Interestingly, my alma mater, New College, although similar to Evergreen in many ways, is different in some ways. All the following (quoting from Geoduck) are also true of New College:
> -instructors focus on teaching, not research, though a
> surprisingly large amount of good research goes on
Yes.
> -multidisciplinary approach to study–subjects are not broken
> down into neat little categories, but rather examined from a
> consuming science+art+religion perspective.
Yes, sort of. If you wanted to do an interdisciplinary independent study project, you went to the appropriate faculty member and set it up. Perhaps there wasn’t as much of faculty setting up interdisciplinary courses by themselves without student input.
> -great opportunities for self-directed work. You can do
> individual contracts with faculty, internships, traditional classes,
> research if you have a vision and executable plan. Great way to
> grow into an adult.
Yes.
> -Focus is on learning, not sports, though team sports do exist.
Zero intercollegiate sports at New College. Some sports on a casual level within the college itself, but not on a very organized basis and not in general continuing from year to year. In December 1971, I and some other people who had been playing Ultimate Frisbee casually drove up to Eckerd College in St. Petersburg and challenged them to a game. This might count as the first ever intercollegiate Ultimate Frisbee game except that there were New College students and Eckerd College students and nonstudent hanger-ons on both teams.
> -instructors are very high quality.
Yes.
> -the physical environment
Yes.
> -lots of current, trendy politics, anti-/non-fashions, organic
> lifestyle elements.
Yes. There was never any feeling that you were forced into any political system at New College. And, bizarrely, the only two polticians with any sort of national recognition who graduated from New College are a Republican representative from Florida and the head of the Republican party in New Hampshire.
> -the graduate programs are fairly limited in number and only
> Masters-level degrees are offered (Evergreen is not a
> university)
No graduate programs at all.
> -some students never graduate and I bet a few of my
> fellow ‘greeners are still there gettin’ high in their rainbow hats.
Yes, although my observation is that nearly all the people who smoked a fair amount of dope at New College now say, “I just don’t have time for that anymore.”
> -the place can be a little too smug about itself
Yeah, sort of.
> -you have a lot of trust-fund kids mouthing socialist worker
> babble
Some trust-fund kids, some socialist worker babble. I grew up in a struggling working-class family myself, so there was lots of variation.
> -not being a university, there are some limits to tools and
> learning resources
Yes.
> -when I was there, there was a distinct feeling that it was
> uncool to be involved in a heterosexual romance. In retrospect
> it must have been a miracle that my wife of 20 years and I met
> there.
Well, sort of. There was certainly a lot of sleeping around. There were also many romances that lasted.
But the interesting thing is that New College didn’t produce any famous, oddball, off-the-wall artistic types like Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Michael Richards, or Ralph Bakshi. Yes, a sprinkling of minor artistic types, but none as famous as that. (There have only been about 4,000 graduates from New College since it opened in 1964.) Despite its hippy-dippy image, New College is a very academically selective place and a place where you learned to study on your own.
What New College produces more than just about any other college in the U.S. is Ph.D’s. It has nearly the highest proportion of graduates who later get Ph.D.'s of any college in the U.S. When I go through my mental list of famous graduates of New College, it’s not easy to explain who any of them are: A winner of the Fields medal (sort of the Nobel prize in math), a congressman, a chairman of a big company.