Oral history interview with Robert L. Miller, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Robert L. Miller
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: January 23, 1990
WL: I’d like to start today just by asking you to recall what your first impressions were when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], when you first came, under what circumstances you came, and what kind of institution you found it when you first arrived.
RM: When I came to UNCG as a candidate for the deanship of a nonexistent college, I was an American Council in Education intern working at the State University of New York in Binghamton. It was one of two deanships that I was being interviewed for, and I remember vividly when I got off the airplane, I believe in early February, that it was a kind of warm spring-like day compared with what I had experienced in Binghamton and what I had known in Chicago [Illinois], so I was very favorably impressed with the climate. I was met by Warren Ashby, who was at that time professor in the Department of Philosophy. And after providing me with a dinner in which the food was very mediocre, we went to a lecture by Harry Aiken [philosophy professor at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts]. Aiken, at that time, was visiting the campus to comment on a book that had recently been written by Daniel Bell on the reforming of general education.
The reason I remember this so well is because when I was at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, Daniel Bell had been my sociology professor. Aiken made some outrageous comments about what Bell had said, and I was somewhat surprised to see that, first of all, the audience was relatively unresponsive; that is, they didn’t jump to the argumentative bait that Aiken had put out. And the audience was largely women; this was still primarily the Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina], predominantly the Woman’s College. When we left the hall, however, the students commented about the lecture that they had just heard in a way that I hoped that they would have confronted the lecturer during the course of—during the question period. My surmise was that they were entirely too courteous and civil to be that disrespectful and aggressive to a visitor on our campus at the time. But others have told me that that’s just the way Southern women are; they were very, very respectful—I thought much too respectful.
WL: They had a passive style?
RM: Yes.
WL: That’s frequently common as being a style now, even, at this institution. Is that true of the faculty, also, did you think? Or mainly students? 2
RM: I think to a very large extent it was true of the faculty. It was true in the sense that the perception—at least the perception I had—was that a few key administrators actually were responsible for the direction and the way the institution was run. One of the most powerful figures was the then Dean of the Faculty, Mereb Mossman [sociology and anthropology faculty, dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of faculty, vice chancellor for academic affairs], who was probably one of the most skilled, articulate, insightful administrators with whom I’ve ever worked. She was—her own professional background was from the University of Chicago School of Social Work. And so she had a kind of intimate knowledge of the way people performed and about their behavior. She—probably the only thing that annoyed me about her was that she would call me about ten minutes to eight every morning and give me some trivial assignment; in retrospect, what I finally concluded was that she wanted to make sure that I was at my desk early in the morning and really for no other purpose than that. Aside from that minor irritant, I think my relationship with her, from my point of view at any rate, was always one of great respect.
WL: Was she—she was sort of a hands-on administrator? Did she—?
RM: She was.
WL: How did she handle detail?
RM: She handled detail by being here very early and staying here very late and working weekends. She and her administrative assistant, Paula Andris [Class of 1944 commercial], knew virtually everything that went on in the institution. When I first came after having been selected for the job of dean, I would meet with her and about twenty- eight or thirty department heads and other deans, so that she was, as the dean of the faculty, was in direct touch with every single department in the institution. I think it was for that reason that the department heads in what became the College of Arts and Sciences proposed to her, and she accepted the idea, of developing a College. That process actually took a year. What happened was, she called in a well-known educational administrator—his name was [T.R.] McConnell—who had been the president, I believe, of the University at—of Buffalo [State University of New York, Buffalo]. And he worked with a committee of faculty and department heads so that together we could develop the outlines of what became the College of Arts and Sciences. I had, of course, come to the institution with a list of those things that a dean expects, and it was only after, I guess, a couple of years that half the list was accepted by Mereb, and we began to move along in the general direction of forming a college. The College was actually not formed, if I remember correctly, until around 1970; that is, accepted by the then [University of North Carolina] Board of Governors at the system level.
WL: What kind of expectations did you have for the College? What sort of—if you had had a dictatorship and were able to propose a college, what would you have done differently?
RM: [laughs] Well, I would have moved much more quickly than the way the situation turned out. As I said, I had my own agenda in my back pocket. Some of the things eventually 3
came about. For example, I was very interested in developing what came to be a residential college. I had seen one; I had seen a model residential college at the State University of New York in Binghamton, but it was more organized along social lines and only peripherally intellectual lines. It seemed to me that one of the paradoxes or contradictions in many universities was the fact that freshmen had no unit with which to identify, although majors clearly did and graduate students certainly did. So here were the newest members of the university community, and they were being asked to identify with the entire institution.
And so one of the principal ideas that—on which the Residential College was based—was the idea of developing both a living and learning site so that freshmen who selected it could find a place that they could call their own, both socially and educationally. It’s still alive, as you know, so there must have been some merit in it. The idea, the embryonic idea, was one that I brought from New York, but in order to make it work, it required the talents and the energies of both faculty and students here. And the person I asked to become the first director was the aforementioned Warren Ashby, who took charge of it as the master of the unit and who asked our colleague Charles Tisdale [English professor] and his wife to actually live in the unit, so that it was literally a living-learning-educational-intellectual-social unit all rolled into one with about one hundred and ten students or so. And I think—and they provided much of the leadership for the undergraduate student body for a very long time.
WL: What kind of person was Warren Ashby? He was a person of great reputation here, great—I know admired and even loved by a large number of the faculty here.
RM: Well, you can count me among his admirers. I think he was a remarkable man. He was, in my judgment, not only a decent human being, a man of broad intellectual interests, but he was almost a caricature of a liberal because he would listen to every point of view. He would find something of value in every point of view. And then, of course, he would sift those viewpoints out and then strike out in some direction. There were some people who would get very frustrated with Warren. And the reason for this is because he would spend so much time trying to understand others, and they would think that he was immobilized, but that wasn’t the case at all. He just wanted to give everybody a complete and fair hearing. One simply has to have a very great respect for that kind of person.
WL: Was the Residential College—how did the faculty respond to the idea? Was it—did it presumably engender individual support? Was it controversial, did it—?
RM: It was because it was different. And I think, in terms of what has come to be called the reward system, faculty members sometimes believed that the Residential College was an impediment to those rewards that the university can bestow. As dean of the College, I tried to use it as a positive consideration in things like salary increases and recommendations for promotion and tenure. But I think that some departments looked upon it as—somewhat negatively. And when you get a group of adolescents together, as they were, certain kinds of problems arise and because you have given yourself a unique identity, those problems are associated with the institution. And so when, as was the case in many American institutions, there was a drug problem, the Residential College became 4
known as, I think mistakenly, as a haven for those students who used drugs. To the best of my knowledge, it was the only dormitory, it was the only part of the institution that faced the drug problem head-on, by calling the group together and saying—Warren, Charles Tisdale; I think Murray Arndt [associate professor of English, with wife, Frances, first faculty couple to reside in Residential College] too—saying to them directly, “This is a problem, and we must solve it.” In many of the other dormitories I know that the problem was either ignored or swept under the rug.
WL: Did the Residential College—the Residential College recruited people from a variety of backgrounds to teach, did it not?
RM: Right. Yes. They set up a core curriculum, and that core was both fashioned on the intellectual dimensions that were believed important and that were consistent with what eventually became the curriculum or, at least the outline of the curriculum, for the entire College of Arts and Sciences. And also, of course, it had to depend very heavily on those faculty members who were willing and interested in participating and teaching in the Residential College. And so those two factors, I think, came together so that instruction and emphases developed along the lines of the social sciences and the humanities. There were very few of the natural scientists who participated initially, and so another colleague, [Richard] Dick Whitlock in the physics [and astronomy] department, who also later became a director of a residential college, was one of the first of the physical scientists to participate in the program, as I recall. And his work was kind of groundbreaking in there. But there was a lot more going on in the College in addition to the Residential College.
There were combined departments; for example, we had a combined department of sociology, anthropology, and social work when I first came. And one of the things, one of the goals that we had set for ourselves—by “we” I mean the department heads and the faculty—was to try and develop some individual departments with specific kinds of emphases. And, in time, what happened was we developed individual departments of social work, anthropology, and sociology; all coming out of this combined department, this initial combined department framework. The same thing happened in history and political science; it was a combined department and we divided that. There were a number of graduate programs that were developed too. My memory is a little dim about exactly which ones were developed, but the PhD program in psychology, for example, and the PhD program in English; there was an MFA [master of fine arts] program, as you probably know. Randall Jarrell [associate professor of English, American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate] had begun the MFA program long before I came. There were master’s programs in several other areas—political science, public administration—several programs in the department, what became the department of communication and theatre. So, a wide variety. New graduate programs developed, and new departments developed as well.
WL: History considered adding a PhD, didn’t it?
RM: Yes, it did. There were three, actually, that we had talked about developing. History was 5
one, mathematics was another and biology was a third. During the early ’70s, however, as you have undoubtedly heard from others, the budget became very unpredictable and extremely lean and, as a consequence of that, these doctoral programs simply never developed. There simply weren’t the resources available so that we could develop the kind of high-quality programs doctoral programs that I think the institution actually stood for.
WL: So it was a matter of resources rather than faculty or—?
RM: Than the will.
WL: Than the will.
RM: Yes, I would say so.
WL: If you had wanted to develop PhD programs as dean, what was the best way for you to accomplish it? Was it encouraging departments to do it on their own, working with departments cooperatively, planting the idea? In this environment, how did you, as a dean, how did you—?
RM: All of the above, I think. All of the above. One of the first things that I learned when I came here was no matter how good my ideas were, that unless the faculty also agreed that it was a good idea, then I would be alone in implementing it, and that simply wouldn’t work. And so the faculty had to subscribe to whatever idea was floating about. The initiative for many of the graduate programs came from the department heads. Mereb Mossman had brought together a group of young, energetic scientists. In the chemistry department, it was [Walter] Pete Puterbaugh; in biology it was Bruce Eberhart; in psychology it was Bob Eason; in physics it was Bob Clark. She had done this deliberately to try and develop, you know, a kind of science thrust on the campus with the hope that we would develop graduate programs in all of these areas.
In my opinion, for example, the Eberhart Building, named after Bruce, who was the head of the biology department, is a kind of metaphor for these poor people who came in. He’s a symbol of the science group that Mereb brought in with the hope that we would be developing strong graduate programs in these areas. She was succeeded by Stan Jones [vice chancellor for academic affairs], whose vision was of developing a comprehensive university with high-quality graduate programs in selected fields. So he, too, gave a great deal of support to the development of these programs.
But, as I said earlier, what happened was we simply ran out of money, and in spite of the efforts of Bruce—and we actually had a doctoral program on the table at the time—it seems to me that [Richard] Dick Bardolph, who was then head of the history department, was somewhat more reluctant to move ahead without some assurance that the resources would be there. [Eldon Eugene] Gene Posey, who was the head of the math department at the time, probably was the most reluctant of all, believing that mathematics requires a level of imagination, creativity, and intelligence that probably only magicians from the Middle Ages had, so he was probably the slowest in this, but we actually had programs on the table, and they were not supported at level of General Administration [of 6
the University of North Carolina System].
WL: So they went to GA [General Administration], and they—
RM: Right. We’d been encouraged by the then vice president, Dr. Wells, especially about the biology. I think he, himself, was a biologist. Then when the time to make a decision came because of the limitation of funds, they simply withdrew their support.
WL: Dealing with department heads—when you came here, were department heads institutionally fairly strong? Weren’t they sort of the pillars of the university system? With lacking a College of Arts and Sciences, your coming in as dean, were department heads losing a lot? I mean, from their point of view, weren’t—?
RM: Insightful question. [laughs] Well, I think I had the best of it actually because it was the department heads who had asked, especially under the leadership of the head of department of English, whose name slips my mind but who had gone by the time I came—I think that they had asked, had prevailed upon Mereb to bring in a dean so that they would have more direct contact with “the administration,” so I think that they were looking for this kind of organizational leadership.
WL: Was that the reason why, the perception that they were becoming—communication wasn’t as good?
RM: I think so. I think that Mereb, having to interact with about thirty departmental leaders and you can imagine what kind of queue that meant in order to get a few minutes of her time so that decisions could be made. I think that was probably one of the motivations for it. I think the other one was sort of obvious; that is, the school was growing. We had about five thousand—I guess between four and five thousand students at the time—and tradition said that we should have a College of Arts and Sciences, and so I think it was part of that general organizational flow at the time that a college be formed. So I think the only kind of comment that I believe I ever heard, and, of course, they may have commented differently to others, was the fact that, when I became the dean, I should be a special kind of a dean. This was particularly the refrain that I heard from Bruce Eberhart, the head of the biology department, because I was the dean over, I guess, ten or twelve departments at the time, and the other units were so much smaller. He claimed that I should request a title like “Super Dean” or “Elevated Dean” or “Higher Dean,” so that a clear distinction would be made, vis-à-vis the other deans in the institution. That was the only comment that I ever heard about it though.
WL: Something like an Arch dean?
RM: [laughs] Arch dean. That’s right.
WL: Did the department—as I understand it, the department head system has changed over the years and has become, at least in the last ten years or so, more subject to more regular appointment and regular review. Am I correct in this impression? 7
RM: Yes. This was something else that we introduced at the college level and then was picked up by the university as a whole. One of the obvious was that, as department heads, when I first arrived, seemed to have, well, clearly had indefinite tenure but, on the basis of what I saw, indefinite meant permanent, or it seemed to mean permanent. There were clearly difficulties in some of the departments, and the question was, “How does one who has the responsibility identify those problems, and then do something to remedy them?” And so what we introduced, based on a report of the department heads themselves, was a review process. The review process consisted of soliciting reactions from the faculty, from a selected number of students and then from administrators outside the College as to the performance of the department and, indeed, the department head.
What I would then do, with the help of an assistant dean, [Ernest] Ernie Lumsden [psychology professor, once acting head of the department] at the time, was to pull the information together. He was—he came out of the department of psychology, and he was just a top-notch statistical kind of person. He would pull the data together, and then I would sit down with the department head and we would make certain kinds of decisions as to whether continuation seemed to be in his best or her best professional interest and in the interest of the department. And so what we did was to find a routine way of strengthening, I believe strengthening, the headship and giving the faculty a direct voice on—as to whether or not they wished to have their incumbent continue. This was then picked up and formalized at the institutional level by saying that the term of office was four years; that is, our review, it seems to me, occurred every five years. And it could be renewed indefinitely, depending upon the attitude of the incumbent and the faculty. And it has changed. It has changed from that. So you’re quite right.
WL: How else did the governance system change? In creating a college, you had to create a governance system.
RM: Right. We set up a faculty committee; that is, the review process of the heads was one that was developed by the heads. The—one of the things that came out of the first year that I was here in which we were organizing the College was the faculty committee whose responsibility was to draw up by-laws for the College. As I recall, that was chaired or a very influential member who was [Joseph] Joe Himes, who is an emeritus member of our sociology department. At any rate, the by-laws—the only thing that I required was that the by-laws not be rigid, not be full of policy statements, and provide a certain amount of organizational flexibility because we didn’t know how we were going to actually work together until we’d given it a try. And they did that and they did it very well, I thought. The by-laws were limited to about two pages.
One innovation that was suggested by Frank Parker, a former colleague of yours in the department of history, was that the election process be done in the same way that it had been done in the City of New York when [Mayor Fiorello] LaGuardia was elected by a single, transferrable vote which, I understand, has now been abandoned. The rationale for that was to provide faculty with overlapping interest, but who might see themselves as a minority, to provide himself with representation on what became the College Council. And the Council, the governance structure, therefore, became two-headed: an academic—I’m sorry, the Administrative Council, which consisted of all the department heads, and a Faculty Council, which consisted of these elected members based on 8
proportional representation and the single transferrable vote. The former group was responsible for the administrative activities of the college, and the latter group was responsible for the oversight of the curriculum, in particular, and for various issues that affected faculty welfare. And so, those were the two units that with which I worked for the time that I was dean.
WL: How did you interact with these two bodies? I presume you’re dealing with two different groups, two different groups of constituents.
RM: Right.
WL: You dealt with them differently, is that right?
RM: Well, I chaired both groups because I thought that I was both administratively responsible and also the spokesman for the faculty in relation to the vice chancellor, for example, and so I thought that was a kind of dual role that I had to play. When issues arose which concerned both of the councils, I would bring them together so that there could be some discussion. The faculty, however, always felt themselves at some disadvantage when talking to their own department heads on issues, even issues of a college-wide nature. And so, perhaps that didn’t work as well as I had hoped that it would work.
WL: Those meetings—they’d feel a little uncomfortable maybe, a little stiff?
RM: Yes. They would.
WL: I’ve been in meetings like that so I know how they feel.
RM: [chuckles] Especially when it came to rethinking the curricula. There were obvious political implications in this—if we lose a requirement in a certain area, what does this mean in terms of our ability to recruit faculty? That would be the way the department head would sometimes characterize the issue, and the faculty members, on the other hand, would say, “How does this particular requirement fit into the overall intellectual kaleidoscope that we’re trying to develop with some dimension?” You know.
WL: So the faculty on the College Council tended to see things more globally, perhaps?
RM: I think they did, yes.
WL: Whereas the Administrative Council would see themselves as representing the department and feel more territorial?
RM: I think you’re exactly right. Well, after all, that was what he was paid to do, in a way, right?
WL: Yes. Well, I’m on the College Council now, and it’s—to represent your department, it feels almost bad form or something, you know, it’s— 9
RM: Right, and so it should be. You’re on the College Council.
WL: How did the—how would you characterize some changes affecting the faculty? Did the composition and character and profile of faculty change in the 1970s?
RM: Yes, I think it did, and I think this was largely due to the impetus that Stan Jones gave it. He came out of a tradition of—what he tried to do is to achieve a greater balance between research activity and high-quality teaching. He also came out of a very strong tradition of the importance of consultation with the faculty. Mereb Mossman had been much more directive, probably because of the nature of the institution.
WL: How so?
RM: Well, she would have rather distinct ideas about the way things should go, and then, if you disagreed with her or if you thought the ideas could or should be modified, you were in the position of trying to persuade her that perhaps a different direction would be more appropriate. I think, too, the institution was used to top-down kind of administration. On most of the committees when I first arrived, there were primarily department heads, so that a faculty committee would consist of one faculty member and five department heads. And so you’d see the same people over and over and over again making decisions about—well, about a variety of matters. When Stan came, one of the things that he tried to do was to change that attitude in the faculty, to encourage much more faculty participation per se; that is, not so much department heads, who he recognized as speaking for a particular discipline, which was fair enough and exactly what they should be doing. And so that new attitude began to pervade the faculty. That is, they felt easier about coming forward with their ideas. And with his encouragement, we also tried to recruit a more research-minded faculty; that is, the thing that had been prized on this campus, and, I think, is still prized to a very great extent, in spite of comments that you may hear to the contrary, is high-quality teaching. I think without diminishing that, what Stan tried to do was to encourage us to recruit faculty members who valued teaching very much but who also wanted to remain professionally visible through their research, and so the nature of the faculty began to change and the expectations began to change.
WL: How do you communicate that? How would he communicate that kind of programmatic or personnel change? In other words, how did he get across a new emphasis on research and try to do the recruitment of faculty into more research-oriented, publication-oriented?
RM: Well—
WL: Partly through you, presumably.
RM: Yes, right. Yes, well, through me and through all the rest of the deans in the institution. He organized a Deans’ Council, where we would meet on a weekly basis, and together we would thrash out what we saw as the goals of the institution and, indeed, to maintain our position vis-à-vis the other campuses. Remember, at this time the old consolidated system was becoming larger. When I came, there was three. [sneezes] Shortly thereafter 10
it became five; and then it became sixteen, and so we had to maintain a certain kind of position, which, you know, it’s still ambiguous in some ways. We are a doctoral-granting institution, but not a research institution such as [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill is. And that was the kind of thing that Stan tried to emphasize for us; that is, in our recruitment, when he would give us a position or allow us to recruit for a new faculty member, it would always be in the context of what kind of research energy can this person bring to the faculty. And that was—and he used to interview all the candidates. It was not a unilateral decision by the department head, but it was an organizational decision that began with the department, to be sure, but involved the dean and it involved the vice chancellor for academic affairs. So he was a kind of mentor; he was a kind of evangelist; he was a kind of cheerleader. And, I suppose infrequently, he became a dictator when he would say, “No, you can’t, you can’t make an offer to so-and-so.”
WL: He would do that sometimes?
RM: He would do that.
WL: [unclear] presumably the end of the process?
RM: That would be the end of the process. When the VCA said, “No,” that was final.
WL: Just generally speaking, how would you compare Stan Jones with Mossman? What you’ve suggested so far indicates a fairly sharp difference, a new approach, new style, breath of fresh air.
RM: Oh, I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that Mereb was stuffy because she was anything but that. I think it was a different time in the history of the institution. We were larger; we were growing; there were different kinds of problems; that is, the kind of—. I hate to use the word “sedate.” I was going to use the word “passive” to describe the student body when Mereb was the dean of the faculty. But the students had changed; the social environment had changed; the issues in the country had changed; and all of this was reflected, as you know, in what happens in universities. And so Stan dealt with a very different kind of institution than Mereb had and therefore had to deal with it in very different ways. As I say, Mereb’s style was much more directive, much more on top of the situation, much less delegating. Stan’s was much more consultative, much more delegation, much more conversation, much more action and activity by the faculty itself, as opposed to administrators who’d been appointed by the VCA.
WL: So his—one of his major objectives was to draw the faculty into a—?
RM: To make them see that they were the center of the university, whereas if I were to draw a distinction between the two, Mereb saw the administrative officials, the department heads, as the core of the university because it was in the process of building. Stan saw the faculty as the center of the institution and that the future of the institution really rested in their hands. And that was—I guess that would be the distinction I would draw. Both of them right during the times that they served. 11
WL: Well, let’s go, since we’re talking about vice chancellors, move ahead to Elisabeth Zinser [vice chancellor for academic affairs].
RM: I worked with her for a very short period of time, but the two things that I most admired about her were, first of all, her willingness to entertain almost any idea. She was a very creative person. And the enormous energy that she poured into virtually everything that she touched. She, as you know, began this process of defining the mission of the institution and did so in consultation with the deans and Jack Bardon [psychology professor, interim dean of the School of Education] was a kind of consultant to the whole process. And I remember very vividly when she first arrived, the dean sitting in a frigid room in her house for, I think, a period of a day, trying to hash out some fundamental ideas on the basis of which one could build a—could have a foundation for the mission and goals development. My particular role in that activity in this ice-cold room in her house was to make sure that the stove, that the fireplace that she had, was fueled with wood from time to time. [laughs] It was quite an occasion. You may wish to speak to other deans to see if they recollect the same kind of environment that I’ve described. She was creative; she was energetic; she had wonderful compassion; she was a pleasure to talk to.
WL: Let’s go back to the beginning of your experience here. I’ve often wondered what—well, let me say first that, as you know, the 1960s were a period of great turbulence in American education. One gets the feeling that in 1960s didn’t happen here. Is that accurate or—?
RM: Not to the extent that it did on other campuses. It seems to me that, and I may be mistaken about this—you, as a historian, would know better than I. It seems to me that that kind, that the turbulence that began in ’64 in California didn’t sweep east and south until much later, so we did have a sit-in in the Administration Building here, but I think it didn’t occur until ’72, maybe ’71—memory’s a little dim about it, but we did have a sit-in on this campus.
WL: What was the sit-in regarding?
RM: This issue was about the—it began associated with the strike of the hospital workers at Duke University [Durham, North Carolina]. Most of the hospital workers, as you remember, were black, and so the black students on our campus sat-in sympathetically to what was happening elsewhere in the state. They were courteous; that is, our students were courteous, but they made themselves known. They were not destructive or boisterous; that is, we could conduct our business, so long as we were willing to step over legs and arms and bodies in the Foust Building.
WL: You could still get in to work?
RM: We could still get in to work. It was very unlike a takeover of a building when I was at Binghamton when the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] took the building over and raced through the building, tearing papers up and sort of turning over file cabinets 12
and so on. So it was—it had a kind of Southern tone to it, if I can characterize it that way. But yes, it came South.
WL: But very courteous and orderly.
RM: Very orderly.
WL: There was a cafeteria strike here also, wasn’t there?
RM: Yes, there was.
WL: Were you here during that?
RM: Yes. And I think that the sit-in that I was referring to was related to that in some ways too.
WL: What sort of special problems did black students have at UNCG? Numbers of blacks at this campus grow significantly, don’t they, during—?
RM: Yes, yes they did. I think that was, again, partly under Stan’s prodding. And I think that the reason that there hadn’t been more black students initially has to do with the traditional history of the institution. That is, it was a white woman’s institution; that was the way it was set up. And so, in connection with any kind of major shift, the potential student body has to know that it’s welcome, and I think it simply took time for that to happen. But once it did, I think we’ve been reasonably successful in recruiting some rather well-qualified black students.
WL: There were individual examples of conflict in the occupation of the Administration Building.
RM: Right.
WL: There’ve been—since I’ve been here, there’s been periodic expressions of discontent. Was there much—what sort of feeling do you get about the problems of being a minority in a majority-white institution? Did you hear about this as dean?
RM: Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, one of the former assistants to the chancellor, Betty Crutcher, took me to a sensitivity meeting in which this problem was addressed by a representative from the Atlanta group. And yes, I was made to understand what that meant very acutely. During one, during a leadership, a student leadership dinner, I once gave a speech in which I addressed this issue, and I still believe that—well, I’m getting off here, off your question. I think it is a problem. I think that one of the things that I failed to do, but tried to do within the context of the undergraduate curriculum, was to introduce material, appropriate materials in appropriate departments that dealt with minority issues. I think for a student to come out of our first two years of undergraduate education with no understanding of the role of blacks and the contribution to American 13
culture and values is a serious failing. This does not mean, however, from my point of view, that one should distort the basic curriculum or that one should separate it. That is, I think that the thread there, the theme is there—it’s a legitimate theme that is now being explored more and more by scholars, both in history and sociology in particular, and those threads should be entwined in our curriculum.
WL: Should be, in other words, discipline-based—based on existing scholarship?
RM: Exactly, exactly.
WL: When did—tell me a little bit more about the history of women’s studies here. Is this—?
RM: This is something that we introduced in the College. Black studies and—well, what we tried to do was to set up a series of interdisciplinary programs within the College. And the two people within the college office who were primarily responsible for the oversight were Ernie Lumsden, Dr. Ernie Lumsden, who was in the psych[ology] department and Dr. Jeutonne Brewer, who was in the English Department. And what we tried to do was to set up a series of these, women’s studies and black studies being two instances of it, but there were other instances as well in these areas, and then to bring that work into the core curriculum as appropriate. That was the hope. I know that we still have a separate women’s studies program and a separate black studies program, and what that indicates to me that there is still work to be done there.
[End of Side A—Begin Side B]
WL: So the idea was to start these programs in order to encourage the teaching—start in reverse—start the program to encourage the infusion of these materials in the curriculum.
RM: Right—in the curriculum in general, exactly.
WL: What would—what was your usual procedure in terms of organizing something like women’s studies. Did you—?
RM: Again, trying to find faculty who had that particular interest; then to persuade to department heads to release those interested faculty to work together. Sometimes what would happen would be the department heads would say, “We couldn’t spare the people.” And we—at that time is when I could use my administrative clout and tell them that they could either give me the faculty to work on these important issues or I’ll simply withdraw positions from the department and develop it myself. They would always see the wisdom of loaning a faculty member, rather than losing the positions that were—but those were the only a few intransigent department heads; most of them were more than willing to cooperate.
WL: That was always used as the last resort? 14
RM: Yes, as a last resort.
WL: Let’s talk a little bit about the curriculum and how the structure of the curriculum changes. This is another issue that I guess more than any has traditionally been faculty preserve or under faculty control and initiative. Yet as dean you are responsible for leadership and every dean of a major College of Arts and Sciences anywhere is going to want to leave his or her imprint on the curriculum. Let’s go back and tell me a little bit more about what kind of curriculum existed when you first came.
RM: It was a—if I use the word monolithic, it was—I don’t mean it in a pejorative sense, at all. I mean that there was a single curriculum that every student in the university had to take, and it consisted, for example, of three years of a foreign language for every student. It consisted of two years of English; everybody had to take a year of history; everybody had to take, I think, a certain amount of mathematics. It was highly prescribed, highly defined, very inflexible. And the first thing that happened that I think that—and this was under Mereb’s leadership; and it probably was part of the history and tradition of the institution to have a curriculum like that. When Stan came, what he did was he broke the curriculum open entirely. That is, we went from a series of highly restricted requirements to what amounted to almost an elective system in which the only requirement remaining from the preceding one was one semester of English. That is, there were certain guidelines about how the other courses were to be taken. For example, you had to take nine hours in the social sciences and six hours in the sciences or some such thing, but the choices were very broad.
What happened then was that we in the College of Arts and Sciences became very disillusioned with what came to be known as a kind of cafeteria-style curriculum in which the student and especially undergraduate freshmen and sophomore undergraduate students who had very little intellectual sophistication were selecting courses probably not on the basis of any theme or any unifying idea, but on the basis of when the class met. Perhaps they want Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9 [am] or 10 [am], so they’d want a 10 [am] class. That would be the way you would characterize it instead of a class of English, or they might hear that such and such a faculty member was more congenial than another faculty member.
Well, when the number of choices had increased to about seven hundred courses, we decided in the college that it was time for a restudy. And Karl Schleunes, a professor of history, was asked to chair a committee to look over the problem and to see whether or not we couldn’t bring some unity, some kind of intellectual integrity, back to an arts and science curriculum at any rate. And he and among others, Jarrett Leplin [philosophy professor], worked on this problem, I think, beginning around 1974 or ’75. And after a series of iterations and much discussion in the College and after I thought that in spite of the differences that I had with my vice chancellor that he would support it, we brought it to the Faculty Council, and I found that for technical reasons we couldn’t get it passed. That is, the vice chancellor finessed me by using a technicality as to whether or not a unique arts and science curriculum could be accepted within the context of the university curriculum, and so we had to go back and restudy what we had proposed for them that technical administrative question.
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WL: So the curriculum that you were developing here was to be a curriculum designed for the entire university?
RM: No, it was for the College of Arts and Sciences. Right, and it was exactly that question—whether it was for the whole university or for the College of Arts and Sciences, whether we in the College could legitimately construct a curriculum for our students; that was the question that arose.
WL: Separate and independent—
RM: Separate from the more general one of the University as a whole.
WL: Was that a question you were prepared to deal with?
RM: We were not prepared because I had not been—in my conversations with my vice chancellor he had never alerted me to this question at all. But it was kind of a last minute, how shall I say, impediment that he placed before us in the College before he would consider our request for a curriculum change, a legitimate one in the context of the policies of the institution, and so—
WL: What do you think his motive was?
RM: Why? Because he disagreed intellectually with what we were doing; that is, he thought that, for example, our creation of a Western Civ core course—Western Civilization core course—was an academic artifact; that is, as a historian he believed that there was no such thing as Western civilization and if there were—to use that kind of argument—and if there were, then it would be inappropriate to present it to freshmen and sophomores because they couldn’t possibly understand its intricate nuances and complexities. So he thought we were simply wrong-headed about the whole thing, and therefore did what he could to, in my opinion, to subvert what we were about. What we dealt with—we dealt with a technicality and after [Chancellor William] Bill Moran came, it was placed on the table before the Faculty Council and after some heated discussion, it was passed. We did it for the College. We did not prescribe the curriculum for the professional schools, although many of the elements were then picked up by the professional schools. Business, for example, was very interested in having their people take the Western Civ course and take more English and so on. So they were brought into it, but they were not forced into it.
WL: What were the new and most important parts of the curriculum that was passed and—?
RM: Well, we defined it. That is, what we did was to define certain elements in the curriculum that were requirements but still retained some latitude so that students could elect the way they wished to satisfy these requirements. That is, we came from about seven hundred required courses to around thirty-five to give you an idea as to what actually occurred. We defined the curriculum in terms of a series of areas. That is, there was an area that dealt with language, there was an area that dealt with the social sciences, there was an 16
area that dealt with natural sciences, there was an area that dealt with mathematics; then there was this core Western Civ area and there was an area that dealt with humanities that was further prescribed in terms of the fine arts and literature [sneezes]; and then something that we called the Foundations of Inquiry, which turns out to be philosophy, religious studies, the study of values, and ethics and intellectual theory. So what we had done was to take, from my point of view, a fairly amorphous and widely distributed program and to say that in terms of the beliefs of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences there are certain elements that are very important and these elements consist of your ability to use language, your understanding of number, something about our own western civilization and its values and then the three major areas of intellectual discourse: the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences.
WL: Western Civilization was a key part of the curriculum?
RM: Yes, it was. Yes, it was.
WL: Tell me a little bit more about the way that developed and the evolution of that as a program.
RM: The idea, it seems to me, came out of the committee that Schleunes had chaired, but in particular was initially the brainchild of Walter Beale, who is currently the head of the Department of English. What he and the other committee members believed, and I think believed very strongly, was that this should be an interdisciplinary course, one in which there should be broad participation across the College. To support this, Ann Saab, who I believe at that time was the head of the department of history, together with some colleagues developed a grant proposal and sent it to the National Endowment for the Humanities. And they were successful in receiving funding for a series of workshops and visiting professors from other institutions, Stanford [University, Palo Alto, California] for example, to help us work out the details of our own Western Civ program and then to evaluate it for us. And so what happened was, Western Civ became the preserve—or was owned by the College as whole—so the members from departments such a history and English would teach together, history being the core. Or history and—. I taught, for example, with a colleague from history where our emphasis was both social and political history and the history of the development of scientific ideas—History in art. History in music. History in art and music. So there are various ways that we conceptualized western civilization and students then could elect one or the other of these emphases and sign up for a kind of sub-course within the overall umbrella course.
WL: Did you always teach as a dean? Did you, were you a teaching dean?
RM: Yes, I tried to. Either in chemistry or Western Civ or in the Residential College or—there were a couple of times, a couple of semesters, when I didn’t teach and a couple of times when I overcommitted myself by teaching two courses and found that I really couldn’t do it as well as I would have liked, but I tried to. That is, what I had to do personally was to make a decision when I came here whether or not I was going to teach or try and continue my research; the nature of my research was such that we did not have the computing 17
power necessary for me to continue and so I chose—and it was not a very difficult decision for me because I like to teach—I chose to teach and do administration.
WL: Did—one are the changes as opposed to the late 1960s in the character of UNCG is the end of its status of a women’s college. When you came here it must have been virtually, well, by a large majority all—not all women—but a large majority of the students were women.
RM: Yes, you’re right, you’re right. As a matter of fact they still had a dress code. The dress code was just fading out of existence when I came here, so that women were not allowed to wear slacks; they were not allowed to come to class with their hair in curlers or with these hairnets and so on. It was rather, you know, a rather strict set of regulations as to what your appearance should be.
WL: Did it have a feel of a women’s college?
RM: I think initially it did. Yes, it did. And it’s changed over time—changed more slowly than a lot of us had hoped that it would change and maybe the introduction of more athletic programs will speed that change up.
WL: Did administration consciously make an effort to attract more male students?
RM: I think so, but largely in terms of the nature of the programs that we developed. I think one of the reasons that we were so interested in developing a School of Business, for example, was because we believed that would be a unit that would be very attractive to young men, and I think that’s the way it’s turned out.
WL: How would you characterize relations between the College of Arts and Sciences and the other schools within the university when you were dean?
RM: I think that the word I would use would be congenial, cooperative. I think this was another feature of Stan’s leadership; that is, his desire to see us work together. And I think that this had a very firm basis in the reality of what this institution was and is. That is, he recognized that in order for us to do anything we would, because of our size and because the size had implications for—for lack of a better phrase—our critical masses of faculty, that we would have to work together in order to do the kinds of things, particularly at the graduate and research level, that the university is expected to do. And so rather than promoting competition and conflict, what he promoted was cooperation and working together between the units and that certainly was the attitude I tried to carry back to the College.
WL: I know when I first arrived here in the early ’80s that you would hear rumblings as a new faculty or hear these things, and it goes in one ear and out the other perhaps—other things to worry about at that point in your career, but there was sort of a feeling of uneasiness. Maybe I’m—did you not feel any of this at the dean level?
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RM: An uneasiness about what sort of—?
WL: Well, sort of a suspicion—maybe I was imagining it. Did you hear any of this kind of thing?
RM: I don’t think so. I think the major problems that had to be dealt with and probably still have to be understood in depth is related to the different nature of—the word I use is the ambiguous nature of our institution. That is, we are not a teaching institution solely; we are not a research institution solely, but we rest somewhere between those two poles, and what that means—and that has all kinds of implications for faculty—that is, they wonder, they are suspicious about, “If I do this, will there be a professional payoff for me in terms of merit increases and my salary, in terms of promotion and tenure?” That is, “Do I earn those points I need to earn in order to be promoted and gain tenure?” That’s the kind of suspicion, to use your word that I have heard from faculty year after year.
WL: That goes back to what you described as a reward system—the uncertainty of the reward system?
RM: Yes, right. Yes, right.
WL: There’s no easy way to answer that, address that problem.
RM: No, there isn’t. There isn’t. You know, if were purely a research institution then we could say, “Unless you publish three articles a year, they are accepted in the best journals in your field, you have no future here.” If we were a teaching institution, we could then say “Unless you teach fifteen to twenty hours, contact hours, a week, and you come out with glowing reports from your students, there is no future here.” We’re somewhere in between and we have to define for ourselves what that means; and I think we’ve been in the process of doing that over the years.
WL: What would you characterize as the most significant change that has occurred in the last twenty years at this institution?
RM: [chuckles] Oh, dear. There have been so many of them. The most significant change—
WL: Name two if you want.
RM: All right. The most significant changes have been in the nature of our faculty, in their increasing independence—all very positive things—and in the size and the complexion of our student body.
WL: Do you think faculty have, on the whole, become more independent?
RM: Absolutely, no question about it. If you could have seen the committees that I sat on when I first came—populated, as I mentioned earlier, by department heads—and look at them now; that is, the effrontery of having a faculty committee whose responsibility is to 19
discuss budget matters with the chancellor and vice chancellor for business affairs. That never could have occurred twenty years ago, believe me.
WL: And perhaps this change has come because a change in the relationship between faculty and department heads?
RM: I think so. Yes. And faculty—and it’s a different view of administration, I think, and a better view; that is, administration should serve the intellectual interests of the institution as reflected by the faculty.
[End of Interview]