From the Cast-Iron Shore by Francis Oakley

Author:Francis Oakley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2018-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Transformative Sixties (i): The New Williams

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Philip Larkin

That the 1960s at large did indeed prove to be transformative is not in question. That proved to be true of almost every dimension of social, intellectual, religious, and cultural life, not only in North America but also in Western Europe and beyond. Called peremptorily into question were the established modalities of political life and, with them, hallowed intellectual assumptions, long-prevailing attitudes towards race, class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as traditional marital and family roles and, as Larkin’s poem amusingly signals, the deeply rooted sexual mores of yesteryear. Living through this great and multifaceted upheaval of the spirit, and especially so on a college campus, could be a destabilizing experience, as challenging as it was invigorating. Its reverberations proved to be long enduring. In some ways, we are still forced to maneuver uneasily today as we attempt to come finally to terms with the torrent of change that stemmed from that watershed era. And not least of all in the world of higher education at large, as well as in the small sector of freestanding liberal arts colleges to which Williams itself belongs.

By the end of the decade, the successful launching of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning testified to the degree to which change had become the norm in institutions of higher education and stasis a thing of the past. And that shift had by then left a deep imprint on Williams. In 1961 when we arrived there, it was the “Old Williams” that we encountered—an all-male, fraternity-dominated institution, with the college still functioning firmly in loco parentis and its 1100 students (soon to be edged up in number to about 1250) subject to various parietal regulations and still required, some eighty years after Harvard had abandoned a similar rule, to attend Sunday chapel. Classes were still held on Saturday mornings and classroom attendance in general was both compulsory and carefully monitored, with only a stipulated number of cuts permitted. Students took five courses each semester, and opportunities for interdisciplinary studies were extremely limited; the available majors were nearly all departmentally based and tightly organized. They were built around a substantial core of required sequential courses and culminated in a reasonably muscular major or comprehensive examination. No more than a decade later, that firm institutional profile had been radically altered. Compulsory chapel was now a thing of the past; so, too, were Saturday classes and compulsory attendance at class. Fraternities had been dislodged from their long-standing pinnacle of prominence in student life, and membership in them had come in the end to be proscribed. Instead, students were now housed and fed in college-owned residential houses possessed of a measure of self-governance, and faculty associates were attached to each house. The semester course load had been reduced to four, and the academic calendar had been revamped to make room for a monthlong

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