Shaping the Past: The Tufts Experimental College

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. The Organization of Education

Abstract

I conducted an inductive study of the history of the governing board of the Tufts Experimental College, a program within a larger university that selects new courses for students to take for credit. One stated purpose of the Experimental College is to “provide a laboratory in which new courses and patterns of education can be created, tried out, and evaluated.” The governing board is made up of students, faculty and administrators and uses a participatory democratic voting system to select the new courses. What is unique about the board is its persistence over 50+ years. In 1971, there were a total of 313 Experimental Colleges in the U.S. But like other organizations “of the time” (communes, free schools) the experimental college movement passed after a few years. In 2014, there are less than 10 Experimental Colleges nationwide. This puzzle of persistence motivated this study. Because this was a case of an organization that retained the residue of the counterculture and was still in operation, the Tufts Experimental College represented an attractive research site for this study.

Author

• Dean Rockwell, Boston College