Oral history interview with Clifton Bob Clark, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: [Clifton] Bob Clark
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: November 8, 1990
LD: Dr. Clark, can you tell me when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at
Greensboro] and in what capacity?
BC: I came here in August of 1965 as head of the physics department and professor of
physics.
LD: And where did you come from?
BC: I came here from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, by way of India. We
sold our house in Dallas, and the whole family went around the world that summer on the
way to Greensboro.
LD: Really?
BC: We at one time had sold our house in Dallas and were living in a hotel in Ahmedabad,
India, so that was our home truly.
LD: I didn’t know that. How interesting. What was the department like when you arrived?
BC: Dr. [Anna Joyce] Reardon had been head of the department for several years prior to that
time. Mrs. [Mabel Livingston] Waynick, who had a bachelor’s degree [class of 1937,
chemistry major] from this institution, major in physics, was teaching the introductory
level laboratories. And I think occasionally Dr. Reardon, when she could find someone,
was permitted to hire a person with a master’s degree in physics who would stay a year or
two and then move on into a PhD program so—consisted of two full-time people,
occasionally another person, one PhD.
LD: And when you arrived, did Dr. Reardon retire before you came here or did you overlap?
BC: No, Dr. Reardon agreed to stay on with me as head of the department so she was a
regular teaching faculty member, professor of physics, for the next ten years before she
retired—didn’t retire until 1975. Very pleasant to work with. That was not the case all
across the campus, I understand, but I was very fortunate.
LD: Can you tell me something about the goals of the department when you arrived and how
things changed after you came?
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BC: The campus had just become coeducational a year or so before that—had really been
pronounced [The] University of North Carolina at Greensboro rather than the Woman’s
College [of the University of North Carolina] about that time and was to have the mission
of being a graduate-level institution so almost all of the department heads that were
brought in then were brought in with the idea that they would develop a graduate
program. In the case of physics, it was to develop a master’s level program then. So we
were to hire new faculty and acquire new equipment and get the approval put through the
powers that be that would say that we could have that kind of a program.
I came to the campus actually in the spring before August of 1965 during the
spring break and started ordering the equipment, planning some renovations of the spaces
in the building and attending to various things like that for about a week or ten days at
that time. Actually came on board a little after the middle of August in 1965. Hired
Gaylord Hageseth at that time who was finishing his degree at Catholic University
[Washington, DC] and was appointed as an instructor while that was going on then.
LD: And he started in 1965?
BC: He started in 1965 also—came the same time, same year I did. And then during the next
couple or three years we added quite a few faculty members. And when [Dr. Robert] Bob
Miller [professor chemistry and physics, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences] came,
as the first one of the first things he did was call the department heads in to discuss the
faculty situation in each department. At that time we had several who had been hired and
were on tenure track but hadn’t been here long enough to achieve tenure yet. So his first
question to me, I remember, was “Which one of these people do you want to stay to
become tenured?” And I told him, “All of them.” And he kind of sat back a little bit and
we talked on about some other things. A year or so later he told me he was very taken
aback when I said that. He said to himself, “Either this guy is lying or he just doesn’t
understand the situation.” But he did agree with me, and all of them became members of
the faculty. We had a very good period of attracting very good people to come in.
LD: But that was the period when you were building the department up. So surely the
university must have expected that you would be hiring a large number of new people?
BC: Yes, but his experience apparently had been that most people hire people, but they don’t
always keep all that they hire.
LD: You’re just a very careful hirer.
BC: We were very fortunate in the people that we attracted.
LD: What was your research interest when you came to UNCG?
BC: I worked in theoretical physics and the region then called solid state and in the area of
lattice dynamics and had had an NSF [National Science Foundation] grant at SMU
[Southern Methodist University] to support some research there, which I continued after I
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came here while department head but without NSF support. A lot of work that I did
became possible because I knew some people at [University of North Carolina at] Chapel
Hill who were interested in the same area. And shortly after coming here, I went over and
actually met one of the people that I had corresponded with before coming to North
Carolina about research matters.
And they had a computer that would be very suitable for doing some of the lattice
dynamics calculations that I had done in the past and very generously made me the offer
that I could make use of their computer facilities there. And Triangle [Raleigh, Durham,
Chapel Hill area] Universities Computation Center was being planned at that time, but
had not yet gotten machines or any of that sort of thing. And so during the year or so until
that actually opened and we began to make use of those facilities, I used the computer at
Chapel Hill. And a few years after that I made contact and spent a summer in the solid
state department of Oak Ridge National Laboratory [science and technology laboratory
managed by the United States Department of Energy] in Tennessee and continued
collaboration with that group then ever since. And most of the support of the research
then has come from them and have been able to work on the campus on much of it, but
make trips over there. And this interestingly enough, was an experimental group, helping
them out with some of the theory they were interested in, but at the same time getting to
see things done that pertained to the problems that I had been doing theory with. I’ve
been very fortunate in that regard.
LD: Now, you were chairman of the department from 1965 until—?
BC: Till 1975. Ten years.
LD: And then who became chairman?
BC: Dr. Hageseth. He finished his degree at Catholic University within a year or two after he
came here and was made assistant professor then, upon completion of the degree. And
then during that ten years had become an associate professor and then full professor.
After ten years I figured that it was time to let somebody else in with some ideas to see
what they wanted to do and felt that if I hadn’t done a good enough job of picking my
colleagues during that time I ought to pay the price.
LD: You had a number of other appointments to various larger communities on campus and
some administrative, campus-wide administrative positions.
BC: Yeah.
LD: What else have you done on campus?
BC: The—I guess the major visible committee that I’ve been on is the all-university
promotions and tenure committee. The last time I was on it was during the two years that
I was vice chairman of the Faculty Council. And on that occasion I sat down and counted
up—I had been on the campus twenty-two years at that time and found out that I had
been for eleven years on that—
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LD: On that committee?
BC: —tenure and promotions committee, which was kind of hard to believe. I hadn’t realized
that I had spent that long. I hope I don’t have more service on it. It’s very demanding.
LD: You think it’s gotten a lot harder to judge promotion and tenure?
BC: I’m not really sure that it’s any harder. I think that some of the decisions are more
difficult in some ways because of the evolving situation on campus. It’s harder to know
what the objectives of the various parts of the campus are quite as clearly as when I first
came here. There wasn’t much difference between what this group was intending to do
and what this group was intending to do. We’ve matured a little more now, and I think
there are some people whose mission is different than others and that should certainly
have a bearing when the promotion and tenure considerations come up. We’ve also gone
through a period in which many of the department heads and deans and other
administrators were brought in from off campus and frequently were plunged into the
presentation of materials for people for promotion and tenure who had actually been on
the campus considerably longer than those who were proposing them.
LD: Yes.
BC: And their ability to present these materials in line with the campus practices was not great
always, and it made things kind of difficult occasionally. I think the system works well. I
think there undoubtedly have been one or two injustices that I know of since I came to
the campus, but I would know of them only during the time that I was on that committee.
And I know of a great number of people then who were considered and not dealt
injustices so I think the system works, by and large, extremely well.
LD: Do you think the criteria have changed?
BC: One of the ad hoc committees that I was on was to draw up the promotion rules
essentially, and that committee’s work was completed in about a year’s time. And I felt,
at the time, “Well, this is good for about three years or something and then undoubtedly
there will be another ad hoc committee that updates it.”
LD: Yes.
BC: This year it was finally changed, and I think that is some thirteen years after it was done.
I think it went far too long.
LD: Maybe you just did a very good job?
BC: I don’t think it was that good a job particularly since the document was amended on the
floor of the Faculty Council and passed—the amendment passed—and I think did a great
deal of injustice to it at the time so that I really felt—
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LD: What was the nature of the amendment?
BC: What?
LD: What was the nature of the amendment?
BC: It was called the Tisdale Amendment, interestingly enough, because Professor [Charles
R.] Tisdale, then an assistant professor [of English], proposed it, and it was one of the
motherhood and apple pie kind of things that nobody could in his right mind oppose. It
simply said that teaching is the main emphasis on this campus and a person who is a good
teacher should be promoted regardless of what else. And there is no way you can vote
against that, but there is no way that you can apply it either. And I think it should never
have been passed. I think it was done hastily, and I know for a fact that a great number of
the faculty members who voted for it subsequently didn’t get tenure here because they
thought they were such good teachers they would be promoted and, in fact, that was not
the criterion that was used.
LD: That’s a fairly controversial issue though still among faculty members.
BC: I think still that we have state wide probably the best teaching that’s done post-high
school because we have people that are interested.
LD: You mean here at UNCG?
BC: Yes. And I felt even then that we were large enough that it would not be necessary to say
that every person had to be great at research, great at teaching and great at service in
order to get tenure and be promoted. But, in fact, that’s what, in my experience, has been
applied all that time. And I then wanted there to be, you know, something like two or
three out of these at least be the statement [sic]. But despite the amendment which said
that if you were a good enough teacher that’s all you need to be to get promoted, it
continued to be then the application that you have to really be outstanding in all three
areas or you won’t be promoted.
LD: So the amendment was to some extent ignored?
BC: Well, it was interpreted in such a way that I think there have probably been three people
on the campus since then who were deemed to be the very distinguished teachers to
which the amendment was interpreted to refer so that they could be promoted without a
research record or service record. I think that’s probably just.
LD: Yes.
BC: But I think there are probably people whose talent in research is such that they would be
quite deserving of a promotion and tenure rank without having at the same time to excel
in the classroom. I would hope everybody on the campus would be interested in doing
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good teaching, but I think I know a number of people that are interested in it but really
aren’t very good teachers. I don’t see that these people are undeserving of faculty rank
because of that. I think their contributions are [unclear]
LD: What else? Is that all the Faculty Council did was promotion and tenure or were there
other responsibilities?
BC: The promotions and tenure was a small committee of—
LD: —of the Faculty Council.
BC: The Faculty Council now refers to the organization of every faculty member on the
campus and, at the present time, then there is an Academic Cabinet that consists of about
fifty or so people and some of them faculty members, some of them administrators, some
of them students. And they meet monthly and act in an advisory capacity to the
chancellor on academic matters and to the larger group, the Faculty Council. And the
promotions and tenure committee is a committee of the Academic Cabinet.
LD: Yes. When, you know, you said that Bob Miller was the first dean of the School [actually
College] of Arts and Sciences, when did that separation take place?
BC: Oh, dear. I’m not sure exactly what year it was. Somewhere probably around 1970. Might
have been ’69 or ’68 or ’72, but it’s somewhere in there.
LD: Who was the dean when you came?
BC: When I came, Mereb Mossman [faculty in the department of sociology and anthropology,
dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of faculty, vice chancellor for academic
affairs] was, I think, still called the dean of the faculty and that meant of the whole
campus. In effect, she did the job that would be done by all of the deans. She was—they
did have people who were called deans of the professional schools, and then there were
department heads in what we now know as the College of Arts and Sciences. And these
were essentially of the same rank. Then dean of the School of Music and the head of the
department of English or something like that were essentially about the same level, and
all reported directly to Miss Mossman, who was a tremendous lady. She was both a great
person and a great administrator and one of my reasons for coming here was being
attracted by her, and I certainly was not disappointed.
I had had experiences at Southern Methodist University as the head of the
department there. And in those days nobody had yet publicly spotted some of the
irregularities connected with their athletic program, but it was well known on the campus
even then that things were abused considerably, and the president of the university at that
time contributed greatly to the situation. He would have been very happy as a high school
coach, and somehow or other he wound up as a university president. And he mostly
added administrative people who he had hoped were going to turn out to be able to attract
really big gifts to the university, and that was his main emphasis. And so a lot of the
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people with whom I had to deal had no academic experience at all that they had ever
experienced, I think. It was not pleasant.
I was very impressed when I came here then in dealing with Miss Mossman. I
would go to her office; we’d talk something over, and by the time I got back to my office,
there would be a memorandum confirming all that we had agreed to. Well, I had just
gone through two or three years of talking to deans and higher-ups who lied to you.
They’d tell you anything to get you out of their office, and then swear it had never been
said. I enjoyed that kind of relationship very much, and we used to sit around and
count—after Miss Mossman retired—that they apparently have added—the count would
go anywhere between seven and thirteen people to do her job once she left.
LD: Are they doing it better than she did?
BC: I would hesitate to say either way. We have some very good people, and we had and have
had some that weren’t very good since her time.
LD: Well, that seems to be the prevalent opinion.
BC: Yeah.
LD: Of Miss Mossman. What kind of overall concept of the university did she have? What
was she trying to move UNCG toward?
BC: She had very much the concept that it was to be a university, not just the Woman’s
College that it had been before, and was very active in building so that it had been before
so that the strengths that we had would be reinforced and not weakened in that building.
She, I think, saw and communicated this idea that the faculty in contact with the
undergraduate students was one of the big strengths that should never be lost. She also
continually reminded the deans and department heads that it was their job to think of the
campus as a whole, and, you know, that we were all working for the same university.
And I think that’s something that is not prevalent on the campus now and that
occasionally hurts us a great deal that it is not.
LD: Because the university is now divided up into professional schools?
BC: Yeah, and a lot of the people that are in charge of this area say, well, you know, my job is
to see that nobody interferes with what my area is doing, rather than saying how can we
cooperate to further the business of the campus as a whole.
LD: Yes. What do you see as the role of the physics department within the College of Arts
and Sciences and in the university as a whole?
BC: Well, I think that we have, of course, the role of providing education to undergraduate
students in matters of physics and astronomy as probably one of our major activities. We
have a master’s degree program. I think that it can be a very strong one. I have never felt
that we should go for a PhD in this area. There were, when I came to the state, three
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nationally-known PhD programs, at [North Carolina]State [University, Raleigh, North
Carolina] and Chapel Hill and Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina]. And I don’t
think this state was big enough that it should have had another one to go along with those
in a field like physics. Since then, Wake Forest University [Winston-Salem, North
Carolina] has added a PhD program. And I think it is a growing and will become well
known all right, but they are struggling very hard finding students to participate in these
activities and so forth and will for a long time.
Our problem in having a strong master’s-level program at the present time is a
lack of funds to be competitive and attracting good students in the program. We are able
to make offers for assistantships that just aren’t competitive with what they can get all
around us and certainly out of state. People who apply here cannot be encouraged
because we have practically no chance of getting one of the few tuition waivers available
for graduate students. So that means they have to pay out-of-state tuition and the size
stipends that we are able to offer now will barely meet an out-of-state tuition cost
providing nothing for living expenses or anything like that. So we simply can’t attract
out-of-state people unless they have some savings they’re willing to put in to it or
something like that. And they can simply find a lot of places that will make a different
kind of deal. In-state students—the financial picture would not be quite so bleak for them,
but we still don’t offer as high stipends as other places around that have master’s
programs.
LD: Yes. Do you think this is a problem with the state legislature level or is the university not
allocating the funds to this department?
BC: Oh, I think the university administration is aware of our problem and, in fact, has—oh, I
guess the stipends that they are offering now are probably three times what they offered
when I came here. Of course, inflation is about the same too, so it’s not a big increase.
But I think they do for us what they can. I don’t think they have the funds to do for
everybody. But this is the first place that I’ve known where it was not possible for the
institution to waive the tuition, but we’re not permitted to do that because of this
peculiarity that tuition money goes into the general fund of the university and then the
university gets some budget money to run on from the general fund, but the university
does not collect tuition and keep it to run the university. They collect tuition and pay it to
the state so we are not permitted to just waive tuition. We have to deliver so many dollars
to the general fund of the state before any tuition.
LD: Is that significantly different from other state’s universities?
BC: Yes. The ones that I know of—if the university decides that this tuition can be waived, it
can be waived, but not in North Carolina.
LD: You’ve seen a number of chancellors, several chancellors.
BC: Well, actually—
LD: At least three?
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BC: —when I came here, the chancellor of the university was on leave in Washington [DC]
heading the Job Corps [United States Department of Labor program that offers free
education and vocation training to those aged sixteen to twenty-four].
LD: [Dr.] Otis Singletary?
BC: Otis Singletary. And we had an acting chancellor then.
LD: Who was it?
BC: [Dr. James S.] Jim Ferguson, and I think Otis Singletary returned to the campus for six
months or so a year or two after I came here and then left to go back to Washington to
another position. And then Jim was made permanently the chancellor—given the
permanent appointment and then, when he retired, [Dr. William E.]Moran came. So I’ve
really only known two, Ferguson and Otis.
LD: Ferguson and Moran. What did you think of Chancellor Ferguson?
BC: I thought he was really great. He was a person who had been in the classroom most of his
life, and I tremendously favor university administrators who have that kind of
background. Also, Jim and I had some ties we discovered after I came here. When I got
out of high school I joined a [United States] Navy program which was supposed
eventually to lead me to be a pilot, but I had to have two years of college before I could
go to flight school so they packed me up in the summertime and shipped me to Millsaps
College in Jackson, Mississippi. And at that time, Jim Ferguson was teaching history
down there. We did not know each other there, but discovered after I came to UNCG
that, in fact, we had been at the same institution at the same time. And so we had that
kind of background that allowed us to get together and talk about what Jackson,
Mississippi, was like.
LD: Yes.
BC: And then he was a person who knew the faculty, who became acquainted with people,
and so we got to be good friends during the years that I was there and he was the
chancellor of the university. Whether it’s because we’re bigger or because of the different
temperaments, that situation does not exist on campus now. It’s very difficult for anyone
to know the chancellor or even the vice chancellors very well.
LD: Not even the vice chancellors?
BC: Most of them not. You know, not for everybody.
LD: Tell me something about the students that you’ve had pass through the department. What
are some of the changes that you have seen in quality of student and the things that they
go into after they graduate?
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BC: Well, when I came, I had been teaching already for fifteen years. There was not very
much difference between the students I saw here and the students I had seen prior to that
time, with the exception that, although this was a state institution, I think they got a
higher caliber student than I had encountered at SMU. SMU touted greatly its stiff
requirements that it could require that the Texas state institutions couldn’t. But in
comparing the students—I mean, you know, looking at their records—our entrance
requirements on this campus were higher than SMU’s were, in practice. I think probably
like everybody else that has been around for twenty years or so we feel the students are
not nearly as well prepared as they used to be, and there’s probably some truth in that.
I tremendously enjoyed the ’60s. I came here in the middle of the ’60s, and
during the latter part of the ’60s I could not walk into a class and say, “I’ve seen this
group last year; what are you doing back here?” Although the faces were new, they’d act
the same way, and it wasn’t true any longer. Each year’s students were different. I
thought that was great. I think there’s less difference now. We’re back again to where—
they’re just not that much different this year than they were last year.
LD: What made them different in the ’60s? The politics?
BC: Well, they were just more individual. They had ideas about what they wanted to do; they
had different ways of approaching the same things that I had talked to students about
before. I found it quite refreshing—the difference in approaches.
LD: What was going on on campus in the late ’60s?
BC: Well, I think this campus probably was not the scene of some of the occurrences that
went on at others. Things were fairly quiet here. But there was a lot more student
concern. Students did congregate at times as a group and make speeches about what they
thought was wrong and should be done right with the general overall political situation
and sometimes addressed campus situations. That had never happened before and hasn’t
happened in many years since.
LD: But there were no major confrontations with the administration?
BC: I think there were one or two. I think there was at one time some considerable concern
over something involving the employees in the dormitories and the food service.
LD: The food service strike.
BC: I don’t know that it ever got to the point of being a strike, but there seemed to be some
situation that was concerning people. And I think the students confronted the chancellor
one time over this. That would have been Jim Ferguson. But I don’t think that on this
campus it went as far as it did on other campuses. I think about that same time for the
same situation Duke had a really big confrontation.
LD: When you first came here, the classes must have been still mostly women?
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BC: Yeah, we thought it was quite a mark when we walked into the first advanced physics
course and found the number of boys equaled the number of girl students, but we passed
that point a long time ago. Now we get quite excited if we go in and there’s a girl in the
advanced physics course. We’ve unfortunately become more like other institutions in that
respect.
LD: But you do have a program going on in the department right now that Sue Lea [physics
professor] is involved in to encourage high school girls to go into science?
BC: Yes, junior high, I think, eighth grade is the group they were working with. I think they
work with them as eighth and ninth grade girls to try to counteract some of the
disenchantment with science and math that occurs for a lot of reasons. I think some of it
is simply peer and societal pressures that say, “You girls ought not to be interested in this
kind of thing.” So they’re trying to create a situation in which it would be all right for
them to remain interested in these things.
LD: It’s interesting how little has changed in that regard, given that feminism has been around
twenty years, and people still sort of have that stereotyped—
BC: That’s true.
LD: —view of science.
BC: It’s awfully tough. Nowadays, I think, no matter what the field is, for married couples
because they generally have to both have careers, at least employment, and to try to get
these to match the same locality is not always easy. And the problems in the case of the
field of physics and astronomy—it would be people in those fields anyway. And then to
have a demand that in this locality I must find an opening makes it pretty tough.
LD: Do you think women are giving up their careers to some extent to follow their husbands
or stay with their husbands generally?
BC: I think that still occurs, and I think it still is true in my experience that most of the women
feel that they are called to be a mother rather than be working as a strong one. It’s a tough
call. I don’t—well, I’ve got kids.
LD: Right. Well, can you think of anything else about your years at UNCG that you’d like to
share?
BC: No, except that I’m extremely grateful to have them. I enjoy what I do, and I think that’s
something that not everybody gets to say about what they do. Rex Adelberger [physics
faculty] out at Guilford College [Greensboro, North Carolina] frequently tells me that I
should not let his administration know it, but if they didn’t pay him to do this he’d pay
them so he could. That’s kind of the way I feel about teaching physics too.
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LD: Thanks very much.
BC: You’re welcome.
LD: I enjoyed the interview.
[End of interview]