Gettysburg's "Forgotten" President: Walter Langsam

The front page of the January 17, 1952 Gettysburgian reported major news. John Yovicsin, Class of 1940, had just been named as the new football coach, succeeding the legendary Hen Bream in that post. Yovicsin's appointment was featured only slightly less prominently than the other big news: Walter Langsam, president of Wagner College on Staten Island in New York, was the Gettysburg trustees' choice to succeed Henry W.A. Hanson here.

The choice of Langsam was on the face of it a master stroke. Langsam came to Gettysburg with impeccable credentials, including an Ivy League Ph.D, stature as a widely published European historian, an impressive record in his seven years at Wagner, and commitment to the Lutheran faith. Asked by a New York newspaper why he would leave a place where he was comfortable, Langsam cited the opportunity to advance his career by heading the nation's oldest Lutheran college and his desire to live in a small town.

At Gettysburg College presidents had enjoyed long tenures in office. Only one of Langsam's predecessors, Samuel Hefelbower (1904-1910), served less than a decade. Hanson was currently in his 29^th year at Gettysburg's helm. While Langsam could not predict the future, he anticipated putting his own stamp on Gettysburg in the time he had at the college. But that was not to be; Langsam's time at Gettysburg was brief. Less than three years after arriving at Gettysburg, he resigned his post to accept the presidency of the University of Cincinnati and closed out his career there, retiring in 1971. What happened?

Hindsight is often 20-20. It's more clear now than it was at the time that Walter Langsam's goal of putting his stamp on Gettysburg College-and moving it in directions that in some respects were different than the patterns of the Hanson years-was the root of his undoing. For Langsam was not only inheriting Henry Hanson's faculty, staff, and his Board of Trustees, he was in effect inheriting Henry Hanson as well. Although Hanson moved to Harrisburg upon his retirement, he retained a seat on the Board and as such was the man people often went to when there was a complaint about the new president.

When Langsam arrived at a college he knew by reputation as a strong liberal arts school, he was dismayed to learn that whatever Gettysburg's reputation and current popularity with prospective students, it faced a serious fiscal crisis. Hanson's dream as president was to build a new chapel, a dream deferred through the Depression years and World War II. Post war, Hanson pursued the dream, hiring an architect to design a building that would hold at some 1200 students-the maximum number he could imagine Gettysburg College would ever accommodate.

By Langsam's arrival in the Summer of 1952, ground had been broken and construction commenced, though the college had not come close to raising the nearly $600,000 the new building would cost. Raising funds to pay for the Chapel would be one major task for Langsam - but then money would factor into virtually everything during his tenure of office. Faculty salaries had been stagnant under Hanson, the college's residential facilities were manifestly inadequate for the needs of a growing student population, and the institution's budgetary system was, to put it mildly, irregular. (Athletic program funding, for example, was essentially under the auspices not of the president but of Henry Bream, and there was no system whereby departments made budget requests for the ensuing academic year.) Funds had to be found to support the basics, including a new campus heating system. Further, a more transparent system of disbursing monies had to be established, Langsam concluded.

As president, Langsam was a change agent. Henry Hanson had met the challenges before him with honesty and a measure of ingenuity. But in truth, his educational principles and practices were increasingly outdated. Langsam recognized this, instituting a budget system for the first time, raising faculty salaries, offering merit aid to superior prospective students, encouraging the creation of new departments of Art and Sociology, respectively, and recruiting the college's first full-time Chaplain. One of Langsam's first acts, even before taking office, was one of his most notable: he told the Admissions Director, "Hips" Wolfe, to find and admit at least one qualified African-American first year student for matriculation in Fall 1952. Wolfe found and admitted Rudolph Featherstone. Feathersone went on to graduate in 1956 (thereby outlasting Langsam at Gettysburg) and to distinction as a pastor, campus minister and seminary professor.

Langsam was a hands-on administrator who focused on assuring that Gettysburg's curriculum was sound and that academic freedom should be respected. Because of the money crunch, Langsam pursued greater funding from the Lutheran Church, in exchange for which he was willing to accept representatives of Lutheran synods on the college's board of trustees - something Henry Hanson, for all his emphasis on Christian education, had never embraced. The infusion of church monies helped the college stay in the black, but at the price of reinforcing its denominational identity and potentially increasing church influence on decision-making.

In perspective, most of Langsam's initiatives, including his efforts to hire more women faculty, made eminent sense. But as an innovator, Langsam evidently irritated and upset older alumni, senior faculty, and trustees who didn't think Gettysburg needed to change. It did not help Langsam that, despite his gregarious nature (he enjoyed playing bridge with faculty members and regularly attended college sporting events), he had a tendency to shoot from the lip. Several observers have noted that Langsam would sometimes make off-the-cuff, cutting remarks that, with a moment's reflection, would have been better left unuttered. Those who were the targets of his comments did not forget-or forgive.

By 1954, as complaints increased over spending priorities at the college, and charges of poor accounting practices were leveled at Langsam's young business manager, the new president began to realize that his own tenure at Gettysburg might be short.

While a special committee examination of the college's financial dealings revealed nothing damning, the investigation itself roiled the waters at Gettysburg and encouraged Langsam to look elsewhere for professional fulfillment. In the winter of 1955, less than three years into his presidency, Langsam accepted an offer to become president of the University of Cincinnati, a 13,000-student institution funded by the city of Cincinnati.

In Langsam's papers at University of Cincinnati archives one can find dozens of letters from members of the Wagner College community thanking him for what he had done for Wagner and lamenting his departure for Gettysburg in 1952. The folder containing correspondence regarding Langsam's resignation at Gettysburg and wishing him good luck in Cincinnati contains just three items, suggesting that Langsam's Gettysburg fan club was small. His presidency would await a kinder judgment from history Charles Glatfelter's sympathetic treatment in A Salutary Influence (1987). While not uncritical, offered a measure of vindication. Glatfelter suggests that Langsam's ideas for moving Gettysburg forward were sound, adding that most of his major initiatives were implemented by his successors.

Whether Walter Langsam would have emerged, in a longer tenure in office, as one of Gettysburg's best presidents is impossible to say. History does not allow for do-overs. But based on his experience, priorities, and energy, it seems likely that he would have made a major impact in a longer tenure at Gettysburg. Because he left, he is largely forgotten, and the small oil portrait of him hanging in the college's Lyceum looks more like a paint-by-numbers sketch than a meaningful depiction of a formidable academic leader.