A group of creative people living, learning, and working together with common purpose - community by design - that was Black Mountain College, a radical vision of college as community. Being part of the total educational experience helped create a whole and authentic person (a common concept now, even "whole and authentic person" was a radical idea in 1933). John Andrew Rice, its founder, believed that education should be deeply transforming. He said, "You're seeing people under all circumstances daily, and after a while you get to the point where you don't mind being seen yourself, and that's a fine moment."

To be among others who cared yet to be on one's own journey was the essence of learning; the intense community experience was the crucible. Intense it was! The student body was sometimes 50 students, sometimes 10, but never more than 100 students. Nestled in mountains, its rural location was remote - especially to the many students from New York City and other northeastern cities. With small classes and one-to-one tutoring, students and faculty were in close everyday contact. Meals were eaten together, and students often said that they learned as much over mealtime conversations with professors as they did in the classroom. The dining hall was the locus of intellectual and creative activity.

The college strived to be as self-sufficient as possible, employing very few outsiders. Students contributed to its operation through a work program: many did farm work - an educational experience in itself for the city folk - while others helped in the kitchen and dining room or with building maintenance. When the physical aspects of the college ran smoothly, there was a shared sense of achievement.

Cooperation - and sometimes conflict - was generated by the intensity of the community experience. Discord, however, was not to be ignored but discussed openly and rationally by the whole group. This lively democratic process too was meant to be part of the experience. Much of the time the group process worked. Occasionally, though, issues and divisions were deep enough to split the group into uncomfortable factions leaving the tightly-knit community in distress.

Students came to BMC - many by word-of-mouth - despite the fact that the school was never accredited, because they embraced its spirit of freedom and self-exploration and its reputation for being progressive. By its nature, the college attracted the adventurous, the strong-willed and individualistic student and faculty member, thus sometimes making "community" a challenge.

Many in the local area, especially in the school's later years, saw the campus as a hotbed of "city people, communists, homosexuals, artists, and crazies" who brought with them wild ideas and strange behaviors from "outside." In at least some ways and at some times, the local folks were right.

ON COMMUNITY

Black Mountain College, in our years, realized that community was complex and always imperfect, and arrogance somehow did not belong to it. It was neither anarchistic nor authoritarian. It was an atmosphere, at its best, of high-mindedness that no one who was there has forgotten.
- Anne G. Mangold, Faculty Spouse 1937-42

The sense of community, our isolation from the rest of the world, provided ample opportunities for close contact with others. A friend with whom to talk, to share an idea, or a newfound joy was so handy - just down the hall, up the stairs, or across the dining room table.
- Sue Spayth Riley, Student 1938-41

Though there was a surprising amount of amity in this often too intimate community, there were of course some negatives: vanities, divisiveness, scandals, cults, and some shrillness from both sexes. Put together Europeans and Americans, educated and uneducated, lazy and energetic, the Left and the Right; add to this the snobberies of artists and intellectuals and one can easily see how fertile it was for problems, but this also created opportunities for problem-solving.
- F.A. Foster, Student 1941-43, 1946-48

BMC was a crazy and magical place, and the electricity of all the people seemed to make for a wonderfully charged atmosphere, so that one woke up in the mornings excited and a little anxious, as though a thunderstorm were sweeping in.
- Lyle Bonge, Student 1947-48.