On the eve of his retirement, a longtime political science professor and Middlebury alum riffs on fraternities, anxiety dreams, the Vietnam era, and the perils of missing a scheduled exam.
By Russell J. Leng '60
My scariest moment as a Middlebury undergraduate began on a sunny May afternoon in my sophomore year, not long after I arrived at the Field House to take my last final exam. (All final exams were proctored in the Field House in those days, and seats were assigned.) As I scanned the bulletin board to find my seat, not only could I not find my name, I could find no mention of the course. I had arrived at the wrong time; the exam had been given that morning. I dashed off to find the instructor, only to be told that he was out of town. I soon found myself attempting to explain the situation to an unimpressed department chair. Finally, he looked up from 
filling his pipe and told me that he did not see what the problem was. The exam had been given at the appointed time; I did not take it; therefore I would receive a grade of zero. As I left his office, my imagination conjured up a bleak image of the future. I would fail the course, I would lose my scholarship, I would be forced to leave Middlebury, and then what? Disaster was averted by the intervention of the dean of men, who allowed me to take a makeup exam. But the last thing that would have occurred to me on that day was a future of 40 years of teaching at Middlebury College.
A boy who is repeatedly called “the absentminded professor” by a mother exasperated by his daydreaming is not likely to view college teaching as a glamorous profession. But I liked school, and I remember back in grammar school telling my father that I would like to be a teacher someday. To my innocent mind, teaching did not look like work, at least not the kind that took place in the business world, and there were those nice long holidays, not to mention having the summer off. Today it seems natural that I ultimately became a teacher; that I ended up as a professor at Middlebury had more to do with luck.
When I began looking at colleges, my father suggested Middlebury as one of a number of what he called “good New England liberal arts colleges.” My interest was piqued when I noticed that Middlebury was coed and had its own ski area.
I applied, and during the spring recess of my senior year, a high school friend and I headed north from New Jersey to visit Middlebury and Dartmouth, and to do some skiing. It was going to be a great adventure, especially as neither one of us knew how to ski. We got as far as Connecticut before we had to turn back because the absent-minded professor had forgotten his ski boots. It was the first of many missteps along the way. We frequently got lost; I did not get an interview at either school; and our attempt to ski at the Snow Bowl was derailed by a wrong turn in Ripton. Nevertheless, after a one-on-one campus tour by a genial retired professor, Middlebury became my first choice. My mother liked to tell her friends that her son was admitted to the college of his choice, “a nice liberal arts school in Vermont, with skiing and girls.”
I arrived on campus in September 1956 with two suitcases and a radio. (Today most students arrive with U-Haul trucks.) My two roommates were an outgoing and idealistic Vermonter and a wordly-wise preppie from Massachusetts. I happily discovered that I was not as ill-prepared for college as I feared—or as my prep-school-trained roommate told me I was. But, beyond the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, which all freshmen were required to memorize, I remember little about my courses that year. My most vivid memory of my first course in political science—the field that would be my major and career choice—was that of mooning over the upperclasswoman who sat next to me. She knitted her way through the lectures, seemingly unaware that there was anyone at all sitting to her left. My major triumph that year was winning $15 by placing second in a
public-speaking contest. (There were three entries.)
**
The sexes were geographically separated by a fault line that ran down the center of College Street, which was patrolled by the College’s single security officer. The women were on the wrong side of the street, insofar as social freedom was concerned. Outside of the classroom, men were on their own, although the Handbook specified that we were responsible for the consequences of our actions, “drunk or sober.” The women were shackled with petty restrictions, including “parietal hours.” Women had to be back in their dorm rooms by 10:00 p.m. during the week, and 11:00 on weekends. (Today most college parties do not get under way until after 10:00.) I remember the sad incident of a classmate who sneaked into his girlfriend’s room on the second floor of Pearson Hall, only to find himself trapped there after hours. He decided to make a dash for the exit out the front door by holding a blanket over his head to avoid being recognized by the dorm mother, who sat at a desk at the base of the staircase. He managed to race down the stairs without tripping but, when he reached the lobby, the blanket blinded his vision. He missed the door, hit the wall, and knocked himself unconscious.
It was also the era of compulsory chapel and Saturday morning classes. Both were failures. Students brought reading material to Sunday evening chapel services, and there was a thriving black market in the cards that were handed out to certify attendance.
Attendance at Saturday classes was not much better, with some male student attendees too hung over to function. Heavy drinking and its consequences, including deadly automobile accidents on trips back from New York state, where the drinking age was lower, were major problems. Too many former classmates who were heavy party drinkers in college later became alcoholics.
**
My father died shortly before Christmas of my freshman year. He had little life insurance and no retirement benefits. Family friends advised me to drop out of college, get a job, and consider night school. But the College came through with a full-tuition scholarship and campus jobs. It was then that I began to think of Middlebury as part of my extended family. One of my benefactors was the fraternity that I joined during that year, DKE, which provided the waiter’s job that covered my room and board.
Fraternities dominated Middlebury’s social scene in those days and, as on all campuses, they were a mixed blessing. Their worst feature was that they were inherently discriminatory, although some of the Middlebury frats fought and, in the case of my own, won battles with their national organizations to admit minority students. Middlebury’s fraternities were no different from those on other campuses in encouraging boorish male behavior, particularly toward women. But they also provided a supportive family atmosphere where maturing young men could relax and feel socially secure. In an era when there were scant student support services, we relied on each other.
It was a male-dominated era in general. Outside of a few language instructors, the faculty consisted of white males of varying competency. But Middlebury had its share of star teachers and, it seemed, more than its share of characters. I was particularly in awe of a gruff, shambling, chain-smoking English professor nicknamed “Beowulf.” I glowed with pride when he mentioned me by name to my classmates one day, even if it was to single me out as a holder of radical views because I once parroted a theory of the French Revolution, which I had picked up from my history professor. It was not unusual for one professor to comment on the views of another, usually in a lighthearted way. One of the most wonderful characters to grace the faculty was Arthur K. D. Healy, an accomplished watercolorist who also taught art history. Once, when showing a slide of an ancient statue of a centaur, he remarked to the class that he used to keep a pair of centaurs on his farm to help with the spring plowing. Unfortunately, he said, Professor Hitchcock, in biology, told him that there was no such thing as a centaur, so he had to let them go. On another occasion, Healy came to class with his fly half open. When he noticed some giggling, he glanced down and said, “Oh, I was in a bit of a hurry this morning.” He continued the lecture without zipping-up any farther. Legend has it that he did not do so for the rest of the day. That, in our eyes, was the epitome of cool.
**
Despite my chosen field, I was not politically active during those days; few of us were. One professor tried to start an “anti-apathy” movement, but it died from lack of interest. To the extent to which there was a counterculture, it identified with the Beats, especially with Kerouac and pot. Rejection of the power structure was expressed by withdrawal, or finding a way to beat the system, as opposed to trying to change it. The atmosphere did not change until Kennedy’s election in 1960. By then I was on my way to Taiwan, as an ROTC second lieutenant. It was there that I got my first taste of teaching. I found that even lecturing to sleepy enlisted men on the military code of conduct could be stimulating. After seeking the advice of my favorite Middlebury professors, I applied to graduate school.
Middlebury was a different place when I returned six years later. I had been working at the Congressional Research Service and finishing my Ph.D., when I happened to run into the political science chair, my former teacher, Harris Thurber. He suggested that I apply for a one-year leave replacement position that was becoming available. I did so, although the position in political philosophy was outside of my international politics specialty. A week before I was interviewed, however, the department interviewed and decided on another, better qualified, candidate. My visit was politely endured, and I returned to Washington, determined to put Middlebury out of my mind. But then luck, in the form of the preferred candidate’s draft board, intervened on my side. I was hired for one year at a salary of $7,700.
**
The night before my first class, I dreamed that my graduate adviser was sitting in the back of the classroom. As I began to lecture, he started nudging students and passing notes. Soon he had everyone laughing uproariously. Then, shaking his head, he left the room, with the rest of the class following him. The dream stayed with me the next morning as I headed to breakfast, where I nervously spilled a glass of pineapple juice on my new wool pants. When I finally arrived at Sunderland Auditorium, I found myself standing on a stage and looking out at 120 expectant students. It was the Vietnam era and I was teaching the first class in international politics that had been given in several years. But as soon as I began the lecture, the nervousness evaporated.
That year, I discovered the demands of college teaching, like teaching at any level, are a far cry from the easy life I had imagined back in grammar school. During my first year I was up late most nights, trying to keep my lectures one step ahead of the student reading. It got easier after that, but the frequent holidays and long summers were consumed by research projects, which generated their own deadlines. On the other hand, I found that teaching was even more exhilarating than I had imagined it would be. Someone once said that true teachers feel more alive in the classroom than anywhere else. It was true in my case. That spring, the administration decided to make my position permanent to meet the demand for courses in international politics. I was back to stay.
**
During the Vietnam era, there was no need for an “anti-apathy” movement. Students had strong feelings about American foreign policy, and they did not hesitate to express them in class. Some students would stand when offering comments in my foreign policy classes—not to show respect, but to be on equal footing. The students even had the audacity to publish pre-registration booklets evaluating courses and the faculty teaching them. The evaluations made for gossipy, if not always enlightening, reading. The evaluation for a course on Shakespeare’s tragedies, for example, rated the professor as “excellent,” but the readings as merely “average.” The faculty soon took over the course evaluations, which are now confidential.
Saturday classes, mandatory chapel, and parietal hours for women were eliminated. Fraternities went into a steady and irreversible decline, less from administration pressure than from lack of student interest. I found myself on committees to consider the implementation of coed dorms and the future, or lack of it, of ROTC on campus.
Whatever opinions one may have of these changes, there is no doubt that they reflected a degree of self-confidence and a willingness to adapt to change on the part of the College leadership, as well as the students, which was absent back in my student days. It was the beginning of a pattern of steady growth in quality that has made my career on the Middlebury faculty so rewarding.
Whatever nostalgia I have for the Middlebury of my student or early faculty days, today’s Middlebury is a better place. Today it would be hard to think of what more a student could desire in terms of academic, social, and psychological support services, physical luxuries, entertainment, and opportunities for challenges, intellectual as well as outside of the classroom. The size, quality, and diversity of the faculty have grown with the rest of the College. Although the faculty is more professional, both in attitude and scholarly accomplishments, teaching remains its highest priority.
People often ask me to compare Middlebury students today with when I first joined the faculty. I sometimes miss the feistiness of the students of the sixties, and I think that the best of my students from those days compare favorably with the best of today’s students. But overall there has been a steady upward trend in the talent and motivation of Middlebury students. Today’s students also seem to be very happy about being here. That was not always true when I was an undergraduate, or even in the sixties. The increased diversity is another plus. My courses have attracted a lot of international students, who provide a welcome additional perspective to discussions of international issues, as well as being exceptional students.
Today’s students still have some of the same problems that we faced back in my student days. Binge drinking remains a problem on campus, and an unfortunate side effect of women’s liberation is that now it affects more women. Despite the diversity of the student body, there is not as much integration among groups as one would wish. I also have the feeling that some of our most talented students are so obsessed with building credentials for the next step in their career path that they fail to appreciate the intrinsic joy of learning. But on balance, it would be hard to find a more attractive group of young men and women. Working with them has been the best part of a wonderful career, and it has gotten better as the years have passed.
Last May I gave my last international politics exam. It was in my introductory international politics class, a course that I had been teaching for 40 years, and it happened to be in the same Munroe lecture hall where I took my first political science course half a century ago. Afterward, as I sat at my desk sorting through the exams, there was an anxious knock on my office door. A flustered student entered the office and approached my desk. He had managed to get the time wrong and missed the exam. After listening to his woeful explanation, I slowly looked up at him and said, “How about taking it at 11:00.”
Russell Leng ’60 is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Director of Alumni College.