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Chancellor Gene Ouellette in 1972 wrote an article in the Town of Redlands' paper, the Daily Facts, explaining the new phase in the University's existence:
Perhaps in the first year or two we were too busy building the college. Now we are very firmly into the program development, and in the more experimental quarters we're even being accused of being too academic.The students are not so much involved in the mechanics of being experimental as they are in learning. Our initial experiments are a way of learning now; they are no longer experiments. And our new experiments are sort of outgrowths of the old ones. They don't seem so radical.[19]
In 1973, a projected College enrollment of 400 in the fall turned out to be 298 students. Yet that number was a record high for the College despite not meeting the lofty 400 number. Those students entered into an institution nearing the end of its period of innovation, an institution still excited with its own existence and not yet realizing its ultimate fate would be integration into the University. The period is referred to by the History as the Zenith -- the period of the institution as its ``period of highest enrollment and generally perceived success.''[16]
Johnston was still an experimental institution but the ways in which it was experimental were largely established. There was no serious sentiment that the fundamental design should be scrapped; the great majority of Johnstonians felt that the experiment had succeeded.
Without the enormous decisions that had to be made before the start of the year, the Pilgrim Pines college-wide retreat was replaced by the mid-semester GYST.[SEE FOOTNOTE]
Beginning in 1974, but particularly in 1975, the University Business Office put out documents suggesting that Johnston was costing the University approximately $100,000 a year.[15] Of course, this seems relatively small compared to a 30 million dollar operating budget, but it also seems to be large enough to serve as a possible justification for the campus ``reorganization'' that was soon to take place.
In 1976, a partial integration of the College marked the beginning of the end for Johnston College. This move by the University was a predominantly adminstrative change, dissolving Johnston Student Life and admissions offices and firing the new Chancellor's assistant. ``The struggles were at first political, then economic, and finally personal,'' the History says. At this point, the struggles were economic. The Johnston dining commons was closed, and Johnston students once again ate with in the University commons, as they had before their own commons had been constructed.
In the student-accessible, impressively maintained Johnston College archives, I found a statement to the Community Meeting from the fall following the May reorganization, a statement that I am including because of the relationship between egalitarianism and community that it suggests:
Recognize that we do not make the College, but that we do make the College what it is and what it can be, given the parameters which contain us...We have to hold to our rare quality of involving ourselves in the management of ourselves. If we have this, then I believe a unified Community of caring and committed individuals will grow natural. But we cannot have one without the other. Of this, I feel very certain.[10]
The History suggests that the ultimate demise of the College, due to economic and personal reasons, precipitated from this ``integrative'' wound, rather than from fundamental troubles within its own structure.
Johnston did pay its own way from 1969 to 1975. A historical summary prepared by the University's own Business Office showed that the college had a cumulative deficit of less than $20,000 by the end of that fiscal year. The college's final four years, however, were another story.