Building a Foundation
Profiles of the Presidents Who Forged Northeastern
By Charles Fountain
Only five men have preceded Richard M. Freeland as president in Northeastern's first ninety-eight years. Speare, Ell, Knowles, Ryder, and Curry created this university, more than any others; the form of the campus over the years and the function of its occupants derive, to a large degree, from these five leaders. Speare, Ell, Knowles, Ryder, and Curry are also the names of buildings at Northeastern, immortalizing them in bricks and mortar. By serendipity and design, these buildings tell subtly of what each past president brought to the university and how he served.
| FRANK PALMER SPEARE 1898-1996 Speare, standing, in his office in the YMCA |
Frank Palmer Speare Hall is a dormitory, an after-hours place that comes alive when the classrooms are quiet and the faculty and the day students have gone home. A dormitory is a place of student dreams and possibilities. Northeastern itself was a place of dreams and possibilities-and little else-when twenty-seven-year-old Frank Palmer Speare arrived at the Boston Young Men's Christian Association building in 1896.
Had Speare told the YMCA's board of directors-interviewing him to head up their new Evening Institute-of building a great urban university, they no doubt would have pointed out to him that Boston hardly needed another such institution. In addition to long-standing Harvard, hadn't Boston College, Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts all opened their doors within the past half-century? Not to mention Radcliffe and Wellesley Colleges for women, or schools like the New England Conservatory of Music and the Massachusetts College of Art. How many schools of higher learning could Boston support?
There is no evidence to suggest that Frank Speare had any plans then to build a university; yet he built one as surely as if he had carried the vision and the blueprints all of his life. Indeed, his early experiences would seem to have prepared him for the future Northeastern, which was to occupy the rest of his years. Speare had had something of a nomadic childhood, accompanying his parents from Boston to Florida to Pennsylvania and then back to Boston. A well-to-do family that had fallen on hard financial times after the Civil War, the Speares clung to the remnants and the pretensions of their previous station, and young Frank was imbued with the sense that he was somehow a child set apart. Speaking of himself in the third person, Speare remembered his childhood thus: "He displayed at an early age great versatility and an interest in everything worthwhile. He detested untidiness, cheapness, and unrefined people and surroundings. He rarely associated with dirty or foul-mouthed children, or those who were combative or hateful."
This secure sense of self instilled in Speare a sense of noblesse oblige that left him suited to crafting a school aimed at serving educational needs not filled elsewhere. Northeastern's formal beginnings came in October 1898 with the opening of the "Department of Law of the Boston YMCA," with Frank Palmer Speare as dean. The law school was joined by the Automobile School in 1903; the Evening Polytechnic School in 1904; the School of Commerce and Finance in 1907; and the Co-operative School of Engineering, the first day school, in 1909. In 1917 the separate colleges were joined under the name Northeastern College, and granted a charter by the Commonwealth. Speare was named the school's first president.
Despite a certain puckishness, he was stern and paternalistic with the students. A teetotaler, he admonished students never to smoke or drink. "A brain fuddled with rum or cigarettes is like a ten-pound shot tied to your leg," he said. But his regard for those students was manifest in the institution he had built for them. It was something fresh, something for a new century: training for new careers, offered in a cooperative plan of education that provided complementary experience as well as a much-needed source of money for tuition. It was a school born of student needs.
Speare served for forty-two years, retiring in 1940 at age seventy. Northeastern was never far from his consciousness in retirement, however, and he was never very far from Northeastern. "I am purchasing several pairs of new shoes," he said shortly after stepping down, "because I find that my old ones take me up Huntington Avenue, in spite of all I can do."
| CARL S. ELL 1940-1959 Dedication of Dodge Library, one of ten buildings constructed during the Ell presidency. Ell is second from right, holding the trowel. |
Even today, Carl Ell's 1946 building is the campus centerpiece. It dominates the quad. For all the elegance of the Snell Library or the drama of the new Marino Center, it is still the Ell Building that draws the eye from Huntington Avenue. Right there on the building entrance is the university's identity. "Carl S. Ell Building" read the letters over the door. "Northeastern University" read the letters across the top. Carl S. Ell and Northeastern University were one and the same. Anyone who shared the campus during Ell's reign will tell you that the imposing presence of his building-the sober, angular lines; the no-nonsense functionality; the way its shadow falls across the campus's front yard-reflects the way the man dominated campus during his nineteen years as its leader.
Ell arrived at Northeastern seven years before it was Northeastern, in 1910. A graduate of DePauw University, Ell joined the engineering faculty after graduate work at MIT. He was named head of the department of civil engineering in 1912, dean of the school of engineering in 1917, and vice president of the university in 1925. Ell was the man who made co-op work, doubling the size of the program the year he took over as dean. From co-op's origin as simply an option within the engineering school, Ell made it first an integral part of the university-wide curriculum, and, finally, the school's identity within the world of higher education.
If Frank Speare built the school, Carl Ell built the campus. Northeastern had moved with the YMCA from Boylston Street to Huntington Avenue in 1913. But at the time of Speare's retirement, the campus consisted of but one building-West Building, later renamed Richards Hall. By the time Ell left in 1959, eleven buildings made up the campus. If the white brick and asphalt did not evoke the spires and lawns of Fitzgerald's Princeton, they did at least proclaim an undeniable permanence to Northeastern. It was no longer the fragile enterprise it had been when Ell took office.
Ell was an indefatigable worker, demanding the same from others. In building the staff and faculty, he once said he had "hunted for men who had a willingness to work days, nights, and holidays, and with no greater allegiance to anything except family." In keeping with this hard-driving ethic, Ell's disposition was flinty and distant. Students, in particular, he kept at arm's length. "Always striding purposefully, Ell would march past us, a juggernaut in a dark suit, his balding head his only sign of imperfection," wrote journalist Nat Hentoff of his student years. "It was best not to catch his eye, for then he might remember you later, and Dr. Ell did not exercise his memory in order to give rewards." Another campus historian wrote that under Ell, "students were there to learn and not to interfere with the conduct of the institution."
But student voices were beginning to emerge. Perhaps the clearest sign of the maturity of the university, as the torch passed from Speare to Ell, was the growing sense of community among its students. Commuters all, most holding part-time or even full-time jobs, students nonetheless felt a growing connection with alma mater. They no longer simply paid tuition and took instruction at Northeastern and then went about their lives. In ways great and small, Northeastern was now a vital part of those lives.
Nat Hentoff's was among the more resonant of the student voices in the early Ell years. He was editor of the Northeastern News. In the decades beyond N.U., his voice would grow in eloquence and influence and become synonymous with the passionate defense of civil liberties. The genesis of this passion, he says, came from Carl Ell. Under Hentoff, the News was peering beyond the world of campus sports and winter dances and writing about such things as anti-Semitism, racism, and the draft. When the paper began an examination of the university's board of trustees and the qualifications of its members, Ell ordered it stopped. The News would write only on campus events, he decreed. Hentoff and the entire editorial board resigned in protest.
There is no indication that Ell ever regretted his summary actions with the News editors. Or anything else he did as president. His vision of the university was as certain as his rule. So extraordinary was his control that when he retired, there was no search for his successor. He simply informed the trustees that a former lieutenant, Asa S. Knowles, was the man to become the third president of Northeastern University.
| ASA S. KNOWLES 1959-1975 When Knowles had rebuffed repeated requests for a student speaker at the 1970 commencement, a graduating senior selected by a student committee made an attempt to speak anyway. |
The Asa Knowles Center has been home to the schools of law and criminal justice. Knowles was neither a lawyer nor a cop; his field was business. Yet he was inextricably linked to both schools. Criminal justice was born of his vision, as were three other basic colleges. And the law school came back under Knowles. The school from which all of Northeastern had grown had been ingloriously closed by Carl Ell in 1953 when its enrollment had slipped. In restoring the law school in 1968, Knowles had in a way made Northeastern whole again.
Yet despite the symbolism of the law school's return, the sixteen years during which Knowles led N.U. would be terribly fractious, marked by the paradoxes and conflicts of the times. Asa Knowles's values had been shaped in an earlier time; like Speare and Ell he was paternalistic and autocratic. Yet by the end of his run as president, students would occupy his office and irreverently challenge his authority at every turn, and the faculty-after a decade's agitation for a greater voice in university doings-would be rattling the sabers on behalf of a union.
Knowles began his career at Northeastern but was not a lifer. He had arrived in 1931, fresh out of Bowdoin College and the Harvard Business School, joining the faculty as an instructor of industrial management and rising quickly through the ranks to become dean of the College of Business Administration. He left Northeastern in 1942, working first as dean of the business school at the University of Rhode Island, then birthing some postwar colleges for GIs in upstate New York, before serving as a vice president at Cornell University and, finally, as president of the University of Toledo. Along the way he enhanced his reputation greatly by writing a textbook on industrial management that became the standard during the '40s and '50s. His academic credentials brought applause from the faculty when he was named president in 1959. "He's one of us," one faculty member said warmly.
But that gentle perception was to change. Knowles implemented tenure and sabbaticals for faculty members and allowed the creation of a faculty senate. But he also supported the unpopular idea of a tenure quota and vetoed cost-of-living raises for faculty, arguing that "Northeastern could not afford to run a race with inflation." And he was loathe to accept the counsel of the Faculty Senate. "Dr. Knowles had never conceded that faculty or students should have a voice in the formulation of policy," wrote university historian Antoinette Frederick, "and he had strongly opposed their representation on the university's governing board."
When it came to students, Knowles's relations were even more conflicted and strained. He was distant; all student interaction fell to vice president Kenneth Ryder. Knowles was visible on campus, but there was an awkwardness in his contact with students. Although he regularly attended performances of N.U.'s student theater troupe, the Silver Masque, cast members suspected he was coming as a one-man Watch and Ward Society. If a production contained anything untoward or the slightest bit sexually suggestive, Knowles had the director into his office on Monday morning to explain.
Short of handing over the keys to the kingdom, it would have been nigh impossible for any college president to find favor with students during the nationwide student strike in May 1970, precipitated by the Nixon administration's invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent killing of four student demonstrators at Kent State. Knowles was no exception. Throughout that shrill and tumultuous academic year, he answered student demands through intermediaries like Ryder. And his answer was always "no." No to prohibiting defense contractor General Electric from recruiting on campus. No to a student speaker at graduation. When Knowles issued a press release during the third day of the strike saying that Northeastern had "resumed normal activities," fifty student strikers occupied his office in Richards Hall. He was out.
Still, there was something uniquely Northeastern in that turmoil of 1970. When Knowles had rebuffed repeated requests for a student speaker at commencement, a graduating senior selected by a student committee made an attempt to speak anyway. She was forcibly removed from Boston Garden and ceremonies continued. That student was a fifty-two-year-old grandmother named Edith Stein, graduating from the evening school. Northeastern University, set to celebrate its diamond jubilee in a world that would have been unrecognizable to the men of the 1890s YMCA, had remained true to its original ideal of providing educational opportunity to "nontraditional students."
| KENNETH G. RYDER 1975-1989 At 1990 dedication ceremony, Ryder points to his portrait that hangs in the atrium of the building that now bears his name. |
The Ruggles Building sat for years at the fringes of campus, looking every bit the old factory it was. A rabbit warren of offices and storage, its exterior was red brick rather than white, but in many ways it reflected Northeastern's essence in its early decades-adequate and functional, bereft of frills, warmth, or charm. Today the front door of this structure opens to a light, airy atrium, serving as an appealing blend of old and new, mixing to grand effect the modern open stairway and the century-old beams and brick. It's Ryder Hall now, and what the architects did to the Ruggles Building, Ken Ryder did to Northeastern. He brought flowers and grass and the arts to the campus; forced people beyond Huntington Avenue to sit up and take notice; reaffirmed what Northeastern has always been and made it something more.
Not all of the passions of protest had quieted when Kenneth G. Ryder began his presidency in July 1975. A disaffected faculty was moving to unionize; a vote was one of Ryder's first tests as president. He was dead set against a union and worked to convince the faculty to vote against it, saying, "You cannot teach or create with divisiveness and 'we versus they' on campus." His argument carried the day, though just barely. He won over the faculty by promising a greater role in university policy-making and more attentiveness to faculty needs. Salaries grew handsomely, as did the emphasis on research and the growing prestige it was bringing Northeastern in academic circles.
Ryder had come to Northeastern by way of Brockton, BU, and Harvard to teach history in 1949. He was an immensely energetic and popular teacher; students and colleagues felt a keen sense of loss when he moved into the administration as secretary to the faculty in 1955. But he remained a student advocate as an administrator and carried this same regard for students into the office of the presidency. He generally had time for Northeastern News reporters, and he listened to students in the 1980s urging that N.U. divest itself of holdings in companies doing business in South Africa. Still, the modern office of the presidency left him less and less time for students. However much raising funds for a new library or increasing the stature of the faculty might be of service to students, it took him away from the face-to-face contact that had marked his first twenty-five years at Northeastern. Those who had known Ken Ryder as a teacher and student advocate found it a little disconcerting to see him riding in the back of a chauffeur-driven sedan. But this is just one image of Ryder as president; a second image is dramatically different and decidedly more humble: Ryder huddled in the doorway of Churchill Hall in the rain, smoking a cigarette, honoring the ban he had approved against smoking inside most N.U. buildings.
Many good things happened at Northeastern during Ryder's fourteen years as president: a new library was built, as was a boathouse on the Charles, and Northeastern University Press and Network Northeastern were established. But there was perhaps no happier moment than the February night in 1980 when, after twenty-seven tries, the Husky hockey team finally won its first Beanpot. Three times more during the 1980s, Northeastern players skated the Garden ice holding aloft that singular trophy. To some, there was no clearer sign that Northeastern was indeed, finally, a first-class citizen of Boston's exalted university community.
| JOHN A. CURRY 1989-1996 Curry could frequently be seen jogging around the Cabot Cage track with a pack of students in tow. |
When John A. Curry announced last year that he was retiring as Northeastern's fifth president, the Student Government Association went to the Board of Trustees and asked that the student center be renamed in his honor. In a place where students too often wear a hair shirt about where it is they go to school, the student center is for those who do not. The building should be named after the most student-oriented president in Northeastern history, the SGA said-the president who understood better than any of his predecessors what it meant to be a Northeastern student because he had been one.
Jack Curry was the person for whomDr. Speare and the people back at the Y had created Northeastern. He was a poor kid from Lynn, the prototypical N.U. student, grateful for the access and opportunity this place offered a guy like him. By the time he stepped down after only seven years as president, he'd spent less time at Northeastern than Speare, Ell, or Ryder. But more than any of them, this was his school. He wore his Northeastern pedigree with a fierce pride. Students figured they could trust a guy who owned a Huskies sweatshirt.
Jack Curry seemed the obvious successor when Ken Ryder announced his intention to retire after the 198889 school year. Curry held the job of executive vice president from which Ryder had ascended to the top position, and he had been Ryder's principal deputy for internal matters. But Curry was not on the faculty's wish list. In the early days of the search, a faculty group drafted a list of qualifications it expected in a new president. Each item in the faculty document was pointedly missing from Jack Curry's otherwise long résumé. In the face of such open opposition, Curry announced he would not seek the presidency. Soon after, however, the trustees came to him. At the ceremony announcing his selection, several faculty members left Blackman Auditorium in protest as Curry came down the aisle to a thunderous ovation from staff and students, his hands raised high in the air-a triumphant moment for the kid from Lynn.
Curry raised Northeastern's status in the academic world by raising the bar; the average SAT score of incoming freshmen climbed more than seventy points during his tenure, even as enrollment dropped. But he is best known for staving off economic disaster. Curry's crises as president were financial, as budget woes followed him for all of his administration. He laid off about 175 staff members and made cuts in programs and services that touched every corner of the university.
With no money in the cash drawer, Curry said "no" to the students at least as often as any of those before him. But he said it with a disarming charm and sense of identity with students, forever reminding them, "I'm one of you." As one student said, "The way he said no" took a great deal of the sting out of it. He was accessible and avuncular, given to telling and retelling his own story. The setting may have been the presidential suite in Churchill, but it might well have come across a table in the student center-a building that has always borne his personality and will now forever bear his name.
Charles Fountain, an associate professor of journalism, wrote on the Head of the Charles Regatta in the September 1995 issue.
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