Hard Travelin' and Still Havin' a Good Time: Innovative learning and living at the johnston center, 1979-2004.

In 1969 the University of Redlands in Southern California opened a cluster college to develop alternatives for higher education and international study. The new college took its name from IBM executive James Graham Johnston, who provided the initial funding. Like its experimenting sister schools - Hampshire, Fairhaven, New College, and Kresge College of UC Santa Cruz, to name a few - Johnston College flourished in the early 1970s, but shifting national attitudes and friction with the main campus led to declining enrollments and financial difficulties. In 1979 the University converted the College into a Center under more centralized authority, a story told in the 1989 narrative history of the College. Now this new exciting collection of essays looks at he twenty-five years of Johnston Center life from more than forty perspectives: those of founding, mid career, and new faculty; those of alums from the last days of the College to the most recent graduates; those of people who have watched the Center from a distance. It also contains representative student /graduation contracts, memorable commencement speeches, the reflections of alumni in the arts, and moving autobiographical accounts of international study and political activism. Anyone interested in higher education in America should find the collection provocative, entertaining, and eminently useful.