Oral history interview with Jean Buchert, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Jean Buchert
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: February 22, 1990
[Begin Side A]
WL: [unclear] I guess it was about—was it a month ago, wasn’t it? Or even longer?
JB: Something like that, or perhaps longer.
WL: Yes, we were talking, and we ran out of time and ran out of tape.
JB: Uh, huh.
WL: What—one of the things we were talking about was the nature of administration and the
faculty. Maybe you can elaborate a bit more about that.
JB: Yes, as I thought over our last conversation, I realized that I talked a good deal about the
tyrannical way in which Ms. [Mereb] Mossman [dean of instruction, dean of the college,
dean of faculty and vice chancellor for academic affairs] actually ran the institution for so
many years. And I think I mentioned one of the archetypal examples that people use
around here, and that is the one of the car keys. But it occurred to me that an even more
interesting one that illustrates many, many aspects of this is one that I probably should
tell you about.
At one point, we had a faculty member here named Jordan Kurland, and he was in
the history department as an expert, presumably, on Russian history, and he also taught
courses in Russian language. He came here without a doctor’s—his doctorate finished,
and we kept hearing for a long time that Jordan was going to finish that degree at almost
any time. We were told, at one point, I remember, that he deliberately did not finish his
degree at that time because there were more opportunities for fellowships to Russia for
those who did not have the degree than for those who did. Along the way, he became a
great administration favorite and became the typical faculty “boy wonder,” who is much
indulged by an administration.
I think almost every institution has one of these on hand most of the time, and
they tend to follow a pattern. He was given a great many colorful committee
appointments. He was elected to the curriculum committee and eventually became head
of the committee. He was given a very large salary, far beyond something commensurate
with his experience and training. He tended to become a kind of spokesman—in the
middle between the administration and the faculty and was, of course, extremely arrogant
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and regularly put the faculty down as generally unworthy when he would speak in faculty
meetings. And this went on and on, obviously with encouragement of various kinds.
WL: When is the period that we’re talking about?
JB: This is—let’s see, I should have looked that up.
WL: Early 1960s?
JB: I think in the ’60s some time—early or middle. I have a file of old catalogs in the Phi
Beta Kappa files. I can look it up for you, as a matter of fact, if you want the dates. This
became very hard to take, but it was obvious that he was such a favorite that the faculty
felt that they were in the position of the messenger in classical drama, who was regularly
the one who gets his head cut off when he brings in the bad news that he, of course, does
not create. We kept hearing that Jordan might finish that degree.
Finally, he began to be listed in the catalog as having a Columbia [University]
PhD in history, and this existed in the catalog for several years which, of course, is a legal
document, presumably verified by the university authorities. He told the students to call
him Dr. Kurland, and at the same time we knew he didn’t have the degree because he had
a very effervescent, charming wife, who at parties would regularly say things such as, “I
wish Jordan would hurry up and finish his degree.” And so we ended up in this situation
where you had a fair portion of the faculty sitting around watching and listening and
saying nothing, wondering just how long this spectacle would go on, while Jordan
tyrannized more and more over the faculty, obviously with Ms. Mossman’s approval.
And the faculty knew he didn’t have the degree, and nobody was going to make sure that
she knew it.
How she finally found out, I don’t know. Jordan did leave the faculty after awhile,
and he joined the AAUP [American Association of University Professors], where I think
he still is, as some kind of very high-ranking officer. Whether he ever got the degree or
not, I really have no idea. He was not—it’s an irony that he’s such a high-ranking person
with AAUP because, of course, during much of my time here, most of the women on the
faculty have felt decidedly discriminated against in matters of promotion and salary. But
whenever we tried to approach Jordan to ask for any kind of help from the AAUP with
the administration, he steadfastly did not help the women. So that I’m afraid that among
those of us who were here during that era, there is entirely too little respect for the AAUP
and Miss Mossman, frankly.
As a woman she should have listened. As it was, she didn’t. She listened to young
men—this was very obvious—and also clearly had no sense of how to discover the
academic phonies, which I think many people in a good graduate school learn how to do,
because the faculty was suspicious of them from the beginning. So it’s an interesting kid
of story on how tyranny can grow and what happens in a group when the power is
concentrated this way and what it takes to break it. To me, that tells all I really need to
know about that administration—that such a thing went on for so long.
WL: So it’s indicative of unresponsive administration or an administration that is tyrannical?
Is that—?
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JB: Yes, I would say tyrannical or, at least, that plays favorites. And, at the same time you
know, I think intelligent tyranny perhaps can be tolerated for awhile. But when tyranny is
combined with judgment that is this poor—I mean, what does one have? That is the
question that arises, I think, in the faculty. At the same time, the administrators have so
much budgetary power and so much control over promotions that it’s understandable
that only a very few senior full professors near retirement are going to feel safe enough
about speaking up in situations like this. And that is one of the difficulties here—still to a
considerable extent, as far as I can tell, though it’s getting somewhat better than it used to
be.
WL: Did faculty feel typically cowed?
JB: Except for the few favorites, yes.
WL: Uh, huh. That was the pattern, even twenty years ago, thirty years ago?
JB: Yes, oh yes, very much.
WL: Yes, that’s less the pattern, you think, perhaps?
JB: No, I think they feel that the administration doesn’t listen to them at all, and what they’ve
done is a—follow a fairly typical pattern of turning inward on themselves, either on
themselves as individuals or perhaps as department groups, where they simply pursue
their own interests—or the interest of a particular program, but feel that in general the
administration is not helping particularly and, in fact, cannot be dealt with, and therefore
it’s a waste of time to try. That is why most of them don’t even come to faculty council
meetings, of course.
When I was vice chair, they told me by the dozens why they didn’t come. And the
reason they don’t come is that they feel all of the decisions have already been made by
the full-time administrators and, in our case now, practically none of whom have been
full time in a classroom and really don’t want to find out how the faculty operates—and
to be talked at by these people with—after a kind of charade of discussion, and then to
have the decisions announced that obviously have been formulated beforehand, it’s not
only insulting, above all it’s time wasting, and for that reason, they just don’t come to
faculty meetings.
WL: Do you think the—how would you characterize the [Chancellor William E.] Moran
administration, with some differences when he first came here, between say Moran’s and
[Chancellor James] Ferguson’s style?
JB: Well, there’s a tremendous amount of difference in style. Now there were faults in both
styles—I should be fair about that. That is to say, James Ferguson was available to the
faculty. One did not have to belabor obvious points about faculty operations or faculty
concerns or faculty values because he knew them already. At the same time, being a very
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gentle kind of person that he was, he tolerated an awful lot of inefficiency and, in fact,
surliness in some quarters.
If one can think of the business office at that time, where the faculty was treated
with such rudeness that it became a major problem. You know, you hated—you would
ask your department secretary, for example, to report a burned out light bulb, and she
would beg you to do it because you, as a faculty member, would not be treated as rudely
as she, even though you would be rudely treated yourself. And this was characteristic of
the entire business operation, not just buildings and grounds. And—this should have been
stopped and could have been, even though the business manager—at the time we heard
had very good connections in Raleigh that protected him to some extent. Nevertheless, it
could have been worked with to some extent, but James Ferguson was not a man of great
physical energy, it seemed to me, and perhaps he did not have that extra bit of energy that
would have prompted him to pursue matters of this kind. But, instead, he rightly placed
his highest priorities on the welfare of the faculty and the academic program, and that’s
where most of his interests and energy went. And, of course, it went into salaries when
buildings were neglected, and that is not so good either. There might have been a balance,
a better balance struck there.
WL: Do you think the—is it true that the physical plant here deteriorated in the latter part of
the Ferguson years?
JB: Yes, I think it is quite obvious it did. However, you need to recognize that that is true on
almost every campus in the country—that at a certain point buildings have been
neglected so that the academic side could get whatever benefit was available. So it’s not
an individual thing. It might have been handled a little bit better that it was. Money, of
course, was very restricted. But, there again, with somewhat better management, I think,
in the business office, the situation might have been better. And certainly people would
have been happier because nobody enjoyed being “roughed up” routinely whenever that
office had to be dealt with, and that should have been stopped.
WL: So it’s—business office was a sort of semiautonomous office?
JB: Yes, it’s clear it is, of course, even now because the vice chancellor for business affairs,
of course, always has to keep the regulations of the state auditor in mind. And so Raleigh
always has a kind of pull on that office that it wouldn’t—that it doesn’t have on the rest
of the operation. And there’s no question that the state office—the budget office in
Raleigh is a tremendous power in the operation of any campus. There are so many rules
of how the money may be handled—understandable in many cases, but it does mean that
the rules are very restrictive.
WL: So what about Moran—the differences with Moran?
JB: Well, Moran, of course, is a professional manager, who thinks in terms of structures. And
he’s this by training and inclinations, but I suspect that reflects also the man because he’s
not at all skilled in personal relations, and, in fact, in my experience has just no real
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insight into what—how the people are reacting to him or what they are really saying
when they talk about some of their concerns in faculty meetings.
He is not only not involved, he clearly doesn’t want to be involved in the personal
side of things. He wants to think only in terms of mechanisms, procedures and structures.
And the consequence of this is pretty wide ranging. For one thing, he has very little
contact with the students. He has very little contact with nearly all the alumni, and
goodness knows, we know about that at present with the standoff that he’s in the middle
of at present. And he really has a minimum of contact with the faculty because it’s very
hard to get an appointment with him, for whatever reason I’m not sure.
I do not know how he allocates his time. I’ve never been in a position to observe
that. Judging by results, I would say that obviously he must spend a good deal of time
cultivating certain parts of the business community in Greensboro because there are the
results for the business school, though there again the deal at the business school has been
busy doing the same thing, and the directors of development have also. And so what
proportion of his time and attention goes to that activity, I really cannot say. What else he
does, I’m not entirely sure. There is, of course, a large amount of paperwork to be seen to
and so on.
But I think that if you compare him with some other chancellors in the state
system, you find that his method is completely different, and that he’s evidently much
less available than most of the others. This does great harm, of course, because it means
that he doesn’t know what’s going on in faculty matters or even, one might say,
educational matters. And this means, in terms of being an educational leader, he simply
isn’t. And this is one thing that the faculty member would like its chancellor to be, I
think, rather than simply a manager.
I think all of us who work in large bureaucracies get frustrated, and we feel that
things could be done more efficiently. There is little question about that. Some of it is
apparently unmanageable, no matter what goes on. But, on the other hand, for the top
administrator to make that his chief goal means that he’s not an educational leader and—
or much of a community leader, frankly. And for that reason, he’s not doing the kind of
job that I think most people would hope the head of an institution would do.
WL: How would you describe his objectivity—his educational philosophy?
JB: I frankly don’t know what it is, and I doubt that anybody else does. He sort of mouths a
few very obvious generalizations occasionally, such as—whatever he said about
education, missions and goal statements, for example, but he didn’t draw that up. And
there are some rather conspicuous omissions, even in that list of missions and goals.
WL: Such as?
JB: Well, for example, part of the mission of the institution is stated really in terms of
regional service and, while it’s true we do a lot of that, no account is taken, to my mind,
of what is the greatest academic strength of this institution, and that is the very strength in
the creative arts and superiority, really, in the humanities with a number of programs
having national recognition. And there is no acknowledgement of that in the missions and
goals, and there is no intention to further it as stated in the mission and goals statement,
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and that is our one real chance, I think, for recognition in the sixteen-unit system. It’s
what we have always had and what should be fostered, at least so that it continues. And
the statement should be made that we wish to continue it. But it’s been brought up in
various meetings, and nothing was ever done with the mission and goals statement, so
there you go.
That’s another kind of thing—it’s a failure to learn enough about the institution
and what the faculty is trying to tell him. He will do anything about that kind of
emphasis, much less carry out , then, any such goal, really. Occasionally, he adds a little
money for the writing program or that kind of thing. But, in general, it’s clearly not in the
forefront of his consciousness.
WL: His style seems to delegate a lot. Is that true, or do you think he doesn’t delegate? Does
he hang on to control?
JB: He delegates, and he doesn’t. He’s a peculiar mixture in this regard in that he doesn’t
really want to hear details, but he’s very jealous of his legal powers and responsibilities,
so that, I think, you would expect him to hold on to every grain of real power that his
office has. And I think there’s a contradiction here, and that’s one reason that he gets into
difficulty. That is to say, he wants the last word on promotion because the university—to
name one thing of faculty concern—he wants the very last word on promotions, and the
code says he has the last word and the legal responsibility as well as the power.
But yet, somehow or another, he cannot seem to learn enough about faculty
operations to do a reasonably good job of judging. Most of the time, he accepts the
recommendations of lower orders, but he’s made a few conspicuous errors and details, in
particular, where he has been presented with overwhelming evidence that a person should
be retained. And he has formed an initial impression that he will not retain the individual,
and he becomes extremely stubborn, and once he pretty well makes a decision, he doesn’t
reverse it. He apparently has some kind of philosophy that once you make a decision,
that’s it, and you never admit a mistake, and you never reverse yourself.
Well, that puts—that makes him a community of one outside the human race, as
far as I can tell. All the rest of us have to admit that we make mistakes and have to
reverse periodically. So that this side of him is very hard for the faculty and students to
understand, faculty in particular. And so what his goals are, I really don’t know. It’s hard
to figure out how much is pure style in what he does and how much is something else.
For example, very often people go to him when they can get in at all—it’s not that
often—but there is considerable number of incidences where people have gone to him
with very serious academic concerns of some kind or other and talked to him at length
and given him evidence, urged him to do certain kinds of things. They have come away
thinking that he understood them completely and that he had agreed with them, and two
weeks later they have attempted to recall the conversation with him, and he appears to not
remember. And they do not know whether his style is never to admit that he remembers
anything or whether he just plain doesn’t remember. It is evident that there is a highly
compartmentalized mind here, but whether or not that explains the action or not is hard to
understand. Even in minor matters, this leads to a tremendous amount of repetitive work
in people who try to deal with him at all.
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In matters, for example, such as campus facilities planning, which we’ve done a
great deal in the last few years, I would hate to try to add up the number of conversations
I’ve been in various faculty meetings or committee meetings of one sort or the other in
which the whole matter of the so-called pedestrian campus has come up—in which there
will be no automobile traffic by faculty or students anywhere within the campus and
parking will be on the periphery (and in a larger periphery with time, one assumes) and
then there will be buses bringing in people and that kind of thing. Well, the faculty has
tried repeatedly to get him and his administrators to understand that many faculty
members have their offices in one building and teach in another, and that many of them
have to carry materials with them to class such as projectors, screens, slides and other
illustrative materials—maps or whatever. And that, in terms of efficiency, a very wise
thing to do would be to set aside two or three parking spaces at each building with ten or
fifteen minute limits on them, so that a faculty member could bring in his teaching
equipment and then move his car to one of the peripheral parking lots. One cannot seem
to get this point across in terms of efficiency of operation. And what normally happens is
that whoever is there from the administration nods very sympathetically, will listen an
indefinite amount of time, and the next time you have the conversation, there is no
institutional memory of what has been said before, and whatever faculty members are
involved have to do the same thing over again.
Now this is just one point of faculty operation. It is not a major one, but it is
perfectly indicative of the kinds of difficulty for a daily operation of this administrative
method, whatever the source of it, that this method creates for people elsewhere. And so I
have told him on occasion what the faculty says very widely about this to wit: that they
feel that in the operations of the university, they have fewer rights and less influence than
a typical worker on a typical assembly line. And this is the vocabulary which they use,
and I have pointed that out to him. He has no reply.
So that I think ultimately this raises the question of management and how much is
it worth. If you are giving up everything else in order to be interested in a management
style, and you don’t get management that is any better than this, what have you got? And
nobody has an answer, I think, to be perfectly frank about it. And it is very clear to
faculty and students both that administrators somehow or other pick up the idea, those in
Mossman Building anyway, that you simply listen to people talk indefinitely, but you are
never unpleasant to them. And then you go right ahead and do exactly what you have
decided to do anyway. And I have been ticked off by this—at least one case last year and
others earlier—of persons being considered for quite high administrative positions who
told me that their mentors from Mossman Building told them, “Just let the faculty talk,
but don’t talk back, and then do what you wish.” So it’s very clear that somehow or other
this tone is established in the upper reach—an attitude is established in the upper regions
of the university. And when you have this, my question once again is, “What kind of
management is this, and what is the good of it?” Because I see the downside, and most
people see the downside of this.
So that this is a really fundamental question about the operation of this
administration. If it made things easier for the faculty, administratively, it would be one
thing, but you see there is lots of evidence that this does not happen. I will say the
business office operates much more efficiently than it once did. But the personnel
increase there is tremendous. I don’t know the figures, but I will say that it operates more
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efficiently and in a much more civil manner than it used to. And that’s a plus—how large
a one I really couldn’t say.
WL: Let’s take the example of athletics—
JB: Oh, my, yes.
WL: —which has been one of the big items, I guess, on the agenda on this campus. Can you
provide me a little bit of background on this? You’ve been here a long time. We didn’t
have intercollegiate athletics of any kind until—?
JB: Well, that’s right. As long as it was a women’s college, we didn’t really have anyth—.
We had a very strong physical education department, but quite a strong recreation
program for the campus at large, as well. There were some games, but not real
intercollegiate athletics in the usual sense. The people in PE [physical education] could
give you the technicalities of that, of course.
Since then, there has been an attempt, of course, to create some teams like the
soccer team and to get some interest among the students going to the games. And this is
part of an attempt to keep it from being a suitcase campus. I think everybody understands
that. The students complain that there is not a lot of goings on here on the weekends, and
they feel the students would be more attracted to weekends on the campus if there were
athletic competitions going on, as well as other kinds of events. I think in the minds of
many faculty members, though not all—I mean many of the men faculty members are
happy to see us go to Class I or Division I, or whatever the term is. A great many of those
are not, feeling that ultimately the price is going to be very high, the price of various
kinds.
This is the question of what is being done, and then, of course, the other question
is how is it being done. So I’ll do “what is being done” first. There is a strong feeling that
when you buy into the equivalent of Class I, first of all there’s the question of where the
money comes from and whether any of that might have gone instead for general
academic benefits, and, of course, it’s very hard to prove this. The usual argument is that
people who give to athletics would not normally give to the general academic program
anyway. I don’t know whether that is true or not. I don’t know how you can demonstrate
one conclusion or the other about that. When you pay the coaches a great deal and then
construct the kind of machinery that involves tutoring and special loving care of students,
you bring in a kind of organization which takes on its own life, of course, you can
illustrate this from all over the country. I don’t really need to prove this for very long.
And if you are not careful, it takes precedence over the academic program,
without question. And you end up favoring athletics in a way you might not favor some
other activities. Athletes ask for special tutoring from the faculty after they’ve been away
for a number of days. This is on top of their own tutoring service. The—if you’ve not
careful, exam files and paper files accumulate in the athletic quarters, unless this is very
carefully policed. You have the question of athletes perhaps feeling that they are special
and should not meet ordinary standards in any realm of their lives. If you’re not terribly
careful, they do that. These patterns can be seen in the Big Ten, the Big Eight [athletic
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conferences]. They can be seen at NC State [North Carolina State University],
[University of] Alabama, [University of] Oklahoma, you name it. And it’s there.
The question is, “How can you possibly hope to avoid most of this, if some
bigger, wealthier campuses have already fallen into the pattern?” And there is no very
real good answer given to these objectives—objections. Another one is, of course, that
many of our students come to this campus with sufficient raw ability, but very few skills
in studying or writing or various other things. And one question is, “Why should athletes
receive tutoring of a kind that your other students do not receive?” Now the usual reply to
that is that the athletic program pays for the tutoring. I don’t feel that that makes it fair
enough, and many faculty members that it is not fair enough even though the program
pays for itself. There is just a strong feeling that you bring on so much that is so
undesirable for the sake of athletic competitions.
And, of course, the whole story of NC State, you know has not been in the
newspapers because the Poole Commission [a panel appointed by UNC President
C.D.Spangler in 1992 to investigate charges of wrongdoing in NC State University’s
basketball program] and evidently the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association]
officials, for whatever reason, did not inquire into the entire situation at NC State, or they
would have learned that there has been long-time protest against Chancellor [Bruce]
Poulton for not favoring academics. The departments have protested and so on. This is
one reason, a very important reason, why NC State has been turned down twice now for a
Phi Beta Kappa chapter, which, after all, is as an objective a measure of the quality of
basic education on a campus as you can get.
And so this faces a lot of questions really about what happens to the academic
program when you really deliberately buy into athletics. And, of course, this is—it’s
happening because a num—chiefly because a number of very prominent businessmen in
town have been agitating for a higher level of activity on this campus in athletics for a
good many years.
We once had a group of businessmen, I know, under James Ferguson make an
offer of some ridiculous sum to get a basketball team started where, you know, they
wanted to get something cheap. But I don’t remember the amount of money, but what
they offered, you know, wouldn’t have bought one basketball player. But they wanted to
get the thing started. There are strong pressures from the business community of this
kind, and this is one of the questions, “Is that the constituency that this university answers
to first?” Or, “What is its primary constituency?” That is not answered very well.
WL: The decision has been made to go to Division I?
JB: That’s right.
WL: How did that happen?
JB: Well, the way it was handled is, of course, another question from the faculty viewpoints.
We knew that it was under consideration. Many faculty members expected to argue it out
on academic grounds in faculty meeting. Instead of this, we found that the head of Board
of Trustees, Mr. [Charles] Hayes [chief executive officer of Guilford Mills] announced it
in the sports section of the newspaper first, quite a long time before the faculty discussed
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it at all. And then the chancellor talked, I think, to individual faculty members and
perhaps small groups about this, and he calls this faculty discussion. I have pointed out to
him that in the eye of the faculty that is not faculty discussion.
Ultimately, what faculty discussion is is a full open meeting of the full faculty in
which everyone has a right to have his say. Then you have heard from the faculty and not
before. What you hear before then is some kind of sampling, and it may not be a very
good sample, in statistical terms. If we are going to use the methodology of management,
it’s not a good statistical sample, necessarily. That’s probably in his terms the flaw in the
method.
And what happened here was that we had a faculty discussion—so-called faculty
council—that’s the full faculty after all, very, very late in the process—with actually the
faculty being lectured to for most of the meeting by various members of the
administration—the man in charge of tutoring, one of the coaches, the vice chancellor for
student affairs, Mr. [James] Allen and a group of other people. Some time after 5:00
[p.m.], when it is known that many faculty members have to leave the meeting because of
classes and other obligations, the crowd became very thin. One faculty member finally
asked for a straw vote and asked for it repeatedly; that was Henry Levinson [professor of
religious studies]. And the chancellor didn’t seem to understand what was being asked
for, and Henry was asked to repeat the question several times, and there were various
other delays while people left the meeting. More and more had to leave. There was no
postponement so that there could be another session of open discussion with more
opportunity for faculty members themselves to talk. Instead, the thing was ended there
with a straw vote, which, of course, split, but not evenly, and the majority of the people
left were opposed to the idea of athletics.
There was member of the Board of Trustees present at that meeting, Mr. Michael
Weaver [president, Weaver Companies], who’s a very pleasant, well-meaning man who I
happened to meet during the time that I was a vice chair. After the meeting, he said to
me, in what I thought was a remarkable piece of naiveté, said to me, “Well, it was a good
discussion, wasn’t it?” And I said to him, “No, it wasn’t at all full or what the faculty
expects, and, furthermore, it should have been held much earlier in the process.”
And that, basically, is what is wrong with managing faculty opinion. And,
therefore, their conclusion, once again, is they have been mouse trapped. The decision
has been made. They’re being allowed to get up for a little bit of time and say what they
have to say, while they are smiled upon indulgently, and then we go on in the
predetermined fashion. And this is contributing—this kind of thing is contributing to
absolute rock-bottom faculty morale. And I’m not the only person who says this. Any
person who’s been around here for any length of time will tell you this. It’s voiced
repeatedly across the campus. So, if you are going to talk administrative method now,
I’ve given you several examples of the method. I am not talking about the intention
behind it because I can’t really be sure what that is. I can tell you what the results are and
what the appearance is.
WL: Let’s talk a little bit more about the successors to Mereb Mossman—Stan Jones and
Elizabeth Zinser. What were their styles? How did they operate?
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JB: Stanley Jones is a very bright man, a historian with some interest remaining in his
academic field. Rather the comic, he did not warm up to people very much, was always
pleasant to deal with, and reasonably accessible, I would say, to most faculty members
for appointments if they had something particular they wanted to discuss with him, He, I
would say, had certain opinions which he would not consider changing, no matter what
the debate. For example, he was very much opposed, as I recall, to foreign languages as
part of a college education—saw no benefit in that at all by way of general education.
When various people—I remember Richard Current [history professor], for
example, who hardly stuck his neck out on anything, once tried to argue with Stanley
Jones while I was present on the value that foreign language had for him. Dick Current’s
an American historian—he doesn’t need it in his research ordinarily, and he couldn’t get
Stanley Jones to budge.
And, in general, Stanley played a great many cards close to his chest and, again,
did not always listen to arguments. Though I must say I myself got him to change his
mind a few times. But most people felt that they did not succeed—in matters of academic
decisions, that’s all I’m talking about—matters where academic standards and practices
should govern the decision.
So, in general, he wasn’t all that bad, except I think he had the idea that this
should be largely a commuting, city-based university. I’ve never agreed that that’s what it
should be and many others—and he tried very strongly, of course, to steer the institution
in that direction. Also, as is the case with many people in these jobs—I don’t quite know
how this happens, whether they simply become so isolated that they do not respond the
way one would like or whether they begin to feel battered by the amount of detailed work
and the number of problems, which, of course, are numerous. I’m not sure.
I do know that in the case of the retention of some deans—at review time, faculty
members tried to demonstrate to Stanley and even to Bill Moran too that a certain dean
should not be retained on grounds of extensive unprofessional behavior, for which proof
was offered—extensive, what you might call basic dishonesty in dealing with people or
which extensive proof was offered—and yet somehow or other, these deans were
retained—much too long before they moved on.
Now this is a very sensitive juncture in university operations, I realize that. And
deans, of course, serve—had to go in both directions. They have to please the top
administration, and they have to please their faculties most of the time. And you’re never
going to get a perfect one. Everyone knows that without being told, though we are
reminded frequently. That’s another time waster, reminding faculty of principles like that.
But, at the same time, when you can prove an unwillingness to listen to very serious
charges, it seems to my—your vice chancellor is putting himself in jeopardy. And that
happened in several cases during Stanley Jones’ administration.
It was very, very hard to try to get something done about the admissions office,
which was operating very badly, and very little was done. It was hard to get anything
done about a dean of academic advising absolutely running wild and making judgments
that faculty members should have made, including, by the way, changing of grades
without notifying the faculty member. You can check with the Phi Beta Kappa chapter on
the history of that, if nothing else—things like that.
In other words, when these people working for the vice chancellor primarily
became well established, it became very hard to control them when their activities were
12
out of line. There needs to be more reciprocity and more dialogue of this kind. And that is
the only control academia has over behavior of this kind, and, in that respect, I don’t
think that Stanley did awfully well.
WL: What about Elizabeth Zinser?
JB: Well, I was vice chair of the faculty during Elizabeth’s first two years here, and I must
say I ended up being completely frustrated and exhausted at the end of the two years. I
ended by telling Bill Moran, at one point, that I found her completely unteachable and
that I had worked very hard at trying to teach her something. Because she came to this
job with a tremendous amount of energy, as everybody knows I think, who’s laid eyes on
her, but very little understanding of what the job was about—practically none—and,
again, with a kind of degree in management, which I assume was impressive to some.
And she really did not know what most of the academic disciplines were about at all. She
had a manner which charmed many people in the short term—that is to say, I think she’s
quite sincerely a very warm person who wants to work with people.
But another part of her that she may not be too conscious of herself wants to run
all those people—everything about them and everything about those jobs. She did not
have any view of the complexity of the operation here and, therefore, tried to make every
last decision herself and did not want faculty members to talk to people in administration,
out side of academic affairs. And that is not the tradition here, and, in fact, it cannot be
made to work—that we are not to talk to people in student services of the business office
or somewhere else without the vice—without the VCAA’s [vice chancellor for academic
affairs] permission. That is an utterly ridiculous rule. Also, she indicated that she did not
really want the fac—and she did this in an arts and sciences meeting—she indicated that
she really didn’t want the faculty going to the chancellor with any faculty concerns—that
they were to go through her. So this became an interesting form of extreme domination in
a person who’s—who was very energetic, but very high strung and whose attention span
was so short that she seldom listened to the end of a sentence.
Those of us who teach know that you watch peoples’ eyes, and you can tell
whether they are paying attention or not. We do this with out students all the time. We all
get to be pros at this. And you could watch her eyes and see her tune out in about the
middle of each sentence, while she thought of some way of contradicting the statement,
whatever it was, and, of course, I deliberately backed her into several corners where I
backed her into making the most outrageous possible statements in order to have the last
word. And this meant that communication really became impossible with her.
She corrected some personnel injustices along the way. She reallocated some
funds—that some funds were better distributed than they had been before—to programs.
So that she did some good, but she wore out her welcome completely by the end of the
second year. And, of course, she didn’t leave until the end of the fifth, I believe, with
everybody wondering how we would be able to stand it.
She might have had a handful of partisans left in the faculty by the time she left,
but practically no one that I am aware of. And it’s too bad, I think you know, that with
her energy and a certain kind of brightness—if she had learned control and had learned
something about how academic institutions really operate, she might even have been
fairly successful here.
13
WL: She seems to have been undone by this [unclear], or do you think it was coming before
that?
JB: Oh, yes, it was coming before that, but that became he epitome of how she worked
because, although various people worked on the writing of the document, ultimately it
was hers. With all of the confusion and all of the extra burdens.
[recording paused]
JB: With all the rambling and full of [unclear], but in many cases does not represent an
understanding of the various disciplines, particularly the humanities, which, of course,
are always hard to define. You do not define the humanities in terms of the creative arts.
There is something else again. [unclear] It may or may not be sciences either. And that
makes it not too easy to define. But I think difficulties of that kind are very evident in that
document.
WL: You have read about that?
JB: Most of it. Not recently, but I did read through it at the time.
WL: How did—this is a completely different subject, but how did promotion policy change
over times?
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]
JB: [unclear]—in practice. So that the real emphasis for promotion now, in spite of what is
said, is on publication. And, as a result, in some quarters teaching has suffered to some
extent, and service—the service function of the faculty—has suffered very seriously. The
administration, of course, always denies this when cornered. But the messages are
different, and they filter down in various ways. The message comes down through
pressure to get outside grants.
And, in some fields, that’s very, very hard to do. But the pressure remains very
intense on the part of people who don’t want to understand that it’s much more difficult
in some fields than others to get outside money. There is pressure from deans who keep
talking about research and publication. And that, of course, sends a message, especially
to the newer people, but also to heads. And then some heads have stressed publication to
the point where they clearly slight teaching in their scheduling and in their promotion
regulations and, in effect, say they cannot evaluate service, and they’re not going to count
it at all.
I know one dean who has said that in fairly recent years, so that the spirit of the
regulations—though they were not terribly well written, I would agree with that—has
14
been violated many times. And the messages are very different from what the words say,
in their inept way, and from what the intention of the document really is.
WL: Did—thirty years ago, more than thirty years ago when you arrived—how did promotion
take place? You mean it was more consistent—or in actual practice?
JB: You mean the basis for promotion?
WL: Well, I mean in actual practice.
JB: In actual practice, there was a lot of favoritism in promotion. That was evident. Again,
Ms. Mossman’s hand was in it. Oh, very often when a department was largely opposed to
a person’s promotion, she would have at times intervene and promote that individual.
And it became clear through the grapevine and in other ways. Though this is hard to
prove, when she was opposed to a promotion that pretty well ended matters. So the kind
of objective review by a number of groups of documented materials that we’re now
striving for in the system simply did not exist.
It was rather nice in a way, as I recall—I was promoted to tenure here, I think,
two years after I came or something—I forget—very shortly after I came with the PhD,
and I didn’t know that I was up for promotion. I was simply told by my lovely, fatherly
department head after it was over that I had been promoted. This, of course, was lovely
for me. There was no anxiety associated with the acquisition of tenure whatsoever. At the
same time, I cannot argue for that way of doing things. But that is pretty much the way it
worked—a very paternalistic, maternalistic, let us say, and very uneven, probably, as to
standards.
WL: Yes, so nowadays—
JB: On the other hand, some good teachers who were good scholars also, but maybe didn’t
publish a lot were given tenure, and they wouldn’t stand a chance now. And clearly,
service to the department and the university was expected.
WL: That was expected and rewarded?
JB: Clearly expected and rewarded. Of course, if you don’t reward it, you don’t get it. You
can’t get it through threats or minimum standards or anything else. You have to reward it.
WL: Yes, what about salary increments, salary increases—then and now?
JB: They apparently were very quixotic. You see, it’s only in recent years that we’ve had
access to salary figures on this campus. I would assume that the state always had
something that you might call a “blue book” or something that listed the compensation of
all state employees, and I guess if you’d gone to Raleigh, you could have gotten it. The
figures were not available here. The—again, Ms. Mossman, I understand from some
heads of that time, rearranged salaries, to a very great extent according to her own
judgment. And it was considered very bad form to complain about a salary, and in parti—
15
you’ll find most of the people who were here for a long time still followed that. They
might have been very unhappy with their salaries, but the practically never made formal
complaints.
You see, that has changed now among the younger faculties. And, of course, you
could never admit that you knew the salary of another faculty member without being
censured for being, you know, out of line somehow in terms of the right forms for doing
things. And this is a very insidious form of control of faculty opinion, of course. You find
it very often, of course, in very small private liberal arts colleges where the president runs
wild, and he keeps faculty under control by making clear that you’re not supposed to
know salary figures, and, therefore, they are not discussable. But that is a very old pattern
that largely has died out of academia, and, of course, has not place in an institution of this
size and should never have had a place in it.
WL: There have been a number of [unclear] inequities in salaries?
JB: Yes, tremendous ones. And the budget meeting several years ago finally volunteered to
the chancellor to be the—a supervising committee for a study of salaries, on grounds that
it was an elected committee, usually of people with a great deal of experience in the
faculty and, therefore, would have credibility with the faculty. But, of course, the
information in any organized form would have to come from academic affairs. The
alternative would be for that committee to take its computers and go through the salary
lists in the library, and that’s a very inefficient way to do it.
Mr. Moran absolutely refused to make the study, finally arguing it’s not a perfect
world, and you cannot make it perfect. And at that point some members of the committee,
including myself, argued that perhaps one should not expect to correct all the inequities at
once, but perhaps one might scan the faculty and start to do something about the most
obvious gross inequities. But he did want to work this way.
There was a committee a number of years ago with some women on it,
interestingly enough, who did make a study of inequities according to some formula that
I never understood. They made a report directly to the chancellor with a list, I understand,
of faculty members who were considered underpaid, and I learned later that I was on it.
But I did not hear for several years that I had been on the inequities list until my chairman
chose to tell me about it, while he didn’t do anything to correct the inequity. So that I
think a lot of people felt that that study was too secret and that the membership of the
committee was never announced. The methodology was never announced. The results
were not made known in any way that had any great effect, as far as I could tell anyway.
So that—and then previous to that, a number of years, the AAUP chapter had
tried to do a study of salary inequities, but they had gotten the information from Ms.
Mossman. And I remember distinctly that a member of the chapter who had a large part
in the study told me that the women in the English department had not been considered in
the study, and our salaries were notoriously low. We were not considered in the study
because there were so few of us that we would be identifiable, and that this would be
pure—poor statistical procedure. Whereupon I said, “You may use my name and my
salary anytime if it helps to get it up.” I don’t feel that methodology can be excused,
given the situation. But you see, the whole thing died on the vine because of the
circumstances. Again, salary figures were not public at that time.
16
The administration has a kind of problem here now because now that the figures
are public, and I’ve very glad they are. Of course, various faculty members have gone
and done their own statistical studies of salaries.
WL: How did the figures—?
JB: And so you’re going to get some studies, no matter what, and it would pay to have a
thorough one done by acceptable methods and accepted. But he’s unable to accept that.
He is extremely stubborn about some of these things. You cannot persuade him on any
grounds whatever to change his mind. That’s a perfectly good example of what I was
talking about earlier.
[End of Interview]