President Emeritus John W. Chandler
The Induction of Adam F. Falk as the 17th President of Williams College
Convocation, September 25, 2010
This afternoon I’m going to talk principally about three Williams presidents whose leadership was significant in making Williams what it is. My function, as I understand it, is to set the historical stage for the panel discussion that will follow, a discussion that will get into some contemporary issues that are of special concern for students.
The three presidents that I’ll focus on are Mark Hopkins, Harry Garfield, and John E. Sawyer. Mark Hopkins was president from 1836 to 1872. After his retirement at the age of seventy he stayed on as a trustee and faculty member for another fifteen years. Hopkins started as a student at Williams in 1820 and was here almost continuously until 1887. Harry Garfield had the second longest presidential tenure, serving from 1908 until 1934. Jack Sawyer’s presidency lasted for twelve years, from 1961 to 1973.
My emphasis will be the leadership styles and leadership effectiveness of the three presidents as illustrated by their major objectives and primary accomplishments. Although it would please me to think that members of the audience would take away from this session better insight into effective leadership, I am not presuming that there are particular lessons from the past that can be applied to contemporary issues and problems. Every institution is constantly adapting to new circumstances, seeking to solve problems, and looking for tactics and strategies to improve its competitive position and carry out its mission better. Some leaders are more effective and some are less effective in directing such efforts. All institutional leaders leave a legacy of some kind that shapes the institutions they lead. For members of this particular community, it is inherently interesting, I think, to know about features and characteristics of Williams College that are the products of the decisions, the successes, and the failures of the presidential stewards who were entrusted with primary responsibility for leading this college.
Most of what I know about Mark Hopkins I learned from Fred Rudolph over the past fifty-five years. What I have to say about Harry Garfield comes largely from reading materials in the Williams archives, particularly the papers that reveal his role in overhauling the curriculum. My knowledge about and reflections on Jack Sawyer come principally from having known and worked with him. I was a faculty member when he arrived in 1961. Then I became a member of his administration, first as Acting Provost for one year, then as the first Dean of the Faculty. Shortly after I went to Hamilton as president in 1968 I became a Williams trustee. Then I succeeded Jack as president of Williams in 1973.
Mark Hopkins (1836-1872)
To understand Mark Hopkins and his enormous influence at Williams and beyond, it is important to know the meta-narrative, the world-view within which he thought and acted. He was first and foremost a Christian. Using William James’ categories of the “once-born” and the “twice-born,” I would place Mark Hopkins in the “once-born” category despite his preoccupation with conversion and revivals. He seems not to have been disposed to those convulsions of the spirit that tormented his brother Albert, who was obsessed with his shortcomings as he strove for perfection. Albert, a professor at Williams during his brother’s administration, was a “twice-born” type. Mark had a triumphal view of Christianity as sweeping the world and bringing unity and peace to humankind. Calvinist though he was, Mark Hopkins followed a softer version than what drove Albert. Mark was proud that the American foreign mission movement began in 1806 at the Haystack Prayer meeting and that Williams graduates were deployed throughout the world in the work of bringing enlightenment. During Hopkins’ early years in office a third of Williams graduates became clergymen, a fact to which he often referred.
Seniors were required to take Hopkins’ course in moral philosophy. James Bissett Pratt, an eminent Williams philosopher and alumnus of a later generation, said of Hopkins’ system of thought that it did not qualify as philosophy. His son-in-law, J. H. Denison, wrote of Hopkins that: “As a philosopher, his great work lay in stimulating thought rather than in contributing it.” (Denison, Mark Hopkins: A Biography), p. v.) To me, Hopkins’ system of thought reads as an amalgam of Calvinist theology, Scottish Common Sense Realism, and even an element of anatomy and physiology, doubtless acquired when he was a medical student. Although Hopkins constantly refined and elaborated upon his system of thought, he was not particularly curious about concepts and views that were in conflict with his own. He was attracted to Scottish Common Sense Realism, which claimed that there is a fundamental congruity between the world as it is perceived through the human senses and the world as it actually is. Immanuel Kant had quite another take on this question with his view that the mind is an active agent in shaping and organizing our perceptions of the world. Hopkins was confident that God had created both the world and our senses, and that the two were in sync. He was not drawn to the epistemological complexity of Kant or the skepticism of David Hume. Although Kant had some interesting and important things to say about Common Sense Realism, Hopkins wasn’t interested. He told G. Stanley Hall of the class of 1867, a leading pioneer in the development of modern psychology, that he had looked at Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason but didn’t get past the first paragraph. Hopkins told a faculty colleague that he didn’t read books. When Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Hopkins recognized that it represented a serious challenge to his thinking. Nevertheless, instead of grappling with Darwin’s theory, Hopkins dismissed it, along with Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism. He argued that Christianity was the message and the method of spiritual, moral, and social evolution. While Darwin cited fossil records as important evidence for his theory, Paul Ansel Chadbourne, Hopkin’s colleague and eventual presidential successor, claimed that fossil discoveries were yet another manifestation of God’s creative design. Chadbourne undertook some significant and courageous field trips with his students, but nature to him and to Mark Hopkins was to be read as a record of God’s majesty and creativity.
Still, the world-view that Mark Hopkins expressed so eloquently and compellingly was congenial to the general mind-set of the audiences that he reached. He did not aspire for Williams to be on the cutting edge of learning. As he himself expressed it, he wanted Williams to be a “safe” college, not a great college.
Despite his lack of curiosity and a certain intellectual laziness, Mark Hopkins was nevertheless a great teacher. He profoundly influenced his students and the thousands of people who heard his lectures beyond the Williams campus. He was in great demand as a lecturer. It is to elevate and not demean him to suggest that he was one of the great motivational speakers of his era. Moreover, despite his indifference to and occasional ill-informed hostility to some of the major currents of thought that deserved a respectful hearing, an extraordinary number of his students became leading thinkers and participants in a wide variety of fields. How could this be?
The Williams of the Hopkins era was not academically rigorous. Students had a lot of time on their hands. Students are wonderfully inventive in filling time, and this was no less true during the Hopkins period. Some filled their time with hell-raising, including such excitement as setting college buildings on fire. Organizing sports teams also took up slack time. Farther along in the Hopkins period, fraternities became a major preoccupation. The list of fines for non-academic disciplinary infractions offers interesting clues to how some students used their time. Playing cards incurred a fine of $5. Frequenting a house of ill repute commanded the more modest fine of $1 or less. Still, there were many students who made significant educational use of their time. Perhaps the most important such venture of this kind was the Lyceum of Natural History, founded by a group of students in 1835 and lasting throughout the Hopkins years until Williams finally began to teach science for the sake of science and not as a branch of theology and moral philosophy. The members of the Lyceum—and they were numerous—organized scientific expeditions to such places as Greenland, Honduras, Florida, and Newfoundland. Harvard scientists Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz cooperated with the Lyceum and acquired botanical and biological specimens from Williams students. Two faculty members, Albert Hopkins and Paul Chadbourne, worked with the Lyceum, but it was a student-run organization. While Albert Hopkins and Paul Chadbourne looked at science as a way of drawing moral lessons and demonstrating the glory of God, Williams students wanted to know how the world works, the practical applications of what they were learning, and even how they might make some money from their new knowledge. As a result, Williams was an important center of scientific education for most of the nineteenth century, and it produced an extraordinary number of eminent scientists. All of this, however, was outside the curriculum. Students were educating themselves with minimal interest or support from the administration and faculty. More significantly, the administration and faculty didn’t interfere. There was a policy of benign neglect that facilitated the work of the Lyceum. If Mark Hopkins had articulated this implicit educational philosophy, he might have said, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy’s words of more than a century later, “Ask not what the administration can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for yourselves.”
Just as Mark Hopkins left the students to their own devices much of the time, he also didn’t try to control his faculty colleagues. John Bascom, who was very critical of Hopkins, didn’t have to worry about being fired. Hopkins endeared himself to the industrial class by ascribing their wealth to the most admirable behavior and traits. One of the most prominent advocates of free trade in the nation was Arthur Latham Perry of the Williams faculty. Hopkins was a protectionist, as were virtually all manufacturers. Perhaps he winced at what Perry was saying and writing, but I’m not aware that Perry felt any pressure to temper his views.
Mark Hopkins raised very little money, and this was perhaps his greatest failure as president. He let the trustees know that he did not plan to raise money, and he lived up to his word. Even when the college had a need that required very little money, Hopkins would hit the road and bring home the money in the form of lecture fees rather than simply ask some friendly alumnus for help. The irony is that he was in a great position to raise a lot of money. He was widely known, and through his lectures to large audiences in major cities he became acquainted with many wealthy people. Generally, wealthy people liked what Hopkins had to say, and in saying it he often waxed lyrical. He represented wealth as a sign of good character. His views were close akin to the thinking of Adam Smith and they anticipated in some ways the message of Andrew Carnegie in his famous essay on “The Gospel of Wealth” in 1889. When Hopkins went to Boston to give the Lowell Lectures he became acquainted with Amos Lawrence, a man of immense wealth and a prominent philanthropist of his era. Lawrence asked President Hopkins if Williams had any needs that he could help meet. Hopkins replied that he couldn’t think of anything. A little later he remembered that, in fact, the trustees had just approved the building of a new library that must not exceed $2500 in cost. So the next day he got back to Lawrence and mentioned his oversight. Lawrence thought that Williams needed to be more ambitious about its plans for a new library. He gave $7,000 to build Lawrence Hall, in 1846. Lawrence Hall was built to house 30,000 volumes. President Hopkins said that it was unlikely that the college would ever need another library building.
With that kind of casual attitude about the college’s financial needs, it is no wonder that Professor John Bascom, in 1871, made his bold and provocative remarks at a dinner for alumni in New York about the long list of things Williams needed. Everyone knows, of course, that future U.S. President James A. Garfield stood up to defend President Hopkins and uttered the famous words about Mark Hopkins and the log. In his own way, each man was right about Mark Hopkins. In support of John Bascom’s position was the indisputable fact that Amherst College had a far larger endowment and a much bigger enrollment than Williams. Indeed, Williams had only slightly more students at the end of Hopkins’ administration than at the beginning.
Mark Hopkins was a real softie with students. Many faculty members and others thought that he was much too lax in enforcing discipline, particularly academic discipline. Reports from the Hopkins era indicate that it was not unusual for professors to dismiss classes after ten or fifteen minutes simply because almost no one was prepared. It was commonplace for students to respond, when asked to stand to recite, “Not prepared, sir.” Absence from classes was a large problem overall, but not in Hopkins’ courses. Hopkins himself did not check attendance, and he said that students should decide for themselves whether or not to attend classes. J. H. Denison, Hopkins’ son-in-law, reported that Hopkins believed that “the discipline of a college should be like that of a family, where the children obey because they revere and love the parents. He thought it futile to compel students to attend recitations and to learn when they did not wish to do so, or to force them to behave respectfully when they did not feel respect” (p. 227).
In 1868, four years before Hopkins retired as president, a major crisis erupted over the question of class attendance. The story became big news in the newspapers. The faculty became fed up with the casual attitude about class attendance. Yale had dealt with the same problem by imposing stiff penalties. While President Hopkins was out of town on an extended lecture tour, the faculty met and passed a rule that students who missed a class exercise or failed to make up the assignment when there was a legitimate excuse, would receive a grade of zero for that day. The students were outraged and staged a boycott of classes. The walkout involved virtually every student, and it went on for several days until Hopkins got back to campus. Walk-outs, or what the students called “bolts,” were not unusual, but this one was damaging to the college’s reputation. Hopkins told the students that he disagreed with the faculty action but that they would be expelled if they didn’t end the boycott. Then he presented a compromise plan that restored order.
Fred Rudolph ends his celebrated book on Mark Hopkins by quoting a letter that Hopkins wrote to his friend David Palmer a few weeks after he retired from the presidency of Williams in 1872. Said Hopkins: “I have always been of the opinion that . . . my forte was teaching. The place I should have preferred would have been was a teacher with no responsibility beyond the classroom. . . . I have made it a point to be present promptly at all recitations and have invariably filled the hours, and have hoped to make myself felt through the influence on the minds of the young men.” (p. 237-238).
Mark Hopkins demonstrated his aptitude for teaching before he went to college. Because his family could not afford his college tuition, in 1820 when he was eighteen he left his home in Stockbridge and traveled six hundred miles to teach school near Petersburg, Virginia. His approximately twenty-five pupils were boys and girls of varying ages. Although Hopkins was a rangy, broad-shouldered young man, he noted with apprehension that some of the boys were as big as he, and he wondered if he would be able to maintain discipline. He demonstrated almost immediately that he was a natural-born teacher. The grateful parents of his pupils persuaded him to stay for a second year. By then he had enough money to start college. Williams was a natural choice. Mark’s great-grandmother was the sister of Williams founder Ephraim Williams, and the Williams family had lived in Stockbridge. But there was a serious question about whether Williams College would survive. Just a year earlier, in 1821, President Zephaniah Swift Moore and a sizeable contingent of students (and, some claim, a generous assortment of books from the Williams library) went to Amherst, where he became founding president of Amherst College. Moore’s dramatic move came after the failure of the trustees to gain the permission of the Massachusetts General Court to move the college to Northampton. Williamstown simply presented too many obstacles to success. A number of towns, including Stockbridge, invited Williams to relocate there. Fortunately, the trustees were able to attract a new president, Edward Dorr Griffin, who proved himself capable of reviving the struggling institution.
So, after slight consideration of Hamilton and Yale, off to Williams Mark Hopkins went. He made up a year of lost time by entering as a sophomore. Mark’s letters to family members show that he did not share the unqualified adulation with which almost everyone regarded President Griffin. He admired Griffin’s eloquence as a preacher. But he thought that Griffin’s platform and pulpit mannerisms, and the way he instructed students in elocution and rhetoric, emphasized show at the expense of substance. There was one incident that probably permanently affected their relationship. In the midst of a sermon to the student body, President Griffin stopped suddenly and admonished the inattentive young Mark Hopkins to keep his eyes fixed on the preacher. Griffin was probably not enthusiastic when the trustees, in 1830, appointed Mark Hopkins Professor of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric. Hopkins had received a medical degree a year before that appointment came, but the faculty appointment set the course for the rest of his long life. Perhaps in part because he felt the need for the gravitas that was appropriate for a professor of moral philosophy, he received his license as a preacher in 1833. Just three years later the trustees were looking for a successor to President Griffin, who was sinking into senility. It was a sad end for the person who had saved the college. He had personally supervised the construction of the building that bears his name and which became a symbol that Williams was in Williamstown to stay.
Had President Griffin possessed a full account of Mark Hopkins’ behavior as a student it is likely that young Hopkins would have been expelled and almost certain that he would never have become a professor or president. Years after Hopkins had gained fame as president of Williams, his classmate Harvey Rice reported two episodes that Mark Hopkins privately revealed to him. The incidents occurred when Hopkins was a student and he had kept them secret. One episode concerned a brilliant commencement oration delivered by the dullest member of the graduation class, to the astonishment of all who knew him. Mark confided to his friend Rice that he wrote the speech for his dull friend. The other episode also involved a literary exercise. Mark wrote a paper in which he ostensibly quoted copiously from the renowned Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, who was much in vogue then. But what the prankish student actually did was put quotation marks around his own statements and attribute them to Reid. The main body of the paper, however, came straight out of Reid’s writings. These portions, however, carried no quotation marks and were presented as Mark’s work. When he received back the assessment of the paper, Mark was greatly amused that his professor had heaped praise on the purported quotations from Reid but responded tepidly to Reid’s actual statements that were disguised as Hopkins’ work.
Those two episodes provide insight into a trait that was important to Mark Hopkins’ fame as a teacher and as president. He identified comfortably with students. Even after he became a professor and then president there remained clear traces of the prankish, playful youngster. He was only thirty-four when he became president. He was not the trustees’ first choice, and they elected him at the insistence of the students. Williams was still in a precarious state and not in a position to attract strong candidates. The retiring president stood at six feet, three inches tall, and he weighed 240 pounds. Mark Hopkins was tall and broad-shouldered, but he did not match the physical heft of his predecessor. Despite his popularity with the students, there were many who doubted his qualifications for the presidency. One critic complained that he lacked sufficient “abdominal dignity.”
Mark Hopkins was way ahead of his time as a teacher. His inaugural address in 1836 is a remarkable statement of what he thought about educating young people. He stated that the human mind is not an inert receptacle into which content is poured, or a piece of iron that is to be beat into shape, or a block of marble that it to be sculpted into a beautiful form. The mind of a young person is rather like a seed that must be tended and cultivated in terms of its distinctive needs. All genuine education is self-education. People don’t learn at the same pace. They mature at different rates. The power to learn is not something that the teacher somehow plants in the pupil’s mind. The effective teacher’s principal qualification is not knowledge of the subject matter or unusual explanatory power. Rather it is the capacity “to give an impulse to the minds of his pupils, and to induce them to labor.” To do this well requires enthusiasm on the teacher’s part and deep devotion to the work of teaching. On many occasions Hopkins emphasized that an essential requirement for the successful teacher is affection or love for students. Mark and Mary Hopkins had ten children, and Hopkins saw himself as the surrogate father of his students. He viewed Williams as analogous to a family.
It is clear from the many statements about his teaching style how Hopkins performed in the classroom. He had a little box, which students called his “pill box,” that contained students’ names on slips of paper. He would pull a name randomly from the box and call it out. The pupil would stand, and a conversation would begin. Hopkins often teased and bantered with the student who was called upon. The exchange between Hopkins and the student on the witness stand was often entertaining for the other students. This was the Socratic method informed by deep respect and affection for the student as Hopkins tried to draw out from his mind what was there in inchoate form, but draw it out as expressions and concepts in which the student could take pride. Hopkins didn’t believe in using threats and punishment to force students to do their academic work. In his inaugural address he stated that: “There should be among young men an ardor of study, a sense of propriety and self-respect, a strength of moral principle which should render government unnecessary, and cause every thing to move as it ought, spontaneously. That college is in the best state in which the least government is necessary.”
When Hopkins’ faculty colleagues in 1868 became exasperated with students who took advantage of lax attitudes about class attendance they underscored the limitations in his point of view. Even in managing a group as simple as a family there are many occasions when love has to be translated into justice. In an organization as complex as a college, affection is a necessary condition of its most effective functioning, but it is an insufficient condition. Still, his students remembered him and his teachings gratefully and fondly. Hopkins truly embodied the metaphor by which James A. Garfield immortalized him and defined Williams College.
Harry A. Garfield (1908-1934)
The New York Times report on the inauguration of Harry Garfield as Williams’ new president asserted that the audience attending the event was probably the largest and most distinguished group of educators ever assembled in the United States. When he came to Williams as president, Garfield was probably better known publicly than any president who preceded or succeeded him when they were initially appointed. Garfield was the son of a slain U. S. president. He had been a prominent corporate lawyer and political and civic leader in Cleveland with a reform agenda. Immediately before he came to Williams he was a professor in the Princeton Political Science Department. At Princeton he was a close friend and admirer of Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton president, who was among those who came to Williamstown for Garfield’s inauguration. Some of the changes that Garfield brought about at Williams were similar to reforms that Wilson undertook at Princeton. From the beginning, Williams had looked principally to Yale for presidents and professors. Yale displayed the Congregational piety and orthodoxy that had been compromised at Harvard, where such movements as Unitarianism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism found fertile soil. With Garfield and then Tyler Dennett both coming from Princeton, a new source of institutional influence entered the picture. Both men insisted upon academic rigor.
Garfield gave direction and stability to Williams after a period of seeming indecision among the trustees. Paul Ansel Chadbourne, Mark Hopkins’ immediate successor, was handicapped by Hopkins’ presence and by the universal knowledge that Hopkins had hand-picked him for the job. Mark Hopkins was still around when Franklin Carter succeeded Chadbourne. Carter was a significant president, and he found ways of working around Hopkins. This was a time of great ferment and excitement in American higher education with the advent of research universities modeled more upon German universities than Oxford and Cambridge, the development of the land-grant university system, and the creation of new universities with wealth from the industrial giants of the Gilded Age. Franklin Carter’s twenty-year tenure was a period of great change and advancement. Still, the trustees seemed uncertain about the future direction of the college. They made two successive temporizing presidential appointments following Carter’s administrations—John Hewitt for just one year as an interim in 1901-1902, and Mark Hopkins’ son Henry, who began in his mid-sixties, from 1902 to 1908.
It isn’t clear just what the trustees thought they were getting with the appointment of Garfield, but they got a lot. As soon as he took office he proposed a revolutionary new curriculum that bore some resemblance to the heralded curriculum that Woodrow Wilson introduced at Princeton. Wilson said in reference to the struggle to reform the Princeton curriculum: “Changing a university curriculum is like moving a graveyard. You don’t know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them.” Garfield had been Wilson’s close ally in the curriculum wars at Princeton, and that experience doubtless instructed him in the strategies and tactics that he employed at Williams.
The curriculum that Garfield inherited included a largely prescribed freshman year. Much of what the first year offered was high school work. Beyond the freshman year the curriculum was made up largely of electives. Professor T. C. Smith said that It was possible to coast to a degree while hardly cracking a book. There was a big divide between faculty in foreign languages, mathematics and the sciences, and those in other fields. Courses in the sciences, mathematics, and foreign languages were necessarily taken in a progressive sequence. In the other areas of the curriculum, however, the elective principle reigned. There was great antagonism between those two faculty camps. Courses of the elective variety were often referred to as “inspirational” courses, which appeared to be a euphemism for what then were known as “snap” courses and later as “gut” courses. Garfield was determined to change all that. He wanted academic rigor. He also wanted the faculty to work together in planning and teaching, and he wanted faculty and students to be in constant conversation about programs of study. In short, he wanted a community of learning. These ambitious goals were largely accomplished through the new curriculum that the faculty approved in 1910 and which went into effect in 1911. I taught under that curriculum for thirteen years until it was replaced in 1967-68. In my early days on the faculty we referred to the curriculum as the “T. C. Smith Curriculum.” T. C. Smith was a highly respected history professor who worked closely with Garfield on the curriculum. Still, Harry Garfield was the real architect of the new curriculum. He asked faculty members to send him written statements of what they included in their courses and descriptions of the student assignments. He did not hesitate to suggest changes in the content of courses. Although presidential involvement in determining the content of courses was not unusual in that era, some faculty felt that Garfield was intruding on their academic freedom. My impression is that the more demanding faculty members (including T. C. Smith) welcomed Garfield’s out-front leadership. Garfield spent dozens of hours with the Curriculum Committee and other faculty groups, patiently listening to their arguments and their questions about his proposals. T. C. Smith reported that when faculty debates showed no signs of leading towards a conclusion, Garfield at times brought closure by resorting to cross-examination skills acquired by his legal training and experience. There was fierce resistance to the proposed changes, driven largely by anxiety over the possibility of losing course enrollments. Although Garfield eventually prevailed, the final vote was not overwhelmingly favorable.
I referred earlier to Garfield as the principal architect of the new curriculum. It was a beautiful piece of work, both conceptually and diagrammatically. The curriculum was divided into three divisions, much like what we still have. Within the three divisions were eleven Majors, or what were called Major Groups. The History major embraced economics and political science. Philosophy included religion. Most courses were two-semester or hyphenated courses. Courses were arranged in sequential order by year. Thus the planning of an individual course had to be done with careful attention to what came before and what would come afterwards. This feature required faculty members to talk and plan together As the size of the student body and faculty increased, there was more and more team teaching of introductory courses. That was the norm when I arrived at Williams. This was exactly what Garfield wanted. The curriculum had wonderful coherence and structure. It was worthy, in its own way, of comparison with the Taj Mahal for its beauty and harmony. But, like the Taj Mahal, eventually, it was more beautiful than practical as new fields of study emerged and new scholarship changed the content of the established disciplines.
Now. what was the goal of the curriculum? It was not to make good Christians of the students. Garfield’s aim was to make good citizens. In his inaugural address, Garfield said that “citizens must be trained to easy control of their mental faculties as well as of their bodily power—trained to discriminate between scientifically determined facts and loosely reasoned opinions.” Garfield said that training of the mind is like putting an edge on a tool. It is interesting that Garfield spoke much more of training than of education. But he did not intend to distinguish between the two. He wanted to produce citizen activists. His message was much the same as that of Woodrow Wilson in his famous address, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” Garfield greatly admired Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and he devoted himself to the same progressive and reformist agenda. His thinking about the aims of education can be viewed as a more secular expression of the impulse that drove the students at the Haystack Prayer Meeting. He was more resonant with the mindset of Washington Gladden of the Class of 1859, the pioneer of the Social Gospel movement, than with the religious views of Mark and Albert Hopkins.
Harry Garfield was preoccupied with curricular matters throughout his twenty-six years, and at the end of his administration he was at work on an honors program. He was also occupied with other matters. Fraternities were at the zenith of their opulence and influence at Williams during his administration. Mark Hopkins and Henry Hopkins were disquieted over the deepening chasm between the fraternity haves and the fraternity have-nots. Harry Garfield was even more troubled. But unlike his predecessors, he acted in response. He provided non-fraternity students with better dining and housing accommodations and attractive quarters for the Commons Club (later to be called the Garfield Club in his honor), the social organization for students who did not get into fraternities. He was acutely aware that Woodrow Wilson met his Waterloo at Princeton when he decided to abolish eating clubs or absorb them into a new structure of residential colleges. Whether he would have acted more boldly had he not observed what happened to Wilson, I don’t know. His strategy was to make life so attractive for non-fraternity students that they would enjoy essential parity with fraternity members. A principal component of this strategy was to limit fraternity membership to 75% of the student body. His reasoning was that this quota system would guarantee that the Commons Club would have an ample population of attractive and able students and that being a member of the Commons Club would be very similar to being in a fraternity. Not surprisingly, the plan backfired and ended up exacerbating the problem. Being a fraternity member became more desirable than ever.
There was another unwitting contribution that Garfield made to the strength and persistence of fraternities. He insisted on four years of Latin as an admission requirement. He cherished his study of Latin at St. Paul School. The trouble was that few schools offered that much Latin. The ones that did were largely the more prestigious boarding schools, whose tuition and fees generally limited enrollment to students from wealthier families. Fraternity membership imposed additional costs. Most of the students at Williams came from boarding schools, and the fraternity population was even more pronouncedly from that background. Still, the non-fraternity students were, overall, superior academically. All of these differences entered into the campus polarization that troubled Garfield.
I want to make some summarizing points about Garfield:
- He had a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, and he realized his vision by providing direct leadership. Perhaps he could have had the trustees simply mandate the new curriculum. That was often done at that time. But he recognized the importance of faculty support, and he had strong democratic impulses that guided him in giving the faculty a crucial and determining role in the decision.
- He never crowed about his achievements. He wasn’t concerned about who got credit.
- He was willing to surround himself with strong colleagues in leadership roles. T.C. Smith was strong, and he had a decided edge, an edge that is revealed in his correspondence with President Garfield about curricular matters. Carroll Maxcy, who was acting president for two years when Garfield joined the Federal Government as Fuel Administrator during World War I, was another strong, decisive faculty member. Garfield knew how to delegate authority, but he had the presence and the intelligence to maintain overall leadership control. He was an effective leader and a skilled manager.
In the final analysis, Garfield’s greatest contribution to Williams was in the creation of the curriculum of 1911. It was an achievement that should have had much more attention nationally that it ever received.
John E. Sawyer (1961-1973)
When Jack Sawyer was a Williams undergraduate, he took a tutorial with President James Phinney Baxter. Sawyer so impressed Baxter that Baxter often spoke of him as a likely future president of Williams. Sawyer’s appointment to the Williams board at the unusually young age of thirty-four lent credence to the rumor that he was being groomed to succeed Baxter.
However, when the time came for choosing Baxter’s successor, it was apparent that relations between the two men had cooled. Baxter was signaling that his preferred candidate was Vincent M. Barnett, a highly respected Williams political science professor. A decision to name him president would have been pleasing news to many of his faculty colleagues. Far fewer faculty members knew Sawyer. Their general impression was that he was a cautious, conservative man, and that his election as president would portend little in the way of change.
Sawyer was an untenured associate professor of economics at Yale when the Williams appointment came. Service in World War II had interrupted his graduate study at Harvard. When he returned to Harvard he was appointed a Junior Fellow. This was an exceptionally prestigious appointment based upon perceived potential for scholarly achievement. In Sawyer’s case it opened up extraordinary opportunities for study with preeminent Harvard scholars in a variety of fields. Sawyer’s intellectual interests were broad, and his Junior Fellow appointment enabled him to both broaden and deepen his knowledge. The appointment also had the effect of drawing him away from his Ph.D. dissertation, which he never completed. He had no Ph.D. He was not tenured. He had a thin record of published scholarship. He had never held an academic administrative position. So what commended him to the Williams trustees?
After he was commissioned an officer in the Navy, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the C.I.A. The hand of James Phinney Baxter was clearly at work here. Baxter had taken a leave from the Williams presidency to head the research and analysis division of the OSS. That’s where Sawyer ended up. Serving during the war in Algeria and later in Paris, he gained a reputation as an exceptionally able administrator. He oversaw the work of about ninety subordinates, many of whom were considerably older than he.
When Jack Sawyer sat down at his desk in Hopkins Hall in July 1961 there was waiting for him a message from a group of students that would define his presidency and change Williams profoundly. The message was in the form of a petition that President Baxter had received less than a month before Sawyer arrived. Naturally, Baxter left it to Sawyer to respond to the signers of the petition. The petition asked the president and trustees to form a committee to look seriously at alternatives to the fraternity system, accompanied by the warning that if the president and trustees failed to act the forty-five signers of the petition were prepared to resign from their fraternities and demand that the college provide them living and dining accommodations. The signers of the petition comprised an impressive list of student leaders, leaders who could command a large following. The organizer of the petition effort was Bruce Grinnell (class of 1962), who was president of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a JA, a member of Gargoyle, and co-captain and quarterback of the football team. The Grinnell petition was only the latest of many expressions of discontent with the fraternity system that had beset the Baxter administration, beginning just after the end of World War II and the arrival on campus of hundreds of war veterans. President Baxter was a loyal Kappa Alpha and a staunch defender of fraternities. His health was poor, and he and the trustees were undoubtedly and justifiably worried about the cost implications of taking radical steps in resolving the issues regarding fraternities. It was beyond their imagination that the fraternity corporations would agree to turn their houses over to the college without demanding payment. It was no surprise, then, that President Baxter and the trustees had sternly resisted calls for fraternity membership to be determined by lottery, and they rejected as unrealistic one student committee’s demand that the college take over the fifteen fraternity houses and use them as dormitories to which students would be randomly assigned. The trustees did eventually agree to the recommendation that rushing be deferred to sophomore year, and Baxter Hall was built to provide dining accommodations for freshmen and non-fraternity upperclassmen. Members of the Garfield Club perceived the construction of Baxter Hall as designed to perpetuate the fraternity system. Refusing to be implicit accomplices in such a design, the Garfield Club members disbanded their organization.
The most vigorous post-war effort to eliminate fraternities, or at least to require them to admit anyone who wished to join, came just as the enrollment bulge of war veterans was ending. Andrew Heineman ’50, president of the Garfield Club and also head of the student government, was perhaps the most influential student opponent of the fraternity system during that era. He continued to be active in that effort when he was appointed a member of the Sterling Committee after he had left Williams to enroll at the Yale Law School. He remembers that Jack Sawyer, by then a member of the Yale faculty, was among the numerous Williams-connected members of the Yale community who encouraged him in his work to end the hurtful practices of fraternities.
Eventually, in 1957, there was grudging acceptance of the proposal (called total opportunity) that students who wanted to be fraternity members but got left out in the bidding process would be parceled out among the fraternities (a process known as the “turkey shoot” in fraternity circles). All of these intended reforms, as with those that President Garfield initiated, served only to exacerbate the fraternity problem, and further offend and agitate students who were rejected in the bidding process. The Grinnell group illustrated that a growing number of fraternity members, in addition to non-affiliates, were challenging the inequities and questionable values that were inherent in the system.
As a brand new president, Jack Sawyer could have finessed the issue and bought time. Instead, he viewed the Grinnell petition as a strategic opportunity, and he decided to seize the moment to deal decisively with a problem that he saw as a great liability for Williams. His fellow trustees knew that Sawyer disagreed with Baxter’s resistance to facing the reality that fraternities had become a serious problem. That disagreement was at the root of the growing coolness in their relationship. Jack Sawyer had been president of his fraternity, Zeta Psi, as had his brother and his father. That background provided him great credibility in dealing with the problem.
Sawyer promptly called in Bruce Grinnell and told him that he was appointing a committee with essentially the composition that Bruce’s group had demanded, and that he wanted Bruce as one of the members. Shortly after Sawyer took office, a Yale colleague told a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle that the new president of Williams would not “shake up” Mount Greylock or “rustle the ivy” on Lawrence Hall. Many who thought they knew Sawyer would have agreed with this perception. Little time passed before events showed how thoroughly wrong they were.
Jay Angevine of the board of trustees chaired the committee that Sawyer very carefully put together. The committee issued no progress reports during the approximately nine months of its existence. The faculty heard nothing about its work from the president or the faculty representatives on the committee. Sawyer never met with the committee, and both he and Jay Angevine reported that they spoke about the committee’s work only once. Those who served on the committee later reported that there was no sense that Sawyer was trying to steer the committee to a particular conclusion. Still, it should be noted that the four trustees on the committee were almost certainly aware of Sawyer’s view of fraternities as a negative force in the life of Williams.
The committee submitted its report to the trustees in May 1962. The heart of the report was the recommendation that the college assume responsibility for providing housing, dining, and social facilities for all students. The report did not call for the abolition of fraternities, although it obviously left little for them to do. The trustees did not formally adopt the recommendations of the report. It simply received the report. Implicit in that action, however, was the understanding that as soon as feasible the college would undertake the role outlined in the report. The final faculty meeting of the year, commencement, and reunions came and went with no mention of the revolutionary changes that were impending. During the quiet summer months, the dramatic news was bundled and buried in the midst of other announcements, one of which was the end of required chapel. When students and alumni woke up to what had happened and was about to happen, all hell broke loose. Alumni groups formed with the purpose of trying to reverse or delay the implementation of the report, discourage fraternity corporations from turning over their houses to the college, and urging a boycott of the alumni fund and other giving to Williams. About eighty percent of student fraternity members declared their opposition to the new residential life plans. There were ugly student demonstrations directed against Jack Sawyer, and insulting messages were painted on the President’s House. There were hostile and noisy scenes when Jack spoke at some regional alumni meetings. At a dinner in Los Angeles he fainted. He did not like conflict and confrontation, and he was not one to engage in loud public debates on contentious matters. Increasingly, trustees took on more of the task of going out to explain to alumni the meaning and purpose of the impending changes. I was among faculty members who met with alumni groups both on and off the campus. Meanwhile, Jack was careful to line up support among student leaders. He met with the College Council, the editors of the Williams Record, Gargoyle. Soon there were formal expressions of support for the new order from those groups. His strategy was to get the opinion leaders in his corner, because he knew that they had constituencies that would tend to line up behind them. Jack was aware that the faculty would overwhelmingly support the changes. Thus he concentrated on students and alumni. The 1962-63 academic year was especially tumultuous. During reunion weekend in 1963 there were encouraging signs of growing support for the actions of the president and trustees. The alumni fund met its goal, and that was a blow to the most ardent critics of the changes in the residential system. (Years later, Jack Sawyer revealed that he had arranged with some of the trustees to make up for any shortfall in the alumni fund drive!)
It is remarkable that fourteen of the fifteen fraternities eventually turned over their houses to the college, and the college did not pay a cent for them. The Phi Gam corporation sold its house to the Town of Williamstown to be used as a town hall. The Kappa Alpha house burned down in January 1968. Although the college assumed some outstanding mortgages, it also received substantial endowments from some fraternities. By 1968, only six fraternities still held meetings, and less than 10% of upper-class students were members. At that point the trustees, at Jack’s urging, ruled that fraternities had to cease all activities.
What about the residential house system that replaced the fraternities? Some features, such as the faculty and alumni fellows, never developed satisfactorily. Although I was gone by then, I judge that eventually the system of random assignment was substantially broken by the mid-nineties. The original house system was modeled to a degree on the Harvard house plan and the Yale college system. Still, the financial investment that Williams made in creating its residential house system was modest enough that it was a rather pale imitation of the Harvard and Yale systems. The amount of new construction entailed by the end of fraternities and the influx of eight hundred new students required a very substantial investment. Moreover, money became harder to raise after the end of the economic boom period of about 1961-1968. Mission Park, which was built in 1971, just two years before Jack retired, illustrates the problem. The bids came in well over budget, and the project had to be substantially curtailed. This resulted in far less satisfactory living and dining facilities than what was originally envisioned for Mission Park.
I’m not sure I understand the neighborhood cluster residential system that is now in effect, but I judge from what I hear and read that there is a lot of dissatisfaction with it. Just two observations. One is that the Paresky Center is the Grand Central Station of the Williams campus. It seems to work very well as a campus mixing bowl. I just wish it were larger. The second is that we are rapidly approaching the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Jack Sawyer presidential era. The central question now would seem to be whether the Sawyer residential housing template is still relevant or whether a new template is needed. Whatever the future brings in the way of decisions regarding student residential organization, it is my fervent conviction that the residential arrangements should facilitate and encourage the kind of mixing and association that will enable students to benefit from the rich diversity represented by the Williams student body.
Now it’s time to move on to coeducation as a second large component of the Sawyer revolution. In 1992, three years before his death, Jack gave a taped interview in which he said that he came to Williams as president with two big goals in mind: the elimination of fraternities, and the admission of women. Having participated in the early discussions and planning for the admission of women, I’d have to say that it didn’t feel that way to me at that time. Still, Jack was a very canny guy, and it is not unlikely that he had the admission of women in the back of his mind. Working for and with Jack was very demanding. It was also great fun. Part of the fun was constantly discovering that just when you thought you were at the last layer of the onion (the onion being what Jack was inwardly thinking and planning), you discovered that there were more layers. Jack often commented to his closest associates that being a successful college president required a combination of “high principle and low cunning.” He was a man of high principle, and he was cunning. It was low cunning only in the sense that he knew how to operate under the radar, but never in the sense that he was being underhanded.
When Jack undertook the initiative on fraternities, many of us assumed—and I think Jack also assumed—that other colleges with something of the same problem would follow the Williams lead. That folIowing was very slow in developing–generally on the order of twenty-five to thirty years–and numerous colleges still have fraternities and the attendant problems. The story was very different with respect to the admission of women. Williams was part of a sizeable parade of all-male colleges that began to admit women at about the same time. It was also the case that as early as 1872 the Williams Society of Alumni debated the question of whether to admit women. Always out front, John Bascom led the effort with the argument that women were as entitled as men to a college education and that Williams had plenty of room for them.
When Joe Kershaw came to Williams in 1963 as the first provost he immediately set to work on plans for expanding the college from about 1200 to 1800 students. Jack’s premise was that a larger college would afford students a wider variety of course offerings and that there would be economies of scale, particularly in administrative costs. Only later did there arise the argument that it would be better to add 600 women rather than 600 men students. That argument as originally presented was based largely on economic considerations. An important component of the economic argument was the assumption that women would enroll disproportionately in under-enrolled courses such as foreign languages and the arts. Although understandable in the context of the times, that assumption later proved to be false. Another argument—and one that now comes across as embarrassing–was that the presence of women would have a civilizing and refining influence on the male students and provide them with a more attractive social environment.
The operating planning assumption for the admission of women until quite late in the process was that there would be a coordinate college for women. As a kind of inside joke, the code name for the coordinate institution was Mary College. We looked at Denison Park as a possible campus, and the plan was to create a corridor between the two campuses through Grace Court, behind the Science Quad. A few years after Williams acquired Mount Hope Farm in November 1963 that possible site for a coordinate college received a lot of attention. There was a secretive meeting at Mount Hope with a delegation from Vassar, with the thought that Vassar might be lured away from Poughkeepsie and enter into a partnership with Williams. The Vassar folks ended that courtship before it could get started, and they also let Yale know that they weren’t interested in moving to New Haven. Although the official name of the Williams Committee that planned the admission of women was the “Committee on Coordinate Education and Related Matters” to the very end of its work, consideration of the coordinate model was dropped after the appearance of an excellent study that Princeton published in September 1968 in which the argument was that the coordinate model was outmoded and that coeducation made sense on all counts. The College Council had its own committee on the admission of women, and it had already adopted the position that coeducation was the route to take. When the official college committee issued its final report in the spring of 1969, Williams was ready to take another bold, transforming step under Jack Sawyer’s leadership. The college enrollment would be increased by 50%.
The report stated that the male enrollment would not be reduced, and Jack had given this assurance in speeches to alumni groups. This commitment would very soon create awkwardness because Williams immediately became a popular choice for strong women students. We were locked into a de facto quota for women. Princeton, Yale, Trinity, and other places had fallen into the same trap. By then I had succeeded Jack, and this became my problem. In 1975 a faculty-student committee on college expansion underscored the problem, but stopped short of recommending a sex-blind admissions policy. Joe Kershaw, the chair of the committee–and I think the other members as well–knew where I wanted the committee to go with the issue. I wanted a report that would set the stage for moving to a sex-blind policy without announcing that intention. To do otherwise would have been embarrassing to Jack and would likely have stirred up new problems with a few alumni who were still fighting the fraternity fight and were in a mood to test the new president with threats of law suits. With the full understanding and cooperation of the trustees, the enrollment ceiling was quietly lifted from 1800 to 2000, the ceiling on the number of women was removed, and slowly the number of male students dropped below 1200. The football team continued to beat Amherst frequently enough. And alumni were just as happy to see their daughters attend Williams as their sons.
The move to coeducation was a cake-walk compared with the abolition of fraternities. In his characteristic way, Jack Sawyer had left nothing to chance. A vanguard of exchange students, and another vanguard of transfer students brought the first women students to Williams. They taught Williams how to do it right, as did Dean Nancy McIntire, who brought valuable advice from her experience as a Radcliffe administrator. And a young provost, Steve Lewis, brought wonderful sensitivity and the necessary economic analytical expertise to the grand project.
The Williams faculty was united and enthusiastic every step of the way towards the abolition of fraternities and the admission of women. It was a different story with the curricular reforms that Jack Sawyer brought about.
In late 1961 or early 1962 the new president called me in to say that the Danforth Foundation had invited Williams to send a four-person faculty delegation to a three-week summertime conference in Colorado Springs. The conference was to look at curricular trends and consider reforms. Each team was to work together on issues at its own institution and also join with delegations from other institutions in deliberating some issues. At that time the Danforth Foundation was doing the most creative work of any foundation in addressing issues in liberal education. Jack told me he wanted me to attend the conference, and he asked my advice about others who might attend. After we returned from the conference, he announced the appointment of an ad hoc committee to study the Williams curriculum and recommend changes. The curriculum that President Garfield had brought about in 1910-11 had served Williams admirably, but the development of new fields of study and advances in knowledge and scholarship generally were putting strains on the Garfield structure. Jack appointed some of us from the Colorado gathering to the new committee.
Near the end of the 1962-63 academic year the committee was badly divided. The majority favored a curricular scheme that we named the 4-2-4. I was in the minority. In the curriculum that would be replaced, the standard course load for students was five courses a semester, except for the senior year, when there were four courses, with one of them a double-credit capstone major course. The proposed new scheme would keep the ten-course yearly class load, but they would be distributed over two shortened semesters and a six-week short term in the middle where students would take two courses. I thought the new proposal was a bad idea and predicted that it would not last long before we would be back at the drawing board. I was sympathetic to the complaints from science departments in particular about the significant shortening of the regular semesters. And it was not clear to those in the minority as to just how the short term was to be used.
Jack invited the committee to meet at the President’s House. With him was Joe Kershaw, who had just been named to the new office of Provost. He had come from the Rand Corporation, where he was the chief economist. Although Joe and I soon became good friends and close colleagues, what happened that evening did not portend this development. The meeting was a tense and difficult session. We were so agitated that we held the meeting standing up. Jack said hardly a word. Joe took over. He began to work me over for not supporting the proposal. This was painful and awkward for me. I decided to hold my ground. I couldn’t say I thought the proposal was a good idea. At the same time I wondered if I had become an obstacle to what the President wanted. But Jack was silent as the Sphinx, and I got no clue from his body language as to what he believed or wanted. For a couple of miserable days I wondered what I should do. Then I had a call saying that Jack wanted to see me. He was warm and cordial. It was a short meeting. He said, in effect, “Don’t worry about that meeting. What you did and said was quite all right.” I was enormously relieved. The majority proposal went to the faculty and received a narrow majority vote, but it fell well short of the super-majority of 60% that Jack required by executive order–a parliamentary move that was upsetting to many. The committee was duly thanked and dismissed. Jack appointed another ad hoc committee. I happily departed on a sabbatical leave, glad to get out of the fray for a while.
Soon I was hearing reports that the new committee was foundering. That committee focused on a 4-1-4 scheme that would shorten the interim term to about four weeks and keep the two semesters closer in length to the semesters in the old curriculum. One of the provisions was to drop the two-year foreign language requirement, a measure that the language departments fought. Many scientists were still unhappy about shortening the regular semesters. There was considerable disagreement about appropriate courses for the short winter term. Another academic year was about to end and the committee was not close to consensus. Jack called me in and told me that he was going to appoint still another ad hoc committee, and that he wanted me to chair it. The faculty in general was badly split over the curricular issues, and he was clearly worried over the lack of progress and the toll on morale and faculty relationships. I agreed to chair the committee, and I was determined that we would deliver. I admired him tremendously, and it was time to get past this obstacle to the general progress of the college Meanwhile, I had already agreed to fill in as Provost while Joe went on leave. There lay ahead of me one of the most demanding and fulfilling years of my life. The faculty adopted without any dissenting votes the new curriculum that went into effect in 1967-68, and which remains the basic curricular structure.
During the year that I chaired the ad hoc committee I was with Jack Sawyer virtually every day. And yet, I don’t remember that we ever talked about what was going on in the committee. He never met with the committee. He didn’t even appear to be curious. Then I understood better that difficult evening at the President’s House and how the Angevine Committee had functioned with regard to the fraternity issue. His style was very different from Harry Garfield’s, and yet both men proved to be highly effective leaders.
Still, in some curricular matters, and on many other matters, Jack was just as direct and just as personally involved as Garfield. He saw the general structure of the curriculum as faculty business. On the other hand, he directly initiated the establishment of the Environmental Studies Program, and Williams became a pioneer in that field. He made it clear that Williams needed to have a more international curriculum and suggested specific measures whereby various departments could contribute toward that end. Eventually, he led in creating the Area Studies program. He brought particular candidates forward for appointment to the faculty, candidates who, he believed, had the potential to make special contributions to the education of students.
When one looks at Jack Sawyer in the larger context of other great educational leaders, he can be compared in some ways with Woodrow Wilson at Princeton some sixty years earlier. Wilson, too, was a revolutionary leader. Wilson did more than any other Princeton president to make that institution a great university. He doubled the number of faculty, and he had a superb eye for academic talent. Harry Garfield was one of his faculty picks. He transformed a loose, aimless elective curriculum into a rigorous, coherent plan with a focus on general studies in the first two years and a demanding major program in the final two years. And yet, unlike Jack Sawyer, he was forced out of office with his revolution unfinished. Princeton still has its eating clubs that were an affront to Wilson’s democratic sensibilities. In the final analysis, he was not able to maintain a solid front of trustee support. Loss of faculty or trustee support is usually fatal to a president. Both Wilson and Sawyer had solid faculty support. Sawyer worked imaginatively and creatively to assure that he had the necessary alumni support. Wilson, despite his great popularity as a teacher, was not able to withstand the coalition of alumni and dissident trustees who were determined to defeat his dreams and plans for a different residential system. Wilson was also the victim of a dean of the graduate school who had his own power base among trustees and alumni. Studies of Wilson as President of the United States frequently point to his rigidity, his craving for credit, his sense of destiny, and his inability to compromise as root causes of his disappointments and defeats. Without judging the soundness of this analysis of his failings on the national and international stages, and while acknowledging that my knowledge of his Princeton experience is too limited to conclude that such shortcomings contributed to his failures there, I can confidently affirm that Jack Sawyer had no such hang-ups. Granted that Williams and Princeton were two very different institutions, and that the two men functioned in different eras and environments, it is difficult to imagine that a college officer with his own agenda and ambitions would have outflanked Jack. He was strategically brilliant, and he was more effective than anyone I’ve known at making an advantage out of bad news or unfavorable developments. He did his homework very carefully. He was meticulously careful and deliberate about process. He left nothing to chance. He lined up the necessary support of the leadership of the major constituencies. As openings occurred on the board of trustees, he brought onto the board distinguished and powerful candidates with independent minds and distinguished records of accomplishment. Many of them had not been particularly active in Williams affairs before Sawyer tapped them. I think of such figures as attorney John Lockwood, Harding Bancroft of the New York Times, Governor Jake Driscoll of New Jersey, Van Alan Clark, Pete Parish, Wayne Wilkins. It interested me that the board that Jack assembled included what seemed to me an inordinate number of lawyers. He pointed out that lawyers tend to be very good at process and that they are usually careful and deliberate about making big changes. When they see a particular innovation as justified, he pointed out, that’s a good sign that others will be persuaded to follow. Jack was one of a kind. We all stand forever in his debt.
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