Gerald R. Ford Dies at 93; President Reached Out to Academe After Acrimony of Nixon Era

By JEFFREY BRAINARD

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Liberal academics may best remember Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States, unfondly because of the pardon he granted to his former boss, Richard M. Nixon, over Mr. Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Ford, who died on Tuesday night at the age of 93, held the presidency for just under 2½ years and was defeated in his bid for re-election by Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was a short tenure in which issues affecting higher education did not feature prominently. Mr. Ford focused on trying to control soaring inflation and oil prices and to deal with a recession.

However, Mr. Ford did take several steps early in his presidency to extend a welcoming hand to academics and other bitter critics of Mr. Nixon's policies who had felt alienated from the White House. Mr. Ford suspended registration for the military draft and started a program to give clemency to people who had resisted it during the Vietnam War.

In that and other respects, Mr. Ford's legacy, for both academe and American society in general, was more symbolic than substantive.

For some, his presidency started to bring a sense of closure to the tumultuous decade that preceded it, including assassinations, race riots, Watergate, and strife and protests on college campuses and elsewhere over the Vietnam War. To others, including presidential historians, his tenure was ineffectual and marked by drift, and closure for the country did not truly begin until the election of Mr. Carter.

Compared with Mr. Nixon, Mr. Ford seemed to represent a calming presence in the White House. Maybe it was his down-to-earth -- some would say bland -- style. Maybe it was his tall and solid physique: He had played center on a University of Michigan football team that won two national championships before he graduated, in the Class of 1935. Or maybe he just seemed harmless, especially after the actor Chevy Chase on the television show Saturday Night Live lampooned Mr. Ford as prone to slipping and falling down.

Mr. Ford justified his decision to pardon Mr. Nixon by saying he wanted to help the country to heal and move forward. Hecklers didn't forget, though. During a 1975 visit by Mr. Ford to the University of Vermont, students chanted, "Jail to the chief" and "No pardon."

Mr. Nixon had appointed Mr. Ford as vice president in 1973, after Mr. Ford's predecessor in that job, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned and pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion. Mr. Nixon resigned as president in August 1974, after he was implicated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in, and Mr. Ford succeeded him. One month later, Mr. Ford pardoned Mr. Nixon of any crimes stemming from the scandal, a move that enraged many liberals on campuses and elsewhere.

When Mr. Ford reached out to people in academe, it was a pronounced turnaround from his predecessor: Mr. Nixon had had little contact with intellectuals, whom he considered monolithically liberal and hostile toward him. The names of several academics had turned up on Mr. Nixon's notorious "enemies list," a written compilation of people he considered political adversaries.

One of Mr. Ford's first speeches as president, delivered in August 1974 at Ohio State University, was on the role of higher education in preparing qualified workers.

A photograph from February 1976 shows a smiling Mr. Ford meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House with a delegation of more than a dozen university presidents and officials from higher-education associations.

What's more, Mr. Ford re-established the post of presidential science adviser and reconstituted a presidential science-advisory board. Mr. Nixon had abolished both in 1973 because the board opposed his plans to develop antiballistic missiles and a commercial supersonic airplane called the SST.

Early in his tenure, Mr. Ford attended a series of six meetings, organized by staff members for his benefit, featuring debates among experts from academe on public-policy topics like the world's food supply and race and ethnicity in the United States.

"Ford was very receptive to open controversy as long as it was reasoned and civil," said Robert A. Goldwin, whom Mr. Ford appointed as a full-time White House liaison to academics and who organized the meetings. Mr. Goldwin, a former dean of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., said in an interview last January that the meetings were held "for the purpose of a better-informed White House." Mr. Ford, he said, showed that "he was a very good listener."

Among the professors at the session on ethnicity were Nathan Glazer of Harvard University, a sociologist who in 1975 was a critic of affirmative action; John Higham of the Johns Hopkins University, a historian of ethnicity who supported the civil-rights movement; and Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist and maverick commentator on the struggles of African-American citizens.

Despite that apparent open-mindedness, Mr. Ford proved something of a disappointment to higher education when it came to budget proposals.

He advocated limiting increases in federal spending because he feared that they would drive up inflation, which was running at 11 percent in 1974. To that end, he proposed flat or reduced spending for student-aid programs in budgets he submitted to Congress, although he did propose above-inflation increases for academic research.

However, Congress generally provided larger increases for student aid than he had requested and twice overrode Mr. Ford's vetoes of spending bills containing those higher numbers.

When it came to federal policy affecting academe, Mr. Ford suggested no major changes, and his proposals were ignored by Congress, where both chambers were controlled by Democrats throughout his tenure.

In 1976, as Congress began considering changes in the Higher Education Act's amendments of 1972, that era's body of legislation setting policy for academe, Mr. Ford suggested requiring each college to publicly disclose statistics about how many of its graduates had found jobs. A Congressional aide said at the time that lawmakers had listened to the proposal "as a matter of courtesy." The idea didn't make it into the final version of the education bill, which Mr. Ford signed.

Presidential historians have regarded Mr. Ford's administration over all as unremarkable, partly because of his inability to tame inflation -- pundits poked fun at his slogan "Whip Inflation Now." Many voters concluded that he was out of touch when he claimed, during a 1976 campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe."

After leaving the presidency, Mr. Ford became an adjunct professor of political science at Michigan. His presidential library was dedicated at Michigan in 1981. In 2000 the university named its public-policy school for him. He had cut back his public appearances in recent years, but he attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the school, in November 2004.

As a young man studying at Michigan, Mr. Ford majored in economics and political science. After graduating, he became a boxing coach and assistant football coach at Yale University, and he had hoped to attend law school there. Yale initially denied him admission because of his full-time coaching responsibilities but later admitted him. He graduated in 1941 in the top 25 percent of his class while continuing to coach.

He set up a law practice in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., taught a course in business law at the now-defunct University of Grand Rapids, and coached its football team.

Mr. Ford served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948 and rose to be minority leader.

In his retirement, Mr. Ford served on the boards of several corporations and lived in Rancho Mirage, Calif., near Palm Springs. He died at his home.