Bad Reporting

I know there hasn't been much here this past week or so, but those faculty minutes are EXTREMELY boring and have very little to do with my project. As consolation I am posting here for you a quick anecdote about chapel that I heard from Dr. Donald Zucker, Professor of Political Science, Emeritus. Dr. Zucker volunteers on a weekly basis in the archives and although he is away for the summer I look forward to speaking with him further about the chapel program and how it was perceived by faculty of the College.

Dr. Creager, the chaplain of Ursinus, would regularly call on the faculty of Ursinus to lead chapel each morning. Although he continuously "stressed the opportunity Chapel offers to members to give utterance to whatever is on their minds" (Ursinus College Faculty Meeting, Regular Meeting, October 6, 1965), Dr. Zucker didn't often feel compelled to get up in front of the school to share his thoughts. However, there was one semester (he couldn't recall which during our conversation) when his interactions with a few students moved him to do so. At the time class sizes were beginning to grow and political and social tensions throughout the country (as well as on campus) were increasing exponentially. Dr. Zucker, wanting to make sure that none of the students at Ursinus "fell through the cracks," volunteered to lead chapel in order to communicate this message:

"I don't have much to say up here this morning, but just know that we [the faculty and staff of the College] are here for you. If you ever need anything - extra attention in your class or just someone to talk to - then please come and take advantage of this. Your classmates won't think you're a brownie and we want to help anyone who needs it."

Well, Dr. Zucker's words were very well received by the student body - so much so that his address was written up in the Weekly (again, he doesn't remember when so I haven't been able to find it) by a particularly inspired student. The one problem with the write up was that this student took the liberty of changing "brownie" to "brown-noser."

Since the Weekly was regularly distributed to the campus community as well as alumni, friends of the College, etc., it wasn't just this aspiring journalist's peers (who had been present at the original chapel service) that were reading the summary of Dr. Zucker's address and, as the story goes, some of the Weeklie's more seasoned clientele were not pleased with a professor using phrases such as "brown-noser" during chapel. The Dean, William Pettit (he later became president of the college before he was ousted by what has been described to me as a faculty coup), was enraged by the situation and called Dr. Zucker in to speak with him.

The way Dr. Zucker tells it I imagine the poor professor walking into the Dean's office to find an angry, red faced man wielding a copy of the latest Weekly. Ragardless, Dean Pettit demanded to know what Dr. Zucker was getting at by using such "foul, army lingo" in chapel. Dr. Zucker told me that he tried to calm down the Dean as he explained that he was misquoted in the paper and that it happened all the time with student publications. Supposedly Dean Pettit wasn't having any of it and Dr. Zucker decided to simply lay low for awhile and stay off of the chapel schedule.

Although it's difficult for me to determine how much of this really happened, how much was exaggerated, etc., it does explain why some faculty members were scheduled to lead chapel more often than others, like Dr. Zucker. Here's a question though...wasn't the Dean at chapel that morning that Dr. Zucker spoke? If he was then there wouldn't really have been a problem and he would have understood that there was an error in the reporting. If he wasn't there then where was he? I understand that not all of the College's personnel would have been present every morning but I would assume that an administrator with such a high profile on campus would have made it a point to set an example for the students. Hmmm...