October 10, 1998In the '50s and '60s, a number of spirited controversies raged over aspects of campus life. At various times in those days, I was Faculty Advisor to the Publications Board, the student government, and the Honor Council. When I came in 1955, the student government was made up of one representative from each fraternity and sorority, plus one independent man and one independent woman. A group of students led by Judy Reid Finley and Andrea "Jelly" Jelstrup Corley (both '58 and both sorority members), introduced a new governing structure composed of elected representatives from each class.
Harris Sherman led the student body in a failed attempt to open the dormitories to visitation by members of the opposite sex. In those days, of course, there were separate men's and women's dormitories, and visits were strictly controlled. In this, the College acted in loco parentis to a degree hard to believe today. But Lew Worner was opposed to opening the dorms, and the Trustees rejected the proposal. Lew once told me that as long as he was President, open dormitories would never exist at Colorado College. In time, he changed his mind, and accommodated to new standards in male-female relationships; that kind of flexibility was one of the measures of his greatness as a leader. Harris Sherman and his friends failed in 1964, but their action pointed the way to the present coeducational dormitories.
When I came in 1955, the intramural program was confined to a fraternity league with one independent team, The Zetas, largely made up of hockey players. With Harry Booth, who was Dean of the Chapel and my best friend at the time, I organized two faculty teams, a touch football team known as the Socratic Seven, and a softball team, known as the Platonic Nine. At first, we thought of calling the football signals in Greek, but only Harry knew enough Greek. In the football season, I posted written challenges on the bulletin boards in the wings of Slocum Hall, where the freshmen lived, concluding with the incendiary phrase: "We hope the men of your wing will be equal to this occasion." The freshmen poured out to the field by Armstrong Hall for these contests, thinking to teach us lessons; I still have sore spots on my anatomy from those games.
In the spring, we did the same thing for softball games. The Faculty began to wear white shirts emblazoned with a big letter "F" and the students variously colored shirts. Harry was the running back, third baseman and cleanup hitter. Once I heard an opposing player say: "Watch out for Reverend Booth, he's fast as Hell." I was sometimes the quarterback and almost always the pitcher, but our best players were often former varsity athletes who had joined the college staff. One of these was Muscles Dave Fletcher '57, former varsity fullback, who was an Assistant Director of Admissions. Once we beat the fraternity touch football champions in a spirited game on Washburn Field. Once we tied a Department of History team from the Air Force Academy in a no-quarter game neither side wanted to lose. Soon there was a Slocum Hall intramural league. In time, the faculty softball team changed its name to Mind and Body, the perfect exemplification of the ancient Greek ideal. I look back on those formative days for the intramural program as one of my happiest involvements at Colorado College. My forty-year old hope is that there will someday be adequate play spaces and also a field house for recreational and intramural sports.
Needless to say, not all the controversies of the last forty years turned out as I might have wished. On three issues that were very dear to my heart, I was on the losing side. On each of those issues - the presence of ROTC on campus, Division I athletics at the College, and the role of fraternities in campus life - I confronted the formidable figure of Lew Worner. When ROTC finally left the campus, it was because of a decline in student interest, not because faculty opponents were ever successful in argument or tactics. Many interests beyond the campus are involved in college athletics and the Greek system - alumni, trustees, townspeople. Faculty members are relatively free of the outside pressures presidents and deans cannot avoid taking into account. It is a fact of academic life that knee-jerk liberals like me have a hard time accepting.
Of course, teaching is the great joy of the faculty at a liberal arts college. I have been Dean of Summer Session for eight years, long enough to know that there are no highs in administration comparable to the surge college teachers know when they enter a classroom. How privileged I have been to be a teacher at a liberal arts college rather than a focussed specialist in a university!
Only at a college like this could I have taught such a variety of compelling subjects - the History of Western Civilization, U.S. Foreign Relations, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Recent and Contemporary U.S. History, as well as courses on war and peace. The trick was to keep up with exploding scholarship in so many different fields; I could not really do that, but it was mind-stretching fun to try. My central course was "Recent U.S. History," which, before the Block Plan, sometimes had 75-100 students (how did I ever read all the papers and blue books they wrote?). A student once called that course "Bend the knee to Franklin D. in Recent U.S. History" - I adopted the title with pride.
My special interest came in time to be courses on war experience. It was certainly not military history, which is usually written about and taught as if nobody was ever hurt. I was interested in what actually happens to people in war, and how they remember it and try to make sense of it afterwards. Of course, I drew on my own experience in the Second World War, and was powerfully influenced by Glenn Gray and his book The Warriors, a philosopher's meditation on a combat soldier's experience. Together, Glenn and I conceived a course we called "War, Violence and the Humanities, "which dealt with the way war appears in literature, film, philosophy, history and poetry. Glenn died on a weekend before the Monday we were to begin a block of that course; the next year, Dan Tynan of the English department joined me teaching it. Eli Boderman of the sociology department and I conceived and taught a course on Morality and War, which dealt with justifications for going to war, and moral standards in fighting. For a few years, I directed a program on War, Violence and Human Values, financed by a grant from the Luce Foundation, which brought a galaxy of noted speakers to the campus. One of these speakers persuaded me to show "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" in Armstrong Theatre. The place was jammed with students, only a few of whom came to hear him speak about it that night.
Students are easily seduced by vivid accounts of war and violence. I tried to avoid that seduction. I used to teach my Civil War course without dealing much with battles, and, until recently, I avoided speaking about my own war experience. I knew that if I did, if I spoke, for example, about the terrible night my ship was sunk at Normandy, every eye would be on me. One day, a girl in one of my classes said to me, "You were lucky, you had the war." That gave me a jolt, but I soon saw what she meant. The war had changed my life. When I came home, I had a better idea of who I was, and I wanted to do something useful if I could, perhaps to atone for my survival when so many of my shipmates had perished. That is how I decided to become a teacher. At Colorado College, I hoped to help students find meaning and purpose in their lives without the intervening catalyst of some traumatic and terrible experience like war.
Above all, I wanted to leave my students with a sense of humane values that would sustain them in their coming lives. I came out of the war with an abiding reverence for life. It seemed to me that what students wanted to know, what you needed to know, was how people actually lived in the past, how they experienced birth, joy, suffering and death.
I wanted my students to feel what it was to have been a slave, bought and sold like a horse or cow, to feel what it was to be mired in the fetid, ghastly trenches of the First World War, to feel what it was for hard-working Americans to be adrift without hope in the Great Depression, to feel what it was to be caught in a city during bombing raid, siege or plague. At the end of my Recent U.S. History course, I used to say I really did not care whether they became Democrats or Republicans (which was not exactly true), but I did hope they would be active participants in public life, with a sense of empathy and compassion for people less fortunate than they, who, but for the accident of birth and the Grace of God, might be yourselves.
I am a former Young Turk; now I am the Very Old Guard. It went fast. The years were filled with controversy and change - new calenders, honors programs, teacher preparation schemes, intramurals and Division I sports, fraternities and sororities, compulsory Chapel, student demonstrations, dormitory rules, departmental requirements, ROTC - the engrossing kaleidoscope of a dynamic institution. And most of all, TEACHING! TEACHING! TEACHING! I see the faces of my students (your faces), probably thousands of them by now. I have had a life-long love affair with them (with you). Faculty who teach at a liberal arts college taste the Fountain of Youth Ponce de Leon once sought in the Florida wilderness.
When I came here forty-three years ago, I thought this would be my first job, and assumed I would soon move on to another institution. Now I give thanks every day that this was the place where I was privileged to live my life as a teacher. How lucky I am to have been what Theodore Roosevelt once called "one of those little men who teach history in College" - this college, Colorado College!