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When College Archivist Diane Windham Shaw hears first-year students grumble about the lack of luxuries in their dorms, she smiles sweetly and tells them about the Rev. George Junkin and the 43 students who comprised Lafayette’s original student body.
Junkin, a Presbyterian minister and head of the Manual Labor Academy at Germantown in Philadelphia, had agreed to become Lafayette’s first president in 1832, and to bring most of his students and professors to help form the new school.
“They walked to Easton from Philadelphia,” Shaw told a rapt audience during Friday’s Reunion College in the Williams Center for the Arts. Then, Shaw said, the students proceeded to build their own housing.
Shaw, speaking on “The Other 15: A Look Back at Lafayette Presidents, 1832-2005,” said that Junkin’s students also grew fruits and vegetables and manufactured a variety of products, including the “Lafayette plow,” to help keep the College solvent.
Later, she said, Junkin tried a variety of other ways to fund the College, including raising silkworms — two mulberry trees remain on campus as testament to that attempt.
Junkin left Lafayette in 1840 after a dispute with the Board of Trustees, but returned in 1848. In between, Shaw said, the Rev. John William Yeomans, another Presbyterian minister, took over with his own brand of leadership, prompting one observer to write, ‘His cold exterior masked an icy heart.”
In the years that followed, Shaw said, Lafayette came close to extinction several times. In 1849, after Junkin’s final departure, the Rev. Charles William Nassau became the College’s third president and found himself faced with an enrollment that had dropped from 82 to 25. He applied to the Presbyterian synod in Philadelphia for financial help, beginning an official relationship with the church that continues – albeit very loosely – today.
After only a year, Daniel V. McLean took over and attempted to raise money to improve the College’s academic standards by selling scholarship certificates. The Board of Trustees quickly used the money for operating expenses instead.
“He resigned in disgust,” Shaw said, describing McLean as “by far the ablest administrator and fundraiser” of the College’s early years.
Shaw said the College welcomed the Rev. George Wilson McPhail in 1854, and his tenure saw the secret beginnings of Greek fraternities and the naming of Francis A. March as the nation’s first English professor.
When the Civil War began, Shaw said, McPhail resigned “so the College could save his princely $150 salary.”
In 1862, the College came close to closing again and was saved when President William Cassady Cattell summoned up the courage to ask Ario Pardee, a businessman he didn’t know and who knew little of the College, for a donation of $20,000. To Cattell’s shock, Pardee agreed to his request.
Shaw quoted Cattell’s account of his reaction: “How I reached the cars or how I got home, either in body or out of body, I do not know.”
The donation allowed for the construction of Pardee Hall and the President’s House, the establishment of a “scientific department,” and many more developments, Shaw said.
“It was a time of real excitement on campus,” she said.
Next, Shaw said, Lafayette welcomed the Rev. James Hall Mason Knox, whose daughter married the famous stained-glass designer Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Then there was the Rev. Ethelbert Dudley Warfield, who hired a professor of mental and moral philosophy who, when his contract wasn’t renewed, proceeded to cut the ivy from all the buildings on campus, burn down Pardee Hall, and attempt to stuff a basket full of rotten eggs into the chapel’s organ.
John Henry MacCracken—the first president who wasn’t a minister–followed Warfield in 1915, presiding over the modernization of the College. The Rev. William Mather Lewis, who began his tenure in 1926, led Lafayette through the Depression and World War II, pulling the College from the brink of ruin by bringing military training programs to campus.
In 1945, Ralph Cooper Hutchison ’18 became the first alumnus to lead the College, spending “12 turbulent years” there, including an incident in which he lied to the Board of Trustees about the College’s accreditation.
In 1958, when K. Roald Bergethon, “a formal man with a deep voice,” arrived, Lafayette entered what the late College historian Albert Gendebien ’34 called a “golden time in the history of the College,” says Shaw.
His 20-year tenure included the construction of Skillman Library, Kunkel Hall, and Kirby Fieldhouse, and in 1970, the enrollment of women for the first time.
Between 1978 and 1990, when David Ellis presided, the once-impoverished College increased its endowment to more than $200 million, built the Williams Center for the Arts, and joined what would become the Patriot League.
Shaw said that during his brief presidency, between 1990 and 1993, Robert I. Rotberg reduced the teaching load for professors and worked with Lehigh University “to improve student behavior” at the annual football games between the two schools, but his leadership style “alienated all of his constituents.”
It took the “accidental presidency” of Arthur J. Rothkopf ’55, hired in 1993 as interim president, to bring harmony to the College—along with what became a $213 million capital campaign, a construction renaissance, rising SAT scores, the Marquis Scholars program, and two new areas of study, neuroscience and Africana studies, Shaw said.
As for Lafayette’s current president, Dan Weiss, Shaw said, “We’ve put a year behind us” and the prospects look good.
Weiss, who had sat quietly in the back of the room during Shaw’s talk, was then invited to offer comments; he said her speech was inspiring.
“I’ve been listening very carefully,” he said impishly, explaining that he’d picked up ideas in several areas, including fundraising – “Ask for a ton of money from someone you’ve never met” — and academic excellence—“If you don’t have good accreditation results, don’t tell the trustees.”
Turning serious, Weiss said he owes much to those who came before him.
“It’s an extensive legacy,” he said. “It’s a gift, and I will try not to squander it.”