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The Bodger Dialogues:
Reshaping a college--and
its president Introduction |
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Contents Chapter One: Michael (Returning to origins) Chapter Two: Margaret (Re-entering the college's life, 1965-1970) Chapter Three: (Matthew (Preparing to preside, 1970-1976) Chapter Four: M.S. Part One (Getting started, 1976-1979) Chapter Five: M.S. Part Two (Making headway, 1979-1984) Chapter Six: Martin (Arriving...and ending, 1984-1994) Chapter Seven: Mirage (Postlude) Some Works Referred to in the Text
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It was in my nature to write something about my experience after leaving the presidency of Ursinus College in January 1995. I was pecking at a draft at a leisurely pace when some signals from doctors reminded me I did not have forever. I brought the draft to a somewhat hasty finish in 2002. Whatever else it is, this is a personal memoir. It deals with influences on me as I grew up and went to Ursinus as an undergraduate. It identifies experiences in my early working years that shaped my ways of thinking and behaving when I moved into a career in higher education. Mainly, it tracks my personal development as a president by reporting on the major events of my administration, seen from my viewpoint. I was president of Ursinus from November 1976 to January 1995, a period of eighteen years. The college developed significantly in that lengthy period, just as (I think) I personally developed as the leader of the college. This text weaves together those two threads, institutional and personal. The result is supposed to be a whole fabric, designed to show the interlacing of institutional imperatives with the peculiarities of my preparation for leadership. A single theme ties together the years under my leadership at Ursinus. It is transition--or, as the title has it, "reshaping." From 1976 to 1995, the parochial and local character of the college yielded to a profile that more closely resembled those of better-known national liberal arts colleges. This transition was largely the result of deliberate actions over the years, not the product of drift. Yet, the clarity of the college's commitment to broad undergraduate liberal education throughout its history made such actions possible. The reshaping of my personal views through my years of preparing for and then of serving as head of the institution was necessary, I believe, to make the institutional transition possible. I too was in transition. I hope that the fabric of this text, woven of those institutional and personal threads, and all of it tied together by transitional dynamics, displays with some accuracy what was essentially happening at Ursinus in those years. This weaving together of institutional and personal threads admittedly makes a peculiar work. Some of my friends expected me to follow the model of objective narrative history set forth by Calvin D. Yost in his account of the first hundred years of Ursinus. Given my place in the story, I simply could not bring myself to write that way. I decided that if this was to be a contribution to institutional memory--and perhaps even in a small way to the larger narrative of American liberal education in the last third of the century--it should give what no one else, not even the best objective historian, could give. It should display the main threads of development from the unabashed point of view of the person who was leading the way. This decision led me to another. To allow for informality and flexibility, I decided to cast the text in the form of imaginary dialogues. Readers will find five completely fictional characters—Michael, Margaret, Matthew, M.S., and Martin. Each has a chapter (M.S. has two). They engage in imaginary dialogues with a person named Bodger. A sixth imaginary character appears in the last chapter as a Mirage, with whom Bodger has a final conversation of sorts. Bodger is my fictional counterpart. Why, then, did I not just call him by my right name? I found that I could not proceed without some narrative distance between the person I think I am and the persona on the page. A fictional name allowed the "I" in the text to hold forth comfortably with the fictional interlocutors. The name "Bodger"--which came out of the blue--seemed to establish the whimsical distance I wanted without (I hope) pinning a completely foolish label on me. Perhaps the fictional name also lulled me into the comfortable feeling that readers would be unable to find the complete person of the writer fully exposed in these pages—that I still could safely lurk somewhere beyond text, out of reach of the most searching light. The fictional characters roughly mirror my age and stage of personal and professional development when they are having their talks with Bodger. For example, Michael, a senior about to graduate, talks with Bodger about Bodger's experiences when he too was in his formative years. Martin, a contemporary of Bodger's and a former college president, talks with him about Bodger's senior years in office and his getting out. And so on. It is not essential for a reader to dwell on these parallels. But they were important tools for me as I sought to organize and dramatize the material. The status in life of the interlocutors determined what it was about Bodger's presidency that they wanted to talk about. These fictional conversationalists talk with Bodger about the real world of the college, except occasionally and briefly when the form of the dialogues and their fictional situations call for obviously made-up stage business. I feel that the device of the imaginary conversations gave me the freedom of form that I needed to present the fabric of institutional and personal life that I had in mind. I hope that their imaginary nature will not prevent readers from seeing the real-world significance in what they convey. My best hope is that in fact the conversational form will assist readers to see things more sharply. Another peculiarity of the text is that the name of Ursinus College never appears. This in my mind reinforced the imaginary nature of the dialogues without hiding what I was really dealing with. The omission in the text should not obscure the appreciation and affection that I feel for Ursinus College. Those feelings were the driving force behind my writing of this text. The names of many colleagues appear here. I felt that it was important to name names when I could to reinforce a sense of the up-close reality of what was going on in the reshaping of our college. I tried wherever possible to show the positive contributions made by these colleagues to the process, even when at times the text is not wholly a bouquet. I failed, I'm sure, to name all the significant names. Named or not in the text, all the men and women with whom I worked at Ursinus have a valued place in my memory. I am grateful to Ursinus College for enabling me to write this account. I am responsible for all errors and shortcomings. Richard P. Richter President Emeritus, Ursinus College November 2002
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