Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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only military establishment maintained by Can- isius during the years of the Second German War. The College also served as the academic base for a continuously changing contingent of Air Force Cadets. In and out, at the fixed statutory intenlals, the waves of blue-clad train- ees, four hundred at a time, came and went: from Brooklyn, the South, the lVlidwest, the Far West. They barracked at the hastily con- verted one-time Nlasonic Consistory on Dela- ware Avenue, gained their first flying hours at an airdrome operated by the College, drilled and ran their vigorous obstacle races at the Villa, and studied in the classrooms of Old Main where otherwise, only a dwindling pool of civil- ian 4Fs worked according to an accelerated schedule of trimesters. Continued in the early post-war years and, for one overlapping year, elongated into a tetramester, this produced the odd anomaly of the Centenary Commence- ment's being the hundred and fourth. lVlean- while, the Canisius gownsmen who would nor- mally have sat beside these fellows of theirs, as well as the graduates of fighting age, marched and flew and lived and died in every theater of the gigantic conflict. The Alumni War Records Office under its director, Canisius Archivist J. Clayton lVlurray, S.J., faithfully kept the long and stirring tally of that Canisius lliad. In all, one thousand six- ty-three Canisius men served in the armed forces. Sixty-two of these died for their coun- try, among them a faculty member, Captain Nliquel Rafael Rodriguez, Chairman of the De- partment of Mathematics, who at fifty was lost at sea somewhere off Africa. Two Canisius Jesuits served in the Chaplain's Corps: James l.. Shanahan, S.J., later Provincial of the Buffalo Province, and John L. Shea, S.J., who returned to head the Department of Economics. Dr. Aus- tin C. lVlcTigue, commissioned during World War I, played an active role in Civil Defense during this Second War of the Nations. Dr. James H. Crowdle received a citation for his scientific contribution to the American war ef- fort - it paralleled one received for World War I. Hundreds of Canisius warriors were wounded. Many survived prisoner-of-war camps. Five hundred and ninety - virtually a mathematical third W were commissioned as officers. Not counting citations, Good Conduct medals and combat infantrymen's badges, over three hundred awards for valor were conferred on a hundred and thirteen Canisius soldiers. After the victory of 1945, with America an empire, albeit a not altogether willing one, there were other wars whose issues were not quite so simple as they had been in 1917 and 1942. Though Canisius men were to fight in Korea, that stalemated conflict did not touch the College closely. The tragic American mis- adventure in Vietnam, however, which had served as chief catalyst for the chain reaction engulfing American campuses from Berkeley to Cornell, did not pass Canisius by. Up to 1967, the fairly infrequent Canisius student demonstrations had tended to center about the classic complaints common to the student condition - there was for example, a cafeteria crowd-in protesting the quality of the daily cuisine. After 1967, they became in- creasingly political. Petitions were circulated: and certain members of the faculty joined the various student causes. With The Griffin, the student newspaper, as its spearhead, the Stu- dent Government, no longer a mimic parliamen- tary arena, showed itself skilled in the new techniques of encounter - confrontation seemed too strong a word to apply to the students' general respect for due process - there were exceptions, naturally - and to the countervailing humorous resilience displayed by the administration. When the rising curve of angry disillusion against what seemed to the students the ambiquities and sequent frustra- tions of national policy reached its apogee on the day after the deaths of the four students at Kent State, the ensuing triune rapport among students, faculty and administration was so close knit and so devoid of excess that the faculty spontaneously found it possible to con- gratulate the students publicly in a paid adver- tisement published in the Buffalo Evening News on Nlay 15, 1970. While the admissible extent of nascent student power remained an open issue as the fall term began in September, 1970, there was a reservoir of good will on all three sides that boded well for the adjustments that the future would necessarily have to bring. As elsewhere in the Eastern academic world, R.O.T.C. membership diminished at the College during 1968-1970. Nonetheless, up to the fall of 1970, student activists had not made it a serious target of complaint. For one thing, membership was no longer compulsory by the time the issue became a fighting one. For another, from its inception in 1951 R.O.T.C. courses had never counted toward academic credit at Canisius. For still another, there was a counter-climate of opinion also operative, ex- pressing itself temperately in favor of an institu- tion that, in more than one way, continued to suit the ethos of a portion of the Canisius constituency. lVloreover, under its local sporting sobriquet of the White lVlachine, the College's military unit, year by year, went on garnering a respectable number of drill and rifle prizes. ln fact, where competition was the criterion, the Drill Team trod close, percentage-wise, on the heels of the Varsity Debate Team which, main- taining along Canisius tradition of success in this forensic department, placed third in 1969's na- tional rankings and first in 1970. All these marches and counter-marches were a far cry from the way things were when the first returning G.l.'s invaded the Ivory Tower in 1946. With registrations booming generally, not only faculty but classroom space, too, were at a premium. lThe faculty bull market would show no signs of flagging until January of 197O.l One reflex of this situation was the College'sfirst territorial expansion in almost half a century. Temporary classrooms in the form of rhom- boid-shaped wooden hutments, painted gun- boat gray and stretching from the Science Building almost to the corner of Hughes and Meech, proved inadequate to accomodate the enormous student onrush. To supplement them, the College purchased the buildings and K . .,,, i rtfr 294 W +54 arr ., - 7 ' ll I -., ill: .... as RJ- ' 'ff- qgl!,,5-.- f-ff- ,-- - r 4- ll In ll H Old tion. lVlain During Various Stages of Construc-

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Change, gradual but palpable, characterized the academic side of the 1930's and 1940's. Until the closing years of the thirties the most memorable teachers had tended to be clerics. Three Jesuit culture-heroes are cases in point: John La Farge, son of the great American painter, who taught English and classics in 1907, the last year of the German regime, Har- old C. Gardiner, later to be literary editor of America as well as of the New Catholic Ency- clopedia, who served in the same capacity be- tween 1929-19325 and John Courtney Murray, theologian of freedom and principal author of Vatican ll's Declaration on Religious Liberty, who taught Theology in several separate sum- mer sessions at the end of the 1930s. The fact that the now separate New York, Massachusetts and Maryland provinces constituted a single hyphenated province into the 1920s - the ar- rangement held for Maryland and New York into the 1930s - meant that, during those decades, the College had been able to draw upon a triply, then doubly, rich pool for its Jesuit personnel. Slowly but surely the balance shifted to the lay side after that until, by the 1960s, the preponderant maiority of Canisius teachers were no longer clerical, even though the original Jesuit Ieaven continued to work gratifyingly in this new dispensation. All in all, however, the lay professor, once very little more than what Oliver Goldsmith had called a gentleman usher, was distinctly in the ascen- dant. Developments during and after World War I had given the sciences a fillip that, over the succeeding decades, meant a continuous expan- sion in Canisius Physics and Chemistry, for their own sakes as well as prerequisite courses for the M.D. The approach of World War ll brought with it an allied curricular innovation that was to have far-reaching consequences, both short-term and long-term. At the request of the then director of the Buffalo City Hospi- tal, Dr. Walter S. Goodale, Canisius agreed to divide with the University of Buffalo responsi- bility for the academic courses mandated for the City Hospital School of Nursing's R.N. Out of that ad hoc arrangement came an unex- pected chain of results. One was an almost immediate connection with the nursing pro- grams of certain other area hospitals. Another was a Nurse Cadet contract toward the end of World War ll which salvaged a fiscal crisis at a time when registration had fallen off to virtual- ly the vanishing point with the few available civilian students serviced by a skeleton staff of teachers and administrators. For a short period, during the 1950s, the Canisius program evolved into a full-fledged Nursing School equipped to offer a B.S. in Nursing. Without possibility of outside subsidy, however, the amplified offer- ing proved too costly to continue. An unforeseen development, of really major significance, may be laid at the door of the Nursing Program. ln retrospect, it appears to have been an evident, if inadvertent, milestone on the road to full coeducation. The expanded Extension Program of the 1930s - and this process had actually begun just after World War l - had brought women onto the campus in the late afternoon, early evening, and Saturday morning hours. Now students, faculty, and administration alike grew used to the presence of young women at all hours of the academic day. The sixties were to witness the penulti- mate stage of this circuitous process which took the form of a half decade of technical evasions of the letter of the admissions law. Transfers from Extension to day school status were sanc- tioned by the Dean's office, with the business curriculum serving as the underground railway breaching the wall of exclusion in this almost fifty year advance toward the granting of full official academic recognition to the second sex. lOnce comfortably matriculated as a business student, it was possible to transfer to any of the other curricula.l By the fall of 1965 Canisius was finally a full-fledged coed college, some- what behind Harvard in this respect, but some- thing in advance of Yale, Princeton, Hamilton, Colgate and Kenyon. Dr. Whateley's too long accepted Oxford principle about a woman's being a creature that cannot reason was given the triumphant lie by the Canisius Dean's list, 1965-1970, a record of feminine intellectual prowess culminating in the Commencement of 1970 where six out of the eight graduates at- taining summa cum laude rank were female. The Nurse Cadets did not constitute the time Laying the cornerstone of Old Main, .lune18, 1911. 36

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grounds belonging to the old Sisters Hospital fronting on Main Street at Delavan, the present site of the Canisius Athletic Complex - prior to its final abandonment and subsequent demoli- tion, the structure was to serve in a series of other capacities, including housing the Little Theater, the R.O.T.C. offices, and, briefly, the Business School. To renovate the facilities for G.l. classroom purposes the State Emergency Housing Grant Board allotted a grant to Canisi- us which was challenged by a Buffalo attorney, Henry Adsit Bull, who had construction halted through an injunction charging a breach of the New York State principle of the separation of Church and State. On June 11, 1948, after almost a year's litigation, the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the decision of the lower courts dismissing the suit. In a sense, Mr. Bull had won an extra-judicial verdict, though the fact was not apparent at the time. It was to become clear in retrospect that the whole dispute and its aftermath had both underlined and furthered a process of seculari- zation that, within two decades, was to bring Canisius to a point of non-sectarianism which it had taken the great originally Protestant colle- giate foundations of America almost two cen- turies to arrive at. The spring of 1970 was to witness a sequel to Mr. Bull's action, this time with Canisius as the plaintiff. Excluded from the Bundy program which provided state mon- ies for the relief of financial stringencies within the private colleges of the State, Canisius sued for a reversal of the decision of State Education Commissioner Ewald B. Nyquist that theinstitu- tion did not qualify for assistance, the grounds of the suit, as stated in the court hearings, that it was not dominated wholly or in part by the Catholic Church. Depression first, and then war, had dictated that Presidents James P. Sweeney, S.J., Francis A. O'lVlalley, S.J. and Timothy J. Coughlin, S.J., 1941-1947, should conduct holding opera- tions in the important areas of academic policy and physical growth. Now the relative affluence of the post-war period provided one of the propulsive forces behind an enormous expan- sion, both functional and esthetic, of the physi- cal plant, as well as of the flowering of an already fine faculty into a finer one. Over its first century Canisius had known three basic architectural styles, with the early Villa's pastoral freshness complementing the first phase and counterpointing the second. These were, in order: the red brick of Washing- ton Streetp the creamy - as it aged, near Oz-yel- low, of Old lVlaing the contemporary mode of glass-and-stone. Yet, for all the eclecticism of its later buildings, the College remained recog- nizably the concept it was when, early in the 1910s, the dome first rose like a white zucchet- to crowned by a gold cross. The first of Cani- sius' modern builders was Buffalo-born Ray- mond W. Schouten, S.J. - of its twenty-two presidents up to 1970 three were Buffalo-born and five alumni. President Schouten launched his building program with Loyola Hall, the seemly Jesuit faculty residence which closes the side of the inner quadrangle abutting on East- wood Place. His second project, the Chapel of Christ the King, was formally dedicated on the Feast of St. Ignatius, July 31, 1951. An exqui- sitely conceived Romanesque building well suited to the masculine genius of the military or- .sff.uXKiK Canisius Today der that founded Canisius, it remains the crown jewel of the campus. Across from it, stone right hand lifted in benedication, as natural a spirit of Canisius place as the Puritan divine John Harvard of Harvard, a heroic statue of St. Isaac Jogues appears to bless this Chapel for Col- legians. Philip E. Dobson, S.J., 1952-1959, contin- ued to build Canisius' city of the intellect. His twin achievements in glass and stone were the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library named after the Jesuit director of the Library from 1935-1955: and, across from it, the Administration Building which commemorates the memory of Registrar Daniel T. Bagen whose connection with the College had spanned the years from 1920-1963. The first of two splendid residence facilities, Frisch Hall, memorializing John A. Frisch, S.J., Canisius' and Johns Hopkins' eminent biologist, came into simultaneous being with the hand- somely appointed and comfortably flexible Stu- dent Center four years after James J. lVlcGinley was installed as president. The second student residence, Bosch Hall whose name keeps in memory the personality of a fiery Catalonian cleric, Raymond G. Bosch, Professor of lvlodern Languages from 1932-1967, was ready for the fall term of 1968 during the current presidency of James M. Demske, S.J. Father Demske's time in office has also wit- nessed, in September of 1969, the opening of the massive Athletic Complex: and, in 1970, the completion of the College's most controver- sial structure, the Faculty Tower, which stands between Bagen and the Bouwhuis Library in front of Old lVlain, altering a Buffalo vista of some sixty-two years. Two converted apartment structures on Main Street near by, Campion Hall and the old Alumni Hall, were modified to cope with an overflow from the campus residences. Alumni Hall found commodious quarters on the west side of Main at Humboldt Parkway. The large former Tele- phone Building on Delavan near Jefferson un- derwent extensive renovation in 1969-1970 to equip it for the business office, the Computer Center, and the Departments of Biology and Psychology. The Eastwood offices of the En- glish Department were also abandoned some time after the Tower was ready for occupancy. All in all, it is a compact urban campus, and a very lovely one. Location has become destiny in another way than could have been envisioned by the builders of Old Main. As the College's second century dawned, Canisius' geographical situation, no longer semi-rural as in 1912, but now on the very edge of the Inner City, clearly cast the school for an important role in the emerging epic of Negro America. As President Dobson had established a bridgehead within the downtown community of business and banking and President McGinley had firmed up lines of communication with the alumni, it fell to Presi- dent Demske's lot to make a collective, Char- dinian leap forward into a new-found and, no sooner found than imperiled, human communi- ty of black and white. To keep pace with the advances in brick and mortar, President Dobson's regime had found it necesary to effect, for an institution still nine-