Oral history interview with Robert G. Eason, 1996 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Robert G. Eason
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: February 14, 1996
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WL: So, maybe the place to start is—if you could tell me a little bit about your background,
where you were born, and where you were educated.
RE: Okay. I’m a native of Tennessee. I was born near Memphis, just outside of Jackson,
Tennessee, and lived there until I was twelve years old, on a farm. And my father also ran
a general merchandise farm store, so we survived during the Depression days with the
store and the farm.
My father died when I was twelve, which created a crisis for the family. My
mother's parents lived in southeast Missouri, which is about seventy-five miles from
where we lived in Tennessee. And after my father died we really didn't have a way of
making a living where we were, so we moved to southeast Missouri where my
grandparents helped us manage some farm land that we bought there. And so we
managed to get through some critical years there.
And so I went to—completed my public education in Missouri—and then went
into the service for almost three years during World War II; it was sort of toward the end
of World War II. And I spent two and a half years or so in the aviation cadet program
learning to be aviator. I was discharged before I completed that program in 1946, after
the war had ended both in Germany and Japan. And then—I forgot to mention that I had
gone to college for a year prior to going into the service—but then after I got out I
continued my education.
WL: Was this at Columbia, Missouri?
RE: Well, I spent a year at Arkansas State College, which is about seventy-five miles from
where I lived in southeast Missouri, before going to the University of Missouri. Then I
transferred to Missouri as a junior and earned all three of my degrees there from—1948
through 1956. So that’s sort of the very brief history of my—
WL: And then you went on after receiving the PhD at Missouri?
RE: Yeah, I went to UCLA, did a post-doc there in the departments of psychology and
physiology. I was working for a professor named Donald B. Lindsley [cofounder of
UCLA Brain Institute, died in 2003], who was in both of those departments—held a
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position in both departments. So my fellowship also involved working in both
departments. I taught a course in the psychology department, and then I did research in
the department of physiology at UCLA with a neurophysiologist there. So that sort of
launched me on my career that, you know, determined the type of general research area
that I would spend my career in.
WL: Lindsley was your mentor?
RE: He was my post-doctoral mentor. He became a very good friend, and I’ve maintained a
close relationship with him. He recently wrote his autobiography. He’s an extremely
distinguished and well known scientist in the field of neuroscience. And he—I wrote a
commentary—it's the last thing that I’ve listed on my vitae there—as an introduction to
his autobiography. That was quite an honor. He is my major mentor to the area of
research that I have contributed to.
But I don’t want to diminish, either, the role that my professor at the University of
Missouri, a fellow named [Robert S.] Bob Daniel, played in my education and career. He
was a wonderful teacher. He’s still alive, retired. Lindsley is still alive, too. And Bob
Daniel was very instrumental in my taking the direction that I took in psychology, which
was the field of the physiological psychology.
WL: Was that a—that must have been a fairly new field.
RE: Well, no, it's not. It is a very old field. Experimental psychology, when it first began in
Germany with Wilhelm Wundt, was referred to as physiological psychology because it
sort of, you know, was an offshoot of physiology.
Wundt was not very highly respected by other physiologists who thought he
shouldn't be looking at psychological phenomena. But he started—his experimental
approach was a physiological approach, and that orientation to the study of psychology
and psychological processes is one of the oldest aspects of experimental psychology, one
of the oldest orientations.
In recent years, it's sort of moved away from psychology, from the discipline of
psychology, and has sort of been absorbed by another discipline called neuroscience.
About twenty years ago, a society was organized to bring people from various disciplines
including physics, chemistry, biology, psychology together to sort of launch an all-out
investigative war on understanding the brain. And that area has become known as
neuroscience and has become a major discipline now of its own. And physiological
psychology has been pretty much absorbed by that. And it goes up by itself.
WL: Well, tell me about the circumstances that brought you to UNCG [The University of
North Carolina Greensboro], the sequence of events that—
RE: Okay. It was a fortuitous thing that brought me here. I was—after I did my post-doctorate
work at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], I went down to San Diego and
took a job initially as a research psychologist with the human factors division of the Navy
Electronics Laboratory. And during my first three years there I became acquainted with
people over at San Diego State College, it was called at that time.
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And after my third year with the Navy, I took a full time position at San Diego
State as an assistant professor, continuing to work at the Navy Electronics Lab on a part-time
basis as a research scientist. And did that for— until 1967. From 1960 to 1967 I was
on the staff at San Diego State and also working at the Navy Lab. And so I had an
opportunity to—through Navy support and through having been successful in obtaining
some NSF [National Science Foundation] grants, I’d established a pretty strong research
career and was becoming fairly well established in my area of expertise.
And in 1966 I had organized a symposium at the American Psychological
Association [APA] meeting in my area of expertise, which was in the area of behavioral
arousal, neural activation, attention alertness—what is it that goes on physiologically in
the brain that enables us to stay alert, attentive, to concentrate, and so on. So I was
studying those kinds of neural mechanisms as well as measuring motor responses from
the body such as muscular tension, which is a very good index of how alert and attentive
people are under certain conditions.
And so I organized this symposium to deal with some of the latest research and
thinking that was going on in the area. And a woman was present in the audience, very—
I didn't know who she was at the time, although I was very familiar with her work. Her
name is Elizabeth Duffy, and Elizabeth Duffy was here at Woman's College [of the
University of North Carolina]. And at that time it had already—although I didn’t know
it—it had become a branch of the university [The University of North Carolina System].
And so she was there. She was very knowledgeable and had contributed to this
same area in theoretical writings; she wasn't much of a researcher. But she was a very
outspoken participant from the audience in that symposium, and after it was over I
introduced myself to her, found out who she was. And she was familiar—we had done
some communicating in writing, because her theoretical writings were very closely
aligned with the type of research that I was doing. As a matter of fact, I used some of her
theoretical concepts for interpreting some of my empirical findings.
We got acquainted there, and it wasn't more than two weeks later that I got a
phone call from Mereb Mossman [vice chancellor for academic affairs] here inviting me
to apply for a position as head of the psychology department. It came totally out of the
blue and totally by surprise. So it was that fortuitous event of meeting Elizabeth Duffy at
an APA meeting that was—undoubtedly was the event that resulted in my coming to
UNCG. If that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here I am sure.
WL: Life works that way sometimes.
RE: Yeah, it does.
WL: So she went back and presumably was impressed enough to make that point—
RE: That's right. This department at the time was in the process of seeking a new department
head. Kendon Smith was stepping down and the, you know, the university had just
become a coeducational institution and a new branch of the University of North Carolina.
It was in its fourth year as one of the branches when I came.
And so Kendon had taken initial steps to develop—move in the direction of
graduate education—had developed a one-year master’s program that had been in
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existence a couple of years before I got here. It was not a strong program, although it was
a step in the right direction. But the university, I got the impression, wanted to really
move ahead quite aggressively in developing some doctoral programs. And so I was
contacted and asked to apply to be considered for the position with the understanding that
one of the objectives would be to develop a doctoral program in psychology here.
WL: That was clear from the beginning?
RE: That was clear, quite clear from the beginning, yes. And so, anyway, I applied really with
no anticipation of coming here. I was perfectly happy where I was and doing what I was
doing. I had risen to full professor out there, just been promoted to full professor, so
things were going very well for me. I had NSF [National Science Foundation] funding.
WL: Was something like a department chairmanship or headship, was that something that you
thought you might want to do sometime?
RE: Well, yes, what really intrigued me about this from the job viewpoint was an opportunity
to build a doctoral program in psychology from scratch. I mean absolutely from scratch,
with hiring a faculty, and planning the program, and considering the direction we wanted
the program to go, and what we wanted the emphasis to be, and so forth. I mean, there
were zero restrictions with regard to how to do that. That was very appealing.
WL: You must have found the institution appealing. I mean, there must have been something
that made you want to come here.
RE: I found it intriguing when I came. I was struck by the elegance of the place, and there
was a sense of excitement that I sensed when I came. You know, it was a new branch of
The University of North Carolina, and everybody had high hopes and aspirations of what
this place was going to become. So there was a lot of excitement, I could sense that.
I could also sense that the psychology department was, in terms of the faculty that
we had, it just had to be rebuilt from scratch, that was obvious. I also sensed that this was
a very poor place. That it—the funding—well, the facilities that the psychology
department was in and other departments that I—biology, psychology and chemistry—
they were all in the Petty Science building at that time. All with just totally inadequate
facilities and resources, and that was obvious. So that was a very strong, that created a lot
of uncertainty in my mind as to whether I wanted to come here.
But there were other things that gave me the very strong impression that this
university was going to develop into one of the major universities in the state of North
Carolina and had high aspirations to really become a very great university at that time.
So the elegance of the place—I recall I stayed in the Alumni House over here, and
it was just really, really elegant. And I hadn't experienced anything like that. I came here
for the first time in late February. It happened to be warm at that time, and those fruit
trees along—were just beginning to, very early that year—just beginning to break out. It
was pretty. It struck me, you know, as what a campus should be like. San Diego State
College is a city campus and not a very pretty—not pretty at all. So this place, I was
really struck by the beauty and elegance.
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WL: And the possibilities and challenges.
RE: And yes, that was primarily why I came here. I came with considerable ambivalence and
with an opportunity to go back to San Diego if I wanted to.
WL: If it didn’t work out here, you—
RE: Yes, I could’ve gone back within a couple of years.
WL: Okay. So you were thinking of trying it out for a while.
RE: Yes, that’s exactly right. But once I got here and got acquainted with Mereb Mossman,
who I guess I admire more than any other administrator that I’ve ever worked with. She
was absolutely magnificent.
WL: Well, tell me a little about her, what—about how she worked, her administrative style.
RE: Well, I felt that her administrative style was a—she, to me, had the characteristics that I
associate with a, I guess a distinguished nun, a very understanding kind of person with a
lot of wisdom, insight. I never saw the woman get rattled or upset about anything. And if
you—she had a manner of speaking and a way of expressing herself that not only
projected complete confidence and comfort with regard with what she was doing, but
somehow the impression that she knew what she was doing and she knew how to
administer an institution to accomplish goals.
And it was clear that she wanted this school to be converted into a very high
quality; she used the term "comprehensive university." That was the term being used by
everybody at that time. We were going to become a comprehensive university. So I was
extremely impressed with her and after I got—before I came and after I came. And I can't
imagine anybody giving my department and I guess other departments any more support.
That doesn't mean she gave us all of the money that we would liked to have had, because
the money wasn't available.
But it was clear that she was helping us in every way that she could possibly
could to the extent that resources would permit. And she was a—well, she could—she
saw herself as a person who helped create an environment in which other people could
work to where their talents and abilities could be maximally expressed. She did not see
herself as a—this is my impression—as a dictatorial kind of person who is going to—
although she certainly kept on top of things and could help lead and guide and steer, but
in a way that was extremely pleasant and acceptable. And also usually what she had to
say very much made sense. So I can't speak too highly of her administrative qualities.
WL: And she was housed here, wasn't she?
RE: Yes, right over there, I see. I have vivid memories of this [Foust] building and the layout
of that time.
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WL: So she was right in the thick of things, literally.
RE: Oh absolutely.
WL: In the academic setting.
RE: Yes, she really, I think she ran the university. When I came, you know, Jim Ferguson had
been acting chancellor, I think, for a year, and then he was installed the year that I came,
in 1967. And I think Jim did an extremely good job as the chancellor and was probably
the best man to be chancellor of this institution perhaps at that time. He was one of the
finest gentlemen, most gracious people that you could ever hope to meet. He was a
southern gentleman. I think if he had any—he had no faults in terms of how he related to
people. But as a chancellor his shortcoming might have been that he was too much of a
gentleman to be sufficiently assertive as he might have been at times to represent this
university's—
WL: You mean externally.
RE: Yes, externally, right, although he and [William] Friday [president of the UNC System]
were good friends, and it was obvious they were. Friday just really thought a lot of Jim
Ferguson. So Jim had a very good relationship with him, and my guess is he didn't have
to be very assertive to convince Bill Friday of what the needs were over here.
WL: But he wasn't pushy.
RE: No, he was not pushy, anything but pushy.
WL: Right. The set up here was that department heads went directly to Mereb Mossman.
RE: That's right. At that time, there was no College of Arts and Sciences, and there were the
deans of the professional schools and the heads of the departments. And it was a co-equal
kind of group.
WL: Heads were co-equal with deans?
RE: Yes, indeed. So we all reported to Mossman. But yeah, heads and deans were co-equal at
that time.
WL: What kind of staff did she have? Was it a fairly small?
RE: Very small. She had Paula Osborne [sic] Andris and one or two other people who
reported to Paula. She essentially had no staff. Well, that's it.
WL: So it was very hands on.
RE: Yes, very much. She couldn't—as the university grew—and she knew this, I mean she
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was planning to, arrangements were being made to establish the College of Arts and
Sciences and to bring a dean in even at the time that that I came here. And of course, we
hired a dean the next year, you know, the year that Bob Miller [dean of the College of
Arts and Sciences] came. So that was, all those plans were in progress when I came,
when I arrived.
WL: You describe her as very interested in developing programs, but Mereb Mossman was
hindered by, I suppose, by a lack of resources. I mean the university was. Is that right?
RE: Yes, that's right. What I think she tried to do, what her strategy was to try to get some
doctoral programs going here, was to go out and bring in the best people that, in her
opinion, that she could find, that she thought would have the energy and drive and the
capacity to develop programs given that the resources, minimal resources were available.
And I mean minimal.
So she brought in people like Bob Clark to head physics, Bruce Eberhart, who
was really a vigorous dedicated scholar and scientist who was really helping the biology
department make great strides during that era. Pete [Walter] Puterbaugh, in chemistry,
who was a very capable person. She brought in all of us approximately at the same time.
Actually those three people got here just before I did. And so she was trying to bring in
people to develop the sciences, which have always been relatively, well, they've been
strong but not the major strengths of this university, as you know.
And the sciences and the, other than psychology, have slipped even further since
the time I got here, I think, relatively speaking. That’s not true of all of them. It's true of
physics and chemistry. Chemistry has, I think, been on the move in recent years. But
there was a time there when they were looked upon as undergraduate—good
undergraduate programs—and that's the way things were going to be for the indefinite
future.
But I do think Mossman had intentions of trying to change that as quickly as
possible. But not just in the sciences, across the board. She didn't see all of the
departments in the—that became the arts and sciences, as well as in the professional
schools—of developing doctoral programs in all areas. But she saw some that were
departments of relatively great strength, I think, developing programs. And I think they
would have except that it turned out there was a very narrow window of opportunity for
developing doctoral programs here. Biology was moving in that direction. English did,
psychology did, history was moving in that direction, and I’m not sure about sociology
and some of the others. But those were some of the ones that were really on the move and
were very actively developing plans for instituting doctoral programs.
WL: She was involved in bringing people in that would support that
RE: Yes, yes she was. But the—it turned out that the window of opportunity was so narrow
that only two of these schools and two departments succeeded, and that was psychology
and English. Biology, if it had pushed harder and faster, it could have. I think—well, and
so could history, we all could have, but it meant moving very rapidly, just as fast as we
possibly could. And psychology squeaked through, as well as English. The other two
didn't—weren't far enough along to fall within that window.
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WL: The widow of opportunity was the result of things that were happening externally.
RE: That's right, exactly.
WL: The job market and also the system.
RE: Well, the system, primarily the system. The, you know, the—I can't remember the exact
year, but you know that first of all, the system was expanded from a three-university
system to a six-campus system, still all part of the University of North Carolina. But
there were only three of any stature and strength. Of course, there was [University of
North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, [North Carolina]State [University] and UNCG.
But political factors very much began to influence that, you know, involving the
legislature. What was happening in the planning began to affect planning at General
Administration. General Administration, I guess, could see what was coming, and they
began to be much more cautious about approving advanced programs. And that happened
right after psychology's program was approved but still before the system had been
totally reorganized into a sixteen-campus, all university system.
WL: So you were aware that—I mean, did it occur to you as department head that you were
facing a window, that you—and there was an opportunity you needed to move fairly
quickly?
RE: No, I really wasn’t aware of that. It’s just that I think that psychology might have been in
a better position to move faster and make faster progress toward developing a doctoral
program than some of the others. I really did have a totally free hand in the very first year
I was here. With Mossman's,—almost with her insistence but with her strong advice—got
rid of the people in the psychology department who are not qualified to be in a PhD
program. Well, that was darn near all of them. Fortunately, the only people with tenure
were Kendon and Elizabeth Duffy at the time that I came here.
WL: This was a department of how—what was the size?
RE: As I recall, there were eight people total. It was a very small department. Ernie Lumsden
had been—had come the previous year from Duke, and there was a woman who had also
come from Duke a couple of years before that, a developmental psychologist that
Mossman insisted [laughs] we had to let go; that is, she wasn’t going to get tenure here. I
don't know what happened prior to my getting here, but Mossman was dead set that this
woman had to go. And she hadn't met my criteria for what I felt, that should be the
qualifications for getting tenure and being part of a doctoral program.
So—and there were several other people at a very junior level who were advised
over the next two or three years that they should seek positions elsewhere. And in many
respects that was the most unpleasant aspect of my job, was having to help—not fire
people, I didn't fire anybody, although with the exception of this one woman. I didn't fire
her, but she didn't get tenure, and I had very little control over that.
WL: But you had to sort of encourage people to leave?
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RE: Yes, I did have to encourage them to leave. And I even did everything I could to help
them get jobs in places where I felt they were better suited. And they all did wind up,
most of them, in those kinds of places.
WL: This was still a period during which academic jobs were a little bit more available?
RE: Yes, yes.
WL: So moving was possible?
RE: Yes.
WL: That would alleviate the pressure.
RE: Yes, that’s exactly right.
WL: Well, so you had a free hand in building a department, which was quiet interesting, I’m
sure. What was your strategy in terms of what you wanted to do in terms of building
faculty?
RE: My immediate strategy with regard what we should do first is build a very strong,
experimentally-based, academically-based psychology department where all of the major
disciplinary areas of psychology were covered by a highly qualified faculty member who
not only, of course, could handle all of the undergraduate needs in that particular area of
psychology, but was also a well-trained person with some research experience and
publications that could help initiate the doctoral program.
The first two people I hired—the first person I hired was a more senior person
who had been at Arizona State University, a colleague of a person that I knew during my
graduate student days at Missouri where he got his degree, too, but after I did-a fellow
named Aaron Brownstein. I enticed Aaron to come here the second year, which he did.
I hired Herb Wells, who had become [sic] extremely highly recommended by
people at Yale. And he had been at University of Washington for several years and
wanted to get back to this part of the country. So I hired Herb Wells. And then Dave
Soderquist at that time was a new PhD graduating from Vanderbilt and a very strong—
that had a very strong experimental psychology department, and so I hired Dave.
So those were the three people that helped—that I hired the first year that I was
here. Actually they came the second year. But Mossman gave me three faculty positions
immediately. Some of them were replacement positions, but authorization to hire three
people—recruit three people the first year I was here, which I did. And then we
continued to hire a couple of people a year, one or two people a year for the next several
years, with Rick Shull coming along after about the second or third year. Some people
who—we had to let go that didn't work out. But the older people who are here now are
people who I hired in the psych [sic] department, the people I hired during those early
years to help develop the—
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WL: The department was expanding from around eight to around twenty, I guess.
RE: We grew from about eight to twenty by about 1978, over that period of time, over a
period of about ten years.
WL: The doctoral program—were you pretty much the architect of that?
RE: Yes, I was, with the help of and guidance of the other senior people in the department,
the people that I had brought in. Kendon Smith was heavily involved, Elizabeth Duffy to
some extent. She developed cancer shortly after I got here. I guess probably had it even
before, although I don't think she knew it. And she died within a couple or three years
after I got here. But Kendon, Aaron Brownstein, Herb Wells, and I basically, with help
from the younger people, including Dave Soderquist, developed the initial
experimentally-oriented program—no clinical, no applied training at that time. That
developed later after we got the academic base established for doing research at the
doctoral level. So that was the strategy, to build a strong academic base before having
doctoral programs, and that’s what we did.
WL: The example of psychology is an example of a successful instructional doctoral program,
I think, and I know from my own experience in the history department—we talked with
the department about, again about whether or not to go for a doctoral program in history
in the late 1980s, early nineties, putting the psychology as an example of one that
worked. How do you explain this, do you think? What were the ingredients? It looked as
though it might have been a good time to begin, but then you got into the 1970s and
eighties and—
RE: That's right, it was a good time to begin, and certainly we didn't have the resources we
needed. And we have, we've never had the resources, you know, we’re always trying to
somehow eke by with inadequate resources. The department has managed to grow and
establish a reputation at the doctoral level, but always with inadequate resources.
We—my strategy was that in order to move as fast as possible, we couldn't wait
until we got some sort of assurance that we were going to get the resources we needed to
operate a doctoral program. We would go for the program, and once we got it approved
and established, then we would start pushing hard for the resources that we needed to
operate it.
We thought that strategy, once we got the program, then obviously it would have
to be supported if it was going to be any good. And that strategy, I think, resulted in our
getting the program quite quickly. If we had kept trying to somehow see how are we
going to get the resources to operate this program, which we knew we needed, without
going ahead and pushing for the program, we would have never gotten it.
I really believe that the strategy we used of not waiting for the assurance that we
would have the resources is what caused us to move fast enough to get the program and
prevented biology from getting it. I don’t know about history, but biology was very
concerned about whether it would have the resources it needed to operate the program.
WL: In this period, in the late sixties?
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RE: In this exact period of time. I think that slowed them down to the point that they, in terms
of pushing though the program, plan ahead, it caused them to be too late.
WL: Your approach from the beginning was to try to make the program into a nationally-competitive—
is that correct?
RE: Yes it was. And you know that was a dream, looking back on it now, to think that you
could develop a program starting off initially with no resources. How could you possibly
develop a program with a national reputation? But my thought was that everybody I was
hiring was going to get federal money; they were going to get their research grants. And
there was a flurry of activity for a number of years and that was happening.
But I also thought—seriously thought—that we would be in a position to get the
resources from the state that we needed to operate a viable doctoral program, you know,
that are traditionally provided by—from state funds to operate doctoral programs. Well,
that really didn't materialize.
But we were able, I think, to— in certain areas—to establish a national reputation
with our doctoral program in a relatively short period of time. Partly because of people—
some of the people who came here already had reputations like Brownstein—and partly
because we brought people who were vivacious and eager to make a name for themselves
and to, you know, make a reputation in their own area of research.
WL: Did you—in terms of attracting graduate students, was it mostly the faculty? Was that the
main way in which you were able to recruit?
RE: It was the faculty to some extent. But what we did—our strategy primarily was to take
the best students that we could get our hands on that were local. We weren't known
nationally, so we had to—we got the very best students that we could get from Chapel
Hill undergraduates and from the area and from within our own institution. And we took
advantage of people in the Greensboro community— bright spouses, professional people
working in the area who wanted to continue their education. We accepted some of those
types into the program. They were very good students. So we did manage to get some
quality students where we provided—gave them very little support. They almost had to
be able to support themselves, and any number of them were able to.
WL: But they were in-state students so they would have the advantage of lower tuition?
RE: Yeah, that's right. So our students initially were predominately state students.
WL: What about your clinical program? Tell me about that a little.
RE: We began to add the applied component starting in about 1974, ’73-’74, and we hired
Rosemary Nelson [-Gray], I think, as the very first clinical person and had—were
thinking of—developing a clinical component that would be extremely closely tied to one
of the experimental areas, the so-called operant psychology area of the Skinnerian-type
behavioristic approach, which was still very strong at that time.
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So we began to think in terms of developing an applied component with a
behavioristic-type approach to dealing with clinical problems. Rosemary Nelson had
been trained in a program of that type at [State University of New York at] Stony Brook.
So we brought her here. And then brought in Marilyn Erickson from Chapel Hill and [P.]
Scott Lawrence from Arizona State, who had been trained in that tradition. So we
initially developed a clinical behavioristic—a clinical program with a behavioristic
orientation.
WL: So there’d be overlap, the degree—
RE: So that it would tie in well with the major component of the experimental training that we
were providing at the doctoral level—so it had this very close coherence and unity. That
program, rather rapidly—clinical psychology is such a, well, can't quite think of the right
word to describe it. Esoteric is not the right word, but it has—clinical psychology will
grab on to any approach that it thinks might help
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]
RE: —to achieve certification from the American Psychological Association. So we did begin
to expand, bringing in other points of view into the clinical training area. So now we do
indeed have quite an eclectic clinical training program here, much more of a traditional
nature with still a strong behavioristic component to it through Rosemary and Scott
Lawrence.
WL: Is—in order to obtain the accreditation you have to have a certain amount of balance, I
suppose, certain areas have to be covered?
RE: That’s right, yeah.
WL: Was that, was that a lengthy process of accreditation that you had to go through with—? I
know it’s—
RE: It was about a two-year process. We got conditional accreditation initially. There were
still, of course, some things that needed to be corrected. So we were accredited initially—
conditional on certain changes being made and some additional coursework being added
to the program that the people in the clinical area were not getting, provide some
internship experiences that went beyond what they were getting at that time and bringing
in some faculty with different—you know, that broadened the orientation of the program.
And so I think we had a three-year probationary period. And after that three-year period,
we then were studied by APA with regard to accreditation for a five-year period, and the
department had met their criteria for full accreditation at that time. So after—I think that
came around 1978, ’79, somewhere in there, the full accreditation.
WL: All that occurred fairly quickly.
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RE: Yes, it all occurred fairly quick. Everything that—the really significant growth and
change in the department occurred over a ten-year period from 1967 to 1977. After that,
things asymptoted very quickly both with regard to adding faculty positions and with
regard to resources for further development. Everything just plateaued.
And from about 1977 through the next three years that I served as department
head—I did it for thirteen years—just maintaining what we had accomplished and were
trying to continue with the quality that we were striving for became increasingly difficult
for me as an administrator. So one of the reasons that I decided to step down when I did
was because I was finding the job increasingly demanding with no further increasing
achievement that would justify it.
WL: Was that because you had already done most of what you wanted to do? Or was it a
matter of a drying up of support?
RE: It was a matter of drying up of support. You know, that was an external factor that was—
just didn't apply to UNCG or to our department. It was being—it was taking place
everywhere. The influx of students that had caused all of the universities to keep
expanding and growing had stabilized. So things had come to a no-growth kind of
environment, and that did mean belt tightening and making more and thinking more
carefully about where you wanted to put your resources within the department. And of
course that was going on university wide as well.
So the opportunity to develop in some of the areas of psychology that we
intentionally planned to develop, much along the—well, I don't want to use Chapel Hill
as an example, but we were thinking of being a department probably twice as big as we
are. We, at the time, didn't see that things were going to come to a sudden halt. So that
we would have strengths not only in physiological and traditional experimental areas of
psychology, but also in social and developmental and further strengthen the clinical area.
So our plans were suddenly brought to a halt by external factors.
WL: So you were thinking along the lines of a department of say—?
RE: —Forty people that were—that had distinguished areas within the field, much like a
Chapel Hill or Duke [University]. And so things stabilized with our having a strong
doctoral concentration in physiological and behavioral psychology and in the psychology
of learning and sensation and perception. Those were the traditional experimental areas
that we were very strong in.
And then when I—we were at the time that I—stepped down as department head.
When Gilbert Gottlieb came in as my replacement, he focused his attention and a major
part of his effort and a major part of the department's resources on developing a strong
developmental component in the department. And he not only was—is—a noted figure in
developmental psychology himself, but he wanted to develop that area and made some
significant progress along that line. He brought in Tim [Dr. Timothy Johnston], who is a
very good biologically-trained developmental scientist.
WL: But there was a certain amount of frustration, in other words, with what you had hoped
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to complete and had been unable to complete in the late seventies?
RE: There was, I wouldn't want to say there was—well, if I'm following your question, there
was frustration that we were not able to continue to grow and strengthen some of the
areas that we had planned to. There was frustration from that. When Gilbert came in and
put resources into developmental, I don't think that further intensified frustration over
what the department was going to be. But yeah, there was frustration that the resources
had dried up.
And it, you know, for a long period of time that department had tremendous, say,
esprit de corps, enthusiastic, everybody wanted to work together. We had a pretty
good—we had a very good idea, a group idea of what our direction should be, and that
was to be a strong academic psychology department, strong in certain areas. And we had
faculty in those areas so there was no disagreement there, with the intention of further
strengthening some of them.
So if we had this enthusiasm and this energy that was causing people to work very
hard to get things done, that was beginning, I think, to dissipate when I stepped down as
department head. I was—I found it increasingly more difficult to keep that group
invigorated and excited about what they were doing and going—making efforts to get
research monies and so on. And I'm afraid as the department has matured, it's lost some
of its vim and enthusiasm and energy.
Gilbert, I think, tried to get people to get excited about getting research grants and
enhancing the research activities of the department, succeeded a little, but not very much.
And I think the department, while still strong, is—maybe I shouldn’t be saying all this, I
don't know—but I feel like the department has sort of stabilized and is, [pause] doesn't
have the desire to continue to reach for higher and higher objectives as it did at one time.
That may be the evolutionary process that any department follows, I’m not sure.
WL: Well, as departments get older, you know, that is part of it, perhaps.
RE: Yes. The—some of that has been due to the continuing frustration of not getting the
resources to be able to do what they wanted to do. Not—feeling that demands are placed
on them all the time by, within the department and through university kinds of activities
that interfere with their getting their research done and finding time to write research
grants and so on. So yeah, there has been frustration. And I think to some degree it’s
caused people to work less hard and lose some of their enthusiasm—some of the older
members.
WL: I know that in every department, particularly large departments—this would be true for
the history department or any history department—there tend to be disciplinary or field
diversions and diversity, and sometimes there are tensions there. And in an era of
diminishing resources or flat resources, sometimes those feelings come out.
RE: Exactly.
WL: And especially in the case where you expected—you were promised certain areas more to
come, and then it doesn't come. That causes a certain amount of frustration.
15
RE: Exactly. And that's undoubtedly had an impact on some of the more senior members of
the psychology department.
WL: Let me ask you about another feature of graduate development of the doctoral program
that—I came here in 1981, and I used to hear a lot of—among older faculty then, most of
them are now retired—the feeling that UNCG used to be an undergraduate institution
when it was Woman's College, and by moving to doctoral programs there was a price to
be paid, and that was less energy put into an undergraduate program or the shift of focus
and mission of the institution. Was there some of that going on, do you think?
RE: There’s no doubt that there were forces pulling on the faculty that would be detrimental
to the undergraduate program if they were to accomplish some of the things at the
graduate level that they really wanted to accomplish. Absolutely.
There—one of the things I fought very hard to prevent during the time that I was
department head was to prevent our doctoral activities, our graduate activities, from
having a detrimental influence on the undergraduate program. But rather worked hard to
give strength to both the undergraduate program as well as to the graduate program by
tying those two together as much as I could.
And I was quite adamant about the graduate faculty all teaching an undergraduate
course, if not every semester at least every other semester. So they all taught
undergraduate courses and they were all involved in teaching graduate courses, the
seminars, as well. But—and some of them very much resented having to do both, but I
insisted that’s something that had to be done.
After I stepped down as department head, Gilbert did not insist that that be done,
and I think that there was a great—somewhat of a fractionation between the graduate and
undergraduate programs and that the undergraduate program has suffered considerably.
The number of graduate students teaching the undergraduate courses has very
significantly increased through the eighties. And I think, my personal feeling is that the
undergraduates are still getting shortchanged. The faculty should be more involved in
teaching undergraduates.
So yeah, I think strong—to operate strong doctoral programs can be to somewhat
at the detriment of the undergraduate students. I think all of UNCG's programs at the
doctoral level should be thought through in such a way that that will not happen. That
may be impossible, I don't know, because I know at other universities the same things
happen. The faculty who are most involved in the graduate program have very little
involvement with the undergraduates. Maybe that's unavoidable, I don't know.
WL: It's certainly the natural thing to do, if you don't think about it too much.
RE: Exactly, that’s right.
WL: That's what will happen. That's what has happened in most places.
RE: I do think that the psychology department now is giving an enormous amount of attention
to correcting that situation that developed during the eighties. And so, as you are
probably aware, they’re totally revamping the undergraduate curriculum, and they’re
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thinking about ways that now they can bring—get the faculty more involved in educating
the undergraduates. And I’m very happy to see that taking place.
WL: Looks like a great change.
RE: I think so.
WL: Let's go back to 1967 when you came. We’ve talked about the doctoral program and the
department changes that affected the department. Let's think a little bit more about the
university and what kind of university it was in 1967. Maybe we could start with the
students. What—how would you characterize the students that were here in 1967?
RE: At the graduate level?
WL: Well, let's start with the undergraduates.
RE: Okay. At the undergraduate level, the students were—they were tops because the very
bright women who had been coming here when the institution was the Woman's College,
they were still coming here. Things hadn't changed enough at that time that Chapel Hill
was raking off more and more of the bright women. And so UNCG was still getting most
of them. So it was still predominately a women's institution with a very bright group of
people.
WL: Did it feel like a women's college, pretty much?
RE: Pretty much, yeah. The undergraduate level of teaching introductory psychology to a
hundred people, maybe five of them would be men, the rest women. I mean, it was
obviously still a women's college in its physical make up at that time. But at the graduate
level, of course, that was not the case. It was moving in the direction of some kind of
balance between men and women.
But in psychology, at least, there were more women in the master's program when
I came here than there were men. We have, probably, over the years, traditionally had
more women in our doctoral program; that may not be the case now, because once the
movement got going, you’ve got to get women into your doctoral programs and to hire
women as faculty and so on. That's changed everywhere. But I think at one time we were
way ahead with regard to having women.
WL: More so than other institutions?
RE: Yeah, more so than other institutions.
WL: How would you, what about the traditions? How much of the old traditions of the
Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] from the thirties and forties and
fifties—the traditions that were quite rich in terms of student life and the student culture
that existed here. How much of that was still around in 1967 that you recollect? Was
there a sense of—when we said earlier that you felt like you were at a women's college,
17
did that extend to student life on campus?
RE: You know, I was not aware of the extent to which—the fact that it was a women's
college— the extent to which it was affecting the students who were still coming here,
although I knew that most of—many of—the women who were coming here were
children of women who had gone here, probably over half of them, I don't know what the
percentage. But they—yeah, they were the children of women who had gone to UNCG,
and that was very apparent because they would tell you.
You know the awareness that came later—that the women who felt very strongly
about this institution maintaining a women's college character—that was not apparent to
me when I first came here. They were alumni, but they were exerting influence at some
level other than at the level that I was operating at in making their concerns known. I
gradually learned about some of the concerns over a period of time.
WL: When did you get a sense that—I assume in 1967 this was still heavily residential in
terms of students mostly living on campus.
RE: Yeah, that's right, virtually all of them.
WL: And then you moved to—certainly by the time I got here in the early eighties, there's a
strong commuter presence. When did you really—when do you think that really started to
take hold? That's a big change from, you know, a residential, basically liberal arts college
to a place where seventy percent of the student body is commuter.
RE: Well, I think it was a gradual process that occurred during the seventies, but I think it was
sufficiently gradual that I hardly noticed that it was happening.
WL: You would notice in, I guess, the quality of the students as well as in the character of the
students?
RE: Yeah. I tell you the quality became very noticeable almost immediately, it seems to me,
after the university system was reorganized. And you know we became a sixteen-campus
system, and then there was this competition among all of them for the limited resources
that were available. And with Eastern Carolina [East Carolina University] having lots of
political influence and pushing very hard for increased resources, you know, there were a
lot of things going on politically that I think began to have an immediate impact on what
was going on at UNCG, including the quality of students that we were getting.
But the gradual decline in the quality of students, I think, also occurred over about
a ten-year period so that it, maybe it almost sneaked up on us. That our students were
getting so inadequately trained—well, I shouldn't say it had to do with their public
education. We were just getting students who were less qualified to be in college, I'm
afraid, because of the competition.
WL: Yeah, because Chapel Hill was taking more women.
RE: That's right. And I think that really became apparent about the time that you got here. It
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was becoming very noticeable. And it seems to me it’s gotten much worse through the—
during the period of the eighties—that the quality of the students has just continued to
deteriorate here.
WL: That’s in many ways is the number one problem right now with the university.
RE: If I go back and contrast some courses that I taught in, say, in statistics when I first got
here—compared to the students I was teaching and the way I had to teach the course year
before last when I retired, I was teaching two different courses. I was teaching this, what
would have been a remedial course to the students that I was teaching back in 1967-68.
WL: That's interesting. How about faculty? I’m sure there have been big changes—maybe
there haven't been, but it seems like there have been big changes in the faculty culture
here in the last twenty-five years, thirty years.
RE: I think there have been very big changes in faculty culture. The people who were here
when I came, many of them were Woman's College-type faculty. And they really were
not happy being at a university. Many of them, I think, looked forward to the day they
would retire—some of them. Although some of those people, I also recall, were just
absolutely exceptional teachers. I mean, that was their life. They prided themselves in
being excellent teachers, and they were.
But they didn't belong in a university that was attempting to develop strong
graduate programs and didn't want any part of that. And those people—I think the
university changed as they retired and were replaced by people who were brought in here
for the intention of being part of a comprehensive university system.
WL: Were they—the older Woman's College faculty-would you describe them as, or some of
them, as demoralized?
RE: No, I don't think I would use a word quite that strong. I think, though, they in a sense
looked forward to retirement because they knew that the way they had served this
university was of such a nature that they—and the university was changing in such a
way— that they were no longer the people to serve the university with its new change in
functions.
And so I just think a lot of those people were glad to—when the day came—that
they could retire. And I don't want to overly generalize here. I guess I’m speaking from
my observation of three or four or five people.
WL: There must have been at the same time, there were strong figures such as Mereb
Mossman herself—
RE: Absolutely.
WL: —in a women's college background, who, you know, were interested in making this
transition, this institutional transition.
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RE: I think Mereb Mossman—I know some people who—I think hate is the word—
intentionally hate her, women, peers of hers who were, you know, of the Woman's
College era. And Mereb Mossman, when she saw what was happening then—what this
institution was destined to become— in her eyes was based on what the legislature had
done and what she saw as its charge—she put the Woman's College philosophy behind
her. She wanted to build on it, but she saw that we’ve got to move ahead toward bringing
in a faculty and restructuring our curriculum and our programs to become a viable
university. She had the vision to see that, in my opinion. And I think some of the people
who really resented her very much couldn't see that and resented her for it.
WL: Was part of it that she was hiring male faculty as opposed to—?
RE: My guess is that was a good part of it because she was hiring male faculty. But I think
she was not a sexist, obviously. But she was doing it because they were the best people
that she was able to get at that time. And she was going for the best that she could get.
WL: In trying to turn it into a university as opposed to a college.
RE: Exactly, yeah. You know she brought in one very extremely capable person to head the
college, the school of nursing, [Eloise] Pattie Lewis. And so she didn't bring in all men.
She brought in good women if they met the need. And, of course, Pattie was perfect for
that job. And Pattie, unlike many of the women around here, I think probably admired
Mossman as much as I do because she knew what Mossman was trying to accomplish
and saw the way she went about it and what an effective administrator she was, as well as
a remarkably wonderful person. I think Pattie felt that as I do.
WL: We talked about Jim Ferguson earlier. He’s remembered quite fondly around here for his
people skills and the kind of direct contact he would have with students and faculty.
RE: He was, in terms of his ability to relate to people in a comfortable, sincere, warm
manner—there was no one around here in administration or anywhere else around that I
knew of who could match him in that regard. So I think he was really good for this
university. He did so many good things and was so well liked that his apparent lack of
assertiveness probably didn't hurt the university as much as it may have even helped. I
don't know.
WL: Do you think that the university didn't move forward enough though in this period if they
had had a more vigorous chancellor?
RE: That’s a hard question to answer. You know, I think most—you think of a leader of a
university that's helping to move things ahead is going to be an assertive person who
really knows how to get things done. But Ferguson totally lacked this assertiveness, in
my opinion. But he might have still been very effective in getting as much as could have
possibly been gotten for this university at that time, because I sensed the—and I have no
doubt that he had as good a relationship with Bill Friday as any chancellor could possibly
have. And that couldn't have hurt him with regard to getting as much resources for this
20
institution as he was able to get, probably with Friday's full cooperation, would be my
guess.
WL: Do you think UNCG was a big loser in the 1972 restructuring, the sixteen-campus
restructuring?
RE: Yeah, it probably was, relatively speaking, because it had the most to lose. None of those
other—the other branches had everything to gain. The newer members of the system, of
the six university system, had very little to lose. UNCG had the most to lose. We were
one of the three prestige institutions in the state, but we were the one that was needed to
continue to get resources, not as much as Chapel Hill and State, but still resources that
need to be fed into a university to give it that kind of stature. And that reorganization
made the resources become much more competitive. And sure, I think we suffered
greatly and more than any other of the campuses.
WL: I had a conversation with Raymond Dawson [vice president of academic affairs, UNC
System] one time, and he acknowledged that basically that as a result of 1972 that
UNCG—that its status was put on hold as a result of 1972.
RE: Exactly. That’s when it became pretty apparent to me that UNCG was not destined to be
the institution that we all thought it was going to be when we came here. I tell you the
excitement here and the enthusiasm that exists [sic] campus wide was something to
behold when I came here. It was the kind of atmosphere that I think Chancellor [Patricia]
Sullivan would like to see recreated, because she talks about it. And I hope she can
succeed.
But at that time the housekeepers, the maintenance people, the secretarial staff
around campus, the people working in the cashier’s office, on the university campus,
people I ran into as a newcomer, would say to me, “You’re going to love it here.” And
they’d say it with great sincerity and pride in being here. So there was this kind of feeling
on this campus when I came here.
WL: A very strong institutional attachment.
RE: Yeah, and a feeling of pride in this place and what it’s been and in where it’s going. It
was really exciting and a pleasant environment to be in despite all the challenges and all
the work that had to be done. The enthusiasm that existed, I think, really went a long way
toward helping many of us literally pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps to get things
done because we had nothing to do anything with.
I remember when I hired Dave Soderquist I had to have a facility for him to set up
his research lab in. We were in the basement of the Petty Science Building and we had a
big open room down there. So I went down there myself and personally built some
partitions to set up a laboratory area for him and a couple of other people that were
coming in. But at that time we all just did what we had to do to meet our needs at the
time to work toward our objectives.
WL: Do it without money, basically.
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RE: Doing without money—that’s exactly right.
WL: But you did it out of a feeling of common purpose.
RE: That’s exactly right.
WL: A sense of institution building.
RE: Yes, and for the first seven or eight years the camaraderie in the department and the
enthusiasm and feeling of common purpose was just incredible.
[End of Interview]