Free The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) by Mary McCarthy Page B

little shoals of Jocelyn students would still be found living together co-operatively, in Malibu or St. Augustine—occasionally with an ex-teacher—sharing a single allowance under the bamboo tree.
    Hence, though the college was in continual hot water financially, it had inevitably grown accustomed to close shaves and miraculous windfalls. Only the bursar seriously worried about balancing the budget, and his worries were accepted tolerantly—this was his métier. The faculty now took it for granted that fresh students would appear every fall out of nowhere, from the blue sky of promoters’ ventures, a strange new race, or stock issued by a wildcat bank, spending what would appear to be stage-money; and the yearly advent of these registrants in defiance of the laws of probability created in the staff a certain sense of displacement or of nonchalance or autarchic license, depending on the individual character. Careless of the future, fractious, oblivious of the past, believing that the industrial revolution was an actual armed uprising of the nineteenth century, that oranges grew in Norway and fir-trees on the Nile, these sons of shortages and rationing seemed to have sprung from no human ancestry but from War, like the dragon’s teeth sown in the Theban meadow. And the faculty which was teaching them their Cadmean alphabet fell to some extent under their influence; they too became indifferent to the morrow and forgetful of past incentives. There was a whiff of paganism in the air, of freedom from material cares that evoked the South Sea islands even in the Pennsylvania winter; more than one faculty-member, washed up on this coral strand, came to resemble, in dress and habits, the traditional beachcomber of fiction.
    But the absence of pressure from without, the unconcern of parents and inertia of alumni groups, produced at the same time an opposite and corrective tendency. The faculty contained a strong and permanent minority of principled dissenters, men and women whose personal austerities and ethical drives had made them unacceptable to the run of college presidents and who had found the freedom of Jocelyn both congenial and inspiriting. If beachcombers had come to rest here, so had a sect of missionaries, carrying the progressive doctrine from Bennington, Bard, or Reed, and splitting here at once, like the original Calvinist college, into a new group of sects and factions. From its inception, the college had been rent by fierce doctrinal disputes of a quasi-liturgical character. Unlike the more established progressive colleges, which lived, so to speak, on the fat of their original formula, without questioning its content, Jocelyn had attracted to itself a whole series of irreconcilables, to whom questioning was a passion, who, in the words of Tolstoy, could not be silent. Beginning with the founder’s time, Jocelyn had served as a haven, like the early Pennsylvania country itself, with its Moravian and Mennonite and Hutterite and United Brethren chapels, its Quakers and Shakers and Anabaptists, for the persecuted of all tendencies within the fold of educational reform, and each new wave of migrants from the centers of progressive orthodoxy wished to perpetuate at Jocelyn the very conditions from which they had fled—thus the Bennington group assailed the Sarah Lawrence group and both assailed Dewey and Columbia, i.e., the parent-movement. Those who did not subscribe to any item of the progressive creed tended nevertheless to take sides with one faction or another for temperamental reasons; Aristotelians in philosophy joined with the Theatre myth-group to fight the Social Sciences.
    An unresolved quarrel between the sciences and the humanities was at the bottom of every controversy, each claiming against the other the truer progressive orthodoxy, the words, scholastic, formalistic, scientism, positivistic, being hurled back and forth in the same timbered hall that had shivered to Petrine, pseudo-Protestant,