Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/06/12/david_mclaughlin_reconsidered_a_true_lover_of_dartmouth.php
Sunday, June 12, 2005
There were never any qualifications about David McLaughlin's dedication to Dartmouth College; but there were misgivings—among some—as to whether that dedication qualified him to be the President of the College itself.
David Thomas McLaughlin passed away in August, 2004. He was a member of the class of 1954, a 1955 graduate of the Amos Tuck School, a member of the Board of Trustees from 1971 to 1981, and from 1981 to 1987 the fourteenth President of Dartmouth College. When he died, he was seventy-two years old and fifty-four of those years—from the day he became an undergraduate in 1950 to the moment of his final summons—were both distinguished and haunted by a kind of fanaticism for the College.
It is College always, staunchly, with an upper-case C. There is a cult of Dartmouth, an intensity that can seem wild and strange to the uninitiated. The school is the ninth and last of the colonial colleges, founded as a kind of errand into the howling wilderness. Few institutions have made more out of more modest origins. And few institutions inspire more affection and attachment, more loyalty, from their charges. John Sloan Dickey, a member of the class of 1929 and the College's twelfth President, said without any sense of irony that "Dartmouth is not a college… it is a religion." "What is meant by this," he went on, "is that men who have lived together on Hanover Plain believe in Dartmouth. There are few things, or so it seems to me, which give as much satisfaction to a man as belonging to something in which he really believes."
So I don't mean to characterize President McLaughlin as phrenetic or lunatic. Rather, for those who care deeply for Dartmouth his fanaticism is vindicated: it confirms the extraordinary power of this school, this place, in the lives of young men and women. But it is difficult to consider his life and times without sadness, too. The years he superintended Dartmouth were almost certainly the most brutal in College history, and his self-styled and self-absorbed opponents denounced him with ferocity that bordered on cruelty—he was condemned not for his positions or for what he believed or even for his character but for who he ineffably was. The more one lingers over his Presidency, the more elegiac it becomes.
There were many reasons he was disliked, but there is always one wet, emotive thing that comes to the fore: he loved Dartmouth, and he wanted to be loved in return. It was absolutely fatal.
He was as Prometheus bolted to the face of the Caucasus, where a vulture preyed daily at his liver and he knew that he must face the same agony over and over and over again. But, like Prometheus, McLaughlin harbored an enduring faith that made it all worthwhile, and that faith too came from the classical world. He often cited Pericles's statement of what the Athenians discovered: that the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is a brave heart. "The spirit of Dartmouth," he continued, "also comes from a brave heart." The public life of David McLaughlin, for all its sorrow, was never a pity because he never lost confidence in that most precious of qualities: his fanaticism.
"Man of Dartmouth, Dartmouth man," as David Shribman '76, a friend of McLaughlin's, put it. And that was what he was, in every sense,—as it was memorably defined by English Professor H. H. Horne in the late nineteenth century: "the vigorous liver of life," "versatile, straightforward, and capable," "practical, forceful, and efficient," a man for whom "the College comes first, partial interests of whatever kind second."
As an undergraduate, McLaughlin won membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society; he was a brother of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity; he was an Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet; he was tapped for both Green Key and Casque and Gauntlet. McLaughlin was president of his junior class and he was unanimously elected president of the Undergraduate Council his senior year. And he was a three-sport varsity athlete, lettering in football, basketball, and track and field; his senior year he was ranked as the fifth leading pass receiver in the nation and the best in the Ivy League. His gridiron record for yards gained in a single season stood for twenty-three years.
The class of 1954 awarded him the Barrett Cup, conferred on the senior "giving the greatest promise of becoming a factor in the outside world through his strength of character and the qualities of leadership, record of scholarship, broad achievement, and influence among his fellows." Few—then or now—could possibly measure up.
He was drafted to play football professionally but turned the offer down to pursue an M.B.A. at Tuck, Dartmouth's business school. For two years he flew jets for the U.S. Air Force. Then for two decades he was a highly-successful executive in the corporate world. For all his achievement, he never lost sight of Dartmouth. He was elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and eventually became its Chairman. And when John Kemeny stepped down from the Presidency McLaughlin was chosen as his successor. Yet, in an instance of cruel irony, it was precisely this post-Dartmouth accomplishment—or for that matter, his accomplishment at Dartmouth—that devastated his Presidency.
It was McLaughlin's lot to assume office under the sour, stolid intellectual and social ferment that characterized higher education in those days. There was a warp to everything, then. The American upheavals of the 1960's benefited society in many ways: made it more fair, more just, more open and humane. But for all this, the sixties probably had precisely the opposite effect on university faculties. They did at Dartmouth, at least. The faculty was increasingly stocked by splenetic radicals. Certain restraints wore away, too. Gentility, conviviality, manners,—out of style, out of mind.
In this atmosphere, everything about McLaughlin was amiss. He was little more than a purse-proud businessman—he didn't even have a doctorate—and for the stable of faculty ideologues, this amounted to apostasy. His corporate outlook, his very presence, debauched the College's intellectual airs.
McLaughlin's relationship with the faculty was catastrophic. During his inaugural address to the assembled professors, one stood up and shouted, to cheers, "You don't belong here!" Despite aggressive diplomacy on his part, the situation steadily worsened. McLaughlin quarreled bitterly with the faculty over the R.O.T.C. program. It had been moved off-campus during the hue and cry over Vietnam; he wanted it reinstituted, and for the most part they didn't. But after it was revived, he gave the faculty total satisfaction: no uniforms on campus, no credit for R.O.T.C. courses, &c. And blithely, they continued to revile him for his decision.
Moreover, he could not escape his own Dartmouth experience, which seemed antique against the new styles. He joked in public about the freshmen being 'pea-green' and mounted a vigorous defense of College athletics (he would never allow sports to be ousted from their "rightful place in the education of future generations of men and women"). He refused to gut Dartmouth's fraternity system, despite pressure to do so.
The situation only got more acrimonious. He always became despondent, he said, "watching uncompromising advocates of academic freedom become apoplectic when I disagreed with their position on an issue." His base position on most matters was that he valued the faculty's opinions on any given issue, and would take things under advisement. When he tacked right, and they wanted to tack left, or he wanted to tack left, and they wanted to tack right, they usually behaved with haughty disdain, and more often became enraged. In 1985 fifty-two faculty petitioners stirred up tell of a "leadership crisis" at Dartmouth.
While it often seemed as though some professors were prepared to challenge McLaughlin to choose a second and mark off twenty paces, the arguments were really about control. Then, as now, the identity of Dartmouth was not entirely fixed. Most of the faculty desired broad change. McLaughlin was more moderate. "It serves us well to remember that the College has never wavered from its original purpose," he said in his inaugural address.
His vision of Dartmouth was always the sticking point. "McLaughlin is a terribly idealistic man," one professor complained at the time. "His love of Dartmouth as he knew it in his undergraduate experience has become a kind of obsession corresponding to a dream."
In a horrible piece of fortuity, the incident that decisively ended the McLaughlin administration came not from the left, where the McLaughlin critique was more or less centered, but from the right. I'm referencing, of course, the notorious evening in 1986 when a score of aggrieved students, most of them staffers of The Dartmouth Review, pulled down several plywood shanties that had been erected on the Green to protest Apartheid in South Africa.
With the passage of time, it is now clear that single incendiary action is really one of the most bizarre events in the history of contemporary higher education, notable mainly for its spectacular mismanagement by everyone involved and the withering criticism it inspired, unique both for its duration and for its intensity. Everything came unhinged. Had the situation been diffused, or had it not spiraled out of control in the way that it did, the Presidency of David McLaughlin might've been wholly different.
The day after the shanties came down, nearly two-hundred students and professors stormed Parkhurst Hall and occupied it. Secretaries fled in panic. Dissidents turned over papers and shouted out impromptu speeches. Several students were hanged in effigy from the rafters. Rushing back from a fundraising trip in Florida, McLaughlin found angry students standing on his furniture, tearing his memorabilia from the walls, and stamping on his things. One of them wanted to know why he was off-campus on the day before the incident, Martin Luther King Day. "What was so important and precious that you couldn't be here to share that with me?" he wanted to know. McLaughlin responded, "My absence wasn't an attempt to be insensitive to your burning need."
Even the students involved in 'beautifying' the Green admitted that the dismantling was probably ill-advised. But both sides were radicalized by events. McLaughlin's old leftist foes took the incident as an opportunity: the students involved in the demolition were hauled before the Committee on Standards on trumped-up charges. They were subjected to closed-door proceedings that were transparently used to mollify the ideologues by handing down exceedingly harsh sentences. Four students involved were expelled from the College, and eight were suspended for two terms. (The sentences were later overturned by a court of law.)
Because of his perceived handling of the C.O.S. hearings, conservatives turned on McLaughlin too, and they were unrepentant. If there was a rightward critique of McLaughlin before the shanty incident it was analogous to Teddy Roosevelt's verdict on Howard Taft: "feebly well-meaning;" now, it was far more insistent and caviling. Even the Governor of New Hampshire (an ex officio member of the Board of Trustees, as stipulated in the College Charter) criticized McLaughlin for his handling of the situation.
But McLaughlin was actually in a bind. He had to act with hands-off restraint in the matter, because the President was the ultimate court-of-appeal for student disciplinary cases. This was subsequently changed, precisely because of the shanty matter. But then, McLaughlin couldn't take a forceful leadership position, or indeed any position at all. And even if he had, however, in the superheated atmosphere surrounding the incident, he probably could have satisfied no one. Reflecting on his Presidency years later, this is how he put it: "being vilified by the far right for protecting the freedoms of all to enjoy the privileges of the campus and then being rejected by the far left for not banishing the conservatives."
But I don't want to continue turning over the old issues. What most strikes me about the whole contretemps is how small it all was, how petty and mean the issues, how willing were those on both fronts to lapse into sanctimony or mawkish histrionics. It was approached as a parlor game, and third-rate events cut down a first-rate man. They spoiled the ship for a halfpenny's worth of tar.
Shortly thereafter, the faculty voted 167 to 2 in favor of an ad hoc committee to examine the McLaughlin administration; the eventual report accused him of misprisions, stating that his leadership was "antithetical to effective governance" and "places the College in real jeopardy." In out-of-town appearances, McLaughlin was increasingly crestfallen. A few times, he referred to the Presidency in third-person—"whoever is President" or "whether I am President or someone else." He formally stepped down late in 1986.
Other men filled the position under more auspicious circumstances. Ernest Martin Hopkins had three decades to leave his mark on Dartmouth. John Sloan Dickey had more than two. David Thomas McLaughlin had six years. Francis Brown's experience as President (1815 to 1820) is probably most similar to McLaughlin's. Brown's tenure spanned the whole of the famous Dartmouth College case before the Supreme Court, and the unremitting stress and controversy of it killed him. He died when he was thirty-five.
During a particularly stressful period in his Presidency, McLaughlin suffered a minor heart attack. He walked himself to the emergency room at Mary Hitchcock, and checked himself in.
Those days are now gone. At a memorial service held for McLaughlin recently held on campus, James Wright, Dartmouth's current President, said that McLaughlin's "legacy as the fourteenth President is clear." Is it, though?
To be sure, he was responsible for several significant achievements. For one, faculty salaries increased considerably, rising forty-three per cent over a five-year period (though in many ways this was appeasement, an attempt to still the turbulent state of affairs). Under McLaughlin, three new dormitories were raised. The Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, the Hood Museum, the Friends of Dartmouth Rowing Boathouse, and the Berry Sports Center were built too. He bolstered need-blind admissions, significantly. The College endowment also ballooned considerably under McLaughlin's tenure—who would have deduced that a corporate businessman would be responsible for such derring-do—and he rationalized its management, which was in a constant state of crisis under his predecessor. The numbers speak for themselves: he more than doubled the endowment.
McLaughlin also engineered a plan and secured approval—over faculty resistance—to relocate the Hospital from Maynard Street to a remote location in Lebanon. The move made room to expand the undergraduate campus northward and allowed for the creation of an entirely new campus for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, now regarded as one of the leading hospitals in the nation. It's fitting that the new student facilities to be built on the old hospital property later this year will be named after McLaughlin.
Yet in another cruel irony, especially for a man so often dismissed as philistine, I think David McLaughlin's real legacy is an idea—an idea about Dartmouth and, as part of that, an idea about the limitations of ideas.
"Education to me," he said, "is defined more than just in the classroom." Dartmouth provided fine schooling, but the Dartmouth experience was far more robust than just that. He believed in "the vital destiny of Dartmouth as a place where the future leaders of this country and of other nations will be developed intellectually, socially, and morally."
In his valedictory to the senior class of 1983, McLaughlin said that education was a "never-ending process," where one was "always questioning, forever growing, perennially renewing one's sense of self and extending one's personal development in a world that cries out for leadership and for understanding." Most, though, would only be at Dartmouth for four years. The College could not provide a complete education—no school could. This is a sophisticated idea about the intellectual thresholds of academia. What was far more important, he said, was the idea of the College itself.
When there are no bones, as T. S. Eliot said, anybody can carve a goose. For McLaughlin, the thing that put the bones into the goose was "the embrace of the sustaining bond that will forever exist between you and your College."
He had a faith in tradition and history that was nearly atavistic. He constantly emphasized the importance of "all lasting traditions" at the College, which he said allowed his students to be "enlarged and enriched by the act of giving himself… to a greater cause." He realized that change was inevitable, but he said that the "challenge before us" was to confront change by preserving the essentials. We must change, he said, "and still, while doing so, to reinforce the constant values that have attended Dartmouth's passage through other periods in the past."
People who criticized him, he said, "really don't appreciate how much Dartmouth has changed, but in a way how much it hasn't changed." What was important, he was saying, was not what had changed, but what had remained, and what remained were the qualities that made the College unique and so special to so many people. What had remained were the values and institutions that lent the place meaning.
David McLaughlin was the last College President to articulate anything like this. He was an extraordinarily fair and even-handed leader—and this accounts for his fall from grace. He could not satisfy ideologues, on either the left or right, because he simply was not an ideologue. The rationale for his Presidency was not his politics but his fanaticism for the College. "We are the envy of almost every college in the land," he said, again and again. He truly believed that Dartmouth was better, and more valuable, and more important, than just about anything else. He supposed that enough to hold things together. It was not a mentality that endeared itself to hermetic, cauterized orthodoxies.
And against almost universal condemnation, he never soured on Dartmouth. He never mourned or grieved. In his resignation report to the general faculty, he wrote, "I share with all of you immense pride in this institution that we jointly serve. It is a place much greater than the sum of its parts—and greater than any single voice can describe or define. I love it—and I know that you do, too."
McLaughlin described his relationship with the College as "a kind of love affair at first sight." As if evidence of this, he passed away while he was on a fishing trip with several of his Dartmouth friends and classmates and his two sons, both of whom attended Dartmouth as well.
He was an extraordinary man. I never had the pleasure of his company, but I am told he seemed to exude energy in a way that few people can. He was never idle, ever. McLaughlin was not satisfied by his official College portrait, joking that it failed to capture his likeness. Of course, when he was sitting for the painting he could not stay still, just sitting there, doing nothing, and the artist had to work from photographs. But he could not stay still because of his hunger for experience, and that experience was always ordered about Dartmouth. A member of the class of 1953 told me, "He lived and died for the College."
David McLaughlin once said that Dartmouth was "a very precious (and, I sometimes fear, a rare) form of organization." And "the greatest danger" to that organization, he said, "is the risk of being taken for granted." President McLaughlin was a historically-conscious man, and perhaps he found solace in these words, which William Jewett Tucker, Dartmouth's ninth President, spoke at one of his Sunday Vesper Services in 1905:
Every man of imagination likes to feel that he has, or may have, a place among the more permanent things of the world. There is nothing so great, certainly nothing so impressive, in this world of limitations and change as the power to live, and still to live. Here lies the glory of institutions above the glory of men. The College was here before we were, and will be when we are no more, but as we are in it and of it, we share its permanency.
McLaughlin lives still. On the program for his memorial service was a poem adapted from 'Remember Me' by David Harkins, that read, in part, "You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday / Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday / You can remember him only that he is gone / Or you can cherish his memory and let it live on."
McLaughlin's legacy, then, seems as great a triumph, and just as great a tragedy, as it ever did.