Q: Today's interview is with Dr. James W. Miller, who served as Dean of the Faculty of the College of William and Mary, during the early 1940s, when the difficulties involving Dean William T. Hodges, the Director of the Norfolk Division, were going on. In the beginning of this interview Dr. Miller will make a statement about that period of time and the statement will be followed by several questions.

Miller: Well, Professor Sweeney, I am glad to meet you and to record for you and your group. The events that you want me to talk about took place more than thirty years ago. When they took place, my principal work at the college had nothing to do with the Norfolk Division, with the result that I don't remember everything that I wish now I could remember for this purpose.

My relation with the Norfolk Division began early in my deanship, fairly early. I became dean in September 1938 and I doubt whether my relation with the Norfolk Division began until many months later. Perhaps in 1939, perhaps in 1940, in one of those two years, some months after I had started as dean.

It began this way. President Bryan said to me one day that we had all been devoting all of our attention to the college in Williamsburg and that we ought to learn more about and get acquainted with the work being done in the Norfolk Division of the College, and the Richmond Division, the so-called Richmond Professional Institute. He asked me if I would undertake to make visits to these institutions in an informal way, by way of getting acquainted and also showing them that we were interested in them.

So, from then on, for many months, I took trips to Norfolk and trips to Richmond for that purpose. My relations with Norfolk became much closer than they did with Richmond, for a very good reason. The Norfolk Division was primarily, well exclusively perhaps, a liberal arts institution giving the first two years of college. It was a liberal arts junior college under the sponsorship or authority of the parent institution in Williamsburg.

The Richmond Division, on the other hand, was primarily a vocational and professional institute. Well, I, being a liberal arts man - a liberal arts dean, was naturally more interested, more qualified to learn about the Norfolk Division than the Richmond. I might say a word or two about my relations with Richmond and then we can forget all about them. My visits there were almost entirely with the Dean, Dean Hibbs. He made a great point of showing me around everywhere and explaining what the institution was doing. I was very much impressed with him. He was a brilliant man, a man who had really created the Richmond Professional Institute. I had a feeling that faculty were not particularly interested in my visits. They thought of me as somebody who wouldn't really know or appreciate the kind of thing they were doing. And so my relationship with the Richmond Division more or less lapsed after a few visits. I felt no real need and they felt no need of my going there very much.

[2]

Well, it was different with Norfolk. I had several meetings there. I think they were always of an informal nature. There may have been faculty meetings that I attended; I don't recall that. If so, they weren't very important. What was important was the informal meetings with members of the faculty and particularly members of the faculty who were most interested in my being there. I met, of course, with the Dean, but in contrast with my trips to Richmond, my meetings with the Dean were a minor part of it. It was the faculty that I got to know.

Well, in the course of those meetings I learned that there was some considerable dissatisfaction with the Dean on the part of the faculty, or lack of enthusiasm for him. A certain amount of disrespect, a tendency to telling anecdotes about him that did not represent him as a distinguished administrator. I didn't take any of this very seriously because I've always felt, in colleges and universities, that the typical academic tends to be lacking in enthusiasm about the administrators. So, I sort of brushed this aside as the sort of thing that any professor might say anywhere about any dean or any president.

But then as things developed a little later, on one of my trips to Norfolk, I was taken aside by two or three members of the staff - faculty who I knew particularly well by then. Ernest Gray was one of them, I can't recall who the others were.

Q: Was Frank MacDonald one of them?

Miller: Had Frank joined the Division by that time?

Q: In '38, he joined in '38.

Miller: Well, he may have been. Frank was a former pupil of mine and an old friend, and I don't know who the others were. Now it is suggested by Bob McClelland that Miss Burke was present. I don't recall that. She may well have been there, I don't know. The only one I remember is Ernest Gray and the fact that there were two or three others and Ernest Gray was the principal spokesman.

Ernest informed me, in very solemn tones, to my great shock that strange things were going on in the Division. In particular, that transcripts which had been falsified were being sent out to other institutions by direction of Dean Hodges. I said this is such a serious matter that I shall report this to President Byran immediately, rather than undertaking to do anything myself about it here and now. They gave, I think, further details, but that was the substance of what they reported. So, I returned to Williamsburg and reported to President Byran, who was quite as shocked and distressed as I was, and as Ernest Gray and his group were. So he said "Well, we must go right down to Norfolk and look into this," and so we did. Not that day, but very probably the next day.

[3]

Taking with us Miss Kathleen Alsop, who was the registrar in Williamsburg, taking her for technical assistance. Well, we went to Dean Hodges' office. I am sure President Bryan must have phoned in advance from here, saying that we were coming and making a definite appointment. We met with Dean Hodges and Mr. Bryan confronted him with the allegations that had come to our notice and Dean Hodges admitted it right away. He said, "Well, I did do that in perhaps three cases."

There was a boy who was wanting to go to another institution, I think a military institution, that required a course in physics. Well, the boy had not had a course in physics. So Dean Hodges had given him credit on the transcript for a course in physics to make it possible for him to be admitted there. In two other cases, as I recall, he raised the grade that the student had acquired to make it possible for him to meet the qualitative standard for admission somewhere.

Admission to other institutions was of course of very great importance for the Division. Students went only through the sophomore year and most, many students wanted to go on toward the senior degree in other institutions and transcripts were of essential importance in that regard. Well, as I say, Dean Hodges admitted that he had done this to help the students in perhaps three cases. And Mr. Bryan said, "Were there any other cases in which you did this?" Dean Hodges said no, that was all.

So meanwhile Miss Alsop had been working in the registrar's office in the Norfolk Division and at that point she came in with twenty, well with a pile of transcripts, perhaps twenty in which she had found falsifications indicated in Dean Hodges' handwriting. So thereupon, Mr. Bryan said, "Dean Hodges, I must ask for your resignation."

Well before I go on with that let me say about Dean Hodges that he did not do these things, I am sure, for any personal gain. He was a kindly man, a popular man, a man who loved popularity. He didn't seem to realize or didn't stop to think that he was being really dishonest, that he was damaging the Division, damaging the College of William and Mary. He thought only of helping the boys and perhaps girls, I don't remember, to get admitted to other institutions into which they would otherwise not have been admitted. I don't think for a minute that any money passed under the table or anything of that sort. It was pure kindliness of a misplaced sort, well-meaning generous dishonesty, thinking only of these kids that he was helping and completely unaware of the ethics of it and the academic damage to both institutions that this would cause.

Well, when Mr. Bryan said, in substantially the words that I used, "Dean Hodges, I must ask for your resignation, that was his Virginia gentlemanly way of saying, 'You're fired.'" That is exactly what he meant. If you take it literally, it isn't a dismissal, of course, but it is the way in which a man of his sort would dismiss a fellow worker. And I am sure the Mr. Bryan meant precisely that and Dean Hodges knew that that's precisely what he meant.

[4]

So, we went back to Williamsburg and Mr. Bryan and I both took for granted that this was a fait accompli, that Dean Hodges was out and the next thing would be to start looking around for somebody to take his place. Well now, friends of Dean Hodges in Norfolk soon found out about this and started a big publicity campaign in the Norfolk papers on his behalf by way of getting his dismissal canceled. An there was a great deal of uproar in the newspapers, especially in Norfolk, to what extent in other papers of the state, I don't know, but certainly big in Norfolk. I think Dean Hodges' appeal to the Board of Visitors to stay the dismissal... The Board evidently declined to stay it and in due time, the dismissal was made effective.

All of this caused great difficulty and distress and damage to the college in Williamsburg, perhaps much more than to the Norfolk Division. As a result of the publicity, a leading educational organization, the American Association of Universities, or is it the Association of American Universities - well it's AAU anyhow. That organization was primarily an organization of graduate schools. It was not an accrediting agency like the Southern Society, Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. It was concerned with graduate work and William and Mary was a member of it. Well that organization decided to investigate what had been going on down here, perhaps with a view to putting the college on probation. Well, a committee of investigators came down to William and Mary, headed by Dean Richardson, who was Dean of the Graduate School of Brown University and an official of this organization, I think perhaps president.

He and Professor Bowles and perhaps one other came down here and spent several days, I believe, interviewing Mr. Bryan and me and members of the faculty and going down to Norfolk, and all this and that. They finally wrote a report and they recommended what Dean Richardson told me was with the greatest pain; he said he hadn't slept all night over this and so on and so on, but they recommended we be put on probation. I think that was the word, it was something of that sort. We weren't excluded or expelled from the organization. We weren't denied accreditation in any effective way. It was in a sense a slap on the wrist, but anyhow it was a serious blow to the college.

I spent a great deal of time on all of that with Dean Richardson and Mr. Bowles and the committee when they were here and I always felt that their decision was very unfair. They were in effect penalizing the college for having taken strong action when a discreditable thing had happened. If we had covered it up, we would never have been discredited, you know. So I felt they should have seen that, and furthermore they claimed we hadn't been taking sufficient interest in the Division.

Well, it was because we had begun to take sufficient interest in the Division that the whole thing happened. Well, be that as it may. The college did suffer grave harm for a while as a result of all of this.

Well now when Dean Hodges was finally and effectively removed, President Bryan appointed Charlie Duke to go down to Norfolk and be director. Charlie was bursar of the college here and assistant to the President. In the way titles are handed out nowadays, he would have been called Vice President, Administrative and Financial.

[5]

Well he was a superb administrator, one in whom President Bryan had absolute confidence, and a very close friend of mine. We were the two heads of the administration under Mr. Bryan and I was pleased with the appointment in every way, but I didn't know how we could get along without him here. Well Charlie was a man of tremendous energy, he managed to hold down both jobs, really. He did his work in Williamsburg and he did his work in Norfolk. I know he did it superbly here and I presume he did there. One reason that Mr. Bryan chose him, I think, was Charlie was a great troubleshooter. He was Mr. Bryan's troubleshooter. It was a natural appointment for him to make and he wanted to appoint somebody whom he knew and knew well, so that there would be a real rapport between both institutions constantly.

At the same time, I think, or very soon thereafter, or perhaps even shortly before, Ernest Gray was appointed as the Chief Academic Officer. Whether he had the title of "Dean", as I think Frank McDonald is inclined to remember or whether it was "Chairman of the Faculty", or Dean was it? Well anyhow and Ernest was the Dean of the Faculty. Yeah, well good. Well, I think Mr. Bryan and I both felt that with that set up, Charlie as Director and Ernest as Dean, that things were well taken care of, that we didn't need to take excursions down there frequently to see how things were going on. We knew that they would be going well and if Ernest wanted to come up and talk to me or Charlie, Charlie was up almost two or three times a week anyhow, we knew that things would be in good strong reliable hands. So I should say that from then on I had very little to do with the Norfolk Division. I don't think I was ever called the liaison man, but the liaison work that I did was all in the years before the trouble about Dean Hodges and the in few months afterwards.

And similarly, in President Pomfret's presidency, I was a dean in roughly the first half of that presidency. We were up to our necks in Williamsburg with the impact of the war on the college. The main concern was just to survive, you know. I don't recall having anything to do with Norfolk in that period, anything to amount to anything. So, really I think that completes my story of everything that you are interested in for me to talk about so far as I can recall.

Q: Just look over some of these, I think you have answered most of these questions and some of them perhaps as you say for one reason or another you cannot answer. One thing that I thought was interesting when I talked with Professor McDonald, he indicated that in those early years the faculty at the College of William and Mary looked on the Norfolk Division as something of an exile and if you got sent down there it was not exactly a good thing. I wondered if you remember that?

Miller: Ha ha I wouldn't put it quite that way. I would say that in those early years most members of the faculty were blissfully unaware of the existence of the Norfolk Division.

Q: Well, I guess that says about as much as need be said on that.

Miller: No, we didn't specify what we mean by the early years there, perhaps we should.

[6]

I think I have heard it said that back before Mr. Bryan was president, back in the days of J.A.C. Chandler, there were a few cases in which he had punished a faculty member by sending him down to Norfolk. I have heard that, Alright, that's for the J.A.C. Chandler days. In Mr. Bryan's day, I would repeat what I said a moment ago, that I think typically nobody had ever heard of the Norfolk Division.

Q: Perhaps, you don't recall anything about this, but I will mention it anyway. The Board of Visitors appointed a committee to study the possibility of separating the Norfolk Division and transferring it to VPI. At this time, Dr. McClelland makes reference to this quite a bit in the Annals. I just wondered about how serious the College of William and Mary was about dropping the Norfolk Branch or if you remember anything about it?

Miller: I don't know. That does not ring a bell in my memory. Any of that. By the way, did Dr. McClelland have access to the minutes of the Board?

Q: I doubt it, I don't believe so as there is no evidence of it. I am trying to obtain access to those myself.

Miller: Yes, well I was about to say that the real story there or at least one important aspect of it could be found only in those minutes, because they wouldn't put it in the newspapers.

Q: No, that's true. It did become known and a committee of local citizens in Norfolk which included Mr. Jaffe, Louis Jaffe, the editor of the Virginian-Pilot tried to save the Norfolk Division. From what you said I would gather that the only reason that President Bryan asked for the dismissal of Dean Hodges or for his resignation was the grades?

Miller: Absolutely, absolutely. I had never heard him intimate to me before any thought that there would be any need of making such an administrative change. No, it was when it turned out that the dishonest practices had been going on, dishonest in the sense in which I explained it. It was only then and immediately then that he demanded the resignation of Dean Hodges. He had no other motive, I am sure.

Q: I think down at the Division there was discontent, feeling that he spent too much money on athletics and feeling that he was too autocratic in the faculty meetings, at least this is the impression given by Dr. McClellan's book about it. I think perhaps that didn't filter up here, and that it didn't come up.

Miller: Spending too much money on athletics at Norfolk, you mean? At Norfolk, oh I don't know a thing about that. Oh Dean hodges, oh, and autocratic at faculty meetings. Well I think Mr. Bryan and I would have both thought that one dean out of two is autocratic at faculty meetings (laughs). About the athletic part of it, I know nothing at all.

Q: I don't know if you recall this, but in the book Dr. McClelland wrote that when you met with the faculty down at the Norfolk Division, and you were informed about the grade situation you closed the meeting with them by saying, "I presume you have not thought that Dean Hodges will be dismissed," and they answered, "Certainly not." And I just wondered what that meant?

[7]

Miller: This was prior to revelation that the grades had been falsified, isn't it? No, this is prior to that. All of that is prior. This is in February 1941. I don't remember that meeting. It was perhaps because in the light of the whole thing, it was a relatively minor occurrence. I don't remember what McClelland says here that the Norfolk faculty came up to Williamsburg and met with complaints and requests. I don't remember any of that, but anyhow all of this is well before the matter of falsified grades was mentioned. These, apparently all of this was about complaints of a different nature.

Q: As you recall that conversation with Dean Hodges, you said you left with the impression that he would resign. I just wondered what his immediate reaction was, or if you could tell by facial expression or words if he seemed worried, if he seemed defensive or if he felt "the game was up," or something of that kind?

Miller: I can't be sure. I left with the impression, as Mr. Bryan did, that this, as I said, was a fait accompli. Dean Hodges was dismissed, resignation was a euphemism. Now as to his, Dean Hodge's immediate reaction, it was nothing that would give us the impression that he did not accept the demand. I would guess that when Mr. Bryan demanded his resignation, I would guess that he said, Dean Hodges said in effect, "Very well, sir." Now that is a guess regarding language but the impression under which we both left was as if he had said that, with no attempt to argue against it, no show of emotion. Apparently it was simply a quiet acceptance.

Q: After this occurred, of course, there was the stirring up in the community of a great deal of support for him and the faculty seemed to be divided. Now Dr. McClelland said that you came down from Williamsburg again and called a meeting of the faculty, and at this meeting you declared that you would have considerable doubt concerning the integrity and ethics of persons who would engage in a campaign to support acts of gross dishonesty or who would place loyalty to persons above loyalty to principles. I know what you meant by that, of course, but I was wondering what effect this seemed to have on the faculty and among the members of the faculty that supported him. And I wonder how many of the members of the faculty supported him? Because Professor McDonald gives me the impression that it was only a minority of the faculty who were critical of him that came under a great deal of pressure in the community because he was so popular.

Miller: Well, Frank would know better than I. He was there, I wasn't. I have no memory of any such meeting as that, and what I am quoted as having said, doesn't sound to me like me (laughs). No, it sounds almost like a threat. I would have not gone down and threatened my colleagues.

Q: I don't know where he obtained this or from what sources.

Miller: If there was such a meeting, there may well be, I just don't remember. If there was such a meeting, I might have used some of those phrases, but not in a way that was intimating attack upon colleagues who don't agree.

[8]

Q: Sometimes things are taken out of context and words are put together and they sound like something else.

Miller: I think more likely put together. If this happened, I have no memory of it. I'm not denying that it did.

Q: The impression that McClelland gives is that, well he says that Dean Hodges submitted his resignation on April 30 and that his case was not heard by the Board of Visitors. He gives that impression that the period of about a month followed Mr. Bryan's trip to Norfolk, at the end of which time he finally did resign. We talked about Mr. Duke's actions as administrator. Did you get the impression during Mr. Pomfret's presidency from '42 - '51 that the, you said that there wasn't that much contact between the college in Williamsburg and the Norfolk Division. Did it seem that things were going pretty good?

Miller: Yes, I think so and I think Ernest Gray was succeeded by Lewis Webb, wasn't he? And I think Dr. Pomfret and I both had a very high regard for both of them. We felt, you know, that with Ernest Gray and with Lewis Webb in charge, we didn't have to worry.

Q: In 1951 you briefly served as Acting President of the College of William and Mary. I was wondering at that time if you had any administrative duties in connection with the Norfolk Division?

Miller: No, I did not. You know, as I recall I had been Acting President for six or seven weeks. Well I looked up some clippings recently in connection with my recording for the College of William and Mary and discovered to my amazement that I had been Acting President for only three weeks. So in that time as you can well imagine I didn't have time for much of anything except holding things together briefly. No, I don't, well, who knows? I don't think anything connected with Norfolk came up in that time.

Q: Dean Miller is going to add a few comments on President John Stewart Bryan's actions in the Dr. Hodges case.

Miller: I gather the impression from your written questions, from several of the written questions, all of which seem to reflect the point of view of Professor Robert McClelland's Annals of the College. I gather the impression that he and perhaps you feel that President Bryan was slow to act, that he delayed that he was dilatory in the matter of Dean Hodges. I think that is completely incorrect, completely untrue. Mr. Bryan acted immediately in all the significant steps of the matter. When I first reported to him the allegations that Dean Hodges had falsified records, Mr. Bryan said, "Well, we must go down to Norfolk immediately and look into this." We did so.

When it turned out that Dean Hodges admitted that he had falsified records and when, after denying that there were anymore falsifications than three, and Miss Alsop found perhaps twenty, Mr. Bryan then immediately demanded the resignation of Dean Hodges. As I said in the main part of my remarks, this was his gentlemanly way of saying "You are fired!"

[9]

Now, we left Norfolk, Mr. Bryan and I, with the understanding that Dean Hodges was out. It was a fait accompli. Delay was produced by reaction in the Norfolk newspapers, and by Dean Hodges appealing, as I believe he did, to the Board of Visitors to review the case and to waive his dismissal. Those were the delays. There was nothing further then that Mr. Bryan could do until the Board acted. So, I would say he acted strongly, Mr. Bryan did, vigorously and promptly, throughout without any delay or weakness.

Q: Thank you again, Dr. Miller.

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