An Adventure in Education

The College of Wooster from Howard Lowry to the Twenty-First Century

Jerrold K. Footlick

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631011849
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Wooster: From the Middle West to the world

The College of Wooster was a proud but modest college for much of its life, exemplified by the titles of the first two volumes of its history, Wooster of the Middle West. In 1944, a Wooster alumnus named Howard Lowry became president and created the Independent Study (I.S.) program, distinguishing Wooster from other quality liberal arts colleges nationwide. I.S. was and is much more than a capstone research project for seniors; the heavy responsibility of mentoring undergraduate research was offset for faculty by university-level research leave, guaranteeing Wooster a faculty of true teacher-scholars.

This third volume of Wooster's history begins with Lowry's arrival during World War II, when Navy V-5 cadets were almost the only males on campus. At war's end, a cadre of veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill arrived, young men tougher and worldlier than Wooster's traditional students, and the demographics changed. Typical for universities at the time, Wooster students followed the rules in the moderate '50s, before the '60s unsettled this and many other campuses. Dramatic blows struck in 1967, when the elegant 66-year-old bachelor president suffered a fatal heart attack in the San Francisco apartment of his 27-year-old woman friend, leaving a college shocked both by his death and by financial strains that few knew about until then.

Wooster's next decade was rocky and cautiously traversed. One antidote for the financial crisis was expansion of the student body, which grew revenue but lowered academic standards and frustrated an overworked faculty. In 1977, Henry Copeland, a 41-year-old historian, was the surprising choice for president, and his term marked a double triumph: restoring the College's academic integrity and raising endowment from $15 million to more than $150 million in little more than a decade. Roads to success are rarely smooth—a failed presidential search following Copeland's retirement embarrassed the College—but the Wooster family proved too solid and too dedicated to stumble for long.

As An Adventure in Education brings Wooster into the twenty-first century, it finds a picture-book campus with extraordinary new facilities, national recognition for both I.S. and the quality of its teaching, a student body diverse in terms domestic and international, and a striking confidence and ambition that might have surprised even Howard Lowry. How the college got from there to here is a tale instructive for anyone concerned with American higher education.

PART 1

The Lowry Years

CHAPTER 1

A Visionary Arrives

We have never assumed here that a senior with a diploma is an educated man. Who, indeed, ever is? He is a potentially educated man, who knows how to continue his education to the very end of his life.

HOWARD LOWRY

Baccalaureate, June 4, 1967

This story begins with Howard Lowry—how could it not begin with Howard Lowry, who brought to The College of Wooster the academic standard that for nearly three-quarters of a century has distinguished it from other outstanding liberal arts colleges; the scholar admired and honored on both sides of the Atlantic; the orator with a baritone so mellifluous that his lectures sounded operatic; the nineteenth-century Romantic who cherished the company of attractive young women yet somehow could not bring himself to marry one; the stalwart campus leader who, as his intellect and very life ebbed in the mid-1960s, appeared perplexed by a new generation of students unappreciative of the stability offered by Wooster’s religious history and traditional calm.

Let us start with the story of how Lowry was almost accidentally offered the presidency of the College, third choice of a frustrated Board of Trustees to follow Prexy Wishart’s twenty-five year reign.

Charles F. Wishart, a Presbyterian minister from Chicago who came to The College of Wooster as president in 1919 and led it through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression and into World War II, had announced that he would give up his position on July 1, 1944. Small in stature and cherubic in mien, Wishart had earned the fond soubriquet “Prexy,” but he was no soft touch. In 1923, barely into his presidency, this unheralded leader of a small college in Ohio stood as the progressive candidate for moderator of the Presbyterian Church USA and defeated the fundamentalist legend William Jennings Bryan in the most bitterly contested election the church had ever known.

Now he was going, but the committee charged with choosing his successor, led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, Wooster alumnus Carl V. Weygandt, felt confident about its task. It was as if a puff of white smoke had floated instantly through the ceiling of the meeting room; committee members had only to turn to their own leader, the chairman of the College’s Board of Trustees, for a new president. He was Arthur Holly Compton, a scion of the most notable family Wooster had ever produced. Compton’s father, Elias, had been a professor of philosophy and dean of the College for thirty-two years and his mother, Otelia, its de facto First Lady, presiding from their modest frame Victorian on College Avenue, a gathering place for faculty and students and every important person who ever came to Wooster. One Compton son would go on to become president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; another would become president of Washington State University, and the only daughter, “the smartest of the bunch,” a family member said, would marry a university president.

Arthur Compton was then a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. But he was already internationally renowned, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics, at the age of thirty-five, for his demonstration of the particle concept of electromagnetic radiation, what is known to this day as the Compton effect. Who better to lead his alma mater? Yet when his friend Carl Weygandt approached him, Compton seemed oddly reluctant. He was flattered and honored, but it was not a good time; he was working on a project that could not be interrupted.

What Compton could not tell the Wooster suitors—just as he could not even tell Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of his own university—was that this was an element of the Manhattan Project. In a row of onetime squash courts, under the grandstand of Stagg Field, essentially abandoned since the university abandoned intercollegiate football, Compton and his closest colleague, the Italian immigrant physicist Enrico Fermi, had created a plutonium chain reaction that could trigger an atomic bomb, which, if their experiment had gone awry, might have destroyed not only the Hyde Park campus but most of the South Side of Chicago. When the reaction was touched off and proved successful, Compton could call chemist James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University and chairman of a secret committee designated to explore the possibilities of wartime use of nuclear fission, and inform him, in the famous coded words, “Our Italian navigator has just landed in the new world.” Conant would reply, “Were the natives friendly?” and Compton: “Everyone landed safe and happy.” This accomplishment led to the hurried construction of Oak Ridge, an entire new city in the Cumberland mountains of East Tennessee, to house a production facility that Compton left Chicago to oversee.

None of that would be known to the world, however, until August 6, 1945, and the Wooster trustees had to look elsewhere. After sorting through nearly a hundred possibilities, they soon settled on a second choice, John Bruere, a Presbyterian minister who had been the activist, quick-witted dean of men at the College for six years. Now, fairly near Wishart’s retirement date, word leaked that Bruere was the choice, and several faculty leaders confronted trustee chairman Compton at the family home on College Avenue. If Bruere were to become president, they suggested, he could be met by a faculty rebellion. The trustees agonized, finally backed off—and Bruere, learning the harsh news, instantly resigned. (He soon accepted a pastorate in inner-city Cleveland, where he served admirably for more than two decades.)

Having swung and missed twice, the trustees were cautious. One question particularly troubled them. The College of Wooster was owned by the Presbyterian Church, and each of its six presidents had been a Presbyterian clergyman. Wishart thought his successor should be as well, a spiritual leader and fund-raiser for the campus, leaving to a dean the primary academic responsibilities. That’s how Wishart was remembered by one of his admirers, Bill Kieffer, the eminent chemist who taught at Wooster for nearly four decades. As an undergraduate, Kieffer had been, in his own word, a “handyman” for the Wishart family, raking leaves, serving dinner, standing as a butler at social events. “Prexy Wishart was primarily a pastor,” Kieffer said. “He was great at preaching sermons and was really a wonderful fellow. But he was just not an academic.” Several board members, including some clergymen, also questioned Wishart’s view of the presidency. During the discussion, Lowry, a former faculty member at Wooster who had become a trustee when he left to join the English department at Princeton University, offered his opinion: “My leaning would be an educator. What I distrust is the feeling that the only spiritual leadership in this country comes from the ministry; for there is a type of person rising on the university campus who, in his quite simple but genuine religious feeling, is going to impress students more than a preacher.”

In fact, Lowry, something of a golden boy at Wooster, had long been thought of as a presidential possibility. As a student, he roomed with the Elias Compton family and was appointed to the English faculty immediately upon his graduation in 1923. In describing a group of young faculty who joined the College during the 1920s, chronicler Lucy Lillian Notestein said: “Of all the others, Howard Lowry was the most brilliant, with a mind that flashed like a lighthouse in the darkness yet with the difference that one couldn’t predict just when or where it would suddenly illumine the mind’s landscape with a phrase or an interpretation; one knew only that moment would come. His classes were an experience to be long remembered.”

While remaining on the Wooster faculty, Lowry earned a PhD at Yale University and built a career as a Matthew Arnold scholar; in 1934 he was appointed general editor of the American arm of the Oxford University Press. Although this opportunity led Lowry to commute frequently by Pennsylvania Railroad between Wooster and New York—the train made regular stops at a now-razed station at the east end of Liberty Street—and occasionally to spend a week or more in the city, the College thought him too valuable to complain about the schedule. In his productive stint with the press, Lowry shepherded scores of manuscripts, among them The Oxford Companion to American Literature and the book he said he would most liked to have written, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s classic text, The Growth of the American Republic. Finally, in 1940, the lure of the East became too strong, and he left Wooster for Princeton.

Although still closely connected to Wooster as a trustee, Lowry had not been formally considered for the presidency, but with the position still open, several professors who were former colleagues weighed in on his side; so did the board chairman, Compton, who was a close personal friend. At a May 12, 1944, Board of Trustees meeting, Weygandt, with perhaps something less than enthusiasm, announced Lowry’s nomination for president.

Howard Foster Lowry was that day two months short of his forty-third birthday. He was tall, dark, and handsome, possessed of a commanding manner and a voice that spellbound audiences old and young. Cosmopolitan, European-traveled, charming in any circle, he was comfortable with men and catnip to women. A lifelong bachelor, Lowry had come close to marrying more than once; his closest romantic relationships may have ended for different reasons, but there appeared to be one constant: his widowed mother, Daisy Lowry, who lived with him in Princeton and moved with him to the president’s home in Wooster, where she remained until her death in 1960.

The campus Howard Lowry took charge of in 1944 was unlike it had ever been in its seventy-eight year history. It was a small college in a small town in the midst of a world war. Less than three months after D-Day, American soldiers had broken free of the hedgerows of Normandy and marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées, while Marines had died by the hundreds on blood-soaked sand and terrifying cliffs to wrest Guam back from the Japanese. The College’s enrollment, more than 1,000 before the war, had dwindled to about 550, civilians, that is—of whom 466 were girls.¹ The few boys were either seventeen-year-olds squeezing in a year of college before military service (Stan Gault, Wooster High School Class of 1943, was among them) or those designated 4-F, rejected by the military for physical reasons, often an embarrassment in those keenly patriotic days.

But upwards of six hundred other students dominated the campus during the 1943–44 academic year, cadets in what was officially known as the Naval Flight Preparatory School, or more popularly, the Navy V-5 program. At the start of the war, the savvy Wishart understood the potential risk to the College’s enrollment and finances; just after Pearl Harbor, he wrote government authorities offering Wooster as a military training site, then went to Washington to lobby the navy. The first V-5 cadets arrived in January 1943, and the navy all but took over the campus in those war years. To provide housing for the cadets, freshmen boys were moved out of Douglas Hall and freshman girls out of Hoover Cottage; other cadets lived and ate in Kenarden Lodge. V-5 used Kauke, Scovel, Taylor, and Severance halls for classes, marching between them in formation, and Severance Gymnasium for exercises. Most of the instructors were Wooster faculty members who retrained to teach outside their field of expertise: among them, geologist Charley Moke in mathematics; biologist Warren Spencer in physics; and an eclectic array of teachers in navigation, including two coaches, L. C. Boles and Johnny Swigart, as well as economist Kingman Eberhart, George Bradford from English, even Dan Parmelee, director of the Wooster Symphony. To further the war effort, a few College faculty members stepped even further outside their fields of expertise: after his classroom day ended, Willy Schreiber, longtime chairman of the German department, went to work at the Bauer Ladder Company; his wife, Clare Adel, remembered that their small sons weren’t impressed with a college professor father but were very proud of their dad working in a war plant.

The navy, of course, paid for what it used, which benefited not only the College but also the city of Wooster, largely through a contract that allowed the College to buy supplies, including food, from local merchants and farmers. (The city contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways: one of its leading industries, Gerstenslager’s, manufactured shell casings for artillery rounds.) But just as important, since this was the closest most of the townsfolk got to participating in the war effort, citizens reveled in events small and large, navy officers playing slow-pitch softball against Wooster businessmen, or the famous Tommy Dorsey performing as part of the nationally broadcast Coca-Cola Spotlight Bands series. Students lined up for hours waiting for the band bus to arrive, then they and a few fortunate townspeople packed Severance Gym into a fire marshal’s nightmare.

V-5 was fundamentally a serious business, young men training to fly Wildcats and Hellcats off aircraft carrier decks. But they were more than ready to have fun during brief hours of liberty. The cadets organized dances in Douglas and the gym—there was usually a major dance as each battalion finished its tour at Wooster—to which they invited girls from the community as well as the campus, and College girls entertained the cadets at dances and mixers. The social events were well chaperoned, to be sure, by officers’ wives and College families, since these boys were not seventeen or 4-F; mostly college age, they were smart enough and sturdy enough to pass stringent recruiting tests and sported the swagger common to fighter pilots. Small wonder that College girls faced parietal restrictions unknown even in older, darker ages on campus—some of which were not removed until years later.

These were bright young kids, though, and they did not always follow rules as strictly as their elders might have liked or even known about. Girls who were on campus then remembered (even some seven decades later) open windows in the back of Holden Hall out of which a few of their number fled for clandestine dates—late-night toboggan rides in winter, strolls near Miller Lake or on the golf course. Although each battalion of V-5 cadets was on campus only for three months, a number of marriages—lasting marriages—grew from these wartime romances. Vivian Douglas, who grew up thirteen miles from Wooster, in the village of Dalton, met a cadet from Iowa named Dave Smith in the fall of 1944; they wrote to each other nearly every day but didn’t see each other again until the next spring. Their marriage, begun not long after war’s end, lasted more than sixty years.

To be clear, the V-5 presence was only part of Wooster students’ experiences during World War II. The class of 1947 lived through some of the most remarkable experiences imaginable. These students spent their last year in high school during the trying early stage of the war, then their first year in college (Lowry’s first year as president) as the tide turned. Each Wednesday morning during the war, at precisely 10:25, the Chapel bell would toll for one full minute, while students paused between classes in respect to Wooster men serving overseas. One of them, leaving for the Marine Corps, wrote in a girl friend’s Index (school yearbook): “If those white buildings are still gleaming in the sunshine on the Hill (I guess you don’t realize that they do gleam until you leave), if those beautiful Elms are still standing on the quadrangle … I’ll somehow be assured that a good life still awaits me there.… Keep pumping the plasma into Wooster. When this thing is over I want to come back to a place that is alive!” The girls did their part for the war effort. They volunteered with the Red Cross and at the local hospital. They made and altered their own clothes and were known to sew a classmate into a gown for a dance, then cut her out of it afterward. Deprived of silk stockings and nylons, they painted their legs tan with liquid cosmetics. They also gained equality, after a fashion: in 1944 the College designated smoking rooms in girls’ dormitories, just like the boys’ dorms.

At the same time, the 1944–45 student handbook informed the girls that “quiet hours” were in force from 8 P.M. until 6 A.M. Sunday through Friday, that they were to be in their dorms by 10 P.M. on weekdays, 10:30 P.M. on Fridays, and 11:30 P.M. on Saturdays. Further, it ordered, “There shall be no motoring whatsoever outside the city limits without permission from the Dean of Women” and stated, “Bumming [hitch-hiking] is forbidden.” A few coed rules were also noted: “In social affairs, young men are expected to conform to the regulations adopted by the Women’s Self-Government Association,” and “It has been the custom of the student body since 1916 to have no dates at football games.” President Lowry’s handbook greeting began, “Inasmuch as you and I are both new at Wooster this fall, I feel a special bond between us.” It could be assumed, however, that he was not subject to the list of “Freshman Rules” contained in the handbook: “Freshmen shall wear their Freshman caps [beanies] until Christmas vacation unless they outpoint the Sophomores in the annual Bag-Rush held the first Saturday of the school year, in which case the caps are discarded at Thanksgiving time.… Freshmen men must tip their caps to all women on the campus.… Freshmen must not walk on the grass of the campus.… Freshmen are required to gather wood for the during football season.… Freshmen are expected to visit upperclassmen as soon as possible and to make friends with them.”

The navy notified the College in the spring of 1944 that it was winding down its flight preparatory program, and by the time the last battalion graduated in October 1944, an estimated four thousand cadets had attended the small college. But in July Wooster became the site for a new preflight program, the Naval Academic Refresher Unit. These cadets were not raw recruits but rather seasoned men from the fleet, plus some Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who were to train as combat pilots. Although its numbers were smaller, the naval presence at the College did not end until February 1946, by which time the trainees were mixing with the earliest batch of returning GIs, newly minted civilians. The College celebrated its military contribution with a Testimonial Dinner at Babcock Hall on February 4, 1946, at which the dozens of faculty members who had taught cadets were honored.

In the meantime, there was a college to attend to. Lowry had spent part of the summer winding down his Princeton affairs while actively setting a team in place. He recruited his old friend Bill Taeusch, an English professor at Western Reserve University, to succeed the retired William Westhafer as dean of the college. Myron Peyton arrived in Spanish and Bill Craig in speech, and Fran Guille, a graduate of the College who had taught off and on, became acting dean of women. (The Index observed that she was one of the best-dressed women on campus and made most of her own clothes.) The year was to have its unpleasantness. The football team, where the roster changed every week as V-5 cadets moved in and out, lost all of its five games, finishing the only nonwinning season in Wooster’s history. More seriously, Bill Syrios, who owned the Shack, the snack bar across Pine Street from the campus, suffered a stroke, before slowly recovering. Saddest of all, Otelia Compton, widow of the College’s first dean and Lowry’s hostess when he was a student, died on December 15, 1944, at the age of eighty-six.

Still, Lowry began his first academic year September 1, 1944 with the war winding down and aspirations rising. In his October 1944 inaugural address, he glowed with pride. “A college is the corner of men’s hearts where hope has not died,” he began....