The chancellor's ardor for the land-grant idea, viewed in the light of his home island
by Patricia Wright
OLIVER SCOTT, BROTHER OF the UMass chancellor
and head of household at North Manse, the single-story stone
house in which both of them were born, in the Orkney Islands
off the northeast coast of Scotland, is an acerbic and ironical
fellow, as given to elusive and puzzling remarks as he is to
hospitality. Welcoming me last year to South Gravity, the cottage
on their native island that was willed to David Scott by an aunt,
and to which David and his family have returned several times
a year for most of the last three decades, Oliver rustled up
a coal fire while Winnie, his wife, made tea, and her brother,
John, made affable chit-chat.
As we sat drinking the tea, Oliver gestured toward a folder of
clippings about his brother that was lying on a sideboard. Most
of the clippings dated from David Scott's appointment at UMass,
but all allude to his journey from this tiny island North Ronaldsay
is the smallest and most northerly of the settled islands in
the archipelago, which for 400 years of its history was a fiefdom
of Norway to the University of Edinburgh, where he studied physics;
to Oxford, where he earned a Ph.D. and taught for five years
at Balliol College; and thence to a career as an academic and
administrator at the University of California at Berkeley, Michigan
State University, and, in 1993, UMass Amherst.
"Crap," pronounced Oliver, investing the word with
amused contempt and its syllables with a kind of sharp music.
(Natives of North Ronaldsay, whose native speech is, or was,
a dialect of Old Norse, speak a polite Scots-English to visitors.)
Not accurate? I asked, flustered.
"Factually correct," he conceded, sipping his tea.
"But crap."
AFTER SPENDING TIME on North Ronaldsay, I've come to think
that what may be "crap" about a recitation of David Scott's history
is how glibly it rolls off the tongue, in comparison with the dense specificity
of the view from South Gravity. Not three miles long from north to south,
the chancellor's home island is less than a mile wide at the narrow midland
on which North Manse and South Gravity stand. Superimposed on our neighboring
town of Hadley, North Ronaldsay would extend from Hadley Common to University
Drive, and not very far on either side of Route 9. And because the island
is not only small, but low-lying and treeless, virtually all of it can be
seen in a single sweeping glance.
"It's amazing how you notice people and cars moving, almost anywhere
on the island," I said this spring to Wendolin Scott, the chancellor's
daughter, who recently spent two years there. "You can see almost anything
people are doing outside their houses," I said. "Yes!" said
Wendelin. "And they can see you!"
North Ronaldsay has no village center, although its post-office, pub, airstrip,
and school are loosely grouped toward the southern end. A single branched
spine of paved road runs north-to-south, connecting the scattered crofts,
or farmsteads: grey stone buildings under an enormous sky, as in a Dutch landscape.
David Scott remembers his father and grandfather working to build those roads
with stone blasted from the rocky shore below North Manse and broken up by
hand. The chancellor mentions this as an example of the kind of labor that
life on the island then required. "I think of my father's life as one
of labor bone-crushing labor redeemed by reading," Scott said.
North Manse had no indoor plumbing until the elder Scotts hastily added a
bathroom in anticipation of their first visit from David's future wife. Water
was carried from a well several hundred yards from the house, and in the North
Atlantic storms "which really have to be seen to be believed," says
one current islander this meant crawling in the lee of a stone wall to avoid
being knocked down by the wind.
The kitchen at North Manse had an earth floor when Oliver and David and their
sister, Alison, were children. The fields were worked with horses.
The island got an electrical power grid only in the 1970s.
The power-poles marching along the island's roads are among its few aesthetic
flaws. Occasional residents like himself and his family, says the chancellor,
were especially distressed when the poles went up. "I remember once we
were sitting around going on about it and when we finished, one of the islanders
I think it was Winnie's father said, `Well, I must say, the electricity's
been quite a boon to me.'
The chancellor laughed, a self-deprecating chuckle characteristic of his conversation.
"`Quite a boon to me,'" he repeated, and added, "Puffing
on his pipe" gesturing in imitation of the sensible old Orcadian who'd
set him straight.
NOW, OF COURSE, EVERYONE on North Ronaldsay
has television and gets around by car mostly by clunker, of which
there are three or four defunct specimens in the farmyard at
North Manse, and one at South Gravity. Oliver brews ale from
a kit, and most groceries besides meat and potatoes come from
off-island. But despite the presence of cars, trucks, and tractors,
and daily flights by small plane supplementing the weekly ferry,
the ancient isolation and agricultural base of the island are
very much to be felt.
The isolation is felt in the huge expanse of ocean and sky. In
certain ways the island is lonelier now than ever, as the population
is down from its peak of 500 in the eighteenth century to just
over eighty today. The ancientness is felt in a Viking past with
which the islanders are quite conversant, and in the prehistoric
remains in which North Ronaldsay, like all of Orkney, is rich.
On Orkney's main island, a 5,000-year-old village has been excavated
within miles of a spectacular stone circle and an immense chambered
tomb. On North Ronaldsay a standing stone rises unprepossingly
in a cow pasture. An early immersion in great stretches of time
must inflect the chancellor's quick interest in history.
As to the ancient agricultural base which must inflect Scott's
affinity for the land-grant idea of practical education that's
apparent too, in the tiny fields and pastures, the low stone
houses, and, uniquely to North Ronaldsay, the celebrated kelp-eating
sheep. Bands of these half-wild, goatlike beasts, an ancient
breed dating back to the Norse occupation of Orkney, can be seen
all around the shore, their horns curving forward like sharpened
mutton-chops, their coats of long black, brown, or gray wool
flying as they clatter away over the rocks at the first sight
of a human being.
The flock is managed collectively by the islanders; a stone dike
running completely around the island confines the sheep to the
rocky beaches. At seasonal intervals the animals are driven into
stone pens for shearing, culling, and separating out the pregnant
ewes, who spend the summer in pasture with their lambs but are
turned out on the shore again in autumn. The flock is actually
at its fattest and healthiest in winter, when wild storms drive
a thick harvest of kelp far up onto the beach. In summer, the
sheep must run down to graze the kelp-beds at low tide, and occasionally
one is washed away in seas which even in fair weather can run
high.
The husbandry is harsh, but symbiotic. Without culling and medical
attention from the islanders, the flock would be regulated by
starvation and disease. Still, the visceral reaction of outsiders
to the notching of the lambs' ears a traditional practice of
branding with marks specific to each household has been one issue
separating islander from "incomer" in recent years.
Incomers are vital to an island with declining population, and
many people at UMass have heard David Scott use his home island
as a metaphor for the peaceful accomodation of diverse values.
And though even the casual visitor can discern a subdued cultural
clash "Well, when you've farmed thousands of acres in the
north of England, you don't really care for people telling you
how to handle your animals," said incomer Sandra Mawson,
who, with her husband, Brian, bought the island's pub a few years
back the island is manifestly living in peace.
There is no law enforcement on North Ronaldsay. Is there any
crime? I asked the chancellor when he told me this. "No,"
he said. "There really couldn't be. It wouldn't be allowed.
It's just too small."
STAYING FAIRLY CLOSE to South Gravity that first visit less
than a month from midsummer, with sixteen hours of daylight making the triple
reflectiveness of sky, sea, and grassy landscape almost literally stunning
I let myself be dazzled by the place, venturing out mostly to walk along the
beach east of the cottage. I did call at Antabreck, home of David's cousin,
the painter Ian Scott, and visited North Manse, where I was fed a heavenly
supper of whiskey and North Ronaldsay mutton, and taken on a summer's-night
jaunt around the north of the island, hearing the corn-cricks, seeing the
seals.
But remembering those several days I think especially of being alone at South
Gravity, acutely aware that it was someone else's house on someone else's
island. I'd walk from window to window, trying to orient myself to a landscape
that seemed both compact and huge. To the north I could see North Gravity,
the home of Alphie Swanney, the neighbor who renovated this cottage for David
and Kathleen Scott. South Gravity was built at least a century ago "probably
in a single day," says the chancellor, "and now we've spent forty
years fixing it up!" on a "but-and-ben" plan: a single block
with a chimney at each end, the tiny kitchen and sitting rooms separated by
a "box-bed" with sliding wooden doors.
There's still at least one unmodified but-and-ben in use on North Ronaldsay:
Veracott, near North Manse, which is being restored by Willie and Jean Tulloch.
Oliver and Winnie took me to meet these neighbors at an unholy hour of the
evening; the couple were just retiring, but, rolling out of the box-bed and
pulling on his jeans, Willie professed delight at the visit, and heated up
a potent nightcap while Jean lit kerosene lamps. When everyone was seated,
Willie lifted his glass to the foreign visitor, swung it around as if to toast
the lamp-lit room, and said, "Now, Pat! What do you think? What more
could you need?"
South Gravity now has most of the modern comforts. The old box-bed has been
removed to make one large sitting room. Baseboard heaters supplement the coal-grate.
A bathroom and kitchen occupy an addition built by Mr. Swanney. From a west
window I could see both North Manse and Antabreck; from a south window I could
see the island school, a two-story house with a single classroom where thirty
children were taught in David's day, and four were taught last year. Near
the school is the modestly crenellated tower of "the laird's house,"
home of North Ronaldsay's principal landowner, whose family bought
the entire island in the eighteenth century. Nowadays many former tenants
own their own land and houses.
Those houses: even the smallest have their own names, and the names figure
constantly in conversation. Wendelin Scott describes a childhood visit to
"Susan of Nouster." Oliver's son-in-law, telling a caller Oliver
is out, says not "I think he's at Anne and John's," but "I
think he's at Purtabreck." The chancellor says, "I'm sure I'm `David
of South Gravity' to some folks on the island."
The word "folks," too, is nuanced. "Island folks" in general
are the eighty-odd people who make up its tight community and who cooperate
to an extent startling to a visitor. At closing time at the pub on a dark,
wet night, for instance, whoever has farthest to go takes whoever's car is
working. This seems to have little to do with personal attachment. "Incomers
can get confused," says Wendelin Scott, "because they'll drive by
a field and see people who just the night before were saying terrible things
about each other out working together on a sick animal."
"My folks on the island" means to David Scott not his parents, who
died in the `70s?, but his brother and cousins and their families, each associated
with a house, as he and his family are now associated with South Gravity:
Ian of Antabreck, Anne of Purtabreck, Kathleen of South Ness. Almost all the
houses, of course, have been there longer than anyone now living. Island folks
belong to the island as much or more than it belongs to them.
ON A DRESSER IN THE BEDROOM at South Gravity is a framed
photograph of a very young, solemn David Scott in graduation robes. His progress
from the island school to the Kirkwall Grammar School, the county high school
for the college-bound on Orkney's main island, then on to Edinburgh and Oxford,
is a source of some pride on the island. Alphie Swanney shows me a snapshot
of himself with the chancellor and his youngest son, Jeremy, who'd come to
see him a few months before. "The Scotts were always very clever lads,"
he said. "Although David has made more of his gifts."
Mr. Swanney's assessment reflects a painful reality of rural life, where success
is often equated with departure. David Scott's story is not unique: with its
strong emphasis on education, Orkney has been said to be "exporting Ph.D.s"
through much of the century, and outmigration of the talented and ambitious
has been going on for generations. "People didn't know what to think
at first of my coming to stay on the island," says Wendelin Scott. "I
think they felt, `Wow, if you're coming back from America after a whole generation,
you must really be a failure."
The equation must be galling to those who remain. Oliver Scott also went to
college, at the University of Aberdeen, but returned to farm the family croft.
"You must be proud of your brother," I said when we met. "Not
particularly," said Oliver in his astringent way, and turned his attention
to rolling a cigarette. Later, when I asked about young people leaving North
Ronaldsay his daughter Evelyn and her husband are one of the few young married
couples on the island he smiled and said, "Oh, well, you know, the bright
lights of Kirkwall."
If Oliver Scott's decision was one faced by many sons of farm families, Ian
Scott's was one made by extremely few painters: he has pursued a serious artistic
career on the remote farm on which he was born. An ardent partisan of the
traditional life of the island, which he chronicles in a regular "Letter
from North Ronaldsay" to the Orcadian newspaper in Kirkwall, he
also makes its rugged shore the subject of most of his art.
Ian was nearly apoplectic, summer before last, over infighting about management
of the sheep flock. "People want to get out of the mess in the south,
but they don't want to take part in the life we have here," he fumed
over tea in the parlor at Antabreck, where his mother, Bethia, then terminally
ill, sat dozing in an armchair, and his father, Sidney whose wide, narrow-lipped
grin is reproduced in his nephew David sat drinking tea and eating syrup-cake.
That David uses North Ronaldsay as an emblem of peaceful change "that
he tells young college students about it!" was a source of passionate
irritation to Ian, at least at this time of arguments over the sheep flock
and sick and aging parents at home. (Bethia Scott died soon after that visit,
Sidney this spring. "Oliver was saying on the phone the other night that
we're the older generation now," said the chancellor in May. "Sidney
was the last of our parents' generation.")
Asked what David says when he points out what sees as sentimentalism to him,
Ian said, "Oh, he just laughs."
THE DIVERGENCES BETWEEN outlooks of these two bright cousins emerged early.
They were at the Kirkwall Grammar School together, in several issues of the
school's literary journal, The Kirkwallean, at the county library,
are both essays by Ian and poems by David.
Ian's are strikingly prescient of his lifelong attachments: in 1957 he was
already composing paeans to haying and noon heat, to the rabbits, rocks, sheep,
and surf of his island home. A poem by David, "Perspectives of Peace,"
looks in exactly the opposite direction: "Up in the air," smiled
Oliver when I told him about it. "Earth spins in its dome of a purple
cone," began the sixteen-year-old David, and in a series of formal
stanzas stretched his imagination"Through infinite planes, [where]
the Spirit reigns," from "silenced caves, where green phantoms
wave," to "the tip of the cone . . . the silent zone / Of
Peace, beyond the sun."
Not Milton, maybe, but a remarkable expression of the mind of a young physicist-to-be,
and remarkably prescient of the affinity for structures and overviews, models
and design, that is characteristic of David Scott's work as administrator.
And not alien to his upbringing, when you think of the parents who redeemed
laborious days with evenings of reading; or of his favorite set of books from
North Manse ("The Complete Home University, I think it was called;
the whole of knowledge in eighteen volumes!"); or of his uncle Sidney,
who wanted to place a visitor immediately on the globe ("Ah the far west
of America, then") and who was enchanted, his grandniece Wendelin recalls,
by the thought that all the continents of the world are connected under the
sea.
It wasn't a foregone conclusion that David would follow Oliver to grammar
school in Kirkwall, the only possible gateway to college. Entry was by examination;
if you didn't pass, you stayed on at your village school for a few years,
then learned a trade. Despite his obvious intelligence David failed, at age
ten, to score high enough on the entrance exam. "That's certainly one
reason I know standardized tests aren't the only measure of aptitude,"
said the chancellor this spring. "It's a fail-safe system: if you set
the standard high enough, you don't let anyone in who can't succeed. But you
also reject masses of people who can succeed."
At the time he took the test, Scott had never seen a truck, a telephone, or
a building of more than two stories. He remembers especially a logic question
involving an elevator and a dwarf: you couldn't solve it unless you realized
elevators have buttons arranged vertically, with the upper ones too high to
be reached by a short person. And he had never seen an elevator. This early
experience underlies his conviction that educational systems must accomodate
cultural difference. It may also underlie his committment to affirmative action:
it was the intervention of the island schoolteacher that got him back on the
grammar school track. "It was that one heroic teacher who went in and
made the case against the environmental bias of the test," he says, "and
who managed to prevail against whatever powers she had to contend with."
Although leaving the island for further education was what many islanders
wanted for their children, the separation was painful. "Once you left,
you were pretty much gone for the winter," says the chancellor. "It's
a pretty dangerous piece of water" between North Ronaldsay and Kirkwall,
some fifty miles to the south. Even getting onto the ferry on North Ronaldsay
was harrowing in those days before the pier was extended.
"You had to jump into a little boat that one moment would be on a level
with the pier, the next moment would be thirty feet down," says the chancellor
with a laugh. He started jumping into that little boat every fall when he
was ten years old, and never lived a full year on North Ronaldsay again.
SIMPLY ON THE FACE of it, David Scott's journey
is an amazing one. He's traveled far enough that it's not obvious
at a glance how far. "I just thought of him as a British
guy in an expensive suit," says a friend of ours on the
faculty. (Although another, art professor Hanlyn Davies, a Welshman,
says thoughtfully, "I think there's some grit in him; I
think he's an island man.") Our immaculate chancellor, with
his quick step and his well-cut suits, his interesting accent
and his Oxford Ph.D., may seem far removed from a childhood of
such material simplicity and cultural specificity.
But he isn't removed from it. When I asked Oliver to point me
toward more authentic sources to his brother's history than those
summary news clippings, he said there were two at South Gravity.
One, a handwritten list of "Rules of the House," is
tacked up on a doorframe. It begins by instructing the visitor
not to move things, not to break things, and so on. By the time
it gets down to requesting the replacement of any electricity
consumed, the reader begins to realize, as Oliver says, that
"this is David being tongue-in-cheek." And in fact
drollery and a fondness for verbal play are notable aspects of
the chancellor's personality, along with a certain parrying discretion
one can well imagine would be useful in a community demanding
so much interaction and offering so little privacy.
The other source mentioned by Oliver I didn't see for myself;
I didn't see it lying around, and it would have felt unseemly
to look for it. It's a book, he said, in which David has recorded
every visit he's made to South Gravity. "The island has
really been a central part of our lives," Kathleen Scott
told me last fall, adding that when their son Kelvin was ill
as a child, they'd sit together and imagine the wind in the long,
hummocky grass outside South Gravity.
An American herself, Kathleen Scott speaks of being struck again
and again by the islanders' love of discourse. Telling stories
of the English and German fleets off their shores in World War
II, for instance, "one would begin, and then another would
chime in, and another it was like the making of a Norse saga."
The chancellor, too, speaking of his home island, returns frequently
to the subject of conversation: the love of it, in a community
with few diversions; the necessity for it, in a community where
survival demands cooperation. "I'm sure that's shaped my
ideas about leadership," he says. "You can't do it
without dialogue." You can't do it either, I thought to
myself, without knowing when to keep your mouth shut, and how
to hunker down and wait out a storm.
Devotion to dialogue, and an understanding of its limits; intimacy
with nature; early schooling in the value of tenacity, even of
stubborness; a respect for the getting of one's living from the
land and the ingenuity of one's hands; belief in the redemptive
power of education, and of broad access to it: these aspects
of the chancellor's character are illuminated, if not explained,
by the view from South Gravity. The campus he now oversees, it
occurs to me, is about the same size as North Ronaldsay. Perhaps
a certain concentration of the mind is one appeal of campuses,
as it is of islands.
"Places that are connected with everywhere else, but also
have some beauty and peace," Scott said recently, speaking
of the qualities that may allow remote archipelagos to flourish
in the information age. And again: "Being able to see everything,
and all at the same time that is always with me," he said
of his home island.
