|
Berea College:
|
Walk around Berea College in southeast Kentucky and you would never suspect that you were in a hotbed of profound populism. I had attended Centre College in the nearby Bluegrass region and felt comfortable at a small liberal arts institute like this, with its Georgian architecture, bustling students and palpable serenity. But the seeming sameness is illusory, because Berea stands as a direct challenge to the status quo in American higher education.
These students pay absolutely no tuition. And every one of them is enrolled in the mandatory labor program, their work ranging from farming to office management, weaving to piano instruction. And then there is something about the sense of community here. Like a lot of colleges, Berea was founded to educate specific populations, in its case blacks, women and poor kids from Appalachia. Unlike a lot of colleges, however, the moral and political thrust of its original mission is still in evidence, even as American higher education has changed enormously around it.
Given these unusual features, Berea may strike some as a standing rebuke to various trends prominent in the American collegiate scene. In addition to its divergent policies on tuition and work, the school has many of those qualities of soul and character that education critic and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz has famously complained are now missing from undergraduate education in the Ivy League. To get a sense of what this looked like up close, I visited Berea for several days last fall.
Opened in 1855, while abolitionists were fighting pro-slavery militias for control of “Bleeding Kansas,” the college was initially housed in a one-room log cabin. Its founder, John G. Fee, the son of a slave-owner, was an evangelical prohibitionist and abolitionist. He used the New Testament to argue, in theory and in practice, for the free and equal education of all Americans regardless of gender, race, or condition of servitude. Fee took as his mottoes two particularly democratic lines from Scripture: “Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all thy heart; … and thy neighbor as thyself” (Luke 10:27), and “Do unto others what thou would have them do unto thee” (Matthew 7:12).
Fee’s refusal to accept the established notion that women and blacks were inherently inferior attracted the notice of the great Kentucky statesman and emancipation advocate Cassius Clay, who provided him with ten acres of hilly farmland about 30 miles south of Lexington with which to initiate his experiment. Four years into its undertaking, pro-slavery vigilantes, fearful that the new school’s teachings could inspire a slave uprising, drove Berea’s faculty and students from the county.
Fee spent the Civil War years in Ohio raising money for his school and promptly returned in January of 1866, restarting the institution as a bastion of “antislavery, anti-caste, anti-rum, [and] anti-sin” education, open to all the deserving poor, regardless of race or gender, who proclaimed their allegiance to Berea’s central tenet, from Acts 17:17—“God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.”
~
My first morning at Berea I met Jordan Sims, a senior majoring in African American Studies and minoring in Business and Music. Jordan is from urban Lexington and is the first in his family to attend college, and he had never heard of Berea (he says he initially considered it “some random hillbilly town”), but is now such a booster that his work for the labor program is as student ambassador in the admissions department.
As we walked through the intense sunshine of early autumn to his morning class, Jordan said that he felt shocked on learning that his instructors wanted relationships outside the classroom. “They actually knew who I was,” he exclaimed with a smile. “They checked in to make sure I was doing OK throughout my freshman year.” Though he had been offered a scholarship at Kentucky State, Jordan is confident he made the right decision to come to Berea. “This is the only school for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have succeeded elsewhere. They made me know it’s OK to ask for help.” Berea’s idiosyncrasies and demanding schedule can inspire panic among incoming students, but Jordan, who wants to be a professional R & B singer and start his own record label, said it was “impossible not to succeed because of the amount of help offered by the faculty. I’ve built the strongest relationships of my life here, with friends and teachers both.”
Later that morning I was met by Tim Jordan, Berea’s dapper and avuncular public relations liaison, who escorted me to my first faculty appointment. Javier Clavere is a burly Argentine expatriate, an instructor in music theory and semiotics possessed of much energy and a wry sense of humor.
During a course in “Species Counterpoint”—during which this visitor was thoroughly befuddled with references to the “cantus firmus,” rules for dissonant intervals, and the importance of stepwise motion—Clavere and his student teaching assistant (TAs are an important part of Berea’s labor program) gently but firmly held their class to the highest standards, offering limited praise when deserved and firm expectations of improvement when needed.
After class, seated beside the grand piano in his well-appointed office, I spoke with Clavere about his coming to Berea. After 25 years as a church organist and instructor in New York he felt the need to seek out more fulfilling teaching opportunities. Upon learning of Berea’s mission to serve the underprivileged, Clavere, who rose from a meager background himself, says he “wept in disbelief.” Confronted with a freshman class that largely couldn’t read music (“Only rich kids get piano lessons”), Clavere had to adapt his teaching methods to suit their needs, and reports a steep learning curve made achievable by “getting them to believe they can do it.”
One such student is Emily Franklin, a junior of modest means raised in tiny Sligo, Kentucky. Emily’s father had warned her that his financial support would necessarily end upon her graduation from high school. She was leery of taking out loans and was faced with either winning a scholarship (like most here, she was in the top ten percent of her class) or entering the job market, so finding Berea was a game-changer. Emily is an eager TA in Clevere’s music department, and she feels the labor program to be a “brilliant idea that introduces you to real life, which is crazy hectic,” she laughed. “Class, work, singing practice, friends, sports, convocations; it’s a full schedule, constantly, but it really helps you learn to plan your time and work really, really hard.”
Clavere turned to another important duty of Berea’s faculty, one of pastoral care. Many of his Appalachian students, he says, come to Berea with a lack of familial support for their studies. As I knew from personal experience, in some rural areas academics are viewed with disdain as effete or uppity, “getting above your raising,” in the local parlance. Clavere said he has heard “horror stories” of kids being persecuted to the extent of dropping out of school, which is one reason Berea makes a strong effort to create a communal atmosphere insulated from fiscal worries, one in which the limitations of a student’s upbringing can be set aside and transcended.
Active in student counseling, Javier Clavere, whose wife is also a music instructor, says that the semi-parental unit they offer has been of great comfort to kids with recurrent personal problems, a responsibility the Claveres take seriously. “They do become," he said, "like our children."
~
Berea’s colorblind principles ran aground in 1904 when the Kentucky legislature passed the Day Law. This regressive statute prohibited interracial education throughout the Commonwealth, a move typical of the reactionary Jim Crow politics then sweeping the South. The college’s president at the time, William Goodell Frost, made the best of this setback by furthering a policy he had adopted a few years previously: making Berea a vehicle for raising the living standards of the entire Appalachian region. For the time being the college’s experiment in liberality had been deflected, but not disrupted; temporarily deprived of its original cause, Berea would pivot eastward to the impoverished peoples of Appalachia and continue its mission of service.
Born a New Yorker, Frost viewed the mountaineers of his adopted home as the natural allies of Berea’s mission. Unionist, antislavery, Republican, possessed of a strong work ethic and the capacity to succeed under the most trying of conditions, the people of Appalachia were to Frost “a glorious national asset,” a means of providing “the South what it has always lacked, a sturdy middle class.” From the ruins of the plantation cotton aristocracy that had compelled secession would rise a new South of equal opportunity for its citizens, led and epitomized by the people of Appalachia. (Frost did acknowledge some regional peculiarities, noting that his new model Americans were “religious, truthful, hospitable, and much addicted to killing one another.”)
~
Next on my agenda was the current President of Berea College, Lyle Roelofs, who described himself to me as a “liberal evangelical” and who offered some reflections on the school’s religious foundations. Of Quaker background, Roelofs sees Berea’s mission as a form of “liberation theology.” He is quick to disassociate the inclusivity of Berea’s campus from prevalent notions of “political correctness,” observing that Berea “is not about tolerance, but about learning from each other. This is the essence of a liberal arts education.”
Roelofs mentioned his predecessor several times during our conversation, and it was clear that Frost’s abandonment of racial integration remained a sore subject, despite the fact that Berea had no legal options available at the time. But the newfound emphasis on serving Appalachia did not diminish the commitment to integrated education that Berea was founded on, with the college challenging the Day Law all the way to the US Supreme Court. Berea College v. Commonwealth of Kentucky (1908) held that the state, having incorporated Berea, retained the right to alter her charter as it chose, but that the college could continue its education of blacks so long as it did so in a separate (though hardly equal, it proved) facility. The dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian, faulted the Court for favoring a state’s right to enforce segregation over the individual citizen’s right to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. His was a distinctly minority view.
Undismayed, the college’s trustees set out to fund the construction of a new facility near Louisville so as to comply with state law. The Lincoln Institute was incorporated in 1910 as an all-black school, though lacking the collegiate departments that distinguished Berea and therefore offering a distinctly lesser education.
A man living in constricted times, when interracial association was being cast into shadow across the country and strict segregation was ascendant in the South, William Goodell Frost lacked the legal and perhaps personal capacity to wholly carry on the inclusionary vision of John Fee. Faced with a ruthless dictate, he did what he could to maintain the college’s mission, channeling Fee’s vision of equality away from racial inclusion and toward the nearby white population that needed it most. His dedication to Berea’s integrative mission was, however, evidently sincere; he is said to have requested in a speech that his heart be buried at the Lincoln Institute.
~
Frost refitted Berea’s mission of service to focus on Appalachia at a time when the need for such attention was becoming dire. By the early twentieth century the region was in the midst of a wholesale exploitation of its people and natural resources by moneyed Northern industrialists, with new railroads and highways servicing the plethora of logging operations and coalmines that soon dominated the local economy.
Perhaps recognizing the alarming similarities between the isolated “company towns,” where miners and loggers were treated like chattel by corporate overseers, and the antebellum serfdom of poor Southern whites, Frost steered Berea firmly toward an emphasis on serving Appalachia foremost. This populist impulse was vindicated in a recent article in the New Republic savaging the Ivy League’s hypocritical aura of “diversity,” with William Deresiewicz observing that “the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all. The only way to think these places [elite universities] are diverse is if that’s all you’ve ever seen.”
~
Today Berea’s student body represents all 50 states and 60 different countries, with approximately 75 percent hailing from the nine states that represent the southern and central Appalachian region. These 1,623 enthusiastic learners are thus offered a kind of crash course in interpersonal, interregional and international acclimatization—for a kid who has never strayed far from southern West Virginia or eastern Tennessee, the prospect of rooming with a student from either Cleveland or Nairobi must appear equally exotic.
Students earn bachelor’s degrees in 28 fields of endeavor, comfortably insulated from the growing costs of higher education that are putting unbearable burdens on families across the country. With the average debt at graduation rising nationwide, Berea students’ debt has actually decreased; with its $1 billion endowment, Berea regards its students not as an income stream but as a regional investment. As Deresiewicz put it, “If there is anywhere that college is still college—anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place—it is the liberal arts college … Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values.”
~
Caroline Arthur is a lively junior from Palestine, West Virginia. A Governor’s School alumna majoring in Business and Communications whose dream job is as a sportscaster, Caroline’s 15-20 hours per week work program involves the integrated marketing of digital media. She’s also taking 20 hours of coursework, captains the cheerleading squad, and is active on the Student Athletic Advisory Committee. I mentioned that this seemed like quite an onerous schedule.
“When I first came to Berea there was a constant feeling of being completely overwhelmed,” she told me. “It felt like drill school; what they kept telling us was that every minute you’re awake is a time you could be doing something productive.” Vigorously homeschooled by her parents, Caroline was no stranger to hard studying, but Berea seems to have taken her work ethic one step further. “It pushed me to where I needed to be,” she said of the school’s tough standards, “it made me work harder and achieve more. My first year I was constantly calling my advisors and professors, sometimes late at night, because I was feeling scared; I’d never really been away from home and I had no car, no independence. I really relied on my teachers and classmates to make it through those first months.”
Berea is fronting half of Caroline’s cost of a semester abroad in London this winter, and even provides needy upperclassmen like her with a clothing allowance for job interviews and travel. “But it’s not just the free tuition and other stuff,” she said. “Berea taught me a strong work ethic, taught me time management, taught me that your work is never really done. They let myself shine through.”
~
The school welcomes nontraditional students such as single parents and the elderly, the only formal prerequisites being proven financial need, academic excellence and a record of community service. The average household income of incoming students is $27,000, with ninety-eight percent eligible for federal Pell grants. Students earn $21 an hour in the school’s labor program, and these welcome funds are often channeled back home as room, board and essential books are all provided.
Like any quality liberal arts school, Berea seeks out prominent scholars from across the world for its faculty, but the college maintains its dedication to serving its native region through the Appalachian Seminar and Tour, a weeklong sojourn into the nearby hills for incoming instructors unfamiliar with the backgrounds of so many of their new students. The program includes a two-day colloquium exploring the region’s history, economics, politics, religion, negative stereotypes and other relevant issues, followed by five days of travel. Previous itineraries have included examinations of mountaintop removal, traditional arts, health and nutrition, paleontological discoveries and regional filmmaking.
Achieving tenure is a matter of assembling a teaching record illustrative of Berea’s core values: excellence in instruction, immersive scholarship, active mentoring, and service to the college and the community. Lacking the frantic “publish or perish” culture so numbingly familiar in American higher education, professors are freed to wholly engage in the work of providing exceptional instruction.
A common understanding among the faculty I spoke with is that these extraordinary mountain kids are every bit as worthy as those attending the most exorbitant universities—they quite simply deserve what Berea offers. There is no time for dalliance or self-pity here, and laggards or the unready are quickly shown the door (“Berea doesn’t need you,” was how one instructor put it). It is the students’ resiliency and their hunger for growth and transformation, coupled with a need to understand and work through their underprivileged backgrounds, that I heard time and again is what makes teaching at Berea a matter for only the most dedicated and multifaceted instructors.
~
Rob Foster has taught the history of East Asia here for 17 years, and he says that his students’ zest to achieve and to make the best of unexpected opportunities is something he “hadn’t noted in other schools.” With a Harvard PhD, Foster could likely have landed an appointment at any number of elite teaching institutions, but he says it is the “no-nonsense enthusiasm” of his students that keeps him happily at Berea. “Our message to students is that anything is possible,” he told me. “With our Socratic emphasis on critical thinking we try to make them lifelong learners,” instilling a sense of potential guided by unflinching discipline, “training their minds and habits” into successful careers and fully lived lives.
Like many of the faculty I met, Foster is an ardent interdisciplinarian, mixing the minutiae of the Sung Dynasty with a love for categorizing the migratory songbirds in the college’s 8,000-acre managed forest. He also leads students on scuba ventures to Honduras to survey Caribbean coral reefs, now under assault from the acidifying seas of climate change, and says that with this rich potential for scholastic crossover one must consistently work to “keep your focus on your field.”
~
An instructor in English with an emphasis on Shakespearean studies, Jason Cohen sees Berea as a “place of possibility,” and locates the essence of his work in the interpretation of Shakespeare as a universal language, applicable and appreciable even by students whose previous exposure to the Bard may have been little or none. Shakespeare’s canon speaks of “enduring, constant epistemological issues,” Cohen says, and his students’ exposure to the relevance of perennial human concerns is central to his approach.
Cohen co-teaches a literary course concerning the ethics of being a neighbor, a project that connects Berea students online with their counterparts at the American University of Cairo. The students communally explore the bases of civic duty as revealed by the Abrahamic faiths in numerous historical instances, including the European interest in Orientalism propelled by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, “obligation as a condition of neighboring” revealed in Antony and Cleopatra, and viewing the fallout of the Arab Spring through readings on hospitality in Kant and Hannah Arendt.
Cohen insists on “close and slow reading,” with three hours of personal study for every hour of classwork. Whether exploring the etymological and philological roots of Hamlet or what he calls the “dubious distinction” of Shakespeare’s centrality to the Western curriculum, Cohen echoes his fellow faculty in insisting that each student give his or her all, all the time. “Their call is to work,” he said, “and to not give in.”
~
The next day I was introduced to Berry Chad, Berea’s Academic Vice President, who says that his job is his “life’s dream” because “Berea is the center of the Appalachian universe.” “Traditional Appalachian schools act as conduits out of Appalachia,” he told me on the sunny porch outside his office. “Our challenge is to make education not ‘up and out’ but ‘up and back,’ so students can bring back to their hometowns the lessons they’ve learned here.” Chad notes that 60 percent of Appalachian Berea grads remain in their home territory, an extraordinary rate of success given that Appalachia accounts for a great proportion of the 23 million whites who abandoned the South during the twentieth century, an ongoing diaspora that continues to impoverish the hill country.
~
Berea’s Chair in Appalachian Studies, currently held by the popular eastern Kentucky novelist and environmental advocate Silas House, plays a critical role in regional scholarship. During a recent class House was discussing the demographic “eclecticism” of Appalachia. Home to Shawnee, Cherokee and Mingo before settlement by the Scotch-Irish, the region was further diversified with an influx of Eastern Europeans and blacks attracted to what was formerly—prior to mountaintop removal’s replacement of workers with giant machines and explosives—plentiful work in the coalmines.
“There are many Appalachias,” House intoned that afternoon in his heavy Southern Midland accent, bound together in the stifling “mono-economy” of coal production, a pervasive corporate hegemony he likened to feudalism. A true son of the mountains, whose own grandfather died of black lung disease and whose family cemetery was “desecrated” by the coal companies, House views the coal and gas industries as purely takers, wholly uninterested in the lives and working conditions of their employees. He spoke of the extractive companies refusing to insure their truck drivers, who are forced to push the limits of safety to get their shipments in on schedule and frequently endanger themselves and the public. He pointed to the persistent sense of hopeless fatalism that grips the region, the product of limited economic opportunity, an often-apocalyptic religious tradition, poor health and nutrition, high rates of suicide and pervasive substance abuse.
This last issue is promulgated by a pharmaceutical industry targeting uninsured miners—often in their mid-twenties—whose injuries are kept at bay with painkillers so that they can continue to work. The coal companies generally do not support detox programs, House says, with workers sometimes terminated if they try to enroll, and this coupled with the tough-minded culture of silence in coal country causes lasting harm to families throughout the region. Not far from Berea’s campus, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma LP is fighting a civil suit filed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky alleging that the company had created a culture of addiction to “hillbilly heroin,” the opiate OxyContin; Purdue fears a potentially “crippling” judgment in the range of one billion dollars.
Silas House feels that to be an Appalachian is to be a “perpetual outsider,” always different from the resident communities of power. Coal is still viewed as the stubbornly blue-collar guiding spirit of the mountain socioeconomy, and those such as House who speak in favor of economic diversification often generate hostility and censorship from their neighbors.
“Appalachia represents both the best and the worst of America,” he declared late that afternoon in his modest office, simultaneously “romanticized and vilified” by outsiders who insist on a brutal stereotyping that would be unthinkable when applied to any other ethnic or cultural group. He recalled a brutal event in southwest Virginia a decade previous. A three-year-old boy named Jeremy Davidson was crushed to death in his sleep by a boulder dislodged from a nearby strip mine, and House asserts that had this tragedy occurred in any community other than the depopulated, perishable society that is Appalachia the media coverage would have been fierce and lasting.
With a teaching style permeated by an “insistent insistence on dialogue,” Silas House seeks to undo the pervasive harms of the past and point the way toward a more hopeful, sustainable future for Appalachia. Much as William Goodell Frost had advocated, House is identifying ways for this endlessly displaced people to take heart from their heritage, and to remake the mountains as a source of national pride. Clearly the spirit and strength of the Revered John Fee, his empirical and pragmatic understanding of the Christian duty to care for the poor and speak for the voiceless, inspires House to work towards a better life for this most denigrated and ignored region of the country.
Like many visitors, I came away from Berea deeply moved by its daily dedication to the mission of equal opportunity. I had very much enjoyed my own education down the road at Centre, but I realized that it had come at a price these students simply could not have afforded. By holding firm to the waning notion of work’s inherent dignity and the equality of excellence, Berea is continuing its vital contribution to the cultural and economic landscape of Appalachia, its mission every bit as radical and daring as it was during the dying days of slavery. Founded over 150 years ago in a blaze of activism rooted in our highest ideals, Berea College continues to provide the most worthy with a rigorous education in a nurturing atmosphere of “learning, labor and service.”
These students pay absolutely no tuition. And every one of them is enrolled in the mandatory labor program, their work ranging from farming to office management, weaving to piano instruction. And then there is something about the sense of community here. Like a lot of colleges, Berea was founded to educate specific populations, in its case blacks, women and poor kids from Appalachia. Unlike a lot of colleges, however, the moral and political thrust of its original mission is still in evidence, even as American higher education has changed enormously around it.
Given these unusual features, Berea may strike some as a standing rebuke to various trends prominent in the American collegiate scene. In addition to its divergent policies on tuition and work, the school has many of those qualities of soul and character that education critic and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz has famously complained are now missing from undergraduate education in the Ivy League. To get a sense of what this looked like up close, I visited Berea for several days last fall.
Opened in 1855, while abolitionists were fighting pro-slavery militias for control of “Bleeding Kansas,” the college was initially housed in a one-room log cabin. Its founder, John G. Fee, the son of a slave-owner, was an evangelical prohibitionist and abolitionist. He used the New Testament to argue, in theory and in practice, for the free and equal education of all Americans regardless of gender, race, or condition of servitude. Fee took as his mottoes two particularly democratic lines from Scripture: “Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all thy heart; … and thy neighbor as thyself” (Luke 10:27), and “Do unto others what thou would have them do unto thee” (Matthew 7:12).
Fee’s refusal to accept the established notion that women and blacks were inherently inferior attracted the notice of the great Kentucky statesman and emancipation advocate Cassius Clay, who provided him with ten acres of hilly farmland about 30 miles south of Lexington with which to initiate his experiment. Four years into its undertaking, pro-slavery vigilantes, fearful that the new school’s teachings could inspire a slave uprising, drove Berea’s faculty and students from the county.
Fee spent the Civil War years in Ohio raising money for his school and promptly returned in January of 1866, restarting the institution as a bastion of “antislavery, anti-caste, anti-rum, [and] anti-sin” education, open to all the deserving poor, regardless of race or gender, who proclaimed their allegiance to Berea’s central tenet, from Acts 17:17—“God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.”
~
My first morning at Berea I met Jordan Sims, a senior majoring in African American Studies and minoring in Business and Music. Jordan is from urban Lexington and is the first in his family to attend college, and he had never heard of Berea (he says he initially considered it “some random hillbilly town”), but is now such a booster that his work for the labor program is as student ambassador in the admissions department.
As we walked through the intense sunshine of early autumn to his morning class, Jordan said that he felt shocked on learning that his instructors wanted relationships outside the classroom. “They actually knew who I was,” he exclaimed with a smile. “They checked in to make sure I was doing OK throughout my freshman year.” Though he had been offered a scholarship at Kentucky State, Jordan is confident he made the right decision to come to Berea. “This is the only school for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have succeeded elsewhere. They made me know it’s OK to ask for help.” Berea’s idiosyncrasies and demanding schedule can inspire panic among incoming students, but Jordan, who wants to be a professional R & B singer and start his own record label, said it was “impossible not to succeed because of the amount of help offered by the faculty. I’ve built the strongest relationships of my life here, with friends and teachers both.”
Later that morning I was met by Tim Jordan, Berea’s dapper and avuncular public relations liaison, who escorted me to my first faculty appointment. Javier Clavere is a burly Argentine expatriate, an instructor in music theory and semiotics possessed of much energy and a wry sense of humor.
During a course in “Species Counterpoint”—during which this visitor was thoroughly befuddled with references to the “cantus firmus,” rules for dissonant intervals, and the importance of stepwise motion—Clavere and his student teaching assistant (TAs are an important part of Berea’s labor program) gently but firmly held their class to the highest standards, offering limited praise when deserved and firm expectations of improvement when needed.
After class, seated beside the grand piano in his well-appointed office, I spoke with Clavere about his coming to Berea. After 25 years as a church organist and instructor in New York he felt the need to seek out more fulfilling teaching opportunities. Upon learning of Berea’s mission to serve the underprivileged, Clavere, who rose from a meager background himself, says he “wept in disbelief.” Confronted with a freshman class that largely couldn’t read music (“Only rich kids get piano lessons”), Clavere had to adapt his teaching methods to suit their needs, and reports a steep learning curve made achievable by “getting them to believe they can do it.”
One such student is Emily Franklin, a junior of modest means raised in tiny Sligo, Kentucky. Emily’s father had warned her that his financial support would necessarily end upon her graduation from high school. She was leery of taking out loans and was faced with either winning a scholarship (like most here, she was in the top ten percent of her class) or entering the job market, so finding Berea was a game-changer. Emily is an eager TA in Clevere’s music department, and she feels the labor program to be a “brilliant idea that introduces you to real life, which is crazy hectic,” she laughed. “Class, work, singing practice, friends, sports, convocations; it’s a full schedule, constantly, but it really helps you learn to plan your time and work really, really hard.”
Clavere turned to another important duty of Berea’s faculty, one of pastoral care. Many of his Appalachian students, he says, come to Berea with a lack of familial support for their studies. As I knew from personal experience, in some rural areas academics are viewed with disdain as effete or uppity, “getting above your raising,” in the local parlance. Clavere said he has heard “horror stories” of kids being persecuted to the extent of dropping out of school, which is one reason Berea makes a strong effort to create a communal atmosphere insulated from fiscal worries, one in which the limitations of a student’s upbringing can be set aside and transcended.
Active in student counseling, Javier Clavere, whose wife is also a music instructor, says that the semi-parental unit they offer has been of great comfort to kids with recurrent personal problems, a responsibility the Claveres take seriously. “They do become," he said, "like our children."
~
Berea’s colorblind principles ran aground in 1904 when the Kentucky legislature passed the Day Law. This regressive statute prohibited interracial education throughout the Commonwealth, a move typical of the reactionary Jim Crow politics then sweeping the South. The college’s president at the time, William Goodell Frost, made the best of this setback by furthering a policy he had adopted a few years previously: making Berea a vehicle for raising the living standards of the entire Appalachian region. For the time being the college’s experiment in liberality had been deflected, but not disrupted; temporarily deprived of its original cause, Berea would pivot eastward to the impoverished peoples of Appalachia and continue its mission of service.
Born a New Yorker, Frost viewed the mountaineers of his adopted home as the natural allies of Berea’s mission. Unionist, antislavery, Republican, possessed of a strong work ethic and the capacity to succeed under the most trying of conditions, the people of Appalachia were to Frost “a glorious national asset,” a means of providing “the South what it has always lacked, a sturdy middle class.” From the ruins of the plantation cotton aristocracy that had compelled secession would rise a new South of equal opportunity for its citizens, led and epitomized by the people of Appalachia. (Frost did acknowledge some regional peculiarities, noting that his new model Americans were “religious, truthful, hospitable, and much addicted to killing one another.”)
~
Next on my agenda was the current President of Berea College, Lyle Roelofs, who described himself to me as a “liberal evangelical” and who offered some reflections on the school’s religious foundations. Of Quaker background, Roelofs sees Berea’s mission as a form of “liberation theology.” He is quick to disassociate the inclusivity of Berea’s campus from prevalent notions of “political correctness,” observing that Berea “is not about tolerance, but about learning from each other. This is the essence of a liberal arts education.”
Roelofs mentioned his predecessor several times during our conversation, and it was clear that Frost’s abandonment of racial integration remained a sore subject, despite the fact that Berea had no legal options available at the time. But the newfound emphasis on serving Appalachia did not diminish the commitment to integrated education that Berea was founded on, with the college challenging the Day Law all the way to the US Supreme Court. Berea College v. Commonwealth of Kentucky (1908) held that the state, having incorporated Berea, retained the right to alter her charter as it chose, but that the college could continue its education of blacks so long as it did so in a separate (though hardly equal, it proved) facility. The dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian, faulted the Court for favoring a state’s right to enforce segregation over the individual citizen’s right to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. His was a distinctly minority view.
Undismayed, the college’s trustees set out to fund the construction of a new facility near Louisville so as to comply with state law. The Lincoln Institute was incorporated in 1910 as an all-black school, though lacking the collegiate departments that distinguished Berea and therefore offering a distinctly lesser education.
A man living in constricted times, when interracial association was being cast into shadow across the country and strict segregation was ascendant in the South, William Goodell Frost lacked the legal and perhaps personal capacity to wholly carry on the inclusionary vision of John Fee. Faced with a ruthless dictate, he did what he could to maintain the college’s mission, channeling Fee’s vision of equality away from racial inclusion and toward the nearby white population that needed it most. His dedication to Berea’s integrative mission was, however, evidently sincere; he is said to have requested in a speech that his heart be buried at the Lincoln Institute.
~
Frost refitted Berea’s mission of service to focus on Appalachia at a time when the need for such attention was becoming dire. By the early twentieth century the region was in the midst of a wholesale exploitation of its people and natural resources by moneyed Northern industrialists, with new railroads and highways servicing the plethora of logging operations and coalmines that soon dominated the local economy.
Perhaps recognizing the alarming similarities between the isolated “company towns,” where miners and loggers were treated like chattel by corporate overseers, and the antebellum serfdom of poor Southern whites, Frost steered Berea firmly toward an emphasis on serving Appalachia foremost. This populist impulse was vindicated in a recent article in the New Republic savaging the Ivy League’s hypocritical aura of “diversity,” with William Deresiewicz observing that “the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all. The only way to think these places [elite universities] are diverse is if that’s all you’ve ever seen.”
~
Today Berea’s student body represents all 50 states and 60 different countries, with approximately 75 percent hailing from the nine states that represent the southern and central Appalachian region. These 1,623 enthusiastic learners are thus offered a kind of crash course in interpersonal, interregional and international acclimatization—for a kid who has never strayed far from southern West Virginia or eastern Tennessee, the prospect of rooming with a student from either Cleveland or Nairobi must appear equally exotic.
Students earn bachelor’s degrees in 28 fields of endeavor, comfortably insulated from the growing costs of higher education that are putting unbearable burdens on families across the country. With the average debt at graduation rising nationwide, Berea students’ debt has actually decreased; with its $1 billion endowment, Berea regards its students not as an income stream but as a regional investment. As Deresiewicz put it, “If there is anywhere that college is still college—anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place—it is the liberal arts college … Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values.”
~
Caroline Arthur is a lively junior from Palestine, West Virginia. A Governor’s School alumna majoring in Business and Communications whose dream job is as a sportscaster, Caroline’s 15-20 hours per week work program involves the integrated marketing of digital media. She’s also taking 20 hours of coursework, captains the cheerleading squad, and is active on the Student Athletic Advisory Committee. I mentioned that this seemed like quite an onerous schedule.
“When I first came to Berea there was a constant feeling of being completely overwhelmed,” she told me. “It felt like drill school; what they kept telling us was that every minute you’re awake is a time you could be doing something productive.” Vigorously homeschooled by her parents, Caroline was no stranger to hard studying, but Berea seems to have taken her work ethic one step further. “It pushed me to where I needed to be,” she said of the school’s tough standards, “it made me work harder and achieve more. My first year I was constantly calling my advisors and professors, sometimes late at night, because I was feeling scared; I’d never really been away from home and I had no car, no independence. I really relied on my teachers and classmates to make it through those first months.”
Berea is fronting half of Caroline’s cost of a semester abroad in London this winter, and even provides needy upperclassmen like her with a clothing allowance for job interviews and travel. “But it’s not just the free tuition and other stuff,” she said. “Berea taught me a strong work ethic, taught me time management, taught me that your work is never really done. They let myself shine through.”
~
The school welcomes nontraditional students such as single parents and the elderly, the only formal prerequisites being proven financial need, academic excellence and a record of community service. The average household income of incoming students is $27,000, with ninety-eight percent eligible for federal Pell grants. Students earn $21 an hour in the school’s labor program, and these welcome funds are often channeled back home as room, board and essential books are all provided.
Like any quality liberal arts school, Berea seeks out prominent scholars from across the world for its faculty, but the college maintains its dedication to serving its native region through the Appalachian Seminar and Tour, a weeklong sojourn into the nearby hills for incoming instructors unfamiliar with the backgrounds of so many of their new students. The program includes a two-day colloquium exploring the region’s history, economics, politics, religion, negative stereotypes and other relevant issues, followed by five days of travel. Previous itineraries have included examinations of mountaintop removal, traditional arts, health and nutrition, paleontological discoveries and regional filmmaking.
Achieving tenure is a matter of assembling a teaching record illustrative of Berea’s core values: excellence in instruction, immersive scholarship, active mentoring, and service to the college and the community. Lacking the frantic “publish or perish” culture so numbingly familiar in American higher education, professors are freed to wholly engage in the work of providing exceptional instruction.
A common understanding among the faculty I spoke with is that these extraordinary mountain kids are every bit as worthy as those attending the most exorbitant universities—they quite simply deserve what Berea offers. There is no time for dalliance or self-pity here, and laggards or the unready are quickly shown the door (“Berea doesn’t need you,” was how one instructor put it). It is the students’ resiliency and their hunger for growth and transformation, coupled with a need to understand and work through their underprivileged backgrounds, that I heard time and again is what makes teaching at Berea a matter for only the most dedicated and multifaceted instructors.
~
Rob Foster has taught the history of East Asia here for 17 years, and he says that his students’ zest to achieve and to make the best of unexpected opportunities is something he “hadn’t noted in other schools.” With a Harvard PhD, Foster could likely have landed an appointment at any number of elite teaching institutions, but he says it is the “no-nonsense enthusiasm” of his students that keeps him happily at Berea. “Our message to students is that anything is possible,” he told me. “With our Socratic emphasis on critical thinking we try to make them lifelong learners,” instilling a sense of potential guided by unflinching discipline, “training their minds and habits” into successful careers and fully lived lives.
Like many of the faculty I met, Foster is an ardent interdisciplinarian, mixing the minutiae of the Sung Dynasty with a love for categorizing the migratory songbirds in the college’s 8,000-acre managed forest. He also leads students on scuba ventures to Honduras to survey Caribbean coral reefs, now under assault from the acidifying seas of climate change, and says that with this rich potential for scholastic crossover one must consistently work to “keep your focus on your field.”
~
An instructor in English with an emphasis on Shakespearean studies, Jason Cohen sees Berea as a “place of possibility,” and locates the essence of his work in the interpretation of Shakespeare as a universal language, applicable and appreciable even by students whose previous exposure to the Bard may have been little or none. Shakespeare’s canon speaks of “enduring, constant epistemological issues,” Cohen says, and his students’ exposure to the relevance of perennial human concerns is central to his approach.
Cohen co-teaches a literary course concerning the ethics of being a neighbor, a project that connects Berea students online with their counterparts at the American University of Cairo. The students communally explore the bases of civic duty as revealed by the Abrahamic faiths in numerous historical instances, including the European interest in Orientalism propelled by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, “obligation as a condition of neighboring” revealed in Antony and Cleopatra, and viewing the fallout of the Arab Spring through readings on hospitality in Kant and Hannah Arendt.
Cohen insists on “close and slow reading,” with three hours of personal study for every hour of classwork. Whether exploring the etymological and philological roots of Hamlet or what he calls the “dubious distinction” of Shakespeare’s centrality to the Western curriculum, Cohen echoes his fellow faculty in insisting that each student give his or her all, all the time. “Their call is to work,” he said, “and to not give in.”
~
The next day I was introduced to Berry Chad, Berea’s Academic Vice President, who says that his job is his “life’s dream” because “Berea is the center of the Appalachian universe.” “Traditional Appalachian schools act as conduits out of Appalachia,” he told me on the sunny porch outside his office. “Our challenge is to make education not ‘up and out’ but ‘up and back,’ so students can bring back to their hometowns the lessons they’ve learned here.” Chad notes that 60 percent of Appalachian Berea grads remain in their home territory, an extraordinary rate of success given that Appalachia accounts for a great proportion of the 23 million whites who abandoned the South during the twentieth century, an ongoing diaspora that continues to impoverish the hill country.
~
Berea’s Chair in Appalachian Studies, currently held by the popular eastern Kentucky novelist and environmental advocate Silas House, plays a critical role in regional scholarship. During a recent class House was discussing the demographic “eclecticism” of Appalachia. Home to Shawnee, Cherokee and Mingo before settlement by the Scotch-Irish, the region was further diversified with an influx of Eastern Europeans and blacks attracted to what was formerly—prior to mountaintop removal’s replacement of workers with giant machines and explosives—plentiful work in the coalmines.
“There are many Appalachias,” House intoned that afternoon in his heavy Southern Midland accent, bound together in the stifling “mono-economy” of coal production, a pervasive corporate hegemony he likened to feudalism. A true son of the mountains, whose own grandfather died of black lung disease and whose family cemetery was “desecrated” by the coal companies, House views the coal and gas industries as purely takers, wholly uninterested in the lives and working conditions of their employees. He spoke of the extractive companies refusing to insure their truck drivers, who are forced to push the limits of safety to get their shipments in on schedule and frequently endanger themselves and the public. He pointed to the persistent sense of hopeless fatalism that grips the region, the product of limited economic opportunity, an often-apocalyptic religious tradition, poor health and nutrition, high rates of suicide and pervasive substance abuse.
This last issue is promulgated by a pharmaceutical industry targeting uninsured miners—often in their mid-twenties—whose injuries are kept at bay with painkillers so that they can continue to work. The coal companies generally do not support detox programs, House says, with workers sometimes terminated if they try to enroll, and this coupled with the tough-minded culture of silence in coal country causes lasting harm to families throughout the region. Not far from Berea’s campus, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma LP is fighting a civil suit filed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky alleging that the company had created a culture of addiction to “hillbilly heroin,” the opiate OxyContin; Purdue fears a potentially “crippling” judgment in the range of one billion dollars.
Silas House feels that to be an Appalachian is to be a “perpetual outsider,” always different from the resident communities of power. Coal is still viewed as the stubbornly blue-collar guiding spirit of the mountain socioeconomy, and those such as House who speak in favor of economic diversification often generate hostility and censorship from their neighbors.
“Appalachia represents both the best and the worst of America,” he declared late that afternoon in his modest office, simultaneously “romanticized and vilified” by outsiders who insist on a brutal stereotyping that would be unthinkable when applied to any other ethnic or cultural group. He recalled a brutal event in southwest Virginia a decade previous. A three-year-old boy named Jeremy Davidson was crushed to death in his sleep by a boulder dislodged from a nearby strip mine, and House asserts that had this tragedy occurred in any community other than the depopulated, perishable society that is Appalachia the media coverage would have been fierce and lasting.
With a teaching style permeated by an “insistent insistence on dialogue,” Silas House seeks to undo the pervasive harms of the past and point the way toward a more hopeful, sustainable future for Appalachia. Much as William Goodell Frost had advocated, House is identifying ways for this endlessly displaced people to take heart from their heritage, and to remake the mountains as a source of national pride. Clearly the spirit and strength of the Revered John Fee, his empirical and pragmatic understanding of the Christian duty to care for the poor and speak for the voiceless, inspires House to work towards a better life for this most denigrated and ignored region of the country.
Like many visitors, I came away from Berea deeply moved by its daily dedication to the mission of equal opportunity. I had very much enjoyed my own education down the road at Centre, but I realized that it had come at a price these students simply could not have afforded. By holding firm to the waning notion of work’s inherent dignity and the equality of excellence, Berea is continuing its vital contribution to the cultural and economic landscape of Appalachia, its mission every bit as radical and daring as it was during the dying days of slavery. Founded over 150 years ago in a blaze of activism rooted in our highest ideals, Berea College continues to provide the most worthy with a rigorous education in a nurturing atmosphere of “learning, labor and service.”
