University Archives, San Diego State University Library

San Diego State in 1948. In 1944 the enrollment was 2000; with the return of the war veterans in 1946, it was 5000.

It was the New Year, 1944, in a small liberal arts college, isolated in Iowa. I had been married for three weeks, but except for the upbeat mood engendered by this beautiful event, feeling miserably stranded within those ivied walls, where most, of the male students had been drafted for combat in the Pacific theater, and I was narrowly rejected as “4-F.” Suddenly I was delivered the following telegram:

San Diego State, 1935. “We only have about one college in San Diego — little better than a teacher’s college really.”

San Diego Historical Society

YOUR NAME MENTIONED AS PROMISING CANDIDATE FOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DIVISION OF WAR RESEARCH, SAN DIEGO. ORIGINAL FUNCTION TO ASSIST NAVY FILING CLASSIFIED MATERIAL. WOULD APPRECIATE OPPORTUNITY INTRODUCE YOU TO DIRECTORS AND CONSIDER PROSPECTS.

AIRFARE MET.

Norman Johnson (Personnel Director)

Quadrangle and bell tower, c. 1955. I was strolling down the cloister which bordered the campus quadrangle when I heard a familiar voice. It was the president.

University Archives, San Diego State University Library

I had never heard of this organization and didn’t know what this was all about, but I took the plane at once and, to my elation and dismay, was forthwith hired at a rank two notches above my academic rating at the college where I was feeling so useless.

Unfortunately, to recount why and how this happened, as with so many “How-I-Came-to-California” yarns, will be almost certain to forfeit trust in my veracity and thus in the rest of my story. Nevertheless, it is the unsober truth and might make a rather interesting symbol of my adopted land (I was a recently naturalized Britisher) at that point in its surging history.

Malcolm Love was a lovely guy, who evidently followed the Confucian maxim of ruling without ruling.

University Archives, San Diego State University Library

The personnel director in question was at a cocktail party at Camp Callan, where he got into conversation with a man to whom, years earlier in graduate school, I had chanced to introduce the blind date who became his wife. Apparently the conversation went something like this:

Walter Hepner got himself saddled with the sobriquet “Hepner’s Folly” by buying up a lot of land around the college canyons.

University Archives, San Diego State University Library

“Too bad you’re in the army. We sure could use you on Point Loma to file the A/S [antisubmarine] documentation.”

“Now you tell me,” says my friend, and then (God bless him), “but failing me I know just your man.”

“That right?”

“Fellow teaching English in Iowa.”

Ted Block in the English department taught Chaucer and Milton, an impressive spread.

“English! That’s not so good. We’re looking for a scientist who will understand how pings find U-boats through the thermal structure of the ocean.”

“Well, he’s a versatile type. [This not markedly veracious.] I really think he’d fit.”

There were some more grumbles about my occupation, but in the spirit of the party my name and address was written, with “Eng” as shorthand for my profession, before proceeding to further martinis. The next morning, feeling the effects, no doubt, our personnel director pulled out that scrap of paper from his pocket and said (you guessed it), “My God, I found me an engineer!” There was a war on. Superfluous foot-dragging was frowned on from above. The telegram went out.

By the time that the war effort had no further use for us, I had taken more than a passing fancy to San Diego. I knew that here was where I would like to teach but was informed by an academic type on the enormous staff that masterminded the sinking of German submarines, “We only have about one college in San Diego — little better than a teacher’s college really. I can’t imagine an Oxford man wanting to teach there. ” Nevertheless, I promptly borrowed a car and drove out to the campus. First I poked about in the college library, which I suppose now is going up a million books but which at the time contained — well, a lot fewer. But in my field, that little library wasn’t at all bad, and I have found that a college is about as good as its library. Taking unction from the stories of how Ronald Coleman and David Niven marched up, sight unseen, to Hollywood producers with a “Here I am, I have come,” I marched up to the president’s office and knocked on the door.

The president was Walter Hepner, a small, brisk, efficient man with no pretentions to scholarship, who was facing a sudden tripling of his enrollment with the impending demobilization. Without further ado, I introduced myself, stating my credentials and my ambition to teach in his English department as an associate professor. “Well, that would be your rank, of course,” said he, and then, giving me the steady stare with which executives size up a likely prospect, “What is your principal interest. Dr. Theobald?”

I said, “Poetry and religion, in that order.”

I have since thought that, had I been sitting in the president’s seat, I would at this point have terminated the interview with a polite remark and the firm decision not to hire me — on the ground that I was probably a hot-eyed Evangelical of some sort, “with a right to his views,” but not a very promising vehicle of great poetry. Instead, he picked up his desk phone and asked his secretary to dial the current chairman of the English department, who not having yet secured his doctorate, was administering the department at a lower rank than the one to which I had announced myself as aspiring.

“I have a man here,” he said, “who is interested in poetry. Don’t we already have a man interested in poetry?” I didn’t, of course, hear the answer to this staggering question. The next thing I knew, I was being advised to visit the professor to whom the president had addressed it. I must have been as good as hired, for when I reached the professor’s house, it was to be slapped on the back and told, “I want you to understand that this is no bush league!” I thought quickly, “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, San Diego State — major league. ”

Thinking back on my superior smile, I say, “What a snob!” Yet that would be the dead opposite of how I really felt about my appointment. Doubtless for most of the wrong reasons, from the very first I loved the place.

Let it be an emblem of the growth of our cities that in those days I would make the twelve and a half miles to class (portal to portal, that is, from our Linda Vista front door to the prof’s rostrum) punctually in fifteen minutes, although the Mission Valley road, which followed the old riverbed through sleepy farmland, had only one lane each way; and now that it has four or five, I would have to allow twice that time, especially if I wished to avoid another citation.

And how was the latest cloister in which I was to instruct the rising generation in completing their sentence fragments and seek, in the upper division, to instill the heady stuff of English poetry ? Well, it must have been the sunniest, sprightliest cloister in the world of learning. The immense sense of freedom, compared with everything I had known, was lucent, pervasive, and centrifugal. To begin with, few students were in residence. They converged and distributed themselves from too far afield every day to build the sort of “traditions” which for me tended to become so oppressive at the liberal arts colleges with which I had been associated. Decisive for any ethos here prevailing were newness, size of enrollment, rapidity of growth, liberated mixture of the sexes, and in general, absence of reverential idols of the tribe. There was little or no airless breath of authority down our necks or pressure to promote college spirit, or even expectation to hold us to a curriculum, though always among the students there was somewhere to be found an appetite for whatever splendor of books our own enthusiasm could impart. Whatever college spirit may have been kindled by sport one might term “before and after Coryell.” Fraternities and sororities existed, but unobtrusively and deprived of the sort of humiliating initiation ceremonies with which I had been familiarized at Amherst College.

For the college as a whole, a sense of status was growing, all right, but it rarely made itself heard and, if and when it did, would be more likely to find expression in a casual mention that our labs were better than at USC, and “When do you suppose we are going to be called the university we are?” Strange paradox that seven years of Oxford should have left me with so little relish for the shadow of antiquity and so much for the exhilaration of a future whose richest oriels were the windowless arches of the sky.

One felt it as a hairy venture that in the first place they put the college down among those canyons at all, to interrupt the dialogue of meadowlarks; and a bonus that they plastered its walls gleaming white and crowned its roofs with glowing Spanish tile and installed the tintinnabulary mission bells in the library tower. When I joined the college, the steepest canyon resounded with the frogs’ brek-ek-ekokoax that Aristophanes’ public thought the most musical of sounds, as Chaucer thought cockcrow was. The campus was swollen with unborn life. When I entered my classrooms, this pregnancy knocked and waved like the perfume of orange blossom around their groves in May.

The college was being built about my ears. Consider that the year before my appointment the enrollment numbered 2000, and that with the return of the war veterans in 1946, it was 5000. The faculty more than doubled that year, the English department itself going from a complement of nine to twenty-one, so that in the frenzy of hiring they became overextended and had to let some go at the end of the year, including one distinguished lady whom they subsequently hired back to show there was no ill feeling.

For quite a while the existing facilities were inadequate to accommodate the enrollments that elected our classes, and the overflow was perforce crowded into Quonset huts. For some reason I derived the greatest t joy from these makeshift classrooms. There was a fixed understanding with my students that what we were doing could survive the competing racket of either the bulldozers or the riveters, but that when they both came together, the class would be held outside on the grass. I would secretly hanker for this double condition, even though I did not deceive myself that I would then hold their attention against the passing girls or boys or even the sky. But I remember it wasn’t at all a bad class, half of them lingering after the end of the period, and one of them asleep in the clover, with her skirts seriously deranged but deftly adjusted by a friend.

Another time I fell into disgrace with a colleague whose class met on the other side of the exiguous partition that separated the two classrooms in the same Quonset hut. My colleague was a very young instructor, newly appointed, who apparently liked to conduct his class in such a hubbub that we couldn’t get on with ours. One of my students had been in the Navy, knew the Morse code, and hammered on the wall at my suggestion: Q-U-I-E-T, and then the same message twice again. It worked, but as I say, made me less popular with the colleague, till I apologized and he confessed that he was having difficulty with his students, who themselves, I am sure, preferred a more orderly procedure. (I’m afraid I make them seem more like high school than college students, and perhaps a greater number than in the East bore this resemblance, though it has been my observation that the quotient of real stars remains pretty steady, whether it is Oxford or Amherst or San Diego State.)

My “office” too, after the first year and for some years thereafter, was nothing but one of ten desks, staggered in two rows of five in a larger Quonset hut, where I believe that some of us were “conferred with” by students in distinctly greater numbers than when we came to have an office to ourselves. If a wasp wandered in from outside, someone bothered by it would chase it out or swat it, but the sempiternal summer would still wander in.

Privacy, of course, there never was. Once when I was chairman of the department and already raised to full professor’s rank (which unaccountably happened after only three years), I provoked the displeasure of the professor who was the department lush (alas! long since lurched from among us) and at the same time the most popular lecturer by far. In assigning periods when our courses should be held, it had seemed to me that I should attempt to provide for better-balanced enrollments by assigning this Shakespeare section to a less popular period, and the rival section of a graver professor to a period with an a priori assurance of brisker trade. It was lucky that one day when I walked in with the wasps, our hut was empty except for one other colleague and one student, for I was attacked by the tiddly Shakespeare professor, both fists swinging. I got my briefcase up between us and did some fast footwork, whilst I am sorry to say I was laughing like a fool. By the time that the divisional chairman had been alerted to the violence resulting from my well-intentioned programing and had reached our “office” to take whatever policy action seemed to be called for, my frazzled colleague had recovered from his tantrum and was ensorceling his class in another part of the campus.

But why would a scene so ludicrously un-Oxonian intrigue me enough to bring it up at this distance? Partly, perhaps, because as chairman, my small share of status being by now more than all I wanted, if any personal dignity was imperiled, it certainly wasn’t the sort that mattered to me. I really cared only about the teaching, and to that I’m sure I sacrificed too much, including the “productive scholarship” which at most colleges gives rise to “publish or perish,” but which here was subordinated to “busy work,” especially lecturing or performing for the town and sitting on committees — this last an area in which I should be congratulated on my artful dodging. Not counting “Lectures and Assemblies” (my self-chosen challenge and cross), only once do I recall having failed to take successful avoiding action when tapped for committee work. This was when I yielded with what must have been transparent reluctance to hollow pleas that “the college needed me” on the curriculum committee. What a farce! A standard procedure was for departments to propose new courses, not because these courses were justified by the advance of any theory of education that I recollect, but in order to provide a pretext for promoting additional hiring and hence enhanced strength of “personnel” in departments predictably even more competitive than rival business magnates scrambling for contracts. Well, just in case it might be supposed that there existed a thoughtful, operative conception of educational ends and means residing in any controlling authority at San Diego State, such as either of the two college presidents under whom I served there, I should hasten to dispel this illusion. To a lesser degree only than their successors, those two presidents were themselves the servants or instruments of the budget-disbursing characters in Sacramento. This budget was never subject to ideas, in anything resembling the Platonic sense, but only to the best compromised accommodation to the ever-swelling student enrollment, with a view to mollifying the minimum demands of the community. It was strictly the lower pragmatism that activated our “Ed.”

The first of my two presidents, the one who had grabbed the telephone to inquire of the English department chairman if we didn’t “already have a man interested in poetry,” came to us from having been the secondary school inspector. He was selected for his administrative ability and confessed only to uneasiness with the world of academes, a discomfort with which, as a poet, I found it easy to sympathize. At faculty meetings he would administer avuncular homilies on absence from our offices during the period we were expected to assign for conferring with our students (“Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that is not the sort of thing your children would expect of you”). He was very much a “straight shooter” who took sides against his own politically conservative instincts by persistently refusing to fire a member of the faculty for whose blood the town patriots were thirsting, because that member was unwilling to sign the absurd “loyalty oath” required of us during that McCarthy era and in fact had raised suspicions of being (whisper it not in Gath) a card-carrying Communist, whose periodic trips to the USSR were quite possibly funded by the party.

My second president, Malcolm Love, must be given the credit for the only occasion during the twenty-four years I taught at this college when a president attempted to address the student body, and the odds are at least even that this was by my provocation. This president and I were entitled to a better basis of exchange than our previous encounter, which had been occasioned by my frustrated attempt to restore the position of a brilliant colleague who had run afoul of the head of his own department, music. This colleague was a pianist, composer, and musicologist, with a bit of glitter for the students. He was certainly one of the most articulate and engaging members of the faculty. The head of the department in question had probably been given cause to take umbrage at my friend’s sharp wit and inclination to lead. My own opinion of the disgruntled chairman’s abilities may well have been more obscured than illumined by his contribution to an interdepartmental course which I had helped to set up, called Aesthetics 138. This was to be conducted as a triangular symposium by the chairmen of the English, art, and music departments. The intention of this colloquium was to draw a large group of students together into a consideration of the principles which underlie all three arts; but the course soon became more two-way than three, for whilst the fine painter and teacher who chaired the art department was stimulating enough with his “chalk talks’’ and our dialogue for the class to overhear, the third member who was to have joined the symposium and whose instrument was the trumpet, on the rare occasions when he showed up, confined himself to expositions of the embouchure, which failed to open up, and I mean the discussions then failed.

I feel urged to go into the affair of the music department a little, not just because I have pretended to be a music critic, or even because it is a fair exhibit of the prevalent departmental frictions in our colleges (over which we draw curtains), but also, and chiefly, because it happens to involve two issues about which I still feel keenly: first, the enhancing of intellectual and spiritual leadership by our college presidents; and second, the seizing of every opportunity for cultural cross-fertilization, as contrasted with the pre-emptive compartmentalization of our disciplines. The latter ideal I may have been first to worry at so, not only by occasionally exchanging classes with cooperative colleagues in my own department, but also within the Romance languages department, and even once by getting into the raised eyebrows department with a talk on “Physics and Poetry’’ in the Chem Lab! It is an ideal which leads directly to my third cup of tea: the desirability, to put it mildly, of voices being heard on the campus of eminent men and women from the great world outside. But let this last go for a moment.

When my gifted friend was to be let go, I first took up the matter with the faculty grievance committee, the chairman of which was also something of a friend, to be informed by him, however, that this bright boy who was to be released had “queered his own pitch,’’ as they say in cricket, by allowing himself to include in a letter of apology this unfortunate sentence: “I have been at fault, but face it, the wrong man is in charge of the music department! ” This took me, through the aggrieved professor himself (useless, of course, but I gave it the old college try), to an appointment with the president, who being new to the place, felt understandably something less than secure, but who disappointed me with a model exhibition of the steel hand in the velvet glove. Aside from mentioning in a small, flat voice that, unlike the department chairman, my friend lacked tenure, he remained very silent, allowing me to step out of line with the remark that if we jerked this young man it would be a pity, since he was plainly one of our all-too-few stars, whilst his boss would be unlikely to last another two years anyway. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been so correct.

So Malcolm Love had been given no reason to feel responsive when, a while later, I wrote him a letter suggesting, in a style as low-key as possible, that the student body would appreciate hearing in convocation from their president, and that an occasional gesture of manifest inspiration from one as highly respected as himself might make a difference to the spirit of the campus. A week after I mailed the letter, I was witness to a rather poignant interlude. I was strolling down the cloister which bordered the campus quadrangle when I heard a familiar voice. It was the president, speaking with the slight lisp which he mistook for an impediment, into a mike which had been hooked up in the center of the quad. He was addressing the students earnestly, modestly as always, somewhat evasively; but the event not having been announced, and he lacking the sort of public force which I have come to associate with hollow executive types, only a miserable smattering of students were pausing briefly to listen before proceeding about their own affairs — probably to their next class. If this had indeed been the sad outcome of my letter, I had forgotten all about it when I received a handwritten answer from the president, thanking me for “the spirit of my letter” and saying that he had never been able to feel that it belonged to his powers to provide inspiration to the student body.

This was a distinctly different president from Hepner, who got himself saddled with the sobriquet “Hepner’s Folly” by buying up a lot of land around the college canyons at a time when he had the vision to be quixotic about what we might become. The enrollment having grown by a thousand, give or take, every year since I was hired, until now, when the plant has put a stop to expansion, the present result is that students jostle each other on the sidewalks and in the more populous classes, whilst to visit “the commons” at almost any time of the day is to risk a serious manic condition from the mingled din of “rapping” and whatever rock-and-roll ensemble is having its fun. It’s hard for the old affections to endure; and although these for me have never extended to sectarianism in any of its forms, I have been made wistful by the campus’s small chapel, in addition to its cathedral , where at any time, on the analogy of the United Nations meditation room, a few individuals are offered an opportunity for silence, l am convinced that this makes quite a difference for the quietness on their campus.

Ah, opportunity! Love was a lovely guy, who evidently followed the Confucian maxim of ruling without ruling, but. . . oh, well, I should talk. Had I been more manipulative with opportunity myself, I might have turned my membership of that curriculum committee to some use, instead of which their meetings were to me occasions of acute frustration. These meetings were held at 2:00 p.m., or soon after lunch, when because I seldom retire before 2:00 a.m., I am very apt to be immoderately sleepy if bored. To show what a keen committee member I was, I shall recall the occasion when, having dozed off, I suddenly woke to find it difficult to believe what I thought I was hearing. What seemed to be under discussion was the addition, not of a new course, but of a separate department as an extension of the department of business management, to wit, a department of real estate salesmanship! If I had been less indecently anxious to vindicate my absent alertness, I would have kept still; but whatever philosophy of education I was blessed with was also being trodden on, and I heard myself, with heavy-footed irony and all the solemnity I could muster, proposing the further addition of a department of car salesmanship. I think I may have hoped to antagonize somebody but only succeeded in being antagonized, as I walked out of the meeting in a smoldering mood because my faintly fatuous sally was greeted with friendly, tolerant laughter. “Just another licensed jester, lightening the occasion with a bit of harmless fun.”

Of my own courses, including those which might have got off the ground, better say nothing, unless of the creative writing, especially at the graduate level, now a considerable empire. That, if I say so, I did see off from ground zero and in fact chaired the first of our master’s candidates in it. I am still bemused that one day, less from vanity than avoidance of torpor, I asked a student who had taken four of my courses (poor fellow), had safely graduated, and become a friend, “Which did you think went best?” He stared at me as if wondering what could be the matter with me, before replying, “Well, but the 260, of course.” This was the creative writing seminar, where it never seemed to me that I did any teaching at all, seldom could claim an assist in getting anyone published, and mostly let them teach each other by the “Devil’s Advocate” method, according to which the first student to criticize a story or poem (the course never confined itself to a genre) would get around the wincing sensitivity we all feel about what we write by the anticipated obligation to be negative or else decline, till the next or the next, of whom some reservation was also first expected. This way we got around the feebly automatic, “I think that was good”; and however sour that first minus, others could and did almost invariably step in to heal the wounds. Or I suppose I would tend to redress the balance. This way we learned to estimate as well as make.

As regards subject matter and treatment, I had no difficulty in describing myself as “shock-proof,” with no holds barred on what was submitted, only stipulating that nothing would be read aloud which might legitimately give offense. In this connection I remember once when the laugh was on me. It was after the first meeting of the class, when students were milling around my desk with questions about what they might write, etc., and me no doubt milking the process, that I noticed a small, middle-age, distinctly homely lady hanging back and twice shaking her head when I turned to her, presumably because she was waiting for the crowd to take off. Finally she was the only one left. She looked me in the eye and said, “I wish to write about sex.” I said, “Fine. Any particular aspect of this large subject?” “Oh, every aspect. There is no aspect with which I am unfamiliar.” I hastened to suppress any surprise at this comprehensive claim and just said, “Well, go ahead,” at the same time mentioning the house rules about audio sharing. It turned out to be one time when the material scarcely lent itself to the overt, consisting as it did invariably of very specific and detailed run-downs of dates with sailors picked up at singles bars. The writing was on a steady B-minus level, neither bad nor very interesting. It was rather late in the semester, however, before it transpired that her disclosures had circulated the class, with their written comments added to mine, and that the criticisms which gave evidence of the most exact experience, as well as color, had been written by a young woman who in appearance might have doubled for one of Fra Angelico’s seraphs.

But outside the ups and downs of the teaching itself, vicissitudes which could be pretty harrowing to anyone who feels keenly enough the gap between what he believes he has to say and the manifested longing to hear it, for me the roughest road was accession to the chairmanship. As far as the basic administrative implications were concerned (chairing department meetings, interviewing candidates for positions in the department, assigning courses and class hours, if possible without fraying feelings, etc.), it wasn’t too difficult to camouflage one’s shortcomings and even to pretend not to be bored. Besides, one could schedule one’s own classes, and if there was an unexpectedly heavy freshman influx (as there always was), one could feel oneself at the center of a giant web of power by going home, calling up four or five really bright boys and girls of exceptional personal charm who needed the money, and offering them work as teaching assistants. Imagine such a thing today, when there are likely to be at least twenty bureaucratically approved applicants for every such vacancy!

But it was only when something like a disciplinary function was involved that the chairmanship shoe really pinched. To be instructed, for instance, by the senior members of the department to advise a member about far-too-soft grading, without on the one hand compromising standards, but on the other without having ad hoc knowledge of the particular springs of compassion that may have moved him/her to adjust the grade — this was excruciating. Besides, there had to come the time when rumors circulated widely enough of how that alcoholic darling of the students had not met his classes for a couple of weeks, so that the chairman was expected to do something about it.

The last time I had seen our bewitching maverick was when I gave him a hand over a puddle in one of our rare Californian rainstorms. As he leaned on me he said, “Holding on to the ropes, John.” And now here I was, with vague intentions of keeping his course from becoming unstuck, making my way toward “Fine Arts 7,” with an admitted enrollment considerably above the seating capacity of 200. I found the students waiting, waiting, as ever heretofore, for the appearance of their idol, who did not appear; for it would seem that once they’ve decided in our favor, our worst faults break helpless against their remorseless forgiveness. They sat regarding me, not without signs of resentment, as representing a branch of officialdom intent upon making difficulties for the class, as was quite remote from my intention.

Having introduced myself and somehow contrived to fill in the period and fetch a couple of laughs with gossip about Shakespeare’s London, I inquired as disarmingly as possible about what seemed to be the assignment. This produced a baffled stare, until finally it was allowed that the next play to be treated might be Richard III. “Fine!” I said, “Richard III let it be. Either your professor will be here, or somebody else to pinch hit” (knowing well who this afflicted surrogate would have to be). This is not a particularly easy play to “treat” on short notice; just to get all that York-Lancaster pedigree straightened out is no small chore, and aside from the course which Craig Noel asked me to give downtown as part of what he felt would be needed to get the city interested enough to start summer Shakespeare programs, I had had no official traffic with the Bard. But through the night previous, I went to work on the play and, more than usually loaded with notes, made my way to Fine Arts 7, on purpose a bit late, against the possibility that the right professor might show. As I came within earshot I heard the well-known tones, punctuated by the unmistakable mannerisms and interrupted by gales of affectionate laughter. I had worked so hard on my lecture that I felt entitled to be the understudy who sneaked up to eavesdrop a little in the wings, where I distinguished the following sentence: ‘And I climbed out of my bed of pain to rescue you from that seducer — Theobald!” (Prolonged laughter, as I sneaked off to congratulate myself rather sourly on having threatened that stardom enough to get it back on the wagon — for about three weeks.)

To what green altar of higher learning, then, had I come? To none. Throughout most of the years I taught at San Diego State College (and after 1965, University), years during which the department increased so rapidly to over fifty when I retired in 1969, there were not enough upper-level scholars of note belonging to my department. There was Ted Block (Chaucer and Milton, an impressive spread). There was George Sanderlin (Medieval and Spenser). Both were my friends, and Ted a close one. I often wish we could have had a couple more like the courtly Andy Wright of UCSD, who could tell a wider world what “the Immortal Jane” Austen and Henry Fielding were really like. Only a minute fraction of undergraduates know anything about their teachers’ scholarly attainments, and fewer still give a damn. What “goes” is about sixty percent entertainment, or play to the gallery; twenty percent grading laxity (the “snap”); ten percent personal charm; and three percent (generously) erudition, or knowing more and more about less and less. Meanwhile, a truly wise man, regardless of academic perks, would have to be an uncomfortable accident.

If they dedicated a room to Ted Block when dead (the lounge in the library), they named the new Humanities Building after Jack Adams while he was and is very much alive — as a large strip of the Wessex counties was called “the Hardy country” long before Hardy died, and in both cases rightly so. As a department, much of our cementing and comfortable consorting should be credited to the more than Confucian guidance of Jack as chairman of the humanities division and originally linchpin of the old English department. He is a sparkling Hobbit, with a small, pudgy frame of perennially juvenile mien, who took me out to lunch the first day after I was hired and gave me all the avuncular advice I needed (I would have called it paternal, except that he outspokenly disdained the idea of progeny). He had a curious way of repeating, sotto voce, the last phrase of a sentence and of humming, in a subdued but soaring tremolo, the arias of his favorite operas between sentences. Thus, on the occasion of the lunch, it was, “You taught before in Iowa and Massachussetts? The students won’t work as hard for you here, but if you don’t bother them too much, some of them will get around to doing a bit of work’’ (snatch of an aria from Gounod’s Faust).

In my first year, before the Quonset huts, I shared a small office with Jack and two other members of the English department, and a desk with him. I knew that my inveterate untidiness must have been a sore trial to him, he being something of a “neat freak,” but he was an extremely good sport about it and would be apt to negotiate an exceptionally intricate coloratura passage from The Barber of Seville while deftly subduing and setting to one side my wild mountain of themes in process of being graded.

Later on I shared a fair-size office just with John Monteverde, who taught Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century with a Socratic flair, and had a simple method with his own desk. He would allow the clutter to reach desperate proportions and only then give it a careful shove sideways from a bare island in the middle, so that the older, more hopefully over-the-hill accumulation would fall on the floor to be swept up by the janitor in the morning. His method with student plagiarism — a rather general nuisance — was also in marked contrast to Jack’s. My office mate’s desk and mine were placed against opposite walls, chairs back to back, thus enabling us with modified success to ignore each other’s procedures. A mutual blackout was not always practicable, however, and on one occasion there was forced upon my attention the following exchange between himself and a blonde with self-confident charms:

“Now, Miss___ , I note an indifference to customary acknowledgements in your theme.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “Well, it is customary to footnote your sources, you know.”

(The tinny little voice getting tinnier) “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Miss_, here is a paragraph that you wrote about the play within the play, and here the identical paragraph in Dover Wilson’s Essential Shakespeare. ”

“Well!” (flouncing offended from the room) “You can’t blame a girl for trying!”

This time we simultaneously swiveled our chairs around and gaped at each other with a wild surmise.

Jack’s response to this old abuse, on the other hand, was completely characteristic. On one of the rare occasions when for some reason his avoiding action of me at the desk had broken down, a young man knocked at the door to ask Jack about his theme. I was alerted to the incipient drama by a certain intensified tremolo in the “Depuis longtemps j’habitais” from Charpentier’s Louise, finally drifting into a sort of tremolo rendering, very high, of: “It wasn’t your theme (hmm-hmm-hmmm). It is no longer mine. I sent it back to the Farmer’s Almanac with a C-minus, about right for their style.”

I encountered the same problem, of course, and always proceeded on the assumption that life was too short for me to be sleuthing in the library, let alone perusing The Farmer’s Almanac, for evidence of theft and grand larceny. I recall how once there was an unusually beautiful girl who, although virtually illiterate, and perhaps in part because of her beauty (which, unlike some of our coeds, however, she never swung as a weapon), had survived to appear in my upper-division course, where a term paper was required. She sat next to an older woman who took a maternal interest in her and offered to look over her paper. The girl, whose name was Eve, was properly grateful but quite put out, I was told, when her helpful friend said, “But Eve, you can’t present this paper to Dr. Theobald.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because you didn’t write it.”

And she, in high dudgeon, “I typed it!”

But returning to Jack Adams, as the college grew and he became chairman of the humanities division, with numerous departments under his supervision, his wise forbearance and magical humor remodeled my previous conception of academic authority — perhaps I should say “of authority.” This luminary, for whom the building is named, was in his rotund royalty the subtlest, kindest, fairest, best behaved of all the masters I have known (always excepting President Nielson of Smith College). I would have taken a sizable salary cut to see Jack’s offbeat administrative princedom expand to the presidency, except that he was far too bright to be tempted by any such idea. And anyway, I take it back, for if this had happened he would not have been my immediate treasured boss, tapping his head as we sat smiling across his desk at each other tolerantly and he saying, “These mystics, you know, John, there is always something making them unhappy!” But along with this mutually benevolent indulgence of the difference between the way we looked at things, I would like to claim that between the two of us (he as chairman of humanities, me likewise of the sadly underfunded lectures and assemblies committee) there was one direction in which we moved together — namely, helping to enable fresh winds from the greater world outside to infuse our campus. Thus, while his own literary enthusiasms may not have extended much beyond Henry James and Thomas Mann (not a bad reach at that), still it was he who brought the Nobel Prize winner to San Diego State and himself gave a fine public lecture to introduce Mann’s works to the students. They called a special convocation for the great man, canceled lectures, and held it in the gymnasium, the only indoor auditorium capable of seating everyone; but since his German accent was totally unintelligible, it would have been better if they had distributed a printed version of his lecture, had him appear at the rostrum and say, “Heah ich ahm. Tomas Mann hisself. Tak gut look” and dismissed the throng.

This signal event was followed in succeeding years by visits from such as Martin Luther King (who arrived forty minutes late but nobody was sorry to have waited) and the Jagat Guru Shankaracharya Śaivite Pope of southern India, a tiny man with a vanishing voice, for whom my last-moment emergency was to find a chair without leather (animal skin) and a mike that would make audible his dying message of world peace beyond the first row. Then there was Clement Attlee, successor as prime minister to Churchill, a quietly distinguished statesman, unfairly remembered for Churchill’s description of him as a “sheep in sheep’s clothing,” but remembered on our campus for his reply in the men’s changing room of the same gym to the young member of the English department who had to introduce him and who, nervously groping backstage for interim small talk, apologized for “what must seem to you, sir, rather a strange green room.” “Yes, smell of old socks!” And then, of course, JFK as our commencement speaker, with his cool, unread mastery of facts and figures, in what was, I believe, his last public address before the assassination. And however incongruous it may seem to some in such company, I would want to include the late Alan Watts, for whom my machinations to get him hired on our religious studies department unfortunately tripped on his crushing reply to the question posed by an influential dean, who had the forlorn intention of causing embarrassment in reverse.

Yes, admittedly, as time went on, we were not immune to lapses of the sort which I associate with the dead hand of the past, seeking as always to fasten on this insistently burgeoning institution of ours. But whenever I come back to the question of why I have been happier there than at Oxford or Amherst or Queens (in Ontario) or Trinity (Hartford) or Grinnell, Iowa — all of them more “ancient seats of learning” — always the answer is, not that life in Southern California is so placid and floral, nor my promotion so rapid, nor the students so exuberant, though relatively unaffected by the political fever of the time, nor even that the twin vastnesses of sea and desert are always there to exalt us. Nor, as I huddle up this finish into “a loose adieu,” am I about to undertake an anatomy of happiness. Only say this: The legend on my alma mater’s shield reads Dominus Illuminatio

Mea: The Lord is my light. That was the light of Oxford, a light of the past. What I always felt at San Diego State is the light of the future.