Founded by Friends : the Quaker heritage of fifteen - Scarecrow Press

Haverford College 11
fall of 1918, 173 Haverfordians were in the former and 130 in the latter. A
1930 student newspaper poll found that 121 students considered themselves
pacifists, while another 143 said they believed in peace but would
support the government. By 1939, most students favored increasing U.S.
armaments, and only twelve said they were opposed to any war.
Among the new faculty brought to Haverford during Comfort’s tenure
was the highly talented Douglas Steere (1901–1995), who came in 1928 to
teach philosophy and stayed for thirty-six years. He was also a popular
lecturer and prolific writer and traveled under the auspices of the AFSC
as a personnel worker. He opened up relief and reconstruction work in
Finland in 1945, was chair of the Friends World Committee for six years,
and was Quaker representative to the Second Vatican Council. In January
1943, Douglas Steere was made chair of the Haverford Reconstruction
Section of the Citizenship and Reconstruction Unit, which trained men to
go into service under governmental direction while emphasizing Quaker
principles “to minister to suffering peoples abroad and work in needy situations
in this country . . . built around language study, study of special
areas . . . social method and practice.” In 1993, Haverford began to acquire
what has become one of its most voluminous manuscript collections, the
Douglas and Dorothy Steere Papers, which consist of correspondence,
journals, travel letters, manuscripts, and biographical materials.
FELIX MORLEY (1894–1982),
THE FIFTH PRESIDENT, 1940–1945
Felix Morley graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Haverford in 1915, was a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and received a PhD in government. A career
journalist, he came to the presidency after running the Washington Post as
a Pulitzer Prize–winning editor.
World War II presented Morley with a dilemma: preserve the college or
maintain the Quaker peace testimony. After Pearl Harbor, students were
resolutely for some sort of involvement in the war effort. In the student
newspaper for December 9, 1941, Felix Morley wrote that students should
follow their own consciences in determining whether to enlist in the war
effort. Meanwhile, the student editor of the paper suggested that military
training at Haverford should be an option.
Taking a course to appeal to both camps, President Morley suggested
bringing a noncombatant officers’ unit to train for meteorological service,
and the board of managers approved. In addition, there was a premedical
unit, an area and language study unit, and sixty engineers. By September
1943, there were 200 in the premeteorological unit as well as twenty women
among the students in a graduate relief and reconstruction program and