Title: Warren Taylor Papers, 1924-1990

ID: RG 30/015

Extent: 7.2 Linear Feet

Predominant Dates: 1925-73

SERIES DESCRIPTIONS

Series I. Correspondence Files (Incoming and Outgoing), 1925-90, n.d. 1.6 l.f.

Correspondence of Warren Taylor, arranged into four subseries: 1. Correspondence (chronologically arranged); 2. Correspondence (alphabetically arranged); 3. Miscellaneous Correspondence (alphabetically arranged by subject); and 4. Letters From Students (chronologically arranged). The arrangement of Subseries 1 and Subseries 2 was established by the Archivist in 1968, while the arrangement of Subseries 3 and Subseries 4 was established by the Project Archivist in 1992.

Series II. Talks and Writings, 1928-87, n.d. .8 1.f.

Published and unpublished writings of Warren Taylor, including articles, book reviews, letters to the editor, poetry, and talks. For Taylor's drama criticism, consult Series III, Subseries 2, Oberlin Dramatic Association.

Series III. Files Relating to Special Academic Programs, 1930-74, n.d., 1.6 l.f.

Correspondence, memoranda, news releases, reports, playbills, drama reviews (photocopies of newspaper articles), one scrapbook, lectures (copies), and syllabi. Arranged into three subseries by name of program: Subseries 1. The Humanities Program at Oberlin; 2. The Oberlin Dramatic Association; and 3. The Twentieth Century Program at Hiram College. Within subseries, materials are arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Series IV. Professional Files, 1931-87, n.d. 2.2 l.f.

Annual reports, correspondence (originals, file copies, and photocopies), memoranda, minutes, and various proposals and reports. Arranged into three subseries: 1. Files Relating to the Trustee-Faculty Governance Controversy; 2. Files Relating to Faculty Business; and 3. Files Relating to Professional Activities and Affiliations. Within subseries, materials are arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Series V. Miscellaneous Files, 1924-83 .6 l.f.

Correspondence, signed petitions, clippings (originals and photocopies), commencement programs, and other printed materials. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Series VI. Notes and Course Materials, 1934, 1955, 1964, 1970, 1971, 1985, n.d. .2 l.f.

Consists of hand-written notes on various subjects, including three volumes of Taylor’s student notes from an English class.

Series VII. Photographs, 1955, 1964-67, n.d., .2 l.f.

Color and black and white photographs, depicting various faculty and student activities. Arranged alphabetically by subject.

Abstract

Creators

Administrative/Biographical History

Warren Taylor was born in Bedford County, Tennessee on July 2, 1903. He received the B.A. degree in 1924 and the M.A. degree in 1926 from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. From 1924 to 1925, he taught at Nashville's Jordonia High School. He served as Instructor at the University of Tennessee from 1926 to 1929 and in 1930 moved to the University of Chicago to undertake graduate work in English literature. He interrupted his studies to come to Oberlin College as Instructor in the English Department, then and now the largest humanities department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Taylor's colleagues in 1930 included professors Wager, Sherman, Mack, Jelliffe, Taft, McLaughlin, Lampson, Bongiorno, Diekhoff, Shaver, Singleton, and Williams. In 1934, Taylor took an academic leave of absence in order to complete the Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago. His thesis, Tudor Figures of Rhetoric, was published by the University of Chicago in 1937, the year Taylor returned to Oberlin to resume the post of Instructor. He reached the rank of Assistant Professor in 1941, Associate Professor in 1947, and Professor of English in 1950. From 1958 to 1961, he served as Chairman of the English Department. His lectures on Shakespeare and American literature marked the intellectual high points of many undergraduate careers, and several of his students sought advanced degrees in literature. Taylor retired in 1970 but continued to teach until 1974 as Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Hiram College.

During his forty-four-year teaching career, Taylor promoted the value of an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum in educating the "whole person." He traced his approach to the educational philosophy of President Henry Churchill King (1858-1934), which celebrated what King termed the "primacy of the person." In 1946, Taylor convened a committee of the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Division to plan an interdisciplinary course in the humanities. The resulting course, "The Humanistic Tradition," was offered for the first time in 1946. Lectures, given by Oberlin faculty and visiting scholars, aimed at a comparative and synthetic treatment of philosophical systems, religious beliefs, and works of art from antiquity to the twentieth century.Taylor's interest in humanistic education led to his selection in 1951-52 as a Ford Foundation Faculty Fellow for the study of interdisciplinary programs in the Humanities. During the summer of 1958, he chaired a faculty seminar sponsored by the Lilly Foundation and was principal author of its report, "The Humanities at Oberlin."

In addition to his coordination of the Humanistic Tradition lectures, Taylor was very actively involved in the Oberlin Dramatic Association. Beginning in 1930, he was a regular drama critic for the Oberlin Review and participated in student productions of Shakespeare's plays. His literary and dramatic instincts found further outlet in The Poetry Trio, which he founded in 1953 with professors John Kneller (French) and Heinz Politzer (German) for the purpose of reading poetry aloud in the original language. One of the most popular poetry programs, "Poems About Paintings," was presented at the Cleveland and Baltimore museums of art in 1966.

At the core of Taylor's approach to the humanities and to the educational enterprise in general was a passionate commitment to the American democratic tradition. The upheaval of the second World War, and the social revolutions of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, reconfirmed his support for academic freedom and civil liberties. Throughout the years of the governance controversy at Oberlin College, from 1945 to the end of his life, Taylor lifted his voice against the abrogation of faculty power. He served as faculty gadfly for the administrations of presidents William E. Stevenson (1945-59), Robert Kenneth Carr (1960-70), Robert Works Fuller (1970-74), Emil Charles Danenberg (1975-81), and S. Frederick Starr (1983- ), restating to each administration his understanding of the purpose of Oberlin. On the question of faculty governance, he was one of the earliest to challenge the views of college trustee, Erwin N. Griswold (b. 1904).

Taylor's support for faculty governance and academic freedom animated his service to the Association of American University Professors. From 1943 to 1947, he served as President of the Oberlin College Chapter. In 1953, he was named to the Association's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, a post he held for twelve years. He also served as Chairman of the A.A.U.P. Committee on Organization. From 1958 to 1960, he served as the national Association's First Vice President.

Warren Taylor was a gifted writer. His essays, articles, talks, and reviews display a vigor of expression rare among academics. His drama criticism, particularly of Shakespeare, is especially piercing. During the late twenties and early thirties, several of his poems appeared in southern avant-garde poetry periodicals, including Blues, A Magazine of New Rhythms based in Columbus Mississippi, and Bozart, a bimonthly review based in Atlanta, Georgia. Taylor co-edited, with Donald Hall, the anthology entitled Poetry in English, published by Macmillan in 1963. In 1966, he published a collection of texts for use in English composition courses, Models for Thinking and Writing (World). His output of essays and articles includes "The Meaning of Teaching" (1941); "Education and the Criticism of Life" (1942); "What Colleges Learn from War" (1943); "The Moral Obligation of a College" (1953); "Educational Myopia: Eight Causes and Treatments" (1962); "The Primacy of the Person" (1968); and "The Achievement of Oberlin College" (1969). These and other writings take up a theme to which Taylor returned again and again: the role of liberal education in democratic society.

Warren Taylor married Adele Elizabeth Wanner (A.B. Oberlin, 1934) on 26 August 1933. They had four sons: Geoffrey Warren (A.B. Oberlin 1957), J. Ransom, Thomas William, and William Dickinson. Warren Taylor died in Oberlin at the age of 87 in 1991.

SOURCES CONSULTED

Staff file of Warren Taylor (28)

Subjects (links to similar collections)

Forms of Material (links to similar genres)

Languages of Materials

Administrative Information

Scope and Contents:

The collection is arranged into the following records series: I. Correspondence; II. Talks and Writings; III. Files Relating to Special Academic Programs; IV. Professional Files; V. Miscellaneous Files; VI. Notes and Course Materials; and, VII. Photographs. Within series, files are arranged into subseries, and thereunder they are arranged chronologically or alphabetically by topic or type of material. Notes in Taylor's hand, explaining the contents of various files, are maintained as they were found.

The correspondence of Warren Taylor is both personal and professional in nature and consists mainly of incoming letters from colleagues and friends. Correspondents include Oberlin professors Frederick B. Artz (1894-1983), Andrew Bongiorno (b. 1900), Roger A. Jelliffe (1883-1970), Chester L. Shaver (1907-80), R. H. Stetson (1872-1950), Charles Henry Wager (1869-1939), and Vanderbilt University classmates Samuel Weingarten and Richard West. The correspondence housed in Subseries 3, Miscellaneous Correspondence, includes letters (1970) from students written during the Vietnam War requesting support for their status as Conscientious Objectors; letters from publishers of literary magazines, including one letter (1927) from the modernist French periodical, Transition; and incoming correspondence (1969-70) commenting on Taylor's review of John Barnard's book, From Evangelicalism to Progressivism at Oberlin College, 1866-1917 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1969). The incoming correspondence (1942-79) from Taylor's students, housed in Subseries 4, is among the richest of its kind. Letters dating from the nineteen-sixties, seventies and eighties are steeped in the idealism of those years and reveal the degree to which Taylor fostered that idealism in the classroom. Taylor's student correspondents include political philosophers Cecilia Kenyon (1922-90) and Sheldon Wolin. Correspondence from neuroscientist Roger W. Sperry (b. 1913) is filed with signed offprints of his writings in Series V.

Taylor's teaching career is documented by files pertaining to the Humanities Program at Oberlin, the Oberlin Dramatic Association, and the Twentieth Century Program at Hiram College. Records of the Humanities Program include articles and press releases (1947-49) announcing the establishment of the program, a nearly complete run of the lectures (1943-70) that formed the program's intellectual core (1943-70), and correspondence (1951-74) with guest speakers. The twentieth century component of the program was offered to Hiram College students from 1970 to 1974; course materials for this program are present here. Taylor's involvement in the Oberlin Dramatic Association is recorded in his drama reviews (1932-51) for the Oberlin Review, playbills, and a scrapbook (1932-47). Also preserved are several small watercolor drawings (1934) of costumes and stage designs for a production of Electra. For programs presented by Taylor and members of the Poetry Trio, consult the records of Series IV, Subseries 3. For Taylor's summations of his professional activities during the years 1931 to 1944, consult his annual reports to President Wilkins, housed in Series IV, Subseries 2.

Records relating to Taylor's faculty service include a valuable series of files, carefully assembled by Taylor, documenting the evolution of the modern faculty-trustee governance controversy from 1940 to 1985. Documentation includes correspondence, memoranda, historical chronologies, notes, and statements by Taylor setting forth his interpretation of the so-called "Finney Compact" and its legal establishment by the 1903 college by-laws. Files contain Taylor's 1945 statement on behalf of the General Faculty Council, issued in response to President Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1880-1966), who, with the support of trustee Erwin N. Griswold, had proposed delegating to administrative bodies what had been faculty council responsibilities: budget preparation, appointment of deans, and review of faculty salaries. Taylor addresses these and other issues relating to the power of the president and the role of faculty councils in a series of letters to Oberlin's presidents and trustees between 1945 and 1985. Also present are letters (1973) from Oberlin College trustee, Erwin N. Griswold, rebutting Taylor's views.

Taylor's fervent belief in academic freedom and the preservation of civil liberties is further reflected in papers (1944-70) documenting his work for the American Association of University Professors at the local and national levels. Files include correspondence (incoming and file copies), telegrams, and miscellaneous printed materials pertaining to A.A.U.P. business. Several files document the case of Fisk University professor Lee Lorch. Lorch was terminated by the University in 1955 and then sued the institution. Taylor was chairman of the special committee which investigated the case. Also present is correspondence relating to Taylor's service on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on Organization. Additional records pertain to various literary conferences held on the Oberlin Campus and coordinated by Taylor. Correspondence (1955) on the Ohio Conference on Intellectual Freedom includes an autograph letter from author Pearl Buck (1892-1973) and one from civil liberties scholar Walter Gellhorn (b. 1906).

This collection does not include a comprehensive run of Taylor's numerous articles; it does, however, include a bibliography listing his articles and reviews through 1971. Housed in Series II, Talks and Writings, are several published and unpublished articles, book reviews which appeared in The Nashville Tennessean during the late twenties, seven volumes of avant-garde poetry periodicals (1928-30, 1934-35) containing poems by Taylor, reprints and tear sheets, published and unpublished lectures and college assembly talks, and a manuscript designated as "Work in Progress."

The remainder of the collection includes miscellaneous newspaper clippings relating to Taylor, a series of files (1963) on the Barrows House controversy, commencement programs (1924, 1937) and photographs of various faculty and student activities, including Oberlin Dramatic Association productions, Poetry Trio members, and the Shakespeare Quadricentennial dinner.

Detailed Description
Series I: Correspondence, Incoming and Outgoing, 1925-1990, undated
Series II: Talks and Writings, 1928-1987, undated
Series III: Files Relating to Special Academic Programs, 1930-1974, undated
Series IV: Professional Files, 1931-1987, undated
Series V: Miscellaneous Files, 1924-1987, undated
Series VI: Notes and Course Materials, 1934-1985, undated
Series VII: Photographs, 1955-1967, undated