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Exiting an Era

By the time Pfnister resigned in 1969, most of the era’s institutional changes were in place. It remained to consolidate and refine them.

While looking for a successor to John Stauffer, the board of directors vested authority in the three senior administrators — Pfnister, Matthies and Reck. Officially they were an Administrative Committee. We called them the troika. William Kinnison was secretary — essentially executive secretary, since he was expected to attend to many details. Pfnister hired Erno Dahl from Texas Lutheran to be academic dean (1967-1969; provost 1969-1976).

In the spring of 1969 the board named G. Kenneth Andeen president over the sharp internal objections of the “troika,” Pastor Robert Karsten and a few others. Andeen had some experience in college administration, but it proved not to be his calling. He was a well intentioned, pastoral sort of person, charming in a conventional sort of way, but he frequently deferred hard decisions, sometimes leaving campus to avoid them. Soon the board restructured the administration into a cabinet-like system, at least partly to compensate for the inadequacies of the president. In 1974 he was released.

It is quite possible that Andeen’s tenure strengthened campus governance. Issues were either resolved without him or deferred. There was time to absorb the innumerable changes of the previous six years and adjust to a declining student pool. There was time for William Kinnison, the vice president for university affairs, to prepare for the position of acting president when Andeen was released in 1974, and then to become Wittenberg’s 11th president, ending an era.

Change was contested in the years between Stoughton’s administration and Kinnison’s. It escaped initial expectations. Students, faculty, administrators, board members — all were sometimes frustrated and anxious, occasionally exhilarated, and often perplexed. They were forging new roles on campus. Their interaction sharpened issues of identity, making change an intensely self-conscious process. The era resulted in less formal relationships, more shared responsibility, a more cosmopolitan and diverse campus, and a kind of learning adapted to both contemporary academic disciplines and the modern world. That was often unclear at the time because turbulence did indeed accompany change. About 1971 the nation wearied of both war and public protest. On campus dispute faded into discussion, and changes became institutionalized. Explicitly relieved, the college community returned to a more relaxed mood.

The preferred college foolishness at the beginning of the period was the water fight, perhaps a panty raid. At the era’s end the college fad was streaking. Following reports of streaking on other campuses in the spring of 1974, a handful of students mimicked the practice at Wittenberg. They ran together and at night, except for one memorable streak through a faculty meeting. Rumor had preceded them, and attendance in Bayley Auditorium was large. The west door opened and perhaps three boys and a girl (the number is not recorded), clad only in ski masks, jogged along the walkway dividing the upper tier of seats from the lower, and exited through the east door. Dean of the College Erno Dahl was presiding. When the students had left he shouted, “why didn’t someone tell me this was going to happen?” Pointing to the east door — the exit, he added, “I’d have locked the door!”

Between 1963 and 1974 Wittenberg experienced an era of rapid social and intellectual change. Once begun, change could not be contained. Until it had run its course, in the words of Jean Paul Sartre and the allusion of Erno Dahl, there was no exit.

In many ways, and under intense pressure from both a social revolution in race relations and a contested war that were breaking in on the campus, the college was breaking out of its past. Many students and faculty — even those least involved — were touched by the events of the Sixties. Wittenberg itself was transformed as it adapted Prexy Stoughton’s vision of the college community as the “sharing of insights and aims and experiences” to a fresh social and academic context. That struggle touches the community yet today.

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