Brilliant Critic

John Andrew Rice is a maverick among U.S. educators. By his own account, only one man ever understood him--old Philosopher John Dewey. A stormy petrel wherever he taught, Dr. Rice quarreled with the University of Nebraska, was kicked out of Rollins College (TIME, June 19, 1933), two years ago abruptly severed relations with his own dream college, North Carolina's Black Mountain. Now the professor is back in the news with a Harper prize book, I Came Out of the 18th Century ($3). His brooding, mordant autobiography reveals him as a brilliant critic of teaching and an acid critic of teachers.

At Rollins, where he scandalized folks by going swimming in white trunks, and at Black Mountain, where he used to take long walks in the woods with an escort of five dogs, roly-poly Professor Rice cut a slightly comic figure. But there was nothing comic about his mind. A preacher's son, nephew of U.S. Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith, John Rice grew up in a family of South Carolina individualists and became one himself, a rebel among rebels. He was a star pupil at Tennessee's famed Webb School, breezed through Tulane in three years, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Then he turned itinerant pedagogue (successively at Webb School, the University of Chicago, Nebraska, New Jersey College for Women, Rollins, Black Mountain).

Having thus spanned a half-century and a cross section of U.S. education, Professor Rice, who knows where the educational skeletons, real and imaginary, are hidden, has turned state's evidence against his profession. His story is peopled with extraordinary characters.

Webb. Of the two brothers who founded Webb School, Sawney and John, Sawney became the better known, but John Rice does not think much of him. "All that the founder of a new school needed [in the post-Civil War South]," he says, "was a little.learning and a lot of physical strength. Sawney . . . had both." A tough man, he sometimes came to class with a scratch on his hand and "allowed it to bleed unnoticed as the boys sat in awe at the brave show."

Sawney was responsible for the school's famed, eccentric rules: no boy might climb a fence on the grounds unless he built a stile over it (there were stiles every 20 feet); a boy who pulled a leaf had to plant a new tree; boys might fight, but never before onlookers--spectators always got a thrashing from Sawney.

But quiet Brother John ("Old Jack") Webb was the greatest teacher Dr. Rice ever met. Webb had a wisdom bump on his forehead the size of half a walnut, used to sit talking to himself and trimming his grey beard with pocket scissors. He taught Greek, English, history, math, everything --sitting in a split-bottom chair and gently posing riddles to his pupils. Says Dr. Rice: "More Rhodes Scholars came from Webb School than from any other in the world."

Tulane. Rice says of his alma mater: "The diploma said I was a baccalaris artium, and when the president handed it to me he welcomed me into the 'company of educated men.' They were both liars."

Oxford. "Oxford was ... no place for the stupid young man on the make, who was ignored, nor for the man chary of brain in the larger interest--he was despised." At Oxford Rice had as fellow students Christopher Morley (New College) and Elmer Davis (Queens). Davis, says Rice, was "the one brilliant man in Queens . . . the most erudite American at Oxford."

Nebraska. Professor Rice and the University of Nebraska were incompatible from the start. He became a great and cynical crony of Chancellor Sam Avery, who "had a nose like the neck of a whiskey bottle" rounding to a golf-ball tip, and ran the university with the hardheaded shrewdness of a county political boss. But Rice found the university politics-ridden, full of "incompetents, misfits, the intellectually lazy, and trash." One day Sam Avery exclaimed in exasperation: "Why don't you keep your mouth shut, Rice? If you would just keep it shut for, say, six months or a year, I could raise your salary." He never got the raise.

Rollins. Professor Rice had been banished to the showy fringe of U.S. education by the time he arrived at Rollins. There he found a class in "Evil," a Professor of Fishing and Hunting and a pink-spotlighted chapel Christmas service which he promptly attacked as "obscene." The college solemnly called its faculty members "Golden Personalities"--in public. "There is something essentially adolescent," observes Rice, "about college doings." He proceeded to make life miserable for Rollins' skittery President Hamilton Holt. With obvious relish, Professor Rice relates how he was finally removed, like Socrates, on grounds of corrupting youth.

Black Mountain. In this mood of disillusionment and martyrdom Rice and his fellow Rollins refugees founded their own college in 1933. The new college was to be an experiment in pure democracy, 24-hour-a-day "education of the whole man by a whole man." But Black Mountain, says Rice, "was born on the wrong side of the blanket. ..."

Individualist Rice soon began to find even his fellow experimenters too conventional, rowed bitterly with them. "I began to see, but slowly and with reluctance," he concludes, "that I must live apart from people, for their good and mine. A teacher should bring peace." Since his departure, Black Mountain has been more peaceful.

If he had his life to live over again, Professor Rice says that he would "choose the 18th Century for its violence, yet touched with grace . . . for its child's world for children; for its passionate belief that the world would be better, perhaps tomorrow. . . ."

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