Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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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-

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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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teenth century in organization outline, a tech- nocratic revolution that proceeded by blue- print. Among other things, this necessitated a setting up of guidelines for a faculty continu- ously being both amplified and upgraded. Be- fore the marking time induced by the Depres- sion and World War ll, there had been a gradual but definite growth under Presidents Peter F. Cusick, S.J., 1923-1929, and Rudolph J. Eich- horn, 1929-1934. To the outer eye, however, things had not altered much from the day of President George J. Krim, S.J., 1919-1923. Change now began to occur at what seemed a rate of geometrical progression, not least in the composition of the faculty. lt was now crystal- clear that the balance of power had dipped in the layman's direction: and no longer the Cath- olic layman necessarily. lAlmost from the be- ginning, of course, there had been non-Catholic members of the faculty, but up to now the faculty had tended to be preponderantly Catho- lic.l By the beginning of the sixties the staff roster had become multi-denominational with Prostestants, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists in its ranks. By the spring of 1969 at least a quarter of the faculty belonged to other religious tradi- tions than the Catholic. At the same time, fol- lowing the national trend, the economic situa- tion bettered for the Canisius professoriat at large. To illustrate this enormous shift in educa- tional gravity: in the Golden Jubilee Year of 1920 there had been seventeen faculty mem- bers in all, only four of them lay, to accomo- date a student body of not quite two hundred. On the eve of the Centennial Year there were one hundred and sixty-six fulltime faculty, one hundred and thirty-one of these Iaymen and women, plus eighty part-time teachers of whom seventy-six were lay, and the all-round enroll- ment had mounted to the neighborhood of five thousand. A similar parabola had been de- scribed within the administration with the Ex- ecutive Vice President, the Director of Student Personnel, the Dean of Admissions and Rec- ords, the Director of the Graduate Division, the Deans of Men and Women, the Director of the Library all lay. In fact, the very term, lay, had virtually become a historical curiosity. The only offices still reserved - and out of tradi- tion, too, not out of statute - for Jesuits were those of the Dean of the Faculty, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the President: and, even for these heretofore sacrosanct pre- serves, there were signs that the situation could easily change in the predictable future. Speak- ing before the Canisius chapter of the A.A.U.P. on December 6, 1966, President Demske star- tled his audience with his response to a query about the future direction of the College: A dramatic difference might well come in the top control of the College .... Will we even have a Jesuit president in ten years? The greater diversification of faculty degrees has been another index of fundamental change. In addition to those standbys of the immediate past, the greater Catholic graduate schools, doctorates from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Ox- ford, the Sorbonne, Chicago, Cornell, Vienna, Louvain, Leipzig, California,Southern Califor- nia, Toronto, Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Wisconsin, Michigan, Northwestern, Nebraska, Rutgers, became com- monplaces among Canisius faculty credentials. October, 1968, saw the election of a Faculty Senate, a circumstance that proved of immense utility during the student crises of 1969-1970. A history of the College might almost be writ- ten in terms of the evolution of faculty ameni- ties, with the early forties marking the first great breakthrough when wives were included in the annual Dean's Dinner for the Faculty. It was to President Dobson's day that the instruc- tional staff owed the cozy institution of the Faculty Coffee Room which at once became the center of common room conviviality. There is a temptation, when writing college history, to confine one's chronicle to bricks and mortar first, after that to presidents, and finally to faculty, without touching, except as a pure abstraction, a college's raison d'etre, students, and that student-extension in time who are the alumni and alumnae. Since the University of Buffalo's College of Arts and Sciences did not get underway significantly until toward the end of the 1910s, Canisius, as the only male liberal arts college within the city limits for the preceding half century, carried extra responsi- bility for those studies which traditionally have been prerequisites for the professions of law, medicine, dentistry, teaching and the sacred ministry. The successful discharge of this obli- gation was reflected in what might almost be thought of a disproportionate percentage of Canisius-trained attorneys, jurists, physicians, dentists, teachers, and priests, to say nothing of an occasional minster here and there. From the beginning, it also served as a breeding ground for political leaders on federal, state and munic- ipal levels. Many graduates elected business ca- reers in addition as executives and experts - in 1968, out of the College's living seven thou- sand, five hundred alumni, some five hundred were accountants. By the second half of the 1930s, with Canisius chemists and physicists already making their mark in industry and sec- ondary teaching, a sizable number of Canisius men had begun to opt for careers in university and college teaching. After the middle fifties, this particular rate of advance notably accelerat- ed. Even though colleges had always been orga- nized for the sake of the students for whom they acted in loco parentis, it was during the 1960s and 1970s that college students came into their own in a special sense as a kind of Fifth Estate. At Canisius, as elsewhere, courses proliferated and, with this burgeoning of outlet, opportunities for later graduate advancement also increased. Woodrow Wilsons, Danforths, National Science Foundation Fellowships, Regents Medical Scholarships, Fellowships in general were won in increasing numbers. For the first time, black students exerted a percepti- ble impact as fully funded Martin Luther King Scholarships made their appearance in 1967. One sign that the macrocosm of the outer world was more and more visibly affecting the microcosms that were the colleges was the fact that, in the Canisius language laboratories, Russian had joined the old, once exclusively preferred Western European tongues. Curriculum reform produced a positive ex- plosion within the once inveterately conserva- tive departments of Theology and Philosophy where the post-Johannine strains within Catho- licism were naturally felt most acutely. Aquinas retreated, the Existentialists gained ground. To paraphrase the English statesman on Socialism, they were all Existentialists at Canisius in those decades. Or almost all, since Thomism still mar- shaled its defenders. After the post-1914 retreat of classic studies in the Latin and Greek vernac- ulars, English and American literature had been the chosen conduits through which the stream of imaginative culture had flowed most freely. Between 1950-1970 the English Department took a broadened view of its commitments to the literary stream of the present as well as to an age in which criticism had become a major activity. lt was, at the same time, hospitable to the new trends in cinema and multa-media. An immediate result of all this ferment was the installation of two honors degrees: on a general levelg on the level of the various major concen- trations. No longer was college mainly a com- bination of social credential and anthropologi- cal rite de passage, though it would have to be admitted that the new tribalism of 1967-1970 was adding a few anthropological innovations of its own. At the same time as the relationship between instructor and instructed - and this was especially true of the younger staff mem- bers - became a more organic one, the campus turned into a literal Chautauqua of outside lec- ture possibilities under the aegis of such entities as the Fitzpatrick Chair in Political Science, the Polish Chair, and the Academic Lectures Com- mittee, supplemented by the independent offer- ings of the various departments. All this change in no way involved a repudia- tion of past values. When the Centennial year of 1970 came to its end, the supremacy of the liberal arts, though shaken, still remained. Another thing that had stayed intact, though hardly unchanged in expression, was the fact that, amid all the hub-bub, Canisius humanism had never surrendered God for the sake of an illusory self-sufficiency. It taught Kafka in its literature classes with great sympathy, but its philosophy went far beyond Kafka's world of masks. Above all, perhaps, it maintained a phi- losophy of death as well as life. At Canisius, however new the garb in which it went forth, the old liberal mystique continued to strike a necessary delicate balance between an institu- tion of higher learning as a generator of new knowledge and as a transmitter of old wisdom, while never ignoring the student-generated de- mand for engagement in the vital issues of the day. lf it accepted - as it did - the cult of the absurd within bounds as a corrective of yester- day's false heroics, it insisted, at the same time, on remembering that man's life also needed overtones of myth, magic, compassion and heroism. With the Zeitgeist effectively seculariz- ing the sacred on every side, Canisius had at- tempted a subtler thing: to sacralize the secular. Only the future will tell whether the effort had proved successful.