Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Beached!
I recently saw the movie Into the Storm about the war years of Winston Churchill – 1940 to 1945. The film apparently accurately portrays Churchill’s accomplishments and the gigantic ego that produced them.
It is framed by a visit to the French seaside in 1945 after the end of the war. Churchill is waiting for the results of an election which, when the results are known, will cast him out of power. In 1945, he seems like a troglodyte arguing a set of values that are no longer needed or important. He is – as we say today – “out of touch”.
He is also a tragic figure washed up like so many Amtracs on the beaches of Normandy.
Coincidently, I have been spending a good deal of my thinking time reviewing my tenure as the first Dean of General Studies. I have to write a fairly long piece for the book and have been mentally noting various events in the five years that I held that office.
The movie was the penny dropped in my thoughts about the years 1970 to 1971. I am not, of course, in any way comparing myself to Churchill except in one small sense – those who have one set of skills for an imperative task frequently don’t seem to have the requisite skills to survive it.
I think that I did have some of the skills necessary to start a college. I am fairly imaginative, generally flexible, not a particularly good team player, indefatigable worker, love change, am not particularly or rigidly ideological and strive for the goal rather than the process. I am also not afraid to fail. At least, this is how I see myself.
Whether this set of skills is the set needed for starting up an institution others will have to judge; from my perspective, these are what made me functional for five years.
Interestingly enough, all of the original Deans and the first VP of Academic Affairs were, for a variety of reasons, gone after five years. It’s as if we had created the college and, a bit like salmon, could not survive in the institution we had created.
I began to get intimations that my role was no longer important when at a meeting of the Deans and College planners, we spent at least a half hour discussing the color of the lamps and lampshades for faculty offices! Something had happened along the way that I – and I assume the other Deans – had not seen happening. We were no longer discussing issues of pedagogy, curricular design, academic structure and the hiring of faculty. Instead we had unknowingly become administrators forced to deal with daily issues of who get what in their offices.
The shift was subtle – so subtle that we didn’t see it coming – and then we were out of touch. The College legitimately needed Deans who could handle budgets (I couldn’t), who could work for short-term goals (What will the College Calendar look like for the next term?) and who were prepared to enforce the policies that the Founding Deans had thought up (I was going to have problems with this one also).
All of this reminds me of Tennyson’s Ulysses. In that great poem after a perilous decade trying to return home, Ulysses can’t stand the drudgery of everyday ruling Ithaca. So, he decides to set forth again for one last voyage. He leaves his son – Telemachus – to rule in his stead. Telemachus is good, solid, capable and dutiful. Ulysses is none of these. One is not better than the other; they simply serve in different ways.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
The Founding Deans, generally, did not have the skills or the interest in discussing lampshades – not after the daily excitement of actually starting a college. For 15 months we imagined what Stockton might be like in 2010. Those were heady times.
But, finally, each of us had been beached after the struggle. We could not become the person left behind; so, each of us set out on a new voyage. He works his work, I mine.
[The first photograph at the top is Wesley Tilley - the first VP of Academic Affairs. The second from the top is Woodworth Thrombley - the first Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. The third from the top is Philip Klukoff - the first Dean of the Arts and Humanities. The fourth from the top is Dan Moury - the first Dean of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The final photograph is Ken Tompkins - the first Dean of General Studies.]
Monday, March 22, 2010
Past, Present, Future Perfect
On Thursday, Ken and I had arranged to interview Dave Taylor, the first President of the Board of Trustees, someone who was a party to all the decisions made during Stockton's early days, from those regarding where the college would be located, what its name should be, who should be its first President, who should be its second, etc. After having met Joan Bjork a couple of days earlier, I was looking forward to this meeting.
What we had planned was a rather pleasant luncheon in the President’s office, with Dave Taylor, the President, and ourselves. Ken and I would then take Mr. Taylor into the President’s Conference room and point a strong electric light at him and begin the interrogation. Well, I jest, of course. Ken had developed some serious questions about how things came to be and who did what, while I, drawing on my many years as a successful softball pitcher (more home runs were hit against me than any other pitcher never to have played the game), came up with some questions that would provide a relaxed tone – things like what are your best memories of Stockton, your proudest achievements, greatest disappointments, etc.? We were going to end the visit with a guided tour around the Campus Center, so that Mr. Taylor would go away having been reminded of the past, and getting a sense, in some way, of where his work had led.
Since Dave Taylor had received our questions in advance, it could not have been the fear of a Reality-TV-style ambush that accounts for his not showing up! Nor, I am sure, was it a concern that the President’s repast would not be up to snuff – Chartwells certainly always puts out a good spread for Herman! No, it was merely a scheduling mix-up, one requiring us to reschedule for another day.
No good meal should go to waste, is my motto, and apparently Herman’s also, so we decided to discuss the progress of the book over lunch, along with Claudine Keenan, who we thought could substitute for Dave Taylor admirably, and who will also be contributing to the final section of the book that covers the 2020 Vision. It was indeed a pleasant lunch! Ken and I talked about the website, the blog, our meeting with Joan Bjork, Ken’s Camden escapades, and many other things, and we all decided, once dessert and coffee settled in, that we should take the tour of the construction site.
This was a good decision. One of the things that assembling material for a book tends to do is focus most of one’s attention on the creation of the college and its early years. This is almost inevitable and is appropriate, since we need to find all the documents and other material that may not have been archived or may just be plain lost. This is a time-consuming project, but it shouldn’t obscure the fact that Stockton’s story is not just about the past, it is about the present, and an imagined future also. Given this, our plan to tour this building, which in some ways represents a new direction for the college, would help situate what we are doing in that larger narrative.
So we located some hard hats, Ken reached for his 433 mega pixel camera (I exaggerate, but it’s good), and we plodded down into the tombs beneath F-wing, where representatives from the architecture and construction firms greeted us. Immediately after we had exited the tombs, we entered into what will soon become the eating area in the new building. The three things that one noted were the amount of space that was going to be available for dining, the high ceilings, and the light. This is going to be a dramatic space, even including a curved stairway down into the heart of the room that would make even a Hollywood mogul feel proud!
We then made our way upstairs to the Theatre and it was only then that one began to see the simple but beautiful logic of this building. Well, my use of the singular there is rather problematic. This is in many ways four buildings, joined together around a mall-like concourse. As such, it combines all the functionality comprised in each separate building (though function never overwhelms style and design in any of the parts), with all the welcoming dramatic, but tasteful vistas one might see in the best-designed malls. That might be considered a slight, I suppose, since we academics view the commercial negatively. But if you think about it, the manner in which architects have designed spaces to inspire people to action – i.e., to consume – makes one fully aware of the power of such buildings, rivaling the religious Cathedrals in some ways in their ability to redirect the mind to a desired objective.
So we were now in the theatre. I have seen drawings of how this will look and am already impressed with the building. As a consequence, though, seeing it in the construction stage was nice, but it wasn’t such a revelation to me. While it will be a wonderful space, I was not as bowled over by seeing the guts of it, as I was for those sections of the Center that I previously knew nothing about.
We then moved to the other side of the house, the new conference center. This really will be a useful addition to the college. A space that will be able to sit at least 1000 guests very comfortably, along with a large conference room for Board of Trustees meetings – Dave Taylor would have been impressed with that!
We then found ourselves in the center walkway as we made our way to the other side of the building. Right now this part of the building reminds me of the conversation in the movie, "My Dinner with Andre," during which Andre Gregory describes to Wally Shawn (better known for his role in the "Princess Bride") a building in Findhorn, Scotland, where the roof seems to be floating above the rest of the building apparently defying the laws of gravity. I am sure when all the wood paneling is added the roof will have a little more solidity to it; nonetheless, with all the light flooding in, and the fireplace at one end, this will be a wonderful greeting area for anyone arriving at the college for the first time.
Carrying on over to the other wing of the building, one sees all the offices for Admissions, Financial Aid, and the like. There are some nice meeting spaces and the rooms seem generally well organized. On the other side of this wing, one finds the Bookstore, also on the ground floor. This is spacious and should match most college bookstores for convenience and pleasing appearance.
Through the other side of the bookstore one sees an excellent congregating space for students that will house a donut shop, ping-pong and pool tables, among other things. Again, the light and the space are noteworthy, as is the other fireplace around which our students will gather in the winter.
Heading upstairs one finds more offices associated with the one-stop approach to Student Affairs, things like advising, as well as considerable space laid out for student clubs. Here too is the new space devoted to WLFR and SSTV, which I quickly laid claim to, setting up the ARHU banner, before anyone else could attempt to grab it.
That’s about it. The Campus Center will be an impressive building. While it is going to be very busy inside, so much so that one wonders what traffic will remain on the old spine of A through N, it will nonetheless feel spacious, with light and exquisite vistas throughout. I am, I have to confess, far more positive about the “Old Spine” architecturally than many others, but I too believe that when this new edifice is completed it will have added significantly to the college and to the pleasure of studying and working here, making our college altogether a more appealing place to attend and visit.
So, in one day, and in one entry, we were able to deal in the past, present, and future perfect tenses.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Taking a Stand
One such story in this latter category is that of the Candace Falk trial. The basic background to this trial was that Candy Falk, a young professor in General Studies who Ken had hired, confronted some Army Reserve Recruiters who were coming onto the campus and informed them that they were not welcome. They said that they wouldn’t leave unless they were told officially to do so, so Falk went to her office and typed up a letter on official letterhead telling the recruiters to go away. This would have been April of 1971, the first semester on the new campus. Candy Falk was then brought before the campus hearing board on the charge that she had misrepresented herself as speaking on behalf of the college in an official capacity. The trial was held and at the end of it the charges were all dropped. Candy Falk left soon after, went west, and became the editor, perhaps fittingly, of the Emma Goldman papers at Berkeley.
I had heard one story from Ken, that the case had hinged on the use of the male pronoun, that the lawyer hired to defend Falk had said that since the male pronoun was used throughout the college handbook Ms. Falk, a woman, could not be charged with having violated the code. Apparently, when David Kairys, the lawyer, made this pronouncement a great commotion occurred and our friend Bill Lubenow, the chair(man) of the hearing board, had some difficulty restoring order.
My interest in the trial was further peaked on reading a flurry of emails between President Saatkamp, Ken Tompkins, and Candy Falk, in which Candy indicated that one of the key elements of the trial was the action taken by Jim Williams, director of campus security. In Falk’s words, Williams had been
asked to say that the demonstration against the army recruiters was violent (which it certainly wasn't!). He testified, under oath, to David Kairys, who was my lawyer, that he knew that this was false and thus refused to follow orders. This was a turning point in the trial -- though it continued to be raucous. Then, during the summer, when no one was around, the campus policeman was fired. I had already moved away... and as far as I know, there was no follow-up.
It turns out that Jim Williams went on to a very distinguished career after Stockton, and it is uncertain whether or not his testimony was a reason for his leaving the college.
But getting back to the original point of this post, one wondered on hearing both of these stories whether or not they had grown in their significance over the years. But it turns out that both were very much founded in events in the trial and were both significant in determining its outcome. No "dis-remembering" here -- just another colorful moment in the early years of the college.
The Argo report about the trial can be read here.
White Doves Ascending
On Tuesday, March 17th, Ken and I drove down to Cape May to visit Joan Bjork. Joan was the wife of Stockton’s first President, Richard Bjork, and so was a witness to many of the events and developments occurring in the early years of the college. She now resides in a beautiful bed and breakfast, the White Dove Inn, which she runs with her daughter.
It was a very pleasant visit. We sat in her dining room and went through pictures and articles that she had kept, and listened to some of the stories that these inspired Joan to recall. At least, I largely listened. Ken and Joan seemed to have a great time reminding each other of many different and sometimes odd (to my ear at least) events that had gone on.
I will give one example. There was an article (which somehow did not make its way back with us in the folder of documents we returned bearing) about Richard Bjork’s participation, along with a few of his administrators, in a trip to Camden, New Jersey. The idea of this venture was to leave administrators to their own devices with a couple of dollars in their pocket in an urban center. Apparently this was frequently done also with undergraduate students at the time until, I learned yesterday, an Antioch student was killed and the program was terminated. The intention, I suppose, was to teach survival skills and to have one learn how “the other half” lived, or in some cases just survived from day to day.
Ken, it turned out, was one of the three administrators who joined Dick Bjork on this trip and he had vivid memories of his own experiences, which, had Orwell not already been dead, might have ended up as a sequel to Down and Out in Paris and London. He also remembered that the President fared rather better than he and seemed to master the dismal terrain quite capably. While Ken and his partner in grime were sleeping, virtually huddled together on the sidewalk throughout the cold night of October, simply because they hadn’t generated enough funds to do anything else, Dick had survived fairly handsomely. He had spent the first night in the warmth of a bus station, went to Manpower the next day and found a day job moving office furniture, and spent the second night at the YMCA. Ken remembered him turning up at one of the meeting points whistling away happily and carrying a bottle of wine. Whether he shared this with his down and out friends wasn’t related.
This was a humanizing story, for me. It was matched by a reaction that Joan had to a picture of her and Dick at the first basketball game held in the Stockton gym. “Oh, look how young we were!” she exclaimed. And it is true, Dick was only 38 when he began as Stockton’s President, astonishingly young for a head administrator. But he also seemed to be harboring some of his youthful idealism, and Joan’s comments gave one a sense of how much he was trying to accomplish.
Now every person in a position of power, no matter how good, has his or her detractors (and as I said in the previous post, there were competing idealisms vying for notice in the Pomona marshes, and Dick’s was only one of them), so it isn’t surprising that the first President had some. But what is sometimes lost in the disagreement over the divergent objectives held by contending forces is the intentions, the vision, and sometimes even the humanity of those with whom one disagrees.
For me, at least, our visit to the White Dove Inn provided a very pleasant reminder that President Bjork was certainly a man of great accomplishment and a person with a sense of a vision for Stockton. To what extent he managed to achieve that vision and whether it was the best vision for the college, I am not in a position to say at the moment; but I came away from our meeting feeling very positive about him.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Ideological Undergarments
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Connecting The Dots
So far the effort has seemed to be made up of a goodly number of individual documents, pictures, articles and media files. I would read one or listen to one and think: "Yes, I remember that event." or "I remember reading that in the mid-1970s." or "What is the relationship of that account to, say, courses taught in Arts and Humanities?" I hadn't, until recently, seen many connections among a whole set of varied documents.
The breakthrough came with four documents that I have had for some years but hadn't read carefully and fully.
The first is a 1966 State of New Jersey document -- intended for the public -- in which the State made its case for adding two new colleges to the seven that had served the state for a century. This document is called A Call To Action and it was issued by The Citizens Committee for Higher Education in New Jersey.
In this 26 page booklet the Committee makes its case for vast expenditures, political reorganization and and engaged public for what it sees as a "crisis" in NJ higher education. As part of its planning, new State colleges were envisioned though not specifically located. The booklet is full of statistical studies such as:
- Percentages of Students In-State and Out-State in 11 States in Fall, 1963
- Hypothetical Distribution of Full-Time Undergraduate Students by Public and Private Institutions In-State and Out-of-State (1965 to 1975)
- Hypothetical Distribution of Daytime Graduate and Professional Students in Public Institutions in New Jersey (1965 to 1975)
- Estimated Costs For Academic Facilities and Annual Operating Expenses for Additional Students in New Jersey Public Colleges and University (1965 to 1975)
- Full-Time College Enrollments in Four States Compared to New Jersey (years 1965 to 1975)
- Planned College Expansion Four States Compared With New Jersey 1965-1975
The second document is more local to Stockton. It is the Richard Stockton State College Education Policies Committee Planning Seminar (4 - 28 - 1970). It is unclear from the Report exactly what the Education Policies Committee was, who created it and whether it came from the College or the State. The former seems likely.
The Committee was made up of faculty, administrators and students -- all from other institutions. Stockton, itself, had not yet opened; indeed, it had not yet hired any of the Deans. I was interviewed in March and came to NJ on June of 1970. Faculty were not being interviewed for almost a year.
The document has section on topics like:
- Academic Majors
- Academic Organization
- Administrative Organization
- Degrees
- Finances
- General/Liberal Studies
- Requirements For Graduation
- Site Acquisition
- Student Life
The third document is the Self-Study of 1975. This, the College's first self-study, explains what we thought we were doing and an analysis of whether we were doing it. By 1975 the college had a couple of thousand students, a faculty of about 100 and a growing administration. We had four buildings and were putting up another four. This document traces how far we had come in five years, what we had mastered and what still was undone. The College was no longer a dream; it had the reality of faculty, students, classes, dorms, a library and cafeteria.
To complete this thread, we will add a Self-Study from, say, 2000 and, finally, our vision for the future called the 2020 Plan.
I hadn't seen all of these connections before looking at individual documents. There will be more; decisions taken in 1965 have powerful consequences in 2010. It is powerfully real for me that history is made up of one fact at a time. The whole narrative comes from how we connect the docs.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Remuneration
But as the years have passed and as faculty have tended to live in distant places like Philadelphia, it is harder to bring them out to College events without paying them. Our Fall Faculty Conference -- held each year -- pays faculty $50 to attend. I'm told that a substantial number of faculty leave by noon. That may be a comment on what happens at this event.
All of this is prelude to whether or not contributors to the book will be paid and, if so, how much.
I don't think Rob Gregg and I have spent much time thinking about NOT paying faculty to write for the book. There may have been a moment -- at the beginning -- when we thought that folks would want to write for the project and to do so for free. That moment didn't last. It was easy to conclude that this sort of work was way beyond faculty responsibility, that a long policy in media and publishing has been to pay for writing, that if we wanted faculty to take the effort seriously and to produce quality writing some sort of payment was in order. But how much?
To observe that State colleges are in financial difficulty these days is to utter a cliche. Stockton, as part of the New Jersey State College System, has serious financial woes because the State of New Jersey faces terrible financial problems. The sins of the fathers, etc.
A major publication of a large, coffee-table volume cannot be done on the cheap. There are many costs: student researchers, editor stipends, production costs, DVD production costs, design costs, travel/interview costs, copying costs and on and on.
In addition, as a small State College, we do not have a long history of producing books like, say, Rutgers which has its own college press. We do not have paid staff, contractual links to publishers, in-house designers and all of the other professional members of a university press.
I am not, I hasten to add, complaining. I am exceedingly proud of what we are doing and how far we have moved in just a few months to actually producing the history. I am merely stating the obvious: given the State's financial problems we are not awash in money.
We have looked at our budget and have finally determined what we can afford to pay our contributors; and while not a much as we would like, it is enough that we don't have to be ashamed to offer it. We have over thirty contributors; only one person turned us down. Faculty and Staff response has been wonderfully positive and supportive. Like in the early days, challenge faculty and staff and they respond -- with or without remuneration.