by
Wallace W. Culver
When I came to Montgomery College in September 1953, with a Ph.D. in sociology, I soon learned to appreciate the dedication of those early colleagues to high liberal arts standards. For the first fifteen to eighteen years of my career, Montgomery College was truly an exceptional liberal arts institution, with the ability and great interest of our students reflecting the high-level type of courses and programs we offered. I could assign three, and often even four, theoretically oriented and scholarly paperback supplementary texts and receive excellent written analyses of these works from most of my students. By the middle seventies no more than two-thirds of the students could complete satisfactorily even the seventy-five percent of the course textbook that I would assign to them, let alone attempt even one supplementary paperback. Also, over the first fifteen years of my MC career, I would find eighty to ninety percent of the young people who had taken the introductory course in sociology signing up for the advanced courses in the field. By the seventies not only were nearly all our advanced courses gone but the number of introductory courses decreased as each year went by. This falling away of the liberal arts program, chiefly as a result of the overall cultural and educational changes in our society, was the greatest disappointment of my long career at the College.
My one other source of unhappiness over the years was the dissatisfaction with the College administration continuously expressed by so many of my colleagues, including some of those whom I admired greatly for their ability and scholarship. I could never sympathize with these complaints, for the administration permitted complete academic freedom and never interfered with classroom subject matter or instruction.
My greatest pleasure over the nearly two and a half decades I was at MC was this complete academic freedom afforded to all faculty. I could teach the way I wanted to, use those textbooks and paperbacks that I felt were most successful in classroom work, and, above all, I could discuss controversial subjects in my classes and bring to my students all kinds of philosophical concepts and sociological theories that had been developed by the great intellects of the past and present. What a great pleasure that was! And not once did an administrative person interfere in any way whatever.
The other great pleasure and satisfying reward I have had from my years at MC came with the later successes of a large number of my students, especially those I recommended and assisted in their later educational endeavors. Several went on to achieve doctorates in sociology and now teach at various institutions of learning. Some are doing well in federal government employment, and even more have accomplished much in local Montgomery County positions and in the business world. I am still in contact with many of my former students and continue to run across others here and in various cities of Europe, where my wife and I travel for six weeks or more each year.
At age seventy-six, with nine years of retirement behind me, I enjoy seeing my former colleagues and often think back to those wonderful days in the classroom at Montgomery College, an institution of which anyone can and should be proud. May it have many more decades of success.
Takoma Park Campus: Sociology 1953–1977; chairman, Department of Sociology, 1961–1977; Professor Emeritus.