June 13, 1979
Page 14618
TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT ROBERT E. LEE STRIDER
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Colby College in Waterville, Maine, is one of the outstanding liberal arts colleges in the country. Colby has maintained a standard of academic excellence and preserved a commitment to a traditional liberal arts education in the face of pressure for relaxed standards and vocation-oriented specialization.
Much of Colby's success can be attributed to the outstanding leadership of Dr. Robert E. Lee Strider, who has served as Colby's president since July 1960.
Dr. Strider is leaving Colby in July to pursue new challenges outside of academia. His 19-year tenure has covered a period of great challenge to all our academic institutions. His leadership and his insistence on excellence have served Colby well.
Fortunately, for my home city and my State, Dr. Strider has not restricted his attention to the affairs of Colby College. He has recognized and pursued a broader responsibility to his community and the State of Maine in educational affairs, civic affairs, and the application of his well-recognized insistence on excellence to the areas of professional responsibility.
In the last regard, I was very recently the beneficiary of Dr. Strider's leadership of a merit advisory panel which I established to review and screen candidates for a vacancy on the Federal District Court in Maine. Dr. Strider's leadership as chairman of the panel contributed to the deliberate, thorough and fair review of all potential candidates.
I appreciate very much his contribution to my search for a Federal judge in Maine, his outstanding leadership as president of one of Maine's finest academic institutions, and his personal generosity in sharing his talents and time with so many Maine institutions and Maine people.
Mr. President, I ask that the article on President Strider's career, from the May 27 Maine Sunday Telegram be printed in the RECORD.
The article follows:
ROBERT E. LEE STRIDER
(By Lloyd Ferriss)
To graduates long accustomed to newsletters filled with football scores and pictures of smiling coeds, some comments in Volume 65 of the. Colby Alumnus might seem inappropriate.
There, in a lead article titled "Erosion of Standards," Colby President Robert E. Lee Strider was once again on the attack.
The enemy?
Academics who don't insist on excellence.
Lambasting professors who give high grades for average work, critical of the teacher who allows friendship with a student to interfere with scholarship, the 17th president of the 160-year old college located at Waterville wound up scolding an entire nation for taking easy routes.
"Our civilization,"he wrote, "may come to be remembered as the one that bragged about its ability to get away with things."
Colby graduates offended by Dr. Strider — whose 19-year presidency of Colby ends with retirement July 1 — could at least take solace in one thing: his consistency.
Strider, a thoughtful man with greying hair and blue eyes, has a reputation for placing honesty and conviction above protocol.
In April of 1966, for instance, he shocked faculty and trustees by contracting for architecturally modern dormitories and classrooms because he thought the Georgian-style brick buildings that predominate on the 1,000-acre campus looked "monotonous."
It has been Strider who for almost two decades has turned down all grants that would replace Colby liberal arts program with vocational education.
And it was Strider who, midway through the 1970 commencement, enraged seniors by announcing that some didn't deserve a Colby degree that year because they'd spent more time on the politics of protest than on studies.
The remarkable thing is that this outspokenness has yielded pay dirt.
Trustees initially dismayed by the decision to bring modern architecture to Mayflower Hill were later delighted when the new buildings won awards from the American Institute of Architects and the Maine Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Some students initially upset by Strider's 1970 speech confided later, that he'd been right.
Finally, Dr. Strider's almost abrasive insistence on academic excellence has brought Colby so many grants and gifts that the 1,626-student institution now has an endowment of $25,887,672 and a faculty salary scale second to no other Maine college and matched by few in New England.
Just who is Robert E. Lee Strider?
Well, he's an eclectic, which is to say a scholar who can write and lecture about 17th century English literature one day and sing a Bach cantata with the Bangor Symphony the next.
He has played lead roles in local musical productions as varied as the Mikado and South Pacific and his choice of books is as diverse as his hobbies.
He has just finished Michener's "Hawaii" and is working his way slowly through seven or eight volumes of papers left by his liberal political hero, Adlai Stevenson.
With his childhood rooted comfortably in the American south, Strider grew up as the son of an Episcopal bishop in West Virginia. He was a Navy lieutenant in World War II. Afterwards he went to Harvard, where he earned three degrees. He next accepted a professorship at Connecticut College.
His association with Colby began in 1957 when he was appointed dean of students. As dean, one of his early innovations was to assign summer reading to freshmen who had never been on campus. The idea was to give students just out of high school some challenging material (The Book of Job was one selection) and ask them to come to Colby prepared for some ungraded literary analysis during freshman week.
Writing about the program later, Strider said he wanted to "let the prospective students know as early as possible that the institution to which they were about to come was concerned with ideas, and that it would never be too soon to start exploring that world."
Succeeding Dr. Seelye Bixler as college president in July of 1960, Strider launched a period that has seen Colby's academic standing strengthen, its endowment triple and its fund raising efforts (directed through four campaigns) net $20 million.
Significantly, these improvements have taken place at Colby as falling birth rates and disenchantment with nonvocational education were bringing more than a few liberal arts colleges to their knees.
Is Strider responsible for Colby's prosperity?
The prexy will say, predictably perhaps, that the quality of his faculty has as much to do with it all as anything; he'll also point to a Ford Foundation "centers for excellence" grant, among other bequests. But it is also true that Strider's 19 years at the helm — phenomenal in an age when the average college president leaves after five years — parallels Colby's remarkable development.
Some insight is gained through a quick look at Colby and Strider during those 19 years: years easily divided into three distinct periods.
1960-1968: Swift-growth and campus serenity marked the early period. New dormitories were built, new courses launched in Afro-American history and East Asian studies. Grantsmanship flourished.
With a 1962 Ford Foundation grant of $1.8 million as seed, the college ultimately raised $4.8 million. A similar effort in 1969 enriched the endowment by $6.7 million.
As the Striders' two children were growing to adulthood, the prexy found time for his own academic interests, which included teaching a seminar in 17th century English literature and intellectual history.
He taught the course until 1968.
"By then," he says, "my administrative duties were taking more time. I was embarrassed because I hadn't been in the library. I hadn't learned any new ideas."
1969-1971: Campus serenity disappeared in the politics of protest, a difficult time for any college president, particularly a bishop's son accustomed to the mostly respectful ways of Ivy League students.
In 1970 the Colby chapel was occupied by black students demanding admission of more blacks and an expanded black studies program. Sympathetic though he was, Strider put down the mini-insurrection with a court injunction that ordered the chapel vacated.
More harrowing was a 1969 confrontation that began when Strider showed up at Lorimer Chapel for a meeting with a small group of students who had said they wanted to talk to him "man to man" about the need to make Colby less conservative.
Strider found many more students than he'd been led to believe would be present. Student dialogue was replete with four-letter words. The meeting ended with the mass resignation of the student government.
Two months later Strider told graduating seniors gathered for commencement that political concerns had so diminished time spent on studies that not all deserved a degree.
"I fully expected half the seniors to walk out," he says. "But they didn't."
1971-1979: Denims and army fatigues — unofficial campus uniforms of the earlier period — are mostly gone now. Political conservatism is in vogue.
Students gather on the green lawns of Mayflower Hill to glide frisbees rather than to engage in demonstration and confrontation.
Are we back to the more mellow atmosphere of the 1950's?
Dr. Strider doesn't think so.
"The mere fact that students do not manifest their concerns by picking up signs and marching around the president's office does not show any lack of concern," he says. "They are very concerned about the quality of the education they are getting and very few seem to want an easier life.
"For instance, students who sit on the Educational Policy Committee are so concerned about the integrity of the Colby degree that they are usually tougher than faculty representatives when they sense that a student, through petition for waiver of a requirement, is trying to get away with something.
"When they graduate from Colby, they want it said that they've earned a tough degree in a tough college."
When Strider leaves Colby in July for some still-unnamed post (he's considering jobs in private fund raising) , he will be replaced by a 42-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, William R. Cotter.
Cotter has most recently served as president of the African-American Institute in New York City. Earlier he clerked for a federal judge and served as the assistant attorney general of Northern Nigeria.
Strider carefully guards his successor's right to chart Colby's direction in the 1980's, saying only that the mission of the institution is to "maintain its standards and continue to be the best possible liberal arts college it can."
But he has his own thoughts about Colby and the state of the liberal arts as this decade draws to a close.
On cooperation of Maine's Big Three: "Cooperation is not only desirable but necessary," he says.
"We set the tradition for that cooperation in 1961 with the establishment of WCBB and in the early 1970s we were recipients of a foundation grant that set up a full-scale consortium.
Examples of future cooperation might be organization of a reserve library containing books and documents from the three institutions that no one uses very often. They might be recalled subject to a 24-hour notice.
"I would also hope that we might take advantage of one another's specialties.
"If Colby continues to specialize in Chinese and Japanese, for example, one of the others might teach Arabic or Swahili or Hindu. So a student at Colby or Bates or Bowdoin with an interest in that field could go to the other.
"As far as closer cooperation is concerned (such as extensive sharing of classes), I think that distance and time are limiting factors. We are 50 miles from Bates and Bowdoin and transportation in winter is a problem.
"The obstacles are not insurmountable. But I have yet to be convinced that (extensive) cooperative ventures between institutions like Colby and Bates and Bowdoin are economic measures."
On a more personal level: Strider says, "There has to be a certain distance between faculty and students ... a faculty member cannot be the buddy of a student if he or she is to be regarded as the intellectual leader of the class. If easy informality gets in the way of objective evaluation of how students are doing, I would say the informality had led to a drop of standards."
On the value of a liberal arts education: "I think the Carnegie Report and Time Magazine and others are probably correct when they say that a certain percentage of liberal arts colleges won't make it into the 1980s and 1990s.
"I don't think this prediction affects the first rate liberal arts colleges for which the mission will always be clear. I refer to Harvard, to Colby, Bates and Bowdoin, to Smith, Mount Holyoke, Middlebury .
"A liberal arts education does not prepare a student for a particular job for life 10 years down the road. It helps to give a capacity for judgment so that a person can tell what is good and what is bad and what is genuine from what's imitation.
"This goal — elusive as it is — may come from understanding the difference between a good poem and a bad poem. It may come through understanding a theory in history or a chemical experiment.
"Students unquestionably forget most of the facts they have learned. The residue that is left is a mind toughened to deal with abstractions; a mind with an ability to adapt to a changing world. The role of the liberal arts college is to prepare for the indefinable era ahead, and it is as important a role as ever.
"There are enduring qualities enhanced by a liberal arts education — qualities of judgment and value — that will be just as important in 1990 as in 1980."
If today's college students are indeed more conservative, it may at least be said that Colby seniors broke one tradition year: With a wide choice of commencement speakers, they picked Robert E. Lee Strider.
And the campus newspaper, "Echo," which virtually vilified the president nine years ago, took time to editorialize about the man whose long name it affectionately abbreviated to "R.E.L.S."
Noting that much may change as President-elect Cotter and succeeding generations of students leave their marks on Colby, the Echo predicted prosperity.
"These inheritors of the Colby family and its future," it editorialized, "have much to work with and much to guide them as they fulfill the potential that exists at Colby today. Without the tireless efforts of Robert E. Lee Strider, it is doubtful they would be so fortunate.".