Oral history interview with Kendon Smith, 1989 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Kendon Smith
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: October 18, 1989
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WL: I'd like to go back to 1954 when you first came to this campus and get you to tell me a little
bit more about what brought you to Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina]
and—
KS: Yeah, I was an associate professor at Penn[sylvania] State [University] and expecting to
stay there when this possibility arose. And as I say, it offered, for the times, a surprisingly
substantial salary. My misgivings were about moving to the South. We finally decided that
maybe the South could use some people like us. We weren't missionaries, but in a day-to-day
kind of way we were equalitarians.
I came down, interviewed, and it looked like a situation I would like because I was
interested in turning to theoretical writing. And there was not pressure for publications here,
but I made sure when I negotiated for the job that I would have time for what I wanted to
do. And what with one thing or another, we finally moved down—my wife and I and at that
time two children. There was a third one born here.
A man named Gordon Gray, who was chairman of the Gray Commission [on
Foreign Economic Policies, under President Harry Truman] and the Oppenheimer [chaired
committee which recommended revoking Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in
1954], was president of the Consolidated University [of North Carolina], which was then
just the three branches [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State
University, Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina]. And a man named
Edward Kidder Graham, Jr., who was known as Eddie Graham to distinguish him from his
father, was chancellor. And I had been warned by people who knew the campus not to trust
him—that there was an administrative power struggle going on down there.
And sure enough there was. Graham was trying to bypass some of the committees
that were near and dear to the hearts of his faculty structure and they were opposing it.
He—
WL: How was he, how was he trying to—could you explain that a little bit?
KS: I think—I know that he was talking about the need for a general education, which never got
terribly well defined. But he felt that in building up the general education curriculum he
ought to be able to bypass the curriculum committee, which had control over all the
allocation of courses and so on. And they—the faculty resented that, the curriculum
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committee in particular, which was composed of a group of elders, resented it.
And the, well, the truth is that Graham had a positive talent for irritating people. I
often wondered if he had a need to alienate people. I guess not, but he certainly had no
talent whatsoever at making friends with people, and in one way or another I—there's a
long history here. But there were two or three incidents that gradually lost him any
adherency he had. And finally he was essentially fired. And it was handled more
diplomatically than that, but he left and the turmoil settled down somewhat.
WL: This was about the time you came then to the—1954?
KS: Not long afterwards. It must have been in '57, '58, something like that. Allen Trelease
[history faculty] would know for sure. He and I have talked about it. I think at that time an
interim chancellor was appointed.
WL: Pierson?
KS: Pierson, yeah, William Whatley Pierson. And shortly a man named Gordon Blackwell was
named permanent chancellor. All this time the student body was getting larger. And one
thing that's often cited in Graham's favor was that he may have been irritating people, but
he was trying to hire people “who knew what a university was,” as one person expressed it.
In fact I think that's one of the reasons I came—I was asked to come. I was youngish but I
had been fairly productive. And they were very exclusive about wanting to upgrade the
department and trying to get research going and make this a–you know, not Harvard
[University] but maybe Swarthmore [prestigious woman’s college in Pennsylvania]—at
least something close to it.
WL: Is that why it was a source of tension?
KS: It was, too, yes, because he made no bones about this ambition. And, of course, the faculty
was still composed mainly of people who didn't see colleges this way. They saw them as
nurturing institutions and were not [unclear] very scholarly. So yes, that was a source of
tension.
WL: His personality you say was a grating personality? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit
more.
KS: Well, it never bothered me because I simply avoided him. When I came here I recognized, I
think, the kind of person he was, but I felt that I'd be dealing with Mereb Mossman who
was then—I've forgotten what her title was then, but I think dean of the college perhaps—
might have been provost.
WL: Yeah.
KS: And she was an extraordinary person. I was going to say extraordinary woman, but by any
standards, she—when I came here for my interview, I came to talk to her. We sat down and
[coughs] excuse me, without any kind of notes she said, "Well, now, the members of your
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department are so-and-so and so-and–so and so-and-so. And so-and-so has this degree and
that degree and this degree, and his specialty is this. Mrs. So-and-So has these degrees, and
her specialties are this and her weaknesses are this." It was quite a performance. And I’m
getting around to answering your question.
I thought that I could deal with her very well. And, in fact, that's the way it turned
out. And my relations with Graham were quite poor. I did, when he resigned—finally I did
make the courtesy visit to his office and say that I was sorry things had worked out this
way. And what I remember vividly is that he was quite friendly, but at one point he said,
"Hell, I never cared about general education." And the implication was that he felt he
needed an issue to ride in on, and this was the one.
Anyway, things changed around drastically after he left. Gordon Gray was replaced
by [William] Bill Friday as head of the [Consolidated] University [of North Carolina], and
that made a big difference. And after that, it was fairly even growth I should think. Still
there was almost a quantum change in—I guess about '63, '64—when the name changed
[from Woman’s College to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro], and we
became coeducational and there was talk about graduate school.
WL: Let's talk a little bit more about the nature of the faculty here in the fifties when you first
came. What—how would you characterize the faculty both in the psychology department
and elsewhere in the college?
KS: Well, the psychology department was full of nice people, but they weren't very well
qualified. They’d been hired by a man who had been head of the department for a long time
and had the best intentions in the world, but was inclined to confuse psychology with
education as disciplines and had hired people—as Elizabeth Duffy who was the star of the
department said, “had hired people in an extremely casual way,” so that it was kind of a
hard situation in the department.
It was full of people I hated not to continue; I hated to fire outright, but the students
were paying too. I mean, you know, they deserved an education. So the department was in
that sense weak, and for several years it was a matter of replacing and letting go as
humanely as I could.
The faculty at large, as I mentioned I think, was, I would guess, seventy percent
female at that time. And these were mainly middle-aged women who had been sort of
pioneers in their time. They had advanced degrees and they’d been unusual several years
before. The common pattern was that they also had mothers living with them. You can see
the family dynamics of, you know, “Let's let Doris since she's not married, and she can take
mother.”
They were delighted to work. It was literally a matter of working night and day.
Faculty meetings were held at night; committee meetings were held at night because the
college was pretty much the life of its people. And as they say, in a sense, they were doing
extremely well at it. They understood the students in that respect and had unlimited time.
WL: Was the teaching load such that often teaching responsibilities would be all day long and
that would necessitate the—?
KS: When I arrived, the normal teaching load was twelve hours a week. I tried to arrange things
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in my department so that people had two sections of the same course and ended up with
fewer than four preparations. I tried to minimize preparations. And really, our people had
time for research and did research. Again, not day and night, but did research and turned it
out. We had books written in the department. We had papers published.
So I don't think the teaching load was prohibitive. I think many people made it
prohibitive. I think many people over prepared and over counseled and that sort of thing.
But certainly the custom was to teach and that was it.
I remember that during the winter the heat used to be turned off at four o'clock in
the afternoon. The radiators would begin to cool because that meant that by five o'clock
your office was cold, and it was presumed you were going home. There was no heat in the
buildings on weekends or on holidays.
And one of the things I did when I got here was to request that they leave the heat
on at night and weekends and holidays because our people wanted to come in and do
research or scholarship. And the idea almost eluded—not the administration—the business
people completely. Why do you want the heat on? There's no classes scheduled. Getting
across that faculty people did other things besides simply teach and counsel was a bit of a
drag.
WL: What was the physical layout of the college in the fifties?
KS: Well, when I arrived here the psychology department was in the McIver Building that
preceded this one, which was a fascinating [unclear]. It looked—as you came down McIver
Street—I used to drive down to work—it looked like a Scandinavian castle, a red brick
castle poised on the promontory here. It was a big old building—high ceilings, big
windows, steam radiators that worked magnificently, wood floors and heavy banisters—
that kind of thing.
My office was on the second floor overlooking the front door and therefore
overlooking the park and Spring Garden Street and trees. And the office, I suppose, was
twenty by twenty or something like that. It was—in a decadent sort of way, it was
wonderful. Oh my. The building psychology is in and biology is in now didn't exist. The
nursing building didn't exist. The dormitories up in the woods didn't exist. A couple of
dormitories that have been torn down did exist.
The library tower was not there. The library was a wonderful building. It was fairly
new. It was comfortable. There were carrels and studies available. The library staff, you've
probably discovered, would knock themselves out to help you. That's a long tradition.
WL: What was the focus of student life?
KS: Probably Elliott Hall. I was just going to say the north wing of Elliott Hall hadn't been built
yet, and there was, in fact, a big old framed building there that had been the student
infirmary and became a graduate dormitory when we had only a few graduate students.
That was finally torn down to make room for the—this is my memory. I think maybe if you
got out documents you'd find that it's distorted a bit. But this is my impression of it. Of
course, the business/economics complex wasn't there at all. The buildings across Spring
Garden Street, except for Curry [Building], were not there at all.
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WL: So that academic life was fairly contained?
KS: I think the academic focus was McIver Building probably. The humanities departments
were here. In fact, almost all departments were here. Chemistry and physics were down in
the old science building. Home economics was in its present building. Phys[ical]
ed[ucation] was down Walker Avenue.
WL: You mentioned that Graham wanted things ran, but ran into this very strong tradition of the
fact that faculty control the curriculum, which is still the case now.
KS: Yes.
WL: How did faculty express itself in the 1950s? Was it—and how much strength did they have
and how much voice did faculty have in well—academic affairs? And what the Graham
affair suggested, it had a good bit.
KS: Yeah, yeah. The faculty being that small, faculty meetings were well attended at the
Virginia Dare room of the Alumni House used to be packed. And there was coffee served.
This was an evening meeting. Graham would preside, but people, in the old Southern
tradition, felt free to get up and speak their minds as long as they were ladylike and
gentlemanly like.
One old lady—whose name I think can I remember, I won’t mention—stood in the
back of the room and every now and then come forth like an evil godmother and make
pronouncements. But, except for that, things were pretty civil. All of this had an impact on
Graham, and partly because the town newspapers followed it closely. There would be a
reporter from the local paper. And by the time I got here they were being somewhat
unsympathetic to Graham. They were tending to slant their reports in terms of the faculty
was attempting to right the system and carry on.
WL: There wasn't much of a tradition of an extensive bureaucracy at the top?
KS: No.
WL: Ed Graham and [Mereb] Mossman and—
KS: Yeah, that was sort of it, that's right. Mossman was dean of the college, which, of course,
humanities and sciences. The professional schools, education, phys ed, music had their
own deans, but Mossman still was their superordinate. It was typical to have meetings with
deans and department heads, and that meant that these other deans were treated as if they're
heads of departments .
The dean of the School of Education was a man named Charles Prall and turned out
he was from southern Minnesota and kind of a farm boy, smoked cigars and said what he
had on his mind. And his idea of running the School of Education was to absolutely
minimize the educational courses as much as possible and maximize the number of
substantive courses that the girls—they weren't really required to take. I think everybody
had to fight the mentality of this rather unfortunate man, but he seemed to be effective.
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WL: That kept the education department kind of small I guess?
KS: Yes. I remember during my initial interview after I'd gotten a chance to look around, I was
talking to the people and the members of the committee and I said, "It seems to me that you
people think you’ve got a liberal arts college here, but what students think you've got is a
teacher's college." And I think was—I'm sure the majority of students coming through got a
teacher's certificate if they took enough education courses. And that riled the committee.
But there was, I think, some truth to it, and the tendency was—you know at that
time it was required that a female student come here if she wanted to enter the university
system. She couldn't go to [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill or [North Carolina]
State [University] unless there were special circumstances, like nursing, I think. But she had
to come here for the first two years, and then at the end of two years there was always a
spiritual crisis across the campus about should we switch to Chapel Hill or should we stay
here.
And the effect of selection was mainly that the girls who were looking for sort of a
normal college life—I think statistically normal, but a little bit of fun and parties as well as
studies—tended to go to Chapel Hill. The ones who stayed here were mainly delightful
students. They were serious and weren't much interested in a social life. Now that was nice
for the faculty, but I'm not sure it was good for the students. I often wished they had more
of a social life.
WL: Was this process of transferring, in which students would go here for two years and go to
Chapel Hill for the final two years, was this true in the fifties as well or was this—?
KS: Oh yeah.
WL: Yeah.
KS: I may be wrong but didn't it last up to '62 or '63?
WL: Sure, or even longer. I don't believe Chapel Hill began to admit them in equal numbers until
the seventies.
KS: Is that so?
WL: Yeah. Well, I know of, yeah. What was—let's talk a little bit about student life. How would
you characterize—you said something already about one important element of student— in
the fact that some students went for a year, some were two year. There seemed to be an
important difference between—what would you say the biggest difference was between the
students—is between the students of the 1950s and the students of the 1970s or the
eighties?
KS: Well, the big—the thing that always strikes me when you walk across campus is the
presence of men, the presence of male students. The girls were hard put to find male
companionship. Of course, men used to come over from State and from Chapel Hill as well
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as from Davidson [College], Clemson [University], Duke [University].
I met all sorts of men in later life who would say, "Oh, you're at UNCG [University
of North Carolina at Greensboro]. I used to go over there. That's where I met my wife."
And so there was a certain amount of—it was a lot like an Ivy League situation where men
were sequestered on one campus, which I think was a matter of importance. So there was
that. The girls, I think, sometimes made contacts around town, although that tended to be
discouraged.
WL: Was it a—was the atmosphere in a sort of a cloistered atmosphere in the fifties?
KS: Yeah.
WL: Fortress mentality?
KS: At least on the surface. There were fairly strict dormitory rules in a sense, but the girls were
awfully ingenious about getting around them by keeping liquor in their room, that sort of
thing. If you got to know them well enough, they could tell you about keeping the gin in the
steam iron because in the room inspections that was always overlooked. I'm not sure how
gin out of a steam iron tasted, but anyway, they did it. I think there was a certain amount of
hanky panky going on between girls on campus and men from off campus. If it was, it was
awfully discreet for me.
WL: It was—there were things like required chapel in the fifties?
KS: There were things like required chapel. It was, I think, called assembly or convocation, but
it was required, yes, it was. One other thing, there were no athletics to speak of. There were
no male athletics at all, of course. And the girls who engaged in female athletics were
considered sort of jocks and not quite in the group.
One of the things that attracted me about this campus was the lack of school spirit.
But that was something that, of course, turned off most students. They wanted to cheer for a
team. But I thought it was great to have a school where there was no nonsense about
football, and that lasted for quite a while.
WL: So in the absence of that—in the absence of this kind of school spirit, rah-rah kind of school
spirit—was there not sort of coherences on campus?
KS: I think so, yeah. You notice this among the alumni even now. They—at least a core of them
—seem to be awfully devoted to—. At the time that the place changed from being a
women's college to being what it is now, there was a great resistance from among the old
girls. Yeah, there was sort of what I’d call it more mature, but maybe that isn’t right either.
But there was a kind of school spirit that was less profound than cheerleaders and football
teams. I think more a matter of, rightly or wrongly, being proud of having gone to a
demanding and a good institution. Woman’s College was considered demanding institution.
WL: What were the students like? Where did they come from? The kind of students you had—
what sort of background did they have?
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KS: Mainly for women in the state and from all parts of the state. Greensboro wasn't—I wasn't
impressed with it being strongly represented. It was always interesting to ask a student,
"Where are you from?" And find out it was Wilmington or Asheville or West Jefferson or
Edenton, something like that. And that was pretty much the picture.
There weren't many out-of-state students. When they came, they were mainly from
New Jersey. There were reasons for that, I think, in terms of what it cost them. They could
come here, all told, at a lower expense than they could go to their own women's colleges,
and I've forgotten if there was one.
WL: Douglass College [The Women’s Division of Rutgers, the State University].
KS: Yeah.
WL: Was there much sense in the fifties that the institution was going to change? You mentioned
that numerous sorts of faculty were being pointedly recruited in the fifties. Was there a
sense that this was—this institution was changing from a college into a university or it was
going to change in other directions?
KS: I think the first year Graham was here there was a fear that it might change; there was
resistance to it. The later people, Pierson and Gordon Blackwell—a sociologist from
Chapel Hill, was here for six or seven years—I think went ahead with the same policy. I
think their aims were the same,—to try to get people who were productive and had a
broader view of what even a college should be. But they went about it in a much more
diplomatic venture. And there was a feeling then, I think, of acceptance of gradual change.
More and more male faculty members gradually popped up.
WL: There must have been a spate of retirements, I guess, coming.
KS: I don't know. I was just going to say there was a turnover, but it was more gradual there.
The feeling probably was—well, it's going to change, but it's going to change in proper
order. There won't be a revolution.
The young men who came on campus got on remarkably well. I was proud of the
ones we brought into our department because, you see, they were [unclear] my job
[laughs], Literally because they discovered in the old computer building that there were
toilets marked students and faculty, and they used the faculty toilets until the ladies got
upset about it. But nevertheless, there was, I think, pretty good feeling between the
youngish men and the older ladies.
WL: Common sense of purpose? Or collegiality? How would you—?
KS: Yeah, I think that's fair enough. I think the women, maybe realizing that this was almost
inevitable, and, well, I think the women commanded respect. I don't mean in a formidable
sort of way but they knew their business. They were good teachers and they were [unclear].
A couple of our young men got up a party for a faculty member after they first got
here, and they sent out invitations to all the ladies in the building named “Miss,” whom
they considered to be also young and interested. You know—a fairly swinging party. Well,
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one invitation went to a lady named Miss Jane Summerell [English faculty], who's now
retired and [unclear]. But she was at the time. maybe fifty-five or sixty years old.
And she got in touch with them and said, "Well, I don't think I'll be coming." She
explained that she was quite a bit older than they were, and they were good enough to say,
"Oh, we meant it. We want you to come." She said, "Well, no, I just don't think that’d be—I
think I'd put a kind of a damper on the party." [unclear] which was fairly typical.
WL: The women faculty had a kind of, I guess, a link with the past, way back to the twenties
perhaps or even thirties. And you mentioned before, I think before we turned the tape
recording machine on, that they had a sense of mission, a sense of teaching mission, of
obligation.
KS: Yes.
WL: Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? What was their—how did they see
themselves, and what was their primary mission objective for the faculty then?
KS: I think they themselves must have been considered, you know, blue stocking intellectuals in
their college days, and they were here, I think, with the feeling that they wanted to
encourage other women to go the same way and to help them—support them as much as
they could. They were impatient with the mass of students, you know, your normal college
student frittering along. They had no use for them, although they tried class reduction now
[unclear].
I think it was more emotional. I don't mean—as far as I know there was no
impropriety at all, but I think they—they were women whose lives didn't really have much
more. They weren't married. They didn't have children. And I think they felt they could do
something for these young women coming along and have it appreciated.
And there was appreciation. The students made quite a bit of their favorites—
parties, trinkets. So I think for them it was—you know, a source of warmth and feeling that
they were wanted which, you know, meant a great deal.
WL: And they had a real focus on students they were teaching?
KS: Yes, they did, yeah.
WL: Because they didn't tend to be necessarily involved in research.
KS: No.
WL: And didn't intend to have families then and put all their energies into?
KS: I don't think many of them kept up with the literature, let alone contributed to it.
WL: Coming to head the psychology department, what did you see and what were your
objectives in trying to shape the future of that department?
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KS: Well, when I took the job I was only thirty-five years old. When I arrived here, I had turned
thirty-six. And I’d just never been any kind of a college administrator before. [Clears
throat] Excuse me. So this was something, you know, I asked myself pretty explicitly,
"What the hell am I going to do?"
And I thought what I should do is, within the limits of what we had to work with on
the campus, build a department that would represent psychology across the board so that a
student coming here could find out what psychology was in its various nuances. And that
these people ought to be at least adequate teachers and, if possible, good teachers. That is,
the people I hired to do this ought to be, if possible, good teachers, but beyond that, ought
to be making at least some contribution to research and scholarship and literature.
And when I hired people, I made that plain to them that—I managed to hire them on
a one-year basis. And then I set up a situation where I could hire them as lecturers for one
year and then go into a three-year appointment. I wanted to look them over as carefully as
possible before we committed ourselves to tenure.
And I warned them that if in that probationary time they didn't show reasonable
signs of productivity—and I also made a point I wasn't going to lean on them. I knew that
things took time, but that I expected that, in the long run, they would be productive and
have some kind of research directed to—.
I don't know why I believe that so profoundly, but I still do. And it's hard, as you
know, it's hard to rationalize in cold type, but I just think that people who keep up with
literature and contribute knowledge are better teachers—maybe not better pedagogues but
better teachers. So that was what I tried to do, and I tried to do it humanely. I let some
people know they weren't keeping up and their prospects—were not good and they could—
it was a time when it wasn't hard to get a job somewhere else.
WL: So some of them left then?
KS: They did.
WL: Did—was the psychology department expanding at this point?
KS: Not much. It was more a matter of turnover, although I think we expanded—it was a matter
of maybe nine full-time people or the equivalent. And I think we expanded to ten or eleven
perhaps in the next maybe dozen years.
WL: As head—explain how the headship system worked in those days.
KS: You were head. [laughs] I feel for the headships now, which would—I remember one time
our considering a candidate for a job. And so I got the faculty together and said, "Now what
do you think of him anyway? Let's discuss this." And we did. And later I decided to hire
him. That was all there was to it.
And so I made that recommendation to Dean [of the College Mereb] Mossman, and
she went ahead. And at a subsequent meeting somebody said—I guess it was probably
Dr.[Elizabeth] Duffy [psychology professor] who—she might be worth discussing in her
own right—who was sort of the dean of the department, so to speak, said, "I don't
remember voting on this." And I said, "I don't consider it a voting matter." And that was
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that.
It was in a sense wonderful. And I'm not authoritarian, but I think there are things to
be said for it. I think the chairmanship system especially—the system of rotating
chairmanships sort of ensures mediocrity. But if you're going to go for a good department,
you need somebody who establishes policies and carries them out and enforces them. Of
course, you may get somebody who establishes and enforces the wrong policies. Then
you've got a problem.
But it was definitely a headship system. I don't mean to imply that I glory in this,
but I think that if you ask anybody else you'd find that I was, in fact, pretty democratic
about how I carried it out. In the end, I was the one who decided who comes and who goes,
who’s promoted and who isn’t.
WL: So in certain cases you were sort of an enlightened despot?
KS: Yeah, right. Enlightened, one hopes, but anyway, that was it.
WL: Did it work comparatively in other departments—what you know?
KS: Yes, yeah.
WL: Go ahead.
KS: I was just going to say that I think, just as an elaboration of this system, after thirteen years
I decided, “I don't think I should be department head.” I found myself doing things the same
way, and I thought that was bad. And I had things I wanted to do in a scholarly fashion too,
and I thought I'd kind of paid my dues.
So I said I might step aside. And I think I'm just about the only department head in
history—I was at that time—who simply voluntarily stepped aside while he was still pretty
well in the harness and do something else. Traditionally, the headship was a kingship and if
you got it, you kept it.
WL: Priceless—had life tenure?
KS: Oh, yeah, yeah. And I think it sort of shook—or at least restructured some people's life
space to realize that you could give this up recently.
WL: So heads had a, I guess, a fairly strong voice as you suggested earlier?
KS: Oh yes.
WL: The administration consisted of Dean Mossman along with the heads.
KS: Yes.
WL: And a lot of the things administrators might do today were actually done by the heads.
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KS: Oh yeah.
WL: Is it fair to say that?
KS: Yes, yes.
WL: One of the things that happens in the fifties and sixties clearly is the transformation from
Woman's College into—college into a university. At least, that's—correct me if I'm wrong,
if you think—
KS: No, I'm sometimes a little skeptical of how real the transition has been, but that's something
else.
WL: Yes. What evidences do you see or not—a lack of evidence if you don't think that actually
happened.
KS: Well, it happened in the psychology department in the sense that as soon of as it was
possible, we were encouraged to offer a master's degree. And by that time the department
was deemed to be strong enough to just simply offer a master's degree. This was during
Otis Singletary's chancellorship here.
I remember the department's reaction was, "Oh well now, are we going to be
exploited? Are we going to have to do master's theses out of our own hides or what?" And
Singletary’s being a little piqued and coming back and saying, "Well, what's the deal,
man?" But we made a deal. And we went into master's work.
And later it became clear the department wanted doctoral work. One reason I quit
was that I didn't want the administrative problems of a doctoral program. But I think in
itself, the graduate program in psychology has been built up very well. I think it's quite
respectable.
But what it misses is good graduate support in biology—good graduate support in
sociology, anthropology, mathematics. I think a real university would not have a
department protruding way above the surface this way without support for standing
[unclear]. And I think this is something of a deficiency from a standpoint of the department
and the whole university. And I believe the university is criticized on this basis. Sure,
you’ve got a few departments that are turning out PhD's, but what kind of support—what
kind of an atmosphere are you providing?
WL: They're isolated compared to other universities where they get good [unclear].
KS: If nothing else, you go to lectures on anthropology. You hear lectures on history; you've got
them all. Supported—a catholic sort of training.
WL: How did the PhD—this decision to go for a PhD originate? From within the department?
KS: Yes, it was. The master's degree was originally conceived as a way—it was called a
master's degree in general psychology and it was thought of as a way of preparing people to
become teachers in local junior colleges and maybe less glorified colleges. And as it turned
13
out, not much of that happened. Some did go to, you know, Roanoke College or Guilford
College or Greensboro College.
But in general, our people got master's degrees, looked around and went somewhere
for a PhD. And I think it speaks well for the program because they went to good places—
Yale [University], Chapel Hill, State and Duke, by and large. But it became apparent that
our students really—most of our students really wanted doctoral training.
And I think the faculty—it came down to a faculty meeting when I said, "What do
you want? Do you want—are you willing to go into a doctoral program with all the
complications this entails? But all the opportunities too, in the way of having people to help
do research and so on.” And their vote was yes. And so I passed this along to the
administration, and it was pushed.
But I had decided that if they voted yes, I was going to gradually resign. Not in a
huff, but I just—I had come here when the administrative aspect of the job was minimal. It
got a little heavier with the master's degree. I knew with the doctor's degree I'd just never
get my own work done, and so it was that that cinched the case as far as resigning.
You know, it was the faculty—our faculty—I would think that with administrative
encouragement—. I think the administration had been given the go ahead for doctoral
programs, and they were looking around and, “Who could we get—whom could they get.”
And there was the psych[ology] department, not straining at the leash but looking eager. So
the whole thing—a deal was cut.
WL: Administration was receptive and encouraged—offered encouraging signs.
KS: I think history decided not to. And I think that was awfully insightful.
WL: They considered it and decided as a department not to.
KS: Yeah.
WL: Actually, we’re reconsidering it now—another [unclear] head.
KS: Well, the scene has changed, I expect.
WL: Yeah, yeah. History may have been a little bit later than that. You know—right about—you
know, as I understand it, it was about the time Yvonne Keller[?] and [unclear]—
KS: Yeah.
WL: That would be '71, something like that?
KS: Yeah, psychology sort of made the decision just before the violence in the late sixties so
that we had no trouble at first placing the doctoral people. Shortly we had a crisis in that the
academic doctors were having a terrible time being placed, but the applied—clinical people
who were going to go into state mental health centers and things had no trouble at all. So
just as a pragmatic expediency, the emphasis in the program here got switched to applied.
[unclear]
14
WL: What other evidence was there that UNCG was becoming more of a university? Or lack of
evidence? For example, the library, did the library change?
KS: Oh yes, I think there were a quarter million volumes, something like that at the time that I
came. Maybe not quite that many, but it's well over a million now, isn't it? Yeah, and the
library—I'm not sure how it supported history, but it's certainly supported psychology. And
all those profligate expenditures to buy obscure books in foreign languages.
We got the present emphasis on athletics. I think that's real interesting. The present
administration has taken sort of—as you know—a very pragmatic attitude towards the
thing. I hate—as I say, I came here being attracted by the academic rather than the jock-strap
atmosphere. I kind of hate to see things go.
You know, I got letters in high school. It's not that I dislike athletics, but I just
question whether an academic institution should be a, should support a farm team for
professional sports. Then again, people will say, you know—if you want a university
you’ve got to have a team.
WL: The argument for this is that this is part of any university.
KS: That's right—which you can find counter examples for, but that is something else.
WL: Yeah. Another argument I've heard—in fact the chancellor may, I think, at one of the
meetings, in fact—I believe—the fact at this meeting the faculty voted against it, but he
went ahead. The argument that he made was that one of the problems UNCG has had is
attracting male students to come, which leads us into another subject, the subject of
coeducation. Nineteen sixty-three was officially the year in which it became a
coeducational institution. How did the campus—how did the university—how did the
college—Woman's College becoming UNCG. How did that occur? What was the impact
among the faculty? Was everyone fairly certain this was going to happen—would be the
outcome? Was it welcomed?
KS: I think so, you know. Again, when I came here for my job interview, I remember telling
them that frankly I thought segregated education was a mistake, and not only racially but
sexually segregated, and that I couldn't understand how in the world in a comparably poor
state had managed to support a kind of a—almost an elite women's college. Of course, it
was history of segregation and “Let’s keep our white girls away from them [sic] black
guys.” But to me it seemed almost inevitable, and that's what it turned out to be. I think it's
a good thing.
WL: When you asked that question when you came in 1954, what was the response?
KS: Well, the stock answer was, “When girls go to a coeducational school, they simply have no
chance to become presidents and chairmen, editors, and they get no practice and skills at
becoming community leaders later on.” The fact is the studies show that the community
leaders in the girls’ school are not the community leaders later on. The ones who become
community leaders are the students. I mean this is not black and white, but it's a tendency.
15
So I think the argument is specious, but that was the argument. A girl just doesn't have a
chance to fulfill herself at a coeducational school.
WL: Was there much indication that this was going to happen in the year before? Was there
faculty support for it?
KS: I don't remember.
WL: What do you remember about the immediate impact of it—the first year, the first several
years? Were there many male students—?
KS: That it was minimal. Yeah, the males were, you know, almost isolated. It was like boys
going to Vassar [College] at first. They were almost curiosities, but what with one thing or
another, as time went on—it's usually considered, I think, about a one-third representation
that gets a college over the edge and makes it acceptable.
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]
WL: They were happier to be at a campus—?
KS: I think so, yeah. I think the Woman's College had a strange reputation around town. It was
called, for instance, the “angel factory.'“ And it had that—I think there was, as you
suggested, a suggestion of a cloister, and a lot of the students were glad to get rid of that.
But the changeover happened slowly.
And it was accompanied by other changes. I walk around the campus now, and
students look like a bunch of bums and think how unfortunate it is, because it used to be
they looked like angels. But there were dress codes; there were rules. You couldn't appear
on campus unless you were wearing a skirt, for instance, instead of shorts. Well, that makes
for a good-looking campus but it's bad education, I think.
If our students look like bums, that's a phase they go through and it's good for them.
You have to put up with it. But I think those of us who were here have a kind of—if we
have a drink or two—have a kind of nostalgia for the superficial tranquility of the Woman's
College situation.
WL: What do you think the other tradeoffs have been? For example, the tradeoff you just
mentioned going from a dress code situation to one where there’s no—
KS: The thing I regret most of all, and it just can't be helped, is the great increase in class size
because the teaching situation used to be just ideal. I had classes of fifteen and twenty,
something like that, and had them for a whole year. And you got so you knew everybody by
name, and you knew something about them and you joked with them. You saw them on the
street, and you asked how the party was last night.
The teaching was much more, much more, much more dialogue, much more
discussion than getting up and lecturing to two hundred people. And I think that's been—
partly that's a matter of graduate programs too. I think that’s almost inevitable when you set
16
up a graduate program. I think that's extremely regrettable, but I really don't see much to be
done about it. It's almost a zero sum game. If you put your money someplace else, it loses
benefit to the first place.
WL: Presumably also there's greater diversity and—
KS: Student body?
WL: Yeah, not just males, but I mean in terms of—
KS: Oh yeah, yeah. I often think of—well, we used to occasionally have a—say, a student from
India in the home economics program, graduate program. So there would be a sari walking
across campus. But that was almost a newsworthy event. And I often wonder what people
would think if they could come back to campus now and see not only, of course, blacks, but
Orientals and the diversity we do have, which I think is great.
That's one of the big advantages in the whole—and I often wonder what Greensboro
of the 1950s would think of the—you know the Grimsley [High School, Greensboro]
valedictorian this year was Kim Sue Phong or something like that. It would be a lot of fun
to see a time warp—to see the reactions.
WL: What impact did the civil rights movement have here? What did—well, before we get to
that question, I'm interested to know when the black students first came?
KS: Well, that was a great learning experience for me. Nineteen fifty-four, you remember, was
the year of the Brown versus whatever decision [Brown v. Board of Education]. And, of
course, that was very encouraging to us. We thought—well, not only that, but the
Greensboro City Council, of Greensboro—yeah, right—issued a statement saying that they
would do everything possible to honor the spirit of this decision, and that was very
encouraging to us. So it helped ease the shock of coming down.
But as you know, it happened very slowly. It was—do you happen to know when
the first student tried to get into Grimsley, for instance?
WL: Nineteen fifty-seven, I think.
KS: Yeah, it was three or four years. And it was quite a long time before the first black student
turned up here. I can remember our first student, and it must have been close to 1960. Again
my memory’s fairly uncomfortable with it. And at first these students were effectually
segregated as they were put in a separate wing of the dorm—for instance, three or four
black girls were on campus.
I was on whatever administrative council was called when Pierson was here, and
I’m sure he was dragging his feet and assuming the rest of us wanted to drag our feet too to
resist this as long as possible. Now Blackwell, as a sociologist you know, came from a
liberal kind of training. I don't think he resisted it. But it took a long time for black students
to get up the nerve to come here and live here.
I remember one time in class that this black girl, Edith [Wiggins, Class of 1962 —
we were talking about emotions and emotional reactions, and I was saying something about
17
a real feeling of anxiety exists in this and this and this. And I said, "Have you ever had this
feeling?" I said to the class. And Edith said, "I have it every day when I step out of the
room, here on campus."
And it made me realize that, you know, for those of us who have been brought up so
comfortably, it's hard to realize how the world looked to these people. The shock to me was
that I'd been thinking, “Oh boy, now we get black students, and as fast as I can I'll make
them lab assistants and push them toward honors work.” And they were deficient. I'm as
sure as anything it's not genetic. It's not innate. It's not inborn.
But they don’t—the depravation, it’s showing. That's been a big shock to me
really— having grown up in Minnesota and had black friends who got along as well as I
did. It's been a great shock to find that even given a chance, these people just don't have the
background or very seldom have the background that we do to get in there and do it.
It's going to be a much longer haul than I thought it would. I'm still willing to make
it, and I’m still perfectly to have our daughters go to school with black students and join the
riots. We had one daughter who learned karate to protect herself. And I'm glad it was done.
I think it should have been done, but it's a bigger job than I thought it was.
WL: Did the sit-in movement affect the student body here at all?
KS: I don't know. At the time I was on crutches. I'd had—I wear an artificial leg, and that's
because of a long, a long siege of infection, fracture and infection and reinfection and
finally amputation. And it happened just at that time I was on crutches and just sort of able
to get in and do my job and get home again. I wasn't in pain. I don't mean to sound
suffering. But it was just I had more to do.
I know some students went down and joined in. I know some faculty members went
down and joined in. But I don't believe it had a big impact. I didn't sense a big impact. You
know, the student body didn't rise and march as a corpus into town and join the A&T
[North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College] students.
WL: Was—to what extent was there student activism in the—particularly in the 1960s? To what
extent did the—well, did this very troubling period of American higher education affect life
here? Was UNCG [University of North Carolina at Greensboro] very atypical or to what
extent was it affected by the turbulence in American higher education in the sixties?
KS: I'm afraid that the campus has the history of provincialism, and I think, in general, the
students may not have been great ones for reading the newspapers and joining in current
debates. I may be wrong, but I think the attitude was, "Well, here's the black students and
let's try to be nice to them, but I'm not going to knock myself out to welcome them."
I think one of the biggest forces for change was the Neo-Black Society, the black
students themselves. The more militant black students came together. They said, “We're an
organization, we demand to be supported, demand to be recognized.” And I'm not sure of
when. You may have records of this, but I think it must have been the early seventies there
was quite a stand off between the Neo-Black—it threatened to become a race riot between
the Neo-Black Society and the campus student organization—student organization I’ve
really forgotten.
But what it amounted to was that they had threatened to cut off any support for the
18
Neo-Black Society, and they had something [unclear]. And the Neo-Black Society was
demanding to be supported. And, as I say, it got to the point of a confrontation, and a
faculty committee was appointed. I was chairman of the committee. I was asked to be
chairman of the committee.
I remember when I said I would, I said, "Well, can we get together next week or
something." And said, “Well, you’ve got to, it's got to be tomorrow.” And we did. We met.
We just dropped everything else and then studied it for two or three days and listened to
people from both sides and acted as kind of a board of adjudication.
And it turned out that the students had made fools of themselves because they’d
rested their case on a memorandum they thought was written last fall, but had been written
the fall before, and it therefore acquired an entirely different meaning. Anyway we decided
in favor of the Neo-Black Society.
And the students took this to a quasi-legal—. There was actually a panel from off
campus called and a legal procedure set up an adversary situation. Still, when it turned out
that the students had made a bad mistake in raising the whole point, they collapsed and
everything went back to a kind of a strange rivalry.
But I think that to the extent that the black students had made progress on this
campus, it's been largely their own. They've had sympathizers. Those of us on the
committee, I imagine, are sympathetic. Although I don't—I think we still made a good,
objective decision. But I think in terms of activism and doing something, it's been the black
students themselves.
WL: Was there much of an anti-war movement here?
KS: Anti-Vietnam?
WL: Yes, anti-Vietnam.
KS: I don't think so. I—we were abroad during the year '68-'69. I was a Fulbright Scholar
[international educational exchange program], which was—apparently was a crisis here. I
remember being impressed by the difference in student attitude when I got back as
compared to—all of a sudden there were hippies and flower children and dropouts, and
there hadn't been much that way. I hadn't had barefoot students in 1967.
So I think I was worried, but I got the impression that there was quite a change in
the wind in a brief time, in a short time. But I’d hate to say much very definite about—
WL: Was there—you mentioned the dress codes before. Did the dress codes go by the wayside
—?
KS: Somewhere along the way.
WL: Yeah. And shoes—
KS: Probably with coeducation, maybe before.
WL: That's been kind of another business.
19
KS: I've been against them all. I was against dormitory rules; I thought the girls should be
allowed to come and go as they pleased. As I look back, I'm not sure that it was really
judicious but I think as a matter of position, I guess I'd still take it.
WL: We have covered some events—I don’t want to change the topic here rather radically.
We've covered some of the important administrators you've mentioned—and you've
mentioned—you've talked about Graham; we discussed Mereb Mossman, Gordon
Blackwell. What about [Chancellor James] Jim Ferguson? How would you characterize his
leadership?
KS: Well, I was one of those who virtually loved Jim Ferguson. Gordon Blackwell, who was a
pretty good administrator in a kind of a low profile sort of way, was followed by a man
named Otis Singletary, who was high profile. He was a handsome, outgoing, self-expressing
kind of man, but also wanted to stay only a brief time.
WL: Was he—?
KS: Pardon?
WL: Was he a popular chancellor?
KS: He brought—I beg, I didn't—
WL: Sorry. Was he a popular among the faculty?
KS: Yes and no. Somebody who was that outspoken will rub somebody the wrong way. But
generally I think he was acceptable. That’s just the way Otis was, and people took him. But
he brought Jim Ferguson here as dean of the Graduate School. And when Singletary left
kind of unexpectedly—I think he got the feeling that he couldn't do much in the situation
and he left—again, did Pierson come back? I know there was a hiatus of some kind.
WL: He did, yeah.
KS: And Ferguson then took the chancellorship, and what he did was run things almost the way
as, say, Oxford [University in England] was run with the “faculty collegium.” He was first
among equals, but everything was done with maybe excessive concern for making sure that
it had been discussed and there was a consensus and everybody understood the pros and
cons, why it was being done. But, you know, that gets tedious, but there's an awful lot to be
said for it in the long run. And I think changes came gradually in a well-planned way. I
think he was a fortunate man to have at the time he was here.
WL: Was he an accessible person pretty much?
KS: Oh yes, yeah, and made a point, apparently, of learning the names of everyone on the
faculty. It was very impressive at faculty meetings where somebody you'd never seen
before raised a hand and he'd say, "Yes, Mr. Johnson." And he was there.
You know, these are things that are not spectacular, and they don't hit the papers
20
and they don't get you remembered as a great leader, but, boy, they had impact on what you
could get done and how people finally pitch in and help. It was very good, I think. A lot of
value judgments tied up in this, but I thought remarkable leadership.
WL: One constant throughout this period is Mereb Mossman.
KS: Yeah, yeah.
WL: She seems to have been able to adapt her personality to—
KS: She sure could, yeah, yeah. Again, Mereb was somebody that I appreciated very strongly.
But I’d heard the term "oriental diplomacy" applied to her way of acting, and she did have a
background in the orient—did you know she had worked in Shanghai?
WL: Yeah.
KS: And yeah, she was, I think she felt loyal to whomever the chancellor might be. And I never
heard her backbite the—you know, the going policies at all. They were just the policies to
be carried on. I know this is a philosophy that can be questioned, but as a, as an
administrative—I don't want to say machine because she was not mechanical, but as—at an
administrative station she certainly did a good job. She understood the policies; she
explained them well; she saw that they were carried out.
I think some of the department heads had trouble with her [coughs]. I think—I
never did, but I think it was because—I think I brought this up, but I think the main reason I
was brought here was to subdue this woman named Elizabeth Duffy, who was sort of a
prima donna member of the psychology department. She—I knew her name. In fact I had
assigned papers she’d written in my classes before I came here. But it turns out that, in fact,
she was pretty much of an unreasonable person.
She’d been reared in New Bern [North Carolina], an aristocratic family in New
Bern, and sort of expected to be treated—she was a Woman's College girl and she'd been
[unclear] here. And she was a—unreasonable, that's all there was to it. And she was
apparently in a great deal of trouble.
There was a running fight between her and the administration about the terms of her
contract. She was supposed to be a research professor and supposed to have less teaching
than other people, and she always felt she was underpaid. I think Mereb Mossman—I don't
know who it was, but the fact of the matter is that Mereb Mossman detested her and vice
versa.
I don't know what other personal considerations there might have been, but finally
there was certainly a stormy [unclear] as far as faculty. I think the reason Mereb never
really contradicted what I wanted to do was that I managed to handle Polly [Elizabeth
Duffy]. I’d had a mother who was much like her and through my life developed techniques
of simply saying this is the way it's going to be and then insisting that it be that way. It was
stonewalling, and it worked pretty well and protected the administration.
But I think Mereb—I've heard of other department heads have said, "Well, I had a
fight with Mossman about this," or [history professor Richard] Dick Bardolph has said, "I
crossed swords with her too often," or something. And those things have surprised me
21
because my own relations with her were always really amicable. You know, I don't mean to
say that's because I'm so wonderful, but I think there was a specific thing,—like I took care
of Polly Duffy, and they loved me for it.
WL: And that was one of your original missions?
KS: I'm sure .When I was here, I suggested I—one suggestion I made was that I don't really like
administrative work. I'd be glad to come here as a full professor. Why don't you make Polly
Duffy department head, and I’ll just be—? And I remember Mereb Mossman almost
swooning at the thought, so she was emphatically against it. It became clear that I came
here to contain Polly Duffy.
WL: I heard that Mereb Mossman's administrative style was to be in close communication with
the chancellor and to—
KS: Yeah, and everybody else, I'd say. It was really fantastic what she knew and how long she
did it.
WL: Did she—what kind of relationship did she have with faculty outside of heads? Was she
accessible? Did faculty feel that—?
KS: Oh yes. But it was—her relationships were pretty formal, I think. There may have been a
small group with whom she socialized. When I first came, it was a group that was still
supporting Ed Graham, Eddie Graham. But she was the only one who worked night and
day, and I think mainly she socialized when it was obligatory and entertaining somebody
like me, a job candidate.
She—as you may know, she had polio when she was young, and she was still
somewhat handicapped and that may have acted to keep her out of the mainstream. It may
be also a motivational thing; she wanted to achieve in spite of it.
WL: One final question I'd like to ask is how—what you think the most important changes have
been since, say since 1970? We've been talking mostly about the period of the fifties and
sixties. What do you think are the most important, significant changes say from 1970 to the
mid-, late-1980s are?
KS: Well, I think there have been changes that are correlated in the differences in approach
between Jim Ferguson and [Chancellor William] Bill Moran. And this is not, you know,
a—I greatly prefer Ferguson's approach. But I'm sure that pragmatically there are things to
consider for Moran. Apparently Moran feels that his job is to set up the athletic program,
build up the physical facilities, get money from the community. There's so much emphasis
on how much has been donated lately. And I'm sure those things have value to the
university.
I don't mean to be [unclear] about it. But it is a change. I think Ferguson—under
Ferguson it tended to be a close community making mutual decisions. With Moran it tends
to be a more and more administered community. This may change when Elisabeth Zinser
[vice chancellor for academic affairs] is replaced, probably. I gather she was one causal
element in that kind of approach
22
But Moran has certainly isolated himself and taken—seems to have a different
concept of the job. So it's becoming, instead of being an Oxford, I'm afraid it's becoming—
it will be interesting to see what name I come up with—an Oklahoma State [University]?
I'm exaggerating. I don't mean to be—
WL: Has there been—there's been a dramatic fusion of administrators during—as compared to
—?
KS: Yeah, I'm not sure it's all been unjustified. There was a self study done in the early
seventies, and I was—I administered that as a matter of fact. And one of the conclusions of
the committee that came to campus and interviewed everybody—made recommendation—
was that there should be more administrative—there was too little in the way of
administrative level. So apparently some of this has been justified. Now, whether all is
justified I don't know.
[History professor] Allen [Trelease] and other department heads keep complaining
about more and more memoranda to be answered. It's hard to say how much is empire
building and how much is really justified in terms of the increase in size and so on.
WL: Was that, at least in part, in response to the current administration and in part in the
response to perceived need for great administrative control?
KS: Yeah. Administrative control?
WL: Hierarchy?
KS: Yeah, I think if—you know, I hadn't thought about what's the big change, but I think it's
been this pulling apart of administration from faculty and students, an interlayering [sic] of
administrative bubbles. But also an attitude of—I hear stories about Bill Moran, you know,
meeting the head of some department at a soccer game and not recognizing him. And that
would just be unthinkable in Ferguson's time. Again, I'm not putting too much of a value
judgment on this. I think it's regrettable but I think it probably occurred. But it is a change,
however you value it, it is a change.
[End of Interview]