Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 in the hills of western North Carolina. It was a radical experiment in higher education, with a focus on the arts and largely self-directed learning. BMC was not accredited, but some students used their GI Bill benefits to attend (in the days before accreditation was made mandatory). The school survived until 1957.
Despite the fact that few students went to BMC, it developed a reputation that still lingers. In today’s Martin Center article, Anthony Hennen looks at the school. While in existence, Hennen writes:
It had a strong core of teachers to attract students, attracting artists like Josef and Anni Albers from Germany after the Nazis rose to power and, in its later years, architect Buckminster Fuller and poet Charles Olson, among others. A liberal arts school, president John A. Rice emphasized the importance of the arts in every student’s education.
Structure was almost entirely absent. Students and faculty decided on the curriculum together. Many of the students were artistically inclined, coming from New York and San Francisco. Eventually BMC had to close because of financial problems.
What we learn from BMC, Hennen argues:
The disappearance of experimental colleges like Black Mountain has left American higher education more uniform and rigid. Such oddball schools would be regulated out of existence today; the curriculum would be seen as too individualized or low-quality because it doesn’t meet the requirements of an accreditor. ‘We have basic education plans, we have five-year strategies, we have long-term planning, we have tenure, we have accreditation, we have so many checks and balances, we have all these things that are antithetical to Black Mountain College,’ Professor Joseph Bathani of Appalachian State University said. A college today can’t operate without a master plan directing it.
One of the many adverse effects of federal intervention in higher education has been its homogenization. “Oddball” colleges face a hostile, daunting regulatory system that makes it nearly impossible for them to get started.
I think Hennen’s conclusion is right: “Black Mountain College serves as a reminder that American higher ed has also lost a certain freewheeling, experimental approach that served students who didn’t find a place in the traditional system.”