Editor's note: UB's Campus Club, which is planning a series of events including a holiday party for members on Dec. 12, is now located in Goodyear Hall. The club, which aims to build a sense of community and collegiality between faculty and professional staff, has a long and colorful history, some of which is recorded here by Robert Daly, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a member of the Campus Club.
As an old definition suggests, a professor is a person who thinks
otherwise. That rugged individualism pervades university culture so it's
paradoxical that almost all major universities have something called the
faculty or university or campus club and that this phrase refers, not to
the weapon of choice, but to an organization in which persons selected for
their competitive visibility are expected to become colleagues. It's a
difficult task, and it is to UB's credit that we embarked on it in October
of 1953, with the formation of the Faculty Club. On 31 January 1954 the
club moved into its first clubhouse, the building now known as Beck
Hall.
But woe, members tended to leave the building, after evening functions, with windows unlocked and even open, thereby exposing the clubhouse to a particularly threatening band of potential miscreants. The time had come for a stern admonition to these slackers, and Frederick H. Thomas, head of Industrial Engineering and president of the club, was up to the task. On 16 March 1955, he dressed them down and shaped them up in language emphasizing that they were each other's keepers. This language of collective responsibility is also an ancient university tradition, and we need it to balance (not to replace) our own language of individual self-assertion and self-inflicted self-esteem.
"We have one problem," he wrote, "in which each member must
participate, and this is one of protection," protection from a group of
malefactors: "Considering the trouble we have with the grade school
children this is an invitation to them to enter and possibly cause
considerable damage."
Apparently, the letter worked. The club grew, and in the '60s, it moved out of its original home and into a wing of what was then Harriman Library. The elegant Mrs. Irene Palmer, club receptionist from 1957 to 1971, moved with the club, sat at a desk with a vase of fresh flowers on it, and welcomed colleagues. We continue to welcome you still, to a club imperiled, even in good times, by the carelessness of its own constituents and by such outside forces as those nefarious grade-school children, waiting like goblins to crawl into any window left open at night, but also to a club still fun, since a community of individualists is the most interesting kind of community, and to a club still necessary, since we are all and always in this together.
With thanks to colleagues in Archives.
Robert Daly
Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Campus Club member
PHOTOS: UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
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