www.union.edu/Presidents/
Fourteenth president of Union College, July 1, 1965–June 30, 1974
Born in the northern Pennsylvania hamlet of Raymond, Harold Martin moved in early childhood to Denton, New York. He emerged from high school in the depths of the Depression and with few expectations, but with a series of jobs he managed to work his way through Hartwick College, where he earned a BA in 1937.
He took a job teaching high school English in Adams, New York, using the summers to take graduate courses in English Renaissance studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1939 he married another Michigan student, Elma Hicks of Webster Springs, West Virginia, and returned to his high school in Goshen, New York, to teach English and then to serve as principal.
Exempted from the draft because he was both a high school principal and a father, he enlisted in the Navy late in the Second World War and served for a year as an instructor in English at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Bainbridge, Maryland. After his discharge he returned to Goshen while continuing to seek full certification through courses in education at Columbia and then at Harvard.
He enjoyed Harvard but found its education courses to be the same "dreadful stuff" he had encountered elsewhere, so he switched to the graduate school of arts and sciences and became a doctoral candidate in comparative literature; he received a PhD in 1954.
According to Samuel B. Fortenbaugh '23, chairman of the committee that selected him, Martin first came to Union's attention through his letter supporting the candidacy of an aspirant to the seat being vacated by Carter Davidson. News of his election was delivered to the campus by the Schenectady Gazette and the New York Times on February 11, 1965.
Martin arrived at Union in the midst of a faculty debate over proposals for a new general education plan. In 1963 the faculty had voted to replace the traditional 5–5 semester scheme with the newly-fashionable 4-1–4 system, but doubts about the value of the one-course January term soon led to a reconsideration. An ad hoc committee headed by the new dean of the faculty, Theodore D. Lockwood, then began drafting another proposal involving more sweeping changes.
The resulting plan discarded a rather conventional distribution system of general education and replaced it with new courses under the rubric "Comprehensive Education." Simultaneously, the College adopted a new academic calendar of three courses in each of three terms a year, with two courses each year devoted to "CompEd." Echoing Dixon Ryan Fox's old slogan of the "balanced college," the new curriculum required all students to take courses in both of the newly organized academic "centers"—Humanities & Social Sciences, and Sciences & Engineering.
Although this process had begun before his selection as president, Martin came down firmly on the side of change and, indeed, agreed to teach a CompEd course in conjunction with Dean Lockwood. He went further. At a faculty retreat in the Berkshires in September 1965, in specific recommendations presented to the first formal faculty meeting that October, and in an article in the fall issue of Union College Symposium, he urged the faculty to re-think Union's mission.
Martin argued that a number of converging trends, including the rapid rise to prominence of public institutions in the Northeast, imperiled all traditional undergraduate liberal arts colleges. The threat was especially serious to those, Union among them, in the looming shadow of the State University of New York.
Initiated by the faculty rather than the students, the most drastic proposal of all called for reconsideration of the policy which, since 1795, had restricted enrollment to men only.
Here, too, Martin's crystal ball misted over. In a 1965 interview with the Schenectady Gazette he commented, "If you ask me whether we will eventually take women, I'd say we probably would not." In 1968, in response to a vote of the Faculty Council, he appointed a committee to study the question. Martin kept his personal views to himself, but to ensure that the proposal would receive critical examination he deliberately appointed to the committee some whom he deemed to be tilted toward the negative. When the committee unanimously endorsed coeducation, the faculty voted in the affirmative without audible dissent, and the trustees nearly so. The first full-time women students entered in 1970.
To the displeasure of some, especially on the Board of Trustees, Martin joined with thirty-four other college presidents in signing a letter to President Richard Nixon urging attention to the student voices. After examining the errors made earlier at Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and other prominent venues, he also moved quickly to establish priorities for dealing with local disturbances: "first priority, human safety; second, institutions—by which I mean the law, college tradition and regulation, and so on; third, property.".
As the Vietnam War wound down and activism diminished, other problems moved up the agenda, among them the question of Tenure. In the years immediately after World War II and into the 1960s, young faculty members could expect an all but automatic grant of tenure at the end of the normal six-year probationary period. By one calculation, in 1980 more than eighty percent of the Union faculty would have permanent appointments if grants of tenure continued at then-current rates.
Fearful of finding themselves shackled to an aging but immobile teaching staff with attendant hardening of the curriculum and steadily rising salary burden, the Board of Trustees voted in 1970 to limit grants of tenure to a maximum of sixty percent of the faculty.
As he entered his ninth year as president, a term already above average for college presidents nationwide, the accumulated pressures of finance and fund-raising, with the prospect of more intensive exertions in both areas immediately ahead, persuaded Martin that the time had come. He announced in mid-1973 that he would resign at the end of 1973/74.
At the very end of his term Harold Martin had a hand in one more building project. For some time he had sought to interest a former chaplain, Rev. H. Laurence Achilles, Sr., of Manchester, Vermont, in contributing to a new gymnasium. In early June 1974 Martin learned that Rev. Achilles wished instead to give Union College a facility suitable for curling, skating, and ice hockey. On June 30, 1974, Martin’s last day in office, Rev. Achilles gifted the necessary money for the project that resulted in the construction of Achilles Rink.
On leaving Union Martin became president of the American Academy in Rome, a position he resigned in 1976 in significant part because of the heavy fund-raising burden it entailed.
After a year as Martha Bundy Scott Professor of English at Williams, he joined the faculty of Trinity College, where Theodore Lockwood, former dean of the faculty at Union, was president. Martin retired from Trinity as Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities in 1982.
The Martins returned to their farm on the outskirts of Rensselaerville, New York, but visited the College only rarely. In retirement he completed two books of Episcopal history, St. George's Church: Spanning Three Centuries (1984) and "Outlasting Marble and Brass": the History of the Church Pension Fund (1986). More recently, he edited the diary of Jonathan Pearson for publication and contributed three articles to the present volume.
In 1988 the Martins forsook the icy blasts of upstate winters for the zephyrs of Corrales, New Mexico. Elma Hicks Martin died there February 26, 1995, and Harold Martin subsequently moved to Maine. He passed away on May 2, 2005 at the age of 88.
Condensed from Wayne Somers, compiler and editor, Encyclopedia of Union College History (Schenectady: Union College Press, 2003), page 472.
Image courtesy of Union College, Schaffer Library Special Collections and Archives, Photograph Collection