William Gerberding in Life

While I was browsing around an antique shop in Lima, NY, on Friday, I came across a Life magazine from January 1965. (Go into any antique shop, btw, and you're sure to find big piles of Life, Henry Luce's hugely popular general-interest photojournalism magazine that ran as a weekly from 1936 to 1972 - that's the media history angle sorted out!) Oh, and btw, Life is back as an insert in a growing number of daily newspapers around the country (see here for a listing). Anyway, this particular issue included a piece on faculty workload and the pressures of academia ... in 1965. It caught my eye for two reasons. First, the issues it was raising about modern pressures on faculty - expansion of student enrollment, teaching loads, low pay, endless committee assignments, the publish-or-perish mentality - could have been written today; it seems that in some ways things haven't changed that much from 1965 to 2005. Second, the faculty member who was the focus of the article was none other than William P. Gerberding, who at the time (as the article notes) was a professor of Political Science at UCLA and went on to become president of the University of Washington, my post-grad alma mater. (Note: the UW home page has been redesigned, and the new version looks better than the old.) Gerberding actually left UW the year I arrived (1995), and was replaced by Richard McCormick. There's a bit of scandal involving McCormick. He left UW under a cloud in 2003, apparently because he was having an affair with a UW staff member who was not his wife. I don't know why I bring this up - just interesting, and it makes a change from writing about the media. Also, I never liked McCormick - or "Dick" as we called him (sorry). Even though he gave me my Ph.D. in June 2002, he always seemed just a bit too slick (yet completely lacking in charisma, oddly enough). He's also associated with a period in UW's history marked by a certain lack of direction, the loss of many top faculty, and his serious inability to secure sufficient state funding for what is still one of America's - and the world's - top universities. In particular, the College of Arts and Sciences was starved of funds under his tenure. I hope things improve under the new president, Mark Emmert.