Meiklejohn resolved to open a new, experimental liberal arts college in late 1924, but struggled to find funding. Seeking $3 million for the venture, he was rejected by
Frank stepped down from the magazine in May 1925 to become the incoming president of the
University of Wisconsin (UW). He invited Meiklejohn to open his school there and offered him a distinguished professorship. Meiklejohn planned the experimental college in secret and moved to Madison in January 1926 to teach in the philosophy department. Meiklejohn finished his experimental college proposal by April 1926. It was similar in style to his Century article and became codified as the Experimental College based on its colloquial reference in correspondence between Meiklejohn and Frank. Meiklejohn presented his proposal to the All-University Study Commission convened by Frank "to investigate the first two years of liberal college work". The university faculty received the proposal apprehensively, and criticized its vagueness, lack of control group, costliness, and effect on their livelihoods. It was eventually approved on the condition that the faculty could review its details and regular progress. The Wisconsin legislature approved two years of funding, and the Experimental College was scheduled to open in fall 1927.
Meiklejohn prioritized compatibility in his staff selection, and so hired ten of his friends who could work in "intimate fellowship".
Meiklejohn's Experimental College proposal called for two years of compulsory and interdisciplinary study of civilizations: ancient Athens for freshmen, and contemporary America for sophomores. The plan had students and teachers living and working together in the same residence hall with no fixed schedule, no compulsory lessons, and no semester grades, but a common syllabus. Their only grade was to be the single final exam. The college aimed "to inspire students to want to learn" and to teach democracy through "the intrinsic value of learning" over bribery, coercion, and physical violence.
The teachers, called advisers, would instruct via small, weekly tutorials and occasional schoolwide lectures on their personal research. Adviser appointments were split with two-thirds in the Experimental College and one-third in the rest of the university, a compromise between Meiklejohn and the College of Letters and Sciences. The program's budget and appointments were negotiated directly with President Frank, bypassing the UW College of Letters and Science and its dean, George Sellery .
Facilities
College men in the Adams Hall den, December 15, 1927 The college was based in Adams Hall, where students and their advisers lived and worked by the shore of Lake Mendota (except for Meiklejohn, who lived in a large house several blocks away). Adams Hall was constructed in 1926, with a Renaissance -style quad and eight identical divisions, each with its own common room, den, and facilities for 30 students, two advisers, and a fellow. The surrounding facilities afforded abundant sporting opportunities, and the site offered distance from the city and university. The students shared part of Adams Hall with non-Experimental College students, and the nearby common dining hall with the UW students in Tripp Hall. The other students were said to be bothered by the Experimental College's disregard for property, rambunctiousness, noise, and dining hall biscuit fights.
Rise
The first class arrived in fall 1927.
The first Experimental College class, 1927 Meiklejohn recommended student government to the fall 1927 class, but they couldn't decide on its form and ultimately voted against government. Put another way, they democratically voted against democratic governance in favor of anarchy. This disappointed Meiklejohn, but he thought they would eventually change their minds.
As freshmen struggled with the Athenian curriculum, he reverted to classification by academic discipline and offered companion texts in the field of the current work studied. In their dorms, the college students were known for their lack of respect for property, with three times the breakage in dorm assets than the rest of the university. Meiklejohn saw this as desirable and indicative of abetting nonconformity, and did not attempt to curb it. Meiklejohn had full reign over the college, so the university and its disciplinary proceedings could not intervene. Upon their exit two years later, students transferred to a number of Ivy League and prominent state universities . By this time, the college was known throughout the nation and Europe.
The college was reputed to be a radical institution. A judge presiding over a case involving three students in a socialist march declared the school "a hotbed of radical activity". Meiklejohn bemoaned this characterization of his school and blamed the college's media prominence for disproportionate coverage of an avant-garde minority. Two such cases included a former student who announced his Communist Party gubernatorial bid from jail, and another who organized a labor march with the college's students that ended in a face-off described as "bearded 'Experimenters'" against varsity athletes "bent on 'smashing the heads of the Reds'". The Experimental College students acted differently from those of the rest of the university. They grew beards, wore their hair long, carried an air of conspicuous apathy , and did not tend as meticulously to their outward presentation. They developed a tradition of wearing dark blue blazers with pearl gray trim, emblazoned with the owl of Athena , worn in the "spirit of fellowship" and to set the college apart from the university. Many of the advisers (including Meiklejohn) were indeed progressive-minded activists.
Despite their stereotypical "queerness", Greek life, and joined campus clubs. However, the students abnormally read an average of 16 non-assigned books each semester and had an average of "only two dates a month", which the paper considered abnormal amid hints of homosexuality. As these claims became widespread, Meiklejohn imported psychiatrist
Frankwood Williams from New York to study the students' sexual habits. He found the students to be "warped and twisted" as "normal for ... their age", praised the program for aiding their psychosexual growth where others inhibit, and concluded that the advisers made the students subservient to their demands even as they spoke in praise of student autonomy.
Decline
dropped out. Along with books and campus salaries, the Experimental College became a budgetary luxury during a time of economic need for both students and the state, and its funding was in jeopardy. Meiklejohn started an Experimental College interest-fee loan fund for unfunded students, and asked advisers and monied students to donate. During this period, some sophomores absconded the college for two weeks to live like the vagrant hobos who traveled the Midwest by rail looking for work. They returned to write papers about their experiences, which Meiklejohn is said to have appreciated for its
syncretism of experience and the great questions grounded in their readings.
A 1930 faculty review of the curriculum questioned the program's focus and choice of civilizations. The advisers entertained the Enlightenment, Middle Ages, and Renaissance as alternatives to their ancient Athens curriculum, but ultimately did not change course. By early 1930, Meiklejohn began to show a loss of faith in the experiment and in education reform, chiefly in the ability to teach "rational self-criticism". Around the same time, Meiklejohn received letters from the Baraboo, Wisconsin , schools superintendent and a Baraboo judge noting the Experimental College's sordid reputation in the state and its habit of repelling "ordinary" students whose parents were uninterested in the ramifications of such an education. Within the community, a January 1930 student committee reported a widespread lack of individual responsibility in their living arrangements. Parents began to complain about the college's public esteem, the qualities forming in their sons, and the curriculum. The experiment was in ill repute.
Enrollment dropped every year since the program's inception such that, when compounded by dropouts, the program was below half-capacity three years later. UW President Glenn Frank had warned of decreased enrollment in August 1928 and of its consequences for the college. UW College of Letters and Science Dean George Sellery offered support conditional on codified discipline and uniform final exams, which Meiklejohn refused. Sellery later refused to allow transfer students into the college. Meiklejohn wrote letters to Wisconsin high schools in April 1929 that acknowledged the college's stereotypes and welcomed demographic change, but the campaign backfired. He sent an adviser to tour the state and solve what he saw as a communication issue. The adviser found high school seniors largely interested in vocational training, and that the prospect of traditional college excited students to the point where they did not consider improvements upon that model. The adviser found students uninterested in the Experimental College's prospects.
The locals saw Meiklejohn as an outsider. He was foreign to Madison in his politics, social life, and personality. Dean Sellery and President Frank's professional relationship was untrusting and contemptuous, which extended to Meiklejohn due to his close association with Frank. Sellery had the support of the faculty, who were envious of the Experimental College advisers' arrangements for higher salaries. In objection to the college's reputation for radicalism, the son of the man who endowed Meiklejohn's professorship revoked his funding. Frank needed the donor's support, and so the incident marked Frank's waning support for the college. Sellery spoke out against the Experimental College in the first quarter of 1929, and Frank attempted to fire him in response. In 1931, Sellery received letters from spies who found Meiklejohn's son Donald, a philosophy doctoral student at the university and a part-time Experimental College adviser, engaged in sex acts against university policy. Sellery pursued expulsion and denied Meiklejohn and his son's separate requests for a lesser punishment. A week later, Meiklejohn asked the advisers to close the college.
Common public explanations for the college's closure include student radicalism, lack of discipline, administrative issues, and financial issues. The Nation ' s Eliseo Vivas blamed its lack of grades as detrimental to student incentive, and judged the effort to create self-motivated students through freedom to be a failure. In School and Society , Professor Grant Showerman also credited the college's freedoms and lack of compulsions with its demise. Proponents of the Experimental College painted it as the foil of a conservative, standard college, and blamed educational stagnation on the existing order. Meiklejohn believed in a liberal education's power to change society through imagining alternatives to the status quo. He aimed to produce students who could counterbalance society with independence of thought, but admitted that he did not know how to facilitate this.
The University of Wisconsin faculty and regents voted to end the Experimental College in May 1932. There was a farewell banquet for 250 guests in June 1932. Meiklejohn did not judge the college's success by its permanence, which he did not expect—he said he attempted the college as a test. Meiklejohn asked Sellery to give his graduate student advisers university assistantships, but was denied. Meiklejohn began to work on adult education in the University of Wisconsin Extension Division in July 1932, where some of the Experimental College's ideas took hold. He later moved to Berkeley. Advisers who stayed after the program's end—such as classicist Walter Agard, philosopher Carl Bögholt, and political scientist John Gaus—were known as popular and innovative, and Agard became the Classics department chair.
Legacy
Meiklejohn wrote a retrospective of the Experimental College during the first half of 1932. John Dewey reviewed the published book and declared it "a contribution to the philosophy of American education". He saw the college to be a true expression of liberal education as it fostered rational faculties and self-criticism, and noted the college's place in fighting norms on a much larger timescale. For its ability to produce free-thinkers in an age without similar values, Dewey found the college "a tragic success".
Meiklejohn's Experimental College 30th anniversary address, St. John's College , Annapolis, Maryland, May 10, 1957 Experimental College alumni celebrated reunions in 1942 at the University of Chicago , in 1957 at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland , and in 1962 back in Madison. At St. John's, Meiklejohn addressed the audience and read his favorite poets. Over a hundred alumni announced a fund for the Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Academic Freedom through the American Association of University Professors . At the Madison reunion, alumni announced the Alexander Meiklejohn Lectureship on the Meaning and Methods of Education for Freedom. Their reunions featured notably intellectual speakers, and would take on the air of their college discussions. Over the next two decades, Meiklejohn would return to speak in Madison at the behest of the Memorial Union Forum Committee and philosophy department.
In The University of Wisconsin: A Pictorial History , Arthur Hove states that the Experimental College "had little discernible influence beyond the university", though it served as a prototype for the university's Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program,
A 1939 announcement described him as "one of the university's greatest teachers". Notable alumni include Victor Wolfson , a Broadway playwright and founder of the college's theater group.
References and notes
Notes
^ Frank published two books about Meiklejohn: one on his Amherst public addresses on college education, and one on Meiklejohn's ouster from the college, which was sympathetic in tone.
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Media related to University of Wisconsin Experimental College at Wikimedia Commons