Category: Academics

Charles S. Pettis served on the Wofford faculty for some 34 years, but he’s almost part of a “lost generation” of professors.

He arrived after long-time professors such as D. D. Wallace, Coleman Waller, John Clinkscales, and James A. Chiles, and was more of a contemporary of Kenneth Coates, John L. Salmon, and W. R. Bourne.  All of these professors came in the 1920s and served into the 1960s, except for Pettis himself.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1892, Charles Semple Pettis was educated at the University of Wisconsin, where he took his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics and physics.  He also did graduate work at Duke, UNC, and Harvard. Later in life, he was an officer in the Harvard Club of Western South Carolina.  He was a college administrator early in life, serving as dean at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia, and then as president of Morris-Harvey College in West Virginia, both before he was 32.

He joined the Wofford faculty in 1924 as a professor of physics and chemistry, though for the most part, he taught physics.  He was also a mathematician, and was involved with the American Mathematical Society.

Kenneth Coates, his longtime colleague, recounted a story of Professor Pettis’s generosity during the Great Depression.

“It was in the dark days of the Depression, ‘those gray and haggard days,’ as Dr. Snyder described them.

“I was standing on the steps of the library, wondering where I could get a few dollars to buy groceries. I was the baby of the faculty at the time, having been at Wofford only three or four years.

“Professor Pettis came up the steps, spoke to me, and went on into the library. Whether he sensed my difficulty I do not know.

“When he came out of the library with a magazine a few minutes later, he came up to me and put something into my hand, concealing it with his own and folding my fingers over it. Then he said, ‘I won’t take any argument about this. You can pay me back when you can, but don’t pay me until you are able.’

“I started to protest, but he would not hear it and hurried on down the steps. When I opened up my hand, there was a crumpled five-dollar bill.”

            A mass of faculty retirements right after World War II meant that Professor Pettis went from being one of the junior to one of the senior professors.  He continued to teach physics through the spring of 1958, when he died suddenly at age 65.  His colleagues remembered him for his breadth of knowledge – they noted that he enjoyed history and literature, with a special interest in the Civil War, as well as his own fields.  He died too soon to see the new Milliken Science Hall completed.

Perhaps instead of being part of a lost generation, we ought to remember him as part of a bridge between the older generation of President Snyder’s professors and a younger generation who taught into the later 20^th century. He was around to teach the GI generation in the immediate postwar years, often, if the stories are true, being led off topic to talk about one of his favorite things – Virginia ham.

By the late 1970s, Wofford’s faculty members had ten years of experience in planning Interim projects.  The process for considering and approving faculty and student proposals had been codified somewhat under assistant dean of the college Jerry Cogdell, who handled much of the administrative work of making Interim run smoothly. Over time, faculty members had become more adept at creating innovative projects, collaborating with each other, and developing new experiences for students.

In 1978 and 1979, projects that have become regular parts of Interim were being offered.  Constance Antonsen was offering a fencing interim, Joe Killian was using the term to organize a college debate team, and students were able to study film as literature. Project offerings saw a mixture of in-class projects, such as Linton Dunson’s study of the Philadelphia Convention, Dennis Dooley’s study of Finnegans Wake, and John Bullard’s project on religious cults, and outside projects, such as field archaeology with Professors Adams, Harrington, and Abercrombie and photography with Vivian Fisher.  The internships that students today value were getting organized, with Don Dobbs’ Institutional Medicine, David Prince’s Student Teaching, and pre-law internships with Dan Maultsby. John Pilley offered a project entitled “Man’s Best Friend” – a study of dogs. Students in that project can say that they knew him well before his national television appearance with Chaser!

The practice of performing a musical had also become established.  Professors J. R. Gross and Vic Bilanchone led a production of The Threepenny Opera in January 1978.  The custom of a joint music-theater performance has continued fairly regularly since the 1970s.

Travel offerings had improved considerably since 1968. In 1978, Vince Miller took a group of students to New York, Professors DeVelasco and Forbes took students to study the Visigoths in Spain, and Dennis Dooley and Ed Henry took students on a literary and cultural tour of Ireland, a practice that Dr. Dooley continued with one of his faculty colleagues virtually every other year until his retirement. In 1979, Tom Thoroughman took students to England to study history there.  Jim Gross, Joe Killian, and Walt Hudgins took students on a 4-week study of arts, culture, and politics in modern Europe. Constance Antonsen took another look at the Renaissance in Italy and France.

Interim, then, by the late 1970s had evolved into something much like students in the 1980s and 1990s would find it.  While some faculty had moved beyond the four walls of the classroom, and internship and travel projects became more common, many professors chose to study a topic different from their discipline but within campus.  After a decade, Interim had become a definite fixture at Wofford.

Last week, I shared some selections from the first Interim catalogue, from January 1968, when Wofford became one of the first colleges in the South, and apparently the first in the Carolinas, to move to the 4-1-4 schedule. The projects varied from those that focused on the classroom to those that used the world as their classroom.

Today, I want to share a little more about some of the projects.  The first Interim featured three international travel projects.  Professor Constance Armitage Antonsen took a group of eighteen students to Italy, where they studied Renaissance art in Florence, Milan, and Rome, with side trips to many of the towns in between Florence and Rome.  The trip concluded with a stop in Madrid on the way home.  Most of the students had already taken the introductory art history course, so the trip reinforced what many of them had seen in the classroom. Professor Antonsen told the Old Gold and Black after the trip that they had seen “virtually every important piece of Italian art.”  Students chose a particular phase of Italian art for more intensive study.

Professor Jacques Forbes took a group of eighteen students to Switzerland. On their fifteen-day trip, students visited Zurich, Lucerne, Berne, Lausanne, St. Moritz, and Geneva, and saw sights ranging from the headquarters of the International Red Cross and the League of Nations. Students researched Swiss culture and prepared papers on various subjects.

A third travel project saw sixty students and four professors travel to Mexico, where the students stayed in private homes with Mexican families.  Each student had assigned tasks, and they met as a group every other day.  The project was led by Professors Paul Lofton, Joe Lesesne, Joaquin Develasco, and Richard Remirez.  The group spent two weeks on campus before traveling to Mexico, concentrating on Mexican history and government.  They spent much of their time in and around Mexico City.

Other on-campus projects involved students examining problems of air pollution in the Spartanburg area, atomic energy, and Great Decisions, 1968.  The Great Decisions project brought a number of regional speakers to campus for discussion and presentations, including former Southern Regional Council president James McBride Dabbs, journalist William D. Workman, attorney and future federal judge Matthew Perry, and a State Department official to talk about Mexico.

These projects took students to other parts of the world and brought the world to Wofford.

Photos (above) – students and Professor Forbes in Switzerland.  (Below) – students and Professor Parker studying nuclear energy at Oak Ridge, TN.