“Being Lucky”
In our type of society, which expects many civic and social needs to be met by voluntary means rather than by government action, each able citizen is under some obligation to assume a share of responsibility for this voluntary work. The responsibility increases with the prominence of the citizen and his role in society. In America the college or university president is typically a leading figure in his town, his state, and frequently in the nation. This is certainly true of the president of Indiana University. The home campus is the dominant factor in both the economic and the social life of the community. As the oldest and largest university in the state, Indiana University has such eminence that any man who occupies its presidency automatically becomes a prominent figure in higher education and well known generally. If his personal characteristics and activities further enhance his public recognition, the amount of responsibility placed upon him is very large indeed.
The special nature of the era in which I have lived increased the number of civic duties to be performed by volunteers. I speak especially of the time during which we were engaged in several wars that put great strain on the manpower of the nation and that required that every individual invest himself fully in the work to be done. Then came the inevitable years of readjustment after the wars. It has been a period nationally of rapid growth in education and of expanding international obligations—social, political, and cultural. I have cited as examples some of the assignments I undertook outside the state and nation. It seems to me important not to neglect local and state responsibilities that were requested of me.
From the beginning, and continuing to this very day, I have tried to assume my share of civic responsibilities first in the local community—to make myself available for committee service, service clubs, the Chamber of Commerce, the community hospital, church boards, and other activities as requested. I remember once serving for a number of years with the head of the Chamber of Commerce to promote the economic development of Bloomington. I did this not only because I thought it my duty but also because I felt that development of an industrial sector in the community would make it a more balanced community, a better place for the students to spend four formative years, and would create more employment for the citizens of the community. Not long ago I read a letter to the editor of the local paper in which the writer alleged that Indiana University had always opposed securing industry for Bloomington. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout my years with the university I have actively helped in any way I could to secure additional industry for the community, even to the extent of advocating the dedication of a certain amount of university ground for the development of research institutes and light industries.
I have also attempted to serve my church in a variety of capacities, on its boards and committees and especially for a long period as a member of the state board of the Wesley Foundation, which supports the student activities of the church in university communities. The presence of student-oriented churches in a university community is of great value. In addition to providing the means by which students may maintain their traditional church relationships, the resident churches with their student-affiliated foundations and ministers are great sources of counseling assistance for students and even for faculty.
Very early in my career the Indiana General Assembly created a New Harmony Memorial Commission for the purpose of restoring and readying for visitors the pioneer community in southern Indiana that spawned many interesting scientific and social ideas. I served on this commission for many years until it was terminated by the legislature. Now I serve on a reincarnated state New Harmony Memorial Commission as well as on the board of Historic New Harmony, the private organization that is involved in the work of restoration and preservation in that community. Another example of a state-level association in which I have been active for a similar length of time is the James Whitcomb Riley Memorial Association. While this association has university connections, as its principal purpose is to build, support, and develop the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children at the Indiana University Medical Center, it nevertheless has an independent character and is one of the most prestigious philanthropic organizations in the state. I became a member of its board when I entered the presidency, and my uninterrupted membership from that time to this makes me the senior member in point of service.
Early in my career I was also appointed to membership on the state board of education. This spot, representing the interests of higher education, had been held by the president of Indiana University for some decades. I served on that board for quite a few years until it was reorganized; in the reorganization higher education lost its representation. From 1937 to the present I have served on many other statewide committees, commissions, and boards of state organizations, too many to name here, but for a reader interested in their range a list of them is included in the chronology in the Appendix. That part of my vita represents my belief in and commitment to doing my share of the voluntary activity to be carried on in the city and state.
Another group of organizations in the state to which I committed myself through the years were those that were designed to sustain, encourage, and promote the private sector in higher education. In addition to helping with the organization and promotion of the Associated Colleges of Indiana, I served on occasion as kickoff speaker for fund drives at Wabash College, DePauw University, and Earlham College. For a time I was a member of the Wabash College Development Board; I served on the board of trustees of Earlham College for many years and on the board of the Indiana Institute of Technology; and I also had lengthy service on the board of the Malpas Trust, a charitable trust created by a philanthropic Hoosier for the purpose of providing scholarships for students to attend DePauw. It now is one of the most generous and cherished fellowship programs that that fine institution enjoys.
Through the years I have been afforded an opportunity to continue some practical contact with my early field of banking, as I have related. Also, after my father’s death in 1948 I became chairman of the board of the Jamestown State Bank, which he had served as president, and I continued in that position until the bank was sold. This was, of course, a sentimental as well as a family responsibility since I had started to work in that bank when I was thirteen years old. It was a surprise to me to discover that I could still recall and identify many of the customers of the bank as their names appeared in the conduct of the board’s business. Since the bank was small and noncompetitive with any other, I could go onto its board without violating a principle that I followed from the beginning of my presidency of Indiana University, namely, that I would not join any commercial board if its business might be competing with the business of other alumni.
THIS, TOO, WAS FOR THE UNIVERSITY
My outside activities have made visible my belief in voluntarism as an essential American principle. It may seem that my extensive engagement with the work of state, national, and international groups deprived the university of time and effort that could better have been applied directly to the university’s needs. Actually, for Indiana University to become what I dreamed for it, its orbit needed to be enlarged and its aspirations elevated. Thus all my external assignments were undertaken with a view to gaining the experience and establishing the contacts that would increase the university’s province. While the indirect benefits to the university from my various external associations seem obvious, it may be useful to illustrate this process by citing an instance or two in some detail.
One illustration can be drawn from my international activities. First, my own understanding, knowledge, and perceptions were broadened with each foreign experience; basically I became an informal student of comparative cultures. This gave me empathy with all elements in our faculty concerned with expanding the international dimension of the university and enabled me to offer encouragement, intelligent comment, and occasionally practical suggestion for development. It also gave me a warm relationship with the student organizations that had begun promoting internationalization after World War II. Mother and I regularly attended their meetings and social events, as did many of the faculty. The Cosmopolitan Club staged annual international shows that attracted the interest and attention of the entire campus, faculty and students alike. During this period also the Acacia fraternity inaugurated an annual fall reception honoring foreign faculty and students. My international experiences enabled me to have a closer relationship with the foreign-born members of our faculty, giving me a firsthand understanding of the cultures that they represented and the educational systems that had produced them. This in turn gave them a sense of security and confidence in their work here, I hope, and the feeling that they were appreciated and had a special contribution to make. In addition, we attempted to make sure that our international faculty had widespread social contacts with other faculty members on the campus, thereby breaking down any hesitancies arising from foreignness. We tried as well to suggest indirectly that our having various cultures represented on the campus was an asset to our corporate faculty life, with the result that foreign faculty members enjoyed a position of prominence.
My many academic contacts abroad also gave me an understanding of how foreign faculty visitors should be treated when they came to this campus if we wished them to carry away a favorable impression of our institution. I do believe that one can extend the fame and reputation of a university without leaving the campus simply by the thoughtful, informed hospitality offered to those who visit the campus. In much of the world the academic is more highly respected by society than is his counterpart in America, and we need to bear this in mind when receiving and entertaining visitors from abroad, to be sensitive to their expectations.
We tried to encourage the expansion of the curriculum to encompass new fields, anticipating the onrush of the international role that the country was destined to play as is now more and more evident. Furthermore, the expansion into the various exotic and esoteric languages and into the history and culture of little-known areas of the world represented a push for knowledge for its own sake. It is a purpose of the university to be the repository of knowledge, some of it not usually available from any place other than a center of learning. The wheel of time and circumstance inevitably turns in the direction of the need for this knowledge and lucky is the university that has a reservoir of it.
After I personally had a major experience abroad, I made it a practice to share that experience with my campus colleagues in formal speeches and informal conversations, and invariably incorporated at least some elements of that experience in speeches that I made throughout the state. I made hundreds of speeches of this type, I suppose, in the course of the years, dealing with international experience, international relations, and American foreign policy. We early helped to arrange rather high-level foreign policy conferences annually on the campus, not only for the benefit of our own campus colleagues, but also for the benefit of selected interested citizens throughout the state. In this way we attempted to increase the awareness within the state of the importance of the international dimension in our life—not only its political, social, and military significance, but also its very great economic significance to a manufacturing state such as ours. We may have been a little ahead of our time, but I would hope that the work of that period has stimulated in part the current widespread realization of our interdependence politically, socially, and—above all else—economically. I do not know whether this has been helped in part by the fact that at long last we realize we have to feed the world.
In my professional associations I invariably found myself on the international committees dealing with cultural interchange or with the problems of internationalizing curricula and breaking down nationalistic stereotypes. For an example of this last, I served on a United States-Canadian textbook commission formed to remove from textbooks some of the fallacies and myths about our national histories that had grown up on each side of the border.
Of course, the more interest the administration evidenced in the international dimension, the more pervasive was its influence throughout the university and, to some extent, the state. People have marveled that Indiana University, in a rather conservative, mid-America state, should have become known for its international emphasis. There are those who allege that this happened in part as a result of the university leadership’s participation in international activities.
Inevitably, interconnections developed among my state, national, and international activities. My acceptance of responsibilities in the international area, for instance, led to opportunities to accept others in the national arena, until in time I became absorbed in a number of professional educational activities that were demanding of my time and energy but that provided some benefit to the university in its expanding role. A clear example of this interaction, discussed above, was my participation in the United Nations organizing conference in San Francisco as a representative of the American Council on Education (ACE). In a less direct way, my experience in Germany with General Clay and my ACE stint led to my assuming the chairmanship in 1962 of Education and World Affairs.
My participation in national and international organizations had an additional value. Inevitably I had opportunities to suggest the names of my own colleagues as members of various committees, commissions, and the like in process of formation. People get appointed to such committees and commissions simply because someone who knows them happens to be in on the planning and discussion of the personnel for a new group. In this way I could open doors of responsibility and opportunity for many of my valued colleagues in a whole variety of fields. At times colleagues through demonstration of their abilities on national committees or boards had many other opportunities offered to them and were able to bring the strength of all those contacts and connections back to the campus. They were then frequently able to bring conferences here and to have their colleagues from elsewhere see the work of individual departments and gain a firsthand impression of Indiana University. In short, my activities off campus, undertaken always with some consideration of the university’s good, affected the university in many ways, it seems to me in retrospect, and I hope that they were justified from the standpoint of the university’s welfare and of the merit of each activity per se.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.