First interview with William H. Sewell

William Sewell #101 Transcript

LS: There was an article in the Cardinal, I think it was in July 7th, 1968, which seemed to me to present a point of view that we could take. You might either be in favor of it or not, but it has some nice things to say. They are speaking of the passing of you and Kauffman, and of you both having been liberal scholars who cared for students and who had thought of the institution as an educational institution. I'm not quoting them exactly here. They said that this is no longer, I think they used the term, "where the university is at." And, they said, what is needed is the--oh, and they speak about the bloodshed and the police and that sort of thing--what is needed is the kind of chancellor who can do that sort of thing and not feel bad about it afterwards, someone who can outwit the students and who could, perhaps, split the protesters. They also said, "We doubt whether either was personally responsible for the decision to use the police, but neither spoke out afterwards." And it just generally--it's a 00:01:00very--they wish you luck in your subsequent career.

WS: It's nice of them.

LS: It wasn't the usual tone of the Cardinal.

WS: No.

LS: But it was a good editorial.

LS: Well, I'd like to ask, to begin with, well, why Fleming left.

WS: Well, I think, clearly, that Fleming left because, during that year--in fact, within the three or four weeks before he made his decision--he was the prime candidate for the presidency of either Minnesota or Michigan. And I think Bob Fleming, clearly it was his desire to be a university administrator. If you're going to be a university administrator, then certainly being the top 00:02:00person in the system or in the university is the most desirable position. And I can't think how anyone who had ambition to be a university president wouldn't rather be president of Minnesota or Michigan than chancellor of Wisconsin, on the grounds that, even though Wisconsin may be as good or better a university than either or both, that is the Madison campus--although some people would argue with that--at least you don't have anybody above you in the administrative structure interfering with or helping to call the shots for what you're going to do. And I know that Bob Fleming, particularly, was bothered by that although he and Fred Harrington got along very well. Still, he had decisions that--he was 00:03:00limited in his choice by Fred's own ambitions, and Fred's own style of administration, and Fred's own program. In fact, he suffered from having Fred in the same building. The system hadn't been at all clearly defined by then. And Fred maintained his office in Bascom Hall, and to many people he was still running the Madison campus. I think that clarified with each successive chancellor and that Fred was in the building only two or three months and then moved to Van Hise. And that physical separation also was a symbolic one.

LS: When you were chancellor.

WS: When I was chancellor. And I think that was of considerable importance. But 00:04:00still, nobody has as yet been able to work out this problem of the president of the system, or whatever he may be called, and the chancellors. And it has been particularly difficult where the head of the system was formerly the head of the major university that makes up the system. California went through that with Clark--well, first with Sproul, and then Clark Kerr, and finally, after Clark Kerr was forced to resign the presidency, they went outside the system completely to get a president--oh, I guess they call him chancellor there as the head of it. I'm not sure whether it's chancellor or president. But in any event they went outside the system. And I think that gave the Berkeley campus much more autonomy than it had had before. So to make a long story short, if you're 00:05:00going to try and run a university, and a university in the traditional sense of a campus and a faculty, you're just a lot better off being number one than number two.

LS: Especially if number one is Fred Harrington.

WS: Yes. Yes. Or any, I think--. I don't think it's just Fred Harrington. Fred Harrington is a prototype of the problem, but certainly the chancellors under Clark Kerr had exactly the same problem. When Clark Kerr himself was chancellor and Sproul was president, he faced the same problem.

LS: Well, I was thinking of Weaver as president. It seemed to me that at that point the scales tipped--.

WS: By the time Weaver came--. I had much more autonomy, actually, in the 00:06:00administration of the campus, than Bob Fleming ever had. And that, in part, was because by then the system had really enlarged, and Fred Harrington had seen his role as the larger one, rather than an immediate interference with what went on, or what went on in administration, on the Madison campus. And also I demanded a bit more authority although I didn't, by any means, have complete autonomy, especially when it came to dealing with the student matters. But I think just the fact that Fred moved over to Van Hise Hall and really wanted to escape some of the problems of the Madison campus, especially the student problems. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and those as possible, except the regents wouldn't let him, of course. So that, if you're going to be held 00:07:00responsible, it's much better to make your own decisions in times of trouble. And I think Bob Fleming clearly wanted to get out from under that kind of an arrangement. Moreover, it'd be hard to argue with taking the presidency of the University of Michigan. It's certainly one of the--all the ratings put it in the first five or six universities in America.

It probably has more autonomy than any other state university. In many ways, it's just a private university paid for by the state, you know. It's a constitutional university. The legislature really has a hard time, even in these days, having much to say about what goes on there. They only appropriate the funds to the board of regents, and the board of regents decides, with the administration, how to spend them. So it probably has more autonomy than any state university in America. And it's a fine university, so I could even imagine 00:08:00somebody going from the presidency of the University of Wisconsin to the presidency of Michigan.

LS: Oh, I see. Well, that would be a--if that's the case, then--

WS: But certainly, the chancellor should, easily. And I think Bob would have gone to Minnesota. He was ready to go. I know that to be true when the Michigan offer came. So that I guess that explains that aspect of it.

LS: Did Harrington have much to do with his decisions about how to handle some of the student problems?

WS: No, I don't think so. I think he didn't pay much attention to it. As I say, he was trying to put distance between himself and the responsibility for students.

LS: Even then.

WS: Oh, yes, from the beginning, which shows him to be a wise man. But I'm sure that Fred did not like some of the dealings that Bob had with the students, 00:09:00particularly bailing out the students who had been arrested, because the regents put great heat on Fred over that.

LS: Oh, they did.

WS: Oh, yes. The regents were very unhappy with Fleming because they said that he coddled the students too much. And so I'm sure he just did things like that completely on his own. I'm sure Fred didn't--if he'd have talked it over with Fred, I'm sure Fred would have said, "Don't do it."

LS: So you presume he didn't talk it over with him?

WS: No, I presume. I don't know. But I'm practically certain he didn't. And I think the regents were probably, by then, putting a lot of heat on Fred about the student discipline and student affairs generally. By that time, it had 00:10:00started to build up.

LS: Although it wasn't yet as conservative as it became.

WS: No, I think what really happened was, if you'll recall,

I think it was the first time in history, but it's certainly the first time in modern history, that a governor had been in office long enough so that he could appoint the whole board. See, there were nine members, and they served for nine years. So every year, barring resignations and deaths when you could appoint more, the governor would appoint a person to the regents. And traditionally in this state, even though it's always been--up until recent years--predominantly a Republican state, and mainly with Republican governors, there's always been a Democrat, or at least a token Democrat, left on the board. But Warren Knowles 00:11:00had become so upset about the student problems that he had appointed quite conservative people to the board and people who were told by him, "Now look, the problem of the university and the thing that's getting the governor heat all over the state is the problem of the students. And so be tough on that." And I think that Warren Knowles was a very good friend of the university, except for that.

LS: He was?

WS: Oh, yes. In fact, you know, I'm a lifelong Democrat, but I would say, in general, in the thirty-two years I've been here, we've fared better under Republican governors, almost without exception, than Democrats. And that's in part because the Democrats elected have been activists, and they tend to interfere more with the university and think they know more what the university 00:12:00should do than have the Republicans, who tend to sit back and say, "Well, let the university make its own decisions about what it wants to do"--until you get a public clamor like you had about the students. And then Warren got very active in that. But other than that I found him very cooperative about what the university was doing. I think Fred Harrington would say the same thing. That was a source of considerable problem. He called me down to his office on two or three occasions to tell me, essentially, that as he went around the state, the most constant heat that he got was about student behavior on campus. And he didn't understand why we couldn't control it better than we did. But he was always very nice about it. That is, he never was, you know, saying, "You'd better quit if you can't control them," or anything of that sort. He just, as a 00:13:00good politician, was upset when the public was upset.

So that the regents, then--by that time a number of them had been put on by Knowles with rather specific expression on his part that he wanted to push the administration toward more of a crackdown on the students. The last remaining non-Republicans both turned out to be liberals, if my memory serves me correctly about who was last. No doubt about their being liberals; one was the labor leader from Milwaukee. What's his name? Jake Friedrick. Marvelous old gentlemen.

LS: I know DeBardeleben would be the other man you had mentioned.

WS: And DeBardeleben. But those two were very stalwart defenders of the administration and they didn't necessarily understand why the students made the university their target, but they wanted the administration to treat the students fairly and to listen to their problems rather than to necessarily crack down on them. DeBardeleben was the last to go, and that must have happened some time after I'd been in office four or five months--in the spring. And I remember our walking out to his car together. And he said, "Well, you're going to have a hell of a time." He said, "You have already, but these conservative members of 00:15:00the board are really going to give you all kinds of hell." I said, "I thought they already had." But he said, "Well, it'll be worse." And it was, although I don't know how much worse after that. It was already quite bad all along.

Very seldom was there a board meeting in which the board, in talking to me, wouldn't spend most of their time on something or other that had occurred during the prior month in relation to students. And I never found many of that board much interested in academic programming in the university. Those weren't the issues they were concerned with primarily. I remember being in one meeting in which they had appointed a committee to come up with a long-term plan for the development of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee as an urban university. Bob Clodius had worked with the committee, and they had developed, really, a 00:16:00magnificent long-term plan. I think they'd worked two years on it. And we were meeting, I think, at Green Bay at that time. I'm not sure whether the chairman, I guess the chairman was a member of the board of regents, but he and Bob were presenting a report. After about ten minutes--all the regents were looking at their watches--finally, somebody just spoke out, I don't remember who it was, and said, "Look, I don't know why we need to go on talking about this. We can all read it. Let's get on to the urgent matters." The urgent matters had to do with things that were happening on the Madison campus in terms of students. They then went on with that for a couple of hours, you know. And I don't even 00:17:00remember what it was, at that time, they were upset about. But whatever it was, that was what they wanted to talk about. And that was typical of many of the regent meetings. Fred used to try very hard to steer them away. And Fred was a great filibusterer. He should have been a southern senator, you know. They'd ask him a question about why students were permitted to do something or other, and Fred would start off with a history of American universities and relations between administration and faculty and parietals. And he'd do it by sections of the country and, you know, after a half hour, they'd all be about asleep. And he'd never really get around to answering the questions. And my problem was always: they'd ask me a question, and I'd answer it right off, and straightforwardly and usually in a way that they didn't like. And one of them 00:18:00even told me--they weren't all unfriendly to me as a person, but my position was what they didn't like--one of them even told me, he took me to one side one time and said, "Look, you know, if you'd get"--this was one of the Republican members--he said, "You know, you'd get along a lot better with this board if you didn't lecture us so much." And I said, "Well, I don't talk very much." He said, "Well, but whenever we ask you a question, you start talking about individual rights in a democracy, and what the system of jurisprudence is, and that embarrasses us, and we don't like to be lectured about those things." But Fred never lectured them. He'd just give a historical statement. He was an expert on chapter nine, I remember, in the legal code for Wisconsin, which sets up the 00:19:00universities and defines the campuses as state parks. And he'd go on into all the ramifications of that for the control of behavior on the campus and all the legal questions involved. He was really a master filibusterer. Now they'd get quite upset by that, but not as upset as they would at me because I would answer their questions very directly and usually in ways that they just didn't like. But I think in light of the fact that--to go back to the original question, in light of the fact that this was a pretty hot place and Michigan, in comparison, although they had lots of trouble, was mild--you know, at the worst, Michigan never had anything that would approach the problems that we had here--so it was 00:20:00a fine place to go. And it was time for a change. And for an upwardly mobile academic administrator, it was one of the top jobs in the United States. So I'm sure that's why Bob went.

LS: I'd just like to ask you about the board. Were they at all awed by Harrington?

WS: No, well, I don't know. I think the attitude of the board toward Harrington--you'd have to talk about what board. The earlier boards were much awed by--impressed I think--by Fred's ability to, his grasp of the big issues in higher education, his knowledge of, and his power to get money. And Fred always knew just what was going on in Washington, and what was going to go on. And he had a lot of influence on what went on, both directly through his influence on 00:21:00people in government administration, and the Congress. Fred was a very common testifier on all higher education bills. And he's forceful, you know, and he's big and impressive. And I think they probably might have been awed by Fred, but they were all that coupled with a very favorable impression of what he was doing for the university. This must have made him, the regents felt, a very excellent person to be president. Now, if you go to the later boards, after trouble started, then they didn't seem terribly awed by Fred. They would tackle him on various issues, I thought quite often tried to embarrass him, but he never was embarrassed. Or if he was, he didn't show it. And I think Fred had a certain 00:22:00ill-concealed contempt for most of them anyway. Fred was the kind of person that tended to ram things down their throat if they didn't swallow them easily. And I think by the time the board that I knew, while I was chancellor, had come into power, they were quite resentful of Fred. And I think, looking back over it, if you could see, it was just a matter of time before they would ask for Fred's resignation if things kept going on as they were.

LS: So this attitude would backfire on him.

WS: Yes. On the other hand there were people there like DeBardeleben, who was a very strong supporter of Fred, although he didn't agree with everything Fred did by any means, but he was a very strong--. Friedrick was a very strong supporter. 00:23:00Matt Werner was a very strong, very strong supporter of Fred. And see, up until about that time, when there were two or three resignations and retirements from the board, the board had been pretty much under the leadership of Arthur DeBardeleben. Even when there was a majority of Republicans, they didn't necessarily all vote together, and Arthur kind of whipped the rest of them into line. And so the alliance between Fred and Arthur was very successful, and I think, for the most part, for the good. And then, after Arthur, Fred's star just kept going down and continued to go down until finally, of course, his resignation, which I'm told, I don't know, was forced. Usually, such 00:24:00resignations are. I guess I should say, mine wasn't. I just quit. But when I told Fred Harrington I was going to resign, he said that he thought that it was probably a good idea because he thought it would only be two or three or four months until the board forced me to resign or asked me to resign. And my main debate was, well, should I resign or wait for the fun of being fired, which I thought would be a marvelous thing, to be fired by this bunch of antediluvian conservatives. And then I decided: oh, hell, it'd split up the year. It would be very difficult to find a replacement and so on. I'd better just quit. I'd had enough fighting by then, anyway. But I did think and had cherished the notion that, wouldn't it be fun to be the only chancellor ever fired, and be fired for 00:25:00being too liberal, and so on. Anyway. But I wasn't quite up to the game.

LS: Did you have your speech ready in case?

WS: Oh, yes. I always have a speech ready.

But in any event I think Fred figured I was a liability by then. Fred and I understood each other pretty well. We'd known each other a long, long time. And although we'd never been bosom pals kinds of people, we had great respect for each other. And Fred and I had our differences while I was chancellor. It was always over students, never anything else: academic programs--anything else.

LS: That's about all anybody thought about anyway.

WS: Well, I was in trouble on a lot of other things, you know. I was in trouble over the appointment of the dean of pharmacy; and law--

WS: Oh, that's right, yes.

WS: --and the director of the Student Union. All those things were big fights, you know. And Fred supported me on all of those, never wavered in his support. But it was the student things that, of course, determined everything in those days. And Fred, I think, felt that I was too easy on students. On the other hand he was very worried about the faculty support during that time, and he thought I had that, even though he probably didn't.

LS: He was worried about it on his behalf, or yours, or--

WS: Well, its whole effect on the university.

LS: Oh, I see.

WS: He didn't want the faculty--this faculty's never been much alienated from administration. There have been instances in the past, but in general the administration's been supportive of faculty, and the faculty's been supportive 00:27:00of the administration. And I think Fred felt that this was an issue on which there might be quite a serious rupture. There was for a while. After all, you remember, after the Dow incident, the University Committee met and came up with a resolution in support of me because they knew there would be a resolution condemning me. I suppose that was the strategy that--they didn't consult me about it--but I think that was the strategy that they felt was the proper one to take. And you probably recall we had two meetings of the faculty. The first one went about seven hours and the next one about five, with the Union Theater full and with two-way communications through closed-circuit television with several 00:28:00other places where faculty were. Of course, a lot of non-faculty got into the faculty meeting and voted and various other things. But anyway, I thought from the course of the speeches that were made in the faculty, certainly the first several hours, that the only thing--that they would vote down a vote of confidence, and I would just resign. And probably giving a ringing denunciation of the faculty, but that I would resign. But then, the second day, a few people spoke in support, and I could see increasingly--I said nothing during that whole time. I turned the meeting over to Jim.

LS: Cleary?

WS: Cleary, who was vice chancellor, and who was a masterful--an authority, actually, on parliamentary procedures. He's written a major book on Robert's Rules of Order, historically developed up to the present. And he turned out to be a very good presiding officer and a very fair one. And I just turned the chair over to him after making a little statement at the beginning of the meeting. And it wasn't until after the vote that I said a word. But then, when the vote came in at the end of the second day, you could see. I could tell the shift. Or what I could really sense was that the people who were verbal and vocal about it were not being supported by the silent ones. And so when the vote finally came, you know, it was about two to one in favor of the resolution, as I 00:30:00recall. But I don't know how I got started on that other than to say, oh, that there was a real split in the faculty. And I felt that it was very necessary to heal that breach. The split in the faculty here was no different than any place else that had real trouble. Berkeley was even worse split than we were and remained split for much longer. Our faculty very rapidly came back to essentially a supportive position. And Fred was very worried about that split as he had good reason to be. And I think Fred felt that some of the actions that I took, such as appointing a student-faculty committee to come up with rules 00:31:00governing conduct and such matters, that was the Crow Committee as I recall, and then another committee to come up with a more appropriate system of hearings for people charged with violation of university regulations. I've forgotten, I think, Merriman, no Mermin, yes, Sam Mermin was chairman of that committee. And people got working very hard on those things, and we had all sorts of hearings and faculty meetings on their report and so on. And I think those things tended to heal the breach much more rapidly than it was healed in other places. In part, it was because the faculty really wanted to support the administration, but they were distressed that violence had occurred. And they were distressed 00:32:00that the administration had had any part in the responsibility for violence. It didn't seem to distress them--well, I'm sure it distressed them but not so that they'd make public outcries--that the students were behaving violently. There wasn't much protest about that from the faculty, actually, although many individuals talked about it a good deal. But sit-ins in buildings had taken place, you know, a number of times during the Fleming period. And the feeling, I think, on the part of the faculty wasn't that that wasn't proper behavior but after all, it was the administration's problem.

But when it became apparent that the students were turning not only against administration but the faculty as well, then the faculty got quite upset. You 00:33:00know, most faculty members see themselves--they don't admit it--as kind of substitute parents to the young people who come, and they really want their love and respect. And when they don't get it, they just feel terrible about it. And I think some faculties--Columbia and Berkeley, much more so than here--just couldn't recover from that. Harvard especially, you know. What happened to Harvard was petty in comparison with Berkeley or here. And yet you would think, if you talked to easterners, that the whole trouble started at Columbia and Harvard. And we had it at least a year before. Well, I mean we had had it for two or three years before, and we had bad trouble long before anything happened at either of those places. But the faculty at those places were probably much, much more alienated from the administration than here.

LS: The difference here is that precisely the faculty who would be most caring about their students were the ones who were most sympathetic with them. So that--

WS: Yes, yes, I think that's true.

LS: --and also who liked you.

WS: Yes, that was a conflict for a lot of people, I'm sure, that there was a certain amount of personal liking and a certain amount of understanding that I was in a hell of a mess, partly of the faculty's making.

It was the faculty that had just the spring before, 9-to-1, voted in favor of continuing interviews on this campus and insisting that people be able to freely be interviewed and so on, you know. It was the faculty who had done all that and then, when the crunch came and troubles resulted, the faculty, of course, felt, 00:35:00except for a few of the wilder ones, felt quite embarrassed that they were now in the process, at least in those meetings, of arguing whether to support or condemn somebody who had tried, at least half heartedly, to carry out their mandate.

LS: Let's go back to that vote in the spring. What interested me was what your own feeling at that time was about whether protests would be allowed and what--.

WS: Oh, well, my feeling, you mean at the time--in the spring--

LS: How did you vote?

WS: How did I vote?

LS: Yes.

WS: I voted against it.

LS: You did.

WS: Yes.

LS: You were one of the ones--among the ones

WS: Yes, because I believed--I believed that it wasn't the business of the 00:36:00university to run placement agencies anyway, and that there was no reason why we should get ourselves in trouble over it when Dow, or General Electric, or Boeing, or anybody else could rent rooms, just like the--. I read the New York Times: you know, full page ads in those days about Dow, and Boeing, and all these companies, they'd be at the Roosevelt Hotel to talk to students, you know. They didn't necessarily go to campuses; they don't in big cities. And I saw no reason why we--I think the reason we had here, traditionally, for providing space for people to be interviewed was convenience of students. But if it was going to get us into a hell of a lot of trouble, avoid the trouble, you know. It wasn't a great moral issue with me. It was just, if this is a source of trouble, let Dow take care of their own troubles. We had enough of our own. And so I was 00:37:00opposed to it then. I was opposed to it all along. I was also opposed to the war, but I never believed that the university should be the target of protests. I felt that this university, of all the universities I knew about, was least involved in any complicity with the government on our Vietnam policy, and moreover it seemed to me that, you know, if you want to protest, go protest where the action is, not where it isn't. So I've always been opposed--I was opposed to the war from the very beginning, and I publicly stated that and publicly demonstrated it. But I believed that the way you did such things was in meetings, and you got up and said what you thought about it. It never occurred 00:38:00to me that the way to do it was to take over buildings, or to burn buildings, or to bomb buildings, or anything else. I thought that citizens ought to assemble where they are and protest, but that didn't mean closing down the university. I could see no point in that. I never did, and to this day I don't. The other thing was that I always felt that if I really felt the university were guilty of complicity, I'd do everything I could to try to--publicly--to force the university to change its policies and I might even be willing to engage in nonviolent kinds of actions in the tradition of the Ghandian tradition and take my medicine for it. But it never occurred to me--and it still doesn't seem to me 00:39:00correct--to assume that you can openly violate the laws and the rules, and not be willing to pay whatever penalties have to be extracted, as a means of change.

LS: How did you feel about Fleming's handling of that spring Dow protest?

WS: You mean bailing the kids out of jail?

LS: Yes.

WS: Well, I thought that was nice thing to do. I never would have. Oh, the hell with them. If they want to engage in things that get them arrested, let them take care of their own arrest. I didn't see any reason why the university should, but I thought that was a nice, humane thing to do. I would never have done that. I just figure, you know, if you want to do illegal things and disruptive things, take your medicine. The medicine isn't all that bad, you know. They'd have been hauled up in court and fined twenty-five dollars. Stay in 00:40:00the caboose overnight. I don't think it would have hurt any of them.

LS: Did you know, personally, any of the people who were involved?

WS: Oh, yes.

LS: Evan Stark, of course, was in sociology. Did you know him?

WS: Very well. I had him in seminars.

LS: You did.

WS: Evan was the genius behind the whole thing. He was the planner, the master strategist of the whole thing. And I knew Evan quite well.

LS: What is your assessment of him?

WS: Well, that's kind of a difficult question to answer. He's bright. I think essentially unprincipled. The kind of guy that takes advantage of any situation that he can to promote whatever aims he may have at the moment. He came and talked to me a couple of days before the Dow interviews. And he said, "I think 00:41:00there's going to be real trouble, and I'll do everything I can to prevent it. And all I ask of you is that, if things get out of hand and there have to be forces brought on the campus--I hope you don't do it, but if you do--then I want you to promise not to let the sheriff with his dogs and deputies on the campus because they'd like to beat hell out of the students." And I said, "Evan, there's no way I can promise you anything." I said, "I hope nothing happens that they have to come, and I don't intend to call them. I don't intend to call anybody. But if the police come, and they want additional forces, there's nothing I can do about it. They'll just call whomever they can get." And he said, "Well, he'd do everything he could to prevent it." But the truth is, he 00:42:00planned the whole thing from beginning to end. And then, you notice, he was not in the building when the police went in. He was outside. And he hadn't suffered. Nor was Bobby Cohen inside. The innocents were inside, and they were outside watching the fracas. But anyway, as an indication of Evan's character, after he left here he went to Canada because he was in a draft category, you know, he had an exempt status, whatever the student deferment was, but they'd been putting a lot of heat on him. And he knew if he got involved in something like this, was kicked out of school or the courts got to him, that he would be--reduce his 00:43:00draft status. So he went to Canada, or at least I don't know if he went to Canada. That's what people say. He left within the hour after the thing was over, unlike Bobby Cohen who stayed here and faced the music of the whole thing. And then, nobody around here heard a thing about him until two or three years later. By then he had passed the draft age, and maybe the war was going down by then. But he went to Minneapolis, where he and Lee Zelden, who was a woman who wasn't a student--

LS: Oh, I know her, yes.

WS: --but was very active in the student affairs during the student disruptions of the time, were working on an OEO poverty program, organizing the poor 00:44:00somewhere as federal employees. But anyway, to make a long story short, one of my friends at UCLA, who knew Evan and knew about him, sent me a picture of Evan with a two-column story on the first page of the Los Angeles Times, saying, "Blue collar workman takes part in panel on poverty," or whatever it was. And Evan was representing himself as a Minneapolis working slob, who was appearing on this panel. And he was quoted as saying, "Before I came to this--when I accepted this, I didn't realize how difficult it would be for me to talk with this bunch of learned panelists, professors and deans, and so on. So I waited 00:45:00until 10 o'clock until a bar opened, got three stiff jolts of whiskey before I could appear here and talk." Here is a guy whose father is an eminent professor, who was raised in a professorial family, who spent all--

LS: Where is his father a professor?

WS: I believe at Brandeis. It's either Brandeis or one of the city colleges, but I'm quite sure it's Brandeis. But in any event, here's an academic brat, you know, putting on this act, which is typical of Evan. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him, on any question. He's now a graduate student again, at Yale, I understand, in social policy, or social planning, or something of that sort. He's very bright. He's a smart guy, but I think, you know, my reading is 00:46:00that he's essentially without character, and an opportunist. He abandoned the student movement the minute he got in trouble. He wasn't in any part of--you know, he left, deserted the cause, so to speak, rather than staying here like, at least, Bobby Cohen did to face charges and to represent the student position. So I never--

WS: Stark took a seminar with me. Then I didn't see him for several weeks. This is probably the spring before I became chancellor. And I didn't see him for several weeks. And finally I saw him out in the hall, and I said, "Evan, you seem to have quit the seminar. Have you dropped it?" He said, "Oh, no. No, no." And I said, "Well, were you upset by what I said the other day?" "Oh, no!. That's OK. Never even thought about it." And I said, "Then why haven't you been coming?" He said, "Well, I'm organizing a strike at Sears." And he said, "When I 00:47:00get around, when I get that all settled, I'll come back and make up the work for the seminar." He has still got an incomplete. I don't think he ever finished it. But you know, the intellectual life was not all that important to him, I don't think. I never could quite make out his motive structure. I didn't know him all that well, but it seemed to me he just kind of wanted to be in the forefront of the radical movement. I haven't any doubt of his convictions about the war--

LS: Oh, you don't? I was going to ask you whether

WS: Oh, no. Oh, no. I don't know, you know; I don't know how anybody, hardly, could have failed to be upset by the war.

LS: But he was upset

WS: Oh, yes.

LS: That's the point, was he--?

WS: I'm sure he was genuinely upset, but at the same time, he's a very complicated guy, and I think he saw this as a chance to get a hold of the student movement at one university at least--and to run it. And that's what he 00:48:00was doing. Well, you know, there were all sorts of incidents that took place long before that he was engaged in. You remember, there was one big fuss about him burning an American flag in front of the Union and, oh, there were all sorts of things that he was engaged in the year or so before.

LS: But somebody else did that, too. Is that right?

WS: Yes. Oh, yes, that was a common trick in those days. But he did--so I'm sure that he was sincere in his protests against the war.

LS: Was he a genuine radical? Was he an SDS member, do you know?

WS: I don't know, but I'm sure he--. I would guess that he was, sure. I don't 00:49:00know that. But he was a genuine radical. I don't think there was any question about that, that he believed in the overthrow of the government.

And he was like most of the radical students that I got to know at all. He was a real elitist, you know. They always talked about the poor, exploited working classes and the poor blacks and so on, but they were going to do something for them. They were not going to bring them into the decision structure, by any means, but they knew what was good for exploited people. And, you know, I never knew whether he was a Marxist or a Maoist or what he was. None of those people was it ever very clear, you know.

Our generation, especially my generation, who finished college during the Depression and many of whom were socialists or had turned to socialism or to communism--Russian style, or Stalinism--they were ideologues. They could give 00:50:00you the answers to anything, and they'd argue eight hours on public debate, you know. The socialists would debate the communists, and so on, and refute each other and all that sort of thing, and their interpretation of Marx and Lenin. But these kids had no such fix. And my generation couldn't understand that. I remember Don Anderson was the editor, the long time editor, of the Wisconsin State Journal, and he couldn't get it out of his head that these people weren't being paid huge sums of money by the communist underground, you know. And he couldn't believe it when I'd tell him that they'd condemn the Russians on many grounds. "Well, that was just a front." And the truth is, I think they were much more Maoist than Stalinist, but they didn't know what they were. They weren't, 00:51:00you know, in any real sense, they had no set ideology. That made one of the things--. You know, for a period of time, there was a focusing among liberal and radical students, there was a focusing on the war that brought them together. They were greatly upset by the war. They were also upset by their own escape from the costs of the war, very much--deeply, psychologically upset by that. And that brought them together. They had a common focus. It didn't matter whether they were Maoist, or Marxist, or Quaker, or what in hell you were, just if you were opposed to the war, you were willing to go to meetings and maybe even do things.

There were a lot of kids who--in that building, when the Dow riots took place, when the police went into the Commerce Building, there were kids sitting there, thinking that that would be--yes, I thought it would be, actually--primarily a 00:52:00symbolic protest. They'd sit there. The police would come in and arrest them. We had arranged for buses and trucks to take them down to the police station; I think even numbers to pin on them, you know, so they could appear and be charged then, and that they would leave without any resistance. After all, there had never been any resistance here, Berkeley, or any place else before, and that's what we had planned for. And there were all sorts of kids in there, you know, who were there, just like good Quaker kids or peacenicks of any kind, traditional, religious, or whatever philosophical grounds upon which they were opposed to the war, and who intended no violence whatsoever. And it's still, you know, completely unknown what happened when the cops went in. The police claim that when they tried to get into the building they were repulsed by the 00:53:00students. And they were, some of them, hit with bricks and various other things. And you know, they just kind of blew them right out through the doors, and then they regrouped and when they went in, they just smacked everybody in sight, as far as I can learn. And a lot of these kids were sitting there, you know, with their hands folded, getting their heads hit. I wasn't in there, so I don't know what actually happened. But those are the kinds of stories that I got from people who were in the building.

LS: What is the name of that report? The Scotton Report.

WS: Yes.

LS: But I don't want to get too far ahead of where we ought to be.

WS: Yes.

LS: Talking about Evan Stark, and since we were talking about him, there's Bob Cohen and Henry Haslach, and Bob Zwicker, they were all--. Did you know the others as well as Evan Stark?

WS: Yes, not as well as Evan, but I knew Cohen fairly well.

LS: And you have a higher regard for him, I gather?

WS: Yes, Bobby Cohen was a different kind of a guy. He was not a crafty planner of things. He was a spokesman and an orator. He couldn't resist an opportunity to orate. Now Evan was a good talker, but nothing like Bobby Cohen. And so Bobby, I think, was more the tool of Evan than anything else, although again, he was philosophically committed to what he was doing. But I don't think Bobby had any intent that there be violence. I don't think he's that sort of a guy at all. But he spoke for them. He spoke for the students, and he was very effective. As an example of how he loved to talk and speak, you know, he demanded, sometime 00:55:00after the Dow thing, to go and speak to the regents in defence of his dismissal of his attorneys in that trial, you know, that he was having, and stomping out of the building. And then the hearing group, which--George Young was then dean of the Law School--just kicked him out of school for what they did there; which you can do. I didn't know that. In a court of law, you disobey the law, you don't need any trial. It's there, and it's public, and bang, you can be sentenced. But in any event, George followed the legal procedures when Cohen dismissed the attorney. It was Cohen, Zwicker, and somebody else; I forgot now who were under hearing, who were being tried there, or having a hearing. He 00:56:00dismissed his attorney and then turned on the hearing board and condemned them personally. Among other things, he said George Young was a drunk and an idiot or something and so on. And so they just threw him out of school right then. I thought that was a big mistake. I thought they should have kept their cool, and adjourned the thing, and gone into conference, and then decided what to do. Well, they did!. They just adjourned it and walked in another room, and then they decided within ten minutes what to do to these guys. But anyway, they did it. So you had to live with it. Well, then Cohen demanded a hearing before the regents, and some prominent liberal members of our faculty counseled him a good deal about what he should claim there.

LS: You mean people like Anatole Beck?

WS: Well, I won't say like whom because I'm not that sure who they were, but he 00:57:00was told that, "OK, go before the board and make your case. Say that these were bad times and these were terrible things that were going on--the war--and that you were very much opposed to all this. The voice of students hadn't been properly heard in federal or local places of power and that, in your frustration, you had done certain things. You're not sorry for them because you knew of no other recourse available to you and that when you felt that the hearing wasn't--you weren't being well represented by your attorney and that possibly the hearing board was not sympathetic with your position, that you said some things you shouldn't have said." Well, that was what he was to say, I'm told. Instead, he went in and ended up giving the regents hell for all of their 00:58:00oppressive measures and finally said that they were the biggest--that he had never stood before nine such complete cretins in all of his life and on and on he went, you know.

Well, anyway, he then left here. Fred fired him, as you recall. And I protested that, not because I had any love for him but because I felt that we were getting--well, I have deep feelings about what justice is and how it ought to be carried out. I think in what I said--I don't even have a copy of it anymore--I said that the university certainly could afford to suffer some indignities from individuals in order to see to it that a fair hearing took place and that it was part of our duty to teach young people what the system of jurisprudence was all 00:59:00about, and that there were procedures set up for dismissal of members of teaching staff, and that I thought they should be adhered to and so on and so on. But I would have done that whether it had been Cohen or anybody else. I had no personal love for him, by any means. He got me into all kinds of trouble. It was just that I didn't think that, in times of stress, you could afford, in a university, to abandon the usual mechanisms that you use. You're trying to force the students to follow the usual mechanisms, and certainly the administration had to be as willing to do so. And I argued with Fred at length on three different times that day about it.

LS: Oh, really.

WS: and tried--

LS: He didn't agree with you?

WS: Oh, I think he probably agreed with me, but I think he felt that he had to 01:00:00do it. The regents were demanding that Cohen be fired, I'm sure. He didn't say that to me in so many words, but I'm sure that's what it was. I think he didn't think it'd make that much difference anyway. And it didn't. You know. I don't think it caused--

LS: No, it didn't get him fired, in fact. I mean, he stayed, Cohen did.

WS: I don't recall.

LS: He was kept, yes.

WS: Was he kept on in this job?

LS: Well, I think then he had the trial, but--

WS: I don't think so. But he didn't go on teaching.

LS: Wasn't the point that he was fired before he'd had his trial?

WS: Oh no, but he wasn't fired by Fred. He wasn't fired for what he did as a student. He was fired for neglect of his teaching duties, or something like that.

LS: Yes, but the thing is that your opinion prevailed.

WS: And that trial would have nothing to do with his teaching duties.

LS: I think the tape is coming to an end, so we'll--[Break in tape]

WS: He had to do something to appease the regents, the legislators, the people of the state. The people of the state knew much more about Bobby Cohen than they did Evan Stark. It was only the insiders that knew Evan, because he didn't play the public game. So the spokesman was Bobby, and he was the one who had everybody infuriated, you know. And I think Fred just figured, well, you know, it was a fluke that he was on the staff to begin with, and that he ought to--that it would help the university in its position with the state, with the governor, with the regents, certainly, to get rid of this guy. So he felt that move had to be taken. And as I say, I really think that Fred was kind of pleased, in a sense, that I opposed him, and wouldn't fire him. See Fred asked 01:02:00me to fire him, which I wouldn't do. And then he said he would. And I tried to talk him out of that, and I gave him all the reasons. And he said, "Well, those are forceful reasons; I'll think about it." And then he appeared on television on the six o'clock news saying he'd fired him. And Fred had gone to Notre Dame for some reason that afternoon, so he must have made that up. Early in the afternoon, he must have made the tape because he was present, you know, saying--. But in any event, I think Fred figured that that had to be done. It was a small sacrificial lamb to slaughter at that point, and I think he figured that: OK, that would cost him some faculty support. But the fact that I came out 01:03:00in opposition to what he had done would kind of recapture it, you know, in a sense; although I certainly didn't have that as my intent, nor, I think, did he. I think that's the way it worked out, in that he was smart enough to see that it would kind of work out that way. The faculty would be mad at him, but they'd be kind of pleased with me.

LS: But it would be only one segment of the faculty who would be mad; and the rest would be very much in favor of it.

WS: No, I don't think that's so. I absolutely don't think that's so. I think this faculty is so concerned with the following of faculty procedures and dismissal that they might say the bastard should be fired, but not without a hearing.

LS: Do you really think so?

WS: Oh, yes. I don't think there is any question about it. The one thing that I encountered in dealing with the faculty during that period, and whereas there were little delegations of eight to ten people who wanted to see me almost every day from the faculty--from the liberal segment of the faculty--to tell me what 01:04:00to do, or to protest what I was doing, or to give me guidance and inspiration, or whatever it might be, there were occasions when I was confronted with the conservative members of the faculty. It turned out that the University Committee was very conservative, and I had been their chairman when I became chancellor, so I knew all those guys very well. And they used to call me in periodically to say, "Look, we're trying to support you, but you've just got to take a firmer stand against these students," and so on and so on, you know. And I'd lecture them the same way as I did the regents, and then I'd keep pointing out to them--when they'd say, "Well, we're going to do this, that, and the other thing"--I'd point out to them the difference between being charged with the administration of the university and charged with policy making. They could make policies, but they weren't running this university. And that used to just make 01:05:00them madder than hell because I'd keep pointing that out, but it was true. Still, they supported me all the way through. But every one of those people believed in due process. Every one of them. And I remember I was asked to go to the two then most conservative faculties to appear after the Dow thing and after my statements about the interviewing and all that sort of thing and appointing these committees and so on. One was the faculty of the School of Engineering, and man, they were really upset. But with all of their admonitions on how we've got to crack down on the students, how we've got to prevent violence, how we've got to prevent interference with orderly procedures, and so on, with the exception of one man, whom I don't even know, who got up and said, well, we 01:06:00ought to do like Hitler did when the German radical youth rose up against him in the early days of his regime and get machine guns and tanks and just mow the bastards down. And the Engineering faculty booed, you know. They wanted a much tougher line, but they didn't want you to--. I wouldn't doubt but what they were all used to, you know, for a hundred years in American universities and colleges people have been thrown out by the dean without any hearing. And I think they kind of were sad that those days were gone forever because there had been federal case after federal case, you know, in which they had put the kids back in school. And they knew about that, vaguely. And I, of course, told them about it, too, when I was explaining why you couldn't throw people out.

But in general I would say the faculty was supportive of orderly procedures, of 01:07:00procedures that were fair to students, that didn't prejudge their guilt, and so on. So I think that, even though they hated--. Much of the faculty, too, thought that Cohen was the great leader of all this, the plotter and the planner. And being the mouth for it and the spokesman, of course, he got all the publicity. And most of the faculty didn't know what was going on anyway. So you're sitting over in your office in Ag Hall, and you hear that the students have taken over the Peterson Building or something. And you think what a horrible thing it is, but you go on about your business, and you don't do much about it. And I think that was true of most of the faculty. And when it came to their attention that there were required procedures and so on, they believed in them, especially they 01:08:00believed when it came to anything like an academic person. Even though Bobby Cohen was a TA and not an instructor or assistant professor, still there were procedures, and they knew there were. And they wanted those procedures followed.

LS: I'm very glad you said that.

WS: You know, it's partly their own self-interest.

LS: Yes, of course, but still it's something to recognize.

WS: And it's also decency and fair play.

LS: It just ties in with, when I interviewed Edwin Young, his comment that he--this is during the TA strike--he didn't worry about the liberal, vocal members of the faculty. He said it was the quiet ones off in the Ag campus, that were worldwide scholars, whose opinions worried him. That's why I said, when you said Harrington was worried about the faculty who might oppose him--. But you're saying it would have been including those quiet ones.

WS: It would have been. Not all of them, but it would have been a lot of them. And you know how all of those things are. Nobody's very absolute about such 01:09:00things. They might have said, "Well, you can bend procedures a little when you've got a guy as bad as this fellow, as flagrant as he is, a man who goes before the regents and calls them cretins and who doesn't behave nicely in public," and so on. They might say, "Well, I won't feel as bad about that as if he'd dismissed somebody that didn't behave in those ways." But still, this faculty has been--. It's not an accident, I think, that this faculty has historically taken a strong position on faculty freedom of expression, all going back to the plaque on Bascom Hall that everybody talks about.

LS: Don't say it!

WS: But in any event, Cohen was not, then, much of a schemer, much of an 01:10:00organizer; he was a spokesman. And as I say, he stayed and took his medicine, then went to the University of Buffalo, where he again got involved in things. The philosophy department there hired him, I think as an instructor, and he got involved in things there. I'll always remember, I was at a conference on the student revolt that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences held in Boston. You know, they print Daedalus. And the person who was running it--they broke the group--there were about, probably, forty people invited, and many of them gave papers, and others comments, and others a good deal of discussion. I guess you know those kind, they go for two or three days, and then, a few months later, 01:11:00they get people to revise their papers and publish them in Daedalus. But in any event, they were ushering us off to the various rooms we were assigned to. And the fellow who was running it said, "Now, you'll be with Marty Meyerson in such and such a room." He said, "Do you"--and just then Myerson came up and he said, "Do you know each other?" See, he had been chancellor at Berkeley during some of the troubles and then went on to Buffalo as president of SUNY-Buffalo. And he said, "Do I know him? He's the bastard that sent me Cohen!" What was his name?

LS: Bobby.

WS: Bobby Cohen, yes. Well, he knew me. But anyway, I don't know what's ever happened to Bobby since then. Somebody told me he still--he got his Ph.D. finally, and is in academic life somewhere.

LS: I've heard he's still in Buffalo, but that's--

WS: He may be; I just don't know.

LS: Did you know Hank Haslach?

WS: Not very well. He was kind of a, by then even, a perennial math TA, as I recall. And he used to come in and talk to me about the union, not about these troubles. He was a very humorless sort of a guy, I thought. I didn't really have much to do with him, nor did he really have much to do with the student movement.

LS: No, he wasn't involved in the--

WS: He was involved, but--

LS: In the first DOW, but not in the second one, I think.

WS: Yes, but he wasn't any great shakes in the student movement, but he was a fairly important figure, I guess, in the TIAA.

LS: TAA.

WS: Not TIAA. Teaching Assistants Association.

LS: Yes. Is this the time to ask about Paul Soglin?

WS: It's as good a time as any. You were going to ask me about that other fellow; what was his name?

LS: Oh, Zwicker; Bob Zwicker.

WS: Bob Zwicker, I knew Bob Zwicker because he used to come in once in a while. He was the Madison, or he was the local boy, you know.

LS: I don't know anything about him.

WS: He's a Wisconsin boy, from someplace up--oh, gosh, I don't even remember the community--but from a Wisconsin family.

LS: That's nice. I'm glad there were some Wisconsin--

WS: He was a very handsome, big fellow and Ralph Hanson, who got along extremely well with the radical students for somebody who had to be policeman to them, he just hated and feared that guy. He thought he was a true radical in the sense that he would do terrible things if called upon. Remember, during that year, 01:14:00they fire bombed South Hall and burned out the dean's offices trying to destroy the records, of which we had copies all over the place. You know, it was a typical syndicalist sort of a thing. If you can destroy the records, you'll grind this monster to a halt, and so on. And Ralph immediately suspected that must be the guy that did it. It didn't matter what happened around here, he thought Bob Zwicker--

LS: More so than Even Stark or Bob Cohen?

WS: Oh yes, because he didn't see them as the desperate types who would do things.

LS: Zwicker was an undergraduate, wasn't he?

WS: He was an undergraduate in--I don't know. I haven't any idea whether rightly or wrongly, Ralph just saw him as the kind of guy who would throw a bomb, or would light a building, who would do the violent things.

LS: That's the way some people felt about Marketti later on.

WS: Yes, and I don't really know, you know. I used to kid Ralph about his mania 01:15:00against this fellow, but I never really knew him very well. He was the one that--during the trial there wasn't room in the law courtroom over there, in the law school trial courtroom, and they had filled every seat. And he came and opened windows and crawled through the windows and wouldn't leave, with a bunch of other people, and disrupted the trial. And oh, they were all upset about that. But anyway, I really don't know much about that boy at all. I met him once or twice. He was not nearly as intellectually oriented as the other fellows. But Ralph really thought he was a dangerous fellow, and I don't know whether he had any basis for that.

LS: I'll have to talk to him.

WS: Well, you ought to talk to Ralph, if you haven't, about the whole affair, because he knows more about it than anybody.

Now, you're asking about Paul Soglin. Paul Soglin was a minor figure in whatever happened on the campus. He's tried to make political capital of it and succeeded in doing it. Again, he was a talker, not a doer. As far as I know, Paul was never apprehended in anything. His greatest claim to fame was in that university forum after the Dow affair. He made his speech. You know, there was this university forum with several--well, the place was absolutely--the Union theater--was packed for it. And all my advisors and friends had urged me to make this public appearance, in fact, to suggest the forum, which I did to the forum committee, and that this would be a chance for me to say my piece--which I, of 01:17:00course, did--and for others to talk. And Paul was going to represent the student view or something. I've forgotten who all was on it. But nobody paid any attention to anybody but me, you know. When I walked in the room, I knew there was going to be trouble because there was just a chorus of boos that followed me all the way to the platform. This was being broadcast all over the state.

LS: How did that make you feel?

WS: I felt terrible. But it didn't give--

LS: Angry? Or betrayed, or?

WS: No, just--. No, not betrayed. I never felt betrayed by anybody in all this. I'm too much of a realist for that. I guess I felt a little, at first, let down by the fact--not necessarily betrayed--because I thought they were kind of pursuing their own self interests and so on, but--

LS: But this would have been boos from students.

WS: Oh, sure!

LS: Yes.

WS: And the place was packed with radical students. Nobody else could get in, and of course they booed and hissed me. Whenever I'd say anything, they'd hiss, and so on. And then, there were no questions directed to anybody but me. And people were planted all over the place to raise the questions. And I must have answered questions for an hour, until it was just the same old stuff over and over again. And I said I just don't see any point in--

LS: Were they specific or where they general, or were they about--

WS: Oh, no, general things about--

LS: The war, and the university, and DOW.

WS: Oh, yes, and me and why I didn't have the courage of my stated convictions about the war, and why had I muzzled some people.

Joe Kauffman had gotten out some kind of a federal restraining order against certain student radicals making speeches on the campus, or holding gatherings, 01:19:00or something. And I really had nothing to do with that, but Joe did it, and--

LS: That was after Dow, was it?

WS: After Dow, yes, a couple weeks after Dow. And then they went to the federal courts and got it changed, you know. We were in federal court all the time. I never went there--

LS: Soglin was the leader of that, though, as I understand it. But maybe that's a different-- WS: You'd better look it up!

LS: Yes.

WS: --because Soglin claims a lot of things that weren't so. But anyway, Soglin was the spokesman at that meeting. He spoke, and at a certain point in the proceedings, after he'd given the speech, he raised his hand on signal, and about 400 followed him out of the room screaming, " You fascist bastard. You've got blood on your hands." I've got a tape of that, you know. If I wanted to ruin 01:20:00Paul in an election, I could play that tape. I've never done it, but--

LS: I didn't realize he was that involved in that part of it.

WS: He wasn't. He was just involved in the--. I mean, I don't think he necessarily planted people there with questions, but Paul has always got his finger in the air to see where the wind's blowing politically. Paul, I think, has got as little firm, philosophical convictions as Evan Stark, you know. He'll do whatever it takes to get elected, whatever it is to have a following, and at that time he wanted to take over the student movement. And so, you know, he did what he thought would help him to do it. But he never did. Nobody ever took it over again, you know. It's really true that, from the passing of Evan Stark and Bobby Cohen from the scene, which they did, effectively, from that point, never after that was there an organized student movement on this campus. Nobody was 01:21:00able to take it over. Various people tried. Paul, I'm sure, thought he was doing it, or might have a chance.

LS: Do you think he didn't have the strength of personality to do it?

WS: Well, I don't have any idea. I don't know if he really wanted to that bad. I shouldn't make that inference. I think he was opposed to the war. You know, he was floating around. He thought he was a graduate student in history, your department. History kept kicking him out because he wasn't getting anything done; hadn't for years, you know. He was driving a taxi cab, and he was into this, that, and the other thing, and I don't think he was at all settled about what he wanted to do in life. And it was only after that, some years after that, that he came back to law school, you know.

LS: He did run for alderman that spring.

WS: Yes, he ran for alderman.

LS: And was elected, in fact.

WS: He was elected, yes, in a student district. But still, I don't know what you mean by a student leader. I mean somebody that can organize them and get things done.

LS: Well, I do mean that.

WS: And that wasn't Paul. He'd never got that--

LS: And he wasn't able to do it.

WS: I don't know that he even tried. But he was certainly not--. You know, he didn't have a following of convicted people that would do what he wanted done, which Evan Stark had and which Evan and Bobby had together. And oh, there were various people among students who tried to take over their role. But none of them ever succeeded.

I remember two boys, I can't even remember their names, a pair of twins, came into my office one day. They were New York kids, and they said to me that, "We're organizing. We have a plan to put you out of this office. And one of us will be sitting in your chair. We're going to run this university before this year is over." And I said, "Well, that's very interesting; I'd love to know how you're going to do that." They said, "Well, there's seven thousand kids in the dorms, and we're going to organize those dormies. And boy, when we get those 01:23:00seven thousand behind it, it's not going to be these few hundreds of kids that will be behind various other radicals around here, and we're going to put you down in the basement, in that office down there, and we're going to run this university." And I said, "Well, guys, you know, that's interesting to me. I just wondered how you're going to get them organized because nobody else has ever been able to organize them in an election or anything else. They're the most unorganizable people in the world." "Well, we'll do it. We'll take up issues like food, and visiting hours, and so on, you know." And I never heard of them again. But there were various people who wanted to be leaders.

LS: Were they undergraduates?

WS: Yes, they were undergraduates. I think they were juniors at the time. I can't even remember their names. I'm sure Burt Fisher would remember.

LS: It would be nice to know what happened to them.

WS: But oh, it would be nice to know what's happened to a lot of the people. But in any event, I would say Paul's role was really small. He had nothing to do 01:24:00with the big things that happened earlier; he had nothing to do with them. And then when the Dow thing came again he wasn't in the building. He hadn't made any statements. He wasn't even involved in it, so far as I know. It was only later than that, after the events of the Dow, that he started trying to get--. Again, he's a talker, you know. Put a microphone in front of Paul; he talks.

LS: Was he a good talker?

WS: Yes, quite good. Not as good as Bobby Cohen. Bobby Cohen was a real rabble rouser type talker, but Paul isn't that good, but he's good. He's verbal, he's smart, and he's clever. And he was by far the most consummate politician of all of them, you know. As I say, I don't think Paul ever did anything in his life that he didn't test the water pretty thoroughly first, even if it wasn't very apparent that he was.

But he's managed, you know. I think he's managed to do very well at it. And to 01:25:00stay in office this long, it's a pretty good record. But I don't really think he has any very profound philosophical conclusions about--or basis for his politics. It's appalling. Maybe you don't get elected if you do, you know.

LS: I was going to say, I'm not sure that was a requisite of office.

WS: So Paul, I would just dismiss Paul as a minor figure in it. Now, he's been a smart enough politician to play that as if he--here's the young radical who led the campus through its strife, and now is mayor and responsible, and gets himself on TV with that image, and so on. But that's pretty easy to do because newsmen don't do much homework, you know. They don't really look into things and try to find out whether these assumptions are correct. It makes a much better story to have Paul an important student leader during the radical days, and now 01:26:00mayor, than it does to say he was one of the second or third rate people in the movement. At least that's my view of it. I think that anybody who had anything to do with the student troubles around here would tell you the same thing about him, in terms of what his role was in the student movement.

LS: I'd like to ask you about Joe Kauffman. You've mentioned him already several times. You must have known him.

WS: Not very well. When I went into office, you see, Robben made the decision sometime in early summer to take the Michigan job. The search committee was a faculty search committee, you know. They didn't have students or regents on them in those days. And they soon came up with a list, in a month's time, I think. 01:27:00And I know at least two names that were on the list.

LS: Young was one of them, I know.

WS: Ed and me. And I would be fairly sure, although I don't know it because nobody ever told me so, that Fred probably called Ed right away to see if he would like the job. And Ed was just early into his presidency at Maine, and I think he decided that he didn't want to get messed up with all those troubles and so on, and that he'd stay where he was. But I don't know that. But I think that's a fair inference. But in any event, Fred called me over and asked if I would do it. He gave me three or four days to think about it, and I talked to only two people, my wife and Burt Fisher. And Burt thought I should do it. Well, 01:28:00I talked to Robben, of course, and I talked to--I meant outside of the administration. And of course I talked to Bob Clodius, who was very anxious that I do it. He was vice president at that time. And when I talked to Robben he said, "Well, you know, I really think the worst of it's over. It's peaked. It's all down hill from here on." And he said, "If I were you, I'd make Joe Kauffman vice president for student affairs. Let him handle everything." And I talked to Fred Harrington, and I didn't--for his advice, and I didn't tell him what Robben had said. And he said, "Well, Joe can handle it. You don't need to worry about it. Just turn it all over to Joe." I wasn't at all satisfied that it was all 01:29:00over, although I kind of believed that maybe it had peaked. You want to remember, looking back over it, that it's much easier now to see that it hadn't than it was at that time.

LS: Yes, I know.

WS: And there were a lot of people who were saying that the whole student movement had peaked. But I didn't quite believe that. But I thought, you know, maybe we'd learned how to deal with it a little. But I talked to a lot of people around the campus, after I took office, about what shall I do about student affairs? Can I turn it over to Joe? Almost to a person, they said, no. I talked to my friend Burt Fisher, to Bry Kearl, to Leon Epstein, to all sorts of people. 01:30:00I talked to Dean Pound, even though I knew that he would be, you know, he was much more conservative about the whole thing. And I just got, generally, the story that, well, Joe can't cope with it, that he's just--whatever capacities he had for handling this, he's burned himself out. He's got no more good will among the students because of what he's had to do. And he's lost patience with the radical students. And you shouldn't! You can't fire him, but on the other hand you shouldn't turn it over to him. And I still tried to turn everything I could over to Joe. But it was true. By then, Joe had gotten pretty gun shy. He was terribly nervous. And another thing was going on.

Joe was issuing edicts of various sorts, without talking to me about them.

LS: I wondered about that.

WS: And he issued some edict about if they took a building, or something like that, they'd just have to have the police. And there would be people thrown out of school and all that sort of thing. And he didn't talk to me about it first, but I learned later that he talked to Fred about it. And I think Fred had been putting the heat on Joe to do some of these things. I don't know this, but--

LS: It would have been extraordinary for him not to talk to you, I should think since you--

WS: Well, it wasn't all that extraordinary because I told him to handle it, you know, and I didn't want anything to do with it. That was what I'd said when I was appointed chancellor.

WS: I was called over there at the last minute, you know, to go to the regents' meeting, be introduced to the regents, and then came out. And they knew it was announced. And some people who saw me go in couldn't believe that was the guy. But anyway, it was announced, and some local reporter said, "Well, now, what are 01:32:00you going to do about the students' problems?" and so on. And I, in my characteristic, quick response, wise-cracking way, made the following statement: "I didn't become chancellor of this university to be dean of students." You know, it was lucky that the guy had enough sense not to put that in the paper because that would have angered everybody right at the beginning, I guess. But I didn't, you know, and I'd been kind of assured by Fred and Bob Fleming and Bob Clodius that Joe would handle it, so I kind of turned it over to Joe. And yet I was terribly uneasy about it all. And then when the Dow incident itself came, Ralph, whom I had great respect for in handling the crises that he was called 01:33:00upon to handle, said to me, "Now this may be a lot rougher than anybody figures, and I'm not at all satisfied. We haven't got a police force here, really. We can't cope with anything of any magnitude. So if things get out of hand, then Bill's got to"--Bill Emery, the chief of police--"has got to come." But, he said, "Because of that, we'd better have a meeting with Bill." So we had a long meeting with Bill, and Harrington, I think was his lieutenant, at which we said, "Now we don't want any--"

LS: Was Joe Kauffman at that meeting?

WS: Joe was at the meeting, oh yes, Joe was in on all these things--"We don't want any rough stuff whatever. We don't want confrontations in which you have to beat people or anything of that sort."

LS: He agreed with that?

WS: Oh, he agreed with all that. And he went on to say, "Well, they aren't going to cause any trouble. They'll come out peacefully, and be charged, and we'll have transportation to get them down to the county judge, or the city judge, or whoever it was as soon as possible and get rid of them. They may do like the kids at Berkeley and that Sproul Hall affair," which had taken place not long before that, which some of the kids, even though they would relax and let them carry them out, the kids charged that the police would bump them down the stairs, you know, and twist their arms, and do all that sort of thing. And the cops claimed they resisted even though they claimed they didn't and all that. And I said, "We don't want any of that kind of stuff." "Oh, no, there wouldn't be any of that kind of stuff." Well, Joe was present during all that, and so was 01:35:00Ralph. But Ralph was the one guy who really sensed that it might be much different from that because he said, "Boy, I wish we had some larger force of less involved people we could call in here. Because if they mean business, our little force and whatever Emery will bring here won't be able to handle it." He said, "You need enough presence to prevent things." And I never thought, although this is gratuitous, I guess, that he trusted Bill Emery. It wasn't that he thought Bill Emery was an evil man. But the police had taken so much junk, so much crap, insults, from the students, that he sensed that they were all up tense, that they just couldn't stand much more. And that Bill couldn't control 01:36:00them. Although Bill was a martinet, you know, in his relationship to his men. But Ralph figured in real stress that he might go to pieces, I think, looking back over it. But in any event, he said to me, "Now look, there's got to be distance between you and the students. We'll set up a headquarters. I'll be in the building, and I'll try to reason with them in and out of the building. Joe's office will be headquarters. And you stay in your office and under no circumstances come down to Joe's office, because we will take them to Joe's office. This will give us time to cool things off. Then we'll bring them to your office if we can't settle things there," you know. It sounded like a good strategy. Well, to make a long story short, Joe kept saying, "Well, the police have got to go in there. People are in danger in there. They're so crowded. The 01:37:00secretaries can't get out of their offices." We don't know, but he thought the Dow guys would be imprisoned in the rooms, and there was danger of great violence. And Ralph would caution going slow, and he'd keep good watch on it. And finally even Ralph got convinced that it was dangerous to let the situation go any further.

WS: And Joe kept pleading, "We have got to let them go in; we have got to let them go in." So finally I went down to Joe's office, and there we had another meeting. Oh, Mike--whoever the president of the student council was then, a very lovely boy, Mike something or other, later became a lawyer, he was a junior Phi Beta--and a boy by the name of Steve Richter, who was vice president--Mike Fullwood--

LS: That's right.

WS: --and Steve Richter were there all the time. They heard all the conversations. And Mike Fullwood kept saying, "Well, we can't wait any longer. 01:38:00Somebody's going to get killed in there. Something is going to happen. I agree that we have got to go in." And Bill Emery was anxious to go, and so on. So we had Ralph keep repeating over a loud speaker: "This is an unlawful assembly," and reading whatever the law is, you know, about unlawful assemblies, and to get out of there, and he'd give them fifteen minutes. And they wouldn't move, and he'd go back. Then, finally, a delegation came. Well, by that time, I had decided I had to get down there. Well, Ralph didn't want me to go near the building to do any negotiating myself. He was afraid.

LS: Oh, for your safety.

WS: Oh, yes, personal safety. He just said, "I don't want you or Joe in that building because I don't know what the hell will happen to you. They can come out if they want to talk to you." And Evan Stark and two or three other guys came to Joe's office to meet with all of us and sat around the table. And they 01:39:00said that they'd come out of the building only if I would promise to never again allow any interviewers to come on this campus.

LS: Any interviewers, or any Dow interviewers?

WS: Well, Dow or any other company that they said shouldn't come and so on. And I told them there was no way I could make that promise, and that I hoped they'd come out because if they didn't--

LS: This was against your own belief because you, yourself, would have preferred not to have interviews on campus, but you were--

WS: Yes, but if you're present chancellor of the university, you don't--you can't run the university on the basis of your beliefs if there's already rules of what you've got to do.

LS: Yes, no, I understand. I just meant that it was a position--

WS: I didn't want them there, but I wasn't going to be dictated to by students, either. If Bobby Cohen and Evan Stark and those guys could dictate to me what I had to do, I figured that would be the end of my administration anyway. I just 01:40:00didn't believe they had the right, nor should I give in to it. So anyway, I just told them, "You guys better get out of that building because people are going to come in and get you out if you don't." And they walked away and went back. Well, then after that, Ralph made--I don't know, Ralph claims he made, I think--nine different broadcasts over the thing.

WS: And finally, the police went in, about thirty of them.

LS: Could you see the--

WS: Yes, I stood in Joe's office. I didn't stay where I should have, probably, to follow the plan. I went down there, and I could see the cops go in. And all of a sudden, they start coming out through the doors, you know, hurled back by I don't know what. Anatole Beck says the kids were scared and pushed them out. The commerce guys who were in the building claimed that the kids started hitting the cops with knapsacks with bricks in them, you know. Here were the same people 01:41:00witnessing the same thing. I don't know what really happened. I don't know to this day. So they came out and regrouped and then went back in again. And apparently, I get this even from Ralph, with their clubs swinging, you know. And they drove them out. Well, then the rioting outside, and kids were up on top of Bascom Hall throwing bricks--those bricks down from the top of the place.

LS: Oh, yes--

WS: Oh, yes. One policeman, you know, was in the hospital for nine or ten months. Got hit somewhere with them, not on the head--that would have killed him--but it broke his leg, or something like that. You could look out of the window and see some cops down on the ground with the kids pummeling them. You could see cops hitting at others, you know; it was just a horrible scene.

LS: When you were with Kauffman, how did you feel and what was his reaction? Do 01:42:00you remember?

WS: I don't know. I just felt terribly upset and distressed that all this had happened. And I think he did, too. I'm sure he must have. And--

LS: A group of faculty came to talk to you. Hack Fain was one of them.

WS: Not during that time; maybe later in the day.

LS: That could be.

WS: Because these events just took place so fast. There were a lot of faculty there including--a lot of my own colleagues were standing in front of the clock tower. And the cops were shooting these--you know, after the kids had come out of the building--were shooting these guns with tear gas.

LS: Yes.

WS: And some of them looked over and saw Marshall Clinard and Burt Fisher and all this group over there, and I don't know if they thought they were trouble makers or suspicious characters, but they lobbed a big one right amongst them. I 01:43:00always thought that was funny. And, oh, Marshall Clinard was so upset. He said, "Why didn't you control those damn cops?" Well, you know, I couldn't any more control them than the man in the moon. But anyway, things were pretty bad around there for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Gee, I can't recall Hack Fain or anybody else coming in in the meantime. I remember my own son and daughter-in-law coming in and saying, "Dad,--"

LS: Oh, was he a student at the time?

WS: Yes, he was a graduate student here at the time, and so was she. And they came in and said, "Look at those cops going into the building. They're going to beat hell out of those kids." That was in between the first and the second round, you know. And I said, "Well, it's out of my hands now, you know. They weren't listening to me."

LS: You couldn't--you didn't think you could--or that Ralph Hanson could stop them either?

WS: No, nobody could stop them. Ralph knew that. I don't know that he tried. I 01:44:00think Ralph felt that, by then, the building had to be cleared. You know, imagine those people were packed in there like sardines for four or five hours.

LS: Yes, but you know the Scotten Report is very vivid on that subject--

WS: Yes. But the point is, you know, that we had no control over the police. This is one of the myths that the faculty had. This is part of the city of Madison. The city police can enforce law in any way they see fit under the law.

LS: Oh, I see. So you're not talking about able to stop them, but you don't have any legal control over them, either?

WS: Well, I knew there was no stopping them anyway. I had no legal control, none whatsoever. They were cooperative with Ralph. But once they'd gone in there and met with whatever resistance they did, they were going back in.

LS: They thought it was their own business and not yours. I see.

WS: Yes, they took it over. They didn't come and ask me anything. In fact, it 01:45:00was, you know, it was minutes--it wasn't any hour or half hour--five minutes may have ensued--

LS: In ten minutes, I think the building was clear.

WS: Well, does it say ten?

LS: Yes.

WS: Well, whatever it was. They went in there and went after them. And once the whole thing had broken loose, there was nothing anybody could have done. It was just out of hand, you know. The police went nuts. The kids went nuts. It was just lucky that somebody wasn't killed--really.

LS: Yes, it was.

WS: Just absolute luck, nothing else, that someone wasn't killed in all that.

Well, I just felt powerless about the whole thing. In the first place, I kind of half believed Joe that they weren't going to raise any hell. I half believed Ralph that they might, and I didn't know what to do about it. Quite frankly, I was never trained as a police officer or crowd control guy. I've never had any interest in applied kinds of things, you know, applied psychology. I never even 01:46:00read about it. It's not any part of my dish of tea. People used to ask me afterwards, "Well, didn't being a sociologist help you?" I said, "It didn't help me a damn bit. I never learned anything in sociology in my life that would have told me what to do in any of those emergencies that came up." And I didn't. I may be too honest to say it, but it's true. Now there are people who, on second thought, figured just--they would have known just what to do and so on. I didn't. Joe didn't. Ralph Hanson didn't. Nobody did--once it broke loose, you know. Now you might have said, "OK, you could have just let them stay there." The advice against that came from people that I respected, particularly from Ralph, who thought there was great danger in letting them stay there. There was also the fact that the regents wouldn't let them stay there or wouldn't allow 01:47:00you to use that policy.

LS: Where was Harrington? I know he was in Milwaukee--

WS: Oh, Harrington went to Milwaukee.

LS: He wasn't back yet.

WS: Oh, no. He didn't come back until it was all over. And the governor called two or three times during the afternoon to say that "Did I want the National Guard?" He'd call and declare a state of emergency and send out the National Guard and clear out the building and so on. Well I told him, "No, thanks." I wish I'd known what I knew later about the National Guard. The National Guard turned out to be the most disciplined, best police force we've got. And it's due, I think, primarily, to the colonel, who had been trained in crowd control through special work in Washington, and so on, and who managed the--. I thought they behaved beautifully once they did take over the campus. That wasn't during my time; it was during Ed's. But I didn't know that then. And I knew nothing 01:48:00about any of those matters, so I just felt helpless. I just felt, here it's gone; everything's gone to hell. I've been in office a month or so, and everything's blown.

LS: Of course, you didn't know that people weren't going to get killed in the midst of it.

WS: Oh, no! I was very worried that they were. But I didn't know what in the world I could do about it. Well, anyway, to get back to Joe. From then on, Joe was not much good in the office.

LS: You know, he made a statement--

WS: Students discredited him completely. The faculty lost faith--

LS: Why did they discredit him?

WS: Well, they knew that he'd issued the edict. They knew that he had been arguing that the police ought to go in. They knew that--. Now, he issued a statement to the press right afterwards when the press were interviewing him and so on. "Well, it's all the chancellor's decision, you know."

LS: That's what I wanted to ask you. He said, "The chancellor will take full 01:49:00responsibility for this." What on earth did he mean by that?

WS: I don't know.

LS: That's a most extraordinary statement.

WS: I suppose that the chancellor has to take full responsibility for it, in a sense. The buck stops somewhere.

LS: Was he saying that he'll take the blame?

WS: I don't know what he was saying. He was a desperate man. And I don't know what--. I never thought he should have said that. I thought he should have said, "Well, we had to do this. I advised it."

LS: If he'd said, "We--. We will," it would have been one thing.

WS: Yes. I don't know that he said that. He's quoted as having said that by the newspapers. I've learned long since that you can be badly quoted in newspapers. But in any event, in subsequent events, I just didn't--Joe remained in office but I didn't rely on him for anything. I just got Bry Kearl in as vice chancellor. He refused to do that, but he'd give me advice about it. And then I learned about the chap in the Law School, Herman--now I can't think of his name 01:50:00[Goldstein]. He's an expert on such matters. He's the guy that teaches the Law School courses about how to handle police, and riot behavior, and so on. He's still here and it turns out he's really one of the real authorities. He had advised various police forces in big cities about crowd control and all that sort of thing. From then on, I used him a great deal for advice.

LS: I see. I wonder who--?

WS: And we handled things much better from then on. For example, the second time Dow came we moved the thing to the Field House. We had all kinds of police.

LS: So Joe didn't have any part--

WS: He had nothing to do with it. Herman handled the whole thing. I don't say this to deprecate Joe. It's just that Joe was completely battle weary by then and I didn't, you know, I didn't depend on him. I just had to make my own team for handling things, and--

LS: I heard there actually was a "Joe must go" slogan circulating around. Did you know about that?

WS: From the campus?

LS: Yes.

WS: Oh, all over. Oh, sure, I knew about that. But--Herman Goldstein. He really is a marvelous guy on such matters. I never heard of him until after we were in trouble. And so from then on, he helped us plan--we figured those hearings on Cohen and company would result in a great deal of trouble. He helped us plan the whole thing of how that should be done, where the police should be stationed, 01:52:00everything else. He helped us plan the interviews at the Field House, all those things.

LS: He should have spoken up before, shouldn't he?

WS: Well, I don't know.

LS: Did it ever occur to him?

WS: No, but he didn't think anything was going to happen either, you see.

LS: That's right. One keeps forgetting that nobody could have known.

WS: That's right. He didn't think anything was going to happen. I'm sure he would have come over if he had thought there would be a riot. After all, there hadn't been one until then anywhere, not anywhere. Remember, this is the first one.

LS: I know. It's very easy to forget that.

WS: And it's very easy to forget that. So I thought from then on Joe became rather ineffective in the job, excepting that he was very good with all the rest of student affairs, you know: the registrar, the Union, all those things. So we just kind of turned that over to him. And I never excluded him from any councils or anything of that sort.

LS: I see, yes. But did you ever discuss this, was it ever something--?

WS: Oh, yes, we talked of it.

LS: You did.

WS: Yes, and--

LS: Did he himself feel that he wasn't effective at it anymore?

WS: I think so. Oh, yes. Well, it never came around to where I said, "From now on I'm going to handle everything." Nothing ever came to that point.

LS: He just thought--

WS: But I was helping him find a job and all that sort of thing.

LS: Oh, I see. So you were?

WS: Yes, because I really felt if I stayed on, I would have had some--

LS: So you were responsible for--

WS: No, I was one of the people who was helping him find a job. There were other people as well.

LS: Because he was looking for one.

WS: He was looking for a presidency somewhere. Fred also was, and various other people, too. Joe's a very fine human being, and I think for the early years he was very good. When you could assume that the students' problems were the kinds of problems that counseling would cure--

LS: Yes.

WS: --but Joe, you know, had to stay in the mode that he knew. And so he'd 01:54:00counsel these people. He thought they were kind of sick or something, you know, and they weren't. They were tough, political realists, and you handle them in different ways.

LS: You know, there's something I'd--we really don't have time--but, beforehand, there were a number of things that could have been changed, such as the place of the interview.

WS: Yes.

LS: Did you discuss this with him--

WS: Yes.

LS: --or did you leave it all to him, or--

WS: He came to me and talked about it. And I said that I thought that we ought not to meet there. We shouldn't have interviews there. We should go to some more remote part of the campus. The campus radicals won't walk very far, you know. And so--

LS: Well, certainly, the crowd of 2,000 wouldn't.

WS: --so I said, "You know, I think it's foolish to hold them there." But I think Joe--I've forgotten, but I think his point was, "Well, we can't back down. We've already announced it, and we're going to have to hold them there."

LS: And you didn't feel that you could override him?

WS: No. Oh, I could have overridden him. But I wasn't that convinced something was going to happen, you see. And I didn't want to show that lack of faith in him. The people in commerce would have all said that that was knuckling under.

LS: Yes.

WS: The Engineering School people were adamant. They all had to be--theirs had to be in the Engineering School. And they didn't want other people coming over there, you see, so we didn't have many degrees of freedom. But I trusted Joe's judgment, and I think he trusted his own. He felt that that would be giving in to threats, and we shouldn't do that, and so on. You know, it's hard to think back why you didn't say, "Oh, the hell with it. We won't have any interviews there," or--you couldn't have called them off.

LS: No, I suppose not.

WS: You couldn't have called them off. The pressure was on from all quarters not to, especially from the regents, and the governor, and so on. You couldn't have called them off. But you could have moved them into the Field House or done something like that. Now, you shouldn't either assume that everybody was willing 01:56:00to have their buildings used for these things. You know, I had to force that decision on the athletic department.

LS: Oh, you did.

WS: Sure, and when we finally met in the spring, when we had some interviews, they were threatening, we met in Engineering. And I just had to force that down the dean's throat, you know, that we want those rooms, and we're going to meet there, and we're going to do the following things. Then--it was Dean Kurt Wendt--and once a decision had been taken he cooperated fully on it. But he didn't want them there, you see. And you don't just go around saying to deans you must give us your buildings whether you want to or you don't. After all the president--the chancellor of this university isn't a dictator. He doesn't have the right to go--the traditions are very different around here from that. And I was really--I had grave misgivings about having the interviews there with the kids threatening and all, although I had no idea that it would be more than--

LS: Than a hundred or two.

WS: Well, I--I thought they'd fill up the building, but I thought they'd be arrested, and go away, and that would be the end of it, and they would have made their point, and that that was it. Well, it didn't turn out that way. If you think of it now, it seems rather stupid not to have seen that things were developing to that point. But if that is true, then there were all kinds of people who didn't see it either. In fact, there were some people that were very upset that we had police there at all. They said, "There wasn't going to be any problem. Why are you having those thirty or forty police around there?"

LS: Oh, I see.

WS: Quite a few people talked to me about that in advance. "Don't have any police up there because the kids aren't going to do anything."

LS: This would've been liberal faculty, or just anybody?

WS: Yes--liberal faculty. The rest of the faculty's not--doesn't come around and 01:58:00advise you much. The liberals are the more articulate, the ones who feel more convinced that they're right, you know. And so they're the ones that bug you.

LS: Yes.

WS: As I say, of all the meetings that I had in my office at the behest of groups in the faculty, there weren't over one or two that were from the conservative elements of the faculty.

LS: Yes. That's certainly true because they weren't really--I mean, they were remote from the whole thing.

WS: They were upset. Well, they were upset about what was going on--very upset. But they didn't think it was their business to come and tell you what to do.

LS: Yes.

WS: So, anyway, those were awful days for me. I wanted to quit right then.

LS: You did?

WS: Oh, yes. I thought, God, you know, I have to take the blame. I doubtless 01:59:00made mistakes, you know. I should have overridden my advice. I should have maybe even moved them or cancelled them, would have been much better than having a riot. On the other hand I'm convinced now that the riot and the troubles were coming. They had to come, and that the people who planned them planned that to come, and that if it wasn't there it was going to be the next place or somewhere else, and it had to come. And maybe it's just as well it came then as any other time, excepting that I felt the full responsibility for it. And I felt, well, you know, I'm disgraced. I haven't been able to manage this thing. Some part of it's my own fault. I should have done things that I didn't do. I didn't know what they were, but I should have. And that--oh, for--you know, I used to wake 02:00:00up in the middle of the night for months afterwards reliving the whole thing. And I guess that by the end of the year I felt that I'd managed, with the help of others, to turn the situation around. And I could quit, you know, and not feel that I had let down the side, that at least I'd restored the place to some semblance of what it had been before, and that it was just a bad decision to ever be chancellor in the first place, and--

LS: Who persuaded you not to resign at that time?

WS: I didn't talk to anybody but my wife about it.

LS: And what did she think?

WS: Oh, she said you have got to see it through, so--

LS: So that helped.

WS: She was never very anxious for me to be chancellor anyway.

LS: Oh, she wasn't?

WS: No.

LS: You hadn't said what she--. You said you talked to her, but she--

WS: No, she said, "You have got to do what you want to do. You think you're better at this kind of thing than other people, and you've done everything else 02:01:00you've wanted to do, go ahead if you want to. And I'll be glad to do my part." And she was marvelous as chancellor's wife, you know. She's a lovely person, she really is, and gracious, and considerate of others, and she did all sorts of things that greatly pleased the women--and men on the faculty, for that matter--and their wives, and so on. And she really did it with ease, and so on. She was much better at it than I was because she's basically a much more social sort of a person. I'm a more private type, basically, than she is, by far. And she's one of those people who never sees any fault in anyone, absolutely no one. When I would rail about Evan Stark, and about Bobby Cohen, or about the regents, 02:02:00she'd always say, "Well, they're not all that bad," and say good things about them. What she didn't like was--. She thought that I was just getting more nervous, more tense, more--I talked more and more about my troubles, you know. And she just thought it was foolish for me to continue. The strain was just too great, the hours too great, and so on. And so she wanted me--she was relieved when I quit. She really was greatly relieved. But I think more for my sake than hers. She didn't even mind the alumni and all these formal things that you had to go to and be with people you didn't like, particularly, or weren't interested in. She didn't mind that at all. And I did.

LS: We'll talk about that next time because there's still a lot to be said about your chancellorship. And you did say one of the things that was difficult about 02:03:00it was the social obligations.

WS: Yes, that was only one, but it was--yes, well, there were a lot of other things that happened, of course, during the year, too, than just the Dow. But a good deal of the time the rest of the year, on my part, was spent trying to get adequate procedures together and all that sort of thing.

LS: Here we are in our second interview.

WS: Yes. I want to make a correction about what I said about Governor Knowles and the National Guard. After thinking about it, I think I probably didn't state what had happened quite correctly. Governor Knowles had talked to me before the 02:04:00Dow and said if we ever had any trouble on the campus, that he could always mobilize the National Guard. But he would only do it if I asked him to. I think you have to declare a state of emergency, or something of that sort, to do it. So on the day of Dow, after the troubles began, he then called and said, "I understand there's rioting on the campus, and I will send out the National Guard, but you have to ask me to do so." And I said, "Well, I'm not asking you to do so." And he seemed quite upset about that.

LS: Oh, he did?

WS: Yes, and I said, "Well, if you do it, it's on your own." And then, an hour or so later, he called again and said, "I understand there's still a lot of trouble up there, and I'm quite willing to send the guard. I talked to the colonel," and so on. And I said, "Well, I think that a show of military force 02:05:00would be just exactly the wrong thing to do. I think it's quieting down and that might just throw it into a serious situation." So he said, "OK," and that was the end of that. But I did think--I think I said earlier in the tape that he had called me several times during the day before--or implied that it was before the troubles, but that isn't correct. So, I don't know what you want--

LS: You didn't discuss that with Joe Kauffman or Ralph Hanson?

WS: No. Oh, I did with Ralph. I didn't with Joe, but I did with Ralph, I'm sure. Ralph thought that things were under control, and he was very pleased with the way the county forces that were brought in behaved. They didn't come until the 02:06:00trouble had started, you know, until the actual difficulties were underway.

WS: And he had been worried about bringing in the county people because he didn't think they were well enough trained to show restraint. So he used them mainly for directing traffic and things of that sort, but they behaved very well indeed. There were, oh, I don't know how many people, a hundred people or maybe more than that who came. And so they didn't--. The students' leaders, like Evan Stark, had been very much worried that if they came in they would start beating up everybody, but they behaved, really--they weren't faced with the problem that the police were faced with--

LS: They didn't actually get into the fracas at all.

WS: Oh, no. That was all over. The building was vacated, but the troubles outside were going on. And, of course, once the news got out, all sorts of 02:07:00people came, you know. There were thousands of people watching the goings on, and so they came and directed traffic, kept people away from this, you know, from getting directly involved in the action. So there was really no need for the National Guard. And I think, perhaps, well, it's hard to know what the governor's motives were, but I'm sure that he didn't want any sort of continuing rioting, as he called it, going on without his stepping in and doing his part. But in any event, that, I think, is all there was to that. There was no need for the guard then or at any time after that.

LS: I guess that was an ultimate shock, wasn't it, when the National Guard was finally called in.

WS: Yes, well, that was never during my days. That was later on, and the guard 02:08:00behaved, I thought, extremely well once they did come during Ed's periods of trouble--Cambodia spring, and that whole time. I thought the guard probably behaved better than anybody else we had in at any time.

LS: Yes, but they were--

WS: But they were very well trained. And their colonel was a very intelligent man. And he'd had all sorts of riot control training in the guard, and so had his troops, so they behaved very well.

LS: Did you know about a meeting between Harrington, and Olson, and the head of the National Guard--who was also a colonel I guess--later on, well, in the late fall.

WS: You mean that same year?

LS: Yes.

WS: I think I was involved, too. I was there.

LS: Oh.

WS: Yes.

LS: I read about it in the Cardinal.

WS: Yes, I was involved. It was just to tell us what the guard could do and get 02:09:00us acquainted with whoever the colonel was, I can't remember his name anymore--who--maybe it was a general [Colonel Olson] but the head of the National Guard. And if we ever needed them, what to expect from them, how much notice they'd need, that kind of thing. There was no immediate threat of anything going on, so it was just a kind of get acquainted, here's a resource that could be used, and so on. And I think--it wasn't in our--we didn't initiate the meeting. I think the governor initiated it, as I recall. He just wanted us 02:10:00to know what was available if we ever had any more troubles.

LS: Well, you have some other things you want to talk about.

WS: Well, I was just going to say, the Dow thing--of course I think we talked last time about the fact of the meetings following Dow--and the thing I was just going to say, there were a lot of other things happened during the rest of the year.

LS: I would like to ask you--I went to the faculty senate meeting yesterday, and Irving Shain gave his first talk, and Anatole Beck had a motion. It was treated rather cavalierly.

WS: By the faculty--as well as--

LS: By the faculty, yes.

WS: Yes, the faculty's just tired of him, you know.

LS: He was--. You mentioned him, I think, last time.

WS: Yes.

LS: And he--would you--did he say something rather effective at that point?

WS: He said a good deal. I've never known him to say anything that was effective. He says things that are provocative, but he's not a man that I consider had very good judgment. And he's not a man that the faculty trusts, not even the people who are on his side. They just think he's too quixotic and that he is not a particularly good presenter of their point of view, actually. At least, that's my impression. At that meeting of the faculty, he spoke several times about police brutality and all sorts of matters of that sort--very emotionally. And of course, he did command a good deal of attention and was one 02:12:00of the main spokesmen, I would say, for the people who felt the students had been greatly wronged. That's true, but he is not the sort of person--

LS: He's not the faculty gadfly, then.

WS: Yes, he is a faculty gadfly but not a leader.

LS: But a gadfly is effective. One thinks of a gadfly as something useful.

WS: Oh, well, maybe at times he's been useful. But he isn't the sort of person, you'll find who faculty--any of the faculty so far as I know--would place a great deal of confidence as being a man of good judgment. That's why, when he speaks on some issue in the faculty, it's almost always defeated. I can't think of anything that he's spoken on that hasn't provoked more opposition votes than if anyone else were to take that stance.

LS: So he might actually harm a cause, rather than--

WS: Oh, yes. That's often true in faculties, you know. There are some people whom the rest of the faculty just kind of ignore or think that it's a nuisance. Sometimes those nuisances are useful. I'm not sure that he isn't. I couldn't imagine, though, a sillier business than the first time the chancellor--the chancellor hasn't even taken office officially and doesn't until the fifteenth--asking him about a matter that he had nothing to do with--that happened two or three years ago.

LS: You were there, were you?

WS: No, I read the paper. I wasn't there. But that's typical of him--and not being willing to take a reasonable response. It seems to me I would have just said to him, "Look, I don't know a thing about it. I'll talk about it. I'll investigate it and talk about it later and if I feel it's worthy of talking 02:14:00about." And, if he pressed me, I'd say, "Look, I've given you the only sensible answer that a sensible man can expect, and that's the end of it, as far as I'm concerned." I wouldn't have been nearly as nice as Irv was about it. But he is, in my opinion, he's kind of a gadfly. He's fairly irresponsible. He represents very little but himself. From time to time, he becomes president of the United Faculty, but that's only because they can't get anyone else to do it, you know. The group itself tries to avoid him because he seems to get them into lots of trouble, and he has come to be such a symbol of his position and what many faculty think is kind of the radical left, not necessarily Marxist left, but just kind of radical, irresponsible left that they can't get people to join 02:15:00their union. And that bothers them, of course. Under more reasonable people, like Bob Alford when he was chairman, their membership grew, but it doesn't, apparently, under Beck. You know, he's a perfectly nice man, personally, and all that, but I just think he's a rattle brain myself. And I think a lot of other people think so, too. And that I thought long before I became chancellor. So I think some people who spoke much more effectively than--many people spoke much more effectively than he did who were on the side to condemn the actions and so on. I thought he probably hurt it more than he helped the cause, but that's the role of some people. You know, there are some people who are just overkill by nature or are so sure of the righteousness of their own position that they 02:16:00alienate those who are not nearly so convinced, you know. He just seems to be that sort of a person.

So I missed Irv's--. I've made it a practice not to go to faculty meetings. I've never been willing to serve on the senate. I just felt that if I were going to stay here, I had to be in a position of never appearing to, in any way, be speaking publicly for or against the administration. I just wouldn't be comfortable. I wanted to stay here because I've been here all these years. And I 02:17:00have a big research program that I immediately returned to, and I could have moved it someplace else, but it would have been inconvenient. I had all sorts of offers: foundation presidencies, even another university presidency of--

LS: You don't want to say where?

WS: No. And I just--but it was a Big Ten university. Not an offer--I shouldn't say that--but an inquiry about if I would be willing. And then, of course, a lot of departments thought that I would be available--departments of sociology. So I got offers from Columbia, from--that was an actual offer--inquiries from Yale, but they were the kind of inquiries that if I'd said, yes, the next day the appointment would have been made; UCLA--oh, I've forgotten--Minnesota. Several 02:18:00places figured, you know, "This is a good time to get this guy to move. He's probably mad at them," and so on. But I wasn't. I mean, I didn't want to move. So I decided that, if I did stay here, I had to get out of faculty matters entirely.

LS: So you haven't been on any committees since then?

WS: No, I've been on one committee or two that deans have had. I was on the committee to evaluate the School of Social Work and one of these internal investigations, that kind of thing. But I haven't been willing to be on university-elected committees or appointed to university-wide committees. But why should I? You know, I've been on almost everything there is. And I figure it's time for somebody else to do that kind of work anyway. I would have 02:19:00concluded that, by now, in any event. But I did feel that if I stayed here I certainly could not in any way appear to be second guessing, confirming, or disaffirming anything that the administration did. So that's why I don't go to faculty meetings.

WS: Now I did go once. I broke my rule once when I thought that freedom of inquiry was being threatened by Bill Proxmire. And I certainly went then and I delivered an oration of--

LS: What was the subject of that, Ph.D. dissertation subjects?

WS: No, it was on the subject of Elaine Walster's research, which he called a great waste of government money and all that sort of thing. And on that occasion I felt that that was nothing that had anything to do with the administration anyway. That was a faculty matter. And I felt that I could speak to it probably as well as any member of the faculty because I probably had more experience on 02:20:00NSF and other national committees than anybody in the social sciences. And I felt that it was time to invest a little of my capital and goodwill from my past in the faculty. And as you know, the resolution in my speech was printed in the faculty minutes in its entirety. The motion to essentially censure Bill Proxmire passed, of course, with one dissenting vote in the whole faculty, so--

LS: What was the date? Approximately when was that?

WS: About two years ago. Something like that. I could look it up. I've got the remarks, copies of all that sort of thing that you might like to have. Oh, yes, that was in the newspapers, the Cap Times scolded Bill and said, "Look, why 02:21:00should one of the leading scholars at the university, a lifelong Democrat, have to come out and chide you in this way. And isn't it time you started getting at important issues, and not just seeking publicity as you have been doing," and so on. The only honest work, other than being a politician, the only nonpolitical job that Bill's ever held in his life, you know, it's literally true, was that for about a year he was a reporter for the Cap Times. And he's always been their darling. While he was establishing residence in the state in order to run--you see Bill was a resident of Illinois, and he decided during the war and the period just after that, when he was with Harvard Graduate School of Business, to be a politician. And he did it in his usual careful, planning sort of way, and 02:22:00he looked around to see where he could go. He decided that the--and I don't think it mattered much to Bill whether he was a Democrat or Republican--he decided that Illinois was no place to run, that both parties were so strongly established there. Where could he make entry into a weak party and take over its leadership? The Wisconsin Democratic Party was certainly that. Post World War II, we had never elected a Democratic governor, except one man, Loomis, who died before he went into office and was succeeded by the lieutenant governor who was a Republican. So, really, until Gaylord Nelson, there had never been a Democrat governor of this state. And the party was just as weak as anything. Bill came in, organized it, got things going, got himself elected to the legislature, then 02:23:00took on old Alex Wiley and beat him. No, he took on--well, yes. He got the Democratic nomination, and then took on Alex Wiley, and beat him for the Senate, and became the successor of Joe McCarthy. And, in many ways, has behaved, you know, with the same kind of political skills as Joe. He never intended to be involved in this Wisconsin thing, just as Joe McCarthy, you know, never investigated anything in this university because he knew that would cost him votes. And the only way Bill got into this was that he made the mistake of making his award of the month--the fleece of the month--to Elaine Versheid, a very prominent psychologist at Minnesota. And some bright young reporter there, when he picked up the story, knew--he was the guy who covered the university for 02:24:00the Minneapolis Tribune--he knew that Elaine had been working with our Elaine Walster, and that they'd published books together, and that this was the same project, essentially, even though each of them had their funds in their separate universities. So he just called Bill on the phone and said, "Look, you've blasted Elaine Versheid and given her this award, and you haven't said a word about Elaine Walster, who, if anybody is guilty, is equally so, because she is the co-principal investigator in this research. They publish together, everything else. And if you don't do something, then I'm going to have a big story in the Tribune saying, `Look, here's Joe McCarthy all over again.'" And of course Bill couldn't do anything but blast her, and of course had to back it up, 02:25:00you know, with interviews and everything else. So that's what got him into trouble. I'm sure he never would have done it in the world.

LS: Did he ever get in touch with you in advance of that?

WS: In advance?

LS: I mean do you know--yes, just to see what--

WS: He never got in touch with anybody in advance.

LS: He didn't.

WS: Well, he knew that he'd be hurt worse by a prominent paper like the Minneapolis Tribune blasting him for these tactics than he would by carrying through on it here. But I'm sure he knew it was going to cost him a lot of friends and votes. Now obviously he ran against a very weak person and won by a landslide. But he's a smart enough politician to know that it's not your friends that you have to worry about, it's your enemies. And they build up and accumulate over time. And he doesn't like--Bill is essentially an 02:26:00intellectual--he doesn't like to be alienated from the intellectual community. Can you imagine? The only other U.S. senator from Wisconsin whoever was reprimanded by the University of Wisconsin faculty was Joe McCarthy. So you know, that's a company he doesn't like to keep, I'm sure, whatever he may feel about the faculty. Oh, no, Bill never checks anything like that with anybody, I'm sure. But he was too deep in it. What could he do? He was already--you know, he doesn't read the stuff himself. He's got some guy in his office who digs up these things, you see. And if he'd ever read it he'd know that what he charged about Elaine just wasn't in the project. But he's a cheap, publicity-seeking person. They asked me--I was interviewed, you know, and I was hoping they'd put 02:27:00some of the things in the paper that I said, but they didn't. Like somebody called me from the New York Times and said, "Do you know, Mr. Proxmire?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Do you know him at all well?" And I said, "Well, quite well, yes. We're on at least a first name basis." And he said, "Well, could you, in a sentence or two, tell me what sort of a person he is?" And I said, "Well, Bill Proxmire is the only man that I've ever known in my life whose friends hate him." That, you know, I just thought of it like that, and it's true! I don't know anybody that knows him well who doesn't dislike him. And everybody who's worked with him, everybody in the Democratic Party--. And then he said, "Well, you don't seem to have a great deal of respect for him." And I said, "Well, I've always supported him and voted for him, but," I said, "when he does something that hurts me and what I stand for, I'll punish him any way I 02:28:00can. That's the only language he understands, that most politicians understand." So, anyway, the guy said, "Well, do you think he's a publicity seeker?" And I said, "Sure. He'd murder his own mother on television if you could give him five minutes of prime time."

LS: I can see why they didn't publish it.

WS: No. It's not libelous. It's an opinion. They should have published it; it would have been fun. And it would have hurt him.

LS: It would have, yes.

WS: And that's why they didn't want to do it, I suppose. But, anyway, that is the only time that I've ever appeared at a faculty meeting. I would have gone to hear Irv yesterday, but I didn't know he was speaking. I would have probably listened--gone for his speech--and then left.

LS: It was very, very brief.

WS: Yes, I thought he probably wouldn't say much or talk very long. Well, anyway, I guess that settles that. Well, as I was saying, I think the rest of the year was kind of tension-filled, too. Right after--.

WS: Oh, one of the things I should tell you because you hit upon this a little: after the Dow incident, even before that, I started feeling that I just didn't have a dependable and sufficient staff in the chancellor's office. There wasn't anybody there that I'd known before. And there wasn't anybody I had any great confidence in. What had happened was that Bob Fleming had been a one-man show. When he first came and he took over, I think he was first provost, and then they changed the title to chancellor, and Bob is a terribly energetic man and he 02:30:00likes to, you know, be on top of everything himself. He can delegate; that's no problem. It's just that he had, at least in those days, so much energy that he just wanted to learn the job in every dimension. So he took on two people as assistants to the chancellor, one of whom was Bob Atwell and the other was Jim Cleary. Then, when I took over--when I agreed to take over--he called me in and said, "There are two things you must do immediately, this day, if you want to take my advice: One, go and ask Emily Peterson," who was his secretary, "to stay on as your secretary. You just won't ever find anybody who is any better,"--and I agreed with that, after I'd had her. She was that good--"and two, go and tell 02:31:00Bob Atwell that you want him to stay on because", he said, "he's just a genius at all of the new budgeting procedures." And he was a whiz kid from the McNamara days, and he was chief budget officer for NIMH, so he really knew that side of it. And he said, "You'll like him, and he has a very good sense of the university. And he's the kind of person that faculty and deans like to work with. So nail him down because he can get another job so fast that, if there's any doubt in his mind, he'll just go someplace else." And then he said, "You had better make up your own mind about Kauffman. I think he's competent. He may be a little battle weary, but," he said, "if I were staying, I might make him a vice chancellor. But I wouldn't do that until I'd seen how things work out with him." 02:32:00Fred Harrington urged me to make him vice chancellor of student affairs. But I wasn't at all convinced. I wasn't convinced because I thought Joe was just worn out from the struggles of the preceding years. And so I didn't ask him to be vice chancellor. And then he said, "Jim Cleary is very competent and very useful but I don't know whether you'll want to keep him or not. He'd like to go someplace else. He's very ambitious to be a college president or chancellor somewhere. It's obvious he'll never make it here." And he said, "The one handicap he has is that--he's willing to do almost anything you ask him, and he'll do it competently, although not brilliantly," he said, "but the problem 02:33:00with Jim is, the faculty doesn't accept him. I appointed him as assistant and there was no screen committee." Of course there weren't so many screen committees in those days. "And then I was satisfied that he had given good service so I made him vice chancellor for academic affairs. But the problem is that neither the deans nor the faculty really accepted him in that role in the sense that they are willing to talk to him instead of to you if you're busy. Now, he's fine at getting up the appointment forms and seeing to it that research applications get channeled in the right direction, and getting ready for various rating committees and things like that. He's fine. He works well with the University Committee, but," he said, "he's never really been accepted." And he said, "That's for two reasons: one, he's young" and he was a relatively young man at that time; I'm sure under 40, "and, two, his scholarly background 02:34:00is suspicious because he's from the speech department, and not many people in the faculty are likely to think of speech as a proper place of origin for a vice chancellor unless they happen to be in that physiological and medical kind of aspect which was then a part of the speech department."

WS: But anyhow, that proved to be true. Jim was very cooperative, very nice, very useful for routine and ordinary things, but took no load, really, off of me. And the load was just unbearable. With the student troubles, with my no longer having any great confidence in Joe to handle things, with the students 02:35:00going over Joe's head all the time anyway--which was Bob Fleming's fault because he'd encouraged that. He was handling those matters himself. There was no way I could pass it back to Joe--and so I just felt helpless, just overwhelmed by the burden of all the things you had to tend to in that office in times of crisis, with very little help. Now, it turned out that Bob Atwell was unusually useful. I valued his counsel on other matters than the business end of the university. But he really ran that. He'd come in and see me every morning and inform me what he'd done the day before, what he was going to have to do, so I'd know, but I just let him do it. That's all there was to it, except for some big, crucial, budgetary decisions. But he was also very useful just to--. He tended to be 02:36:00terribly sympathetic with the students, and I thought it was good to have somebody like that around. But he also knew the faculty quite well. And he was very helpful, but still his real role kept him busy as administrative vice president or whatever we called the business end.

LS: He wouldn't have much to do with students, would he?

WS: No, but he did because they liked him. He was young, and he was liberal. And so they--quite often, whenever there were any building take-overs after that, he always came to my office. And he'd go down and negotiate with them because they wouldn't talk to Joe. But they'd negotiate with him. And he negotiated them out of buildings, he and Ralph together, you know. In a very friendly way, they'd say, "Look, you guys, the chancellor is willing to let you stay in here, you 02:37:00have made your point. But if you're in here more than two or three hours, then the regents are going to start raising hell, and the governor's going to start raising hell, and you only got a hundred guys in here, and we'll clean you out of here in no time. You'd better get out." You know, that kind of talk. And they could do it, and they both did it very well. They maneuvered people out of the--when they seized the Peterson Building and various other--two or three other--smaller and abortive kinds of things. So they were very useful. But still I needed somebody whom I knew well and really could trust. Very soon after the Dow--

LS: Could I ask you why you decided to keep Jim Cleary?

WS: Oh, he was very useful.

LS: Useful enough, was he?

WS: He was useful. Somebody had to be doing the job he was doing. He just wasn't 02:38:00able to do what I think a vice chancellor for faculty affairs is, and that is, serve as the substitute for the chancellor when he's needed, when the chancellor is busy with other things or gone someplace. Well, anyway,

WS: Burt Fisher came over. He's an old, old friend. I brought Burt here in the department many years ago. We had worked together in the bombing survey in Japan, and I had known him for a long time. And I had great respect for Burt. And Burt is very closely in touch with students and faculty, and everybody knew that he was my friend. And so they would come to Burt and tell him their tales. And Burt would come to me and say, "Look, I think you ought to do the following things." Well, I asked Burt if he would be willing to come in as a vice chancellor and officially serve in that role, because I knew he'd be accepted 02:39:00both by faculty and the students. And he said, no, he was willing to give me all the time I wanted but he thought he could perform a more useful function not being identified as officially in the administration. And he didn't have any taste for administration, anyway.

LS: Do you think he was right?

WS: Yes. He probably was right. He is a supreme and crafty negotiator and the sort of guy that's always got his ear to the--I was going to say both ears to the ground--but he's always got his ear to the ground. He knows what's going on. He knows more people than almost anybody I know of on the faculty. And yet he was sympathetic with me. We're old friends. He would do such things as hear 02:40:00groups in the faculty who were upset because I was being too lenient with the students, and he'd bring those groups in to talk with me. He'd leave, and we'd talk for an hour or so. Or he'd hear of the people in the faculty who were, say, of a more moderate persuasion, who said that nobody was being listened to excepting the radicals, and the student friends, and the conservatives. So he'd bring in people--groups of fifteen, ten--we'd sit and talk, and I'd hear their views. And likewise with what was then thought of as the more radical element of the faculty.

LS: But there you mean faculty, not students.

WS: Yes, faculty. Yes, faculty. Well, students--the radical students came to talk to you anyway. You didn't have to bring them. And the conservative students came to talk, whatever they are, the somebody-for-freedom group, the Republican 02:41:00ultraconservative wing, those people came. The more radical students came. And the rest of the students, you know, I don't know how you can get them represented. They won't vote in an election. You don't know who they are, even. But anyway, it was mainly faculty that Burt was dealing with although he knew a good deal about what student opinions were on a variety of topics. So he was very useful. He came in and worked around the clock for a couple of weeks.

LS: Did he actually have an office up there?

WS: Oh, he would just come over and sit in an office, yes. But he didn't see people there. He just--

LS: But I mean, he had, there was a space.

WS: Oh, yes.

LS: I was just thinking that if he had been an official vice chancellor, he could have been in on meetings at crucial times. But apparently, he wasn't in on--

WS: Oh, yes. He was in on all of the meetings that had to do with planning for how to handle a threatened crisis with the students.

LS: Was he even there the--

WS: Oh, yes. He was in on all those things. Not the Dow; This is post-Dow.

LS: Oh, I see.

WS: No, I wish he'd been there then.

LS: Yes, I see.

WS: But he wasn't. But this is post-Dow.

LS: You hadn't gotten around, by that time, to asking him to do this, I suppose.

WS: Yes.

And then, he had been working with me two or three weeks. And boy, we were just working around the clock trying to put things back together and making strategy decisions. I felt that one of the first things we had to do was to clarify the whole situation about the student discipline procedures--hearings and all that sort of thing--because that was all messy, you know. And the students complained that they weren't represented in disciplinary proceedings and yet actions were 02:43:00taken which affected their lives and their careers, and that the system was loaded against them.

LS: Now, was this because policy was unclear or because Joe Kauffman had--

WS: No, policy was perfectly clear.

LS: Oh, it was.

WS: Yes. The existing rules of the university provided for all sorts of little misdemeanors to be handled by a student court. But anything serious went before a faculty discipline committee. And that was in the rules.

LS: Yes.

WS: And had been for years. Any university had those discipline committees in those days.

LS: But were the students unjustified or--?

WS: Well, they weren't on those hearing committees. That was their point.

LS: I see, yes.

WS: Students were not given a chance to sit in judgment in those kinds of cases. 02:44:00Moreover there was no provision for having an attorney represent. And there were a lot of things that probably under later and current interpretations--I mean now--would have been seen as being improper by the courts. In fact, there were decisions all over the country around that time setting aside disciplinary judgments made arbitrarily and without due process and proper hearings. I'm not sure that ours were that bad. I don't think they were. But at least students weren't represented. And there were a lot of questions about the whole effectiveness of disciplinary procedures. If, indeed, the students weren't represented, would they pay any attention to the judgments that were made, the decisions that were made? So Burt and I talked at great length about the need 02:45:00for some reform.

So we set up a committee that was chaired by Mermin in the Law School. And Burt helped me a great deal in picking the people for that and keeping contact with the committee, supplying them with the results of the deliberations on similar matters at Cornell and various other places. He was really my liaison with that committee. Then we set up the Crow Committee, about the same time. Of course, these were--. I got, you know, motions from the faculty to do these. But they were our ideas, none the less. And then we set up the Crow Committee, which was designed to study the question of whether we should continue to have the same 02:46:00policy about interviews on campus, which only the spring before we had reaffirmed by a huge vote. And again, the vote was not as high, but it was at least four to one in favor of continuing interviews. And the Crow Committee sketched out the conditions and so on.

LS: The Crow Committee or the Mermin Committee?

WS: The Crow Committee. The Mermin Committee was on discipline, disciplinary procedures. The Crow Committee was on whether or not we should continue to have interviews on campus--and under what conditions and so on.

LS: With Hack Fain, Hugh Richards, and--

WS: I don't know which one Fain was--

LS: They were the Mermin Committee. Well, that's--

WS: Well, there were two quite separate reports. There are copies of them. They were printed in their entirety in the Cardinal--

LS: Yes.

WS: --and various other places, in the faculty minutes and so on. But you wouldn't have Mermin for whether you had the interviews, you'd have him for the legal things. I'm sure that's right. And Jim was the chairman of the other committee. But anyway, he helped me a great deal in setting up those committees and liaison with them and so on.

And then, after Burt had been helping me for a while, he said, "Look, the flow of work through this place is just absolutely impossible. The three of us who are really handling it--Bob Atwell, and you, and me--just can't do. We're getting behind all the time on the daily business of the university. And you ought to have somebody come in who'd really be vice chancellor and be your 02:48:00executive vice chancellor in the real sense, who serves for you over everybody else when you can't give attention to the broader things."

LS: The job you wanted him to do.

WS: Yes.

LS: --which he didn't want to do.

WS: --which he didn't want to do. And so we talked about it and agreed that by far the best person if we could possibly talk him into it was Bry Kearl, whom we both knew very well. And Bry had been, for several years, the social science vice dean of the Graduate School. And Bob Bock relied on him more than anybody else, and he kind of served as his real executive vice dean whenever he couldn't be there, and he turned over a great many matters other than social science matters to him. And we knew that Bry had the energy and that he knew probably more people in the university than any single person in it, and that he was a 02:49:00guy of good judgment and had just the skills we wanted. So I proceeded, then, to ask Bry to do it, and he didn't want to. And the reason he didn't want to was he didn't want to get involved, as he felt sure he would have to, in the troubles of the students. So the only way I finally talked him into it was to say, "OK, we'll leave you out of the student things. I'll try to handle all those that I can with whatever help I can get from Joe, and you can be vice chancellor. You'll deal with deans most of the time, you'll deal with department chairmen, and you'll deal with faculty. And we'll meet every morning for an hour or so and say, what's up, and what're you up to, and what I've got new that's confronting 02:50:00me? And we'll just parcel out the work and keep each other informed." Well, it was the happiest choice I ever made.

LS: You didn't have to have a search and screen committee.

WS: No, not in those days. I didn't. I just did it. I talked to Fred, and he said he thought it was a great idea.

WS: --what're you up to, and what I've got new that's confronting me? And we'll just parcel out the work and keep each other informed." Well, it was the happiest choice I ever made.

LS: You didn't have to have a search and screen committee.

WS: No, not in those days. I didn't. I just did it. I talked to Fred, and he said he thought it was a great idea. So I just did it. Oh, there wasn't any time for search and screen. These were times of crisis, for God's sake. All this fuddle de diddlin' around about search and screen! You know, half the search and 02:51:00screen committees in this university have not come up with the name of the person who ultimately got appointment to the job. And the search and screen for my successor didn't come up with Ed Young's name.

LS: I'd heard that.

WS: Well, that's a fairly important instance, and there are others that I could name.

LS: It was Harrington's choice.

WS: Yes. Harrington wanted him. And who's to tell--you know, it's such damn nonsense--who's to tell the chancellor who he can have or should have as his vice chancellor? Advice is good, but when you're responsible for everything that happens in that office you ought to have the choice of who you want to do it.

LS: Yes. I should absolutely agree with that. It would be different with the chancellor.

WS: And it's lousy administration to think anything else. But it's part of the over-democratization of the administrative process, in my opinion. You 02:52:00know--nice, sure, I want faculty advice. But I'd walk into the faculty and say, "Look, this is the kind of guy I'm looking for. If I had my choice, I'd take Bry Kearl. If you can come up with or convince me of a better name, fine."

LS: You actually did this at a faculty meeting?

WS: No, I would have. No, I didn't do a damn thing. I just appointed him, period. I didn't--there was no rule then that you had to have a search and screen. That all came later for vice chancellor. But it's a silly rule. A vice chancellor's job is to stand in for the chancellor, to be his right hand, to be his substitute. And for the Lord's sakes, he ought to have free choice over who that person is going to be. He's got to have enough sense to get somebody that will be respected by the faculty. I didn't appoint--I went to the deans, and said, "Look, I want to talk to you very frankly. I can't handle the load in 02:53:00these times of crisis, as evidenced by the fact that some of you have been waiting to see me for two weeks. And I've got to have somebody I trust. The person I trust and would love to have would be Bry Kearl." And every one of them said, "We'll work with Bry. Now, if half of them would have said, "Now look, I won't see Bry; I have got to come directly to you." Then that would have been a different matter. So I talked to them before I talked to Bry. I talked to Fred before I talked to Bry. And then, when Bry agreed, he was just appointed.

LS: Why is he so good?

WS: Why is he so good? Well, one reason he's so good is that he knows everybody and he's trusted by faculty. He's a very knowledgeable guy. He's a very bright guy. He's a very good administrator, really good administrator, and gets things 02:54:00done, and he does it without making many people mad. And then he has this tremendous energy that you need for that kind of job. He is just an unbelievably energetic man. He works fast, he works well, he's a very literate person. You know, he has his Ph.D. in political science, but he was chairman of agricultural journalism. But he writes just beautifully. I don't know anybody--. I've never had anybody write speeches for me in my life. I always write my own. I'm fairly literate for a scientifically oriented kind of a scholar. When I start writing articles for journals, I get all crunched up and into the tight sort of a rhetoric pattern of thought and writing and so on, but I am fairly good at the 02:55:00freer sort of thing as the occasion demands. But I have never had Bry look any remarks over that he didn't just make much better as a result. He's very, very good. So, you know, there's no--. And then I trusted him, absolutely and completely. I figured I could leave the campus in an emergency for a month and I'd be perfectly satisfied with what Bry did. And it proved to be true. That is, when I'd get all tied up with all the student things, or legislative hearings, or whatever else it might be, Bry would just kind of take over. He'd always tell me what he was up to, and if there were big important problems, he'd say, "Look, you've got to know what the alternatives are. I think we ought to do as follows. But if we do that, the following happens or is likely to happen. Another course 02:56:00would be to do so and so." And those are the kinds of talks we'd have. And then we're close friends. You know, it's nice to have a friend that you trust in that kind of job. But he just took an enormous load off from me. And then he continued throughout the year. And I think by the end of the year we had a lot of things put back together. I think we'd re-established faculty support. And students, at least, were coming around to the point where they kind of thought I wasn't such a horrible person. Even the radical students, I think, thought that. I always thought it was kind of touching that, when they hanged Joe and me in effigy some time later in the year in front of Bascom Hall, that they felt they had to come in and tell me that it was my office that forced them to do it, not 02:57:00my personal behavior and so on. I then started, you know, whenever I had a chance, I knew that--oh, I had to tell my staff, of course, what I was doing. So I talked to each one of them individually. And I told them I just had to have Bry and what he would be doing, and in a sense that would reduce their role, but unfortunately that's the way it had to be.

Nobody seemed particularly resentful although I always felt Jim Cleary thought it was a vote of no confidence, which, in a sense, it was. And Jim then started, quite actively, looking for jobs, and I started helping him to look for jobs. And by the end of the year he landed the job as president of San Fernando Valley 02:58:00State College, then. I guess it's a university now. And he's been there ever since. From all I hear, he's done a good job. And Joe also started looking for things, and I encouraged him and tried to help him in his aspirations to become a college president. But I didn't use either of them a great deal after that. I mean, they did routine things, but the big things I left to others.

LS: Did Burt Fisher go on?

WS: No. Once we got Bry into the fold, Burt withdrew, excepting that he was always available for emergencies. For example, he did such things as the mail 02:59:00after the Dow thing. There were just sacks full of mail.

LS: From the state.

WS: From all over, alumni and every side of the opinion, you know. And Burt said, "You can't read all this junk"--and I, of course, knew I couldn't-- "and you can't answer it, but it needs to be answered." So he prepared, then, a set of letters, you know, for various--. And then he and Emily classified the files. And then Burt and Emily made up the letters and answered everything. He did a lot of things like that that would move things along. And then, whenever we needed him or wanted him, he'd come. And I kind of used him, really, as a substitute for Joe on crucial issues. His judgment was so much better. And so, when the students took over whatever--the administration building, Peterson 03:00:00Hall--Joe was in the office, too. We sat there in my office and had telephone communications to Bob Atwell and to Hanson, and Burt was there as one of the main strategizers. He was the one I listened to.

Bry would come to those things, too. He couldn't keep out. He was very helpful, actually. And later in the year, when the black students' uprising came--I was away at the time, and Bry took that over and handled it beautifully, actually. He prevented any really serious developments. And he also proposed to me the 03:01:00minute that I got back that we set up a real blue-ribbon committee to talk about their demands for black studies programs, and housing, and all the other demands that they made. And we did. And he, then, was the main contact for that committee. So he did--he couldn't avoid--there was no way he could avoid--. This was the great problem, you know. There was no way anybody in the administration could avoid being involved in it. That had been my foolish idea, you know, when I took over. Well, I can turn all this over to somebody, and I'll stay out of all the student things. You can no more stay out of student things than anything. And Fred Harrington tried very hard to, but in the end, he really 03:02:00couldn't. That is, he was blamed by the regents for not being here when the Dow troubles began. And he was blamed by the regents when the students would come over there and try to prevent them from having a meeting or disrupt the regents' meetings. After all, he's the boss as far as the regents are concerned. And he isn't handling these things well. If he hasn't got people in offices that are supposed to handle them that can't, then he should get somebody who can, you know. You know, old Harry Truman was just right, the buck stops here, in those jobs. And it doesn't matter whether you don't care about that kind of use of your time, you don't feel you're very good at it, anything else; you've got to do it when the crunch comes. And Fred isolated himself as much as he possibly could. And in general he left everything up to the chancellor, and let the 03:03:00chancellor take all the blame. But eventually the regents and the legislature and the governor started blaming him as well. So you know, in those times, you just can't--no way you can--occupy a top administrative post and insulate yourself from a true crisis.

LS: I would like to make a little tie-in here. I happened to be reading or hearing Zillman's interview yesterday, and he looks down on all of you, beginning with Fleming, for having so much to do with students in this. In his day, students had to go through this channel and that channel and couldn't just come in.

WS: Oh, sure, of course. But Ted, you know, doesn't live in the modern world. He doesn't--

LS: I was going to say, it's a difference in students.

WS: Oh, well, even when Ted was in office, my own son and my daughter-in-law 03:04:00were on the student council, and they had utter contempt for him as did all the rest of the students. They called him "deanie wienie," and they claimed, you know, that he puts up all these barriers, and that this means that student self-government has nothing to say or nothing to do. My youngest son ran for the president of the student council with a platform to abolish student government because it was useless under Zillman, and he damn near won! He lost by about eighty votes, as I recall. He claims to this day that Zillman called up all the fraternities when he saw the big turnout and saw that his party was probably to be elected and marched them all down there to vote, to retain for the other side. So he was absolutely, you know--. It's true. In those days, a dean could 03:05:00walk up to somebody and say, "You're kicked out of school; you're breaking a rule." No hearing, no nothing. But you're dealing with a different kind of people in those days than you're dealing with--during the late '60s, you know. So trying to divert them to somebody else, they just absolutely came to the top. They'd break the door! They literally did it several times when Emily would have the door locked, after hours or something. They would just bang against the door and break the lock; storm into your office. What would Dean Zillman tell them to do? Go see somebody else? Oh, you know, he just didn't know what was going on. In fact, I think he was out of date, for his times even, in handling students. But anyway, that's one man's opinion.

But anyway, the Crow and the Mermin committees were taken very seriously by the 03:06:00faculty. They held all sorts of hearings, and then their reports were adopted by the faculty. And I think that, you know, that helped the faculty to feel that their position was adequately heard, that what emerged from all this was a faculty rather than an administrative set of decisions. I think that tended to heal some of the wounds in the faculty. And so I think by the end of the year--and the appointment of Kearl was very well received by the faculty and by the deans--and I think by the end of the year, we had things in pretty good shape. Now, there were several other crises that had less, much less to do with the students that arose during that era.

LS: I'd like to ask you a question before you leave this. Did you feel that the faculty did their share in talking to the students?

WS: No. The faculty, you know--I was told by every person I knew intimately that had been in higher administration that, when the crunch comes, the faculty will desert you. I was told that by Bob Fleming. I was told that by Fred Harrington. I was told that by Roger Hines, who was chancellor at Berkeley. I was told that by Marty Meyerson, who got through various Berkeley troubles. Every one of them said, "Look, when it's really--the going gets tough and it comes to you and the students, the faculty, at least a good hunk of it, will side with the students." 03:08:00So, I was still disappointed. I didn't believe it. Well, having said that, most of the faculty didn't side with them, obviously, but the vocal faculty did.

LS: Now you're talking about those particular meetings.

WS: Well, the whole year long.

LS: It went on--

WS: Yes.

LS: --during the year.

WS: The number who, however, shifted over is what I'm talking about. The number who shifted from identifying with the students to identifying with the administration just kept increasing all the time. The faculty felt disavowed, too. They were getting carried out of their rooms for not allowing the students to take over the class to put on pantomimes, or to make radical speeches, or to make speeches about the war and various other things. No less a personage than Bill Young was carried out and dumped in a snow bank because he put to a vote 03:09:00whether or not to let a group of students come in to his introductory American government class and take thirty minutes to present their views about the war. And when he put it to a vote and the kids voted it down about five to one, they picked him up, and carried him outside of the building, and dumped him in a snow bank. Well, you know, faculty don't mind. My own son was then teaching at Chicago, and was terribly upset about the way President Levi handled the Chicago problems, you know. They've got only a few hundred undergraduates, a couple of thousand at most. Everybody knows them. They let them sit in the room, and sit in the building, and take it over, and they copied down their names. And when they left, then they prosecuted them under the rules of the university about occupying buildings. And they kicked out forty or fifty kids, put a lot of 03:10:00others on probation, and built up--. It was very vindictive and wrong and so on. And he stood up in a faculty meeting and argued that cause. About three weeks later, they dumped Bill Young out in the snow bank, and he said, "By God! that's terrible when they invade a man's classroom and treat him in that way. Or they come in to your class and try to take over a man's classroom." And I said, "Well, you used to holler at me all the time because I didn't want them to come in, twenty or thirty of them, and take over my office. You thought that I ought to sit there all afternoon or all day patiently talking to them." And that's the way faculty are, you know. When the students started invading on faculty prerogatives, they got very, very, anti-student--even the most liberal of them.

WS: Well, I did just want to say that faculty comes around in these things. They 03:11:00have everywhere. But their identification with students is like father-son, mother-son, mother-daughter sorts of relationships. They are, in their own mind, somehow, close to students. They have to be close to students. It's part of their role. It's part of their conception of themselves. And when students get alienated from the university, and then turn against them, they're terribly upset. Well, when students start invading their prerogatives, then they kind of fall back in support of the university, and the administration, and tradition. And most of them do that eventually; even the radical ones are really committed to the university, its traditions, its ideals, and so on. They may temporarily 03:12:00depart, but it's when you need them that they depart. Then they come back. Now, having said that, at least two-thirds of the faculty never once deviated from full support of university traditions, academic freedom, the support of the administration. But they were kind of quiet people. They voted with their feet. They came to the meetings and voted. But they didn't make any speeches. And so when you talk about the faculty dividing in crisis, it may be, instead of their being 90 percent or so united and holding to the same values and goals--or 95 or 98 or whatever it is--it maybe becomes 20-80, or 25-75, or some other sizeable fraction. And then the job, it seems to me, of the administration then is to 03:13:00wean them back to a position that they really basically believe in anyway and have only temporarily abandoned. But it still means that you're in real trouble when that happens. And very few people in an administration survive that anyway. At Columbia, both the president and the provost--who was a marvelous guy, David Truman--were sacrificed in that. Really, Berkeley, there's a whole string of chancellors, and President Kerr, probably the outstanding university president of his time--a man with a true philosophy of education, articulate, smart, excellent administrator--but he still, eventually had to be sacrificed. If Bob 03:14:00Fleming had stayed here and gone on doing what he was doing, he'd have been fired. Fred Harrington, who tried to stay away from it, eventually, had to resign. I don't know anybody who survived the whole period where there was real trouble. Oh, you know, the namby pamby sort of stuff that took place in a lot of colleges, where the students took over the newspaper and put in radical articles--as they were seen by the administration--or where they held protest meetings in class hours and all that sort of thing; that just blew people's minds at places like Arizona and Utah, you know, terrible troubles. But I mean where they had real trouble--I don't know--maybe somebody survived through the whole period. I don't think so. I don't know of anybody. So Harvard certainly 03:15:00didn't. Pusey--that was his undoing eventually. There are always a lot of other things involved in the undoing of anybody, but that was probably the main factor. Columbia, Berkeley, here, Kent State, those were the five places that had the worst troubles. Then Bob went from here to Michigan--where they had much less trouble to begin with, much less violence, much less violent people--and weathered it. Whether he could have if he'd been there the whole time, I don't know. In Minnesota, nothing much happened. The other places--. Ohio State was another place that, toward the end, got really tough. And it lost provost, presidents in succession. So it's a pretty hard thing to survive, and I'm not 03:16:00saying that because I didn't survive. But I'm saying that where the troubles were great it was pretty hard to survive. You could kind of mend the fences and get out, as I think I did. But I don't know what would have happened to me if I'd have had the Kent State and all those things that Ed had after that, you know. I'd have known more about how to handle them. But I'm not at all sure that I could have stayed in office, if I'd wanted to, once further troubles came. In fact, I'm not at all sure, as I might have said last time, that I could have stayed in office very much longer anyway. The regents, I thought--. I think Fred tried to protect me from the conversations that he had with the regents, some of whom were demanding that he fire me--later in the year.

WS: But the real telltale thing was in the spring meeting when they got around to voting salary increases. I got the smallest increase of any administrator anywhere--dean, vice chancellors, presidents of the other units like the chancellor at Milwaukee, and at Green Bay, and at Parkside. Oh, you just look down the whole list. I've forgotten what it was: eight hundred dollars or a thousand bucks, something like that, you know, increase. And everybody else got three, five, six thousand dollars. Well, that was a message that the regents wanted me to have, I'm sure; that they weren't at all happy with my administration. That had no effect on my resignation.

LS: It didn't? I should think--

WS: No, I didn't care.

LS: --you would have been very angry.

WS: No, I wasn't even angry. I figured, you know, poor bastards have got to take it out some way. And I was a frustrating person to them because I wouldn't do what they would tell me to do when they tried to get their nose into administration. I'd point out, "Well, that's an administrative matter, and I'll handle that."

WS: And I always thought Mr. Kahl--did you know him? He was the elected head of education, what do we call him? Not minister of education--

LS: Secretary?

WS: Secretary of education? No, that isn't what we call him.

LS: You mean in the state. I don't know.

WS: Yes. And he is an elected official. You know, there's a woman who's in that office now. Is it commissioner? I don't know what it is. But anyway, he's head 03:19:00of the state department of education in the capitol. He's an elected, not an appointed, official. And Mr. Kahl was an old ex-superintendent of schools. That's a usual career, you know: the ex-superintendents run to head the educational agency of the state. And they're ex-officio members of the regents, by law, that person is. And Mr. Kahl would always--with a vote, however--and Mr. Kahl would always say, "Well, you know, gentlemen, I just don't approve of your telling the chancellor what to do. The way it should be done is you hire a person to be the executive officer of the university, and you don't tell him 03:20:00what to do. But if you don't like what he does, you fire him." And he said, "I happen to like what he's done and I wouldn't vote to fire him, but that's your alternative. You can't constantly be telling him how to run the university." And I always liked that support. But anyway, so I would--in the regents' meetings, both open and closed ones--I'd just say, "Well, I'll have to handle that and thank you for your advice." And they didn't like that. And then I'd lecture them a good deal about things they didn't want to be lectured about. So as the year went on, even though I got stronger with the faculty and probably with the students, I got weaker with the regents. And I'm sure that they would have fired me in two or three months anyway. That was Fred's opinion. And I just was so torn about it. I thought it would be so much more fun to be fired than to resign. And it'd be kind of a vindication. They were firing me for really 03:21:00representing, essentially, a faculty position before them. And rather than doing what they wanted done, I was trying to do what the faculty wanted done. And I thought that would be kind of fun to be fired. And I thought it'd be fun to be fired by a bunch of antediluvian Republican conservatives anyway, you know. But I finally decided that that wouldn't be fair to Fred. It wouldn't be fair to the university, and it would cause a lot of trouble for the university. So, since I didn't like the job anyway, I'd just quit at the end of the year. So that's what I did.

LS: You wouldn't have enjoyed going on at all.

WS: No. I wouldn't have enjoyed going on without the complete support of the 03:22:00regents. I just didn't--. If there had been some way you could separate out the student problems, which I foresaw lasting for a long time at that point--I didn't think, you know--I figured I could cope. But I didn't enjoy it. And I just figured, the hell with it. I'll do something more useful, something that I enjoy more. So that was the reason for--. That was when I decided to resign.

LS: Had Harrington brought back Ed Young with a mind to--

WS: Oh, I'm sure he had. He never said so. I always said, "Well, Fred, you're stockpiling Ed Young for when they fired me." And he'd laugh. But I'm sure he had that in mind. He knew I would probably want to quit anyway. He told me--when I told him I was going to quit--he said, "Well, I would never have asked you to. 03:23:00But I think your analysis of the situation--. It's going to continue this way and isn't going to get an awful lot better. You obviously don't enjoy it. If you want to quit, OK. But I would never ask you to," he said. Well, I don't know whether he would have or not. He never did. And he seemed quite surprised when I, you know, at that moment, that I proposed to do it. I shouldn't say that he begged me to stay on. But if he had, it wouldn't have made any difference. I'd decided to quit. No, I think Fred was kind of relieved to see me go because he figured that I had become a source of constant trouble for him with the regents. And so he figured he had to have somebody else, you know, who didn't represent that added dimension to his burden.

LS: Then why didn't the search and screen committee come up with Ed Young's name?

WS: I have no idea. I wasn't there. All I know is the same rumor you know. I don't know that it's true although I was informed by quite a reliable source. I don't know. I haven't any idea. I thought they would. I would have if I'd been on the committee. I thought Ed was ideal for the job and for the times. I thought he had the characteristics of lots of cunning, very smart, knew the university well, had all this negotiating and labor negotiating experiences. I just figured--. And he wouldn't be as precipitous as I was about things. And that wouldn't get him in as much trouble. I just reasoned that Ed was the right guy. If I'd have been on that committee, he would have been my first choice. 03:25:00So--Ed and I have always been very close friends. So I thought that was an ideal choice myself. But if they didn't come up with that name--. I'm told, actually, by a member of the committee, that they didn't. So I don't know. But then Fred called them in and said, "Look, I want Ed Young's name on that list." And they agreed to put it on and then he chose Ed. But again, I guess I feel less that the chancellor has to be the sole choice of the president because he isn't really his assistant.

LS: No, I would think that would be rather different.

WS: He runs a separate job. In fact, one of the great problems of every one of these systems is to define autonomy for the local administration. And it's gradually coming about all over the country. At first, California--Sproul and 03:26:00then Kerr--couldn't keep out of the local management. Fred couldn't here, although he did a fairly good job of it. He probably kept out of things here much more than he did at Milwaukee or the other places. But still, he had been the guy who sat in that chair, and he knew more about it, he thought, than you did or anybody else could. And so he wanted to and he couldn't avoid getting involved.

WS: So that was one of the great advantages of bringing in somebody like Weaver is that he had nothing to do with it. In fact, he never did understand it. Probably it was the best thing that could have happened to the university is to bring in somebody like Weaver who really was weak as a president and who wouldn't interfere too much with local autonomy. I think the autonomy of the 03:27:00university grew greatly under Weaver, and we should all be in his debt for that.

LS: And Young will promote it because he believes in it. Is that right?

WS: Well, and Young will promote it for a number of reasons: one, he believes in it, especially for this campus, and two, Ed is not a man with great energy, and he has to delegate a great deal to others. He's not a Bob Fleming, you know, or an Irv Shain. He doesn't have the physical stamina and the resources to cope with constantly having to be involved in big decisions and running things. In fact, I think that was one of the hallmarks of Ed's chancellorship was that he 03:28:00just had to have somebody around like Shain or Bry Kearl who'd take over and do the day to day management of things. Then when he lost those two guys, he never found anybody who could do that. And so everything got diffused all over the place. By the time Ed left Bascom Hall, the place was a shambles in terms of administration. Nobody knew who did anything around the place. The deans insisted that Ed appoint an acting chancellor and specified that it be Glenn Pound, who is a very good administrator, to clean up things and get things in shape. They didn't even want to wait in the interim until the new chancellor came because they felt it was such an administrative mess. So Ed's long suit isn't administration. Ed's long suit is being a wise, judicious, and crafty sort 03:29:00of a guy who gets the main things done that he wants done and he leaves other things to other people.

LS: Why did Bry Kearl leave?

WS: He didn't want to work with Ed. He liked the relationship he had with me, where he'd come in, we'd talk about things, and I'd say, "Do it," you know. He'd go and talk to Ed, and Ed would say, "Well, I'll have to think about that." And he could never get any--. Ed doesn't make decisions. He lets the events make them. He waits until the events make them and then moves. But Bry just found it terribly frustrating. He'd go, let's say something comes up about the environmental institute, and he goes and he works out a compromise. And he goes back to Ed and says, "We ought to do the following." Well, Ed would say, "Well, 03:30:00let's talk about that some more next week, you know. Let's think about that." And meanwhile, it's all come undone. Well, Bry just couldn't--Bry likes Ed and admires him--he just couldn't stand to work for him. Now the difference between Bry and Irv is a very interesting one. Irv is a complete take-charge guy. He'd go and say to Ed, "I'm going to do the following." Unless Ed said, "Don't do it," he did it. And pretty soon, he got to where he just would do it and then go tell Ed and--.

LS: So this is why Bry Kearl isn't chancellor and Irving is?

WS: Probably. Well, in part, it's another thing. Bry withdrew his name from the list for chancellor. I know he's been offered top administrative posts in other universities. I think he just doesn't want to do that. I don't think he wants 03:31:00the real heat that comes from the top job. He loves the kind of thing he does as vice chancellor with somebody he likes to work with. And he's marvelous at it. I'm sure he'd be a marvelous chancellor. But he just doesn't like--. I think he just doesn't want the top administrative post where he's subject to all of the pressures. You know, there are people like that in this world. There are some people that want to be number two.

LS: By pressures, you mean people not liking you and--

WS: Or making all sorts of demands upon you. And I don't think he wants to make the decisions himself. I think he doesn't want to make the decisions, the unpopular ones. Nobody minds making the popular decisions, but I don't think he wants to make the unpopular ones. And I think he just is an excellent behind-the-scenes kind of operator. And that's what he likes to do. That's what 03:32:00he's superb at. He's exactly what Ed should have had. Ed should have said to him, "Bry, you run the day to day things and tell me what you're doing." But Ed is not that decisive. So he never told him that. He didn't have to tell Irv. Irv just did it.Irv once told me, he said, "You know, what I do with Ed is I size up a situation. I tell him about it. I tell him what I'm going to do. If Ed isn't here, I don't even tell him; I do it. But I've told Ed, anytime you want somebody else to do this job, get him. I'll go back to chemistry, gladly."

LS: That's just what Ed said about his job, that he could do what he wanted to, that he'd be glad to leave if they wanted him to.

WS: Yes. So that's why I think Bry didn't want to be chancellor. He didn't want 03:33:00to be chancellor. He acted as chancellor after I resigned until Ed came in. But that's just the summer, a couple of months. But he didn't want to be considered then. He did stay on with Ed for a year or so, I think. Not more than that. But he didn't enjoy it that much.

LS: I'm glad you said that. I've heard reasons that were much more complicated than that, and this sounds like a very--

WS: No, I think that's the real reason. I probably know Bry almost as well as anybody on the campus. He's one of my really closest friends. We play golf together. We do all sorts of things, and Ruth is very close to Liz and, you know, that sort of thing. So I think I know him. I think I know him better than he knows himself. I think he doesn't know that he doesn't want the challenge of a top job.

LS: But what I meant by "thank god" was that one needs desperately, I suppose, people who are willing to stand behind and not be famous and yet make important decisions.

WS: You need two different kinds of people. You need either that kind of a person or you need the kind of person--. Oh, and Bry needs variety. He may do that for two or three years, then he's got to do something else. You know, he won't do that as number two man forever. But he'll take another of that sort of job doing something else, like when he left on leave to go to the Agricultural Development Council, which is one of John D. Rockefeller's foundations. He was number two man. He ran the Asian office. When he was asked by John D. and the board--I was on the board, so I know--if he would be willing to consider being president of the foundation when the president retired, he said, no--again. So I have several bits of evidence that make me quite sure that Bry doesn't want 03:35:00whatever it is that's involved in the top job. Ambitious administrators always are aiming for the top job. You need those kinds of guys. You need the Shains who want to make the reputation, use the job, do the best you can, learn on the job, and move to the higher level. You need both kinds. Bry happens to be the rarer type, I'd say.

LS: It was some time in February or March--

WS: I thought it was.

LS: --because I was just looking at it yesterday.

WS: It was after Dow, long after Dow.

LS: Well, we are recording now. Well, why don't you tell it again.

WS: Well, I was just going to say. There were other crises than Dow during the year. I think maybe the one we were most worried about, I guess, was the second 03:36:00Dow, when the Dow people came back in the spring. But we were much more prepared for that. Essentially what we did was to move the interviews to the Field House on the advice of various experts and brought in adequate police force to guarantee that people could get into the building and that it wouldn't be blocked. It's very hard to block a building of that size with many entrances. And moreover, we scheduled all the interviews very early in the morning--I think about 8 o'clock--and had enough interviewers there so that the interviews could 03:37:00be over in an hour total. People had to register in advance if they wanted to interview and were given a specific time to be there. They all had to be there at whenever that time was, I think it was 8 a.m. And of course they all went in at once. Doors were barred, and then they all went out at once. And then we had on reserve, I would guess, maybe 150 sheriff's deputies who were inside of the Field House. Wait now, I've got the terms confused. The practice hall is what we used, you know, where they practice all the sports. That great huge building next door to the Field House is where the interviews were held. That's bigger 03:38:00than a football field. That's quite a huge building. And then the Field House where basketball is played is where we had the county sheriffs and all of their minions from around the surrounding counties on reserve if anything broke loose. But we didn't want them out with a show of force. Moreover, we told everybody we had them there. And of course nobody knew how many there were. There could have been hundreds. You could put 14,000 people in there; obviously you wouldn't have that many law people. But they knew there was a goodly number there.

WS: And also it turned out that the second Dow interviews were held just the day before the primaries--

LS: Before the referendum.

WS: --before the McCarthy--

LS: Well, the referendum on the war was on the second of April.

WS: No, this was before the primaries when McCarthy was running for the Democratic--the state primaries in which McCarthy was running for nomination and for support in the state.

LS: They were March 30th.

WS: March 30th?

LS: The day of the Dow interviews.

WS: OK, I don't remember when they were. As I recalled, it was early spring. But, in any event, that probably kept all the McCarthy kids from coming because they realized they had to exhibit good behavior or it would hurt his chances in the primaries.

LS: Did you deliberately schedule them for--

WS: Yes, very deliberately. There were some people very upset, some of my 03:40:00liberal friends, but I told them, "You can't have it both ways. If they feel they've got to disrupt the interviews, there will be certain costs, and one of those costs will be it'll probably hurt their political cause." And I know Midge Miller was upset and several others, but it seemed to me that we had to play our strategy to win just as they had to play theirs. And I just told them--I didn't say it in the newspapers--but everybody knew why we scheduled it right at that time. It was to be within a week or so of that anyway. So we figured, the closer the better. I think that effectively kept out a great many kids who might have come there to raise hell. And then the fact that, really, the back of the radical movement had kind of been broken, temporarily at least, on campus 03:41:00because of lack of leadership. And then the fact that we'd held it and announced what we were doing and that police would be there, and that force would be used if necessary to keep people from entering the building who weren't permitted to enter, and so on. But, whatever, it went off without an incident.

LS: How did you feel about having Dow on campus? You originally hadn't been in favor of having--

WS: I wasn't then!

LS: You still weren't.

WS: No, but by then the faculty had again said we'll have interviewing. The regents had said, under no circumstances can you cancel interviews. I could have resigned over it, but that didn't seem to me to be a very sensible thing to do.

LS: There was a regents' meeting at which you--on the 20th of March. Do you remember that?

WS: Not particularly.

LS: And you went in and announced when you had scheduled the interviews to be. They would have expected to have discussed the interview policy, I guess, but they didn't. And there was some speculation about that.

WS: I don't remember it at all.

LS: You don't?

WS: No, it wasn't any--to me, no big incident. We told them what we were going to do and just did it. And that's all there was to it, as I recall. Now, earlier, I had said, in that forum that was held after Dow, that I would not allow the--I guess it was the CIA was next scheduled to come--I would not allow the CIA on the campus if I felt that there was any likelihood of bloodshed and 03:43:00great disruption. And I know that the regents questioned me about that, asked me who I'd consulted with, and I told them "Nobody." That, after all, I was the chief executive office of the campus, and I made such decisions myself.

WS: On the other hand, I was pretty sure the CIA wasn't coming. The reason is--

LS: Did they cancel on their own?

WS: Yes.

LS: They did.

WS: Well, they cancelled. They started cancelling all over the country.

LS: I see. It wasn't somebody here called up and--

WS: Yes, somebody here called up. At least three or four people I know of called up--

LS: And told them what?

WS: --and suggested that they not come.

LS: Do you know who? Who was it called?

WS: Yes. I don't think I should tell. After all, you know, it was done as a 03:44:00favor to me as a person, to the university, and so on. That's a matter I don't think I can reveal to anyone, but there were three or four calls. I don't know that anybody from the administration called, but I know that some faculty people called. And one person, in particular, who was a friend and a classmate of Helms, called. And he had his assurance, long before the policy was made, that they weren't going to go to campuses to interview, that they wouldn't come. So I was pretty confident they weren't going to come. But if they had come and when they were scheduled, which was just two or three weeks after the Dow thing, I would have told them you just can't come on campus. You'll have to go someplace else. We can't protect you. You can go to the federal building. You can go 03:45:00someplace else, and the students can come to you. But in any event I think Helms, you know, despite his recent conviction and all, he was basically a very decent sort of a man. And I don't think he wanted the CIA to have trouble on campuses. He was interested in getting the best people he could to join and at least that's what I'm told by some of his friends.

LS: Why couldn't Dow have? If they brought so many people here to interview, why couldn't they have spent the same amount of money and transported the university people?

WS: Well, they could have.

LS: Did they think of it?

WS: Yes, it was suggested to them by nobody less than me. I had a meeting with them, and I think they would have been willing, but they would have done it with 03:46:00reluctance. They're kind of intransigent people, you know, themselves, and very great in their own righteousness. But by then the regents and the faculty committee and the student referendum had all been held again, and it was agreed to have interviews on campus. I think I could have forced them off campus, but I don't think the regents would have stood for it.

LS: Well, I didn't mean in terms of your forcing them but just a suggestion that they do this which would have been what they could have done.

WS: Yes. That was a very strong suggestion. I met with the vice president in charge of personnel and others of Dow--

LS: Did you actually go there?

WS: No, they came here.

LS: They did?

WS: Yes.

LS: In early--

WS: Well, whatever it was, sometime, oh, a couple or three weeks before the interviews were scheduled. But they didn't want to do it, and I couldn't force 03:47:00them. That was the point, see. I could have said to them, "OK, you can't come." But then I would have been in trouble with the regents and I think with rather large elements of the faculty by then and would have gone against everything that, through the democratic process, we'd decided on. You want to remember that, even in the spring when the students held their referendum again on interviewing, they were three to one in favor of interviewing on campus. You know, we tend, we liberals, to think that student opinion was expressed by the liberal students on this campus. It never was, you know. It's still true that most of the kids did not agree with what the liberal, radical kids on campus 03:48:00were doing. And they couldn't win a referendum. Now, they could get elected to the student council if only 2,000 kids voted. But in the referendum about 11,000 voted. And that would, of course, kill them. If they'd keep them from voting, then they can win because they can pack it.

But in any event, we then went on with interviewing for the rest of the year, but always--. I think the Dow was the only threatening one. The others were--. We held the interviews with somebody, I've forgotten, General Motors or somebody they were mad at, in the Engineering Building; all of them over there because the engineers were the ones that wanted to do the interviewing mainly, and commerce people, ag. So we just made the interviews in those places, the College of Agriculture, nothing up here centrally. And there was a little trouble, as I recall, whenever those interviews were held in Engineering. There were several 03:49:00hundred people went there to protest. But again we'd learned the business, and we had enough police and officers to maintain order. And we had no real trouble. I think a few windows were broken, a few things of that sort, a few arrests made, but that was it.

LS: I'm curious about your remark that the Dow people were intransigent. You mean, they, in a moral way--was that it?--that they took a moral position?

WS: Yes. Very much so. They said they had always worked and cooperated with the universities, including the University of Wisconsin, that they had always interviewed on campus. We had agreed to that, and there was no reason--. They didn't feel that they were immoral people, that they had as much right to hire people as anybody else and to come and go in the university as anybody else. 03:50:00They saw no reason why they should be singled out for special treatment or to be denied any rights that were offered to any other company or any other employer.

LS: What was their reaction to the October--? Didn't they see that there was something a little special happening?

WS: Well, they knew something special was happening. It wasn't only here.

LS: No. Exactly.

WS: They got exactly the same thing everywhere; or not everywhere, but in a great many places. But again, they were not about to knuckle under to what they saw to be radical, liberal students trying to prevent them from the same rights that anybody else had to interview.

LS: So they weren't the suave, sort of bureaucratic man who just gets done what 03:51:00he wants to do, but they really had a moral feeling of opposition to radicals.

WS: Sure.

LS: It's interesting.

WS: Well, opposition to being denied freedom of speech and freedom of access, which is guaranteed under the U. S. constitution, you know. I'm not sure I wouldn't have agreed with them if I'd been in their position. These kids were denying people their rights. They were denying kids their rights to come in the building. They were denying companies their rights to come here. Now you could say that those rights should not have been granted. But as long as they were granted to other companies, they had to be granted to Dow. The University of Wisconsin is not in a position of deciding who's moral and who's immoral, is not in the position of deciding what people have a right to come here and interview and don't, you know.

LS: No, I didn't mean--I meant them. I was thinking of individuals--

WS: Yes. Well, that's the position they took.

LS: --that they might have said, "Well, we don't want to give you so much 03:52:00trouble next time, and we don't want to get all your--. you have to spend so much money to police, we might as well, just this time, do it a little differently." I thought they might have done that.

WS: We don't want trouble, yes. Well, at least CIA was smart enough to do that. But I can understand their position, too.

Oh, we were talking about the other major student crises. There were a number of taking over of buildings but leaving, and coming to my office--under the guise of having a discussion--and then staying and refusing to get out, and all that sort of thing. But none of those were any real crisis. When I got through talking, I'd just say, "OK, I'm going," get up, and leave, you know. People 03:53:00would kind of get in front of my way, and I'd say, "Get out of the way, son. I'm going out of here." And that would be the end of it. There were no police around on the outside to make arrests and so on. And I would have charged anybody who attempted any battery or any hindrance of my freedom of movement. And they knew it. So they'd get out of the way, and I'd go out.

LS: Was this SDS people, or Committee to End the War people, or--

WS: Oh, no. They were the SDS, and I think we had probably as many Weathermen here as any place in the country. We had the real tough ones here. That was the difference between us and Michigan. They said we had the real--the people who were committed to do destructive things. But they weren't going to do them against the wrong odds, you know. And so there were such people. In fact, you 03:54:00know, I don't know if I ever told you, but after the Dow, both Bill Emery, the city chief of police, and Ralph Hanson insisted on having a twenty-four hour guard on our house even though we lived, you know, way out at the very edge of town. They had policemen sitting in cars; first a couple of cars and later on only a couple of guys in one car. And those poor guys would sit there all night on five-hour shifts, you know. And I'd go out and try to get them to leave. So did Liz. But they insisted on staying. Nobody ever came, that I know of, during that time. But they were quite worried because there had been threats and so on, but nothing of that sort ever happened. I would walk through the Union, where Ralph had forbidden me to go without police. But I'd go anyway, and people would 03:55:00hiss as I'd walk down the halls, or make remarks, you know, about that fascist bastard, and so on. That isn't all the fun you might think it is. But anyway, I never felt that they'd do anything to me. I was quite confident of that.

But anyhow, there were no really serious, big things that came up after that. There were all sorts of threatened things, but we always managed to plan for them. And we learned that the way you plan was always to have more, much more force available than you needed in the event of any threat. I think that was a big mistake at Dow. If we'd have had three or four hundred policemen up there, 03:56:00we probably would have gotten by, excepting, I'm also convinced, that something like Dow had to come, that it was going to be forced there or elsewhere, so--. I'd rather it had come later when I'd learned more about what to do in these things. But we came to manage the things much better later on. Well, about the only other things that I--

LS: Well, I'd be curious, since we've touched on SDS briefly, if you remembered individuals, if they came to your attention. There were--John Coatsworth was one who was in SDS. Or Don Bluestone. I don't think he was SDS. But I just wondered if any of these--

WS: There were kind of minor figures. They came in to talk to me and they were 03:57:00all in the business of making threats, not to me personally, you know, but, "If you don't do so and so, we're going to take over this university or we'll--." One guy said, "I'll be sitting here, and you'll be sitting in the basement."

LS: That was the Kaplan twins.

WS: Yes, those were the Kaplan twins. They'd come in once in a while to talk to me. But mainly they were just figures on the campus. I didn't know any of them personally.

LS: You couldn't distinguish among them as to which was more effective or which was more--

WS: None of them was very effective.

LS: You mean, there would have been better ways of disturbing the campus, you think.

WS: Yes. Oh, yes. The only real organizer and planner that there was in the whole student movement was Evan Stark. And he was a masterful tactician. And 03:58:00once he left they never got anything well planned again, you know, with the clock-like precision that Evan had. Evan had the driveway to the Bascom Hall parking lot blocked with old cars right on the second, you know. He had everything laid out. And they never had anybody like that. These were mainly kind of idealistic, middle class kids, you know, who had these great, burning convictions about freeing the laboring classes from exploitation once the war was over and all that sort of thing. But they weren't very capable leaders of movements. You know, they'd get up and talk very effectively at meetings and get people shouting, and yelling, and going up the hill. But they wouldn't know what they were going to do when they got there. So I would say that none of them was 03:59:00an effective leader of a movement. There's a difference between being a good speaker--. You go to our faculty meetings when there are troubles and certain people get up, and make impassioned pleas, and get tears, and so on. But they're not effective in getting legislation through or implementing it once it's through. And the same with student leaders. They're much better at talking than they are at organizing or doing anything.

LS: What would you say to the statement that it wasn't that they lacked leaders but that they took different tactics and just went underground, started trashing and--

WS: Well, certainly they went underground when they couldn't do the things that they needed to do more openly or couldn't get sufficient support. Trashing is 04:00:00kind of an easy thing to do once you get into a mob spirit and start breaking windows and doing things of that sort. You can get a lot of people in that at the university to go along and throw bricks at windows. That doesn't take much organization. It does a lot of harm, and it cost us over $400,000 to fix the windows; you know, these big, double, thermopane windows in this building [Social Sciences], I think every one of them was broken, all along the lake. You know, they'd throw bricks right through them, things like that. There are a lot of people that will do that. But I don't know how much organization that takes. Get twenty good, committed Weathermen to do something like that and pretty soon--. They can do it by themselves, you know. Most of that was done, not in big mobs of people, but relatively small groups working in the middle of the 04:01:00night. They could do all that kind of stuff. There must have been a leadership for that. I don't know who it was, and obviously I don't think anybody else knew. Ralph was trying his damnedest to find out who was organizing this kind of stuff. I would guess there was a certain amount of spontaneity about it. And there were certainly people who were doing it. But we didn't know who they were. So I don't know who did the underground things. I don't know who set the fires. If I did, I'd have had them in jail, you know. There was no question. I don't think anybody should misinterpret what I would have done if I could have caught those people. I think it's just a, you know, it's a criminal act to go around and destroy $400,000 of university windows and take money we could have used for black students fellowships and scholarships and various other causes, you know. And if I ever saw anybody, I'd turn him in in a minute. Or we had twenty-two fires set within a week after Dow, several of which were in Bascom which, if 04:02:00they hadn't been discovered right away, would have destroyed the building. We had the gutting of South Hall, fires that cost us thousands of dollars. Any of those things, you know, I don't think there's hardly anybody on the campus who wouldn't have been in favor of finding out who did it. We did everything we could to find out who did those things. We had the help of the FBI, the state fire marshal, everybody else. We couldn't find out. If we had them, we would have prosecuted to the hilt.

LS: Was it that you suspected but didn't have any evidence, or you didn't even get that far?

WS: I don't know. Without question, people like Ralph thought that it might be one of a dozen students. And I always kidded Ralph and said they were the people 04:03:00he didn't like. But you know, he had no evidence. Nobody had any evidence. If we'd have had any evidence, I'm sure enough evidence, we could have--. If we had good evidence or some good suspicion that it was a particular individual, then, as I understand it, police work changes very much, and you concentrate on that suspect. And you try to find out, minute by minute, where he was during all that time. You try to get his friends or his acquaintances to squeal on him. I don't know what police do. But you know, if you've got one or two suspects, you can run them down pretty well. We never were in that position, that I know of.

LS: Joe Kauffman was accused of getting Ralph Hanson to have plain-clothes policemen infiltrating parties and that sort of thing. That comes up in a Cardinal article in the spring sometime.

WS: I knew nothing about whether he did that or not. Certainly, it wasn't with my knowledge. I guess I wouldn't have had anything against it. I mean, I don't find anything immoral about trying to track down people who are burning buildings and doing things like that, using whatever techniques you can use. I don't see anything immoral about infiltrating somebody's organization if that organization has as its avowed purpose to destroy you. I don't see anything wrong with that. LS: I guess it's standard police tactics.

WS: Oh, standard tactics throughout the society. I don't find anything that requires the state or representatives of the state to not use whatever is 04:05:00constitutionally permitted in the society. There's no constitutional guarantee that people won't squeal on others or that you can't plant stooges and so on, you know. There's nothing in the world that guarantees you the freedom to plan to destroy without vulnerability to police tactics.

LS: I suspect the point of the article was that the dean of students was doing this.

WS: Oh, I suppose.

LS: I think that was probably it, not that--

WS: I don't know that he did. I haven't any knowledge about it. I wouldn't doubt but what--whether the dean of students was doing it or not, the FBI was doing it. Certainly, the state and the city police were doing it as part of their regular tactics. Whether it was done with aid and help from Joe Kauffman, I don't know. But I don't know what help he could give them. You know, it's part 04:06:00of the student--the Cardinal--mania to decry such things. But I don't know what constitutional or legal arguments were made to support it. But I read the Cardinal, partly for amusement and partly because I figured that the Cardinal had been pretty well captured by the group and that you could get pretty good ideas of what they were doing, what they were thinking, what they were planning.

LS: I guess it would be invaluable to read at that time. Letters to the editor--

WS: Yes. Oh, yes.

LS: There was a very good one from William Rice on another solution to the Dow problem, which I wondered how the faculty reacted to because he's so highly respected, isn't he?

WS: I don't know. I didn't think so, but--

LS: You didn't think he was?

WS: No.

LS: Oh, I see. Maybe it was just by the liberals.

WS: Yes, by the liberals he is, but I don't think otherwise. I don't know. I don't know that much--. Bill was never a force on the faculty of any sort.

LS: Oh, he wasn't?

WS: No. No, not really. And he very seldom talked at faculty meetings, for that matter. So he was well known to the members of the Civil Liberties Union and things like that, which I belonged to, and so on, but I don't think, generally, in the faculty that he was a well known person or necessarily treated with great respect by everybody.

LS: It is a perspective then.

WS: Yes.

LS: I'm curious about the Mermin and the Crow committee reports and what--the 04:08:00action taken on them by the University Committee. Do you remember that whole series--

WS: No, I don't. I remember the committees, of course, because I proposed them, and then the University Committee appointed them, as I recall, rather than my appointing them.

LS: How would you choose a committee when you'd know, pretty much, how they would be likely to vote on an issue, such as student--

WS: I don't think I chose the members. I suggested to the faculty that we have such committees. But I had nothing to do with the choice of members.

LS: Who would have chosen them?

WS: The University Committee. They were a university committee.

LS: I see.

WS: They were committees of the University Committee.

LS: The choice of a committee, pretty much, if you've got an issue such as--. Well the Mermin committee was dealing with how you would face disruption on 04:09:00campus. And the choice of a committee--you'd know how people would be likely to vote on an issue.

WS: I didn't. I don't know how you'd know. I don't understand why you think they'd know.

LS: Well, you take somebody like Haskell Fain, and you know pretty much what his conclusions are going to be, or David Cronon, and you can guess--

WS: I don't know who appointed those committees, but I think it was the University Committee. I'm sure I didn't. And I think that the University Committee probably tried to figure out who are people representing various points of view, who are reasonable people, and who are amenable to argument, you know, and to being convinced by the force of various arguments brought. That's 04:10:00the way they did when I was on the University Committee anyway. So David Cronon, you say, as an example. I suppose the inference would be that he'd be somewhat traditional and conservative in his views about what the university stance should be and that Haskell Fain would be more liberal. But certainly neither of them were prominent in the defense of the students, or in the defense of causes, and so on. They're both, in my opinion, quite reasonable people. I guess I wouldn't know how Haskell Fain was coming out on it. I know him very well. I knew him very well then. But Haskell Fain is very much of a traditionalist when 04:11:00it comes to what the university is, and what it should be, and what it should stand for, and so on. So that gets immediately into conflict with whether or not you're going to permit students to ignore university traditions and rules and so on because they have such strong feelings about a cause. I'm not sure where Haskell came down on any of those things. I don't remember. I wasn't ever at the meetings, but whatever the committee comes up with it's going to be argued and debated in the faculty.

LS: Yes, actually, the committees did reflect quite well the composition of the faculty--

WS: I think that was what--. I'm sure that's what the University Committee was trying to find.

The University Committee doesn't want to be accused--even though, as I recall at 04:12:00that time, the makeup of the University Committee, in my opinion, was very conservative--because they used to come and tell me what to do and that I had to do this and that to stop various actions by students and so on. And I would just tell them, "Look, I thank you for your advice, but these are administrative kinds of decisions, and your business is policy, and there's a thin line between, and I'll do what I think is best, given the policies that the university has. And you just tend to your knitting, and I'll tend to mine."

LS: How did they take that?

WS: They didn't like it. Nobody likes it, but some of them could see that they were really talking about day to day running of the university, and that wasn't their business. And I was very quick to point that out to them. They also knew me very well because I'd been on the committee with them, and I kept telling 04:13:00them that all the time when they were trying to tell Bob Fleming how to run the university, too. So they kind of expected it, I think. They're good friends, Phil Cohen and Cameron in geology, who was a very, very conservative man.

LS: Cameron. You know, I, for some reason, was thinking that he was Rondo Cameron--

WS: Oh, no.

LS: --of course, not.

WS: No, no. He was a very distinguished geologist and a very fine, decent, human being. He just happens to take very, very conservative positions on almost every kind of issue, whether it's political, or in relation to the university, or anything else. But he's very fair about it. He lays it out and says, "This is where I stand," kind of thing. And I've never been able to hate people because 04:14:00they believed in something different than I did. In fact, he was a very reasonable guy. Jim Villemonte would, the year before when he was chairman of the committee, he would--Jim is a very good friend of mine and has been for years, but Jim really didn't know the difference between administration and policy. And he was over telling Fleming not to pay people's fines and all sorts of things that I took to be a personal matter, not even administrative. And I kept telling him that. And Jim would write letters to Fleming and would want us all to agree with him. And I'd lead a fight against the letters and usually stop them in that way. So they knew what I was all about, but they still did a little of it. They did much less of it with me than they did with Fleming, but again, 04:15:00the University Committee can't be in the position of setting up a committee whose report is completely predictable. They've got to represent different aspects of the faculty, whether they agree with them or not, or they'll just be discredited. And when it comes before the faculty it'll be voted down. They know that. And so I think they had a quite representative committee as far as the faculty was concerned.

LS: Would your job have been easier or different, would you have had more support, if there had been a less conservative head to the University Committee at that time?

WS: No. I think that helped. I think that helped.

LS: I see. The conservatives would have felt that everything was weighted in the wrong way if there had been a liberal there.

WS: Yes, and I think the faculty is essentially conservative, if you have to put 04:16:00it in a liberal-conservative continuum. And I think the majority of the faculty tends to be quite conservative when it comes to anything about university procedures and university rules and so on. And I would say the great majority of the faculty is quite conservative. They believe that these rules and traditions and attitudes and values have evolved over hundreds of years of university experience abroad and in this country. And then they have their own respect for this university's traditions. And they're conservative about them. They don't see that some pressing, current, moral issue is enough to upset the rules of the 04:17:00game. And basically I don't think you'd find ten percent of the faculty that would believe that they would. You know, I never could buy the argument, myself, that certain people didn't have a right to speak in this university because they were immoral people in support of the war in Vietnam or whatever else it might be, but that was the position that was being taken. And that the kids had a right to occupy buildings and to trash and to raise hell because they were in favor of stopping the war and the government wasn't. And there aren't many on this campus who believe that, very few indeed. So that, you know, it's that kind of a--. That was what the problem was. It wasn't political liberalism and conservatism. The problem was not that. There were a number of Republicans who 04:18:00were very much opposed to the war, you know.

LS: Oh, of course.

WS: And there were many Democrats who were, and the numbers kept increasing as the war went on. And you had people, you know, like Robben Fleming, when it was all over practically, then gave a ringing denunciation from the presidency of the University of Michigan against the war, which I had done before I became chancellor for God's sakes. But that's the difference between the guys who know the game and those who don't, you know. But anyway, how did we get off on that?

Oh, about the University Committee. No, I think the University Committee was supportive, that it took the steps that it had to take, like when there was a 04:19:00motion--. They foresaw right after the Dow that there would be a motion to condemn me, and so they introduced a motion to support me, which is a good political move if you're trying to head off a condemnation thing. And they were smart enough to call a special meeting of the faculty, to make sure everybody could be heard, and to keep the meetings going, and keep open the discourse as long as anybody wanted to keep it open. And they took the position within the University Committee themselves that they were available to students, to faculty, to come and talk to them if they wanted to try to change things. Anything that could be done in an orderly, procedural fashion, they were in favor of. And I think they were a source of strength, not only to me but to the university in general, I think, to help us get through the crisis. And I admired 04:20:00them for it. They must have spent at least a half of their time throughout the year meeting and on committee work that they had to do. So they did it at great sacrifice. What little warning they did of me by coming up every now and then and telling me that I couldn't move the interviews to the Field House or off the central part of the campus and things like that I just, you know, I'd just say, "Well, thanks for your advice. And I know you have the best interests of the university at heart, but I have to make these decisions, and I'll make them as follows." And I'd tell them. They'd go away grumbling, but there wasn't really much doubt that those were administrative questions. And so we got along quite well actually. I guess, though, there were a number of other things that I would 04:21:00have called crises with the students, but nothing ever came up that approached the first one.

WS: Now, there were other troubles. The only other big one that students were involved in was when, in the pre-campaign period when Johnson was probably trying to decide whether or not to run for another term of office, we got a call from the President's office. I've forgotten who the person was there--it certainly wasn't the president--but from some presidential assistant saying that Orville Freeman was going to be--the secretary of agriculture wanted to come to 04:22:00Madison and--

WS: He was going to make an important agricultural policy declaration, and they wanted to hold it in the student union. And they wanted us to be sure that the room would be filled and proper news and television coverage and so on. I always thought, as did those around me, that this was purely a political thing and that they probably--. The president had been making some speeches at places like Texas A&M and places where there was no student movement, and being cheered, and I think they perhaps had decided to test the water in some other places. And I told them--

LS: You mean, as to the reception to--

WS: As to the reception that a representative of the president's office might 04:23:00get on campuses. And I told them there was no way we could possibly guarantee any large audience for Orville Freeman, that I didn't think there was much interest in him and anything he had to say, and that certainly students weren't interested much. And I would predict that representing President Johnson and at the time when the question of his running for office had come up, that it wouldn't be just agricultural but would be an attempt at having a major political speech, that obviously the University of Wisconsin was not going to deny the secretary of agriculture or anybody else an opportunity to be heard on this campus. It might very well provoke some strong student reaction, but by 04:24:00then they must be used to that because they were getting it in other places in the country. And if they wanted to come, I and my office would do whatever was possible to provide an adequate meeting place, but we didn't provide crowds, that the speaker had to draw the crowds. And so we had a little council on the matter and decided that it probably wouldn't draw over two or three hundred people at most, and so we asked Dean Pound to hold it in the School of Agriculture in the auditorium there, which he did. And Orville Freeman came and was introduced by the dean, and there were a number of students in the audience, 04:25:00and they started making catcalls and various other things. They were said by the papers and others, I don't know, to be McCarthy followers. And I really, I don't have any way of knowing who they were, other than what the newspapers said. And Orville Freeman finally just said, "Well, there's no way I can speak on this campus. The radicals have prevented free speech, and I'll have to withdraw." And then he was interviewed by the television people and everybody else, and what a sorry state of affairs we had in America, that the Secretary of Agriculture couldn't be given a hearing when he wanted to talk, even about a nonpolitical matter and so on." I always suspected that they predicted that result and hoped 04:26:00that that would lead to a great show of indignation throughout the country and perhaps that it would lead to greater sympathy with the Johnson administration. And I certainly don't mean to imply that it wasn't picked up by all the newspapers, but it really never created much of a splash. By then, people had been shouted down at Harvard, and Princeton, and Yale, and all the polite places. So I think most people thought, "Well, it's too bad that this happens in a university, but they should have known it would and shouldn't have gotten into trouble with it." And instead of any great wave of sympathy, it just seemed to have no great effect. And it was embarrassing to us. It was certainly embarrassing to me. I sent a telegram and a letter, offering the apologies of 04:27:00the university to the secretary, which I sincerely meant, because I think it terrible when anyone can't speak on a university campus and be treated with courtesy.

LS: But you thought he probably could have gone on and given his talk.

WS: Well, I didn't, but people who were there, newsmen, thought so and so did others. I didn't go to the meeting myself. But those who were there seemed to think that he could have gone on. He'd have had catcalls and insults but politicians, you know--all you have to--if you've ever been in Britain during a political campaign, that's standard fare. In the United States we're more polite to speakers, generally, political speakers. But it certainly wasn't--. It was disruptive, no doubt, and still seems to me that an educational institution is 04:28:00something different from just going speaking to any group, that we, above all, should allow people the freedom to say what they've got to say, and to weigh what they say, and decide on whether or not we, as individuals, think what they have to say has any merit. But those weren't times in which people were that rational about freedom of speech.

LS: Did you have many policemen there?

WS: No, I don't think there were--. I don't remember the details.

LS: Because you had said that you--

WS: We had policemen.

LS: --thought it might have turned into a--

WS: Yes, we had policemen there. But by then, we had learned to gauge these things much better. We had learned from experience. Well, how many people are likely to come out to hear the secretary of agriculture? Well, our information, 04:29:00our best guesses from a variety of people were that you couldn't fill the ag school auditorium, which only holds 300 people or some such number, and that it was a relatively easy place to police. And, I don't know, somebody figured out about how many people we needed there, and we had that number. It wasn't a huge number. It was probably more people than we had on the grounds for the Dow thing, which was about thirty to thirty-five people, as I recall, at first. So that there were police there. They were in the hall. They were outside. To get in to Ag Hall, you had to go up that middle staircase, you know, up to the second floor, or something. And so, it was rather easy to have that, more or less, lined with police, I suppose. But there were no huge numbers. And as I 04:30:00recall, there was no threat to disrupt that by the radical left. I think it was mainly the McCarthy liberal kids rather than the radical left, who saw no great profit in being disruptive.

LS: Yes, I would imagine.

WS: So that passed.

WS: Well, let's see, what other things. I think the other things were more academic kinds of things during the year. We had troubles. We were in a time when the faculty learned to protest every decision. Everybody was in a protest mood. It didn't matter what you did. People, instead of taking the position that faculty normally take--OK, we'll make our case with committees, with 04:31:00administration for what we want, and if we lose, we'll lose gracefully, and we'll run back at the target next year with a better thought-out plan or whatever else--but it got to where every decision, or almost every decision, that the University Planning Committee would make, the minority got beat, and it would come and protest in my office. Oh, I don't mean by that they'd sit in. But they'd come in and try to figure out ways to change the decision. Oh, even little matters like whether the Hoofers should be permitted to put a new dock out in front of the Union was protested by Art Hasler--an old friend of mine, much respected colleague--even though he was out of the country at the time the decision was made, and he was on leave in Finland or someplace. But his people 04:32:00were thoroughly heard and the committee on the lake ecology reported favorably on it. But when Art came back, he wanted to stop the whole thing and came to my office and raised hell about it. And finally I said, "Art, just go away, we're going to do it."

LS: This was the point of view of ecology or--?

WS: Well, his view of what it would do to the looks of the lake and so on, you know. But the point is, you have a faculty planning commission. It has open hearings on these things. It notifies all the interested parties. They come and present their views. His own lake ecology committee said it was too bad that they had to put the dock out where they did, but it wasn't going to hurt anything. And they went along with it. But that was just--I just give you that example as a--

LS: Yes. It was interesting because--

WS: It didn't matter what you did in those days, somebody came to protest about it.

WS: And so when we got around to making certain appointments, we also got into difficulties. The first one was the Law School. Robben Fleming, himself being a graduate of our law school and a law professor, believed that the Law School needed a new leadership. And George Young was then dean of the Law School. And George is still here and was a classmate of Robben's in the Law School. They were good friends. But a number of people from the Law School, apparently, had been over--influential people there--to say to Robben that they thought the Law School was going downhill in terms of its reputation, that it needed new blood 04:34:00in the faculty, that it had suffered some rather important losses, and that it needed revitalization. And that, while George was a good dean, the students liked him and alumni liked him, that he wasn't an active person in recruiting faculty and getting research monies, matters of that kind. And they felt that it's time for a new dean. So Robben then, apparently, got those people to go back to the Law School and collect further--talk to more and more people, and finally, on the basis of what he saw to have been a movement from the Law School, which I think he generated himself, there were delegations waiting on 04:35:00him who said, "It's time for a new dean." So it was a very difficult thing for Robben because George was a friend of his. But he did, finally, call George Young in and tell him and that he wanted him to resign, and he would appoint a search committee, and they would have a new dean.

LS: This sounds rather drastic. Is it? Does this happen often, that a school gets together and says the dean's inadequate?

WS: No, not often. But it's certainly not unheard of.

LS: It would never happen in L&S--. It isn't?

WS: No, not at all unheard of, I don't think. You mean in this university or in universities generally?

LS: I can't imagine, say, one of the L and S deans--

WS: I think it--

LS: No, here, I meant.

WS: Yes.

LS: It has happened?

WS: Not to my knowledge. We've only had, you know, up until Mark Ingraham 04:36:00resigned, there'd only been two deans of L&S or three, maybe. I think that it would probably take a little administration push. But there have been administrative pushes that resulted in new deans, in education, certainly; in the School of Commerce that happened. In fact, it was in process while I was chancellor in the School of Commerce, and the next year it did occur. No, it's not unheard of by any means. But I think that in this instance it was probably stimulated partly by Fred Harrington. Fred wasn't at all satisfied while he was president, and this was his university. He wasn't satisfied with George Young's performance. And Robben wasn't. And Robben, being a lawyer, was worried that the 04:37:00school was slipping, and it was, in the national rankings. And there were a number of very influential people in the Law School that felt that way, too. So there was dissatisfaction. Well, anyway, to make a long story short, George would come in one day and kind of agree to resign. And he'd go back and talk to his buddies in the Law School, and they'd say, "Well, why don't you stay, George." And he'd come back and talk to Robben and say, "Well, they want me to stay, the people I've talked to. It's not so clear they don't want me," and so on. And I think, finally, Robben got around to saying, "Well, George, it's just, I've decided that it's time to make a change." So I came into office. Well, George and I are old friends. Again, I'm old friends with almost everybody around here, but, you know, if you've been here that long. So George came in immediately to see me to say, "Well, now, this business of the resignation," he 04:38:00said, "I think I should not. I haven't formally tendered a resignation. I think I'd like to stay on as dean, and I think there's support for me in the faculty." I decided that it was time to just--. In fact, this is the way I tend to do these kinds of things anyway. I said, "George, we're old friends, and I just want to tell you that I think it's time to have a new dean, and I want you to keep your resignation, and I expect to have your resignation." And then George's friends in the Law School started coming to see me, several of them, and saying they thought that Robben's handling of this had been very high handed and that I, too, was falling into the same trap. So I met that one head-on and said, "OK, tell me when you can call a meeting of the law faculty and I will come over and 04:39:00talk to the law faculty about this matter."

WS: So I asked the law people to call a meeting of their faculty, and I'd come over and discuss the matter with them. And George introduced me, said what the topic was, and asked the vice dean to take over the meeting, and left. And so I told them what I understood had happened in the past, which I'm sure they knew pretty well, and what my understanding was of how Robben had handled it, that the decision had been made before I got there, and that I happened to agree with the decision, and I told them why, but that I'd come over there to talk to them, 04:40:00that I was not going to remove a dean that they wanted for dean, that the Law School could choose its own dean. I certainly wasn't going to force somebody to resign if they, indeed, wanted to believe that his administration was good and that they wanted him. Well, it was a very interesting thing to me because it's kind of a professional stereotype. I don't think a single person spoke up in the defense of George as dean, other than to say he had been good with the students and fine with the faculty, but they all--all those who spoke--said that they felt things had gone downhill and that he didn't give any vigorous leadership, but he was a fine man, and he shouldn't be treated this way. And then they objected to the procedures used--as lawyers are great procedural people, you know. There's a proper procedure for doing everything. So I said, "What do you 04:41:00think the proper procedure would have been in a case like this?" I said, "My experience in administration is there's no right way to do something that will hurt others, that my way is to just come right out with it and do it. Other people do it by degrees as Robben was doing. What do you think would have been the proper procedure?" Well, they said, "Robben shouldn't have worked with a few people. He should have come over here, and put the issue to us, and given us a vote on it, and let people just make their arguments. We'd weigh them and vote." So I said, "Well, that's exactly what I'm here for today is to say to you people how it's been handled, that I personally don't have confidence that George has the energy or the skills to do a rebuilding job of the Law School. I want to see 04:42:00it built up. I want salaries increased, and I want you to get some new people here. And if you think George is the person to give it that leadership, you tell me so." Well, they seemed reticent to talk right then, and I said, "You need time for this, so I will give you ten days. And I want every member of this Law School who has a vote on such matters to either come and see me personally, or Jim Cleary, and tell us what your vote is. Do you want George, do you want somebody else? And anybody who doesn't want to come can write a letter to either of us. You've got to sign it, obviously, so that we know that you've got a right to vote, and I want that done in the next ten days because I'm not going to have this dragging on forever." Well, to make a long story short, I don't know what 04:43:00the size of the faculty of the Law School was then--thirty or thirty-five-- there were only three people who wanted to retain George. So I called George in and said, "George, it's perfectly clear that they want somebody else." I didn't tell him the vote, and he agreed to resign and then did. So then we set up a search committee, in which we included members of the bar; Judge Heffernan, I think, from the Supreme Court; somebody else--oh, a very prominent attorney in one of the big firms in Milwaukee; members of the Law School; and I think that might have been the first one we put students on or maybe we just had students in a consulting role with the committee. I've forgotten what it was. Well, once that got started, then all hell started breaking loose. The alumni association of the Law School were very strong for George, and so--they thought he'd been 04:44:00handled badly and they came to see me. And I told them just what had happened, and about the vote, and that kind of calmed most of them. Then the student association, they just loved George and they were very upset about it. And they demanded the reinstatement of George, and they weren't quite so easy to satisfy.

WS: Well anyway, the search committee got going, and they came up with several excellent people. And we finally chose--. I've forgotten, there were four or five names; one of them then became the dean, after we offered him the deanship here, at Yale Law School. One of the others was the man who headed the arms 04:45:00embargo negotiations, who was a Harvard Law School professor. I believe he is now dean of law at Harvard.

LS: Really?

WS: Yes, so we had very good people and very good names.

LS: I suddenly have a vision of search and screen committees doing the work for other universities.

WS: Yes. Well, it helps, you know, to get offers made to people. And then we came up with the man who became dean. Oh, what's his name; I've forgotten.

LS: Kendall, isn't it?

WS: Yes. Kendall, who was at the University of Michigan. Kimball.

LS: Kimball.

WS: Kimball, who was at the University of Michigan and an eminent authority on insurance law. He had been here several times doing research and consulting with the state government on the writing of insurance laws in Wisconsin. So he was well known to the faculty, the people in the state, and to the bar in the state, 04:46:00and a very good administrator. And he drove a hard bargain. He said, yes, he'd come, but only if I would see to it that in the next two years there would be a very large increase in salary money to get Wisconsin up somewhere within the reaches of what the better law schools paid, and also to hire new people, and so on. And he was a very vigorous dean and a very good one. And he immediately moved in--. Well, before he got here though, then there was one last gasp. And I've forgotten just the details, but I remember we were having the meeting of the regents in Green Bay. And a flock of telegrams came to the regents early that morning and the night before in their motels, signed by certain attorneys and students in the Law School, condemning Kimball for dean, and demanding that 04:47:00the matter be reconsidered and that George Young be taken up again as a possible candidate. We got in touch immediately--when we heard about it that morning, we got in touch with Judge Heffernan, and he was quite upset about it. He said that that was all foolishness and they--that the alumni association were--and the bar association were very strongly for Kimball. But, by then, you see, there were people on the regents who were very sensitive about these matters. And they thought I handled it badly, and appointments generally. And so Walter Renk and two or three others were ready to hold up the appointment. So a hurried call was made to Judge Heffernan, who immediately said, "Well, fortunately this noon at the Madison Club the state bar association executive committee is meeting. Hold 04:48:00it off until afternoon, and I can guarantee you a unanimous approval of the bar commission. We're going to take it up before them anyway." And so along about one o'clock telegrams started arriving for every member of the board of regents saying, this is the most brilliant choice we could possibly make, and the state bar association urges you to approve it. So it went through, and that was the end of that crisis.

LS: Wow, what luck!

WS: Well, it wasn't all luck. There was a plan.

LS: That the state bar association was meeting?

WS: No, but Heffernan would have called it--the bar. And we knew where--who to deal with on that one, and Bry did most of the dealing. And he had it all pretty well cased. But anyway -

WS: -unfortunately, just to end the story, Kimball only stayed two or three years. And I think the main reason he left was that Ed wouldn't make good on my 04:49:00promises. I made good on the first year of the promise--

LS: For salaries and new--well, the faculty money was suddenly starting to tighten up then--. When he came that year they were talking about it.

WS: For, I suppose--tightening up?! It was tightening up when I was there! It wasn't that.

LS: Oh, it wasn't?

WS: There was money. Look, the chancellor keeps a half of one percent in his special kitty. The dean keeps a half of one percent in his kitty, in each of the places. Let's say six percent is--I mean, a half--yes, a half of one percent of what's given. The dean is given his allocation--let's say it's six and a half percent. He keeps a half percent to use beyond what the departments do. The chancellor does the same thing. So you got quite a chunk of money there to be used at the discretion of top administration. And you can put it into the Law School, you can put it in Engineering, you can give it to a number of key 04:50:00professors, you can do what you want. So there's some discretion.

LS: So it wasn't lack of money then.

WS: Well, Ed thought it was. Ed didn't think it was as important to put the money there as someplace else. It's a matter of opinion. I did it because I really thought that the Law School needed a lot of improvement and that was one way to bring it about. You bring in a new dean, you don't give him anything to work with, I don't know what he's going to do. But anyway, Ed did not come through, for whatever reasons. And I don't know, I'm not blaming Ed or passing judgment. His judgment was that he had other places to put the money that he'd rather put it. And the upshot was that Kimball stayed about three years and left and became head of the American Bar Research Foundation in Chicago, on the University of Chicago campus, a magnificent organization, beautiful building and 04:51:00no hassles, you know, about money, things of that sort. And he's been highly successful in that. So anyway, that was that one. Then I had the pharmacy one.

LS: But hold on. Did they consider a man from the Law School as dean?

WS: There was no one on the committee. I mean, no one on the--. They must have considered, surely. But there was no one who came through on the list of five names.

LS: Was that an issue? Did some people want to have a--

WS: Not that I know of. There wasn't any prime candidate. There wasn't any candidate that anybody in the Law School wanted and felt could lead them out of the wilderness, I think. They felt they needed somebody from the outside to come in. There wasn't a single person who emerged in the list, nor was there any advocacy of any single person that ever reached my ears, at least. And lawyers 04:52:00let you know if they've got somebody they think would just make a magnificent candidate for dean of the Law School. And they didn't--

LS: So you didn't have to cope with that particular problem?

WS: No, that was no problem. It was George versus--or the change--versus getting somebody who would maybe pump new life into the school.

LS: What finally happened to the Law School?

WS: Well, the Law School, I think, improved under Kimball considerably. But that's a long-time process, you know. The Law School currently is not--the last ratings I saw--it is no longer in the first ten law schools in the United States. And there are very few schools or departments in this university that aren't in the first ten, so that's kind of a blow. It's had a great tradition. It's never had the prestige of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, and Chicago. 04:53:00You know, the big five have much more prestige than the next five. But we've always been in that next five. We've always been an activist kind of law school with a good deal of legal research, particularly society and law kinds of traditions. Chicago, Minnesota, a number of schools have taken that off, and we no longer are terribly distinctive in that area. But the Law School is a good, you know, very good law school, but not as distinguished as it once was. My personal opinion is that it has had weak leadership ever since Kimball left. When we did go within and got George Bunn, who's a lovely man but not a powerful sort of a leader and dynamic person--. The current dean I don't even know, but 04:54:00again he's not a terribly forceful, national figure, you know. And I felt that that's what you needed for the Law School. So they get along nicely over there I'm sure. It's a very, very highly respected Law School. But it still doesn't have the vigor and the prestige that it once had.

WS: Well, the pharmacy thing I thought was interesting, too. And, again, this is one of those things I inherited from Bob Fleming. Pharmacy, at this university, was once the great graduate school of pharmacy in America.

LS: Oh, really? I didn't know that.

WS: I think it was the second. Pennsylvania was the first, I think, university to establish a pharmacy school. You learned pharmacy through an apprenticeship, 04:55:00of course, in the old days. And this was the first school to really establish graduate training in pharmacy and a great research tradition to go along with it. So we weren't just turning out pharmacists. We were turning out pharmaceutical researchers. And that's really been the great tradition of this university. At one time, more than half of the deans of all the schools of pharmacy were our graduates, our graduate Ph.D.'s in pharmacy. And there have only been, again, two or three--. There had been only a couple of deans of pharmacy, and the man who was dean had been dean for twenty-five years, and he was well over--

LS: Was that Uhl?

WS: Yes. And he had been dean for some twenty-five years. And during his early years, he had been a very interesting, vigorous sort of man. But the place kind 04:56:00of stood still as he got older, and the other schools rose to greater and greater prominence. And still people were saying, all over the country, well, there at the University of Wisconsin, the pharmacy school had slipped badly and needed rejuvenation. There were even such reports from the accreditation committees--not threatening to discontinue accreditation, which would have been ridiculous on the face of it, but saying that the place had slipped and needed new people. But Dean Uhl had continued his interest in research and had brought in some research professors during his regime, one of whom was David Perlman, the son of Selig Perlman and an eminent biochemist--pharmaceutical 04:57:00biochemist--who headed Squibb's research laboratories and was really a very significant man, not just in the field of pharmaceutical chemistry but biochemistry generally. And he had been brought in as some kind of a distinguished professor, a named professor in the School of Pharmacy. Robben Fleming had appointed a search committee the year before I became chancellor, and they had come up, as their prime candidate, with a distinguished pharmaceutical researcher and biochemist, again, from the University of Chicago. And that was by far their first choice. And it turned out he wasn't a pharmacist 04:58:00but a pharmaceutical chemist or a chemist of some sort. So Robben apparently talked about this with a number of people, like the State Pharmaceutical Association and so on, to see what they would say about it. And he sensed that there would be resistance to appointment of a non-pharmacist, so he just dropped the matter. And then it fell on me because Dean Uhl was already beyond retirement age.

WS: So it fell upon me, then, to name another search committee, which I asked the University Committee to help me in the appointment of. And we appointed a new committee with representatives from the pharmacy school--the majority were from the pharmacy school faculty, but with somebody from Medical School, and somebody from the general biological science community. And again, they surveyed 04:59:00the situation. There were about three people who wanted to be dean, including the vice dean.

LS: People from the--

WS: From the pharmacy school.

LS: --from the school.

WS: And there was no enthusiasm for any of them on the part of the pharmacy faculty. And they brought in several people to be interviewed, including some pharmacy deans. And I must say that even the best pharmacy deans were not very attractive in terms of having any scholarly reputations at all. And so the committee came up with their first choice, David Perlman. And I had been warned that there might be some resistance to this on the part of the pharmacy association, but I didn't think that it was the pharmacy association's business 05:00:00to say who should be dean of the School of Pharmacy. But it was the faculty deciding. So I studied it pretty carefully, and I sent my own people over to the School of Pharmacy to talk to a number of people over there. It's a small faculty.

LS: By your own people, you mean vice chancellors and--

WS: Yes. And they came away with almost unanimous support for David on the part of everybody but the dean and the three people who wanted to be dean.

LS: Not the dean, though. What did he want?

WS: The dean was against it.

LS: He was?

WS: Yes. He wanted his assistant to be dean, thought he'd earned it through all these years of faithful service. But it would have been just a continuation of the same downward path. And most of the pharmacy people thought that too. So anyway, we took the name of David Perlman to the regents, and they unanimously approved. The word got out that he wasn't a pharmacist, and the State 05:01:00Pharmaceutical Association started just raising hell about it. And there were literally hundreds of letters and telegrams rolled in, not to me but to the regents, about it, demanding that this insult be righted, that David Perlman was certainly a distinguished professor of pharmacy, one of the most distinguished in the world, but he wasn't a registered pharmacist, and therefore it was not proper for him to be dean.

LS: How on earth did he--what time is it by the way?

WS: It's 10 minutes until--

LS: Well, how did he escape being a registered pharmacist if he was a--?

WS: He just got his Ph.D. in biochemistry.

LS: I see, OK.

WS: And Squibb and Co. didn't care whether he was a pharmacist. They couldn't care less. They wanted a great researcher to head their laboratories. And we couldn't care less--including the dean. He was brought here as a distinguished 05:02:00professor of pharmacy to do research and to give us reputation. But he wasn't a pharmacist. So anyway, the State Board of Pharmacy and the State Pharmaceutical Association met in my office to tell me that he was a wonderful man, and my plans for the School of Pharmacy, which I put first on the priorities list to get a new building--all this was wonderful. They agreed with all this. But they couldn't have somebody who wasn't a pharmacist as dean. I told them that was ridiculous. I thought his ideas were much better than anybody else's I talked to about what to do for the School of Pharmacy; that he was interested not only in the research side but in turning out good pharmacists.

WS: Well anyway, the big protest went on, then, and the regents got so excited about it that they called a special meeting of the board to reconsider the appointment after they'd already made it. Well we really prepared for that one. 05:03:00So when the meeting came, all the School of Pharmacy people, the whole faculty, were invited. And people were asked and--

LS: By the regents.

WS: By the regents. But we told the regents they ought to have them all there. And every person came. And we asked that those who were opposed ought to speak and be heard, and the three people who wanted to be dean all spoke in their own behalf, which was very embarrassing and very--. And the regents just thought that was all wrong, you know, that none of them could be dean, obviously, after they heard them. Then a young man spoke for the pharmacy faculty--the younger faculty, assistant professor--and one, a distinguished full professor, spoke, all in favor of David Perlman. Then one of the distinguished professors of the Medical School came and said why there ought to be a closer link between 05:04:00pharmacy and the Medical School and why David Perlman was just the man to establish that link because he was one of the most respected researchers on the campus and so on and so on. And then, finally, the regents asked David Perlman to speak about what his plans would be, and he spoke, and they unanimously voted not to rescind but to reaffirm their act. So we got by that one, but they were furious with me about it. They thought that I--

LS: The pharmacists, the state pharmacists--?

WS: No, no, the regents were full of--. The pharmacists were so furious! Do you know that they never--in David's five year term as dean of the School of Pharmacy, they never asked him to a state pharmaceutical convention. This was such a deep thing with them that they felt this was an insult to their profession, you see, that some non-pharmacist could get a school of this sort. 05:05:00Now I pointed out to them that, at that time, there were four medical schools headed by non-MDs, but they paid no attention. This was just a deep insult to their profession. Then I don't think I did it any good when I said to this committee, when they were meeting in my office, "Well, if you must have a pharmacist, a registered pharmacist, for dean of the School of Pharmacy, I'll go over and be dean because I'm a registered pharmacist." And of course I had become a registered pharmacist from an apprenticeship in my father's drug store and writing off for the pharmacy exams in Michigan. And that, of course, was adding insult to injury. I knew it was, I guess, but I couldn't resist the chance.

LS: If they'd had a sense of humor, they would have enjoyed it.

WS: Yes, but the national association sent people to the regents to protest. The president of the national association came. It was just a terrible insult to all 05:06:00of them. And they never forgave David or me. They never cooperated with him a bit. I think the faculty of the school was very cooperative because they wanted him. I don't believe, as it turned out, that David was a great administrator, but he at least brought in some new people, and strengthened the school, and got them new quarters. The building never came, but they took over much of the Chemistry Building and remodeled it. Anyway, that was a hectic one; much, much more serious than the Law School--

LS: Yes, I can see that.

WS: --because it was the first time that I've ever heard of--at least in the history of the university--of the regents having a special meeting to reconsider a decision they'd made only three weeks before. But they were terribly worried about political pressures. After all, think of this. As one of them said to me, 05:07:00look, there are some 3,000 registered pharmacists in the state of Wisconsin. Most all of them run their own drug stores.

WS They are much respected people in their communities, and if they're down on us and on the university, it's going to hurt us badly, you see. But, again, they overestimated. We never really heard any more from them. I don't think it made the university all that many enemies, except among the pharmacists. And most of them, once it was over, forgot it, you know.

LS: I'm curious. Once this opposition from the State Pharmaceutical Association was--maybe that was just because a particular man happened to be the head of it at the time and maybe it wasn't unanimous.

WS: No.

LS: You think it was unanimous.

WS: It was not very spontaneous, and, I always thought, the ex-dean helped to organize it.

LS: I mean, but the continuous bad feeling--

WS: I think Uhl was really quite effective in helping keeping the fires burning and getting them to make this protest. I always thought that, although I have no proof of it, but I think that's true. Certainly he didn't help us in any way. But there was just no question that pharmacists in general, I guess, were insulted by this once it was called to their attention. And, see, telegrams went out to all of them from the state headquarters to make the protest and to get in touch with their own regent--the regent in their area--which, of course, they all did. So it was quite a hectic time. But again, we survived. But by then we had learned this business of what you do to cope with protest, and we organized this thing--just orchestrated the whole thing at the regents' meetings: who would speak--

LS: This, you say, was Bry Kearl and--

WS: Yes, and me, and Burt Fisher. And we just orchestrated the whole thing just beautifully. And actually, see, insisting that the regents call on these three people who wanted to be dean. And then some man gets up and says, "Well, I really think I should be dean. And I've been here twenty-five years, and I've been associate dean, and I've done so many things for the School of Pharmacy." And so, you know, there's nothing worse than putting a person in a position of pleading his own case in public. And anyway, the regents were very upset with me because I had embarrassed them. I had done this thing. Why didn't I give them a pharmacist for dean in the first place? It didn't make all that much difference. It's small potatoes anyway. Why didn't I have the good sense to foresee all this and not cause them to have to do this? Well, I guess, it was one of those things, you know, where I thought that if the faculty wanted a particular person and if he were eminently qualified why in hell not name him?

LS: And they, themselves, were convinced by him, you said.

WS: Sure, they were convinced but they still didn't like the trouble, you know. All this uproar from valued members of the community, you see.

LS: Well, it was like having Dykstra be president of the university. It's, it's--

WS: Excepting that I always felt that anybody who could be a member of a faculty of a school or department ought to be able to be chairman, dean, director, whatever was involved.

LS: Yes, that's right. It wasn't as if he wasn't in the faculty.

WS: No, you weren't bringing in some guy who was not on the faculty and not a pharmacist. But here's the best known professor in pharmacy. So, anyway--

LS: And a famous Wisconsin--I mean, just like Perlman. You say he was Selig Perlman's son.

WS: Son. Yes, he's still on our faculty. A very, very distinguished man; very lovely man. And a man with great ideas, really. As I say, I don't think he was able, for whatever reasons, to carry out many of his ideas. But still, I think if you were to add up everything, he was quite a good dean. But he tired of it after a few years and quit.

LS: Well, let's stop for now.

WS: OK.

LS: The date today is November 22nd.

LS: I would like to find out about the removal of Porter Butts, which various people seemed to take credit for.

WS: Well, I don't know who should take credit or whether it's a matter that really involves credit in the first place. One has to remember that Porter Butts is the father of the student union movement as we know it in the United States. 05:08:00He established what was by far--and what has remained, I think, by far--the most important student union in the country because, unlike many places, the student union here has always remained kind of a center for student living and activities. At Many universities and colleges where they had just as big student unions, none of the fraternity or sorority people would be caught dead in the place, whereas here it was very, very popular. They had a program that appealed to almost everybody. So Porter, I think, deserves a great deal of credit, not only for what he did nationally but in the university itself. He somehow or other was able to capture some--had a good idea of student needs. He always had 05:09:00a good board, made up of students and faculty and alumni. And he ran a good show. So that that wasn't the problem with Porter. The problem was that Porter had been at it a long time. He started as a young man and stayed here his whole career. Before I became chancellor, there had been--it had been decided on a policy of age 65 for retirement of administrative people--deans, chancellors, directors, and so on. And of course, Porter fitted under that category and he'd already reached 65. He was probably 67 or 68 by the time I became chancellor. Moreover, Porter didn't know how to handle the new situation that was developing, of students having a different orientation to the Union, many of 05:10:00them living in apartments now rather than rooming houses--didn't need it as badly. He was rather an arbitrary sort of man in dealing both with his staff and with students. He thought they ought to go through certain procedures that neither students nor staff anymore liked to do. And by the time I became chancellor there was a good deal of discontent with Porter, both on the part of the students and his own staff. But yet, everybody knew that Porter had this tremendous following among alumni, and they felt that some exception ought to be made for him. Or at least that's what the rumors were. I guess the reason why I 05:11:00felt that he had to be treated the same as other people was I felt that, in other instances, where we would be asking people to retire at age 65, it would look--. If you made an exception for Porter Butts, they would also seek exceptions. Moreover, I felt that he had really outlived his usefulness as the director, that he wasn't able to adjust to the times. And then, I think, finally, my mind was clinched when he opposed the building of Union South with everything he had at his command. And I felt that it was long since time that we had a union facility on the other side of the campus where agriculture and 05:12:00engineering--you know by then it was six, seven thousand students--nursing and, to a small extent I suppose, medical school personnel might use it. Others were convinced that--. The Union board was convinced of it, of which Lowell Frautschi was chairman, I think, at the time. And so we just told Porter that he had to retire at the end of the year, that is, from the directorship. But he'd stay on with his salary for his remaining years, which were only a couple more years. And we'd start a search. He didn't like it, but he didn't make any big fuss about it. He recognized that that was true. I think he always blamed me personally because exception had been made before, but he wasn't at all nasty 05:13:00about it.

WS: But what did happen, of course, was that we immediately set up a search and screen committee, which consisted in that instance of a couple of faculty people, a couple of alumni--I think Lowell Frautschi was chairman of the committee, as I recall--and a couple of student officers of the Union. That was the first time we put students on a search committee, but it was a student union, after all. Well, they came up--they searched the country--and they came up with three excellent people. We interviewed all of them.

WS: And the person they placed first was Ted Crabb, who was the director of the Union at Milwaukee.

LS: Oh, I thought he was here.

WS: No.

LS: Because he'd been here earlier.

WS: He had been here earlier as a student. I think he was editor of the Cardinal and then stayed on after that, maybe while doing some graduate work, I don't 05:14:00know, as associate or assistant director of the Union, that's true. He had to have that background. But he had been in Milwaukee for several years and had developed an excellent union there. And so, since he was placed first, since he appealed to those of us who interviewed him more than any of the other people, we did ask him to become director. Now, we were forewarned that some of the students were quite opposed to anyone other than the man whom Porter had brought in two or three years before. I think his name was Henry Herman. Lovely man. An ex-Unitarian minister, just a lovely person. And he was the choice of a great 05:15:00many students, but certainly he was championed primarily by the more radical students. Henry had been able to get along pretty well with them as associate director of program, or whatever it was called. And he had had one or two serious heart attacks, just within a year or so of the time that Porter stepped down. So the people on the search committee just didn't feel that he was the proper man. In the first place, they felt that he wasn't a good administrator although a very nice person. And they also thought he would be completely in the 05:16:00pockets of the radical students on all sorts of points. But we decided then on Ted Crabb. And I called Ted Crabb in and told him of our decision. He bargained very hard about what Porter's role should be. He had worked with Porter. He knew what a strong personality he was, and so he insisted that Porter not have anything to say about the running of the place. He said he'd have enough to say, whatever we had told him, but he insisted on that. And he insisted that he be given an office as far from Porter's as possible--all the usual things in such matters--and that he be permitted to choose his top staff and things of that 05:17:00sort. So we agreed, and we knew that that was likely to cause some trouble. We didn't realize quite how much. So meanwhile, the word got out, of course, that Ted was our choice.

WS: And so the students who were opposed to that choice and had Mr. Herman as their candidate went to Milwaukee for the regents' meeting the following month and made a big protest there. And Walter Renk, who had only been on the board a very short time and who had rather close contact with the students, although they didn't necessarily like him and what he stood for, he was a nearby resident and came to all sorts of things on the campus, was always available to students 05:18:00for discussion, he kind of championed their cause. He said, "Why in the world--this Mr. Herman seems to be a perfectly nice man, students want him--why do you in the administration insist on appointing somebody else?" Of course, the meeting was open. Some people came from the search committee. I think Lowell came, which was very effective, of course. And he gave the reasons why we wanted him and not Mr. Herman. And one student leader, I forgot who, of the formal governance of student government, got up and spoke in favor of Ted Crabb. And then people from the other side spoke. Well, to make a long story short, the regents then decided, after some discussion, that Crabb was, indeed, a good 05:19:00choice and went ahead and approved it. We never really had any great trouble. Ted came. He and Porter got along, I think, rather well on kind of an avoidance basis. The new union was developed and in the plans for it Ted had a great deal to do with that and he has, to my knowledge, never had any real trouble with the students, including those who were opposed to him in the first instance. But, again, it was one of those situations where a choice was made on, I think, rather rational kinds of grounds and in accordance with the procedures. But those who didn't like the decision had opposed it. All sorts of dire predictions were made, of boycotting the Union and all that sort of thing, but none of it 05:20:00ever really happened. And I think Ted has done a good job in the Union since that time. At least, I have never heard any great amount of kick.

WS: But again, the regents' attitude toward me was, why do you make us all this trouble?

LS: There he goes again.

WS: Yes. Why are you always appointing--they even asked me right out, you know: Why is it you've got to always appoint somebody that brings all this opposition? And I guess what they didn't understand was probably there was nobody you could appoint that you wouldn't--these were the times when people protested, you know. The faculty would protest appointments. The students would protest almost any decision you made. This was more serious than that because it was a public meeting, the regents, and it looked, for a while, as if they would possibly not 05:21:00refuse to approve or to delay the appointment. But-

LS: Do you remember what part of the year? I have it somewhere.

WS: I think it was towards spring. But I don't remember. I think it was after the other cases, probably. This is at least the third major protest before the regents of an appointment of a dean or director, so they--. But they still couldn't understand why I always had to have so much trouble about these appointments. They hadn't had that trouble in the past and so on. And I'm sure they blamed me for it. They thought better handling of it--. If I had--. They all seemed to have the idea, I don't know why, that if you'd just go and talk to the students, all these things could be settled. Well, I had talked to them. The minute the students who were opposed to anybody other than Mr. Herman heard 05:22:00about it they were in my office in force, you know, to argue and protest and so on. And I explained to them why, and they just refused to accept that sort of reasoning. So what can you do?

LS: The students that came in would have been people involved in the Union, not just radical students as radicals, I don't suppose.

WS: I can't really remember the composition, but that doesn't follow, necessarily. Whenever there was anything that anybody was dissatisfied with, the radical students would join and come and see you, and make all sorts of threats and all that sort of thing. But you see now, there was something in this particular thing that--radical students had a real stake in this. After all, they had--the Cardinal offices were located there. No, the student government 05:23:00offices were located there, and a number of them were on the student council. And they used the long distance telephone for calling their cohorts all over, in Berkeley, and in all of the other places where the student movement was active, Michigan and so on. And Mr. Herman, they felt, you know, protected them and had given them office space and all that sort of thing. So they had a real stake in that. It wasn't that--

LS: I see. I suppose also they could use the Rathskeller and--

WS: Oh, yes. And all sorts of rooms and things. Of course, they were always open to all students, so I don't think they had any real problem about that. But they might have. I think the real thing they had the problem about would have been the telephones, and typing services, and things of that sort that were furnished.

LS: And Mr. Herman died then--

WS: He died within a year or so, I think. My memory is that Ted Crabb kept him on as associate director.

LS: Yes, you are right.

WS: He was a lovely man. He did come to see me afterwards and said that he was disappointed, that he really didn't know whether he could have handled it, that his health wasn't good, and so on. But, you know, he was never bitter or anything of that sort. I think his candidacy was really pushed by some of the student groups, but he wasn't all that anxious himself to occupy that role.

LS: The Union had come under the dean of students office. I know Porter Butts didn't like that one bit. That would have been before you became chancellor.

WS: That was before I became chancellor. It was kind of an interesting thing. You see, what had happened was, Kauffman was dean of students, which included 05:25:00all--student affairs, I think it was called--which included all things, then, that had to do with the care and feeding and welfare of students, not only the traditional deal of student discipline and that sort of thing, but it included as well the registrar's office, student housing offices, the dormitories, you know, and all that sort of thing.It included the Union, the student union. Oh, I don't remember, but it was quite a chunk of university activities, other than anything that had to do with teaching and instruction. And Porter didn't like that.

One of the problems that Robben had encountered when he became chancellor was 05:26:00that so many things, over the years, had been created that reported directly to the chancellor or to the president, and all that was turned over to the chancellor. And that's always a problem in universities. You know, everybody wants a direct line to the number one boss. And so they kind of fight for not having to go through a dean but coming directly. And all of these things, as I understand it-- registrar, intercollegiate athletics--all those things directly reported to the chancellor, and he just apparently decided that some reorganization was necessary.

LS: Oh, I assumed that was Harrington's doing.

WS: Well, it might have been Harrington's decision. I don't know who made the decision, but I know Robben said that was one of the things you always had to guard against. So I don't know when the decision was made to have a dean of 05:27:00student affairs. But whenever it was, all those things were included. And a number of those people didn't like it. Certainly, the leading--the person who like it least was Porter Butts. At least, he was most verbal about it. So he never did like that. Interestingly enough, he didn't get along very well with Joe. That is, he ignored Joe by and large. But he dealt rather closely with Bob Atwell, who was vice chancellor for administration and controlled the purse strings. And Bob felt he ought to go, too, both on principle and because he had gotten out of touch, in Bob's opinion. But Bob dealt with him very directly in terms of--because of the fact that the Union stands or falls on how many dollars 05:28:00it gets out of student fees. You see, students have no choice about it. A certain amount of their fees goes for the Union operation. And of course, that was one of the targets of the radical students again was, you know, here we're being taxed without our consent and so on. And so that was in some jeopardy. And Bob dealt with him almost exclusively. And Joe, very little indeed. At least, that was my experience. I had kind of a feeling, though, that Joe had rather good relationships with those various things like the registrar, and Newell Smith, and dormitories, those people. I think they got along rather well with Joe. Joe understood their problems and argued for them. The main argument was 05:29:00always money, you know, and staff positions, and things of that sort. But Porter paid no attention to Joe, just ignored him completely, and I guess tried to continue to come directly to--maybe that's how he got with Bob Atwell--he always tried to come directly to Robben Fleming, and Robben, I think, finally got him over onto Bob Atwell.

LS: If the Union was under the dean of students, was it the dean's immediate job to decide whether he was to stay on or not or did his--how did you--?

WS: No, I don't know. No, if there's going to be an exception in this university--if there's going to be any exception to any rule like staying on 05:30:00beyond age 65--the chancellor has to make it.

LS: But I mean, since he was, in effect, being retired, would that not be Joe Kauffman's decision since the Union was under--

WS: I don't see how it's his decision. He could have come to me and said, "Would you keep him on?" If that's what you mean. But I would have said, no, whatever he said--

LS: But what I'm trying to say is, who fired--I'm saying, who tells him that he is out?

WS: Who actually told him?

LS: If he's under the dean to students, wouldn't the dean of students tell him?

WS: I don't honestly remember, but I think I told him. I asked him to come over and probably told him in order to--because I felt, you know, that he was wanting an exception, and I had to be the one who made that.

LS: And you felt that he'd been around here too long just to be summarily told by the dean of students that we didn't--

WS: Well, I'm not sure. I really am not sure. Joe might have told him, and then he came to me. Bob might have told him, and then he came to me. I'm not sure, but I remember talking with him about it.

LS: It seems to me someone said that the 65-year retirement was created, that is, specifically, in order to have a reason for--

WS: No. I don't think so.

LS: No?

WS: You mean Porter? No, I don't think so. I really think--it was created before I came into office, I know that. I thought it was a great idea because if you had to you could make exceptions. You know, in a really difficult situation where you didn't have someone in advance, couldn't find someone within a reasonable limit of time, you could ask somebody to stay on a year while the 05:32:00search was made or something like that. But I thought it was sensible, and most people ought to be out of administration by 65. Granted that every now and then a great administrator is lost. But for every one that's lost, a lot of other people who might have been great once, you know, their tyranny no longer has to be maintained. And so I thought it was a good administrative principle to begin with. I don't think it was created for that purpose.

LS: Or for any other person. It occurs to me it's the sort of thing you would think up when you were trying to find a reason for--

WS: No, but you've got costs involved in that--

LS: --getting rid of somebody.

WS: --you know, who would have--I'm not sure where it came from. My guess is Fred Harrington, but I don't know. But Fred Harrington, for God's sakes, he wasn't afraid to go and tell somebody that their usefulness had ended, I don't think. So I can't imagine that. I think he just thought it was a good principle. I know Robben agreed with it thoroughly. I did, and when I talked to the deans 05:33:00about it, they all agreed with it. So I don't think there was much resistance to that. And I don't think it was put up for Porter Butts. If it were put up for anybody, there were about three people that I can think of that Fred Harrington wanted to be rid of, and Porter Butts was the least of them because what Porter did really didn't matter an awful lot to what Fred thought was the university. He probably was very anxious to get rid of George Young, but he had no way of getting rid of him under those grounds. He was very anxious to get rid of the dean of pharmacy, who again was small potatoes, but he felt long since should have been retired. He was very anxious to get Erv Gaumnitz out of the deanship of the School of Business--Commerce as we called it in those days, I guess, and 05:34:00get more vigorous leadership there. So he had some people that he thought ought to be out. And I remember that Fred thought Ivan Williamson ought to go, but you see, only two of those people--I think Fred probably thought Porter ought to go, too, but out of the five people I've mentioned, only two could be gotten rid of by that route. When Erv Gaumnitz hit 65, he resigned. So I can't believe that that was the real reason. I think it was a genuine belief in that's the way you ought to--that you ought to have some mandatory retirement age for people in the administration. That's always--there's a very serious aspect of that, other than the chance that you might lose some great administrator as a result of it. And that is you have got to find something for the guy to do for the next five years of his life at a very high salary, and that's not always easy. What do you do 05:35:00with the ex-director of a union? What do you do with the old dean of pharmacy, although he was so near complete retirement age that that was no problem. But what do you do with these people who have been in administration for some years and especially if they come out of an academic background. They're likely to be just out of touch with the developments of their field and so on. So you have got to find some way to--they're kind of dead weight to carry for four or five years.

LS: Do you know what they did do? I know that Luberg gives a very clear--I mean, he knew he was being gotten rid of as dean of men and that his job would become extinct--

WS: Well, I think, you know, it's interesting. What happened to Luberg was that they moved him over to the president's office and called him vice president for public relations, and made him the university's principal plane meeter and 05:36:00greeter, and which he did very well indeed. And he was much liked by--loved, you could say--by alumni and by the regents. The regents would, on numerous occasions, according to Fred Harrington, and I witnessed it once--we'd have a meeting and, you know, the regents make the determination of top administrative salaries in the university. It's hard to recommend yourself and so on, and they have a screening committee. And every time they would say, well--I think Fred Harrington probably made his suggestions for everybody but himself, and then they'd argue over these. But anyway, I remember that--and Fred said that happened almost every time--he recommended a thousand dollars or so for LeRoy Luberg--he didn't have much use for him--but the regents would always double it. 05:37:00They thought that LeRoy really was doing a lot of good for the university--which he probably was. He's a very nice looking man, very nice person, and very--kind of formal looking and always wore a homburg hat, you know. And he'd get the Black Maria, as they used to call it--the president's car--and go out and meet planes when visiting dignitaries came. And he was always available to talk to alumni or citizens when they complained about something that was going on in the university--very good at it. I thought he earned his money. But it was not a role that most faculty and administration thought was terribly important to the university. I rather thought it was, myself.

LS: Certainly, in those years, it was.

WS: Yes.

LS: This is interesting. So it was Harrington, was it, who decided about George 05:38:00Young and the dean of pharmacy?

WS: No, not at all.

LS: Well, I know you--

WS: Not at all. I decided.

LS: But I mean, you say he wanted to--

WS: Oh, no. No, I just mean that from talking to Fred you could tell who he thought were the important deans and the people who ought to be replaced. No, he never took any active steps on any of those. I never felt any pressure from Fred, at all. In fact, Fred did say, "Well, now you've gotten the dean situation cleaned up excepting for Erv Gaumnitz. Why don't you find some way to get rid of him?" And I said, "Well, Fred, I've learned a little lesson along the way." I said, "From all I can determine, Erv runs a very good school. He's inaugurated a 05:39:00graduate program. It's very successful. The school's maintained its status somewhere around tenth among business schools in the country, and he has brought together a fairly good faculty. And if you would like to see it really get into the big time, be one of the great schools of business, it's going to take about two hundred thousand dollars more a year. And are you willing to come up with the money if I am willing to ask Erv to resign and find a more ambitious person?" That ended the conversation. But it's true! Just getting a dean isn't going to change anything very much, excepting over a gradual period. And unless you are willing to put up the money to hire some additional outstanding people, you're not going to change things much. And so I made that point, and that was the end of the conversation, as I recall. And Erv was a good dean under ordinary 05:40:00circumstances. He wasn't aggressive. He wasn't as imaginative as some of the other deans, certainly, but he ran a good show. No, Fred always was looking around the place to see what he--. He had his ear to the ground as to how the outside world viewed the various schools and departments as well. He was very much tuned to the fact that the sociology department, for example, was going up rapidly in the world and very much concerned, earlier on, before I became chancellor--long before that, because I talked to him a good deal about it--about the status of the economics department and how it could be improved. Fred always was looking toward the improvement of the departments and the schools. He knew where they stood, at least the important ones.

LS: Well.

WS: I guess the other--. There were all kinds of troubles that took place in that year I was chancellor. I think, maybe, another big crisis was the one in relation to the black students because there was a good deal of--. We had done everything we could here to increase the number of black students. You remember that we had begun the five-year plan for minority students, most of whom were black, a year or so before. And Mrs.Doyle had been running that program. It had 05:42:00become increasing clear that we needed more minority people in the administration of the program. And so, at the beginning of the year I had appointed a committee, which kind of supervised and advised--I suppose it was called an advisory committee for the minority student program. And I had said to that committee--and Ruth Doyle and I had talked about the need for more minority people in her office and in that program. And I had talked to the committee in those terms, and I felt that we ought to expand the program considerably over the level at which it was at that time. And the committee was not a very 05:43:00effective one. I had appointed one of my ex-students and colleagues, Archie Haller, to be chairman of the committee because of his views about such things, which I knew very well. It turned out he was a very ineffective chairman under the circumstances. But in any event, they had come in with a report of some sort. I don't remember whether they ever wrote it or whether it was just a verbal kind of a report. Before they had been in existence very long, they thought that the program should be considerably enlarged and that we just had to have even more emphasis on going out and recruiting minority students and pretty much financing their way through the university. And of course that meant a lot of dollars, and it meant a lot of recruiting effort. And I wish I had before me 05:44:00the timing and so on, but I don't. But I think Jim Baugh had already come, was on the staff. But if not, he came during that year.

LS: Jim Baugh?

WS: Baugh. B-A-U-G-H. A black. A young black man who succeeded her the next year as director.

LS: Succeeded Ruth Doyle?

WS: Yes, as director of that program. It's a very interesting thing. Ruth had done a very good job on a small scale and demonstrated that you could take kids who couldn't get into the university under usual admissions procedures and through pacing them more slowly in the first couple of years through the university, through intensive tutoring and careful counseling, you could get them through, and repair a good deal of their background. She had special courses in English and in arithmetic and basics to bring them up to near the 05:45:00level of most entering students. And then demonstrated that it could be done. You could find people with promise who didn't score well on tests--and in that time, they had to take the ACT tests to get in--or who didn't have good high school records, and so on. She had demonstrated that, but at the same time, as the number of black students, particularly, increased, it became apparent that you were going to have to have a black director of it. And she knew that, too. And we talked about it. Primarily, Ruth was concerned with when it should take place and whether Jim Baugh could take it over and do it. I don't really remember whether she resigned at the end of the year, something toward the end of the year when I was chancellor, or what. We had talked about it a good deal. And Jim Baugh then took over. Well, that's all by way of background. The 05:46:00students were here. They were experiencing difficulties.

WS: After all, you know, Wisconsin is not a--is almost a lily white state. Blacks are just about two percent of its population. And we were trying to get some eight, nine hundred, a thousand black students here. Well, the blacks are concentrated in two places, really--Milwaukee and Racine-Kenosha. And at both places there were institutions they could go to and stay at home. And of course the majority tended to go to those places. So we had to go out and actively recruit black students--from Chicago, from Milwaukee, from other places in the state, and even more distant places--and Jim Baugh was very good at that, and he got two or three other blacks to join him. And so by the spring of 1968 we 05:47:00probably had seven or eight hundred black students. You know, that was a tremendous increase. We had had a handful of blacks here in all the previous years that I'd been here--very, very few blacks. But it was getting to be--their presence was becoming a factor. And they had gotten pretty well organized. They demanded separate dormitories. We refused to do that, but we were quite willing to let them, you know, choose roommates, and that ended up with floors pretty solidly black and so on in the dorms. They were demanding such things as a separate minority student union or meeting place. Kwame Salter was the person 05:48:00hired to handle black student affairs. I think he was part--yes, he was part of the dean of students office. And he became kind of the leader of the black students as well as the person who was charged with and paid for their care, the administrator of black students program. At that time, you will recall, there were no courses, there was no curriculum, there was nothing special done for them, other than bringing them here and trying to prepare them and to pace them through the university. Well, that's background. They used to come in and talk to me about black dormitories, about a really sizable structure that they would 05:49:00run themselves--first exclusively for black students. Then, later, they said other minorities could come there but no whities around except on invitation. A good deal of conversation about those things. And I was sympathetic to the idea of something like an international house, or something like that, but that was clearly not what they wanted. And they wanted to run it. They wanted us to turn over money to them, and they'd run the whole show. No--not money through the dean of students, but directly into--that sort of thing.

LS: I see. This was undergraduates, I expect.

WS: Well, mainly because there weren't many graduate students. Yes, almost exclusively undergraduates.

WS: But anyway, we'd had several meetings with the black students and got along, I thought, you know, passably well.

LS: Was Joe Kauffman in on these meetings?

WS: Yes, I suppose he was. I don't really recall. Everybody wanted to come to the top in those days. I suppose, if I knew they were coming, I'd call Joe in and that sort of thing. But I'm sure he was involved. And Joe had a good deal of sympathy with their general position, but of course wasn't willing to segregate dormitories and do things like that. But anyway, all that was going on. And we really didn't have much problem with the black students.

And then the Martin Luther King assassination took place. And that was really the signal all over the country for the black students to protest and to organize. And in any event, as soon as I heard about the assassination--

LS: Do you remember where you heard about it?

WS: Where?

LS: Yes.

WS: No. Where I was when I heard--?

LS: Yes.

WS: I probably heard about it on the radio or TV or some kind of news. I decided that--well, I thought it was a great tragedy. And I had great respect for Martin Luther King, whom I had met when he came here one time to talk, had a little visit with him. And I had admired his career and so on. And I thought it was just a terrible thing and that the university just had to do something about it. So I--it was in the evening, I think. I don't remember when--but anyway, that evening I remember calling Leon Epstein. We had a long talk. He came over to my house, and I told Leon that I thought the best thing we could do would be to 05:52:00declare a day of mourning at the university and cancel all classes. And by then the black students had called. By the time Leon and I were talking about what we were going to do and so on, they were demanding we close the university for a week or something. I've forgotten what it was, you know. But in any event, I decided, well, that we ought to close the university for a day of mourning and to meet the next morning early with representatives of the black students. And I brought in the deans of all the colleges who could get there. We met about eight o'clock in the morning. And a marvelous gentleman from the Law School, Professor Katz, who retired soon--the next year or so--who came here from the University 05:53:00of Chicago after his retirement there and was an authority on minority law--a lovely man--and

WS: --we had the meeting. And it was a rather trying meeting at the beginning. The black students were not just the ones which we had invited, but many others came. And some of them did the main talking. And they fell into the jargon of the ghetto immediately, calling us honkies, you know, and white mother fuckers, and all that sort of thing. And they went on with that for a while. I remember 05:54:00it particularly because when I was just about to intervene and say, "Look, you know, you speak English and so do we. Why don't we communicate a little better?" the--I'm not sure, I think it was the dean of the nursing school, it was one of the women deans--just spoke up and said, "Look, you can't challenge us with this kind of talk. Let's get down to facts and talk about what you've come here for." So anyway, that kind of changed the tone of things and one of them said, "What do you plan to do?" Well, I said, "I've already announced"--by that time, I had announced that the university would be closed for a day of mourning and that at ten o'clock that morning, we would ask the students to gather on Bascom Hill, 05:55:00and we would conduct some kind of services there, a memorial service. And it became apparent right away that was not enough to satisfy. And I said, "I would like you people to say who you would like to speak," and things of that sort. And they were rather antagonistic about that. They said that, after all, there was no call for anybody but them to speak. So finally I just said, "Well, I'm perfectly willing to turn the whole thing over to you and let the black students decide what the memorial service should be. And I'll just leave it up to you to 05:56:00plan it. But you have got to do it fast because we have only got, you know, it's only a couple hours. And we have got to get microphones there and everything else." That kind of took them right off their feet. They weren't quite prepared for that big a concession. Everybody agreed--interestingly enough, everybody, the faculty, the members of the group there, all agreed that that was a good idea. And I know some of them didn't really like it. But they figured, well, there was some logic to the fact that their grief was greater than ours and that they ought to have an opportunity to speak. So anyway, we told them that. And a little committee got busy right away. But the interesting thing was, as they started to go out the door--they were kind of baffled by all this--I said, "Now you can use the conference room. You can sit here. You can decide what to do. You tell me what you want my role to be in it and what you want any of the rest 05:57:00of us to do." And one of the black women said, "Well, I know what your honky trick will be. It'll be to shut off the microphone. So we can't--. If we just say things you don't like--." And I said, "No, I'll assure you that you can have the area until at least noon. You can say whatever you please. You will--it'll be your program. And if there's any way in the world we can keep the microphones going, nobody's going to shut them off or anything else."

So then somebody said, "Well, that's nice, but what effect's that going to have? What good's that going to do in getting across our problems to the white students, who don't really understand us and understand our problems?" And, if I may say so I had a slight--all of a sudden a flash--that I thought was one of the better things I did during the year. I said, "Well, look, why don't we announce, at the beginning of the program, that Bascom Hall, the Social Science 05:58:00Building, the School of Business--the Commerce Building--and I think one other, the Zoology Building, all of which are the most central buildings on the campus, have many classrooms, that those buildings will be open for as long as anybody wants, for the black students and the rest of the student body to get together informally, talks or lectures, anything you want to plan. And they all agreed that was a great idea. And they got another committee figuring out, you know, where they should have these meetings, and who should talk, and so on.

WS Well, they decided that I should open the meeting and say a very few words 05:59:00about, not so much about Martin Luther King, but express the university's and my personal grief at this and to announce that the program from thence onward would be turned over to black students and that after that the whole afternoon and as far into the evening as anybody cared to meet, black students would be in these various buildings to confer and talk with whomever might come, town's people, anyone else. All this was on WHA, you know, so it was broadcast. So--

LS: You mean live.

WS: Yes.

LS: Oh, was it?

WS: Yes. It's my memory--

LS: Oh, you mean the program. But not your preceding--

WS: No, no. My statement was all on--

LS: Yes. Yes.

WS: I don't remember if TV was there or not. I just don't remember. But, in any event--I'm sure the TV people were there for parts of it--in any event, they 06:00:00then proceeded with the memorial services, and there was a good deal of protest, you know, this terrible country, and talks about suppression and racist universities, and all that kind of stuff. At the end of the program the black students started a peaceful march down to the capitol square, where they wanted to hold a little, short, again, memorial service. And we called the governor, and he came to it and so on. And the march started down State Street, singing "We Shall Overcome", and by that time--people kept joining all along, Liz was 06:01:00there--and we went with the students, of course. But I had guessed, by the time they reached the square, there were ten thousand people in that march, you know. They turned around and came back up to the university. But I thought they would just disperse there but they started into the buildings. And I must say, it was the white students responding. The Social Sciences auditorium downstairs, the big one, was full for hours with black students talking to white kids, getting up and talking.

LS: You went to some of these?

WS: Oh, yes. I went to many of them. Liz went to many others. Joe and various other people went to them, just, you know, out of interest. And I thought it was one of the great educational experiences of the year in the sense that for the first time, black students who had been going to classes with white students, 06:02:00largely ignoring them, and white students ignoring them, and the white students not understanding their real problems, and so on, got a chance, you know, to really talk out some of these things. One of the most interesting things to me--it took place downstairs in the auditorium here--there was a big gathering there. There might have been others in other buildings, but anyway, the black students got up and talked, and one of the radical students--I have forgotten who he was--jumped to the platform and demanded the microphone, which they gave him. And he went on to say that this was going to be a hot summer in Chicago. And many of them were from Chicago, and the radical students would be there with their guns to shoot down the honky pig police and so on and so on. And they asked him to quit talking and sit down. And somebody got up and said, "We don't 06:03:00need your guns. We don't want anything to do with you bastards." And they went on and on with this. And everywhere, apparently, the radical students saw this as a chance to take over the black--incorporate them into the movement--and as you know, all over the country they were just buffeted by the blacks, who weren't going to--not because the blacks weren't making radical demands, but they didn't want whitey taking over the movement. And they just gave them hell all the--. There were just--several of them were just absolutely defeated after this because they saw this as a great chance to get about eight or nine hundred solid, tough kids behind them. But the Blacks just wouldn't do it. Well, then, meetings went on in some buildings until after midnight. You know, just an amazing sort of thing. There was such a need for the students to talk about some of these issues in ways you don't talk about them in class, you know. And to 06:04:00try--many of the white students were just there trying to understand what it is they want, Haven't we given them civil rights? We're doing all these things. We resent, we're against the kinds of prejudice and segregation that they have to endure, but we aren't to blame for that. We don't believe in it. But then the blacks would, you know, tell them about what the consequences of it were, what it was to them, and how the university really, even though it was trying to help them, did it in a manner which they found degrading and so on. So it was a--and kids would get up and say, "Well now, why is it? I've always been a liberal. I've always wanted to--I've always felt this was our country's greatest problem. And when I know one or two of you, we're good friends, we walk over to the 06:05:00Union, I walk in with my friend into the Rathskeller, and I'm told I can't sit with him: "We don't want any honkies." And he said, "My friend tells me that, immediately. And this I can't stand. I can't understand. How am I going to help you if you won't listen to me?" And they'd explain all this. It was really an amazing experience for the kids. And I know that, well, I got letters from white students and others saying how useful this had all been, how much it had promoted understanding.

WS: Well, as you could imagine, I didn't consult with Fred Harrington about it at all. I just did it. I called him up and said, "Look, Fred, I'm going to announce this day." And of course I had to get him out of bed because it was early in the morning. But anyway, he said, "Well, go ahead, if you think that's 06:06:00the thing to do. The regents will be mad." And I said, "Well, I know that, but we'll go ahead anyway." So anyway, the regents were mad, but--

LS: They were?

WS: Yes, some of them. But on the other hand they also had been reading the papers and getting the feedback, and they knew that this had been a great day. And I remember saying to them that I felt that it was the most educational--it was the greatest day for education that had ever hit the campus in all the years I had been here and that it was largely inadvertent, that nobody knew it would succeed like that, nobody planned it, but that I had just felt that was the thing to do. And they grumbled, some of them, a good deal about it. And apparently grumbled a good-- quite a bit, to Fred. And then they passed some kind of a resolution that, in the future--one of the other campuses followed 06:07:00suit. I don't think it was Milwaukee, but it might have been, it might have been Milwaukee, and all around the country a number of places declared it a day of mourning--but in any event they passed some rule that in the future, if you're going to declare a holiday, you had to have permission of the president and the executive committee of the Board of Regents.

LS: That was what bothered them, was it? Closing the university?

WS: Yes.

LS: Not the Bascom Hill talk or anything, or the teach-ins or anything?

WS: Oh, no. No, no. It was just that you're giving in again, you know--that was their statement to me--to pressures, you're giving in to student pressures. They were all hard line.

LS: I was going to ask you if they gave you credit for it. But obviously not--

WS: Oh, no. No, no. I'm sure some of them--Arthur DeBardeleben thought it was great, of course, and Mr. Friedrick thought it was great. But the rest of them were pretty solidly opposed to it. They thought it was giving in to the students, and that was something you weren't supposed to do. But anyway, then, I 06:08:00think, that put us in, made us credible at least, with the black students. And they were aware of our sympathy.

WS: Then, later on in the spring, I went to visit our junior-year-abroad places in France, and in Germany, and one or two places-

LS: Now, is this related to the black students--

WS: Yes. I went to visit those places, not about the black thing. But I went there because we were trying to work out a deal at Aix for the housing of our students. And there were a lot of misunderstandings. And they thought we could go and raise a couple of million dollars, or use state money to build a dormitory in France and all that sort of thing. And Henry Hill insisted that I 06:09:00had to go and talk to them because he hadn't been able to convince them of that, so they were threatening to stop the whole program and so on. So anyway, I thought it was a good time to go, and things seemed to be kind of quiet, so I went. And during that time Bry Kearl was, of course, acting chancellor as vice chancellor. And during that time, then, there was kind of an uprising of black students. They were making demands like separate dormitories and the usual kinds of things that I mentioned before. And apparently they got fairly well organized and went through buildings, like this building. They broke a few windows and everybody was scared to death that it was going to be like Cornell and all of that sort of thing. And Bry and Bob Atwell handled it. Well, I don't know what 06:10:00all happened, but I know there were all night-conferences--

LS: I had this all down in my notes, but I hadn't reviewed them, so--

WS: Yes. Yes, they were all-night conferences. And among other things--you ought to check this with other people because I wasn't here, so I don't know exactly what happened--but among other things there were all-night conferences out at Bob Atwell's place, out on a farm out near Verona. And I know that Burt Fisher was there, and I know that Bob and Bry were there, but I don't know who else; I imagine some of those committee members. Anyway, they agreed that there should 06:11:00be some kind of a black student or an Afro-American program. That's one of the things that they were demanding, an Afro-American college, or department, or something. So that was one of the things that Bry agreed to. They were demanding a center, and Bry agreed to a certain amount of money and so on to improve their center facilities.

I had just said that, as a result of that conference, the things that I remember 06:12:00were agreed upon were (one), that there should be some kind of a program in Afro-American studies, and (two), that there should be some expansion of the facilities for minority students, more money for it and so on. And I'm not sure whether it was a full-time director, but staff and that sort of thing. This one I'm not sure of, but I'm--it would have to be checked. I think they were demanding at that time black direction of the five-year program, the minority student program. But by then it had been pretty well settled anyway that there would be a minority program, but they didn't know that, I guess. I don't know 06:13:00what the other issues were. I guess Bry and Bob and whoever was there just said "No" to the black dormitory questions. But they were willing to negotiate on a number of matters and did, I think rather successfully.

Then when I came back, it was settled, really, in that sense. I immediately, with the counsel of Bry, appointed a committee to study what we should do about an Afro-American program. Wilson Thiede headed the committee, and it was a really star committee, and they just worked to beat the band. They explored all the possibilities from a separate department to an interdepartmental major to a distributed major, all sorts of things. And they finally hit on the--I guess a 06:14:00department with an interdepartmental staff is the way they finally decided upon it, which was less than the students wanted. And then, of course, that had to be argued like any new program does through the faculty. There were some people quite opposed. There were some people who felt it wasn't enough. There were a number of people who felt it was too much. And a great many people had great reservations about the scholarly quality of such a program and so on. And I was, of course, present and chaired those various debates in the faculty, making it very clear that I favored a setting up of a program and that I felt that there was a scholarly content, that it would be difficult to organize and so on, and that the way to do it was to take advantage, full advantage of the resources we 06:15:00had in history, and sociology, and various other departments. But there would have to be a staff for it and so on. Well, anyway, we came through that. I don't think we ever had any serious problem again with the black students. I don't think we have since.

LS: Did the regents object to the--

WS: By the time the plan came in--I'm not sure about this--I think by time the plan came in, the department was set up. It took a year or so, you know, to get through all these things. I think I was, by then, out of office. But I don't know whether they objected or not, but they approved it. I'm sure there were people who didn't like it because there are still a lot of people in the faculty, to this day, who think it, you know, it was a mistake. I have never felt that way, and one of the reasons--you know, it's had troubles, lots of troubles--but one of the things I've always been impressed by is the fact that 06:16:00it hasn't been just a haven for ill prepared black students. Their courses have more white students in them than blacks. And it has been a means, again, of interested students informing themselves on a lot of questions they didn't know about the black heritage and the black contribution in this country. So I think it's, overall, been an important educational venture. It's had its troubles, you know, with its staff, and with promotions, and other problems. But I think, on the whole, it's been a worthwhile educational program in the university.

WS: Well, I think that kind of brings me to the end of the things I can think of that we had trouble about.

LS: But I would just have one question on this. Did any of the, any individuals, 06:17:00do you remember any particular individuals that names of--

WS: Students?

LS: --of the black students whom you dealt with that stood out?

WS: I really don't remember because it was always a changing cast of characters. There was obviously no leader, you know, in the sense that, say Evan Stark was a leader of the radicals, or Bobby Cohen was a spokesman for the radicals. There wasn't anyone who played that role. There was one person who was tremendously effective. And he was a black history major working on his Ph.D., a graduate student who went from here to an assistant professorship at Yale, Bill--something [Hale? WS]

LS: I'll have to find out who he was.

WS: He was very good indeed.

LS: And he was one of the activists.

WS: Yes.

LS: And would he be one of the people who came to your office that morning?

WS: He came. But he was a very, very impressive person. For example, he was the 06:18:00one who worked out the two-weeks program we had on Afro-American culture, in the spring, which was so well attended. We brought in national figures, and music, and art, and politics, and so on. And he was the person who had the idea for that program. And he was present, but he wasn't one of the loud and demanding ones.

WS: I found that an interesting experience as an administrator, too. It was going to take about twenty thousand dollars, ten to twenty thousand dollars, to bring off this program, which we felt, I felt, various people on my committee felt, people in my office felt, was a very important thing to do late in the year and that was to sponsor such a program, organized by the black students. 06:19:00But again, it was going to cost a lot of money, and we wanted to do it right. So I started searching around. And here you are, running a budget, a university with a budget of two hundred and fifteen million dollars, and you can't find ten thousand bucks, you know. That was literally true.

LS: Even in your discretionary fund.

WS: Well, the discretionary funds--you don't have much discretionary fund as chancellor of the university. You have money out of savings. You spend everything you get and more, at the beginning of the year. You're committed. And then a little money kind of gathers in the deans' budgets, and you remove a little of it for this, that, and the other thing. But the truth was we had just, as I recall, purchased a new computer, a Univac computer, with a million and a half dollars of these funds. And for anything of this sort we just didn't have the money. So I had to go on my knees to Fred Harrington and beg it out of funds that he had control over. And these were the gift funds, the trust funds, and all--

LS: Oh, I see.

WS: And after arguing a lot about--I remember his famous statement, "Well, you want ten thousand? You need a minimum of ten thousand dollars? Well, you guys lose that much money on the way to the bank every morning with the big budget you've got." But the truth was we didn't really have any money for that sort of thing. So I talked him out of the ten thousand bucks or whatever it was he gave us, and--

LS: This was completely his own decision. He didn't have to get anybody else's--

WS: No, he didn't have to get any approval. He might have had a committee. As you said, I was on a committee on trust funds. I didn't even remember that I was. He just decided that was a good expenditure of the money.

WS: Maybe I ought to say, too, that Fred was very good on all the things that had to do with disadvantaged students. He committed most of the monies that were not already committed--like Vilas professorships, and Knapp fellowships, and so 06:21:00on--practically all of the funds I know, while I was in office, and I know for some time afterwards while Fred was president, practically all of the university's gift funds that weren't specifically labeled for some purpose or other were put into the minority student program. And of course that was one reason why we didn't have any money was that it was very expensive to bring in students, pay their tuition, their board and room, in some cases even furnish travel, you know. That's a very expensive program. And that was before the loan and government subsidy programs had developed to any great extent. And the university just took that out of its gift funds, primarily, because you couldn't use state funds for it, obviously. You did use state funds whenever we got 06:22:00people from the state because there were programs that would allow us to at least use part of it. But in any event, by then I was used to that sort of thing. I mean, here you have the responsibility for huge budgets, but you really don't have much to say about what's done with them. Programs are already operating, and in place, and have been for years. No way you can say to the dean of liberal arts--or of arts and sciences--such and such a department ought to be abolished and turn the money back to me, you know. There's no way you could do that nor did you even say to them, cut them twenty thousand dollars because, if you did, they had another place for the twenty thousand dollars. One of the great things that one soon--simple things--that one soon learns about universities when you're in top administration, private or public, none of them have as much money as they need for really legitimate demands of the educational 06:23:00and research program. They just do not. And this university, particularly, does not, because it tries to maintain a level of quality that's well beyond its means. And it always has. And that's what's made it such a great university. But it always means that you're always straining for every dollar, you know. And there aren't excess funds.

LS: But what about WARF, with all its money? Couldn't you have gone to a place like that for a program--

WS: Not at that time, no. I don't think so because they'd define it entirely in terms of research. You just couldn't call that research.

LS: And they wouldn't make an exception for--

WS: I don't think so. They never have. And I didn't even, didn't even occur to me to go there. I figured Fred had some money squirreled away over there that I could get my hands on. So I went to him.

LS: Or one of the rich men around the state--

WS: Yes, now that happens from time to time. And that's one of the things about 06:24:00some of the rich men around the state. When the university's in the good graces of the public in general, and most of the time throughout the recent history of the university, we have had enormous support--both publicly and in quiet, less public ways--from some of the very top--I hate the word but--decision makers in the state, outside of the political level. This university has been unusually freed from legislative and state government interference in its programs.

LS: Because of their influence?

WS: I think in part because of their influence. I wouldn't want to play down some other influences in this either, but I think they've helped us a great 06:25:00deal. Contrast this with the University of Texas. Texas has much more money than we have, of course, from the oil leases and so on. But the University of Texas has been constantly interfered with by the legislators, by the governor. They are down the street just about the same distance as we are from the state capitol to the university campus and instead of there being practically no direct influence of governors, and legislators, and politicians with the ongoing educational and research program of the university--they're constantly in it there. They've fired presidents, they've gotten rid of professors, they've done all these sorts of things. That's the one, that's the only thing that's kept Texas from being one of the really great universities in America. It's got more 06:26:00money than anybody else, more money than Harvard, even, you know, plus state appropriations. And yet they've never been able to achieve real greatness, and I think that's because of the political pressures under which they have to operate, or seem to operate. The tradition here has been the opposite. And I think in some part the business elite of the state has helped us in that regard. They have planned--somebody starts an investigation or starts wanting to make professors sign oaths here. Some of these people just quietly get to the, in those days, to the Republican Party and say, "Get off it."

LS: What's their motive? Why do they--?

WS: Because they believe, I think, they're--the motive I can't tell you--but I think their belief is that a great institution is of tremendous value to the 06:27:00state, to business, to the people of the state; that it brings prestige to people who do business in the state; it is a source, a constant source, of first class recruits into their businesses; and then there's the general level. I think it's true, probably, almost everywhere, that there's a general appreciation of higher education on the part of the upper classes. You know, they all send their kids to college. But the interesting thing that happens here, unlike many states, is that most of them send their kids to this university, not to Harvard and Yale and Princeton, and the places where most upper class people send their children. They send them here. That has helped us in a great many ways. Some of the leading people of this state are graduates of this university, even though they came from well-to-do families, back forty or 06:28:00fifty years ago, or more recently, with the consequence that this university, almost throughout its history, has been able to appeal, if it wanted to, in quiet ways for their support. And they haven't had to directly appeal. Many times they'll just go to the legislature or call up somebody and say, "Look, lay off the university. This is the wrong tack to take." And if you're one of the people contributing very largely to the campaign funds of the party, you have quite an effect when you're doing that. Well, but I think some of them are quite visionary people. I think, you know, they really understand what universities are all about and that, if you're going to be a really great university, you have to have freedom of speech. You have to have freedom from interference on the outside. Then this whole Wisconsin idea--not being from Wisconsin, I've always puzzled about, you know, the borders of the campus are the borders of the 06:29:00state and all those kinds of slogans, which, I think are overworked.

WS: Still, very early on, the university became a great resource to the state in terms of the solution of all sorts of problems. And I think that has given it a place of respect that many state universities have never gained, and that has maintained friends for us. I think it's significant that Joe McCarthy never once came into this state and made any attempt to embarrass the university. And certainly we had as liberal a faculty as Harvard or Michigan or Chicago--much more liberal faculty, to be honest about it than any of those places. And yet he never touched this university. He knew it would cost him votes. He was a good politician, and he knew we had lots of friends.

LS: Some people say that was due to the influence of President Fred.

WS: Ah, I think it was more due--Mr. Fred certainly behaved very well, and he knew Mr. Fred would fight it--because Mr. Fred, whatever his strengths and weakness were, that was one of them. He knew that you had to support the faculty on academic freedom. And he believed in it, and he did it on numerous occasions. And I'm sure Joe McCarthy knew he'd fight it. But I don't think that--that isn't what motivates politicians. It's the votes that motivate politicians. And to attack this university might have cost him the election. You know, there is a thought, and a part of it's due to sociologists and their use of public opinion polls, that public opinion determines what a politician will do. You know, and that's a false conception. It may, in the long run, have a lot to do with what he'll do. But what determines what a politician will do is who will go to the voting polls and vote for him and who'll vote against him. And they are the guys 06:31:00you've got to watch.

LS: --contribute to his campaign chest, I suppose.

WS: Yes, and they're the people you've got to watch. If it's going to cost you just ten thousand votes in the state of Wisconsin to attack the University of Wisconsin, you'd better not do it. And Joe McCarthy knew that, and he knew it well, and so he stayed off us. In general, nobody has made the university the target of political attacks, and I think it's just because they feel that it will hurt them.

WS: Now, during the student uprising, the student troubles, we started losing even those people, although not completely. But there's no doubt in my mind that as I went, not many times but a few times, among the alumni to give talks and so on, the constant concern was about the students, and why can't you control them, why are they behaving so badly, and why can't you keep them from doing all these 06:32:00terrible things? They're hurting our great university and so on. And the governor told me that that was the biggest problem he had during the time--Governor Knowles--that he was in office in those later years was that everywhere he went he got that same question. And so you started losing support. And I can't tell you for sure that I think that support that we had from what I'm calling as kind of the citizen elite of the state--I think that diminished, too, considerably.

LS: Considerably.

WS: Yes. But on the other hand, when somebody tried to get through a bill to limit the number of out-of-state students--many people saw the out-of-state students as being the source of everything--

LS: Yes, that's right. That was the year, that began In your time, didn't it?

WS: Yes. A bill was introduced, and it never got out of committee.

LS: Now, do you think that was the work of--?

WS: I know. But I can't name names. But I know that certain people, very high in the business community, without consulting me, without consulting Fred Harrington or anybody else, just said that they disapproved of this. And that was enough to keep it from really developing. Now, I shouldn't, I shouldn't under--I shouldn't overplay their importance. That was only one factor. We testified, at great length, about why we shouldn't restrict out-of-state enrollment beyond the point that we already were restricting it, which was about thirty percent of the undergraduate student body. And a great many others testified against it. And we had many friends in the legislature, too, who were graduates of the university who were against limitations. I'm not trying to say that just they pressed some button, that is, the elite pressed a button. But 06:34:00they were on our side on that. In fact--and of course you might expect this--the Chamber of Commerce, which was terribly critical of what we were doing around the university, they were right there in full force to testify against it, too, because they figured it hurt the business community, I'm sure. And they also made the good arguments about how this made the university more cosmopolitan and so on and so on, but they were there, too. So that I'm not sure they ever completely deserted us, but I do feel that a number of them just couldn't quite understand why it was that we couldn't manage things better, so that students didn't clash and do all these kinds of things.

LS: They felt it was Harrington's and your fault, I suppose.

WS: Yes, I suppose. Well, they felt that there was some defect in the management of the university if, that is, if you had this trouble. For example, they'd say, "Look over at East Lansing, Michigan State, they haven't any trouble. Minnesota 06:35:00had no trouble. They're bigger than you are. How come you have so much trouble?" And no end of saying to them, you know, you couldn't say to them, "Well, we have a different kind of student body." Immediately, they'd say they're the out-of-state students. Fortunately, almost every major ruckus we had, there would be a few in-state students involved. But the other thing I'd noted over the years, and I don't know that I could really document this, is that it is true that, at the beginning, when a new cohort of students--freshmen--comes in, it is the out-of-staters and especially the New York kids who kind of seize the political structure and get elected to the student council and so on. But by time they've been here three or four years, the Wisconsin kids have taken over all the offices as well as the informal political leadership. And so that, you 06:36:00know, we are not dominated by them, weren't then, by the out-of-state students by any means.

WS: Well, anyway, these people, though, had helped in various other ways, and--

LS: Can you name some of them?

WS: Oh, sure. I could name some names. Well, Oscar Rennebohm as governor, of course, and as a member of the Board of Regents, and as a friend of the university, did a great deal for the university in terms of, well, of course, obviously, his handling of the Hilldale, you know, the University Farm, turning it into that. That was pretty largely his idea and his development. I don't think anything is ever any one person's, but he certainly had a lot to do with that. As governor, he was very friendly to the university. And he finally left his fortune, you know, to a trust fund that mainly support things within the university. And when the university was in trouble, he was always quite 06:37:00understanding and attempted very much to understand its problems and to help. Now, he was also a politician so that wasn't quite as much behind the scene. I would mention, for example, people like Oscar Mayer, who's been very, very friendly to the university. He's one of the few rich men that I know of who've made sizeable contributions anonymously to the university for various programs.

LS: Are you supposed to say that?

WS: Well, I didn't say what ones. I just said that he has done that, and he has done it for years. I know that if I had gone to Oscar, which I would have done if Fred had said he didn't have the money for the blacks, I would have just called up Oscar and I'd have had the money in no time. And it's nice to know there are people like that. Oscar also--he's not as active a person in the political spheres and so on. But again, he's willing to help the university there.

LS: I'm going to have to stop this now. I guess--

WS: You could ask me about WARF if you want to--

LS: Well, we're back again this following Tuesday, and you had been talking about Oscar Rennebohm and sources of money for the university.

WS: Yes, and I also talked about Oscar Mayer. And I think I had said all I had to say about either of them. I'm sure there are people who would know either of them better than I knew Mr. Rennebohm or than I now know Oscar. But in fact, if you haven't talked to Bill Young, you ought to someday, about Rennebohm and his relationship to the university, because Bill has been the contact, was with Oscar himself and he's on the foundation board, Rennebohm Foundation board, and so on. So he knows more about that than any other person, I'm sure.

WS: Well, the others that I think of in terms of people that I've known well that are important friends of the university and who can be depended on in times of need are, of course, the Frautschis', the two of them. I know Lowell less, although, when I was chancellor, I used to see a great deal of him because he was the long-time alumni representative on the Union board and probably by far its most influential person. In fact, he was chairman of it and had been for many years, I guess, when I became chancellor. And so we had a great many discussions, both in the appointment of a new director and on the development of Union South.

LS: So his very soft and gentle manner hides a--

WS: Oh, yes. He's a very effective person. And I'm sure, there are many other ways in which his--

WS: --both in the appointment of a new director and on the development of Union South.

LS: So his very soft and gentle manner hides a--

WS: Oh, yes. He's a very effective person. And I'm sure, there are many other ways in which his council has been sought by the university and he also isn't reticent about volunteering, if he feels the administration needs his opinion or help on any particular topic. But during that time those were the two major problems that he was directly concerned with. And I found him very helpful 06:41:00indeed, helpful because he had rather clear-cut opinions about what we ought to be doing in terms of the Union, and he was not in the least afraid to express them, and then he had tremendous influence on the other members of the board. He is--

LS: Including the student members?

WS: Yes, including the student members. They all respected him very much. There might have been one or two student members who kind of represented the radical students who paid less attention to him, but he certainly could carry the board on anything he wanted to do. And he did so. And that, in a sense, is a very important function because the Union still had, at that time, and I'm sure it does today, although maybe less so, it had a great following among the alumni. The alumni were probably as concerned about the Union and its future as with any 06:42:00single topic. And you hear a great deal about how much the alumni care about athletics and football, but that's a tiny, loud portion of the alumni, who make maybe five dollar contributions. They're not, really, a very important aspect of the alumni, and we have not had leadership in the alumni office, for the most part, that could appeal to the great mass of intellectually oriented graduates of the university. But we've at least had people like Mr. Mucks, who appeal to the athletic interests, and people like--and the Union has appeal to a fairly wide cross-section of people. They have very, very fine and fond memories of what it did when they were here as students, and who continue to contribute to it. And then, of course, they also have Bob Rennebohm and his Wisconsin Alumni 06:43:00Foundation, who does a very good job of trying to appeal to the mass of the alumni that are missed by the athletic and Union kinds of interests. But all I was wanting to say about Lowell was that he has been very helpful to the university, at least in those connections.

LS: I would just like to ask you, what was his relationship with the radicals?

WS: I don't know.

LS: He was not as opposed to them as Porter Butts, I would imagine.

WS: Well, I never knew how much Porter was opposed to them. He thought they got in the way and made it hard to run the Union. But I never had much evidence that Porter was all that--. He really tried to appeal to the students and to make the 06:44:00Union a useful place for students. So far as I know, he never held back on the facilities. In fact, the Union was almost taken over, as far as its use was concerned, by radical students, and I never noted that he did anything to discourage that. I just don't know. I wouldn't doubt that his views would be very different from theirs, but I think he saw his professional role somewhat differently, and then he had Mr. Herman as his associate director, who worked very closely with those students. So I have no reason, really, to believe that, whatever his personal views were, that he had any great opposition to the radical students making full use of the Union, which I think they did. And I have no idea what Lowell's position was, you know. I never discussed anything of 06:45:00that sort with him.

LS: But he never said something like, "Get these long hairs out of here," or anything like that?

WS: Oh, of course not. No. And I don't think, and I don't think--

LS: Because some of them probably did--

WS: Oh, alumni, many of them did. But I don't think that either Porter Butts, or Lowell, or the board felt that way. After all, you know, the Union's always been the center for what were, in their day, the radical students. They're not unused to having other than the fully washed over there, by any means. So that--I don't know what other charges one might bring against Porter, I don't have any, particularly, except he got old and crotchety, but I certainly don't know of any evidence that--

LS: I thought you had felt that he--

WS: I just thought he was out of touch!

LS: --that the Union wasn't being quite used--

WS: I thought he was out of touch, sure. But most people by the time they get to be late in their careers are really out of touch and have lost a lot of their enthusiasm.

LS: Except Lowell didn't.

WS: Well, I'm not sure of that. All I know is that he was a very good chairman. And he tried to listen to everybody's points of view, and that he did, very subtly and effectively, organize his forces to get through the things that he wanted. And that's, really, as much as I know about him. I don't know what his personal views about things like radical students or matters of that kind. Nor did I ever know Porter that well--to really know him. He was never a friend, you know, in the sense that I saw him frequently and talked to him much, before or 06:47:00after being chancellor. In some ways, I never was very much in touch with the students and what students cared about here. I don't know, I wouldn't say it's a disinterest in students, but there are so many other interesting things that I was concerned with that I never really had much contact with what you might call the student culture. So I'm not a very good person to judge some of those things. I never served on any committees that had anything to do with students in all the time I've been here.

LS: And later on, when you talk about your teaching, we can bring this up again.

WS: Now, I had great contact with graduate students but not the undergraduates.

Well, anyway, to go on with the Frautschi's, Walter Frautschi is a very 06:48:00different sort of man. He's a very highly organized, outspoken person, rather conservative in his economic--quite conservative in his economic and political views. I find it interesting because he tells me that when he was a young man he was considered a campus liberal, at least. But certainly he's a very conservative gentleman now and has been in over twenty or so years that I've known him. He has served the university in a great many capacities. I think the most important one has been as a member of the WARF board and as its chairman. And he has been very effective on the WARF board in getting what the Graduate 06:49:00School and the chancellor want out of the WARF board. The WARF board, from my one or two meetings with them--which were not terribly pleasant, I must say--is rather an interesting group. It's made up of--they have to be graduates of the University of Wisconsin and they tend to be, for the most part, people who are executives of various kinds of engineering and agri-business kinds of activities. And, oh, people like the president of Campbell's soup, I don't even remember his name anymore; one of the top people in Ralston Purina; of course Mr. Romnes, who is head of the AT&T; various industrial firms, many of them 06:50:00located in Wisconsin. And I wouldn't say that they are, for the most part, intellectuals. They have great interest in technology and technological change. And it has been very difficult, for whoever has been dean of the Graduate School or president or chancellor of the university, to get them to be willing to support things that they didn't see as having a direct, technical payoff. I remember that one of the times that I met with them, one of the members was wondering why in the world the University Committee was supporting some project in archaeology, and another one in history. What in the world use would that ever be to anyone? And there was kind of a chorus of like views. And at that 06:51:00time Mr. Romnes was president of the board, and he said, "Oh, we don't have time to talk about all those things. We've talked about them many times before. For the most part, the money's going for research in biological and physical sciences. No one ever knows"--and he went on to talk about the Bell lab a little, you know--"what will pay off. And after all, we have to support a great university and its many activities," and he just went on, you know, and they didn't have any more questions. But there's always a need for that kind of person, and I think Walter served that role very well. He understands very well the need for scholarship. Both he and his wife were junior Phi Bet's, and I think she has had a great deal of effect on his thinking about what a university ought to be. And he, himself, has a very broad conception of it. On several 06:52:00occasions, he's told me he couldn't understand why we got into this or that kind of trouble, but he'd always defend us. And I think that he's been very effective in that way. He also has been an important figure in the behind-the-scenes aspects of the Republican Party, and so, again, he's been very useful although I can't give you specific instances. I understand he's been very useful in putting in a word now and then to someone in the party to tell the legislature to get off some particularly silly kick or other. But anyway, he has been very helpful. And during the time of merger he was especially helpful. Ed Young and I went and talked to him, got him to lunch one day, I think out at Blackhawk Country Club 06:53:00or maybe at Maple Bluff, but anyway,

we started working on him about what the merger might do to trust funds, and that one interpretation that could easily be made is that WARF funds and Vilas funds and Knapp funds should be shared throughout the system and that there were some people pressing for that. And we thought that Fred Harrington had made a great mistake to ever extend--in the fight to get WARF funds, extend it to Milwaukee. And we went on and made the point that this was the research institution, that it ought to continue to be, and that those funds were of great importance to the university, and that when those funds--all of those trust 06:54:00funds--were left to the university or set up for the purposes of the university, it meant Madison and nothing else. And that Mr. Knapp never had any desire to leave money to what he would have thought of as Whitewater Teachers College, nor did any of these other people, and that Milwaukee, also, was an afterthought in the development of the university and that it was never intended for those purposes. I indicated that as a Vilas professor I would be willing to have a friendly suit in my name to challenge the right of the regents to extend Vilas monies to other places because I could argue that it would threaten the funds that were designated for my appointment. And we had a long conversation. And 06:55:00essentially he would say, "Well, I agree with you, but we can't change what's already been done. We'll have to continue to give money to Vilas--or, we'll have to continue to give WARF monies"--he was then chairman of the WARF board--"we'll have to continue to give WARF monies to Milwaukee, at least." But we kept working on him. I think Ed might have had--I think I had another meeting with him, and I think Ed had one or two more. But we finally got him convinced and then started talking to some of the other--he started talking to some of the other WARF members and finally the WARF board decided that the monies were for this campus and this campus alone and even withdrew future funding from Milwaukee. That, then, became the model for the other trust funds. And that was 06:56:00a terribly important move, and it wouldn't have been possible without getting someone who was powerful in that board to make the initial decision and to talk to the others. And I don't know; it might have been that Ed could have just gone to the board, you know, and even to a stranger on the board and made the case. But at least we felt much more comfortable doing it this way. And he became the leader of the movement, and it was a very successful thing. And it's meant that these funds, which are of considerable importance to the university, will continue to come to the university, that is, to the Madison campus. Now, I don't know of other instances. That's the one important instance that I was directly 06:57:00involved in with Walter Frautschi, but he's also been very important in the Alumni Association. He's a past president of the Alumni Association. He serves on various committees that are important, of importance in the community and in the state, so that he's been a very useful friend of the university.

LS: You used the phrase, "Harrington had to fight to get WARF money for Milwaukee." Is that the way it was?

WS: Yes, Oh, yes.

LS: They didn't want to, at the beginning, they didn't--

WS: No, no. I don't think the board wanted to give the money to Milwaukee at all, but Fred argued that that was going to be the urban university, that it was going to be a part of the--that it was going to have a full graduate program in 06:58:00those days. That was Fred's aim. And certainly it had to have some start-up money, and WARF was a source. I don't know how much money they ever gave. I think it was two or three hundred thousand dollars a year. You'd have to check that. I really don't know. But it was--