Liberal Arts, Inc. was an unsuccessful corporation founded in late 1946, which intended to create a Great Books-based liberal arts college in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is notable for failing despite the involvement of four educators of stellar reputation, and an offer of an apparently generous endowment, later withdrawn under unclear circumstances.
In 1937, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan successfully established the Great Books curriculum at St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland, which continues to the present day. In 1946, Barr resigned the presidency of that institution "with the hearty good wishes of the board of trustees" to found a new college.
According to Glen Edward Avery , Barr thought St. John's had grown too large and feared that its land was about to be seized by the U.S. Navy for its own academy. The first such threat had been made in 1940; St. John's was saved only by the direct intervention of President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. A 1946 newspaper story says that "the college's Damocles sword again threatened to drop in 1944, by which time St. John's had lost its two greatest friends in the government." The college's board of trustees was unable to get a definite answer from Congress, then in control of Federal land-taking, on whether St. John's land would be taken, and Barr wanted to secure "a home free of the endless menace of eviction."
Charles A. Nelson, in Radical Visions, his biography of Barr and Buchanan , says they were convinced that "the navy would never accept final defeat... They were wrong, but their judgement at the time is hard to fault. No one who can recall the temper of those times will forget how powerful the navy was."
Several sites were considered for the new college. The first choice was a site in New Lebanon, N.Y., occupied by the Darrow School, which refused to sell. The final choice was the estate of Dan Hanna (son of Mark Hanna) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
The choice of this location may have been influenced by Scott Buchanan, who, according to Samuel Sass , was familiar with the area, having graduated in 1912 from Pittsfield High School. The site, officially known as Bonny Brier Farm, already contained eighteen buildings, including an inn, a dormitory, and a boathouse located on 2,500 feet (760 m) of lakeshore frontage on the lake known as Stockbridge Bowl. When the project was announced in 1946, Buchanan expected the institution to be open by September 1947, indicating that "the present buildings are sufficient to answer its purposes for the opening and the number of students attending in the first year or two." The site was about a mile and a half from Tanglewood, home of what was then called the Berkshire Symphonic Festival; in fact, it was the venue for that festival in 1934 and 1935, the first two years of its existence.
The enterprise was launched with a $4.5 million endowment from Paul W. Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon. Mellon had attended St. John's as a freshman in 1939, despite already holding degrees from Yale and Clare College, Cambridge, and studied there until 1942 when he left to enter the Army.
A corporation was formed, named "Liberal Arts, Inc." Members of the corporation included Barr, Buchanan, famous educators Mark Van Doren of Columbia University and Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, two Pittsfield attorneys, and a legal secretary. Sass indicates that Robert M. Hutchins and Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst College and another "great books" luminary, also planned to join the college. The Hanna estate was purchased and deeded to the corporation in March 1947 .
The Hanna farm property was later sold in 1948 to Hans Maeder , who founded the Stockbridge School on the site. The school, a private school for adolescents, operated from 1949 to 1976 and was notable for being completely racially integrated from its inception. . The Stockbridge School included Jackie Robinson's son among its attendees.
In August 1947, it was formally announced that the project was abandoned. Conflicting accounts of the circumstances subsequently transpired.
The stated reason was "inability to secure funds for the extensive building program needed to provide an adequate physical plant." In more detail, the trustees of the Old Dominion Foundation—Mellon's fund "felt it was unwise to authorize invasion of principal for fear that the remaining endowment would be insufficient to accomplish the purpose of the gift. It was also felt that under the circumstances it would be wiser to place the endowment with an existing institution capable of housing the educational project which Old Dominion was prepared to endow. No such institution was found and it is understood that the grant will revert to the general funds of the foundation."
Sass suggests that that was not the real reason, but does not say what the real reason was:
A November 1947 article in the Springfield Republican says plainly that there was a conflict over politics:
Charles A. Nelson devotes an entire chapter in Radical Visions to the episode. He tells a complex and detailed story which does not mention any political issues and essentially agrees with the publicly stated reasons. In his view, Barr and Buchanan overreached, and believed that Mellon would agree or had agreed to a plan much more ambitious than his original intention.
Nelson makes clear the depth of Mellon's interest; this was not a casual millionaire's whim. Mellon had read a 1940 article about St. John's in Life Magazine, and wrote in his autobiography that after reading the article he drove to Annapolis
In April 1946 Mellon wrote of an interest in "setting up an initial endowment for the St. John's Program" but of being "deterred from action by doubts as to whether St. John's College could keep its campus." He therefore set up the endowment but left in Barr's hands as to where the endowment should go. If St. John's was likely to lose its campus,
The Navy issue was resolved in favor of the college, so it might have been expected that Barr would recommend using the endowment to fund the St. John's program. Instead, Barr and Buchanan decided to found a new college. Nelson notes that "The grant letter did not envision starting a new college from scratch." Yet "the speed with which the two moved from seeking an existing institution stronger than St. John's to acquiring property for a new college seems to indicate that Barr made no significant effort to find such an institution." Nelson suggests a fundamental understanding, in which "Mellon accepted the idea of a new college in the expectation that Barr could raise the additional funds to sustain it, whereas Barr interpreted Mellon's acceptance of the substitution as a sign that he, Mellon, would supply the necessary additional funds." In a 1947 letter, Mellon wrote:
Educational perennialism is a normative educational philosophy. Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that are of everlasting pertinence to all people everywhere, and that the emphasis should be on principles, not facts. Since people are human, one should teach first about humans, rather than machines or techniques, and about liberal, rather than vocational topics.
Stockbridge is a town in Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 2,018 at the 2020 census. A year-round resort area, Stockbridge is home to the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Austen Riggs Center, and Chesterwood, home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French.
St. John's College is a private liberal arts college with dual campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. St. John's is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States as the successor institution of King William's School, a preparatory school founded in 1696; the current institution received a collegiate charter in 1784. In 1937, St. John's adopted a Great Books curriculum based on discussion of works from the Western canon of philosophical, religious, historical, mathematical, scientific, and literary works.
Stringfellow Barr was a historian, author, and former president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he, together with Scott Buchanan, instituted the Great Books curriculum.
The National Humanities Medal is an American award that annually recognizes several individuals, groups, or institutions for work that has "deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities."
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969 merger of the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation. These foundations had been set up separately by Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon, the children of Andrew Mellon.
The Norman Rockwell Museum is an art museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to the art of Norman Rockwell. It is home to the world's largest collection of original Rockwell art. The museum also hosts traveling exhibitions pertaining to American illustration.
Paul Mellon was an American philanthropist and an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of only five people ever designated an "Exemplar of Racing" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He was co-heir to one of America's greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank created by his grandfather Thomas Mellon, his father Andrew W. Mellon, and his father's brother Richard B. Mellon. In 1957, when Fortune prepared its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa Mellon-Bruce, and his cousins Sarah Mellon and Richard King Mellon, were all among the richest eight people in the United States, with fortunes of between 400 and 700 million dollars each.
Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Franklin College and Marshall College, in 1853.
Gutenberg College is a private, four-year Great Books college in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1994, the school currently has 20 students.
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Scott Buchanan was an American philosopher, educator, and foundation consultant. He is best known as the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College, at Annapolis, Maryland.
Berkshire Community College is a public community college in Berkshire County, Massachusetts with its primary campus in Pittsfield. It also has a satellite campus in Great Barrington and classroom spaces in the city of Pittsfield. Established in the 1960s, it is the oldest college founded by the Massachusetts Community Colleges Executive Office.
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Hans Karl Maeder was an innovative educator who founded the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and served as its director and headmaster for 23 years.
Stockbridge School was a progressive co-educational boarding school for adolescents near the Interlaken section of Stockbridge, Massachusetts and which operated from 1948 to 1976.
Abraham Barr Snively II was an American football player and coach of lacrosse, football, and ice hockey. He played football for Princeton University from 1921 to 1923 and was captain of the 1923 team. He held coaching positions at Williams College in lacrosse, football and hockey from 1928 to 1948 and at the University of New Hampshire from 1953 to 1964.
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The University of Wisconsin Experimental College was a two-year college designed and led by Alexander Meiklejohn inside the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a great books, liberal arts curriculum. It was established in 1927 and closed in 1932. Meiklejohn proposed the idea for an alternative college in a 1925 Century magazine article. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Glenn Frank, became the University of Wisconsin's president and invited Meiklejohn to begin the college within the university. Despite pushback from the faculty, the college opened in the fall of 1927 with a self-governing community of 119 students and less than a dozen faculty. Students followed a uniform curriculum: Periclean Athens for freshmen and modern America for sophomores. The program sought to teach democracy and to foster an intrinsic love of learning within its students.
John Barrett III is an American politician serving as a Democratic member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He was elected to the post on November 7, 2017, filling the vacant seat previously held by Gailanne Cariddi, who had died of cancer in June 2017. He represents the furthest northwest district in the state, the 1st Berkshire district. Barrett serves on three committees in the chamber: the Joint Committee on Marijuana Policy, the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, and the Joint Committee on Election Laws. Barrett was reelected to the House of Representatives in 2018.