The Best Kind of College

An Insiders' Guide to America's Small Liberal Arts Colleges

Susan McWilliams, John E. Seery, Susan McWilliams, John E. Seery

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438457734
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Saggi di didattica

The fevered controversy over America's educational future isn't simply academic; those who have proposed sweeping reforms include government officials, politicians, foundation officers, think-tank researchers, journalists, media pundits, and university administrators. Drowned out in that noisy debate are the voices of those who actually teach the liberal arts exclusively to undergraduates in our nation's small liberal arts colleges, or SLACs. The Best Kind of College attempts to rectify that glaring oversight. As an insiders' "guide" to the liberal arts in its truest form the volume brings together thirty award-winning professors from across the country to convey in various ways some of the virtues, the electricity, and, overall, the importance of the small-seminar, face-to-face approach to education, as typically featured in SLACs. Before we in the United States abandon or compromise our commitment to the liberal arts—oddly enough, precisely at a time when our global competitors are discovering, emulating, and founding American-style SLACs and new liberal arts programs—we need a wake-up call, namely to the fact that the nation's SLACs provide a time-tested model of educational integrity and success.

PART ONE

The Classroom

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Shakespeare: A Liberal Art

MARTHA ANDRESEN

Martha Andresen, University of Minnesota, BA, BS, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Yale University, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, MA, PhD, is Professor of English Emerita at Pomona College, hired in 1972, and appointed as the Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English Literature from 1989 until 2006. She is a specialist in Shakespearean scholarship and teaching and the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including seven Wig Distinguished Teaching Awards at Pomona College, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) California Professor of the Year (1992), and the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, an international award sponsored by Baylor University (1992). In May 2006, Pomona College granted her a Lifetime Teaching Award. Outside the academy she has engaged professional, corporate, university, and theater audiences through her publications, lectures, workshops, seminars, public television presentations, and dramaturgy. She has been affiliated with the Ashland, Oregon, Shakespeare Festival and a longtime friend of the Shakespeare Center Los Angeles, an endeavor that fosters innovative performance, education, and broad community outreach. She was elected a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Intellectual Renewal in 2000 and has served as Visiting Director of the Arden Summer Seminars, Theatre and Thought, affiliated with Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, an ongoing opportunity for outreach, intellectual enrichment, and leadership development. At this venue and many others, she has created seminars designed to connect Shakespeare’s art to present-day issues and audiences. Her publications include essays on Shakespeare, creative teaching, and the liberal arts. She is completing a book, To Bring Forth a Wonder: Shakespearean Awakenings, a teaching memoir and analysis of her transformative encounters with the plays. Most recently, the Shakespeare Center Los Angeles named her a recipient of the 2012 Crystal Quill Award, given to “scholars, patrons, and artists whose work and philanthropy advances appreciation of the immediacy of Shakespeare’s plays.”

As long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

—Sonnet 119

Many years ago, I smiled to read a note hastily scribbled on the back of a class evaluation. “Thanks to this class,” my student wrote, “Shakespeare has not been a terminal experience.”

What she meant to say (I hoped) was that Shakespeare had a future in her life, a presence not terminated at the term’s end. Something in our shared experience, and in the learning environment that fostered it, had brought his art alive and might endure. I smiled at her way of saying this, for she implied that Shakespeare had not killed her. That, possibly, like a mortal disease, he could be deadly to anyone exposed to him. I was intrigued by her surprise at his liveliness and her own. How had he come to life for her? How was she enlivened in return?

For many years, as a scholar and teacher in the English Department at Pomona College, a small, private liberal arts institution, I have sought to foster such reciprocal enlivening and to fathom its mystery. Shakespeare leaps from the page, I have learned, when his art becomes something personal, when we inhabit as well as study it, when imagination and identification are wedded to textual scrutiny and contextual scholarship. His plays surely speak as complex artifacts of the Early Modern period, answerable to historical analysis and literary theory. But so too, if we find a way in, are his plays mysteriously animate, catching our lives in the moment and beyond, speaking to what matters to us. They change as we change, ever responsive to our lives now, and to what the years may bring. An intimate encounter in art and education—as in life—transforms everything. Such an encounter, says actor and director Louis Fantasia, happens “where we meet as strangers and hope to be understood.”1 Long ago, in my classroom at Pomona College, I wondered: How can we meet Shakespeare as a stranger—of another time and place—and yet find ways to understand and to be understood?

What follows is a story of an encounter I had with Shakespeare long ago that transformed my understanding and pedagogy. It is also—crucially—a story of how Pomona College fostered such intimacy of knowledge and experience. At home in a small, residential institution steeped in the values and practices of the liberal arts, I found a liberty to experiment and innovate, and my students did too. Our shared creativity was grounded in academic rigor and enriched by breadth of study. We were met with institutional generosity of spirit and support for many years. As a scholar and teacher within this vibrant community of liberal learning, I was free (as the old song goes) to do it my way.

A Story of Origins: Shakespeare on Stage

“You have to love your character,” he said. How strange, I remember thinking at the time. What’s love got to do with it? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Now I wish to reply, nearly a lifetime later, at the close of my career.

He was an actor and a poet, beyond my ken. I was an academic, newly minted and recently hired. He was some older than I, but we were both young Shakespeareans. He dreamed of stardom on stage and had a passion for language and an ear for its music. I sought acclaim as a scholar and teacher, trained well by English Departments in elite institutions who (in those days) taught that Shakespeare was best served by the “theater of the mind.” Theater Departments were separate domains, another country. And the rough and tumble of working theaters was a world apart from what literary scholars like me thought and did. Passion? No—we were cool experts, not heated actors or poets. We competed for a place in the vast field of Shakespeare studies by staking claim to specialized territory or theory, say, Shakespeare as history, philosophy, politics, or rhetoric. We had our own way of thinking about Shakespeare, and our own way of writing and speaking about him, a specialty style. Love was not a word we used.

But here I was among actors, indulging a curiosity and seeking adventure in a foreign land: the Ashland, Oregon, Shakespeare Festival, 1978. A call had come from Professor Homer “Murph” Swander, a Shakespearean in the English Department at UC Santa Barbara. Famed for his mane of white hair and manic energy, Murph was legendary too for his innovative “cross-over” endeavors that fused scholarship, teaching, and theater in the classroom and beyond. A full-time faculty member, he was also director of Actors-in-Residence, an international Shakespeare program enlisting the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and selected American theaters, and Theatre in England, a travel-study program for students of all ages. Ebullient and generous, he was notorious too for his proselytizing and recruiting talents. No doubt he had detected in my timorous, bookish ways a convert to be made. And so he targeted me as a candidate for his new summer program in Ashland, grandly called The Shakespearean Renaissance Academy, cosponsored by UC Santa Barbara and Southern Oregon State College.

As enticement, Murph sent along a brochure entitled: “A Festive Campus: Playgoing and Studying at the Institute of Renaissance Studies.” The cover photo featured a hunched actor garbed in a period costume of an inky velvet cap and cloak, his neck adorned with a massive gold chain. Caught in an aside to an audience, he emerges from the shadows, his pale face a smirk of malice. He leans on a leg ominously clad in thigh-high, brass-studded, black leather boots. His left hand gestures casually: dark deeds are easy. Sinister and seductive, he invites conspiratorial intimacy. Richard III!

Opening the brochure, I found a pitch for Murph’s academy. It was his voice, enthused and unedited.

A Renaissance retreat in which the way of life and of study will take everyone more completely inside Shakespeare’s plays. Taking the plays of the Festivals as the primary subject matter, students will live and dine together in a small dormitory where the atmosphere will move thoughts, conversations, and activities toward Shakespeare’s world: the dancing, the games, the music, the paintings, the entertainment, a Renaissance ball and feast, will suggest that world.

Meetings and activities of various kinds, lectures and class discussions; sessions with Festival actors, directors, and designers; sessions of Renaissance music and dance; visits backstage to study the Elizabethan stage; and projects created by individual students in order to pursue special interests.

Here was a new kind of prose—and a new kind of program. Richard III beckoned too. How could I refuse? I had time that summer, and Pomona College offered to support such faculty development. But this opportunity was unique. Institute and academy had prestige. But a festive campus? A Renaissance retreat? I had to check it out. I was a snob who secretly yearned to play.

We did play that summer, we happy few, a brave band of scholars and teachers who gathered for Murph’s four-week academy in Ashland. In a dorm at Oregon State University, we lived, dined, and talked together. Our festive “atmosphere” did indeed “move thoughts, conversations, and activities toward Shakespeare’s world.” That world was manifest in four plays of the season, The Tempest, The Life of Timon of Athens, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tragedy of Richard III, all performed on the Ashland festival’s outdoor stage, a looming, half-timbered approximation of an Elizabethan playhouse. It was not a precise historical replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, achieved in recent years by the spectacular New Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank. But never mind: all those years ago, that rambling festival outdoor stage worked its wonders for me, once so proudly wedded to the “theater of the mind.”

A first wonder: The Taming of the Shrew. A sparkling production emblazoned an obvious truth: Shakespearean comedy was written to be performed—and performance is revelatory. I had a front-row seat to a show that was visceral and cerebral, a bawdy mélange of the silly and sophisticated, sexy and witty. The play’s nod to prevailing convention was undercut by the actors’ sly comic irony—a gesture or tone or pause on stage that mocked the powers or prejudices that be. In so doing, this show provoked giddy laughter as well as sober recognition. I had once dismissed The Taming of the Shrew as mere slapstick and misogynist rant. On the festival stage, it was something more.

A brilliant husband-and-wife duo, actors Rick Hamilton (Petruchio) and Fredi Olster (Kate), carried the show. They played warring and witty partners who were animated, it seemed, by the savvy of a real-life marriage as well as seasoned theatricality. Their romp on stage was a fast dance of competing power plays, fired by simmering erotic energy. But all that funny business morphed into a closing spectacle of ironic reversal and tender bonding. They began as “players” who perversely overplayed their gender roles, mirroring each other as outrageous caricatures: the Shrieking Shrew, the Bully Tamer. But then, by the fourth act, they got it—and so did the audience, deliciously more clued into the changing game than the characters who watched it on stage.

What Kate and Petruchio got is that the old game served only to isolate and defeat them both. Each saw in the other a cartoon of pride and prejudice. Battle weary, shrew and shrew-tamer alike hungered for something more. Stunned by the dullards around them, awed by the brio of each other’s wit and will, suddenly they were smitten by equalizing admiration and desire. Soon this spirited twosome joined as partners in a new game. In the end, they performed a stealth action. True to the script, Petruchio—in response to a wager by men on stage—commands Kate to place her hand under his foot, a public display of male dominance and female submission. But this pair subverted the ritual by signaling their private recognition and new bonding. Kate locked eyes with Petruchio while she slowly knelt before him, proffering her hand to his boot. But he bowed down, gently taking her hand. Then he knelt too. Now they were face to face, hand in hand, holding each other in a show-stopping gaze of electrifying intimacy. Only then Petruchio said: “Come on, and kiss me, Kate”—and “Come, Kate, we’ll to bed.” He didn’t crow in mastery; he crooned an entreaty, uttering her name (once a taunt) as a term of endearment. He beckoned her to shared marital bliss, and she happily accepted what was promised: the joy of sex—and the abiding pleasures of mutual valuing and accord, well earned.

The audience roared.

Not everyone would agree with such choices then or now. No one would deny that patriarchy rules in this play, a system oppressive and dangerous to women, even when exceptional individuals (men and women alike) find a way to thrive within it. But this show taught me that provocative choices could be made—and made to work as dazzling theater. But how and why (I wondered) had this gifted pair made these choices? What was their interpretive and creative process, their progression from “page to stage” (Murph’s mantra for the path to enlightenment)?

An answer came from Richard III.

“You have to love your character,” he said.

Richard III was Michael Santo, a resident actor in Ashland that summer who offered a workshop for Renaissance Academy scholars and teachers. He promised to reveal how he prepared for his first role as Shakespeare’s infamous villain. It was Michael, in full costume and makeup, whose photo adorned the brochure; on stage too he was a menacing, mocking presence, lurching between dark shadows and white light. But on this sunny morning, off stage and unmasked, he chatted genially with academics like me, strangers to his world.

“The tradition is daunting,” he began, “mostly terrifying. How to follow Olivier? The bravura style of his deformed and sardonic villain who exults in self-pity to justify evil-doing?” He mimicked Olivier’s crooked back and deformed arm, his halting gait, his nasal sneer: But I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty…

“How to find the part and make it your own?” he asked. “You have to find the pulse. And a quickening.”

Quickening? A word as strange as love.

“Shakespeare’s language is alive,” he said. “You begin by reading and rereading aloud, listening for the iambic pentameter, seeking the pulse. You learn to breathe its rhythms, to feel its sound and sense. You make a strange idiom familiar—and revealing: Why does he talk this way? How does he think and feel? Then you’ll find your character. And you have to love your character. Not mindlessly. You don’t dote. You imagine and inhabit, incorporate and enact. What’s hard is not how Shakespe...