Oral history interview with Walter L. Wehner, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Walter L. Wehner
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: November 12, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: This is Linda Danford and I am speaking to Walter Wehner this afternoon at his home
[address redacted] on November 12th 1990. Dr. Wehner, can you tell me when you came
to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]?
WW: It was in September 1969 and I came as a full professor on tenure in the School of Music and within two years, I guess it was 1971, I was appointed director of Graduate Studies and, at that time, we had just gotten approval of a doctoral degree in music education and I think that was primarily why I was brought in, to work with doctoral students and to help in the development of the program and as a result of that the program itself expanded and most of my teaching was in relation to the doctoral students.
LD: And where did you come here from?
WW: From Texas. From Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I was chairman of the music department.
LD: And was there a graduate program there?
WW: Yes.
LD: What was I going to say. Was it a School of Music at the time or was it still a Department of Music?
WW: It was a School of Music.
LD: It was a School of Music.
WW: Yes.
LD: In 1969.
WW: On a graduate level, we offered, I think we had state approval for two master’s degrees in music and one of them was in music education and one of them was in the applied music 2
but that wasn’t spelled out too clearly, so over the next ten, fifteen years as director of Graduate Studies, I had to get approval for all the different programs we had through the general, whatever they called it, the central administration in Chapel Hill.
LD: Who was the chairman, head of the School when you came?
WW: The dean was [Lawrence] Larry Hart.
LD: What was the history of the music department here? How strong a department had it been when this was still Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina, now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]?
WW: Well, it was sort of interesting to me because the large majority of students enrolled were enrolled in music education and yet, the large percentage of faculty were in applied music and the students, in music—in fact, when I came in, there wasn’t one person in the school that had a doctoral degree in music education.
LD: Yes. Was that what your doctoral degree was in?
WW: Yes.
LD: What were the different areas within the school? You said music education and applied music, were they teaching voice at the time?
WW: Yes, applied music would include all of the areas of performance and then there was music history and literature. Now they didn’t have a graduate degree in that field and they didn’t have an undergraduate degree in that field at that time but they had, you know, four or five faculty members in music history and literature and the other field would be music theory. They had a number of people in music theory but they had no degrees in music theory at the time.
LD: Did they subsequently get a degree in music theory—
WW: Yes.
LD: —and also in music history?
WW: Yes. In both areas, but not on the doctoral level.
LD: Did UNCG have an orchestra?
WW: Yes.
LD: At the time that you came?
WW: Right. 3
LD: And several choruses, I remember?
WW: Yes, the applied areas were pretty well-developed and they had, they were offering a study, a private study in the, in most of the areas in performance and applied music.
LD: Now, how would you say, now you were here from 1969 to 1985?
WW: Right.
LD: What can you tell me about how the music department changed, expanded, and so forth in that time?
WW: Primarily, it was with the approval in additional graduate degrees. With the doctorate degree in music education, that started the doctoral program and it was, usually when you have a doctoral degree program in one specific area you have to have accessory areas or other areas which complement it and those began to build up too. Then, in the meantime, we got approval through the, again, general administration to develop a doctorate in musical arts degree, which was in performance and in conducting, composition—yes, those three fields; conducting, composition, and performance. In all fields, in all areas of performance really. And then that took about approximately five to eight years to have it approved and as usual in North Carolina you get approval but you don’t get any money. So we had approval for the degree, we had no money for scholarships or anything allocated or no additional money for the library, nothing. So we had to do the best we could with that situation. But then that opened up the doors for a different kind of doctoral student, namely a person interested in composition and performance and conducting and that added to the doctoral program. And, of course, it strengthened the undergraduate and the master’s program too at the same time, because you had to get some additional people for that.
LD: What were your majors graduating, undergraduates going on to do? Were they mostly going on to graduate work or were they going into performance?
WW: Well, the time I was there, I would say probably sixty, seventy-five percent of them, of the undergraduate people were going out as teachers.
LD: Yes.
WW: And they would, they didn’t seem to have any difficulty at that time finding teaching positions for them.
LD: In the schools or privately?
WW: In the schools.
LD: In the schools.
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WW: Public schools. Yes, they would become certified with their degrees in music education and then they would go out and teach. The other percentage, oh maybe twenty-five percent or so, would go on to master’s degree programs. A few of them would try to go in to performance but then they would need additional study and they would go on and get a master’s degree up in New York at one of the conservatories or go up to Eastman School of Music [Rochester, New York] or to Cincinnati [Conservatory of Music, Cincinnati, Ohio], or someplace like that in the hopes that they could move into performance. But our big emphasis was in music education although, again, when you look at the faculty and look at the offerings, you couldn’t tell that too well. Music education was sort of down at the bottom of the heap, the totem pole, in a sense as far as its prestige but it made up the bulk of the student body.
LD: Did co-education change the music department? The focus of the music department in any way?
WW: I’m not sure it really changed the university up ’til today. I still think that there’s more women than there are men.
LD: Well, it’s about, I’m not sure of the percentages, it may be almost two-thirds, one-third.
WW: Really?
LD: But there are departments, there are schools, for instance the School of Business which probably wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for co-education.
WW: Right, right. Well, in the School of Music in 1969, I would say that it must have been ninety percent female and ten percent male and that gradually changed a little. But I don’t think we ever got fifty-fifty in the School of Music. I’m not sure it’s that today.
LD: Yes.
WW: It seems that, I’ve thought about this a lot, you know, and there is nothing wrong with having fifty, sixty, seventy percent female—
LD: Yes.
WW: But it seems to me that in the mind and this came too from talking to alumni when I would go out to perform for them or talk to them or something that they looked upon it as sort of a, what would you call it, a high-class girls’ finishing school pretty much and I’m not even sure for many years they knew that there were men on the campus.
LD: Yes.
WW: The alumni.
LD: Yes. 5
WW: But I’m sure that’s changed now and I’m sure there are a lot of, it’s probably very well-divided, I don’t know for sure.
LD: It all depends on the department. Some departments are more divided than others.
WW: But see that did something else to the School of Music. Girls are primarily, women, when they come in, they are primarily singers, organist, pianists and that’s what we have.
LD: Yes.
WW: And to develop a band and an orchestra was very difficult because they didn’t come in playing instruments until later and gradually over a period of time and so you had a big, a big vocal area. They were studying privately and singing in the choruses, you see. In fact, there wasn’t a men’s chorus here until probably early ’80s or late ’70s.
LD: Yes.
WW: It was, oh, there were a number of all-female chorus and there was a mixed chorus but no men’s chorus. So it took a while and that primarily influenced the offerings and the development of the faculty and the school in general.
LD: That’s interesting. One of the things I was going to ask you about opera at UNCG. When did UNCG start putting, producing an opera?
WW: I’d have to guess at this. They weren’t doing it when I came so it was probably in the early ’70s that they started.
LD: Yes.
WW: And there was a gentleman here by the name of Rolf Sander [opera director, music professor], I don’t know if you plan—
LD: I haven’t, I’m going to interview him—
WW: Yes, he was brought here from Colorado, I think, in the late ’60s after Larry Hart came. He was brought here to do this, to get opera going. He was a former opera singer in Germany and so he was the opera director and it started out small and it gradually grew. But I would suspect in the ’70s somewhere, early or maybe between ’70 and ’75 when it began.
LD: Was there a high degree of cooperation or, I don’t know, interscholastic, intrascholastic, cooperation between the music department and the drama department?
WW: Yes, there was in the sense that you needed the drama department to do an opera and there were other situations too, where in musicals too, you needed them, but the cooperation was limited to the extent that the various faculty members were able to get 6
along with each other and there was, at the time, there were conflicts between the two and one would say: “Well, I’m never going to do anything with him again,” and I don’t know how, probably there were temperamental personalities involved so the cooperation was there but it was dependent on how well they could get along. [chuckles]
LD: I once wondered about that because I know that the School of the Arts [Winston-Salem, North Carolina] when, you know, every two or three years will have an all-school production and I think that’s very hard to do, to get all these different departments to cooperate and to work together.
WW: I agree. I agree.
LD: How, what do you feel personally about UNCG as an institution to work, a place to work? How was it, as a—?
WW: Oh, well, I would, I taught in, let’s see, there was the University of Kansas, and Texas, and Phillips [University, Enid, Oklahoma]. I taught at three universities before I came here and I always had the feeling, it might have been idealistic, that the university holds, and I’m sure that this is true in Greensboro, the university holds the best and most educated people in the city. Now you know a lot of people who have college degrees but how many have doctorate degrees? How many have master’s degrees, and so on. The university holds the best educated people in the city and, yet, they have very little impact on anything. I looked upon the university as the place that should be the cutting edge in society for change because of the education involved and it’s never true here. It was in some of the other places I was but not here. It seems to be a very conservative university living in a fairly liberal city. Most of the cutting edges for change are coming from some of the churches and some of the organizations, but not the university. I was—This was a big disappointment to me and if you talk to some of them, they’ll probably mention some of the things I said at the academic cabinets. But I had the belief that the State [of North Carolina] or the [University of North Carolina System] General Administration [Chapel Hill] could do almost anything they want and nobody up here would say a word.
LD: The central administration in—?
WW: In Chapel Hill. They could cut their salaries in a third. And nobody would say anything. They would just go on, well, I’m here yet; they haven’t fired me or something. Sort of complacent and fearful type attitude and when I first came, you couldn’t get anything done up there as far as new degrees or new courses until you found out what Chapel Hill was doing and, you know, I could care less what Chapel Hill was doing but that didn’t make any difference because anything you introduced, had to, someone had to decide, well, will Chapel Hill be happy if we do this or will someone down there approve it. And, you know, I don’t know what Chapel Hill had to do with it but that was the philosophy, of Chapel Hill makes the decisions and we follow along—and I never could understand it. That seemed to me sort of a—like they were dragging their heels. I used to say at the cabinet meetings that if Chapel Hill was doing anything of interest to me, I would know about it and they’re not. 7
LD: Yes.
WW: You still had to—the dean of the Graduate School and the vice-chancellor were always, “well, let’s find out what Chapel Hill is doing.”
LD: Why do you suppose that was?
WW: I think they looked upon themselves, which was really unfortunate, looked upon themselves as second-rate to Chapel Hill and then, at the same time, we had some degree and degree offerings that they didn’t have in Chapel Hill. I think, I suspect that’s sort of true today, you know, when the chancellor at Chapel Hill came out with a remark that Chapel Hill is the flagship of the universities? Well, where does that put UNCG? And no one up here said anything at all. So I—you know, as far as the university, that in a sense has been a disappointment to me. That where opportunities were here, they didn’t grab a hold of them and grow instead of holding back all the time. Even today, you know, what do you read in the paper about UNCG? Someone got $42,000 to study what rats do, someone else, you know? What are they doing for the homeless in Greensboro? What are they doing about all the social problems that exist? You don’t hear a word up there. The racism that exists here? And that, to me, is disappointing, because a university should, I don’t expect the uneducated, semi-literate, functionally illiterate people to do much. They are struggling to stay alive, but here you have educated people who should know better.
LD: Do you think this is a failure of leadership?
WW: Yes, failure of leadership and, primarily the failure of leadership and making the people aware of the fact that something is expected of them besides going here and going there. You know, for example, it’s like, where is it there’s a university in, let’s see—in Atlanta, in Georgia, I think it’s Atlanta, that started new, what was called Atlanta State University, which was fairly new when it began here about twenty, twenty-five years ago and it grew by leaps and bounds and the president was able to attract fantastic faculty from all even the country and he was interviewed and that’s where I learned about, I read the interview and he said in there that he looked, the question was: “What do you do to attract all these faculty members that you have down there?” And the reputation was soaring. He said: “Well, first of all, if the department heads that I bring in as a faculty member, prospective faculty member, who is certified and, or I mean, he isn’t certified, he is going to be considered for a job in the physics department. He says: “I assume they’ve taken care of all of the stuff involving physics and they’re recommending. I don’t talk to them about physics. I talk to them about the Mozart String Quartets and Beethoven. That’s how I get my faculty.” I don’t think that ever happened up here. I think it’s been the, that side of the university, the idea of having people who had taste and were knowledgeable about a variety of fields. I think they’re up there, but they’ve never gotten any recognition for anything. And there is no encouragement for that. Never has been up here.
LD: You think there’s too much emphasis on specialization?
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WW: Yes, yes. It’s a—for example, I was on the graduate, I was director of Graduate Studies, I was on the, what-do-you call it, the Graduate Administrative Board, that’s what it was called, and then I was in the Academic Cabinet and on the Graduate Administrative Board, we had doctoral fellowships, I guess they were called fellowships, and everything was based, I mean the awarding, was based on Graduate Record Exam scores and that’s not bad. You know, you get people that have 99th percentile in the quantitative and the 98th percentile in the verbal and that tells you something, but never did they ever consider someone, in addition, who was demonstrating some creative thinking or creative aspects in his career. Always—Whenever I brought it up, it was always, well, we can’t measure that. Well, there are a lot of things you can’t, like love, you can’t measure love, so you want to just throw it out then, because, you know, you can’t measure it. That would be stupid but why couldn’t you look at what they’ve done in the undergraduate, did they write an opera? Did they write any poetry? Did they contribute to the newspaper? You know, there are a lot of ways you can look, but you can’t measure that so forget it and just focus on the Graduate Record Exam scores. I think that’s a mistake. Of course, then you get a certain type of student and that’s what they’ve got.
LD: Well, if you don’t encourage it, and you don’t recognize it, then you don’t see any evidence of it.
WW: No. That’s right. And creativity was really never encouraged in that sense, not when it came to fellowships and scholarships. In fact, I had the feeling, and this isn’t only at UNCG, I had the feeling the more creative a person is, the less likely he is able to succeed in college because you’re going to step on toes.
LD: Yes.
WW: And then you become a trouble-maker and that kind of thing. But anyway, those are some disappointments about the university, that first of all, to me, they’ve never done what a university should do, I think, and that is set the tempo and take the lead for change. For example, when they had this thing here with the [Ku Klux] Klan shooting [November 3,1979] those members of the Communist Party and the, the members of the Communist Party were, these were highly-educated people, doctors, medical doctors, the university should have really taken a stand on that. This is not going to be left alone [unclear] you don’t hear one word up there. And you know today, it’s like if you could, I suspect, you could live in Greensboro your entire life and if you’re not in the right circles, you wouldn’t even know UNCG was here. That’s unfortunate to me, because again you’ve got the most educated people in the city there, but just don’t take the lead. I think it’s been all leadership and I think it still is. What would you gain by protesting something? Except written after your name “trouble-maker” or something like that and they are deathly afraid to lose their promotions, or lose their jobs. Oh, God, I could never understand that. I told an administrator one time that it might be an honor to get fired from this place.
LD: [laughs] To whom did you say that?
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WW: That was the academic dean of the school I taught at in Oklahoma.
LD: Oh!
WW: Yes.
LD: So you didn’t say that in regard to UNCG?
WW: No, I didn’t say it up there. But I used to raise questions along that line at the Academic Cabinet but, again, you know, you had so many colleagues up there who would come up to me afterwards and say: “Boy, I’m glad you said that—that needed to be said.” I said: “Well, why didn’t you support me?” “Oh, I’m not going to do that.”
LD: Interesting, because I’ve heard it speculated by a number of people that this sort of thing resulted from its being a women’s college.
WW: Really?
LD: Because women’s colleges traditionally are, take a much lower profile in protest. During the Vietnam War, for instance. [Editor’s note: the Vietnam War was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from November 1, 1955 to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.]
WW: Oh, yes. There was no—
LD: There was nothing going on here.
WW: A&T [North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University] had a lot, but not UNCG.
LD: But that’s something that’s often associated with the character of a women’s college and—but you’re the first person I’ve heard lay the blame on the faculty and administration, on leadership.
WW: I really don’t think you can blame students for those kind of things. I think there has to be some example set for them. For example, I believe, again—I’m idealistic as you can tell, but what good is getting a college education if you’re not going to utilize your intelligence to help. What if anything needs to be done, the country needs help, you know. That may be true but I think, of course, the character or whatever you want to call it, the status of women, this has all changed. You know, I don’t think that the girls’ finishing school is going to work anymore. I don’t even know if it worked twenty years ago. But I don’t think that’s going to work anymore for women and look at the strength that the women have in the political field and it isn’t the greatest, but it’s a lot better than it was. In many areas.
LD: Yes. 10
WW: So, I don’t know, it might sound like sour grapes but I really, and they treated me well there, you know, and I did what I wanted to do pretty much and since I came in on tenure as a full professor, they couldn’t say much no matter what I said. So, I wouldn’t have come otherwise.
LD: You think tenure really does make that possible?
WW: Yes. Although people don’t take advantage of it. Most of the people I know are on tenure and they won’t say anything.
LD: Yes.
WW: But tenure, to me, see I don’t look upon it as any great shakes because I had a good job and I wasn’t going to come here unless I was a full professor on tenure and I made that clear to them when I came and so I said what I wanted.
LD: Yes.
WW: And, you know, ran into all kinds of things that I couldn’t understand. For example, we had situations where we were supposed to be following the, there is a statement in your catalogue in the back about, what is it called, equal opportunity, you know, they said “we are an equal opportunity employer” and they have a statement of what this means. Well, it means that if you’re going to hire someone for a faculty position, you advertise nationally and you allow all kinds of people to apply. We had a situation where our dean was hiring people off the street. I mean, they were friends of somebody and he just hired them.
LD: Without a national search?
WW: That’s right, not a national search and see, I complained but they didn’t—
LD: How long ago? Because I thought that was something that they pretty much, I know in our department they [unclear]
WW: Oh yes, well there are some departments—
LD: I’d say they may have tightened up—
WW: This was in the ’70s, I’d say the early to mid ’70s or maybe ’75 to ’80 and this was so, he hired them, to me, which he did, he hired them and they weren’t on a tenure track, see. Okay, maybe that’s the reason he thought he could do this. All of a sudden they get on the tenure track and that’s when I raised the question, you know, it came up at a faculty meeting and we were supposed to vote on these people for tenure and for stuff like that. I said, “Wait a minute, I think if we vote, it’s illegal.” Well, everybody got shaken up. [I said] “What are we doing that’s illegal?” Well, we were asked to vote on someone, 11
whether he should be on tenure track and he hasn’t followed the equal opportunity statement that’s in our catalogue. Well, that stirs things all up, you know.
LD: Yes.
WW: But finally, I made enough noise about so they couldn’t do it. They had to change it and then they went to national searches and so on, but this is the kind of things that go on.
LD: Yes.
WW: And the chairman of the Tenure and Promotions Committee on campus said to me: “Why are you making such an issue out of this?” And I said: “Why are you not making an issue out of it? It’s your job to do it.” He didn’t see it as his job; he was scared to death that if he did anything that someone was going to jump on him, I guess. So anyway there were a lot of things like that which made it sort of exciting. I look at it now, you know.
LD: It sounds like you made it exciting for some people. [chuckles]
WW: I made it exciting for myself too, you know. And maybe exciting for some of the others. I remember it got to the point on the Academic Cabinet, I was questioning things that were coming from Chapel Hill all the time, for us to do, and I got a class scheduled at the time the Academic Cabinet met for the second semester one year and that meant that I was going to be a half hour late to the Academic Cabinet and the chancellor.
I told the chancellor, I asked the chancellor, I said: “We can do two things,” I said, “I can come thirty minutes late or I’ll get someone else to take my place for this semester.” And he said: “Well, nobody can take your place.”
LD: Do you think that, were the other institutions that you taught at member institutions of a large state system the way it is here?
WW: The school in Texas was.
LD: Do you think our system operates differently from Texas? Do you think it operates to keep the other institutions submerged?
WW: I think so. More so here than I noticed in Texas and I also taught at the University of Kansas and, of course, the University of Kansas is a big one, see, so I don’t know how you would measure it there because when I say the big one, it’s the largest state school in Kansas, whereas the school in Texas was not, it was one of the smallest. But I never had the feeling that we were being restricted in any way at all and also that anyone was telling us what to do, because I was doing, what was it called, an arts festival which involved poetry, literature, music, art, dance. I’d do this for the whole month of April every year and we had people coming in, for example, I remember we had [Supreme Court] Justice [William O.] Douglas who was speaking about the arts. We had Steven Spender [poet], we had [Vladimir] Ussachevsky [composer] from Columbia, that guy in the electronic music business, we had all kinds of people coming every month and the dean at the 12
University of Texas at Austin, he came up and said to me, he said: “Walt, how do you do it? Where are you getting the money to do this?” Well, I didn’t have any money really. It was coming from student fees and they had a budget for bringing in people on campus so I would tell them who I thought would be good to have for our festival and then they would approve it. But anyway they didn’t tell us: “No, you can’t do it, that’s for the big school to do stuff like that.” We were left pretty free to do it. The only time I ever ran into “better see what Chapel Hill is doing” is here. Yes. And, of course, a lot of the people up there graduated from Chapel Hill, too, I think, you know, it’s sort of like a double whammy.
LD: Not to mention the people who are in the state legislature?
WW: Right, right. And then when they came out of the—I don’t have anything against Chapel Hill, in fact, I’ve thought a number of times of moving down there because I think the environment down there would be more suitable to me than up here because I think there are more liberal people down there. And I thought of going down there but, at the same time, Chapel Hill, you know, it’s a good school and everything but, at the same time, they can become overwhelming in the way they try to hold another school back.
LD: Yes.
WW: You see. I think a lot of the things that I did as director of Graduate Studies, getting new degrees approved, I just bypassed them down there. I mean, someone would say to me: “Well, what do they think about it at Chapel Hill?” I said, “I don’t care; I don’t care what Chapel Hill thinks.” I don’t think that’s my job, to worry about what Chapel Hill thinks. That’s someone else’s.
LD: Now when you say Chapel Hill you mean the central administration or the school?
WW: Both, both because there were times, on the, I was a member of the, I forgot the name of that. There is an organization that meets with representatives from all over the state, the state schools, and they meet at the General Administration at Chapel Hill every year. I was a member of that for eight or ten years and I heard people from Chapel Hill stand up and say: “We don’t think any doctoral degree should be offered anywhere but at Chapel Hill.” What’s that supposed to mean? And, you know, if he was influential enough and high enough in the administration, that could scare all these people. That’s a stupid statement. Now you see A&T is going to get a doctoral degree. They wanted to see doctoral degrees granted. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. But you talk to those people at Chapel Hill from years ago, oh boy, they were against that and they could vote those things down in this faculty council that we had. They didn’t do anything of an academic nature at all, any degrees should go beyond Chapel Hill; they didn’t think master’s degrees should be offered—stuff like that. But that’s their right, but why we pay attention to it is beyond me.
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LD: Was Mereb Mossman still the dean when you came here? [Editor’s note: Mereb Mossman was sociology professor, dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of faculty, and from 1969 to 1971 was vice chancellor for academic affairs.]
WW: Yes.
LD: How long was she the dean after you came?
WW: She was the dean until Stan Jones came and he must have come about 1980? [Editor’s note: Stanley L Jones was vice chancellor for academic affairs from 1971 to 1983.]
LD: No. Earlier.
WW: Or ’70s?
LD: He was here in ’76 when we came.
WW: Oh, okay, well then she was only there then from probably ’69 ‘till ’75, maybe, that period of time.
LD: What was your impression of her?
WW: I think again she seemed to be pretty hardnosed in terms of, how do I say that, progressive thinking. For example, what we, we were trying hard in our school, we were trying hard to get good talented musical kids to come to school. And they don’t always, these kids who spend, you know, twelve years practicing on the violin may not get the highest grades.
LD: Yes.
WW: So what I was trying to—Here’s what would happen: They were requiring, this university was requiring that all scholarships that were awarded have to be based on the SAT scores at a certain level, plus, they had a formula, plus the position in your high school graduating class and your high school grades and then they would develop a composite of this, you see.
So again I was on a committee, I don’t know what it was, and she was the chairman of it and I said: “So what you’re saying, really, is that if, let’s take nursing, get out of my field, let’s take nursing for a minute. If you’re a student and you want to come to the School of Nursing but you don’t fit into this formula, that means you can’t succeed in the School of Nursing?” She said: “That’s absolutely right.” I said: “I don’t believe that at all. Why don’t you try an experiment? Let’s slip three or four in that don’t fit that once and see what happens to them. See if they can do it?”
See that, she couldn’t handle that, but I still don’t believe that. I still don’t believe a formula is going to be appropriate for every kid. And so anyway, I said “Let’s go back to the School of Music. You have a kid who is a top notch performer, a violinist in the state but his SAT scores are not that high and he may not have been as highly 14
academically as you’d like, he couldn’t succeed in the School of Music? I don’t think so.”
And then she said: “Well, he shouldn’t come here, he should go to the School of the Arts.” Thanks a lot! So we should send the talented kids to the School of the Arts, we don’t get them. But anyway, that was Mereb Mossman and I could never understand why she wasn’t a little more flexible, you know, because I still think there are girls out there that could graduate from the School of Nursing and don’t meet those standards.
LD: Yes.
WW: Because how are you going to measure motivation? How are you going to measure hard work? And all the other things that enter into it? I’m sure you have to have some standards but why not try a few once in a while and see what they do. Maybe what you’re afraid of is that you’ll find that ordinary students who don’t meet the criteria can succeed, it’ll defeat the whole purpose.
LD: Of having criteria?
WW: Yes.
LD: Well, I can certainly see a strong argument for substituting performing, demonstrated performing ability, for some of the other criteria.
WW: Again, what about the School of Nursing? What makes a good nurse? I mean, if you’re in the hospital and someone really made you feel better and helped you and everything else, would you want to know what their SAT scores were or how they fit into that formula or where they graduated from?
LD: No, but if they were administering medicine I might be a little concerned with, you know, about how much they’ve got upstairs.
WW: Well, I agree that there should be some—
LD: Right.
WW: But I’m not so sure you could say that with that, that’s going to guarantee that they’ll graduate.
LD: No.
WW: Or you could say that without it, it’s going to guarantee that they won’t graduate. I don’t think that either. There have been too many.
LD: But I think your point is well-taken that it’s a very rigid and narrow set of criteria.
15
WW: Well, that was my impression with Mereb Mossman. Although I think she was really interested in the academic program and pushed for all kind of academic changes and I think that was more so than some of the vice-chancellors that succeeded her. She probably was responsible for a lot of the development in the university, you know, because she was there a long time.
LD: Yes.
WW: She was here, I think, when it changed from a girls’ school to a co-ed school.
LD: Yes. I know, she spans from the ’50s to the ’70s. Quite a long time.
WW: Right. I see her every once in a while. Or did she die?
LD: She just recently deceased. It’s been in the last year.
WW: Oh, that’s right. It’s been, she and I go to the same physician and I used to see her there at the office but it’s been some time, now that’s right.
LD: But it was in the last year, there’s been a number of well-known people connected with UNCG have died in the last year.
WW: Yes.
LD: Were there any really rewarding things about teaching at UNCG?
WW: Oh yes, the students. When I first came, up until about, let’s see, up until about 1978 or ’80, we had some fantastic students and the classes were exciting. They could really tear into things and discuss things, ask terrific questions and then, for some reason or other, it started to go downhill and that may have been true of students in general, I don’t know on that, but I had students, and these were master’s candidates, I only taught graduate school, I never had any undergraduate courses here and get students like, for example, I would tell them about the man who was ill, or his wife was ill and he had to stay home from work so part of his chores around the house was taking the trash out. And he took the trash out and the trash man was there and he introduced himself, he said my name is such and such, what’s yours? “My name is Al Einstein” And he said: “Al Einstein! That sounds very familiar to me.” And the trash man said: “Well, it should! I’ve been taking out your trash for the last ten years!” You know, not a sound in the room. Nothing—something’s wrong.
And after class one of them comes up and says, “By the way, who is Al Einstein?” That’s remarkable to me, how a graduate student wouldn’t know who Al Einstein was. But there was, wasn’t a sound in class. But I, it seems to me that the intellectual level had dropped. You may know more about it than I do. I don’t know what happens.
16
LD: I think a lot of people were wondering what happened because that’s something that has been generally remarked. Now again, I’ve heard people conjecture that this resulted from the switch to co-ed, that the caliber of the female students was higher, and then, starting with the introduction of men, the standard dropped.
WW: Well, now these students I’m telling you about in ’69 to ’75 or ’78, those were all female. Yes, boy they were sharp. Gosh, it used to be fun to go to class because you never knew what was going to happen.
LD: Yes.
WW: But then on, I don’t know, it just—
LD: I think it is true that there was a time when UNCG or Woman’s College was “the” place, had a reputation in North Carolina, and regionally as being the place to go. Certainly in music, it had a strong music program and the options have increased greatly for women. There are many colleges and universities that are accepting many more women, many more graduate students than they were then. So I think that there’s a much greater competition for the best students, they aren’t all concentrated in one place any more.
WW: Well, you know, maybe this you’ll find interesting too, I think. When I came, there were no blacks or women in the doctoral program. It had only been there two years and, of course, you don’t want this to go on. So within a short time, we had over half were female and maybe a third were black in the doctoral program. But I discovered that the females, they didn’t trust their brains. See, for example, part of our program, they had to take some courses in statistics and research, techniques and stuff and they didn’t trust themselves with numbers and it used to scare the life out of them.
And they would, in fact, they would go over to the statistics class and then come back to my office in tears, saying “I’ll never do this. I was told from the time I was [unclear] that I couldn’t work with numbers.”
And I said: “Don’t pay any attention to that.” And so what I did, in one of the courses I had for these people, I set up little, little things where they could begin using statistics at a very simple level and then they would succeed and we’d do it a little harder and we’d go ahead and by the time they took the regular statistics course, they were all ready to go and they had to gain little confidences at a time to build up their—Now, I had one of them tell me that well, I was always taught that I should get by on my charm and personality, you see. Well, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, you know, but at the same time it wouldn’t help her get through statistics, you see, and so we had to do that, just to let them gain these little confidence-makers with math especially—
LD: Yes.
WW: —until they got into courses and, of course, they turned out to be our best students. It’s fantastic what they’ve done. In fact, I think some of them are teaching statistics now but that, for some reason or another, was the stumbling block, was—
17
LD: Yes, there are a couple of professors in the physics department who have gotten some grant money and have set up a program for eighth grade girls to try to get them to excel in science, at that age, at an age where girls who have shown aptitude in science tend to turn off.
WW: Yes.
LD: And, you know, pursue other, more stereotypically acceptable women’s fields.
WW: There is no reason for that at all, you know. It’s amazing.
LD: Do you think that this lack of confidence was unfounded?
WW: Absolutely, absolutely. Because I never found one of them, after they sort of caught on to the idea of using numbers, oh, they’re the best ones we have. In fact, the ones who’ve gotten post-doctoral grants in that, have been females. But you’re right, there were a number of them were ready to quit. They just couldn’t see themselves doing this and it was all because that’s what they were taught, I think. Someone along the line said well you can get by on your personality and charm and beauty, maybe, you don’t have to use your head.
LD: Well, I can’t believe anyone actually says that to girls nowadays but you certainly do get the message from society.
WW: That’s right. Well, it wouldn’t have done any good to just let them flunk out. I mean, at that stage, they had already made up their minds they couldn’t do it so you had to just let them do little ones at a time until they’re over it. For example, square root, no one had ever showed them how to do square root. Well, the whole idea of it was frightening and that’s a simple thing.
LD: Yes.
WW: And of course, you know the development of the calculator helped, [LD chuckles] because you can get calculators that will do the square root but then I wouldn’t let them use, I’d let them use them but then I’d have them compute it to make sure the calculator was right. I would say: “What if the batteries get weak or something. Make sure of your answer.” But anyway, they did it and they turned out excellent and, in fact, there are three or four of them that are, I’m very proud of them because they’re really outspoken, you know. Oh, one of them I had in, how did this happen?
LD: Let me turn this over.
WW: Okay.
[End Side A—Begin Side B] 18
WW: Another area that development needed to be taking place was in the ability to have enough confidence to speak out. You know, a lot of the girls would do beautiful notes but they didn’t say anything. One of them, I remember I was talking in class about, she was a teacher in the Greensboro Schools, a music teacher, and she would go from elementary school to elementary school and I said to her one day, her name was Brenda. And I said, “Brenda, do you enjoy what you’re doing?” And she said: “No, I hate it. I don’t enjoy teaching those kids and I don’t enjoy going from school to school. I don’t like anything about it.” I said: “Well, why do you do it?” And she says: “Because I can make more money doing that than I can as a secretary or something.” I said: “You know, Brenda, there’s a name for what you’re doing, selling yourself in something that you don’t particularly enjoy.”
[telephone rings, recording paused]
WW: And she didn’t say much about it and she was playing the cello in the [Greensboro] Symphony and that was when [Sheldon] Shelley Morganstern was the conductor and one of the other students told me this. He came in the next day and says: “You know what Brenda did last night?” I said “What?” They were at a rehearsal and she got in an argument with the conductor and she picked up her cello and she walked out and she said: “In the words of Dr. Wehner, I’ll not be a prostitute.”
LD: [laughs]
WW: Thanks a lot, Brenda. But boy was she outspoken! They really blossomed, you know.
LD: Good for you.
WW: I hope she didn’t—She got married and she probably has two or three kids now. She lives up in South Boston, Virginia, so I hear from her once in a while. I think she’s probably active in the community, which is good. Oh, we had some, I think, top notch students and whatever. The last four or five years was sort of drudgery, trying to teach. I don’t, they seemed that they had no knowledge of the past. There was very little that you could refer to that they could function with. Even in music, if you talked about where the development of things like, it probably won’t make sense to you, but the finale in a piece of music is based on the sub-dominant chord or sub-dominant feeling in a certain key. They didn’t know what you were talking about. You’d go to the piano and demonstrate and they’d still didn’t know what you were talking about. I think the whole idea of history and where they fit in was lost somewhere, which is unfortunate. So that wasn’t particularly enjoyable but there were other things too.
LD: Well, is there anything else you’d like to slip in?
WW: No, I may have a painted a picture here for you of a lot of disappointment and there were a lot of good things too. I mean there are a lot of nice people and a lot of friends that I 19
enjoyed being around over the years and did some combined things with the Residential College, helped the young lady who was involved over there, you probably don’t understand. Is the Residential College still going?
LD: Yes, yes.
WW: Well, there was lady there by the name of Kate Rushford who wanted to do, she was one of my students and she wanted to do a festival, a contemporary art festival, which she did. She brought in some people, I’d given her some names and others gave her some names, she brought them in. But anyway, she is now at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], has her doctorate out there and she is in the School of Music and I’m not, I don’t know in what capacity, I know she’s a professor but she was really exciting and I’ve done some, what-do-you call them, like seminars, over at the Residential College. That’s how I got involved over there, which was a lot of fun.
LD: How old is that program? Do you know? Was that going when you first came?
WW: No, it started somewhere in the early ’70s.
LD: Do you know who was instrumental in starting it?
WW: Warren Ashby, Warren Ashby [philosophy and religious studies professor].
LD: Oh that’s right. I recall being told that.
WW: Yes, I think he died.
LD: Yes.
WW: He was sharp.
LD: Quite a while ago, seven or eight years ago.
WW: And a very nice person.
LD: He lived around my neighborhood and my husband knew him.
WW: Yes. Very liberal, liberal-thinking person, intelligent, exciting to be around and did a lot of honors tutorials, which were exciting too. Although I found the honors students, again, creativity scared them, because they were afraid they wouldn’t satisfy somebody, you know. For example, I gave them once an assignment to do something creative, whatever, and I gave them examples of what they could consider and some of them would come up and say: “You’ve got to assign me a paper.” I said, “I’m not going to assign you anything.” [He said] “No, I’ll do a paper for you, I’ll do a good paper for you. You tell me the subject.” [I said] “Nope, I’m not going to do it.” [He said] “Well, I don’t want to do one.” 20
Think about it, it scared them. Yes, but I wanted them to get away from doing the term paper and I wanted them to think and maybe write some poetry or paint a picture or do something. And they did, but it wasn’t easy, you had to just really keep turning a deaf ear to them and say: “Nope, I don’t want that, I don’t want your paper. I don’t want that. I want you to do something you’ve never done before that you’d like to do perhaps. Think about it a little bit.” I said, “I’m not going to leave you in a bind here so don’t worry about that.” One time, I turned down a piece of paper and I said: “Put down there on the paper your name and what grade you want. And we can put that aside and forget about it. I’m not going to worry about grades anymore. I’m going to do other things.” That worked pretty well and they all didn’t put As down, so there might be something of value there.
LD: Do you think that Residential College students were more receptive to the creative ideas?
WW: Oh yes, much more than the honors tutorial students. They were really concerned about their grades.
LD: Well, you had to have a certain grade point average to get into the honors courses.
WW: Yes. And I remember that at one of the honors tutorials I had, I brought in one of my colleagues, [Raymond J.] Ray Gariglio [music professor], you probably don’t know him, he retired the same year I did. But he was outstanding in jazz, a jazz performer and had a very good career. I brought him in and he spoke to the class I guess about two hours and gave examples and played and showed how jazz started with the combination of the African drumbeats and the gospel music in the South and so on up to the present day. I finally had to signal to him to take a break because the kids had been sitting there for two hours and they needed to go to the restroom or get a drink of water or something and so I signaled for him to stop and he wound it down and he said: “Do you have any questions before I leave?” It always happens, someone raised their hand and says: “Is this going to be on our exam?” Made him feel about that big. But they really are uptight about grades. I hope it doesn’t interfere with their learning but, you know, maybe it does. They’re really concerned, I think, overly concerned. Because I know when I was at school, I graduated magna cum laude in my class and I never saw my grades because I was a veteran and my residence was in Pennsylvania and I was in school in Kansas so all my report cards went to my mother. I never saw them. I didn’t know what grades I had until I was graduating and I saw this magna cum laude and I said what in the world is this? And then they went back and showed me my grades. I had no idea what I’d gotten.
LD: That is unheard-of, I can tell you right now. I don’t know any student who [unclear].
WW: I never saw them. My mother never went beyond the fourth grade. She got these things. I guess she didn’t even know what they were. She just put them in a drawer somewhere and saved them for me, I suppose. I never saw them, because I had too many other things to do. I was playing in the excellent symphony orchestra and had a wife and a small baby and teaching in a town thirty miles away and going to school, I didn’t have time.
21
LD: What was your instrument?
WW: Clarinet. I came out of the Navy Band after the Second World War [global conflict fought between 1939-1945] and went to school on the GI Bill. [Editor’s note: The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, known informally as the GI Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning Second World War veterans.] Anyway, so I didn’t, grades didn’t interest me at the time and I never thought about it. You know, when you think about it now, it’s sort of strange, maybe, but it never dawned on me that I could flunk something because I liked going to school, really.
LD: Yes.
WW: I liked going to school and I had an ability, which helped me and that was that I could remember everything I heard.
LD: Yes, that’s helpful.
WW: Yes. And the teachers would lecture and I could make a few notes but I would remember what they said. Teachers are notorious for asking you what they said. On the tests, they would ask exactly what they said. On the tests, they would ask exactly what they said and I remembered all of it.
LD: I think memory is probably the single most valuable school skill.
WW: Yes, I agree.
LD: You can tell in children which ones are going to make it in school based on how well they can remember.
WW: Well, UNCG, well, it was fun, there were nice people and it was sometimes frustrating, sometimes a little disappointing but I guess there are other places, too, like that. UNCG is unique in the sense that it doesn’t take the lead as much as it should, I suppose. You know, I don’t want to belabor this thing, whatever, if you want to take off, but it seems to me that part of the education of a faculty member should be some kind of a debt of gratitude towards the fact that they are educators and that means that they should take the lead, they should do something rather than wait for these poor people to have to stand up and protest something. They have more ability and everything else. But that’s not part of the education of people, the fact that they are the beneficiaries of our civilization, you know. The fact that the university exists and is an accumulation of knowledge has to count on a whole bunch of people that lived in the past and anyone who graduates from college is a beneficiary of that knowledge. And part of it should be not sitting on your hands, and doing something, to help, I think. But that’s idealistic and a lot wouldn’t agree with that, I don’t think.
[recording paused] 22
LD: Dr. Wehner, can you tell me what you remember, what role was played by students in protesting during the Vietnam War?
WW: Well, the one time when a sort of a protest was expressed was when President [Richard m.] Nixon sent the troops into Laos and the students in the School of Music organized the presentation of the Benjamin Britton War Requiem and that was used as a protest. You know, it wasn’t like marching on the streets or burning buildings or anything, but it was their way of expressing a protest and it turned out to be a fantastic performance. I remember I was playing in the orchestra there, one of the chamber orchestras, and after that was over, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that Britton War Requiem, but it’s such a dramatic piece of music and when it ended, there was absolute silence for I’ll bet a minute and a half until you heard one hand started to clap. Wow, it was overwhelming. The feelings.
LD: Very emotional experience.
WW: Yes, because it’s about, the Benjamin Britton War Requiem is about a number of things about war. But it’s a German, it’s about the First World War, it’s a German soldier and a British soldier are dead and they are singing to each and one is saying, “Well, I’ve learned to like you so much. Why did I kill you?” And the other one would say: “Why did we fight with each other? What were—what was wrong?” They didn’t understand all this but it’s a very dramatic piece and that was their way of expressing their feelings at the time.
LD: Was it well-attended?
WW: Yes. The auditorium was filled. It was given on campus in Aycock Auditorium.
LD: In Aycock?
WW: There should be recordings of it in the School of Music Library. I have one too.
LD: Yes.
WW: It was a great performance.
LD: Well, thank you for sharing that with me.
WW: My pleasure.
[End of Interview]