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34 / Part I Gathering persisted, he recently was elected moderator of the Gathering. Though recalcitrants are not harshly chided for their indifference, they may be aware of those subtle messages floating about the community that focus on the unbelievers. For some student, faculty, and administrative power brokers bandy the term community about as if it was a sacred inscription to be worshipped on the totem of democratic religiosity. Also, one of the major criteria for review of faculty and staff is the amount and quality of their participation in the community. In letters to the school newspaper, declarations at community meetings, and serious discussions and casual conversations in and out of classes and tutorials, a seemingly all-encompassing worship of the community and propagation of Plufort’s democratic ideal is sustained. The amount of time students, professors, and administrators devote to describing, analyzing, and interpreting the strengths, weaknesses, and nuances of democratic life at Plufort is indicative of the degree to which many of them link the college’s democratic community to their own redemptive search. The Academic Trajectory From the perspective of students, disciplinary, gender, ethnic, and ideological variety in professors is crucial because Plufort’s academic culture dictates that students establish not only an intellectually emulative relationship with at least one professor but a political and personal one as well. The college’s academic apprenticeship system not only contains Plufort’s deeper institutional requirements but also serves as the arena in which many of the nuances, ambiguities, and ambivalences associated with the student’s search for redemption are played out. The Plufort student’s ultimate academic and personal focus is the “Method of Specialization,” commonly referred to as “the Method” or as being “on Method.” The Method is a course of study undertaken in the junior and senior years under the tutelage of at least one “Method advisor” and culminating in extensive intellectual or artistic projects that are evaluated and graded in an oral exam by the Method advisor, “co-Method advisor,” and an expert “outside evaluator” from another institution. The Method often proves to be an all-encompassing, grueling, and emotionally exhausting process. For, without intending to, Plufort’s academic program injects an amount of personal, emotional, social, and intellectual meaning into the Method akin to the degree of meaning a religious convert perceives in the scriptures to which he has prostrated himself. To the extent that students associate academic success with their deeper needs for personal adequacy and self-actualization, successfully navigating the Method can become their overriding redemptive juncture. Even more than involvement in community religiosity, the Method often becomes an icon to which students are totally devoted. Yet like Plufort’s Plufort College / 35 institutional democracy, the Method provides a structured process of achievement, replete with bureaucratic and academic hurdles to be overcome, amid the seemingly unstructured and “alternative” curriculum that Plufort affirms. The premise of this curriculum is that through free and unhindered sampling of the “liberal arts” and getting to know one’s professors, a viable “match” among personal interests, subject matter, and Method advisor will coalesce, catapulting the student toward a successful, even transcendent, Method of Specialization. Furthermore, this two-year search for a Method is similar to the search for a professional career in the market economy of the “real world.” Plufort’s requirement that the student eventually choose a Method and a Method advisor provides a disciplining focus amid a seemingly chaotic sea of infinite options in the marketplace of ideas. In Plufort’s microcosm of the larger world of uncertainties youth face when assessing career options in the competitive job market, these students can become even more cognizant of the inextricable connections among their deeper secularly redemptive yearnings, preparation for occupational success, and the Method of Specialization they are being groomed to navigate at Plufort. To this enigmatic reality of being encouraged to integrate one’s deepest personal needs for meaningful creative work with academic work while being prepared for success in the “real world,” entering students bring the consequences of their past identities and conversions and present anxieties. Within this ambiguous context, Plufort’s students must find a Method advisor and negotiate a Method of Specialization. The entering student begins the Plufortian academic career surrounded by extensive curricular options and cadres of student, faculty, and administrative advocates who, in scheduled orientations, workshops, meetings, ceremonies, and conferences, as well as informal encounters and bull sessions , assist in the student’s search for a Method. Pivotal to this search...

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