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Authors: Michael Hiltzik
Tags: Non-Fiction
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University in St. Louis was reaching the end of his rope.
The academic year just ending had been the most trying of George E. Pake's career. The 1960s were not easy on anyone in a college administration, but Pake felt that unrest on his own normally placid liberal arts campus had reached a high-water mark during the previous semester. A group of protesting students had occupied the chancellor's office. Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into the ROTC Quonset hut and burned it to the ground. Pake spent the year contending with all sorts of reactionary trustees and alumni who, he recalled, "wondered why we didn't just fire the students and keep the faculty." As spring drew to a close, he said, "I was a case of battle fatigue."
In a more peaceful era Pake would have seemed the ideal college administrator. Narrow-shouldered and retiring, he possessed a clipped and slightly distracted manner of speaking that reinforced his donnish air. But this diffidence was deceptive. When the faculty got fractious he could dig in his heels and hold his ground, especially when called upon to uphold his standards of academic propriety. Fairness, he insisted, was the key. No administrator of a large academic institution could possibly know enough to mediate every issue purely on academic or scholastic grounds. The trick in refereeing among powerful faculty with their overdeveloped intellects and underdeveloped social graces was to remain unyieldingly impartial. When all else fails, split eveiything down the middle.
This was a skill he had tried to hone in the years since he had come to St. Louis from Stanford, where he had held a physics professorship. Washington University had installed a dynamic new chancellor determined to enhance its reputation as a first-class academic institution, and Pake had accepted his call to join the crusade as a senior administrator. At first the change fed his idealism. He imagined himself promoting the social benefits of higher education in ways that would be closed to him if he remained merely a teacher and laboratory researcher. But by the spring of 1969, when he was next in line to succeed that chancellor, he had also become profoundly disillusioned.
"I hadn't visualized myself as running a command post in a military operation," he said. "I knew I did not want to be a candidate for chancellor, not to lead that goldfish-bowl kind of life. My wife would have hated it."
So that fall he returned to teaching. On Thanksgiving weekend, just as he was finally re-acclimating to the milieu of classroom and chalkboard, he got a phone call from his old friend Jack Goldman.
"George," Goldman said, "I got a proposition for you."
Jack Goldman's relationship with George Pake dated back twenty- five years to when they had worked together on wartime projects at Westinghouse Research Laboratory, Goldman as a senior fellow and Pake as a Westinghouse undergraduate scholar.
After the war Goldman remained in industry while Pake moved on to Harvard for his doctorate. But they kept track of each other's careers within the insular community of working physicists. Just as he was starting his search for a director for his new research center, Goldman heard that Ford had offered his former job to Pake, and that Pake had turned it down. Goldman guessed Pake's reasoning had something to do with Ford's erratic commitment to basic research. "I figured I could make a better case for Xerox than Ford could make for Ford," he recalled. After a speaking engagement in Chicago he swung down to St. Louis in Xerox's new Sabreliner corporate jet (his favorite mode of transportation). "I met Pake at the airport, invited him aboard the company plane, gave him a couple of drinks and proposed that he join up."
In truth, Goldman's pitch was more focused than this breezy descrip tion suggests. From the airport the two of them repaired to a nearby hotel, where Goldman spent the better part of a day spinning a seductive vision of computer
The academic year just ending had been the most trying of George E. Pake's career. The 1960s were not easy on anyone in a college administration, but Pake felt that unrest on his own normally placid liberal arts campus had reached a high-water mark during the previous semester. A group of protesting students had occupied the chancellor's office. Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into the ROTC Quonset hut and burned it to the ground. Pake spent the year contending with all sorts of reactionary trustees and alumni who, he recalled, "wondered why we didn't just fire the students and keep the faculty." As spring drew to a close, he said, "I was a case of battle fatigue."
In a more peaceful era Pake would have seemed the ideal college administrator. Narrow-shouldered and retiring, he possessed a clipped and slightly distracted manner of speaking that reinforced his donnish air. But this diffidence was deceptive. When the faculty got fractious he could dig in his heels and hold his ground, especially when called upon to uphold his standards of academic propriety. Fairness, he insisted, was the key. No administrator of a large academic institution could possibly know enough to mediate every issue purely on academic or scholastic grounds. The trick in refereeing among powerful faculty with their overdeveloped intellects and underdeveloped social graces was to remain unyieldingly impartial. When all else fails, split eveiything down the middle.
This was a skill he had tried to hone in the years since he had come to St. Louis from Stanford, where he had held a physics professorship. Washington University had installed a dynamic new chancellor determined to enhance its reputation as a first-class academic institution, and Pake had accepted his call to join the crusade as a senior administrator. At first the change fed his idealism. He imagined himself promoting the social benefits of higher education in ways that would be closed to him if he remained merely a teacher and laboratory researcher. But by the spring of 1969, when he was next in line to succeed that chancellor, he had also become profoundly disillusioned.
"I hadn't visualized myself as running a command post in a military operation," he said. "I knew I did not want to be a candidate for chancellor, not to lead that goldfish-bowl kind of life. My wife would have hated it."
So that fall he returned to teaching. On Thanksgiving weekend, just as he was finally re-acclimating to the milieu of classroom and chalkboard, he got a phone call from his old friend Jack Goldman.
"George," Goldman said, "I got a proposition for you."
Jack Goldman's relationship with George Pake dated back twenty- five years to when they had worked together on wartime projects at Westinghouse Research Laboratory, Goldman as a senior fellow and Pake as a Westinghouse undergraduate scholar.
After the war Goldman remained in industry while Pake moved on to Harvard for his doctorate. But they kept track of each other's careers within the insular community of working physicists. Just as he was starting his search for a director for his new research center, Goldman heard that Ford had offered his former job to Pake, and that Pake had turned it down. Goldman guessed Pake's reasoning had something to do with Ford's erratic commitment to basic research. "I figured I could make a better case for Xerox than Ford could make for Ford," he recalled. After a speaking engagement in Chicago he swung down to St. Louis in Xerox's new Sabreliner corporate jet (his favorite mode of transportation). "I met Pake at the airport, invited him aboard the company plane, gave him a couple of drinks and proposed that he join up."
In truth, Goldman's pitch was more focused than this breezy descrip tion suggests. From the airport the two of them repaired to a nearby hotel, where Goldman spent the better part of a day spinning a seductive vision of computer
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