Stephen Cary: Conscience of a College
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Someone at some
time may have cared more deeply than Stephen Cary about Haverford College. Someone
may have wanted to reach still higher for excellence in education, honor in
performance, and commitment to peace. But I know of no one who did so. He was
Haverford at its aspiring best.
Thirty-three years ago, Steve asked me to have lunch with him in Philadelphia.
I knew him as a member of the search committee that brought me to Haverford
in 1967 and then as vice-chairman of the College’s board. We were just
nicely into the meal when he stunned me with a question. Would I have any interest
in bringing him onto the Haverford staff to head our development program?
Interest? My heart leaped. It had never occurred to me that he might be willing
to leave his American Friends Service Committee job to come to us. Yet, I knew
what a catch he would be for us, and especially for a president still feeling
his way in the world of Quakers.
Here was a man with an extraordinarily rich background in service of peace.
He had been a conscientious objector in World War II, a laborer and leader in
civilian work camps, a fighter for civil rights back home, a jail inmate for
some of his protests, a good will worker in Vietnam, and a conferee with winners
of the Nobel Peace Prize searching for saner ways to resolve conflict.
Why would he want to come to Haverford? Aren’t campuses withdrawn, contemplative,
and unreal?
Steve saw this switch as a logical next step in his life. What Haverford offered
him was a chance to play a part in turning out leaders for the future who would
combine the highest intellectual abilities with a passion to use those abilities
in the service of others. In 1630, John Winthrop saw the new world which he
and his fellow founders of the Company of Massachusetts Bay as “a City
upon the Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” Steve’s vision was
less sweeping but just as inspiring. His alma mater would be a place where young
people could find harmony for head and heart. And this harmony would have something
that John Winthrop could neither imagine nor enjoy: fun.
His personality and passion were such that he could have made a compelling case
for that harmony in any job on campus — director of security, assistant
head of grounds (he was too modest to try replacing our head gardener), librarian
of the Quaker collection, lecturer on conciliation, or vice president for development.
Put him anywhere, and he would be heard and loved.
His earliest contact with the College was inevitable. To be raised in a home
with deep Quaker roots and to have a strong mother as an alumna of Bryn Mawr
was to have one’s educational path predetermined. His intimate contacts
from that 1969 luncheon until cancer took his life this summer were not inevitable.
They came from a searching on his part (“Where can I have the most lasting
impact?”) and luck on our part. (“Who out there might best illustrate
what we want to stand for?”)
To have the impact that he had on the College — and on me — he had
to have two qualities side by side: faith and humor.
His religious faith was rock solid. The man Jesus was for him ever-present.
“What would He do in this situation?” was the question that came
to Steve at each turn in the road. I realize that religious fundamentalists
are supposed to ask that same question, but Steve knew what Jesus said about
love, about peacemakers, and about the least among us. He had no need for the
rest of us to be as committed to the Galilean as he was. It was enough that
each of us had a faith, a belief in an ideal rising above the everyday and the
self, and a striving to live by that faith. Steve made us believe in man’s
capacity for goodness even when greed, corruption, and evil surround us. The
College’s job, as he saw it, was to plant and sustain in students the
ability and desire to make a difference.
Yet had he
not had humor to match that faith, he could have been a pain in the butt. Many
a crusader is. Steve’s humor was abundant. His laugh was loud, and his
appreciation of life’s ironies and jokes was acute.
One of his early adventures foreshadowed the Cary that would be with us for
60 more years. As an undergraduate, he went with a team to some game in Baltimore
against Johns Hopkins. The team took in a movie that afternoon. It was a Laurel
and Hardy picture. Twice, the theater’s usher (there was such a job in
those days) warned Steve that if he continued to laugh so loudly he would have
to leave the place. The warning did no good. The film was too funny. Steve guffawed
again and was kicked out.
He could laugh at himself. Next to his faith and his family, he loved athletics
most. Let Haverford be playing Swarthmore in any sport and Steve went into overdrive.
At a football game (that, too, existed in his time), our vice president for
development would be on the edge of the playing field, red-faced, fists pounding
the air, and shouting “Kill, Quakers, kill!” Afterward, he’d
laugh at what our #1 pacifist had done, only to repeat it at the next game.
Much of my presidency and Steve’s vice presidency was taken up with the
issue of admitting women as full-time Haverford students. Had I not had the
full support of my administrative team, I doubt that I would have stuck with
the fight for coeducation — or with the College, for that matter —
after a succession of defeats. The opposition was almost always charitable and
above board, and was based solely on the impact of such a change on Bryn Mawr.
That put Steve in a tough position. His mother had been a devoted Bryn Mawrter
and he had many Bryn Mawr friends. Yet he came down solidly, if painfully, in
support of coeducation. The issue for him was one of fairness: he could not
any longer reconcile exclusion of women from full membership in the Haverford
community with his abiding belief in treating everyone as he would want to be
treated. The power of the Cary voice in Quaker circles helped make coeducation
a certainty before many years passed. I was gone by then, but he was there to
see a dream come true and to be a member of the welcoming crew for women.
Steve served one year as acting president. That year was surely one of the happiest
for him and for his wife, Betty. He loved having the chance to give still more
voice to his belief in Haverford’s unique place in education. He loved
the little perquisites that went with the job, like performing a song-and-dance
routine in a Class Night skit. He would have liked to be chosen as the full-time
president. That was not to be. But living all the rest of his life on the edge
of campus he was, for countless men and then women, too, the conscience of the
College. He kept that Quaker light bright during one presidency not enamored
with that faith and practice, so that both of the next presidents who came along
could build again on that special heritage.
Steve was conscience for me. Time after time, then and since, I have shaped
my response to a new situation by asking “What would Steve do in this
case?” I have had before me the image of a man who brought together the
Sermon on the Mount and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights — and
had a whole lot of fun doing it.
Jack Coleman served as president of Haverford College from 1967 to 1977. He
lives in Chester, Vt.