A History of WCW

World College West has opened its doors this year to a handful of students who will participate in planning a work-study, world-study Liberal Arts College, which will serve up to 600 students by the end of this decade.

Well, you get the point; even if the projection wasn't quite on the mark!

That group of students joined Dick Gray (spokesman), David Newhall (Coordinator of Studies), Chuck Greene (Coordinator of Resources), and Mike Stone, Jane De Lawter and Milly Henry as WCW's first three full time faculty members along with office manager, Gail Davis as the first seven staff members (Elden jumped on Board in year 3). There was also a small board of directors willing to pitch-in, including the widely known author and psychotherapist, Dr. Rollo May.

Dick also was quoted in that first Bridges saying that these reasonable adventurers "are going to help pioneer a new kind of liberal arts education stressing self-reliance and intercultural understanding." For those who experienced "Chem Toys" at the Headlands, living-often alone-in a distant culture, the solitude of the hill top campus and, at least in the early days, cooking their own food in food groups, self-reliance may have been a bit of an understatement.

Also in that first year or two, we developed what might be called WCW's first mission statement, which read:

The goal of World College West is to help each student discover and prepare for his or her own venture in the world so that each person-having both competence an a sense of purpose and self-worth-may become an effective humanizing agent in a world which needs effective conveyors and supporters of human values.

Not bad at all!

And so WCW and a wide array of "reasonable adventurers" plowed their way through 19 remarkable years. Each one of us has memory after memory of experiences we can reflect on-some weird, some embarrassing, many enjoyable, often life-changing-all of which helped make our years at WCW a powerful influence in our lives. In addition to what WCW put us all through, there were the people we met along the way-sometimes stranger than fiction, other times becoming lifelong friends (though not necessarily mutually exclusive).

There are hundreds of landmark experiences during each successive phase of WCW. At the San Francisco Theological Seminary where we lived and worked for five years, we created our own sports programs, highlighted each year by the Oxtoby Olympics (too odd to actually describe), field trips to Yosemite and Death Valley, Tuesday Time at Dave Newhall's home, while the academic focus for all students was "The Human Condition." The Lifework Program actually started the very first year, enabling students to earn a good chunk of their $400 per term tuition! When it came to "college building" the key question (which in some ways never dissipated much over the years) was "who decides who decides."

Then came our very brief seven years at the Marin Headlands. Many of you are STILL trying to forget being led during orientation by the one and only Deborah Merola to howl at the moon on the beach-a fine introduction to your college education! Yet nobody left (that week, at least). There was our modern dorm with state of the art outside plumbing, eating at Yosemite Institute-until we had the year of fine Indian Cuisine catered by Homi Vasifdar-llots of former AFS, YFU, Amigos students (a great recruiting strategy), and who can forget Ache putting the library books in storage every summer? And the repeating emphatic statement for each of those seven years was 'Next year up on the land." Some of us started to wonder if that would really ever happen, that is until Board Chairman Dorman Commons welcomed new students assembled (for another famous photo-op) on the bridge to the beach saying, "I promise you, we will get to the land." And Dorman took the lead in making that happen-through his extraordinary personal philanthropy and pure will (as well as folks like Maxime Taylor, for those of you who remember).

Of course getting to the land and being able to use the buildings, as we discovered, were two different things. Ten days before our first orientation on the campus, the new Petaluma fire marshall said "Not in those dorms you don't!" So six weeks of additional construction-and orientation-had to take place, while new students went from a week at Westminster Woods (extended from 4 days), to the old haunts of the S.F. Theological Seminary and finally to the San Francisco Youth Hostel. Then we could finally occupy the dorms, and not one student dropped out (that week, at least).

How great was it to listen to returning World Study Students tell of their experiences living and learning in their adopted homes? How much did we enjoy-and feel proud of-all those Deborah Merola plays with our homegrown actors? How crazy was it at each and every "Gumby Awards Ceremony" and how trying but ultimately meaningful were ALL of those damned community meetings!

Unfortunately, after fifteen years of successfully building the impossible, Dick decided it was time to turn the leadership over to someone new. We hired Mark Franda as the College's second president (which only lasted seven months) then Mike took over for about a year until we hired Doug Trout. But too much borrowing against the campus in times of extremely high interest rates was too big an obstacle to overcome, and the College closed its doors in 1992.

But closing its doors certainly didn't mean the college never existed-for we each, in our own way, had some very profound and wonderful experiences and certainly friendships-sometimes friendships for a year or so, and other times for a lifetime.

Was WCW perfect? Hardly. Did we each come away better people? Hopefully so. Looking back at Dick Gray's first words about WCW in the initial brochure (with real models on the cover!) named From These Rolling Western Hills (1973), he says:

What kind of world will we live in thirty years from now, when the year 2000 is history and today's young college men and women are the world's decision makers?

No one really knows. But one thing is certain. It must be a world whose leaders must face the realities of diversity. If there is one trend that is discernable over the past thirty years, it is the almost headlong breakdown of cultural homogeneity. The dismantling of colonial empires, the rising expectations of minorities in the U.S. and abroad, and the succession of wars, which have put race against race in prolonged conflict-all have produced a consciousness of the differences, which divide us, culture from culture. What qualities and skills will tomorrow's leaders need in order to live and to serve wisely in such a world?

One trait they will have to possess is creativity, the ability to envision untried connections, for the problems they face will be new ones calling for new and imaginative solutions. Another will be self-reliance, that acquired characteristic which enables an individual to take resourceful action without the need for constant reinforcement and approval. Perhaps most crucial of all will be the talent for intercultural understanding, i.e. the capacity to know and appreciate people of different lands and languages…to recognize and accept the differences which separate us and yet welcome and cherish those elements of our common humanity which link us all.

How will the college students of the 1970's develop these qualities? One way will be by living and learning and working in an academic community whose purpose is to foster independence of thought and action while building awareness of the interdependence of people in a world growing smaller year by year.

World College West intends to be just such an academic community. Independent, non-profit, coeducational, it is a liberal arts college dedicated to creativity, self-reliance, and intercultural understanding.