Wells more than lucky

University officials often invoke Herman Wells' name to invest their policies with an air of historical legitimacy.\nFor example: "Herman Wells would have expected us to rise to this historic occasion. And I'm quite sure that we will," Chancellor Brehm said in her installation address in October 2001.\n"IU has a strong historic commitment to diversity, dating back to the 1940s when then-President Herman B Wells insisted athletic teams, recreational facilities, dining halls, dormitories and local restaurants no longer be segregated," Brehm said in March 2002 when she announced that the Benton Murals would remain in Woodburn 100.\nAnd Brehm again said on Founders Day in March 2003, "Herman Wells was a founder because he took a good school and made it a great one."\nThe impulse is understandable. In Bloomington, few names are more honored than that of IU's best-loved president. Today, Wells isn't a man, but a symbol: St. Herman of Indiana.\nSt. Herman never existed. The real Wells was always interesting.\nWells, born in 1902, was president of IU from 1937 to 1962. He never retired and served until his death in 2000 as University chancellor. \nUnder Wells' leadership, the University attracted Nobel laureates and other top scholars, sponsored research like Alfred Kinsey's sexuality studies, and created the University structure that persists, with modifications, to this day.\nThat's the reputation administrators want to borrow when they mention Wells' name. But that portrait overlooks Wells' ambition and talent. \nWells played down both traits in his autobiography "Being Lucky," preferring, instead, to paint his accomplishments as nothing more than a string of fortunate coincidences. In the early '30s, he led a successful effort to reform the state's banking laws, and was then named a high official in the state Department of Financial Institutions by Governor Paul V. McNutt. Then he was named dean of the business school when he was only 33. Two years later, President William Lowe Bryan retired, and the trustees appointed Wells acting president. They gave him the job permanently the next year.\nThat's not luck.\nWells' personal papers from his early career reveal him to be an ambitious and public-spirited man. He was progressive and took an active role in working for the election of Democratic candidates, including many of his friends, in the 1932 election. He put his social science training to use in applying research to the state's problems. And he built a statewide network of contacts to help both the University and his own career.\nHe had a wild side, too. In an oral history interview in the 1970s, one of Wells' friends recalled that during Prohibition, Wells took "a wild ride to French Lick to buy some speak down there one night."\n "Speak" was '30s slang for liquor. \n That's hardly something a saint would do. Nor do we often hear of saints having to work for their accomplishments.\n But it's only St. Herman who gets mentioned in official speeches. That's a disservice to Wells' memory, but it's probably inevitable.\n It's also corrosive. The cult of personality that arose during Wells' lifetime and has only grown since his death portrays his presidency as a Golden Age. The implicit message is that it was because of Wells, and Wells alone, that IU became a great school.\nThat's not true. By the end of his presidency, Wells complained in another oral history interview, people had ceased to question his actions. He had become too venerated to stay on as an effective president.\nBurdened by the false image of a perfect man, we convince ourselves we are fallen and unworthy, unable to do what Wells did.\nThat's the wrong way to honor President Wells.\nInstead, we should work to exceed his achievements.\nHe would expect nothing less.