Decision making under uncertainty

Although I made my decision to go to Johnston pretty much there on the spot, and never visited another private college to compare, I don’t think I went into the experience with my eyes closed. I find it necessary to stress this because some of what I’m examining here is the whole concept of decision-making under uncertainty as mapped to the experience of liberal education. Which is to say, one can't guarantee the good outcome of even the best possible decision.

I had been taking classes at the local community college in Simi Valley and had visited two University of California campuses, L.A. and Santa Barbara, as well as having hung around Cal State Fullerton years before when we lived in Orange County. So I was comfortable with campuses as mental geographies. And U.C.S.B., in particular, had offered a direct comparison to what was offered at Johnston, in its College of Creative Studies. Whereas the Santa Barbara version of experimental education offered an austere, apprenticeship model based on the development of gifts, Johnston College appeared to place a multitude of opportunities on offer, with further opportunities available constrained only by one’s negotiating talents. CCS was the studio or the shop; Johnston was the marketplace, or the amusement park.

John Prine

The evening’s dinner offered me a model of Johnstonian conviviality: food and conversation around common tables, then an extended after-dinner sitting around listening to guys playing their guitars. They were singing what I would later learn to John Prine songs. That the songs were ones I’d not heard before gave them a power over me they’d certainly not have had otherwise: for all I could tell, the guys performing, who had the outdoors look, moustaches and denim jackets, and had girls hanging by their sides, were singing their own songs. Psychologically, if not at the level of common sense, that’s how I must have interpreted the performance. Johnston was the possibility that I could sing my own songs, as it were, and get the girls. I was especially fixated on one particular blond-haired girl during the evening. Maybe I hoped she’d be there waiting for me on my first day of school at Johnston. At any rate, that passion was as evanescent as they all were then. She is unrecognizable in the light of present memory. It's possible I never saw her again. On the other hand, she may have been someone I saw all the time when I came to Johnston, but re-cast in the very different light of the place as my own home.

Encouragement

What I remember from my visit to Johnston as a high-schooler is not a single Johnston class, though I must have sat in on several, but discussions with two faculty and the evening’s dinner in the Commons. One of the faculty was, he revealed to me, on his way out of the school, and argued that if it was intellectual challenge I was looking for, Johnston would not be the place to find it. The other faculty was Bill McDonald, the person who then and now most represents for me the possibility of pedagogical compassion, if not rigor, at Johnston. Bill was much more encouraging than the other gentleman (who shall remain nameless because I haven’t been able to figure out his name with certainty), and presented the case for Johnston being just the place where such as I would shine, and get the education I was looking for to boot.