Invisible Ink

by Guy Stern

  Shortly after my divorce from Margith, I found that our mutual town of residence became a pretext for Margith to join me in various campus activities or to initiate a meeting, ostensibly to discuss Mark, but in reality to attempt a reconciliation. “Guy, Mark is bored to tears. He’s got to do something. You know, a movie just opened, Star Wars. That would interest him. Why don’t we take him to that movie?” In time her maneuvers became, by their frequency and intensity, utterly unbearable. I decided that I had to move. Several offers came my way. I thought that the University of Maryland at College Park would make for a seamless transition of my teaching assignments, especially since the provost for humanities offered to have me straddle two departments: German-Slavic on the one hand and Comparative Literature on the other. My dreams of being a comparatist might still see fulfillment. Also, I felt that my acquaintance with Walter Hinderer, one of the luminaries of German Studies at the University of Maryland (and now one of the leading scholars in our field), might be the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

  All the information pointed to a satisfying career. But the only expectation that came to full fruition was an enduring friendship with Walter Hinderer. When Dorothy and I—more about her later—first came to Washington, DC, Walter and his wife, Dietlinde, immediately offered us their guest room until we could find a suitable residence.

  But portents can be deceptive. Provost Corrigan had alluded to the fact that there was “internal strife” within the department, but had predicted that my experience as a department head and dean would make this a trifling obstacle to success. Well, it wasn’t. My time as a fireman, counteracting the havoc brought about by some skilled academic arsonists, consumed much of the moments I had set aside for scholarly activities. I found that the ethics of one member of my department rarely interfered with his quest for professional aggrandizement. Loud warning signs came early. He had published a scholarly article and a colleague in Europe had republished whole paragraphs of it, accompanied by corresponding passages of his own, earlier published article. The excerpts were identical or nearly so. As another indicator of his character, my colleague had broken library rules. As department head I should have taken additional action beyond reprimanding him. My words apparently didn’t upset him greatly.

  I was dissatisfied with my position, and my personal life also lacked the complete fulfillment that I had hoped for. To be sure, I approached my post-divorce relationships with more caution than I had exercised in my first marriage. During the next few years, I dated several women my age, all of them talented, with admirable professional aspirations. One of them became more than a conventional date. Dorothy, also divorced, and a former graduate student and successful Ph.D. candidate of mine at the University of Cincinnati, came to neighboring Washington after landing a job with the National Endowment for the Humanities. We went to the theater together, never missing a performance at the Arena Theater in Washington; collaborated on a scholarly article; shared trips to conventions; and moved in together. This might have lasted. Then came a flattering but portentous telephone call: an offer to me from Thomas N. Bonner, the incoming president at Wayne State University in Detroit, to become his senior vice president.

  Dorothy and I sat down one evening to ponder options. We considered a joint relocation to Detroit, with Dorothy relinquishing her job with NEH, or we could both stay in Washington, where I might escape the civil war in my department, but that also meant turning down the chance for a major advancement. Two mature adults—Dorothy was one year older than I—addressed a decision at a crossroad of our lives. But the very fact that we could discuss our dilemma so dispassionately told us that whatever existed between us was simply not enough to sustain a long-term commitment. Passion, to be sure, was not lacking in our relationship. But after we returned from a party one evening, she repeated a remark she had overheard. We were tagged as “the odd couple.” And she agreed with that characterization. To me she typified the restrained, self-controlled Brit. She saw me as the extroverted, spontaneous continental.

  Also, a remark she once made had stuck with me. I had repeated a question posed by a close friend: “Could you two ever contemplate marrying and, even at this later age, starting a family?”

  She reacted rather brusquely: “I have a family.” That reinforced my perception that her highest priorities were clearly the daughter and son she had from her previous marriage. I rarely met them—and never became part of what she called “the inner circle.” We parted as friends, and I went to Wayne State and stayed there for twenty-five years.

  Teaching and administrating at Wayne State bred different problems than I had encountered during my halcyon years at Cincinnati. The differences are easy to point out: Like virtually every municipal or state university, Cincinnati had financial problems. But then, at an opportune moment, a friend of the university would step in and during a fund drive would surpass everyone’s expectations by lifting the university out of the pit of deficits. Money in Detroit was harder to come by. Not that the alumni at Wayne did not have an equal aggregate of postgraduate success stories, but people tended to be far more cautious in making large-scale contributions. Another difference: in Cincinnati, a college or a professor might encounter opposition from the board of directors, but most of the time the objecting board member would be impelled by his conservative convictions, reinforced by his belief that Cincinnati and its university had attained a golden age and that any large-scale innovation would cast us down from that pinnacle. Frankly I had no great quarrel with that comfortable attitude. I was still recuperating from the fractiousness at Maryland. In short, a sort of golden atmosphere hovered over the campus, and one event that happened at UC probably could not have happened at Wayne State.

  University of Cincinnati had a very prestigious music department. When it appeared that the department’s strength and growth would stretch the seams of its facilities, the dean of the College of Music approached two of its most generous patrons. Patricia and J. Ralph Corbett had come into sums of money beyond avarice. Ralph’s company had invented a new type of doorbell, Nutone, which played popular tunes upon being activated. It sold millions. So Pat and Ralph Corbett, who became my friends during my time in Cincinnati, were petitioned to help with the needed expansion of the music department. They had a better, more ambitious idea. “Why don’t we simply raze the old buildings and put up a new music campus?” Exactly that happened. I was there as graduate dean for Graduate Studies and Research when the new campus was inaugurated. In preparation for that event, Ralph’s generosity climbed to yet another dizzying height. “Why not have a rarely performed opera be the touchstone of the inauguration and draw on top talents?” he asked. He managed to import the entire cast, plus costumes, sets, and other niceties from that season’s showing of Prince Igor by the New York City Opera. Every luxury hotel in town soon resounded with the voices of the leading performers. I can still hear the baritone belting out “Oh, give me back—Oh, give me back my freedom” during a lunchtime visit to the Vernon Manor Hotel. I was charged with escorting the charismatic star and subsequent director of the New York City Opera, Beverly Sills. As a symbol of our matchless collaboration, Diva Sills and I shared an oversized, quickly devoured salami sandwich en route from the Vernon Manor for a dress rehearsal on campus.

  The Music Department at Wayne State was no less blessed with talent and outstanding instructors. But when we found that it also needed expanded facilities, the solution was to overhaul Old Main, the oldest building on campus. It was imaginatively done and, voila, the Music Department had a new home, if nothing as spectacular as the brainchild of Mr. and Mrs. Corbett.

  When I assumed my duties at Wayne State, I knew from the start that the combination of teaching and administering would not be my duty from here to eternity—or retirement. As many others have learned to their chagrin, professional skills in a specialized discipline can atrophy very quickly. Teaching one course each semester turned into my inviolate routine; burning the midnight oil becam
e my guard against professional obsolescence.

  I will not dwell overly long on my work as provost. Some of the problems that faced an administrator at Wayne were endemic to its location and mission then, and, to some extent, now. Detroit is divided by the so-called 8 Mile Corridor. To the north the population is largely white, to the south largely black. Often resources are unequally divided, so that schools and supportive institutions in the black sectors receive less and the students are disadvantaged. As a result, many undergraduates from the poorer neighborhoods are inadequately prepared for a college career, and hence do not finish their education or take inordinately long, dropping-in and out until they have acquired a degree or certificate.

  Wrong inferences are often drawn from the disparity in precollege education. As a language professor of fifty years, I can say with conviction that there is no difference in mental endowment because of race or ethnic background. Damn the so-called bell curve! I have seen cases where a certain shyness holds back an American student when talking or writing in his native English. But then a miracle occurs: the same American student finds that acquiring a new language becomes a liberating launching pad toward speaking without inhibitions.

  My three years as provost will not go down as a hallmark in academic leadership. Yet I look back on them because they gave me the opportunity, when the right moment came along, to become administratively creative. Those memories I cherish.

  First of all, there was a chance to solve a controversy among a segment of the African American population who contributed a significant tributary to our student enrollment. At the end of one academic year, The African American Lawyers Association of Michigan, called The Wolverine Society, protested that a much higher percentage of African American law students were terminated by the law school faculty after their first year. The faculty explained that the gateway to a law degree was a course in legal writing. Only those students who passed that course were admitted to further study. And the final examination in legal writing, the professors argued, was standardized, and submitted pseudonymously. Hence the grades were arrived at completely objectively. The Wolverine Society responded that due to the current university practice, they could foresee a shortage of black lawyers in Michigan and beyond, much to the disadvantage of African American citizens who would be deprived of getting legal assistance from an attorney of a similar background.

  The two positions appeared to be irreconcilable, neither side willing to desert its point of view. Finally a solution occurred to me. To be sure the law faculty had balked at the idea of reexamining students who had failed the first time, but in collaboration with the dean of our Graduate School I proposed a variation short of an immediate reexamination. What would the law faculty say if we did not terminate the students who had failed the legal language examination, but instead transferred them to the Graduate School with a one-year tuition-free enrollment into our Advanced Writing Program? Much to my relief, especially after some sharp exchanges on the floor of faculty meetings, both sides found this to be a reasonable compromise. At the end of the year, several of the discontinued African American students presented themselves for a re-examination in legal writing. More than half of them, about six in number, then passed that requirement, and, for all I know, are now active attorneys in Michigan.

  The other memorable mark I left as provost was not entirely original. At the University of Cincinnati there existed a society of outstanding scholars of all disciplines, the Graduate School Fellows. No similar recognition existed at Wayne State when I became provost. I looked at the vitae of notable scholars, writers, and artists at my new university. Colleagues of great merit, recognized nationally and internationally, graced our faculty. No further incentive was needed. In the spring of that year, I approached President Thomas N. Bonner during the first year of his presidency with the idea for an academy. Its main purpose was to raise the scholastic prestige of the university by bringing the most prominent academic experts to campus under its aegis and to create a community of scholars from among its most celebrated researchers. The Academy of Scholars, as the organization was ultimately called, was founded in 1979 with the enthusiastic approval of Wayne State’s faculty, administration, and board of governors.

  During its entire history, the Academy of Scholars has lived up to its charter. The drafters of the charter accorded equal acknowledgement to distinguished scholarship and creative achievement. As the highest recognition the university can bestow, the Academy was instructed to choose for membership “the most productive and widely recognized” members of Wayne State University. It defined the functions of the Academy as promoting and recognizing creative achievement in scholarship and providing incentives. The Academy would also serve to attract young scholars of outstanding promise by bringing to the university distinguished experts from other institutions, sponsoring meetings, stimulating interdisciplinary intellectual activity, and promoting intellectual interchanges at all levels.

  It also envisioned that the Academy, as a whole or through a committee, would advise the university in intellectual and artistic concerns, act as a scholarly resource, and sponsor lectures by distinguished speakers from the WSU campus and beyond. The charter outlined the internal method of nominating, electing, and inducting new members and the procedure for electing its president. It stipulated that election was for life. The most gratifying development in the Academy’s history has been the constant addition of further enterprises by its successive presidents.

  President Bonner’s endorsement had been immediate, and after his retirement as president he was to become one of the chief benefactors of the Wayne State Academy. He established a book prize in his name and charged me with the implementation of his idea. The biennial Bonner Award, given to the best treatise of the combined benefits of scholarship in humanities and the natural sciences, was established in his honor in 2000.

  It was also my sad duty to be the main speaker at a Wayne State memorial service after his death in 2003. I praised both his scholarly accomplishments and his administrative leadership. But I think he would like to be remembered most for his character. This is what I said:

  Tom never surrendered his principles. At WSU he faced financial crises matching those of today. But, he was buoyed in all his struggles by an unquenchable faith in the validity of American democratic education, born of his own background. All that he had achieved and would achieve, including a nomination for the National Book Award, came mostly by dint of his own efforts. Hence he wanted each American, no matter what his or her background, to have an equal chance. Wherever he could exert his influence, he promulgated a fair, unbiased admissions policy.

  Finally, in my role as provost, I had a chance to stimulate cooperative learning experiences between our colleges within the university. I have always felt that C. P. Snow’s distinction between the humanities and the sciences represents a false dichotomy. In Snow’s Read Lecture of 1959, he argued that a precipice had opened between the natural sciences and the humanities.

  There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues. I mean that literally. I have had, of course, intimate friends among both scientists and writers. It was through living among these groups and much more, I think, through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I became occupied with the problem of what I christened in my mind as the “two cultures.” For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral, and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

  At times in my work I was able to push through the walls that separated the two disciplines and create departments that could further the philosophy and practices of both. In retrospect, both the University of Cinci
nnati and Wayne State, each in its own way, proved to be the most rewarding chapters in my teaching career. In addition, Cincinnati provided me with some of the closest friendships of my life and Wayne State with a wonderful wife. As to the former, my initial suggestion of converting an existing vacancy into a continuous guest professorship greatly contributed to the well-being and harmony of our department and provided me with a new friend, Heinz Starkulla, Senior. Heinz became a close friend on and off campus until his death in 2005.

  As to Heinz’ off-campus activities he had a gift to move easily into the higher echelons of well-endowed social and financial classes. He befriended Mr. Foster Stearns, the owner of a well-known mattress company and Stearns’s generous gifts to the department enabled us to promote departmental events that aroused the jealousies of our other language departments.

  Also, his classes were so stimulating and good clean fun that students enrolled in every one of his course offerings. One of my students excused himself from a meeting by saying, “I am in Dr. Starkulla’s class and I don’t dare to show up tomorrow without being familiar with every German phrase he has assigned for his conversation class.”

  And his charisma didn’t stop there. Heinz Jr. was of high school age when he accompanied his mother and father to Cincinnati, where he attended a magnet school, one of the most demanding in Cincinnati. He was most appreciative of that opportunity. After his father died he slowly grew into his father’s role in relationship to me. We became friends. Even today the friendship and collegiality continue. He is also a communications expert at the University of Munich. When I was a guest there the two departments that had engaged me realized they had both signed me up for a full program for communications and Germanistics. When the departments realized they couldn’t do that even to a sturdy character like me, they offered to ask Heinz to join me in all my responsibilities of that year. I accepted with alacrity. The fun of it became apparent in the first week of that hectic academic year. We rarely agreed on anything, but our students fell in love with the sparkling debates that we spread out before them.