Beached!

I recently saw the movie Into the Storm about the war years of Winston Churchill – 1940 to 1945. The film apparently accurately portrays Churchill’s accomplishments and the gigantic ego that produced them.

It is framed by a visit to the French seaside in 1945 after the end of the war. Churchill is waiting for the results of an election which, when the results are known, will cast him out of power. In 1945, he seems like a troglodyte arguing a set of values that are no longer needed or important. He is – as we say today – “out of touch”.

He is also a tragic figure washed up like so many Amtracs on the beaches of Normandy.

Coincidently, I have been spending a good deal of my thinking time reviewing my tenure as the first Dean of General Studies. I have to write a fairly long piece for the book and have been mentally noting various events in the five years that I held that office.

The movie was the penny dropped in my thoughts about the years 1970 to 1971. I am not, of course, in any way comparing myself to Churchill except in one small sense – those who have one set of skills for an imperative task frequently don’t seem to have the requisite skills to survive it.

I think that I did have some of the skills necessary to start a college. I am fairly imaginative, generally flexible, not a particularly good team player, indefatigable worker, love change, am not particularly or rigidly ideological and strive for the goal rather than the process. I am also not afraid to fail. At least, this is how I see myself.

Whether this set of skills is the set needed for starting up an institution others will have to judge; from my perspective, these are what made me functional for five years.

Interestingly enough, all of the original Deans and the first VP of Academic Affairs were, for a variety of reasons, gone after five years. It’s as if we had created the college and, a bit like salmon, could not survive in the institution we had created.

I began to get intimations that my role was no longer important when at a meeting of the Deans and College planners, we spent at least a half hour discussing the color of the lamps and lampshades for faculty offices! Something had happened along the way that I – and I assume the other Deans – had not seen happening. We were no longer discussing issues of pedagogy, curricular design, academic structure and the hiring of faculty. Instead we had unknowingly become administrators forced to deal with daily issues of who get what in their offices.

The shift was subtle – so subtle that we didn’t see it coming – and then we were out of touch. The College legitimately needed Deans who could handle budgets (I couldn’t), who could work for short-term goals (What will the College Calendar look like for the next term?) and who were prepared to enforce the policies that the Founding Deans had thought up (I was going to have problems with this one also).

All of this reminds me of Tennyson’s Ulysses. In that great poem after a perilous decade trying to return home, Ulysses can’t stand the drudgery of everyday ruling Ithaca. So, he decides to set forth again for one last voyage. He leaves his son – Telemachus – to rule in his stead. Telemachus is good, solid, capable and dutiful. Ulysses is none of these. One is not better than the other; they simply serve in different ways.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle — 

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and through soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

The Founding Deans, generally, did not have the skills or the interest in discussing lampshades – not after the daily excitement of actually starting a college. For 15 months we imagined what Stockton might be like in 2010. Those were heady times.

But, finally, each of us had been beached after the struggle. We could not become the person left behind; so, each of us set out on a new voyage. He works his work, I mine.

[The first photograph at the top is Wesley Tilley - the first VP of Academic Affairs. The second from the top is Woodworth Thrombley - the first Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. The third from the top is Philip Klukoff - the first Dean of the Arts and Humanities. The fourth from the top is Dan Moury - the first Dean of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The final photograph is Ken Tompkins - the first Dean of General Studies.]