Oral history interview with Henry L. Ferguson, Jr., 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Henry Ferguson
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: April 12, 1990
[Begin Side A]
WL: Okay, I’d like to start today just by asking you to tell me a little bit about yourself before you
came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], where you were born,
where you were educated, and what circumstances brought you here.
HF: Well, I grew up in Durham, attended public schools there, graduated from Durham High
School in 1938. I was—I had my undergraduate work at Wake Forest [University], and I was
in the first semester of my senior year [clears throat]—excuse me, at Wake Forest when my
draft number came up for military service. My draft board gave me an extension to finish the
first semester and said that very likely they could offer me another extension to go through
the second semester and let me finish school.
But in the meantime, there's a little incident [clears throat]—excuse me, there’s a
little incident called Pearl Harbor came along, and that changed my draft board's mind. They
let me stay through the first semester, and that was the end of it. Of course, back at that time
semesters ran a little bit differently, you know. You didn't end first semester until about late
January. So I went into military service then, in late January of ’42.
I was in military service for four years. And during that time, I got some schoolwork
done, and I came back after the war was over and showed Wake Forest my credentials on
what school work I had gotten done. This was mostly at a university that the Army set up in
France. They set up one in England and one in France. And I got some work off at the one in
Brest, France. And so when I came back I showed Wake Forest the credentials on that. They
gave me enough credit on that to let me graduate without going back to the campus there.
WL: A full semester's credit? You were lacking a semester, or a little bit less than a semester?
HF: Yeah, I had a little bit of extra credits. As I remember now, I needed ten hours to graduate
and they gave me ten hours on this work that I had at Brest. So I went back—so I did not
have to go back to school there. I decided that, after giving it some thought, that I would go
into accounting, and so I went to [The University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill there and
took accounting. And I went for the equivalent of five —quarters. I believe, they were on the
quarter basis then, and left in June of 1947 and went to work for a public accounting firm in
Raleigh.
I got my CPA certificate in 1949 and at that time went to work for the state auditor’s
department, the state of North Carolina auditor. And one of my audits for the next three
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years was the university at Chapel Hill.
In 1954, the two top accountants in the accounting department in Chapel Hill both
passed away with heart attacks within three or four months of each other. And since I'd
audited the records there for the past three years, I probably knew as much about them as
most anybody else, so they approached me to see if I would go to work there as the chief
accounting officer. And I did so, and it was a very happy relationship.
WL: So were you essentially the chief financial officer at Chapel Hill, chief accounting officer?
HF: I was the chief accounting officer, and then a little bit—in two to three years—they added
the responsibility for the preparation and control of the budget, so I had the title of director of
accounting and budgets. Yeah, that was the chief financial officer. They didn't have anyone
by that title at that time.
WL: So you worked with—the local chancellor there would have been Chancellor [Robert]
House, I guess, at that point?
HF: Well, Chancellor House was there when I first started. He retired pretty soon after that and
was succeeded by William Aycock, I believe, and I worked with him too. I—it was a very
happy relationship. I enjoyed work there very much.
On this campus [Woman’s College of The University of North Carolina] is the
business manager, a man named Wendell Murray, and I had known him for some time.
Wendell passed away with a heart attack, also. And I'd have to say that after I went to Chapel
Hill, because two men had died of heart attacks and then started to come here because one
man, the business manager, had died of a heart attack, my wife got a little bit edgy about me
going into jobs where that seemed to be the—[laughs]
WL: Something of a pattern going on.
HF: Yeah. But the chancellor here at that time was Dr. [Otis] Singletary, and he approached me
and asked me if I might be interested in coming here as the business manager. And after
some—giving it some thought, we decided to do it.
WL: What reasons did you find, what were the good reasons for coming here from Chapel Hill?
HF: Well, Chapel Hill, even though it was a larger campus, I had responsibility just for the
accounting and budgets. Here the range of responsibilities was much broader.
WL: It was established as a bigger job?
HF: Yes. Another thing that played into that, too—we loved Chapel Hill very much, but it's a
very unusual place. And we decided our children would grow up to be different people here
from what they would in Chapel Hill. Their contacts at Chapel Hill were almost entirely with
children of university people, the faculty and administrative officers. We realized they—
there was a certain cross section of the whole populace and culture that they had no contact
with. And they would be much broader here.
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WL: Right, more diverse.
HF: We talked to them about it. They had some problems leaving Chapel Hill, of course. When I
say problems, I mean, you know, just personal adjustment of doing so. But they recognized
that, too, and they were willing to come. And I think it turned out really just as we had
thought it would on that basis.
WL: You must have been fairly familiar with Woman's College [of the University of North
Carolina] before you came, but I'm wondering if you had any initial impressions of the
institution, the campus. The, well, how—any initial thoughts that you had that you remember
about the institution?
HF: Well, it was quite a different institution from what I was at, it being a women's college. It had
a much smaller enrollment. My—most of my impressions, I think, centered around the
institution as a part of Greensboro. It had a—well, in Chapel Hill, the university dominated
everything. It was by far the largest employer. It just dominated the whole community.
Here, this institution has been a part of Greensboro for a long time and has certainly
had an influence on it. But still, Greensboro is a rather diverse city. And the Woman’s
College, or as a lot of people said at that time, just "The College," it was highly respected by
the people in the city of Greensboro. And still, it was just one of a lot of things in
Greensboro. I think that was one difference I certainly noticed when I came here.
The institution was much smaller. As I recall it now, the enrollment then was in the
range of two thousand to thirty-five hundred or so. There was a more personal relationship, I
think, between the administration—and I started to say between the faculty—I'm not sure I
was that close to the faculty—and students. I had—as business manager I had more contact
with students here than my observation of the business manager in Chapel Hill at that time.
WL: What kind of contacts would you have with students?
HF: Well, I was—well, let’s see, they used to have dorm meetings, and if something was coming
up that business affairs was involved in—on several occasions I was invited to a dorm
meeting to talk about something. I can't remember any of the topics right now. I remember
attending two or three, I’d say, two or three, several dorm meetings when regulations were
being changed, something like that.
WL: These meetings would be well attended generally? A lot of students there?
HF: Yeah. Most times they had—let’s see, I think students were supposed to be in the dormitory
about eleven o'clock [pm] during the week back at that time, so they'd have them at eleven
o'clock.
WL: So you'd be sure to have everybody there?
HF: So virtually everybody in the dorm was there, yeah.
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WL: Did you—how did you find the student body there when you first came in the early 1960's?
How would you characterize them? What sorts of students were they? Obviously they were
almost all women, at least until 1973 [sic] [Woman’s College became The University of
North Carolina at Greensboro in 1963].
HF: Yeah, they were all women. There had—my understanding is there had been a few men on
campus back in the thirties, but when integration was getting started, moving along in the
early fifties I believe, the trustees said that there'd be only women here. So what few men
day students there had been dropped out at that time. And someone told me that back in the
thirties they even had a men's basketball team called the Woman's College Tomcats. [both
laugh]
WL: Composed of men, male day students?
HF: Yeah, male day students. That's right.
WL: Did they have male undergraduates? Is that your understanding?
HF: Yeah, I think they were all undergraduates. The graduate program was very small at that
time. Technically, as I recall it, this institution could award a doctorate, that is, you know,
that the trustees permitted it, but there was only one program on campus in which they were
even authorized to offer a doctorate. I believe that was home economics, and they had never
actually awarded a doctorate. Not too long after I came here they awarded the first doctorate.
And if my memory is right, it was to a person who then became a faculty member named
[Josie] Nancy White [Schools of Human Environmental Sciences and Education for almost
forty years].
WL: That's right.
HF: Over in home ec[onomics].
WL: She has the distinction of being the only person to get a doctorate from WC [Woman’s
College of the University of North Carolina], I think, if I have that right. I talked to her and
that's what she said.
HF: Well, my memory is she was the first. They've awarded some other doctorates since then.
WL: Yes, but it became UNCG after that.
HF: Oh, oh, because of that name change. Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah, the 1963 legislature
changed the name and the mission of the university, and they first admitted male students
then in the fall of 1964, I think.
WL: Did you find the student body to be, strictly in the discussions that you had, to be acquiescent
or assertive or passive or—? Did they ask a lot of questions? Were they—?
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HF: When I first came, my recollections—and they're my impressions now—are that they were
fairly acquiescent at that time. Within a few years, by the late sixties, they were more
assertive, considerably more so.
WL: That was part of the times, I guess, too.
HF: That's part of the times. I think most of the times—the one thing that I was most involved in
that involved student activism at that time, ARA [now ARAMARK Food Services had been
given a contract for running the dining hall, and they were also operating [North Carolina]
A&T's [State University] dining hall. And the food service employees at A&T went on
strike, and that sort of overflowed to this campus and the food service employees went on
strike here.
And since food—since the dining hall was considered one of the—or at that time at
least—was considered one of the business operations on campus, that followed me. Some of
the students had gotten quite active in that.
WL: It was a strike by the workers, but it also had support by the students?
HF: It was supported by the—by some students, yes, in general. The students who supported it
were the more vocal ones, the ones that didn't have much to say about it. Some of the
students decided they would boycott the dining hall. They wouldn't go down there to eat.
They pretty soon realized they were cheating themselves, I think. And then they switched
tactics, and they said they were entitled to unlimited seconds of food and they were going to
run the dining hall out of food and then accuse them of not living up to their contract.
And I recall on one occasion there were several fellows that would go back for
seconds and come back out in the dining hall and just pile— pour that food up on the table
and go back again. And they’d have one table just piled up with food. They were never able
to run them out of food, however. But there was some of that kind of activism.
WL: Did you have much to do with the—you must have had something to do with the
negotiations during this strike? Or were there—?
HF: Well, the negotiations technically were between the food service employees and ARA, but
since it was on this campus we certainly had a real interest in it. I did not sit in on their actual
negotiating sessions, no. But I tried to facilitate them if they were breaking down, and they
did two or three times.
I was involved with students to some extent then in trying to keep them informed of
what was going on and hopefully keep them satisfied as to the—as to the nature of the food
service. We, at that time—well, when I first came, about 95 percent of the students were
living on campus, very few town students. And of course the dining hall then was the chief
place that nearly all students ate.
It isn't like, wasn't like it is now, when less than a third of the students live on
campus, I guess, about a third. And I assume that the university still has a regulation that if a
student lives on campus, they have to contract for board. That's the way it was after we—
well, the whole time I was here. If they lived off campus they did not have to, but they could
if they wanted to. And the vast majority of them did not. But we were, we certainly had
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concern then that the students did not suffer and did not go without food because of the food
service strike.
WL: That was your primary concern?
HF: That was my chief concern, yes. Now there were some demonstrations on campus in
connection with that, and since campus security was part of my concern, too, campus police
were involved in certain ways to keep order. I had concern from that standpoint also.
WL: Yes. Was there any possibility at any time that this might have led to disorder, greater
disorder? Was there much concern about that? How much concern was there?
HF: Well, you say disorder—
WL: Well, violence.
HF: Rioting?
WL: Yes.
HF: Yes, there was concern about it. It never did.
WL: Based on what had happened elsewhere maybe?
HF: Yeah. There certainly were some gatherings of people who were milling around. I remember
one evening they were out in front of the Foust Building, which was the administration
building at that time, and, oh, there must have been three or four hundred people out there. I
don't know, don't remember now just what their immediate concern was, what they hoped to
accomplish by congregating that way.
I remember I was inside Foust Building, but I didn't have any lights on. I don't think
they knew I was in there. And it being at night, the building normally at that time of day was
closed and locked. So I really don't know just—don't remember now just why they were out
there, but I do remember very vividly them milling around out there.
WL: Jim Ferguson, Chancellor Ferguson, must have had a lot to do with this crisis?
HF: Oh yes.
WL: How do you think—how did he try to handle this? What was his style in handling student
activism and handling the cafeteria strike?
HF: Well, I think Jim's style was to be open with the students and try to keep them informed and
to have a concern for their concerns. I think he handled it very smoothly.
WL: And do you think the fact that the way that it was resolved had something to do with Jim?
Was he directly involved in trying to manage the crisis? Or was it—?
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HF: Oh yes, he was very closely involved. From my contacts with it, any time that anything
occurred or anything developed that I thought he would want to know about, I kept him
informed. And we set up a private telephone line going into his office for two reasons. One
is, it gave those of us who worked closely with the new students, just a few of us, it gave us a
direct line to him if we needed it. That phone was an unlisted number. Very few people
knew the number of it. But those on campus who were working closely with him did know
it.
It was also another reason too. On some other campuses during that time of activism,
students had, in essence, surrounded the president's office and sort of held him hostage in
there. And we wanted him to have a line of communication out of there other than the
regular phones, which they might be able to put out of commission.
WL: Was this phone held—was this phone located in a sort of secret location? Was it—?
HF: Well, it was out and visible in his office but—
WL: Yeah, but it was an unlisted number?
HF: It was an unlisted number, and the wiring for the phone went in in an entirely different route
from what the regular phone was.
WL: Okay, so you mean when they might have cut communications for the other phones, this one
would go somewhere else?
HF: This one still would be working, we hoped.
WL: I see.
HF: That's the chief thing that I can remember that we did in the way of any physical facilities for
working with the—I don't think we ever—well, I used it a little bit to contact him when I
needed to, but it was used very, very little. And I don't remember now just when it was taken
out, sometime later, but it stayed in. I would guess .a couple of years or so after that period of
activism tended to die down some, you know.
WL: It was kind of a hotline, then?
HF: Yeah, a little bit like the line that got so much publicity between the White House and the
Kremlin, I guess, you know?
WL: Who had access to this besides yourself? Other administrators? Were there other top
administrators?
HF: Yeah. I'm not sure now. I don't remember just exactly who had it. Dean of students at that
time was Tom Smythe, and I'm sure he did. And I don't know just who in his office or in the
student affairs area. There would have been a few people there, I think.
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Our—I started to say director of security, probably was the chief of police. See, our
position of director of security was established a little bit later, I believe. So our chief of
police would have had it. And I suspect that the title at that time was the dean of the faculty.
The chief academic officer had it, but I—right off hand, I’d say I don't know who else.
WL: Yes. Since you worked most closely with Jim Ferguson—you came in 1962, left in 1980—
there was—almost all of your tenure here was with Jim Ferguson. How would you
characterize your working relationship with him?
HF: Oh, it was great, couldn't have been better. Yeah, Jim—I came in April of ’62. Jim came,
him and his family came that summer, and—
WL: He was dean of the graduate school?
HF: He was dean of the graduate school. [telephone rings] Yeah, he was dean of the graduate
school until [Chancellor] Otis Singletary took a leave of absence and went to Washington
[DC]. He was the first director of Job Corps, I believe, one of Lyndon Johnson's [36th
President of the United States] poverty programs. And that would have been, I suspect, a
year after Jim came, something like that. It wasn't too long.
So Jim was acting chancellor then while Otis was up in Washington. And as I
remember now, he was in Washington for somewhere in the range of a year to two years.
And he came back and Jim was, at that time, then made vice chancellor. And that was a new
position then, and Jim stayed in there until Otis left the campus. And that's when he—Otis
ended up the president of the University of Kentucky.
One personal observation, I say personal observation, personal recollection—I
remember Otis telling me that when he brought Jim here as dean of the graduate school, that
that just happened to be the position that was open that he might attract Jim with. He just
wanted to get Jim on this campus. And that—this, Otis told me this when he was getting
ready to leave, when he resigned—he told me that he couldn't pick his successor on this
campus, but that he could put Jim Ferguson in a position that they'd have an awfully hard
time overlooking him.
And of course, when the trustee committee got to searching for somebody, Jim, I'm
sure, was the head of their list, most of the way through there.
WL: Yeah. He and Otis Singletary were close, quite close, I guess?
HF: Very close friends, yeah. They'd both been at Millsaps College down at Montgomery,
Alabama [sic] [Jackson, Mississippi].
WL: What kind of educational—what kind of administrator was Jim Ferguson? What was his
administrative style?
HF: Jim was very, very low key in most respects. He could be very assertive when he felt he
needed to be. But that was not his nature. And he knew a lot about what was going on on
campus, but at the same time, he’d give people a job to do and he'd let them do it. He didn't
interfere much.
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He, but he really did have a finger on just about everything that was going on on
campus. I think he was a very strong administrator, but in a low-key way, not in an assertive
way, except when he felt he had to.
WL: Yeah, basically a very strong person but low key?
HF: Very, very strong person, yeah.
WL: What—I gather he had sort of an open door policy, too, in terms of access by students and
faculty?
HF: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Most anybody could get in to see him. He had a staff meeting every
Monday morning, and he would try to take care of contacts as much as he could with his
staff at that time. He had always—after he'd brought up what he wanted to, he'd always go
around the room and let everybody else bring up anything they wanted to.
WL: And did they generally?
HF: Oh yeah, yeah. Nearly all of them would accumulate things during the week, unless it was
some urgency to it, they'd accumulate things during the week to bring up at the staff meeting.
That kept all the staff involved—or informed, I mean, on a lot of what was going on, which I
think was very good.
There were things going on in other areas of the university that I wouldn't have
known anything about otherwise. And sometimes some of that activity had implications for
business affairs, which the people involved in it didn't really recognize, and I wouldn't have
known anything about it if it hadn't come up at staff meeting.
I'm sure that was true with other areas of the university, too. It was during that time
that Jim Ferguson had developed his organization of vice chancellors, and there were six
then. I think there are five now. And so it was the chancellor and the six vice chancellors and
the chancellor’s secretary.
WL: That would be the staff meeting then?
HF: They're the ones who were at the staff meeting, yes.
WL: I was going to ask you actually a little bit more about the nature of administration in those
days. I gather it wasn't a very large administration, really. What you're describing here is
something fairly intimate, everybody knows each other and—.
HF: Yeah, that’s right.
WL: It's not so large that you can’t get the key people in one room.
HF: Yeah, we all met in the chancellor's office. Part of that time his office was in the basement of
the Alumni House. And then we got Mossman Building, and of course, it was, his office was
moved into there. They'd planned for that.
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WL: Let's talk a little bit more about your office, business affairs, and some of the functions that it
performed. Let me just ask you, to begin with, whether those functions changed over time.
Did they—did you add new functions, new duties, new responsibilities over time, or did
the—
HF: During the years that I was here?
WL: Yes, yes sir.
HF: No, the overall responsibilities remained basically the same the whole time I was here. I had
responsibility for accounting and budgets, for physical plant operations, buildings, grounds,
the campus utilities, you know, such as water and electric and heat, and so forth; business
operations such as the bookstore, food service, dormitories. Now I did not have student life
in the dormitories, but the upkeep of the buildings themselves, and so forth. Campus
security, new construction, well, they’re the things I can think of at the moment.
WL: Yeah. Let's examine some of these individual functions, maybe beginning with budget. Tell
me a little bit about how budgets were made and the process by which a budget was put
together, whether that changed. I don't know if it did change. Maybe you can indicate.
HF: Well, we had two basic types of money. One was state funds, and the other is university
funds which are non-state. The state funds is where we had to do most of our budgeting, and
we were controlled in that area by the State Budget Office.
WL: Right.
HF: We had to submit state budgets and in the format in which they specified. When I
first came, we were submitting budgets directly to the state budget office as a
separate state institution. When the University [of North Carolina] System was
created, bringing in all sixteen institutions, then the General Administration offices in
Chapel Hill took a considerably larger hand in budgeting, and we submitted our
budget to the General Administration. And they combined that and submitted one
university-wide budget to the state legislature.
WL: Before the early seventies, budgets would be submitted by each campus, is that right?
HF: Yes, each campus. We furnished the General Administration a copy of it, of course, but we
submitted it directly to the state budget office then.
WL: Did you have to go to the legislature—was there a certain amount of lobbying that had to
take place in order to get the budget through or—?
HF: Yes, there was some lobbying. The General Administration offices technically lobbied for
each institution. As a practical matter, the institutions did have some contact with the
legislators, though it was more limited than the schools that were not part of the university
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then.
WL: Oh yes.
HF: And, but I say "then"—you know, it started out with three institutions, [The University of
North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, N[orth] C[arolina] State [University] and this school
[originally Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina]. It grew while I was here
to include [The University of North Carolina at] Wilmington and [The University of North
Carolina at] Charlotte and [The University of North Carolina at] Asheville, so that at the time
the University System was created and they were all brought in, there were six institutions
there.
But up to that point, all six institutions did submit their budgets directly. And at
certain times, General Administration wanted somebody from each institution to be down in
Raleigh and do some work with the legislature.
WL: So the work would be, would be coordinated by the consolidated office, Consolidated
University—?
HF: Yes, that's right.
WL: But there was more of that perhaps that took place prior to the big reorganization when the
sixteen-campus system was built?
HF: That’s right.
WL: More of that going on than after the reorganization?
HF: Right.
WL: How did UNCG fare, do you think, in budgets, in the amount of state money that it received
in the sixties and seventies generally? Do you think it got shortchanged or—
HF: It didn't fare real well. I wouldn’t say real badly, but not real well. The school was growing
pretty fast at that time and that growth helped it, I think. Certain, certain things in the budget
were tied pretty closely to instruction. They had a student/teacher ratio, for instance, and as
the enrollment grew, that helped us get—keep up with adequate number of faculty, for
instance.
An institution—well, let me bring this in, too. It was during that time that we were
getting into more graduate work and the state certainly took notice of that, or was aware of
that, in their allocating funds to us. They were aware that graduate programs cost more than
undergraduate. So that helped some.
But at the same time they were always short of money, and a growing institution
always has more financial needs than it has resources. So times were somewhat lean on—we
were not able to give everybody what they wanted by any means.
WL: Yeah. One of the things you hear a lot about now is the—if I have this right—the other-than-
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personnel sector of the budget as being underfunded.
HF: Yeah.
WL: And—was that a problem do you think? Does that go back a ways?
HF: Well, I happened to run into Fred Drake [vice chancellor for business affairs] a few days ago
and just chatted for three or four minutes, you know, and he made some mention of the
problems they were having with the budget. And I remember saying to him that, "Well, if
you went back and picked up certain news stories from the newspapers back then, I think
you could change the date and change the name of the governor, and you'd have the same
story."
Yeah, we've had those times when the state budget was running short of funds. The
income was not up to what they had projected. And we've had to, we've had funds cut before.
And the approach that they're making to it now—and, you know, all I know about it now is
what's in the newspaper—but, the approach that they're making, they're trying not to reduce
staff, but they won’t let you fill vacant positions, cuts of non-personnel funds before they cut
personnel funds, all of that, yeah, we went through those then. Some of those economic
cycles back in the sixties and seventies.
WL: Yeah.
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
WL: —earlier about state funds, did you find this excessively rigid?
HF: Yes, yes. North Carolina had the tightest monetary, or budgetary, controls on institutions of
higher education of any state in the Union. I'm convinced of that from contacts that I had
through the University Business Officers associations. We were a member of both the
Southern and the Eastern association, and contacts I had through that, I think we certainly
had the tightest state budgetary controls of any state in the Union.
WL: Yes. So that made your job somewhat difficult, or more complicated, anyway?
HF: Yeah. It gave you less flexibility in trying to meet problems.
WL: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about physical plant, and particularly I'm interested in what
happens to the campus structure. This is a period of growth, new buildings are added. How
did you envision, how did anyone envision the campus growing, say, in the early sixties?
Was there a master plan or—?
HF: Yes, we had, we gave a lot of thought to campus development.
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[recording paused]
WL: We were talking about plans for development of the campus and how the campus was, in
fact, developed physically in the sixties and seventies.
HF: Well, we did quite a bit of building during that time, and we did have a master plan. It was a
fairly informal one for the early part of those years. And then in the early seventies, I believe,
we brought in an outside consultant and drew up a more formal master plan. The more
formal one was not basically different from our informal one, however.
We recognized that there were three natural boundaries to the campus that very
likely would not be good to cross: West Market Street, Aycock Street, and the railroad. And
then we looked upon Tate Street as being not quite as firm a boundary but still, for all
practical working purposes at that time, that Tate Street would be a boundary and we would
do our developing within this geographic area.
Within that, we recognized certain areas that would be better for—to retain as the
academic parts, certain for student housing, parking, service facilities. And the campus has
continued to develop since I left, during the ten years that I've been away, I think within that
same—
WL: General structure?
HF: General structure. For instance, the new art building—I always envisioned that corner [of
Tate and Spring Garden Streets], which had some private businesses in it when I was here, as
being a place that would—that should have, when the right building came along—should
have one that would service in many ways the general public and, at the same time, a
building that would delineate the edge of the campus well. And I think the art building is just
a perfect building for that.
Nothing quite like that came along while we were here. And for that reason, we just
left those businesses there. The parking lot on up behind it was all residential when we
came—when I was here, when I came here, that is. But we, in the later sixties, acquired all
that land and put it into parking thinking that there would be parking reasonably close to the
academic area. But at the same time, on the fringe of the campus as we had just described
it—the railroad and Tate Street being boundaries—we began to develop parking out from
the center and leaving the center of the campus.
As the University grew, parking got to be quite a problem. When I came in ’62, there
were no parking regulations of any kind on campus. Almost everybody could park close to
the building they wanted to go to. I was in, my office was in Foust Building at that time.
There were times I had to park as far away as the back of Aycock Auditorium. [both laugh]
WL: You were shocked.
HF: And I instituted the first charge for a parking permit, instituted the first permit system. And
the charge for a permit at that time was a dollar a year.
WL: Yes, expensive. When did that come in, do you remember the year?
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HF: No I don't, but it was mid-sixties. And I knew it wouldn't stay at one dollar very long. Some
things the state provides money for—for improvements— and some things they don't. And
they don't for residence halls, for instance, for dining halls. They have to be self-liquidating.
The state will authorize you to borrow the money to do it.
And parking is one of those. The parking facilities have to be self liquidating. So we
instituted the one dollar parking fee, and then, when we acquired the land behind where the
art building is now—I think that was the first one we acquired, first parking lot we built and
put a parking fee on, a permit fee, to pay off the debt. And it went up to, oh, I'm not sure
what, six or eight, ten dollars a year, something like that, when that fee or when that debt
came in that that was placed for.
WL: It's gone up a bit since then.
HF: Yeah, I'm aware of that. I recall when it, when the parking fee took a jump somewhere along
the way and this was—it may have been when this parking lot we were just talking about
came online. A retired faculty member came to me and complained that this would cut them
out because they didn't want to pay the ten dollars a year or whatever it was for the permit
that they wouldn't use very often, just when they came back to campus for a visit, and I
thought they had a good point.
And so we, at that time, decided that we would give a free permit to any retired
employee and—because after all, they wouldn't be on campus a whole lot, you know, and
that wouldn't affect the supply and demand situation very much so far as parking was
concerned. So we instituted it at that time and gave them a regular faculty permit, an A
permit.
I wasn't looking far enough ahead then to realize that I would be a beneficiary of that
some day, but I have a parking permit and have had one every year since I retired and enjoy
using it. It’s no more frustrating for me than it is for the faculty members to circle around
trying to find a vacant spot to park. If I can find one, I do have a permit.
WL: Tell me a little bit more about the development of campus security. When you first came,
was there such a thing?
HF: There was a campus police department. And I don't remember exactly how many officers we
had but not very many, probably eight, something like that, and one police car. And they—
there was no campus parking requirements at that time so they didn't have to get into that at
all.
Not too long after I came, we established a position of director of security, and we
put the police department under him. And the—and parking had come in so we had parking
control under him. And this was not too long, not nearly as long after World War II and there
was more concern with the possibility of nuclear explosions. I can't think of the term that
was used now for that program, but we had, we had certain buildings on campus designated
as bomb shelters.
WL: Oh yes, civil defense?
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HF: Civil defense, that's what I was trying to think of. And civil defense operations came in as
part of security. And—
WL: Was there a growing security problem at all on campus, say by the seventies, in terms of
crime?
HF: No, I don't think there was a large growth in it. There was some, just purely because of the
increased number of students and people on campus. The relationship of incidents to the
campus population was fairly constant, as best I remember. But obviously with more people
on campus there were more incidents. And we, with the director of security, we tried to get
into more professional training than we had had for police officers, too.
WL: Did you operate a training program yourself as part of that?
HF: We did some ourselves. We, as I remember it now, we worked with the city of Greensboro
police department on some of it. Some of our people could go to some of their training
programs. We had, I remember we had a real legal problem once in connection with security.
Our—I'm not sure I'm remembering all the details of this right, but our security officers had
their law-enforcement authority as deputy sheriffs of Guilford County.
They'd have to have—to be a law-enforcement officer and to have the powers of a law-enforcement
officer, you have to have some legal basis for it, you know, the power of arrest,
for instance. There has to be a legal basis for that. Well, we had that from the Guilford
County sheriff.
At an election sometime in the early sixties, ’63, I believe, the Republicans swept
just about all the offices in Guilford County. And a new sheriff came in, and that sheriff said
he wasn't going to have—he wasn't going to extend deputy sheriff status to our officers. And
that meant that our officers didn't have power of arrest. They didn't have any more power
than the ordinary citizen.
We went to the, in essence, went to the legislature with it, but that same year all of
the representatives to the legislature were Republicans. They swept out the Democrats here
in Guilford County. Well, of course, the legislature at that time was much more heavily
Democratic than it is now, and they weren't going to do anything for these Republican
legislators of Guilford County.
But they did recognize that something needed to be done on this, and a—one of the
Guilford County legislators put in a bill to give us, give our police some kind of authority. I
don't remember the details of that. And a Republican, I mean a Democrat, from a
neighboring county, I believe, I don't remember which one, put in another bill. They weren't
going to pass any bill that a Republican put in.
But he put in a bill that gave us police power under, I believe, the same state law that
gave the railroad and certain other businesses the authority to have their police force on their
own property and extended that to the university here. And so we operated on that basis for a
while. I don't remember just how long.
And then there was some other change in the law that affected all the campuses, I
think, in the state. But for a while—not too long a while either—out of, I think a few months,
our police officers just didn't have any authority as police officers. But that crisis finally
worked out.
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The students seemed to have learned fairly quickly that the police didn't have any
authority, because when they didn't have it, we'd have them take their badges off of them,
you see. And the students learned pretty quickly that they might have, a police officer might
have some moral suasion with them, but certainly didn't have any authority. And there were
a few of them that took some advantage of that.
We had some difficult times. And I don't mean with any large number of students,
but with an individual student now and then.
WL: This was public knowledge, this kind of gap in authority?
HF: It got to be public knowledge, yes. But as I say, that didn't last very long. As I recall it now,
the legislature was in session when it came up, or would be very soon, and it was a matter of,
I don't know what, three or four months at the most when that occurred.
WL: What about the bookstore? This was one of the responsibilities of your office. How did it f
function? What was its relationship to your office?
HF: Well, it was one of the operations on campus that our office was responsible for. It's operated
on a contract basis now. But during the whole time I was here we operated it.
WL: Operated it directly?
HF: Directly, yes. It was—the employees there were university employees, and it was strictly a
university operation. Your bringing that up reminds me of that—I mentioned earlier
something about the student activism during the late sixties?
WL: Yes.
HF: The operation of the bookstore was one of the things that they—some of the activists were
unhappy about. They took the position that no profit should be made on students. It should
be operated as a non-profit operation.
Well, it had been university policy for a number of years, as far back as, as I can
determine, that they would operate selling things at normal retail prices—books, you know,
the price of books was pretty much set by publishers. Other things, student supplies of
various kinds—we in general priced them about the same as they would be priced most
anywhere else. And then all of the profits of the bookstore went into student scholarship
funds.
And this campus had very little in the way of scholarship funds at that time. And this
was one of the largest sources of scholarship money. As I recall it now, the bookstore profits,
they went into scholarships in the range of sixty to seventy thousand dollars a year, which
was considerably more money then than it is now, of course. And we wanted to maintain that
as a source of scholarships even though we freely admitted that this, in essence, took money
from some students and gave it to other students, but that we thought that was still a good
thing to do.
Back during this time of activism there was some question by some students to
operate the bookstore on a non-profit basis—supposed to break even. That’d be extremely
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hard to do and make it come out exactly breaking even. We could—they said we could mark
up merchandise enough to cover operating expenses for salaries and whatever other
operating expenses there were.
They were not large. We never had—the bookstore never did pay any rent on the
space it was in to the university. It didn't pay anything for the heat and electricity and that
type of thing. But we sort of rode that one out and continued to operate, putting profits into
scholarships. And as long as I was here, that was the way the bookstore was operated.
WL: Did that system work fairly well? Do you think it was a satisfactory system?
HF: Well, you know, this gets into more of a question of the philosophy that the university wants
to take than what the business office would decide. I don't think the business office should
really decide—
WL: It wasn't your decision?
HF: No, it really wasn't my decision. That's something that the chancellor would have to decide
ultimately. But business affairs has an interest in it. And student affairs has also. And I would
think academic affairs has, in the diversity of students that these scholarships could bring in.
So—
WL: I guess the success of the bookstore was sort of predicated in part on having a monopoly, as
it was the only bookstore.
HF: Well, yeah, that's what—to an extent, there was a monopoly there. Before, close to the time I
left, the bookstore down here on Tate Street opened up.
WL: Right, Addam's Bookstore.
HF: Yeah, I couldn't recall the name of it. I've never been in it, but I know it's there. There was, I
remember, some discussions on how much to cooperate with them. We—lots of times back
then, had trouble getting information from certain faculty members on what texts they were
going to use, and we at times had problems getting textbooks stocked within the time that we
had from the time we were told what was going to be used.
There was discussion within the university for a bookstore like Addam’s, the extent
to which you would cooperate with them and furnish them information on what texts were
going to be used. And I don't remember what we did with that. Addam’s or an outside
bookstore next to the campus, came into existence so close to the time I left, I don't
remember. And I didn't really get involved in the decision on that and I don't know what they
do now.
WL: When I first came to campus, which was 1981, there seemed to be some disgruntlement with
the bookstore on the part of faculty and the part of students, to a certain extent. I'm not sure
all of it was well directed or specific, but, did you hear anything like this from—?
HF: Oh yeah, yeah. The Carolinian—and I don't mean this critically of The Carolinian, it's just
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my impression. The Carolinian sort of made its rounds of certain things that it would
criticize, and the bookstore was one of them. The food service was one, parking was one.
And I don't mean to minimize those things. They all are services and they need to be
operated satisfactorily.
And still most anything that you have daily contact with over a period of time, you
sort of get fed up with. I remember—this is not something you've asked about, but let me
insert it here along this line.
I remember only two occasions, I think, when I was here that a—some student had
complained right much about food service, that ways, that things developed so that that
student's parents happened to be on campus at a time that I knew about and could arrange to
do so, and I took them down to the student dining hall to eat, and their impression of the
food, as they expressed it to me, was entirely different from what the student's impression
was, because the student was eating it day after day, you know. And the—the parents—on
these two occasions the parents would eat it just that one time.
I think I heard more complaints about the food service than any other one thing, and I
suspect that still is true. I don't know. That was so common on campuses. When I had some
opportunity to be on some other campus, if I could arrange it, I would eat in the food service
that that campus had. And on our own campus here, I made it a point to eat a meal down at
the student dining room, oh, every two or three weeks or so.
WL: Just to sample the fare?
HF: Yes, to sample the fare and see how long the lines were, how much congestion there was,
just the whole operation of it. And encouraged certain others to do it, too. We had contracted
with ARA at that time and we—I had written into the contract that there were people on
campus who could go in and eat without charge any time they wanted to—the chancellor,
myself, dean of students and two or three of the dean of students' staff members—had a dean
of men and dean of women, and I've forgotten what else.
But anyway, all of those types of people could eat a meal down there any time and
were encouraged to do so, without paying for it.
WL: To get that kind of contact with students? To sort of see what the dining hall facilities were
like?
HF: Well, for them to know what the food service was so that if students complained to them
they had some firsthand understanding of it.
WL: Let me ask you a final question: just wondering what kind of observations you have about
the general evolution of the institution. What do you think the most significant changes were
during the time that you were in business affairs? Between 1962 and 1980, how would you
characterize the way the institution changed?
HF: Well, the institution became much more a research and a graduate institution than strictly an
undergraduate. I say strictly—a few master’s programs, but it was mainly a teaching
institution not a research institution. There was a lot of change in that area.
With an increase in enrollment from, I think, somewhere around thirty-five hundred
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to a little over ten thousand students, there obviously was a lot of change in the physical
plan. Somebody, when I started to retire, somebody counted how many buildings, new
buildings had been built during that eighteen years, and I don't remember just how many
there were, but—
WL: Quite a few?
HF: A sizeable number of them, yeah. There was quite a bit of campus expansion from the
standpoint of the geographic area of the campus. We bought quite a bit of land. We were not
able to buy land except when we had a particular project to go on it.
The—if we were buying with state funds—and that was basically all we had except
for a little bit of parking meters—if we were buying with state funds, then we had to follow
state policy on it. And state policy was that if you did not already own the land that you were
going to put a project on, you could not, the state would not provide the money to buy the
site until they had authorized the appropriations for the structure. So that limited us
considerably in the purchase of land.
But since we're a state institution and have the power of eminent domain, when we
got the appropriation to buy the land and build the building we could always get the site.
WL: Yes. Did you have to displace many people in the process?
HF: Not a whole lot. We did some. I tried to get the word out to all the people in this area, or
publicly, I should say, that we would give anyone information to the extent that we knew
ourselves on what land we would want and our best estimate of when we would want it.
And I had a number of people come to me and want that kind of information. Here
on McIver Street, for instance, we ended up buying everything on the west side of McIver,
and we bought some on the east side where the, what we referred to then as the Life Sciences
Building—biology and so forth.
WL: Yes, the Eberhart Building.
HF: It’s Eberhart Building now, isn't it, for Bruce Eberhart. We needed the land for that. So we'd
tell people where we thought we would go and our best guess on when. Now our best guess
on when, the further I thought when was, the less reliable our guess was.
WL: Yeah.
HF: But we did have to displace some people, that’s right. And when we did, we give them as
much notice as we possibly could. But that's inevitable, you know. That’s just part of a
growing institution. And it is one of the differences between a state institution and a private
one. The private one could be held up for the longest kind of a time in its plans if it didn't
already have the land that it needed.
It was more serious for us than for any other institutions, and we, I think, were able
to convince some of the people in Raleigh who had quite a bit of influence on this kind of
thing. University [of North Carolina at] of Charlotte was a very new campus at that time, but
they had bought a large tract of land. I'm not sure how much, a thousand acres or something.
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WL: Outside of the city?
HF: Outside of the city, and so when they wanted a building, you know, it fit into their campus
development, but there wasn't any question about the site. People in Raleigh did recognize
that we were a landlocked institution. We had very little land. I think I remember once, based
on some comment that someone in Raleigh made to me, I’d figured up for several campuses
the average number of students per acre of land. [laughs] I'd never heard of that being done
before, but I think I did work up such a table and at times used it to some advantage. And
obviously we had a greater concentration of students per campus and per acre of land on a
campus than any other state institution, I believe, certainly than any of those that I computed
it for.
[End of Interview]