Futch interview
                                                                                                            
[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Warren: I hope I'm not overstepping the bounds of this subject, because I'm really
glad to get your perspective on that, because I feel awkward, because I've heard so
often that party line that things were going academically badly, and we've had about
a ten-year span of alumni who are really being run down by that.
Futch: Yes. Very much, yes. I would be furious if I were one of those alumni.
Warren: So I'm glad to have a perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily
agree or disagree. You know, I mean, I don't take any position on it at all.
Futch: You were out of town during so much out of town.
Warren: Well, and I also just don't take any position. I'm here gathering
information, but I think it's important to get the other point of view.
Futch: I am convinced that there is something haywire about that. Now I'll tell you
another thing. This cannot be in the book, obviously. I think that the previous
president, the president previous to the current one, was very anxious to be credited
with creating a new school, as he called it in a faculty meeting of September of '84
"The new Washington and Lee," and that-if you quote me on this, I am dead
meat-that he wanted an enormous amount of credit for being the refounder of the
school, and therefore, that assertion and claim could be best supported by saying the
school had become a garbage pail of derelicts, that these guys were drunken morons,
that they had IQs in the double digits, they were nothing but disgusting inebriates.
And that party line was hammered away-I'm told behind closed doors it was
hammered away at and hammered away at and hammered away at and that we now
have a school of kids who talk about nothing but Plato and Aristotle in their free

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time, in their off-duty-I started to say off-duty time-which, of course, is very far
from the truth.

         As far as alcoholism is concerned, alcoholic revelry, which I don't doubt
existed in the late '70s-of course, I didn't live downtown so I can well imagine
what you saw on the street those Friday and Saturday nights perhaps, or on some
other night, but I didn't see that with my own eyes because, of course, I don't-I
guess professors are well advised not to roam around on the streets at 11:00 o'clock
on Friday and Saturday nights.

         But when I was hired here in '62, one of my grandmothers was still living,
and so I told her with some degree of pride that I had been offered a job at W&L.
This was in May of 1962. I was offered the job in April, in April of '62. And so I said
to her that this job offer had come along, I'd accepted and would be going down
there, down to Lexington in September from Baltimore, and my grandmother's only
comment was-she was about seventy-eight years old at the time-she said, "Don't
the boys down at Washington and Lee drink a lot?"

         And I evaded that by saying, "Do you think I would take a job at a place where
the boys drink a lot?" But obviously she had heard other elderly ladies whose
grandsons had come down here as students, she had heard scuttlebutt from the
elderly ladies of that day. So this alcoholic reputation of the school, I think, goes back
to the 1920s, if not earlier, and I doubt if it was earlier, because the South was so
poverty-stricken after the Civil War that I don't think it was a playboy school before
World War I. But with the gradual return of prosperity to some places in the South
after the First World War, I think the South was fifty years getting over the Civil
War and the impoverishment that came from that, but by the 1920s and '30s, W&L
was in jeopardy of becoming a playboy school, and wealthy families from Atlanta
and New Orleans and places like that had kids here.

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         So I think that that reputation does not particularly belong or uniquely belong
to the 1970s but that the party line, as you rightly call it, of the '80s and now the
nineties was that the school had become simply a pit of disgraceful "alkies" and that
the changes that were made in the 1980s corrected that. And I think also probably
that the admissions office was told to be on the lookout for high-schoolers, for
twelfth graders who have been sort of-how can one say-goody-goodys, sort of the
editors of the high school literary magazine if the high school had a literary
magazine, editor of the high school newspaper, the kids in high school who were
the least likely to be hell-raisers and the most likely to be bookworms from their
possibly junior, certainly senior high school years, and that a kid who was editor of
the high school poetry mag was much less likely to be hurling bottles of whiskey or
burning piles of furniture in college.

         There probably has been some toning down of that, not on the basis of grades
only, but on the basis of kids who were very quiet. I mean, I was a high school
goody-goody. I never got drunk. I never vandalized anything, was always in the
bosom of Mom and Pop's nest, and I think that is, ironically, the kind of kid that I
was in the 1940s is the kind that they began to recruit more carefully in the latter
half of the 1980s, the goody-goodies who were-please don't use it in the book-the
goody-goodies who were the least likely to misbehave.

         For example, there was a case around 1990 or so when the SAEs and the Phi
Psis, who were great rivals, the Phi Psis being mostly Northerners, the SAEs being
mostly Southerners, and they have hated each other for decades, and their houses
are very close together, and there was some incident, I guess in 1990, when one of
them threw a soft-drink bottle, or more likely a booze bottle, through the window of
the next-door house, and then the other guys reciprocated, and several windows
were broken after the Fraternity Renaissance or at the climactic moment of the
Fraternity Renaissance.

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         The president of the university in 1990 was very, very angry about this, and
summoned the offenders from the two houses, not necessarily together, but some of
the offenders who had broken the windows to his office for a tongue-lashing and
said that they were bringing the violence of the Bronx in New York to Lexington,
and they were suspended from school for either a semester or a year or something of
that sort and were told as they left his office, these kids, of course, told their friends
who told me that he said as they left, "I hope you enjoy bagging groceries for the
next year," or the next semester, whatever it was. "You're fit only for that." So kids
who would likely break windows would have been laughed off as just typical W&L
guys in the '70s and '60s and '50s and '40s and '30s and '20s, but by 1990, kids who
deliberately broke windows were equated with vandals in the Bronx, and so that had
nothing to do with academics. That just had to do with self-control and the way kids
spent their leisure time. He was extremely determined to exclude these roughnecks
and-what would you say-kids who behaved in trashy ways, whether from rich or
poor backgrounds. Of course, rich kids can be very bad vandals.

         He was determined to put a stop to that and to make sure that not only were
they academically motivated, but also they would behave like good little boys and, of
course, hoped, as often happens, that the academic motivation and behaving like
good little boys go together. Of course there are kids who are good little boys who
don't have any candle-power mentally and, of course, can't be good students,
however motivated they might be, and then there are kids who are very bright and
can do quite well academically, but are crazy hell-raisers in their free time.
Warren: Have you seen a change in your students academically in recent years?
Futch: No, not academically. Not academically. I think I've detected kids who are
less likely to break windows and less likely to smash up a car while drunk and less
likely to run up on a sidewalk and hit a fence or something like that. I think there is
less of that. But as for academics, no. For one thing, the high schools, I think, do

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increasingly bad jobs with the teaching of English, and one thing I look for is good
English, spelling, syntax, use of the right word in the right context, and, if anything,
that is worse now than the 1960s or no better, certainly. And I don't think they're
getting stupider at all. I think that the high schools are just getting-and maybe the
prep schools, are getting worse and worse and worse. A lot of these kids don't come
from public high schools.

         So, no, I don't see any improvement in performance or any noticeable decline
other than spelling, spelling mistakes that didn't happen in the 1960s happen now,
and the running together of words that didn't happen thirty years ago happens now.
But that's not an intellectual decline. That is a matter of very poor high school
preparation. So !don't think that the intellectual caliber of the place is any different
from what it was thirty years ago, certainly no worse, but very dubious that it's any
better.

         But the politeness is still there. That also is the same as the 1960s. I'm very
grateful for that. Of course, good manners are extremely important in getting
through life, and somebody who comes across as polite and friendly will go far . It's
hard to mess up one's life with a reputation of politeness and friendliness, and these
kids have been brought up in the right way, and they are polite and friendly and,
therefore, a joy to deal with. So that is something, thank goodness, that hasn't
changed.

         But I think, getting back to what you said about the female students being so
similar to the male students in the last ten years or eleven years, I think some of the
faculty crazies were hoping that nasty females would arrived, and to my great
delight, nice females have arrived. So another case where some of the faculty
members have been disappointed, just as some were disappointed that a revolution
didn't break out during Cambodia Week twenty-six years ago.

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Warren: I feel like I've taken a lot of your afternoon. Is there anything more you
would like to say? Is there anything you want to summarize?
Futch: Not that I can think of. No. Not really.
Warren: I feel like Richard got so many really wonderful stories from you.
Futch: On tape, now, you mean.
Warren: Yes. I have had great delight in sharing the Barry Goldwater story, and I
will never walk through those boxwoods without thinking of Barry Goldwater.
[Laughter]
Futch: Yes. Well, where the boxwoods come to a right angle. I pointed that out to
some people yesterday afternoon and showed them the spot, and one of their kids-
they were some people who were in town to usher their boy into VMI for his rat
year, and these people also had a relative who went to W&L a very few years ago,
and we were standing at the end of our discussion up in front of Lee Chapel. We
met late in the afternoon, so Lee Chapel was closed, but then we went down to the
parking lot, and I said, "Oh, by the way, this is where Barry Goldwater did this," and
it was a mother and father and three boys, three sons. And they giggled and chortled
at this. So yeah, that is a true story, the Barry Goldwater story.

         Now, if you want to do this again in a week or two weeks or three weeks, I'm
available.
Warren: All right.
Futch: If you think of some more questions, and I will certainly be on the lookout
in my house for more things like the graduation. But as I say, there's an 1880 one.
That's 1870, but there's another one someplace in the house, and I've got to find it. If
I find any photos, I will certainly let you know.
Warren: Okay. I'm real interested in finding those.
Futch: Yeah. I will be glad to be helpful any way I can, and I'm so hard to get in
touch with. Drop me a line in the U.S. mail if you want to-

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Warren: That's what I understand, that's the way.
Futch: Yeah. Yeah. Thirty-two cents will do it.
Warren: How about campus mail? Do you read campus mail?
Futch: Sometimes.
Warren: I've got to pay if I want to contact you?
Futch: Well, I'll reimburse you, because I realize I'm very hard to get at. But
sometimes I will pick up campus mail, and somebody will be with me as I go into
the office, I'll lay the campus mail down and be talking to someone, and then that
gets forgotten.
Warren: So best to write you at home?
Futch: Oh, yes. I'm alone when I get the mail at home.
Warren: Okay.
Futch: Because there's never anybody in the house.
Warren: All right. Well, shall we wind this up?
Futch: Okay. We can wind it up, and I appreciate all of your attentiveness.
Warren: Thank you.
Futch: You're most welcome.
[End of interview]

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