By David S. Hathaway, '57
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2003
William A. Chaney, professor emeritus of history, consented to a series of interviews with Chuck Merry, '57, and me during the autumn of 2002. This oral history was audiotaped, and the tapes and transcriptions have been submitted to the Lawrence Archives as a permanent record. This article contains excerpts from those interviews.
William Chaney joined the Lawrence history department as an assistant professor in the fall of 1952. At the time, he was a member of The Society of Fellows at Harvard University, having completed his undergraduate degree and doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I thought I would stay at Lawrence two or three years and then move on," Chaney says. Fifty-one years later he remains a member of the history department and an integral part of the Lawrence faculty.
"I found a community at Lawrence, a community of learning. It was like a family — this is my family, you know."
Although he officially retired in 1999, he continues each year to teach his favorite courses on medieval history and also presides over The Salon, his long-running thrice-weekly evenings with four to six highly motivated and gifted students.
Remembering Nathan Pusey
It all started when Chaney received a phone call from the secretary of the placement bureau at Harvard, saying that Nathan Marsh Pusey, the president of Lawrence College (1944-1953), would like to meet him for an interview.
"I was in my room at Dunster House and the phone rang, by my standards early — it was nine o'clock in the morning — and [the placement secretary] said, 'President Pusey of Lawrence College is here and would like to talk with you this afternoon if you are free.' And I said, 'President Pusey of what?'"
Chaney recalls that at that point in his life there were several reasons why he hadn't heard of Lawrence.
"We often think that people on the coasts think the Midwest is provincial, but there is nothing more provincial than the two coasts. There is nothing more provincial than Boston. To them, the world does end at the Berkshires. Harvard thinks education ends with Harvard Yard . . . there is a place somewhat south of that called Yale that perhaps exists, but they did not know a great deal about other colleges. The other reason that I had not heard of Lawrence is that it simply wasn't as well known as it is now."
In Chaney's eyes, much of the appeal of Lawrence in the early years was related to President Pusey, whom he describes as having intense devotion to the well-being of the faculty as well as the students.
In that employment interview at Harvard, Pusey had told Chaney, "I would match our seniors against anybody's seniors, but sometimes it is difficult to persuade our freshmen that the higher life is really worthwhile."
"A great gentleman," Chaney says. "I respected him then and respect him now, immensely. He introduced Freshman Studies, one of the glories of Lawrence." The course was first taught at Lawrence in 1945 and has remained in the curriculum (except for a brief hiatus in the early 1970s) ever since. President Pusey had taught a similar course while on the faculty at Wesleyan University in the mid-1930s.
Chaney also emphasizes Pusey's skills as a teacher: "He wanted people to observe closely in their readings; he wanted people to observe closely in life."
As the story goes, when teaching at Lawrence between 1936 and 1938, Pusey once had an unobserving student in his class.
"He sent her back to her dorm and had her come back [to class] again. She came back, and he asked her what she saw on the way. Well, she didn't see much; she passed a couple of people or something like that. So he asked her to do it again. 'Go back to Ormsby, then come back and tell us what you saw on the way.' She realized that something was up. She mentioned a few things she saw, some trees. She saw steps. He sent her back again — the number of times grew with the telling of the story, of course, over the years.
"He had taught that young woman to observe and urged her to apply that to her reading and not skip words as she had been skipping trees, bushes, and ants and everything else on the way. He was a wonderful teacher — in an off-beat way, as in that story."
Another lesson learned from Pusey was how best to communicate with students, particularly those presenting under threatening circumstances, such as Honors Thesis exams.
"I saw him in action at my first Honors exam," Chaney remembers. "Jim Sackett ['55] was a senior anthropology major who later became, for many years, chairman of the anthropology department at UCLA.
"This was my first year, and I had never been on an Honors Committee. I kept quiet and listened. What interested me was how Nate Pusey did it. He asked questions that wouldn't frighten Jim but would draw him into a discussion about the subject.
"You can always ask students questions they can't answer. The trick on exams is to ask them things they can answer — and then expand and explore their thoughts."
He also recalls Pusey's light touch and sense of humor.
"I remember when he was president of Harvard and the students, having nothing else to riot about that spring, rioted because he had decided it was time to put the diplomas in English instead of Latin. They gathered in front of the president's house, demanding that Latin be put back on the diplomas instead of English. Pusey came out and addressed them at length — in Latin. Of course, they had no idea what he was talking about."
The Knight years
The rest of the '50s was under the leadership of President Douglas Maitland Knight (1954-1963), at that time the youngest college president on record. "I liked Doug right away," Chaney says. "You couldn't help but like Doug."
In Chaney's mind, memories of Knight will always be linked to the Honors Dorm.
"There were so many students who complained they had nobody to talk to — like Mike Hammond ['54, later to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts], Bob Sonkowsky ['54, professor of classics at the University of Minnesota], and some of the other bright students. They were scattered around, one in one fraternity and one in another, that sort of thing. I thought it would be quite logical if they all lived in the same place.
"I went to see President Knight and suggested that it would be a good thing for our brightest students, the best students, to have a building where they could live, an Honors Dorm. I remember Doug's exact words; he said, 'I do not think it speaks to our problems.'
I knew there was more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. Doug always liked things that appealed to students." At one of the encampments held in those days, Chaney recalls being asked by James Beck, son of Professor Warren Beck and the editor of The Lawrentian, "If you could do one thing to improve Lawrence, what would you do?" To which Chaney replied, "I would have an Honors Dorm." The Lawrentian subsequently ran an editorial about the need for an Honors Dorm, whereupon, as Chaney notes, "all at once Doug Knight thought it did speak to our problem."
The tumultuous sixties
President Curtis William Tarr (1963-69) succeeded Knight and thus inherited the ongoing racial strife that characterized the scenes on many American college campuses.
One of the issues of the time was the racial discrimination practiced by many national "Greek" organizations. During this period of growing tension and unease, when much of the college community differed with members of the Board of Trustees who clung to tradition, Chaney recalls that Tarr handled the issue, as well as the emerging dissidence over Vietnam, with great dignity and moral steadfastness.
In President Tarr's first address to the college community, Chaney says, "He offered three maxims, and they were typical of him, deceptively simple, direct, concerned always with students: '(1) Be yourself; don't follow the crowd. (2) Allow yourself to grow, keeping your personal integrity as you grow. (3) Don't lose track of the purpose of a college education.'"
In due course, Lawrence's 13th president, Thomas Stevenson Smith (1969-1979), also faced the tumult of the Vietnam-era protests and, in Professor Chaney's eyes, was "a wonderful man. Great integrity. Very concerned about students."
Chaney recalls that, in 1970, in response to the Kent State "massacre" and the war, Smith called a meeting of the entire university in the Chapel. "This was Thomas Stevenson Smith. He presided over it in person. If there was to be a demonstration, he put himself at the head of it. In other words, he calmed things down by bringing order to the whole idea of demonstration.
"It was a long convocation. The president was on the stage, but anyone could speak — there were mikes in the aisles. It was decided, under his leadership, that faculty members who wished to, could turn classroom time into discussions on the crisis of our times, the war and students' roles in it, what happened at Kent State, and what was going on in Vietnam."
The Warch legacy
In concluding our review of the Lawrence presidents during Professor Chaney's tenure, we queried him about the college's current president, Richard Warch (1979- ). He smilingly declined, believing that the role of a historian is to review and interpret the past, not comment on the present, but he did say that President Warch was the best of the best under whom he has served.
Faculty colleagues, warmly remembered
Some of Professor Chaney's fondest memories are of his faculty colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s. M. M. Bober, professor of economics, is a particular favorite. His witticisms provide Chaney, himself the master of anecdotal enlightenment, with endless tales.
When discussing an art history professor's latest attempts at painting, Professor Bober is reported to have said, "Hanging is too good for them." Regarding a faculty debate over whether final exams should be reduced to two hours from three, Bober modified the proverbial distinction between those who can and those who can't: "The men leave after two hours, and the boys sit around and write for another hour!"
Bober's sharp commentaries even warranted national attention when Time magazine published some of his more notable lines in a review of the retirement of several of academia's greats in 1957: "If God were half as good to us as we are to Him, we'd be living in paradise," "Businessmen have as much competition as they cannot get rid of," and "When you leave this room I want you to feel that you have learned something. Don't go out and just develop a personality."
One of Chaney's favorite anecdotes about "M.M." concerns the time when faculty members and students were gathered at Sampson House (the college president's home at that time) on the evening of President Pusey's impromptu announcement of his appointment to the presidency of Harvard.
According to Chaney, "Among other things, Nate Pusey said, 'I don't feel that I am going to a better college but simply a different college.' M.M., possessing both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, grabbed his head and said, 'He really believes that, he really believes that!'"
Professor Bober's close associate in the economics department, William McConagha, also draws special praise.
"I would say that, of all the faculty I have known in my half century here, Dr. McConagha was the most beloved. A very gentle but firm-minded man. A real gentleman and scholar — soft-spoken but a ramrod when it came to integrity. He made the first public denunciation of Senator Joseph McCarthy in Appleton, not exactly the popular thing to do. He gave a public lecture in which, among other things, he simply told the McCarthy record, how McCarthy had accepted Communist support when he was running in Milwaukee. He told the facts of McCarthy's record and talked about principles, about integrity. He was the first person to do that on campus."
The English department of the time had a very distinguished faculty, including Warren Beck, Craig Ringwalt Thompson, and Merton Sealts.
"Warren Beck I knew probably as well as anybody of that department — a wonderful human being, a very distinguished scholar of Faulkner and Joyce.
"William Faulkner wrote to him and said that he, Warren Beck, knew what he, Faulkner, was up to before anybody else did. Warren framed the letter, had it hanging in his home, and was justly proud of it.
"He was, himself, a noted author of a number of novels but, above all, of short stories. He won one prize after another for the best short story of the year."
Craig Ringwalt Thompson was another highly respected (and somewhat feared by students) member of the English department. He was reputed never to give A's, but Professor Chaney disputes this.
"One undergraduate legend was that Thompson never gave A's, that he was an A student and nobody was as good as he was, so he didn't give As. That was a myth. He said it, and they believed it. They would deny the evidence of their senses and continue [the myth] that he never gave A's. He always gave A's. His bark was much worse than his bite."
Merton Sealts — "I liked him very much, and he was a very popular teacher. He left after some years to teach in Madison because [they offered him the editorship] of the Emerson Papers. When he was here, he was noted mostly as a Herman Melville scholar and was president of the Melville Society.
"He wrote me a letter just before he died, saying that he remembered his happy years at Lawrence — in some ways better than in Madison — and how much he admired Lawrence."
Perhaps one of Chaney's most favorite faculty colleagues was William H. Riker, with whom he shared an office for a few years. Riker was a very creative and intellectually restless member of the faculty, who made major contributions in political science through his application of game theory and mathematics.
"He was one of the most influential people in the world for the new approach to the study of government, namely computer-oriented decision-making," says Chaney.
"The year that Uppsala University in Sweden was celebrating its 500th anniversary, every faculty department there was allowed to give an honorary degree from Uppsala to the person in the world they regarded as most crucial. Riker received one of those 'most crucial person' degrees.
"His ideas, his approach to the field, came in part from conversations at Lawrence with colleagues and students. This is where he shaped his view of the field — and it was a new field, as Uppsala recognized."
A final footnote
A persistent theme throughout William Chaney's reflections was his dedication to learning and scholarship. The Honors Dorm, a recurring topic in our interviews, came to symbolize that. "My view was that everything in this society brings its own privileges except brains. Money brings its privileges, social status brings its privileges, and there is nothing wrong with that. The one thing, however, that Americans are always wary of is the idea of brains bringing privileges." While the Honors Dorm quest did eventually come to fruition, it lasted but six years, giving way to competing priorities for housing.