Academic life in the Pioneer Valley

As I write I pause and look up at a framed, professional photograph that hangs on the wall of my study. It shows a rural scene on a clear autumn day just after the sun has set and before darkness supervenes. In the middle there is a broad, placid river that winds, mirror-like, across a flat expanse of farmland dotted with maple trees that have begun to turn golden brown and russet red. In the background there is a range of slate-blue mountains. It is the Connecticut River in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. The mountains are the Holyoke Range, which separates the Amherst-Hadley-Northampton area of Hampshire County from the metropolitan sprawl of Holyoke and Springfield further down valley. Amherst is where I lived for more than two decades.
The Pioneer Valley was settled in the 1600s and 1700s. In the 1800s it began to acquire institutions of higher learning. By the 1970s it had a network of five colleges: Amherst and Hampshire in Amherst town, Smith in Northampton, Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, and the University of Massachusetts flagship campus on the outskirts of Amherst. Students could use a frequent, free bus service to travel between the colleges and could choose from a total of more than 5000 courses offered at the five institutions.
Despite this sense of unity, the five colleges are very different places. In the Amherst area the diversity is extraordinary. The University of Massachusetts began life in 1860 as an agricultural college and became a general state university in 1970, following the post-War expansion of higher education in the United States under the so-called 'GI Bill'. It has a pleasant campus made up of architecture that varies from undistinguished to downright bad. The central focus is a small lake and the adjacent library building, which is 28 storeys high and suffers from structural faults. With typical American pragmatism the campus is known as UMass-Amherst. The working class people from lower down the valley put the accent on the second syllable: U-Máss. They send their sons and daughters there and these young people dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to five things: sex, drugs, beer, sport and entertainment. When, fearing that they will be kicked out for having too low a grade-point average, they actually start to study, they creep into the lecture halls looking cadaverous and with grey complexions. The academic staff despise them but cannot afford to show it, as in America undergraduate higher education is a consumer-driven product.
UMass-Amherst is the only one of the five institutions with a thriving Graduate School, and that is its glory. Nevertheless, it is a place where, in true American tradition, the basketball coach earns a salary 30 per cent higher than that of the Chancellor. In fact, the ordinary people of Massachusetts, that terse breed of Yankee with an insatiable demand for consumerism, tend to think of UMass primarily in terms of basketball and football. Several of my students were basketball players--black, well over two metres tall and, in one case, a millionaire immediately on graduating, for he found a place with the leading team in Toronto and became an instant superstar.
During my time at UMass I lived through the terms of office of several chancellors. One was a slippery-mannered, Oxford-educated Scot. Several were inarticulate or incompetent. Best of all, I remember Joseph Duffey, a Chancellor who was distinguished only by his all-inclusive smile. He was adept at beaming. He graced any academic occasion--concerts, degree ceremonies, convocations--with his ultra-violet sun-lamp of a smile, which he seemed able to turn on and beam at whoever he was talking to, introducing, giving a prize to, or whatever. It was not an insignificant gift for a chancellor to have.
Higher education in the United States is broadly divided into public and private kinds. Few public institutions have much prestige (though Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and several of the University of California campuses are clear exceptions). Moreover, there are second- and third-tier public institutions such that, at poor state colleges tucked away in odd corners of the least important states miles from the last vestiges of civilisation, educational standards are truly atrocious. Therefore, rich, powerful, influential parents send their children to private colleges and universities. A colleague at UMass sent his son to Brown University in Rhode Island. The fees were so high that he said it was like buying a new car every six months: in four years that is a sizeable fleet, and such costs explain why ambitious parents start saving for their children's undergraduate education as soon as their offspring are born. It reminds me that I once visited a doctor in Northampton, Massachusetts, who at the end of the consultation begged me to come back to him for my next visit because he needed the fees: he had two children to support at private universities and was at his wits' end about how to pay for them.
The difference between a college and a university in America is that the former does not offer a graduate programme and its professors are not particularly encouraged to do research, given that teaching is their primary function. It is a curious paradox that, however prestigious a college is, a better education can be obtained from a much less chic public university that has a thriving programme of graduate studies and research. I emphasise the word 'can' as very few students have the maturity and initiative to obtain such an education, and of those who do, many are foreigners born and bred.
Amherst College is just about the most prestigious of the U.S. colleges. A four-year degree there costs about as much as the professional salary of a successful middle-ranking executive in a big American corporation. Prince Albert of Monaco went there, and so did various men who went on to be presidents of the United States. The poet Robert Frost taught there, although it is said that in one of his exams he merely wrote on a blackboard "Do something". I have no information on what the examinees actually did, but knowing Amherst College students I would suspect not very much.
I taught in the Geology Department at Amherst College for a semester. I found the students to be lacklustre performers, but I appreciated the privileges that came with the assignment, one of which was free lunches in the dining commons (which I actually had no right to, but I always walked in with an air of authority as if I had the necessary entitlements). In general, the experience showed quite clearly that all the advantages of an Amherst education were social: the particular handshake in the board room, or perhaps the Oval Office, the whispered question "So we were both class of 79, eh?" It was a very effective form of freemasonry and it clearly depended on wealth and power much more than academic ability.
Amherst College is located on a site in the centre of Amherst town. Indeed, such is the rationalism of American urban planning, that it is one quarter of the centre of town, and it owns a sizeable proportion of the rest, including Emily Dickinson's homestead, a national monument. Further down the road, on the outskirts of Amherst, is the leafy, windswept campus of Hampshire College. This was founded as an experimental institution on land donated by an apple farmer called Bob Atkins. It has retained its experimental, 1960s and 1970s counter-culture ethos. Students do not exactly take courses there, but are politely asked what they would like to do, so that they design their own 'portfolio of learning'. This delicatessen approach encapsulates what is wrong with American higher education. It ascribes too much power, too much choice and too much discrimination to a group of school-leavers who have no self discipline and no idea about what will be useful to them and what will not be. In the average degree transcript in America, the graduate has taken courses in Chinese, bible study, scuba diving, sociology of rock music and a variety of other things that fit badly together and have little or nothing to do with the alleged focus of the degree, the 'major'. At Hampshire College this tendency reaches epidemic proportions. Cynics have suggested that the best way to graduate from such a place is to write a thesis on some aspect of sex, while simultaneously playing the saxophone and roller-blading backwards. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it acquired the nickname 'Hamster College'. What is curious is that this dated pedagogic experiment has survived and continues to charge astronomically high fees which 1600 parents are willing to pay each year.
I found its professors to be an odd group. One, a colleague in Philosophy, was hardly convinced that he or anything else actually existed. He would always finish a sentence about something or someone with the words "if it is what it is", or "if he is what he is". Another, a rugged, bearded outdoorsy type in the regulation check shirt, was Professor of Geology. One summer afternoon he and I took a trip on the Connecticut River in the Hampshire College boat so that he could do some sonar studies of the river bed. Typically enough, the boat was poorly maintained and the outboard motor caught fire, which would have ended with the craft sinking and us having to swim for our lives if the Professor's student had not had the presence of mind to sling a fire-extinguisher in when we launched it. A placid type, this lad spent most of the expedition diving down to the river bed, where he mesmerised large, bewhiskered catfish with a torch and then speared them with a clasp knife and brought them up to be cooked for his dinner.
Hampshire was co-educational from its foundation, but Amherst was an all-male college until the 1980s. Indeed testosterone was its hallmark and remained so even when women were admitted. The other two colleges were all-women institutions. The reasoning behind this was that it enabled young women to realise themselves without suffering the pressure to compete with men. This may have had some resonance in past times, but by the 1980s it seemed decidedly anachronistic. If Amherst, the leading college in the entire country, could open its doors to the other sex, why could not Smith and Mount Holyoke? In any case, as soon as the young ladies left the cloistered environments of South Hadley or Northampton, they had to compete with men. Why not train them to do it sooner? The answer is that exclusivity, in whatever form it took, was always the essence of the American colleges. Here it meant female exclusivity. It was the wives of presidents of the United States who went to Smith, people like Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan.
State Route 9 is the axis of the Pioneer Valley. It runs through Northampton, under Interstate 91 to Amherst and down to the Holyoke Range. At a certain point in the (relatively) ancient township of Hadley, there is a large billboard that advertises Budweiser beer. On the back of it someone spray-painted the slogan "Let them eat Smithies... and choke!" Smithies are the female students of Smith College. Smith is rolling in money (its art museum displays a fabulous collection of relics from Renaissance Europe, the Roman and Ottoman Empires; the Orient and all over the world). The Smithies tend to be gushing types who never even think about money--they don't need to, they radiate the stuff. For some years the president of the Smith College Italian Society was the Pirelli heiress, a woman who one didn't even presume to talk to unless one turned up in a thousand-dollar suit. The vaguely revolutionary reference to Marie-Antoinette was quite appropriate to the majority of Smithies. Not all: for a while I dated a German-American Smithie (before deciding that large, heavy blondes were not my type, however good their aesthetic sensitivities were) and she was refreshingly free from the Smith College ethos of gushing conversation and trailing clouds of glory.
Mount Holyoke College was a fairly distinguished place, all cloisters and quadrangles and visual references to the 1800s (the Protozoic Era of American higher education). It's official symbolism was decidedly masonic, which was clearly the intention of its founder, Mary Lyon, who wanted to create something that would put women on the same power footing of men, as much as on the same intellectual plane. But Holyoke always had a chip on its shoulder about Smith: it was always number two when compared with the campus in Northampton.
I occasionally gave lectures at Holyoke and for a few months I had a liaison with a girl who taught Italian there. She was a physically unattractive woman who came from peasant stock in the mountains of the neglected southern region of Molise. Indeed, when I visited her at home I discovered to my surprise that her parents, who farmed the hills, spoke no Italian, only a totally incomprehensible dialect. She also invited me to the graduation day celebrations at Holyoke and I found I was the only man among at least 3000 women gathered there on that day. But they did not roast me or eat me alive. It did give me a strong sensation of being completely out of place.
One of the professors of geology at Holyoke was an intrepid woman volcanologist. For much of her adult life, before turning to academia, she had been a cowgirl in the Cascades Range of Oregon. It was said that she showed no fear, only professional interest, when confronted with an erupting volcano, an enraged steer or a bucking wild horse. Apparently she was a crack shot with a .45 magnum and an excellent rider. But when she and I ran a Five College field trip to Scotland I found that she was absolutely terrified of being abroad. Aged 47, she had never been outside the United States. She clung to me (embarrassingly) at Oxford Circus on the London Underground and begged me not to leave her there (I had other things to do than be a tourist guide). I remain perennially surprised by how little understanding Americans have of The Rest of the World. So many of them have little idea even of where it is, let alone what it is about.
So those are the Five Colleges according to my personal impressions. Founded with much earnest New England idealism, run with the Puritanism of the staff and hedonism of the students, a truly American institution.