Thomas A. Spragens Interview

INTERVIEWER. Mr. Spragens, I wonder if we could start out by asking you a little bit about your personal background. Could you tell us a little bit about your folks first?

I'm a native of Kentucky and was born in Lebanon in Marion County, thirty miles west of here. I'm one of seven children, the third of five brothers who were followed by two sisters. My father was William Henry Spragens, a lawyer and then long-time circuit judge in the Eleventh Judicial District of which Marion County is part. My mother, Lillian Brewer, was a native of Lancaster, Kentucky; my father a native of Casey County, Kentucky, where my grandfather, great grandfather, and great-great grandfather were all engaged in farming. Of my brothers, Henry, the eldest, was a college professor throughout his career, a mathematician, who served the longest single part of his career at the University of Louisville, where he was chairman of the mathematics department. Incidentally, the five of us all hold bachelor's degrees from the University of Kentucky. Henry received a master's degree at Illinois and took his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati. My brother next in order of age was John Brewer Spragens, who went from an undergraduate major in physics at Kentucky, where he earned Phi Beta Kappa Honors, into the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. He was throughout his life active in various church vocations as a pastor, as a seminary professor, and as an administrator of a central church agency. My brother, George, who was the fourth, is an engineer, served variously in corporate research, in the air conditioning business, as a consulting engineer, and for the past ten years with the University of Kentucky as the supervising engineer for their construction program. Robert, my youngest brother, is following in the footsteps of our father as a lawyer and now circuit judge in the Eleventh Judicial District.

My sister, Dorothy, married a Kentuckian, James Trice. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott with a master's degree from the University of Kentucky, and has lived with her family for many years now in the Philadelphia area. She is now chairman of the mathematics department at the Shipley School. The younger of the two sisters, Betty Spragens Griffin, is a graduate of the University of Kentucky Law School, and is now professionally engaged in the position of Friend of the Court to the Circuit Court of Fayette County, Kentucky. That is a position in which she serves in effect as a commissioner in the area of domestic relations.

INTERVIEWER. Could you tell us something, of your childhood and of your education, please?

My childhood was spent in the delightful small town of Lebanon, which at that time had about 3500 persons, I think. It's grown to about 6000 now. We had the good fortune of having good schools in Lebanon. Our superintendent of schools throughout my years in public schools was, as I recall it, a graduate of VMI. He was versed in the classical tradition of education. He was himself a mathematician, a fine teacher, and a fine educational statesman. We enjoyed in the Lebanon High School, which had at that time about 160 students, a very fine education offering us four years of Latin, a thing that's hard to find now in public schools, and French. We had excellent training in mathematics and the sciences as well as in the literary disciplines there. We were, all of us in my family and other young people in the community, stimulated by good teachers. The school in one year (I think it was the year before I entered) had three students ranked highest in their particular discipline in the state-wide examinations they used to administer competitively to high school students throughout the state. That was at the time when they perhaps were conducting examinations in twelve to fifteen subjects altogether. Some of them represented different subject levels of one discipline; for example, the English composition and a more advanced English literature. But the school gave us a fine preparation for collegiate work. I went on from there, following others in my family, to the University of Kentucky.

I think you'd be interested in my college choice. I had the experience of being solicited for consideration of entry to Centre by the chief admissions officer of the College who at that time was the president, Dr. Charles Turck, who served as president of Centre from 1926 through 1935. Dr. Turck came into the Lebanon High School to speak at an assembly one morning during my senior year in 1934 and later to talk to a few of us in my class who were college bound. As he himself recalled later to me, to my surprise, I was one of four members of that senior class who comprised a male quartet that had some local regional recognition. He talked with the four of us about entering Centre, all of us being college bound, and held out to us the prospect that we might indeed as a foursome succeed what was then widely known in the area as the Centre College Quartet, all of whose members at that time were seniors. It was an attractive thought, but I elected to go to the University of Kentucky, and the other three came to Centre.

I had career ambitions which I thought would be served by combined collegiate study in business and then in law; and Centre had no particular business administration curriculum, though offering a major in economics, of course. The University of Kentucky had a separate college of commerce, and I (misguided as I came later to know) entered that University of Kentucky College of Commerce. After a year and a half in that program, I realized I'd made a grievous error. I went to the registrar's office and to the appropriate deans' offices and arranged to transfer into the College of Arts and Sciences, where I majored in economics, which I might have done and would have done had I elected to come to Centre in the first place. The interesting thing about that undergraduate experience is that it led me to a keener appreciation of the significant values of a broader, more scholarly undergraduate training than that that's offered by many of the professional undergraduate colleges in the larger institutions. That very experience and what I went through in correcting my errors led me, once I got into education administration, to be particularly interested in undergraduate education and particularly in fostering the traditional liberal arts learning at that level.

As I approached the finish of my undergraduate work, I debated between going on into law as I'd earlier planned or going into public administration. My adolescent idea of going into the general world of commerce and business had been diminished by virtue of a growing interest in public affairs over the period of my collegiate years. I resolved that by deciding to go into the area of public administration. I spent a postgraduate year employed in the Kentucky state government in Frankfort beginning in June of 1938. The following year I accepted a fellowship to study in the graduate school of public affairs at Syracuse University, at that time considered to be probably the leading school for training toward a career in public administration. I went to Washington during the summer intervening between the two years of that master's degree program at Syracuse, and became deeply engaged in work with the Bureau of the Budget at a time when the government was undertaking to build up its personnel. I was asked to remain on, though I had gone there on a temporary appointment, and after consulting with the dean at Syracuse I decided to forego the rest of my graduate program there. I was placed in a position which both he and I valued as being a highly educational setting as well as one professionally satisfying. And that concluded my formal education. (I still maintain a very close relationship with the members of my Syracuse graduate school class. They have come to the Centre campus three times during our years here for reunions of the group.)

Thus it was that I became well launched into the field of public administration. I served primarily in the federal government for five years following, from 1940 to 1945.

A wholly fortuitous chain of circumstances I won't even try to trace led to my being asked by Stanford University to take on an assignment with the University serving in effect as their Washington representative. This was at the conclusion of World War II, and the universities and colleges were facing major challenges as they looked at their postwar role. After some thought I made that move, but with the understanding that I would serve them for a year or at most two years. If after one year in our mutual review of it, we decided that it would be desirable that I continue in that place for another year I was prepared to do so; but I intended to return to government service after that time. I never did do so. I became more deeply involved in the affairs of the University and became assistant to the president. That led me then fully into my career in the world of university and college administration.

INTERVIEWER. While we are on it, maybe we could just pick up with your career history up until the time you had the offer to become president of Centre. Then I'd like to cover a few other things and then get to your Centre years.

I remained at Stanford from 1945 to 1951, initially as a special assistant to the president and based in Washington. But after nine months there, as the summer of 1946 approached, I was asked to bring my family to the campus in Palo Alto, California to assist with some of the internal management development problems that went along with the expected growth then of the University in 1946 from an enrollment of 4500 in June to 7200 in September. That was the outgrowth of the massive return of men in the service either to pick up an interrupted education or to take up collegiate learning for the first time. By summer's end I was in a new continuing assignment as assistant to the president. I served in five years under two presidents and two interim presidents. The untimely death of President Tresidder under whom I want to Stanford had me for a year aiding two men who served consecutively as acting president while the search for a permanent successor was in process. I then served for three years with President Wallace Sterling, who came in as the permanent successor to Dr. Tresidder. Sterling, incidentally, served at Stanford for more than twenty years and came to be known as one of the outstanding university presidents of our time. (He later spoke at my formal induction to the Centre presidency.) I remained in that role until I was invited early in 1951 to join the newly formed Fund for the Advancement of Education, which was a foundation subsidiary to the Ford Foundation and wholly financed by it. It was charged with carrying on the interests of the Foundation in the area of higher education, or institutional post high school education.

I was invited to take on the position of secretary and treasurer to that Foundation as it was being formed. I was one of the initial group of four professional persons who were involved in the development of that Fund which made major contributions in its own name to the improvement of higher education during the 1950s and on into the 1960's, before it was merged back into the structure of the parent Ford Foundation. I was in that position for less than two years when I was asked to consider the presidency of Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. I did accept that invitation and went into that position in November of 1952. At that time I was, incidentally, 35 years of age. I served in the presidency of Stephens for five years until I (after some consideration) decided to accept the invitation to come to Centre as its president.

We came in November of 1957. As you have earlier noted, we remained in that responsibility - I say "we", I think of my wife and myself and to some extent to the family, because it's an all-engrossing role - we stayed in that role for twenty-four years with a great deal of satisfaction until my retirement from the presidency in November, twenty-four years later, in 1981.

INTERVIEWER. Could you tell us a little bit about your wife and her background and something about your children?

My wife was Catharine Smallwood, and for the record let's spell her name, it's most often misspelled; it's "C-a-t-h-a-r-i-n-e", who is a native of Mississippi. She was born and educated in Mississippi, a graduate of the University of Mississippi, and her home for most of her childhood and adolescent years was in Oxford, Mississippi, which is the seat of the University of Mississippi. Her father was a banker in that community. She and I met in Washington where we were both employed after our college years and were married in 1941. We have three children. The first bears my name, Tom, Jr., and is now a professor of political science at Duke University. He has been at Duke since he completed his doctorate there; the exact year I don't recall. But I'm pleased to say he's well established and well recognized as a specialist in political theory; and though he has stayed very close to the academic community in the ablest sense as a political theorist, one tends to write for other political scientists more than for the general public, but he has four published books. He is married and has two children.

Our second child, a daughter, Barbara, is married to Lynn Kelley, who is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University and holds his master's degree from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in political science with a special interest in international affairs, specializing in Latin American affairs, comparative government. Barbara herself took her bachelor's degree in English from Emory University and her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin where she and Lynn met. They subsequently lived in New Mexico while he completed his doctorate, then moved to Missouri where he was assistant professor and then associate professor of political science at Webster College in Webster Groves in the St. Louis metropolitan area. About three years ago they came to Kentucky when he accepted the deanship of Midway College in Midway, Kentucky, which is a two-year women's college. They have two children. Barbara herself has gained substantial competence in counseling. She took a master's degree from Wisconsin in rehabilitation counseling. She has worked with children who have become wards of the court, and has worked in counseling with adolescent drug abusers. She dropped from her work when they came to Kentucky but is now employed as a counselor and a referral officer in the department of psychiatry for the medical school at the University of Kentucky.

Our third and youngest child is David, who is a 1973 graduate of Centre after taking his first undergraduate years at Denison University. He holds his law degree from Wake Forest, is now engaged in the practice of law here in Danville, and is married to Carol Tate, a Centre alumna, who is now part-time member of the Centre faculty and director of music for the Presbyterian Church in Danville. They have one child.

INTERVIEWER. Just for the record, I don't recall if you gave it; could you give the date of your birth and also the date of your marriage?

I was born April 25, 1917; married on May 24, 1941; married in Oxford, Mississippi.

INTERVIEWER. Could you tell us briefly what your hobbies, activities, special interests have been, apart from your career, through the years?

My wife will tell you that Centre College has been my hobby and my special interest. The recreational sport that I've been most interested in is tennis, though I must say I neglected it for quite a time my first fifteen years at Centre and before that time. But that's a game that I enjoy playing with such people as our late dean of instruction, Harold Hanson, and Barry Dixon, and some of the faculty in other parts of the College. My primary recreational indulgence with the family really had to do with water sports, I guess. I play golf with my wife who is, I would say, a better, certainly a more diligent golfer than I. With the children I learned to water ski years ago, and we still water ski together. Just this past summer I succeeded in getting our oldest granddaughter up on water skis at the age of eight. That's the recreation I find that bridges the age gap almost better than any I know, a sport that has some physical component in it, yet can be indulged in at the same time by people of all ages and sexes.

Other interests of mine outside the College have run to a general interest in public affairs, community affairs. I have during the course of my years at Centre served on bodies outside the work of the College. During the term of Governor Breathitt I was a member of a commission for the study of higher education in Kentucky that he appointed and which produced, about 1965 as I recall it, a very extensive study of the needs then existent and the projected needs for higher education in Kentucky. About ten years ago I played an active part in a move to reform the judicial system in Kentucky. It was culminated with the successful adoption of a constitutional amendment which reorganized the state judiciary in substantial ways, created for the first time a supreme court. Prior to that the highest court and the single appellate court was the Court of Appeals, which is now an intermediate court, and which substantially reformed the administration of justice at the county level. We won't go into all those details; but that was an effort in which I became involved and gained some satisfaction in the way of extracurricular activity.

In 1968 I was a delegate to the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I was pushed out front by a group here in Boyle County interested in advocating the candidacy of Senator McCarthy for the Democratic nomination at that time. You may recall he was seeking the nomination in primary opposition to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. This group approached me and asked whether they could nominate me to serve as chairman of the County Democratic Convention, where they hoped to present a slate that might go from this County to the State Convention favoring Senator McCarthy. They knew that I, as a matter of practice as a citizen, declared myself a Democrat, and they knew that I attended the occasional conventions of the Party here in the County that meet every other year or every four years. I always felt that was one obligation that a citizen should have, to take some part in the work of the political system. In any event, I allowed them to put me in nomination for that position, and they mustered a majority at the convention and elected me as chairman instead of electing the County Judge or someone else who might normally have been elected. I discovered only after they had successfully elected a McCarthy slate that the chairman of the County Convention was supposed to chair the delegation to the State Convention, and so I had a moral obligation then to go to the State Convention. At the State Convention I became a somewhat visible figure for the McCarthy group which was in general a younger group of persons without much visibility. Being a college president I got singled out. The Convention was wholly controlled by the Humphrey group. But Senator Humphrey had sent out word that he would like to see a few opposing delegates sent up to Chicago. I was asked if I would allow my name to be put up, and I did, not expecting to go, thinking that one of the alternates could take my place. But my son, David, who was then very much interested in the political activity of the time rather challenged my conscience to feel that unless I was barred by other things, that I should go. I agreed to go if he would accompany me; I went, but he didn't. He got a job and was going to earn some money in the summer. So I went, and the other two children gathered from Durham and Madison, Wisconsin, to be there with me at the time. That was my one foray into active national politics; a very interesting experience. It did lead me to find a topic for my opening convocation in the Fall. If you want to know about my experience in Chicago, look at my address to the Convocation in September of 1968; it treats with that episode in the life of the nation.

I also have maintained a continuing interest here in the local community in certain elements in the affairs of the city. I served for quite a few years in the first municipal Council on Human Rights which was set up as an agency of the city to moderate problems that might develop in the area of human rights, interracial relations, and that sort of thing. And, though in no official capacity, I've taken a considerable interest in urban renewal activities, city planning, and things of that sort. All that, grows out of my background, I guess, in the interest in government and public affairs. My wife and I have always enjoyed an active social life in this community. She is a very good dancer, and she gets me to the dance floor more often than I might otherwise get there. She and some mischievous women students occasionally used to get me on the dance floor; but I always thought that I was competing uphill against Professor Hazelrigg, so I didn't keep that a part of my most active extracurricular life.

INTERVIEWER. On the second side of the tape we'll be moving into your years at Centre. Is there anything you'd like to add referring strictly to your background that we haven't discussed yet?

No, I think not, thank you; except that I think it's fair to say that my coming to Centre was probably governed by the fact of my interest in the region as one who'd grown up in it, whose forebears on both my father's and mother's side had lived in the region (within 50 miles surrounding Danville) for three or four generations, and my having grown up here and being educated here; those facts influenced my decision when the question of coming to Centre was raised. I guess I consider myself one who has his roots very deep into this part of the world. In that respect I think I was luckier than those who grew up on the desert or the prairie. I like this countryside.

INTERVIEWER. Beginning the discussion of your years at Centre, could you tell us the circumstances by which you came to Centre; and then if you would, just briefly contrast the two colleges?

Centre and Stephens College?

INTERVIEWER. Yes, Centre and Stephens.

I guess the Centre trustees were at the time casting about a bit. The chairman of their search committee called me by telephone, I guess it was in June of 1957, to ask if I would be interested in talking with the board here about the presidency of the College. I told him at the time that I really was not interested to make a move anywhere, that I would be glad to think about it for a while, but that I was satisfactorily and deeply involved in the work of Stephens College. I had within three months of that time declined to consider the presidency of another college which was in far more favorable circumstances then than Centre College was. I speak of that because it goes back to what I observed earlier; I guess the fact that my roots were in this region was the ultimate factor that weighed my decision to make the move at just that time.

But there were substantial differences in the institutions. Stephens is a women's college and was at that time a two-year women's college. As a private junior college, coed or otherwise, it was preeminent of its kind; it had developed a program that had national visibility. It drew students from all 48 states; probably at that time the most widely distributed student body among all the institutions of the country except for the service academies. That was by design; that was one of the purposes the institution had, to create a very heterogeneous - geographically heterogeneous - environment for its students.

Stephens had some very creative approaches to general education. It drew many young women who were making the choice of having a certain experience in women's college, and then a coeducational experience by returning to their own region of the country, more often than not into the principal state university.

At Stephens I led an institution that had more national interconnections than Centre College did at the time, though Centre is a far older college. Centre was also smaller. Stephens had 1800 students; Centre at the time had 427. Centre had always been happily a smaller institution. I was influenced in the choice by my feeling, which I took with me to Stephens, that I would be more at home ultimately in a four-year institution. But that was a very interesting institution and continued to represent a major challenge to an administrator because they were involved in some complex situations at the time. It was, and remained, a fine institution that deserved to get those things squared away. That was the thing that had attracted me there in the first instance.

Centre, of course, was far older, more traditional in its approaches. It had nearly two males for every woman in the College. At the time there were separate campuses, and the women's campus would at most accommodate, as I recall, 165 resident students. But Centre had a student body that was then, as it is now, to a considerable degree a pre-professional group. It constituted, in my view at the time which I think was fairly generally shared, in terms of the standards of work maintained the best institution in Kentucky and in the region it primarily served.

The challenge to me, frankly, in coming to Centre was to restore this College, the best in the state, to a position that it had enjoyed fifty years before as being clearly one of the best of the independent colleges, and one of the best undergraduate colleges of the South. Centre had lagged, as Kentucky had lagged, in its economic resources. Kentucky had suffered from the agricultural depression of the 'Twenties, the subsequent general depression of the 'Thirties, and other circumstances such as changing energy sources. Kentucky had not even developed as well in the Twentieth Century as had other neighboring states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, to be specific.

I was challenged by the idea that Centre College could be and should be measured by the best that the region offered and should be a college that would measure itself by the best in the nation, rather than looking on itself as a wholly provincial institution. I felt that it traditionally had commanded a quality of students that made it worthwhile to seek to add greater strength to the institution. The longer history of the College, the general academic priorities, and my own estimate of the potential and challenge at Centre were all factors that led to my decision to come.

INTERVIEWER. From the time that you were a senior in high school and you considered Centre for going to college, and then you became president, did you have any connection at all with the school, in terms of possibly knowing people who were at Centre or who attended Centre?

I spoke of meeting President Turck when I was a senior in high school. I had met one of his two very attractive daughters when I was in high school; high school youngsters tend to develop some acquaintance across county lines. He had a daughter, Emmy Lou, who was my age or a year younger with whom I had some contact over several years. I knew Professor Joe Proctor Knott, who was a professor of modern languages here, because he was a native of Lebanon (my home town) and a long-time friend of my mother from their early years in Lebanon. He died prior to his retirement, I guess about 1960, as I recall it now. Dr. Knott was a beloved teacher, a man of delightfully eccentric ways in some respects, but a very stimulating teacher and a very delightful colleague in the College. I had known him distantly from childhood.

You will recall that I spoke of the three other members of my high school male quartet coming to Centre. Hence I had three of my closest friends here at Centre College. Indeed, two of the girls from my high school class also came to Centre, so I had five high school classmates here while I was in the university in Lexington. Danville lies between Lebanon and the University of Kentucky, so I would drop in here every now and then to visit my friends.

I gained acquaintance of some others of the ladies in the then separate women's department at Centre College. The dean there at that time was a native of Lebanon, a very charming older person (older in my eyes at that time) named Lucy Blayney Thomas. She had come to Centre as dean of the women's college after years of being in women's education at the preparatory school level in New York.

So I had a friend in court when I went to call at the women's campus to seek the company of some of the young ladies I knew over there. They kept a much closer eye on the comings and goings of the young ladies then than we do now, but in any event, I had a friend in court there.

Yes, I had friends here; I met other Centre students in various ways. I had those kinds of acquaintances with the College, but I really didn't have a significant acquaintance in Danville, as such, except for some of the people of my age at Centre and at U. of K., some of whom I readily recognized when we moved to Danville. I knew I'd find them here, but that was the primary extent of my acquaintance with Centre. (Oh, I used to come over here as a boy from Lebanon to watch football games back when Centre had a team that beat the University of Kentucky rather regularly. I suppose that might happen this year if the two teams met; but it was a different world then in intercollegiate athletics.)

INTERVIEWER. Describe, if you will, your first impressions, not of Centre because obviously you had ties with the past but, upon settling in, your impressions of Centre as president, the social structures of the College, academic structure...

It might be useful if I spoke of the elements of strength and the needs that seemed apparent to me before I accepted the presidency. I didn't accept the presidency wholly out of the generalized considerations I mentioned earlier; I took objective information about the College to try to judge what its potential was. I took a single sheet of paper, used the handbook of American College and Universities published periodically by the American Council on Education, and took about six objective data elements that are indicative of institutional strength for Centre College and about twelve other institutions. I remember that I used national institutions such as Amherst and Wesleyan University in the little Ivy League area, Davidson, Sewanee, Washington and Lee, Southwestern at Memphis in the South; Wooster, Denison, and Kenyon in Ohio. I listed their student enrollment, the size of the faculty, the composition of it in terms of distribution by rank, the percentage of doctorates in the faculty, the book value of the physical facilities of the college, the market value of the endowment, and statistics of that kind.

Centre showed up to have the least endowment, having an endowment of $3 million. It was, except for Berea's endowment, the largest endowment of any Kentucky institution, and it was probably twice that of any other independent college in the state except Berea. Berea has an endowment that's been built over the years out of a national constituency to provide a tuition-free program and stands in a completely different category. But the endowment was low; not quite as low when you put it on a per student basis to some of the others; it compared reasonably favorably, let us say, with Denison in Ohio when you took the endowment on a per capita basis.

The physical plant at Centre was worth $1,900,000 then; that was the cost value of every building on the campus; and the endowment was $3 million. An institution like Davidson had a plant that was worth $10 to $12 million; that is as determined by the investment they had in the plant. Their endowment which was at that time maybe four to five times the Centre endowment. Washington and Lee, Davidson, Sewanee, and Southwestern at Memphis I considered to be the four institutions of the South which Centre might be most properly compared. Southwestern's endowment was perhaps at the time $5 million or $6 million, but the other three had anywhere from three to five times the Centre endowment. Centre faculty was obviously a stable faculty and a good faculty. I also went behind the degrees to see where the degrees had been earned. We had at Centre then a faculty which stood in contrast with any of the other Southern institutions, including Washington and Lee (which, you know, lies on the border of the East). Centre's was the most diverse in their graduate school backgrounds. A larger proportion here came from the Middle West and the East, to a far greater degree than the other Southern institutions. That I considered in an element of strength, not that the degrees were any better, but the College was not quite as deeply entrapped in a regional definition by virtue of that fact. That had been characteristic of Centre for over a hundred years; well, from the early founding it had to go East to get its professors, and they came primarily from the College of New Jersey, which much, much later, 80 years later, became Princeton University. The faculty was good; represented in it were Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, Ohio State, Wisconsin, and other fine institutions.

That to me was the primary strength of the institution at the time. The physical plant was terribly outdated; the endowment was respectable but not as good as other institutions with which the College could properly be compared; but the faculty, small as it was (about 35 full-time persons at that time), was a very good faculty. I knew we were coming up on a time of great growth in the numbers of students in colleges and, necessarily then, of growth in the institutions, a time when faculties had to be built and enlarged.

I had been in the business long enough to know that it's very hard to attract on the average a faculty that's significantly better than the faculty already in place. It can be done, but it's difficult because one of the attractions to a young person seeking a placement on a college faculty, is the quality of the people he or she will be working with. Beyond that, there's also a sad disposition of a faculty in place not to be too eager to bring in someone who may set a pace or standards that they themselves have not been accustomed to maintaining.

I discovered in the years I was at Stanford that it's far easier to build greater strength into our strongest departments than to build new strength into the weakest departments in the university; and it was because of factors within the university and the natural reaction of the persons outside. So I felt Centre had the one strength that was essential to success in developmental terms during the 'Sixties. It appeared to me there was more than a fair chance of helping the College to achieve the goals which the trustees had. The goal of the trustees was quite in line with what my goal would be should I come here. That was, as I say, to raise the College to the level in the academic world and Kentucky it properly deserved. The whole thing built on that background.

INTERVIEWER. I had read in an earlier interview with you, you had described a couple of observations after being president a short time here: one was that you felt there was a low morale among alumni outside of Boyle County, that they possibly felt that Danville alumni played too large a role.

That was a thing you heard at that time, yes. In those days they tended to talk about the "Danville alumni< and the "Louisville alumni"; those were the two largest (still are) pockets of location of alumni of the College. But it's true; the people in Louisville, in large numbers, felt alienated or disillusioned. They cared about the College, else their discontents would not have been evident; but there did exist a concern that their College was in a period of decline, going nowhere, and there was a feeling, not really justified, that "Danville" controlled the College. Despite this there were fine evidences of alumni support. Some very fine persons constituted the board of directors of the Alumni Association. In other words, graduates of the College who were persons with many other involvements were prepared to give time to the College; and certainly the trustees were nearly all alumni of the College at that time. I say nearly all; there was a component of Presbyterian clergy on the board at that time, larger than now, though not a large number, three, four, or five.

I'm not sure whether there is a clergyman on the board just at this time; I guess there isn't, but there nearly has always been at least one, sometimes two. That really had nothing to do, I think, with the strength of the College; it just is related to the fact that the College at that time was far more highly dependent on the Church for its financial sustenance than it is today, both in absolute terms and, even more, in relative terms. At that time the Church was putting about $50,000 a year into the College, and the College budget was (excluding dormitories and dining halls) about $600,000; so it was nearly ten percent of the educational budget. Today the Church is again giving some support to the College; but the budget is about $8 million and the Church support is measured perhaps at $25,000 or $30,000. That's the case across the world of traditionally church-related colleges; there's nothing unique about that. But the challenge at the time I came was to get the various constituencies, alumni, church, community at large, all working in concert to advance the strength of the College. And that they have done, magnificently.

INTERVIEWER. How would you describe the Danville of 1957 to a student just arriving at Centre and looking around town today? How do you remember it, and what's the thing that stands out most in your mind?

It was a more agrarian-related community then than it is today. The manufacturing industry in the town at the time was pretty much comprised of Corning Glass Works, the Palm Beach clothing plant, and the Genesco shoe manufacturing plant. There were other smaller enterprises, as there are today. As you know, today in the industrial park out here there is an employment of a couple of thousand people at plants of several other national corporations that have come into the community. That is a significant change, but it's not unlike the change that has taken place all across the mid-South over the same period of time.

Danville was then, as it is now, a community with a rather surprisingly large proportion of its population more cosmopolitan in their interest and experience and taste than one would expect of a town of this size. That I've always assumed is due to two things: one, that the town and the College grew together, and second, that this town was the marketing center for a rather prosperous agricultural community when agriculture was one of the prime generators of wealth, not just in this area, but in America back during the early and middle Nineteenth Century. A larger proportion of Danville and Boyle County families generated the wealth to make it possible to travel more widely to seek the advantages of education in broader terms than was true in most other communities.

I've always considered it to be a fine college town. Over my years of experience with it, it was then and it is today. Alumni and others who come back remark on how much the town has developed in some ways; it's also lost in some ways. There was really a remarkably good hotel in the Gilcher Hotel which was in the block of Main Street just east of Third. Now the Hub Frankel department store has spread into the whole of it. In terms of hostelry, food service and the like, downtown Danville is not what it once was. And yet I walked up the street today and just by chance encountered Professor Emeritus Mary Sweeney and Professor Nelms. They had with them Dr. and Mrs. Jameson Jones. (Dr. Jones was dean of Centre at one time until he was called to a similar post at his alma mater, Southwestern at Memphis. He is now retired. His wife is a graduate of Centre College, who became secretary to Dr. Sweeney when she was dean of the Women's College.) The Joneses were passing through here and we had lunch together. She was commenting on the attractive changes in Main Street since they left here some thirty years ago.

Danville has not changed in essence that much; it's been an unusually sophisticated town for a town its size for decades, for many generations. It was the center of intellectual life in pioneer Kentucky. This is where the early political debates were held that led to the decision to initiate the process of securing statehood. The constitutional conventions were held here. It's a town that very early occupied a greater importance than one might have assumed in the life of this region in terms of its intellectual, social, political life.

INTERVIEWER. How would you characterize your relations with faculty, other administrators, and students during your career here?

Then and always it was a very enjoyable relationship. This faculty, as I found it, and incidentally I visited with members of the faculty before making any ultimate decision to come here, was a body of excellent qualities in terms of their academic preparation, but they also showed unusually fine professional qualities in terms of their sense of their collegial responsibilities and mutual relationships. That's been a continuing characteristic of this faculty. I take some pride in the fact that we haven't lost that; it might have been lost, you know, during my long time here. It's been a thing that has been attractive over the years to prospective members who visit the campus.

Every academic community of course has its internal differences in terms of preferences, and in judgments about priorities. This has been a faculty that has always maintained a spirit of good will internally; and that's not necessarily true in all academic communities, even good academic communities. It's a thing that has marked this College during the whole of my experience here. Just to elaborate on that: about six or seven years ago I brought in here for a short period of time a man that had long-time campus experience. He was one of my graduate school colleagues that I'd enticed to Stephens College as a business manager after I'd gotten there and needed a strong fiscal and managerial associate. He was ultimately administrative vice president of Stephens, and he had also been president of the Indianapolis Art Association for a time. His name was Gordon Freese. He was wanting to taper off and called me to ask about my thoughts about some post-retirement activities he had in mind. I suggested he think about coming and spending a couple of years here to reorganize our external relations staff and our development staff. He said, "Why, Tom, that's something I don't know much about." I said, "I know you don't, but you know the significance of the function, and you know how to manage; I want somebody to reorganize this and put it in shape. Somebody with your experience could do that." He did, and he made a far greater contribution here than most people realize, because he was in and out in a short period of time. He had a large part to do with helping us to get structured to get into the capital campaign that we successfully finished last August 1.

But back to the spirit of this faculty. Freese had been here for some weeks. He had moved around the campus quietly as he always did, and he met and talked with members of the faculty, die probed to make sure he understood the institution, as a wise administrator would. In due course, while in my office he said to me, "One question I just have to ask you: Who are the soreheads in this campus? I've looked all over, and have found none yet. Who are the disaffected?"

I stopped to try to name someone who would constitute a "sorehead" and I could not do so. I said to him, "There are two or three people who have lost their edge, who are not holding their own, not keeping pace." Those are often the people who become soreheads. "But", I said, "in these instances they have not become antagonistic, they have not become soreheads." I said, "This just doesn't happen." That, I think, is a fair description of the faculty I found and of the faculty as it exists today. If there's ever a college president who's had the privilege of working in a harmonious environment, I've been that person. I've experienced splendid interpersonal relationships at the College.

INTERVIEWER. I wanted to ask you just briefly about how the students in general accepted or dealt with the changeover in administration? In an article, I believe it was December of 1957, shortly after you took office, you talked at a Convocation. There had been apparently some kind of disciplinary action taken, and the writer was paraphrasing, but I believe he stated that in your address you had mentioned we had "lost our respect for the law at Centre." Did you have to come to terms with more discipline in your approach to the students? Had there been a laxity in some things that had to be corrected?

Centre was maintaining, as most institutions do, let me add, a rather specific set of codes of conduct that were not always honored in practice. In any community we don't always live up to our rules. Centre had rigid rules on the books against the possession or use of alcohol. This was the cause of a disciplinary action that had been taken then. It was an off-campus affair.

The College didn't pay much attention to what happened until things may have created some disturbance or annoyance. In the instance at hand there, there were about six students, I think, that had been made the object of rather severe discipline. I've forgotten whether there were suspensions or very severe probations, maybe a combination. When I arrived at my desk on the llth of November 1957, I had a stack of appeals from the action of the faculty Committee on Discipline. I had to treat with it. The behavior that had been the cause of the disciplinary action was clear; the examination of it had been meticulously fair in terms of the way in which the discipline committee worked in those days. They would have a preliminary investigation that was almost a grand jury kind of exploration before they went into actual ultimate adjudication of it.

The problem that existed then was that, though the College said, "You shall not possess alcoholic beverages", it didn't pay much attention to what went on. The students felt that the administration of justice wasn't very even handed. I had to agree with that, but I reminded the student body of their own duplicity. I had to acknowledge that the faculty process was not even-handed enforcement because it was an enforcement that related only to flagrance and those kinds of situations. I approved the findings of guilt, but stayed the penalties, while putting out a call for the reexamination of the way in which we carried out our processes of internal governance, proposing that students should be capable of judging their peers. We set about it in no hurry; no crises. As a result of that, after a year or so, the students had agreed to set up their own judiciary, and I had asked the trustees to approve a rule that eliminated the prohibition against possession or use, but which called for observance of state law. We didn't direct ourselves to the simple possession or use of alcohol as being a punishable offense, and have not since. Intoxication or disorderly conduct is forbidden.

That was not a major problem. It was not the thing that one came into the campus and wanted to take up as the first item of business; but on the other hand, it gave me a handle to address the whole community. I recall how a senior member of the faculty, fifteen years later said, "I can recall when you first came here, you asserted that you felt the primary concern of the institution always should be for its own integrity." I had used that term at that time. I observed that our rules could vary, but whatever they were, the most important thing to us all was to maintain a sense of integrity in our common life. Whatever our regulations were and by whose ever authority they were established, we respect them, feeling free to work toward orderly change in them if they need to be changed, but always with a sense of responsibility and integrity.

There were no great problems. I was looked upon initially as exercising a kind of a crackdown influence, and yet our administration-student relationships were friendly because I was prepared for open reexamination of old rules while standing for good deportment and a basic integrity of practice in relation to our common professions of good standards in our community life. And there were changes in what was transpiring in the fraternity houses particularly at that time.

But you can find around here people who were students of the College at that time. I think we all got along very well together.

INTERVIEWER. We are resuming our interview with President Emeritus Thomas A. Spragens and today's date is November 9, 1982. Mr. Spragens, during your service as president you guided Centre through a major rebuilding program, dramatically changing the face of the campus; enrollment doubled, faculty doubled, the number of buildings and remodelings dramatically increased. I wonder if you would give us some of the background of this ten-year plan and the accomplishments you've taken the most pride in.

The first portion of your question is easier to answer than the last, though it might seem the other way. I think I mentioned in our earlier discussion that one of the weaknesses of the College apparent at the time I became part of the institution was the fact that the very small enrollment made it difficult for the College to provide majors with what we judged to be (the faculty, the dean, and I) a sufficient number of faculty members in each of the individual disciplines in which the College had traditionally undertaken to offer major fields, or fields of concentration. We hypothesized that to be able to offer a good major, that is, to expose the student to varying perspectives among persons in the field he is choosing to pursue, we should undertake to build ourselves to the point where in every discipline which we offered as a major we would have three faculty members qualified to teach in it. We felt that in some cases you might have one faculty member who was competent to function as a part of a major committee in more than one discipline. An example of that is Professor Scarborough who has been with Centre ten years or so; he functions both as a part of the philosophy program and the religion program and is certainly qualified by his training and scholarship to function in both fields. Following that principle, it was quite obvious that we could not offer as many as twenty majors, and that's roughly what we were offering at that time, without having a faculty of roughly sixty individuals, irrespective of the enrollment. (We had, as I recall it at the time of our coming here, something like thirty-five to thirty-eight members of the faculty. However, that included persons in physical education, for which we then offered course credit, but it was an area in which we had no major course offerings, no upper division offerings.) Moving further with one hypothesis, we said that the College needed to have something like 700-750 students to make that staffing an economical staffing. We recognized that there were some disciplines in which necessarily you needed more than three persons in the basic areas such as English, language, and literature.

We projected a scenario, if you please, that called for increasing the size of the institution by progressive steps without sacrificing standards; indeed we hoped to raise our standards of admission during the period of the 1960's which, as we have earlier discussed, was a period of great growth. We thought we had every reason to think we could, not double the enrollment as you suggested, but increase it by about 75-80 percent; that's roughly double.

We set out then an overall goal of building the enrollment over the 1959 to 1969 ten-year period to 750 students, providing a faculty soundly built to serve that, and with physical facilities competent to care for an increase in enrollment of something over 300 on a base of 425, which was roughly the enrollment from which we began.

Obviously, everything else aside, we needed more residence facilities. It was not possible to expect the city of Danville to take up as residents an additional 300 students. There had been a time when nearly all students in the College lived in private homes in the community, but that tradition was evaporating under changes of more modern times when domestic help was less available to the same degree that it had been. Twenty years earlier many of the local gentry had enjoyed taking a student or two in and were not too burdened with the care of the service of in-house boarders.

We projected then our dormitory needs; along with that and parallel to it, we needed to make plans, clearly, for a new library. Our assessments indicated that the greatest fundamental limitation of the College's academic resources was the then existing library. But in that connection we had the problem of treating with the fact that at that time our women's division was on a separate campus, something more than a mile away from the men's campus on West Main; and we had to project our thinking into the question of how we provided, shall I say, equal opportunity for women students if we built a major new library on the campus of largest enrollment, the men's campus, while continuing the existing expectation that women would get to and from it by bus running on half-hour schedules.

This posed the question of whether we ought to think in more drastic terms to the end of planning for a unified campus. We conducted studies of the cost of maintaining a major library collection on the women's campus, the Lexington Avenue campus. It began to appear that there was only one rational way to go, and that was to provide for a planned removal from the women's campus and for the development of residence facilities on the Main Street campus adequate to handle the relocation of all women students which, as I had indicated, was about 165, while providing also for growth in the amount of an additional 300 students.

To do that seemed feasible just then by virtue of the fact that the federal government was at that time expressing its interest in and support for higher education primarily by providing loans to build residences on college and university campuses. It was also providing great support for research in the larger, research oriented universities, but that was irrelevant to our situation. We could, however, turn to those government sources for low-interest loans to build additional residence halls. We had to persuade the government that they would be justified in putting in money to provide that much housing on a campus so small.

We were successful. Without going into the details of it, we initially arranged for the construction of two residences for women students; and those were the Acheson-Caldwell and Cheek-Evans duplex units on the north side of Main Street; and for the construction of three duplex units, housing 26 students each, that formed the fraternity quadrangle. The latter element provided housing to supplant the existing converted single-family residences in which the fraternities of the College then had their abode and in which some 50 percent of their members lived.

That became a major defined need during our studies of the period of 1957-1958. The need for the library was a clearly defined need. And along with the increased residence facilities was obviously the need of a central dining facility that would accommodate that growing number of students.

By the time we entered the year 1959, which was ten years short of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the founding of the College, we had projected a program which called for an increase to the level of 750 students during that ten-year period, moving in a first stage to providing facilities for 600 and then providing for later development further on into that decade.

We also projected the need later in the decade for additional science facilities, Our earliest plan called for a wing on what then served as our science center. It was a building called, as our present science building is, Young Hall, but it was located on a site farther south than the present building. The original master plan study projected a wing on that which would project on the east end and north. It would become a unifying unit between Young and the existing Old Main building. Our original studies had led us to believe Old Main could possibly be converted to be the needed larger library if we constructed added space winged to it on the east to provide classroom space replacing that which might be removed in the library conversion process.

So we had a plan during the ten years to provide new instruction facilities both in the humanities, the social studies, and the sciences, and a plan to develop housing and dining facilities progressively over the ten-year period to get us up to the level of being able to handle 750 students.

We added one other assumption to our master planning: With respect to facilities that could not simply be expanded incrementally as dormitories could, we should build in the assumption that they might later need to accommodate as many as 1000 students. This applied to the library and science facilities and to others planned for development in the second decade, an auditorium facility, expanded gymnasium facility, and a new, smaller theatre to replace the theatre which had been completed on the Lexington Avenue campus as late as 1955. The final master plan was done, as I may have indicated earlier, with the assistance of an able group of planning architects, the firm of Murphy and Mackey of St. Louis, Missouri, who had done a great deal of work of this kind with Washington University in St. Louis, whose experience appealed to us and whose aesthetic sense as it related to campus facilities had also appealed to our sense of appropriateness.

Having defined physical plant needs in those terms, we undertook also to assess the adequacy of our endowment. We projected a need to increase the endowment of $3 million with which we entered the period to a total of $6.5 million by the end of the first decade.

Putting all those needs together, we projected a need of 1) raising, both for the physical facilities and for additions to the endowment, gifts of $6.5 million, and 2) borrowing an additional $3 million or so from the federal government for the construction both of dormitories and of some of the academic facilities. That became a well defined program enthusiastically approved by the faculty and warmly and purposefully adopted by the trustees of the College.

That led us into the Sesquicentennial capital campaign which we launched, as I recall it, in November of 1960. Our kick-off dinner was in Louisville in the Crystal Ball Room of the Brown Hotel. We had a fine turnout of alumni of the College and other citizens of the region interested in education. There we first publicly exposed the Master Plan and announced our intention, during the first phase of two to three years, to raise the initial part of that $6.5 million in cash. Because the first period involved mostly dormitories and dining halls, our cash requirements were not nearly so great as they would appear when one looked at the size of the building program, so we were seeking $1,700,000.

We were not very highly organized for fund raising at that time. We had an Annual Fund which was producing $20,000 to $25,000 a year and a very limited program of seeking larger gifts through estate plans. So having adopted these goals, we retained external fund-raising counsel; this was, for the record, George Brakeley and Associates of New York, who also staffed our initial fund-raising campaign.

I would just go on to say that as the campaign was moving into its later months, we took the step of going outside to find an experienced, young fund-raising specialist in order to create a permanent mechanism in the College. We created the position of director of development, using a term strongly favored at that time, and brought in a young man named Ray Handlan, who was an associate on the development staff of his alma mater, Cornell University.

So our major fund raising was relying in the first instance on external staff brought in for that purpose, but built into its latter portion a properly trained and competent young development specialist on our own staff.

The objectives of that first-phase campaign were realized. We did not raise as much money as we might have wished during the first phase for endowment, but we recognized that the goal of getting our endowment up to $6.5 million was something that could not be too tightly planned within two-or-three-year terms. It was a long-range goal, spreading over the full ten-year period. But with some false starts, with a lot of commitment and effort on the part of the trustees and other friends of the College and particularly a large body of alumni, we did successfully complete the first phase from 1961-63 though not in every part in the way in which it was defined.

The second phase involved primarily the library development which, as we had gone along, had changed its definition considerably. We abandoned the idea of modernizing the Old Main building; we abandoned the idea of creating a wing on Young Science Hall. We didn't abandon that fully, but we undertook at least to separate that from the facilities for the library and for instructional facilities for the literary disciplines, I mean social studies and humanities. The outcome of our revised planning was what is now the Doherty-financed library-instruction building. We called it at the time a Hall of Learning to suggest the multiple functions it would serve. I can recall the brochure that we used in its promotion-it had a three-or-four-color cover on it with an artist's rendering of the building which stands there today.

We completed that building and dedicated it in 1966. And immediately, under the impetus of initiatives of the development committee of the board of trustees, chaired by Chauncey Newlin, we turned our thinking immediately then to getting ahead with the science facilities.

Let me go back and point out that the real turning point in the development program in terms of funding physical facilities that were planned came in about 1964. Having completed the dormitory and dining units that we discussed earlier, and having by that time also gotten into the construction of Yerkes House which was the third unit in the women's complex (now coed in parts, as you know) on Main Street, we faced a lack of funds to get ahead with the library, though it was time to begin to think about going into detailed architectural planning. The board of trustees, under the urging of Mr. Newlin, who later became chairman of the board, authorized us to begin construction drawings for the development of this building, even though the funds were not in sight. They said, in effect, that in some way we must bring it about.

Mr. Newlin himself became the agent for providing the assurance that we could get ahead with that construction. Just about the time we were ready to break ground he brought to us word of the successful reception by the Henry and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation of New York of a grant for $1 million toward the cost of the project, which was estimated to cost $1.5 million and toward which we had something like a quarter of a million dollars in a federal grant available. With that assured, even though all the dollars were not in place, the trustees authorized us to proceed full speed to build the building.

The College, having $1 million in construction working capital at that point, did not draw down all of that money for the library. Since the federal government by that time had in place an educational facilities loan program (that is, for the academic facilities rather than residence facilities), we took advantage of the highest loan capability that we might command for that.

We were borrowing, not incidentally, at rates that varied between 3 1/8 and 3 3/4 percent. Your generation has a hard time grasping that at all. It was a subsidized rate, but it was a rate that was established against the going prime rate in the money markets of 4 1/2, 4 3/4, to 5 percent.

But we were able to borrow money to the extent that we completed the Doherty Library and still had a cash reserve on hand. We had an additional indebtedness to be amortized over a 40-year period. Thirty or forty? Let's just record that I don't recall that at the moment; but we had a base on which to plan immediately to get the science building completed. Here again, the trustees authorized us to go ahead with the planning. We set up a careful working group from the faculty of the sciences and mathematics departments and planned a functional building to serve that area of our teaching program. We borrowed added low-rate funds, and raised more gifts, to the end that the building was begun late in the 1960's and finished very early in the 1970's. The project completion followed the termination of the ten-year period, though the work was financed, authorized, and under way at that time. We did during that Sesquicentennial period exceed the $6.5 million total fund-raising goal. The goal that was considered perhaps too ambitious in 1959 was achieved, and it moved us on with a momentum towards achieving our other needs. We addressed the question of an auditorium and facilities for the fine arts, and also the need for gymnasium facilities for the women students who had come from the other side of town, which had been satisfied earlier when we exchanged the former women's campus to the Danville City School Board for their property which was located on the southeast corner of Walnut and College Streets. (That's the present site of the arts complex today.) I need to go back and interpolate: We acquired the old High School campus when we had moved entirely from the other side of town by exchange with the school board of our Kentucky College for Women facilities. This enabled them to build a completely new high school plant there, after having removed the old Women's College facilities. We used their old high school facilities for instruction and their gymnasium as a women's gymnasium (we spent some $120,000, I think, modernizing the facility, which was not a small expenditure at that time, in the middle 1960's). We moved all of the activities in our Old Main building to give its site to the library-instruction building which became the Doherty Hall. So we had satisfied the gymnasium need by that exchange of properties and had temporary space to make possible our new construction.

I should add for the record: When we exchanged sixteen Kentucky College for Women acres and three major buildings plus a residence and a gymnasium for the high school plant, we acquired two buildings, added four-and-a-half acres, and accepted as a differential payment $100,000 beyond the property swapped. But that gave us a piece of land that became invaluable to the College as time further developed.

But now to return to the point where we had the science building under construction and its funding through loans and cash availabilities assured. The development committee then encouraged us to go ahead with planning for an auditorium and facilities for the fine arts. When we had made a Master Plan in 1959, we had anticipated an expenditure of, say, $1.75 million to $2 million for such facilities, and were speaking of a building with an auditorium to seat 1000 persons and also provide facilities for arts instruction. The College's courage had increased considerably over the intervening time, particularly under Mr. Newlin's leadership. The development committee urged us to think even more boldly about a complex for the arts, including an auditorium that might be large enough to serve not just the College but the surrounding community and be a center for presentation of programs, concerts, gallery shows, and dramatic productions that would go far beyond what we had earlier anticipated. Having had called to our attention, again by Mr. Newlin, a very successful auditorium that had been built on the campus of the Arizona State University at Tempe, Arizona, we looked at that and at another auditorium that had been built in Florida by the same architects. With the unanimous approval of the board, we retained the designer of those two buildings, Wesley Peters, the chief architect of the Taliesen Associates. This was an architectural group that was the working wing of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which had both an educational objective in which they were training young architects and a practicing objective in which they functioned as architects with an international practice.

They were invited to project the finest facility for the fine arts which might be conceived for Centre College or any of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. They came in with a design which was extremely attractive and which embraced a projected financial investment of nearly $10 million. It was fascinating and completely beyond the belief of many of us that we could accomplish that. But it was whittled down over the time we arrived at the plan which was constructed and completed in 1973. It was constructed on a budget of about $5.5 million with an actual expenditure initially of $5,300,000 for construction and the equipment of the building throughout.

Even this called for far more money than we had planned, but it was a highly attractive goal and still an impractical goal in the minds of most of the trustees. I urged the trustees also to keep in mind, if we built a building of that kind, that the sheer maintenance of it would require an endowment of $ .75 million to $1 million, but I encouraged the board to think that we might raise that money. We agreed to recognize that if we built the building we should immediately set about providing some endowment for it in order not to adversely affect the financial stability of the College.

But at the time we were still casting about in many directions for the construction funds, and with very little success. Looking at the fact that the best potential single asset in terms of funds that were not specifically designated was a substantial interest, but a deferred interest, in a group of trusts that had been set up by W. T. Grant. He had placed the College in trusts that he had established, from which Centre would receive one-twentieth of a major estate comprised mostly of stock in the W. T. Grant Company (which, as you will recall, had low-cost department stores scattered all over the country; W. T. Grant was at the time perhaps a larger name than Kresge or Kress or any of the other chains of that kind). But these were only future interests. Mr. Newlin again, with access to the directors of the Grace Doherty Charitable Trust, saw possibilities. (The Doherty board acknowledged a particular interest in Kentucky by virtue of the fact that Mrs. Doherty, the wife of Henry Doherty and a co-founder of the foundation, was born in the Ashland area in Eastern Kentucky and lived for several years as a child in Danville while her parents were proprietors of the former Gilcher Hotel in Danville.) The Doherty board listened to a suggestion from Mr. Newlin that they consider buying our future interests in that Grant Trust giving us cash in exchange for our rights which would be falling in the future. Those rights had legal and economic value which could be determined by the use of the actuarial projections, not too unreasonable when you had twenty different trusts, each of the twenty having life interests invested in twenty different individuals.

It was pretty easy to project roughly what the current value of those ultimate assets would be. The Foundation purchased our rights there for a figure in the neighborhood of two-thirds of a million, giving us a real nest egg to get ahead; and they also, after other discussion, offered to advance all needed construction money to us against funds we would later raise. We had a responsibility to pay back to the Foundation those additional advances. It was an exceedingly generous arrangement . We went ahead in all directions. We were undertaking to raise money for the project, and we were completing plans for putting the building under contract and getting ahead with that last major element in the development of a newly expanded plant. The building was completed and dedicated in June of 1973.

I think the record will show that the auditorium, by the testimony of outstanding artists, has turned out to be one of the finest multipurpose auditoriums in the country in terms of its acoustical qualities. In terms of knowledgeable critics, from an audience standpoint it is also one of the most comfortable, with excellent sight lines. Everything about it is outstanding. And the little theatre has comparable merit when compared to teaching theatres or experimental theatres in other parts of the country.

We set about raising funds and raised all we could; we were some distance short of having the funds to repay our obligations at the time. Ultimately the Foundation accepted from us a payment in the lump sum of something short of the initial advances of funds to a considerable extent and excused us of our further obligation in return for our making an effort to raise the needed endowment, which we undertook to do.

We set out to raise $800,000 in endowment. With major support from the Danville community, which put up half of that, we raised the $800,000 which was the figure the Doherty board challenged us to raise. Then the last super-generous act of great generosity on the part of that foundation led them to add to our $800,000 an additional $400,000 which pushed the endowment to $1,200,000. It was one of the most unbelievable financing arrangements that I have ever experienced here, or known of elsewhere. The investment of the Grace Doherty Charitable Trust in this campus has to go down in history as the largest investment in the College up to that time.

So much for the development of the physical facilities at the College. Well, let me add, as the need became apparent, we had developed one more residence hall to house 103 persons and financed that primarily, again, with government loan funds. That was the Nevin Hall on the south side, that is in the south group of residence buildings. We had then the physical facilities to accomplish all those early goals of facilities for a consolidated campus adequate to provide for 750 students in all its parts, including residence and dining facilities and with the capability, if need be, to accommodate within those instructional facilities as many as 1,000 students if that should become a desirable later objective.

Let me just stop to comment on that. At the present time I would doubt that the College will in the near future seek to increase the enrollment to 1,000 students. It seems probably a goal that would have limited academic advantages, limited fiscal advantages; indeed it might be counterproductive because it would mean that the same endowment which now serves 750 students might be required to serve a third more students, and it would mean a reduction in the per capita endowment and in the endowment support then for the education of individual students.

It may appear that the College's primary preoccupation during that time was with borrowing and building; but at the same time, efforts had been put in place to raise the academic strengths of the campus, both in the instructional program in the availability of a faculty and then, also, to hopefully become more selective in the admission of students; though the College was at the time these efforts began the most selective institution in the state of Kentucky, certainly. And that had gone along equally well.

One overriding dream of the dean of the College who was in place when I came here and continued to serve as dean for six and a half to seven years, Dr. Frank Heck, whom you know today as Matton Professor Emeritus of History. He had hoped that in his time the College might bring to its campus a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He himself was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, as were a number of other members of the faculty. This I found was an objective that he had hoped might be pushed in his time; it was one I certainly embraced enthusiastically, and though we didn't say much publicly about it, that was one measure that we felt would constitute an external measure of the quality of the institution. We measured various plans against the expectations of Phi Beta Kappa. One of the things we did not pay much attention to was the fact that for some fifteen years prior to that time they had not placed a chapter on the campus of an institution of less than 1,000 students. We were prepared to challenge that fact, feeling that if we built adequate strength we would have as much reason to have a chapter as Haverford, let us say, which was a college of similar size and which had received a chapter far earlier in the history of the organization. An application can only be made one in three years under the rules of Phi Beta Kappa. And in 1958, I think it was, our faculty members of Phi Beta Kappa went forward with an application with the endorsement of the College because they felt that they would probably not take us under study at that time, but we at least ought to get our name in the pot. Much to our surprise they did take us under study in that triennium, and we were not surprised when the visitation committee did find some weaknesses.

The library, thought it was then, by the time they arrived here, fully in plan but had not been realized in fact. So we were among the limited number of institutions, normally they will have applications from 50 or 60 institutions and take 10 under study during the triennium. We were passed over at that time.

I made mental note of the fact, and I'm naming no names, that they had placed chapters at that time in one or two instances that I felt certain within ten years they would feel perhaps not as meritorious of a chapter as the Centre faculty was. As I say, that was simply a mental note and a mental assurance that I gave myself.

We were not able to be taken under study again for nine years, as I recall it. But we were taken under study in 1968, and Centre was awarded a chapter at that time; and the enrollment of the College was considerably less than 1,000; in the range of 750.

One year about that time we, by mistake, ran a little over 800 students because the percentage of students accepting invitations to admission ran higher than normal. But that was, I considered, an external measure of the quality of the program at the College.

Now they have since that time placed chapters in a few other institutions not much larger than Centre; in one case perhaps smaller. Centre was at that time one of probably the six smallest institutions in the country to have a chapter. Today we are among the fifteen smallest, of that I am sure. Not because they added that many, but some of the institutions that had a hundred students more than we did later dropped to a size somewhat smaller than Centre as enrollments began to fall. That, as I say, was a source of real pleasure to me to see that come to pass. Dr. Heck retired from the deanship at that time, but he was chairman of the faculty committee that presented our application at the time. I've never gotten more pleasure than to see that come to pass in his time at Centre.

Meanwhile, we had seen the abilities of our students move up in terms of the average ACT scores by nearly a hundred points, from a level of about 429 verbal score, as I recall it, in 1957 to a point ten years later where we were in the range of 530 as a median score on the verbal test. That was measured against national means. Measured against Southern means of the Southern institutions, we were running 150 points or more above the average of Southern colleges and universities that used the SAT. The great increase in the aptitude of the students led the faculty to realize that a careful restudy of the curriculum would be in order. How would one devise a curriculum to better serve those students. And that led to the major curriculum reform that was initiated in 1966 and put in place over three succeeding years, or really four years until the first class was admitted under the new curriculum, as we called it, graduated four years later. That was perhaps as thorough going a reformation as has ever taken place on a college campus since the University of Chicago reformed its college back in the late '30's, the early Hutchins years; or until St. John College simply wiped out its prior existence and took on Scott Buchanan's philosophy of spending a whole curriculum on a hundred great books.

The most important thing that the Centre faculty embraced in entering into this was a commitment that every course then authorized and advertised to our students was to be invalidated over the period of four years; that is to say that every course to be offered thereafter within the framework, the design, of the new curriculum had to be a course that would be newly defined by the appropriate department, later a committee of the faculty, and authorized through the curriculum committee and through the faculty. Looking at it another way, every group within the faculty, every disciplinary cluster, threw all their cards on the table; so no one was protecting any vested interests in that sense. Their willingness to do that made it possible for us to undertake a reform that was very thorough going. The educational goals really were not changing; it was simply the mode and the methodology. But involved in it were all the changes now involved under just assumptions here.

Classes meet generally four days a week, and "wonderful Wednesday" is free for more extended study, research, or for whatever less worthy purposes people might give to them; that we would keep classes running pretty solidly from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon during those four days; we eliminated Saturday classes, too, in that process. It involved a change of the daily teaching schedule from the traditional seven 50-minute hours to the four blocks of 90 minutes of instruction with the assumption that classes would meet normally twice a week rather than three times a week under the old pattern. It involved for administrative purposes the abolition of departments, created the possibility of more broadly designed courses particularly for the freshman and sophomore years and for a little bit more experimentation with study in a more integrative mode. We changed the grading system. We've now gone back, but we eliminated A, B, C, D grades. We had a "Pass", "Good", and "Superior" level of grading, three grades, and unfortunately put numbers on them because people couldn't agree on what the three adjectives should be; and this led people to begin to try to make those numbers work according to a digital system. It was not intended that way because the top grade was expected to be exceptional and to bear no proportional relationship at all to the others. This ultimately led the faculty to backtrack this and the problems of graduate schools trying to evaluate our transcripts and all. People were beginning to pull back from more daring and experimental modes, and we went back to an A, B, C, D system. That program was in planning in 1964-65, placed in effect in 1966, and was fully implemented over the next four-year period. It was a time of harder work than I have ever known done by this or any other faculty, because it was an unbelievably taxing experience. It was exhilarating, but before the four years were up the faculty was, I would say, pretty much exhausted from the effort. I'm not sure whether the same faculty could ever be induced to do anything so daring again. But during the course of that time the College saw over the next five years or six years three students from this campus elected to Rhodes scholarships, which is out of all proportion to our size or expectation; and when one remembers that Centre students have to complete in the Great Lakes district which includes such populous states with such fine institutions as Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin; that I thought was an even more remarkable evidence of the kind of intellectual strengths that were being demonstrated by Centre students at the time. Since that time we've had a gap; but in nearly every year, I think there have been only two years since that time when one of Kentucky's two nominees to the regional selection process has not been - one of the two has not been - Centre student. I attribute the improvement in the external measure of the intellectual strength of Centre students to rest as much as anything else in the kind of vitality that was created growing out of that curricular reform. So that I consider to be one of the truly exciting parts of the years in our experience here.

INTERVIEWER. Was there any resentment from Kentucky College for Women alumni about losing their campus when that changeover occurred in '62? Were there any problems on that score?

No major problems, though there were many people who felt a sense of great disappointment among the graduates, understandably, of the former Women's College. You see, until 1926 Kentucky College for Women was a free-standing institution; it merged into Centre in 1926. Many alumni who had known it when it bore no organic relationship with the College, that was still the case in 1957; in other words, anyone 52-55 years and up who were graduates of Kentucky College for Women were persons who thought of it as a completely independent institution. And certainly the physical separation was the thing that held (most of them) as being one of the unique situations in the relationship of men students and women students in Danville. I would say that the majority of the alumni, though they may have had some nostalgic regrets, accepted the idea, if not applauded it, from the beginning. Those who had greater reservations, I think, have all come to feel that, and in the light of history of development of higher education in America, considered that Centre probably made the move at the better time than institutions who moved toward coeducation later and under a greater sense of haste and perhaps not so soundly considered as were the arrangements here. I would not be able to point out, however, any focus of opposition. I do recall a wife of one Centre trustee (these persons not to be named) who claims, verified by her husband, that she didn't speak to him for two weeks after she learned that the trustees had voted to do this. He hadn't dared mention it to her earlier! But she and he remained loyal supporters of the College.

INTERVIEWER. Do you think the merger of the two campuses was inevitable, or could the College have somehow maintained two separate campuses if it had wanted to do so?

It could have been done. It would have made it much more difficult to achieve the level of academic competence that exists by virtue of a wholly unified campus; I am convinced of that. Just the cost of maintaining two separate campuses just from the standpoint of maintenance of buildings and grounds was greater. As I look back on it, I would doubt that we could have raised $100,000 more to have perpetuated that separation. It would have cost us more to have expanded both campuses, as we would have needed to do. I might just mention at this point that when I came to Centre I had a disposition to theorize about developing a relatively unique organization, one that would count on growth in numbers of students, that would operate the women's campus as a relatively self-contained campus, instruction and all for the first two years; and then would move into a completely coeducational experience. That would assume that there would be no additions to residence facilities or other physical facilities on the women's campus except as they might have been necessary to accommodate a stronger library to serve those first two years.

That seemed to me to combine the best of the arguments for the separate Women's College; that is, the opportunity to develop a greater sense of personal identity. When at age 18 or 19, not yet out of the teenage years, women seemed often to defer too much to men in situations where, as was the case here at the time, the men were in the dominance just in terms of numbers; but to provide coeducational experience and the greater strength, I think, of classroom experience which can grow out in the upper division classes, smaller classes, of having men and women together in the classroom.

That was the model that I had secretly in the back of my mind when I came to Centre. But when you begin to look at the inefficiencies of it, I just didn't see out there the resources that could make that a reasonable alternative to the full integration of the campus. I occasionally stop and ask myself what the College would be like if we had adopted that as a goal and pursued it. My general conclusion has to be that we would not be as competent an institution in almost any sense of the word as we have become. It was primarily an economic element, economic analysis, that would lead to that. I'm just awfully glad we made the choice that we did. We were ahead of a move toward much greater integration in men's and women's education. I am reminded occasionally that I would have thought myself crazy if I had projected a coeducational gym when we first began planning back in 1957-58 for the development of the College; but we have one now, and it seems to work very well indeed. I'm sure that the quality of the educational experience of the student at Centre has been enhanced by the full integration of the two separate campuses.

INTERVIEWER. Centre has had a policy for some time of not providing athletic scholarships for students attending Centre, and I believe when you took office you agreed with or reaffirmed this position. I was wondering if there had been any discussion during your term as president, if alumni would come forward and urge the reexamination of that policy. What are your thoughts on that general question?

I found in general that Centre alumni, though with some nostalgic enthusiasm for the days back in the early '20's when the College's football team was as good as any in the country, that nearly all the alumni recognized that with the growth in size of the big state institutions and all that any effort to return to those days of glory, if indeed it was glory, would be a practical impossibility. I found that when we talked about strengthening the program here the one thing that I heard from alumni as much as anything else was, "Sure we've got to be small, and it doesn't make sense to put money into athletic scholarships. Let's make sure that our program is a good program that serves the needs of the students, and that it is carried on in the context of relating ourselves institutionally in this field with other institutions of comparable standards and comparable academic quality."

There are two things that are done to provide championship, nationally-recognized athletic programs: one is to pay the players in terms of the subsidies that go with it, that is athletic scholarships and the other is to give those best athletes special consideration if need be in admission to the institution. You have to do both of those things. Even if we were going to try to be the best small college football team in the country, we'd have to do both of those things. Neither one of them appealed to the sense of proper priorities for an institution whose primary goals were academic of anyone that was associated with the College at the time. There has really been no dispute during the course of my twenty-four years about the propriety of Centre's programs in this area. On the board of trustees when I arrived here and for many years after was Norris Armstrong who was captain of the team that beat Harvard. He was one of the greatest advocates for the saner approach that College had embraced long since.

INTERVIEWER. Could you discuss briefly the early recruitment and admission of black students into Centre College, the first black students?

Let me preface this by saying that the question of whether Centre should seek or encourage the admission of black students, not be open to them but whether to encourage them, was something of a matter of disagreement among different parts of the College constituency when I came here. It had become an emotional issue on both sides of the argument; people questioning to a degree the apparent good faith of the other side. I made it a point to say to the trustees when they and I were in conversation about my coming here that I thought the College - well, that my own view of the matter was that any institution should be prepared to accept students without regard to race and should not let that be a cause of concern, indeed that the quality of the educational experience of the students would be enhanced by a greater diversity in the enrollments. Feeling that fully, I wanted them to understand that position and to know that I could not act comfortably under different understandings. In the connection, however, I also expressed the view that an institution such as Centre should not allow its levels of expectation of its students to drop at all in order to achieve an integration of the student body. You've heard me say "levels of expectations" of the students and not "levels of readiness". I thought it was important to make some concessions where you had students, though with less adequate preparation, showing strengths that would lead you to believe that they, given the opportunity, could compensate for their shortcomings, and would have as reasonable prediction of success as any other student.

We anticipated all the federal laws and regulations about making clear-cut statements of policy in that respect. Indeed we took steps to try to encourage black students particularly, but also any student of minority persuasion. But in our part of the country there are not many Latin Americans and there are not many Orientals, though there are a good component of blacks. I encouraged our admissions staff to visit what at that time were still the segregated by geography schools in the state. Louisville Central High School was the dominantly black institution where nearly all blacks attended; in Lexington the Dunbar High School was the school that enrolled the black students. (There was probably greater integration in the smaller communities than in the larger communities of this region at the time.) We began not only to visit those schools but to try to persuade the counselors that this was not simply an effort to be courteous but that our interest in their students was genuine. It became apparent, however, that given the degree of segregation that still remained in fact in the schools, the counselors or the leading educators in the black community had serious doubts whether Centre was a spot where their students might comfortably go, either in terms of academic readiness or perhaps social acceptance. So we went for four or five years without enrolling a single black after I came here.

The first black enrolled was an African, a young man who had come to America and was studying at Kentucky State University. He was from Ghana and had been educated in British developed preparatory schools there and didn't find the level of competition in the dominantly black school in America meeting the level of expectation that he had for it. He was encouraged by a minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Frankfort to visit Centre, look at Centre; and in due course he applied for admission and was accepted.

It was about two years later, I think, that we first enrolled American blacks as full-time students. That really was brought about by virtue of the fact we were able to gain funds from a New York-based foundation to offer what we called Opportunity Scholarships. They were by definition made available to students who came from families where there was no previous college tradition, and where the economic means would not allow them to enter Centre without substantial external financial help. We made it clear that this was not race specific, and this was demonstrated by the awards of those scholarships over the years that we had them in place. This was before the federal funding became significant and that pretty well eliminated the need for special opportunity scholarships.

We enrolled, I think, the first year we offered those scholarships, four black students. I think we awarded five of the so-called Noyes Opportunity Scholarships. My recollection is in that first year four went to black students and one to a white student, all judged by the same limiting criteria that I have discussed. From that time the College has continued to enroll a limited number of blacks; not as many as I would have liked to have seen, primarily because I think the black student has necessarily found it a bit lonely on the Centre campus in terms of the social patterns, as indeed would have been the case on any other campus of the country.

We don't find quite as many black students today. I can't speak for the past year's experience, or the experience just now in the Admissions Office, but we don't seem to find quite as many who are quite as venturesome in terms of being prepared to enter into a program that nearly all of these students conceived as being the greatest challenge they could accept in terms of academic difficulty while staying within the state of Kentucky.

I don't mean to suggest that all our black students have come from the state of Kentucky. We've had Noyes scholars coming from Jackson, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Denver, Colorado. All of those students looked on Centre as a place where they would get a substantial academic challenge, and they were prepared to forego the greater sociability of being on a larger campus or in a large urban community.

As you know, with black students at Centre today, the motivations are not as universally high as they were ten to fifteen years ago. In the dominant group now the motivation is as good but no better. But for a time there the motivation of the students who came to Centre among the blacks was just exceptional, and they tended to perform well above their projected abilities when you used a single scale for rating blacks and non-blacks. They have certainly gone on to perform well in various ways since leaving the College.

INTERVIEWER. I just wanted to ask what the reaction was to the first black students that were admitted, both among Centre students and the Danville community.

I would say there was, on the part of both the Danville community and the student body, a large majority accepting this wholly openly, if not warmly. There were a minority of people who had derived out of and still carried in their makeup a more prejudiced outlook; persons who were victims of a kind of conditioning that is not overcome simply by a rational decision of will. But we never have had on the Centre campus conflicts of the kinds that developed at times over the past fifteen years on larger campuses where students of different racial backgrounds tended to cluster together wholly as a group and to find points of group conflict with other groups.

Now it was some time before any Centre black was rushed extensively by fraternities. There was a point where we had to call their attention to the fact that the fraternities appeared to be blind in this respect, given the obvious qualities of minority students. With no more affirmative pressure than that they began to look at this more seriously. All the Centre fraternities have bid black students and continue to do so. In one or two of them I'm afraid the sense of openness does not seem to be as great as it should be.

INTERVIEWER. During the mid to late 1960's radical changes came over American college campuses. How would you describe the climate at Centre, some of the changes at Centre, that maybe took place with the growing mood of activism in this country?

Centre was not isolated from the rest of the world, and Centre students were subject to the same kinds of influences from the mass media of all kinds and suffered the same agonies of conscience and of spirit that were common to thoughtful people during the long period of the Vietnamese War. The first things one observes, I think, that, though activism began to develop out at Berkeley in the early 1960's, strident kinds of challenges to "the system" (that term, it's amazing how commonly it was used then and how we've forgotten it today), on Centre's campus there was very little disposition to become that politicized. The thing that was apparent in those mid 1960's was the development of a greater sense of unease. A college student in those years was not experiencing a period in his life which in earlier and more innocent years was often referred to as "the happiest time in your life." I recall commenting one time that there had almost disappeared from this campus, as campuses all over the country, a sense of pure joy. It was a gloomy period.

I don't mean to say that there were not episodes of enjoyment of more casual and more social life unalloyed by overhanging social concerns or anxieties or internal personal conflicts; there were. But it was a time when I think I felt even more sympathy, really, for students. They were being caught up in a social condition that was more destructive of a sense of equanimity and balance and self-confidence during the college years than any time I have known.

Let me editorialize a little bit: I say I think one of the great mistakes the federal government made, among many other mistakes made in handling our involvement there in Southeast Asia; was its unreadiness to seek the taxes to pay our way. We are still suffering from the great indebtedness that we accumulated by fighting that undeclared war on the financial backs of the future generation. But the provision which automatically provided deferment from the draft of any student enrolled and proceeding normally toward a bachelor's degree was, I think, clearly the worst mistake we made. It led many students to feel, I think, a real moral tension growing out of the recognition that, even though they didn't want it to be that way, one of the factors that had them in the position of being a college student was that it sheltered them from the draft. They would be very pragmatic about that in one minute, and the next minute they'd be worrying about their guilt in that respect.

There were some students who were in college for that reason only, or dominantly for that reason. That was damaging to the morale of campuses. But any student who was thoughtful began to wonder about the reasons why he was in college. Was he really there for valid purposes, or would he stay if he were not going to be subjecting himself to draft to fight a war that didn't appeal to him?

Those were difficult times on the campus. You found many students functioning far below their abilities because of their agony of spirit in that respect. Others tried to relieve themselves of their sense of guilt by becoming strident opponents to the war, to the political system that was in place, to anything that was part of the system, that is, the social order that could allow these kinds of seeming moral contradictions to measure the order of our lives.

Over the years during the later 1960's that sense of rebellion grew on this campus as on other campuses. We never had as much of a sense of rebellion against our institution as the nearest manifestation of the system as was true on other campuses in many parts of the country, and particularly on campuses, where I think, you had the level of intellectual activity that would be comparable to that of this campus. But these students at Centre were concerned about the conditions of our life at that time and suffered a great deal of agony on that account. The Spring of Kent State brought crowds together on this campus, as all over the country; partly internally generated, partly being generated by a network of drum-beating that was going on across the country and was never, I think, really analyzed by the press at the time. It was amazing, the communication among campuses and the efforts of some campuses to stimulate kinds of social rebellion, if you please, against the system all over the country.

That Spring and the previous Spring were probably the most tense times on this campus, and the general anxiety level of Centre students was disturbingly high. But I never saw communication really break down between the students and the faculty and administrators of the College. Sure, we differed over certain points of view, but communication remained. The maturity of students on this campus at that time was demonstrated in a very gratifying way. One could spend a lot of time talking about that Spring; I'm not sure how deeply into that you'd like to go.

INTERVIEWER. Centre held a day of Concern during that Spring in which there was a march through the streets of Danville to demonstrate concern, and I believe there was a moratorium on classes on Friday. In reading the articles from around Kentucky and around the nation of that period, there was quite a split in administrations as to whether to grant moratorium to the classes, whether to show much of a reaction at all to the events on the part of the administration. How did you arrive at the decision to go ahead and not hold classes on that particular day?

There was consultation there, too. I can't recall the dates exactly. It was in that Spring and it was the Kent State week. There were calls for mass meetings to determine what kind of response Centre students were going to be making in those circumstances. There was a particular call on the part of some concerned people for students to gather in the auditorium of Sutcliffe Hall on Wednesday evening (i.e. May 6) of that week. The leadership was basically self-appointed leadership, though student officers undertook to participate.

During those days I was trying to keep pretty close touch with what was going on the campus, not to guide, but to understand it and hopefully perhaps to be helpful. On that night I had been at the City Hall for a hearing on some zoning questions or something of that kind in which the College had an interest. As I walked back to my home I realized the meeting was still going on over in Sutcliffe Hall, and I went over to listen. I heard some students calling for a walk-out of classes as a protest; this kind of thing was happening on other campuses. I heard other students expressing more moderate views. I heard faculty members who were there in good numbers listening and sympathetic but undertaking to say to students as they spoke: "You're going to lose ground academically if you do this." "We do understand." But expressions were not going much farther than that. Then there arose one young woman names Forrest Roberts. She was about 5' 2" high and must have weighed about 89 pounds. She looked like perhaps the younger sister of some of the members of the freshman class, though she was a senior; in other words, a tiny young lady. She spoke to the fact that she felt the students were not gaining any help in really understanding the conditions that surrounded their malaise of the time. And I recall she said, "I have sat here tonight, and I have listened to two or three of the faculty members that I value more highly than anyone else tell me 'Let's just get on with normal business.'" she went on, "It's hard to get on with normal business under these circumstances." Then with her voice breaking, she said, "Can't you see we need help?" It was a very moving experience.

It seems to me that someone then asked me whether I had anything to say. I spoke to my own concern for their concerns, and of my own sense of dismay and distress with all that was going on around us, but said that it seemed to me that they needed to bring the big issues of the moment to better focus. Since they couldn't possibly that night bring things to a focus, I suggested that they could at least then and there set up a few subcommittees, committees that might address themselves to different aspects of the thing, and that they might undertake to get together again to hear from them. They discussed this and went ahead and did it. And they called for a meeting the next day (Thursday) on the campus. They wanted to have such a mass meeting during the middle of the school day when everybody could be there, 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning to listen to better articulated views that might come up and to hear from some committees. To that proposal I responded by saying that I would ask the executive committee of the faculty the next morning to honor that time for a mass meeting on the campus, to encouraging members of the faculty to excuse any of their students, but also being prepared to meet those students who still wished to meet at that time, but also to have a make-up meeting that evening; in other words, to accommodate the midday meeting while keeping their academic machinery going. This was done; and when they gathered that morning, they had a lot of people who had prepared to express points of view. Again you had some people calling for closing down the campus. There were one or two faculty members who were saying, "What we are doing today is wholly irrelevant. We ought to..." These were younger persons. I won't say they were any less dedicated to their profession than others; but it's characteristic of us in our younger years to look for more dramatic ways of focusing issued when we are facing them.

One of the committees that had formed itself out of that Thursday night meeting had brought forward a statement of concern that they wanted to communicate to President Nixon the views of this campus. Their term "concern" was significant; they had no easy answers, but they did have concerns that they thought needed to be heard.

The previous night's calls for indefinite discontinuance of going to classes were again being heard, along with calls for business as usual, and so on. I was back in the edge of the crowd, but I was seen by the vice president of the student body who was presiding at that time. He finally asked me if I had anything I wanted to say. I have to admit as I walked up there to the proverbial soapbox, I was still grappling for a way of trying to bring focus to what was going on there. I encouraged them to get ahead with that formal expression of concern. I said to them at that time that rather than simply wiring it off or mailing it off to the President, they might consider sending a duly constituted small committee to Washington to carry this message to the White House through one of our senators. I suggested Senator John Sherman Cooper because he was a trustee of the College, and I knew he would be sensitive to the students' concerns. I stated that, if they developed a statement that was supported by a majority of the students, whatever that statement was, I would draw on some discretionary funds to provide the funding for them to send a delegation of three students to Washington to carry their message. It seemed to me that that was one way to try to bring things to a focus and give them a sense of doing something, and it did seem to appeal to them.

But then I said, "I sense here three different attitudes, and I can't measure what the dominant view is. I hear some who say, 'Let's bear with this, but let's keep on with business as usual.' And I hear some who are arguing for an indefinite suspension in order to organize other ways of exploring our concerns, and then others who want an organized 'day of concern." I tried to outline just very briefly those three things to suggest ways in which each might be brought about; that we could simply go ahead with classes, and the individual could make his/her choice; that we might call for an indefinite suspension of classes with all of the losses that would accrue to individual students, of whatever persuasion, if we were to do that; or it seemed to me that we might structure the weekend beginning with Friday discontinuing that day's normal classes, and organize a series of seminars for that day. It would allow for a full day of organized examination of the issues from whatever perspectives anyone who wanted to organize a seminar might do. I suggested they set up a steering committee, and make it a focused effort. They would have Friday; they should have Saturday (there were those who wanted a parade and this kind of thing). But we could make up all classes lost on Friday by rescheduling them for Wednesday of the next week. There would be no loss. Anyone who wanted to cut them could cut them, but at least there would be no short-changing of faculty contract time. Then I said, "Mr. Chairman, I know you are not taking votes, but I personally if you would, would like to see a show of hands on the three options. It would help me to understand better." Well, they bought the idea of the concentrated weekend. I reminded them that I was not on my own initiative going to cancel or reschedule classes. Though I don't think the faculty would have argued if I did, I felt I should talk with the executive committee. (I also felt confident that they would recommend to the faculty the suspension, or would act for the faculty to do so; and they did within two hours of that time.) That systematic suspension without any essential loss in the conclusion of the academic year clearly appealed to a large majority of the assembled crowd, and the student leadership put together in a short time a fine schedule of seminars. Members of the faculty worked with them on any idea, justifying my confidence that they would do so. We had everything from a panel discussion of the history of the political and economic conditions of Southeast Asia to a session on the music and poetry of political protest.

I had suggested to the committee working on the Southeast Asia seminar that they probably could get Amry Vandenbosch who was an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. He knew more about Southeast Asia than anybody in Kentucky, having lived there for years. It was his field of scholarship, comparative politics focused on Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In World War II he was the principal consultant to the State Department on the political problems of that area.

There were a whole variety of very interesting things that went on that day, but I spent more time sitting in on that symposium looking at the political issues in Southeast Asia. I watched students fill that hall to overflowing and stay for three hours or more.

I had suggested that anybody who would be helped more by it should take Friday and Saturday and Sunday and go home, or go out and lie in the sun on the lake. Some of them did just that. I should say that 20 percent of the students left the campus without any concern at all for those other activities. But those who stayed were deeply involved. They not only sat for three or four hours in a given session, they followed one in the morning with another after noon; and went on some evening activities as well.

Then on Saturday they had that major parade which you speak of. I encouraged their steering committee just to consult the police department to get a permit and to get down and talk with them about what they wanted to do. I said, "You won't have any problems, I'm sure; just do it." They did that; it was really a very moving thing. They decided they wanted just a parade, carrying a few banners but no shouting; absolutely silent. They came in large numbers. The town and the newspaper was carrying the report that there was going to be this parade in the Friday newspaper. People in town were worried about it with a great anxiety. Others of course had far greater confidence. It was so beautifully disciplined, not in serried ranks but the discipline of attitude, that it won a great deal of commendation in the community. There were people in the community that came up and walked with them; though the students didn't go out really to seek this. There were ministers, there were business people. It was very interesting what happened that day.

The parade wound up back at the campus, back in front of Old Centre there to hear a few people who still had things to say. One earnest freshman was calling for a reorganization of the government along socialist lines; others spoke of their sense of satisfaction. Then everything dispersed, and everybody was satisfied.

Those who wanted to understand more felt they understood a whole lot more, even though they didn't have the answers; but at least they understood the complexities that effected the situation in Vietnam. Those that wanted to make a speech stood up and made speeches. Those who wanted to listen, listened.

Monday we went back to classes. The missed Friday classes were picked up on Wednesday. The group went to Washington, came back and brought a full report. We set up a meeting so they could report to all who wanted to come. Senator Cooper, interestingly enough, had a delegation from Yale down at the same time. He took the Yale delegation and the Centre delegation together in his office and spent two and a half hours with them. Our students came back saying; (I'm sure it was the case) "We had better focus to what we went in there with than the Yale crowd did." That's understandable, Yale being a larger, more diverse campus. But Cooper heard and talked with them, assured them he would convey a report to the White House, which he did of course. The whole thing had given them both a sense that they had expressed their concern and an opportunity to understand more fully what was going on.

The pleasing thing to me about it was that students of all persuasions on the campus felt like they had done something in a unified way. I remember one boy who approached me in the Hangout. I knew him barely by name because he was on the football squad. Coming up to me on Monday morning, he said, "Dr. Spragens, I just wanted to tell you how good I feel about what has happened here at Centre." He said, "My father is a policeman in Louisville, and I've had it up to here with people shouting about the 'pigs' and 'down with the establishment' and so on; there's been enough of it here." Then he said, "I've got a brother that's finishing high school this year, and I was telling him I didn't really want him to come to Centre, but I feel completely different about Centre today." He said, "I think I understand the student body a whole lot better than I did. I hope he'll come here over any other place he might consider." This boy off here on the right whose loyalties to his father had been challenged and trampled was just feeling really good about it, and the young fellow who made the fiery socialist speech, he too felt he had had a chance. The morale for the rest of the spring was superb. Everybody was in class, everything went beautifully, and all felt good about themselves. It was just one of those very gratifying experiences.

It might have gotten led some other way by someone more persuasive who had taught violence. You recognize in times like that, "This is when emotionalism can carry a lot of people with it." But that week was to me one of the most gratifying experiences I had on this campus because it seemed to me that the totality of the prior experience of those students on this campus had led them to rely more on their rationality than generally is the case, and also to feel like they were not neglecting their political responsibility by simply turning their backs on what was going on elsewhere in the world. You'll find a lot of students who will remember that for the rest of their lives as an experience in which they felt pride and satisfaction. Many alumni talk to me in that vein when I've run into them around the country at various times since then.

INTERVIEWER. This is the third part of our interview with President Emeritus Thomas A. Spragens, and today is November 10, 1982. We are again interviewing in Mr. Spragen's office. We left off yesterday talking about the Day of Concern in 1970 following Kent State. I have one very brief follow-up question. You seemed to be more than a step ahead of some of the changes that were taking place when you delivered a Convocation address entitled "Beyond Protest" in 1965; yet it seemed as if a number of college administrators were completely caught off guard by some of these changes. They had seemed rather bewildered by what was happening on campus. Could you discuss the background of that address and give some of your insights on the subject?

That was 1965. I recall the address; it was simply a reflection on developing attitudes on campuses around the country where the protests of some form or another, systematic and sometimes confrontational, were developing. As we know, that tendency seemed to take hold on the West Coast earliest. It was part of the public record at the time that these things were taking place.

INTERVIEWER. You didn't seem as surprised by it. It seems as if some college administrators were genuinely surprised that this was taking place; that they were becoming activists.

Well, they knew it was happening, but somehow they didn't know it was happening on their campuses. The primary reason is that senior college administrators, that is college presidents, generally during the 1960's were so preoccupied with matters fiscal and developmental that they tended to maintain very little contact with students; partly a function of size and partly a function of complexity in the organization and leadership of an institution. I always have said that at Centre we managed our concerns better because we were small.

We had moved into the day of "sit-ins", you know, even earlier than 1965; some of the earliest having to do with efforts to secure racial equity. I think the first sit-ins were blacks sitting on lunch counter stools in drug stores that had a white-only service attitude.

We were wrestling with those issues on our campus just as any other institution in the country. We were a college of 600-700 students. Everyone knows everyone else in that kind of situation. I don't mean to say that the president of Centre College can know all the students at the College. But fundamentally you were dealing not with strangers but with persons you knew. In larger institutions the distance between the president of the institution and individual students sometimes was a yawning gulf. I served as a member of the board of the American Council on Education in the late 1960's. I really have forgotten the term of my office; it may have begun in 1968, it may have terminated in 1968 - those were three-year terms. But in any event, I recall at that time serving with Grayson Kirk, who was then the president of Columbia University, and Fred Harrington who was president of the University of Wisconsin; and it seems to me there was yet another whose campus turned into a tumultuous spot. I once flew on the same plane to Ne

Title:	Interview with Thomas A. Spragens
Author:	Spragens, Thomas A., 1917-2006
Source:	Centre College Special Collections. Oral History Interviews
Note:	The interview with Thomas A. Spragens, President of Centre College from 1957 to 1981, was conducted by John LeDoux, and took place over several days in November 1982. The interview was transcribed in 1985, edited by Mr. Spragens, and then retyped.
Rights:	http://www.centre.edu/web/library/rights.html