My first impression of administrative life, when I started putting in full days at my Hopkins Hall office in January 1977, was how surprisingly tiring a day of end-to-end meetings could be. But I quickly adjusted to that and was later to find in turn, having stepped down from the presidency, that a full day open for research and writing without any interruption could seem virtually endless. At Williams, as at similar freestanding liberal arts colleges, the role of dean of the faculty is a significant and demanding one. In virtue of the responsibilities attached to it which relate directly to the college’s central academic mission, however, it is also a compellingly interesting assignment. While, through my years of work on the CAP, I had become familiar with the dean’s normal array of responsibilities (which focused largely in the crucial area of faculty appointments and promotions), I had also come to conclude that the role had some still-untapped potential for furthering the college’s intellectual well-being. And I must confess that, when appointed as dean, I was already champing at the bit to see some of that potential realized. I remain grateful to John Chandler for having reposed his confidence in me and appreciative, too, for the degree to which, without anxious intrusion, he let me get on with the job. Unlike Jack Sawyer who, I’m told, could be something of a micromanager, John delegated confidently to those whom he had appointed to senior administrative positions and, while the dean’s role could be challenging, demanding, and stressful, under that regime of generous delegation it proved also to be very satisfying and fulfilling. I look back to my seven-and-a-half years of deanly service with no small measure of pride in what I was able to achieve. Though I do so also, of course, with a keen sense of the support I received from my colleagues in administration as well as from the truly fine series of senior faculty members who served during those years as members of the CAP, prominent among them John Reichert of the English Department, Bernie (J. Bernard) Bucky of theatre, and Gary Jacobsohn of political science.
The dean of the faculty serves as chair or, better, chair-cum-secretary of the CAP, organizing and scheduling the work of the committee, forwarding to it in a timely manner the documentary materials it needs to discharge its responsibilities, keeping the records, handling communications between it and the department chairs, and, not infrequently, conveying the news of negative decisions to disappointed and sometimes distraught aspirants to tenure—spending time listening to them, in effect grieving with them, and advising them about their options for the future. My years in office were punctuated by some difficult times, some of them precipitated by the recrudescence of student activism and protest at the college, but more often involving the fallout from negative tenure decisions and the subsequent tangled unfolding of bitter appeals which, with time and the worsening condition of the academic job market, became more frequent and exacted a heavier toll on everyone involved. In all of this I would like to think, however, that I proved to be an efficient, judicious, and (I sincerely hope) empathetic supervisor of that whole, crucially important, appointments process. Certainly, I very much enjoyed the annual winter round of interviewing candidates brought up to campus as finalists for the various openings on the faculty and remain especially impressed by the ability of some of the mathematicians to deploy clever analogies in the attempt to render their (very abstract) research topics at least quasi-accessible to uncomprehending layfolk.
In the middle of one such interview, however (the moment remains, understandably, etched indelibly in my mind), a campus security officer diffidently interrupted the proceedings in order to give me a message. My wife had had a horse-related accident and I was to get home as quickly as possible. That I did, and as I drove down Scott Hill Road I saw her standing, waiting for me, at the end of our driveway. She was holding to her face a bloodstained towel that covered her left eye. It was an awful sight, but when she moved the towel so that I could see the wound (which had bled very profusely) I saw to my enormous relief that she had in fact been lucky; it could easily have been much worse. The accident had happened when she was turning out into pasture our then-current horse, a handsome grey thoroughbred called Lady. Delighted at being out of the stable, Lady, once released, had whirled around in high-spirited fashion and flipped up her rear feet in a rather high buck. Unfortunately, Claire-Ann had been taken by surprise and was still a bit too close. During the winter months when the slopes of our pasture could sometimes be rather icy, we were in the habit of having the farrier put sharp Borium tips on the horseshoes so that the animal could get a secure footing. And one of those sharp tips had missed Claire-Ann’s left eye by less than an inch and had gouged out the flesh for about an inch and a half across the upper bridge of her nose. On the one hand, despite all the blood, it was a superficial wound; on the other, unless stitched up in expert fashion it could leave an ugly scar. When I got her to the emergency room at our rural hospital in North Adams, the doctor on rotational duty was a markedly noninterventionist pediatrician prone to agonizing even about giving an aspirin to a sick infant. When I told him that she was not altogether lacking in vanity about her looks, he panicked a bit and insisted that what she really needed was the attention of a skilled plastic surgeon. Such was not readily available in our area and he took some time to face up to the fact that he might have to deal with the task himself. Treatment as a result had not got much further than an exercise in advanced hand-wringing when Providence itself finally intervened. It did so with the arrival in the emergency room of a fellow horse-lover from South Williamstown, Roger Gould by name, by profession an upper maxillary surgeon whose skill the nurses on duty clearly admired. He had done his residency in the “Apache” zone of the South Bronx in New York and had dealt with many a jagged knife wound. When he walked in, one had the sense that the lights had suddenly been turned up. Striding over to the gurney on which Claire-Ann was lying, and with the astonishing confidence that some surgeons seem to possess, he peered down quickly at the wound and promptly said: “I can do that.” If for no other reason than he was a fellow horse-lover, Claire-Ann reacted with a reciprocal degree of confidence and let him get on with the job. Neither his confidence nor hers was misplaced. He repaired the wound very skillfully (good hands!) so that all that was left when it finally healed was a fine, white line across the bridge of her nose. If some interviews of candidates stand out in my mind because they involved stellar performances, the one that I had to interrupt that day lingers on for less happy reasons.
Throughout my term of office as dean, I continued to teach two courses each year and I did not want to give that up. Partly because my services were needed, especially in the History of Ideas Program, but partly, too, because I wanted to signal in concrete terms that I was not as an administrator permitting myself to drift out of direct, personal touch with the sort of responsibilities my faculty colleagues were called upon to discharge. It would have been easier, of course, had I had the sort of help afforded later on when an associate dean of the faculty was appointed. But given the continuing adverse financial pressures of the late seventies and early eighties, I didn’t feel I could reasonably make a case for any additional help. The less so in that I was still finding it possible to embark on some, at least, of the initiatives I had in mind.
At that time at Williams, as at American institutions of higher education at large, faculty salaries had been steadily losing ground in absolute terms to high levels of inflation and also in comparison with salaries in other occupations. Also at that time, with an oversupply of people with PhDs pursuing an undersupply of available academic openings, conditions were such that the receipt of a negative tenure decision could well threaten the end of any realistic chance to continue pursuing an academic career. Faculty morale, then, was understandably not very high, especially (though not exclusively) among the non-tenured cohort. Those of us in administration, accordingly, were acutely conscious of the need to do whatever we could to boost our colleagues’ spirits. I myself had also become conscious, somewhat to my surprise, that even in a comparatively intimate collegiate setting like ours, individual faculty members might well be unaware of the presence in other departments of colleagues whose intellectual interests overlapped with theirs. There was clearly a need to do whatever we could to stitch together more effectively our particular community of learning.
My own response was twofold. First, perhaps a bit old-fashioned, I redoubled and expanded the amount of entertaining traditionally done by the dean of the faculty. So, taking care to mix together on each occasion faculty drawn from a range of different departments, we launched at our house an ongoing succession of cocktail parties, buffet dinners, and even small dancing parties for those whom we knew liked that sort of thing. Had we relied on caterers, our rather modest entertainment allowance would speedily have been exhausted, but Claire-Ann cheerfully came to the rescue by doing the cooking for our buffet dinners herself, and the barkeeping was done (if not by me) by one or another of my sons, who seemed to be amused by the large quantities of cheap white wine my colleagues cheerfully consumed. Being by temperament and habit rather social creatures, we tended to enjoy all of this and were certainly not prone to dismissing it as some sort of tiresome duty.
My second, related, venture, while it also pertained to community building in general, represented more specifically an attempt to enrich the intellectual experience of the collegiate community. After a year or so on the job, and in collaboration with colleagues at Amherst and Wesleyan, I was able in 1978 to get going a Little Three Faculty Colloquium which was destined to run on every year into the mid-1990s when the presidents of the Little Three colleges, all of them new to their positions, decided in rather peremptory fashion to terminate it. Being by that time out of administration, I was not privy to the reason for their decision. It can hardly have been financial because the colloquium really didn’t cost all that much. Maybe it had simply run its course or, perhaps more likely, maybe the current deans of the faculty at the three colleges, all of them unfamiliar with the original intent behind these annual gatherings, had come by then to bridle a bit about the not-inconsiderable amount of time and effort they themselves had to invest in order to keep the colloquium going. Whatever the reason, I could not help regretting the decision to terminate. It is all too easy to let such programs go down the drain and much harder to get them going.
The beginnings of that particular effort went back to a conference at Williams in 1977 at which I had met several faculty members from Wesleyan including Richard Stamelman, a scholar of some distinction in French literature then serving as director of the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities. I had been impressed with the intellectual liveliness of the Wesleyan group and had sensed that their center was either itself a reflection of that liveliness or a stimulant to it. It had already launched History and Theory, a journal focused on metahistorical issues which had swiftly risen to a position of international prominence. A little later on I had attended (at Wesleyan, I believe) my first meeting with the Little Three administrators’ group which met at the end of each academic year at one or another of the three colleges in rotation. Punctuated by enjoyable dinners, it afforded one the opportunity to get to know one’s opposite numbers and to learn how the other colleges went about their business and under what conditions. In the group sessions, we shared quite candidly the triumphs, challenges, and disasters experienced on our several campuses during the previous academic year and brooded about the lessons to be learned from them. We also tried to identify the general trends affecting all our institutions and to get a clear fix on the challenges lying ahead. Of all the meetings of various administrative groupings I have attended, the Little Three meetings were by far the most helpful and enjoyable.
That was partly the case because of the characteristics that the three colleges shared in common. And that gave me the idea, working in collaboration with Richard (a fine, imaginative colleague), to approach Prosser Gifford (whom I had known, years earlier, at Yale), then dean of the faculty at Amherst, to see if we could add to the Little Three athletic competition and the Little Three administrators’ meetings a Little Three Faculty Colloquium. Though his faculty colleagues proved to be a bit lukewarm about that idea, Prosser himself embraced it enthusiastically and proved to be a fount of creative ideas. The plan was to meet towards the end of January each year at one or another of the three campuses in rotation for a (reasonably convivial) weekend of paper reading on a chosen topic, broad and interdisciplinary in nature. That topic would be introduced in a keynote address by a luminary from outside—thus, for example, Edmund O. Wilson when the chosen theme was “Sociobiology,” René Girard when the theme was “Culture and Violence,” and so on. And, for some years, we at Williams published the papers in a little regional magazine called the Berkshire Review. None of our departments were all that large and those occasions, attended regularly by about sixty conferees, were intended to provide the members of the three collegiate faculties an opportunity to get to know their opposite numbers at the sister colleges, thus enlarging the circle of colleagues in related fields. The gatherings were also intended to acquaint the faculty members with colleagues on their own faculties whom they might not have met, to nudge all of them out of their departmental silos, and to encourage a more ecumenical approach to the larger intellectual issues with which all would eventually have to grapple. All such goals struck me as eminently worthwhile, and these colloquia proved to be very stimulating intellectual events.
In terms of the ongoing building up of a community and the facilitating of a healthy measure of communication, other, more administratively oriented, measures were also called for, especially in relation to the body of academic department chairs. On the college’s official table of organization (as quasi-fictional as all such documents tend to be), those chairs were represented as reporting to the dean of the faculty in presumably the same way as subordinate administrative officers report to their seniors. At most, that represents an exercise in wishful thinking. Those chairs, sometimes quasi-baronial figures, possess in fact a considerable measure of independence, bolstered by the confidence the other senior members of their departments have chosen to repose in them. And any dean of the faculty foolish enough to think that they worked for him rather than with him wouldn’t last very long in the job. With that in mind, then, during my first week in office I made appointments with all those chairs, the people with whom I would have to work most closely and whose confidence I needed to enjoy. Thinking, rightly or wrongly, that some helpful symbolism might attach to it, I made a point of going over to see them on their own home turf rather than asking them to come to see me in my office. After my first year as dean, I also began the practice of holding, during the spring semester after the annual reappointment and promotion round was over, several dinner meetings with small groups of them at the Faculty Club. On those occasions, at which the discussion agenda was open-ended, I would have with me David Booth (the college’s vice provost), partly because he was responsible for designing, managing, and monitoring the process whereby students were involved in the evaluation of teaching effectiveness, but also, and more important, because he was such a good, careful listener who could often pick up on nuances in what was being said that I myself might have missed. After each session was over, he and I would sit down to go over the evening’s discussion to see if we agreed on what was to be learned from it. The chairs were constantly changing and always something of a mixed group, including not only more experienced and less experienced people but also those who by talent and temperament were more suited to their roles than were others. Some were impressively effective—I think, for example, from the generation ahead of mine, of people like Charlie Compton of chemistry or Bill Gates of economics, the latter a superb mentor to his junior faculty. Or, from my generation, people like Hodge Markgraf of chemistry, Larry Graver of English, and John Hyde of history. Others, especially from the small departments where there were fewer senior members available to choose from, were not necessarily very good at the job and I thought they might learn something valuable listening to how others went about their chairmanly duties. At each such meeting, then, I mixed the experienced with the inexperienced and made a point also of including chairs of the interdepartmental programs so that they could share the challenges they faced and hear, in turn, of the burdens that some chairs felt those programs placed on their departments.
Such occasions were not only highly informative but also quite enjoyable and, occasionally, even convivial. So, having gone through the cadre of chairs, I went on to work my way, across time in similar dinner meetings, through the entire tenured faculty. I listened closely to what they had to say when we moved on from general conversation over food and drink to more formal discussion, and I learned a great deal about their characteristic concerns and from the ideas that surfaced. So much so, indeed, that I tried to extend the process to assistant professors in their second term of appointment, but without success. Any views they had about the college and its well-being at large were understandably dwarfed by their obsession with their own upcoming tenure decisions. So I returned to the established cycle and began again with the constantly changing group of department chairs.
All of this activity directed at the stitching together of the fabric of community was, of course, quite labor-intensive and from time to time, when I was tired or felt a bit down, I couldn’t help wondering if it really made much of a difference. I usually decided that it did, if only in a subtle sort of way, and I stuck with it throughout my time as dean. If nothing else, it meant that by the time I was elected president it had helped me get to know the faculty as a whole very well and, for good or ill, they had got to know me too. And I had been encouraged to keep on with the practice by an approving comment embedded in the 1978 report of the visiting committee that had conducted our decennial reaccreditation round.
Another initiative, dating this time to my last year as dean, reflected, like the founding of the annual Little Three Faculty Colloquium, a continuing attempt to promote the intellectual vibrancy of the faculty and, over the years, it has borne considerable fruit. In the spring of 1982 I met with Jim (James MacGregor) Burns of the Political Science Department and Mark Taylor of the Religion Department (both of them highly productive scholars of distinction) to discuss the role of faculty research at the college and its intersection with the college’s teaching mission. At that time, the putative value of having some sort of humanities center at the college, one similar to the one at Wesleyan, was one of the topics of discussion. But we put it to one side in favor of a small program of senior seminars focused on the research interests of the faculty members teaching them. In the fall of 1984, however, the beginning of my last year as dean of the faculty, while driving back from the Albany-Rensselaer train station where I had just deposited Deirdre (who had to pick up a train to New York City where she was then working), I began to think that there might be a way in which a center, not just for the humanities but for the humanities and interpretative or humanistic social sciences as well, could be fitted into the life of the college. So I drafted a position paper on the subject, the first, in fact, of three, one of which explored ways in which we might fund such a center. I tried it out first on Mark, who responded with great interest and encouraged me to go ahead with the idea of getting together a small group of appropriate faculty to help shape a formal proposal. And we submitted that proposal, having encouraged a further and larger group of colleagues to sign on in support, to the president. As we ourselves constituted no more than an advocacy group, he then appointed a formal faculty committee to address the issue. That committee reframed the proposal slightly, submitted it to the president the following spring (1985), and endorsed it with enthusiasm. John Chandler held an open meeting to discuss it at which I spoke, affirming my own continuing commitment to the project, and a few days later John confirmed that the proposed center would, indeed, be established. When he did so, he knew something that I did not. The weekend before, the board of trustees had arrived at a decision concerning who the new president of the college should be, and they were to assemble again in a few days’ time to take the formal vote. That weekend, then, Pete (Pete S.) Parish ’41, chairman of the board’s executive committee, informed me that I had been elected as John’s successor. For the nascent center that was good news as it put me in an excellent position to situate it appropriately (in a handsome college house located in a quiet spot on the edge of campus). It also put me in the right position to ensure that the raising of restricted funds to endow it for the long haul would be made part of the bicentennial fund drive that we were to launch publicly in 1989.
Since then, and after thirty years in operation, the center has come to flourish as an integral part of our collegiate life, sponsoring a rich variety of conferences, seminars, study groups, panels, and visiting speakers, and holding a weekly seminar at which the fellows currently in residence present papers relating to their research. As I have an office in the building (which is now named after me) and am privileged to take part in those seminars, I can attest to their liveliness. One of the reasons for the establishment of the center had been the greater difficulty faculty were beginning to experience, because of the demands of dual careers, in getting away from Williams while on leave and avoiding continuing (and distracting) entanglement in the life of the campus. From that life, which can be quite devouring, we needed to help them find a way to distance themselves while still in residence in order to concentrate on their own scholarship. The center, then, is a partial response to that need, and most of the fellows are Williams faculty, chosen as equitably as possible via a competitive process. Every other year or so, however, we tend to have a visiting fellow from one of our neighboring colleges. And every year, in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute’s fine program for research scholars in art history, we appoint as Clark-Oakley fellow a scholar from home or abroad whose interests combine art history with another contiguous discipline and who, participating in the seminars of both programs, can serve as a helpful bridge between our group of scholars at the center and those brought together in the Clark program, the latter group being characteristically quite international in composition. This arrangement has worked very well, and the ongoing sponsorship of scholarly activity in the humanities by both the center and by the Clark has added significantly to the intellectual liveliness of our small community.
Not all my initiatives, of course, worked that well. One, indeed, involving an attempt to make a change in the college’s curriculum overall, simply failed, foundering ultimately, I think, on the long-established and deeply rooted tradition of stubborn departmentalism at Williams. It may have foundered also, as, indeed, did every other college-wide curricular initiative right through the 1970s and most of the 1980s, on the unforgiving rock of changed faculty attitudes at the college. This is suggested interestingly in the little curricular history of the Chandler era that I asked Jim (James B.) Wood of the History Department to put together in 1985 by way of preparation for the curricular review we launched in that year. There he remarks that “by 1973 much of the senior faculty was tired and increasingly irritated by attempts to push the curriculum further away from the pre-1967 model.” And, having noted that, he goes on to speculate that
at the heart of this opposition were departmental concerns, often educational but also worries about staffing and enrollment implications of further modification of the curriculum. A common theme underlying the withdrawal and defeat of many measures [in this era] was also antipathy to increased requirements. To these [factors] can be added the increasing conservatism and more narrow professionalism of many junior faculty who, in an increasingly depressing job climate, resented any attempt to compel them to experiment outside what they did well and comfortably. Although the influx of more widely recruited faculty in the late 1960s and early 1970s had at first been an impetus for change, the steady increase in the variety of educational backgrounds since the mid-1970s has probably further decreased the chance for faculty consensus in terms of major structural changes on educational issues.
In the latter half of the 1970s, though not a great deal had come from it, a lot of concern had surfaced in the world of higher education at large about the inadequacies of the provisions for “general education” on our American campuses—that term being used to denote what went on in the part of the curriculum that lay outside the orbit of the various departmental majors. At the Williams of that day, by tradition highly disciplinary and departmental in its focus, the only real requirement that students had to meet beyond their major course of instruction was the stipulation that a minimum of two courses had to be taken in each of the three divisions (arts and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences), a regulation that served in practice if not in name as, above all, a science requirement. The principal concern at Williams, flagged in the years immediately preceding by the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) and, again, by one of its subcommittees, was the failure of all too many of our students to avail themselves of courses offered in the pre-modern period, of courses pertaining to non-Western societies or to the African American and other minority American traditions, or of courses in women’s studies. In effect, there was a prevalence of an undesirable degree of historical and cultural provincialism. Another concern was the lack of commonality in the intellectual experience of students and the obstacle that constituted to the emergence of a vital community of intellectual discourse among them. In the fall of the 1978–79 academic year, the president asked me to put together and chair a small working group with the charge of looking into this issue and, if it was deemed appropriate, proposing a pertinent reshaping of the student’s non-major curricular experience at the college. The group was a good one and a privilege to work with. It was composed of Jim Wood, an early modern Europeanist in my own department whom I knew to have a good, creative head on matters of curricular import, David Park from the Physics Department, my old neighbor from Chapin Court and fellow member on Committee X, Michael Bell, an Americanist in the English Department and a highly energetic man possessed of a cracklingly sharp intelligence, and two students. One of those students, Jay Wallace, ’79 (at that time a thesis student of mine in the history of ideas major), was later to become an esteemed senior member in the Berkeley Philosophy Department and one of the leading moral philosophers in the Anglophone world.
Benefiting from a series of earlier (if inconclusive) reports emanating from the CEP and one of its subcommittees, we were determined to end several years of fruitless discussion on the matter and to bring the issue to a moment of decision by the end of the academic year. So we went to work with dispatch and in committee sessions distinguished by their openness and intellectual liveliness. Michael Bell had volunteered to serve as secretary and was to bounce back highly literate minutes of our sessions with such rapidity that I was sometimes tempted to surmise that he had written them in advance of the sessions themselves. By December, having discussed our own curricular situation and canvassed the general education provisions at cognate institutions, we were able to circulate an interim report to which we requested responses. By the following spring, then, having sought out the views of our own students and faculty via both open meetings and a demanding effort to touch base individually with practically every faculty member currently in residence, we were able to circulate our final report with a view to thorough discussion at the April and May faculty meetings. The idea was to get to a preliminary vote warranting, if positive, the considerable effort that would be involved in the detailed planning for the courses and the way in which they would be staffed. Once that was done, we planned to present the overall detailed proposal for a final, definitive vote early in the fall semester of the following academic year. By now, we had done everything we could to familiarize the faculty with the general line of march we were pursuing and to encourage them to give it their careful consideration.
Products of institutions like Columbia and Chicago, which are still possessed of a strong general education tradition of the “great books” type, will doubtless be tempted to dismiss what we were proposing as very small beer indeed, no more than a minor tilt in the orientation of our highly departmentalized curriculum. For, apart from some recommendations for testing the standard of “numeracy” and “literacy” among our freshmen (a matter in dispute among the faculty), our principal recommendation was the college-wide institution of two required “great works” semester courses in the freshman year. Modest as that might seem, such a move was also very much at odds with long-standing and hallowed curricular tradition at Williams. That being so, and though it was supported by votes of both the CEP and the student College Council, the proposal sailed into a veritable storm of opposition in the April and May faculty meetings. It even generated a flicker of pamphlet warfare which served to inform and enliven debate at the second of those meetings. The working group’s blue-covered report, signed by twenty-four faculty members and running to more than twenty pages, was countered over the spring break by a pink-covered oppositional document of comparable length, signed by an oppositional group composed of some two dozen senior members of the faculty. From internal evidence, I would judge that it was drafted largely by Russ (Russell H.) Bostert, an Americanist colleague of mine in the History Department who was a very good teacher and, on his watch, a fine chairman of that department. A deeply conscientious and engaged citizen of both department and college, he was also, however, a well-entrenched and stubborn opponent of college-wide curricular change. Highly polemical in tone and deploying adjectives concerning the proposed “great works” courses like “arbitrary” and “dogmatic,” that pamphlet spoke disparagingly of “herding” freshmen into “compulsory” courses and of encouraging a superficial “dilettantism” among the faculty who, in relation to the great works under discussion, would not be “professionals” who “knew their material.” Attributing to the working group “a serious misunderstanding of what a liberal education is,” and stipulating that the “primary goal” of such an education was the production of “an informed and critical intelligence,” the author(s) of the pamphlet argued that the type of general education requirement that the working group proposed was “a liability to be avoided,” that, indeed, it would have “profoundly negative effects that would harm the educational mission of Williams College.” Beyond that, it went on, reaching now the heights of plangent negativity, to predict disastrous consequences stemming from the impact of the proposed requirement on the distribution of course enrollments and its supposedly negative impact on introductory courses right across the college, as well as its possibly negative impact on faculty recruitment and departmental staffing. After all, 475 freshmen registrations each term would be shifted from departmental introductory courses into the general education courses being proposed, and (consolidating teaching factions) no less than 4.2 full-time faculty equivalents would be needed to staff those courses.
Fair enough, but in its last sentence the “pink pamphlet” did succeed in going one bridge too far. “Under the circumstances,” it said, “we did not believe it appropriate to involve non-tenured faculty in the signing of this statement.” While it archly avoided identifying what exactly those “circumstances” were, the implication was that non-tenured faculty might have something to fear, or might think that they had something to fear, if they came out openly in opposition to a proposal backed by the dean of the faculty. Though I myself viewed this as a shabby and insulting sentiment for a group of senior colleagues to sign on to, all I could do was to swallow hard. But I was heartened somewhat when one non-tenured colleague got to his feet to object to it.
In any case, it was no more than an irritating distraction from the matter at hand. The practical concerns being expressed were themselves not irrational nor lightly to be dismissed. The working group itself had felt bound to acknowledge that it could not predict with any degree of certainty what the impacts on enrollment and staffing would be, but it had properly insisted that
Even on the most gloomy of predictions the perturbation in course registrations that the imposition of the new requirement would create could not simultaneously result in every department’s “worst case.” And planning that envisages simultaneously every “worst case” is unlikely to be productive.
In the end, however, the working group did so in vain, and the optimism of those who by temperament were prone to seeing the glass half full was trumped by the pessimism of those who were habitually prone to seeing it half empty. Nonetheless, though occasionally punctuated by sardonic one-liners injected from the sidelines by the curricular agnostics among us, the debates at those two faculty meetings proved to be very animated and, at times, quite passionate in nature. Reading now, some thirty-five years later, the minutes of those meetings, I cannot help being impressed by the seriousness with which the pertinent issues were engaged. I cannot help being struck, too, by the degree to which they ultimately reflected, not simply the clash of differing temperaments, but also the hostile encounter of irreconcilable educational orientations. At the second of those two protracted faculty meetings and as the debate proceeded, one could feel the tide of opinion turning in favor of those prone to dismissing the “great books” approach as fostering superficiality in the students’ reading and amateurishness and dilettantism in the faculty’s teaching. For the approval of a college-wide curricular change, it was customary to stipulate the need for a 60 percent majority vote, but, in the event, the vote in favor of the working group’s proposal came nowhere near that mark, falling just short of a simple majority. The faculty had spoken, and had done so decisively. After years of inconclusive discussion at the college concerning general education, the core course approach, which had no roots in the college’s instructional history, was now definitively extruded into the outer curricular darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
While this outcome understandably left proponents in general and the members of the working group in particular in a rather bruised state, the extended debate involved—intense, deeply serious, and focused directly on fundamental educational issues—was, I believe, a significant contribution to the ongoing health of the college. If a constantly changing faculty had proved unwilling to approve the moves being proposed, it had at least reappropriated and made its own the curricular arrangements it had inherited. And that was no unimportant matter. Or so I assured the members of the group, to whom I was very much attached, when I took them out after the meeting for a dinner that was very enjoyable even if it was of necessity consolatory rather than celebratory in nature. In subsequent years, though we have gone through more than one important review of the curriculum, we have never again had anything quite like that great 1979 upheaval of the curricular spirit. And that, I am inclined to think, is a great pity.
One other thing from those years in the late 1970s and early 1980s deserves mention. Though it exacted its heaviest toll on the president himself and undoubtedly caused him some lost sleep, the other senior administrators were of necessity drawn into it. It was the recrudescence, after a period of relative calm, of the sort of organized student activism and protest directed against the college that had earlier peaked in the waning years of the 1960s. And that sort of activism, punctuated by vivid moments of protest (rallies, sit-ins, building occupations, hunger strikes even), was to persist on into and throughout my own presidency right down into the mid-1990s. At that time the tide finally ebbed, not to rise again during the twenty years that have since ensued, until the very recent past when flickers of activism focused on such things as institutionally based historical names or representations have made their disturbing presence felt.
Two moments of outrage precipitated the re-emergence of that sort of activism in 1977, the first in itself evanescent though leaving a quasi-permanent residue of disenchantment among the college’s women faculty, at that time over twenty in number and now beginning to reach critical mass. The second, the 1976 uprising in Soweto, South Africa, was more far-reaching in its implications, giving birth eventually to a tradition of protest over the college’s investment policies that was destined to persist until the collapse of South African apartheid in the early 1990s and, much later, to generate some feebler harmonics on matters relating to investment in the tobacco and coal industries.
The first precipitating incident was entirely homegrown, rooted in the continuing presence, in what had been an all-male student body but was now one more or less evenly divided between men and women, of a measure of crude and distressingly puerile sexism. On November 7, 1977, a group of sophomore men, singing obscene rugger songs, had thrown an inflated female mannequin, clad in what appeared to be bloodstained panties, down the steps into the library’s reserve book room. What to them had doubtless seemed to be a good “guys’ joke” backfired immediately, igniting furious expressions of outrage among some of their male as well as female classmates and leading to a passionate rally against sexism on campus attended by several hundred students, the organizers of which bitterly proclaimed that, despite the advent of coeducation, “Williams today remains essentially a school for men.” As the correspondence columns of The Williams Record (the student newspaper) reveal, and despite a written apology to the community by the crestfallen sophomores involved, reverberations from that incident continued to be felt for several months. And not only within the student body but also within the ranks of women faculty who now organized themselves into their own, rather civil, activist group (Committee W), placing pressure on the college in connection with some of the issues that the deplorable incident had surfaced: the need to expand the number of courses addressing topics pertaining to women’s studies, the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of our affirmative action efforts to increase the percentage of women on the faculty, and the very receptivity of the Williams community to the presence of women faculty. All three issues touched on my responsibilities as dean and, in response to urgent request, I prepared two, fairly meaty, memoranda for the group. These we went over at three lengthy meetings to see if we could reach agreement on the facts of the matter and, beyond that, on steps to be taken to improve the situation in which women found themselves upon arrival at Williams. At the first two of those meetings (in December and January 1977–78), the fear was expressed by some that a pattern might even exist at the college whereby women were prone to being appointed in disciplinary subfields that were not central to our curricular concerns, with the result that they were being appointed to what were, in effect, cul-de-sac positions so far as the possibility of promotion to tenure was concerned. When I first heard that, I immediately viewed it as inherently improbable, but I did, in response, go over the appointments record very carefully and felt justified at our third meeting in dismissing it as groundless. But I think it was revelatory of the mood of passionate dismay prevalent at that moment among many women on campus that such a fear had any currency at all.
So far as faculty appointments in general were concerned, in my capacity as affirmative action officer for faculty (a responsibility that had, three or four years earlier, simply been tacked onto the dean of the faculty’s job), I had been keeping track of appointments statistics not only at Williams but also at an institutional cohort composed of some twenty colleges and five universities. Though they were not necessarily comparable, with the group of nine institutions that had historically been all male but had begun the transition to coeducation between 1969 and 1975, I also included six of the historic women’s colleges as well as four of the colleges that had long been coeducational. The comparisons proved to be mildly reassuring. A decade earlier when Williams was beginning to think of going coeducational, we had only two women on the faculty (both teaching foreign languages), a tiny percentage. With the transition to coeducation, our stated policy had become that of recruiting women at a rate in excess of their presence in the PhD pool for the subject areas we needed to cover. With that, it turned out, we had had some success. With women now constituting, after eight or nine years of effort, some 14.8 percent of the Williams faculty, we were doing somewhat better than many of the other small colleges. The exceptions were women’s colleges like Smith and Vassar, where the comparable percentage oscillated around the forty percent level, and Oberlin and Swarthmore, which had been coeducational since their early years and where the pertinent percentage fluctuated around nineteen percent. That the percentages of women on the faculties of those two colleges (and, indeed, at the women’s colleges) were not higher reflects, I think, the declining presence of women in the academic profession at large during the years between the onset of the Great Depression and the 1960s. Only in the midsixties did the number of women choosing to enroll in PhD programs finally get back once more to pre-Depression levels. And even then, it is easy to forget that, as late as 1977–78, women constituted little more than a fifth of the PhDs graduated in the liberal arts fields that we were teaching.
But even if we were meeting our stated affirmative action goals, I am not sure how reassuring the members of Committee W found that fact. Clearly we still had a long way to go and other related problems to face. Doing the bulk of our recruiting at the entry level (and for good reason), it would be years before we could expect to have a significant number of women in the tenured ranks, and we also had good reason to be concerned about the fact that our retention rate for women was significantly lower than it was for men. There was, of course, little we could do about the rural isolation of Williamstown or the fact that it was such a small town. And that was clearly part of the problem. Williamstown had never been as attractive a location for single faculty as it had been for those who were married, especially those with children. And young women, working hard to get their careers off the ground, sometimes found it to be a lonely and uninviting setting.
So there was plenty to worry about. And greater cohesion among the group of women faculty already at the college, even if stimulated by a grotesque incident, was a helpful development. It certainly effected some appropriate consciousness raising among those of us (all male) in senior administrative positions. And, in the near term, it led to some useful advances. John Chandler decided to add an Affirmative Action Office with college-wide responsibility in relation to staff as well as faculty appointments and underlined its importance by making the position, assistant to the president for affirmative action and government relations, report directly to him. And I was to find Judy Allen, whom he recruited for that position, to be a fine, thoughtful colleague with whom it was a pleasure to collaborate. And there was another interesting development stimulated by this unpleasant episode and its subsequent fallout. It related to the presence of women’s studies on campus. Recognizing that most faculty at that time—women as well as men—had little or no acquaintance with the emerging field of women’s studies (let alone with feminist perspectives at large), some of the members of Committee W organized what turned out to be a splendid weekend conference on the subject. It was intended to serve the needs of all faculty (men as well as women), and I was happy to be able to provide the necessary funds to support it and to attend myself as many of its sessions as I could. Two of those sessions linger in my mind as having brought home to me how very illuminating feminist perspectives on traditional subject areas could be: one, on anthropology, by Professor Deborah Gewertz of Amherst College; the other, closer to my own interests, on political philosophy by Nan (Nannerl O.) Keohane. Then professor in the Stanford Political Science Department, the latter was later to become president, first of Wellesley College and then of Duke University. I was to see quite a bit of her at that stage as an admired presidential colleague in Massachusetts and, later, as a fellow board member at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
Among students, the passionate outpouring of anger and dismay that followed upon the mannequin incident somehow established interconnections with three other student causes: a push by the Williams gay rights organization to have the then comparatively new term “sexual orientation” included in the college’s general nondiscrimination statement; a growing movement to pressure the board of trustees on investment policies, with the ultimate goal of seeing the college divest itself of all shares in companies with some of their operations in South Africa; and a more amorphous, late-sixties style effort to demand more democratic and direct student involvement in the governance of the whole institution. While the coming together of these disparate causes didn’t quite constitute a perfect storm, it did eventuate in the formation of what came to be called the Thursday Night Coalition, a group that sought to mount pressure on the president and the board of trustees in order to wrest concessions that would advance the whole series of causes involved. The several meetings that ensued varied in tone, but they could be strident, accusatory, and unpleasant, punctuated by moments of student “acting out,” with administrators clearly being viewed as recalcitrant and trustees sometimes dismissed as devious. That was certainly true of one such meeting between the president and members of the coalition that he asked me to attend with him. On that occasion, as at similar occasions later on when, as president, it fell to my lot to put in long sessions with alienated students, it was clear to me that the student participants were unusual mainly in the blinkered absolutism and impatience of their idealism, in the intensely serious and dramatic nature of their commitment, and unusual also, something that should not be overlooked, in the extent of their (albeit wounded) institutional loyalty and the intensity of their desire to make the college (in their terms) a better place. That said, one should not permit twinges of nostalgia for the golden years of youth to lead one to romanticize student protest. Youthful idealism is rarely, in my experience, the full story. Commitment to campus protests has the potential for being mildly corrupting for some of those involved in it, and the protests themselves can be damaging to the institution. Certainly one should acknowledge that, to the Thursday Night Coalition group (as to similar groups later on), devious, disheveled, unstable, or manipulative temperaments were not altogether foreign. At the meeting in question, though I can’t now recall the point at issue, one student was clearly lying and some, at least, of his comrades in arms, while silent on the matter, appeared to me to have been uneasily aware of that fact.
In the event, despite its proclivity for unpleasant confrontation, the disparate nature of the goals the coalition was intent upon pursuing undercut its effectiveness and, perhaps because its future members had become restively aware of that fact, the subgroup with an intense focus on the investment issue separated out. And, known as both the Williams Students for Divestment and the Williams Anti-Apartheid Coalition (WAAC), it was to enjoy a long and somewhat tumultuous history during the full decade ensuing and was to place as much pressure on me as it had on John Chandler before me. And that pressure extended also to the board of trustees, especially to those serving on the Trustee Finance Committee who, over the years, were to have a whole series of edgy meetings with a constantly changing succession of passionate, bright, and often quite well-informed representatives of WAAC. Though the trustees welcomed and usually enjoyed meeting with members of the student body, I can’t think that they enjoyed those particular meetings, where the atmosphere could be self-righteous, accusatory, and even hostile. The most troubling of such encounters and, indeed, the worst moment in the relationship between WAAC, trustees, and administration was to occur in the context of the trustee meeting in January 1983. By that time the college had long since got its act together on the issue of divestment from the portfolio of multinational companies with some part of their operations in South Africa (usually a very small part), for that was what was at stake. Williams had no holdings in any South African companies.
It is not always realized that the practice of paying attention (at least in any systematic fashion) to the ethical aspects of college and university investment policies is a comparatively recent development. It predated by no more than a decade the upwelling of anguish and outrage across the Western world in the wake of the uprising of black high school students in Soweto on June 16, 1976, later dubbed as “the Day Apartheid Died.” The precipitating factor had been the government’s attempt to impose instruction in Afrikaans (“the language of the oppressor”) on the schools but, with at least 176 students killed in the riots and upwards of a thousand injured, the whole upheaval quickly eventuated in a full-scale mobilization of the black South African population, spearheaded by the African National Congress, against the very apartheid system itself. And that whole struggle was to be intensified the following year by the death in police custody of the Black Power advocate Steven Biko.
By that time, the reverberations of that mobilization were being felt on American campuses in the form of the push for total divestment of all companies with any of their operations in South Africa. By the fall of 1977 that movement had made its impact felt in the Northeast, where two institutions in the Connecticut valley, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Hampshire College (the latter after a building occupation), acceded to that approach. The trustees at Amherst College, however, despite considerable pressure on campus, declined to go that route, though in subsequent years they were eventually to crumble on the issue, as were their counterparts at Mt. Holyoke and Smith Colleges. Despite the miseries of campus turmoil, protest, and pressure, Williams and Wesleyan chose not to go that same route, committing themselves instead to versions of the intermediate route carved out carefully by TIAA-CREF, the large not-for-profit enterprise that manages the pension funds of most academics, and by universities like Harvard and Princeton under the firm, clearheaded, and articulate leadership of Derek Bok and William G. Bowen.
By the beginning of the 1978–79 academic year, Williams had adopted the mediating course which, with periodic modifications (and periodic paroxysms of on-campus opposition), it was to follow right down to the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s. Given the intricacies, complexities, and, indeed, ironies—moral no less than financial—involved in the business of socially responsible investment, as well as the added complexities and uncertainties about attitudes and outcomes connected with the particular South African case, one might have expected that this would be a matter on which all parties involved would concede that people of good will could understandably differ. That proved, however, not to be so. Such was the mounting sense of impotent dismay over the manifest injustices of the apartheid regime that the thwarted proponents of total divestment, including, it may be, some faculty members who should have known better, displayed a disagreeable proclivity for imputing bad intentions or unworthy motives to those who had the gall to disagree with them. And that at Williams meant especially the president and the members of the board of trustees. For in a statement issued in August 1978 (revised somewhat in 1980 and 1981), the board, having emphasized the sheer complexity of the factors involved, rejected the goal of total divestment and opted for a case-by-case approach to multinational companies whose stock the college held and which conducted some part of their operations in South Africa. The relations of those companies with the South African apartheid regime and the quality of the conditions of employment they afforded to their black or “colored” employees were to be closely monitored with the help of a new on-campus Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibilities (ACSR) composed of faculty, students, alumni, and administrators, itself reliant on the pertinent and high-quality information gathered by the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC). Using as a guideline the recently promulgated Sullivan principles proposed for the appropriate deportment of multinational companies in their South Africa operations, the college would use its proxies in voting pertinent shareholder resolutions, letters would be sent to management to solicit pertinent information and/or to urge appropriate course corrections, and, as a last resort in the case of managerial recalcitrance, individual stocks were to be divested—a course which the board took on several occasions across those troubled years.
As conditions in South Africa continued to deteriorate, however, none of this proved to be enough for the impassioned advocates of total divestment. A species of twilight warfare set in, characterized usually, and depending on the current leadership of WAAC, by alternating periods of quiescence and/or tactical skirmish but punctuated from time to time by some passionate upheavals that set the whole campus on its ear. The nadir—or peak—of all of this, depending on one’s point of view, occurred in 1983, in the context of the regular January meeting of the board of trustees. It already had been agreed that at that time the president and some of the members of the Trustee Finance Committee would meet in a smallish seminar room in Hopkins Hall with a delegation of ten from WAAC. This turned out, however, to be an unfortunate setup. If one can believe testimony reported in The Williams Record, and there seems to be no reason not to do so, the leadership of WAAC, frustrated by the trustees’ “inaction” on the matter of divestment, had been “considering extreme action for a while.” What they did was to hold a rally outside Hopkins Hall immediately prior to the meeting in question. It was attended by 150–200 supporters and they then proceeded to cram into that small room as many of that large group as they could. The rest, unable to get in, remained in the corridor outside and crowded around the door. It was clearly not something conducive to the promotion of rational discourse or the respectful exchange of opinions, and the students involved may not have intended to hear the trustees out in the first place. What was involved, instead, was an attempt at intimidation. They wanted to “put the vibes” on the unquestionably irritated trustees, handing down a series of demands and insisting on an immediate response. When they didn’t get it (the trustees responded that they would need to study those demands), the WAAC leaders immediately proclaimed the onset of a hunger strike in which (first three, and eventually six) students participated. It dragged on for no less than six days, placing an enormous burden of worry (for the health and welfare of the strikers who could easily have done themselves some harm) on the president and the dean of the college. The latter was my old friend Dan O’Connor of the Philosophy Department, a fundamentally decent, deeply conscientious, highly principled, and essentially gentle person. And the president and the dean were certainly not helped by the fact that a group of about fifty faculty members, moved, no doubt, by the stern resolve of their students, signed a petition “to express solidarity with the hunger strikers and full support for the demands presented by WAAC” to the trustees. That had the effect, alas, of muddying the waters. Some of the signatories seemed oddly relaxed about endorsing both goals and tactics as a package. But other signatories, it turned out, had intended to signal support for the substantive demands concerning divestment while still harboring anxious reservations about the hunger strikers’ choice of tactic. That the latter group of faculty had such misgivings is hardly cause for surprise. The hunger strikers themselves may well have believed that Gandhi’s ghost was beaming down benevolently on their actions but, then, Williams was hardly the moral or political equivalent of the British Raj in India. We were a voluntary, not a compulsory, society and, beyond that, a highly intellectual community committed, as a bedrock principle, to the resolution of problems via a process of reasoned deliberation and consensus, and that process was not to be subverted by the triumph of any coercive moralizing will, however noble its cause might seem. And, in the event, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the chosen tactic, which was an unquestionably coercive one operating via the manipulation of compassion, inevitably found its way close to the heart of debate at the two-session faculty meeting that swiftly followed upon the heels of the ending of the hunger strike itself.
We gathered together for that meeting on a dark and dreary late afternoon early in February under weather conditions not untypical for our region. Low-hanging clouds clung tenaciously to the slopes of our encircling mountains and the unfolding of our debates in Griffin 3 afforded no kindly light to lead us through the encircling gloom. John Chandler initiated the proceedings by describing the unfortunate nature of the meeting in Hopkins Hall which had ended with the declaration of the hunger strike. Dan O’Connor then picked up the narrative, noting that the crowding at the meeting had produced “conditions of physical intimidation and discomfort” and that the hunger strike had been planned in advance of the meeting. He continued with a detailed account of the unfolding of the strike and the course of the “negotiations” with the disaffected students that culminated in its ending. And he concluded by commenting on the regrettable nature of the tactic chosen. Following upon that I myself spoke, and not without a measure of passion, about the illegitimacy of that tactic in an open, voluntary society and of the need for a principled commitment by the members of our community to “the preservation of the conditions necessary for rational discourse.” As the debate unfolded, however, it became increasingly clear that the faculty was deeply divided, and multiply so, not only on the goal of total divestment but also on the question of the student’s chosen tactic and, beyond that, on subsidiary issues relating to the latter. Words, it seemed, could hardly wait upon thoughts and tended, more than once, to precede them. Two interventions have lingered in my mind, and not for happy reasons, leading me to go over the minutes of the meeting in question which make for interesting if not encouraging reading.
The first is a combination of two brief comments made by a member of the Political Science Department. He himself perceived the hunger strike, he proclaimed, “as an act of communication, as an advancement of discourse,” because it had brought the divestment issue back into the focus of the community’s attention. But he was “distressed by the breakdown in trust which [had] occurred; the fact that the WAAC students had not felt they could speak to the trustees without mass support . . . was one indication of that breakdown.” The “cause of the breakdown,” he was magnanimous enough to concede, was not “the cast of characters” (i.e., the particular people currently filling the senior administrative positions) but, rather, “certain aspects of the structure of the institution” itself. As his listeners sought to grapple with the profundity of that insight, he stressed, and “in particular” (though its relevance was far from being obvious), the fact that the president, not a faculty member, presided over our faculty meetings. Nonsense, of course, and no less nonsensical for being quite so portentous. Having been nudged thus to the brink of terminal academic silliness, one would have thought that things could hardly get any worse. But they did. Right at the start of the second session into which this particular faculty meeting ran, a colleague of mine from the History Department who was a very powerful speaker rose to his feet and said that he had a prepared statement he wished to share with the rest of us. He himself did not appear at that time to be an advocate of total divestment. That, on this occasion, was not the central burden of his plaint. The focus of his statement was rather, or so it seemed (the skein of his argument was a tangled one), the attitude of the deans towards student protest. What he was presumably referring to, though it wasn’t altogether clear, was the fact that the dean and I had expressed strong disapproval of the hunger strike tactic. Students, of course, had every right to protest if they so desired, and, should there be need, the college would put itself out to protect that right. For us, the neuralgic point was not the fact that the students had chosen to exercise that right; it was, rather, their particular choice of tactic on this particular occasion. That distinction got lost, however, in what followed. Reaching, as was his wont, for a putative analogy drawn from the dismal annals of Nazi Germany, he argued that “one reason for the success of Nazism had been the silence of German academics,” who had felt that “their overriding obligation was to academic pursuits, the life of the mind. . . .” He then evoked the 1943 incident at the University of Munich in which the Gestapo had seized, tortured, and killed two students who had publicly protested “the moral enormities of the Nazi regime.” I don’t believe he intended to suggest any moral equivalence between the stance of the deans and that of the Gestapo, though a careless listener might easily have assumed that was where he was heading. The [im]moral equivalence he appeared to have in mind was, rather, that between the Williams administration and the University of Munich faculty. The latter “kept public silence [about the killings],” he noted. “Many said in private that they were sorry it happened but [that] such moral protests had absolutely no place in an academic community. It is a line of reasoning,” he added, driving his point home, “familiar to the deans of this college.” Punkt! Perhaps the head of moralizing steam he was caught up in discharging had the effect of concealing from some of his hearers the shoddiness of the argument he was unfolding and the deeply offensive nature of the analogy he was invoking. I really don’t know. What I do remember, however, is that when he sat down he received a round of enthusiastic applause from one segment of the faculty, not all of them, I would judge, believers in total divestment. And I still recall how disappointed and appalled I was by that fact, my habitual pride in being part of the academic profession momentarily shaken.
The outcome of this whole upheaval of the collegiate spirit was that nothing was really settled. WAAC proclaimed that the ending of the hunger strike was “really the beginning of the next chapter of protest” and that chapter was to involve various symbolic actions as well as an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Williams alumni to withhold their annual giving until the college embraced total divestment. Later that spring, the trustees held an open meeting on the divestment issue in Chapin Hall. It was quite well attended and, though the trustees exhibited varying degrees of discomfort under a barrage of basically hostile questions, they kept their balance and explained and defended their stance with patience and occasional flickers of good humor. The college also used the vehicle of Williams Reports, an occasional publication, to put out a detailed description and defense of its position on the divestment issue, to which was appended a history of the actions taken to date by the ACSR, along with various pertinent essays, including a lengthy “Open Letter to the Harvard Community” written by Derek Bok in 1979 and a “Statement on Corporate Social Responsibility” issued not long before by TIAA-CREF (whose retirement plan, involving a huge multibillion dollar portfolio, was providing retirement income for university and college people throughout the country). Faculty and staff at Williams were part of that plan and enjoyed, accordingly, voting rights in the election of the fund’s officers. But I can recall no faculty move to pressure TIAA-CREF on its South African stance. Williams itself was clearly a softer target. That issue of Williams Reports also estimated that less than $9,000 of the income that Williams was receiving in 1983 could be attributed to the operations in South Africa of the pertinent multinationals in which it held stock. I don’t know if that Report had any impact on faculty opinion. But I suspect that TIAA-CREF’s considered judgment that “in general we don’t consider divestiture a desirable, or even permissible, means of social protest” may have given some of my colleagues pause. Whatever the case, when I in my turn, a little more than two years later, had to cope with the longueurs of campus protest on the divestment issue, fewer than a half dozen faculty members appeared to be at all actively engaged in it.
Having witnessed at close hand the burdens it could place on the president, campus protest was on my mind in the fall of 1984 when, after John Chandler announced that he would be stepping down from his position in June 1985, the newly formed presidential search committee informed me that my name had been placed in nomination for the position and asked me if I would permit it to go forward. By that time I had more or less concluded that I was not really interested in presidencies as such. But the presidency of Williams, a college to which I had come to be so deeply attached, was a different matter. I still thought long and hard, however, before replying in the affirmative. I had by then a very good sense of the downside of the job and of what I would be in for if I became president at that difficult time. That notwithstanding, I had also had some beguiling glimpses of how invigorating and rewarding the presidential role could be. And not least from the experience of two months or so during which, in accordance with the college’s bylaws, I had served as acting president while John Chandler was away in France on a well-earned mini-sabbatical. Having also been nominated as a candidate for the presidencies of five other liberal arts colleges, all upper tier but of varying stature, I had had ample reason to reflect on whether or not I was suited to that presidential role. Two of those nominations I had declined, and in two of the other three searches I got no further than the intermediate interview round. In the third case, however, I had gone much further and would, I think, have had a good shot at election had I not decided to withdraw my name from competition. The college in question was Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. It was very much on Claire-Ann’s home turf and Chris, our eldest boy, having responded to the appeal of a liberal arts college in an urban rather than a rural setting, was currently a freshman there. When informed, then, early in the spring semester, that someone had placed my name in nomination for the job, I had let it go forward. As the months went by and I heard no further word, I simply assumed that I was out of the running. As the end of the semester came within sight, my thoughts were fixed, rather, on spending my upcoming 1981–82 sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I had been appointed as a member of the School of Historical Studies. I was also anxious to get to work on the series of four Mead-Swing Lectures I had been invited to give at Oberlin College early in the autumn. The Trinity search process, however, had clearly taken a course different from the norm to which I was accustomed. The spring semester was almost over when I got a telephone call from the chairman of the Trinity Board of Trustees informing me that I had emerged as one of three finalists for the presidency of the college and asking if Claire-Ann and I could come up to the campus to meet with the search committee, other members of the board, the senior administrators, and a couple of faculty or faculty-staff interest groups. Given how late in the academic year it already was, I assumed that they had to be reconciled to some delay in the timing of the successful candidate’s arrival to take up the position, so I accepted the invitation.
Our visit to the Trinity campus proved to be an interesting, informative, and energizing one. While I didn’t get a clear sense of the dynamics on the Trinity Board of Trustees and am pretty sure that not all were present at the meeting, I found the chairman himself to be an open, attentive, kindly, and judicious person, the administrators to be courteous and helpful, and the faculty, who revealed somewhat indiscreetly how anxious they (and some of the board) were to see an academic installed as president, quite welcoming. One of the groups it was arranged for me to meet was composed of about fifty women faculty and staff members who had concerns not unlike those I had encountered at Williams four years earlier. Claire-Ann, who was also invited to attend the meeting, thought that it went well. At least, she assured me that I had managed to navigate my way through some delicate issues without quite putting my foot in it. Our final meeting before leaving was with the outgoing president and his wife. When we arrived, and before they showed us around the president’s house, he apologized profusely for the fact that somebody on the faculty who had been involved in the search had leaked the names of the three finalists to the Hartford Courant so that everything had become public. And that, I must confess, bothered me. I cannot remember who the third finalist was, but, apart from myself, the other finalist was the incumbent vice president for finance at Trinity, Jim English by name, an alumnus of Trinity and a former insurance executive in Hartford who was well connected to the business community there. He was possibly, or so I had somehow sensed from one or another of the faculty or trustees, viewed as something of a front-runner in the search and he was, indeed, the person eventually elected.
One of the things that had become increasingly clear to me as our visit unfolded was the fact that they really wanted to have a new president who was able to hit the ground running immediately—that is, in July 1981. So, when we got home, I had a decision to make. It didn’t prove to be too difficult. My heart was really set on the plans already made for the 1981–82 academic year, both my stay at the Princeton Institute and the delivery of the Oberlin Lectures. Neither of these was I prepared to give up, so I called the Trinity board chairman and told him that was the case and that I was, accordingly, withdrawing from candidacy for the presidency. While clearly a bit disappointed, he was also politely understanding. But, oddly, a couple of days later, and before his board had proceeded to a vote, I received a call from another Trinity trustee urging me to reconsider and to leave my name in contention. It was nice, of course, to have some evidence of being wanted, but I didn’t find it a reassuring testimony to the smooth operation of the Trinity board. So I was not at all tempted to change my mind.
The Trinity adventure, however, had proved to be an educative one and, along with my earlier experience as member of a Williams presidential search committee, prepared me quite well for what I would encounter in 1985 as a candidate for the Williams presidency. I was morally certain that my candidacy would be taken seriously and it was. In January 1985, then, I was summoned to New York to be interviewed across the course of two hours by the search committee, which had divided itself for that purpose into two sections. Nor was I altogether surprised late in February, after the committee had recommended its three or four chosen finalists to the board, to be invited back to New York as a finalist for interview by the full board. But the circumstances were really quite unusual in that two of those finalists were members of the Williams faculty who had both served for some years as senior administrators at the college, whom most of the trustees had seen in action, and whom they knew quite well. I was one of the two; the other was my good friend Steve Lewis, with whom I had worked on more than one collegiate venture. A first-rate development economist with a good deal of advisory governmental experience in Botswana, he was from the outstanding Williams class of 1960 (two of whose members sat on the board), had put in two distinguished terms of service as provost of the college, and was, by any standards, a powerful candidate for the presidential office itself. Though from experience I could not help being conscious of the unpredictability of the selection process, he was, I thought in my heart of hearts (and depending on the quality of the unknown third or fourth (?) finalist), likely to be the one whom the trustees would finally tap for the job. I was prepared, then, for disappointment. But I was also proud of my own track record as a faculty member and administrator and possessed of confidence in my capabilities. I was, moreover, by temperament a competitive sort of fellow and was determined to give the challenge my best shot. And that I did, coming away from the exercise recognizing that my best shot might conceivably not have been good enough but content in the knowledge that, for good or ill, I had turned in a decent performance.
One of the senior trustees was Fay (Francis T.) Vincent, Jr., who was later to be baseball commissioner but at the time was chairman of Columbia Pictures. He had arranged for the use of the Columbia Pictures board suite at 711 Fifth Avenue, New York, and that is where the interview took place. The boardroom itself, where the walls on each side of the long table were punctuated by niches (each containing an Oscar), had a bit of a sacral feel to it. And I couldn’t help wondering if any enterprising art historian had ever had the wit to undertake a study of corporate boardroom iconography. That was the setting. As for the process itself, it was both careful and complex. Each candidate and his spouse were to breakfast, lunch, or dine with the full board, which would then split into two groups, each of which in turn would interview the candidate for an hour while the other group entertained, chatted with, or grilled his or her spouse. This latter effort was not billed as any sort of interview—the proceedings were more indirect and genteel than that. But when Claire-Ann later described to me what it had been like, it sounded to me very much like a not unpleasant, low-key interview. And, in that setting, by her very deportment no less than what she had to say, I have no doubt that she mightily advanced my cause.
The Williams board at that time (predominantly male) still seemed to harbor the “vicar’s wife” conception of the presidential spouse. She (as yet, so far as I know, no “he”) was to expect no title, hold no official position, receive no remuneration. But she was certainly expected (though not technically obliged) to support her husband as a volunteer and work on behalf of the college. In effect, a two for the price of one sort of deal. Claire-Ann, it would be fair to say, understood the rules of engagement. At the time, she was very much immersed in the production of quite beautiful pieces of fiber art and had to her credit two successful solo exhibitions of her work. In 1985, moreover, she became very caught up in the foundation and nurturing of the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation, a badly needed land conservation organization for which she was later to serve as chair of the board. Nonetheless, and in the event, she also threw herself into the traditional role of president’s spouse with great enthusiasm, style, and success. It all began with her devoted supervision of the redecoration of the President’s House (1801), the college’s second-oldest building and a beautiful and elegant structure which had not had a thorough going-over since the Sawyers moved into it nearly a quarter of a century earlier. She didn’t need to retain an interior decorator; that skill she supplied herself with the support of our Buildings and Grounds Department and good, sensitive advice from Bob (Robert F.) Dalzell, a friend and colleague in the History Department and future college marshal. And though she was not herself a college employee, she went on to interview and choose people for the house staff, training them to her own high standards of discreet table service and writing for the Personnel Office their annual performance reviews. She also organized in detailed fashion (and picked the menus for) the continual stream of social events at the house for trustees, students, faculty, alumni, major donors, movers and shakers around Berkshire County, and visiting dignitaries of all sorts—artists, poets, playwrights, politicians, state governors, ambassadors, the Aga Khan, and so forth. It was a commanding performance (for which she received from visitors many a flattering comment or note), and it was to be an enormous help to me in the discharge of my official duties. Without the assurance of her help and support I doubt if I would have wanted the job. She brought to her role an instinctive sense of style, and the elegance and warmth of the events she managed echoed the elegance and warmth of the fine old house in which they took place. She bonded at once with that house, for which she cared deeply, and though, being on the road so much and so busy when I was back in town, I myself didn’t have all that much time to enjoy it, I did enjoy the constant stream of entertaining there. It was one of the more relaxing and rewarding parts of the job, though I am not sure that I myself contributed much to its success. Hers was the real contribution. I could simply relax into it and enjoy myself, secure in the knowledge that the place looked so good and that everything was organized so well. I couldn’t help recognizing with admiration and pride the alchemy with which she somehow routinely succeeded in conjuring up an atmosphere that was invitingly personal rather than blandly institutional. It was fun, and I much enjoyed the sense of being a team that went with it. Hers was quite a performance, though with time she was to become uneasily conscious of the fact that some of the women faculty and administrative staff, their feminist consciousness long since raised, probably thought her a bit foolish for being willing to work so hard in a purely voluntary capacity and without much in the way of recognition. But, then, anyone curious about the demands involved and the ambiguities and ironies embedded in the role played by the traditional presidential spouse need only turn to the pages of Jean Alexander Kemeny’s tell-it-all It’s Different at Dartmouth: A Memoir (1979). There, the irrepressible wife of John George Kemeny, esteemed thirteenth president of Dartmouth College (1974–81), portrays those demands, amusingly evokes those ironies and ambiguities, and bluntly insists that she herself viewed the role, however interesting it might be, as a truly demanding one that trustees would do well to recognize warranted official, salaried status.
At the interview weekend in New York, we had been a bit disappointed to be assigned the breakfast shift; dinner, we thought, would have been better and more enjoyable. But the members of the board already knew both of us quite well and I assume that they wanted to reserve the longer dinner session for an outside candidate whom they needed to get to know from scratch. And I can’t help thinking that the sort of questions put to me, and, doubtless, also to Steve, may well have had a degree of informed specificity lacking in those put to outside candidates whom the trustees did not know. But that could just as easily have hindered our candidacies as helped them. Whatever the case, I had the impression somehow that it would take a couple of weeks before the entire board could reassemble for a final vote. A week later, then, as I was preparing to go into campus to start interviewing the students who had applied to go to Oxford the following year, I was taken by surprise when Pete (Preston S.) Parish, chairman of the board’s Executive Committee and our senior trustee, called to tell me that I had been elected president and that, within two hours, he would be announcing that fact at an all-campus meeting in Chapin Hall. And from that moment onwards, my life underwent a change more dramatic, I think, than anything I had anticipated.