The Road Not Taken, or Reinventing the Wheel

I have taught a course on sports history since the summer of 1986, when I was a graduate at the University of Pennsylvania. My course was fairly unique for its day, not looking at sports in one society, but focusing on them comparatively. Students in my course would learn not just about the history or sociology of baseball in the United States, or football in Britain, but the history of sports around the globe, including many sports with which many American students, at that time at least, were unfamiliar. Since then, rugby, cricket, and soccer have become more mainstream in the United States, and much globalization has occurred, so my course may not seem as much of a stretch to my current students as it once did. But while becoming familiar with more sports, students have become less aware of both their own history and that of other nations and societies.

One aspect of sports history with which they are certainly unfamiliar is what I would term “the road not taken.” There is a feeling that what exists is natural and inevitable and the rules of each game and the manner in which they came into being do not require explanation. There is no sense that contestation over the way sports are played and who profits from them is a major part of the story, except with regard perhaps to the policing of the performers, either in terms of their propensity to act in corrupt ways – throwing games for money, or performing no-balls at particular moments to make large sums of money for sports gamblers – or otherwise cheating – by taking body-building drugs, for example.

But one of the things that teaching the history of sports brings immediately to the fore is the fact that each of the sports that developed did so in the way that it did for particular reasons that relate to the social conditions of the time at which it developed into its modern, organized form. Association football (or soccer), for example, was fundamentally shaped by the conflict between the elite amateurs and the working-class professionals of the 1890s, the resolution of which would enable it to spread rapidly throughout much of the world, but would fundamentally limit its ability to compete for many decades in the United States. Rugby would have similar kinds of class divisions that would lead to bifurcation into a working-class sport (League) with heavy policing (refereeing) and numerous stoppages, and a middle-class sport (Union) that would be heavily reliant on notions of gentlemanly behavior and self-restraint that could be free-flowing and loosely policed (at least in the eyes of its advocates). While the Rugby League game could be easily adapted to conditions in the United States, with the creations of downs and the assumption that every action needed some form of intense surveillance to assure conformity to the rules, Rugby Union would only spread initially to those areas where English middle-class communities were vibrant.

Contestation in other areas occurred also. Societies that were divided along racial lines, like the United States and South Africa, witnessed different kinds of development in their sports – the United States instituting segregation within sports, South Africa generally doing so between them (Rugby for Afrikaners, soccer for Africans, Cricket for the English). And gender would also play its part, both in divisions between sports prescribed for women as opposed to those limited to men, and the impact of these developments on fluctuating notions of masculinity and femininity.

Such contestation within sports is similarly reflected in the historiography related to the subject. Historians and writers on sports offered different theories about the relationship between sports and society. The most important intervention, perhaps, was to begin acknowledging that sports were important social phenomena in their own right, not simply confined to leisure hours and diversions from more important occupations like earning a living wage. Two people did more in this area than perhaps any others – Ranjitsinhji an Indian prince and cricketer playing in England in the 1890s who wrote about the significance of cricket in Victorian society, and C.L.R. James a Trinidadian Trotskyist and cricket journalist who wrote the transformative work in sports history, Beyond a Boundary. The former contested the notion that sports weren’t a significant part of English life, the latter fundamentally altered his own earlier political beliefs that sports, like religion, were just an opiate keeping workers from challenging via revolutionary methods the inequities in the larger society. Without mentioning Gramsci (and before he became vogue in the Anglo-American academy), James provided a description of hegemony forming around important cultural phenomena – preeminent among which were cricket and football.

But, and we will soon get to our point of connection with Stockton College (thankfully, I hear), there were other ways of looking at sports that were less positive or complimentary than those offered up by Ranjitsinhji and James. The three most significant, which came to the fore at the same time that Stockton was being conceived (at the end of the 1960s), were those of neo-Marxism, radical feminism, and black nationalism:

The neo-Marxist moved beyond the Marxist assumption that culture (the superstructure) merely reflected the economic and social conditions of the society (the structure), to look at how the development of the corporation and the profit motive had totally infused the sports world – thus, in effect, making that world a part of the fundamental structure of society. So for the neo-Marxist, the rise of media corporations, the growing power of the owners, commissioners, and entities like the NCAA, symbolized the corruption of sports that otherwise would have been played by people for their own sake and for the joy of participation.

Along parallel lines, the radical feminist argued that sports reflected the patriarchal society in which it was embedded and these organized games simply reaffirmed the dominance of men in society. Radicalizing the notion of the “separate sphere” and assuming gender differences, radical feminists advocated their own sports, which could be built around field hockey and “girls rules” basketball, for example, or could extend to different types of less competitive and testosterone-driven games.

Finally, the black nationalist focused on the racial oppression evident in the way sports were structured, with black athletes, when they were not completely excluded, being underappreciated and exploited more than their white counterparts from the high schools all the way through the college farm system to the majors. At a time when athletes were producing Black Power salutes on the Olympic podium, many at the college level wanted to challenge the institutional and behavioral manifestations of racism.

Being informed by any of these theories would lead one to the conclusion that to just play the game along the lines defined and controlled by a white, male, or corporate elite, would only mean that one was continuing down a course and implicating oneself in a system that was fundamentally objectionable.

Enter Marty Miller.

Assigned by the Provost to oversee the development of sports at Stockton, Ken Tompkins (Dean of General Studies) had hired Marty Miller and assigned him to develop a proposal. Clearly informed by a radical critique of the role of sports in society, Miller came up with “Life Sports at Stockton: An Alternative.” This would be an attempt to chart a completely different path for the development of sports at the college, one that would differ from that found within those enmeshed in the NCAA.

Miller made his sentiments clear right at the outset, “Though the American University has professed [a goal of developing a mind-body synthesis],” he wrote, “too often college athletics has become associated with professionalism, anti-intellectualism, and practices antithetical to a purposeful academic life.” Given this situation a new college could take a different, more salutary, course. He continued,

Stockton State College has an opportunity to enhance the unique principle which govern the general college community, by forming a sports program which complements these basic tenets. Namely, the egalitarian nature of Stockton must be mirrored by athletic endeavors having mass participation by men and women, faculty and administration and having these participants provide internal direction for sports policy. Stockton will not withdraw from sports in an attempt to avoid well-publicized “excesses”, but seek excellence in this “art form” in the same manner as traditional academic departments desire a high level of competence. Similarly, the interdisciplinary nature of academic departments may have its analog in a flexible sports program which relates to other forms of motion and crosses into conventional academic courses. Sports should be a rallying point for social interaction and provide a holistic approach to the learning process which would coincide with Stockton’s total community approach. Just as one does not belong solely to a Division, the athlete is not circumscribed in a specific role which alienates him from the general student body.

This is a very radical conception, shaped by a neo-Marxist critique of college sports and making overtures to the feminist and nationalist visions (the former here, in terms of “mass participation by men and women”, the “holistic approach”, and the “art form”; the latter at other points in his proposal).

Miller’s vehement opposition to the current state of affairs in sport is most pronounced in his response to the Intercollegiate Task Force concerning the college’s relationship with the NCAA. He espoused a position that was pro-club and anti-NCAA. He writes of the NCAA:

1. I believe that the NCAA leadership has had a racist orientation, or at least has been extremely insensitive to the needs of black athletes. For example, James Decker, Syracuse Athletic Director and NCAA head of all televised sports, is the same man who in 1966 answered charges of racism leveled against one of his coaches by saying, “haven’t you ever heard a man use the word ‘nigger’”? The leadership has allowed various schools to remain in the NCAA while excluding blacks from participating in team sports – under the rationale of “manifest disobedience” or blatant segregation. (University of Washington is an example of the former case and Alabama, Mississippi, ad infinitum, are examples of the latter).

2. Philosophically the NCAA had a clear mandate in its formative years to combat the growing commercialism in college athletics. Needless to say, the NCAA which funds itself from gate receipts gleaned from the NCAA Basketball Tournament has helped college athletics become a huge industry, with millions made at various games.

After further analysis of the NCAA, in which he suggests that joining it would limit the possibilities for Stockton students, he concludes: “Thus, the NCAA framework does not seem compatible with the goals of having sport open to the general student population, and for the most proficient athletes to develop their skills to the maximum.”

In another document, the outline of a “Proposed Supporting Program in Life Sports,” Miller proceeds to expand further on what he sees as a more ideal relationship between sports and the academy. He writes:

Throughout traditional academic history, a professed goal of the college curriculum has been the study of man in his entirety; a synthesis of mind and body, spirit and matter, which encompasses the multi-faceted human experience. Sport, that, broad area of movement, evolving from games, ritual, drama, and the arts, has been relegated to a rather subordinate and very often meaningless role in understanding man’s interaction with the structures of society. On one hand, a burgeoning interest in spectator sports has generated separate professional and commercial athletic institutions on the periphery of academic life which creates the antithesis of the organic scholarly community. Yet paradoxically, this proliferation of athletic activities has not prompted a concomitant growth in serious academic commitments to study the purpose and effects of sport in modern society. To a large degree, Thinking Man and Athletic Man will remain casualties and reflections of a fragmented and specialized human emerging in a technological era unless sport begins to be integrated into the main body of academic thought.

The analysis here is dialectical. The thesis is “games, ritual, drama and the arts”; the antithesis is the form of sports found currently in the academy, with the alienation of humans and the fragmentation into Thinking Man and Athletic Man; the synthesis, will be whatever Miller and Stockton manage to create that will bring these fragmented and alienated elements back together.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Marty Miller’s Life Sports proposal seems very utopian, and one’s immediate response to reading these documents is along the lines of wondering how he could have imagined his program would have gained a foothold at the college. But using hindsight in this manner is rather unfair. As I noted, his approach was informed by the critical analysis of the time, and it was that same analysis that was leading to significant changes that were occurring and that would take care of some of the more egregious and negative aspects of commercial and college sports. And this was indeed a time of change, perhaps not of revolution, but a time when people believed that things could be altered dramatically. Why couldn’t new approaches to sports be formulated along the lines that he described? And, indeed, haven’t some of the kinds of sports that Miller would have supported appeared in different guises since that time? While the college would later join the NCAA and have Division III varsity sports (which are far less invidious than is the case for Division I), it is also the case the intramural world of sports at Stockton has been very vibrant. And the sports world itself, while previously highly monopolized around major leagues that were protected by the Supreme Court from conformity with Anti-Trust regulations, now finds that these sports are competing with all kinds of games and pastimes that vie for participants and spectators through cable television and other media. So while Miller was up against a behemoth in the form of the NCAA, such that he was unlikely to have been able to keep the college from resisting its blandishments, he was not merely a deluded utopian by any means.

This is most clear in the fact that he initially received encouragement and even support from those who appointed him. Ken Tompkins was clearly up for any kind of experiment; Wes Tilley, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Richard Bjork, the President, also seem to have been intrigued by the ideas he was presenting. In the end, they would not be able to resist the NCAA, but they certainly gave the idea serious consideration. Perhaps the thought of trying to create and administer something totally new and extremely radical – when they were doing so much else besides – was too much for them to take on. But this does not mean that the ideas didn’t resonate and make considerable sense to them.

But the sports world is not merely divided into the world of those who have power who control things, and those who are either controlled or who endeavor to create something entirely unique to replace that which they think oppresses them. As both Ranjitsinhji and C.L.R. James knew, the sports world is one that inspires non-participants to participation -- it is one that excites the imagination. This is not merely the case of an opiate being given to the masses so that they switch off and tune out; it is rather the case that people get excited enough either to root for a team or to endeavor to advance within the structure that exists (however corrupt one imagines it to be). One reason the NCAA would have been appealing to college administrators in the early 1970s, in spite of all that it was doing to which many objected, is because inter-collegiate athletics could help to create identification with the college, to bring in revenue and so forth. Sport could be a source of recruitment and the basis for prestige. Such things are enticing, because they do, in the end, excite people.

Of course, what Miller had been suggesting might have ended up exciting many members of the Stockton community as well -- and by all accounts he was a very popular faculty member; but the wheel that he was trying to reinvent was going to be very difficult to construct, and when fabricated it would only move a cart slowly along a dusty road. The NCAA’s wheels were already so well lubricated by this time that it would not be long before the cart drivers and their passengers looked longingly over at the sports car as it zipped by leaving dollar bills flying around in its wake.

The Train Has Left

There is probably no more cantankerous, anger-producing, intractable problem in the history of the College than the issue of the "tenure quota" beginning in 1972 and lasting for at least a decade.

In many ways, it is the defining issue of that decade setting the tone of the College community and extending from the faculty to the Board to the President to the Chancellor.

Ironically, if you ask any of the younger faculty -- those that have been appointed in the last ten years or so -- about the tenure quota they will all say that they have no idea what is being asked. It simply has disappeared as an issue; most have no idea about the struggle that obsessed us as a College for so long.

If you find an older faculty and ask about the quota, they will tell you that it was a device invented by the first President to make sure the administration had "managerial flexibility". That phrase is almost never heard these days.

I have been going through the relevant documents recently and the history of the tenure quota here is complex and sometimes unclear. It is, however, essential for us to understand how this became a dominant issue, who were the players and what caused it to disappear.

To understand how the tenure quota became such a defining issue we have to understand higher education in New Jersey in the late 1960s.

At that time, the six State colleges were really teacher training schools. They tended to duplicate each other's curricula and, as it finally came to everyone's attention, a high proportion of their faculties had tenure. Over all, in September, 1971, 63% of the faculty across the State had tenure; this rate climbed to 71% in early 1972 but was expected to drop back to 65% in 1972 because new faculty were hired to meet increased enrollment. One State college had a 75% tenured faculty.

The other causal issue was the fact that, by State statute, faculty in New Jersey State colleges were tenured in three years. This may, on the surface, seem an advantage. From the faculty's standpoint, the College has to commit to a young teacher at the end of three years so the waiting and stress of defending one's teaching and research is over quickly. From the administrator's standpoint, if the faculty member shows no aberrant behavior in that three year period, the college can make the commitment and move on. It would seem like everyone wins.

This might work for experienced teachers -- those at the rank of Associate or Full Professor -- who will have a verifiable record. But what about Assistant Professors who have minimum teaching experience? How valid is a judgment made about teaching after three years?

The concatenation of a short probationary period and high proportion of tenured faculty certainly caused State officials to wonder whether a tenure quota might not solve both problems at one blow.

Stockton's founding falls between these issues.

The President, Richard Bjork, in January of 1971, wrote a document Adminstrative Working Paper IV: Faculty and Staff Evaluation outlining a Promotion and Tenure Policy for the college. In this document, Bjork lists the various State laws and regulations that defined tenure and the probation period including Title18a:60, Chapter 271, Public Law 1967 which defined the probationary period as three years.

Interestingly, no mention is made of tenure quotas. Also, of equal interest, a Report of the Faculty Committee on Administrative Working Paper IV (the document written by Bjork) does not mention tenure quotas once. At this point (1971) neither the administration nor the faculty considered tenure quotas worth mentioning. Things were about to change dramatically.

That change came in the form of a report on Tenure At the State Colleges of New Jersey (June, 1972) ordered by the then Chancellor of Higher Education, Ralph Dungan. This 34 page report covers the tenure situation in the State colleges, what the Department of Higher Education had tried to do about the short probationary period, what other reports had recommended about tenure quotas and, finally, what the report recommended.

Briefly, this report stated that a tenure quota of 60% should be instituted at the State colleges. To insure compliance, each college was to submit an annual report to the Department of Higher Education.
Coincidentally, the AFT was elected as bargaining agent in February of 1973 -- just between Bjork's document on Promotion and Tenure and the DHE report on tenure quotas. These three facts shaped the firestorm that followed.

When the NY Times ran an article on October 22, 1972, the bargaining agent was the Association of New Jersey College Faculties -- and NJEA affiliate. It attacked the quota plan as being against State law and the US Constitution. They also saw Chancellor Dungan as overruling local boards. Montclair's president resigned over the issue and the reporter states that Stockton's faculty was especially "infuriated".

And so the issue was joined. Four months later the bargaining agent elected -- with incredibly strong Stockton support -- became the AFT. From that point on the tenure quota was the center issue for the Union because to lose the fight would have meant that the Union could not protect its members and if that had ever happened it would have lost all credibility.

Tenure quotas appeal to administrators in times when education is expanding. If a college isn't hiring many new faculty, quotas are not impressive or needed. But, when Stockton doubled its faculty in two years after its founding, quotas made sense to administrators who feared that if the faculty ever achieved 100% tenure, change would have become impossible. At a place like Stockton -- which prided itself on constant change -- full tenure would have been anathema.

On the other hand, Stockton's faculty was uniquely young in the State system so it saw the quota as a direct attack on being here, teaching, doing research and becoming a successful academicians.

Once these lines were drawn there was no turning back to the excitement of the earliest days and to a communality of purpose.

Indeed, Bjork wrote and presented testimony before The New Jersey Assembly Education Committee in November, 1976. In his short statement he argues fully against tenure. By then, the issue was already beginning to fade -- though it wasn't a dead issue until at least a decade or more -- and Bjork's speech is an elegant rear-guard action. As they say: the train had left the station (see Rob's remark about his speech below).

With 40 years hindsight one is forced to wonder if all of the anger, effort, talk, arguing, planning and writing was not wasted. Other issues of power sharing, faculty governance, tight budgets and benefits occupied the Union -- and rightfully so. Once the halcyon days of the Founding had passed, the College had to survive in a radically different world from 1971 as the new kid on the block. It had to compete for funds, for faculty, for lines, for students and for the excellence it had so long assumed.

No one talks -- or writes -- about tenure quotas today; this is true, at least, in my hearing. Concomitantly, no one becomes much excited about any issue either. As I said: the train has left.

Logical -- and Wrong

It seems evident that the first President of Stockton, Richard Bjork, was very interested in doing away with tenure, or, if that was not possible, imposing a quota so that the negative effects of permanent employment status, as he saw them, would be limited as much as possible.

Two of President Bjork’s key advisors were also very much interested in reevaluating the institution of tenure in higher educaion. Richard P. Chait and Andrew T. Ford argued in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that tenure would most likely disappear in the academy because it was both no longer necessary and an impediment in the way of constructive change.

It was no longer necessary, they felt, because of the rise of unionism. Every protection that tenure provided – with regard to academic freedom in particular – could be secured through employment rights. If tenure had been established to secure such freedom then it had now been made superfluous by the union’s grievance procedure. Moreover, the process of attaining tenure might even provide its own barrier to academic freedom, with young faculty needing to tow the line in order to gain acceptance from their tenured colleagues. The more that unionism became established in the academic landscape, the more likely it was that tenure would go by the wayside. If the union needed to protect all its members, the tenured, the untenured, and those not in tenure-track positions, it would find itself obliged to question tenure privileges that placed many members beyond their control.

With regard to being an impediment to change, tenure was by its nature a source of inflexibility. The more a faculty was tenured-up, so to speak, the less it would be responsive to change. In the past this meant that new trends, new ideas, and new technologies faced stiff resistance, and this was definitely an inconvenience. But by 1973 there were more pressing concerns. In order to provide redress for past discrimination colleges were required to hire more minorities and women. If there were no lines available because faculty were all tenured moving towards a diverse faculty would be extremely tough. Not only this, owing to past discrimination, or the life experiences of those who were previously excluded, the requirements for tenure themselves were problematic. Stringent requirements bolstered the status quo; and tenure decisions were made at about the time that many women were taking time away from the labor market to have and raise children -- past discriminations would therefore not be overcome. Tenure, Chait and Ford argued, was not really an appropriate institution for the academic landscape that seemed to be emerging in the 1970s.

As Ken Tompkins wrote to me after reading the Chait and Ford piece, “it is a good example of something that is logical – and wrong!” Ken is exactly right. The argument of the article is well developed and fundamentally very persuasive. So persuasive, indeed, that one puts it down (or turns away from the screen) and wonders why it is that one is now, in 2010, working in an institution that still enshrines tenure. This cannot be, surely! But while logical, the argument is fundamentally flawed – perhaps because its understanding of history is somewhat cockeyed, but perhaps more because it doesn’t seem to comprehend the psychology (or recognize that it might need to consider this) of those who they believed would oppose the continuation of tenure.

Regarding history: unions have never freely given up rights that any of their members have attained. Moreover, they are and have always been founded around their strongest members. They don’t give things back or make concessions to management because the rights of one portion of their members interfere with the rights of others. The AFL was based around crafts; these unions comprised the aristocrats of labor – the closest thing to tenured faculty that existed in the industrial landscape. In order to protect positions, they needed to reach out to the unorganized, lest their position might have been undercut by the rise of new industrial organizations. While the CIO did later form around organizations that endeavored to cover the whole workplace, across trades and work classifications, it did not displace the AFL.

The unions that formed in colleges and universities brought together members who were already tenured or who were aspiring to that status. The notion that they would find this status problematic and something they ought not to have because it was unfair to others in the academic workforce, is a little absurd really. The primary goal of the union would be to protect the right of tenure for its members and to ensure that no infringements, like quotas, were established by management. Other issues that might relate to the protection of untenured and transient labor would always remain secondary, because these concerned issues with people who were not fully established, long-term members. There is nothing sinister about this, it is just a fact that unions and their leaders were going to perform in ways that they always had done, and there was no reason to expect otherwise.

Re psychology: people who have been discriminated against seldom want to replace the system from which they have been excluded. Women and minorities didn’t look at the institution of tenure and say that it negatively impacted them in some way and therefore needed to be replaced. Rather they noted that they wanted to be represented in the ranks of the tenured on a more equal basis. So, while affirmative action might cause some stresses in colleges and universities, it would almost never be the case that this would be made grounds for replacing the system of tenure; and those who were endeavoring to break into the ranks of academe would never be leading the charge to achieve such a goal.

So Chait and Ford were very logical, and they clearly believed that they were in the vanguard of change, but they also were fundamentally wrong – so much so that they had retreated from almost all their positions by the time they wrote Beyond Traditional Tenure in 1982. They were obviously also very influential in terms of the development of Bjork’s own thinking on this subject. In November 1976, Bjork went before the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee, to speak about academic tenure in public schools. In his presentation he came out strongly against tenure. “No reasonable claim can be made,” he exclaims, “that the extent of tenuring today is essential to, or even helpful to, risk taking and free inquiry.” He continues:

In an effort to provide a condition of special freedom for a select few, education has developed a protective shield for the many who work under its umbrella. Critics have made it clear that this shield probably protects the less competent more than it does the exceptionally competent. I agree that such may well be the case. But what concerns me more is that the shield of tenure protects its holders form the refreshment of criticism while permitting the tenured the irresponsibility of whatever criticisms or ideas they believe worth uttering.

This argument had been part of the Chait and Ford case made against tenure regarding flexibility and the need of institutions to have the ability to change.

Added to this, Bjork referred to the employment aspects of tenure, along the lines developed by his two assistants:

In public education, tenure is not the sole instrument of protection for the work and person of teachers. Tenure is one layer. Added to tenre are protective layers of employy-employer agreements, civil service regulations, civil rights regulations, statutes, and court decisions which accord individuals property rights in their positions. The suggestion that the individual is not well protected in a job from the ravages of a vindictive group and/or an arbitrary or capricious manager can only find sustenance by reference to the isolated and often bizarre.

Bjork ended with a flourish: “Those who are truly seeking are seldom fettered by their critics, rather they are stimulated. Education as a crucial arena of free inquiry needs several protective layers removed and tenure is among those layers.”

But if that were the case, Bjork and others who agreed with him would still find those protective layers difficult to remove. Tenure was something that the union fought for bitterly, even at a new college (perhaps especially at a new college) like Stockton. Those creating a new college may have believed that it would be easy to move against tenure; those who stood in their way knew that they needed to be extremely vigilant on that score.

So, if eradication of tenure would be difficult to achieve in its entirety, perhaps its negative effects could be limited in other ways. Back in 1973 Bjork and Stockton’s Board of Trustees had already established for the college a relatively strict tenure quota. For Bjork, conforming to this quota would remain of fundamental importance to the healthy development of his fledgling college.

Central Heating

Robert Hutchins – the President of the University of Chicago – once described the modern university as “a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system.”

I was reminded of this remark when Peter Mitchell – the second President of Stockton – quoted it in an interview just before he left Stockton to take up a position in Massachusetts.

The remark summarizes a fact about American higher education: not much connects departments in colleges and universities. Many, of course, give lip-service to how wonderfully linked they are but the truth is that there is very little holding them together.

When the Deans first began to think about how the College might be organized it was a revelation that all of us had had bad experiences in traditional departments. For example, we found them restrictive, fiercely competitive, wasteful, frequently divided into factions and dominated by senior faculty or, more likely, a martinet of a chairman.

We saw traditional departments and power-grabbing chairmen as having the most severe, unhealthy and debilitating power over junior faculty and we wanted no part of this traditional arrangement.

I think that, among the Deans, I was the only one who had been a Chairman so we tended not to see the academic world from that perspective. Having been Chairman at a small Midwestern college, I can state that being in that office is no picnic either. I once tried to fire a poorly trained teacher who had been a member of the English Department for many years. I had evidence that he was awful in the classroom but was unassailable because of his long service to the college. I gave him a poor evaluation and informed him that I intended to replace him (he did not have tenure). Immediately, faculty throughout  the college strongly defended him. Within a few weeks, the faculty member claimed that I had ruined his marriage and had caused him to seek psychological counseling. The administration of the college rejected my recommendation citing his long service to the college. I have to admit that I had been warned by the Academic Dean that the college would support him. He returned to the classroom to continue “teaching” and I was denied tenure.

My point is that the early Deans – and the Academic VP – did not view departments and chairmen favorably. We all had had bad experiences and were seeking other power arrangements.

The solution that we examined and, ultimately, adopted was to create strong Divisional structures with no departments and elected co-ordinators to organize and serve the programs. Academic Working Paper 7 – finalized by November of 1970 – summarizes this arrangement. Faculty were assigned to programs (what I have called “a federation of faculty”) which are independent of administrative control. Faculty could be – and were – assigned to more than one program. Alan Lacy, for example, was based in the Philosophy Program but was also a member of Environmental Studies, Methods of Inquiry and Urban Studies. Indeed, most faculty were members of at least one program other than the one they were hired in.

A modest indication of the increasing conservatism of the College is the abandonment of the concept of multiple program memberships. We are the lesser for the shift.

The central focus, then, of a faculty member’s academic life was – and is – the Program. This is a traditional, long-held attachment. The co-ordinator, however, does not have the two department chairperson’s sources of power: hiring/firing and budget. These, originally, were shifted upwards to the Dean.

This arrangement is considerably different even today from large university departments. These departments operate without the control or oversight of a Dean except in extraordinary circumstances. The department might request a position from a Dean and, if granted, they would hire faculty (many times without the Dean or VP for Academic Affairs ever meeting the candidate; at Stockton candidates are seen by the Dean of the hiring Division, and the Dean of General Studies – until recently they were seen by the Academic VP), assign courses and other responsibilities with no further participation of the university administration above the Chairperson. If that person proved to be unsatisfactory, the process is reversed but is still contained within the Department. Again, at Stockton, the process of firing someone involves the Program, the Divisional Dean, a College-wide committee and the VP for Academic Affairs.

The administration at Stockton periodically suggests the adoption of the Department model but, so far, the faculty has resisted these overtures. Not all co-ordinators follow the earlier model; some act like Chairpersons in large part because their faculty want it that way. Most, however, are without real power and the programs keep them as they were -- powerless.

Strangely, programs at Stockton are not much more connected than the quote from Robert Hutchins observes. Multiple program membership offered a means of true interdisciplinary connections but, with its abandonment and without the necessary acculturation of new faculty to the old ways, programs exist in splendid isolation.

We have lost much.

Escape From(m) Freedom

Wes Tilley’s "Examination of the Goals of Stockton College" is a curious piece, but one of great magnitude, I believe, to Stockton. Tilley penned the 73-page manifesto in the Summer of 1973, in the immediate aftermath of having been fired by President Bjork from his position as the founding Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the college.

Having learned this fact, one might be forgiven for assuming, on picking up the document to read, that it would be a political screed, blaming those below him for any failures and criticizing those above him for unsound judgment. This is far from the case, and while there may be a passive aggressive tone at times, and some sniping going on in the text, most of this is not evident to someone like myself who is unfamiliar with some of the targets. Ken, I believe, would recognize some of those caught in the crosshairs, and having known the man at the time, he would be aware of where Tilley’s anger about being removed from his position had carried over into the document.

But from my perspective, as someone who has penned an angry screed or two, this is a very measured piece, a little overbearing sometimes in terms of its language and its resort to theory rather than example to make its case, but very interesting. Tilley was clearly an exceedingly well-informed intellectual who was very self-conscious about what he did, and knew exactly how what he was attempting to achieve at Stockton fit within the American educational landscape. Apparently, his tone in the paper, one in which he defines in great detail every element of the college to see whether it should be considered in one category (e.g., objective) or another (e.g., goal or desideratum), was what he brought to meetings as well. This would have annoyed me to no end, but I am sure I, like the people who worked with him, would have been the better for it.

That said, I want to focus on just one aspect of this document. This fits within the explanation of what Tilley sees as the reasons for the failure of parts of the Stockton experiment. In particular, I want to examine the collegium and preceptorial, both of which were key elements of what Tilley brought to Stockton.

Both of these fit within what Tilley saw as one of the objectives of the college, namely to afford students “a large measure of self-direction” (Tilley draws this from the Prospectus of 1971). They were to be able to create their own courses, and their own curriculum, though the amount of their self-direction (how many courses? How much of the curriculum?) was unspecified. They were to undertake this with their preceptor, who would not merely provide a blueprint for achieving graduation in a particular major as expeditiously as possible, but would rather point students in particular directions based upon deep and philosophical discussion about what they wanted to accomplish. Through the collegium, preceptorial groupings would come together to create community, and also become the foundation for the college’s shared governance – among students, faculty, and administration.

By any measure this was a radical vision, but Tilley is keenly aware of the problems it faced in the educational landscape of the 1970s, and that it would be likely to face for the remainder of the century. He notes that the college had advertized itself as a place where these kinds of institutional arrangements were going to occur in the hopes that it would attract students who yearned for this kind of freedom and faculty who wished to be involved in this kind of close interaction with students in preceptorials. And yet, in neither instance had this occurred. The students didn’t really understand what the point of these preceptorials was, and their understanding of freedom was very different from the one implicit in the preceptorial structure; while many faculty members, for a variety of reasons, came to dislike the preceptorial approach also.

From the student perspective, freedom was clearly important, but this freedom was to be found at a different level from that of self-direction. There were two, somewhat contradictory, elements to this freedom that Tilley observes – though there may be others also I am forgetting. One is that students want to be able to assess whether the faculty are doing their job properly, so that there should be a clear set of objectives in their courses and in their curriculum, and the faculty should help them reach those goals – as quickly (and therefore as cheaply) as possible. The idea of going to a faculty office to shoot the breeze and discuss the larger issues framing the person’s educational career, while it may have been the experience of some and welcomed by many, was often alien to the first-generation college student, whose grasp of academic fundamentals was perhaps not as sound as would be desirable for him or her to take advantage of such interactions to the fullest extent. And where there was a line outside the door with other students waiting to receive the faculty member’s attention, the faculty member may have been less than willing to oblige with such a conversation. The student’s freedom in this process came in his or her ability to assess and evaluate whether the faculty member was providing the kind of positive experience that he or she wanted – the birth of student entitlement, which is a far cry from self-direction.

At the same time, freedom also meant the breaking down of traditional educational markers of excellence and achievement – an erosion of standards. This harks back to the idea then current (mentioned in a previous blog entry) that the student was the “nigger of the world.” What was the wisdom that faculty wished to impart, and really, beyond certain clearly defined (and frequently vocational) skills, what right did they have to suggest that something was better than something else, morally, intellectually, spiritually, etc.? This touches on an underlying crisis that Tilley seems to recognize as being in existence at the time, which revolves around the question of what an educational establishment is trying to accomplish? If it is certain vocational skills, that is all well and good – it can be assessed in accordance with the number of people earning particular credentials and their subsequent success in the job market later. But if there is something more than this, and every Liberal Arts College would suggest that there is, what is that additional element comprised of, and how is it to be measured? In a world where students are going on strike and endeavoring to suggest that their understanding of the world may even be more valuable than that of the professor in his ivory tower, there is a significant problem to be faced – one that comes directly to the fore in the preceptorial.

For if it is true that the student may not be willing to listen, it is also the case that the young professor may be less than willing to speak. The faculty preceptor may have felt, and Tilley believed this to be the case with young faculty, where he or she didn’t believe they had established their legitimacy and didn’t feel comfortable providing much direction for their students. The average age of the faculty was low, owing to the recruiting practices at the new college, and while these faculty may have been open philosophically to the idea of precepting, they may have felt less than comfortable in the fairly confrontational environment prevailing at that time. Meanwhile, those who were older and more comfortable in their view of what was good and bad educationally, regarding what their standards were and what students ought and ought not to be doing, were frequently less committed to preceptorials and were more devoted to the more traditional disciplinary structures. [The youth of the faculty in NAMS, for example, led to a greater sense of commitment to the preceptorial culture, and closer interactions between faculty and students, compared to the situation in ARHU, where there were several older and more firmly established faculty, who, I believe, disliked the preceptorial approach.]

Other reasons could be provided for the failure of preceptorials, but one other aspect worth dwelling on is that, however committed a faculty member may have been to the idea – and there were several who spent hours upon hours working directly with students – this was still uncompensated labor; and this was bound to present problems. If one were to teach three 4-hour courses, and that constituted one’s workload, why would one want to kill oneself doing preceptorials in the way they had been designed? After not too long, one would look at the next office and see that the same commitment wasn’t being put forth there, and yet that other faculty member was receiving the same level of compensation; one would then most likely adjust one’s approach accordingly. Add a union into this mix and the likelihood that the Tilley-inspired preceptorial would survive in any meaningful sense becomes almost non-existent.

The larger philosophical questions remain in place, and these give Tilley’s document a tone of disappointment, in my view, rather than one of anger. The administrators, faculty, and students had been given a rare opportunity to create something new; something that would allow faculty to free themselves of some of the traditional strictures then in place in academe; something that would encourage students to challenge themselves in an educational environment freer and less structured than anything else they were likely to encounter at another college. But, instead of embracing these freedoms, Tilley witnessed all of his innovations, and those of his deans, being rejected piecemeal, and really without any true test being undertaken as to whether they would work.

Perhaps, in the end, it came down to another objective of the college that encompassed two different notions that were sometimes mistaken for each other. This objective was that the college should be both innovative and experimental. For Tilley, the latter, with all its assumptions that one would endeavor to determine whether the experiment was working, was far more preferable than innovation. Innovation was change for its own sake, and something put in place could just as easily be altered in the next wave of innovation. Tilley wrote:

During the past few years, especially since 1968, a number of colleges and universities have dedicated themselves to innovation. Experimentation seems less popular, probably because a good many recent innovations have been undertaken not in the spirit of inquiry, which would mean that they were subject to continual re-examination, but as new dogmas, reflecting the conviction of their sponsors that certain things have been done badly and that they, the sponsors, can do them better.

For Tilley, the spirit of inquiry was important and an experiment needed to be tested rather than put aside in a rush to a new innovative, and dogmatic, approach.

But, while Tilley might come close to blaming particular people who rejected his offerings, he also provided a sense that he felt that this was really a moment in time when things were possible, and that this would not remain the case. The same forces associated with 1968 that he might have felt doomed his project, also made it possible by, to some degree, fostering the notion that a public liberal arts college modeled on the small private institutions was a worthy experiment. In addition, as a new college, Stockton would have some time to do some experimenting before it needed to answer to powerful forces, a Board of Trustees, for example, which might not have the same liberal perspective of the college, and the State, which too might have had different intentions for the institution. The simple question – was a self-directed student necessarily what the State wanted in its workforce? – provides a sense of the problem. The question could be answered affirmatively, of course, but most legislators would have a hard time working through an explanation of why this was actually the case. They were far more likely merely to demand the college be more responsive to the demands of the job market, and not simply turn out free thinking individuals.

Tilley’s penultimate paragraph is worth quoting at length, as it gives a flavor of his sense of the forces impinging on the Stockton experiment:

Finally, if the present paper were extended to questions about the selection and ordering of institutional objectives, it would be necessary to consider the very great changes now occurring in American and other societies, and the consequently changing demands on higher education. For example, the decision of Americans to open the advantages of higher education to all or nearly all citizens was made long ago, but only recently began to create severe problems for the undergraduate curriculum. Now it appears that what a great many students want and need is not academic learning, but vocational training. It seems quite likely that by the end of the twentieth century there will be not more but fewer colleges of the conventional four-year undergraduate kind, and more vocational post-secondary institutions. Yet this development poses a new problem: cut off from the sources of research and study, vocational colleges may well encounter a worse form of the affliction private and state colleges have suffered in the recent past: they will have trouble attracting enthusiastic and capable faculties, and they will find it hard to challenge the more able students as they would be challenged in academically strong institutions. The resulting waste of student abilities, probably intensified by the competition for graduate and professional training, could prove damaging to the society, and would certainly be damaging to the students themselves. It seems, then, that colleges will have to work closely with vocational schools, and probably will do well to work out more flexible patterns of vocationalism, with more varied kinds of academic opportunity available for the greatest number of students. In effect each college would become a university, with component schools ranging from vocational to metaphysical, and students permitted to spend varying length of time in traditional and new kinds of academic study according to their abilities, interests, and needs.

In effect, then, Tilley may have been recognizing that he too might need to propose making the escape from freedom in such a world that he saw emerging. The educational, the social, indeed the American (and later, global) landscapes would be such that those colleges offering the freedoms that he had advocated would become starved for resources because they weren’t meeting what were considered to be the needs of students; such freedoms would be considered unaffordable luxuries, when particular credentials were their keys to a better livelihood. The college would need to branch out and take on new kinds of educational endeavor if it were to keep any of the highly valued, but not easily measured, metaphysical elements from simply withering away.

To Long Prevail

Sometime in 1987, only a few years after the beginning of her presidency at Stockton, Vera King Farris produced a confidential report for the Board of Trustees. The report appears to have had two objectives, to record what the President had been accomplishing in her work, and, secondly, to respond to a number of problems arising from an investigation then underway into some financial dealings of the college.

These two halves of the document are very different indeed, and may have been intended originally to be two entirely separate documents. The first, called “Accomplishments at Stockton State College since April 7, 1986,” was probably meant to be an annual report to the Board. It is comprised of quite an impressive list of the array of initiatives then under way, many prompted, I would imagine, by the President herself. Taken in isolation this document would suggest a college moving forward in some quite impressive ways.

But, there is that parenthetical subtitle to this section: “(Initiation of Prosecutor’s Investigation)”, which certainly leaves a disquieting impression. Further, this section of the report ends:

It would be naïve to conclude that the prosecutor’s investigation had no effect on our college, yet it would be wrong to conclude that it impeded or weakened the college and its ability to move forward, to plan, grow and prosper. In fact, the investigation proved to be an effective acid test of the college’s management, strength and vitality. Tested by it, I believe we have stood up quite well, professionally and personally, and will continue to do so.

This seems a somewhat odd statement to me. The acid test metaphor is perhaps understandable given Farris’s science background, but it seems very reductive, in the degree to which it reduces the college’s functions to the response made to the investigation. One would imagine that in actuality the first part of the report, detailing all the accomplishments, would have been a much better test of the vitality of the college.

So this document seems to me to have a tragic feel to it. It seems to be very revealing of Vera King Farris and her presidency. She accomplished many great things and she was in many ways an asset to the college, but her insecurities about her position as President and the degree to which she believed that there were underhanded opponents among the faculty who were out to get her, created a climate of distrust that in the end led in exactly the opposite direction of the one she intended.

The college’s “management, strength and vitality” became connected to the strength of her position, and the more she seemed to want to build management, the more she invited opposition to grow. In the end, the very opposition that she believed was lurking in the wings did seem to materialize. Faculty members who may have opposed different policies of hers, but who might have supported others, ended up being implacably opposed to her. Distrust of the administration grew to unfortunate levels, and some of the residual effects of this are still to be found at the college, though to a diminishing degree.

The second part of the document, then, entitled “Suggestions for Handling the Prosecutor’s Report,” has an entirely different flavor to it than the first. This was the document that produced the firestorm when it was leaked to the faculty. In some ways it was understandable that she should have produced a document communicating what she felt the Board should be doing in response to the investigation, but it was the nature of this response that was a little disturbing.

I don’t want to rehash the document except to say that it outlined four different responses that the administration could make to the prosecutor’s report. The odd aspect to this, as Ken Tompkins outlined at the time in his own reading of the document, was that she believed the response to the report needed to revolve, not around dealing with the problems arising from the investigation – things like falsified invoices, misuse of the President’s discretionary fund, and reimbursement for travel by private organizations – which from this distance at least don’t seem of earth-shattering magnitude – instead, they needed to revolve around difficulties at the college with certain oppositional faculty members.

Why a problem of administration needed to be solved by an approach to handling faculty is a mystery, except that President Farris may have believed that the information that reached the press and which led to the investigation may have been leaked by a faculty member; this seems unlikely, as Ken pointed out at the time, and it was probably the case that it was leaked by someone within the administration and only then led to demands among faculty that it be investigated. As such, she may have wanted to avoid a recurrence of such demands, but a more appropriate method of assuring this might have been to clean up the accounting practices in Administration and Finance – which she, no doubt, was already doing.

President Farris outlined four such approaches for the administration in response to the report: essentially carry on as if nothing was occurring, which she rejects out of hand; “search and destroy” the mischief makers, which she rather less quickly dismisses as inappropriate; compromise with the adversarial group, which she also believes would be unproductive; and, finally, “develop a long-term strategy and plan for the health and vitality of the college,” which she supports.

On the face of it, this would be fine, but for the fact that the long-term strategy is not framed in terms of the initiatives and other accomplishments outlined in the first part of the document, but is rather focused on management of disgruntled faculty. As Ken pointed out, it was a question of divide and rule, classifying faculty into groups and trying to isolate those who were ill-disposed towards the administration, while rewarding those who were supportive. This was clearly problematic at many levels (again, as Ken shows very well), and the manner in which it was dependent upon a rather severe classificatory system is particularly disconcerting.

The President divided the faculty into those who were always rabidly and irrationally opposed to her, those who supported her, and those who were “skeptical” or ambivalent (though still somewhat suspicious about administration in general). As Ken noted in his reading, “[The President was] seeing each of us [the faculty] as simple, rather single-minded individuals…. But,” he continued, “clearly, each of us is a complex of opinions and visions. On some issues, I can easily – even eagerly – support the administration. On other issues, I adamantly disagree. On still others, I couldn’t care less. Simplification, like the President’s, is not only incorrect, it is evident of a serious flaw.”

This seems like an important lesson for any administrator to take note of; one perhaps that can be matched by the corresponding realization (that faculty sometimes miss) that not all members of an administration speak with one voice, even in authoritarian regimes.

The unfortunate consequence of this classificatory system was that it tended to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Those who were considered opponents were treated in a different fashion to those who were considered supportive, and so their opposition to the President did indeed become increasingly intransigent over the years. The result of this was that it did seem to be the case that the faculty was left speaking with one voice, with those who may have supported other mediating courses less willing to speak up, while the administration also was left taking its lead from the very top.

This was very unfortunate in the grand scheme of things, both for Vera King Farris’s Presidency, which, as I mentioned, did witness many considerable achievements, and for the college, as a climate of distrust grew throughout these years.

Ken ended his own analysis with a very powerful paragraph, one that, it seems to me at least, was both very accurate, and, in one aspect at least, wrong. It reads:

It is distressing to read the President’s words in this document. It is even more troublesome to comprehend that she believes them. It is, finally, tragic that she does not understand that her strength lies in her ability to accept genuine differences from all parts of the college. Without that strength she cannot fight off our mutual enemy – ignorance – and without the eager acceptance of those differences she cannot long prevail.

One is left saying, with Ken, if only she had been able to accept those differences; what a college she might then have helped create! But, the real tragedy may be, contra Ken, that where a climate of distrust is created one may still be able to prevail for a significant amount of time. After all, 1987, when this document was created, was only four years after the beginning of her Presidency. She would be the longest serving President, thus far anyway, remaining in office till 2003.

Tempest at Stockton

I have just finished teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest for close to the 50th time -- perhaps more. I'm not exactly sure because I have been teaching full-time for 45 years. Trained as a Medievalist, I early on got selected to teach Renaissance literature because "the two time periods are so close" and because I had had a few graduate courses in Renaissance and 17th c. literature.

I'm not at all complaining; teaching Shakespeare has been one of the highlights of my career. Some terms he is easier to teach than Chaucer. As I said, I finished the term -- as most everyone does -- with "The Tempest".

Students like to end with this play because the previous play is King Lear and they really struggle with that terrifying and difficult play. So The Tempest seems to bring us back to the light.

Much has been written about whether or not Shakespeare meant Prospero's island to suggest the New World. Those who support this interpretation refer to William Strachey's account of being shipwrecked in the Bermudas that Shakespeare probably knew about (there is a new book -- Hobson Woodward's A Brave Vessel -- which examines, again, all of the relevant documentation of Strachey's adventure).

I assume that the play could easily portray common Renaissance views about the New World whether Shakespeare knew of Strachey's account or not. Those views saw the New World as a "new Eden" and part of it's attraction was that English citizens could themselves become new by casting off old values and taking on new identities in America. The Virginia Company certainly made that argument though it was frequently couched in economic terms.

One of the most famous sections of the play is the speech by Gonzalo which considers what it might be like to create a new society and what that society might value and reject. Here is the speech:

GONZALO: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,--


ANTONIO: He'ld sow't with nettle-seed.


SEBASTIAN: Or docks, or mallows.


GONZALO: And were the king on't, what would I do?


SEBASTIAN: 'Scape being drunk for want of wine.


GONZALO: I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;--


SEBASTIAN: Yet he would be king on't.


ANTONIO: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning.


GONZALO: All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.


SEBASTIAN: No marrying 'mong his subjects?


ANTONIO: None, man; all idle: whores and knaves.


GONZALO: I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.

Gonzalo argues for a kind of confused -- Gonzalo is old and can be excused his rambling -- communism reminescent of More's Utopia. "All things in common", "riches, poverty,/And use of service, none; contract, succession,/Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;" -- nothing that would mark class or rank.

What is important here -- as I read it -- is the ironic switch where young men -- Antonio and Sebastion -- refuse to throw off old, European values (they show only mocking interest in Gonzalo's speech and are at that moment planning the murder of Alonso, the King of Naples in a seizure of power). Stereotypically, one would expect the elderly not to accept such radical change and the youth to eagerly seek it. This is the opposite of what happens in this scene.

What does this have to do with the Book that we are co-editing and, even more importantly, what does this have to do with the early days of Stockton?
Be patient.

I think I have mentioned that Wes Tilley called me in March of 1970 and asked: "Would you like to come to New Jersey and build a college?" That question has haunted me for 40 years. Few of us get asked and fewer still get the opportunity to actually do it. I did.

In a sense, it is the implied question in Gozalo's opening statement

"Had I plantation of this isle...."

"If I owned this land this is what I would do" is not logically far from the question Wes Tilley asked me. The thing that strikes me over and over is not the creation of the College but how quickly we made conservative changes and that the effort was primarily (but not exclusively) led by the faculty.

This was brought home to me today when I reviewed a section of a video recording recently produced by the staff of the College of a discussion held in 1995 on the early days of the institution. I was particularly struck by a four minute segment featuring Bill Gilmore -- he taught American history and studied colonial literacy and reading habits -- remembering what brought him to the College in 1970. The video can be seen HERE (13 minutes into the video)

Gilmore reviews a set of early ideas -- General Studies, faculty building book and media collections, interdisciplinary courses, etc. -- but what interests him most is the equality of the faculty to each other. He sees this idea as truly radical. He also notes -- accurately -- that it didn't last.

The connection between Stockton and The Tempest seems clear -- at least to me. There was much about our early ideas that, to a conservative mind, were chaotic, silly, subversive, dangerous and even, perhaps, immoral. Those of the Founding Deans who came up with these ideas then found it strange and unexpected that young faculty wanted early to overthrow these ideas with their own (usually more conservative). Gilmore is right that many things we thought up didn't survive but not because of executive fiat, senior faculty power grabs, political threats or community pressures. From my perspective, some faculty seemed to want to recreate their graduate experiences ideologically, structurally, politically and culturally. Like Antonio and Sebastion, they carried with them old fears, old patterns and old structures and like in The Tempest it was the older Founding Deans who thought the unthinkable.