We'll miss you, true, but we know you'll do

The best job there of all places.

Now farewell to Nate, Miss and Jamic,

They're right in the headlines with Mamic

And their Mom'll make a great first lady,

With lots of class

At Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Scholastically and financially, the new college did not always fare well. Students with the necessary qualifications for college work were so few that until 1908, the College maintained a preparatory school to boost applicants to the necessary academic level. And in the '80s the school was debt-ridden to the point that the president offered to resign so that his salary might be used to keep Lawrence from buckling.

Lawrence has always been co-educational, though in the Victorian era there were constant dicta forbidding pleasantries between the sexes. One elderly former co-ed remembers the rule banning any Lawrentian gentleman walking with a Lawrentian young lady without a chaperon. The one exception was during a rainstorm in which event the young man could offer to share his umbrella with the girl. "We used to call them our rainbeaus," the lady smiles.

Compulsory Chapel

Pusey, an Episcopalian opposed to a sectarian approach in campus religious life, does work at encouraging the spiritual growth of his students. A course in religion, with philosophy as a possible substitute, is required of all freshmen. And at the weekly convocations, attendance is compulsory. Once a month, a convocation is likely to be of religious nature, with speakers invited from every faith. The convocations are generally not too popular with the students, but Pusey thinks they have a definite value. "I know they kick about going," he says, "and sometimes the programs are poor. But by the time a student is a senior, I think he comes to realize that it has been a very unifying experience." Pusey adds that to establish such a program at Harvard would be almost impossible since there is no auditorium large enough to hold the entire college; and unless attended by the whole student body, the meetings lose much of their effect.

Even more than encouraging a religious atmosphere at Lawrence, Pusey's chief concern has been in recruiting a superior faculty. He has drawn often on Harvard and its graduate schools--six of the 53 active faculty members have a Harvard degree and two more have been engaged for next term.

Near Miss

Pusey, always careful in his screening of prospective teachers, has had only one near fumble. In 1949, he hired by mail a professor from Australia, Robert Peters, whose qualifications on paper were excellent. When the new term began, Roberts had not arrived. Pusey took over his course in ancient history, waiting anxiously for his new professor. After 4 weeks had passed without Peters, student speculation was rife: one story had Peters captured by Australian canibals, another had him washed overboard during his voyage to America. Jaime, Pusey's younger son, then 7, immediately named his imaginary friend "Peters," and the President wished increasingly as the months dragged on that his long overdue employee would turn up. Four years passed and this spring when the errant professor was almost forgotten, a small news item appeared in Milwaukee newspapers. The College of Wooster, with a collective red face, had just discharged one Robert Peters, a fraudulent "professor" with bogus references and no degrees. No one at Lawrence knows why Peters changed his mind about the College, but the incident is always related with a sigh of relief.

Once Pusey has hired an assistant professor, there is not iron rule about promotion. He requests each year a list of publications by the faculty, but as he says, "Out in this part of the country, we put much emphasis on the great teacher concept. I am in no way minimizing scholarship and research, but I can see little value in large volumes of short articles." At Lawrence, where the faculty carries a heavy teaching load, Pusey has been very tolerant about a small published output. Then, too, the College library with its 75,000 volumes is too limited for advanced research. Ideally, however, Pusey prefers to promote professors on a combination of their writing and classroom work.