Life in Time
| DELIGHTING IN HISTORY: CHANCELLOR DAVID SCOTT (standing third from left) among some of his recent predecessors in 1997. Standing, from left: RICHARD O'BRIEN, JOSEPH DUFFY, SCOTT, and LOREN BARITZ. Seated, from left: HENRY KOFFLER, JEAN PAUL MATHER, JOHN LEDERLE, RANDOLPH BROMERY. |
One day very early in
January, 2000, Chancellor David Scott was making a luggage-run to the
airstrip on North Ronaldsay, his native island off the northeast corner
of Scotland, where he and his family had been seeing in the New Year.
Such a storm was in progress that when he tried to get out of the car,
the wind blew the door off.
Somehow this tale, together with the image of Scott laughing as he tells it, seems emblematic of the unique and uniquely gifted man who leaves UMass this June after eight years as chancellor.
The product of a tiny, closeknit, highly literate but physically almost primitive community – electricity didn’t come to North Ronaldsay until the 1950s – Scott went on to the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford and to an academic career as a physicist, and eventually an administrator, in England and America. Widely traveled and intellectually sophisticated, he remains unfathomable without reference to the windswept, treeless, minuscule island where he was born and lived until he went to high school in Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands’ “mainland.”
Scott’s embrace of UMass’s land-grant mission – something rarely celebrated in the years preceding his tenure – is bound up with his own identity as the son, nephew, and brother of crofters, or small farmers. His ardor for equal opportunity is inseparable from his own near-exclusion, as a 12-year-old, from the ranks of the college-bound.
There’s something else we’d emphasize: Scott’s feeling for the history of this campus, for its life in time. Whether he was rounding up former heads of campus for a ceremonial portrait or drumming up interest in his time capsule project, this feeling and actions based on it have been a signature of his stewardship of UMass.
Remembering them, we think of a small island in the North Atlantic where the minutest outcropping and inlet is named, where written history goes back a thousand years and the Paleolithic record goes back millennia beyond that. This remarkable place has surely illuminated the mind of our campus’s outgoing leader, and the campus has been illuminated in its turn.
– Patricia Wright
