Searching For Stan Leavitt

After Rob and I realized it would be important to memorialize deceased early members of the faculty and staff, I started compiling a list from the 1971 – 3 Bulletin. I can’t remember all of the faculty who have died though I know many of them; at some point we are going to turn to the present faculty to help us remember. But now I have a list of 20. So far, so good.

The problem is that of the 20 I can’t find the dates of their death. I realize that such dates are not needed and that it would be sufficient to remember their names. But, a bit obsessively, I want accurate dates. This comes, I think, from years of genealogical work on my own family where every tiny scrap of information is important – sometimes crucial.

Anyway, I want the dates. I also want their academic rank when they started here and their discipline.

It’s the problem of accurate death dates that brings me to Stan Leavitt.

Most readers here will not remember, or never knew, Stan. But I remember him well. For example, he always had time to chat. I could meet him in the hallways and say “Hi” as I did to dozens of others during the day. But “Hi” for Stan meant we should chat for a few minutes. He would stop me and ask about my Navajo daughter or about my courses or what I was reading or what films I might have seen. These questions would lead to similar questions from me; chats with Stan were never one-way.

The other more and more important thing I remember about Stan Leavitt were his Navajo rugs. It seems that Stan had made contact with a group of Navajo weavers and every summer would visit the reservation buying their rugs. These he would pile in his office where, if you asked, you go see them. If you found a rug you liked, he would quote a price and let you take the rug even if you didn’t have the money then. I bought at least three.

Stan was probably in his late 50s or early 60s when he came to the college; he might have been younger but he was older than I was – in my 40s.

The basic way to find someone who has passed is to look them up in the Social Security Death Index. That index contains almost 86 million Americans. It provides the date and place of death, the Social Security number and the issuing state. It is exactly what I needed to find deceased faculty. Type in the first and last names and get a hit. It sounds so easy.

Using Stan’s name turns up 7 hits using his exact first and last names. But which of the 7 is our Stan? There are Stanley Leavitts from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Mexico and Georgia. Three of the seven have birth dates of 1917 – 1919 which would fit Stan’s approximate age when he came to Stockton. The other four range from 1898 – 1905 which seem too early.

I have, then, three names but without having more information about Stan’s life – relatives, where his next job was when he left Stockton, etc. there is no way to tell which of the three is the one I’m looking for.

A middle initial would help as would a birth date, the location of his death or even his SSN. It just so happens that Stanley R. Leavitt is listed under the College’s Administrative Studies Program. But, even having his middle initial, I get no hits at all when searching the Social Security Death Index.

If I don’t limit the search to one database – Social Security Death Index – but simply search for the name using all of the hundreds of databases available, I do get a Stanley R. Leavitt living in Santa Fe, NM in 1993. If that is my old friend, there is no way to tell. If I play loosely with dates it is a possible match. Whether Stan is still living is possible though doubtful.

One would think that – given all of the databases out there and all of the technology to access them – this task would take a few minutes. I’ve spent at least three hours on locating Stan and still don’t have confirmed evidence. We cannot spend this sort of time on the dozens of names that we will have but for which we have no death date.

I’m reminded of John Donne’s famous lines:

“all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated….

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

I am lessened by any friend’s death; I am even more reduced when I cannot celebrate that life because I cannot ascertain his fate.

Let Us Now Praise Infamous Stocktonians

I bumped into Bill Lubenow today and he began to inquire about the volume. Ken had asked him to contribute something for the project, and his response was to let us know about a book (Louis Menand's recent Marketplace of Ideas) that might be relevant to our project – very helpful, of course, but somewhat cryptic. Would he contribute, or would he not? The note didn’t say.

In person, however, Bill indicated that it would be a pleasure to do so, and suggested that he had voluminous journals and diaries, recounting all kinds of activities going on over the years. Surely, he said, we needed to be covering the sex and the drugs, because wasn’t that a substantial part of the history?

Bill was joking, of course. No, of course he was! But there is an interesting kernel in here that needs consideration. It may well be true that there are stories to be told in this area. For some part of its existence, Stockton may have been known as a party school; faculty, staff, and students may have and no doubt did explore avenues that might not be explored so openly today.

Some of the stories may indeed be less glamorous than we have been led to believe. There is of course, the story that is often recounted (I believe I heard it at my interview in 1996 – indeed Bill may have told me) about the philosophy professor who held his classes in the nude – this being told as if this happened on a weekly basis, out on Lake Fred, and as if it had been tolerated by the college community. In fact, the story is a lot more prosaic than that, and actually led to the firing of the professor – pretty sharpish!

But, it is also important whether or not the things that happened at Stockton were unique to the institution – or whether they occurred everywhere at that time. It was perhaps unique that the college was being founded at a time of experimentation – social, political, and cultural. But was there anything unique in what Bill’s fictional journals may have covered? Probably not. And if that is the case, then maybe these things don’t warrant a great deal of attention.

I am reminded of James Agee and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Here was a journalist who wanted in 1941 to cover everything that happened in the lives of poor white sharecroppers in the South. He wanted to go through their drawers and almost check through their underwear. He believed he was endeavoring to recapture their lives and honor them – make them famous in a way. This was not to be Andy Warhol-like celebrity – providing them 15 minutes of fame – it was rather an attempt to show that what they did on a daily basis was worth noting, and perhaps more so than what Princes, Lords and Ladies might be doing.

But here’s the rub. Even if what we end up describing is something that appears to be unique, by comparison with ourselves and our own practices – the use of out houses in these rural communities, say, compared to the indoor plumbing of today – and even if these things appear to be very strange and noteworthy – are they really so when we take into consideration that what we deem as abnormal was in fact the taken-for-granted thing of the moment. Was the praise to be located in the private materials inside the closet of the sharecropper, or merely in the mind of the author who wanted to make a statement that middle-class Americans should take greater note of these people and their lives?

In line with the foregoing analysis, therefore, I believe that we should leave Bill’s fictional diaries and journals where they are. What they may describe will not necessarily provide insight into what made the college tick, especially when we are writing for an audience of today and not one shaped by the experience of living through the 1960s and 70s.

This isn’t an effort to reach for respectability and to avoid what might be deemed offensive for our readers (though this is a consideration). It is rather an effort to understand the boundaries of respectability that may have been in different social locations in the early 1970s from where they lie today.

Rob

For Absent Friends

I received an email from Ken saying the following:

Rob...

I just had a call from Joan Bjork and she informed me that both Jim Judy and his wife are deceased...
I'm sorry to hear about the Judy's; they were kind and considerate colleagues. Jim was the first person I met when I came here to interview.

In response to Ken's email, Herman Saatkamp wrote:

Very sad news.  But it emphasizes the need for us to complete our task...

It does indeed! And as Ken has written elsewhere and said around the corridors, this book should have been written a while back.  In line with this, we now would then merely be creating a companion volume as part of our task instead of endeavoring to accomplish the whole history.

Be that as it may, I do think that we need a section in this blog -- which I am calling "For Absent Friends" -- where we commemorate at length (or even just briefly) some of the people who are no longer with us.  Obviously, Jim Judy is one of them, and he is certainly someone about whom I would like to hear more.  Paul Lyons, Dave Emmons, and Vera King Farris have also been in our thoughts recently.  But there are many, many others who have added substance and flavor to our institution. 

Rob

Ubi Sunt

I have been saying to colleagues who ask about progress on "the book" that it should have been written 25 years ago. What I mean is that, had it been written in 1996 most of the original faculty and administration were still alive and could have added their stories to the effort. They would have made a much better book.

Now, most of the First Cohort of faculty have passed as have most of the administration. Out of the five deans and the first Vice-President for Academic Affairs only two are left. Of the four Presidents we have had since the Founding only two are left; the third President died a few months ago.

Trying to find those early Founders takes a great deal of time. Let me offer an example.

Actually, the first person hired to start the college -- even before the first President -- was James Judy. Jim came to Stockton from the Department of Higher Education (it, too, is no longer in Trenton) to assist the first Board of Trustees and, ultimately, to find and appoint the first President. Jim Judy was the first person I met when I came here to interview; he picked me up at the motel and transported me to the then office of the College. That office, by the way, was in a small strip-mall on Rt. 40 west of Atlantic City, NJ. It was next to a pet shop and all through the interview barking dogs and a howling monkey could be heard.

Jim was a pipe-smoking administrator; he was jovial, funny and had his feet on the ground. He was also a wonderfully effective expediter. I liked him instantly and, while we never became close friends, I think he liked me.

It was natural, then, when we started working on the book for me to suggest that I would try to find him to ask if he would write something on those early days and to invite him to the celebration when the book is launched. The problem was that no one I could find at Stockton had any idea where he was. I asked the President's staff to see if they could locate him. I asked First Cohort faculty if they had info on his location. I spent quite a few hours online searching for him; having worked on my family's geneaology for years, I knew what sorts of research materials were online and where. I still couldn't locate him.

Then, I happened to write the first President's assistant and asked him if he knew where Jim Judy went when he left the college on the late 1970s. He said he was fairly sure that he had gone to Thiel College in western Pennsylvania. I found their site online but Jim's name was not in their list of faculty and, surprisingly, I originally couldn't find any email addresses of present staff who might remember him. I finally did find an address for an administrator so I wrote her about Jim Judy's whereabouts.

After a few days, I got an answer: he had been an administrator at Thiel but hadn't worked there since the late 80s, she did have an email address and would forward my message to him. Great! He -- or someone in his family -- will respond, I thought, and the mystery will be solved. But I heard nothing as a few weeks passed.

It was at this point that I used the "Street View" of Google maps. Thiel College is in Greenville, PA and I had heard from someone that Jim ran a bike shop there called Judy's Bikes. Indeed, searching on that name I found the shop location and a phone number that, ominously, was not a working number.
Carefully manipulating the street view photos on the main street of Greenville I found the exact building where the bike shop had been but it was clearly empty. Another dead end!

That was where the search was left until, by accident, I was in the Graphic Arts office of the College and mentioned that I also had been trying to find contact info for the widow of the first President who I knew lived in the area. A secretary overheard my remark and said: "Oh, she is easy to find. I know her personally and will get her phone number for you." A door opened!

She did get her phone number and told me as well that she knew where Jim Judy was as well as another administrator's location I had been searching for. Ah, I thought: Jim is still alive -- as is the other administrator -- and I can get phone numbers and addresses. I will now be able to write them to ask them to write for the volume and we can celebrate their parts in founding the college. Wonderful!

I did get in touch with the widow of the President, she said that she had seen the other administrator as recently as last summer and that she was sure he would know where Jim was. I asked her to get whatever information she could and to call me when she had something I could follow-up with.

She called me today. The other administrator was still alive and she gave me his phone number. But, sadly, Jim Judy died in 2002 and his wife died in 2006! What information he could have shared with all of us about the very earliest days of the college before any administrators, staff or faculty had been hired! Lost -- totally gone.

This is true for many of those who came here for the opening in 1971. We would have their stories if we had celebrated the college's founding 25 years ago. But we didn't and we don't. Ubi Sunt.

That which we call Stockton, by any other name would smell as sweet

[This is a second post on the naming of Stockton College]

One of the documents that we have seen, and which we will need to post to the main website, is a page listing names that were proposed for the college at its founding.  The list includes names like Pinelands, and Southern New Jersey State, and many others.  Whether or not Richard Stockton is on the sheet, I don’t recall now, but this name seemed to make its appearance in a somewhat unique way.  In other words, the name may be on the sheet if the document is the complete list of all the suggested names, but once the name of Richard Stockton was conjured up it seemed almost immediately to displace and make the others irrelevant. 

 

On the surface the name, Richard Stockton, had a lot going for it.  It was tied to a historically prominent family in the state of New Jersey, the third person in the family bearing this name being a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  That same gentleman had also been important in the history of Princeton (the College of New Jersey), as an alumnus and member of the Board of Trustees, and as the person largely responsible for bringing John Witherspoon to the United States.  The fact that several among the creators of the college in Pomona wished it to be, in effect, a “public Princeton” or a “Princeton in the pines”, with some ideas from that ivy league establishment (e.g., collegia and preceptorials) being carried over to the new college, meant that this connection to Princeton would be considered a good thing.

 

So Stockton held sway and carried the day, but the origin of the name itself is a question.  Several people have made claims to be the originators of the suggestion that the college should be called after Stockton.  Joan Bjork, the wife of the first President, claims that her husband was out in his yard when the son of a neighbor came over to him and suggested two names of people after whom the college might have been named (who that other person might have been is not recounted).  Richard Bjork was taken with the name Stockton immediately, largely for the reasons mentioned, but also because it would give the college an identifier that wasn’t tied to the region.

 

There are at least two other claimants to the position of originator.  Many attribute the name to Elizabeth Alton, and at least one other person on the Board of Trustees at the time seems to have made the claim that they were the key to its adoption.  However, it may be that there is a distinction between coming up with the name and being responsible for shepherding it through the selection process.  Certainly, any member of the Board, along with the President, would have to be given credit for the latter, so all the claims may indeed fit together.  One wonders, though, if the story about Bjork’s neighbor is true, why the child's name was not remembered or taken note of; but that will have to remain a mystery.

 

What was unfortunate in this process, however, was that no one actually took the time to vet Richard Stockton, to see whether he was truly up for the job of having a college named after him.  Being a signer of the Declaration was certainly a positive, as was the Princeton connection, but a cursory examination would have turned up some disquieting facts.  Stockton, after all, was the only signer to recant and to later sign an oath of loyalty to King George III.  He was also a slave owner who didn’t free his slaves, in spite of being the father-in-law of Benjamin Rush, one of the most prominent anti-slavery advocates of the revolutionary era.  In the aftermath of the civil rights struggle, and at a time when African American studies was becoming a significant force in the academy, the awareness of this connection to slavery might have been sufficient to condemn Stockton’s candidacy.

 

But since no one inquired about the matter, Stockton’s positive credentials remained intact and the college now bears his name.  One man who wasn’t really considered was another signer, Francis Hopkinson.  He was a more well rounded person compared to the lawyer, Stockton.  A veritable renaissance man, a musician and intellectual, Hopkinson perhaps best represented the character of the college that was to be created. 

 

But this was not to be.

Rob

Box Or Agent?

The first problem that we faced when we met to discuss editing the book, was what large sections we would have. We felt that if we could get a structure to the project, that structure would help us determine who to ask to contribute. I refer to this as the "box" structure.

We certainly had some general ideas of how we wanted to focus the text. For example, we knew that we wanted a section on teaching which has, from the beginning, been central to Stockton's mission. We also wanted a section on the earliest personalities, earliest pedagogies and the earliest ideas about what the Stockton experience should be like.

We knew we needed to have a section on the future plans of the College; the President has advised us to include a long range planning document that suggests what the institution might be like in 2020.

So we had the time period from when the College opened in Sept of 1971 to 2020. But what might be in the middle?

We could have organized the middle sections around the various Divisions (now called Schools). We could have had texts about the School of Arts and Humanities or the School of Professional Studies. This is a fairly common way to organize anything -- committees, governance models, union representation, budgets, etc. Include one administrator or one faculty from each School. Initially, we tried this but quickly abandoned it as too restrictive.

As we discussed this initial problem, we began to see that organizing around various large efforts -- each of which brought both early and recent faculty together, which created interdisciplinary teaching, which served the wider community, focused on the "greening" of the College and still included our most ancient history and our newest vision, offered a structure that seemed right.

The tentative structure looks like this:

A Different Vision
Primacy of Teaching
Sustaining the Environment
Promoting the Professions
Serving the Community
Envisioning the Future

For us, these do not seem restrictive, they highlight central efforts of the College, they allow us to tell our story from 1971 to 2020 and they detail individual faculty and administrative efforts to continue the uniqueness on which we were founded.

What, then, about "boxes" and "agents"?

I have a piece of software named Tinderbox which I have owned for years and which I have, for the same number of years, attempted to understand.  I have had glimpses of its incredible power but have never mastered it. the author of Tinderbox is, in my opinion, one of the most creative and insightful software engineers I have ever met. My problem is not with the software but the way that I think.

Let me give a quick example which should link to how we have organized the book. 

I learned all through graduate school -- and especially when I wrote my dissertation -- that the mode was to read and digest copious amounts of research on a narrow topic and then to expand those digests (carefully written on 3 x 5 note cards) into larger texts. This was the way that all of us worked and it certainly worked for me. My dissertation ended up at 306 pages. In other words, the process required that I shape a group of boxes -- background, terminology, structure, textual issues, critical history and others -- and then fill each of those boxes with huge amounts of text. And Tinderbox certainly lets you do just this. Create an outline in Tinderbox and, then, fill in sub-categories of sub-categories of sub-categories until you can't do it anymore.

But the genius of Tinderbox is that allows users to create tiny pieces of code called "agents". These agents then rattle through all of the research data organizing, separating, combining, coloring, moving, re-labelling until all of the data makes sense. In other words, Tinderbox encourages a user to have one, really big box which. In a sense, they don't have to think about structure when they collect what they are throwing in. Structure comes later when it is needed and clear about what it is looking for.

I try to imagine what our text would look like if we used agents instead of boxes. Throw everything we can find into a file and let the agents sort it out.

Genesis -- and some revelations

There is a history to this book.  A couple of years ago, I had been talking with Paul Lyons (another of those classic Paul hallway conversations) and during our conversation he mentioned both that he was planning to write a history of Stockton and that the President, Herman Saatkamp, was interested in supporting the project.  It seemed to me a worthwhile endeavor, but as a member of one of the younger cohorts (I came to RSC in 1996), I didn’t think it likely that I would be heavily involved in it. 

 

That was as much as I knew about the situation until, very sadly, Paul died suddenly at the beginning of 2009.  With his death, it seemed to me, the project was no longer likely to move forward as most faculty members are very committed to their own teaching and research agendas, and finding time to pull something like this together is difficult.  Interestingly, Paul hadn’t been the first person to begin working on this project.  Two earlier attempts had been made by Ingie LaFleur, a former dean, and Bill Gilmore-Lehne, a history professor, and both had died suddenly before the project had really taken off.  This too might deter someone who was mildly superstitious from wanting to take on this project.

 

The idea of the project came back into my consciousness when, out of the blue, Herman Saatkamp summoned me to his office.  After some friendly banter he got down to business.  A book focusing on Stockton needed to be written, he said, and it would be great if it could be done in time to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the college – or at least of teaching at the Pomona campus – in 2011.  He believed that I would be able to accomplish this, and he sugarcoated his suggestions in this regard with several compliments about my writing ability and my publication record.  He thought it would be a difficult project, but he believed that if I could find someone else to co-edit with me, and we drew on members of the community for essays and other contributions, that we would be able to accomplish the task. 

 

Internally I groaned, while maintaining a smile on the outside.  This would be a big job just trying to cover the history of the college, and that was if we kept it simple.  But Herman wanted something more than just a basic history.  It should not cover only the early days; it should be a serious volume, with some scholarly and intellectual heft; it should look attractive and be engaging, so that it could also be used for fundraising purposes; it needed to be positive, but not a white wash of real issues and difficult topics; in short, the editors would need to be able to dance on a pin – and all within a fairly tight timeline.  No problem. 

 

Herman also suggested names of some potential co-editors, but none of them appealed to me particularly.   This wasn’t because they weren’t worthy people in their own right – they were all people who write well and have a track record of publication.  But there were several problems with them in my mind: they were from the same cohort of faculty to which I belonged, and I didn’t feel that having someone with similar perspectives to myself, or representing a particular faction of the faculty, would be optimal.  How would we be able to solicit the ideas and contributions from the earliest Stockton cohort, the Mayflower faculty?  Moreover, as I knew from my time as a co-editor of an encyclopedia, writing monographs wasn’t necessarily the best preparation for creating a work of this kind.  I needed someone altogether different from the folks being suggested – someone who was able to bring together vast amounts of information, who already knew where bodies and facts were buried, and who was a player in the early days of the college.  I also felt that, while I was going to be important to the project, that person should also be the first author of this volume.

 

I hadn’t decided on whom that person should be, even though I had a couple of ideas, when I happened to have a meeting with Ken Tompkins, about some entirely different matter.  Ken started to talk about the early deans and how it was truly unfortunate that they haven’t been given full credit for what they accomplished and that it is a great shame (though the language may have been stronger than this) that the history of Stockton and all that had been attempted at the college over the years had never been written.  I won’t say that I felt like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, but having Ken as the other co-editor struck me instantly as being an excellent idea.  As a faculty member in transition to retirement (so having some time to devote to the work), with a commitment to the topic unmatched by any person on campus, Ken was the obvious choice.  Did I think we could work together?  It seemed to me that we were sufficiently different that there would be an interesting creative tension that could only be productive.  Ken will always speak his mind, and while I felt his view of the college was sometimes more pessimistic than my own, I felt we could work together to make this a success. 

 

So I mentioned the topic to him and he responded extremely positively once I had laid out what it was that the President was asking of us.  It is still early days yet, but it is safe to say that for me what seemed to be a project almost impossible to accomplish, no longer seems quite so insurmountable.  And the material that we are finding and the information that we have been unearthing has been interesting – at times even very amusing.

Rob

What's in a Name? (Part One)

The current name of the college, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, is one that developed over time.  It’s first incarnation was Stockton State College, but at some point along the way, I believe during Vera King Farris’s period as president, it was decided that the term “state” seemed a little déclassé, and that some advantage might come from associating more closely with Richard Stockton.  It might then almost seem as if the college had been founded by Richard Stockton himself, giving the college the appearance (even with the absence of any building dating back further than 1971) of being a much older institution than it is.    

This move was somewhat ironic, I think, given that the founding President, Bjork, had insisted upon the appellation “state” because he wanted it to be clear that Stockton would not just serve the communities in the southeastern tip of New Jersey, but that it would be trying to draw its students from across New Jersey.  This represented Bjork’s expansionist vision at the founding, and it was now under Farris being displaced by a somewhat different vision, which suggested that, even while the student body did in fact remain largely southern New Jersey in origin, that it was a college drawing on more select elements of New Jersey.        

The college's identification with the region is an interesting topic, one that may become an issue bearing more political freight in the coming years.  When the college was founded the southeastern part of New Jersey was certainly the most depressed region economically, the least populated, and harboring a population that was frequently the victim of stereotypes about “pineys” and the like.  The region had very little clout, if any, in the state as a whole, and it was dominated largely by a political machine that didn’t necessarily want to see the introduction of a college or university into the area.  Atlantic City at the time was a resort city that had seen better days, and the casinos were still not yet adopted as the mechanism for turning around the city’s decline.  So from Bjork’s perspective, while he may have felt that the college would help the area grow, it was certainly not a good move to attach the college too closely to the region through its name.   

But, in part owing to the growth of the casino industry and the partial recovery of Atlantic City (though that is an open question whether it can continue), and in part owing to the contributions the college has made to the region in helping it grow in significant ways, the region is now less one that needs to be held at a distance, and more one that might be embraced to help the college grow and sustain its reputation.  And with the declining political support for education from the State – such that different colleges and regions may have to fight for the financial support they get – it may be considered necessary to line up support from area politicians. And if these politicians believed that they were coming to the aid of “their” college, as opposed to one that seemed to want to maintain its distance (even in spite of what the college has done for the area and its clear commitment to serve the region), then they might be more willing to do so.  So clearly the name of the college itself is one that might be tinkered with in the future, just as it has been in the past.

This is my first discussion of the college’s name.  I intend to come back to this with another piece on the name Richard Stockton – the debates about who chose it, and why it was chosen instead of other names that might have been selected.

Rob

Watching What I Eat

I have avoided examining the College archives because we have been consumed with creating the structure of the book and finding contributors (I'll write on this process later). Once that was well in hand, the next step was to see what might be available in the archives.

Ours are located in the bowels of the library in three small rooms, a neaby hallway and a more distant stacks area. The folks there are helpful and know where things are in the three spaces they use. How documents, media and objects are organized, of course, makes them more or less easy to find. Because we have had a series of archivists over the years -- each with a slightly different procedure and system for organizing material -- makes it somewhat difficult to place new material coming into the archive.

The Board of Trustee's minutes, thank goodness, are arranged by year and we have a full run from before the college was built to the present. They are invaluable because they record the official policies and decisions of the college. A history of the college, however, can't simply chart those policies and decisions. Such a history needs to contain much, much more.

The question, however, is what sort of documents should be "much more"?

I thought long about where I should start. Should I start with the College Bulletin where Programs and courses are listed? Should I start with the Board of Trustee's minutes? How about starting with the files of the three Presidents we have had since the beginning? Should I examine our Union papers or Divisional documents? What about photographs and media?

All of these eventually have to be perused; for the first time, however, I decided to read through the earliest volumes of our College student paper -- the ARGO. We have a complete run beginning in 1971 when we opened in the Mayflower Hotel in Atlantic City.

Looking at the paper was like stepping into Hippydom. "Fros" were everywhere as were moustaches, peace symbols, beads, bell-bottoms and American flags in every conceivable shape and form. One of the first issues in 1972 offers a young woman, tied to a chair with a sign around her neck and an American flag bandana silencing her speech. Having lived through the 60s and 70s and having been involved in many Washington marches, sit-ins, teach-ins and other forms of protest, it was old territory though I hadn't visited that place since those days.

I realized quickly that what I didn't need was a memory trip; I had to focus on the problem of choice. Which of the articles, interviews and editorials -- if any -- were right for telling the history. I was reminded of Johah Lehrer's How We Decide; we can become paralyzed with too many choices.

Choice is the fundamental, driving engine of this text and because we haven't yet been presented with contributions (they arrive in June) we have had few choices to make. Reading the ARGO confronted me with a vast array of choices and I found after two hours, I was happy to leave. The archives are somewhat like a large box of assorted chocolates. Each needs to be nibbled to see what they are but quickly a cloying develops that sends us far away from the box.

I have really got to watch what I eat.

Dis-Remembering

One of the strange aspects of working on this book are the different anecdotes told by different people about the same event. The problem for us, of course, is trying to decide which are true.

For example, I was recently listening to a group of faculty discussing the earliest days of the college. When the state bought the 1600 acres the college sits on, they got many houses and barns -- it had been an area of small truck farms and family dwellings -- and some of these were new enough to be converted into administrative spaces. My office was in a structure called the Scott House which had been owned by the Scott family when the state bought the land. It was a new house -- single story rancher -- and was quite usable for academic offices. Each of the academic deans and the VP of Academic Affairs had their offices there.

At the faculty discussion, I heard one faculty swear that the building was used as a "motel" to house visiting candidates for a night or two. Now I worked in the Scott House for 15 months and can draw -- if asked -- its exact floorplan. There were no extra rooms where visiting candidates might sleep. Yet this faculty stated that he remembered candidates saying they had stayed there.

Who knows the truth?

We run into this sort of thing on a daily basis. Memories change over 40 years (mine do also!); perhaps I have forgotten that the Scott House was used as a motel. Is there any documentation that would prove which of us has it right? Would it be worth the considerable time it would take to find such documentation - - assuming it exists? Probably not.

We both have to keep in mind the following:

The plural of anecdote is not data.

kt