Chapter Two: Margaret (Re-entering the college's life, 1965-1970)

Contents

Introduction

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

            "I'm not sure you get it," Margaret said to Bodger after they had been talking in his office for a while.

            She was in her second year in the Modern Languages Department.  Bodger was nearing the end of his presidency.

            She came to the college fresh from her Ph.D. program in New England, just about thirty. Like others recently hired, she had a refreshing interest in the practice of teaching.  It separated her from her older colleagues, who thought that teaching was a gift, not an acquired skill, and not to be spoiled by conscious meddling in methodology.

            Bodger had suggested, ever so gently, that some critical distance helps a faculty member get through to the students.

            "I want to get CLOSE to the students," she said, "not put distance between us.  They can hear my voice, generationally, I think.  Feel it.  That's important.  I could reach them as a teaching assistant in grad school.  It carries over now."

            "I understand--been there," Bodger said.

            Her skeptical glance invited him onward.

            "When I came here to teach," Bodger said, "I was nearing my mid-thirties.  I never had taught a college course in my life.  I did not have a doctorate to mask my inadequacies.  I was thrown in with an English department made up substantially of people I had studied under as an undergraduate.  This led to cross currents of deference and outrageous rebellion, all unspoken and unseen by them.  Since I had no professional allegiance to an objective body of knowledge, I was free to align myself with the students as SELVES.  I don't think my department chairman--my former teacher--suspected the disloyalty to the discipline that this represented.  But I was teaching freshman composition anyway; nobody really cared what you taught as long as the students practiced writing."

            Margaret, Ph.D., looked slightly puzzled at Bodger through her round glasses.  He understood that his sense of getting close to students and hers were not precisely the same.

            "I could not be that cavalier," she said.  "Syllabi have to be handed in.  Students need evaluation.  They have to prepare for a general examination."

            "I know," Bodger said.  "I was not overtly accountable to anyone but myself in class.  The department head, the president, and colleagues all made an unspoken assumption.  It permeated the entire college then.  That was long before we put in a formal faculty development program, with deans and department heads hovering over syllabi and doing performance evaluations.  That only happened after I was president.  In those old days, people made the grand assumption that each faculty member could be depended upon to do the right thing.  Without that, I never could have given the self-referential spin to teaching that I gave.  No one checked on anyone else, at least not bureaucratically or formally.

            "My own needs were mixed up in this.  I over-prepared and studied hard to stay ahead of the students; but it all had to do with my own self as much as theirs.  It was important to me to tell them that THEY and not the books they were reading held first place in the priorities.  Looking back, I am not comfortable with the emphasis I felt compelled to give the students.  Undergraduates have always been preoccupied with themselves anyway.  The quest for self was something that was more important to me, probably, than it was to them.  It was something I should have completed long before I got there, perhaps.

            "One year I devised the 'yellow paper project' to give structure to this insistence.  The essence of it was that yellow tablet paper liberated the students to say anything they wanted to say.  There was a contract.  I would read their yellow papers but never say anything judgmental about what they wrote.  The mere fact that they wrote knowing I would be their audience was powerful.  Naively, they wrote of private things.  They were quite open.  I never violated the contract.  I learned about drugs on campus, loves and losses and cheats and youthful dreams of fame and fortune.  The contract allowed me to respond as I wished to their submissions, as long as my responses supported them or added something substantive.  So I got close to the students; but the medium of the yellow paper gave us both some space between."

            Margaret said, "Yes, I see. It made students very vulnerable."

            "It made me vulnerable too.  To them.  And to my colleagues, who mostly ignored my experiment.  Even after it received some notice in the College English journal."

            Margaret asked if Bodger thought he really taught them anything in this way.

            "It was not the only thing I did with a class, of course.  But, yes.  You always teach something with half an effort, although you don't always know what it is they're learning.  I am sure they learned that words on paper can matter to one in a personal way.  Frankly, that was enough for me in one small comp course on a small campus hidden away in a small town."

            "Cool," said Margaret.

            After she left his office, Bodger tried to put a definition to "cool."  He failed.  He guessed it affirmed something he had said; what it was affirming, however, escaped him.  Given the difference in their ages and in their generational markers, Bodger realized that Margaret and he had at best an approximate sense of living on common ground.  Yet their occasional conversations continued after he was out of office.   She lacked the unvarnished curiosity of Michael about Bodger.  But Margaret kept coming back to him.  She was rather like a tongue drawn to a missing filling in a molar.

            Months later, after he left office, Bodger leafed through his journal for something he said to himself in 1973 about his teaching.  He wanted Margaret to see it.   When she came to his new office away from the main campus, he gave it to her to read.  It was written on yellow tablet paper with the old manual typewriter now prominently situated on his new desk. 

            June 4, 1973: Yesterday the president announced at commencement that I was one of two recipients of the Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching.

            After reviewing all the reasons why I should not have received it, and all the bad reasons why I did receive it, I am left to poke around in the residue of possible merit in my teaching.  It is for me an added thing, tacked on to the end of my days, knitted and mended late at night and displayed--with no time to correct slips of the needles--at nine the next morning.  But it is also my link with authenticity, my opportunity, three times a week, to deal with things as they are and not the way I must push them into being.  Hence it is a seemingly unimportant segment of my life, which has in fact great importance.

            A scholar I am not.  The unhurried, ordered marshalling of information around common themes is a luxury I cannot afford.  I'm not even sure that, if I could afford it, I would know what to do with it.  My preparation for class is a combination of long-remembered postures, of hastily gathered information, and of overriding desire to Face the Fact, to cut out all the bull shit and get down to It.

            My skill, if any, lies in the ability I have to be in the classroom and to preserve it and mock it at the same time.  The classroom is a mortuary, which is in search of a live body.  To provide even a half-live body is an accomplishment, I think, and to stir even a few minds to look at things as they are is "excellence," perhaps.

            When I am sixty-five, I suppose I still will be a smart-ass kid who can't stand the stuffy atmosphere of the established way of doing things.  I remember when I was about to be graduated from eighth grade at Mont Clare School.  I was the Legion Award winner, a big cheese identified by the Big Cheese for future Big Cheeseism.  I distinctly remember blowing away at least part of the glory by tearing up all my art papers for the year and throwing them all over the front lawn of the school.  To be straight is to be dead.  I recall that the principal, Raymond Spaid, withheld another special award that I would naturally have received if I had not chosen or been compelled to stick my fingers up to my nose.

            That's the kind of person it is who has been named Lindback Award winner this year.  Dangerous business. 

             "Real cool," Margaret said.

            Bodger reconsidered whether Margaret's usage of "cool" was affirming anything.  But she continued to draw him out in their occasional chats.  Bodger sometimes felt that her interest was that which she might bring to an Andy Warhol lithograph: she liked the feeling you get when you run your eye over smooth surfaces that don't connect to anything else.  For her their talks may have been like a recreational drug, fun for the moment and forgotten the next.  Whatever the reason, Margaret sustained her interest in his apprenticeship years at the college.  It gave Bodger's memories a focus on that time of tumult and exhilaration.  He was in the very midst of it before he was conscious of a deliberate process of preparation.  It was one thing for him to be grabbing indiscriminately for new experience--to be developing himself out of instinct.  It was another to be the object of an agenda, raw material--in his own hands, in the hands of D.L. Helfferich, or both.  Yes, both.  Margaret over time may have devised a game of making that distinction, but she did not tell Bodger.

            One day, she had a particular reason to draw him out. He went to the 800s in the library stacks in search of a book on Kurt Vonnegut.  There he saw Margaret, squatting on the floor, head tilted, studying the titles on the book spines on the lowest shelf.

             "I was thinking about you the other day," she said.  "I was trying to tell my class about the feelings at colleges when Kent State happened.   I was about five years old at the time.  I only remember the pictures in the papers and vaguely see scenes on the screen in my memory."

            "Take them out to the main gate and look in toward the campus," Bodger said.  "Look to your left, at about ten o'clock.  You'll see a maple tree.  It's twenty-five years old.  Students and the president planted it to mark the moratorium against the war."

            "It sounds pretty tame," she said.

            "Planting the tree was the alternative the administration put in front of the students.   Some wanted to close the college."

            "And they bought the alternative?"

            "After much talk and persuasion."

            "By you?  Were you president?"

            "Not yet.  President's helper.  In charge of whatever the president wanted me to be in charge of.   So, yes, I did a lot of the talking with the students about the moratorium in the fall of '69.  The talking was even more intense when guardsmen shot students on the Kent State campus in the spring of '70."

            "Tell me more," Margaret said.

            Bodger agreed to meet Margaret in the chapel some days later.  She wanted him to remember more about his involvement in campus affairs in those times.  Beforehand, Bodger sat in his study at home and tried to recall specifics of those troubled years of the '60s and early '70s.  He did not feel confident that he could describe it so that Margaret could make sense of it.  He had to do some reconstructing ahead of time. 

 A sense of vocation led Bodger back to the college

             Bodger arrived at the college in 1965 with a sense of life as a vocation.  It was grounded in the Germanic work ethic of his family.  Only in retrospect, after he was grown, did he see the relentlessness of his mother's pressure on him to achieve.   The beauty of her project, he realized after she was gone, lay in her neglect of WHAT he should achieve.  He never felt inhibited by her in pursuing his secret ambition to write a great novel or to publish the greatest poetry.  She did not say, "Become a great doctor!"  or "Become a college professor!"  Without being fully conscious of doing so and without ever saying it explicitly, she said, "Become!"  She taught him to fear indolence, lack of purpose.  She never went beyond high school and spent her whole adult life as a housewife and mother.  She read The Reader's Digest for serious fare.  But her mind flew.  Her handwriting seemed to take wings across a piece of paper, skipping the leaden weight of careful grammatical structure.  He could feel her nervous energy whenever he was in the heat of a creative task.

            The quick energy of his mother contrasted with the passive place of his father in his young life.  His father would get up and go to work at the steel factory and come home and fix the house and smoke his cigar and talk little and go to bed so that he could get up before dawn for the next day's work.  His father and Bodger had an arms-length relationship.  Yet he was a Large Presence in Bodger's life.  Bodger feared him because of what he did not do but could.  In a day when children were still routinely beaten "for their own good" by loving parents, his father never put a hand on him.  But Bodger always knew he could.  And he kept a safe distance from him.  In the end, his father's presence complemented the forceful messages implanted by Bodger's mother.  Work! Become! Be good!

            When he read in college about the grand ambitions of the major writers, they enriched this ingrained disposition.  The Romantic greats--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats--attracted him with their combination of revolutionary impulse and heroic scope.  The high Victorians and major modern Americans deepened the feeling that he had a vocation to discover.  He thought it was to be found in creative writing, because his teachers said he knew how to write a sentence.  For a while, the texture of the prose of Fitzgerald and Hemingway seemed to him to have grown out of the shape of his own feelings.  He was slow to set aside that conceit.  He had to learn bit by bit that his vocation would be the utilization of his gifts--writing among them, certainly--in pursuit of  organizational imperatives.

            That realization blossomed only after he went through a decade of corporate servitude following the Army and Penn graduate school.  During that time, he experienced the superficial satisfaction of shaping events in the company through the printed word.  He also experienced the pleasure of shaping a good piece of prose for its own sake, even when the content was the trivia of company affairs.  And he learned the rhetoric of management relationships in an environment of masculine camaraderie.  He discovered a knack for knowing the flow of a deliberation and riding it just ahead of the others while making them feel good.  He thought of it as gamesmanship of a kind; but he felt too that it had something to do with his private need to discover vocation, to give himself over to something large.

            After arriving in the college setting in 1965, Bodger closed some of the distance between his public life on the job and the private world of his ambitions. The college was a more congenial setting for the merging of his public and private zones.  If he had revealed the extent of his sense of vocation in the conventionalized setting of the company, he had feared that his superiors would label him "weird."  Still, after moving to the college, he felt that he had to retain a guardedness about himself when talking with the college president and with his colleagues.  He still feared that they would think he was odd if they knew the whole truth about him.  In worst moments, this made him feel like an out-and-out paranoid.  It lent a tone of duplicity to the way he envisioned himself in action.  He felt that he was not leveling with those with whom he worked.   He felt devious and vaguely guilty.

            When he read his journal entries from the first couple of years after coming to work at the college, the high seriousness of it all made him chuckle.  He saw there the thinnest wisp of a reminder that he had once immersed himself in the hyperbolic psyches of F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic young heroes.

             17 Sep 1966: A fatality [sic] grows upon me.  This is all there is to do and it will take all of me and the outcome is not as important as the absorption in the process.  It is a joyful sinking, a dread irresponsibility, an inescapable contract with that in me which has the most value.  Above all, it is all risk, and there is the likely chance of utter failure but it doesn't matter: that's the joyful part.  It doesn't matter.

             24 August 1967:  I believe I have seen the transformation of my youthful neurotic anarchism into a useful social agent.  There has always been a tension between the wish to rebel, to make the old bastards look out the back window and gasp at the field we set on fire, and the opposite craving to be accepted without ridicule, embarrassment.  I had long assumed that the two desires were mutually exclusive.  Now I see they are not.  I am paid to rebel against what has been, and my judgment as to the best method of rebellion for the whole institution is respected, if not always accepted.

             26 January 1969: The real thing is always the same for me, and always will be, I guess--the fatal fascination at the conflict between myself and the social Other.  The validation of myself for deep unexplained reasons hinges still on daring to oppose the Other while being OF the Other.  This may be heroism but quite possibly instead may be hypocrisy or cowardice: lacking in guts to state your position unequivocally.  The private business between me and Chaos, or Karma, or God if you will, seems submerged under that great social conflict--or seems maybe to be contingent upon it.

            So I manifest the great American dream of being suicidally involved and of saving myself by total sudden escape someday.

             What a funny innocent!  "A good thing I hid some of me from DLH and the rest," he said to himself.  His struggle for self-understanding in the heat of action lay now in a past for which he felt only marginally accountable.  DLH was gone from the earth, with many others.  Bodger himself in retirement was no longer the object of public scrutiny.  For Margaret, he was doubtless an historical artifact, worthy of a small curiosity.  He could talk freely to her now with impunity.

 A presidential apprentice learned in the unrest of the '60s

             Margaret and Bodger sat alone in the balcony of the empty Bomberger memorial chapel.  The large overhead chandelier lights were dark.  The afternoon sun coming through the massive stained glass window in the rear cast their figures in a soft pink light.  The founding president of the college, for whom the chapel was named, looked out from his prominently placed portrait, vintage 1890.  Enclosed with Margaret and Bodger in the afternoon light, he mutely watched them talk.  The great white forked beard seemed to be the most important thing about him.  To Bodger the portrait was a happy combination of historical pastiche and venerable icon.

            "This whole thing started because Bomberger and his crowd BELIEVED," Bodger said, pointing to the portrait.  "Believed in a way I can't adequately grasp."

Margaret replied, "But he wouldn't grasp your way either, or mine."

            Bodger thought a moment.  "True enough."

            "Belief in a different sense," said Margaret, thinking probably of herself as much as of Bodger.

            "I suppose the '60s could be cast in terms of a sense of belief," said Bodger, not having thought of it that way himself.  "In those years, through all the hype and gamesmanship, some basic questions of belief were at stake in our lives.  I was contending in two different confrontations of belief, I guess.  One was with the students.  The other was with my superiors in the administration.

            "I came to work at the college somewhat blindly.  I was getting away from the way the corporate life squeezed you into a small package of efficiency and left the rest of you to dry up.  That was clear.  I didn't have clearly in focus what I was getting into.  I spent the first couple of years here finding that out.  The pace of my life was so fast that I was finding it out on the run, in the heat of the conflict."

            "Conflict with students?"

            "I was discovering an accord with students more than conflict.  The conflict was more with my elders.  And with my own ambitions.  I had a sense of vocation.  That is, I felt I had to use myself up in a great worthwhile endeavor.  But I was unclear about the particulars.  It was an attitude ingrained in me from childhood.  I always imagined myself as a writer--that would be the way.   But by the time I got here, I had developed an organizational talent.  I could harness my writing to the function of the company.  I had learned to write my way into an understanding of an organizational situation.  Then I would use that piece of writing to make something happen in the organization.

            "Before leaving the company, I wrote a question-and-answer piece for the general manager on labor negotiations for our company magazine.  Nothing about the union ever had been said so directly in print before in that medium.  The G.M. liked it and it went to press--making our legal counsel nervous.  The employees soon after voted not to strike.  My piece did not bring that about.  But it helped.  It made my boss look forthright without giving in on any substantive points.  He thanked me.  I felt as if I had done something useful."

            "Did you believe in what you did?" asked Margaret.

            "I would not have thought about it in terms of belief," said Bodger.  "At that age and stage in working, don't you want to feel your mental muscles strained to the maximum?  You want to show that you can move something.  It doesn't much matter what.  You want to be in it, with it, doing it.  That's the way it was in the company.  And I did enjoy that.  But you get over being high on your own sheer ability.  So leaving that and coming here in some way involved me in something I guess I could label 'beliefs.'

            "Funny.  My relationship with my father was distant.  I never got close to him.  In all the jobs I have ever had, I have built a special relationship with the men under whom I worked.  I felt that they approved of what I did.  They encouraged me and applauded when I did something right.  And that meant more than I realized at the time, I think.  It made me follow them and perform for them whether or not I 'believed' in what they were trying to do. Their loyalty to me was functional, I am sure: it got more out of me.  But that was fine.  Without getting psychoanalytic about it, I enjoyed my relationship with them as if they were supplemental fathers.  I needed their loyalty to focus my attention, to get my energy into gear, to postpone, at least, the doubts I had about the worth of what we were doing together."

            "You had doubts," said Margaret.

            "Beliefs.  Doubts.  For me they go together.  I've gone through the letters of Bomberger in the archives of the college.  If he expressed a doubt about his mission to create this college or about his resolve to hurdle the thousand and one obstacles against him, I did not find it.  He did not falter in his belief.  If he had done so, we would not be sitting here in the ambience of his memorial—under his fearsome gaze.  I could never get inside the feeling of such unflagging and simple belief as he must have had.

            " I remember the hour after I left the meeting at which the board told me I was the new president in 1976.  I went out to a special place of my boyhood in the ravines above the river, just a couple of miles from this spot.  'What have I done!' I said to myself.  It was the most desperate moment I ever had in the whole time I was president.  Believe it or not, I was thinking of Bomberger, and of all the men who had come after him.  Compared to their steadfastness, my resolve to have a vocation, to do something worthwhile, seemed like mere juvenile ambition.  How could I ever represent what they represented?  I will never forget the pain in my stomach at that moment.  It felt as if someone had stabbed me."

            Margaret asked, "You didn't think you had the same degree of belief they had in themselves?"

            "Right--for that dreadful moment.  I doubted myself and the institutional imperative, the sense that it was all-meaningful.  But that moment in the ravines was merely a relapse.  By the fall of 1976, when I was inaugurated, I had pulled together a set of convictions that operated.  I think you could say I believed in something."

            "In the nick of time," said Margaret.

            "Right on schedule, actually," said Bodger.  "Any lingering sense of doubt about my fitness for the job died from that stab wound out there along the ravine.  I never again felt I had made the wrong decision to accept the presidency.  That's not to say I did not have many painful moments afterward."

            "So--what you had to do in the days of Kent State was useful for you," Margaret said, arching her eyebrows in a question.

            "Yes.  My work with D. L. Helfferich from 1965 to his retirement as president in 1970 was filled with cross currents and exhilaration.  In the six years that followed, from 1970 until 1976, while I was vice president to his successor, the dean, DLH as chancellor continued to provide the main tension that led to my learning and growing."

            "You call it tension."

            "One of the conditions required for learning," said Bodger.  "DLH created it.  In a sense he set the agenda for my existence for eleven years.  Growing up, my mother and father drilled into me, without being specific, that I had to achieve something.  DLH picked me up and gave me the specific thing to shoot for.  Within two years of my coming to work at the college as alumni secretary and English instructor, the agenda became overt between us.  Even then the politics of the college were intense.  The small and parochial character of the place only deepened its political intensity.  So DLH could make no promises about my future.  Still, he wanted to shape me as much as he could so that at least I would be a possibility for succession.

            "He wanted people to believe that he could make anything happen.  He was incurably romantic in his way--it startled me once when I first made the generational connection between him and the hyperbolic strutters in This Side of Paradise.  DLH was only four years younger than F. Scott Fitzgerald.  World War I was a defining experience for him too.  He too was of the 'lost generation.'  He had a kind of Nietzschean freedom from bonds and limits.

            "He said he could put anyone in a job and influence him sufficiently to do it well.  That, by the way, led to some pretty wrongheaded appointments in his time.

            "When he was president, he sought to make the institution the shadow of himself.  He bestrode the place.  He was one of  four brothers who followed their grandfather and father to the college.  His wife and son were alumni.  His grandchildren were enrolled during my years under him.  So to him the college was family.  This somehow turned the college in his mind into an absolute good.  It also made his sense of personal ownership close to total.

            "The Helfferichs were historically folded within the Pennsylvania German tradition.  DLH said that his grandfather was in the group associated with the German Reformed Church in the US that started the college.  Bomberger's religious beliefs therefore were always central in the Helfferich vision of the college."

            "So, Helfferich was a 'believer' in the same sense as Bomberger himself?" Margaret asked.

            "Yes-and-no," Bodger replied.  "I think he and I got along so well because of that yes-and-no.  DLH was closed and open at the same time.  He was firm in his adherence to his sense of the origins and meaning of the institution.  He affirmed the religious heritage and sought to give the college the outward appearance of it until his last day on earth.  The Helfferich family tradition rested securely within the womb of the denominational tribe--DLH's father and a brother were preachers in it.  He liked people to think of him as a quintessential Reformed character.  He was a pillar of the church.  He took a major role in the merging of the old denomination with the Congregational Christian churches in the late '50s and its aftermath through the '60s.

            "His behavior, however, belied his apparent respectability as a churchman.  The Helfferichs had a family tradition within the Reformed tradition.  It had the appearance of brazenness--a sense of the absurd, you might say.  Stuffiness was its mortal adversary.  Wit was its weapon.  Legend said that DLH's father was renowned within the circle of Reformed preachers of the early part of the century for his phrase-making and his seeming iconoclasm.  DLH carried forward this paternal style.

            "The structure of that style was the key to its effectiveness.  His brazenness was securely anchored in his propriety.  He never abandoned his sense of occasion or his leading role in the occasion.  With that role clearly established, he could then be brazen.  He may never have ceased to be a 'preacher's kid.'  A 'pk' lives within the established system like no other kid.  He can never get out of it.  But within it, hey, it's okay if he throws a dead cat into a dark alley.

            "Preacher's kids of course get into a lot of trouble for behaving that way.  There is something irreconcilable about the structure.  DLH to his dying day was unexplainable in the minds of many people at the college.  The contradictions seemed too great.

            "The absurdist side of him at its best came out as a sheer zest for living.  He hated boredom.  He despised committees.  He was a life-long actor, both on stage and off.  For many years he and his wife coached the dramatic club.  His gestures partook of the grand when he spoke.  Even in more private moments, he positioned himself consciously to achieve the greatest effect.

            "His critics thought his theatricality was too much.  They missed the essential point: he usually had a purpose in mind when he decided to say something or do something out of the ordinary.  He saw the outrageous as a tool.  He used it to advance his notion of  sanity and respect for a vision of the universe.  His vision, I think, was that of the modern man individually upholding a belief in the coherence and the mystery of an expanding and intentional universe.  After all the shenanigans, that' s where he came down.

            "I think that, in the end, he rested quite securely in the accepted Protestant Christian view of the world.  He saw undergraduate higher education as a natural manifestation of Christian belief and endeavor.  As the controversies of the late '60s on campuses raged, he managed the college with an appearance of confidence because he had that view.  He made people feel that the nuttiness would end, that his view would prevail."

            Margaret nodded.  "Did it?"

            Bodger replied, "A style prevails even when views do not.  He knew better than many of his conservative supporters that serious change was going on in the late '60s.  One part of him was quite clear: he wanted to stop it.  The other part of him knew he could not.  He saw the conservative business person and conservative church person as his principal constituents.  He saw them as the parents who would send their children to us and he viewed them as financial supporters.  Accordingly, he pitched his public rhetoric directly at them.

            "Overhearing that rhetoric, the faculty were sometimes aghast and fought with him when they could.  His inclination toward the unorthodox helped somewhat to keep them from outright rebellion, and it helped him greatly in his relations with students.  He could get inside their youthful anarchism and sometimes understand it better than faculty, certainly better than other senior administrators.  Once the kids were carrying picket signs in front of his office, protesting about poor food or something.  He came out of his office and borrowed one of their signs and walked around with them.  He unapolgetically manipulated student affairs to keep the kids in tow.  He would offer a carrot and then shake a stick and wait until spring break before coming down on a decision.  By then, the students would lose interest, as he knew they would.

            "He put me out in front with students as his assistant and felt comfortable in doing so.  He knew instinctively that I had a maverick streak related to his.  But he also knew that, as a well-conditioned corporation man, I would not knowingly double cross him.  In parallel, he had a dean who was straight and strict without deviation.  The dean attracted the animosity of students and faculty, leaving the president relatively untarnished.  He and I to some degree became foils for one another.  I'm afraid I had the better bargain in terms of popularity, anyway, since he took so much of the criticism for the administration as a whole.  It wasn't fair to the dean.  But he was tough and knew how to take it.

            "If DLH truly believed every conservative thing he said, he would not have managed the college through the troubled years as successfully as he did.  Deep within, he had his family bias for the bizarre to draw upon.  He also read the winds and knew he should bend when they were too strong.  That's why the '60s did not overwhelm him.  He drew upon the loyalty that his conservative supporters gave and had to ask them to go on faith when he sounded as if he was going against their beliefs.  Largely, they went on faith.  So he never fully had to resolve the contradictions of the times.  In the end, if he had to, he could admit a mistake--to whichever party was aggrieved--and go forward.  That's what he did after he banned an atheist from speaking publicly on campus."

            "Why was that such a controversy?" Margaret asked.

            "It grew out of the unusual climate of the campus as it was in 1967," Bodger said.  "The college was committed to open inquiry into truth in the academic sense--quite respectable as a liberal arts institution.  It was also committed to guiding students in desired behavioral directions in the residential setting.  That meant the perpetuation of a set of social rules and regulations and the survival of a sense that we were building Christian character, even after the faculty defeated compulsory chapel attendance.  If DLH sanctioned the appearance of an atheist on campus, he would appear to be sanctioning a 'belief' contrary to this extra-academic intention of the college.  He had an especially tough issue because the speaker was the nationally known iconoclast, Madalyn Murray O'Hair.  She won the Supreme Court case to ban prayer in public schools.  She was a big target and a vivid symbol.  DLH believed that the criticism of conservative parents and donors would be unacceptably great if he did not step in and ban her appearance.  He erred in weighing that possible criticism against that of faculty and students."

            "But how could you reconcile banning her with the freedom to seek the truth?" Margaret asked.

            "Precisely," Bodger said.  "There was the conflict--although DLH said he objected to her vulgarity and obscenity rather than her espousal of atheism.  He ran the risk of reducing religious principle to a question of manners. "

            The soft afternoon light entering Bomberger chapel through the stained glass window had darkened.  Margaret glanced at her watch and jumped to her feet.

            "A student is coming to see me," she said as she gathered up her bag.

            "I didn't do Kent State justice," Bodger said.

            "I'm getting the drift," she said.  "Next time."

            Alone in the chapel, with no need to go and meet anyone, Bodger stayed on for a few minutes.   He had often done just this in those early years, after classes were done for the day and students and faculty were elsewhere.

"Belief," he said to himself.  There was a breadth of view in the college tradition that he perceived without understanding it at first.  The Reformed theology as it developed in the US in the end seemed to him to be as compatible with free inquiry as any religious tradition could be.  Why, then, did DLH have difficulty with such issues as O'Hair?  Bodger came to think that Helfferich confused a politico-social philosophy with religious doctrine.  DLH mistakenly tried to ground the politico-social objective of preserving a set of norms in a religious position that did not essentially depend on those norms.  That is why they later could change under Bodger.  But in the meantime, during his years of apprenticeship under DLH, Bodger had difficulty handling the tension.  Still, it set the conditions for learning in his apprenticeship.

            He looked again at old Bomberger's portrait.  In the centennial history of the college, Bodger had read a description of daily chapel during the first administration.  Bomberger would call an errant student to his feet in front of the entire student body and faculty.  He would point his finger at the miscreant, shake his forked beard, and thunder his admonitions for all to hear.  He could imagine DLH in such a role, right here in the chapel named in memory of that first worthy.  DLH would have played the role with flair.  But his fulsome mustache, in place of the forked beard, would have twitched ever so subtly at the height of his harangue.  The student object of his outrage would have caught that subtle signal.  Together they would have played out the scene, both projecting the appearance of an informed sincerity while participating in a conspiracy of irony.  When Bodger tried to see himself as president in that same chapel scene still another generation later, shorn of both beard and mustache, his imagination failed.  His fund of irony was not rich enough to enable him to pull it off.  The student would simply think he had lost his mind.  The times were utterly different.

            He rose from his chapel seat and headed for dinner at home.  He would look for notes of the O'Hair brouhaha and piece the details back together again.

 In the O'Hair affair, Bodger tried to walk a fine line

             In his files,  Bodger found a clipping from a local paper.  "College Boots Out Atheist," the headline read.  The YM-YWCA student organization invited O'Hair to speak on campus.  Neither the president nor anyone else in the administration knew it had taken this initiative.  DLH took the position that the college had not authorized the students to make such an agreement.  Technically, he said, it was not the college's agreement, and the college therefore was not obliged to welcome O'Hair to campus.  Her appearance would be incompatible with the Christian background of the college.

            The students rented a hall at a firehouse in a neighboring town.  O'Hair appeared there to a cheering crowd.  The rebuff by the college president made her feistier than usual.  When she said that freedom of speech and thought were lacking at the college, the crowd of several hundred students and faculty roared their approval, according to the article.

            The report was accurate, Bodger reflected. His presence at the event symbolized the tension in the college community and in him.   He remembered his personal turmoil the afternoon before O'Hair's speech.

If he did not attend, he would be demonstrating his solidarity with DLH, his boss--who a few days before had confirmed that Bodger would formally become executive assistant to the president.    At the same time, he would be showing students, with whom he was sympathetic, that he opposed their initiative; and he would be putting uncomfortable distance between his faculty friends and himself.

            If he did attend, he would be running the risk of inviting the ire of DLH, the dean, and other administrators who would stand firm in support of the ban.  But he would be showing students and friends his tacit personal support for them and being faithful to his own belief that the ban was a mistake.

            As he wobbled back and forth throughout the afternoon, in a desperate maneuver he concocted the idea that his attendance would help the administration.  By attending, Bodger would be perceived by students and faculty as a surrogate for the president.  This would undercut the impression of DLH's total hostility toward them.  If the president's assistant could be present, surely the administration's declared posture was more a publicity maneuver than a substantive opposition.   They would attribute to DLH a measure of irony and soften their criticism of him.  They would see that his opposition mainly served his purpose of putting a good face on the college for the benefit of its conservative supporters.

            So he attended.  His administrative colleagues failed to see the virtue in his action.  They let him know archly the next day of their sense of his apostasy.  But apparently it did not upset DLH himself.  This became evident to Bodger as the president processed the discontent that lingered among faculty and students after O'Hair's appearance at the fire hall.   The humanities faculty formally criticized the banning and urged the president to approve a resolution prohibiting the ban of speakers in the future on grounds of academic freedom.  To deflect the heat, DLH created a special committee on academic freedom and appointed Bodger to it as a representative of the administration.  To Bodger, at least, this was DLH's implicit affirmation of his decision to show up at the fire hall.  To his other administrative colleagues, it must have been a confusing signal from a boss to whom they had been loyal.

            The president resolved the confusion at a faculty meeting some time after O'Hair appeared.  "In retrospect," DLH said from the chair, "I made a mistake."  By then, his decision had rallied the admiration of conservative supporters, a main objective.  He did not go out of his way to apprise them of his subsequent admission on campus to the faculty.

            Bodger felt that DLH's admission of a mistake vindicated his decision to attend the O'Hair event.  But he felt troubled by his failure to influence DLH at the outset of the incident.   If he had done so, the president would not have had to try to unscramble the egg that the ban cooked up.  He was with DLH and other administrators on the afternoon when the president began to formulate his resolve to keep her off the campus.  The others urged the president to ban her by "unilateral action" to protect the college's "institutional self-respect."  That meant not consulting the faculty ahead of time.  Bodger knew his faculty friends would react to being ignored.  He thought this was a price too high to pay for a position that he felt was wrong.  He said none of this at the meeting and watched quietly as DLH came to his decision to act against O'Hair.  About to be newly minted as the president's assistant, he did not want to tarnish his position so early by talking contentiously against a view that the others clearly held and that DLH himself wanted to adopt.  He left the meeting with a dead weight over his eyes.  He apparently saw more clearly than any of them that DLH's decision was about to rend the fabric of the campus community in a willfully unnecessary way.

            He found the following entry in his journal about this moment:

              If I had not allowed my own political considerations to keep me quiet, I might have raised a rational dissent and perhaps given DL a chance to think of a different course of action.  My job is to give the man counsel, and I sure muffed the chance.  From now on, if I have any conviction on an issue, I will let him know what it is, even if I know it is counter to his own inclinations or to others counseling him.

             When he recounted all this to Margaret at their next meeting, Bodger said that his involvement in the O'Hair episode was a useful example of his entire eleven-year apprenticeship under Helfferich.  "I did not rest comfortably with what seemed like the narrower aspects of the tradition of the college," he said.  "I was naturally pulled toward those people and events that seemed to push toward openness, breadth, greater freedom.  It was remarkable to me that DLH took me into his inner circle so willingly and supported me and taught me what he knew.  No matter how I circled around or wobbled in the face of an issue on his desk, he always gave me a feeling of trust.  That was a powerful motivator.  It made me loyal to him.  It made me do administrative duties I never thought I would want to do or be capable of doing."

            "But you kept doing them," Margaret chided.  "Something in the administrative work must have satisfied you at some level."

            As she spoke, another snippet from his journal of that time scrolled in his mind's eye:

             I reaffirm my belief that Gully Jimson [Joyce Cary's protagonist in The Horse's Mouth] is greater than all: art will outlast all.  In the end, administration is the manipulative art which, though it do good unto others, drains the administrator of his life-juices and pours them off into oblivion.  The fulfilling art is that which deals with the materials of semblance, as dear Suzanne [Langer, Philosophy in a New Key] would say, not of reality.  Administration is an art all right, but it sucks out one's creative power and there is no deposit in form.  It is evanescent and deathly.

             "You are right," Bodger said.  "It was what I called my 'excremental vision' that kept me going, against another vision, of art as everything."

 The campus felt the effect of the Kent State killings

             "Kent State," Margaret said.

            "I can talk about the years of the late '60s leading up to it.  You have to remember that the college was a tightly managed little place in the heart of a conservative WASP community.  Many alumni--by no means all--had a rock-like sense of reality, which translated into political caution.  They liked the idea that, while the ivy campuses and 'liberal' places like Swarthmore were erupting in student violence, our college was noticeable by its absence from the headlines."

            "You kept the lid on," Margaret echoed.

            "We were less prone to disorder for a couple of reasons," Bodger went on.

            "For one, Helfferich was a tough, combative bird.  He briefly had been a professional prizefighter and a merchant marine as a young guy.  He always relished a good bout.  In a special issue of the college magazine on his life, you see him pictured bare-chested aboard ship in 1920, when he was a sea-faring man.  It's easy to imagine that well-formed physique in the ring.  The belligerence shown by students got his blood boiling.  The fatal heart attack of the Swarthmore president in the heat of a student protest affected the feelings of all college administrators around here.  The national coverage of gun-toting kids in front of the library at Cornell, the rise of rock in a cloud of marijuana--the whole cultural swing of youth was to him like a red flag to a bull.  He was damned determined that they would not get the upper hand here.

            "His stance went under the disguise of cultural responsibility.  His admirers among the board and alumni applauded his declarations that the college stood foursquare against the insanity of the times.  He saw a herd instinct at work among the feisty youth of the late '60s, not the flowering of free-thinking individualism, as the ideology proclaimed.  He thought the kids were conformist sheep in their putative nonconformity.  He claimed the high ground of liberal education against the young people calling for the revamping of the very grounds of learning.  He said the college would continue to teach students to think and to prevent them from all thinking alike."

            "That doesn't sound very hide-bound," Margaret said.

            "It wasn't.  DLH felt the need to make almost a fetish of 'conservatism' for the sake of his presumed external audience.  But the cultural wars of the '60s did not split conservatives from liberals.  They lumped conservatives and liberals together on one side, although they repudiated one another.  It took me some years afterward to realize that my liberal leanings did not differentiate me from DLH and the board as much as I feared.

            "On the other side were the extreme leaders of the youth revolution.  To them, it did not matter if you were conservative or liberal.  You were wrong either way.  In the extreme formulation of the '60s revolution, the whole system of government and industry and the military and education had to go.  Liberals had a harder time than conservatives in dealing with this because they wanted to allow room for the students' viewpoint.  At least conservatives could stand foursquare against the forces of New Left youth and pit force against force to support their stand.  That suited Helfferich's disposition.

            "The SDS--Students for a Democratic Society--epitomized the radicalism of the campuses in those years.  If you looked at their pronouncements, you saw that politically they opposed the broad liberal consensus even more than a specific conservative posture.  Marcuse's concept of the 'one-dimensional society' helped SDS and their ilk to define the enemy, which turned out to be ubiquitous.  The capitalist hegemony that sustained the Cold War as well as the hot Vietnam War became the target.   What I found interesting was the translation of a political agenda into a personal agenda.  To achieve a political upheaval, a young person was called on to achieve a personal upheaval--to turn on, drop out, wear different clothes, allow hair to grow, join a commune, and so on.  All this was to be in the service of a romantic vision of a permissive, unhierarchical vision of a world that could never be."

            "The Greening of America," Margaret said.  "I read it in college, after it was forgotten."

            "Right.  Charles Reich thought that eating unprocessed peanut butter and wearing bell-bottom trousers would bring in the revolution.  In the case of SDS, the theme of the revolution was power to the people.  The power was supposed to manifest itself in radically democratic forms.  Students were being urged by SDS to hold teach-ins on campuses against the war and against the 'system's' victimization of minorities and the poor.

            "One day word spread around campus that a rider for the SDS would arrive on a motorcycle at noon.  He reportedly would be organizing a chapter then and there in order to radicalize our too-quiet campus.  The handful of activist kids on campus put out the word that everyone should get together in front of the administration building at noon that day to greet the emissary from the great cultural war blazing on American campuses.  We alerted the local part-time policeman, just in case--we had only one.  Our dean of men doubled as football coach.  He and a few of his hefty linemen were out of sight but at the ready.  At noon, about fifty students responded to the call and milled around together.  Soon they heard the gunning of a motorcycle engine as the SDS representative rode up the campus drive.  When he pulled to a stop, the president strode out of the administration building and walked right up to the visitor, his white mane waving.  They exchanged a few words, which I could not hear clearly from where I was standing.  They had something to do with the privacy of the campus and our wish to keep it that way.  The visitor had a few  words with a couple of the students while DLH stood his ground.  And then he turned his motorcycle around and left!"

            "What would the president have done if he hadn't?" asked Margaret.

            "We didn't discuss it beforehand, so I could not know for certain.  On another campus, the massed students would have raised hell with him then and there.  Most of ours treated the incident with mild curiosity and went off to one o'clock classes.  The few organizers were so outnumbered that they had no immediate recourse.

            "We had a spectrum of political commitment among our students, of course, but the majority of them were watching out for number one, not throwing themselves onto the ramparts for the revolution.  The draft put a damper on the men.  They did not want to get kicked out of college, so they played things cautiously.  The women were quietly going through the revaluation of values that was fast becoming the women's liberation movement.  But our place was not the place where the wave was breaking.

            "While the campuses in the limelight thrashed it out over national issues surrounding Vietnam and civil rights, our students thrashed it out with the administration over the campus rules against alcohol and visitation in the women's dormitories.  Often the conflicts seemed trivial.  But the board and administration were solidly against changing those rules.  Students were increasingly unhappy with them.  Later even some parents and alumni would favor some modification.  But the late '60s were not the time for DLH to bend.   So the administration took hard knocks, and life was quite stressful for us all.

            "Still, the kids worked out a modus vivendi of sorts.  They widely ignored the rules but managed to keep a semblance of obedience in place.  The student life deans, for their part, along with student proctors, figured out an unacknowledged double standard that allowed youthful life to go on.  To keep up appearances, now and then the deans would come down hard on this dorm or that and students would be kicked out--a few of them no doubt destined to deal with the vagaries of the draft as a consequence.

            "The stand-off on social rules drove some students away from the campus. Although the fight over rules usually centered on the ban on beer, marijuana became increasingly evident.  Kids even suspected of using it would be dismissed by quiet administrative action, but that did not stop the trend.

            "To escape the regimen, a small group, I learned, rented the old town train station.  By then passenger trains had stopped running.  The railway company had not yet disposed of the property and had rented it as a domicile.  I had a special relationship with a couple of the guys in the group.  One night they invited me down.  With much hesitation, I went.  They ushered me into the old waiting room and then up a ladder to the windowless loft.  It was the pad of pads--mattresses on the floor, blankets and pillows here and there, plus an unmistakable redolence of sweet smoke.  Fortunately, they did not do marijuana in my presence.  They offered a beer but I refused it.  We had a fine old bull session together.  We settled the fate of the dawning world and worked out the answers to the campus dilemmas as well.

            "That visit has stayed in my mind all these years because of the naiveté both of us displayed and the newness in the air that it captured.  All students were required to live only in college housing or at home if they were locals.  By inviting an administrative officer of the college to their cozy pad, they put themselves in danger of being disciplined if not dismissed for violating that rule.  Offering me beer and allowing me to infer they  used the place to smoke pot only compounded their vulnerability.  By accepting their invitation, I put my administrative position at risk.  My fellow administrators already thought of me as a weak-willed sympathizer with students and liberal faculty.  If they learned of my clandestine visit, my dependability would be doubly questioned.

            "However, although I never told him about it, I was sure that DLH would have disapproved only if I had been compromised publicly.  He knew that I was connecting with the students in a way that he could not.  He wanted to know what they were thinking from the inside.  I seemed to be the only administrator who could give that to him unfiltered by the bureaucratic screen through which the other administrators viewed things.   It was one of the benefits that came with my never before having been an educator."

            "Where was the train station?" Margaret asked.

            "The railroad sold it to a fast food place after the town failed to raise the money to make it an historic landmark.   Next time you have a pizza at the Hut, shed a tear for the '60s."

            "So," Margaret summed up, "a tough president with imagination and a cautious student body equaled relative tranquillity?"

            "Every baby boomer felt the waves of change," Bodger said, "even those who thought the hippies and yippies and war protesters were wrong.   But it was surely the case that the particular circumstances here kept things from falling completely apart."

            "You had no really good anti-war riots, then?" Margaret asked.

            "I'll try to catch the flavor.  In the spring of '69, just a year before Kent State, an unofficial group of students formed a 'Concern' organization.  They sent out a flyer calling for a rally in the football stands.  The issue was not the war.  It was the social rules that the college insisted upon.  An official student-faculty-administration committee had put forth some proposals for open dorms and drinking on campus.  The convoluted process for reviewing them prevented quick review and passage.  As the weather warmed, impatience rose.  The 'Concern' group sent out a flyer--I found an old copy of it."

            Bodger handed Margaret the paper to read:

             The official committees are hamstrung by paper shuffling.  The "Concern" is a body of students who wish to, in a peaceful, orderly, and rational way, call to the administration's attention the students' wishes, especially in regard to the imminent decision on the recommendations for open dorm and drinking privileges.

            "Concern" has two main goals.

            1) To promote a sense of cohesiveness and unity in a student body now in a state of anomie, alienation, and disintereest.

            2)To provide a channel for the students to make the college a more livable, modern institution in keeping with other schools of its caliber.  "Concern" is of, by, and for the students.  It is not behind or in front of them--it is with them.  It has and wants no power without a firm base of student support.

            The first priority is a show of support for the proposals for open dorms and drinking.  To best accomplish this, on Tuesday, May 13, the "Concern" will meet on the football field with anyone interested in taking part in a peaceful, orderly and quiet show of student feelings.  From there, we will move to the president's office, congregate for a short time, and finally disperse.

             "Let me guess," Margaret said.  "The president was displeased--and not just because of the majestically split infinitive in the second sentence."

            "The students toting guns on the steps of the Cornell library had recently been on front pages across the nation.  The week before the planned rally, a board committee had told us they expected us to be as rough as possible on any students who disrupted the college.

            " We made elaborate preparations.  DLH was a special patron of the football team.  He had been a player at the college in his student days and connected, man to man, with the guys.  He called in the captains and asked them to take some of the squad members to the rally, but to stand at a distance as visible non-participants.  The leaders of 'Concern' were not part of the jock culture of campus.  --You may see why I thought DLH would understand my complicity with the students at the railroad station lair.  The dean of men was detailed to go and note the names of speakers and other organizers.  Again, the local authority was put on alert.

            "We met in advance with the student leaders of 'Concern' and laid down some specific ground rules.  There was to be orderly discussion, and there was to be no march on the president's office afterward.  As an alternative to the march, Helfferich agreed to meet afterward with a delegation from the rally of any twelve students.  In this advance meeting with them, he adopted his brusque persona.  He made it clear that they had walked onto thinner ice than they might have gauged.

            "On the day of the rally, about two hundred students showed up at the football field.  Many were there out of curiosity, not as loyal followers of the 'Concern' people.  They drifted away before the end of the speeches.  The speeches were mild in tone, cautious in substance.  No delegation went to see the president.  'Concern' died, I think, when the semester ended shortly thereafter.  The leader, however, got an invitation from DLH to attend the college board meeting afterward and handled himself well."

            "The art of co-option," Margaret observed.

            "Absolutely," Boger replied.  "It was a main ingredient in the glue to hold the place together.  By fair means and other means.  We followed up with plans for seminars in the fall on values, discussions among students, faculty, and administrators.  One thing DLH was never unwilling to do was talk.  There was a kind of effrontery in the basic attack made on the 'system' by the ideologues.  They saw the system manipulating the young into positions of subservience and, in the case of service in Vietnam, terror.  To a degree our small campus efforts, mostly successful, to keep control fitted the critique.  Ours was a benign terror, to be sure.

            "That summer saw the rise of the national Vietnam Moratorium Committee.  By August, I was in discussion with the student leadership about plans for a moratorium in October on campus, to coincide with the national moratorium.  The emphasis was on fair and open discussion of all sides of the issue.  Helfferich constantly impressed on me the political value of the highest commitment to open discussion.  He was right, I thought, to expect student rallies of any kind to be intolerant of the other viewpoint.  The students could never credibly argue against his call for representation of both sides of an issue.   Our faculty strongly supported that rational stance as well.  Actually, if DLH had listened to himself more carefully, he would have pitted Madalyn Murray O'Hair against a credible opponent and allowed her to enter.  He could have claimed victory of a different sort over O'Hair and her student hosts."

            "Did the moratorium lead to any greater trouble than the event on the football field?" asked Margaret.

            "Not in numbers.  The college had certain numbers written in the stars.  We would have 300 freshmen, give or take, forever.  We would have 200 activist students forever.  That would leave 900 students who would watch the 200 activists while quietly forming their own private opinions, and meanwhile doing their work.

            "Again, Helfferich did not let events drift toward confrontation.  Before the students came back in September 1969, he sent a letter home to parents and students.   I worked well as a ghostwriter with him.  In that, my relationship with him extended a lengthening history as a loyal spearman to leaders in need of words on paper--my major in the Army, Charlie Simpson, head of my company, now DLH.  Helfferich had a totalistic kind of mind.  He would size up the entire situation and develop a position within it, even before he had words that explained where that position was.  He would have a phrase, often vivid, to tag it, but it would take a word smithy to make a presentable public package.  I increasingly provided that service.

            "The letter congratulated ourselves for escaping the unhappy headlines of recent months about disorder on college campuses.  It commended the common sense of the majority of our students--an act of faith by DLH, to be sure.  It applauded the willingness of administration and faculty to listen.  It underlined our determination to deal firmly with students who crossed well-defined limits of behavior.

            "The letter acknowledged, however, that the college was not without a share of student discontent.  It indicated that we were sending the letter to make sure that students and parents understood that we expected students to obey the rules of the college.  It promised that the college would continue to consider student suggestions for change.  But it declared that our willingness to listen did not mean a willingness to agree to every proposal.

            "It forthrightly told drug users that they would be subject to dismissal.  It acknowledged that the rules on drinking alcohol and visiting dorms were less liberal than many students wanted and remained unapologetic about that.

            "Finally, it said love us or leave us, in effect.  If you can't hack it here, we'll help you find a place elsewhere.  Go in peace.

            "My liking for Alfred North Whitehead's style made marks on more than one piece coming out of DLH's office.  This letter ended with Whitehead's justification for a university from his Harvard Business School speech of 1924.  'The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.'"

            "You had a happy fall semester?" asked Margaret.

            "Essentially, yes.  'Happiness' was not a word for that time, though.  It was as if the energy emitted by the fireball of a whole generation was scorching most established functions and values--from peanut butter to the definition of reality itself.  The waves of enthusiasm and anger had a tantalizing quality for most of the students, regardless of particular issues--that's why some of our students could be as exercised over funny little social rules as others elsewhere became over international policy.  I have to say that much of the faculty and staff similarly felt charged up at that time--and everybody, including the president, had to modify rhetoric because of the student audience.

            "I had only recently abandoned the corporate scene because of the limitations I felt that it set on my development.  The college offered up a stark contrast.  To be riding the back of what seemed like a unique wave of college and national history was exhilarating, even though it caused great anguish and uncertainty day by day.  Looking over my notes of the times, I would have to conclude that, yes, I was happy.

            "The Vietnam Moratorium in the fall actually went well here.  It was messy at some campuses around the country, I'm sure.  The students and administration and faculty here worked together on it.  Our students did not make the mistake that others made.  They did not equate their educational institution with the larger establishment target of their discontent.  Helfferich had the good sense to work along with the students.  I dare say my influence and direct involvement with the students helped him to find a comfortable way through this.  We had speakers, discussions, a candlelight walk.  A draft counselor came to tell students how to do alternative service.  A German professor, with Quaker convictions against war, keynoted the day.  Other professors took polite issue with him.  At lunch students 'fasted' by eating plain rice instead of the standard dining hall fare.  Two other humanities instructors and I led a discussion on 'art and violence.'   I don't remember what we said.  I would be amazed if I did not hold forth on the transformative power of art.  DLH gave a talk at a tree planting for peace in which he declared war as a political procedure to be archaic and parochial.  It was what the protesting students wanted to hear, but he carefully couched his words to be sure they could be read approvingly by conservative board members.

            "So much of what we were doing involved political language and symbolism.  It was the game of the war protesters, of the youth movement generally.  We had to play the game their way, to some extent, at least, with language and symbolism to match.  The two hundred or so who were involved had energy, but most of their political ideas were borrowed.  Our Moratorium itself was in response to a national call, not to an indigenous urge.

            "By the time Kent State happened in the spring of 1970, we had this train of experience behind us.  There was an expression of anger on campus, yes.  We had to process it, yes.  We had an audience off-campus in need of reassurance that we were not allowing a bunch of kids to wreck the place.  I can't emphasize enough how important that seemed to be at the time.  There was outrage at a whole generation on both sides.  The young people were mad at the leaders; the leaders were mad as hell that youth had somehow escaped from control and were dictating the course of events.  That was outrageous in their eyes.

            "We never lost sight of that other audience off campus, embodied in some board members and leading alumni.  We knew that words acceptable and useful in keeping the lid on in the campus situation could raise the hackles of off-campus onlookers.  Helfferich was just about seventy years of age in that last year of his administration, when the moratorium and Kent State took place.  He taught me how youthful and resilient one can be in managing affairs, regardless of chronological age.

            "Kent State came a couple of days after Nixon decided to make his extraordinary bombing raid on Cambodia.  I personally think of it as the last act of the World War II generation.  You had to have lived through World War II to understand how Nixon could decide that such an attack made sense.  As a kid in the '40s, I sat through many newsreel films and movies that celebrated the raining of bombs on cities.   It was an icon of our times, a symbol of good--just as pictures of black smoke belching out of stacks came to symbolize industrial progress after the war.  I have not read Nixon's books and have never been that interested in understanding what he thought the bombing would bring about.  We know what it brought about on the domestic front.  It raised the pitch of war protest to a new height.

            "When the four students were killed at Kent State on 4 May 1970, the spring semester had only a couple of weeks remaining.  Professors were scheduling a lot of tests.  Students, faculty, and administrators all shared the frayed feeling built up by a long, hard academic year.  The college community also was coping with the uncertainties of a search for a president to succeed Helfferich.  He had announced a year before that he would leave after the 1969-70 academic year.

            "His impending departure from office undoubtedly made it easier for him to manage the tension of Kent State.   His off-campus audiences mattered less to him.  He felt less compelled to look like a hard hat.  The annealing fact in the whole thing, of course, was the violent death of four students.  Who on a college campus could not mourn the death of students by any means?  Who could not feel outraged at death itself?

            "Students at Kent State had plundered the town's business district in the course of the protest demonstrations.  In hindsight, it would be possible to understand the Guardsmen's feeling that the students were out to destroy their own civic fabric and needed to be stopped.  The pictures of felled young people, their friends weeping over them, however, prevented any balanced view.  I have found that college students always are very sensitive to the death of the young anywhere, under any circumstances.  Here and on campuses everywhere, students treated the death of the Kent State students like the death of students on their own campus.  But the mourning went forward in the hot brew of political outrage.

            "So you did have violence," Margaret said.

            "Violence of mind, sure.  We did not have any senseless physical violence.  The closest I came to it took place in my classroom.  I was teaching an English comp course in Bomberger after lunch.  The flagpole, just outside our windows, became the focal point for mourning the death of the Kent State students.  Our students were pursuing a fairly well-organized agenda of commemoration.  In the dining hall, a student had played taps.  Then 'the 200' massed around the flagpole.  Four white styrofoam tombstones were inscribed with the names of the Kent State dead and placed around the flagpole.  Then the flag was lowered to half-mast and faculty and students gave speeches.

            "I had a Vietnam veteran in my class.  He walked with an artificial leg but was physically robust.  He was still trying to come home.  He wrote long, tortured papers about death and dying in war. He would write two thousand words for a five-hundred-word assignment.  I seem to remember he was a medical corpsman--so his basic assignment in battle was to reach the wounded.  It was clear to me that the writing was therapeutic for him.  I did what I could to encourage him while meeting the requirements of the course.  Emotionally, he was on the edge and ready to go over at any time.

            "The class was watching the proceedings outside the classroom.  I gave up trying to conduct the usual lessons.  When the students outside lowered the flag to half-mast, our vet lost it.  He came up out of his seat with a roar and plunged out of the room.  He would have weighed in against the students who lowered the flag if some of us had not succeeded in restraining him at the door of Bomberger."

            "He believed in the war," said Margaret.

            "At that point, of course," said Bodger.  "Think of his investment in it.  God knows what he came to believe in time.  I do not remember his name; I think he left the college without taking a degree.  I always have thought of that young guy as a victim no less than the students who were shot at Kent State.  The cruelty that became common currency in the '60s did not cease to circulate in our society after we got out of Vietnam.  It just took on different shapes and colors."

            "And that was Kent State here, sum and substance?"

            "I went back and looked at the student paper that reported the week.  It reminded me that about a hundred students marched down Main Street to the Perkiomen bridge and back on the day of the shootings.  It was 'a solemn and orderly show of peace desires.'   Bear in mind, if a hundred marched, a thousand did not.  The guys in a Main Street dorm water-ballooned the marchers as they went by.  The police stopped the water bombing.  I had not remembered that.

            "The student leaders tried to get all tests and quizzes canceled on 7 May, when the flag pole proceedings would take place.  This became a point of continued conflict.  Many faculty informally cooperated, I think, but officially the college did not grant the request.

            "With the experience of the moratorium the previous semester, students were pretty well schooled in setting up discussions and talks.  We worked as closely with them as we could to keep the whole proceeding in a mode of rational discourse or prayerful reflection.

            "The flag pole remained the rallying point.  After our vet ended my class, my students and I joined the group.  Faculty spoke.  One of our philosophers gave his 'curse of all philosophy' speech, a plea for reason and compassion.  While he spoke, the flag unaccountably was raised again to the top of the pole.   There was much debate and discussion before the flag again came down to half-mast.

            "I was surprised to learn from the paper that at that very point I spoke to the group, one of several faculty invited.  I had completely forgotten that.  The complete quote from my talk in the paper was to the effect that the campus is where mind and emotion meet.  We always were trying to put the brakes on the emotional excess of the students.  We were always trying to hold them to a commitment to rational discourse.  At least I think that's what I was getting at.  Control, largely, was our game, whether we liked it or not.

            "By then I was a vice president.  My presence at the flagpole to some extent was as a representative for the president.  He did not speak there.  But the students knew he would take a benign view of things as long as they did not get out of control.  After the rally around the flagpole ended, the flag again went back to the top, put there by pro-war students and some townies who were members of the American Legion.  They had watched the march down Main Street, apparently, with disapproval.  The styrofoam tombstones somehow lit up their pro-war sentiment.

            "When DLH learned the flag had gone up again, he came out of the administration building and personally returned it to half-mast.  It was one of those moments when his instincts merged with the mood of the students.  There was something quite beautiful about the way this seventy-year-old man caught the youthful feelings in that gesture.  Of course, I am quite sure he was thinking of the need to control their behavior.

            "The student reporter quoted Helfferich's assessment of the Kent State remembrance.  'The only difference between you and me,' she reported he said, 'is that I walk on the sidewalk and you walk on the grass.'

            "The Kent State days wound up on the following Saturday, May 9.  It was time for the traditional Spring Festival dance, once called May Day.  The college perpetuated this tribal tradition from more innocent days.  Ours was probably one of the last to do so.  Before the dance, about thirty students carried an American flag and peace signs on the football field in front of the assembled students and parents.  You get the pulse of our students when you read what happened then.  The thirty went into the stands and watched the rest of the May Day show."

            "Delightful," Margaret agreed.

            "There was one lingering desire among the seniors.  They wanted to show their feelings about Kent State and Cambodia at commencement, scheduled for early June.   There was talk of walkouts, impromptu speeches, and other now-familiar commencement antics.  This called for real negotiation.  One of the honorary degree recipients was a target for a proposal of a major gift.  She had a conservative political tilt, and she did not like youthful disorder.    Her money-laden family and corporate minions would be in the audience, compounding the danger of losing financial support.

            "I was apparently the first administrator to learn about the movement among seniors.  By chance I encountered the leader in the administration lobby two weeks or so before commencement.  He asked if I had heard about the protest plans.  I quickly learned that no one had told the president about them.  I sought out the class president, who was to be the front man.  I told him he had better see the president right away, since their plans had possible consequences that they could not imagine.

            "The path of Helfferich's changing position between his first meeting with the leaders and the day of graduation revealed much to me.  At first, he asked the students to do absolutely nothing, in deference to our guests.  They showed an understanding of the problem but still wanted to have a show of concern about Kent State and Cambodia.  They were willing to talk about a moderate approach without promising that they could control the students already incited to act.  At that point, DLH was hard-nosed.  He told me that he would not permit those who wanted to demonstrate to appear for their degrees.  One of the student life administrators gave hardball counsel.  He encouraged DLH to write to parents a week before commencement and tell them that their sons and daughters would get diplomas in the mail--student commencement would be cancelled.  The president had often thought of such a move and was so inclined.  I thought it was fortunate that he continued talking with student leaders after he got that advice.  I was sitting in on most of the conversations.  He gradually became convinced that we could deal with the desires of the students and still be deferential to our honorary guest.

            "Finally we came up with an agreement.  Those who wanted to could wear blue armbands with a peace symbol.  The president would include in his remarks an explanation of their significance to the students.  There would be no student walkouts or peace speeches or other disruptive demonstrations.  There would be a moment of silence.

            "Then I had the task of writing the copy that would explain this in Helfferich's address.  After he approved it, I asked the student protest leaders to read and approve it, and they did.

            "DLH did not become comfortable with the assurances of the leaders until a few days before the event.  His original plan was to change the order of business so that he could cut the ceremony short if any disruption took place.  At the final instant, he followed the usual order of business.  Everything went as planned.  Not a single student walked out of the convocation in protest."

            Preparing to leave, Margaret said, "I want to read that issue of the student paper."

            "Check the college archive in the library," said Bodger.

            "Check," she said.  "I have a date with my department head to talk about my annual evaluation.  I'll look tomorrow."  And she left.

 The social changes on campus were inescapable

             Local student issues were harder for Bodger to deal with than the big national issues.  "Harder for DLH too," he said to himself.  On balance, the president handled the moratorium and Kent State affairs well because he had a thread of understanding if not of agreement with the youthful protesters.  The religious denomination of the college harbored plenty of war resisters.  The mounting evidence of the counterproductive nature of the war became increasingly hard to dodge, despite the inclination of conservatives to support the military through thick and thin.  The students were insisting on an ethical judgment of the war.  That was attractive to DLH.  It made him responsive to Bodger's attitude.

            There was no similar thread of understanding to soften his stance on campus social rules.  The students year after year battered away at the rules.  The college yielded inch by inch.  Sometimes, as in 1967, when the dinner dress code fell in an evening of mass protest, it yielded a foot.  But the dynamic, for Bodger, was uninformed by anything like enlightened social thinking.  He struggled to grasp why the college stood so stiff-necked in the doorway of social change.  He tried to counsel students to move gradually and accept small gains gracefully.  He finally found himself trying to rationalize the status quo to himself so that he could continue serving Helfferich with a good conscience.  For he did feel like an apostate at times.

            One day Margaret met him for coffee at the Hut, where the old train station once stood.

            She told him about a woman student, Adrien, who was having trouble studying and sleeping.  Her roommate's boyfriend was sleeping over in the room.  At first, the boyfriend did not seem to care that Adrien was in the other bed while he bedded with the roommate.  Eventually, however, he hinted that he would be happier if she disappeared for the night.  The roommate silently confirmed the wish for privacy, and Adrien complied.  She bummed around the residence hall, finding a floor here and a sofa there for the night.  Her study habits fell victim to her nomadic night life.  Margaret learned of this when she called Adrien into her office one day to talk about the drop in her grade in intermediate French.

            She empathized with Adrien.  Something similar had happened to her when she was an undergraduate.  Margaret had marched into the residential dean's office and complained.  A rift between her and her roommate had ensued.   The dean, however, had maneuvered her into a private room down the hall.  Her life had gone on.  Her roommate had soon outgrown the charms of her bedmate and had come back to live with Margaret.  They forgave each other.

            "I told Adrien about my experience and recommended a similar course," said Margaret to Bodger.  "So far no help has come.  The resident advisor convened a non-judgmental discussion between Adrien and her roommate.  The emphasis was on mutual respect.  When Adrien said she respected her roommate's romantic attachment to the guy, the discussion ended, with no change in her nightly vagabondage.  I want to talk to the president about this."

            "Something eventually will work out," Bodger smiled.

            "You smile."

            "At the oceans of distance we have sailed in student administration in my career."

            "Managing student life seems like a necessary evil," Margaret said.  "Which oceans have you sailed?"

            "On my way to the presidency, I nearly drowned in the sea of student life administration," Bodger said.  "It was the hardest lesson put in front of me by Helfferich."

            "Was he that deliberate in designing your apprenticeship?" Margaret asked.

            "I will never really know.  He was managing the college through the storms of social change.  The war in Vietnam was a focal point, but I think the baby boomers' attack on World War II values would have occurred even if the US had avoided the Southeast Asia conflict.  With John Kennedy's death in 1963, we entered a time of violence in high places.  It set a tone.  The highest towers could fall.  JFK's death now seems like the beginning of the end of World War II.  Kent State seems like the very end.  The postmoderns soon were attacking the 'hegemony.'  That bashing of the establishment encouraged the rising expectations of women and blacks and gays and lesbians, anybody without a piece of the power."

            "And students," Margaret added.

            "Students.  Not just female and black.  Students who were children of the establishment as well.  Even well-mannered students at our college.  One of my vivid memories is of a girl named Eileen--she died at forty of cancer--and her band of followers marching down the campus street to dinner one evening, chanting, 'One-two-three-four, we won't take your shit no more.'"

            "Bad grammar," said Margaret.

            "That was the point," said Bodger.

            "What shit wouldn't they take no more?"

            "Guys being banned from visiting women in dorms.  Beer being banned from campus altogether.  These were the local manifestations of the global uprising against the established system.  Even the moratorium, even Kent State didn't displace these chicken shit rules in the minds of the students and some younger faculty.

            "Oppression, repression are the same even in a Halloween costume," Margaret said.

            "Correct," said Bodger.  "And sometimes it must have seemed to DLH that he was running a Halloween parade.  I happened along, and he picked me up as a usable baton.  If I could help him run things, he could assume that what I thought about these things did not much matter.    He was of a generation that could think of my happening along as providential.  I can't imagine he would have picked me up so readily if he did not have a blind confidence that my role would work itself out."

            "Did you think you were the wrong baton for his purposes?" Margaret asked.

            "I guess I thought that he would have thought I was not the right baton.  He watched me wiggle around and agonize about the college social rules.  He did not understand fully that I did not understand their symbolic importance in defining an ethical purpose at the root of the institution.  But he did see early on that I would drive myself crazy TRYING to understand.  I wanted to please him; I wanted to help him. To a few of my colleagues, at least, that had to appear naive."

            "Self-serving?"  Margaret asked with her characteristic tilt of an eyebrow.

            "Yes, that too.  I was self-serving, of course.  But not in the customary sense.  I was a kind of zealot in search of a cause.  There was a sacrificial streak in me that would not go away.  It made me indifferent to mere 'getting ahead.'  I think that DLH could see that while others could not.  Maybe that was at the root of his decision to make me an apprentice for the presidency.  That, combined with the sheer need for a tool, a helper, in the midst of the storm.  Some of his board members, I later learned, worried about him.  Despite his appearance of vigor, he was aging.  They wanted him to have someone with legs.  Several of them were more vocal in advocating my apprenticeship than I imagined at the time.  I think he listened to them."

            "Student life, then, was the hardest lesson," said Margaret, "because of the gap between his thinking and yours?"

            "Yes.  And no.  Yes, there was that gap, and I had to bridge it if I was to be of use to him in the operation of the college.  No, it was not the gap that made it the hardest lesson.  What made it the hardest lesson was that DLH himself was reaching unsatisfactorily for an expression of the traditional parental role of a college even as students were denying that role.  The courts soon followed in denying it too."

            "This seems quaint," said Margaret.  "It only matters now because it helps explain how you were moving from apprentice to president.  Right?"

            Bodger thought a moment.  "Except that adjudicating the social life of students did not go away when in loco parentis went away--it merely changed form.  DLH would have told you we HAD the answer to Adrien's problem long before Adrien was born.  Ban the horny cad from the room!"

            Margaret protested: "There are feminine issues of freedom and choice."

            "Sure," Bodger interrupted.  "I am talking about the moments of their birth.  In this little place, the vocabulary with which to discuss them was old and aching.  The president had to use it because he had no other.  But he never stopped trying to hear something new.  He wanted to reaffirm in loco parentis in terms that would make sense in the 1960s.  That is what I came to want too, as a condition of my staying on at the college.  Without it, I felt that I would self-destruct.  The contradiction of what I was expected to do as an administrator and what I thought about it was too great.

            "DLH and I engaged in an ongoing discussion about the policy position of the college.  We even called it the 'philosophy' of the college, a limp but comforting word under the circumstances.  Memos from me, dropped on his desk like time bombs, punctuated this discussion.  He would scrawl his reactions in the margins.  I often could predict them, but sometimes he would amaze me by agreeing with a point that seemed to be from the far left.

            "In the summer of 1968, I precipitated his reaction in a more complete form.  I was editor of the alumni magazine.  I had assumed a fairly free hand in determining content and emphasis.  My closeness with students led me to encourage Pat, a bright senior, to give her idea of the purpose of a college in the late 1960s.  Of course I knew I would get a polemic for change at our college.  I knew her argument would ride the hobbyhorse of what was now being called the 'counter culture.'   I knew also that I would get a civil, even ameliorative, voice.  Before the women of the late '60s learned to express their rights, they learned manners the old-girl way.  The combination of fresh outspokenness and social grace produced a posture to be reckoned with, even if the argument for change was laced with the liberationist romanticism of the moment.

            "Pat agreed with many that her generation was in the midst of a world-wide social revolution.  It was a revolution against the social 'schizophrenia' caused by the depersonalized technology at the heart of modern mass society.  Young people, the first to see clearly into this schizophrenic quality of contemporary life, had to speak out, drop out, or go crazy.  Pat took the position that American colleges could fulfill their historic mission by becoming a 'channeling device' for speaking out, the healthiest of the three alternatives.  To do that effectively, she argued that they would have to create more realistic social conditions.  They would have to be freer, more willing to allow the crossfire of opinion on the street.  They would have to be better able to allow students to engage directly, not just intellectually, with the larger issues of the day.

            "Pat's message for her own college grew out of that line of thought.  She acknowledged that the social rules, against which she had valiantly fought, might have seemed petty and local.  But the college's heavy emphasis on them showed that it did not understand the necessity to encourage students to participate in the critique of the larger social situation in the world.  By being obsessed with petty social rules, the college assured that students would also be obsessed with them and ignore the big picture.  The college effectively shut down the students' inclination to speak out for a better world at large.  The apathy of the majority of our students in the face of the world revolution supported her argument, as she saw it.  She even accused herself of a too-narrow focus.   She called for a college community as an effective organ of the body of the larger society, there and then, not after commencement."

            "Sounds right to me," Margaret said, beneficiary, as she was, of the two decades of change that flowed from the activism of the Pats of the world.

            "Pat clearly caught the note of the moment," Bodger continued.  "I had the foresight to show the article to DLH before going to press.  He was upset by her direct criticism of our college, however indulgent he might be of her general argument and her civil tone.  He denied the logical link between social restrictions and apathy toward 'real world' issues."

            "He censored the article?" Margaret asked.

            "I think there might have been a moment when he wanted to kick me in the shins for having invited Pat to write her piece.  He didn't tell me to pull it out, though.  Instead, he told me to make room for a comment to accompany the article.  This was a space problem, but I managed to squeeze it in with small type."

            "You ghosted the comment?"  Margaret guessed.

            "He wrote it.  I edited, but he wrote it.  That's how strongly he felt about it.  His basic point was that a college is a place for preparing to deal with 'real world' issues.  College was not an arena for the 'real world' as such.  If he could hold to that distinction, then the social conditions on the campus by definition could be--and should be--different from those in the larger society.  When I read her article, I had missed that critical distinction.  I admitted to myself that he had a point.  It was probably the biggest step I had taken so far in the struggle to grasp the so-called philosophy of the college on social matters."

            "But he missed her point," Margaret said.  "They talked past each other."

            "Categorically, yes.  Practically, no.  DLH did not deny that the social conditions of a college could change without destroying its preparatory function.  But he did insist that its function was categorically preparatory.  Pat did not deny that a college had a preparatory function even as she insisted on making the social conditions more like those of the real world.  But she did insist that the social conditions categorically must change.  It was in the practical overlap of their positions that I took a smidgeon of comfort."

            The Hut was filling with young families coming for early pizza dinner.  A paper plate winged by a sneaker-clad kid in a nearby booth missed Margaret's head by a few inches.  She made a move to leave.

            "I'm talking to a group of non-traditional-age students tonight," she said.  "All women.  Trying to balance work and studies."

            "What will you tell them?" Bodger asked.

            "'Hang in there.  You have your rights.'"

            And she was gone.   At home after dinner, Bodger took down the bound volume of magazines from the 1960s and found that his recollection of the article and Helfferich's comment was fairly accurate.  The comment by DLH on Pat's article evoked a memory of many moments in his office when in clipped exchanges they talked about the tilt of the institution.  DLH wrote:

             I enjoyed reading Pat's article because as I know her, she has a serious concern for the welfare of higher education.  However, I see the relationship between a college and the "real" world in a rather different light.  A college cannot--and in my view should not--be completely representative of the society around it.  A college has a special purpose, the transmission of accumulated knowledge and the stimulation of young intellects to add to that store of knowledge and perhaps thereby someday to attain wisdom.  A college must limit itself to particular functions if it is to achieve such an ambitious purpose.  It cannot hope to provide all the confrontations with reality that go into making the well-developed individual.  Perhaps the best it can do is to pose the right questions about what Pat calls a "viable philosophy" and to make possible a sampling of the experiences that lie in wait after graduation.

            I believe that as presently structured our own college is capable of channeling the tensions that students experience.  I do not believe it is unrealistic to have rules on alcohol, dormitory visits, women's hours and the like....

            Without giving up their civil rights, students are in a kind of voluntary servitude to the words and thoughts of others.  They do not often realize that very soon that servitude will end and they no longer will be classed as students.  It is only when they cease to be students that they can become truly effective agents within the body of society.

            Like Pat, I want our students to be more concerned with the burning social issues of the day than they are....But I hope they spend the great portion of their time in thoughtful preparation in basic knowledge so that they will have enlightened concern when they take up the business of running the world.  I believe my generation does better than did former generations and that the next generation will do better than mine....

            Someone has called the colleges and universities important co-trustees of civilization.  Our college cannot maintain that role and be a place where undergraduates are exempt from the consequences of their own action or inaction."

             That last paragraph, thought Bodger, was a zinger out of Helfferich's combative past.  He would have envisioned it bringing his conservative alumni and board supporters to their feet cheering.  And he would have seen it hoisting the youthful insurgents on their own petard of independence and freedom.  After all these years, Bodger also saw that it undercut DLH's own argument.  If the college was a place for preparation and not a "real-world" component, it did exempt itself--and presumably its students--from some of the conditions of the real world.  How could it then be a full-fledged co-trustee of the whole civilization?   Pat never had a chance to comment on the comment.

            In hindsight, Bodger could see Helfferich's comment as a milestone on the road to the end of in loco parentis as a legal doctrine.  It would not have occurred to DLH or to Bodger at that time that the college soon would lose its ability to declare students in "voluntary servitude" or that their civil rights would dramatically expand on campus as well as off.

            Hindsight also gave him a clear view of the lessons he was painfully learning as the president's apprentice.  Even after so many years, DLH's leniency toward Bodger's invitation to Pat struck him as remarkable.  None of them had time to reflect on the tactics required to navigate in the changing tides.  DLH was energetic for his age but he was of his age.  In retrospect, it appeared that he looked to Bodger for a flow of actions that might help and probably would not harm.

 The college entered a new era of social justice

             One day at the supermarket Bodger ran into Margaret and Antoine.  They were holding hands as they cruised the junk food aisle.  He was a new member of the faculty, hired since Bodger's departure from the presidency.  Margaret introduced Antoine to Bodger as the newest member of the communication arts department.  Bodger wished him well.

            "He's different," Margaret told Bodger later.  "I like him."

            Bodger had not talked to her about her personal life before.  The survivors of graduate school who did not marry a fellow student usually had social make-up work to do when they started teaching after getting the Ph.D.

            "I'm glad to see an African-American come to the faculty," said Bodger.  "We have so few."

            "He worried about attitudes here before he took the job," Margaret said.

            "Understandable.  The matter of race in the 1990s could not be much more complicated than it is, here and elsewhere."

            Margaret said, "After we met you at the supermarket, he wondered what I would think you thought about our having something going."

            "That seems anachronistic," Bodger said.

            "Did you think about it?"

            "I thought how good it is that the college has come this far in the thirty-some years I have been involved."

            "I didn't think about it until Antoine thought about it."

            "That's good too.  In the '60s, when I was starting out here, we were just touching the surface.  The number of minority students was low."

            "It's still not high," Margaret said.

            "But higher.   No one on the staff was of color.  Black students had a hard time being seen and heard as people with different needs and outlooks.  The entire emphasis, such as it was, came down on equal rights, not on multicultural legitimacy.  That was the thrust of the federal civil rights legislation that went into effect only a couple of years before."

            "How did the college react to the new push?" Margaret asked.

            "Black issues were simmering, along with protests of the war, along with the itch of many students to push basic changes in the structure of all mainstream institutions.  The college's historic principle of openness to different ethnic and religious applicants was a fortunate matter of official record.  It was expressed in our original charter of 1869.

            "In reality, however, most of the people here had little zeal for getting out in front on minority student recruitment.  We rightly celebrated our few black students for their inherent ability to make the grade on their own merits in our program.   The majority white kids were making about as many waves as we could ride.  The student government was pushing for a new student bill of rights.  If adopted, it would have had the effect of voiding all the social rules over which we constantly wrangled.  If you look at the student newspaper from the late '60s, you find a steady stream of bitching about just about every aspect of the college, from the bathrooms in the dorms to the socio-economic make-up of the board and administration.  The students were unhappy in part because their options were few.  It was hard for them to transfer to another college.  Dropping out meant that the guys might be drafted for Vietnam.  Keeping the lid on all of the unrest and maintaining a style of civility and considerateness at the same time took massive energy and imagination.  It took a lot of seat-of-the-pants decision-making.  The administration was not out looking for an additional crisis agenda.  Neither students nor faculty felt the urgency to push the administration very hard on racial justice."

            Margaret said, "This was not a proud moment."

            "Don't misunderstand.  There was much good will and even good intention.  There was less organized action for a while.  Then there was organized action!  Black issues were an important part of my apprenticeship in college administration in the late '60s."

            "Antoine is cooking late dinner," Margaret said and was gone.

             Alone, Bodger ordered the events of 1969 that he would tell her about some other time.

            First, he thought, the college was fortunate to be associated with the United Church of Christ.  It had a broad vision of human relationships and was as militant as any mainstream Protestant church in supporting civil rights and social justice.  In the summer of '69, the church's Social Action Commission of the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference convened a meeting on the campus.  Bodger and the college's assistant for alumni and church affairs made what amounted to a command appearance.  Some 35 people were there, virtually none from the college community itself.  They were the voices for justice.  Bodger now thought of them as the canaries in the coal mine.  They did the college a service.  But at the time, they made him mad.

            The Commission had received a complaint against the college from a group of inner-city ministers and laypersons.  "Do-nothing-ism!"  Bodger remembered the self-righteous anger of the white leader of the Commission.  He was a young preacher filled with the zeal for liberation that crackled in the air of the '60s.  How easy it seemed then for people to feel absolutely right.   The young preacher spoke as the complainant, not just for the complainants, whoever they were.

            Bodger felt poorly cast as the defender of an alleged "do-nothing" college record.  In his years at the gas company, he had been a soldier in the movement to connect the company with the rising expectations of the black community of Philadelphia.  The Equal Opportunities Industrialization project under Leon Sullivan had early backing from the company.  The company head, Charles Simpson, saw the oncoming movement of black people into the mainstream of professional leadership and into the turf of white workers.  He embraced Sullivan under the guise of idealism.  But he justified his actions to a socially conservative board and management under the banner of corporate practicality: the work force and the customers of the future would be increasingly black, and the company should move with the wave of change.  When affirmative action laws came along a little later, the company stood on firmer ground than most employers in the Delaware Valley.

            Enabled by the Simpson agenda, Bodger had the luck to hire and supervise the first black member of the company management.  Masco Young was a bright black man about town who wrote a kind of gossip column for a venerable black newspaper.  He had a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois.  Masco had the high-wire skills of a man who knew how to walk without a net on the thin line of white permission.  He forgave America because he saw it under the pressure that would force it to change.  He became Bodger's tutor in the praxis of dismantling the barriers erected against blacks.  To other blacks, he might have looked like a Tom or a sheer opportunist; to Bodger's white company colleagues, he might have looked like a token.  To Bodger, however, he was an instructor who knew that he had a willing pupil.  He was usually moving from where he was, in front of Bodger, to someplace else, more compelling, over on the other side of things.  He went typically with his cigarette in an onyx holder jauntily clenched in his teeth.  He was supposed to be helping Bodger with corporate communications and the writing of personnel policies.  Mainly he was injecting a new perspective into the mind of the management of the company.  Bodger was his principal hypodermic needle.

            Bodger's job exposed him to employees throughout the company, in the pipe repair gangs on the street as well as in the cadre of office workers around the city.  He found it easy to befriend people at all levels of the company.   After Masco arrived, he worked more assiduously to maintain contact with the numerous black workers with whom he had struck up acquaintances.

            In the '60s, the American agenda on race seemed simple and achievable.  The discriminatory barriers, overt and covert, had to be dislodged, by legal and all other means.  The separatist impulse inherent in the multicultural movement to come later still simmered at the margin of public attention.  "Black pride" in Bodger's view was mainly a means of overcoming barriers.  It was not yet an end in itself.

            Bodger's enthusiasm for opposing discrimination did not owe much to the sting of personal experience.  His growing up in a small industrial town made up largely of central European immigrant families precluded a direct encounter with the condition of black America.  The few black students in his school days had deep roots in the town, probably going back to freedmen families in the pre-civil war period.  They were accepted because they were excepted.  He had a few black co-workers on the labor gang at the iron company during summer break from college; their individual presence in his mind, however, could not adequately represent the issue of discrimination in its collective magnitude in the American heart.

            Bodger's visceral egalitarian bent, which came from within himself, received its support mainly from his reading in college and after.  His professor of sociology, Jessie Miller, introduced him to Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in his sophomore year.    Like a good sophomore, he was astounded by it and by his instructor's attitude.  To her all-white, middle-class audience, she was teaching social science, but her intention was to prick consciences.  The metaphor of the spiral lay at the heart of Myrdal's presentation of the social dilemma of America.  The spiral of black deprivation would continue to spin downward, to worsen and worsen, if the conditions of discrimination and denial continued.  Conversely, it would reverse and spin upward toward better social conditions as the discrimination and denial decreased.  It was one of the lasting lessons of his life.  Jessie Miller reinforced the deep-felt notion in Bodger's mind that the justification of scholarship was not in its purported revelation of objective truth but in its service to action, to life itself.   Years later, he read Alfred North Whitehead's observation that knowledge keeps no better than fish, that it has to be used in order to have value--Gunnar Myrdal and Jessie Miller revalidated.

            Bodger later read Richard Wright's Native Son with the eyes of a true believer in social determinism.   When he read the text of James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, he knew that the matter of race was more complex than he could understand: the statuesque sentences seemed to burn with a fire that, no matter how hot, failed to consume them.  He read all that Baldwin wrote with the deepening sense that a tragedy beyond his ken stalked those sentences.  While he saw that Baldwin spoke of a dimension he would never enter, Bodger at the same time took reinforcement from Baldwin.  His writing to that point made it evident what had to be done in the '60s.  The day would later come for the deeper call in Baldwin's voice, to the fire itself.

            Bodger entered the meeting of the Commission with his own sense of righteousness.  In recent weeks, he had been a proponent of starting a summer pre-freshman program for admitted students who were socio-economically disadvantaged.  He had done much of the detail work to get it up and running later in the summer.  He had been on a campaign of his own to identify qualified black students for admission to the college.  He had been actively cultivating the leader of the black students on campus and had even had a major conflict with his administrative colleagues over that.  He was a vocal participant among faculty members on the need for the college to identify and recruit qualified young blacks with scholarship aid.

            When the young preacher poured his ire on the college for sitting on its hands in the teeth of a revolutionary need, Bodger at first was combative and defensive.  He took the criticisms of the college to be criticisms of himself.  Before the meeting ended, he realized his mistake.  The confrontation began to sound like a conversation.  Both sides remained wary until the end.  The madcap humor of the politics of '60s youth did not reach as far as conferences such as this.  The mood was grim to the end.  The Commission left in the late night.  Bodger maintained an informal liaison with the young preacher and a black inner-city minister for a couple of years.  Like the joining of so many passionate issues in those years, the confrontation of church and college simply became tired.  Interests changed.

 A black student alliance sought recognition

            "Antoine cooks Creole," said Margaret.

            Bodger and she were together again.  They regularly were meeting for coffee on Wednesday afternoons at the Hut.  She seemed to have acquired a taste for the pieces of Bodger's pre-presidential years.  He dished them out to her as if they were specials of the day to go with the coffee.

            "So I finally had my climactic episode in black issues," he said.  "It had nothing to do with confrontations with preachers.  The outcome had more to do with my apprenticeship in college management than with the welfare of black students as such.

            "We had a small handful of black students.  Byron was the only one I knew who had it in him to take an initiative.  I befriended him.  We talked about his plans to go to graduate school.  I told him about my involvement in breaking down barriers in the corporate world.  I told him about my acquaintances from the work force at the company.  They had kids who might go to college.  We talked about the fire in James Baldwin's sentences.  He came to trust me.  I trusted him.  I came to believe that he would not willy-nilly trash the place out of revenge.

            "In the spring of '68, black students at Columbia and Trinity and elsewhere held sit-ins to protest for student rights.  In early '69, black students sat in at Swarthmore's admissions office, and the president, Courtney Smith, simultaneously died of a heart attack in his early fifties.    That was a shocker.  Helfferich and most of our administrative group knew Smith--I did not know him myself.  He was an elegant man who, in retrospect, looked poorly equipped to fight the kind of nastiness emerging on campuses.  Our campus had already been through two big conflicts in two years, not counting the unending argument over social rules, which climaxed at the football field in the spring of '69.  We had the shock of conflict over Madalyn Murray O'Hair's appearance in '67 and the non-renewal of contracts of two young untenured faculty members in '68.  DLH was out to prove that he was no Courtney Smith in '69.  That death hardened his position on student discipline.

            "He took an especially dim view of black student protest because of the prominence of black student protesters at the time of Smith's death.  But of course bizarre concatenations of events were a commonplace in those days.  So it was not a surprise that, at the moment of Smith's death, Byron and his quiet supporters were organizing a black student alliance on our campus.  He wanted to test the college by writing a constitution and seeking formal approval for its existence."

            Margaret guessed: "You played on your friendship with Byron and persuaded him not to do it?"

            "Not exactly.  DLH declared in a meeting of administrators that he would oppose the constitution.  He assumed that it would exclude all students from membership except minority students.  That would enable him to declare it discriminatory and contrary to a founding principle of the college.

            "Meanwhile, Byron came to me with his draft of the constitution, sent by one of my colleagues in English who was on the student activities committee.  Byron wanted my advice before taking his proposal to the student activities committee.  I will never be certain whether my response to him was naive, manipulative, or simply administratively pragmatic."

            "You rewrote his constitution!" Margaret said.

            "You're getting to know me," said Bodger.  "Knowing of DLH's opposition to an exclusive alliance of any kind based on race, I could have--should have, some thought--told him to ice the whole idea.  Instead, seeking accommodation, I gave him suggestions, aimed at making the group an interlocking part of the campus life.  If he followed my suggestions, he would keep the organization from becoming a separate 'alien' entity.  I thought that would be in the spirit of the president's thought.  I cautioned Byron to keep my advice between us.  I felt pretty good about our exchange. 

            "Word got back to DLH and the other administrators that a draft was going forward.  DLH convened four of us at lunch to discuss what to do.  One of my colleagues said rumor had it that I had written the draft.  'Is that right?' he asked."

            "A loyalty test," said Margaret.

            "You bet.  I realized I was on thin ice.  In the O'Hair affair, and in other touchy situations, I tried to keep DLH informed of my position and what I would be trying to do.  In this instance I was out in front of him, caught flatfooted!"

            "The president forgave you," said Margaret.

            "That was not exactly what was at stake," Bodger said.  "Later he made light of my embarrassment in front of the other administrators and my attempt to rationalize the advice I gave Byron.  That only came after the follow-up to my abortive constitution-drafting.  Right after that luncheon meeting, I crawled back into my shell and resolved on two courses of action.

            "First I would draft a statement of policy on students and black awareness.  I would give this to DLH as a way of opening a discussion with him about the ongoing response to black student activism, which we all expected.  I would recommend that he take it to the board for approval.   That would cement our position, clarify his intentions and mine and give us something to say when the issue reached the media, as we expected it to.

            "Second, I would suggest that the president create a task force on black awareness, with students, faculty, and board members.  Since DLH would not soften his stance against the black student alliance, I thought such an alternative structure could be a productive lightning rod.  It would be a legitimate venue for airing the gripes of the students.  I thought I could persuade Byron that this would be a better fruit of conflict than the approval of a student group to which the college could turn a tin ear.

            "Both steps took place.  With a little stiffening here and there, the policy statement went to the board and it was approved.  The task force produced an action agenda that gave us a framework for moving black issues through the life of the college in a manageable way.  In the ensuing years there were many tense moments.  Black students were edgy.  The college was always in danger of becoming merely defensive or doing too little.  Conflicts across the nation kept us aware of the need to get on with racial justice while they also kept everyone on pins and needles.

 Bodger became vice president for administrative affairs

             "When the dust settled on these two steps, DLH referred to the implication at lunch that day--that I was in collusion with students against the president's intentions.  I said I thought my skin was getting pretty hardened to such implications.  He said on that day he thought my skin was pretty thin.  I allowed that I was embarrassed.  He said it amused him.  Then he went on to tell me that I had been helpful to him.  I was making him lazy, he said.  He told me I would get a raise for the following year at what seemed like a princely percentage to me at the time.  And he advised me to set my price a year or two hence at an even higher number." 

            "I see you playing a role for him and learning what it was all about for yourself," Margaret said.  "I vote that you showed pragmatic administrative action, not naivete or dastardly manipulativeness."

            "The young always are more clear-eyed," said Bodger.  "I used to acquit myself the same.  Now, looking back at it all, I would not be so quick to judge myself favorably.  But it is certain I was learning what managing the college was about."

            "Seems like a lot of tactical skirmishing," Margaret said.

            "Seems so.  These episodes with students were embedded in a denser narrative.  I was only partly aware of what it was saying.   Helfferich's approval in spite of monumental mistakes kept me going onward.  One day in the spring of '69, in the midst of a scrap within the administrative team about student rules, he told me I would be named vice president for administrative affairs.  The academic dean would be named vice president for academic affairs.  Our scrap was inopportune and nearly scuttled DLH's plan.  He gave me a reflective talk on getting along and going along for the good of the order.  This meant I had to try harder to stand fast for the college's position on student behavior.

            "While continuing to teach, I became responsible for running the non-educational side of the college, closely watched by the president.  My main duty had been and remained promotion, alumni affairs, and fund-raising.  But now the business manager, athletics director, and miscellaneous other functions reported to me.  I was eager.  Helfferich urged me to absorb everything I could.  I remained his personal assistant, sat in with him on meetings of all kinds, continued to write letters and articles for him.

            "Student affairs were the dean's and the president's.  Not mine.  DLH thus put some formal distance between the student life stew pot and me.  I told the dean I would be cautious with students and would always let him know if I was dealing with a student policy issue.

            "It was good for all of us that I became so busy.   I could not spend as much time with students.  Even so, they knew I would listen to anything they wanted to say.  I was still an easy door for them to open.  But they had a harder time finding unqualified support.  No more daredevil posturing from me."

            "You grew up," Margaret said.

            "At age 39, a little late.  But not completely.  I behaved more discreetly. DLH encouraged me more than ever to think like a president.  Privately, and for my own satisfaction, not his, I set out to find common ground between the position Pat took in her article and the position DLH espoused.  He could not couch the institutional position in terms that made any sense in the climate of the youth culture.  He was sure of what he believed about the fallibility of the human being and the need for structures in the face of that fallibility.  His entire Pennsylvania Dutch heritage shored up his resolve to deal pragmatically, without nonsense, with the radical ambitions of the youth movement.  Rhetorically, however, he mainly persuaded his conservative supporters and himself.  The kids were deaf to his arguments.

            "For their part, the students who were pushing for change--not all were--talked mainly in code words and ideological scraps.  The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley happened five years before.  Its inchoate agenda set the tone.  Jerry Rubin was yippifying the nation.  The fallout from the upheavals of the summer of '68 in Europe came to our students in the form of anti-establishment snippets.  Timothy Leary rhapsodized drugs.  The cynical analysis of the government's handling of Vietnam permeated the day's atmosphere.

            "Where did you find common ground?" asked Margaret.  She left the question hanging in air as she left to meet Antoine.

 Bodger tried to find common ground

             In the evening, Bodger studied the photograph of DLH on the cover of a special issue of the college magazine, published as a commemoration after his death in 1984.  The photo was taken in January 1970 in the great hall of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.  The college held a black tie dinner there in conjunction with the year-long celebration of its centennial. The photo showed him silver-maned in profile, standing at a lectern in front of the fluted Greek columns of the great hall.  He was raising his left hand royally toward the unseen audience, eyes uplifted.  Bodger recalled the massive marble figure of Benjamin Franklin, just out of the camera's range, majestically looking into the truth of things there in the hall named for him.

            President Helfferich was in his last six months of office.  He was in a mood to give his last lecture, to lay out the truth, once and for all.   The words he spoke at the moment the photo was shot were a peculiar blend of ideas.  They would never have come together as they did if DLH had not hitched Bodger to his wagon five years before.

            Helfferich had a need to make a dramatic statement, a formulaic summation of the essence of the institution.  That need was personal as well as institutional.  He was coming to the end of his presidency; the institution was coming to the end of its first hundred years of existence.  He felt an urgency to characterize the place so that its uniqueness, its special destiny, would be reinforced and propelled forward.  He had an increasingly compelling feeling about the waning of his presidency.  Time for him was running out.  He wanted to do all he could to prevent the same from happening to the institution.  As long as he was on the scene, he doubtless felt confident that he could manifest the essential institution in his being, in the daily drama of his executive acts.  The idea behind his acts, however, would have to live independent of him when he no longer was president.  He had to give it expression.

            Looking at the cover photo, Bodger realized now that Helfferich's own mortality was at issue as he had not realized it then.  By nailing down the place of the college, by assuring that it had a particular future, he could suppress his mounting feeling of fleetingness.  It fitted his long-honed skills in theater to undertake such a feat on stage, with an approving audience, dressed to the nines, under the giant sculpture of America's first and foremost sage, with a script pretending to be for the ages.

            For his part, Bodger had a need to find an expression of the college's purpose that would enable him to continue in its service with less personal conflict.  After his embroilment in the black student constitution, the dean in a private talk urged him to reconsider whether he really belonged in a conservative place like this.

            "It's a fair question," Bodger said.

            He decided to look at conservatism more closely.  He now wanted to come to grips with a concept with which he instinctively felt uncomfortable.  It was clear that it was the operative concept in Helfferich's world.  Bodger would have to make peace with it if his career at the college was to have any chance of continuing.  His faculty friends had the luxury of voicing liberal sentiments under the protection of academic freedom.  As an administrator, Bodger had a different and more difficult ideological project.

He read Clinton Rossiter's Conservatism in America (1955) and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (1953).    He rediscovered a thread of thought in Burke that he had not understood in his graduate school study of the eighteenth century.  In doing so, he became aware again of the shallow and unshapely body of what purported to be his formal learning in English literature.

            One day in the fall of 1969, the president told him of his goal of bringing strong new men to the board of directors of the college.  He wanted to beef it up before his departure from office the next spring.  It was a given that they would be conservative.  He wanted to construct a "case" that would persuade them of the importance of joining the college board.  He asked Bodger to help.

            The assignment coincided with Bodger's reading of Rossiter and Kirk.  Late one night he drafted a letter to a prospective new board member.  He found the draft among his papers.  Reading it after nearly thirty years, he imagined Margaret's bemused smile at some of its pronouncements:

             TO A PROSPECTIVE DIRECTOR:

            You have been asked to consider serving on the board of directors.  You may wonder what allegiance you would be pledging if you accepted the invitation.  What is our college that it should win your interest and time and support?

            We who now serve as board members will try to put into words the philosophical temper the college represents.  We will also explain why we think its outlook is important today and why it should assure the college of a respected and unusual position in independent higher education.

            If you find yourself in general agreement with us, we respectfully suggest that by joining us you would find an avenue for the expression of some personal concerns about the direction of our national life; and would specifically gain an opportunity to have your convictions heard in higher educational matters.

            As interested laymen, we approve of much that is happening in higher education--the emphasis on rigorous standards, the improving of facilities.  There is much also that we disapprove of--the breakdown of administrative leadership, the abandonment of reasonable student rules.  But rather than deal with specific issues, about which there may be honest differences of opinion, let us give for your consideration a characterization of the general outlook that we see at our college.

            It should be made clear at the start that our college is firmly committed to liberal education.  Like all liberal arts institutions of any distinction, ours holds to the position that a professor of a discipline has the freedom to profess his knowledge untrammeled by considerations other than the demands of truth.  The college has no closed ideological system to advocate.  It assumes that the answers to the important questions about God, man, nature and society are open to honest doubt and are subject to free discussion and debate in the classroom.

            Nevertheless, an educational institution is more than the sum of its classroom experiences.  The college participates corporately in American society.  As a discrete social and legal entity, it makes decisions--about courses to be included in the curriculum, about the size and shape of the physical plant, about the extent of community involvement, about student rules, about candidates for faculty positions, about students seeking admission, etc.  Taken together, these decisions express an institutional point of view.  This point of view, essentially philosophical, is the product of the attitudes and ideas of those governing and operating the colleges--about the nature of man, the aims of educating men endowed with that nature, the ways of regulating human affairs in general and in an academic setting in particular.

            Using the word "political" where we say "philosophical," Robert Paul Wolff, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, recently made the same point as follows: "Every university expresses a number of positive value commitments through the character of its faculty, of its library, even through the buildings it chooses to build...No institution can remain politically neutral in its interaction with society or in the conduct and organization of its internal affairs." (The Ideal of the University, Beacon Press, 1969).

            It is clear enough to us, then, that an academically excellent college such as ours can and should maintain a neutrality of values as a method of teaching subjects; and at the same time, as an organization in society, maintain a commitment to a set of values, or, perhaps more aptly put, a predisposition to a distinctive philosophical temper.

            At our college this temper historically has been conservative.  It is our belief that both the institution itself and the society to which it is an important contributor will be best served if a conservative outlook is maintained.

            In seeking to define the conservatism of the college, we could look to its origins and link its present-day temper with the careful pietism of its religious founders in the German Reformed Church.  It may be more meaningful for you, however, if we take that religious foundation as given and try to describe the college's outlook in terms that are more general than strictly religious ones would be.

            As we see it, conservatism at our college is not mindless opposition or willful blindness to the upheavals all around us in higher education and American life.  Nor is it a naive belief that change can somehow be forestalled; it recognizes, perhaps even more clearly than the most revolutionist doctrine, that change is the essence of history, and it is the first business of men to manage change.

            The attitude of our college is that a change in an existing structure or relationship should be encouraged only after the most thoroughgoing study of its concrete effects on people and institutions.  It distrusts doctrines and programs that, by neat logical argument, promise to solve every problem.  It distrusts policies that depend for success on the naturally good inclinations of people or that take for granted the basic reasonableness of men.  It holds that people still have to learn to be good, often through bitter experience; and that, although our rational powers make us unique among living beings, they are harnessed to emotional drives that still shock or exalt us because they are beyond our understanding and sometimes our control.  It distrusts innovations that tend to throw men back on their independent resources of mind and emotion, or to turn them away from a shared tradition to a private world of uncharted experience.

            On the other hand, the college's attitude trusts a practice or an institution which has proven its effectiveness through experience.  It trusts economic, religious, educational and social structures which have mediated successfully among the unbridled ideas and feelings of individuals.  It trusts that which already is existing and working rather than that which is merely a theory.  It trusts a practice that tends to give people a sense of being rooted in an ongoing, unbroken tradition, whether the tradition be religious, cultural, patriotic, or whatever.

            For historical antecedents of this temper, we might turn first to Edmund Burke.  In his speeches as a member of the House of Commons, and especially in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke fathered the strain of evolutionary conservatism in British and American public philosophy which we believe is alive today at our college.

            In his reliance on custom, in his fear of applying simplistic rational formulas to human affairs, in his insistence on the importance of experiment and experience in making  judgments, in his habitual attitude of doubt about the ability of men to manage themselves without reference to the successful attempts to do so in the past--in all this, we see something of our college's attitude.  Burke said that to provide for human needs governments must control the passions, and that "in this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights."  With this the spirit of our college concurs.

            Although it is hardly called for here to trace the complete history of the conservative outlook, we note that in its evolutionary, moderate Burkean form, it had a profound influence on the founding of the United States through the thinking of such men as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay (the authors of The Federalist).  By resisting the doctrine of natural human goodness and other utopian revolutionary notions, by basing liberty, as Peter Viereck has stated, "on the Burkean principle of concrete roots, prescriptive right and judicial precedent", (Conservatism, 1956), by arguing for a representative republic rather than a direct democracy, the founding fathers sewed a conservative thread inextricably into the fabric of the American experience.

            The thread may be followed through the careers and writings of many men, including John Quincy Adams, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Graham Sumner, Henry Adams, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, T.S. Eliot.  In recent years writers like Robert Penn Warren, scholars like Peter Viereck, Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, theologians like Will Herberg have given intellectual expression to the conservative thread.

            It is important, we think, that our college preserve a conservative attitude because of the counter-conservative posture of many independent colleges of similar size and quality.  We think that a conservative approach has contributed significantly to the success of our free society and has much still to give.  We do not deny that our technology predisposes us as a society to constant and rapid change; nor that modern methods of inquiry--in psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics--allow us to measure the effects of change with greater speed and assurance than did an Edmund Burke, who could not have foreseen our technological dynamism or the reliability of the social sciences.  None of this, however, persuades us to abandon a healthy distrust of pat theories for change or emotional calls to new revolutionary vistas.  We remain convinced that it will serve America well for the students of at least one small independent college of quality to be educated in a pervasively conservative atmosphere.  For our college to go along with the liberal tendency found on most similar campusees would be to cut itself off from its own best traditions and to abdicate a role in higher education that deserves to be played.

            We accept the likelihood that such a posture will turn many students and their parents away from us.  This is a day when the permissiveness underlying much of home and school life makes a conservative atmosphere unappealing to many well-intentioned people.  But we are convinced as well that many students and parents will seek us out because of our conservative atmosphere--that as most campuses drift further and further away from a system of customary sanctions, a great many families will be happy to find a small college where the contrary is true.

            We thus see for the college a distinctive and unusual position.  We see it cultivating academic quality second to none--and that means cautious trial and error in new techniques as well as a holding to the informal, personal approach that traditionally has characterized education here.  We see it exposing students to institutional policies and practices that embody the best of the conservative strain in the American experience.  We do not see it as a quiet, dull place: conservatism is not opposed to the controversy that new ideas and young people, mixed together, inevitably generate.  But we do see it as a reasonably decorous place, where basic good manners are valued because they tend to be civilizing (we hold civility to be one of the hardest and highest-valued goals).  We do not see it as an irrelevant haven for the sons  and daughters of people who cannot accept the complexities of contemporary life; we see it as a full partner, along with institutions of a liberal persuasion, in showing young people how to approach those complexities, we from a conservative posture, they from a liberal.

            And finally we see the college as the object of interest of a group of public-spirited, thoughtful men of affairs who believe that the conservative temper must survive if the nation whose fruits we all enjoy is to survive whole.  It is our hope that you will wish to be one of them.

             The letter was drafted for the signature of the chairman of the board.

            "You were serious," Margaret said when she finished reading the letter next time they met.

            "I was seriously trying to survive in my job," said Bodger.  "I knew too little to understand the philosophy of education in America.  I knew too much to believe that what I saw going on was all that there could or should be.  I knew I was in cahoots with men whose bent of mind was different from mine.  I did not think they could articulate satisfactorily what they thought in their bones and expressed in their daily behavior.  I knew we were on a collision course as a team if I did not figure out how to live with what they felt to be right and fit.

            "It took me four years on the job to figure out that a college is not a value-free medium for inquiry into truth, that it is an institution in a specific society with the values of that society.  By the time I found Burke, I even had reached the conclusion that there was no such thing as value-free inquiry.  This was a recent surprise discovery in my journal of November 1969.  The entry had an outright postmodern ring to it, although I had not heard the word at that time.  Listen: I have just this moment taken a quantum leap in my understanding of what the liberal arts college is and is not.  The Phi Beta Kappa viewpoint is not free.  It is culture-bound and culture-blind to itself.  The notion that the mind is a disinterested instrument, that it is uncommitted to anything but the spirit of free inquiry--that notion is dogma, mouthed for years by the colleges and the professors.  It is rhetoric which sustains enthusiasm and obscures the facts.  The fact is that the institution is committed and that individuals are committed--that the mind is our chief instrument for survival.

            "Is it any wonder that I was ripe for Nietzsche, even though nearly thirty more years had to elapse before he entered my field of vision."

            Margaret looked at Bodger the way an archaeologist might look at a newly uncovered fragment.  But Bodger could see that she also had some feeling for the effort he had had to make.

            "You either had to think your way out of the dilemma or drink your way out," she said.  "It was healthier your way.  I detect that you were not only trying to live with what they felt to be right.  You were also trying to sell them something they might not believe."

            Bodger agreed.  "The letter to a prospective board member and the re-draft of the black student constitution had similar functions.  Both were self-serving, to begin with.  I was trying to put the situation into words that I could live with and that others could live with.  That meant that my words were trying to win affirmation from people who had not previously affirmed all of the words--both DLH and Byron."

             "Did they win it?" Margaret asked.

            "When DLH read the draft, he was pleased," said Bodger.  "His big speech at the Franklin Institute was coming up in less than three weeks.  Suddenly he had something to hold on to. He trusted that I was not hoodwinking him.  It was a blatant polemic, of course.  I knew it would anger many faculty.  But it identified a common ground, and DLH could stand on it.

            "Could you?" Margaret asked.

            " It cast the issue in simplistic terms of classical rationalism vs. tradition.  It left out of the discussion much of the substance of generational conflict and new social ideology then disrupting the campuses of the nation, including ours.  The logic of it suited me, though.  I enjoyed the blush of discovering Burke through Rossiter and Kirk--late, again, though I was.  However, DLH rushed too fast for my comfort to believe I believed it.

            "On a cold evening early in January, we met in the board room with William Elliott, one of the biggest financial players on our board.  We had the opportunity to borrow several millions from the federal government to build the new gymnasium, which would come to be named Helfferich Hall, with the pool named for Elliott.

            "DL had stood firm against taking government support for the college as a matter of conservative principle.  If the college got into bed with the government, sooner or later the government would tell us what we had to do.  If we did not take the money, the capstone project of the Helfferich administration would probably be postponed.

            "Elliott took a small life insurance company from obscurity to success.  His financial judgment was sharp.  He had a sense of the flow of the social and political process.  He also was a super salesman.  He had pledged a quarter of a million dollars or so to our campaign, so his voice had clout.

            "DLH put it to Elliott.  Should we borrow the money or not?  Knowing how eager DLH was to go forward, Elliott meandered his way to a rationalization for borrowing the money that DLH could buy.  Elliott talked about the trend toward public involvement in the welfare of the nation, reaching back to the WPA and coming forward through the GI Bill and federal capital support of higher education.  'It's contrary to everything I was brought up to believe, but I'm not so sure it's all bad.  It's different,' Elliott said.  He was confident that at some time in the years ahead the government would forgive indebtedness of the sort we were contemplating, sooner than reclaim the property.

            "When the issues were really serious, DLH enjoyed puffing on a pipe.  He puffed as Elliott delivered himself of this opinion, a wry smile curling around the stem, his eyes widening and their corners crinkling just noticeably."

            "So much for laissez-faire conservatism," Margaret said.

            "Precisely.  I can't tell you how much that meeting eased my mind over my own difficulties with conservatism.  I saw to my relief that conservative truth  no longer seemed so impregnable."

            "The college borrowed the money, surely," Margaret said.

            "Of course--behold the gym today, still being paid for at three percent interest, which we pay with a grant of other federal dollars.

            "Later, after Elliott left, Helfferich and I stayed on to chat a little.  Still puffing his pipe, he mentioned the 'draft to a prospective board member.'  He remained pleased with it and seemed to see it as evidence of a personal conversion.  He asked: 'How far away were you from believing what you wrote when you came here five years ago?'

            "This was disconcerting to me.  I wanted to tell him, 'Wait, I wrote that to put into sentences what I think you have been getting at.  It's a field test, a model to think about.  I need to work out what is there that I can affirm and what I can't.'"

            "You didn't say it," Margaret said.

            "I said, 'About 25,000 miles.'  That confirmed a thesis he often talked to me about.  He had seen many young faculty members come to campus with liberal fire in their eyes, only to dampen down into reasonable conservatives.  He attributed it to the atmosphere of the place, which, of course, he felt he had a major hand in creating and sustaining.  I simply did not have it in me to differ with him at the time.  I felt as if my draft had won something important.  Clearly it deepened his feeling that I should continue to prepare for the presidency sometime.  But I knew that the common ground staked out by the draft was something of an intellectual illusion.  It would fool the true believers for a while, and it would certainly get the goats of many of my faculty friends.  I would have to own up to my friends on the faculty that I wrote much of DLH's big speech."

            "How did the speech go over?" asked Margaret.

            " We incorporated great chunks of the draft into his text.  The moment was electric--apologies for a Ben Franklin pun.  DLH was at his theatrical best. When he spoke, standing under the feet of Franklin's huge statue, I heard my own words with an eerie feeling--a mixture of distance and intimacy.  The true believers loved it.  Many faculty couldn't believe what they were hearing.  I think most wrote it off as sheer entertainment, bravura.  But I think to this day that it was a milestone in my path to becoming president.  It gave DLH, and those over whom he had influence, a belief that I was thinking the right things and could express them.  The text was reprinted in a pamphlet.  A faculty member took DLH to task in a letter to the student paper for his pessimistic assumptions about human nature.  That was about it."

            Later at home, before retiring for the night, Bodger almost visibly blushed when he leafed through the pamphlet containing the speech.  He had not looked at it in a quarter of a century.  It had mercifully disappeared quickly from public view.  It seemed that none of his friends ever figured out how responsible he was for those words.  If they had, he hoped that they would have excused him as a subordinate to DLH who had no choice but to smith a speech.  They would not have believed that he held such convictions.  They would have known that he was elsewhere on the spectrum, at a distance from those who paid obeisance to the tried and true.   They had seen his enthusiasm for transformative creativity expressed by Suzanne Langer in Philosophy In a New Key.  They had witnessed his affirmation of the abstract expressionist art then in the ascendant in America.  They had heard him talk about his own wish to break through the forms of the day, to create something truly new.  They had come to think his allegiance to something he called "the creative advance" set him apart from his fellow administrators.

            Bodger could not have pretended to master the philosophy of process and reality in the heavy pages of Alfred North Whitehead; but he could have emulated--and he had-- Whitehead's buoyant, optimistic attitude toward novelty.  In doing so, he had set up an unresolved tension in himself: the polemical formulations grounded in Burke simply would not sustain the way he found himself thinking when he confronted an administrative problem.  Burke would have had him try to stop the flow; Bodger, in keeping with Whitehead, wanted to gauge its direction and ride it toward something better, a new formulation.

            He thought, as he turned out the light: "DLH could not have been so credulous.  Surely it didn't matter to him whether or not I thought I was a conservative.  He saw me cooperating with him and helping him--that was enough for him.  Enough for me too, at the time.  I was not in the business of political philosophy but of surviving."

            Bodger was thankful in the darkness.  He would never have to make such a confession to anyone but himself.

 Bodger's relations with faculty were complicated

            Margaret was upset about the annual evaluation handed in to the dean by her department head.  She sought Bodger's advice after dinner one evening at his home.

            "Gone fishin'," he said.  "Advising days are over, especially on faculty relations."

            "I'm going to write a complaint to the dean and president," she said.

            "It's your right," he said.  "Faculty culture on an undergraduate campus is deeply communal.  At the same time, everyone leads a very separate professional life.  The people who know you best don't know you.  Often they don't know your work either.  Much of it is invisible and resistant to measure.  When your status is at stake, you have to do what you have to do."

            "I appreciate your encouragement," she said.

            "Just don't call it advice," Bodger replied.

            They turned to Bodger's experiences with faculty.

            "From what you've said," Margaret mused, "I take it that your relations with faculty were complicated but good before you were president."

            Bodger reflected: "If the old term 'alma mater' ever meant anything other than sentimental attachments to an institution, it meant something central to me.  When I returned to the campus to work in 1965, I found myself becoming a colleague of a dozen or so people who had taught me in class, not to mention a number almost equal who knew me but whose courses I had not taken.  Most of them were alumni, like me.   It was an experience I never expected to have and even today wonder at.  I felt as if I was moving back into an arena where those professors had created the molds for the way I would think and feel.   I was one of hundreds, thousands, they had taught.  Yet I possessed them--and was possessed by them--in a way that seemed to me unique.  This feeling of possession of course exceeded the bounds of what really took place when I was a student.   At a time when I had doubted my ability to become much of anything, their affirmation of my class work astounded me.  I never forgot it and surely magnified it over time.

            "By the time I was a senior at the college, I have a hunch their affirmation had led me to believe I had greater intellectual power than I had.  I did not understand that their knowledge and their judgment were limited too.  It did not matter.  The confidence they gave me in my power to move ideas around surely enabled me to get on with my life after graduation.  They knew, certainly, that I would discover my limits without any need of help from them.  

            "I could never feel on a par with them after I came back to the college because of the special role they played in my youthful development.  It did not take long for me to find that they were fallible human beings like everybody else.  But that never changed my absolute sense of gratitude and appreciation for what they did to me at a tender age.  I hope some of them, at least, felt that.  As I moved into administrative work, often saying and doing things that they would find objectionable as faculty members, I always felt they would grant me a pardon.  In a parental and filial sense, perhaps we knew that we would be for each other and not against each other, however hot the policy issue became.

            "I feel sad to count the number of funerals where I have stood to speak well of them.  I'm glad, though, that I have lived to be able to do it."

            Margaret said, "'Alma mater' suggests rah-rah stuff and boys being boys and girls girls, all the rite of passage baggage."

            "I hardly experienced any of that.  I was a local kid, commuting to campus.  I even dodged the hazing routine as a new student, imposed by the sophomores.  Pretended to be a veteran, who were numerous in 1949, although I looked like a mere boy.  Vets were exempt from soph rules.  The college for me was the teachers I had and the latitude to think about doing something with my life.  They were the bed of rock on which I constructed the rest of my thinking life.

            "As pedagogical styles and expectations changed in the years after I became president, these big figures in my youth sometimes came in for criticism by young Turks.  Few did any notable publication after they finished their graduate work.  Few practiced any classroom style other than the 'stand-and-deliver' lecture.  Some did little to refresh their notes over the years.  In a strange way, I heard this and could even agree with it, but that did not alter the larger-than-life perception of them that I had formed and that remained in my thinking about them throughout. We developed a set of criteria for evaluation of teaching during my presidency.  By then most of the cohort were retired or senior enough to treat the process with ironic good humor.

            "To this day I celebrate them all.  They reminded me that teaching is a mysterious process.  Most of them became legendary when alumni gathered.  Even their weaknesses became the stuff of story and acquired, through time, a special meaning.  From the start of my employment, I was responsible for cultivating the interest of alumni in the college.  I naturally trafficked in the experiences I shared with so many of them as students under these professors.  It was one of the resources that came to me without my having to earn it.  By bringing current news to alumni out in the field about the professors they and I had sat under years before, I created a common bond.  Many of the senior faculty were themselves alumni.  So the circle of loyalty was tight.  I sometimes felt that promoting alumni interest was too easy as a job.  The common connection all of us had with the campus made it all very natural."

            Margaret said, "It was all very provincial too."

            Bodger acknowledged this and then moved on to talk about other faculty members.  "Beyond the group of my former teachers, I gravitated early to the young faculty.  We had a feisty bunch.  There was generational magnetism.  The young faculty always tend to hang together socially as well as professionally."

            "Antoine," Margaret said by way of agreement.

            "That's one of the difficulties of aging, I found.  I only discovered it a lifetime later.  When young, you take for granted that you can connect with your peers.  When you become a senior player, you cannot take connection so easily for granted.  Sometimes in my last years I found that even great effort to communicate became suspect.  The young people did not want connection from my end, or could not seem to handle it at face value.  I became more brittle too."

            "I'm an exception?" Margaret asked.

            "I'm out of power now--that makes it easier for you and me to talk."

            "What were the young faculty like then?"

            "Wonderful, as I look back on them.  I arrived on campus thirsting for intellectual stimulation after years of drinking the watery goop of corporate management philosophy.  In English, Mike Foster was fresh out of the Harvard MA in teaching program.  He was on his way to discovering linguistic anthropology.  He dragged me--and others--along in his wake, full of excitement about the interrelations of language and culture.  In Wes Clymer, I felt a kinship based on a kind of purist belief in the power of literary art.  He was the mad monkish scholar I imagined I might have been if I had not become an operator.  His insight into the darker marks in Joseph Conrad seemed to come out of a cauldron deep in himself.  Mel Ehrlich had theatre and journalism in his background and brought a swinging sophistication to the old gray hall.  Gary Waldo was in history, a specialist in Mussolini.  I did not teach with him, but we shared an enthusiasm for engaging the students in debate.  I once taught in Bomberger in a room next to his, divided by a wall that could open up.  His voice boomed through the wall as if he were Mussolini himself.  A young mathematician, Dick Call, tried to teach us about symbolic logic.  There were some mainstays of the faculty who because of temperament connected with the new guys, a psychologist, a political scientist, another English comp teacher.

              "We never were a definable group, although for a time some of us met at someone's home.  In my journal I dubbed it 'the "new" Vienna School on the Perkiomen.'  We did not meet often and soon we stopped.  Our logician spoke in a language from which the rest of us were excluded.  We poked at the nature of the external world, at the relation of logical thought to the reality of reality.  My insights on Zen did not get through.  Today we would start a chat group on the Internet and have a better chance of surviving.  Everybody was busy, and this was outside of our course obligations.

            "In English comp, Foster, Ehrlich, and I collaborated on a freshman project centered on the nature of language.  It served Foster's emerging graduate school interests more than it served our students, I'm afraid. Mike went on for his doctorate at Penn and ended up in the Canadian museum system, an Iroquois specialist.  But it was exciting for me to be up to my ears in new ideas. I had inadequate credentials even to be on the faculty.  I felt as if I had not read enough--of course, I hadn't."

            "You had a stimulating process going," Margaret said.

            "A couple of years after I arrived, the academic council was restructured.  It provided for the addition of a representative from the rank of instructor.  When it came time for election in the faculty meeting, I was nominated unopposed.  The thought among my colleagues probably was that I could pull more weight, since I was then assistant to the president.  Still, such a conflation of roles seems unique in retrospect.  Faculty trust of an administrator does not normally come that easily, especially one so poorly equipped with academic credentials and experience.  It is hard to go back to that time, through all the impressions of faculty suspicion and criticism piled up through my years as president."

            "It looks pretty evident to me," Margaret said.  "You had two big blocs of natural support--your former teachers and your current young friends."

            "In my corporate experience, I developed a compulsive need for ordering my ideas and actions.  This led to lists and check-offs.  Editing a magazine, for one thing, made me compulsively aware of tasks to be done by a date certain.  I brought this habit to the campus.  I always had to write an agenda.  It always had to be comprehensive.  I kept notes after most meetings.  I wrote in my journal about issues afterward.  When I got onto the council, this compulsive bent came into play.  By that time, 1967, I had had a full exposure to all the curricular gossip.  It was new to me, and I loved the novelty of it.  I had been used to a corporate product as a tangible thing, made in catalytic cracking machines, transmitted through pipes.  Here, to my delight, I found the product was the stuff of mind, to be shaped and packaged according to wonderfully debatable principles of organization.  It was sheer luxury.

            "When the faculty elected me to academic council, I pulled in all the ideas for curriculum change that I had heard and made them into an agenda, which I circulated among my young faculty friends.  This was unique.  Nobody had done it before.  Here was a lowly instructor, teaching only part-time, with no legitimate credentials, new to the campus, mobilizing a platform for improvement.  The effrontery of it!  DLH read it with an amused smile.  If half the items were pursued, he would have a headache.  However, he said nothing critical.  He seemed to look on my list as another step in my basic training--both the content of the curricular ideas and the process I would have to go through in dealing with the dean and other council members."

            "Was your agenda all that radical?" asked Margaret.

            "It was a pastiche.  By this time, I think I had read Daniel Bell's book on reforming the Columbia curriculum.  So I was not altogether devoid of a theoretical understanding.   It was Bell who more than others advanced the notion that we should teach the method of a discipline and not just the subject of a discipline.  That is now conventional wisdom.  Thirty years ago it was not, at the undergraduate level, anyway.

            "Urged by DLH, the faculty had gone through an extensive study of curriculum and had passed a new plan.  Parts of the plan were unimplemented.  It was easy for me to call for implementation of what had already been decided.  Fine arts was an item, for example.  The typical liberal arts curriculum in the '60s was heavily skewed toward the cognitive and away from the creative, a classic liberal arts position, completely defensible.  The faculty decided we needed something in art but had not specified what.  I'm not even sure why it thought we needed it.  There was probably a fuzzy notion of 'rounding' the offerings.  Then too, colleges we aspired to equal had such things and they thus were a code for a certain kind of perceived quality.  With my friends, I urged the formation of a Fine Arts Committee and the development of guidelines for courses in art theory and the formal problems of art as well as in studio work.  Studio courses did become an offering.  An 'appreciation' approach to art history remained in place, however, to the exclusion of more esoteric studies of art theory.  Art theory happened to be a hobby-horse of mine without much meaning for the curriculum then in place."

            Margaret said, "You were the prime mover years later for creating the Berman Museum in the old library."  New though she was, she was coming to own the institutional memory.

            "Yes, I brought my biases to bear in this, then and later.  Nobody ever told me that leadership required the person to abandon all his special interests.  The important thing is to match the special interests of the person with the needs of an institution at a particular time."

            Margaret said, "Fine arts was one thing.  Did your manifesto call for other innovations?"

            "'Manifesto'--good," Bodger laughed.  "You have to realize that the college in the mid-'60s was still living with the ghosts of penury.  The Depression had almost put it under in the '30s.  Led by DLH, it had painstakingly reestablished financial stability.  It had done so by depriving itself of extras.  That was true of the physical plant as well as the program.  So, many colleges like it in mission and scope had a richness in curricular offerings unavailable here.  Filling in gaps was thus one simple need.  That's not to say that DLH or the dean or many of the faculty necessarily saw them as gaps.    We didn't offer some things, they would say, as a matter of principle."

            "Such as?"

            "Our offerings in the social sciences.  The college had a reputation as a hard and good place for science.  'Science' meant chemistry, biology, physics, with mathematics.  This determined the attitude of the prevailing powers in the faculty toward the other sciences.  The others did not quite count.  Psychology had been allowed into the curriculum years before because of the pragmatic need to give student teachers the requisite exposure to educational psychology.  The prevailing faculty leaders felt small need to acknowledge the rigor brought to psychology through the newer work of behavioral experimenters.  At bottom, I think that Helfferich believed that psychology invaded the turf of traditional wisdom surrounding human behavior--of which he felt himself to be a dedicated custodian and practitioner.   This was a veiled theological issue.  Psychology seemed to pose a threat to the Protestant ethos ingrained in the culture of the college from its start.  By the '60s, the college had moved far enough away from that start to disallow a forthright airing of this conflict.  It would have appeared even to DLH as an intellectually questionable confrontation.  But he knew his feelings; he knew what he had inherited.  Instead of taking a direct look at the value of psychology in the curriculum, DLH and the dean marginalized it through budgetary constraints and occasional administrative legerdemain.  Faculty meetings occasionally were enlivened by a harangue for psychology from the head of that department, Dick Fletcher.  DLH--or the dean--would invariably follow it with a witty retort or an arch expression of gratitude for the thought, which he would promptly dismiss.

            "The attitude toward psychology was compounded when attention turned to anthropology and sociology.  My memorable experience with Gunnar Myrdal's analysis of the American dilemma on race took place in the single one-semester course in sociology in the early '50s.  It was paralleled by a one-semester course in anthropology.  That thin diet had not changed in the fifteen years or so that followed."

            "What did you call for?" asked Margaret.

            "I didn't know enough to call for anything other than the reforms already written into the new Curricular Plan and still unimplemented.  Hardly points of a manifesto."

            "Such as?"

            "Nothing new was promised for psychology itself.  In the '60s, the urge to integrate disciplines came alive.  The Plan called for an integrated science course for non-science majors and an integrated social science course.  I urged implementation forthwith.  The faculty set these goals with good intentions, I imagine.   But the urge to pursue them was weak, as I saw it.  Money was alleged to be unavailable.  The only contribution I could make was to suggest that the integrated courses pay attention to the social effects of science.  I cited the work on that being done at Columbia's Institute for the Study of Science in Human Affairs.  Perhaps I had been reading Gerald Holton--can't recall."

            "'Integration' has a period sound today," Margaret said.

            "It was a banner in the '60s for change.  Like 'relevance.'  Like many others, I thought things should be integrated and relevant.  Did I know what I was talking about?  Not much.  Did I realize that these were political and social banners waving--that the push to restructure the curriculum as a pure academic concern was far less strident?  Not until much later."

            "Was that all there was to the social science agenda?" Margaret asked.

            "Anthropology was targeted in the Plan but not yet implemented.  I urged action."

Bodger read from the old paper he had written:

 I recommend a two-semester (six hour) introductory course.  Beyond that, we might offer two or three courses in a special field of cultural anthropology, such as South American or African.  The area should be accessible enough to permit field work in summer.  Urge the administration to hire a person who is qualified to teach the introductory course and specialized in the field we wish to emphasize.  The college should set up a cooperative program with two or three neighboring colleges, which would offer courses in other specialties (perhaps archaeology or physical anthropology or some other area of cultural anthropology).  Our students and theirs would receive full credit for courses taken at the cooperating colleges.           

            "Where did you get these ideas?"

            "The young faculty talked a lot.  There was a spirit in the air.  We were looking outward, looking for connections, embracing the world beyond our little campus.  The college to the young faculty seemed quite parochial.  I had a denser experience of it because of my student background, and I was older than most of them.  But I went with their drift.  The college was not in the vanguard of academic change.  It was deficient in offerings, in perspective."

            "That was my impression when I arrived," Margaret said.  "Still."

            "Of course," said Bodger.  "It's a given in any new faculty member just out of a creditable graduate school experience.  An undergraduate-only environment will not have the velocity of thought found in a decent graduate school environment.  But what seems to you to be parochial today was not even on the horizon in the '60s.  The Plan called for courses in comparative world cultures, world literature, exemption from English composition.  My 'manifesto' said, 'Implement.'"

            "Some of the curriculum plans did come into being, then?" asked Margaret.

            "Sooner or later.  But here, look at my agenda.  I took the whole college for my province, not just the curriculum."

            Margaret looked through the yellowing memo.

             The faculty should make recommendations to the administration of individuals who would enrich our general educational program by brief periods of residence on campus.

             Bodger said, "Many years later, in foreign languages, we brought in native-speaking graduate students to live in the halls.  Some of these ideas had a long life and, of course, they were not mine for the most part.  I cribbed anything that sounded exciting.  I look shameless in my zeal to push ahead.  What a pain in the butt I must have been to some of the people."

             Research: The faculty should study, through a special committee, the place of research at the college and make its views known to the administration in the form of a resolution.  Urge that a separate Faculty Scholars Fund be established, the proceeds of which would pay for certain costs of research.  Decisions for use of such proceeds might be made on recommendation of a Faculty Committee which would review research projects proposed by colleagues.

             "You mean there was no such thing?" Margaret asked incredulously.

            Bodger replied, "You take for granted our faculty development program today. In 1967, my little statement was tantamount to heresy.  The college did not expect faculty members to do research.  If they did, they pursued it on their own time, in the middle of the night, as Helfferich once pridefully told a group of alumni.  The fruits of that labor, he implied, were sweeter because they came from deep within the soul of the professor, not from a mere term of employment.  It was not until after I was president for some years that anything like this idea came into being."

             Margaret read on:

 Size of classes: Some courses are heavily populated.  The faculty should call for a study of those courses to see whether the large enrollments are doing violence to the quality of instruction.  If this seems to be the case, appropriate recommendations should be made to the administration.  A related subject for consideration is the place of closed-circuit TV and computerized courses.

             "Tight-budget syndrome," Bodger said.

            Margaret pointed at the paper and said, "Here's one that surely set the dean to gritting his teeth."

 Divisional Organization: One of the reasons for our failure to implement some of the Curricular Plan proposals is the lack of inter-disciplinary structures.  The supremacy of the Departments was strongly asserted when the Plan was approved.  Much might be gained by modifying that position.  Without destroying the departments, we might set up four divisional councils which would have a more inclusive and coherent perspective on the curriculum.  For example, if we had had a divisional council concerned about the social sciences as a whole, the need for an anthropology program may well have come to the surface much sooner.  Also, divisional councils would be well suited to devise the integrated science and social science courses called for in the Plan.  Some fear that divisional units would create "super-departments" and cause "political" problems.  This may be a lesser problem than the one now prevailing--the "splendid isolation" of 14 different departments.

             Bodger said, "Divisional consciousness developed in my presidential years, as you can see today, but nothing this formal ever came into being.  More than other items, this one came out of my own observation.  My previous corporate experience came into play as I thought about the organization of the faculty.  Some faculty gave lip service to the idea of integration.  Yet their comfort with their stand-alone departmental structure contradicted their declarations of faith.  Partly that came from the sheer inertia found in every social organization.  Partly it came from the boundaries they had constructed around their professional disciplines in graduate school.  A liberal arts college foists upon the collective faculty a breadth of responsibility for the whole of liberal learning that the average faculty member individually is poorly trained to bear.  I came to this conviction soon after sitting through the prickly debates that then erupted in monthly meetings of the faculty.  President Helfferich, as chair, sometimes allowed the troops to shoot each other down.  When they were shooting at each other, they were not shooting at the administration--a lesson I carefully kept for future reference.  Of course, I did not understand the unwritten codes and the esoteric history of relationships on the faculty.  I'm confident that I misread much of what I was seeing and hearing in those early years.  Nevertheless, 'integration' and the construction of divisional common ground were not burning priorities."

            Margaret rippled to the last page.  "Here you talked more about divisions and interdisciplinary studies."

 One of the problems of institutionalized learning is that the methodological assumptions of a discipline (and its individual courses) tend to become submerged.  With the changes and additions being made in most fields of study, we should try to make our students more conscious of the strategies of inquiry with interdisciplinary courses which take a subject matter and approach it from several angles within one of the disciplines--humanities, science, social science, language (see the program at Amherst College.)

             Bodger said, "If that wasn't straight from Daniel Bell, I would be surprised.  Here in the nineties, we are used to the discussion of building the canon of a discipline.  We are all veterans of the 'culture wars' precipitated by multiculturalism.  The underlying structure of the disciplines in my early years, at least at a place like ours, was rather like Victorian sex.  We knew it was there but there wasn't much talk about it."

            Bodger turned to the window. "But most of these pronouncements grew out of my naive enthusiasm.  It was a grand time to be romping around in the field of academe, new to me, and inhabited by interesting people who were too considerate to shoot me down, at least in public."

            Margaret was not finished with his 'manifesto.'

 Student-Faculty-Administration Committee: The faculty should seek to elevate the newly constituted joint committee above the level of petty griping by submitting an agenda for discussion.  Items on the agenda should be curricular as well as extra-curricular.  We should take the initiative in seeking student involvement in academic questions.

             Bodger responded, "This was not out of step with DLH's thinking or that of most faculty.  If we have one deep channel of practice at this place, in spite of the paternalistic history, it is a predisposition to put students to the test of engagement with us.  The difference between my intent here and DLH's, say, would have been that I thought something substantive should normally grow out of student engagement with us.  New programs should result.  DLH, on the other hand, would have thought that talking a lot and following through on a little was more appropriate.  Back to Burke--be not hasty to make a change."

            "But that's dishonest," Margaret said.  "You shouldn't go into a process without intending to get out of it what you said should come out of it."

            "I suppose I thought so then," Bodger replied.

            "And not later?"

            "The fray over time changes you."

            Margaret decided not to push the question further and continued reading:

             Ten-year planning: The Academic Council should set a deadline of, say, November 30, 1967, for completion of all 10-year departmental plans.  Subsequently, the Curriculum Committee should be charged with the responsibility to digest, coordinate and supplement these plans, so that a unified program emerges.  Attention should be given to eliminating courses as well as introducing new ones.

             Margaret asked, "Wasn't this something you already had under way?"

            "Memory fails me," said Bodger.  "Planning, in any event, became my mantra, and this is an early sign of it.  DLH had been talking to me about the planning process.  He put me in charge of planning rather early in the game.  In one sense, you could say that my entire experience at the college parses into planning stages.  I took to it because it allowed me to embrace the entire place, to think globally about it, to ignore the brambles and briar patches that snagged your trousers as you walked between departments.  I think 10-year curricular planning may have been a diversionary tactic at the time, however--set up by DLH and the dean to stir some thinking but not to precipitate significant action."

            "You sound critical of them."

            "Not really.  They were exercising a canny wisdom that sometimes is hard to codify or even to express intelligibly.  As an apprentice, I absorbed ways of feinting and dodging from them, as I had absorbed lessons from my former bosses at the company.  You come to internalize these things.  Only now, in retrospect, do I see the conditioning process a little more clearly.  Still, planning was key.  With our business manager, I worked out ten-year global planning scenarios.  They included the buildings we hoped to build, the endowments we hoped to grow, the new expenditures some of us envisioned for improving academic quality."

            "And then...." Margaret waved the agenda in the air.  "Finally, 'Venture Programs.'"

            "Some pie in the sky."

            She read:

 The college is more inclined to conserve methods that have proved successful over the years than to experiment with "risky" innovations and untried approaches to learning.  (The few exceptions to this merely prove the rule.)

 "You were hearing Burke even this early," said Margaret.

            "I was anticipating the reaction of the president and the dean to the fluky ideas about to be spread before them."

            She continued reading:

 We should find a way to experiment rather freely with new programs without placing the time-tested system in total jeopardy.  We should create a climate in which "venture programs" (as they are called at a neighboring prestige college which shall be nameless) naturally work their way into our curriculum on an experimental basis and, if they don't live up to expectations, naturally work themselves out again.

            It will be argued that experimentation with curriculum is dangerous because it is unwarranted tampering with a given student's four-year package of courses.  It will also be argued that many experimental programs come in with great fanfare and then "fizzle out."

            Both arguments have a basis in fact.  But they overlook the importance of a spirit of adventure not only in individual courses and instructors but in the institution as a whole.  There is nothing to fear from "venture programs" if we provide at the outset for the possibility that they might fail, but still provide students with a meaningful experience.  In other words, we need not stake the reputation of the college on the success or failure of a given program; we may stake our reputation on our disposition to give a program a chance to succeed or fail.  It should contaminate students with the zest for intellectual adventure.  It will do this best if it is flexible enough to permit adventure in its own program of offerings.

             "Whitehead's parrot," Bodger laughed.  "The dean should have charged me with plagiarism.  The unnamed college was probably Swarthmore."

            "You proposed language houses for foreign language majors."

            "Not original," said Bodger.  "We never did this. The department sometime after this began a healthy tradition of conversation at language tables in the dining hall.  We started an international house during my presidential tenure but it was not language-specific."

            "Here's one," Margaret said:

 Non-graded colloquia.  Establish a course required of all students, and taught by all teachers, with pass-fail marking as in physical education.  The subject matter of each course would be decided upon by each of the sections individually.  The only guideline would be that the course would deal with the broad question of Personal Values.  Perhaps something of this sort would be a sensible alternative to chapel-assembly.

             Bodger said, "The pass-fail fad lost its wind after the '60s.   It never took root here.  This failed idea lingers as a ghost behind our present Liberal Studies seminar, which has no prescribed common syllabus.  But something else was lurking in this 'venture' idea, and you see it in that reference to the chapel-assembly.  Required religious chapel was dead or dying.  DLH and others wanted to hang onto something that affirmed the importance of moral and ethical behavior as a college goal.  I thought I was offering a way to end compulsory chapel while holding onto a compulsory consideration of moral and ethical behavior.  But it did not fly.  The president, the dean, and most of the faculty thought poorly about non-graded work.  It violated in some way the work ethic of the Protestant culture.  I did not do battle for this item."

            "Here's one that's even farther out," Margaret said, coming to the end of the paper:

 Non-course, non-grade program: Set up a program for 20 specially selected students who would work as a group under a director employed for the purpose.  The group would be exempt from all normal requirements and would qualify for graduation by taking comprehensive tests at intervals.  Purpose of the program would be to permit freedom for students with special qualifications, and to provide a model of study for students in the conventional curriculum.  Obviously, after such a plan were blueprinted, foundation money would be needed to implement it.

             Bodger shrugged, "You have to realize that the air was filled in the mid-'60s with innovation and experimentation.  The baby boomers coming to college were brighter than any cohort in history.  We were not worrying about remedial work but about offering the best challenge to bright minds.  I suppose the Great Books program at St. John's was lying under the surface of this suggestion.  I romanticized that purist approach to liberal learning.  A few years later, however, I modified my admiration a little when I had a long talk with a St. John's alum.  He felt deprived of the mainstream American academic experience; he felt like a strange flower when he sought to get into the workplace.  Of course, my idea was at the other end of the spectrum from the prescribed program at St. John's.  I would have had the students and the faculty invent their course of study from scratch.  But my hope would have been that they would end up studying the best of the brightest."

            "Nothing came of your 'manifesto'"? asked Margaret.

            "What came of it was that I learned by looking around, relatively late in my life, at the academic landscape as well as I could.  I was still in a learning mode, and effusions such as this 'manifesto' were the fallout from the process.  Again I wonder at the tolerance I experienced from those senior to me.   I think they had an owlish insight: the best way to kill off bad ideas was to allow them to see the light of day.  Their indulgence thus may not have come from kindness but from a wary sense of how the battles are finally won."

            "Burkean," said Margaret.

            "Pennsylvania Dutch, maybe," Bodger replied.  "Understand, the ruts of our curriculum ran deep, despite the academic upheavals around the country at the time--and despite yawping at the edges by people like me.  Our ideas were possible only because of the stability of what was in place.  As colleges did away with core requirements around the nation, we did not.  Language requirements, for example, held fast here, while their disappearance across the academic landscape led to a deep crisis in those disciplines."

            Margaret looked at the clock.  "Duty calls," she said and left.

            Afterward, Bodger remained in his chair, reflecting.   That was a mad, grand time, no matter how he came at it.  He was never so high again, probably.  The camaraderie with bright young people, the sense of being able to touch the strings of institutional authority, the affirmation he received from DLH, the awareness that their small scene was a microcosm of the national scene, on the edge of momentous change, the self-assurance that came from being young and healthy--"Rich stuff," he said to himself.   The institution, of course, was trying to find its way through an unanticipated moment of change in social and educational values.  It was in some ways a more threatening time than the Depression '30s.  Then, the threat was financial; now, the threat was less definable and therefore less manageable.  The youth generation was eating away at underpinnings of American higher education that had not been questioned theretofore.

            In retrospect, Bodger saw a self-centered enthusiasm at play.  He should have had more respect for the traditions of the college.  He should have had greater humility in the light of his thin preparation for academic life and his inexperience.  "Grand time, though," he said as he put away his papers.  The word "grand" took his mind back to a passage from his journal; he looked it up:

             Plans afloat, sweeping gestures, heroic terminology--it is a little grand to be this close to the center of motion.  I risk failing at so many things, but I don't care at all.  There is only an intoxicating sense of doing what I am to do, no regrets, no fear.  Things do not get done fast enough--that is the only frustration.  All else is the turning on of forces, which may well destroy the old place, but I don't care.

              The passage bore the date 24 August 1967.

 Faculty terminations brought student protests

             Next time they met, Margaret told Bodger she had asked several students to write letters to the dean about her teaching.  "Will it do any good?" she asked him.

            He told her it might.  "Be warned, however, that deans suspect faculty of coercing students into such things, using their obvious power over them."

            "I would feel insulted if my dean thought that of me."

            Bodger said, "Of course you would. You were not wrong to get them to write letters.  Student voices have always mattered on this campus, even when the students have not thought so."

            Her evaluation maneuver led Margaret and Bodger back to their conversation about the late '60s.

            He said, "The students caught the national fever.  In the 1967-68 academic year, campus after campus came under siege by dissident students.  Harvard itself, the pinnacle of the academy, found students sitting in University Hall, protesting Harvard's alleged plans to tear down black housing for medical school expansion.  They were also protesting the ROTC program on campus.  President Pusey feared the students would rifle the confidential files in the administration building.  He called in police.  Harvard Yard, like the hallowed grounds of other colleges and universities, became a scene of violent assault and resistance.

            "Here at home, an administration decision to terminate two young faculty members sparked the conflict.  First Waldo, in history, then Clymer, in English.  They were my friends.  Clymer especially.  The college had the right to hire and fire such nontenured faculty.  In a day when there were no formal evaluation criteria, the dean and president, occasionally with the collaboration of a department head, made staffing decisions based on informal feedback and their canny ability to size up people.  Usually a non-tenured faculty member who was not renewed would simply fade away, leaving hardly a smudge on the blotter.  A number of them came and went in those years, particularly part-timers hired for a specific annual need.  Waldo and Clymer were well-credentialed full-time instructors, however.

            "When Waldo learned that he was not going to get a new contract, he told his students.  Since he had not learned a reason for the decision from the administration, he assumed that he was being fired because of his outspokenness on politically sensitive issues and on the conduct of the affairs of our college by the administration.  That was his report to his students.  Appealing to the doctrine of academic freedom and the need for intellectual vitality on our campus, Waldo persuaded a following of students that the decision was unjust.  They saw in him a youthful spark plug who could stimulate debate and thus advance knowledge in an interesting and attractive way.  Waldo himself was not shy about advancing that self-image.

            "Clymer was a non-aggressive and quiet man.  He sticks in my mind as nearly a saint.  While he took none of the self-serving steps with students that Waldo took, his name and Waldo's became hyphenated in the amalgamation of a single hot issue.

            "Pretty soon, the students precipitated a statement from the president to explain the non-renewals of contract.  He said that the administration was interested in a continuing effort to provide vitality, to bring in fresh ideas.  To that end, it had adopted a 'new faces' policy.  This was described as a periodic 'in and out' hiring process for young faculty at the instructor level who were on their way to permanent careers elsewhere.

            "Waldo and students derided the statement as an after-the-fact rationalization.  The students then circulated a petition calling on the college to retain the instructors.  With signatures from an estimated 80 percent of the student body, the leaders presented their petition.  The students presenting the petition came away with a report that inflamed the situation.  They quoted Helfferich to the effect that most of the students did not know what they were signing.  Although his observation was probably accurate, it brought out protest posters and escalated the student newspaper's campaign to retain the instructors.  To the Philadelphia press, it looked as if our college was heading for the kind of disruption and violence widely reported at other campuses, including Penn.  We became 'protest' news, even though order had not yet broken down."

            "But it did break down?" Margaret asked.

            "In fact it did not.  Back in December 1967, when I first heard about the decision on Waldo, I had sent a blunt dissenting note to the president, completely private between us.  He had made a ground rule when I began as his assistant that I could say anything behind his closed door, however frank, however opposing, so long as I held my tongue in public.  I was glad that my Waldo note proved that the ground rule could work.  DLH did not get mad at me.  However, when we talked about it, he advanced the 'new faces' rationale and failed to convince me.  I was thinking of the intellectual fun created by Waldo among his students and among us, his colleagues.  Why not keep it up?

            "I decided at that point that the motives for dismissing Waldo and then Clymer lay deep in the viscera of DLH and the dean.  I  respected DLH enough to believe that at some level the 'new faces' notion was bona fide; but at the same time, the decision seemed to be simply wrong and unnecessary.  Of course, I learned later that the system of tenure made deans and presidents look ahead to see whether they wanted to spend a lifetime with a new person--for that's what tenure normally meant.  I think more indulgently of the administration now than I did then about the weighing of the merits of my two young friends.

            "At the time, Waldo and even more so Clymer seemed like innocents in a drama beyond their ken.  I remember comparing them to Yakov Bok in Bernard Malamud's The Fixer.  He was the target of forces beyond his understanding.  The power that moved Bok's world--and ours, said I--was not rational, it was visceral, from the conditioned gut, which grunts before it allows for thought.  Only afterward did the grunts get sculpted and hammered into reasonable-sounding shapes.

            "The tragedy of Waldo, I said then, was that he did not know; and the tragedy of DLH was that he did know and still acted as he acted.  The tragedy of Clymer was that he knew and did not choose to resist.  The tragedy of Bodger may have been that he saw all this as tragedy rather than as the meat and potatoes of ordinary institutional management."

            Margaret said, "But the upset students made it extraordinary, anyway, right?"

            "It was extraordinary for me, especially, because my relations with the several players complicated things.  I was by now a confidant of the president on many matters, including this one.  Yet, I was a colleague and friend of Waldo and Clymer.   As advisor to the student newspaper, I was on good terms with the editor and other students leading the protest.

            "I wanted to serve my boss and mentor as well as I could.  I wanted to be helpful to my faculty friends.  I wanted the students to voice their viewpoint without damaging their academic careers and without bringing violence to campus--without bringing unwanted media attention.  I particularly worried that DLH would mistakenly castigate the student leaders as mere hell-raisers.  They were among our best and brightest on campus."

            Margaret said, "It was impossible for you to serve them all equally.  How did it play out?"

            "In the heat of discussions around the campus, I sensed that a violent student eruption was becoming likely.   After the student paper reported on the president's alleged slight to students who signed the petition, student antagonism solidified.  I heard nothing from DLH that suggested any compromise.  Waldo intensified his public outcry against the decision.  He cast himself as a cosmopolitan and criticized the inbred character of the faculty and the college's culture.  He thus accused me as well, I guess, although the slight went over my head at the time. The students' special flyers around campus hinted at violent reactions if the administration did not heed the complaint.  I worried when I had to tell DLH that the students were inviting the Philadelphia press to a massive armband protest in the making."

            Margaret asked, "What would be so bad about publicity?"

            "In those days the college was not news, good OR bad.  Since then we've professionalized our media relations program.  The college works hard to get positive media attention.  At that time, the only interest the media would have had in us would have arisen because of bad news.  It is a little difficult to reconstruct the mood of college administrators then.  Many feared a headline could make them look weak in the face of the student movement.  No one fully understood the root causes of the unrest across the nation.  No one therefore had developed a successful process for dealing with it.  Why did Nathan Pusey at Harvard make national headlines?  Because even the president of what was thought to be the best felt he had to process the takeover of his administration building with nothing more sophisticated than police muscle."

            "It sounds like the smoke from a paradigm shift," Margaret said.

            "Except that that whole Thomas Kuhn concept had not hit the street," said Bodger.  "Anyway, headline writers didn't talk about paradigm shifts.  They dealt in shouting matches and bloody heads.  I felt I should do what I could to prevent bad media coverage while trying to find a way through the conflict.  I envisioned an outcome that would be acceptable to the administration, to Waldo and Clymer, and to the student protesters."

            "Modest goal!" Margaret said.

             "It was a measure of my hubris as an administrator at the time, perhaps--or of a more sinister pathology buried deeper in my psyche."

Margaret probed, "An irrational aversion to the uncontrolled?"

Bodger merely smiled and continued, "Plans for the armband protest proceeded.  It now seemed likely that the major Philadelphia papers would cover it.  The leaders called for the protest two days in advance and asked all students to take part.  I decided to make a try at conciliation.  I went to DLH and asked whether he would permit me to talk with the student leaders to seek an understanding.

            "He puffed his pipe and consented.  Then he gave me the themes to work with.  Commend the students for their peaceful way of petitioning (by implication, threaten them if they don't do it that way henceforth).  Tell them he and other alumni and board members seek excellence for the college as zealously as anyone; neither students nor Waldo and Clymer had exclusive title to the aspirations of the college for quality.  Validate students' claim to a voice in governance by quoting the statement on student freedom recently endorsed by the board.  Say he is unsure how far apart he is from the students.  Set up a review that will shift the final position to the board and away from him.  He ticked off the particulars of a procedure he could accept.  Make absolutely no promise that Waldo and Clymer will be retained.   He said that I should take credit for the procedure and not tell them immediately how much of it would fly.  'See what you can bring back,' he said in effect.

            "I called one of the student leaders and told him over the phone of a possible breakthrough.  Could he meet with me?   I banged out a draft of a statement for possible publication next day and showed it to him in the newspaper office.  He was unhappy that there would be no capitulation forthwith on the substantive decision to terminate the two instructors.

            "'You've complained that you have no voice in the process,' I said.  'This gives you a voice in the process.  I would to take it.'

            "Despite this last-minute grousing, he and the others were ecstatic.  They had forced the top man to do something he did not originally intend to do.  I showed a final draft to DLH first thing in the morning.  It was a go.  Within an hour a special issue of the student publication was on the campus in mimeographed form.  It called for the originally planned show of support and solidarity for the instructors and the wearing of black arm bands.   However, it declared that the students' demands had been well treated.

            "At a special meeting of the board the following week, Waldo, Clymer, and a committee of students met with the board members.  The president absented himself and promised to abide by the board's decision on the appeal.  The students received the respect and courtesy of the board members and said so afterward.  Then the board heard the president's case.  It finally decided to reaffirm the non-renewal of the two contracts.  At the same time, it commended the students for the serious and civilized character of their petition.  Helfferich did too.  By that time spring break had started.  As DLH knew, the heat of the fray would leave campus with the students, who went in search of sunshine."

            Bodger produced the late-night statement that led to the orderly resolution of the Waldo-Clymer affair and gave it to Margaret.

            "Pretty prose it is not," he said to Margaret.  "But it proved to me yet again that institutional management can come down to a negotiation over words on a piece of paper.  I think I could say that I hardly ever faced a dilemma that did not in the end lead me to put words on paper on which I would seek the agreement of others."

            The statement was from the editors of the newspaper and other student publications.  It was headed simply "SPECIAL ISSUE" and dated 13 March 1968.  Bodger read it aloud while Margaret stared out the window.

            "'The following is a statement from President Helfferich regarding the "dismissals" of Messrs. Waldo and Clymer.  We feel the students' demands have been fairly and most satisfactorily treated.'"

            Bodger interrupted himself: "The student leaders felt that this was a massive concession in the interest of getting a compromise and they agonized about it before accepting it.  But they accepted it."

            He read on: "'We also commend the student body for its reasonable actions through peaceable demonstration.'    The student leaders knew that unreasonable actions through disruptive demonstration were still possible.  They didn't want us to forget it even as they affirmed the reasonable course that they knew we wanted."

            'It is to be hoped that the college community has learned a valuable lesson in student-administration communications.'  DLH tolerated the supercilious tone of the students with mild amusement.   'Today, Black Wednesday, we must reaffirm our support and solidarity for Messrs. Waldo and Clymer.'  They insisted that the black armbands had to appear; the tradeoff was that the leaders would discourage any other form of protest.

            "DLH's statement follows this introduction.   Here he was teaching me the lesson of changing position while preserving control.  In every management situation, I had learned  from my mentors that the preservation of one's authority in the face of everything was axiomatic.  It was not even discussed.  It was a given.  This was an even more compelling axiom in the late '60s on a college campus, where it had become evident that control by the authorities was no longer a given.   A corollary was, 'When you give a little, get a lot in return for having given it.'  DLH gave up the process and allowed a review by his own  board.  In return he demanded and got a commitment of the students to reasonable behavior, non-violence, and acquiescence in whatever decision the board would reach.  In fact, I would guess that most of the students knew in advance that the board would reaffirm the decision.  But they had shown their muscle and could show that they had done so.  They had not been kicked out of college for it.  In the end, I had a hunch that their own fate became a concern to them."

            Bodger then read the text of the president's statement in the Special Issue.  Even after all the years, he felt he could tell which phrases were Helfferich's, which were the students', and which were his.

            "'I am pleased to be engaged in discussion of academic excellence with students.  It is all too seldom that students show concern for so fundamental a concept of liberal education.  Those students who have shown sincere concern for this concept in recent days are to be commended.'

            "Put yourself on common ground with the opposition," Bodger commented and went on.

            "'If  the college is to grow great, it needs academic excellence.  I am for it and for the means of gaining and preserving it.  The issue of academic excellence has now been raised by students, as is often the case, because of a particular set of circumstances.'         "Note that DLH did not equate institutional greatness and academic excellence.  The latter was a subset of the former.  I clung to that distinction even after academic excellence came to consume the agenda in my later years.  Gradually, I think, it came to distance me from some of my colleagues.

            "'With a few exceptions I believe that up to this moment the students have presented their views on this set of circumstances in a manner acceptable at an institution of higher education, where rational inquiry, discussion and debate are the primary means of solving problems.  The small independent college is the most fitting place where rational discussion should control.'"

            Bodger paused: "The shadows of violence at big places such as Cornell and Columbia are hovering in this paragraph.  The guardedness of this affirmation of students peeps out of the phrase, 'up to this moment.'  Meaning: I think you kids could lose control of the situation if you are not very careful."

            "'The college community is composed of many groups, including the students, the faculty, the alumni, the Board of Directors (the college's legal entity), the elected officers, and the public.'

            "In the hurly-burly of campus life, students and sometimes faculty failed to see this obvious diversity of legitimate interests.  The board especially seemed remote if not irrelevant.  When it adjudicated the case of Waldo and Clymer, of course, students and faculty both had a refresher in governance.   Some, though, thought that the board would do whatever the president told it to do.  I'm sure he was confident that the board would do the right thing, although, given the amount of publicity, his position was not invulnerable."

            Bodger read on: "'We must recognize that all constituents of the college have pride in it and a concern for its welfare.  Our degree has lustre alone on the basis of the college's excellence and the accomplishments of its students and alumni.  As a graduate and as president, I desperately want the college to be one of the best small colleges in the United States.  I am confident that desire is shared by our alumni, our faculty, and our Board of Directors.   And I am confident it is shared no less by you students, who have shown your wish for rigorous intellectual challenge in the classroom.'

            "Take them at their word.  Hoist them on their own petard.  Say by implication that youthful protest for its own sake is not acceptable here."

            Margaret shook her head affirmatively and said, "Also, don't let the students take exclusive possession of the institutional jewels."

            "You got it," Bodger affirmed and continued reading:

            "'But we must also recognize that each person and each group has differing views on the course the college should set in pursuing excellence.  In meeting its constituted responsibility to make decisions for the college, the officers should ignore none of those views.'"

            "That is," Margaret chimed in, "you students don't have exclusive ownership of the place."

            "Correct.  'I value responsible student opinion and would be unreasonable to ignore a request from 80 per cent of the student body.'"

            Margaret warmed to the game: "He was saying that the petition and protest were not an outrage but simply a very visible expression of appropriate constituency opinion."

            Bodger echoed, "That is, don't get to thinking you are pulling off a revolution here, kids," Bodger echoed.  "Don't think you're too damned smart."

            "'On the specific matter in question, up to this point I have been in disagreement with the petitioners' view.  I am unsure how far apart we are.  I am willing to listen and to talk about it by reasonable means--the only acceptable means in an intellectual community.'

            "This was Helfferich's special tactic.  Declare your position.  Acknowledge the opposition to it.  Concede on a process for deliberating the conflict.  Make sure the process allows you, without guaranteeing it, to emerge the winner.   In this case, disarm the exuberance rampant among the students."

            Margaret said, "Still, the students must have been happy that he acknowledged he was unsure of anything."

            "Absolutely," Bodger said and read on.

            "'I quote from a draft "Statement on Student Freedom" which has been reviewed by committees of the Board of Directors and of the Faculty: "It is desirable that students as well as faculty members and administrators have appropriate influence in reasonable discussion through existing structures of organization."'"

            Bodger commented: "This statement emerged out of the controversy over Madalyn Murray O'Hair's appearance the year before.   A couple of board members, faculty, students, and I had crafted it.  We entered into that process to find a kind of closure to the O'Hair affair.  Note we used the word 'reviewed' rather than 'approved.'  I doubt if the board ever formally acted other than to review.  But in this situation, we at least had an institutional statement with community authorship.  We felt it gave an air of procedural normality in this abnormal proceeding.

            "Next came a warning against violence and a repetition of our commitment to excellence--the save-all mantra:  'Obviously, demonstrations resulting in personal or property damage would be harmful to all students and faculty members concerned, to the dignity of the college and, most important of all, to the cause on which we are all united--that of intellectual excellence.'"

            Margaret said, "You were obsessively denying the students sole ownership of the issue of academic excellence."

            "No question," said Bodger.  "Control control control.  Finally, after all this defining and positioning for the sake of control, the statement tells the students what DLH will in fact do about their call to keep Waldo and Clymer.  A few days earlier, I had privately written a suggestion that never went to him.  It would simply have referred the petition to a board committee, followed by a presidential statement that the committee endorsed the non-renewal.  I did not think he would even go that far.  But once he decided to draw the board into the game, he realized that it had to act credibly.  That required an actual appearance of the aggrieved before the students would believe a decision on the appeal.  So that's the way it came out:

            "'I shall present the petition to the Board of Directors on Friday, March 22, the earliest date on which the Board can be assembled.  The president of the Board of Directors has been informed of the situation.

            "'A committee of students, to be appointed by the Student Government Association, will be granted the privilege of stating its views to the Board, as will Mr. Waldo and any others who feel unfairly judged.

            "'Before the end of this week, I shall request a meeting of the Academic Council of the Faculty to seek its recommendations, which will be communicated to the Board along with the petition.

            "'I promise to be bound by the decision of the Board of Directors, and call upon the petitioners and all others concerned to be bound also.'

            "We wanted that final emphasis on student acceptance of the Board's decision," Bodger said.  "We wanted to keep the campus from disruption.  Student passions had blown away similar procedures elsewhere.  We were doing everything we could to erect a structure of actions that would withstand the zaniness lurking at the edge of campuses that year."

            He ruffled the paper in the air and said, "The final paragraph is vintage Bodger: 'We have it on our grasp to demonstrate to ourselves and others that our college is a place where reasonable men and women, within the established framework of the college, can act with dignity and responsibility in resolving its own problems.  That is a true measure of intellectual excellence.'

            "This appeared on 13 March.  On 22 March the board would meet.  In the interim, I had a date to speak in morning chapel—chapel still clung to life but would soon disappear.  I was supposed to tell students and faculty about a new capital fund-raising campaign just then being organized.  I feared that the talk about raising money would sound irrelevant or insensitive in the ears of people who for days had heard the din of controversy over Waldo-Clymer.  A favorite student of mine had just said no when I asked if she would be on a panel to talk about the need for one of the new buildings.  She would have no part in raising money for a college that would not rehire Waldo and Clymer.  I decided I had to talk about the fund-raising plans in the light of the controversy.  I argued that 'the issue' would help the capital campaign, not hurt it."

            Margaret said, "That must have been a stretch to put on a happy face.   How did you get to that conclusion?"

            "I felt that, with the board all set to act as an appeals court, the students and administration had shown maturity in the face of possible disruption.  Prospective donors would see a viable college community in action, peaceable but vital, pursuing academic excellence--while police had to come to other campuses to combat disruption.  I thought I could use the platform to reemphasize the concession made by the administration and the expectation for order, whatever the decision of the following week would be."

            "Did students react?"

            "I doubt that many listened.  Chapel was a place they had to be.  Most were thinking about the work they were to have done for the next class hour.  I don't remember any reaction.  Truth is, with the president's agreement to a review, the issue quickly ceased to be the main topic on campus.  Campus moods are mercurial."

            Margaret asked, "In the end, did the students' view of these instructors make any difference?"

Bodger said, "Did students save their jobs?  No.  Did students get something educational out of the controversy?  Surely."

            She thought a moment and said, "I have doubts now about having asked my students to write to the dean.  In spite of your encouragement.  It won't do any good for them or me."

            "Don't have doubts," Bodger replied.

            After she left, he read his journal for 27 March 1968:

             Like all intermediaries and compromisers, I suppose I appear badly to both sides.  But I think I acted out of a concern for reason: if this controversy could not be dealt with reasonably, on a campus supposed to exist for the sake of reason, how could the college justify itself?  I feared the president would take the hard, uncommunicative line he took in the O'Hair affair a year before.  I feared the students were sufficiently motivated and organized to take the issue to the violent stage.  The result of violence would have been further hardening of the administration position, damage to property, police intervention perhaps, student liability and resulting expulsions, and loss of any hope for reinstating Waldo or Clymer.

             It occurred to Bodger that over the years he had kept up a friendly relationship with many of the student leaders in the Waldo-Clymer affair.  Perhaps he did not appear as badly to them as he then had thought.   That summer, he wrote a letter to Waldo.  Could they still say "friend" in the face of all the stupidities of institutional existence?  Whether or not, Bodger wished him well.  He did not recall hearing from Waldo again.  Clymer bore no grudge against Bodger or anyone else.  He knew the destiny of Yakov Bok.  He married that spring, a handsome Russian Orthodox woman with a mad mother.  Clymer and his wife came to visit Bodger.  They talked about the war and probably Dostoyevsky.  Bodger felt very good about that.

            In his journal, he said:

             Clymer emerges as the memorable one, the still seeker in the depths so misunderstood by the skimming administrative mind.  In the end even the president wished he would be saved.  He worried that his own black chasms of thought might cause his students to become lost.  Haunted by the image of a good friend in Vietnam, who unarmed himself and tried to persuade the villagers to surrender and was shot as he came forward.  Is that me? he asks.  Would I do that?  Lord Jim.  What struggle am I capable of?  How far can I stretch this wire?  If I think to the ends of thought, will I go mad, or find God?  Or is it all the same?  Whatever, it is lonely, a burden I must carry to my apartment or my billet now that I am draft bait.

             In the objectivity and austerity and fatalism, grandeur becomes possible.  Yet the alienation of a friend too--the gulfs that Position gouges between people in spite of themselves.  Waldo and Clymer are the first ones: I see a long procession of faces growing distant, puzzlement or hatred in their eyes, seeing me but failing to see what I see: the mystic swirl of civilization, the inexorable, locked-in logic of a public role, the erosion of the private, simple sympathy of a man for a man.

             He must have been drinking when he wrote the passage that followed a page and a half later.  It was of Bodger on the field of carnage, shameless in a Walt Whitman stance:

             I say, Yes, let everyone go, let the young sarcastic bright ones all go, let them flee from the bearded warlords.  They shall be replaced by more young ones, eager and bright, loving life and students.  They too shall see the tall battered swords of the warriors and fight them and retreat and go to other battles.

            Yet I shall remain, for I have sheathed the swords and know of the dyspepsia after the battles.  I shall remain for I know what they are and they are as meaningful and meaningless as the bright young ones.  And there I shall remain and there I shall swell with the blood of those that win and those that lose.  I shall be the third army, in splendid alliance with all and everyone.  I shall win and I shall lose.  I shall count up my gains and losses and strike them off as fairy tales.  I believe and I do not believe.  I think and I do not think.  I fight and I do not fight.  My cunning is the cunning of the race.  I give it, I use it for it is ours all together.  Let me help you deceive yourself.  Let me help you see the bone grating flesh at the base of all.

             "Save me," Bodger muttered with a smile.

            After Clymer and his wife visited him in that spring of 1968, Bodger reflected on the administrative work that he seemed more and more drawn to do.  The creative challenge of the craft of presidents, he saw, was that the materials--people, procedures, policies--were both recalcitrant and immensely variable.  Nothing held.  The artwork was of the moment, evanescent, made and gone.  A balletic leap.  Yet even when gone, something of it remained to become an element in the next creation.  It was an exercise in real fiction.  Realistic illusion.  Illusory reality.  The deepest reality, the airiest fantasy, all of a piece.  There was the challenge.  To make people!

 Bodger sought an alumni program with intellectual substance

             Margaret wondered one day how he had overcome the credential gap with the faculty.

            "No offense," she said, "but how could anybody without an academic career track end up as a president of a college?  I can't picture the current faculty buying that."

            He tried to capture for her the self-contained life of the mid-'60s faculty.  They were familiar with alumni who returned to campus to teach and saw Bodger in an established pattern.  Credentials mattered less than institutional identity.  While the faculty displayed some fine graduate school pedigrees, a disproportionate number came from the University of Pennsylvania, where Bodger earned the master's degree.  The Penn label was almost as important as the college's own in the eyes of some faculty.  At least it denoted familiarity with a style of mind.   The intellectual tradition of the college was not then demarcated primarily by the standard symbols of accomplishment, books, articles, lectures given at professional meetings.  Those who published and received recognition from their peers elsewhere provided the foil for the more indigenous life of the mind of the majority on the campus.  The full professor rank was not closed to those lacking the Ph.D.  Neither the president nor the academic dean had the Ph.D.  That was not to say that the culture of the campus was hostile to standard academic distinction.  Helfferich's predecessor, Norman E. McClure, was an acknowledged Elizabethan scholar, a product of a great era under Felix Schelling in the English Department at Penn.

            Still, the faculty tended to be egalitarian and functional in its approach.  If teachers in class generated good feedback from students, if they held their own in the ongoing faculty conversation over coffee and donuts, they usually would be favorably received, whether or not they wore colorful academic credentials on their sleeves.

            Bodger said, "I was surprised when I arrived by their ready acceptance of me.  It simply had not occurred to me that I had any right to claim a place in academic life."

            Bodger told her that in his first couple of years, the alumni relations program was at the top of his priority list, starting in January 1965.  It was for that primarily that Helfferich hired him.  It involved running the annual alumni fund, something new to him, directing the alumni association, and editing the alumni magazine.

            "The fund raising and the alumni relations program," Bodger said, "involved a lot of smoke and balloons and promotional hype, pretty thin stuff.  However, a serious player had preceded me in that position.  He was a Reformed pastor, wrestling coach, and instructor in religion, Dick Schellhase, '45.  His family ties to the place and his Reformed heritage gave him a legitimacy and seriousness of purpose unlike the typical alumni promotional person.  Like many pastors in the '60s who were on campuses, he had a fire in his belly over the current issues of social justice.  He had strong roots in the traditions of the denomination that started the college.  But he was not a traditionalist refugee from the current debate in the nation.  He gave me the feeling that in my position it would be acceptable to think and talk about ideas and strongly held principles, especially those having to do with peace and social justice.  He enjoyed a family-like relationship with Helfferich, grounded in their membership in the Reformed church network.

            Dick also had a reputation for good teaching and collegial integrity among many faculty.  He was a member of a group of faculty who were loyal to the college and its heritage but openly critical of some of the traditional practices on campus and sometimes of the president or dean in particular issues.  In one instance, a few years before my arrival, Dick and others criticized when the president offered an honorary degree to someone perceived to be a right-wing nut.

            "He told me after I arrived that it was he who originally brought me to Helfferich's attention when they started looking around for his replacement.  He had decided to leave and become a fund-raising head at his theological seminary."

            "Did he know you?" Margaret asked.

            "Not personally.  I had corresponded with him in his role as editor of the alumni magazine.  With his encouragement, I had sent him an article a couple of years before his job opened up.  He thought that my style of writing must betoken a style of thought that he affirmed.  Forever after, I credited him with getting me the job.  Through the years, I jokingly would blame him for all my subsequent sins of commission and omission as a member of the college staff.  We had that between us.  He was a friend in an oddly formal way.  We did not see much of one another.  In my mind he gave my new job a certain air, and I emulated him."

            "So--he had given the alumni job a weightiness?"  Margaret asked.

            "Right.  Knowing no better, I simply saw his example and assumed that it was acceptable for me to take myself seriously as a player on the campus.  You would have had to be there at that time to get the feeling of it.  It's hard to imagine today."

            The interviews leading up to his being hired also made Bodger think that his position had importance.  After he was interviewed by vice president James Wagner and by Helfferich, he was told he would have to meet two alumni leaders before Helfferich would reach a decision.  One was Harold Wiand, president of the alumni association.  The other was Paul Guest, a member of the board of directors.  Wiand was a public relations executive with the railroad.  Guest, who graduated in the late '30s, was an attorney.  They met Bodger for lunch at the Union League in Philadelphia, just down Broad Street from Bodger's office in the UGI building at Broad and Arch.

            "Although I was a graduate of the college," Bodger said, "I had no sense of the life of the organized alumni group.  I had given a small gift each year and written for the magazine, but that was it.  I had a very small circle of former classmates with whom I had contact, but they were mainly high school friends.  Like me, they had trotted across the way to the local college as non-resident students and did not engage with the college after graduation.  So I did not know the tribal customs of the alumni who were actively involved, like Wiand and Guest.

            "I went to that meeting feeling intimidated and ignorant.  I sensed that Helfferich was surrounded by a group of alumni heavy hitters who shared his religious position and who protected the institutional walls with their money and righteousness.   I was prepared to tell them that I was not really up to the job if I sensed that the conversation was leading nowhere.  The appearance of churchiness, you see, still made me uncomfortable.  I still suspected that all these people were in some sort of salvation game that I could not understand."

            Margaret said, "I can't believe that was true of this place, even then."

            Bodger went on, "Of course I was inexperienced and uninformed.  I passed the test at the Union League more successfully than I realized at the time.  A couple of things were in my favor.

            "I was corporate, for one thing, not academic or religious.  It surprised me that both men saw my little career in Philadelphia companies as a plus.  It gradually dawned on me that they had a paternalistic--if not patronizing--attitude toward the academic and religious professions.  They were actively supporting the college to nurture thought, morals, and values.  They did not think that the learned or sacred professions could support themselves.  So they seemed to embrace me as one of the band of brothers who shared a sense of duty to sustain the college.  We were the strong whose obligation it was to nurture the valuable but vulnerable flowers within the academy.  I knew the corporate jargon of the time.  Without fully realizing it, in my eight years as a corporation man, I had acquired a pinned-down manner, a surface efficiency, which they liked.  They respected the job being done by my boss, Charles Simpson, who headed up the city gas company.  The fact that Charlie, a fellow Union Leaguer, liked me meant a lot to them.  My corporate pedigree removed suspicions that I might be anti-business, or politically to the left.  In the '60s, these were important issues in the world that Wiand and Guest occupied.

            "Also, by sheer chance, Wiand knew Margot's family.  Her father was a railroad man in Phoenixville with the Reading Company.  Wiand knew the Denithornes as good church-going people.  They were stalwarts of the Reformed church in town.  Margot had grown up in the denomination out of which the college emerged.  To Wiand, this was a fortunate circumstance.  I must have skirted around the question of my non-involvement in a church.  Wiand's affirmation of the Reformed pedigree of the Denithorne clan must have brushed that question aside in the remainder of my conversation with him and Guest.

            "There was another thing going for me in the meeting.  I did not know it at the time, though.  Helfferich wanted to hire me.  He had to have revealed his disposition to Wiand and Guest before they met me.  So their task was not to see if I was worthy of the job.  Their goal was only to see whether they could find cause why DLH should not offer it to me.  They wanted to be supportive of his intentions if they could.  And nothing in the interview appeared to make them do anything but advise him to bring me aboard.

            "When I got into the job, the gravity of that Union League meeting hovered in my consciousness.  These were serious people!  There was something going on here that I did not fully grasp but that must be important.  Along with the heavy footsteps of my predecessor, this gave a sense of importance to my new work that was seemingly belied by its place at the margin of the central activity of the college, which was academic."

            Margaret said, "I can't picture you as the alumni person."

            Bodger attempted to sketch his first several years on the staff.  As it turned out, he found that his work at the margin made a better connection with the faculty and the academic program than he would have anticipated.  His own curiosity about the academic enterprise dovetailed with his need to touch the imagination of his alumni constituents.

            "Almost from the start in 1965," Bodger said, "I felt that I had to try to engage the alumni in the current life of the campus if I was to get their attention and their financial support.  We had a small body of living alums, fewer than 7,000.  They were heavily concentrated on the east coast.  The regional character of the student body simply carried on into their afterlife as alums.  I knew I could get directly in the face of many alums with a modest investment of time and travel.

            "First and foremost, I thought of myself then as a magazine editor.  I thought that I could reach them all through the medium of the magazine.  I was like a kid in a candy shop, for the budget was fairly generous, and the editorial focus of the magazine was virtually mine alone to determine.

            "I found that only a handful of alumni took an active part in the organized activities of the alumni association.  Either I had to involve an exponentially greater number of people in its various committees or I had to reach them and motivate them in a different way.  Early on, I decided it would be impossible to increase the direct activity of many alumni.

            "I drew upon my experiences as an industrial relations person to develop a strategy.  The magazine would be central.  It would portray an alumni program as it ideally ought to be.  I would set up activities that actually would take place, but their main function would be as media events, to be reported in the magazine.  The people actually involved would be small parts representing the whole body of alums.  A typical alum would be somewhere out there reading about the activities of the few and vicariously enjoy their experience.   Additionally, I would publish substantive articles and not just news about the college and the alumni association.  This was a sheer luxury for an industrial editor whose editorial scope had been severely limited by the company's agenda."

            Margaret said, "Something manipulative about offering vicarious experiences."

            Bodger agreed.  "I had long since found that you did not build perceptions of corporate identity by striving to convey the reality of it.  Instead, you found just enough reality with the right appearance, and then you built a superstructure of fancy on top of it.  In the process, you did not talk about other aspects of the reality of the corporation that might complicate or muddy the impression desired.  The outcome, if done well, would be consistent with the character of the organization either as it was or, more often, as it ought to be."

            "This does not sound good," said Margaret, "probably because I don't see what you're saying, exactly."

            "Take the simplest graphic example," said Bodger.  "When an event took place on campus, you would want it to be well attended.  You would want a picture of it to show that it was well attended.  More often than not, alumni activities were not as well attended as you would have liked.  An audience would be scattered around the auditorium, with many seats empty in between.  You would have to stage a photo to get the desired impression or have the photographer shoot from an angle that would avoid as many empty seats as possible.   What was true of getting the right photo was also true of making a vivid impression of the college as a whole and the alumni involved with it."

            "I get the picture example," Margaret said.  "How does it extend?"

            "In the ideal impression of the college, I wanted to show a connection between the academic process and the alumni body.   I was taken by a thought from A. Whitney Griswold's book, Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal, published in 1962.  A president of Yale, Griswold talked about the obligation for an alumnus to continue learning after graduating.  He spoke about the alumnus as a 'patron of learning.'  That meant furthering the interests of higher education and doing so preeminently by practicing self-education throughout life.  That would lead to the free and responsible life.  In the Cold War context in which Griswold wrote, alumni would preserve a democratic way of life through their intellectual habits in opposition to the communist hegemony.

            "I thought it could be the role of our alumni program to help our graduates realize this noble role.  It would be self-serving in that it would lead to the pleasures of intellectual discourse.  It would be high-minded because it would contribute to the tone of our society and to the welfare of higher education."

            "A far cry from begging for annual gifts," Margaret observed.

            "Yes, but I assumed that gifts would come when people felt that they were involved with the college in a meaningful way."

            With the consent of the alumni board, Bodger organized alumni volunteers and faculty members into a liberal arts committee.  Its mission was to make the connection between the academic dynamics of the college and its alumni.  Before the end of 1965,  the alumni magazine announced a new reading-discussion program.  The topic was a timely one in 1965, "the war trap."  The choice was not out of the blue.  It was taken from the syllabus of an experimental elective course just introduced in the newly installed curricular plan, the Senior Symposium.    Seniors came together in an interdisciplinary spirit to study major problems of the space age.  It emphasized independent reading and open discussion in small groups, focusing on current movements, ideas and values. 

            Professor of history, Maurice Armstrong, was the moving genius behind the new senior course.  Armstrong had been Bodger's favorite teacher of history in his student years.  He turned to Armstrong as his principal resource for the alumni program.  It was he who chose the title, "the war trap."  With some consultation among colleagues, Armstrong also chose two book titles related to war for alumni to read.  The choices were The Abolition of War (Macmillan, 1963) by Walter Millis and James Real; and Winning Without War (Anchor Doubleday, 1964) by Amitai Etzioni.  The alumni association offered the books by mail order.  Bodger also published a supplemental bibliography on war in the magazine, the titles provided mainly by the faculty, led by Armstrong.  Those who ordered the books became registrants in the Alumni Liberal Arts Program.  As such they became eligible to receive occasional mailings on "the war trap" theme.  These mailings included notices of television productions, periodicals, new books, on-campus discussions.

            The winter 1965 announcement of the program promised a feature for the next magazine on "the war trap."  This in the spring 1966 issue was a pair of articles presenting differing views on the vision of a disarmed world.  One was by General Thomas S. Power, an excerpt from his book, Design for Survival.  Power saw a demilitarized world as a pathological escape mechanism and advocated the continued development of nuclear weaponry.  Power was opposed to the idea of "one world."  He feared that it would turn the democracies over to the Soviet enemies without resistance.  The other half of the feature was by Arthur I. Waskow, an excerpt from his booklet, Keeping the World Disarmed, published by the Fund for the Republic.  Waskow claimed to be no appeaser of communism, any more than Power; but he believed that western democracy would have a good chance of winning against communism in a demilitarized world.

            The cover of the spring 1966 issue depicted a welded steel sculpture by local artist Bernard Brenner, who recently had spoken on campus surrounded by some of his works.  The cover showed his semi-representational "Achilles," a section of rounded steel resembling a helmet, suspended on a neck-like stem.  "Is the ancient institution of war obsolete?" queried the accompanying cover heading.

            The readings, occasional mailings, and the magazine articles preceded spring alumni regional discussion meetings on "the war trap" in 1966, organized by Bodger.  They were led by Dr. Armstrong and other faculty members and seniors participating in the Senior Symposium.

            The spring readings were capped by a seminar in June 1966 at the annual alumni day on campus.  Two expert voices on international affairs debated issues associated with "the war trap."  They were Dr. James E. Dougherty of St. Joseph's College and the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania., co-author of a book, Protracted Conflict; and Dr. Charles C. Price, of the University of Pennsylvania, immediate past president of American Chemical Society and a past president of the United World Federalists.  Like Power and Waskow, Dougherty and Price respectively offered traditionalist and innovative tools for freeing us from "the war trap."

            Margaret said, "In view of the subsequent Cold War story that culminated in Reagan's 'star wars,' the hard-line military people seem to have won the debate, even in spite of the disaster then bursting forth in Vietnam."

            "Demilitarization and world federalism certainly did not bring down the Soviets," Bodger agreed.  "No one realistically in 1966 was thinking of bringing them down.  Containing them was more than enough to chew.  In truth, the Soviets may have been the main instruments of their own undoing, not our militarization."

            Margaret nodded in agreement: "They sprung us from their war trap and left us to fight the dirty little desert and mountain wars that followed."

            "The theme today might be, 'war traps,'" Bodger concluded.

            Margaret asked, "Was 'the war trap' program like that doctored audience photo you talked about?  Something of a falsehood?"

            "Too harsh a judgment, I hope," said Bodger.  "Everything really took place.  The participation was modest at best.  The publicity made considerably more of it than the alumni as a whole did.  It was successful enough to persuade the association to accept my recommendation to try another round in the following year."

            "Not more war."

            "'The Paradox of Urbia,'" said Bodger.  "The discussion leading up to this choice in the committee was memorable."

            Bodger pulled down from a shelf the Winter 1966 issue of the alumni magazine and read:

             The committee members talked over a great range of current issues and problems.  Someone suggested readings in American Negro thought.  One of the students proposed a comprehensive bibliography on the emerging non-Western nations.  This led another to wonder where the U.S. stood with its Alliance for Progress program.  But, asked a faculty member, don't all these relate in some way to changing moral values and couldn't that topic tie together a lot of things?  Another staff member pointed out that the topic of modern values, along with modern art and the impact of space exploration, was a theme for this year's Senior Symposium course on campus.  Well, asked a former Curtain Clubber, why not read something on modern theater, and have an alumni group put on a stage performance on Alumni Day?  The talk returned to moral values; the nature of violence became wrapped up in the nature of modern life--urban, fast, confusing.  So the topic was finally chosen, by a free-wheeling, no-holds-barred exchange of ideas, some carefully thought out ahead of time, others--like the problem of cities--popping into someone's head because of something someone else said.

             Bodger said, "We offered Raymond Vernon's The Myth and Reality of Our Urban Problems, Harvard Press, 1966.  And we suggested a spicy list of other books.  Among them was a book that even then was taking its place as a classic in the literature of modern cities, Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961.  It was Jacobs's voice that sounded the charge on the megaplanners who were ignoring people and glorifying functional megabuildings.  We also suggested Harvey Cox's The Secular City, still being read widely after its 1965 publication.  Cox was attractive because, as a preacher, he affirmed the beat of urban life that seemed to jar conventional religious sensibilities."

            The second year of the reading and discussion program followed in the track of the "war trap" program of 1965-66.  Bodger ran a piece in the magazine about an urban inner-city ministry in Louisville, led by a preacher of the class of 1943.  The preacher wrote approvingly of the embrace of urban life in Cox's book.

            "I also ran an interview," Bodger said, "with two blue-collar black fellows I had befriended at the gas works when I worked there.  'Negro Voices of  the City.'   These guys today look rare.  They had worked for the company steadily for a long time.  One was a World War II vet, the other a veteran of Korea, about my age.  Both were married with families, steady and stable citizens who lived in North Philadelphia and Overbrook.  It was not uncommon in the 'ghetto' in the late '60s to see respectable and safe black neighborhoods of working class people.  My daughter, who was then four years old, still remembers our visit to Lester's home.

            "I felt I had found a frank way of talking about race when I would see them around the stores department of the company.  They seemed to trust me up to a point.   Probably my naivete came through: 'What does this innocent white boy know?'   I was obviously not a threat.  I stayed in touch with Lester after leaving the company and coming to the college.  I tried to help him place his daughter in college.  She went through the early stages of application here.  She was interested in art and we had no major in it.  I still have a painting she did as a gift for me.

            "I invited him and his younger friend, Bob, out to the college.  They came in suit and tie, looking like two Sidney Poitiers coming to dinner.  They said that their apprehensions grew the farther they drove out Germantown Pike from the city.  The white suburbs felt like alien turf to them--it was, of course.  But they sat with me for an hour in my office on campus and talked candidly in front of a tape recorder.  Then I took their picture, out on Main Street.  They carried notebooks in hand and walked purposefully into the eye of the camera.

            "After three decades, I still think the article is interesting," Bodger said.  He handed it to Margaret.  She looked Lester and Bob in the eye and scanned the article.

            Margaret read from Bodger's lead-in to the interview: "'Both men agreed to take part in this discussion for one main reason.  They believe that the real hope for black-white relations lies in showing the white man what the black man really thinks and feels.  In their experience, white men rarely relax their complicated racial defenses and speak to them man to man.'

            "Then you invoke James Baldwin's voice," Margaret said, "with a pretty heavy-handed editorial club: 'What we hear  in these voices is an expression of the rage that Baldwin says is in the blood of every Negro alive (in Notes of a Native Son).'

            "'It is one of the ironies of black-white relations'--you continue citing Baldwin--'that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.'"

            "And vice versa," Bodger said.

            "That's what you said next."

            Margaret read aloud from parts of the interview:

             The men were asked what one thing they would change that would do more good than anything else.

            Mr. Coleman: "You really want to know?"  (Laughing)  "You got a shotgun?"

            Mr. McRae: "No, the one thing you could change would be a very intangible thing, people's attitudes, their minds.  That's about the only thing."

            Mr. Coleman: "I agree.  I think the white man must get to know the Negro, which he don't.  That's the biggest problem--he thinks he knows him but he don't."

             She turned to the discussion of the new Black Power message of Stokely Carmichael:

             Mr. Coleman: "I think he's all right--but not if I listen to what the white man says about him."

            Mr. McRae: "I think he's good, he's a necessity, whether you agree with him or not.

            Mr. Coleman: "Whether you agree with him or not: that's not the question.  The question is, is this right or is it wrong, the things he does and says about Black Power.  Because we, the Negro race, have tried every way we know possible to, what shall I say, better ourselves or whatever it is, and nothing has come of it.  So we can't be wrong in supporting Stokely if his way's working."

             Margaret then read what they said about the Great Society civil rights legislation recently passed in the Johnson administration.

             Did either man see any concrete results from the Philadelphia poverty program?

            Mr. Coleman: "No."

            Mr. McRae: "Nothing....In employment, the prejudices are dressed up a little bit more than they were fifteen or 20 years ago.  But I don't think the legislation makes all that much difference."

            Mr. Coleman: "It doesn't help much, all they have to do is say they didn't want someone with this or that qualification.  There are so many ways of getting around it."

             She went to the discussion of open housing policy.

             Mr. McRae: "I have two daughters, and I think they're beautiful.  Maybe you have two sons next door, practically the same age.  You think they're gonna grow up around these girls without ever looking at them as girls?  This is what worries people--what's gonna happen in the years to come living this close to the Negro family?  But beyond that, I think the average person prefers to live in a neighborhood with his own people.  I feel better in a neighborhood where my kids can go out on the street and nobody's going to insult them."

             Margaret said, "After an exchange on media bias on rape by blacks, you bring in another big literary name."

            "I'm sure I was using it in my English comp class," Bodger said.

            She read:

             So say two voices of the city.  Hearing them, we recall hopefully what Ralph Ellison's hero says at the end of…Invisible Man: "The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness.  So it is now that I denounce and defend...I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man--but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate."

             She applauded his use of literary spice.  "A little dab here, a little dab there," she said.  "If I were a faculty member reading this, I would wonder about the college magazine as a polemical tool.  You had a message."

            "Sure," Bodger replied.  "But thirty years ago, a segment of faculty thought I was asking right questions and dealing with them in a fresh way.  It sure wasn't scholarship.  But I was dealing with timely issues and making defensible bibliographic references.  And, by the way, I was presenting a tone that differed noticeably from the conservative vibrations sent out by the administration about life in general.   And I involved some of the faculty in the program for the alums."

            Margaret thumbed through the rest of the magazine.  She found another article on "the paradox of urbia."  Dr. Rosa Wessel of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work gave a talk on alumni day about the urban black slum.  She referred to third generation families on public welfare in the cycle of dependency.  Dr. Wessel told her alumni audience that she saw hope for their future in the principles of reform adopted by the Johnson administration.

            Bodger said, "Rosa was the wife of Herman Wessel, our education department head."

            "She didn't predict the future very well," Margaret said.  "The Johnson program set the stage for more dependency for another thirty years."

            "But having her on the program put lines of connection out to the faculty.  I was with them in an unusual way."

            Margaret shook her head: "It should not have counted for so much.  You were just on the surface."

            Bodger said, "In another time, in another place, yes.  Here, then, I had the feeling that it counted enough to make me something of a member of the club.  I imagined that few understood where I was coming from.  How could they?  I did not fully know myself.  But I seemed to be interested in the right things.  I seemed to want to engage with them in a style that differed from that of DLH and the dean."

 Finding a way to teach English

             Alone later, Bodger thought he tried too hard to show Margaret how his alumni programming connected him with the academic life of the faculty.   After all, he had entered the classroom.  He had held his own in faculty debates about changing the curriculum.

            After his first couple of years as a follower of the young instructors of the English Department, Bodger struck out more on his own by the 1968-69 academic year.  The "yellow paper project" would happen some years later, but in the late '60s he was already looking for new ways to challenge freshmen in English composition.  The students were bright.  They mastered the 500-word-paper format and the major grammatical issues in the fall semester.  Bodger tried something new in the spring.

            He had read an article in College English (November 1967) by one Charles Deemer called "English Composition as a Happening."  "Happenings" were in the air on campuses as well as on the streets.  He said to himself:  "Forget about 'covering' a body of material.  Look for an understanding of the 'creative process.'  Show that expression in literary art can be compared with expression in non-verbal art.  Require students to write a journal.  Let students have enough freedom in writing assignments to talk about something that matters to them.  (It was easy to assume in the late '60s that they would be able to identify something that mattered to them--an assumption that became harder to maintain as the tension of the '60s waned.)  Shed the role of 'professor' of a subject matter and adopt the role of 'fellow inquirer,' different mainly in that I have lived longer and read and thought some things they may not have read or thought.  At the same time, acknowledge that I have not read some things and not thought some things that they have."

            Bodger stressed creativity in the course.  He had to get the students past the feeling that this was one more professorial ploy of some phony sort.  He assigned a menu of standard readings on creative process by Susanne Langer, Jacob Bronowski, C. Day Lewis and Archibald MacLeish.  Then he verged away from the traditional track of the course by inviting the students to make themselves "laboratory specimens."  They were offered the chance to write a poem themselves.

            "Be brief; be honest with your thoughts and feelings; be as free as you wish from conventional restraints of grammar, or metrics."

            All but one of the class members took him up on the offer.  He reproduced about half of the resulting pieces and distributed them anonymously for class discussion.

            "An eye-opener," a few of the students agreed after the class discussion.  Bodger had discovered a fundamental fact about college freshmen.  If he paid as much attention to their expression as he did to that in the standard canon, he would win their interest and attention.  Of course, he had to assume that in almost any piece by a student, something virtuous could be found and highlighted.  He had to find it amid the dross of over-blown or under-imagined prose.  Usually, he did.  He felt that every student had a spark of a universal fire, however dampened it might be by upbringing or inexperience.  Only such an optimistic feeling--it was not at the level of a conviction--could have driven Bodger to experiment as he did with the class.

            Still trying to identify the problem of what literature IS, he played a tape of Wallace Stevens reading his The Idea of Order at Key West early in the semester.  Bodger thought of that recording as something almost beyond belief.  Stevens had been dead for more than a decade; yet his cadences, his crystal imagery, sounded like a glimpse at the day after tomorrow to Bodger.  The voice of Stevens pulled at him like a siren.  He felt that if his students heard it they would at least witness creative action at its highest, even if they did not know what it "meant."  He asked the class to picture themselves with "pale Ramon Fernandez," looking off at the "glassy lights" of the bay in the distance, wondering what was real and what was imaginary.   A short discussion followed; the students wanted to believe in Bodger's own enthusiasm for Stevens.

            He brought the tape recorder back to class again the next day.  Before any students arrived, he arranged the seats in a circle.  As they came in, the recorder already was playing Wanda Landowska's rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations.  Bodger then confounded their orthodox expectations.  He said nothing about the music--no lecture point, no harangue on creativity.  This drove a deeper fissure into the old monotonous surface of the classroom.  Henceforth the students on their own moved seats into a circle as they entered class.

            One day an incoming phone call made him late for class.  Finally arriving, he found that the students had lined up the chairs in orthodox rows--except that they all faced a rear corner instead of the front of the classroom.  The students had decided that the circle, however conducive to conversation, was getting them back into a rut.  Their decision identified the mood that they had found for the remainder of the course--play merging with thought.  Bodger felt good.

            The great test of their new mood, however, came when Bodger announced they would have to write a 2,500 word essay, five times longer than anything anybody else was writing in other comp sections.  The piece could be fiction if the student preferred.

            "Foul," somebody said.

            "We can't say that much about one thing," somebody else said.

            A lobbying movement against the assignment erupted before Bodger's eyes.

            "The assignment stands," he said, quelling the dissidence.  "But I hear your pain.  Tell me about it on paper.  Start a journal."

            The journal was ungraded.   Entries could be long or short.  They could say anything they wished.  The only requirement was that to write a journal entry at least once a week.  When Bodger read their gripes about the long assignment, he wrote his reactions and suggestions.  That led students to react to his comments in their subsequent journal entries.   Through this journal "dialogue" he tried to find the aspect of the literary problem that attracted each person.    He jockeyed each one toward a topic and toward suggested extra readings.

            In time their journals became the medium for comments on class readings, on campus controversy (marijuana use, dormitory rules), on their relationships with fellow students.  Bodger became the peripatetic commentator, his words on paper privately directed to each journal keeper.  This new experience would lead him later to write a proposal for a course based on  "epistolary pedagogy."  The entire course would consist of letters from and to each student.  The instructor would select meaningful passages from the letters and duplicate them for the class.  Many years later, electronic mail and Internet "discussion lists" reminded him of his experiment of years before.  The ease of communicating informally with students made Bodger an early supporter of the new technologies.

            Bodger introduced a non-verbal project into the course for two reasons.  One, it came at the question of "what is creativity?" from a different artistic angle.  Two, it dramatized the spirit of play that Bodger felt was an essential ingredient in any thinking about creativity.  The object was to see what could be learned about creative writing by looking at creative non-verbal expression.

            Each student had to show and tell about the product of his or her imagination.  Bodger could remember none of the presentations concretely, except his own.  It was an abstract rendering of white lines on a black field, seeking to convey the feeling of release-and-capture in Kafka's short story, The Bucket Rider.  He had seen it not long ago in a dusty corner of the cellar and wondered why he had saved it for so many years.  Bodger could only remember that many of the students enjoyed doing their non-verbal project.  He doubted that they got the conceptual lesson intended.  At the time he concluded that at least they were confronted with the notion--through the very fact of the assignment--that something about literature may relate to non-literary expression.   However, he knew it could look like a Mickey Mouse approach in the eyes of other faculty members; he did not keep it in his teaching arsenal for the future.

            Bodger knew that his bag of tricks could bring more general criticism from other faculty.   The culture of the campus made it clear that students ought to do a lot of work and faculty ought to stick to their business in class; fun and games were not highly prized in the classrooms.  To avoid coming under criticism, Bodger experimented on top of the grunt requirements of the composition course, not instead of them.  The students in all of the English comp sections were required to read a batch of short stories, a bunch of poems, and three novels: Camus's The Fall, Malamud's The Fixer, and Meredith's The Egoist.  Bodger pushed this reading through class discussion, some quizzes, encouragement to the students to comment on the reading in their journals, and essay questions in his final exam.  He carefully calibrated the amount of writing done by his students to equal that done in the other sections, where the standard 500-word papers were assigned.  He thus guarded his flanks against conservative criticism while siding with younger instructors like Mel Ehrlich and Mike Foster, who flouted the old ways of teaching.

            He decided at the end of the semester that the central question of the course--what is the creative process?--was of doubtful importance.  It helped him organize the course, but he found that the students as a whole did not pursue the question with great interest to the end of the semester.  Their critical reading of texts turned out to be more or less the standard stuff.   They did perceive, however, that the question led to themselves as worthy objects of attention, and that satisfied Bodger.

            In his self-evaluation of the course, he preserved two student comments, the kind that since Socrates has made teachers feel justified in their antics.  One day he told Margaret about his experiences in the course.  Then he read the two comments:

             For the first time in thirteen years of English classes, I'm interested in the subject and have been considering changing my major....I have learned much concerning my own capacity to create.  I received far more satisfaction from writing my short story than from almost any other single creative endeavor this year.  I have uncovered a new and challenging field into which to channel my efforts, a new mode of expression, and I am grateful.

             And then:

             As the year the year progressed I began to grope for one interrelating idea to the instructor's method and refused to accept the idea of "literature the work of art" as the ultimate point.  Far more important than this, I realized, is the responsibility of "me-the-intellect" to read and analyze the great literary works, both for my own satisfaction and betterment, and for the benefit of those "intellects" that will follow after me.  I came to an appreciation not of the literary arts but of myself as an intelligent human being who holds not only the ability but also the responsibility to read the enthroned writings of this time in an analytical manner.

             "This is stuff that gives teachers goose bumps," Margaret said.

            "Allow for some flattery of the teacher.  And I didn't save the other ones," Bodger said.

            "Hey, two converts out of twenty--okay."

            "It is evangelism of a kind," Bodger agreed.  "If you recognize that, you get beyond the definition of subject matter as the essence of curriculum.  You don't avoid the subject matter.  But the students see that it is fundamentally not what the whole business is about.  Ninety percent of the time they have to concentrate on the subject matter.  Still they know that's not what it's about."

            "I have a hunch," Margaret said, "that's what your faculty colleagues could see in you.  You were an enthusiast for ideas."

            "If so, that's what got me by as an interloper in their professional midst."

            "It would have been enough," Margaret said, "to get you by academically when it came time to put you in the presidency.  They could see that you could be their advocate."

            "There also was the curriculum debate.  When I first came to campus to work, the president had stirred up a curriculum review.   The climate for debate seemed to be free-wheeling, something DLH could generate.  So I jumped in, not knowing how little I knew.  But I read Daniel Bell's book about the Columbia curriculum and some standard stuff on the liberal arts curriculum.  I knew Newman and Arnold from college and understood the heart of the modern tradition of liberal education.   I had learned about it from some of the very voices now in the campus debate."

            "Were they really interested in changing the curriculum?" asked Margaret.

            "At the time, I think DLH was ambivalent.  The maverick in him made him want the faculty to be more exciting to students.  Not being a man of an academic discipline, he could not lead by example.  His predecessor, McClure, was the quintessential scholar of English lit.  He was respected for his work on the Elizabethans, Shakespeare especially.  His classes were classically medieval.  We sat and listened, for the most part.  I enjoyed his classes, but DLH never could have taught like that.  Nor could I.  DLH didn't teach at all. But he read the literature on pedagogy.  He knew the rising pitch in the '60s had something to do with youthful expectations.  He was an exhibitionist and thought that teaching always should be dramatic.

            "On the other hand, the conservative in him made him suspicious of novelty.  He knew it would cost more.  And, anyway, he knew he could not impose it.  So he allowed the faculty deliberative process to grind away in its own time-consuming way.   I think he figured that, sooner or later, they would come up with something.  It would be less than desirable, probably, but it would allow him rhetorically to point to it as progress.  He probably thought that, if they at least would refer to the current movement toward 'integration of knowledge,' he would not care about the substance of changes, so long as he could afford them.  He never told me any of this.  I'm guessing."

            "Did the faculty want to change?" Margaret asked.

            "I soon discovered there is not a faculty.  There are faculties.  Some wanted change.  Others thought it was newfangled nonsense.  They knew what they were teaching."

            "So, they actually revamped the curriculum after you got here?"

            "Only after years of deliberation.   The dean summarized the process for an article in the magazine in spring 1966.  He traced a lengthy path.  I think it all began as a half-surreptitious faculty movement in the early '60s, years before I came aboard.  They called it the core committee and then the planning committee.  By the summer of 1964, one of the bright young lights, Dave Hudnut in English, received a stipend to write a lengthy report on the two years of deliberation already behind them.  A year more of discussion took place.  Then Jerry Hinkle, a bright young Philosophy and Religion professor, pulled the ideas on the table into a package.  In the fall of 1965, the faculty department heads had a major shot at the Hinkle draft and changed it.

"After another academic year of discussion and compromise,  the new curriculum was announced in the spring of 1966.  It was implemented for the 1966-67 academic year.  A new set of categories came in, based on the metaphor of the 'core.'  It led to 'pivotal' courses that were required and to 'radial' courses that were elective.  It legitimized the truly innovative experiment in the teaching of introductory science.  This course combined chemistry, mathematics, and physics into a single integrated course for science majors.  It started as an experiment a couple of years before, put together by three veteran teachers, all alumni and custodians of the mystique of science at the college—Blanche Schultz, '41, Evan Snyder, '44, and Roger Staiger, '43.  It created a 'senior symposium,' an elective course with loose structure, intended to allow students to 'integrate' knowledge by drawing on several disciplines as seniors.  It created a College Honors program, which granted credit for independent work for the first time.

"Hinkle drove for integration as well as that could be determined here at that time.  That mainly meant, I think, assuring that majors would take distributed requirements in other areas.  This now seems hardly more than tightening the bolts on an already-built ship.  At the time, however, the faculty and administration were quite absorbed.  The president and the dean worried that new decisions would mean new expenditures."

            "Coming in as you did and working where you did, you could not have had much influence on any of this," said Margaret.

            "I had none," Bodger said.  "But I was able to support the innovations in a public way.  I was aligned with the forces for change.  And that really did include DLH, no matter what doubts he may have had about major alteration.

            "I wrote a piece on curriculum for the magazine that had to attract some notice.  I compared the Ursinus changes with the reforms of general education proposed by Daniel Bell at Columbia, in his The Reforming of General Education.   Bell seemed refreshing to me because his critique attacked the very education I had received fifteen years before.  The old system, even in graduate school, emphasized the mastering of a body of knowledge.  Faculty paid too little attention to the assumptions and structure that made that particular body of knowledge significant.  Bell called for the study of the structure of a discipline, the method of inquiry, how we study what we study.  By the mid-'60s, it was commonplace to talk about the exponential increase in 'knowledge.'  Educators were recognizing the impossibility of knowing an entire corpus.  Bell acted for a whole generation when he turned away from a received canon.  He made sense to me when he sought to highlight the grounds or basis for putting that canon together."

            Bodger paused.  "By the way," he said as an aside, "without knowing it at the time, Bell was softening up the battlefield for the 'culture wars' that would break out more than a decade later, under the pressure of cultural theory based on race, class, and gender."

             Margaret  said, "Thank you, Mr. Bell."   She spoke as a younger feminist scholar in language studies.

            "Bell's most attractive proposal," Bodger recalled, "called for 'third tier' senior courses.  They would generalize experiences in a discipline by examining one of four approaches--the historical foundations of disciplines in a common field; the presuppositions of methodology and philosophy of disciplines in a common field; the application of several disciplines to common problems; comparative studies, especially of non-western cultures.

            "Our faculty were using the term 'integration' as a sort of mantra, without giving much reflection about its mechanics, how it would work conceptually.  Bell provided such reflection in his third-tier concept.  So I compared it with our proposed new senior symposium.  That grafted a conscious intent onto our modest initiative and made it look more significant than it probably was."

            "No matter," Margaret said.  "Your comparison in print would have put you into the campus conversation."

            "Yes.  Also, from the start I was in fund-raising.  That's what the alumni job was about, when all was said and done.  I naively thought that a good cause like ours would naturally attract alumni support just by defining the needs clearly.  With editorial and promotional gimcrackery, I injected a newly strident tone into Helfferich's development plans.  The centennial anniversary of the college would take place in 1969.  He wanted to go out with a bang in the 100th year.  He saw his final years as a dramatic spectacle.

            "One day we sat in his office with a map of the campus.  Pointing with his well-chewed pipe stem, he specified the sites of the buildings he wanted to build before he retired.  He wanted a new library in the center of the campus, on the exact spot of the 'old main' building dating back to 1848, Freeland Hall, with its dormitory additions, Derr and Stine.  He wanted two new men's dormitories to replace the rooms in the 'old main,' a new athletic facility, new science building, new chapel.

            "Many years later, I found a drawing in an alumni magazine from 1918.  It was a grand vision of the growth of the campus dreamt up by the then president, George L. Omwake.  It displayed the basic form of the campus that Helfferich dictated to me decades later.  DLH told me that when he was a senior, president Omwake called him into his office.  'Donald, you have worked hard in telling me how to run the college in the last four years.  I predict you will be back.'  DLH told that story with pleasure and pride.  Indeed, he returned as the youngest trustee in the history of the college.  It was in 1927, only six years after he graduated.  Omwake had nine more years to serve as president.  I think DLH learned a basic lesson about apprenticeship and mentorship in his relations with Dr. Omwake.  That example, central to his vision of his own life, must have been in his mind when he put me to his uses in my first years here.

            "In any case, I gave him some stage props and some script.  Within months of my coming, we threw together an Alumni Centennial Fund program that would last four years, into the 100th year.  We had the college mascot arriving by helicopter on the football field.  We had a logo showing Zack the Bear loping toward 1969 against a great '100' in the background.  We brought in the class agents and redefined their volunteer duties.  We pushed them to reach every classmate.  We made new charts of gifts and held them accountable as we had not before.  We created committees and I bugged the chairmen to perform.  Helfferich's die-hard alumni supporters reached out and recruited new supporters like themselves.  George Spohn, of the class of '42, came in to head up the program.  He was a super achiever with one of the Philadelphia-based oil companies.  I knew George's style, having just come from the corporate environment.  We could speak the same promotional language, and we went at the game as if I were still at my old gas works job.

            "There was an obvious stylistic clash between that alumni program and the academic culture.  This had to have been evident to my new faculty friends and familiar professors of student days.  They probably saw it as benign hokum.  If it would help generate the money they knew was needed to get the college out of its threadbare tradition, then give Bodge the benefit of the doubt."

            "You represented hope?" asked Margaret.

            "I'm sure the level of skepticism was high:  'This too shall pass.  Still, why not watch and see how much he can do?  --Maybe we'll get something from it.  In any event, Bodge seems unthreatening.  At the least, indulge his boosterism.  Moreover, he's in with DLH anyway, so we may as well live with what he is doing for now.'"

            "You are not describing a noble road to the presidency," said Margaret.

            "Even in small political games in academia, noble tactics hardly count," Bodger replied.  "At the time, of course, I didn't even know I was in a presidential game."

 Bodger was learning how board members influenced events

             "Can the board help me?" Margaret asked Bodger one day.

            "Is the dean still giving you trouble?"

            "Not yet.  But I think he will.  Does the board have a final say?"

            "Yes," Bodger said.  "But it's not that simple."

            It took Bodger some years to fix the board in his understanding of the college.  To the ebbing and flowing of classes, the daily traffic of students and faculty, it seemed irrelevant.  Early on, he saw that the president mainly wanted affirmation from it--and money.  When it became directly involved in campus issues, he became nervous about it.  Yet Helfferich seemed to take seriously his routine pronouncements to them about their relevance to the reputation and advancement of the college.  It was that that took time for Bodger to understand.

            "DLH sought advice," Bodger said to Margaret.  "Of course, mainly he was seeking advice in the form of approval for something he had already decided was right.  A year or two after my arrival, I scheduled a weekend meeting with an alumni group in the Washington-Baltimore area.  Tom Beddow, '36, and his wife, Virginia, '37, were the leaders of the alumni group there.  Tom was one of that cohort of alums who graduated in the late 'thirties, fought World War II, became professionally successful, and supported Helfferich in his effort to make over the college.  He was on campus for a board meeting and offered to drive me to the weekend meeting and put me up at their home.  The trip down Route 95 in his big Oldsmobile felt in the end like another job interview, friendly and supportive though it was.  He wanted to know what I thought about the chances for the college.  How did I envision the future?  What would I do to make the college improve?

            "Lying in a strange bed that night, unable to sleep, it hit me.  DLH had seen to it that Tom would invite me to ride with him.  He had wanted Tom's opinion about me.  It was one of my clearest early insights on what a board member does in working with a president.  It was probably lucky for me that I was too green to see what was going on at 65 miles an hour in that Oldsmobile until afterward.  Tom liked the unvarnished things I said to him, long on enthusiasm, short on understanding.  I am certain he told DLH so. 

            "Years later, when I became president, he was among my steadiest supporters.  Two years into my presidency, he put the motion to liberalize student rules that rescued me from having a fatally split board of directors."

            "Bedfellows, so to speak," said Margaret.

            "There was an old boy feeling.  Absolutely.  I knew it from my corporate experience.  My Army experience.  It felt familiar.  Generationally, however, I was different from Tom as well as DLH.  Being younger, I lapped up their support, almost took it for granted, it came so easily.  I suppose I gave my quid pro quo.  But I never felt consciously that I was doing so."

            "Does that mean you were disloyal to the old boy code?"

            Bodger answered, "A good question that I can't answer well.  For one thing, nobody ever spelled out the code in so many words.  Tom was not always in agreement with Helfferich.  He faulted the use of endowment funds to build buildings, something DL believed we had to do to jump-start the capital improvement program.  Sometimes DLH talked about the alumni board members as if they were still students--he knew them then, after all.   Years later, I was guilty of the same attitude toward some of my former students.  So, even in the tightest alliance between Helfferich and a board member, there was an edge.  No one could ever forget that the president held office at the pleasure of the board.  DLH acted like a patrician, even a prince, as if he were the institution.  But in tense moments, he let me see that that was a pose.  He knew the board had final authority, even if they exercised it gently, or not at all, in deference to his judgment, or to his pride."

            "You absorbed that understanding from him," said Margaret, following his line of thought.

            "And added to it in the relations I began to build with individual board members," Bodger said.

            Margaret asked, "Was that part of the job you had?"

            "Yes and no.  Yes, because as alumni secretary I was supposed to cultivate the interest and support of as many successful alums as I could.  No, DLH did not tell me in so many words to create a coalition of board members who would later support me for the presidency.  And I was not doing that at the start at all.  Nothing was further from my mind.  Still, it turned out that the early bonds that I built contributed essentially to my successful bid for office in 1976."

            "Was Beddow the main one?" Margaret asked.

            "One of them.  My alumni position brought me into natural contact with all of the board members who were alumni, and a majority of them were alumni.  That included the board president, William Reimert, '24.  He was head of the newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  When DLH gave me the responsibility for running the centennial fund-raising program, I complained that I could not do everything he asked me to do without some help.  He was not receptive.  I got in the car and drove to Allentown to see Reimert without telling DLH.  He was a courtly, generous man.  If there was such a thing as a German Reformed culture, he was its flower.  He had been born in China to missionaries of the Reformed church.  I think his father was killed there in the Boxer Rebellion.

            "I told Reimert that I feared failure for lack of help and did not want unfair blame. He listened sympathetically.  He assured me I would not be hung out to dry.  When I told him DLH was unaware of my visit, he told me not to worry.  I was naive enough to think that he would not have called DLH before my appointment to see what was up.  But I never knew.  DLH never let on that he knew that I went to Reimert behind his back."

            "And you never got your help?" Margaret asked.

            "I got it.  I hired Lee Dickson as a fund-raising consultant and others for publicity and alumni contacts and a succession of people afterward.  I know better now than I did then why Reimert and others listened to me.  I was young and full of energy and willing to knock myself out for the cause.  That didn't seem to me to count for much, contrasted to my vast ignorance of what I had become involved in.

            "Especially fund-raising.  Dickson was the toughest critic.  He told me every day how mistaken I was in almost every step I took in the fund-raising program.  He was a kind of monomaniac about fund-raising.   What I learned from him in a year or so lasted my whole career.  He gave me the hardest lessons about fund-raising.   Above all, Dickson taught me that fund-raising is not about money.  It is about building allegiances to an institutional epic.  The money comes in after you have built a network of loyal advocates of that epic.  People of conscience would not violate their allegiance to the institutional epic."

            Margaret said, "It sounds as if your ignorance was getting you somewhere."

            "Now I can see how valuable youth is to an organization, despite its vast ignorance.  It is all that the organization has to carry it into the future.  I guess it's lucky that most young people don't fully know their importance to the ongoingness of the organization. It's lucky, too, that the seniors don't tell them the secret.  Otherwise, the young would demand more than they do.  They're insufferable enough sometimes.  Certainly I was."

            "Do you have more to say about your insufferability?" Margaret probed.

            "Maybe later."

            "Can I assume that somebody can be insufferable and still be retained?" she asked.

            "Living example," Bodger said as she left, looking a little weary.

            When he was alone, Bodger mused further about administration-board relations.  They divided into three parts.  He could identify each part with a person.    Bill Heefner, '42, stood for the innovative alums.  Paul Guest, '38, stood for the traditionalist alums.  Bill Elliott stood for the non-alumni business supporters.  Bodger's adaptability enabled him to win the favor of all three parts.  It was not that he deliberately sought favor for future payoff.  He simply had learned in his US Army stint and in his corporate decade that it was his job to get along with whatever powers there were.  Right or wrong.  For the time being, anyway.

            Elliott presided over a small life insurance company in Philadelphia.  He also owned  rural property near the college, a productive dairy farm, complete with a retail store.  Walebe's farm-made ice cream was a highlight of the community.  He served on the board because of his personal loyalty to Helfferich, flavored with a pinch of local noblesse oblige.  He had little apparent interest in liberal education as such.  He reluctantly allowed his name to be used as an honorary co-chairman of the capital campaign that came to be called the All-College Anniversary Drive.  Helfferich expected large dollars from him in the end, and the pool at the new gym came to bear his name.

            Elliott knew that Bodger had worked for a couple of years at Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company in Philadelphia, a major-league competitor to his small but successful company.  Like other business people on the board, Elliott seemed to take that past history as Bodger's seal of acceptability.  He never knew the cross currents of Bodger's loyalties and had no reason to want to.  Bodger was okay because he had business experience and because DLH said he was okay.

            Guest apparently felt that way too. He was an entrepreneurial attorney with an office on South Broad Street in center city Philadelphia.  He had piloted a B-17 bomber over Germany in World War II.  He was named the alumnus of the year in the year preceding Bodger's start on the job.  He was a co-founder of the alumni Loyalty Fund.  He loved the college he attended in the '30s, when order prevailed and roles were clear.  On social rules prohibiting dorm visits by members of the opposite sex and the consumption of alcohol on campus, he was an absolutist.  The revolution in social behavior in the '60s to him was a total calamity.  It called for adamant resistance.  Guest encouraged DLH to hold the line against social changes for which students were constantly agitating.  He viewed the college as an extension of the church.  He expected the numerous clergy on the board to be his natural allies.  This was in spite of his concern that the clergy at times seemed willing to legitimize the national angst over Vietnam and the rise of youth as a moral force in the public arena.

            Guest seemed to like Bodger's aggressive approach to fund-raising and his familiarity with the rhythms of the city.  As a leader of the capital campaign, he espoused Bodger, gave advice and encouragement.  They met in early morning sessions over breakfast at the Union League, a short walk from Guest's South Broad Street office.  A friendly intimacy developed.  Bodger appreciated the affirmation he received from Guest.  They both felt that they were connected to the spirit of the institution and were working together for its enhancement.

            Guest, however, never stopped testing Bodger's bearings on the social and academic policies of the college. As one of the men who had passed favorable judgment on Bodger when he was a candidate for his job, Guest had a serious personal investment in him.  Guest appeared to want to believe in him.  But he was inquisitive where Elliott was simply accepting.   He was wary of waverers. Bodger was sufficiently separated from decision-making on social and academic policy in his apprentice years to preserve the trust of Guest.  He admitted to himself that he sometimes had to say less to Guest than he had on his mind about the social upheavals of the late '60s in order to keep that trust.  A decade later, Bodger would reap the consequences of those omissions when Guest opposed his recommendations for change in student life policy.  But that was only after he gave firm support to Bodger for the presidency.

            Bill Heefner came to the board in 1969, well after Helfferich had confidentially tagged Bodger as a presidential apprentice.  He too was an attorney, busy building a major firm in Bucks County.  He too fought the war in Europe but on the ground in Italy.  Like Guest, he had the GI generation's commitment to goals and results.  Like Guest, he valued institutional loyalty and team play.

            From their first meeting, however, Bodger saw in Heefner someone with a different and more adventurous outlook.  To Guest, the challenge of change was to build a strong wall of resistance.  To Heefner, the challenge of change was to seize it and manage it.  A talented performer at the organ keyboard (he played for chapel during his student years), he pursued his profession with a conscious sense of style.  He would do the expected thing, but he would do it his way.  That was true as well of his volunteer activity for the college.

            Bodger had met him for the first time in his office in Morrisville.  Bodger was there to ask him to become active in the alumni association.  Heefner was quick with a quip, and he agreed to emcee the annual alumni luncheon--"but only if I get to choose the color scheme, the menu, and the flowers."

            "Agreed," Bodger had said.

            And he did choose the color scheme for the tablecloths and napkins, did review and modify the menu, and did order the flowers for the tables.  The meeting was a grand success.  When Bodger visited him again to debrief the day, Heefner told him to be careful of involving him further.

            "If I'm involved, I want to be involved, not used for show.  I will want to lead things.  I will push.  This may make you or your boss uncomfortable.  So think before you ask for more."

            Here was someone he could work with, Bodger said to himself.   He came back to campus and urged the president to approve Heefner as a candidate to run for election to the board by the alumni association.  His election to the board began a formal relationship that would last until the end of Bodger's active service to the college.   It also started a personal friendship that gave Bodger a steady pole through the ups and downs of his years on the job and into retirement.

            Heefner was in the heat of building his law firm into one of the biggest in Bucks County.  In addition, he was a bank director, a leader in the state Democratic party, a mover and shaker of cultural and historical organizations in the county and the state.  He played the organ at the local Lutheran church every Sunday.   He molded and shaped his spacious country place in Perkasie with the attention of an artist.  If there had been an American squirearchy, the charm of his estate would have signified his leading place in it.

            Heefner seemed to sense Helfferich's intentions toward Bodger from the start.  He never deviated from his posture of steadfast support for Bodger's advancement.  When he became the chairman of the Century II fund-raising program, which followed on the heels of the All-College Anniversary Drive, he replaced Guest as Bodger's regular companion at breakfast or lunch.  They mapped the campaign with a sense of fun and comradeship.  He took a deliberate and intentional approach to the prospect of Bodger becoming president.  The campaign ran from 1970 to 1975, the very years when Bodger was finishing his preparations to be president.  Heefner's voice therefore had a formative influence on Bodger in his most malleable period.

            As the deliberations for Helfferich's successor began in 1969, Heefner talked with Bodger one day at lunch.  It was before Bodger made a decision to remove himself from consideration.

Heefner said, "If we want your election to be the outcome, everything that you say, everything said by those trying to bring it about, should be said with that outcome in mind.  By the time the board votes, their choice of you should be so obvious to everyone that it will happen as if there were no alternative."

            Heefner was constitutionally disposed to make things happen.  He was patient in the face of obstacles but impatient when the sought-after goal could not be defined.  He thought that to make things happen, one had to have prescience.  One had to have the insight to know before the other people where events were tending.  Then one had to go to work.  "Going to work" meant doing all the messy things required by organizations to move people through the glue of fear and ignorance.  He took the long view on setting goals and the short-term, nitty-gritty view on getting something done.

            That combination, it turned out, reinforced Bodger's own bent.  He took confidence from Heefner.  Bodger sometimes felt that the dilemmas of the management of a college in the heat of the late '60s were irreconcilable.  He sometimes wondered how Helfferich could balance contradictions on his shoulders with such apparent aplomb.  Heefner's attitude reassured Bodger.  Heefner gradually came to believe that conditions on the campus had to change and that they would change for the better if the right things were said and done at critical moments--and if the leadership had a destination in mind.  This was so even in the face of apparent intransigence from some board members on some issues, especially social life and student freedoms.   For Bodger, Heefner became a trusted confidant.  With discretion, he would listen to Bodger's most outrageous diagnoses of current campus distress.  As time went on, more and more he also listened to Bodger's developing visions of what the college might become.

            As the 1969-70 academic year grew longer, the board's search for the president's replacement limped.   Ellwood Paisley, of the class of '13, orchestrated it.  Paisley was a  retired executive who now gave much of his time to his role as secretary of the college  board.   Paisley perpetuated a family tradition of service to the college.  His father, a railroad vice president, had set a world record for longevity as president of the college's board--54 years!  

            "That's incredible!" Margaret said when Bodger reviewed these events with her at their next cup of coffee at the Hut.  "He couldn't have lived so long."

            "I never met the man," Bodger said, "but his name is on my undergraduate diploma."

            "Ellwood was to the college born, then."

            "I count four generations.  The Paisley family figured large in the German Reformed Church in Philadelphia.  Ellwood was like Bill Reimert in that sense.  The same gentility and courtesy.  He spent several days a week on the campus.  He won the respect of students and faculty on a 'concerns' committee, which he served as secretary representing the board.  He was a dapper little fellow, who blossomed into colors and fashion after his retirement from business.  He modeled mature men's clothing in center city for the fun of it.  He had a sense of design, having apparently studied drafting in high school.  He created the shield of the college that appeared for decades on the convocation program covers.  His athletic emblem hangs in the gym over the basketball court in Helfferich Hall.  The students and faculty saw in him the embodiment of the old college, a kind of mascot or cartoon.  They were benign in this perception.  In the heated fights over social rules and anti-war rallies, he was a walking symbol of civility and respect for everyone.  Helfferich was shrewd to put him front and center as the visible representative of the board.  He never spoke out on issues but listened attentively to everyone."

            "But he ran a limp search process," said Margaret.

            "He was under Helfferich's thumb, I imagine. There were several candidates who appeared publicly on campus in the fall or winter of 1969-1970.   The public interviews were uncoordinated.  One candidate had to eat hot dogs for lunch because Ellwood neglected to order a special luncheon in the president's dining room. It almost seemed as if the search was supposed to fail.

            "In May 1970, with the field thinning to virtually no viable candidates from outside, Ellwood made an appointment to see me in my office.  It became evident to me after a few minutes that he had been coached by DLH.  He reviewed the months of searching and said that the arrow was now pointing inward at the campus, since the pool of outside candidates had pretty well run dry.  The last great hope had been that Fred Binder, a seasoned college president who graduated in 1942, would come back to alma mater.  But a liberal arts college in California made him an offer first and he took it.

            "Ellwood told me, 'Now, I'm here to tell you that I will submit your name if you are willing.'   This turn of events did not seem quite real to me.  Perhaps he did not think it was completely real either.  But he went on. 'As I see it, the next president needs to be a good administrator, and you have shown how good you are as an administrator.'  I had been named v.p. for administrative affairs just the year before.  The dean had been named v.p. for academic affairs at the same time.  I protested.  He went on. 'That would be the case I would make for your candidacy.  The committee has letters from several faculty members, some students, and an administrator endorsing you.  Would you be interested?'

            "You were, surely," said Margaret.

            "I had the good sense to defer my response.  I wrote him a note that evening and explained why I was not the best qualified person.  I said I would be willing to try anything they wanted to try but in my judgment this was not the time for me.

            "By the following month, the campus was a bog of speculation and anticipation.  The search committee had one more outside candidate, who did not appear to be strong.  The growing sentiment among board members, I sensed, was that the college could not trust an outsider to hold the line against student unrest.  They wanted assurance that the college would not follow Swarthmore and others into the headlines about permissiveness and the violence that flowed from it.  I indulged in some secret play acting in my journal; I thought about the way I could play at the role of conservative defender of the castle.  It seemed like a game, but the reality of the college's situation kept sobering me.

            "It was at that point, in June, that DLH finally confided in me.  He told me it might come down to a choice between the dean and me.  The board would ask for his recommendation.  'In that case,' he said, amusement on his face behind his cigarette, 'I will have a trying half hour with myself.'  I do not remember my response, but I am sure it was an attempt, at least, at self-effacement.

            "A few weeks earlier, he had broached the subject with me without referring to our particular search.  'You're going to be a college president in maybe two years or four--if not here, then someplace else.'  And then he gave me some advice on how to train Margot for the job of president's wife!"

            "O wow," said feminist Margaret.

            "It was a different day," Bodger smiled.

            "By mid-summer, they interviewed the only remaining outside candidate.  He was a genteel southern scholar of English literature.  Paul Guest was leading the discussion in the search committee.  He was increasingly emphatic that the person chosen would control the students, or else.  A southern gentleman just wouldn't cut the mustard here.  So, it was evident that the choice would be the dean, another year in office for DL, or moi.  I told myself that I would not take the job if offered.  I knew I would lack the clout to lead on my own.  Everyone would see that I was out in front as Helfferich's voice.  I knew that Guest's expectations were dominant in the board.  It was clear that I did not have it in me to conduct stone-walling tactics with students and faculty of the kind he and others expected.  What's more, I felt that my lack of academic standing was a mortal handicap."

            "You're telling me this because you want me to know that you were learning something useful for later," Margaret said.

            "About boards of directors," said Bodger.

            "Yourself too?"

            "That too.  Boards seem remote from the classrooms.  But they establish the tone and the framework in ways mysterious to students and faculty.  I was fortunate, as I look back on it, to have been a target of their interest, a pawn, in a way, of their moves to guide the place."

            "Heefner--wasn't he beating the drum for you?"

            "He was very new to the board.  He didn't presume to play a big part this time around."

            "Let me see," Margaret said.  "Five years after you escaped from the chains of corporate conformity, after you were adopted by Helfferich as a malleable talent, you came up to the starting line but did not run."

            "In a nutshell," Bodger said.

            "But life went on and you waited for the next race."

            "Right again.  1976."

            "By then you were ready."

            "No, but the board deemed I was ready."

            "The board," Margaret said.  She returned to her evaluation problems.  "Reassure me the dean can't get rid of me without sensible people seeing that I'm worth keeping."

            Bodger replied, "I think you're worth keeping, but I may not be a sensible person.  And I'm not involved now.  It depends how far toward decision the president has gone before he brings a question like that to the board."

            "How can I influence that?"

            "Keep on being an imaginative teacher.   Keep on studying and involving your students in your study.  Be patient.  You have a couple of years before the tenure decision.  Do you want to be here?"

            "I do."

            "Trust the gods a little bit."

            "They don't exist outside the board," she said with an arch look.

            "Well then...." Bodger said as they left the Hut.

 The Kennedys called for bearers of the burden

             "The worries of the eating class," Bodger said to himself.  Raking through the first years of his service at the college, he still could feel the constant pounding of anxiety.  Anxiety over nothing in particular and everything in general.  The anxiety of being in one's thirties, with two kids and a wife and a mortgage.  The anxiety of doing the bidding of a superior whose expectations often seemed to go beyond sensible bounds.   The anxiety of the insurmountability of time.  The unmet demands on him were so deep, so all-around, that he could not look beyond the moment at hand.

            At some point, though, anxiety modulated into exhilaration.  He knew the sheer pleasure of being pushed to the limit of physical and psychic power.   Helfferich's attention to his performance reinforced his sense of self worth in strong if subconscious ways.  If he had known how to calibrate the anxiety, the fear of just about everything, so that it sustained itself as exhilaration, his life would have been euphoric.  He was not that emotionally agile.

            In the main, he told himself, those first years on the campus were the most exciting and the most exasperating of his career.  He had little perspective and no time.   That compelled him to reach for examples and resources already at hand when he started to work at the college.  For one, he privately looked to the slain John F. Kennedy as an exemplar of style, of a manner of commitment.  Kennedy was of that older World War II generation in whose shadow Bodger, of the younger Silent Generation, had grown up.  Bodger saw in him, as in others of that committed cohort, clarity of purpose and forthrightness of action.  Kennedy had the extra merit of putting himself into service with high humor and quick imagination.  There was a seeming selflessness about his passage that appealed to Bodger, his rich-boy brazenness to the contrary notwithstanding.

            When war in Vietnam started to fill the screen two years after JFK's bloody end, Bodger could feel the fading of the romance and relevance of Kennedy, both in the life of the nation and in his own life.  But its trace lasted.  By the time Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968, Bodger was embroiled in his own small wars on the campus.  That doubtless made him more vulnerable to the emotions of that second Kennedy death.  It was as if it took Bobby's fall to move him beyond a certain naivete about leadership--at that moment when he was moving and being moved into a small-scale position of leadership himself.

            He ruminated on it in his journal of that time.  As he had done often in his ongoing conversations with Margaret and Michael, he went to that on-again off-again archaeological dig.  For 9 June 1968 he found he had written:

             Although I have watched another Kennedy go down to rest, I cannot fully believe it.  I have the feeling that tomorrow is planless, beyond control.  The web of rational public conflict is destroyed.  The nation is dangling, subject to whims and powers too erratic to allow hope.  The madness of high places runs as a constant through history.  But the violent death of two Kennedys is a fact for ME, for MY lifetime.  It is my personal tragedy, history be damned.  These were the flesh of my times.  They held out some hope for an adequate response to the needs.   They ended up powerless.  The promise, the poise, the passion, the desire, the dreams, the drive: Bobby, like John, was close to Camus's existential man--pushing his rock for all he was worth, and damn the consequences, even the irrelevance of it.  It was all Bobby could do: he had his 'special responsibility'--not just toward Jack's memory, one suspects, but toward himself most of all.

            --Ironic that these jet-age Medicis act out their tragedy in the forms of the old Christian institution before the eyes of millions via TV.  Here they speak of Bobby with the angels at his side.  Far from smiling, they pray solemnly as Bernstein conducts Mahler's 5th symphony!  When the fallen is a prince, one need not strive for petty consistency.  The very richness and variety of the mix of style--the combination of rhetorics--comes close to the heart of the Kennedy charisma: a going off madly in several directions, but with a quiet and simple stability at the center.

            Let them be hated if that is the price we have to pay for leaders who will speak out.  The hate cannot hurt them now, anyway.  They stood up and stood out.  It's something to be a man of courage, even if it kills you and leaves the survivors to doubt.

            I take a private vow to try to prove what both Kennedys sought to prove: a man can affect this society for the better.

            Perhaps that's the only way to dispel the disillusion, to make a personal decision in spite of one's feelings.  To shrug at this moment is to die.  To study 'the problem of violence' sociologically now is to count angels on bullet casings.  Let Milton Eisenhower's commission call for a three-act tragedy from Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, or Tennessee Williams--and then all go home and meditate on the depravity of humankind...on the ritual means required for hemming in or transforming rage and revenge.  The Kennedys deserve better than a beady-eyed analysis.  Let the nation at least give back what they gave.  Art.  An American Odyssey.

             Bodger was seeking a private expression for a public event.  It did not matter then, or now, that it risked crossing the border of bathos.  Three decades later, he was trying to calculate what made him go on to become president of a small principality.  The terrible events of the '60s at the highest places of power became a solution in which he was able to bathe his own motives.  He could see that now.

            "We will bear any burden,"  JFK said at his inauguration.  Bodger would serve, come whatever.  He would serve where he could, where chance had put him.  It was lucky, he reflected, that he had kept this rhetorical extravagance within the confines of his private journal.

 The board finally chose a new president

             "And finally," he told Margaret, "there was a letter to my ten-year-old daughter.  Of course, she never received it.  Even to this day.  It was in June 1970.  The search process was losing all its steam."

            He handed her the pages of lined, yellow tablet paper.

            "Read them at your leisure," he said.  At home, later, in her study, she read the following:

             Dear Kar:

            I think of Anouilh's Joan of Arc, in The Lark.  Joan advised the timorous king to be afraid as he had never been afraid before.  She said, 'You say, one thing is obvious, I'm frightened, which is nobody's business but mine, and now on I go.'

            "So, Kar, I'm frightened of the whole crisis of leadership.  So what's new?  Now on I go with the business.  Please guard my secret--that I'm scared to death, and to hell with it.

            Strunk advised his composition students at Dartmouth College, when they knew they were about to make a mistake in speaking, to SAY IT LOUD.  Maybe that's the way to purge the squeamies too: when you know you are afraid, look your fear right in the eye and howl like hell.  OK.

            You will know, if you look in my private journal, that I have been sneaking sips of fantasy about presidential leadership for more than two years--long before the problem reached its present crisis, long before I was anything more than a mere dabbler in organizational dynamics, ironic-uncommitted intelligence hanging on the ambivalences of the 'fifties like a free and occasionally panicky chimpanzee.

            Yet not unadulterated fantasy.

            After all, there wasn't any doubt that the Helfferich era would move toward a climax.  There was a small reason for me to think that, over and beyond all the waves of feeling and all the intellectual ambivalences, I had a core of something that was brute and stubborn enough to endure.

            ENDURANCE: A certain final imperviousness to the erosive emotions that lead you by the nose.

            I came to understand it was that final imperviousness that made it possible for my old boss at the Gas Works, Charlie Simpson, to come to the top from the ranks.  It was the same thing that enabled D. L. Helfferich to absorb and dissolve contradictions of thought and attitude that would have disabled other men.  I knew quick wits counted.  I knew you had to have a fatalistic sense that each turn of the organizational wheel may crush you.

            Leadership, I realized, was a mysterious contradiction.  It was at once a willingness to risk everything and a pathological determination to hold everything together.  But Endurance counted most.

            Not unadulterated fantasy--BUT CLOSE to being that.  How could a graduate school dropout presume to think seriously of Presidencies?  Someone who plied the most superficial conventions of corporate PR, a marketable hack, lacking fibre for sustained creative performance?

            The crisis is simple.  Helfferich has publicized his retirement.  There is no replacement.  The board's search committee has been looking for more than a year.  If there were good candidates, they have slipped away through maladroit committee work or a darker motive rooted in the parochial soul of the place.

            With no one in sight, attention has turned toward me.  I am popular with various segments of the campus partly because the president and dean have been willing to take blame for unpopular decisions.  I have been cast in the role of conciliator, friend of students, reasonable colleague.  The director of the play has been D. L. Helfferich.  Few know they have been watching his play.  They think I can BE as well as PLAY those characters.

            "The board will be wiser in its judgment, I hope.  Too young and untried.  Too ambitious.  Too sympathetic to some of the ideas of some faculty members.  Too lenient with students.  Yet also, the ghost who wrote THE college speech of our times, the notorious Franklin Institute speech on the philosophic temper of the college.

            "Today the president told me he has all but given up on the faculty.  He decries their self-centeredness.  First, they are watching out for number one.  Second, they are watching out for their disciplines--how can each get more courses, more professors, fewer teaching hours, better offices?  Third, they are watching out for nothing else at all.  Certainly not for the goal of sensitizing students for a moral and ethical mission in life.  They do not acknowledge the primacy of the board's role in deciding on a philosophical commitment for the institution.  The president said these things more in sorrow than in anger.

            Meanwhile, Kar, students are busy busy busy.  Reading about the free university.  Asserting the rights of students to have a say in the decision-making process.  Determining their life-style their way, no thanks to the college.

            And the focal point of these conflicting lines of force is the hot seat in the president's office.  With enough time, one perhaps could study the problems and produce a document that would resolve the conflicts of ideas.  There is no time.  One makes do.  Hoping that those who don't agree will agree to continue speaking to each other.  Hoping that the creative tension will not increase and become transformed into a destructive tension.  Despairing, finally, at settling the thing suitably for all.  But knowing there might be a moment, a blessed point of rest, when at least in one's own mind, each force is counterpoised to every other force in a harmony of conflict.  At that point, anyone mad enough to be a president might be wise enough to quit, effective at once, and hurry away to the hills to write his personal memoirs.

            It does seem to be a personal matter at bottom.  We have the crisis because the shadow of a man has been so long that no one believed it would really withdraw.  Now people know.  It is late.

            The conflict of outlooks, the conflicts of definitions have been held in constructive tension because they have been played along the nerve ends of a single man.

            My Larkian panic derives not from lack of will to decide issues.  Rather, I doubt the suppleness of my nerve ends.  Could they sustain that kind of electrical charge for very long?  Those nerve ends sensitized early by admiration for Stevenson, conditioned by New Republic rhetoric, Henry Miller exuberance, the arcane godmanship of Alan Watts?  Tuned into non-verbal communication, half-persuaded by the merman of the tube, McLuhan, fascinated by the indeterminate universe of Gully Jimson: can I be guardian of a conservative temperament?  Or, can I turn an entire board and college around?  Gas Works man?  Publicist?  Word tinkerer?  Pied piper?  Madman?

            Remember, when this has been decided, your nutty father had the sanity to laugh at it and himself.  That's the most serious thing I've said here."

             "And so it did come down to a choice between the dean and me," Bodger told Margaret.

            "And President Helfferich did have his trying half hour with himself," said Margaret.

            "And he did make the prudent choice," said Bodger.  "On 25 September 1970, the board met in special session to elect William S. Pettit the next president, to take office on 1 November.  It elected D. L. Helfferich chancellor, a unique position without portfolio.  He was to watch over the comedy.  To the degree that Pettit and the rest of us were willing, the board expected Helfferich to see that our play did not bomb."

            The day after the election, Bodger wrote a letter of support to Pettit.  He told DLH he was doing so and promised him that he would do everything possible to help Pettit.  DLH seemed pleased with the sound of sincerity in Bodger's voice and told him that Pettit would need all the help he could get from anyone at hand.  Bodger heard a voice in his head, saying, the institution is bigger than any of us as individuals, and the office molds the man.  He sensed that the next years would call for Service and Duty in ways that he had not yet fathomed.

            "You must have played an acceptable part, since you survived to run again," Margaret said.

            Bodger said, "I don't know how acceptable it was.  I did survive."

            When Margaret called on the phone a week later, her anxious tone seemed to have faded.  She was high, in fact.  Antoine had an offer at a liberal arts college in the south that he could not refuse.   The president and dean there liked the way he combined ethnicity with his use of deconstructive tools.

            "You'll go back to living here alone," Bodger probed.

            "I'll go with him," she said.

            "What will you do--for work?"

            "I can edit, I can teach introductory French as a part-time lecturer, I can tutor rich kids who lack language skill...."

            "You mean you'll go even if our dean says you're okay?"

            "Outahere," she said.

            Bodger saw her some days later and said he would miss talking with her.  He hoped his roaming around in his own past had not burdened her.

            "I think I made you do it," she said.  "You've taught me more than you know.  Come hell or cranky deans, be master of your own fate, captain of your soul.  Even if you feel the chains around your ankles.  Even if it's not possible."

            As she turned to leave, she could scarcely believe she heard Bodger say, "Cool."

 END CHAPTER TWO, MARGARET (Re-entering the college's life, 1965-1970)

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5 November 2005 Richard P. Richter