Limited Engagement: Kirkland College 1965-1978: an Intimate History of the Rise and Fall of a Coordinate College for Women

By Samuel Fisher Babbitt

After three years of planning, Kirkland College opened in 1968 as a small, liberal arts college for women, coordinate to Hamilton College in upstate New York. The author was the first, last and only President.
Planners envisioned a female counterpart of Hamilton which could introduce women without distressing alumni, and allow needed curricular expansion.
But Kirklands advisors and administrators wanted innovation. Its openness, inclusiveness and curricular choices affronted many Hamiltonians. When, at last, Kirkland sought further support to undertake a necessary endowment campaign, Hamilton let the young college go under in a contentious and wasteful way. It closed in 1978.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 7, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465323972

Samuel Fisher Babbitt

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Babbitt attended Yale University, receiving his B.A. and doctorate in American Studies. He married Natalie Zane Moore in 1954, and they have three grown children. Following a variety of jobs in academic administration, Babbitt became President of Kirkland College in 1965, at 36. The women’s coordinate college had existed only as a plan of all-male Hamilton College, but Babbitt brought it into reality, and remained until its merger with Hamilton in 1978. Retired as Senior Vice President for Development at Brown University in 1993, he continues active in the theater, as actor and Board member.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

SECTION ONE

Snapshot—September 1968

SECTION TWO

SECTION THREE

SECTION FOUR

1968-69

1969-70

1970-71

1971-72

1972-73

1973-74

1974-75

1975-76

1976-77

1977-78

AFTERWORD

Notes—Afterword

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

APPENDIX E

Preface

Chapter I

Goals of Kirkland as a Liberal Arts College for Women

Chapter II

Coordination: Conservation of Educational Resources

Chapter III

Beyond Innovation

Chapter IV

The Quality of a Kirkland Education

Chapter V

Allocation of Present College Resources

Chapter VI

Kirkland’s Total Educational Community

APPENDIX F

APPENDIX G

APPENDIX H

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX J

APPENDIX K

APPENDIX L

APPENDIX M

DEDICATION

To that splendid—and finite—group of students, faculty, staff, trustees, Associates and friends who were, at various times, Kirkland College.

In them, Kirkland still exists as an experience that has informed their lives. Through their actions, it continues to touch others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I started to write this book before Kirkland held its last graduation, in the sense that I was mindful of the record and the need to preserve it, both in the form of official documents and personal notes. In the years since 1978, the original Kirkland Archives—essentially the contents of the college’s administrative files—have been augmented by my personal files and those of Francis H. Musselman and Charles Root, Jr. All of these materials, together with much more in the way of photographs and other items, are under the care and keeping of Kathy Collett, Hamilton College’s archivist, to whom I am indebted for assistance. Elaine Weiss has been wonderful in providing precise and prompt research.

Early drafts were read by Walter Beinecke, Jr., and by Catherine Frazer and Ursula Sybille Colby, among others, and their comments have been most helpful, though they are blameless for its conclusions or omissions.

Many other people, including those who were interviewed as part of the Kirkland Oral History Project, have added richness by lending their perspective. I am particularly grateful to those whose quotes I use throughout the book.

Most of all, I am indebted—in this as in many other ways—to Natalie Babbitt. She has been my editor, my conscience, my proofreader, my therapist and my cheering section, first, through the exhilarating, intense and often difficult experience of our time at Kirkland, and second, in the shaping of this book.

FOREWORD

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order…

—Machiavelli

o n the surface, it appears as unlikely in retrospect as it did to many at the time: what made a small, traditional, all-male liberal arts college in upstate New York decide, in 1963, to embark on a dramatic plan to establish five or more adjacent coordinate campuses, and to start the first one as a college for women? And what led that same college, fifteen years later, to withdraw its support from that coordinate partner of ten years, forcing it to close?

The answer seems to lie in a rather complicated web of perceptions and social dynamics, played out not only on the bucolic hilltop the colleges shared, but also in the larger society, where the social structure was undergoing enormous and, for many, threatening change in the decades of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Among the many variables, there was the Ford Foundation, which, in 1960, was engaged in an unparalleled cash giveaway to liberal arts colleges and universities. The requirements of the Foundation’s grants set Hamilton College, like many other recipients, on the path of longrange planning, an activity virtually unheard of in the academic world before that time. The near-desperation of a president too long in office gave impetus to a plan that, though it had the formal approval of the Board of Trustees, did not have the approval or even the collective involvement of the college’s faculty. Within a relatively short time, the implementation of the plan was passed into the hands of people new to the community—-just at the moment when its chief architect suffered a severe heart attack from which he subsequently died. The rapid and repeated changeover in leadership at the originating college meant there was little ownership of the plan that was being implemented across the road. Further, those who came to lead the newly established college, though they were cloaked in the credentials of the establishment, had found a platform on which to challenge many of the more hidebound beliefs of academe.

And, in the wider world, a series of social movements against the status quo—from civil rights to a new feminism—had emerged as a great generational upheaval, redefining values and individual responsibility. These challenges to the world as it was took root in the malleable soil of the new institution, propelling it even faster and further from its founding partner.

Nor was it simply the social patterns that were shifting. When the vision of the new college had been hatched in 1963, it was a time of notable prosperity: the stock market was soaring, interest rates were low, and federal support for education was impressively high. But the new college actually came into being in the years 1965-70, when economic factors had changed drastically for the worse. Then, interest rates—affecting the necessary debt service on new dormitories—started up, together with construction costs, to double digits. The federal largesse began its long decline from the heyday of the late ‘50’s, and even the population explosion known as the baby boom tapered off in those years, so that fears were raised about future enrollments.

Despite all this, the new college was built, and it opened on schedule in the fall of 1968. It attracted a first-rate group of students, drawn specifically to its programs and the promise of individual responsibility that they offered. The new college successfully pioneered a series of educational innovations, many of which have been subsumed into the mainstream of American liberal education today. As in any such endeavor, there were false starts as well as successes, but it seems clear that the quality of education was excellent.

For a period, a dual community existed in which students enrolled at either college could choose from an array of offerings and styles of education and living which covered a rich spectrum unusual for a community of that size. The tensions were seen, at first, as helpful, in the sense that they made manifest the differences, forcing each institution to justify itself, and allowing students to make choices based on honest exploration and belief. But tensions would persist and heighten over the decade, exacerbated by modes of decision-making on the two campuses that were antithetical.

Finally, in 1978, the founding college, holding the financial cards and in possession of the essential services necessary to both units (library, health service, business office, etc.) decided that the game was not worth the candle. By withdrawing financial support, Hamilton forced its erstwhile partner to close, and, in the process, received its assets and became the coed college of much larger size which it had specifically rejected in the planning that began the whole cycle a decade before.

Whether one regards the matter as an aborted success or as a simple failure, it is surely an instructive example of the fact that careful and sober planning can never hope to take into account all the dynamic elements which will inevitably accompany change. It shows, as well, the ways in which a single set of assumptions can be perceived quite differently when seen from different viewpoints, and it serves as a warning that real change requires close, explicit and sustained support and a clear means of dealing with tensions and misunderstanding when they arise—as they inevitably will.

When all is said and done, there was terrible waste in the process that led to the birth and subsequent demise of Kirkland College. The waste was not only in terms of financial resources (indeed, most of the capital expenditures have been well-used by Hamilton). Much of the waste was human, spelled out in the confusion of students who watched their elders spending too much time feuding with each other, in the tensions felt by faculty and staff involved in the very difficult business of building a new institution while trying to advance their professional lives, and, finally, in the acute loss which Kirkland alumnae still feel at the disappearance of an institution which many of them came to identify with their own growth as individuals. One must mourn the failure of Hamilton administrators and trustees, however well intentioned, to grasp the richness that was inherent in the coordinate pattern, and the lack of consistent leadership and nerve that led to its abandonment.

This book is best called an Intimate History because it makes no pretense to be other than one person’s understanding of events. It is the story as seen from Kirkland’s point of view. As the first, last, and only President of Kirkland, I was so personally and fully involved in the development of the college from 1965 onward that I am not an objective author, nor do I claim to be. Furthermore, like any historian, I am at the mercy of existing sources, in the form of the correspondence and other materials that I and others have collected as the Kirkland Archives. I tell the story from the point of view of an administrator who was immersed in the policies of the college, the work of the trustees, the strategies of growth and the daily struggle for survival.

What is missing, unfortunately, is the texture of the place as seen and felt by students and faculty in and out of the classrooms and residence halls and offices. I wish it were possible here to show those aspects, since that was what Kirkland was about. But those memories and experiences are for others to write about in their turn.

Institutions are, like humans, at once strong and fragile. Kirkland was a vibrant place, informed by a series of beliefs and the practices that flowed from them. Those who spent time there, particularly the students, knew it as a place, but also as a set of people who were dedicated to making education effective, personal and empowering. Yet it has vanished. Many of us mourn it still.

SFB August 2005

SECTION ONE

Early Planning

Snapshot—September 1968

o n September 15 1968, a visitor to Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York, might have been surprised to find the Chapel, a striking colonial structure at the center of the campus, its needle-like spire white against the blue sky, filled not with men—the students who had filled it for more than a century for worship and general meetings—but with 160 young women and a group of academics who had never set foot there before that morning. The young women were turned out in a variety of dress ranging from smart autumn outfits to jeans and tops, but almost all had their hair parted smartly down the middle, falling to their

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Kirkland entering students gather in the Hamilton chapel for the opening convocation. September, 1968. Hamilton College Library Archives.

shoulders and below in smooth, clean sheets. This was the opening convocation of Kirkland College, a brand-new coordinate college for women, founded in 1965.

The convocation itself was brief, consisting of short welcoming remarks from the President, the Dean, and Millicent Carey Mcintosh, former President of Barnard College and a founding trustee of the new institution, who had served as an advisor for three years prior to the opening. Mrs. Mcintosh gave a rousing exhortation to the new students, hailing them as pioneers in a new educational frontier, and urging them to commit their minds and their energies to making it work. Then, led by the brand-new student banner and the colors (U.S. flag and the new Kirkland flag), the procession, faculty and students walking side by side, made its way across the Hamilton campus, passing the original cottage of the Reverend Samuel Kirkland [1], across the road that runs up College Hill, and into an unfinished campus construction site by means of a walkway paved just twenty-four hours earlier.

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We reassembled before a small platform set up in front of three brand-new concrete and glass residence halls. Bright Marimeko print banners waved from the tops of the rectangular, three-story buildings, and new sod around them positively glowed in the sun. i presided over the dedications, [2] and at one point, as i was making an introduction, i heard a gasp of happy surprise come from the audience. i later learned that a large, bright-yellow butterfly had lit on my academic headgear [3] and fluttered there briefly. We took it as a splendid omen.

i remember telling the parents, later in the afternoon, that the time had come to go away and let their daughters begin a new chapter in their lives, and then, that evening, we celebrated with a fine display of fireworks in the sky over the open meadow that layjust beyond our muddy campus.

Since all our literature had stressed that students would take a central part in determining the rules by which their conduct would be guided, it followed that we had no rules at all when we first met as a community. Well, almost no rules. I had broken my own restriction by writing in the first catalog: There will be no sororities at Kirkland.

In a memorandum titled First Things [4] sent out to all incoming students in the summer, I asked that each one of them give thought to the ways in which they would collectively govern themselves. I said that nothing would be decided until they were on campus and could meet to

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The Kirkland procession makes its way onto the construction site that will serve as a campus for the first year. Fall, 1968. Photo by Dante Tranquille, reprinted with permission of Utica Dispatch, Utica, NY Hamilton College Library Archives.

deliberate, but I asked that they give some serious thought to the issues before their arrival. Our first meeting took place on the evening of that first day. Students, staff and the small group of twenty-one first-year faculty members met in an auditorium somewhere—it must have been at Hamilton, since we did not have any place on our side of the road in which we could all meet—and Dean Inez Nelbach [5] and I were leading the discussion of community, when we came to the matter of visitors in the dormitories, quiet hours, etc.—so-called parietals. This wonderful word parietal will soon have obs. next to it in the dictionary. Originally referring to the wall between hemispheres of the brain, it came also to mean the regulations governing the visiting privileges of members of the opposite sex in campus dormitories.

To understand the context of the meeting, one needs to go backwards down two trails, one social and the other architectural. The architect for Kirkland, Ben Thompson [6], had worked closely with an advisory group and the small Board of Trustees to design living and teaching and administrative spaces reflective of Kirkland’s philosophy, including our best guess about residential life. These conversations, and the design which resulted, took place in 1966-67, roughly, and they reflected dormitory life as it was then on most campuses. For example, each residence hall had a waiting room just inside the front door. The assumption was that men who came to call would identify themselves to the student on duty at the front desk, and she, in turn, would notify the woman upstairs that the caller was there. Upstairs, each dormitory had an informal lounge, and the reasoning was that residents might gather there in curlers or informal dress in which they would not wish to be seen in public [7]. Little did we know, in 1966, that we were on the cusp of a profound revolution of social norms, particularly among The Young.

By the fall of 1968, when we met to decide how arrangements of desk duty in the dorms would be handled, the whole notion seemed archaic and quaint to our students. Most of them would never see a curler outside of a dated movie. Their hair, as has been said, was long and straight for the most part; their clothes were the newly adopted uniform of the proletariat—jeans and castoff bits of military clothing—both in public and in private. In fact, the whole idea of public and private was under severe pressure.

In my memorandum, I had written: As you know, the college has announced its intention that Kirkland students be involved, from the beginning, in the development of the assumptions and the philosophy which will govern us all as members of this new community. It was into this context that I pitched the question of rules relating to the residence halls. There were some halting responses (we had not yet developed the Kirkland mode of endless discussion, so this was still a testing time), and then a young woman in a splendidly large violet-colored hat (which was to be her trademark [8]), rose and said, quite simply, that she didn’t see any reason why there had to be any rules at all. After all, she added when the cheering abated, the students were supposed to be responsible, and if we really believed that, then there was no need for artificial rules. Thunderous ovation. I asked if that was how they all really felt. The answer—at least from those who spoke at all—was a clear yes.

I remember calling a kind of recess, and I took Dean Nelbach aside for a whispered conference. This is a real bind, I said. If we impose regulations now, then all we have said about real participation goes down the drain, and our chance of building significant trust goes with it. I assured her that I knew it was easy for me to say this, but that she was the one responsible for residential life, and she would have to pick up the pieces if we went forward. What do you think? Can we risk it? To her everlasting credit, she replied, I don’t see that we have any choice. And then she added: Heaven help us all.

Once the actual fireworks were over that evening, and for a number of evenings thereafter, there followed some very wild nights at Kirkland. Not only did the Hamilton men quickly discover that they could roam the women’s dormitories at will, but students from Colgate, a half=hour away, came in caravans the second and third nights, shouting and honking, and seeing who could make themselves more conspicuously macho than the next. Those first nights probably did real damage to Kirkland in terms of our image. A handful of Deans and residential faculty did unsung and valorous duty walking the halls and shooing off the worst of the invaders, but people who suspected (and perhaps hoped for) the worst saw what they took to be proof that Kirkland women were whores and the administration either radically irresponsible or totally inept. Possibly both.

What the administration was, was both scared and hopeful. Scared that some serious incident might occur, and hopeful that Kirkland women would understand that civil conduct comes out of a set of agreed upon ways to transact community life. When, after a night or two, students came to the Deans and faculty to complain, we sent them back to talk to their peers. When they came in groups, finally, saying that there had to be rules, we set aside a day to discuss the problem, established the first of what would be an almost endless string of Ad Hoc committees of students, faculty and administrators, and began to pound out ways of coping with living as a residential community.

Some of our faculty grumbled that we should not interrupt class schedules for nonacademic work, but most of us, I think, felt that the lessons being lived and learned were among the most important which would be tackled in the lives of our students, let alone our own.

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Under the levelheaded and patient guidance of Inez Nelbach and faculty member Ursula Sybille Colby [9], who chaired the Ad Hoc Committee, a set of viable rules was adopted. Like much at Kirkland, they changed over time, but by and large, they worked. Then came the debate that must have been replicated that year or the next on almost every campus in the United States: how do you define overnight in the phrase No visitors will remain in the dormitory overnight? The Jesuits would smile at the skill of argument and counterargument brought to bear on the issue.

For me, the opening of Kirkland had strengthened a philosophical position that, for lack of a better phrase, I thought of as behavioral functionalism. The action the students took to establish order after the experience of the first week came about out of practical (functional) necessity. Giving them a set of tailored regulations would have saved time, but it would have had little meaning for them and would have removed them further from a sense of responsibility for their own lives. Like it or not, they owned the rules they made for themselves, and that meant that they would take responsibility for them. Behavioral functionalism meant not interjecting the institution between the student and the results of her actions. Let the results flow from the actions, be seen, be felt. In some cases (and the opening night was one) the approach could be risky. Most of the time, however, it was more instructive than risky [10].

Hamilton College in the 1950s.

Amidst the rolling green land of upstate New York, a little southwest of Utica, there is a glacially-smoothed hill which, by the 1960’s, had been

Limited Engagement the site of an educational institution for nearly 150 years. It remains a place of enormous natural beauty, adorned, over time, by three parallel rows of Federal style buildings made of native stone, which ride the crest of the land in serene and dignified order. To a small cottage on that hill, in pre-revolutionary America, first came the local Native Americans of the Onondaga tribe, to be taught by the missionary Samuel Kirkland.

Later, when the surrounding region was settled by the white man, the sons of farmers came to a new academy, and finally, with the new nation, a college emerged. Since that time, thousands of young men have come to sit at the feet of older men, the faculty, to be given the received formal wisdom of their day and to go about the business of socialization and preparation for lives of useful service.

A statue of Alexander Hamilton stands before the Chapel at the center of the campus. It depicts an elegant colonial gentleman, cane held forward rakishly in the hand which emerges from a lace cuff. It is the statue of a man sure of his place—or, perhaps, intent on looking like a man who is sure of his place.

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Isolated from the bustle of the world like many another private liberal arts college, this campus had always set its own priorities and pace of activity. By the beginning of the 19th century, most students were comfortably well off economically, and represented the dominant American, white, male, protestant culture of the day. By 1960, they were being trained very much as those before them had been trained—to assume roles of substance in that still dominant Christian male culture. The college was first in New York State and eighth in the nation in terms of the number of graduates listed in Who’s Who. Enrollment was 750, and there was an endowment of $20 million by 1960. Many Hamilton students—particularly those whose fathers had not gone to Hamilton—had aspired to the front rank of small colleges for men (Williams or

Amherst, for example) but, failing of admission there, had come to Hamilton without great disappointment, knowing that it was well regarded and would serve their future interests, if not quite so publicly as their first choices.

Academic standards were reasonably high relative to the national norms, which is to say that an intelligent faculty dispensed its knowledge to intelligent students in the time-honored, hierarchical way. SAT Board scores averaged 639 for the verbal and 660 for the math. The predominant physical arrangements of classrooms reflected both philosophy and practice; seats were lined up smartly and bolted to the floor to avoid any possible deviation, and they faced squarely the instructor’s desk, raised on a slight dais before them. Behind this desk, the professor sat or stood and gave his lecture, and before him sat the students, intently taking down the words as they came. Some lucky ones did not have to work quite so hard, since they had been provided with the notes of those who had gone before—notes thoughtfully filed in Fraternity archives.

Social standards were reasonably permissive, after the fashion of the day. This meant primarily that boys could be boys, provided there was no obvious sexual activity involved, no cheating, and that excessive drinking was confined, on the whole, to weekends. If damage to college property occurred, it might be assessed against a student’s bill, an expedient that passed on the pain to the parental pocketbook where it would be least felt and was most likely to be recovered. A benevolent and all-powerful Dean presided over the fate of those who transgressed standards in either the academic or the social arena. Such vices as he came to know (and there were few which escaped his notice), he kept confidential and dealt with in camera.

Ravishingly beautiful in the spring, summer and fall, upstate New York can be dazzling as well in the depths of winter when the snow settles in and retains its sparkling white through the clear, cold days. But there is a period in the latter part of the winter, particularly in late February, when stretches of deadly gray assault the eye and the soul, and the world seems moribund and incapable of self-renewal. It is in these times that a resident can more fully understand the history of the region as the burnt over area of religious revivals in the nineteenth century, and as the present-day locale of often disturbing crimes of violence. The Mormons, the Shakers, the Millerites, communal and utopian groups of every stripe, have risen in upstate New York over the years. It seems likely that many of these fringe sects emerged in the month of February, when the mind, in these latitudes, seeks some gripping emotional jolt to counteract the dormant, gray and numbing environment.

Limited Engagement

A small residential college can be a very parochial place, and an isolated location can exacerbate this tendency, as can the fact, which Hamilton shared with many other colleges of the time, of having a mostly tenured and graying faculty, generally pleased with the status quo. Such an island produces conformity to its norms, but interestingly enough, it can also tolerate eccentricity quite well on an individual basis [11]. Hamilton men graduated and fanned out into the professions, into business, and even occasionally into the arts. If they were not all the prime movers and shakers of their world, certainly some of them were, and the others were usually those who carried a disproportionately large burden of responsibility in it.

From the point of view of those most involved—the students, their parents, the faculty and staff—it was a good thing, this Hamilton. It worked. It was healthy (as colleges go [12]) and its alumni were proud and generally supportive. And yet, in 1963, this quiet enclave of men embarked on a course which would lead to the founding of a new college, the introduction of women, the dramatic broadening of its curricular offerings, and the redefinition of its culture.

So rapid were the changes in the social fabric of the latter half of the twentieth century in the United States that it is important to start with some sense of the context in

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which all this took place. Much of the upheaval that was occurring in the U.S. in the decades before and during the existence of Kirkland College was being played out on the nation’s college and university campuses. Change ran throughout the society, of course, but it was most visible on the campuses, and it came to be acted out and articulated by the generation that was passing through higher education in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies.

For all its reputation as a quiet decade, the 1950s had also witnessed enormous change in higher education. It took a remarkably short time—about a decade—for higher education to absorb the massive change that had been brought about by the G.I. Bill following World War II (a broadening of the constituency in terms of age [13] and economic status [14], a broadening of the curriculum, general growth in both student body and faculty numbers). Then, in 1952, President Eisenhower announced that every American had the right to go to the college of his choice.

A staggering concept that—that every citizen was so-called college material. There were two ways for the system to accommodate an enlarged college-bound population: one was to lower drastically the admissions standards of many existing institutions; the other was to create a whole new tier of colleges. In the fullness of time, the U.S. Higher Education system transformed itself in both ways.

As the 1960’s approached, this shift was being borne in strongly on those who were charged with the future of higher education. The college-going population was still expanding rapidly, and its makeup (age, gender, social class, aspirations) had begun to shift dramatically. The question at Hamilton, and at hundreds of small colleges throughout the country, was whether these changes would require adjustments of small or large proportion, and, if so, how such an institution might position itself in the newly defined educational world.

There were some disquieting signs to draw the attention of administrators. Admissions, that most sensitive of institutional barometers, were getting a little worrisome at colleges for men. Nothing really alarming, but any downward trend after years of increase was worrisome, and there were indications that students who once might have been expected to apply to places like Hamilton were opting for institutions where they might be in classes, and enjoy steady social contact, with women. Others were choosing the more urban institutions over the traditionally isolated campuses on the hill. The great state university systems, galvanized into expansion after World War II, were increasingly attractive—and notably cheaper. Finally, many of the best students were choosing larger institutions because of the breadth of courses offered, as opposed to the comparatively narrow curriculum that small colleges could field.

Hamilton’s leadership [15] had ambitions for the institution that went beyond its simply continuing to serve as it had for two centuries, but even the goal of preserving the status quo was threatened by the fact that its traditional constituency was showing signs of deserting. Like many another college in its class, Hamilton was looking for a definition of its future in a changing educational world. Into this setting, like some philanthropic deus ex machina, stepped the Ford Foundation.

Events work in mysterious ways. The Ford grants were a direct result of an embarrassment of riches on the part of the Foundation. In the mid-1950s, the Foundation’s trustees had sold vast amounts of their holdings in the Ford Motor Company to the public, and then, possessed of hundreds of millions of dollars in sudden new capital, and mindful of the fact that they were under increasing public scrutiny, they launched one of the most ambitious attempts to strengthen private higher education which has ever been conceived.

The Foundation determined to address the matter of depressed faculty salaries, a problem of long standing which was evident to all, and which could be directly affected by an influx of cash. In December of 1955, it announced, as part of a $550 million Christmas package [16], a $260 million program to raise faculty salaries at private, regionally accredited, four-year, liberal-arts colleges and universities in the United States. [17] Three years later, as the Foundation’s assets passed the $4 billion mark, it concentrated a similar program on a group of the smaller liberal arts colleges, like Hamilton. This time the grants were unrestricted as to use.

There were two stipulations, however. The first was that the Ford Grants would have to be matched by gifts from others within a specified time. This meant that the recipient colleges had to scramble to get their fundraising efforts in shape and to make that activity an increased priority with their governing boards. Indeed, the Ford Grants were probably the single strongest catalyst in the growth of what is now an enormous professional development establishment in private higher education.[18] The second catch was a far more subtle one. Each college that accepted the terms of the grant was required to produce a longrange plan [19] .

A Long Range Plan today is, for the most part, an accepted piece of any institution’s policy arsenal. It is often a dry piece of committee prose that tries to encapsulate what it is that the particular institution stands for and how it intends either to preserve itself or get where it aspires to be. But in the early 1960’s, a long-range plan was virtually unheard of on the nation’s campuses. There was a general feeling that such a document was unnecessary. After all, education knew what it was about and knew how to do its job. Money might be a problem, and that made the Ford Grants enticing, but planning was generally thought to be a waste of time and good energy. There was, to be sure, an increasing amount of fluttering in the dovecotes, largely on the part of dissatisfied students, but the educational establishment at the time tended to view this as an aberration that should be dealt with by the appropriate institutional arm, i.e., the Dean of Students [20].

Unwittingly, the Ford Foundation had launched a program that was to have unexpected ramifications. By forcing long range planning on

Section One—Early Planning colleges by using institutional greed to motivate them (a basic ploy which foundations have used since the beginning of their existence), the Foundation would open up a process of self-examination which would expose fundamental shifts in the country’s understanding of what higher education was, and how it might achieve its ends.

To a large extent, this is the story of what happened when one institution undertook to meet the requirements of the Ford grant. It concerns a small, private institution near the top of the heap. Hamilton College was expensive, elite, exclusive, male, traditional and relatively isolated from the strong winds sweeping through the larger system. Most of the Hamilton community was comfortable that way. Nevertheless, to a small group of active and influential men associated with the college, the Ford Foundation program seemed to offer a chance to make real strides towards a number of goals: for example, the elusive and perennial goal of permanent fiscal stability, the desire for greater public recognition, and a potential solution to social isolation and curricular sclerosis. At the urging of their President, they set out on a remarkable journey.

President Robert W. McEwen saw in the Ford offer a chance for the kind of genuine change he had sought for the better part of his decade-long tenure at Hamilton. McEwen had come to Hamilton in 1949 from the presidency of Blackburn College, in Illinois. He had been Hamilton’s president for eleven years by 1960, and in many ways he was a perfect fit for such a place. Basically a moderate liberal, though no ideologue, he was a gentle person of intelligence, wit and humor, and he embodied a strong sense of traditional morality. His academic background included an undergraduate degree from Macalester College, ordination as a Presbyterian minister, and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Chicago. He had taught philosophy and religion and had been the Librarian at Carleton College for a number of years.

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A low-keyed but doughty leader and administrator, McEwen accepted the faculty’s central place in the governance of the college. By 1960 he presided over the Hamilton academics with a quietly practiced hand, but he was aware that he had failed to move the college as he had wished. He had intellectual honesty, and he had traveled enough outside the narrow confines of Clinton, NewYork, to know that there was fundamental change abroad in the world of education, and that Hamilton was in danger of becoming a quaint anachronism. He found himself in the position of fomenting change.

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Not revolutionary change, but a pragmatic recognition that the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of the educational world and the young people in it were shifting, and that institutions would have to respond sensibly to such movement, as the best of them had always done, or they would suffer the consequences of decline.

He had tried persuasion. He had tried by every means he knew to reward his more forward-looking colleagues and to dampen the more Neanderthal among them. But the faculty had not moved, and he was beginning to despair that he could ever make a significant dent in the complacency of an institution that felt comfortable with the ways of the golden age of the small liberal arts college in the late 19 th century. Moreover, his faculty was tenured at a very high percentage, so there was very little chance for new blood as a means of introducing new areas of study or new ways of teaching.

McEwen was not the first Hamilton College president to be frustrated by what he found on his campus [21]. He also suspected that he was getting too tired to keep up the battle. He had been in the position for a long time by any measure [22], and the inevitable toll of that job had made him weary by the early 60’s. He was ready for a rest. He told me in 1965 that he had reached the stage at which he could no longer tell when an obstacle, placed like a wall before him, was made of brick or of cardboard. He hesitated now, he said, not knowing how much of his weight to throw against it. He had, I came to learn [23], resigned once, angered by a baiting during a Board meeting from trustee Coleman Burke, who later became Chairman. Others had persuaded him to stay on.

And now the business of the Long Range Plan genuinely intrigued him. Might it be possible, over time and in an open, rational way, to do what he had not been able to bring about by any means thus far [24]? We cannot know his mind, but Bob McEwen must have felt a strong sense of duty as well as lively curiosity at the prospect of developing a long-range plan that might finally bring change to Hamilton. What is clear is that the trustees of Hamilton pressured him to stay on in the presidency during the Ford Foundation matching period, for it was as true then as it is now that foundations will rarely deal with an institution when the leadership is in transition. At any rate, in 1961, instead of retiring, McEwen agreed to continue as president until the required matching funds were found. Hamilton set about the business of raising money and planning its future.

In April of 1961, McEwen formally requested that his board set up an Ad Hoc Long Range Planning Committee, and this was done by the end of the calendar year, under the chairmanship of Richard W. Couper [25], a sixth-generation Hamilton graduate, and an elected alumni member of the Board of Trustees. He had been very active as an alumni volunteer, knew Bob McEwen well, and also knew many of the Board members. Couper found it remarkable that he was given the chairmanship of the committee, and even more so that he was allowed to choose his own members [26]. He came to the Board at a time just before a major transition of leadership there.

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Clark H. Minor [27] was in the last year of his long tenure as Chairman. Infirm, basically uninvolved in the details of the college, he hung on to the Chair as a ceremonial right—there being neither tradition nor by-law to stop him. He was literally carried in a chair to the second floor of the building where the Board meetings were held, there to passively preside before being carried down again. There must have been some chafing among the more interested trustees, and particularly those who might inherit the leadership. Lacking a strong Board chairman, President McEwen essentially ran things himself, abetted by an able riaht-hand man Dean Winton Tolles [28]

McEwen also appointed a Committee on Long Range Planning, chaired by Professor David M. Ellis of the History Department. This committee was to meet jointly with the trustees on occasion, and to provide them with whatever wisdom it could, particularly on academic and instructional matters. By the time the two committees first met, in January, 1962, the faculty group had prepared some Guiding Assumptions for Long Range Planning at Hamilton College. [29]

Though Couper chaired the trustee committee and took full part in its deliberations, McEwen set the agenda. In those days there was still a rhythm to the academic year that meant that the summer was thinking time, the period during which the daily crises from faculty and students abated, and there was margin enough to sit back and take the longer view. [30] Throughout the planning process, one can see this in the dates of the most fundamental memoranda. On August 20, 1961, well before the group had met, McEwen laid out for the Long Range Planning Committee the major academic problem he saw at Hamilton and the potential solution to it.

The problem had to do with size and the scope of the curriculum. McEwen knew that he could not reorganize or expand a curriculum which was bound both by the number of faculty and by their training and interests. New courses would have to come by way of an expanded faculty, and that logically meant an expanded student body, since the faculty/student ratio was already generous [31]. Yet, there were strong arguments against an expansion of the student body. They included, first, the sense that Hamilton’s size, at around 800, was ideal for fostering the kind of individual attention that was central to the small college concept [32]. They included, as well, the understanding that, although admissions applications were in a healthy ratio to acceptances, a large new pool of well-qualified and paying customers might not always be available. The argument circled back at that point, since part of the reason such a cushion was not there, according to McEwen and many other observers, was that the academic offerings of the college were too narrow.

The early discussion, therefore, centered on size as an economic variable and on ways in which new curricular additions might be made. Engineering, for example, was examined, as was an emphasis on foreign studies, but always the question of size nagged at the group, and the strong desire to maintain the scale of the institution as a defining characteristic remained.

The potential solution McEwen finally envisioned was the possible establishment of one or more coordinate colleges, physically adjacent to Hamilton. These institutions might bring in new faculty, new disciplines, and even new approaches to teaching, which could then be shared by Hamilton students through cross registration. The model was at hand in Claremont, California, in the group of institutions that had formed around Claremont College for men [33].

In another long memo in September of 1962 [34], McEwen forwarded an outline, in the form of questions which the committee might want to explore. He also informed the group that Couper would have to spend most of his time organizing the fundraising effort in the temporary absence of a Director of Development, and that he therefore could not give much time to the committee’s work. Nonetheless, the President urged the committee to make some progress even under these circumstances. As Couper has pointed out in recent conversations, the college’s administrative staff was remarkably thin. There was the President, the Dean, the Treasurer (a member of the Board who was retired and lived nearby) and Couper, newly appointed as Vice President-in-charge-of-everything-else.

The September memo shows clearly that McEwen had not only identified the problem areas at Hamilton in detail, but had concluded that the coordinate college idea could address almost all of them. In a set of General Assumptions which actually took the form of questions, the President pinpointed the defining characteristics of his college: private, male, residential, liberal arts, undergraduate, and highly selective. He asked the committee to consider each before moving to other concerns. This may have been pro forma, as a means of broadening the committee’s thinking, but what followed was not. The issues he raised were not the usual ones for Hamilton: for example, whether the college was too bound by geographical dependence on the Northeast or by a predominately middle-class clientele. Then, suddenly, there was question #8: Should Hamilton remain a men’s college? closely followed by #9: Should the trustees encourage the establishment of coordinate colleges?

There were four more questions, raising the matter of potential graduate-level study, but numbers eight and nine are the questions on which the committee focused much of its deliberation, and it is difficult to believe that McEwen would have put them there quite so boldly if a fair amount of preliminary conversation had not already taken place. He assumed that his readers were familiar with the concept of coordination as a response to a variety of issues.

The rest of the memo was divided into two sections, the first on The Educational Process and the second on Student Life, focusing to a very large extent on the role of fraternities at Hamilton. McEwen asked: Should Hamilton College train its students in the methods of thinking?[35] And, later: Should Hamilton afford its students intensive training and encourage creative activity within a chosen field? He was concerned about the amount of depth which Hamilton offered its students (Is our stress on breadth and freedom at some expense to depth sound? [36]

Many first-rate colleges exempt a considerable number of students from a required course in English composition. Hamilton requires all students to take a year course, McEwen wrote. Is it possible that not all students should be required to take such a basic course? He questioned, as well, Hamilton’s comparatively heavy foreign language requirement, and in this context, the issue of students taking courses only because of compulsion. [37]

Perhaps most important, McEwen spoke of possible interdepartmental courses, or less traditional courses such as those in history of science and the philosophy of science. [38] Finally, McEwen began to outline the areas in which Hamilton should offer specific courses not now available. They were: Sociology, American intellectual history, American diplomatic history, state and local government, Old and New Testament, Latin American history, and others.

As the concept of the coordinate college was discussed, the opportunity for curricular expansion (without the attendant need to cut existing offerings) became one of its most attractive features from the point of view of the Hamilton faculty. It took the pressure off departments that felt that their offerings might be vulnerable. As we shall see, it also set the stage for what was probably the most basic structural flaw in the coordinate arrangement [39].

In a final coda to the Educational Process section, McEwen unconsciously abandoned the question format in which the rest of the memo was cast. He made this statement:

Many colleges are joining in rather widespread and intense cooperative enterprises. In this manner, without merging identities, they are able to do in concert things that either they could not do alone or could not do well alone. There is great potential in this type of activity.

McEwen suggested that the committee might wish to investigate what could be done cooperatively with nearby Syracuse or Colgate Universities, or even local Utica College, though there is no indication that any serious attempt was made to do this. Perhaps it was McEwen’s way of getting the issue of coordination on the table in a comparatively unthreatening way.

During the spring of 1962, and through the better part of the 62-63 academic year, the Trustee Long Range Planning Committee met, sometimes by itself, and often with its faculty counterpart. Couper reported general progress at the intervening meetings of the Board, and could tell them, in January of 1963, that his group would recommend that Hamilton maintain a student body of approximately 800, but that the coordinate idea was under very serious consideration.

The Committee issued what it called its Interim Report on April 20th, 1963 [40]. In his cover letter to the Board of Trustees, Chairman Couper pointed out that the interim report was not what the committee had in mind as it began its work. But, having seen the scope of its charge, which was virtually all-encompassing as regards the nature of the College, the committee had concluded that there were three matters that needed the immediate attention of the Board. They were, to begin with, the necessity for a Campus Center, which was seen as a partial solution to the dominance of fraternities in Hamilton’s social life and culture, and second, the consideration of year-round operation, as a response both to budget pressures and the sense that a larger student body might be served without increasing the size of Hamilton itself. The third matter was simply called growth, and it was addressed as a potential response to national pressures to serve the larger college-bound population, and, at the same time, a way of solving local curricular, social, and fiscal issues.

One of the committee’s strong recommendations was that a campus social center be built, and, in the fullness of time, it was, in the form of the Bristol Center. It was also recommended that specific steps be taken towards a system of year-round operation. Such steps were, in fact, taken, in the form of studies and plans, but they were never fully implemented. It was the matter of growth that began to set new directions. The committee wrote:

After a most careful kind of consideration, we have concluded that the expansion of the academic community on College Hill is a desirable, indeed necessary, thing, notjust because of increasing applications, but primarily because of the benefits it would bring to the students and faculty.

The choice of words was very deliberate. The academic community on College Hill was distinguished from Hamilton College itself, and this was made clear in an underlined passage further down the same page:

The Committee favors the principle that any future growth on College Hill should take place in the form of coordinate colleges as the needs and opportunity arise.

There it was. Under the general rubric of growth, the committee proposed the establishment of a series of new, coordinate, institutions. An interesting document exists in the files, presumably dating from this time, but without either attribution or date. It is titled Hamilton College Cost Comparison Between a Coordinate and a Coeducational College. In brief, it concluded that there would be financial advantage to the establishment of a coordinate college—though its conclusions were founded on the then-prevalent fact that greater income could be realized from a separate college for women because colleges for women were able to charge higherfees. The fact that this could be the basis of a serious conclusion regarding future costs is indicative of the prevailing mind-set. This was not a vision that regarded women as equal partners, nor was it one which contemplated an economic diversity in the future student body. Nonetheless, the study is of particular interest in the comparisons that may be drawn between it and a study undertaken by the Hamilton President in 1976 that assessed the same differential between a coordinate college and simple coeducation.

The committee went on to spell out the fundamental elements of what would become known as the Cluster Plan. First, without mentioning a specific number, they recommended that several coordinate colleges be established over time, and pointed to the fact that the Claremont group had started a new college about once every ten years. Second, they specified that the new colleges should be defined by the liberal arts, although they encouraged each to have special emphases or bents which might complement what was already on the Hill.

Then, indicating what had occupied a great deal of its thought and time, the Committee specified that the first of the coordinate colleges should be for women. The Committee has reached this conclusion after protracted and careful deliberations, the report stated. Then came the words that echo strangely from this distance: We are fully aware of the magnitude of the undertaking and its implications for Hamilton College.[41]

Much careful study preceded the writing of the Interim Report. The

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document reveals, however, what was most studied, which was material that could be reduced to figures and therefore given the trumping status of hard data. [42]

First, the committee heard from the admissions people at Hamilton that many very good potential applicants were being lost because of Hamilton’s isolated, single-sex characteristics. As we shall see in greater detail, the Committee reasoned that adding women to the mix would be beneficial to Hamilton in terms of the quality of its applicants for education on the Hill. The committee had concluded that there was a strong supply of well-qualified college-bound women. It cited the fact that, in the 1956-61 period, the increase in the number of women attending college for the first time was 55%, as compared to 33% for men. They were convinced that if Hamilton were to recruit to fill 100 more spaces, it would experience a decline in the quality of applicants, but that a college for women could recruit and enroll 100 very well-qualified female students. It followed that, if one wanted to expand the academic community without loss of quality, recruiting women could best do it. [43]

What was left unsaid and unwritten, however, was a group of very strongly held views on the nature of undergraduate life at small, male, fraternity-dominated and geographically isolated rural colleges. [44] There was the weekend cycle of desertion of the campus, broken only by the big weekends when students drank too much, when girls were imported from other colleges, and a protracted and demeaning game of chauvinistic one-upmanship was played out against the deadline of Monday and the resumption of classes. Students outside of the majority (fraternity-dominated) pattern felt ever more isolated, and only the strongest of them could find identity in opposition to it. It was a structure so pervasive that students could seldom resist it, and the college administration had long since abandoned hope of real progress in the area. The faculty perennially raised the issue, the president persistently decried it, and the trustees occasionally discussed it, shook their collective head, and got on with the business of keeping the college going. After all, they reasoned, as loving alumni, they had survived the same sort of thing. Could it be all that bad?

The social environment at