An emeritus English professor and frequent Gazette contributor looks at how Penn’s faculty has been portrayed in the magazine during its first century.
By Gerald Weales
It may well be that there is a database in the offices of The Pennsylvania Gazette, monitored by a gaggle of market researchers, that clocks the motivation of alumni readers of the magazine. If so, I have not consulted it to find out the appeal to former students of articles by and about faculty members, a staple of the magazine since its inception as Olde Penn. I simply assume that, faced with a professor they know, they are moved to nostalgia or belated exasperation, depending on how things went in the classroom. Reactions to men and women who have joined the faculty since their graduation presumably range from the curmudgeonly—“The place has gone to hell since my time”—to the envious—“Why didn’t we have such academic richness in my day?”
Professors, as writers, can be seen in articles written particularly for the magazine, in pieces that might have found a berth in any general publication, and in excerpts or adaptations from published work. The first was particularly prevalent in 1918 when professors tailored their academic subjects or their experience to a nation at war: George B. Roorbach (Geography) on “Geographical Influences of the War;” James Curtis Ballagh (Political Science) on “America’s International Diplomacy;” William E. Lingelbach (History), who was in Russia when war broke out, on the Russian Revolution. Lingelbach decorated a detailed account of the shifts in power with proper Pennish suspicion: “To my way of thinking anarchy is not freedom, nor should license be construed as liberty.” This kind of essay has continued to appear in less disruptive times as in 1979 when Edward B. Irving, Jr. (English) contributed an article on the value of reading the great works of literature.
The second kind of essay, which often reflected the off-campus interests of the author, can be seen in my description of a visit to the gorillas in Rwanda (1988) or the “Asian Note-Book” (1999) of Peter Conn (English), an account of a trip he and his wife Terry Conn (Vice-Provost’s Office) took on behalf of Pearl S. Buck International, which ended with their shepherding two six-month-old Korean boys to their newly adopted parents in the States. Book excerpts, to name just two, include adaptations 20 years apart by professors of sociology—E. Digby Baltzell’s Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979) and Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street (1999). There are also occasional samplers—a page of brief excerpts buried in a profile—of, for instance, Paul Fussell (English) in 1989 or Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Annenberg School for Communication) in 1995. I never much cared for literary smorgasbord, but in the case of Jamieson at least the snippets are longer than the sound bites by which most people outside the classroom or the library know her.
Over the century, a great deal more has been written about than by faculty members—news items and brief pieces like those in today’s “Gazetteer” section triggered by a specific event: the publication of a book, say, or the receiving of an award. There were profiles, labeled and unlabeled. For a couple of years (1956-1958), under more than one editor, a feature called “Faculty Profiles” appeared. Using two columns of the conventional three-column page, these consisted of a large photograph of the subject and a single paragraph about his work, his career, and maybe a sentence on his non-academic life; the first of these mini-bios tells us that Norman Brown (Engineering) “was 135-pound intramural boxing champion at M.I.T.” A few years later (1964), a new editor, Robert M. Rhodes, published a feature, “Pennsylvania’s Faculty: George W. Taylor,” which was identified as “First in a Series.”
With or without that rubric, the faculty profile as Gazettereaders now know it developed under Rhodes. Take as an example Mary Ann Meyers’ article (1967) on Marvin E. Wolfgang (Sociology). It opens with a discussion of The Subculture of Violence, by Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, and its place in the larger context of Wolfgang’s work, segues into a biographical section, and comes back at the end to reconsider his ideas. The subject’s words are present here, too, but arranged by the interviewer to fit the shape and thrust of the article. This is a pattern that was pretty much followed in other articles and by other Gazette writers. Occasionally, physical descriptions creep in as when Meyers calls “tall, shaggy-haired” Digby Baltzell “ruggedly handsome” (1965) or Derek Davis says that Robert H. Koch (Astronomy) has “the broadly-smiling countenance of a genial troll” (1981). Openings sometimes become a tad cute, as when Patricia McLaughlin backs into a discussion of Lawrence R. Klein (Economics) and Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (1975) by way of a long anecdote about another writer dropping Klein’s name to conceal his own ignorance of econometrics (“‘Well, as a matter of fact, when I was at Penn I took a course from in econometrics with Klein.’ A small silence will fall over the group and the person who had been pretending to authority will discreetly change the subject.”) A whole article can be suffused with too much gemütlichkeit, as when a former student of Daniel Hoffman (English) visits “Penn’s resident bard” (1971).
The profiles tended to grow in length depending on the complexity of the ideas being discussed or the eccentricities or the celebrity of the subject. The wordage prize probably goes to Marshall Ledger, who in 1984 did a two-part piece on George Gerbner, longtime dean of the Annenberg School—an exercise that gives color to a throwaway remark: “Some observers suggest that he is an adept self-promoter.”
The articles mentioned above concentrate on the individual faculty member, but they only incidentally touch on the changing image of the Penn professor. That can be seen in other pieces. In 1930, the editor instituted a series “designed to acquaint the Alumni with the organization and scope of the various departments.” Since the articles were written by senior professors with long years of service in the University, they tended to describe the “now,” often proudly, and call up the “then,” often nostalgically. Edward Potts Cheyney underlines the changes in the history department by emphasizing that it is now “a department of the University, not two or three or four teachers of History,” and C. G. Child elegantly dwells on “the life and growth of this living, this complex thing”—i.e., the English department—but fondly recalls when there were “just six of us” at the turn of the century. Edwin S. Crawley (Mathematics) dutifully comments on the undergraduate program, thinking that that is what the alumni want to hear, but his main thrust is the growth in graduate studies, mathematics beyond the conventional courses.
One result of these changes—although it was not immediately apparent—is that the old identification of the professor with the University was weakened, as academic stars, like free-agent athletes, moved from institution to institution, a practice commonplace today. A Gazette article (2000) on the exotic globe-trotting of Robert F. Giegengack (Earth and Environmental Science, once known as Geology) opens with an exuberant account of a celebration marking his 25th year at Penn, an occasion that is retrospectively upstaged by a less rambunctious report (1926) on a gathering honoring four professors who had taught in the College for more than 40 years: Crawley, Cheyney, Felix E. Schelling (English) and Hugo Albert Rennert (Romance Languages). In 1934, when the Gazette printed a speech that Cheyney delivered to the Alumni Dinner, he had been teaching for 50 years, and it would be six more years before his History of the University of Pennsylvania would be published. I do not want to suggest that Giegengack is an anomaly. There were plenty of us who stayed with Penn; even I, although I took early retirement, did not depart until just before my 30th year.
Still, a kind of clubby coziness had begun to disappear—although it held on long after those 1930 surveys. Shortly after I arrived on campus in 1958, I asked the classicist Lloyd Daly, then dean of the College, how long it took really to feel a part of Penn; he said, “I don’t know. I’ve only been here 20 years.” The nostalgia for the good old days created an image of the professor which demands a grain of salt. An editorial (1934), presumably written by the then-editor of the Gazette, Horace Mather Lippincott C1897, began, “College professors have been much before us since the fourth of March last.” This coy locution refers to the inauguration of President Roosevelt and to those professors who left campuses for Washington to become part of the new president’s “brain trust.” Turning his eyes from such vulgar pushers, Lippincott proposes to define the true nature of the academy: “The vast majority of college professors are gentle, refined scholars of culture and background engaged in one of the most noble and unselfish of professions, unused to the rough and tumble of the world and the oftentimes unscrupulous wiles of politicians.” He adds, in case the dreamy alumni readers have missed the point, “They lack avarice and the sordid tricks of trade.” This is heady stuff and, even if it were an accurate portrait, it obscures the fact that there were residential restrictions in the ivory tower.
In 1940, Lippincott recycled much of the earlier editorial, this time as a prelude to a warning. “Owing to persecution abroad, there has been an influx during the last decade of many foreign professors into this country. We must be careful to see to it that they do not introduce theories which are not in conformity with our representative form of government and with the American way of life.” Then he used the Rule of St. Benedict to draw the line between welcome and disruptive guests in a monastery (aka, the university), and the need to exclude the latter.
This uneasiness about radical professors calls up the memory of the Scott Nearing scandal of 1915, in which the Board of Trustees refused to renew the appointment of the young activist as an assistant professor of economics (see article on p. 28). The case resonated off campus and into the public press and led to a formal declaration of freedom of speech for the faculty. So what were Lippincott and St. Benedict up to in the 1940 editorial?
On second thought, it occurred to me that Lippincott might not be warning us against the intrusions of dangerous leftists. After all, most of the refugee professors were Jews, and the University had the reputation for being anti-Semitic. In 1918, David Werner Amram, the eminent Jewish scholar of Talmudic law, contributed “A Jewish State in Palestine” to Old Penn. That Amram was teaching in the Law School at the time is probably no more important statistically than the fact that W. E. B. DuBois taught sociology at Penn for one academic year (1896-97). In sketching the historic background for the call for a Jewish homeland, Amram wrote, “Anti-Semitism was a German pseudo-scientific formulation of what in coarser language may be called Jew-hatred.” There is no evidence that the Gazette in the early years ever considered the subject closer to home.
At a party in New York in 1958, I was assailed by an outraged acquaintance who wanted to know why I had accepted a job at a university that did not hire Jews, and I had to explain that Penn had undergone a change since World War II. That change is reflected in a remark by Digby Baltzell in a piece (1965) on his The Protestant Establishment: “In striking contrast to the caste-lined corporate elite, major universities are now drawing on a truly national pool of talent.” At the beginning of a profile on Renée Fox (1973), Mary Ann Meyers opens with a general discussion of campus prejudice: “But up until the Second World War, the University of Pennsylvania was largely inbred and essentially white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Today the faculty is drawn from universities throughout the world and anti-Semitism is the aberration of a nearly forgotten era.”
The Fox profile was about the breaking of the last barrier. She had just become chair of the sociology department, the first woman to head a department at Penn. Women—as students as well as teachers—were a long time finding their proper place in a once-male bastion. A survey by an outside committee, reported in the Gazette (1925), called for, among other things, “more adequate collegiate training of women,” and Professor Cheyney in the 1934 speech mentioned earlier lists “real co-education” among the University’s needs. That co-education was in place by 1958, but the College for Women still existed as an administrative and advisory entity with a faculty of its own, little more than a list of names; I joined that faculty when I arrived on campus but only after a discreet inquiry, from the English department secretary, about whether or not I minded being so listed.
The Fox profile describes the projects she undertook, the studies that she produced, the part-time lecturing that she did—all of which gave her the reputation that would eventually bring her to Penn—but when she attempted to find a formal university position in 1965 she got only one offer: “It was then that it struck me that universities discriminate against women.” It seems a little late to get the news. Back in the early 1950s when so many pre-Ph.D. students were scrambling for jobs, Nora Magid, who many years later would become a celebrated adjunct faculty member at Penn, sent an application to the English department here. Somewhere in her effects—although I cannot find it—is a letter from Albert Baugh, then-chairman of the English department, saying that her credentials were superb and that he would hire her immediately if it were not that she was a woman. Which, thank God, she was.
Although the number of female faculty members grew in the 1950s, when Professor Fox took the chair in Sociology, there were only 20 women full professors on campus, 3.6 percent of the faculty at that rank.
The spotlight moved from faculty to subject matter. In 1978, Ann Hill Beuf, then coordinator of women’s studies, told the Gazette of her struggle to convince some foot-dragging departments that were reluctant to lend teachers to her program that hers was a serious discipline, “not some rinky-dink,” and a 1986 article on Carol Smith-Rosenberg, then director of women’s studies, indicates, through her work as a historian, that Beuf’s rinky-dink discipline had indeed become serious.
Inbred or out, regardless of race, religion, or gender, there have been dichotomies, real or perceived, within the faculty of which the Gazette took note. In the address opening the Graduate School in 1924, Professor Schelling called for disinterested learning and worried that “graduate work has suffered a change from a condition of that ideal disinterestedness … to the definite pursuit of training in a wage-earning profession.” A report on an interview in the Wisconsin News (1926) finds Provost Josiah H. Penniman calling for a balance between pure and practical research, and in the same year, in a reprint of an article of his from The Nation’s Business, he counters the charge that the purity of education is being sullied by too much attention to the daily world. He goes back to Benjamin Franklin and William Smith, the first provost, and says, “Both believed that higher learning should be set to work in practical ways.” He is speaking of American education in general, but his local focus is primarily on Wharton—understandably, given the place of publication—and on the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
Pure or practical, research has often been cast as the enemy of teaching. That division is implicit in the rather tetchy report on the Latin Department that John C. Rolfe contributed to the 1930 series: “In spite of the fact that every member of the department carries a heavy burden of teaching, we have given due attention to research although we have never formed the habit of cackling whenever we lay an egg.” In response to a Gazette request (1955) for indications of what the new Physical Sciences Building would mean to the departments who would share its space, Herbert B. Callen (Physics) began his remarks, “Instruction and research in physics are inextricably interrelated.” President Gaylord P. Harnwell, also a physicist, using the same occasion to consider “Our Future in Science,” necessarily leans heavily on the facilities for research; but in his annual report in 1956, “Tradition and Transition,” he says, “while pioneering in the development of specialized instruction, we have been mindful that man must be educated to live as well as to earn a living.” In a special report in l965, looking back at “a decade of pivotal years,” Harnwell still feels he has to deal with the presumed teaching-research conflict, the accusation that “senior faculty members do little teaching of undergraduates.” As “a ‘senior’ professor who has taught many a freshman physics class,” he dismisses that idea.
It is not so much research per se that robs the classroom. It is the off-campus demands on professors who have marketable specializations, who are on call to give advice to corporations or to governments, to testify before Congress, to take part in international conferences, to fill television’s insatiable need for talking heads. Or that is the impression one gets leafing through the Gazette. The 1995 profile on Dean Jamieson mentioned above emphasizes her busy schedule as an expert on politics and the media (“toward election day, she is umbilically connected to reporters”), but it quotes a student as saying, “Dean Jamieson is entertaining as well as intelligent. I hope to actually meet her some day.” It is an old refrain, although often it is the professor, not the student, who sings it. Thirty years earlier the profile on George W. Taylor, famous as a labor arbitrator on call, reported, “Although Dr. Taylor says he is trying to cut down on his arbitration work so he can devote more time to his first love—teaching, he admits that turning down the President is tough.”
Frank Furstenberg (Sociology), known for his studies on the American family, encapsulated the dilemma in an interview in 1987: “There are features of becoming part of the popular culture that are potentially quite corrupting, and the kind of work I do confronts you with a lot of mass-media attention. A long time ago, I decided I had to kind of think through how much of this is acceptable, tolerable, desirable, and I decided that, in part, if I was going to work in areas that so much touch the cultural consciousness, that it was going to be impossible to sort of close my door to it altogether.”
The problem for the Gazette, if not for the professor who wants to or does teach, is that it is a process almost impossible to describe. Back in the unbuttoned 1970s, a student of mine said to Joel Conarroe, then head of the English Department, later dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, “I have just come from Weales’s class. For the first fifteen minutes I thought he was high on something and then I realized he was just high on Chekhov.” I took that as a testimonial—and still do—but it hardly describes what I was doing. One can gather thumbs-up or thumbs-down comments on any professor, but they rest in generalization. It is possible to describe the eccentricities—of manner, of gesture, of dress—of the classroom performer, but, however revealing, they are stuck on the surface. There are plenty of anecdotes promulgated by students who admire or despise a professor, but these are only icing on the pedagogical cake. One might even examine a professor’s notes, if he or she lectures from notes, but at that point one is edging from process to subject matter. And so it goes in the pages of the Gazette. Penn may be a great teaching university, but when the alumni magazine turns to a particular professor, the author inevitably focuses on his discipline, on her research.
One of the first and favorite subjects of the magazine is the expeditions of the University Museum, presumably because, besides the obvious dirty work of digging, sorting, sifting, these hold the promise of adventure, of discovery. A news item in the first issue of Olde Penn said that Herman V. Hilprecht, an international star after four Babylonia expeditions since 1888, had become the first holder of the Clark Professorship of Assyriology. This brief note quickly gave way (1902-3) to more detailed pieces describing the excavations at Nippur, the library of clay tablets found there, and Professor Hilprecht’s appearance before Kaiser Wilhelm defending his belief that his discoveries proved the historical accuracy of the scriptures. In the late twenties, the pages of the Gazette were heavy with reports by C. Leonard Woolley, the director of the joint expedition of the British Museum and the University Museum in Mesopotamia (Babylonia again) and by Clarence G. Fisher, who was directing Museum digs in Palestine. Both Woolley and Fisher give physical descriptions of the excavations, evocations of what the ruins must once have looked like, accounts of artifacts found, mini-histories of the shifting forces that anciently made and marred the cities. Fisher is particularly good at the latter, and Woolley seasons his scientific descriptions with mild jokes and a romantic overlay: “Today the Arab workmen in their long robes going up the steps that lead to the temple doors might belong to any age. And it is easy to forget that so many centuries have passed leaving only the ruins and to imagine for the moment that all is as it was, that the bare walls are clothed again with plates of silver and brass and that in his inner shrine the Moon God is still enthroned.”
After touching all the scientific bases in a long article (1970) on excavations of Phoenician cities along the Lebanon coast, James B. Pritchard (Museum) contemplates a shattered vessel and conjures the daily life of the owners: “I wonder what small domestic tragedy caused this. When a woman looked away from the cooking pot, did her child come along and kick it over? You can’t help but wonder what she said, whether she spanked the kid. Of course, this is pure dreaming, but you can’t help wondering.” The genre goes on; a recent example—not a University Museum expedition this time—is the account (2001) of the discovery of a new dinosaur by two graduate students from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
A general article (1958) indicating that 76 percent of outside funding came from governmental sources was titled “Adventures in Research.” Not as flamboyant as archaeological digs, perhaps, but particularly since the 1940s there has been a steady stream of scientific and social research presented in the pages of the Gazette through the reigning professorial presence. Aside from the articles mentioned in the pages above, here is a decade-by-decade sampling chosen almost but not quite at random. 1940s: Leslie A. Chambers (Biophysics) on the structural nature of proteins. 1950s: Charles E. Wilde, Jr. (Dentistry) on the variety of studies underway in the new Dental Research Laboratory. 1960s: Frederick Hartt (History of Art) on the restoration of Florentine art after the disastrous flood of the Arno River. 1970s: William Labov (Linguistics) on street language. 1980s: Howard Brody (Physics) on building a better tennis racquet. 1990s: Peggy Sanday (Anthropology) on fraternity gang rape. 2000: Amy Jordan (Annenberg) on V-chips to help parents control the television viewing of their children. 2001: Joshua Klein and others (Physics) on tracking solar neutrinos. 2002 and beyond: Who knows?
To all the faculty members whose names and works have graced the pages of the Gazette over the years and are not mentioned in this article and to all of their alumni admirers, do not fret. We still love you all.
Gerald Weales has written many articles for the Gazette, is the author or editor of 15 books, most of them on drama, and has been reviewing theater for almost 40 years. He taught at Penn for 30 years, and is now an emeritus professor of English.
