Reminiscences and Ruminations

Reminiscences and Ruminations
by R. Justus Hanks

Writing a personal recollection for a public celebration must be one of the more difficult things to do. No longer dangerous perhaps, since one is retired and emeritus and thus enjoying a certain immunity. But still difficult. A college community is a collection of human beings no freer than most people of all the weaknesses, depravities, foibles, pretensions, strengths, brilliance, and creativity of the human race. It has been fascinating to see them all in operation at the College. To be more specific, however, might not be judicious and could totally consume my limited prose supply.

Probably the most interesting period in my years at the College was that during which the Rockville Campus was being planned, built, and then brought into operation. What dreams, what nightmares, what battles! How can one forget, for example, what I choose to call the great Battle of Bull Pens, as the planners proposed to herd faculty into large, airless, interior rooms with no windows to gaze out of or jump out of, and cheek-to-cheek with the plumbing and ventilating systems? Was there some symbolic intention? Somehow, individual cubicles or offices with windows were, like telephones at Takoma Park, regarded as offering faculty dangerous contact with the outside world. Not that there was too much to see at first. The Rockville Campus was muddy, treeless, and architecturally undistinguished, to put it kindly. A visitor to the cement-block cafeteria described it as “early Stalinist.” Administration and organization were rather anarchic, with one president (dean? chancellor? provost? rector?) bedded down in his office keeping a twenty-four hour watch.

Yet despite adversity, turmoil, and the growing pains of the College, there was progress, hope, expansion, ferment—against a national background of the Vietnam War and the revolutions of the young, the black, the women, and the poor. At a 1968 Sophomore Awards Luncheon I jokingly commented that it might not be a good year for commencement speakers to urge graduates to hold high the torch of learning lest they burn the place down.

Through it all the faculty struggled fiercely against those perennial enemies of public education and of community colleges—mediocrity, tastelessness, apathy, and ignorance. Seeking in a 1963 convocation to stimulate the incoming students, I expressed the faculty hope that the College was truly becoming a local, community institution of higher learning, and I closed with a rather extravagant peroration to the effect that the College might yet be a veritable “Cambridge by the B&O.” I thought my remarks were not a bad combination of wit and inspiration, but following the convocation I was approached by one faculty member (male!) whose only comment was, “You know, you have a sexy double-chin.” So much for extravagant ideas!

The B&O has been replaced by Amtrak and Metro. And we may not yet be a Cambridge. But while waves of assorted administrators have washed over the College, there has been a strong continuity of faculty personnel and purpose. We have been generalists, even perhaps dilettantes, but with the broad interests and large devotion to teaching and to sustaining the idea that a good general education is essential to a democratic society.

Takoma Park and Rockville Campuses; Department of History, 1959-1980; chairman, 1973-1976; Professor Emeritus.