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Plufort College / 43 dimension that pervades the Plufort community and that places such great pressure on the Method and the student-professor relationship to deliver. A student whose Method advisor went on leave during her final year had to find a new advisor in an allied academic discipline. Although the student appeared somewhat lackadaisical, the new pedagogical relationship seemed to be going well. In ongoing negotiations concerning degree of commitment, strategic decisions, expected results, and evaluation of the work, the professor was led to believe that the student had “other priorities” and that a mediocre grade would be acceptable. When the student, who had chosen an “expert in the field” for an outside examiner, received a less-than-expected evaluation of her Method, she felt betrayed and wrote a long critique of her professor, which she distributed to key faculty and administrators. Like many of Plufort’s graduates, as well as those who do not “finish,” she settled in Evergreen County. Years later, the professor and former student still feel uncomfortable in each other’s presence. Students who devote their junior and senior years to the exploration of a subject matter with one or two professors often take Plufort’s mission and their own education very seriously. The experience of having failed in the redemptive quest can be the source of feelings of shame, betrayal, and bitterness on the part of students and self-doubt and tarnished reputations for the professors. The oral examination marks the end of this long, complex, and oftenarduous process. For those whose capacity to finish was in doubt, to “finish” with a high grade or even a modestly acceptable one can be cause for cathartic celebration. In completing the Method, the student’s financial sacrifice, investment of considerable time and energy, experiences of self-doubt, and emotional suffering can be justified by the result. Furthermore, the Method as a pedagogical strategy, the Method advisor-student relationship, and Plufort’s academic vision are once more vindicated and affirmed. In this pedagogical climax, Method advisors, fellow students, and friends gather, sometimes with champagne, followed by a round of dinners, parties, and commencement. At least for a short time, in the afterglow of completion, life at Plufort approaches the quality of its new-middle-class promise. The Sociopolitical Whirlpool On contemplating their isolation atop Plufort’s sylvan hillside above a verdant and undisturbed valley, Plufort students often note the trap of easy idealism their protected location affords them. They feel they can comfortably cast sweeping criticisms of the mainstream from their collegiate ivory tower. The Plufort student often believes that here she is free of the social pollution attributed to the world left behind. But this belief in Plufort’s isolated euphoria is occasionally interrupted by jarring observations. A student politico 44 / Part I emerging from a nasty meeting with faculty or administration might be heard to comment on the hypocrisy of her elders’ simultaneous devotion to Plufort’s ideals and willingness to use bureaucratic tactics to accomplish their political objectives. One student politico was surprised to receive adamant opposition from a faculty member usually friendly to him when the student proposed a bylaw for regulating the distribution of student office space on a credit basis. The student soon overheard that this faculty member had provided one of his own underclass students with office space that would be denied that student under the proposed bylaw’s regulation. Disturbed by what appeared to be the faculty member’s unspoken motives, the student politico pushed his bylaw ahead with a new wariness toward “fundamental” opposition to his agenda. Students who remain distant from the official rigmarole are less likely to view such realities firsthand and can more easily sustain their idealistic image of the college. Yet, through friends in the political ranks, most often they too will vicariously come in contact with what they believe to be the slings and arrows of Plufort’s outrageous bureaucratic politics. At some point, the idealism of most students is likely to be tarnished; many leave Plufort skeptical of all idealistic institutions. On visiting Plufort, prospective students are informed of the college’s unique apparatus for democratic participation. They are made aware of the close student-professor relationships that ostensibly develop because Plufort professors are not separated from students by the massive bureaucratic apparatus that exists at most other colleges and universities. Such close relationships do develop, and Plufort’s atmosphere of friendliness, which surprises many visitors, is not a put-on to draw...

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