How has Johnston influenced the University? Certainly in Johnston's 25 years, the University has evolved from advertising itself as a traditional, baptist University, to a secular innovator. But how much of that is due directly to the University, and how much is more due to the times, or reformers in the University proper? Or perhaps Johnston can simply be given credit for being the catalyst for the University's catching up to the age. The University prospectus now calls the University a school embracing innovation: ``The University of Redlands is synonymous with innovation.''[23] Internships and independent studies are reportedly encouraged, and business students are required to double-major. Many University evaluations now also acknowledge the role of the Johnston students in enlivening and leading classes.
Another part of the same prospectus talks about the University as a ``dynamic living-learning community.'' Clearly, however, the term means something different to Johnston and to the University.
In the mid-seventies, Johnson had initiated a UWW program on its campus. The program grew to offer both bachelor's and a master's of humanistic psychology. With the low enrollments and budget crunches that were plaguing the University, the University decided to expand the Johnston UWW program. In 1976, that reorganiztion took place, creating Alfred North Whitehead College. Whitehead has become a very successful part of the University, now with 20 full-time professors of its own, and heavily subsidizing the operation costs of the University.
This year, a new program, the Spinnaker program, offered University students the opportunity to have a living-learning opportunity in some ways similar to Johnston's. Rather that the community being made up of egalitarian student-faculty relations, constantly working together towards a new conception of education, however, it is hierarchical. It's similarity to a living-learning environment is in the integration of the classroom and the actual physical learning space, by having classes in dorm lobbies and having the freshmen in the Spinnaker hall take that class together. In an interview with the head of Student Life, I learned that she felt the Spinnaker program was working well. The impression I got from a student in the program, as well as students who had talked to other freshmen in the program, was that it was not working at all.
Many other experimental schools exist independently and thus the transmission of their more successful discoveries to traditional universities is very slow. At the University of Reldands, due to our proximity and the overlap of the two programs, new ideas can be more immediate. In this sense it will better serve us to puruse a collaboration rather than a stand-off. Our new vision, in order to succeed, must be at least generally shared by not only Johnston students and faculty but by the greater University.''[7]
``That new vision hasn't happened yet,'' Margie Austin, Johnston secretary for 20 years, told me. And she does not think it will. ``You might get the idea that they [University Administration] are accepting things by incorporating little things into their programs.'' However, the University does not acknowledge that these ideas come from Johnston, or that the continued existence of Johnston is indeed important to the University. According to Austin, Johnston had two unforseeable problems that really came to haunt it: not enough startup money to really be able to break from the University, or to continue to offer its own programs, and the unexpected counter-culture students that Redlands was so indignant to be associated with. The Board of Overseers of the College never gave enough money to make the College seem like a worthwhile donation to potential benefactors, and Johnston alumns have only raised very little towards the operation of the Johnston Center. As long as Johnston does not have enough donations coming in in its own name, the University will not support it.FOOTNOTE[1]
Founding Johnston faculty-member Bill McDonald has perhaps the most optimistic view of the integration of Johnston into the University:
From my perspective, which includes a period of open warfare, I think that JC students are now in fact ``integrated'' into the University, and in just the right way. Integration fortunately doesn't mean unification: Johnstonians, most of them, work well with University faculty and in University classes while maintaining their sharp critical edge about the place and their passionate sense of their difference. They're impatient with boring/overly-structured classes, but then so are many University students; one of the dangers in working with us ``minority'' Johnstonians is accepting our frequently lazy, monolithic/binary account of the University as an institution; the Larger Campus reeks with cub-cultures of its own. Taking integration in this sense -- Martin Luther King's sense -- I think the students have been successful -- and extraordinarily mature.[16]
My impression from my visit with Johnston is that Johnston is not working effectively enough to solve its problems to be taken seriously by the University Student Life office. For example, Johnston incessantly suffers noise problems, partially because it chooses not to have hall designations. Additionally, some Johnston students feel so much that the community is not able to deal with their needs that they are willing to sacrifice the future of the community by filing complains with the Dean of Student Life. If the community continues to make people feel this alienated, and they continue to go to Student Life, I predict that Student Life will attempt to drastically increase its management role on the Complex. If Johnston's process is viable, it will have to prove that soon by examining itself and formulating a plan for avoiding the alienation that has occurred in its community.