2014 Meeting Information 
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faculty and provide better pay and benefits. Some legendary professors, 
such as Lewis P. Jones ’38 in the history department, arrived within a few 
years after the war. Philip S. Covington, who served as the college’s 
academic dean during the 1950s and 1960s, displayed a remarkable knack 
for looking past a curriculum vitae to spot a great teacher. The story goes 
that he met the late geologist John Harrington on an airplane flight. 
Covington talked Harrington into coming to Wofford even though the college 
had no major in his subject and no plans to add one. “Dr. Rock” taught his 
famous bus-trip laboratories into the 1970s and changed the lives of dozens 
of students. 
Despite these efforts, Wofford still was not really ready for the “Boomers” 
when they finally began arriving on campus in the late 1960s. As the 
distinguished sociologist Wade Clark Roof ’61 has said, they were (and are) 
“a generation of seekers,” inclined to ask tough questions and unwilling to 
accept arbitrary authority and institutions. While students did not doubt that 
administrators cared deeply about their welfare, they still squawked about a 
long list of rules, room inspections, and twice-a-week chapel assemblies. 
Even at this late date, freshmen wore beanies and were “ratted” by 
upperclassmen during their first weeks on campus. As one student 
remembered, “Frank Logan ’41 (the dean of students) couldn’t keep you from 
going straight to hell, but he could relentlessly harass you on your way 
down.” 
When President Paul Hardin III arrived on campus to begin his administration 
in 1968, he found few radicals and revolutionaries among the students, but 
he felt that major changes in residence life policies and programming were 
overdue. A new “Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities,” guaranteed 
academic and political freedom for students and established a judicial 
process regulating campus behavior. Another committee drew up a 
constitution for a Campus Union that reorganized and sought to empower 
student government. Though there have been occasional embarrassments 
over the years, the policy of treating Wofford students as adults has proved 
to be healthy and wise. It has been a principle that the college has 
steadfastly defended, while at the same time taking steps to ensure that 
caring, personal attention is available to students when they need it. An 
effective campus ministry and serving-learning program in the United 
Methodist tradition undergirds this commitment. 
The college also implemented curricular reforms to encourage faculty 
creativity and give students more choices. The 4-1-4 calendar and the Interim 
term permitted a student to spend the month of January working on a 
“project” of special interest. The Interim became a popular feature of the 
Wofford experience, particularly for career-related internships, independent 
research, and foreign travel. Wofford’s first-year humanities seminars, 
pioneered in the 1970s, were copied at institutions large and small. Although 
a broad liberal arts core curriculum remained in place, pruning departmental 
