Interview with Tom Zinnen

Troy Reeves 00:01

And it's going. So today is July 1, 2021. This is an oral history interview with Thompson and we are doing this remotely via zoom. My name is Troy Reeves, and I am the oral historian for the UW Madison archives. This interview is being done for our academic staff award winners oral history project. Tom, if you can help me out with sound quality, can you start by saying your name and spelling your last name?

Tom Zinnen 00:30

Yes, my name is Tom Zinnen, and Zinnen is spelled Z-I-N-N-E-N.

Troy Reeves 00:35

Okay, that is perfect. I've just turned up the recording on my end a little bit. And so we can speak at what we're the volume we're speaking at right now. And my tool should pick it up just fine. So Tom, I sent you the questions in advance. So the first one I want to start with is the first one on the list. And that is what brought you to UW-Madison?

Tom Zinnen 00:59

Well, it's more likely what brought me back to UW-Madison. I first came to Madison as a junior at UW-Platteville I drove a state van here to pick up some mice or something and I can't remember I was working for the microbiologist Marilyn Tufte, who's an alumna of UW-Madison's bacteriology program. I have a distinct memory of being stuck at a corner that I now know as Charter and University during class change. And I was astonished by the huge numbers of students how long I'm going to be stuck there. And the size of the buildings and I'd been in the University of Illinois and I knew what big buildings were and stuff, but it was a distinct difference from Platteville. And then I came here in January of 1982. To be, to go through my Ph. D. program in plant pathology. I got my master's in plant pathology at the University of Illinois from '79 to '81. And so I was here from '82 to '85. And then I postdoc'ed on the east side of town at Aggra[?] genetics, till August of '86. When I went to Northern Illinois University from '86 to '91, and my friend Mike Grasmick sent me a newsletter in the fall of 19...I think it must have been a fall of 1990, saying there was this outreach job in biotechnology available. And so I thought I could either stay at NIU and go through there, or I could return to Madison. And so I came back here as extension biotechnology extension specialist and started on Monday, the third of June 1991. It's one of the happier moments of my life to be able to see the state capitol in views, I drove up from Oregon, Illinois, excuse me, Oregon, Wisconsin to see the Capitol again, knowing I was going to get to live back in Wisconsin in general and Madison in particular.

Troy Reeves 02:59

Great, thank you. Tom, just let you know, sometimes on my end, I'm gonna I'm 00:03:00gonna mute my mic when you're talking. So I don't get any background into my recording. So if there's a pause, sometimes it's just me unmuting my mic to ask my next question. So you talked about plant pathology? The next question is kind of taking you pre-UW-Madison to talk about, you know, what factors lead to your, to your work interest or your research interest in in plant pathology?

Tom Zinnen 03:25

Well, the story that I told myself, all of this stuff is perfectly sensible. In retrospect, when it's happening, you don't know that it's important. But when I was a boy living on 118 College Avenue, my dad showed me in the side garden, how you could pick the heads of dried marigold flowers off and there were the seeds. And then the next year, next spring, we saved those seeds and planted them and they grew, and we transplanted them and that was very cool stuff. And then my grandpa Deutsch, who also lived in Dixon, Illinois, asked me if I would like to help him with his rather large garden, I always say it was about 130 acres, it was probably more like a half an acre, but when you're between fourth grade and fifth grade, and then again, between fifth and six, it was a lot of work in a big garden, and I grew more different types of plants than than I ever have since. My last name is Zinnen, and so ah, I went to the Catholic school in town. So when it came time to sign up to go to the Dixon High School, public high school, I was the last kid in the last school to get to register. And I had wanted to take Woods as a freshman, only all the slots in Woods were taken. And the guidance counselor who was a colleague of my dad, who was a guidance counselor said well, I happen to know Mr. Tieken, who's the Ag teacher, because the teachers at the time were all that World War Two generation and the Tiekens hosted our annual, well their annual, Memorial Day picnic. And he was an extraordinary character. So I ended up taking agriculture, that was a full year class, not just a one semester class, the way Woods was. Got me involved in FFA. When I was, February of that year must have been, February of '72, Mr. Tieken gave me a bunch of old tomato seeds to grow. And, well not to grow, but to test, and he had a seed germinator. And he said, well take, count these seeds out, make 10 rows of 10 columns of these tomato seeds on some brown paper, hand paper, and keep them warm and put it in this germinator, so I did that. And a week later, none of them are grown. And he said, What are you gonna conclude? 00:06:00And I said, the seeds aren't any good. And he said, How do you know it wasn't the germinator? I said, I don't know. And he said, Well, here's some fresh seeds. Not so many of them. But here's some fresh seeds, go ahead and redo the test, only this time, run it side by side 100 fresh seeds, 100 old seeds and see what happens. And so the fresh seeds did germinate, and hardly any of the old ones didn't germinate. So that was my first controlled experiment where you actually do something side by side. And that's been a huge theme of my work ever since. The next thing was he said, Well, now that we have these seedlings, why don't you transplant them into these little pots and we can grow them up and grow them under lights, and you can have some tomato plants. I said, that's great. And I started to do that and he said, Well, wait, you can't touch these plants. And I said, Well, why not? And he said, Well, your mom smokes. I said, so what is it? Well, there is a virus called tobacco mosaic virus and tobacco and it can get on your mom's hands. And it will get on the doorknobs and get on your hands. And so you can't touch these. I said, well, that's a tobacco virus - this is tomato, and he says it doesn't matter. This virus, even though it's called tobacco mosaic virus can still get on the tomato. So what you have to do is not touch the seedlings, you got to make little chopsticks out of wooden plant sticks. And so that's what I ended up doing. So the irony of that is, that was 1972. In March of 1985, I got my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in plant pathology, working on tobacco mosaic virus. And the first time I'd ever heard of it was from my Ag teacher. And that was my introduction to there are viruses, there are viruses of plants, their names don't tell you what their host range is. And one way you control how they spread is by being careful how you touch the plants. So that's one of my favorite origin stories. If I'd ended up being a lawyer or something else, I would never retell that story, but because I ended up like this, it's a very influential story for me.

Troy Reeves 08:22

Thank you, Tom. So the other thing I want to talk about in terms of sort of your work, reach and interest is, you know, we're going to talk more about what you do, but at least from what I can tell what you do, is a lot about communicating science to others. And so I wonder how you, if you've thought about what factors led to you being able to not only do science, but communicate it in a way that makes it understandable to others?

Tom Zinnen 08:57

Yeah. It's weird because I bristle at being called a science communicator, not at you personally. But when people think I'm a science communicator, when I'm a 00:09:00science extension person. There is the professional science communication and it's a fine, fine profession, and that's not what I do. It's not that I don't communicate science, but I'm the role in extension is for me is to how do we develop people's own science savvy? It's not that I'm the Shell Answer Man, and I can explain things to you very well. I'm a coach and a coach for how do I show an individual person the connections of science as a way of probing the unknown so that people are able to use their own science savvy better in making personal choices and informing public policies and making decisions in the face of uncertainty. And so I distinguish, it's like a lot of things, as you get closer and closer, you distinguish between things that most people don't even think there's any difference. But there is and for me. And so, to get back to the question, what's it take to talk well to people? One, I was always pretty good at what do you call it tutoring other people, being able to explain things and distill things. If I was better at doing that to myself, I could have been smarter. But I was pretty good at it. One of the scenes I love in the movies is the scene in the movie Big, when Tom Hanks as an adult explains to the fourth grader how shooting free throws is a way to look at percentages. And being able to find the right analogy is a great thing, both in science communication and in work in science extension like I do. One of the reasons finding the right analogy isn't knowable until you try it, is that the way extension people look at it, is the communication begins with the ears. And that's a big deal, learning how to listen, learning that listening is at least as important as speaking, realizing that different people are going to be saying different things. And you got to listen to what they have to say. So that you can keep hitting the ball back and forth over the net with them while you're having a conversation is a huge deal. So from that point of view, the listening is different. And so much what I do is oral, both oral in the mouth and oral in the ear, a-u-r-a-l, and you know that better than anybody because you do oral history both ways. That's a very big deal. The other thing is, the impression I have out of most science communication is that they're trying to explain what we know. And for what I'm trying to do is help people get to how do we figure out what we don't know? And what are the powers and limits of science. And I made up 00:12:00a word play long ago, there's this you know the branch of philosophy that's called epistemology. That's the branch of philosophy that asks what is knowable? What is the nature of proof and disproof. And if you take the word epistemology, and then capitalize the STEM, you get epi-STEM-ology. And "stem" is this acronym for the last 25 years standing for science, technology, engineering and math, which if you know, epistemology, they don't have anything together at all. So by them together, I don't know, but they are. So but that's what I'm getting at is that what I do is about coaching and coaxing people to develop their own science savvy. And if there's ever been a year where this has really been vital, it's been since January of 2020, to right now, July of 2021, with COVID. And the previous year, where that was more most important was 2019. And the year before that would have been 2018, etc. It just becomes more vital every year as we have all kinds of, what are they called, conspiracy theories that rise very high in the public domain, and in the highest halls of power. And so being able to arm people, with the valor of being able to ask, wait a minute, how do you know that? How do you show that? How do you know it's not someway else? The distinction between "I prove something" versus "I disproved something." The idea that scientists are trying to find things by disproof and not trying to convince people by proof that's those are all big shifts of mindset. And that's what I like.

Troy Reeves 13:56

Thank you, Tom, again for that. So the next question, I think you've kind of answered in this last question, but I always like to ask them directly and see where they go. So, you know, when you're asked, what do you do, how do you describe, what do you do?

Tom Zinnen 14:12

So I have to back people off from, I often ask them what what I, what do you think I do, so that I can get an idea of their, what's already in their heads, I always have an impression what somebody does. It's usually not a very good impression and may not have the person but I'm not very accurate in knowing what people do till I talk to them. So the big thing is, I say my job. What I've made my job into is connecting the public to the people, places and programs of their public land grant research university. And the reason for that isn't to advance the university, is not to promote any particular technology. It is, again, to 00:15:00me, back to help, how do you help people in their lifelong learning become more scientifically savvy. My job is not to make young people into scientists. I have no aspiration whatsoever to funnel people into a pipeline. I take a very liberal arts approach to science. I've gotten in more than one discussions with organizations that have Greek letters that keep conflating the humanities with the liberal arts. And I will not let anybody tell me that my biology degree from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville is not a liberal arts degree. And that's how I look at what I do is the liberal arts, the burning yearning to know about nature and about humanity, is what this is about for me, and be able to share that aspiration, that burning yearning to know, is what I tried to get across. So how do you do that? Well, one is to let people know, by asking them this question, Who owns the university? And then by asking them a follow up question, Are you a taxpayer? It's very interesting to ask people who owns the university, the UW system in general, UW-Madison, in particular, to hear what the answers are, especially since I work with kids that are in fourth grade and sixth grade, in high school, and then with adults and with retirees. It's a good thing to see on their face when they realize that they are, if you live in Wisconsin, you were one of 5.9 million co-owners of the University of Wisconsin system, and UW-Madison. And then when I asked the kids, especially fourth graders, are you guys taxpayers? Oh, no, my parents are, but I'm not. And then I asked them, well, you go into the store to buy $1 Snickers bar, how much more do you have to leave at the store than just a buck? And at least some of them know, it's $1.06. One of the most powerful things about the sales tax, regressive tax, though it may be, one of the most powerful things about the sales tax is that it makes every kid who buys her own candy, clothes, or computers, or anything like that in the state of Wisconsin, it makes them a co-owner of this place. And so there's an issue of stewardship of the scientific enterprise. That's really important to get across that you are a co-owner of your public universities, including your public land grant research university, UW-Madison, and that even if you're in fourth grade, you are a co-funder. And so you have a stewardship obligation and an opportunity. The obligation is to maintain the public resource, and the opportunity is to use it and advance yourself in your 00:18:00community by taking advantage of the resources that are there. And so that's a big part of what I do. From motivation. Why, why do this? If you're asking what are the mechanics of what I do? In my first four years when I, when the biotech center was still at the Enzyme Institute at 1710 University in the east wing, there, I didn't have any space where I could welcome people to campus. So almost all the things I did, were on the road, or I organized presentations by researchers so that my extension colleagues could come to Madison and hear presentations by them. But this wasn't at the biotech center that was at Union South or Memorial Union or somewhere else. Well, in 1993, the university broke land for the new biotechnology center. And that groundbreaking was right in front of the old University High because the first thing they had to do is tear down old University High which is also 425 Henry Mall, raze that to the ground and then build up the new biotech center. In the summer in 1995, Dick Burgess, who's the founding director of the biotech center, and the person who hired me in January 1991, walked me over to the biotech center, had to have hard hats on and everything, because it was still under construction, and walk me into a room that was a lab on the first floor and he said, oh, would you like to have an outreach lab? I said, that'd be great. He said, how would you like to have to two outreach labs? Even better. So that's how it came to be that the program that I lead shares with the undergraduate laboratory class in the genetics department, these two labs, 1340 and 1330, that were originally intended to be research labs, and were originally intended to be two of the four labs that were going to be the home of a human-genome-project-funded major center for DNA sequencing that would focus on bacteria because Fred, Fred Blattner's group here, it already sequenced, what was in the middle of sequencing ecoli, in the basement of genetics. And so that building was built, the new building was built with the idea there would be four labs dedicated to that project. For whatever reason, UW-Madison was not selected as one of those major DNA sequencing sites. And that's why I ended up getting to have labs. We all went into that lab. Oh, the other thing that Nick asked me that day was, well, how do you want to have a change these labs [inaudible], and I said, I wouldn't change anything. These are 00:21:00authentic. These are clearly not teaching labs, these are research labs. And if we're gonna have people only for short periods of time, little divots of time, I want to be able to make it a pivotal experience. And by not changing anything, even though the shelves are high, and the benches are high, lines of sight are not good. It's not a great place to do a teaching class in. But that's not what I'm doing. The whole idea was when people walk into this lab, they're walking into a real research lab. And that's the best part of it. It also saved a whole bunch of money by not having to tear things out. But that's not why I did it. So in October 16, of 1995, we moved into that building, or at least I did, it was staggered, and different people moved in on different times. But that's the day that I moved in. And we've been using that space ever since to have field trip groups, mostly middle school, some high school on occasion, adult groups, group groups like Grandparents University, the Wisconsin 4-H summer conference in June. That's the thing that distinguishes those were the two. As far as I know, I'll have to leave this up to the historians. As far as I know, those were the two first, wet lab spaces, dedicated to outreach on the UW-Madison campus. And so that was what really turned me into what a big deal it was to have a place to be able to welcome people. And that led to the emphasis on hospitality. My friend, Ken Smith, is the lead person on the thinking on this. He always thought the university should project itself as a destination for exploration. He always thought that hospitality should be at the forefront of what we do. And therefore we needed venues commensurate with the outreach aspirations of the university. And that new building gave us a pretty good start on that. And that's when my work shifted to in order to defend that space, because that space was very precious space, we didn't have a whole lot of brand new laboratory research space at that time. One of the weird things about being an academic staff person in outreach is, especially for Cooperative Extension, we get funded by federal money every year, but it's not considered grant money. And it doesn't come with overhead. And overhead is the point of the realm. And so it's something that I had to take into consideration if I'm going to defend this space. And my major professor Bob Fulton in plant pathology has already, tuned me into how important 00:24:00it was, especially for greenhouse space, to always defend your space. And your best uses. Best way to defend your space is to use it and see that people see that you're using it. And so that's why being able to do public events at the biotech center was so important. That allowed engagement that allowed me to welcome people to a community of researchers who view science not as what we know, but as figuring out what we don't know yet. And that's very different than what people get when they go to museums, science museums. Science museums, you know, they have great science exhibits. But it's all about what people know. And here by coming to the university, we don't have interactive science exhibits. But we do have interactive scientists, and the emphasis isn't on, oh, here's what we know it's on, "wow, this is what we don't know. And here's how we're trying to figure this out." And that's where the science savvy comes in. And that's where grasping why being part of the scientific research enterprise, as a taxpayer, the state taxes or federal taxes, and by being a co-owner, and most of all by being a steward of these public resources, that's such a big deal to me.

Troy Reeves 25:21

Thank you, Tom. So I have a question about, you know, what comprises a typical day, but I might punt on that for a second, since we you're now talking about sort of defending that space. And I wonder if you can talk about some specific programs that you've utilized to help defend that space. I have a few in mind. But I just wonder, just by asking, broadly, what you would focus on.

Tom Zinnen 25:46

Um, well, the first thing, the first thing we do is we have field trips come in, and we used to organize the field trips, pretty much ourselves, and then I can't remember how long ago it is, seems like a long time, might have been in the mid-2004, -2006, whatever. But there's the campus visitor program set up a office specifically for orchestrating field trips. So that's a big deal, because that means I can focus more of my time on leading and doing the field trips and less time on the nuts and bolts, there's still a lot of nuts and bolts time, but not nearly as if I had to coordinate field trips. So for example, in fourth grade, and Wisconsin fourth graders learn about Wisconsin history and government. So you see lots of yellow school buses coming into town all the time. And they're heading to the state capitol, and we gave them very little reason to stop at their public land grant research university. And by having the campus field trip office, we could present to people the option of not only 00:27:00going to the state capitol, but also then driving another mile and a half West, before you drove home, to come and explore science at their public land grant research university. So I can do about 25 kids at a time, that's one class. A lot of times people are coming with three or four or five classes. The great thing about that office for field trips is that we could then do round robins. And those are the folks that would do the professional work of coordinating with my colleagues and horticulture at the Physics Museum at the Geology Museum, after December 2 of 2010, at the Discovery Center, Discovery Building, the Wisconsin Energy Institute, Alan Gardens, Babcock Hall, places that meant that we could welcome a group of 400, excuse me, 100 students four groups of 25, by doing a round robin. And I already mentioned the Discovery Building, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery Building, which opened in December of 2010. Right across the street from that on April 15th of 2011, the new Union South opened. And those two buildings really revolutionize the center part of campus, I think that Union South could have been renamed Union Central, because it's so central to the life of the university now, compared to the previous Union South, which was designed by Joseph Stalin on a bad day. And to be able to have those places, the additional hospitality, the lunch options, this all made us a much better destination. So those are, that's one kind of thing that we do. In 2005, I was working with Sarah Chute, who at that time was split between the Alumni Association and the Division of Continuing Education. And there was what was called an Osher Center for Lifelong Learning, something like that. And Sarah was leading that and she and I put together this program called "Wednesday Nite @ the Lab." And the whole idea was, hey, you know, arts does it. Athletics does it. What if science folks did it? And by doing it, I mean, what if we welcome the camp, welcome people to campus every day in an organized way. So that people would know there was a destination that they could come to. So Wednesday Nite @ 00:30:00the Lab does not do that. But that's what we're aspiring to, is that, if it's Wednesday night, it must be Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, which is a play on, if it's Sunday morning, it must be Meet the Press or Face the Nation. I can't remember which one it is. So in December of 2005, we launched the pilot program for that in January of 2006. We found out we got funding from the Baldwin folks to fund the first two years of Wednesday Nite @ the Lab on February 16th of, I think it was February 16th of 2006. We launched Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, and it's been going every Wednesday night, 50 times a year ever since. And that was a big change for our building. Because up until that time, the building was locked at six o'clock, there was no reason for people to come into that building, or so the whole mindset was. So at least since then, the whole idea of public being in the building, in the evening has become a regular part. And that shift in mindset, when is it okay? And in what buildings? Is it okay for the public to be in their public land grant research university is a big deal to me. In October 2007, we started a partnership with at that time, Wisconsin Public Television, now PBS Wisconsin, because in 2005, 2006, 2007, what was on the horizon was the coming of digital television. And the opening up of digital television was going to mean that PBS went from having, or Wisconsin Public Television, went from having a little bitty bandwidth like this to big bandwidth. And they what were they going to do to fill that space? One of the ironies is that when I interviewed in January of 1991, one of the things that Vic Burgess asked me was, if there was something that I could do, and if I had a magic wand, what would it be? And I said, well, when I was at Platteville, it always amazed me on public television, I could watch, Wisconsin Badger football team, I could watch those kinds of Badger basketball team, I could watch the Wisconsin, at that time, men's hockey team. Never saw any science. So here we have one of the largest research universities by budget in the country, got one of the proudest traditions of public broadcasting, public radio was invented on our campus. Public TV was pioneered on our campus. Wow. We, you know, you can learn all kinds of stuff about what's happening in London or Boston, but we don't, you know, we don't seem to do anything in science. So what was great about that was the expanding of the going digital meant there was a much bigger pipeline, which meant they had much bigger programming, bill to fill. And one of 00:33:00those things was University Place. And one of the things that University Place was willing to do is record on-campus lectures in any field. And since I had Wednesday Nite @ the Lab all queued up, and we'd already been running for a year and a half, they started coming and recording the presentations. At that time we started in 1360, which is a conference room, and which was very great. It was everything was in a circle, it was just like a seminar, a laboratory seminar, we would go around the room, first of all, a guest would say their name and all this stuff. And then the presenter would speak. The folks at PBS Wisconsin said, we would probably record almost all of these, if we could record in the auditorium, because we can set up there and the lighting is better and the acoustics are better. So for the benefit of having a broadcast quality recording that would then be broadcast and then be available on the website, I gave up the intimacy of the seminar in 1360. And we moved over to the auditorium, room 1111. And that's where we've been ever since. So that's another thing that I do, since that's 50 times a year, lining up those speakers, promoting it. That's a significant chunk of time. At the same time in 2006, Paul Brandel was a member of the participatory learning and teaching organization (had to think about it because it's called Pluto.) And he's at UW alum and moved back to Madison to retire, which is another thing that's amazing. And I hope I can remember to mention the fact that Madison has gone from being a place that you flee, to a place that you come to to retire is a big deal for science outreach. Paul asked if I'd set up a "Frontiers in Life Sciences" seminar for Plato, they had like 30 classes, and almost none of them were in the life sciences. So he and I've been doing that ever since. We met at the biotech center, but then parking became difficult we met at the Wisconsin Center, eventually called the Pyle Center. But parking was still difficult, because the closest place you could get a good parking at was Lake Street. And then, because UW Space Place had moved out to the Villager Mall at 2300 South Park Street, and they had lots of parking. And Kay Kriewald and Jim are very cordial and have, they've been hosting us for at 00:36:00least the last 12 or 13 years at Space Place. So that's another 20 speakers a year that I line up. And so that's a good chunk of what I do. And then in the last two years, three years, when I became I shifted from being a family living extension state specialist over to being a Wisconsin 4-H state specialist. I do much more extension programming now, because I'm doing programming with my county-based colleagues in 4-H with the 4-H youth and other youth and communities, development programs. And I have wandered there, but I'm hoping [Troy Reeves: that was great.] But still answering your question.

Troy Reeves 36:51

Yep. And I want to make sure there's a there's a couple specific things that you you may, I know, Wednesday Nite @ the Lab was one thing I wanted you to talk about. And I might have follow ups on that for the second, you know, for the follow up interview, but there was a couple other specific things. One was the biotrek public outreach program. Did you talk about that? And...

Tom Zinnen 37:09

So my colleague, starting in 1995, Cheryl Redman, was very good at coming up with names for things. And she suggested the word "biotrek" as a play on bio, on Star Trek, and biotechnology center. And so as a way to brand that we call our program the Biotrek outreach program. I added the idea that Biotrek, it's a journey through the living sciences. And to me since the campus itself is such a great place to walk around, I talk about Biotrek tours of different buildings on campus. And the "X marks the spot" tours. And that's a play on the Indiana Jones movie where X never ever, ever marks the spot until of course, you're at St. Mark's in Venice, and it does. And to be able to walk people around and say, well, this is where vitamins were discovered. This is where warfarin was discovered and worked on. This is where four Nobel Prizes in medicine or physiology were won and we haven't walked 150 yards from our place yet. This is the railroad running through campus that went from Madison to Prarie du Chien in 1857. And that was the interstate highway of its day. And that's why the State Fairgrounds were in Madison in 1858 and 1859. Because people from all over the state could bring themselves, their family, and their livestock and they could stay at these camp- at these State Fairgrounds for one, two weeks. And so in 1861, when the Civil War broke out. That's where one of two major places where the Wisconsin militia mustered. And our governor at the time was named Randall. 00:39:00And that's how Camp Randall got its name. And that's why, to this day, I sit here, two and a half blocks south of Camp Randall Memorial Stadium, to be able to tell stories like that, again, if the people are from Wisconsin, they are co-owners of what they see and what they walk upon. The health of the university depends on how they view their stewardship. And that's what's great. And I do not walk people around trying to convince them to go to college here. That is not my job. If they decide to go to school here, that's great. But I don't judge my success or failure based on how many people decide to come here. I'm about lifelong learning and regardless of where you go to school, or if you go to, don't go to college. That's all fine with me. The big deal is, I hope you aspire to lifelong learning and that you realize that you have resources at your public land grant Research and Extension university that you can tap into and come to for the rest of your life. And whether that's in person or online. Or if we come to you, that's all great, but this is a high aspiration for American higher education. And I hope we keep that in mind.

Troy Reeves 40:27

Thanks, Tom. The other one that I had written down a specific name was Science Alliance.

Tom Zinnen 40:32

Yeah. So, 1998 Peyton Smith asked me if I would help organize one of four sesquicentennial events that were going to happen in 1999, the 150th anniversary of the opening of the University of Wisconsin, and I contend that the university was founded by the Constitution. So you know, May 29th 1849, I think that's the date, is founding day to me, but other people say it was 1849, when the first classes were taught, that's fine. The sesquicentennial was held in the summer of 1999, specifically, so we could have lots of space for public events on campus. And I ended up organizing CALS Life Sciences lunch. That was the first time on campus that I had to do what I now call science impresario work. An impresario is a guy like Sol Hurok, which nobody remembers anymore. Or uncle Max in The Sound of Music. An impresario is a fancy word for somebody who asks other people to do things, design and do events. And so that was the first time that I had 00:42:00really gone beyond the College of Ag and Life Sciences, which I'm not a part of, I've always been in the grad school or vice chancellor for, you see, our Vice Chancellor for research and graduate education is a name for the last seven years. But this this time, it allowed me to go a little wider and have an event that involved food and had the public have this focus, not solely my extension colleagues. And that was great. And then we did the next one the following year, and I was going to be happy to do this as an annual event. However, in 2000, and then again, in 2001, there was a crash of the stock markets. There were two crashes, one right after 9/11 and one in 2000, it's a long time I can't remember. And that led the university to decide not to continue that, those events. And that was dismaying, but that's what happened in 2002. Yes, in 2002, I think, in the fall, Wren Singer, who was the woman who was in charge of the campus Visitor Information Center eventually became known as CAVE or CAN, I can't keep track of all the acronyms, the big thing is she said, Tom, would you like to organize a biotechnology public event, and I will give you $20,000, if you can do this, and I said, I would be happy to do it. But I don't want to do it only on biotechnology, I want to do it broadly. And I won't do it, if you won't commit to it being perennial, I have already done this. And it's a lot of work to do the first year. It's a considerable amount of work to do it the second year. It's like a vineyard. You need to keep doing it year after year after year, if you want to get grapes out of it. And she committed to that, and so that's when we came up with the idea of UW science expeditions. In the planning group for that is what morphed into Science Alliance. The word Science Alliance is used by a lot of people I first heard it when my nephew Luke Zinnen, was wrote a poem about the relationship between the United States and Britain during World War Two, that's kind of kid he was still is and he was talking about and the power of your "science alliance" and when I heard that phrase, I wrote it down. This is years before this, but that's why I use that name. It 00:45:00conveys what it is. It's an alliance, it's spoken into existence. It has no charter. It works because all the academic staff people that make it work, make it work. There's almost nothing like it that I am aware of at any other university. There are other communities that practice, but we haven't heard one yet that's as wide ranging as Science Alliances. And I've had my ears open for many years. And you're probably interviewing Kevin Mimi, he's been a big player on the national level and science outreach at universities. He says there's nothing like Science Alliance, he ran Science Alliance for 10 years. So I'm very proud that we have something that we will have 15, 16, 17 people meeting every week during the school year. In the spring, we plan science expeditions. The metaphor that I use is that science expeditions is the trellis upon which we grow the community of the science outreach folks on campus. This university is remarkably blessed with lots and lots of events and science outreach. And science expeditions came out in part of me watching every other year, the undergrads and engineering pull off Engineering Expo. And I often thought, geez, if they can do that, why can't we do that. And so when that opportunity came up, we did. And the big deal behind science expeditions to me is it's great to have this public open house to welcome people, not just the three days of the open house, but at all 363 other days that they're better able to navigate their land grant university. But the big deal for me was it gave us a project where we could build the science outreach community. And so that's been a big deal. It's taken a long time. But we now have folks from the east part of campus, participating in science expeditions, people on the west part of campus participating. We collaborate with Engineering Expo, we share a weekend. These are all things I'm pretty proud of. It's all social infrastructure, has nothing to do with bricks. It has everything to do with bodies and souls and people being able to work together. And then the relationships that come out of science expeditions are also relationships that work throughout the year. So in the 00:48:00COVID year, when we had to shift over to everything on Zoom, my colleague Liz Jesse, who succeeded, Liz succeeded Cheryl Redmond, when Cheryl retired five years ago, we were able to draw on folks from engineering from School of Medicine and Public Health from nursing from pharmacy from L and S, as well as CALS. And that's all based on relationships that got going 18 years ago in the spring of 2003.

Troy Reeves 48:43

We're past 45 minutes, but we do have a few more minutes till two. So if you're willing to maybe do a follow up on that, because I'd like to ask a little bit more about one of the questions. I asked about technology, but I want to put a pin in the technology, want to just ask a little bit more about COVID, since it's fresh on everyone's mind and how COVID, how COVID affected what you did over the last and has affected what you've done over the last, you know, now 15 months.

Tom Zinnen 49:11

Well, I want to start by saying that Steven, Steve Oreck gave a Wednesday Nite @ the Lab for me in November of 2018 on the occasion of the centennial of the Spanish Flu, the flu pandemic and a focus specifically on Madison and the university. And his talk blew me away because here's a person getting his Ph.D. in history. He's a retiree, he's a retired naval officer, he's a retired surgeon and he stood up at the lecturn and basically said, neither the city nor the university handled this very well nor did they remember it. They specifically chose to forget the pandemic and the policies that they put in place. Some, understandable, some haven't stood the test of time, so well. I think when everything got shut down on the 13th, 14th of March of 2020, that all made pretty good sense. But soon thereafter, came a word of outreachers could not do online work with young people. And out of that, the justification for that in part was online safety, which, okay, so we can deal with that. But the other one that really gauled me, and there's a stain on the university to me is that, part of the explanation for it was, youth programming is not a core enterprise of the university. And I was sitting right here, where I'm sitting right now when that when those words hit my ears. And it still is something that the university needs to deal with that somebody from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the home on Wisconsin Idea, would say, youth programming is not a core enterprise. 00:51:00Therefore we don't want you using our online resources. That eventually was, those words were never taken back. But eventually, we were allowed to use Zooms, and do Zooms and all that stuff. And that was great. It took a huge toll on my 4-H colleagues, on my community and youth development colleagues in the, in the counties, especially last summer, when they were not able to do any programming. And I understand that, in the summer of 2020, we barely had enough testing capacity, let alone, you know, we had no idea when vaccines would come. Here on the first of July of 2021, we know that vaccines arrived on December 14th 2020. But we did not know that a year ago today. Being able to do things online, had some very positive effects. It meant I could have Liz Jesse, and I could have collaborations with county colleagues in a way that we weren't able to before. Previously, we could drive out to a county they might be having, you know, a 4-H science day, listen, I would do an exploration station, it was all very nice, come and visit us maybe we'd get a reciprocal visit out of it. That was great. The online stuff allows us to have a sustained working relationship that was personal enough that we could get to know each other tell jokes understand when people were having good days and bad days. That carried over into the ability of the Zoom to, we could see in most cases how the kids were doing. That is huge, and that's a wonderful addition to what we can do. So that's I don't want to say it's easy. I want to disabuse people the idea that anybody immediately pivoted. It took a long time to figure out how to do this. We were not good at it. I don't know how good I am at it now. There were in the first few weeks, we were just sitting there going, what's, what are we going to do? And I, this is a great thing about the project that you do is that, I hope it defeats some of this perfect retrospective. The historical inevitability, it's not inevitable that all this stuff would work out the way that it did. But people in Extension flocked to let Zooms happen. Instead of WebExes, or Microsoft Teams, like this is really important UW-Madison, I know, it's only been two years since Cooperative Extension came back to be part of you. But you have to be able to use things that people in the counties are using. And, people in the counties are using Zooms. And it's great that you might have concerns or contracts or 00:54:00whatever about these other things. But that's part of being a land grant university with an extension function. And eventually they came around and I hope that timetable becomes clear why they did what they did, they're going to have their explanations. But it was a big deal to be able to get this, be able to use this technology, this technology. The other thing is it took a long time to switch over, for Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. Wednesday Nite @ the Lab was problematic, a challenge, because they needed to have broadcast-quality recordings, and Zoom quality, although it's pretty darn good to me, isn't broadcast quality. So here we are the end of March, April, May, June, it was and I don't know if it was in July, maybe it wasn't even till August, we started getting the idea of... And keep in mind, I put that slowly just to get you an idea like, Whoa, how are we going to get this? We have to get it so that the PBS Wisconsin University Place people are happy with it, that their engineers are happy with it, that there's a functional way to do this and be able to have record presentations. How are we going to do Q&A? Do we even bother with Q&A? So it wasn't until the end of September that Tina Hauser and her crew had arrived at this idea that they were going to buy a laptop, we're going to buy a special laptop, broadcast quality camera, special Lavalier mic, a big old, SanDisk hard drive. And get this all set up. So that you could put it in a Pelican briefcase, high impact plastic, and drop it off at people's homes, they would open it up, we would go through a tech check on Tuesdays at two o'clock. And Wednesdays at two o'clock. They would record their talk, we would be on a WebEx or whatever, it wasn't Zoom, they didn't use Zoom. So that we had four people from the PBS Wisconsin crew, myself tagging along and then the presenter. And that's how we switched over to doing Wednesday Nite @ the Lab sessions of PBS Wisconsin's University Place. And we've been doing those at a rate of about two per month ever since. And their broadcast quality, they look pretty good. I've watched 00:57:00them on TV, I've watched them online. And that's a success story. But it wasn't fast. It took a lot. And there were a handful of months there where I didn't know what we were going to do. Once that happened, then I could resume doing Wednesday at the Labs by Zoom on Wednesday night. And luckily I had very helpful and sharp undergrads who could help me on Wednesday night with the technical angles. And the other big thing was when the new feature came into Zoom that you all you had to do is hit "live stream to YouTube." And not only could you have a Zoom, where you registered for and people could see your face and you could speak but you also had the live Zoom, excuse me the live feed to YouTube, which allowed people to type in but they didn't have to give you their names. They didn't have to register. And the big deal was the live stream got automatically recorded and archived onto the Wednesday Nite @ the Lab YouTube site. So those are some things that I think are going to be hard to remember in two, five, ten years and the things that people look back now and go, oh, yeah, that happened. Of course it happened. And it's like, well, when you're looking forward, you can't see what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone next week or next year. And I hope that's one of the things these oral histories capture is, it's the fog of what are we going to do now.

Troy Reeves 58:53

Thank you for that, Tom. So I'm going to wrap up for today. As I said, when we emailed back and forth, I will do at least one follow up interview because I'm sure there's things used to want to say and they're certainly questions I still want to ask so. So this concludes the first session with Tom Zinnen and Tom, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

Tom Zinnen 59:13

Thank you.

Troy Reeves 00:01

And it appears to be working. Okay. All right, Today is July 9th, 2021. This is a follow up interview with Tom Zinnen. We are doing this remotely via zoom. I'm in my home office in Madison, Wisconsin. My name is Troy Reeves. And I'm with the UW Madison oral history program. So Tom, like we did at the start of the first interview to help me with my recording tool, can you say your name and spell your last name?

Tom Zinnen 00:30

My name is Tom Zinnen, my last name is spelled z as in zebra, Z-I-N-N-E-N.

Troy Reeves 00:37

Okay, great. Thank you. Alright, so we already have a list of things we would like to talk about. So I want to start with letting you if there's anything from 01:00:00last time that you'd like to expand or clarify, because I think there was something about welcoming youth to campus that you wanted to talk a bit more about.

Tom Zinnen 00:59

Yeah. Over the course of my time here, the importance of being able to welcome the public in general and young people in particular has been a big part of what my work is, and the theme of Science Alliance and a distinguishing character of UW-Madison as a public land grant research and extension university. That hospitality is a really big deal. And I think it's something to be very conscious of in the last year and a half, in particular, over COVID, how the university has responded to welcoming the public to campus or not, and in particular, how they, well, they just announced two weeks ago that young people would still not be allowed on campus and youth programs until September 8. And so I think from a historical point of view, from a current point of view, for me, it's a really important thing to note, this means we've had two lost summers as far as welcoming the public to campus for youth programs, and that can be a very damaging ripple effects. As we move forward, those cohorts of kids will not have had the same chance to come to campus and get to know the people, places and programs. So the public university, public land grant university. And so I think that's something to be conscious of, just as I mentioned, last time, when Steve Oreck gave his talk about the city of Madison and the University of Wisconsin, responded to the 1918-19 flu epidemic. We have to learn from decisions that we make and policies that we implement. And being aware of that is a tough one, there's I think we had other options available to be able to welcome youth programs to campus this summer. We chose not to even after, on May 6, the University System President issued this press release, promising people that they would be welcoming youth to UW System campuses this summer, because it's so important.

Troy Reeves 03:22

Thank you, Tom for adding to that. So there's one thing, well actually, a couple of things. But the first thing I want to ask you, and this is something you talked about last time, alluded to last time, that I want you to elaborate on and that's the difference between liberal arts and the humanities. If you could, could discuss the differences. You see them between those two things?

Tom Zinnen 03:46

Yeah, well, the humanities are a subset of liberal arts as are the sciences and 01:03:00math. And one way when people start conflating those as if, when they say the liberal arts, they mean only humanities and they exclude the science and math parts of STEM. That gets my attention because it shifts how people look at the liberal arts, they disparage the liberal arts. They don't realize that to be a liberally educated person, which in some views, that means, that's the education required of a free person. You want to be able to be cogent in science and math. And for me, that includes the social sciences. And so, in my outreach in science, I always make it real clear that my dad was a high school history teacher, I like history. I'm not here to convince anybody to go into science or to get a career in STEM. But I think it's really vital that people have a yearning for learning as broadly as possible. And that includes the liberal arts. One way to define what the liberal arts are or not is to ask, what can you major in at a liberal arts college? My mother-in-law, I happen to live in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is right next to Williams, Williamstown, Massachusetts, which is where Williams College is, which is considered one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the country. It's important to the University of Wisconsin because we have two former UW presidents buried there, including John Bascom. Because they came from Williams to Wisconsin. And it was, at Williams, you can study Humanities and Performing Arts and Fine Arts. And you can also major in Chemistry and Biology and Physics, and Math, and those are all liberal arts. So for me, that's a big deal that we are clear that one of the reasons we want to have lifelong learning, so that people can have an education in the liberal arts, even if they don't have an opportunity to go to college and to major in those particular fields. And I'm in an area of extension, with the biotechnology center, with life sciences, a step or two away from agriculture, that these are things that I get to bring to bear and I'm very happy to do so. That's also one of the reasons. The range of topics and presenters I have for Wednesday Night at the Lab are so broad, so that we can have the full range of people, places and programs at the university that bear on sciences shared with 01:06:00viewers and listeners.

Troy Reeves 06:59

Thank you for that. Tom. I want to get to one of the questions that was on my list from last time. I still have a couple of follow-ups. But as I said in the email, I'll pepper those throughout the time today. And one of the questions from the follow-up that I didn't get to last time was how have changes in technology changed your work.

Tom Zinnen 07:20

When I arrived in 1991, I was typing on a Selectric typewriter, I sent mail out in an envelope with a stamp. I received mail in an envelope with a stamp. There was this thing that some people was using, were using called email. I'd seen it used by a friend of mine who was in engineering at the University of Illinois, but it was like, it wasn't going to do anything or go anywhere. Once again, I was incredibly prescient. Within six months, I think it was by the end of my first year, December of '91, not only did we have computers, but the computers all plugged into the wall now to the Ethernet. And that wasn't just for printing, to be connected to the printer was the major reason. And I use the wrong word, Ethernet was not around probably then. But anyway, you plugged your, computer into the wall and that way it could go to a printer. And you didn't have to have a printer attached to your computer. And I was stunned, it's like, wow, what is that? And that was the first hotlink I'd ever clicked on. So that was my introduction to the power of the World Wide Web. It's hard to remember what a wild wild west it was at the time with what browsers, what software, how things are going to be arranged. But it was real clear to me that, Geeze, this is different, and I'm a very late adopter. So a friend of mine, Kevin Smith and 01:09:00I put together a couple of things we call the Terrace Conferences, were and one of them was working the World Wide Web, and we invited outreachers from around the Midwest to come. And we had like a two-day conference at the Wisconsin Center, which is now the Pyle Center. And we had other things where we brought in Ag teachers and gave them the first hint of HTML. So that was really powerful. And it was a shift away from, are we going to do things on paper with mail and print shop and publications that you keep in warehouse and then you had to distribute them when people sent in their stamped self-addressed envelope? To, wow, you put things up on this world wide web for free, and people can use it. So in 1995, I remember seeing at home at 210 Campbell Street, was the first ad on TV that had ever had a worldwide web address on it, it was a toyota.com ad that's woah, that's, that was amazing, because that meant that it was coming into very much the mainstream. So that was one big thing that really worked out well. I think the coming of PDF was also a big deal. It's hard to remember what that, gee, when you started out, you had to send paper things out, especially if you had anything that had any illustrations. And you got Portable Document Files or formats, whatever PDF stands for, wow, you just send them an email, and all the graphics and all the color there, and then eventually, that's water that we swim in now. So those were amazing technologies that happened in the first five to eight years that I was on the job. The other one that was interesting was that we had this thing called satellite video conferencing and like 1991 and '92 Cooperative Extension, which at that time was separate from UW-Madison was part of the UW hyphen extension. Had a program where they were going to put satellite dishes on the roofs of the county offices in all 72 counties in Wisconsin. And then we would be able to have the satellite video conferences, so live, an 01:12:00extension person could be at the Wisconsin Public Television Studios being recorded. And then people could have lower quality cameras or still cameras with audio at 72 places if it was a really big video conference. So this was going to change how we did things. And I did two separate satellite video conferences in 73 and 74. One was with SCRC. I can't remember what SCRC stands for, it's S-C-R-C. And the other one was a USDA-funded video conference on biotech and food. And that was pretty amazing. But it was also like oh, my goodness, there's no soul to this, you can't really see the people that are out there. It's much more like broadcast TV than it was by... interactive. You couldn't tell a joke. If you did tell a joke, you couldn't tell whether the people got it. And they couldn't tell you a joke back. And that's the line that I was giving to people for the next 15, 20 years when I would go to national meetings and when people were having exhibits and part of the exhibits were, all used our distance learning software, distance learning equipment. You don't have to travel, you can have these great video conference experiences. And I would say to them, can I tell a joke? Will the people get it? Can I tell that they got it? Can they tell me a joke back? And that was not the case until recently, and that's what was so amazing about the, I don't think I'd heard of the word Zoom, which is what we're meeting on now, in February of 2020. That, that company was not on my radar. And I never did video conferences. So I think that's the other thing is that we went from something that was probably a little premature in 1992, '93. And it's like to, wow, this is the core of my work for the last 18 months, is doing meetings like you and I are doing right now. And I can tell a bad joke. And I can tell when people get the bad joke. And they can tell me that joke back. And it's amazing. So those are the major ones that I can think of email, worldwide web, portable document, PDF, and then really effective, for free, Zoom 01:15:00conference, or web conferencing, there might be others. But I'm drawing a blank on those. [Troy Reeves: Okay. Well, thank you.] I guess I would say YouTube, specifically, because YouTube is such a big part of what we do with Wednesday Night at the Lab now, to have a free, high quality, audio visual video archive of what we do, we used to be, we would arrange all these meetings and have all these talks. And if we recorded them, we had one little cassette, and they were functionally archival materials that nobody would ever see. And now, all these things are live, they're all live streamed. And within an hour, they're in an archive that anyone anywhere in the world can watch. That's astonishing. Glad I got that in.

Troy Reeves 16:47

Thank you, Tom for that. So I do want to move. I'm gonna try to get these other follow-up questions in at the end. But I do want to move to these questions about academic staff since we're interviewing you because you won an award. So when I offered the question about being involved in academic staff, governance or groups, I think you in the email said you want to talk about visitor parking fees, and then some other things too. So I'm going to ask the question, were you involved in academic staff governance or groups? And I will let you answer it however you see fit.

Tom Zinnen 17:24

Yeah, I was involved in the CASI, which is Committee on Academic Staff Issues. And then I was on a academic staff assembly. One of the things that motivated this for me, first of all, I was familiar with shared governance in the University of Wisconsin system writ large, because I was involved in the residence hall council at UW-Platteville, back in '76 to '79. And I had an idea that, you know, it's the, the Regents, the President, the Chancellors, the faculty, the staff, at that time academic staff, the civil service staff, and then the students and there was this Russian doll kind of nested thing that I was attuned to. So when I came here in 1991, I wasn't very involved in that. But I was very, got very attuned to the idea of how important it was to welcome people to the campus, and what things that impeded the public from coming to campus. And one of the things has always been parking. And that's not unique to this university is widespread in many universities of the size and scope of University of Wisconsin-Madison. So I tried from time to time to say "Where can 01:18:00we get more parking for visitors?" And where can we get bus parking? Why, Why do when we have these yellow school buses come in with 30, 40, 50 kids, we don't let them park on campus. We send them at best, to Lot 60. One time we're sending them out to Alliant Energy Center at that time, Dane County Coliseum, the park there, it's like well, that if you, if you had a bus driver, that was fine. But in my experience, a lot of teachers were the drivers and so you can't ask teachers who are also the bus drivers to go out and drive the bus away. So those were things that I was tuned to. And it was a huge deal when the Biotech Center building opened in October of 1995. That at that time, they were building a parking structure for Lot 20 attached to our building, because that meant that our building could be a really great destination for public events. And that's what I do for a living. And so I was very happy with that. And that there would be free parking after four o'clock and on weekends and yay. And then over the years that kind of got eaten away, eaten away, they started charging parking fees at night and eventually on the weekends, and it's like, Okay, this is, it's an auxiliary service, they have to make their money, okay. But what really got me going was in on Leap Day, February 29 of 2012, the director of transportation services came to meet with me and five or six other folks from the Biotech Center, I was, I was the low person on the totem pole there. And he proudly announced that we were not going to be having any raises in the rates charged to faculty and staff, but we are going after visitor parking. And those six words, just stunned me that, the idea that we are going after visitor parking, so that you faculty and staff don't have to pay more, but we're gonna soak our visitors, really got to me. And there wasn't much I could do about it. But I didn't think it was very welcoming or hospitable. And it affected what I could do, especially since Wednesday Night at the Lab at that time was already in its sixth or seventh year. I depended on being able to have easy parking, didn't have to be free, but it had to be convenient and reasonable. Well, later that spring, for whatever reason I had in the back of my mind, and it was probably from reading 01:21:00From Red Ink to Roses by Rick Telander, that one of the things that Alan Fish had done when he came on to fix the hemorrhaging red ink of the athletic department, was to set, in the late '80s, was to say, we're going to start charging more for parking. And we're going to start getting parking that athletics generates, they get to keep some, a lot, perhaps all, of that parking money. That was pretty interesting. And for whatever reason, sometime, I can't remember what it was, but I stumbled on a chapter called was 36-point-11-point-8B. And that was a statute that said all fines and fees from parking on campuses, not just UW-Madison, but on any UW System campus, were to go only for parking, transportation, excuse me only for Parking and Transportation facilities. So, somehow, I heard that that's not how things were, that there was a lot of money going from parking fees to athletics. And I looked up all these statutes because one of the things that I'd done was, I was a Congressional Science Fellow in 2000-2001. And I worked for the committee, House Committee on Agriculture, and I knew how to look up stuff. I'm not a lawyer, but I know how to do stuff like that. Well, come to find out, there's this memorandum of understanding between the University Transportation folks and Athletics that basically shifted all this money over to Athletics, and there was no statutory basis for it. And it was actually contrary to that. And this is not something that people were very happy to hear about when I went and talked to Randy Menorca, or Merocco or, well, he and a couple other people that were on the Campus Transportation Committee. The other guy, Dickey, was the lawyer for the Athletics Department. So here I am now going through the Campus Transportation Committee, which is one of the big, powerful shared governance committees on campus, going to their meetings in September of 2012 and October 2012, November 2012, December 2012. And basically hearing that, wow, no, this is a perfectly fine thing that we're doing. And it's an important part of our 01:24:00revenue. So after hearing that in December and saying that they that their lawyers are still looking into it, I went from that meeting to, I called the folks that were the leaders on the academics, no, on a Academic Staff Executive Council, ASEC. And I let them know what was going on. And then I talked to their counterparts on the University Committee. And that was Mark Cook, who I knew from working with, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, although I'm in the grad school. And Mark took my, Mark Cook made things happen that afternoon. And by having a powerful shared governance, it was, that's how that got moved ahead. And so, the following months, January, February, is when the Legislative Audit Bureau came back and said, No, you can't do this. And by May, the Athletic Department had to had to give back $702,000 that they had used as revenue to transportation. And that was all possible, I think, for two reasons. One, I was willing to stick my neck out, to...because I didn't think it was not only was it not legal, I didn't think it was right to have parking fees be diverted to athletics. It's also against the statutes. But I would have been stonewalled if we didn't have the Academic Staff Assembly and the Faculty Senate and the university community. Excuse me, University Committee. That's what got people's attention. And I think that's also why there weren't any stronger recriminations against me than there were. So I think that's one reason why having real governance if we're not going to have unions, and that was good news that we know, when, historically, the university would not have unions, for academic staff and for faculty, but we would have very strong shirt governance, we lost a lot of that with Act 10. And April of 2011, and more since, but whatever we have, I think it needs to be wielded and used and regarded as an important part of how we play a role as academic staff folks in the governance of the university.

Troy Reeves 27:46

Thank you, Tom. So also within your your notes that you gave me, and I just want 01:27:00to make sure that if this isn't rolled up as part of what you just discussed, that you get a chance to, is, it was a couple different things like the utility of assembling meetings, and then the uses of CASI committees, especially grad school CASI.

Tom Zinnen 28:04

So for me the utility of the academic staff assembly meetings since me that was about how much time I wanted to put in it. The only committee I wanted to serve on was the Transportation Committee for what I just talked about. And not too surprisingly, I was never appointed to that committee. So I served on the academic staff assembly and I that's the power to me of being able to go to a meeting that is run by the provost. And once a year the Chancellor is there, is the power of in the British Westminster parliamentary system is basically Queen's questions. In other words, you have a chance to ask questions of the people who are leading the university. And that's something that I think is a powerful part of that. ASEC gets to meet with provosts and chancellors quite often but we get that chance, eight, nine times a year at the academic staff meetings. It's a good way to let the leadership of the university, the chancellor, the provost, know what our concerns are, to be able to ask pointed questions in public that they need to be able to respond to.

Troy Reeves 29:38

Okay. And then the uses of CASI committees, especially grad school CASI.

Tom Zinnen 29:44

So for me, the grad school CASI is different. How a governing body is constituted and who gets to pick up, who's on it is a big deal. So CASIs are interesting in that they're actually set up by the deans of the various colleges and schools. So they're quasi- not part of shared governance, but they kind of are. They're advisory committees. But they're also selected by, they are delegates in the sense that they are, you get elected, not appointed. And I think that's another place to be able to go and say, Here are our concerns, especially if the dean comes to the meeting. And Dean Cadwallader did a very good job of saying, I will come to half the meetings, which was a lot, and people told us that was a lot more than most other deans came to the CASI meetings of other colleges and schools. And he was a splendid person, and 01:30:00listened to us and even respond, you know, he listened when he got reports to the meetings that he wasn't at. So I think that is, again, really vital if you, as a leader of a college or school want to know what your people are thinking. And you don't have a union with shop stewards, or whatever approach you want to do. It's great to have some sort of listening, infrastructure. And I thought, that's what those were for. And that's also why it's important to talk about things that are not pleasant, to be able to say, these are the things that are stressing us, these are the things that are affecting morale. And of course, starting with February of 2011, and Act 10. And all the repercussions after that. The following four years were very hard time at UW-Madison, for morale and for budgets. Those two play off each other. So I think that's something that I hope continues and that those committees are robust. And although they are advisory, I hope that they're able to be places where people can say, as I did, morale matters. What are you going to do about morale? How can you do more to acknowledge and this is specifically in the graduate school? How can you do more to acknowledge people as they're going through their careers? What can you do for professional development, particularly being able to go to meetings. So these are some of the thing-, go to scientific meetings or distant places around the country around the world that cost a lot of money. So those were the kinds of themes that I brought, because I thought it was important to keep ringing those bells, quite often so that there was a sustained, theme a known set of concerns. And if they, if you know it's advisory, all you can do is give the advice and try to persuade, but at least they got the advice, if they choose not to take it, it's on them. And that is a little bit different than academic staff assembly where because of the shared governance, you have more sway, it's not a lot of sway, but you have some sway.

Troy Reeves 33:38

Thank you, Tom. So my next question is, do you think about the relationship between faculty and staff? And if so, what are your thoughts?

Tom Zinnen 33:47

Yeah, I think a lot about that, because I was faculty at Northern Illinois University, as always been staff here. I've been staff within Cooperative Extension. Cooperative Extension has a lot of academic staff that do lots of controversial work in groundwater and pesticides, my case in biotechnology. And so from a point of view of having credibility, having academic freedom, in even though you're not on a tenure track, normally you get tenure, nor do we have any job protections anymore. At one time, I had an indefinite rolling horizon, that all went away. Now I could be let go at any time as I understand it. So it's really important to have an understanding of the powers and limits of academic staff people and the powers and limits of faculty people to do as much as you can within the station but also in my case, it was real clear because of how controversial biotech and food was. I needed and I think all scholars at University of Wisconsin-Madison have that academic freedom. A lot of times people conflate tenure with academic freedom and vice versa. And for me, it's always been the idea I have academic freedom, because I'm a scholar here, because the university says that I do. And that's what's so important about that brass plaque that's bolted to the wall on Bascom Hall. And I, that's one of the things that concerns me about the power differential between faculty and academic staff. Especially as more and more extension positions have been shifted to academic staff rather than faculty. Who is going to go to bat for the academic staff, folks who are in tight positions. If we have fewer and fewer of those folks, and they have less and less influence, then I think that will have a chilling effect on the ability of all scholars at the university, but particularly academic staff people to do their job and to do their duty and to stand up and speak out in their areas of professional expertise, especially when the area and the topic is controversial.

Troy Reeves 36:50

Thank you, Tom. So we're interviewing you, today and last week, ostensibly because you won an academic staff award, specifically the Robert and Carol Heideman Award for excellence in public service and outreach. So I wonder if you would talk as much as you would like about the award, you know, including the the nomination through the reception?

Tom Zinnen 37:17

Well, it's one of great things that the Heidemans did, I got to meet them once at their home. And then I talked to Carol on the phone after I found out that I had won the award. And I let her know that I thought it was really vital, especially for the identity of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Idea and how important outreach has been, not always at the university, but at least since the late 1880s-1890s. That people like myself and my colleagues who spend their lives, doing the public service, public outreach mission of the university, that we too, can be acknowledged on a par with our colleagues in instruction, and in research and in administration. I'd watched several colleagues that I knew win that award, and I was very happy for them. And I was like, boy, I would not mind being so acknowledged. And I was very happy to learn in 2020, that my boss had nominated me, but he let me know that I was not selected. The person who I, who was selected, I know very well. And I was like, Well, I can see. It's like, very good. And so I was happy that he and my other colleagues at the Biotech Center, again, nominated me and I was delighted to win. One of my sayings when I do things with Science Alliance, and to help convene that into co-organize science expeditions is that credit is infinitely divisible and should be commensurate with what the persons who were being acknowledged to have done. But there's always room to offer credit to people. And I think that's something that the university would do well to do more of, and to have more opportunities to acknowledge people sooner in their career early, middle, late. That's one thing they do very well with the faculty, and that we don't do so well with academic staff. If you saw the other folks that I'm assuming that you have interviewed, almost all of them are 15 or 20 or 25-30 years into their careers. And that means we have a lot of people who have 01:39:005,10, 15 years into their careers who may not be getting acknowledged for the contributions that they've already made, the sacrifices that they have put forth. And it can really help keep people, we talk about recruitment and retention of faculty. We hardly ever talk about recruitment and retention of academic staff. And I think that's one of the things that we could do and that I'm really grateful for the Heideman award and for the other awards that people won this spring. But there's only eight or nine or ten awards, and we have 7,000 academic staff people. That's a ratio that could be addressed.

Troy Reeves 40:51

And I've, I've heard that the reception was virtual this year, or, and I wonder if you have thoughts about that.

Tom Zinnen 41:00

It was very well done. We all knew that was gonna be virtual. It was harder, I think for the folks last year because they were going to be live and then it wasn't very classy. A pamphlet that had a graphic artist's work on it. The chancellor made the presentations. I thought it was first grade. And I'm very grateful to the academic staff. Assembly in ASEC and to the Secretary, the academic staff. It was a big deal for me, it was a big deal for my family and very [inaudible] for the ceremony.

Troy Reeves 42:02

Thank you, Tom, for that. I want to get to a couple more of my follow-up questions before we do the final question about legacy. One of them is actually one of the things that you want to talk about. You alluded to the last time about people who retired from campus not fleeing Madison, but actually either staying or coming back to Madison. Yeah. So how has that influenced or affected your work?

Tom Zinnen 42:35

Last night, I went to visit a friend who's subletting a eight story apartment on the 300 block of West Main, it's right across from Capitol Lakes. And it was an 01:42:00unbelievable view looking south onto Lake Monona. The sun was going down, it was 6:30, 7, 7:30. And it was not any, like any view of the city I've seen before. The only up high views that I've seen were from the State Capitol. But this was different. And it just the way the city of Madison is different now from when I came here in January 1982, is that this was a place that you would flee. Once you got done, whether you retired from state government or university or any other thing, I mean, people were getting out of Dodge, and this is Madison. And then people were fleeing the Midwest in general. I grew up in Northern Illinois. You know, let's go to Florida. Let's go to Texas. Let's go to Arizona, geez, let's go to Arkansas, at least they don't have any income tax. And to see in the 40 years, since 1982, to now that when I do programs with participatory learning and teaching organization, PLATO, which is an organization of about 900 active retirees with college degrees, when I go around the room and ask the 25 people or so that are there, you know, who are you and you know, how did you come to be in Madison, it's not unusual anymore for two or three of them out of the 20 or 25 to say, I just moved to Madison so that I could be near my grandkids. I moved back to Madison because of all the great things that are here that I can afford. And that is 180 degree shift. And that means there's more wealth, both financial and intellectual in the town. It means we're being able to draw, attract, retain young people who want to come here for intellectually-driven jobs. They get married and have kids, and those kids are grandkids to somebody, and those grandparents wanna come and be by their grandkids in many cases. And so that testimony, that evidence, that is impressive to me, because it allows us to think about ways that we can take advantage of in a good way we can harness we can put to work, we can invite, we can enroll, we can enlist. The older folks, we're now, I'm in that age, who used to sit there and think, man in a year or two, I'm going to head to Florida, I might come back for a couple months in summer, but otherwise, I'm gone. So I think it really increases the vibrancy of 01:45:00the community and an environment, it really pumps up the vibrancy of what I can do with and things like Wednesday Night at the Lab, which primarily has an active retiree with college degree, audience. And then, because we have programs like that, that means the experiences that our researchers and outreachers get in interacting with older audiences hones their talents, in being able to talk with other folks, whether it's teachers or parents of younger children or the young children themselves. So I, I'm looking for a downside of this. But it's pretty hard. It's great to live in a city, where you have a free zoo, a botanical garden that costs $1 or $2 to get in, an arboretum that's free to walk through, one, outstanding art museums, both the Chazen and the Madison Museum of Modern Art. The one thing we don't have yet is a large [inaudible] commensurate with Wisconsin and with the University of Wisconsin science museum. And that's something that I'm hoping that over the coming years, some of these retired folks will see fit to put their time, energy, and money into. But it's a very impressive thing. And I think other university towns are seeing this. And I think when people are asking, Where do I want to retire to? Finding a university town where there's Platteville, where I went to undergrad, or Eau Claire, or Green Bay, those towns have another leg up on towns that don't have universities, and that is their ability to draw and retain retirees. So that's, to me, it's a wonderful thing about the last 40 years.

Troy Reeves 48:18

Thank you. You've mentioned Wednesday Night at the Lab a few times, and specifically at least one of the programs. One of the specific programs. And this might be like asking you to, you know, choose your favorite child. But I do want to ask since you've been a part of it from the beginning, are there a few programs that stick out? And if so why?

Tom Zinnen 48:46

Yeah, clearly the one that Steve Oreck gave really influenced me because of the 01:48:00power of what he had to say in his critique of the city of Madison and the University of Wisconsin as it was at the time. And how, within a year it came to bear on how we are or are not responding to COVID. Plus he was just a great storyteller. I think the other one is, that stands out was the one that we had for the heart transplant case, story, saga, gift. There was a student who got meningitis and died, in like 24 hours. And luckily, his family allowed his organs to be donated. And his organs went to 9, 10, 12 different people. One of the people that went to was a professor that I knew. And I happened to hear that, my goodness, he was in the hospital getting a heart transplant. Woah. So I talked to that person, that professor and said, this is a pretty hard but important story. Would you be willing to come and share your story at Wednesday Night at the Lab, and he said, Not yet, it's too soon. And if I do, it would be only with the permission of the family. And so, I said, completely understand. And about a year, you know, I'd asked him from time to time and about a year later he said, I think we're ready. So we lined up the surgical team, the mom, the professor, and they all told their stories of the young man getting ill, going into the hospital, being sent home, getting ill or more ill, going back to the hospital, and dying. And the harvesting of the organs, and all this so that 01:51:00the...The mom was particularly willing to share some insights that you wouldn't know unless you were there. So that's one that affects me a lot. And it shows the power of people being able to share what [inaudible] and the idea that when this young man died, because of the science and the medicine and the surgery, and the infrastructure for quickly finding donors and being able to quickly get the organs into the recipients. What an amazing thing that is. And these are things that didn't happen very routinely. When I was born in 1957. I think the first successful heart transplant was 1966 or '67, something like that. Kidney were, may have been early earlier and some other things but that one was the other great one. And then the third one was the two cases of the MIA, the Missing in Action program, that my associate director or my boss, Chuck Konsitzke launched. And that was work that the Biotech Center did to, in the first case, identify the remains of a Canadian citizen who was a US soldier, who was killed in August of 1944 in France, and then his bones were misidentified and misplaced and they had to do a lot of sleuthing work, but they were able to track all that down and use DNA to identify the bones properly. And so that was pretty good. And the second one was Frank Fazekas. And that was amazing because I got to go to France in August of 2016. To help with the dig. Frank Fazekas was a Airforce Air Corps pilot who was shot down near Dunkirk in May 1944. And his remains were never recovered. But they that's what's great about this program, 01:54:00is they figured out where the crash site was, got the permission of the French government and the local folks and the owners of the property. That team went and I got to carry a shovel. And it so happened that Frank Fazekas, the pilot, had a six-month-old son named Frank Fazekas Jr, who had grown up to become an Air Force pilot, was retired. And he was invited and he accepted, he came to the dig site. And he was there. On the days that we found the first remains. And the days that we found the first remains were the last two days before we had, we had two weeks, and we didn't find anything until the last two days. And so that, we got to have a Wednesday Night the Lab on that, where Frank Fazekas Jr came and got to share part of his story. So those are the good, tough ones.

Troy Reeves 56:15

Thank you, Tom. We're getting near the end. So I'm going to I'm going to scrap the question about graduate school I'm, and finish with the legacy question. And that's, you know, you're obviously not retiring today or tomorrow, but you have been here on campus for 30 years now, and more if you count your graduate school experience. So what do you think you'll be remembered for? And is it what you want to be remembered for?

Tom Zinnen 56:50

You know, there are 20,000 employees or more at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and if you ask who, you know, almost nobody gets remembered. They're presidents of the university that nobody knows, nobody remembers. So I guess the question is, what do you think you can do that will be a good thing. And I'm, I'm pretty open about saying there will be a university on the shores of Lake Mendota in 100 years, in 300 years, in 500 years. And it's an amazing thing to go to Cambridge and England and see universities that started in the 13th century. So anything that you could do to keep that going was pretty good. 01:57:00The thing that I liked is, I've mentioned him several times, my friend, friend, Ken Smith, he said, Tom, you move the pile. And I asked, what does that mean? When he said, Well, university's a huge thing. You can't do lots about it. But you move the pile as far as helping the university be a more welcoming place, helping organize science outreachers, even if informally, setting up things like science expeditions and helping set up Wednesday Night at the Lab. That continues, doesn't mean, you know, none of this stuff is brand new. But it continues that tradition and expectation that did start in the 1880s, being able to share science with the public, here, and all around the state of Wisconsin, so that that reciprocity is really important that if we want to be welcomed into communities around Wisconsin, we need to be able to welcome people here and be able to help connect them. So I think that's what my children will tell their children. That was a big theme of what I did. And then three generations nobody'll remember anybody. So, except there's people like you that maintain archives, and then you never know who will go look at this stuff in a decade or a century.

Troy Reeves 59:36

Yeah, we certainly hope people will listen to this or or look at what we have as the years continue.

Tom Zinnen 59:45

I do want to put in a plug for what you do. It was amazing to me to be able to have, to be able to go see the speech from February 15 of 1905 that Charles van Hise gave in the Red Gym, where he, his last paragraph was "I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family of the state." And there's a lot to be said for the real McCoy, is to having the real deals, the primary documents, those things are precious and powerful. I appreciate oral archives, physical archives, it helps keep that story alive and it helps also debunk baloney. And those are two pretty important functions.

Troy Reeves 1:00:38

Thank you, Tom. I appreciate you saying that. So, this is going to wrap up the oral history. I'm going to hit stop on the my recording device and then I'll 02:00:00talk to you for a minute or two and then we'll hit stop on the other one. So, Tom, thank you for your time. I do appreciate it.