Colleges: The Perils of Being Offbeat

In many ways, New Hampshire's Franconia College (enrollment: 325) is a student rebel's paradise. The free-wheeling curriculum has no academic departments and little required study. Students enjoy unrestricted visiting hours in coed dorms, occasionally teach their own courses, and have the right to interview prospective faculty members. As some of its neighbors see it, the five-year-old experimental college is an example of liberty turned to license. Unquestionably, it is a troubled school. In April, the trustees demanded and got the resignation of President Richard Ruopp. Last month 19 of Franconia's 41 faculty and staff members handed in their resignations. The question now is how long Franconia can keep its doors open.

Overt Hostility. The college's difficulties stem from both lack of leadership and the overt hostility of its New Hampshire neighbors, whose Yankee conservatism clashes with Franconia's avant-garde aims. Unintentionally, perhaps, the school quickly earned a reputation as a refuge for well-to-do but offbeat students (total yearly cost: $3,400). Last year more than one-third of Franconia's students were either transfers or dropouts from other colleges. Teachers in refuge from more orthodox corners of academe were attracted by the innovative spirit at an almost completely faculty-run school.

The crisis began this spring, after local police arrested nine students in a surprise marijuana raid. New Hampshire's largest newspaper, the archconservative Manchester Union Leader, followed with a front-page exposé titled "Bare Debauchery at Franconia College." The newspaper charged that "drugs, alcohol and sex are among the main ingredients of campus life. Naked and drugged or drunken men and women have been seen running through the halls at night, and orgies and nude parties have occurred." The accusations, supposedly based on secret reports from an unidentified informant, probably exaggerated the situation at Franconia. Nonetheless, the attack alarmed many local citizens, and one town restaurant posted signs announcing that long-haired or barefoot patrons would not be welcome.

Under fire from the community, Franconia's once sympathetic board of trustees demanded the resignation of President Ruopp, an Oxford-educated Methodist minister and philosophy teacher who came to the college in 1963. Explains Board Member Philip Robertson: "It was an experiment that had run away with itself. A man would come up to me on the street and say, 'I hear you're running a whorehouse up there.' "

Foreclosed Mortgage. The public scandal was the immediate reason for Ruopp's dismissal, but the trustees were also worried, justifiably, about Franconia's precarious financial situation. Although an imaginative educator, Ruopp was unimpressive as a fund raiser. The school was running $100,000 per year in the red on an operating budget of $1,000,000. Insurance companies canceled their policies on the college's buildings, and the banks holding its mortgage threatened to foreclose.