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The Day of Moore's Directorship

Year's end is a good time for looking back, and the pit of winter is a good time to curl up with a substantial book. Putting the two together lets me pass along an odd anecdote, and share some musings on its meaning.

I've been reading Neil Davis's latest book, The College Hill Chronicles, which---at 600-plus pages---is certainly substantial. Subtitled "How the University of Alaska Came of Age," this account of the youth and adolescence of the university is the least science-centered of his publications. Yet science has a prominent place in the book, because the practice of research has also been important in shaping the university.

And I've thought about this column, what I've written down, what I've left out. One point I've wanted to convey is that science is a human activity. Sometimes it involves sophisticated equipment or brilliant ideas, but the real work of science always involves real people. So, like all human endeavors, science sometimes stumbles into trouble.

I offer as example the early history of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The institute is now known worldwide for its research, but it has encountered some rough spots, and---since human institutions are as imperfect as human beings themselves---there are probably some rough ones lurking in the future. According to Davis's book, Terris Moore, the second president of the University of Alaska, punctuated one of the roughest so far by taking over the institute---for the day of May 24, 1950.

Terris Moore arrived as president-designate of the Territory of Alaska's premier educational institution in 1949. He was bright, competent, and seemed to believe that people with intelligence, good intentions, and shared goals were bound to agree about the best way of accomplishing those goals. Naturally, that attitude soon offended and alienated people who disagreed with him.

Among those people was Stuart Seaton, first director of the Geophysical Institute. Seaton was an electrical engineer with little formal education but great passion for the institution he had fought for and tried to design down to the wallcoverings. Seaton's great Alaskan ally in getting the institute up and running was Charles Bunnell, first president of the university and thus the man whom Moore displaced. That was one strike against the new president, as far as Seaton was concerned, but there were many.

The dislike apparently was not mutual; though Moore knew they were in for rough times over various matters, such as Seaton's misunderstanding of some federal financial expectations, the president was oblivious to the director's suspicions---and to the director's problems. Those were brought to his attention by some men from Washington, who dropped by Moore's office to tell him their agency was not at all satisfied with work of the Geophysical Institute. In his determination to get the fledgling institute off the ground, its director had evidently cut a corner or two. When Moore visited the institute, the most scientifically valid work he could find was a test of how different sorts of paint hold up under subarctic conditions.

It's true that geophysics concerns itself with matters from the center of the earth to the center of the sun, and paint falls in there somewhere, but not usually as a geophysical study. Moore was upset; Seaton was upset; eventually the regents were upset, and they accepted Seaton's resignation effective at the end of business on the 23rd of May 1950. In the same action, they named Moore acting director. He served only for a bit over 24 hours. That was, presumably, how long it took him to convince chemistry professor William S. Wilson to become the next acting director. Wilson shaped things up and lured world-class scientists into the institute, including the twin stars who replaced him at its helm, Sydney Chapman and Christian Elvey. The rest, as they say, is history---human history, even when it concerns science.