Saturday, April 24, 2010

A Little Help From My Friends

Dan Moury visited the College last week (he's on the right); it was the second time he had returned since he left in 1975. Dan was the first Dean of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics Division (NAMS) and is the other surviving Founding Dean.

Dan and I came to work at the College on July 1st, 1970; we were both interviewed and hired in March of that year. As I said, he and I are the only surviving Deans from a large group of the first administrative staff.

It was writing for the Book that brought Dan back. When I initially found him -- on Facebook, of all places -- he admitted that he hadn't thought much about Stockton since he had left but was delighted to reminisce about his days here, his faculty and his innovative designs for science labs.

He was here for four days meeting friends, former faculty, Rob and me and the President. You could see the delight he experienced as the past became real again from chatting about his life then and since. For example, I sat in on his meeting with the President and someone who didn't know either might think that they were old friends. The conversation went something like this:

Dan: In the 1980s I was VP of Academic Affairs at X College.
President Saatkamp: Did you know Joe Smith who was the President at X College.
Dan: Yes, I had known Joe for many years having met him when he ran X Foundation.
President Saatkamp: Yes, that was where I met him.
Dan: After that, I moved to Y Foundation.
President Saatkamp: Oh, I know the president of that Foundation; it was Bob Green.
Dan: Yes, Bob and I taught together as young chemists at Z college.


Well, you get the picture. They seemed to know everyone in the South who ran a college or a foundation. You'll notice that I couldn't, as they say, "get a word in edgewise".

After leaving Stockton, Dan has -- unlike me -- taught and administered a number of institutions in the South. He worked at Tusculum and at Pfeiffer and was the head of at least one Southern Association of Colleges. Our paths diverged when he left Stockton; I returned to teaching and he went on to other administrative tasks.

Through all of his life -- which has had plenty of serious illnesses -- he has maintained a positive outlook and a strong sense of humor.

I wasn't there but, apparently, he had a wonderful five hours with what is left of the First Cohort who were in NAMS. A few of them told me that the evening was frank, sentimental, uplifting and memorable. There has always been a special connection among members of NAMS and it can be traced to a specific decision Dan made in the Summer of 1971.

The College provide money to bring in the Co-Ordinators to organize teaching, courses, schedules and other academic concerns. All of us but Dan did exactly that. We chose a weekend, brought the Co-Ordinators to the area, paid for motels, meals and transportation. Dan decided, however, to bring his WHOLE faculty to the area for two weeks. They worked daily on academic matters and spent the evenings and weekends playing softball, at picnics, at the beach and other social activities.
The result was that NAMS faculty had a solidarity of purpose, real connections to each other and to the mission of the College that lasted for decades. No other division was as close as NAMS and, because of this, it avoided conflicts, personality clashes and shifting missions.

That basic decision for all to spend the time together made all the difference.

It seems to me that having left the College until a week ago, has made Dan a somewhat larger-than-life memory in the minds and hearts of those who stayed. He wanted to meet up one more time with his faculty and they wanted to renew their affection toward him.

It was good for all of us to meet. Dan was deeply moved by being here. I was equally moved by seeing him again given that only two of us have survived. And his faculty went back over their lives together almost 40 years ago. It doesn't get much better for colleagues and friends.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

AWP

Rob and I have begun to notice that there are some documents that are more primary, more basic, more foundational than others (this is true of pictures as well; for example, the Groundbreaking picture is certainly more important, more absolute, more fundamental than, say, Pres, Bjork at Stockton’s very first basketball game.)

We have mentioned before that there is a sequence of documents beginning with the 1965 Call to Action, the 1970 Educational Policies Committee Report and the 1974 Self-Study Report that form a basis for viewing the College as it was formed.

However, there is one set of documents that seem to precede all others in terms of pedagogical vision. That is a set of 30+ titles officially called the Academic Working Papers -- colloquially referred to as AWP. Rob and I have named these as “foundational documents” in that there aren’t any below them in significance and influence.

When the Deans arrived on July 1, 1970 a few of the AWPs were written or in outline form. Our task was to revise and flesh out these documents as we discussed them and the ideas they represented. For example, as the first Dean of General Studies, I saw that there were two AWPs that dealt with my Division: (1) AWP2 which was titled “General and Liberal Studies” and (2) AWP9 which was a description of the Division of General Studies. Neither had been written until my Division -- like all of the other Divisions -- became part of the debate about the structure of the College; I wrote the first version as a result of these wide-ranging discussions. I then shared it with the other Deans and the discussion started again. It took us most of the summer of 1970 to write the 30 original AWPs.

There is, however, no doubt but that the most important of these documents was AWP1 entitled simply “General Principles”. It was written on Dec 26, 1970 by the first Academic VP, Wes Tilley. It reflects the long and sometimes difficult discussions of all of us during the summer of 1970. Tilley could have written it before we arrived and it would have dominated and shaped the subsequent discussion. Instead, he waited until the discussion was almost finished and then produced a document that summarized our best and most innovative thinking.

The “We” of AWP1 carries serious weight because the ideas it contains really were OUR ideas. This gave the document an importance and validity that it wouldn’t have had had Tilley established the general principles before we arrived.

Fundamentally, we argue that the heartbeat of a college is dialogue and that the better and wider the dialogue, the better the education. The concept that all voices have importance and must be heard is central to the dialogue we envisioned.

Dialogue, however, demands facts, proofs, questions, answers and principles; perforce, then, dialogue accompanies and follows learning.

AWP1 reveals the fact that the founding Deans were uncomfortable (some of us were downright aggressive on our opposition) to traditional barriers or walls or boundaries of colleges, departments, disciplines and services generally offered at mainstream institutions. We wanted to shatter those limitations. AWP1 mentions erasing the traditional, definitional lines between the classroom and extra-curricular activities. We tried very hard to think about a college where there wasn’t classroom life and outside-the-classroom life. Once again, all things fed into the dialogue and flowed back into all things from the dialogue.

Perhaps one of the most innovative ideas is Principle 6. It suggests that all things at the College -- including the buildings and facilities -- come out of the College’s educational objectives. This, it claimed, was the opposite of what most educational institutions did. We hope to have an essay in the book about this.

Clearly, one of our early concerns was whether students could make informed choices about their curriculum. This was particularly true in General Studies. I had decided early on that there should be no restrictions in the GS curriculum and that students should follow their interests if the courses were offered. The counter argument -- mostly from First Cohort faculty -- was that we would, say, be graduating students who never had a math course or a history course or an accounting course. Exactly! Actually, when you think about it, American colleges graduate students all the time ignorant of wide areas of the college’s offerings. I prevailed for a year or so but eventually the faculty -- under a new Dean of General Studies -- voted in restrictions. Students were required to have two arts & humanities courses, two science courses, two social science courses, etc.

Such requirements are what the “educational establishment” prefers -- they provide work for graduate students and young faculty -- and we insisted on breaking the power of that establishment whenever we could.

The other issue that played a part in whether students could make such choices was our rejection of the in loco parentis concept. Other institutions saw themselves as standing in the place of parents; rules -- and there were lots of them -- were formulated AS IF the college was parental. The culture of the new colleges started in the late 1960 - 1970 period rejected this practice universally and Stockton was no exception. There were all sorts of support services in traditional schools that we had no intentions of creating at Stockton (actually, years later, we did create them but that is another story).

President Bjork was a strong advocate of NOT being in loco parentis. He argued against such services as psychological counseling and health services.

These proposals were radical in 1970; from the long historic perspective of today though, they are not very shocking or different. Applying these ideas at the beginning, however, was a very different thing.

(To be cont’d)

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Forks and Cedars

Rob posted a picture of the Groundbreaking Ceremony for the College below; the event took place on Dec 9, 1970. In a follow-up article written on Dec 10, 1970, it was noted that a cedar tree that had been saved from the bulldozer had been planted to commemorate the event.

In looking at the picture, I can see in the very right horizon a tiny sliver of the main lake (just under and to the left of the drooping flag on the right edge of the photo) we have on campus so the lake was on the left of the platform party.

I note this here because for forty years I have maintained that the Groundbreaking Ceremony was held quite a distance away from the lake; there is, however, no way that the photograph "works" at the site that have been advocating for four decades. So, I am determined to find the actual site or someplace near where the site -- because of the view of the lake -- would have to have been shot from.

There is a wide grassy area near the end of the lake that is a likely candidate. It is just outside of the original buildings and would have been a natural spot for the groundbreaking. The problem is where on the grassy area would the platform have stood?

In back of the platform there is an oak tree that has a fork partly up the trunk (I’ve marked this in red) so I thought I would look for an forked oak near the grassy area. Most of the oak trees near the area are either (1) too young or (2) don't have a fork. One, however, does; it is large and exactly in the place one would expect given the geography of the black and white photo.

Here is a photo of that tree with the fork marked with red as I marked the original.

This suggests, at least to me, that the area below this tree is where the platform stood. All of the details in the original photo sufficiently match this site to make it very likely that here is where the Groundbreaking Ceremony took place. Oh, yes. This site is about 50 feet from the corner of one of the original buildings.

But what about the tree planted at the same time. Here is the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin article describing it.





Dr. Richard E. Bjork, college president, turned over the first spadeful of soil. He then broke tradition by following the groundbreaking by taking part in a tree-planting.

He said the young cedar was ‘snatched from the jaws of a ground-clearing bulldozer’ and symbolized the institution’s concern with ecology and the environment.


So, 40 years later, where is this cedar snatched from the jaws of a bulldozer?

The exact site is, today, unknown though I have a strong guess. First is would not have been far from the Groundbreaking Ceremony site – no one is going to walk far on a December day to watch a tree be planted. Exactly opposite from where the platform probably was is a single cedar on a grassy plot. It is a dozen feet from a nearby stand of oaks and pines. I’m convinced this is the same tree planted after the Groundbreaking Ceremony. Here’s a picture:



I think, then, that we can fairly safely claim that we know about where the Groundbreaking Ceremony was held and where the cedar they planted is. I sure hope the College permanently marks both so that 40 years from now someone isn’t going to have to repeat my work. We move forward in small steps.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

What Have We Done?

Yesterday was a day for considering the history of the college once again, but also for learning more about one of the initiatives of the last twenty years that has had a great impact on the college and its reputation in New Jersey.

Our meeting with Dave Taylor, the first Chair of the Stockton College Board of Trustees, occurred today, and it was a wonderful occasion. Dave came to the college with his wife, Beni, and Ken and I joined them and the President for a very pleasant lunch. This was a great deal of fun, and Dave Taylor had an excellent memory for all the events that occurred so long ago. Ken had sent Herman a picture (at right) of the ground-breaking ceremony, which he had added to his office computer's screen saver. It pictured Dave sitting alongside other members of the platform party, while Hap Farley, then the State Senator representing Southern New Jersey (who had been a strong advocate of bringing the College to the region), was speaking. Dave laughed about Hap and indicated that he had to persuade the Senator to do a number of things and it was always a tough call for him to make – the Haphazard of being the Chair of the Board at the time, I injected to a general groan of displeasure!

Many other things were learned during lunch, which I think Ken will have honed in on, during his interview with Dave, later in the day (the audio of this will be uploaded to the volume web site in the near future).

The President also recounted one story that Elizabeth Alton had recounted in her book on the early years at Stockton. Apparently, when she observed all the students and faculty entering the Mayflower Hotel for the beginning of the first term, some of them a little more ragged and hippy-ish than would have been to her taste, she thought to herself, “My goodness, what have we done?”

After lunch, we decided that although we should take Dave around the Campus Center, Beni would not be up to clamoring through the construction site. So we took her to the balcony at the end of F-wing to view the building, and then we all accompanied her to look at the new extension to the Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center in the library. She and I then remained there to talk with Gail Rosenthal, Director of the Center, while Herman, Dave, and Ken wondered off to inspect the progress of the construction.

I cannot comment on the trip around the Campus Center, but you can read about the building in a previous entry here. I can report, however, that Dave Taylor seemed bowled over by the growth of the college and all that had been created since he left the Board after 12 years service in 1981. I believe that he felt that his work had reaped great benefits for South Jersey, and that were he to comment in the vein of Elizabeth Alton it would have been a more positive exclamation: “My goodness, look what has been achieved!”

But, Beni Taylor and I were to learn another couple of uses for this phrase. We listened to Gail recount the origin of the Resource Center and all the work that has occurred there, particularly the work focusing on the many survivors from the Holocaust in the South Jersey region.

We also watched a 10-minute NBC supported documentary called, “Rails of the Holocaust: A Journey to Stockton College.” This covered the recent expansion of the Center, the creation of a sculpture at the new entrance, and the endeavor to secure some rails from Poland – rails that had been used to carry the cattle-cars that had transported so many of the victims of the Holocaust to Auschwitz, where most of them would be exterminated at the hands of the Nazis.

The great accomplishment in the establishment of this architectural memorial to the Holocaust could easily inspire the positive exclamation, “Look what we have achieved!” Stockton, after all, has been in the forefront of educating residents of New Jersey about the horrors of the Holocaust and the ever-present and continuing danger of genocidal outbreaks occurring around the world.

Of course, what this Resource Center memorializes can only inspire a negative exhortation about human history – “What have we done?” indeed! But as Dave and Beni wandered back down the corridor of the college they had helped to create, the more positive meaning for the phrase came back to the fore, and an overall feeling of purpose and accomplishment prevailed.