The Professor From the Cast-Iron Shore

This month I’m blogging about a book a quarter of which I don’t much understand. There’s my effort at transparency, a theme that will briefly return. A lot more of the book, however, I understand very well, and furthermore, I like and admire the author. So I’m going to praise what I can of it and admit what parts fly over my head.

 The book is From the Cast-Iron Shore: In Lifelong Pursuit of Liberal Learning, by Dr. Francis (Frank) Oakley. He was my history professor when I was a sophomore at Williams College in 1964. Later he was named 13^thpresident of the college, serving between 1985 and 1993. His book lies somewhere between autobiography and memoir, far-ranging in scope, chronological in organization. In it I learned a great deal about my old history teacher, and a great deal else besides. And then there was that material flying over my head.

Mr. Oakley – for so I always think of him – was the son of Irish immigrants to Liverpool. I didn’t originally realize where he came from, though I should have, for there’s a faint Beatle echo in his speech. Nearly eight when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he writes of being home-schooled by his mother when the schools closed. During civil-defense exercises he played the role of an injured civilian for transport practice, once being marked “DEAD.” It was exciting: “a most satisfactory and enjoyable day.”

After the war he received a Junior Life Scholarship to St. Francis Xavier College, a Jesuit preparatory school, and eventually won a Senior City Scholarship to Oxford, arriving at Corpus Christi College. He spent summers in Ireland with relatives at a small village called Lissananny. In a flash-forward he describes returning to Oxford in 1985 – as the newly installed Williams president – to set up an “Oxford experience” for Williams students, in connection with Exeter College.

Mr. Oakley clearly loved his undergraduate years at Corpus, reading and thinking about the conjunction of history and philosophy, on his own, for at that time there was no course of study for such interdisciplinary work. While at Oxford he participated in theater (Eliot’s Murder at the Cathedral was a whopping success), played the violin, and ran cross-country. He met and befriended the young Vidia (V.S.) Naipaul. Eventually, after “vivas” (orals) he received First Class Honours in medieval history. So this was my history professor!

Now I must confess something a bit shameful. Someone once told me that Catherine the Great had died in a Pasiphae-like accident. Pasiphae was the mother of the Minotaur, who, driven crazy by Zeus, had, with the assistance of the inventor Daedalus, been impregnated by a bull. I was told that in Russia a crane holding a bull had slipped, crushing the lustful Catherine flat beneath it. Disingenuously, I simply asked Mr. Oakley how Catherine died, but he replied he did not know. I did not explain why I was asking.

As the Cast-Iron Shore continues, there is a good deal about historical philosophy, specifically the work of a medieval cleric and scholar, Pierre d’Ailly (1350-1420), the subject of Mr. Oakley’s thesis. After Oxford, he spent two years on a fellowship in Toronto, where he became friends with Marshall McLuhan, and in the summer worked in the Weidner Library at Harvard in Cambridge. I fear I mostly turned the pages about the research (virtually, for I was reading on a Kindle; more on this later), but honestly much of the time I was simply looking up at the philosophical material floating high above me.

He then returned to England for his required military service, two years in the Signal Corps. This account reminded me of several novels, most vividly the third trilogy of Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, when the narrator Nick Jenkins, a writer, joins the army during the War. Of course, by this time the War was well over for Mr. Oakley, but the army is, War or no, the army.

After his military service and a couple years in New Haven, he came to Williamstown, where he settled for good. While in Toronto, he had met a lovely young woman, Claire-Ann Lamenzo, who came to England while he was in the army.  They married during his time at Yale. He had been only two years at Williams when he ran into me, an experience he easily survived. I may not have been a memorable student, but I enjoyed his class thoroughly.  However, he mentions dealing with two major challenges during his first decade at the college, and the first was one I was also part of the problem: fraternities.

By the time I got to Williams, in the fall of 1962, seismic upheavals in the school’s curricular and social fabric were rumbling. Historically, 1100 men, most of them white, living in reactionary Greek-lettered institutions, had followed a heavily sequenced, department-based curriculum. There were few interdisciplinary options. Not many faculty members were excited about changing this academic structure, and the fraternities were dead set against reorganizing the social system. A trustee committee headed by Jay Angevine, class of ’11, was working on a set of recommendations concerning these issues – most visibly from our callow perspectives the dissolution of fraternities.

[I have written in an earlier blog about my own fraternity experiences.  Anyone who wishes to know why the Angevine Committee might have been distressed at the fraternity culture would do well to read it: http://www.johnagould.com/fraternity-in-the-woods/.]

The new president, Jack Sawyer, had been tasked with implementing these changes, and Mr. Oakley, whose talents were almost immediately apparent to everyone, began serving on committees to assist in the task. Lying beyond these efforts were plans to rebalance the ethnic and socio-economic mix of the student body and to turn Williams into a coeducational institution. Having spent four years at Williams and having taught at residential secondary schools, both single-sex and coed, for more than thirty years, I have to confess that to me President Sawyer’s task seems Herculean; in some ways, much as I was glad to be a student at Williams, I am reminded of the hero’s labor of cleaning the Aegean stables. Still within ten years, the tasks were accomplished – not without blood, sweat, and tears, as the rock band would have it. Mr. Oakley credits President Sawyer with modeling “the crucial role of the leader in defining and proclaiming in a day-in-day-out basis the institution’s role and mission.”

The other challenge he mentions has less to do with the school directly, but a lot to do with the social climate of the ‘60’s. Pope John XXIII began the housecleaning of the Second Vatican Council in 1959; after John’s death in 1963, it was finished, however reluctantly, by Paul VI, in 1965. As it proceeded, Mr. Oakley saw the changes it created pertaining directly to the history of political thought. He was, after all, the Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of ideas. (Incidentally, in his discussion I learned there was a first John XXIII ((1400-1415)), Antipope of the Pisan party, who appeared in the midst of a great deal of papal wrangling: www.newadvent.org/cathen/08434a.htm.)

The overturning of long-standing traditions and the pressures for transparency (a concept mentioned at the start), as the Church strove towards liberalism, were important to Mr. Oakley as a liberal, life-long Catholic; and the parallels to what was happening in Williamstown are hard to miss. In a book composed in “passion and in white heat,” Council Over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology, he essentially took on the conservatives, using history as the basis of his argument, but when Paul VI began to retrench, it became clear that liberalism was, for the nonce, a non-starter, and Mr. Oakley grew disillusioned. “I was led, however uneasily, … to abandon the anxious preoccupation with certitude … so deeply rooted in the Catholic temperament.” In consequence, he began to “focus more exclusively on the college,” where more positive contributions towards change and transparency seemed possible.

From the Cast-Iron Shore moves over the rest of the 1970’s to 1985 in three chapters, covering “Teaching and Research,” “Matters of Governance,” and “The Administrative Turn,” all of which lay the groundwork for his presidential term. A year of research in England eventually resulted in lectures and books. Mr. Oakley has long been interested in the “publish or perish” debate, concluding that those who research and publish are every bit as likely to be good teachers as those who don’t. Perhaps better. In “Governance” he describes serving on a number of committees, including the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, clearly a big deal, and on the presidential search committee after in 1972 Jack Sawyer announced his decision to retire. The final chapter in this trilogy – “Administrative Turn” – covers his appointment as dean of faculty when John Chandler was named president. As the college and the times changed, he found himself dealing with diversifying the largely male, white faculty, with curricular development, and with student activism. (Remember all those protests and student occupation of buildings?)

The above chapters point out, first, the various competencies that the governance of Williams required, and secondly, the ways in which Mr. Oakley was – without knowing it – being prepared to become president of this venerable institution.

So in 1985 he took the reins. The next three chapters deal with the big job itself, describing it carefully, outlining its nature and range, naming its challenges. Fellow faculty members at the prep school where I taught – older and not much smaller or poorer than Williams – used to suggest that the primary function of a school head was to spearhead money-raising efforts; and although that is indeed one aspect of the job, any residential school has many more: managing a complex physical plant, developing curriculum, interacting with trustees and alumni, coordinating faculty (a.k.a. herding cats), and dealing with students (a.k.a. herding younger cats).  (The parentheticals are mine, not Mr. Oakley’s.) He refers to “organized anarchies.”

Much of his work involved bureaucratic organization. Faced with choosing a new secretary, he picked Julie Peterson, who had been his administrative assistant while dean of faculty.  Other appointments included a new director for the Oxford program and new administrators in the development office. He also recruited a vice president, long-time faculty member Hodge Margraf.  Mr. Oakley had been made president with the understanding that he would remain through 1993 – the College’s bicentennial, and the conclusion of a major capital campaign. (So, yes, spearheading money-raising was certainly part of the deal!) I found it all fascinating: following the process of setting up the college machine to function in a well-oiled fashion.

The book’s penultimate chapter, and one of its most interesting, is “Presidential Years (iii): Principal Challenges Confronted.” As an alumnus and a long-tenured class secretary, I had kept my eye on what was happening at Williams, but I recognize I had no real sense of what the issues actually were.

Some challenges were expected, as the afore-mentioned Third Century Capital Campaign. Others came out of nowhere. For example, because of code issues, the Williamstown building inspector began closing Hopkins Hall, the administration building, for classroom instruction. (I remember having classes in Hopkins.) Another challenge was presented by the Department of Justice concerning setting salaries and tuition and awarding financial aid. This issue essentially reflected the national conservative assault on affirmative action.

As Williams stepped up the recruitment of minority students, there were – as all over the country – rising tensions about the size and diversity of the faculty and the student body.  And there were calls for endowment divestment of corporations with South African interests.

A final horror occurred when, after the death of a popular Black female student, racist messages were posted outside Rice House, the building that housed the Williams Black Student Union. The perpetrator eventually turned himself in – saying he had wanted to “stimulate ‘intellectual discussion’ of racism” – and was disciplined. Lawyers got involved, but finally the issue was more or less resolved.

There were other events, of course. There always are. But what emerges for me is that Mr. Oakley, before becoming an administrator, was a scholar and a teacher. These roles permeate his book, and they provide the critical aspects of his entire career: both thought and instruction. These two inform all really good administrations. (I can’t resist: both of these elements are so sorely missing in our present national debate.)

Enough. Every graduate of Williams should read From the Cast-Iron Shore, and so should anyone else who is interested in how university-level education ought to work. Oh, and by the way, I apologize for the lack of footnotes in this piece, but I used the Kindle edition. No page numbers. Why Kindle? I discovered on line that the hardback, from the University of Notre Dame Press, would cost $150, which seemed a bit steep.  I’ve since learned that there’s a paperback edition for $35 – worth every penny.