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SERVING THE CAUSE The Gettysburg board of trustees in 1945 was not experienced in dealing successfully with many of the kinds of issues which it would face during the next forty years. One might argue that this statement applied with equal force to the boards of many, if not most, of the institutions with which Gettysburg usually compared itself. The task of private college and university trustees in any age is a difficult one. Those who prepare and enact charters vest these persons with broad powers to manage, direct, govern, and control, but assume that they will not be engaged full-time in exercising these responsibilities. In fact, unless trustees delegate the most important of their powers, they fail in their mission. The heart of a liberal arts college is to be found in the teaching and learning activities of faculty and students, both of whom must have broad freedom in choosing how to do their work, if they are to do it well. Without disrupting a successful educational enterprise, trustees cannot treat either faculty or students as though they were employees in a business firm. Trustees contribute most to the well-being of that enterprise when they provide it with the general guidance and the material resources necessary for its good health, when they resolutely defend from attack the freedom to teach and to learn, and when they do everything in their power to create good will for the institution. At the same time, since trustees are ultimately responsible to public authority for the entire performance of a college or university, they must from time to time review and evaluate its operations, weighing them against the stated purposes of the institution and the generally accepted standards in the world of higher education. In order to do this properly, they must become familiar enough with the details of how the college functions so that the judgments they make are soundly based. In reaching their conclusions, responsible trustees walk the fine line between uncritical acceptance of what they are told and hasty substitution of their own opinions for those of the administrators and faculty who have been placed in immediate charge of the college. Not surprisingly, the record of the Gettysburg board before 1945 in reviewing and evaluating College programs was not consistent. At times, they became minutely involved in those programs, while at other times there is no record that they were at all concerned. In general, trustees were undoubtedly more willing than they should have been to defer to what successive presidents told them about what was happening both inside and outside the classrooms.8 Had they conducted their own investigations and made their own com- 8The presidents during this period—Henry W.A. Hanson (to 1952), Walter C. Langsam (1952-1955), Willard S. Paul (1956-1961), C. Arnold Hanson (1961-1977), and Charles E. Glassick (from 1977)—will be discussed in a later section, 75