Chapter Six:  Martin (Arriving...and ending, 1984-1994)

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

             Some time after leaving office, while vacationing in the Caribbean, Bodger ran into Martin Allott.  Martin had been a fellow president of a small private college in Pennsylvania resembling Bodger's in size, age, and regional character.  Martin and Bodger had struck up a friendship over the years at meetings of Pennsylvania's independent college presidents.  The Commission for Independent Colleges and Universities usually met in Hershey, near Harrisburg.  Its agenda, in the hands of its president, Francis Michelini, a former college president himself, dealt with governmental relations and issues of program, finance, and governance common to institutions in the independent sector.  (Bodger served his obligatory term as chair of the Commission in 1984-85.)

The meetings of the Commission and its committees also gave harried presidents a safe haven for off-the-record conversation with peers about management problems and about their personal feelings in the peculiar leadership journey that they found themselves taking. Over beer and pretzels in the Hershey Hotel bar late at night, or on afternoon strolls over coifed grounds high above the chocolate factory, safely distant from their home campuses, Martin and Bodger discovered common ground and ease in sharing their sense of things.  They developed a professional friendship that was open because it was unencumbered by significant obligation one way or the other.

Martin had left his presidency a couple of years before Bodger.  He became a gun for hire by colleges in the throes of changing presidents.  He would enter and act as interim chief executive during the institutional search.  This would enable him to clean up some messes left by the outgoing administration and to prepare the ground for the new regime.  Meanwhile, he would keep the machinery running.  His nuanced sense of organizational life would enable him to read a client institution quickly.  He would do a job without sinking his feet deeply into the soil and would be ready to move out the minute the new leader was aboard.  Martin had done two such tasks since he left his presidency.  He would be undertaking a third after his respite in the islands.

Watching the sun go down over the blue waters from a comfortable deck, cold drinks in hand, the two former presidents both felt nostalgic.

"Old warriors touching the welts of their long-healed wounds," said Bodger.

"Well," Martin replied, "I'm still accumulating some surface scratches in my consulting role.  Now, though, I can walk away from the battlefield without being shot for treason."

Bodger said, "When you and I began in the 1970s, few had yet fully acknowledged the fierceness of the competitive marketing paradigm for private colleges.  Despite the upheavals of the late 1960s, traditional academic style still keynoted institutional life.  It gave that life a heft that we thought was unchanging.   I can remember feeling pangs of guilt, at the start, for trying too aggressively to fold the spice of marketing into the parochial pottage I knew as my alma mater."

Martin said, "A retrospective assessment now would undoubtedly fault you for having been less aggressive than you should have been.  In the full span of our careers, strategic marketing moved from the periphery to the very core—that's what it all came to be about."

Bodger agreed: "I think you could evaluate my administration by tracking its progress from its exploratory marketing strategy in the beginning to one that was more explicit and nearly full-blown by the time I left."

Martin said, "Mine too.  I'm envious that your college, as you left office, appeared to have moved farther.  When I leave the islands and head back, I'll be running a college much like yours.   The last president got it started toward a stronger position.  Now it's poised to get to a really new position in the market under the lucky person it chooses to be president while I'm managing the place temporarily.  I have a sense it is about where you were just as you mobilized for your big campaign in the mid-1980s."

Bodger said, "We had changed a lot up to 1984—staff, curriculum, student life, board, faculty.  Above all, I think we changed the atmosphere, more open to the world, more desirous of being in the big swim with the best of our kind.  And more professional—our Pew-funded faculty development program was having a transforming influence on faculty culture.  But I still felt that we lived with one shoe in the old parochial pottage and another on the new professional runway."

Martin said, "Without a deliberate and vigorous push, you might have remained in that compromising position."

Bodger said, "And with the count of kids plummeting nationally and even more so in the mid-Atlantic area where we recruited, we could have been left standing there without a viable student body."

Martin said, "Looking back, don't you feel that we always were anxiously watching out for the crisis that would catch us off guard and deliver a mortal blow?"

Bodger agreed that they had had their run in what felt like one of the most trying periods of history in American higher education.  "We came in when the baby bust was beginning and left when the echo of the baby boom began."

Martin continued, "And that's why I liked what you did.  You declared a bold advancement agenda, took the risk of going for it, and colored your whole institutional life with that advancement initiative.  I took a more low-keyed ad hoc approach.  I would probably do it differently if I could do it over."

"We had been getting ready for years and we were already started," Bodger replied.

Martin ordered them another piña colada and said, "I'd like to talk when we get back home.  We never talked details about your big push from 1984 to 1991.  Your experience could help me lay the groundwork at my next venue.  I'd like to see if my new college has developed to the point of launching itself toward a new market position.  If so, I would want to take some actions as interim that would set a stage for the new person taking over."

"If not?" Bodger asked.

"I'll hold my tongue, keep my shirt on, and hunker down for my short stay."

Bodger said, "Our push surely looked more tightly thought out, more organized than it was.  But perceptions take you a long way.  Certainly looking back I feel as if that period was one of deliberate effort to push the whole works into a clearer position in a fast-changing marketplace."

 "Well?" said Martin. "I'll have a couple of weeks before I start."

"Sure," Bodger said, "when we're back home, let's meet." 

The college by 1984 appeared to be on the move 

Martin and Bodger met a few days after their vacations ended.   In Bodger's office at home, he had piled up some files on his desk before Martin arrived.  Martin patted them and ribbed Bodger for still being compulsive about preparing for meetings.

"The best starting point, I found," Bodger said, "is something I said to Middle States when we had to do a five-year periodic review report in 1984, following up our 1979 big report.  This was the first time that Middle States required an interim five-year report."

Martin said, "Middle States always seemed like an intrusive bother."

Bodger said, "It probably was.  But I didn't know how to handle it except to take it seriously.  The requirement for self-study always seemed to serve us well in a timely way.    So we simply made the external requirements a kind of internal mile marker.  Middle States liked that.  I've gone through our 1984 report and culled the items we said we were going to address in the next couple of years.  They make an interesting ensemble.

"We were going to continue having academic departmental reviews, something our new dean had instigated, using where possible outside visiting committees.  We were on the verge of deciding to build out the 'Residential Village,' renovating the old dorms on Main Street and turning the area into an upscale space visible to the community at large.  We were going to work on a physical plant master plan, stimulated by the Residential Village prospect.  We were going to strengthen the administrative support for development, public relations, and communication.  In fact, we had just taken the key step to that end by hiring a new vice president for college relations, John Van Ness.  We were going to get serious about a resolve made more than a year before to mount a major fund-raising campaign.  The campaign would aim to build endowment to support faculty compensation and professional development and to augment scholarship aid."

Martin commented, "These were big promises."

Bodger said, "But they did not emerge out of the blue.  They were logical extensions of the headway we had been making up to that point.  The periodic report to Middle States of 1984 also told what we had been doing on the issues that the 1979 Middle States visiting team had raised with us."

Martin said, "That list would give a pretty good indication of what you had done in the 1979-to-1984 period to 'make headway,' as you put it."

Bodger waved the report and proceeded to read off the highlights.  "The 1979 team had criticized us for our weak curricular offerings in sociology and anthropology—long-standing omissions at many small colleges dedicated to strength in the natural sciences.   The 1984 report boasted of additions in anthropology on the peoples of Latin America; North American Indians; peoples of the Pacific; a course on deviance; on the family; and new topical research courses.  It also reported new courses in the sociology of religion, plus research and seminar courses.

"In 1979, we reported that full-time faculty were overloading their schedule by teaching about 50 percent of Evening School courses in our continuing education program.  The reviewers registered a 'serious concern' that this overwork would jeopardize the quality of instruction."

Martin scoffed.  "A typical bureaucratic myth.  They could re-use their preparations for regular daytime courses in the evening courses, I'm sure."

Bodger nodded yes and said, "But we bought into the criticism at least somewhat, reporting that the percentage had dropped to 30 percent by 1984.  In truth, as our measurement of quality went up, the end game someday would have to be withdrawal or inclusion of evening courses in the normal full-time teaching loads.  This remained an unresolved tension throughout my administration.

"For the time being, we took credit for paying people better and thus reducing their need to moonlight.  We also took credit for the professional upgrading that was coming out of the $500,000 faculty development program grant from Pew Charitable Trusts.  A key component of the program was to change pay for one-semester research sabbaticals from half to full pay.  More faculty now were taking sabbaticals because they could afford to, and because peer pressure increasingly made them want to.  We told Middle States that a fund-raising goal would be to endow faculty development so that the transformation of faculty culture wrought by the Pew money would be permanently institutionalized.  And indeed that came about in one way or another in the 1984-1991 period.

"The visitors in 1979 also thought faculty vitality was endangered by alumni inbreeding and the prospect of a high ratio of faculty on tenure.  Sure, we were inbred--I was as much an example of it as a cadre of senior professors who had been hired in the 1930s and 1940s.  Here again, we agreed with the visitors when in 1984 we boasted of a decline in alumni faculty in the intervening five years.  We reported that the number would decline further with retirements in the offing.  And so it did.  In 1986, we would create a formal early retirement incentive for all faculty, and it would take out of active service a significant number of senior folk with their undergraduate roots in the college.  This of course also would reduce the percentage of tenured faculty as we would bring on a new bunch of assistant professors."

Martin said, "You and I both were pushing to increase the ethnic and racial diversity of the faculty and of the student body.  What did you have to say about that?"

"We couldn't say anything good about faculty recruitment, I'm afraid.  And the 1979 team was emphatic that we were not doing enough."

Martin said, "The pool of black Ph.D.'s in 1979 was simply not big enough to bring quick diversification to all aspiring colleges across the nation, even when those colleges diligently recruited."

Bodger said, "I went up to Harvard sometime before our 1984 report and had a talk with Professor Charles Willie in the School of Education.  An African-American educator with national stature, he was blunt and helpful.  He said some obvious things—for example, go to your minority alumni for students, board members, even faculty.  He gave me hope and encouragement.  But for the moment, I could merely say to Middle States, 'We intend to persist.'"

Continuing to scan his papers, Bodger said that the 1979 visitors were unimpressed with the salaries and professional development of administrative staff.    In 1984, he could report that a dramatic evolution in the professionalization of the administrative staff had occurred in the intervening five years.  He pointed especially to the five new staff persons in the office of student life and the staffing up, virtually from scratch, of a college relations department.

The 1979 team observed an aging board of directors and urged a youth movement.  Bodger could report in 1984 that a dozen members had since left, taking with them an average age of about 75 years.  Sixteen new members had come aboard, averaging 57 years of age, with the number of women doubling.

"From three to six," Bodger added reluctantly.

"But I'll bet that the number got better in the years since 1984," Martin added charitably.  Bodger nodded affirmatively but his expression said not enough.

The 1979 visitors paid a lot of attention to enrollment, and rightly so.  Starting that year, the number of teenagers would plummet in the mid-Atlantic region.  The team urged the college to use outside marketing consultants, to do an even more diligent job of analyzing and improving student retention.  To that end it urged beefing up the services offered in career planning and making short-term psychological counseling and referral service available to students.

Bodger said, "We could say in 1984, yes-yes-yes, we're working at it as hard as we can—within the limits of our understanding.   Marketing for students was evolving too rapidly for us to understand fully.  All colleges in our tier in the Middle Atlantic area were learning a whole new way to recruit and retain without ever having the luxury of stopping and catching breath.  We could not just stick to familiar knitting the way the top national liberal arts colleges could.  At the same time, we were far enough away from the bottom to avoid tactics for sheer survival, such as changing the mission and adding bread-and-butter courses to meet the immediate job market."

Bodger continued, "In 1979 we did not have a full-fledged registrar function, believe it or not.   The visiting team properly gigged us for this and by 1984 we remedied it."

Martin said, "I guess this was just an instance of 'catch-up.'"

"Yes," Bodger said, "but we had persisted without a registrar in the contrarian spirit of the institution, which said we know it looks odd but it's the way we do it.  Similarly, the team urged improvements to our bare-bones bookstore.  We outsourced the management of the store by 1984 and gained noticeable improvements."

Martin said, "I think all small private colleges enjoyed their parochial peculiarities.  If you couldn't afford to compete with Swarthmore, you could nonetheless feel self-satisfied about the authenticity of your character.  And that sometimes surfaced as practice in everyday management, such as your registrar and book store stance."

Bodger said, "There was more.  The 1979 team saw peculiarities in our desultory budget reporting to departments, in our casual purchasing procedures, in our very long marriage to a single auditing firm, in our amateurish management of investments."

Martin replied, "And I bet that by 1984 you had changed to conform to their suggestions or were promising to think about them."

Bodger, said, "Yes—so much for the persistence of the contrarian spirit.  We were destined to conform more and more to the commonly perceived model of the national liberal arts college."

Bodger turned to the final page of the 1979 Middle States report.  "Finally, the team thought our fund-raising program was less sophisticated and organized than it should be, given our aspirations."

Martin said, "Some presidents would have taken offense at this as a criticism of their administrative leadership."

Bodger replied, "Not so in my case.  In those first years, the problem as I saw it was to heighten the sense of responsibility of the board of directors for fund-raising.  D. L. Helfferich for more than thirty years had instilled the notion that the president would take care of the fund-raising, with ad hoc aid from a few individuals on the board.  Bill Pettit his successor had not done anything to alter that.  The notion of collective board stewardship for new resources was simply not in the psyche of the college in 1979. So, the critique by Middle States was immensely helpful to me as I tried to remedy that lack.   It gave an outside official voice to back up my plans for fund-raising.  By the time of our 1984 report, we had hired John Van Ness and were well on the way toward creating a new fund-raising practice.  But not without some private discomfort among some of the veterans on the board, who might have thought we were getting uppity."

"Or," Martin said, "they might have worried that a more aggressive program would tap their personal coffers more seriously."

"There's always that," Bodger said.

Martin said, "The essential message was that between 1979 and 1984 yours was a college definitely on the move forward."

Bodger said, "Yes, but…When Middle States replied to our 1984 answers, it pointed to some real unfinished work.  Despite our emphasis on faculty compensation and the academic program, our financial statements showed that the ratio of instruction and library support to total expense was declining. We were spending more in student life and administrative areas. We had to resolve to haul in more voluntary support for the educational program.

"Though faculty salaries had improved steadily, the continuing inflation and our spending conservatism kept them well behind the levels at a comparison group of colleges.   We were paying full professors $32,700 on average.  Franklin & Marshall was paying $43,900.  Even Albright was ahead of us at $35,900.  It's interesting that tuition charges usually paralleled these differences.  F&M, for instance, was charging $11,050 in 1984-85 and we were charging $8,725.

"Middle States was most disturbed, and rightly so, over our abysmal enrollment of minority students—nineteen in the whole place!  After being personally invested heavily in minority recruiting when I first came to work at the college, I had let it lapse while I worked at all the other issues on my platter.  Mea culpa.  With the marketing anxieties of the late 1970s and early 1980s, we were thinking about numbers and not social justice, regrettably.

"Middle States, moreover, questioned whether our projections for an 1150 full-time student body could hold up in the sharply declining marketplace—and we knew of course that every year would be a challenge." 

The stage was set for expansive development 

Continuing the conversation, Martin said, "Well then, you had a college showing some forward movement and poised for an ambitious climb up the ladder of quality."

Bodger said, "We were beginning to study indicators of comparative quality in faculty professionalism and compensation, in our academic program, in our physical plant.  That was happening in the Campus Planning Group, where I tried to build consensus among faculty, administrators, and students."

Martin said, "Building consensus--always a work in progress, always about to unravel."

Bodger continued, "Yes, but in our case at that moment, I could feel the college moving with me—or, better, perhaps, I could feel myself dancing in step with the tune of the community.  By now, we all had a clear sense that broad movement, on just about every front, was the order of the day.  We had been getting started and making headway for some years, since 1976.  Had I not been ready to lead into an expansive agenda at that point, I think the college community would have begun to withdraw its support of my presidency.  We had all waited long enough for old demons to withdraw and new visions to crystallize.  The time was ripe finally for arriving somewhere.

"And, as you know too well, once a consensus resonated throughout the college, it translated into a money game.  Through the entire history of the college, money was the root of shortcomings.  It always colored almost everything.  In his history of its first hundred years, Calvin D. Yost, who advised me when I was an English major under him, had captured that central theme in a passage that stuck in my mind.  He quoted President George L. Omwake's 1917 statement that the college was 'founded on debt instead of endowment.'  And Yost added, drawing on his own lifelong experience with low salaries and Spartan teaching conditions, 'Finance has been the college's greatest problem throughout its first century.' (p. 12)

"By 1984, it was possible for the first time in more than a century for the college to feel on relatively secure financial footing and able to think ambitiously about developing itself.  After my years of working in that Spartan climate and seeing it first-hand as an undergraduate, it dawned on me how historic this moment was.  You get the real sense of it from the comment of Middle States on our finances in that 1984 review.  Middle States saw 'a profile of a stable, viable and fiscally prudent operation characterized by substantial liquid reserves, a healthy endowment fund, low accounts receivable, low ratio of plant debt to plant assets, a sturdy operating surplus, and no reported deferred maintenance.'  That was the legacy that Helfferich handed to me, abetted by Pettit who through very tough years kept financial solvency at the top of his priorities, even at the expense of other things deemed by many--I myself at times included--to be more important. "

Martin said, "At that same point in the mid-1980s, my institution was seeing the net revenues declining as our student financial aid budget soared.  Our endowment was not growing and we were taking out every cent we could for operations.  We had some deferred maintenance and considerably more capital debt than you did.  My operating statement on 30 June 1984 showed a small but real deficit.  You were a lucky man."

Bodger continued, "Having husbanded our resources and kept the expenses tight, I now felt tremendous pressure to change course and begin to spend.  The death of my patron, Helfferich, and the rising number of voices who wanted to see substantial enrichment of programs and plant combined with our fiscally favorable situation to convert me into a spending president.

"One late-summer day the senior partner of our auditing firm brought me an analysis of his findings as of 30 June 1984.  All trend numbers were good, and our operating surplus was substantial to the point of embarrassment.  'What should I do?' I asked him.  'Spend to strengthen your program,' he said.  'Improve your position in the market.'"

Martin whistled.  "When a bean counter tells you to spend, that's something."

Bodger said, "At that point, we had $20 million in endowment, up from the $7 million when I took office in 1976.  That grew because the double-digit inflation was earning big interest and because we enriched our academic programs cautiously—to a fault, critics could say.  We were transferring operating surpluses into endowment instead of spending the money outright.  We carried a debt of only $3.5 million and the cost of it was low.  Our operating budget was pushing $20 million at that point.

"Moreover," Bodger went on, "our net revenues were getting a healthy bump from our Evening School operation.  The market was great as women retrained to enter the working world and as education became the key to promotion in the many companies in Montgomery County.  We beefed up the staff and saw a steady rise in part-time enrollments, until eventually the body count exceeded our full-time enrollment.  In 1985, we became a partner with St. Joseph's University to promote and offer its MBA program on our campus.  This flourished and added further net revenue over the years.  Our Evening School was a happy 'cash cow', and we were able to claim that we were providing an essential service to the corporate community."

Martin said, "My college also did well with adults at that time.  But continuing education created a question about our focus.  Could we focus on teaching full-time traditional-age students while we were busy teaching adults in the evening?"

Bodger said, "Could you rub the top of your head with one hand while rubbing your stomach with the other?  We certainly had the same question of focus.  I appointed a task force to study what we were doing in the mid-1980s.  But its conclusions affirmed the status quo, and the tension did not go away.  We really wanted that extra money because it subsidized our traditional operation so generously.  I was willing to live with the question of focus for the rest of my tenure."

Martin said, "Few presidents I know would deliberately have turned off that financial spigot just because it created an internal tension."

Bodger agreed and went on, "So, in spite of our financial stability, a critical analysis would have shown that we were not measuring up to quality indicators in the best liberal arts colleges.  We had low visibility.  We were recognized in a very narrow geographic circle.  Most of our students still came from the five-county Delaware Valley area.  The market for traditional-age students was now in a dangerous decline.  It would get worse all the way to 1995.  The competition for the better students, as you know, was fierce.   It seemed like a 'no-brainer' to decide to spend in order to strengthen competitive advantage while the treasury was healthy."

"Spend—and also get," Martin said.

"Absolutely," Bodger replied.  "It became clear that our charitable support came through an old model--the penurious college gratefully receiving small support from its loyal but tight-fisted constituencies.  It was time for a major overhaul of our approach for voluntary support.  While we had some operating surplus to spend, we needed vastly more money than that."

Martin said, "I never would have thought your fund-raising apparatus was so far behind the curve.  But few of us were doing all that was possible, as I look back.  Still, you couldn't have improved fund-raising without changing your strategic vision."

Bodger said, "Precisely.  We had to clarify what we were and who our clientele was and how we had to change—with lots of new money—to attract them and serve them better."

"You were talking fund-raising but you were really doing strategic repositioning."

"In our fashion," replied Bodger.  "Getting there was not clean and clear-cut.  Always there was institutional inertia, always a ceiling on our ability to imagine our future.  When you're leading a change process like this, you know in a general way where the goal lies.  But bringing it off is like chopping yourself out of a thicket of bamboo armed with a dull machete.  And you have to hack away at the stalks with your head down, just trusting that you're moving in the right direction."

Martin's silent smile said that Bodger had just articulated a feeling that he knew too well. 

Three obstacles blocked a change in development practices 

Bodger went on to sketch for Martin the path that had led to the decision to break out of the old model and in 1984 to mount the most ambitious development campaign the college had seen to that point.

"I look back to November 1982.  The board of directors received a confidential assessment of the financial development staff and program from Barnes & Roche Inc., a consulting firm from nearby Bryn Mawr."

"Well regarded," Martin said.

"I had initiated the consultation, with the encouragement of Bill Heefner and a few other board members.   We all knew, more or less, what had to be done.  But several obstacles were holding us back.  I became convinced that a consultative report from a reputable outside source would help remove them.

"One obstacle was that, while I had a general sense of what we should do, I needed a concrete menu of actions to be taken and an ordering of them by priority.

"The second obstacle was entrenched campus attitudes about the cost of administration.  Many faculty members were like drug-sniffing hounds whenever they suspected the administration was fattening the non-instructional budget for no good reason.  I knew that they would raise their voices as soon as we began adding people to the development staff.  In fact, in the administration itself, my chief financial officer, Nelson Williams, took a skeptical and understandable stance toward additional expense that did not show immediate payback in substantial increases of income."

Martin interrupted, "Let me guess that the third major obstacle was the reluctance of some board members to become really aggressive in fund-raising."

"You said it.  As I mentioned earlier, the culture of the board had not yet changed enough.  It had a good and growing cadre of new and younger people.  It had a core of senior members, like Heefner and Glassmoyer, who were ready for it to make a big change.  But the dominant note had not yet shifted.  When the Barnes & Roche report came out, one member, for example, took some offense because it seemed to be overly critical of fund-raising in the immediate past, when he was development committee chairperson.  I had no more loyal trooper behind me than Frank Smith, whom I had hired in 1968 to help with fund-raising.  Before the build-up of a college relations staff, Frank carried most of the weight in the fund-raising office.  His integrity and diligence gave volunteers great comfort.  Combined with the personal attention I tried to give all our board members, his services led some of them to like the way things were.  But the entire effort was simply not robust enough to meet our newly defined needs.

"Barnes & Roche enabled us to move those three obstacles.   They made it clear that the change in the action plan had to begin with me.  I had been the hands-on administrator for fund-raising since Helfferich's last year in office in 1969-70.  When I took the presidency, I continued to manage Frank and the whole fund-raising operation out of my office.  I had the intuitive understanding that this had to change at the right time, but I maintained this situation for more years than was healthy.  Some of my own staff members recognized this but were hesitant to press their point too aggressively with me.  An outside voice like that of Barnes & Roche could simply tell me to back off and do things the orthodox way and not worry about sensitivities."

Martin said, "So they told you to hire yourself a qualified VP for development, which you had not done partly because of the cost, probably."

"Yes, but with our auditor telling me to spend, my hesitation withered.  The rest of their operating recommendations were what you would expect.  Hire more staff under the new vice president to do research and keep good records.  Convert part-time positions in annual giving and alumni relations into full-time jobs.  Clean up the keeping of gift records—get a computer system.  Strengthen the prospect pool through professional prospect research. Heighten the positive image of the college in the Delaware Valley through a comprehensive and integrated public relations program. Create highly visible 'cultivation events.'  Build my role into the operation as a proper presidential cultivator of major donors rather than a hands-on micro-manager.   Convert the veteran Frank Smith into a special gifts officer responsible for selected major donors, people who knew him from long years of contact.  Begin systematic and ongoing cultivation of traditional groupings of prospects.  Sharpen up the 'stewardship' process of acknowledging and accounting to donors for their gifts."

Martin asked, "Did the faculty members on your Campus Planning Group buy into this?  It clearly would cost a lot more money and it would not be going into faculty pockets."

Bodger replied, "This of course was one of the big obstacles the consultant's report was designed to remove.  Those on the CPG did understand and they did support the move.  The farther you went out from that core in the faculty, the more skepticism you found.   And as the new college relations team actually assembled, I absorbed kibitzing about costs from some faculty members.  Even from my spouse!  Most people, however, saw the strategic reasons for expanding the staff.  When the campaign later began to show some results, the doubters became less vocal even if they never became completely converted."

"Did many board members resist?"

Bodger said, "The consultants said what they needed to say.  We should shape the board into an informed and active fund-raising resource.  We should revitalize and charge the board development committee with responsibility for increasing gift income.  Sure, something of the old parochial suspicion of money as a corrupter of the institutional soul lingered in the minds of a few.  Nearly everyone understood that we were involved in nothing less than a transformation of institutional culture beyond the mere surface.  It would have been odd if there had not been some who continued to worry that we were putting money ahead of our historic mission.  I took that tension as a sign of the integrity of the institution's sense of itself."

Martin said, "And you?"

Bodger smiled, "You guessed it—I had my own worries at times as we started hiring staff and beefing up a small fund-raising and promotion budget.   My roots in the old ways of our charming little campus, going all the way back to 1949 when I started as a freshman, had to be transplanted with care.  Despite personal feelings like that, though, I obviously had to be the most committed of all to change.  I think I was." 

New college relations department pushed the pace 

Bodger told Martin that the hiring of John Van Ness came through a recommendation from Barnes & Roche, which knew of his experience as a capital campaign manager and consultant.  Barnes & Roche thought he would fit the college situation because he combined thoroughly professional fund-raising experience with impeccable academic credentials.  A graduate of Colorado College—a useful model of small-college distinctiveness—John received a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in anthropology, specializing in the mestizo culture of the American southwest.  When he took a faculty position at Knox College in the 1970s, demographic downturns and financial tightness descended on such mid-western colleges.  Feeling that his academic career would lead to a dead end, he turned to development work.  His wife Chris, also a graduate student at Penn, followed the same route.  At about the time he came aboard, Chris was becoming the head development officer at Hahnemann University.  Their combined fund-raising expertise and academic bent made them an unusual "power" couple, adept at navigating the rising tide of institutional fund-raising throughout the Delaware Valley.

Bodger continued, "John was interested because of the readiness of the college for advancement.  He was devoted to the mission of small liberal arts colleges and saw that we were not going to compromise our purposes.  He felt that he could implement for us the change that Barnes & Roche had charted with their consulting report.  He would bring us a professional fund-raising discipline and insist that we submit to it, even if our parochial constraints made us uncomfortable with it.  On top of that, his scholarly standing would look good to the faculty and help overcome resistance to what many would surely perceive as administrative empire building.  He would be able to meet faculty on their own terms.

"In October 1983, I brought him to the Union League in Philadelphia to meet with Bill Heefner and a few other key board members.  John's cerebral approach made him different from the 'hail fellow' usually conjured up by board members when they thought about professional fund-raisers.  There was some feeling that he might have trouble adapting to our institutional personality.   Would he be able to work comfortably with the rest of our staff and our key board members?  But the board members involved saw that he had a firm grip on the principles of college advancement and knew the administrative and promotional requirements to make a program go.  And he talked knowingly, I thought, about the college's evolution up to a certain point and its need for a big push.  His reading of the situation seemed accurate to me.  I had met many development types in the course of my career, having been one, after a fashion, myself."

Martin interjected, "And you knew how many lacked substance, despite appearances to the contrary."

Bodger answered, "Exactly.  I thought his strengths outweighed his perceived weaknesses by a considerable margin.  I was in a hurry to get on with it.  So I tried to calm concerns and invited him for a day on campus later in October.  When D. L. Helfferich's very last communication to me before his death affirmed John's candidacy, I felt it was time to move."

Bodger tried to give Martin a sense of the upheaval signaled by the arrival of Van Ness in Corson Hall.  Student life dean Houghton Kane moved downstairs so that Van Ness could take the big office adjacent to the president's office.  As new staff members came on board, they took over newly arranged offices in basement space where faculty had had offices.  These moves had domino effects on the campus spaces that alerted many to the new day dawning.

            Bodger had resisted pressures to name vice presidents.  After James Craft resigned as vice president for planning and administration in 1979, he was without any senior officers with that title until now.  He felt that he had to confer a vice presidency on Van Ness.  Indeed, Van Ness would not have considered the position if it had a lesser title.   To maintain harmony within his senior staff, Bodger, with the board's concurrence, named Nelson Williams vice president for business affairs.  From having no vice presidents for several years, now he had two, and others no doubt aspired to the title.

Martin said, "Hierarchy and status were the rewards we threw to people.  But I think you and I agree—it would have been better to manage by committee of the whole, with everyone in an equal position around the table."

Bodger replied, "In actuality, my senior staff colleagues behaved as much as I could ever have hoped like an assemblage of equals.  We had a fairly open forum, I think, before the Van Ness expansion.  Akin, Kane, Williams, and I constituted a weekly 'RAWK' gathering, where just about all management issues were on the agenda and fair game for comment by one and all.  We did some juggling of personal tics and pet peeves, to be sure, but we all knew what they were and who had them.  Each summer we would go off campus for a day of reflection together.  One year I called our day the 'strawberry dialogues' after our chocolate-dipped strawberry dessert.

"I always aimed at anti-hierarchy by instinct.  I told many over the years that I became a bureaucrat because I hated bureaucracy so much and felt I could tame it.  In fact, of course, I was president, and the unspoken rule was that everyone in RAWK would talk freely in order to register his viewpoint as strongly as possible with me.  For my part, my antennae had to pick up whether a point I was pressing was being persuasive or was simply winning agreement because I was the boss.  If the latter, I had to know how to temper my voice and allow that we should not come to a final decision yet.  When I was far enough off base, I was sure that someone would say so, either in our staff meeting or privately afterward."

Again, Martin nodded knowingly, having been there.

"The arrival of John Van Ness inevitably complicated our comfortable way of managing.  Coming in, John had no inkling of our management ways.  When he came to the table, he did not always have the patience or the institutional understanding to let the dialogue run its course.  Each of the other senior staffers had to accommodate themselves to this new presence in their own way.

"John wanted his new department to have the right tools, which would cost money—a computer system for gift recording, for one.   Our business system still had not been computerized, so we went ahead with a computer system designed solely for development operations.  My staff had to grit their teeth quietly as they watched this and other development costs suck resources away from their departments.

"John was listening and trying to tune his voice to the local culture, but often his expectations for his department or for the college as a whole simply seemed extreme.  My veteran staffers would look to me for guidance on how much to object.  More often than not, I would agree with John, and the others had to wrestle with the outcome as well as they could.

"For by this time, I was clear in my own mind what we were doing.   In that fall of 1983, I had said to myself as we opened the academic year on Labor Day that it was the first year of my second administration.  That was the year we completely changed the freshman orientation program—to a 'customer-friendly' style.  It symbolized for me that the old guard was gone and that we would now build a wholly new tradition.  And by the end of that 1983-84 academic year, when Van Ness and his team had been in our midst for some months, I tried to say in my journal what we were doing."

Bodger read from a paper he had obviously had at the ready for Martin at the right moment:

The history of my administration is that of seeing the obsolescence of a system of college life, laying it to rest with some decorum and respect and finding an alternative system that will work to achieve ends similar at bottom to those of the old system.  4 July 1984.

     With such an inclination to basic change, Bodger said that he supported Van Ness as much as possible as he built up the college relations department in the months following his arrival.  Bodger thought of Van Ness as his chief instrument of institutional change.  Staffers in alumni relations, public relations, annual giving and other development activities all had been reporting directly to the president's office.  Now they were placed under Van Ness's supervision.

     Bill Stahl, '81, a bright young alum who dropped out of law school, was an apprentice to Bodger and was primed to take major responsibilities in a new department.

     Mary Ellen DeWane, '61, went from part-time to full-time in the alumni office.

     Jill Leauber, '78, was an adjunct English composition teacher who switched to full-time development work.  She had been a student of Bodger's in her freshman year.  Jill took to fund-raising with ease and skill.  Years later, she left the college staff to become vice president for development at Lehigh University and then at Haverford College. 

     The build-up gave Ken Schaefer, '70, who had been heading up admissions, an opportunity to make a career move into fund-raising as director of annual giving.  (This opened the way to the appointment of Lorraine Zimmer to head admissions, a staff change that shifted the emphasis further to a marketing mode in student recruiting.)

     In public relations, Andrea Detterline, '72, decided that Van Ness's arrival was a trigger for her to move on.  The college upgraded the position and Van Ness identified Debra Kamens to fill it.  She was an F&M graduate, hence with a grasp of our kind of college, and with an imaginative approach to promotion and a strong graphic background.

     Then he found Ingrid Evans to fill a new position as director of development.  She parlayed her experience in the development office at Swarthmore into a major expansion of responsibility under Van Ness.

     Van Ness had placed great emphasis on the importance of prospect research in advance of a campaign.  A new position for that purpose led to the hiring of Pat Benes, a graduate of Oberlin College.

     "In each new hire," Bodger continued, "we concentrated on depth of understanding of our mission, on brightness of mind, and on capacity to grow and learn.  Van Ness knew the market for fund-raising and public relations people was overpriced.  The available talent too often was run-of-the-mill.  So, John took us to people who were not all that experienced but who were adventurous enough to get involved in a department-building exercise in a promising place, where they would stretch their skills.  Meanwhile, the in-house people that he folded into his department went through a learning process under him.  He helped them broaden their sense of what the college should be doing in promotion and fund-raising.  This process did not always please them.  The tension between old ways and new never completely dissipated.  Still, they bought into the basic agenda.

     "The college relations department quickly developed a style of operation.  Van Ness was tightly organized, cared at times to a fault about details, held people to weekly accounts of their work.  He chaired heroic weekly staff meetings in the boardroom of the entire departmental team, clerical people and all.  All reported on their doings, all listened for the cues from their new leader for the next steps in transforming the college.  I would sit in now and then to report on policy issues, but by and large this was John's gig.  Out of all the frenzy of new activity, he was following a plan for promoting the college much more ambitiously, for broadening and deepening our cultivation of alumni, and then for constructing and conducting the biggest capital campaign in our history.

     "Part of the fun--and frustration--for the newcomers to the department was their swapping of stories about the quaint ways of our college culture.  'You won’t believe this,' became their theme over coffee, where they would exchange anecdotes about odd characters with peculiar duties, antiquated methods of keeping records, anomalies within the organizational structure.

     "The rest of the campus watched and waited, basically indulging the new department but secretly, I imagine, suspecting that the air might go out of the balloon before it brought the promised glory to our parochial little institution.  Fortunately, operating funds were abundant, salaries were moving upward, and no real political opposition to what we were attempting could gain traction in the faculty.  As it became evident that the faculty and the academic program would be the central object of attention in a campaign, their wariness seemed to diminish.

     "As the goals took shape within the staff and the board, Van Ness's perspective had a major influence.  He brought that influence to bear on our market positioning, on our academic plans, and on our physical plant plans.

     "Lacking a long and intimate experience of the institution such as mine, he was uninhibited by its past history of penury and its limited horizons.  He saw no reason to hold back from a vision that would elevate the college well above its prevailing position in the hierarchy of small liberal arts colleges.  'Excellence' for him was a professional concept not a local expression of self-worth—it came from the whole world of higher education, not from local self-perceptions.   Applying it to us, he could assess our strengths more objectively than I could; and he could name our weaknesses candidly without the restraint that I felt a need to exercise.

     "So he pressured me to define more explicitly where we wanted to be in the marketplace.   He held my feet to the fire—to live up to the heightened aspirations I had expressed for the college.  What did I mean?  Where was the college's constituency now and where should it be five years hence?  How much better in academic credentials could our student body become in five years?  How could we enrich the intellectual experience of students through an improved curriculum and through a social atmosphere more receptive to the excitement of ideas?  How could we change the physical space of the campus to make it more distinctively academic and culturally sophisticated?  And as to resources needed to bring about change, how could we extend the reputation and influence of the college so that we would capture support from the movers and shakers from the region and beyond?"

     Martin said, "Are you saying that your planning for the institution's future market position moved from the representative Campus Planning Group to the office of college relations?"

     Bodger said, "I guess I conducted an administrative balancing act.  The CPG kept working, in tandem with a board long-term planning committee.  But the planning for a fund-raising campaign by Van Ness fed back into those policy forums and had a determining effect on what we recommended to the board."

     Martin replied, "Regardless of organizational complexity, wasn't it all the agenda of the president, not the CPG or the college relations department?  How you balanced Van Ness with representatives on the CPG was mostly an issue of management style."

     "Mostly," Bodger said.  "I could let John propose his loftier view of where we should be going and allow the others to react, without my having to take a hard position at the outset.  In that way he was a useful instrument to me for pushing toward a progressive program."

     "The prerogative of presidents to be manipulative," said Martin.

     Bodger said, "I kept talking with everyone and listening.  For me, managing at that point seemed like conducting a daily conversation about the future of the place.  Every day brought nuances and shifts of insight.  They became the content of my conversations with John and everybody else who reported to me.  In due course, I would become sure that I was hearing a consensus about a given issue.  That would spin out of the ongoing conversation and solidify into a recommendation to the board."

     Martin said, "That style works best in a small place where the trust level among the people talking is pretty high."

     Bodger said, "I think in 1983 and 1984 I felt as much trust among my staff and the larger campus community as I would experience, plus the board.  Without such trust the goals that we developed would have been reduced by the thousand cuts that an academic community knows how to administer so adeptly." 

Campaign emphasized faculty development 

     Bodger talked further about Van Ness's influence on campaign goals.  As an academic, he said, Van Ness saw the limitations of the college's curriculum and the constraints on its scholarly life.  He tended to take for granted the unprecedented strides recently taken toward professionalizing the faculty.  The point for him was to consolidate and make a permanent change of culture after the Glenmede money stopped.  As an aficionado of architecture and design, he took an immediate interest in the space and plant problems standing in the way of forward movement of the educational program.  His arrival coincided with a decision to engage Dagit Saylor Architects for a renovation of Duryea Hall, one of the old buildings across from the main campus on Main Street.  Van Ness quickly hit a cordial note with architect Peter Saylor—they were both Penn products.  And he was prepared to lend his strong support when Bodger had to decide whether to use Dagit Saylor in the next steps for plant planning.

     Bodger continued, "As it turned out, Van Ness's take on our academic needs meshed pretty well with what the rest of us were seeing.  Our success in the market would increasingly depend on the validity of our undergraduate liberal arts mission and its delivery by a high-toned faculty to a bright undergraduate student body.  We already had a good start on improvement through the Glenmede faculty development grant.  But we needed to institutionalize professional development after the grant money ran out.  And we needed to enrich the curriculum, which was thin in spots and not yet evolving out of the scholarly dynamics of the newly energized faculty.

     "When we applied fund-raising realities to this situation, we concluded that one of the most attractive ways to support the faculty and the curriculum would be to sell endowed professorial chairs.  We had no chairs that enjoyed anything like a self-sustaining fund behind them.   We figured that three benefits would flow out of seeking endowment funds for endowed chairs.  By paying a portion of the salaries for those holding them, they would relieve the total faculty salary budget.  By providing some financial help for professional growth, they would help sustain the change in scholarly culture begun with Glenmede money.  And their very existence would signal that the college had moved up in the world—only the better colleges had the luxury of endowed chairs."

     Bodger fished out another paper, a memo prepared by the academic dean, Bill Akin.  At Bodger's request, he had collaborated with Van Ness, seeking to define specific targets for endowed chairs.  Their objective was to name possible chairs that would enhance the academic program and that would be likely to attract donor interest.

     Martin said, "Who ever said that the world of learning is not shaped by the world of money?"

     Bodger replied, "Van Ness believed in reciprocity between the worlds, I think.  He genuinely felt that the money would flow in the most constructive channel.   Some of my old-time colleagues thought of John as a fast stepper in a crass money game.  He struck me sometimes, on the contrary, as a somewhat innocent believer in a philanthropic creed.   It was that seemingly innocent attitude that made for a good working relationship between him and me, I think—a relationship that many of my long-time colleagues seemed hard put to understand.  We were going grubbing for big bucks.  My own sense of the world demanded that we go grubbing in a noble cause.  It was John who reassured me of our nobility of purpose when the process itself grew grubby."

The memo in Bodger's hand blended academic and financial possibilities by identifying the following possible endowed chairs: chair of Pennsylvania German studies; Eleanor Snell chair of health and physical education; The John Mauchly chair of computer science; chair of health science; chair of music; artist in residence; visiting professor of the college.

Bodger said, "In fund-raising, you know as well as I do that intentions and outcomes often don't match up.  But in the case of professorial endowments, we didn't fare badly.

"The Pennsylvania German studies chair did not materialize.  Van Ness thought it would be attractive outside.  But the subject was peripheral.  It had no base of broad support, and it did not attract sufficient interest.

"A chair honoring Eleanor Snell, our legendary coach of women's sports, on the other hand, did win broad support and became a reality.

"John Mauchly was our physics professor in the 1930s.  He went off to the University of Pennsylvania in 1940 and, with Presper Eckert, invented the world's first operating computer, ENIAC.  The college wanted to tie itself to his famous coattails.  But it didn't happen in the campaign.  However, the kernel of an idea for a math chair found fertile soil.  Joe Beardwood, '50, had been president of the alumni association in my first years on the staff as alumni secretary.  He then came onto the board.  Joe was an early computer guru, who knew what it was from an engineering standpoint.  He did much to heighten everyone's consciousness of the computer revolution, including mine.  Joe died of cancer in late 1983, a few months before D. L. Helfferich died, leaving a spouse, Louise, who was his classmate.  Louise created a chair in memory of Joe.

"The idea for a chair in health sciences emerged from our celebrated pre-medical program.  It had been the spawning ground for the largest and most affluent segment of our alumni population.  Harold Brownback, '15, and Paul Wagner, '30, had been the biology professors who led that program from the 1930s until Wagner's untimely death in 1970.  Hundreds of alumni physicians felt that their professional careers rested squarely on the mentoring and teaching those two men provided.  We promoted a Brownback-Wagner chair of health sciences, and that segment of alumni responded generously.

"The chair of music would not have been on the list had it not been for the interest expressed by Bill Heefner.  Bill became the board development committee chair.  He was eager to set an example.  His passion for music made it the target of his charitable interest, and he proposed to make major gifts to elevate the status of music in the college priorities.  First, through the resources of his mother, he provided for a magnificent pipe organ in Bomberger Hall.  Then he committed to endowing a chair in music.  Both gifts came as the campaign was just revving up.  They set the intended tone and did much to stimulate other board members to give and get.

"In the 'visiting professor' category, Thomas G. Davis, '52, M.D., of the board and his wife, Nancy Bare Davis, '51, created an unusual chair that focused on 'Judeo-Christian values.'  While we did not endow a position of artist-in-residence, Philip and Muriel Berman endowed the directorship of the museum that came to bear their name in the course of the campaign."

            Martin said that he associated endowed chairs with university research positions, not undergraduate college teaching positions.  Bodger explained that the guidelines for these new chairs made them different.  They were to be held for a finite number of years.  They were to provide for specific professional development projects in the faculty member's field.  They did not require recruitment of new stars; rather, they were designed to uplift existing faculty members for a period.  With a $500,000 minimum, the chairs would provide some but not all the income to support a salary.

            Bodger continued, "I can't stress enough the symbolic value we attached to these endowed chairs as we set the campaign goals.  We felt that they would begin to differentiate us from the run-of-the-mill liberal arts colleges from whom we were trying to separate ourselves.  They would tell the faculty unambiguously that the college valued academic excellence above all else.  They would give the college some concrete perks with which to motivate faculty members.  They would also tilt the image of the college toward professionalism and away from parochial concerns about social behavior."

            Martin said, "You had soft money for three years from Glenmede to jump start a system for faculty development and renewal.  Endowed chairs would not in themselves provide the funds for institutionalizing that system after the soft money ended."

Bodger replied, "Income from the hoped-for endowments of faculty positions would relieve other operating income, which we would then direct toward general faculty development projects.  In addition, we intended to shift our operating priorities, supported by annual giving, to favor faculty development.  One way or the other, we were uncompromising in our intention to sustain a more professional academic life."

Martin reflected, "Where I'll be going, they have a long track record in anthropology, an oddity for a small college.  That may be the focal point for an endowment initiative to celebrate past faculty heroes." 

Campus and plant improvements became priorities 

            Bodger told Martin that, while he and his colleagues honed the plan to raise endowment funds for professorial chairs, they were simultaneously assessing improvements to the physical plant.  If academic advancement was to be the keynote of the campaign, it would have to include changes to the physical environment for teaching and learning in a residential setting.

            By the time Van Ness arrived to organize the college relations department in early 1984, the college already was working with the Dagit Saylor architectural people.   They were assessing what to do with the collection of old residential buildings on Main Street, opposite the great lawn of the main campus.

            Some of those buildings bore evidence of the earliest life of the college in the nineteenth century.  Notably, Schreiner Hall, at the corner of Sixth and Main Streets facing the Eger Gateway, was originally the home of the founding president.  Super House, farther to the east, was the home of an early president, Henry Super.  President Donald L. Helfferich lived in the house until his retirement in 1970.  Over the years, the college acquired properties along Main Street as they came on the market.   A rough division of territory assigned many upperclass women students to the Main Street dorms and men to those on campus.  The college had maintained the Main Street properties at a utilitarian level.  It had paid little regard to the historical character possessed by some of them.  It made additions and alterations over the years as demand for space dictated.  Keeping the maintenance budget tight dictated how much upkeep to do. Since several properties in the area from Sixth Avenue to Eighth Avenue (in addition to Trinity Reformed Church east of Sixth) did not belong to the college, it managed the properties as separate entities.  It did not conceive of the entire area from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue as an integrated unit.

            By the early 1980s, some vocal townspeople were criticizing the college for the run-down appearance of the dorms.  Tour guides showing the campus to prospective new students carefully steered their guests away from the old houses.

            Bodger said, "We realized that something had to be done to turn these resources around.  In December 1982, a volunteer engineer analyzed the Main Street buildings to see if they could be renovated.  He was a member of the staff of Roberts Filter Manufacturing Company, headed by the chair of our board buildings & grounds committee, Charles V. Roberts, '32.  His findings encouraged further thought about renovating some of them.  Several months later we discussed the feasibility of renovations with Dagit Saylor Architects.  Dagit Saylor had recently attracted attention in Philadelphia for its handling of the restoration of the president's home at the University of Pennsylvania and for other successful renovations of old buildings.  Peter Saylor quickly turned out to be a compatible collaborator.  He worked well particularly with Nelson Williams, our financial officer who had responsibility over the physical plant.

            "Dagit Saylor confirmed the finding that most of the buildings were restorable.  We took a test flight by restoring one of the best-constructed buildings, Duryea Hall, named for Rhea Duryea Johnson, '08, daughter of one of America's first automobile manufacturers.  Then we commissioned Dagit Saylor to provide an evaluation and master plan for developing the entire area facing the campus green on the other side of Main Street.  At first, the architect and we thought in terms of demolishing some buildings and building new ones.  Soon Peter Saylor was urging us to acquire the remaining properties.  He envisioned an integrated 'village' with all the old buildings restored to Victorian style and limited new construction.  They would be tied together by a winding pathway and landscaping in back.  A completely new wing was designed for old South Hall on Sixth Avenue, which later was espoused by Pete and Betty Musser, who funded it as an international house.  A parking lot took up some of the backyard space, with neighboring properties protected by a new wall behind it.  Fetterolf House, the oldest part of which predated anything else on campus, was serving as a make-shift studio for fine arts, and the plan kept that function.  Also, Super House next door would remain as housing for faculty members.  The entire Residential Village on one side of Main Street would represent the Victorian façade of a small college town.  It would interplay gracefully with the grand open greensward on the other side.

            "When Van Ness came on board, he immediately seized on the plan as a key piece of our fund-raising strategy.  We came to name the entire project the 'Residential Village'—after first toying with the term 'Academic Village.'  John saw the potential for leveraging alumni gifts for this target.  We put together a proposal for a challenge grant to the Kresge Foundation, where we had had success in years past.  Peter Saylor became an advocate for us at Kresge.  We won the grant, and the challenge was for alumni to match the Kresge grant three dollars for one.  That campaign within a campaign succeeded—a major piece of the over-all effort."

Martin said, "A Kresge grant would also have given your campaign a 'Good Housekeeping' seal of approval.  If you won a Kresge grant, it said to the world that you were getting to be a player on the big scene."

"Right, even though Kresge had the nasty habit of giving their money after the project was finished rather than when it started."

            Martin said, "I assume that the townspeople who had been criticizing your stewardship of the old houses were won over."

Bodger said they were.  "Indeed, the Residential Village came to symbolize the effort we made over the years to be a good citizen of the town.  Sensitivities often were large because our town was so small, and the college sometimes seemed to bestride it like its mascot, the Grizzly Bear.  But many townspeople were employees and the town had an intimate understanding of the rhythm of the college's life.  There always was pressure for more voluntary college support of the fire company and other borough services.  Our responses were generous enough to keep peace, I guess.  Anyway, the Residential Village instilled a new feeling of pride in town."

Bodger continued his account of the creative relationship between Dagit Saylor and the college in planning for a new campus setting.  "Our confidence in Dagit Saylor was now deep enough to push us toward a next major step.  We engaged them to do a master plan of the main campus.  A residential campus is an expression of the values of the education proffered by the institution.  Ours had grown and changed piecemeal over the years.  Helfferich had followed a 1918 vision when he decided on the placement of new buildings in the 1960s.  Since then, the college had to anticipate new site needs and solve problems of traffic flow.  The legacy of ad hoc development was that the parts of the campus did not fit well.  We knew a new academic building had to be done sometime.  We had a crying need for more athletic fields.  The campus road knifed through the heart of the campus since its early days and made for an ungraceful and dysfunctional space for students going to and from the dining hall.

"The campaign mood pushed us into thinking comprehensively.  Peter Saylor assumed that on the main campus we needed to create a more closely integrated academic community.  A bird's eye view told him that the campus was functionally fractured.  He saw in front the formal greensward, our great lawn, facing the newly defined small-town façade in the Residential Village across Main Street.  He saw in back, toward Route 29 and the Perkiomen Creek, the organized playing fields.  And he saw these two great areas interrupted by the roadway cutting through the entire campus, paralleling Main Street."

Bodger summarized the master plan reorganization for Martin.  The old campus roadway would close to become a pedestrian spine from one end to the other.  It would become a landscaped promenade and the fulcrum for future building projects.  A plaza in front of Wismer Hall would become the center of action.  Maintenance functions in the center would move to the peripheral shop area at Fifth Avenue.  Anachronistic sites for waste would disappear.  New space for athletic facilities would extend into the old college woods toward the Perkiomen Creek.   A new "beltway" would move traffic to the back of campus, away from the academic and social core.  It would connect with the west end of campus, allowing flow all the way through in both directions.

"The master planning was prescient," said Bodger.  "We had it in hand when in the course of the campaign we defined two major building projects.  One was an art museum in our college union building, which had been the old Alumni Memorial Library—what would become the Berman Museum.   The second was a new humanities building, which would come to be named F. W. Olin Hall.  Without the master plan, our case to Philip and Muriel Berman and to the F. W. Olin Foundation would have been weak.  The plan demonstrated the coherence of our vision and made our case persuasive."

Martin said, "Are you saying that the Berman Museum and Olin Hall were not goals of the campaign?"

"Not as we announced it."

"But they became goals after the campaign began?" 

Estimates of gift sources shaped the list of other campaign goals 

Bodger replied, "The general idea of the campaign was that the college had to take a big leap forward academically, that it had to heighten the perception of its character and quality in a bolder way with a broader public.  The campaign had a list of specifics, but these always were seen as representative not exhaustive.  We specified the endowed academic chairs and the re-shaping of the campus plan, along with a longer list of specifics.  Defining the campaign goals was somewhat like running a vacuum cleaner through the organization and sweeping up the unmet wants and needs.  Our list included money to sustain the faculty development program started with Glenmede funds.  It included a $3 million increase in endowment to support scholarship funds to offset the higher tuition charges we knew we would have to set.  We identified the need for new academic computing facilities, which would allow us to cut our umbilical cord to the Dartmouth Time Sharing System.  Our science departments drew up a list of equipment and instrumentation needs that came to three-quarters of a million dollars.  Before we formed the final campaign plan, the library staff had been studying the ways and means of converting the old card catalog to an online system and, in the process, renovating the building.  Our staff was near the forefront in re-thinking information science as the digital revolution warmed up.  So, we set a half-million-dollar goal for automating and renovating Myrin.  Van Ness was disturbed to find that our fund-raising record keeping was still in the green eye shade era—nor had we yet computerized our general business operations.  So, we included an item to pay for the computerized automation of administration.  The health and physical education people weighed in for a weight training room—this was just becoming popular with students—and for the renovation of tennis courts and hockey fields."

Martin said, "You probably could have had a list twice as long."

Bodger replied, "Of course—we were constrained by the gut estimate of our capacity to raise funds from our known constituencies.  You were right when you said that money dictates academic priority.  The board endorsed these staff-defined goals, knowing they were half the result of wishing and half the result of informed planning.  The total came to about $20 million, not counting another $3.5 million for much of the campus master plan reconfiguration, such as parking lots."

Martin wrinkled up his nose.  "I bet you didn't raise the precise amounts designated for each of the items."

Bodger replied, "We were able to direct some undesignated giving to items that did not have sales appeal.  But, yes, in the end there were significant gaps between amounts announced and amounts raised, item for item."

Martin said, "That's why I could not bring myself to put a big package of a campaign like that together.  I was fearful of setting up expectations, failing to fulfill them, and being unable to explain why."

Bodger said, "It depends what you want a campaign to do.  Sure, we wanted to hit those specific targets.  But that was not the big message.  Helped by Van Ness, I came to think that the campaign would be an orchestration of separate needs into a semblance of institutional wholeness—the classic purpose of a capital campaign.  The individual parts were less important than the vision of institutional movement on a broad front.  In the campaign literature we began to talk about advancing our position among the nation's best independent liberal arts colleges—it took the campaign to push me into that assertion.

"The parts, as a matter of fact, did seem to cohere.  They involved annual program support, endowment growth, and capital growth.  And for good measure we figured on $2 million in deferred gifts for future interest.  The campaign goals were an expression of the college's self-understanding.  If that self-understanding appeared to be clear to donors, we figured they would endorse it with their gifts."

Martin said, "And I know they did, one way or another." 

"Patterns for the Future" demanded institutional discipline 

Bodger continued: "They endorsed us largely because of the discipline we enforced on ourselves to execute the campaign.  I had been working up toward a campaign since Barnes & Roche studied our readiness to campaign in 1982.  The board development committee, chaired by Bill Heefner, had accepted the discipline of soliciting the board to create a nucleus fund before any public notice of campaigning was contemplated.  John Ware had committed $200,000 to the nucleus fund, and this became a motivator for others.  But when Van Ness came aboard and we structured the campaign, that nucleus fund exercise became a preliminary step.  We solicited the board all over again.  That would have been unheard of in the old days at the college.

"The selection of Heefner to chair the campaign was the most important single decision.  Without a qualified chair, a campaign just wouldn't succeed, except by a fluke.  Bill was qualified in any number of ways.  He was in the number two position among the board's officers, behind Tom Glassmoyer, and the presumed heir apparent—and he was quite open with me about his eagerness to take on the chairmanship of the board in due course.  He saw the campaign as a step to that position, and so did I.  He was at the peak of his legal career in Bucks County, well respected in the region.  He had a philanthropic track record as long-time head of the Bucks County Historical Society.   He and I had a close working relationship that dated back to the late 1960s. 

"Most important for the campaign strategy, he understood that a lead gift by the chair was key.  And his lifelong love affair with music gave him focus.  He wanted to support the music department.  He had played the pipe organ in Bomberger Hall during his undergraduate years and was still playing the organ at the Lutheran Church down the road from his rural homestead on Old Bethlehem Pike in Perkasie.  We had identified a chair of music in our list of goals because of his early expression of interest in endowing it.  Bill had already 'adopted' our bright young music director, John French.  The good chemistry between them created a solid basis for Bill's commitment to the endowed chair.

"He also attached a kind of string to this pledge.  The pipe organ Bill had played as a student in the years before World War II had died and a mediocre electronic instrument stood in its place.  It was an embarrassment in his mind and certainly out of keeping with the grand space of the chapel that memorialized the founding president of the college.  Bill proposed to replace it with a new pipe organ designed for the hall.  He saw such an installation as a symbolic statement about the general aspirations of the campaign and the college.  It would say to the world: 'We're going top drawer.'  This was in perfect harmony with the strategic planning we had been doing to identify a higher market position for the college.

"Bill was closely involved in the choice of the Austin Organ Company in Hartford to custom-design and build the organ.  He followed the project each step of the way.  It was for him a labor of love.  And his expertise combined with his pocketbook to shape the instrument into the symbol of excellence that he had foreseen better than I.

"For me the project provided an education from the ground up in organ building.  It was not my favorite kind of music.  Schooled by Heefner and French, I came to the threshold of appreciation for the rich tradition of organ music in Western culture.  It was a marvelous marriage of the physical and the artistic.  An organ is a great big hunk of physical reality!  Having a music teacher as a spouse of course helped me to accommodate the whole initiative.  And I hope it helped Bill to understand that he had a genuine ally in the president's corner, not just an opportunist.

"Not everyone on the board shared Bill's sophisticated insight into the symbolic value of the instrument, but they understood his generosity, and that stirred generosity from others.  In setting an example, he was the consummate campaign leader.   The total of his gifts for the endowment and the organ exceeded a million dollars, and that was generosity indeed for a self-styled 'country lawyer.' 

Martin said, "A lead gift was essential from the chair, but I take it that it was not the only contribution he made to the campaign."

Bodger replied, "His financial pledges were integral to his leadership.  But his leadership was far more than that.  He was available, involved, engaged, and responsive to the proposed campaign tactics coming from Van Ness and the rest of the development staff.  The interplay between staff and the campaign leaders provided a discipline for the entire campaign.  It was always in danger of falling apart.  But Bill insisted on schedules, on keeping feet to fires.  He schmoozed and entertained and asked for the dime, always with the support of the staff.  'We'll do what we have to do,' was his theme.

Martin said, "The trust between you and him had to be critical."

Bodger answered, "I feel I was lucky in my working relationships throughout my career at the college.  I guess I had a compelling need to be trusted and supported.  That made me want to be trusting and supportive.  And that involved a mutual willingness to be vulnerable."

"To take risks together?"

Bodger replied, "That's it."

Bodger drew for Martin a thumbnail sketch of the execution of the campaign.  It was an exercise in willed institutional discipline.  Bodger empowered the senior staff to make day-to-day decisions without him.  He withdrew from some off-campus commitments at the state and regional level so that he could be on the road in pursuit of major gifts.  The Campus Planning Group became a monitor of the progress toward campaign goals and watched over implementation as new resources began to flow in.  The college abandoned its Spartan approach to ceremony and held splashy 'cultivation events' designed to bring new supporters into the fold and to expand the gift potential of existing supporters.  Bodger's black tie saw frequent use.

Bodger said, "The splashiest was the first, on 1 November 1985.  We kicked off the campaign publicly with a black tie bash at center city Philadelphia's finest hotel, the Four Seasons on the Parkway.  The mere fact of the event symbolized that we were going to do things with more style, more glitz.  It was a typical event as these things went in the larger world, but for us it was a breakthrough.  That night, Bill Heefner announced that donors had pledged $6.5 million of the $20 million goal.  A million of that was his own gift for the chair in music and the Bomberger organ.

"The stage for the public kick-off was set at the board meeting the previous May.  It was there that Bill Heefner obtained formal approval of the campaign after he announced his own lead gift.  The theme of his remarks was important.  I had been saying all along that the campaign for money was a surrogate for a search for higher institutional status.  And Bill caught that.  I have what he said here:

All of the steps taken to date are linked together.  A synergism is at play.  One gift supports another gift.  In a campaign, each part contributes to all other parts.  We are not merely securing gifts, we are raising the sights and the level of performance of the whole college.  Our students tell us we need that.  Our faculty tells us we need that.  Our admissions people tell us we need that.  I believe that the board agrees that we need this.  What we do will affect the quality of the students we attract, of the faculty, and yet the quality of future boards.

Now we are prepared to go public.  This is the time, here and now, for the board, the alumni, friends and supporters---the entire college community--to put the campaign formally into motion and to take it and the college to new heights of success.

Martin said, "It sounds like campaign rhetoric at almost any decent college.  But I know it was a new note for your college."

Bodger said, "New in a couple of ways.  Heefner's was a proactive board voice.  The board was not just getting a sermon from the president, as in years past.  Someone from within the board was giving the sermon.  Also, he was rolling the dice for the quality of the whole college, not just for this or that campaign objective.  Win or lose the campaign, I felt the college never was going to be quite the same again. 

"This sense of novelty permeated much of my agenda in the months following the kick-off.  In December 1985, Margot and I and an entourage from the development staff mounted an unprecedented six-day assault on the alumni of Florida.  We traveled from Orlando down the East Coast and then swung over to the Tampa Bay area, with stops all along the way.  Van Ness was unrelenting in pushing me to meet with major gift prospects one-on-one.  Meanwhile, he and other staffers organized meetings with groups of alumni.  We had a freshly minted video production to stir nostalgia and set the stage, complete with Handel in the background.  Everything we did aimed at bringing alumni a new and urgent sense of occasion.  The 'Patterns for the Future' campaign was the most ambitious financial outreach in our history.  But it was also an unprecedented effort to alter the culture of the college—and that needed explaining.  How would we preserve the old college that alumni had experienced and remembered fondly while changing it into something they would not recognize?

"I found my speech to alums at the Tequesta Country Club, where Tom Beddow, '36, and his wife Ginny, '37, were hosts.  You can see me stretching to identify a market position:"

First, we will solidify our status as the best regional liberal arts college in the greater Delaware Valley, measured in quality of students and faculty, quality of curriculum, and endowment per student.  Second, we will do a far better job of letting our public know of our premier status in the region through improved communications. Third, we will set as a longer term target the attainment of comparability with the leading liberal arts colleges throughout the east, building upon our top regional position.  Fourth, we will spend more dollars per student than we ever had done to bring this about.  Fifth, we will generate that money through somewhat higher tuition and through an unprecedented capital campaign, "Patterns for the Future."

     After identifying the financial goals, Bodger explained his personal priorities:

It has become my personal mission for the next couple of years to reach out and activate the interest of as many alumni as possible, so that the campaign will be successful…. I am here today to extend an invitation.  I invite you to give serious attention to what is happening at and to the college at this time.  If as a result you come to share ownership of the vision of our college at the pinnacle of regional leadership in liberal education, then I invite you further to help us achieve our goal for the campaign.  I invite you seriously to rethink your personal giving priorities for the next several years, or, with the aid of planned giving instruments, your lifetime charitable commitment.

     He finished with a reference to two themes that ran through Calvin D. Yost's centennial history of the college:

One is that the college was always dedicated to seeking the best.  The other was that it never had enough money to seek the best in the best possible way.  In a real sense, then, this campaign is designed to put an end to the penurious tradition and to enable us to demonstrate once and for all to the academic world that we properly belong with the leaders.  I do hope all alumni will want to take an active part in this historic adventure. 

Campaign forced the college to seek its market position 

Martin said, "What did 'regional' mean in your mind?  Why did you limit the vision?"

Bodger said, "Positioning was a brand new game for us.  Van Ness pressed it.  I felt strongly that I would have been just whistling in the dark to declare that we were one of the 'national' liberal arts colleges."

Martin said, "Chistopher Jencks and David Riesman in The Academic Revolution used the term 'university college' to mean something similar."

"Exactly," said Bodger.  "In fact I used that term at times and felt it worked better than 'regional liberal arts college.'  We did fit into their category—ours was a college that prepared undergraduates for graduate school.  But the culture of academic professionalism that predominated at nearby colleges of unquestioned national stature, notably Swarthmore and Haverford, simply had not matured yet on our campus.

"Nevertheless, by defining the campaign, we were defining our aspiration to move in that direction.  Our changes in student life programs by now had weakened the hold of parochialism—we were freer to concentrate on academic vitality because we were freer of the need to sit in loco parentis over student behavior.  Some years would have to pass before the 'regional' rhetoric would yield to the message that we were seriously contending for national status.  By traveling to Florida and elsewhere, we were at least beginning to assert an identity that meant something beyond the five counties surrounding Philadelphia."

Martin said, "So, you were campaigning for identity as well as for money."

Bodger nodded in agreement.  "And campaigning for a future."

He put a copy of the college bulletin in front of Martin from January 1986 to press the point further.  "I said that the 'big plan' represented by 'Patterns for the Future' was to position the college as 'the premier liberal arts college of our geographical area' and as 'one of the best such colleges in the east.'"

Martin said, "In your mind you were excluding the national Quaker colleges, but it does not sound that way."

Bodger laughed, "Ambiguity on positioning was my strong suit at that point—I was groping for what I think became the right direction.  That year, Edward B. Fiske, The New York Times education reporter, included us in his Best Buys in College Education.  This resulted from a combination of our relatively good academic quality and our still-low tuition price.  It was the first time, I think, that the rating game brought us national recognition.  It was actually the ratings by US News and World Report that finally allowed us unabashedly to call ourselves a national liberal arts college.  The Carnegie Endowment criteria put us in that category, and they were the criteria adopted by US News.  As the rating game heated up and the criteria became better understood, our problem of identity changed.  Granted, we became identified as a member of the national liberal arts college group.  But our ranking within that category was nothing to boast about.

"While the campaign was going on, however, my language was still ambiguous.  'Patterns for the Future' shakily moved us along a trajectory of perceived quality in the marketplace.  And along with the movement came parallel movement of our needs and expectations for more financial support." 

Board members had a "greatest generation" attitude  

Martin told Bodger that the limits of time on the calendars of his board members created a perennial problem for him as a president.  "They were on our board because they were busy and successful.  But I had to scurry to get their time and effort just because they were busy and successful.  Didn't you have that problem, especially during the campaign?"

Bodger answered, "We set a monthly schedule of regular campaign committee meetings.  Heefner and those of us on the staff relentlessly held to the schedule although we knew we would rarely have full attendance.  That regularity had a stabilizing effect on the soliciting and did much to move the campaign forward when reports went to the full board and other constituents.  We worked for new gifts between meetings so that we could report progress at the meetings.  It wasn't pretty, but it sort of worked."

Reflecting, Bodger added that the campaign seemed to tap into a reserve of personal loyalty and pride among the alumni leaders.  This made them eager to put the college's needs at that point ahead of other activities.

Bodger continued, "They believed that the quality of the college was greater than its public reputation.  They believed that by improving the quality even more we could correct its low public profile.  They wanted to do that to ratify their sense of self-worth and to pass on a better institution to a new generation.  Furthermore, they agreed with my view, I suspect, that a change in public perception would not undermine the college's traditional homely virtues grounded in religious and moral principle, which they had experienced as students.  The campaign would enable it to get out from under a barrel and receive recognition for the worth it always had quietly possessed."

Martin said, "You were fortunate to have this sense of the ripeness for a campaign.  It's something I will have to look for in my upcoming task."

"Remember," said Bodger, "many of the leaders were from the World War II generation.  They had a simple sort of optimism, a conviction that, once resolved on a mission, they could succeed, as long as they stuck to the program."

"The 'greatest generation' mindset," said Martin.

This attitude became unmistakable by the time the campaign reached its half-way mark, Bodger remembered.  The campaign raised about $10 million by June 1986.  Van Ness urged a celebration to mark the moment and renew the enthusiasm of leaders and major prospects and donors.   James Baird, '38, and his wife Betty, '45, volunteered to provide the venue at their country club.  As a retired executive of the DuPont Corporation, Baird retained his social standing among company managers.  This gave him membership in the exclusive Greenville Country Club outside Wilmington. A Sunday brunch on a bright summer day in that graceful setting was just the lift the campaign called for.  The campaign leaders reported on recent successes.  One of the most notable was a $1 million memorial bequest from Katherine Wicks Perry of Washington, DC, an elderly daughter of Ross Frederick Wicks, of the college class of 1897.  Another was the approval of a $350,000 challenge grant in support of the Residential Village from the Kresge Foundation.  Riding the tide of success, Bill Heefner announced that the board had re-opened its pledging process and would increase its original nucleus fund commitment. 

Bodger said, "Bill Heefner's committee piloted the campaign successfully through its second half.  From the start, it sponsored high-profile events to lend drama on campus, among our constituents, and in our publicity.  The most symbolic and most telling for the dramaturgy of the campaign, I think, took place when we held Founders' Day in Bomberger Hall on 2 November 1986.  We dedicated the Russell E. Heefner Memorial Organ and installed John French as the holder of the William F. Heefner Chair of Music.  Our guest speaker was Joseph Polisi, the president of the Juilliard School.  New at Juilliard, Polisi was thinking of bringing music and the liberal arts into closer integration.  His enthusiasm for his own agenda was just right for us, since, working from the other end of the academic spectrum, we were proposing a closer integration of music in our liberal arts program.

"Bill Heefner's willingness that day in Bomberger Hall to stand up and be counted, and to bring his mother into the picture besides, captured the attention of all members of the board and major donors beyond them.

"Then there was the dedication of Musser Hall.  Betty Musser of our board had led me to her entrepreneur-husband Pete, then beginning his rise to the top of the high-technology corporate revolution in the Delaware Valley.  Their $500,000 pledge early in the campaign lent lots of credibility to the effort.  We applied it to the building of an international student residence hall, actually an expansion of a classic old dorm, South Hall, on Sixth Avenue.  It was the cameo of our newly conceived Residential Village running the length of Main Street across from the main campus.

"Another campaign event involved the Bermans in our rededication of the oldest building on campus, Fetterolf House, also a component of the Residential Village.  We added an art studio to the old building.  The Bermans loaned some of their most attractive work for an exhibit in the newly renovated building.  Phil Berman had bought a monumental outdoor sculpture from Mary Ann Unger titled "The Temple."  It was a multi-colored mushroom-like affair standing perhaps fifteen feet high.  You could walk inside it.  Guided by Peter Saylor, the architect working on our grand master plan, we located the Unger piece on the open greensward in line with Fetterolf.  The point was to establish an axis of art across Main Street from the art studio to the sculpture.  This decision aroused predictable pros and cons on campus and among townspeople, who could not avoid the new campus feature as they drove by.  All of the action around art of course was a run-up to a decision by Bermans and the college to take the plunge and create a new art museum. 

"The campaign hummed along, with solicitations vigorously taking place at all levels.  The challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation helped us push smaller donors to a more generous level of giving.  It supported the transformation of the old houses on Main Street into the Residential Village.  The campaign moved to closure by 3 March 1988, when we announced we had crossed the $20 million goal. It took a pledge by Tom and Nancy Davis to push the campaign over its goal.  I had been talking with them for months about an endowed chair in Judeo-Christian values.  Their enthusiasm for such a focus had to fit with the academic culture of the campus.  In the end, their endowed gift funded short-term stays on campus for visiting professors dealing with values and religion.

     "To mark the attainment of the goal, we held an all-campus celebration, with a special dinner for students, faculty, and staff in Wismer Hall."

     Martin asked, "Did students buy into what was going on?"

      Bodger said, "You know that student perspectives are likely to be self-centered."

     Martin added, "And blunt as a bludgeon."

     "Sure," Bodger went on, "campus chatter stirred some doubt about the grand enterprise that excited so many of us on the staff and board.  My very public commitment to adding an art museum to the campus drew fire.  Phil Berman's gifts of monumental outdoor sculpture made it impossible for students and faculty to ignore the commitment. A good many thought it was Berman's insult to our integrity.  More, though, seemed to see the bigger purpose.  I felt affirmed more often than not by the campus buzz." 

Despite weaknesses, the campaign leveraged the college's strengths 

     Bodger said that the campaign raised nearly $4 million for annual program support, more than $7 million for endowment, including a number of newly endowed professorial chairs, more than $6 million for capital improvement and $3 million for future interests.  The college said it would continue raising funds for specific objectives that were undersubscribed, such as faculty development endowment and computer science.

     Bodger added, "Though in hindsight, $20 million does not look large, at the time it was more than the sum of all dollars raised in previous campaigns.  It was the first campaign of modern times at the college that proceeded with the kind of professionalism found at the most ambitious American colleges and universities."

     Martin nodded:  "The point of it, from my viewpoint, remains 'institutional boot-strapping.'   Your college leveraged itself by drawing on its strengths and taking the risk of setting very public targets."

     Bodger replied, "I guess the weaknesses of the whole effort stand out in my mind.  I would hesitate to tell a new president to jump into a high-profile campaign, considering the inherent problems.  Sure, we made the over-all goal.  We did not make a lot of subordinate targets.  After kicking off, the Bermans caught fire and gave for the museum but it was not in our campaign goals.  That over-inflated plant gifts.  Not all the proposed endowments for faculty chairs attracted support—notably Pennsylvania German studies.  We failed to raise significant money to support computer science, one of the stated program goals."

     Martin said, "Did these anomalies make your faculty and donors question the legitimacy of the campaign's over-all success?"

     "They did not, mainly, I think, because we promised to keep going after funds for the unfulfilled objectives.  So, we dodged some bullets."

     "That's my point," Martin affirmed.  "It was worth it to you to risk looking bad on particulars if you could convey a general feeling of advancing the college on a broad front."

     Bodger said there was something more.  It was as if the campaign had a talismanic effect.  In the period immediately following its successful conclusion, the evidence that the college was "arriving" accumulated.  Many in the college could feel that its success was begetting success.

     "I could paint a pretty picture, leaving out negative nuances lurking in shadows," Bodger said.  "As the campaign success was being announced, the Bermans were deciding to take the plunge with us and go for a museum.  Our application to the F. W. Olin Foundation received a friendly welcome and led to our winning of the annual national Olin sweepstakes—to finance a new humanities building at the heart of campus.  The Middle States Association ten-year visit by an outside committee led not only to reaffirmation of our accreditation but to an endorsement of what we had been doing and where we were headed.  The Phi Beta Kappa fortress—after decades of rebuffing pleas for entrance from our Phi Beta Kappa faculty committee—finally showed signs of opening up for us to have a chapter.  The faculty committee on curriculum revision, after time-consuming and frustrating labor, produced a fresh package that conformed to the philosophical goals set by a previous committee.  The multi-year effort cost our academic dean a case of the shingles but he won the day in the end.  We did some new packaging of the student life program too.  The Centennial Conference for football—and later for all sports—burst into being after midnight telephone calls among its eight founding presidents, of which I was one.  It meant that our college was moving into a differentiated company of peers that later would benchmark our further moves in the market.  Bill Heefner's leadership of the campaign and the trust between us had led to his move at last into the presidency of the board.  Bill resolved to run the board more aggressively than his predecessor, Tom Glassmoyer, who remained as chair of the executive committee.  Bill's move into the chair set the stage for the final chapter of my tenure."

     Martin said, "Sounds like the fruits of success, falling into your lap."

     "Sounds like," Bodger repeated.  "These developments felt very good.  I said there were background clouds."

     Checking the clock, Martin rose and prepared to leave Bodger's study.  He said that he wanted to run through the fruits of success that Bodger had ticked off.  "And give me something about clouds.  I think I have to look carefully at some clouds before I wander off to my new venue."

     The veterans promised to meet again in a few days.   

Fruits of success--Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art 

     Rain was lightly falling the day Martin knocked on Bodger's door for their final conversation.  Over coffee in the comfort of Bodger's study they returned to the markers of "arriving" that he had enumerated last time.  Martin seemed to be looking for a pattern of priorities, growing out of the successful campaign.  He said it might provide a template against which to compare conditions where he was going.

     "I hear you saying that the Bermans were the most promising and challenging major donors to surface in the campaign," Martin said, raising his eyebrows.

     Bodger nodded yes.  "Promising yes.  Challenging yes.  Fun yes.  Demanding yes.  Generous yes.  Controlling yes.  Cooperative yes.  They rejected the typical role of donor.  Giving resources—art, money—was their start, not their end.  Their goal was to become intimately involved with the target of their philanthropy.  They wanted to have an active part in the institution's development.  They liked to be thanked like any other major donor but it was more important to them to help set the agenda.  They were wary because so often they had been the target of proposals that sought their money but not their involvement.  There was an abundance of folklore among area college presidents about hopeful relationships with them becoming testy."

     Martin said that he might have contributed to the folklore, having made proposals himself for their support when he was president—unsuccessfully.

     Bodger continued, "Phil was retired from his merchandising enterprises but he had not retired his zeal to win, his love of gaining advantage and making a good deal.  He transported his business approach to the philanthropic activities that filled his later years.  Heads of colleges and other charitable entities were not always tuned into his style.  Muriel and he were a close team, always speaking as a single voice.  She too had a sharp eye for the right deal, and together they could intimidate an unwary college president.

     "Despite warnings and concerns from board members and others, I went forward with the Bermans, encouraged by Van Ness, who saw in them the biggest hope for a heroic development drama."

     Martin asked, "You were a reluctant suitor?"

     Bodger said, "Not reluctant.  Careful.  I suspect that the Bermans came to respect my caution as they came to believe in my desire to go forward.  I was cautious partly because of fear of some on the board that the college would be used for the Bermans' personal purposes at the expense of institutional mission and priorities.  I did not want to get too far ahead of that view.  The Bermans for their part were cautious for fear of being taken for granted once they committed their gift."

     "This was a very personal matter for you and them," Martin said.

     Bodger carefully replied, "Without question, the Berman Museum would not exist if it had not been for the steady growth of personal trust between us, abetted by trust and encouragement from Bill Heefner and a few others on the board.  From the start, Bill supported a Berman agenda as expansive as we could make it.  For it would complement his personal interest in advancing the arts on campus through the music program."

     "So, the subtext of the Berman Museum project," said Martin, "was the cultivation of a relationship."

     "It was the prerequisite for the project," Bodger replied.  "And it was the source of benefits for the college and my leadership that went far beyond the museum project.  The Bermans bestrode a broad stage.  It extended beyond America to Europe and Israel and even Japan.  They never hesitated to bring the college and me onto that stage with them.

     "Their circle of friends and acquaintances included, for example, medical pioneer Jonas Salk and his spouse, Francoise Gilot, once Picasso's partner and mother of his children.  It included writer James Michener.  Phil had served in the South Pacific with Michener in World War II.  He remembered when Michener and he met the original of the character Bloody Mary in Michener's story, South Pacific.  Honoring his old friendship with Phil, Michener made the trip to Collegeville to keynote the dedication of the Berman Museum.  The Bermans visited with Henry Moore and Lynn Chadwick, England's preeminent sculptors.  Through Martin Meyerson, president emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, an old friend, Phil helped persuade Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress, to visit the college.  And so on.  Phil and Muriel managed their network of friendships and relationships with a joy of living that infected the air around them.  This became a resource for the college too as our relationship matured.

     "There actually were deep foundations that augured success for the relationship between the Bermans and the college.  We were not just getting acquainted for the first time. Phil's feelings about Ursinus were favorably colored by his youthful adventure as a freshman at the college in 1932-33.  He enjoyed telling the story of his daily jaunt down the Perkiomen Valley by train from his home near Pennsburg to take classes.  He dropped out after one year and never returned to college.  That may have made the memory of that one year as a student long ago more precious to him.  When he was a powerhouse in the civic life of Allentown, Phil and Allentown newspaper publisher William Reimert became friendly and mutually supportive.  Reimert, of the class of '24, served for many years on the college's board of directors and presided over it for some years before his death in the late 1960s.  Reimert saw to it that Berman received an honorary degree from the college.  When Wismer Hall opened in 1965 with a small gallery for art in the back of the auditorium, the Bermans were quick to agree to display works from their collection at an opening exhibition.  The then-president of the college, Donald L. Helfferich, and the Bermans got along amiably, albeit cautiously.

"The legitimacy of the college's need for an art program also helped solidify the relationship.  Phil was an entrepreneur first and last, and Muriel had the same instinct.  They both saw that a museum would be more than an educational resource on campus.  It would become a new indicator of quality for the college in the marketplace.  A marriage of art education with marketing was just right to them, as it was to us.

"My relationship with the Bermans began a few years after I became president.  They brought Glenn Zweygardt and other young sculptors to the fore, and I decided to accept Glenn's 'Upheaval II,' a piece of rude rusted steel sculpture, taken from twisted wreckage created by a major hurricane.  This and other abstract work kept the campus buzzing and kept our relationship cooking.  Campus critics of the very contemporary stuff appearing on campus had to take a second breath in 1983.  The Bermans agreed to commission Michael Price to do a statue of our college namesake.  Price's sensitive and thoroughly representational rendering showed campus critics that the Bermans had eclectic tastes that did not exclude traditional work.  The unveiling of that piece took place at the 400^th commemoration of the life of our namesake. 

"The personal bond between us tightened in the summer of 1987.  Phil and Muriel organized an elaborate two-week tour to Israel for a dozen or so people, all expenses paid.  In the group were Phil's daughter Nancy and her husband Allan Bloch; Martin Meyerson and his wife Margie; Robert Smith, erstwhile head of the Glenmede Trust Company, manager of Pew charities, and his wife Tamara; Joseph Rishel and Anne d'Harnoncourt, husband and wife, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Eric Outwater and his wife Myra Goldfarb, a writer from the Lehigh Valley.  We traveled the length of Israel with our private guide in a private bus.  We met many of Israel's political leaders, including the prime minister and Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem.  Kollek was a long-time Berman friend.  We were in Jerusalem for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.  The Bermans gave a massive Liberman sculpture to the Jerusalem Foundation headed by Kollek, and the dedication of "Peace" was a highlight of the trip.  We met veterans of the '47 battle for independence and our guide was a veteran of the '67 war against Egypt.  We met Moshe and Trude Dothan, world-renowned archaeologists at Hebrew University, who enjoyed backing from the Bermans for their work.  The Bermans, including Nancy, who had done a summer of digging in Israel while she was an undergraduate at Wellesley, had friends everywhere in Israel.  Tiberias, it turned out, was a sister city of Allentown, PA, owing to the initiative of Phil and Muriel years before.  The Bermans were buying sculpture by young Israeli artists and having it placed in towns like Tiberias.  It seemed as if we went to a public dedication every day in the week.  The bonds we made on that bus trip with the Bermans and their band of friends lasted for many years afterward."

Martin raised a finger for a moment in silence and carefully asked, "After such an experience, courtesy of the Bermans, were you still in a position to be cautious about the museum project?"

"I think so.  The Bermans wanted to see whether I was a trustworthy partner, I think.  The total immersion of a trip like that allowed them to see Margot and me without mirrors.  Whether or not they intended it, it also allowed me to see what kind of partners they would be.  I obviously came down on the affirmative side.  Though they enjoyed their place with the rich and powerful, they were personally unpretentious.  Phil never forgot his roots in rural Pennsylvania Dutch country.  I liked that about him and I think he liked my common origins.  The trip allowed us both to conclude that we could trust one another.

"I called for a special board meeting in December 1987, when the agreement with the Bermans received approval.  They would give art and cash while the college would foot the bill for renovating the old library building, now the college union.  The Bermans became involved as we went to the market for a director.  They and the college were happy with Lisa Tremper, fresh from the graduate program at the University of Southern California and a position with the Armand Hammer Foundation, where she helped manage Hammer's traveling collection.  Lisa was Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Richmond, full of energy and ideas, flexible and fun to work with.  Flamboyant on the surface, she proved to have solid stuff and stayed the course for many years."

Martin said, "And so the museum project went forward.  At the same time, if I understand the story, Phil was negotiating with Lynn Chadwick to cast a large number of his sculptures for an American venue."

Bodger said, "With the death of Henry Moore, Chadwick, many thought, was the king of British contemporary sculpture.  The Bermans had bought his work and had become personally acquainted with him and his wife.  Phil and Chadwick agreed on a casting of more than a hundred pieces of his work, some of it large for outdoors, more of it small for museum display.   The entire collection was a gift from the Bermans to the college.  Margot and I visited the Chadwicks at their country estate, Lypiatt, in Gloucestershire, in the summer of 1988.  Our mission was to assure Chadwick that the college and we were worthy stewards.  He flew over on the Concorde for a visit on campus in the fall of 1988.  The Chadwick collection was worth an incredible amount on the market, though the terms were that we would not sell.  The whole Chadwick transaction, occurring as we negotiated the final terms of the Bermans' gift for the museum, gave the museum project itself a world-class air.

"We had our opening in 1989, featuring James Michener speaking outdoors to a crowd of students and faculty, alumni, townspeople.  It was great.  We held the customary formal dinner and the inaugural exhibit featured favorites from the Bermans' collection, showing their eclectic 'passion for art.'"

Martin said, "You absorbed a fair amount of criticism for the museum.  Any regrets?"

"None," Bodger said.  "We spent more than we planned to, of course."

"One always does," Martin said.

"But the museum was our most visible sign of change from the old college into something new.  The negative criticism was small by my estimation, spray from the breaking wave.  I never doubted for a minute that we were doing the right thing."

Martin encouraged Bodger to say more about other "fruits of success," signs that the college was "arriving." 

Fruits of success—F.W. Olin Hall for the humanities 

Bodger replied, "The museum in my mind said it all without having to say a word.  Indeed, securing the commitment of the Bermans significantly influenced the F. W. Olin Foundation to choose us as one of their two winners in 1988.  Phil Berman, having signed on, did all he could to endorse the college with the foundation.  Lawrence Milas, head of the Foundation, saw the Berman commitment as a sign of life and progress."

Martin said, "How envious we other presidents in Pennsylvania were of your success with Olin.  And regretful in a way, for we knew that Olin distributed gifts by state.  Once it made an award in Pennsylvania, it would not do so again for some time.  So you put a whole bunch of wannabes like me out of the running."

Bodger and Martin talked further about the unique place of the F. W. Olin Foundation.  It was the only major foundation in the nation to give the entire amount needed for a building.  A college could not add other funds from elsewhere.  Olin had a construction management team that followed construction from start to finish and controlled the disbursement of construction funds.  In its application procedures, it was fiercely independent of "pull."  Competition was intense. Milas had his own fine sense of protocol for applicants.  For years, the  veteran development staffer, Frank Smith, had paid the college's respects to Olin in Milas's New York office, but the time to apply was slow to come.  Urged on by Van Ness, Bodger decided that the clear signs of new strength, symbolized in the museum plans and Heefner's support of music and other gifts, indicated that the time had come.  Architect Peter Saylor took a critical part in the development of the proposal and accompanied Bodger on his visit with Milas. 

"The amazing thing about our proposal," Bodger said, "was that it did not offer a plan for the building.  Saylor created a master plan for the campus that placed the proposed building right in the middle.  Olin wanted to make a big impact on a campus, and our plan showed that it would do that. Our proposal of course did specify the academic program for the building, the number of rooms and so on.  But except for a footprint on the master plan, it lacked an architectural design.  We told Milas that Saylor would design the building when he gave us the award."

Martin said, "This was close to being foolhardy."

"But it was the right strategy," Bodger said.  "Milas and his board bought into our story that we were a college demonstratively on the move.  It showed in the success of the capital campaign, in the decision to do the Berman museum, in our hiring of well-credentialed new faculty, and so on.  By giving our college their money and therefore their endorsement, Olin would give us the kick that would take us to a new level of perceived and real achievement.  Milas liked to deal with seasoned presidents, not newcomers, and I clearly was seasoned.  He did not like to give to those that already had, such as Swarthmore.  He had a kind of democratic sense that Olin money ought to go to aspiring colleges that could be excellent if they had just an extra measure of support.  We certainly needed an extra measure of support and certainly had not yet arrived.  So, our situation at that moment happened to match Olin's ideas.  Despite Larry Milas's claim to objectivity, I have to say that our board members who met with him, along with Phil Berman, felt good vibes.  There was something about us that caught his fancy."

"How did he react to you?" Martin asked.

"I think we hit it off," Bodger said.  "You know when you are on the same wavelength."

"And when you're not."

On 28 August 1988, Milas came to campus for an announcement of the Olin decision to award $5.37 million for a new academic building.  Bodger produced the student newspaper reporting the event, complete with a photo of Milas with Phil Berman, Peter Saylor, and himself.

The college and one other were the only two winners out of a field of 75 that had been invited to submit final proposals that year.  The newspaper reported how Milas explained why Olin picked the college.  He said that it showed strong and active leadership from both the administration and the board.  It had growing strength in the quality of students.  (Milas also mentioned growth in numbers, though that picture changed from year to year in the depressed teenage market conditions.)  It had a faculty committed to teaching, excellent financial management, strong annual fund support from board, alumni, and others.

Bodger said, "The Olin project had a domino effect on the physical plant.  We had to move the bookstore, which occupied the building site.  We had to close the old vehicular street that ran from one end of campus to the other.  It became the grand brick-paved pedestrian spine of the campus that ties Berman at one end to Olin, Wismer, and Myrin library in the middle to residence halls and the science complex at the far end.  As we were seeking the Olin grant, we were building a new underground utility tunnel on that spine.  The mud, ugliness, and disruption of that ditch caused us grief and may have persuaded some prospective students to turn us down.  So when the new promenade appeared in the wake of Olin, it was like finding ourselves on a new campus."

Martin said, "Such dramatic physical changes quickly become digested and taken for granted."

"Still," Bodger insisted, "they evoke positive feelings even when people don't know why." 

Fruits of success—Middle States approved 

"Meanwhile," Martin probed, "with Berman booming and Olin on the way up, the Middle States team was coming to campus to evaluate how truthful all your self-proclaimed steps to glory really were."

     Bodger said, "John Pilgrim orchestrated the ten-year self-study.  I promoted him from executive assistant in 1988 as we were getting the self-study into final shape.  He replaced Nelson Williams as the business and finance vice president.  I had made Nelson a vice president when we hired Van Ness at the vice presidential level.  Pilgrim naturally expected to inherit the same rank and he did.  To maintain parity—and some peace--among my senior staff, this meant Dean Akin also received the additional title of vice president for academic affairs.  So, I started with no vice presidents and now had several."

Martin said something about the necessities of senior staff development but returned to the Middle States visit.  "A team could have come in and thrown cold water on the grand narrative of 'arriving' that you were advancing.  Did the visit help or hurt progress?"

Bodger replayed his refrain of approbation for the Middle States process.  He had sought to make virtues of the necessities of reaccreditation ever since the 1979 self-study, which keynoted the first phase of his administration.

"Helped," he said.  "Our study looked back over the decade to indicate our direction.  The cumulative effect of that summary was affirmed by the visitors."

Bodger pulled out the weighty 1989 document and opened it to page 4 for Martin to peruse.  Martin saw an array of changes in the ten years.  New majors included anthropology and sociology and communication arts and extensive revisions of major course requirements.  The residential life program, freshly minted in 1979, evolved and now included enrichment through intellectual and cultural offerings.  The music program took on a whole new life, owing to the support of William F. Heefner.  Academic computing was no longer a telephone wire to Dartmouth's time-sharing system; it had its own extensive mainframe system, a personal computer network, two microcomputer labs, and a collection of microcomputers through academic departments.  A faculty development program had trained many faculty in the use of the computer in their fields.  The new art museum of course received prominent mention.  Enrollment of residential students increased in number and diversity.  Faculty grew in size and took part in more professional development, owing to the faculty development program, by now fully institutionalized.  Salaries were improving.  The administrative staff was more professionalized, a goal Middle States had suggested in years past.  The college was carrying a small and manageable debt and had one of the strongest balance sheets among independent colleges in Pennsylvania.  The report noted the successful $20 million "Patterns of the Future" campaign.  It also noted the automation and renovation of Myrin Library, new athletic fields, and the Residential Village.  And it noted the comprehensive plan for the physical plant, precipitated by the Olin building project.  That building was under construction as the college made finishing touches to the report. 

Fruits of success—curriculum revision changed the tone 

Bodger said, "From an educational viewpoint, of course, the self-study mainly was valuable because it pushed the dean and faculty into a study of the college's educational philosophy and goals.   The faculty was anxious for a new design that would cut their course loads, give greater reward for professional activity, provide them and students with more depth and less superficial 'coverage' of materials.  The dean and other key members of faculty had insisted on a review of philosophy and goals before the faculty dove into a wholesale revision of the curricular offerings as such.  They correctly felt the need for a roadmap so that special interests did not run amok and leave the college and students with a badly lobbied result."

Martin said, "But comprehensive curriculum changes always are 'badly lobbied' results.  The structure of knowledge always grows from a social process that at bottom is political.  In undergraduate colleges, I've found that the limits to resources and the historically strong departments are the biggest influences."

Bodger said, "Given all that, Bill Akin and his committees, I thought, produced a design that at least was self-consistent, and it resonated with our reaffirmation of the practical values of liberal education."

"Right," said Martin, "its main virtue, I bet, was negative—it said by implication at least that the liberal education curriculum would NOT include such and so."

Bodger smiled, "You've been around the circuit too long.  Of course, you are right.  On the other hand, for our institution, at least, some innovations occurred.  Freshmen now took a four-hour liberal studies seminar designed to model the intellectual life of liberal inquiry.  Effective communication in writing and speaking and in quantitative skills gained new priority for all students. 

"The faculty tried to interpret the old 'distribution requirements' in new language, which in many areas led to new introductory courses.  It came up with 'conceptual communities.'  There were few arguments over naming 'awareness of science and society' and 'awareness of society and the individual' as conceptual communities.  However, sparks flew over 'awareness of historical consciousness and the individual.'  This latter had the effect of ordering humanistic knowledge by reference to historical development.  It offended those who believed that the humanities should line up differently, in particular, according to philosophical concepts."

Martin observed, "Your dean was a historian, I believe."

"And of course the non-historians saw in this move a deaconal bias.  But it won the vote.  I thought the strength of what came out was its acknowledgment of the instrumental nature of disciplinary strategies of thought."

"Truth began to be acknowledged as 'truth,'" laughed Martin.

"In any event, the new system precipitated four-hour courses where from time immemorial we had mostly three-hour courses.  It led to a reduction in over-all course loads for faculty and students.  Depth won over breadth.  Along the way, we ditched our ancient and honorable grading system based on 100 and adopted the 4 point system that had become the norm in higher education while we stood still.  We urged students more strenuously to study abroad, emphasized diversity in the curriculum as well as in the social make-up of the campus community.  We were doing all we could to look more like an elite little college worthy of note on the broader stage and less like a parochial regional institution with its feet buried in the past and traditional pre-med.

"In the course of a couple of years, we hired a whole cohort of bright new faculty.  Many of them were Phi Beta Kappa and deliberately hired because of that.  Most of them had ambitions to make a mark in the scholarship of their discipline, while they obviously also wanted to influence bright young undergraduates to recreate their own excitement over ideas and learning.  The new curriculum, built on a conscious attempt to articulate a pedagogical vision, gave them the signal that this was a compatible place for them."

"Okay," Martin said, "the picture begins to fill in.  You were damned determined to get a Phi Beta Kappa chapter before you were finished.  The Middle States outcome helped that."

Bodger said, "The Middle States team was supportive of our advances.  In reaffirming our accreditation, Bob Chambers, Western Maryland president who was then chairing Middle States, wrote, 'The Commission commends the college for the excellent and productive use it made of the self-study process and in particular for the major effort in the evaluation of the curriculum.  The college, in the words of the evaluation team chair, is an institution 'with an enduring tradition, a college which knows what it is."'

Martin wondered why the team had not picked up as keynote the college's movement to a new level of quality in the marketplace rather than emphasizing tradition.  Bodger answered that the team had no college president on it and lacked a perspective on institutional development.

"Actually," Bodger continued, "their 'gig' list was pretty extensive.  They had suggestions and criticisms of our Evening School adjunct faculty policy, our enrollment targets, our financial aid budget, excesses of our Greek system, our reluctance to take on new capital debt, our affirmative action policies and procedures.  They offered a list of specific suggestions for additional faculty positions in individual departments.  I wrote a letter disagreeing with or correcting most of their observations on these points.  Looking at it now, I sound pretty self-righteous."

"Self-confident, probably," Martin offered. 

Fruits of success—Phi Beta Kappa finally noticed 

Bodger nodded in agreement:  "Right.  I felt we were on top of our game.  The faculty's Phi Beta Kappa group reinforced that feeling some months after the Middle States visit.  In October 1989, they submitted a general report to Phi Beta Kappa, having been invited to do so after having been rebuffed many times over in the preceding decades.  The PBK report drew substantially from the Middle States self-study.  When the Society scheduled a team to visit campus for two days in February 1990, we all got excited.  The visit went well.  The team consisted of two emeritus professors, historian LeRoy Graf of the University of Tennessee and physicist Albert Bartlett of Colorado University.  After they reported favorably to the Society, in May 1990 mathematician Jef Neslen, who headed our committee, got good news.  The Committee on Qualifications would recommend us to the Senate.  If the Senate approved in December 1990, the recommendation would go to the whole Society Council in October 1991."

Martin said, "And it all happened and the princess came out of the pumpkin."

"What made it the best thing to happen in our 'arriving' story was its gratuitous nature.  Phi Beta Kappa did virtually nothing except proclaim self-superiority to the world.  The purity of the message was great.  It is the essence of academic elitism.  For decades, the college stood outside the castle, shivering and wishing.  When we got in, it of course resulted not from wishing but from all the huffing and puffing of the past years, trying to 'arrive' in demonstrable ways."

Martin said, "Many might have wondered why your college didn't have a chapter years before."

Bodger replied, "Many did.  The reason looking back is simple.  We remained in a parochial trough longer than some liberal arts colleges of similar character and perceived quality.  All the indicators of quality had to move before we could look like a serious candidate.  And that happened.  That's why I did not try to be too discriminating in our development agenda as we were coming through the 1980s.  We needed more quality in just about everything.  Gradually, it came along.  So, the seal of good housekeeping from Phi Beta Kappa was a victory for our faculty first but it was a boon to the institution and my administration in wonderful ways.

     "In that period other good news might have helped our case with Phi Beta Kappa.  The Howard Hughes Medical Institute awarded us $500,000 under its undergraduate biological sciences educational initiative.  Hughes had turned us down in its first round of undergraduate grantsmanship.  To come back with a victory like this was incredibly encouraging on the science end of campus and, indeed, throughout.  Academically, it put our science program out front and encouraged newer faculty lights just coming aboard.  It built on a $480,000 grant for science that came in the year before from our long-standing supporter, Pew Charitable Trusts." 

Fruits of success—an altered setting for student life 

Martin asked if it was time yet to talk about clouds.

"Not quite," said Bodger.  "We've touched on most of the signs of 'arriving' but not all.  The administration of student life was always in process, ever since I led the changes in 1978 that loosened the laces on student behavior.  In the intervening decade, student life dean J. Houghton Kane steered us between control and freedom, always proclaiming 'education' as the singular purpose of all social life on campus.  My mind blurs when I try to recall the conflicts over drinking rules, over rules against hazing in Greek pledging, over the shift from the college union building to Wismer as a center for student life.  We had a succession of staff members who came to us from graduate programs in student personnel and counseling.  There was productive discord between their formal professional training, which was being applied across the country on campuses of every variety, and Kane's approach.  His legal mind combined with his finely honed moral sense to make him an unusual resource in the constant battle to make student life programs creative.

"My main impression as I headed into my final years in office was that we had altered the conduct of student life.  I felt we had found some kind of creative control that we had been seeking for years--partly because of internal changes and partly because of external changes.

"The collective efforts of our whole student life staff drove this change.  In addition to them, I also had an unorthodox student life resource person in my executive assistant.  M. Scott Landis doubled as campus minister and my administrative aide.  He worked directly with Kane and the counseling staff.  He carried 'pastoral care' into the nitty-gritty stuff of student culture with a special intensity.  He was hands-on in the most helpful way.  Probably the most dramatic project he undertook was to lead a support team to help John Chang, '90, make it through college.  John became quadriplegic after his freshman year in a surfing accident.  He needed total attention to his personal needs every day.  With Scott's devotion to his needs, John graduated as president of his class.  In this extraordinary way, the college illustrated a commitment to educating handicapped students.

"My point of view on student life administration was inevitably influenced by my history.  I was chiefly responsible for altering the prescriptive parochial system of controlling students that came down from an earlier generation.  I never ceased to wonder if I had unleashed the social whirlwind and would not be able to control it.  That is why I had a mixture of people with strong principles, such as Kane and Landis, along with professionally trained young people from graduate schools of student personnel.  I didn't trust one or the other alone to be able to handle students.  The faculty members of course exercised their influence on student attitudes, but they were day workers.  Most had only a dim understanding of how intense social life was in residence halls.  We had to have around-the-clock presence and flexible policy approaches.  This was the price we paid for broadening student freedom and trying to balance it with student responsibility."

Martin said, "A price you had to pay if you were going to escape from a parochial orientation and the charge of hypocrisy from students trapped by double standards."

"Sure," said Bodger.  "In the decade or more after we loosened the rules, the larger society swung toward a more conservative position, especially on youthful drinking and on hazing.  Pennsylvania came up with new laws that forced colleges to institute tighter controls.  In some sense, when we caught up with the social revolution we were already behind the next curve, which was seeking more controls."

Martin said, "My college and yours zigged and zagged on about the same course over the period—like so many of our peers.  The social climate became more and more challenging and complicated.  We started educating students on AIDS in 1987 and distributing condoms if they wanted them.  Women raised concerns about sexual harassment to a new level as the old social conventions disappeared—or became illegal.  We overhauled campus security after the Clery murder at Lehigh University and the Pennsylvania legislature passed new requirements for security reporting.  We managed a more complex campus society as we added more non-WASPS to the student population, driven by a strong push from Middle States to diversify."

Bodger said, "Our stories are similar.  In addition, this college had to adopt an emergency radiological plan.  We were only a few miles away from the Limerick nuclear generating station, which started producing electric power in 1987."

Martin said, "That proximity surely didn't make students feel more comfortable."

Bodger said, "Not at first, I guess.  People didn't notice so much after a while, either on campus or in the region.  Housing boomed in the ten-mile Limerick radius, contrary to predictions.  Our area became the fastest-growing residential area in the state.  The farms disappeared.  Although we continued to notify students and staff periodically of emergency procedures in case of a nuclear accident, they acquired an air of unreality.  But the real presence of Limerick and the rapid development of the Perkiomen Valley placed our old rural college clearly in a new environment, with all the complexities of postmodern America on the students' doorsteps.  The traditional student gripe that Collegeville was Deadsville began to lower in volume."

Martin said, "For better and worse, I'm certain that managing in Deadsville was simpler than managing in a heated-up contemporary climate."

Bodger said, "Musser Hall for international studies became a symbol of the new residential model of student life.  There the college was trying to merge living and learning in one setting.  Faculty were directly involved along with student life administrators.  We wanted to think of this as the model of residence hall life for the future.  The model was slow to replicate itself, but at least it stood as a goal.  Kane and I talked about it as 'the social life of the mind.'"

Martin said, "A fruit of success that was trying to ripen." 

Fruits of success—Centennial Conference 

Bodger said that developments in the intercollegiate sports field around this time abetted the college's drive to differentiate itself in the liberal arts college marketplace.  The Centennial Football Conference had sprung into life in the 1980s as a maverick move by eight Middle Atlantic Conference members.  The initiative seemed to come from the presidents of the central Pennsylvania group, Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg, and Dickinson.  They and others were frustrated by the failure of Middle Atlantic Conference (MAC) to unravel a complex and long-standing knot of scheduling problems.  The breakaway group also had increasing concerns about an excessive emphasis on winning in MAC and the expanding athletic budgets and recruiting machinery--and standards--that this entailed.  They worried that too much emphasis on football in some colleges was translating into not enough emphasis on academic standards for athletes.  They couched these worries, however, in careful language, seeking to avoid giving offense to fellow presidents and their institutions in MAC. 

When the group announced its decision to schedule football outside MAC, it emphasized that its primary goal was compatible scheduling.  It would aim at the simplest and most unbureaucratic style possible.  It would stress the love of the sport rather than the need to win.

The conference members remained in MAC for all other sports.  Nevertheless, many other MAC presidents did take offense and said so forthrightly to the eight Centennial Conference presidents.  They saw that the newly aligned group would inevitably claim to have academic and athletic priorities that differentiated them from the others.

After several years of life as an informal, collegial body, dominated by the presidents, the Centennial Conference took the step that its critics predicted at the outset that it would take.  It pulled out of MAC altogether and created an all-sports conference, complete with a full-time executive director.

Martin said, "You know I've forgiven you, Bodger.  But I was one of those who protested at your pretentiousness and high-handedness at the time.  You left us out in the cold.  We all saw the market position that inevitably would accrue to the conference.  It spelled elitism and superior selectivity.  When the papers picked up on the clever phrase the 'egghead eight', we gritted our teeth.  Many of us remaining in the MAC could show indicators of academic quality that were better than yours.  You took 'centennial' as your marker because all of you were more than a century old.  Big deal, we said—many of us were older.  It was a grand marketing strategy, at least for some of you.  We just regretted being overlooked."

Bodger acknowledged that the power of the conference to position the college was certainly in his mind as the negotiations raced ahead in the beginning.  "But I did not think it out in advance," he continued.  "It was so right that I didn't feel the need to spell it all out for myself or the board.  Our dean and athletics director were keen on the idea from the start.  So, we went ahead.  I admit that when the football group expanded to include all sports and left MAC in the last phase of my administration, we were far more calculating about marketing ourselves as a member of the conference."

Martin added, "The indicators of quality of the Centennial members clearly would become benchmarks for your college and others, even if you did not hold them up as such in the beginning."

Bodger added, "It took the administration after mine to seize that strategy by the throat and put it to full use.  Through the rest of my tenure, the Centennial was mainly a symbolic marker."

"A kind of Phi Beta Kappa tune on a different instrument?" Martin ventured.

Bodger waved the idea away with a smile but doubtless saw the point. 

"Clouds"—limits on revenue, growth in spending 

"Clouds now?" asked Martin.

Finally, Bodger turned to problems that shadowed the garnering of the fruits of success as the 1990s opened.

He said that the considerable financial strength of the college was proving to be insufficient to cover the growing expenses of "success." Some on the board and on the staff favored a dramatic increase in tuition charges to enrich net revenues.  Bodger, however, feared significant market resistance to dramatically higher charges.  His cautious stance prevented the college from generating the new revenues needed from tuition. 

The market for new students grew more and more competitive as the number of teenagers continued downward.  The college failed markedly to bring in a robust number of freshmen in the fall of 1989—nearly 50 fewer than the hoped-for 300.  This led to a change in leadership in admissions.  Lorraine Zimmer had bravely carried the burden through the 1988-89 year following the shock of her husband's suicide.  Bodger shifted her to a less stressful role in student life after the year ended and brought aboard Richard DiFeliciantonio from Swarthmore College's admissions office.  He started an even more aggressive market-driven strategy for recruitment, but admissions continued to suffer for the next two years until a complete overhaul kicked in.

Bodger continued, "The tone of my stewardship began to shift to a darker shade as the problem of matching revenues with spending levels grew.  Pew Charitable Trusts, our long-time supporter, now on a new mission, and other national voices were by now decrying the escalation of college costs.  They were calling for structural reform of finances.  Grants from such sources would come only if you could show evidence of cost control.  This public debate was creating a new zeitgeist for college leaders across the nation.  The Ivies were jumping all over themselves to show cost containment and operational restructuring.  The media enjoyed a new era of doubting higher education because of its alleged profligate ways and its failure to show measurable outcomes in return for high tuition charges.  Voices from the national higher education establishment, not to mention self-proclaimed gurus and pundits, were telling us that the time had come for institutional restructuring, for doing better with less."

Martin said, "How well I know."

Bodger found a document in a pile.  "Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education—we gave him an honorary degree years before--said it this way in his 1993 annual report: 'Many institutions are facing the challenges of scarcity head-on.  Beyond simply cutting their budgets, colleges and universities nationwide are engaged in restructuring, resource reallocation, strategic planning, and total quality management—an indication that our enterprise remains vital and responsive and committed to serving its many constituents.'  Bob hit the main buzz words of the moment."

Martin said, "But it was serious—and lasting--business."

Bodger continued, "The gadflies added to the official voices.  Mel Elfin of US News & World Report perfected the commercialization of the college rating game during the 1980s.  As the issue of escalating college tuition rose higher among public concerns, the voices of critics such as Elfin also rose.  He appeared at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers in 1994.  He accused leaders—that's you and me—of being in denial about the problems involved in restructuring to save costs.  He accused the faculty of failing to recognize that they worked for institutions that were essentially economic--failing to face up to supply and demand.  He thumped the drum for accountability—what were people getting for all the money they were paying for tuition?  'Get real,' he said.

"This reinforced the insight that John Pilgrim had of a tightening financial situation in our little shop.  He persuaded me of the accuracy of his dire predictions about our financial prospects in the years ahead.  His projections graphically showed that on existing assumptions we would not bring in enough revenue to cover our expenses by 1995-96.  And he emphasized that we had few strategic options at our command to change this scenario.  So, the euphoria of our successes lingered in the campus psyche while we wondered how to persuade the faculty and the larger community that a new and tougher day was dawning.  This led to a final big effort on my part in my last months to educate the community and change our revenue-expense ratio."   

"Clouds"—Recruiting new classes grew harder 

Bodger continued: "Our disastrous admission results in the fall of 1989 did not improve enough in 1990.  In 1991 the incoming class total again dropped to around 250, at least 50 off our target.  These were big subtractions of revenue for a small operating budget like ours.   Ricky D. was getting his head around the game but was still learning—and teaching us the day after he learned.

"After that failure, we went into full battle mode to recruit the class to enter in fall 1992.   I gave recruiting my primary attention.  Ricky D. threw off all lingering restraints and entered the fray like the feisty southpaw pitcher he had been in college.  He went after the goal as if he were pitching in a championship playoff game.  He was stung, I think, by the shortfall under his leadership.  He was still learning the ropes as new admissions head, and now he learned more quickly.  We coordinated the efforts of the athletics department, my office, financial aid, academic departments, and admissions.  The whole campus became a welcome mat to prospective students in a new way.  We laid to rest lingering notions of equity in distributing financial aid.  Instead, we cranked up a system of financial aid incentives based on the likelihood of a student to accept.  Our money went to the students who would be most likely to come.  Collaborating with an econometrician in the economics department, Rick adopted an elaborate multivariate analysis of candidates' characteristics, which pointed to their inclination to accept.  My office took a direct role by orchestrating a personal mail campaign to selected alumni.  I sought their personal referrals of good applicants.  Like other strategies, it was productive.  We opened the fall 1992 academic year with more than 400 freshmen, probably more than in any previous class since the post-World War II years, when returning GI's inflated the numbers.

            "Even that success, however, did not assure success in following years, for the number of kids would decline even more dramatically through 1995.  Like other successes, the turnaround in recruiting gave people an impression that all was well.  But Pilgrim and I were still troubled by the financial trends.  We still saw problems in the continuing rise in faculty expectations for more and more spending on academic quality." 

"Clouds"--A new sense of disconnecting from the community 

Martin said, "If faculty thought the spigot was still open and you were planning to slow the flow, you needed to be talking that talk before surprising them with the tough news."

     "In one sense," Bodger said, "they believed a little too much in our ability to continue succeeding. In truth, many of my senior staff administrators also had a hard time buying the Pilgrim numbers.  They too were believers in our successes.  They had bought my long-told tale of hope.  By 1990, I was trying to season their thinking without destroying their confidence.

"Through most of my years as president, my message was that we had or would get the resources to do what had to be done to claim our place finally in the sun.  I could say that only because I had begun with a stable balance sheet and resources that were not eaten up in debt management.  Bill Pettit, my predecessor, absorbed massive faculty criticism in his years as president. A considerable amount of it arose from his unwillingness to spend.  He felt so threatened by the external conditions of the mid-1970s that he preferred to take blame for preserving resources.  He feared blowing the whole financial soundness of the college.  That was for him a politically damaging position, and I could probably agree that he was too cautious.  But I was grateful that he handed me a financial situation that allowed me to be as bullish as I was.  So, even my closest allies, I think, had trouble understanding that I was beginning to sing a different financial tune by 1990."

Martin said, "This test of your leadership differed from any before it, I suspect."

Bodger said that was so.  He felt that in a fundamental way he failed to do what he had succeeded in doing in earlier stages of his administration.

Martin the consultant said, "This is an important insight.  Please explain."

Bodger said, "I felt that I failed to connect my sense of the college's need to the sense of the community.  In the beginning of my administration, I did not doubt for an instant that I had to change student life policies.  The community had a score of ideas about how I should do that but the consensus was overwhelming that I had to do it.  My feeling of being supported was palpable. I felt in synch and took all the risks without thinking twice.

"A feeling of connectedness persisted in my mind through the next decade.  It enabled the Patterns for the Future campaign to take flight in the mid-1980s without a lot of bitching and second-guessing.  I could feel in step with the rhythm of the campus.  I was aided in this when our son Kurt decided to attend the college and live with us in the president's house.  Elliott House at 785 Main became a friendly place for his friends.   They saw me with my necktie off, and I saw them as kids in the neighborhood rather than as my student customers.   Kurt's insights on the campus psyche were usually on target.   There was an organic flow that told me inside that I was on track.

"Throughout my tenure, I wrote a column nearly every week that appeared in the student newspaper.  I worried about usurping student space and ownership.  When editors changed, I usually offered, gently, to bow out.  But editors over the years were consistent in wanting my commentary on the flow of an academic year.  I confess that I enjoyed the journalistic discipline, which took me back to my undergraduate years when I wrote a political column for the very same pages.  The weekly trek from Elliott House to the newspaper office in Bomberger on deadline late in the evening became one of my favorite rituals.  The student editors were usually buried in the details of putting the paper together as I delivered my disk.  But we would exchange a few comments on this or that.  I imagine that students would not have seen significance in such casual exchanges, but, for me, they were important.  They were like holding my finger up to mark the direction of the wind."

Martin said, "You were probably as interested in what you did not hear as in what you heard."

Bodger said, "Such small exchanges helped reinforce my general sense that the college and I were still moving to the same beat.  On my tenth anniversary in office, in 1986, the newspaper ran a sympathetic interview on my years as president.  My tenth year was my personal high point, I think, though much would be accomplished well after that marker."

Martin said, "Many in the consulting game on college presidencies even then were arguing that a decade was time enough in which to put a distinctive stamp on a private college.  The mounting pressures since then have made it easy for some to argue that less than a decade should be the norm." 

Bodger said, "I spoke to Joseph Pirro, '87, the interviewer for that article, about my longevity in office.  In effect, I told Joe that I would decide on how long to stay at it depending on the degree to which my energy level held up and how much the college would benefit from my continued work."

Martin said, "That gave you plenty of wiggle room."

"And of course in the end I stayed at it--longer than I ever thought possible on that tenth anniversary.  By 1990-91, I was beginning to feel out of step as I tried to identify a new structure of resources in the light of the new financial constraints. I was beginning to lose the feeling that my voice was an instrument of the community.  Faculty and staff seemed to me to take my concerns about financial tightness at something less than face value, as if I had some other intention that I was not exposing.  After all, we had come through a period of years when many fruits of success had ripened.  People were unaccustomed to hearing bad news from my office.  I felt unable to persuade the campus of the unvarnished truth of where we were as an institution and what we had to be doing to sustain our success."

Martin said, smiling, "Surely you had not become just a voice in the wilderness."

"I guess there was a reservoir of respect, and people were probably reluctant to contradict my view of things.  But I had the feeling the reservoir was getting lower as my final years loomed.  Freshly hired new assistant professors perceived that I did not hear their concerns.  Some senior faculty, old fellow soldiers from the trenches, discreetly suggested that I move up to chancellor and hire a new president."

Martin reflected, "From my own experience and that of presidents with whom I've worked, I've come to think institutional leadership when effective has something of the tribal about it.  The leader and the tribe have an organic relationship and resonate to the collective awareness of things.  This overcodes the merely rational communications of a leader with employees about policy."

Bodger said, "Yes.  You might say that the organic tribal relationship lends meaning and credibility to efforts to communicate in the usual managerial way."

"Okay."

Bodger continued, "I guess I could say that I felt the relationship weakening between the tribe and me as we turned into the 1990s."

"And this was not just because you were becoming the messenger with bad news."

Bodger thought a minute.  He wanted to capture the sense of a senior president who was consolidating gains while instinctively anticipating an end of his tenure even before anyone expected that he wanted to leave—even before he himself was conscious of wanting to leave.  He finally took up his report to the board for the 1989-1990 fiscal year ending 30 June 1990.

"The keynote was our 'long march toward distinctiveness,'" Bodger said.  "I quoted the F. W. Olin Foundation's endorsement: 'The Foundation believes the college, already possessing high academic quality, will gain increasing notice in the years ahead and emerge as one of our nation's leading liberal arts colleges.'  Then I offered instances to illustrate our march forward.  The new curriculum began, setting a new academic tone for the 1990s.  The Berman Museum opened in 1989, bringing its enrichment and broader recognition in the Delaware Valley and beyond.  Students and faculty demonstrated serious moral concerns through a vital Coalition for the Environment.  The campus took new steps toward diversity, both in recruiting and in campus programming through an umbrella committee on minority affairs."

Bodger interjected that the administration, especially in the efforts of his assistant Scott Landis, tried to give the diversity agenda a thoughtful and positive flavor.  The college sought to strike a celebratory note.  He read from the document: "It is not enough to deal with 'the problem.'  A college with our principles and traditions, grounded in the United Church of Christ, and with our intimate scale, has an opportunity to foster diversity with a special style."

Each person, he said, was called on to celebrate the ethnic or racial characteristics not only of himself or herself but also—and with equal enthusiasm—of all the others in the community.  Encouraged by Scott Landis, Bodger urged that the college community make a celebration of its differences the very basis of its consensus.

"Sounds almost casuistical," Martin said.

"Yes, but we were determined to transcend guilt trips and blame games and make a more joyous sound, if we could.  And I had confidence in Scott to lead in that direction."

Continuing to scan the report, Bodger read that the outcome for minority enrollments in the class entering in the fall of 1990 would continue an upward trend, despite an over-all freshman yield that was less than planned.  His report noted the emphasis at commencement on the college's clear sense of its values.  This was expressed through high-achieving alumni in the commencement speech (Paul Doughty, '52), the baccalaureate speech (John Westerhoff, '54), and honorary degree citations (Doughty, Westerhoff, plus Ismar Schorsch, '57, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.)   All three were of Bodger's generation of students on campus; this set a tone that combined shared nostalgia with achievement.   The speech by John Chang, handicapped senior class leader, further symbolized the character of the college community.  His return to college after a devastating accident demonstrated his courage and the resolve of the college community to be supportive.

Bodger reported historic new levels of funds raised in 1989-90.  The newly designed campus was emerging with the rise of the Olin building and the central campus walk.  Signs of vitality showed in the capture of the national Division III championship for the second time in a row by the women's lacrosse team.  Bodger commended the Evening School for its continuing growth and maintenance of academic quality as the region began bursting its old rural bounds, opening new educational needs and institutional opportunities.

His wrap-up emphasized the strength of the board as the college's key resource.  He thanked Thomas P. Glassmoyer, '36, for his leadership through the 1980s and saluted William F. Heefner, 42, who would lead the board in the 1990s.

Martin said, "Our colleagues at sister institutions would have been pleased to have such a 'brag list' of achievements in their annual reports."

Bodger said, "I'm trying to say that, even with much to brag about, I could feel my administration reaching a state of advanced maturity.  This meant what no one, myself included, was yet ready to express—that the end of an administration had to be looming somewhere on the horizon."

Martin said, "That's when you decided to take a semester away from campus, in the fall of 1990, as I recall."

Bodger said, "I billed it as a period of personal renewal for Margot and me.  But I said I hoped to reflect on the college's directions.  A year before, in fall 1989, we had learned that our son was victimized by mental illness.  He had graduated from the college just a couple of years before we received this heavy news.  Doctors told us he would spend his life coping with it.  It took us a while to understand that we would spend the rest of our lives coping with it too.  It took even longer for us to understand how much that would change us.  Until now, I had sacrificed personal and family needs for the sake of the college's needs.  I don't think Margot could ever fully forgive me for this—rightly so, I'm afraid.  Now, I began slowly to see that this no longer could be my way of operating.  Through a botched dental operation, Margot had become a permanent pain victim herself, and that added to the refocusing of my attention.

"The time away certainly helped us get our bearings.  I prepared to teach a section of the new Liberal Studies Seminar for first-year students.  This academic exercise liberated me from the feeling of unremitting administrative weight.  I had spent little time in classes with students after becoming president.   It would be an indulgence to teach a class.  The readings surrounded a topic I dreamed up, 'the idea of the journey.'" 

Martin said, "That would seem to have fitted with your own situation at the time."

"It had a nice ring to it, and the open-endedness of discovery seemed to please students—just starting their college careers--when I returned and met them through the fall semester."

Martin, a psychologist by professional training, said that he had found it impossible to remain in the classroom after taking the presidency of his college.  Bodger nodded with understanding.  He said that the decision to teach the course was not just to give him a change of pace.  He wanted to demonstrate how important he thought that it was for the faculty to embrace the new curriculum, the centerpiece of which was the Liberal Studies Seminar.  Martin said that leading by doing in such a moment made great sense.

Bodger answered carefully, "But the leave from campus and my immersion in the weekly round of classes in the semester when I returned had unintended consequences that no one ever fully acknowledged or measured."

"Could this be the darkest cloud?" Martin asked. 

"Clouds"--color the administration gray 

"How can I put this accurately?" Bodger pondered.  "My fuel gauge was beginning to dip.  I really needed a break.  I went on leave only because by then I had a strong, experienced, stable senior staff.  The management arrangement left Scott Landis to run my daily mail and refer issues to the right senior staffer.  I unequivocally designated Bill Akin, who was now vice president for academic affairs as well as academic dean, as the officer in charge while I was absent.  But he did not get the temporary title 'acting president.'  Bill ran weekly meetings of the rest of the senior administrators, including Scott.  Bill and Scott both were consummate processors of administrative stuff, methodical, logical, and fair-minded.  They were conscious of the need for correct process as well as right action.  They also sought to protect the integrity of the president's office in my absence.

"The semester without me went swimmingly for the senior staff and, I think, for the campus.   When I returned and started my class in the second semester, it seemed sensible to continue operating much the same way.  Had we done anything else, the senior staff might have felt cut off from their newly won sense of confidence in running the place.  Landis enjoyed the facilitative role in my office—almost too much so in the eyes of some close to the operation.

"I laid out the rationale for keeping the staff as an operating committee.  It was, first, to 'make the daily operation of the college go as efficiently and effectively as possible,' as it had during my absence.  Second, it was to 'allow me to devote greater time to the financial development and public advocacy of the college.'  I told the faculty and staff I would involve myself less in campus matters because I would be involving myself more externally.  And that is what happened."

Martin said, "I'm going to guess the unintended consequence."

"Shoot," Bodger said.

"The disconnect with the tribe that you earlier perceived got worse.  The senior staff acted more and more as if you were not there.  The community began to wonder who was in charge."

Bodger said, "Everything seemed okay on the surface.  Those erosive forces doubtless were working, though.  I wrote some reflections on leave about the evolution and prospects for the college.  Mostly they went into a drawer and had little impact on anyone.  I did some theorizing about making the driving myth of the college that of 'informed work' but I never tried to implant it as a goal.  Ditto for some thoughts about 'the social life of the mind.'"

Martin said, "The truth seems to be that, despite time off, you were tired of leading.  After a while, one does it by rote and doesn't notice that the fire is not as bright—the voice of experience talking."

"Only a good friend would be so direct and so right," Bodger smiled.  He said that the anti-climactic nature of his return was comfortable for the staff and for him.  "It was bad statecraft, however," he continued.  "How clearly I remember consulting with Bill Akin and others about the need to convene an all-campus open meeting on the priorities and future of the college, a standard piece of my leadership in years past.  This would have preceded any recommendations about another capital campaign.  He and other senior staffers wondered what good it would do and worried that it might stir up resistance that was dormant.  I took that advice and regret it to this day.

"Instead of an anti-climactic re-entry, I should have reinvented my administration and called for bold discussions about new directions.  Re-connect with the tribe."

Martin raised a finger, "Alternatively, given your changing personal outlook, could you have announced plans for winding up your term of service?  This would have been a different way of maintaining stability.  It would not have had to be a hasty process."

"Exactly," said Bodger.  "Many believed that I intended my leave of absence to signal just that.  But on my return, I said nothing like that.  The effect on the community probably was a vague feeling of drift."

            "Color it gray," said Martin. 

"The Next Step" capital campaign became a last step 

Martin said, "So you went forward with plans for yet one more major capital campaign.  You saw it as a swan song, surely."

"Of course," Bodger said.  "My new vice president for development, Pete Scattergood, was a solid thinker and planner.  He and his predecessor, John Van Ness, differed in style.  John was aggressive and insistent.  Pete was quiet and accommodating but incredibly hard working and persistent.  John contributed to the sparks of an exciting agenda.  Pete had an unyielding integrity that made him good for the long haul.  When I took up the reins again in January 1990, Pete and his development staff were in deep conversation about capital needs with the board development committee.  They felt an urgency to do the preliminary work toward a new campaign.  I accepted their position mainly because I believed that in my last effort for the college I should try to cash in on the reputation among alumni and friends that I had been building through the years.  I might as well expend in fund-raising whatever good will I had accumulated, and then get out."

            Martin said, "Mounting capital campaigns was simply a way of structuring work in our generation of college leadership.  That old standard approach by the early 1990s was being challenged by more flexible and agile ways of attracting money."

Bodger said, "It had been my modus operandi and the board had bought it.  To run a final campaign seemed like the most natural thing for me to do.  I caught up with my followers, who had been busy identifying goals in my absence, and carried the recommendations to the board.  By June 1991, it gave provisional approval for a campaign.  By then, Bill Heefner was in the chair, and he was ordering events in the board in an effective way.  At the end of the 1991-92 academic year, we kicked off The Next Step campaign, aiming to raise $39 million for endowment, capital projects—especially the renovation of Wismer Hall as a student center—and operations.  Bill persuaded Tom Davis, '52, to chair the campaign.  Tom devoted himself to the work despite his departure for a major new pharmaceutical job in England.  He became very ill toward the end but persevered.  The last time I saw Tom before he died was at the campaign victory dinner in March 1995, after my departure from office.

"Phil Berman remained helpful; he pushed for several millions from the state to finance an expansion of the museum.  Thanks to Senator Richard Tilghman, we got as far as the capital budget of the state but the appropriation never came.  That phantom money was counted in the campaign total anyway, making it possible to say—with a wink—that the campaign fully met its goal.

"But I used whatever credibility I had with donors to broaden their giving and we did raise a lot of money.  In other circumstances, the capital campaign would have been an upbeat and forward-looking event.  Regrettably, the need to trim operating expenses persisted and grew more urgent in my final years.  And my ability to persuade our faculty and staff of this requirement, even as capital campaign gains were being reported, grew no better.

"We were announcing great strides forward in the capital campaign at the very moment that I was preaching penury on campus. I was pushing the theme that the college had finally 'emerged' from the shadows onto a brighter academic stage, the results of all our 'fruits of success.' The cognitive dissonance never resolved in the minds of most faculty and staff, I'm certain.  In some sense, I was revisiting the dilemma that Bill Pettit faced in 1975.  Then too, we were reporting the success of a fund-raising campaign while at the same time trying to persuade the campus that our appetites were bigger than our pocketbook."     

After "arriving," it was time to prepare for an ending 

Bodger said that the final stage of his career as president took place through most of 1994.  By the start of the year, the feeling of having done what he could do combined with his new family priorities to make his secret decision certain.  When he told Bill Heefner that he wanted to get out, Bill took charge of the process with his usual mastery.  They consulted with Bruce Alton, a former president of Bodger's acquaintance who was now in the headhunting business for college presidents, operating out of Washington.  With Bruce's help, they established a timetable.  Announce in the spring, before the end of the term.  Establish a representative committee and search through summer and fall.  Seize and hire by the end of the year.  Bodger would leave by 1 January 1995.  "And none too soon for Margot and me," he added.  "We were pretty well used up and wondering how we were going to cope with family problems in years to follow."

Bodger would be only marginally involved in the process of finding a new president.  He resolved on expending his last burst of energy on fund-raising and on strategic planning.  The need for a plan to bring finances and operations into congruence ticked like a time bomb in his mind.  John Pilgrim's model kept churning out the negative balances that the college operation would face in the years beyond his departure.  Encouraged by Pilgrim, Bodger felt driven to set up a special process for dealing with it.  The change in the environment of higher education management that had arisen since the late 1980s gave him the incentive and the vocabulary to address the financial problems from the perspective of strategic institutional planning.

Bodger continued, "So, before I announced my decision to retire, I urged the board to create a special ad hoc committee, a Strategic Study Group—the SSG.  Three highly respected board members would serve on it, along with me ex officio.  Geoffrey Marshall was provost and senior vice president of the Graduate School of the City University of New York.  Edward Stemmler was former dean of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and now executive vice president of the Association of American Medical Schools.  Jan Smith, '74, was an experienced banker who, as an alumna, had developed trusting relationships in the faculty through previous joint committee activities.  Two faculty members, Victor Tortorelli, chair of chemistry, and Heather O'Neill, chair of economics, would represent the faculty.  Both were members of the campus planning and priorities committee.  As such, they already were heavily invested in the issues.

"Geoff Marshall agreed to chair the SSG.  With his impeccable academic credentials—his field was eighteenth century English studies—Geoff enjoyed the respect of key faculty leaders and would be certain to address the strategic issues tactfully but directly.  He had intimate working knowledge of the change of climate in higher education from his work at CUNY.  His restructuring headaches there were monumental compared to ours.  Geoff had been my fellow student at the Harvard Institute for Educational Management in the summer of 1974. He was then an assistant provost at the University of Oklahoma but soon after moved to the Endowment for the Humanities, where he became deputy director.  Before he moved from NEH to CUNY, he and I had a conversation about our deanship, but it was the wrong time and probably the wrong venue for him.  But he graciously accepted my invitation to join our board in 1986 and brought a cosmopolitan academic perspective that we highly treasured.

"The SSG first met 16 May 1994 and met through the spring and summer, leading up to two reports to the community, the first on 1 September 1994 and the second on 6 October 1994.  We dovetailed the deliberations and reports of the SSG with the strategic discussions to take place that same fall under the aegis of the Pew Roundtable.  Starting in November 1994, a month before my departure, these discussions were facilitated for Pew by Mary Maples Dunn, outgoing president of Smith College.  She helped greatly by demonstrating to our campus that the issues of restructuring were not just local bugaboos that the SSG and I had foisted on it but were nationally significant.  The second Pew Roundtable was scheduled for January, and the SSG proposed that the new president lead that discussion as a component of his orientation."

Bodger put in front of Martin the two SSG reports that came out before he left office.

Martin said, "And the whole point was to cut costs?"

Bodger said, "One point was to cut costs.  Starting in 1989-90 operating year, net student revenues—after the financial aid discount—increased an average of 3.1 percent per year.  In the same period, total spending, not counting financial aid, increased 6 percent per year.  That was the nub of the cost problem.  But our cost problem simply ignited the process--it didn't constitute the declared essence of the exercise.  The essence of it was to bring revenues and expenses back into a healthy ratio through strategic planning.  In principle, that meant an increase in revenues could serve as well as a decrease in expenses.  The times, however, were calling for a rearrangement of revenue and expense so that institutions would become more efficient and do more with less.  The people at Pew had latched onto that theme with a passion.  The SSG was designed to gain the license to raise questions of academic priorities in a blunt way that we had not been able to do in the Campus Planning Group."

Martin said, "I've seen that the protective hide of the academic status quo is tough wherever you go."

Bodger continued, "We needed to allow the college to look critically at old organizational molds.  We needed a new planning approach to do so persuasively, and the SSG was to provide it.  We needed to confront the meaning of our growing financial aid discount, which was consuming more and more of our gross revenue.   We needed to address our problematic recruiting potential and our tuition trends.  We needed to stop spending down so generously the income from our endowment; the board wanted to be at a five percent spending rate but okayed seven percent in 1992-93 to prevent a deficit result for the year.  We needed to acknowledge that we could not expect to continue indefinitely increasing our unrestricted annual gift income by ten percent a year.  We had to stop servicing our capital debt from plant funds that were supposed to pay for campus improvements.  We needed to look at the massive new cost of expensing future employee benefits—the Financial Accounting Standards Board would require this for the first time in our 1995-96 budget year.  It was like an ugly sword over our heads."

Martin said, "I was glad to have left office before I saw that sword."

Bodger continued, "Above all, we needed to decide whether we could change the scope and style of our operation so as to 'lower cost and increase productivity,' as the mantra of the day decreed.  We needed to do these things and more all in one place under one authority so that we did not end with piecemeal responses leading to business-as-usual.  Mainly, this was my last chance to get the attention of the faculty and staff as I had not heretofore done.  I wanted to leave knowing that everyone was seriously aware of the college's need to do something dramatic and visible to bring its financial structure into concordance with its operating structure.

"Your friend and mine at Lehigh University, Peter Likins, at that moment was deeply into his own strategic restructuring agenda.  Peter's challenge, too, like Geoff Marshall's, was far more complex than ours.  You may recall that he proposed short-term 'fast wave' changes to contain the cost problem and then long-term 'slow wave' changes to restructure the university."

Martin said, "I vividly recall his doggedness in pursuing that process."

Bodger said, "We borrowed Lehigh's two-wave metaphor.  The fast wave would make changes in the immediate 1994-95 operating year if possible and in the oncoming budget year, 1995-96.  The slow wave would make changes, after broad campus discussion, designed to begin with the 1996-97 budget year."

Martin quickly digested the fast-wave recommendations in the second SSG report.  "It appears that in the fast wave you succeeded in keeping the endowment spending rate at 6 percent instead of dropping it down to 5 percent where the board wanted to be.  You cut costs by capping senior faculty salaries, giving 1.5 percent increases to others, and reducing part-timers by 5 percent."

Bodger added, " Faculty volunteered savings in specific areas such as printing, mailing, phones, social gatherings, and the like, for the current operating year, 1994-95.  Then we froze non-personnel expenses in all departments for 1995-96."

"Why didn't you push the tuition up a percentage point or two instead of cutting it down from the figure in your planning model?" Martin asked.  "You gave up precious new dollars for 1995-96 and beyond, seems to me."

Bodger replied, "The economists were clearly declaring that the inflation rate in the year to come would be three percent, not the four percent in our planning model.  Our plan called for a tuition increase of inflation plus one percent.  So we felt it necessary to lower our budgeted increase from five percent to four percent."

Martin said, "I assume that your reluctance to stay at five percent means that you were uncertain you could recruit the needed number of new students at that higher tuition rate."

"That and other uncertainties made the SSG very cautious," Bodger replied.  "Lurking in everyone's mind also was the imminence of new presidential leadership."

Martin asked, "Did you think that the SSG decisions would stabilize the transition of administrations?"

"The board leaders and I felt that the board, not the administration, should have primary ownership of the financial agenda as the transition took place.  I think the faculty members involved in the SSG felt comfortable with that notion too."

Martin said, "But your 'slow wave' vision of change would go well into the beginning of the new administration.   Couldn't that preempt the leadership initiatives of the incoming president?"

Bodger said, "It could have.  The SSG was careful to keep the specifics of 'slow wave' change fungible.  The board members wanted to assure that the leadership baton would pass smoothly and effectively."

Martin said, "As it turned out, then, you're saying that the new leadership had ample latitude to act."

Bodger amended, "I'm saying that everything the SSG did in those last months of my administration were intended to do two things.  One was to alert the college community to the reality of the need for change.  The other was to contribute to an informed and stable beginning for the new administration.  I want to believe that the work of the SSG offered tools that could be employed in the months after I left."

Martin said, "The SSG mandate seemed to pay no heed to the boom times about to occur in America or to the end of the long decline in the number of traditional-aged college-bound students, due in 1995.  The student market was going to improve.  Both developments, I have to believe, would brighten the dire financial picture that you were wrestling with.  Judging from the news from the college since you left office, financial problems worked out one way or another."

"Indeed." 

"Clouds" lifted as the ending came 

Martin said, "You seem to be telling me that your last couple of years were 'cloudy' even though the college had achieved a position in the sun such that it had never dreamed of having before."

Bodger said, "I never doubted that the 'clouds' would pass.  The decision to announce my departure in April 1994 was to be, among other things, an antidote to that gray feeling.  I think it immediately began to clear the atmosphere.  The financial crunch was not a crisis but an irritation in most eyes and was easy to gloss over in the excitement about new leadership and new beginnings.   My announcement, I think, minimized the 'tribal disconnect' we talked about.  A moment of good feeling seemed to me to arise and take us through the final months.

"At Founders' Day that fall, I had an appropriate forum for a farewell refrain.  I used T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding as a text to play on the interlocking themes of present and past.  The farewell party organized by the faculty and staff was far more elaborate and generous than anything I would have imagined.  So, sure, by December 1994 I seemed to have dodged the worst retribution for all my sins of leadership.  The college was on a sound course.  New leadership could take it in the professional direction that we had identified toward new academic heights.

"I tried to catch it all in my final annual report, which came out in the fall of 1994. I reported good news about the immediate year in review.  Middle States gave the college an accolade after reviewing our five-year periodic review report, which was a follow-up to the 1989 self-study.  Recruitment outcomes were on target, with 315 new students in fall 1994.  The college had more minority students than ever, with 37 in the incoming class, some of them assisted by scholarship money from a big grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  The academic life of the college continued on the path of professionalization.  The faculty sharpened the review criteria for promotion and tenure, with new emphasis on faculty scholarship. Associate Dean Peter F. Small led a charge to increase the involvement of students in undergraduate research.  Additional academic departments invited reviews by peers from other institutions.  The board approved a statement on diversity that established a reference point going forward.  A wellness program replaced the traditional medical service for students.  J. Houghton Kane's leadership course in Liberal Studies attracted more student interest.  The college completed the first full year of competition in all sports, not just football, in the Centennial Conference.  The shows mounted at the Berman Museum were carrying the name of the college to corners that heretofore ignored it.  The college community looked to Founders' Day 1994 to climax a year of celebrating the college's 125^th anniversary.  I could say that The Next Step capital campaign was zeroing in on final success.  The college beat back a vigorous legal challenge from the local school board that would have required the payment of an exorbitant real estate tax.  Because many colleges were being similarly threatened, I gained state-wide recognition for successfully leading that fight.

"But much demanded attention as I was leaving. The Strategic Study Group's mandate to restore a healthier income-expense ratio was paramount. While modifications to Greek pledging looked promising, they were merely indicators of possible improvement in student life.  A study group was working to devise a five-year recommendation on implementing information technology, but the college was not up to speed as my watch ended.  Although facilities for life sciences improved with funds from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the old departments of chemistry, math, and physics were crying for improvement of their facilities in Pfahler Hall.  Turning Wismer Hall into a full-fledged student center was more of a plan than a working project and needed priority attention.

"My former boss D. L. Helfferich was always looking beyond his own day.  Now as I left I tried to follow his example.  It was time for me to abandon diffidence about our place in the pecking order.  I called on the next administration to make our value 'as a national liberal arts college' greater. Successful capital campaigns, solidification of a recruiting strategy, conversion of the Centennial Conference to an all-sports league comprised of compatible liberal arts colleges, some of unquestioned national leadership stature, Phi Beta Kappa's approval of a local chapter on campus, the third-party endorsement of the F. W. Olin Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the burial of parochial quirks that the administration had inherited—major developments such as these gave me the comfort to assert the college's place on the national scene.   I wanted the world to know that, as the college in years ahead moved toward a brighter place in the group of national liberal arts colleges, the accomplishments of the Bodger administration would have made such advancement possible."

Martin leaned back, looked at the clock on the wall, and prepared to leave.  "Some parts of the world know it," he said to Bodger.  "I'm glad we talked."

"Will any of this really transfer to other places?" Bodger asked.

     Martin said, "Conditions since you've been out already have altered higher education substantially.  But the specifics of your 'arriving' remain relevant, at least for certain colleges at a certain stage of development.  You were lucky to have resources to work with going in.  It was a long haul, not a quick fix.  At the college I'll be running as an interim, I'll be trying to set the stage for it to 'make headway' when the new president is finally hired.  Your fruits of success will be useful in devising some benchmarks.  Your 'clouds' mainly would mean something to a president getting along in his or her watch, not a newcomer.  I think I'll stick mainly to sunshine."

"From start to finish," Bodger said, "it always came down to individual students and individual professors at work on the excitement and expansion of someone's learning.  Great educational experiences can happen in colleges that are not nationally acclaimed.  Still, I had to lead the game of institutional development or else.  We had to become a marketing machine or else.  But we somehow had to prevent all that from destroying what it was intended to foster.  I cringe at the bragging we had to do.  I guess I still want to believe that a poem being studied by a student is more valuable than a priorities committee agenda.  My parting shot was to encourage my colleagues to stay firmly fixed on their students, for they were the only reason for the existence of the college."

     Bodger wished Martin well in his upcoming adventure as an interim president.  After he left, Bodger's eye ran over the files and papers he had pulled out for his conversation with his friend in his study.  He pictured them gathering dust in a far corner of the carriage house at the edge of campus where he had worked on them.  Just as well, he thought.  What's ended is ended.

 END CHAPTER SIX, MARTIN (Arriving...and ending, 1984-1994)

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      5 November 2005 Richard P. Richter