On Steven G. Poskanzer’s fourth day as president of Carleton College, he got a voice-modulated telephone call. “It sounded like Darth Vader,” he says.
The caller identified himself as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the intellectual giant who died in 1832. He welcomed the new president and suggested that he reach out via e-mail to a friend, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, the Romantic writer and philosopher.
Mr. Poskanzer, who has held administrative posts at SUNY-New Paltz, the University of Chicago, Princeton, and Penn, already knew that Carleton students exalted Schiller—or, more accurately, Schiller’s plaster bust. Since the 1950s, when students liberated Schiller from a library or an academic building (the legend differs), they have perpetually swiped him from one another and staged his elaborate cameos at public events.
Twice, in 1962 and 2004, Schiller dangled from a helicopter over a homecoming football game. He has been photographed from Lake Superior to the River Thames. Before Mr. Poskanzer started at Carleton this past August, he told the student newspaper that he looked forward to meeting the illustrious figure, who has broken in half at least once, in a nasty fall from a horse (he was repaired and later replaced).
On the phone, the president buttered up Goethe. He then e-mailed the “August, Awesome, All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and Highly Respected Guardians of Schiller.”
“How best can I describe the sentiments which arose in my heart once I realized the momentous occasion at hand?” Mr. Poskanzer wrote. He and the anonymous guardians, presumed to be Carleton students, spent a few weeks exchanging lofty rhetoric and Schiller quotes. Toward the beginning of the fall term, they instructed him to proceed to a specific location in the college’s arboretum.
There Mr. Poskanzer discovered, behind a rock, an envelope containing a cellphone and a number to call. The person who answered told him which trails to follow. As the president walked on—20 minutes, 30, 40—he grew expectant. “I’m thinking, ‘Gee,’” he says, “‘are people just going to jump out of the woods and surround me?’”
In a secluded area, a masked man in a jacket and tie stepped out of the brush and waved. He explained that he and his associates would briefly entrust Schiller to the president. The man extracted the basketball-size bust from a backpack and drew Mr. Poskanzer into the trees, documenting the exchange on a tripod-mounted camera. The president then swaddled Schiller in a towel, stuffed him in a gym bag, and hiked home. The precious cargo was heavy; he had to switch hands several times.
Still, the tradition justified the trouble, Mr. Poskanzer says. He played along to signal that he not only understood the quirky Carleton ethos but shared it. He also hoped that the episode, captured in photos, would cast him as a good sport. “It was important for me, as a brand new president,” he says, “to show that I was an accessible, approachable person.”
Keeping Schiller’s presence a secret, he used his camera’s self-timer to snap a series of shots: shaving with Schiller, donning matching ties, riding a scooter, having a drink after a round of croquet, reading each other’s books, dining by candlelight.
“A Saturday afternoon when I should have been unpacking in the house, I took a lot of pictures,” Mr. Poskanzer says. He confesses to eating Schiller’s dinner after the shoot.
With his family still back east as his children finish high school, the president could have found Schiller to be nice company. But Mr. Poskanzer says they never became close. “I did not talk to him,” he says. When they weren’t taking pictures, he stashed Schiller in a closet drawer.
Late one night another masked man came to his back door and, in a prearranged dialogue, supplied the endings to several Schiller quotes. Only then would the president let him in and surrender the bust. (“I’m not going to hand Schiller over to just anybody,” Mr. Poskanzer says.) A few days later, the shaving shot ran in the campus newspaper—and, of course, was posted online.
A trustee, Catherine James Paglia, soon spotted it. “The minute I saw that picture on Facebook, I thought, ‘We’ve got the right guy,’” she told Carleton’s alumni magazine.
The current guardians were also impressed, they wrote in the Carl, a student magazine. “If Poskanzer’s interactions with Schiller thus far are any indication of his presidential term,” they said, “Steven G. Poskanzer is going to do very well here.”
