A Ph.D.’s Reverie: The Letters

Frank Guittard, for years history department chair at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, was facing his personal Everest. His university president Samuel P. Brooks had strongly advised him to go back to school and earn his doctorate. So now at age fifty-six Frank was sweating blood at Stanford as the oldest student in the room and occasionally wondering why he had agreed to do it. Brooks, who was not well at the time, had his own ultimate challenge-defending against an unrelenting fundamentalist archenemy intent on exposing alleged evolutionists on Baylor's faculty, the battle requiring Brooks to adopt increasingly aggressive defensive strategies to protect academic freedom. These lively, colorful letters from the 1920s by an unassuming professor and his family are bound to entertain, resonate, and inform with their "everyman" and "you are there" feeling. Frank's family members went about their normal, everyday lives.