Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1204

Copy of letter from King’s Crown Hotel 420 West 116th Street, New York, to Dr. Agnes Snyder, New College, Columbia University, New York City

December 27, 1933

Dear Dr. Snyder:

It gives me pleasure to act upon your suggestion of writing down the impressions which I received throughout several days of visiting, and interesting contacts at New College. From the beginning, your very kind reception went far towards making me feel at ease in the new environment.

In the first class I attended Dr. Alexander gave me an enigmatic sense of energy impact coming from different directions in rapid succession and impinging at different angles. The class he conducted seemed eagerly watchful to make quick return of his erratic service and to keep their eyes on the ball. As a stranger to New College, I was keenly affected by his humorous prescription to those who were visiting other schools in the technique of getting access to the inner spirit and workings at such places. It ran thus: Get inside, look dumb, act dumb, go about the place, keep your eyes open — and you can find out a great deal. I need hardly suggest how gratefully my own trepidation seized upon that formula nor how it sustained me in the several days of my intrusiveness among you. What is more important, I found that it worked.

Mingling with the students in class rooms and corridors, smoking rooms and lobbies, and with conversationally delightful faculty members at luncheon and elsewhere, my field of observation was rich and full.

New College, for its student material, seems to follow that excellent recipe: “First, go out and catch your rabbit.” This gives it access to diverse educational preserves and doubtless helps to account for the diversity, as well as high quality, of personality types found in the bag.

In student contacts, I experienced constantly an emotional warmth induced, no doubt, by the zest and eagerness revealed. This circumstance is to me an earnest and a pledge that in these minds a deep sense of values prevails; a feeling that there are things well worth while. This feeling seemed to me to find attachment in three fields: in education, in economics, and in the fine arts.

I was impressed by the pre-occupation with the economic problem — with the sorrows of the world in respect to food, clothing and shelter — and by the color of the evident reaction to the this problem. I felt moved to suggest the efficacy of a positive and creative attitude towards economic change in contrast to an attitude motivated by resentment and pain and that this latter is often negative and destructive. I suggested the need, first of all, to see things as they are, — that is, in respect to the simplest creative activities persistently expressing themselves in business and industry and then to discern what forces are distorting or inhibiting them.

If we find our economy distorted and deranged we can perceive that its norm is to be achieved only by withdrawing the disturbing forces that we now apply and not by the application of still further coercive force. I was much impressed by Mr. Tannenbaum’s Cartesian diagram with its disparate curves showing the natural forces of production increasing at so much greater rate than production itself. I hope he has tracked down and evaluated the negative forces which he found it necessary to suppose in order to resolve the paradox of his diagram.

The earnest student response to Dr. Watson’s admirable program of social goals suggests almost an unanimity of wishful thinking and also the need for creative thinking to the same or similar ends. All in all, my student contacts have been a stimulation and a delight.

The New College curriculum impressed me as heavy with the social sciences and art, as indeed it should be, but perhaps a little light in science, particularly the physical sciences. These last, I believe, are of lesser importance as subject matter but of the very highest value in their conceptions of nature and particularly in the mode of investigation by which they have advanced, for I think it is in the method of the physical sciences that the hope of authentic social science must lie.

Next to social problems in point of intensity of interest as I observed it was the fine arts, especially music and literature and the graphic arts. Here, I believe, in the intimations of secret beauty, weird and vague, yet somehow sensed as native and attainable, lies the inspiration to creative work that seems to be the guiding spirit of the school. I doubt not that Dr. Limbert’s readings in philosophy give balance and unity of conception in the elements which this guiding spirit informs.

Finally, to the teaching staff I would like to acknowledge the pleasure and the gratitude that their attentions to my interest and my inquiries inspired. I feel that in New College I have been permitted to glimpse something germinal, something prophetic, of the best that is yet to be.

With sincere respect, I am,

Very truly yours,