College campuses across the nation were in turmoil.

Syracuse University was no different. The years 1969 and 1970 turned the university into a chaotic place and chased out its chancellor in just 18 months. And to find his replacement, the Board of Trustees turned its focus inside and chose to make the obvious internal promotion.

Melvin Eggers came to SU in 1950 as an economics professor and quickly rose through the department, making department chair in just 10 years. Following Chancellor John Corbally’s abrupt departure in 1971, Eggers – then serving as vice chancellor for academic affairs – stepped up into the role of interim chancellor. He was the last chancellor to assume the position from within the university.

The board officially conducted a search for the chancellorship, but weary from the long process that had led to Corbally’s appointment and facing a university with both financial and directional issues, it was the safe choice to pick its inside man.

‘The time called for an internal person,’ said Kenneth ‘Buzz’ Shaw, SU chancellor emeritus who succeeded Eggers in 1991.

‘The Board of Trustees looked around and said, ‘there’s Melvin Eggers and who knows better what’s going on than Melvin Eggers,” said Mary O’Brien, assistant university archivist.

Penny pinching

It was not a pretty time to take over an institution. SU was freshly in the wake of the student protests and in a serious financial bind.

‘I don’t know this to be true, but some have said that we were only a few months ahead of not being able to pay our bills,’ said Robert McClure, political science professor and former associate dean at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Eggers would have to rely on his knowledge of SU’s inner workings and trust his economist instincts during his early years as chancellor. Following three decade’s worth of expansion under Chancellor William Tolley, the school was at a loss to maintain its fleet of buildings and pressed to make capital decisions.

‘We were really in quite a precarious economic situation when Mel became chancellor,’ McClure said. He added that rising energy costs, along with deferred maintenance and SU’s precarious position in the admission’s marketplace, made the ’70s ‘tough times.’

To remedy the problem and return the institution to sound financial footing, Eggers enacted a number of measures. He made tough calls, including determining which premier programs would receive investment, how to budget the needed capital maintenance and growth and setting the size of the student body.

‘The decision that Eggers made about size was basically: let’s take as many students as we can, let’s get as much tuition money as we can, because we’re desperate for money,’ said Dale Tussing, an economics professor who was Eggers’ teaching assistant and wrote a textbook with him.

‘The most important aspect of his chancellorship, in my view, is that he took us from the brink of insolvency to a position of some substantial economic reserves,’ McClure said.

Don’t stop growing

The development of the SU campus was not going to stop, despite the school’s economic situation. While it would be difficult to parallel the building frenzy of the Tolley years, some of today’s most important buildings were opened during Eggers’ tenure.

The Carrier Dome, E.S. Bird Library, the Schine Student Center, the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel and Conference Center, Crouse-Hinds Hall, Newhouse II and Skytop were all projects that Eggers either initiated or saw completed.

‘His interest was really in moving the university forward and he did that by the capital program and all the buildings that were built and dedicated during his time,’ said Eleanor Ware, senior vice president for human services and government relations, and former administrative assistant to Eggers.

Schine is one example of Eggers knowing the needs of the university community. The student body had been vocal about not having a building on campus to base itself out of.

‘Building the Schine Student Center was a huge project for him because I think students had said over a multi-year period that there was no student union or no student center,’ Ware said. ‘So,’ she said, there was ‘making a decision that we were going to do that – doing the fundraising for it.’

And it was Eggers who gets to take credit for the refurbishment of the centerpiece of the SU campus.

The renovation of the Hall of Languages began in May 1977 and was completed in September 1979. Because of its placement on the National Register of Historical Places, the government was able to supplement much of the costs, allowing SU to perform a needed touch-up on the iconic building, according to John Robert Greene’s ‘The Hill.’

Money was not the only cost incurred through the upgrades.

The faculty watched as capital upgrades were made across campus, yet salaries did not improve and were not comparative to other national universities, said Jerry Miner, economics professor and friend of Eggers.

‘That was a tension throughout the Chancellor Eggers regime,’ he said.

Pan Am Flight 103

The hardest thing to deal with as chancellor is the death of a student, Shaw said. Eggers would have to confront this tragedy to an unprecedented extreme.

When a plane from London to New York blew up in mid-air – an act of terrorism – with 35 SU students aboard, Eggers would face one of the toughest challenges of his chancellorship.

‘It was truly devastating to him,’ Ware said. ‘I saw so much suffering in his face.’

Eggers quickly called his cabinet together and began to delegate responsibilities and make decisions amidst the grieving and frenzied atmosphere.

Ware was part of the team assembled that December evening in 1988. It was ‘kind of a chaotic time, but still organized in that people from the highest levels of the institution were talking together and making decisions in real time,’ she said.

A ceremony was held in the Dome a few days later and the entire university shut down, O’Brien said. She added the students’ parents were first on Eggers’ mind during the entire process. The university was very open to the parents, she said.

Ware recalled the discussions concerning the type of memorial the university would enshrine to remember the students. But it was Eggers’ vision that has remained with her still almost 30 years later.

‘He said, ‘I don’t just want a memorial in stone. I want some sort of living memorial that will help us remember these students always,” she said.

The memorial lives on today in two ways. The Wall of Remembrance at the entrance to campus and the Remembrance Scholarships – one for each of the 35 SU students killed. It is the scholarships that really reciprocate Eggers’ goal, as the SU seniors who receive the scholarships each year must perform research on the history of Pan Am Flight 103.

‘I have heard him say, and have every reason to believe it was true, that it was the most searing and scarring experience of his academic life,’ said McClure, director of the Honors Program during the tragedy.

A leader

Shaw, a renowned leadership expert, summarized his predecessor’s style of leading in one word: ‘persistent.’

‘People talk about charismatic leaders, talk about people that light up the room and make you want to do whatever it is they say – and that wasn’t Mel Eggers,’ Shaw said. He ‘was a person that earned his charisma because he was so persistent and so willing to do what was right for the institution.’

Leading a large university did not always come easy for Eggers, whose experience was chiefly in running a small, tight-knit economics department.

‘At first, it was rather awkward and he found it hard to go from being a rather private person, whose approach … was to meet with those who were involved more or less on a one on one basis,’ Miner said.

‘His having to make decisions based on information that came to him from the bureaucracy and administration of the university put him in a situation where I think he felt awkward and unconformable.’

Toward the end of his tenure, he became more comfortable making decisions in this fashion. In the 1980s he was instrumental in an effort to recruit star-quality senior faculty to SU. The initiative did not exactly succeed, recalled Miner, but it did eventually lead to broad improvement in the university’s faculty.

But some decisions Eggers thought were right for the institution did not match the sentiment of the faculty. It is a problem intrinsic for a leader bred on the inside.

Eggers was even forced to face off with his former teaching assistant and co-author.

Tussing recounted the strange predicament between him and the man who hired him as a professor at SU four decades ago: ‘I became head of AAUP, which was an active organization of professors, sort of opposition to the chancellor. I became, after having been his student and his co-author, sort of the head of the opposition in the University Senate.’

And then, Eggers, the former faculty member, was forced to combat the effort to unionize the faculty – led by Tussing.

‘His opposition to the unionization of the faculty and his skill in defeating that vote was one of his finest moments,’ McClure said.

Even as the recipient of that defeat, Tussing said he has great respect for Eggers’ leadership qualities.

‘He was such a leader. He grabbed the reigns of the university. He said ‘We’ve got to keep on solving this problem, and this problem,” Tussing said.

According to Tussing and others who knew him, Eggers was best characterized as unpretentious, dedicated, an intellectual and a good listener.

‘My favorite memory of him – that I always think of when I remember – was his lack of pretension,’ McClure said. ‘This was a man who wore his title and his standing lightly and treated people with courtesy and respect.’

McClure noted that Eggers’ 20-year tenure as chancellor was double that of the average university president or chancellor during that time, as most either sought another job, were fired or died in office. He couldn’t have done that without the skill of management and keeping himself positioned to continue, McClure said.

His style was to listen long and hard, thinking in terms of students and faculty before coming to a decision, said Ware, who found his academic training followed him into the chancellorship.

‘He was always a professor,’ she said. ‘I think he always had that way about him.’

‘He was an intellectually independent and eccentric thinker,’ Miner said. ‘He did not accept conventional wisdom and always had his own idiosyncratic view.’

‘This was the way he did things for 20 years as chancellor and for the 20 years prior as a professor and department chair,’ Shaw said. ‘He continually put the university first.

‘It was his life. It was his whole life and everybody knew that. And everybody knew that his dedication was tremendous.’

Eggers at the end

Eggers had been a trademark on campus for decades when he decided to step down at the beginning of the 1990s. Those close to him said he was prepared to make the next step in his life and thought it was appropriate for a new leader to take the helm.

A large party was thrown for Eggers in the Carrier Dome. He and his wife received the honor of entering the celebration on a horse drawn carriage, O’Brien said.

He was the last internal SU chancellor. He had taught at SU, chaired a department, made lifelong friends, fiscally saved the institution, built buildings and today lives on through Maxwell’s Eggers Hall, which bears his name.

‘I don’t think anybody on the Hill or anybody downtown viewed him as an outsider,’ Tussing said. ‘Every new chancellor has to get over the idea that they are being viewed as an outsider, they come from another school, they kind of go ahead of all the people who have been here for years, they don’t know as much as other people. He didn’t have that problem at all.’

Eggers passed away a few years after retiring and never got to hang around campus, the way he had envisioned his post-chancellor years.

‘You would not have thought him, had you just come upon him, as chancellor of Syracuse University,’ McClure said. ‘He was just a good ole regular Hoosier boy.’

Published on March 12, 2007 at 12:00 pm