John Andrew Rice Jr. was the founder and first rector of Black Mountain College, located near Asheville, North Carolina.
Background
John Andrew Rice was born on Feburary 1, 1888 in Lynchburg, South Carolina, the son of John Andrew Rice, a Methodist minister, and Anna Bell Smith. His autobiographical I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century (1942) is especially revealing of his childhood. Rice resented his father's peripatetic existence and craving for success, and early on, Rice developed a profound appreciation for what he saw as the tranquil, present-oriented, communitarian, satisfied way of life of southern rural blacks.
Education
At Webb School in Bellbuckle, Tennessee, from about 1903 to 1908, Rice learned to question the authority of books and to admire the "inner discipline" of his teacher John Webb. He entered Tulane University in 1908 and graduated with a B. A. in 1911, convinced that he had wasted his time in an institution that insisted on quantifying knowledge into hours and credits.
Following a brief term as a New Orleans tenement-house inspector that crystallized his skepticism of social reformism, Rice was selected to serve as Rhodes Scholar from Louisiana to Oxford University (B. A. , 1914). He found Oxford laudable in its devotion to free inquiry but excessively concerned with status and success.
Career
Following graduation, Rice returned to Webb School as an instructor. He studied at the University of Chicago (1916 - 1918) and served with the Military Intelligence Division of the United States Army (1918 - 1919). In 1919, he joined the Department of Classics at the University of Nebraska, remaining there as associate professor and chairman through the spring of 1928.
From 1928 through 1930, Rice was professor of classics at Rutgers University and head of the Department of Classics at the New Jersey College for Women. In July 1930, after fifteen uncongenial months as a Guggenheim Fellow, Rice took a position as professor of classics at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
It was at Rollins that Rice's talent for sarcasm, biting honesty, and style of sardonic confrontation first got him into serious trouble. He made apparent his belief that Rollins' "Conference Plan" system of curriculum, under which students were required to spend six hours each day in three two-hour classes called "conferences, " was just another example of the stultifying character of most higher education. "Two hours with bores, " he said, "was at least an hour too much. "
He was fired in 1933 by Rollins' president, Hamilton Holt. When Holt asked Rice why people hated him so, Rice replied, "I think I know the answer. They know that if I had the making of a world, they would not be in it. " Unemployed and seemingly unemployable, Rice made his own world and, in the process, launched the great experiment of his life. With a few colleagues and little money, he founded Black Mountain College in rented facilities in rural North Carolina. The school opened its doors in the fall of 1933 with four faculty members and twenty-two students.
When it closed in 1956, Black Mountain was not much larger, but a steady stream of innovative faculty, including Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Walter Gropius, Paul Goodman, and Charles Olson, had given the school an unsurpassed reputation for creative work in literature and the arts.
The Rice era at Black Mountain (he served four terms as rector, from 1934 through 1939) was characterized by conflict over the purposes of the college. Some participants wanted Black Mountain to be a utopian community in the tradition of Brook Farm and New Harmony. Others, Rice among them, conceived of it more as a teaching and learning enterprise, a pristine expression of John Dewey's progressive education. Most agreed that Black Mountain should be democratic, and from the beginning, the school's structure gave the faculty a great deal of power and provided for student participation.
In March 1938, Rice was forced to take a leave of absence from Black Mountain but even then was ostracized until he resigned in early 1940. Although he sorely missed teaching, he reconciled himself to a career as a writer. His short stories appeared in the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post and a column in PM's Weekly. His autobiography was cowinner of the Harper 125th Anniversary Award.
He died in Silver Spring, Marland.
Achievements
During his time there, he introduced many unique methods of education which had not been implemented in any other experimental institution, attracting many important artists as contributing lecturers and mentors, including John Cage, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline.
Views
Rice believed that "democratic man" must be competitive only within himself - hence, Black Mountain's emphasis on the creative, artistic act, perhaps the school's most important contribution to twentieth-century educational theory.
Rice's advocacy of the primacy of individual self-development alienated those who wished for a cohesive group experience, and his definition of democracy - he believed in governance by a majority of the "intelligent" - did not sit well with many colleagues and students. Yet, one may also interpret the schisms that appeared at Black Mountain in the 1930's as reflections of profoundly different ideas about the nature of thought and inquiry. According to this view, Rice's contempt for the social sciences and the scientific method and his desire to fuse thought with intuition, spontaneity, and emotion came into conflict with a more mechanistic worldview represented by the Bauhaus-educated Albers.
Quotations:
"One ceases to be lonely only in recollection; perhaps that is why people read history. "
Personality
If his charisma and vision were essential to Black Mountain, Rice also had deficiencies as a leader. In an era of depression, he was no fund-raiser. His abrasive personality wore poorly in the intense emotional climate brought about by students and faculty living and working at close quarters.
Connections
On December 28, 1914 he married Nell Aydelotte; they had two children. After being divorced from his wife, he married Caroline Dikka Moen in 1942; they had two children.
