Remembering Sam Thompson

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AUGUST

1983

Samuel Martin Thompson, Alumni Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, represented the best a college can offer its students. There is no better reason for celebrating his life and work and for . .

Remembering Sam ing Ernest Schlaretzki, '41, and William Winslade, '63, two of his philosophy majors. Winslade brought Sam a copy of his just published book, The Insanity Plea, dedicated to Sam Thompson and to his graduate advisor. He was visited Sam Thompson died June 20. The cancer that had ravoften by local friends, especially Prescott Johnson, his colaged his body for more than two years claimed him shortly league in philosophy at Monmouth since 1962, who had after midnight that Monday morning. Through those two looked after Sam during his two-year bout with cancer. He years, however, Sam Thompson was essentially unscathed, spent time reading, too, and judged Winslade's newest book unchanged by his illness in any sense but the physical, for a "devastating" indictment of the insanity defense. Although he saw his ordeal through with the same dignity, grace, and he tired easily and could work little more than an hour or good humor with which he lived his life. "Grace under prestwo at a time, Sam Thompson continued to write virtually sure" was Hemingway's definition of courage. Sam Thompto the end, tackling those philoson had that in abundance. sophical problems that had been his The sources of his strength were abiding passion for nearly six deseveral. The life he led was, after cades, including his forty-six years all, the life of the mind. Condias an active member of the Montioned by six decades of rigorous The more the years that pass us by, mouth College faculty. thought about philosophical probthe swifter they run.

During those forty-six years, lems, his was above all an indepenSam Thompson, both in his public dent, disciplined mind, a mind that The more the years increase their pace, roles-teacher, scholar, churchwould yield to superior reason but the fuller they grow. man-and in his private life, achardly one that would bend before quired the admiration and affection superior force. Too, he had grapThe longer grows the stream of time, of countless students, colleagues, pled with the most difficult, but the wider it spreads, and neighbors. His stature in his most important, questions of huprofessional life is summarized by man existence and had come to until ahead the ocean looms Mary Bartling Crow in A History of terms with human mortality, includMonmouth College: Samuel Martin to swallow it all. ing his own. He had, clearly, found Thompson was "the man who a place in his thinking for faith in Samuel Martin Thompson stood prominently above his felGod, not an easy, uncritically aclows in humanities through the cepted faith, but one confirmed by middle years of the century." long and careful reflection. ComSam Thompson's early years fail to suggest the distinmitted to human knowledge but profoundly aware of huguished career that lay ahead. Born March 10, 1902, in man ignorance, he thought it only reasonable for faith to Mays, Indiana, he was the first child of Alice Martin Thompbegin where knowledge leaves off. Grounded in reason and son and the Reverend Robert Thompson, an 1894 graduate faith, he was not one to be thrown off balance by anything of Monmouth and a Presbyterian minister. Like many minisso mundane as illness. ters' sons, he was a bit of a rebel, chafing under the restricIn the three months between his previous hospitalization tions adults imposed upon his behavior and the stigma, in and his death, Sam Thompson had both good days and the eyes of his peers, of being a "preacher's kid." He knew, bad days, but he was able to remain at home until the Montoo, that his parents had invested their hopes in his brother day before he died. During those weeks he was occasionally George, who had decided to follow in his father's footsteps. seen out and about in Monmouth. He had visitors, includby Rick Perry Editor

TIME

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Thompson The Thompsons moved often and lived in Des Moines when Sam graduated from high school. Accounts of his early years indicate that his intellectual capabilities remained dormant and his academic performance pedestrian. Two years at Tarkio College in Missouri failed to arouse his still slumbering intellect. Transferring to Monmouth as a junior, his father's status as an alumnus and prominent minister seems to have been important in the decision to admit him.

His brother George was already at Monmouth, and both were graduated with the class of 1924, but George died in an automobile accident in September, 1926, on his way back to Princeton Theological Seminary. Their sister Dorothy continued the family tradition at Monmouth, graduating in 1928. She died in 1970 after a career in teaching.

Enrolling at Monmouth, Sam Thompson met the man who changed his life-Luther Emerson Robinson, professor of English. Robinson saw in the young Sam Thompson the potential that everyone else had missed. Born and raised in Mississippi, Robinson was a brilliant man with the courtly manners of a Southern gentleman. He was deeply learned in English and classical literature, American history, and philosophy. His students were all but unanimous in thinking him the most stimulating lecturer they had ever heard.

For Sam Thompson, the effect was liberating. Before coming to Monmouth, he had been a young man yearning for something he could not define. The answer to that yearning was provided by Luther Robinson, for in him Sam Thompson found an exciting, even inspiring, teacher who could unleash the frustrated energies of his restless mind.

He devoted himself to his studies with a passion for understanding that was wholly new to him and did extensive independent work with Robinson. Guided by his teacher's penetrating questions, incisive comments, and wise suggestions and, certainly, by his example, Sam Thompson was given the freedom to pursue his interests, interests which led him, at Robinson's urging, to readings in philosophy.

Completing his Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English, his exceptional performance as a student may have surprised no one more than it surprised Sam Thompson.

Robinson encouraged him to continue his education and, strongly recommended by Robinson and others, he was

Four former students on Sam Thompson W. E. Schlaretzki: When I was a student at Monmouth, I took, as I recall, thirty-six semester hours of philosophy with Sam. His breadth of competence amazed me then, as it has ever since. Sam was not an indoctrinator. He did his best to help me to learn to think for myself. As it turned out, my general point of view in philosophy is in some respects rather different from his. But I continued to benefit from his philosophic thinking through his numerous publications, his letters, and many personal conversations over the years. So I was not, after all, a "former" student of Sam's; I continued to learn from him. On my visit to Monmouth in late April, I was delighted, but not surprised, to find that, despite the medical problems that beset him, he was continuing his long-standing practice of doing some writing every day. He read to me some subtle, illuminating paragraphs which he had just completed. One never went away intellectually empty-handed from a talk with Sam. I have known few people who displayed so continuously, over so long a period, such a level of intellectual vigor and creativeness.

For Sam, thinking and writing philosophy were as natural as breathing. Not that the work was easy, even for him, but it was work that suited the notable powers of his mind. He was a highly skilled craftsman of ideas and arguments. Because thought and language are virtually inseparable, the superb quality of Sam's work as a philosophic thinker reflected also his exceptional command of words. Any reader of Sam's writings is aware of the author's mastery of language. Sam once remarked, in a note, that he had recently spent an hour and a quarter revising one paragraph in a paper.

He said he especially enjoyed that kind of writing, for in it he did his hardest thinking. His interest in the outer reaches of the capabilities of language led him to explore extensively the uses of aphoristic writing in philosophy (he happened also to be a gifted poet).

In Sam's thinking and teaching, it was not the techniques of philosophy, enjoyable as they are, but the substantial questions the philosopher confronts that

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admitted to Princeton University for graduate study in philosophy. There he received the Master of Arts degree in 1925 and began work toward his doctorate. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton in 1931 after successfully defending his dissertation, A Study of Locke's Theory of Ideas.

In 1926, President Thomas Hanna McMichael offered him a full professorship in philosophy, a discipline which had been taught only sporadically at Monmouth in the preceding years. Sam Thompson accepted the appointment and returned to Monmouth with his new bride, Margaret Grace Nicoll, whom he had met at Tarkio and married in August, 1926. In the years that followed, they would build the house on Detroit Avenue, in the first block east of the campus, that was the family home from 1937 until Sam's death. They had two daughters, both graduates of Monmouth: Jean Thompson Newman, '51, and Roberta Thompson Fassett, '56. The family connection continued for a fourth generation with Jean's daughter, Julie Follett Sarff, '74. Grace Nicoll Thompson preceded her husband in death in November, 1963.

Beginning his career as a teacher at age twenty-four, Sam Thompson had yet to find the key to the success he would achieve in the classroom. Shortly before his retirement in 1972, he delivered an Honors Convocation address entitled "Are College Professors Obsolete?" and spoke of the question that nagged at him during those first years: "What can a college professor do in the classroom that is essential to student learning and can be done only in direct interaction between professor and students, where the professor talks to the students and the students sometimes talk to him and to each other? What special, unique, and indispensable 6

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link does the professor forge between his discipline and the minds of his students to hear him talk in the classroom?"

Recounting his early experience, he said, "As a young teacher, too young to know better, I asked the question of my elder colleagues. Their mouths dropped open, and I was afraid to call for help. So I had to try to answer it myself. It was five years before I was able to meet a class without wondering what I could do for those students that they could not do for themselves."

The answer Sam Thompson found has been characterized as the Socratic method, although he didn't use that label in his address. A teacher, he maintained, who simply presented information might as well be replaced by a book, by duplicated notes, or by closed-circuit television. Rather, the key to college teaching lies in the interaction between professor and students, in the professor's ability to gauge his students' reactions and to adapt the presentation of his discipline to the present understanding of his students, to start where they are. But more. A college professor, if he is in fact professing a discipline, must be engaged in the problems of the discipline. His most effective teaching will be done when he engages those problems in front of his students, demonstrating, in his own person, a mind at work on the problems of the discipline.

Sam Thompson was passionately engaged with the problems of his discipline, outside the classroom as well as in it. He was constantly writing, thinking, rewriting, always working on those philosophical questions. One consequence was frequent publication in scholarly journals, among them The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, The Journal of Religion, The Review of Metaphysics, Ethics, Modern Age, The Personalist, and The International Philosophical Quarterly. He wrote the article on Immanuel Kant for The New Century Cyclopedia of Names and a chapter of The Heritage of Kant. Too, he was active in professional societies throughout his career, holding memberships in the American Philosophical Association, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the Illinois Philosophy Conference, which he served as vice president and president.

Most notable among his scholarly publications were two textbooks. His first, A Modern Philosophy of Religion (Henry Regnery Company, 1955), filled a need felt by many philosophy professors, one of whom wrote, "To think that at long last there would be a textbook in the philosophy of religion that is thoroughly and properly philosophical!" The quality of Sam Thompson's work in meeting that need was revealed by the book's rapid acceptance as a college text; before long the book was in use at Amherst College, Cornell University, Temple University, the University of Nebras-

ka, Oberlin College, Yale Divinity School, the University of Kansas, Drew University, the University of Pittsburgh, St. Olaf College, Syracuse University, Garrett Theological Seminary, and many other institutions. Indeed, the demand for the book was such that a second printing was necessary the year after it was published. His second text, The Nature of Philosophy: An Introduction (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), was written for freshmen and sophomores and was widely adopted for introductory courses in philosophy.

His work in the philosophy of religion attracted the attention of churchmen. In 1957 the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church authorized the appointment of a special committee to consider a new statement of faith for the church, and Sam Thompson became the only layman among the fifteen members of the Committee on a Brief Contemporary Statement of Faith, serving as its secretary.

He was one of the three members of the committee responsible for drafting the document that was adopted by the church as the Confession of 1967.

Sam Thompson also served the church locally. Monmouth, a city of only ten thousand, was supporting five Presbyterian congregations. Sam Thompson and others worked hard for the merger that resulted, in 1964, in Faith United Presbyterian Church, which he served as an elder.

No summary of Sam Thompson's activities and accomplishments can suggest the great self-discipline he brought to his work and, indeed, to his life, for throughout these years of distinguished achievement he lived with a heart problem that forced him to adopt a regimen that he was not naturally disposed to embrace. Until he was in his early forties, when the ailment was diagnosed, he had enjoyed hard work in his yard, long walks, swimming, and other strenuous activities. "For a man active in mind and body," wrote Professor Crow in A History of Monmouth College, "the enforced rest and quiet were difficult, but with the help and support of his wife, the time passed, and he was able to resume a semi-active life. It was at this time that Thompson literally remade his life. He adopted alterations in his daily routine that took herculean self-discipline not only to make, but to sustain for the rest of his life."

Sam Thompson received every honor Monmouth College could bestow. In 1956, after the publication of his philosophy of religion, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award. When he retired in 1972, Monmouth conferred on him the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters. Still active on the College's behalf after his retirement, he was presented the Distinguished Service Award in 1979.

For all the accolades his achievements brought him, Sam Thompson remained a modest, unassuming man who

were of greatest concern: questions that belong to the traditional branches of philosophy, such as metaphysics and ethics, but questions that matter, for most of us, primarily because of their relevance to religion, art, science, government, and education. A student of Sam's knew that he or she was being invited to think together with the teacher about matters of deep human significance. The student was aware also that his teacher was not only a highly skilled philosopher but also someone of great breadth and depth of knowledge in such related fields as history, law, theology, literature, and the arts. Sam was a paradigm of the teacher who makes our liberal arts colleges what they are at their best.

As to Sam as a person, let me venture a few brief observations. First, he struck me as one of the most independent, self-possessed persons I have ever known. He had what Kant called autonomy. But to be free is not to lack commitments and attachments.

Sam's deep love of his family and his care for his friends were evidence of this. So were his other loyalties, though for him institutions could never matter in the way that individual persons did. Secondly, his equanimity and courage in the face of a long series of physical afflictions commanded the admiration of all who knew him. Finally, his never-failing good humor and wit, sometimes pointed but never malicious, always made him the best of company. I think he was a happy man.

Ernest Schlaretzki, '41, was the first student of Sam Thompson to earn the Ph.D. degree in philosophy, which he did at Cornell University. He has taught philosophy at the University of Maryland since 1953 and previously chaired the department. He received Monmouth's Distinguished Alumni Award in 1979.

Ann Garry: I attended Monmouth College from 1961 to 1965 and started taking philosophy courses as a sophomore. At the time I took Introduction to Philosophy, I was a history major. One lesson I learned from Sam Thompson - how to find (or create) new philosophy majors-is one I've used over the years. As if it were all one sentence with no punctuation, he said, "Miss

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was simply going about his business. When asked for an interview, he said, as I recall, "I'm perfectly happy to talk to you, but I can't imagine that anything I might say could possibly be of interest," and he made essentially the same remark when I arrived at his house. He seemed to genuinely believe that, and it was perhaps only out of courtesy that he fell silent on the point after I explained why I thought otherwise, for he did not seem convinced.

I went to interview Sam Thompson on a Monday afternoon, May 16, only five weeks, as it turned out, before his death. I found myself thinking of the students who had visited him in that same comfortable but modest home over the years. The Sam Thompson I met had aged and his illness had weakened him, but it was not difficult to believe that he had remained unchanged, except in appearance, that he was the same man known by generations of students.

When I left an hour and a half later, I thought I had glimpsed some of the qualities that had endeared Sam Thompson to so many. His sense of humor and appreciation of irony were evident in the gentle laughter provoked by particular memories. He smiled and his eyes sparkled as he spoke fondly of people and events he remembered. Also apparent was the Sam Thompson of independent mind who would do his own thinking, thank you, and never mind the party line. Above all, he seemed a man in love with the life he had made for himself.

He requested, in seeing me out the door, a chance to see what I came up with, for he feared he had spoken too bluntly. Nor did he know that I would publish our conversation as an interview, for that was not certain until after the tape had been transcribed. By the time I was ready to show him the interview - after getting through Commencement and the June issue of Update - it was too late. He might well have wanted to soften a few of his comments, for his words on paper look blunter, colder, than the same words sounded when he spoke them. Throughout our conversation, he was reflective, good-humored, and warm, never harsh or mean-spirited. Too, I wanted to get back to him so I could fill in a couple of gaps and clarify a couple of points.

There was to be no such opportunity, so the interview that follows will have to stand as it is.

While appreciative of recognition he considered warranted, he would surely have thought the attention paid to his passing out of proportion to his importance. He was clearly uncomfortable with the idea that he would be mourned, but these pages are intended not to mourn his death but to celebrate the life and work of a great teacher, for ours is a day in which we sorely need those eminent men and women who, unique though they are as individuals, exemplify the 8 I MONMOUTH

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excellence from which springs the best our society can bequeath to the future.

The scholarly accomplishments of great teachers, their work in and outside the classroom, the qualities of mind and character that they bring to their work and that attract the admiration of others - all bear fruit in the lives of their students. More than one student found his or her life changed as a result of happening into one of Sam Thompson's classes. Many of his majors went on to advanced work in philosophy, law, medicine, theology, and other fields and are making distinguished careers for themselves. Still other students, majors in other disciplines who took one or two or several courses with Sam Thompson, found their minds stimulated, their understanding enlarged, and their habits of thought shaped in his classroom.

In presenting Sam Thompson for the degree Doctor of Humane Letters in 1972, Dean of the College Frank McKenna said, "The honors and recognition which have come his way have been richly deserved. Of all of them, it may well be that the highest accolade, and the one he might prize most, was offered by a former student . . . when she said simply, 'He was the best teacher I ever had.'

"That thought must be uppermost in the minds of hundreds of Monmouth alumni today."

Your relationship with Monmouth goes back a long way. It's been six decades now since you enrolled here as a student.

My connections go back even further. My father was class of '94, I was class of '24, my granddaughter class of '74, and then my daughters, nieces, and sons-in-law and so on came in between. So it's a family connection that I've had here.

You started your undergraduate work at Tarkio College in Missouri. What led to your coming here?

My brother was here. I was extricated from Tarkio by my father for very good reasons. For me, it was a waste of time. All I got from Tarkio was my wife, and that was great.

We were engaged for seven years. After I left Tarkio I had a job with Equitable Life Insurance Company of Iowa, a clerical job in the services department. Then in a couple of months they turned over to me the monthly magazine for our agents, a sixteen-page magazine. I wrote the copy for it and saw it through the press - we had our own press - and I wrote the copy for whatever advertising they did, which wasn't much. I did that for two years and I was getting tired of it, it was pretty trivial stuff. I was thinking of getting back to college, so I came over here on a vacation trip. In fact, I

had taken afternoon courses in law that Drake University gave downtown. I took courses in real property, persons, agency, and something else. Anyway, my brother was here and I attended some classes and found just what I wanted, so I came here in the fall. I had no intention of going to graduate school.

I understand that your graduate work at Princeton made a big difference in your life.

I was very fortunate, all the way around. Graduate school really made me as a philosopher and pretty much as a person. There was an enrollment limit of 250 in all departments, so the graduate classes were small. We had a separate quadrangle up on the hill away from the campus.

You can't imagine how one registered for a course in the graduate school. I made a social call to the professor at his home. He talked to me about my reading and background and so on, and if he thought I could handle it, he signed my book, which put me in the course. At the end of the course, he signed the opposite page, which showed that I'd completed the course. What I knew about teaching I learned there. Our sessions were three hours, for one thing, and the professors, in very different ways, were following up the work they were doing. We learned a lot about how to approach questions, how to deal out what was trivial and what was central, and that sort of thing. I couldn't have had a better preparation.

In the last couple of years, some have said that philosophers have lost interest in the central questions, and, in many instances, lost themselves in trivia, that central questions are no longer of interest.

I think that's true. In the United States philosophy never had the kind of emphasis on history that is needed. I had that at Princeton; their whole approach was historical. But my explanation for the devotion to trivia is a little bit ridiculous. I think it goes back to the fact that the papers at the meetings are limited to twenty minutes, unless it's an invited paper or something like that. What can you do in twenty minutes? The real work in philosophy doesn't necessarily get into journals, and there is some good work being done.

Since you've retired, have you done a lot of writing, a lot of reading?

Yes, I've done a lot of writing. Until the last couple of years I did the equivalent of a book-length manuscript every year with no interest at all in publishing. I was dealing with problems that I was interested in. I had a chance really to follow them up and found a great deal of satisfaction in

Garry your work is excellent what is your major?"

In addition to liking the content of Sam's courses, one of the things that influenced me to become a philosophy major was his attitude toward tests. He showed a great deal of respect for students, not testing them for what they didn't know but allowing them to show what they had understood. It seemed so much more adult to me. I'm sure that influenced me in the way I treat my own students.

Although this was the early sixties, pre-liberation at its height, Sam was very good about treating female students as real people. At a time when other esteemed members of the faculty were telling me that "women are to be the flowers of the campus" or "women are not capable of abstract thought," Sam never distinguished between male and female students. When I was considering graduate study in philosophy, I received the same counsel he had given Bill two years earlier (Bill Winslade, then my boyfriend, later my husband, now my former husband).

One of the few times he called attention to the fact that I was a woman was in my senior year after he had written a letter of recommendation for my graduate school applications. He was expressing sadness at all the good female students he had taught who had "disappointed" him after they graduated, who had not lived up to what he had seen as their potential. Recent studies of women who are high achievers suggest that relationships in formative years with male figures who inspire the woman's self-confidence are just as important as having good female role models. Sam clearly did this for me.

Sam's lifestyle also influenced me (and other students, for I remember our discussing it at the time).

His was the Monmouth version of the good life. Mrs. Thompson had died before I ever visited Sam at home, so here was a single (and, in the eyes of a twenty-year-old, pretty old) man who was listening to good music out of the most enormous speakers I have seen (to this day, except for commercial rock concerts), sipping wine, and, later, driving a Mercedes. Sam's projected sense of contentment contributed to our feeling that this was a good life. (Today our students seem to see us as poverty-stricken people who for some strange reason see fit not to do something more lucrative.)

I have one clear memory of Sam as a faculty guest

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that. I still try to do a little writing every day, but since the surgery I had two years ago and this year, that has been narrowed down to a very small amount.

I was told that you were in University Hospitals earlier this year.

That was from March 9 to March 21. I was in the local hospital for about a week shortly before that. I had major surgery at Iowa City. Two years ago I had colon cancer and got it in the liver, and this last surgery was for complications from that.

So you have several book-length manuscripts tucked away?

Yes, yes. Some are circulating and I don't know where they are; I'm very careless about that. I think I'll just have my friend Schlaretzki decide what to do with them.

Do you find, as I do, that writing is a way to find out what you think?

Yes, writing is the way I think. I write and rewrite. It takes me several versions, often, to find out where I am, where I'm going. I come out frequently with results that really surprise me, that were unanticipated. My teaching was of that sort, too, but of course that was a little different.

I'd work on a problem, but teaching often turned the direction of my approach to things.

You returned to Monmouth directly from Princeton, hired by President McMichael as a full professor.

What stands out in your mind about the Monmouth College of those years?

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I came here in '26. You can't really compare college presidents, but I think I would say that T. H. McMichael was the wisest and most successful president that has been here in my time. He had a strong faculty; they were people who had authority and used it. The central group on that faculty-Robinson, Van Gundy, Goodrich, and three or four others - formed what I called the kitchen cabinet. In the twelve years I knew him, I never knew President McMichael to try to impose his will on the faculty. But he was an artist in controlling the processes of discussion. If something came up at a faculty meeting that he had real questions about, he managed either to wear the faculty out or to get it postponed. Then he'd meet with these people and, as far as I know, followed their recommendations. If they favored the proposed step, then one of them would make the motion at the next meeting, and if they did not favor it, one of them would make the motion to defeat it. Very few of the faculty would try to buck that group, because we knew their concern was the College -not their own personal fields, but the College. It was a collegium in the proper sense, and this is the way we operated. There were no lines of authority as such. He didn't get along with the students very well, but he got along splendidly with the faculty. When he was in college, he was the son of the president [Jackson Burgess McMichael].

And had some trouble, as I recall reading.

Yes. He was awfully suspicious of the students, perhaps because he remembered his own shenanigans. He was also shrewd in financial matters. When money was plentiful and costs were high, he added to the endowment. When costs were low, he built buildings. So that was, to my mind, the most successful period, successful in the way I felt a college was really meant to be.

How did you personally get along with President McMichael?

I came to be very close to him. He was of great help to me. If the door to his office was open and you wanted to see him, you walked in. In the twenties, there was a lot of science-religion controversy, so my subject was a rather sensitive one. I remember a conference I had with one of my students soon after I came here, and she happened to remark that the president was asking questions about what I was teaching. I excused myself and told her we'd continue at another time. I went over and walked in and said, "Now, if you have any questions, I hope you'll ask me." But he said there had been a misunderstanding. He said, "I would never ask questions like that. You're on the faculty and you

do your work your own way." In fact, I knew him to interpose himself against some very powerful people in town who attacked the College for having speakers they disapproved of. Well, I know that McMichael probably disapproved of some speakers as much as anyone, but he told those people off. He took the position that the College would have the speakers the students wanted, within limits, of course, but that was that.

I've had the sense, in dipping into the College histories now and then, that there have been other times when Monmouth happened to have the president it needed for the circumstances it was in.

Yes, I think of Gibson like that. He came here with no experience, and the College community was kind of his parish, but he saw the pressing needs. Now this was a few years after the war, and the faculty was becoming very unhappy because of low salaries. I remember we had a little confrontation with Grier about that, and it wasn't long before he announced his resignation. Gibson really tried to improve salaries - and he did - but it took him a little longer than he had expected. And Wimpress came at a time when his special gifts were of great help.

Do you mean his gifts in development and public relations?

Yes, but beyond that he was a man of imagination. He changed the campus and got some really, I think, innovative architecture on the campus. Then there was President Freed. Freed tightened up the whole business operation at a time when the College needed a strong financial manager and did, I think, a very fine job, although he didn't have much to do with the academic program.

Were there, along the way, circumstances that might have been turned to the College's advantage, opportunities that were missed?

You realize I retired in '72, so I've had no close contact since then. I think one of the missed opportunities was that period when it was a buyer's market in getting faculty. We simply did not have the leadership to see this and to take advantage of it. This I've felt for a long time was a tragic mistake. It was our chance to strengthen the very basis of our work.

Are you talking about the period since the late sixties or earlier than that?

Well, in that general area, when job opportunities were decreasing. There were, I think, errors of judgment that

at the "French Table." (We had a French house in those days, for about ten French majors and minors who had dinner together in the main dining hall each evening.) I don't remember how the topic was introduced, but I clearly recall Sam's telling this table of young women that we had no appreciation for the strength of the sex drive of a twenty-year-old male.

We later giggled about it, but he was probably right.

Some of the things I specialize in now, such as contemporary moral problems and feminist philosophy, didn't even exist as academic philosophy in the early sixties. So perhaps Sam's .influence on me was less in the content of what he taught than in his style of teaching, of respecting people, of living-what we now call being a good role model.

Ann Garry, '65, did her graduate work at the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland, where she received her Ph.D. degree and where one of her teachers was Ernest Schlaretzki. Since 1969 she has taught at California State University, Los Angeles. She currently chairs the department of philosophy there and was recently promoted to full professor.

William Irelan: Most teachers can help students acquire knowledge. Few are also able to teach them to think; Sam Thompson was among the latter. He always demanded of his students the highest standards of analytical rigor and intellectual integrity. As an active scholar, his own rich intellectual life invigorated his classes. It was not enough that his students learn something - they must also be able to analyze and interpret it. He inspired students to reach beyond mere information, to develop their powers of reasoning and understanding.

His capability as a teacher may be seen in the success of his students in some of the nation's best graduate schools. It might well be argued that Sam Thompson gave his students a Harvard education wrapped in a Monmouth sheepskin.

Studying philosophy with Sam Thompson was especially relevant to my later study of law. He used the Socratic method, posing questions and probing with students the implications of their responses. Students learned that reasoning entails problem-solving through

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were made - the idea of increasing the enrollment to sixteen hundred and getting the faculty before we got the students was not very successful.

I think our greatest weakness has been a failure on the part of the administration generally to take the academic work seriously. It's something that justifies the existence of the College, but there's been no real interest in the academic work that I know of. Now McMichael stood aloof from the academic work, but he didn't need to involve himself because he had that core group on his faculty of people who were interested in the whole program. This is, I think, the kind of leadership we have lacked. In fact I would go so far as to say that there have been times when I was pretty sure that the president didn't know what was going on.

You yourself had a considerable interest in the academic program, the curriculum, as a teacher.

Yes. That was a lot of paperwork. You know, a curriculum doesn't really mean anything. If I give a course, I can give it the way I want to and I can handle the subject matter I want to handle. My conscience is the only thing that stands in the way.

I think that in this country we operate our higher education program upside down. We put the requirements on what students are to spend their time at. I think the requirement should be to show results.

In the early fifties several of us worked out a program called the Senior College Proposal. The first year, the first two years, would require a wide experience of different areas, and then a student would follow a certain number of those areas up to a second level. Now at the second level, ideally, he would soon begin to get into the technical side of the disciplines. The first level would be to interest him, to tie the disciplines up with his concerns, and so on. A smaller number of these courses would be carried through the junior and senior years as senior courses and independent study courses so that students would come out with a very strong preparation in the area that most interested them.

For some years we required a comprehensive examination and many departments had departmental theses. In many ways I think those were quite successful, but they didn't have the administrative support they needed so we dropped them. But I think the requirements should be in showing what has been accomplished. It's awfully hard to get that across. So, as far as I was concerned, I did it in my own way in my own field.

In reading the Senior College Proposal, I was struck by your claim that, even though everything in the 12

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last two years was organized around the student's primary interest, this was the opposite of specialization, the opposite of narrow focus.

Yes, the further you go in an area or discipline, the more you get involved in other, related problems. There's no way of escaping that, unless it's just a lot of nonsense that you're dealing with. Now one objection I have to certain tendencies I hear about here is the idea of giving courses that are supposed to give students a broad, general understanding, general-education courses, as they're called here. I don't believe you can get students to understand relationships among disciplines unless they first have some competence in those disciplines. I think the synthesis side of education, the bringing together of things, takes care of itself, and that when students get some content they begin to know something. In other words, I don't believe you can solve a student's problems, intellectual problems, by giving courses.

In that case, how does a teacher help students solve their intellectual problems?

I think the strength of Monmouth College, the academic strength, was certainly not high selectivity in admitting students. We took anyone who wanted to come and who we thought was able to do the work. And the students who made an effort got a lot of consideration. In my classes, for example, if a student tried, if he wasn't just too blank, he could get a C. But when we found students who were gifted, and interested, we not only turned them loose but carried them as far as they could go as undergraduates.

Bill Winslade was one of those. He came here and opened a pizza joint, took Introduction to Philosophy, and his whole life was different. Of course, for me, my students were the center of my work, and my policy in teaching was to try to get questions raised that I was interested in and that I did not have answers to and see where we would go with them. Independent study students-I had some very gifted ones-carried the ball themselves. Take Winslade, for example, and Ann Garry, the girl he later married - temporarily. I suggested that they take the Graduate Record Exam when they were juniors. They took it and didn't do particularly well-in the eighties. So I suggested they get one of those books that gives sample questions and get the idea of the thing. They took it the next year and their scores were over the top; they weren't even on the scale.

Winslade went on to Northwestern, and toward the end of his first year, one of his professors suggested that he take the preliminary examinations for the Ph.D. "Well," he said, "I'm not ready for that." The professor said that that didn't

make any difference, that nobody would hold it against him, and that when he came up for his exams he'd have some idea of what it would be like. Well, he took them, and he came out on top. So he was through with everything except the rest of his residence and his dissertation.

He did so well, I think, because I had allowed him as a student to follow his problems and areas of interest as far as he could go. In chemistry and many other departments, that same approach had similar results.

In taking that approach, how closely did you direct the work of your students?

My relation to the serious student was to examine his work with him and, as I say, I'd turn him loose. I did not consciously direct the student's interests, but if he showed promise I did arrange that he be freed from a lot of the petty requirements and so on so he could do it his own way.

Back in the forties, a couple of people at Wesleyan University took surveys. They published the first one under the title The Undergraduate Origins - or something like that - of the Young American Scholar. They identified the colleges and universities that had sent students into graduate programs, and then they scored them in terms of Ph.D.s and awards and that sort of thing. They listed the first fifty, I think it was, of the two thousand or so four-year colleges.

After the leading fifty they worked in all the others that had any points at all. We were around thirtieth, but when I calculated our standing in terms of the proportion of Ph.D.s, we were sixteenth. We weren't far behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which were tied. Now this was astounding; after all, we didn't press people to go to graduate school.

And you've already said that admissions standards were not particularly high.

No, they weren't selective. But it indicated the kind of relationship we had with our students, that it brought something out of them, enabled them to find themselves, or at least some of their possible selves. I don't know how many of my students got Ph.D.s at very fine institutions. Many of them are on faculties; two of them are on law school faculties. Many of my students went to law school, and I was very much interested in that, having taken some law myself and having an interest in the problems of law.

But that was the approach in working with gifted students, and I don't know any other way to describe it. It is not an approach that I can neatly classify. We followed those students. Well, here's an example. I had a girl in Introduction to Philosophy who came to class a couple of

logical analysis, not flights of intuitive fancy. That approach was ideal preparation for law school, which focuses on the process of legal reasoning and employs the case method of analysis, a pedagogic technique grounded in the Socratic method.

Sam Thompson showed an unfailing personal interest in his students, helping them consider their options in life, consistently advising them to take advantage of opportunities that came their way. In my case, he greatly encouraged me to study at the University of Geneva in Switzerland when that opportunity arose, even though it seriously interfered with my program in philosophy. The decision to take my junior year abroad marked my entire life, both professionally and personally, for it led to a career as an international lawyer and development consultant and, not incidentally, marriage into an Austrian family.

William Irelan, '62, like many of Sam Thompson's philosophy majors, went on to law school. He earned his J.D. degree at the University of Virginia in 1965. His work as an international attorney and development consultant has focused particularly on the Middle East and Egypt. He recently entered private practice as a partner in the firm of Cabell and Irelan.

Nelson Potter: Samuel Thompson had a decisive effect on the course of my life. When I arrived at Monmouth as a freshman in 1957, I thought of choosing among wildly different subjects - chemistry or English or music, to name a few-for a major. But even before classes began, faculty in other departments suggested that, if I wanted to take advantage of the very best the College had to offer, I should consider working with Sam Thompson and majoring in a subject that was then not really on my list of possible majors.

I followed that advice: I majored in, went to graduate school in, and am now making an academic career in-philosophy. Besides myself, there is no one to blame but Sam Thompson, Monmouth's one-man philosophy department.

I took an enormous number of courses with him. I took all or almost all the courses he taught; in a twoor three-year cycle, he must have offered a dozen dif-

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Ofllf ACADJIV times, and then I didn't see anything of her until toward the end of the term, when I happened to see her in the hall. I said, "I missed you, you haven't been to class." "No," she said, "I got to working on some things of my own." "Well," I said, "I'd like to see what you did." She brought me what she had done, and it was astounding what that girl had done on her own. She got an A in the course.

What had she been up to? Had she been writing? reading?

Yes, reading and writing. That was, of course, unusual.

I had another case that taught me a lesson, a girl who was not only young but younger than her class, and she was practically a genius. She wrote some fascinating papers that just floored me. I called her in, and she said something about wanting to major in philosophy. I told her that her work was so promising that I thought what we should do was to arrange to free her from the requirements for graduation, free her, then, to work in this field as she pleased.

Well, that frightened her, and she didn't come back.

Besides your teaching and your scholarly pursuits, you were also active in the United Presbyterian Church. How has the relationship between the College and the church changed over the years?

Well, the change in the church relationship came with the change in the government of the church, in the charter providing for a certain degree of control by certain church bodies, such as the synod and the presbytery. The Presbyterian colleges show almost every variety of relationship.

Wooster, for example, had a very close relationship with the church. Occidental had a very, very loose relationship.

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We're more like Occidental, and I think that is appropriate.

For some years I was on the committee on churchrelated colleges of the Illinois Synod. I never detected the slightest interest in the colleges on the part of synod officials. We'd have our meetings, and the presidents of the colleges would meet with the synod officials in Springfield.

The only thing the presidents were concerned about was how much money they were going to get. The only thing the synod people were concerned about was to get the thing out of their way and out of their hair. So, for example, I suggested having college nights in various strong church centers and having the Presbyterian colleges send representatives to interview students that might be interested, very much like the college nights in high schools. But there was no interest in that at all. By that time the relationship was pro forma, it was not really a matter of substance.

But I do think it's appropriate for church colleges like Monmouth to operate a program of religious exposure, enlightenment, for students that are interested. Of course, when I came here, daily chapel was required, but that was very often a joke, and we had monthly vespers, for which all the students dressed up in their finest. By the way, when I was a student here, no College girl was permitted to walk downtown without a hat and gloves.

But about the church relationship: I don't think there's any formula. There's a historic side to this, a traditional side, which may always play a part, as it has here. But I think it's simply a matter of both sides' - church and college - being discerning about the relationship and using it to enhance the interests of both. Now there's no question, in my mind, of a church asserting authority over a college. I think that's out.

If that happens, it's not a real college; it's an adjunct of the church.

Like some of the fundamentalist . . . ?

And the Catholic system back before the war. Of course, that's changed tremendously. Catholic colleges are now quite independent. I did an article, kind of a review article, on a number of things for The Metaphysical Review.

One of them was the yearbook of the Catholic Philosophical Association, and the key discussion, the key papers, in that were on the question of whether the Catholic colleges should break loose from the rigid Thomas Aquinas authority in their philosophy. Well, they have certainly broken loose.

Do you mean that until that time it was pretty much straight scholasticism, straight Aquinas?

It wasn't even Aquinas; it was scholasticism and neo-

scholasticism, which is a crude form of Aquinas. That was quite a change, and of course the Catholic colleges greatly benefited from this. Oh, I can remember that in the twenties what they call Notre Dame was a joke as an academic institution. No one took it seriously, it was a football school.

And now it has one of the finest reputations.

Yes, it is a very fine institution - one man mainly, Father Hesburgh.

You earned over the years a considerable reputation for your work in philosophy, and you surely could have gone elsewhere. Why Monmouth?

Monmouth was not a place for people who were ambitious for professional recognition. The people who stayed here were people who liked this place and who found a chance to do, as I did, the sort of thing I wanted to do. In all the time I was here, I very seldom did anything I didn't want to do. No one ever told me what to do. And if I did have to do something I didn't want to do, I learned how to want to do it.

Do I understand you correctly, that what you wanted to do was work on these problems?

Yes, my interest is philosophy.

And teaching and writing were the vehicles for that?

Teaching is the way that philosophy develops. I became interested in students, of course, but I didn't come with a missionary zeal to make philosophers of them.

Your students were, in a sense, your traveling companions in dealing with philosophical problems?

Yes, yes. Let's see, I was here forty-six years. I never once had an unpleasant situation in the classroom. I wasn't beating anybody over the head, I wasn't pushing them. If a student didn't want to do something, that was his choice.

But the classroom atmosphere was always friendly, so I enjoyed it. I looked forward to it. I was never one who would push a student in class, press him into contributing. If he had something to say, it was great, I always welcomed it.

But I seldom asked direct questions of students unless something led up to it. I think they felt safe.

I came to Monmouth with the hope that I could open up for my students the satisfactions and enjoyments of this kind of activity, and I think it was with some success. Over these many years, I've had no regrets, for I can't imagine anything else I could have done that would have made for a more satisfying life.

ferent courses. I also took a large number of independent studies with him. I remember thinking, when I completed my undergraduate work, that the courses in which I learned the most were his two history of philosophy courses. He also had more than usual to teach in his aesthetics course. History of philosophy and aesthetics remain central to my own philosophical work to this day.

I regret taking his philosophy of religion course one of the first courses I took from him and one in which he taught his own book - before I was prepared to fully understand what he had to say. I missed, then, an area of his learning that was absolutely central to his thought.

Philosophy has historically sought a synoptic and analytic view of the whole of human knowledge and experience. Perhaps there is, then, an advantage, as well as obvious disadvantages, in teaching philosophy at an institution where, if a certain subject is part of philosophy, and you don't teach it, it doesn't get taught. (I write this as a member of an eleven-person department that would like to be larger.) The single characteristic of Sam Thompson that is most prominent in my thinking of him, and that remains with me as an ideal for my own life, was the extraordinary breadth of his learning. In an age of specialization, no area of human knowledge was foreign to him.

I remember his comment that Spinoza, in his life of extreme isolation (he was a Jew who had been expelled from the synagogue, doubly exiled in antiSemitic seventeenth-century Europe), had the advantage of not being pulled hither and thither by the prevailing philosophical fashions and was free to develop his philosophy in his own way. This remark, characteristically, reflected rather precisely Spinoza's account of life's highest value, the topic with which he concluded his greatest work, the Ethics, entitled "Of the Power of the Intellect; or of Human Freedom." I realized at the time that that was a partial description of how Sam Thompson conceived of his own life and work at Monmouth College.

Nelson Potter, '61, is associate professor of philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at the Uniuersity of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he has taught since 1965. He did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, which conferred his Ph.D. degree in 1969.

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