The New College Plan

The Committee for New College, appointed by the Presidents of the other four colleges in 1958, created the original plan for what was to become Hampshire College. Click here for a PDF file of the New College Plan.

Excerpted here are three studies done by the Committee.

The New College Plan: a proposal for a major departure in higher education.
Prepared at the request of the Presidents of Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts. Committee for New College, 1958.

Foreword
The attached report recommends the establishment of a new college in our area, to be sponsored by our four institutions--a coeducational, residential college, initially of about a thousand students, at which major new departures in liberal education can be initiated.

We were asked to re-think the assumptions underlying education in the liberal arts and to re-evaluate accepted practices and techniques, in order to draw up plans for a college which would provide "education of the highest quality at a minimum cost per student and with as small a faculty relative to the student body as new methods of instruction and new administrative procedures can make possible." A grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education enabled us to work intensively for five months and to enlist suggestions and criticisms from a variety of consultants.

The most important contribution a college can make to its students is to develop in them a capacity to continue their education throughout their lives. We have become convinced that there are several new departures which could make an important contribution to the evolution of the American liberal arts college in response to the demands and opportunites of our period. The changes we propose reflect widespread opinion in the academic world, but it is not now possible to introduce most of them, on a decisive scale, in existing institutions. They can best be tested and demonstrated by making a fresh start: a new style of college, located among our established institutions, could both profit from their sponsorship and contribute, in its turn, to their development.

It is a widely-held conviction among liberal arts faculties that our system of courses and credits has got out of hand, and that our students are capable of far more independence than they exercise in present college programs. We propose a college which frees both students and faculty from the system which make education a matter of giving and taking courses to cover subjects.

At New College, subjects will be covered, not by providing complete programs of courses, but by training the student to master recognized fields of knowledge. A systematic and sustained effort will be made to train students to educate themselves. As freshmen, they will start with seminars especially designed as the first step, not the last, in independence. Other devices, such as student-led seminars associated with all lecture courses, will follow to reinforce this initial experience. Throughout, the program will provide for a type of social interaction which will create a climate favorable to intellectual activities.

Students will study only three courses at a time, an arrangement making possible concentration of effort and high levels of achievement. The faculty, on their side, will give only one lecture course at at any given time; the rest of their energies will be devoted to the several kinds of seminars which characterize the curriculum. The student's program will be built upon a large freedom of choice among areas of learning, and will be tested impersonally, by field examinations set according to recognized professional standards, frequently with the participation of outside examiners.

The College's total offering of lecture courses will be small. But it will be supplemented by other kinds of study and testing. It will also be supplemented to some degree by the collateral use of the course offerings of the sponsoring institutions. And there will be, each year, a month-long midwinter term after the Christmas vacation, during which the whole College will join in studying two courses which will provide a common intellectual experience. One will deal with a subject of central importance in Western culture, the other with a subject in a non-Western culture, the subject changing each year over a four-year span. Visiting teachers from other institutions and from outside the teaching profession will play a large part in these midwinter courses.

The changes proposed will lead to significant economies in dollars and, more important, in the number of teachers required: we calculate that the New College plan, by giving up the attempt at a complete course offering (impossible for a college in any case), will make it possible for a faculty of fifty to give a first-rate education to a thousand undergraduates. This ratio of one-to-twenty will go with efficient sizes of classes: relatively large groups in lectures and small groups in seminars. But the proposal has not been arrived at by cutting the curriculum to fit economic considerations; on the contrary, educational motives have been paramount throughout our planning. Because the economies are motivated in this positive way, it seems to us that they can actually be carried out.

We should add that the several innovations we propose for New College, including in the extracurricular area the elimination of fraternities and intercollegiate athletics in favor of more spontaneous forms of student recreation, are changes that would reinforce each other, so that a style of life should emerge at the College which would have its own momentum. This does not mean that we look to the establishment of a place which would appeal only to special "experimental" people, either as students or faculty. On the contrary, we are convinced that the time is ripe for a general shift in emphasis in first-rate liberal arts colleges, and that New College, working with a representative student body and faculty, could provide an example which would have wide influence.

This is a proposal for changes not in ends but in means. It affirms a belief in liberal arts education--that appropriate for a free man. Although New College aims at producing useful citizens, it rejects vocationalism and a narrow concentration on science divorced from humanism. The challenge of authoritarianism must not be met by a surrender of the principle that the supreme goal of an educational system is the free growth of the individual student and of the intellectual community.

If this report seems at times to be expressed with a confidence and a conviction warranted by a proven experiment, rather than an untried one, the authors may offer the compulsions of brevity as one reason for their forthright statements; but even more, they must confess the growth of their enthusiasm for the plan as they wrestled with its philosophy and translated convictions into proposals. We earnestly hope that the project will be found a wise one, and that the necessary support can be enlisted to make "New College" a reality. (p.3-5)

Cooperation with the Sponsoring Institutions
It will be a great advantage that New College can use some of the teaching resources of the four sponsoring institutions. When a subject which is missing from the New College course offering engages a student's serious interest, and cannot well be studied as an independent project, it will usually be available to him at one of the cooperating colleges. Students will be required to take at least one semester course away during their college career. The College can pay the costs to its neighbors of this enrichment of its program without incurring anything like the expense required to maintain separately the teachers and facilities involved. And it can afford to pay its full share of a cooperative transportation system. It will be unnecessary to support disciplines which are included when a college is conceived as a single, isolated entity. (p. 11)

Establishing and Sustaining the Pattern of Student Initiative
The independence which all good teachers want in their students cannot be created by an act of will on the part of the faculty. Too often, faculty members themselves discourage initiative by elaborating packaged tasks in an effort to be sure that the student learns all they think he should...The New College curriculum is designed to establish a pattern of independent behavior by intensive training in it at the outset and to reinforce the habit of initiative thereafter by continuing to provide situations which call for it...Breadth of knowledge is certainly essential; but really to know goes with knowing how to know. Broad knowledge will not be pre-digested for New College students; it will come as a natural consequence of exploration, of "getting around" in their subjects...Methods are best introduced, not in the abstract, but in action. The fall freshman seminars will teach methodology by exploring limited subjects, each teacher deciding on a subject and its limits with a view to best showing a group of about thirteen students how he works, and how they can work, in using his discipline. (p. 16-17)

The Institution as a Community
The curriculum proposed could be adapted, we believe, to a variety of institutional settings. But its educational goals can be realized most fully if they are promoted all along the line: in the selection of students and faculty, in administrative arrangements, in working and living facilities, in plans for student activities and recreation. This does not mean recruiting a special "experimental" group of people and trying to create for them a unique, utopian community, so that an alchemy, impossible elsewhere, can take place. On the contrary, if what is new about New College is to have general significance, it should have a representative student body and faculty, comparable to other first-class institutions, working with representative resources. In many features the College will simply follow good current practice. (p. 29)

The Campus and its Architecture
The requirements for the New College campus are obvious, in the large, from what has been said already. The dominant, central building, visible if possible from afar, will be the library, with its associated study center, probably arranged as wings and commanding attractive views. Near the library, and connected, if possible, by covered walks, will be the laboratories and the auditorium and administration building. In one direction from this working area--presumable further uphill if the College is on a long slope--will be the student's living areas; in the other direction--downhill--will be the recreation center, with the amphitheater, the tennis courts, and the level playing fields. The dormitories will be grouped around their common rooms and dining halls; the latter must be near enough to each other so that a common kitchen can serve them. The site planning should provide space, if possible, for additional residential units (with separate kitchens if need be) and for space around the library so that its stacks and its study wings can grow outward and another laboratory can be added. Automobile traffic should circle the central living and working areas, not go through them. Land should be acquired to provide for doubling the athletic fields in the future. If possible, adjoining woodland should be purchased, or privileges obtained, so that trails for nature study can be developed and an accessible outing club cabin built.

The Committee favors a forthright modern architecture rather than a period style. The energetic, open-minded intellectual life which we hope for at New College could be expressed by adapting the style of building which is often used now by business and industry for laboratories and offices. One feature of business buildings which we certainly should take over in study and recreation structures is the elimination, so far as may be, of interior bearing walls: it should always be possible to alter the arrangement of partitions as space requirements change over the years. Novel (and expensive) materials need not be used--beauty, meaning, and drama can be achieved by fine proportions of the large masses involved, and by disposing the living, working and recreation centers effectively in relation to each other and the terrain.

Maintenance should be considered at every point. No landscaping or planting that involves expensive maintenance should be undertaken; wide lawns can be inexpensive if keeping them mowed is all that is called for. The committee believes that there are several sites in the Valley where the terrain is such that a campus of beauty and distinction could be created without great expense, the sort of campus that would become identified for the community with the distinctive life led on it. (p. 43-44)