interpretive essay

Donald L. Helfferich's event-filled presidency ended on 31 October 1970. His taste for the dramatic gave a colorful curtain to his long years in the administration (1936-58 as vice president, 1958-70 as president). He timed his retirement to coincide with the completion of the college's first hundred years. The centennial celebration therefore took on the dramatic color that he created around his departure from the presidency. And because it coincided with the centennial celebration, his departure seemed to become a little larger than life. It seemed to wink with destiny's glitter.

In his final year, Helfferich sought to stamp his administration with a lasting seal of success. Unverified rumor held that he was less than enthusiastic about the account of his administration in the manuscript centennial history of the college written by Calvin D. Yost, '30, professor of English and librarian. Whatever his opinion of the manuscript, its printed version, which did not appear until after his death, caught a note of success that he would have wanted to hear:

The campus [i.e., addition of new and upgraded facilities] gives

concrete evidence of his leadership during

his presidency; then there are the intangible gifts to the spiritual,

intellectual and social life of the College, just as real if not so

easily enumerated. He brought the College through to its

Centennial Year able to look back on its first hundred years

with justifiable pride.

About a month before Helfferich left office, the college sent an update on its condition to the Middle States Association, its regional accrediting agency. It was an answer to some of the questions raised by a visiting team in 1968, when Middle States reaffirmed the college's accreditation. The update acquits the college on some specific issues dealing with faculty workloads and documents other advances in the academic program. Then it concludes with an assessment of the general condition of the college. It was certainly Helfferich's view of what he was leaving to his successor to carry on:

We are extremely pleased with the recent progress that Ursinus

College has made on all fronts and we are proud to report it.

We believe that we are in a far better position than ever before

to meet the challenging days ahead. It would give us great

pleasure indeed to have members of the team who visited us

in February of 1968 to return to the campus to see what has

taken place in less than three years.

Helfferich did not limit his use of the centennial moment to mark his administration with a seal of success. He also used it to point the college on the path it would take into the first years of its second century.

He gave his farewell report to the board of directors a self-deprecating spin as he faded from office. In a bit of doggerel he wrote,

And so to retreat--perchance to dream;

I'm still running little errands for the faculty and dean.

He said he moved comfortably "to the cryptic bench marked Chancellor," giving the impression that his continued influence and presence would not weigh heavily on the board or his successor. The board decided to create this new office with scant job specifications other than the requirement that the incumbent concern himself with finances and fund-raising. It mainly wanted to ensure that Helfferich would be a resource for the new president.

He could justifiably move out of the president's office with a degree of comfort. He could feel that he had labored as hard as he could through the centennial year--while still towering over the college--to set its future course. His labors had concentrated on three critical points. With key board members, he had affirmed the ability of his long-time academic dean to assume the duties of the presidency. Through a systematic long-term planning process, he had handed the board a comprehensive and ambitious plan for developing new financial resources and for further advancing the quality of the institution. Perhaps most important in his mind, he had obtained the board's vote in principle for a ringing assertion of the college's conservative philosophic temper.

While he might retreat and run little errands as chancellor, no one doubted that he would be watching to see how the fruits of these labors would fall. His "cryptic bench" gave him an official though sketchily defined place from which to watch events and, if he chose, to try to influence them. Helfferich himself knew that his effort to fix the course of the college would not determine it but merely open a possible avenue among others. He knew that there were uncertainties and unresolved tensions surrounding the choice of president, the long-term development plan, and the declaration of philosophic conservatism. He was also enough of a theater man to realize that he no longer would direct the play or perform the lead role. The "cryptic bench" might look to some observers like a familiar director's chair, repositioned for a better view of the actors. Helfferich himself knew his influence, great or small, would come mainly from the work he already had performed.

With the election of the veteran academic dean, William S. Pettit, to succeed Helfferich, the segments of the college community entered into a kind of running dispute that helped to define the years from 1970 to 1976. As Helfferich himself might have privately expected, the dispute enfolded the three critical points on which he had labored as he prepared to depart in the centennial year. In essence, the college community was seeking to clarify its priorities and directions while struggling to survive in a daunting external environment.

This contentious exercise went on through the entire period. It engaged the voices of the board, administration, faculty, students, and some alumni. The argument was not very orderly or disciplined. Sometimes the participants thought it was about bread and butter rather than basic institutional values. Sometimes two segments of the college community contested without the knowledge or involvement of other segments, compounding confusion.

The dispute made for a politicized mood much of the time on campus. This unsettled many people. Some remembered the Helfferich years with nostalgia, forgetting that internal and external discord often disrupted them too. Others wished for a better time to come. In spite of the mood--sometimes because of it--students played hard and worked well, and faculty pursued their professional tasks diligently. Likewise, in spite of or because of the mood, the administration and board satisfactorily did the daily tasks needed to keep the operation going. The successful records of students of these years following their graduation confirm the essential effectiveness of educational work through the six-year period.

Nevertheless, the students happened along at a time when the internal dynamics of the college and events in the nation combined to provoke disagreements over the direction Ursinus should take. The college community had to confront these disagreements and resolve the tensions before it could take next steps in its development as a liberal arts college.

***

Participants in the events of that time did not always clearly see the genesis or the complete picture of these tensions. Reflecting on them a quarter of a century later, I think I discern more clearly than I could at the time a pattern running through the disagreements. The remainder of this essay tries to trace that pattern through selected events of the period. Mainly I am seeking to satisfy a long-felt personal need to bring greater order to memories of an exciting time in Ursinus's history and a formative time for me. If this perceived order also contributes to the understanding of others interested in the college's development in those years, that will be a gratuitous extra.

The disputes at the time seemed to arise from the opposition of two differing ideas about the purpose of the college as it moved beyond the Helfferich era. Faculty, administrators, students, and board members seemed to gravitate toward one or the other of these ideas, depending upon their personal convictions, their roles in the college's life, and their vision of its traditions and prospects. Looking back, I can still see the participants playing their roles in response to these two motivating ideas. The interpretation of events that follows will remain faithful to that original impression, even though this involves the risk of oversimplification. After outlining the two ideas below, I will try to minimize that risk by identifying the several historical threads from which they were woven.

One of the two motivating ideas was that the college's overriding reason for being was to develop the moral character of students in the broad sense of that term. While the academic program was obviously the principal activity of the campus community, it was in service to the larger end of making better human beings--the "whole" person. In principle, the college developed the students' intellectual attainments as a means, not an end. The knowledge gained from the academic course of study, from this viewpoint, would enhance the ability of students to be better moral agents in the world, whatever professions they might enter.

Because of this priority, the college encouraged students to learn and practice excellence in their behavior as well as in their intellectual endeavors. To do this, it set forth expectations for social conduct, complete with disciplinary sanctions. Just as students would progress in knowledge in their classes, so they would progress in their responsible behavior outside of class. The college sustained the extracurricular and residential programs not just for relaxation and comfort. It designed these programs to give students opportunities to develop the social and leadership skills of a fully developed person. The result was to be the proverbially "well-rounded" graduate, developed in every sense--intellectually, socially, and morally--to serve society. In this view, the out-of-class program, centered in residence hall living and dining in common, and the social interaction of students with one another, were as important as the curriculum in the programmatic structure of the college. Because of the importance of these aspects of the college experience in the history of the college, the administration and the board of directors watched over them with a sense of special responsibility.

The second idea about the purpose of the college was that it was overridingly an academic enterprise. The faculty professed knowledge, and students learned from them. The faculty thought of themselves as members of a profession that divided into disciplines and areas of learning. Although at Ursinus at that time they rarely were publishing scholars in their disciplines, they tended to define themselves in terms of their disciplinary callings. Their allegiances with colleagues on campus often began with the members of their department or division. They encouraged their best and brightest students to advance as far as possible within their majors. They were always on the alert to bring a promising student into the disciplinary fold, to get them excited about biology or political science or whatever.

Those who espoused this second idea did not deny that the college developed the moral character of students. However, from their viewpoint, student values developed mainly from the content of the liberal arts, the honest and objective pursuit of truth in courses, and the influence and example of teachers in action. Faculty prided themselves as mentors who valued their students as developing human beings, even those students who were not academic stars. They acknowledged that the social experience among students and the many extracurricular activities played a part in their development. But they tended not to be overly intentional in wanting to direct extracurricular life, and they were quick to condemn its anti-intellectual effects. When they did become involved, they usually favored any steps that would reinforce intellectual values at the expense of purely social values. Although by custom they shared in the administration of student discipline with deans, they were often ambivalent about this role when social values were at play. When students violated rules that jeopardized the academic program, however, they tended to be vigilant.

A number of faculty adherents to this second idea who were graduates of the college had a special loyalty to the institution--grounded in the rich experiences they had had as students and as fledgling instructors in their familiar terrain. In an intimate way, they knew what it meant to be "molded" by Ursinus. Their loyalty, however, did not neutralize their commitment to this second idea about the basic purpose of the college. If anything, when dispute over priorities arose, it gave them a feeling--as faculty members--that they knew better than anyone did what would best serve the college's interests.

These two ideas about college purposes in the 1970-1976 period could appear to be quite separate and distinct from one another. Participants of that time, however, would probably have agreed, if they could have gained the needed perspective, that they were really differences in emphasis and orientation rather than categorical opposites. A member of the board, administration, or faculty at a given moment in a particular discussion might have felt sympathetic to the first idea or to the second, depending on circumstances. To a certain extent, the disputes arose from the reluctance of Ursinus people of various groups to see that they actually stood on ample common ground with those who appeared to disagree with them. Indeed, that actuality made it possible, in the end, for Ursinus to hold together in spite of the disputes and to go forward in subsequent years. However, the differences were real. It was necessary for the people of Ursinus to deal with them in the politics of the institution before it could undertake an unabashed renewal in a subsequent period.

It helps to understand that the conflict over college purposes did not arise suddenly out of nowhere in the heated-up political atmosphere of that particular historical moment. Each of the two differing ideas sketched here had a lengthy genealogy in the history of American colleges and a particular track of development at Ursinus. Before probing how they played out in some of the important events of the post-Helfferich period, I would like to try to identify the historical threads woven into the two motivating ideas of the time. This should soften the impression that, by pitting two overarching ideas against one another, I am drawing an overly simplified interpretation of a complicated situation. This attempt to order events in terms of a simple opposition starts with an acknowledgment of the complexity of underlying crosscurrents.

***

The first idea, emphasizing the development of moral character, had venerable roots in the very beginnings of American higher education. Ursinus in 1869 was founded in religious piety hardly less strident than that which accompanied the founding of Harvard in 1636 and all the denominational colleges that preceded Ursinus's start. The first president, John H. A. Bomberger, and the three presidents who followed him all were men of the cloth. They were wholehearted advocates of "Apostolic Christian" faith through the old German Reformed (later Evangelical and Reformed) Church. Most of the early instructors also were ordained ministers, who placed a premium on moral development. All doubtless would have subscribed to the declaration of a contemporary president of Amherst College in 1872: "Character…is of more consequence than intellect." Character meant Christian character to them. By linking education with religion, they aimed to discipline the intellect along with the emotional side of human nature, using Biblical truth as an ultimate reference. The outcome they sought was a graduate whose mental and moral faculties were in balance, equipping him to serve society as a fully formed Christian.

The moral fervor driving the early college rings forth in the following passage from the 1881 catalog:

[The college aims] to give chief prominence to the moral and religious

element of education as of supreme value. Without true views of life,

and right principles for its government, the acquisitions of learning

only increase man's power for evil.

While the overtly religious foundations of the old regimen gradually declined at Ursinus, following a nearly universal pattern in mainstream denominational colleges, important themes lived on. The old pietistic approach established a fundamental link between virtue and supervised discipline in and out of the classroom. It was the first basis for educating "the whole person." By harnessing intellect with morality, it left a legacy of "service" at colleges such as Ursinus. A respect for a higher order of things remained in the institutional memory long after the early years of pietism. (The religious affiliation of the college remained symbolically fixed and visible through the uniquely long leadership of board president Harry E. Paisley. An active Reformed church layman, Paisley served as head of the board from 1909 to his death in 1961 at the age of 97, surely a national record.) This helped sustain a serious concern about moral responsibility if not about explicit forms of religious practice. At its core was the lingering idea of an enduring right and wrong in human behavior that was immune to changing fashions and generational enthusiasms. The mission statement in the catalog of 1970-71 carried a trace of the old piety up to the modern day. It said that the college would cultivate in students, among other qualities, "ideals of morality and service consonant with the Christian character."

Ursinus in its early years implemented the pietistic worldview in part through the curriculum of "mental discipline." This theme, too, flowed out of the past and helped to enliven the conflict of ideas about college purpose in the 1970-1976 period. It harnessed academic work to the development of character. In 1869, this hoary curriculum based in the Greek and Roman classics was actually losing its hegemony in American colleges of the old kind. At the same time, upstart institutions such as John Hopkins University and Cornell University were opening to a wholly different modern beat that would ultimately change most of American higher education. However, Ursinus, new to the game but old in its orientation toward piety, adopted the traditional curriculum of mental discipline pretty much as Yale had canonized it in a famous 1828 defense--at least as much as it could afford. This was consistent with Bomberger's pietistic motives. Yale had declared its support for the traditional goal of education, "the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge." Colleges pursued this goal through disciplined study of prescribed classical texts in daily class recitation, with no electives. The rote form of learning allowed professors without special knowledge to conduct classes in a variety of subjects from day to day.

The curriculum of mental discipline in its original form did not last at Ursinus any more than at other colleges in step with changing times. Even before Bomberger retired in 1890, science courses came into the curriculum, and other innovations blew into the Perkiomen Valley from the larger academic landscape. Changes in the academic preparation of professors and in instructional methods over time left the old approach behind. But it combined with religious piety to leave lasting traces. It subordinated the intellectual pursuit of knowledge as such and correspondingly elevated mental discipline as a higher value. It made diligence in class a virtue that professors ever after would seek in their students. (Complex in its lasting influence, the curriculum of mental discipline also was a genealogical source for the second motivating idea about the purpose of Ursinus, as we shall see shortly.)

The first motivating idea of the 1970-1976 period, relating to character development, had another genealogical source in what historian Frederick Rudolph aptly called "the collegiate way." The collegiate way was to set up a residential campus in a sylvan setting, out of the way of social distractions, and then to engage students and faculty in an intensive living and learning experience. It harked back to the original Harvard College and to its models in the rural colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. In the American form of the collegiate way, as it evolved through the two and a third centuries before Ursinus came on the scene, paternalism and discipline were its keynotes. Rules and regulations in residence halls and dining halls combined with compulsory chapel to control the moral and social development of students.

The regimented social experience of the collegiate way complemented the curriculum of mental discipline in "rounding" the student into a responsible adult. The collegiate way translated into the legal doctrine of in loco parentis. Through the decades, students at Ursinus, like those elsewhere, both chafed at and enjoyed the collegiate way, and the college, like others, adjusted the regimen as styles and expectations changed. The metaphor of "family" persisted as a description of the collegiate way throughout the century. The whole idea of educating in an intimate residential setting shines forth from the following language out of the 1913-1914 catalog:

The college aims to provide thoroughly healthful, wholesome and

homelike conditions in the residences for both young men and young

women. The boarding department is made an educational asset in

the institution. All resident students take their meals in a large,

cheery dining room constructed on artistic and thoroughly sanitary

lines. The meals are prepared in a spacious, well-lighted, sanitary

kitchen with complete modern equipment.

By controlling the conditions under which the students live, the

college provides a physical basis for its higher functions that

insures not only health of body and joy of life, but greatly

promotes mental efficiency and success in intellectual pursuits.

Most students and some faculty by 1970 perceived that the comparison with "homelike" conditions had grown thin and that the collegiate way at Ursinus was best described as "controlling." When they compared the Ursinus rulebook with those of similar colleges, they concluded the Ursinus atmosphere was excessively regulatory. Still, the long and attractive tradition of the collegiate way gave strength and legitimacy in many minds to the idea of the 1970-1976 period that character development was the first goal of the college. This was so even though many advocates of the idea probably saw little connection between the collegiate way and the traces of the pietistic impulse and of the curriculum of mental discipline. Indeed, most on both sides of the disputes felt at least a nostalgic connection with the more colorful and humane features of the old collegiate way, even in the midst of revolutionary social changes spawned in the late 1960s. The challenge in many minds was to preserve the desirable features of collegiate life while muting its paternalistic and disciplinary keynotes. The collegiate way, of course, aimed not only at disciplining the social life of students but also at providing a setting for the development of the intellect. This historical tradition, therefore, while mainly flowing into and supporting the idea that the college's aim was primarily the overall development of character, also bore on the second idea, as we will see.

(To follow the path of development of the old piety at Ursinus and its convergence with the collegiate way, see the analysis of catalog copy in Appendix I.)

That second idea--that the college was overridingly an academic enterprise--would have been obvious and uncontroversial in 1970 if an academic revolution had not occurred in American colleges during the century of Ursinus's existence. Clearly, the old curriculum of mental discipline was academic in its commitment to classroom recitation and prescribed text. Starting after the Civil War, however, professors in American colleges ceased over time to come mainly from the clergy. The German research universities and the graduate programs in American universities (those hatched full-fledged and those that metamorphosed out of the old colleges, led by Harvard and Yale) spawned a new class of academic professionals. It changed the nature of most colleges by changing the character of the acceptable credentials and the disciplinary boundaries of their curricula. The first Ursinus faculty member to hold a Ph.D. degree, from Yale, Edmund Morris Hyde, came to the college in 1887 (Calvin D. Yost, Ursinus College, 57-8). This was less than twenty years after the founding. By fits and starts, Ursinus thus launched itself on a long journey. It was moving toward its destination as a modern liberal arts college, with faculty members who were conscious of themselves as practitioners in fields of disciplinary expertise that flourished independent of any single institution. It was moving toward the type of institution labeled by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman a "university college." In such a college, the main priority of academic professionals became that of preparing students for doing graduate work in universities in major academic fields. This was never the only priority, and it had to compete with other, more practical outcomes, such as preparation for business and high school teaching. The latter were especially important at Ursinus. Nevertheless, the sense of linkage with graduate programs and a culture of professionalism came to characterize the life of the faculty at Ursinus as it did at other colleges of its kind. This tilted such institutions toward a vision removed from the old college pursuing the classical plan of Yale.

The rise of scientific research in the post-Civil War universities drove the academic revolution and had its effects at the undergraduate level. Ursinus was teaching science at a relatively early stage of its existence. It soon came to focus on the science required for preparation to do graduate work in the medical schools of the Philadelphia area. In time "pre-med science" would become the dominant attraction to Ursinus students interested in preparing for professional and graduate school.

Also in the late nineteenth century, the scientific spirit led to the development of modern social science disciplines. Economists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists came out of the graduate schools to teach in colleges such as Ursinus. They augmented the professionalization of the faculties of such institutions. At the same time, they gave a new kind of intellectual support for the goal of "service" to society. This reinforced older ideas about institutional purpose rooted in the pietistic tradition.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, "liberal culture" in new humanities departments of the emerging universities developed in reaction to the new scientific emphasis. This laid the groundwork for the development of departments of English literature, modern languages, and philosophy in undergraduate colleges. Ursinus followed the pattern, sometimes lagging behind a little because of limited resources.

The split between sciences and humanities had a fragmenting effect at Ursinus as elsewhere in undergraduate colleges. The relevant observation here, though, is that the advocates of liberal culture were just as professionalized as were professors in the sciences. Their graduate school pedigrees and professional self-definition were of first importance to them. We need to emphasize this point because the movement for modern liberal culture reached for roots in the old classical curriculum, that mainstay of piety. Moreover, the advocates of liberal culture, with their emphasis on an ideal moral order and the values of civilization, found the old collegiate way to be a friendly setting within which to teach. In short, professors in the humanities had intellectual affinities with the older order, but that in itself did not align them unqualifiedly with the idea that the college's primary purpose was character development. The faculty across the disciplines, to be sure, had differing professional backgrounds and intellectual traditions. But those backgrounds and traditions rested on the common ground of academic professionalism.

I have taken this quick excursion through a couple of centuries of American college history to put some additional flesh on two basic ideas about college purpose. (For a more extended discussion of the themes touched on above and an identification of sources, see Appendix II.) One of those ideas emphasized the development of character and, as our historical excursion suggests, had deep roots in the old piety and pedagogy and in the collegiate way. I propose to use the term parochial purpose as shorthand for this idea in the ensuing discussion. Any such shorthand risks misrepresenting a complex reality, but the genealogical exercise may have provided some antidote. Also, "parochial" may ring a pejorative note in a reader's ear. I do not use it to convey a critical judgment but to suggest that those who favored this idea gave priority to local institutional ownership of the process of character development. Developing character was the special work of the faculty and staff of a particular place, with its own texture of habit and tradition.

The same may be said about the purpose of conveying knowledge, of course. However, that second motivating idea at play in the 1970-1976 period was firmly in the hands of a professional faculty. The professional style was unabashedly intellectual, and its practitioners tended to view it as "cosmopolitan" rather than local and particular. Faculty members could differentiate their teaching in the various academic disciplines from the college's programmatic aim to shape the moral behavior of students. In the extreme, they could even think of "character development" as an obstacle to their work when it appeared to be nothing but the enforcement of social rules and regulations. As shorthand for the second motivating idea about the college's purpose in the interpretation that follows, I will use the term professional practice. Here too, the excursion into American college history may have helped to minimize the danger of oversimplification.

***

Through nearly all of Ursinus College's first century, attitudes of faculty and students toward the changing relationship between its parochial purpose to shape behavior and the professional practice of the academic disciplines remained fairly supportive and stable. A willing cadre of professors managed to sustain loyalties to profession and to institution with little sign of discomfort. They shared a Christian life (or tolerance of that life). The registrar's (admissions) office admitted mainly like-minded students to campus. A non-sectarian policy on admission ensured from the start that the student body would not be narrowly Protestant Reformed in religion. But most students for many decades were homogeneously white, middle class, and Christian. Most were graduates of public high schools in eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. The corps of people who administered the college and a good many of the professors worshipped in the Reformed church or kindred denominations. The presence of a Reformed minister on campus as a chaplain, the annual celebration of Christmas with the traditional performance of Handel's Messiah in Bomberger Hall, the important role of the student "Y" in student affairs, and other Christian activities gave the college a religious appearance. Under these conditions, the board and administration could feel that they were perpetuating the original purpose--to shape behavior according to Christian principles. Because the campus community broadly shared the same values, they could feel, at the same time, that this was not incompatible with the increasing academic strength of the faculty and its departments.

It took the social and political upheavals of the last half of the 1960s to begin to reveal that a parochial tradition and professional commitments could tilt the college one way or the other. President Helfferich had to concern himself with the disrupting effects of the anti-war movement among students and the overturning of traditional social values. In the early stage of conflict over norms of student behavior and the rules surrounding student life, he was usually flexible but always determined to hold onto the paternalistic collegiate way that he knew so intimately. Faculty members began to be less comfortable in the climate set by the surviving elements of the parochial purpose of the college. But Helfferich's commanding presence and the felt need of the faculty itself to keep order in Collegeville while campuses erupted across the nation combined to keep professional faculty concerns off the front burner.

After Helfferich withdrew in 1970 and Pettit took over, external pressures continued to impinge strongly on the campus. They had a major influence on the internal debate when it got going in earnest through the 1970-1976 period.

The disillusionment of the younger generation with the system that took the US to Vietnam remained. When the government ended the draft for college students, much heat left campuses, but they could not go back to a pre-Vietnam consensus on the way institutions should run. Ursinus students, like those elsewhere, by the early 1970s were becoming less confrontational in pursuing a youthful style of life but no less determined than their elder siblings to have greater freedoms. This put them in opposition to the surviving social rules that came to stand for the behavioral goals at the heart of the parochial vision. The national Watergate trauma leading up to President Nixon's resignation in 1974 only intensified their sense of distance from an established order.

But the social revolution paled as an influence on the campus debate when compared with the economic crisis of the 1970s. Double-digit inflation caused by the world oil crisis and the cost of war put an unprecedented squeeze on college finances and personal budgets. It forced the college to seek frantically for more cost-efficient methods of operating. It also pushed faculty members into a state of anxiety about their ability to live on paychecks that year by year lost purchasing power, even when the college gave small periodic percentage increases.

While Ursinus was experiencing what all colleges were experiencing in this troubled period, it seemed noticeably different from some of the colleges to which people compared it. Its administrative leaders did not have the standard academic credentials of the typical educational leaders of selective liberal arts colleges. It was possible for faculty members lacking terminal degrees to attain tenure and influence among their colleagues. The administration still dominated the promotion and tenure process, and criteria other than professional performance occasionally appeared to determine decisions. The baby-boom student body was bright, as befitted the Sputnik-inspired school preparation of the time. However, the student body was rather homogeneous, as noted above. Through the selection procedures and self-selection, the majority leaned toward the conservative side of the scales when social attitudes and political persuasion were measured--a contrasting vocal minority to the contrary notwithstanding. The social policies of the college were conservative too, when compared with those at many similar colleges in the East. The rules prohibited alcohol on campus and severely limited contact between men and women in dormitories. Strong voices against the social upheavals of the times dominated the board of directors. Although the college had a long tradition of independence from denominational control, the board and administration acknowledged the connection with the United Church of Christ (successor to the Evangelical & Reformed Church) and sought to give it meaning in the way they managed the college. A local style of thought, rooted in Pennsylvania Dutch matter-of-factness and in traditional concerns for correct behavior, continued to preoccupy the leadership and many of the members of the campus community.

Despite such differentiating traits and some anomalies, Ursinus had an acknowledged place among the liberal arts colleges in Pennsylvania. In retrospect, it is possible to see it in 1970 at some point on a trajectory very much like that of other colleges. That trajectory, as we saw in our excursion into college history, was toward a role as a "university college" in the sense of that term given by Christopher Jencks & David Riesman in their book, The Academic Revolution. That is, Ursinus was moving toward the priority pursued by the recognized national liberal arts colleges of the time--that of preparing the majority of their students to go on to graduate work in a university. In 1970, Ursinus was playing that role to a considerable degree in the sciences and pre-medicine, less so in other disciplines. But it is unlikely that a college spokesperson would have described its purpose in such undiluted terms. The administration, board, many faculty, and many alumni had strong convictions about the importance of developing "the whole person" irrespective of his or her graduate education or career beyond Ursinus. In insisting on this role, Ursinus was not unlike comparable colleges or even the national liberal arts colleges, except in the degree of importance it attached to it. In summary, related social, political, and economic conditions were crowding in on Ursinus's homegrown path of internal development as the 1970s began. The college was different but not uniquely so in its preoccupations.

The local differences, however, are the stuff of personal memory. And it is personal memory rather than historiographic method that shapes the sections that complete this essay. I was at Helfferich's elbow when he crafted the three-fold legacy that he gave to the Ursinus community as he left office, and I helped his successor to deal with its consequences. That is why the following sections focus on that legacy. The two competing ideas about the college's purpose loom vividly in my memory as forces that energized my contemporaries and me. That is why they are central to this interpretation. The resulting picture probably bears only limited resemblance to the whole tableau of Ursinus in those years. Perhaps it contributes a little to it, however, while it establishes some long-desired order in my personal remembrance of events. (I shift to third-person references to myself in the remainder of the essay.)

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