Even during the best of times, most people have no idea what it takes to be the president of a small liberal arts institution, a diverse and dynamic community of learners.

When Allan Kuusisto arrived in Geneva to assume the presidency of Hobart and William Smith, the Colleges were in absolute turmoil. When he left, the Colleges had taken great and surprising leaps forward in a number of areas and established a firm foundation for future success.

Allan Kuusisto died on April 23 at his home in New Hampshire. The following accounts and reminiscences of the Kuusisto years from friends, colleagues, and loved ones reveal not only an incredible stamina, vision, and diplomacy, but also an unwavering love for the liberal arts and faith in peoples’ capacity for good work.

My father went to Geneva to see Hobart and William Smith in the early winter of 1970. He was serving as president of the State University at Albany.

He went up for a look and when he got back I asked, “Well, what’s it like?” And he paused and said, “Well, Hobart and William Smith have an aura of genteel shabbiness.” And it was an apt description of the place as it stood in 1970. Buildings in disrepair. Facilities in decline. It was a time of serious financial difficulty for the institution.

And it had lost alumni support owing to bad publicity that came with Tommy the Traveler and anti-war protests.

I wondered why anyone would stay, given all the problems the place had, but I think he had tremendous affection and took great satisfaction in seeing the improvements. There was a lot that had to be done.

A whole range of problems confronted him when he got here. We had pretty well dismantled the curriculum by that point. Faculty morale was falling.

Early on in his presidency we created something that had never been done before. Each department was reviewed by two peers from elsewhere, a well-known publishing [professor] and someone primarily concerned with teaching. This was a very delicate operation. Some departments may have been fairly defensive. There was a good deal of groundwork and back and forth between administration and faculty to get ready.

Al became president at probably the lowest point in the Colleges’ history. The Colleges were in crisis in the wake of Tommy the Traveler and the events of 1970. . . . On the campus the women’s movement manifested itself in a particularly strong way because of the heritage of William Smith. These were days of real acrimony between Hobart College and feminists at William Smith.

There was absolutely no pretense about the man. He was a very kindly person, well remembered by his old friends, very modest and self-effacing. I think the students liked him. He was plain and genuine and so on.

Al often feigned innocence about things people were doing, but he knew. For our part, Al’s greatest contribution was his support. In other words, he was an ideal president for those of us who were young and getting started in academic administrative work. I think that’s one of the highest compliments we can pay him. One of the images I have is of Al being willing to delegate responsibility and this vast amount of activity occurring.

I think I was hired at that tender age partly because of the experiences I’d had administratively and partly because I connected with people there, but also because hiring the new dean at William Smith was not the biggest problem. The biggest problems were legal and recovering from Tommy the Traveler. That’s my frank assessment.

Yes, there was tension [between the two Colleges]. Certainly the word feminism was in the air all through that decade. We needed to re-balance the Colleges. There was tension because this was such a big change.

Everything was so out of balance then. We recreated the traditions—Founders Day, Moving Up Day—which had totally disappeared. Al was there every time and enjoyed them and took full part. He was wonderful. It wasn’t necessarily his idea to make these changes but he was very, very supportive. He must have taken a lot of heat.

We began a campaign—a very serious campaign—to talk about parity and start moving rapidly toward it. Good things started happening. We were able to sustain the high quality of William Smith while almost doubling the numbers of women.

I think most students in most places don’t give a hoot about who the president is. That’s why the dog was so important. Al had a presence and a personality around campus because of that. Presidents everywhere would be well-advised to remember that.

I got there in the fall of 1970, and there were tremendous changes in behavior. We still had freshman parietals, maids came and vacuumed the rooms. All women lived on the Hill. Men weren’t allowed above the first floor social rooms of women’s dorms. There were drug busts and some very turbulent tenure decisions that some people thought of as being a purge of faculty.

You might hear two sides of it. He may have seemed standoffish because he had this Finnish stoicism about him. Yet he was always available. He was always around. He could be seen walking his dog on campus every night. Sometimes he ate dinner at fraternity houses and he wasn’t always well treated at those dinners. He wasn’t flamboyant. He was direct and he was always concerned with the students.

It was a highly political time. Everything had political meaning. It seemed like every other school in New York was closing down and we stayed open.

I was the first African American to sit on the Board, and I had an opportunity to meet with President Kuusisto when he arrived and talk about what was going on. I found him to be very reasonable, very concerned with students, and not unsympathetic to our situation. He was very well aware of the various roles students felt a college should play in their lives—one of them being to stand up for justice on behalf of students. There was trepidation from students that the new president would be a real disciplinarian, and invalidate or attempt to reign the students in. He was the exact opposite of our fears.

Kuusisto came in under some highly erroneous assumptions. He never set out to say “these are false assumptions.” He just set out to do his work. He worked by talking with people. He was accessible and trustworthy, and he would present the students’ case.

He stepped into a pretty volatile and difficult situation and handled it pretty well. He could have come and attempted to clean house, which would have been a disaster. Instead, it was a time when people really came together. We all worked through our concerns together. People were really and sincerely working through issues. As I look back there was an extraordinary amount of tolerance, a lot more than what could have ordinarily been expected. It was an incredible time to be in school.

Stephen Kuusisto ’78

It shouldn’t be lost on people that my father was a Finn. The Finns use a word that can’t be easily translated: sisu. It’s a famous Finnish word that means tremendous stamina, and I think he relied on that.

Improving the intellectual climate and coping with the contentious political climate in the early ’70s, those things were all consuming. But he liked the challenge.

He was a very fair-minded and discrete individual who never gossiped, and he talked with honesty and respect to absolutely everybody whether they were donors, faculty, students, or members of the buildings and grounds staff. And, that’s a product of his upbringing as an immigrant kid who had to learn English as a second language. I admire that tremendously.

Christopher Muller ’74

When faculty voted to change the curriculum and eliminated freshmen tutorials without involving anyone else in the decision, I found that particularly upsetting. I thought it was too important a decision to let it go unnoticed. . . .

I typed up a document saying this was not to be a unilateral decision. . . . I got Mara O’Laughlin ’66 [member of the Admissions staff] and someone from the English department to sign it and took it to Kuusisto. He was not a happy guy because the catalogue needed to be in place for recruiting students for the coming year. That meant a full meeting of the community Senate. After

I gave him the letter—he had a really great frowning face—he looked at me and said this was not something he wanted to deal with but he had no choice. We had this Senate meeting in his conference room. I remember sitting at one end of the table. There were all these faculty members. One was absolutely beside himself. “Do you understand you have emasculated the faculty?” He screamed this at me.

The women in the group took immediate umbrage. They stonewalled the procedure. The community Senate said, “That’s it. This was in fact taken as a community-wide decision and it can’t go any further.”

I bet most of my classmates don’t realize we closed the school down for a day. There was a boycott. Faculty said, “We can’t teach.’’ Al could have overruled this, but he said he had to respect the community Senate.

I thought it said something about him, about his willingness to let the community govern itself even though it was incredibly inconvenient. I don’t know if any other president would have done that.

I looked at Al and I asked him if he was crazy for wanting to come here. And, if he was crazy, I said, then maybe he was just right for the job.

Actually we looked at Al and thought he was the kind of guy who could get the job done. There was a feeling that here’s a guy who won’t get ruffled. He seemed like someone we could count on.

To his very great credit and, I guess, good luck, Al hired some very good people—Skotheim, Van Arsdale [Treasurer William Van Arsdale], and Don Morris [the Colleges’ first vice-president for institutional advancement]. There were a lot of things to do and those three guys got together every evening and figured out strategy.

Al was wonderful. He was not meddling. He was there if they wanted him but he made sure they understood what he wanted and let them do their thing. I know because they told me.

Good management creates an aura of confidence. I think Al projected a sense of integrity, courage, and a willingness to do what was necessary to correct the situation. He had an air of calmness. He went about his business in a way that gave a sense of normalcy. For example, walking that dog of his every day. After all, who can get terribly excited about things, no matter how bad they seem, when they see the president of the Colleges walking his dog every morning?

At that time, I don’t think there were very many people who thought the Colleges were even going to be around much longer much less raise—what was it?—10½ million dollars. You’ve got to remember this was all new to us. We had never really tried to raise so much money in any kind of a formal way, but Al led us into it.

Al helped people get back to work. He helped back us away from the precipice. He wasn’t one to rush in and plant a flag on other peoples’ work. He wasn’t a meddler and people liked that about him and felt more confident.

Al was a great one for building consensus, for getting people together and making sure everyone had an opportunity to make their case. He sat back and listened, asked questions, and basically made sure everyone had their day.

When it came to students and [events on] campus, Al very plainly told people that these were different times. We were still doing what we had always done. We were just doing it in a way that was different from what they had known, and that someday in the future HWS would do things differently again. People appreciated hearing that from him.

Some of the hardest days I ever worked were on the rubber chicken circuit with Al when we were beginning the library. He had his dog that he always walked on campus. On the road, I felt sort of like his dog in that he would walk me all over whatever city we were in. I felt like I should stop at intersections and wag my tail to cross the road.

He was always looking around, gathering bits of information, commenting on a bumper sticker or a jacket or picking up some local tidbit that he would use later in his informal, seemingly unrehearsed talks at banquets. He’d sort of shrug and jingle the change in his pockets and tell people “this is what we’re doing and this is why,” and he would weave these details in that just made people feel very comfortable.

Stephen Kuusisto

I don’t know which commencement it was, maybe 1972. The students had Buckminster Fuller as the commencement speaker, who was famous for inventing the geodesic dome. He had quite a following as kind of a proto-new-age guru in the ’60s and ’70s.

My father had been forewarned that Fuller was known for giving three-hour commencement speeches. Sure enough, he’d been going for about an hour and Dad noticed he still had two-thirds of his speech piled up there on the lectern.

All at once, Fuller said, “And so we should all love one another.” When the students began cheering Dad leapt to his feet, raced up, shook Buckminster Fuller by the hand, and led him away from the podium. Fuller didn’t know what has happening. Nobody was the wiser.

My father loved telling that story.

My most abiding and pleasant memory—I don’t have any unpleasant memories—was as a mutual Red Sox fan. We used to constantly commiserate about the Red Sox and their promise and inability to fulfill that promise.

If they win it all this year, I know somewhere Al will be smiling.

Stephen Kuusisto

As we speak here, I’m wearing his 1976 Hobart Lacrosse NCAA Championship shirt. He was a big fan of both the Statesmen and the Herons and paid a lot of attention to the programs.

The birthday of our parents almost coincided. Both sets of parents belonged to the Republican Party. He used to say they belonged to a dwindling group of rock-ribbed Herbert Hoover defenders. He referred to us as classmates. Then we actually got to be classmates when the Colleges honored us with honorary degrees.

I was helping with advice on fund-raising. I met with him several times in New York City. He was a great walker and we would go out and walk the streets talking about the future of the Colleges.

I remember one very wet, slushy day in February or March when we wandered for about two hours around Midtown. Unlike me, Al had come prepared with galoshes. There we were, happily babbling away about the merits of a liberal arts education, me getting increasingly less interested. When we got back, my shoes were slushy and the dye had come off.

Al was an old shoe guy, easy to be with, all in all a very comfortable person. I also think he was one of a handful of really great presidents these Colleges will ever have. I think of him as a real strong leader, a very good-humored man. I’m proud to have called him a friend.

Al was a great coach and mentor. He had a great line about fund-raising I’ve never forgotten. “There are only two things you really have to remember about fund-raising,” he said. “One is if someone offers you a bathroom take it. You never know when the next one’s coming along. The other is always remember to ask for the gift.”

He was pretty much right. There may be nuances, but at its core, those are the critical factors. He was tremendously easy to be with. He made it fun. He put people at ease. Most people, when the president and the head of development are coming, are not exactly at ease because they have a good idea of why you’re making the visit. Al had a real knack of bringing things down to a level where you just had a good conversation and an enjoyable time.

I used to report to the Board some of the unanswerable questions we’d get at the research desk. One was: What was Popeye’s last name?

This must have tickled Al’s fancy. He just liked it. Obviously the answer is Sailor Man. He brought that story up repeatedly. There was no outward resemblance between Al and Popeye, but he must have been eating his spinach.

He really was a quiet hero in this community in terms of the leadership he provided.

Sisu? That’s what he had. He had this wonderful sense of humor, but also a calm and quiet way of bringing consensus and making sure things happened.

Christopher Muller

The school was under great stress and Kuusisto comes in and manages to keep the place together. My perspective is that he was a guy who got us through a pretty tough time and, above all else, he was a decent man.

Robert Huff

Thinking back, those years were really a period of growth for the Colleges. The number of faculty increased. We never had much money as an institution, but it was sort of after this period of problems, there came a very positive, optimistic period.

Stephen Kuusisto

Looking back 30 years, I think a measure of his success is that today it’s nearly impossible to imagine those times.

Bill Scandling

He was the right man at the right time.