Arnold R. Weber, 1929-2020

 

I’m not sure what was more startling, the fact I was up sometime before noon on a Sunday during college or that Northwestern’s 14^th president and his wife were strolling through the fraternity quad. As I was more focused on obtaining something greasy to sop up the previous evening’s alcohol, I gave the sighting no more thought until later that afternoon when someone came rushing into the TV room. “Guys,” he said, “Guys, we have got to go outside and clean up from last night’s party now. The Dean of Students just called me. President Weber walked by the house a little while ago and was pissed that the place was a mess.” With that we hurried out and beautified the landscape in record time.

There was, of course, a bigger lesson from this than a scare from the administration. First, as we’ve been told since kindergarten, clean up after yourselves. But more importantly, don’t give the authorities a reason to put you on their radar, especially for something as petty as plastic cups in the shrubs. Suffice it to say that going forward we assigned a more responsible crew for post-party clean up. It was also a classic Arnold Weber move. Don’t overreact to the minor problems, but make sure the message gets out there. Be fair but let everyone know where you stand. With Dr. Weber’s passing last week at age 90, it is a chance to reflect on how to run an organization.

In today’s world we look at leaders as our friends—whether it’s an association on Facebook or, increasingly at colleges, even taking a class taught by the President themselves. I could think of nothing more repugnant to Arnold Weber. Don’t get me wrong—he was, in our few interactions, perfectly sociable in a polite way, but tweedy and worried about your feelings he was not. There wasn’t a chip on his shoulder, but every time he opened his mouth, his highly intelligent voice boomed through a distinct Bronx, New York working middle-class background. His habit of chain smoking unfiltered Camels added even more gravel, and no less gravitas, to his tone.

But persona is no substitute for substance, and Dr. Weber showed real leadership on the toughest of issues. One such example is the tale of Barb Foley. The good Dr. Foley was, charitably, a character—one who was an actual card-carrying communist and not afraid to invoke class warfare at the slightest provocation of imperialist aggression. While I never took one of her classes, the collegiate gods had a good laugh when they assigned her to me as my freshman advisor. She walked through the ministrations of academic advice about my intended courses (Econ for a career on Wall Street for me, naturally) and even hosted an outing to a theater performance in downtown Chicago with her other advisees.

By following year Foley had jumped through the final hoop of academia’s obstacle course, recommendation for tenure, and had but Weber’s signature to seal a guaranteed lifetime of employment. But in an ironic twist, one of the great symbols of the anti-communist fight, the Nicaraguan contras, snatched paradise away. One of the group’s leaders was on campus and temptation was too great. Not satisfied to picket and pamphlet outside the lecture hall, Foley led a group into the room and splashed red paint on the speaker, symbolizing the blood of Nicaragua (of course!) while also proclaiming to the audience that “This man cannot be allowed to speak.” The continuing disruption and threats caused the speech to be canceled and the speaker hustled out by campus police for his own safety.

This was no he-said, she said incident. Foley proudly owned her actions and declared victory. That is until Dr. Weber just as decisively rejected the tenure recommendation, effectively firing her. Here was a university where free speech and thought, the exchange of ideas, was paramount and Foley would have none of it. Weber understood that allowing this to pass would undermine the entire concept of academic freedom. Appeals and litigation ensued, but Northwestern’s decision survived and its reputation remained intact. Comrade Barb exiled herself to the People’s Republic of New Jersey and continued the proletariat struggle at Rutgers. It may also have marked the last moment of sanity at this country’s elite institutions of higher learning. For any university president to take the same action today would be unthinkable; in fact they wouldn’t just give Foley tenure, they would name a teaching chair after her.

But behind the intellect and rock-solid principles was a biting humor to make his point. Early on in his time on campus he organized a few “meet the new President” session-really just a question and answer get together. The first one had, maybe, two participants, and Weber made it very clear that people would have to show up if they wanted these to continue. As a campus photographer I was assigned to cover the second event, and sure enough a larger group gathered at the student center. As time passed, one particularly irritated student started in on some of the renovations Weber had started. Railing against newly-installed rocks demarking walking paths, the student ended up red-faced, denouncing, in light of the expensive tuition, why Weber could be “planting all of these trees!” In classic Weber fashion he quietly ashed his cigarette before taking a few soothing puffs. Thus fortified, he looked the youth in the eye and sternly proclaimed, “I like trees.”

And there is was. Clearly this student never got a phone call about cleaning up the garbage. Trees weren’t some Sierra Club manifesto or green energy plan; he wanted the place to sparkle, academically and physically, and he sure as heck wasn’t going to let a few bucks get in his way. He sorted out the school’s finances by fundraising like nobody before him and judiciously cutting where he had to. By his retirement he definitely left the campus better than when he arrived.

And so I give thanks for having known Arnold Weber, albeit in only that slightest of ways. But looking back, seeing leadership with integrity, force of personality, and keen intellect matched with sharp wit was as important as any class I took. And whatever the afterlife holds, I know that for one person it will be filled with trees. Lots and lots on neatly planted trees.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

It’s All Greek To Me

If you thought practicing the piano was just a nice way to pass the time, you would be wrong—it was more like a full-contact workout in an overheated gym. How would I possibly know this, as I can’t even bang out chopsticks, you ask? Early Saturday evenings, my junior year fraternity roommate Mike would come back drenched in sweat from a few hours of piano rehearsal. Aside from the annual mud football games, few guys came back to the house from any kind of workout looking as drained as he did. This weekly ritual culminated in a spring recital, and naturally I would be attending. What was truly impressive was that 20 or more of our brothers made the trek down to south campus and took in the performance, without even the promise of booze afterwards. I’d put good money that only a couple had ever heard of Debussy, or even had attended any kind of classical music performance, save a sibling’s end-of-school-year show. But that was the great thing about my fraternity—these were your friends and supporters, often times when you least expected it.

With colleges reopening this month there’s a new punching bag across campuses. Greek life has always had its doubters; some out of a false sense of intellectual superiority and others simply had no interest. The latter never bothered me—in fact I respected them for not caring about it. The former, however, always seemed to invoke the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to be in a club that would admit them. What they never got was that that Groucho was making fun of himself, not the institutions. Now the not-so-funny joke at colleges is the move to disband the Greek system by members of the Greek houses themselves.

This new pandemic of social crusading centers on the tenet that the Greek system is beholden to, and promoter of, inequality, elitism, and racism. The most vocal critics are students at such institutions such as Vanderbilt, Duke, Emory, and my alma mater, Northwestern. Of course, these students also claim that these very same institutions that they attend are also propagators of inequality, elitism, and racism. Oddly, they aren’t leaving campus in protest or calling for the closing of the schools, or at least not until they get their degrees. And I can personally attest that there was neither inequality nor elitism in my fraternity—all the booze was equally cheap and bad.

It’s the charge of racism that particularly rankles me. There was no sign over our door saying “Whites Only.” At any given time we would have had three or four black members, which as a percentage of the house almost perfectly matched the University’s minority percentages. We were probably slightly more progressive than some other houses, especially with a number of South Asian members. During rush week we would have daily meetings to evaluate pledge candidates. Unlike the movie Animal House, we didn’t set up an overhead projector to show face book photos and throw beer cans at the wall when we didn’t like somebody. Actually we tried that once and Hollywood makes it look much easier than it really is. But during these “hash” sessions, nobody, and I mean nobody, ever said, “We have a black guy, why do we need more?” or “Gee do you think it’s going to look bad if I say I just don’t like the guy and he happens to be Hispanic?” Minds met, bids were handed out, and pledges made. As Groucho also said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

A final, and overarching, complaint from the disaffected is that there is no “meaning” to the Greek system. I have vague recollections of the meaning of the secret lessons from my initiation ceremony. You can look up the meaning of my fraternity’s crest in any standard reference book of heraldry. As with anything in life, meaning comes from what you put in, and it varied for each man. Some guys were active in the house all through college, living, breathing, and drinking it in for four years. As junior and senior years came, more distanced themselves, perhaps just paying dues and doing door duty for parties, but not so involved in the day-to-day. Some just faded away.

But there was real meaning in the day-to-day life. Our weekly chapter meetings were nominally to go over the house’s business, but more gossip sessions from the previous, pre-social media, weekend’s parties. Occasionally, however, the meetings turned ugly. The President storming out of the meeting and threatening to resign ugly. Calls for an active to leave the fraternity ugly, only for that active to defend himself in speech so eloquent that it ended in a cacophony of applause. Verbal knife fights that would have ended in blood with real weapons ugly. As unpleasant as these incidents were, I’ve applied what I learned in my personal and professional life time and time again. That’s what college should do for you, and my fraternity definitely did.

Which brings us to the question that Greek members who call for the elimination of the Greek system can’t seem to answer: Why did you want to join in the first place? It seems that these youths felt that their purpose in life was to change the Greek system into some functionary of social change and promoter of “social justice.” This isn’t just naïve but utterly stupid. These days there are a hundred campus organizations, with every flavor of disaffection, that are looking to change the world. The Greek system isn’t it. The virtue signaling of deactivating after failing to complete this mission simply completes this circle of self-absorption.

I won’t defend every Greek house in America. There are plenty of idiots to want to funnel booze into an 18 year-old’s throat or throw them out into the cold woods as pledge training and not expect bad things to happen. There’s no place for that, or if there is it’s probably jail. A friend of mine once recounted a hazing ritual, best not repeated here, whose purpose was to confirm that these fine young white men would not be aroused by black women. Obviously there’s no place for that either. And if there was a shortcoming in my house, it would have been the difficulty for those who were exploring their sexual identities. We all knew members who were gay, but it wasn’t as if they could bring a boyfriend to formal.

Yet there is still plenty of meaning for most of those who have gone through the Greek experience. About a dozen of us have gone on virtual reunions during this Covid time. Predictably, the years have added a few pounds or taken away some hair, but overall the crew is in great shape. The conversation revolves around the issues of 50-something men—how kids will adjust to college this year, golf, and hoping Northwestern’s football team will be at least average. But the jokes are just as cutting as they were three decades ago, and as my wife pointed out she hadn’t heard me laugh that hard in a long time. The camera also shows that our careers have been successful enough that we can afford better cocktails than the swill we had in the past. This brotherhood, in its own way, is Stellis Aequus Durando, “Equal to the Stars in Endurance.” I only wish Mike were alive today to give us all one more performance, even if it were just over a blurry Zoom video.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.