Dr. Peter Wood Gives Second Annual Founders Day Address

The King’s College was pleased to welcome former provost Dr. Peter Wood to campus on April 18 for its second annual Founders Day. His address was titled “The Invention of a College” and explored an early accreditation crisis that nearly shut King’s down as soon as it started, along with several episodes that shaped the College’s identity as it is today.

Wood was a professor of anthropology at Boston University before coming to King’s; afterward, he became Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars, where he is now President. At King’s, he served as provost from the summer of 2005 to the summer of 2007. Stan Oakes attempted to recruit Wood to King’s as soon as he became the president in 2003, but Wood declined at the time for personal reasons. Still, he advised the administration on academic and curricular matters, and so was drawn into the school’s orbit anyway, and in this capacity he held a significant shaping role.

Wood opened his remarks with the second verse in the Book of James: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” [1]

“It was my joy,” he said, “to be at King’s during a time of trial,” in which the newly-reopened King’s nearly came to ruin over the issue of accreditation.

“Accreditation is a word that causes sheer dread in the minds of many academic administrators and quite a few faculty members; it’s soporific to everybody else—that is, you can hardly think of a topic that would be more boring,” Wood said. “But stay awake: this is an accreditation story with life and death consequences.” When the College reopened, it applied for temporary accreditation not with a regional accrediting body according to standard practice, but with the New York Board of Regents. Wood said King’s and New York State were both unique in this respect—King’s in thinking state accreditation was good enough, New York in getting into the business of higher education. One difficulty of state accreditation was that students who wanted to transfer from King’s to other schools were denied because those schools did not recognize their King’s courses as legitimately accredited. Jody Paul, then assisting the Dean at King’s, now a New York City construction manager and Wood’s wife, successfully advocated for many such transfers, but that effort should not have been needed.

Another difficulty was that, because King’s was still new in their eyes, state accreditors wanted the College to prove itself, and required frequent reapplication. King’s apparently expected more advance communication about this from the state than the state expected from itself, and so it came to pass that in 2004, about two weeks before accreditation was set to expire, “a helpful member of the state Department of Education sent a note over to the then-dean and said, ‘Hey, you know your accreditation’s about to expire—are you at all concerned about that?”

Ordinarily, the report that institutions submit to renew their accreditation involves a yearlong process of self-study and preparation. “King’s, being distinctive, did it a different way.” After the Regents’ note arrived, Wood traveled down to New York from Boston on a weekend, installed himself in an office on the 15th floor of the Empire State Building, and, over the next 60 hours, conjured up an accreditation report in close collaboration with Ms. Paul. He supplied the “how to talk to accreditors” knowledge, she fished up documents and information to supply the details about King’s, and “presto: we produced a yearlong accreditation report in two and a half days.” He added in an email after the lecture that “I was skeptical this crash approach was even possible. She insisted it could be done.” They sent the report to Albany for review, and “miracles happen”: it was recommended to the Board of Regents for approval. That would usually have been the end of the matter, and a great relief. In general, Wood said, accreditation is gained once and secured forever, and the Board of Regents rubber-stamped whatever was put in front of it. Not this time.

The plot twist came from a new member to the Board of Regents. John Brademas had most recently been president of New York University, but had originally made a name for himself representing Indiana for twenty-two years in the United States House of Representatives. In 1980, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority successfully targeted him for electoral defeat. According to Wood, evangelicals were to blame for Brademas’s ouster from elected office, and The King’s College’s accreditation request was his opportunity to get revenge. [2]

Brademas made a number of claims to his colleagues on the Board of Regents that King’s was a fraudulent institution. Of these, he laid the most emphasis on a theory that its name attempted to deceive prospective students into thinking they were going to Columbia University—never mind that Columbia stopped calling itself The King’s College in 1775 during a certain falling-out with King George III. Brademas also insisted that the College’s newly-launched Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) program was not legitimate—something he did know a thing or two about, having studied PPE at Oxford University where that curriculum was born. Wood acknowledged that this criticism carried some weight, since the newly-announced program was then but a shell of what it could and would become. But it was unheard-of for the Board of Regents to reject the recommendation of its reviewing body, and the reviewers had recommended King’s for reaccreditation.

Rejection, however, is exactly what happened. The Board of Regents listened to Brademas and voted unanimously and unprecedentedly to reject the College’s application. They gave King’s a year to shut down. “It was a death sentence,” Wood said.

The College flew into a variety of responses. The trustees, mostly members of Campus Crusade for Christ, devoted themselves to prayer, as did the students. Oakes hired a lobbyist, who was, however, tightly connected to the Board of Education. Wood said, “This isn’t going to work; we need something more tough-minded here.” Among other things, he called a couple of key legislators in New York and told them how evangelicals had ended Brademas’s legislative career—well, evangelicals in New York could end theirs too. He took a public line singling out Brademas as an anti-Christian bigot, inviting the rest of the Regents to back away from him.

Wood noted several times that these actions are not a source of pride for him. “The one thing that the Board of Regents had to give, we took. They withheld it unfairly; we took it with cunning, and not with righteous persuasion,” he said. “Was this a deception blessed by God?” Wood asked. “Was this Jacob defrauding Esau? Were we Ahab-like, taking Naboth’s vineyard unjustly? Possibly. Were we blessed like Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho who lied to the king to save the Israelite spies? I take it these are questions worth pondering, and I still ponder them.”

Righteous or not, Wood’s approach worked. When the Board of Regents reconvened a two months after the initial vote to consider the College’s appeal, Brademas was alone in voting against King’s. “The day we got accreditation,” Wood said, two things happened: the students, who had been fasting and praying, broke their fast with a trip to Tad’s Steakhouse on 34th Street and spent the next several hours regretting their choice; and the College started the regional accreditation process with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. That accreditation did not come easily, but was granted in 2009.

The accreditation drama was the longest story Wood told, but not the only or even the most significant one. Of great relevance to the College’s current identity, “the creation of PPE, the exodus of the unready, the founding of Interregnum . . . and the great grading scandal” were also on the menu.

The creation of PPE was the final phase in an attempt to clarify the college’s vision that began with Friedhelm Radandt in Briarcliff Manor and radically intensified under Oakes, with Wood advising. Recruiting materials from the last years at Briarcliff Manor indicate that Radandt saw proximity to New York City as an asset and was moving away from the idea of a secluded, rural college experience well before King’s shut down. New York City was mentioned as a place of educational enrichment and opportunity—a major departure from its earlier portrayal as, at best, a mission field. Still, Wood said, the College’s vision when it reopened was unclear. Its recruitment plan rested entirely on New York City’s churches, it had no clear plan for recruiting donors, and “the closest thing King’s had at that point to a mission” was a desire to put students on track to teach in New York public schools. The College attracted a handful of students whom Wood called “mostly unqualified” and served up no fewer than three degree programs in education. The best of these degrees resulted in a temporary qualification to teach, but none satisfied the New York State requirement for a Master’s degree.

Wood felt that this was not a service to the students. More significantly, he felt that the education programs actually impeded Oakes’s goal of building an intellectually serious college with a compelling Christian identity that could go up against leading colleges and universities and make a difference in the world. Wood’s recommendations were uncompromising and perhaps controversial: Get out of the field of education with its heavy regulations and undesirable teaching requirements, and get out of the shallow end of the admissions pool, i.e., students with low personal ambition and academic drive.

As provost, he acted accordingly. Over time and with the help of the faculty, he built a “powerful and demanding” PPE curriculum. He hired both young and established faculty members to teach it, rewarded faculty whose students showed improved writing skills, and enforced a previously ignored rule that students had to earn at least a C in both of their freshman writing courses to remain enrolled. Though this was difficult, letting underperforming students linger tended to land them with no degree and lots of debt, amounting to a “false mercy” that is both a powerful temptation for teachers and, he said, critical to resist.

Wood knew his changes would create hardship. He predicted that 50 percent of the student body would leave. In retrospect, he joked, “I was wrong; we only lost 43 percent.” But something else happened: “Those who stayed were on fire.”

Nowhere was this passion more in evidence than in the creation of Interregnum, whose story has been told elsewhere; in Wood’s sophomore Rhetoric class, which he called his proudest accomplishment at King’s; and in the rise of “The King’s English,” originally an extemporaneous speaking and peer criticism exercise for faculty. Both Rhetoric and the King’s English transformed students’ mastery of language. Wood gave them the lowest grades they had ever seen in Rhetoric, but those applied themselves saw their writing bloom. When students watched faculty organize into “speaking Houses” (a spoof on the student House system) and use their King’s English skills against each other in random theme debates, speeches with planted hecklers, and other entertaining challenges, they responded, “Why are you withholding this from us?” And they created speaking groups of their own.

Wood saw the way forward as one of slow growth and a focus on high-quality students, but the trustees and the Vice President of Finance were understandably displeased with the exodus his changes had triggered. Pressures materialized to raise grades retroactively, after faculty had submitted them; and an idea of making capitalism a central focus of the College emerged to compete with the focus on academic excellence. Although the grade inflation scheme was never instituted during Wood’s time, both of these developments factored into his resignation.

Although he left the College over disagreements about its direction, Wood said he is grateful for the many ways King’s changed him for the better. When Oakes first tried to recruit Wood to King’s, Wood was in personal crisis. His marriage of 25 years had ended against his will, and he had been removed from a rewarding administrative role at Boston University, where he had taught for 24 years and been tenured for ten, to focus exclusively on teaching. He had lost a great deal at once and needed to rebuild. “It was hard to leave Boston. It was hard to leave tenure,” Wood said; “but [coming to King’s] was kind of salvational for me. I barely had time to think about myself because I was so busy thinking about how to make the place run.” As for what he accomplished, he credited the faculty, for whom he expressed deep gratitude, and students: “I was able to light a match and start a fire, but the tinder was here.”

Having opened his address with James, Wood concluded with Paul: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” [3] Having spoken of the trials King’s endured in the past, he observed that “the present has its own trials. Count them all joy, and find in them your own steadfastness.”

From the day King’s opened in New York City to the present, there has never been a day anyone would call easy. Wood’s address was an encouraging reminder that difficulty accompanies all good things, and that difficulty itself can be a channel for personal and communal redemption.

[1] James 1:2, RSV
[2] Let it be duly noted that, according to various newspaper articles from this time that are framed and hanging in the College’s halls, Brademas declared this narrative to be spurious.
[3] Romans 5:3-5, RSV