Sweeney: Today it is my pleasure to be interviewing Professor Frank MacDonald of the department of philosophy of the College of William and Mary, who for the period 1938 to 1956 served on the faculty of the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary. Our first question, Professor MacDonald, could you please provide me with some information on your origins, your educational background, and any other careers you might have pursued before coming to the Norfolk Division of William and Mary?

MacDonald: Yes. I'm a native of New Brunswick, Canada. My father was from there, but he migrated to Massachusetts considerably before then, and we spent our summers there. That's how I happened to be born there. They made particular pains to go down there because there was a polio epidemic at the time and it was thought that cold climate was better. I went to public schools in Malden, Massachusetts. I came to William and Mary and did four years there of undergraduate work during the Depression period and then stayed on for another year, working as an in-section instructor in philosophy and helping in the psychology lab and also doing a year of graduate study there. I completed my Master of Arts course requirements and then I looked for a job in various places with a considerable degree of unsuccess, engaging in things like door-to-door collecting for a magazine company and odds and ends and things, trying to get a permanent position, which was pretty difficult. I'd finally lined up a position with McGraw Hill, a publisher, when I had the opportunity to come down to what was then the Norfolk Division of William and Mary. This was made possible, I'm sure, by my former professor, James Wilkinson Miller, who had been chairman of the philosophy department in Williamsburg and subsequently became dean of the College. So

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that's how I got down to Norfolk. As part of my preparation, I spent that summer at Columbia doing some work in sociology, etc., because I had to go beyond the area of philosophy and psychology in the assignment in Norfolk. Anything else that fits into this?

Sweeney: No, I think we can probably go on then.

MacDonald: Okay.

Sweeney: Could you describe the exact circumstances under which you were hired to teach at the College, the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary?

MacDonald: Well, I wasn't on deck here, so I don't know exactly what happened. My predecessor there had been a man named, I think, William Brownley, or Brownlow, Miller, who for some reason or other left William and Mary and then, as I say, they filled the position and apparently the College at Williamsburg was in charge of that. And I gather my name was put into the hat by Professor Miller and this is how I was offered the job. I jumped at the chance because you must remember that in those days one was lucky if he had a job as a busboy, let alone doing something he liked to do.

Sweeney: Two related questions. I wonder what subjects were your responsibility at the beginning of your academic career and if you could give me some idea of the course content of your early psychology and philosophy courses?

MacDonald: Well, this is a somewhat embarrassing question because I had a fantastic arrogance fortified by necessity, I guess, and I came down to Norfolk to cover the field of philosophy, psychology, European history and sociology. I was the only person pretending to teach any of those courses. I was reasonably well qualified in philosophy and psychology. My preparation in history and in sociology was less than could be desired, but everybody had to double in brass, and I think I was a lot of brass in what I did. So I went ahead and tackled it, and consequently I learned a good deal of several subjects. That situation only went on, I think, during a single semester because the history classes were so large, so many enrolled that we had the opportunity to get a man to help out by doing history. So I was relieved of that, I think, during, well, maybe I did the whole works for the year, but, anyway, not more than that; and I had to go on without the responsibility of the history, which was a great load, as you could imagine. The courses we taught were what were then traditional standard introductory courses in all the subjects I taught. In the case of

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the philosophy course, we taught a duplicate of the philosophy course which was then being taught at William and Mary and which is now still being taught here, that is, in general principle and pattern. This is an introduction to the history of philosophy through the historical method involving reading, study, and analysis of classical texts, specifically Plato, Lucretius, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, during the first half, then going on to Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, possibly a more modern person such as William James or John Stuart Mill. This was the basic nature of the course then. The introductory course in psychology was a one-semester course, and I used at that time as a text Woodworth's text in introductory psychology, which was the most widely used and best known college psychology text, and we covered that or attempted to cover it from cover to cover. After the first year or two we started introducing some experimental demonstrations to fortify the reading and eventually develop the psychology laboratory. I might as well say, although you didn't ask me, I'll mention the content of the sociology course and the history. The history was just a standard survey of European history from the fall of Rome to the present or roughly up until the First World War; I think we did this in two semesters. We used a standard large textbook. The sociology course -- I'd done some work at Columbia in sociology and very much liked McKeever's introductory sociology text which, I think, still is one of the classics in the field. And this had a pretty catholic and universal and somewhat philosophical slant. We had a semester course in introductory and then we had a social problems course for a semester in which I shifted from one book to the other, sometimes Harry Elmer Barnes' big volume and other books that were coming out which we tried out, picking about five major social problems and trying to direct students' attention toward an understanding and possible solutions to these problems. So that's about what that started out to be, and I say this is a pretty good picture of what was going on the first few years that I was there. The biggest change that occurred after the first few years was the introduction of a full-dress psychology laboratory on a small scale but augmenting the introductory course by some systematic laboratory study.

Sweeney: I was wondering how you were able to survive on a beginning instructor's salary of $2,000 in 1938 without outside employment to supplement your income?

MacDonald: Well, if you look at what people were paid in those days and the rest of the faculty were paid, I was doing pretty well considering I had no graduate degree at the time and was starting off first thing. I had intended when I got the job to get married the following Christmas, but with this large income of $2,000 a

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year it seemed quite unnecessary to wait. So we got married in haste and came down for our honeymoon to Norfolk. It consisted of a ride from New York on the merchant and miner's liner, or the Eastern steam ship, I forget which, to Norfolk. And we occupied a one-room apartment in Arrelton Court which still exists opposite the yacht club, where we had a view of the river and the club, one room with a bed that came down out of a door, a little bathroom with an adjacent dressing room, and a kitchen, back door onto the fire escape. We were very comfortable there, the only difficulty being that in order to get the bed down at night every piece of furniture in that room had to be in its exact position or there would be no room for the bed to go down. We didn't drive a car. I had a weekly pass on the streetcars, which was available at that time, and would ride down to the college and back or walk, as the case may be. Our food bill was small, and we lived very comfortably on this. I had wanted to be in an academic community where the main aim was to associate with people who had the same interests and inclinations that I had, and the company of my colleagues and the possibility of using the library, the swimming pool and other facilities of the school made me about as happy as I've ever been in my life. And, far from considering myself in poverty, I thought I was comfortably off and very well taken care of.

Sweeney: Do you have any recollections of outstanding faculty members at the college during your early days there?

MacDonald: I certainly do because I don't think that this picture that I'm going to suggest is colored by the shades of retrospect. At the time, I thought that the faculty that I was lucky enough to belong to was about as good a cross section of a top-notch faculty as you could find. And the future history of the members of that faculty whom I knew, I think there were about 14 of us, indicates that I am not far off the mark. It was a faculty I was certainly the weakest and least prepared in the group. I think, I hesitate to classify them in any serial order, but I do think that perhaps the really outstanding member of that faculty was Ernest

W. Gray, who was professor of English and who was subsequently, for a short period, I believe we called it chairman of the faculty, in effect, the dean of the institution in an interim period. He had a Harvard degree and doctorate from Harvard, was an extremely superb teacher, well informed on almost every field and really not just a student's professor but a professor's professor. I thought him and I still think him to be one of the best college teachers I knew. Alas, he died a couple of years ago, but he really was a first-rate person. He went from the Division to head the English department at the University of Toledo, but he could have gone

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almost anywhere he wanted. E. Ruffin Jones, the professor of biology, was an absolutely first-rate man, educated at the University of Virginia, who, when he left the Division, went there to head the department of biology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Perry Y. Jackson, who had been an instructor at Annapolis in chemistry, was, again, really an inspired teacher of chemistry. C. S. Sherwood, who assisted him in chemistry, was an excellent second to this. W. Gerald Akers -- I'm taking a lot of time on this, but you asked for it -- W. Gerald Akers, whose doctorate was from Heidelberg, was a superb teacher of several languages and Norfolk's official interpreter when a foreigner came to town, I think also a person of wide liberal inclinations and activity. Well, I have difficulty now in, let's see, recalling exactly who else. Margaret Holman, who was the professor of women's education, put on a program with very few facilities that was really, in my opinion, a model of a physical education program. And Tommy Scott, who headed the men's physical education, was encumbered with the necessity of coaching several teams and at the same time running the whole department of physical education, and he also did an admirable job. If I were going to start a college with 15 people right now and I could get those 15 people as they were at that time, I don't think I could do better. And I am boasting about this because the proof of the pudding is the fact that our students who had two years with us during the early days got tested elsewhere. We couldn't cover up our mistakes, and they did in practically every case considerably better grades at the schools they transferred to than they had at William and Mary, which suggests that either we had an extremely fine lot or that our teaching was of a fairly decent level. And, indeed, I think that this is much of it. We devoted ourselves primarily to the teaching game. We had no time for anything else, and our teaching was focused upon people in the first two years, whereas the customary thing in a four-year college is to devote your time to your upperclass students and in a graduate school to push the graduate students. All the energies of a first-rate faculty were devoted to the education of students in the first two years of college work. Well, let's see, I'm sure I left somebody out in that early faculty. I haven't mentioned Lewis Webb, but that's because everybody knows Lewis, and Lewis was the same kind of a teacher of physics who was really an inspired teacher who knew how to deal with students, could speak to them. He and Eddie White, now I shouldn't have forgotten Eddie because these two, you see, belonged to the VPI faculty officially, the rest of us William and Mary. Being liberal arts, I thought of the other people first, but Eddie White was an absolutely terrific mathematics and drawing teacher, and A. Lee Smith was not far behind. They really had a

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bunch of people who couldn't be more devoted or more competent and better prepared. That's my view and I would be prepared to verify it with, say, Gerald Akers, who can see the thing objectively as I do. Well, that's a long-winded answer but....

Sweeney: Let's leave number six until we get to number 19, so we can just skip one question and go on to the next. Did you believe that there was an overemphasis on athletics at the college when you arrived?

MacDonald: It's very hard to make statements about this. I believe that there was an overemphasis, yes. The question is to look at what happens in a school in terms of the pressures, the local conditions, and what you've got to do to make it run. We happened to have Foreman Field already when I went there, and this was a P.W.A. project or W.P.A., I forget what the initials were, and in some ways it might have been regarded as a white elephant. It gave us a playing field, but it also gave us a stadium that was asking to be filled up for various events and invited us to go into intercollegiate football. At that time the college was operating, and I believe this is strictly correct, solely on the income from student fees without any subsidy from the general fund. We were allowed to spend as much as we took in fees, and this is an incredible operation at a college this size. I think that there were some, possibly a few contributions, for the support of football. By and large, under those circumstances, some money had to be taken out of that to be used for football and basketball. They didn't take out very much, but I think that most of us on the academic side felt that we could better have sacrificed the attempt to do intercollegiate athletics. But there again, as I look at the picture now, Dean Hodges was balancing or juggling several different considerations constantly when he kept that college going together. He had to keep public interest, patronage, and a certain attempt to draw students in. And so I do not think there was a very serious problem of overemphasis on athletics, certainly not what we think of in these days. The program was too limited for that.

Sweeney: Did you find the students in your early classes receptive and industrious?

MacDonald: Well, I'll be very blunt about this. The standards for admission were not terribly high, as I recall, in those days. And so what happened is that a number of people, I believe, came to the college simply because they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. And if you take a cross section of middle-class people and just take the children in and send them to school without --middle class or lower middle class or some certainly from what we would think of as working class families -- you are not going to get a highly selective group that are peculiarly qualified for or indeed interested in college work. And so I think that when one looked at the grading curve, you saw this, have what you call, I

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believe, positive kurtosis. The upper part of the curve, the high part of the curve, the mode was rather bunched up toward the top and then there was a second mode down below which consisted, I think, of those people who were just there for the ride. I think I can put it this way; I think we had the result that you would get if you took a cross section of well qualified college students, such as you would find at William and Mary at the present time where they have selective admission and then tossed in a second group of people who weren't particularly interested in college but had to be kept off of the streets. And one bump was up at the top and the other bump was down below. Sometimes what happened is that the people that were ill-qualified and disinterested became interested. This was part of the challenge, to teach a class which was a mixture of people who really could do something and were as well qualified as any college group you'd find and at the same time to try to drag along and interest the group which was not there for what I would think of as proper academic reasons. I don't know, have I answered that question?

Sweeney: Sure. I wonder if by any chance any of your students at the college in those days became well known public figures in later years?

MacDonald: Well, I thought of that question, read over this question, and I thought of how to answer it and decided I couldn't cite names. I can think of a few. I've in the last 35 years had so many students that only a few of them have I followed. I am sure that a considerable number of those students did extremely well and are holding positions of some distinction. I don't see many of them. Just off the top of my head, I'm forgetting names these days, but off the top of my head, I immediately think of Forrest Merden who, I believe, was the Dean of Christopher Newport College until he decided to go back into teaching. I may have that wrong; I'm pretty sure. Dr. Thrasher of Norfolk, the psychiatrist, was one of the Thrasher boys, several of whom attended William and Mary. We turned out a lot of good people, more than our percentage of Phi Beta Kappas, at other schools. So without scratching through those records and doing a lot of checking up, I simply couldn't name off a list. I wish I could. I'm convinced that we had some pretty good eagles.

Sweeney: In 1939 you served as the chairman of the Absences Committee. I was wondering if absence from class was a serious problem at the college then?

MacDonald: Well, in those days absence in class was forbidden or restricted, and measures were taken to insure attendance. This was true at the parent college at William and Mary as well as in the Norfolk

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Division. Students were allowed something like four cuts a semester. And those who over-cut were brought in and obliged to give excuses or put on probation or something of this sort. The theory was then, of course, part of the general loco parentis notion that we had some responsibility to these people to control their behavior until they grew up sufficiently to control it themselves. So we did follow a practice, which I think was quite common in many Virginia schools and perhaps elsewhere, of holding to the compulsory attendance line, which we did up here in William and Mary until perhaps a dozen years ago. And we spent perhaps too much time in trying to get the bodies into the classrooms in the hope that mere exposure and presence there would somehow start getting information and activity in the brain.

Sweeney: You coached the fencing team in the early 40's and later on. Did you find much interest in this sport among students? And I was wondering how successful your teams were?

MacDonald: Well, yes, I found considerable interest in it and we had some good teams. I had a men's team and a women's team and we successfully competed in Virginia, in North Carolina, and we even made one or two trips North, going to such places as Rutgers, Stevens Institute in New York, John Hopkins University. We consistently won more bouts than we lost. We had a small team because we had to take the best people and we had a small student body. So we didn't carry anybody who was dead wood and frequently we would have to use the same man fencing two weapons or even three weapons, but we made a very satisfactory result. We beat Virginia on occasion and qualified. Our girls' team on one occasion, as I recall, beat the William and Mary team, which was a very fine team. And we were, I would say, an average, at least, intercollegiate fencing team even though we were only a two-year institution. I'll qualify that -- an average collegiate fencing team for our area. If you moved then as now up to NYU or Columbia, you will find a standard of expertise that puts the rest of the country to shame, pretty much. But we were a good outfit and had very good results, chiefly because the coach at William and Mary, L. Tucker Jones, was a master fencer, and he would come down to help us out, give us lessons, and fortify the interest and training of the team.

Sweeney: Do you remember any other extracurricular activities of that time that you became involved in?

MacDonald: Well, the school was small enough then so that everybody knew everybody else on the faculty very well, and we knew just about

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all of the students by their names. And we had a very informal family situation. So there were a considerable number of activities in which students and faculty got close together. The one I remember the most vividly right now is the Greek Festival which we had. At that time Latin and Greek were considered to be important parts of our curriculum, and I should have mentioned before that Robert McClelland, who was a professor of Latin and Greek, was a mainstay and again one of this excellent team of teachers that I had the good fortune to belong to. And the Greek Festival is something that would be anachronistic at the present time. But what it consisted of was an afternoon of Greek games, athletic competitions, Greek dances and recitations. We did some Latin as well. And these would be enacted in the spring in Foreman Field and drew a small but interested audience. So we had the men's physical education department provide Greek warriors, using garbage can covers for shields, painted suitably, with swords and we had... This Greek Festival was done in other schools and it was simply raising our hats to the tradition of Greek learning and culture. And we had, of course, the girls doing Greek dances, etc., and the entire faculty pitched in. I have in mind a picture of working at a work bench in the back cellar of the main building that was there originally except the leftover high... (Tape stops) . . . working at a back bench that the college maintenance man used. We had one maintenance man; Mr. Gibson was a genius who kept things going, and there was a big vice there. And I remember Lewis Webb and Eddie White and Lee Smith and I making Greek armor out of sheet metal and whacking it out and painting it for the Greek soldiers to wear in the Greek Festival. We had some boys helping us, too, of course. And so this was the kind of a rather, if you choose, corny kind of relationship on a very much informal family basis which everybody entered into, and we had our own fun and made the festival a thing that really delighted us and satisfied all of us. And then, of course, we had the Greek and Latin recitations and, strange as it may seem, this was an amusing and beneficial and heartwarming experience. I guess I could think of some other activities. We had dances in the gym. Our basketball games were peculiarly well attended and enthusiastically attended. And we did some, well, we had a series of, once a year, I think, we had a faculty day in which the faculty, using the stage in the college gym -- wasn't much of a stage -- we put on a series of skits for the benefit of students. And then the students lampooned us by putting skits on about the faculty. So we had that kind of thing. I just cannot think of any other peculiar activities; of course, you have to remember that I'm talking about the days -- later on we went into dramatics on a fairly large scale and opera and performances of this sort.

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Sweeney: You mentioned that the faculty was a close-knit group. I wondered if you might go into that a little bit more? Did this close-knit nature of the faculty extend to off-campus activities and social life?

MacDonald: Well, yes, it did. We were all poor together and consequently we didn't feel it and we all lived in that general neighborhood. I'd come down there originally and lived up at Arrowton [Arrelton]Court across the Lafayette River, but we soon moved down into the Larchmont area where most of the faculty lived in the neighborhood of Bolling Avenue, Brunswick, Buckingham, and so on. And nearly all of us lived down there; our closest friendships at the time were with other faculty members because we were really actively involved and full-time devoted to the activities of the college. Our lives literally centered around this. We had some other friends but this was.... So we had faculty parties and other small groups where part of the faculty would be there. And we were constantly in and out of each other's houses. It was really a full-time association for most of us. Running bridge parties to get money for the library and, well, it was really a full-time faculty activity, far as I can tell.

Sweeney: Why did you take a leave of absence for the 1941-1942 academic year and go to Harvard? And I also see that you took a leave from 48-49. I was wondering if the administration was putting a good deal of pressure on you to attain the doctorate?

MacDonald: Well, no, the administration didn't put a lot of pressure on me. I'd finished my residence requirements and course requirements for a Master's Degree at Williamsburg in 1938, but then I finished a thesis in 1941, I think, and got a Master's from William and Mary. But I wanted, of course, to do additional graduate work, and I was making $2,000 a year or a little bit better by this time. And it seemed very little possibility of getting together the money to go to graduate school that was necessary. Fellowships were very rare at that time, nothing at all like the financing we have. But I did apply for a fellowship at Harvard, saved a few dollars and I got a graduate assistantship there in which I made something like $1,600 for teaching half-time. So I was able to go up to Harvard and do half-time graduate study for a year on this pay by borrowing a little money and pinching here and there. But I did this because I wanted to, because I always wanted to go to graduate school, but this was the first way that we could possibly make it. Then subsequently I got a fellowship in, I guess it was about 1948, and I went up there under similar conditions with a fellowship grant and also a teaching grant. And so I was able to survive there for a year again doing half-time work on the same basis.

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Sweeney: You were at the college during World War II, and recently Dr. Webb mentioned the fact that the college barely survived during that period outside of the war training work. I was wondering if you could recall the atmosphere at the college during World War II?

MacDonald: Well, we were all pretty busy. A number of the faculty went into the service, and so it was unnecessary to dismiss anybody. Of course, we had a predominance of women students at the time, and I believe that the college had economic heavy weather. This didn't affect me directly because my salary wasn't cut. It was too small to be cut anyhow, as with all of us. And we still had, at least I had enough classwork to keep me busy. But as far as the total welfare of the college was concerned, it was small, and it had difficulty in meeting its regular bills. We did have a defense program and evening courses and customarily all of us did one or two night courses when we could. During the war, we did a good deal of night work for which we got supplementary pay which allowed us to get along reasonably well, not luxuriously, but satisfactorily during the period of war shortages and cramped possibilities.

Sweeney: In 1945 you became the interim director of the office of counseling. Two or three questions in this regard. I wondered about your duties in the office of counseling. Did you advise the returning veterans, and could you give your impression of the returning veteran students?

MacDonald: As I recall, that appointment was relatively short-lived. I'd had some work in counseling and, when the veterans came back, there was a great necessity to have something done about counseling, advising them because, for one thing, many of them had in-service training. And these courses that they had had to be evaluated for college credit. They also needed some vocational guidance and educational guidance. Many of them who came back would never have come near a college if it hadn't have been for the opportunity that was offered to them through the military training program. So when that became necessary I was designated to go up to a couple of weeks' training up at CC, no, NYU, I believe, and there we learned about the evaluation program and the possibilities of or the basics of vocational-educational counseling with respective veterans, testing programs, etc., so that when I came back I was at least knowledgeable about the routines and what kind of problems we were going to have to meet. Very shortly thereafter, because I could not possibly carry this load and really wasn't peculiarly qualified to do it on the scale we needed to do it because we found many veterans coming back and we found we had to install a really full- dress counseling service. So we then proceeded to hire professionally trained people and had a sizable counseling center which, I think, I had somewhere like eight or ten people on a full-time basis.

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And I had for awhile the supervision of that in a very pro forma way until it got going in such a fashion that it was really self-controlling and self-operating. Betty Simcoe was involved in that. Betty Simcoe, whose name now is, I've forgotten whom she married, but she was administrative dean at the Division until recently. I guess she's still there. Her maiden name was Simcoe and I wish, I should remember her married name, but I don't. Who's the dean of women down there?

Sweeney: Deans of women have been abolished. The last dean of women was Rebecca White.

MacDonald: Anyhow, Elizabeth Simcoe is certainly there in some capacity or other, a very knowledgeable and agreeable person who did a first-rate job in the veterans' counseling system. So that's how I got into that.

Sweeney: I was wondering if you were involved in any college honor societies at the school?

MacDonald: Well, I believe we did have a college honor society, and at one time I functioned as an advisor for it, but it wasn't any particularly onerous duty, simply meeting with them and serving on the board which helps select people who made a certain grade level and were admitted to it. They had, of course, no branch of Phi Beta Kappa at the time, and I've really forgotten the name of the honor society that existed at that time.

Sweeney: It was just a local society.

MacDonald: Yes, only a local society.

Sweeney: In 1945 the newspaper the students put out named the High Hat reported that you used films in your psychology class. I was wondering if this was a radical instructional innovation for 1945?

MacDonald: Well, let's see. When I studied, began studying psychology in Williamsburg in the '30's, there weren't any satisfactory available films and we didn't use any. But about that time some films were coming out and being made available for classroom use. Unhappily, many of them were very bad, made in an amateurish way and not satisfactory. But there were a considerable number coming out, and some of them were available through the state organization for the distribution of films for educational use from Richmond. So we were able to make use of some of those, and I wouldn't say it was a radical move but it was, let's say, a little, it was the way you should have done at the time if you were keeping up with

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what was going on because certainly you could show illustrations of conditioned response, for example, diagrams of nerve action, which you couldn't possibly readily demonstrate on the blackboard. And also examples of animal learning from the Yerkes laboratory, things of this sort, which were a very useful adjunct and supplement to a straight lecture course.

Sweeney: We'll return now to the sixth question about Dean Hodges. Did Dean Hodges impress you as a competent chief administrative officer? And how did you react to the revelations of his falsifying grades and altering students' records?

MacDonald: At the time when Dean Hodges was Dean of the Norfolk Division, I was totally ignorant of administrative problems and totally uninterested in the activities of administration. I didn't know, so I don't know, really, what was going on. Looking back at it now, I see Dean Hodges as I saw Dean Hibbs who ran the Richmond Division which became Richmond Professional Institute and later Virginia Commonwealth -- both as people who had to try to run as good a college-level institution as possible using makeshift buildings and without anything like a respectable income. As everybody knows it is simply impossible to run a respectable college on the income from student fees, at least those of the trivial sort which were charged in those days. Somehow or another both of these men succeeded in building up schools that did do a remarkably good job. They made bricks without straw and seemed to me that anybody who can juggle the various considerations in such a way as to come out on top and do that good a job had some kind of engineering or administrative and executive ability. While I was not always happy about things that Dean Hodges did prior to the unhappy instance of the grade falsification, it seemed to me or at least I had the impression that he was holding together a respectably operating college just by his own sheer will power and ingenuity. I have no inside information. I can't resist remarking on one thing. The state budget, of course, was at that time a biennial budget, I believe, and July 1st was due date to balance the books. Otherwise, if you didn't spend it by then you could not carry it over to the next biennium. Moreover, if you had a deficit then somehow this was a terrible thing and you had done it wrong and were personally liable or something like that. Anyway, I remember once in the early days when I was teaching summer school, which we did do, we had to do, but there was a chance usually to do it to supplement income, when Dean Hodges met me in the parking lot just a couple of days just before I thought I was going to be paid and he said, "Frank, I think I'll have to ask you to let me have your check for a couple of weeks, a little while anyhow, because I've got to make the books balance.

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And we have simply spent too much on this or that and we just couldn't possibly make a go of it. So, if you will just write over your check to me, I'll advance to you grocery money as you need it to tide you over, and then you will get paid as soon as we get the biennium over." So I did this, and I think several other members of the faculty did the same thing. I was very glad to do it. I thought that Uncle Billy, as I thought of him, was trying to make ends meet under almost insuperable difficulties and that, just as long as I could keep the groceries going, this was no particular sacrifice for me. But I saw him then, maybe incorrectly, keep the place going and operating, as I say, in spite of conditions of operation which were simply intolerable.

Sweeney: I want to know if you felt that Dean Hodges was a popular dean with the rest of the faculty?

MacDonald: Well, I think we all liked him, yes. He was an agreeable person and he frequently would lay down the law in faculty meetings. This was not a highly democratic structure. I don't think this was at all unusual in small schools or in Virginia schools or schools in the South in general at the time. It's not many years since we used to take it as an axiom that a college president is the nearest thing there is to an oriental potentate in existence. Those days are gone and we see it quite differently now. He did certainly exercise arbitrary power and in some times ways that I didn't like. But when I looked at the total operation, it seemed to me that he was holding things together and making it work. Now, what was going on behind the scenes I don't know. All kinds of stresses and strains and improvisations, I am sure. And I'm not privy to the correspondence he had with Williamsburg, other relationships which he had. He always gave us the impression that Williamsburg was not sufficiently supplying support to the Norfolk Division, and I must say that I think this is probably exactly true because certainly Williamsburg was not operating solely on fees. It was getting, in effect, a subsidy from the general fund, and the Norfolk Division was not getting its share of it. So we were having to work under very difficult conditions, and the fact that he was able to make the thing work seemed to me a good idea. So I think he was reasonably competent. Maybe somebody would have been better, maybe if I knew more I would have a different view of it. I don't know. I always thought he was a pretty good man.

Sweeney: You served on a committee which went to Williamsburg to persuade President Bryan to take vigorous action in the Hodges matter. I was wondering, it's rather vague in the Annals, what precisely were the objectives of this committee? Why was it necessary to make a second trip to see President Bryan?

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MacDonald: Well, this is a very complicated issue, and it was a trying time. As I recall, some of us discovered grade discrepancies by chance. When we had to write a recommendation for somebody and went back to look at his permanent record card and something was wrong because grades had been changed. And when we started talking about this, a few of us, we found a half a dozen or so cases that were clearly instances. And these were brushed aside by the authorities at first. There were, I think, about seven people who were sufficiently shocked by this to insist on communicating with the parent institution, which we did. I think Alice Burke, the registrar, who was also a good teacher, by the way, of government, was our agent. What happened when it became public knowledge, as it did, that Dean Hodges' behavior was under scrutiny and when finally the registrar from William and Mary, Kathleen Alsop, made a trip down to the Division with other administrative officials and explored the grades and came up with something in the order of 50 altered grade transcripts, the position of those people who thought that this should be inspected and explored and made an issue of and straightened out became very difficult. Instead of being congratulated on having undertaken the unhappy task of exposing a difficulty that had to be corrected, the entire city of Norfolk, as far as I can determine, decided that anybody who believed that Dean Hodges had done anything of this sort must be a vicious person. The newspapers were all a hundred percent in support of Dean Hodges without knowing anything at all about what had happened. They didn't know because nobody who was in the position to know would tell because it would be quite inappropriate and breach of confidence to discuss the business of the college and indeed Dean Hodges' business publicly at that juncture until it was acted on by the parent authorities in Williamsburg, until all people were properly consulted. Nevertheless, meetings all over Norfolk were held -- if you looked at the papers at that time; I have a few clippings at home -- castigating over at Larchmont School across from the college. I remember several meetings held to criticize and complain about the vicious members of the faculty who said that Dean Hodges had done something wrong. So the whole town was in support of him, and the headlines and newspapers supported him. And the result was that, the point is that why did we have to go? Well, we had to go because of this, because it seemed quite clear to, I believe, it was seven of us who stuck by our guns on this thing and insisted that this was academically intolerable and improper for the status of the college, deleterious to its basic foundation. And we waited for some action from Williamsburg. None came for some time; of course, this is because they did not act quick enough to please us. To us it would have been 24 hours, but they acted, I think, with all deliberate speed. But in the interim, from day to day, we were constant objects of vilification

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by other people and we actually, many of us, thought it altogether likely that somehow or other Dean Hodges would triumph in this and the whole thing would succeed in being swept under the rug. It being, if I may say so and I do, a customary solution in Virginia when some public official is caught in flagranto delecti to promote him and kick him upwards to a better job and cover it up. This has been in the past an easily observable activity that's gone on, and it looked as though the tremendous enthusiasm and public following that Dean Hodges had in Williamsburg was going to come out ahead and he was going to be whitewashed and somehow triumph. And this meant that, at a time when the job situation was very bad, it seemed unlikely to us that we would be able to remain in jobs that we liked, at a place that we liked. I actually thought it entirely likely, I gave myself not better than a 50-50 chance, of surviving at the Norfolk Division, and the rest of us after this. So we were puzzled as to why action was not taken sooner. And as none came and none came, we finally decided that perhaps the message had not come through as clearly as it should, so we went up to point out something needed to be done and to be sure that it was clear what our position was and the necessity of action before this thing was completely snowed over. So that's what we came up for, simply because we couldn't understand why action was not being taken.

Sweeney: Then you had to take a second trip. You weren't satisfied with what?

MacDonald: This is why the second trip occurred.

Sweeney: Well, what was the first trip for?

MacDonald: Well, the first trip was simply to, well, now, I have forgotten about the first trip. I guess the first trip was simply to answer questions about the episode and specifically the degree of evidence we had. I had several grades that I knew to be changed, but I was really addressing myself then to a later trip that we took which was the result of this wave of vitriolic antagonism against us. We drew some newspaper editorials of a very dubious sort.

Sweeney: Did the letter which President Bryan released and sent to the parents of the students and to the faculty satisfy you and the other committee members?

MacDonald: You know, I can't recall the wording of that, but I am sure that we were quite satisfied with it. I recall it as being a measured, reasonable and not bad-tempered statement of the resolution of this problem. We were all sorry that it happened.

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Sweeney: Overall, did you rate President Bryan's handling of the case pretty well, and did you think that Dean Hodges had received fair treatment?

MacDonald: Oh, well, it seems to me, well, it's not just "seems to me," I categorically stated he is bound to have, that is, he was shown every opportunity to discuss the issue, and it is my strong impression -- and it is so strong that I am inclined to state it as a fact -- that what happened is that while Dean Hodges was being treated by President Bryan in an extremely humane and understanding, open manner, Dean Hodges returned to Williamsburg to systematically stir up as much emotional support and opposition to any correct resolution of the matter as he possibly could. And I thought that his behavior in organizing propaganda and forces against President Bryan was improper under those circumstances, very improper, although I understand that he was in a tight spot and it was a very uncomfortable one that he wanted to get out of. No, I think that the behavior of Williamsburg with this was judicious. In fact, one of the reasons why we had to go up there a second time was in order to get them moving, we thought. They were moving, I think, with great care and with great consideration that no false move would be made, and I think they did it correctly. Although I think that Dean Hodges' activities in Norfolk succeeded in... (Tape ends) I think that what Dean Hodges had done is created a widespread impression that our local college was being abused by the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Most people in Norfolk eventually came to realize that what Dean Hodges had done was the academic equivalent of the sin against the Holy Ghost. If there is anything sacred it is the grade which is given, but I think they were just embarrassed eventually of that idea. But I think that in Norfolk there still remains the impression that the handling of the situation was one in which William and Mary was abusing the Division and its head and not handling it properly. My opinion is quite the reverse.

Sweeney: Did you fear that at any time during this crisis that the Norfolk Division might be closed by the William and Mary authorities?

MacDonald: No, I didn't. None of us thought it would be closed under these circumstances. I am pretty sure we'd been doing a good job, we'd been sending up to Williamsburg and elsewhere well prepared students, and I think it would have been madness to have closed it at that time. I think maybe once in awhile I heard somebody ask this question at the time, but I never thought of it seriously as a possibility.

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Sweeney: What were the orientation assemblies held throughout the academic year for freshmen?

MacDonald: Well, you know, we were a teaching institution primarily and we were really devoted to it. And so one year, considering what we were going to do at the level of preparation of some of our students, it was difficult to talk on the college level when a student's background in certain areas is defective areas is defective. You need some kind of background in which to fit in, upon which to hang new material and ideas. And so, what we as a faculty decided to do was to do the orientation program which, as I recall, consisted of a meeting of the entire freshman class in the gym once a week -- or maybe it was once every other week; I think it was once a week -- and we on the faculty took turns in giving a lecture on some broad aspect of Western thought or culture. I think I remember giving a lecture on the Medieval thought at one time. We divided up what we thought were major general topics and covered a broad area in what we thought were essential points. It was in many ways something like what you would find in the old Columbia Western Culture course which then was an intensive course of usually about five hours a week for a whole year. But what we wanted to do was to lay the background for that kind of comprehensive understanding by simply staking out major areas and major signposts along the way to give a skeletonic background into which ideas of literature, art, history, science, etc., could be fitted in into some kind of coherent pattern. So we were doing this, by the way, on our own time and at considerable bother and trouble. And we did this perhaps for two or three years. I have forgotten how long we lasted.

Sweeney: On the 23rd of September 1946 Lewis Webb was appointed director and you were appointed assistant director of the Division. I wondered what your duties were in this administrative position, whether you continued to teach and how long you remained as assistant director?

MacDonald: I continued to teach one course, and I did this because I wanted to, because I wanted to keep my hand in. I undertook to do this when Ernest W. Gray, who had served as chairman of the faculty, that is, in effect, dean of the institution for several years withdrew from this position. And I think he had been working under Charlie Duke, who was the director, but at this juncture it was decided in Williamsburg to bring Mr. Duke back to Williamsburg to help there and detach him from the Division. And when he left, Gray moved out of his position, I believe, as chairman of the faculty, at which he did a stupendous job; he was a first-rate person and excellent in that. Under this new structure, Lewis Webb was made director of the Division. I was made assistant director. In effect this meant that Lewis Webb was the local president and I

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was the academic dean. I mentioned to you before that I didn't care about administration and didn't know about it and that's true. The reason I did it was because I was asked to do it by Mr. Duke, and I got a quid pro quo as a consequence: namely, that if I did this for as much as two years, the college would arrange for me to have a semester off with half pay so I could go away to do some graduate work, and they did that when the time came. So I did it for two years, and I found it a lively and interesting experience because this is a period when the college was absorbing the new veteran group and our population went up stupendously, and we were bulging at the seams and had problems of admission, classroom, teaching assignment, recruitment of faculty, and I inherited in my office a filing cabinet which contained in one drawer a pair of golf shoes and nothing else. So I started from scratch and learned how to put things together and I had a fine time for two years. At the end of two years, I had done all that I could do in this direction. I had exhausted whatever ability I had; from there on from my standpoint it would have been downhill. So I was very glad to get back to teaching, which is the thing I really like to do, and I guess I answered that.

Sweeney: I wonder if there were any professors who had hoped to be appointed director, or was there a faculty consensus that Lewis Webb was the only logical candidate?

MacDonald: As I recall, I think it very likely that many people wanted to see Ernest Gray president. He was extremely well liked. He had a good advanced degree, and he was admired by faculty and by students. However, I suppose since his concerns were primarily academic, Lewis Webb was appointed because, presumably, on some kind of organizational interest and so on. But I don't think there was much consideration of competition to this. The decision, as I understand, primarily came from Williamsburg. In my own case, now, I think there was some competition or some disagreement about who would have been the more suitable director, Gray or Webb. In the case of my job there wasn't any. I was completely flabbergasted at the notion of being tapped for this job. I knew of nobody else that was competing for it. It was a dirty job, and I don't think anybody else wanted it at the time.

Sweeney: Could you give your views on the Honor System as it operated at the Division in the late 1940's?

MacDonald: Well, I thought it operated with a reasonable degree of satisfactoriness. But that's because of my own special views about the honor system. I don't regard the honor system as being primarily justified as an instrument for preventing would-be cheaters from cheating. I regard it as a system which provides the opportunity for decent people to take examinations under decent circumstances without being spied and watched upon like criminals. Now I grant that the grade is devaluated by the individual who makes good grades by the

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cheating process, but on the whole I don't think that the number of people who got away with cheating in those days was appreciable, and I think that by and large the honor system handled them with a reasonable degree of success. I might want to revise that statement if I looked back over some of the honor system cases. Remember that these kids were two years of college; they didn't have upperclassmen, and I think that the honor council, considering the age of the people who ran it, acted with a commendable degree of responsibility in the vast majority of cases. So I don't think that this was a...we always talk about the honor system wherever we are, and we are always distressed that the wicked flourish. But you never expect to stop this completely, simply to keep it in reasonable check. Many of us made an effort to give examinations in which cheating was virtually impossible. It's pretty hard to cheat in a philosophy examination where you write answers.

Sweeney: In 1947 you commented that the small size of the Division led to better student-faculty relations. I wondered if you wanted to elaborate at all on that statement?

MacDonald: Well, we just knew everybody and we had students in and out of the office constantly and we were on an extremely, really, friendly basis with them. When I occasionally, as I do, go to Norfolk and see one of my former students who identifies himself and then I place him, we are just like being back with boyhood friends. It's this sort of thing. It's a closeness of affection that is very difficult to develop where you have as many students as we do now with whom you are not in constant contact. Moreover, these students were, you see, we had no dormitories; they would go home at night. But they spent most of their day on campus without dormitory rooms to go to. They'd come into your office and stay there until six o'clock at night or until they were thrown out, and many of our people were very highly interested in the work they were doing. We had some terrifically motivated students.

Sweeney: How about the atmosphere on the campus in the post-war years in the late '40's and early '50's?

MacDonald: Well, of course, this was everywhere in academia a tremendous experience because nobody could cut it like the veterans could. They came back and they meant business, and we had a rise in academic standards and people who were not veterans with this discipline and business-like self control with which they could make themselves do their work -- people who weren't in this group nevertheless took these as models and brought their work up within reasonable closeness to it. It was really a teacher's delight.

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I spoke about the distribution before of students with good ones and then a whole lot of people there for the ride. Well, the veterans' period didn't strike that way at all because this big infusion of much more mature minds asking the right questions, able to devote themselves to disciplined study, self control --this made a great deal of difference. It was, as I guess it was everywhere in the academic world, a great delight to be able to go into the classroom and find that everybody had read the material and had some reaction to it one way or the other.

Sweeney: In 1950 you became the sponsor of the student senate. I wondered if you could describe the functions and the activities of the student senate and what kind of issues came before it?

MacDonald: You know, that's a very dim picture in my mind. I'm sure that the student senate was an attempt to get student government operating in a way where students would take over their own decisions about areas within their proper sphere, as today we have similar organizations, only on a vastly augmented scale. My recollection is that this particular student senate never really did very much. People in those days would have been shocked anyway at the extent to which contemporary college students take over in comparable situations, but there simply wasn't a vision of the scope of student activity. I think that they tried to make some kind of general rules for the operation of different clubs, societies, fraternities and what-have-you on the campus and they may have been making some kind of significant contributions, but I can't for the life of me say just -- it didn't impress me a great deal, I guess.

Sweeney: In 1950 you were elected secretary of the Virginia Philosophical Association, and in 1952 you attained the presidency of that group. I wondered if you could describe the organization and the significance of your election to these posts, coming from a junior college faculty?

MacDonald: Well, I guess I was rather pleased with the fact that I could be tapped from a junior college faculty. I'd read several papers before the group in the past. This is a group which is a delightful group to belong to. It is a group to which all of the teachers of philosophy in Virginia are invited to be members automatically, and most of them are. We meet once a year for a couple of days at some Virginia college in the fall, preferably in view of autumn foliage, and read papers to one another without any ulterior motives. Nobody's looking for a job. Nobody's trying to impress anybody else. We have one paper a session, one in the afternoon, one in

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the evening, one the next morning, something like that. So that paper gets the full attention, plenty of chance for comments and discussion by anybody who comes there. This is a philosophical discourse. There are too many of our philosophical organizations like our big American Philosophical Association, which one has to belong to, which are job markets, as we call it, slave markets, or intended to provide the opportunity for polishing one's badge or whatever the case may be. But the Virginia Association is a very agreeable organization, as I say, with no other alternative except to read papers to one another and discuss them in a lively and interesting fashion. And I was quite pleased to be in this, elected to a post, because, as you said, I was a member of a two- year faculty and without a doctoral degree.

Sweeney: Did you give lectures in the community to professional and civic groups? And did you find the audiences receptive?

MacDonald: Well, yes, I did my share of it, I guess, until they got sick of it and I got moved around. Yes, I'd give a number of lectures on various topics. We thought that, I think on the faculty that part of our function was to be part of the community and that we had an obligation to engage in civic activities and that sort of thing. So while I was there I used to be a member of the Optimist Club and went to those meetings, although I'm not a joiner by nature. I thought this was an appropriate thing to do, and I gave occasional lectures whenever I was asked to. I enjoyed it.

Sweeney: You told the Jaycees in 1947 that philosophy is the only practical activity. I was wondering if you could discuss that statement?

MacDonald: Well, of course, I said that philosophy is the only practical activity because that's the truth. But what I mean by this, of course, and what I said to them is simply this, that what makes an action practical is that it is designed for practice. It's a guide to action and it's impossible. If, for example, somebody happens to be aimlessly tearing up pieces of paper and throwing them on the floor, you wouldn't call that a practical activity. What is it that makes it impractical? If, for example, it were the children in the fairy tale who were tearing up the pieces of paper and strewing along the path behind through the woods so that their parents could find them after they had strayed, this would have been a practical thing to do and what made it practical is because it had a goal or an object. Because nothing is practical, I'm preaching now on the stump, nothing is practical unless it is done for a purpose and a more practical thing is done for a more valuable purpose. And without an understanding of value, no action is practical. To know the price of everything and the value of

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nothing is to know nothing. And that, consequently, that field of knowledge which is among other things concerned with an understanding, an explication and an analysis of, what is valuable is an essential and basic propaedeutic to any rational practical activity at all. Things can be valuable without being put into practice, but nothing can be put into the category of practical activity unless it's informed by value. I'm just really hashing over a little Platonic insight or Aristotelian, if you choose. That's all I meant, and I believe it.

Sweeney: In 1951 you received a Ford Foundation fellowship for another year at Harvard. I wondered if you could tell me any more about that fellowship and whether it was related to your doctoral course of studies?

MacDonald: Yes, it was. This was a Ford fellowship for the advancement of education. My case was a little different. I used it to pursue graduate work although most of the people whom I knew who had comparable fellowships, all of them, in fact, were people who already had graduate degrees and were working on a post-graduate project of some sort. But mine was permissible for a continuation of study in my area of interest, history of philosophy and theory of knowledge.

Sweeney: Before you left on that fellowship you declared that you preferred research to teaching. Could you explain that statement?

MacDonald: You know, I read that question and I was baffled by it. I may have said something like that, but I really don't think I could have said exactly that. I found, incidentally, that when I gave talks in Norfolk, as elsewhere, you can be pretty sure to be misquoted every now and again. I got out of administration because I preferred teaching. But teaching to me means always teaching and research, because if you are going to teach you have got to have something to teach, and you don't do the same thing every time or you will die intellectually. So that every time I teach something I have to do a great deal of research so I'll know more about it because the last time I taught it I discovered my ignorance in this area. And so my life is 50 percent devoted to teaching and 50 percent to research because in order to do the teaching I have to do the research. And the same courses that I have taught for years, even my major introductory course, I am finding something new in and new insights and reading some more material that comes out on Plato or this or that. But I am not primarily the kind of a researcher who is concerned with taking a particular topic and digging into the library and devoting health solely to that. That is not my particular facility, so it is research directed towards the aims of my understanding and my communication with students.

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So I have to put into this record the fact that I never got that Ph.D. What happened is that I never finished that piece of research that I was supposed to do or never got into the state where I thought I was willing to stake my life on it and turn it in. But it hasn't been any serious handicap to me either psychologically or professionally. I continue to operate pretty well.

Sweeney: Could you tell me about your involvement and that of your wife in the production of operas and concerts at the college?

MacDonald: Well, ever since the time of the Greek Festival, I should guess, and the faculty skits we put on, we were interested in this sort of entertainment. And we were both particularly interested in music and when we first got some people there in music and theater, especially, I believe, it was when Charles Vogan came there in the music department, he started an opera workshop and put on some early productions in the tiny auditorium of the old Larchmont School building at the corner of Brunswick Avenue, which I guess is still standing. And there's a room with a little platform at one end which we used for a stage and a flat auditorium floor that seats maybe 150 people. And I remember that we put on Gilbert and Sullivan there -- I don't say we, Charles Vogan's people -- and my wife, Peg, and I were interested in music and happened to be Gilbert and Sullivan buffs, among other things. So we helped with costumes and lighting and stage managing. And we got so that as the opera workshop became regularized and musical activity expanded at the Division we were always involved in it one way or another, backstage and even on stage occasionally, I think. I got into the men's chorus line in "The Chocolate Soldier," I guess, and maybe into a Gilbert and Sullivan. But most of my work was, what I did was help stage managing, publicity, building scenery, etc., etc. And we worked in a large number of productions both at the college in the gym and then down at the Center Theater, my wife also. She engaged, she played the well in the operetta "The Well" at the Center Theater. When the bucket was put down she was sitting in the bottom of the well and put water in it so that water could be. . . well, anyway, we had fun because we were very close to the students and very close to music, and we had some really bang-up voices and some good operatic productions. That was lots of fun to do.

Sweeney: In 1953 you joined with Professors Pliska and Akers in a college self-evaluation study. Could you tell me more about this project?

MacDonald: I've forgotten what precipitated that. I think that it was perhaps some suggestions from Williamsburg, but I think it was primarily the college's own desire perhaps activated by Charles Duke, who

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would have been director. Anyhow, the object was to stand off and look at the college and try to evaluate what our strengths and deficiencies were. And this was done department by department, and I think we had to do it because of the fact, now I think this was the case, that the Southern Association requires schools to do this every ten years or so. And I think that we had to do that evaluation to serve as part of the evaluation which the main college had to submit to the Southern Association. So that they couldn't just evaluate the Williamsburg campus without paying attention to the other campuses as well. I'm quite sure that that was the occasion for our doing that evaluation, and it was a college-wide cooperative activity.

Sweeney: By 1950 you were listed as chairman of the department of philosophy. I was wondering under what circumstances were psychology and philosophy separated as courses of study?

MacDonald: Well, I don't think they were. In 1950, I was still teaching some psychology, I believe, and I think that it was, wait just a minute, no, I've forgotten how that was. In any case, you see, what we had down there was larger administrative units. In 1950, I'll get at it this way, when I stopped being an assistant director, I then became chairman of the division of social sciences, which was in effect a department of social sciences and involved psychology, philosophy, sociology, and history. That is to say, I was the administrative officer for that group. So we didn't have to have a chairman for each group. This would have been, for such a small collection, a waste of manpower. So that philosophy and psychology were tossed in together originally in 1950, I'm sure, and before simply as a convenient administrative device. Now, philosophy and psychology did not get separated from each other up here in Williamsburg until about 1934 or 5 and rather late in making a separation for that traditional pattern, and we had simply a convenience association of them at the Norfolk Division. It was not a notion that psychology was a branch of philosophy at all because the general drift of our psychology department from the time I went down was following the empirical behavioral psychology, scientific psychology, laboratory psychology, that is the usual thing in most American colleges as a predominant sort, which simply abstracts from the whole philosophical packet. So I was kind of a schizophrenic when I taught them both because I would just jump over into that pattern.

Sweeney: I was wondering what reaction you received to your speech in 1955 before the Portsmouth Rotarians in which you declared that the function of liberal education and the college professor is "to create radicals - in the true and best sense of the word"?

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MacDonald: You know, I had forgotten what their reaction was; I think it was very likely what I expected, namely, that they would be profoundly shocked by this remark, and then I would point out to them what I meant by "radical" and they would lose their shock. So this was kind of an attention-getting device on my part, but not solely that, because I think the term -- in those days -- "radical" was thrown around with a good deal of carelessness.

Sweeney: That was '55?

MacDonald: That was '55. Well, the McCarthy hearings were not far away at that time, and the whole climate of things was quite different. I remember that it was along about that time when some of us on the faculty wrote the newspaper a letter when there was a question about black people's salaries in school. We wrote a letter suggesting that it was very difficult to find any reason why people doing the same activities, with the same preparation, shouldn't be given the same salaries, no matter what color they happened to be, and we got a blast of editorial the next day ridiculing us in an editorial entitled "Seven against 'Injustice'" (in quotation marks), being a lambasting of us for a radical attitude.

Sweeney: Which paper was it?

MacDonald: It would have been the night paper; it wouldn't have been the Pilot. No. But this is the atmosphere that we found ourselves in.

Sweeney: That was the early '50's?

MacDonald: Yes, that was the early '50's. What are the dates of the McCarthy hearings? -- along about that time. Well, that's when we got it, and the college was always looked on with suspicion. All right, so the term "radical" was around. And, of course, what I simply meant, I think quite literally my statement is correct. That is, that there are two views of education, and one consists of stuffing the goose with more food or stuffing the student with opinions and punishing him if he doesn't believe them so he will come out making the same noises his grandfather did. In which case he is a zombie and an ignoramus. And I think the function of an educational institution on the collegiate level is to stimulate the student to learn to use his own intellect to make the kind of decisions about new conditions that he has to make in new situations. And that the past cannot answer for him, that referring to the past is a help, but there is no substitute for the active use of intelligence. Presumably the function of the college is not to fill a student with facts, although he

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has to know some facts, it's true, but to get him into the notion of arriving at new solutions for new problems instead of thinking solely in the same patterns that he has always thought in the past. You've got to have new concepts in science, you need in society, and people who develop new concepts are called radicals. But there is another sense in which they are radicals, I remember, and that is that it is not just a matter of a radical as a person who develops a new concept, the way, for example, Copernicus did, but the root of a radical is the meaning of a root. And in some senses radicals are not concerned with the superficial conformity surrounding an issue but are trying to get the roots of the matter and deal with those considerations which have to be dealt with as basic and fundamental. Well, I think that is generally the line that I took.

Sweeney: In 1955 you left the college to become acting head of the philosophy department at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. What circumstances led to this change which became permanent? How did you feel about leaving the Norfolk Division? I wondered if Admiral Alvin D. Chandler, the president of the College of William and Mary, persuaded you to remain at Williamsburg?

MacDonald: Well, no, the Admiral didn't persuade me to remain and I did feel... but my colleagues here... well, I persuaded myself to remain. I was persuaded. I liked the atmosphere. I was very sorry to leave the Norfolk Division. I had very strong friends there. My wife was extremely distressed at leaving. I left for several reasons. The first one was money. I got a very substantial increase. The second was an opportunity to teach upper level courses, which was just about as important as the money end of it, but the money was important because I had three daughters then that I had to take care of. And another reason was that the, yes, I might as well say this, that the Division was becoming less attractive to me than it had been before. The great enthusiasm of a small closely-knit organization was disappearing. Inevitably with the increase in size and the focus of the Division which had initially been clearly upon two things, liberal arts and basic engineering, was now expanding. I think the focus was moving off of that so that what from the standpoint of the basic liberal arts and sciences, which I'm devoted to as my chief interest, that this was becoming more peripheral than it had been in the first place. At least this is how it seemed to me, and I wanted to stay in an institution where the prime concern was with four-year undergraduate focus primarily on liberal arts and sciences. And this was the kind of a place I'd like to have been in the first place anyhow. But I had a fine time in Norfolk and learned a tremendous amount. So, yes.

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Sweeney: Did you take one year off to come up here to be acting head of the department and then reach your conclusion?

MacDonald: Well, not really. I believed that my appointment up here was as professor of philosophy and acting chairman, which meant that the possibility of replacing me as chairman was open but I had a firm contract for a professorial appointment. And so I was committed the first year for a permanent appointment. You know, I had tenure already and I suppose that I discussed it then, but it didn't loom very big. I think I more or less assumed that this would happen. And I don't think that tenure practices became as clearly established formally until after that time because it was considerably later than that that I received my first letter saying that I had been granted tenure. We had always said tenure is a gentleman's agreement and not a written commitment in the college because of the one-year appointment system in Richmond. So I don't think that I ever had a tenure notice and neither anybody else up here had. This wasn't formalized until some time later and some time or other after some few years after I'd been up here, all of us got our first appointment letter which included the assertion in it that we formally had tenure in accordance with some A.A.U.P. tenure practices that the Board at that time formally accepted. I think that's the way it went, but I didn't have any notion that I would lose my job up here if I did a decent piece of work. No, I was morally convinced that I was a tenured person.

Sweeney: Did you find the college at Williamsburg to be a more stimulating atmosphere intellectually? Did you find it easier to be creative in your thinking here?

MacDonald: I found it stimulating in a different way. In the Division at that time, you see, we still were on the two-year basis. The interesting thing to do was to try to do a first-rate job at the freshman and sophomore level. Now that's quite a different thing from moving into junior-senior courses, especially in our case, where we have seniors who are capable of doing, in effect, at least first year graduate work in some course or other. So I had the opportunity then to really work on contemporary philosophical issues which I could use in the classroom and discuss in the classroom, and I couldn't have afforded the time to do that when I was solely concerned with the freshman-sophomore level and where I was spreading out rather thin. Here I had a slightly decreased work load, too, and, no, I didn't, not at first, that came later. I had a full job here. Moreover, another thing that happened is this. My biggest

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problem professionally in Norfolk was the lack of philosophical colleagues. It's very, very difficult to go on for 18 years doing philosophy without someone to talk to. As you can see, I'm a verbal person and this is a verbal occupation. Socrates set the scale for us. And so up here I had a couple of colleagues to talk to for the first time. And this makes a great deal of difference in trying out a new idea, getting some criticism or encouragement on it. And you get this kind of feedback, of course, from superior students. We've had some good ones, consequently. So, no, I found this stimulating in that it gave me an opportunity to extend my interest. What Norfolk did for me outside of giving me that very fine introduction to teaching in a warm, really friendly, dynamic atmosphere, what this did is taught me, I think, to teach introductory courses in philosophy, which I think I got to be very good at and I still do a pretty good job at doing this up here. But it didn't give me the opportunity to really push on and expand my philosophical scope in contemporary and more advanced areas, and that we have an opportunity to do here.

Sweeney: You mentioned about the students. I was wondering if you would compare or contrast the students you had in your first classes here with those you had just left in Norfolk?

MacDonald: Well, the ones that I have to make a comparison with are those in the introductory level because this is all we had here, and in logic, which we did introduce in Norfolk before I left. And I think that by that time, by the way, we had had a rather selective admissions program that began during the period when the school was crowded with veterans, and we began a selective administration. We were obliged to. We couldn't take everybody who applied. So there was some selection there. And I did not find that the students at Norfolk were appreciably worse than those here. I think I would make this contrast, that if you took our students here in Williamsburg and added to them, for every hundred students, maybe 10 or 12 who really weren't particularly interested and were just time killing, that would be like what we would have there in Norfolk. And so, what you do is aim your work at the comparable group and hope that the rest will get somewhere. So I didn't feel that there was any great difference in lecturing to or doing quiz sections in my introductory course here and what I did in Norfolk. No real serious differences except that, of course, in a day school you do have people coming to school who would not take the trouble to go away and at that time William and Mary was in the more enviable, I won't say more enviable, position, was using a very selective admissions procedure. I say that's not necessarily better. Here we've got

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New York schools, for example, having open admissions, and something is to be argued for that. So I don't know. We didn't have open admissions in Norfolk then, but the standards of admission were not as rigid as here. And they had students who would not have bothered to make the investment in time and effort to come to William and Mary. No, I did not find worse students in the Norfolk Division.

Sweeney: The next question is one that you may have already answered, but you might want to add something to it. I wanted to know what gave you the most satisfaction and the most frustration in your career teaching at the Norfolk Division? And how you evaluate that career? You've already mentioned, I think, something in that regard.

MacDonald: Well, my satisfaction was to see people whom we had for two years go away and do distinguished work at other institutions. Now, we saw constant repetition of this, and the place that we saw it occur more than any other was in William and Mary. The students who transferred from the Division to William and Mary in the junior year were, on the average, their average, as students, was certainly superior to the average of the William and Mary junior class that they entered. We gave William and Mary some selected and well trained people, and all you had to do is go back in those days and look at the Phi Beta Kappa election and see that the Norfolk Division transfers here had far beyond their percentage share of Phi Beta Kappa election. I remember one year when 15 of the people were elected to Phi Beta in Williamsburg in one election and 10 of them were Norfolk Division transfers. So this was an impressive thing and that's what really gave us satisfaction. And, of course, the kind of satisfaction you get when taking a student who's never really seen any notion, I say, of philosophy and opening it up and getting them excited about this. There's an awful lot of satisfaction, as I'm sure you know, in the introductory level to be able to do this for a student, to get him into the room for the first time and start looking at the goodies and becoming interested in them. You have to learn to do it, and it's a great satisfaction when you can get through to somebody whom you think might never have seen it and would have tossed the whole thing aside. So we got some students there who would have gone back to, in some cases, to virtual slums of Norfolk. To at least the underhoused and lower middle class or lower class who, if they hadn't come to the Division and had their eyes opened by somebody in classics or psychology, history, whatever it is, they would have, but instead moved along and really hit into an area I am sure made their lives quite significantly different. Now that, I think, is a great satisfaction. My biggest frustration there was in trying to set up a psychology laboratory, an experimental laboratory, without any money and without a satisfactory room for it. Lewis Webb, when he was assistant director,

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gave me a little bit of money, as much as the college could afford, to buy some equipment. But we had very poor space facilities, and we had to do with very limited experimental equipment. And in a way that was fun because we improvised, etc., etc.

Sweeney: Could you discuss your philosophy of education and the value of an education in the liberal arts?

MacDonald: Well, I have already said some things that I think point to what I regard this to be all about. I'm now talking about liberal arts at the college or university level, and I think the function that I see is really an Aristotelian function, namely, that I have a self-realization view of education. The aim of education, I think, is to stimulate and activate the student to develop those particular qualities and characteristics and aptitudes which are basically and essentially human, namely, that of rational thought, of aesthetic appreciation, of sharp perception, of criticism, and to so become familiar with himself that he can conduct his life and future thought in accordance with these principles of self control, self discipline, and expanding horizon of perception and thought. I can say this better, perhaps, but I think those who are acquainted with Nichomachean Ethics know what I am talking about. And this is what we are here for, and this means new horizons, meeting new conditions with new thoughts, and discovering not only our own capacities but the self confidence to go on in operating in those things that we are really suited to operate in regardless of such secondary considerations as economics, etc., etc. And it seems to me the function of this is to equip the person when he leaves school to continue with his education and use what education he already has in the solution of those important problems of his own adjustment and of other practical problems with which he comes in contact, not just from a narrow perspective but taking into account the whole range of appropriate human value; not only the summum bonum but the complete bonum is what they are after.

Sweeney: And did you think there was too much of a vocational emphasis at the Norfolk Division?

MacDonald: When I was there we didn't find this. The only major vocational program that you could speak of there was the engineering. And the engineers had a program which at that level, at the first two years, was pretty much infused with liberal arts because they had to do English, they had to do history and other things of this sort.

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Then, of course, we did introduce a distributive education program, but that was usually accompanied by some concern with liberal arts. So that, as long as I was there, the central activity of the Division was within the focus of liberal arts. Of course, we had the technical institute, but this was deliberately vocational of a particular sort. So we just never had the complexity and diversity to have a real conflict between vocational concerns. I would think that it is reasonable to have vocational institutes and all kinds of vocational facilities because, since you ask me about my view of education, I think that some kind of liberal education is desirable for everybody. I think that we could all -- people who are going to technical institutes do get short-changed in many cases because they could profitably have more liberal education than they do have and less early rote education. But leaving that aside, certainly I don't think that everybody ought to become necessarily an A.B. or M.A., and the four years of college for everybody in the standard American pattern of college seems to me in many cases a waste of time and people's efforts because they unhappily -- many businesses have decreed that they are only concerned with college graduates to employ for jobs of a certain type in which, in many cases, the particular characteristics of liberal education tend to be nullified in those jobs rather than exploited. So I like to see a diversity of education and consequently I am bound to approve of the kind of development which the urban university in Norfolk has gone into. This is a necessity. You've got to have this variety. What we've got here is quite a different thing. It's one, and I think it should be, one of the vast spectrum of different types of schools which are still available. I am very nervous about the notion of there being governmental universal control and influence so that all the schools feel they have to be the same kind and do the same thing. And right now an awful lot of places seem to have got the notion that because school 'X' does it, school 'Y' has to do it, too. And the regional differences and types of different education...(Tape ends)... Well, if it's running I will tuck in a comment that I just thought of, Alf Mapp, as I go back. Alf was one of my students back in the early days and he's one of the people whom I see once in awhile but whom I think about and whom I take great delight in because I remember what a bright spot he was to have in class and to see a man who has developed and gone on and feel that you had some part in the development of this kind of person.

Sweeney: You were going to quote a comment of his?

MacDonald: No, no, I just, I couldn't think back of various people whom I thought of particularly. I don't know whether you know Alf.

Sweeney: Oh, yes, I know him.

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MacDonald: Sure, right, right. He's one of those people who, you know... Have you done anything worth doing? Yes, I did. I had a little part in this guy and this one and this one and this one.

Sweeney: Could you tell me about your subsequent career at the College of William and Mary since 1956?

MacDonald: Well, since 1956, come to think of it, I believe I came up here in '55, but it's '56. Well, I've been chiefly concerned with teaching philosophy and that's the main thing, and as the department has grown in size in trying to recruit good people who will upgrade our department. And now that I am no longer chairman, thank heaven, I can say that I think we've got a good philosophy department, one of the best in the South, and we've got a good reputation, and we've got enough people so that we can fight with one another on philosophical issues, and some good students who are capable of fighting with us on some, too. So it's been an interesting and satisfying and enjoyable thing from my standpoint, frustrating because, for many years, of the problems of pay for faculty. Because for a long while, especially when Admiral Chandler was here, the scope of faculty influence in the academic affairs of the college was in my view sharply limited. We've outgrown those problems. The faculty organization and our communication with the Board of Visitors is improved. So I've been interested here as I was in Norfolk in the internal structure of the college so far as it makes for some kind of faculty voice in the educational structure of the college, and I think we do fairly well in that respect now. And so I've had a pretty good life here and I've worked very hard and have enjoyed it a great deal. And I am going to be awfully sorry when I have to quit.

Sweeney: Thank you very much, Professor MacDonald.