The Human Development Program

The Human Development Program is an example of an experimental curriculum planned and begun with high hopes in 1965-70, that did not succeed. What follows is an excerpt from the original planning bulletin for the program, an evaluation written for the Educational Policy Committee, and a look back by John Boettiger, originator of the program.

Perspectives on Human Development, by John R. Boettiger. August 1969.
Hampshire College is committed to a conception of liberal education as designed--most of all--to improve a person's chance to be more fully human: to discover and rediscover within himself and among others whose world he shares that which genuinely nurtures human freedom and integrity. Such a commitment, if it is to be one of substance, must pervade the College's life, finding expression in its architectural design and setting, its program and community. To express an intention to redesign liberal education so that it better serves the growth in every human dimension--intellectual, emotional, intuitive, sensuous, enactive--of those who comprise its community, is to express the College's collective responsibility and that of each of its members whatever their disciplinary or professional concerns. The programs sketched below are thus conceived within a larger context: the College itself as an experiment in human development.

This is not--at least not in the conventional sense--to view the College as a therapeutic community. Nor is it to couch the College's responsibilities in terms of preventive medicine. Psychological counseling and mental health programs in educational institutions continue very largely in narrowly therapeutic and preventive veins: isolated, often forbidding enclaves of professional sevices for the sick, preoccupied with the anticipation, diagnosis and short-term treatment of psychopathology. The weakness of such programs is largely contextual: they are working parts of larger institutions that demand too much of our tolerance and too little of our imagination...In such a context it should come as no surprise that counseling and other psychological services are too often merely perfunctory agents of adjustment to prevailing social conditions.

If such conceptions are out of place in any community committed to nurturing the free and disciplined energies of its members--and how else is liberal education to be defined?--the problem takes on special consequence in conditions of extraordinary social flux. A conventional wisdom suggests that the exploration of identity, the nurturance of human growth and relationship, is so intensely personal and problematic that it cannot usefully be addressed explicitly by the College and its program. There is little doubt that it requires a special care in preparation and leadership: that it may be, indeed, the realm of responsibility in which it is most difficult for the College to respond creatively. When student generations are said to succeed one another at intervals of three or four years, the communication gap between students and faculty may take on appalling dimension.

But such rough terrain is also the area in which the adequacy of our traditional educational conceptions and forms deserves the strongest challenge. Precisely because of the vexedness of such issues in social conditions of unparalleled volatility, a person's sense of himself, his development, his openness to relationships with others in the communities of which he is (or might be) a part, must be more carefully and cooperatively sought than in the past. Old ideologies and old role models, whether parental or professorial, tend to irrelevance or to ephermeral and conflicted relevance. The ends they once served are, if anything, more pressing. The search for identity, intimacy, and ideology are now more complex and more consuming, and for that reason can ill afford to be left to precipitate out of other more manageable preoccupations. (p.5-7)

Fall Term Division I Seminars in Human Development
Beginning with the issues raised during the Fall Colloquy and extending through the fall and early winter of the first year, the Seminars in Human Development will offer the student a range of opportunities to understand and explore aspects of the individual life-process, the ages of man and woman from birth through death and the echoes of a life in the succession of generations. (Such a seminar will constitute one-third of a normal full term Division I program.) Students will be offered a common ground of experience through lectures, demonstrations, films, and some common readings, but the basic unit of the program will be the small seminar-workshop: accommodating about a dozen Division I students, student- or faculty-led (sometimes both), varying in their specific focus, style, and materials, but all attending more explicitly than is common in the academic idiom to the personal experience and relationships of the participants as they confront themselves, others, and the materials in hand. Whatever the focus and leadership, students will be engaged in the integrative application of different skills and disciplines to complex subjects: persons in their total living situation.

One workshop, for example, might be concerned with the experience and conditions of childhood: the cultural history of children's lives and the evolution of popular conceptions of childhood: the interwoven social, psychological, and somatic dimensions of growth in children; the nature of childhood in other cultures, and the experience of American children, portrayed in fiction and the literature of social science, to reveal something of the quality of life in the students' own culture. Members of the seminar would work with children in a variety of roles and social circumstances, seek access to the children in themselves, and join in reading from Philippe Aries, Jerome Bruner, Robert Coles, Erik H. Erikson, Jan Piaget, and others. (p.11-12)

Seminar themes and styles of inquiry and expression will be developed to facilitate those processes of encounter and reflection by which the student may gain a richer sense of himself, his movement through time and in his environment, and his relatedness to others in the past, present, and anticipated future. The range of disciplines that bear upon problems of human development--and thus the range of Hampshire faculty who may be attracted to prepare and conduct a seminar--is large. While the core of the seminar program may well be anthropological and psychological, it is expected that its faculty will be drawn from such diverse additional fields as history, sociology, biology, literature, folklore and mythology, religion, philosophy, dance and drama. The challenge to the program's planners and faculty might be put in these terms: to combine manageable coherence and intellectual responsibility with devotion to unusual diversity of style and theme; to offer the College's faculty and upper-division students a chance to explore new modes of teaching and learning in a program whose basic interest is the generation of coherence and facility and meaning in the pursuits of Hampshire's first-year students. (p.14-15)

Leadership and Training for Human Development Programs
Leadership for the Division I Seminars in Human Development will be drawn from the College's faculty and from the community of its upper-division students...They will be working on difficult and sensitive ground, and for their student's sake, their subjects', and their own, it is important that they come to that work and pursue it with careful preparation and continuing support and review. The same point, of course, holds for those members of the faculty teaching the seminars.

It is necessary to face these matters at the outset, for the pitfalls of such a collection of seminars may seem on preliminary glance as great as the opportunities. Three problems, in particular, should be mentioned:

1. In attempting to combine a self-analytic and expressive perspective with the critical or scientific mode more common to the academy, there may be danger of losing the matter at hand in a welter of subjectivity; danger of manifesting what William Arrowsmith has called "the turbulence of the actual disorder of experience" without adequately turning the arts of teaching and learning to its transmutation into order, form, judgment--in a word, comprehension. If programs in human development serve only to turn the person more thoroughly in upon himself, or upon a small group of similarly-initiated and common-minded fellows, or if such programs teach him new modes of experience only to discredit clear and disciplined thought, they will not serve well the ends of liberal education. The challenge, as ever, is one of integrity: the enlargement of one's field of vision and action, not the substitution of one narrow gauge for another.

There is a regrettable tendency in the academic world, with its thinking man's filter, to believe that non-cognitive processes are intrinsically soft and sloppy, and that self-regard is of its nature solipsistic. And to the extent that such a bias informs institutional definitions of curricular legitimacy it takes on the character of a self-fulfilling prophesy...

2. The second danger is that we will cope with the first, and its attendant apprehensions about "softness," by a hardening of the pedagogical arteries. Joseph Katz has remarked that the language of the emotions "is by no means easy to decipher, and is subject to misinterpretation even by qualified observers. It would be regrettable if, in paying more attention to the affective domain, we allowed a hardening of concepts such as has taken place in the cognitive domain with its IQ's, SAT's, and GPA's, which force people into ill-fitting abstractions."

3. Finally, there is the danger of putting inadequately trained or poorly chosen or simply inexperienced people into a position to influence (and be influenced by) aspects of the lives of others that are volatile, unpredictable, and full of an energy both powerful and resistant to control. The line, for example, that tells a teacher or counselor that "this is a dangerous thing to press on with" is often faint and tortuous and subject to illusion.

It is with these thoughts in mind that the College must choose with care its faculty and Hampshire Fellows for leadership in the human development seminars and establish supportive pre- and in-service training and review programs. Such programs, in turn, will reflect and draw from a college-wide interest in the assessment and improvement of teaching. (p.16-18)

December 9, 1975
To: Educational Policy Committee From: Richard Alpert Subject: Human Development

I have been struggling in the last few days to sort out my ideas about Human Development. They are still tentative but I thought it might be helpful to share my thoughts with you before our discussion on Wednesday.

As far as I can gather, the original notion for a program in Human Development was quite ambitious and potentially far-reaching. The program was to be broadly based intellectually. Its focus was to be on the life-process "...to understand and explore aspects of the individual life process, the ages of man and woman from birth through death." The purpose, however was not simply to develop a new program, but to change the prevailing definition of a liberal arts education...Liberal education was to be redefined as "...having to do with (students) as people, with the sources and impediments and tools of their own realization, with self and others and society, and the commerce between them that best serves the quality of each."

As with a number of the College's original programs, Human Development never fulfilled its original promise. After an initial attempt for required participation of each student in the Human Development program, it was dropped. The program, moreover, failed early in developing a broad cross-School basis of faculty support, and by Fall 1972 Human Development was essentially a program in the School of Humanities and Arts. In addition, the broad set of intellectual and conceptual concerns which underlay the original design for the program gave way necessarily to a more limited set of concerns. The program, in as far as I can figure out, now deals primarily with either issues in the field of psychology which relate to psychotherapy and counseling or with issues of personal grown and personal development.

The fate of Human Development as a cross-School program is not unique. The primacy of the Schools as the focus for curriculum planning, evaluation for reappointment and for colleagueship proved an insurmountable obstacle for a number of efforts at developing cross-School programs. Human Development, however, suffered from an additional burden. To many it lacked conceptual clarity and academic legitimacy.

The most frequent question asked about Human Development has been, "Is it really academic?" I assume that most of us know what is meant by "academic" when we ask such a question, but at the resk of belaboring the obvious, let me sketch out what I mean.

The College as an "academy" is distinguished from other institutions by its focus on ideas, that is, on intellectual abstractions and constructs. Ideas are the institution's most important activity. Developing, generating, evaluating, and criticizing ideas is the peculiar work of the academy. Educating students--as well as each other--in the skills, attitudes, and methods for dealing with ideas is the particular purpose of a College.

This central activity of the College, moreover, must be public, in the sense that the ideas which are developed, and evaluated, must be available for others to share in, to learn from, to build on, and to criticize. And the activity should be detached. This is the sense for which the term "academic" is most often maligned. But, the basic nature of a community for which a concern with and for ideas is central is that that concern be basically detached...

This is the sense of "academic" which I sense most people share and mean when they ask whether or not the human development program is "academic." It is also the meaning of academic work for which most people believe students ought to be awarded a degree. A liberal arts education may involve many different kinds of learning experiences from Plato to Kayaking, but the eligibility of students for a degree rests upon their having demonstrated sufficient competence in academic work.

The issue that Human Development puts before us is the one which John Boettiger defined in his paper in Spring 1969. Is there a broader conception of "academic" for which we want to award a Bachelor of Arts degree? If not, is there nevertheless a non-academic educational experience for which the College should award such a degree?

The Human Development faculty seem to argue for what some call a more wholistic educational experience which they believe is more in keeping with the idea of a liberal arts education. They want at least to see concentrations and Division III work that deals not only with ideas but also with the relationship of those ideas to the personal growth and experience of the individual student.

When the discussion moves in this direction, I find myself getting lost. When I finish reading the concentration statements available to the Committee, I get even more confused. I simply don't understand what it means to award someone a degree for working toward becoming more fully human. What would it be like to fail such an undertaking? What does becoming more human mean? Who among us is qualified to judge?

To the extent that the concentrations, and the discussions, emphasize the opposite end of the spectrum of human development concerns--those which are more fully rooted in psychology--I don't understand how they differ as intellectual inquiries from psychology concentrations. What distinguishes them conceptually as human development concentrations? What are the peculiar concepts, paradigms, principles, or framework which distinguishes human development from other disciplines?

In the concentrations I read which had a more central focus on the personal growth of the student involved, I didn't understand what was being studied and evaluated. What does someone end up knowing about other than one's own personal journey? This is of course something crucially important to know about, but where is the detached, reflective, and public character of the study? What other than the student's own feelings and experiences constitutes the student's curriculum?

I also don't understand how one studies Human Development by studying oneself. Is a study of one's own life-cycle a sufficient empirical basis for studying the human life cycle? Where in these concentrations is there a concern for history, anthropology, and biology?

My most serious questions arose when I was struck by the unabashed pretension of some of the concentrations and Division III contracts.

One student, for example, proposed to study the question: "What does it mean for man to exist in the fullness of his being?" Not simply Western man, or Twentieth Century Man, or oppressed man, but all men, and I presume in all times. How does a student study this? He studies philosophy and religion--a total of six courses, psychology, six courses, and psychology and experiential workshops (3). The concentration is both pretentious and meagre. It is also unclear. What does it mean to "...study man's relationships to himself and to his external world and the religious significance of that?"

Another student proposed to study humanistic education, psychology, and personal growth by taking a few courses in education, a few in psychology, doing classroom teaching, and participating in the Human Development module. This strikes me as a very thin curriculum and, again, quite pretentious.

Having heard all the discussions and having read all the available material, I have serious doubts about what is going on, about whether or not it is to be judged differently than "normal" academic work, and, if so, how. Most importantly, I don't understand the conceptual basis for what is happening. It is clear that there is no program, if by that, we mean a clearly defined, philosophically coherent, and conceptually interrelated array of studies. There are courses and related experiences as there are in a wide range of other areas. But, not much more.

I feel that an important and exciting program in Human Development--or some such titled program--could be developed at Hampshire. It could emphasize the personal growth patterns of its students. Few colleges have taken these problems seriously. These problems are taken seriously only when they can be defined as a "sickness" in need of special care from the psychiatric or counseling personnel. But, most personal growth problems for students are not special. They are the normal problems of a particular age group. For a very large number of students, these problems constitute the most important and compelling "work" they do while at college. It is possible for colleges to take that "work" more seriously, to give it appropriate status and support, and perhaps, to integrate it with the academic program. I think such an approach would be exciting, rewarding to both students and the College as a whole, and would potentially develop new approaches to undergraduate education. For such a program, however, we need a clear and well-developed plan, which we now lack.

Interview with John Boettiger, conducted by Amy Mittleman, June 17, 1986.
John Boettiger:...I think that Pat (Franklin Patterson) had begun to think through some of the content issues of what a college might do academically and had begun to think interestingly--and, of course, these dimensions were further developed by the rest of us as we came on--about issues of community and the relationship between intellectual/academic development of students and their personal development. I think Pat had a sense that the two were intimately linked--that optimum development intellectually and academically had something fairly critically to do with the degree of satisfaction and stimulus a student found in his or her living circunstances and his or her relationship with other students in a subculture called a college. I thought that that was very exciting--the idea that a college could be something more personal, less impersonal, caring more integrally about the whole development of the human being, rather than in as unbalanced a way as I had seen at Amherst College and elsewhere about the intellectual processes, which had a danger of producing sophistication without a kind of comparable integration of emotional, social, and spiritual development. And I think that what happens then, of course, is that the intellectual development undergoes a kind of desiccation--what Pat used to call "micro-scholasticism," I think, and I've forgotten whether that word was in The Making of a College or just in his conversation. But he was also suspicious of--another one of his phrases--sort of the other end of the spectrum--suspicious of what he called "sloppy agape"--of the tendency in the sixties in what used to be called the "human potential movement" [that] now seems to be gathered around the phrase "New Age," of a kind of touchy-feely personal growth, Esalen Institute sort of approach to education. I was much more inclined myself to see potential in those quarters--not sloppiness, God knows, but for disciplined inclusion within the college of what was being learned about human relationships within any kind of community and systematic attention to their quality. So early on I was doing and bringing people who were more skilled and more experienced at leadership than I, doing, in effect, some experimental T-groups with the staff and building into my own field, my own sort of embryonic and developing field in the course of those early years of human development a kind of approach that I've thought of as a disciplined subjectivity--that is [an] approach that included one's own, the students' own, whole human development--social, emotional, spiritual, as well as intuitive, as well as intellectual. And as I said, I think that from the beginning although Pat was very responsive, very warm and generous in his response to my notions about a human development program at Hampshire--in effect, we redesigned what was a kind of third tier of the Division I Program to incorporate a commitment to seminars and workshops in human development...And at the same time that that generosity existed and...I saw Pat's interest in it, I also saw his wariness about it and that...more than slightly schizoid institutional attitude towards what I'm going to call for shorthand, "human development", the kinds of things about which I've been speaking--was built into the college from the very beginning, and had a lot to do with the subsequent history of that as a field and my own professional history at the college...(p.4-5)

Amy Mittleman: Maybe we could talk a little more specifically about the Human Development Program and how you planned that, and then how it actually worked.

John Boettiger: Sure. Well, it was, as I say, it was initially something that had grown out of my experience and training in the field of...psychology and human relations. It was grounded in the assumption that one could usefully, with real complementarity, pay attention in students' education to their own developmental processes, as one paid attention to wider subjects having to do with human development in an inter-disciplinary kind of fashion. So it was not simply psychology. It would have to do with issues of political socialization, issues of culture and history. The Human Development Program was an effort to blend attention to personal processes--students' own experience of family, students' experience of their own relationships, students' experience of their own history--with systematic academic attention to those processes in more conventional ways. And my thought from the beginning was that we could build this collection of workshops and seminars in Human Development, offer it as part of the core curriculum in the Fall term to all entering students as part of an initial experience of socialization and an embodiment of the college's commitment to sensitizing and developing sophistication on the part of students into their own processes...So we designed it in such a way to offer something like fifteen or twenty such seminars the first year and offered a program of core lectures that students who were in all of the seminars were required to attend that were essentially organized to present the sequence of the human life cycle. And we got an interesting, lively psychobiologist from Harvard named Frank Irvin to come and offer them. I think we should have had somebody in-house do it, because I think that to have a visitor do it made for less coherence in the program as a whole. The program worked, I think, reasonably well for a year, although that commitment to disciplined subjectivity, to really seriously including the development of students' skills in discovering and attending to and becoming more differentiated, sophisticated students of their own development was something that not a lot of people were interested in doing, so for me it was...a kind of sad learning, but, a necessary one that, you know, no matter how interesting your vision is to you and no matter how successful you are in selling it to the leadership of your institution, in this case a college--unless you've got people who are prepared to staff it, it's going to be undermined. And there was no way to sustain [it]...our initial faculty was not hired to do that work and to pursue that sort of human development perspective on education. They were no necessarily unsympathetic to it, but they didn't come to do it. And they were prepared to join in it, but their hearts, a lot of their hearts, were not in it. So that the program existed in that form for two years, and then it became clear to me that we simply hadn't the staff to continue it...And so the next stage in its development after those first two years, I think, was an effort to keep a large array of seminars and workshops, but to make a number of them sort of semi-curricular and some of them even extra-curricular, that is to turn to house courses, house staff for leadership, other people in the wider Valley community for leadership, and it became a kind of in-house growth center...An opportunity for students to be seriously self-reflective in a wide variety of ways within the context of a couple of dozen term-long [courses], some of them in January, some of them in the regular term, so that the program continued to exist in quite an ambitious scope, but in a less central place in the curriculum than had been the case in the first two years, probably for the next three or four years in that form. And gradually there, I think, the commitment on the part of a sufficient number of people to sustain that scope of a program with its increasing sense of marginality to the college's central and formal curriculum was such that it became increasingly more modest, and I became over the course of time less interested in administering a program and more in developing my own teaching, and there was really nobody in that sense to take my place. So, we had then for a time--I guess this sort of a third stage in the evolution of Human Development at Hampshire--a core of maybe six or eight people of whom I was the only full-time faculty member--that interestingly was true from the very beginning and should have been a kind of signal to us of the limited degree of institutional support for this program...We had at various times an additional half-FTE in H&A, but in that third stage of the Human Development Program in which we essentially had a collection of courses and workshops and programs, some house-based, some H&A curriculum-based, offering, in a sense, an opportunity for concentration in studies in Human Development through the three divisions, staffed by me and then primarily by the house staff who had adjunct faculty appointments but some good training: Ellie Skinner, Dick Spahn, people of that sort. So that that third stage of the program existed again for several years throughout the late seventies in that form and provided students, who would then take our work, but would also with our advice and collaboration, would take more conventional, straight forward work in particular disciplines or inter-disciplinary areas of their interests, in psychology, for example...And then, with sort of the fourth stage, I suppose, which is really the last, with the gradual attenuation of substantive connection between the Houses and the educational program, the leadership of the Houses increasingly becoming purely administrative...the house staff for my human development efforts dried up...And so the fourth stage of Human Development then at Hampshire really was as my own specialty within the School of Humanities and Arts, and was then one of the opportunities for students to work within the School of Humanities and Arts and again to sustain some linkage between their work in psychology or in other areas and pursue then a program at all three of the divisional levels that incorporated a kind of human development dimension to it. So it's continued to exist, but it's gradually moved through those four stages, I think...I've never conceptualized it that way before, but they seem reasonable to me. And whether or not with my departure there will be any remaining fragment of that perspective at the college, I think is a very real question. (p. 15-17)