July, 29, 1969
Page 21137
ON THE SELECTION OF WINTHROP C. LIBBY AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINE AT ORONO
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, these are challenging times on American campuses. From what we frequently read in our daily newspapers, administrators and students appear incompatible and irreparably estranged.
This, of course, does not represent the situation on a majority of American college campuses. My belief is that where there is harmony on campus, there is an administration which listens to its students and trusts them.
Such an administrator is Winthrop C. Libby, the new president of the University of Maine, at Orono. At the time of his selection, Mr. Bill Caldwell, of the Maine Sunday Telegram, wrote an editorial page feature on President Libby, and the feature has been reprinted in the Maine Alumnus magazine.
I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Caldwell's article on President Libby be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
LIBBY IS APPOINTED PRESIDENT
(By Bill Caldwell)
(EDITOR'S NOTE.-Winthrop C. Libby, 57, was named the 11th president of the University of Maine at Orono April 18 by the university's board of trustees at an executive session. President Libby has served for the past 10 months as acting president. His salary was set at $30,000 per year. A member of the university faculty and staff for 35 years, he became acting president of the University last July when Dr. Edwin Young resigned to return to the University of Wisconsin. A native of Caribou, President Libby was graduated from the University of Maine in 1932 and received his M.S. degree in agricultural economics from the university in 1933. He has also done graduate work in agronomy at Rutgers and Cornell Universities. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Ricker College in 1988. Appointed to the staff of the department of agronomy in 1934, was made head of the department in 1943. He served as associate dean of the College of Agriculture in charge of resident instruction from 1950-57. He was named to succeed the late Dean Arthur L. Deerling as dean of agriculture in 1957. In this position he directed the work of the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, Cooperative Extension Service, and Maine Agricultural Experiment Station. He was named vice president for public services in 1988. During his years at the university he has been engaged in research activities, extension programs, and many public service activities. In 1988 he was named to the President's Committee on Rural Poverty, a select group comprised largely of cabinet officers and administrative officials. The committee later made a report to the President on their findings. He is married to the former Elizabeth Tryon and the couple has a son and two daughters.
(Bill Caldwell, editorial editor of the Marine Sunday Telegram, in his weekly Downstreet column, described Libby as "The Spirit of Orono." The Alumnus, with Caldwell's permission, reprinted most of that column.)
Given bio-data like this, an IBM computer, programmed to choose a modern-day college president, would probably choke on Winthrop C. Libby's punch-card. Yet, few at Orono would doubt that among 7,500 students and 450 faculty, he is the best-liked, most trusted man-on- campus.
The reason is not because he is a Maine-bred and Maine-raised man from Caribou. Or because he is an agronomist. Or because he has been around the Orono campus for over 37 years. Those characteristics should, by rights, make Libby old-hat, hidebound, backward glancing at a 'golden age' of education which is dead and gone. This background should put Libby on a wave-length of thinking in collision and clash with the ideas and outlooks of today's students.
But, in an old-shoe way, Libby is a perverse contradiction of himself.
Instead of being 'old guard,' he is almost avante garde. But, like a deer in the forest, Libby's Caribou exterior camouflages his attunement to the times.
"The Major Mission of the University of Maine," says Libby (talking 'Caribou'), "is the education of men and women." Libby's simplicity is no simpleness. He adds: "But the U of M, like any University worthy of the name, is a proving ground for ideas as well as a transmission belt of knowledge ... It must be a place where different viewpoints can be discussed freely and openly in an atmosphere of candor . . . " Quietly preaching his gospel of open-mindedness, Libby goes a long step further, saying "Experience convinces me that student disagreement is preferable to student apathy; that student commitment even to false gods is preferable to no commitment whatsoever; that students who believe in their own maturity and wisdom are preferable to those
who expect the University to function as their parent."
The pomp and prerequisites of a university presidency hang loosely on Libby, almost unused. He has never moved into the President's house on campus. Instead he lives in his old home in downtown Orono and walks two miles to work in all weather, arriving at 7:30 a.m. in the President's office, first man on duty. At night his wife picks him up. He barely uses the President's car. When he takes a visitor to lunch, Libby takes his place in the cafeteria line. When he invites a visitor for a cup of coffee, he takes you to the undergraduates' Bear Den. where his table fills up with students. When President Libby drops you at the SAE fraternity house to change your shirt, he waits downstairs and in two minutes he is surrounded by 30 'brothers.' "I'm Libby," he says, stretching out a handshake to the counselor on duty, when he carries your bag into the Gannett Hall dorm where you are spending a night. There is no "side" to this man.
Libby is proving to be an ideal conduit between the sometimes opposite poles of Trustees and Students. Trustees rely upon Libby because after almost 40 years on campus Libby knows more about Orono than any man living. Students trust Libby for the best of all reasons; he trusts them.
In the brief span of two years under Libby, Orono students have won and are exercising a bigger and more responsible voice than ever before in changing and improving student life.
For example, an excellent and new Disciplinary Code, enforced jointly by students and faculty (without administrators), now governs student conduct; student recommendations have resulted in liberalizing girl-boy visiting rules in the dormitories; a current student-faculty committee, with carte blanche from Libby, has just completed a thorough investigative report into all phases of Student Activities, including such holy-of-holies at the Deans' Office, the office of the Director of Student Activities, the Student Union, Counseling and Placement Services. It will recommend major overhauls in many phases of university administration. And Libby hopes to move promptly on putting them in effect, wherever feasible.
Dialogue, frequent, meaningful, mutually respectful, between President and students is today part of the fabric of Orono. It happens half a dozen times a day. This is the kind of an interchange which minimizes the need of student revolt or administrative repression.
The relationship on campus at Orono might be an eye-opener for other troubled universities. And it all occurs in a natural, normal way, without the pressure of crisis pushing it or the fishbowl glare of publicity which follows after a campus collision between students and administration.