After Jim Underwood retired last year as the longest-serving current faculty member, the Board of Trustees invited him to share his thoughts on more than forty years at Union. With his long experience, which included service as both a teacher and an administrator (e.g., dean of the faculty), he had accumulated lots of opinions. Here is some of what he said to the trustees:
Some things have not changed much in the forty years-the Ramée buildings, Jackson's Garden, two dozen walnut and several honey locust trees planted by Eliphalet Nott in the 1820s, commencement, the Memorial Chapel chimes, faculty and student suspicion of the administration, a collection of eccentric faculty who are in sufficient control of their eccentricities to allow them to function effectively in the classroom, to name just a few.
Obvious and important changes would include:
- Growth in the student body from about 1,250 to about 2,000 and the rise in the proportion of women from zero to about fifty percent;
- Growth in the size of the permanent faculty;
- Growth in the size of the administration, illustrated by a seeming plethora of vice presidents as opposed to exactly none in 1963;
- An across the board increase in staff, including explosive growth in areas such as security, development, and student life.
- Despite the loss of most elms, the campus looks much better: Campus plan-tings and lawns are lush, automobiles are gone from center campus, and most new and restored buildings are eye catching, witness especially the “new” Nott Memorial.
The nature of decision making is a second way in which the College has substantially changed. We are now far more bureaucratic in the sense of having decision- making processes that are more formal, “rational,” transparent, and bound by rules. Good examples can be seen in faculty evaluation processes, the budget process, and the process for making decisions regarding student discipline and academic dishonesty.
Curricular changes, some dramatic, have helped make Union a very different place-new departments (computer science, anthropology, and classics, for example), new interdepartmental programs (biochemistry and East Asian studies, for example), and several truly substantial College-wide programs (General Education, Writing Across the
Curriculum, vastly expanded study abroad opportunities, an honors program, greatly expanded opportunities for undergraduate research, for example). In addition, faculty were added in areas in which the College was embarrassingly shorthanded, most notably, the arts and modern languages.
One result of some of these changes is that the College became for the first time a genuinely balanced college, a state that had been a goal for seventy years or more.
Some of the more dramatic and positive changes are those in teaching methods and the intensity of the “professional” relationship between faculty and students.
There has been a general but by no means complete move away from the lecture toward various forms of so-called “active learning,” including, for example, simulations (such as a course on Congress in which students become the House of Representatives) and the use of electronic classrooms in imaginative ways to fully engage students in learning a variety of subjects. Many of these changes would not have occurred had it not been for a virtual revolution in which faculty, for the first time, began to come together in productive conversations and workshops on teaching, most sponsored by a committee on teaching created in the early 1990s.
Although there were examples of students and faculty working closely together when I came to Union, both the frequency and the intensity of such relationships began to steadily increase beginning in the 1970s. I believe that one very important factor is the increasing emphasis that the College began to place on independent undergraduate research and other forms of scholarly and artistic endeavor. Senior thesis and senior project requirements in many departments include such endeavors, and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research and our own Steinmetz Symposium provide opportunities at which students and their faculty mentors can aim.
Nothing pleases me more at retirement than the quality of the students I have taught for the last several years. Although we have always had good students, what I see is a higher proportion who are fully committed to learning than at any previous time-provided that they are challenged by faculty willing to demand their very best.
The quality of work that students have produced for me and many other faculty is truly impressive. One example comes from my “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” course, in which students play Supreme Court Justices and Counsel. In a class of the most engaged, best prepared, and most aggressive questioners I had ever seen, one student serving as counsel managed a truly extraordinary performance, never hesitating, never wavering in the face of a seemingly endless volley of incisive and tough questions. She performed in a highly-articulate and convincing manner, not equaled in some tapes I have viewed of experienced lawyers before appellate courts, and I am confident could not be equaled even by many Union faculty. (To my regret, this student, an economics major, did not go to law school. She is a bond trader with a leading firm in New York City.)
I would be remiss not to include some observations on the administrations I have seen.
Harold Martin (president 1965-1974) should be credited with four substantial accomplishments:
- He maintained a remarkably stable and civil campus in a very troubled time.
- He created expectations that faculty should be published scholars as well as good teachers. (This deserves to be labeled an important turning point in the recent history of the College.)
- He managed to add a badly-needed science and engineering building and a library addition to the campus.
- He gave to his presidency the highest level of integrity and dignity.
The administration of Tom Bonner (1974-1978) saw the decision to leave the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Done under a cloud of suspicion, that decision was a turning point; NESCAC was, and is, as much a club as an athletic conference, and membership translates almost directly to academic reputation.
The administration of John Morris (1979-1990) saw some significant achievements:
- Calm was restored and the College's financial situation was stabilized.
- The Reamer Campus Center was created.
- The Alumni Gym was expanded.
- There were also major additions to the academic program, including a substantial and innovative General Education Program and a Writing Across the Curriculum Program.
- Finally, at Morris's initiative, a dozen tenure-track additions to the faculty were approved, thus allowing an overdue reduction in the number of visiting faculty. Roger Hull (1990-today ) brought the sort of energy and ambition for the College that is rare, and the result has been an effort to move Union forward despite the challenge of relatively limited financial resources. Perhaps the most obvious accomplishments in the past dozen or so years are:
- An improvement in student quality, commitment, and energy that has been both steady and substantial.
- The astonishing number of new buildings, expanded buildings, restored buildings, and, most recently, acquisitions of buildings in “Seward Park” and the Ramada Inn property for conversion to student housing and social space.
- The academic area has seen rapid expansions in two endeavors central to the College's mission-study abroad and undergraduate research-and creation of the College's Honors Program.
- Finally, the House System that will be fully in place next year is an initiative that has the potential to transform student life in fundamental ways.
In summary, where do we stand? We are well led; a faculty of generally high quality brings intelligence and high competence to the research and artistic enterprises and energy and imagination appropriate for practicing teaching as a calling; students are the best I have seen in their commitment to learning-when properly challenged; student life is more vital than ever; our academic program has exceptionally strong elements, such as study abroad and undergraduate research (my own strongly-held view is that the senior project required or available in many departments is the single most valuable opportunity that we offer students).
This does not mean that we do not face problems and challenges. In my opinion, the biggest problem we face is that the degree to which we challenge students is not uniformly high. The most important lesson I learned in 40 years of teaching is that the higher one sets the bar, the better students perform. My personal preference is that Union set a goal of becoming the most challenging college in the Northeast.
The task of maintaining the College's hard-won momentum in the face of relatively limited resources is a formidable one. The demands on those resources are increasing. For example, providing financial aid sufficient to continue the improvement in the quality of the student body will be extremely difficult, and increasing or even maintaining the proportion of our students who study abroad will be very difficult. My one great fear, unfounded, I hope, is that in the face of limited financial resources we will grow faint-hearted and draw back just at the time we are poised to reach a new level. While we work to increase our resources, I believe that we can use the full force of our ingenuity and commitment to take carefully-considered initiatives that will continue to advance the College and its reputation.
A last word. Union is a warm and spirited place with a magnificent campus, dedicated and committed people at all levels, and students distinguished by their energy, their lack of pretension and cynicism, and their eagerness to learn when challenged. If that were not enough, I have been privileged to be at a place with faculty colleagues distinguished not only by their intellect and scholarship but by their committed practice of teaching as a calling. I consider myself blessed to have been part of this place.
Although retired, Jim Underwood teaches one course each year and, with his long-time colleague Bob Sharlet, holds an appointment as the Chauncey H. Winters Research Professor of Political Science.