Learning for Leisure

"Few women reach middle life with out a heartache," says the prospectus of Clarke College, so Clarke sets about to head off the heartache. The small Roman Catholic girls' school in Dubuque, Iowa, accepts the commonplace theory that fledging a family of children can leave a woman with too much time and a painful lack of purpose. Consequently, Clarke trains its girls to be come, as President Sister Mary Benedict explains it, "the heart, the educated heart, not only of the home but of communities outside the home."

One-third of the 69 sisters on Clarke's faculty of 84 have doctorates, and one-third of its seniors go on to graduate school. In the past five years, four Clarke girls won Woodrow Wilson fellowships and two received Fulbrights. Yet for all but a few students, the future means marriage and a family. "If women are not to cheat themselves," warns Sister Mary Benedict, "they must learn to use leisure so that it will produce self-growth, self-deepening, self-discipline."

Intellectual Unfolding. Training for leisure at Clarke is a fulltime occupation. The liberal arts curriculum includes a political science course on political parties and pressure groups taught by a man who should know: Robert Horgan, a Ph.D. from Notre Dame who is also mayor of Dubuque. Twelve hours of philosophy and 14 hours of theology are required, but the academic atmosphere is far from rigid. "A freer academic atmosphere is opening up," says Edmund Demers, a lay member of the faculty. "In the old days, Catholic schools were more concerned with virtue than intellectual achievement. We're still concerned with virtue, but we see college as an intellectual unfolding." A philosophy student says that the most stimulating books she read all year were by Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber. The Catholic Index of Forbidden Books is frequently ignored. "Religion permeates everything," says Art Major Kay Kurt, "but you don't hear God, God, God all the time."

According to campus legend, the founders of Clarke arrived at Dubuque by riverboat in 1843 bringing a grand piano with them. The creative arts have played a central role at the college ever since. The girls are bored with traditional music, preferring to hear concerts by Jazzman Dave Brubeck, or to put on their own performances of Virgil Thomson's Medea or Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti. Bold, colorful abstract painting, sculpture, ceramics and mosaics by students and faculty are everywhere on campus, reflecting Demers' concept that art "is the flesh of every aspect of life." In drama as in the fine arts, the results are vigorous and venturesome.

The Deputy. Clarke's Coffee House theater, a twelve-girl troupe, is currently on a Defense Department tour of U.S. Army bases in Europe, accompanied by two nuns. Last week they played Munich with a revue of songs and blackouts so lively and worldly that, said one G.I., "only on second thought did you notice that this is a clean show." Campus productions include not only classics and Broadway shows, such as The Diary of Anne Frank, but theater-of-the-absurd plays such as Zoo Story and The Bald Soprano, and next year selections from The Deputy. Though some Clarke alumnae have become career actresses, teachers care less about professionalism than awakening imagination.

"The fine arts satisfy the natural cravings for the good, the true, the beautiful," says Sister Mary Benedict, who used to head Clarke's psychology department. "Women must not only be helpmates and companions to their husbands, chauffeurs and counselors of their children, but intelligent, generous participants in affairs of church and state."

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