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The Bodger Dialogues:
Reshaping a college--and
its president Chapter Seven: Mirage (Postlude) |
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Contents Chapter One: Michael (Returning to origins) Chapter Two: Margaret (Re-entering the college's life, 1965-1970) Chapter Three: (Matthew (Preparing to preside, 1970-1976) Chapter Four: M.S. Part One (Getting started, 1976-1979) Chapter Five: M.S. Part Two (Making headway, 1979-1984) Chapter Six: Martin (Arriving...and ending, 1984-1994) Chapter Seven: Mirage (Postlude) |
Bodger began jogging daily in 1976, the year he became president. He especially enjoyed being out at night. The darkness conferred a privacy that he craved. It freed him to sort out events of the day. As his old knee injury worsened with years, he gradually stopped being a jogger but kept up the regimen by walking. In retirement, he was able to be even more diligent about his exercise than he had been when he was under the pressures of office. One night some time after he met with Martin, Bodger was walking on the track that circled Patterson Field. Hanging in the outer lane, he was just rounding the turn farthest from campus. Darkness was shrouding the trees beyond. He could make out in the light from the distant campus that the mythical Son of Sycamore, rising in the end zone of the football field, was showing early colors of fall. The tree had been planted in 1984 from a seedling taken from the original sycamore that had reached old age and had fallen in a storm in that same place. Decades before, the unique location of the original tree had won the college a place in Ripley's "Believe It or Not." The seclusion of the tree at night for generations afforded lovers a trysting place. Greek organizations initiated pledges into their mysteries under its branches. Bodger knew that students had recently repopulated the campus with the start of another academic year. But on this weeknight, the campus harbored an eerie quiet. He wondered whether he had not simply imagined that fall and students had arrived again. He always felt something almost magical about this spot by the tree at night. The ethers of the valley rose from the nearby Perkiomen Creek. They were reminders of his earliest years of growing up in the valley not many miles from here, years that by now seemed mythical, at one remove from reality. A zephyr was always stirring as he rounded the turn of the track, even on the stillest nights. It seemed to suggest the presence of some nature sprite, declaring possession but granting him passage. On this night, feeling the freshness of the air on his face, Bodger came to a stop. He walked over and rubbed his palm on the trunk of the sycamore tree. He allowed the influences of the place do their work. Soon he was imagining that a mirage had come to have a talk with him. He squinted into the darkness and believed that he could see its visage. It seemed at first to be a composite of the mentors he had followed over the decades, all those who had set goals for him and had kept him running. Soon, however, he imagined that the mix of faces resolved into a single ghostly appearance. He thought he was looking at the face of D. L. Helfferich there in the darkness. D. L. seemed to be clasping his old corn cob pipe between his teeth. Bodger remembered that he would usually choose that pipe to smoke when he was in a whimsical mood, open to the day's absurdities. He seemed to be wearing a bemused expression. D. L. would put on that expression when he was reflecting on the successes and failures of Bodger's performance. The kindness of the appearance belied the toughness of a critical faculty at work beneath the surface. Bodger imagined that the mirage was prepared to talk with him, and he lingered in the darkness, alone yet not alone. Bodger said, "You seem to wonder why I pushed so hard to change the old place. I've often thought how things that I did would sadden you. But I never believed you would have insisted I do them differently. You knew that the college had to adapt or decline. I always thought you egged me on to become president because you knew how I would behave. I could make changes that you could not bring yourself to make because you bore so much of the dead weight of institutional history. I bore some of it, though-- and that imposed the degree of constraint that I guess gave you some comfort." Questions came into Bodger's head that seemed to come from outside himself. Why was it necessary to yield so much to the new freedoms surrounding youthful behavior? Why did the college now seem more like an academic shop than an agent for good in the world? For a moment, Bodger's hackles rose. He was ready to argue when the darkness suddenly reminded him where he was and what he was doing. The argument was long over. Only imagined feelings about it remained. He could be indulgent of a mirage, and again he spoke to it. "You doubted that faculty expertise could provide definitive answers to questions of ultimate worth, questions of basic values. Once you told me that, if you were not so lazy, you would run the college without a faculty in residence at all—as if you could engage the whole student body in a daily discussion about the important things of life and persuade them how to live well. This was in jest—but not wholly in jest. You had a radical inspiration for the college. Some took it to be just a put-on. But I took it at least half seriously. Obviously, the hard realities of higher education never permitted the pursuit of such a fantasy. Still, you used to insist that our college was so different from other liberal arts colleges that it did not share common points of comparison—it was unique. You seemed actually to believe it. I understand how my push toward academic professionalism rubbed against your grand vision. "Your self-confidence in the teeth of a pack of professionals--at least the appearance of it--exceeded mine by far. I saw no choice but to bring the college into the path of similar institutions and to celebrate doing so. You knew all the time, however, that I was not deeply dyed in academic colors. Language and logic mattered only so much in the world. They were useful, even essential, but not sufficient. I agreed with you then about that. "Not having to answer every phone call now, perhaps I'm gaining better perspective. 'Passion' for scholarship--much touted these days--might bring language and logic closer together with action. Maybe an altruistic human act completes the usefulness that comes of scholarship. But I'm not sure. "I guess I'm trying to say that my ambitions for the college--to enable it to cap scholarly knowledge with virtue—far exceeded my grasp, as yours exceeded yours. "Ludwig Wittgenstein might have said it for both of us. His experience of death and destruction as an Austrian soldier in World War I surely had something to do with what he wrote in his philosophical treatise, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He thought his way through to the limits of language and logic. But although they could not fit into propositions, he felt that things could exist. They had to 'make themselves manifest' beyond language and logic. One had to take them as 'mystical.' He decided that ethics could not be put into words. But ethical rewards and punishments could exist. They manifest themselves as action, not language. "In the Wittgensteinian vision, language and logic could enable you to climb up beyond language and logic. Once there, you could kick them out from under you as if they were a ladder. Only then would you 'see the world aright.'" Bodger imagined the mirage chuckling. It seemed to be enjoying this picture of the limits to professional intellectualism. Bodger finished his thought: "There was something more than the products of the academic enterprise. Neither of us ever quite figured out how to do something completely satisfactory about that with the campus community." The zephyr slightly stirring the sycamore leaves seemed to soften. The mirage in the mind's eye of Bodger seemed to take on a wistful air even as it continued to smile. Perhaps, Bodger thought, it was this insight that brought them together as mentor and docent so many years ago. They recognized it in each other without ever fully expressing it. Bodger lingered a little while longer. A different question seemed to come to him from the darkness where the mirage hovered. It was harsh. It raised a doubt about his very sincerity as a president. Was he all that dedicated to a doctrine of "servant leadership"? Or, did inner demons, personal desires, drive him into office, where they, not the institution, demanded their due? Again for an instant he felt himself rising to an argument and again sank back into a reflective mode. "I sometimes detected a small voice of doubt in your mind about me. Usually, you charitably attributed my most egregious errors to a fool, not a knave. Still, you were so wily yourself that it puzzled you when I seemed to be deficient in the same quality. In my grand confrontation with Bill Pettit while you were still in office and we both were answering to you, he told me I wanted too much to be loved. He was suggesting that I gave in to students and colleagues too readily. I remain a contradiction in my own eyes. Yes, I wanted to be in tune with the others. But, no, I always was something of a loner, viscerally inclined to do things my way. "Judge me harshly if you must. I was a member of the Silent Generation. We were children during the Great Depression and World War II. This led us to be trusting of organization. We would grow up to be instruments of organization, well adapted for the rigid life drawn out by Cold War. I often wanted to duck that destiny but never really mustered the independence to break free. One day, you may remember, I confessed my fate to you as you were schooling me in the ways of presidential behavior, trying to bolster my courage to enter the fray: 'I have nothing better to do with my life than to serve the institution.' From this distance in time, how contrived it sounds. No wonder you sometimes had a doubt. I think I meant it, though. If you must criticize now, I hope you still see a fool not a knave at work." Bodger paused for a couple of minutes. The darkness seemed to deepen. Then he said, "I have moments when I resent the neglect of a part of myself in pursuit of institutional service. I regret the damages done to my spouse and my kids for the sake of the institution. I could write another book--the unadmirable version of my life. It would feature my avoidances and fears…." With that the mirage seemed to shrug again and recapture its bemused look, as if to advise Bodger not to go down that road. One life remembered would suffice. Then nothing but the darkness confronted Bodger. He slowly walked away from the Son of Sycamore toward home. END CHAPTER SEVEN, MIRAGE (Postlude) |
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