For more than thirty years, the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands has been a focus of innovative education in the United States. This collection chronicles the last twenty-five years of this academic community's development. Johnston fosters student-centered learning through a contract system used to negotiate both course content and the terms under which each student graduates from Redlands. The essays investigate the collective coming of age of the Center, and explore the educational practices, alternative teaching and learning, instructive failures, cultural complexity, and rites of passage that have made it so successful.