A Most Noble Enterprise by William H. Hildebrand

Author:William H. Hildebrand [Hildebrand, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, History, United States, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI)
ISBN: 9781606350300
Google: UqF3PgAACAAJ
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2009-01-15T02:41:02+00:00

Nine

TROUBLED TIMES

{1971–1977}

The new president of Kent State University made a memorable entrance onto the scene. He purred into town at summer’s end behind the wheel of a Thunderbird and, as he later recalled, with “just twenty bucks in my pocket.”1 He and his wife soon discovered that the situation in town was memorable, too, if in a “bizarre” way. They were staying that first night at the University Inn when he was accosted by two couples who recognized him as the new president. “Well,” one of the men leaned toward him, “I hope you’re going to be a hell of a lot tougher than the man you’re succeeding; they should have shot 400 of them, not 4.”2 Such was his unofficial welcome to town.

There was also a touch of the bizarre about the process that brought Glenn Olds to Kent. Though the campus had witnessed several dustups between trustees and presidents in the past, such academic unseemliness had been pleasantly absent during the Bowman and White eras. But the post–May 4 tensions among trustees over the institution’s management and mission bristled with thorns after White announced his retirement, and the trustees’ first priority became finding his successor.

On May 9, after the first May 4 ceremony had passed in relative peace, the board formally appointed a nine-member search committee: three trustees (Dr. Kenneth Clement, Robert Baumgardner, Cyril Porthouse); three professors (Drs. Ray Heisey, Martin Nurmi, Thomas Moore); undergraduate president Craig Morgan; graduate student president Jack Eyman; and alumni president John C. Young. By then the committee was already eye-deep in resumes, having been at work since the beginning of March. Fourteen candidates were in the pool by the end of March, among them Vice President Ron Roskens and John Kamerick, a former administrator at Kent and then president of Northern Iowa University. Olds was tossed in sometime in April. By May 23, 1971, his and Roskens’s names were on a list of fifteen candidates board secretary George Urban recorded as already interviewed.3

Eventually the committee worked its way through over a hundred applications, winnowing the chaff from the wheat until it had a small handful of the choicest prospects for the board to consider. The complexity of the task was exacerbated by the importance of the final choice at that instable period in the school’s history. Anxiety on campus grew with each passing week, as the committee went about its work with such proficiency and regard for confidentiality that no credible report of its doings dribbled out. Would a new president be in place come September? If so, who? If not, what then? No one relished beginning a new academic year without a sitting president.

Sometime early in July, with the search in its final lap, faculty committee member Tom Moore got a phone call from a trustee not on the search committee. The caller said that Canton-area “conservatives on the board” were maneuvering to scuttle the whole process and unilaterally appoint Roskens president. Moore immediately alerted the other faculty members on the committee.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.