By Richard Warch
President, Lawrence University
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2003
Thousands of Lawrence alumni, with affection and respect, remember Douglas
Maitland Knight as “their” president. As professor of English at
Yale (where he had earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees), Doug was
selected as Lawrence’s 11th president in 1953 and departed in 1963 to
become president of Duke University.
In that sentence appear three of the institutions he served and about which he writes in his latest book, The Dancer and the Dance: One Man’s Chronicle, which deals with his experiences at Yale, Lawrence, Duke, and Questar (a small manufacturer of optical instruments) from 1938 to 2001. Knight also devotes portions of the narrative to his experiences at RCA, in Iran, and with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, but the aforementioned institutions command the majority of his attention.
Knight refers to this book as a memoir, not an autobiography, and in broad terms its approach is to explore and express “that duality which embodies the central purpose of liberal learning — to live simultaneously the action and the perceived significance of it” (hence, from Yeats, the book’s title and theme: the dancer and the dance).
This feature of Knight’s work is itself instructive, not only in that it provides a frame and focus to his understanding of his own life but in that it also offers readers a way to understand our own, individually and collectively. Knight seeks to understand his (and thus our) times, their turmoil and dissent, and to examine how his experiences may help explain “why we are as we are.” This is not the author’s version of The Education of Henry Adams, but something in this book evokes that earlier masterpiece (to which Knight alludes at the outset).
Douglas Knight was, as far as his career is concerned, clearly on what is styled a fast track. When a young English professor at Yale, his mentor, Dean William DeVane, remarked to a group of senior professors that Knight was “doomed to administration,” and so it was to be. He became president of Lawrence at 32, and of Duke when he was just ten years older — young in both instances by any measurement.
That fast-track career was derailed at Duke (to some considerable degree, by Duke) six years after he took the job. The trauma of the Duke years for Knight cannot be overstated. He came to terms with that experience in his 1989 book Street of Dreams, the writing of which, he says, was an act of exorcising the personal darkness that had befallen him there. As I noted in reviewing that book for Lawrence Today in the summer of 1989, Knight wrote of the Duke years “without bitterness or rancor. His purposes here are not to settle scores, but to understand.” That same claim applies in the present instance.
While the Duke years are central in this book as well, they are not its sole focus though they are assuredly the most compelling. In the first sentence of the fourth chapter, Knight writes: “The 1960s are the pivotal point in this story — equally so for the country and for me personally,” and indeed the fractious features of that decade are invoked prominently here, both when the author is writing about them as they unfolded and in other sections as well, where he anticipates them by citing their harbingers and where he suggests their long-term aftereffects. While Lawrence readers will obviously take keen interest in Knight’s reflections on his presidency here, the Duke years are the most salient to the overall texture of the narrative.
He begins by citing the four changes that dominated the decade of the ’60s — the alienation of students (and the accompanying demands for “relevance”), the black movement, the women’s movement, and the “dark vortex of Vietnam.” As these coalesced on American college campuses in particular, they destabilized and disrupted institutions that were especially vulnerable because their traditions of civility and debate were overwhelmed by insult and confrontation.
In one of many reflective passages, Knight notes that his whole training and experience up until the 1960s “had been based in a concept of the university and of liberal education totally grounded in mediation, critical discourse, civility, and the restraint of uncontrolled dogmatism.” For him and for others, both individuals and institutions, that concept was shaken, if not shattered; as he notes elsewhere, “civility may have been one chief casualty of the ’60s,” as intemperate rhetoric ruled the day (and, he suggests, proved to be the origin of the aggressive style of the ’90s).
Indeed, one might say that Knight’s world was consistent and coherent from his undergraduate, graduate, and professorial years at Yale through his tenure at Lawrence. He does not write about those decades as halcyon, and he wisely points out their troubling elements and the seeds of change embedded in them, but they are nonetheless the most positive and celebrative parts of the book (though that mood returns in the chapter on Questar).
His treatment of the years from 1963 onward, however, can only be described as dark. Here the reader finds words like “fail,” “nausea,” “defeat,” and “exile,” the last referring to the fact that after devoting his life to higher education, he suddenly found himself cut loose from that mooring and personally adrift.
The 1970s were a time of, if not despair, certainly of dispiritedness for Knight. He sought a sense of purpose and of self through his work with RCA, and found neither; while his experiences in Iran were certainly stimulating, in the end they did not save him from a sense of malaise (though had there been frequent flier miles in the ’70s, Knight would have racked up plenty). Where teaching literature and writing poetry had saved him at Duke, his salvation — and I do not think that too strong a term — in the post-Duke years came finally from Questar, where he was able to reinvent himself, as it were, and devote himself to a company and product in which he believed and on behalf of which he could and did make a difference. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation provided another setting and set of opportunities that served much the same purpose.
Readers should know that Knight denies to satisfy any interest they may have (prurient or otherwise) in the details of certain aspects of his life — How, exactly, did the Duke years end? What was the nature of the transition from RCA to Questar? — by keeping a more-or-less Olympian perspective on the events of his life and their meaning, both socially and personally. While certain people are mentioned in the book, they are those about whom he writes warmly; his adversaries and antagonists are, in the main, anonymous (members of the Duke Endowment Board, for instance), a style in keeping with that he applied in Street of Dreams.
Throughout, Knight acts as a loving critic of the entities and institutions he loved — the university, the United States — and so the book offers an ongoing critique even as it holds out for a more generous and positive vision and version of what each ought to and might be or become. He writes in passionate opposition, for example, to the ways in which a corporate model has come to dominate higher education, particularly the large universities, and has some wonderfully apt sections on the misapplication of “bottom line” thinking to the business of colleges and universities.
Lawrence readers will take particular pleasure, however, in Knight’s assessment of places like ours: by the 1990s, he writes, liberal arts colleges “had become the preeminent places for undergraduate education. There, dedicated teaching and sophisticated research are fused to one enterprise, as they should always be; and the resources now available allow a richness of opportunity and focus which the universities no longer seem to offer so clearly.... The numbers of students in these colleges could never by themselves explain their influence. The quality of the experience and the sense of responsibility which that experience seems to engender create an influence in the country out of all proportion to the student numbers. It may seem like academic boosterism to say so, but their sense of community has an enduring effect on the values by which their graduates live.”
The foregoing is but one among many pithy and provocative observations to be found within this slim volume. The reader will come away from this book with a deepened appreciation for the warp and woof of the last half of the last century, but even more for the author, who has offered here a personal testimony that illuminates the common experience of those years. The dancer in this instance reveals the inner meaning of the dance with grace, wit, insight, and verve.
The Dancer and the Dance: One Man’s Chronicle, by Douglas M. Knight. New York: Separate Star, Inc. 2003; 191 pp.