Some Little Giant: An Interview with Thomas Bambrey ’68
Amidst all the commotion these past months regarding the curricular future of our College, the paradox has once again proven true that the words which resound the loudest are those which are uttered by the softest of voices. Of the many individuals who took a stand on behalf of what they believed would be best for the College recently, one man in particular offered an even-keeled tone, a controlled disposition, and a modest bit of heartfelt advice to the school that he holds so dear. That man is Thomas Bambrey of the Class of 1968. You may not yet have had the chance to get to know him as the Director of Athletics, or in his previous role as the Dean of Students, but one thing you cannot help but know about the man is his genuine care and compassion for the students, faculty, and staff of this great institution. The son of a Pennsylvania steel worker, a track and cross country runner under the Wabash legend J. Owen Huntsman, an educator by trade, and a Wally through and through, Bambrey’s sincere and thoughtful approach to life and to the roles he has held both here and at other institutions is an excellent example of what it means to be both a respectable “gentleman and a responsible citizen.”
Wabash Conservative Union: When you were Dean of Students, what was your approach to the office?
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Thomas Bambrey: I always thought when I was in the Dean’s Office that my primary job was to be an educator. Then the question of course comes to mind, “How do you best achieve that?” I would say that tone has a lot to do with it, that demeanor has a lot to do with it, that trying to understand from a perspective that is removed by some years from the student perspective has a lot to do with it. My chief role, as I perceived it, was to protect the welfare of the College. “How do you protect the welfare and reputation of the College?”—I thought about that a lot. So my tone probably varied as a Dean, but I tried never to treat students as though they were not important and as though I did not care about what they thought.
My task always was, “What does the Gentleman’s Rule mean? How do we enforce it?”—and I was in a position where, for the most part, I was the judge of that. The hard part about being the Dean here is that the Dean has an ultimate authority, and that is not to be trifled with. Students know that, and the Dean knows it too. So how do you navigate your way through that in terms of the Gentleman’s Rule with all of its ambiguities? Really, that was the toughest part about being the Dean: the hard decisions, or the decisions where there was more gray than there was black and white. I was always aware that the Dean here has the power to decide, and sometimes those decisions would have the potential to change a student’s life—sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. With power comes responsibility. It is not whether everybody agreed with my decision; more important to me was that, if I made a decision, I took responsibility for it, thought it was the right thing to do, and stuck by it. I did not want to abuse that power.
WCU: What is your perspective on the Gentleman’s Rule, especially given the events of the past couple of years?
TB: The Gentleman’s Rule is unique to Wabash. It is something that works here far more than it fails; it is way more complicated than the language of the sentence would lead most people to think it is. I have been Dean on two other campuses and they had books of rules. The Gentleman’s Rule and their many rules probably work about equally well—that is to say, a lot of students here, at one extreme, take the rule very seriously, and at the other extreme, take any set of rules as a nuisance. And then, there is the vast majority of students in the middle who know about it, and they take it seriously; they may differ from the Dean, from a faculty member, from the President, or from other students in how they interpret it. In a way, the ambiguity of the interpretation is part of the beauty of the Gentleman’s Rule because you have to think about it! My idea was that as long as students were thinking about it, taking it seriously, then it continued to be a good thing, because that is the way life is: you think about the things that are important. I think the rule sets a tone. The rule, after all, says the student is “expected to”—there is an expectation that the student will conduct himself as a gentleman. It does not say, “Don’t do this, and don’t do that” in any specific way; it says “you are expected to conduct yourself as a gentleman.” I always think that it is a little bit like the Golden Rule: treat others as you expect to be treated.
With regard to the last couple of years: I was a Dean of Students for a total of about eighteen years, and I dealt with tragedy during those years. Over the last couple of years, Wabash has unfortunately had to deal with some of those tragedies. In my mind, that does not change the essence of the rule at all. People say, “Well, the Gentleman’s Rule does not work because a tragedy happened.” I disagree with that.
WCU: In your recent email and chapel talk, you talked about change happening naturally; and yet, while there are new needs, there is also a value in keeping the traditions that we have. What is your perspective on balancing today’s needs with our traditions?
TB: That is a really hard question for me to answer. People know that certain things should change or have to change. Knowing which things should change is important. Sometimes we make mistakes about that. I don’t know if C&T had run its course or not; I don’t think we will ever know. Some students, maybe lots of students, think it had not—they liked the course even when they didn’t like the course! My own experience in C&T was that I liked teaching it, I found it valuable for me because it took me back to some texts that I either had never read, or that I had not read in a long time, and I had the good fortune of having a fun group of guys! But curriculums change to meet changing times.
We are always going to have debate. Curriculum changes are always bloody. I have been around them for forty years, and they are always bloody, because you have the traditionalists and the modernists, right? I don’t know what this next course is going to be; nobody does, I suppose. I have a very high degree of trust in the faculty that something good will emerge from this. How will it compare to C&T? Will it be as good as C&T? Oh gosh, I don’t know! The next generation of students will think about it just the way I thought about CC (pre-C&T), and the way generations of students have thought about C&T. They will think that it is a precious, integral, central part of the liberal arts experience. The essential thing to me is that it is still a liberal arts curriculum, and this new course will give another chance, as C&T did and as the tutorial does, for students to sit in small groups around a table or in a classroom with a faculty member and discuss important thoughts and important texts. And to me, it does not even really matter what the texts are. Having a discussion group, early in this experience, tells students, “This is a good way to be educated.”
WCU: As we move forward, what is one thing that you feel Wabash would be remiss not to keep?
TB: I value the fact that we are a college for men, because we offer to a small number of students a chance to do education in the way we want to provide it and in the way some students want to achieve it, so being a college for men is part of our essence. If we are to someday go co-ed, it will be for reasons, I think, that are either philosophical or financial: philosophical because maybe we will decide that we no longer serve a function, and until and unless we decide that, we have a niche, we have a place; and financial because maybe we will not be able to educate students who are willing to come here because we do not have the financial means to do that. Then I think we would have to change. Now, there is no indication to me that either one of those right now is pertinent, although people would argue the philosophical side, as they have for a long time. But my issue on the philosophical side is that until we think we cannot educate men to go out into the world and do good things, in the way we do it—and that includes being all men, being liberal arts, being about eight or nine hundred students—why change? We offer a viable educational alternative in American higher education, and that is important. Other questions are subsumed in, you know, “How about a woman’s perspective,” and “How about…” all of these other things. Those are legitimate, and we have to think about those things, but I do not think they are reason enough to change.
WCU: What is one thing that you feel the College should change? What is an area of need that you see right now, that may be unique to this specific time or that may be a long-term problem that we have had here?
TB: In my view, and this is entirely personal to me, we need to help our students understand that times change. As much as we want to preserve the traditions that are valuable in student life—and those include traditions in the classroom as well as in social life and in fraternities, and in independent life—I think that if I had a chance to change something I would say to students, “You have to recognize that and help us consider our future while preserving the best of our past.” That would include everything from the curriculum, to our fraternities, to the way we interact with one another. It has to do with issues of race, class and gender. Because, as good as we are, and as valuable as I think we are as a college for men, we have some deficiencies and probably always will in some of those areas. But how do we understand them? We are always trying to get better at what we do. Standing still is lethal—it is like the dinosaurs in the La Brea tar-pits!
I have always been encouraged, though, by looking at what our students go out into the world to do. The vast majority of them go out and find something and make a difference. So what we are doing works. And maybe, if we did it differently, it would still work, but I do not think I am willing to take the chance!
WCU: What word of advice would you give to Wabash men today?
TB: Care about what you do. Care about one another, care about learning, care about making friends, care about understanding, but care about what you do.
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