Chapter Four: M.S. Part One (Getting Started, 1976-1979)

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

            Maria Sylvia Aumen was her name.

            "My grandmother wanted me to be a nun," she told Bodger in her freshman year.  "When I was a little girl, I thought my name was the ending of a prayer.  When I became a woman, I decided against being a prayer and started using my first two initials instead of my name.  It seemed to save me from a fate I didn't want.  I didn't believe a nun by any other name could remain a nun."

            "So you are not a manuscript, the name of a feminist magazine, a paralyzing disease, or a walking Master of Science degree."

            "Nope, I'm just me, M.S."

            She was a junior when the board elected Bodger president in May 1976.   Her name belonged on a list of a dozen exceptional students with whose minds he had connected over the years.   His relationship with them seemed to transcend the generation gap.   He seemed to understand the poetry of their ways without scanning.  They seemed to sense in him a traveler who had been down their road ahead of time.

            At some point after he became president, he looked critically at his closeness with such students.  He projected himself to all students all the time, admittedly in varying degrees.  He felt this to be a kind of sacrifice of self to institutional service; it was the daily rite of obligation.  Had all students had the quickness and compatibility of this small group, their sense of being with another adventurer, he might have shared the same sense of connection with all students.  This group appeared to have the sensors to feel what was going on with Bodger.  They had the internal instruments with which to respond to his offer of himself.  He felt an instant connection with them.  He went over the professional wall and allowed himself to be vulnerable.  He allowed himself to trust them by lowering the shield of his authority.

            He always knew it was a dangerous enterprise.  He knew that, when he willingly suspended some of his power, they could come to mistrust him.  They could discover a manipulative intention in his apparent openness.  They could come to see his shortcomings, the flaws he labored to mask behind official screens.  They could betray him.

            The gods of feeling roved the garden of intellect with sharp swords and had the capacity to wreak swift havoc.  They were all the more threatening because they gained embodiment as young adults, crystal-eyed, hard-muscled, sharp-minded, ever-renewing, buoyed by their moment of invincibility, changeable in their allegiances, remorseless in their conclusions.  After taking office, Bodger became more cautious, and the number of students on his list after 1976 was few.

            Now such risks were over.  Bodger could say that the students on that small list had not betrayed him and only rarely had disappointed him.  He knew now that his special relationships with them made up a vintage collection, worth saving and judiciously savoring as he reconstructed his career. 

An account of the presidency began  

            Bodger invited M.S. to his office two or three times during the months leading up to his election as president.  Her quick readings of campus mood allowed him to think he knew the pulse of things from a groundling's perspective.  Since she avoided seeking membership on the search committee, she was free to say what she thought without appearing to compromise or speak for a constituency.  Bodger filled her in on faculty maneuverings and the eager hopes for change of social rules that he heard from students.

She commented from the standpoint of a courtier exiled  from a duchy in Renaissance Italy.  That was during her year for the course in political theory.  She tried to cast Bodger as the would-be prince who foolishly had a conscience.   At times in their talks, he found himself suspended on a bridge between the idealism of the Reformed social vision and a Machievellian urge to win control.  M.S. smiled knowingly if enigmatically at him sometimes, her lips tightly closed but her eyes alive.  These were moments for Bodger when the fray became briefly enchanted.

            The day after the board elected him president, M.S. saw him leaving the dining room after lunch.  Classes were over but she was working for the food service as a waitress through commencement weekend.  The decision still was supposed to be under wraps.  The board chairman, Theo R. Schwalm, had imposed a gag on the board so that he could make a surprise announcement at commencement a few days hence.

            "I heard on good authority…" she said, catching up to him.

            "Don’t even breathe it," Bodger said.

            "But it’s true," she said, meaning it as a question.

"Truth is in the eye of the beholder," he said, not wanting to break his promise to keep silent.  He knew now that some board members—or student or faculty representatives on the committee--would have talked, as any reasonable person would expect them to do.

M.S. flitted ahead of him on the path toward her residence hall, throwing the word "fantastic" back over her shoulder as she disappeared around a corner.

When she graduated the following year, after Bodger’s first phase in office, M.S. came to see him.  She was planning on graduate work in behavioral psychology at one of the big public universities in the midwest.

"A life of scholarly research, then?" said Bodger.

She was not certain that was her final goal but she had come under the influence of her favorite psychology professor and felt a calling, for now, anyway.

Then Bodger made one of those rash moves against which he usually guarded when chatting with students.  He knew from hard-won experiences how his casual words could come to mean more than he intended.

"Someday," he said, "I have a hunch you’ll end up back here as the first woman president." As soon as it was out, he knew it was more than he wanted to say.  She grew sober and only after a minute passed did she say that she took that very very seriously.  He knew she would not forget the exchange.

Although he thought at the time that he had created a small specter that would haunt his future, he lost track of her.  She did not get in touch through the rest of Bodger’s presidency.  After being gone from office nearly a year, Bodger one day received her letter in the mail.  She had not forgotten.  She had sped through graduate work to get a Ph.D. in three years, rushed through a marriage that was over, borne a child who lived part of the year with her and part with her ex-husband.  She published solid stuff as a post-doc, won a tenure-track position, soon showed her administrative talent.  She chaired a psychology department at a liberal arts college on the midwestern plains for a few years.  Now she was dean of the college and looking at presidencies.

"I'm writing to ask a small favor," she concluded.  "Please tell me everything you did in your presidency so I will know what to do."

Even without the implied flattery, Bodger would have responded effusively.  It was an excuse to reconstruct his administration.  For months he had procrastinated about writing his account.  He had felt that more time would have to pass before he was mentally ready to try for an objective rendering of what his eighteen years in office had done to the institution.  His whole experience seemed as if surrounded by an inflammation, too tender for the time being to touch.  But to tell it to M.S.—that would be different. 

The professional contended with the parochial 

"You know how it was when I began," said Bodger.

"Dicey?  Ugly?  Difficult?  Unhappy?" she hazarded, remembering.

M.S. flew in during the holiday break to visit her parents, who still lived in Bucks County.  She and Bodger were meeting at a restaurant in Doylestown over lunch.  Afterward they lingered for a long afternoon talk in the cocktail lounge.

" 'Difficult' will do, though all others somewhat apply."

"Difficult faculty?  Staff?  Board?  Budget?  What?" she probed.  Her sense of organizational structure had obviously developed on orthodox lines.

Bodger said, "The fundamental difficulty, as I felt it at the start of my watch, you will certainly remember.  I had the burdensome sense that the college community was dysfunctional.  I thought that the disputes that Pettit had with faculty and students over policies and priorities went beyond surface frictions, beyond personalities.  They seemed to me like a fever, symptoms of something more deep-seated.  Looking back, I see my election as something that could only have happened in an institution out of sync with its purposes, prone to decisions that would have looked abnormal elsewhere."

"And out of sync with the times?" M.S. asked.

"I believe so, in a sense.  Similar colleges by then were using professional agencies to select their presidents.  Our board could not bring itself to do that.  Some probably masked their paranoia by saying a professional search would bust the budget.  At the same time, our faculty was not self-assured enough, professional enough, to push the board to do the orthodox search--though it deserved credit for trying.   Students were innocent of the larger picture."

"We thought otherwise," M.S. said.

"I know," smiled Bodger.

"Many alumni," he continued, "understood the crossroads approaching the college, I’m sure.  We had movers and shakers, savvy people, all over the country, and especially in the Delaware Valley.  But alumni constituted no critical mass, except as a support for the general welfare of their alma mater.  Voices of advocacy within the alumni body, one way or the other, too easily blended into the process of selection and became moot."

"What was the board's problem?"

"As a governing body, I did not think it had yet clarified where the college ought to be going.  It had cognitive dissonance.  It wanted the college to continue to be the parochial, provincial Heimat, the protective place where young people could safely grow up, receiving a heavy dose of traditional values."

"I remember," smiled M.S.

"But it also wanted an academically first-rate college.  If you looked at the better national liberal arts colleges of the time and compared them to ours, you noticed real differences.  The differences were not just in our lack of some important academic programs and academic depth, our relative scarcity of resources.  The essential difference was that their culture was outspokenly that of academic professionalism--tinctured, to be sure, by their particular origins and history, but no longer steered by them.  We were not yet there."

"Paternalism lived," said M.S. and Bodger nodded in agreement.

"D. L. Helfferich was in the habit of saying, when he was president, that you could not compare our college to any others.  We were uniquely what we were in his eyes.  This was code for Heimat.  His view still weighed heavily with the board in 1976.  He still actively served and everyone was deferential to his view.  This made it hard for the board to think its way through to the path that it would have to choose, one or the other, parochial or professional.  In 1976, it could not clearly see that it would have to give up something it valued in order to take the one path or the other."

M.S. said, "You’re saying that the college still had the option to hold a rightward course and become a provincial little place of safety without academic distinction?"

"I don’t think it had that option.  I think the tide already was taking it toward professional distinction in the long run.  To try to turn it around and go the other way would have taken a miracle leader.  I do think, though, that some significant number on the board thought the option still existed. Yet, no one could articulate that except by genuflecting in the direction of tight social rules and expostulating on benevolent paternalism."                                                                                                                       M.S said, "So, with all that baggage, the board would have been unable to digest the outcome of a truly objective presidential search."

"I think so."

"But the outcome would probably have been the same," M.S. said—loyally, Bodger thought.

"Negative," he replied.  "Credentials would have mattered more.  Breadth of academic experience would have mattered more.  Professional marks on the world would have mattered more.  I was a company clerk who was smart enough to survive and driven enough to chance taking a role I was not fully equipped for, by any informed external standard.  It was not just the board that was limited in perspective.  Most of the people in the college community looked inward.  They were too willing to define the agenda in terms of what they saw inside the walls.  Too few could look outward at the academic universe for benchmarks and import them persuasively to the campus."

            M.S. said, "Most of us thought you were the right person for the time--in the sense that you knew the terrain better than anyone.  You were living and breathing the institution.  I think that nearly everybody who paid attention could see that.  This was parochial, right.  But it was probably the right inward turning at the time.  It had the potential, anyway, to move on out the other side, toward the wider academic world, toward professional orthodoxy--if that's what you all wanted."

            Bodger said that he was not all that clear at the time that the college should move out from under a parochial umbrella.  He did not then envision an all-out campaign to win new standing in the public eye that compared the college favorably with similar but less parochial places.

            "Look," he said, "I had just come through years of on-campus preparing and maneuvering, consciously or not, covertly or not, directly or not, to get to the position of president.  My head was buzzing with the expectations of D. L. Helfferich and the board, the faculty, the students, even the Maintenance Department.  The inaugural moment, scheduled for 7 November 1976, loomed like a psychological wall.  I had to get past it before the agenda would really fall into place.  An outside candidate would not have been burdened with all that I knew about the state of mind of so many on campus.  Too much knowledge, in this case, was probably as inhibiting as it was enabling.  And I was still in a mode of listening rather than deciding.

            "So, I spent the whole summer before taking over, thinking about it all.  But I could not get much beyond a few basic imperatives.  Address student life dilemmas—absolutely the first priority.  Communicate.  Plan to plan.  Above all, make people feel better about the college.  Lighten it up.  And make everyone aware that we would be doing things, acting not reacting, taking risks.  I wanted to show that we were not stuck with the established dogma that what had been done in the past was good for the future.   That may have meant turning toward a professionalized campus.  But that's not the way I was saying it.  I don't think many were thinking of it quite that way, yet.  And I had to be ever mindful that the board, which elected me, expected me to protect the parochial stance." 

National stresses and strains touched the college 

Their talk eventually turned toward the larger public context of Bodger’s inauguration.  He linked the transitional moment of the college to transitional cross-tides occurring in the nation.  It was a strange time of harvesting the results of Vietnam and Watergate.  The social unhinging now was being documented and accelerated by the newly arrived marvel of color TV.  The result was a muddled public mind, which led to the election of a bright peanut farmer to the White House who would have to try to make up solutions as he went along.

"It should have been a bully time," Bodger reflected.  "It was the year for celebrating the bicentennial of Americian independence.  Philadelphia did make a moment out of it.  Daniel Bell may have caught the underlying mood correctly, though—'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.'  He said it was more appropriate to a funeral than to a birthday.  He saw the spirit going out of modern life—no reverence left for institutions, no enthusiasm for the robotic continuation of technological progress, no faith left in our democratic process, no optimism in the academy.

"Our faculty's fight with the administration at the college over salaries was our small version of the doldrums created by double-digit inflation everywhere.  The country was in a hurtful recession.  The effects of the '73 oil crisis lingered.  Kids graduating from college, especially in the humanities and the 'soft' sciences, were not finding jobs.  The over-educated cab driver was becoming a staple of the cartoon pages.  Faculty members at best were stuck in the jobs they had.

            "Over the whole scene, I remember a kind of gray fog, created by the mutual distrust of  business people and academics.  Business leaders brandished a two-edged sword.  One edge was their old conservative view of the professoriate as a sink of leftist socialist sympathies, hostile to free enterprise.  The other edge was their belief that colleges were failing to turn out graduates with the skills needed to succeed in the marketplace.  There was a hue and cry about college graduates who couldn't write, for example.

            "On the other side, many academics did have an elitist disdain for the grubby business world.  These were hang-ups grounded in the classic Left vs. Right dialectic that drove American political life since the New Deal in the 1930s.  It may be that the recession stirred up the passions on both sides.  I took the conflict with a grain of salt, having lived in both worlds.  Still, it was there as a complicating condition in the environment.  Even on a tame campus such as ours, you could feel the tension in the rhetoric of some of our colleagues.   I knew that, at some point down the road, I would have to do something at least to orchestrate these biases.  We had some pretty conservative people on the board.

"But as I look back," Bodger continued, "what sticks out most prominently about 1976 is the shifting of personal values in the young—your crowd.  You were too young to participate in the early romantic surge of the '60s people.  But your cohort was old enough to absorb their irreverence for authority.  You picked up the ironic distance that they developed, once 'flower power' failed and drugs and disbelief took its place."

"Whoa," M.S. said, "a lot of tar on that brush.  Let me just say this about that, Sir.  We had our share of concerns.  College was costing more and financial aid was tightening, and that we cared about.  Many were worrying about the job market, sure.  Faculty were warning us there would be few opportunities after a graduate program if we were not careful.  But it was not for us to get upset.  The Ford administration was trying to put Vietnam behind it as soon as it could--kids beat them to it. We had learned from TV as little kids how to vent anger if we wanted to.  Most students, though, were not into anger.  Apathy was a word we threw around, but I think we meant something different by it.  Apathy toward being angry maybe.  Mood mellow, maybe.  We weren’t the first 'me firsters' but we were warming up the idea for the kids who followed us."

"You expected a wider apron of private space around yourselves as a matter of entitlement," Bodger offered.  "You got that from the '60s."

"I can credit that," she said.  "And if you were looking for anger, it would come when you presumed to go too far onto that apron."

"That was a basic change," said  Bodger.  "Small freedoms won in the '60s were yours for the taking, with no thanks to anyone."

"OK," M.S. replied.  "And when we didn't say we were grateful, and wanted more, you all got perplexed."

M.S. went on to remind him of the expectations of women by that time.  The students had pushed for equal residence hall rules just two years before Bodger's election.  But national surveys were revealing the "chill" felt by women students in classrooms, where men professors still far outnumbered women. "Do you remember that the NCAA was still arguing in court that Title IX didn't apply in women's sports?" she said, poking the air with her finger.

Bodger indeed had not remembered that. "I do remember the cigarette ads—'you've come a long way, baby.'" They grimaced in unison.

Bodger and M.S. agreed after a while that their respective recollections of the state of the times when he entered office were beginning to mesh. "Whatever," said M.S., "it was a tough time to become a college president."

Bodger answered, "A view D. L. Helfferich himself held.  After the board acted, he puffed his pipe one day in his office.  He reflectively told me in that privacy how pleased he was with the outcome for the college.  But he was not so pleased at the thought of what I would have to deal with.  He wished better times were coming but knew they were not.  For we already were getting the dire projections of the demographers.  Starting in 1980, the great boom in teenagers that started in the '60s would end.  College enrollment offices would face a long slow decline in the number of college-age kids, lasting fifteen years.  This would be especially stressful for colleges because since the GIs went to college after 1945, they had been in a growth pattern that seemed to have no end.  As I took office, it was still psychologically impossible for us to absorb the reality of what was about to happen.  I knew it but could not feel it with conviction."

            "But you were ready to try."

            "Hey—'But still try, for who knows what is possible.'" He was quoting the familiar saying by Michael Faraday from the face of the science building, memorized by generations of students. 

The inauguration was a community affair 

            "You know,"M.S. said, "the gloom in the atmosphere rose and disappeared, as I think back to your inaugural day."

            "Even if it was only for the day," Bodger replied.

            "More than a day."

Although certainly it was as upbeat as M.S. remembered, the inauguration was an odd little ceremony in Bodger's memory.  In its low-keyed style, it followed the tradition of presidential inaugurations at the college.  Pettit and Helfferich had advised Bodger not to get grandiose, and that had suited his inclinations.  It was a community affair, patched onto the regularly scheduled annual Founders' Day convocation in the first week of November 1976.

Founders' Day traditionally served as commencement convocation for a small group of students each fall who finished academic requirements over the summer.  It also was an omnium-gatherum for other ceremonial business of the institution.  That always included an acknowledgment of the German Reformed Church people who started the college in 1869.  At this year's convocation, in addition to the awarding of degrees and the inaugurating of a new president, the college ceremonially presented a portrait of Dean Richard Bozorth, painted by the college's art instructor, Ted Xaras.  Since in some minds Bozorth had been a fitting candidate to be president, the appearance of this item on the program along with Bodger's installation symbolized something politically bizarre.

"I remember it as a magnificent portrait," M.S. said, "but to a student’s eyes, it looked as if the college was saying, 'OK, here’s your new president, but don't forget that the established order, familiar in Dr. Bozorth’s visage, isn't going to change all that drastically.’"

Bodger explained.  The planning for Founders' Day was done months in advance, as usual, in collaboration between President Pettit’s office and Dean Bozorth’s office.  The portrait had been in the works much too long.  The artist, the subject, and the outgoing president were all eager to launch the portrait into the official iconography of the institution.  Here too, tradition was at play, for it was the custom to unveil portraits of presidents, board heads, and deans at ceremonial convocations.  So, the plan to present the portrait proceeded out of an established set of assumptions, irrespective of the other plans that were patched onto the convocation, namely, the inauguration.

"The result was anomalous and, for many, an amusing reflection of the quirky character of the place," Bodger said.  "I wondered at the time what our handful of guests from other colleges must have thought."

Unlike most inaugurations at such colleges, there was no procession of representatives from other colleges and universities.  Invitations did go to a small list of kindred institutions; when a few of their presidents showed up prepared to process in regalia, the marshals had to tell them to stow their robes and sit with the president-elect’s wife.

Bodger also remembered the reception committee.  An ancient and honorable custom of the college's convocations involved a committee of faculty wives in arranging and hosting the reception afterward.  The custom held for Bodger's inauguration, even though the dining service did most of the actual work.  Afterward, in time-honored fashion, the chairperson of the committee submitted to now-President Bodger a two-page report on the logistical and social execution of the coffee and tea service.  It was the last act in a long institutional play that was ending.

"I was indifferent to most of these stylistic peculiarities and customs," Bodger said, "because I was thinking—'how can I strike the right note of new leadership, hoary setting to the contrary notwithstanding.'"

M.S. said, "The students heard what you said to them loud and clear.  I'd

guess all other constituencies also heard you speaking directly to them.  You tried to touch all the bases, as I remember."

            Bodger said, "And you won’t have any choice but to do the same on that promised day when you rise to be inaugurated."

M.S. managed a wry smile. 

Inaugural speech searched for consensus 

Bodger said, "Most inaugural speeches are rhetorical exercises that are quickly put aside.  In my case, coming from within the established management, I thought it was necessary, if possible, to set myself apart from Pettit and Helfferich, right away.  To do that without giving offense would be a trick.  I repeated the obligatory, conventional formulas.  But I didn't want anyone to mistake me: I was going up against rhetoric that I had earlier helped to forge as helper to Pettit and even more to Helfferich.  The concept of the college in the 'conservative' tradition was deeply ingrained in the board and alumni and much of the older faculty.  I sought to say something different about that without scaring the folks.  Continue the traditional work of Ursinus, I urged, because that renewed our commitment to liberal education as a practical pursuit.  But it would open the way to something new."

Bodger was fishing in the briefcase on the floor by his seat.

"I can't believe you brought the speech along," said M.S.

"But I did."

"And then you said a pox on conservatism—or something like that."

"Your memory is failing." Bodger quoted from the text in front of him:  

The college has been called a conservative institution.  Since being selected for my new position in June, I have talked about that with Board members, faculty members, alumni, students and friends of the college.  And it seems to me that most people think of the college as a conserving institution—not a custodian of received ideas and entrenched custom, but an institution that respects the past as it impinges on our needs of the present and the future. 

M.S. took the document and glanced through it.  "I can see that you were trying to walk a tightrope by ringing in T. S. Eliot as your reference to support that trope."

"Eliot of course was by then canonized as the great savior of tradition rather than as the iconoclast of the inter-war era.  I doubt if many of my conservative board members would have known this, but it pleased my political sensitivities to pin my rhetorical turn to him.  And thus get the best of both Eliots.  In his essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,' which I quoted, he made creative effort dependent upon the vigorous exercise of the historical sense."

M.S. read the quote Bodger had used from Eliot:

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.  This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.  And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

She continued: "And then you said, 'What T.S. Eliot said of the poet, who is at the same time traditional and contemporary, can also be said of the creative academic institution.'"

"Sounds tame now,"Bodger said.  "At the time, I felt like a kid playing with the fire of his elders," said Bodger.

"Also, by the way, sounds Eurocentric and sexist now," M.S. smiled.

Bodger said, "Wonderful, isn't it, how feminist and ethnic studies have made so much look different," Bodger said.  "But in November 1976, nobody was remarking on such things here."

M.S. said, "I'm struck, too, by your compulsive need to justify the liberal arts in the speech.  But, as I think about it, those of us studying science and social science thought the humanities majors were handicapped persons."

Bodger said, "The whole purpose of higher education was really a big concern on the national agenda.  I was determined to ring the bell for our traditional stance on curriculum.  I felt it was necessary to resist voices that were urging 'practical' programs because they would fit with emerging but ephemeral markets."

"Not voices in the faculty, surely?"

"A few, but mainly it was a note coming from board members and parents and alumni, together with students.  It was an important moment to reaffirm the practicality of the seemingly impractical."

M.S. said, "You associated tradition with liberal education and then pointed to the ways in which that tradition would address contemporary need."

"And by enumerating some of the needs," Bodger said, "I sought to sketch the beginnings of my agenda, though it might have seemed like mere rhetorical flourishing at the time.  I had learned from DLH that rhetorical flourishes could be executed in such a way as to suggest substantive significance without delineating it."

"So, you enumerated the importance of building personal values for living, for fostering individualism, for earning what you get in competition with others, for living within institutional means, for casting the liberal arts curriculum as an instrument of usefulness for careers and living."

Bodger said, "There was a coded message for someone in every one of those points.  Shamelessly, I was trying to say something to all parties that would make them feel favorably toward this surprising and improbable outcome--that I really was going to be the president."

Still scanning the text, M.S. said, "The instrumental nature of liberal learning—an instrument of the mind in service to a striving for ethical and moral performance—I liked that and even remember it, sort of."

"I had to work in my favorite writers one way or the other," said Bodger.  "The large idea from Loren Eiseley--that modern technology created a human paradox--served me well."

M.S. replied, "You threw against the dehumanizing force of modern technology a belief in the individual and the 'old universal truths' inherited by high modernism from the Western tradition—you had to cite Faulkner, didn’t you?"

"And Alfred North Whitehead and Meister Eckhardt.  The showy furniture of my mind.  I really did believe at that time that bureaucracy, the normalization of idiosyncratic human achievement, which technology furthered, could be resisted.  I thought it could be countered by a radical affirmation of the idea of an irreducible self, the person, the subject, the soul, if you have to hear it.  I became a bureaucrat because I hated bureaucracy so much and figured I could control its evils."

M.S. said she understood.  Bodger's appeal at the time, she said, lay partly in the naivete of his stated conviction.  Students like her took it at face value.  Only later, when they went off to study further and live more life through the postmodern era just dawning in 1976, would they be able to see that Bodger’s pronouncement emerged from an overly simplified vision.  A more learned scholar, a more experienced  practitioner would not have entertained such a simple vision, even in 1976.  Old universal values?  The sanctity and endurance of the human subject?  M.S. and her contemporaries in graduate schools would see the academic engines reshape these traditional formulations into new questions.  A speech like Bodger’s would become rapidly like a piece of evidence from a world that they lost.

"But it still makes me feel good," M.S. said, and Bodger hoped that her patronizing was meant to be in fun.

Bodger said that the guest speaker, Miller Upton, was supposed to provide an authoritative voice of endorsement.  He gave a ringing huzzah for Bodger’s notion of liberal education and implicitly for the heroic role still open to the deeply defined individual produced by liberal education.  Upton had been president of Beloit College for more than two decades.  Beloit too was related to the United Church of Christ.  In retirement, he was acting as a consultant to UCC-related colleges through its Commission on Higher Education.

Bodger said, "Miller thus brought a couple of different themes to the program.  His presence suggested that I might be tapped somehow into age and experience, young and inexperienced though I was—in fact, he came back later and gave me some useful advice on how to organize the staff.  It also said I was remaining allied to the church, although Miller was about as churchy personally as I was.  And his message, which we talked about by phone in early fall, gave a rousing endorsement of the practicality of liberal education practiced at small colleges."

Bodger retrieved Upton's speech from his briefcase and quoted:

The liberal arts do not exist as an alternative to career preparation but as the indispensable ingredient of career education.  It’s not a matter of liberal arts vs. vocational education but liberal arts for vocational preparation.  To educate the worker you must first educate the man, for man is part worker, part parent, part spouse, part citizen, and, in sum, creature of God.

Bodger went on to cite Upton’s personal endorsement of the inaugural speech that Bodger had just delivered.  Upton told the crowd that he thought the address demonstrated Bodger’s understanding of the significance of liberal education, the nature of the learning process, and the unique contribution of the small liberal arts college.

M.S. said, "So, in the end, you called everybody to the task, group by group.  What do you think mainly came out of the inauguration exercise?"

"Consensus," Bodger quickly answered. "My election threatened to widen the cracks in our already-fractured little campus.  I was, after all, the candidate of the established power.  I still think, after all these years, how remarkable it was that student leaders and a good percentage of faculty came to think of me as their candidate.  If you look at the process from the standpoint of realistic politics, you could say that Helfferich and the board, once having settled on me, did a successful job of indirectly selling me to the community."

M.S. said, "It was you who sold you, not Helfferich and the board."

Bodger answered, "You could say I was complicit.  But whatever the case, I felt in the end that the college community, by and large, was behind my presidency at the outset.  It seemed prepared to give me a chance. I took Larry Dalaker's greeting from the students and Evan Snyder's from the faculty as more than mere politeness.  Both were pointed enough."

M.S. said, "Bet they're in your briefcase too."  And sure enough, he reached in and pulled them out.

            Bodger said: "Here's Larry:"

The students see Mr. Bodger as a man with new ideas and a sense of community.  He has shown his concern for student problems by always keeping his door open to all students.  We are looking for him to continue this policy.  The students would like to see him take an advocate's role and promote needed changes rather than that of a passive onlooker who merely assesses problems and acknowledges their possible existence.  We feel that Mr. Bodger is truly interested in the students' problems and has the desire to work with us toward a college setting where learning, both academic and social, can be achieved in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

"Here's Evan, speaking directly to me:"

I suspect you realize that the Board of Directors will make demands of you, the students will make demands, the alumni will make demands, and even the faculty will make some demands.  Of course it is perfectly clear that, of these, the demands of the faculty will be the most reasonable and the most important.  I should like to discuss two of the demands of the faculty, but first I should like to soften the word and make it concerns or goals.  One of the concerns of the faculty is the continuing re-evaluation of our educational program....It is true that new is not necessarily better, but a new program does generate enthusiasm and interest....Another concern of the faculty is the need for candid communication and cooperation between the various segments of the college community.  Dr. Pettit has already taken steps in this direction in the procedure he set up to choose his successor.  In this process members of the board, faculty, students, and alumni worked together, sometimes harmoniously, on a selection committee.  Since the committee chose you, the process was eminently successful....With cooperation, candid communication, and the leadership that we all know you can provide we can change the college from a great small college to a greater small college.

            Bodger said that the subtexts of these public utterances by members of the advisory search committee were forthright for the times.  M.S. agreed now, although at the time, when she was a student, she did not find them all that noteworthy.  Bodger could imagine now, as he could not then, how Pettit must have felt as he sat in the audience and heard them.  Pettit knew, like everyone else, that those qualities were being called for because the students and faculty, by and large, had felt they were lacking.  Snyder was able to throw a small bouquet to Pettit only because of his unquestioned reputation for fairness.  It would have sounded false coming from nearly any other faculty member.

The hard message that Bodger took from the remarks was that they provided a warning and a benchmark.  We're supporting you, although you are the company man and although you are scantily equipped academically.  We'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but only if you hear us now and assure us you'll deliver on the promises you've made.

"What, precisely, did you promise?" asked M.S.

            Bodger said that overtly he had promised little.  But students and faculty alike read clear implications from his guarded language. The students expected him to change the social code of the college one way or another.  The faculty expected more salary and more say in the governance of their professional lives.

            "The editor of the student newspaper got it about right, I think," said Bodger, dipping again into his briefcase.  He read:

            In his inaugural address, President Bodger showed that his appreciation for the college's past will not interfere with his concern for the future.  'It is altogether practical...for us to continue the traditional work of the college.  But, unless we carefully calibrate our way of doing so, it is dangerous also.  It is dangerous because we may fall prey to our own past success and forget that a new day requires new thought and a fresh approach.'

            He has made his commitment and now it is up to us to help him in whatever way we can to keep it, whether that is praise for a good decision, constructive criticism for a bad one, or suggestions on how to improve the college.  We can be sure...it will be treated with respect and thoughtfulness.  It is in that spirit that we will prosper and grow even more.

            Bodger commented, "After six long years of hearing negative stuff from students and faculty about the failings of the administration, I can't tell you how delicious it was to read such words.  Coming off the inauguration, I was prepared to break my butt to fulfill the expectations being expressed."

            M.S. looked over the editorial, remembering. "Some kids thought the editor laid it on too thick--you weren't that great." She read the first part of the editorial:

We should be grateful that we will have such an able and efficient administrator guiding the process of this college.  President Bodger comes to office with a great deal of support and encouragement from all facets of the college community--his good reputation is the result of a lot of hard work....He was always ready to offer some sort of guidance or solution to all who came to him whether it was a student in one of his Freshman Comp. classes or the editor of the Weekly agonizing over how to balance the budget.  We are confident that the policy of openness and understanding will continue in his new position of leadership.

            President B's job is not going to be an easy one...and we should not try to make it "easy" for him.  He will have to cope with demands from all sides and try to reach a solution equitable to all; he needs the input and ideas from all sides in order to keep in tune with what is happening at the college.  He has proven his concern and dedication to the college; we must have faith in that dedication.

     "Consensus, you see," Bodger said.

            "Whether they liked it or not," said M.S.

            "Most people, I think, appreciated the tenacity of the old structure and my need for time and tact to change it.  Dick BreMiller, my most ambitious advocate among faculty members, told me they understood that I would have to go at it in my own way.  At bottom, I think what I mainly promised was a change of style."

    Bodger was counting on that promise to stand in for other, more concrete ones when he found it impossible to deliver them.  "That is what most new college presidents promise an institution, I suspect.  The need for freshness, for novelty, is very deep in an academic community—the escape from ennui, which constantly descends as classes drone on."

            M.S. brightened.  "Hey, I think that's my big lesson for today.  I'm taking a note," she said.  She was more serious about it, Bodger thought, than her tone suggested.

            They lingered on in the restaurant lounge, reminiscing about the year when Bodger's presidency was being launched and M.S. was finishing her final year as a student.  Then he asked if she remembered the day in his office when he predicted her future.  She remembered.

    M.S. said, "I've carried it with me like a secret badge of membership in a shadowy society."

    Now, she was hoping to run for the job at the college where she was teaching.  The president just recently announced he was taking another presidency at a college on the west coast.  The board chair had let M.S. know that he hoped that she would apply, with no promises about the outcome of the open search.

            "I don't think I'll be a real president, though, until I come back here," she said.

            They finally left as the earliest birds arrived for their bargain dinners at the restaurant. 

An in-house president pursued a new role in a familiar place 

They met again soon after at the college, in Bodger’s hideaway retirement office at the far edge of the campus. 

"This is the geographic demonstration of the postmodern notion of power," he said to her. "I was the center; now I'm the margin."

M.S. asked, "And you like it like this? Out of the circuit?"

"I like having been the center—it is good to have been there.  I like this margin now, yes, yes."

She wondered why he could not continue to contribute to the affairs of the college.  He said the new president had to have his own organizational society around him.  It would be too incongruous for the former president to be in a team around the current president.  It was nothing personal, he said, but rather had to do with roles, social masks.  It had to do with the echo of vibrations that attach to your person from the function that you once performed.

"Even if all that were not so," he said, "remember I opted out because I didn’t want to do it anymore.  My game was over.  Why would I want to play the next game?"

"But you're still on the board," M.S. observed.

"By the book, I should not be.  It's a hangover from old times.  Heefner, other old hands on the board, probably felt a need for familiarity and comfort while a new man took charge and reshaped things.  I have to assume that they persuaded him to ask me to stay on board.  Remember, in the whole history of the place, my successor was the first new leader who did not come from within the body of the lodge, so to speak.  The old boys naturally assumed I would participate in a kind of continuity that they had seen when DLH became chancellor.  Pettit too had stayed actively on the board for a while after he left the presidency.  Having been asked, I could not say no.  It felt good, I suppose, to think that the college still needed me.  But I have stayed distant from the process, despite my seat at the table.  On the few occasions when I have initiated advice, I have done so with a feeling that it was out of place.  I would not fault him if the new guy had the same feeling, though manners would prevent him from saying so.  I'll be cycling off in due course, anyway.  That will end whatever anomalies persist by my nominal presence."

Bodger advised her against building any official bridges to the current president at her institution if she succeeded him.  There is something almost metaphysical about this, he suggested.  If one thinks of the collective energy of the people in the institution as a flow of desire, it gravitates toward the head for its production.  A college still has something of the character of a despotic machine, overlaid on the more visible collegial configuration.  This drives the attention of the people to inscribe their desire on the body of the despot.  Bodger apologized to her for dragging in the language of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

He said, "The president-as-despot is not something the faculty would consciously acknowledge.  But their gut feelings about institutional reality would lead them to act according to such a concept without expressing it.  I think this partly explains the persistent resentment that manifests itself as irony at wine-and-cheese parties, when faculty let down their hair.  If the old despot is still visible after the new despot takes authority, confusion arises in the eyes of people on campus.  Their flow of desire for the institution now runs the risk of territorializing on the familiar old despotic body as well as on the new one. The system calls for only one despotic body.  So the campus finds itself with a confusion, a social and conceptual dysfunction."

M.S. said, "OK, I guess I get it: hide the old despot from sight." In her case, she added, this would not be a problem, since the outgoing president would be going to a new presidential assignment.

"Good," Bodger said.  "One less human tangle for you to manage—you'll have enough of them without it."

"If…," M.S. reminded him.

Luckily, Bodger said, Pettit moved to Florida after leaving office and summered by long custom in Nantucket, where he and his wife had bought a small house many years before.  He remained on the board for some years. However, early on, when he opposed Bodger’s recommendation for the promotion of a faculty member, the board committee—knowing despotic metaphysics—sided with Bodger.  It was the last time Pettit took an active part.  Although DLH remained on the scene, his thespian instincts enabled him to play the role of mentor to Bodger without crossing over to the role of advisor on specifics.  He grew gradually farther away, until, by the early 1980s, his presence was an institutional curiosity rather than a significant influence.

Bodger said, "Once authority shifts to your hands, it is impossible to share it effectively except for a certain condition.  The condition is that your team members have to understand that you may recapture the authority that you gave them at any time, when political circumstance demands it.  That is why it is so necessary to divorce your authority from the person who had the authority before you.  That is also why you have to build your own staff."

He said that the case of D. L. Helfferich's presence was unique.  Probably no new presidents today in mainstream institutions would have to deal with such a presence.

"In reality," Bodger continued, "DLH's presence was not a problem for me.  Though I would not have become president without his nurturance and his political maneuvering, he knew that I could not be on his string, either perceptually or actually.  During the summer after my spring election, and before I took office in the fall, I decided I had better make this explicit.  I sent him a letter that thanked him for everything and also, by the way, said I would have to be my own master.  His reply was vintage Helfferich.  He knew I was on my own and supported that."

Bodger began to reach for a file on his desk.

"You have the letters, of course," M.S. smiled.

He read:

Now that the formalities of my new position have been agreed to, it seems an appropriate time to express my gratitude for your support, guidance, and constructive admonitions throughout the process of presidential selection.

Ever since we first talked about the possibility of my preparing for such a job eight or nine years ago, I have felt a rather special relationship between us—one based on our mutual recognition that we were interested in something larger than a career or even personal satisfaction, that we were interested in the well-being of an institution.

I have gradually come to believe that I have nothing more useful to do with my life than to devote it to the needs of the institution.  Your own life-long service to the college has given me an example and helped persuade me of the good sense of such a seemingly foolish attitude.  I will always remain indebted to you for that.

"And here is the main point of the letter," said Bodger:

You know better than anyone, probably, that I will often have to act in my own way without the benefit of anyone’s judgment but my own.  And I will do it willingly.  Yet I will seek your help when I need it—and will be grateful for it.  We all are fortunate that your seasoned wisdom will remain as a valuable asset to be drawn upon.

Thank you for helping give me an opportunity to use my energies in so challenging and honorable a cause.

Bodger said, "DLH’s response was in a characteristically laconic style.  He usually sought to be meaningful by understatement.  His whole note read, 'I'm well pleased with the letter you sent to me on July 7, 1976."

"And with that, you felt you were free to move on your own?" asked M.S.

Bodger said yes and no.  "Helfferich labored very hard to stay at a disengaged level.  But on the great issue of my first phase, he talked to me directly about my bad handling of things."

"That would have been the change in student life policies in 1978," M.S. said.

"Right.  Even then, he struggled to be a kind of Confucius.  He never 'ordered' me to change course.  Shortly after that, he also told me what he thought I should do about replacing the academic dean.  Then too he was careful to respect my status as the president."

Bodger continued, "What a burden he must have felt, though.  He virtually embodied the institution.  Yet, he had to acquiesce in my assumption of authority.  He had to stand aside as I did things and said things he would never have done or said.  He more than anyone knew my leadership weaknesses.  He seemed to manage an aloofness from decision-making by keeping his eye on a higher definition of the institution.  He was looking beyond the mere management of it.  I think this attitude at bottom was ecclesiastical.  He saw the college in the stream of the Reformed tradition, by then the United Church of Christ.  For him, this dimension allowed for all sorts of variety at the perceptual level.  The managerial level.  As long as he could feel that the college existed in an ecclesiastical sense, he could tolerate being out of the center of management.  He was still sitting at a more deeply situated center.

"But it is only now, when I am in an even less-empowered position than he, that I can imagine his feeling.  During the Pettit years, he remained almost as a chairman of the board.  He gave Pettit his room to manage also, but I don’t think it was quite the same as the space I had.  Pettit had been dean in DLH's presidency for many years.  They had a well-rehearsed way of relating to one another then.  It carried over to the Pettit presidency."

Bodger said that such overlays of personal and official relationships were subtle and complex, bound to the particularities of the place and its people.  It was not just a question of filling an administrative slot with a competent person.  It was also a question of tending to the feelings of people who knew one another well.  The college under Helfferich and Pettit was in some ways like a village.

"It was still like that when I took over," Bodger said. 

An administrative team began to emerge

"In such a setting," M.S. asked, "how did you go about creating an administrative organization around yourself?" She knew the people he had appointed; but she wondered about his motives in choosing them.  "I attended a summer institute on presidential leadership," she added, "and the consensus in our chat group was that a new president should lean toward cleaning house rather than toward maintaining continuity."

Bodger said that in the beginning he thought little about the organizational structure of the college.  The main functions were well-defined—academic, student life, business, admissions, development. For six years as vice president, he had exercised managerial oversight over just about everything but the dean’s academic function.  And he was fully involved in curriculum and academic governance as a faculty member.  His energy level was at its peak.  He devoured details of daily management like a hungry dog.  He had a bias for hands-on management.  So, he took the structure as a given.  For the first three years or so, at least, that gave him room to think of people rather than structure.  He knew that as policies began to change in the years ahead, commensurate changes in structure would follow.

"Starting out," he continued, "I needed people who above all would help me with the attitudes on campus.  I needed loyalty to an agenda for change even though the particulars of change at the outset remained vague.  I needed people who could put up with my style—the cocktail of personal strengths and weaknesses, biases and convictions, that determined the way I worked day to day.  I needed bright, competent people, of course."

Bodger said that he tried not to upset applecarts that seemed to have wheels that were turning efficiently.  He did not set out to replace everyone.

His way of working with the business officer, Nelson Williams, was well established.  Williams began reporting to him when DLH made Bodger vice president in 1969.  Williams was conservative in his management of the financial and business affairs, loyal to Bodger in a personal way, and trustworthy.  Moreover, DLH had hired Bodger and Williams at about the same time and had tutored them in a similar way.  This shared experience gave them a personal bond.  It lasted through the rest of Williams's active service on the staff, to his retirement in the late '80s.  It was a relief for Bodger to be able to assume that the financial and business affairs of the college would go on without change.  DLH never hesitated to go directly to Williams with counsel on financial management; his presence on the investment committee of the board gave him a legitimate avenue.  In another institutional setting, such a direct line would have given a new president the jitters.  For Bodger, it seemed like a natural and comfortable way to work.

The admissions office was led by Geoffrey Dolman and his assistant and long-time colleague, H. Lloyd Jones.  They had grown into senior status through the long years when their mentor, Bill Pettit, was dean, dating back to the mid-1950s.  Both taught English while recruiting students.  As young faculty members, both had taught Bodger when he was an undergraduate.  Their attitude toward Bodger seemed to him benignly avuncular.  He still had a feeling of respect for them as the teachers who had influenced his early years.  This obviously affected the way they worked together when he became the boss.  Civility and deference ran in both directions.  Bodger felt that his long relationship with Dolman and Jones, now transformed into a working relationship, represented something definitive about the institution itself: he was a product of the developmental process to which they, as humanities professors, felt strongly committed.

"Because of my relationship with Dolman and Jones," Bodger said, "I did not push immediately for change in the recruiting process.  But I knew that would have to come in due course.   Together, they had developed a successful, no-frills method for making a class from a narrow geographical radius that did not extend much beyond the counties surrounding Philadelphia.  Their travel schedules were manageable because they could go to high schools and come back in a single day.  Dolman and later Jones, when he took over, enjoyed the respect of their admissions peers in Pennsylvania.  In 1970, they had hired their best student helper, Ken Schaefer, upon his graduation.  They trained Ken in their admissions lore.  The extra legs allowed them to cover the territory better and anticipate greater staff needs in the changing climate.

"Dolman knew that recruiting was getting tougher and tougher.  He had been warning the faculty and board about adverse changes for several years before I took over.  He would cite economic pressure on families, increasing competition from other colleges, the decline of interest among applicants in studying the humanities.  In addition, the dropout rate among our upperclass students was disturbingly high.  This forced him to get larger freshman classes to maintain the total enrollment needed for budgetary balance.

"All this told us that a fundamental change was occurring in the recruiting of students.  I knew that we would soon have to stretch beyond Dolman’s experience, which he acquired in the baby boom years when students were plentiful.  He and Jones were more willing than their faculty colleagues to think about their work as a marketing process.  But an unapologetic 'marketing' strategy was not going to take place under Dolman’s leadership.  Jones was a little more flexible.  Even so, he too was limited by what he and his long-time partner had learned in the boomer era."

M.S. said, "But you stuck with them for the first phase because they were stable in what they were doing, and they were willing to support your new presidency.  Right?"

Bodger nodded to say she was right.

"So, Dr. Byerly was onto something when during the selection process she worried that you would be too slow to replace your old buddies.  Right?"

Bodger said that it might appear so but that it was mainly a question of pacing and timing.

"An era ended, sort of," he continued, "when Jones stepped down in the spring of 1981 after succeeding Dolman as leader of admissions for two years.  Ken Schaefer's appointment as dean of admissions to succeed Jones represented a generational transition.  Yet, Ken's training under the two old masters also meant that we would not make a clean transition into the new marketing paradigm, which was rapidly overtaking colleges.

"We finally tried to make that turn in 1984.  Ken turned out to be a good fit in a newly configured college relations department under John Van Ness.  Ever resourceful, Ken transferred out of his old admissions calling and became head of alumni annual giving.  That opened the way for me to tap Lorraine Zimmer to lead admissions.  She enabled the college finally to define recruiting unapologetically as marketing—though the keynote was promotion rather than analysis.  After Lorraine, Richard DiFeliciantonio came in from Swarthmore College to carry that definition into its most ambitious form by the time I ended my tenure." 

An executive assistant came from within 

"I remember," said M.S., "that you appointed Dr. Craft as your key administrator right after you took office.  Even as a student I thought I could see that this sent a couple of messages.  Tell me what you really intended by appointing him.  In the higher ed literature, the position of executive assistant to the president gets a mixed evaluation."

Bodger could not help smiling as he remembered Craft.  "To understand Jim, you had to remember that he had aspired to become an Admiral in the Navy.  He was down-the-line career military as an Annapolis grad.  But if that's all you remembered, you would miss the whole person.  Did you know that after the Navy he was dean of students at Penn while kids were raising hell in the late '60s?  He acquired there a marvelous gift for flexibility, which he masked under his correct bearing.  He also was of the South—his courtliness never wavered.  Jim was administrative to the core of his being.  He had different sized pads for different memos, depending on their degree of officialness.  He was almost always operating but never being dishonest about it, as far as I could ever tell."

M.S. said, "He was also too bright for his own good."

"He was bright."

"My roommate had his course in political science methodology.  Computer-driven, when computers were tough machines and not cargo ships for electronic information.  She busted a gut proving some damned obvious fact about political parties.   He talked in engineering riddles when all she wanted to do was learn how to serve the public good."

"But he was a nice guy about it," said Bodger.

"Grade-grinding students had a hard time seeing him that way sometimes."

Bodger continued, "Craft helped solve several problems for my new administration.  Over the summer of 1976, after my election, I interviewed a number of outsiders for the position of executive assistant.  A couple of them came to me with recommendations from board members.  They were all well-qualified people.  One of them was military, like Jim, but out of West Point.  Another had a Ph.D. in higher education, up on the current management philosophies—but his Mormon religion seemed out of kilter with the Reformed atmosphere.  A special note on institutional history: Bob Reichley, '50, who was an administrator at Brown University, was preliminarily interested, at my invitation.  He opted out before coming to talk.  Some years later I asked him to be on our board.  He joined up, and after I left office he became board chair.

"I came to realize by Labor Day that none of the outside candidates would help with internal organizational needs—campus politics colored them all doubtful.  I was relieved when Jim made himself available.  I was grateful that he was willing to take what for him was the junior-level title of executive assistant.  I delayed making him a vice president until nearly a year after his appointment in February 1977."

"What held you back?" asked M.S.

"Generic caution," said Bodger.  "I was trained to give away only as much as I had to in order to get what I needed.  In this instance, DLH probably counseled me.  I was not completely certain we would work out as a team.  It would be easier to drop an executive assistant than to unseat a vice president."

The look on her face said that she thought this was an ungenerous approach to nurturing loyalty of staff members, but she said nothing and Bodger let it pass.

He enumerated the problems that Craft's appointment addressed.

First, it was a gesture of peace toward the faculty leaders who had pushed against Bodger's predecessor and against his own candidacy.  The Staigers and Eugene Miller had sponsored Craft's candidacy for the presidency.  With Craft in the administrative inner circle, they could feel in touch, Bodger hoped. 

Second, Bodger believed that Craft’s age and experience, plus his military bearing, would calm the fears of some board members about Bodger’s youth and inexperience.  Craft in short order became the administration’s point person on the knotty issue of student life reform, about which some board members were highly concerned.  He also paid attention to the recruiting of new students on Bodger's behalf.

Third, Craft helped contain the displeasure of many faculty when Richard Bozorth did not immediately step down as academic dean.  They associated Bozorth with Pettit, who had installed him as dean.  They wanted to see a new academic leader in the dean’s office.  Craft had been Bozorth’s assistant dean.  Now, Bodger announced that one of Craft’s duties would be to act as the liaison between the academic house and the president.  Without saying so, he thus virtually made Craft the superior over his former superior.  Bozorth had declared his support to Bodger early on in the search.  Until Bodger could tactfully and honorably deal with Bozorth's position, Craft was able to convey to faculty that the status quo ante in the dean's office was ending, although the incumbent remained for the time being.

Fourth, Craft was just the right person to execute the planning agenda that Bodger installed as the keystone of his new administration.  As a former Navy officer, Craft had an exquisite sense of organizational procedure and protocol.   He understood Bodger’s intent to use "planning" as a multi-dimensional tool for reshaping the college.                                                                                              Finally, Bodger felt that Craft would give him good counsel on the general management of the place.  He had far more experience than Bodger and was willing to put it in service to the fledgling administration.  Bodger believed in his own ability to work with other people who knew more than he did.  He was confident that Craft could work well with him.  Bodger was willing to defer, in an odd way, to his new assistant; and Craft had proven that he was willing to acknowledge, in an equally odd way, that Bodger indeed was in charge.  A stylized but effective relationship between the two men quickly developed.                                                                                                                Bodger said, "He was never wholly mine, and he was gone soon after we hired a new dean, when he felt his usefulness ended.  But he served the college and me well when we needed his service most." 

A senior faculty member became assistant academic dean 

M.S. had a wry look in her eye.  "Politically speaking," she said, "you did not forget the woman issue when you built your team, but you kept it in its place."

She was referring to Bodger’s appointment of Blanche Schultz, '41, to replace Craft in the position of assistant academic dean.

"You may be accusing me of building a glass ceiling," Bodger replied.  "Gender representation played some role in the selection of Blanche, I’m sure.  But I picked her mainly because of her peerless reputation for classroom teaching."

"Legendary," M.S. agreed.

"And her sterling character.  She represented what people thought of when they wanted to conjure an image of what the 'old' college produced.  Salt of the earth.  Bright but connected to daily reality.  Pennsylvania Dutch.  A local.  Family connections to the college.  Reformed church.  Talented woman athlete.  A member of the alumnae athlete network, tied to the mystique of legendary coach Eleanor Snell.  Math teacher to pre-medders, giving her a large alumni following.  A woman achiever long before the women’s movement.  She taught a subject that was mainly taught by men.  She moved into a high rank in the US Navy after graduating in 1941.  Blanche was one of a special group of alumni faculty of her World War II generation.  They were the 'soul' of the faculty for several decades.  She was a member of the triumvirate who conducted the ‘University of the Pines' project."

"Where the C-M-P course originated," said M.S.

"Right.  Roger Staiger of chemistry, Evan Snyder of physics, and Blanche of math spent a summer under the pine trees in the Staiger back yard, working up the syllabus.  Integrated Chemistry-Math-Physics.  It became the blockbuster requirement for every entering science student from its experimental inception in 1964 to its demise some fifteen years later."

"I have friends scarred for life by the experience," M.S. said, only half kidding.

"Blanche spelled faculty integrity," Bodger added.  "By her presence and with her talents, she added much to the sum of trust between faculty and the new administration.   She served the college creditably before she bowed out of administrating in 1983.  She gave the advising of students a new priority, especially those who were heading for academic trouble.  Like Craft, she combined a no-nonsense military expectation with a large supply of empathy when counseling students." 

Student life staff underwent reorganization 

"On the female front, you inherited Ruth Harris," said M.S.  "She was also a true sister of the old campus.  You surprised me when you kept her in the position of dean of women."

"Ruth was class of '36," Bodger said.  "Like Blanche, she was a former woman athlete, one of Eleanor Snell's first generation of students—Eleanor came in the early '30s to head up women's phys ed and sports.  Ruth too had a Pennsylvania Dutch practicality about her, as well as an unquestioning loyalty to the institution.  She enjoyed the respect of the old guard on and off campus.

"But Ruth had not spent her whole career on the campus," Bodger continued.  "She formed her professional perspective at a women’s junior college before coming here.  She was better able than some other administrators on campus to separate her duties from her self.  Students thought she lived the college heart and soul; but she had a devoted husband and they lived a life apart from campus.  Her professionalism carried her through the tough transitions of the '60s and the confrontations in the seventies—when your cohort itched for fundamental changes in rules."

M.S. said, "No administrator could have enforced the women's rules by the book.  Dean Harris had two sets of books.  The one the college said was in effect, and the one that she followed at the grunt level.  I would have been sacked three times over if that had not been her way."

Bodger nodded in agreement. "I never did understand how, during the Pettit and Helfferich years, she was able to give the impression of tough conservatism while she also tolerated a zone of behavior in dorms that would have upset the old boys and many alums and parents.  But I did understand that she was wise in the ways of the world of students--much more so than her administrative colleagues and most students could comprehend."

Bodger said that from the first he and Craft wrestled with the question of changing student life policy.  They knew that they had to change the rules that limited dorm visits by members of the other sex and totally prohibited alcohol on campus.  Craft and Bodger both began having conversations with Ruth about the problems.  Their intent was to prepare her for changes that were theretofore unthinkable.  Craft and Bodger sought to weigh whether she could or would be a helpful ally when the change process became apparent.  The concern was that her commitment to the tradition might have made her too rigid to handle a new order of things.  By the time Bodger prepared the board and obtained its approval, he and Craft put their confidence in Ruth.  In the spring of 1978, she became dean of student life, responsible for men and women students both.  Her canny administrative skills, her credibility with the people of her generation on the board and with parents, her loyal service in the past, her overriding professionalism—together these made her the best possible person to ring in the new era of social life at the college.

"But she was in her 60s," Bodger added.  "She did not want to wait much longer to change pace.  She did us an immense service by heading up the biggest social change the college had seen in living memory.  But I knew we would have to relieve her before too long.

"Dick Whatley, the dean of men, was about my age.  But he would not have fitted into the new position of student life dean.  Before 1978, as dean of men, he ran the male side of student life apart from Ruth.  Though the law had eliminated discriminatory rules in 1974, the reality of the old sexist tradition still made the culture of our men's dorms very different from that of women's.   Dick was a classic football-coach-and-dean.   He came to the college in 1959 as Helfferich’s new dean of men, about six years before I arrived.  He followed the long tenure of Sieb Pancoast, an alum who spent his whole life in service to the college.  DLH molded Whatley to be his special kind of dean.  He operated a classic paternalistic system of a kind that had prevailed on American campuses for generations.  And it soon was to disappear in the firestorms of the '60s.

"Whatley added his own peculiar flavor.  He had played football in Maine.  He brought a non-local perspective to the campus.  Like Ruth Harris, he also operated with a real and a virtual rule book.  But her professional administrative experience and acumen were hard to match.  Moreover, he spent each fall immersed in football coaching.  This took his attention away from dorms at just the moment when first-year male students were learning to be grown-ups at the knees of their sophomore elders.

"Nevertheless, by the time I got into office, Dick was a fixture of campus life.  He would do whatever we asked him to do, but it would be in his own fashion.  I had watched as he had adapted to the social revolution of the late '60s and early seventies.  He never ceased to be an independent maverick, interpreting orders from Helfferich and Pettit as he thought best, keeping students off guard with a wily kind of broken field administration."

"And a treasury of malapropisms," added M.S.

"The unforgettable Whatleyisms," said Bodger.  "Count off by fives and each group go to a corner of the gym."

"He could not have been a major player in your big change agenda," said M.S.

"But I was not in a mode of cleaning out the house," said Bodger.  "I resolved to find a place for Dick as long as he wished to stay on.  I felt certain that, with Craft’s assistance, he could be a willing supporter of whatever we decided to do.  He became associate dean in the new order of things, reporting to his former co-equal, Ruth."

Bodger added how impossible it was for him to capture something else about Whatley, but he would try.  He remembered a night in the late '60s on Main Street.  Bodger, then assistant to the president, and Whatley were surrounded by a protesting group of students, mostly male.  The students had stopped traffic in both directions.  The town's only police officer was on the scene.  He was about to radio for back-up support so that arrests could be made.   He gave Whatley ten minutes to avoid this.  Whatley isolated the most influential student leader in the crowd.  While Bodger talked to some protesters, he saw Whatley talking one-on-one to the student.  Then Whatley climbed atop a car hood and said the student had something to say.  The student spoke and the crowd, as if walking in glue, slowly moved off the street.  They took more than ten minutes, but the police officer saw that the students were responding and kept still.  As they left, Bodger asked Whatley what he had said to the student leader.

"I told him you would arrange a meeting for him with the president to discuss the issue," said Whatley.

"What’s the issue?" Bodger asked.

"I'm not sure," Whatley smiled.

Get the job done.  Use your wits.  Don’t look back.

Bodger said to M.S., "Whatley morphed into an outstanding track coach and a faculty character in the phys ed department after he left football coaching.  He remained in the student life staff, but always as a lonesome end.  A true character.  He left here early and returned to Maine.  He loved the deep snow.  When we tried to find his administrative records, they were gone.  He either took them to Maine or destroyed all the evidence."

Bodger said he never thought of replacing Ruth Harris, as her timetable ran out, with an outsider.  Inevitably, the liberalization of social rules went forward under her leadership imperfectly.  All constituencies of the college had reasons for finding fault with it, although most realized there was no way to go back.  Bodger believed that he needed someone in charge who would know the parochial tradition of the college and the history of the change in progress.

"I wanted someone to lead who would take a creative approach to students from a clearly defined moral-ethical position.  Someone to attach high educational seriousness to messy post-teenage life.  Someone who could outdo even Ruth Harris in elevating the student life program to educational status.  Otherwise, I worried that people would see me presiding over the mere legitimization of booze and promiscuity on campus."

Bodger said he found a window of opportunity to groom someone when Jim Craft announced in August 1980 that he would be leaving the college.  J. Houghton Kane, assistant professor of political science, came and offered his administrative service.  Kane had a law degree, was a popular classroom instructor, and had a high level of energy.  He also was ambivalent about a career in academia.  He continued to practice some law while teaching.  He looked to Bodger to help him resolve his uncertainties.

For 1980-81, with Craft gone, Kane became executive assistant to Bodger, with special responsibility for overseeing and learning about student life administration.  His legal training brought an extra resource at a time when college administration was becoming increasingly litigious.

Meanwhile, he and Bodger had an ongoing conversation about the pedagogical and philosophical meanings of student life at a residential college with a parochial history.  Kane came to that conversation with an unabashed Christian belief, combined with a lawyer’s ability to interpret and bend.  Kane grounded his religious commitment in an enthusiastic personal relationship with Christ.  He worked hard, however, not to flaunt his personal beliefs; indeed, as Bodger saw it, he translated them into a charitable and open stance toward students and colleagues, whatever their persuasion.   Some on campus were wary of Kane’s association with a proselytizing strain of Christian endeavor.  But Bodger observed that Kane knew how to contain it and adapt to the Reformed campus tradition.  Satisfied finally that they could work together on the difficult area of student life administration, Bodger in July 1981 announced the appointment of Kane to the position of dean of student life.  Kane’s mandate included all student life programming plus other student services, including financial aid, medical services, and career planning and placement.  Ruth Harris stayed on as administrative assistant to Kane, thus providing continuity. 

Faculty expected a new academic dean 

Bodger said, "The Kane appointment came after we completed the big change in academic leadership, which climaxed in August 1979, when we hired William Akin as academic dean.  I approached the leadership of academic and student life programs as separate issues, although I envisioned them as parts of a whole educational machine.  Incidentally, this approach to hiring the two leaders, I realized years later, made it impossible to mesh the operation of the machine as successfully as I always hoped we could."

M.S. said, "Dean Bozorth was a decent man."

That of course was not the issue, Bodger went on.  "Bozorth held a personal charm for many and had a finely honed enthusiasm about higher learning.  He brought the sophistication of university life—Princeton, Penn--to our small island of intellectuality.  Dick supported my candidacy—especially after the board chairman, Ted Schwalm, told him on the sly that I was the man.  Dick reported this exchange to me behind a closed door, some weeks before the May 1976 election."

Bodger pointed at the honorary degree citation framed on the wall over M.S.'s head.  He received the degree at the inauguration convocation.  "The text was from Dick Bozorth’s pen, I’m certain."

M.S. read the following:

Farsighted beyond your years, you left a career in industry and public service to return to your alma mater as an imaginative teacher and a vigilant administrator.  In the past decade of your service you have given your college a record of peacemaking without unction, discretion without withdrawal, leadership without bombast, and of unremitting labor. You are thus to blame for the occasion that has brought you before us today, and it is our pride and our pleasure to honor you as this convocation draws to a close.

"Knowing Dean Bozorth," M.S. said, "I think it was genuinely expressed."

Bodger said he thought so too.  Yet, he knew from the first day that he would have to replace Bozorth.  In the months between Bodger's election in May and his inauguration in November, Pettit had offered to plant a seed with some of his senior staff members, including Bozorth.  He would tell them that every new president needs the freedom to build his own team.    Pettit never said whether he carried out this intention.  But Bodger assumed that some exchange took place.  DLH that summer also encouraged Bodger to think about a change.  And BreMiller, Bodger’s main line to the faculty psyche, made it clear that, sooner or later, they wanted a new dean.  They would give Bodger a little time.  But not too much.

"I hear what you're saying," M.S. said.  "You were from the inside.  The faculty was willing to go along with that, for whatever reasons.  Still, they wanted a broom to sweep the Pettit years away.  You, in yourself, did not symbolize such a sweep."

Bodger nodded yes and added, "As the dispute between Pettit and the faculty had intensified, and people had started to imagine Pettit retiring, their fear had been that he would bequeath the presidency to Bozorth.  This probably threw some support my way by default.  And even after my election, the idea of Bozorth as Pettit's man would not evaporate.  I suspected that these faculty members thought his influence would tilt my presidency back toward a Pettit agenda. This was naïve on several counts.  But the notion persisted."

"A rotten reason for you to dump a guy willing to be loyal to you," M.S. said.  Bodger saw the impertinence of her student years rise up and speak to him through her bright smile.

He replied, "Desire drives politics, not reason.  The position of academic dean was inevitably and inherently political.  It is in every institution."

"This I know," M.S. said, speaking as Dean Aumen.

"If my administration was to have a chance of really flying, it had to have an academic rudder that enjoyed the complete support and confidence of the faculty.  I think this is true of any administration—it will be true of yours.  For mine, it was doubly true.  For I was a commander of an academic ship who did not have the standard license for such a role.  The academic dean that I chose had to make up for that lack in an unambiguous way.  Dick had the credentials and the experience.  He did not enjoy the political support of a significant portion of his faculty.  I never knew how much the courtesies of our small campus hid that reality from him.

"Beyond merely subjective likes and dislikes," Bodger continued, "the more innovative faculty members had a proper concern.  They saw little reason to think of Bozorth as sympathetic to an agenda for curricular change.  During the disputes in Pettit’s administration, Bozorth had spoken in favor of the status quo in the curriculum, envisioning changes to it as a minor process at the periphery.   He meant this to support Pettit's admonition against spending already scarce dollars for new courses.  He also meant it as a refrain to Helfferich's position speech on the philosophic conservatism of the college.  Bozorth's colleagues surely did not forget the message after Pettit left office.

"I shared their concern.  I believed that we had to address the imbalance in our curriculum and enrollment between the sciences and non-sciences.  This would take imagination and some money from somewhere.  My discussions with George Fago, John Wickersham, and other young Turks in the faculty involved implicit promises—they had a right to feel I would light fire under some kind of curricular change.  I did not doubt that Bozorth would try to do what I would have asked him to do.  I did doubt that he would have the fortitude to initiate curricular innovation on his own that would be relevant to our institutional problems."

M.S. said, "In my experience, curricular innovation can easily become a pork barrel operation.  Faculty are great at mutual back scratching.  You support my new course and I’ll support yours.  Let the dean and president worry about paying for them.  It's hard to be high-minded about curriculum change."

"All the more reason for fresh leadership from outside," answered Bodger.  "If the search for a new academic leader is participatory and perceived to be legitimate, the new person comes in with a certain amount of leverage and credibility.  He or she can do things quickly that a familiar colleague cannot."

M.S. said she had come to her deanship from within but had been the object of a draft by a significant contingent of her colleagues.  That, in essence, made her like an outsider.  "I feel it gave me the leverage and credibility you’re talking about."

"And your success as dean is the basis of your current candidacy for president," said Bodger.  "This is rare these days."

M.S. brightened at the compliment but returned to Bodger’s story of transition in the dean’s office.  "If you didn't want to drop him unceremoniously and if he didn’t understand what you wanted, weren't you at an impasse?"

"It seemed so, for a while," said Bodger.   "I did not want to hurry.  Partly this was out of simple respect for Bozorth.  But also, I did not want to appear to have undue haste in responding to faculty desire.  There was a window of tolerance.  I thought it best to tarry a while in that window.  This, I felt, would establish that it was I, not the political winds, that would set the tempo of the agenda."

Bodger said that there were ways of letting the faculty know that he was quietly at work on the deanship behind the scene.   Sometimes he could do this roundabout.  For example, a senior faculty member's brother-in-law was president of another liberal arts college.  When he came to town to visit, Bodger asked to meet with him.  They had a president-to-president chat about hiring and changing deans.  Bodger assumed that the grapevine would disseminate some information about such discussions.

"It took almost a year and a half to precipate the change," Bodger said.  "Longer than it should have taken, but not so long as to cause a major political problem." Bodger explained that he finally offered job assurances to Bozorth in return for his withdrawal from the deanship.  Bodger made the case to him that he wanted a person in the position who would be more administrative—as opposed to collegial.  Bozorth was not inclined to think and act programmatically and had an awareness of his own strengths and weaknesses.  With support from his spouse, he soon resigned as dean to teach full-time in the English Department. 

An acting academic dean stepped in 

That was in May 1978.  With advice from Craft and key board members, Bodger resolved on appointing an acting dean for the 1978-79 academic year from within the faculty.  This would buy a year for a full national search.

"Faculty nerve ends were still sensitive after a year and half," said Bodger.  "If I chose the wrong person, political feelings could worsen rather than improve, even for an interim appointment.  We all needed someone who would keep waters calm, work competently and systematically, infuse further consensus, support my initiatives without flak, and keep the stage uncluttered while we chose the new person."

"O, you mean J.C. Himself," M.S. said.

"He was unavailable, but by choosing Evan Snyder, I felt I addressed all those needs as well as one humanly could."

"Evan was on the committee that recommended you," M.S. said.

"So Evan had a stake in my performance.  He and Blanche Schultz were lifelong faculty colleagues.  I knew they would work well together as deans.  Of the senior faculty members who were alumni, he was the least likely to exacerbate political feelings.  A few might have been secretly unhappy that he had refused to sign the letter of concerns against Pettit.  But respect for his integrity was so high that none dared say so.  Evan's simplicity of style belied the keenness of his mind.  He loved physics because it sought to express the complexity of nature with the simple elegance of applicable generalization.  As a child, he spoke Pennsylvania Dutch before he spoke English.  If there was a provincial culture of the college that deserved to be celebrated and preserved, Evan as much as anyone embodied it.  We were determined to bring an outsider's view to the academic house.  I believed, however, that the new person would have a greater chance of success if he could build on a platform of the familiar values with which the college traditionally identified itself.  Evan reinforced that platform."

Bodger said that a young Turk movement was gaining steam in the faculty.  The Turks were mounting a campaign to install one of them as acting dean.  If  Bodger did not choose their person, he ran the risk of alienating the rising force in the faculty.  Snyder, of all the senior people, was least likely to arouse their resistance.

"In fact," Bodger added, "some people began to doubt that the announced public search would produce an outside appointee.  They were thinking the inside acting person would become the permanent person.  By choosing a senior colleague, I was able to undercut this expectation.  Evan was the least likely person to trade on a de facto position and push for permanency if we did not want him to."

Bodger said that the appointment appeared to work well.  Evan took to the tasks with predictable efficiency and quiet enthusiasm.  When the new academic leader finally came aboard in August 1979, he found an office in good order and a faculty prepared to follow his lead.  Snyder's even-handed service for the year was the most important reason for this. 

The eleventh hour produced a new dean from outside 

"You have to see the search for the new academic dean," Bodger said, "against the foil of the search that led to my election as president.  The presidential search had been held back by the parochial distrust of the outside, still strong in Helfferich and others on the board.  Even those on the faculty and staff and the board who were not xenophobic still had assumed that the body of the college was sufficient to produce its own leader.  A consensus that outside blood was essential simply had not formed, though some close to the Pariahs had had the thought.  Even they believed, though, that an alumnus from outside would suffice.  By electing me, the board had perpetuated a parochial posture.

"From day one, it was clear to me, as it was to many others, that a new dean had to come from outside, preferably with no prior contact with the college.  This was essential to give my administration a belated look of academic novelty.  It was essential, too, because we sorely needed to focus fresh ideas about undergraduate curriculum and the culture of residential academic life after the revolution of the '60s.  It was not that fresh ideas were not arriving on campus—the hiring process brought a steady influx of younger faculty members, aware of new directions in their disciplines, and eager to bring the light to what they doubtless perceived as a benighted campus.  What we needed was the academic leadership to direct this influx and make sense of it within our budget and our aspirations."

M.S. asked, "If there was no consensus that an outside president was necessary, was there a consensus that an outside dean was necessary?"

"The feeling in favor of one was widespread.  Still, the pull of the inbred culture remained  strong.  Helfferich thought Snyder would be just right for me.  I had asked him to be in the ad hoc group of board members who interviewed final candidates, so he may have quietly counseled others to think so too.  He feared that all the fuss over an outside search was being forced on me by a faculty that I could not fully manage.  In this he was mistaken, but I danced around his perception rather than confront it.  Some faculty thought that the appointment of a committee and the outside advertising was just for show.  They remained convinced that Evan in the end would remain as permanent dean."

"I've found advisory search committees to be sticky wickets, hard to manage," said M.S., referring to searches for faculty at her college.

Bodger agreed with her but emphasized how essential it was for him to have one in the search for his new dean.  Legitimization was absolutely needed, even if the committee was recommending Mickey Mouse.  The faculty committee was made up of three persons elected by the faculty and three appointed by Bodger.  They were all senior people: Jim Decatur of English, Jane Barth of chemistry, Bill Williamson of philosophy and religion, Roger Staiger of chemistry, Harry Simons of economics and business administration, Jim Craft of political science and the administration.  They worked amicably and closely with Bodger in screening and interviewing.  He gave heavy weight to their preferences.  Craft was able to steer them and Bodger in a way that promised agreement on the choice of finalists.

"Still," Bodger said, "it was a tightrope walk at the eleventh hour and I had no safety net.  The search came down to two finalists in early June 1979.  Both had demonstrated competence as academic administrators.  But they could not have been more different from one another.  Both came out of a strong religious-ethical position.  The one was Quaker, quite liberal in his thinking about the world, given to conversation and consensus, casual, informal, articulate, charming in a slightly unkempt way, a biologist.  His wife was even more opinionated on issues than he, and she talked more than was good for him.  Neither of them understood the college's tradition and therefore were clueless about the gap between their style and the prevailing parochialism of our place.  He captured the imagination of many faculty who met him, a somewhat romantic figure who would embody their image of themselves as adventurous intellectuals.  One of them, though, thought he was still in mid-life identity crisis.

"The other finalist was from a midwestern Lutheran college.  He knew the Reformed tradition, knew the history of our college somewhat, felt empathetic with it.  He had a professional historian's comfort with context.  Our committee perceived him as cautious and somewhat colorless, unlikely to be a change agent.  At some point, owing to misunderstanding, faculty came to believe he was my choice.

"With neither finalist meeting the test in a second interview, I decided to invite Bill Akin back for a second interview, without consulting anyone.  He had made a good impression on the committee members on his first visit.  DeCatur had argued that he should be invited for a second interview ahead of one of the other two finalists.  But I had disagreed, on grounds that his application came very late and that he seemed ambiguous about the prospect.  When I called him in Montreal, the very evening after the second candidate left, I was pleased that he was still interested, contrary to my impression after his first visit.  I told him to stand by.

"Then, ex post facto, I lined up some support with individual members of the committee, starting with DeCatur.  Happily I found that other key members were eager to see a third finalist and had good impressions of Akin from his first visit.  When he visited again, he wowed the department chairs and other faculty.  He talked knowingly about achievable projects to professionalize the life of a faculty.  He referred to such things as summer stipends and released time, simple strategies but still unknown here.  As dean of humanities at Concordia University in Montreal, he had hands-on experience with motivating a faculty to reach for its next level of competence.  He was likable, yet carried himself with a guarded reserve that seemed professional, though it was rooted, probably, in a personal need for protectiveness.  Like one of the other finalists, he was an American historian.  His graduate research at the University of Rochester had been on the technocracy movement in the US before World War II.  But his passion was to see American society through the prism of baseball, his first love.

"I felt that his guardedness masked a free spirit.  He had left the US a decade before for French Canada when a first marriage ended and he and his second wife needed space.  The Quebec independence movement arose meanwhile to make life uncomfortable for expatriate Americans.  They were ready for reentry.  Our deanship would be an avenue.  When I worried that he would merely be using us for that purpose and would have no commitment, he said he understood the concern.  He promised me five years.

"When I drove him back to the airport, I think we both felt a comfort with the day and with one another.  He seemed to accept my abnormal academic profile.  I liked his reserved and professional surface, having discerned something more beneath it.  I had to do some selling with DLH and others on the board.  And he and I later had to get down to terms.  But the deed was done that night going back to the airport, when we both made commitments.

"Akin began in August 1979.  The five years he promised extended beyond the length of my term as president.  He was the right person for me at the time.  I suspect our place, in the end, was the right place for him, though it took a long while for him to resign himself to that.  I think he may have persisted in seeing himself better suited for the larger university environment.

"The lesson to be drawn from our relationship seems to be this.  We each had a sense of the protocol of one another’s office.  We tried not to presume or impinge on it.  Throughout, we were aware of a personal space around one another.  Sometimes this professional and personal respect caused him, or me, to tolerate actions that we would not have taken ourselves.  But I can't remember a time when we were not mutually supportive.  In addition, Bill was careful to try never to surprise me.  I tried the same, but he had to work harder at that than I did, given the different places we occupied in the hierarchy.  We would disagree by silence and omission rather than argument.  And the disagreements were, in my recollection, few and principled.  His field of American studies gave us an intellectual common ground.  We enjoyed talking together about the social and intellectual experiences of our lifetimes and about the books that dealt with recent American experience.  I think we both felt that the way we grew up, each in different places, gave us common ownership of a uniquely American dialogue.  He understood the south as I never could.  I understood the industrial north as he never could. "

M.S. asked, "If he was a good dean, was this the key element—his relations with the president?"

"A key element," answered Bodger.  "Not the only one, of course.  I'm not ready right now to give a full-blown assessment of Bill's strengths and weaknesses," replied Bodger.  "I'll say this.  Good deans are first good teachers and scholars, not necessarily of the top rank but passable in any company, and particularly respected in their own faculties.  They have easy and unquestioned membership in the professional body.  But they have an array of extra talents and the most important that comes to mind is a talent for the architectonic.  They have a knack for seeing the whole structure of an intellectual edifice; they have to play the curriculum—and by extension the faculty--as if it were an orchestra.  Another 'most important' is a certain social skill, a comfort in the sticky stuff of human intercourse, a tolerance for foibles and fools.  And another is a capacity to blend toughness into tenderness, to have the obtuseness, it may be, to make a decision and sleep with it.  Bill had all these qualities in good measure."

Bodger watched Dean M.S. meditating a moment.  Finally, she said, "I think it's time for me to move on."

"Up, rather," replied Bodger, and added, "It might have served my administration if Akin had landed a presidency before my last phase, as I look back now.  But that's a complicated speculation for some other time." 

The administrative team rounded out 

Bodger said he fleshed out the team as need dictated in the first phase of his presidency.  Helfferich and Pettit both had run the administration on budgets as small as possible.  Bodger did not change that stance in his first phase.

Ted Kavanaugh, a seasoned advertising professional in semi-retirement, came in part-time starting in 1978 to do press relations.  Mary Ellen DeWane, ’61, a school teacher with young children, signed on also part-time to handle alumni relations.  Frank Smith, whom he had hired while still assistant to the president under Helfferich, remained as the only full-time fund-raising person.  It would take until 1984 to make changes in fund-raising and promotion that would bring basic enrichment of that operation.  That was the year that Bodger hired John Van Ness as vice president for college relations.

In July 1979, Charles Lesveque in the Evening School expanded the continuing education staff by hiring Erlis Glass and C. Joseph Nace.  This started a growth pattern for part-time enrollment and community outreach that would last throughout the Bodger administration.  In September 1979, Bodger was forced by unrest in the maintenance shop to change leadership.  Howard Schultze relinquished his position as director of physical plant.  He concentrated on facilities development and purchasing, while his erstwhile assistant, Fred Klee, took over the management of the department.   This was a painful maneuver for all concerned, but Bodger’s labor advisors insisted it would help prevent unionization in the shop—and it did, on a close vote.

M.S. said, "Starting out, then, you were biased heavily in favor of trusted alumni staff members.  You did not want to start with a clean sweep of the broom.  You worried a lot about faculty perceptions.  The parochial tilt of the college seems to have helped determine much of your staffing agenda.  You were budget conscious, no doubt to a fault.  A new president from elsewhere, who was not an alum, would probably have been freer to shape a staff from the start."

Bodger knew she was thinking about her own options if she got the job at her college.

"Right," he said.  "I've never pretended that my beginning team was the outcome of anything but a pragmatic need to get on with the business with as little friction as possible.  When he was still president, DLH once said to me, 'If I weren't so lazy, I could run this whole thing myself.' While I did not have that much hubris, I did think that I could keep the whole thing going without staffing up with expensive outsiders."

"Was it the right way to start?"

"In the very short run, probably.  In the longer run it inhibited movement on major issues.  I sort of stumbled into a grander agenda only after some years of planning without being seriously committed to spending a lot of money on overhead."

M.S. mused, "You had to reshape yourself, then, before you could reshape the college."

Bodger said, "Interesting thought." 

The first phase--1976-1979--was "getting started" 

M.S. held up three fingers and said, "Seems like a lot of years went by before you could say your staff was in place and ready to go.  I don’t think I could take so long today, starting out."

Bodger replied that the three years that preceded the hiring of a new academic dean, from fall 1976 to fall 1979, made up a definable first phase of his administration.  Much happened, he felt, considering the history of the early 1970s on campus and the handicaps surrounding him.  Akin’s arrival provided an ending as well as a beginning.

"Definable how?" asked M.S.

       "As I analyze my whole administration," answered Bodger, "I distinguish three main phases—getting started, making headway, and arriving.  Then I had to end it as gracefully as I could.  In the period up to Akin’s arrival, we were getting the college started toward something big.  First we had to take care of old business hanging over from the past—most important, altering the student social climate that represented a discredited parochialism.  That was a prerequisite for trying to improve the educational atmosphere of the campus.  How ambitious would we be?  I didn't know at the time.  The details were still murky, although it was obvious that it would involve the movement of the institution in the direction of professionalization.  We would have to recalibrate the balance between a parochial definition of the college and a professional one.

"This would involve making the college more competitive with other small residential liberal arts colleges. I was getting a team in place.  We were laying the keel for a new curriculum, which emerged out of the Middle States ten-year self-study.  This was finished by the time Akin came aboard.  I was thinking about changing the demographics of the board and particularly its leadership.  Riding over all of this, we were installing a new method of management.  Planning as a method of management was resoundingly in place by 1979."

M.S. asked, "Were the steps you took in the first phase clear-cut in your mind as you began?"

"You know the answer or you wouldn’t ask the question," smiled Bodger.  "You know how events arise and determine the short-term agenda.  Then, time goes by and the long-term agenda takes some of its shape from what you have been doing to fight fires.  Nevertheless, when you get up in the morning, you have to remind yourself that there is a larger design and no one but you is ultimately responsible for drawing it.  All through the first three years, even with crises, I felt confident that a larger vision was coming into being.  I saw myself leading the college toward it.  Without that sense, I think it would have been impossible for me to reckon well with the exigencies--the thousand things that every week demanded. We had to show intentional action, while we also had to react to circumstances."

Bodger offered her a pair of examples from those years.  One showed the administration’s proactive, intentional way of "getting started" by reviving a dormant issue, calendar reform.   Another showed how it had to react to those opposing a field hockey trip to South Africa, where apartheid still prevailed in the face of international opposition.   

The administration managed change through calendar reform 

Most colleges in the mid-Atlantic region already had shifted to a calendar that ended the first semester before Christmas.  The college's unreformed calendar called for final exams after the Christmas break in a short lame-duck end of the first semester in January.  Once the norm throughout higher education, this calendar allowed for a leisurely holiday season on campus, when good will and celebrations could take precedence over hard work.  Students would leave for the Christmas holidays laden with last-minute papers to write and with studying to be squeezed into their weeks off.  During the Pettit administration, the college’s increasingly anomalous calendar came in for study by an ad hoc committee.  It did a diligent job of marshalling the pros and cons of change.  Receiving no signs of preference from Pettit, the faculty committee submitted its findings without making a recommendation.  There the issue languished until Pettit left office.

Bodger entered office with a need to do something that would touch everyone quickly.  He wanted to show that he intended to be an active agent for constructive change.  Most major policy issues would have to await the dynamics of a planning process and did not lend themselves to immediate action.

The issue of calendar reform, already well studied, was tailor-made for his purposes.  A calendar change would show an assertive approach toward a representative issue left over from the previous administration.  It would be controversial but not mired in the issues of faculty pay and governance that nagged at the whole community in recent years.  If the administration could lead the way toward a change, it would demonstrate a determination to act rather than react.  It would provide a model for leadership involving more important changes to come.

At the January faculty meeting, two months after taking office, Bodger announced that the new administration favored a change in the academic calendar.  He said he hoped for implementation by the 1978-79 academic year.  This declaration was a test of how much moral authority Bodger could command at the outset.  If the faculty were disinclined to follow his lead, it easily could scuttle this call for change.  Since he had done some communicating one-on-one with key faculty members, he knew there was a core of support.  As it turned out, a consensus arose informally.  By fall 1977, the faculty and the board approved the change, on schedule for implementation in 1978-79.

M. S. said, "You could have ended with egg on your face and your moral authority besmirched.  I myself thought the change would be a pain, but I was about to graduate and didn't really give a damn."

Bodger replied, "I had no guarantee going in.  But it seemed like a small risk to win a considerable symbolic gain.  Craft favored it and he did plenty of politicking for it after he became executive assistant in February 1977."

"But the old Christmas spirit got blown away by pre-holiday exams."

Bodger said, "Frankly, I personally thought the change was frivolous except that it brought the college into line with the norm around the country.  The change helped make us look a little less weird in the eyes of students, I thought.  So at bottom calendar reform was a marketing issue, though we did not emphasize it as that at the time."

M.S. reflected, "I'm wondering now whether there's anything we do as administrators that is not marketing in the end."

"You speak the current wisdom," said Bodger. 

South African apartheid threw a crisis Bodger’s way 

Women’s intercollegiate field hockey at the college long enjoyed a special prominence.  It was the linchpin in a stellar women’s sports program built by Eleanor Snell, who joined the faculty in the early 1930s.   Over the course of several decades, Snell's field hockey teams dominated national competition.  When alumnae of the program moved on to coaching positions in schools, they nudged their top players toward the college, perpetuating and strengthening its women's athletic prowess.  One of Snell's best alumnae, Adele Boyd, '53, became her assistant in 1967 and took over when Snell left in 1972.  Before it became an Olympic sport in the 1980s, women’s field hockey had its own form of international competition through the U.S. Women’s Field Hockey Association.  The world field hockey network fostered an ethos of amateurism and gave players friendships throughout the world that for some lasted a lifetime.  The culture of the network celebrated athletic prowess, but, in that pre-Title IX era, equally valued the relationships among women emerging from the game.

Having competed against the world's best players internationally, Adele Boyd had maintained relationships with fellow athletes, especially in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and South Africa.  She believed that traveling to compete had given her an invaluable extra dimension as a liberally educated person.  When she joined the college staff, she wanted her students to enjoy the same advantage and similar international friendships.  With the help of alumnae friends, she regularly arranged summer trips abroad for the field hockey team.  She had a knack for making arrangements quietly and efficiently.

In the Snell tradition, Boyd kept administrative baggage to a minimum.  She informed the administration of her plans but asked for little more than the license to do the whole thing herself.  For Bodger, like Pettit before him, Boyd’s summer adventures seemed to involve plenty of gain and little risk.

For the summer of 1977, Boyd planned a trip to South Africa, where women played some of the most competitive field hockey in the world.  She had toured there with the US team in 1973 and established friendships that she sought to sustain.  Boyd knew that the apartheid racial policies of the South African regime were the target of worldwide opposition.  But she also knew that her friends in South Africa were working at integration and education of the non-whites of South Africa—at least to the degree that they could.  This combination of circumstances led her to believe that a trip to South Africa in the "winter" of 1977 (seasons there being the opposite from North America) would be uniquely productive.  It would give her players a valuable experience in playing world-class hockey while they gained a first-hand look at one of the most troublesome political spots on earth.

Boyd quietly cultivated the support of Bodger (her undergraduate classmate) for the trip.  In February 1977, she sent him a rationale that emphasized its educational benefits.  In it she acknowledged that the college group might appear to be tacit supporters of the apartheid system.  She countered with a statement of the value of her firsthand experience as a traveler to South Africa, which enabled her to form her own opinions.  "What a wonderful opportunity for college students to experience a problem situation." She cited other parts of the world where human rights were being violated but where travel still took place.  By traveling to South Africa, she said, students from the US would build common interests and common goals with their counterparts in cultural activities as well as in sports.  This, she hoped, might "help to bring understanding and equality among people." Besides, she insisted in conversation with Bodger, the students would be traveling as individuals, not as a team representing the institution.

Bodger said to M.S., "In retrospect, Adele’s position was naïve.  She wanted to travel into a smoldering political impasse that would break out into revolutionary change in not too many years.  She did not gauge accurately the political symbolism that could attach to the trip in the eyes of people actively working against the apartheid regime.  Playing field hockey, in truth, was doubtless--and rightly--her main objective."

M.S. said, "If she couldn't see the power of the symbolism, did you?"

"I was no better at anticipating the problem than Adele.  We were long-time friends and colleagues.  I wanted to support her because she was well intentioned, and she demanded little other than moral support.  The anti-apartheid campaign had been around for some time.  I did not have the gut feeling it was going to come to a climax that year and, frankly, paid too little attention to it.  Often you have to do crisis management because you've been inattentive to something before it explodes."

M.S. remembered, "Some of the players who planned to travel were in my dorm that senior year.  I’m afraid they were all as naïve as the coach…and you.  Well intentioned, to be sure."

"You remember the story, then," said Bodger.  "A classic case of a president being overtaken by an event and having to manage it reactively.  It taught me a lesson but it did not make me immune to future occasions when crisis management was my only option."

The plans for the trip quietly came together during March.  Meanwhile, however, the social action people in the United Church of Christ got wind of plans.  The UCC was in the national forefront in urging organizations to withdraw investments in South Africa.  Its social justice stance was as unyielding as that of any mainstream church in the US.  Though the college board governed itself independently, its willingness to acknowledge its historic church tie made it susceptible to UCC criticism.  The UCC's criticism came sharply and unequivocally in the form of letters from higher-ups and pastors in the field.   Soon Bodger was receiving letters from alumni and from pastors in other denominations.

"At some point," Bodger said, "I realized that I was not dealing with a neat little educational trip led by a good-willed coach.  I was dealing with the institution’s reputation in the public arena.  I had quietly okayed a student trip and ended with a public relations hot potato."

Bodger knew how hot it was when he received a call in early May from Margaret Roach, a reporter for the New York Times.  She wanted a full run-down on his reasons for sanctioning the trip.  Didn't he know that it would run up against church policy?  Did he intend to flout the human rights boycott of relations with the white regime in South Africa?  By then he assumed that the UCC people, who were headquartered  in New York, had put Roach onto the story.

"So, under siege, I had to find a position that would rescue the college from an appearance of insensitivity to apartheid—and keep my administration from just looking dumb about international and organizational realities.  But in the same breath I had to try to salvage the loyalty and support of Adele, her students, their parents, and the far-flung alumnae network that backed the trip.

"The close collegial relationship I had with Adele was a key.  When I told her how serious the public relations issue was, she understood that her little sports project had become a big institutional issue.  Because she did not want to make it a bigger problem, she quietly contacted other field hockey friends in New Zealand and sought alternative arrangements.  That gave me time to jawbone with parents and people from the UCC.

"The UCC people gave me the other key to managing the crisis.  They gave us field reports from South Africa that played up the personal danger to Americans traveling in an increasingly tense region.  Valuing the personal safety of students became my face-saver.  Adele did not believe the danger was all that serious, based on her telephone talks with her South African friends.  But she acknowledged that a concern was plausible.  With her tacit support, I was able to persuade some parents to back off from their support of the South African trip on grounds of safety.  At first, some, like their daughters, were stiffening their backs and wanting to resist the presumptuousness of critics of the trip."

"Neat trick," said M.S.

"With plans for New Zealand quickly drawn up, I announced the cancellation of the trip to South Africa in a 13 May 1977 news release.  We sent it special to Roach at the Times, and she was on the phone to me at once.  Her coverage came out two days later.

M.S. said, "Do I recall correctly that the Times did not laud you for bravery?"

Bodger said, "From a public relations point of view, I felt that impressions could have been worse.  True, Roach wondered why I was initially so obtuse about the political significance of such a trip.  She did, however, use ample quotes from our official statement.  That took some of the edge off her criticism.  I was relieved that she reported on our abhorrence of apartheid.  Most important, she reported my observation that the players and parents were distressed at having their motives questioned.  This, I felt, would help sustain the sense of community that was in danger of being lost in the controversy with 'outsiders.' Adele confirmed that the quotes helped salve feelings.

"When the players returned from New Zealand in the fall, they told of having a tremendous experience, staying with families, holding hockey clinics, winning lots of games.  End of lesson on crisis management.  But I could never really learn enough from one such incident to avoid another one.  You simply have to remain in shape as a reactive crisis manager." 

Dean M.S. concurred.  "I’ve already learned."

Later by himself, Bodger sorted through his memory for other instances when events blindsided him.  Fraternity hazing incidents stood high in his memory, along with the near-fatal stabbing of a woman student on Main Street by a would-be rapist, false alarms in residence halls that sent the local firemen beyond the pale of reason, the sudden death of a student in a residence hall from a cause never to be determined.  He decided that M.S. had enough examples and tucked these memories back where they had been. 

"Planning"became a mantra of the new administration 

M.S. would be going home to her campus shortly.  She had heard from the consultant to the search committee for her college's new president.  He told her that the committee had put her on the short list.  It scheduled her for an interview in two weeks.

"What’s the most useful thing you can tell me?" she asked Bodger.

Bodger replied that times had changed from 1976 to 1996.  "What was current then is old stuff now," he said.  "I’m wondering how much of my experience will help you today."

"Trust me," she said.  "Talk to me."

"OK," he said.  "To succeed, an administration does best if it identifies a dominant note--a key goal or theme, something that outlines and stamps it as recognizable and positive in the eyes of all its constituencies.  You can do this up front, at the start, or you can let it bubble up to the consciousness of your publics over time.  In a time of institutional crisis, the circumstances will establish the dominant note for you.  But one way or the other, before too long after you start, people have to be able to identify in a word or two what you are doing.  At least you have to be able to do that if they ask you.  And you had better be the one who determines what that word is.  If they do it, they may be saying something about your goals that you do not want to hear."

M.S. replied, "In your case, it had something to do with inclusiveness."

"Right," Bodger said.  "It had to do with shared planning.  'Planning' became the mantra of my first years.  It meant just about everything that was on my platter.  The product became the process."

"I don't think I could use it," M.S. said.  "On our campus it would be a given, hardly worth claiming as my own.  We call it marketing."

"Here," said Bodger, "in 1976, the conflicts between Pettit and the faculty produced a representative priorities committee, a new medium for cooperation.  It departed from a long tradition of unilateral presidential decision-making.  When I took office, I appointed the members of the priorities committee to a new administratively created Campus Planning Group, with students, faculty, and principal administrators.  The priorities committee continued to have a separate life, but it dealt narrowly with financial and faculty compensation issues.

"'Planning' was the fashionable management thing in the '70s.  Higher education was trying to cope with demographic and financial distresses.  I was in the first generation of college presidents who were compelled to think more consciously of themselves as managers of a business-like enterprise.  My six weeks at the Harvard Business School in the summer of 1974 had acculturated me to this new leadership model.  Indeed, that experience helped to legitimize me in a job for which otherwise I was poorly credentialed.  So, when I talked about planning, I hoped that the college community believed that I knew what I was talking about.

"The lessons about planning that I brought home from Harvard, reinforced by my experience and further reading, reduced to three--participation, continuousness, and comprehensiveness.  You had to involve the faculty and students so that their ideas and your ideas fused into a vision for the future.  You could lead but not dictate without consensus.  You could not write a plan and put it on a shelf.  Rather, you had to think of planning as a never-ending round of envisioning the future, setting goals and objectives and timelines, assigning responsibilities, checking outcomes, and starting all over again.  A conversation.  You had to encompass in planning the whole institution—not just the finances and bricks and mortar, but the curriculum, the enrollment process, student life, the articulation of the basic values, the soul of the place.  The agenda of the Campus Planning Group, therefore, became the agenda for the college in a rather total sense.  It was a little too soon for us to identify all of this as a 'marketing paradigm'—that would emerge a few years later.  But that's what 'planning' in those early days was leading toward, as you surmised.

"By lucky coincidence, the college was coming up for its ten-year self-study, a prerequisite for reaffirmation of accreditation by the Middle States Association.  By making the new Campus Planning Group the self-study committee, I was able to give immediate purpose and focus to planning in the eyes of the campus community.  Everyone knew we had to do the self-study to satisfy Middle States.

"I was also lucky to have hit upon Jim Craft as my executive assistant, for he became the chair of the Campus Planning Group, and it was, in my view, a perfect match.  His training in bureaucracy made him a master of process.  His connection to the faculty leadership made him credible.  His breadth of view made him comfortable with a comprehensive and complicated agenda for planning and action.  His willingness to serve under my leadership—good old sailor that he was—made the machinery run smoothly.  Jim was my superior in age, credentials, and experience, and yet he saw a duty to perform as my subordinate and he did it with dignity and good humor.  He shared with me a sense of the adventure of a totally new beginning in an old institution that had not seen anything like our agenda before.  We secretly shared an iconoclastic bent.  We conspired to mask it for the sake of public appearance."

M.S. said, "'Planning', then, enabled you to characterize your leadership."

"I think so, to the degree that it could be characterized at that early point.  It was a convenience.  Lacking heavyweight academic experience, I would have been unpersuasive if I had tried to get out in front of the faculty as an academic leader—you won't have that handicap.  'Planning' had the virtue of subsuming academic issues under a broader management umbrella, which I felt I could credibly claim to carry."

"So by identifying yourself as the 'planning' president, you thought you were establishing your bona fides?"

"Much more than that," Bodger replied.  "By raising up the process as the dominant note, I was trying to create an environment where we could grapple with the old baggage of student social policy while probing for a new set of words that would take us forward.  In the clarity of hindsight, I was getting ready, through planning, to rearrange the tension between a parochial and a professional ethos."

"In favor of the professional," said M.S.

"Yes, but in truth at the start it was more important to me to get our planning process legitimately into place.  I was assuming that the content, the hard objectives for professional performance, would emerge by natural force once the process was in place to accommodate them.  It was not as if I felt compelled to attack the old character of the place.  I was a product of it and was too close to it to scan it objectively.

"Planning itself was not my invention.  D. L. Helfferich had made much of plans, especially after I became his assistant and we cobbled together goals and financial projections for board digestion.  Indeed, I hoped that DLH himself, along with Paul Guest and a few other hard-line board members, would at least be compelled to stop and listen if they received recommendations wrapped in the rhetoric of planning."

Bodger went to a file and produced a near full-page advertisement from the Philadelphia Inquirer, dated 10 February 1980, from which he read the banner message of "good news": "It's no coincidence that this college is starting the new decade in a position of strength." It was no coincidence, the ad continued, because "of a tradition of careful management and a new planning process involving students, faculty, administrators and board members."

The body of the ad sang the college’s praise for increased enrollment and alumni giving, its aim to educate for leadership, its traditional strength in the sciences, its commitment to the humanities, and its development agenda.  It attributed these good developments to the planning process.

"We had been sitting around wringing our hands about our lack of visibility," Bodger said, "even in the Philadelphia area.  Our part-time public relations guy, Ted Kavanaugh, persuaded me that we could begin to attack the problem frontally by simply buying space and bragging.  When he sat down to write the copy and looked for the differentiating factors that would set us apart, he saw our planning work and made it his hook."

"With what effect?" M.S. asked.

"It made some of us feel good, just seeing our name in big letters.  The blatant bragging disturbed some sensitivites on campus.  I myself was secretly uncomfortable.  The feedback was small.  It was impossible to measure the ad's worth.  My point is that the ad put 'planning' in a neat package and said 'this is important.'  For my administration, it was important."

"Just for the inclusiveness?" asked M.S.

"More than that.  I thought the planning process would give me a palatable means for talking with the board about substantive change in policy.  The process and its seasoned admiral, Jim Craft, gave me the feeling that we could develop new policy from the bottom up and present it in a blanket of legitimacy to the board."

"The students and recent alums were expecting results no matter how you got them," M.S. said. 

Changing student life policy: the necessary first step in "getting started" 

When Bodger set out to define his presidential priorities in 1976, it went almost without saying throughout the campus community that the quality of student life had to receive priority attention.  Students were unhappy; faculty were unhappy in part because students were unhappy; board members, when they elected Bodger, recognized that something was persistently bothering the campus and, whether they liked it or not, most seemed to see that the new administration would have address it.

The college had clung to a set of social rules that mainstream America was casting aside in the late 1960s.  In the two preceding administrations, the social system imposed by the rules had come to be a shorthand for the college’s commitment to conservative educational principle.  Most students and many faculty did not perceive the rules as a sign of principle but as an obstacle to communication and a personal irritant.  There was a widespread perception that the rules prevented students, faculty, and administration from dealing together on common ground with extracurricular life.

Since the rules forbade much of the social life actually lived by students, the students could not discuss social behavior with the faculty or administration in anything like realistic terms.  Many, including Bodger himself, traced the problematic morale of the college community in 1976 to this inability to communicate.  Moreover, many younger faculty said that the preoccupation with social issues on campus worked against academic priorities.  The distress over student life policies, they believed, took attention away from academic priorities and inhibited a lively intellectual climate.

The deliberate decision to preserve a conservative social climate as a positioning strategy came in the administration of D. L. Helfferich.  It was a conscious effort to create an alternative college atmosphere to that which was rising on other liberal arts campuses with the social revolution of the 1960s.  The board endorsed Helfferich’s policy statement on conservatism while it was in the process of selecting William Pettit to be Helfferich’s successor.

Pettit comfortably accepted this policy position for his administration.  He worked throughout his six years in office to hold the line against the constant pressure of students (who often had the tacit support of some faculty) to liberalize the rules surrounding residential life. Pettit had had to make tactical concessions on the rules against residence hall visitation by members of the opposite sex.  A milestone concession came in 1974, when state law on the rights of women compelled the college to equalize rules for women and men where theretofore they had fundamentally differed.  Meanwhile, the young people coming to the college were continuing to absorb the changed values legitimized by their older siblings in the late 1960s. However, by the time he left office in 1976, Pettit could say that he had met his promise to the board to hold the line on social life as much as possible.   Open visitation during the week still was forbidden, and the consumption of alcohol on campus anywhere anytime remained forbidden.

Although the students protested against these particular rules, it was the negative climate created by the college’s general approach to student behavior, more than the specific rules, that seemed to cast a shadow on the campus.  Bodger had felt for years that the tone of administrative action was as telling as its substantive policies in determining student attitudes.  The college appeared to many to be overly paternalistic and tradition-bound, insensitive to the psychological needs of current-day students, disconnected from newer theories of human development, committed to an older model of discipline as the key to education.  They perceived that the college valued the nitty-gritty administration of rules over the developmental needs of young people in a volatile and complex American social environment.

The acceptance of Bodger’s election to the presidency rested to a considerable extent, he felt, on the belief of students and many faculty that he would take a fresh approach to student life.  He had surely indicated as much to plenty of people in the months leading to his election.

"But," he said to M.S., "I avoided specifics as much as I could.  And I avoided deadlines and target dates."

"But you knew," said, M.S., "that people wanted to change the dorm rules and the alcohol prohibition, and you knew they would not wait very long."

"I knew students wanted that and would lose patience with me before too long if they did not see action.  I remember an editorial by two seniors in March 1977, only several months into my term.  They stated four myths about the 'rules and customs' that they believed the college clung to.  And they laid out their arguments to dispel each of those myths."

M.S. confessed that she was in the dorm room the night the editorial was born.

She remembered: "The editorial said that one myth was that, when they entered the college, students were fully aware of what the rules and customs said.  I sure wasn’t, and most hadn't a clue what they were getting into.  The editorialists argued that it was wrong of the college to insist that the consent of students to the rules and customs could be based on their initial ignorance."

Bodger said, "Another myth was that parents, who paid the bills, were conservative and happy with the rules and customs.  Your friends knocked down that argument with demographics.  They hypothesized that the clientele of the college had shifted from rural to urban and, with that shift, parents as a group became more sophisticated about social customs.  They assumed that the older constituency, which supported the rules, now were sending their kids to 'Bible colleges', which were booming, and new community colleges.  It was a valiant try, though the editorialists acknowledged that they were only guessing at the data."

M.S. said, "It really outraged them when an administrator told them that the rules were working just fine.  Most of the time, a dean would persuade students caught up in wrongdoing to forego trial by peers in the judiciary committee and take the certainty of an administrative judgment.  Students saw something fundamentally wrong when the discipline officers acted as police, prosecutor, and judge all at one time."

"And then," continued Bodger, "they denied that the rules and customs represented 'traditional values.'  They instead characterized them as dead conventions.  They appealed to the authority of Thomas Merton, who differentiated tradition as living and active but convention as passive and dead.  Convention was an evasion of reality in Merton’s formulation.  That fitted perfectly with the students' sense of the rules and customs."

By now, Bodger had found in his bound copies of the student paper the editorial in question and he read aloud: 

If the college truly wanted to be a part of the tradition of liberal arts education, …then the rules and customs would have as one dominant theme the development of individual freedom within a community to make choices as a free moral agent.  Instead we find a thoroughly conventional set of blanket restrictions on how we may express ourselves publicly, whom we may visit and when, what we can eat or drink, and where we can live and under what circumstances. 

"And then," he added, "they called for a transition to systems like those at Moravian and Lafayette, which were in their view reasonable and workable."

"I thought it sounded pretty good then," said M.S. "and still do, granting youthful exaggeration."

"They certainly captured the sense of urgency and expectation," said Bodger.  "Faculty were less expectant of particular policy changes than students.  They wanted a more academic environment.  They didn’t care much how we created it.  If they had to accept some of the appearances of a 'party school' in order to make a transition toward greater academic engagement, they were prepared, I think, to acquiesce in such nutty logic."

M.S. said, "In truth, of course, the youthful lack of perspective of my peers blinded them to the complex reality.  The rules and customs were as ridiculous as they said.  But the faculty and the administrative staff were already in the business of developing individual freedom of students in an intentional community, according to the educational light of the time, anyway.  The students could not have been expressing their criticisms of the social policies if that were not so.  They would not have had the freedom."

Bodger agreed with her and said, "No one on the faculty thought that we could just do away with rules and customs.  Nearly all of us felt the rules had to be put into the context of the social revolution that was just about completed by 1976.  The social revolution had brought nothing less than a revolution to educational practices as well.  Most colleges were in the process of discovering the consequences of those changes.  It is just that our college, because of its deliberate attempt to hold fast, had not yet seriously engaged with the issue."

Bodger said that a successful transformation of student life would depend on two things and they would take some time.  He first had to decide concretely what changes he could realistically advocate to improve the social and affective climate of the campus.  This was largely a political matter of finding the point of agreement where all the constituencies could be minimally dissatisfied and willing to concede ground.  Second, he had to prepare the most problematic constituency, the board of directors.

"To find consensus in the campus community, we needed a credible process," Bodger said. "The Campus Planning Group headed by Jim Craft was the most credible vehicle I could devise."

M.S. said, "Students were listening carefully as you started talking about changing student life policy.  They were hoping you would do something even before the 1976-77 academic year ended.  I remember that you wrote memos for the student paper and weasled around about a specific timetable."

"My first intended audience was not the students or the faculty," replied Bodger.  "It was the board of directors.  The question was how much change the board would stomach.  I felt that a robust planning process, with plenty of participation by faculty and students, would show board members the legitimacy of the need for change.  I deliberately put the process, with Craft in the lead, at the center, and tried not to shoulder the whole thing myself."

"But you could not avoid being in front," M.S. said.  "The students and faculty saw you out there."

"I could not avoid it and didn't want to.  I wanted the process for the legitimacy it could bring but tried not to kid myself about who was in charge.  I had one-on-one exchanges with most board members over the summer before my inauguration.  I tried to tell them of my belief that change in student life was tops in importance and stressed that a planning process would be put into place to address it.

"I vividly recall the reaction of one of the most thoughtful board members.  He was the one who, while not opposing my candidacy, told me that he abstained in the final board vote because he thought the process leading to my selection was flawed.  After I talked to him about student life, he told me he was opposed to alcohol on campus and cited Gettysburg's bad experiences after it permitted it.  He thought dorm visitation would put romantic needs over study needs in rooms.  Nevertheless, he mainly hated the simplistic confrontational situation the college found itself in, with students saying 'we want it' and the administration and board saying 'you can’t have it.'  There must be reasons, he believed, for each viewpoint and they needed to be laid on the table in blunt and forthright terms.  I told him it was my intention to ferret out those reasons and counted on his forthright evaluation of them in due course."

One of the most laborious pieces of work of Bodger’s first few months was writing a white paper on student life policy.  He needed something substantial to put in front of the board members.  He wanted them to get an unmistakable signal that student life, in his mind, was the most important policy issue of his new administration—not just rules and customs but the whole range of out-of-class activity.  It went to the board committee on government and instruction in February 1977, only a couple of months after the inauguration.

Bodger said, "I intended it as a shot across the bow and a harbinger of things to come."

The paper, which he handed to M.S., was titled "The Quality of Student Life." From the start, Bodger tried to move the focus of discussion away from the negative student complaint about restrictive rules and toward the pedagogical root of the question: Was the college residential for educational reasons or for the mere convenience of putting students in close proximity to their classes?  The obvious answer, which everyone in the college community unhesitatingly would endorse, was that the traditional "collegiate way" of the American residential college had a developmental purpose from the start.  It professed to build good moral character through the benign influence of a structured campus environment, removed from the hurly-burly of the larger community.  Lessons and campus living went hand in hand.  They contributed to the outcome sought, the well-rounded person able to think critically about the subjects that came to furnish his or her mind and adept at living gracefully and productively in society.  This ancient and honorable ideal of American residential colleges by 1976 was placed under fatal pressure by the dynamics of social and political change that erupted a decade or so earlier.  By the time of Bodger’s inauguration, any college that had not sought actively to accommodate those dynamics was sure to be in distress.  That precisely is what Bodger felt the college was in as he took office.

M.S. read from the white paper:

We assume that Student Life and what might be called Academic Life are halves of a single college experience that leads to informed, sensitive and effective adult living.  We assume that the college is predominantly residential not merely to make it convenient for students to go to class but also to immerse the students in a 24-hour-a-day educational process that includes but transcends their strictly intellectual development in courses.  In some fashion, directly or indirectly, this round-the-clock experience, we assume, has an educational impact on the thinking, the attitudes, and the behavior of students.  In theory, at least, every activity on the campus, whether generated outright by specific policy or stimulated by the general conditions and expectations of the institution, affords students a chance to learn.

"I felt a need to make these seemingly obvious statements," said Bodger, "so that the discussion would move beyond the narrow issues such as dorm visitation and the prohibition of booze.  It was important to contextualize those narrow issues by talking about broader goals."

"Most students," said M.S., "saw such rhetoric as smoke off the kettle.  The real question was whether the college was going to get off our backs and let us live the way we figured we had a right to do while growing up away from home for the first time."

"True enough," Bodger said, "except that research at the time showed that young people were looking for more rather than less attention from the system."

"But of a different kind than that traditionally offered by our college," rejoined M.S.  "You show as much in your paper when you quote a student:  'Of course we need guidance.  This, in part, is a purpose of a liberal education.  But I say, let the administration and faculty give us guidance, not surveillance.'"

Bodger said, "Having established the importance of a student life program, I indicated to the board that Jim Craft and the planning committee would be looking systematically at everything associated with it.  I let it be known in a student newspaper article that I saw May 1978 as a target date for recommendations for change.  This was a calculated effort to stave off the impatience of students and some faculty while allowing a comfortable cushion of time for educating the board on the need for changes."

"It also put you under the gun to deliver change or else," M.S. said.

"Absolutely.  I knew that my administration would be in deep water unless the board approved something substantive by spring 1978."

M.S. walked through the white paper with Bodger, summarizing as she went.  She read Bodger's obligatory tribute to the status quo by discussing the accomplishments under the old system of student governance with a dean of men and a dean of women.

"Dick Whatley and Ruth Harris were troopers of the first rank," said Bodger, "and I was in awe of what they could do under ambiguous, even contradictory, conditions.  But they never had the freedom to raise basic questions about the policies they were expected to enforce."

M.S. read off the reasons Bodger advanced to review the student life program at that juncture.  There had been no systematic review for a long time and that in itself demanded one.  Perceptions of many, and not just of students, were negative.  Evidence from the admissions office suggested that negative impressions of the quality of student life led a significant number of accepted students to decline the offer of admission.  The long slow decline in the cohort from which the college recruited, soon to begin, gave particular urgency to this concern.  The characteristics of current students were different because of the changes in American life and demanded a reconsideration of the student life policies designed to help educate them.

M.S. read:  

Sesame Street, freeways, jet travel, the socialization of marijuana, 18-year-old legal adulthood, the blurring of sex roles by federal mandate, the segmentation of adolescents into a lucrative commercial market, for food, cosmetics, clothing, and music, the relaxation of social constraints on personal behavior, the energy crisis, consumerism, the decline of belief in material progress and in institutions—all these deep-seated changes came into the consciousness of a member of the class of, say, 1950, after he or she graduated from college and was embarked on an adult career.  For the member of the class of 1980, however, they were facts of life before he even entered college and began defining himself as a person.  We may assume that the member of the class of 1980 sees social reality in a manner that makes him noticeably different from his counterpart in the class of 1950 at a similar stage of life. 

"I would think this was telling—or disturbing, maybe--to your board audience."

        Bodger replied, "It was my attempt, again, to move the discussion to a broader arena.  I was desperate to make the most hide-bound board leaders look at the changing world in a more realistic way."

        "You say it will be important to compare our college policies with those of similar colleges."

Bodger reminded M.S. that the traditionalist social policy was in place because of a deliberate attempt to set the college apart from competitors by identifying it as a conservative place.  The white paper did not challenge this but simply said that the college should look across its fence at the neighbors to learn what it could learn.  In fact, Bodger already was thinking of adapting programs well in place at competitive institutions that shared other characteristics.  Gettysburg College was high on his list, for example—in spite of criticisms of it by at least one board member.

"And you end with a peroration on the importance of doing a 'student-centered review.' What other kind would you have imagined?"

Bodger replied, "The existing policy, however unexamined, had been propped up to answer the societal turmoil of the preceding decade.  It reflected the goal of positioning our college to the right of center in the marketplace.  In what might have been a perverse way, I was suggesting that we address our marketing position—we never called it that at that time—by ignoring market considerations for the moment.  I urged that we think primarily about educational effectiveness, what we had to do to enable students to learn better.  I thought that if we could show an improvement in our educational effectiveness by changing our traditional student life policies, in the end we could strengthen our recruiting position in the marketplace."

M.S. observed that the students' preoccupation with open dorms and permission to drink obscured more systemic deficiencies in the student life system that Bodger could address without fear of board opposition.

"Right," Bodger said.  "The judicial system on paper was student-centered but by practice it had atrophied.  Administrative handling became the norm, with no peer participation.  Student proctors in the dorms were a weak link in the system.  They had no training to speak of.  By the book they were expected to see that rules were obeyed but in practice did not.  There was no formal system of advising and counseling of students, so the student proctors had no back-up  system in dealing with social problems.  The college made little attempt to put a friendly appearance on official student life policy.   Prescription and judgment were the prevailing themes.  The rule book issued to every incoming student was a classic example of paternalism.

"In truth," continued Bodger, "the years of social upheaval from the mid-1960s on had taken a heavy toll.  The administration became mainly concerned about keeping order.  The price was that it gradually removed students from active participation in the order-keeping process.  As the heat of the social change began to abate after the peak of the late '60s, I found myself assuming office with a moribund system of student life.  It was, as you say, not just a matter of dorm visits and alcohol—they were the surface issues atop a systemic educational problem.  Anyway, my predecessor, under the constant pressure of student demands, gradually had liberalized dorm visitation de facto, without formal authorization by the board.  Students consumed alcohol widely in dorms, as you know, with less and less enforcement.  When there was enforcement, it was erratic and arbitrary."

M.S. said, "We discussed a 'ripeness' metaphor at one of our recent regional meetings of academic deans.  Some policy issues ripen to the point where they demand comprehensive review, irrespective of the details that led up to that point.  You saw student life as a chronic case of overripeness, I would say."

"Hence," replied Bodger, "my decision to make student life a major target of the new system of planning."

Bodger turned to his colleagues at the Harvard Institute for Educational Management for help in establishing the new planning process.  He adopted a system of setting goals and objectives and assigning tasks from an example offered at Harvard by an IEM participant from the College of St. Thomas, Don Leyden.  Another participant, Scott McDonald, who moved to Drew University, became a friendly adviser when Bodger and Craft visited him in March 1977.

"These people had rigid procedures," said Bodger.  "Jim Craft and I felt nervous about getting too rigid.  We emphasized the disposition to plan.  We emphasized planning as a process not a final product.  We wanted a feeling of open-endedness to attach to our planning, although, obviously, we had to reach conclusions and decide on particular targets.  It was important to begin by allowing the campus community to declare consensus on the values it espoused and the goals that would permit it to manifest those values.  We felt that we could narrow broadly stated values and goals into concrete administrative and academic programs through ad hoc task forces.

"I announced all this in spring 1977 and by May 21 we held an all-day broad-based planning conference to identify values.  After that I constituted the Campus Planning Group to follow up and guide the planning process, with Craft as chair and the faculty-elected Priorities Committee members as key players, along with students and appointed administrators. And so we launched the process.  Though modified over time and shepherded by several different administrative colleagues, it lasted through the rest of my administration."

"Surely," said M.S., "you did not set up such an elaborate planning process just to cover your tracks in changing student rules on dorms and booze."

"Surely not," answered Bodger.  "But there was no doubt that the quality of student life would take a priority place in the process.  And a task force in due course came into being, with Craft in the chair, to carry the spear in the charge for change.  Formally engaging students and faculty in the process was more significant than it appears in hindsight.  The college traditionally kept student and faculty input as informal as possible.  Pettit and Helfferich had felt that power belonged to the authorities and should be distributed only to the extent necessary.  The new planning process appeared to be a kind of internal revolution.  Nothing short of revolution was needed, I felt, perhaps naively, if I was going to move the tired policies on student life."

"And thus gain the moral authority to move the tired policies on academic life?" asked M.S.

"Just so," he replied.

M.S. said, "Nearly two decades have passed between my student days and now.  It's hard to reconstruct the consuming feeling we had that the student rules had to change before the college could take charge again of its academic soul—but I know some of us students felt it that way."

"The time indeed has passed," said Bodger.   "I too am unable to reconstruct the intensity of that feeling.  But I was quite sure that if I could not effect basic change in our approach to student life, I might as well get out."

"So you did not hesitate to risk all for the sake of it."

"Right.  The irony was that my mentors, those on the board who pushed the process to get me elected president, didn't understand the firmness of my conviction in this.  I realize now that America was undergoing a fundamental shift of values to what we now know as postmodernist culture—the whole social climate was moving.  I can see myself now simply as an engineer responsible for turning the organizational levers that would enable the college to shift tracks along with the rest of the society.  At the time, though, I lacked such perspective.  I felt the fervor of the revolutionary who does not know the outcome of his actions but knows he has no choice but to proceed. I was engrossed in the particulars of a particular institution.  That kept me from clearly seeing the national context.  I felt at moments the way I did in eighth grade.  I trashed the schoolyard at the end of the year, just before the recognition ceremony.  That forfeited a big American Legion award the disappointed principal had planned to give me.  I knew DLH would be disappointed in what I now was planning to do."

"Truth is," M.S. said, "the college was simply hurrying to catch up with competitors who were ahead of it in adapting to the inevitable social change.  The rules changes surely were not revolutionary in the perspective of what was happening to mainstream American liberal arts colleges, particularly in the mid-Atlantic region."

Bodger, nodding his head in agreement, produced a paper that spelled out the changes.

"Amusing," he said, "that we rhetorically subordinated the big issues of dorms and alcohol.  At the top, we emphasized the programmatic changes to be made.  Career testing, career counseling and placement should be considered an integrated program with staffing of at least one full-time person.  Intensive provision should be made for orientation of new students.   The college should investigate the feasibility of coordinating all aspects of student life in one office.  The college should investigate the feasibility of an academic counseling program utilizing trained student assistants.  The college should investigate the feasibility of an expanded training program for resident assistants.  All these recommendations became, one way or the other, the agenda that we pursued after the board approved them in May 1978."

The operative changes in student social life came in the form of editorial changes to the student handbook.  Bodger read from the document:

"'Although the college does not encourage any use of alcoholic beverages by students, it recognizes the fact that many students do drink beer and other alcoholic beverages.'  This recognition tacitly permitted students to have alcohol in their rooms without penalty.  It acknowledged that enforcement of the old rule was more and more unrealistic as the behavioral transition continued from the late '60s into the '70s."

Bodger read the set of regulations for parties at which alcohol could be served:  "A sponsoring group—that was code language for fraternities and sororities, mainly—had to register a party.  Seventy five percent of the residents of a dorm had to vote approval for a party.  The sponsoring group had to post a $100 bond.  Parties were limited to Friday and Saturday from noon to 2:00 am.  The regulations prohibited parties by groups with a bad history of party management."

All this came into force after M.S. had graduated.  "My God," she said, "salvation was in the details.  But did you ever believe such a regimen could be enforced any more than the old prohibition?"

"Frankly, no one knew.  Craft kept assuring me it would work.  The best students kept promising responsibility.  But of course they soon graduated.  It wasn't long before we realized the system did not really work well.  We spent the rest of my administration trying to improve on it.  But the end of prohibition did much to win the main objective--to move the fight over social regulations to the periphery and allow us to get on with building up the academic life of the college."

M.S. asked if the new dorm visitation rules helped to that end also.

"From my perspective, they indeed did so," Bodger said.  "A new 'social hours' program allowed residents of a hall to elect visitation hours up to a maximum allowable.  The maximum was Sunday through Thursday, noon-to-midnight each day, and Friday and Saturday from noon to 2:00 am.  I think the rules against visitation were so openly flouted by the time I became president that this formal change a year and a half later mainly brought precept into line with practice."

"And removed it from the students' list of gripes," added M.S.

Bodger said that another significant change came in the judicial system.  "The Judiciary Board, a faculty-student joint committee, had long existed but had become less involved in discipline.  Student offenders tended to avoid the uncertainties of J-board actions and to choose the more certain method of accepting administrative sanctions, which deans encouraged.  The college sought to put new life into a more participatory judicial system.  We assumed that it would be more educationally productive for all students.  It would lessen the appearance of arbitrary action by the administration.  New procedures aimed at fairness and even-handedness came into the handbook.  They included a formal notification of charges, presumption of innocence, open hearing, right of challenge to J-Board members, rules of evidence, right to name a campus friend and to participate in all proceedings."

"More catching up with what had already changed at other colleges," M.S. said.  "And did you feel that the total effect of the May 1978 'revolution' was positive?"

"Except for details of procedure on alcohol control, I would do it again in a minute," said Bodger, "even though it cost us a major board member.  Paul Guest, '38, was D. L. Helfferich's choice to be the next president of the board.  He had been the most vigorous defender of the college's conservative social position in arguments with students going back to the 1960s.  He foresaw what we were planning to do and warned me that I would lose his support if we turned the college into a 'whorehouse.'  Since he saw the recommendations in just that light, he voted in the board meeting to table them for further consideration.  No one supported his motion.  I had done careful political homework with nearly every other board member."

"How did he deal with the changes afterward?" asked M.S.

"On the Monday after the board meeting, he sent me his letter of resignation from the board and ended all support for the college for the rest of his life.  Some board members privately sympathized with Guest's position but followed the lead of the administration anyway. Others thought that the changes, despite their sharp departure from the college's past conservatism, had to be made to allow the institution to move ahead.  Guest and I agreed in believing that the changes represented an historic shift in the posture of the college.  He disagreed with my belief that the shift was necessary."

M.S., thinking of the need of presidents to keep peace with board members of every stripe, asked how Bodger handled the aftermath of Guest's defection.

"First I had to deal with DLH.  Remember, he still was an active member of the board, though now in his late seventies.  He was absent from the climactic 19 May 1978 meeting.  It was his first unexcused absence since he first joined the board in 1927.  Later he told me he 'forgot' the meeting.  I had to believe this was a subterfuge.  He knew what was coming up.  Had he been present, he would have felt compelled to agree with Guest in delaying action.  But he would have also felt compelled to support the administration.  In his wily heyday he would have been able to finesse such a contradiction.  But I think age had caught up and he no longer had the zest for doing the politically impossible that drove him all his life.

"When I showed him Guest's resignation, he tried to assure me that this was not the end of the world.  After he talked to Paul, his tune changed.  He felt I had pulled one over on the board and regretted that it had cost us Paul's loyalty.  He urged me to meet with Paul and try to patch things up.  I did that but we found no common ground.  We parted politely, and that was the end of it.  It was a bitter turn of events for him.  He had been one of the alumni who recommended that DLH hire me in 1965 and had backed my candidacy for president."

"Except for Guest," M.S. said, "I take it that the rest of the board felt comfortable with the changes."

"Some were comfortable, I guess.  Others acquiesced.  My strongest supporters knew what I was doing because I had talked to them over many months about the importance of it.  Some expressed privately to me that Guest had backed himself into a corner from which he could not escape.  I discovered that Paul's assertiveness over the years had not had the unqualified support that DLH thought it had among other board members.  Beddow believed that I should have aired the whole thing in the committee of the whole instead of in the confines of the government and instruction committee.  He was relieved that I had dodged the effects of that flaw in procedure and had landed on my feet.  He was upset with Paul's opposition and glad we could get on with the changes.  It was Beddow who cut short the discussion of the recommendations in the board meeting and called for a vote.  Bob Anderson's view was important to me.  He was the Pew family's designated member of our board.  As such he was peculiarly responsible to tend the conservative flame.  However, he also was a new model of corporate manager at the Sun Oil Company, committed to participatory management, forward-looking and comfortable with organizational change.  I reported to him on the meeting at length, since he was absent.  He regretted Paul's resignation, he said, but it did not surprise him.  He believed I was bound to come up against Paul sooner or later, having heard him in action at committee meetings.  Bob saw inflexibility in Paul and thought it contradicted the qualities that he, Bob, was pursuing in his own career.  So he supported me.

"Ted Schwalm, the board president, was the key player in making the changes happen.  He was as fixed as DLH in wanting to preserve the old ways.  But he was retired and wanted to get out of the chair.  He wanted to go to his workshop every day, where he crafted metal and wood with masterly precision.  He had wanted to leave after he engineered my election.  I had persuaded him to stay, not wanting to see Guest move in until after we dealt with the issues of student life.  Schwalm felt the best way to proceed was to give me his support and to gavel into being whatever program I felt was needed.  Then we could choose someone to succeed him.  He never really argued with me about the details, to my amazement.  Some time later, when we met to reminisce, he congratulated himself for the way he pushed through the action on the changes over Paul's objection.  He had backed me as the candidate of choice in 1976 and never wavered in his support of me, come hell or social change.  Many faculty saw him as a hard-headed reactionary.  He seemed to me to be a complex man with many remarkable qualities.  I remained profoundly indebted to him.  He could easily have aborted my presidency if he had not felt so supportive of me in a personal way."

Bodger then explained how the policy changes of May 1978 became the template for the administration of student life as it evolved over the course of his administration.  They had far-reaching effects on the structure of the staff and its agenda. He eliminated separate positions of dean of men and dean of women.  The position of dean of students came into being, with all student affairs under that office.  Ruth Harris, erstwhile dean of women, became the first dean of students.  She was responsible for a new and far-reaching student life program.  It emphasized the expanded training and use of student resident assistants.  Changes in women's roles made it virtually impossible to perpetuate the old system that depended on mature resident preceptresses or "house mothers" in women's residence halls.  In men's residence halls, the dean of men had long employed student proctors, but they had lacked training and authority to manage.  The new system introduced trained student resident assistants across the residence halls for both sexes.  (Eventually, when residence halls began to be co-educational, this earlier step made the transition easier.)  Orientation for new students became an ambitious new priority.  The theme of the student life changes was individual student responsibility, a particular need in light of the liberalization of rules on visitation and drinking alcohol.

Bodger was certain that the new policies began to engender less negative perceptions of the college by students and prospective students.  They enabled the college to move beyond a preoccupation with the tensions surrounding social behavior and to elevate academic priorities.  They changed the atmosphere of the campus from restrictive to party-friendly (and thus went full circle in creating a new image problem in ensuing years).  They created an unbreachable wall between the older college and a newer one.  They signaled the long-delayed end of a "pietistic" concern over conduct and a turn toward the campus style of liberal arts colleges that enjoyed greater regional and national recognition.

In the wake of the changes, the annual report for 1978-79 waxed positive about a "more positive and open atmosphere among faculty, administration and students."  "Responsible students became noticeably engaged in discussion about unresolved problems in residence halls, with an underlying support for quality and civility."

Bodger said, "This was our code language.  We tried not to talk too much about booze and dorm visitation.  We had uncorked a new ethos on campus.  The social changes were no panacea, God knows.  But they did allow us to move on.  In the next couple of years, Ruth Harris stepped aside and J. Houghton Kane became dean of student life.  Kane completed the build-up of an integrated student life staff and program."

M.S. said that she would like to hear more about that but had to leave.  Her immersion in Bodger's world was over for the time being.  She said she felt better equipped to find her way into a presidency.

"But," she added, "we haven't talked about a lot—the curriculum change, for one."

Bodger added, "Also, our first attempt to grapple with the recruiting and retention problem.  Our lukewarm look at the mission statement.  The faculty committee on committees—a tiger that threatened to take power away from the president's office but that ended up being made of paper.  The way we wrapped all this up in the happenstance that the ten-year self-evaluation for Middle States was coming up soon after I was elected.  It was all part of 'getting started.'"

"You should tell me about all that," M.S. said.

"We'll find a way to communicate," Bodger said.

"Send email," she said over her shoulder.

And Maria Sylvia Aumen, with a wave reminiscent of her flamboyant student days, departed for her home in the midwest.  Her great presidential adventure lay ahead.  Bodger knew that he would continue his account, whether or not it was worth anything to an aspiring presidential candidate.  By this time, the account had become necessary for him.   

Email from:  M.S. Aumen

To:          Bodger

Subject:     Home to the Fray

Sent:        12 June

up in the sky, everything you told me whirled around like clouds out the window but when i got on solid ground and back to campus (where the search is closing in fast on somebody) i realized you drew a useful pattern for me. curriculum please. m.s.                            

Bodger smiled as he looked up from his computer screen.  He pulled from his shelves a couple of college catalogs of the late 1970s and opened a box where he stored files on planning.  His answer would be too long for an easy email message.  So he replied:

Email reply to: M.S. Aumen

From:           Bodger

Subject:        Home to the Fray

Sent:           13 June

Let me know as soon as the committee decides you're the one.  Being an in-house candidate means you have to behave with ironic detachment over coffee and lunch.  So behave.  The curriculum story here was an integral component of the Middle States self-study for reaffirmation of our accreditation in 1979.  The task force on student life was a no-brainer—we had to do it.  The curriculum study we could have delayed but the mood was for change and we had some young faculty who wanted to get into it.  Anyway, I wanted people to understand that we were changing student life policy so that we could get on with the more fundamental academic work.  So it was important to look at it as soon as possible.  The academic program that you went through as a student dated from the self-study of the late 1960s. People thought its structure had proven to be needlessly complex—"pivotal" courses faded into "radial" courses and vice versa.  And we had new insight on what college students needed a decade after the revolution of the 1960s.  That led us to create MINOR CONCENTRATIONS for the first time.  I'm going off-line now.  I'll send a snail mail account of the curriculum revisions of 1979.  Be cool.

New curriculum made a framework for change to come in 1980s 

Over the next few days, Bodger wrote his answer to M.S.  When he stuffed the finished letter in an envelope and licked the flap, he was freshly aware of the central importance of the curriculum to his entire presidential agenda.  His account of it to M.S. seemed to have tentacles reaching out to the many corners of the institution's life.  This is what he sent her: 

Dear M.S.,

In my run-up to being elected, I had talked with younger faculty members about pedagogy and curriculum.  We talked about gaps and needs in our curricular offerings.  These talks had two purposes.  They were in part political—I was seeking to say to colleagues that I could and would lead them into academic improvement.  They allowed me to signal that faculty members should open academic issues that had appeared to be closed.  They were also in part diagnostic.  I wanted first-hand understanding of where my friends on the faculty wanted to see when we turned to academic renewal.

The mid-1970s were traumatic for liberal arts colleges not in the top national rank.  We all were anticipating the end of boom years in enrollment.  The prescribed curricula in liberal education at many small colleges lay like wounded deer after the student attack in the late 1960s.  Standard prerequisites and requirements fell nearly everywhere under student pressure.  The old requirement to take two years of a foreign language—mainly Spanish, French, or German—fell in scores of colleges where they had prevailed from their beginnings.  New courses in race, class, and gender were stuck onto the corpus, usually without regard for symmetry and relatedness to a core.  The coherence of the whole, never strong in the pre-1960s, became a phantom.  A curricular miscellany resulted. 

Sooner or later this led people to look more inquisitively behind the wizard's black curtain—they dared to question the virtue of liberal education per se.  If it was so fungible, if so much of it could be avoided or turned into electives, what was its inherent virtue?  That rising doubt coincided with a renewed demand for relevance.  If liberal education was so great, why were so many liberal arts graduates waiting tables and driving taxis?  A growing segment of the college-going public no longer saw the liberal arts as a wide avenue to a wide choice of professional ends.  They wanted to see a straight lane between undergraduate majors and postgraduate jobs.  Since business and industry were the arenas of choice for the majority of graduates, economics and business administration began a long rise in enrollment.  The movement of continuing education for adults from the margin to the center of the higher education enterprise abetted this change.  Most adults wanted to hone skills directly applicable on their jobs. 

Our college held fairly tight in the face of this national conflict.  We kept the foreign language requirement, for example.  But our language departments began to hurt seriously because the high schools would no longer need language teachers.  Their college-bound students would be going to colleges and universities where languages no longer would be required.  So the number of our students preparing to teach foreign languages plummeted.

Despite our cautious stance toward loosening the curriculum, some faculty members on our campus began to feel that we should move away from the traditional commitment to a basic curriculum in arts and sciences.  I remember chatter from that moment or later about gerontology, recreation, even a nurse anesthesia program in tandem with a local teaching hospital.  Little of this went beyond the chattering stage; but its very existence posed a challenge to the classic liberal tradition that defined our college.

So, the decision to review the curriculum was in part defensive and in part creative.  There never was a serious challenge to our "pure" stance on liberal education.  But we needed to dust off the position and state it in a new way.  That would give us new conviction to resist blatant vocationalism.  One reason for resisting was that "practical" programs that met an immediate market need often had limited lives and had to be replaced with other programs equally vulnerable to changing demands.

Done thoughtfully, a re-theorized curriculum also would restore life to the tired nostrums about "learning for learning's sake."  It would make the virtue of liberal education meaningful in new language in a new time that did not accept traditional justifications.

Although we did not say it, this was marketing.  If we were going to continue selling liberal education to a generation shaped by the revolutionary changes in attitude coming out of the late 1960s, we would have to put it in a form that would make sense to new students and their parents.

Given this mixture of motives driving us to curricular review, I knew that the choice of a chairperson for the task force would be critical.  We needed someone who could see the depth of the liberal arts tradition at the college. He or she would have to acknowledge—this was easy—that we had a bare bones liberal arts offering that would benefit from judicious enrichment, particularly in the social sciences, funds permitting. At the same time, the person would have to acknowledge the pressures of the times—and have the patience to hear the thousand chirpings that would purport to be collective pedagogical wisdom.

Of all the young faculty with whom I jawboned before becoming president, George Fago in psychology stuck in my mind as one of the more insightful and creative.  George got his training in behavioral psychology when the methods of operant conditioning held sway.  He was ready with bloody stories of "sacrificing" rats after they served their destiny as experimental subjects in graduate school labs.  I always felt, however, that his specialization was an accident of timing in his field.  George had a philosophical depth.  This permitted him to tap the roots of thought from which psychology grew.  It gave him a broad perspective both on the "hard" sciences, with which he was confidently aligned, and on the humanities, where his heart seemed at times to lie.  In his subsequent career at the college, indeed, he became interested in the formation of student values and pursued a private journey of some kind that appeared to move him far from the animal lab.

In our one-on-one discussions, George showed that his mind was flexible and his commitment to liberal education total.  We enjoyed the exchange of ideas in community.  (Let me underscore this.  It was long after this before I was able to understand and accept personal bias as a legitimate part of the governance process.  In hindsight, I see that the rational decisions that people make are the outcome of confrontations between strong beliefs and resistances.  If a person's beliefs and resistances are so strongly fixed that they make it hard for him or her to hear another person, he or she does not make the common search for truth very enjoyable or productive.  I developed this insight from a reading of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Belief & Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, which appeared in 1997 from Harvard.)  I could feel comfortable with George when we agreed and comfortable when we disagreed, and I think most people had that same sense of intellectual comradeship with him.  He gave what seemed to me just the right tone to our curriculum study.

With Jim Craft's strong recommendation, I felt out George's disposition toward the onerous business of chairing a curriculum review, that most Byzantine of procedures.  Luckily, he was still young enough and unscarred enough to have the necessary enthusiasm.  I knew beforehand that he had the interest.  So George became our curriculum task force leader, and the task force was complete and ready to go by the end of December 1977.

He had a quality team but not one to follow sheepishly.  Three members were my administrative appointees--the dean, Richard Bozorth, the assistant dean, Blanche Schultz, and Jim Craft, the orchestrator of the whole planning process and, of course, the former assistant dean and still professor of political science.   I also appointed our most prestigious academic leader from the board at the time to the committee—Millard Gladfelter, retired president and then chancellor of Temple University.  The faculty elected five independent-minded and enthusiastic younger members—not one was a full professor.  Gayle Byerly of English, Robin Clouser of German, Ronald Hess of chemistry, Marvin Reed of history, and Martha Takats of physics.  Then we topped it off with three outstanding students. One of them, Mark Arena, had been one of my best-ever students in my freshman English course.

The tilt toward youth was widely understood to be a sign of changing times in the faculty, and one that gratified me.  Nearly all of us had a feeling that the time was right for a fresh look at everything.  The pleasure for me was that I could so easily be the agent to legitimize that feeling and make things happen.  It was a high time despite all sorts of institutional problems.  Every new president, if conditions are right, has that marvelous feeling of being an agent for freshness, a feeling of standing, however briefly, at the crest of a world that wants to be reshaped.  (It's a feeling you should prepare to savor!)

The task force formally launched its work on 8 February 1978.  The faculty approved its final recommendations by the end of 1978.  The new curriculum took effect with the opening of the college in the fall of 1979.

George and his colleagues met many times with many people in a dogged process.  But the task force from the start identified an orderly agenda and way of proceeding.  That enabled it to drive a reasonably straight path to final recommendations.  George had an organizational flair.  He applied it well to the work of the task force.  The group quickly decided not to be bound by the existing plan.  It wanted a fresh set of terms—no more "pivotal" and "radial" courses.  It then decided to look separately at the goals of general education and the state of the majors.  Then it gathered up several particular issues that had been simmering and now were fair game for analysis in the open atmosphere of the self-study.  These included the mission and current state of the Evening School, especially its inter-relationship with the full-time program; the pre-medical program, especially the academic plight of students who dropped out of pre-med; the languages program, especially the question of continuing the foreign language requirement; academic procedures; career emphasis and preparation; and departmental honors and capstone courses.

As I look back, I see how well the task force identified issues that were emerging from the changing market conditions at that time.  Its work laid the foundation at the core of our institution for the transition to a more self-conscious pursuit of a better place in the market in the coming decade.  So often, foundational work such as this is covered up and no one sees how the edifice depends on it for its stability.  The curriculum task force enabled the college to address the mood swing of the 1980s toward more preparation for careers immediately after graduation.  Yet, it laid down some important bricks that would underpin our effort later to improve our status as a "university college," committed as a liberal arts college to preparing students for graduate professions.

As for general college requirements, the task force talked about goals before it talked about courses.  This was conceptually the right thing to do, for it allowed the group to express a couple of emerging expectations without immediately having to talk about courses.  (Ten years later, when the faculty again attacked curricular change, this preliminary step was elevated to a pursuit of "educational philosophy and goals.")  The group affirmed the need for writing skills.  This perpetuated the old required freshman composition course that I taught for many years.  Some top colleges had abandoned this requirement or had made it easy to place out.  The task force affirmed the need for knowing a foreign language.  That too bucked the national trend.

The task force introduced three goals that resulted in a significant shift in the curricular offerings—development of effective speaking skills, development of ability to think and communicate in mathematics and other quantitative analyses, and physical education for lifetime health and recreation.

Public speaking became a foundation course for students.  This created a larger staff and later led to the start of a major program in communication arts.  (A clairvoyant president will see massive expansion of finances in such small and seemingly sensible beginnings.  Once you expand a service staff for required courses, you begin to get a critical professional mass that will strive to fulfill its self-defined purpose in life—to offer a major.  Be warned, Madame President-to-be.)

A math requirement had languished long ago; the curriculum even in my student years in the late 1940s and early 1950s did not force me to take math (and I did not take it!).  The rising importance of computer science had much to do with this new goal.  It was widely thought in the late 1970s that the impact of the computer would largely be in the realm of statistical computation.  Only after the personal computer arrived in the early 1980s did we begin to understand that the computer was bringing a much more radical change in pedagogy.  This new goal populated courses in math, statistics, computer science, and logic.

As you know, health and physical education had traditionally been a requirement for freshmen but the pedagogical basis for it had become obscure.  It typically took the form of team sports.  Throw out the ball and let 'em kick together.  The task force took account of a national trend toward lifelong fitness for the individual.  That led to a new introductory course that all freshmen had to take, taught as a lecture course with lab.  The first-year students then had to take a complementary activities course, aimed at giving them skills in a selected individualized sport rather than in team sports.  The idea was that they would carry these skills into their lives after college as they sought to remain fit while growing older.  This new academic status for health and physical education reflected the logical rigor of the task force as it defined goals.  In practice, most faculty still probably placed it outside the serious curriculum.  Still, the innovation represented a significant if small shift in the college's academic culture.  Its elevation in status probably received the necessary faculty vote because of internal faculty politics rather than broad philosophical consensus.  But the philosophical prologue doubtless made it hard for nay-sayers to stand up and oppose it.

The task force labored long over goals related to diverse world cultures and values and the relevance of the fine arts to these issues.  In the end, the faculty modified the group's recommendations and allowed students broad latitude in choosing courses on these issues.  At the time, I looked critically and ironically at a faculty that would require all sorts of courses in its majors but require no courses that dealt with the very heart of civility and civilization.  However, my mellower perspective today allows me to think my colleagues were not that far wrong.  The very breadth of choice in electives spoke of the college's unwillingness to prescribe a codified way of thinking about values; it symbolized an openness to discussion.

But the issue of values was not clear-cut.  The task force and the faculty as a whole, I think, felt it was central to our goals.  Still, they could not find a way to incorporate the study of value systems into our curriculum.  The task force therefore did what all good academic committees do.  It recommended the creation of another committee, specifically charged to develop a course designed to familiarize students with different value systems.

On the other hand, "knowledge of the fine arts" as a goal made it into the final formulation because it had political legs within the faculty—and, frankly, I favored it and did what I could to support the political push.

The task force did not dabble with recommendations for new majors.  But it did directly address heretofore-sacrosanct departmental prerogatives by calling for a limit on the number of courses required for a major.  It set a 30-hour minimum for a core major track but allowed additional hours to be added by students who knew they were preparing for graduate school.  This was a direct attempt to adjust the academic program to match student plans and expectations.  Surveys showed that larger percentages of students were expecting to go directly into the job market on graduation and not to pursue graduate work, at least right away.  Many of our majors had evolved to prepare students for graduate schools.  A fair amount of course revising and model changing took place in the wake of this recommendation.

The vocational imperative of many students also gave impetus to the creation of a wholly new "tier" in the curricular plan.  It gave students the formal opportunity to take a minor concentration. The reduction in the number of hours for a major was supposed to enable the introduction of minor concentrations.  The classic example was that an English major would now be able to take a minor in business administration and thereby show better preparation for the corporate market in such fields as advertising or public relations. Each department created packages of courses that would introduce non-majors to the discipline.

Additionally, students now would be able to take "special interest" minors and "inter-disciplinary" minors.  A special interest minor would combine course offerings from several departments to meet students' career or vocational needs.  An inter-disciplinary minor would allow a student to combine courses on a single theme from a number of disciplines.

Such arrangements had been possible in the past but only informally.  I myself in the early 1950s double-majored in English and history by taking a minimum of courses in each, but my history work never received formal acknowledgment by the college as either a minor or a second major.  Now, students would receive credit on a transcript for minor work outside their major.

By reducing major requirements and adding minor options, the college was responding to the perceived need of students for flexibility in designing their courses of study.  The complement to flexibility was good advising.  The faculty feared that, left to themselves, students would lack the foresight to devise a solid program before it was too late to remedy their initial mistakes.  Because of that, the task force recommended that faculty become more available and better able to advise students on their academic choices.  It also recommended that the career counseling and placement service be beefed up.

The task force touched some sensitive nerves.  The pre-medical program was our flagship academic track.  As our best-known attraction, it brought us a steady stream of students with top high school rankings in sciences.  The little secret of pre-med was that the few who got through it were almost certain of acceptance in medical schools but that many did not get through it.  The disappointed ex-pre-medders, having failed to hack the big introductory courses in pre-med, became academic problems for themselves and the college.  They required extra advising and were not getting it.  The task force recommended an increase in staff to deal with them and in due course we did expand.

Another sensitive nerve was the Evening School.  It was playing an important role as adult learners, eager for advancement in the expanding corporate scene in our region, turned to formal education to improve their skills.  And it was contributing a growing and very welcome chunk of net revenue to the college operating budget.  Yet, its unabashed link to the working world made for discomfort for some on the faculty.  They felt that it blurred the identity of the college as a traditional residential undergraduate liberal arts college of quality.  More concretely, the task force found that fifteen percent of full-time students were taking a course in the Evening School in a given semester.  Advisors were permitting it because of convenience or because, in a few instances, elective courses not available in the day were available in the evening.  This enrollment development raised questions about academic quality, pricing, and ultimately Evening School mission.

George Fago and colleagues wisely ducked these broad implications and again recommended the creation of a separate study committee.  Later I did create a committee under the chairmanship of Houghton Kane.  It did a diligent analytical job but the outcome did not resolve the tensions created by our Evening School.  When I left office in 1995, the continuing education program was the first major activity to change under the mandate of a new president.

Sifting through the curriculum task force record, I found three threads worth mentioning to you because they connected to the future.  A subcommittee on academic procedures made the following recommendation: "It is expected that full time faculty members will be on campus at least four days during the week.  When assigning courses, department heads should consider faculty need for schedules with blocks of time open for research and professional development."  The first sentence related to the need for faculty to be available to students for advising.  It is the second sentence that I think had future significance.  The college still had no formal provisions for professional development; they would only begin to take shape after Bill Akin came to us as dean and we received a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.  However, the curriculum task force sensed an immediate need to begin to change the culture of our faculty.  This was a pregnant sign of that awareness.

The second thread worth mentioning relates to practicums and internships.  A subcommittee on "honors and capstone courses" deliberated on all manner of independent work that fell outside the rigid confines of departmental courses and tracks.  The significant finding was that it could come up with nothing!  The faculty was still tightly bonded to its traditional forms. Pedagogy still was thought by the heaviest hitters on our faculty to consist mainly of lectures, assigned reading and writing, lab assignments, and testing. The educational power in practicums and internships, aside from student teaching (which created its own set of tensions in faculty minds), would not become evident to the college for some years.  The shift to a new pedagogy was coming.  Younger faculty showed it in their willingness to be vulnerable to students.  It would make the professor a guide and coach and the student a self-directed learner.  But our campus was not yet ready for that shift in 1979.  The majority of faculty cast suspicious eyes on any academic activity by students that looked too independent of their supervision.

The third thread identified computer science as a newly significant area of study.  Interestingly, it was the subcommittee on career preparation that looked at it and commented on it.  The subcommittee urged that current offerings in computer science "be considered to be the minimal acceptable offerings in this area and that the instructors be encouraged to implement computer usage in courses where appropriate."  This was diplomatic language intended to mean,  "Do more."  The report explained its intent as follows, and this is the emphasis I wanted you to note: 

            Familiarity with computers and computer programming is a potentially valuable job skill.  Moreover, as computers and data processing come to increasingly permeate our lives and as technology makes home computing facilities more feasible and probable, familiarity with computers and programming takes on the aspect of a life skill as well. 

        You have to remember that the personal computer had not yet appeared.  The subcommittee was prescient, I think, in seeing computing not only as a vocational skill but also as a "life skill."  It did not know at the time, of course, how pervasive the new technologoy would turn out to be.

            In sum, the curriculum revision of 1979 did some adjusting to current reality and set a stage for future change. However, it did not fundamentally alter the way the academic menu of the college presented itself to students.  By the the time of final adoption, Evan Snyder had become acting dean of the college.  His comment on the new plan accurately summed up its significance for continuity and for change:

           Interestingly enough, when the new curriculum was completed, it was found to differ very little from the old. This should not be too surprising because during the 1960s and 1970s when many colleges and universities became very permissive academically as well as socially, we chose to stick to the basics of a good education.  Many of those permissive institutions are now returning to the basics. However, there are new things in our curriculum....  There is also a new flexibility in the number of alternative ways of satisfying the ten goals.  It is reassuring that the new curriculum so much resembles the old.  The work of the Curriculum Task Force has reaffirmed our commitment to a sound liberal arts education.

             So, drawing on the curriculum change of 1979, I would advise you to be ready to make changes that respond to your market conditions.  But now, fifteen years later, you know that the pedagogical revolution has now occurred and you will have to make them in terms of the new pedagogy.  Give us credit for sensing something in the wind that long ago; but fault us for being less prescient than we could have been.  We did another curriculum review ten years later.  By then the players had changed, and that imposed a new perspective.  But that is another story for another time.

 Sincerely,

Bodger

Middle States self-study offered a showcase for new hopes and plans 

A few days after he mailed his letter to M.S., Bodger's phone rang.  M.S. thanked him for his account of the curriculum changes of 1979.  She agreed with him that fifteen years since then had changed pedagogical horizons everywhere in higher education.  Faculty were rapidly being recast as guides by the side of self-starting students.  They were less likely now to be seen as jugs of knowledge that poured their contents into the waiting crania of passive recipients.  Still, it helped her to know about Bodger's sense of the importance of choosing the right chairperson to lead a curriculum study.  And she had a question.

            "When the Middle States team visited, did it focus mainly on the curriculum?  Or did it cast a broad net?"

            Bodger replied, "Our self-study was comprehensive and the team scrutinized everything on its visit in the fall of 1979."

"As dean, I'm chairing our upcoming self-study," she said.  "I've been thinking this gives me a chance to highlight hopes and plans I think are essential—a kind of warm-up if I get the presidency."

"Good thought, but politically intricate.  I'll write again and flesh out the picture of the '79 Middle States experience.  I was lucky that we had to do our ten-year self-study in the first phase of my presidency.  It immediately allowed me to insist that we had to take account of an external professional reality.  The college had nurtured its sense of self-sufficiency for so long—we were so much who we were--that many on the faculty and staff had an underdeveloped sense of our place in a larger scheme of higher education.  I had a gut sense that this had to change but did not know enough to put my thoughts into action.  That's how the Middle States obligation served at the start.  It gave us a mandate, and I was the in-house owner of the obligation.  That allowed me to demand self-analysis with a particular urgency."

"Sounds cool—write to me," said M.S.  "By the way…."

"Yes?"

"The outside candidate met with the board search committee for the third time."

"This sounds ominous," Bodger said.

"I'll let you know," M.S. said. 

The greatest worries surrounded recruitment and retention  

Dear M.S.,

            It's amusing for me to look back at who worried most about what in that "getting started" phase culminating in 1979.  The faculty worried most about its compensation and its curriculum.  I worried more about making the student life changes work.  The board worried about who would become its new leader.  Underlying just about everyone's worry, however, was enrollment.  It persisted like a dull toothache.  And it wasn't very amusing.  The parting shot of the Middle States visiting team's report, which I just revisited, is revealing.  It said, "The institution faces problems in recruitment and retention of students, but it has faced up to this and is taking a variety of measures to reverse the downward trend."

Sure, we were facing up to the problems but we did not know enough about marketing at that point to come at them with the right weaponry.  We developed an approach to recruitment and retention that was long on earnest intent and a little short in genuine insight.  In inventiveness, we were behind the hungriest and least-equipped colleges and at best a hair ahead of those better positioned than we were.

In truth, the state of the art of recruiting was in rapid transition to an out-and-out marketing model.  I had to deal with the drag of tradition in the staff, with the college's mixed self-image, with tight resources, and with the severe limits on my knowledge of the oncoming marketing revolution.  Then too, I had to deal with my desire to preserve the character of the old college even while trying to move it into new times.  I was trying to keep on running while changing my socks.  As my metaphor implies, this was at the start a crazy challenge.  Still, I think we did a good deal to keep the wolves at bay.

Taking office, I was quite convinced that something dramatic would have to be done to improve enrollment.  Two findings startled me.  One was that the number of applications had dropped 25 percent in the period from 1970 to 1976!  (1158 in '70 to 858 in '76).  That happened while the number of teenagers in our recruiting area, the five-county Philadelphia region, remained high, the last hurrah of the baby boom.  We knew that the flood of teenagers in the college marketplace would end by the late 1970s.  The number of eligible applicants would plummet in the 1980s and decline still further until half way through the 1990s.  If we could not hold our own market share while applicants were plentiful, what would we do when the number of college-going kids went down?

The other finding seemed less startling because it was not far from the national average.  Nevertheless, I was disturbed to contemplate that the percentage of entering freshmen who stayed to graduate—the so-called retention rate—had dropped to 55 percent in 1977.  It had been as high as 70 percent in 1972.  (That number doubtless came in part from the decision of many male students subject to military service in Vietnam to remain enrolled.)  In 1967, the retention rate was 61 percent.  It did not take rocket science to figure out that if we could do something to keep students from dropping out, our total enrollment would hold better and we would have less pressure each year to fill the empty beds with new freshmen.

Because of its critical nature, enrollment was a top issue in the first phase of my administration.  After taking a few months to get the new administrative staff organized, I called an exploratory meeting on admissions on 14 March 1977.  That meeting focused on the stark projection of decline in public schools in the decade from 1975 to 1985.  Grade 12 in public schools would decline from 3.10 million in 1977-78 to 2.55 million by 1984-85.  The number of kids would continue to slide for another decade beyond 1985 before bottoming out.  The mid-Atlantic region would be especially hard-hit.

The exploratory meeting was just to make clear my concern that we had to change something soon and to ferret out the strategic thinking of the admissions staff.  Although I tried to approach cautiously, the admissions staff doubtless felt threatened.  The other staff members who attended, particularly my new executive assistant Jim Craft and business manager Nelson Williams, knew how critical the enrollment was to our financial stability. Tuition income accounted for 85 percent of our total revenue.  They were perhaps less inclined than I to appear non-threatening.

Body language aside, my intent in that and in subsequent meetings was to gain some management control over a function that was used to operating largely on its own.  To some, it looked almost like a quasi-independent fiefdom.  It had that character because of its historical evolution in a small and tightly knit administrative structure and because of the long and successful performance of Geoffrey Dolman and his small team.

Geoff Dolman had been working at recruiting and admitting students for more than a quarter century.  He knew the ropes.  His Ivy League background at Penn gave him a sense of educational quality, which he transferred to his work at the college.   He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Penn.  His father had been a legendary professor of drama there, and Geoff's values had been shaped by his life-long Ivy League experience.  As an instructor in creative writing and the short story, he had a healthy sense of comedy and a human touch.  Nevertheless, he had a traditionalist's sense of manners and social structure.  This made him into something of an apparent social elitist in spite of the warmth of his personal approach to people.  That had not been particularly problematic at an aspiring college like ours through the booming 1950s and 1960s.  It helped him define expectations for admission that reached beyond academic credentials.

He felt an enormous sense of responsibility to bring to the college a good class of freshmen each year.  With the latitude to set his own departmental agenda, he worked tirelessly and loyally to meet that responsibility year after year.  In the heyday of the baby boom era, by early March he would be able to close his logbook on admitted students, pat the cover, and feel confident that the vast majority of those hand-picked students would show up in September.  And he achieved this while still teaching a couple of classes of English composition!  (I was his student in a sophomore composition course that the college still required in the early 1950s.)

Geoff accomplished this annual feat with the help of H. Lloyd Jones.  Lloyd too was a product of Penn's English department.  He too taught part-time while running the road.  Like Geoff, he was a master at keeping up relations with high school guidance counselors, the college's key to getting face to face with prospective new students.  He shared Geoff's sense of social values.  For years they performed as if they were the same person, able to understand one another instinctively and able to speak for one another on admissions matters.  Lloyd carried a heavier teaching load than Geoff.  (As a student I took the sophomore survey of British literature with him, at the same time that I was studying writing with Geoff.)

In 1970 Ken Schaefer joined the staff after having learned the recruiting ropes as a student helper.  Then a few years later a young woman came on full-time.  So we had two part-time leaders and two full-time "road runners" when I took over in 1976.

At that point, Geoff, I would imagine, worried as much about his organizational place as he did about the enrollment outcomes as such.  He was a decorated tank officer in World War II and knew what hierarchy and organizational discipline meant in that context.  However, his sense of direct operational accountability in wartime somehow did not migrate intact to his work at the college afterward.  He understood his obligation to bring in a class.  He assumed, however, that within the budget he was finally responsible for strategic planning and execution of the recruiting and admission program.  Presidents and deans found it difficult to penetrate that sense of ownership, except in hard-won cases when they pleaded for the acceptance of a candidate with connections.  Geoff always was properly deferential and gave the appearance of being cooperative; yet, he stood firmly on his departmental turf.  The early evidence that I wanted direct access to that turf, that I wanted admissions to integrate with a coherent planning process for the whole institution, probably troubled him more than I knew.

Deep as the experience of Dolman and Jones was, Jim Craft persuaded me that it was not sufficient to address the new challenge of teenage shrinkage in our market area.  Consequently, we began to poke and probe.

Bill Pettit in his last year had appointed a faculty advisory committee of admissions, chaired benignly by a senior faculty member, Robert Cogger of education.  That faculty committee was supposed to aid the admissions staff.  Pettit's main intent in creating it had been to give faculty members a semblance of involvement in a critical administrative function.  Of course, it also spoke a soft message to Dolman that Pettit too thought he did not hold exclusive ownership of the function.  Sometimes the members of the advisory committee helped with interviews of applicants.  They periodically made suggestions for fine-tuning the recruiting process: select and train student tour guides more carefully; engage alumni in a more systematic role in recruiting; make department heads available to chat with applicants interested in their major; ask the United Church of Christ for help in recommending the college to church-going high school seniors.  Dolman and his team seemed to have worked out a modus vivendi with the Cogger committee.  They fielded such suggestions without departing from the course that they knew best.  The advisory committee lacked the teeth to bite into the deeper problems, and Craft and I decided not to expand its use.

The day after the exploratory meeting of 14 March 1977, I met with the head of a consulting firm, Enrollment Analysis.  He had a stable of consultants at his call, eager, for a hefty fee, to solve all our recruitment and retention problems.  When I talked about such a possibility with Geoff, his resistance was as palpable as his politeness was polished.  Outside experts and our inside old hands, it was clear, would mix like oil and water.

With that clear, and counseled by Craft, I decided for the time being to rely on Geoff's ability to address on his own the concern about the future of enrollment.  On 4 April 1977, I sent him a request to develop a written plan of actions that would lead to an increase to 1,200 total students by the 1979-80 academic year.   I said this plan should be a major undertaking.  It should result in an inventory of our present techniques, possibly the change in some of them, and the addition of new ones.  It should also result in a statement of specific goals by geographical region and/or high school.  I offered to support outside consulting services and to hold an all-day "brainstorming" session to help him meet the request.

For the life of me, I can't find evidence that he ever responded directly to that call.  Two months later, I wrote another memo, this time asking him to look into his "crystal ball" and tell me what he saw for enrollment in the years just ahead.  This was evidence of my continuing anxiety about recruiting and my felt need to stay on top of the process.  It also evidenced my reluctance to relieve Geoff of the new pressures of the changing times.  I still hoped that he and his staff would tackle the problems with fresh insight.  My memo, I must have thought, was another opportunity for Geoff to offer an analysis and the rationale for a change in strategy.

I found in the files Geoff's reply to my "crystal ball" request and here it is: 

            Twenty-five years ago our students were middle-class, of the protestant ethic, and seeking higher education for the sake of learning.

            The blue-collar worker, largely Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholic, improved their lot, moved out of the city and, with the more successful Jewish shop owners and small businessmen, became the suburban middle class.  Their sons and daughters and grandchildren constitute a much larger part of our student body today.

            Statistical studies give some of the reasons why students come to the college and the social and cultural changes also suggest why some of them have not come.  I suggest that socially and culturally our college has changed less than the students in the last twenty-five years.  Courtesy, manners, pride in personal appearance, respect for authority and elders, willingness to work hard and respect for the language have virtually disappeared.  As a result, permissiveness and liberality (an almost anarchistic freedom to do one's thing) are the rule and high school students, in increasing numbers, gravitate toward those institutions which permit them to take the path of least resistance.

For these reasons, and others, I do not see any signs of improvement in the quality of our students in the near future; however, we will be as careful as possible to hold to the quality that we are now receiving….

            We will find it impossible to compete with [community colleges and state colleges] on the basis of cost and on the basis of such "job oriented" fields as medical technology, occupational therapy, nursing, dental technology, secretarial training, law-enforcement, and the like.  To off-set these offerings, we will have to maintain our own "gimmick," and that is quality education, academic standards, and intellectual competition in the best sense of the liberal arts tradition of teaching the best of what men have written, spoken, thought, and practiced. 

This was an incredibly revealing document, I thought at the time.  It encapsulated, in its own code, why the college had been so slow to change its social environment or to look analytically at its academic program.  We would teach those blue collar kids how to behave even if it killed us.  We would stand fast with the traditional canon even if nobody in our market knew what it was or wanted it.

I should have realized at that moment that the current staff in admissions would not make basic changes.  Geoff knew we were on a slippery downward slope of applications.  He knew the world was turning toward vocationalism—another way of saying that students and parents were looking for a better understanding of the link between courses of study and employment after graduation.  Yet, he could see nothing in his crystal ball that he could do.  I remember feeling that this was not a failing on his part—he was of his time and generation.  The memo confirmed for me that the college had been undergoing fundamental stresses.  Geoff did not see their full significance and had no strategies to offer for survival.

His realistic acceptance of suburban Philadelphia as the principal recruiting universe for the college revealed an unexamined bias.  The surrounding counties of Philadelphia historically did constitute our main market; he would have misled himself to think otherwise.  But the historical reality, for Geoff, somehow appeared to be an unshakable destiny.  It did not occur to him—or to many others at the time—to suggest that resources be expended to change this reality.  He would have thought that the budget for recruiting would remain at its current Spartan level.  He would not have pushed to make a significant increase in the number of recruiting staff members available to travel.  This low threshold of recruiting ambition characterized the college and differentiated it significantly from higher-profile institutions in the region and around the state.

But Geoff's memo insightfully touched on the vital link between academic program (the product) and the marketing of the college.  Faced with positioning the college vis-à-vis upstart competitors in the region, he instinctively referred to the college's position as a liberal arts college with allegiance to the best intellectual tradition. 

That, indeed, became the dominant marketing theme in the long run.  But first the college had to work its way through questions of vocational relevance and geographic reach.  It had to discover the operational link between an active faculty development program and an intellectual community capable of challenging bright students in creative and productive ways.  These and other initiatives would hatch in years just ahead.  So, the "crystal ball" of Geoff Dolman in an odd way revealed a fleeting glimpse of the fundamental answer for the long range.  It failed, though, to point toward anything we could do to alleviate the immediate problem.

Had a new president just come in from the outside, with no ties to Geoff and no obligations to institutional tradition, he or she would have had the insight and will just to call it quits at that point and start with fresh leadership in the admissions office.  Because we knew one another so well, because I had been his student in years past, because I did not want to alienate the old establishment any more than necessary, I took a more circuitous route toward a change in recruitment leadership and practice.

It's any critic's call as to whether that was wise.  Looking back, I conclude it was not.  It probably served Geoff as badly as it did the college.  At the time, though, I had much to balance. The compelling need to change the climate of student life on campus never left my mind—this was critical to any hope for improving the retention rate.  I knew I would be flouting the old parietal system and thus be raising doubts among the many who had worked so hard to keep it in place during the Vietnam years and afterward.  Geoff and Lloyd had been loyal supporters of Helfferich and Pettit in that effort.  I felt a need to avoid the appearance of kicking over all the traces.  I felt that if I could bring Geoff and his staff along step by step, I could have it both ways.  I could keep their loyalty as I brought about other changes and hold their support when I changed the social system.  I believed that I could help them see the limits of their traditional recruiting practices and persuade them to retool and revise for the new day.

In this balancing act I had the support of my new executive assistant, Jim Craft, and of the business manager, Nelson Williams.  Others on the staff and faculty also seemed to understand.  Geoff and Lloyd enjoyed the respect of colleagues, even those who quietly criticized the way they were running the shop.  I felt that most of these people supported my view that the less I alienated the powers that had been in place before me the better.

My reluctance in part, of course, arose from my own lack of sophistication in marketing.  I should have realized more fully that the important market factors that would improve recruitment and retention lay outside the scope of admissions office activity.  I was asking a field officer to make changes in his tactics when, as the commanding officer, I should have been connecting more clearly the strategic changes in the direction of the college with the enrollment results in the field.

I want to believe I would have made better management decisions if I had it to do over again.  Yet, it's impossible, from this later vantagepoint, to appreciate how little out-and-out business marketing practice had entered academia at that point.  For example, during this period I circulated to the admissions staff an article on the new marketing activities by New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske.  Fiske captured the trend of the moment when he reported: "As the nation's colleges and universities struggle to maintain their enrollments in an increasingly competitive atmosphere, more and more of them are turning to the personnel and techniques of marketing."  (NYT, 22 January 1978).  Fiske cited Philip Kotler, professor of marketing at Northwestern University, whose book on marketing non-profit organizations soon would crystallize and promote the transformation of management in colleges and other charitable organizations.  Kotler saw marketing as the final area of business technique to be taken over by higher education institutions: "College administrators have been lapping up modern theories of accounting, personnel and finance as necessary evils.  And now they're beginning to take notice of marketing.  It's still disguised by terms like 'development,' but I predict that within five years we will see the position of vice president for marketing in 10 to 15 percent of our colleges—in substance if not in name."  Given that state of the art, maybe I can be a little less self-critical for failing to see fully that enrollment solutions should come from total institutional market positioning, not just from tinkering with the methods used by the recruiters.  All of us were learning while running.

In any event, with the Dolman team in place we pressed on with the attempt to improve recruitment.  In the 1977-78 academic year, it went on pretty much as usual, with little change in results.  But by then the Campus Planning Group had identified recruitment and retention as a major topic for the institutional self-study mandated by the Middle States Association.  In December 1977, the CPG created a task force on recruitment and retention, with John D. Pilgrim of economics as chair.  Although this formalization of concerns sent a strong message to the admissions staff, it was not until after the task force submitted its final report in September 1978 that we moved in a defined direction.  The task force report became the plan of action that I had hoped to get from the admissions staff more than a year before.

The task force did an exhaustive job of analyzing and recommending, evidence of skills in Pilgrim that later would result in his entry into the administrative team.  The task force ferreted out the damage being done to total enrollment by unfavorable recruitment and retention trends over the preceding decade.  The task force recommended enrollment targets into the middle of the next decade, designed to yield the needed net revenue and demographic vitality in the student body.  We should increase the total enrollment by about 100 students, with 850-880 resident and 250-300 commuting students.  And this, it underscored, would have to happen even as the total pool of candidates was dramatically shrinking.

The task force also recommended more specific characteristics for the future student body: more non-science majors (we were "maxed out" on lab space), a higher proportion of commuting students compared to resident students (because of the limit on bed spaces and our high visibility at area high schools), more students from geographic sources beyond our traditional market in the five-county Philadelphia area (to make up for the radical downturn in numbers soon to come), and more women students (the ratio of women to men had been dropping).

The task force also urged that, while achieving these targets, the college maintain or improve the current academic ability of students, which was above the national average for liberal arts colleges.

Then the report suggested sixteen ways to improve recruitment strategy.  The task force at least had an elemental grasp of the relationship between our educational product and our target markets.  It recommended that we acknowledge our commitment to quality liberal arts education.  It urged that our recruiting message change to appeal more frontally to the type of student who desired such an education.  That, however, did not prevent the task force from bowing to the rising parent-student expectations for vocational relevance.  It urged the faculty to restructure the majors so that students could choose career-oriented combinations of elective courses.  (The task force on curriculum, meanwhile, was proposing minors for that and other purposes.)   It encouraged a revision of the catalog and other promotional material to highlight the relevance of liberal education to professional careers—a relevance that current students and parents would not see.  (Shades of Geoff Dolman's finding about the social changes in our clientele; in the old days, the college would not have had to point out the then obvious value of a liberal education.)  It even cautiously suggested that we might discover "vocational-oriented" majors in harmony with a liberal arts degree.

To give a community boost to the admissions folk, the task force then suggested a variety of ways for involving faculty, current students, and alumni in the process of promoting and recruiting.  Like me, the members of the task force wanted to see admissions come out of its isolation.  They felt that recruiting would benefit if the community had a sense of ownership in it and contributed directly to it.

The sequel to the submission of the task force report I can quickly tell.  On 27 September 1978, I asked Geoff to prepare a comprehensive recommendation for follow-through on the objectives and general strategies offered up in the task force report.  I followed that up with a special "brainstorming" dinner meeting between the members of the admissions office and the members of the task force on 21 November 1978.

That meeting witnessed a wide-ranging discussion of tactics and strategies aimed at improving the enrollment outcome.  Among the topics discussed was the need to set realistic enrollment targets and not to expect the impossible.  The group discussed the changing role of the high school counselors and our need to re-think the traditional relationships with counselors.  Traditionally, the admissions staff depended heavily on its personal cultivation of guidance counselors, who would recommend selected students to our college; but since the 1960s, high school counselors were adopting an increasingly non-directive stance and this was eroding the system that favored us.  This meant the college had to make a radical change of emphasis: it had to begin to manage the inquiry file more directly without the mediation of counselors.  Ken Schaefer said this was a new insight, and the college still lacked the computers, memory typewriters, experience, and management know-how to make this radical change.   The group discussed the need to emphasize the strengths of the college—academic reputation and attractive campus—in better brochures.  Every aspect of the publicity program needed upgrading, some felt.  The prospect pool was not yet computerized and some thought the college should do that in order to manage the process more effectively.  We talked about the task force recommendation to use alumni, faculty members, and current students in the process.

The morning after this meeting, I received positive feedback from Geoff Dolman and from Nelson Williams.  Dolman wrote in a note, "You handled the meeting last night with patience, skill, and good humor.  Thanks!—We got a lot out of it.  I was ready for more, but I was pleased at the way Ken & Kim spoke up."  Williams wrote, "I felt that things may have got some positive reactions from Geoff and company.  They now admit their need for aid and assistance, and the need to do things differently—something they never admitted before….now they seem convinced the rest of the recruiters are not afraid to use better marketing approaches."  

       Despite evidence of a forward-looking spirit in this meeting and in others, I saw no evidence that the admissions staff was organizing a plan to meet the suggested targets.  Meanwhile, however, the curriculum task force was moving ahead with recommendations for an emphasis on career relevance.  In February 1979, I appointed Jim Craft to lead a special administrative team to develop a marketing plan for the recruitment of students.  Its task was to define the recruiting goals and to draw up a detailed plan for subsequent execution by the admissions office.  The memo appointing Craft stipulated that Geoffrey Dolman and Ken Schaefer be named to the team.  It was to have a plan in place in time for the start of recruiting for the freshman class entering in the fall of 1980. 

       This was the last straw for Geoff, I guess.  He submitted his resignation shortly afterward.  It came after a long and successful career and with no need for apology.  I guess in the end his former student and he both became pawns in a game neither of them imagined possible in their innocent classroom days in 1951.  I know he enjoyed his new-found freedom from admissions when he took up full-time teaching before retiring.  We remained good friends.  I spoke at his funeral.  These are things not found in Kotler management books.  They bespeak the precious subtleties of college community.

       Geoff's decision meant that the old quasi-independence of the admissions office turf was at an end.  I appointed Lloyd Jones to succeed him and tried to establish a strongly supportive climate around him, with Ken Schaefer as a major player.  The task force recommendations, naively conceived though they were, gave me a template for administrative communication and action.  At least I no longer would have to knock on the door to gain admittance to the admissions office.  However, the systemic issues of marketing that surrounded it would outlive Lloyd's brief tenure and that of Ken, who followed him at the helm. 

New retention strategies became a priority for meeting enrollment goals  

       Bodger continued his letter to M.S. by shifting to an account of the related study of retaining enrolled students until they graduated:

       I don't think I ever fully "solved" the recruiting problem, but not because I didn't work at it throughout my eighteen years in office.  Retention, though harder to grasp as a process, in many ways proved to be more tractable. The 1978 report of the task force on recruitment and retention gave a detailed set of recommendations for improving the graduation rate of entering students.  With changes stimulated by that report, we substantially improved our retention rate in the course of the 1980s.

       At the time of the self-study, the faculty and staff together were coming to a new appreciation of the college as a process.  We saw with growing clarity that enrolled students would respond to premeditated actions aimed at keeping them enrolled.  Thus we could serve our total enrollment objectives.  I'm sure that our predecessors were conscious of this and worked at it in their way for their times.  But I think that in the late 1970s the daunting pressures of the marketplace raised the collective awareness and resolve to a categorically new level.

       John Pilgrim brought an economist's orderly analytical style to the recommendations of the task force.  It laid out a set of actions that would not have been identified in an ordinary examination of departmental responsibilities.  The task force made two initial assumptions.  The accuracy of those assumptions led to specific recommendations that over time improved our retention rate.

       First, it assumed that students tend to stay at their institution if they feel that the college "fits" with their sense of educational need—they perceive that it can "deliver" for them.  New research being done by consultants such as Enrollment Analysis supported this insight.  The theme was "congruence": if you showed students that there was congruence between their expectations and the program of the college, they would remain in their course of study.

       Second, it assumed that every individual student—not just a "problem" group or a set of majors—should be the target of proactive programming aimed at retention.  Traditionally our faculty tended to be passively available for advising.  Students had to initiate contact with a faculty or staff member.  We had been taking for granted that students were feeling favorably about their experience at the college until they came forward and told us otherwise.  The flip side of this passivity was our notion that students now were young adults and should learn to initiate action independently.  We were learning how disastrous this was from the viewpoint of retaining students.  By the time a doubting student came forward—if she ever did—it was usually too late for a rescue effort to succeed.

       I know these assumptions will seem obvious to you now.  At the time, it took effort to persuade some faculty that they were valid.  It took further effort to move the machinery of the college accordingly into a different mode of operation.  "Do a better job of delivering on the promises we make to students to treat them as individuals; scrutinize how you approach students' needs in and out of class and modify your behavior so that students feel they are getting the service and the attention that they deserve."  This was the retention message.  It was a sound marketing message, as I look back on it.  And new for us.  It was not that we did not work hard at our tasks.  Now the message told us we had to reconfigure our tasks.

       I think the most useful result of the task force recommendations was to compel us to focus on retention as a discrete window into the operation of the whole college.  That enabled us to stimulate a range of activities, all aimed at retention.  Jim Craft and the student life staff began to track withdrawals with unprecedented precision.  A "concerns" committee came into being; it assembled staff from the academic and student life offices to look one by one at students with emerging academic or social problems.  This led to specific actions that aimed to keep the student enrolled.

       In due course, we did a study of student values that led to a new approach to student advising.  Advising of new students in their first semester became a discipline aimed at assuring the fit of the student and the college program.  We hired new student life professionals to give particular attention to advising.  We took a root-and-branch look at the orientation of new students and made it earlier and deeper.  In June, we invited parents as well as incoming freshmen to campus for pre-registration in courses and for help sessions on how to start college—traditionally they didn't register until the fall. We involved upper-class students in advising freshmen.

       We identified the financial aid office as a key player in retention—worry about paying tuition was a high priority for students.  We tried to see financial aid and advising through student eyes as services rather than as administrative obligations, or, worse, as a residual paternalism.

       Retention, the task force had argued, should begin at the moment a prospective student first inquired about admission!  This message slowly began to take hold.

       The work of the recruitment and retention task force dovetailed nicely with that of the student life task force.  It encouraged a major change in social life because it would help retain students.  It endorsed the administrative and regulatory changes recommended by the task force on student life.

       The recommendations for curricular revision likewise reinforced the recruitment and retention recommendations.  In sum, we tried to construct a coherent strategic analysis out of the three major studies.  And all of them together in the 1978 Middle States self-study sought to express in fresh terms what we were about and how we were going about it.

       In some ways we were reaching back into our past to reshape the informal, small learning community that had existed before the air became politicized by the student movement of the late 1960s.  That air had had a corrosive effect on campus patterns; they had collapsed before our eyes without our full understanding of the need to rebuild them on new post-1960s foundations.  Coming into office, I felt responsible to begin rebuilding in the wake of that cultural trauma.  As president I tried internally and externally to make our innovations sound without thumbing my nose at the college's tradition.  I told myself that my status as an alum and as an inside appointee in some way helped me in this effort.   

The mission statement changed but didn’t change 

       Bodger's letter to M.S. then turned to other parts of the Middle States self-study that he thought she should think about--revising the mission statement, restructuring the committees of the faculty, and assessing financial strength for getting started:

       What we did with the mission statement in the Middle States self-study further illustrates this balancing act between the traditional and the innovative.  The mission statement in the college catalog had remained unchanged for many years.  I think it was the outcome of a revision by President Norman E. McClure in the late 1930s of an earlier permutation from the pen of his predecessor, President George L. Omwake.  It encapsulated both (A) the clear resolve of the college to be a liberal arts institution and (B) its religiously based moralistic intentions.  The latter began in pietistic Protestant Christianity.  In the beginning, the college could unabashedly proclaim its pietistic taproot.  Over the decades, however, it had to temporize as professional academic priorities gained weight.  By the time I became president, the congruence of this duality of vision was in grave doubt.

       Some on the faculty would have liked to seize the occasion to expunge the Christian rhetoric.  They would have liked to acknowledge forthrightly the decline of the religious role in the actual conduct of life on campus.  That, they felt, would free us from parochial drag and allow us to pursue the model of the best-known national liberal arts colleges.

       Luckily for me, this view did not yet dominate in the faculty.  The majority could live with a continuation of some religious reference as long as it did not represent actual interference with academic values and priorities.  I say "luckily" because a significant alumni constituency and most board members still valued the religious characterization of the college. You have to bear in mind that D. L. Helfferich remained on the board.  He was living testimony to an older concept of the college as a player in a Reformed Church (now United Church of Christ) drama.  I had nothing to gain at that time and a good bit to lose from an all-out fight to divorce the college from its relationship with the church.  Despite the traditionalism associated with religion on campus, the United Church of Christ denomination was in the forefront of the national agenda for social justice.  Better than many on campus and on the board, church representatives could see the point of social changes that we were pressing.  Ironically, by continuing the traditional connection with the church, we were conserving some external sympathy for an innovative agenda.

       A review of the mission statement came first in the Campus Planning Group's schedule of activities for the Middle States self-study leading up to the 1979 review for reaccreditation.  By the fall of 1977 we had received input, revised it, and obtained the approval of the board for a modest revision.  The old chestnut that opened the statement stood intact:

The college is a Christian, coeducational, liberal arts college which seeks to help the student to understand and to emulate excellence in scholarship and in conduct.  Although in recent decades the college has extended its work to include the preparation of men and women for a variety of professions, the college continues to emphasize the fact that however varied and specialized the changing needs of the day, the fundamental needs of man remain constant.  Each student, whatever his field of specialization, is required to study those subjects which are the core of our cultural heritage.

       I never read those sentences without hearing the dour cadence of  Norman McClure's  voice, embedded in my memory of his classes in Anglo-Saxon and Shakespeare.  They would survive for another decade before they finally would wash away in the next self-study.  Related phrases, however, fell to our need in 1977 for fresh vision.  We would no longer say that it was our duty to "preserve the cultural and spiritual tradition which this generation has inherited."  We would no longer acknowledge that we were transmitting "a sense of that duty to future generations."  The elitist sense of a liberal education—an implicit noblesse oblige--also disappeared when we deleted a reference to qualities that fitted students "for the extraordinary responsibilities of educated men and women."  But the new statement did adopt that forward-looking orientation with the following substitution, which to date has survived as the college's basic statement of purpose:

The mission of the college is to develop independent and responsible individuals who are prepared for a creative and productive role in a changing world through a program of liberal education.

       (In light of the changing tenor of pedagogy, I can't help but think that the insistent accent on independence and individuality needs now to be qualified by the word "cooperative." But that's for people in charge like you now to decide.)

       For the remainder of the statement, we simply made modest revisions to a laundry list of eight qualities that supposedly characterized the graduate after going through our ringer.  "Attitudes consonant with the Christian ideal of morality and service" became "Ideals of morality and service consonant with the Christian character."  As I recall, the subtle shift meant that a graduate now could act on ideals of morality and service even if Christianity was not his or her motivating force. This was one of the many small steps over the years that kept pushing piety to the periphery until, finally, it fell off the map of the college.

       In short, the faculty and staff had no great desire to change the charter.  We wanted to solve a host of difficult operating problems.  The formal exercise of looking at the mission served us as an enabling ritual, not much more.  Middle States expected us to do it, so we did. 

The committee on committees labored to produce the status quo 

       A similar attitude informed the study of  the complicated committee structure of the college.   The Campus Planning Group appointed a special committee on committee structure in the context of the Middle States self-study.  William B. Williamson, head of philosophy and religion, became chair.  Williamson and his group were supposed to analyze the effectiveness of the committees of the college in pursuing the mission.  They were to consider who was on committees, including the question of student membership; methods of selecting members and the chairs; terms of office; frequency of reports to the faculty.

       Craft crafted this assignment; it was, I think, a masterpiece of busy work intended to have no substantial effect. The governance of the college leaned heavily toward administrative control.  The president was chair of major committees, such as admissions and academic council.  He appointed the key people to many more.  This gave the president control of the flow of faculty power; it enabled him to frustrate initiatives if he chose by the power to appoint and to set agendas.  Helfferich and Pettit had held onto that power.  It was mine by inheritance.

       Williamson had his own mind about things, but he gave Craft and me the impression that he did not want to upset the apple cart of governance.  That was good in Craft's view and mine.  When Williamson and I exchanged thoughts about his mandate in March 1978, I was forthright in advising him not to replace administrative leaders of committees with faculty members.  And he accepted that advice.

       The committee on committees did away with a couple of anomalous committees.  It reclassified committees by type.  It recommended new procedures for electing members to the promotion and tenure and judiciary committees.  It recommended the creation of a new student life committee to reflect the new priority being given to student life issues; I had suggested this to Williamson in a private memo to him.

       These changes did not alter the establisehd tilt of the faculty governance structure that accentuated administrative control.  One might interpret that as the committee's affirmation of my election.  A decade later, new conditions and the tide of events in my administration led to a shift of control toward the faculty.  In retrospect, I think we missed an opportunity to make some reasonable structural changes in 1978 that would have been good for the college as we opened an agenda of improvement in the 1980s.  We had so much on the platter, though, that faculty and administration alike were content to let this wait.  It certainly left things easier for me to manage than they would have been with greater faculty oversight and ownership of the structure. 

Financial stability was the prerequisite to getting anywhere 

       The Pettit years from 1970 to 1976 played out in a financially distressing environment.  Double digit inflation combined with economic stagnation to create a doomsday feeling.  Pettit's Depression-era attitude toward money kept him from investing our very modest resources in educational advancement.  His whole effort was to assure that we survive the storm without losing our shirt.   Conservative businessmen on the board reinforced him.  Our careful business manager, Nelson Williams, and the continuing influence of D. L. Helfferich gave him further reinforcement.  As Pettit's vice president, I was passively in step with Williams and Helfferich.

       Pettit severely limited salary expenditures along with other operating items. He concentrated on doing as well as we could with less. The faculty largely attributed that to a limit of his vision (and sometimes of his character). His critics faulted him for not trying to do better by finding more resources. Through it all, however, this zealous fiscal caution left the finances of the college in a manageable situation when he left office—though the price for that was a fractious campus community and a lasting scar on Pettit's reputation.

       Inflation worked on both sides of the ledger.  While it constantly pushed up costs, it also generated hefty increases in investment income.  Consequently, the endowment, unadjusted in value to reflect inflation, grew from about $6 million in 1970 to $8.8 million when I took over in 1976.  We steadily reduced our internal indebtedness to our endowment; Helfferich had borrowed from it to build the plant in the 1960s.  We had a no-frills educational operation.  Our per-student expenditures were lower than we saw at colleges thought to be comparable in quality.  Because we were charging a relatively low tuition, we had not yet begun to give big financial aid discounts—in effect we built the discount into the sticker price.  Two-thirds of the students were getting some aid but it was in small amounts.

       I tell you about these financial conditions as I was going into office because, without financial stability, everything I have told you about my agenda for starting toward improvement would be so much smoke.   I was lucky to step into a financial situation that, while always worrisome, was manageable.

       The Middle States team acknowledged this in its 1979 visitation report:

The examination…revealed a stable, prudent, and highly competent and professional approach to financial management.  The college's working capital position is unusually good and cost control is evident….  Student charges are moderate compared to regional norms and increases in recent years reflect a conscious effort to maintain this position.

       In the next breath, though, the Middle States team faulted our in-house management of investments.  It failed to see that it was Helfferich's continued involvement in investment that had kept it that way.  As he faded in the next couple of years, the board began to professionalize investment management.  The team also saw how limited I had kept the financial development office.  My old comrade-in-arms, Frank Smith, was the only staff member with full-time fund-raising duties.  Beefing up development also would become a major initiative in a couple of years.

       As a dean, you know a lot about the micro-management of finances within the academic domain.  The financial game at the institution-wide level is different.  Much of it depends on the philosophy in the board and on the Zeitgeist.  Will you be leading in a time of optimism or pessimism?  Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, his election in 1980 led to a more optimistic environment, and that made it easier for me to "get started" up the path toward institutional improvement.

           I probably haven't told you enough about all sorts of other issues during that "getting started" phase from 1976 to 1979.

            Athletics, for example.  What can I say?  The college had a long-standing national reputation in women's field hockey and lacrosse, and the women kept on winning.  In men's athletics, individual athletes carried the college's name into the limelight—wrestlers who went to national NCAA wrestling competition in the 1978-79 season, a baseball great who won the MVP award in our league.  A new men's basketball coach, Skip Werley, though limited to a part-time position, was implanting a recruiting and coaching program such as the college had not seen before.  By the 1980-81 season, he took the team to the Division III "final four."  Such accomplishments came without major change in our funding or program priorities.  I took them as gifts and could take little credit for them, except as a fan in the stands.  Randy Davidson was newly in charge of athletics, in place of our veteran, Ace Bailey; but it would take a while for a new set of athletic priorities to solidify.  I'm afraid that, going in, I did not think that a highly competitive athletics program had to accompany a top undergraduate liberal education program.  Even if I had thought differently, the limited dollars for operating the college would have kept at least one of my hands tied behind my back.  In retrospect, I think I gave too little attention to that whole complicated issue.  That's a discussion we might have some day.

       So now, for better or worse, I've told you about as much as I'm prepared to say about 1976-1979.  In the summer of 1979, after the Middle States team report came in, we hired a new academic dean.  Jim Craft resigned soon after that.  Before I knew it, the conditions and problems of that initial "getting started" phase dissolved.  The agenda for "making headway" from 1979 to 1984 flowed naturally into place.  Some day when you visit, maybe I can tell you what that agenda involved, if you need (or want) to know.  Cheers.

       Sincerely,  Bodger

       About a week after mailing this letter, Bodger learned that the outside person got the presidency at M.S.'s college.  She knew that her position as dean would be in jeopardy as soon as the new man arrived.

       "Damn," Bodger said on the phone.

       "I'm undaunted," M.S. said.

       "Will you be going back to the market then?"

       "I need to know more," she answered.  "I'll be visiting you again.  When I get a presidency, it will be as an outsider.  If you had been an outsider, you would not have had an initial 'getting started' phase.  You would have been 'making headway' from day one.  You need to tell me about your 'making headway.'"

       "I'm here," he said. "Be in touch."  Bodger opened a new box of files from the early 1980s.  Soon he was reconstructing a new round of remembrances.

 END CHAPTER FOUR, M.S. PART ONE (Getting Started, 1976-1979)

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  5 November 2005 Richard P. Richter