For an exciting ten year period Johnston College at the University of Redlands was a locus of innovative education in the United States. Along with institutions such as hampshire, UC Santa Cruz and Fair haven, Johnston College pioneered work in student-centered learning using academic contracts, affective education, narrative evaluations rather than letter grades, and a host of other innovations. Our narrative history chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of this academic community's journey. The book concentrates on the founding and the closing of the College, and its transformation into the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, which continues to prosper at the University. It explores the educational practices, alternative teaching and learning, instructive failures, cultural complexity, and rites of passage that made it so successful, and so difficult to sustain.

Bill McDonald joined the Johnston College faculty in the fall of 1969 as a Faculty Fellow in literature. He's now also a Professor of English at the University of Redlands (since 1981), and holds the Virginia Hunsaker Chair in Teaching. For the English department he teaches courses in British and European modernism, "Joyce's Ulysses", "Dostoevsky," and courses featuring intertextuality; in the Johnston Center he designs courses with students, including "The Ancient Greeks" (also with Kevin O'Neill), "The History of Love," "Wine and Opera," and many other interdisciplinary seminars. His most recent book: "Thomas Mann's 'Joseph and his Brothers': Writing, Performance, and the Politics of Loyalty" (Camden House, 1999).