Calvin Plimpton; physician led Amherst, Beirut colleges

As he prepared to leave Amherst College, where he had been president for more than a decade, Calvin Plimpton extolled the benefits -- the need, even -- of living life with a furrowed brow.

"From my point of view, it is of great importance to be bothered a great deal by almost anything," he told the Globe in 1970. "I can think of very few issues that did not bother me greatly. Worry gets you doing the best you can. I would feel awful if anyone were in my position and things did not bother him."

Whether dodging bullets in Beirut, guiding Amherst through student protests, or struggling to play a passage of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," Dr. Plimpton always found a few things to fret about. For him, worry was a worthy trade-off in the pursuit of knowledge.

"His belief was that you could risk anything for education," said his son David of Brooklyn.

Dr. Plimpton, a physician who led three colleges and narrowly missed becoming a hostage in 1985 when he bowed out of a flight to Beirut, died Tuesday at his home in Westwood, where he had lived for several years. He was 88 and had suffered complications from surgery for a fractured hip.

"I still believe that the institutions of higher education are the most hopeful instruments that have been invented by man for creative change," he said in 1970.

Tall, rangy, and only a few pounds heavier than he had been when he boxed at Amherst as an undergraduate, Dr. Plimpton was 41 when he became president of the college in 1960. An aficionado of Chaucer, he had specialized in metabolic diseases as a physician and had learned Arabic, his fifth language, while serving as chairman of the department of medicine at the American University of Beirut.

"We want to set people free to use their powers to the fullest," he told the Globe in 1960, after being named president of Amherst. "Educating people at the college level is just that."

Calvin Hastings Plimpton was born in Boston and grew up in Walpole. After attending Phillips Exeter Academy, he graduated from Amherst in 1939 and from Harvard Medical School in 1943. He received a master's in biochemistry from Harvard in 1947 and a doctorate in medical science from Columbia University in 1952.

While at Harvard Medical School, he married Ruth Talbot. The Plimptons lived in New York City in the early 1950s, and he worked at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons until 1957, when he took a leave to teach in Beirut.

Life in Lebanon posed challenges. Once the Plimptons were hosting a cocktail party at their home in downtown Beirut and were out on the balcony with guests.

"A bullet came whizzing between my parents and slammed into the wall," said their son Tom of Leverett. "Upon which my mother commented, 'You know, it's very nice in the hallway inside.' And they went in and continued the party."

At one point Ruth Plimpton and the two youngest of their four children spent two months in Greece and Italy for reasons of safety.

"It is spoken of in Beirut as the 'political events of 1958,' " she told the Globe in 1960. "Just overnight it ended, and everything was serene."

After moving to Amherst, the Plimptons hosted President Kennedy when he visited on Oct. 22, 1963, to dedicate the Robert Frost Library. According to the college, Dr. Plimpton told the audience during the ceremony that they were witnessing "the birth of a memory," words that resonated a month later, when Kennedy was assassinated.

Six years later, during burgeoning Vietnam War protests, members of President Nixon's Cabinet attributed the disorder on the nation's campuses to a small minority of students. Dr. Plimpton promptly sent a sharply critical letter to Nixon and publicly released the text.

"The pervasive and insistent disquiet on many campuses throughout the nation indicates that unrest results, not from a conspiracy by a few, but from a shared sense that the nation has no adequate plans for meeting the crises of society," he wrote.

While at Amherst, he also secured funding to begin creating Hampshire College, which became the fifth of the five-college system in the Pioneer Valley, along with Amherst, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts.

In 1971, Dr. Plimpton left Amherst for Downstate Medical School in New York, where he was president for several years and then professor of medicine.

He had been a member of the American University of Beirut's board of trustees for many years when its president, Malcolm Kerr, was shot to death outside his office in 1984. Dr. Plimpton stepped in and was president the next three years, a time of violence and hostage-taking in the city.

As a precaution, he kept his name off flight manifests when he flew in and out of Beirut, but once, in June 1985, his name stayed on. For various reasons, Dr. Plimpton decided not to travel to the city on that flight. Instead, his limousine picked up Thomas Sutherland, dean of the university's school of agriculture, who was on the plane.

The car was stopped after leaving the airport, and Sutherland was kidnapped by members of the group Islamic Jihad and was held for more than six years. Officials believed that Dr. Plimpton had probably been the intended target.

Undeterred, he stayed on as president for two more years.

"He was very committed to the idea of there being a liberal-arts institution in that part of the world that was educating many of the leaders in that area," said his son David.

In addition to his wife and sons David and Tom, Dr. Plimpton leaves another son, Edward of Amherst; a daughter, Polly of Boston; four grandsons; and three granddaughters.

A service will be held in the spring at Amherst College.