in his recent book, The Essential College, published appropriately enough in Gambier, Ohio, where most of the action (if that is what the life of the mind can be called) takes place — at Kenyon College shortly after the end of the Second World War.

A small liberal arts college, Kenyon was not unlike Monmouth (and Knox, too) in those early days except that it admitted only male students — a very important distinction — and was publishing the nationally respected Kenyon Review. Kenyon was decidedly small, with wholly insufficient endowments, and with every reason to suspect that the swiftly growing state universities would take both its students and best faculty members.

References to Knox and Monmouth are subtle, recognizable only to those who know both colleges and have followed their evolution through the years, but the challenges, successes and failures at Kenyon are those of most upward-striving liberal arts colleges.

Bruce Haywood, born in Yorkshire to working class parents, never heard of liberal arts colleges growing up, but after his four year tour in the British Army, he had learned two lessons: first, from interviewing Nazi prisoners, that education separated from morality would lead straight to disaster; second, that America offered him an escape from the rigid class system of Britain. His graduate school experience at Harvard, however, was hardly liberating — departmentalism put strict bounds on inquiry and thought.

He hardly knew what to make of the offer of employment from tiny Kenyon College, an institution which was in the shadow of Gordon Chalmers, a visionary who had persuaded the faculty to see the potential for greatness in educating undergraduates. Haywood found at Kenyon the intellectual and social companions he sought — all from departments other than German, and the opportunities to read and think widely. Unfortunately, Chalmers died soon afterward, leaving a void that was not easily filled. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that it was never filled.

Haywood’s stories of presidents who failed to lead is the history of higher education in America writ small. Presidents thought of buildings, of growing enrollments, of endowments, but rarely of education. It is in this context that Bruce Haywood sees the unique role of the small liberal arts college, a role that the large university cannot play. Such colleges, if properly directed by the trustees and administration, can provide not only a better education for undergraduates, but also put that education in the context of moral decisions.

Concern for students means more than knowing their names, and certainly not using the classroom for indoctrination, but as a deliberate communal effort to raise the great questions and encourage students to view them in multiple ways, then make good choices.

Large universities, by their very nature, cannot take a moral position on anything beyond relativism and the need to emphasize graduate studies. Research colleges can only be second-class small universities.

Of the various moments in Kenyon’s recent decades, none is more important than the decision, under Haywood’s leadership, to admit women. He also expanded the programs in the arts and religious studies. Then he began to create new classes for freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors — courses with common materials and goals taught by the entire faculty regardless of departmental affiliation.

It was such a program that he helped the Monmouth College faculty introduce, not only a freshman seminar that was innovative at the time, but also a senior course that brought forward great moral issues; this was a program he was tireless in explaining to a wide variety of audiences. He was not successful in developing the sophomore and junior courses, but those are being implemented now.

Most small colleges have chosen other paths than moving toward a coordinated curriculum that dealt with eternal and relevant issues — as though being small and poor were sufficient virtues for anybody, or small, rich and smug — while the faculties have modeled themselves on the mega-university, with little concern for the life of the college outside the classroom or, in the worst cases, inside it. Meanwhile, the dean of students’ empires have grown astronomically, with new dorms, new wellness centers and activities of every type and stripe. Everything except what is essential.

Haywood’s residential college is a community of scholars and students working together on education. It’s a noble dream. If, like most noble dreams, it is unlikely to be realized in the light of day, when money and crass practicality, great ambitions and petty jealousies roam the campus, it is nevertheless worth dreaming. Or, in this case, worth reading about.

William Urban is the Lee L. Morgan professor of history and international studies. He has been at Monmouth College since 1966.