Word: emerson
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...Emerson College in Pacific Grove, Calif., is-well, like a college. But not much. Though legally chartered and all that jazz, Emerson shuns entrance exams, grades, degrees and administrators. The result is one of the fresher, if freakier, experiments in U.S. education...
...Emerson's goal is to encourage "intense, committed teachers to work with intense, committed students." It presumes that most conventions must be swept aside in the process. No one expects Emersonians to make the scene for a full four years. Nor has the school any established curriculum; a teacher must create his own class. For $300 a quarter (or less if the applicant is short of money), students are prodded to find "new alternatives" in theology, Kierkegaard. Shakespeare and "Now Theater" ("It's like spontaneous...
...Well, let's have-like a class." said Duskin one recent afternoon. Subject: materialism. In ambled Emerson's 13 summer students-mussed boys in need of haircuts (one beard), and ethereal girls in need of bras. Their wan look might have been due to their frugal lunch: beef broth, casaba melon. Duskin snapped them awake: "I don't allow irrelevant statements. Your comments must either advance my thought or contradict it." Firmly in control, Duskin hammered his theme-the dispassion of Homer. "Remember," he said, "Helen makes it in the end. She falls back on Menelaus...
Last year Duskin launched Emerson, named for Ralph Waldo, by simply renting a gabled Victorian mansion in Pacific Grove, a dry town founded by Methodists that seems at times as whimsical in its way as Emerson. For example, the municipal code forbids "any person to molest or interfere with the peaceful occupancy of the monarch butterflies on their annual visit to the city of Pacific Grove." Pacific Grove gives Emersonians the butterfly treatment. "They're a little weird," says the chief of police, "but I kind of like seeing them around...
Dennis, Mass., Cape Playhouse: Faye Emerson and Reginald Gardiner in The Pleasure of His Company...