If You Live by the Sword offers an honest portrayal of the human struggles faced by a university president and it explains how these seldom discussed stresses of the position are intensified by the intrusion of politics. Pettit goes behind the scenes and writes openly about intrigue, betrayal, anxiety, and the contention for power that is faced within the university system. In a career that has mixed academia and politics for over forty years, the author was fired more than once for his politics. And when he ran a gubernatorial campaign, he actually had to fire the candidate’s mother. On a more personal level, the author experienced two divorces because of the turbulence of his career, and had to fend off false rumors of sexual impropriety and endure politically inspired audits.
If You Live by the Sword
Politics in the Making and Unmaking of a University PresidentBy LAWRENCE K. PETTITiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Lawrence K. Pettit
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-0838-3Contents
Preface........................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgements...............................................................................................................xiiiChapter 1 Montana: Growing Up With Joe McCarthy................................................................................3Chapter 2 Montana: College as a New Lease on Life..............................................................................26Chapter 3 Across the U.S.A.: Academic and Political Apprenticeships............................................................38Chapter 4 The Hybrid Career Begins: Penn State and the American Council on Education...........................................64Chapter 5 Montana: The Ambiguity of Identity...................................................................................83Chapter 6 Montana: The Clash of Political and Academic Imperatives.............................................................104Chapter 7 Montana: Hardball Politics...........................................................................................120Chapter 8 Montana: Don Quixote's Political Adventure...........................................................................144Chapter 9 Texas: ... y Justica Para Todos......................................................................................161Chapter 10 Illinois: Don't Let the University Embarrass the Board..............................................................182Chapter 11 Illinois: Partisanship Comes Knocking in the Night..................................................................206Chapter 12 Pennsylvania: Flagship Abuse........................................................................................239Chapter 13 Pennsylvania: Ambush, Intrigue, and the Beginning of the Fall.......................................................282Chapter 14 Pennsylvania: The Dagger and the Sword - A President's Reward.......................................................313Chapter 15 Pennsylvania and Montana: Bittersweet Transition into Sagehood, and a Return to Peaceful Values.....................369Endnotes.......................................................................................................................381Index..........................................................................................................................387
Chapter One
Montana: Growing Up With Joe McCarthy
I was born in the heart of Montana into a rural poverty that cruelly inhibits the development of one's intellect and imagination. It was 1937, just 20 short years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Fifty-three years later, in 1990, as head of a delegation from Southern Illinois University I sat across the table from a team of Russians, hoping to negotiate establishment of the first American college of business in that country. We occupied an ornate government office in Moscow, and one could walk a short distance from our conference table to the second story balcony on which V. I. Lenin had stood to deliver a fiery speech which has been forever captured in an historic rendition, with his right fist clenched and jutting into the air. The image is one with which I have identified throughout my life.
Over the course of that half century and since, my political consciousness has evolved and changed, beginning with an inherited faith in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. As with anyone to some degree, my outlook assumed shape and hue as I reacted to events within my life, interpreted against the backdrop of nascent history, and filtered through whatever psychological apparatus may have predisposed me toward certain beliefs and preferences. This political socialization proceeded hand-in-hand with intellectual development and a persistent love for universities, forging a life-long duality in my sense of self. On occasion, almost as an addictive force, this duality would entice the educator into the more exciting and dangerous arms of politics, with harsh, but perhaps predictable, consequences. Inevitably, several of the "lessons learned" from the experiences of my career reflect the uneasy relationship between politics and higher education.
My generation, now predominantly in retirement, shares an expanse of history that swept us through the end of the Great Depression; World War II; the beginning and end of the Cold War; the McCarthy era; wars in Vietnam and Korea, and now Iraq and Afghanistan; the Watergate scandal and a President leaving office in disgrace; large scale civil unrest and protests; political assassinations; the Civil Rights movement and the end of sanctioned racial segregation; the environmental movement; a rapid journey from the first transcontinental air service to space exploration; transatlantic telephone service; the development of television and the onset of televangelism; the development of computers, cell phones, the Internet, and other accoutrement of the Information Age; the development of a birth control pill; the belated organized movement to gain equal rights for women; the revolutions in biotechnology and astrophysics; the establishment of the United Nations and NATO; the evangelical/fundamentalist "Awakening" by which a previously marginalized religious persuasion and style grew into a respected and powerful social force, not only threatening the moral hegemony of the established, mainline denominations, but wielding enormous political power through a skillful fusion of literal theology and political conservatism; and a strategic act of terror on September 11, 2001, that crumbled not only the World Trade Center towers in New York but also the confidence of the world's singular power, and signaled that organized stealth, not connected to any nation state or its agenda, has supplanted rogue state aggression as the world's chief threat and primary agent of fear.
One generation has experienced all this and, as a capstone in 2008, the improbable election of a black President of the United States as Senator Barack Obama shattered the racial barrier with a message of hope, unity and change, and a campaign brilliantly executed both in its use of cutting edge technology and its extraordinary ability to withstand a campaign of character assassination waged against him.
As my professional career neared its end, I looked backward in an attempt to see for the first time the genesis, evolution, and change of my own political consciousness, noting how my spot on the left-right continuum sometimes shifted in response to both societal and personal events. Because I began thinking about this effort when I was about 67 and had officially retired, it occurred to me that the many millions of us entering retirement at the change of the centuries had shared a remarkable set of politically related experiences, with a scientific and technological chasm separating our early and later years that is almost inconceivable for one lifetime. We and those who preceded us and still live, along with those who will follow in the next decade, constitute the largest demographic group in the American polity. Yet I discovered also, into my late 50s and early 60s, a preference for spending much of my time amid young people, drawing energy from their own exuberance, getting excited about a role in shaping their destinies, learning to talk their language, understand their music, and engage them as adults. If I had not understood it earlier, I did then that it was a love for the young, as much as a love for scholarship and the life of the mind, that drew me to a career in higher education.
I suspect those life forces that shaped me into a risk taker rather than a survivor are more common to our generation, however, than to those who follow us. We developed and matured during historical times that required moral courage and hard decisions, and our model for political leadership is that of Churchill and Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. We knew a time when university presidents also were strong and resolute, great leaders who took risks, and who spoke out on issues beyond the campus. In both politics and higher education there often are consequences for taking risks. How we confront those risks is determined in large measure by both a broad socialization shared by a generation and the more particular character shaped by one's own evolving life circumstances. I look back on my own career as a chain of risks and consequences, one that I believe is worth sharing through this memoir for what it says about moral courage and independence in that exotic space, the public university presidency, where the intrigues and battles of politics and academia intersect, sometimes with excruciating pressures.
* * *
Utica, Montana, is a post office, tavern and grocery store for surrounding ranches and the sprinkling of homes in the town itself, population fewer than 100. The town sits not quite at the foot of the Little Belt Mountains in the central part of the state, near the once well- known Yogo Sapphire Mine. Montana's tourist bureau sometimes calls this "Charlie Russell Country," in honor of the famous cowboy artist. Russell, who sought adventure in moving to the state from his native St. Louis, which is connected to Montana by the Missouri River of the Lewis and Clark trail, in fact did spend considerable time in Utica at the pool hall and barber shop of my maternal grandfather, Charles Brown. Russell completed one of his most famous paintings, "Last of the Five Thousand," while staying in a small cabin outside Utica.
Although I was not born there, I spent my first seven years in Utica. The birth occurred in the nearest hospital, St. Joseph's, some 35 miles to the East in Lewistown, noted as the precise geographic center of the state, and thus appearing as remote as can be on a map of the United States. On May 2, 1937, the nation was still reeling from the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just been re-elected in a landslide six months earlier, and while his New Deal got off to a flying start, most of the components of Roosevelt's economic recovery program were yet to come. Poverty was generalized throughout the country, captured in FDR's famous statement about one-third of a nation ill-fed, ill-clad and ill-housed. The lack of modern communications stunted consumer aspirations in any event. There was no television and very limited visual mass marketing, air travel was still quite rare, and the infrastructure for distant automobile travel was undeveloped. This, added to the generalized extent of poverty, made it less embarrassing, albeit no more enjoyable, for a young boy to grow up virtually without anything but food, clothing and a bed - with only a few cardboard toys and precious few of the stimuli that shape one's brain in the first three years of life.
By the year of my birth my grandfather had long since abandoned my grandmother, and my mother and father had been divorced during her pregnancy with me. Until my mother remarried, when I was about four, I grew up in a household on welfare, with a grandmother, mother, and two older sisters. In this impoverished environment, Franklin Roosevelt was virtually God, offering the only hope there was for deliverance. My mother would tell me many years later that whenever FDR spoke on the radio we kids would stop what we were doing and listen. Though we could not necessarily understand the message, his voice and his spiritual presence in the room were so compelling that he mesmerized us even as he bound together in hope and resolve the millions of American adults who would have made him King. I thus inherited my initial political identity. This is true of most persons, but those of us who were born into the Roosevelt coalition inherited a movement psychology similar to following a Gandhi in India, or a Jinnah in Pakistan, or perhaps Churchill at the crest of his political career.
Of course, during my pre-school years I was largely unaware of the political world, especially given how my life was situated geographically, socially and economically. I was only two when Hitler invaded Poland, and four when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred and the United States declared war on the three major Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy. War has no intelligible impact on a four year old who is thousands of miles from the nearest combat zone.
I don't recall hearing much about Republicans in those years. The enemies were poverty and despair and Germany and Japan, and so far as I knew, FDR was the horse - the magnificent and reassuring thoroughbred - on which every family bet its pennies. I don't think the Republicans were very much in the game as I was absorbing a political allegiance.
When my mother, Dorothy Brown Pettit, married Wilbur Gregory we moved from my grandmother's home to a rickety, Charles Addamsesque house on the edge of town, where we had no indoor plumbing. There was a barn with a few animals, mostly sheep. I delivered a lamb when I was five, having observed a ewe in distress as I was walking across the barnyard. It was the only time until late high school that I ever felt like a hero in my family. This, no doubt, is unrelated to my political socialization, except that in retrospect I must speculate that a budding young Republican, instead of grabbing the lamb and gently tugging, might have lectured the ewe on self reliance.
We moved into Lewistown as the school year ended in 1944. That summer, Allied troops under Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery invaded Normandy, their tanks driving through German defenses, on what became known as D-Day. At the same time, French underground forces rose up against the Germans. The Axis powers would surrender the next year. I do not remember this having registered with me, although I am sure that we all got caught up in the celebration. What I remember vividly, though, is the impact of Roosevelt's death in 1945, when I was eight years old. My mother had sent me with a list of purchases to the corner grocery store where we had a charge account. When I got there people were talking in an agitated fashion. The first thing I heard was that Roosevelt had died. The second was that Truman had killed him so he could be president. I was stunned. I understood in an unformed manner the greatness of FDR, and to me Truman was a mystery. By now I had lived in Lewistown a year, and a steady diet of news reels at the theatre, where I spent every Sunday afternoon (fourteen cents for a double feature), had tutored me on the dominating qualities of the two great wartime leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill. The only president I had known was gone, but he was more than a president, he was a majestic force for good who touched the common people in an uncommon way. Even as a child I felt some sense of loss.
Upon entering the second grade at Lincoln Elementary School in Lewistown I had been placed in the slowest reading group. My early years in Utica had meant no kindergarten, and first grade in a two-room school where grades one through four were taught in one room, all by the same teacher. By the end of the year I was in the fastest group and excelled as a student thereafter. In school I had found my niche, my escape and the focus of my life. Lincoln was quite a progressive school for the times. It had a student council, to which I was elected each year, a result, I was certain, of my being the smartest kid in the class. It would be many years before I understood that electing the stronger intellect was not the natural order of things in American elections. The school also had a rich curriculum in music and art, and in social studies taught us thoroughly about the United Nations. I even remember learning at that tender age how the General Assembly and Security Council were constituted and functioned.
Many people in the development of their political selves experience anger, alienation and frustration that leads to rebellion and even revolution. Whatever it is that seems to be oppressing them appears too potent or too pervasive to deal with by accredited methods. Often I have reflected on what turns my life might have taken had I grown up in a city, in a neighborhood of the dispossessed - all that my family could have afforded- where there would have been antisocial support systems to enable truancy, delinquency and eventually crime as an expression of alienation, or where there would have been role models and fringe groups to induct me into radical politics. In Lewistown I began to feel the frustration and resentment of my economic circumstances midway through elementary school, and at about the same time I could not bear to witness the living Hell of my mother's life at home as she assumed far more than half the burden of support for four kids and my step-father's two brothers who came and went and were never self sufficient. Over the course of a lifetime all men and women accumulate a record of both good and evil, and it seems unfair to recount only one's failings after his death. So it is with my stepfather. By the last decade or so of his life, after so many years of my mother's civilizing influence, he had become a respectable man in the community and a benign and loving family member. I grew to love him by then, having merely declared a truce at about the age of 15. But he had had enormous problems adapting from life as a cowhand who had been ejected from his home after just an eighth grade education to life as head of a family. There are memories from this early, formative part of my life that are painful, and that I had first chosen to ignore; I feel though that I must mention them as critical to my over-all socialization as a man, and of potential significance, therefore, to my political socialization, and even to my thoughts and behavior as a university leader later in life. I was actually frightened of my stepfather for years because of an incident that occurred when I was about five, and had to hear and observe his beating my mother.
Did this affect my political orientation? Perhaps. If I consider that I had no male role model - a father whom I never met, a stepfather who was a negative model, my uncles on my mother's side geographically distant, no older brother - and if conservatism is less sentimental, more judgmental, more punitive, more macho than liberalism, then at some psychological level I would reject the more fearsome and aggressive conservatism and embrace a more nurturing liberalism. Certainly, I would predictably be more in favor of women's rights, more pro-choice, than a man who had had a father who was a great pal and a mother who was a shrew. Throughout my life, in politics and in education, I have been almost an inveterate risk taker. I have to believe that the early childhood experiences of poverty sometimes laced with physical or psychological brutality, the lack of protection from a father and only minimal nurturing from a mother who was kind and loving, but unable to express love verbally and who was worn down by her life circumstances, conditioned me to embrace risk as the only door to hope and advancement.
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