Thomas Neville Bonner
Fifteenth president of Union College, July 1, 1974 - August 31, 1978
A native of Rochester, New York, the eldest of three children of John Neville Bonner, a waiter, and Mary McGowan Bonner, Thomas Bonner entered the University of Rochester but left during the Second World War to serve for four years in Europe with the Army Radio Intelligence Corps. Returning to the university, he took his undergraduate degree in 1947 and married Joan Nadine Compton, with whom he would have two children. After taking a master’s degree (1948) at Rochester, he then earned a PhD in history from Northwestern University in 1952, with a dissertation on the history of medicine in Chicago.
His first appointment, as Academic Dean at William Woods College (1951-54), was followed by a year as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Mainz, Germany. Dr. Bonner then spent seven years as a history professor at the University of Omaha, where he became chairman of the social sciences department (1955-62). While there, he was awarded his first Guggenheim Fellowship (1958-59) and published his first three books: The Kansas doctor; a century of pioneering (1959; reprinted 1976), an edited translation from the German of Jacob Heinrich Wilhelm Schiel's Journey through the Rocky Mountains and the Humboldt Mountains to the Pacific Ocean (1959), and a co-authored textbook, The contemporary world; the social sciences in historical perspective (1960). In 1962 he ran unsuccessfully as Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives from a Nebraska district.
After joining the faculty at the University of Cincinnati in 1963, he published two more books - American doctors and German universities; a chapter in international intellectual relations, 1870-1914 (1963) and a textbook, Our recent past; American civilization in the twentieth century (1963) - and received another Guggenheim Fellowship (1964-65). He eventually entered administrative work there as Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs (1967-71).
In April 1971, the University of New Hampshire Board of Trustees appointed Dr. Bonner to that institution’s presidency. His three years at New Hampshire were marked by increased state support and lower tuition, as well as by expansion of the university’s outreach through continuing education and ancillary campuses. Although exhausted by the pace he had kept, Bonner claimed that critics of his administration did not prompt his departure and that he bore no ill will. President Bonner was so well regarded within the New Hampshire University system that he received a surprise honorary doctorate in 1974 at the last UNH commencement over which he presided.
Dr. Bonner’s appointment as Union’s fifteenth president was announced on March 5, 1974, the culmination of a search to replace President Harold C. Martin, who had resigned effective June 30 of that year. Responding to his selection, Bonner stated that he was looking forward to working at "the final frontier of education—the private college." Bonner assumed the presidency on July 1, 1974, and was formally inaugurated in ceremonies on October 5, 1974. His inaugural address formulated a sort of battle plan for the future of private colleges, urging the value of liberal education in a time of increasing vocationalism, advocating a new level of "statesmanship between the public and the private sectors," and asserting that the "ultimate strength" of small colleges is the teaching they provide, with a "faculty devoted to students" and "a caring atmosphere where living and learning can flourish together." This was followed by an Inaugural Symposium on "The Resurgence of the Independent College," whose six participants included the president of the Association of American Colleges.
During his first term at Union, President Bonner had to deal with two bricks and mortar projects carried over from the Martin administration. One was the eventually ill-fated addition to Schaffer Library, which was dedicated in ceremonies on October 26, 1974; the other being the Achilles Rink project. Ground was broken for this facility on November 2, 1974, the building to be completed in time for the 1975/76 collegiate hockey season. Because the Achilles gift had been made on short notice, before realistic estimates of the ice facility’s cost could be prepared, it proved necessary to consume Achilles’s maintenance endowment in the building’s construction. The trustees were not able to replace that lost income and cover operating expenses, and consequently Bonner needed to appoint a hockey coach who was also an experienced rink manager. Perhaps influenced by the high-profile Division I hockey program at the University of New Hampshire (with which he had found it politically useful to be identified), but also reflecting his belief in the general importance of athletics as a factor in the public recognition of an academic institution, the president looked for a well-known and highly successful coach. In January 1975 he appointed Nevin "Ned" Harkness, a nearly legendary college hockey coach who had won the national championship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1954, reputedly with only ten regular skaters on his team, and later won two more national championships at Cornell in 1967 and 1970.
Given the lateness of the Harkness appointment, the application deadline for hockey candidates was extended; one indication of the new coach’s prominence and connections within the world of hockey is that, of the twenty-one hockey players recruited late and offered admission, twenty came to Union to play for Harkness. During the first season, this team had a 19–4 record against Division I, Division II, and Canadian university opponents, drawing capacity crowds of student, faculty, alumni, and community supporters. Commercial advertising appeared on the scoreboards and the Zamboni. Although Union’s was officially a Division II team, pressure was already developing, encouraged by Coach Harkness and certainly not opposed by President Bonner, to "move up" to Division I—a prospect which some students and many faculty members viewed as inconsistent with Union’s values and reputation. Moreover, such a change in status was clearly incompatible with Union’s continued membership in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC).
In his first full report to the Board of Trustees in January 1975, President Bonner cited plans to improve morale and strengthen campus communications (including the introduction of the weekly Campus Chronicle); to improve educational planning and strengthen the administrative organization of the College (including additional administrative support staff and an improved admissions effort); and to make Union a "better place to live, study and work" through increased faculty and staff compensation and "more attention to campus recreation" (including "competitive athletic teams" and the creation of a "real campus center in Carnegie Hall," with the Dutch Hollow Pub its main attraction). April 1975 brought the president’s announcement of endowment of the Washington Irving Chair, a $250,000 Mellon Faculty Development Grant, $230,000 for a new computer center, and prospects for a larger gift for "non-budgeted sports expenses."
At the opening faculty meeting in September 1976, after citing as achievements the six-year medical education program in cooperation with Albany Medical College, the Mellon grant, and the Washington Irving Chair, President Bonner introduced what was to become a major point of controversy, namely, his conception of Union as "a comprehensive college in a university setting." Implicit in this conception was a view of Union University as more than a very loose association of basically independent institutions; in the president’s view the University provided opportunities not only for cooperative undergraduate programs, such as the medical education program, but also for expansion of Union’s limited graduate and continuing education programs. Unlike most Union College presidents of the preceding century, Bonner found in his role as Chancellor of Union University much more than an unwanted opportunity to attend the university’s annual meeting and to preside at three additional commencement ceremonies each year. His ambitions to expand Union College beyond its primary fulltime undergraduate orientation became a point of opposition for many in the Union community.
At a general faculty meeting early in the fall of 1976, a faculty advisor, speaking through Professor Neal Allen in order to conceal the identity of the student in question, queried the extremely low SAT scores of a freshman advisee who was also one of Coach Harkness’s prime hockey recruits. This led to considerable speculation about and, ultimately, a faculty committee investigation of the entering credentials of other hockey players and indeed of Union athletes more generally. Then, in March 1977, a letter from the president of Williams College brought to light evidence that, a year earlier, Harkness had violated the NESCAC recruiting rules and then lied about the matter when confronted by President Bonner. Bonner immediately suspended Harkness, and offered his own resignation to the Board of Trustees at its April meeting. The trustees reinstated Harkness, refused to accept the president’s resignation—reappointing him for one year—and voted to terminate Union’s membership in NESCAC.
Just after the fall term concluded, a crisis occurred. The Committee on Standing of Students declared several hockey players ineligible based on their academic performance. Finding the provost unwilling to defer implementation of this ban until after an upcoming Christmas tournament, on December 23, 1977 Coach Harkness abruptly resigned and a few days later the entire team said it would no longer play without Harkness as its coach.
On May 16, 1978, Bonner resigned effective June 30, 1978, to accept the presidency of Wayne State University in Detroit, then the largest urban university in the United States. Perhaps learning from his experience at Union and New Hampshire the uncertain duration of a president’s term of office, Bonner also obtained appointment as a tenured professor of history at Wayne State./p>
Norman P. Auburn served as Acting President from September 1978 until July 1979.
Condensed from Wayne Somers, compiler and editor, Encyclopedia of Union College History (Schenectady: Union College Press, 2003), page 654.
Image courtesy of Union College, Schaffer Library Special Collections and Archives, Photograph Collection