Interview with Henry Haslach

Henry Haslach #47 Transcript

LS: This will be an interview with Henry Haslach, a TA in the Math Department. The interview is being held on April 14th, 1976. The interviewer is Laura Smail (small talk).

When we made our appointment which you had to cancel twice because you were bargaining, I was planning to talk to you about the 1970 strike, but it seems to me that that's been canceled out in a way, the significance of it, by the recent of defeat, as I guess the people call it. So that what we should be talking about is this recent non-strike, not quite strike. Do you agree?

HH: We can talk about both, I guess.

LS: Well, I do want to get back to talk about the other two, but (tape cuts out) 00:01:00-- I gather that you decided to have a different strategy this time in working with the TA position this year. I've been reading some articles in The Cardinal.

HH: Yeah.

LS: Is that correct?

HH: Yeah.

LS: What was it?

HH: Well, before -- I don't know if you've erased it now, but basically -- depends on what you call "defeat" a "defeat." The reason that strategy was chosen was because there wasn't the militancy among the members that there was in '70, and that's the reason, just to try a two day work stoppage, get everybody used to the idea and to see what would happen.

LS: I meant the -- the strategy of -- I gather in 1973, they tried to recruit 00:02:00new TAs in order to get their votes, but this time, fearing that new TAs might be against a strike, you concentrated on your existing membership in talking to them, is that right?

HH: Yeah, that's true, but I don't know if it's a significant difference.

LS: Oh.

HH: Because most of the people who will join have joined. We've had a -- there was about 25 new members during the last week.

LS: During the last week?

HH: Um-hmm. So, it's just a question of showing the union's going to do something, and then those people who are inclined will join.

LS: Yeah. Have you been in the bargaining all the way along? I know the TAA has been bargaining over --

HH: I was chairman in the first contract in '70 and chairman in this fourth contract, and I gave advice in the other two. Part of that time I was working in Baraboo, so I wasn't around very much.

LS: So -- and when did you get back here?

HH: Um . . . '73.

LS: Oh, I see, so you've been around for three years. Well, what -- when did this start -- the push for the recent work stoppage?

HH: Well, after the strike vote failed in the fall, a vote was held to do this, so that vote has been in existence since November.

LS: Oh, I see, so everybody was thinking about it.

HH: Right, yeah.

LS: In case you couldn't get a contract, is that right?

HH: Right.

LS: Was it a -- did you have meetings of the leaders, or how often do you have a meeting of the general membership?

HH: They're not regular. It could be as much as once a month or once every two weeks. There was -- about every two weeks is recently.

LS: You mean in the past month or so.

HH: Yeah.

LS: But before then, it would have been the sort of central core.

HH: Well, the central core is the Stewards' Council, which can be up to 60 people.

LS: Oh yes? Are they elected, or --

HH: Yeah. Well, each department chooses them any way they want.

LS: I see. They sort of -- the faculty sends the TAAs out --

HH: They're not as bad as that. They're shop Stewards. They're not representatives like that.

LS: I see, yes.

HH: They don't legislate. The membership body is the only body that can pass anything, so, it's just an implementation and communications network, plus the way the grievances are handled.

LS: And when -- the offices were elected last spring, the ones that are officers now.

HH: There's another election going on right now.

LS: Oh, there is? How long does that take?

HH: Well, it had to be postponed because of the contract problem, so I don't know when it will be done.

LS: I wanted to ask you about the leaders. Well, there were the people who were 00:05:00the bargaining team; Matthew [Brynn?] is --

HH: He's the president.

LS: Yeah, and he's in the Math Department.

HH: Right.

LS: Do the leaders -- is leaders a correct word for it, or what would you -- what do you think --

HH: Well, the people the press named aren't the leaders.

LS: They aren't.

HH: A different group of people organized the strike, and then those people got their names in the press.

LS: Well, that's interesting.

HH: For example, I did no organizing whatsoever. I did nothing except bargaining.

LS: Is it that you were too busy or not interested or --

HH: It's because that's what I chose to do, but there were many, many people doing the organizing who's names don't appear anywhere that were Stewards. It was done mostly at the local level by local people.

LS: Who were they?

HH: Their names?

LS: Yeah.

HH: Most -- well, a good chunk of them came out of the German Department; Chuck 00:06:00Spencer and [Eggott Hyne?]. I'm thinking because I don't know some of their last names . . . um . . . and some of the executive board. That was the primary movers, the organizers, but we've had enough practice now organizing that it's not a job done by one or two people.

LS: Is there an office? Does the TAA have an office somewhere?

HH: Yeah.

LS: Where?

HH: 306 North Brooks. We've had that office since 1969.

LS: I see, and so that's where the telephones are.

HH: Yeah, um-hmm.

LS: And is it paid for by dues?

HH: Mmm-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: Any other sources of income?

HH: Umm-hmm (negatively).

LS: And they get out of -- (laughing) -- you look as if you thought I was thinking of some --

HH: Or that they're getting money from Cuba or something.

LS: That's right (laughing). Um . . Do you get out a newsletter?

HH: Yeah.

LS: Regularly.

HH: Um-hmm. There's a Gestetner press there.

LS: Who does that?

HH: Right now it's being done by the administrator/secretary, [Mark First?].

LS: And he's a paid --

HH: He was. It's just temporarily-- It has to be re-voted very frequently, and right now a vote is in progress.

LS: Oh, you mean for who's going to be the paid member?

HH: Well, that there's going to be one.

LS: Oh, I see.

HH: We very rarely have paid people, and this is one of the -- in fact, in the whole history of the union, he was paid since -- I don't remember when . . . February or March . . . and the only other paid person was for one month in '71.

LS: Yes. I'd assume that'd be an expensive luxury; besides, presumably most people volunteer.

HH: Which also leads to problems with democracy.

LS: Yeah. What are the dues?

HH: Um . . . 461 I believe.

LS: A month?

HH: A month, um-hmm.

LS: That's a lot, isn't it?

HH: It's only half standard union dues. We get half break because we're half time employees.

LS: Yeah, I was going to say since you were half time employees. Seems an awful lot, though for -- how many of the -- the people who were sort of intimately into things, the Stewards -- are married and have children -- what percentage?

HH: I would say less than in '70.

LS: I should think that the [stats?] would fall off considerably. That's what I was wondering.

HH: Or else the desire for revenge builds, because what you had in '70 was a lot of people who wanted revenge and they were out to get it.

LS: You mean -- but I meant if you hadn't -- if you were married --

HH: Well, if you made a decision to leave and you want to take as much of it down with you when you go, that's the kind of attitude that develops into a strike.

LS: Yeah. Well what I meant was if you had -- if you were worried about feeding 00:09:00your children and that sort of thing, you'd be less militant, I should think, or doesn't it work out that way?

HH: I don't think you can draw a ruling like that. It just depends on the individuals. Sometimes that happens; a lot of time it doesn't.

LS: More so now, I bet.

HH: I don't think there's been any married graduate students. I could be wrong; at least not TAs.

LS: Well, that would be interesting.

HH: I have no statistics or anything. I just don't see them as much.

LS: You're not, I gather.

HH: Yes, I am (laughing).

LS: You don't see TAs as much, you mean.

HH: Hmm?

LS: You don't see TAs as much.

HH: Maybe, maybe (laughing).

LS: Anyway, Joan DeBardeleben was one of your --

HH: Oh, yeah, yeah.

LS: And she's the daughter of a Regent.

HH: That's true.

LS: Do you -- does she ever talk about what her father says?

HH: I don't think she discusses the union with him, so -- I mean, that's --

LS: But she must get some sense of --

HH: Not that she's ever spoken to me about.

LS: Really?

HH: Really.

LS: It's nice to have somebody who's connected with a Regent.

HH: Maybe they just don't talk about it.

LS: Yeah. And only a couple of people who were active were around in 1970, is that right?

HH: Yeah. [Brynn?] was around.

LS: Yes, I'm sorry, [say again?].

HH: Yeah, [Brynn?] was around; several of the people in the Math Department whose names aren't well known, but they're around.

LS: Why does the math department figure so strongly?

HH: It has ten percent of the TAs on campus.

LS: That's a good reason.

HH: It's as simple as that.

LS: The English Department would have another --

HH: It doesn't have as many. It has a big chunk.

LS: They changed, didn't they? I mean, they used to have more TAs, the English Department.

HH: They had about a -- they had less than the Math Department did always, but 00:11:00they have much less now because they cut out the composition course.

LS: Well here I thought it was because the Math Department had so many people -- faculty members -- who were politically active.

HH: Well, you could get into a theory about the kind of people who go into mathematics, maybe, I don't know.

LS: Yeah.

HH: Versus those who go into English, but I don't think the faculty influence is significant, except in a negative way.

LS: Well, they do choose TAs, though.

HH: But they need so many TAs there, I don't think there's a high selectivity going on.

LS: And why should the German Department be -- again, do you think that's just chance? HH: Accident. I think that's an accident.

LS: You know the German Department used to be very mindful of its TAs and used to have them in on all its decisions; this was back in the '50's.

HH: I think it still does, as far as I know.

LS: So it's not --

HH: They've had some confrontations over educational matters, but -- what can I 00:12:00say? I don't really know that it was anything the faculty did or not.

LS: Yeah.

HH: Although I did hear that the Chemistry Department called up the German Department and told them that if they didn't do something to calm their TAs down, they were going to abolish the language requirement.

LS: (laughing)

HH: Apparently this is true.

LS: Oh, that's -- you mean, maybe they'd require French and Spanish, but not German?

HH: Well, I think they had in mind all the languages.

LS: Yeah.

HH: Apparently a lot of those kinds of threats were being tossed around last week.

LS: Well why do you think the whole thing failed, if you think it failed?

HH: I don't think it failed. I think it was taken to the maximum it could be taken to. It was clear to me a week ago today that that's where it was going to end, just based on the fact that people didn't want to go on strike beyond the 00:13:00class size of 19, plus a few other things.

LS: You mean the issues weren't that important to warrant that --

HH: They weren't important enough to start a strike.

LS: Big a difference, yeah.

HH: The 19 would have gotten a strike, there's no question of that. If they would have kept 21 on the table, there would have a strike. It would have been nearly announced.

LS: So that was THE most crucial issue.

HH: That was what determined it, right.

LS: If they had settled sooner, they could have gotten a flat 19, is that right?

HH: Yeah. I don't think that -- that was just a slap in the face from the Chancellor. I think it was a childish gesture, frankly. I don't know how much difference it's really going to make. We'll find out.

But we made a lot of gains in other areas. There's things in there that people don't know about, and --

LS: Such as?

HH: Well, for example, this business about the majority of students and TAs being able to petition for investigations and if there has to be one. I just 00:14:00came from the Math Department, and there's already a petition being prepared, so --

LS: The investigation of what?

HH: Teaching methods; whatever the teacher's doing in the course. So --

LS: Oh, really?

HH: Yeah. These are the kinds of things that weren't publicized.

LS: You mean, if the TAs and the students disapprove of what a faculty member's doing in the course, they can petition to have it --

HH: Um-hmm (affirmative response).

LS: To the math -- to the rest of the faculty in that department.

HH: To the chairman; not to the faculty.

LS: That does seem very significant.

HH: There's some other things like that in there, too. We'll have to see how they work out. They don't look like much on paper, but --

LS: Could you mention some of them?

HH: Well, TA was defined for the first time, and that will have a lot of difference in how they assign the job categories and will inhibit the money shifting a lot. Um . . . let me look at my list here.

I mean, some of the things that were the University's positions were the result of a lot of their moving a long way from their original position, so while we took their position as of that day, it wasn't the status quo by any means.

LS: So they had made a lot of concessions.

HH: Oh, yeah. They moved on a lot of issues.

LS: And you, yourself, were not particularly anxious that a strike would --

HH: No.

LS: Or that these TAs -- you were just getting the most you could.

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively). I was.

LS: So there was probably not a particularly friendly atmosphere.

HH: Well, it boiled down to --

LS: Did the other bargainers feel the way you did?

HH: Um . . . basically. Well, there was a large number of people in the Executive Committee who felt that a strike was possible, that the membership 00:16:00might vote. We didn't make any recommendation on the package we brought back. We just let it go up for grabs and it was a pretty close vote. It was 40 votes for the strike. So --

LS: So the Executive Committee was prepared to be -- to push along.

HH: Oh, everything was set to go, sure. We wouldn't get into that situation without being ready to do it. Sure, we knew there'd be no bus service and no nothing the next day. That was all set.

LS: But you sound very dispassionate about it.

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: And you say -- you said the others -- I mean, you're more experienced, after all, than some of the others, I presume.

HH: Yeah.

LS: Would some of them liked to have pushed -- have liked to push for more concessions and --

HH: Yeah, they wanted some -- a lot of them wanted the wage issue solved. Some wanted the educational planning --

LS: I'm talking about the bargainers, now, that --

HH: Well, it's hard to say who the bargainers were.

LS: Aren't they the same?

HH: Matt [Brynn?] and I were the only ones who were always the same.

LS: Oh, I see.

HH: We have a -- we try to rotate through all of our jobs to ensure more democracy and more skills, so it's -- when you say the leadership, for example, it's not a very meaningful term.

LS: Yes, I see.

HH: It depends on what day you ask it about, so --

LS: It would have been the same ones who did the organizing, the day to day organizing.

HH: Sometimes, and sometimes other people got into setting up the mechanics of the strike who hadn't done any organizing, then they became important to the decisions because they knew where everything was, so --

LS: But that must have given you and Matthew [Brynn?] -- you must have been a much more important in the negotiations, because the faculty administration people would have known you and --

HH: Well, that's assuming that what you say across the table makes any difference, which I don't really think it does. You know, I don't think anything's really going on there that -- the decisions were made on both sides 00:18:00what they would settle for and -- for example, I'm totally convinced that Krinsky fooled around all day Sunday so he could have his -- make his final offer at 11:00 Sunday night when the union closed, because that's where we were bargaining. The point of that being that our members would have been sitting there since 7:30 waiting for the offer. I'm sure he thought that it would change votes, which I think is an asinine idea, but it's typical of the mentality of an academic bargainer.

LS: Do you -- were the administration faculty people all the same during the bargaining?

HH: Pretty much, yeah. They had a committee appointed.

LS: Which events were -- which of them were easier to get along with?

HH: None of them talked; Krinsky -- Young was doing all of the bargaining. This façade about the faculty having any input at all is ridiculous. I mean, that's just for the press and for the faculty's consumption. It's totally hideous. What the idea of that is, is to use the faculty against the TAs. Young's strategy, 00:19:00which he began to develop in '70, was the educational planning issue which he brought to sole fruition this time, was to get the faculty so upset over the issues that they'll go around and intimidate their TAs, which happened on a large scale. It wasn't just the Ed planning stuff. He would claim that any money gotten for anything would come out of their salaries and so forth. It was total manipulation as far as I could see.

LS: How many of the faculty bought it, do you think?

HH: A lot; I would say probably 90%, because they're jackasses anyway (laughing). I mean, they're already in that mentality, so why not believe it? You know, they think they have to rip off the public for everything they get, and so anybody that's trying to do anything is seen as ripping them off. I think that's their world view. It doesn't surprise me at all.

LS: So Krinsky was there just saying what Young was telling him.

HH: Oh, sure. He wouldn't have made any concessions without authorization, except on the most trivial procedural matter.

LS: Is this always true in bargaining? That the people at the table are not --

HH: Usually, yeah. I mean, we knew exactly how far we could go with what. We had been instructed by the Stewards Council.

LS: There were a lot of people who did vote to strike. Were they disappointed?

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: Badly?

HH: A lot of them were pissed off, too.

LS: Hmm?

HH: Yeah, a lot of them were very mad.

LS: At you, or --

HH: No.

LS: At the --

HH: At the whole union.

LS: And at the other TAs who voted not to strike.

HH: Sure, um-hmm. I think that's pretty normal. I mean, that's what happened. So the upshot of the whole thing was that the union was totally rebuilt in about three weeks. I mean, there's now people who have seen what the University acts like; have seen what their faculty members act like. I know one guy in the Math 00:21:00Department who was brought -- pulled aside during the two day work stoppage and intimidated out of picketing on Friday, but then the professor kept it up so far the guy came and voted for the strike. His whole attitude toward the faculty was changed in three days.

LS: And this was a particularly -- I mean, this professor was doing a very foolish thing. They wouldn't have all done it, though.

HH: Well, apparently a lot of them did. I know that in Com Arts, people who didn't have -- who were in their fourth year were told that they probably couldn't have a job next year because of the TAA. I know people who were sitting in meetings saying that the way to get something is to go in and talk reasonably wanted to kill as on Sunday night. I mean, they just saw what -- it was very instructive. It was the same thing as confrontation politics in the '60's. You do something to make the establishment react and show its true nature, and it did.

LS: But it didn't work on as many people this time.

HH: Well, you don't know where we started from. It worked on a lot of people, as 00:22:00a matter of fact. This union was in very serious trouble a year and a half ago.

LS: So, I see. It's --

HH: And they've rejuv -- the University has managed to rejuvenate the union as far as I can see, and show why it's needed.

LS: So the TAA is going to be more militant as a result of this, do you think?

HH: I think yeah, definitely. Bargaining opens again a year from May.

LS: From May. That's a long time.

HH: The last set of bargaining went on for 14 months, so --

LS: Yeah. In other words, it will be two years before there's actually any confrontation again.

HH: Maybe.

LS: Well what about some of the -- well, people like Mike Bleicher in the Math Department who was --surely you thought was liberal. He was --

HH: I've never seen him say anything in favor of the union. I've never seen him 00:23:00criticize it, either, but I've never seen him say anything in favor of it. I think they know where their interests are, however liberal they may be. It's a very rare exception.

LS: You think it's sort of a more of a bread and butter matter.

HH: Yeah. Well, for example, some of the people in United Faculty were rooting for a strike not because they wanted the TAs to get anything, but because they thought if the TAs could get something, then they could; sort of like using the TAs for shock proofs. I mean, that's why I say there's no labor consciousness there. It's all "more for me," so --

LS: I noticed that -- this is really aside from the point, but one of the issues that's been knocked around, is women's position on -- among the TAs. Is that -- has that been much of an issue?

HH: You mean employment of women?

LS: Yeah.

HH: It reached its peak in '71/'72.

LS: As an issue?

HH: Yeah.

LS: And then it was solved?

HH: I wouldn't say that. I think that people realized that the problem was the 00:24:00admission practices and the faculty's attitude towards letting people go onto Ph.D.s. That's where the sorting out goes. There's a lot of -- women are discouraged from going beyond a Masters, especially in Science Departments, and it's hard to get at. I mean, it goes on behind somebody's closed door.

LS: Is it still the case?

HH: Oh I think so, sure. There's -- I would say that there's -- the campus is now more sexist and more racist than it was five years ago.

LS: Heavens. How can that be?

HH: Because nobody's putting any pressure on them. They don't talk about it, but what they say is, "It's not my problem. Let me do my research." I know that's the case with blacks. For example, there's -- according to people I work for, there's no black majors in Chemistry, Physics or Math. That's a lot of people you're talking about; not one black.

LS: And had there been any for a short while?

HH: I don't know. That's as of this year. As far as I know, there's no blacks -- at least no black Americans in the Graduate School in the Math Department. Basically, it's racism of its kind that says, "It's not my problem."

LS: You're teaching -- well, not just blacks, presumably, but --

HH: No. It's a program; whoever's in the program, I teach.

LS: That's engineers.

HH: Right.

LS: And their original training whether here or somewhere else wasn't good enough in Math, so --

HH: No, I wouldn't say that. I mean, probably there's as many white kids that could use the training, too. The fact is that this affirmative action program has a lot of money invested in these people and they want to make sure they get through.

LS: Oh, I see.

HH: But I think the teaching job done by the Mathematics Department is awful.

LS: Isn't that mostly done by TAs, the --

HH: It's done by lecture and discussion.

LS: In the early Math courses?

HH: No. I'm talking about Calculus. All the Calculus courses are taught by three faculty lecturers and two TA problem sessions.

LS: And you would teach it differently.

HH: You bet.

LS: Do you ever get to talk about it in the department?

HH: Sure.

LS: They do consult with you.

HH: Everybody knows what I think about it (laughing).

LS: Well, I mean, is any attention paid to you?

HH: No, of course not; no money they say.

LS: Why, you'd have smaller classes, I imagine.

HH: Yeah, sure. You have to have people actually talking to people.

LS: Blackboard work and that sort of thing.

HH: Well, there's absolutely no commitment to education on this campus that I've ever seen, really, except with a very minor scattered exception. I mean, you'll find a lot of people who'll say they're committed, but then when it comes down to shifting money around in the Department which is the real proof, you can see where it goes.

LS: Shifting from research to teaching.

HH: Yeah, or putting more time into teaching.

LS: This is in your mind, is the big issue, then, having a say in planning for the TAs.

HH: Yeah, because the reason I think -- I would rather have the public have a 00:27:00say than the TAs, but I see the TAs as the opening wedge to that, to get that issue open. I don't think the ultimate end is to have the TAs and the faculty run the University; that's just as bad as having the faculty run it. I think the public and the students have got to get at least 50% of the say. I mean, it's really outrageous to let this small group of self-serving people spend a quarter of the state's budget, which is really what it boils down to, and what does the state get for it? Sloppy educated kids and a bunch of stupid research, some of which pays off, most of which doesn't.

LS: The article in The State Journal said that you hope to teach here, is that right?

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: Do you have a good chance of it?

HH: No.

LS: Oh.

HH: I told them that because I knew what they were after.

LS: I see.

HH: There's a big propaganda campaign with the leadership is all trying to get trade union jobs. Actually what I told them was that I'd like to teach in "a" University, but he misunderstood what I said and he wrote that down.

LS: Oh, I see, yeah.

HH: That was the reason I emphasized that.

LS: I saw you had been straight into this Master of Research and (laughing) --

HH: I'd like to reform this place. If they'd appoint me Chancellor, I have a lot of ideas.

LS: And there's nobody in the Math Department that shares your views? I mean, nobody on the faculty?

HH: Yeah. I'd say that's a true statement. There's a couple of people who are concerned about education, but that's it. (tape cuts out)

LS: Any feeling about the other people on the negotiating committee? You said they --

HH: From the [NCA?] negotiating committee?

LS: No, the faculty. Were they mostly faculty?

HH: No, I wouldn't say that.

LS: There was two administration people on that. Oh, I'm curious . . . what do the TAs who are not members of the TAA, do they make themselves felt?

HH: Um-umm (negatively).

LS: There must be people who are very much opposed to the TAA.

HH: No. That's never been the case. What you have is a lot of people who are glad to let other people do their fighting for them and are glad to take the benefits without running the risk of any disapproval from their professors. We have never, ever had an anti-TA movement on this campus, much to everyone's surprise. Even at the height of its left wing nature, people took the attitude that they're getting a lot of benefits from them, and if somebody else wants to get them for them, I'll take them.

LS: This is even the Ag campus and Engineering campus TAs. I guess there aren't nearly so many of them.

HH: Interestingly enough, on Engineering on the two day work stoppage, we do have a member or two over there, and they reported that most of the TAs were sitting in their office discussing what they should do about it instead of teaching their class. I think it's amazing that the University announced that 50% of the TAs were off the job on that work stoppage; first of all, because I figure that's an underestimate, and second of all, because we didn't even have 50% of TAs as members of the union.

LS: Yeah.

HH: So obviously many more people were not going to work those days.

LS: Is there any way of finding out?

HH: Who didn't teach?

LS: Yeah, and what percentage actually did.

HH: You could take a pole if you wanted to, I suppose, but we wouldn't want to do that officially because that would give them an excuse for their pay to be docked.

LS: I see, yeah.

HH: So they have to find out for themselves who didn't teach.

LS: There is very little information of that, of the sort of inner-workings of the TAA, and I suppose that's the reason why: that you can't afford to let the administration find out what dissention there might be or disagreements, because then they could play on you. Is that right?

HH: Yeah, the only disagreements there've ever been that I've been involved in anytime is how far to go. There's never been a disagreement over the clause.

LS: Really? That sounds remarkable to me. I should think some people would say, "Oh, I'd like more money, but let's not bother about the rest," or --

HH: Yeah, but we always (tape cuts out) --

LS: How do you handle that, when some people are just wanting --

HH: Well, since they go after both things, or how ever many things there are 00:31:00that people want, and tell people that everybody agrees, that if they want support for their favorite issue, they have to support other people's favorite issue.

LS: And that works?

HH: Yeah.

LS: And, finally, would the other unions that said they'd support you, would they have?

HH: Yeah. I don't think there's any question at all with that. I've certainly talked to them long enough and since we're an AFL-CIO union, not to support us would have set up a lot of other problems for them, so I wasn't concerned about that at all.

LS: I find that puzzling because generally, people in Wisconsin who are not associated with the University tend to look with suspicion upon militant TAs in those faculty and think that they shouldn't do that, and yet you can get union people from who, looking at it from another position, to support you.

HH: Union people aren't against militancy, or against -- even against any of 00:32:00this other stuff. It just depends on what it's for.

LS: Even -- because there's a lot of anti-University people.

HH: Oh, sure. I think that's one of the main reasons we get the support, because we're against the University.

LS: Oh, I see.

HH: Sure. The University has very, very few friends, in fact.

LS: But I thought a lot of people were against the University because of the student militant.

HH: I don't think that's true. I don't think that ever was true. I think, for example, that the reason that the legislature was after the University around 1970 and right before that was because of President Harrington, his arrogance. He never explained anything. We have that same thing coming to a head now with this legislative audit of the University. People are now gathering their thoughts to find out what the hell's going on here and this year it's going to be the money and a few years from now they'll start looking into why the 00:33:00education is so bad. I think that's the end of the line for the freewheeling, free loading faculty. I think there's going to be more requirements of more teaching time, more tests on how well they're doing their job, but I think it will be a good thing.

LS: Does anybody ever go and talk to people in the state about what the --

HH: Oh yeah. We work there a lot of times.

LS: Are you?

HH: Sure. They use us for a source of information.

LS: Now, in what -- how do you get -- how to you manage it? Whom do you talk to?

HH: Well, a lot of people -- see, a lot of people know a lot of people. I mean, just -- you underestimate how many people know each other.

LS: Of course, a lot of TAs are from the state, presumably.

HH: Right.

LS: And they explain their positioning.

HH: And I think they have parents or relatives or they -- a lot of TAs have had jobs before they came here and they know people, and they've worked in political campaigns. And so there's always somebody who knows whichever legislator you want to talk to or even people in the DOA, and so we find things out by rumor 00:34:00and anything that we find about the University, which we're getting good at doing, we pass on.

LS: To the legislature, too?

HH: Yeah. They can't get any straight answers from the administration, so they're glad for the -- any answers we give them.

LS: So you were here during Harrington's presidency, weren't you?

HH: Yeah, um-hmm.

LS: I just was talking to somebody yesterday who said Harrington would go to the legislature reinforced with all of his aides and would have the answer to every single thing they asked and this made him so angry.

HH: Yeah -- AN answer.

LS: AN answer, alright, yes.

HH: It wasn't always the truth. It was usually obscure, not very [close?].

LS: But he was apparently immensely well informed on every issue.

HH: Well, it was a big snow job.

LS: They felt that they ought to have a chance to know something, too.

HH: Yeah, but what I'm saying is it was a big snow job. They would just put on all these little -- all this big show with charts and everything, and there was 00:35:00no way to check a single thing they were saying, and anytime anybody'd try to check it, he'd yell out academic freedom. So when you really need academic freedom, you ain't gonna have it. It's like howling wolf so many times.

LS: You played a leading role in this effort of the TAA and I would be curious to know how you got to where you are now . . . sort of your life history.

HH: Where am I now? (laughing).

LS: You're 34.

HH: I will be May 1st.

LS: And you were -- where were you born?

HH: Brooklyn, New York. I never lived there, though. I just happened to be born there.

LS: Nice thing to be able to say, I'm sure. You get a lot of popularity. So, where did you live?

HH: I lived for six years in Albany, New York and then one year in Elmira, New 00:36:00York and seven years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and three years in Chicago, Illinois and then I went to school in Hartland, Connecticut and went back to Chicago for my masters and then I came up here.

LS: Is your family the middle class liberal type that seems to --

HH: No. My father was in the insurance business.

LS: Oh.

HH: I would characterize him as a liberal Republican.

LS: Why did you go to Trinity?

HH: Because he went there and I didn't want to be bothered with hassling how to get into colleges. I knew I could just write them a letter and get in. I didn't really -- I wasn't that excited about the whole thing. Everybody else was so competitive to get into school, but I didn't really want to get into the competition thing, so Trinity was a thousand miles away from home and that was enough for me.

LS: You sound as if you were a little bit jaundiced with society even then.

HH: Well, I grew up in the west side of Philadelphia in the run of it and I think I saw what life was like and then my father moved to Lake Forrest, Illinois which is a rich suburb and I saw what bullshit was like and I learned the difference. I didn't want anything to do with Lake Forrest type people.

LS: So you'd already been thinking about these things when you wrote?

HH: Oh sure; even in high school. When I was in high school it was the beat era and that stuff really appealed to all of us.

LS: Did you have brothers and sisters?

HH: I have two younger brothers.

LS: So you went to Trinity and you majored in Math, did you?

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: Are you very good at Math? I mean, did you -- was it something you've shown --

HH: It depends on who you ask?

LS: I mean in high school.

HH: Yeah. That was my best subject in high school. I had won a prize or two.

LS: So you came -- went to the University of Chicago, got your MA.

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: And then?

HH: Then I came up here. That was in '65.

LS: Why did you decide to come here?

HH: They told me that I had too many "C"s and they weren't going to give me any support for a Ph.D.

LS: At the University of Chicago.

HH: Yeah. So I left.

LS: But they accepted you here.

HH: Um-hmm.

LS: But why did you choose here rather than somewhere else?

HH: Just seemed nice. No particular reason. I applied here, Michigan and Illinois and Michigan had already started because I got my masters in August of summer school and Michigan was starting early in those years and Wisconsin seemed more interesting, and so I came. I didn't know anything about the school.

LS: This was 1965, did you say?

HH: Um-hmm.

LS: That was about -- let's see . . . I made out a chart of things that happened in the '60's and I suddenly realized how little I knew about it. That was when Selma [Alabama] was happening, wasn't it? Or did that happen earlier?

HH: I think that must have been earlier.

LS: That was in March.

HH: Yeah.

LS: Were you involved in -- you said you had been involved in the Civil Rights.

HH: Not really, when I was at Trinity my junior year, would have been the summer of '63, it was one of the big voter registration drives; [Ed Snick?] was running and three of my classmates from Trinity went down there; two of them got shot, wounded, not killed, and when they came back the following year was when I really started finding out what was going on. I had been to New York a lot and seen what was -- you know, I wasn't fooled about anything, and I was interested 00:40:00in it, but -- went to a Civil Rights demonstration or two, but I wouldn't say I was really being political.

LS: So when you got here, the war was already well under way, too. So what -- how soon did you get into campus activity here?

HH: Well, when I was in Chicago, I had sort of been working up to it, getting more and more frustrated about the way things were going so by the time I got here, I joined a group called Americans for Reappraisal of Far Eastern Policy that fall and worked in that through most of the winter.

LS: Was that a nationwide thing at campus?

HH: Yeah, it was a nationwide thing that -- now I'm going to forget his name -- Allard Lowenstein -- started that was -- its basic theme was we should recognized China. I think that that kind of thing could happen, because nobody thought the war in Vietnam would last more than six months at that time, so 00:41:00people weren't really thinking about the war.

LS: And this was -- so not just a student movement?

HH: No. I wasn't interested in student movement, per se. I wasn't interested in being a student, frankly. You know, I always thought that that was one of the under classes of society, and I didn't want to be identified with it.

LS: Really? Were you a TA? Did you start as a TA?

HH: Not the first year I was here, no.

LS: Did you have a Fellowship, or --

HH: No. I worked over at the Extension grading papers.

LS: You made a living?

HH: No. I had a national defense loan that would --

LS: Oh. So for a year you just -- you were a mathematician.

HH: Yeah.

LS: And that's '65/'66, except for the -- re-examining far eastern policy.

HH: Well I joined SDS that spring of that year.

LS: And what -- how did you decide to do that? What influenced you?

HH: They were interested in across the board social reorganizing. They had projects in places like Newark, community organizing projects, and I thought it was time to put my time into something that would mean something instead of being a student, which I considered, and still do, basically, a waste of time.

LS: Was this -- were friends of yours in SDS, or was it that you went to a meeting that was announced, or --

HH: I must have gone to a meeting. I don't really remember. I suspect that I just went to a meeting that was announced, and SDS had started to get some publicity because it had these projects -- I probably brought some literature from the table.

LS: Yeah . . . let's see . . . they had the -- yeah, the SDS -- they had -- the draft sit-in was 1966.

HH: Um-hmm. That was right after I joined, while I was president of the SDS then.

LS: I thought you were president in '67, or you started then?

HH: I started probably around April of '66.

LS: Were you -- you were -- how did you get to be elected president? Were you very active? Did you speak well, or --

HH: Nobody was particularly active. I guess I was a little bit older than everybody and I guess spoke well and --

LS: Did you go to some of the meetings that were held at the SD in say, Michigan, or -- were you --

HH: Not at that time. Later I did, yeah. You mean the national conventions?

LS: Yeah.

HH: Yeah.

LS: Because those must have -- you must have picked up a lot of -- must have learned about other campuses at the --

HH: Yeah, that was part of it.

LS: You just got inspired by them, I suppose.

HH: Yeah, to some extent. I was -- yeah, everybody was telling what they were doing and why.

LS: And did you organize the anti-2S and the -- I mean, you must have been the --

HH: I don't really remember the details to tell you the truth. But I remember 00:44:00that Bob Zwicker and I were the ones that moved at the meeting that we take the building, so to that extent -- I think what happened was we had been leafleting the field house where they were having the deferment tests. They were giving the test then to all males, the Selective Service was, and if you passed the test, then you could stay in school. If you didn't pass, you got drafted, and we were out there leafleting that, and that action grew into the sit-in because we were trying -- well, what -- it's sort of -- the issue was taken over by Committee to End the War type people and it was turned into an anti-2S demonstration . . . I'm sorry . . . that's not right. Let me say that again: it was turned into an anti-University complicity with the Selective Service demonstration. In other 00:45:00words, they didn't want the grades or the University facilities to be used for these tests and so they didn't want the grades sent to Selective Service. And the University of Chicago had had a demonstration a few weeks earlier about that. And the SDS people, because they came out of the Civil Rights movement much more than the Committee to End the War people, a lot of whom were "Red Babies" felt that the question of race was important and realized that if middle class college students didn't go fight, the blacks would be fighting, and so they tried to raise anti-ferment position, which was not adopted, but that issue was raised.

LS: Anti-deferment position in -- in the University?

HH: In the demonstration.

LS: Oh, I see.

HH: To be against all demonstrations.

LS: Yeah.

HH: I mean, against all deferments, right.

LS: Yes, that wouldn't be very popular with most college students.

HH: And it eventually wasn't when they adopted the letter, which was a very 00:46:00political mistake on their part, because it really increased the demonstrations, I think, from the college kids. But it was because of those criticisms raised by the anti-war movement that poor people and blacks were doing all the fighting that they were forced to adopt the letter, I believe.

LS: Did you ever have the -- you weren't faced with the issue of going to Vietnam, I gather?

HH: Yeah, I was -- when I was 25, I was declared "1A" and I went down there and said I was a member of every organization I could think of and refused to take the test and all that stuff and I signed a "we won't go" statement.

LS: And they let you --

HH: Well, eventually I got my student deferment back. I had to go appeal it and everything, but I had to fight like a dickens to get it back. See, they went through cycles. Every six months, they were giving politically active people "1Y's" as being unfit and then they'd go into a fit of revenge and they'd be drafting them all. If you got into the wrong six month cycle, you were in 00:47:00trouble, so I caught the wrong one, I guess.

LS: And they preferred to treat you as a student deferment than to presumably -- them to handle you as somebody protesting the war.

HH: Well, see, my draft board was in Waukegan, Illinois and so I guess that when I went down there presenting my case, the connection wasn't made or something. But I got it back after a struggle, so -- what they were doing was every time they got to 25, they would automatically cancel every defermentship and make you want to try and pick up on all of the people that had deferments.

LS: But then re-assignment.

HH: Sometimes.

LS: And then what happened?

HH: With what?

LS: You had the sit-in.

HH: Yeah.

LS: What was your work in math? And would you want to say briefly what you're 00:48:00trying to do?

HH: I'm an algebraic thropologist.

LS: Is this what you started off -- you must have started off --

HH: Not at that time. I hadn't started to specialize.

LS: You were still getting -- doing the graduate courses?

HH: That was the last year of classes I got to do. The following year I became a specialist, or about '68, I guess.

LS: Did you take courses in other departments?

HH: I had to get my language requirement, so I took a course in the German Department. I think that's it, as far as I can remember.

LS: So you're really strictly a mathematician.

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively). They didn't have rules then of taking minors in other departments, which I think they're starting to have now, so -- I didn't ever get into that. I'm sorry I didn't, too.

LS: You're sorry you didn't?

HH: Yeah. I think that's a good rule.

LS: Yes, I do, too. And you developed some original piece of research that you're doing.

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively), which is almost completed.

LS: Have you finished the research and just doing the writing, or are you just getting to the end of the -- research isn't the word, I'm sure.

HH: You have to write the proof up so that people can understand it. What I have now is -- they get one part of my proof so people can understand it, so you can decide whether that's a mathematical problem or an exposition problem. It's both, I guess.

LS: Do you not have to worry that somebody else is going to get there in front of you?

HH: A little bit, but since it's the kind of field it is, you sort of know what everybody's doing, so --

LS: So you'll have an article in Scientific American [any semester?].

HH: Oh, I doubt that (laughing).

LS: Well, the TAA started -- let's see . . . when did that start? That started in 1966, didn't it?

HH: Yeah, at the draft sit-in that we were talking about.

LS: Can you describe that, how the whole thing sort of --

HH: Basically what happened was that some of the TAs felt that by giving F's to people, they were sending them to Vietnam, so they felt that they had a special problem and they formed to decide how they were going to deal with that, and they separately sent some statement to the Chancellor, I believe, at that time. And then that demonstration was in May, so by the time school --

LS: Which demonstration?

HH: The anti-draft demonstration.

LS: Yeah.

HH: And by the time school started in the fall, these people realized that the TAs had problems of their own, and they wanted to keep the organization alive to deal with those problems, so spent the whole year of . . . what would that be . . . '66/'67, drawing up model contracts and things like that.

LS: Now you were a TA by this time.

HH: Yeah, but I wasn't that involved in the organization. I got involved in the summer of '67. It was a fairly moderate, in the real sense of the word -- I 00:51:00mean, these people, in that first year, felt that they could write up this model contract and take it to the Chancellor and it'd be instituted. And in '67, a lot of people from the left got involved and took the position that the traditional trade union was reactionary, which was a very common feeling among the new left at that time, and said what the TAA should be is an ad hoc organization; still use labor techniques, but not go for a contract, because a contract is a very restrictive document, and that's a true statement. I still agree with them. I mean, you give up a lot by signing a contract. But -- so the emphasis on going for a contract was taken off and the TAA was primarily an educational reform organization from the summer of '67 through January, '69, at which point the 00:52:00legislature decided it was going to cut out-of-state tuition remissions. In other words, everybody would have to pay out-of-state tuition, which was a big chunk of money, and we were down to about eight people then; seven people from English, which was very politically active at the time, and myself.

LS: In the TAA?

HH: Yeah. That's how many people were active at that time, and so we thought that the right thing to do was take a strike vote; have a -- so we put out ballot boxes in all of the departments and took a strike vote over this and announced it; 1,500 TAs -- it was about 2,200 at the time -- or, not that many . . . that's a chancy estimate -- probably 2,000. We were going to go on strike.

LS: How many did vote for the strike then?

HH: I have no idea. I never saw the ballots.

LS: Oh.

HH: Could have been that many. I never counted them.

LS: And it might have been seven.

HH: I have no idea. So we got -- what happened was that we had this press 00:53:00statement that there was going to be this strike and so Bob Muehlenkamp and myself said, "well, geez, if there's going to be a strike, we better figure out how to do it," and so it so happened that we had met a guy -- Muehlenkamp had met a guy named Fred Sherman from the School for Workers so he called up Fred Sherman -- excuse me -- Frank Lyons -- called up Frank Lyons, who was on the staff then, and asked him if we could meet him and could he show us how to strike the University?

LS: On the staff -- he was a member of the faculty?

HH: Yeah, and he was a pretty well known liberal. And he was involved in Catholic left wing stuff, like the Berrigon Brothers and that enough was -- the Berrigon Brothers, but that kind of thing, and Muehlenkamp was a Catholic as well, and that might have been the connection. Anyway, so we met Frank Lyons in the 602 Club and he brought along Fred Sherman, who was later to be our lawyer first. And we sat there and said, "Well, where do we put the picket lines to 00:54:00close the University down?" You know, draw a map. And Lyons said, "You guys are crazy. What you've got to do is get some authorization cards. I'll show you what they are. Get the union recognized, and then you won't have to go through this every time," and so Muehlenkamp thought it was a good idea. I didn't.

LS: Why didn't you?

HH: I was still -- thought the way I did about unions; that it was a reactionary way to go, but after talking it over for awhile and realizing that -- well, one of the problems, you see, with the student movement type thing is that you have a demonstration, you make a gain, but you have no way to consolidate your gains; no way to preserve them and no way to move them forward. And so to develop an organization which would do that was the main argument for going to union. Well, by this time, anyway, the legislature had rescinded its little ploy for -- I guess it was Shabaz was the one, and took so much heat for it that he withdrew it, but once we had gotten that far, we decided to go all the way, and so we 00:55:00called an ad hoc meeting of everybody. We had 90 people there. The vote was passed to go ahead with the authorization drive even though Shabaz billed it and it was withdrawn. And we started the authorization drive which I chaired and ran and by March -- I forget what date -- somewhere around March 15th, we had actually over half of the TAs signed up on authorization cards. TAs were just plain and simple fed up with fighting by themselves and they wanted an organization. That's what it boiled down to.

HH: And so we went to see the Chancellor, and --

LS: Who was already --

HH: That was Young. That was Young by that time, and since we didn't want to be treated like students, we called up the Teamsters, and Glenn van Kieran came from the Teamsters, and we got the national director of the American Federation of Teachers, Dick Katz --

LS: And how did they feel? You -- this was the first group that had been organized, wasn't it?

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: So how did they feel about this up-start group?

HH: They thought it was fine; thought it was amusing, I guess. I don't know -- we had Dick Hixon there from the AFT and Tom King who was then on the [ASTMA?] staff and who has since become the president of Council 24, or the secretary/treasurer, and --

LS: They came as advisors?

HH: Yeah. We brought them along to show that we had labor support, and that they considered us as union, and we had our stack of authorization cards there and the Chancellor said he couldn't -- wouldn't do it, wouldn't recognize us. And I remember Glenn van Kieran sitting there with his tattoo on his arm rolling up his sleeve and leaning on the table, saying, "Well, I don't know what you think, but as far as we're concerned, they're a union. If they go on strike, we're going to respect their picket line." He told the Chancellor that. And the Chancellor has a lot of ins with John Schmidt with the AFL-CIO, but he has no ins at all with the Teamsters union, and Don Eaton was the head of Teamsters at that time and I think that they didn't like the University too much, so they 00:57:00were -- they had no qualms about anything that would have happened.

LS: But isn't there a legal requirement to recognize a union?

HH: We're not covered by any statutes; same as a faculty member -- no statutes at all; no national statutes and no state statutes. See, that's what put the whole thing up for grabs. Anyway, the Chancellor refused to bargain and he told Muehlenkamp and I that his door was always open and he'd get us a health plan. We were sitting in his office and I remember I told him that we weren't going to kiss his ass anymore. He got up and walked out of his own office and said the meeting was over (laughing). He had an appointment. So, anyway, just after that, Muehlenkamp got a phone call saying that they were ready to talk about it and so we had these negotiation sessions and Dave Loefler from Goldberg, Previant and Uehlman was a labor --

LS: Say that again.

HH: Goldberg, Previant and Uehlman is a major labor law firm that has a national 00:58:00Teamsters -- handles the national Teamsters stuff. Anyway, he was in Madison then, but he since went to work for Goldberg, Previant and Uehlman. Anyway, he came along with us and helped us negotiate what became a structure agreement, which set up the bargaining relationship. And so on election -- that set up an election also. An election was held I think in May, I forget, and we got 77% of the vote, which turned out to be an absolute majority of the TAs. All we needed was the majority of their vote to win.

LS: Of the TAs -- who were members of the TAA.

HH: We didn't have any members then. We had 77% of all TAs on the campus -- of all TAs voting, which was an absolute majority of all TAs on campus, voting that the union should represent and even when it was counted by the departments, places like electrical engineering and places like that voted for it, so it was a general feeling that they had -- that there had to be some voice of the TAs to try to protect them, and I think that feeling remains. Even though people don't 00:59:00join, they don't want it abolished. I mean, the Chancellor has never gone for a recognition election to try to get us dis -- I can't think of the word -- to disaffil -- I mean to --

LS: Disappear.

HH: No, that's not the right word. I mean, he's never taken on that challenge, and I'm sure he would lose the vote. No matter what the state of the TAA is in, I'm sure he would lose that vote, because the TAs know that they are basically slaves in this. It's just that you have some that are afraid to fight back.

LS: What did you mean there was no TAA then?

HH: There was -- we had no membership system that we could say, "you're a member, and you're not."

LS: Oh.

HH: See, we didn't start collecting -- we collected a dollar dues a semester or something, but we had no -- I mean, if we had a hundred dues payers, I'd be surprised.

LS: So when did that start?

HH: Well, once we became recognized after this election, then we set up a formal union system and started having dues. But dues at that time weren't very much. I 01:00:00think they might have been a buck a month. I don't know . . . I can't remember. Yeah, and then we got checked off right away, so that's when it became formalized. So that's how the TAA got started.

LS: And so . . . well, go on then.

HH: Well, we started bargaining right away. It must have been the end of May, '69, and we had about a weekly bargaining session all summer where the level of discussions was whether or not the union could have bulletin boards in every department. That attack was lead by Dean Doremus who's been on the bargaining team, along with a guy named Neil Bucklew who was just a jerk out of the IR department. He had just graduated and they had thrown him onto this and he screwed it up completely.

LS: Now these people were talking at the time.

HH: Yeah, all these people talked. Arlen Christianson was their lawyer. Since that episode, he's been concentrating on the credit union. I think he was an assistant to the Chancellor at the time. Then they had several faculty that came and went -- came and went. But, I mean, they --

LS: Well, Brian Cole was on it.

HH: No, he was on the structure -- he might have been formerly on the committee, but he only helped negotiate the structural agreement. He was the top guy for that. But he was the assistant Chancellor then of wherever he's from.

LS: Something like that -- Dave Byrne.

HH: Those sound like the people who were on the structure committee as opposed to --

LS: Before we go further into the TA strike in 1970 that you had started to talk 01:02:00about, you left the SDS, you said, in 1969. Would you want to explain what happened? Why you did?

HH: Well, basically we went to the convention in Chicago, a lot of us from the Madison chapter, and we found ourselves in the middle of the Weathermen PL fight, progressive labor fight, and basically got left in the wash, I guess. After that, it was clear during the convention that the thing was going to fall apart. A lot of us left after the first day and for awhile after that, SDS maintained an independent caucus within -- it was a progressive labor caucus, and the Weathermen caucus, and a lot of the Midwestern chapters, non-city Midwestern chapters, non-big city chapters, maintained independent status. And 01:03:00that would be -- it was a real feeling of togetherness with people from Texas and Missouri and a whole strip from Texas to here, between those chapters, who wanted to maintain an independent sort of anarchist tendency, but it soon became clear that that was not to be had.

LS: You mean that the Weathermen were too strong and would drown out the --

HH: Actually it was -- progressive labor was the problem.

LS: Oh, I see.

HH: I mean, it's a long story and I'll give you a few comments and if you ever want to look into it you can, but basically what happened was progressive labor was a separate political party within SDS and they were trying to recruit members from SDS and they made one solid contribution in the context in the new left and that was raising the question of trade unionism in the working class, which SDS did come out of middle class background. And they did make people face that, but in the process, used tactics at meetings, disrupted the meetings, 01:04:00disrupted workshops and so forth. The Weathermen were a reaction to that, and the Weathermen were also very close to the black movement and they were close to the Black Panthers in Chicago and it has now become clear from FBI testimony that Hoover had a "kill the Panthers" program going and they were actually murdering them, and the way the Weathermen got started, really, was saying that the whites had a responsibility to these blacks, and they took it one step further and said that whites should be fighting in the streets with them. And that's exactly -- that's the motivation that got the Weathermen started. Now, of course, in areas where there wasn't a large black population, the Black Panther party wasn't very strong, and that didn't have as much meaning as it did in, say Chicago or Detroit, New York City, the west coast. And so it was really a gap in consciousness between those people who were in the cities and those people who weren't.

LS: Well, you would have had to go into it full time, I suppose, you couldn't --

HH: Oh, yeah.

LS: If you were going to --

HH: They didn't go underground right away at all. In fact, it was quite some time, I think, probably nine months to a year after that before they started going underground and going into an armed struggle of any kind.

LS: Did the violence bother you? Was -- I mean, was your position that you didn't want to go that far, or --

HH: I'm not particularly opposed to it. I don't like some people getting killed, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest to see stores trashed or things like that. I think that it was only those tactics that made middle class America face up to the war. I think they would have just ignored it if you just tried to talk [with them?].

LS: Well, I meant specifically in your leaving -- or not going --

HH: Oh, no. I didn't leave because of that.

LS: But you didn't consider going with the --

HH: No. I was working on the TA by then. I mean, I was heading much more towards labor union organizing, working class organizing. It was a lot of -- all these 01:06:00tendencies had been in SDS from back in '67. Maybe I told you -- I don't know if it was on the tape or not, but when Carl Davidson had written the national newspaper about organizing TAs. Part of this was the analysis that there was a new working class developing under capitalism of technicians, engineers, people like that -- mind workers rather than blue collar workers who were really -- had no more control over their job in the assembly line, people did, and that these people should be organized, and one of the theoreticians of this is André Gortz from France and it was that tendency within SDS. That's the tendency I followed. I mean, I didn't have any objections to what the Weathermen were doing other than I wasn't going to do it.

LS: I see, yeah. You had said that you were initially not in favor of going the union way with the TAA and then you decided it was the best way.

HH: Well, the reason for that is to consolidate the gains you make. I think one 01:07:00of the things we learned was every time we had a demonstration, we raised an issue, maybe we educated people. At least we got them mad enough to think about it, but we would make gains and then lose them right away, so there had to be a way to consolidate those gains. I mean, it was definitely with a long term strategy in mind that that decision was made. Unfortunately, things happened after that. I mean, the Nixon repression sort of worked and really disrupted the movement.

LS: The whole thing. You mean --

HH: Yeah. I mean, I think the movement fell apart after '71 because of the repression, nothing else. I think it just shows how successful a repression can be.

LS: Not because the war ended and the immediate --

HH: Well, that had something to do with it, yeah. But, I mean, I don't think -- I mean you get all these asinine comments like the bombing of AMRC affected things. I don't think it did. I don't think it had any effect at all.

LS: Yes, I've seen that.

HH: Excuse me.

LS: I said I've seen that -- that that was the reason --

HH: And that was the propaganda line, sure. That's the propaganda line from -- 01:08:00whoever, the establishment, but -- I mean, because they wanted to stir the violence. I mean -- but -- I don't think that's true. It's just out and out repression. Mitchell and those guys had a [Grainger?] system going that you wouldn't believe, and I think it worked.

LS: Well, I guess that's starting to get something.

HH: Most likely.

LS: I gather that Young, at some point, said that the TAA was a group of radical --

HH: Oh, yeah. That was always his line. See, this goes back to another one of our strategies in organizing a union, why we were so careful to get as much labor support as possible, because Young always painted us as student revolutionaries. I mean, he called Brickson down at the Labor Temple before we were members of the AFL-CIO and told him he shouldn't endorse us because we were just Communists. I remember 1969, Fred Sherman made an appointment with us and talked to Brickson. We went down there and Brickson was sitting in his office. I 01:09:00guess I went down there and [Dick Schiedenhow?] and . . . I can't think of the other guy's name. Anyway, Brickson was sitting there with his finger in the AFL-CIO constitution and he read us the anti-communist clause and said, "now, before we go any further . . . " this is the very first thing, "before we go any further, are any of you Communists?". I mean, obviously Young had called him, so --

LS: So they didn't really buy it, then, the unions didn't, that you were a radical.

HH: Oh yeah. At that time they did, sure.

LS: Well, he believed you when you said you weren't, so --

HH: Yeah, but that didn't mean that we weren't radicals. They had come to understand that you don't have to be a member of the communist party to be a radical.

LS: That's right. They didn't really -- the AFL-CIO didn't really -- they sort of hedged, didn't they?

HH: They absolutely -- they refused to endorse us because -- I mean, the reason they gave was we're not an AFL-CIO union, and, in fact, that's a consistent policy of the AFL-CIO not to support non-AF of L unions. But I think there was 01:10:00more to it than that in this case.

LS: Well, the Teamsters weren't disturbed by this.

HH: No. No, Don Eaton had been involved in other efforts to organize student workers on campus, so I don't think it bothered them at all.

LS: Well, um . . .

LS: Oh, what was the TAA Radical Caucus, while we're on the subject? Is that a group?

HH: It wasn't anything.

LS: I saw it in an editorial, or an article by --

HH: It was a group of left -- it was sort of an interesting situation. The leadership was all left; mostly active members were left.

LS: When you say "left", what do you mean, really?

HH: In a generalized sense, that they believed that capitalism was wrong, that the U.S. was an imperial power.

LS: Oh, O.K.

HH: And that something had to be done about it, and that they weren't afraid of 01:11:00the word socialism or anything like that. And these other people were no different, except that they had -- they're a little more -- well, I resented their presence in the sense that they're mostly intellectuals and what they were doing was saying that -- the thing that happens -- let's put it this way: the thing that happens in the sectarian political movements and especially on University campuses, is argument by false analogy. They will look at another trade union or another organization and see that something happened in there, and therefore they will take the same model and put it into a different situation. So what had happened in the late 60's -- the model that we were using -- was that in the late 60's, caucuses had developed in many of the trade unions, because the trade union leadership is reactionary and if it's not reactionary it's lazy, or it's afraid and so nothing happens, and so you have to organize a rank and file caucus to put pressure on the leadership. Well, in the 01:12:00case of the TAA, the leadership was bleeding with -- I mean, there was no problem. But still these people formed a rank and file caucus, so they said, which they called the Radical Caucus and this happened very late in the game. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was -- I don't think it appeared until after the strike vote. I mean, this was essentially the strike --

LS: I think it was during the strike that this article was written.

HH: Yeah. The first thing that they did was around the educational planning issue, was after the strike started, put out a leaflet with another proposal demanding that we raise our educational planning. I mean, I think it's a fine thing to do, but it wasn't prepared for. The organizing wasn't done. It was just sort of out in the open and, I mean, out of the clear blue.

LS: You mean they didn't really have to do this on their own, the whole -- the things they wanted, others would have joined with them.

HH: Yeah, right. At least -- by that time, however, the thing was put in motion and it was a little late to change the demand, and they hadn't organized other 01:13:00people to change it that way. All I'm saying is, I don't object to what they did. I do object to their -- the reason they did it, which I thought was pretty asinine and that this has happened over and over again in different movements, this kind of false analogy failing. You have a caucus when leadership is not responsive; not when leadership is responsive.

LS: I can see that. How many of them were there?

HH: I have no idea. It was never --

LS: Did you know them?

HH: Oh, yeah. I know them. I mean, I know most of them, but if you put a number on it -- people come and go to meetings; there's 20 to 30 people probably. I mean, there wasn't the split there. I mean, that was the other problem. The leadership agreed with what they were doing, and there was no conflict and -- I mean, it was a tempest and a teapot. It was in a vacuum. It was -- I don't know how to describe it to you, really. I mean, meetings were held. I went to some of them myself; talked about these things, talked about making the union more 01:14:00radical, which is something we've been trying to do all along, and it was good to see some political motions. Too bad it didn't continue, you know?

LS: Was this the group that -- no, it wouldn't be. Somebody accused the TAs of being anchors of conservatism.

HH: No doubt (laughing). It might even be true.

LS: But it wouldn't -- but not this group, because they were in the TAA.

HH: Yeah, I don't [know that?].

LS: The idea was --

HH: There's always secretarian groups around there. I mean, the Spartacus League went around to our picket lines and handed out leaflets saying we were being counter-revolutionary by having a strike.

LS: Yeah. People were against union --

HH: I mean, things like that -- you just ignore that.

LS: Well, can you -- let' see, there's three different groups of people: there will be your fellow TAs that you would have known. Muehlenkamp, you spoke a bit 01:15:00about him last time; Marketti and Steve Zorn, some of the others. Do any of them stand out in your mind as -- well, will they be heard about in their --

HH: They already have (laughing).

LS: So that an historian many years from now would like to find out more about them.

HH: Well, one thing about that group is that Muehlenkamp and Marketti, myself and Fred Sherman came together in a very interesting way. I mean, everyone had talents that complimented each other and I think that was an important component in making it work. Muehlenkamp was the PR type guy, always did the press things and Marketti knew the hard core trade union stuff, how to write contract clauses. I knew all the politics and knew all the political people on campus that we got support from. Fred Sherman did all the legal work, and I think that 01:16:00coming together of those talents really made a lot of it work. The other person you mention is Steve Zorn, who was head of the Stewards Council at that time and wasn't really involved in the executive committee too much.

LS: You mean the organizing, strategy planning. Is that what you mean by the executive committee?

HH: Yeah, yeah.

LS: Had you -- had the others been in the SDS?

HH: Um-mmm (negatively).

LS: So you knew the political people on campus because of the SDS.

HH: Oh yeah. Well, I can tell you some of their political backgrounds. Marketti got involved -- well, Marketti -- his story's been in the newspapers, when he got involved with the Teamsters thing, but he was a -- came out of high school -- he grew up in Neenah Menasha, came out of high school and went into the carpenters' union working a utility up there; was a shop steward there. Came down here to the Industrial Relations Department; was never very political. And then he got himself involved in the anti-Standard Oil demonstration. Got his 01:17:00picture in the paper for that, I remember. That was -- and then he said that the thing that really got him going was the 1967 Dow demonstration. He had his office facing that commerce building. He was in social science and his office faced that, and he was sitting there watching this thing go up, all the tear gas, and he said that really opened his eyes. And, actually, that's the point that Muehlenkamp got involved, too. Because that night, there was a TA meeting where -- I don't know if you remember, but a general strike was called on campus to protest the police action there, October Dow thing. We had a TA meeting. There was about 400 TAs there, and my voice was so hoarse from yelling, "Sig Hile!" at the cops. Our president had quit. I was vice-president so I was chairing the meeting.

LS: Oh, that's how you -- I remember you spoke --

HH: Yeah. Walter [Jotty?] was sitting in. After this happened, he said he didn't want anything more to do with the University and just left.

LS: Oh, really?

HH: Yeah. Walter [Jotty?] --

LS: He had been head of SDS --

HH: No. He was in SDS, but he was also president of TAA for a month.

LS: Oh, yeah.

HH: That one month of that fall, and so he just quit school; flat out left. Anyway, I was chairing this meeting and I couldn't talk anymore. I just saw this straight looking guy down in the front row and I said, "Do you want to chair the meeting?" and he was Muehlenkamp and he said, "Yeah," and that was the beginning.

LS: Oh, that is interesting. You mean he might have been in the tenth row, or --

HH: Yeah, right (laughing). So that's how he got started and now he's working with the Hospital Workers' Union and he's one of their national organizers and I'm sure he'll be heard from. He got that job right after the strike. Same with Marketti -- got hired by local 695, the Teamsters, right after the strike.

LS: Well, that's the origin of your comment last time that a lot of these -- it was thought that a lot of these people would be going into union organizing afterwards.

HH: Well, the Chancellor likes to play on that because those two guys did.

LS: Yeah, I see. What fields have -- you said Marketti was --

HH: He's industrial relations and Muehlenkamp was in English. Fred Sherman --

LS: So you sort of recognized each other as kindred souls --

HH: I guess. I don't know.

LS: Is there anybody else that figured in the mix?

HH: Well those were the primary people. That led to great charges of sexism after that (laughing).

LS: I was going to ask, but I decided to refrain.

HH: No, it was true. In fact, during the strike -- well, during the strike, the only membership meeting that I know of that has ever been called by petition -- in our constitution, you can call a meeting by a petition with ten percent of the members, and the women called the meeting about a week or so into the strike to discuss that issue.

LS: Yeah. Did you go?

HH: They were right. Yeah, I was there. Everybody was there. I mean everybody I 01:20:00knew who was being criticized. It wasn't really sexism as much as there were some forms of elitism. And this all came to a head in the following year. I mean, there was an incredible split in the TAA over this issue.

LS: Can you say how it happened and who was involved?

HH: Well, basically -- as I said, it wasn't really sexism, It was the cult of the expert, and what happened after the strike was we had to start administering the union and people like Paul Schallert and David Burress, Roger Herring, took over the grievance jobs and it's a real job, and they became the experts at it and ended up handling all of the cases, and since this is where the action of the union was that year, the first year after the contract, that cut everyone else out and a lot of the women thought they were being cut out of learning that 01:21:00expertise so that they could get into the union. I mean that was the time -- I guess the height of the women's movement, in terms of its asserting what was wrong with what was going on, and so what happened was that there became two coalitions in the elections in the spring of '71, one year after the strike, one of which was the coalition called [Carl Shram?] and Paul Schallert and those people, and the other was Steve Zorn and Ann Gordon, Pat Russian -- I'm trying to think of the main people -- Laura Hodge.

LS: Did you -- Phyllis Karrh is the one woman's name I -- I guess she's later --

HH: Yeah -- She was later than that.

LS: Penn -- yeah, and they were all later.

HH: There's a couple others. Anyway, this conflict came out and the Zorn slate won.

LS: And what was it?

HH: Hmm?

LS: What was that? I suppose --

HH: Well, basically, it was an inner-office conflict, in a sense that there's always 20 or 30 people who are doing most of the work and there was conflict between those people. I don't think the average member knew what was going on and why there were two slates. It wasn't handled very well in the sense of getting the politics of it out, and Zorn, etc. slate won. I say the Zorn slate because he was still up for president. He was president during that year, too.

LS: Which one did you belong to?

HH: I was -- Bruce Vandervort and I were trying to get them back together (laughing). See, I had sort of slipped out of things by that time. I was just offering technical help and trying to hold the thing together, which is really all I've done since then. (tape cuts out) I'm going to say a couple more things about that. I mentioned Bruce Vandervort is another person that should be mentioned. He handled the office along with Noel Adams during the strike and he 01:23:00was from the History Department and he's another one of the ones that's gone onto trade union work. He stayed a year or two after the strike and then he got a job working for the international -- I think it's the building trades, in Geneva, Switzerland. He still works for them.

LS: It's interesting, isn't it? That this shouldn't -- they shouldn't have left their own careers and gone --

HH: Well, a lot of people learned a lot of things about the University from that episode and how much of a sham it was and so forth.

LS: You think it was that rather than having the positive training for something? Because that would be an incentive, too, to realize that you were good at union organizing.

HH: Yeah, but that just takes the same kind of skill that it takes to talk to people, really, plus having good political sense. I think it was a decision to want to do something positive in the world instead of wasting your time on ridiculous research and also seeing that the University wasn't as important as 01:24:00it was cracked up to be in the 60's. You have to remember in the 60's, but everybody thought the University was the way to salvation, getting a college degree or a Ph.D.

LS: Anyway, tell me about the two coalitions, I mean their different positions. Apparently it was over the women issue.

HH: I'd say really that's a false way to say it. It was over elitism. It was over expertise; over a small group of people having all the expertise, and --

LS: And that was the un--the non-Zorn group.

HH: Yeah, who had done all the work, and they reacted because they said, "We've done all the work, where have you been?" and they were both right. The women and some of the men had been cut out, but on the other hand, they had not put out much effort and then the women would come back and say, "well, that's in the context of the whole situation of the country, what do you expect?" and they might have been right, but they still got that reaction from the people who were doing the work.

LS: So who won?

HH: The Zorn and the women did.

LS: And then what happened?

HH: Well, at that point, my sense of the history isn't too good, because then I started working at Baraboo.

LS: Oh.

HH: But, basically what happened was the union went downhill; not because those people got elected. The union stayed together for the year that they were in office, but then following that, when Phyllis Karrh and Ron Walker and Pam [Moyenstein?], people like that began to run it, they got very lazy, is one way to look at it; very few membership meetings were held. They ran the whole show themselves. And this is what I mean. It's not a women's versus men's issue, it's an elitist issue, because here you had two women and one man doing the same thing that the other group had done.

LS: It's always easier to just do things by yourself than have to get other people involved.

HH: Yeah, and with a union with this kind of turnover, the only way it could be held together is by whenever you do a job, take somebody new with you so they learn how to do it, or else hire paid staff, which nobody really wants to do.

LS: Have there been any very good women in the -- during the TAA organizing?

HH: I'd say Phyllis Karrh was excellent. I would say -- somebody I haven't mentioned -- Jean Turner from the 70 group. She was the only woman on the executive committee. She was excellent.

LS: What was she in?

HH: English. Phyllis Karrh was in French. There was -- it's again a false issue because if you look at the picket captains during the strike, they're over half women.

LS: Yeah.

HH: And so -- it's not a false issue, but it's not stated clearly when you say that there's no women involved.

LS: Yeah. I wondered if because the women's rights were so predominant it would have been in their minds whether they let that interfere with their -- with the TA cause at all.

HH: Well, the women's issues were just getting started in '70, as I remember, at least with respect to this organization, and what happened was in the contract 01:27:00bargaining for the second contract, which would have started in the spring of '71, free daycare was the main issue and so was the anti-discrimination clause. As a result of their political activity, this became the main issues in our contract bargaining.

LS: Anti-discrimination against everybody, or just against women?

HH: Well, against women. And it soon became clear that the problem was -- well, there were two problems: one is that professors were flunking women out after their master's degree, making it very difficult for them to find somebody to work with, that was one problem; the second problem was that the admissions policy of the school, which the TA contract couldn't cover, not because we didn't try to, but (laughing) . . . ah, I mean it's hard to argue against the argument that you're only covering TAs, not enrollment into graduate school, 01:28:00even if you tried it anyway, so -- and so I think one of the things that happened was that a lot of the politically active women decided that the TAA was not a vehicle -- was not a successful vehicle in solving the problems they were concerned about, and if they wanted to -- you could not save anybody's professional career if a professor was going to flunk you out or tell you that you weren't good enough to work for Ph.D.'s. It's not a TA issue; it's a graduate student issue. And so I think that a lot of them went into other forms of activity.

LS: So the more talented ones -- or some of the very talented ones might have gone into something more --

HH: They did. For example, Pat Russian, who was one of the main activists in the year . . . that '71 year, spent a lot of her time in women's group -- that's not the right phrase -- ad hoc committees attacking various problems around women's issues, and that seemed to be where the thrust of things was.

LS: Yeah. Well, what about your relations with the faculty? Some of the faculty were extremely sympathetic, I'm sure, weren't they?

HH: During '70?

LS: Yeah. How did you feel --

HH: I wouldn't say that. I'd be hard pressed to name names. If they were extremely sympathetic, they were keeping it quiet.

LS: Um . . .Frank Battaglia -- he was somebody who --

HH: Alright, O.K. The New University Conference people, all six of them, all of whom were eventually fired, were very sympathetic, that's true, and what the New University Conference was was a faculty, SDS type group. In fact, it was Frank Battaglia and David Siff and -- what's the woman at the U.S. Department -- eventually got fired also?

LS: Oh, it was -- Joan something? No, I've forgotten. (tape cuts out)

HH: Anyway, these people were sympathetic and they were all fired and they were 01:30:00not granted tenure and there was a whole series of open tenure hearings.

LS: These were the -- they were young faculty. Was --

HH: All non-tenured, almost all in the English Department.

LS: Was Peter Kolchin one of those? Because --

HH: Not a major one.

LS: There was a group that wrote an article or wrote a joint letter and it was Stan Schultz was one of those two, who were young faculty, non-tenured, who expressed their --

HH: Yeah.

LS: Did you have anything to do with --

HH: No. Because we knew that there was only a couple of them (laughing). I mean, and they had no power whatsoever; none of them were tenured. They weren't on any committees or anything.

LS: No. O.K. What about Harvey Goldberg? He's --

HH: What about him? He's a good lecturer.

LS: He apparently recently had a -- after the TA thing ended, he had a gathering in his class, didn't he, or --

HH: In this last one?

LS: Yeah.

HH: In this last one, his TAs got really mad at him, because he said his lectures were more important than the TA strike; once a professor, always a professor. He said he was going to hold his lectures anyway during the strike, and he did. He had a meeting with his TAs alright, but it wasn't to drink beer.

LS: Oh, I guess it was after the thing was over, he had TAs come into discuss -- that's probably what they came into discuss.

HH: Yeah, because they were so outraged.

LS: I see. There was an analysis in The Cardinal.

HH: Maybe that's why.

LS: So, in the Math Department, then -- in other words, they were all adversaries, this --

HH: I would say basically, yeah. You could probably find some who would say, "Well, I agree with some of your issues, but I definitely don't agree with educational planning." I mean, they had this problem and they think they ought to run the whole show on campus, and so -- and that cuts across the board. It's only the very unusual and politically left member that doesn't believe in that 01:32:00sort of elitism.

LS: There's an Educational Reform Association which had a workshop, I guess.

HH: Run by the faculty?

LS: Yeah. Do you remember that?

HH: No.

LS: They said they were in sympathy with the TA position.

HH: That's interesting (laughing). I'm glad to hear that.

LS: That's news to you. You weren't there, I gather?

HH: No. I was in bargaining most of the strike.

LS: The issue that you bargained about was the bulletin boards in the departments.

HH: Yeah.

LS: Do you remember that? And you were going to go on, I think, and describe it.

HH: Well, I don't remember what I said before, so I'll just say some of it over it again.

LS: You mentioned Doremus' name and --

HH: Yeah.

LS: O.K.

HH: Basically we were bargaining with Doremus, who I guess had just recently at that time had become L & S financial Dean. Neil Bucklew, who was a flunkey from the IRR Department, just graduated there and they made him -- I don't know what they made him -- but he was in charge of bargaining, anyway. Arlen Christianson 01:33:00was their lawyer and they had a few faculty members who came and went. Oh, I guess Mulvihill was pretty -- Mulvihill from the Spanish Department was pretty much involved. I can't remember exactly. Anyway, basically the conversation with Doremus and Bucklew, Bucklew being their formal head of their bargaining team, and we spent the whole summer of '69 arguing about bulletin boards and other technical matters; dues check off, things like that. They had no intention of bargaining anything. It went that way into the fall, and we had had some of the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers people, Jerry Marshan, who was the woman who was their executive director at the time, had come through bargaining with us to see what was going on. I remember during one caucus right in the first week, she 01:34:00said, "well, fellas, you guys are going to have to strike," and she was right, nine months ahead of time. So, and starting in the fall, we started cutting back our demands to prepare for the strike and we set a bargaining deadline of January 8th, at which time we weren't going to talk anymore, and January 8th came, and very little had happened. I don't remember what was settled at that time. It couldn't have been very much.

LS: Were these sessions fairly bitter, or not.

HH: Well, you know, you yell at people, so . . . yeah. Doremus, I mean, is just an idiot. The guy -- I don't think the guy knows whether he's coming or going. I'm sure he can add figures pretty quick, but in terms of understanding that it's not a dictatorship and that he has to make -- he has to deal with employees as people, I don't think he has any sense of that at all, and he has very professorial, asinine way of putting things. I mean, as I told you before, this 01:35:00example -- we were talking about the discipline, discharge clause and one of the things we wanted was that the TA -- any TA fired had to stay in the classroom until appeals were held, and this was because of the political case we had in 1967 with Bob Cohen who was a TA in philosophy, and was also one of the people arrested in the Dow demonstration, and they had fired. The legislature wanted him fired, and they fired him. And we said, "Keeping someone out of the class like that is political intimidation, that's what we're trying to protect against." We eventually won this clause, by the way, exactly the way we wanted it, and -- but Doremus' argument was, "well, what if a TA machine guns his students? Don't we have the right to take him out of the class then?" I mean -- you know, just stupid. It's not even worth answering and -- so we call him a jerk, or anything else you can think of (laughing).

LS: Was there anyone among them that you did respect, or --

HH: Of that crowd?

LS: Yeah.

HH: No. Bucklew didn't know whether he was coming or going. It was the first job he ever had and --

HH: I mean, they were just all doing what the Chancellor told them to do, which I'm sure was sit there and fool around; try to talk us to death. That's another thing the Chancellor learned from the student demonstrations: the more meetings you can have, the more bored people will get, the more likely we are to quit. And so we just weren't up for that. We bargained with them I'd say an average of once a week up through that fall, and that's why we called a deadline, because we weren't going to do that forever.

LS: What, for two or three hours at a sitting?

HH: At least. I don't remember. It'd go for longer if there was anything to say, but it wasn't -- no progress was being made.

LS: So they might have chosen somebody that you could have had some rapport with and --

HH: I don't think that's the issue. I don't think rapport makes any difference. I think the question is: are they willing to make concessions or not? It doesn't matter -- the guy can be an idiot and sit there and make concessions. We can have the greatest rapport in the world and sit there and make concessions, you 01:37:00know? (laughing) I mean, when you talk about rapport, you're starting to talk about it in terms of actually arguing with people and making a difference and -- I mean, this is a power struggle, and the question is to put some restrictions on the University's power to deal with TAs. That's what the contract does, and of course they resisted that. And it doesn't matter whether you have good relations with the people you're talking to or not. It makes you feel lousier if you feel like you're wasting your time, but that just brings the strike closer. I mean, it's in the management's interest to have somebody there that can smooth talk and make people feel like they're going somewhere but not really going somewhere. I mean, that's the kind of guys they try to get, if they had any brains. But that's not who they're gonna get. I don't think it would have made any difference anyway, because we were determined to take care of all those issues. It didn't matter who was there.

LS: Was the faculty TA committee set up then, or was that afterwards?

HH: What do you mean by that?

LS: At some point, somebody -- I guess Young probably -- maybe -- members of the 01:38:00faculty -- thought it should be set up, a TA faculty committee. Has there ever been one?

HH: I don't know. It sounds like something he'd think up to try to co-op the union, try to claim that --

LS: So it didn't materialize?

HH: Not that I know of. I don't know what that would be. I mean, this is his line, that "my door's always open, just come through with your problems and we'll solve them," you know, and so he was going to set up a committee to listen to people and listen them to death.

LS: You had a lawyer. Did you get advice from him? You must have needed advice from --

HH: Oh, we had lots of help.

LS: People who were skilled and --

HH: First of all, we had Fred Sherman, from the School for Workers.

LS: I know you said initially that you had gone to consult with him.

HH: Oh, he worked with us all along. I would consider him one of the -- I mean, he had no political sense, but when we told him what we wanted done, he could do it, and he could think up a way to do it. He was a very creative lawyer and we always had the help of Dave Loefler when we wanted it, too, from Goldberg-Previant and Uehlman.

LS: Yes. Say that more clearly, will you?

HH: Goldberg-Previant and Uehlman.

LS: Preevy?

HH: PreVIANT.

LS: Previant.

HH: Goldberg -- that's clear.

LS: Yeah.

HH: Previant -- P-R-E-V-I-A-N-T; Uehlman -- U-H -- U-E-H-L-M-A-N and they have the National Teamsters' contract.

LS: Yeah, I see.

HH: In other words, they're Frankie Fitzsimmons' lawyers (laughing).

LS: And they were -- some -- one of them was here in --

HH: Well, Loefler started out in Madison and he go --he did a lot of political cases when he was here and then he got the job in Milwaukee with this law firm, but he maintained his friendships with a lot of people up there. So he's done cases like this for a long time.

LS: Because you must have all been rather -- I mean, well you, for instance, inexperienced in bargaining, so you must have occasionally had --

HH: Yeah, but I mean -- it's just simply to sit there and saying what you want, that's all. It doesn't take any experience to do that (laughing).

LS: O.K.

HH: Not to listen to any of the garbage that comes back, that's all. I guess some people get fooled when they believe that the other people are sincere 01:40:00(laughing). It's as simple as that. I mean, they can't be sincere, because you're asking for their power, so I mean, there's no -- no matter what they say. So they can sit there and say how sympathetic they are all day, I don't care. What I want to see is the action.

LS: Ah, well . . . is there anything else you want to say about what was going on before the strike started?

HH: Well, I just finish up what I was saying about what we did. We set the strike deadline.

LS: Yeah.

HH: I mean this bargaining deadline, which came and went, and then we just stopped bargaining. We said, "they'll be a strike vote March (whatever it was)," and we organized for a strike during that period, and the fact that bargaining had gone on so long with so little effect was definitely a factor in the strike vote.

LS: Now, there was a sudden increase in the TAA membership at the end of 1969. Was this in connection with the -- with your organizing the strike?

HH: To be honest, I don't really remember how that happened, but we did talk to almost every TA on campus during that two month period, so that could be when it happened.

LS: You mean you'd go to -- the Department would have a meeting.

HH: We had departmental meetings in the departments. We had parties. We had meetings in peoples' houses. I mean, we had a full infrastructure of departmental representatives and so forth and the people on the bargaining team and some of the executive committees were divided up into teams. I think there was -- I don't remember how many there were. There were at least three teams, probably more, and I --

LS: Of how many?

HH: Well, there was a core of three people on a team or something. I bet I went to two or three meetings a day, and that's all I did for two months, and we talked about the issues, but more importantly, we talked about the union we were trying to create; what kind of union it was going to be, why it was a long term project. We talked about the nature of the University, why it needed to be changed, and how the TAs could help do that.

LS: Was it difficult to persuade the TAs? I mean, they must have had some 01:42:00reservations. I mean, did you have a lot of discussion and --

HH: Oh, yeah, I mean, but it wasn't of a hostile nature. When people realized that here was an opportunity to do something, it was a question of whether they wanted to, and once they decided they wanted to, whether they had the guts.

LS: I mean, they must have had philosophical reservations, and you must have had to go into those and --

HH: Yeah.

LS: Set them at rest.

HH: Yeah.

LS: And there must have been a lot of that, or wasn't there?

HH: Well, there were questions about why are we different from other unions? I mean, we talked about democracy in the TAA and what we were trying to do with the TAA. One -- we never talked about wage demands, for example, at that time.

LS: About what?

HH: Wage demands.

LS: Oh.

HH: We never brought that up, on purpose. And we talked about the nature of the University, what we were trying to do to it. Then -- at least after the meeting, would be whether the strike would work or not. I mean, what passes for apathy is 01:43:00often people's feeling that nothing can be done.

LS: Yeah.

HH: Rather than apathy.

LS: Well, fear perhaps.

HH: Yeah, and so the point was to show that actually something could happen. I mean, we talked about how we had -- explained how the pickets would work, how the Teamsters were going to support us, what we were going to do to get money from people.

LS: What were you going to do?

HH: On what?

LS: To get money from people.

HH: Just ask for contributions.

LS: Just -- not raising dues or --

HH: No, oh no. And I think we raised about $17,000.

LS: From students and --

HH: Just donations.

LS: Faculty, I suppose, too.

HH: Some, yeah. We did get $500 from the United Faculty. I remember that. A loan, it was. It wasn't a donation. It may not have been paid back yet, either. We certainly took our time paying it back, because we thought they double-crossed us on the educational planning issue.

LS: Why?

HH: They didn't back us on it. Right now, the United Faculty is an AFT logo. 01:44:00We're an AFT logo, and they maintain their right as management over us, still, to run the University the way they want. I mean, it's really a bizarre situation, and if it ever comes to a strike, I don't think they'll be unity between the two groups. I personally would not respect a United Faculty strike over those issues. I don't think they deserve more money and I don't think they deserve more power. So, I mean, see I judge these things in terms of their politics rather than in terms of their trade union content.

LS: But in the meetings, the -- there must have been a good deal of fear that they might get thrown out?

HH: Well, like I said, maybe I don't -- I don't remember when I said it, whether it was in the other meeting we had or on a tape, but there were so many things that happened in those years and the University -- let's put it this way: people -- most of the people came in to school about '67 or '68.

LS: Oh, that's right.

HH: They came in. They started in school with a vision of the University. Well, 01:45:00there are two kinds of people: if they came in with the University being a neutral place where real scholarship went on, and they found through the Vietnam era that the University was working for the army, and was making lots of money that way; it was recruiting for the CIA, [Bratzi?] was here, and so forth, that the University was just a part of the war machine, and that disgusted a lot of people who came for something different. So those people -- a lot of them had gotten to the point where they said it was a lot of crap, they didn't care whether they got kicked out, and this was a good way to take as much of it down with them when they went.

LS: You're explaining that you made that statement but you didn't explain it before. I see what you mean.

HH: Yeah. And then there was the other group of people that I also talked about who were there to avoid the draft and they were -- a lot of them were politically motivated in the first place, and so they had no particular commitment to a career. I mean, the thing showed itself for what it was, really, the University did, to be just another business tied into the U.S. business in 01:46:00military and something in need of change, and here was a way to try.

LS: Did the TAA have anything to do with the local things that went on, say in the History Department or the Journalism Department also?

HH: It depends on what you mean by that.

LS: Well, there was -- remember Stan Payne's course of some TAs came into bat. I'd forgotten what the issue was, and there was a -- I remember there were a lot of meetings between the faculty and the TAs in the History Department, and I think there were.

HH: I have no idea.

LS: So these were just local things.

HH: Yeah, but they could have been run by the TA history affiliate or they could have just been as an ad hoc action. I mean, it's hard to separate when people are acting as members of the union and when they're just acting.

LS: I just -- the bigger question is whether some people were doing things that you'd rather they hadn't done, or went further than you felt they should, or --

HH: Nobody ever went too far for me (laughing).

LS: I'm asking the wrong person (laughing).

HH: My general feeling was as long as the strategy -- the goal is to change the education, to serve the people, that whatever you try is fine, and I realized that things are going to be tried that are going to fail and some things are going to be tried that are going to be counter-productive, but that that should be -- still should be done. You've got to find out what will work. So -- I mean, the only things I resented was co-optation committees where there's two faculty and two TAs and then you have to report to the faculty who'd then veto your report. To me, those are a waste of time. But even those, I feel that people have to learn that that's what those are, and if they want to serve on them, let them. They've got to learn somehow.

LS: What did other graduate students that weren't TAs think about all this?

HH: I have no idea; never any reaction that I ever saw.

LS: Hmm . . . that's surprising, because they had a lot to lose by this, in a way.

HH: Why?

LS: Well, they might, for instance, not get appointed TAs because TAs are kind of tenure, or --

HH: Nobody took that seriously. The Chancellor took it seriously. The faculty took it seriously, but nobody else did.

LS: You mean the demand for tenure.

HH: It wasn't tenure, first of all.

LS: Well, not tenure. I'm just using the word, but for -- what was it? There was a tenure one.

HH: Not a tenure. I mean, it was a guaranty of a job for four years. That's not tenure. You could be fired for bad teaching and a lack of academic progress. That's not tenure. It's job security if you do a good job, just like any other worker has.

LS: So you didn't really think that that meant very much.

HH: I think it was very important, but I don't think that that objection is meaningful. I think it's another one of these faculty type statements that don't mean anything, that they think means something. You know, nobody else in the 01:49:00world would think it meant anything. And, I mean, no doubt that there were some people that felt that they lost out, but many other people said, well, a quarter of time you can't live on anyway, so we changed the minimum to a third time appointment which, at that time, was livable. I'm beginning to believe it isn't now because of inflation, but -- and the same thing with the long term appointment. Because what was going on was they would bring people here with a TA-ship, get them involved in the program, and then dump them from the TA-ship. So they already had their time in and their credits here, and so the tendency would be for them to stay here, and what they were doing is suckering a lot of people in that way. And the TAs and other graduate students were very aware of that. The faculty would never think of that.

LS: This must be in particular departments.

HH: Ah, that happened -- it happened in the departments where they didn't use many TAs, like History, for example. The History TAs resented that and were quite mad. Now, in the Math Department, that wouldn't come up, because they need 01:50:00all the TAs to do all their teaching for them, so anybody who had any skill at all in math got hired.

LS: You mean, they would hire -- they would -- people would come to the University with the promise of being a TA and once they got here and settled in, would then be fired the next year?

HH: Well, they would be told that they wanted -- the money was going to be given to somebody else to spread it around. Let's put it in the faculty's terms.

LS: In other words, they'd have one year --

HH: Yeah.

LS: And they'd be -- I see.

HH: They'd be off for awhile and then they might be back on, and you're committed to the place, and the faculty rationalizes to themselves, having no empathy at all for people, by saying they're spreading the money around. But what they're really doing is screwing more people, and the TAs and the graduate students are very aware of this. If there's one clause that the History Department and the TAs supported, it was that one. And as I say, that was the place where the quarter times were most prevalent, too, and they also supported it being raised to a third time. In fact, the following year, they raised -- they filed a grievance and got their minimum up to 40%, so -- the other 01:51:00departments, the Science Departments, these weren't real issues because people were getting these kinds of appointments anyway. We just contractualized it and gave them the security of knowing it's contractualized, so -- that was very -- that was one of the strongest issues, I will say that.

LS: So, then, do you want to say anything about the strike?

HH: What would you like to know about it? I guess one thing that I could point out that might be interesting to some people is that the night before the strike -- I could get to something that you wanted me to say, anyway, but this wasn't what I was leading up to, but they did bring Jim Stern in the night before the 01:52:00strike, and Jim Stern's in the Industrial Relations Department; also was Marketti's advisor and may have something to do with his being there, because they believe that advisors can intimidate, but he had been involved in the original negotiations that lead to recognition of the union and the fact that they brought him back the night before the strike makes me suspect that he was advising the Chancellor on this subject all along. And I believe that he and the Chancellor were testing out a theory of whether the labor union model could be used to control student disruptions; because the contract does put restrictions on employees, too, especially if it has a "no strike clause" and had a management rights clause in it, which ours does.

LS: You mean restrictions that haven't been there before.

HH: Right. I mean, the TAs had gone on strike a couple of times, just anytime they damn well please. It's very hard for the University to enforce that, because it's hard for them to find out who's not teaching, for example. I mean, 01:53:00it takes a lot of people to go out and count rooms -- it's just a regular -- it's just a chaos principle that they didn't want to deal with, and so they thought -- I think, my conjecture is -- I have no real evidence other than my feeling for the situation, that Stern and the Chancellor were up to trying this out, and in the context of the times, which was 1969/70, things were really reaching their peak then. I think it makes sense in that context. I think the fact that the strike occurred really burned Jim Stern's butt. I mean, I think his career went downhill from there.

LS: He was banking his reputation on the --

HH: Well, I think that had it succeeded, he would go around lecturing on it and writing articles and so forth, like a typical professor (laughing). So that's why I say, not much was heard from him around the Chancellor's office that I know of since that time.

LS: And you were going to say something else.

HH: Yeah, and what I was really going to say, was that he came in at 11:30 or 01:54:00whenever it was, and said, "if you don't settle now, I'm going to call off the strike and we're never going to talk to you again." So we said, "Alright. Fuck you," (laughing) and we left. I mean, that was the way it ended, and we went out on strike, and-

HH: It was a couple of days before anything happened, and then they got -- Don Eaton got involved, really, the business agent for the Teamsters. I think he was the one that really got the sides together, because we had known it was going to be a long strike, because (tape cuts out) -- what I was saying -- we had expected it to be a long strike, and we had organized for it to be a long strike. We had told people, "don't expect this thing to be over for a couple of weeks." So that I think the Chancellor's first strategy was not to talk to us to see if it would fall apart in the first day or two, since all the other student things had fallen apart within a day or two after they had started. But so he refused to bargain with us and we also predicted that and re-organized, so that 01:55:00didn't surprise anybody. But then Eaton got into it and our law firm got into it -- Goldberg-Previant and Uehlman and Uehlman was up here also and Loefler.

LS: Did you have to pay them?

HH: No.

LS: You didn't.

HH: I don't think we did.

LS: Not even the law firm?

HH: I think we picked up some expenses. No, Loefler was doing it as a favor, and Uehlman --

LS: You're lucky.

HH: Yeah. As I said, it was a very unusual confluence of things that came together at that point in time to make the TA possible, skills, that didn't cost money, and experience, too. And that's -- I think what happened there was that Eaton was a big worshiper of Feinsinger and he was the one that suggested Feinsinger be brought in.

LS: I see it a lot, too.

HH: Yeah, that's how that happened. We were basically opposed to it.

LS: Why?

HH: Because we were ideologically opposed to mediators.

LS: Oh.

HH: I mean, who go around twisting people's arms. But then some pressure was put 01:56:00on us by Eaton, et al, because they were -- after all, they were keeping the trucks off campus and they said they weren't going to do it unless we had pots going, and so we were sort of in a position where we had to do it (laughing) and the power struggle in Local 695 was just coming to a head there, too. Don Eaton was in a power struggle with a guy named Al Miller, who had built the union up; had retired, but still was keeping his fingers in the politics, and so we were dealing with Al Miller in a weak way, too, and Eaton was trying to help us and defend himself against Al Miller's attack from the right. So --

LS: These were very internal matters that you couldn't have brought to the whole TA membership, weren't they?

HH: We didn't even know about that.

LS: Oh.

HH: In fact, I didn't understand what was going on during the strike until two years later when Marketti was working for Local 695 under Eaton, and all this came to a head when the Local was put under trusteeship. It's only in looking 01:57:00back that I can see what was going on.

LS: But you were prepared to -- Eaton merely said that he used the Teamsters -- having to stay off campus as a way of persuading you, and he didn't mention the other --

HH: Yeah. No, that was part of it. That was none of our business, really. As I've been saying, looking back, you can see what was going on, and he couldn't afford to commit the union resources for a group that wasn't even Teamster local, although we did talk to him about becoming a Teamster. His answer was he didn't want us in his local, but if we wanted to form another one, we could. He'd be glad to have us do it (laughing).

LS: You never did, though.

HH: No. It almost went to a vote. I mean, there was a lot of support for it, but it never went to a vote. I mean, there was a lot of -- at that time, it was silly to be even affiliated, because once people were just sick and tired of 01:58:00George Meany's position on the war and so forth, they didn't really want to be associated with the AFL-CIO because of that. And, you know, I mean, after all, TAs are TAs and they bought the Teamsters gangster image and it was only the most political people who wanted to join the Teamsters, and the only reason they wanted to join was because then that would guarantee that all they had to do was call Eaton and the campus would be closed (laughing). So, and that never really came to a vote.

LS: You didn't want to particularly yourself?

HH: At that point, I wouldn't have minded joining the Teamsters myself. I wouldn't have objected to it.

LS: Did you actually deal with Feinsinger?

HH: Yeah. I don't remember what day of the strike it was -- second, third, fourth day -- mediation sessions began in the law school. We had our bargaining team in one room and their bargaining team in another room, and he would shuttle back and forth telling stories about what he thought each side would settle for, and I really mean that. I mean, he would say -- we'd say, "well, we want to 01:59:00handle this issue," and he'd say, "Oh, that's no ultimate problem. Write "ULP" next to that."

LS: Well, what's that?

HH: That's his notation -- no ultimate problem --- see, what it means is: a) he thinks' they'll agree to it, or b) he thinks we'll drop it. Anyway, a lot of pressure was put on us. Dave Uehlman was there from the law firm.

LS: But he was a member of the faculty, so you must have felt that he was one of them.

HH: Well --

LS: Could you accept him as a mediator?

HH: I didn't accept him, myself; none of us accepted him, but, I mean, it was a way to get talks started. We knew we had to have talks started because we couldn't -- the membership would have fallen had there been no talks for weeks, so we had to get them going.

LS: Did you respect him and the way he handled it?

HH: Not particularly, no. It wasn't a question of respecting or not respecting.

LS: Well, I mean, just --

HH: He was just doing his job and he was doing --

LS: Did he do it well?

HH: Well, what does "well" mean? To me, doing a job mediary or doing a job well 02:00:00means screwing the union (laughing). You know, so -- I mean, my job was to stay there and keeping people from screwing us.

LS: And screw the union well. Let's put it that way (laughing).

HH: In a way. In a way, he didn't. In a way, he did succeed because -- well, let's put it this way: they tried to intimidate the hell out of us. Both he and Dave Uehlman told us that there would be an injunction coming down, and that we would be in Waupun the next day in jail.

LS: Oh yes?

HH: Yeah.

LS: That's right. You were -- you did have an injunction served on you.

HH: Well, they had filed for it by that time, but the hearing hadn't been held. The Judge didn't -- I don't think the Judge wanted to touch it if he could avoid it. But I can tell you more about that in a minute. I just want to finish -- I mean Uehlman came in. I remember one session, Uehlman came in and said, "you know, you boys are going to be in Waupun," and we'd just had enough, and so Marketti just stood up and stared at Uehlman and said, "you can just shove Waupun right up your ass." Now, it was just -- finally, that was Uehlman left 02:01:00the situation. He realized that tactic wasn't going to work, and we were definitely ready to go to jail for that, and that leads into the injunction, because we told Loefler that we wanted the hearing for the injunction right away because we wanted them to convict us and put us in jail, the leadership in jail, and we were going to insist on conducting the negotiations up in the Dane County Jail. What it would have done -- I think it would have made the strike a lot stronger had that happened, and I think the Chancellor realized that. We would have been able to create martyrs out of ourselves. What happened was that they took the Newark strategy of naming rank and file members.

LS: Yeah, I noticed that.

HH: Rather than the leadership, and I think that's the reason they did it, because it was obviously unusual that we were pushing for the injunction hearing, so eventually the hearing was held. I didn't go. Muehlencamp handled that, and we were enjoined as expected, and we ignored the injunction and these 02:02:00people were named and what happened was the faculty went around four selected departments: History, Math, German . . . one other . . . I don't remember what the other one was -- and picked out something like ten people from each department, just at random, who weren't teaching, and those were the people who were convicted. This is a strategy that they tried -- they also did against the Newark School strike in '69 or '70, so rather than put the leadership in jail, they were trying to set a strategy. I mean, the Chancellor is very much on top of his management labor relations, so -- but that cost us $5,000 to ignore that injunction.

LS: Oh, did it?

HH: Yeah. That's what we were eventually -- or $5,250 or something like that.

LS: How did you pay for that?

HH: Donations.

LS: From your strike fund.

HH: No. We didn't pay it for about three years later, because we appealed it.

LS: Oh.

HH: It was paid much later, at least three years, and it was paid out of donations. There's always money to fight the University.

HH: You asked me something about Feinsinger's role in the negotiations. As I remember, what happened -- the mediation sessions that he held basically didn't go very far. There was some movement in those things, but what finally happened was Marketti and Loefler and the Chancellor got together in the Chancellor's office and I suppose --

LS: Now why did they do that?

HH: Just to make it easier, I guess.

LS: Why was it Marketti and --

HH: Why did we send Marketti?

LS: Yeah.

HH: Because he has the most skill in nailing the language, and because we knew 02:04:00he wouldn't sell us out. So they essentially worked out the language --

LS: Did the Chancellor say, "Send one person," or did you say, "We will send one person," or who initiated it?

HH: I have -- I don't really know. I don't think the Chancellor did. I think that Eaton -- see, Eaton was always talking to the Chancellor. It's the way these things work. The labor leader says, "Well, look, we brought all these people out. You've got to do something to get them off. What can we do?" The Chancellor says, "Well, maybe let's have a meeting or something." Anyway, this thing got started. I don't really know, to tell you the truth. It probably -- these meetings definitely involved Marketti. They probably involved Loefler most of the time; definitely involved the Chancellor. I don't know who the Chancellor had there. I think Eaton was probably there some of the time.

LS: And they settled everything but the educational plan.

HH: Right. They worked through all the issues, got the language down. Well, Marketti was bringing it back to us and we were going over all of it, but we 02:05:00weren't actually sitting there with the Chancellor. I think it boils down to one or more of these tactics of, first of all, I say to somebody, and second of all, getting all the other people out there who are going to yell and scream at the other side. Marketti, I don't think, was intimidated. I mean, they picked the wrong person to try to do that to. So, as I can remember, this must have been done by the middle of the second week at the latest.

What I was starting to say was that we had picked the time of the strike two weeks before Easter vacation on purpose, because we knew that we could get -- we were asking for a student boycott and we knew we could get it for one week based on previous demonstrations. We figured we would have one week of that, and then everybody would go home for vacation a week early anyway, which they always did, especially if there was a strike going. So what we were really doing was scaring them into a two week student boycott and we knew that after vacation, the 02:06:00student boycott would probably fall apart, as it did. So, what was happening after vacation -- so we had two weeks of strike, then one week of vacation, then -- so then Monday of that fourth week, the first day of school, students were going back to class, many people were getting tired, and they held this -- I think on that Tuesday, they held this sham faculty meeting about educational planning, and this was a master of orchestration, master of orchestration by the Chancellor. He had a right wing motion on the floor which would take away recognition of the union so it could stop [range?] at somebody -- They could pass it if they wanted to. It wouldn't mean anything. We had his position in the middle, and then the liberals, all 20 of them or whatever it was, had their position to the left and so they had really classic debate which -- there's tapes of some of it, and -- I mean, if you want to find out where the faculty's 02:07:00at, listen to people like Barbash who were taped in this. Barbash, who was a former head of the AFL-CIO research division -- I mean, this guy's a former trade unionist, probably even hung around the CP in the 30's, one of these people that's renounced their past, and he gets into a situation like this and he says he has the right to make all the decisions and stands up there and rants and raves about, "I'm not going to let anybody tell me what textbooks to use," which wasn't even the issue anyway. The TA made a film and they had his speech on the film with walruses playing in the sea while he talks. He sounds like a walrus (laughing). Anyway, so --

LS: Did they put it in the archives?

HH: These films were in, and people can show them. If you want to buy a copy, you can (laughing).

LS: I'll keep it in mind.

HH: So, anyway, they past the Chancellor's motion, of course, and that -- eventually what they past went into the contract the next day, I think it was. I mean, I'm hazy on the time. You can check it. But basically what happened was we had a memberships meeting either the night of the faculty meeting or the night after and the question was whether or not we should escalate tactics and cause the University a lot of trouble or whether we should settle, and the decision was to settle.

LS: Was the -- well, I guess the vote would be recorded in The Cardinal, I suppose.

HH: Probably not. We closed the meeting.

LS: Oh. What was the difference?

HH: I don't remember. It was pretty even. Actually, I think what the decision was was to put their offer to a vote but, I mean, once that decision is made, you know that it's going to pass, so --

LS: So that was it, then.

HH: Um-hmm, and the faculty were used once again (laughing) as tools of the 02:09:00Chancellor to sort of round it up.

LS: Do you talk jovially with your math faculty about all of this? Do you sort of --

HH: I try not --

LS: Put in on one side.

HH: I don't find them to be very intelligent people, so I don't talk to them very much. I mean, I find them very boring people. I talk to them about mathematics; that's it. Most of them sit around talking about their stereos or their lawns, which is very bourgeoisie and I find that boring. So I don't sit in the lounge and talk to them, and their political discussions are in another world. I mean, they have no sense of what's going on at all, so -- the myth of the ivory tower is true, as far as I'm concerned.

LS: You don't talk with any faculty?

HH: Not on any kind of non-business terms, not really. I mean, I don't want to 02:10:00paint it to -- there's a couple of people that I find interesting and worth talking to, but as a group, I don't.

LS: And you went off to Baraboo.

HH: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

LS: What is there, a center up there?

HH: Yeah, the University of Wisconsin Center, two year; up there for a year and a half. See, I believe in teaching. There's no contradiction here at all.

LS: Do you like teaching?

HH: Yeah, and I think that's what should be done. I also like doing research, but that doesn't mean I like being around a bunch of jackasses and I don't see why that has to be that way, but apparently it is.

LS: But you would -- if you had a chance and had the choice, you would put more effort into teaching again.

HH: On this campus? Yeah.

LS: Tell me, if you could just briefly, about your recent -- Paul Soglin made 02:11:00you -- what is it . . . Board of Public Works, the head of Board of Public Works.

HH: Yeah.

LS: That's very intriguing.

HH: Well, when he got elected, he asked me to serve on the Madison General Hospital Board, which I did for a year, and then the guy that they had been -- chairman of the Board of Public Works resigned so they asked me.

LS: Is that just an honorary position, or do you have work to do?

HH: Yeah, I get paid.

LS: You get paid?

HH: Hundred bucks a year, if you call it -- it's the only City -- citizen position that is. What we do is do all -- we have to approve every construction project, every street repair, all the real estate division purchases, all the parks things --

LS: Heavens.

HH: It's everything in public works.

LS: How many people of you are there?

HH: Seven; there's -- I'm on there as the mayor's representative, there's two 02:12:00regular citizen members, one of whom is always from the trade union movement and is generally picked by the AFL-CIO and one of whom they try to have as a business representative, and then there's the city comptroller, city planning director, that's the two city representatives, and then there's two aldermen -- alderpersons.

LS: And were you in the minority on the -- are you in the minority on the votes, usually?

HH: Um-umm (negatively). I don't think so. Um . . .

LS: I have some bones to pick with you, but I won't do it here.

HH: If it's about a project in your ward, talk to your alderperson (laughing). I don't think there's that many splits on the board. I really don't. I mean, I hardly even thought about the question until you asked it, and --

LS: That's amazing. I would have thought this would be a place where your feeling about what society did generally would put you always in a position.

HH: Well, it doesn't come up that often, but on occasions when it does, I find support. I would say out of the seven, there's only two that are really right of center and they aren't always right of center.

LS: Yeah. Would you -- does that sort of -- does being in the public administration -- would you call it public administration -- interest you?

HH: I guess, you know.

LS: I mean, is that a direction you would consider going on in?

HH: I doubt it. I never thought about it much. I mean, I don't consider it a job. I consider it as a -- that I'm trying to represent the views of the center city. I try to do that.

LS: I see, I see.

HH: And I consider it sort of a representative job in the city government and 02:14:00also representing a political turn of the city which, even though the mayor is mayor, doesn't get represented that much.

LS: Yeah. Do you want to say anything else?

HH: I can't think of anything right off.

LS: You can always come back in and I can always call you.

LS: This is -- we just ended up, and the last second of about three months ago, of whenever it was, so this is November 23rd now, I guess, and I asked you back to ask you some other questions.

Should we talk about the TAA some more? I'd like to find out what your view of it is now. You talked about elitism being a problem in the early 70's.

HH: Well, that situation is actually, now that you mention it, that problem has 02:15:00just actually been finally solved. That that -- in 1971 or 1972 when that really came to a head, one of the solutions proposed was to have a steering committee for the leadership and is, at this very moment, a ballot being conducted to change the constitution to do that, and I fully expect it to pass, so there will no longer be a president and so forth of the TAA. There'll be a steering committee and the idea is to run the thing through the executive functions collectively.

LS: Sort of a consensus operation.

HH: Well, I assume that will be worked out by the people who are on the board, how they're going to do it, but it should be more or less that way. So I -- and I think that the efforts of the women's movement have borne fruit and women are definitely participating on an equal level and I think that that problem has 02:16:00basically resolved itself. The problem now is to deal with the University and I think people are devoting their attentions to that and I think that no doubt the issue of elitism will flare up occasionally when some people get a little bit out of hand, but I think it will be dealt with.

LS: Graduate students are in a different spot now from what they were in 1970. I've heard that there's a lot of competition among them in some departments out of the need for jobs and recommendations. Are you aware of this and do you have enough to do with graduate students?

HH: I think it's true. I've been grading some graduate course papers and I think that to some extent, you're getting back the kind of people that came to the University in the 1950's. As my uncle used to say, the "social misfits," the 02:17:00people who couldn't get along anywhere else and who had some brains, and I think those people are now coming -- tend to be more individualistic, a lot less concerned about other people as opposed to people who came in the 60's, a lot of whom came to avoid the draft. An even greater number of them came because they thought going to the University and working here was a way to change society. So those people who I think were more motivated to helping other people than the people who are here now. So I -- I mean, I really think that the University System is producing a lot worse type person.

LS: You don't think it's a question of people fearing for their ability to earn their living?

HH: Yeah, I think that keeps out the people who are socially concerned, because they know they're not going to get a job. You have to -- it's still the last vestiges of the futile system. You have to have good recommendations from an 02:18:00advisor to get jobs and so of course, if you open your mouth, you're not going to get the letters of recommendation, so I think those people no longer come to the University in the first place. I think universities have lost a lot of very creative people and I think that that will show up and I think they'll be funded less because of it.

LS: I was really wondering if this didn't affect the TAA.

HH: I'm sure it does, definitely. The TAA has, I think, gone in the directions of more traditional trade unionism, but it's still a very militant union, compared to other trade unions, and still far to the left of most of the other unions. But, I mean, there's a larger group of people who aren't joining.

LS: Who aren't joining.

HH: Because of this attitude.

LS: Oh, yeah.

HH: So I think -- I think the universities are in trouble. The faculty -- 02:19:00especially in a place like this where the faculty is getting older and older and we're not getting any young blood. So --

LS: Well, that's a serious problem, but we'll talk about your suggestions for improvement at the end. Somebody in The Cardinal editorial commented that -- I think was it was at the end of the strike after last year -- that this was the end of the TAA.

HH: Well, it isn't. I think that's a joke, you know. It's just somebody that doesn't know what they're talking about. The organizing of the last year -- we totally revitalized the union. It's going full force. It's extremely active in the Madison Federation of Labor and the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Teachers, and the AFL-CIO. I think there's no fears about the TAA. It's here to stay.

LS: What --

HH: The only question is how militant will its demands be in time, any point in time. I think that's the only question.

LS: Say that -- what did you say?

HH: The only question is how militant will its demands be at any point in time. 02:20:00I mean, I'm sure they'll be a vacillation between conservative eras and more militant eras. But as I said, when you live in a futile system, you may have to find people that won't join, but they'll never vote to abolish it. It's too important to keep the faculty off their back, basically, and a lot of people realize that. I mean, it never bothers me when the membership falls down 25% or anything, because they'd never win a decertification election. The University would never win. I mean, I think it's become part of the institution. I think it will happen in other places, too. It already has.

LS: Are you still involved in it at all?

HH: Yeah. My role right now is I'm delegate to the Madison Federation of Labor.

LS: I was going to ask you what was the effect of having affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers?

HH: Our effect is we're involved officially in the labor movement, in the 02:21:00AFL-CIO, and that has gotten us a much bigger audience. It's gotten us access to legal aides that we never had before.

LS: Any financial aid?

HH: On occasion. But we don't usually need it. We generate a pretty good sum of money here. We're actually one of the wealthier locals in the Federation of Teachers.

LS: And you're here helping other people.

HH: Right.

LS: So -- I know -- I read a statement that as a consequence of TAA representatives attending the national meetings, they were learning more tactics, better ways of handling strikes and negotiations. Do you think that's true?

HH: No. I think we know what we're doing. In fact, I think that most of the suggestions from the national staff tend to be from a conservative and sell-out nature and our problem is keeping the national staff out of them. We don't 02:22:00usually invite them in.

LS: Do they want to come in?

HH: Well, the local staff who I'm pretty good friends with comes around. It's his job and he doesn't say anything unless he's asked a technical question. We do all our own bargaining, all our own planning. I don't think that we'll know -- (tape cuts out).

LS: [Do you know of?] any projects such as the one to get the budget made visible to the University?

HH: What do you mean by projects? Yeah, we're still working on that. We've won the lawsuit to get access to the computer tapes and I'm sure we'll be analyzing that computer tape and will come up with our criticisms of the budget, so I think there's -- the state legislature, I think, is looking forward to that because they've never been able to get a straight answer out of the university administration and I think they would like to see a third party, or even -- 02:23:00they'd really like to see their own analysts get into it, but they don't have the information about the university to really test some of these -- they don't have the experience to know what's going on in the departments to really test some of these items and I think the TAs do and we'll be able to spot some things.

LS: How -- in what way are you doing this?

HH: Well, we'll have -- we've won a lawsuit. We had to sue them to get their computer tapes so we can analyze right on their computer instead of working it out by hand.

LS: This is as to class size and professors' pay and that sort of thing?

HH: Everything, right. And so we'll do a study on that and be ready for the next budget, [essentially?] our recommendations.

LS: Won't that be in another year or so?

HH: Yeah, and our recommendations will be in the direction, I'm sure, of putting more money into teaching.

LS: Undergraduate teaching.

HH: Right; which is, after all, what the public thinks they're getting. I mean, I don't -- there's no other particular projects other than to support the labor 02:24:00movement and get ready for our next contract bargaining.

LS: What about the audit? Did you -- were you at all interested in that?

HH: Yeah, but that was a sham from start to end. I mean, I think that was a first step. The legislature is afraid of the University and they wanted to make a little bit of a noise and they did it and backed down. I think it will build up in a few years to come. I think there will definitely be more and more audits and I look forward to those with great hopes. I think that the public really needs to know what's going on.

LS: You think the legislature would handle it more intelligently than the administration?

HH: Well, I think that some of the special privileges might be cut out.

LS: Of faculty members.

HH: Faculty, sure. I don't see any reason why they should be paid $30,000 a year and be incompetent teachers and come up to the campus a couple of hours a week. 02:25:00If they want to be hired to do research, then they should apply for a research job in the budget. If the state wants to spend money on research, well budget money for research. Don't budget it through -- what they do right now is they sneak it in in the faculty salary; fifty percent of the faculty salary is for research. The public doesn't really know it's paying for that, and I doubt that they'd want to if they knew.

LS: Do you think -- you must think that research has some value to teaching.

HH: Sure, but I think that the public should know that they're spending money. I don't think it should be essentially stolen from them under this guise of teaching, especially if so many of these allegedly good researchers are totally incompetent teachers. For example, they were -- in the math department this semester, they were short a teacher from Math 122, which is an education course, which is totally faculty taught, so they asked me to teach it and right away I get people coming from my advisor section who's also teaching, saying could they come to my section because my advisor's such an incompetent teacher. So, that's 02:26:00the kind of thing that goes on. I really resent being in my position, when he can sit in his position and not do his job.

LS: How long has he been here?

HH: I don't know . . . early 60's probably. Well, there's no one that will ever be fired by this University by the faculty for bad teaching.

LS: No. I was just wondering if he was one of the ones -- there was a period when the hiring was -- people were being hired without a great deal of thought.

HH: Oh, I'm sure he was hired, I'm sure. But even the ones they're bringing in now can't teach. I mean, they've got a guy in my field who was teaching Math 120, which is another education course in the hour after mine, and people were standing up, all saying that they hoped he wouldn't come. I mean, there's people that just can't do it, and they can't communicate to people. I doubt they could communicate about how to take a -- drive a car across town. I don't understand why they're being -- you know, my feeling is that they shouldn't be paid to be teachers then. If the public wants to hire them as researchers, hire them as researchers.

LS: Do students grieve this at all?

HH: Well, there was a -- in the Math Department this last spring, the graduate students got after one professor who finally drove them up against the wall. He was taken out of the course; no disciplinary action, but they did stop him from teaching the course in the future. I think that the graduate students may be more self-centered, but on the other hand, they are becoming more militant about the teaching they're getting. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see some more --

HH: This is an issue I think will come to a head. Some of the faculty are proposing that -- such as some private schools do -- that they hire undergraduate teaching staff to handle all the teaching and these guys can sit around and do their research. That's their solution. Of course, that keeps them with their fat salaries and all their prestigious positions. I mean, I wouldn't 02:28:00be surprised to see that proposal come out. They can hire a whole batch of lecturers to handle all of their undergraduate courses, non-tenure-track.

LS: I've heard that spoken of, but as a very bad idea, because then you get a two class system (tape cuts out) --

HH: No, I'm sure it's caused them a lot of trouble, because I'm sure those people were organized. If I was there, I would definitely try to organize. No question about it, because they would be doing the real work of the institution, the work that brings the tax money in. I think these people have a real problem, these faculty do, in justifying their existence.

LS: You don't think that it's perhaps just a momentary -- a problem that arose in the 60's and that will resolve itself after that wave has passed.

HH: Well, do you think that people were hired for their teaching ability at any time in the past?

LS: I don't know.