Now enjoying its 50th anniversary of granting degrees, the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) can take great pride in our alumni, who, in a remarkable array of fields from pharmaceuticals, law, game development, digital media and art, design, communication, teaching, and research, to film animation, academic administration, and government, distinguish themselves as indivduals making a difference in the world.

 One of our earliest graduates, Basil Whiting '60, accepted Dean John P. Harrington's invitation to reflect at the April 25, 2008 Fiftieth Anniversary of the School on his years preparing for his B.S. in Philosophy.  He was among the first Humanities and Social Sciences graduates.  Looking back with the added perspective of a successful career in government, business, and nonprfit organizations, Baze, as he has been known for years, had earlier offered his reflections at a gathering in 1990 called together by Dean Thomas Phalen on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of the School, then the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (H&SS).  His reflections at both events, excerpted here, are invaluable because he provides historical context for the current growth of HASS, as he lays out the path he pursued toward a degree in philosophy at Rensselaer. 

Dean Phelan's "Vision" Plans

Dean Tom Phelan, a Jesuit Priest and as a consequence "Father Tom" to many, served as educator, mentor and friend to thousands of Rensselaer students, faculty, and staff during his quarter century as the leader of H&SS.  Baze recalled The Dean's Planning and "Vision" documents that were the focus of the 1990 gathering. "No mere replication of classical liberal arts courses - though, thankfully, they're not all gone," he said at the time.

"There is now a sense of conscious choice among the special opportunities the Institute's environment offers. Thus:

• The Arts will express the aesthetic impulse through integrated electronic arts media;
• Language, literature, and communication, Will combine rhetoric and technical communication;
• Philosophy will explore moral development in a context of artificial iuntelligence;
• Psychology will center on productivity and innovation in industrial organization - and on "human factors" (which I hope is full-blown social systems analysis, no mere ergonomics);
• And Science and Technology Studies will analyze the policy, political, and historical inter-relationships between society and technology."

Baze finished by describing the strategies that were driving the School toward the new millennium: "Building bridges to span the socio-technical dichotomy,  finding our mutualities, is an exciting and exhilarating challenge."

A View from a New Century: Memory and the Future

Dean Harrington's charge to Baze for his remarks eighteen years later was, in Baze's words, to "reminisce with you about the early years, the founding years of the School. Let me do this by offering you four memories."

Basil Whiting, successful in a fistful of fields, only partially retired, opened with "how the School began and I got into it. Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1958, I was a sophomore in physics at RPI. I had been admitted on a full Alumni Tuition Scholarship because I was very much into science, especially physics-nuclear physics-in high school, having read as far as I could into writings of Neil's Bohr and Einstein and others of those pioneers until their math stopped me. But in that spring, I was not a happy camper on campus. I was getting straight A's, but I was developing new needs and desires that physics wasn't answering and didn't promise to. I wanted to know how the world really worked, not mechanically and scientifically but in terms of how people and groups and nations did what they did and how they interacted.

"But, I was locked into a full tuition scholarship that I couldn't take with me elsewhere, and my parents were sacrificing to support me at RPI. I was as deeply unhappy as a 19-year-old in such a dilemma could be.

"Now it so happened that at that time the "commentariate," a term we now use but that didn't exist then, had created quite a flap, or national wave, of widespread concern about the need to "humanize" our engineers and scientists. I don't recall what the precipitating event of this was; maybe something to do with those who created the doomsday weapons we all feared during the Cold War and were digging Rockefeller bomb shelters against. In any respect, at least from my perspective, RPI and several of the technical institutions that we considered our competitors and peers were beginning to offer degrees in the humanities, arts, and social sciences and create departments and schools to attract such people as faculty. And so, in that spring, I was recruited into this new School, into its new Department of Philosophy.

"At spring break, I went home and sat down with my parents and said I was switching majors from physics to philosophy. I remember my father, a jewelry toolmaker, the best of that breed, shaking his head and saying, "When you were going to be a nuclear physicist, I knew what you were going to do. You were going to make atom bombs. But what does a philosopher do?" That stumped me for a bit, and I recall lamely responding, "Dad, and Mom, I don't really know. But I'm told that most of the leaders in our society, in business and government and other things, came mostly out of liberal arts programs, like those at Brown University (I said, reaching for a local ‘hook'). I will have to find my way in the ways they did."

"I'm not sure they understood and supported my decision, but they didn't oppose it. And, in the fall of 1958, I became a junior in the first degree-slated class in philosophy from RPI. My second and third memories are of two faculty members, two professors, because they are, if you are lucky and academia works the way it is supposed to, the mentors and guides who can shape your life, or at least enlighten it-and, I can't do this without citing these two.

"I was recruited into Philosophy by the head of that department, Dr. Robert Whallon. Does anyone here recall Bob Whallon? [Several hands raised in response.] Well, he offered a way to "wisdom" that was what I was looking for. Now, Dr. Whallon was something of a quiet character. He was bony thin with a prominent Adam's Apple and fading hair and chin-line. He looked like what you'd imagine Ichabod Crane would look like. He lived with his wife in a house that he'd hand-built in the hills above Troy; and he drove a Model-T Ford that he'd restored and maintained down those hills, even in winter, to park in the West Hall parking lot-where H&SS was then-and back up a day's end.

"In winter, he'd wear Long-John red underwear that would stick out of his sleeve and pants cuffs. He'd sit at the tables in the front of the West Hall Classrooms we then inhabited, lecturing and entertaining Socratic questions from us, smoking-we all did that then but he did it with king-sized, unfiltered Chesterfields, lit end-to-end, pulling the table drawer open and dumping ashes and butts into them. By year-end, all the drawers in all the classrooms I recall our using with him were chock full of this debris. This, of course, led to the emphysema that in later years I'm told killed him-as it did so many others.

"But, he was a kind and gentle and wise man who spent hours one-on-one with a distraught and searching young man like me. In the classroom, he led us through a survey of the great thinkers from the pre-Socratics into the mid-19th Century. (Hey, it was the first two-year survey program for majors, and he didn't have the timing down exactly yet. So, we never got to the late 19th and early 20th century Existentialists, which I've always lamented, since I was deeply into watching Ingmar Bergman's early movies.)

"But, withal, he made us read more than I ever thought I would-and also write ten pages a week on any of the subjects we were addressing-a demand none of my classmates had until then had to deal with. And which I think was as formative of me as anything else he did. That, for him, and my editing the POLY, made me a good writer (my high school English teachers had something to do with this, too). And I will testify that I have since seen in my career more done, or not done, for good or ill, because of what someone wrote and how well they did it, than from all the other analysis and argument that others might array for or against something.

"The second great professor: Does anyone here recall Doug Washburn? [Again, several hands rose.] I'm not sure what department he was in then, Language and Literature, I think. But he taught a fabulous survey course on the major movements in all of the arts in the century preceding the late 1950's. I found this revelatory. He would define, say, Expressionism, its roots and major canons. Then he would show how it infected many modes of artistic expression. We saw it, of course, in painting, but also in dance, music, literature and poetry, and more. He would trace how that spreading occurred, in part, in ways I think he called social and we'd maybe now call viral, from artists from different domains spending nights in the same cafes in Paris. (Analogous to the bars in the Silicon Valley that are cited as the fermenting centers of the digital revolution-and many of its companies-of today.)

"I recall Washburn assigning us to analyze the "symbolism" of, I think, a Hart Crane poem. I spent hours reading and re-reading this poem. What the devil was symbolism anyway? And I got into it, and finally "got it." There were two things going on, a straight-forward, and lovely, description of children gamboling at a beach-and within it, the symbolism, the allusions, of the words used, a foretelling of the sexuality that these kids would grow up to express and experience. I have to tell you that this was one of the most intellectually exciting moments of my life. You could do something like this at two such levels! Omigawd!

"Now, I have to say, too, that this was the 1950's, the Eisenhower years, before The Pill, when no one really spoke or wrote or depicted sex (much), so that to discover that you could discuss "sex" in a poem (!) in this "secret" way was revelatory to a highly hormoned 20-year old. I remember running to Prof. Washburn almost shouting my discovery. And he listened and said I had got it and patted me on the back and told me to keep going.

"Number four. We in the new humanities and social science programs more or less co-existed with the science and technology majority, sort of like what we as a nation did with the Soviet Union in those days. I don't recall our "humanizing" them much. And, it did not seem that those who led the creation of the School and its first few years had much of a vision of what a humanities and social science school at a technological university should be like-how should it be special because of where it was located, how could it take advantage of that larger and older set of schools, how could it devise ways of making distinctive contributions to the university at large. Oh, there was a technical writing program, I recall, and a philosophy of science course. But mainly the leaders then seemed mainly to be recreating at RPI the kind of traditional humanities programs that one could find in liberal arts colleges of RPI's scale.

"That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it didn't grasp the opportunities inherent in the situation. I recall 25 years ago writing to then Dean Phalen and suggesting that he convene a celebration of the School's forthcoming 30th anniversary. He did and I was asked to make a formal address on that occasion. I recall my saying that I had found that a humanities education at a technical university was perhaps the best preparation for a life and career led in the last 40 years of the 20th century, because so much of what I had lived through until then was basically of a "socio-technical" nature, and I went on at some length about that, arguing that what we need are "bridge people" who are comfortable in both worlds. And, if you think about it that was clearly true then, more so since then, and promises to continue to be so. The social interacts with the technical, sometimes happily and fruitfully, sometimes not. Our President's opening remarks tonight reflected similar perceptions.

"But, as I scan the School's catalog these days it does seem to me that leadership at the School in recent decades has found an appropriate vision of what a humanities and social science program at a great technical university can and should be. Far fewer traditional courses, much more in the way of courses that draw on and extend the scientific and technical traditions of RPI and that make their own, new contributions, like the new game theory program that I heard about during the cocktail hour.

"So, enough memories. In another 25 years, there will be the 75th anniversary and we will be able to look back on yet more evolution of the unique role of this School. I'll be 95 then, and if I'm still around-and you'll have me-I'll speak to you then, too."

Basil Whiting held positions as a U.S. Army Intelligence Corps officer, a Senior Program Officer of The Ford Foundation, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Carter Administration, the Vice President for Human Relations of the Long Island Rail Road, and a management consultant for over 20 years on teamwork structures in industry and on workforce, community, and economic development with nonprofits, foundations, and business groups. At present he was noted as acting as director of the Army Wounded Warrior Careers Demonstration Program, which, with private funding, seeks to assist severely disabled veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to resume roles as "contributing members of their communities.