conveying knowledge

9 February 1971 The administration collected some examples of recent or hoped-for advancements in the ACADEMIC PROGRAM. The examples became a campaign document for the CENTURY II development program, soon to receive approval by the board of directors. The board’s new fund-raising leader, WILLIAM F. HEEFNER, '42, and his committee, along with key staff members, wanted to bring about a shift of priorities with money. Their intent in devising the Century II campaign was to shift priority from bricks and mortar to the advancement of the educational program.

The collection of examples ranged across the curriculum. In mathematics, the report said that faculty were evaluating alternative ways of introducing the computer to the academic program. They did not yet see their way clearly to a decision. Acquiring better lab instrumentation was a priority in the minds of natural science faculty. Psychology was enjoying the prospect of more laboratory work in the newly opened life science building, later named Thomas Hall, and hoping for additional staff. Political scientists were turning new attention to Africa, Asia, and constitutional law. However, they already had brought the most important change when they introduced quantitative methodology for analyzing social problems. A major in anthropology and sociology was not in the immediate offing, but the college knew that the current offerings ought to expand. The college started a new major in philosophy and religion four years before and was in the process of acculturating new courses in aesthetics, philosophy of science, and epistemology. Language faculty, aware of declining enrollments, wanted to offer "study abroad" opportunities. They wanted to provide richer laboratory experiences for students but limits on funds prevented it. Faculty hoped for growth of fine arts electives but, again, limited funds and other priorities posed obstacles.

The faculty welcomed the fund-raising message from the board and the administration. However, the deficiencies in compensation and in funds for basic professional development took precedence in faculty minds. They overshadowed any ideas they might have had for significant curricular innovation.

While the faculty made modest curricular changes here and there in the 1970-76 period, the time had not yet come for significant development of the academic program. There were no incentives among senior faculty to be "change agents" in their disciplines. The group of new faculty just entering the college from graduate schools lacked the voice to influence curricular policy. Their hopes and fresh ideas, however, fueled the unrest that marked the months leading up to a presidential transition in 1976. President Pettit’s administration preoccupied itself with the board’s "conservative" agenda, which gave priority to the fostering of socialization rather than the conveying of knowledge. When inquisitive students sought to find out why curricular changes were slow in coming, faculty, instead of seeing potential allies, tended to give the students a perfunctory if not patronizing hearing. The dean of the college early in his tenure under Pettit expressed hesitancy toward innovation and thereby set a tone for the entire period.

In short, the attempt to infuse change in the academic program through rhetorical and fund-raising pressures proved to be less than a success. Faculty were not yet interested because of their personal pocket-book woes. The number of newer faculty probably would not yet have been great enough to stimulate a desire for professional change across the campus, even if the national economy and other distractions had not been present. In a 17 October 1975 "letter of concerns" the faculty accused Pettit of misleading alumni and them about the allocation of funds raised through the Century II program. Too little, they avowed, went for the goal of improving the academic program, too much for buildings. They were wrong to find duplicity in the Century II record. However, they justifiably felt disappointment when the program failed to stimulate the academic program. By placing most blame on the president, they obscured the complex conditions underlying their disappointments. Not the least of those conditions was the lack of a unifying vision within the faculty itself for renewing and upgrading the academic program of the college.

9 February 1971 The faculty computer committee recommended that computing in some form be brought to campus. The committee report, submitted by its chair, EVAN S. SNYDER, ‘44, professor of physics, reversed a recommendation against computers in undergraduate education submitted five years before. "Things have changed since then," said the report. "There are now less expensive ways of obtaining computing capability, and several of our faculty have now had experience with computing and recognize its importance in the undergraduate curriculum." The committee members emphasized that they did not favor the teaching of computing as a subject in its own right. It was to be "a tool to be used by the student in his own discipline." They envisioned its use throughout the curriculum, not just in the sciences. They cited John Kemeny, president of Dartmouth College: "I would like to make the case that in 1971 a decent computing center for educational purposes is as important for undergraduate instruction as a decent library, and that accrediting teams deny accreditation to those schools which fail to provide this service." The committee thought Ursinus should enter academic computing by striking a contract with a university for long-distance time-sharing on its computer over telephone wires. It would allow entry into a new era of educational methodology without capital investment and long-term commitments. The faculty did not act quickly. Nearly four years later, on 15 November 1974, the college entered a time-sharing contract with Kemeny’s institution, Dartmouth.

The computer committee included two mathematicians (RICHARD BREMILLER and E. VERNON LEWIS), four social scientists (JAMES P. CRAFT, JR., DONALD HUNTER, CONRAD MEYER, and GEORGE SHARP), and a physicist (EVAN S. SNYDER). The absence of humanities or language instructors reflected the perception of that time that computers were enriching mainly the quantitative areas of study. Soon after the college gained time-sharing capability from Dartmouth, GAYLE BYERLY in English taught her students to study linguistic patterns with the aid of the computer. Even her early applications had a quantitative basis. The competition for time on the computer led to an argument among students about the legitimacy of using the computer for humanities studies. With the advent of the personal computer in the early 1980s, faculty came to see the broader pedagogical potential.

18 March 1971 A survey revealed what students would favor if CURRICULAR CHANGES were proposed. About a third (324) of the whole student body answered a student-initiated questionnaire. Several findings were of particular interest to faculty and administrators. Should more offerings in art be offered? 84% said yes. Should tutorial independent study programs be made available to all students in good standing (not just to those with a high cumulative average)? 84% said yes. Should students be able to choose between a broadly defined academic major (e.g., natural sciences or humanities) and a specific major (e.g., chemistry or English)? 79% said yes. Should students be able to take non-major courses for a pass-fail grade? 74% said yes. Should the foreign language requirement for graduation be dropped? 43% said yes; 15% said no, and 39% said dropping it would be "detrimental" to an Ursinus education. (Weekly, 18 March 1971)

14 April 1971 The faculty selected SUMMER READING BOOKS for students who would enter in the fall. Summer reading was a "complementary cultural activity" in THE URSINUS PLAN adopted by the faculty in 1966. Each spring a faculty committee selected reading choices intended to resonate either with current issues or with subjects of abiding interest in liberal education. For the 1971 summer, incoming freshmen would be expected to read the following: For English, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; for science, S. Mason’s A History of the Sciences; for languages, one of three books from French, Spanish, or German.

The 1972 summer reading committee reflected a decline in importance of the practice when it made a perfunctory suggestion to colleagues. Any department wishing to do so should suggest for entering students one or two books of general interest and importance or of particular use in the discipline. Departments could use their discretion in following up their suggestions during the academic year.

Summer reading selections in 1973 were Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education and Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. That year the faculty committee encouraged a revival of the lapsed practice of providing discussion sessions for new students at Sunday evening suppers in homes of faculty. (Faculty minutes, 7 June 1973)

Incoming students in 1974 were assigned Robert L. Heilbroner’s An Inquiry Into the Human Aspect and B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

In 1975, new students read Jaws, by Peter Benchley, and Alive, by Piers Paul Read. Both books were on the best seller lists that summer and were light fare compared with the assignments of the summer before by Heilbronner and Skinner.

14 April 1971 The faculty allowed seniors to participate in the COLLEGE SCHOLARS PROGRAM. Theretofore, only juniors, sophomores, and second semester freshmen with a B average could take the independent study program. Under the old rule, faculty expected that seniors would do independent study in the form of department honors. In recent years, that long-standing option earned three semester hours of credit as well as the "honors" designation at graduation. The new rule allowed seniors not bent on honors to do independent study. It also allowed a student doing an honors project also to do a college scholars project at the same time. This move reflected a conviction among an increasing number of faculty that independent study enabled the best kind of learning because it made the student a proactive supervisor of his/her own research interest. The college nurtured that pedagogical orientation in ensuing years until "student research" in the late 1990s emerged as a dominant theme of Ursinus.

22 November 1971 The ACADEMIC COUNCIL met to weigh a "statement of position" submitted by the curriculum reform committee of the Ursinus Student Government Association. The students were seeking to relax the course requirements for science majors. The paper captured the spirit of the times in this concluding paragraph: "College students are old enough to make responsible decisions regarding their course selections. It is the responsibility of the school to provide knowledgable [sic] advisors who can inform the students as to what courses graduate schools consider necessary. At present much advice seems quite unnecessary and arbitrary. For example, Biology majors are urged to take literature courses which are not pushed on Chemistry majors."

Academic Council formed a sub-committee to study procedures for cross-departmental majors in response to the statement. At the same time, it expressed a comfort with the status quo and rejected as impractical the suggestion for a "general science" major.

15 December 1971 At a meeting of the ACADEMIC COUNCIL, invited students proposed the formation of a student-faculty curriculum committee. They suggested it would provide a channel of communication in academic affairs similar to that provided for social affairs by the student life committee. President Pettit and Dean Bozorth suggested an alternative--that students be invited to some academic council meetings. This, they said, would promote student-faculty-administration cooperation, clear confusions, and acquaint students with departmental and cross-disciplinary problems and procedures. Students agreed, and invitations now and then went to students to attend. It would be a number of years before students gained actual voting membership on the academic council. The student presenters were James Stellar, '72, the president of the Ursinus Student Government Association; Kevin Akey, '73; and David Miller, '72.

This proposal, like the "statement of position" presented the previous month, was a manifestation of the student activism that followed in the wake of unrest in the late 'sixties. The desire of students to be involved in shaping the curriculum had a double-edged significance at Ursinus. On one hand, it seemed to some faculty and administrators a cheeky invasion of their professional turf, where they felt they knew best what they should offer in the curriculum. On the other hand, many wanted to commend students for showing such a serious interest in their college experience. To them, the students seemed to be demonstrating the kind of intellectual independence and responsibility that the college sought to engender. It seemed more worthwhile to argue with students over curricular issues than over alcohol on campus and visiting hours in dormitories. For their part, the students, serious sometimes to a fault, took the pedagogical givens of the institution at face value and pressed against faculty when they found current practice at variance with stated objectives. The give-and-take created a sometimes turbulent and frustrating experience for both students and faculty. Yet, it also created a feeling of vitality and engagement.

9 February 1972 Academic Council recommended that the faculty approve the addition of INTERDEPARTMENTAL COURSES OF STUDY. Cautious about unorthodox innovation, the faculty referred the question to a meeting of department chairs but in due course the option entered the Ursinus Plan. The proposal allowed a student with at least a B average to combine two or more recognized academic disciplines, with the assent of department heads and the dean. The addition had little college-wide impact. It betokened, however, the prevailing notion that interdisciplinary studies were a desirable vehicle of learning for the best students. It added a challenging option to the curriculum at virtually no cost. It also responded to one of the concerns expressed by the leaders of student government, who were urging such changes.

3 March 1972 RICHARD G. BOZORTH, dean of the college, made a report to the board on academic planning. His comments captured the cautious position of the administration when it came to curricular innovation. President Helfferich had stimulated discussion and some action in the 1960s. He had raised special interest in the "integration" of disciplines. In the Pettit administration, severe constraints arose, caused by inflation and the reaffirmation of a conservative stance found in Helfferich's "philosophic temper " speech. The administration stressed "deliberate study and change" in the curriculum rather than "experiment for the sake of a progressive image." Bozorth said, "Consolidation, refinement, and occasional amalgamation should be our immediate curricular aims."

26 April 1972 ACADEMIC COUNCIL anticipated teaching problems to come when the SAT scores of entering students declined from the highs experienced during the late 1960s. Council minutes said to the faculty, "It was agreed that all of us may have to make unusual efforts to stimulate and motivate students in our classes." This was an early appearance of the movement at Ursinus and across the nation some years later to engage the faculty in changing methods of teaching. The language departments already were feeling the pinch of enrollment decline. They were showing interest in new ways of teaching languages. With the hiring of John Wickersham in classics, the campus would become aware of new ways of teaching classical languages as "living" languages. Nevertheless, in faculty deliberations there remained throughout the Pettit period a strong emphasis on the students' responsibility to learn how to learn. The pedagogical ethos remained heavily judgmental. Students seemed to be satisfied in a competitive environment. At the same time, as evidenced in USGA proposals, some wanted relief from the rigidity of major course requirements and greater flexibility in course selection.

3 May 1972 A course in MINORITIES IN AMERICA was added to the history curriculum. The history department and education department strongly recommended the course for students seeking certification in the teaching of social sciences and other areas of teacher certification. More generally, the introduction of the course betokened the growing awareness on campus of black perspectives and the need to include such perspectives in the academic program.

1 November 1972 THE FACULTY approved the start of COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATIONS as a graduation requirement for some majors--history, French, and Spanish. English already had a comprehensive requirement.

At the same meeting, faculty approved the granting of baccalaureate degrees to students who left Ursinus with ninety semester hours or more. To qualify, they had to have earned a doctoral degree from an accredited institution. This accommodated a number of former students from the World War II period who went on from the college’s V-12 program to earn medical degrees.

15 November 1972 MARVIN J. REED of history chaired the first meeting of an ad hoc CALENDAR INVESTIGATING COMMITTEE. The faculty had voted in principle for a major reform of the academic calendar on 25 October 1972. The committee's fact-finding survey of other colleges disclosed a widespread trend of change. The traditional "lame-duck" period after Christmas and New Year's break was largely disappearing on other campuses. First-semester finals were ending before the holiday break. Although it made informative reports and offered possible models, the committee never made a final recommendation for change of the calendar. The Reed committee, however, did necessary groundwork for the eventual calendar reform after the change of administrations in 1976.

28 February 1973 ALBERT REINER, head of Romance languages, received approval for a SUMMER STUDY ABROAD program for academic credit in France and Spain. Reiner was sensitive to the problem created by colleges and universities when they loosened their entrance standards for foreign language study. This was fallout from the student-driven revisionism of the late 1960s. He was anticipating the decline in enrollments by offering the attractive opportunity for study abroad. Since Ursinus did not abandon the language requirement for graduation, enrollments in the non-major courses were certain to continue. The decline in majors, however, was a certainty to Reiner and other language faculty. It would become a persistent academic problem, leading later to reorganization and to pedagogical innovation.

1 March 1973 Four academic departments began using new MINI-COMPUTERS. The student newspaper described them as "essentially multi-memory banked calculators that are programable [sic]." (Weekly, 8 Mar 73). Chemistry, economics, mathematics, and political science used the computers. A champion of moving into electronic computing was JAMES P. CRAFT, JR., assistant academic dean and professor of political science. Craft's recent graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania had turned him into the new "quantitative" breed in political science. He used statistical methods to analyze political issues. Electronic computing facilitated these methods.

A Weekly report captured the primitive nature of the early computers on campus: "One of their special contributions is learning reinforcement, for a student needs to master his material before he may program." Programming was the essence of use in those early days. "The Physics Department presently possesses the most intricate computer of the four now on campus and entertains the possibility of obtaining a plotter which would plot graphs in accordance with data." It would be another year and a half before Ursinus stepped briskly into computer use with a long-distance contract with Dartmouth College's Kiewit Center.

2 May 1973 The faculty adopted a new NUMBERING SYSTEM FOR COURSES to show the normal year in which the course was taken. Courses in all departments received new numbers in a system that was consistent across the college. Courses numbered in the 100s were normally first-year courses, in the 200s second-year courses, and so on. The system was full of loopholes and many exceptions were possible and even desirable. Yet, the standardization had a unifying effect on faculty thinking about curriculum in subsequent years. Notions of sequence and timing were important in the mapping of curricular changes. The numbering system facilitated planning for such changes. In the preparation of the 1974-75 catalog, the first with the new system, department chairs and the catalog editor absorbed the many headaches always involved in changes of system.

7 June 1973 The faculty reinstated an old CLASS CUT RULE, applicable only to first-year students. Before a liberalization of the rules governing class attendance in the late sixties, the faculty required regular class attendance of all students. Allowable cuts could not exceed twice the number of weekly class meetings. For some years class attendance was at the discretion of the students. Faculty chafed at the chronic cuts this sometimes produced without sanction. They had a lengthy discussion about the free-cut rule at the 7 June 1973 faculty meeting. With the year over and a summer break in the offing, a senior member of the biology department cast caution to the wind and moved the reinstatement of the old system in toto. Cooler heads urged that the rule apply only to freshmen. His motion then passed with 30 in favor and 22 against.

This movement back toward an older order said several things about the faculty’s posture. The faculty was unhappy with what they saw as student indifference to serious educational application. As a whole, however, they did not have a widely supported vision of the direction that pedagogical change should go to remedy this perceived problem. There was something of a split by age. Senior faculty tended to support the reinstatement, younger ones not. Meanwhile, student leaders were on the doorstep of the faculty, pushing for changes in educational culture. The reinstated cut rule ran at odds with their wishes. At a deeper level, the reinstatement suggested that the faculty members favoring it were somewhat comfortable with the "conservative" temper asserted for the college by the board in 1970. Their teaching style was rooted in long-standing custom. A new generation of recently hired faculty had not yet reached the strength or the clarity of view to effect significant pedagogical change. That would have to wait for some years beyond 1976.

18 July 1973 The AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM for Japanese students from Tohoku Gakuin University in Sendai, Japan, began. The Rev. Milton E. Detterline, campus minister and director of alumni affairs, administered the program, working closely with Richard G. Bozorth, dean of the college. The students stayed at Ursinus until 7 August, then left for a tour of the United States. Professor Jun Kawashima of the TGU English faculty accompanied the 15 Japanese students. Kawashima had studied for a time at Ursinus as a young man after World War II. He had found his way to Collegeville because of the German Reformed connection between Ursinus and Tohoku Gakuin. Missionaries from Pennsylvania in 1886 helped Japanese Christians found the university (then North Japan College). It maintained its Christian identity, even through the nationalistic fervor of World War II. (Article by Philip Williams. Ursinus Bulletin. May 1973.)

The American Studies Program for TGU students began largely because of the enthusiasm and persistence of PHILIP WILLIAMS. Williams was a United Church of Christ (UCC) missionary in Japan with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. (The UCC was the successor denomination to the Evangelical and Reformed Church and its predecessor, the German Reformed Church. German Reformed pastors and laymen founded Ursinus.) He and his wife, Mary, also a Christian missionary educator, went to Sendai, Japan, in 1950. (Mary answered around the world to her more familiar nickname, "Tinker.") Their original destination, China, had banned Christian missionaries when it came under the control of the Communists. Williams became a faculty member at Tohoku Gakuin University in war-ravaged Sendai. For the rest of their active service, he and his wife were central figures in the life of the Japanese Christian community in Sendai. Motivated by Christian commitment to peace and love, both Philip and Mary Williams became dedicated promoters of Japanese-American relationships in the post-war decades. They were telling their American contacts at Ursinus and elsewhere of the emergence of a revitalized Japan after World War II long before it became a commonplace of the world’s economy. Their black-and-white album photos of a hungry and incapacitated Sendai in the early 1950s were their base line for their story of the Japanese recovery.

Missionary fervor fueled Williams’s communications with Ursinus in the planning years that led to the summer of 1973. He and Mary themselves had experienced personal fulfillment through their intercultural experience as missionary residents in Japan. They wanted other Americans to share in their enrichment through educational exchange.

Williams arrived on campus for the spring 1973 as a colleague in the English department, where he taught two courses. In the summer, he taught a course in non-western world literature in which the visiting Japanese students studied along with regular Ursinus students. (Faculty minutes, 7 March 1973)

1 September 1973 RUSSIAN LANGUAGE instruction disappeared from the foreign language curriculum offerings owing to continuing low enrollments.

1 September 1973 Changes in courses for 1973-74 showed a trend toward less rigid CURRICULUM REQUIREMENTS and greater flexibility in designing courses of study. Chemistry majors no longer had to take German. Philosophy and religion majors no longer had to take Old and New Testament. They could take a new course, history and anthropology of religion of the western and eastern setting. Students with a B average or better now could arrange a specialized major combining two or more fields. The trend toward comprehensive coverage of material continued. History majors had joined English and philosophy and religion majors in taking a required departmental comprehensive exam for graduation. Now the economics department added a diagnostic test for seniors "for surveying purposes."

20 September 1973 The philosophy and religion department for the first time offered an introductory SURVEY OF RELIGION COURSE. Taught by KEITH HARDMAN, philosophy-religion 201-202 stressed the history and anthropology of the world’s religions rather than the scriptures of various faiths. This shift in course content mirrored changes of interest among students. It also signified that the descriptive study of religion was displacing the college’s earlier zeal to expose students to scriptural truths.

11 November 1973 After debate, the faculty approved an increase in the hours of observation required of STUDENT TEACHERS. Education department head ROBERT V. COGGER urged that students intending to seek secondary school teaching certification spend ten hours in field observation at area schools as sophomores and twenty as juniors. The prevailing rule required a total of only fifteen hours of observation. A number of faculty colleagues questioned the wisdom and necessity of this expansion. They were jealous of the finite time available for teaching major subjects. An addition of such pre-professional experience meant a subtraction of time devoted to liberal disciplines. The sense of proprietorship among faculty members derived from their partnership with the education department. Ursinus offered certification but not a major in secondary education. Student teachers always majored in a subject field, not education. This arrangement preserved the tilt of the college in favor of liberal education as opposed to pre-professional education. However, it led to tugs of war over time such as this one. Cogger and his education department colleague, WALTON LANDES, explained that the proposed thirty hours of observation was becoming the standard among certifying institutions. With complaining from some defenders of the liberal arts tradition, the measure passed.

16 November 1973 Ursinus reportedly was the only college of its size in the region without a COMPUTER PROGRAM. Board member JOSEPH T. BEARDWOOD III, '51, made this comment at the board meeting. Beardwood was a constant advocate of computers. He and professor of mathematics PETER G. JESSUP, who joined the faculty in 1973, had continuing conversations about the emerging technology.

6 February 1974 An ad hoc faculty committee began a re-evaluation of THE INTEGRATED CMP COURSE (Chemistry-Math-Physics). George Storey of English chaired the committee, made up of Richard BreMiller (math), Gayle Byerly (English), George Fago (psychology), Conrad Kruse (biology), and Blanche Schultz (math), one of the architects of the course. The committee reported out with a recommendation to terminate the integrated program. The faculty approved the recommendation on 8 November 1974.

10 May 1974 The PRE-MED COMMITTEE (formally the professional school credentials committee) chair made a report on strengths and weaknesses to the board of directors. Speaking for the committee was A. CURTIS ALLEN. He had become chair of the committee the previous year. (E. Vernon Lewis, mathematics, preceded Allen. Lewis had stepped in when Paul Wagner suddenly died in 1970.) Allen talked about the unprecedented influx of students into programs in the health-related sciences at Ursinus and elsewhere. This influx assured the colleges of a robust pool of well-qualified applicants. At the same time, it posed a problem of balance. Many students interested in applying to medical school were not in the top academic cohort but were qualified for admittance to Ursinus. The admissions office depended more than ever on students with pre-med in mind to achieve the projected size of incoming classes. Allen cited this as the heart of the dilemma faced by his committee when advising pre-med students. When such students demonstrated only middling performance in the college's science courses, he and colleagues had the task of convincing "less promising students to reorient their goals and redirect their efforts...."

By rigorously screening candidates for medical school and redirecting those unlikely to gain admission there, the pre-med committee sought to maintain the college’s reputation among medical schools. Annually in these years, the pre-med chair would exhort faculty colleagues to channel their graduate school recommendations for students through the pre-med committee. Individual recommendations sent directly to medical schools without endorsement from the committee risked the college’s reputation. For example, at the 5 January 1972 faculty meeting, E. Vernon Lewis, committee chair, said, "With admission to these schools becoming increasingly difficult, it is essential that the college maintain its reputation for sending only highly qualified students...." (Faculty minutes, 5 January 1972). However successful this strategy was for the institution, it had the effect of motivating some students negatively. It created divisions among students on campus. It strained relations between faculty and students in the sciences on one hand and in the humanities on the other. Most faculty members realized that the strategy adversely affected the morale of the campus. However, a systematic way to ameliorate the effects did not present itself.

10 May 1974 The college conceived a "3 PLUS 3 PLAN" to permit students to graduate in three years on an accelerated schedule. It required attendance at sessions during three successive summers, starting immediately after graduation from high school. The college guaranteed a selection of courses in summer even if a limited number of students participated. The college saw advantages for students in this schedule. They would spend less in tuition and become gainfully employed a year sooner. On the negative side, they would have to forego the income from summer jobs. They would get no financial aid for summer courses. The record shows no significant number of takers for the plan and it fell by the wayside.

The "3 Plus 3 Plan" was symptomatic of the recruiting uncertainties of the time. It fell into the category of "great ideas" called for by Pettit. A great idea was one that added value without adding cost. It represented an early attempt to size up the far-reaching changes occurring in the delivery of higher education. It suggested that the college was beginning to see a more prominent place for marketing in its planning (a word just beginning to have meaning in higher education management).

5 June 1974 The college inaugurated a summer seminar course in PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH ETHNIC STUDIES. WILLIAM T. PARSONS, '47, professor of history, with the assistance of EVAN S. SNYDER, '43, professor of physics, designed the course. GEORGE W. HARTZELL, professor of German, also assisted. The seminar used Pennsylvania Dutch resources and specialists in the region. Students visited the KUTZTOWN FOLK FESTIVAL. The festival had come into the hands of the college in 1969 when it acquired the Pennsylvania Folklife Society. Parsons sought to emphasize the college's roots in the Pennsylvania Dutch community. The seminar focused on the "Deitsch" dialect, then beginning to decline in usage, and on the cultural heritage and folkways of the descendants of both plain and "church" (or "gaudy") German immigrants.

Parsons's book, The Pennsylvania Dutch: A Persistent Minority, appeared in 1976. The research for it, well along by 1974, gave him a solid foundation for introducing the seminar. The initial success of the seminar, however, did not lead to its growth in subsequent years, when offerings took place at the festival grounds as well as in Collegeville. Parsons continued to offer courses on various aspects of the folk culture and history, with varying enrollments. The hoped-for synergism between the course offerings and the annual festival in July did not arise. There were logistical problems. In addition, academic offerings seemed to many to be incompatible with the character of the festival. Mark Eaby, the festival manager, sought to generate money for himself and the college through light offerings of culture and heavy emphasis on food, entertainment, and the sale of crafts.

Snyder supported Parsons's work on personal grounds. He grew up as a Pennsylvania Dutchman whose first language was the dialect. His first calling in the physics department over time crowded out his participation in the folk culture program. His moral support of Parsons's efforts, however, never flagged.

Parsons's grand vision of an ethnic studies center at Ursinus continued to motivate him for the rest of his career. Illness finally forced him to give up offering courses. Still, for his remaining years of productivity, he wrote a steady stream of articles on the culture and published them himself. He pursued his custodianship of the archives and papers of the Pennsylvania Folklife Society in a room dedicated to them in Myrin Library. At his death in 1991, the work of cataloging and organizing remained unfinished.

Ursinus took direct ownership of the most valuable holdings of the Society--a tract of land in Lancaster County, fraktur, and broadsides. The Berman Museum of Art incorporated the fraktur and broadsides into its collections in the late 1980s. This gave them the curatorial attention they deserved. A developer bought the land for a substantial sum. Mark Eaby ended his long career as festival manager in 1995. The college sold the capital assets of the festival and its name to Richard Thomas. He moved the festival from Kutztown to Summit Station, where he successfully continued its operation.

1 July 1974 (approximate) The old snack shop in the center of campus became a new DRAMATIC ARTS WORKSHOP. The snack shop had occupied half of a corrugated "temporary" structure. The bookstore was in the other half. The snack shop had moved to the COLLEGE UNION the previous year. Although a modest if not Spartan venue, it provided a setting for English department newcomer JOYCE E. HENRY to put sparkle into theatre course offerings of the campus. This remained the site of instruction and performance until the college converted Thompson-Gay Gymnasium into RITTER CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS in 1980.

20 August 1974 Incoming students were reading their summer book assignments by Robert L. Heilbroner and B. F. Skinner. Heilbroner's book, An Inquiry Into the Human Aspect, argued that human aspiration had material limits that the world should acknowledge. The faculty who chose the book may have seen it as a dose of reality needed by new college students in the aftermath of the Age of Aquarius. Skinner's book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, gave the students an unadulterated dose of reductionist behavioral science by the maven of "operant conditioning." One way or the other, both books signaled the end of an optimistic liberal humanism at a moment that later would be seen as the start of a "postmodern" period. At the time of the assignment, the books were current and popular in academic circles. Freshman composition teachers and others focused on the summer readings in the start of the fall semester.

As in other years before and after, most students and faculty soon forgot the summer reading experiences in the blur of regular course assignments. Freshmen probably read or skimmed the books with the uncertain sense that they were a kind of intellectual hazing. By merely assigning the reading, faculty felt they were holding the students to a properly high intellectual standard. Yet, many felt less compelled to lead the students into a disciplined critical analysis of the texts. The ritual of reading and talking about the texts, without measured outcome, seemed to satisfy an institutional aspiration for intellectual quality.

30 September 1974 President Richard M. Nixon's resignation over WATERGATE on 9 August 1974 provoked an editorial comment, "Post-Watergate and Ursinus." The acting editor of the Ursinus Bulletin seized the occasion of the disastrous end of Nixon's presidency to assert the relevance of liberal education to practical affairs. Liberal education by the mid-70s was under fire. Critics said that it was irrelevant to the "technocratic system of specialized functions" of the emerging American society. "But if the tragedy of Richard Nixon's Watergate can teach us anything," opined the Bulletin, "it should teach us that the search for good is as practical and compelling an end today as it was in other days."

It continued: "First and foremost, private persons need a sensitivity to qualities that are life-enhancing and an abhorrence of thoughts and acts that are life-destroying. For politics magnifies and takes unto itself the private values of the persons who practice it. After Watergate, it is all the more important that our political leaders bring to office an awareness of the need for wisdom as well as for knowledge."

The Bulletin acknowledged that Nixon was the product of a private liberal arts college (coincidentally, for a decade presided over by an Ursinus alumnus, FREDERICK BINDER, '42). It argued, nevertheless, that the liberal arts college was one of the few types of institutions that could still "presume to speak directly of values, of good vs. evil, of a concern for the whole range of human experience. Sometimes our rhetoric seems worn, but our idea is permanently relevant and true."

It is noteworthy that the decade's greatest political tragedy should evoke from the college what at bottom appeared to be a marketing position statement. The piece suggests that mounting pressures on recruitment and retention and on finances were touching the deeper nerves of institutional self-identity. In an earlier decade, such a self-justifying editorial would have seemed superfluous or self-evident. As the national government underwent fundamental trauma, so other components of America's institutional structures--colleges and universities prominent among them--underwent their own parallel tensions and transitions. Ursinus in the Age of Watergate was thus representative as it looked within itself for validation.

6 November 1974 The faculty approved additions and changes to the offerings in the PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT. The number of majors in psychology had grown to more than a hundred in a total student population of about 1,100, nearly ten percent of the whole enrollment. It ranked third in size behind biology and economics. The department proposed the new courses because, despite large enrollment, it had a relatively small number of course offerings. New members of the department, with fresh insights from recent graduate study, argued to close noticeable gaps in the coverage of the field. Because of the budget restrictions imposed by the administration and board, the department proposed to add the offerings with no additional staffing. Instead, it would offer courses in alternation with existing courses. The proposals supported a trend toward student research by expanding a seminar and permitting juniors as well as seniors to enroll. New courses were in human learning, developmental psychology, and psychopathology and psychotherapy.

These modest departmental additions and changes typified the incremental approach to curriculum revision during the 1970-1976 period. The economics department in the same year introduced quantitative methods for business. Latin American studies, taught in English, augmented the World Literature offerings. This was a symptom of declining interest in languages and rising interest in other areas of study. Derk Visser of history received encouragement for developing an interdivisional course in humanities. Later it won support from the Glenmede Trust/Pew charities. More ambitiously, the president appointed an ad hoc committee of faculty to investigate the possibility of a major in fine arts. This was a symptom of the felt need to give students exposure to questions of human values in the academic setting. Some faculty and students felt that the study of the fine arts would provide a more desirable engagement with such questions than the social program of the college. The social program was a topic of continuing dispute because it heavily emphasized rules of social behavior. A fine arts major did not result from the study, but the faculty after the 1970-1976 period continued to show interest. It would lead to the development of the Berman Museum of Art and other steps to enrich the arts on campus.

8 November 1974 The faculty voted to terminate the integrated program for freshman science majors, CHEMISTRY-MATH-PHYSICS (CMP). This ended an experiment that began in 1963, conducted by three veteran Ursinus alumni professors, ROGER P. STAIGER, '43, EVAN S. SNYDER, '44, AND BLANCHE B. SCHULTZ, '41. The college created the eight-credit freshman course in the spirit of "integration," much on the minds of the Ursinus faculty in the early and mid-1960s. The course had its defenders. It remained innovative and marked Ursinus off from its institutional peers. It helped control the quality of the science and pre-medical programs. On the other hand, it proved to be inflexible as a curricular track. Prospective science majors began to be vocal about their negative experiences in the course. Biology majors criticized it for blocking them out of their favorite subject until the sophomore year.

With the decision to end CMP, starting in the subsequent academic year, 1975-76, the faculty seemed to gain an appetite for additional substantive change of curriculum. The psychology department added three new courses. Economics and the Romance language departments each added courses. The new economics course in quantitative methods betokened a turn toward statistical methodology, a turn also seen in political science.

15 November 1974 Ursinus took a forward step in its COMPUTER PROGRAM by starting as a long-distance user of the services of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth College. Dartmouth at that time was a national leader in the academic use of the computer. Dartmouth's Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny developed the program language BASIC. Kurtz became the college's informal counselor on computer use. Kemeny was president of Dartmouth when Ursinus signed up. Mathematics professor PETER G. JESSUP was director of the program that developed at Ursinus. Groups of Ursinus faculty members made the pilgrimage to Kiewit in the following years. Their exposure to the emerging technological environment in higher education proved valuable, especially for those in the humanities.

At the outset, the services available to Ursinus consisted only of programming capabilities in economics, statistics, anthropology, and political science. The Dartmouth computer was programmable in Basic, Cobol, and Fortran. Ursinus had access through four terminals operating 8.5 hours per day seven days a week. Terminals printed only in capital letters. Text editing was not workable.

The contractual relationship with Dartmouth lasted into the mid-1980s, when the college finally changed to a campus-based system. It allowed Ursinus to avoid the initial capital cost of buying a mainframe computer. It relieved the college of the many organizational and operational problems of the early, centralized approach, before the personal desktop computer arrived in the early 1980s. At the same time, on the negative side, the dependency on Dartmouth retarded a comprehensive approach at Ursinus to the development of academic computing. On balance, however, the college's first big step into the computer age hand in hand with Dartmouth was productive. Jessup was instrumental in establishing the relationship through a graduate school friend from Lehigh University who went to Dartmouth when Jessup came to Ursinus. An article in the September 1974 Ursinus Magazine said, "Ursinus is broadening the students' exposure to the computer because of its increasingly important place in scholarship and in every dimension of contemporary civilization. A person who does not understand the use of the computer in the work of his own choice will be severely handicapped, compared to others who are computer-oriented."

The college was careful to note, as it entered the computer age, that its foundations rested firmly at Ursinus. John Mauchly, professor of physics at the college in the 1930s, was co-inventor of ENIAC, the world's first computer. Mauchly credited Ursinus as the site of his early thinking about computing. He went from Ursinus to the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Presper Eckert unveiled ENIAC there in 1946.

15 January 1975 A new course in COMPUTER PROGRAMMING appeared in the curriculum, taught by PETER G. JESSUP. Hastily, Jessup offered the new course in the spring semester so that seniors could take it. Ordinarily a new course would have opened the following fall. Jessup proposed to introduce students to the basics of computer programming, then to isolate and formulate "solutions to problems in a large variety of fields." The advance publicity for the course in the Weekly (12 Dec 74) said that the course "will aid all students in working with the increasing 'quantitative' emphasis in all areas from the social sciences to mathematics and science." The heavy application of early computer instruction to statistical method is evident here. The transformational influence of personal computing on all aspects of learning lay years ahead.

27 February 1975 The start of a COMPUTER PROGRAM rekindled old humanities-sciences conflicts. CYNTHIA V. FITZGERALD, '75, the Weekly editor, an English major, criticized science students for their proprietary attitude toward limited time-sharing computer facilities. (Weekly, 27 Feb 75). English majors, led by professor GAYLE BYERLY, were experimenting with the computer in doing language study. They perceived that science majors were criticizing them for using valuable computing time on "frivolous" pastimes instead of "serious" study of science.

Fitzgerald used this new conflict to highlight a long-standing perception of difference between the sciences and humanities at Ursinus. The sciences, particularly biology, were more heavily enrolled than non-sciences. Competition for admission was keener among those wanting to major in science. The pre-medical program, which was the heart of the sciences at Ursinus, enjoyed a prestigious position in the college. This "bread and butter" program brought the college good students and good public reputation. Humanities students such as Fitzgerald resented what they saw as a "better than thou" attitude among their peers in the sciences. She accused "bio" majors of poor participation in the life of the campus and vented her anger at "the lofty attitude and the segregational beliefs of the majority of the science people."

Predictably, the editorial provoked sympathetic and antagonistic statements about the accuracy and appropriateness of Fitzgerald's opinions. Whatever the shortcomings of the editorial, it touched a nerve that went to the center of the campus community's definition of itself. That self-definition held conflicting formulations about the value of the sciences and humanities. These would persist into the future not only among students but among faculty members as well.

25 June 1975 PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH STUDIES expanded to include dialect studies and other cultural topics. EVAN SNYDER, professor of physics, native-born speaker of the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, supplemented the cultural studies course offered by WILLIAM T. PARSONS. Parsons and Snyder and others offered mini-courses at the KUTZTOWN FOLK FESTIVAL for one-semester-hour of credit. Parsons was an inveterate promoter of regional ethnic studies. In the 3 April 1975 issue of the Weekly, he sketched the vision he had of graduate seminars in Pennsylvania Dutch. He saw the Ursinus campus flowering as the focal point of a far-flung interest in the ethnic roots of the area and of the college itself. He brought about a portion of this vision in subsequent years, largely on the strength of his enthusiasm for teaching and tireless scholarly effort. In the next several years, he produced an ample shelf of monographs and specialized studies of the folk culture and its artifacts, particularly the design of barns and outhouses! He took a growing interest in the genealogy of Pennsylvania Dutch families. When his health deteriorated, his support of the program diminished. No one had the knowledge or initiative to sustain it.

20 August 1975 Incoming students were reading their SUMMER BOOK ASSIGNMENTS: Jaws, by Peter Benchley, and Alive, by Piers Paul Read. Both books were on the best seller lists that summer. They were light fare compared with the heavy treatises by Heilbroner and Skinner, read the year before. Summer Reading Committee chair JOYCE E. HENRY said that the committee chose the books because of the moral and ethical questions they provoked. Faculty continued to prize the common experience provided by summer reading assignments. Yet, they gave little sustained interest to the readings after brief discussions in freshman orientation. The history of the summer reading program in the 1970s was up and down. It would come under scrutiny in subsequent years. Faculty perspectives on its value changed as faculty demographics changed.

1 December 1975 MYRIN LIBRARY extended its hours of operation from 11:00 pm to midnight. The new librarian, HARRY E. (CHUCK) BROADBENT, '69, added a new degree of responsiveness to library operation, illustrated by this extension. Some students had recommended it as a way to "spread out" the noise created by students taking evening breaks around 9:00 pm. Broadbent based the professional rationale for extension, however, on the need to allow access to the newly installed computer center and generally to shift student values toward serious academic business in the later evening. At a time when the college sought to save energy, the extension added to consumption and cost. The library closed the third floor and turned off its lights after 11:00 pm to compensate in part for the extra usage.

1 January 1976 WILLIAM T. PARSONS, '47, was visiting the Palatinate in Germany, where he lectured on the Pennsylvania Dutch. He addressed a conference commemorating the 300th anniversary of the emigration of Palatine Germans to America. In the course of his visit, Parsons paid homage to the namesake of the college, Zacharias Ursinus. Ursinus's home and school in Neustadt remained standing. A memorial to him adorned the town church, where his remains were buried under the floor of the sanctuary.

1 April 1976 (approximate) THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES (NEH) awarded Ursinus a $39,500 grant for an experimental interdivisional studies program for senior students. The program originated in the thinking of Derk Visser, associate professor of history. He named it "CIVITAS AND CIVILITAS—THEN AND NOW." (The folkways of the campus converted "Community and Civilization" into the familiar "C&C" course.) C&C sought to offer a fresh approach to the humanities for the most ambitious students. Evaluations by faculty and students had found the College Scholars program and Senior Symposium, innovations of the previous decade, lacking in rigor and coherence. The experimental course was to focus on the relationship between communities (civitas), the values of institutions (civilitas), and the forces that bring about changes in both.

Visser had sharpened his conceptual approach to history to a critical edge when he did his doctoral studies at Bryn Mawr College. It led him to find significant shortcomings in the prevailing curriculum that he found at Ursinus when he joined the faculty in 1968. He was especially eager to lead the best students in all majors to integrate all of their learning around a disciplined quest for understanding "the condition of man in the present world."

Other faculty members who shared this ambitious goal with Visser made up the committee that launched the pilot project in the 1975 fall semester. They included the following: EVAN S. SNYDER, '43, of physics; LOUIS A. DECATUR and GAYLE A. BYERLY of English; CHARLES T. SULLIVAN of psychology; S. ROSS DOUGHTY, '68, of history. Dean RICHARD G. BOZORTH and vice president RICHARD P. RICHTER, '53, took part ex officio. Richter had worked with Visser in preparing the proposal to NEH.

NEH funds brought university scholars to campus in the summer of 1976 to consult with the committee preparing the course for offering in the fall of 1976. They also paid for guest lecturers. The consultants were CYRIL E. BLACK of Princeton on modernization; ARTHUR P. DUDDEN of Bryn Mawr on the industrial revolution; CARLOS ALVARE of Lehigh on the environment of cities; DONALD W. BELCHER of University of Washington on interdisciplinary health care.

Some 50 students and 17 faculty members took part in the pilot offering.

This was not a promising time for curricular innovation on a broad front at Ursinus or elsewhere. President Pettit and dean Bozorth had declared an incremental approach to innovation and a firm resolve to preserve the existing good. Internal funds did not exist to encourage faculty innovation. The NEH project thus gave the college an appearance of forward-looking academic change almost in spite of itself. The faculty’s interaction with noted scholars from prestigious universities also conveyed the feeling that Ursinus was moving in the right academic direction. It appeared to be in touch with the right academic places.

C&C lived for a good many years on campus. It was an intellectually stimulating outlet for inquiring students. It did not have a broad effect, however, on the prevailing academic style of the campus. Its very breadth may have hobbled its high hopes for "integrating" knowledge. The annual offerings, though organized around a theme, came to seem fragmentary and arbitrary. The grand goal of a disciplined conceptual effort at integrating knowledge seemed to fade as the course became one more elective for a small group of adventurous students. The course disappeared when the faculty revised the curriculum in the late 1980s.

B. Faculty Teaching

1 July 1970 ALLAN LAKE RICE, professor of German, received the Royal Order of the North Star from the King of Sweden. The Swedish knighthood came to him "in recognition of your fine and selfless interest in Swedish culture." Rice took Swedish as an elective when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. He said he fell in love with the language (as he did later with a Swedish woman who would become his wife) and taught it at Ursinus as an overload to his courses in German.

18 August 1970 PAUL R. WAGNER, '32, professor of biology and head of the prestigious pre-medical advising program, died suddenly while on vacation in Germany of a stroke. Born in 1910 in Mahonoy City, PA, Wagner began teaching upon graduating from the college in the midst of the Great Depression. Like numerous other alumni on the faculty in that era, he did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania while teaching at Ursinus. He earned the MS degree in 1935 and Ph.D. in 1941. Wagner enjoyed respect for having built up an exceptionally strong pre-medical program. A high percentage of graduates each year won admission to medical schools, mostly in Philadelphia. Alumni remembered Wagner for his first-name acquaintance with the admissions officers at medical schools. He perpetuated and strengthened a network of such relationships that went back through the tenure of Matthew Beardwood and of Harold Brownback, '15, who had taught Wagner and had hired him. His hands-on style of medical school placement soon changed after his death. Changes in the competitiveness and scope of medical school admissions made it outmoded.

Following Wagner's death, President Pettit appointed ROGER P. STAIGER, '43, to be acting head of the biology department for the 1970-71 academic year. He continued to chair the chemistry department. Before his fateful departure for Europe, Wagner had recommended the hiring of A. CURTIS ALLEN to replace LEVIE VAN DAM, legendary biology professor, who retired. Allen, just finishing his doctorate at the University of Michigan, came to a department in crisis over Wagner’s death. After he became acclimated to the biology program, Allen took over as head of the biology department in 1972. The pre-medical program came under the leadership of E. VERNON LEWIS. A mathematics professor, he was pursuing a second career after long years in the employ of DuPont Corporation. Allen took over as pre-medical chairman in 1974. ("Ursinus Mourns Loss of Dr. Wagner," Ursinus Magazine, Fall 1970.)

1 November 1970 RICHARD G. BOZORTH, assistant dean and associate professor of English, became the seventh dean of the college when WILLIAM S. PETTIT moved up to the presidency. Bozorth came to Ursinus in 1969 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had started teaching in 1947. He was a 1942 graduate of Penn, earned the master's degree at Princeton in 1946 and the Ph.D. at Penn in 1951. He had been chairman of composition at Penn from 1958 to 1965.

At the same time JAMES P. CRAFT, JR., became assistant dean of the college under Bozorth. Craft came to Ursinus in 1968 as assistant professor of political science from the University of Pennsylvania. He became associate professor a year later. He practiced the newer political science that applied statistical methodology to policy issues. An Annapolis graduate and career Navy officer, Craft left military service after 30 years to study political science at Penn. There he was dean of men from 1964 to 1967, during the first years of major campus unrest among students.

15 April 1971 (approximate.) EUGENE H. MILLER, ‘33, became president of the National Social Science Honor Society, Pi Gamma Mu, for a four-year term. Miller already had served as president of the Pennsylvania Political Science Association and enjoyed respect among political scientists both regionally and nationally. His duties as Pi Gamma Mu president took him to many chapters around the country to promote the purposes of the honorary association. Its purpose: "to inspire scholarship in the social sciences, to inspire social service to humanity by a rational approach to the solving of social problems, to promote tolerance of differing views by engendering better understanding."

8 July 1971 JOHN C. VORRATH, JR., head of Romance Languages and former assistant dean, died at age fifty. Vorrath earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Yale. He came to Ursinus in 1962 after teaching at his alma mater and at the University of Delaware. Vorrath was a big man with a heart to match. In the tumult of the late sixties, his compassionate presence provided a safety valve. He could be severely critical of the stupidity surrounding much of the student movement. At the same time, he was sensitive to the youthfulness and hope of those striving for effectiveness and understanding. An anonymous eulogist in the 7 Oct 71 Weekly (p. 1) said, "Surely Dr. Vorrath taught us all the poignant beauty of the enduring heart, the soul that strives against all adversity, yearning for flight." Teachers of the quality of Vorrath assured that Ursinus would make it through troubled years. It was unfortunate that he was not present to help the Pettit administration through the vexations of the 1970s.

8 February 1972 JOHN J. HEILEMANN, physicist, died at age 64 after a 31-year career at Ursinus. Heilmann was a "lovable" small-college teacher. Students had a personal affection for him, even in the climate of alienation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an unusual move, President Helfferich appointed Heilemann "professor of the college" in 1969 and ended his chairmanship of the physics department. This gave him college-wide license to lecture in integrated courses. In this role, he embodied the goal of curricular synthesis. He had a passion for music and an intellectual curiosity unbounded by normal academic disciplines. His enthusiastic life of ideas touched students in physics and other courses where he made cameo appearances.

He was a star performer in the traditional "Christmas lectures" given by science faculty in Pfahler Hall. In what might have been his last, he demonstrated the conservation of angular momentum about a fixed axis and rotation about a moving axis. A student’s description in the 17 February 1972 Weekly: "Like a human top, he sat on a piano stool and spun a wheel which he held. The wheel transferred its angular momentum to the stool, so it too went around. Dr. Heilemann just kept on spinning around, changing direction, and coming to stops because he thought it was fun."

Another student reported a year before (Weekly, 18 March 1971) on Heilemann’s perception of students of the early 1970s compared to those he taught in earlier decades. "He sees no great difference in today’s students from those who were here thirty years ago." However, he did find the campus atmosphere freer than it had been. He reportedly found "a freedom on campus to say what is on one’s mind without fear of embarrassment.... [He] feels that this is one sign that ‘the whole culture has grown up.’"

Heilemann’s imaginative mind found unusual expression in an article on Jesus that he titled the "Anonymian Heresy" in the spring 1971 issue of the Ursinus Magazine. He argued that it was unproductive to search for the historical Jesus. He thought that Christian virtue, especially humility, became more meaningful if the particular life of Jesus went "completely unnoticed." He suggested that salvation was an enterprise for all humankind. The impact of Christianity increases, he said, if we see Christ as "a figure Who has achieved reality as a result of a process as mysterious as the process of cultural and biological evolution." There is no record that theologians from the United Church of Christ responded to his "heretical" paper. The student newspaper reprinted excerpts from it and concluded: "We are sure that those who have been touched by this beautiful man will never forget him. The sages tell us that this is indeed the test of a great man."

30 June 1972 A memorable faculty generation began to depart the active scene of the campus when four stalwarts retired, following the recent deaths of two others. Leaving active service at the end of the 1972 academic year were ELEANOR F. SNELL, professor of health and physical education and legendary coach of women's field hockey and other sports; DONALD G. BAKER, professor of classics and long-time coach of men's soccer; WILLIAM F. PHILIP, professor of music, director of the vocal chorale known as the Meistersingers and of the annual Messiah performance in Bomberger Hall, a traditional event that continues to this writing to bring the fall semester to a climax; and HERMAN M. WESSEL, visiting professor of education, a short-timer in years of service compared with the other three but a strong influence on the campus owing to his personality and success as an elementary school principal.

During the 1971-72 academic year, three popular professors died. JOHN C. VORRATH, JR., head of the Romance languages department and one-time assistant dean, died 7 July 1971. Vorrath, a bear of a man, had a heart as big as he was, possessed of "kindness, patience, humor and forbearance," as President Pettit said. JOHN HEILEMANN, professor of physics and, since 1969, professor of the college, on the faculty from 1941, died 8 February 1972 while still on active duty as the faculty's "Renaissance man." HELEN T. GARRETT, professor of Romance languages, mainly French, died 24 April 1972 after a long and painful illness. Students during her thirty-year career remembered her as a cheerful enthusiast for foreign language study. She walked the halls of Bomberger with difficulty caused by her crippled leg but maintained a pleasant demeanor as a mask to her physical pain.

President Pettit was a colleague and contemporary of these major faculty figures. He paid tribute to them at the 12 May 1972 board meeting (to Heilemann at the previous meeting). He said of Snell: she "placed Ursinus women's sports in a prominent position on the map of the world." Of Baker: "As a convinced Quaker and a faculty gadfly, he has lifted every discussion to a new and different level." Of Philip: "He has never judged harshly, never lost a friend nor missed an appointment in his stay at Ursinus." Of Wessel: He "has unusual powers of personality, which are always exercised to a degree that others seek his company, his counsel and his friendship." Of Heilemann: "a distinguished gentleman, and a warm friend, the Professor's Professor, unique in the literal sense--one of a kind. In his breadth of interest and knowledge, primitive, classical and modern, he was today's counterpart of the Renaissance Man."

Meanwhile, two professors of German who helped give the faculty of that time its distinctive stamp were looking ahead to retirement. GEORGE HARTZELL received approval for a sabbatical leave in 1973-74, and ALLAN LAKE RICE received permission to extend his teaching beyond age 68, the mandatory retirement age, through the 1973-74 year.

At the end of the 1975-76 academic year, ALFRED L. CREAGER, '33, who had been head of the old religion department and chaplain of the college in years past, left active service after gradually withdrawing. Throughout his thirty years on the staff, he doubled as pastor of Trinity Reformed Church across the street. Creager by virtue of his positions was the custodian of the college’s Reformed Church heritage. He worked valiantly in class and out to demonstrate its vitality amid the changing moral and ethical perspectives of the faculty and students. Toward the end of his career, he reluctantly supported the end of required attendance at chapel and thus helped remove religious observance from the prescribed program of the college. By combining his openness to ideas and change with his certainty that such openness accorded with the deepest Reformed faith, he helped perpetuate the religious vitality of the college’s founders. However, this was a holding action at best. The influence of the Evangelical and Reformed Church (after 1957, United Church of Christ) on the lives of students and on the policies of the college continued to move toward the periphery in years to come.

As this generation of faculty members departed the scene, their concept of their profession also began to diminish on campus. They did not define their accomplishments by the scholarly work they did beyond their home campus. (One exception among others was Rice, who was a prolific translator.) Nor did they pursue faculty development plans submitted for approval to a dean--that style of faculty life lay in the future. They all knew the deprivations of the Great Depression and the severe limits set for those who elected college teaching as a profession. They complained about the things Ursinus did not have. Yet, whatever they thought of the institution's constraints, each had the self-reliance to make a pact according to individual values and pedagogical vision. Snell rarely sought or received administrative approval for her unique way of evaluating the combined academic and playing-field performance of Ursinus's women student athletes. Baker's pamphlet handouts against smoking and drinking in his classroom in Bomberger evoked the amused tolerance of colleagues and students alike. Philip inspired students to follow him because he manifested a vulnerable sort of love for them, not because they perceived him as a great musician. Faculty members had a kind of entrepreneurial freedom to impact students in their particular styles, unfettered by formal expectations. The constraints on their pedagogical freedom came disguised as the subtle tyrannies and stylistic quirks of a dean or a president. It was a strange kind of professional arrangement in the light of subsequent practice on campus. However, it worked, if measured by the productive careers of alumni of those years and by their loyalty to the institution.

ROBIN CLOUSER, '63, one of George Hartzell's proteges who came back to teach German, interviewed his mentor for the February 1975 issue of the Ursinus Bulletin. He quoted Hartzell: "At Ursinus a humane attitude toward the students was always the main thing because a student is really a less experienced scholar." In speaking for himself, Hartzell spoke for a whole faculty generation. Hartzell would die on 25 November 1975 as renewed controversy over social rules stirred among the students.

As major faculty figures departed, new names came to the fore that would identify the faculty as it evolved through Pettit's administration. Among those promoted or tenured at the 3 March 1972 meeting, several would serve through long careers and make their own different sort of impact on the institution: RAY K. SCHULTZ, associate professor of chemistry, received tenure; MARTHA C. TAKATS of physics and RICHARD P. RICHTER, '53, of English advanced from instructor to assistant professor.

Meanwhile, a cadre of fresh new faculty faces prepared to arrive on campus in the fall of 1972. Several of them would stay the course and make their mark on the college no less distinctively than the outgoing generation.

Among the newcomers was JOYCE E. HENRY in the English department. Henry brought professional experience and formal study of theatre to the college's theatrical program during the Pettit administration. She remained as the driving force of theatre instruction and performance for well over a quarter of a century. She pressed to convert the snack shop in a corrugated "temporary" building at the center of campus, behind Bomberger Hall, into a theatre-in-the-raw. Later, Henry conceived of the conversion of Thompson-Gay Gym into Ritter Center with its black-box theatre.

The college had chosen ROBERT RAND DAVIDSON in the health and physical education department as the likely successor to EVERETT M. BAILEY, veteran chairman of both athletics and the academic department. Davidson took over in 1977. He held both positions until 1996, when he gave up the athletics position and concentrated on leading the academic department.

JUAN ESPADAS entered the life of the college as an instructor in Spanish. He became the first chair of a newly combined modern languages department in the early eighties and played a major role as a faculty leader on academic council.

PETER F. SMALL began as assistant professor of biology, later became chair of his department and for many years was an assistant academic dean.

JOHN M. WICKERSHAM replaced DONALD G. BAKER as the one-man classics department. Wickersham stamped the department with his own unique personality and professional drive. He became one of the most-published Ursinus faculty members in the academic press. With a team of other fellow members of Phi Beta Kappa, he worked mightily to bring national approval of the PBK Society to an Ursinus Chapter, a victory finally won in 1992.

In the next couple of years, Pettit hired other new faculty members whose careers on the campus would be lengthy and influential in the life of the college: (in 1973) PETER F. PERRETEN in English and THEODORE A. XARAS in art; (in 1974) JOHN D. PILGRIM in economics and ROBIN CLOUSER, '63, in German; (in 1975) S. ROSS DOUGHTY, '68, in history and MARY B. FIELDS in biology.

Xaras's meticulous approach to instruction in drawing contrasted to his imaginative reading of American popular culture. This made him an unpredictably interesting instructor to students and a colorful colleague to faculty members. In the course of his career, he would become the college's in-house portraitist of important faculty, board members, and administrators. His subjects would come to include board presidents John H. Ware, Thomas P. Glassmoyer, '36, and William F. Heefner, '42; president Richard P. Richter, '53; deans Maurice W. Armstrong, Richard G. Bozorth and William E. Akin; faculty members Calvin D. Yost, Jr., '30, (and a copy of a portrait of Calvin D. Yost, Sr.), and Roger P. Staiger, '43; maintenance supervisor Joseph Hastings. Taken together, these portraits make up an unsentimental, realistic set of insights into the character of people who had important parts in shaping the course of the college's development.

Students rightly perceived that Pilgrim, fresh out of Vanderbilt, was hired to help "shape up" the standards of the economics department. They came to respect him as a demanding but interesting teacher. He would later do a fellowship with the American Council on Education and cast his lot as an administrator. He became in the Richter administration the vice president for finance and planning. Throughout he continued teaching a course in economics. He left Ursinus after 23 years in 1998 to serve as vice president at Millsaps College in Mississippi. Perreten's unflagging professionalism in the teaching of literature and composition, Clouser's unique service as a humanist on the pre-med committee, Fields's dedication to teaching the teachers of biology, Doughty's uncommon commitment to the teaching process--by such individual qualities was the collective quality of the faculty augmented.

Also in the "class" entering in the fall of 1972 was ROBERT V. COGGER. A seasoned school superintendent from New York State, he came in to head the education department upon the withdrawal of HERMAN M. WESSEL. Cogger gave Pettit a stable point of maturity in the faculty at a time when many veteran colleagues were leaving and many new faces were appearing fresh out of graduate school. He served until retirement in 1985.

Seen in retrospect, this cadre of bright new faculty hired by Pettit constituted one of his most lasting contributions to the welfare of Ursinus. They were of a generation of professionals who brought from graduate school a new commitment to remain abreast of their fields not commonly seen before on campus. By the end of Pettit's administration, they would begin advocating a reformed campus culture that would formally support professional research and pedagogical development in ways previously not expected by faculty and not provided by the college.

3 September 1972 JAMES L. BOSWELL, professor of econics for nearly 40 years, died at age 84. Boswell had retired in 1960. Alumni remembered Boswell's purist teaching of supply-and-demand economic theory, unsullied by Keynesian notions or other theories that emerged from the distresses of the 1930s. They also remembered his benign indifference to class attendance. Legends of skipping parts of Bosie's lectures in Bomberger by exiting through the back window enriched alumni cocktail conversation for years after his retirement.

15 September 1973 WILLIAM B. WILLIAMSON, head of philosophy and religion, added another title to a growing list of his book-length publications, Oneness: Ephesians on Church Unity. Joining the faculty in 1968, Williamson brought a penchant for publication not commonly found in the faculty at that point. With a focus on Christian education and the linguistic analysis of concepts, he had three previous books on his curriculum vitae and was preparing another for appearance in 1974. Williamson would later receive the first professional achievement award funded by a major faculty development grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. He was one of the forerunners, then, in moving the college faculty toward a greater emphasis on producing visible scholarly products.

The new cadre of faculty just entering the college was bringing a new commitment to scholarly publication and would follow in the wake of Williamson’s work. Later that fall, JOHN WICKERSHAM of classics saw his first book into print, co-authored with a fellow classicist, Greek Historical Documents--the Fourth Century, B.C.

8 November 1973 The CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT commemorated its long-time leader, RUSSELL STURGIS, with a portrait by ELLWOOD S. PAISLEY, ‘13. ROGER P. STAIGER, ‘43, current department chair, declared Sturgis "the father of modern chemistry" at Ursinus. The portrait by Paisley, who was secretary of the board of directors and a self-taught artist, included symbols of Sturgis’s life--chemical scales, a Christian cross, Pfahler Hall, and a Pennsylvania Railroad logo, representing his hobby. The portrait was hung in the chemistry department reading room in Pfahler Hall (space that served as the office of the college president during the administration of McClure and most of that of Helfferich).

15 November 1973 The SOCRATIC CLUB, a faculty forum for scholarly interests, heard its first lecture, delivered by GEORGE FAGO of psychology. He contrasted radical behaviorism as taught by B. F. Skinner to "new-behaviorism." The latter, he said, was more inclined toward hypothesizing in the classic scientific mode. The Socratic Club was a vital sign of the intellectual life of the campus, breathed into life by younger faculty members and serious-minded students. Subsequent topics were the Watergate problem and the tenets of Quakers. While it did not last long, the club’s emergence signaled the infusion of youth and new perspective into the faculty. Fago and others like him would become the major change agents in the curriculum reviews of subsequent years.

16 November 1973 NON-RENEWAL of the contract of a non-tenured professor, approved by the board, precipitated an appeal. The appeal process, involving an advisor from outside the college community, was an ad hoc arrangement. From the administration's perspective, informal arrangements for voicing grievances protected the interests of the faculty member. While the faculty member departed and stability prevailed, the case left a residue of opinion among some faculty. They felt that a formal grievance process for retention, promotion, and tenure decisions would improve relationships between the faculty and the administration and board. That feeling translated into a specific call for a formal grievance procedure in the faculty's "letter of concerns" in October 1975.

20 March 1974 (approximate) Two political science professors presented RESEARCH PAPERS at the International Studies Association convention in St. Louis. EUGENE H. MILLER and JAMES P. CRAFT, JR., spoke on a panel on "The US in Asia: The Containment Policy Re-examined." Miller was a leader in Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honorary society. He maintained a tireless schedule of study, travel, and research, regularly producing articles in various journals. Craft’s recent Ph.D. work at the University of Pennsylvania made him the "quantitative" political scientist of the campus. His duties as assistant academic dean did not deter him from playing a role in the professional political science organizations in the east.

25 April 1974 Two English professors received post-doctoral research GRANTS FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES. At Princeton, JOYCE E. HENRY studied Shakespeare's development as a dramatist. At UCLA, PETER PERRETEN studied the influence of other arts on literature. NEH over the years would provide additional grants, small but useful, for Ursinus faculty members. The work enabled by these awards enriched the professional atmosphere of the college at a time when it was not spending its own funds for professional development.

1 July 1975 HARRY E. (CHUCK) BROADBENT, '69, became head of Myrin Library, replacing CALVIN D. YOST, JR, '30. Broadbent was a student worker in the library during planning and construction of Myrin. He brought an up-to-date understanding of the dynamics of what was becoming "information science." Later, he led Ursinus through the computerization of its collection management. Broadbent became responsible for coordinating planning in the Richter administration in addition to his library responsibilities. Yost continued to teach English literature until his retirement a few years later.

14 November 1975 The board named the astronomy observatory atop Pfahler Hall in memory of Professor WALTER W. MARSTELLER, '49. Marsteller, who died 19 September 1975, designed and constructed the observatory with his own hands over a period of several years. In a report to the board, President Pettit had personal recollections of Marsteller's craftsmanship: "He designed and personally built the Observatory atop Pfahler Hall, ingeniously devising the dome from aircraft aluminum and constructing motors and timing mechanisms from surplus military parts."

For several decades, it housed the Elihu Thomson Memorial Telescope, on loan from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The Institute reclaimed the instrument in the 1980s. Although the observatory thereby lost its primary function, its prominent place on Pfahler's roof continued to make it a visible symbol of the sciences at the college. Contractors dismantled the Marsteller observatory in the course of building onto Pfahler Hall in the 1997-98 academic year.

Marsteller was the only full professor in the modern history of the college whose formal education ended at the baccalaureate level. He combined his knowledge of applied physics with his calm concern for students to become a model of the small-college faculty member in an era when credentials were less compelling than they later became at Ursinus.

C. Students Achieving

4 December 1971 A team of MATHEMATICS MAJORS ranked high in a prestigious national competition among mathematics students. Ursinus placed 16th among the 165 contestant institutions in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. NED SCHILLOW, '72, FRANK SCHMIDT, '75, and KATHLEEN YOUNG, '73, represented the college. MIT, Harvard, and the like took the top positions in the competitive test. Demonstrated student performance such as this helped sustain the reputation of Ursinus as a good place for bright students in mathematics and the natural sciences. (Weekly, 16 Mar 1972)

13 April 1972 Three CHEMISTRY MAJORS won external awards for their high academic achievement. The Philadelphia Section of the American Chemical Society recognized LARRY S. ANDREWS, ‘72, for his high academic average and his research project for honors. Andrews presented his research findings the following month at the Intercollegiate Student Chemists’ Conference, held at Moravian College. The Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Chemists, meeting at the faculty club of the University of Pennsylvania, honored SUSAN K. ESTERLY, ‘72, for her high average and honors paper. DONALD W. HESS, ‘72, received the Merck Index Award for his high academic standing. Their chemistry department counterparts in other years received similar recognition from the larger chemistry community. They helped sustain Ursinus’s reputation for success in the teaching of the natural sciences and mathematics. (Weekly, 13 Apr 1972)

10 June 1973 (approximate) Seven students went to France with ALBERT REINER, chair of the Romance languages department in the first SUMMER PLAN ABROAD. The seven-week program gave students the opportunity to live with French families in various parts of France and then to live in Paris. As interest in foreign language study began to falter across the nation and at Ursinus, Reiner sought innovative ways to give it appeal. The following summer saw nine students go abroad for summer study, some to France and others to Spain.

30 April 1976 A junior psychology major presented his STUDENT RESEARCH PAPER at a professional colloquium. ALAN TAREN, ‘77, gave his paper at the eleventh annual eastern regional Psi Chi Colloquium, held at Lafayette College. Taren titled his paper "Evidence for an Interruption Theory of Backward Masking." It grew out of a course requirement in Tests and Measurements. The psychology department intensified its established emphasis on student research at about this time. It led the way among academic departments in years to come. The movement would grow through the ensuing years to become a campus-wide institutional hallmark in the 1990s.

5 May 1976 An Ursinus student won a year’s study in Scotland from the ST. ANDREW’S SOCIETY for the eighth consecutive year. KEVIN S. LEIBENSPERGER, ‘78, a sophomore political science major, followed GEORGE S. BAUSE, ‘77, who was finishing his junior year at the University of Edinburgh. Ursinus students had won a disproportionate number of the highly competitive awards from the inception of the scholarship in 1957. Among the long line of recipients was Ursinus history professor S. ROSS DOUGHTY, ‘68. Some other past winners were DAVID LISCOM, ’76, RANDALL S. COLE, ’75, WARREN ROBINSON, ’74, CHARLES L. CHAMBERS, ’73, and MASON WILLIAMS, ’71.

Ursinus students fared well against their area peers in part because of a rigorous pre-screening conducted on campus. It assured that only the best and brightest would apply. However, the history of the scholarship was also at play. NORMAN E. MCCLURE, a proud Scotsman, in his later years as the Ursinus president (1936-1958) headed the St. Andrew’s Society committee that worked up the ground rules for the endowed prize. His copious notes on the project make it abundantly clear that he and his Society colleagues expected Ursinus students to be among the regular beneficiaries. His colleague and fellow Society member, H. LLOYD JONES, of the Ursinus English department and admissions staff, for many years administered the search for candidates on campus. Jones kept the relationship between the college and the Society well cultivated.

D. Teaching and Learning in the Evening School

1 August 1971 The direction of the EVENING SCHOOL changed hands as ROBERT J. MYERS retired and CHARLES L. LEVESQUE joined the staff. Like his predecessor, Levesque had had a lengthy career as a chemist at Rohm & Haas Company before taking retirement and embarking on a part-time second career in education. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College and holder of a doctorate from the University of Illinois, he brought an aggressive managerial style to the Evening School and a high level of interest in liberal education to the campus community.

12 May 1972 CHARLES L. LEVESQUE, director of the EVENING SCHOOL, reported to the board on Evening School enrollment and its long-term objectives. Enrollment stood at about 725. Levesque said that as patterns of college education were changing, the Evening School allowed the college to achieve some flexibility and undertake experiments at minimum risk. Its long-term objectives were (a) to gain fullest possible utilization of facilities; (b) to give maximum service to the community; (c) to gain maximum added net income for the College; (d) to achieve these objectives within a framework compatible with the overall mission of Ursinus. The Evening School was offering only degrees in business administration. Levesque floated the idea that it might offer baccalaureate degrees in the arts and sciences. It would be some years before it began to do so.

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