4 decades after a college president's death, have we learned anything? | OregonLive.com4 decades after a college president's death, have we learned anything?
Published: Saturday, April 16, 2011, 9:30 AM
On a humid June afternoon 42 years ago, Charles E. Johnson, utterly exhausted after a year as the acting president at the University of Oregon, rose to tell the Class of '69: "It is your generation that has forcibly reminded us that society is valuable not only in terms of its ability to attain some technological utopia, but in terms of the caliber of its people, their sense of justice and honesty, and their appreciation of duty, their self-restraint, and the excellence of their discourse and thought."
The speech drew no applause. Two days later, Johnson -- determined or distracted -- drove his cream-colored Volkswagen bug straight into the path of a Mack B-61 diesel log truck hauling 16 tons of Douglas fir down the McKenzie Highway.
I was reminded of Johnson, and what has and hasn't changed since his death, by the passing last week of UO journalism professor Ken Metzler.
Metzler wrote an exhaustive history of Johnson's tenure, "Confrontation: The Destruction of a College President." His admiration for his protagonist owes largely -- as he notes in the preface to a 2001 edition of the book -- to Johnson's "belief that reason and logic would prevail over the
