PRESCOTT INSTITUTIONS

It is a new type of four-year, degree-granting college.

Participation in the wide-ranging Outdoor Action program is available to those seminar participants who want the recreation, the stimulus, the renewal of pursuing an alternate lifestyle. Activities range from the lake to the mountain, the kayak to the sailplane.

The permanent business of The SCHOLE, then, is to direct the force of the intellect to those conditions which beset mankind; to seek human fulfillment; to focus on essences those basic issues which are intrinsic to the humanness of man and to his movement through time and space.

The SCHOLE brings facts and wisdom, vision and experience, youth and age together in the pursuit of basic issues.

Such intellectual action is for a lifetime.

The program of the Institute is designed to challenge the capabilities of the students whose talents and motivations extend beyond the traditional patterns of scholarship.

Basically, the Institute is action oriented using the classroom as but an aid to experience. A greatly developed version of Prescott's nationally recognized Outdoor Action program is central to the operation of the Institute, which accepted its first students in September, 1971.

The Program reflects a basic assumption that a need exists for an institutional framework within which people may function who already possess a sense of purpose and who have the capacity for a considerable degree of self-direction.

The implication is not that entering students need to have a firm commitment to a specific career choice, but rather that they will take responsibility for determining their own educational priorities in view of their own goals and objectives. The Institute is not based on the model of the free school, nor is it based on the traditional college curriculum. Individual students have considerable freedom to pursue their own course of action, but this course of action must be clearly within the stated limits of the Institute.

It could be said that the Institute deals in leadership. If this is so, then the time has come to demythologize leadership. Leaders must serve as much as they lead. They must inspire trust, have confidence, have an openness, a style, a willingness to risk as they build. They need to be thinkers beyond simply being well-meaning. A physical and mental environment with an emphasis on the servant/leader, which gives opportunity to work with real people in real situations, an environment where qualities can be tested such an environment may produce leaders. If it can be argued that leaders are not so much products of training as they are products of evolution, then the Institute can aid that evolvement.

The Institute serves its students and the other Prescott Institutions through three programs, each offering its own particular approach to education:

Outdoor Action

providing the College, The SCHOLE and the Institute with outdoor programs designed to allow the maximum in physical self-expression and self-understanding. The Outdoor Action programs, improved and more academically oriented versions of the internationally famous Outward Bound Schools, form the basis of the Institute, and are available only to students and participants of the Prescott Institutions.

Experiential Education

providing the academic elements which will lead to a Bachelor of Arts degree. Educationally innovative, this program is designed to produce academic validity for experiential education, and to demonstrate that learnings outside the formal classroom are worthy of credit. These programs are available only through registration with the Institute.

Challenge/Discover

making the Outdoor Action programs available to other academic institutions and to the public at large. As the success of Outdoor Action gained national attention, demands from other outside institutions for similar programs began to increase. With the formation of the Prescott Institutions, which gave Outdoor Action a more prominent and distinctive role and provided additional facilities for its growth, such programs are now available to any interested individuals or organizations through Challenge/Discovery.

Using the magnificent environment of the Southwest, rich in the history and character of a developing America, the Institute creates situations where undergraduates learn to follow, to relate to others, to achieve a mastery and an understanding of themselves. Just as the academic program of the Institute is intellectually demanding, so are its experiential programs strenuous upon body and spirit.

Ronald Nairn...Chancellor, The Prescott Institutions By Paul Dean

The Prescott Institutions, represent an unusual educational complex.

The scholar Dr. Ronald Nairn, chancellor of the Prescott Institutions, appears more ordinary.

Slender and short. Soft, Irish-New Zealand enunciation prowling from beneath a David Niven moustache. Sandy hair in a faculty trim. A blue-eyed Mr. Chips. Controlled. Mild. Quiet.

Yet that appearance lies.

There have been moments when life was a vicious grinder and the emotions and body of Ronald Nairn were its grist.

At age 18 he was firing 50-caliber machine guns in sincere anger as a P40 pilot over the Southwest Pacific. Twice he was shot down by the Japanese. Twice he was wounded. Once he was reported missing in action only to be recovered from his rubber dinghy slurping in the Solomon Sea.

While barely old enough to vote in his native New Zealand he had killed five enemy aircraft and become an ace. He survived the gut-terror of 187 combat missions. His Commonwealth gave him its Air Force Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

But these were more than war story years to be recalled and amplified when uniforms no longer fit the conventioneers or their hotel reunions.

For horror, fear and the very individual despair of war fought while belted in the plexiglass coop of a fighter cockpit gave Ronald Nairn a philosophy.

And they introduced him to a voice, a presence, an intangible that even Nairn, with all his later education, can only establish as some supreme being.

He heard it and felt it first as a student pilot in 1941.

Nairn, who would graduate as a sergeant pilot and rise to the commissioned rank of squadron leader in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, was flying an AT6 Harvard from Woodburne, N.Z.

He was practicing forced landings, gliding his trainer towards the field with its engine at idle.

Another student in another Harvard climbed beneath him. The two airplanes collided. Both spun, locked together. Nairn broke free and recovered his ship. The other plane twisted down, crashed and burned. Derek Lippett, the pilot, Nairn's companion at enlistment, the friend from the same hometown of Upper Hutt near Wellington, N.Z., was killed.

But a voice kept Nairn alive. It told him what he couldn't know or see. It said his right wheel was crushed but the left landing gear was intact.

Nairn touched down at Woodburne, gave his guess to the left wheel, held his controls to that side and survived what he remembers as "a magnificent ground loop."

Later, this time at war, Nairn obeyed his guardian instinct for a second time.

The Solomon Sea, 1942. Nairn's P40 Kittyhawk was stumbling in tatters after a squadron dogfight against 40 Japanese Zeros.

Forty bullets had hot-skewered the airplane. The hydraulics were dead. A magneto had been shot out. His canopy had been blasted away. A chunk of metal was imbedded in Nairn's thigh. Flying plexiglass had peppered one of his sides, from ear to heel. And he was hundreds of overwater miles from an allies field.

"Dammit, I wasn't all that well trained," Nairn recalls today. "But I felt an incredible thing, something beyond any knowledge I had at the time. I had this very real assurance that I was going to make it. I was completely confident. To the point where I was singing Irish songs as these little islands flew by beneath me on the way home."

He reached home, Henderson Field. But his instinct wasn't done. It spoke again. It said his right wheel was crippled but the left wheel was down, locked and intact.

Once more Nairn obeyed what he couldn't identify. Once more he landed heavy on the left wheel. Once more he survived the crash landing.

Days later, the voice returned to tug Nairn from another disaster.

His flight of eight aircraft had been chewed by the Japanese. Two Kittyhawks had been shot down. The battered escaped and ran for home.

They bored over the field in rain that chopped visibility to 800 feet and dropped the cloud ceiling to half of that.

"I knew something was going to happen," remembers Nairn. "A thought flashed into a brain cell and something said 'pull up... pull up.

Nairn pulled up. The others didn't. Two of them collided with a flock of P38 fighters coming the other way. Four pilots died in the crashes.

There are obvious challenges to Nairn's early experiences. Maybe he was saved by instinct, the same feeling that stiffens back hairs when there is no apparent alarm. Maybe it was luck. Or extra sensory perception. Or hindsight allowed to twist and inflate coincidence as a rationalization for the inexplicable.

But Nairn destroys such obvious reasoning.

He does it by telling of a dream he had as a 16-yearold boy who presumed no war and had no ambitions to fly.

"I dreamed of a light blue airplane, one with a cranked wing, flying over a circular harbor. There was a horde of airplanes on his tail. He was in trouble and I couldn't help him. I was impotent. The blue airplane crashed into the water."

New Britan, 1943. Nairn's airplane was under attack by Japanese Zeros. He was over Rabaul Harbor. A circular harbor.

From a half roll, Nairn looked down. He saw a light blue F4 Corsair, an American airplane with a cranked, inverted gull wing. It was being splintered by cannon shells from following fighters. It fell into the sea.

"And I was too damned busy to help him. It was my dream."

In 1945 the armistice silenced Nairn's guns. But the peace was no softer on the man. Nor did it stop the voice that had been his co-pilot.

Nairn, born in Ireland, moved to New Zealand as a babe, stayed with the New Zealand military. He was stationed in Japan and flew Corsairs as a member of a formation aerobatic team.

Iwa Kuni, 1947. Nairn's team was aloft and performing loops in diamond formation. But the loop was too low.

And at better than 400 miles per hour, Nairn's Corsair was upended by propwash, dug a right wingtip into the ground and started a 400-yard cartwheel.

The voice, says Nairn, was quite distinct this time. "My God, you're in a difficult position," was its decision. "But don't worry Ronald, you won't be killed. You'll survive this one."

Nairn did escape. But the crash broke his back, ribs, left leg, left arm, right ankle, fractured his skull and left him temporarily blind.

He was in a hospital for three months before returning to the air, formation aerobatics, his embarrassing penchant for bending airplanes and the doom counselor inside his brain.

Then, Whenuapai, N.Z., 1952. It was Air Force Day at this RNZAF station near Auckland. Nairn was leading the "Jetobatics," a formation of six de Havilland Vam-pires, on a high speed display run over the city.

The flight was lancing across Mangere Harbor. Nairn felt a wingtip slap on his own. He looked up. A wingman had flipped inverted. His Vampire crashed, canopy to canopy, on Nairn's ship.

Noise. Flash. Heat.

Nairn's little fighter was in an inverted spin. It was on fire. The voice spoke: "Ronald, after all this, after all this flying and fighting, you are going to die."

Nairn says there was no doubt. He was ready to accept it.

The Vampire was breaking up. A wing snapped off. But by some quirk of aerodynamics, the sudden separation righted the airplane. Nairn shoved himself through the shambles of his cockpit. He could see flames lapping over half an airplane. He saw a way out and kicked himself free of the airplane.

The next voice he heard was his own. It denied the earlier verdict on his future.

"Son, you are very, very low," he told himself. "Pull your chute and risk it failing. It's your only chance."

At 600 feet, Nairn's pilot chute popped free. At 400 feet the main canopy opened and he thudded onto the harbor mud flats.

Here is how Nairn remembers the following minutes: "I hit the beach, sat up and could feel a beard of blood on my face. There was no pain, no discomfort, no sense of cold.

"I could see the tail of a Vampire not too far away. There was a figure lying alongside it. He was wearing an air force flight suit with squadron leader bars on the epau-lets and the patch of 14 Squadron, a Kea bird, on his chest. I thought he was a very handsome fellow.

"Then I realized I was looking at myself. This man wasn't unconscious. He was dead. I was looking at myself and I knew I was dead.

"I moved towards this guy and could feel wet sand on my hands. I didn't physically touch him. I just looked at him, looked at a grey sky and green sea, and we merged.

"At that moment there was this feeling, an enormous presence, a power outside of me, a feeling of being one."

Nairn remembers shouts. The sound of a truck motor. The hands of two New Zealand farmers helping him to stand up. And touching himself to learn that his only injuries were a cut forehead and massive bruising.

Shock could explain what Nairn believes he saw on those mud flats of Mangere Harbor.

The blow on his head could have created the vivid delusion of death, life, detachment and the return to life.

But Nairn believes it was the work of an absolute being.

And later, he thought of combat in the air, the 39 young men who had graduated from his pilot training class and of the six who made it back from World War II.

He dwelled on young heroism, the courage and character that had epitomized the living and the dead, most of them teenagers, and of his own course through the past.

And he accepted then that hunger, deprivation, cold, loneliness and fear must be faced and conquered if man is to have quality.

Nairn brought this philosophy to the United States in 1961.

He attached it to a master's degree and a doctorate from Yale. He put it to work in Arizona when he became president of Prescott College.

At Nairn's school, coeds are taught to rappel backwards down sheer cliffs. Young men and young women shoot rapids in fragile kayaks and paddle across the often irritable water of Mexico's Sea of Cortez. Students challenge the skies in sailplanes, are trucked to live alone off the land, and are led to ascend Colorado mountains that have never been climbed by man.

For the demands of life and society, says Nairn, parallel the demands of mountains and seas.

A man can conquer mountains and be complete from beating its challenge. But if the man fails, the mountain doesn't give a damn.

Seas and deserts are rigid and uncaring. Yet they save a place for the strong who understand them, beat them. As life saves a place for the strong.

Nairn admits that the methods at Prescott College are pure Nairn and that his means are harsh, maybe even brutal. But their demands simulate the life that matured him.

"No matter what today's youth may say they are not the best generation we have ever had," Nairn has said in public speech. "When I look at this generation I do not feel ashamed of mine."

In private conversation Nairn had said this: "I can no longer believe that life is material circumstance. I've been one of the people privileged to be shown and learn this. Maybe I'm not passing it on universally. But to certain people, a few people, yes, I am passing it on."