A Very “New” Educational Program for 1964
The “contract system” replaces distribution requirements. Students cooperate/negotiate with a faculty sponsor to define their “program of study”, term by term. Foreign language requirements gone. Western civilization gone. Religion gone. Humanities gone. Science gone. Each student will have a “major” in order to graduate, but the first 1-2 years can be very flexible. The student-faculty relation/interaction is essential. Starting with just 100 “high potential” 18-year-olds in 1964.
Narrative evaluations replace letter grades. Pass, fail or incomplete. Faculty try to clearly define “mastery” up front for each course, tutorial or project. Real feedback is provided in person and in writing regarding progress and “opportunities for improvement”. Faculty and students are fellow learners, but standards are high; basically elite graduate school level.
Many independent study projects are required for all students. Tutorials with significant “independent study” components are offered by faculty to cover subjects not frequently offered. Students are encouraged to ” define their program of study, including the creation of interdisciplinary majors.
A senior “honors thesis” is required for graduation. The ability to research and write at a high level is required. Students must pass an oral examination of their thesis and related “major” program of study. Quasi-graduate school for undergraduates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_Florida
Economic Context Circa 1960
The US is leaving behind the pains of the 1930’s and 1940’s, enjoying more than a decade of solid economic growth. The business cycle is still very relevant. Rapid and extended post-war growth was unexpected once the economic demand of the war fell off. General economic growth into the future is now generally expected by 1964. The Keynesian economic model and policy prescriptions appear to be working. But true poverty continues in both urban and rural areas, especially among the elderly. Union-management relations remain tense, with strikes and labor actions frequently in the news.
Social Context
This is a conformist period where most individuals are willing to “go along to get along” in a world that is generally deemed positive by most. Religious attendance increases and conformist symbols on money “in God we trust” and the pledge of allegiance are adopted in the context of the Cold War. There is no 4th religious “Great Awakening”, but Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches see rapid growth. The Roman Catholic Church works through the second Vatican Conference to reform, update, reorganize and modernize the church. Mainstream Protestant churches are at the peak of their membership and influence. Liberal Paul Tillich is the representative theologian, emphasizing “matters of ultimate concern” and “the courage to be”. “Rock and Roll” music grows as an expression of teenage independence, but the “British Invasion” is yet to come. Racial justice is growing as a major topic, south and north. National and regional politicians take small steps forward on race as liberal judges take controversial larger steps ahead.
Global Context
The Cold War is topic A, B and C. The threat of nuclear war is omnipresent with students learning to “duck and cover” and citizens and communities building “bomb shelters”. Oppenheimer and other scientists who wish to “limit” further development are sidelined by the military and national leaders. Eisenhower warns about the power of the military-industrialist complex as he retires. The United Nations fills some global functions and Europe begins its long journey of integration. The US builds NATO into a strong alliance and supports the recovery of Germany, Japan and Europe through the Marshall Plan. Imperial/colonial holdings are released around the world within the context of the Cold War. Military technology continues to advance. The US is shocked by Soviet rocket, nuclear and satellite advances and invests in programs to recapture the lead. Displaced people and immigrants are resettled. Limited food production, oil availability and unlimited population growth are highlighted as a new Malthusian challenge. The pain is mostly felt in the “less developed” world, but policy elites highlight the risks. The Peace Corps is founded.
Political Context
Truman rode FDR’s goodwill to victory in 1948. Eisenhower accepted the New Deal and governed in a low-key, centrist manner for two terms. Populism and McCarthyism (nationalism) were largely eliminated in the 1950’s, but the existential threat of “Red” communism in Russia, China and its allies remained as a major political debate. Modern conservativism began with the academic scribblings of Russel Kirk (1953), the voice of William Buckley (1955) and the political moxie of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. However, John Kennedy squeaked out a narrow win over Richard Nixon in 1960 and provided that time with an idealistic, progressive, academically supported New Frontier and Camelot.
Intellectual Context
Some academics were walking away from the party line Marxism of China and the USSR by 1960 as the shortcomings of the economic, political and social systems were becoming apparent. They were very focused on the French existentialism of Sartre and Camus. In the shadow of “mutually assured destruction”, this was not surprising. The structuralism and post-modernist philosophies emerged at this time but did not quickly impact American cultural life. Universities were growing rapidly in this period, fueled by the GI Bill and the coming Baby Boom freshmen.
Public intellectuals were still a significant part of national debates about politics, technology, the economy and culture. The mainstream media provided print, radio and TV stages for public debate.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-happened-americas-public-intellectuals-180963668/
https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/where-have-all-the-thinkers-gone/
The “popular” intellectual debate was largely focused on the eclipse of the individual versus the power of the group, whether that group was society, advertisers, corporations, neighbors, property developers or government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Elite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Organization_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Gray_Flannel_Suit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
Book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye
The continued growth of science and technology as practical applied science and theory was also a major concern at this time. The split between scientists and the humanities scholars was emphasized. The changing view of “science” as a firm, fixed, objective body of work conducted by objective scientists was also called into question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions
Birth of New College
The local (Sarasota and Florida) and national founders of the college were shaped by the context of the period. In hindsight, it is clear that they worried about growing “individuals” who could resist the power of the various social and organizational forces that demanded compliance. This was not a left- or right-wing political initiative. These were business, government and university elites doing their best in a patriotic American way to shape a new institution in a growing city, state and country.
60 years later, it’s not clear that these founding principles were “leaning left”. The focus was on the individual, not on the community, society, nation, state, religion, history or culture. The founders: well-minded business, religious and academic elites, emphasized this dimension of education because they believed that a simple, patriotic, conventional, practical, productive, well-defined, professional, feasible, traditional model of education was simply inadequate. It’s 1960. Two dozen successful people got together to form a new college in a resort town. They did a quick SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) of colleges and universities. They chose to innovate. Let’s “reach for the moon”. We want to attract the “best and the brightest”. (Ouch).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
College freshmen today (1960) are unduly shaped by society’s expectations. Let’s “turn them loose”. Young people are much more mature today due to their exposure to the “mass media”. They are very well educated in many high schools. Faculty and administrators are also much more highly qualified to lead the education process. Let’s fully engage them in the learning process.
This was an idealistic birth process only possible in a positive period of confident national growth.
I don’t see any incompatibility between New College’s historical educational program and associated learning environment with Florida Governor DeSantis’s stated desire to improve the critical thinking skills of students, making them less influenced by “trendy” philosophies. I believe that New College already provides a solid base in those skills. The burden of proof is on new trustees or new programs of study to better deliver the desired results.
Good News 
Nice article by Elizabeth Mitchell. Where are the Intellectuals. I’ve often wondered why there hasn’t been the public offering of these thinkers )outside of possibly PBS). At least we have the short form in TED talks, which may not have been obvious when she wrote this.
New College certainly has evolved over time as your historical analysis suggests. However, there was a pedagogical and intellectual purpose behind the selection of variants determining what succeeded. The changes p
There are a few historical errors here and then finally a colossal misrepresentation of the “individual/group” dichotomy. The academic year 1964-1965 was entirely devoted to a core curriculum on principles related the contributions of Hutchins at Chicago. There were three departments: Science, Humanities, and Social Science. Lectures were to the whole student body in College Hall. There were some electives and and I introduced the tutorial method by persuading Ross Borden, the head of Humanities, to do a weekly tutorial with me on the Divine Comedy. He was an English professor so knew as little about Dante as I did, but the Divine Comedy is always supplied by rich annotation, and we learned as we progressed from Inferno to Paradise, knowledge that I expanded over years and which stayed with me all my life. As at Oxford, it was one-on-one. Most professors had some extra stuff on offer but the whole college was required to do the Core curriculum and to take a comprehensive exam at the end of the year. The contract system was instituted in 1965. Quite a few of us liked the Core curriculum (perhaps not the scientists, however, who might have had less interest in the humanities. It is not true that the language requirement was dropped. I had to learn enough French to read Madame Bovary to graduate. There was other specific requirements. The motto of the college, more or less, was “Every student is responsible, in the last analysis, for his own education. The emphasis on the contract system in this article makes it sounds like there were no classes, only tutorials, which is absurd and unsustainable. But the faculty-student ratio was about 7 to 1. The emphasis was, indeed, on the individual, although that is (technically) a conservative position opposed by anyone with Marxian leanings. So called individualism is spurned by the left as “voluntarism,” a rather confusing term used by Marxists. New College was neither right nor left, exactly, but there was a small knot of frank Goldwaterite conservatives in the Charter Class. I now see them as primarily anti-communists, and I evolved into an anti-communist too. Ex-communists are a group that on the whole is intellectually dishonest and marred by bad faith. But in our youth we didn’t see the ideologies clearly. We read Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and were late in coming to understand what I think of as the left-fascism of the Frankfort School. I had to learn what was wrong with Stalinism on my own. Because even “left-anticommunists” were liars, this took a long time. But New College, probably founded with Cold-War thinking, was politically amorphous or Brown would’ve said polymorphous, and I think it may be true that the college has been polymorphous for sixty years. I was definitely on the individualist end. I went to Cornell after Paul DeMan had moved to Yale but his influence was still in the air. Eventually I was more taken by Harold Bloom, M. H. Abrams’s best student . . .