Swarthmore College Bullettij ^ March, 19Ì ) \ | I “Behind us are thefearsome voyage and the slow ascent up the lonely rock scourged by Atlantic storms, habitable only by birds and seals. Ahead o f u s .. .isa livingfragment o f the sixth century. We have walked back in time, out o f our own mundane earth into the world o f the Irish saints” ist lay over the North Atlan­ green whirlpools in the wake of the tic near Bray Head, County breakers. Our solid little boat was Kerry, in the southwest of picked up and tossed like an empty snail Ireland, a remnant of the shell. For a few minutes we wallowed, rainstorm that had flattened the water no a headway at all. The motor making few minutes before. The wind had driven took hold and we slowly crawled out of it off and now it lay to the south, a dark the riptide. cushion of cloud hiding the horizon. The open ocean was no better. Near Near shore the ocean was flat under the shore the waves were short and choppy. thinning fog. In the north the great Out in the swell they were relentless, massif of Brandon Mountain hulked rhythmic combers far bigger than our over the Dingle Peninsula, its unseen boat. We would climb a steep green hill summits wrapped, as they always were and poise at the top, shuddering, the even on the fairest days, in moving screw out of water. Our pilot cut the clouds. Over the ocean the sun broke motor so we wouldn’t dive to the through and the water began to shine. It bottom, and we careened down the looked like a lake. other side, to pitch and rock uncon­ The boat picked us up at the bridge trollably in the trough. There was barely over Portmagee Channel between Va­ time to gun the motor to meet the next lencia Island and the mainland of the wave, which wasn’t always directly in Iveragh Peninsula. It was a thirty-two- front but might be coming at us from foot fishing boat fitted out to take a the side, roughened by the gusty west dozen or so passengers on short expe­ wind. ditions, with benches along the sides We couldn’t see where we were going and a cabin forward. nor where we had come from. Every­ For a short way beyond the bridge the where we looked there was only water, channel was protected; green fields rose above us, beside us, before us, behind to mild rocky heights. But when we us, at every pitch but level. Out of the came out of the lee, the wind off the corners of our eyes we glimpsed uncon­ open ocean hit us. Waves came from cerned birds: kittiwakes playing with every direction as conflicting tides and the wind and puffins beating low across currents crossed at the meeting place of the wave tops. Sometimes there was a inlet and ocean. The water that had seal, head high, staring curiously before been a gray monotone from afar was a submerging in its element, while we surge of flying white spray and thick unqualified humans clung to the rails, M 2 numb to the water breaking over us, one identifiable thought in our minds— beyond the unvoiced fear that this was our last journey—“we have to come back the same way!” Suddenly, dead ahead, appeared a tall rock of spires and castellated walls, covered with gannets—perching, nest­ ing, landing, taking off, diving. It was the island of Little Skellig, inhabited entirely and only by gannets, 20,000 nesting pairs, the second largest colony in the world, their home for possibly the past thousand years. As we came under its sheltering peak the boat steadied enough so we could see, a mile or so beyond, the sharp dark triangle of Great Skellig, also called Skellig Michael, 714 feet high, which had been home to a few of Ireland’s wandering monks even longer ago than the arrival of the gannets. They had come across the same eight and a half miles of ocean in their curraghs, wooden-frame, hide-covered boats that bobbed lightly as thistledown over the waves. On the last part of the journey, between the two rocks, the water was no less rough, but they must have felt a somewhat startled elation, as did we, at seeing their awesome destina­ tion. The sun was so bright now that we could not look at the sea, and the shadowed island was a formidable silhouette without detail, piercing the SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN Left: Beehive huts o f the monastic village on Skellig Michael. On the previous pages, similar structures are visible, with Little Skellig and the Iveragh Peninsula in the background. light sky. As we neared we could see waves breaking, scattering their spray far up on bare and shining rock. We looked in wonder at the vertical slab of the wall, thinking of those ancient voyagers. No harbor was visible until all at once we came around a corner and were in it, a small straight-walled inlet protected on three sides from open ocean. A cement dock was built into one corner, and a paved walkway cut from the sheer rock led out of sight away from it. Before the walkway was built no one could have climbed from here. The hand-hewn steps made by the monks ascended, we learned, from another landing place on the north side, a triangular cove open to the sea, where today boats can land possibly four days in a year. But for several hundred years they had brought their little vessels into that exposed corner, where they had to haul them up on the sharp rocks above reach of the waves. They came with the few supplies they could carry in their curraghs, to an island open at every point to wind and rain, where only small hardy plants can take root in rock crevices and no animals but sea birds and rabbits can find sanctuary in weather-eroded fissures in the sheer walls. They did not come here to escape. They left their quiet lives within the sheltering walls of their monasteries to set forth with positive hope over the savage ocean, ill-equipped, unworldly, caring not what hardships they would meet at the end of the voyage. They came for love. Today the narrow road from the harbor ascends part way up, curling around Skellig Michael’s perpendicular south side, to end at a lighthouse on the southwestern tip. About halfway along the road the stairway of the monks appears, rising uncompromisingly straight up toward the rounded dome of the eastern peak: six hundred steps crudely cut in the rock face, of differing widths and not always level. The monks’ tools must have been other rocks, and they must have worked fast. Summer off the coast of southwestern Ireland is notably cool and rainy, but winter is almost insupportable. Never does the wind out there cease long enough for the ocean’s turbulent swell to subside. Winter gales drive the waves thirty feet up on the lee side of the island, and up to two hundred on the south where the full MARCH, 1981 force of the North Atlantic hits. No­ where on the rock is there so much as a cave for refuge, nor is there a level place anywhere near sea level that is wide enough for building. If they came in April, when the storms diminish, they had to complete their stairway to the island’s only practicable terrace, 550 feet up, and build their houses, all within the four summer months of comparative calm. Because when Sep­ tember came, with its equinoctial tempests, the monks could neither live there without shelter nor could they depart. The flight of steps is not continuous. The slope moderates here and there, and a precarious layer of soil has had a chance to form. In these places, a few yards wide, the steps cease and we walk over pillows of sea pink and big soft clumps of sea campion, those hardy colonizers whose roots twine together in tangled mats, catching their own dead foliage and making of it their own soil. The monks took advantage of a few of these slanting terraces, erecting stone crosses where those who came later could stop and worship, or just catch their breath and look at the birds. One of these monuments is still there, a pitted stone worn almost shapeless by time and weather, rising stark out of the flowers at the threshold of the cliff, the sea fierce beyond it. A few steps beyond the cross, lichens and mosses have invaded a section of rock already eroded by wind and rain, and the spongy surface is honeycombed with puffin burrows. This oasis gives token that in summer, at least, the monks would not have gone hungry. Besides the puffins, which are easy to get at, the cliffs are home to hundreds of other nesting sea birds: Kittiwakes, fulmars, razorbills, and guillemots lay hey left their quiet lives . . . to set forth with positive hope over the savage ocean, ill-equipped, unworldly, caring not what hardships they would meet . . . They came for love. T their eggs and raise their young in clefts and on ledges high above the sea. The monks could have kept a few goats, the only domestic animal unfussy enough about its diet to live on the rock’s scanty pickings. Some of the wild plants are edible, and the monks could have grown a few herbs. In the sixth century, when it is probable that the first voyagers ar­ rived, the climate was warmer than it is today. There could not have been much more soil, because there is simply no place for it; everything slips downward, and only in a few places can a plant take root for long enough to provide its own habitat. But the summers then were not quite so short nor the winters so unkind. Fish and the few birds, such as gulls, that wintered over, would have seen them through the crudest months. The last few yards of the climb are in a tunnel under a retaining wall, built in modern times to protect the monastery site from the depredations of burrowing rabbits, relative newcomers. We climb upward through dripping darkness. Behind us are the fearsome voyage and the slow ascent up the lonely rock scourged by Atlantic storms, habitable only by birds and seals. Ahead of us, as we come out of the tunnel into the mild sunlight, is a living fragment of the sixth century. We have walked back in time, out of our own mundane earth into the world of the Irish saints. The pitch of Skellig Michael at this place, between 550 and 600 feet above the ocean, levels off in a series of narrow, uneven terraces before it mounts the last steep fifty feet of the peak, out of sight on the rounded hill­ side. Six little beehive-shaped stone huts, a slightly larger stone oratory with a barrel-vault roof, and the roofless walls of a small church are clustered here at varying levels, some nestled close against the swell of the hill, some poised at the very edge, only a low drystone wall between them and the breath­ taking cliff. Between them are winding walks lined with flat stones. A widening of the central walk into a miniature plaza is occupied by leaning tombstones, their inscriptions obliterated. In its own green square beyond them is a stele, probably originally a cross; its cross­ piece two blunted knobs, the weathered carving on its face blending with lichens to form a design of geometric abstrac­ tions. It stands alone, tall as a man and somewhat resembling one, as if an 3 anchorite had been forgotten there and still stands lost in contemplation of Little Skellig rising out of the sea, framed by the curving walls of two beehive huts. he buildings and walls are constructed of flat stones, without mortar. Each hut has a hole in the top, origi­ nally closed off by a rock slab. quarters they offer small latitude. The highest, which is thought to have had two stories, is sixteen feet; the lowest is about nine, the walls from three to six feet thick and the square interior floor space hardly big enough for a man to lie down in. They have no windows, and the doors are only about four feet high. They must have been cold in winter and damp all year round. But the people who dared the ocean waves to find their peace on this rock had no interest in comfort. On the contrary, their disre­ gard for the everyday usages of ease was the very core of their spiritual vitality. Austerity not only pleased them, it was necessary to them. And the rough life had compensa­ tions. Asceticism gave an intensified response to the smell of flowers, the texture of stone, the feel of rain or sun or wind, the flight of birds. When they came out of their dark cells, their spirits must have lifted to heights rarefied beyond our experience. The ground they knelt on was of springy moss with flowers growing in it. Beyond the low stone walls the sea was blue, lavender, silver, and green in broad uneven patches, and appeared from this height flat as a pond. The morning clouds looked like white Skelligs, and the penitents could almost talk to the fulmars and puffins flying to feed their rock-bound young. As they watched the sun rise, a curtain of rain might fly over the sea from the west, bright steel with the sun’s low rays on it, to pass over­ head in a few minutes leaving a rainbow and the clover-like scent of wet sea pink. In such a setting the simple prayers to God might have been tinged with an almost pagan pantheism. It is not known positively when the first voyagers arrived, nor who they were. The style of the buildings goes back to the sixth century and beyond, to the pre-Christian dwellings on which the first Christian structures were modeled. Although the earliest churches and dwellings were usually built of T 4 wood or of wickerwork daubed with mud, on Skellig Michael the builders would have had to use the only material at hand. The settlement survived at least four attacks by Norse raiders in the ninth century. The monks evidently turned the other cheek, because, ac­ cording to tradition, in the tenth century one of Skellig Michael’s holy hermits converted Olaf Trygvasson, the fierce Viking who became Norway’s and combatively, Christian ruler. Asfirst, living The last monks left in the twelfth cen­ tury, when life had grown soft, to settle in the village of Ballinskelligs nearby on the mainland coast. Through all the years the name of only one monk has survived. That is Etgall, an anchorite who was apparently living there alone when Vikings arrived in 823 looking for treasure. The poor little island monastery, that could barely support six or seven ascetics, would hardly have run to the silver chalices and jewel-studded shrines that provided the freebooters with such easy pickings in the mainland monasteries. In anger, or perhaps in hopes of getting a ransom, the raiders took Etgall, who died while their prisoner, say the annals, of starvation. The implication is clear: The stark rigors of Skellig Michael held no dangers for Etgall, but when he could no longer hear the cries of sea birds and the crash of waves, or taste the salty wind of his island retreat, he grieved until death rescued him. In no other connection is Etgall mentioned. He was not a saint whose feast day is on the calendar; history records no heathens converted by him, no miracles performed, no poetry written, no manuscripts illuminated. He might have done all these things. Ire­ land’s legion of holy men and women, the luminous quality of whose piety, learning, and imagination inspirited the western world for more than six hundred years, from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, were most of them anonymous. Even many of the saints whose names still shine over the dimness of the centuries are probably composite personalities. Legend has blurred their outlines until they have become as large and brightly unreal as the pagan heroes they superseded. Yet their accomplishments were very real. The intricate art of their illum­ inated manuscripts is still as brilliant as when it was first set to parchment. Their poetry makes the heart sing today. Greek and Roman literature and lore, as well as the authentic voice of their own Celtic ancestors transcribed by them from oral tradition, are ours to study now because these cloistered monks reached into a receding past, rescued the vanishing knowledge and gave it back to the world. In a darkened and barbaric Europe, Irish priests and scholars kept alive the light that had burned for Greek philosophers, Roman colonizers, early Christian martyrs. By the time dawn came to Europe again with the early Renaissance, Ireland’s day was over. The Norse raiders and the Anglo-Norman conquerors between them extinguished that bright torch. Though Ireland owed the extraordi­ nary literary, artistic, and scholarly flowering of this age to her inspired clerics, they were only secondarily artists and poets, teachers, missionaries, and humanists. Their first purpose was the same that brought them to Skellig Michael: to achieve a state of grace. It is hard for us today to understand the rationale behind this imperative yearning of the early Christian mind. What made them take their little open boats out into the Atlantic, to the Faeroes, to Iceland, possibly to Amer­ ica, looking for a land that had been promised in a dream? What made them starve themselves and live without sleep until the world around them was full of strangeness and the wind in the leaves became the wing beats of angels? Why did they leave their comfortable mon­ asteries to wander friendless and defenseless in the lands of barbarians? We can find out by looking into the past, where their roots were, and exam­ ining the subsequent world that they themselves created. For however enig­ matic are their motivations to us, it is clear that the Irish saints made some­ thing new on earth. It was that we had felt when we stepped back in time high on Skellig Michael. The little monastic village was part of a world that came out of a vision. Behind the vision were the men and women who saw it, and it is in their lives that we must look for its pris­ tine freshness, its radiant imagination, above all its shining spirituality. This article has been adaptedfrom Katharine Scherman’s forthcoming book, The Flower­ ing of Ireland: Saints, Scholars, and Kings, to be published in June, 1981. Reprinted by permission o f Little, Brown and Company, Inc., Boston. ©1981. The trip to Skellig Michael is an option­ alfeature o f the 1981 Swarthmore Alumni College. See back cover for details. SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN COLLEGIATE GOVERNANCE Is it Organized Anarchy? By John W. Nason, Hon. ’53 The eighth president o f Swarthmore analyzes the disintegra­ tion o f the traditional model ofgovernance and postulates modifications pertinent to the decade o f the eighties. A s I return to campus after many years, I am acutely conscious of how much better a job I 1 m might have done forty years ago if I had known in 1940 all I know now about college administration, con­ scious also of the problems which face this and other colleges in the decade of the eighties. My topic—“Collegiate Governance: Is It Organized Anarchy?”—is not unique to Swarthmore. It points to problems endemic in current higher education. The title is taken from a book by two scholars named Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, entitled Leadership and Ambiguity: The Ameri­ can College President. The book was commissioned by Clark Kerr ’32, mem­ ber of the Board of Managers, for many years chairman of the Carnegie Com­ mission on Higher Education, and one of the most distinguished figures in higher education today. Cohen and March characterize col­ lege governance as “organized anarchy,” describing the condition as one in which (1) goals are uncertain and changing, (2) technology is unclear, (3) the centers of authority and power are shifting. In their own words: “These properties are not limited to educational institutions; but they are MARCH, 1981 particularly conspicuous there. The American college or university is a prototypic organized anarchy. It does not know what it is doing. Its goals are either vague or in dispute. Its technology is familiar but not understood. Its major participants wander in and out of the organization. These factors do not make a university a bad organization or a disorganized one; but they do make it a problem to describe, understand, and lead.” Two or three years ago, when I was doing field work for a book on the selec­ tion of college presidents, I made a visit to a reasonably distinguished New England college which was noted for the obstreperous character of its faculty. They had had a very difficult time selecting their new president, and I was interested in the reasons for their diffi­ culties. The chairman of the search com­ mittee, a faculty member, confessed finally: “You know, Mr. Nason, I’m not sure that this college is really governable.” History, of course, indicates that most of our colleges have been govern­ able. Cohen and March suggest that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, but in different ways from the earlier pattern. I believe that they still are governable, and I want to discuss some of the necessary conditions for effective governance. Let me begin by talking about the evolution of academic governance—in an oversimplified scenario. Back in the nineteenth century, when Swarthmore and most of the private colleges in this country were founded—most of them, like Swarthmore, by religious groups that were concerned to protect what at Swarthmore was described as “a guarded education for children of the Society of Friends”—the trustees who set them up and gave the first money to get them going were deeply concerned about the character of the colleges and what went on in them. They were apt to take a very direct hand in the management—much too direct for Dorie or me or Frank Aydelotte or anybody else in this par­ ticular century. They believed in what the colleges stood for; they believed in certain purposes and certain goals; and they were concerned to make sure that these were achieved. For the last quarter of the nineteenth century and extending through the first quarter of the twentieth, we witnessed the era of the great college and univer­ sity presidents—an analogue to the era of the great captains of industry who dominated the growing enterprises that developed in the latter part of the nine­ teenth century and flourished in the twentieth. Eliot and Lowell at Harvard, Harper at Chicago, Gilman at Johns Hopkins, Butler at Columbia, Aydelotte at Swarthmore. In 1915 the American Association of University Professors was founded. Be­ ginning at about that time and partly as a result, college and university faculty assumed more and more control of the administration or at least of the policies The Swarthmore College Bulletin (USPS 530-620), of which this Volume LXXVIII, number 4, is published in September, November, December, March, May, and August by Swarthmore College, Swarth­ more, PA 19081. Second-class postage paid at Swarthmore, PA 19081 and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Swarthmore College Bulletin, Swarthmore, PA 19081. 5 5. Much that happens in colleges and universities is now the subject of litiga­ tion. At one time students who broke official college rules were dismissed, and that was the end of the matter. Today such episodes not infrequently result in law suits, and the courts, not college officials, determine whether or not a student should be reinstated. Faculty members on term appointments onsider the changing condi­ will sometimes institute protracted legal tions which brought this proceedings on grounds of discrimina­ about. These will be familiar tion if not reappointed or granted to all of you, but let me tick tenure. The targets of such suits are administration and the trustees. them off as the factors whichthe created 6. Throughout our society there has this change: 1. An explosion in enrollment oc­ been a decline in respect for authority. curred at the end of World War II, when This is true for ministers of the gospel, the veterans swamped our colleges and politicians, and successful businessmen, universities, and we decided that many as well as for college presidents, provosts, more high school graduates could profit and deans. It represents a profound from a college education than had ever cultural shift in the contemporary out­ been considered before in our society. look. Let us hope this phase will pass. We had some two million college and For the present, however, the exercise university students before the stampede. of authority tends to be viewed with suspicion. We have 11 Zi million today. 2. They were a new breed of students. These factors have created a com­ Many of them, instead of being children pletely different climate in which to of families whose mothers and fathers operate a college or a university, and, as had gone to college, were children of a result, we have the disintegration of families no member of which had ever what might be called the traditional been near a college or a university. They model of college or university govern­ didn’t know what to expect; they didn’t ance. In that model students were at the know how to behave;' they wanted bottom of the pyramid. They were things colleges weren’t particularly well relatively docile and respectful of prepared to provide. They made new authority; they viewed membership in demands; they lowered the standards of the college community as a privilege; performance; they created a kind of they thought that the faculty knew more consumerism in higher education which than they did about the subjects taught and about the subjects which ought to we’re wrestling with today. 3. They viewed higher education not be taught. In the traditional model, as a privilege but as a right. If you were faculty members knew what they to take a poll today and ask people in wanted to teach and why. Today as the United States, “Is post-secondary faculty we are no longer as clear as we education a right or a privilege?” you once were on any one of these points. would get an almost universal answer We tend to be more interested in our that it is a right. But if you asked people individual disciplines than in the total associated with Swarthmore, “Have educational program of the institution. students a right to come to Swarth­ We find ourselves caught up in the con­ more?” the answer would be, “No, it is a flict between the amount of time and privilege. Individuals must qualify in energy we will give to teaching and the various ways. There is no inalienable time and energy that go into research. The presidents and deans, the viceright to come to this institution.” It is quite clear, however, that there are state presidents and provosts, are no longer institutions which the citizens of that the figures of authority which they state consider they do have an inalien­ once were. Instead they have become able right to attend. Open admissions is crisis managers, mediators, negotiators, labor arbitrators. the descriptive term. 4. The turbulence of the sixties created At one time trustees were remote and an interesting and exciting time on august figures who devoted themselves college campuses, but it was in many to giving and raising money, to review­ ways a disastrous period as well. There ing the budget, to supervising invest­ are still deep scars at many institutions ments, to hiring (and firing, if necessary) the president. Beyond that they were from what happened in the sixties. which guided the administration of higher education. Then came World War II. In the postwar period, we have seen a swing of the pendulum back to the point where trustees are once again playing a more influential role in the affairs of colleges and universities in this country. C 6 largely content to endorse what the president and faculty recommended in terms of policies for the college. Except in a few places that pattern no longer exists. More of it remains at Swarthmore than at many others, but even here you can detect a certain ragged fringe around the edges of the description of the model which I have been giving you. My thesis is that trustees, because of the nature of the current situation, will have to play a more important role in decisions on operations and policies than they have played since the middle of the nineteenth century. Only in this way can the future of our colleges and universities be assured. In addition to all the responsibilities characteristic of the traditional model—and the Swarth­ more Board of Managers fulfills them superlatively well—they must, for ex­ ample, also define the mission of the college. It is not their job to draft the mission, but to insist that the president, the faculty, the alumni, and others co­ operate in writing a statement which they can either endorse or modify. Furthermore, they must select a pres­ ident who can speak to and serve the particular needs of the institution. This may call for an educational leader, or somebody who can heal wounds of dis­ sension, or somebody who is a good fund raiser, or a salesman who can recruit students. Beyond that, the trustees must see to it that the president does what he or she is selected to do and must provide every possible assistance and encouragement in getting it done. All presidents need to be supported, encouraged, and—if need be—comforted by the board. This is probably the most important job for any board of trustees or managers to undertake. To do it, they need to under­ stand the educational policies, the edu­ cational programs, and the educational problems of the institution. It used to be said that trustees should deal with finances and with buildings and grounds, but stay out of educational issues. How can trustees deal with the budget, with fund-raising, with what is the heart of the operational significance of an educational institution without knowing what that institution is really trying to achieve and in what direction the college should go? What choices, among the incompatible options that are offered, should be selected? How does the program relate to the financial resources of the institution? How can the changing demands of society be SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN John W. Nason, Hon. ’53 Mr; ffonji>’1^46;tô 10ÿ;-pêjfi^éâ'J»:^ e | ; ■ Æ^ropusdàst Qcjfcbef' sfe host and jkihci’; | as president 1 >.®tt6|$5 3A 1%2'j. a-ftd:kier