Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

Page 42 text:

CANISIUS COLLEGE ORIENTATION 2001 MAIN SI BFLO. N.Y. 14208 I 'Maud 40 wg., A

Page 41 text:

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.

Page 43 text:

E 2, ', .4 ,,.1- -N .-- New ' il x X N x- .- QA 43 1 4 a I , , 7' 71+- V , K . , , f , 1 , 9. Ya 1 ' Q A iw' -J 554 x A ,syn .J m i sf ' 'Y g, K 'Y A V ,MA