Purdue Profiles: Hansen legacy built on openness, intellectual drive
When Purdue remembers President Emeritus Arthur Hansen on Friday (Sept. 10) in a memorial service, the remarks inevitably will indicate a notable ability to combine a personable warmth with intellectual candor.
The service will be at 1:30-3 p.m. in the Nancy T. Hansen Theatre, which he had helped fund in honor of his wife. Hansen Theatre is in Pao Hall.
Hansen, who served from 1971 to 1982, was Purdue's eighth president. He came with two expressed challenges from the Board of Trustees -- renew student confidence and establish a continuing program in fundraising -- that both demanded his range of abilities.
"Arthur Hansen was the perfect choice as president at that specific time in Purdue’s history," says Betty Nelson, dean of students emerita. She was assistant dean of students, then associate dean of students, during Hansen's tenure.
He had shown tremendous ability to mend campus relationships quickly at Georgia Institute of Technology, where his popularity took him from being dean of engineering to being president. Similarly at Purdue, he adopted an open door policy and lunched with students. He liked to keep up his Purdue engineering know-how by tackling a problem from students' homework.
"It was popular at that time," Nelson recalls, "for students to assert that 'if you are over 30, you can’t understand me.' President Hansen's personality was so open, positive, and inclusive that he was disarming -- even students who were being very cranky found it difficult to sustain that demeanor with him.
"Walking with him or behind him on the way to a meeting across campus was a remarkable experience -- he was the 'Pied Piper of Purdue.' Students were attracted to him like a magnet -- his easy gait, ready smile, and genuine interest in students made him an attractive companion for a walk between classes."
He even stopped students on the sidewalk to ask their views. But though he respected students' voices, he wanted meaningful interchange, not diatribes or coddling. The Purdue history "A Century and Beyond" quotes Hansen's first public speech at Purdue, given at a convocation, as he spoke of immature, insincere game-playing with public and educational issues on U.S. campuses: "[Purdue must be] a place where reason prevails, where scholarship is honored … where all who employ reason and respect scholarship have the opportunity to express themselves freely."
On the fundraising side, Hansen in 1972 founded the President's Council, which provides loyal financial supporters a strong ongoing connection with the University and mutual encouragement. Started with 30 members, it now has more than 17,000.
Hansen, born Feb. 28, 1925, in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., was a strong student there and later in Green Bay after the family moved there. He learned lessons in work and dealing with people as he helped in his father's grocery store in the Depression years. Though his father wanted him to stay on after high school graduation in 1943, Hansen joined the Marine Corps Reserve and soon was assigned to the wartime V12 education program at Purdue. He had never been farther than Milwaukee.
But he came, chose electrical engineering on the V12 accelerated program and finished a bachelor's degree in 1946. Of course, World War II had ended by then, and that fall he started a master's degree in mathematics at Purdue, which he earned in 1948. A few years ago he told Purdue Perspective about the summer of 1946, when he was short on cash after graduating and joined a union so he could work on constructing the "temporary" barracks that lasted until Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering was built.
"I met people I wouldn’t have met otherwise," Hansen recounted. 'These were good, hardworking people." His general labor was tough going at time. "The second day, I unloaded 200-pound radiators. I wasn’t used to that." Another time, he started digging a six-foot-deep pipe trench by starting down six feet. The more seasoned workers told him to go down one foot for the entire 15-foot length, then go down another foot. It’s safer.
Those experiences and his V12 training helped prepare him to be a graduate teaching assistant to older students.
"These hardened vets were coming back from the South Pacific," Hansen said. "These guys were no nonsense." In his V-12 experience, he had gotten a taste of their way of life, since "we ran at the crack of dawn, and drill was on Saturday."
Not every student was a veteran. One of his assignments was to teach algebra, in which one freshman was Nancy Tucker, whom he had met earlier through her older sister. They took a liking to each other, but he gave her a C. Their lives went on different paths, but years later, when Hansen became Purdue's president, he got a congratulatory note from Nancy's sister, and when he wrote back he asked about Nancy, which led to their reuniting and marrying in 1972. Nancy was active on campus and also well-liked by the students. She died in 2003. Hansen, who died July 5 in Fort Myers, Fla., is buried next to her in McCormick Cemetery near Westwood, the Purdue presidential residence.
In the intervening years, Hansen had married Margaret Kuehl, a University dietitian, and they raised five children before parting while he was leading Georgia Tech, his position just before coming back to Purdue. He had taught at the University of Michigan for some years also and then was Georgia Tech's dean of engineering.
He received a doctorate in mathematics from Case Institute of Technology in 1958. He also received several honorary doctorates, including one from Purdue.
Hansen's mix of regard for people with analytical rigor was displayed also in his administrative choices. Following Frederick Hovde as president, he kept numerous key people including John Hicks, executive assistant; Lytle Freehafer, vice president and treasurer; Fred Andrews, vice president and general manager of the research foundation; and Charles Lawshe, vice president for regional campus administration. But two weeks after taking office on July 1, 1971, he announced the creation of the position of provost and filled it with Harold Robinson, who came from Georgia.
Later he abandoned the unified regional campus administration. He merged the offices of the Dean of Men and Dean of Women into the Office of the Dean of Students, appointing Beverley Stone, the dean of women, to the new post.
Nelson, working in that area, remembers, "President Hansen supported the dean of students in decisions that were important 'firsts' for our campus, decisions that confirmed the rights of students in protected categories. He knew he would receive vigorous criticism from some, but he also knew the decisions were the right ones." He also encouraged appointment of students to University committees.
The knitting of relationships extended beyond the office and sidewalk. Hansen was the first Purdue president to live at Westwood, given to the University by R.B. Stewart, who had been treasurer, and his wife. After a major enlargement and remodeling that required relocating and was in progress when Hansen married Nancy, they moved into Westwood and made it a welcome place for student meetings, wiener roasts and other occasions. They also invited employees to share gatherings there and instituted home tours. All were part of the effort to create calmer, friendlier relations with students, staff and the community.
"Often individual students stopped by the house, and a couple of student leadership organizations regularly met in the Hansens’ downstairs family room," Nelson says. "That level of accessibility and hospitality was important to improving the campus climate."
Nelson also recalls an incident that reveals something of the spirit of the man: "During a May commencement one year, the toddler son of one of the graduates escaped from his parents and wandered up the steps and onto the stage of the Hall of Music; President Hansen was greatly amused … got up first, approached the child, offered his hand, and returned his new friend to a greatly embarrassed parent who had rushed forward unsure how to retrieve a child in front of 6,000 spectators."
At the time, most public universities including Purdue depended on state funding for nearly their entire budgets, The trustees' charge to awaken the giving potential of alumni and others, coupled with the inflation of the 1970s and enrollment growth, made private giving vital. Besides its centerpiece President's Council, the Hansen plan led to the Phonathon, Annual Fund and Purdue's first retirees organization, the President’s Advisory Council on Retirement.
Now, as the Purdue University Retirees Association, the organization continues to honor his care for retirees with the Arthur G. Hansen Recognition Award, which Nelson helped establish. She says it "is given most years by PURA and the Office of the President to the University unit that excels in fostering a strong relationship between Purdue and that unit’s retirees (the cash award of $2,500 is funded by TIAA-CREF)."
Early on, he began work to solidify funding, program and leadership for the young Black Cultural Center. He worked to increase opportunities and acceptance for minorities and women. Despite the demands on his time from the start, he took flying lessons and earned a private pilot's license. Also, he and Nancy taught a class on contemporary issues in Fall 1972 but didn't attempt to fit teaching into their schedules after that.
During his administration, as enrollment grew from 26,000 to 32,000, Purdue added Potter Engineering Center, Johnson Hall of Nursing and buildings for agriculture, psychology, life sciences and athletics.
Hansen chose to leave Purdue in 1982 to become chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, where he served for four years. Before leaving Purdue, he told trustees at length about his perceptions of what financial strait-jackets were doing to limit and even harm education. Even so, in retirement, he was an educational consultant and served on the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. Those involvements reinforced what he often said when speaking in public: Education is the best way to build lives and improve societies.
His legacy at Purdue, where many think of him as "the students' president," includes the Arthur G. Hansen Life Sciences Research Building and the Nancy T. Hansen Theatre, for which he donated $1.8 million in 2002.
Hansen is survived by his wife, Marylin White Hansen, three sons, two daughters and five grandchildren.
