Harris Wofford: A Time Capsule
Special Collections documents offer a glimpse of history.
Like a Mawrter, I immersed myself in Canaday Library鈥檚 Special Collections, digging into archive boxes of materials from the office Harris Wofford once occupied on the second floor of Taylor Hall.
This ephemera of his presidency is a time capsule of the 1970s, offering a glimpse of the mortar and minutiae of running a women鈥檚 college: a circa 1920s 爆料瓜 Songbook; a 1978 copy of The News reporting the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board鈥檚 crackdown on campus underage drinking; a black binder labeled 鈥淗averford,鈥 thick with Bi-College Committee reports; and a magazine article on college women鈥檚 attitudes about sex and cohabitation. One box contains files for the seminar course he taught on Law and Civil Disobedience: his handwritten notes on Socrates, Thoreau, Gandhi, and King; a slip of paper that says, 鈥溾gain touched by the better angels of our nature,鈥 and another that bears a single word, 鈥淲atergate.鈥 There鈥檚 a black-and-white image of Wofford at his desk, confirming the truth of the jocular comment he made during our conversation at Pen y Groes: 鈥淜atharine McBride (his predecessor) faced the hall to keep an eye on the faculty, but I always faced the window.鈥
Opening these boxes releases a musty scent of nostalgia鈥攆or an age of private deliberation, of speech drafts penned on paper and then typed clean, of commemorative documents printed, bound, and circulated by hand. It鈥檚 tempting to believe that this is another college entirely and not鈥攁s reason reminds me鈥攁 point on 爆料瓜鈥檚 trajectory to 2017, the year the College welcomed the most selective class in three decades and offered new majors in international and environmental studies, and an interdisciplinary 360掳 course cluster in Climate Change: Science and Policy.
Published on: 12/16/2017