I last saw Don nearly forty years ago. We were on the veranda of a house at the top of the cliffs in Laguna Beach, watching the sunset and sipping fine California wine. Don was explaining how he had come to be fired from his job as a political science professor at his university.
Ever since then I’ve considered his to be a story of how tragedy—in the proper Greek sense—can affect anyone, not just the powerful or famous.
Let me back up. I first met Don a few years earlier. I was still in college and attended a conference hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Don was one of the speakers. I already was familiar with his writings. His articles appeared regularly in ISI’s periodicals, and I had on my shelf some of his books.
Perhaps it was the topics he chose to write and lecture about that attracted me in those Cold War years, but it also must have been his limpid style. He was one of the best sylists among politically conservative writers.
The political conservatism of those days was much different from that of today. First of all, it was conservative: it sought to conserve the best things of Western civilization. It had not yet been transformed into neo-conservatism or into an appendage of the Republican Party.
Conservative periodicals were thoughtful, demanding concentration by their readers. They contained serious articles about Edmund Burke, the Founding Fathers, the Greek and Roman roots of our civilization, and the role of Christianity in society.
Inspired by what we read in such publications, some college friends and I founded the nation’s first conservative college newspaper. Its title was Dimension. A year or so later other schools—mostly on the East Coast—had their own alternative newspapers. Somehow Dartmouth ended up getting credit for being first out of the gate, but actually our newspaper was first. It was partly through our publishing efforts that I got to know Don.
In any case, I found myself on that veranda, listening to the story of how an intelligent and good man did himself in. It happened this way.
Don was born in 1927 (which meant he was about 49 when we sat together). Like me, he was born in Chicago. His doctoral studies were done at Northwestern University in 1957–58. One day, near the end of his studies, he received an unexpected phone call from the chairman of the political science department at the university. The school wanted him to join the teaching staff.
Don was delighted and a bit flustered.
“Naturally, you’ve finished your course requirements,” said the chairman.
“Sure,” said Don, unthinkingly. It didn’t occur to him to mention that he still had one class to take. As I recall, it wasn’t a class that was directly about his subject area but one that needed to be completed by all doctoral students, no matter what their field of study.
When Don hung up the phone, he realized he had blundered. He should have told the chairman, “Not quite, sir. I still have this one stray class to finish—I just couldn’t squeeze it into my schedule before this—and I hope your university would be willing to wait another semester, until I get it out of the way.” But in his excitement Don didn’t say that.
What to do? It would have been embarrassing for Don to call the chairman back and say that he had forgotten to mention the remaining class. Don figured he could get the class out of the way in the summer session—but, as I remember the story, the class wasn’t offered then. The next opportunity would have come with the fall semester, but that’s when Don was supposed to begin his employment.
He figured he could work it out. He never did. As time went by, the more difficult it became for Don to find a way to take that class and to formalize his degree, and the more the university came to like him. He was doing well in the classroom and well in terms of publications.
After a while, the university offered him a promotion. He accepted it. A few years later he was offered another promotion, and he accepted that one too. Eventually the university offered him a full professorship—and he turned it down.
His excuse was that he didn’t think he was yet worthy of the honor, but the real reason was that he suspected that, before granting him this final promotion, the university would feel obligated to make a thorough investigation of his credentials. It would discover that he never had completed his Ph.D.
When, a few years later, a promotion to full professor was offered to him again, and when he turned it down again, the university authorities undertook the investigation. No doubt they were dismayed at what they discovered and at what they had to do: they had to let Don go.
He understood. As much as the administration, his colleagues, and his students liked him, he couldn’t be kept on the payroll. As innocent as his original telephonic misstatement may have been, the situation had persisted for so many years that there was no way to fix things. Don was out of a job, and that was the status in which I found him in Laguna Beach.
We fell out of contact after that. Every few years it would occur to me to ask about him. After his dismissal from the university, Don became a horse trainer. I learned only recently that this made sense, since he had taught horsemanship at a military academy before entering his doctoral studies and, in the 1940s, had joined the last unit of the United States Cavalry.
I heard nothing further about him until 1994. He still was engaged in animal training, but now with quite different animals. He had become a professional trainer of elephants. With the man who headed the elephant program at the San Diego Zoo, Don co-authored a book about how to manage elephants.
I have that book before me. On the cover the two authors are shown casually standing in front of five elephants. Don wears a ball cap, sports a scruffy beard, and has more of a paunch than I remembered him having.
He died in 2011 at age 84. However satisfying he may have found his later employment, I’m sure Don regretted the turn of events regarding his Ph.D. I wonder whether he ever came to peace with what happened.
He was in many ways (so far as I could tell) a good man, but he had a character flaw that many of us share: fear of embarrassment. He could have called the department chairman back, but it would have been awkward. Such a small thing, but it meant at length the end of his academic career.
Tragedy is not something that afflicts only storybook or history book characters. In the Greek sense (not in today’s tabloid sense), tragedy is the undoing of an otherwise good man because of a character or personality defect. Often it consists of cascading events that begin small, almost imperceptible, but that seem to take on a life of their own, until the denouement.
To me, Don’s tragedy speaks louder than do the famous tragedies we learned about in school—partly because I knew him but also because, to me, his was the tragedy of Everyman.