Wednesday, February 9, 2011

First Of The First

A few days ago when going through some papers in a file, I found a copy of an Atlantic City Press article from 9 January 1971 which has the headline: “11 Professors Hired By Stockton College”. The article lists the names, official titles and salaries of the group. Wes Tilley – the first VP of Academic Affairs – is quoted as pointing out that this group of 11 brings the total number of faculty hired to 20. This is 1/3 of the projected total faculty of 55.

As I read the article, I wondered who the first faculty hired was. This sent me to the College Archives and to Louise Tillstrom, the incredibly helpful Assistant Archivist. I asked Louise if she would try to find the exact dates and names of the faculty appointments in the Minutes of the Board of Trustees. She spent a goodly part of the morning searching through the Minutes and found all of the appointments of the First Cohort of 55 faculty.

Before I provide the listing and try to answer the question of who was the first appointee, I want to review our recruitment plans and procedures.

The Founding Deans worked through the summer of 1970 setting up policies, organizational structures and academic definitions for Programs, governance, divisions and disciplines. It was clear to us that with all of this in place we would then need to hire faculty to flesh out the work of that summer. To make sure that we had requisite faculty, we began recruiting in the early Fall of 1970. Our goal was to have the faculty hired by the Spring of 1971 when they would be involved in the details of the curricula during that Summer in preparation for opening in the Fall of 1971.

The first recruitment ad for the College was placed in Academe in June of 1970. It started with this paragraph:

Richard Stockton State College of New Jersey: Scheduled to open with 5OO students in September, 197l; will accept applications for faculty positions all levels for the 197I-72 academic year. A new and rapidly developing institution, Stockton will encourage innovation and experimentation in the undergraduate (and later, graduate) curriculum. Stockton should appeal most to the teaching scientist or scholar who is interested in shaping exceptionally sound and significant programs. Located just outside Atlantic City, Stockton will offer the advantages of comfortable living and convenient access to Philadelphia and New York. Salaries will be competitive with most institutions.

This was followed by a description and contact information of each division. Here is an example for the Social and Behavioral Sciences:

The Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences will include the disciplines of Political Science, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology. The division will use new interdisciplinary methods to define and attack a variety of urban and environmental problems. For further information please write to W. H. Tilley, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Richard Stockton State College, Pleasantville, New Jersey 08232.

By the Fall of 1970, the ad* had been rewritten, Wes Tilley’s name had been replaced by Woody Thrombley – the first Dean of the Division – and the description had been rewritten (it would seem that Tilley wrote the first but the second version was changed by Thrombley).

                   

There are other changes between the first ad and the second. The Division of General Studies omitted from the first has been added to the second. Originally, when I interviewed for the position in March, 1970 I was not going to have any staff. By the time I had arrived in July, that decision had been changed and General Studies was going to have an initial six staff so text was added to the recruitment ad placed later in the Summer of 1970.

The Deans (actually, we were officially designated as Chairmen but that is another tale) actively recruited in the Fall of 1970.

To structure and universalize our recruitment practices Wes Tilley wrote a five page document in August, 1970. The document outlines where we would place ads:

  •     Placement Offices of Major Universities
  •     Professional Colleagues of Established Reputations
  •     Chairmen of Graduate Departments
  •     Notices in Professional Journals
  •     Commercial Agencies

There is nothing terribly different in the listing from a national search today but it does illustrate the bed from which we were going to pluck flowers.

 Our overall schedule – a very detailed, hour-by-hour interview schedule is also included in the document – was as follows:

  • During October and November [1971] we should aim to fill about one-third of our projected positions, giving priority to projected majors.
  • During January and February we should aim to fill another two-thirds.
  • During April and May we should  be able to fill most of the  assigned positions. It may be necessary , however, to keep several positions unassigned, in order to meet the pattern of late enrollments.
  • When the candidates finally arrived on campus, we were to consider them within the following general purposes:
  • We want the candidate to get a sense of the academic community, and of the larger community which it must serve.
  • We want an opportunity to hear at length from the candidate, in order to assure ourselves that both the faculty and the students will be able to work with him toward the established goals of the institution, and that he will be able to do his share in the development of outstanding programs.
  • We want an opportunity to acquaint the candidate with our ways of thinking and with our previous decisions, so that during the interval before he joins the faculty he will be able to think constructively about his future on our campus.

It should be noted that (1) we had made previous decisions during the 12 months leading up to this moment. It has been claimed by some early faculty that we “over sold” the new College by suggesting that everyone’s input would have significance. (2) that we wanted evidence from our discussions with candidates that they really liked students especially state college students. In addition, we sought faculty who wanted to build programs (read: departments), curricula, policies, etc. Not all did especially those who came to us directly from the most famous and most scholarly institutions. (3) We also wanted candidates to understand that there were many communities at the college including actual communities in the environs and that our expectation was that they served all of them.

The document concludes with the “principles of faculty selection” that we were to employ:

  • Our first consideration must he pedagogical excellence. This would be s simple requirement if it were not so easy to confuse with popularity.
  • It is essential that the candidate show an interest in teaching the kinds of students we shall probably have at Stockton.
  • It is also essential that the candidate show outstanding intellectual, scientific, or artistic ability and very desirable that he show at least two of these.
  • While long lists of publications ere suspect, the candidate ought to show a serious interest in the continuing inquiry that is properly called research, if he is to teach effectively in s serious institution. (We encounter a paradox here: people who are not interested in doing or at least in aiding research seldom make good teachers; but what is usually called research is more often the grinding out of routine operations or, especially in the humanities, the spinning out of undisciplined cerebrations: and this kind of thing does not make for intellectual scientific, or artistic leadership -- which is to say, does net make for good teaching)
  • We should pay careful attention to the probable capacity of a candidate to work in flexible und open situations. (The kind of candidate who keeps to himself end wants to work only with his chairman may find Stockton unpleasant, if not unendurable.)
  • Because we are placing so much emphasis on the interactions of faculty and of faculty and students, the candidate should show that he is able to carry on a productive academic discussion.
  • Finally, somewhere in the candidate’s experience there should be a period of several years during which he has worked or taught in a first-class institution.

There are significant expectations in this list.

Notice, first, that teaching was the absolute criterion. In addition, notice that traditional scholarship is doubted as a litmus for good teaching. Evidence of scholarship is also suspect – not because Tilley thought that it might have been falsified or plagiarized – but because, if a candidate presented a long list of articles, chapters, books and other scholarly writings, he created that list at the cost of teaching. For Tilley one couldn’t have both.

It is also clear that Tilley and the Founding Deans understood completely what sorts of students Stockton was going to attract. This is significant because there are critics who argue that the early Stockton faculty was blinded about the sorts of students we were going to attract here and, therefore, were shocked and dismayed when students actually appeared. The College may have been jokingly named “Princeton In the Pines” but we all understood that we were not ever going to live up to that title; nor did we want to!

We also were in agreement that Stockton was and would be in flux and that faculty had to delight in change and impermanence. I have, for example, written elsewhere about the pedagogical values implicit in the fact that all of the walls of the college were modular and could be changed easily and quickly into other configurations. The shape of the College was impermanent not for architectural reasons but the architecture was shaped by pedagogical demands. We wanted faculty not only to understand this but to seek it.

There is an implied – not very covertly – collegiality in these desiderata. Faculty connections to other faculty and to students was expected. We distrusted candidates who displayed tendencies to isolation or who showed contempt for students. We wanted, and generally got, faculty who had had very positive experiences with students and who would treat students as equals. This was particularly true about the science faculty though it pertained across all of the Divisions.

Tilley closes with an acerbic comment on other institutions; let me hasten to add that, generally, the Deans totally agreed with Tilley on these issues so we did not – at the time – find them distasteful or wrong.

Please remember that the point of all these comments is just to help us find scientists, scholars, artists, and intellectuals who will teach in both an exciting and a responsible way. It seems vitally important that we work together to bring that kind of academician to Stockton. No doubt mistakes will occur. But in the long run, if we keep the objective in mind, we shall probably succeed -- if only because most colleges and universities have other objectives, or have lost sight of their objectives, or still do not know what their objectives ought to be.

The recruiting process started with ads. The next step was to send the four Deans forth into the country to interview interested candidates. Each of us was assigned a “territory” and we spent a week or more going from university to university interviewing candidates – most of whom were graduate students.
I went to the mid-west visiting Chicago, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. While exhausting, these trips gave us an opportunity to gauge interest, to find out where our descriptions of the College and the position needed tweaking, to report back on where it was going to be easy and hard to recruit specific disciplines. We all came back with lists of candidates and suggestions for sharpening and clarifying our presentation of the College.

All of this effort paid off; we received 5300 applications for 55 positions!

Here are some stats that may be of interest:

  • Among the 56 First Cohort there were 11 Professors, 10 Associates, 30 Assistants and 5 Instructors.
  • The average age was 32.6
  • The number of doctorates was 30
  • The number of doctorates expected was 21
  • The number of women was 7
  • The number of African-Americans was 3

The faculty was born in 19 different states and 5 foreign nations. Based upon the place of recent employment, the faculty came from 21 public colleges and universities, 22 private colleges and universities, 10 public agencies and 3 private concerns.

The doctorates earned by the faculty were granted by 27 different institutions.

The first group of 5 faculty presented to the Board of Trustees was on December 9, 1970. The were Enscoe, Hecht, Marsh, Mench and Solo.

On January 7, 1971 a second group of 11 were presented. They were Broughton, Constantelos, Decker, Klein, Lacy, Lester, Lubenow, Mikulak, John Miller, Reiss and Wirth.

A third group of 6 was presented in February 11, 1971. They were Daly, Epstein, Jaffe, Milstein, Rickert and Townsend.

On March 4, 1971 Bean, Ferrell, Ford, Loft, Steinberg, Wilmore were presented. It was the fourth group of 6.

The fifth group of 17 was presented on April 6, 1971. They were Bogart, Colby, Falk, Good, Haggerty, Hartzog, Helsabeck, Larsen, Manley, Marino, Ozersky, Plank, Richert, Richey, Sanford, Sternfeld and Wood.

On May 18, 1971 the sixth group of 10 was presented to the Board of Trustees. They were Bailey, Burkman, Drummond, Gilmore, Martin Miller, Silverman, Smith, Sorkin, Stanton and Taylor.

Interestingly enough, out of this First Cohort of 55 only 7 remain at the College teaching full time. They are Daly, Epstein, Farrell, Helsabeck, Lester, Lubenow and Wood.

So who was the first faculty member hired at the College? Because the names were presented to the Board alphabetically and because they had to vote on each recommendation separately, the first one voted on had to be Gerry Enscoe.

[I apologize for the illegibility of this quote from the ad. It comes from a scanned version which is a graphic instead of text. I am trying to find a cleaner copy]

2 comments:

  1. Thank you, I really enjoyed reading this history. It is interesting to me how the original policies/ expectations shaped the personality of the College, and the important role that the original faculty had in keeping these ideals alive.

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  2. I was an original "faculty wife," and I can attest to the emphasis on collegiality both faculty and students, as well as college staff. Faculty parties often included students and vice-versa.
    I came to know most of the people mentioned in the article, and each one was dedicated not only to Stockton as an innovative institution, but to the search for social justice.

    Mary Maudsley

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