25 Years of Extraordinary Change

By GLENN E. BROOKS

hen our Bulletin editor asked me to write a note about the Colorado College Plan, I read through a batch of old materials in my files about what the college expected from its new program in 1970. I wanted to make sure my memory was not playing tricks on me. The review was not an easy exercise. As one who was involved in the design of the Plan, I felt like an old Bolshevik being trotted out on May Day to extol the glories of the Revolution. I thought that our small academic revolution, like larger political revolutions, had a tendency to lose its motive force and to develop self-serving justifications for its existence.

Since its beginning I have had a detached view of the Plan (it is often called the Block Plan, but that refers to the academic part; residential and leisure programs are integral to the overall scheme). My position, like most of my associates in those early days, was that there should be nothing sacred about the way an academic program is organized. If it worked, fine. If it didn't work, change it. The Plan was specifically put together in a way that permitted us to change its parts without disrupting everything else.

Then I looked at current statements -- the Block Plan 25-Year Evaluation Report, the college viewbook for prospective students and our college catalog. Sure enough, the things we say we do today come close to the original objectives we set: by teaching one course at a time in an intensive, flexible format, the Block Plan focuses the attention of students and professors on the subject; students are active in learning; they develop personal discipline and concentration that serves them well in graduate school and professional life; student-professor relations are strong; courses can be taught quite literally all over the world; and non-academic features of the Plan -- the leisure program and residential life -- provide contrast and balance in the liberal education of the student.

This is not just catalog propaganda. The college has hard evidence that many of our hopes have been realized. What is important to me is that the original purposes have remained reasonably intact through 25 years of extraordinary change.

Consider these changes:
The Students. The Colorado College Plan was developed in the late '60s, a time of immense cultural ferment. The college avoided the disruptions of Berkeley and Columbia, partly because our students knew they were having genuine influence in shaping the Plan. We were reading Charles Reich's The Greening of America, and we thought that students and faculty would become partners in a joint enterprise of learning. As it turned out, we were naive about what was happening.

In the '70s and beyond, cultural upheaval gave way to what Herman Kahn called The Squaring of America. Students demanded more structure, more direction, more professional preparation and less talk of philosophical issues and poetry. Students wanted a tight syllabus, with each day clearly laid out.They wanted the professors to state precise expectations for grades. "Tell me exactly what I must do and I'll do it" seemed to be the new student motto. Even so, the intensive format of the block courses still required students to be active participants instead of passive spectators.

The Faculty. One fundamental fact is that only 30 percent of the regular faculty who were present at the creation of the Plan are still teaching at the college. Most of this remnant came from the so-called Benezet generation, hired in the late '50s and '60s. They were almost all white males, married, with wives who stayed at home with the kids, politically moderate, dedicated to teaching the liberal arts and sciences, fairly active in research and heavily involved in college affairs.

The Benezet faculty had job mobility and little concern about getting tenure (I remember that my great department chair, Doug Mertz, stuck his head in my office one day and said, "By the way, you just got tenure." I didn't even know that I was under consideration). So they were willing to take personal chances in teaching and were disposed to try a new academic structure.

The faculty scene has changed dramatically in the ensuing decades. The Vietnam War and domestic unrest produced a generation of young professors who were politically radical, suspicious of authority and institutions, often single or with working spouses. They are now full professors or senior associate professors. More women, gays and minority faculty members joined the ranks. They tended to be more specialized in their fields of study than their predecessors, more oriented to their disciplines, more research-minded.

They were caught in a shrinking job market. If they failed to get tenure at the college (although almost all of them did), they faced the real possibility of losing their academic career. These faculty members came into the Block system with fresh ideas. They were not comfortable with the administration and their faculty elders. They made race, class and gender leading topics in the humanities and social sciences. The new generation was not happy with conventional approaches to the study of literature; postmodernists challenged the traditional reliance on canonical texts. They supplemented or replaced broad survey courses in history and sociology with topical courses on women, minorities and class conflict.

The Administration. The Block Plan survived its first decade under the direction of President Lew Worner, who always told his faculty that if an idea was educationally desirable it should be administratively feasible. The registrar solved the complexities of scheduling courses of different lengths running at the same time. The college remodeled classrooms to suit the seminars made possible by the block courses, bought buses to carry students into the field and geared up for new leisure and residential activities.

As the decades passed, events and laws changed the administrative character of the college. Anxiety over tenure and promotion gave rise to laborious (though perhaps more equitable) procedures. Personnel issues that had been settled in quiet conversation turned into lawsuits. Faculty members were advised to leave their office doors open during student conferences. Gresham Riley struggled to hold down the volume of paperwork, largely without success.

In the early years of the Plan, the leisure program and residential life were run mostly out of the hip pockets of students, faculty and administrators, but as time went on, these programs were increasingly run by full time professionals with special degrees in student personnel administration.

As the college entered a capital campaign in the '80s and the competition for financial support became fierce, the Development Office and its auxiliaries expanded its staff, sometimes to the dismay of faculty members who did not understand what it takes to raise money in the current environment of higher education.

The Trustees. The Colorado College Plan was born in the days when Russell Tutt chaired the board, supporting his president without exception, brooking little debate among the board members and holding memorably short Friday afternoon and Saturday morning meetings three times a year. The Plan was approved by the board without a murmur of dissent. Students and faculty knew little about what the board did, and did not especially care.

Today, the board meets four times a year and begins committee work as early as Wednesday of a meeting weekend. Conflicts between the board and the faculty have erupted from time to time, particularly when the faculty has sensed that the board was getting into decisions about the academic program. Both sides now make a greater effort to understand the other, but the differences remain.

What do these changes have to do with the Colorado College Plan? If nothing else, they confirm the capacity of the Plan to adapt to transformations in the student, faculty, administrative and trustee culture. The Plan is praised for the successes of its students and blamed for everything from administrative burnout to the faculty divorce rate. In reality, the Plan is a vehicle that carries the academic, leisure and residential life of the institution -- nothing more, nothing less. And for the last 25 years, it has carried us rather well.

Glenn E. Brooks, known as the father of the Colorado College Plan, is a current professor of political science.