Charles E. Lambert

Written by Monte Remer, Class of 2026

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At the end of the 1879 school year, Willamette’s President Thomas Gatch resigned along with his entire faculty.¹ The school’s debt was ever-increasing, its expenses were constantly insurmountable, and the Board of Trustees refused to alter its operations to meet its budget. The Board decided that if Gatch resigned, Willamette’s situation was so dire that it would need to close for at least the following school year. However, the Board’s understanding was mistaken, revealing a disconnect between the Trustees and Willamette’s day-to-day functioning—a disconnect which may have contributed to the abrupt end of Charles E. Lambert’s one-year presidency.

Lambert first served two months as acting-president in 1879. He had formerly been a professor of English at the University of Indiana. In August, despite the Board’s grim outlook, Willamette elected a new faculty and resolved, “‘This, the oldest University in Oregon, will continue to maintain its high character as the leading Christian University of the Northwest Pacific Coast.’”² October of 1879 proved a fateful month for the university—Thomas Van Scoy joined the Faculty (later to go on as President) and Charles Lambert was promoted from acting-president to President. In the school’s disarray, students were charged only half the regular rates.³

The new president inspired a rising tide of optimism. It had been a long time since bright prospects were visible on the horizon. The Statesman reported in May of 1880: The Willamette University, under its present management, gives fairer promise than at any time in its history. It has been thoroughly reorganized in all its departments. The different classes in the Collegiate and Preparatory departments are now distinctly separated and their studies and duties distinctly defined. President Lambert, coming directly from an institution of the first grade in the East, and having made school government a special study, knows that to secure the greatest efficiency, a well defined system in the course of study as well as in school government must be planned and strictly followed, and it has been with this end in view that he has made the changes noted.

Lambert’s leadership of the school was by all accounts exceptional. The order he forged out of Willamette’s chaos was present from its administration down to its classrooms. He instructed in a faculty meeting that “Students [are] not to leave room till dismissed by Prof.—Ladies first” and that following class there was to be “no loafing, lounging.”⁴

In his one-year tenure, Lambert laid the groundwork for much of Willamette’s future: the organization of the Woman’s College, the more active role of the presidency, and the eventual re-establishment of the law school.⁵ He operated more like the modern concept of a university president than any of his predecessors. President Lambert “occupied a position of leadership, was busy preparing and submitting well considered plans of action for the school, and more and more administrative leadership appeared to be gravitating into the hands of the President.” In his history of the school titled Chronicles of Willamette, Robert M. Gatke speculated, “Had Charles E. Lambert continued as president, and won full support from his Board, Willamette would apparently have had a man whose conception of university administration was like that held in more recent years by able university executives.”

In light of such success, Lambert’s resignation at the start of the 1880 school year left Willamette surprised and confused. Gatke could not make sense of the decision in the pages of Chronicles. He wrote:

There is no indication in the Board minutes as to the cause of Lambert’s resignation; certainly there had been no evidence of friction and he had been re-elected for the year. His resignation was accepted without comment that reached the records. Oddly enough the transition between Lambert and Van Scoy was passed over without comment in the Advocate.”⁶

This seems especially strange given how closely the Pacific Christian Advocate followed events at Willamette. Shortly after Lambert’s resignation, the Advocate even reported on his sermon at a church dedication—an event that could easily have been overshadowed by bigger news, as Rutherford B. Hayes was visiting Forest Grove the same day, marking the first visit of a U.S. president to the state of Oregon. An account of Lambert’s sermon by an Advocate correspondent makes it more baffling still why Lambert could have possibly been chased out of his position. The correspondent described him as “A truly conscientious man, of good presence, and scholarly bearing, we welcome him among us as a minister and educator” and noted that “One of the weary lady workers said [of the sermon] after hearing it, ‘the sermon has taken all my tiredness away.’”

Lambert had sought re-election and showed no signs of intending to leave. His tenure was successful, the school’s outlook optimistic. Certainly it was not a matter of tact. Gatke wrote that when Lambert resigned, “It was not an auspicious start for the year, as Charles Lambert had proved himself an able president and his continued leadership promised much good for the University.”⁷ In an event almost reminiscent of Dead Poets Society, students banded together to circulate a petition to retain Lambert as President. The petition reads, “‘he has always commanded our highest respect and greatest esteem such as a man and instructor.’”⁸

The petition was unsuccessful. Again, we do not know why. Who responded to the petition, and how? Was Lambert insistent on leaving, even though he was successful, well-liked, and recently re-elected? Was there some party at Willamette insistent on chasing him out?

An editorial in the September 3rd, 1880 issue of the Willamette Farmer claimed it was the latter. The Farmer first addressed the same confusion towards Lambert’s resignation seen elsewhere, “The resignation of the gentleman created considerable surprise, and is deeply regretted by the many friends of the institution, as Professor Lambert is highly esteemed both personally and as an educator, and his retirement as President makes a vacancy that will be hard to fill.”⁹ The Farmer goes on to speculate: “It seems that Professor Lambert, like his predecessors, cannot work under the methods and dictation of Rev. Mr. Tower […] who has no regard for scholarship or true culture, but wants graduates turned out in regular grists, and insists upon keeping the diploma machine at work, whether graduates possess requisites or not.” F.P. Tower was Willamette’s Financial Agent at the time. The editorial continues, “Mr. Lambert represents ripe scholarship and culture and a high standing of character, while Mr. Tower represents the coarse elements too often found in the backwoods ministry.” Further still, the Farmer asserted that Tower chased out not only Lambert but also Gatch before him.

Was Tower therefore the reason for Lambert’s resignation? There is nothing which necessarily corroborates a conflict between the two, but accounts of Tower’s tenure as Financial Agent depict a restlessness which may have made him difficult to work with. During his very successful tenure as Financial Agent, Tower nearly paid off the school’s debts and on one occasion trudged through a snowstorm in the mountains to secure funds for the University.¹⁰ A relentless pursuit of the University’s success seems to have been something Tower and Lambert shared, though. Surely it would not have been the thing which chased out Lambert from the presidency, a severance so sudden that its context escaped Gatke’s methodical research.

Another possible explanation exists in Gatke’s brief speculation of what Lambert could have  accomplished had he “won full support from his Board.”¹¹ Was support from the Board of Trustees therefore something Lambert lacked, either prompting his voluntary resignation or forcing him out? Lambert’s pursuit of change might have clashed with the Board’s insistence on business-as-usual. In the school’s financial crisis which caused the resignation of Lambert’s predecessor Gatch—along with the entire Faculty—the Board had been obstinate. Gatke described how “Faced with the fearful reality of drastic re-trenchment to the point necessary to live within the income of the school the Trustees refused to make the changes and determined to go on hoping yet to overcome their financial difficulties.”¹² If they were willing to let the University’s finances sink deeper into ruin to avoid change, were the Trustees also willing to snuff out a successful presidency?

If the Board did in fact chase Lambert out of the presidency, its actions might have been ascribed to ignorance rather than malice. The Board was at that time also fertile ground for baffling, out-of-touch decisions. Gatke described its modus operandi as such:

A careful study of the Board minutes shows that at any time there was only a small group of active members on the Board. There were men elected who never attended a single meeting of the Board, others who attended very few. In most cases these names soon dropped from the list and others appeared, yet in a few cases men were elected time after time to the Board who never attended any meetings, or at most a few, and too widely spaced to gain any vital understanding of the University and its problems.¹³

These methods of operation combined with the lethargic pace of travel (a full day’s journey between Portland and Salem) and constant meetings over trivial business made for a disorganized body which was disconnected from the school it supposedly oversaw. Why would the Board have possibly chased out a successful president? It was so divorced from Willamette’s day to day operations that it may not have even understood that Lambert was successful.

The context of this inner politicking was obscure to Willamette’s faculty and students, and largely remains so to readers of the historical record. Is there some explanation, however, which reconciles the Farmer‘s confident accusation of Tower with Gatke’s open-to-interpretation note about the Board’s “full support”? As Financial Agent, Tower may have served as the face of the Board’s resistance to change, or simply its confusion and disconnection from the University. Whatever his own priorities, Tower was the Board’s representative to Willamette, making him a convenient fall-guy for the Board’s mistakes. As Gatke observed, “No consistent policy except that of immediate expediency was followed in the relationship of this agent to the Board.”¹⁴ If the Board rendered a verdict which came out of nowhere and which made no apparent sense, it would have been easy for the public to lay blame at Tower’s feet, who in his position may have been powerless and helplessly complicit in carrying out the Boards’ will.

Any of these answers might have been the context of Charles E. Lambert’s sudden, unexplainable resignation as President of Willamette, or it might have been another factor entirely. Of his legacy, only this much is certain: given only a year and two months, he left Willamette better than he found it. The University entered the Eighties with optimism and the unanimous election of a new president, Thomas Van Scoy.¹⁵ On the first day of 1882, the Collegian reported, “Prof. Chas. E. Lambert, ex-President of Willamette has recently been elected to, and accepted the chair of English Literature in the State University at Eugene. We congratulate both the Professor and the University.”¹⁶ Despite the mystery shrouding the end of his tenure, his record at Willamette ultimately concluded with a fond farewell and good wishes.

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Endnotes

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1. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 318.
2. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 320.
3. The Oregon weekly Statesman., October 24, 1879, Vol. XXIX No. 45, 1.
4. Minutes of Faculty Meetings of Willamette University, Dec. 19 1870-Oct. 18th, 1892, “March 15th, 1880”, 85.
5. See note 2
6. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 345.
7. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 354.
8. Petition, September 13, 1880. Willamette University Business records, WUA098, Box 4, Folder 5, Willamette University Archives and Special Collections.
9. Willamette Farmer, September 03, 1880, “The Resignation of Professor C.E. Lambert Tendered and Accepted”, 7.
10. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 394.
11. See note 2.
12. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 318.
13. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 321.
14. See note 12.
15. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 354.
16.  Willamette Collegian, 1882-01-01, Vol 2 No. 5, 8.
    
    

Works Referenced

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• Gatke, Robert Moulton. Chronicles of Willamette. Portland, OR: Binfords & Mort, 1943.
• Minutes of Faculty Meetings of Willamette University, December 19, 1870-October 18, 1892. Entry for March 15, 1880, p. 85.
• “Petition, September 13, 1880.” Willamette University Business records, WUA098, Box 4 Folder 5. Willamette University Archives.
• The Oregon Weekly Statesman. October 24, 1879, vol. 29, no. 45, p. 1.
• Willamette Farmer. September 3, 1880. “The Resignation of Professor C. E. Lambert Tendered and Accepted,” p. 7.
• Willamette Collegian. January 1, 1882, vol. 2, no. 5, p. 8. https://hdl.handle.net/10177/9790

Image Citations

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• Lambert, Charles. Letter to Board of Trustees, August, 28, 1880. Willamette University. Business records, WUA098, Box 1, Folder 17, Willamette University Archives.
• “Petition, September 13, 1880.” Willamette University Business records, WUA098, Box 4, Folder 5, Willamette University Archives.