Chapter Five: M.S. Part Two (Making headway, 1979-1984)

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

It was semester break around the nation.  M.S. flew east and again sat in Bodger's study in his home a few blocks from the college campus.  Bodger found her as eager as ever.  Her failure to get the presidency at her college seemed to have fired her up for more.

She said, "You wrote to me about 'getting started.'  Interesting—but I need you to talk about 'making headway.'  I mainly need to know that.  If you had entered from elsewhere in 1976, you would not have had a 'getting started' phase.  You would have started with 'making headway.'  Don't you think?"

Bodger said, "I imagine most new presidents need to do some dusting of the office before they can really start.  Outsiders as well as insiders.  But, sure, you're right in that outsiders don't have to operate from the standpoint of first-hand familiarity with people and issues.  The people don't know them.  If their search process was legitimate, they get an automatic pass until they prove themselves lacking.  In the other case, the two-way familiarity surrounding insiders has to work itself out before the new administration starts making headway."

M.S. said, "So, you're saying that by 1980 you had done your dusting satisfactorily and could think of really moving ahead."

Bodger flipped his pencil in thought.  "I suspect that the main outcome of the first several years was the legitimization of my election.  I never could have been considered for the job without the push of Helfferich and Schwalm.  I was Helfferich's man.  That made my election possible.  I assume that it also made it initially impossible for many to see me as a president in my own right.  When the ship didn't sink, when people saw that I had my hand on the wheel and could steer in a deliberate direction, 'getting started' ended and 'making headway' began."

"But that's just politics," M.S. replied.  "I'm asking about the substantive management agenda aside from politics."

            "It took me longer to get through 'getting started' because of the political reality."

"Whatever," waved M.S.

"In any event," Bodger waved back, "yes, by early 1980 the college was at a really fresh beginning.  I had a staff in place that could work as a team.  In particular I had a new dean from outside.  I had a record of small tactical accomplishments that illustrated that I could indeed be the president effectively in the eyes of my multiple constituencies.  We had made 'planning' into a kind of mantra for the way we would work at developing the place.  From that first big round of planning, culminating in the Middle States self-study, I was beginning to articulate and pursue actions that would start the college down an intentional path of development.  The direction of that path would begin to define the quality of my administration as a whole when time would come for assessing at the end."

"You initially were fixing things, but by 1980 began to forge things?" queried M.S., raising her eyebrow.

"Whatever," he smiled.  "Something happened in the spring semester of 1980 that made me feel that we were in a change of phase.  You might appropriately think of it as 'The upheaval over Upheaval II.'  In our planning discussions, we touched repeatedly on the predominance of sciences and the second-place position of the arts and humanities in our college priorities.  I was looking for something to dramatize my intention to give the arts a more privileged place.  The opportunity came along when Philip and Muriel Berman offered us some monumental outdoor sculpture."

"I heard about the student objections to your monumental art initiative while I was in grad school.  But I didn't hear it from your side."

Bodger told her the story. 

Monumental sculpture signaled the start of something new 

"Though I didn't fully realize it at the time," Bodger said, "the placement of monumental outdoor sculpture in spring 1980 would be the start of something that would put a watermark on my administration.  I had a personal discomfort with the lack of attention given at the college to the creative and performing arts.  This dated back to my  student years.  Then, I had wished I could be in an academic environment that would encourage my creative writing; instead, I saw dull scholarship lifted up as the ultimate enterprise, at the expense of imagination and creativity.  The college kept these in extracurricular pastures, thus clearly declaring their second-class status.  It was this feeling that had predisposed me to give priority to the renovation of the old Thompson-Gay Gymnasium into the Ritter Center for Performing Arts in 1979.

"Didn't you learn that scholarship itself is an imaginative and creative pursuit?"

"Truth to tell," Bodger answered, "I did not learn that lesson well when I was a student here, and my experience at Penn didn't correct the failure."

The Bermans were art collectors who had given some pieces to the college in the 1960s.  Philip Berman, who dropped out of the college after his freshman year, 1932-33, received an honorary degree during the Helfferich administration.  A successful entrepreneur in Allentown, PA, he was a friend of William Reimert, then chair of the college board.  When Bodger became president, he sought out Berman, who was by then leading Hess’s of Allentown, an old-line downtown department store, into a successful proliferation in suburban malls.

Bodger said, "Berman responded cautiously but affirmatively to my invitation to become involved in enhancing the college’s art program.   He made it clear from the start, however, that whatever the involvement, it would be a joint effort by him and his energetic spouse, Muriel.  'We do everything together,' he said.  'And we don’t just give money.  We want to participate with you in whatever you do with what we give.  We get our pleasure from doing things with institutions, not just giving them our bounty.  If this makes you uncomfortable, you shouldn’t encourage us.'

"The Bermans had collected art eclectically for many years.  Mrs. Berman had made herself into an informed and perceptive critic of art old and new.  Phil contributed enthusiasm and a gut instinct for identifying art that would catch attention.  Both enjoyed the spirit of the chase after new art.  It threw them into direct contact with young artists and with the heady business of art.  When they decided to acquire work by aspiring artists, their patronage typically led to lasting personal associations with the artists.

"At the time of my overture, they were growing increasingly excited about collecting and supporting the work of sculptors doing monumental outdoor work.  They favored freedom of form and were broadly inclusive in their selections, as long as they combined vigor with novelty.  They had developed the certainty of their taste by collecting masterworks of major artists such as Henry Moore.  They had cultivated a personal acquaintance with Moore.

"Phil's entrepreneurial genius migrated easily from his business to his avocation.  He saw Muriel and himself as the motive force behind the production of vital sculpture and its distribution to receptive venues.  Because it involved the movement of what Phil called 'tonnage,' I think he was the more enthusiastic of the two when they got into outdoor sculpture.  While they built a unique collection of large outdoor sculpture for their showplace in their yard in suburban Allentown, they created a system of buying and then giving other sculpture to institutions.  Most of it was by little-known sculptors who needed a market for their work.

"This perfectly fitted with the desire of the Bermans to involve themselves actively, to make a difference.  Every piece of sculpture that they bought or commissioned made an opportunity for them to talk to college and university presidents--or mayors or arboretum directors--about their interest in placing it.  Phil saw Muriel and himself as purchasers of inventory (Phil's 'tonnage') and then as salespersons seeking 'customers' to whom they could distribute their products.  Since they undercut the literalness of this business metaphor by buying and then giving the products, they assumed control over the whole process.  It turned into a grand game, especially for Phil.  He thoroughly enjoyed the search for prospective recipients who would endorse the Bermans' zest for contemporary forms by rising artists.

"Because monumental contemporary sculpture was so visible and usually so arresting, its placement on a campus typically commanded the attention of the whole institutional community.  Attention often divided people into two groups—those who reacted enthusiastically to the novelty now in their midst and those who thought the new art was an affront to their familiar or traditional environment.  The Bermans relished the controversy.  It seemed to them to arouse interest in human values, to compel viewers to examine their reasons for liking or hating art.  This motive—to challenge the attitudes and ideas of people through critical encounter—usually persuaded college leaders that an engagement with the Bermans would bring cultural gains to their institutions.  At heart, both Phil and Muriel thought of themselves as educators.

"The leaders who accepted their gifts of outdoor sculpture also accepted a risk.  The Bermans and the artists they supported often had strong opinions about the placement of the gifts on a campus.  The risk was that members of the campus community would resist their preferred locations as well as the style of art, which was certain to be large, bold, and abstract.  An institutional leader had to conduct a communications campaign to explain what he or she had decided to do in cooperation with the Bermans.  Sometimes he or she had to manage unexpected crisis caused by the negative reactions to the gifts of sculpture."

M.S. laughed, saying, "And now the rest of the story comes from the voice of experience."

"True," Bodger said.  "I accepted Upheaval II and Bearkeeper in the spring of 1980.  The previous summer Margot and I went to a lawn party at the home of the Bermans.  Their purpose was to share with friends the wonders of sculpture arranged everywhere on their lawn, a unique assemblage of styles, juxtaposed according to the unique sensibility that Muriel and Phil brought to their collection.  There was a summer rainstorm.  Phil and Muriel somehow created a madcap atmosphere in keeping with the warm summer rain.  Barefooted guests sloshed around the yard with umbrellas, thoroughly enjoying the experience, to the delight of their hosts.  The party made headlines in the social pages because Phil had insured the party against rain.  So, he collected his insurance money although the party happened anyway with great success.

"Phil introduced me to one of the artists in attendance, Glenn Zweygardt, a new find of the Bermans among young sculptors.  Glenn was at Alfred University. He was a man’s man, out of the midwestern farm belt.  He said he found his sense of sculptural beauty in the old rusted machinery abandoned on the fringes of fields out there. He sought similar form in his abstractions, made of large pieces of rusted steel.  He had done a series of  'upheavals' that associated the power within the bowels of earth with the transformational function of the world our senses inhabit.  I liked the sound of this.  Having bought Upheaval II, Phil, in introducing me to Glenn, was seeking a home for it—on our campus.

"Glenn made Upheaval II in part from I-beams twisted by the power of Hurricane Agnes in 1972 and salvaged from the Susquehanna River.  A thin, flat metal plate sat atop these supporting beams.  A sleek geometric form—a rhombus—perched precariously on the narrow edge of the upright plate.  I thought the whole assemblage, its mass and complex line, made a strong statement about the association of the primeval force of earth and the transforming power of civilization.  Glenn read it from the bottom up.  He saw destructiveness in the twisted metal beams delicately connected through the vertical metal plate to the mathematical order of the rhombus at the top.  The provenance of the beams in the actual hurricane gave the work a link with reality, despite its highly abstract appearance.

"Egged on by Phil, I invited Glenn to study possible sites on our campus.  Neither Phil nor I made any final commitments.  We were engaging in a Bermanesque courtship, in which Glenn and I would dance.  Phil would entertain himself by coaching us and encouraging us to get together.  He was manipulating both Glenn and me.  Both of us knew that and Phil knew we knew it.  What made the process acceptable—to me, anyway—was a sense that we all had good intentions.  We all were seeking an outcome that would somehow inch civilization onward.  Phil, in addition, doubtless was thinking of the future of his philanthropic enterprise.  If he found me receptive to the courtship and adept in the dance, I might do more ambitious projects with him in the future.

"On campus, Glenn identified a site for Upheaval II near one of the men’s residence halls. He wanted it to be in the students' space so that they would have to confront it, deal with it.

"He went on to identify a space for a second sculpture on the large patio in front of the college library.  The library director, Chuck Broadbent, '69, had an adventurous attitude.  He strongly urged me to place a sculpture on the site, the more attention-getting the better.  Glenn asked the Bermans to commission a second piece to be called Bearkeeper.  It would create a thematic link between his current experiments with primitive mythic forms and the college’s symbolic mascot, the powerful grizzly bear.  It would incorporate a flowing scroll-like form that would suggest the power of text, doubling as the graceful line of a grizzly standing on its haunches.

"It pleased the Bermans that Glenn and I had found a common ground.  They readily agreed to pay for the second piece.  In truth, I think Glenn had the piece already largely constructed back home.  He managed to infuse a local thematic reference into an existing form.  Like other sculptors I came to know in subsequent years, Glenn was as entrepreneurial as his patron Phil." 

M.S. said, "When I heard about the campus reaction, it sounded predictably peasant-like."

Bodger answered, "Students and faculty both rather liked Bearkeeper, perched complexly in front of the library.  It was okay because it was smooth, shapely, harmonious.  Most did not like its rusted finish but excused it.  Upheaval II for many people simply bore too much resemblance to a pile of scrap metal.  Of course, it started as junk from the hurricane.  It was too great an imaginative leap for them—students and faculty both—to see the scrap as material transformed into elements in an artistic composition.  The men in the nearby dorm had a visceral need to reject it from their space."

"So they draped it and the nearby trees with ninety-six rolls of toilet paper," said M.S.  "The roll count came directly to me from an authoritative source, somebody’s girl friend."

"The morning apparition," Bodger replied, "of gently waving toilet paper was awesome as I walked through it on my way to the office.  The draping was fun and fair enough.  But some went too far when they toppled the piece onto its side.  A victory, sort of, for the fascist primitive world that lurked in the hearts of some simple students.  The world of the hurricane:  I thought it was ironic that the destructive forces symbolically overcome in the sculpture became embodied in some hell-raising kids who attacked it."

Bodger called a noontime meeting of all student leaders.  He told them that they had an opportunity to show how big they were as a college community or how small.  He asked them to see that students cleaned up the paper at once.  And he asked them to persuade the people who tipped over the sculpture to come to his office and apologize to the artist.

"No luck on the latter," he said.  "But in the afternoon I went to the dorm for a talk about art and responsibility.  I listened to much rationalizing and explaining away.  It was their space and I violated it.  Finally, they agreed with me that there was no excuse for physically abusing the piece, no matter how offensive they found it.  They agreed to write a letter to Glenn to explain that not all people on campus were insensitive to his work.  He himself joined me next day for more talk about art and values with some students.  That was after Upheaval II on its second night received a heavy ornamentation of shaving cream.  In the nights ahead, students pushed it over a few more times.  Finally, Glenn recommended that we move it to another site that he had approved.  It was at the far end of the triangle from the dorm, nearer the gymnasium, space that students did not feel they owned.  Students and I wrote pros and cons in the student paper.  More than a few faculty members let me know that they were quiet sympathizers with the students.

"I sent copies of all the commentary to the Bermans.  They thought it was a great controversy.  They were gradually coming to believe I would take a risk for something important.  Later they would show that they were preparing to give us more."

The Zweygard  t affair, Bodger explained, was a small crisis that grew out of his larger hopes for the advancement of the college.  He could easily have avoided it by simply avoiding his involvement with the Bermans.  The conflict with students was largely a gain, he felt, because it engaged them in serious discussion about personal and institutional values.  A fair number of students, faculty, and alumni told him they supported the sculpture initiative.  They too thought it spoke of the need for the college to enrich its perspective—and ultimately its program—on the arts.

"Somebody said it began to change the flavor of the college from plain vanilla to pistachio," he said.

M.S. said, "You had no clear plan.  You jumped in without knowing how deep the water was.  An external constituent pushed you.  You had to wing it when the students reacted rambunctiously.  Was that good planning?   Was that vision?"

Bodger answered, "My point is that I was looking ahead and not just tidying up.  It was not good planning in that it did not grow out of a community process—I was the sole owner going in.  I think it was visionary.  I wanted to start the college up a path toward substantive change.  I wanted to broaden the definition of undergraduate liberal education so that it included the affective and the creative as well as the logical and the cognitive.  This required gathering new resources and jumping through the hoops necessary to gather them.  That's why the Upheaval II affair, small in itself, sticks in my mind as a symbol of the turn from 'getting started' to 'making headway.'"

M.S. reflected, "Sounds like you were inventing your program as you were running."

"Yes, and no," said Bodger.  "The planning process provided a forum in which we could grope somewhat safely for a grander vision of the college.  The legitimization of my presidency, achieved in the first several years, at the same time allowed me to go outside the forum when opportunity called."

"As you did with Upheaval II."

"Yes."

"You could only have done so if you had pretty solid political support across the community," M.S. added.

"I felt by 1980 that the base was pretty solid," Bodger said. 

Outside evaluation by Middle States pointed the way 

To document his assertion, Bodger showed her the report of the evaluation team from the Middle States Association that visited on 22-25 April 1979.  The author of the report, he said, was a veteran president of a well-known liberal arts college in upstate New York.  He had seemed to take a personal liking to Bodger.  He must have seen in him a novice president who was long on enthusiasm and energy while forgivably short on normal academic preparation and experience.  The report was designed in part as one knowing president's attempt to support another's beginning efforts to get things started.

"So," Bodger smiled, "you have to recognize that his favorable comments about the campus climate and my influence on it are more generously expressed than I deserved."  He read the following:

We were particularly impressed to find all significant elements of the campus satisfied that they were having input into policy processes most important to them.  Perhaps what makes the system work more than its structure is the underlying sense of openness and willingness to communicate and to share with others.  This we learned is a hallmark of the current president's administrative style.  The resulting atmosphere on campus is thus extraordinarily set for productive and even innovative consideration of how to resolve common problems.

Presidential leadership has not only been expressed with uncommon candor and ready accessibility to everyone on the campus but it has also featured a capacity to keep all concerned focused on priorities.  Although here and there in this report attention is drawn to unresolved problems, the evaluators were in total agreement that the college has proceeded to face its key problems in order of importance through a clear understanding of what had to be done first.  The president's grasp of institutional needs and his program for action are impressive.

"Outside endorsement of that kind had to be useful on campus," M.S. commented.

Bodger leafed through the Middle States team report, noting items along the way.  He replied, "The report was useful in a fundamental way.  It gave me a platform to stand on as we developed a program for reshaping the college.  If something appeared in the report, I could claim that we had to pay attention to it."

"You were exaggerating."

"Only when I agreed with the recommendation. In fact, with advice from board members, I told Middle States we were NOT accepting some recommendations for action.  It wanted us to hire a registrar right away.  It wanted us to get professional investment consultants.  It wanted us to get a new auditing firm.  I politely said thank you for the suggestions and assured Middle States we would think about them—but did not promise to do them.

"On the other hand, the team thought we should beef up the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology.  It thought we should diversify and rejuvenate the board.   It found the faculty too heavily weighted with alumni and not weighted enough with minorities.  It recommended that we get some outside consulting help with recruiting.  It thought we should stop resisting the student pressure to provide psychological counseling and better vocational counseling.  It found that our students used the library as a place to study rather than as a place to find intellectual resources—a finding about the more general limits of our academic culture.  We should do something to enrich that culture, as the Middle States team saw it.  The team faulted us for a low minority enrollment and no evidence of special effort to recruit minorities.  It worried about the rise in business administration majors and the growth of our adult part-time evening program, which was heavily pragmatic and career-oriented; these developments, it thought, might compromise our classic commitment to liberal arts.

"I agreed with all these points and may have been the source for some of them in interviews with Middle States team members.  There was consensus on campus that we should do something about them."

M.S. said, "So, the Middle States report gave 'making headway' a third-party endorsement."

Bodger replied, "Yes, it created a frame for the professionalization of the college on a broad front." 

The desired destination was hard to see clearly 

"But the Middle States recommendations," Bodger continued, "failed to take two complicating issues into account.  First, we did not really have a concrete map of where we wanted to go after we got under way—at least in any measurable sense.  I knew that we were inching our way toward an ambition to become one of the top fifty small liberal arts colleges in the nation.  With our severe limitations on resources and plain vanilla curriculum and faculty, I could not bring myself to think this was any more than a remote dream.  The stark reality of comparing our position and resources with those of neighboring colleges of secure and long-standing national stature—Swarthmore and Haverford, to be precise—made me shrink from declaring this as a goal.

"However, as we pushed off, I developed some language that expressed our ambitiousness without making us look foolishly unrealistic—so, at least, I hoped.  I talked about becoming one of the best traditional liberal arts colleges 'in the East.'  Then I began talking about our becoming the best 'regional' liberal arts college located in the Delaware Valley.  I chose 'regional' to differentiate us from Swarthmore and Haverford.  Both of them had a 'national' constituency and stood in the forefront of liberal arts colleges across the nation.  When US News invented the college rating game in the mid-1980s, it confirmed this judgment.  And it also, alas, confirmed that our college, though technically in the national grouping, merited a mere footnote.  It was not until we were well into the 1980s before we were able to dilute the fuzziness about our strategic destination."

M.S. said, "The road was long."

"I knew we were starting but did not know how far we could go or exactly where we would be when we got there."

"Your planning process should have helped," M.S. said.

"It did and it didn't.  It got campus constituencies involved.  I think it lowered the paranoia and negativism that lingered from the years of bitter dispute in the first part of the 1970s.  When we resolved to do something, the process gave it legitimacy in the community.  That was the good outcome of having participation.

"After Craft departed in 1979, Chuck Broadbent, library director, took over the role of my assistant for planning.  He was in a doctoral program that put him under the tutelage of Robert Zemsky at Penn, then emerging as one of the gurus of organizational change in higher education.  Chuck was great on process.  We developed a complicated system of aims and targets and ventilated every issue with our several constituencies in a truly participatory process.  Chuck was particularly good at tracking trends in student retention and talking about the whys and wherefores of those trends—which began, happily, to turn upward.

"But our process was less helpful in producing a coherent and clear-cut strategic vision that we could implement with the resources at our command.  That still depended on leadership, which resided at my desk.  In effect, the planning process gave me a good-willed environment within which to grope for a direction and a destination in the marketplace.  The groping took time, put my leadership always at some risk, and produced an incomplete vision all through these years."

"Nevertheless, it showed you that the route was there somewhere," M.S. said sympathetically.

"It was, and we saw it and went ahead, come hell or high water." 

Revitalizing the college's parochial culture 

Bodger went on to say that the second complicating issue that went unacknowledged by Middle States was subtler but just as real as the fuzzy declaration of a destination.  All the items on the Middle States list would turn the college toward orthodox professionalization.  The team apparently took for granted that the distinctive culture of the college would continue to thrive even as the new administration introduced changes.  Bodger did not.  He believed that the advancement of professional quality would dilute the localized campus culture of the college.  He would have to work to preserve the college's personality as professionalism deepened.

Bodger had come to think that the college's peculiar flavor derived from the particular circumstances of its past.  The college started in a contrarian spirit.  The first president had resisted the prevailing establishment in the Reformed Church in the US and had struck out on his own.  If the denomination would not see the liturgical issues his way, he would start a school where his way would be sure to prevail.  This founding act placed a defining mark on the campus culture that survived down to the moment, as Bodger saw it.

     Though the original religious issues faded in subsequent years, the contrarian tilt did not.  For those immersed in the culture, it elevated the value of their independence, of going their own way.  It affirmed non-negotiation on fundamental issues, even when that made them look odd, out of the mainstream.  It allowed them the luxury of feeling a bit self-righteous about their peculiarity.  This went hand in hand with a feeling of being beleaguered by the mainstream; and that fostered a feeling of camaraderie, of special caring for close comrades under siege.  The result was a tight-knit campus community, sure of itself in its differentness, tolerant and supportive within, skeptical about the usual standards applied in the larger community.  Bodger felt that this contrarian spirit enabled the college to elect him president despite his unorthodox credentials and preparation.  D. L. Helfferich, the embodiment of the culture, epitomized it when he refused to make measurable comparisons between the college and others such as Swarthmore and Haverford.  He thought his college was valuable in a way that no other college could be.  It was literally incomparable, and he was not bashful about saying so.

Bodger went on: "But obviously it was not merely Helfferich's continued presence that gave continuing force to the campus culture.  The senior faculty amalgamated their loyalty to it in their own contrarian organization, the Pariahs.  They met off campus weekly for many years.  Even as we speak, a remnant of those still living gets together.  The Pariahs became an important political voice in the disputes that arose in the Pettit years, 1970 to 1976.  Some still thought of themselves as my 'loyal opposition,' I imagine, when I got into office."

"You're saying they gave a local flavor to the place," said M.S.

"Yes, with others.  A strong contingent of alumni on the board gave life and voice to the college character, each drawing from his or her experience in student years.  Old loyalists led the Alumni Association.  Indeed, the students themselves, though they fought with the administration over social rules, valued the offbeat quality of campus."

M.S. nodded yes: "There was a kind of cult feeling about the college among a creative crowd of kids in my student years.  Its very peculiarities they thought of as funky and cool.  A well-kept secret."

"Remember I too was an alum," Bodger said.  "My college experience as a kid was so etched in my bones that I was unable to look objectively at what I'm going to label the 'parochial' personality of the college.  It was not even a deliberate judgment for me to try to protect that personality, even as our agenda to professionalize got started.  The college had its character and I simply would do what I could to protect it."

"So," M.S. said, "you set yourself up to arbitrate a conflict between the parochial and the professional."

"I don't think it was exactly a conflict anymore.  It had been that in the Pettit years.  You can read what I thought about that in my essay on the disputes over principles and priorities during his administration.  As president, I felt that some elements of the parochial culture would naturally melt away in the heat of measurable educational improvements.  I felt this could happen without provoking a political backlash from the old guard.  But at the same time I felt that we could and should take some elements from the parochial tradition and revitalize them.  They would season the new environment that we were going to make.  I had a gut feeling that the blending of local character with mainstream academic legitimacy would be possible—and desirable.  We had an example of sorts in Haverford, where Quakerism apparently lived in balance with an unqualified commitment to professional scholarship."

"What elements?" asked M.S.

"They coalesced, I guess, around the student life program.  A shirt-sleeves attention to individual students had to survive, I felt.  We were going to be less paternalistic and permit each student to surround himself or herself with greater private space.  At the same time, we were going to raise scholarly expectations.  As a counterbalance, I felt we had to preserve our nearly obsessive commitment to nurturing and guiding students one by one.  This had its deepest roots, no doubt, in the original concern of Dr. Bomberger to save souls from damnation.  That had ceased to be the declared business of the college well before the turn into the twentieth century.  But it survived as zeal to help students find their way to living a good life on earth. 

"This zeal remained attached in my mind to the college's religious leaning.  It made me want to preserve something of the relationship with the Reformed Church tradition, merged since 1957 into the United Church of Christ.  The church relationship no longer had to mean that we would make kids go to chapel and pay respect to faith.  The UCC was the most active mainstream Protestant denomination in America in matters of social justice.  It was the most liberal in including minorities and gays.  That made it possible, in my mind, to have our old connection but in a new formulation.  In 1983, after the first fruits of allowing alcohol on campus had ripened, the Council for Higher Education of the UCC gave us a grant to develop an alcohol awareness program on campus.  The grant symbolized what we could do to hold onto a traditional relationship and convert it to our agenda for change."

M.S. said, "Holding onto a church relation had little meaning for most students."

"Probably so.  Students are so deep in the waters that at the time they cannot perceive all the institutional currents outside their immediate environment.  The church relation worked at a level that they could not see—but it was there nonetheless.  Politically, I enjoyed strong support from the old Reformed constituency and felt obligated, in my fashion, to be loyal to those people.   I was certain that many changes had to come that would take us down an untrodden path.  In truth, it was a comfort for me to feel that I still connected to the inner thread of the institution's history even as I engineered change.  I did not want to create skirmishes at the fringe while we were trying at the center to push the quality of the educational program upward.

"Along the way I read a bit about our obscure namesake, Zacharias.  A pleasant discovery.  He was a man of qualities in a turbulent time.  It was impossible for me to draw on our founding president, Bomberger, for contemporary relevance— liturgical fine points and denominational politics apparently consumed his mind.  I knew Heidelberg from my military duty there in the 1950s.  I could imagine myself walking where Zack walked, high above the city on the Philosopher's Way.  He was a thinker.  He had a certain kind of modesty and integrity.  The Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, his masterwork, reflects both qualities.  I came to like him.

"In 1978 at Founders' Day I cast my lot with Zack.  This would align me with the old tradition of Continental scholarship and with the college's old religious orientation.  The scholarly thread, I thought, would finesse faculty discomfort with a continued religious affiliation; and the religious thread would reinforce my alliance with the Reformed constituency while allowing issues of worship and faith as such to remain off the table."

Bodger wanted M.S. to see his maneuver and fished a flyer out of a file.  It was a reprint of his remarks that day and he indicated the following for her to read:

We can be fundamentally grateful that our founders chose Zacharias as their scholarly patron or symbol because the man's qualities of mind give us a substantial foundation upon which to stand proudly as contemporary teachers, students and citizens.

In essays about Zacharias, including one soon to be published by our own colleague, Professor Visser, one can glimpse a precocious fellow with an excellent memory, committed by conscience to the unremitting search for underlying truth.  Despite physical problems and excessive shyness, he sought through his writings as professor at Heidelberg the conciliation of ideas beneath differences of language or style; he sought the accommodating formula that would avoid needless polemics and allow freedom of interpretation.  He distrusted authoritarian control and preferred to see church polity lodged with those who made up the church—a seed of democratic insight.

We see a careful scholar, attentive to the various meanings and interpretations of words, anxious to find the truth for himself and not to be a follower of any other thinker, even one—such as Philip Melanchthon—for whom he had the greatest respect.  And, finally, we see a rather courageous man who, despite a private desire for living in obscurity, felt compelled to remain in the very middle of the action swirling about his patron, the Elector Frederick III.

"The Visser essay became a book, which came out in 1983," Bodger added.  "We made it the centerpiece of a major scholarly symposium on the Reformed tradition in the Palatinate.  The occasion was a commemoration of the 400^th anniversary of the life of Zacharias, who died in 1583.  We had scholars from all over North America and from Europe, and our man Visser was at the center of it.  Theology sparkled again for a day in old Bomberger Hall."

"Is that when you unveiled the statue of Zack on the front campus?" asked M.S.

"Yes, courtesy of the Bermans, who had taken Michael Price into their orbit of young sculptors.  Price had a scholar's approach to his art.  He read Zack's sermons and papers and developed an insight into his character and beliefs that transferred to his statue."  Fishing again, Bodger produced Price's remarks at the dedication that fall day in 1983:

In reading about Zacharias and his times, two things impressed me greatly.  First was that it took a great deal of courage to do what Zacharias did.  It was not the polite society that we are accustomed to.  Firearms were often brought into church, and bodily harm could come to the person whose pronouncements were not well received.  It was clear to me that only true conviction could motivate men like Zacharias.

Secondly was his commitment in his Commentaries on the Heidelberg catechism, that all of his work, in fact all of religion, is derived from two principles.  The first is that of faith, the second is to "love your neighbor as yourself."

 "I liked Price's riff on neighborly love," said Bodger, reading further:

To love your neighbor as yourself has implicit in its meaning to regard your neighbor without judgment, to not assume that there are differences between you even though the circumstances may appear to indicate that there are, just as I, I'm afraid, presumed about Zacharias and his preoccupation with the interpretation of the Lord's Supper.

"Yes, but…" said M.S.

"I know, I know," Bodger echoed.  "This religious stuff sounds distant from the main business of getting an aspiring liberal arts college started on a course of improvement in the last quarter of the twentieth century."

"Yes," M.S. said again.  "At the same time, I see what you intended.  You were trying to say that you would not thumb your nose at the old constituency of the college but that you would respect it in your own way—scholarly, intellectually, not worshipfully.  There are those who would say you can't have half without the other half."

"Yes," Bodger said.  "In retrospect, it was a last-ditch strategy, which would not have the vitality to renew itself.  At the time, I did not see this.  We went forward with an important programmatic innovation. I thought it would ground the new religious relationship for the long haul."

"You set up a new full-time campus ministry with the UCC," said M.S.  "I read about Rev. M. Scott Landis with interest because he was just about my age."

"We had not had a full-time campus minister for years.  The regional conference of the UCC and the college collaborated on financially supporting the position and program.  A joint committee provided oversight.  Today, though the collaborative agenda has probably languished and Scott has left the position, I still think it was a useful thing to undertake.  It gave a special coloration to my administration.  Scott was not appointed until July 1985 but we laid the foundations for creating the position before that."

Bodger said that the full-time position emerged from an organizational negotiation between college and church, stimulated to a large degree by John Shetler.  Shetler was the former administrative head of the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ.  As a new member of the college board, he had supported Bodger's candidacy for the presidency.  Shetler probably saw Bodger as a likely agent for keeping the church connection alive in the face of diminishing interest in it among faculty, students, and many alumni.  He and Bodger had had offices in the same building, 620 Main Street, in Bodger's first years on the staff, when the headquarters of the Conference was housed upstairs.  The joint committee with members appointed by the college and the Conference approved a job description and plan of activities.  The campus minister would have standing with the Conference as a pastor but also have full employment with the college.

Hammering out such details became a labor of love for an alumni contemporary of Bodger's, Robert Hartman, '54.  Hartman was the son of a Reformed pastor.  He had firm loyalties to both the denomination and his alma mater.  He embodied an earlier time when the people of the college and the church participated together in a vital Reformed community.  Hartman would serve for many years on the board of the college at Bodger's invitation.  His career as a personnel administrator made him a useful resource for the college.  That same expertise gave him a role in the search and selection of the first campus minister under the new agreement, the Rev. M. Scott Landis.

"Scott appeared to be made for the job," said Bodger.  "His youth, candor, caring, enthusiasm, flexibility, inclusiveness—all made him acceptable to all camps, as far as I could tell.  He became a valuable ally of the student life staff and did heavy duty in counseling individual students.  He was a master in crises, when students were at risk.  He gave confidential counsel to faculty members.  If the college's religious tie resulted in providing such a valuable campus citizen, the tie must be okay even if it seemed old hat—that's my sense of what many thought who otherwise would have objected to the continuation of the UCC relationship."

A year after Landis's appointment, Bodger evaluated the pilot project in a memo to Hartman and urged that the campus minister position become permanent.  He discussed it in terms of market positioning.  He thus tied it in with the question of destination—where did he want the college to go?  Bodger handed M.S. a copy of his memo, dated 3 November 1986, and she read the following:

 The Campus Minister position as it is evolving will help the college to position itself clearly with the constituency that we seek to attract.  One of our important factors in promoting the college is that we give individual attention to the student not just in the classroom but in the entire educational experience in a residential setting.  The position, as Dean Akin has said, is a visible symbol of our caring and nurturing role.  More than that, however, the position provides a substantial resource for actually carrying out that role.

This function combines with our active participation in the United Church of Christ Council for Higher Education to show that we are actively engaged with a value system that prizes the Christian approach to human relations and the old Reformed emphasis on the independence and responsibility of the individual.

Such a position will mark us off from other selective liberal arts colleges that are less willing or able to make a formal show of commitment to a Christian tradition.  Yet it will also keep us separated from colleges that are more doctrinal and less open to a range of beliefs and styles.

In marketing jargon, the Campus Minister position helps us define our niche and differentiates us from others in our segment of the market.

"The college had an active role to play in the national Council for Higher Education of the UCC during these years," said Bodger.  "This reinforced our commitment to our local campus ministry project and to our open acknowledgment of religious roots.  I was chair of the national Council in 1983-84.  When the Council required institutional members to reaffirm their active association with the Council, we did so with no difficulties on campus with faculty, students, or board.  Other presidents such as my counterpart at F&M could not 're-enlist' because of the degree to which professionalization had advanced on their campuses at the expense of a parochial past."

            Bodger made Landis his executive assistant some years after his arrival.  He continued to grow as an administrator and orchestrated the search for Bodger's successor in 1994.

            "Sounds like the kind of person any president should have," said M.S.

            "You should look for one right away," Bodger said.

            "So," she continued, "was your decision to hold onto the church relationship the only strategy for seasoning a more professionalized campus with healthy parochialism?"

            "Another holding action was in the academic domain itself," said Bodger.  "As we looked down the road toward professionalization, we could see the totem of 'publish or perish' looming in the mist.  How could we move forward without having to bow down completely to that totem?  I of course had never immersed myself fully in the research culture of graduate school and had never internalized the value placed on research and publication by the orthodox academic world.  We had not required our faculty to jump through the hoops for promotion and tenure that were standard at places such as Haverford and even F&M.  But many younger ones wanted to move in that direction.  I felt fortunate in our choice of Bill Akin to become academic dean.  He took a middle position, and it served us well, I believe, in this period.  With a faculty development committee, he advanced the notion of 'visible products' rather than 'publications.'"

            "But why did you want to resist 'publish or perish'?"

            "To do so, I felt, would reinforce our commitment to caring and nurturing individual students.  It would be consonant with the state of the art in our existing faculty—most of them were simply not ready for such a professional leap full tilt.  It carried forward that 'contrarian' spirit that I thought I detected at the core of our institutional personality, grounded in Bomberger himself.  It kept a focus on students rather than academic discipline.  It kept the purpose of faculty linked to the institutional mission, which focused on students."

            "All things in their season," said M.S.

            "The season for 'publish or perish' had not yet arrived," said Bodger. 

New dean led the reshaping of academic culture  

            M.S. was going home to her midwestern campus.  Her resolve to try for another presidency remained solid.

"I've got the bug," she said during her last visit with Bodger.  She knew her position as dean was in jeopardy, now that her new president weighed the merits of retaining a person he had defeated for the job.  "I'll keep my head low, do my job for the time being, say 'yes sir' and polish my resume," she said to Bodger.  He advised her not to jump at the first opening but to look for more than surface compatibility between her qualifications and the opening.

"Thanks," she said.  Then she set the agenda for their next conversation.  "Tell me what tools your new dean used in remaking the culture of the faculty."

"First of all," Bodger replied, "conditions were ripe when he entered the scene.  The start that we already had made opened a path for him.  The new curriculum went into effect the very moment he arrived—all that harrowing committee work was over.  It gave him a fresh framework that could be enriched or expanded as time went on.

"And just the year before Bill arrived, we began the first formal faculty evaluation program in the history of the college.  It came out of the deliberation of the priorities committee.  The energy behind it arose from the distress of the faculty in the last Pettit years.  They were sure that arbitrary and capricious tests, which were unwritten, had led to bad decisions on promotion and tenure.  The faculty's impulse to professionalize was thus an impulse against patriarchal arbitrariness.  It led them, of course, into a rigorous new set of expectations for professional performance.  Not all of them in the end were happy to see bureaucracy creep into their lives.  There was particular doubt about how much weight to give student evaluation of courses, which was coming in too.  But the expectations were public, had the legitimacy of faculty sponsorship, and presumably could be reasonably applied by department heads, dean, and president."

"But no 'publish or perish,'" M.S. said.

"The criteria simply said that all faculty members should involve themselves in professional growth activities.  The college—and their colleagues--expected them to develop their knowledge so that they kept abreast of work in their disciplines.  They should read the appropriate scholarly publications and regularly attend scholarly conferences.   They should participate in on-campus faculty seminars or lecture series.  They should lecture in interdisciplinary courses and supervise student research on campus.  The faculty handbook specified a number of outward-looking activities that they should undertake—obtaining fellowships and scholarly grants; attending extended workshops and seminars; engaging in active research; presenting scholarly lectures or talks; and developing expertise in fields related to theirs.

"Under Akin's leadership, the evaluation rewards soon came to include special recognition for juried scholarly work.  I'm reading from a faculty handbook of 1984, which says, 'Recognition will be given to faculty members who attain a high status or make a significant contribution in their field, who present papers at scholarly conferences, who write scholarly publication, or who produce creative works.'  The recognition for the best came in the form of an annual award at commencement—and, of  course, heavy points at the time of promotion or tenure deliberations.  The point was to nudge the faculty in the direction of professional achievement with carrots not sticks."

Bodger added that perhaps the most important pre-condition for modifying faculty culture was an improvement in salaries.  The bitter feelings of faculty in the last year of Pettit's administration did not flow exclusively from the personal distress created by the dismal economic climate of the mid-1970s.  However, their lack of hope for adequate compensation had darkly colored the other grievances.  Bodger had no choice but to be aggressive in seeking improvement.  Had faculty not believed that he would give it top priority, faculty surely would have resisted his election.  In this mission from the start, he had the sympathy and support of the board.

"I worked closely with the faculty-elected priorities committee to devise a plan of multi-year improvement by rank.  We based it on a comparison with the AAUP's national averages in rank for colleges of our type.  The plan was transparent and had support because faculty members worked on it—and because it had an external benchmark in AAUP.  It was fiscally cautious while promising that the college would spend more on salaries.  When Akin came along, the faculty were just coming to believe that salaries would improve further in some reasonable way.

"I tried not to kid myself—there was never going to be enough money to make people really happy.  But there was enough to enable us to move away from money as the main issue.  We had to get on with the business of changing the culture of faculty in the direction of professionalism.  Fair pay was necessary but not sufficient in that business.  And we felt obligated to spread the money around, given the low pay that generally prevailed.  We clung to the principle of merit pay for commendable performance; but the merit increments were small.  It would be years before merit commanded a really noticeable chunk of new salary."

The final pre-condition for the new dean's program, Bodger told M.S., was that the Middle States self-study had already analyzed the demography of the faculty.

He said, "Its weaknesses, from a professional perspective, were easy to enumerate.  There were more non-Ph.D.s in senior ranks than similar colleges would have had.  The tenure ratio was inching upward and beginning to threaten the general vitality of the faculty.  We were at only about 56 percent tenured in 1978.  We projected an increase to 82 percent by 1984 unless interventions by early retirement or death took place.   Women were underrepresented, especially in the full-time and senior ranks, and their pay was not equal to that of men.  Minorities virtually had no representation.  Teaching loads were twelve hours and often more when individuals chose to add evening school courses to their workload for extra pay.  The percentage of faculty who held the Phi Beta Kappa key was small.

"At the same time, a new dean could see in the college faculty considerable strength and potential.  A younger cohort had led the curriculum revision; they were eager to realize its potential under new administrative direction.  In the disputes of the Pettit years, the faculty had pulled together as an entity and had a rising sense of itself as the soul of the college.

"And," Bodger added, "scattered about were teacher-scholars of quality, who were numerous enough to suggest a tone.  A few of the senior people enjoyed respect for their charismatic teaching and active scholarship.  Derk Visser led a happy few in an interdisciplinary program, where they breathed on the flickering flame of liberal scholarship in its purest form. A number of assistant professors still had the enthusiasm for scholarship that came with them from graduate school; they were prepared to perform as soon as conditions of employment gave them half a chance."

            M.S. responded, "So, the dean's work of identifying demographic priorities in the faculty was pretty well done by the institution; it was Akin's job to begin implementing changes in hiring and retention."

            "Sure," Bodger replied.  "But the immediate job was to work with what he had.  Bill early on began to strengthen the work of departments.  The academic program traditionally was highly departmentalized in its small way.  But the departments were short on process and long on custom.  Shortly after he arrived, Bill had to navigate the nasty wash that flowed from the denial of tenure for a member of the German Department.  The case accentuated a need to evaluate all the foreign language departments, and that led to a new language department embracing all the languages under a single chair.  The health and physical education department, driven by a concern over 'market share,' also underwent a program review.  That led to the inclusion of a recreation component and a change of name to exercise and sports science.  By these and other means, under Akin's leadership, the departments changed into units that were accountable.  The chairs of departments acquired a more important voice in the promotion and tenure process.  In the course of time, it became normal for departments to undergo periodic evaluation by outside peers." 

Pew funded the professionalization of the faculty 

Bodger said that the college turned the corner toward a new academic culture when, with Akin's guiding hand, it devised a systematic faculty development program and won a half-million dollar grant to fund it from the Glenmede Trust Company.

            "A half-million dollars for faculty development may not seem like much today," he said, "but in 1982 I thought it was magical.  As a new dean, Bill had to have been pleased with our success in winning it from the Glenmede Trust Company, which became better known as Pew Charitable Trusts.  The Pew family had been solid supporters of Ursinus owing to the personal cultivation done successfully over many years by D. L. Helfferich and then Bill Pettit.  Myrin Library, named in 1970 in memory of Mabel Pew Myrin's husband, is our most visible monument to that relationship.  When I entered office, Pettit was able to give me a cordial introduction to the president of the Trust, so I had expectations of continued success.

            "From Akin's first day we agreed that professional faculty development should be second to none on his action list.  It did not take long for him to persuade me that our next approach to Glenmede should be for professional improvement rather than for more bricks and mortar.  He then worked hard with a representative faculty task force to forge a three-year faculty development program.  Since the task force was a creation of the Campus Planning Group, it had the stamp of high priority and institutional legitimacy.

            "The faculty members on the task force made a good mix of senior people and younger people, and of divisions of the curriculum.  They were Juan Espadas of Spanish, J. Houghton Kane of political science (and Dean of Student Life), Eugene H. Miller of political science, John Pilgrim of economics & business administration, Blanche Schultz of mathematics, and Peter Small of biology.  Two board members of high academic stature also served and provided legitimacy as well as professional insight: Millard E. Gladfelter, former President of Temple University, an historian; and Eliot Stellar, former Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, an internationally regarded neurobiologist—he became president of the American Philosophical Society after his departure from office at Penn.  The interest and participation of these two board members sent the message to faculty that the college was in earnest.  We were declaring a new day in the professional academic life of the professoriate at Ursinus.

            "Eliot was a successful supplicant at Pew on behalf of Penn.  He accompanied Bill Akin and me to deliver the proposal later.  I felt that his endorsement pushed it over the top."

            M.S. said, "The task force was really your way of trying to follow up the Middle States self-study to tone up the academic endeavor, wasn't it?"

            "It was.  And that too, I think, helped give the proposed program timeliness and persuasiveness both inside and outside the college.  When the Campus Planning Group initially charged the faculty development task force, we cited the renewed self-confidence of the college in itself, referenced in the Middle States self-study.  We said that the faculty development program should fulfill this feeling by enhancing the intellectual tone and quality of teaching.  A heightened professional ability and intellectual activity would bring this about.  And that called for a specific formal program."

            M.S. said, "Merely by calling for it, you set the transformation in motion, I would think, given the absence of any substantive support for active scholarship in the past."

            Bodger, nodding yes to her insight, said, "The task force called the past position of the college on scholarship 'passive and permissive.'   There was scant encouragement for systematic professional growth.  There were few penalties for failure to be an active scholar.  Promotion and tenure procedures were aberrations in that they tended to ignore the normal professional benchmarks of progress.  The college would now lay the foundation for an academic culture that would begin to look like that found at residential liberal arts colleges of acknowledged national stature."

"Long long road," M.S. said, repeating her refrain.

"Not only that, but at the same time we were being careful to pin faculty development to the newly formulated mission.  This emphasized not academic activity as such but the broad development of the students for independence, responsibility, creativity, and productivity.  I wanted to avoid a proposal that would appear to serve faculty without tying their self-improvement directly to the larger purpose of the college, which meant service to students. The specter of a deep division between the professoriate and the administration and board had quieted with my appointment in 1976.  It was still lurking in the wings, however.  If it revived by making faculty improvement an end in itself, we would be going backward not forward, I felt.

"Happily, Akin, though fresh from a university environment, understood.  He came to see why I worried.  He led the task force toward a plan that would be professionally creditable.  He was careful, at the same time, to root it in the broad behavioral values expressed in the mission statement."

Bodger continued by explaining how the proposal depicted the need for academic renewal as a natural next step to follow the three major initiatives of the first several years of his administration.  The college had sought, first, to enhance the quality of student life consistent with the mission; second, to change recruiting and retention methods so that enrollment levels and standards would hold up; and third, to update the curriculum. With actions taken on all three fronts, the time was ripe to turn to the professional concerns and needs of the faculty.  This would hone its most critical resource as the college strove to meet new aspirations for student life, recruiting and retention of students, and curriculum.  A survey of faculty in 1980 showed that heavy teaching schedules and lack of financial support for research were the main culprits in retarding professional growth.  The proposal that emerged put these problems in the crosshairs.

The new dean’s vision of a transformed academic culture at the college keynoted the specific proposals.  The program would address all facets of faculty development.  It would "emphasize a series of one time projects designed to move the faculty to a new level of quality and achievement and establish a new set of norms for what constitutes a satisfactory performance in the areas of teaching, professional growth, and advising."

Concretely, the program aimed to heighten computer literacy among at least a third of the faculty as an extension of the curriculum improvement already accomplished in the revision of 1979.  Of particular importance was a "Dartmouth Mentor Program."  This would send selected college faculty members to Dartmouth College for a brief, intensive immersion in the computer environment at one of the most advanced campuses.  The college still was buying its computing services as a long-distance user from the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth.  During this period, Dartmouth's Thomas Kurtz, the co-inventor of the widely used Basic programming language, was a close adviser in this program.  His partner, John Kemeny, had become Dartmouth's president; and Bodger had a meeting with Kemeny to put ceremonial cement in the connection.  The value of computer literacy as an objective, Bodger explained, was two-fold: it could reach a broad range of faculty members, and, because many of them would be in the humanities, it showed a collaborative posture between non-scientists and scientists.

The proposal secondly concentrated on improvement of advising skills, with components in values development, personal and career counseling.  The sharing of student advising duties for freshmen across the faculty was an important college goal.  Advising would also take on new importance as faculty tried to guide students in the selection of the newly created minor concentrations.

The proposal gave some attention to the development of teaching skills, including teaching seminars.  But an interest in pedagogy as such remained modest at this stage.  It would be some years before a new cohort of faculty members brought fresh attitudes toward the importance of methods of college-level instruction.

Professional development was more important at this time to faculty; the proposal reflected this priority.  It recommended a menu of activities—summer grants, research support grants, release time, travel grants, faculty seminars, more generous sabbatical leaves, and professional achievement awards to celebrate outstanding performance in scholarship.  Akin had aired nearly all these when he came to interview for the deanship.

Bodger said, "As soon as we had advance word of an approval from Glenmede in the fall of 1981, Bill kicked off the program as hastily as possible; we launched it in January 1982.  The announcement in the middle of an academic year made for some breathlessness and much excitement about the future.  It was a high point for Bill and for me as well as for the faculty.  In one fell swoop, the college ceased to be 'passive and permissive' about professional growth and became 'active and supportive.'"

"You probably thought this was as important as building a new academic building," said M.S.

"Probably more so," said Bodger.  "Dormant in the proposal was our promise to sustain a newly institutionalized faculty development agenda as an ongoing part of our operation after the three-year grant period.  In the blush of new excitement, that sleeper went unnoticed.  But if we could do that in the longer haul, we would have basically changed the college."

"And that happened."

"I think yes, it did."

Bodger said that, with a year still to go on the three-year Glenmede grant, Akin was declaring "a profound increase in the life of the mind" on campus.  Virtually all faculty members took part in one component or another of the program.  More than half of the faculty went through computer literacy training and some were expert enough to be appearing at professional meetings to share their new competencies.  Faculty members who attended professional meetings in their fields increased from less than a half to two-thirds of the faculty.  Papers presented by the college's faculty at professional meetings increased five-fold.  Scholarly publications doubled.  "Of course the baseline was small," Bodger added.  In 1984, ten faculty members devoted their full summer to research, with meaningful compensation to make up for gainful employment they might have forgone.  The Glenmede program also provided for workshops on student advising for about one-third of the faculty.

Faculty members, Bodger reiterated, were least attracted to the part of the Glenmede program that encouraged them to rethink pedagogical practices.  Akin had hoped that roundtables to discuss teaching in an informal atmosphere would dispel their original disinclination.  These produced little enthusiasm.  Pedagogy remained as an unaddressed issue for another five years.

"The Glenmede program," Bodger continued, "ironically gave a boost to my parochial efforts in a most professional way.  We used grant funds for a scholarly colloquium on campus.  But the colloquium dealt with 'Controversy and Conciliation: The Reformation and the Palatinate, 1559-1583.'  This was the productive period in the professional life of the college’s namesake, Zacharias.  The gathering commemorated the 400^th anniversary of his life—he died in 1583.  This obviously was a specialized topic that would appeal to only a small group of our faculty, led by historian Derk Visser.  Yet, Visser enjoyed the professional respect of his peers on campus.  And the assembled presenters were among the world's top Reformation scholars.  The colloquium thus dovetailed the academic initiative with my effort to revitalize our historic connections with the church.  Akin was politic enough to understand the public relations value of the topic and, at the same time, insisted on nothing but the scholarly best in the make-up of the program.  It was an interesting blend of motives and outcomes.  A decade later, it would not have happened, I think.  Professionalization by then would have moved so far that faculty would have resisted such a parochial topic."

Bodger paused.  Midway through the Glenmede grant program, he remembered, around Thanksgiving in 1983, Dick Bozorth, former dean, suddenly died of a heart attack at age 63.  It was a personal tragedy for his attractive family and for his many college friends.  His life as a full-time faculty member, following his withdrawal as dean in 1978, had been less happy than he might have wished.  He was not comfortable with the more bureaucratic ways that inevitably came in the wake of the new faculty culture.  His status as former dean made it necessary for him to tread carefully in the new dispensation.

"His faculty friends occasionally came to me to protest some felt slight surrounding evaluations of his teaching," said Bodger.  "I doubt if anyone could fully fathom his personal feelings.  I have often imagined Dick standing on a divide between a faculty world that we lost and one that we gained.   He remained gallant and loyal in his relationship with me as he watched me nudge the college farther away from that informal and comradely world that he knew well.  His sudden death has stood as a sad symbol, for me, of the heavy stakes involved in managing the reshaping of an institution.  Bill Akin made it a point, understandably, not to consult with his predecessor in office, beyond the usual civilities.  Even so, I think he felt what I felt about a passing era."

"Academia is the real world," M.S. said, "despite what our critics sometimes say."

Bodger nodded in agreement.

He said that as an end of the three years of the Glenmede-funded project loomed, the college hatched the idea of holding a faculty development symposium.  It would solidify the gains made, point to future activities in faculty development, and let the larger—"real"--academic world know about the college's achievement.  It would take the college beyond its parochial boundary.  Akin received support and encouragement to undertake this from the newly arrived vice president for college relations, John R. Van Ness.  The event on 3-4 November 1984, as it turned out, blended academic and promotional goals.   Robert I. Smith, president of Glenmede, representing resources not professionalism, became a significant figure in the two-day affair.  By giving him a place on the program and an honorary degree, the college hoped to cement further the relationship between that deep funding source and the college.

Bodger continued, "We called it Faculty Development in Liberal Arts Colleges: An Unfinished Agenda for the '80s. Main presenters were Robert H. Edwards, President of Carleton College, and Warren B. Martin, scholar in residence and senior program officer at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and author of A College of Character.  Edwards spoke on 'The Role of Faculty Development in the Liberal Arts College' and Martin on 'Institutionalizing Faculty Development Programs at Liberal Arts Colleges.'  Moderators were Eliot Stellar, our board member, and Akin.  Respondents in addition to Smith were William C. Nelsen, President of Augustana College; Peter Beidler of Lehigh University, named 'Professor of the Year' by the national Council for the Advancement and Support of Education; Geoffrey Marshall, deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who would become one of our board members; and Christine Young, Vice President of the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education and former Provost at Hood College.  Attending along with members of our faculty and staff  were representatives from some 30 institutions."

"Strong voices from the real outside world," said M.S.  "Anti-parochial."

Bodger found the remarks he made to open the symposium and gave them to M.S. to read:

The three-year faculty development program funded by the Glenmede Trust Company already has permanently affected the professional style of our faculty and significantly stimulated the "life of the mind" of our campus.

…[W]e made a commitment to ourselves as well as to Glenmede to institutionalize beyond the lifetime of the grant a formal faculty development program.  We believed that this would be essential to the continued success of the college in pursuing its mission in liberal education--and believe so even more now….But we also came to realize that…the college would have to clarify precisely what faculty development in the next phase should be.  It was at that point that it appeared that a broader dialogue would be beneficial.  The problem is not uniquely ours but touches the very center of the operation of every liberal arts college in America.  We came to see that a sharing with other voices from the academy and the philanthropic community could sharpen our definition of the role of faculty and point to strategies applicable generally in liberal arts colleges….We hold the dialogue, then, still for our own ends….But we hold it in the conviction that understanding can be heightened today that will benefit every aspiring liberal arts college and many funding agencies trying to decide on priorities for the rest of this decade.

Everyone here is aware, I am sure, of the severe criticism leveled at higher education recently in the study sponsored by the National Institute of Education.  One of its principal recommendations is that liberal education requirements be expanded and reinvigorated and that students and faculty integrate knowledge from various disciplines.  With such a call, liberal arts colleges have an exciting and unique role to play.  And the faculties in them have a special problem and promise.  We have the capacity today to make a significant contribution to the emerging national dialogue on the revitalization of liberal education.

"Your reach for 'national' significance is hard to miss," M.S. said, smiling.

Bodger said that it was Akin who first connected the local concerns about the next step in faculty development with problems being experienced at similar colleges across the nation.

"That gave us a bridge to the outside," Bodger continued.  "These colleges, Akin held, had common characteristics.  They defined undergraduate teaching as their primary purpose.  They fostered a breadth of knowledge in their curriculum.  They were concerned with the development of student 'character.'  They were small and residential and stressed a sense of community.  At the same time, they shared the common problems of the day.  Many voices were rising in the 1980s to question the utility of a liberal education.  The number of traditional college-age persons was falling and would continue doing so for more than a decade.  This was bringing financial stress and instability.  Moreover, student mores and expectations were changing.  This was raising the need for new teaching approaches and academic services.  We were seeing a sharp increase in the number of students majoring in economics and business administration, and so were many colleges.  We all were addressing an increasingly pragmatic, show-me-how-now generation.  Faculty were less mobile, especially in the humanities and social sciences, which showed distressing downturns in enrollments nationwide.  Tenure percentages were increasing.  Colleges were hiring fewer new young faculty, increasing the risk of academic stagnation.

"Given these common characteristics and problems, we identified some important issues for the generic liberal arts college. Should the mission of liberal education lead to faculty development programs that differ from those at universities, community colleges, and professional schools?  Will traditional scholarly research conflict with teaching at the undergraduate level?  How can faculty development reinforce the liberal education of students?  What impact can faculty development have on student development?  How can faculty development foster collegiality and a sense of community?  How can colleges with robust faculty development programs fund themselves without perpetuating their dependence on external foundation support?  I think the nationally recognized people who responded to our invitation were doing so because they too felt the relevance of this kind of inquiry at that moment in American higher education."

"And what were the answers?" asked M.S.

Bodger retrieved a slim volume from his shelf.  It was a collection of the papers, edited with an introduction by Akin.

"In a word, the answers for colleges like ours tended to push faculty development into harness with institutional mission and with curriculum renewal.  Student learning remained the unchanging priority."

Bodger read Akin's summing up as follows:

For all but a handful of liberal arts colleges, it is clear that faculty development needs to be conceived more broadly than traditional scholarship.  We need to think more creatively about ways to improve classroom teaching, ways which move beyond the concentration on methods and techniques of the initial faculty development programs, and which somehow allow us to address fundamental philosophical questions about our teaching mission.  It is also clear that just as institutions have differing faculty development needs, so faculty in the same institution will have different needs over time and career stages.  Finally, one might reasonably conclude that if the first phase of faculty development [in the 1970s] was motivated by a concern for students, and the second phase was impelled by a concern for faculty, the next stage will be driven by a concern for the institution.  If the focus of phase one was teaching and phase two was on comprehensive development, the unfinished agenda is curriculum.

     "I can see," said M.S., "how he was pushing toward curriculum enrichment through faculty renewal.  And he was putting up a barrier to the simplistic notion of traditional publishing or perishing on the university model."

     "I do think this position over the next decade served us well," said Bodger.  "My point in digging into this is to emphasize how hard we were trying to balance a growing professional activity with our priority for developing students as individuals—all the while trying to hang onto something of the flavor of the old parochial campus.  By bringing in outside voices of authority, I think we reinforced the message on campus."

     "And having the head of Glenmede on the program made your new development chief happy, I'm certain."

     "It did," said Bodger.

     Bodger added that in addition to Smith a venerable professor also received an honorary degree that weekend--G. Sieber Pancoast, '37, professor of political science and former dean of men and long-time baseball coach.

     "Pancoast epitomized the 'collegiate way' of parochialism," Bodger said.  "Aside from military service in World War II, he spent his entire adult life on the campus, earning his advanced degrees by commuting part-time to the University of Pennsylvania—like a number of others of that generation.  While teaching half-time, he spent fourteen years in the Pennsylvania General Assembly toward the last part of his career.  Pancoast represented the faculty on this weekend when the college raised up the professoriate as its essential resource."

     "The significance," interpreted M.S., "was that you would honor the parochial tradition of the college even as you sailed into a new world of professional priorities.  Right?"

     "The decision to award an honorary degree usually arises from several motives; but certainly you've pinpointed one of them behind this award.  Sieb was one of the original Pariahs who were kicked out of Joe Lynch's kitchen—he was true blue.  I thought it would help the traditionalists to know that we honored them.   But the symposium was saying that something new henceforth would be going on." 

New faces rejuvenated a forward-looking faculty 

     However, Bodger went on, the internal audience for the faculty development symposium primarily was the young cohort.  "We were trying to say to them that this place would live up to their expectations for a supportive scholarly climate.  The cultural divide between the Pancoast generation and that of the newcomers would widen substantially because of the institutionalization of professional development started in the Glenmede program.  With Akin driving the hiring process, we brought on board a lively bunch of assistant professors and instructors in his first several years.  They became the nucleus of the faculty that would enable the college to 'arrive.'"

     Bodger then ran through a number of names, none of which was familiar to M.S., since they arrived after her '78 graduation.  In history: Hugh Clark.  In political science: Nick Berry (he led the charge to change the name in due course to politics, connoting something more classical), Gerard Fitzpatrick.  In economics & business administration: Cindy Harris, Bernard Lentz.  In languages: Colette Trout; Lynn Thelen; Shirley Eaton.  In health & physical education: Tina Wailgum, '77.  In chemistry: Victor Tortorelli.  In communication arts: Jay Miller.  In biology: James Sidie.  In English: Joyce Lionarons; Patti Schroeder, '74.  In mathematics: Jeff Neslen.  In the library: Charles Jamison.

     A second wave of new faculty arrived in the later part of the 1980s, as senior people cycled into retirement, egged on with early retirement incentives.  They constituted a significant block of the next generation of faculty who would carry the institution well beyond the early steps toward professionalization—such people as Doug Cameron in Spanish; Carol Dole and Jon Volkmer in English; Dallett Hemphill and Richard King in history; Steve Hood and Paul Stern in politics; Andy Economopolous and Heather O'Neill in economics; Stew Goetz in philosophy; Eileen England and Ken Richardson in psychology; Gina Oboler in anthropology and sociology; David Mill in the library.  In  1986 jazz specialist Tony Branker came to the music program, bringing not only a new musical dimension but denting the waspish coloration of our faculty.  'Diversity' had a hard time getting legs, in spite of good intentions.

     "All are just names to me that have appeared in the college alumni magazine," M.S. said.

     "I name names simply to say to you that we had a major influx of young talent during the 1980s.  The flesh and soul of the professoriate metamorphosed.  The climate newly created by the Glenmede program enabled us to recruit them.  We were building the kind of faculty that finally would bring approval for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter—we gave candidates with a PBK key extra points and hired a number of them.  The new climate would finally elevate substantial scholarship to a norm.  This cultural change was less visible than buildings going up or endowment funds increasing.  But it was the essence of institutional reshaping.  I'm arguing that the transformation of academic culture that started in the first years of the 1980s provided the foundation for what the college would become academically before I got out."

     "I'm not disputing it," said M.S.

     "The earlier cohort, like the later, brought sterling credentials from excellent graduate schools.  They brought new blood—only a couple were alumni.  Mainly they brought a blank tablet that had no writing on it about the bitter disputes of the first half of the 1970s at the college.  They took Akin and me for granted as the established administrative authorities and were not measuring us against old scars.  Bill, of course, as the person who recruited them, felt a special responsibility to nurture them as young professionals.   I think they could perceive this, and in a couple of years we had a new and fresh spirit to work with."

     "Berry," said M.S., "was different, I gather, in years of experience, from what I read.  Didn't he come in as full professor to replace Gene Miller, our revered icon, at the head of political science?"

     "Correct.  Nick was in a category of one.  He felt a mission to shake up the faculty and the students.  He was Akin's 'shock trooper' who stirred controversy about the style of teaching and learning at the college.  Until Nick's arrival, few wanted to talk about pedagogy.  The Glenmede program tried to sweeten the issue but there were few takers.  Nick blasted the faculty for failing to challenge students to think.  Then he blasted students for being 'brain-dead.'  That got him into hot water, where he seemed to enjoy swimming.

     "I don't think Bill Akin and he had a premeditated plan to stir the pot about pedagogy.  I think Nick was just a free-spoken guy whose penchant for blunt talk happened to serve our purpose at a pregnant moment.  Bill simply didn't discourage him.  A lot of his colleagues got mad at Nick but they could not deny his sense of the priority of connecting with students in an intellectually exciting way.  For some years, he enjoyed popularity with many faculty and students on campus.  One year we experimented with commencement by giving the students an opportunity to choose the main speaker from among the faculty—Nick was the choice.  He was instrumental in starting a noontime open forum on hot issues of the day.  It flourished for some years.  I think Bill saw in Nick a kind of Huckleberry Finn.  He enjoyed tossing dead cats into dark alleys.

     "Nick set an example in a couple of substantive ways.  He insisted on hiring unusually articulate and challenging young colleagues.  Candidates had to 'audition' for a campus audience to show how interesting they could be.  This became the standard practice under Akin's leadership.  Nick also revamped the departmental curriculum offerings shortly after his arrival.

     "Biology, economics & business administration, health & physical education—all sooner or later were doing similar reviews of their offerings.  Dust and debris shook out of the course offerings.  Departments dove into this partly because of a new sense of competition for students taking minor concentrations.  And departments that lacked suitable major enrollments began to think in entrepreneurial terms.  How could they win a greater 'market share' of the finite total student count?  It took the changing of the generations to make such thinking acceptable among academics.  Faculty members got the message that it was okay to make broad recommendations to academic council for curricular changes; its agenda each fall around Thanksgiving grew and grew.  Akin was responsible for setting up the climate to make that happen.

     "It was in the earlier 1980s, too, that we institutionalized Japanese studies in partnership with our friends at Tohoku Gakuin University in Sendai.  Margot and I went over in the summer of 1982 and came back with a signed intent to develop exchanges of faculty and students.  Our continuing church relationship was an essential element in this new partnership.  TGU was founded with the encouragement of old Reformed missionaries from Pennsylvania in 1886.  TGU had preserved its identity as a Reformed Christian institution for a century, through war and peace.  Without the sense of community that our shared roots gave them, they would not have been so comfortable about entering a partnership.  We returned in 1986 for their centennial celebration.  For the rest of my term in office, the TGU connection grew and prospered.  It gave us a venue for faculty exchanges and opened a global window for students.  The Japanese studies program always seemed to me like our outdoor monumental sculpture initiative—it was a detail that gave texture to our otherwise bland exterior."

     M.S. asked if Pennsylvania German Studies were also in that category.  "They were around even when I was a student."

     Bodger said, "To a degree.  The college became serious about teaching courses about our ethnic forebears when chance brought it the ownership of the Pennsylvania Folklife Society at about the time Helfferich was retiring and Pettit was taking office.  Tom Glassmoyer of the board engineered our acquisition.  He knew the Lancaster attorney who was then working the Society out of bankruptcy.  The Society began at Franklin & Marshall College in 1949 under the leadership of Professors Shoemaker and Yoder.  They had a grand vision of a center for ethnographic study of the Pennsylvania German culture of the region—out of which both F&M and our college emerged.  A centerpiece of the vision was an annual folk festival at Kutztown.  When the operation ran into financial straits, Attorney Eaby stepped in to rescue the operation.  F&M no longer wanted an affiliation with it.  By that time, I think President Keith Spaulding had set his sights on enhancing F&M's national reputation.  This, I guessed, made it timely to downplay the parochial 'Dutchiness' of F&M's Lancaster County origins.  Whatever the case, Eaby turned to Glassmoyer in search of a comparable tax-exempt entity to which to attach the Society.  With our board's consent, they changed the name of the owner from F&M to our institution with the stroke of a pen.  We thus came to own a valuable collection of art and artifacts, a rich bibliographic collection amassed by Shoemaker and Yoder, a piece of valuable real estate along Route 30 east of Lancaster (where Shoemaker had planned to situate his center).  We also acquired the assets of the Kutztown Folk Festival, which Eaby was operating on his own, with aid from his family and accounting partner.  He not only worked the organization out of bankruptcy but began to show real surpluses from the summer festival.  It became a 'cash cow' for us through the 1980s."

     Bodger added that American historian William T. Parsons, '47, had in recent years espoused the regional culture as his specialty and was working up courses to offer in the summer.

     M.S. said, "I remember his article on the cultural significance of Pennsylvania Dutch outhouses."

     "That told you something, perhaps," Bodger smiled.  "Our ownership of the Folklife Society gave impetus to his studies and led him to offer an elaborate set of courses, some of which he taught in the summer at Kutztown, others on campus in the evening and summer.  The long-term failure of his program is a complicated story I won't relate here.  But for the time being, in the mid-1980s, yes, we looked on the program as a 'market differentiator.'" 

The end of in loco parentis meant a fresh start for student life 

     M.S. said that the regional ethnic studies program seemed like an anomaly to her and her friends when they were students.  Bodger said most of the interest came from adult students in the area.  He acknowledged a "disconnect" between some programmatic priorities, such as Pennsylvania German, and the market realities of the residential student body as it developed in the 1980s.

     Bodger continued, "A significant number of students still were kids of parents who had not been through a four-year liberal arts curriculum themselves.  Family income levels were lower than those at places we were beginning to compare ourselves with—Gettysburg, Muhlenberg, F&M.  Studying the esoteric and the arcane was not popular—more and more students wanted to major in what we called economics and business administration.  Most of them just called it 'business.'

     "You can see what was happening in the changing number of majors.  When I took office in 1976, about 15 percent of students majored in economics and business administration.  In 1984-85, about twice that percentage of the whole student body was in that major.  Meanwhile, our traditional bread and butter major, biology--which meant for most students 'pre-med'—remained about the same at around 24 percent.  English remained the same at about 5.3 percent.  All other majors declined.  Health and physical education, for example, dropped from 9.5 percent to 2.9 percent."

     M.S. said, "This was morning in America, after all.  The Reagan revolution was making it neat to go into business."

     "Especially if you were coming out of the cultural corner of many of our students, where 'learning for learning's sake' was less valued.  Geoff Dolman's lament about the decline of 'breeding' had captured his sense of the generational change in his special language.  He was not fantasizing."

     Bodger said that the changing characteristics of the student body gave impetus to the reform of the college's student life program in the 1979-1984 period. 

     He said, "The first changes in student life staffing and the liberalizing of social rules in 1978 had reflected business realism."

     M.S. said, "But didn't you rationalize them on educational grounds?"

     "I did.  Still, they were necessary adjustments to negative 'customer' attitudes.  The new social setting, I hoped, would stop the dropout rate from worsening.  And I hoped it would move us beyond the disputatious experiences of the recent Pettit years.  Indeed, I think they did that.  As we entered the 'making headway' period, we thought more about how to have a genuine educational impact on students in the newly liberalized atmosphere."

     M.S. said, "Truth is, the students were having a ball with their new social freedoms."

     Bodger replied, "Life at the grunt level got pretty messy.  There was some predictable fall-out.  With the move away from a parochial position of in loco parentis, we had to beef up our minimal security system.  A serious sexual assault on a woman student occurred in a dorm at 4:00 am on 8 April 1983.  This gave renewed urgency to our planning for campus safety.  I appointed an ad hoc study group on security to revise and beef up the system, with Nelson Williams, our no-nonsense business manager, as chair.  Talk about professionalization—we put a former state police officer in charge and hired a team that must have numbered half a dozen or more.  If anything symbolized the end of the old parochial college, I think the new security system did it.  Not too many years before, the whole security system of the campus consisted of the eyes and ears of the students, faculty, and staff.

     "Meanwhile, we tried to encourage students to take more responsibility for their personal lives by instituting a formal 'wellness program' that targeted alcohol abuse.  Beverly Oehlert, a nurse with advanced counseling skills, energized this, with the help of funds from the United Church of Christ. We tried to empower students by making the judicial board more representative and more responsive to standard judicial process.  We created double tracks for the Forum program, one for lectures and one for performing arts.  We thought that this enrichment of out-of-class activity would counterbalance the purely social life in the dorms.  I even tried to foster an 'alternative weekend' program, which would give students non-alcoholic activities, including visits to the homes of faculty and administrators."

     M.S. said, "It sounds like cultural warfare between the forces of post-teenage excess  and the forces of liberal learning."

     "In a way it was," he said.  "We hardly ever took our eye off the mission of the college, even when it seemed we were just trying to fight back against sheer grossness.  We were determined to develop 'independent and responsible individuals'—the ancient and honorable aim—in a way that accommodated the social changes in America without abandoning some of the texture of our tradition.  We were trying to mesh the agenda for social life with the agenda for academic life—narrow the gap between beer and books."

     "And beer resisted the rapprochement," said M.S.

     "It did," Bodger confessed.  "Kids drank too much.  Damages in dorms distressed us.  The guys in maintenance would patch a wall one day and find it punched out again the next.  The student life staff inventoried beer keg use in 1984-85.  Students went through an estimated 615 half-kegs that year.  That was an average of almost a quarter keg per student, if the statistic was accurate."

                "We drank a lot in the preceding decade," M.S. said, in defense of students.  "But nobody in the administration wanted to count how much."

            "Exactly," said Bodger.  "The students' game now was our game, whether we liked it or not.  In loco parentis died, but we bought into the lives of students in a new way, which had unique perils.  And many faculty didn't like it.  But their suggested alternatives, when they had any, tended toward the prescriptiveness that we could not return to.  We had to continue to try to change student behavior from within themselves."

            "The Protestant tradition in extenso," M.S. said.

            "Not a bad reference," Bodger said.  "We talked about 'values' instead of religion but the intent was the same—to lift up the quality of student life.   When the faculty revised the curriculum in 1978-9, it set a lofty new goal.  The college was charged to give students 'knowledge of the diverse cultures and value systems of our society and the contemporary world, and the development of a capacity for making independent and responsible value judgments.'  It was a great expectation—but the curriculum committee lost steam before it could recommend how to implement it.  Instead, it recommended the formation of a new committee to do further study."

     M.S. commented, "Academia's catch-all solution, or cop-out, to all problems."

     "In this instance it was the right thing to do and the outcome was productive.  We created the ad hoc 'committee on values' in 1980, after Bill Akin took office as new academic dean.  Chairing it was one of his first major undertakings.  I appointed Dick BreMiller of math, Gayle Byerly of English, Jim Craft of the administration and political science, and Jane Shinehouse, '52, of biology.  The faculty elected Tom Gallagher of sociology and anthropology and Bill Williamson of philosophy and religion.  Later Evan Snyder, '44, of physics and Dave Rebuck, new associate dean in student life, joined the committee.  Two students also served.

     "On 15 April 1980, the committee members held a faculty colloquium to talk about student values.  They took from their colleagues some clear guidelines on what to recommend.  I was immensely relieved when after the colloquium the committee decided that the usual academic remedy to a problem would not suffice for this one: that is, they decided that a formal course would not be the most appropriate means to the desired goal.  The corollary conclusion was that the arena for developing a greater capacity for making independent and responsible value judgments in students lay outside the classroom.

     "For two weeks in June 1980, a sub-committee attended the Lilly Endowment's Workshop on the Liberal Arts at Colorado College.  Akin, Byerly, Snyder, and Williamson comprised the team.  That retreat enabled Akin and the others to study the literature on student development and crystallize it into thinking that would apply to our particular circumstances."

     M.S. said, "I take it their report was not the typical product that gets buried in a file."

     Bodger said, "Right.  Their report went to the faculty in the fall of 1980 and received approval for implementation in the 1981-82 academic year. It became the template for a major revamping of the students' first-year experience and for further professionalizing the student life staff.  The proposed plan built methodically on our seat-of-the-pants first steps in student life reform in 1978.  I attribute its professional tone to Akin, who combined a teacher's open spirit with a seasoned administrator's cautious hand."

     Bodger sketched in the main features of the template.  It started by assuming that a concern for values pervaded the environment of the college and inspired its mission.  The committee intended that its conclusions touch and change the entire college.  The report said the following:

The college environment must present each student with ample opportunities to explore personal values, must encourage students to exercise responsibility in personal decision making, and must foster values consonant with the mission of the college.  Such an environment is one in which the faculty act as mentors and models to support and sustain appropriate values, and to demonstrate their care for students as persons.

The committee, Bodger explained, assumed that the most formative moment in the students' campus career happened during their first year, and more narrowly during their first semester.  This assumption led to recommendations for basic changes in freshman advising, the role of freshman advisors, and their selection, training, and assignments.  The old system of advising focused mostly on the course selection students would make in a major.  They did this upon admission to the college, before they even arrived for classes in the fall. The new system made the faculty advisor a "mentor/model" who would help freshmen develop ethical standards and clarify career directions while continuing to give academic advice.  This called for a far closer working relationship than the one in place and a formal training program for freshman advising.  By allowing students to defer the choice of a major until the sophomore year, the new system set up the conditions for informed discussion about majors and careers with their advisors.  The committee recommended creating a coordinator of freshman advising, who would select and train about thirty-five colleagues for the freshman advising duty.  Each would have only a dozen or so advisees.  The committee also recommended a "freshman values symposium."  It would focus on ethically relevant texts for (non-credit) discussion at the outset of college.

     M.S. said, "It sounds like a big step beyond the old departmental advising I was familiar with—strong on good feeling, short on substance and method."

     Bodger said, "The committee's report applauded the major revision of freshman orientation, which we undertook in 1979 and 1980.  The members liked the way that revised program projected 'the care and concern of the college toward incoming students.'"

     "Am I hearing a marketing message here?" asked M.S.

     Bodger simply smiled in answer and went on, "Departments of course remained in charge of advising students after they declared their major.  The freshman program helped heighten everyone's perception of the importance of advising all the way through the four years.  The committee urged major advisors to encourage upper-class students to take electives that dealt with diverse cultures, fine arts, and interdisciplinary topics.  Such courses had to compete for attention with courses that students could now take in the new minor concentrations, many of which pointed toward practical career preparation.  So, we did little to lessen tensions over academic priorities."

     "But you expanded the student vision of what was possible."

     Bodger said, "Well put—I hope so.  Following the values committee advice, we placed students on more faculty committees, particularly academic council.  That helped season the institutional discussion of academic issues."

     M.S. said, "I can see academic enrichment was happening in several directions at once, in the interest of values.  However, I would think a committee on student values would say something about dormitory life, fraternities and sororities, personal counseling, things like that."

     Bodger replied, "It did.  Indeed, the committee urged greater self-government in dorms to promote a renewed sense of community and responsibility.  At the same time, we were creating a resident assistant program that would pay students to take major responsibility for administering dorm life under the guidance of student life deans.  The resident assistant program blossomed into a powerful educational experience in its own right for those selected."

     "So, the ghosts of house mothers past finally went to their rest," said M.S.

     "They represented a generation that was indeed gone."

     M.S. continued, "But the nub of social life was the Greek organizations—did the committee have the backbone to take them on?"

     "Many faculty members would have preferred to see the college do away with Greek frats and sororities," Bodger continued.  "Their traditions seemed to contradict college values as we expressed them in the mission statement."

     "They were saying that when I was a student," M.S. said. "Lotsaluck."

     "The committee made a noble statement about Greek reform," Bodger said.

     M.S. laughed, "To no great effect, I bet."

     Bodger answered, "Well, at least to a little effect.  All the carping about Greek life done by faculty over the years often struck me as myopic.  Faculty had the naïve idea that intellectual values could and should predominate over the affective lives of a cohort of libidinous post-teenagers, residing cheek to jowl on a tight little campus.  You know the depth of currents flowing at that point.  Most faculty members as undergraduates already were heavily intellectual and valued Greek social experiences less than the majority of their peers—some were exceptions, of course.  So, I felt that the typical faculty member entered the professoriate with a personal bias against fraternities and sororities.  This intensified when they observed the ritual extremes stimulated by the intense desire of their otherwise-sane students to 'bond' with friends."

     M.S. said, "What you say of your faculty is true of every faculty I know of."

     Bodger said, "The values committee huffed and puffed about the conflict between some Greek activities and the values of the college.  Mainly, this helped my administration to put Greek behavior officially on our agenda.  We wanted the students to know it was there so that we could talk to them about limits and responsibilities.  Houghton Kane became dean of student life in July 1981.  He had the job of implementing much of the program that came out of the values committee report.  He kept up a good-willed contest with Greek leaders for the rest of our term together.  Greeks never ceased crossing the line of acceptable behavior.  It was an unending tug of war.  Kane's main goal was to squeeze some educational juice out of the eternal conflict itself.   This often seemed to many like a great rationalization for tolerating outrageous misbehavior; but Houghton persevered and I along with him."

     Bodger found a particular issue of the student paper in a pile and showed M.S. his weekly column from 2 March 1984.  "Frats move in desirable direction," ran the heading.

     "You weren't being truthful," said M.S. with a smirk.

     "I wanted it to be true," replied Bodger, "even if it wasn't, quite.  If I said it, I thought that might encourage the Greeks to behave.  They had been declaring their good intentions in official discussions with Kane.  These discussions were by now a mandatory step in pledging preparations—Kane's effort to educate leaders.  I thought it right to acknowledge at least that they were talking to us."

     M.S. skimmed the article.  She said, "As I interpret this, frat pledging was about to begin and you were warning the rascals they had better behave as promised or you would again bring down the wrath of the institution on them.  I heard that you just about closed down ZX when they mooned the Todd girls one night from the front lawn of your home on campus."

     "That," Bodger said, "regrettably involved my presidential persona directly.  I foolishly came out of the house and personally confronted those guys in the act.  It was an exception, which the students precipitated by their ignorance of my place and position on the campus. For the most part, Kane maintained the direct contacts with Greeks."

     Pointing to the page, M.S. said, "You cited Amherst and Colby as examples of colleges where Greeks were banned.  Your threat was transparent."

     "When communicating with Greeks, Kane discovered that a shout was equal to a whisper, and he taught me that I should shout—judiciously.  It wasn't easy to get their attention.  I was not about to take on a host of alums by seriously talking about abolition.  But it didn't hurt for the students to fear that I might.  Kane was a master, I thought, at structuring situations where they had to listen.  My newspaper piece was just a small component in a complex strategic effort to persuade."

     M.S. read from the article:

Pledging activities, in their present, concentrated form, are simply not essential, from my standpoint.  Short of my own preference, I recognize that students enjoy the game of pledging.  It is surely a part of campus life.  As long as the college position against dangerous or disruptive activities is clear and enforced, and as long as communication with fraternity leaders remains open and positive, I believe we are moving in a desirable direction, toward the enhancement of independence and responsibility—central goals at the college.

     Bodger said, "'Independence and responsibility' by then had become the secular piety of the institution.  In any event, the values committee endorsed our intrusion into Greek life and left it more or less at that.  One of the unwritten functions of student organizations, Greek and otherwise, was that they gave a student a group of friends to whom to turn when troubled about things.  Traditionally, the college had avoided specialized counseling services; it had made the community as a whole, students and faculty, the responsible agent for counseling.  As the lives of students became more complex in the aftermath of the 1960s social revolution, this community approach simply did not seem to serve adequately anymore.  The values committee finally broke the institutional taboo, perpetuated under Helfferich and Pettit, against professional counseling for personal adjustment.  It recommended that a service be created to help faculty advisors meet their now-heightened obligation to be mentors to students in a more personal and invasive way.  It extended the notion of counseling to include career counseling and recommended new staff for that purpose as well.  In due course, Kane hired Bev Oehlert for counseling and Carla Rinde for career counseling.  He also brought aboard a student life professional to oversee student activities."

            M.S. observed, "These were additional moves in the direction of professionalization, I take it—in tune with professionalization of the faculty itself."

            "Yes," said Bodger.  "Of course, much of what the values committee recommended was already in the air.  In 1979-80, we had created a campus life committee to monitor the entire out-of-class dimension of college life.  A student chaired the committee."

     When Bodger said his name, M.S. replied, "I knew him when he was a freshman.  He would push the boundary without knowing it, but had a winning way with upper-class students."

     "By 24 March 1980, after months of discussion about the policies of the college," continued Bodger, "the campus life committee came in with a big set of recommendations.  There had probably never been anything like them before.   They demonstrated that, in the freer climate of the new administration, the faculty and the students on the committee had negotiated a mutual support treaty.  The menu of expectations included enrichment of social activities across the board, control of Greek hazing, provision of alternative housing such as quiet dorms and co-ed dorms, outreach to day students, improvement of college public relations with help from student journalists, better use of alumni for career counseling, introduction of personal adjustment counseling, and greater socialization among students, faculty, and administrators.

     "The faculty signed onto these student-generated initiatives.  In return, the students supported a key recommendation for adding an elected voting member of the faculty to the board of directors of the college.  Here I saw evidence that the spirit of the 'committee of five' still lived.  That was the group that carried faculty concerns to the board in 1976, during Pettit's last year."

     M.S. said, "It probably also gave evidence to you that the new open style of campus management would make your life complicated.  Surely you couldn't agree to that recommendation."

     Bodger said, "The board had no wish to open its membership to faculty.  On that there would be no negotiation, I was certain.  I therefore had to do some talking with the students on the committee.  By that time, faculty members were sitting on several board committees, though not on the full board as such.  I was regularly inviting a member to board meetings as a guest.  I had initiated board-faculty dialogues after board meetings and had been inviting all board members to attend the annual faculty dinner at the start of the college year. 

      "So, there was a case to be made that the communication lines between faculty and board had improved dramatically since the tense last year of Pettit's administration, when they were drawn up against each other.  Moreover, there was a legalistic argument that would deny faculty membership on the board.  It would be a conflict of interest for the faculty member.  He or she would be acting as employer in a board capacity and as employee in a faculty capacity.  In the good will surrounding these years, faculty did not push further after I told the committee that the board would likely oppose the recommendation.  The laundry list of improvements to be made in social life were the main interest of the students, and for the most part we took them seriously as the values committee was swinging into action. "

     M.S. stood and looked out the window and said, "See if I understand.  When I graduated in May 1977, the college was still set up to operate in loco parentis.  However, the mores of students and faculty made its posture no longer effective.  The laws supporting student privacy and equal treatment of men and women made it officially impossible to continue in the old way.  And the marketplace was telling you to change to a more student-friendly style on pain of losing your market share.  The support among students and alumni for your election to office the year before gave strong evidence that our college community was ready to make a new beginning in the new era.  You used committees such as the campus life committee and the values committee to do the grunt work of refocusing the agenda and winning over those who remained unconvinced of the need for some fundamental social changes.  It all kind of worked, though the process was complicated and messy.  And as you worked through the 1979-1984 period, you completed the reshaping of student life management, which began with the big policy changes in spring 1978.  Life in the dorms became messier and sometimes embarrassing, but students were freer to develop themselves.  And the college remained as intentional as ever in seeking to help them develop core values of independence and responsibility.  Now, however, the college did this within the constraints of new law and new social custom."

     Bodger mocked an applause.  "You've got it.  It might have seemed revolutionary to the old guard as you recount it.  But from my seat I thought I saw a remarkable continuity of change within the institution.  I often felt in those years that we were simply adjusting the external and formal features of the college to conform to what already had changed in the spirit of the place."

     M.S. said, "But somebody had to craft those features so that appearance and reality did not diverge further, and you were the artisan they turned to."

"Fair enough," Bodger said.  He made as if to hammer a nail into the stack of books at his side table.  "But I have to credit Houghton Kane as the artisan on the ground who kept pushing appearance and reality toward one another.  His training in law helped give him a professional distance from the messiness of student life.  As we expanded the staff, he sought out young professionals coming out of graduate schools of student personnel administration imbued with the new research in developmental psychology.  The student life program under Kane sought to empower students to solve social and ethical dilemmas from within their own personal and collective resources.  Staff members were to be facilitators.  Our student life program before long lost its last semblance of parochialism and came to resemble those at the more selective liberal arts colleges.  The appointment of Kane led to organizational consolidation of functions under his supervision; it followed rather closely the recommendations coming out of the values committee.  Career Planning and Placement, Financial Aid, and Health Services combined with Dean of Students, with its cadre of professional assistants and student resident assistants, to make up the Office of Student Life.  Those functions up to that point had reported directly to my office."

M.S. scratched her chin.  "You depended on Kane more than people knew."

"Thanks," said Bodger.  "That's what I was attempting to say." 

The college had to try new recruiting strategies 

     M.S. would be flying back to work early next morning.  She thanked Bodger for new insight into the way he had sought to intertwine academic and student life objectives.  From the outside, as an alum, she had previously believed that some of the organizational steps he had taken were disjointed.  "The parity you sought to give to social life now makes more sense to me—but you never really pulled it off completely, right?"

     Bodger answered, "You're too insightful.  It was an uneasy balance, never without tension.  Later, when I made the academic dean a vice president and did not do the same for the dean of student life, the reality was visible to everyone who wanted to think about it—although Kane continued to report directly to me.  In addition, the academic program, as it gained strength, was like a currency that consumed all else."

     M.S. said, "Wherever I go as a president, circumstances won't be quite the same as here or at my present college.  To some extent, your experience will not inform that situation.  But my thinking about it will season it."

     "Let's wait and see where you go," Bodger said.  He thought he had ended their dialogue, but M.S.'s curiosity about his experience remained partly unsatisfied.

     Standing at the door, M.S. said, "You've touched on new marketing initiatives several times in different contexts.  But we didn't look frontally at the central marketing issue, student recruitment.  With the downturn in teenagers happening rapidly in the early 1980s, I know you had to retool staff, engage alumni, remake the printed image of the college, use students and faculty as never before, and all the rest.  Midwestern liberal arts colleges were hit before their east coast counterparts by the demographic disaster.  We had to do all that retooling before you in the east got around to it.  I'd be interested to know what you were doing, if only for comparison."

            Bodger said, "I think you know the basic story."

            M.S. said, "Now we've totally run out of time.  Email me when I get back."

            Bodger said, "I'll do it."

     Watching his former student climb into her rented Taurus, Bodger knew she would return to see him seldom.  The market offered rich opportunity to women aspiring to lead as she aspired.  I'll go to her inauguration, he promised himself, certain she would have one soon.  She tooted and disappeared down the avenue.

 Email from:  Bodger

To:          M.S. Aumen

Subject:     Recruiting/enrollment

Sent:        3 January

In brief, as far as recruiting was concerned from 1979 to 1984, I continued to change socks while running.  Changed staff leadership.  Did a lot of micro-managing.  Hired consultants.  Hired new people.  Pulled various departments together to help the common cause.  Changed promotional materials.  Used the football program to add bodies.  And so on.  Bottom line: we dwelt on tactics in the Admissions Office, not enough on the large strategic fit between educational product and position in student marketplace.  Our thinking about marketing was crawling but at least we knew we had to be crawling.  Always seemed as if the next recruiting cycle was in our faces before we could step back, get our breath, and do serious market planning that would effect real change.  Doubt if you need to know more.  Keeping your head low?

To this brief message, M.S. replied that she wanted to know more, especially about the difference between tactics and strategies.  He said in an email reply that he would poke around in his files a bit and be in touch by snail mail.

Dear M.S.,

When Geoffrey Dolman bowed out of the admissions leadership in 1979, it went without saying that the baton would pass to his long-time partner H. Lloyd Jones.  Lloyd was a little more receptive than Geoff had been to the invasive steps I was still taking to gain managerial control.  He also seemed to me to have a more realistic grasp of what the market held in store for us.  The dire reports of the baby bust predicted for the next fifteen years were stark.  It took all Lloyd's resolve to alter the attitudes and habits he had developed as a recruiter during the long baby boom years.  But he did his best to adjust.  He resolved to change with changing times.  He had the trusted help of protégé Ken Schaefer, '70.  Ken's experience was limited to the college, but, young and eager to get ahead, he responded enthusiastically to greater responsibilities under Jones. 

Together, Lloyd and Ken worked up a plan with monthly goals for applications.  They targeted higher numbers from outside our traditional markets of eastern Pennsylvania  and southern New Jersey.  They went along with a plan, which I pushed, to increase non-resident full-time students from high schools in our immediate area.  They hired additional help.  While all this added up to little more than tinkering with the long-established admissions system, Lloyd's efforts produced satisfactory freshman numbers, though he could do little to increase the academic quality of the new classes or to buck the trend of interest toward business administration.

After two years at the helm of the admissions office, Lloyd Jones assessed the very steep declines still to come in the teenage market.  He decided to step out in 1981 while he was still ahead and give Ken the chance to blossom as the leader of admissions.  He returned to the English Department to do full-time teaching until his retirement some years later.  In those last years of his professional life, Lloyd secured his unique place in the English Department, respected by younger colleagues for his prodigious grasp of material, particularly the plots of Victorian triple-deckers, and by students for his gruff but never-flagging empathy.

The conversion from a genteel tradition of student recruitment in a boomer market to an outright marketing model in a declining market by this time was well along in many selective liberal arts colleges.   We entered the new period of declining numbers of teenagers with the handicap of our strength.  That is, we traditionally had recruited a solid freshman class from the narrow geographical base surrounding Philadelphia.  From a limited pool of fewer than 1,000 applicants, we had managed to remain selective, with a remarkably high yield of those accepted.  The administrative cost was low, and promotion was largely by word of mouth.  Our strengths—and weaknesses—were fairly well-kept secrets.  Other such colleges in the eastern US with similar academic quality had a broader geographic base for recruitment.  They enjoyed better name recognition.  And they spent a lot more money on their recruiting programs

Ken led the admissions office from June 1981 to March 1984.  The competition for top high school students intensified in those years as the number of teenagers in the college's marketing area continued to plummet.  Ken worked hard to move beyond his training during the boom years, when Lloyd Jones and Geoff Dolman taught him the job of "weeding out" applicants.  He adopted the new vocabulary  of "enrollment management" and tried to accommodate his department to the close scrutiny that I insisted upon.  Through the Campus Planning Group, we continued to set specific targets for freshman class size and quality and for retention of upperclass students.   Ken did all he could to live up to expectations.

When I look back at the enrollment numbers for those years, I fail to see in them the sense of anxiety that surrounded the recruiting process from year to year.  My senior staff colleagues shared my nagging fears about our narrow geographic market, our lackluster promotional style, our seeming lack of currency in the competition for the better students. 

My middle-of-the-road approach as president did not dispel that feeling.  I was backing Ken, a home-grown operative whose energy and stability were counterbalanced by his experience in the "old school" and a tendency to be cautious about marketing innovation.  I was unwilling to expand the budget beyond a certain limit to retool the promotional material.  I talked a lot about admissions with my fellow presidents around the area, and it was comforting to know that recruiting troubled all of them.  Still, I did not take seriously enough at first the transition of higher education to an out-and-out marketing model.  In the total array of responsibilities that made up the presidency, I was pushed to make the college a marketing machine but then pulled to immunize it against commercial taint, to uphold the ancient and honorable tradition of disinterested learning.  The ghosts of predecessors and mentors in that tradition such as President McClure and Dr. Yost had a place in my mind and I would not forget them.  The result was that I would go so far and no farther in marketing until circumstances pushed me.

The numbers suggest that recruiting and total enrollment were good from 1979-80 through 1982-83, despite all the uncertainties:

YEAR           FRESHMEN           TOTAL ENROLLMENT

1979-80                                310                                                       1073

1980-81                                316                                                       1139

1981-82                                307                                                       1149

1982-83                                291                                                       1168

The increase in the total enrollment showed that our early decision, when I first took over, to do everything possible to improve the retention rate was beginning to pay off.  The retention rate for the class of '82 was 62 percent and for the class of '83 it was 63 percent.  The rate had been down in the high fifties in 1976.  We set a target of 65 percent for the class of '85.  The record would show that we achieved it and went on above 70 percent before I got out in 1994.

The freshman numbers showed that, despite our marketing drawbacks, the admissions office was delivering on its promise to meet specific targets.  Moreover, quality as reflected in SAT scores and class rank was not eroding as it was at many less competitive colleges in the Delaware Valley and around Pennsylvania.

The numbers, however, masked weaknesses in our situation.  The college had not yet switched to a fixed date for admission.  Under its old "rolling" admission policy, we told students that we would accept them as soon as their credentials showed their admissibility.   Colleges such as Muhlenberg and Gettysburg, with whom we heavily competed, by this time had moved to a fixed date in spring for acceptances.  This was the practice at the most competitive national liberal arts colleges.  Our practice tagged us as a less competitive place.  Although we sought to wrap up a class by the traditional May 1 deadline, we never had our complete class; we had to continue accepting applications and admitting students through the summer, up to the start of classes in the fall.  We were glad to augment the May count with those later recruits.  But those who came in during the summer were more likely to develop social or academic problems.  They were thus likely to make our struggle to improve total retention more difficult.

Furthermore, the competitive climate made families increasingly savvy about financial aid.  We found ourselves giving more aid to more students so that we would assure their acceptance of our admission.  Remember that the Reagan administration was cutting back on federal grants and pushing students into federal loans.  We put in an installment plan to help families meet the higher costs.  By 1983, the record shows 84 percent of all our students receiving financial assistance, whatever the source of funds, in the form of scholarships, grants, loans, or self-help employment.  Nearly everyone!

In the 1982-83 recruiting year, we made a decision to begin targeting our aid money more aggressively on students with superior academic quality. As we studied our data, we saw that we were granting more aid money to students with middling academic ability and less to those with higher ability.  Understandably, the data showed also that we finally enrolled a higher percentage of the middling sort than the higher sort.  We decided that, if federal policy and market forces were conspiring to push our financial aid budget ever higher, we at least should begin to deploy it to our competitive advantage.  So, we began to abandon the old doctrine that emerged in the late 1960s under the pressure of federal policy.  That old doctrine said that we should make awards strictly to meet the financial need of all admitted and eligible students, regardless of their academic rank or other attributes.  "Need only" was the old mantra.

  We created several new academic scholarships, ranging from $1,000 to $5,500, which was full tuition in 1983.  Steinbright Scholarships came into being, supported by the Steinbright family and their Arcadia Foundation, to denote full rides.  We also created Board of Directors Scholarships, Community Scholarships, and Bomberger Scholarships.  Merit rather than financial need determined the winners of these discounts dressed up in the name of scholarships.

We made these moves in the anxious climate I've suggested above.  While they were tactical moves made without a full understanding of long-term impact, they represented a fundamental turn in the direction of a marketing strategy.  Years later, this turn would define and dominate the way the college presented itself to prospective students.

Such improvisations did not add up to a rational recruiting strategy in 1983, however.  In May 1983, only about 250 new students had accepted our offer of admission.  The minimum target was about 300; and we had missed that target the year before by a small amount.  I knew that we would add incrementally to the 250 over the spring and summer.  (The official final count by fall was 271.)  But I could not ignore the danger signal.  We really were as vulnerable as the next college down the road to the  shrinking teenage market and the resulting competition.  If we could not routinely recruit the 300 freshmen that we needed to make the budget work on our accustomed scale of operation, I would have to do something more drastic than I had done so far to improve recruiting.

And I had no doubt that this had to be my personal handiwork.  There was no one on the senior staff to whom I could lateral the ball and feel comfortable about getting results.  I alerted the board to the seriousness of the problem.  I brought in an experienced recruiter as a consultant to examine our marketing process—Thomas Huddleston, Jr., associate provost for student affairs at Bradley University.  I contracted with a new public relations vendor to remake our recruiting image and materials—Tom Adams Associates of Devon PA.  I supported Ken's call for additional staff strength.  I empowered a "Recruiting Coordinating Group" to steer inter-departmental activities that supported recruiting.  It included staffers from the offices of admissions, alumni, financial aid, college communications, athletics, and president.

I delivered my statement to the board at its spring meeting on a sober note:

I am viewing the recruiting results this year as critical.  I expect to conduct a thorough analysis of recruitment results, the recruiting program and the personnel involved.  I will seek help in this analysis as appropriate.  During the summer, I expect that a revitalized recruiting and admission plan, based on the results of our analysis, will be developed and operating in the fall.  I ask the Board to join me in giving the highest priority to this project.

Meanwhile, I intend to work with the Campus Planning Group to develop alternative institutional strategies for staffing, programs and budget control that would enable us to accommodate a somewhat lower enrollment if we should find that our current objectives for the number of students must be altered.

            I never made such sweeping forecasts to the board without being certain that I could show later that I had followed through.  That was true in this case too, except that I had no way of knowing in spring 1983 whether my actions would bring satisfactory results in the final count of the freshman class entering in the fall of 1984.  Many changes took place.  They added up to a giant step in the direction of the new order of "enrollment management" through systematic marketing practices.  The administrators signed onto a comprehensive Recruiting Plan (29 July 1983) that came from my office to guide the work and act as a check on actions taken.

Advice from the outside consultant and the advertising-public relations firm laid the groundwork for changes in policy and practice.

Tom Huddleston came to my attention as one of a growing band of successful admissions officers who were spreading the gospel across the nation's campuses about "enrollment management."  He came to campus in the summer of 1983 for a talk with me; then in January 1984 I exposed him to Ken and other admissions staffers.  He knew that I needed him both for his knowledge and for the catalytic effect on the staff that his mere presence would bring.  Bodger must mean business!  His advice was basic but important as we tried to learn the ropes.  Do methodical research on the important market factors that motivate your students to apply.  Devise your strategy to connect prospect and college over the bridge grounded in those market factors.  Do the tactically alert things to show applicants that you have the answer to the things they want.

Huddleston helped us see that the admissions office had to embellish its traditional role of "gatekeeper," which led it to allow only the worthy to enter and partake.  Without abandoning the gatekeeper role, it now had to become wiser in the ways of persuading those who might be worthy to look and ultimately to enroll.  Like so much in management, we needed to acquire a new vocabulary and new body language.  Huddleston's visits, though brief, were important to me in setting forth that vocabulary and suggesting new body language.  (Years later, he moved from the midwest to our area in a corporate job.  Then he went back to academia as admissions head at one of Philadelphia's Catholic universities.)

The publications and materials sent to prospective students underwent a quick overhaul at the hands of Tom Adams.   The college mailed them to a larger cohort of prospects, obtained from the College Search service in Princeton, NJ.  They all reflected a new promotional theme aimed at accenting the college's important market factors--"College With A Difference."  The theme picked up on the rising vocational turn being taken even by traditional liberal arts colleges in the frenzied attempt to recruit bodies.  By remaining steadfastly committed to requirements in liberal education and resisting the proliferation of courses and the introduction of vocational programs, the college would be different by remaining the same!  

I explained the theme in one of my regular columns in the student newspaper as follows:

An amazingly small percentage--about 15 percent, as I recall--attend strictly undergraduate, independent liberal arts colleges such as ours.  In categorical terms, then, our college is atypical….Most students with high ability--such as those who come here--will do one of two things: (1) they will go into a professional or graduate school after receiving their bachelor's degree; (2) or they will enter a career path that will take them into several different kinds of work and up to increasing levels of responsibility.  Both groups of students are best served by a solid grounding in a basic and rigorous undergraduate program of general education with a strong major in one of the liberal disciplines.  Our college differs in that it focuses almost all of its institutional energy upon such a program and avoids more narrowly defined undergraduate objectives and graduate programs.

We remain relatively small and keep the faculty/student ratio low in order to reach students personally and effectively.  Because we are strictly undergraduate, experienced faculty members, by and large, teach nearly all courses.  The teaching assistants encountered by undergraduates at large universities--even the very prestigious ones--are not found here….

We try to educate students to think of themselves as responsible persons who must deal with moral dilemmas throughout life--both private and public.  We try to emphasize that ethical responses to those dilemmas can be rationally based and compassionately pursued.  Many of the problems in dormitory living provide grist for this mill.  And extra-curricular activities give students the chance to develop leadership skills and cope with real operational problems.  Life in the "real world," one may say, is life at the college writ large….Mirroring this emphasis is the recent commemoration of our namesake and our active partnership with a religious denomination concerned about human values, justice and peace.

Besides, a college with a tree in the end zone of the football field and a namesake called Zack cannot be just any old college. 

The findings from some surveys of students and parents supported the deliberate emphasis on requirements and liberal education.  The informed judgment of the admissions staff and the traditional self-image of the faculty reinforced it. It involved no significant shifts in the way the college was going about its work.  It had the effect of validating the mission in liberal education.  Recent years had seen some faculty study groups flirt with vocationally oriented programs, such as gerontology and nursing anesthesiology.  The "College With A Difference" theme buttressed the existing wall against such changes.  (Recreation in the Health and Physical Education Department had a brief life in the mid-1980s but did not develop into the major program originally envisioned.  Instead, a biology-based program in physical therapy emerged.  It maintained a root in the basic science disciplines of liberal education.)  While the "College With A Difference" theme lasted only a short time, it probably helped move the college along toward a marketing position that later would put it head to head with better-recognized national liberal arts colleges.

Accepting the risks of micro-managing, I worked closely with the staff in the admissions office to reorganize the way it worked in the field and in the office to attract the interest and applications of high school students.  We invited high school guidance counselors from targeted high schools in the region to spend a day on campus.  We gave them an up-to-date understanding of the college's strengths and tried to influence them to acquaint their students with the college.  The admissions office organized spring receptions for students considering the college.  In the fall, we invited students who inquired about admission to visit campus for a night to get better acquainted--"Red and Gold days."  The first took place in October and November 1983.  They had a big impact on the yield and continue to be a centerpiece of recruiting to the present time.  Through the Recruiting Coordinating Group, the admissions office reached out to the campus community and the alumni for ancillary support of its efforts.

The effect of all the new activity on the size and quality of the class entering in fall 1984 was positive.   New students totaled 340.   The quality of the incoming class held steady and in some categories improved over the previous year. In terms of SAT scores, improvement in the 500-599 range--then the heart of the Ursinus market--appeared for both verbal and math aptitudes.  The merit scholarship program had almost immediate effects.

But the intensity of the recruiting agenda persuaded Ken Schaefer earlier in the year to seek a new direction within the college administration.  His lengthening institutional knowledge made him a valuable addition to the new development team that by then I was assembling under the leadership of a new vice president, John Van Ness.  Ken transferred to the Van Ness team in March 1984 to head up annual giving.  Into the breach jumped a young and enthusiastic recruiter who had shown exceptional grasp of the Huddleston model, Lorraine Zimmer.  Under Lorraine, recruiting marched foursquare into the marketing world even as Van Ness mobilized our institutional development forces for an unprecedented entry into fund-raising.  But that's another story.

 Sincerely,  Bodger

      M.S. did not answer Bodger's letter for several weeks.  One evening she called on the phone to say that her prospecting plans were moving far faster than she ever thought they would.   She was in conversation with a national headhunter about an opening at a small private college in the south.

"Count on me to be on the lookout for them from the very start," she said.

"For what?"

"The 'important market factors,' of course."

That was his last conversation with her before he would board a plane many months later heading south.  He would be going to her inauguration. 

The board came to life with new leadership 

In the meantime, Bodger reflected on the gap he had left in his conversations with M.S.   "The buildup of the board leadership was the indispensable piece in 'making headway' and I never talked about it with her."  He would not burden her with more of a tale already too long.  But for his own satisfaction he wrote a few paragraphs.  Filing the short piece, he said to himself, "This provides a last narrative touch, though it should have been the first—strengthening the board was the first order of business."  This is what he wrote: 

REVITALIZING THE BOARD

 Paul Guest resigned from the board in May 1978 to protest its approval of my changes in student life policies.  Since Guest was in line to become president of the board after Ted Schwalm, his departure compelled us to consider new options.  The main consideration was to start a new chapter in the life of the board.

Schwalm had become chair during Helfferich's administration and had held the position throughout the Pettit years.  I had prevailed on him to remain as a holding action in my first two years.  This prevented Guest from quickly stepping in before I could make a move on student life changes, which I feared he would oppose.  After Paul resigned, Schwalm knew that he had served my purposes to a kind of completion and insisted on retiring.  By then, he wanted to spend time writing a memoir about his active and productive career as businessman, churchman, family man, and civic leader.

In my years as assistant to Helfferich and Pettit, I had gained some insight into the evolution of our board.  You cannot understand it without referring to something that happened in 1946 and its effect on D. L. Helfferich.  In that post-war moment, as I understand it at a distant remove, opposition arose among some alumni to the leadership of President McClure and his vice president, Helfferich.   The alumni association initiated an inquiry into alleged shortcomings.  The board apparently agreed to receive the findings.  Helfferich expended a good deal of energy behind the scenes to assure that the resulting report found no substantial fault.

Although the crisis passed and McClure went on to serve until 1958, with Helfferich succeeding him, it left a permanent scar on Helfferich's mind.  He must have vowed to himself to do everything possible henceforth to protect the administration from such threats.  One strategy for doing so was to keep close to the vest the vital statistics about the operation.  And when he moved from vice president to president in 1958, he sought to create an imperial aura around the office and its functions.  He once told me it was somewhat like nurturing a cult of personality.  Its purpose was to create a shield around the administration, to keep potential critics at bay.  Helfferich's histrionic bent enabled him to play such a grand role.  He combined it, however, with his innate sense of humor and talent for surprise, both of which he employed to keep faculty, alumni, and other would-be challengers to his authority off guard.

Consistent with this strategy, Helfferich worked to keep the board of directors (as well as the alumni association) passive and compliant to his initiatives.  No one came onto the board without his careful scrutiny and affirmation.  He managed the board agenda with an iron hand.  He kept its work compartmentalized by committee so that a critical mass of opinion on the operation as a whole would not crystallize.  Two criteria for membership predominated.  A director should agree with Helfferich's conservative attitudes toward education and be prepared to support his policies.  And a director should be prepared to give financial support.  Not everyone, of course, towed his line to a T.  Because of his allegiance to the Reformed church constituency of the college, he invited some church representatives to serve who proved at times to be more loyal to their convictions than to Helfferich's policies.  Additionally, a number of board members who were alumni felt an ownership of the college independent of their service to Helfferich.  The non-alumni businessmen on the board were usually his most supportive members.  In all, however, the board did his bidding.

Having learned from Helfferich, Pettit sustained a reactive and supportive board when he took over in 1970.  Even when the issue of board-faculty-administration relations heated up toward the end of his administration, the board steadfastly stuck by him.  During his six-year administration, Pettit recruited twelve new people, a good number of whom would prove to be valuable in my administration.   Among them were John Shetler from the church; William Robbins, '29, who would leave a generous estate to the college on his eventual death; Marilyn Steinbright, whose personal gifts and those of her Arcadia Foundation had a greater impact on the college in the next quarter of a century than any other single source of financial support; L. G. Lee Thomas, a friend of the Helfferich's, who tightened our ties to the Main Line and to Lee's circle of corporate influence; and John Ware, head of the American Water Works and former Pennsylvania state Senator and US Congressman.  Ware was a classmate of Pettit's at the University of Pennsylvania.  He would become a key figure in my effort to move the board toward renewal.

Coincidentally, I had heard of John Ware in the 1960s before coming to the college.  I then was working at the Philadelphia Gas Works.  Ware's corporate empire went beyond water to gas and other products, and he was then presiding over the Pennsylvania Gas Association.  My acquaintance with his name came from my PGW bosses at the time, Charles G. Simpson and Walter P. Paul, who served with him at the Association.

But I first met him when he joined the college board.  Pettit had offered Ware a convenient venue when he needed to become acquainted with new constituents in the wake of a legislative redistricting.  He agreed to join our board as a kind of payback after his legislative service ended.  The old Red and Blue tie had a lot to do with it too. 

Ware's presence added significantly to the public image of our board.  He was a quiet and simple man, but he carried great weight and respect in corporate, governmental, and philanthropic circles in our region and nationally.  He operated out of a nondescript office in his hometown, Oxford, PA, which was southwest of mushroom country, almost into Maryland.  From that off-center position, he played major roles at his alma mater, Penn, and in philanthropic support on a broad front.  His presence on our board sent the message that the college had the endorsement of a businessman, public servant, and philanthropist known for integrity, reasonableness, and loyalty.

A number of alumni board members urged me to recruit Ware to preside over the board in the wake of Ted Schwalm's retirement.  He was the strongest person we had.  When I met with him, I proposed a relatively short time of service, a couple of years, during which we could cultivate a new leader for the longer term.  I would try to limit his time to that required by the formalities of presiding.  John readily agreed, to my pleasure and amazement, with one condition—that I do everything possible to identify a graduate of the college to lead the board after him.  He had bought into the doctrine at Penn that a college or university board is most vital when an alum with a life-long loyalty and commitment to it is in the chair.  He had noted that Schwalm was not a graduate and felt it limited the reach and persuasiveness of the chair.

I readily agreed to his condition, for it accorded with my own view.  During Ware's brief term of leadership, 1979-1981, I discussed succession with him and with other key players on the board, including Helfferich.  One of my fond memories is that of driving out to the Red Rose Inn near Oxford on Baltimore Pike to have lunch with Ware.  There we would review the agenda for an upcoming executive committee or board meeting; and there, in a private corner reserved for him, we would scan the candidates to succeed him.

Thomas P. Glassmoyer, '36, emerged from this process as the natural candidate in the minds of most board members. Tom had given long years of service to the college and epitomized the loyal alumnus.  Originally he was an officer of the alumni association.  That led in the mid-1950s to his election to the board as an alumni representative while McClure was still president. Only Helfferich and a couple of old-timers from the Reformed church had been on the board longer than Glassmoyer.  Throughout his years on the board, he gave pro bono service as the board's legal counsel.

Everyone felt that Tom's reputation as one of Philadelphia's top corporate tax attorneys would boost the reputation of the college itself in the region.  He was happily married to a college alumna, who was also actively involved with the college over the years; and their daughter was a graduate.  Tom had graduated as valedictorian of his class and had excelled at Penn Law School.   He cherished his memory of undergraduate years and was happy to acknowledge that the college laid the foundation for his professional success.  He equally enjoyed his memories of events and personalities associated with the life of the board over the years.  He had seen the board evolve from a lethargic body under the extraordinarily long leadership of Harry Paisley to a governing body ready to step out vigorously into the new decade of the 1980s.  He enjoyed nostalgically reminiscing about the whole span of his college experience.  In short, he was a walking example of the college's brightest and most loyal graduates.

I had seen Tom in action as a board member during the Helfferich and Pettit years.  He was a congenial team player with a somewhat gruff exterior, a stylistic trait familiar to me in other Philadelphia lawyers.  His first instinct as a board member was to support the incumbent leadership, even when he was not sure its position was the best one.  He was temperamentally conservative but operationally pragmatic.  I knew that he would be lukewarm on some issues but would usually defer in the end to what I felt was best for the college.  He felt self-confident about the inner workings of a board that he had served and helped to develop for many years.

I went to his center city office to propose the new role and found him ready to move up—he already was first vice president.  As his law career peaked, he had the time now to give significant charitable service.  He sensed that I was trying to push the college to a different level of perceived and real value and saw himself supporting such a push for an indeterminate period ahead.  It clearly pleased him to contemplate capping his life-long service to the college by becoming the leader of its board.

With Glassmoyer's assent in hand, my next stop was the office of Bill Heefner, '42.  He was altogether as qualified to take the chair as Glassmoyer except for Tom's seniority.  Bill had led a major financial campaign during Pettit's presidency and served as treasurer for a number of years.  He too had an exemplary undergraduate experience and, like Glassmoyer, looked at the college as a foundation of his success in law school and in the building of his large law firm in Bucks County.  My working relationship with Bill was closer than the one I had with Glassmoyer.  Bill had been one of the earliest advocates of my candidacy for the presidency and had been a confidential and trusted advisor as I went through the process of getting elected.  He understood my sense of the need for deliberate change at the college in a way that few others did.  I felt it was essential for the college to keep him in a leadership role.  When I proposed that he become the vice president of the board behind Tom, he agreed.  His strong commitment to institutional decorum made it comfortable for him to see Glassmoyer as next in line.  As a fellow attorney, he knew and respected Glassmoyer's attributes and knew he would work well with him.  At the same time, Bill and I understood, without having to express it, that he could not wait forever to assume the chair.

In Glassmoyer and Heefner, two fellow alumni were in place to give me the guidance and support needed to move ahead toward the institutional objectives that were beginning to crystallize for the 1980s.   The move toward a roster of more active members under their leadership took place at first through evolution and attrition rather than through a systematic program.  Death or retirement in the years from 1981 to 1984 removed a number of major figures who started serving in the Helfferich era—Philip L. Corson, William Eliott, Harleston R. Wood, all prominent Delaware Valley businessmen.  I lost an activist ally when Joseph T. Beardwood, III, '50, died prematurely in 1983 of cancer.  An early computer specialist, he had been head of the alumni association when I first came to work at the college in 1965.  He and his wife Louise, '50, had remained trusted comrades as I moved up through the college administration.

In this four-year period, I sought out a number of new members.  Each of them brought substantial new talent to the table and broadened our horizons.  Nearly all of them would come to play major parts when the board bought into an ambitious plan to move the college forward.

Hermann F. Eilts, '43, was the former US Ambassador to Saudi-Arabia and then Egypt.  In 1976 he had withdrawn from consideration as a candidate for the college presidency because he remained obligated to his State Department post beyond the deadline the board had set for making a choice.  Negotiations between Egypt and Israel made his presence there critically important.  Eilts was the candidate of a powerful group in the faculty, led by Eugene H. Miller, '33, his former political science professor and mentor (and mine, for that matter).  I thought that by inviting him to be on the board I could neutralize residual feelings of disappointment in that group.  His presence might give them the sense of having a trusted overseer and pipeline at the board level.  Hermann was a steadfast friend of his alma mater throughout his illustrious diplomatic career.  I don't know how much attention he paid to the political fault lines within our little campus community, but I'm sure his global diplomatic vision made it a snap for him to put them in perspective.  He had trouble attending meetings after he took a major professorial position at Boston University under President John Silber.  But I traveled periodically to Boston to meet him and benefited greatly from his insights on higher education, his new-found profession.

John E. F. (Jef) Corson was the adoptive son of recently deceased Phil Corson.  We had named our 1970 administration building in honor of Phil and his wife, Helen.  Jef had been managing the old family business for Phil and his brothers before it was sold to a public corporation.  A Williams College alum, he had a quick mind and sharp business acumen.  He was a member of the Republican Party establishment that dominated Montgomery County politics for generations.  He thus represented an old local constituency of the college; but he had a good-humored, no-nonsense style, based on his certainty of who he was.  We had become acquainted during his father's last years.  After Phil was gone, I proposed that Jef take his seat on our board.  He immediately acknowledged a sense of family obligation and began his service.  Like Glassmoyer and Heefner, he was a team player with a predisposition to support and encourage management—just the kind of younger ally I needed.  Jef became an officer of the corporation in a few years and oversaw the finances of the college for many years, beyond my tenure.

William G. Warden, like Jef Corson, accepted my invitation to join the board out of a sense of family duty.  His father, Clarence, who died in 1980, had been on the board since the McClure years.  As president of the local tube manufacturing company, Clarence had represented the county business community.  He also brought the quiet dignity and resources of an old Main Line family.  Bill Warden followed his father into the management of the company after a career as a fighter pilot in the Air Force.  Encouraged by Clarence's widow, Bill's stepmother, I met with him to suggest a continuation of Warden service to the college.  He too felt the weight of family obligation and said yes.  Coincidentally, he was like Jef Corson in having graduated from Williams College.  Bill and I got along well from the start.  We found a special bond when I told him that I had once worked for the UGI Corporation.  The first William G. Warden had founded the huge utility holding company in the nineteenth century.

Other recruits came from the ranks of successful alumni.

Donald E. Parlee, '55, had been president of the alumni association and we shared a knowledge of the campus as it was in the early 1950s.  Don typified the loyal alum who had married his campus sweetheart and, having attained professional success, was preparing to "give back" to the college that laid the groundwork for his happy place in life.  He was head radiologist at one of the largest suburban Philadelphia hospitals.  Don's sense of responsibility as a director would grow over the years to make him one of the quintessential leaders during the later period of my presidency.

Thomas G. Davis, '52,  was another of the scores of alumni physicians who had

the qualities needed to strengthen our board.  He too had married his campus sweetheart.  He felt heavily indebted to the college for the intellectual challenge he received from gifted professors in his student years.  His career path had taken him from general practice to a vice presidency with a major Philadelphia drug company.  Early in his service he chaired the board's Business Economics Council.  I had cobbled this into being soon after becoming president to bring the business and academic perspectives to a common table.  Some board members and alumni worried that the college would be infected by the anti-business bias that they perceived to be endemic in higher education nationwide.  (My own sojourn in the corporate world before coming to the college apparently absolved me of their suspicions.)  Tom's energetic work in recruiting provocative panelists for the Council's symposia showed that he would be a major player in the life of the board through the decade.  He helped make the Business Economics Council more than a defense mechanism.  Its programs enriched the academic program in the social sciences with real-world voices on current issues.  It brought the name of the college to Delaware Valley opinion makers.  It was a proving ground for identifying possible board members.  Tom had a clear vision of the multi-dimensional value of the Council.

Betty Umstad Musser, '45, combined two essential qualities for distinguished alumni service to her alma mater.  One, she was passionately interested in the transformative power of the college in the individual lives of students.  Her passion focused on the fine and performing arts and the humanities.  She liked to mix it up on campus with creative faculty and students.  Second, she was married to one of the Philadelphia region's most enterprising business leaders, Warren V. "Pete" Musser.  Pete was a Lehigh University alum who was emerging as a prophet of the entrepreneurial breakthrough that would transform American and global business in the coming decade.  Pete was known to be a generous philanthropist, and Betty made it clear that she was willing to help advocate her college with her spouse.  More than all that, Betty combined a lightsome personal quality with a lively curiosity about ideas.

From the standpoint of higher education, the best addition to the board came as we entered the next period of my administration.  Eliot Stellar was the father of Jim, '72, a campus leader with whom I had spent many hours agonizing over college policy in those stressful Pettit years.  Eliot was then the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, the number two officer.  He resigned his position during Penn's own stressful times in the Martin Meyerson administration.   His default position was to become president of The American Philosophical Society.  With Jim's encouragement after his father's return to the medical school faculty at Penn, I invited Eliot to serve and he agreed.  He immeasurably broadened and deepened our board's academic perspective.  He became a mentor to our new academic dean and added his persuasive voice to our application for faculty development funding at Pew.  As chair of our government and instruction (academic affairs) committee, he gave us confidence as we sought to enrich our program.  Eliot's marvelous self-confidence, brilliance of mind, happy sociability, and acknowledged place among America's leading intellectuals injected a unique quality into our institutional life.  If I were to count the five or six most important acts of my entire administration, I would be certain to put on my list the recruiting of Eliot Stellar to our board.

The informal process of identification and capture that brought such new members aboard did not proceed fast enough to effect the needed transformation of our board's culture.  That led us to create in the mid-1980s a President's Council, an "incubator" for growing board candidates.  We invited promising potential board members to serve for a couple of years on the Council, which met twice a year.  We would inform them of current policy issues and ask them to analyze problems in simulations of business school case studies.  This gave them a chance to think about further service and gave us a chance to choose the most promising and most interested candidates.  A number of new members joined the board through this process.  These and others who came aboard by less formal recruiting efforts reshaped and revitalized the board in the years from 1984 to the turn of the decade.  Without them, the senior leaders, particularly Glassmoyer and Heefner, would have been unable to mobilize the board support needed for the college to "arrive" during my administration.

The board received a unique infusion of energy and perspective in 1984 when Gladys Pearlstine joined its ranks.  She and her spouse, Raymond, lived on the perimeter of the campus in their home, "R Glad House."  Ray, a Collegeville native, was the long-time solicitor for Collegeville borough and head of one of Montgomery County's outstanding law firms.  Gladys was a charter member and former chair of the board of the Montgomery County Community College, which came into being in 1965.  With Ray, she was an active alum of the University of Pennsylvania.  She brought a cosmopolitan interest to social and educational issues, all the while remaining happily rooted in the local community.  Gladys encouraged the board leaders to look beyond the parochial boundaries of the college and supported Bodger's efforts in that direction.  The Pearlstines climaxed their support of the college later when they gave "R Glad House" to it; with renovations and expansion, it became the home of the president following my tenure in office.

Gladys Pearlstine was not the only local leader to give new strength to the board in the mid-1980s.  David Cornish, then president of the local flag and costume manufacturing company, grew up in Collegeville.  He played on the campus as a boy.  Family members had attended the college, though David went away to Gettysburg.  When he served the borough as mayor, he learned of the complex ways in which town and gown complemented and at times conflicted with one another.  In that role he worked to smooth and strengthen the town's relations with its largest organizational inhabitant.  His appointment to the board in 1986 thus symbolized a coming together of the interests of the community and the college as the institution's plans for aggressive development grew.

Throughout, a basic principle was driving me as we sought new board members.   I was elected to office by a passive board.  In the Helfferich and Pettit administrations, the power to act had gravitated heavily toward the administration.  The board had become an affirming rather than an initiating governing body.  I wanted to move the college to a new level of quality.  I knew that this would be impossible unless the board transformed itself from a passive to an active board.  I knew that a more active board would ultimately allow less latitude for initiative by the administration.  It was a shift I was willing to foster if it would allow the college to gain substantial new academic strength within itself and new market strength.

An occasion arose on 6 December 1984 for me to express this conviction.   What I said there serves to round out this reflection on the board.  The occasion was a seminar with a group of American Council on Education Fellows.  John Pilgrim, who under my sponsorship was a Fellow in 1984-85, organized the meeting for a dozen or so other Fellows.  John asked me to talk about the way our board and I worked together to make policy decisions.  I reflected on the demographics of the board at that point and described the way the board and I were relating.

I reported that about half (20 of 39) of the members who elected me president in 1976 were still serving eight years later.  Ten had died, seven had become life members, and two had resigned.  In 1984-85, virtually all of the 19 no longer actively serving had been replaced.  Of these, I had identified and cultivated seven new members.  Seven others were identified and cultivated by another member of the board with my help.  Four were identified and cultivated by the alumni association with my help.  The new members were in a rainbow of categories: local corporate leaders; women; a local community leader; United Church of Christ representatives; person s of wealth; sons of former members; an outstanding academician; a socially prominent Philadelphian; successful alumni in business, diplomacy, and the professions.

The ACE Fellows mainly wanted to talk about our policy-making process.  I painted an impressionistic picture of a proactive president working with a board that, with the injection of new blood, was steadily gravitating from passive to active.  Here are some of the statements I made to them before we got into a question-and-answer session:

PRESIDENT LEADS:  In our traditional way of operating, the board expects the president to lead actively and aggressively in identifying priorities and new policies….The board is an affirming board, not a corporate board or a "rubber stamp" board….[R]ecently board members have been encouraged to take a more direct hand in prior policy deliberation.

CONTROL OF THE AGENDA:  He who makes up the agenda of committees and the schedule of meetings guides the governance system.  Here, the president's office does this, in collaboration with appropriate staff.

WE ARE CHANGING:  Our board is more passive than active, but it is supportive and, we hope, informed.  It is in a developing process toward a more active mode of operating.  The president is the chief instigator of this change process, not the board leadership itself.  As this new process evolves, the president's role will be to coordinate and orchestrate more variables.

PRESIDENT LEADS, BUT…The president has to walk a narrow edge in his relations with the board.  The board that hired him becomes subject to his own influences and priorities, but he is always accountable to it.  The board expects him to initiate, but he must successfully confer ownership of his initiatives on the board itself.  He must take the initiative but be prepared to attribute it to the board and give it the credit.

A HUMAN RELATIONSHIP:  The relationship between president and board that matters most is not the legal or formal relationship but the human relationship.  Trust, respect for the role each can play on behalf of the college, sensitivity, shared commitment to the welfare of the whole enterprise, a joy in the spirit of the place--these matter most.  If the institutional mission is clear-cut, these human relationships will generate the most momentum for the progress of the institution.

NEVER-ENDING ATTENTION:  The president should NEVER become lulled into a complacent attitude toward board dynamics, especially when things seem just fine.  Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, the board is absolutely important in the one crucial decision regarding the president: it alone hires and fires him.  The president needs to create the board situation actively.  This needs to be done with individual members as well as with the board as a governing entity.  In our case, the president can move with confidence that the board leadership will support his initiative--and with equal confidence that, if he errs or presumes too much, the board leadership gently but effectively will send him a signal, with plenty of room for him to heed it and adjust gracefully.  If he misses the signal, the board's ultimate authority will be demonstrated in spite of him sooner or later.

STRENGTH OF BOARD ESSENTIAL:  A weak board leads a weak college.  A strong board leads a strong college.  A president who keeps a board weak to protect his authority will lose his ability to lead more readily in the long run than one who builds a strong board.  Nevertheless, a president needs to preserve the strength of his own position with a strong board.  A strong board that wants a weak president will lead the college into weakness.

D. L. Helfferich died at the age of 84 on 23 January 1984, nearly a year before I made these pontifical remarks.  He and his wife Anna had moved to a retirement home a few years before and he hated what it foretold of his future.  He had a circulatory problem that grew worse and that toward the end resisted treatment.  However, he remained on the roster of active board members.  I communicated with him from time to time, mainly in notes, still seeking his counsel, but mostly his affirmation.

When we hired John Van Ness as vice president for college relations—a major step toward speeding up the advancement of the college—I sent him John's resume.  I covered it with a note saying I thought he could do the job.  Some board members were uncertain John was the right choice.  I feared that they might convey their reservations to D. L.  My note to him was thus preemptive.   He returned my note in the mail a few days later and attached a comment on a small slip of paper.  "I'm for him," it said.  It was his last word to me before his death.  I took it as a good omen for the next big phase of my administration.

Throughout the eight preceding years, D. L. had been there as a force, wishing only my success, and doing anything he could to assure it.  I felt inordinate gratitude that, even as he neared his end, he had seen what I felt I needed and had given it.  He wanted to reassure me that I was doing the right thing.  In D. L.'s passing I saw a perfect marker for transition to the next period of my presidency.

Bodger ended his paper on the board and filed it neatly in a drawer.  Perhaps one day, he mused, M.S. and I will be able to compare notes on how she went about building a board at her new place.

 END CHAPTER FIVE, M.S., PART TWO (Making headway, 1979-1984)

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  5 November 2005 Richard P. Richter