History of The University of Redlands - Redlands During The 1960s and 1970s

Redlands During The 1960s and 1970s

The effects of the free speech movement began to be felt at Redlands in 1967, when students invited Bettina Aptheker, a Cal student and avowed Communist, to speak on campus. Although the event occurred without violence or other disruption to the university, Armacost suspended the organizers for five weeks in violation of a 1963 Board policy that explicitly prohibited communists from speaking on campus. He later reduced the suspensions to two and a half weeks, and a university and community council was developed for approving controversial speakers.

In this time, planning started for an experimental college to be attached to the University of Redlands. James Graham Johnston, of IBM, made the founding grant, and buildings were constructed for the purpose of developing Johnston College as a separate institution that would complement Redlands, similar to the way the Claremont Consortium was organized. Although the Redlands planners only intended it to be an academically autonomous school of foreign policy, in line with the ordinary conventions of the university, those directly involved as its students and faculty envisioned Johnston as something far different.

Dr. Presley McCoy, Johnston's first Chancellor, developed its contract-driven pedagogical philosophy by means of a series of encounter groups held at an initiating student and faculty retreat at Pilgrim Pines, Yuciapa, in September 1969. This encounter-driven approach became the lasting pedagogical philosophy of Johnston. According to John Watt, a faculty fellow who was present at Pilgrim Pines:

Certainly one of Johnston's major and most lasting objectives was to find ways of combining education of mind and heart. This was expressed in the language of the times as combining cognitive and effective learning, creating a living learning environment and confluent education. None of these concepts does justice to the intensity with which the College engaged in this process, especially under the leadership of its first Chancellor Pressley McCoy... McCoy's approach... was the force which brought about Pilgrim Pines and which introduced the encounter group mode into every social structure, from classes to faculty and community meetings. -John Watt, "Johnston College: A Retrospective View", Journal of Humanistic Psychology, XXI (Spring 1981), pp. 41-42.

This approach did not bode well with President Armacost, who went to Pilgrim Pines in order to discuss McCoy's controversial hiring of Jeanne Friedman, an avowed Communist, as a faculty member, following her well-publicized arrest for felonies at Stanford. According to Ed Williams, another professor present at these events:

A great moment of truth came at Pilgrim Pines when the University President came to the terrible realization that some promises he never could endorse had gone out to all 180 vibrating students, in materials he hadn't read carefully enough. There was an amazing confrontation with the President and Pres McCoy on a public platform sticking their jaws out at each other. Pres said, 'We have the right to develop our own social rules,' President Armacost said, 'Pres, you do not and you never did.'

The profound repercussions of that confrontation alone almost blew up Pilgrim Pines; and we faculty, consciously, deliberately went much further in developing academic collegiality with students than we otherwise might have done, just as a way of relieving their anger and frustration over social control issues.

I suppose a fourth seed of destruction was thereby sown. Because students emerged with split feelings, almost split personalities: 'The academic program is ours and well will live by it heart and soul; but the student life policies are theirs, and we will undermine them however we can. We will develop our own group ethic of self-protective disobedience. -Ed WIlliams, "A Confirmation and Critique", Journal of Humanistic Psychology, XXI (Spring 1981, p 20-21)

These objectives were realized when Armacost suspended a Johnston girl for keeping a cat in her dorm, in violation of health regulations. McCoy readmitted her, and her cat, a few weeks later, which was one of many factors leading to McCoy's forced resignation in 1971. These events continued to be debated on campus for years afterward; however, as an independent institution, Johnston had lost the support of both the University and the community of Redlands.

Broader student militancy at Redlands lead to compulsory chapel attendance gradually being discontinued in the early 1970s. The seventh President of the University, Dr. Douglas Moore, was not even Baptist. The campus became truly interdenominational and multicultural, going for years without Baptist clergymen on the Board of Trustees, but remained true to the spirit of its founding.