Huntley interview

[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Warren: One of the other things that I believe was suspended during your time was Fancy
Dress.
Huntley: Well, it was wasn't suspended, they just quit having it. It petered out and then it was
redeemed. It was revived.
Warren: Was there a sadness to that?
Huntley: Well, yeah, I would say, although, again, when things peter out, it's less sad than
when they're shot. Fancy Dress had been a rather unsuccessful event for several years prior to
its-
Warren: Oh, really.
Huntley: Yeah, it really had, because it didn't work very well. During that time period,
students were not as interested as they had been earlier and probably are now in carefully laid

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plans for large celebrity weekends. That sort of thing was not popular in the early seventies.
That's when it died out. I've forgotten when. I've forgotten the years, you'll have to look it
up. And I've forgotten when it was revived.
Warren: I think it was '70, '74, something like that.
Huntley: But it was a mere shadow of its former self before that.
Warren: So when it came back, did it come back full force?
Huntley: Well, it came back anew. No, it didn't come back as it had once been. It came back
as a new creature. And as a new creature, it better suited the times than we live in now. You
couldn't bring back the dance sets of the forties and thirties.
Warren: Oh, wouldn't it be fun, though?
Huntley: It would be fun, but you couldn't possibly do it. It would be an act to try to do it.
Fancy Dress, when I was a student, was a three-day dance set, three days, three nights and with
two different bands, sometimes with both bands in the same night. I mean both Dorseys, for
example. Both bands, real bands. Bands that don't even exist now. You couldn't get them
now if you wanted to; they don't exist.

         We had two bands, one for Thursday night and one for Saturday night and two for Friday
night, and dressed formally all three nights, one night in tails, one night in tux, and one night in
costume. To revive something like that today would be silly. You might put it on as a play
once, but you couldn't sustain it as a tradition.

         There were four dance sets in those years, all formal. Dance set in Opening Dances,
there was Fancy Dress, Spring Dances and Finals. The other three dances were two night sets
with big bands. You couldn't do that today. As I say, it would be kind of silly if you did.

         So Fancy Dress is not what it was. That's not to say it isn't good. They still dress fancy
and they still have a nice party.
Warren: Do you ever go now?
Huntley: I have been. I haven't been in the last several years. I never missed one when I was
here.
Warren: I think it's a great party.
Huntley: It is.
Warren: I went to my first one this year and had a fabulous time.
Huntley: It is, it is a great party.

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Warren: Well, speaking of parties, one of the things I remember most when I lived here in the
late seventies is fraternity parties.
Huntley: Yeah. Well, they had them and I suppose they still do.
Warren: Tell me about your relationship with fraternities.
Huntley: Well, generally my relationship with fraternities was good. We had troubles with
various fraternities from time to time, and still do, I guess. I thought, on balance, fraternities
served a useful purpose for those who joined them. I didn't think they should have an exclusive
hold on the social life of the school. I thought we ought to try to afford the students who didn't
belong to fraternities some social alternatives, and that we've attempted to do. But I was never
opposed to fraternities, and knew them well. On balance, I think they performed well. They
provided support for students. The good fraternities provided support for students that they
needed, social support as well as other kinds of support, and the bad ones didn't.

         And all of them were sometimes good and sometimes bad. They were fraternities in
cycles. Fraternities went in cycles. X fraternity might be good for three or four years and not
so good for three or four years. I'm sure that continues to be true. I don't have any present
view of how well they're run, but they probably still serve a useful purpose.

         They fell into disrepair physically, and mainly that occurred in the sixties and seventies
when everything else fell, when the students ceased to take care of things. It wasn't all the
students' fault. Some of it was, a lot of it was. The houses were very old physically, of course,
and the school really couldn't afford to own them at that time. So as the houses fell increasingly
into disrepair, it's a vicious circle, the sense of pride in them fell into disrepair, and it was hard to
refurbish. But they've done a marvelous job with that. The Fraternity Renaissance program,
seems to me, has been very successful. John Wilson's Fraternity Renaissance program, I'm very
complimentary of the way that's worked.
Warren: Would anything like that have ever been possible during your administration?
Huntley: Oh, yeah, sure, but we hadn't gotten to the point where we could afford to do that. I
think it was the right thing to do. I really do. It seems to be working.
Warren: It sure seems to be. Those places look like show houses now.
Huntley: They do. They do.
Warren: And, of course, the other thing that was talked about a lot during your administration
was coeducation.

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Huntley: Yeah, it certainly was. I guess we had two formal studies of it and more than two
semiformal ones, deciding both of them to remain, for the time being, at least all-male. The
major reasons I think we decided to stay all-male, I've already touched on, were financial, plus
the desire to retain those four features I referred to, one ofwhic~ you remember, is size.

          The most difficult feature of coeducation, I thought, was going to be retaining the small
size of the school, which would require both fortitude and money. I'm glad to say they've
seemed to me to be able to do that so far. The school is larger, sixteen hundred as distinguished
from perhaps thirteen hundred, but I think it's still within the scale that allows the teachers that I
described in my earlier description of the four features of Washington and Lee that I think are
distinctive, none of which, you remember, was gender. Those same four features could be
found in some all-female schools, incidentally. But I think those four features are vital, and if
any one of them has to be sacrificed, it will make a substantial difference. Washington and Lee
would lose the characteristics that make it distinctive.

          So if coeducation was going to occur in a context that compromised one of those four,
then it would have been a mistake, but I think eventually we reached the point where that wasn't
true, and clearly the correct move for Dr. Wilson and the faculty to have taken when they did
take it, and it seems to me to have been done very, very well. The women students whom I've
talked to, and graduates, seem to me to be as caught up in the mystique of the place as everybody
else.
Warren: They fit right in, don't they? It's remarkable. It's like they found another corner of
the cloth and just kept cutting.
Huntley: One feature of coeducation today as distinguished from what might be true, let's say,
thirty years ago, is that women now more nearly tend to take a wide array of courses in a large
curriculum than they would've done in 1930 or even 1950.

         One of the features of the school that I described to you is a student body that populates a
large curriculum, a small student body that populates a large curriculum. Some earlier
enrollment patterns in the forties and so on would've implied that women didn't do that as
clearly as men. They do now, the reason being that they have opportunities for uses of
education that are greater than they were in those days. So that the need to populate the
curriculum can occur with a mixed student body easier than it could've and still retain its small
size.

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         When you can't populate the large curriculum, the temptation, there is only one of three
things you can do: you can cut the curriculum; you can subsidize the curriculum-that is to say,
force students into it, which is never going to work for very long-or you enlarge the student
body. Those are the only three things you can do, and all three of them have serious
disadvantages, financial disadvantages and, more important, community disadvantages. But I
think the school has reached a point financially, and society has reached a point culturally, where
it looks to me like it works very well.
Warren: Would you have liked to have been part of the coeducation change?
Huntley: Yeah, I would've liked to have been. But I'd been president long enough. Fifteen
years was long enough. Longer then I had thought I would be president. I always maintained
when I took the job that I would stay only long enough to achieve an identifiable set of
objectives and then get out. I've seen presidents remain in the position too long, and I was
determined not to be one of them ifl could help it, and it took fifteen years. I had hoped to do it
in ten or twelve. I took fifteen years to get to a point where I thought it was a stopping point.
You've got to find a stopping point. You can't walk off in midstream. It took fifteen years to
get to what I perceived to be a stopping point. Most of the things I had thought had to be done
when I became president had either been done or abandoned. In most cases they had been done,
and it was a good place for me to stop.
Warren: I don't want you to retire quite yet. I want to pursue the coeducation just a little
more.
Huntley: Sure.
Warren: There was that major study done.
Huntley: There were two studies done.
Warren: Why do you think it didn't happen at those times?
Huntley: I think for the reasons I've given you. I think I gave you the reasons.
Warren: Do you think there was just too much resistance from the board?
Huntley: No. I didn't recommend it. Don't get the idea that I was striving to get the school
to go coeducation and the board wouldn't let me. That's not true.
Warren: That's what I want to clarify.
Huntley: Well, I can clarify that for you right now. I didn't recommend it.
Warren: Okay. It wasn't the right time.

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Huntley: I didn't recommend it. The faculty well knew that. They haven't told you
otherwise, have they?
Warren: No. No, no, no. I just want to hear it from you. I just want to make sure that
question is asked in that way.

         I'm still not going to let you retire yet. I want to talk about, as an entity, the grand
capital campaign that you oversaw. That has to be a crowning achievement.
Huntley: Well, I don't know if it's a crowning achievement. It was just a chore that had to be
done. We had good people to do it, to help do it, and a generous constituency, which, once
informed of the level of need, over a long time period-you can't inform people overnight about
such things-once convinced that the need existed, started stepping forward to meet it. It takes
a long time for those things to happen. You can't wave a wand and make them happen
overnight, but you can start the momentum going and develop a habit, develop the conviction.
The basic conviction about the importance of the school was already there. What was lacking
was any understanding by the alumni the school needed them. That's what they didn't know.
You have to go tell them.
Warren: How do you go about doing that?
Huntley: You just go tell them.
Warren: Go to the chapters?
Huntley: Go tell them. Time and time and time again, go tell them.
Warren: And are you going to the chapters, the same groups, are you going to individuals?
Huntley: Both. You're going to both, chapters and groups, and you're sending faculty. Lots
and lots of the faculty went out, frequently at my request or Bill Washburn's request or Farris
Hotchkiss' request, to see alumni, and we developed increasing programs to get them back on
campus.
Warren: What kind of programs?
Huntley: Well, we made bigger deals out of the reunions than we used to, and then we began,
of course, the Alumni College events during those years. They were much smaller then, but
that's when they began. We would find ways to get them back for any occasion we could, and
they responded-again, slowly at first. It takes time to develop these things. But we went out
on the road a lot.
Warren: Did you have a role model in doing this, or was this the Washington and Lee way of

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doing things?
Hundey: No, I didn't have any role models. It was just a job to be done. It was easy to see
what needed to be done.
Warren: You flidn't study how Harvard had done it, or Princeton?
Huntley: No, I still don't know how they did it.
Warren: This was the Washington and Lee way of doing things?
Huntley: No, I didn't study any role model.
Warren: Because it seems very unique. It has a feel of being a singular way of doing things.
Huntley: I just don't know the answer to that. There just didn't seem to be any other way to
do it but to take it on, head on. Just like, for example, we were talking earlier about Roy
Steinheimer in the law school and the students, you just take it on head on. If you need
students, you go find them. You can't sit back and wait for these things to cure themselves.

         The alumni responded in time to the needs they began to see existed. And because they
shared the conviction that the school required, the school had these characteristics I've described
to you, used to tell them that, too, they agreed with that and they wanted to see it perpetuated and
they treasured their own experience and wanted others to have that experience. Eventually,
enough of them came forward to make it possible, and the momentum is good. It looks to me
like the momentum is good on that score. They do come forward.

         One of the things that occurs to me for a person who is president ofWashington and Lee
now, I think we have a magnificent president in John Elrod. I think the board showed great
wisdom and courage. I say courage for the following reason. The school is so strong now, by
the time the president to succeed John Wilson was being sought, the school was so strong
because of the things that had happened before and because ofthe strength that Wilson brought
to the school, that they had open field on who could be president. I don,t know that, I wasn't
part of the committee, but I know the world well enough to know they could have gone outside
Lexington and hired any one of dozens of people.

         An easy course for a board to take, it occurs to me, in a situation like that, and in some
ways one thafs good for the board's ego, is to go out and try to find some prestigious name from
elsewhere just to demonstrate the visibility and the strength of the school. That must have been
a temptation. I don't know that it was a temptation, but it must've been. But I think their
wisdom in staying home and choosing Elrod was great.

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          But it occurs to me that a person becoming president of Washington and Lee now, as
John had just become, has a whole different set of issues from those that faced me or, indeed, to
some degree that faced John Wilson. Those that faced me, to a large extent necessity dictated

. my agenda, and my job was to tum necessity into virtue, and that's a lot easier. When your

range of choice is limited by circumstance, it's sometimes easier to make the choice. The
present generation of those running Washington and Lee had a far wider array of choices than I
had, than my predecessors had, and probably than John Wilson had in all the terms we can think
of--in terms of the size of the school, the curriculum of the school, the objectives of the school,
the vision of the school, and so on. They have a wider array of choices and, hence, a much
more difficult job than the one that faced me.
Warren: An interesting point.
Huntley: Really much more difficult, in my opinion.
Warren: That's an interesting point.

         Well, I have worked my way down my list, and I've taken up a lot of your morning.
Huntley: That's all right.
Warren: Is there anything more you would like to say?
Huntley: No, I don't think so.
Warren: Was retiring difficult?
Huntley: Well, yeah, sure. Sure, it was, but it was the right thing for me to do. I thought so
then and I think so now. I was still a young man, I thought, when I retired, but your level of
enthusiasm for a job of that kind is hard to sustain for an indefinite time period, and needs to be
there every day if you' re going to do it right. It's an unusual job. Not the hardest job in the
world, I don't think. It's not as hard as a lot ofjobs I can think of It's certainly not an
unpleasant job. You certainly work with the finest and best-intentioned people. But it required
that you maintain a sense of mission and enthusiasm daily, with lots of constituencies. And
that's just not something you can do forever. When you've become aware ofthe fact that
you 're not doing that, then you'd better quit before anybody else becomes aware of it. And
that's what I tried to do.

         John Wilson will put that much more eloquently than I did. I bet you he would echo a
similar thought, because he was president at the time, twelve years, clearly a very popular man,
at the height, the ascendancy, of his popularity. So why did he quit? I'm not asking you to

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answer that; I'm asking rhetorically. My guess would be for something like the same reason
that I just stated, although I'd say more eloquently put then I did. Elrod will reach that stage,
too, but not, I hope, for a very long time.
Warren: He t eems pretty happy with himself
Huntley: Well, he is, but you see, you can see the enthusiasm he brings to the mission, and
that's what you've got to have. If you can, as president, find it possible to step out at the very
moment when someone like Elrod, or in my case, like Wilson, can succeed to a happy situation,
if you can leave a happy situation for a successor who can bring a new level of enthusiasm to the
job, then you've done the ideal thing. I feel like I did that, and I think Wilson did, too.
Warren: I think Washington and Lee is very fortunate in its presidents.
Huntley: They're lucky. Lucky to get them when they got them. It's possible that I was the
right person to do the job at the time I became president. Certainly Wilson was at the time he
became president. I think Elrod is. It's also possible that none of the three ofus would've been
very good if switched around into other slots in that three-decade period. It's entirely possible
that any one of the three ofus would've either failed or been less successful if we'd switched
roles, which is back to my guardian angel theory, that Washington and Lee's always had a
guardian angel that bails it out whenever it gets in trouble.
Warren: Thank you so much.
Huntley: You're welcome. You're welcome.
Warren: This has been an honor and a privilege.
[End of interview]

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ers from our own past. Smith was just a marvelous character.
Warren: Why was he a character?
Huntley: Well, he was a brilliant mathematician and most ofus certainly weren't, and he
tolerated us, but not always willingly. In class, I recall he would send you to the board to work
out a mathematical problem or whatever, and would allow you to get to a certain point, say you
were stuck, and you would say, for example, I can recall him saying, ~~Mr. Huntley, what's the
sign there, is it a plus? Is it a plus?"

         "Yes, sir, ifs a plus."

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          "Hell, no! It's a minus!" [Laughter] There were many legends about Smith throwing
erasers. He would throw erasers out the window. He would throw erasers and once he threw
one out the window while I was there in his class. He would vent his spleen at the students in
that way, but a wonderful teacher. Winter Royston taught me math, also. He's still here, still
alive.
Warren: Who's that?
Huntley: Winter Royston. He's right here in town.

         History department, ifl were to mention Dr. Jenks and Dr. Crenshaw, taught me. Dr.
Bean, W. G. Bean, was a wonderful teacher, a great style about him. "Now, you want to watch
this man. He going to merge," meaning '"emerged". That meant in the early days of a history
course, he would want to identify the people who would be important through the remainder of
the course. 11You want to watch him. He gonna merge," is what that meant. Wonderful
teacher.

         I'11 tell you somebody you ought to talk to is Roger Mudd. Have you talked to Mudd?
Warren: Not yet. We're going to talk in the fall.
Huntley: Ask Mudd about Dr. Bean, for example. There's a lot of stories about Dr. Bean.
Dr. Moger, I mentioned him, wonderful history professor.

         I was an English major, and as I say, eventually an intellect as uninterested as mine was,
was able to be stimulated by an English teacher. We had some wonderful English teachers. The
heads of the department were Drs. Flournoy and Moffatt. Fitzgerald Flournoy was Washington
and Lee's first Rhodes Scholar. You can see his picture over there on the wall in the library of
Rhodes Scholars. He was a professor ofEnglish, but principally Shakespeare and latter-day
drama, also, but Shakespeare was his-I always thought Flournoy believed himself to be
Falstaff I never had any actual proof ofthat. He was a grand figure and a marvelous
classroom performer and spoke in stentorian tones. I remember the students using him at Fancy
Dress from time to time, would ask him to the be the caller, to introduce the couples as they
would come down the aisle, because of his wonderful way of speaking.

         He was an exciting teacher, absent-minded, almost to the nth degree. I recall on more
than one occasion his beginning to teach the wrong class, within the classroom. He would begin
on subject A, when, in fact, this was the class on Subject B. We'd begin on Ibsen when it was a
class on Shakespeare or something. He would usually catch himself.

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Warren: Did anyone ever have to remind him?
Huntley: Once or twice. Although also once or twice, no one ever did, and he went right
through teaching the wrong subject. [Laughter] He was a marvelous character. He was not
great on student names. He never knew my name, although I was an English major. He knew
me, but he didn't know my name. In fact, I'd graded papers for Dr. Flournoy. I guess it's true,
I bet it's true, though I don't have any way of proving it, this is the only instance in the school's
history when we had graders. That would be quite contrary, you see, to the Washington and Lee
philosophy of teaching, and that was done only because ofDr. Flournoy, who was such a prized
member of the faculty and sort of got away with things others might not have got away with.

         He would not grade, so the story was-this is the story we as students thought to be true.
I have no reason to think it wasn't true. He would not grade sophomore survey English papers.
The survey course that was then taught to sophomores was a required course, and he opposed the
teaching of a survey course in anything. He felt that to be impossible to do. He opposed
requiring anything. So for two reason he didn't think that course offering was good. but he had
to teach it because there weren't enough professors of English for him not to. Every student in
the student body was going to take it, so he had to teach it, but he wouldn't grade the papers. So
the department hired a senior English major each year to grade the sophomore papers for Dr.
Flournoy, and because Dr. Flournoy had them graded for him, then they were graded for other
members of the department in the sophomore English course, too. That was my job one year.
My senior year, I was the grader. I graded the sophomore English papers. Presumably he
would look them over before he awarded the grade. I don't know if he did or not.

         I'd be in his office-I'd use his office as a place. He rarely used it in the evening. I had
a place where I would sit, it was quiet, to grade papers. And every two weeks there was a test
given in the English survey course, and I had to grade the tests. There were themes. Every
other week there was a theme or something to be written. I had to read those. He'd
occasionally he'd come in the office when I was sitting there grading, and he'd look at me, clasp
his hand to his heart like this, ""Oh, yes, Mister...Mister... Don't tell me. Mister...Mister."
Finally he might get "Huntley" out. When I came back to teach, he welcomed me, but he still
couldn't remember my name. [Laughter] He was a wonderful teacher. Those are among the
teachers that I remember.

         And of course, the dean of the students was Frank Gilliam, whom you must have heard a

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lot about.
Warren: Not really. I'd love for you to talk about him.
Huntley: Well, he's one of the great characters in this school's history, I would think. I think
that's the reason why you need to talk to more alumni than you've shown me in your list,
because the majority of the alumni of that period would remember Gilliam as one of the most
important features in their lives. He knew all the students, literally knew all the students. He
learned every student's name before they enrolled, by hard study, before he'd ever met them, by
reference to their pictures and their names. He used to study their names and pictures so that
every student, when he entered Washington and Lee, was already known by name by the Dean of
Students. And from then on out, he knew all the students in the student body by name and
called them all by name when he greeted them, and continued to know them by name for the rest
ofhis life and the rest of their lives.

         So he knew by name literally every alumnus who had been to Washington and Lee over a
period of twenty-some years, every one. He not only knew their names, but he knew about
them, what their backgrounds were and what their needs were like and he knew what their
weaknesses were and where you could help them. He was available as a wise resource to any
student in the student body at any time. Not all students took advantage of that, but a lot did.

         I was talking with a friend who was staying with me over the weekend, Merrill Plaisted
from Richmond, who was a student here just after I was. His recollection of Gilliam-Plaisted
came here from Maine, from a small town in Maine, had never been here before, was a stranger
to the area, and, of course, no one else in the student body came from his small town in Maine, if
indeed, from Maine at all. His recollection of Gilliam was his ability to make his years here
good ones. Very touching.

         So Gilliam was a wonderful dean of students. He could be stem when need be, but the
main feature of his personality was one of standing by to be helpful. He was still dean of
students when Leybum came as dean of the university. Those were Dr. Gaines' latter years, and
Dr. Gaines was not as active in his later years as he had been earlier. He'd been present for
twenty-five years, twenty-some years, and by the time Dr. Leybum came, Dr. Gaines had already
been president for twenty years, I guess.

         So, much of the administration of the University occurred between Frank Gilliam and Jim
Leybum and, to a lesser degree, but to a significant degree, nonetheless, the then treasurer,

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whose name was Earl Mattingly, whom you must have heard something about by now.
Warren: rve read, but I haven't heard.
Huntley: Mattingly was the treasurer and kept a firm grip on the school's limited finances, and
they were quite limited. He parceled out the pennies carefully over all those years. The three
of them were sort of a triumvirate in the years between Leyburn's arriving and Fred Cole
becoming president in 1960.
Warren: Were you involved in sports?
Huntley: I was on the crew, which we no longer have, in my junior and seniors years as was,
incidentally, Roger Mudd. He rode the sixth position, I rode the fourth position on the varsity
crew. We rowed on the James River, a course which no longer exists because VEPCO, the
power company, for whatever reason, decided to get rid ofthe dam that made it possible to row
on the James in those days. You couldn't row on the James anymore and you couldn't use it as
a course. That probably explains the fact that the sport is gone. But I had a marvelous time on
the crew. We did fairly well. A lot of fun with it. We had a coach named Anderson, whom
Mudd called the Mad Swede. You just ask Mudd about the crew team, he' 11 have marvelous
stories for you on that.
Warren: Great. Okay, I will.

         So how did an English major decide to go to law school?
Huntley: That's not an unusual combination. I think the Law School, certainly when I was a
law teacher, always felt that undergraduate majors in the humanities were the ones we preferred
to get. So that was not an unusual combination in law school following an English major or
history major. How did I decide to go? I don't know. I was out for four years between
undergraduate and law school.
Warren: And what did you do in that time?
Huntley: If you recall, there was a war going on then. While that seems to have been
forgotten by most folks of your age, the draft in 1950 was every bit as comprehensive as the draft
had been in 1941 . Everybody, unlike the Vietnamese draft, which was selective and, I think,
flawed for that reason. The Korean draft was analogous to the World War II draft and every
warm body, every warm male body, had to go into something. Again, we've seemed to have
forgotten now, but it was then thought that we were at threat of major world war. It happily
turned out not to have been the case. So all of us had to go into something.

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          I joined the navy a couple of months after leaving Washington and Lee, just short of
being drafted into the army, and spent a bit more than three years in the navy and then came back
to Washington and Lee the following fall, the fall of '54.
Warren: So you came back to old Tucker Hall.
Huntley: Oh, sure, yeah, of course.
Warren: Tell me about old Tucker Hall.
Huntley: Well, it's right there now, as you know.
Warren: But it's a very different building then it was then.
Huntley: Yeah, it's a different building. It was a lovely building.
Warren: In fact, I saw some pictures yesterday, I'd never seen the interior before yesterday.
I'd love it if you would describe what it was like.
Huntley: It was a lovely building. The central core was a large library, reading library. Of
course, it would be small by comparison to the present law facility or law library, but it was okay
by the standards ofthat time, and then a lovely, comfortable and welcoming building to be in.
As you know, the old building burned in the thirties. Have you ever seen pictures of that
building?
Warren: You can tell me about it.
Huntley: I don't remember it. It was before my time. It's about the only thing you can think
of that's before my time. I don't remember it, but it was as ugly as a mud fence. In fact, it
looked somewhat like a mud fence, or lime fence. It was a large limestone building, quite
incongruous with the rest ofthe campus. It burned in the--I've forgotten the date now, late
thirties, and was replaced with Tucker Hall, named after John Randolph Tucker. But it was a
marvelous building, had big, very comfortable classrooms for teaching. The classrooms in the
present law school are modeled after it. They are more modern in appearance, but their
configuration and appearance is similar to the ones in the old Tucker Hall.
Warren: I didn't know that.
Huntley: My first office was in a corner of the basement of Tucker Hall. In fact, that's the
office I had, I guess, until I became dean. I may have had one year in one of the main floor
offices before that, perhaps. I believe I did. I was in an office in the basement and next to me,
shortly after I came--! came back when Clayton Williams was dean, as I mentioned. Dean
Williams retired as dean when he reached the age of, I don't know, sixty-five or seventy, and

                                                                                                                                    13
was succeeded by Charlie Light, who was one of my favorite people, and another person it's a

shame you can't talk to now. He was here for many, many years. He was a law professor and

dean. He was twice dean, in fact. He was dean after Clayton Williams, and then I became

dean in 1967, late in '67, I was made president early in '68. So my daughter says I was dean for

a day. I succeeded Light, then when I became president at the beginning of 1968, the beginning

of the second semester of 1968, late January of 1968, Charlie Light had to step back in as dean

during the time we searched for the dean who became dean, Roy Steinheimer. Charlie used to

say he was the only man he knew who succeeded his own successor. [Laughter] He was a

wonderful person, one of my closest-good teacher, great classroom performer.

Warren: Tell me about him.

Huntley: Well he would pace the platform. The platforms in Tucker Hall, the teaching

podium was a long platform which was raised about a foot above. Most of the ones in Lewis

Hall are that way. A long desk that the teacher sat behind. I mean, six feet long. Charlie

Light would pace back and forth on that platform. I recall on one occasion he paced so hard, he

fell off the platform. He'd get so carried away with his comments and his lecture. He taught

torts, which is a basic freshman course, and constitutional law, were his primary specialties. He

was a wonderful teacher. All the law professors were.

Clayton Williams was a wonderful teacher.  Old          Charlie  McDowell,  I  say  old II  II  to

distinguish him from his son, who is about my age, I guess that makes us old, was sort of the

third person in that trinity over there at the law school in those days. Charles Laughlin came in

a little later and was a welcome addition to that group. They were a wonderful four men. Then

they found a young man named Bill Ritz, who turned out to be a wonderful teacher. And others,

there were others, but those were the ones that stand out. All those men taught me and all those

men then were there when I came back to teach, and all those men were still there when I

became dean, which is sort of an unusual relationship.

That was true, of course, with Bill Pusey, for example. Bill Pusey taught me and then I

came back and taught here while he was the head of the Department of German and then he

became dean under Fred Cole and remained as dean at my request for several years after I

became president. I was never able to call him anything but Dean Pusey until I had been

president for several years, and he finally one day said, "Bob, we've got to stop this. I call you

Bob and you call me Dean Pusey. We've got to get passed that." [Laughter] So I finally did.

                                                                                                    14
I

                     But I was never able to call Clayton Williams anything but Dean Williams, or Dr. Leyburn
                     anything but Dr. Leybum; I was never able to bring myself to do that.
                     Warren: I need to turn the tape over.
                     [Begin Tape I, Side 2]
                     Warren: So tell me about going to law school here.
                     Huntley: Well, the experience was not unlike the undergraduate school experience. There
                     were close relationships with the faculty. The law absolutely fascinated me, I'm sure by reason
                     of the skill ofthese professors who delivered it in such a way as to make it a fascination, a
                     fascinating discipline. So I worked a great deal harder. I was older, four years older.

                              As I said earlier, when I was an undergraduate student, I was really just a boy, and the
                     four years of undergraduate years were years in which I grew up, which, of course, is one of the
                     things that happened in undergraduate school, one ofthe things that Washington and Lee allows
                     to happen, and one of the special features of this school, which always is understood,.I'm sure
                     this is still true, that things must be managed in such a way as to afford the students that measure
                     of self-determination and freedom which is requisite if they're going to grow up, recognizing
                     that if they don't grow up now, they may not ever grow up. So one of the features of a school
                    like Washington and Lee is its willingness to tolerate students who are growing up, and its desire
                    to help them do that. Thaf s why they remember these personal relationships. When young
                     me~ as it was in those days, grow from boyhood to manhood, they're likely to have some
                    impression about the features of that experience.

                              Now that, of course, was different by the time I got to law school. I had grown up by
                    then. I had been out four years in the navy and I was, I suppose you would say, more serious of
                    purpose in terms of career orientation and objectives and goals. So I worked a lot harder. I
                    was fascinated by the subjects that I was taking. I enjoyed it thoroughly, the academic
                    experience, the law. The legal academic experience was an exciting one for me, which is why I
                    was anxious and willing to come back, wanted to come back and teach when Clayton Williams
                    asked me to do it. I enjoyed teaching greatly, more than anything else I've ever done, I guess.
                    I enjoyed teaching.
                    Warren: How do you suppose they recognized that you would be a good teacher?
                    Huntley: Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know that they did. I just don't know, but
                    they knew me well. Agai~ the feature of the law school, like the undergraduate school, there

                                                                                                                                                 15
were not that many ofus and they had many, many discussions with me individually, each
professor, on the subjects, and they knew not just from reading exam papers, they knew from
discussions, not just in class, not even primarily in class, but in sessions in their offices and
elsewhere, they had been able to form an opinion about everybody there. For right or wrong,
they formed the opinion that I'd be able to teach, and they were certainly right in terms of my
enjoying teaching. It was an exciting experience for me, it really was.
Warren: What did you teach?
Huntley: Well, the law school was small in those days, so that one needed to have some
flexibility in terms of what he teaches. So I began as a junior professor, and I taught the courses
least desired by the other professors, which in that day were probably creditor's rights, which is
bankruptcy, not exactly a catchword around the house, and agency, a kind of a stepchild that's
not even taught anymore.
Warren: What is agency?
Huntley: The legal relationship that's established between a person and someone who works
for or is commissioned by that person to do something. Employees are agents.
Warren: What would that be called today?
Huntley: It would still be called agency, but it's consumed, subsumed under other headings
now. The same principles would be taught, they just won't be taught in a separate course. It's
not organized that way anymore. We haven't done away with agency, we've just done away
with the course named "agency."

         So I taught that, and then I taught in subsequent years, I taught secured transactions; that
would be things like mortgages and stuff. Then later on I taught contracts, which is a basic
course, of course. Over the years, I actually, from time to time, in the absence of another
professor, I'd teach anything. Because if a professor went on leave, you picked up and taught
his courses. So I taught lots of other subjects. Those were the main ones I taught--contracts,
creditors' rights, secured transactions.
Warren: A lot ofvariety.
Huntley: Yeah, that's right. That's right. But I loved it.
Warren: So who else came in as law professors while you were there teaching?
Huntley: Well, both Andy McThenia and Lewis LaRue were hired with my input. They were
hired either just before I became dean or just after I became dean, I really can't recall. But I was

                                                                                                                           16
active in the process of recruiting them. They are two who are still here. So I mention those
two.
Warren: Why did you recruit them?
Huntley: Well, I guess for the same reason Williams did me. I thought they were-well,
Andy had been to school here. Lewis LaRue-Lash LaRue, they call him-had been to
undergraduate school. I had not known him. He had gone on to Harvard to law school. Andy
had gone to undergraduate and law school here. I knew him well. I sought Andy, and Andy, I
believe, suggested I talk to LaRue, which I did, and I was impressed with him. They're both
here now, senior members of the faculty.

         Then, of course, Steinheimer came as dean. I was responsible for finding and hiring
him. He was marvelous. You ought to talk to him, if you can find him.
Warren: I did.
Huntley: Good. He was wonderful, a wonderful dean, and brought a dynamic grasp to the job
that we badly needed. The law school was in transition then, as all law schools were, and we
were specifically. We needed to do many things in the law school to improve and enlarge the
curriculum, as well as the building, and find strong faculty and strong students, and Roy did all
those things beautifully.
Warren: How did you find him?
Huntley: Well, we had a long search going on. As I said, Charlie Light came back to be dean
during the search, succeeding his own successor. We searched for a long time. I had talked to
lots of potential candidates and was not overwhelmed by any of them, really. There were
several who were perfectly okay, but I hadn't really been gripped by any ofthem.

         One of the members ofthe faculty, I think it was Charles Laughlin, asked a friend of his,
who was himself a major figure in the teaching world, in the legal scholarship world, if he had
any suggestions to make. Not a person here, the man was at another institution. And he said,
"Well, have you talked to Steinheimer at Michigan?" He said, "You ought to talk to
Steinheimer at Michigan. I don't think he's looking for a position, I know he's not, but if you
talk to him, you might be able to prevail upon him."

         So with that suggestion, I called, I just called Steinheimer, I didn't know him. I just
called him and asked him if he would be willing to talk to me. He did and we got on, got along
with each other immediately, and he came to see the vision ofwhat could be done with this law

                                                                                                                       17
school and had the ambition to want to do it. He came here and worked very, very hard and just
did an outstanding job as dean. He was dean the entire time I was president. He left the

deanship shortly thereafter, not because I left, but because his retirement age as dean had-I was _,,

here for fifteen years, and Roy became dean about a year after I became president, and he was
dean for probably fifteen years. Then he continued to teach here after. He's a wonderful
teacher. And again that was partly-at Michigan he was not an administrator, he was a teacher.
He had done some assistant administrative work, but he was primarily a professor. He never
taught me, but I know what the students' thought of his teaching. He was a wonderful teacher.
He continued to teach until just a couple years ago. A very dynamic classroom performer and
extremely effective administrator with a very firm understanding of what needed to be done and
an ability to get it done.
Warren: I was really almost overwhelmed by his personal touch that he brought to the job.
Huntley: Yeah, well, that's right, he did, and that fit in here so well, you see. I suspect that's
one ofthe things that attracted him about coming here, was that he knew his personal
involvement would be valued. The law students who were here during the years he was dean,
any of them will tell you, ifyou mention the law schoo4 I'm sure he's the first thing they will
mention. Not as dean so much, just as Steinheimer.
Warren: And that he probably personally brought them there.
Huntley: Sure. He did. He went out on the road and recruited all these students. Law
schools were very competitive in those days. Law schools were competing vigorously for
students in those days to a much greater degree than now. Things have changed in that respect
now nationwide, but in those days, the number of students seeking to go to law school was
smaller than the number of spaces in law schools that were waiting for them, different from
today. The law school here had not been a rigorous recruiter, ever. Roy had to start from
scratch on that score. He visited the undergraduate campuses all over the United States every
year, dozens of them personally. And for ten years, the freshman class, he would have talked to
every freshman before they applied; practically everyone, anyway. So they were, in a sense, his
students.
Warren: One of the things that I was most interested in was his concern for diversity in the law
school. Want to talk about that?
Huntley: Well, you're correct. He was concerned to have a diverse student body in every

                                                                                                                         18
                                                                                       )

sense of that word, and he succeeded in doing that, which was a doubly difficult task because I
say he was-well, I don't know whether it was doubly difficult, but it was a doubly important
task, because, as I say, he was beginning from ground zero, but he succeeded in bringing
students not only from all institutions, but from all walks of life to the law school. They were
all good students. He didn't recruit weak students. Roy was very demanding in terms of
academic performance and other performance. So he did a great job, he really did.
Warren: The other monstrously important thing that happened to the law school in that time
period was the new building.
Huntley: 0~ yeah. Well, they had to have the building. There was no way. It was either a
new building or shut down the law school.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: And while it was never debated in those terms-you'll find no record of any debate
that suggests that those were the two alternatives-but in my judgment, they were the two
alternatives. The building was too small. The law school itself, the student body, was too
small to support the curriculum it needs to have. The size of a school, I think most people
misperceive the function of size in a college or university, including, I think, most college
administrators. But the law school, with 100 to 120 students, simply could not support a
modem law school curriculum. It could support the curriculum of the thirties, the forties, in
which the number of courses to be taught was manageably small and much more analogous to
the kind of teaching that occurs in a humanities curriculuffi:, for example, but the necessary
addition of courses and more detail courses in law was a function ofthe growing role of law in
American society.

         Again, whether you applaud that or whether you decry it, it was a fact, and if we were
going to teach young people to be effective and powerful lawyers and powerful in the sense of
their abilities as lawyers in American society, we had to embark upon an educational plan that
would allow that to happen or cause that to happen. It could not have happened with the size
curriculum and the size student body and the facility that we had at that time. It just couldn't
happe11:, in my opinion. That was my opinion. I told Roy that when I went to hire him, and he
agreed. So he knew what the objective was, and he knew it was either a make-or-break
objective. You either got it done or you shut it down. He might not have put it in those terms
to you, but believe me, those are the terms in which he and I understood it, and that the

                                                                                                                          19
possibility of shutting it down might have occurred was realistic.
          The existence of a law school in a small undergraduate college is an anachronis~ an

anomaly, anyway. You know why it exists. Law was an undergraduate discipline at the time.
That's why it was, for all those years, called a bachelor's degree. It was an LL.B.., you know.
Law was essentially a discipline that was analogous to the other disciplines taught at what we
now call undergraduate colleges. That term was not used in the same sense in those days. At
the time that Lee bought Brockenbrough's itinerant college into their itinerant law school into the
college, that would not have been perceived as an incongruous thing to do. It would not have
been perceived as bringing in a graduate discipline to an undergraduate school. It wasn't
thought of in that way.

         But then it grew in its importance in the curriculum. It was lucky enough to attract very
important early legal figures from the American legal world, John Randolph Tucker, notably so.
I mean, the most dominant figures in the American legal world, some ofthem, several of them
were here, came here. So the school-and again you could say that was by accident~ I don't
know if it was by accident or not. The same features that attract people to Washington and Lee
now attracted them then and they came, and the Law School grew into a professional division of
the institution, a professional graduate division of the institution. Again, not something one
would have thought of doing ifwriting on a clean slate. You don't write on a clean slate.
Nobody's ever found a slate that was clean, that everybody's trying to write on.

         So we had a law school and we had a good law school. We had a law school with a
good reputation and strong alumni and a long history. The question of whether or not it had a
future, that was the question. Does it have a future? And it could've been answered either
way, it really could've. And Roy and I thought it ought to be answered affirmatively, or at least
we ought to give it a fair shot. [Telephone interruption. Tape recorder turned off.]

         That was Director of Admissions Bill Hartog, lining up tomorrow's golf game.
[Laughter] Since his job of filling the class is about over, he can now take off a little bit and play
golf. I hired hi~ incidentally. That was a good day's work. He's been very, very good,
Hartog.
Warren: Let's talk about him later. Let's keep going with the law school.
Huntley: So it was a job that had to be done, and the attracting of students, the attracting of
faculty, and the design of the building and the curriculu~ all that had to be done, and we got it

                                                                                                               20
done. Roy was dynamic and we worked on it a lot together. We got it done. We were
fortunate enough to get it done.
Warren: Well, I presume the gift of the Lewises-
Huntley: Oh, well, absolutely, the gift of the Lewises is what made it possible to have the
building.
Warren: How did that happen? Take me through that.
Huntley: Well, I guess like most of the gifts that have been made to Washington and Lee that I
know about, they happened without much pre-planning. If you haven't talked to the Lewises,
you ought to. They can tell you, give you a perspective on it that will be different from mine,
although I don't think it would be much different.

         But Syd Lewis, whom I didn't know at all, except I may have met him, I didn't know
him, had that same feeling about Washington and Lee that we described earlier when we talked
about the students. He felt that Washington and Lee was like an extension of his family. He
had gone here to undergraduate school and to law school, and he felt it was an extension of his
family. I didn't know that. I didn't know him well enough to know that. Syd and Frances had
been fortunate to have found a business which provided them with substantial amount of wealth.
And early on, as soon as that became true, as soon as it became true that he had substantial
personal estate, apparently, I now know-I didn't know then-apparently he and Frances
decided they wanted to start giving away money, and I think the first thought that occurred to
him was that one ofthe earliest things he wanted to do was to identify what he could do for
Washington and Lee.

         So he actually got in touch with us. Again, that's not unusual. That's not unique. He
got in touch with us to let it be known that he'd like to have someone suggest to him things at
Washington and Lee that could be done. We were just beginning the planning process which
underlay the development program of the seventies. We had not announced any such program,
had not even identified all of its elements. We were just in the process, Steinheimer and I and
others, just in the process of laying out the rudiments of the law school's needs. That was also
true of other areas, it wasn't just the law school. There were a number of other things. There
were lots of needs. That was just one of a large array ofthings that had to be done in a short
time period.

         I told Sydney that. I went over with him and Frances the sort of shopping list of things

                                                                                                                         21
we believed were going to be necessary, wasn't able to put price tags on any of them at that
stage. I thought perhaps at the outset their interests might be in the arts, and we needed, among
the other needs, were needs there in the arts.

         I think my first suggestion to him was that he consider a gift towards a professorship or
some other need in the arts. I don't believe, as I recall, that I even quantified what I hoped he
would be able to do, but I certainly didn't have anything in mind like the gift that he finally
made, in terms of that size, nor did I know that his interest would be the law school. He hadn't
told me that. But among other things I had laid out for him what the needs of the school were
that we identified, in general, and the law school was among them, though one of only perhaps a
dozen things that I told him about.

         So he got back in touch with me through his attorney, to tell me that he would like to
consider the law school needs. So I got together a sketchy outline ofthe law school's needs,
both the building and endowment, the endowment equivalence to the university that would be
thought of as supporting the law school, and shared it with them. Roy and I shared it with them.
Both of us saw them on all occasions, I think both of us saw them.

         Not long after that visit, Sydney got word to me through his attorney that he and Frances
had decided to give seven million dollars, which was then thought to be the price tag of a new
law school. That was the number that I had given him as an estimate, at his request for the new
law school. And he subsequently made that nine, the other portion being an addition to
endowment. He just called and told us that's what he was goipg to do. They are marvelously
generous people, and they have been generous to the school since, of course. They've given
money to the school since then. They've given lots of money elsewhere, too. But a lot of gifts
occurred spontaneously like that. None as large as the Lewises', however.
Warren: When I was asking about women who've been important to Washington and Lee,
I've heard that you're the man to ask. You could tell me about Miss Parmly and Mrs. duPont.
Huntley: Oh, well, lots ofwomen have been important, not just those, but I mean another
interesting feature, it seems to me, ofWashington and Lee's past, the past that I knew, is that the
alumni spouses, who in this case were always wives, obviously, were not uncommonly as
supportive of the school as their husbands were. Now, whether they were not given any choice
about that or what, I never knew.
Warren: I think that's a fascinating phenomenon.

                                                                                                              22
Huntley: Frances Lewis, for example. Ask Frances. She obviously didn't go to school here,
and Frances and Sydney make their decisions jointly. I think she subsequently became a trustee,
but one would not have guessed that in 19-whenever it was that were talking-1969 or
something. So it isn't just the women who happen to be able to make big individual gifts, but
the spouses of the alumni who come to be devoted to the place, and still are, I think.

         Mrs. duPont was the first woman on the board. The second woman on the board was the
spouse of an alumnus, Teen Martin, whose husband, Jim Bland Martin, was a devoted alumnus
of Washington and Lee and no doubt would've loved to ave been on the board, but was devoted
to his wife, and was not, therefore, in any way offended when it was she whom we put on the
board instead of him. You can ask him. He's still alive. She's dead, I'm sony to say.
Warren: Who is this?
Huntley: Her name was Teen Martin. His name is James Bland :.tvlartin. I don't know what
his condition is, you'll have to find out from Farris. But I think he would be someone you could
talk to. She came on the board as a spouse. She was a spouse and she came on the board. She
didn't come on the board as a spouse. She was a good trustee.

         Mrs. duPont I never knew as a trustee, of course. I came to Washington and Lee on a
duPont scholarship. I met her when I was a freshman. In those days Dr. Gaines had Mrs.
duPont at the president's home, had her receive the incoming freshmen whom she had supported,
and I met her when I was a seventeen-year-old boy, in the front lobby of the Lee House. I
remember that. She was a gracious, stately lady. I never knew her well, personally, though she
was still around when I became president. I saw her, but I never had a chance to know her well.
Dr. Gaines was very close to her, of course. A lot of good stories about Mrs. duPont. One of
my favorites Jim Whitehead could tell you.

         Are you going to talk to Whitehead?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: Well, you'd better, because he's marvelous. There are so many people you can talk
about in Washington and Lee, and Jim is one ofthose whose story ought to be told, too. He was
treasurer many ofthe years, the first ten years that I was president. Being treasurer of
Washington and Lee in those days was not an easy task since we didn't have much money. A
treasurer's job is always easier if you've got some money. Jim was the right man for the job at
that time. He has a marvelous story. He came here in development, in the same year that I did,

                                                                                                                                23
in 1958, at least three people whom I can identify, one of whom lives next door, Bill Washburn.
Are you going to talk to Washburn?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: He and I and Whitehead had all arrived here at the same time in 1958, Washburn as
the assistant alumni secretary. Whitehead as a development guy, I've forgotten what title, and
Huntley as the law teacher, and we came to know each other casually very quickly and then later
on, of course, both of them became very close friends and still are.

         Whitehead has a marvelous story about Mrs. duPont. He and Celeste assisted the
Gaineses in entertaining people, including Mrs. duPont, and they lived in that beautiful old
antebellum home that's on Main Street, one of the oldest houses on Main Street, on the comer of
Randolph and Main, or Jordan and Main, I forget, anyway. Beautiful home which they had
furnished beautifully, but the plumbing was quite old. Have you heard this story?
Warren: No.
Huntley: I wasn't there, but Jim is the one to tell you about it. The plumbing was ancient, it
was 19-you know, ·teens' plumbing. Have you ever seen plumbing where the flushing
mechanism of the tank is suspended above the toilet and it flushes by gravity, when you pull a
chain the water runs down a pipe and flushes the toilet? Well, the plumbing in this old house,
which the Whiteheads had not, by then, had the money to restore nor repair or renovate, well,
Mrs. duPont was there and went to make use of the plumbing facilities, and when she came out,
she was drenched. Her marvelous coiffure was draggled and her beautiful pearled gown,
whatever, was soaking. According to Jim, she didn't flinch at all. She went right through the
evening as if nothing had happened. Never called attention to it. What had happened is the
thing had overflowed, the tank that was suspended from the ceiling above her head had
overflowed and drenched her. But Jim said she never lost her dignity for a moment.
Warren: Oh, my God, what a story.
Huntley: He tells that stol)' more humorously than I can tell.
Warren: What a great story.
Huntley: You ought to talk to Jim. He's got a lot of things to talk about.
Warren: He's very high on my list.
Huntley: He'll be fun to talk to, too. You'll enjoy that.
Warren: Who was Miss Parmly and what's her connection?

                                                                                                                                 24
Huntley: Miss Parmly was introduced to me by an alumnus in New York City who worked for
one of the banks. This happened frequently, but not always turned out this well. He said that
he hoped I would find time when I was in New York to go by and see a lady whom he knew,
only because her estate was in trust with, or being managed by, this bank that he worked for.
He asked her permission. She let him know that she was in quest of objects of charity, and he
said, ir.Well, I've got one in mind." [Laughter] So she knew he was going to mention her to
me.

          So I called her, of course, and set up a time to see her in New York City, and we got
along very well. I explained to her all about Washington and Lee, and by that time we were
well along into the development program, so we identified pretty clearly what the needs were,
and we were perhaps maybe halfway down the road to seeing it actually achieved. Her father
had been a prominent physicist at CCNY, in the days when CCNY was a premier academic
institution. As you may know, until the past couple of decades, CCNY was as difficult an
academic institution as there was in the United States. Many ofthe great brains ofAmerica,
especially American science, came out of CCNY, and her father was professor of physics there,
which I think was really an important position. He had also patented something, and I've not
got it straight as to what it was. He invented and patented something back in the early years of
the century, from which he made a lot of money. That's where the money came from.

         Miss Parmly was born and raised in Manhattan, one of the few people I've ever known
who was born and raised in Manhattan and who remained on there until her dying day. But she
had become disenchanted with CCNY. I should say this differently. CCNY was such a totally
different institution, she no longer felt any identification with it. She wanted to find a way to
honor her father, and we needed lots ofthings, but we needed endowments more than anything
else at that moment, and I told her that. I suggested to her that we'd be honored if she made a
gift to our facility and we'd honor the gift by naming the building in which physics is housed
after her father, even though we would not, in fact, be spending the money on that building.
The building was there. We just called it the new science building in those days. She
understood that. She was very bright. She spoke several languages fluently and was a
delightful person.

         She came down here and visited several times, but she didn't come down here to visit
until after she had made her mind up about giving the money, incidentally. But she came down

                                                                                                                          25
here and visited. The faculty liked her and the faculty would entertain her. She was a very
entertaining person. This really became sort of a second home for her. This place was an
adopted institution place where she was, I think probably in some ways, a lonely person in
Manhattan. She loved it. But she had made up her mind about the gift before she ever visited
here.
Warren: How old was she?
Huntley: I would guess at the time she made the gift she was in her late sixties, probably.
This was a long time ago, so money was worth more per dollar than it is now. She asked me to
come by and see her, that she'd made up her mind about the gift. I had never given her an
amount. I was going to take her to lunch. She had a place where she liked to go to lunch that
I'd introduced her to. I went by her little apartment first. She said, "Let's get this business
over with first." She got out her pocketbook. In there was a little folding checkbook, the kind
that ladies carry in their pocketbooks. And she undid the checkbook and wrote out, by hand, on
a tiny little check, the check for-was it a million and a quarter, a million and a half dollars. I
recall that the zeros went down the side of the check, she couldn't get them all on, and she said,
~Tve never written one this big." [Laughter] But it worked, it cashed. And then we went to
lunch.

         She came down after that and became increasingly enamored of the school after she'd
made the gift, and indeed she'd never led us to expect that there would be any more money, nor
did I expect that there would be. There was, as it turned out. She left another substantial
amount in her estate when she died, I don't recall it now, bit a couple of million. She loved it
here. She just thought it was the greatest place she'd ever been.
Warren: So when she would come to visit, what would happen?
Huntley: Well, we entertained her at home. We kept her in the Lee House, of course. The
faculty would take her in hand and go off on campus with her and have little parties for her that I
didn't even go to. I didn't have to be with her every minute. Or Evelyn would entertain her.
But the faculty would take her, and she thought they were marvelous. And they liked her, they
genuinely liked her, so it wasn't necessary to set up anything.

         Another feature of the school, as Evelyn could tell you, faculty spouses thought it was
natural for them to entertain visiting firemen, and I guess they still do and they do so.
Warren: Well, I'm just delighted to get that story, because I've heard all kinds of silly stories

                                                                                                               26
about Miss Parmly. It's nice to hear the truth.
Huntley: Let me tell you a story about Miss Parmly that you might not have heard, which is
really of historical interest. This is of hard historical interest, as distinguished from the soft
historical .interest of the oral, or the kind of conversation I've been giving you. This is an
absolute fact, unvarnished truth.

         I asked Miss Parmly, after I'd known her for a visit or two, if she'd ever heard of
Washington and Lee before meeting me, because a lot of people haven't. It's a little school.
And she said, yes, she had, in her childhood, heard of Washington and Lee through a friend of
her father's. She said she recalled a friend of her father's talking about Washington and Lee in
her presence when she was a child, perhaps twelve-year-old.

         I said, "'Well, who would that have been?"
          She said, ~'His name was Doremus." Well, lo and behold, it turns out to be the same
Doremus, and she knew the story. She's telling me this now with no prompting from me. This
is not a case of my prompting her recollections. She said the story he told her father in her
presence was the story of coming to the Washington and Lee campus and being greeted by an
anonymous student and shown the campus and treated with hospitality and warmth. He'd never
been anyplace where that happened before, and he went back to New York and he left us-was it
$8 million? It was like that, it was a lot of money. That was just a whole lot of money in the
early years ofthe century. He didn't visit again. She knew that story from the man himself
She heard him tell her father that story.
         The reason that's of interest is because that's a legend around here of long standing,
which no one has ever credited as necessarily being true. Dr. Gaines loved to tell that story.
Well, it just didn't have the ring-it had the ring of the kind of thing that one would sort of
embellish with, you see. But it turns out to be, this is-if that's not independent verification, I
don't know what is. She heard the man say that, and she told me that with no prompting on my
part, about this story. She remembered that from her childhood, that's how she remembered
Washington and Lee. So you could say that anonymous student who wowed Mr. Doremus also
indirectly wowed Miss Parmly a half century later. Isn't that amazing?
Warren: That is amazing, because, you know, I've done a great deal of reading of those early
years, and even right around the time of the Doremus gift, the story isn't straight. There are
stories that are inconsistent. One may be true or the other might be true, but they can't both be

                                                                                                                       27
true.
Huntley: Right. This was her story which she heard from him and never heard from anybody
else, and thought she was telling me for the first time. Then, of course, when I told her that had
been a legendary tradition down here, she was pleased.
Warren: That's the ultimate small world story, isn't it? Big money, small world story. I'm
going to pop in another tape.
[Begin Tape 2, Side I]
Warren: This is Mame Warren. It's the fourteenth ofMay 1996. This is tape two with
Robert Huntley.
Huntley: They're embarrassed when it doesn't, as ifyou were going to their home, and there
were years when they couldn't afford to make it look good. There really were. Couldn't keep
the grass growing and they were acutely embarrassed in those years. We just couldn't do
anything about it.
Warren: When would that have been?
Huntley: Oh, when I became president, that was true. The campus was ragged-looking and
we couldn't afford to make it-it wasn't anybody's fault. There just wasn't enough money to
keep it. You understand that at that time we were borrowing money every June to make the
payroll through to September.
Warren: No, I don't understand that.
Huntley: Well, okay, it's easy to do if you just get the financial records out and look at them.
[Laughter] The endowment of the school was like fourteen million dollars or fifteen million,
and we were broke. So things had to give, that had to give.
Warren: Let's start to talk about that period. One thing I found out in my quick research this
morning is that you had a leg up when you came in as president. You were secretary of the
board for a couple ofyears.
Huntley: Well, yeah, that didn't really mean anything much, but, yeah, I was. Fred Cole
asked me to help him out on one or two assignments-I was teaching at the law school-one or
two assignments that were legal or quasi-legal in nature, and got to know me and asked me ifl
were to assist him in relationships with the board, which I, of course, did. I think he eventually
formalized that by calling me secretary to the board. I'd been doing that for a while before I had
any title involved.

                                                                                                                          28
Warren: Tell me about Fred Cole. I really don't know anything about him.
Huntley: Well, that's unfortunate that you don't, because Cole was president for eight years
here, and I think he was one ofthe most marvelous men that I ever knew. He was soft-spoken,
quiet, even timid, and therefore, except by the faculty who were here then, and they will
remember him with praise, but the alumni don't remember him terribly well, because he didn't
ever succeed in establishing a close relationship with many ofthem; some, but not with many.
The strengths he brought, academic strengths he brought to the faculty, were important. He was
a marvelous, marvelous president, I thought.

         I did not want him to resign when he did. He did because he had concluded that he was
not the right man for the job at that time, and I thought he was wrong and told him so, but he was
determined. He had great devotion for the school. He loved it more than anything else he had
ever done. So it wasn't for that reason that he left. He just didn't think it was a job he could
do.
Warren: Where did he go?
Huntley: He went to run a library organization in Washington that was funded by the Ford
Foundation, called the Council on Library Resources. He ran that until he retired at age seventy,
I suppose, and died a few years ago. His widow is still living.
Warren: And I understand he has a son.
Huntley: A son, Taylor.
Warren: A couple of people have mentioned his name.
Huntley: He was a wonderful guy, just marvelous, I thought. Frank has vivid recollections of
Fred Cole and could share those with you, Frank Parsons, and Farris and Jim Whitehead, and Sid
Cou1Iing.
Warren: So at the ripe young age of thirty-eight, you were asked to fill Dr. Gaines' shoes.
Huntley: Well, I don't think it was put quite that way. [Laughter] No, it wasn't.
Warren: Sitting here listening to you talk about Dr. Gaines, it occurs to me that that's what
you were doing.
Huntley: No, I didn't think of it in that way. Actually, it was Cole I was succeeding and not
Gaines. I thought very highly of Cole. It was a real humbling experience. I was on the search
committee, which probably the records would reveal, the Presidential Search Committee.
Warren: What does it mean to be on a search committee?

                                                                                                                                     29
Huntley: Well, that means you've got to go out and try find somebody, to develop a list of
possible people who you'd like to have as president and who you think the faculty and board will
accept. It was a difficult time to seek a president for Washington and Lee.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: Well, the school was not in robust condition financially. The reputation was still
good, but it was not an easy time. I don't exactly know how I came to be suggested, because I
was not present when that occurred. We were talking with other people, the committee was,
interviewing people and trying to find people. And in some way, I really don't know. Some
members of the committee, other than me, eventually talked to the board, and the committee was
still in process of trying to find somebody when the director of the board called me in late 1967,
probably November or early December of ' 67, and asked me ifl would consider.
Warren: Who was director then?
Huntley: Huston St. Clair, marvelous person and a strong Washington and Lee family from
West Virginia. A medical doctor who didn't practice medicine. His family had been in the
coal business and he'd been on the board for many years, and his father before him. He was
rector during the first several years that I was president.
Warren: So what was it like getting that call?
Huntley: Well, it was startling. I didn't anticipate that. I hadn't aspired to be dean of the law
school, certainly not to be president. So it was a matter on which Evelyn and I had several
weeks deciding whether to do it or not. But I knew, because I had been close to the situation,
that the job to be done was going to be kind of hard sell to a new president from outside. So I
concluded that maybe it was a duty I needed to do, and that really was the way I thought about it,
because the main thing I liked to do was teaching. If I had wanted a different kind of career, I
would have stayed in law, which I believe I could've succeeded at, and was doing all right with,
so it was not a job I felt ambitious to have. But as I said earlier, most of the administrators of
Washington and Lee never had the ambition to be administrators, and that was true. But I never
regretted doing it. It was a marvelous fifteen years, which is several years longer than I
expected it would be. [Laughter]
Warren: As you say, it was a very difficult time.
Huntley: Well, all times are. They're just difficult in different ways.
Warren: It seems like it. One of the things that seems obvious to me with historical

                                                                                                                            30
perspective that was happening at that time was the issue of integration.
Huntley: True. That's right.
Warren: Can you talk about that?
Huntley: Sure. It was happening, and I had been active with Fred Cole in discussions with the
board about reaching the decision that the faculty would be the agency that would determine
admissions at Washington and Lee. That understanding was confirmed by the board during
Fred Cole's presidency.
Warren: What's the distinction you're making there?
Huntley: The distinction I'm making was that it was not the Board's role to determine who's
admitted to Washington and Lee.
Warren: And had it been in the past?
Huntley: No, as far as I know.
Warren: You just wanted to clarify it?
Huntley: Exactly. And that had been confirmed by the board, I think an important step for
Cole to have taken, because it made it clear to the board mainly that they knew that this issue
was the admission ofblack students and Fred did not want an after-the-fact suggestion from the
board or any member of the board that the decision as to whether or not to admit black students
was a board decision. So, in effect, the board made the decision without ever passing a
resolution that the institution was not closed to black students and that the faculty would decide
whom to admit, though I don't think you'll find that in any board resolution. Maybe you will.
I don't think so, because there had never been any resolution to the contrary, as you just noted by
your question. There had never been any suggestion that the board did control admissions.
There was nothing in the record of the institution indicating that the institution would not accept
black students, nothing anywhere in its history. No resolution that they wouldn't. So a
resolution that they would would've have been gratuitous. Nevertheless, it was wise that there
be a consensus among the board that that was the fact, and that Cole got accomplished. It was
one of the things that he asked my assistance with in those years that I was secretary.
Warren: And how did you assist?
Huntley: I just explained it to the board in those terms.
Warren: In one-on-one?
Huntley: Yeah, one-on-one, as did he.

                                                                                                                          31
Warren: Was there resistance?
Huntley: No, no, there wasn't resistance. Among some of the older board members, there was
reluctance, but no resistance. Reluctance may not be the right word. There was trepidation
about what this would signify, about how successful we could be in having black students who
would succeed at Washington and Lee come here-trepidation that was well placed. That's a
legitimate concern, still is. But we felt it had to be faced and attempted, and then we did begin
to admit black students, to seek black students who would want to be admitted, and then to admit
them as aggressively as we could in the years that followed.
Warren: How do you think it worked out?
Huntley: I think it worked out as well as I suspect we could have expected. There were fits
and starts and some false starts and some failures, so the course wasn't a smooth one, but we
were fortunate in finding a number of young black men who wanted to come here, of which
number a substantial percentage succeeded. Ofthat substantial percentage, a number of them
are avid alumni ofthe school and did absorb the devotion that the white students had had about
the school. It was a tough time for them.
Warren: Why?
Huntley: It required a lot of courage on their part. Well, why not? They were in a
community of a previously all-white community, a school with the names of the guys who
fought the Civil War at its masthead. What could have been easy about that? And whether or
not they were caused to feel it, they obviously were going to feel some extent of alienation, and
all of them did. All of them did. I think there are no exceptions to that. And I think to the
degree it succeeded, I believe it did, it did because people here were anxious to have it succeed.
And I think it's for the same reason other things at Washington and Lee seem to work,
eventually. If it didn't work at first, we just kept trying.

         I think the black students, even those who felt alienated, even those who continued to feel
alienated, and some did, I think even those knew that most of us here were an.xious for them to
succeed and did all we could to help them succeed. There was certainly many hours of
conversation with them, and they learned to come to us with conversations and also learned to
accept negative answers when we couldn't do things they wanted done.
Warren: Do you have any examples ofthat?
Huntley: Well, I can recall early on, the ideas that were so prevalent in those days, I guess still

                                                                                                                          32
are, of having separate living quarters. Well, that was just not something we were going to do,
and I explained to them why I thought that was wrong. They didn't do that. They could and,
of course did, form social organizations that were separate. That was something they could
certainly do, and did do. But separate dormitories and separate curricula, those ideas were so
prevalent in those days, were bound to arise here. I'm not sure that any of them wanted that, but
they were discussions we had to have. I know those young men to this day, the ones you
mentioned and others. Some of them come by to see me occasionally.

         I'll tell you a story. I guess it was successful. A modest success, I guess it was, I'd
describe it as. Modest success from hard work.
Warren: I'm intrigued by your making reference to the masthead, that General Lee is the name
of the place.
Huntley: No black student ever mentioned that to me, incidentally. They must've thought
that, but it was never mentioned to me.
Warren: I was flabbergasted by Eugene Perry saying that's one of the reasons he was attracted
to the place because he read a lot about Robert E. Lee.
Huntley: Well, no black student, while I had complaints from them about many things, many
of the complaints justified, some of them not justified-that was also true of the white students, I
might add-I never had a black student, even when they were, for one reason or another,
outraged, I never had a black student ever express to me any resentment about the Lee heritage.
I had some of them, as Perry apparently told you, refer to that heritage favorably. I never had
anyone express resentment about it, nor was there even days when it was popular to demonstrate,
you know, in those days when people wore their hearts on their sleeves and usually on sign
boards, no one ever had a demonstration that would have protested Lee. Now, you would've
thought that might have happened. Looking back at the 1969-'70 period, you might have
thought that somebody would've done that. No one ever did. I'm glad they didn't, because I
don't know how I would've handled that. [Laughter]
Warren: That would've been pretty tough, wouldn't it? That would be pretty hard.
Huntley: With Lee's recumbent statute lying behind the podium at Lee Chapel, it's amazing to
me that that never happened. I don't believe they, any more than the others at Washington and
Lee, think ofLee primarily as a leader ofthe Civil War battles. That's how histmy thinks of
him, but that's really not the way he's thought ofhere.

                                                                                                                           33
Warren: Tell me what you mean.
Huntley: Well, he's thought of here for his years as president and for the attitude he brought to
the place, which is the attitude that has been perpetuated, I think, over the years. The personal
involvement. The Lee letters. Have you read the Lee letters he wrote? He knew all the kids.
He wrote letters back to the parents about them and everything. It was his personal touch.
And, of course, he never dwelled on the Civil War. He wouldn't talk about the Civil War. He
had put that behind him. As he said in the letter he wrote to his wife shortly after he arrived
here, he hoped the Lord would spare him to do something useful with the years he had left. And
that's the way he saw it. So he saw the pinnacle of his career as the years he had here, which
were not related in his mind to his years as General Lee, and somehow that must have seeped
through to the students, black and white.
Warren: I think it did. I think it did.
Huntley: I'm sure Perry wouldn't be thinking ofLee, when he thinks of him favorably,
wouldn't be thinking of him as the guy who ordered Pickett's Charge. [Laughter]
Warren: What he's talking about is the tradition of honor.
Huntley: Right.
Warren: Which he knew a lot about before he ever walked on the campus.
Huntley: Of course. And they do. Those are the things that people remember of him. The
distinctive figures ofWashington and Lee, in my judgment, are severalfold, and most of the folks
who worked here know and even articulate them and work hard to preserve them.

         It's a combination, not necessarily in this order, it's a combination of a large, very large
liberal arts curriculum, as large a curriculum as you would find at the undergraduate level at
major universities, coupled with a small student body, small enough so that the students can, and
do, know each other and can, and do, know their faculty, not just the sub-cliques in which they
find themselves, but the whole group, know each other personally and feel a sense of
responsibility for each other, or can at least do so. It can occur that they can develop a sense of
responsibility for each other. It doesn't always, but it's small enough that it can. So, small
size, small in that sense.

         Free choice. A wide measure of free choice among this large curriculum, across this
large curriculum. Not totally free choice. A choice that is channeled into various directions by
wise faculty, but within those broad ambits, a wide measure of choice. In other words, a school

                                                                                                                         34
that does not have to subsidize its cuniculum by forcing students into certain comers of it. That
requires some balance in terms of administration, to have a curriculum that's this large and have
it populated by a small student body, because all parts of the curriculum may be populated just
because you're going to have it. Faculty are not going to remain, even if you pay them, if they
don't have students, and good students. So ifthe curriculum is going to be large and
demanding, the students need to populate that curriculum, and if you have to force them into its
corners in order to populate it, you've lost one ofthe features I'm describing. So it needs to
have that balance.

         Then the fourth element is the element of which the honor system is a premiere condition,
the sense of trust and community that exists in the group. Those four elements are what makes
the school distinctive and what is difficult to find anywhere else, not impossible, I don't suspect,
but difficult to find anywhere else. Those four elements are why students want to live here, and
they' 11 tell you one of those four things. If you go talk to them, one of those four things is what
they'll hit on, sometimes all four of them. But those will be the reasons that they like it.

         And those that didn't like it, of which there are some, usually will be something relating
to one of those four areas that caused them not to like it. They couldn't identify with the honor
system, not necessarily because they're dishonorable, but they didn't like the thought. They saw
that as something different than what it is, or their own personal circumstance was such that they
did not succeed in relating themselves to the community, or they chose badly within the
curriculum and did not, as it happened, get the kind of advice they could have used, or didn't
seek it. That's one of the features ofthis school, is that advice is available here from anybody,
but it's rarely forced. I used to tell the freshmen this as emphatically as I could, and again and
again during their freshmen year, and some don't remember it: faculty and others here are
available to advise students at almost any time on curricular or non-curricular matters, but rarely
do they force the advice. Rarely does a faculty members seek out a student and say, '"You
know, you really made a bad choice there." That again is part of the process of-they've got to
grow into men, not be grown into men. And so the students who don't seek advice and make
mistakes, which, as a measure ofyour freedom, you can make, may have a bad experience. So
it doesn't suit everybody, but it suits, I think, the majority of those who come here.

         So that's about all I know about the place. [Laughter]
Warren: That's certainly succinct. You know what you're saying there, especially towards

                                                                                                                            35
the end, makes me think of what an incredible contrast it is between this institution with the
white columns and the other institution next door and their point of view.
Huntley: Well, yes, it's a contrast, but there are similarities, I suspect. It's, of course, small,
develops a devotion and a sense of community among its students by different means from what
wedo.
Warren: Did you interrelate with \lMI very much?
Huntley: Yes. I was very, very fond of the superintendent who was there most ofthe time that
I was president, Bud Shell, General Shell, who was one of the most marvelous, I think, just a
wonderful man. I don't know what his physical condition is now.
Warren: I think they're failing, both, a little.
Huntley: Did he talk to you?
Warren: I haven't attempted to, but that's a really good idea.
Huntley: He would be interesting to talk to.
Warren: That's a very good idea.
Huntley: He would have a view ofWashington and Lee that would be interesting to know.
Warren: That's a really good idea.
Huntley: But I thought he was just one of the wisest men I ever knew, and I should tell you
that during the early years I was president, I sought his advice on more than one occasion, and he
gave good advice. During 1970, when the students were parading around here like a bunch of
lunatics from time to time, Shell was a good source of counsel for me. Not many people know
that.
Warren: Tell me aboutthat.
Huntley: Well, I talked to him, I knew him well, and I talked to him about it. He was very
wise. He was not [unclear] military school. But his view was, if we remained open but firm,
open but firm, firm in the things that really mattered, the final things that really mattered, that the
students would, in due course, recognize the value of that position. He was right.
Warren: Let's go back to 1970.
Huntley: Let's don't. [Laughter]
Warren: Oh, come on.
Huntley: Well, it wasn't all that bad. It was an interesting time. Watershed years, I guess.
I'm not exactly sure where the water shed to, on either side ofthe watershed-watershed just for

                                                                                                                           36
the nation, I mean, and, I guess, in some ways for the school, but the students had somehow had
come to the-and I won't attempt any sociological analysis, but had somehow become alienated
in many cases from their families to a greater degree than I ever saw before or since.
Warren: What do you mean?
Huntley: Well, just specifically that. They were not relating to their families. I recall we had
to keep the dormitories open during the holidays because they wouldn't go home, for example.
So I mean it literally. Not just here, lots of places. Washington and Lee seemed to them, again
the sense of community and a sense of the importance of the place to them. I said it earlier the
alumni had a downside. There was a downside where the students were concerned, too.

         So they, in a sense, were ambivalent about Washington and Lee. They had a love/hate
relationship with it, some of them did at that time. And of course they were upset about the
things that the students were getting upset about then, about the Vietnamese War and other
things they saw as unjust. They had the kind of passion that youth always has, I once described
as deep convictions lightly held. That's true ofyouth. Each passion is more significant than its
predecessor and they don't necessarily last long. Some do and some don't, but this is part of the
process of growing up. This is way the mind and the intellect and the emotions develop.

         Young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one are a potent chemical force.
[Laughter] And that had been ignited, to a degree, by the events occurring nationally and
internationally.. And by whatever sociology goes before that, the years since World War II and
the things that had occurred in American society that caused youth to feel less close to their
families, all those things coalesced in the late sixties and early seventies, here and elsewhere, and
surfaced in terms of unrest and demands for this or that concession, as they saw it, by the school
and so on.

         But we got through it well. I think we got through it well because the faculty remained
staunch in both senses of the word. They declined to give up the institution's autonomy to the
students, the curricula of autonomy to the students, they declined it. They would've declined to
give it up to the board, too, but they declined to give it up to the students, and at the same time
remained open to the students. So they didn't feel alienated from the students, even though in
some cases students seemed to feel alienated froIJJ. them and remained opened, and the
conversations that could and did occur, could occur here, couldn't have occurred at a school any
larger than this or with a different background. It just wouldn't have happened. It just couldn't

                                                                                                                         37
have happened.
Warren: What kind of conversations?
Huntley: Endless conversations about all the issues that were bothering them. I mea~ you'd
sit up for hours. Nobody would ever cut them off. Everybody had all the time for them they
wanted, as they always had. Eventually good sense prevailed. Not all the incidents of that
period were good and not all the outcomes were good, but on balance it was good. The school
retained its sense of purpose, and the students agreed with that eventually.

          So it was an interesting time. I don't think of it with any bad thoughts. A lot of those
students who were here, I knew most of them, a lot of them who were here then I see regularly
now. The class of 1970, I guess it was. The reunion two years ago, the twenty-fifth, and I was
very honored, they established a scholarship in my name.
Warren: Well, now if that isn't flattering.
Huntley: A six-figure scholarship in my name. They said they gave me so damn much trouble
that they owed it to me. [Laughter] I said, "'Well you certainly did."
Warren: What goes around comes around.
Huntley: Yeah. So they were interesting times, but we got through that.
Warren: Were there any personal vignettes, personal things that happened? It's such a huge
historical time. But on the personal level.
Huntley: Oh, well, lots of them, yeah. I remember, for example, living in the Lee House, the
kids had various camps amongst students then. It was even difficult for me to keep track of
which camp was which sometimes, although I knew them all. And this camp would sort of
distrust that camp, and one group of students was of the view that another group was likely to be
violent. None ofthem ever was violent. And they wanted to sit on the front porch of the Lee
House. They came to the Lee House about eight o'clock one night, rang the doorbell. Evelyn
went to the door, and he said, "Mrs. Huntley, we thought we should let you know that several of
us are going to be sleeping out here on your front porch tonight, because we think that maybe
some of these other kids out here need watching."

         So Evelyn said, "Well, I don't think they need watching, and it's going to be a cold night
tonight. It's going to be frost tonight. We're going to have frost." It was early May and we
were going to have frost like we did last night. She said, "I think you're going to freeze out
there. It doesn't make any sense."

                                                                                                                           38
         They said, "No, ma'am, we think we're going to stay out here."
         She said, "Well, if you' re going to stay out here, I'm going to leave the front door
unlatched. You see the geranium sitting here? Ifyou see it frosting, set it in the front hall."
[Laughter] True story.
Warren: She had her priorities straight.
Huntley: And we left the door unlocked to the Lee House, in the middle of the nation's-sure
enough, the students put the geraniums in the house during the night. They remembered that
story when that kid graduated that year. He said he couldn't believe that. There we were
woni.ed about the fate of the world and Mrs. Huntley told us the door was unlocked and put the
geraniums inside.
Warren: And were they still there in the morning?
Huntley: The students?
Warren: Yes.
Huntley: Yes, they were. They were still there in the morning and probably for a day or two
thereafter. They were camped all over the front lawn. They were literally camped on the front
lawn. All over the place.
Warren: Tents?
Huntley: In some cases, tents, yes.
Warren: It must have been a little bit like the Civil War starting up again.
Huntley: Yes, it was. It was. And in the middle of that, we had alumni reunions. Imagine
an alumnus who hadn't been here in fifty years, for example, coming back and looking at the
front campus, here are these kids running around looking like savages, dressed in the ways which
you may be able to remember students liked to dress in those days-I mean, you know, bare
from the waist up and no shoes, and with tents pitched around the campus, growing scraggly old
beards and long hair and so on. And you can imagine what the alumni returning thought of that.
But we survived that too, you see. They forgave us. [Laughter] Right in the middle of alumni
reunions occurred right in the middle of that period.
Warren: That must have been really dramatic.
Huntley: It was less dramatic then it sounds to tell about it.
Warren: It just sounds like you've got a cast of characters. There must have been drama.
Huntley: Well, there was. Actually it was good that the alumni were here, because that gave

                                                                                                                         39
them a chance to talk to the students, and we facilitated that, because they weren>t nearly as
savage as they looked, you know. They weren't savage at all. So we facilitated the alumni
talking to them and they went away with a much better feeling then they would have had if
they'd only seen pictures, which a lot ofthem didn't see anything but pictures. So it was
probably good, on balance, that we had a big group of alumni here, who were able to go back
home and say, "It's really not as bad as it looks. 11
Warren: So let's talk about these "savages. 11 That was something else that happened during
your tenure, your presidency. Conventional dress went by the-
Huntley: Well, yeah, it had already started to go before I became president. It had become
less and less conventional.
Warren: How did that happen?
Huntley: The year before that. It didn't happen overnight.
Warren: And it isn't a university thing.
Huntley: It never was. It never was.
Warren: Explain that to me.
Huntley: Well, it never was. I don't know when the custom began. There was a custom.
But you need to put it in time, in perspective of the times. When I was a young man, for
example, coming along, when I was a boy, a child, my father never came to the dinner table
without a coat and tie. Rarely went out of his room without a coat and tie. My grandfather
probably never went out of his room without his coat and tie. So that normalcy in a civilized
community was, for most people, unless they were in physical labor at the time, was a coat and
tie. That's probably how the custom began. Again, they thought they were growing into men,
they might as well behave like men, and that's the way men behaved in those days. It no longer ·
is. I mean, I don't put on a coat and tie to go to dinner and I ain't got one on now. But that
wouldn't have been true at the time I came here.

         So the custom started and then the custom was enforced by the student body. It's not the
way it began, it's just the way it ended, really. The student government had a conventional dress
understanding and had a committee called the Assimilation Committee, which would punish
students-they made them wear beanies or something-who didn't dress conventionally, in the
years after World War II. This is mainly after World War II when the conventional dress
Assimilation Committee would have been quite active. Conventional dress had been around

                                                                                                                         40
long before that. I'm not suggesting that it occurred then, but the enforcement of it was
probably more rigorous after World War II than in earlier times.

          The prevalence of the custom of dressing like that was always changing, and it would
have already been true by the mid-fifties, that you would see students occasionally without coats
and ties, whereas you never saw that when I was a student, unless you were actively engaged in
an athletic endeavor. You never left your room without a coat and tie, never. I never did,
unless I was literally going out on the crew or the tennis courts. But that had already begun to
change.

         Then the emphasis came on enforcing it, as always happens when something is changing,
you know. Then the emphasis came on the enforcement techniques. Well, it obviously was not
something the University was going to enforce, never had, and I was not about to make
conventional dress analogous to the honor system. The University doesn't enforce the honor
system either. But I was not about to suggest to the students that I thought they should treat
conventional dress as they treated the honor system, because I didn't believe that. I thought it
would be fatal to the honor system, or at least dangerous to it, to burden it with that false
analogy. They weren't enforced in the same way, incidentally. Conventional dress was not
enforced by the Executive Committee, which is the group that enforced it. And slowly it just
slowly petered out over a period of a decade, I would say.
Warren: I was intrigued by an article in the current alumni magazine, an interview with Larry
Boetsch, the new dean, who says that he can remember going off for a year in Spain his junior
year and coming back, and conventional dress was gone. For him it happened in one year.
Huntley: But it really didn't, though. It didn't. It happened slowly over a long period of time.
I saw it happen over all those years.
Warren: Do you think something was lost or gained?
Huntley: Oh, I don't think anything was gained. I suppose something was lost in the
communal sense that we referred to earlier, but I'm not sure that that it was anything significant.
I think it's important that students concern themselves now about how they look. I don't like to
see them now looking like ragamuffins, unless they're required to look that way, which I don't
think they are. I don't think it's helpful to one's own psyche to dress like a barbarian unless you
are a barbarian. I don't think it helps. So in that sense, I guess, something's lost, but I don't
think most of them dress like barbarians now. To a degree they do, I think that's bad. To the

                                                                                                                       41
degree they dress conventionally, that is in the way that the conventions of the time suggest
civilized people dress, then I think that's fine.

          To me, at least, the method of dressing should not be a statement. I believe there are
better ways to make statements than by attire. I think conventional dress, at one point in its
evolution, was not a statement; it was the way one conventionally dressed himself to live life.
There are different ways now one dresses himselfto live life, and that's the way they ought to
dress, I think. I don't know, I never thought clothes make the man. I think that's true of
conventional dress or highly unconventional dress. Neither one makes the man.

          We went through a petiod in the sixties and seventies when students thought clothes
make the man. They didn't think it was conventional clothes that make the man;
unconventional clothes made the man. And it didn't either way, you see. Dressing like you're
impoverished does not make you poverty-stricken, nor does it imply any real empathy with those
who are.
Warren: Good point.
Huntley: So I dislike that talk. Polonius' advice to Laertes was badly flawed, and as you
recall from reading your Shakespeare, Shakespeare painted Polonius as a trite old fool. And all
ofhis advice, everything he had to say, Polonius' advice to Laertes is wrong, including what he
had to say about clothes.
Warren: I need to tum the tape over.
[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Warren: One of the other things that I believe was suspended during your time was Fancy
Dress.
Huntley: Well, it was wasn't suspended, they just quit having it. It petered out and then it was
redeemed. It was revived.
Warren: Was there a sadness to that?
Huntley: Well, yeah, I would say, although, again, when things peter out, it's less sad than
when they're shot. Fancy Dress had been a rather unsuccessful event for several years prior to
its-
Warren: Oh, really.
Huntley: Yeah, it really had, because it didn't work very well. During that time period,
students were not as interested as they had been earlier and probably are now in carefully laid

                                                                                                                           42
plans for large celebrity weekends. That sort of thing was not popular in the early seventies.
That's when it died out. I've forgotten when. I've forgotten the years, you'll have to look it
up. And I've forgotten when it was revived.
Warren: I think it was '70, '74, something like that.
Huntley: But it was a mere shadow of its former self before that.
Warren: So when it came back, did it come back full force?
Huntley: Well, it came back anew. No, it didn't come back as it had once been. It came back
as a new creature. And as a new creature, it better suited the times than we live in now. You
couldn't bring back the dance sets of the forties and thirties.
Warren: Oh, wouldn't it be fun, though?
Huntley: It would be fun, but you couldn't possibly do it. It would be an act to try to do it.
Fancy Dress, when I was a student, was a three-day dance set, three days, three nights and with
two different bands, sometimes with both bands in the same night. I mean both Dorseys, for
example. Both bands, real bands. Bands that don't even exist now. You couldn't get them
now if you wanted to; they don't exist.

         We had two bands, one for Thursday night and one for Saturday night and two for Friday
night, and dressed formally all three nights, one night in tails, one night in tux, and one night in
costume. To revive something like that today would be silly. You might put it on as a play
once, but you couldn't sustain it as a tradition.

         There were four dance sets in those years, all formal. Dance set in Opening Dances,
there was Fancy Dress, Spring Dances and Finals. The other three dances were two night sets
with big bands. You couldn't do that today. As I say, it would be kind of silly if you did.

         So Fancy Dress is not what it was. That's not to say it isn't good. They still dress fancy
and they still have a nice party.
Warren: Do you ever go now?
Huntley: I have been. I haven't been in the last several years. I never missed one when I was
here.
Warren: I think it's a great party.
Huntley: It is.
Warren: I went to my first one this year and had a fabulous time.
Huntley: It is, it is a great party.

                                                                                                                           43
Warren: Well, speaking of parties, one of the things I remember most when I lived here in the
late seventies is fraternity parties.
Huntley: Yeah. Well, they had them and I suppose they still do.
Warren: Tell me about your relationship with fraternities.
Huntley: Well, generally my relationship with fraternities was good. We had troubles with
various fraternities from time to time, and still do, I guess. I thought, on balance, fraternities
served a useful purpose for those who joined them. I didn't think they should have an exclusive
hold on the social life of the school. I thought we ought to try to afford the students who didn't
belong to fraternities some social alternatives, and that we've attempted to do. But I was never
opposed to fraternities, and knew them well. On balance, I think they performed well. They
provided support for students. The good fraternities provided support for students that they
needed, social support as well as other kinds of support, and the bad ones didn't.

         And all of them were sometimes good and sometimes bad. They were fraternities in
cycles. Fraternities went in cycles. X fraternity might be good for three or four years and not
so good for three or four years. I'm sure that continues to be true. I don't have any present
view of how well they're run, but they probably still serve a useful purpose.

         They fell into disrepair physically, and mainly that occurred in the sixties and seventies
when everything else fell, when the students ceased to take care of things. It wasn't all the
students' fault. Some of it was, a lot of it was. The houses were very old physically, of course,
and the school really couldn't afford to own them at that time. So as the houses fell increasingly
into disrepair, it's a vicious circle, the sense of pride in them fell into disrepair, and it was hard to
refurbish. But they've done a marvelous job with that. The Fraternity Renaissance program,
seems to me, has been very successful. John Wilson's Fraternity Renaissance program, I'm very
complimentary of the way that's worked.
Warren: Would anything like that have ever been possible during your administration?
Huntley: Oh, yeah, sure, but we hadn't gotten to the point where we could afford to do that. I
think it was the right thing to do. I really do. It seems to be working.
Warren: It sure seems to be. Those places look like show houses now.
Huntley: They do. They do.
Warren: And, of course, the other thing that was talked about a lot during your administration
was coeducation.

                                                                                                                          44
Huntley: Yeah, it certainly was. I guess we had two formal studies of it and more than two
semiformal ones, deciding both of them to remain, for the time being, at least all-male. The
major reasons I think we decided to stay all-male, I've already touched on, were financial, plus
the desire to retain those four features I referred to, one ofwhic~ you remember, is size.

          The most difficult feature of coeducation, I thought, was going to be retaining the small
size of the school, which would require both fortitude and money. I'm glad to say they've
seemed to me to be able to do that so far. The school is larger, sixteen hundred as distinguished
from perhaps thirteen hundred, but I think it's still within the scale that allows the teachers that I
described in my earlier description of the four features of Washington and Lee that I think are
distinctive, none of which, you remember, was gender. Those same four features could be
found in some all-female schools, incidentally. But I think those four features are vital, and if
any one of them has to be sacrificed, it will make a substantial difference. Washington and Lee
would lose the characteristics that make it distinctive.

          So if coeducation was going to occur in a context that compromised one of those four,
then it would have been a mistake, but I think eventually we reached the point where that wasn't
true, and clearly the correct move for Dr. Wilson and the faculty to have taken when they did
take it, and it seems to me to have been done very, very well. The women students whom I've
talked to, and graduates, seem to me to be as caught up in the mystique of the place as everybody
else.
Warren: They fit right in, don't they? It's remarkable. It's like they found another corner of
the cloth and just kept cutting.
Huntley: One feature of coeducation today as distinguished from what might be true, let's say,
thirty years ago, is that women now more nearly tend to take a wide array of courses in a large
curriculum than they would've done in 1930 or even 1950.

         One of the features of the school that I described to you is a student body that populates a
large curriculum, a small student body that populates a large curriculum. Some earlier
enrollment patterns in the forties and so on would've implied that women didn't do that as
clearly as men. They do now, the reason being that they have opportunities for uses of
education that are greater than they were in those days. So that the need to populate the
curriculum can occur with a mixed student body easier than it could've and still retain its small
size.

                                                                                                                          45
         When you can't populate the large curriculum, the temptation, there is only one of three
things you can do: you can cut the curriculum; you can subsidize the curriculum-that is to say,
force students into it, which is never going to work for very long-or you enlarge the student
body. Those are the only three things you can do, and all three of them have serious
disadvantages, financial disadvantages and, more important, community disadvantages. But I
think the school has reached a point financially, and society has reached a point culturally, where
it looks to me like it works very well.
Warren: Would you have liked to have been part of the coeducation change?
Huntley: Yeah, I would've liked to have been. But I'd been president long enough. Fifteen
years was long enough. Longer then I had thought I would be president. I always maintained
when I took the job that I would stay only long enough to achieve an identifiable set of
objectives and then get out. I've seen presidents remain in the position too long, and I was
determined not to be one of them ifl could help it, and it took fifteen years. I had hoped to do it
in ten or twelve. I took fifteen years to get to a point where I thought it was a stopping point.
You've got to find a stopping point. You can't walk off in midstream. It took fifteen years to
get to what I perceived to be a stopping point. Most of the things I had thought had to be done
when I became president had either been done or abandoned. In most cases they had been done,
and it was a good place for me to stop.
Warren: I don't want you to retire quite yet. I want to pursue the coeducation just a little
more.
Huntley: Sure.
Warren: There was that major study done.
Huntley: There were two studies done.
Warren: Why do you think it didn't happen at those times?
Huntley: I think for the reasons I've given you. I think I gave you the reasons.
Warren: Do you think there was just too much resistance from the board?
Huntley: No. I didn't recommend it. Don't get the idea that I was striving to get the school
to go coeducation and the board wouldn't let me. That's not true.
Warren: That's what I want to clarify.
Huntley: Well, I can clarify that for you right now. I didn't recommend it.
Warren: Okay. It wasn't the right time.

                                                                                                                         46
Huntley: I didn't recommend it. The faculty well knew that. They haven't told you
otherwise, have they?
Warren: No. No, no, no. I just want to hear it from you. I just want to make sure that
question is asked in that way.

         I'm still not going to let you retire yet. I want to talk about, as an entity, the grand
capital campaign that you oversaw. That has to be a crowning achievement.
Huntley: Well, I don't know if it's a crowning achievement. It was just a chore that had to be
done. We had good people to do it, to help do it, and a generous constituency, which, once
informed of the level of need, over a long time period-you can't inform people overnight about
such things-once convinced that the need existed, started stepping forward to meet it. It takes
a long time for those things to happen. You can't wave a wand and make them happen
overnight, but you can start the momentum going and develop a habit, develop the conviction.
The basic conviction about the importance of the school was already there. What was lacking
was any understanding by the alumni the school needed them. That's what they didn't know.
You have to go tell them.
Warren: How do you go about doing that?
Huntley: You just go tell them.
Warren: Go to the chapters?
Huntley: Go tell them. Time and time and time again, go tell them.
Warren: And are you going to the chapters, the same groups, are you going to individuals?
Huntley: Both. You're going to both, chapters and groups, and you're sending faculty. Lots
and lots of the faculty went out, frequently at my request or Bill Washburn's request or Farris
Hotchkiss' request, to see alumni, and we developed increasing programs to get them back on
campus.
Warren: What kind of programs?
Huntley: Well, we made bigger deals out of the reunions than we used to, and then we began,
of course, the Alumni College events during those years. They were much smaller then, but
that's when they began. We would find ways to get them back for any occasion we could, and
they responded-again, slowly at first. It takes time to develop these things. But we went out
on the road a lot.
Warren: Did you have a role model in doing this, or was this the Washington and Lee way of

                                                                                                             47
doing things?
Hundey: No, I didn't have any role models. It was just a job to be done. It was easy to see
what needed to be done.
Warren: You flidn't study how Harvard had done it, or Princeton?
Huntley: No, I still don't know how they did it.
Warren: This was the Washington and Lee way of doing things?
Huntley: No, I didn't study any role model.
Warren: Because it seems very unique. It has a feel of being a singular way of doing things.
Huntley: I just don't know the answer to that. There just didn't seem to be any other way to
do it but to take it on, head on. Just like, for example, we were talking earlier about Roy
Steinheimer in the law school and the students, you just take it on head on. If you need
students, you go find them. You can't sit back and wait for these things to cure themselves.

         The alumni responded in time to the needs they began to see existed. And because they
shared the conviction that the school required, the school had these characteristics I've described
to you, used to tell them that, too, they agreed with that and they wanted to see it perpetuated and
they treasured their own experience and wanted others to have that experience. Eventually,
enough of them came forward to make it possible, and the momentum is good. It looks to me
like the momentum is good on that score. They do come forward.

         One of the things that occurs to me for a person who is president ofWashington and Lee
now, I think we have a magnificent president in John Elrod. I think the board showed great
wisdom and courage. I say courage for the following reason. The school is so strong now, by
the time the president to succeed John Wilson was being sought, the school was so strong
because of the things that had happened before and because ofthe strength that Wilson brought
to the school, that they had open field on who could be president. I don,t know that, I wasn't
part of the committee, but I know the world well enough to know they could have gone outside
Lexington and hired any one of dozens of people.

         An easy course for a board to take, it occurs to me, in a situation like that, and in some
ways one thafs good for the board's ego, is to go out and try to find some prestigious name from
elsewhere just to demonstrate the visibility and the strength of the school. That must have been
a temptation. I don't know that it was a temptation, but it must've been. But I think their
wisdom in staying home and choosing Elrod was great.

                                                                                                                           48
          But it occurs to me that a person becoming president of Washington and Lee now, as
John had just become, has a whole different set of issues from those that faced me or, indeed, to
some degree that faced John Wilson. Those that faced me, to a large extent necessity dictated

. my agenda, and my job was to tum necessity into virtue, and that's a lot easier. When your

range of choice is limited by circumstance, it's sometimes easier to make the choice. The
present generation of those running Washington and Lee had a far wider array of choices than I
had, than my predecessors had, and probably than John Wilson had in all the terms we can think
of--in terms of the size of the school, the curriculum of the school, the objectives of the school,
the vision of the school, and so on. They have a wider array of choices and, hence, a much
more difficult job than the one that faced me.
Warren: An interesting point.
Huntley: Really much more difficult, in my opinion.
Warren: That's an interesting point.

         Well, I have worked my way down my list, and I've taken up a lot of your morning.
Huntley: That's all right.
Warren: Is there anything more you would like to say?
Huntley: No, I don't think so.
Warren: Was retiring difficult?
Huntley: Well, yeah, sure. Sure, it was, but it was the right thing for me to do. I thought so
then and I think so now. I was still a young man, I thought, when I retired, but your level of
enthusiasm for a job of that kind is hard to sustain for an indefinite time period, and needs to be
there every day if you' re going to do it right. It's an unusual job. Not the hardest job in the
world, I don't think. It's not as hard as a lot ofjobs I can think of It's certainly not an
unpleasant job. You certainly work with the finest and best-intentioned people. But it required
that you maintain a sense of mission and enthusiasm daily, with lots of constituencies. And
that's just not something you can do forever. When you've become aware ofthe fact that
you 're not doing that, then you'd better quit before anybody else becomes aware of it. And
that's what I tried to do.

         John Wilson will put that much more eloquently than I did. I bet you he would echo a
similar thought, because he was president at the time, twelve years, clearly a very popular man,
at the height, the ascendancy, of his popularity. So why did he quit? I'm not asking you to

                                                                                                                       49
answer that; I'm asking rhetorically. My guess would be for something like the same reason
that I just stated, although I'd say more eloquently put then I did. Elrod will reach that stage,
too, but not, I hope, for a very long time.
Warren: He t eems pretty happy with himself
Huntley: Well, he is, but you see, you can see the enthusiasm he brings to the mission, and
that's what you've got to have. If you can, as president, find it possible to step out at the very
moment when someone like Elrod, or in my case, like Wilson, can succeed to a happy situation,
if you can leave a happy situation for a successor who can bring a new level of enthusiasm to the
job, then you've done the ideal thing. I feel like I did that, and I think Wilson did, too.
Warren: I think Washington and Lee is very fortunate in its presidents.
Huntley: They're lucky. Lucky to get them when they got them. It's possible that I was the
right person to do the job at the time I became president. Certainly Wilson was at the time he
became president. I think Elrod is. It's also possible that none of the three ofus would've been
very good if switched around into other slots in that three-decade period. It's entirely possible
that any one of the three ofus would've either failed or been less successful if we'd switched
roles, which is back to my guardian angel theory, that Washington and Lee's always had a
guardian angel that bails it out whenever it gets in trouble.
Warren: Thank you so much.
Huntley: You're welcome. You're welcome.
Warren: This has been an honor and a privilege.
[End of interview]

                                                                                                                       50