Third part of AN INTERPRETATION, continued from Second part
Faculty Argue for Professional Priorities
The selection process adversely affected the faculty's will to follow Pettit's lead. It appeared in their eyes to deprive him of the legitimacy of leadership. Before he took office, a critical letter from a senior faculty member, soon to retire, appeared in the student newspaper. Donald G. Baker, professor of classical languages, complained of "the callous indifference to student and faculty opinion in the selection of a new president." Baker's forthright if awkward public statement probably caught the sentiments of more than a few colleagues disinclined to express them.
The lack of confidence felt by such faculty in Pettit's presidential authority led them over the course of his administration to take two initiatives. In both initiatives, they believed they acted because they had a responsibility to uphold the quality of the professional academic enterprise. What led to conflict was their corollary belief that the administration was failing to uphold it. The first initiative had to do with financial resources. The second had to do with faculty representation on the board of directors.
Faculty knew what double digit inflation was doing to their family budgets. Some were genuinely hurting. Others generalized from their experience to see a serious threat to the quality of the professional practice of the institution. As they saw it, low morale, caused by poor pay and poor future prospects, fed on itself to make the financial problem feel even worse than it was. Additionally, faculty said they feared that the lack of a good pay scale would diminish the ability of their departments to hire and retain excellent professors in the right specialties.
The start of a new administration in November 1970 purchased a little time for good will. To call it a honeymoon, however, would be a stretch. By March 1971 the issue of money was on the faculty meeting agenda. A faculty committee had been investigating practices at other colleges for reimbursement of expenses involved in attending professional meetings. For the committee members, this in large part was an issue of institutional quality rather than personal finances. If Ursinus professors did not receive reasonable reimbursement, they would not attend meetings. They would thus fail to keep up with the scholarship in their disciplines. That would lower the academic quality of Ursinus. The faculty committee recommended a catch-up strategy for Ursinus until reimbursements equaled those at comparable colleges; and it suggested that the college increase reimbursement scales over time to keep pace with inflation.
These modest recommendations kicked off the faculty-administration debate over principles and priorities that was to characterize the entire period. Two responses to them are noteworthy for an account of that debate. First, the faculty voted to send the recommendations directly to the board of directors. Second, the president, chairing the meeting, voiced a word of caution.
The procedural step of communicating directly to the board, though no one said anything at the time, constituted a significant departure. The board agenda under Helfferich had been his to determine. Any faculty presence or representation of view was at his call. In numerous crises, he had carefully controlled the access of faculty and students. They communicated with board members on his terms. Pettit did not directly tag the action inappropriate at the time. Faculty therefore could feel that they had found a new means for expressing themselves on board policy directly to the governing body. In communicating directly with the board, they were seeking their welfare--and, as they saw it, the welfare of the professional practice of the institution. By doing so, however, they appeared to put at risk the prerogatives of the administration, which had custody of the parochial purpose of the college. The parochial-professional balance of forces was thus to a degree jeopardized by the initiative of the faculty. The issue of governance relationships raised at this time would persist through the period.
Although Pettit chose to say nothing on the spot about the direct communication to the board, he did caution the faculty. Immediate implementation might not be possible, he said, because inflation was making the college budget ever tighter. A $150 increase in tuition for 1971-72--a 5.5% increase--would hardly be in line with the cost of living; and to push higher would begin limiting the access of students from families with modest incomes.
At the following board meeting in May 1971, Pettit's voice on reimbursement policy and related benefits had the final say, faculty recommendations to the contrary notwithstanding. He sought and received board approval for a policy statement on faculty benefits that would not soon achieve the goals suggested by the faculty committee. The policy was "not an attempt to curb activities but to limit unnecessary ones."
It may have appeared to the board that Pettit had handily won a point in the argument with faculty over reimbursement benefits. But the faculty moved on to the larger issue of salaries. At its May 1971 meeting it elected a committee to study faculty salary structure and policies for increments, with a mandate to the committee to report back by the end of 1971. The proposal originated with the Ursinus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Although the active members were relatively few, their colleagues on the faculty tacitly concurred when these members presumed to speak for them to the president and the board. A patina of professionalism still attached to the AAUP, giving it a sort of legitimacy in the campus debate, although never explicitly acknowledged. Near the end of the 1970-1976 period, the patina dissolved in the eyes of the administration and board when the local chapter flirted with unionization.
The faculty as a whole, in voting for the study, prevented the AAUP initiative from looking like a maverick move. It voted to refer the study to the standing committee on promotion and tenure, augmented by three others elected by the faculty.
The report that came back in December predictably found Ursinus salary increments lagging behind cost-of-living increases. It urged a near-term catch-up strategy for salaries of full professors, which had taken the hardest hit. The committee's final recommendation demonstrated its sense of stewardship for the quality of professional practice. Performance evaluations from department heads on individual professors, it said, would be useful to the dean and president in deciding who should get how much in annual increments. As a statement in the debate, the committee was probably implying that the dean and president appeared remiss in not requiring performance evaluations. Faculty critics were beginning to believe that those who remained loyal to the parochial vision embodied in the administration received favor when it divided up the small amounts for salary increases. The college would best serve the professional practice of the college, the committee was saying, if it installed a system that would dispel such suspicions, unfounded or not.
What happened after the committee made its report and recommendations on salaries in December 1971 characterized the style of the prolonged debate over principles and priorities. At first, nothing much happened. And that, of course, the faculty heard as a response from the administration and board. They heard it as a negative answer to the question they had posed: Can or will the college do anything substantive about the financial plight of its professional practitioners? Some attributed the lack of response to the lack of authority lodged in the president. That kept alive the sense that limiting conditions had accompanied the selection of the president.
When audible messages about college finances did come from the president and others in the months after the committee's December 1971 report, they did nothing to encourage faculty to expect redress from the inflation pinch. From a professional standpoint, faculty felt that the foundations of the academic enterprise would be in jeopardy as long as a financial solution to their salary dilemma remained undiscovered. They felt justified in looking to the leadership for solutions. They felt frustrated when they perceived that the administration seemed unable to offer any.
As department heads set about building their budgets for 1972-73, Pettit cautioned them to be frugal in their expectations and complete in their plans. Contrary to past practice, they would no longer receive approval for expenditures for unbudgeted needs that cropped up after the new operating year began. When the board budget committee approved Pettit's 1972-73 budget in April 1972, it directed him to prepare the faculty for more fiscal tightness.
Before he could do that, the AAUP at the 5 April 1972 faculty meeting acted again to push the president and the board on salaries. It intended that its resolution reach the board at its upcoming meeting on 12 May 1972. This time the AAUP did not call for more study. It called for salary increments "sufficient to meet immediately the increased cost of living." It also recommended raises as soon as possible to put Ursinus averages in a certain category of the nationally published AAUP salary scale.
Pettit immediately expressed sympathy with the resolution. He endorsed the raising of salaries to correspond to the category IIB-2 on the AAUP salary scale. But he said he objected to a commitment to meeting the cost of living increases. He explained the precarious situation of private higher education in the inflationary and competitive climate in the nation. He explained the financial problems at Ursinus in particular. Payments on the new debt for Helfferich Hall were demanding. The need to restore Bomberger Hall and install a College Union in the old library building required the use of funds that the college otherwise could spend for salaries and other operating expenses.
Faculty tended to remember Pettit's objection and to forget his endorsement. They were even more certain that his basic message was bad news after he spoke at the following faculty meeting on 3 May 1972. Here Pettit dutifully carried out the directive he had received from the budget committee in April. Among other cutbacks, he told the faculty he anticipated a moratorium on expenditures for capital equipment and for faculty travel (in direct conflict with the earlier faculty hopes for catching up to sister colleges in their reimbursement allotments). And he hoped that the administration could "avoid cutting or freezing faculty salaries." It was a sobering moment.
In effect, Pettit on 3 May 1972 gave an answer on behalf of the board to the faculty's 5 April 1972 question. He did this before the faculty resolution came to the official attention of the board at its 12 May 1972 meeting. We might speculate about his timing. Perhaps he anticipated a negative reaction from the board to both the form and the substance of the faculty's recommendation. He wanted to cushion the feeling of letdown that this would bring to faculty. He wanted to cushion the reaction of the board that faculty were getting out of line. So, he took it on himself to convey a preliminary bit of bad news about salaries on top of the bad news about moratoria on travel expense and capital expenditures. This would let faculty know forthwith of the limits to improvement and shield the board from having to process the faculty communication. In passing, it might signal the faculty that their growing taste for sending messages directly to the board was not about to alter the basic line of governance through the president to the board.
But this speculation is not essential to the thesis of this essay. We do know that the board had made it clear as a condition of his appointment that the president should hold the line--on the fiscal management of the college as well as on campus order and the social code. Pettit could feel he was performing his duty well in notifying the faculty in a timely fashion of the financial constraints.
Although on his own he had responded in effect to the faculty's message, he did his duty to them when subsequently, on 12 May 1972, he submitted their recommendation to the board. He probably repeated his endorsement and his objection for the benefit of the board and probably informed it of the warning he already had conveyed to faculty on 3 May 1972. The board members, like the president, sympathized with the declining buying power of faculty. Unlike the president, they felt they had officially dealt with the issue in the goals for improvement set in the new fund-raising program, Century II. That Century II was not in fact funneling sufficient gift dollars into the income side of the budget to permit salary increases did not faze board members. They had given a mandate to Pettit to manage and keep order and his reports indicated he was doing that well. Century II fund-raising was going along and would continue to command the energy and attention of key board members. Owing to the limited terms of his appointment, Pettit was not able to propose far-reaching ideas for solutions. The board and the president, mutually reinforcing, were ill disposed to make budget balancing an even more difficult act by pumping up salaries as recommended.
So matters stood as news about the financial conditions in Pennsylvania's colleges and universities worsened. A survey by McKinsey & Co., commissioned by the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Universities, showed that the vast majority of institutions were becoming financially more vulnerable. On campus Pettit shared the McKinsey news, giving Ursinus better grades than the average but still warning of the adverse conditions. These included public disillusionment with colleges in the wake of disruption and violence, cutbacks in government assistance, the likely inroads on private-college enrollments by the newly emerging community colleges, weakening demand in admission (perhaps owing in part to the waning of the draft for college-age men), and a "grim" placement market for graduates.
At their 6 December 1972 meeting, faculty learned the surprising and disheartening news that the college was failing to meet the original enrollment assumptions underlying Century II goals. Vice President Richard Richter, who was responsible for executing the development campaign under Pettit, told the faculty the enrollment assumption in the financial plan was 1250. The tuition stream of income was adversely affected because that target was now found to be unrealizable. Total enrollment figures remained a hundred or more short of that. Because gift funds from Century II were making up the operating shortfall, they were not enhancing faculty salaries or professional development.
Richter did not go on to explain that the annual operating budgets prepared for the board's approval made enrollment assumptions that were unrealistically pessimistic. They not only did not anticipate income from 1250 students; they did not even anticipate income from the actual 1100 or so then enrolled. The number was more about 985 or so. Because of this low budget estimate of tuition income, an operating deficit routinely appeared in the budget submitted to the board, regardless of the amount of gifts to the operation. At the end of the actual operating year, the better-than-budgeted enrollment would then yield the extra income to close the gap or come close to it. Because of this practice, started years before by Helfferich, budgeted operating expenses always looked excessive, even when the college achieved economies. This budgeting practice made the inflationary pinch look and feel greater to Pettit and his fellow administrators than it was--although it was real enough. They did not think that a detailed explanation to faculty at this point would improve understanding or perception. The fact was that, any way they looked at the situation, money was tight and inflation was making it tighter.
At the national level, President Nixon's Cost of Living Council in 1973 declared a 60-day price freeze to deal with the inflationary economy. It included college tuition, room and board fees. The freeze lifted and Ursinus was able to increase its charges. But the atmosphere of fiscal distress symbolized by the threat of a freeze added to the gloomy mood on campus.
The argument over salaries appeared to line up the faculty and administration on opposite sides of the table. The administration, constrained by the fiscal realities and the terms of the president's engagement by the board, appeared to be holding the line on expenditures in a style consistent with the parochial frugality of the place. The faculty appeared to be increasingly vocal advocates for saving the professional practice of the college from the destructive effects of inflation. One of the ironies of the argument was that the president came around by 16 November 1973 to a robust call to the board to improve salaries. Most faculty failed to know of his call or to credit him for it. The board responded in the budget with amounts that would prove too little and too late to end the argument.
At that November meeting, Pettit got as far out in front of the board as his limited mandate would permit him. He said the faculty were among those "most punished" by the inflationary economy. He set as a "requirement" for the year ahead "a supreme effort to move in the direction of restoring the purchasing power that our faculty members have lost during the recent year or two and additionally to support a substantial number of merit increases in salary. To this end we must direct our careful and thoughtful attention." Pettit's message on the need for salary improvement was unmistakable. In a less argumentative climate, faculty members might have enjoyed taking credit for having succeeded in winning him to their point of view and in moving him to assertive action--and he might have enjoyed leading the way to an agreed-upon solution.
But the difficult financial environment persisted despite some advance in meeting the goals for faculty support in Century II. Small salary supplements in the 1974-75 year showed a will on the board to heed the president's call for a supreme effort. They did virtually nothing, however, to relieve the actual financial pinch felt by individual faculty members. The supplements probably did more harm than good to the morale of faculty. Again in the spring of 1975, urged by Pettit, the board conditionally authorized $50,000 for salary increases in the 1975-76 year. The lack of a promise and the smallness of the amount further fed the unhappiness of faculty.
As faculty pushed to change financial priorities and the administration worried over the mounting operating expenses caused by inflation, students played a muted counterpoint on the financial issue. Students knew the college was trying to keep tuition affordable. One student editorialized that instead of making the college cost-efficient, this effort made it "just plain cheap," but that view was not widely discussed. Each year, when considering how much to increase the charges, administrators agonizingly sought to find the precise amount that would yield maximum income without stirring criticism from students and their parents. They thus managed to hold down criticism but also held down needed increases in income. While Pettit and the board were contending with faculty concerns over finances, the Weekly editorialized in favor of a $400 tuition increase for 1976-77. It acknowledged that volunteer gifts would not be enough to keep up with expenses. The administration took some comfort from this show of student understanding of the need to bring in more income to combat double-digit increases in expenditures.
In the end, the president's words and deeds on salaries did not tell sufficiently in the ears of faculty. In the fall of 1975, the enrollment income was sufficient to allow Pettit to go ahead with the salary supplement conditionally authorized the previous spring. He called a special meeting for 17 October 1975 to announce this. One-time salary supplements, he said, would range from $100 to $400, with full professors getting the least and lower-paid instructors the most. But Pettit's announcement failed to capture the attention of the faculty. As he spoke, most were wondering what would happen when he and the board digested an unprecedented letter of concerns that would hit his desk that very day.
In the previous spring, many faculty had come to feel that only a truly dramatic call from the professoriate would stop the unproductive giving and taking that characterized the debate being conducted with and through the president. To avoid the appearance of narrow self-interest, that call would have to emphasize the need to maintain the quality of the professional practice of the college. If such a faculty thrust were to destabilize the relationship between the academic enterprise and the parochial purpose of the college as embodied in the president and board, they felt that such a consequence would be justifiable. In the fall of 1975, a small group drafted a letter addressed to the president and all members of the board. The draft of 7 October 1975 passed muster with those working on it, and it became the final form of the message, bearing that date. It listed six concerns and called for immediate remedial action by the board. In the ten days that followed, the drafters went the rounds to solicit signatures of support from tenured colleagues. All of them sympathized and nearly all signed the letter. In the end, a total of 37 faculty signed.
The drafters did not ask untenured faculty members to sign because they might have feared it would jeopardize their chances for promotion and tenure; but some signed anyway. The influx of a number of young faculty members during the 1970-1976 period had increased the ranks of the untenured. They had brought new expectations for professional development and new viewpoints on the Ursinus campus culture. Some came to wonder when resources for faculty would increase. Some found the campus culture confusingly provincial. Their presence and their views doubtless encouraged the longer-serving leaders who wrote the letter of concerns.
An unprecedented political move by faculty, the letter gave fresh life to the major points of conflict over principles and priorities reaching back to the circumstances surrounding the selection of the president in 1970. For better or worse, it created a new playing field on which the administration and board would have to deal with the faculty initiative on salaries. As we will see below, significant change in salary administration resulted before Pettit departed from office.
Hoping also to succeed on their second initiative--securing a voice for faculty on the board--the faculty included it in the list of concerns itemized in the letter delivered on 17 October 1975. But the parochial purpose, now wrapped in the cloak of a policy statement on conservatism, restrained the board from granting that desire. A brief look at events reveals the board's unyielding opposition to the second initiative.
After that look, we will examine the formal and the substantive responses made by the administration and board to the unprecedented letter of concerns.
Virtually all faculty members supported the initiative to allocate more money in support of the professional practice that was their basic responsibility, including more money for their own welfare. A smaller but still significant number felt as deeply about the second initiative that came to the floor of the faculty. They believed it bore directly on financial decisions. Professional interests of the faculty would be better tended if faculty members had voice and vote as full-fledged members of the governing body. They felt that the conditional terms of Pettit's selection made this presence particularly important.
The desire of faculty to have one or more of their own on the governing body arose long before Pettit took office. President Helfferich and President McClure before him resisted the desire as a matter of governing principle. Their opposition had the solid support of the board. The legal view of the college attorney, Thomas P. Glassmoyer, '36, prevailed. Members of the faculty sitting on the board would be in a conflict of interest. They would be exercising management authority over themselves and peers. This would render them incapable of objectively exercising the fiduciary and other responsibilities legally incumbent on board members.
Nevertheless, a modus operandi, grounded in the tight-knit college community, had finessed the issue for some years. The wife of a faculty member, herself an alumna, served from 1960 to 1970. Technically, she owed her board membership to her nomination and election by the Alumni Association; it had the right to choose five alumni board members for no more than two five-year terms each, none of whom could be members of the faculty. But then-President Helfferich informally had given his and the board's nod to the nomination in advance. Muriel Pancoast, '38, was the wife of G. Sieber Pancoast, '37, professor of political science and for a long time the dean of men and baseball coach. His complementary career as a Pennsylvania State legislator for fourteen years--pursued while continuing to carry a sizable course load--had earned him special stature in the college community. As a young married couple, the Pancoasts had done their service as live-in proctors in a women's dorm. Muriel's principal life's work was teaching in the local school system, but she had served as a part-time secretary of the Alumni Association. She was a classmate of Paul Guest, a vocal defender of the parochial tradition on the board. The Pancoasts were close friends of Thomas Glassmoyer and his wife, also an alumna. The Pancoasts were members of Trinity Reformed Church across the street from the campus, which had close historical ties to the college. Helfferich and other college leaders knew that Muriel was good-willed, insightful, and discreet. They could trust her to be a responsible custodian of the unofficial compromise agreement lying behind her board membership. Her service allowed the board and administration to avoid the election of a faculty member; and it allowed the faculty to feel that they had direct touch with the board's authority.
The mandatory conclusion of Mrs. Pancoast's two terms of service ended this mutually satisfactory arrangement. In 1969, Helfferich and the board attempted to provide a different but equally satisfactory arrangement short of electing faculty to the board. The proposed arrangement responded to stirrings of faculty and students over issues of governance that Helfferich had labored hard to contain, precursors of those that fueled the 1970-1976 debate. Board president William Reimert nudged Helfferich in this direction in the last months of Reimert's leadership before his death on 1 October 1969 at the age of 67. Reimert's letter of appointment to one of the faculty members to be involved explained the purpose and the strategy. The aim, commendable in the eyes of interested faculty, was "a closer relationship among the several elements of the college community." There were two parts to the strategy. The board henceforth would invite a member of the faculty and a representative student to meetings of the board. Second, a faculty and a student representative would serve on the "principal committees" of the board.
The letter of appointment sent to one faculty member over Reimert's signature elaborated on the new relationship being advanced by the board. (It also served to remind faculty that the board made the decisions):
It is the function of the Board and its committees to pass judgment on
policies and procedures recommended by the President of the College
who speaks officially for the staff and faculty and students of the College
before the Board.
Under the new arrangement, the Board and its committees will turn to
student and faculty representatives for background information, and
suggestions in reaching their decisions. The President of the College
has asked me to encourage you to discuss your suggestions with him
in advance of Board committee meetings.
Had this approach taken full root, the board may well have avoided the faculty's push for a seat on the board during the contests of 1970-1976. At least one major faculty participant believed so. Reimert became terminally ill and with him went a powerful influence on Helfferich's judgment. Helfferich implemented the strategy selectively. He remembered when the whole truth about the shaken finances of the college in the Depression years would have destroyed the confidence of the faculty. He had become a master at dispensing enough of the picture to be responsible and encouraging without showing the full extent of the weaknesses. Despite Reimert's encouragement and his own inclination to take dramatic turns, he could not quite come to believe that the time had arrived for greater disclosure. Some appointments to committees took place and others did not. Guests began to receive invitations to board meetings on a regular basis. But essential committees went on meeting without faculty and students. When Pettit moved into the presidency, he perpetuated the selective implementation of Helfferich. The initiative to include faculty and students in the board's business through committees brought lasting representation on buildings and grounds and in long-term planning (through the intermediary staff long-term planning committee). This was an insufficient presence, however, to persuade faculty that they had access to the levers of final decision-making.
After 1970 the old faculty desire remained, especially among some alumni faculty members who felt disenfranchised by the board's policy. The limits they perceived on the new president's ability to lead, owing to their critical view of the selection process and its outcome, gave their desire a renewed intensity. Some faculty wanted assurance that the viewpoint of the academic professionals of the college would have direct influence on decision-making at the board level. They wanted to have a first-hand listener at the deliberations on policy that would determine their salaries and the parameters of their professional lives.
The initiative to gain a voice on the board surfaced just a few months after Pettit was in office. The occasion was the same 3 March 1971 meeting where faculty pushed for better reimbursement for professional travel expenses. The simultaneous surfacing of both financial and governance initiatives probably was intentional; at least it showed the range of attention faculty members were giving to the principles and priorities of the college early in the new administration. As in the initiative for better salaries, the local chapter of AAUP took the lead on the floor of the faculty. The faculty approved its proposal to put two faculty representatives on the board. The action included a directive to the secretary of the faculty to forward the resolution to the secretary of the board. The effect of this directive was to reinforce the faculty's expectation that the president himself would convey the message to the board. He did so without his endorsement just two days later, on 5 March 1971, when the regular board meeting took place. He told the board it was a manifestation of "the participation explosion," a reference to the opening up of social processes in the late 1960s. The board referred the matter to its nominating committee for review after several members spoke against it. Not surprisingly, the nominating committee at the next board meeting (14 May 1971) recommended against the request.
It was not clear then and is not clear now how much tactical cooperation took place between faculty members and students who took part in the ongoing debate over the directions of the college. Whatever it was, a proposal from the student government reached the board at its 10 May 1974 meeting. It sought a seat with vote for one faculty member and one student. The board again turned down the request. It would not have been unreasonable for Pettit and board members to assume that some faculty were sympathetic to the student initiative, perhaps even in some way initiators of it, although they had no evidence of this.
The desire for board representation may have appeared to some board members to be an isolated show of dissatisfaction with the governance of the college by a few faculty members. The refusal of the board to act favorably, however, did not lay the matter to rest among faculty. When the letter of concerns appeared on 17 October 1975, faculty representation on the board surfaced as one of the six issues calling for immediate remedial action. Although it took the letter of concerns seriously, the board never weakened in its opposition to giving a voting seat to a faculty member. In this it felt legitimized by the parochial purpose, reinterpreted by Helfferich's statement on the college's conservative temper. The board leaders saw boards at other liberal arts colleges welcoming faculty and student members. These governance changes appeared to be episodes in the general rearrangement of social structures precipitated by the radical movements of the late 1960s--a rearrangement to which they were in the main opposed. It was a small step for them to objectify their visceral sense of opposition and make it into a manifestation of the parochial purpose of the college. Faculty came to realize that the board and president, however diplomatically they might behave in response to the letter of concerns, would resist this initiative to the end.
***
We turn now for a more systematic look at the formal and the substantive responses of the board and president to the 17 October 1975 letter of concerns. By sending it, the faculty won for itself a new voice, which the president and board could not ignore. The very submission of it directly to every board member, combined with the bill of particulars, made 17 October 1975 the critical turning point in the prolonged argument between faculty and the board and president over principles and priorities. (The date on the letter was 7 October 1975; the date of delivery was 17 October 1975.) It put on the agenda of the college for the first time in a formal way larger questions of institutional balance. It gave the college a new opportunity, after years of undisciplined contest, to redefine the desired interrelationship of its parochial purpose and professional practice of the faculty.
The letter arrived on his desk on the same day that Pettit announced the favorable news about salary supplements for 1975-76. It listed six concerns and called on him and the board to meet with a small group of faculty to discuss them. It spelled out the following concerns: (1) "...drastic and imaginative action" should take place "to improve basic faculty salaries if Ursinus College is to maintain its academic excellence." (2) The administration had not been totally candid with alumni about the Century II Program. The alumni "should be fully apprised of the fact that while Century II was publicized as a total success, ...it has not fulfilled one of its original goals--namely, the improvement of faculty salaries." (3) The administration did not fully disclose the budget. Faculty should "participate in decisions as to the allocation of financial resources." (4) A grievance committee should be elected. (5) The faculty had not been given its "rightful role in the governance" of the college. The expertise of faculty should be utilized in making administrative decisions. (6) Faculty should sit on the board.
After the faculty delivered the letter to the president and mailed copies to all board members, the form of the communications among board, president, and faculty between 17 October 1975 and 17 February 1976 became almost ritualistic in character. No one doubted that the faculty had finally succeeded in pushing the years-long debate about principles and priorities to some sort of climax. At the same time, all parties seemed to sense that delivery of the letter created a serious situation that had as much potential for harm as for good. Loose words, false reports, hasty demurrers, or hot heads could have caused the prevailing civility to crack. That could have led to an unsought communications breakdown. The basic educational operation would then have suffered. The public would have received bad signals. And the grievances themselves would have gone unaddressed.
Fortunately for the stability of the college, the faculty showed some patience. The letter of concerns had ended diplomatically by disclaiming personal animosity and espousing "genuine concern for and loyalty to Ursinus College." The president and board, for their part, took care to prepare measured responses to the concerns. A calculated but considerate tone descended during the gaps of time between communications. Everyone seemed motivated by the very enumeration of issues to remain orderly while the college squared up to the problems. The undertone of dissatisfaction with the presidential selection process, dating back to 1970, now had surfaced in the forthright expression of grievance. This seemed to cleanse the atmosphere. Faculty could feel as if they had finally had their say up front; the board and president could now think about how to respond; and the faculty could patiently but persistently wait for the invitation to meet and talk.
Pettit formally acknowledged receipt of the letter when the faculty gathered for its monthly meeting on 5 November 1975. He read the whole thing to the faculty on the premise that not all faculty had signed it and some might not be aware of its contents. He further said he could not immediately respond because the letter writers, in sending copies to all board members, had drawn thirty or more additional and concerned people into the discussion. He would have to wait for reaction from the board before he could respond as president.
Two days later he received a letter saying that the signers had met and elected a committee of five representatives who made themselves available to meet with the president and board. The "committee of five" were chemistry professors Roger P. Staiger,'43, and Ronald E. Hess, business professor Harry C. Symons, and political science professors Eugene H. Miller,'33, and G. Sieber Pancoast,'37. The whole faculty later ratified this selection.
On 14 November 1975, the board responded to the letter by way of a letter to the president, with instructions to him to communicate the message at the next faculty meeting, which took place on 3 December 1975.
Pettit met his promise to respond to the faculty at the 3 December 1975 faculty meeting. In addition to reading the letter from the board, he laid out a detailed plan designed to deal with some of the expressed concerns. Together, the board letter and the president's plan sought to be a total substantive response to the 17 October 1975 faculty letter of concerns. The "committee of five" would not be content, however, until it succeeded in meeting with a board committee. That meeting belatedly took place after the semester break, on 17 February 1976. The participants went over ground already staked out by the previous responses from board and president with little of substance added, except the board members' renewed agreement that faculty salaries should improve.
On 5 March 1976 Pettit announced at the board meeting his wish to retire from office by 1 November 1976.
The rather ritualized form of message-and-response initiated by the 17 October 1975 letter led to a significant change in the position of the professoriate at Ursinus. A newly innovative Pettit was to a considerable degree responsible for this--granted that his innovations came as reactions to the faculty's initiative. The letter of concerns seemed to release him for the first time to step out on his own. Now that his administration was heading toward a final chapter, he seemed finally to avoid the constraints the board had imposed, intentionally or not, by the conditional nature of his selection. To keep order and to avoid hounding by the faculty at this point, he came back to them with a strong counter stroke. Ironically, his plan tilted the balance in the college further in favor of professional practice, even as he was doing his best to preserve the strength of the parochial purpose of the college. Nevertheless, the manner and substance of his actions from this point to the end of his term helped to hold the center while his and other voices worked to restabilize the college for the start of its next administration.
The president's plan went hand in hand with the board's 14 November 1975 letter to make up a comprehensive response to the concerns. Pettit was the principal drafter of the board letter. It cleared the table of certain concerns, reaffirmed the president's lead role, and thus set the stage for Pettit to announce his plan.
In its letter, the board said it was sympathetic to the concern over salaries and spoke affirmingly about steps that the college should take. It hoped faculty members with expertise on college problems would always come forward with the offer of help. But these were the only points of agreement with the 17 October 1975 faculty concerns. It refuted with printed evidence the allegation that reporting on Century II results had not been candid. It absolved the president of the charge of failing fully to disclose the budget by saying he had never been authorized by the board to do so (thus stating bluntly the limits the board set on Pettit's exercise of authority). It said the board would make no change in its long-standing policy against electing voting faculty representatives to the board; it would continue, however, to invite faculty members as well as students to meetings. As to grievances, it reviewed the standing structure of the administration and suggested that matters unsatisfied at the administrative level could come to the board for handling on an ad hoc basis. In other words, it opposed an elected grievance committee.
The plan Pettit unveiled at the 3 December 1975 meeting sought to address several of the faculty's concerns in a grand stroke. Preliminarily he reminded them of actions he already had taken to improve salaries. Then he announced the creation of a new three-member faculty advisory committee on college priorities. Faculty would elect the committee members. It would advise the president on salary administration and on the allocation of other financial resources. Additionally, a faculty member with expertise in finance and investments by appointment would join the college investment committee. New ad hoc advisory councils on admissions and fund-raising would draw still further on faculty expertise in administrative decision-making.
The "committee of five" immediately dissociated themselves from this plan, which Pettit had disclosed to them just before the general meeting of the faculty. They still awaited their face-to-face meeting with board members. Undaunted, Pettit urged faculty members to support his plan, to work for the common good, and to resist divisive actions that would hurt the college. When the "five" finally met with board members on 17 February 1975, it was in an atmosphere of anti-climax. The majority of faculty went along with the plan to create an advisory priorities committee, and it soon was functioning. The work of the "five" seemed largely over to most colleagues, doubly so when Pettit made his retirement announcement.
By mid-March, the priorities committee, working with the administration, was drawing up a new faculty salary scale. Finally, the faculty had a legitimate venue where they could discuss salaries without groping for a form in which to do that effectively. There was fair promise that the agenda would broaden to take in the college financial structure as a whole. So, an initiative that began on the floor of the faculty near the start of the 1970-1976 period reached a kind of finish. It did not bring many new dollars into faculty pocketbooks, then or later. But it created a new role for the professoriate in the management of the college. The management had become identified as one of the components of the parochial purpose of the college. By opening the door to direct professorial participation, Pettit thus made it possible for a new equilibrium to work itself out between the parochial and professional forces that energized the college. The administration that followed Pettit's converted the priorities committee into the central planning group for advancing the institution. And the faculty representative on the investment committee, Harry Symons, a member of the "five," built a bridge of confidence between faculty and the administration. He was as fiscally conservative as any board member. The ad hoc councils on admissions and fund-raising did not amount to much. Symbolically, though, they said the administration held out a newly welcoming hand to advice and assistance from the faculty. That too helped to restabilize the forces at play before a new administration took up its duties.
While the board and president were responding to the letter of concerns, the faculty pushed forward with a second initiative. That initiative added impetus to the review and revision of the place that professional practice occupied in the life of Ursinus. It involved a revision of the faculty handbook. The academic council in the previous academic year had empowered a committee to work on enrichments and supplements to the handbook. Up to that point, the administration produced the handbook. It was a personnel manual of sorts and a compendium of academic policies and practices. Rewriting many provisions, the faculty committee changed the tone by muting the administrative voice of the text and by emphasizing greater self-governance by the faculty. The draft received approval of the faculty at a special meeting on 13 February 1976. The president made it clear that the board would have the final say, and the faculty referred its recommendation to the governing body. A special board committee scrutinized the text. With some reservations, the committee recommended and received board approval on 14 May 1976. The board did not approve the provision for a formal grievance procedure that would take complaints beyond the level of its own government and instruction committee. The faculty thus failed to find a second door through which to push this same recommendation found in the letter of concerns. The board also disallowed explicit references to AAUP policies and disagreed with some specific provisions surrounding tenure, sabbaticals, and outside employment.
Even with the reservations, the board's approval of the new handbook moved the college a significant step toward a more collegial culture and drew new boundaries around the management authority of the president and administration. Combined with the changes precipitated by the letter of concerns, these changes now shifted the priorities of the college noticeably in the direction of professional practice.
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