V
THE YEARS OF CHANCELLOR W. CLARKE WESCOE

At first blush, Murphy’s successor as chancellor of the university appeared to be very much like him. Like Murphy, Clarke Wescoe came to the chancellorship from the deanship of the medical school where, when he succeeded Murphy as dean. He was only one year older than Murphy had been at the time he became dean. Both men were of rather short stature but agile and energetic. Both were highly articulate and could be strongly persuasive.

The Regents had wasted no time: Murphy had announced his coming departure for UCLA on a Monday; by Saturday of the same week Wescoe had agreed to be his successor. “Agreed” is used deliberatively: Neither Wescoe nor his wife was eager to make the change but were prevailed upon by the Regents in the face of a public announcement by Governor George Docking that he saw no reason why Kansas should have to look outside the state for a chancellor for its university and then identified four individuals, all in Kansas, as prospects that would be agreeable to him.

To be sure, during nine years as dean of the medical school Wescoe had become well known in the state; since the medical school’s budget was (and is) separate from that of the main campus in Lawrence, the dean of the School of Medicine (and later the provost and then the executive vice chancellor of the Medical Center) is also always well known to the members of the legislature. Just as Franklin Murphy had been the logical choice in 1951, so Clarke Wescoe was in 1960.

Murphy had been a product of the University of Kansas as an undergraduate; how deeply his year in Göttingen had affected him has already been noted. He had enjoyed the benefit of growing up in material comfort amid high culture. Clarke Wescoe was the son of a Lutheran minister in Pennsylvania; his undergraduate years had been spent at Muhlenberg College, a small Lutheran college in Allentown that waived tuition for the sons of Lutheran clergy. Until he became dean of the KU Medical School Wescoe had done little traveling outside the United States. One of Wescoe’s first acts as chancellor was to direct that the report of the Committee on “The University and World Affairs” be printed and widely distributed.

The greatest challenge facing the American people today [so the committee wrote] is learning to live in the world of tomorrow. The challenge is addressed primarily to the American educational system, and especially to the institutions of higher learning.

The world of tomorrow will be no larger than the nation of today — or the county of yesterday. Improvements in transportation and communication continue to shrink the globe. Already communication between nations and peoples has become practically instantaneous.

The revolutions of our time promise to create a community of people whose interests and aspirations do not stop at geo- graphic boundaries. More and more, domestic and foreign issues are having worldwide ramifications. Today the problems of one nation are the problems of all nations. To accept responsibility for the welfare of others is therefore not only a moral obligation; it is a simple matter of practical necessity dictated by self-interest.

Higher education must share this responsibility. The problems created by the new world situation cannot be solved by political action alone, nor by economic or religious institutions. Education must supply the means that will develop an informed citizenry capable of recognizing its responsibilities and able to cope with them. Education at all levels must prepare the citizen of tomorrow to think effectively about the challenging world in which he will live.

…

No problem facing us today is more pressing or urgent than the challenge to understand the world about us, the direction in which it is heading, and the nature of our responsibilities. Then — and only then — by accepting these responsibilities can we exercise some control of the future.

…

[The same kind of ringing language appears in the final sentences of the report:]

Our age calls for an educational system that considers the world its classroom. A state university will not have fulfilled its obligations to its state in this, the 20th Century, if it fails to provide for its students the kind of educational experience which will fit them for life in the 21st Century.

The first part of the report recited some of the efforts in international activities by which the university had already moved toward the report’s lofty goals, most based on or involving individual initiatives. In its later pages the report recommended steps which the university could and should undertake as an institution. Here appeared a goal of having one half of each undergraduate junior class spend a period of study abroad; this, so the report noted, would require a steady expansion of exchange arrangements with foreign universities. To accommodate such arrangements—which ideally should be reciprocal—the University should find ways to ease the rigidity of the credit system, largely unknown in universities abroad.

The report noted that greater attention than in the past would have to be paid to assure that faculty from abroad to study or do research at the University of Kansas would be adequately compensated and, both professionally and socially, integrated into the host institution and its city. Lastly, the report noted the need for an administrative focal point for international activities and recommended that provision be made for such a position (without, however, being specific about the scope and placement of the official who would be given this task).

Franklin Murphy had already let it be known that he was in full accord with this report. In the years and decades to come, every chancellor, from Clarke Wescoe to the present incumbent, has allied himself with its aspirations and most have supported its goals by lending his voice and impact to the efforts to obtain the resources needed to sustain the university’s thrust in international education.

In submitting its report to the chancellor the committee had formally called attention to the Ford Foundation’s program to raise the level of international educational efforts at selected universities; the first round of awards had gone to private institutions (except for the University of Michigan). Wescoe resolved to make the case for Kansas to be the second public university to earn Ford Foundation support and appointed a committee to prepare the case for KU. He directed the committee to select a chairperson from among its members and the committee assigned the position to me. Eventually a subcommittee undertook the task of preparing the final application; in addition to myself this group consisted of John Augelli (Geography and Latin American Area Studies), Oswald Backus (History and Slavic and Soviet Area Studies), Floyd R. Preston (Petroleum Engineering) and Thomas R. Smith (Geography and East Asian Area Studies). Its work product ran to 35 pages, with appendices identified by the letters A through Z.

After Wescoe had informed the Ford Foundation that the University of Kansas wished to submit an application and that I would be the person charged with its preparation, I was granted an interview—that seems the best way to describe it—with a staff member of the Ford Foundation. To set the stage, this gentleman advised me that I was being seen only because I had a Ph.D. from a respectable university (the University of Virginia). He never came straight out and told me that Kansas simply was not on their list, but he reminded me twice that we should expect our application—and our qualifications—to be subjected to rigorous review.

Wescoe had told me that my designation to the group writing the Ford Foundation proposal had been suggested to him by George Waggoner. Although we no longer lived across the street from each other, George and I still had adjacent offices and interacted continuously. I had his advice throughout the application process.

It was he who thought of two ways that might strengthen our case with the Ford Foundation. One was to provide them with statistics on the performance of our undergraduates in competition for prestigious awards: beginning in 1956, each year had seen one of our students selected as one of the 32 chosen each year to go to Oxford as Rhodes scholars. In the competition for Woodrow Wilson fellowships for graduate study (1,000 grants nationwide each year) KU had twice in the last three years been tied with Michigan for the highest number of grants among public universities. That information was easily assembled. Waggoner suggested that, whenever the foundation sent a representative to us for a site visit, I have the visitor meet a group of our honors undergraduates.

The second suggestion was not nearly as easily put into effect. Waggoner had talked to his counterpart at Michigan and had learned that the Ford Foundation people had almost rejected Michigan’s application for one of these major grants because the University’s own private support organization had shown little interest in the proposed enhancements. At the University of Kansas, private support is handled through the Endowment Association which has its own board of trustees and its own (at the time still small) staff. In its earlier years anybody could approach KUEA’s staff with requests for small grants or loans, but by 1960 the KUEA board required that all requests for payments from unrestricted funds be brought to it by the chancellor or a person to whom the chancellor had formally delegated his privilege. Wescoe’s first reaction was positive, but he wavered when George told him that he and I were thinking of a request for $100,000. But the following weekend George and I were asked to come to the Chancellor’s house for lunch where we were given the opportunity to make our case to the chair of the KUEA board. At the next meeting of the board the grant was approved.

In due course our application for a grant in the amount of $750,000 went forward to the Ford Foundation. Eventually I was asked to come to the foundation’s office in New York for a meeting with the same staff associate I had seen in my earlier visit. This time I managed to get him out of his office and took him to lunch at the Yale Club (where Virginia alumni enjoy membership privileges). My (and KU’s) stock went up.

The foundation officer’s first question was about the $100,000 from KUEA. Surely this was just a loan. When we got back to his office I asked to use his office phone, called the executive secretary of KUEA (Irvin Youngberg) and handed the phone to my host. Youngberg confirmed that it was an outright grant, to be administered by me or whoever chaired the Council on International Educational Affairs. There were no further questions; I had the distinct impression that I had been summoned for the purpose of receiving the foundation’s denial of our request. The KUEA grant obviously made the difference.

The same foundation official came to Lawrence for a site visit, in the course of which he did everything he could to collect evidence that our facts were, at best, in error or, at worst, deliberately false. My wife had suggested that the meeting I had scheduled with some of the honors students be held at our home. Fifteen students showed up—and overwhelmed our unfriendly guest.

Two more visits to New York followed. But we now had a friend in court; George Beckmann, our professor of Japanese history and, though currently on leave, chair of our East Asian Studies program, was temporarily working in the higher education section of the Ford Foundation and provided Wescoe and me with periodic reports which showed that, while we might not get the sum we had requested we would probably be given a half a million dollars. Chancellor Wescoe was eagerly looking forward to being able to publicize this unprecedented donation.

At the last minute the foundation insisted that the university commit itself to create and fund an administrative office for international pro- grams-–a proposition that had, of course, already appeared in our own report on “The University and the World,” a copy of which was Appendix A of the application we had sent to the Ford Foundation. The same condition, we were told, had been exacted from all recipients of these “major” grants. Beckmann had alerted Wescoe to this last-minute condition and, in the course of their telephone conversation, Wescoe had asked Beckmann if he might be interested in this position, and George had responded in the affirmative. Wescoe knew that Waggoner was being rumored as a leading candidate for the presidency of Indiana University; if he left, Clarke wanted me available to take his place. He did not know but probably surmised that I too had been approached by other universities seeking to fill administrative vacancies. I thought it entirely reasonable that he should wish to strengthen his immediate staff—and agreed that I would turn over the chairmanship of the Council on International Educational Affairs to Beckmann.

By this time George Waggoner had clearly become the focal person for virtually all activities in our relations to Central America and the Caribbean. He had lost his wife to cancer in 1961 and remarried the following year. Helen he had met while both were undergraduates at KU where she had majored in home economics. A delightful person who enjoyed being wife and mother, she took little interest in her husband’s professional life. Barbara Ashton had lost her husband in the collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon; at the time she met George Waggoner she was a very active Assistant Director of Continuing Education for the University of Missouri at Kansas City. She had a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Ohio University and had a strong desire to be involved in the academic scene. Her command of Spanish was much better than George’s, and her involvement in Latin America was every bit as pronounced as his. Their combined efforts resulted in, among other evidence, the joint publication Education in Central America.

Waggoner had become increasingly well know among Latin Americanists in the United States and among rectors and deans of universities in Latin America. The latter group in particular produced a range of interactions that often started as purely personal ties but eventually grew into projects, programs and contracts. The rectors and deans valued the opportunities for dialog and learning that he provided in the annual seminar for Latin American rectors and deans which had grown out of the remnants of CHEAR, with the strong support of the Department of State. Eventually, for political reasons, the department insisted that the guests from below the Rio Grande should visit other universities in the United States besides KU, but Lawrence remained the key of their six-week tour, and many of them included Lawrence, Kansas, on later visits to the United States, whether personal or professional.

Thus Luis Penalver, the rector of the Universidad del Oriente [UDO] of Cumanà (Venezuela), took advantage of his participation in the seminar to talk about the needs of his institution, a new creation of the government of Venezuela in a remote area of the republic. He needed teachers and the opportunities for potential teachers to get graduate training. With a strong assist from Waggoner, he found funding from the Ford Foundation with the result that four KU teachers, all in the sciences and mathematics, went to Cumanà to teach for six to twenty months at a time while four young instructors from UDO embarked on doctoral work at KU.

While in Costa Rica on his first visit Waggoner had become acquainted with CSUCA (pronounced “Casooca”), the Council for Higher Education in Central America, which maintained its offices in Guatemala City. CSUCA was particularly interested in establishing geography as a college subject of instruction. There was, at that time, not a single professionally trained geographer in all of Central America. This project was underwritten by AID, the government’s foreign aid agency. Pierre (“Pete”) Stouse and, after his death in a civil aircraft accident in Topeka, Robert Nunley, both of KU’s geography department, spent extended periods of time trying to stimulate interest in geography and identifying candidates for training in the field, all this in the face of senior colleagues who saw no merit to geography as a subject of advanced study. Similar undertakings covered sociology and anthropology, with similar ambivalent results.

This is only a partial listing of activities in Central America that had their beginning at or found critical support in the University of Kansas. George Waggoner played a major role in each instance; he became so widely known among Latin Americanists that, when the government of Argentina first seized and then closed some of its universities, Waggoner was a member of a three-person team dispatched to Argentina as a fact finding group.

George had found a valuable helper in Thomas M. Gale, a young historian who in the decade that he was on the KU faculty spent more time in Central America than he did in Lawrence. Tom was completely bilingual and had a profound appreciation for the cultural setting in which he found himself. Differing from some others who ventured into Central America, Gale also knew how to get along with the Americans in the field, the embassy, AID and the Ford Foundation.

One of the propositions that the Council on International Education Affairs had developed and Chancellor Wescoe had approved was that KU should not enter into any commitments for work abroad that it could not perform with its existing resources. This position ran counter to the practices of some universities that promised to do things without knowing who would be doing them. KU may have had fewer foreign aid contracts than other universities, but every contract signed by KU was performed by faculty already on board (and preferable already tenured.)

The Peace Corps, however, purported to operate without regard to possible profits. But, in a concession to for-profit entities, Congress had not ruled out for profit operation of the training that prospective Peace Corps personnel had to undergo before being placed in the field. Tom Gale had talked to the Peace Corps representative in Central America, with a view of having KU placed in charge of both training and field operations for Peace Corps teachers in Costa Rica. KU, he noted in his report to Waggoner, could make some money on the training part. He was disappointed when I had to inform him that this ran counter to KU policy. Then he discovered that the Peace Corps, as a matter of policy, would not assign training and field operations to the same contractor. Eventually, with the aid of a United States Senator, the webs became untangled and KU, with Tom Gale as director, trained and operated a Peace Corps team for Costa Rica. That summer 1963, when I visited Costa Rica for three weeks, there were more than one hundred people in the small country who, in one way or another, were related to the University of Kansas.

An incident that fall may be illustrative. William Argersinger, the associate dean of faculties for research, was in San Jose at the request of the University of Costa Rica to talk to them about research. At the end of the second day of his discussions at the university he was offered transportation to his hotel but declined; he was confident that he knew where the bus stopped and would prefer to walk to that point and then take the bus. There was a small group of people at the bus stop and it did not seem to bother any of them that every bus drove on without stopping for these prospective passengers. Bill did not speak a word of Spanish. But he noticed one person who was black; blacks in Costa Rica, he knew, lived in the coastal town of Limon and, as descendents of migrants from Jamaica, spoke not Spanish but a resemblance of Jamaican English. But when he addressed the man, the response came in good Midwestern English: he was a KU graduate student in public administration doing research in San Jose under still another grant, from AID, and he was just as lost as the dean. (They caught a taxi and had dinner together).

Waggoner, quite rightly, thought highly of Tom Gale and eventually brought him into the College office as an assistant dean. But his reputation as an administrator was already established and a year later he moved to Las Cruces as dean of Arts and Sciences at New Mexico State University. If he had spent the remainder of his professional years at KU it is highly likely that he would eventually have become a key administrator for international programs. His departure was a definite loss to KU and, more specifically to Waggoner who was clearly the most visible person at KU with a strong interest in Central America and in higher education throughout Latin America but was not inclined to become involved in the administration of projects intended to advance these interests. This was, of course, why the recruitment of John Augelli was of such importance to him.

In 1961 Waggoner persuaded Augelli to leave the University of Maryland and join KU as a professor of geography and director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Augelli was a man of tremendous energy, eager to build the center into a nationally and internationally renowned activity. But soon after he had assumed his duties in Lawrence, he began to express frustration about his apparent lack of authority and, more emphatically, about the lack of identifiable lines of authority. “You told me,” he wrote to Chancellor Wescoe in November 1962, “that I would be in charge of all activities pertaining to Latin America, but I am unable to find out where I am to take my questions: Surface [who just been named the chief academic officer], Waggoner, Heller? Who handles problems with the Junior Year in Costa Rica? Any of the same three? Tom Gale [that year’s director in San Jose]? The dean of students? Time and again I have been told to take my problems to Mr. Nichols even if they have nothing to do with money or budget, and he always gracefully sends me back on the circuit that seems to have no end.”

Augelli would leave KU for the University of Illinois in 1967 but returned in 1971 as dean of international programs, a position he found as frustrating as his earlier task and which he relinquished two years later. Augelli’s complaints were not without substance. George Beckmann had prepared a job description for himself that placed all international activities (except the care of foreign students) under the umbrella of his office. George Waggoner thought that there were international activities that were entirely within the college, were in the college budget and should be handled in the college office. Beckmann persuaded the office of research administration, through which all university grants and contracts had to be funneled, to require clearance by him whenever there was an international aspect. He also insisted that his title should parallel that of the head of research administration, “Associate Dean of Faculties for — .”

Among the matters that Beckmann had brought under his jurisdiction were the various activities that Toni Burzle had brought into being: the processing of Fulbright grants and the summer orientation program. Toni did not take kindly to the transfer of these matters and told Waggoner that he would look for another position. Waggoner assured him that the last word had not been heard and that he, Burzle, would always play a major role. Burzle was, after all, the chair of a department in the College but could Waggoner protect him if Beckmann was determined to carve out his area on his own terms—and had the chancellor’s support? Or did he?

Shortly thereafter in 1964 the Institute of International Education cited KU with the IIE-Reader’s Digest Award in International Education, one of five such awards it made this year and the only one to go to a public university. The annual award was accompanied by a monetary grant of $1,000, which was to go to the person at the university who had contributed the most to the development of these activities. “Toni” Burzle and I were announced by Chancellor Wescoe as the two persons to share this award. Perhaps naively, we both took this to be recognition of merit—but later recognized that it had really been a consolation prize.

In 1965 Beckmann accepted an offer from the University of Washington to be its vice provost for international programs. A major reason for his decision to move was that he faced continuous difficulties in his efforts to gain, if not control, then oversight of international programs at KU. This was certainly the case.

Both Beckmann’s and Gale’s brief careers at KU may serve as examples of a major problem faced by KU. Time and again a well-qualified person would be persuaded to join KU’s faculty or accept an administrative responsibility, only to be hired away after a few short years. Often this was due to substantially higher salary offers. But some departures, such as Beckmann’s in 1965 and Augelli’s in 1967, were caused by unfulfilled expectations. It is, of course, also true that area specialists, regardless of discipline, need to return to their area of specialization, to reinforce their contacts, to refresh their linguistic competence, to be updated on changes in the order. Beckmann (and later Augelli) felt that there should be funds for such purposes, and they should be under the control of the person designated to administer the university’s international programs. The fact was that the granting agencies, whether public or private, rarely responded to pleas for the support of faculty travel or library resources.

Backus, the Russian historian, who had a remarkable capability for foreign languages, asserted that, at the least, he needed to spend a semester every third year in a Russian-speaking environment—and had the impetus to find support for his trips to the Soviet Union. But he was exceptional—in many ways.

~return~