Chapter Three: Matthew (Preparing to preside, 1970-1976)

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

             Bodger henceforth saw Margaret hardly at all.  Then she left.  Bodger missed her.  She would have helped him reflect on the final six years of his preparation to become president, from 1970 to 1976.  These were hard years to explain to himself.

            One day he had a phone call from the Rev. Matthew.  Matthew had been pastor of one of the old German Reformed (Evangelical and Reformed) churches in the area of the college.  He grew up in that very congregation and went to Lancaster Theological Seminary.  He was in  the early generation of pastors to be ordained in the new United Church of Christ.  The Reformed church and the Congregational Christian churches, the old Pilgrim church, merged to create the UCC in 1957.   Matthew graduated from Lancaster in 1976, when Bodger became president of the college.  Matthew's home flock invited him to be their pastor not long after his ordination.  In the mid-eighties, a call from a big UCC church in the midwest took him away from the area of the college.

            "I'm back in town," Matthew said.  "Associate head of the Pennsylvania Southeast area conference of UCC churches, nearly three hundred congregations.  No promises, but I'll be contending for the top position in the next year or two.  Reverend James has been in for a long time.  He's told them he is ready to withdraw soon."

            "I'm glad you're back," said Bodger.

            "I can't believe you're out," said Matthew.

            "Believe it."

            "We should talk," said Matthew.

            "We will," Bodger said.

            A few years after Bodger took office in 1976, the conference designated Matthew to be its local liaison with the college.  It was a natural way for him to serve the larger denominational body from a comfortable position on the doorstep of the college.  This responsibility brought him to Bodger's office periodically.  They liked each other from the beginning.  Matthew was straightforward and listened well.  Bodger drew something from the younger man's quiet sense of himself.  He brought affirmative energies to the table, even when there was an issue to contest.  The integrity of the Reformed character that Bodger had found in Helfferich, Reimert, and Paisley he also saw in Matthew.

            Although not a graduate of the college, Matthew knew it well.  He had grown up in its shadow.  His congregation had been one of those involved in its founding in the 1860s and valued its sense of that history.  It traditionally supported the college with annual gifts; Matthew had increased its amount of giving during his years as pastor.  Bodger had let Matthew know that he wanted to draw strength for his administration from its historic roots.  Matthew understood Bodger's need to dress the traditional tie in more contemporary style.

            Following up his phone call after his return to the area, Matthew came to visit Bodger at home.  Bodger was celebrating his ninth month out of office.

            "Why did you get out?" Matthew asked.

            "Personal rhythm, institutional rhythm," said Bodger.  "Both.  When you see 65 on the horizon, your sense of inexhaustibility decreases.  And flexibility."

            "But your predecessor was in his early 60s coming in," said Matthew.

            "Bill Pettit had the energy of a bulldog," Bodger said.  "He budgeted time well.  And his administration was for six years, not eighteen, as in my case."

            Matthew sat back and reflected: "When I was doing my undergraduate years in North Carolina, several of my local high school friends enrolled at your college, when Pettit was becoming president.  They said he was hard in class, hard in discipline.  They said charity was not his strong suit.  Foul up, and pay.  Sometimes, pay even without fouling up."

            "When I became president," Bodger said, "Pettit told me something that stuck.  'Keep up the standards.  If you do that, everything else will be fine.'  He believed in standards, and he believed that he knew what they were.  He thought everybody should know what they are."

            Matthew said,  "I had the impression from my friends that he was a classic conservative.  Natural inequality of humans.  Traditional norms of behavior, handed down from the past.  Need for respect and reverence.  Hard work.  Every man responsible for his own destiny.  Accept the results of providence one way or another.  No excuses on the basis of 'soft' feelings.  Stick to hard conscience...."

            "Pretty good," Bodger said.

            "When I was in college, I saw the traits in a couple of my senior professors," said Matthew.

            Bodger said, "He did not readily excuse poor performance in students, that's certain.  Like all of us, he was a man of his time.  He was in college at Penn when the Great Depression hit.   It cut deep scars in him.  I think his father lost his business.  He was a rugged individualist at heart.  As a chemist, he knew that matter could be described with precision.  And should be.  That orderly, precise sense of the physical world he applied also in the behavioral arena."

            Matthew said, "Truth about chemicals and truth about morals and studying ought to be equally evident, then?"

            "I never heard Bill say that," Bodger replied.  "I have a hunch he would have been sympathetic to the idea that they ought to be.  He was not so simplistic as to think they could be, I imagine."

            "Some of the old timers in my old home congregation used to be critical of the college of those years," Matthew said.

            "Well they might," Bodger replied.  "They were very tough times.  Nationally, the US was trying to get out of Vietnam, not very gracefully.  Our society had just gone through the biggest shift in values in memory--and it was not finished.  I think it took much of the '70s to normalize what we did with and to ourselves in the '60s--and never did it satisfactorily.  Watergate, double digit inflation, stupid popular music, and the oil crisis all symbolize a kind of distemper that followed the excesses of the '60s.  Some pundits point to the 1973 oil embargo as the closing act in America's sense of limitlessness, its post-World-War II hegemony."

            Matthew joined in: "The end of twentieth-century high modernism, the beginning of the postmodernist critique of it." 

            Bodger continued, "At the campus level, we were trying to find a way to accommodate the changes of social behavior within the traditional practices of the college.  We were trying to satisfy a faculty receiving less pay than peers elsewhere with a budget that permitted salary increases of two or three percentage points a year.  That's when annual inflation nationally was in double digits.  It would take a little more time, but we also were beginning to see that the thought underpinning the '60s would create distress lines in the curriculum itself, in the way we thought knowledge took shape. The '60s brought an epistemological revolution, not just a social revolution."

            "A daunting time to be president," Matthew volunteered.

            "The office makes you want to do the right thing for the institution, no matter who you are or what your talents," Bodger said.  "Pettit tried as hard as anyone to move us on a correct course.  Many people criticized him.  A lot of the criticism he brought down on himself by his manner.  They did not understand that whatever he did in office he did because it seemed to him to be the right thing for the institution at that time." 

Bodger learned to be subordinate 

            "How did you help him?" Matthew asked.

            "Why do you ask?"

            "I've never really been a number two man before in an administrative situation.  Now I am.  You've been there."

            Bodger said, "Denominational administration and college administration are two different things."

            "A professional working under a professional must have similarities, whatever the mission," Matthew said.  "Your experience with Pettit could teach me some do's and don'ts in the new job I have."

            Without time for thought, Bodger said, "I helped, I guess, by trying to be subordinate."  After his years of ramming around campus under President Helfferich's tolerant eye, after coming into conflict with Pettit more than once in his green years as Helfferich's helper, Bodger could not help laughing at this knee-jerk recollection.

            "You laugh," Matthew said.

            "It was a complicated situation for Pettit and for me.  I don't know how much DLH talked with Pettit about his expectations for me in the future.  Certainly Bill knew I enjoyed a special relationship with DLH, and DLH remained on the scene.  He had an office in the administration building with regular hours three days a week.  Much of his time he spent on contacts with the donors he had cultivated over the years.  Some of it he spent on privately counseling Pettit, I'm sure.  Some of it he spent on shaping me--keeping me in line for Pettit's sake, but not discouraging me from learning by doing."

            Matthew said, "Judging from what the management textbooks say, you had the makings of a real management mess."

            "True.  A president who had to defer to a predecessor who remained actively on the scene.  A vice president who had presidential fantasies if not ambitions, fanned by the predecessor president."

            "Did the mess materialize?" Matthew asked.

            "In truth it did not.  Helfferich's title was chancellor.  When asked for his job description, he would say that the chancellor is responsible for 'chanceling.'  When asked what that entailed, he would refer to the lyrics of the campus song:  'When across the Perkiomen, the chimings wing their flight....'  In the trope of the song, the chimings--notes from the bell of the college tower-- leave campus and fly over the nearby creek and then fly back to campus, where the students have 'for a time their books laid by.'  To chancel, DLH would say, is to tend to the chimings."

            "To ensure that they winged their flight back home," Matthew chimed.

            "Winged back home, yes," Bodger smiled.  "Helfferich had a consummate sense of theater.  He could cast himself and the rest of us in what for him was a play.  He could direct and act in it at the same time.  That sense of theater gave him a distance from his own actions.  What he did was not necessarily who he was.  To chancel, to look out for the chimings, was his droll way of  letting others know there was a play in progress.  Everyone took for granted that he was the director, but not everyone could see that the directorship itself was a part in the play."

            "Very complicated," Matthew agreed.

            "It was unusual, if not unique.  I wouldn't put it in the college management textbook as a model for others.  There was something tribal going on, perhaps, despite the seeming sophistication of DLH's theatrical posture.  The college was parochial.  It knew itself from within.  It had an authenticity.  It affirmed character rooted in internalized values.  The mystique of the Reformed tradition had a lot to do with this, even though it was hard for outsiders--new faculty--to put a finger on it.  The college-as-tribal-community was more powerful than the college-as-administrative-organization.  That empowered Helfferich after he left the presidency.  It made all of us accept the arrangement as a given.  Few could imagine the college without the defining presence of DLH.  Pettit and I were comfortable in this parochial matrix.  It was only years later that I could discern its uniqueness with what seemed like some objectivity."

            "So, it was Helfferich's canny way of playing a role that allowed Pettit and you to work together," Matthew said.

            "We all had an understanding," Bodger said, "even though it was not codified.  It was not even fully expressed.  We each kept our eyes on each other.  We all subscribed to the conviction that first, last, and always, the college's best interest was our best personal interest.  That dissolved a lot of potential grit in the machine.  I guess that's why I think of a 'tribal' situation."

            "But it was partly expressed," Matthew prompted.

            "Not many days after the new administration started, I wrote a letter of acknowledgment to one of our board members for a fairly generous gift.  An information copy went to Pettit.  As new president, he called me on that.  Wasn't it his role to acknowledge major gifts of board members?  I countered, saying it was something I did as a natural response of the college's development officer, which I was.  He said it was his role to decide who should acknowledge what.  He was right.  Helfferich during his presidency allowed me--encouraged me--to presume.  In Pettit's administration, it was my job to stand back and support him, to stay out of the limelight.  After that mild air-clearing, we had few differences henceforth.

            "Helfferich warned me now and then that Pettit felt I was pushy on this issue or that.  This may have been true or it may have been a Helfferich stratagem to get my attention and to influence me before any conflict blew up.  I would try to trim my course accordingly.

            "Pettit and I were of different generations.  We were very different people.  He had a patrician air, which was artful and consistent.  I guess it was always at the back of my mind that my old man was a steel mill man.  But the task joined us.  Military and corporate life had conditioned me to fit in, to recognize authority over me.  It was a relief for me, in a way, after the five helter-skelter years of free-wheeling as DLH's spearman."

            Matthew said, "When I got to know you, after you became president, you seemed impatient with the constraints of organization."

            "I was.  But I also had mastered the mechanics of organizational life.  It wasn't that I thought of myself as an obedient organizational creature.  I simply had learned how to get something done by working within the organization's constraints.  That included deferring to one's boss.  I was able to think privately like a free man and behave publicly like a good company man."

            "Not sure I can empathize with that kind of split," said Rev. Matthew.

            Bodger said, "It may seem to hold the seed of hypocrisy in it.  Remember, though, my origin in a steel man's family and my upbringing in the Depression of the 'thirties.  Being a wannabe came a distant second to my first drive as a bread-winner.  I was my father's son in that I thought it was axiomatic to work like a dog to put bread on the table.  One did not state this; one simply lived it out. I enfolded whatever I thought about leadership and teaching within this fundamental assumption.  Life was work.  Pettit and I of course understood this between us without our ever saying it.   He had been on the faculty through most of my lifetime and knew the kind of local kid that I was.  So, in spite of my feeling of great difference, he actually had a good grasp of where I was coming from and what I was.  He HHe He understood//He understood me a lot better than I understood him, I am sure."

            Matthew asked, "Did that make him more indulgent of you than you expected?"

            "'Indulgent' is not a word I would use.  I think he saw early on that I was useful to him.  I was driven to work, and it was easy for him to take advantage of my eagerness, once it became evident that I would not wreck the set-up for him.  He made a point of not assigning me a portfolio.  While I retained my title, Vice President for Administrative Affairs, I did what I thought I should and what he asked me to do.  We tacked and trimmed together as we went along.  This gave Pettit maximum latitude to lead.  It allowed me to experiment with initiatives, always with a wary eye for being out of bounds.  He knew that Helfferich saw me as a future president.  The loose administrative arrangement allowed him, I think, to buy into Helfferich's notion without having to say so.  He never talked to me about my own future until after he had announced that he was retiring."

            Matthew asked, "Are you saying he did not assign work to you?"

            "I'm not saying that.  I was self-starting, compulsively, to be sure.  But he made certain my platter was full.  He was more budget-conscious than DLH had been, at least in the non-academic side of the house.   He tried to minimize staff strength.  For a time I returned to editing the college magazine, the task that brought me to the college staff in the first place.  We were into an intensive fund-raising effort and that consumed much time.  I took my teaching of English composition very seriously.  In the summers, Bill and his wife spent a long vacation in Nantucket.  That meant that I kept the store on campus for him.  My vacations were brief.  In a way I was satisfied to lose myself in all this action."

            "It kept you out of trouble."

            "That--and then the whole immersion fed an addictive impulse in me.  I was at the peak of my energies.  Being up to my eyes in work gave me a compartment.  I could keep out anything that made me uncomfortable.  This was a self-indulgence of a kind.  Your priorities--as a preacher, I mean--are better at this stage of your career than mine were, I am sure."

            Matthew said, "I don't covet James's position.  There is the will of the Lord in this move back to Pennsylvania for me.  If I am to be the next conference leader, God will lead me there.  That's not to say that I am not anxious or that I am not preparing." 

The fund-raising agenda continued from Helfferich to Pettit 

            Bodger said, "DLH started the remaking of the physical plant.  He built Wismer Hall, which opened in 1965.  He razed Freeland-Derr-Stine, our old main, which dated back to 1848.  In their place in the campus core he built Myrin Library.  Before he left office in November 1970, he briefly occupied the splendid new offices in a new administration building, to be named for Philip and Helen Corson.  He was still president when we broke ground for the physical education facility--later to bear his name--in September 1970.  He pushed to completion in quick time a new men's dormitory complex to replace the lost space in old Freeland, Derr, and Stine.  The college would name it for Bill Reimert, our board president, who died in the fall of 1969, a princely man, one of Helfferich's best-informed supporters, in my view.  He built the science building, triggered by DuPont money, for biology and psychology, behind Pfahler Hall.  DLH imagined a chapel building at the perimeter of campus that would cement the relationship with the church.  He got the fund-raising started for that.  Jim Wagner started it, and Milton E. Detterline, who came on as chaplain and alumni secretary, picked up the effort.  But it foundered.  The limited amount raised from churches went for the renovation of Bomberger Hall after Helfferich left office.

            "And that's my point," Bodger continued.  "Pettit inherited a dynamic physical plant financial development agenda from his predecessor.  We did not stop moving when Bill took office.

            "Pettit led us through the renovation of the old library into a student union.  He oversaw the restoration of Bomberger Hall.  With his artistic bent--he was a creditable painter in his leisure--he gave that project his special interest and care.  He chaired the planning committee for Bomberger from the start, while he was still dean.  He saw us through to the completion of Helfferich Hall and the relocation of playing fields and tennis courts.  He saw that his old academic home, Pfahler Hall of Science, was refurbished.  He even approved the renovation of a snack shop in the book store building into a rough and ready theater arts site."

            "Busy," said Matthew.

            "Being in the command post, Bill could have impeded the momentum of the physical plant agenda that he took over from Helfferich.  But he did not.  He went ahead.  Helfferich had persuaded himself and the board in the earlier '60s that a first-class plant would sell the college to parents and students.  By 1970 this was cast-in-iron doctrine, and Pettit bought into it too.

            "It was a revolutionary approach considering the college's past.  For decades the college espoused a bare-board simplicity--the proper setting for the building of mind and character.  That happened to fit well with the extremely frugal posture of the board leadership and the thin flow of charitable dollars from one and all.   Helfferich had the guts to attack that and to begin to challenge people to give more.  He said it was time to stop putting patch on patch and build things right.

            "I happened along at the very moment when Helfferich needed someone who was not cowed by the college's past diffidence in fund-raising.  There had been a start in the early '60s, when DLH and Dick Schellhase, my predecessor as alumni secretary, conducted an ambitious solicitation to support Wismer Hall.  In truth, however, DLH saw that as only a modest start.  I was naive about fund-raising.  But I brought a promotional tool kit from my corporate years.  I had no reservations about thumping for more dollars from alumni and friends.  I was too green to know how rough it would be.  I did not know enough to know how many ways I could fail.

            "So I became Helfferich's point person for fund-raising in the last several years of his term.  We cobbled together a kind of campaign called the All-College Anniversary Drive, tagging on to the centennial anniversary coming in 1969.  Altogether, we raised $2.9 million, mainly to help pay for the buildings.  DLH had crossed the Rubicon on taking federal funds for buildings when he applied for and received a modest amount for Wismer Hall in 1965.  That had cost him a board member who could not stomach getting into bed with government.  The library and the physical education facility both had heavy infusions of public money.  He received encouragement from younger board members, from Reimert, from Bill Elliott.   We had recruited a group of board members and alumni to lead the committees to raise funds for DLH's ambitious expansion program.

            "So, the change of face at the helm in 1970 did not fundamentally alter the energy in the development program.  I was in the thick of that program as the guard changed, responsible for on-campus coordination with builders and for raising funds outside.   In fact, at the special board meeting to elect Pettit president, in September 1970, there were other heavy items on the agenda.

            "One of them was a report that the All-College Anniversary Drive had met its goal.  This was given by Paul Guest, who had chaired the drive and given DLH the legal counsel and reinforcement to forge ahead with the building program.

            "Another item was a preliminary report from Bill Heefner.  Heefner at the June 1970 meeting already had been appointed chairman of a new fund-raising committee.  It had the euphemistic name Academic Development Committee.  I think that was my concoction.  The point was to emphasize the programmatic uses of the buildings that were coming into being.  Bill was talking about raising money for faculty enrichment and the like.  He reported on talking with faculty in the spring and on his intention to talk with students in the fall.  The next fund-raising plan thus was born even as the old one ended.

            "At this special meeting the board also recorded the signing of a contract for the start of construction of the new physical education facility.  The short of all this is that Pettit's election took place amid great to-do about financial development and unfinished building plans."

            Matthew raised a finger.  "I think I hear two things.  The board handed Pettit an ambitious agenda.  In the process it also handed you one."

            "Yes," said Bodger.

            "That no doubt made it easier for you to be a good subordinate," Matthew said.  "A predetermined structure shaped the behavior of both of you."

            "True," Bodger said.  "The Heefner committee turned into a fund-raising campaign called 'Century II.'  It ran from its start in 1970 to 1975, most of Pettit's administration.  It kept my nose to the grindstone and relieved Pettit of the need to make strategic decisions about voluntary support.  Century II was the medium by which Bill Heefner and I cemented an alliance.  He was then in the midst of building his Bucks County law firm into one of the biggest in the suburbs.  He had little time for volunteer work; so he leaned on me as much as possible to act on his behalf.  In the process he seemed to solidify his belief that I could be president.

            "Century II raised some money for faculty development and other educational needs, but not as much as we hoped for.  We met our general target, more than $5.5 million.  However, the specific designations were out of whack.  Too much was specified by donors for plant as opposed to faculty development and student aid.  And we counted government grants for buildings in the totals.

            "Regardless, Pettit should have received credit for the effort.  Unfortunately, the faculty came to see it as a major failing and used it to push him into retreat at the end of his term.  The  effects of double-digit inflation on spending power demoralized the faculty.  Pettit went to the board and told them faculty and staff needed more money.  The board approved some supplements to salary, but they were drops in the bucket compared to the losses to inflation.  The faculty never believed that Pettit acknowledged the dilemma.  But the constraints in our exchequer daunted him.  He would not risk the financial stability of the whole place by paying out more than seemed prudent for salaries.  The spin among faculty on that cautious and responsible course was terrible.  It crippled his ability to manage."

            "Then it must have harmed your standing too," Matthew said.

            "Oddly I don't think it did.  The fact that we had a structured and visible fund-raising effort was still a kind of novelty.  I got credit, I think, for its creation in the eyes of faculty.  I frankly don't know how I escaped criticism for perceived fund-raising deficiencies.  In truth, my experience in fund-raising still was shallow.  I had learned some sound fundamentals from a consultant whom Helfferich hired in the late '60s.  Still I did not know very well how to apply them.  But the whole place was naive about the fund-raising game.  Relatively speaking, I guess it looked as if I knew something."

            "Looking at this as a number two person, wouldn't you have to say you failed to help your leader?"

            The question gave Bodger pause.  "You saw that both of us were working in a structure created out of the circumstances of Helfferich's last years as president.  We both did our best within that preestablished frame.  Sure, I could have stood up and taken all the responsibility for the shortcomings of Century II.  In fact, I did report to the faculty in 1975 on what did and did not happen with the money.  Pettit's biggest critics accused him of making misleading statements about the campaign.  It was my job to show them the facts and to prove he was not misleading them.  I think I did that.  But it did not help much in the end, probably.  Faculty could not see past what seemed to be his condescending manner toward them.  Style really did become substance in the Pettit years, I think."

            "If you appeared to be credible, it would have helped you and perhaps not helped him," Matthew observed, as he rose to leave. 

Bodger built a public persona on campus 

            That's possible, Bodger said to himself when Matthew had gone.  He remained on good terms personally with a large number of faculty, the younger ones with whom he bonded and the older ones to whom he looked as former teachers.  He felt they were predisposed not to doubt him.  His own self-righteousness seemed to insulate him.  It would not have occurred to him then that any of them would mistrust him.  Naiveté is an effective life preserver in certain seas, he thought.

            Indeed, he solidified his sense of belonging to the faculty in the Pettit years.  He continued teaching introductory English composition and a section of Senior Symposium, a loosely structured course for reading, talking, and writing about contemporary issues.  He worked hard at his course preparations.  He went to English department meetings and tried to be a professional colleague.  His "yellow paper project" in composition received a small notice in College English. In 1972, to his surprise, George Storey, the department head, recommended him for promotion to assistant professor, a full-time title for a part-time performer.  He received tenure the following year.  That year, the president selected him to receive the Lindback prize for excellence in teaching.  The announcement at commencement stunned him.  Pettit had not told him ahead of time.  He was busy in the background that day, seeing that the crowd was under control and that the loudspeakers were working.  He took it as an affirmation by Pettit.  In the life of the campus, it reinforced the appearance that he was a practicing faculty member, despite the paucity of his academic preparation.

            Each year for several years, he invited students interested in writing poetry to meet at his home.  A handful would respond, and a remnant of that group would stick it out for the year.  They would sit on the floor at 27 Glen Farms Drive, drinking soda or coffee, reciting their poems.  Bodger would recite his now and then too.  The rule was that one could say only good things about a poem.  Corrective criticism was banned.  He formed bonds with those students that overrode the tensions and disagreements on the campus.

            The students would never realize it, but he had ambivalent feelings about the poetry groups.  He succeeded in breaking the wall that on campus irrevocably divided students from faculty.  But once he was through the wall, the students unconsciously made him feel vulnerable.  The students had a vocabulary of emotions that he could not share.  He always felt that they would take off in a direction that they would expect him to understand.  Sometimes he sat quietly as they connected, hoping that they would not notice that he was not getting the youthful twist of a fresh phrase.  On the other hand, he saw how receptive they were to his presence.  It gave them an experience with a faculty member that was outside the fence.  There was something of the clandestine in the room, although none of them, including Bodger, could have put words to it.

            Through these and other informal gestures toward students, Bodger felt that he was building a kind of public persona on campus in those Pettit years.  He was accessible to students, willing to hear their most outrageous complaints about the college.  Despite his title and his faculty status, some students seemed to level with him.  They were the ones who came to know him in class or in the numerous committees on which he served with them or those who came to his home for poetry sessions.

            Open though they were with one another, however, he could not offer promises of official receptivity.  He attempted assiduously to remain the loyal subordinate to Pettit.  Faculty and students both criticized the leadership's commitment to a conservative position on social rules.  They faulted the administration for resisting further revision of the academic curriculum.  Bodger developed a manner of interest in particular complaints.  By the very intensity of his attention, he paradoxically signaled that the problem was beyond his ken and beyond his reach of influence.  More often than not, however, he knew the inner meaning of the problem from an administrative perspective.  In his mind it was in the nature of a trick to appear to listen sincerely without conveying the impression that he could or would respond.  He would worry about someone seeing through the trick.  He never lost the feeling that at any moment a student would see through the apparent pretense and blow a whistle at him.

            In Helfferich's style Bodger had seen the value of role playing.  But Bodger lacked his mentor's flamboyance, his thespian bent.  Bodger was too self-conscious to emulate him.  Yet he managed to put a persona before the students and his colleagues on the faculty that seemed to work.           

1972: A watershed year for Bodger 

            When they met again, Bodger told Matthew about the feeling of misleading students or colleagues in his mixture of roles.

            Matthew was quick with an analysis: "You probably didn't give them enough credit for understanding the power structure.  They knew where you were in it, surely.  You were successful in your relations with them because of your apparent openness and willingness to be vulnerable."

            "'Willingness' is probably too strong a word.  I was vulnerable in spite of myself, I think.  There was always in me a reluctance to become wholly the administrative functionary.  I felt a bit like an outsider even after managing to be included on the inside."

            "Are you saying you wanted it both ways?" asked Matthew.  He thought he spied a thread of significance for his own impending change of duty.

            "It was clear to me fairly early in the Pettit administration that I was going to go all out for the presidency.  Deep within I may have had many reservations about it.  But the organizational imperatives of my upbringing were inescapable.  I became less and less hesitant about the goal as the Pettit years wore on."

            "You never seemed to have lost a bit of a sense that you were outside, critical of the seat of authority," Matthew offered.

            "I suppose that you saw that when you came along later, after I was president.  I have to tell you I never resolved the tension and felt a kind of guilt."

            Matthew sought his own lessons: "Still, a healthy self-doubt in an administrator is rarer than it should be, don't you think?  I've seen a lot of leaders, in the church and elsewhere, who were too insecure--or too filled with themselves--to allow for much self-criticism."

            "At this point of my development, in the early '70s, I had a vast capacity for self-criticism.  But I repressed it in order to move along--sheer panic never was very far below my hard surface and I managed to keep it there most of the time."

            Matthew asked, "Was there a definite moment when you began to behave consciously as someone who wanted to succeed Pettit?"

            "There was.  The fall of 1972 was a watershed for me.  We dedicated Helfferich Hall on 21 October 1972.  I think that put a kind of period to the Helfferich era.  The dedication combined a mellowness and a kind of grandeur.  DLH after two years out of office felt relaxed.  The new gym named in his honor was the biggest building on campus--appropriately.  To me, and to many, he still seemed a little larger than life.  How right it seemed that our big-name speaker was George Murphy, actor turned politician--he made the turn in advance of Reagan.  By then former Senator Murphy was president of the Football Hall of Fame, which fitted him for his ceremonial task with us.  More important, he complemented Helfferich's qualities--actor, doer.  Anna Helfferich, who equaled her husband's stage skills, gave a tribute when she unveiled the big dedication plaque.  I think DLH drafted it.  It had a valedictory ring."

            Bodger went to his file and brought out the college magazine covering the event.

            "The dedicatory plaque described Helfferich as 'student, alumnus, board member, president, chancellor.'  After reciting it, Anna went on to say, 'There could be added--athlete, aviator, orator, poet, musician, sailor, dancer, husband, father, brother, friend, and always the actor.'

            "Then she added: 'He is good at almost anything that does not require a hammer, saw or screwdriver.  He moves everywhere with ease, skill, strength and assurance, and no one has ever taken a neutral position towards him.  Because of his life-long love affair with his Alma Mater, it is fitting that she return the affection with this beautiful, gigantic gesture.  A very generous and thoughtful man--Ty Helfferich.  Long may he wave!'

            "I recall that day, that fall, in a glow.  As Helfferich took this bow and moved toward the wing of the stage, I somehow felt new strength.  It is always so, perhaps, when the generations gaze on one another at fateful turns.  Bill Pettit, I suspect, felt it too.  You see him in the photo in front of Helfferich Hall with DLH and Bill Elliott, for whom the pool was simultaneously being named.  Pettit is smiling knowingly, uncharacteristically unguarded, the man in the middle, in charge.  DLH is already at the margin in the shot, though still gesturing to Elliott, his friend, with a show of fading majesty.

            "So much seemed to be in place by then.  It was time for movement, to try to read the tide and ride it through.  DLH was not a scholar but he had a vibrant sense of himself as an actor on an historical stage.  He talked often to me about the record, the legacy.  He felt that he was writing a history with each day's act; and he acted often so that the history would read favorably in the years ahead.  As we listened to George Murphy laud the virtues of a sound mind in a sound body, I must have taken a private resolve.  To get on with the agenda.

            "By this time," Bodger reflected, "the irrational excesses of the late '60s seemed to cool.  The end of the draft for college students helped restore some calm.  And the sheer novelty of hippie culture lay in the past. For a while, Pettit was playing a transparent but successful game of delay in response to never-ending pressure from kids to allow dorm visitation and alcohol on campus.  It would take a year or so for the inflationary spiral to inflame faculty impatience for more money.  Students were transferring out at a fairly high rate, but our incoming class enrollments seemed steady and the total enrollment held fairly constant.  There was fractional erosion each year but not enough to raise red flags in Pettit's mind—though he certainly was watching it.  The board seemed comfortable enough that Pettit had taken charge.  They gave their support as well as they could.  Through the Century II program, we appeared to be raising a fair amount of money from board and others.

            "Taking everything into account, I could hypothesize that in the fall of 1972 we saw a moment of stability, when God might still have been in heaven in spite of the '60s and much might be right with our little campus world if not with the world at large.

            "I kept my skirts as clear as possible of campus political muck, supporting Pettit as well as I could.  I continued to take my teaching of freshman composition and senior symposium seriously.  I was surprised by my promotion to assistant professor in the spring of '72 and the awarding of tenure and the Lindback prize the following spring.  There was a feeling of inauthenticity about these moves that made me uncomfortable.  On the other hand, I took them to mean that Pettit as well as DLH and some board members were looking favorably on my role at the college, not just in the classroom.  I took them to be political signals."

            "They would not have recognized you if you in fact were not perceived to be doing a good job in the classroom," said Matthew.

            "Let me flatter myself that this was so," said Bodger.  "I could not judge the outcome, but I know I worked like a dog to prepare myself for the classes I taught--overprepared, partly out of a sense that I had no right to be there in the first place.  Being in class with students kept me fresh, in contrast to the constant drain of administrative work."

            "I know the difference between being in a pulpit with the people and being in a church conference office," Matthew said.

            "I felt that you had to stay open with students in a radical way.  If you pigeonholed them, or the subject, too aggressively, you killed something in yourself as well as in them.  It takes a sustained naiveté, I think," said Bodger.

            "Teaching and preaching are best done when they are not manipulative," Matthew agreed.  "When you are in a college administrative office or a church office, you are by definition converting people, to some extent, into objects."

            "My serious teaching commitments at this time went with the general atmosphere of stabilization at the college that I am remembering," said Bodger.  "And Pettit's acknowledgment of me as a teacher may have helped legitimize the case for me as a presidential wannabe.  But it was all very 'in-house,' very parochial."

            "And so you set out in the fall of 1972 on a long journey to the top," Matthew prompted.

            "Again, looking back, I see how by that time Pettit contributed to my candidacy in other ways besides endorsing me as a teacher.  He stood out front and took the criticisms of his administration without pointing to me standing behind him.  He could accurately have blamed me when the Century II fund-raising campaign drew heat for failing to raise enough for salaries, but he did not.  He gave me space to learn and grow, less expansive than that which DLH had provided but real.  But he also expected me to stand on my own and do my job as assigned, without excuses, and I did that.  I was able to continue testing ideas about administration without running a great risk.  As long as I did his bidding well, he granted me some protection and some space.  A fair bargain, good for me, certainly.  Maybe good for the institution as well."

            "And Pettit," Matthew added.

            "There was a moment that fall, yes--as if I felt the inner stability of that day when we dedicated Helfferich Hall and secretly said to myself, 'OK, now I'm going to begin to destabilize this place from within.  Nobody is going to know I have made this decision but I am not going to rest until we know the final outcome.  I am deliberately going to try to make this thing happen.'   In a sense, DLH's Galatea finally stirred with life."

            "You seem so clear about the turning point," Matthew said.  He seemed to be wondering whether he was at such a point yet in his own turn of career.

            "I documented it," Bodger said, moving toward his files.  He handed Matthew a single leaf from a journal and Matthew read the following: 

            Nov. 21, 1972...A new game plan dawned on me this morning while shaving.  Ever since DLH,  more than a year ago, told me Pettit thought I was too pushy, I have trimmed sail, not challenged, followed orders, drained dry ambition.

            That ended this morning.  I am now campaigning.  All constituencies, alert!  The big wave is coming. 

Bodger's plans included joining the church 

            Bodger chuckled as he heard the words.  Matthew paused and smiled.  Both behaved like conspirators behind a screen, watching an amusing fool talk himself into a lather.  Matthew continued reading: 

            More appearances in public:  news release quotes.

            More overt leadership role among alumni.

            More words of mine in print.

            More cultivation of faculty support --veterans, middle group (DeCaturs, Vissers, Reiners)--                       invite to lunch to tell me what's happening in their disciplines: off campus (check Pen &               Ink back room).

            More policy-level proposals to Pettit--heighten the pressure by 10 degrees.

            Begin DLH biography.  Visit DLH more frequently.

            Win Bozorth the dean--accept his oft-offered hand of camaraderie.

            Build a new set of objectives:  downplay philosophical air, set down good things others on                        faculty want.

            Amend Heefner's image of me as an "exec" officer: think big.

            See Creager re church.

            Stay loose--don't overwork: outfox the bastards.

            Practice public speaking.

            Build set of quotable quotes.

            Do some silly things--kiss babies.

            Write letters of thanks to people who aren't expecting them.

            Pay attention to the edges that reach the center--Mrs. Bone, Mrs. Paul Wagner, Jim                                              Wagner.

            Stop tending store--go fishing for bigger things.

            Build a following among student leaders only--let the small fry find out for themselves. 

            "Even now this is embarrassing," Bodger said, "but you will understand."  He laughed again at himself.

            Matthew laughed too.  "And yet..."

            "Right," Bodger said.  "Many of those things, one way or the other, directly or indirectly, I did."

            "Stay loose--don't overwork?"

            "Skipped that one, I'm afraid," said Bodger.

            "Thought so," said Matthew.

            "I may have had some beer when writing that," Bodger said, "but it has been a funny part of my private story all these years.  It did seriously signal a shift.  Two years before, after Pettit's election, I had written to myself that the way to prepare for president was not to prepare for being president.  So the worm turned."

            Matthew was trying to relate this revelation--amusing but puzzling--to his own development. "Were you really that--programmatic?"

            "That I had to write a list suggests how unprogrammatic I really felt," Bodger said.  "Call it planned overcompensation for a feeling of directionlessness.  Most of the time, I doubt if I knew where I was headed.  Aren't you always aware of a kind of buzzing that the moment at hand generates, masking out the other sounds, the sense of them?"

            Matthew looked knowing but responded slowly: "Maybe not the same buzzing others hear?  For me, the presence of God is a constant.  I feel that fills my spaces."

            Bodger said, "Of course."  He realized he should not have made a  presumptuous comparison between his feelings and those of Matthew.

            Matthew said, "Could we talk about 'See Creager re church?'"

            Bodger responded, "My appreciation for the qualities of character nurtured by the Reformed tradition grew rapidly under the influence of DLH and other mentors on the campus.  However, I felt unprepared to be one of that band.  My relationship with churches throughout my life was furtive.  They were not places of consolation for me but of self-consciousness, embarrassment, discomfort even."

            "This is something beyond me," Matthew said.

            "I know, and I can't expect that you would understand it," Bodger said.  "You grew up inside the church and I grew up outside it.  I was never churched as a child.  Maybe that's as much as I need to say by way of explanation."

            Matthew said, "I just assumed you grew up as a Reformed kid."

            "In any event, behind my manifesto was the conviction that I could not become president if I did not show the religious colors of the Reformed church, by then a part of the merger into the United Church of Christ.  Al Creager was pastor of Trinity Reformed church across the street from the main campus--as you know."

            "He was a familiar figure in church circles in my youth," said Matthew.  "He was on the committee that wrote the United Church of Christ statement of faith in the 1950s."

            Bodger said, "You know, for many years he did double duty as a college staff member--chaplain of the college, professor of religion. Trinity had an historic association with the college. Al was an alumnus, class of '33.  In his dual role, he embodied the common Reformed roots of the two institutions.  He was one of the numerous Reformed folk who had treated me kindly when I came to the staff, more so than I believed I deserved.  He thought I did some good as an ameliorating presence in the administration during the confrontations of the late '60s.

            "Margot was a Reformed kid.  She always wanted me to join the church.  Her private wishes now converged with my own programmatic sense of the fitness of doing so.  In his friendly way, Al allowed me to get beyond my lifelong sense of distance, alienation, in a sanctuary.  He even affirmed it.  By starting so far outside, he thought I would be stronger once I was inside the church.  He thought in terms of the testing and forging of souls."

            "He saw you on a 'pilgrimage,'" Matthew said.  "The Reformed merged with the Pilgrim church to create the UCC."

            "In early 1973 I started attending services, dragging my nine-year-old son along for moral support.  Margot was directing the church choir at the other Trinity Reformed church, in Skippack.  Not too long afterward, I met a couple of times with Al to talk about theology.  I read some work by Paul Tillich.  I found that the Heidelberg tradition, as Al talked about it, made behavioral, practical sense.  It was not, I discovered, a 'Eureka' tradition, of seeing the light in a flash and coming ecstatically to the cross.   Acquiring faith was more like learning to walk or to talk, and when you had it you performed it with a certain unself-consciousness, a naturalness.   This of course allowed for all the hesitations of someone like me along the way."

            Matthew replied, "Not everyone would isolate that theme of the Reformed faith at the expense of others."   He was being cautious not to allow Bodger to oversimplify the complex fabric of which he was a steward.

            Bodger continued, "As time went on, I tested how much I could say about religious faith without feeling hypocritical.  I discovered I could say a good deal if I carefully chose my words.  The vocabulary of personal faith easily employed by the typical Christian simply could not come out of my mouth.  Al Creager was sensitive to this.  He found a way to incorporate me into the church body without histrionics and without putting me to an embarrassing public test.  One quiet evening, Margot and I met Al alone at Trinity church.  He performed a bit of a ceremony for adults entering the church, the specifics of which you would know better than I can remember.  And the deed was done."

            Matthew said, "However you felt personally about church, your administration is seen as a time of renewal and strengthening of the relationship between the college and the denomination."

            Bodger said, "I could not have pushed a UCC agenda, however, if I had not taken this personal step.  Many people, like you, assumed that I had come up in the religious tradition of the college.  To my knowledge, nobody made a fuss about that quiet little evening experience with Al.  So, in a sense that simply gave substance to a perception that many people had all along.  I never said a word about it to Pettit.  He was himself not of the Reformed church--he went to the Episcopal church in Evansburg--but he knew and respected the folk from his long years of association with them at the college.  I told DLH what I had done.  It surprised but pleased him.  We talked a little about my personal rationale but not so much about the politics of becoming 'churched.'"

            "In truth," Matthew asked, "do you think now it mattered to your becoming president?"

            "Who will ever know?  It made no difference to faculty.  If anything, it would have been a negative with many of them but they would have understood my sense of the necessity for joining.  It made me a member of the Freundschaft, the power structure.  It removed a reason for the board to turn me down.

            "Speaking nonpolitically, however, it made me more fit inside my head to be a candidate, regardless of other feelings of stress and contradiction it may have caused me.  I needed comfort as an administrative operative, a sense of being able to move with ease and skill, as DLH so often put it.   The religious grounding of the college was still very much part of the rhetoric if not of the program.  I could not envision myself at the head of the place without an unambiguous position vis-à-vis the body of the church.  I would have felt a dissonance and that, I believed, would have made my behavior dysfunctional.  Unacceptable."

            Matthew mused, "A papal-like blend of worldly and religious politics."

            "I did not try to resolve the tension about 'belief' in myself," Bodger said.  "I was not hostile to Christian faith and thus at bottom could not accuse myself of hypocrisy.  I was deeply grateful for the way it seasoned the environment of the college, to which I was attaching myself more and more firmly.  The exclusiveness of it, I guess, never finally would make me comfortable.  My understanding of Zen was superficial, based on the popularized stuff by Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki in the '60s.  But it had a permanent effect on the way I dealt with religious faith.  The radical reality sought by Zen beyond language, beyond expressions of faith, never left me as a kind of ultimate religious consciousness.  It put the deeper, more distant issues of faith, in my mind, out beyond the formulations of Christian belief.  It did not contradict them but relativized them.  It was that that I simply could not presume to resolve."

            "But, pilgrim, you tried," Matthew said charitably.

            "You're too generous in thinking so," said Bodger easily.  "Meister Eckhart's Zen-like sermons came as close as anything to telling me Christian faith was not restrictive.  The congruence between his medieval European insight and Asian tradition amazed me.  But once I took the step with Creager, I did not worry much about this.  The times were filled with interesting developments and I was busier than I can now imagine."

            Matthew said he had not intended to press Bodger into so much self-revelation. 

Bodger said that he felt no discomfort, now that so much time had passed.  "But I fear my little tale of balancing religion and politics holds small meaning for your situation as a church administrator."

            Matthew said, "You had an easy balancing act by comparison, I suspect.  Faith for a church administrator may be a given.  But the playing out of faith, the ongoing life of the church as an expression of the life of  Jesus, makes the politics far more volatile by far than anything you were going to deal with."

            "Amen," said Bodger.

            "Must run," Matthew said.  "Be back sometime if you're willing to talk more about your list."

            "Willing."

            Bodger found the journal entry for 30 March 1973:       I tried to tell DLH why I could consider joining and not feel it was hypocritical.  It all has to do with my coming to work at the college.  I came here partly as a lark and partly because I felt it might be the right thing to do.  In the intervening years, I have become convinced that it was a correct move, a move into a friendly sea by a finny vagabond in search of a mission and enough to eat.  I make no apology for having married my fortunes to those of the college: it is a force for good and light in the world, it deserves to survive and flourish, and I am happy giving my energies in its behalf.  As I have sought the truth of the place, as I have read its history and looked in the character of its people for clues, I have come to see that, when one goes down deep enough, he sees the roots of the college begin to intertwine with the roots of the church.  So for me, the church is an outgrowth of my discovery of the college.  History will say that the church created the college--at least, a splinter group from the church did.  My personal arrival at the church door is really the other way around: for me, the college created the church.  Grand principles like independence, responsibility for moral judgments and the like are not easily understood, still less easily taught.  The sanction of both institutions may tend to support such large and good principles.  If they do that together, good.  Let them flourish together, with all their funny faults.  

Bodger sought insight from faculty members 

            Bodger reflected on his list, thinking of Matthew's next visit and what would interest him then.

            More cultivation of faculty support.

            He had pursued this but not in political terms.  He invited faculty members one on one to chat about their departments, their disciplines.  Most were younger than he, with fewer years on campus.  For Bodger it was a continuation of learning, not a building of a coalition.  The political benefit, if any, came as a natural consequence of the genuineness of his interest in what was going on academically.  At least he could tell himself that.  He was not sure it would look that way to Matthew.

            His meeting with John Wickersham stood roundly in mind as an example.  With classic academic credentials from Penn and Princeton, and a Phi Beta Kappa key, John was the new man in classics.  He replaced one of the stalwarts of the faculty of Bodger's student years, Donald Baker.   Wickersham, Bodger remembered, in his early years had a watery look behind glasses, as if his face were continually changing, and only something within kept constant.  What kept constant within, of course, was his undefiled concern for the thing that he did--study and teach Greek and Latin.

            In Bodger's office, John had a ready attention to wayward conversation.  He quickly grasped the half-clear notion.  He went readily with a sudden turn of thought in a different direction.  They talked about the state of his discipline ("critical"), the movement of Philosophy from the center to the periphery of the problem of values, the precarious place of Classics on the small campus.  John agreed that it would be mere nostalgia to expect Philosophy to reassert its place at the center of our cultural problem of morals and values.

            Wickersham said, "You would have to reject more than two centuries of intellectual development in the other direction.  They've developed many methodologies for coping with morals and values.  We call them psychology, literature, political science, and so on, you see."

            What good was a classicist in 1973?  John knew that he was like the coat of arms over the liberal arts door.  He valued the specialism of textual research, that rare realm smacking of ancient gold.

            "Won't save us, though," he said. "Beyond being a symbol of a mighty tradition, we have to teach students.  Aristotle will do.  Some think Tom Wolfe is better but Aristotle's okay, he's all right."

            Wickersham would enrich the platter with service course work for non-majors--translations, history.  But he could not do this because he was spread too thin.  "Give me a colleague," he said.  Years later, Bodger approved a part-time addition to Classics.  Wickersham, in his way, came to prevail.  He not only taught with a passion but also produced several solid pieces of scholarly gold during Bodger's tenure.  And he was in the vanguard of Phi Beta Kappa members who finally brought a chapter to the campus.

            As a behavioral psychologist, George Fago stood at a far end of the academic spectrum from Wickersham.  George was trained as a rat man.  But in his visit to Bodger's office, not long after Wickersham's, George demonstrated the kind of awareness of human values that mattered to Bodger.  That awareness influenced his sense of what was going on educationally on a small campus like theirs.

            "People are more important than programs," George said.  "But you have to have the programs.  You can't neglect the curriculum.  It's the ground on which we meet the students, where we have our influence as persons."

            They talked about the atmosphere of the campus under Helfferich and now Pettit.  They agreed that the college had a nostalgic residue of desire to educate the old way, by instilling a value system by forced feeding, by prescription..

            "It won't work well much longer," George said.  "The '60s happened.  Educational theory changed."

            "So," said Bodger, "the old liberal arts college knew what it was doing--it was building a value system for students."

            "It's still our objective," George said, "but it simply can't be done that way now.  We can't stuff values into their bodies like so much cotton."

            As George saw it, the college had to show students that forming a value system of their own devising was of first importance to their right living.  "We have to say: look, in principle the college is not going to force a value system down your throats.  We will, however, force you to see that you must work out a value system for yourself.  Through our personal life styles, we will go a step further--we will demonstrate one value system for you to consider.  Through the ambiance of the entire college, which is the effect of a multitude of accumulated institutional decisions, we will predispose you to make certain choices.  Be honest in your thoughts.  Seek the truth in the face of too-obvious answers.  Credit others for their efforts.  These things we value.  But you decide whether or not they are your choices."

            "Have we arrived at this approach?" Bodger asked.

            "We are talking about the contrast between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation," George said.  "Our atmosphere tends to emphasize extrinsic motivation.  Students will work because a grading system drives them, not because of their inner convictions about the value of learning for its own sake.  If the faculty and the administration tuned themselves to the importance of intrinsic motivation, some change in the ethos could be effected."

            "The extrinsic approach has left deep grooves," Bodger said.

            "That doesn't preclude making new grooves," George said.

            This view, and that of others Bodger sought out for talks in his office, reinforced his growing sense that he could lead the faculty and staff toward an alternative programmatic future for the college.  He would keep the essence of the college's traditional purpose while swinging stylistically away from it.  He felt a generational affinity at work in his talks with Fago and those like him, even though Bodger was a decade or more older.  They were newer to the college than he.  They were in the early stages of investing their professional capital in the place.  They were looking for assurances that it would adapt to the changes they saw in their graduate schools and their undergraduate alma maters during the troubles of the '60s.  Bodger was talking about those changes in a way that others in the administration were not.  His talk may have been superficial, but it may have given hope.  That may have been enough to create some bonds.

            When Bodger told Matthew about his cultivation of faculty members, Matthew challenged him about his motives.  "You say that the talks were ways for you to learn the issues of the faculty from inside their heads.  Yet all along you pursued them as a prong in a campaign to become president."

            "I still had a shoe solidly in the faculty, despite its thin sole," Bodger countered.  "I could still claim to be first of all a colleague."

            "Still," Matthew said, "you had more in mind about yourself than they did at the time."

            Bodger said, "Looking back, I believe that leadership does not have the luxury of making neat boundaries between motives and actions.  In this process, I was refining an insight that DLH tried to give me.  It had to do with appearances and substances.  If people saw you inspecting the state of the trees on the campus, you created for them an appearance of concern about the quality of the learning environment.  You might ALSO have seen some sick trees and have told maintenance to bring in a tree doctor.  That was optional, extra.  Either outcome had value.  Both of them together had greater value.  That was the objective--from every single act of leadership, get as many outcomes as possible."

            "Didn't the Wickershams and the Fagos hear you making commitments to them?" Matthew pressed.  "Maybe that's why they were interested in your talks--not your brilliance but your access to the honey pot."

            "Altogether likely.  What was true for me had to be true for them.  That is, they did not have to make neat distinctions between motives and actions any more than I did.  If what we were doing was merely talking educational shop, that was fine with them.  If in addition they were possibly positioning themselves favorably with a potential power-maker--that was okay also.  I never thought they should not play it both ways too."

            Matthew said, "Levels of meaning, ironies of effect.  You would have been good in the church.  A parish preacher lives inside an organizational structure distributed more widely than that of a faculty member's campus organization.  But it is just as real in his local life on the street and in the pulpit.  He rarely knows how much effect he can have--or should have--on the way the larger church organization lives.  Sometimes it seems like a mirage, sometimes like a sledge hammer."

            Bodger said, "I had an instinct, I think, for getting at the right themes with the folks in those days, without too much calculation.  This was possible because of the reality of a small campus community.  We all knew what our mission was and, each in our fashion, felt committed to it.  I felt there was more cohesion than was apparent in the fractiousness of faculty meetings and the divide between faculty and administration.  We all talked about the same things in different places around the campus.  The 'politics' of it was virtually the life we lived every day."

            "No apologies for being manipulative, then?" asked Matthew.

            "I recognize the multiple purposes at play in any situation and acquiesce in the complexity without feeling 'guilty' about it.  I think," Bodger smiled, "that means no apologies." 

Bodger broadened his perspective one summer at Harvard 

            Matthew asked Bodger for another look at the 21 November 1972 manifesto.  He wanted to confirm an impression.

            "Make big plans.  Shift from being the 'exec' officer.  More overt leadership.  You seemed to be deciding that the role of 'can boy' had to be put behind you."

            "Right," Bodger said.  "My career to that point had been to be the boss's helper.  It reached an apotheosis under Pettit.  Even if the presidency of the college had not been a possibility for me, I would have begun to shift at that point."

            "Was this a kind of burn-out?"

            "Not at all.  To this day, I think that the small organizational issue enfolds the large one.  This is not a standard view.  The standard view is that the boss should not do the details.  I used to think--and still think--that small problems become great.  The microcosm becomes the macrocosm.  Feelings about small, private offenses become large, public conflicts.  The state of skin temperature becomes an affair of high office.  I simply saw a need to shift my focus at that time, not to abandon my sense of the importance of the daily grind.

            "I kept a log of little things.  Here are slices of summer 1973: Ace Bailey, athletic director, asked me to issue a memo warning others not to book the new swimming pool to outside groups without talking first with him.  Five resident summer school women students called me at home at 9:30 pm in a state of revolt over the conditions in their dormitory.  The director of aquatics asked me to decide the kind of bench and chair to be purchased for the swimming program (my notes say I chose not to decide this one).  I made emergency plans to permit evening summer school use of air-conditioned classrooms in the new gymnasium.  I met with the dean of men to decide where to move twenty-four students in September from their assigned suites to allow the Philadelphia 76ers professional basketball team to stay in the dorms.  We later had to buy extra-length beds for them.  I got a warning from someone that a maintenance supervisor was up in arms because his major medical policy did not cover a condition that his young son had.  Threats of labor unrest in the shop resulted.  The head of a major department told me that he favored a union for the faculty.

            "That summer we were still shaking down the newly opened Helfferich Hall, the College Union, the newly renovated Pfahler Hall.  We were doing the renovation of Bomberger Hall.  The plant agenda kept on going, and the director reported to me.  So I was up to my eyes in the business of running things."

            Matthew said, "Organizational life happens.  The particulars tend to look more or less alike from one place to another, I imagine."

            Bodger replied, "I was in the muck of  the college's life, in any event.  And I saw the personal need to use that experience, to incorporate it in a larger agenda, not to get away from it.  Later, when I was president, people would say that I needed to give up the hands-on management of so much.  I did give up a lot over time but not because of a principle of management leadership.  I simply did not have the time then."

            "It was probably a flaw to try to have so much stuff on your platter."

            Bodger said, "Probably.  It's not that I did not think a lot about management and leadership.  I had hoped to go to Harvard in the summer of '73 for its six-week Institute for Educational Management.  Too much was happening in '73 and the plan fell through.  But I picked it up and went in the summer of '74 instead, the fifth year of its existence.  I think some scholarship money became available that year that wasn't there the year before."

            "This was a 'finishing school' experience?" asked Matthew.

            "There were more than a hundred participants, mostly upper-level administrators, hardly any presidents.  Each got there by a slightly different route.  All of us were upward mobile, however.  We were there because we wanted to lead the educational establishment.  The venue was the Harvard Business School campus, across the Charles from Harvard Square.  The faculty largely came from the HBS.  The School of Education administered the program in some sort of of partnership with the Business School.  The Business School 'case method' and its special atmosphere dominated the experience."

            "The atmosphere?" Matthew asked.

            "An admixture of Harvard elitism, pressure to participate competitively, simulation of real management situations, a pragmatic, action-oriented mind-set.  Even an activity this far removed from the center of Harvard could co-opt the mystique: 'this is the best.'"

            Matthew said, "It doubtless sorted out some of your thinking about management style."

            Bodger said, "IEM at Harvard did several things for me.  It got me out of town and into a nationally attuned environment.  I got in touch with the hot issues of the mid-seventies.  We met and listened to guests of note, such as David Reisman, Hannah Grey--who was still at Yale and not yet president of the University of Chicago--, John Silber, near the start of his long journey as president of Boston University, Harvard President Derek Bok, still fairly new to the task.  When a  group of us had cocktails with Bok at the Faculty Club, one of us asked him what Harvard's number one problem was and he shot back the same answer that any of us would have given--finances.  That Harvard worried first about money made me realize that the '70s would hand any new college president a heavy sack to carry.

            "The Harvard summer gave me needed distance on the job I was already doing as a college vice president.  It gave me the confidence to conceptualize administrative and governance issues with greater objectivity.  Even a little chutzpah.  The inclination at Harvard was to seize a complex problem as if it were a piece of raw meat in the paws of a predator and to shake it and chew it to bits.  I did not talk about it with anyone back here, but the experience privately gave me a cushion, a resource on which I knew I could draw if I were to move on to become a president.

            "IEM gave me a network of hopefuls around the country.  I stayed in touch with a number of them for some years.  One of the most interesting was Walter Leonard.  At the time he was a cross-campus commuter.  A black lawyer, he was Derek Bok's affirmative action officer for Harvard.  Walter gave us an inside look at the ways of  Harvard at a time when legal issues were high on the list.  Harvard hired no one before Walter reviewed the application and the process.  He later became president of Fisk University.  Fisk was a member of the Council of Higher Education of the United Church of Christ.  Walter and I saw each other again in a very different venue.  He had a rough sea while Fisk's president.  At Harvard, though, he had all the luster of the growing group of black scholars and administrators who rose to prominence after the struggles of the '60s.

            "The famous case method of the Business School inspired me.  The faculty of IEM for the most part came from the HBS faculty.  They played the pedagogical game with mastery in their horseshoe-shaped discussion halls, with wrap-around blackboards and big first-name cards in front of each of us participants.  Their success, of course, was owing only in part to classroom virtuosity.  The key was the case studies themselves, real problems addressed in cross-disciplinary perspectives.  I could never duplicate these conditions in a freshman English comp class.  But I was so excited by the teaching that I saw at IEM that my classroom never was the same again.  I went after structured student participation and became a chalkboard jockey like never before.

            "At Cambridge I developed a list of local issues that I wrote up and shared selectively when I came home among board members and maybe even some faculty colleagues, if I remember rightly."

            Matthew intoned, "Make big plans.  Shift from being the 'exec' officer.  More overt leadership."

            Bodger after some searching showed Matthew the paper that ended with his list.

            "This is a report on your experience as a whole," said Matthew.

            "It ends, though, with a set of eight items, each of which touched on a significant policy nerve here at the time."

            "You were using your report to float a political platform without calling it that."

            Bodger said, "You could see it that way.  I could also have denied it was anything like that if challenged."

            Matthew perused the following text: 

            Did my exposure at IEM cause me to perceive our college more clearly or differently?  The experience did lead me to compare our college with others and to form some thoughts that might be useful.  In listing a few of these thoughts, I reserve the right to explain myself more fully to anyone interested--and to change my mind about any of the items without prior notice!

            Item:  Our unwillingness to diversify our mission--that is, our dedication to an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum--is a strength.  It compels us to keep first things first.

            Item:  However, our resistance to change within a liberal arts curriculum is somewhat excessive.   Standards are not necessarily upheld by merely standing fast.  Colleges around us are reshaping and rethinking the conceptual boundaries of the disciplines, and we should take heed.

            Item:  Administratively, we are thinly staffed with competent people.  This has been a strength.  As the world encroaches--through government, programs like affirmative action for women and minorities, local population growth, consumerism, regional coordination, State Education bureaucracy--we will probably have to get thicker, and at the same time resist "self-bureaucratization."

            Item: We have identified our segment of the regional market fairly well in the past.  We will have to sharpen our focus and strive even harder just to keep our share of the students in the future.

            Item:  We have maintained narrower boundaries on student behavior than most colleges of comparable academic quality.  This has related to our marketing:  the "customers" we identified have wanted this "product."  We will find increasingly that the narrow boundaries must be carefully relocated each year if we are to keep our share of the market.

            Item:  Mere academic professionalism is not enough to make a great small college.  Some sort of overriding social or ethical vision must inform the activity of everyone.  Our vision, rooted in the pietism of yesteryear, needs to be studied rationally and articulated in terms that are meaningful to faculty and students of the present day--but by no means should we abandon the idea that there is a commitment larger than the sum of the major academic disciplines.  I talked with some disillusioned people from prestigious sister colleges who felt that a graduate school mentality had cost their campuses a soul.

            Item:  We do not adequately recognize or utilize the fact that the most important influence on learning is the peer group, the student's fellow students.  (Frank Newman, author of Health, Education, and Welfare's influential study, National Policy and Higher Education, and president-elect of Rhode Island University, made this point.)

            Item:  We could give much greater attention to the retraining and enrichment of faculty, both within their disciplines and in other disciplines.

            Finally, I list the goals of undergraduate education as they were expressed by Newman.  His thesis was that while these goals are familiar to us, we have no measure to prove that we are presently meeting them.  Newman said that education should teach the following: learn to learn; master critical thinking; develop a sense of the humane nature of mankind; learn to communicate in speaking, writing and mathematics; develop scholarly objectives; gain specific knowledge in a subject field; acquire intellectual curiosity and daring; learn to tolerate ambiguity; develop creativity, imagination and esthetic appreciation.

            These goals had an old sound, but in the refreshing atmosphere of the IEM program, they also sounded like mandates for a new and better order in higher education. 

            "Translate the last sentence," Bodger said, "to mean a new and better order here, at this college."

            Matthew said, "I could imagine that Bill Pettit would see this as a criticism of what he was doing."

            "Oddly, he didn't tell me that.  By the summer of '74, it was more and more evident that I would be a candidate when he decided to bow out.  We had worked harmoniously together for several years.  Much happened, especially in the continued development of the plant--Bomberger and Pfahler renovated, Helfferich Hall opened, the College Union opened, an all-weather track installed and playing fields relocated, even an electrical substation installed.  I was a willing go-between for him in these projects.  They did not have the potential to separate us on policy grounds.  I had direct relationships with key board members and DLH.  My fund-raising and physical plant responsibilities legitimated these relationships."

            "Still," Matthew said, "I could imagine it."

            "Sure," Bodger said.  "We both were in an odd position that became more odd as the time for transition came closer.  My Harvard caper and the report on it put me in a more serious running position in the eyes of Ted Schwalm, the board chairman, Heefner, Guest, DLH, and others.  Though he kept his own counsel, Pettit must have become conscious of the horizon and the inevitability of his departure. He had to be looking ahead to that as the pressures mounted.  The faculty, even old friends, nagged him constantly over salary needs in the double-digit economic climate.  Students were after him constantly to ease up on social restrictions surrounding dorm visits and drinking on campus.  He had to tuck it in and make a major change when our students honed in on Pennsylvania's new ban on gender discrimination in college housing.  It must have been a strange moment for him when he had to abandon the old paternalistic women's hours in dorms and make them equal to those of the men.

"The '60s ended but the first half of the '70s in a way was worse.  The idealism faded but the predisposition to doubt the system flourished.  The Nixon Watergate tragedy heated up, leading to Nixon's resignation on 9 August 1974.  It infected everything in America.  It compounded the lingering oil supply dilemma and galloping inflation.  Pettit pushed for more salary expenditures in his presentations to our board, but the faculty did not hear him, and they blamed him for their malaise.  We had a long tradition of low tuition charges.  He could not bring himself to push them up to meet inflation, fearing the negative reaction of families and damage to our retention rate.  We already were losing too many students through transfer and drop-out.  On social policy, he managed to delay and engage the students better than DLH had done, allowing incremental change without getting into trouble with our conservative board.  But student resentment kept simmering and spreading nonetheless.

            "Point is," Bodger said, "he had such a heavy schedule of issues that there was little need for him to be thinking about my place in the future politics of the institution.  I like to think that he welcomed my help, such as it was, and that he thought the dynamics of leadership change would take care of themselves in due course.  He may not have seen it as one of his responsibilities.  DLH was still very much on the scene, tending to the chimings.  The chimings to Pettit may well have looked like candidates to succeed him and he could leave them to the chancellor." 

Work engulfed family 

            "Families pay a price for executive leadership," Matthew said to Bodger.  "If it was evident to Pettit by 1974 that you would be running for office, it must have been evident to Margot and maybe your kids.  I worry about the price tag families have to pay."

            "You should worry," said Bodger, "if my example teaches anything."

            "My wife and two children have a strong church foundation," said Matthew.  "We're close.  Even so, I see the traveling that James does and the nightly meetings around the conference."

            Bodger said, "Mine is an easily told tale but not a proud one.  I was obsessed with work.  I took my wife's support for granted.  Without realizing it, I paid little attention to the daily needs of my two children.  Mea culpa."

            "These are the sins of a male-dominated generation," Matthew said, with a stab at charity.

            Bodger replied, "I went beyond.  I have only been able to see this more clearly since leaving office.  Acknowledging it does not erase the loss."

            "Overdeveloped super-ego?" Matthew queried.

            "That's a way to see it.  I was involved in self-sacrifice for the social good.  Margot saw that it was workaholism long before I could accept her diagnosis.  Then it was too late.  I knew only one way to work, flat out, all-giving, damn the consequences to my body, my family.  I had a need to avoid myself.  I think it lay behind a suicide theme in those years."

            "As a thought about suicide?" Matthew sought clarification.

            Bodger said, "A thought, yes, not more than that.  To think about it was therapeutic.  Paradoxically, it may have helped me to survive."  Bodger showed Matthew one of his poems as evidence. 

           MY SUICIDES 

"Even if one does not believe in God,

Suicide is not legitimate"--

Camus.  But I've contrived a lawful mode,

A guillotine that's indeterminate.

He chose survival slung between a hope

Of order and consciousness of empty sound

Across a cosmos.  Lucid heliotrope,

He raged.  I concentrate upon the ground.

It's true: I must survive by any means.

I have to live; I cannot fully kill

Myself; I cannot lightly empty veins.

Expect of me no perfect lack of will.

Yet I cannot leave the house before I've died:

Each morning I commit a suicide. 

            Matthew looked up and said, "Literary."

            Bodger said, "Words words words.  To myself.  They were a life jacket of sorts.  In that sense, the theme served my family.  But isn't that a stretch?"

            Matthew held up his hands.  "I'm not the judge!  I'm just interested in the parallels."

            Bodger said, "Your personal priorities are more shapely than mine could ever be.  May God save you from psychoanalyzing yourself."

            "Doesn't anyone in a leadership position need to be self-aware, if only to function effectively?"

            "I'm sure," said Bodger.  "I mainly remember being driven by feelings, as if I was compelled to act without conscious reflection.  The thoughts I had about my path to the presidency were like flashlight stabs in a dark wood rather than a light bulb in a room.  When I read my lists and notes today, they seem sensible only because the drives within--fear, desire, hunger for affirmation--no longer flood my brain.  I am lucky to have survived to be able to think about that whole hurricane with a little detachment."

            Matthew replied, "It has to be hard to keep family obligations in perspective when you feel like you're living through a hurricane."

            "We survived because Margot was long-suffering.  We had a rock-bottom sense of connection.  We started as teenage sweethearts.  I was able to take her support for granted--that is what I can see and regret now.  We were of a generation that were married once and stayed married.  If you want to evaluate the influence of marriage on a career, I simply could not have become president of the college without her.  This says nothing, however, to the issue of fairness and justice to her."

            "Children?" said Matthew.  "How do you think family obligations can play out for them in a father's 'hurricane'?"

            "Creativity was the key, as far as I was concerned," Bodger said.  "Karen was musically gifted.  Kurt had a whole palette of talents as a boy, music, electronics, photography, poetry.  I always felt in synch with my kids.  It was a shock to learn later in life that I might have appeared to be remote from them.  I suppose that the work I was doing made that inevitable, but it did not occur to me at the time.  I admired their abilities and thought I encouraged them.  The masculine values of the time would have allowed me to believe that I was somehow doing them good by succeeding in my work."

            Bodger knew he was talking with an expert in family values.  He was certain his testimony could do nothing to advance Matthew's knowledge of what might come of his family if he advanced to the big job at the church.  Their conversation about family soon ended. 

It was a dark time to be preparing 

            Their talk about the Bodger family in the mid-'70s, however, reminded him of the pivotal character of that time leading up to his election to the presidency.  He moved before a larger background dramatically colored by Nixon's emerging Watergate tragedy and the sense of crisis precipitated by the energy shortage.  DLH had lessened his influence on the Pettit administration.  Pettit had demanded good judgment and performance from Bodger as a matter of course.  Bodger no longer had the luxury of being an apprentice.  Bodger's children were growing up.  His wife was teaching elementary music again and directing a church choir.  She too had a drive to work.  His reading of American literature had led him to think his life's experience could represent something more than himself in the story of evolving American character.  He thought in his younger years the medium for that representation would be literature itself.  Now he yielded to the realization that the medium would be the college.  The turn of events moved him into position to be an institution builder.                                                                                                                                                                                                     When his father died of a heart attack at the very end of 1973 at age 80, it signaled for him a turn, finally, into the full-blown phase of maturity demanded by such a role.  His death was literally a dark moment, coming in that Kafka-esque winter when, to save electric power, people did not unpack their Christmas tree lights.                                                                                                                           Bodger and Karen and Kurt walked up the white middle line of Route 29 toward the next village, Rahns, on a foggy Christmas Eve.  They feared being hit by no traffic, for there was none.  The energy crunch kept everyone home.                                                                                                                              Bodger's mood was dark for a while that winter.  He felt, as all sons and daughters feel, the edge of the timeless unknown move a step closer to him as his father's large figure disappeared from the space in front of him.  But that too was a step in the maturing process he could feel working within him.  His six summer weeks in Cambridge in the summer of '74 followed that dark winter.  A new light in his life began to emerge.  He became less uncomfortable with the still-incredible possibility waiting to happen to him.

            In the two remaining years before his election to the presidency, Bodger groomed himself deliberately for the possibility.  His friends on the board and on the faculty became increasingly sure that his election would serve the college well.  (He guessed also that many non-supporters harbored growing fear that the board could actually make such a mistake.)  Faculty politics heated up in ways that Bodger did not fully understand.  Tutored by Bill Heefner and D. L. Helfferich, and toward the end by Bill Pettit too, Bodger tried to behave as presidentially as he could without letting people see that he was consciously doing so.  Looking back through all the years now, he enjoyed another laugh at himself.  His behavior must have been as transparent as glass to anyone watching.  But a basic naiveté must have served him and helped him get through.

            One day, as the selection process was getting started, DLH puffed his pipe and looked at Bodger, amused and quizzical at the same time.

            "Where did this Bodger thing come from?  Who are you?" he said, echoing a question someone had asked him earlier in the day.

            "God knows," Bodger replied.  "I don't." 

Campus conflicts set the stage 

            At their next talk together, Matthew said, "The church has an elaborate selection process.  It took nearly a year for me to get this new number two position in the church conference.  It will take at least that when I apply for the top position.  Colleges don't choose leaders swiftly either, from what I see."

            "What can I tell you?" asked Bodger.

            "Competing candidates are in a kind of zoo," said Matthew.  "Isn't there a brand of behavior that develops strictly for that limited time?"

            Bodger said, "When you are candidate for a position while hard at work on the scene of the search, and not a visiting fireman, that is especially so."

            "How did your behavior change?" asked Matthew.

            Bodger said, "I remained very active in my day-to-day work.  I became rather passive with respect to the search."  But not totally, he thought to himself.

            At Matthew's urging, Bodger reconstructed what went on in the months leading up to his election in May 1976.

            Looking back at those campus events from his vantagepoint of some two decades, Bodger felt as if he were looking through the eyes of Gulliver at the land of little people.   The citizens of Lilliput were in a conflict with the neighboring nation of little people in Blefuscu.  The nub of the argument:  which end of an egg should one break before eating, the Big End, as the Blefuscuans held, or the Little End, as the Lilliputians had come to believe?   Small issues, he mused, for the small.  The parochial process by which he was selected to be the president reminded him now of the bustling and huffing that Gulliver found at the Lilliputian court over Big-Endism.  Matthew is not going to believe this, Bodger told himself.

            "There are no grown-ups," a priest once said to Andre Malraux.  He was summing up his insight into human life after decades of listening in the confessional booth.  We are all Lilliputians, Bodger wanted to add as a gloss.  The players on the college scene in the mid-'70s, including himself, looked oddly like the subjects of the Most Mighty Emperor of Lilliput, Delight and Terror of the Universe, seeking to preserve Little Endism.

            Bodger would not tell Matthew about his Swiftian comparison.  It was an indulgence better kept to himself.  He recalled an old saw about campus politics: "the passions are so great because the issues are so small."

            But the issues of that time on campus were real enough.  The selection process, however parochial, was earnest.  The institution was approaching a fork in the road of its development.  The urge was strong among many on the board to preserve a certain posture in the face of a rapidly changing higher educational scene.  They aimed to constitute the college as an avowedly "Christian" institution of an unashamedly conservative kind.  DLH's speech on the philosophical temper of the college would be its vehicle.

            Yet, Bodger was aware, at the same time, of a more receptive attitude toward change.  It pervaded the faculty and the students as a matter of course.  It also arose in his conversations with some board members and alumni with an interest and an influence.   Those of this persuasion criticized the slowness of the college to change and wanted to see a sharp turn toward a new direction under a new president.  Many thought this would require someone from outside the Freundschaft of the current leadership--that is, someone other than Bodger.  Bodger believed that carefully excerpted parts of the DLH speech could equally well become the vehicle for this course of development.

            The transition to Bodger's presidency had its roots in a concatenation of this conflict of vision with other conflicts during Pettit's final year in office, 1975-76.

            At a personal level, Pettit was turning 67 years of age, and his wife had been found to have a serious illness.  After 43 years of unstinting service to the college, sixteen as dean and nearly six as president, he was doubtless growing tired of the stress and strain.  The personal satisfaction of being the top man eroded quickly, Bodger would later learn, in the acid of everyday executive responsibility.

            The unpredictability of the politics and the economy of the nation in the post-Watergate years had its unsettling ripple effects even in Lilliput.  There was a worrisome downward trend in the number of applications for admission to the college and an upward trend in the number of enrolled students transferring elsewhere.  The erosive effect of inflation on salary increases demoralized the faculty and staff.

            The hasty termination of a psychology professor's employment in 1973 had left some scars in the body politic.  The basis for the termination seemed to the professor and others to be personal rather than professional.  It led to an ad hoc review that put Pettit's judgment on trial, but the termination stuck.  The scars took the form of nagging complaints among a number of faculty about arbitrary and capricious administrative style.  There was a rumbling underground about the virtues of faculty unionization.

            Pettit's art of keeping students at bay while preserving conservative social rules deserved to be admired for its cleverness.  But the stridency of student voices did not abate. The official student government as well as ad hoc groups initiated demands for reform of rules governing residential behavior.  One had to wonder how long he could continue practicing a subtle art of give-a-little, take-a-little with the student leaders.  The student newspaper played along with faculty who were critical of the administration.

            Pettit became the titular leader of a fund-raising campaign in 1970, The Century II Program, and he worked hard to raise funds.  The goals were not of his making but largely worked up by Bodger with key board members.  Some specific targets were unrealistic.  The aggregate goal was being met; the sub-goals for support of faculty especially were glaringly undersubscribed.  The faculty blamed Pettit for the shortfall.  Further, they blamed him for declaring the Century II Program a success and covering up the lack of funds raised directly for faculty.

            Hurts and grudges of a personal nature lasted long in Lilliput.  In his final year, some of Pettit's old friends and colleagues allowed them to surface.  They tended to forget good times of past years together.  It was not a happy Empire in 1975.

            However, it was not a campus knowingly about to tear itself apart.  As faculty discontent simmered and found expression in the fall of that year, their public voices preserved a sense of the importance of respectful but decisive procedure.  They framed the conflict in formal professionalism, in the expressed desire to find resolution for the long-term good of the college. 

Some faculty wrote an open letter of concerns to the president 

            The precipitating events in the story of Bodger's election to the presidency started rolling on 7 October 1975.  A handful of faculty wrote an open letter of concerns and began asking all tenured faculty members to sign it.  They did not ask the untenured to sign.  They acknowledged the untenured members' lack of job protection and assumed they would fear the reprisal of the administration.

            The initiators of the letter were hardly the stereotypical faculty rabble-rousers.  One was Pettit's fellow chemistry department colleague of long-standing, a protege in the department since his days as an outstanding chemistry undergraduate.  Two were quintessential alumni faculty members with many years of devoted service in and out of the classroom, both members of the political science department.  Veteran colleagues of Pettit on the faculty, they were highly regarded on and off campus.  One had capped his career by seeking and winning election to the legislature in Harrisburg.  Another leader was a long-time member of the economics and business administration department, respected as a practicing bank board director as well as mentor to several generations of business majors.  The fifth was Pettit's own handpicked successor to teach organic chemistry, an outstanding young teacher who in his ten years on campus established a reputation for unflinching integrity in faculty governance.  As they told a committee of board members some months later, they represented over a century of service to the college and were steeped in its quality and traditions.

            Bodger, it turned out, remembered hearing about the letter of concerns from campus contacts before Pettit but not by much.  The faculty had not approached Bodger for a signature.  He had not seen the letter, but his circle of faculty friends was abuzz about it.   He remembered telling Pettit about the letter in the president's office, perhaps a day before it was delivered.  Thirty-seven faculty members signed it, a majority of the tenured faculty.  It reached Pettit's desk on the morning of 17 October.

            Perhaps unaware that the letter was circulating, but sensing a need to connect, Pettit on 14 October had asked the dean to announce a special mid-day faculty meeting for three days hence, the 17th.  He wanted to give the good news that the board had approved the distribution of a salary supplement to faculty to help make up for inflation.  When the letter of concerns arrived before the noontime meeting, Pettit resolved to acknowledge the letter immediately but to delay any substantive reaction except on the prescheduled topic of salaries.

            Pettit's announcement about a salary supplement fell on largely ungrateful ears and failed to quiet the excitement over the delivery of the letter.  The maximum one-time supplement for a year would be $400, the minimum, $100, with low-ranking instructors getting the most and full professors least. It appeared to be too little too late.

            The "We're concerned" letter identified "problems which require immediate remedial action."  The particular issues:

            --"...drastic and imaginative action must be taken to improve faculty salaries if the college is to maintain its academic excellence."

            --The Century II Program "has not fulfilled one of its goals--namely, the improvement of faculty salaries."  The alumni were allegedly misled by the president, who spoke of the Program as a "success."

            --Faculty should "participate in decisions as to the allocation of financial resources, according to AAUP guidelines."

            --A "grievance committee" should be formed.

            --Faculty should sit on the board of directors.

            --The college should utilize the expertise of faculty in making administrative decisions.

            The letter concluded, "In light of these concerns, we request that a small group of Faculty representing the undersigned be permitted to discuss with you and with Board members, at the earliest convenience, the seriousness of the situation which exists on this campus and possible solutions to some of these difficult problems.  We want to make it clear that this letter is not motivated by personal animosity but by genuine concern for and loyalty to the college."

            In the paternalistic, traditionalist culture of the college, such an open expression of dissatisfaction and demand for specific changes aimed directly at the president and board had not been seen since an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the administration immediately after World War II.  The faculty leaders made certain that board members received copies at their homes or offices.  They thus sought to guarantee that Pettit would be unable to sweep it under the rug.

            Circulation to the board members actually helped Pettit to frame a response.  It gave him some time.  Communication with the board was diffused; he could credibly tell the faculty that he needed time to get guidance and direction from the board members.   It allowed him to select strong board members as key participants in the discussion of the issues.  He thereby avoided a lonely presidential confrontation with excited faculty members.

            Pettit delayed an official procedural acknowledgement of the letter until the regular faculty meeting in the first week of November.  This was nearly a month after the letter was drafted and some three weeks after Pettit received it.  He delayed a substantive response until the following faculty meeting in the first week of December.  With the fall semester moving toward a close and Christmas break in the offing, he perhaps was thinking like the veteran dean that he was: the passions of October usually cool a little by December.

            At the November meeting, Pettit kept a presidential air.  Bodger remembered thinking how hard he himself would have found it to maintain equanimity in front of a roomful of familiar people who had deliberately sought to undermine him.  Pettit took credit for having already prepared a strategy to improve salaries prior to receipt of the letter.  The salary supplements may have been woefully small, but the step he took was real.  He picked on the procedural weaknesses of the faculty leaders with an appearance of deference to the board and to the faculty who had not signed the letter.  He read the letter of concerns aloud for the benefit of the untenured faculty who were reportedly left out of the loop by their self-appointed leaders.  Many took this as his way of putting down the leaders.  In effect, he called into question the leadership's license to represent the entire faculty when they had failed to bring the entire faculty into the process.

            Then he advanced his own office and the floor of full faculty meetings as the best venues for airing concerns.  He offered all an invitation to visit him singly or in small groups to talk informally about concerns.  Special faculty meetings could be arranged, he said, if time were needed to get issues into open air.

            The faculty leadership correctly understood these offers to mean that Pettit opposed meeting with them as they proposed.  Bodger assumed that legal counsel was supporting Pettit's own canny judgment to avoid the appearance of a de facto collective bargaining engagement.

            Two days later the faculty leaders parried Pettit's unwillingness to meet by informing him that the 37 signatories to the letter had selected them by secret ballot to speak on their behalf.  They pressed to meet with him and the board or with the board alone.

            This tactical maneuver went unanswered, however.  Pettit already had promised to respond to the whole faculty at its regular 3 December meeting after he received the feedback of the board--and not before.

            He also got out in front against the charge that he had not been candid about the results of the Century II fund-raising campaign.  At the November faculty meeting, after Pettit spelled out his procedure for answering the letter of concerns, he asked Bodger to clarify the goals and outcomes of the campaign.  Bodger distributed a six-page assessment to each faculty member and commented on the achievements and shortcomings of the five-year effort ended 30 June 1975.  It showed that the general goal of $5,450,000 had been surpassed, if government funds and deferred gifts were counted.  It showed clearly, at the same time, that support for faculty reached only a little more than half the proposed targets.

            His appearance in front of the faculty as the vice president for administrative affairs at that charged-up faculty meeting was a notable if not critical moment for Bodger, the would-be candidate for president.  The faculty had been careful not to indict him for the shortcomings of Century II.  Yet, the campaign was in reality more his doing than Pettit's.  Its shortcomings were sown in the over-optimism of 1970, when goals were set without the research to show they were attainable.  Although many on the faculty may have thought of him as a savvy fund-raiser because of his early success in boosting the annual fund, Bodger lacked experience at capital campaigning.  He had taken responsibility for the fund-raising campaign without cautioning himself about the consequences of failing.   With DLH still active on the board and with Pettit becoming supportive of his ambitions, Bodger continued to feel insulated somewhat from the dangers of performance evaluation by the faculty and the board.

            He never sought or received an assessment from faculty colleagues of his report.  It was clearly intended to support the president against his critics.  It set the stage for the board's confirmation that a renewed fund-raising effort would be made to improve the lot of the faculty.  Bodger came to believe, in the absence of word to the contrary, that he had effectively removed the criticism of Century II from the faculty's bill of particulars against Pettit.  He had not, of course, changed their judgment that the college was raising too little money to support their salaries and professional development.

            From a personal viewpoint, Bodger concluded that his report did not fatally damage him in the eyes of faculty.  He had the satisfaction of having been up-front about his role and his allegiance.  For better or worse, he was Pettit's vice president, working as hard as he could for the betterment of his alma mater under Pettit's leadership.  Period.   He avoided any overtures from faculty colleagues to show his agreement with the letter of concerns.

            It appeared to Bodger that the president had successfully skirted the danger of inadvertently entering a collective bargaining process.  He had carefully communicated only with the whole faculty.  He had avoided any formal acknowledgment of the five leaders.  In their excitement at having openly joined the issues, the faculty leaders, Bodger felt, failed to see that procedurally Pettit had gained the offensive.  Yet, it also was evident to him that they had gained the attention of the board.  One way or another, they would have their chance to say their piece to the board.  No matter what the outcome, they could feel successful in putting Pettit's presidential leadership on trial. 

The president and the board responded to faculty concerns 

            The air was charged as the faculty convened in the large lecture room of Pfahler Hall for the regular monthly meeting on 3 December 1975.  Counting Pettit, 78 faculty members were in attendance, plus five administrative staff members--virtually the whole house.  Bodger remembered having almost contradictory feelings.  He felt apprehensive because the stability of the entire college appeared to be at risk.  But he felt an inner calm because, with the issues finally addressed directly, the collective good judgment in the room would somehow make everything work out--or so he wanted to believe.

            Pettit had an air of assurance.  He probably had privately decided by that time, without confiding in anyone other than his wife, to retire.  That would have allowed him an ease of feeling otherwise hard to find in such a setting.

            In his remarks, he continued to insist that the leaders of the letter movement did not represent the whole faculty and that he and the board therefore would not meet with them.  However, he had invited them to his office before the meeting to give them advance knowledge of the official response to the 7 October letter.  This had the appearance of courtesy.  It also no doubt was a long-shot attempt to resolve the conflict by giving the committee a chance to support the official response to their concerns.

            The official response came in the form of a letter from the secretary of the board, Ellwood S. Paisley, to the president.   Pettit and board leaders deliberately chose the channel of communication to reinforce the doctrine that the president was the only official liaison between the faculty and the board.   Later some faculty would say that the Paisley letter sounded suspiciously like Pettit in style.  The complaint reflected in Bodger's mind a naivete about the way a president and a board functioned together.  Pettit of course had had a major hand in drafting the letter.  Bodger understood that that was the way it worked.

            The letter began by conceding that increases in faculty salaries were slow in coming and by hoping for more to come on top of those already announced.   It ended by encouraging faculty members with a particular expertise in dealing with a problem of the college to offer their help to the administration.

            With the other faculty concerns, it did not agree.  It forthrightly rejected the allegation that Pettit had not been candid about The Century II Program.  It reaffirmed the position of the president as head of the faculty and the medium of communication between faculty and board.    It would allow grievances to come to the board through the president on an ad hoc basis but did not agree to create a permanent grievance committee.  It flatly rejected the idea of placing voting faculty representatives on the board.  At the same time, it reminded them that faculty members and students frequently came to board meetings and spoke as guests.

            On completing his reading of the board letter, Pettit spoke out against internal discord.  He hinted that that would pull the college down.  Instead, he offered his own leadership in keeping the college on a positive course: 

            When discontent is sown among faculty members, and among students who contract the contagion, our capital whether in dollars, good will, or mutual trust runs down as the sands run in an hour glass.  I ask for your support of the package that I present today.  I can't forget that I was once a faculty member and although I no longer teach, don't forget that I have been continuously sympathetic to you and to your needs. 

            Pettit then presented an itemized method for addressing the dissatisfactions of the faculty--for "approaching a higher degree of satisfaction among all who have the interest of the college at heart."

            His initiatives were thoughtful and responsive to the concerns.  Had they come before rather than after the faculty letter of 7 October, they might have struck faculty as useful responses to the hard times at hand.  They appeared to faculty in December 1975, however, as a transparent stroke to halt the dissidence.

            Pettit reaffirmed the salary supplement announced at the 17 October meeting and promised more for the following year from a just-decided increase in tuition charges.  He called for a deferral of capital expenditures so that those funds could be used for salaries.

            He promised that Bodger, with the aid of the business manager, would present to faculty five-year projections of income and expense that were presented earlier to the board.  This was his attempt to share information about institutional finances more widely.

            Then he itemized a set of changes in faculty involvement in governance intended to give them greater knowledge and voice.

            A faculty member was to be added to the Campus Investment Committee.

            He recommended that the faculty create an Advisory Committee on College Priorities with three elected members.  They would sit with the president, academic dean, business manager, and vice president for administrative affairs.  They would deliberate on budgetary priorities including salaries.  Pettit suggested that one of the three attend board budget committee meetings.  He proposed that the three members meet before the March 1976 board meeting with the board "committee to work with faculty and students," which was created ad hoc to deal with the discordant situation.

            He then proposed that the economics department develop a lesson in "how to read a balance sheet" for faculty members so that they would better understand the college's financial position.

            Finally, he announced that he would appoint two ad hoc committees intended to involve faculty directly in new strategies for fund-raising--Bodger's responsibility--and admissions.

            Pettit's proposals provoked a heated and lengthy discussion.  One of the five initiators of the letter immediately disavowed the group's participation in the proposals.  Pettit's overture to them prior to the meeting thus failed to win them over.  The thrust in the discussion was then to legitimize the five as representatives of the faculty to the board.  Pettit countered by reminding the faculty that the board had authorized three persons to be elected to the newly proposed Priorities Committee, not five.  Several parliamentary initiatives showed that the five did not have unanimous support in the faculty.  But in the end they were constituted as an ad hoc committee and elected by their colleagues to represent them in discussions with the board.

            Bodger had entered the meeting wanting to believe that the faculty and Pettit would find a way of working things out.  Two of the five initiators had been his professors; his respect for them as mentors had remained intact even as he had come to know them as colleagues, fallible and vulnerable like everyone else.  He respected the rest of the group as well.  By the end of the day, his reserve of respect for them still held, though it was a little diminished.  Having a window on both the lonely agony of Pettit and the machinations of faculty activists, Bodger watched as egos contended and as tacticians stumbled through the briar patch of parliamentary procedure.  Rather like a child watching parents in a family argument, he kept quiet and tucked the events in his memory for future reference.

            The "five" now were legitimized and would meet to discuss concerns with the ad hoc board committee.  The semester break and other delays postponed that meeting until 17 February 1976, two and a half months later.  In the interim, the "five" sought feedback from all faculty on their feeling about the concerns itemized in their 7 October letter.  Several faculty members with loyalties to Pettit urged that the faculty work with the proposals Pettit had set forth in December.  They were trying to show that "the faculty" was not a political monolith.

            Indeed, while the faculty as a whole was cautious and non-doctrinaire, Bodger became aware that a small segment might be pushing for the recognition of AAUP as a collective bargaining agent.  The maneuvering of Pettit around the status of the "committee of five" derived in part from the caution he felt to avoid such recognition.  If this was a major objective among faculty leaders, it did not surface and a vote never was called for.  Bodger, although out of the loop of faculty chatter, assumed that only a few were willing to push for formal collectivization.  Most probably saw the threat--however slight--as a useful way to pressure Pettit and the board to yield salaries and some power.

            In tandem with the faculty conversations over the letter of concerns, some faculty gained control of a process for revising the faculty handbook through action on the faculty floor.  Theretofore, this had been strictly an administrative task.  The handbook had been an administrative tool, intended to inform faculty of the working rules and procedures.  The energizing force in The Faculty Committee to Revise the Faculty Handbook was the junior member of the "five" who was now teaching Pettit's own classic course in organic chemistry.

            Both sides pretended that the committee was doing "editorial" work and not making new policy.  This pretense allowed the revision to go forward in the traditional "collegial" setting of a faculty attending to its affairs.  In fact, the draft text introduced substantively new procedures on promotion and tenure and other issues.  These provisions had enjoyed no standing in the eyes of the administration and board from time immemorial at the college, although they were common at many colleges of comparable reputation.

            On 13 February 1976, the faculty met in special session to discuss and vote on the proposed policy changes to the handbook and to recommend them to the board of directors.  Presiding over the meeting, Pettit projected a tone of accommodation.  He remained focused, however, on the environmental realities of the college.  He cautioned the faculty that the marketplace for independent colleges was threatening and that imprudent internal changes of policy, especially those costing more money, could put the college at a further disadvantage.  His admonitions mainly served his own sense of need to remain in charge and probably had little bearing on the proceedings.  The changes approved that day and later confirmed by the board ultimately gave the faculty a greater say in the standards and practices of their profession on campus.    This would establish a new set of conditions for faculty governance in the Bodger administration.

            Four days later, on 17 February 1976, the long-awaited meeting between the five faculty members and the board committee to work with faculty and students took place.   The "five" presented written discussions of the main concerns raised by the 7 October letter and reported on faculty responses to their call for opinions from their colleagues.  By the time the two groups met, of course, much had been set in motion. The 7 October letter, the response of the board and of Pettit, and the proposed revisions of the handbook had represented a change process that to a considerable extent satisfied many on the faculty prior to this meeting.

            The fact of the meeting was more significant for many faculty than the substance of the discussion.  In the fall, few believed that faculty representatives ever would get around Pettit to a direct confrontation with board members themselves.  Yet here they were.  In addition to a review of the five key concerns expressed in the 7 October letter, the "five" emphatically requested a continuation of meetings at least once a semester.

            In less than a month, the college would learn that Pettit wished to retire from the presidency.  Although they were unaware of his intention, the faculty "five" had to have been thinking about succession as they went into the meeting with board members.  The issue did not surface in the meeting, however, except tangentially.

            One of the "five," Roger Staiger, head of chemistry, produced a letter he received from the board president in February 1969, during D. L. Helfferich's last year in office.  The unrest among faculty and students at that time had stirred the board to reach out.  In a bold stroke, the board president, William Reimert, picking up Helfferich's inclinations, had jumped ahead of the unrest.  He announced that a member of the faculty and a representative of the student body would be invited to board meetings.  Faculty and student representatives additionally would be named to serve on the principal committees of the board.

            In the minutes of the board, Bodger found that in November 1968 it approved this innovation.  There were to be two faculty members and two students on the long-term planning committee and the same number on the buildings and grounds committee.  A faculty member was to sit with the Government and Instruction Committee and the Honorary Degree committee.

            Staiger commented approvingly on this arrangement as a rational solution to board-faculty liaison.  He criticized the Pettit administration for failing to adhere to those procedures.  The letter from Reimert that Staiger showed to the board members explained the board's general strategy for including faculty and students and invited him to serve on the committee on presidential selection.  The November 1968 board action made no mention of service on ad hoc committees, but the evidence presented by Staiger showed its intention in that direction.

            Bodger could not help but agree with Staiger's observation about faculty representation on board committees.  He had been at DLH's right hand at the time of the decision to include faculty and students on the committees.  He felt that, if Reimert had not ceased to be active owing to an illness that proved fatal later in 1969, the plan would have been fully implemented.  He knew that Reimert believed it was a desirable step to keep the college community together amid the disruptions of the late '60s.  As editor of the Allentown Call-Chronicle newspapers, he was in immediate touch with the far-reaching reshaping of institutional structures in American society.  He had developed his own convictions on how to deal with it.  The letter in Staiger's hand was as much the product of his thinking as of DLH's--perhaps more so.  Implementing the plan, DLH modified it somewhat, and when Pettit became president in the fall of 1970 he modified it still further.  It was possible for Bodger--with Staiger--to look back on that failed initiative of the late '60s as a lost opportunity.  It could have made Pettit's administration significantly more responsive to the pulse of the campus community before rather than after the declaration of "concerns."

            In any event, by circulating his seven-year-old letter of appointment, Staiger signaled the board members that the "five" were thinking about presidential selection without having to say a word about it. 

Students had their own demands 

            Students as well as faculty were in Pettit's face with demands for change in the fall of 1975.  There was some evidence that student leaders were prepared to endorse the concerns of the faculty in return for faculty support for more liberal social policies for students.  Whatever the degree of collaboration, Pettit had to conduct campaigns on two fronts to keep both segments of the campus community in check.

            In DLH's last years as president, 1969-70, a formal statement of Student Freedoms and Responsibilities emerged from the conflict between students and the administration.  Bodger played a key role in its drafting.  It incorporated high-sounding concepts about rational discourse.  While granting students the right to talk and request, it essentially kept authority solidly in the hands of the administration and board.  It came down foursquare against campus disruption.  The board had no difficulty in approving it.  And students, with successive graduations, lost sight of it.

            Pettit sought to divert the attention of students from dorm hours and alcohol prohibition.  He pushed the renovation of the old library into a handsome and functional College Union, which opened in 1973.  It gave a sizeable set of students new opportunities for learning about management of an enterprise; and it provided a campus "living room" that received high marks from all.  Bodger was the chairman of the Union governing board.

            For a time, Pettit also empowered a team of young faculty to generate service projects among students.  This initiative became obscure as the concerns of faculty and of students respectively came to overshadow campus consciousness.  Such efforts became suspect in the eyes of many faculty and students because of their official presidential sanction.

            In spring 1974, Pettit orchestrated new gender-blind rules for dormitories, which removed tradition-sanctioned but discriminatory restrictions on women students.  Although the college nominally equalized the rules in order to meet state non-discrimination law and thus avoid a formal legal complaint, Pettit received credit from student leaders.  He managed to persuade some of them that the new rules called for new student responsibilities.

            Despite his nimble tactics in the never-ending battle with students dissatisfied with social policy, Pettit by 1975 still was a target for complaints.  On 8 November 1975--a month following the faculty letter of concerns--he received a letter from 18 student signatories.  It called for direct communication between students and members of the board.  Mirroring the faculty letter of 7 October, it said, "The attitudes and opinions of the majority of students on campus are not effectively presented to the board of directors."   The 18 names were from among the campus's best and brightest.  They accompanied their letter with the signatures of other students totaling about 480, half the population of resident students.

            Several days later the elected student government representatives caught up with their bright, vocal constituents who had acted ad hoc.  In a letter to Pettit they called for a new system of dormitory visitation to "insure the greatest amount of individual choice, through a democratic process, as possible."  The letter hit Pettit's desk on the morning of the board meeting, 14 November 1975, the same meeting at which it dealt with the faculty's letter of concerns.  Pettit read the student letter at the board meeting.  It was referred to the ad hoc board committee to work with faculty and students.

            The following week several hundred students and several faculty members assembled in Bomberger Hall, hosted by the Student-Faculty-Administration Relations Committee (SFARC).  This was an ombudsman-like group constituted in the heat of the late '60s to channel concerns from all quarters.  Its chair was a student.  The secretary was Bodger.  Intoxicated and unruly students on the previous weekend had verbally abused the academic dean and dean of men at a confrontation in the large men's dorm named in memory of former board head William Reimert.  Student leaders realized that the incident jeopardized the political initiative to circumvent Pettit and to gain the ear of the board.  A student read a statement of apology at the SFARC meeting but attributed the student behavior to frustration over "archaic, anachronistic" rules.  Then SFARC agreed to distribute the 8 November student letter and petition without endorsement to faculty members--a standard channeling procedure.

            Like the faculty, students had to wait for more than two months before they met with the board committee to work with faculty and students.  They met with the board members on 23 February, a week after the faculty "five" met with them.  Like the faculty, they received a polite and interested hearing but not much satisfaction over substantive issues.

            Paul Guest, on behalf of the ad hoc committee, submitted a report of the meeting when the board met on 5 March 1976.  Guest's contempt for the social revolution served to season his report with heavy humor and ironic regard for student views.  He said the documents submitted by the students--a 15-page statement on rights and responsibilities and a two-page proposal for visitation in dorms--boiled down to only two issues, namely, use of alcoholic beverages on campus and dormitory visitation privileges.  He said that the students were not aware of the 1970 statement on student freedoms, which the board committee suggested they study before further discussion.

            He added: 

            There appeared to me to be greater uniformity on these issues among committee members than among the students as one student requested after each arduous week of classroom activity the right to sleep on weekends with the female of his choice, each fully clothed which would preserve the high morals of each, while another male student more realistically, in my opinion, commented he would not be willing to trust himself in bed even with a fully clothed female. 

            Guest said that several of the students commended those responsible for operating an excellent educational institution.  He ended: "Their condemnation appeared to be concentrated in the areas of social life and enforcement of disciplinary measures.  This is merely an interim report and requires no action."

            As far as Bodger could remember, no formal action ever really came of the contact between the board committee and the students.  A new student government president came into office and wrote a letter to Pettit on the very day of the board meeting.  He disavowed responsibility for all previous letters regarding open dorms and called for a fresh discussion.  The students felt spring in the air not long afterward.  The semester ended, and the students headed for surf and summer jobs.

            Most important, at that same 5 March 1976 board meeting, President Pettit announced his intention to retire no later than 1 November 1976.

            This event effectively preempted the attention of the campus.  The particular concerns of faculty and students, so compelling throughout that academic year, slid into the background for the time being as the search for the new president geared up.  They would lurk there like nasty elves of the Perkiomen fog, ready to emerge again when the college settled the decision on leadership. 

The "Pariah factor" influenced events 

            Matthew raised his hand, as if to ask the teacher a question:  "What was the basic motive of the 'five'?"

            He and Bodger were sitting on the patio behind the house with drinks in hand.  From there, they could hear the Westminster chime winging across town from Wagner Tower in Bomberger Hall.

            Bodger said, "I never fully knew whether they started their movement to redress the particular issues or to unseat a president.  I was not privy to their sense of timing.  There is no doubt that the bread-and-butter issue was very real.  People were hurting in their pocketbooks.  It looked as if the economy would continue to be inflationary for the foreseeable future.  That created a great sense of doom and gloom at every college.  Pettit's depression-era view of money seemed to me almost to paralyze his power to think through the consequences of continued shrinkage in the purchasing power of the faculty and staff.  His old friends knew that.  It may be that they thought the letter of concerns would provide him with a useful wake-up call."

            "Considering his initiative on salaries, it did provide that, apparently," said Matthew.

            Bodger said, "It turned up the fire.  In fact, Pettit painfully knew of the problem.  The 'five' did not help solve it.  It was waiting for me when I took office, and it would be a stretch to say that the problem of poor pay of faculty ever was solved."

            "But money was not the whole story," Matthew said.

            Bodger said, "Their complaint about lack of input related in part to the way Pettit filled the deanship when he moved to the presidency in 1970.  Pettit put Dick Bozorth in the seat of the dean with no consultation to speak of.  Bozorth was new to the campus from Penn, untenured and untried as a small-college faculty head.  Though his mandarin-like style may have mystified them, many liked him personally.  But the faculty smelled cronyism in the appointment.  As the time for Pettit's retirement came inevitably closer, the faculty suspected that the choice of a new president by the board would be equally uninformed by faculty opinion--and that Bozorth might get it by simply being in place, so to speak.  They harkened back to the appointment of Pettit himself in 1970.  Staiger had been appointed to the presidential selection committee in 1969, which drew up criteria for a new president.  He felt that the board did not consult properly with the committee before selecting Pettit."

            "Was his feeling justified?" asked Matthew.

            Bodger replied, "I'm not certain.  The record shows that there was a faculty committee on presidential selection, separate from the board committee.  Staiger also was a member of this committee, along with Calvin Yost of the library and English and Geoffrey Dolman, the admissions director.  On 10 June 1970, that committee wrote a memo to the chairman of the board presidential selection committee, Ellwood Paisley.  They recommended that Helfferich be asked to continue as president until the board officially named a successor.  If he chose not to continue, they recommended that Pettit be elected president.  And then they recommended that the search for a new president continue under the guidelines established by the board selection committee."

            "So the board elected Pettit--but stopped searching," Matthew said.

            Bodger said, "I think this unmet expectation that Pettit would be a kind of interim created a critical handicap.  The letter of concerns may have been long-delayed evidence of that."

            Bodger felt that he had not yet put his finger directly on the motivating force behind the letter of concerns.  Then he told Matthew about the Pariah factor.

            During Helfferich's era, a group of faculty met daily for coffee in the food storage room of the old kitchen in Freeland Hall.  Before that original college building fell to the wrecking ball in 1967, its steward's space had a ritual aura.  Soon after joining the staff Bodger had lunch with Helfferich there.  They sat at a makeshift table amid the coffee tins and jars of spaghetti sauce on unpainted shelves.  The setting said something droll about the proprieties surrounding presidential protocol.  It reinforced Bodger's attraction to DLH.

            Joe Lynch, head steward, was a former prizefighter and roustabout on the Philadelphia docks, a burly classic from the streets.  Camaraderie was his stock in trade.  He watched over the back room coffee breaks as if he were at a club in Irishtown.  Among the regulars was Sieb Pancoast, then dean of men as well as political science instructor and baseball coach.  Also among the regulrs were Roger Staiger of chemistry, Eugene Miller of political science, Ray Gurzynski and Ace Bailey of health and phys ed.  Lynch's street talk mixed with professional chatter to make a unique cloud of gossip and banter.

            Helfferich became concerned about the regular faculty gatherings in the back room.  Perhaps he suspected a conspiratorial motive or malingering.  Perhaps the cost of the coffee and the doughnuts bothered him.  Perhaps he feared that faculty were comparing salary notes.  For whatever reason, he ordered Lynch to end the back room tradition.  One retired faculty member who was on the scene at the time remembered Helfferich saying to some of his colleagues, "You're all Pariahs."  And the name stuck.  "Cast out" by Pharoah, the back room group melded into the Pariahs and began meeting elsewhere.  Their new self-consciousness led to more pointed conversation about the ebb and flow of college life.  Lacking the solvent of Joe Lynch's boisterous presence, the meetings of Pariahs took the tone of their professorial participants, critical and articulate--but forever outside the pale of the official college.

            As far as Bodger could tell, the Pariahs developed a sense of themselves as the soul of the college, the bearers of the true colors.  Their banishment from the back room ignited a resentful feeling of "otherness" that became a point of pride.  Administrators and board members might come and go, but the Pariahs, like a secret order, would preserve the essence of the institution.  Those such as Staiger, Pancoast, and Miller were graduates and had given their whole lives to service on the faculty and staff.  They seemed to embody a college that, though lost in the flux of reality, had a clear sense of itself somewhere within, or above.  Individually, some of the Pariahs had enjoyed some administrative power at times in their careers: Staiger had been alumni secretary, Miller admissions officer, Pancoast dean of men.  But collectively the Pariahs never had power.  They prided themselves on being apart from and more meritorious than the powers-that-were.

            Bodger always assumed that a tongue-in-cheek humor seasoned this pride.  They were the "loyal opposition" that affirmed the worth of the board and administration.  They were at once a part of the established order and a counter to it.  By their very counter-pressure, they thought they performed a service by helping to define the college's official machinery.  But this was Bodger's speculation.  He was not one of them.  How would he know?

            Matthew said, "Is it that you saw the letter of concerns as the entry of the Pariahs finally into real campus politics?"

            "Not as a real bloc," Bodger said, "but as a spirit, a presence, yes.  Pancoast, Staiger, and Miller were the heavyweights on the committee of five.  Throughout the months leading up to Pettit's decision to retire and my election, there were threads of meaning that seemed rooted out of sight, that never got into the conversation with the board or with Pettit.  They led, I think, to an assumed set of deep loyalties among the faculty that did not depend on the administration or the board--or on the AAUP, for that matter.  I thought of it as the Pariah factor."

            "How did you relate to that assumed set of loyalties?" Matthew asked.  He warmed to the hermeneutic thrust of Bodger's look at the Pariah factor.

            Joe Lynch had established a private link during Bodger's beginning years on the faculty and staff.  After his morning English composition class in Wismer Hall, Bodger would meander upstairs to Joe's office.  They would move to the nearby empty president's dining room with a pot of fresh coffee.  In splendid isolation, Joe would regale Bodger with the student and faculty gossip of the day.  Bodger would give his reading of events, often with a candor that would have embarrassed him had Lynch ever told others.  Bodger's years on the streets of Philadelphia with the gas company gave him a rapport with Lynch.  Bodger knew Irishtown; he knew North Broad Street and the neighborhoods from the perspective of meter readers only a generation removed from Joe's time on the streets.  He found in Lynch a connection to his father's roots in old Philadelphia.  From their chatter Bodger took a kind of affirmation of himself, a comfort that he knew whence he came.  Cannily, Lynch gleaned the latest scoop on the administration from Bodger as a quid pro quo.

            Nevertheless, Bodger's one-on-one relationship with Lynch never migrated into an association with the Pariahs.  He had been a diligent student under several of the most prominent faculty members in the Pariahs.  He believed that they were pleased with his accomplishments off campus and on.  Yet, he never ceased to be Helfferich's man and Pettit's vice president.

            "I could not be a Pariah," Bodger told Matthew.  "I could not be their candidate for president." 

The search for a new president began 

            The day after Pettit's announcement of retirement at the board meeting, Bodger marked his 45th birthday.  Coming at the start of the official search, it seemed to him like a private rite linked to the very public life he now could not escape.  In his journal his thought was all of style.  "One good thing about turning 45: I can abandon any pretense at a super-youthful style.  That's comforting."

            Bodger told Matthew about his behavior during the search process that Pettit precipitated with his 5 March announcement.

            "I think of it now in terms of my relations with board members, with faculty members, with students, and with alumni," said Bodger.

            "Each group took part in the formal process, then?" Matthew asked.

            "In varying degrees," Bodger answered.  "The board chairman, Ted Schwalm, appointed the board committee to recommend a president.  It was made up of Glassmoyer, Guest, Heefner, and Helfferich, with Schwalm chairing it ex officio.  They all were alumni except Schwalm himself.

            "A week after Pettit's announcement, some of the 'five' prepared a letter urging that three groups be represented in the presidential selection process--students, faculty, and alumni.  About 70 faculty signed the petition, a vast majority.  I happened into the lounge in Bomberger the morning they were preparing the copy.  I kibitzed with them about the need to petition for alumni representation.  I said that five board members nominated by the Alumni Association would participate in the final vote, and the search committee members were all alumni.   Staiger then invited me to sign 'as a faculty member' and I declined, saying it would be inappropriate in my position.  There was a playfulness about the exchange."

            "But you favored the input," Matthew said.

            "Of course.  I felt the selection process should help heal wounds, forge harmony, generate enthusiasm.  These were themes I would have heard at Harvard two summers before."

            Matthew said, "They felt a need to petition.  Was it a fact that the board was not going to involve these constituencies?"

            "I felt that the board failed to seize its moment the week before, immediately after Pettit's retirement statement.  Schwalm could have announced he would create an advisory committee of students, faculty, and alumni.  Now, with the faculty letter out in front, the board would appear to be reacting to pressure rather than acting from its own sense of fitness.  Letters in the student newspaper at the same time were calling for an open selection process."

            "Were the students suspecting a closed-door process, then?" asked Matthew.

            "Probably reflecting faculty suspicions," said Bodger.

            Pressured or not, the board soon announced the creation of an advisory committee of six persons.  One faculty member was to be appointed by the board (on Pettit's recommendation) and one elected by the faculty.  At the April faculty meeting, Gayle Byerly was elected.  As a fellow instructor in English, she knew Bodger as a good teacher.  She was a non-Pariah, a non-alum, a younger faculty member with a fierce commitment to high standards of teaching and a maverick's sense that she would never bow to bloc pressures.

            It took another couple of weeks for the board to appoint its faculty choice.  Pettit asked Bodger's opinion of the person most likely to help his candidacy.  Together they focused on Evan Snyder of physics.  Evan, like Staiger, graduated from the college in the midst of World War II, came back to teach after military service, worked for his Ph.D. at Penn while teaching at the college.  He was dyed as deeply in red, old gold, and black as any Pariah but remained outside the magnetic pull of the group.  He was one of the few tenured faculty not to sign the letter of concerns of 7 October.

            Bodger told Pettit that he did not know Evan's attitude toward his candidacy.  But he had made it clear that he was uncommitted to any candidate in advance.  He had the highest possible standing academically with his peers.  He could be depended upon to be fair-minded.  If Bodger could pass muster with Evan, his position going into office would be stronger.

            The student government elected a male student well acquainted with Bodger from class.  Pettit and the board determined that the second student should be a woman.  The logical choice was passed over when Bodger told Pettit that she was known on campus as a close friend of  Bodger's nephew, then a sophomore at the college.  As it turned out, Bodger knew that the young woman chosen was sympathetic to his candidacy.

            To represent alumni, the board chose a "two-fer," Ruth Harris.  She was dean of women on the college staff as well as a graduate.  Pettit, in recommending her, assumed her loyalty to a fellow alum and staff colleague.  The alumni president, Henry Pfeiffer, '48, was a Nantucket neighbor of Pettit's on summer vacations and had become active in college affairs at his urging.  Pfeiffer liked Bodger's work with alumni.  He also revealed to Bodger a peculiar personal bond: as an undergraduate, he had dated Bodger's sister, who entered the college in the same class.  Bodger was learning that nothing is irrelevant in politics.

            He said, "In a sense, all of my work of the past half dozen years had been focused on earning the support of the board members on the search committee.  Helfferich's support was a given.  I was Galatea to his Pygmalion.  I would be the major test of his belief in his own power to mold anyone into an acceptable functionary to fill an organizational position.  That was his ultimate hubris.  The fact that the former president and current chancellor was on the search committee in the first place seemed to go unremarked at the time.  DLH still towered over the institution.  Today, such a parochial patrimony in a liberal arts college of the mainstream would be rare.  If it were found, a search consultant would decree that such a presence would be politically unacceptable to the constituencies.  It would taint the start of the new person's tenure."

            Matthew said, "The churches do not permit outgoing and former incumbents to serve on selection committees.  I'm surprised also at Pettit's direct involvement."

            Bodger continued, "Glassmoyer was another dyed-in-the-wool alum.  He was valedictorian of his class in the mid-'30s and a top graduate at Penn Law School.  He married a college alumna and one of their children was a graduate.  He acted as the attorney for the board.  Glassmoyer probably saw in me a member of the college tribe who had won the support of the leaders.  He would follow the leaders.

            "Guest was one of the alums who had interviewed and affirmed me for my first job with Helfferich in 1965.  I worked closely with him when he headed our fund-raising campaign in the late '60s.  He knew DLH supported me and went along because he knew some of my strengths from close observation.  He had a keen nose for liberal softness, however.  He was wary of my views on student rules, but his loyalty to DLH and the team overrode his suspicions.  Regretfully, his suspicions were justified, as he discovered a couple of years after I was in office.

            "Heefner was my most open and enthusiastic supporter on the committee among the alums.  Like Guest and Glassmoyer, he too was an attorney, with the difference that he had his own firm in the suburbs and did not work in center city.  Bill had political savvy as a born-to-the-cloth Democrat--an aberration in our heavily Republican board.  I took credit for getting him actively involved in college affairs in 1969, when I asked him to chair an alumni annual meeting.  He soon came on the board and accepted the leadership of the Century II program, our fund-raising effort from 1970 to 1975.  That threw me into close and constant contact with him.

            "The simple fact is that we liked the way we each approached the world.  He was a quintessential insider with the subtlety to act as an outsider.

            "On 5 May, less than three weeks before the committee formally chose me, he invited me to dinner.  The occasion was a small gathering of movers and shakers in the Trenton area to hear an informal talk by the president of Princeton, William Bowen.   Heefner introduced me to Bowen and his group as a candidate for president at the college.  Since the deed was not yet done, this surprised me.  Presumably, it reflected Heefner's confidence about the outcome or at least the strength of the possibility.  After dinner we talked quietly about the process.  He had been present four days before, when the search committee formally interviewed me in the boardroom.  He told me that I came off okay.  He also told me that in his mind the decision was certain.  He believed that Glassmoyer, Guest, and Schwalm were with me--along with DLH and himself.

            "Schwalm, who chaired the search committee as president of the board, had a simpler view of the process than the campus people, the alumni, or the attorneys.  Ted was a self-made man with an insightful mind and can-do instincts.  He founded a watch dial company in Lancaster and turned it into a major success as a closely held enterprise.  Although not a product of our college, he played prominent roles as a layperson in the Evangelical & Reformed Church and then the new United Church of Christ.  DLH got to know and like him in their work together in the national church body.  His appointment to our board at DLH's invitation gave renewed strength to our orientation as a church-related college."

            Matthew said, "I remember references.  He was from the Freundschaft, as it were."

            "Right.  About two weeks after Pettit announced his retirement, Schwalm invited me to lunch in Lancaster to talk. I learned then how direct and 'can-do' he could be.  He told me in advance that he wanted to discuss the problems of the college in the months ahead and in particular my part in them.  Not far into his oyster stew, he asked me if I was interested in the job, and I answered yes.  He asked me if I wanted it enough to fight for it and I said, 'Yes, within reason.'  He led me to think that Helfferich had touted me as a future president from the time I was hired.  Ted felt that I had measured up during my 'training' program.  He thought the board had made a certain commitment through Helfferich and that it should keep the commitment to me.  His view was that I was ready to take over in 1970 but the faculty opposed me.  I reminded him I myself did not think I was ready then.  We talked about presidential styles and his role after the election.

            "Except for his unalterable opposition to a faculty union and co-ed dorm visitation, he projected a tolerant and flexible view of how the new president could manage.   I liked the guy then and came to appreciate his loyalty and support in the next couple of years.  Some of my friends on the faculty who knew of his 'rugged individualist' ways in business thought of him as a hopeless conservative.  In fact, Ted was his own man, with a generous spirit and a maverick quality that made him an individualist in the best sense."

            "I take it, then," Matthew said, "that you had all the votes of the board committee but they could not guarantee you the job because they could not be sure of controlling the input of the faculty, students, and alumni."

            Bodger replied, "That's about it.  Schwalm after our meeting, I think, saw his role clearly.  It was to move the process along to favor me with as much dispatch as possible.  He tolerated the creation of a search committee and gaveled its work with the same directness he would have brought to the floor of his shop. His desire to get the job over with quickly ran in the face of the expectation of many in the college community.   The events between March and May could be accounted for largely as tension between two poles.  At one end, a good many thought that my election was a foregone conclusion.  At the other end, a good many thought that there should not be a foregone conclusion--that the college deserved a genuine search, with an outcome to be produced by the process itself."

            "Not unreasonable," said Matthew, student of search processes.

            "Eminently reasonable," Bodger agreed.  "In the days after March 5, I maintained a public position that I would be a candidate only if certain unnamed conditions were met.  This was my way of buying into the opinion that a genuine search should take place.  It allowed me to avoid campaigning or presuming in public."

            "What were your conditions?" asked Matthew.

            "If the board wanted to exact a loyalty oath from me to uphold the existing rules on alcohol on campus and dorm visitation, I was certain that I would have to decline an offer to serve.  Further, I had witnessed the handicap that starting assumptions had laid on Pettit.  I knew that a charade of a search would cripple my start.  Though I guess I never acknowledged it to myself, I too thought the college deserved a genuine search."

            "On the other hand," said Matthew, "you had invested years of yourself preparing for the job.  It would have made some sense just to get on with it."

            "Absolutely.  I gave up the alternative notion of going for a Ph.D. or starving while writing unpublishable novels.  I no longer felt well-suited to remaining a number two guy."

            Matthew said, "You doubtless did not want to throw the game away in the final minutes."

            "Correct."

            "So, in your heart of hearts, maybe you did not really want a genuine search."

            "Mr. Ambivalence, that was me," Bodger smiled. 

The election process went on a fast track 

            Reviewing the events leading to his election for Matthew, Bodger saw that the board's timetable gave the search a hurried look.

            On 5 March, the very day Pettit announced he would leave, Bodger and Margot went to a production of Richard III by the student theater troupe.  There they saw Jim Clover and Linda, his friend.  Jim and Linda told them the news was out.  Pettit had resigned and rumor had it that Bodger would take over.  This rumor, so early begun, never abated and ran like a refrain through the campus during the two and half months leading up to the board's decision on 22 May.

             In the days that followed, while the college prepared for a search, colleagues came to visit Bodger to offer opinion, advice, and assistance.  One in particular, Dick BreMiller of math, appointed himself a campaign strategist.  Bre brought Bodger the insight that the faculty--at least his segment of it--wanted the board to make a genuine search but would understand if it ended by choosing him.  Bodger's impression was that Bre had accurate (if incomplete) intelligence about the Pariahs as well as other faculty sub-groups.  When Bre offered to stimulate a rash of supporting letters from alumni, Bodger took a leap of trust.  Bodger held him off for two weeks until he became an "unconditional" candidate.  When he gave Bre the green light, letters came quickly to the search committee.

            Nelson Williams, the business manager, played an unusual role as a communications link between DLH and Bodger.  Williams and Bodger came to DLH's staff at about the same time.  DLH maintained a mentor-like relationship with him.  With the search public and every word charged, DLH found it convenient on some topics to reach Bodger by talking with Williams.  He knew without asking that Williams would relay the discussion to Bodger.  And if necessary DLH could always deny he said what Williams said he said.

            It was through that link that Bodger gained timely and much-needed relief on the sticky issue of student social rules.  A week or so after Pettit's announcement, Williams reported a chat he had just had with DLH.  "He knows things are going to change," Williams told Bodger.  "But he said he would like them to hang on as long as possible."  Williams did not specify what "things" would change.  But he knew.  Williams knew DLH knew.  And Bodger therefore knew DLH knew.

            With DLH, Bodger understood there always would be more than one level of action.  DLH would be standing with Guest in support of the old rules unto death.  But he would be sending Bodger a softer message that Guest would never know about.  It was no message at all, really.  It was the whiff of a tolerance that Bodger eagerly wanted to get from somewhere, anywhere.  If DLH misled Williams, or if Williams misunderstood DLH, or if  Bodger misunderstood Williams, no matter.  The assumed signal had the desired effect.  It freed Bodger's mind from "conditions."

            Williams was a friendly administrator in the midst of a certain set of faculty, centering on the theater group.  Before the end of March, Williams gained more comments from his faculty friends.  "They say the younger faculty favor you to be president," he told Bodger.  That appeared to mean that the non-younger faculty did not.  This became evident when the search committee took shape and went to work.

            In addition to sources of feedback and advocacy among faculty and staff, Bodger had links with key students.  One with whom he talked was George Geist, who years later would become a local and state politician.  Bodger hazarded the thought that George might stimulate a handful of letters of support from students.  He quickly learned this was not a wise initiative.  George's reading of student opinion restored Bodger's contact with reality.  He said that students on balance were more favorable to Bodger than to the academic dean (they did not know that Bozorth had removed himself as a candidate).  However, before anyone would write letters of support, they would want to know where he stood on "specific issues."   He did not have to spell out the issues of student alcohol use on campus and dorm rules for Bodger any more than DLH had had to spell them out for Williams.  Bodger said any letters from students would have to be written at arm's length from him.  He told Geist he would not even be able to acknowledge his acquaintance with the project.  Then he asked Geist to drop the idea altogether and the student was quick to agree.

            In spite of Schwalm's apparent desire to move to closure quickly, it was mid-April, more than a month after Pettit's announcement, before faculty and student appointments to the advisory search committee were completed.

            Meanwhile, Pettit acted for the board in pushing the process forward.  He made a surprise announcement at a special faculty meeting on 17 March.  The purpose of the meeting was to review the changes proposed for the faculty handbook.  He seized the occasion to call for election of three faculty to recommend the qualifications of presidential candidates.

            Bodger told Matthew, "This was in addition to the advisory search committee.  That committee's mission was strictly to write a set of specifications."

            "If involvement they wanted, involvement they would get," Matthew interpreted.

            Bodger answered, "I think that's right.  I imagine that their recommendations went into the public announcement of the opening, but Pettit probably would have written the final copy."

            At the next regular meeting of the faculty, on 7 April, Pettit made another unexpected announcement.  It too had the appearance of involving faculty directly in the selection process.  Pettit asked everyone attending to answer two questions:  Are you interested in being president?  Who is your first choice among faculty to be president?

            "What was the intent of that step?" asked Matthew.

            Bodger said, "I did not talk about it with Pettit.  Perhaps he and the board wanted to flush out the wannabes so that there were no festering desires to lick like wounds afterward."

            Matthew said, "A gutsy step—rather incredible.  If five or six declared themselves by that process, it would have complicated matters."

            "Only three declared themselves," Bodger said. "Pettit called me into his office the following week to tell me who they were: Zacky the Bear, our college mascot; Charlie Sullivan, a young faculty member who followed his own drummer; and me.  Of the 55 voting members present, 33 indicated that, of those on campus, I would be their first choice.  Dean Bozorth got 5 votes."

            Matthew said, "This would have given the board a strong signal that it should name you or else go outside for someone new to the campus."

            "Pettit was totally supportive of my candidacy by this time," said Bodger.  "He advised me in various ways, trying to gentle the process to the conclusion that he knew the board leaders and DLH wanted.  But neither he nor anyone else on the board could close the door on candidates from outside.  An advertisement for the position appeared in the 12 April 1976 edition of  The Chronicle of Higher Education.   The announced deadline for submitting applications was 20 April."

            "That really looks like they were just going through the motions," Matthew observed.

            "Nevertheless, about 35 applications came in and Pettit processed them for the board committee in the days after the deadline."

            "Yours was among them, then," Matthew said.

            "My behavior was odd, looking back.  By identifying myself as a candidate in the faculty survey on 7 April, I felt I had made a declaration, although it was not public.  Meanwhile, publicly I was saying that my interest was 'conditional.'  So I paid no attention to the 20 April deadline.  A few days later, with the advisory committee finally constituted and scheduled to meet with Schwalm and the board committee, I sought tactical advice from Pettit.  He told me to submit my name to the committee with a formal letter, and I did that.  At the 28 April faculty meeting, Evan Snyder, reporting on the advisory committee's meeting with the board committee, announced I had applied, so I could no longer pretend to having 'conditions.'  He told the faculty the committee would interview candidates on two successive Sundays in May.  I was slotted for an interview on May Day, the first of the month."

            "A pretty fast track, Bodger."

            "The formal fact of an open search, nevertheless, gave the leaders of the Pariahs the conditions needed for a candidacy of their own.  Their choice was Hermann Eilts.  On 17 April, Miller formally submitted his name to the committee, three days ahead of the deadline.  Staiger sent a letter of support for him.  Shortly before that, in a letter dated 6 April, Schwalm received a letter from Horace Godshall, former head of maintenance, a leading local alum whose opinion mattered.  He urged the college to go outside for a new president.  He emphasized that no one on campus was qualified.  Godshall and Staiger were neighbors in town and were friends.  When Pettit told me about the letter, it seemed like a piece of a larger Pariah strategy."

            "Only seemed?"

            "I never knew one way or the other."

            "Who was Eilts?" asked Matthew.

            "He was one of the best known and most accomplished alumni, class of '43, with an outstanding diplomatic career.  He was then in Egypt as the US ambassador.  Staiger was his classmate.  Miller was his mentor.  Everyone at the college who knew him regarded him with the utmost respect.  Though he had no experience as an academic administrator, he had been an outstanding student of diplomacy and languages at Johns Hopkins.  He had a reputation for running an embassy staff with the greatest tact and professionalism.  He would attach significance to the name of the college by virtue of his reputation in the broader world."

            "You could have closed the deal by throwing your support to his candidacy."

            "I knew him and shared the high opinion others had of him.  In fact, I invited him to serve on the board some years later.  However, a critical problem for his candidacy was logistical, especially in view of Schwalm's sense of urgency to close the deal for me.  He would be unable to come to the campus for a personal interview.  When his advocates learned of this, they petitioned the committee to hear Miller as his proxy.  Schwalm initially resisted but then allowed the interview to keep peace with the faculty.  Miller afterward said the board members seemed indifferent in the interview, and he felt poorly dealt with."

            "More reason to suspect the board was fixing the race," observed Matthew.

            "The committee members may have seemed indifferent because they knew Eilts had withdrawn even before Miller met with the committee.  Miller may not have known of that.  Eilts sent a telegram to Schwalm from Cairo a day or two after my May Day interview.  As it happened, Pettit was out to lunch and I was alone in the executive suite when Western Union called with his telegraphed message.  Eilts said he was interested in the presidency; but he had commitments until late summer 1977, a year and a half away.  'If this leaves me out, I understand,' he said.

            "So that would have allowed Schwalm to eliminate him."

            "I am sure he seized on it," said Bodger.

            "Assuming the other 34 applications were not going to be taken seriously, you could count on your election, then," said Matthew.

            "Not quite.  The Pariah leaders had a back-up candidate.  Even before the Eilts candidacy became moot, the back-up came to the fore.  James P. Craft, Jr., assistant academic dean, visited me on 3 May to explain why he was throwing his hat in the ring at the eleventh hour.  He thought I would make a fine president and he would be happy to serve under me.  But he was not sure I had the backing of the faculty and the board.  If it turned out that I did not, he wanted the board to have an alternative on-campus candidate."

            "Was he dyed in red, old gold, and black?"

            "On the contrary.  He was new.  He was an Annapolis product.  I understood that he mustered out of the career Navy when he learned that he would not reach the rank of Admiral.  He went to Penn for his Ph.D. in political science.  There he was a dean of students during the rough and tumble of the late '60s.  On becoming president, Pettit hired him to assist Bozorth when he moved Bozorth up to dean.  Craft combined a tough military bearing with an inventive engineering mind and a talent for negotiating.  In an odd way, he was an attractive possibility.  He was one of the first on campus to apply quantitative computer methodology to political science problems.  He was in the Pariah camp by virtue of his appointment in Miller's political science department."

            "Did Miller put him up to it, then?"

            "I had no way of knowing what was going on behind the scenes.  I moved on the assumption that he was his own man.  We got along well together.  I learned a little about his role as a Pariah candidate years later, but I could not know whether they came to him or he went to them.  At just about the time Craft was telling me of his intentions, Miller was sending a formal letter of nomination for him to Schwalm.  That was around 3 May, well after the 20 April deadline. Within a day or so of Miller's letter, I learned from Pettit that another endorsement of Craft came in from another faculty member. 

            "Schwalm would have had to reject the nomination for coming in after the deadline," Matthew ventured.

            "I imagine he would have wanted to do that," said Bodger.  "But the faculty on the committee would have known it would badly sour the atmosphere.  So the committee accepted the nomination and gave Craft the courtesy of an interview.  I read from Pettit's tone of discussion with me about Craft's candidacy that the board members would not take it terribly seriously."

            Matthew said, "If the Pariahs picked up that tone, they would have become more fearful of a fixed process."

            Bodger said, "The committee extended every courtesy to Craft, as far as I knew, and that was sufficient for appearances, at least. But by the time Craft met with the committee, on 15 May, the momentum toward a decision accelerated greatly.  On 7 May, Gayle Byerly came to see me in my office.  She was the faculty-elected member of the advisory committee.  Gayle and I had a collegial relationship that allowed us to talk frankly.  She always pushed toward the heart of a matter with a certain abruptness, tempered by a hidden desire to conciliate.  I knew her style well from meetings of the English department.  She was one of the younger faculty who came in out of graduate school a couple of years after I joined the staff.  Gayle told me up front I came off well with the board in my interview.  She would not be visiting me if it had been otherwise.  She had warned me she would play the heavy in the interview and she had done so.  She asked me particularly pointed questions about the way I would deal with old friends on the staff who might not be the best people for the future of my administration.  She believed I would be too loyal to friends whom faculty perceived to be mediocre."

            "She thought you were too dyed in red, old gold, and black?"

            "Yes.  She came at the issue in the interview so aggressively that Schwalm criticized her afterwards.  In truth, her perception of me as an arch-crony surprised me.  She thought my ties with Bozorth and Dolman and others were tighter than they were. She seemed to think I would perpetuate the status quo because of my insider origin."

            "An inaccurate thought."

            "She did not know I had been talking recently with DLH and Pettit about changes needed in the administrative staff.  They both agreed that I should make timely changes.  Pettit even offered to plant a seed with key staffers that a new president should be free to make a new team as he saw fit."

            "Did you tell her this?"

            "No.  But I seemed to have parried her thrusts suitably enough.  Her visit looked like a final check before she resolved to become the honest broker who would bring the search to closure in my favor.  She seemed to minimize the zeal of the Pariahs for Eilts--maybe she guessed he would be unavailable.  She dismissed other outside candidates.  Craft's late emergence did not seem serious to her.  The clincher was her clear impression that the board members wanted me.   That meant that they did not want Craft or Eilts or Zacky the Bear.  Gayle probably thought apprehensively about a board-faculty tug of war over someone other than me.  And summer was coming.  She told me that she feared most of all an appearance of a 'sneaky' decision after the faculty and students left.  It would not rest well and would handicap the new president.  From the start she felt it would be important to reach closure before the summer break.  Now satisfied with me, she told me that she thought she could move to conclude the search for candidates and get the committee to come along."

            After the second round of interviews on 15 May, Pettit telephoned Bodger at home.  Byerly's view  prevailed.  The committee voted to conclude the search for more candidates and to support Bodger for president.  Pettit advised him that he had a meeting on 19 May with Schwalm to talk about the terms of the job.

            "I actually met with Schwalm and DLH together.  We talked about salary, perks, living arrangements on campus, the awarding of an honorary degree.  Schwalm said he was inclined to think that we could work everything out.  I said I thought so too.  Then I surprised both of them by asking for 24 hours to think it over!  I said I had to talk it over with Margot and they understood.  I did not tell them I also had a political agenda in mind.  I wanted to talk with Miller, Craft, Staiger, Snyder, Byerly, Larry Dalaker, one of the student reps."

            "I suppose you saw this as your last chance to secure support."

            "I was acting instinctively at that moment.  Only later could I see this delaying tactic in two lights.  One, I wanted to see how much of a liability the hasty selection process appeared to be.  Two, I was by then aware of DLH's concept of the power of office as 'the honey pot.' Everyone wanted some of the honey and would buzz around it like wasps.  'Protect the honey pot,' he admonished me.  I think in my twenty-four hour delay, I wanted to let key people have an advance look at the mouth of a honey pot in-the-making and thus win their gratitude."

            "You had a manipulative instinct--like all administrators," Matthew said.  "This could have backfired."

            "It probably cost nothing and gained little," said Bodger.  "Except that I felt more secure going forward.  No one said he would work against me when I became president.  When I accepted the offer the next day, the path was clear for the board to elect me at a special meeting on 22 May.  On Pettit's advice, I came to campus and waited with Margot outside the president's dining room of Wismer where they met.  Pettit asked us to come in after a long wait and Schwalm told Margot that her husband was the new president of the college.  It never occurred to me that the board might not make the decision then and there and that we all could thus have been terribly embarrassed by my lurking outside the chamber door."

            Matthew said, "So your program of careful behaving as an in-house candidate was over."

            "Almost.  I had written a speech and read it after the polite applause.  I even made sure a lectern was in place for me to use.  I spelled out a fairly clear agenda for the new administration, as I look back on that speech. 

            I foresee the need, with my shift in duties, to revitalize our administrative team, the need to fine-tune the management of our resources, the need to reach out for students in creative new ways, the need to arouse the enthusiasm of alumni and friends for our new development campaign, the need to bring this college community together in support of our principles and in support of the long-term plans that we must develop together in the months ahead. 

            Bodger said that DLH criticized him next day for his unrestrained style of acceptance.

            "I had made a couple of unwise off-the-cuff quips.  It was the beginning of a week of emotional hell for me.  Pettit told me about an irate letter from an important alum dissatisfied with the search process, a protégé, as it turned out, of Staiger.  He also told me about a letter to DLH from another influential alum telling him of the magnitude of the mistake of electing such a nobody.  I walked one afternoon in the magical woods of my childhood, trying but failing to stop the acute pain in my stomach.  The feeling in my gut was saying, 'The process was flawed and did not heal wounds.'  What in God's name had I allowed myself to get into?"

            "Stage fright," Matthew said.  "The way I feel before a sermon, even today."

            "The election was an open secret until commencement on 30 May.  I processed with the faculty in my appointed slot with the assistant professors.  Schwalm made the announcement to the crowd of several thousand in Helfferich Hall--graduating seniors and their family members and the faculty and board.  I rose in place to accept applause.  It was more robust than I ever could have expected.  Later, Pancoast, one of the Pariahs and an Eilts supporter, said he disapproved of my election until he heard the applause that day and became a supporter.  That gave me great encouragement.  Perhaps wounds would heal after all."

            Two days after commencement, Bodger traveled to Beloit College with Schwalm in Wisconsin.  They were going to a meeting of The Council for Higher Education of the United Church of Christ.  It gave Bodger an opportunity to talk quietly about his new responsibilities with the man formally at the top.  He came back from that trip further assured that the prospects for his leadership were fair.  Schwalm's supportive posture was manifest in their conversation.  Bodger was his man and he would stand behind him.

            In his journal Bodger wrote the following: 

            I told Schwalm I assumed I was chosen partly to provide continuity and that therefore I did not plan a major change at the outset but rather would move deliberately and carefully to change things.  He advised me not to worry too much about doing things the old way.  He said the board wanted continuity in the sense that it knew it wanted to get to Chicago but it did not mean that I should get there by any prescribed route; there are many roads to the goal, he said, and you should take one that suits you best. 

            In his last years, Schwalm in an autobiographical memoir gave his impressions of his leadership of the college board.  It confirmed the worst suspicions that Pariahs and alumni might have had about the election of both Pettit and Bodger.  Schwalm took great pride in the role he played in first supporting Helfferich, then in orchestrating the elections of both Pettit and Bodger.

            Bodger retrieved the red-covered book, published by the Schwalm family's historical association  (Theo R. Schwalm.  Ed. Richard C. Barth, Ph.D.  Memories of My Life.  Pennsauken, NJ: The Johannes Schwalm Historical Assn., Inc., 1992).  He pointed out the chapter on the college for Matthew to peruse.  It showed his frontal approach to organizational processes.

            Of the election of Pettit in 1970 Schwalm wrote: 

            Dr. Helfferich decided to retire and assume the title of Chancellor of the college.  I believe that he was looking for the election of Bodger to take his place and that he would act as his mentor until he could fill the job.  Dr. Helfferich had hired Mr. Bodger several years before and announced to the board that he was being hired to eventually work into the office of president.

            I could see no problem with such an arrangement, but the faculty was not about to let a young upstart take over the top job even though some of the board members felt he was qualified.  A problem was that he had no doctor's degree.  (p. 289) 

            The passage went on to describe how Schwalm persuaded Pettit to take the job for five years after having refused it initially.  One of the conditions he said that Pettit set was Schwalm's continued service in the board chair.

            Of the election of Bodger in 1976 Schwalm wrote: 

            I had sounded out some of the board members about [Pettit's] successor.  All agreed that now was the time to turn the job over to Mr. Bodger.  When the board received the announcement of Dr. Pettit's retirement, I announced that we were fortunate to have a successor for Dr. Pettit who had been in training for more than five years.  One of the board members noted, however, that the faculty would insist on a search committee to select a successor.

            We again went through the process of asking for applications for the job as well as interviewing prospective candidates.  After about six weeks of this charade, we interviewed the final candidate who was Mr. Bodger.  When the interview was over, I waited until one of the faculty committee members suggested that Mr. Bodger was the best candidate and he was unanimously elected by the board. 

            Bodger said, "Ted forgot that a second round of interviews took place after mine.  He also forgot that one board member abstained from the vote to elect me.  He did not oppose me, he told me later.  He opposed the process.  It must have looked like a charade to him too!"

            Matthew asked, "What do you think I can take from your story that might help me down the road?"

            "Not too much, I imagine.  Time changes organizational styles and expectations.  As a candidate, you have to behave in context to have a chance."

            "You actually behaved differently in different contexts."

            "Duplicitously, do you think?" asked Bodger.

            "Realistically, perhaps," said Matthew.

            Bodger replied, "There was the context of paternalistic nurturing, where I was a willing apprentice.  There was the context of participatory governance, where I was a contestant in a competitive exercise seeking excellence.  It was a transitional time for the institution.  The paternalistic system was still in place and working, but the participatory process had become an expectation that the board could not brush aside.  My election was a last hurrah for the old way and a muffled yawp for a new way."

            "Was it a mixed blessing, then?"

            "God knows I cannot be the judge of that," said Bodger.  "I was incredibly lucky, going in, to have support from various quarters when it often seemed to me blind and unjustified.  I felt like an instrument for purposes I could not fully understand.  I was resigned, in a way, to whatever might happen."

            "This begins to sound theological," said Rev. Matthew.

            "I've said more than I should, then."

            Bodger did not see Matthew after that.  Then one day he heard that Matthew had moved out of town.  Some time later, he received a note from Florida. 

            Dear Bodger:  Rev. James regained his spark and decided not to get out for now.  I decided not to wait around.  Here I am in the Sunshine State, ministering to the Yuppie itinerants from up north and the WWII vets who have fought their battles.  I think I belong in the pulpit after all.  Contexts here change too, but living out faith with the people in the pews remains a constant.   Maybe your story helped me to get clear on that.  Maybe I didn't want the top conference job.  Maybe what you told me helped to clarify that.  Gratefully yours,  Matthew.

 END CHAPTER THREE, MATTHEW (Preparing to preside, 1970-1976)

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5 November 2005 Richard P. Richter