Drinking Deep at Black Mountain College Charles Perrow (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, was an icon of progressive education during its short life, from 1933 to 1956. Isolated in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, it was one of the very few schools in the country that was open to experimentation. Buckminster Fuller's students demonstrate the lightness of the dome during the 1949 Summer Architecture Institute, photographed by Masato Nakagawa. All photographs from the North Carolina Museum of Art Black Mountain Research Project, courtesy of the North Carolina Digital Collections, ncdcr.gov. [End Page 76] Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, was an icon of progressive education during its short life, from 1933 to 1956. When I was there, from 1946 to 1948, there were sixty to eighty students and twenty faculty. There were few formal academic requirements, no required courses, no grades, limited resources, but an amazing abundance of creative students and faculty. Students in my two years included such notables as the writer Jose Yglesias, director Arthur Penn, painter Kenneth Noland, and sculptor Ruth Asawa. The Summer Art Institute in 1948 had John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold. The regular faculty had as its star the abstract painter Josef Albers, and many notables in painting, mathematics, chemistry, weaving, and music, including Ilya Bolotowsky, Max Dehn, Natasha Goldowski, Anni Albers, Erwin Bodky, and Edward Lowinsky. The rest of the faculty included lesser-known but often distinguished writers, philosophers, musicians, historians, and a progressive psychologist. The college was always a dynamic, explosive, self-destructive hothouse. Since its inception, it had been a hotel for progressive ideas in American education, the arts, and the social sciences. Isolated in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, it was one of the very few schools in the country that was open to experimentation. A busload of new faculty and students arrived yearly, welcomed as refreshers and feared as competitors by those who had been there a year or two. Some tried to renovate BMC in their own image, some simply basked in its tolerance and idealism. The most authentic of the students and faculty were seeking to feed deeply on its vibrant flesh, immersing themselves in the unique experience and embracing its contradictions. All but a few moved on after a year or two, gratified or rejected, and a new busload arrived. A small core faculty stayed, providing some continuity and every three or four years wearily congratulating themselves on staving off another educational challenge and on disposing of the disruptive faculty and students who sought renovations (and sometimes achieved them). The core faculty sullenly cleaned up and tried again to square the circle, to create stability and security while proclaiming innovation. My busload, I believe, was quintessential. Making Our Way Almost everyone there at this period seemed a poster-child of some sort, representing a fragment of our culture—the closet gay, the civil rights activist, the communist, the avant-garde painter, the urgent truth-seeker, the parent-escaper. My poster was being about the only student from the West Coast (most were from the Northeast, particularly New York City); about being the only one without parents and siblings who had attended college (most students, but certainly not all, were from a well-educated upper middle class, or intellectual elite class); and being one [End Page 77] of the few, I suppose, who had had little contact with Jewish people. BMC, in my retrospective judgment, was predominantly a Jewish culture. Tacoma, Washington, had a few Jews (including a friend), and some of my army friends were probably Jewish, but I never thought much of it. My acquaintance with Jewish culture was so limited that, even after I left BMC and went to live on the Lower East Side (East 6th and Avenue A), it struck me as very strange as I walked in my neighborhood (a Jewish enclave in 1948-49) that all the people chatting on the front steps spent their time telling Jewish jokes. I finally realized that BMC was the only context in which I had heard...

When Hurricane Katrina struck in August, 2005, people in the U.S. and around the world were dumbfounded by the scope and severity of the storm's impacts and equally astonished by the sheer incompetence of the governmental response to the largest catastrophe to strike the nation in the last one hundred years. Astonishment turned to anger when the public began to realize that, contrary to President Bush's early statement that the breach of the levees and the subsequent flooding could not have been anticipated, the devastating consequences for the Gulf region of a large storm like Katrina had long been predicted. Disaster training scenarios such as the " Hurricane Pam " exercise had already envisioned what would happen in New Orleans following a large hurricane, and the Bush administration had in fact been informed that Katrina was a catastrophe in the making on the weekend before the storm made landfall. Amid the shock and awe that accompanied the Katrina disaster, perhaps the most riveting images not only focused on how Ka-trina stripped bare the landscape of the Gulf Region but also illustrated how pre-existing social conditions led to vastly different consequences for the storm's victims. While better off residents fled the city in their cars, the poor, elderly, and disabled were unable or unwilling to leave (or both), and many residents lost their lives when the levees burst. Those who remained waited days to be rescued, and for some, help never came. Through a social triage process driven by negligence, incompetence, and perhaps even malice, other victims lost their lives in nursing homes, hospitals, and shelters. Victims with the fewest resources and the greatest needs, such as those who sought help at the Superdome and the Convention Center, lived in miserable conditions and then were transported out of New Orleans by agencies that cared little about their resettlement needs. When community residents stranded in New Orleans tried to survive by taking water, food, milk, and diapers, they were labeled as looters and thugs. When isolated pockets of violence developed after the flooding, New Orleans was treated as a war zone, and threats of deadly force were used against residents, particularly if they happened to be young black males. " Shoot to kill " orders issued two days after the levees broke undoubtedly hampered the ability of those trapped in New Orleans to assist one another. By slowing down search and rescue …

Organizations are the most intensive and effective environmental destroyers. Organizations in a competitive unregulated market such as the United States and emerging Asian and former Soviet countries are more likely to be destructive because externalizing environmental costs increases profits and competitiveness, but organizational properties encourage destructive practices even in command economies. In the United States, a fully wage-dependent workforce makes whistle-blowing risky, structural interests of employees limits the reform efforts of even an environmentally sensitive executive, decentralization limits accountability, consultants and public relations staffs are available to reassure executives that trade-offs are in society's interests and that regulations mean waste, and organizations socialize all employees, making whistle-blowing even rarer.

Learning from Disasters: A Management Approach. By Brian Toft and Simon Reynolds Butterworth-Heinemann: 1994. Pp. 140. £25, $49.95.