Reflections on Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College began in 1933 when John Andrew Rice, a classics professor, and several of his colleagues and students left Rollins College in Florida amidst a storm of controversy regarding issues of academic freedom. Their desire was to create a new type of college, an experimental liberal arts school with the arts at the center of the curriculum. There was no logical reason to start a small liberal arts college in remote Western North Carolina in 1933. The market did not demand it, nor could the economy support it. It was a confluence of personal circumstances and opportunities that made it happen (Reynolds, 1995). This was the same time in which the United States was struggling through the Great Depression and Europe was seeing the rise of Nazism, the closing of the Bauhaus, and the persecution of artists and intellectuals. Black Mountain survived the Depression, World War II, dissension and changes in leadership and faculty, until faculty disagreements and financial difficulties ultimately brought its “adjournment.”

Some fundamental beliefs shaped its practices. The first was that living and learning should be intertwined, that education happens everywhere. While information, analytical skills, and reason were highly prized, they were not considered the whole of life. All aspects of living were considered important for learning. There was a strong emphasis on fulfilling the social responsibilities of a community without sacrificing individual freedom. Students and faculty alike lived on the campus, took each other’s classes, created celebrations and performances, and made art of all kinds. They participated in the work program of the college, raising their own food, and building and maintaining the facilities of the college.

Rice’s philosophy was to create a climate of freedom, to offer invitation after invitation (Duberman, 1973). Especially in the arts students and faculty were encouraged to try all forms, to experiment. One of the underlying factors at Black Mountain was a desire to see in a new and fresh way, free of previous restrictions. What was most encouraged was experimentation. Rice believed that there was something of the artist in everyone. He also believed that the whole community was the teacher. Rice was an innovative educational theorist, a colleague of John Dewey. He aspired to teach philosophy in a dynamic of query and pursuit, promoting constant questioning, and he was strongly opposed to a controlled pre-established syllabus or any bureaucratic control of the educational process (Katz, 2002).

Josef Albers of the recently closed Bauhaus in Germany was brought in to lead the art department, which he did for 16 years. His philosophies of art making and teaching were extremely important in shaping the foundation of the school. Albers saw art as revelatory and transformational, not just informational, and he felt that experimentation was more important than production. He believed that one should start not with theory, but with materials, and that free play was crucial in the beginning. Specific aesthetic forms were not taught. He believed that as one worked with materials and through experimentation an individual aesthetic could develop. His wife, Anni Albers, exemplified his ideas in her weaving, endlessly experimenting with new weaves, materials and designs. Her presence at the college also served to bridge the gap between art and craft, which both Alberses felt was an unfortunate artifact of the Renassiance (Katz, 2002). Albers was innovative and dynamic, and his presence drew other distinguished artists to Black Mountain. In the early years the ideas of Rice and of Albers inspired continual experimentation and innovation.

The natural beauty of the setting was a factor in bringing both students and faculty to Black Mountain. Doughton Cramer (1990), a student in the early 30’s, put it this way:

The college’s setting was extraordinarily important to me. The mountains of western North Carolina are beautiful beyond description, and it is as if the atmosphere of the College was consciously a part of the living beauty. It made me sensitive to everything. (pp. 80-81)

During the 1940’s Black Mountain grew and flourished. It moved location to nearby Lake Eden at the foot of the Seven Sisters Mountains and began the continuous project of constructing the campus, primarily with student and faculty labor. May Sarton (1990), in a letter to a friend after visiting Black Mountain, offered a glimpse into the spirit of the college at that time. She wrote, “The thing that holds Black Mountain together and keeps it from the phoniness I feared is that they are building their new building with their own hands. It is something hard to describe in words. . . .” (p.80) Again she comments, “There is continual dissatisfaction and improvement and clearing of fundamental issues going on. Every single person in the college feels responsible for it.” (p. 80)

Black Mountain reached its peak of enrollment during this time, partly due to the special summer institutes that became full-blown multi-disciplinary culture institutes. (Patterson, 1995). There were also internal and external difficulties. Rice had resigned amidst faculty controversy in 1937, and an unfortunate incident brought the sudden departure of a subsequent rector in 1945. Money was an ongoing issue. Faculty never were paid more than a token salary, along with their room and board. Race was another divisive issue. Black Mountain was the first college in the United Stated to admit Black students in 1945.

The 1950’s were a period of decline from an enrollment standpoint, but still a time of inspiring innovation and remarkable energy from an artistic standpoint, bringing John Cage’s first legendary “happening,” and other multidisciplinary arts events. Under the leadership of the poet Charles Olsen, Black Mountain became a vital center for contemporary writing. Olsen founded The Black Mountain Review, an arts magazine whose seven issues helped establish the Black Mountain writers as well as others such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as important forces in American literature (Patterson, 1995).

Michael Rumaker was a student at Black Mountain in its later days, under the leadership of Charles Olsen. In his recently published memoir of that time Rumaker (2003) writes that Olsen’s advice to students was always to take what feeds you. So there were many opportunities, to write with Charles Olson, to dance however awkwardly with Merce Cunningham, to improvise, thanks to Stefan Wolpe, on the various Steinways around the campus. Rumaker (2003) was also influenced by the setting of the college. He writes:

I was learning not only the slowed pace of the school itself but also the slow time of the Seven Sisters Mountains, so that my movements, even my heartbeat became slower, yet, paradoxically, my eyes and mind became sharper, began to perceive. . . new ideas new ways of seeing and thinking. . . ideas and visions that seemed to stream everywhere, tumbling and echoing from ridge to ridge over all of the hundreds of acres of land that was Black Mountain, ideas and ways of seeing and being that would in years to come stream everywhere beyond its borders. (pp. 143-144)

Black Mountain College was a group of creative people living and learning together. It held to the radical idea of college as community, always complex and imperfect, where both cooperation and conflict flourished with intensity. It existed in geographic isolation from the rest of the world. Imagination, inspiration, intuition, and integration were seen as fundamental to all learning. The process of artistic making was seen as a model for integrating vision, materials, imagery, and structure.

Black Mountain unquestionably became a nurturing ground for much that was later considered innovative in education and the arts. But beyond the names of famous people who studied and taught there, it was, says Duberman (1973), really the story of a small group of people attempting to find some resonance between their ideas and their lives. It was a disparate group of individuals who committed themselves to a common purpose, who were resilient enough to hold the inevitable conflicts involved, and who sometimes were brave enough to allow themselves to be transformed by the experience. It was at its worst a series of bitter squabbles, but at its best a glimpse (not a sustained vision) of how both diversity and commonality can coexist and reinforce each other.

The diversity of experience that characterized the Black Mountain College cannot adequately be reflected in such a brief summary. I have attempted to capture the flavor of its story, particularly as it relates to attitudes and values about the nature of learning, community, and the arts. The writer, Fielding Dawson, in an interview with Joseph Bathanti (1995), said that the learning at Black Mountain was life changing. It was facilitated not only by the living/learning community itself, but also and especially by the fact that all the teachers were doing what they were teaching.

Some of the most interesting commentary about Black Mountain comes from M.C. Richards (1973, 1989, 1990, 1996). Her experience at Black Mountain is reflected in almost all of her written works, and it is she who has written most clearly about the dynamic tensions that existed between the ideal and practical at Black Mountain. Richards (1996) said of Black Mountain, “She was born in controversy and died in controversy, splendid in the between, as she inspired and shattered dreams of liberation and fulfillment.” (p.61)

Richards left the University of Chicago to come to Black Mountain to teach English in 1945. She was drawn by the vision of possibilities for education and community free from grades, tenure, and administrative bureaucracy and by the three-fold program of community life, studio arts, and intellectual discipline based on the imagination. Richards (1996) said of that time, “We were called to a new consciousness, and we felt the thrill of a new vision—something generous, resourceful, contemporary, witty, informed, visionary, and grounded in the daily work we chose to share. . . .” (p.67)

She was devastated when the ideal didn’t work out. She left Black Mountain and left teaching for a number of years. In those years following Black Mountain, the question she continued to ask herself again and again was why such intelligent, creative, idealistic, and well-educated people could not make community work. She concluded that the members of the community had not developed the habits necessary for the commitment to process. She also felt that, despite a real commitment to live in community, each of them carried shadows of adversarial ways, all in the name of armored idealism (Richards, 1996).

In her later life Richards transformed her sense of loss into a sense of gratitude. She wrote of Black Mountain, “We did the best we could. We lit our little light on the darkling plain of higher education and human values and it has not gone out.” (Richards, 1996, p. 67) She added, “There is a view of creativity shining through the fabric of Black Mountain which to me has the wisdom of the Fool—the wisdom of the Saint. It has affected deeply my own lifelong engagement with creativity as a Life Path.” (p.67)