but what was a s you like uh when you first got here?
Well, it was, if I don't remember what the enrollment was, but it was,
It was, it was still big for the time, but it was much, much smaller than
it is now. It might have been 20,000, I don't know. Um It seemed like
everybody knew everybody. One of the things that struck me about the
campus was that it really was easy to meet people and um and faculty
members, it seemed very welcoming to visit with you and that was helpful
to me because one of the first things we started working on when I got
here was an interdisciplinary degree in exercise science and I went to
chemistry and Biology to psychology. Um and at every stop found people
that were interested and willing to participate. And then in a short time
we put together an interdisciplinary faculty that included, I think three
people from chemistry and three from biology, uh two from psychology,
maybe one from nutrition and then a number of them from our department and
and put together a first rate program. And it was to me it was just
because there weren't barriers really departmental barriers. In fact, we
collaborated with some people in engineering too. And so
I felt part of a bigger campus family than just my department and
and I guess maybe
got to learn about the broader university sooner than a lot of people do.
And that was awfully helpful. Um and I, I don't know if it's always good
to know the history, but of all the administrators later on, I knew the
history more than anybody. Uh, I'm not sure when chuck bacchus came, but
ah, I don't think anybody else had been here anywhere near as long as I
had. In fact, my case was pretty unusual. It's very seldom that a person
starts out as an assistant professor and in the same university goes
through all the steps that I was fortunate enough to go through. So
I, I thought it was helpful. Uh, Now the other argument of course is if
you've been other places, then you've seen how other places operate and
you can bring those ideas back. Um, I guess I ah,
when I became active later in my academic career, going to other campuses
and giving talks,
I guess I came away from all of that with the impression that we were
doing things better than most places, that most places really were slower
to change and adapt to what higher education needed than we had been. And
so I felt like they had more to learn from us than we had to learn from
them.
It was, it was the campus a pleasant place. Was it crowded? Did you have
any sense of the sort of the hustle and bustle that we get more of
nowadays? Well, the campus was, was strange, I guess in the sense that for
us, for a campus as big as this one was, there weren't many students
around and it was because there were so many commuting students and so few
on campus students. And over the years, of course, that's changed
enormously as they've added dorms. But um, the first week of campus it was
always busy. Um, and then it seemed like as the semester progressed,
there'd be fewer and fewer students around uh, compared to other campus as
I was familiar with, um where they were largely residential.
What was your home department like when you first got here?
It was thinking of it as a young person coming in. It, it had more old,
older people than older than, than young people. Um, but like the rest of
campus it was growing. And so every year we added new faculty and um, and
every year the old members of the old, some of the older members retired.
And so in fairly short order, the, the demographics of the department
changed a lot among the older faculty, that the people were really nice
individuals, they really cared about students, they did a good job
teaching. Um, none, none of the older faculty really had any kind of
research program at all. And most of them had really never published much
of anything. And so the generation that came in with me reflected, I think
changes in the broader university where the expectation was, and the thing
we wanted to do was to, to do original work. And, and have it published in
and develop a significant research program who who is chair of the
department then and dean of the college you said was president, Who were
the Dean? Richardson was the chairman of the department. He had been
brought in from the university of Minnesota um to provide leadership for
this new combined department
and the Dean was George peak, that actually George peak interviewed me,
but then he stepped down and George Wolf Was actually the dean when I
started my position. Uh Wolf replaced dean that summer, the summer of 73.
Carl Dannon felt was the vice president for academic affairs at that time.
And then of course john swallow was present.
How did your career progress as you work through a yes, you are, what do
you most remember about those things? Like what were the sort of, one of
the things that I told people was um one of the nice things that happened
to me is that about every five years I did something different. And so I
came in 73
now it wasn't five years, but in, in, in two years I became director of of
the exercise and Support Research Institute. And so that gave me Something
a little different to do. In 79 I was promoted to full professor and
became department chair. Then in 84 I became associate Dean and served
with Sam Kirkpatrick then for, I guess it was 4.5 years because he left
midyear. So in 1990 I was named interim dean and then That was January one
and then in December or January than in May. I mean in January I was named
interim dean and then in May I was appointed as Dean.
And While I was deemed 11 years, um about five years into my deanship,
a number of opportunities came to me too, do things on a national scale.
And so I was, I was the president of the Council of Colleges of Arts and
Sciences, which is the largest, most comprehensive organization of liberal
arts and Sciences Dean's in the country. And I served as the president for
four years actually, or five years of the, of the Urban University, Urban
University Dean's group. Um and so that kind of gave me a new thing to
work on and of course exposed me to lots of interesting things that were
going on nationally that I could bring back here. And then in, at the end
of 2000 Laddie Core asked me to come and and be the senior vice president
in charge of trying to keep the various a sus entities from flying off in
different directions.
Each campus had its own notion of where it wanted to go and what it wanted
to be and laddie worried that there wasn't anybody thinking about the
whole. And so anyway, we had east, we had west, we had the downtown campus
, we had the research park and the main campus and so it was, it was my
job to try to look for the ways that we could hold that all together and
act as a ladder used to say one University geographically distributed.
You know, it was hard to judge how much people thought about being part of
one university I think at that time West really, I would have liked to
maybe split off um,
you know, I don't, that's maybe not, I, I can't document that, but uh,
there was a time when I think they would have liked to have split off,
maybe, I don't believe East ever was inclined that way. The downtown
campus was never inclined that way. They just wear the mask. The critical
mass wasn't there for the downtown campus,
but west had been more independent from the start and uh, I think that
hold back the drawback there was, they really wanted to be independent as
a research entity and that probably was never going to, going to fly. So,
but people,
the leadership Elaine Maimon at the time chuck bacchus, they were very
supportive of the broader university, tried to be good citizens. They were
Elaine was in the toughest spot because I think
there was, there was less support for that among the faculty at west and
then uh, was expected or hoped for. And so she was in a tough spot there,
um chuck managed that I thought very effectively and but then he had an
easier faculty to work with, many of them were from the main campus and I
don't think particularly wanted to be separate from it
because you talk a little bit about your sort of personal transition from
being a full, like a regular faculty member to your administrative career.
Well, it um, it was an evolution I guess is a fair way to describe it
because
probably my most productive years as a, as an academic, as a scientist
were my years as department chair. And so I had just achieved the rank of
full professor and really had my research program going strong. I had nice
funding regular funding from the Air Force and uh I also got some from the
Heart Association and um from a few other sources. Um
and so
The years when I was chair from six from 79 to 84, um you know, I was
learning about administration because nobody is trained to be an
administrator in higher education. You just, you get selected and then you
try to figure it out. But um during those years I was figuring out how to
be a chair. And uh and was really had good years in research and and
publication. Then when I became associate dean, the thing that I
discovered pretty soon was I really couldn't spend the amount of time that
a person needs to spend with his doctoral students and do a good job in
the associate deanship. And so I began to not to take any more doctoral
students just to finish the ones I had. And also cut back on my teaching.
And and also cut back on my publication and research. Although I still
continue to do some. Then when I became dean, I didn't take doctoral
students at all anymore, but I actually changed my research and writing.
Maybe research is too strong, too strong a term for it. But I began to
think about and write about and give talks about. And
actually I was invited around the country at many, many places to talk
about um leadership and higher education. And so from The early 90s on, I
the only the only publications that my name is listed in are things that
were sort of left over and finished from when I was active with my grad
students or other faculty members or new things that were more in the
administrative academic realm. Was there a point at which you knew there
was no going back? Oh, I think a couple of years into the deanship, right
. I felt like, uh I mean I could have gone back, but I didn't have any
particular interest in. I really enjoyed administration. And so I felt
like my first choice would be to finish my career doing that. But I never
, I never worried about, I never felt threatened about going back. I think
I could have gone back and been productive, had that opportunity uh
developed or that scenario unfolded. What would you, would you enjoy about
administration?
Well, I think as a faculty member, um,
you know, one is pleased or frustrated by the administrator depending on
whether you're happy or unhappy with the decisions. Um
and I guess I felt like I could, I could do at least as well and perhaps
better than the people that I had observed in those roles and
I wanted an opportunity to try it. And the years as chair were frustrating
because Guido wagon um, came in as dean and uh, Guido was a really nice
man, but he, and he was sort of from the old school, um,
and he really wasn't a good fit for the College of liberal arts and
Sciences right then and he wasn't a good fit with the, with the page
Mulholland who came in and replaced Carl dan Infeld. And so those were,
those were tough times.
A point of contrast with Guido. And then Sam Kirkpatrick, who I than
worked with and learned a great deal from um, with Guido as a department
chair, you needed to go in and see him regularly and ask for things
because Guido's method of operating was when people came in and asked, he
would say yes or no and he'd say he'd say yes or no until the money was
gone. And then, and then it was no for the rest of the year. And so The
department chairs knew that July one, he had his new budget and you'd
better go and see him once a week about something. Um The trouble was when
you look back over what those decisions had produced and if and you ask
your question, ask yourself, did they really move the college forward? I
guess they did. But but not in any the way that related to any planning,
it was just whatever each department wanted and what each department
wanted might not have been what was best for the university, but it was
what what what was on their agenda when SAM came, um he introduced a whole
new way of planning and budgeting that I thought was just enlightened
compared to what I was used to. And that was, he would start by saying,
what is it we're trying to accomplish as a college now, what what sorts of
decisions do we have to make to move us in that direction? And so he would
do a single comprehensive comparative collective exercise that brought all
the ideas in at once from every department. And then he would look at that
set of investment opportunities, he called them and he would and he would
say, okay, this makes sense for what we're trying to accomplish. This
doesn't this makes sense. This doesn't, this will help to programs, not
just one, this will help this interdisciplinary program and this
interdisciplinary program. And so by looking at everything it wants, then
he could make a set of investment decisions that moved us forward And to
me, I just thought that was that was really a good way to proceed. And
then I used it from then on when I became dean,
I don't know what your question was, but
this seemed like a good answer.
What what did you feel were the biggest challenges that s you collectively
I was facing during the time that you were here? Well, the one that was
just overwhelming when we first came was that we were too many years from
achieving the university status and we've just been offering doctoral
degrees about a decade. Um And the U. Of a
the head of a faculty member from the U. Of A. Was the head of the
appropriations committee and the legislature tom Goodwin.
And so our poor presidents,
I just had an awful uphill fight. The Board of Regents was stacked uh you
know, with you of a people and they weren't quietly you of a people. They
were they were overtly view of a people and they would tell the CSU
presidents uh you know, you have a is the main university and that's the
one we're going to support and you and I know you will get what get what
we can get you. But um
so it was a struggle because we had the students, we had the growth. Um
but in any kind of a funding comparison the U. Of a was so much better off.
It was unbelievable now over the years,
the board and the Legislature
fussed around with that and made a few adjustments, but I'll bet if you
look today the funding for students in equivalent programs is still
stacked in the vase direction so that that was always a problem.
And it's been astonishing to me just to kind of wrap that topic up how how
that has changed. Um
Okay in terms of I think the legislature and the board um it's much more
balanced and way more favorable to A. S. U. Than it ever was back in those
days. It was it was incredible and it was a struggle because every time we
went to introduce a new program um I would say we're already doing it so
we don't need to in the state or we were just about to do it. Uh And so
let us do it or we could do it better or the A. S. A. S. You really isn't
staffed up to do that. In fact when we got our interdisciplinary PhD
program chuck Wolfe worked with me um because he wanted it to be and
unimpeachable proposal, he didn't want it coming back at us and having the
U. Of a say it. And so he was really pleased. Uh and and and he should
have been, I mean he encouraged it, but he felt like when we went forward
with the proposal with three people from chemistry, three from biology to
from psychology to from engineering one from nutrition and then the dozen
from our department, you they couldn't, they couldn't say we're about to
do that or we can do it better and so on and they didn't and so it went
through and you know, without a hitch. But but it was a struggle that is
for all the things that we proposed and tried,
we were always struggling for space. I mean that was always an issue. Um I
know john swallow was president when I came and he he was I know he
worried all the time and Russ nelson to, they were just overwhelmed with
how do we, how do we handle this space needs of the campus? Um when I
first came, none of the athletic complex that we know today was complete.
Uh And so all the coaches were still in PE west and in fact the men and
women physical education areas had just combined the year before and and
it wasn't a happy marriage. Um They had like most campuses up to that time
, men's and women's physical education were separate and uh and didn't
want to be merged, but anyway, they had merged and but all the coaches
were there too, so it was quite a um it was quite a crowded set of
buildings there. Then soon thereafter the activity center opened and the
coaches moved up there and of course then they built the athletic complex
we know of today in the next few years
and then like every campus we, everybody has budget issues. Everybody can
think of more things they could do if they had more money. And the biggest
problem we always had in liberal arts and sciences was we were never
budgeted fully to do our what we had to do because the university operated
on this principle that salary savings was recovered by the provost office
and then you had to try to get it back. If we could have kept all those
moneys, we'd have been fine. But that's just the way it works. It works,
it works that way. And almost every university and so each year we would
have to uh ask for money back from the vacancy savings that was collected
by the provost, so we could staff all the freshman english, freshman math
, freshman history, freshman this and that, that we had to offer. So that
was always a struggle.
What um, what kind of advice would you give young people nowadays in
choosing their college and career?
Well, I don't know if a person can choose their college, your college kind
of chooses you. But um,
I don't think there's any magic formula
in higher education, You'd better be a strong academic because you're
probably not gonna go anywhere if you, if you don't have a strong academic
base. So the, you know, the, I guess the first rule would be
become as good a faculty member as you can be. Um, and most people want to
do that, but sometimes
the reward systems or the feedback people get maybe cause them to become a
little narrow or slanted eye. I always appreciated most the faculty
members that were that that we're good at everything, they were good at at
bringing in grant money if that was important, they were good at
publishing their work, that was always important um that we're good with
students, enjoyed students that that lifted and inspired students. Um and
that we're good. Externally, we would we would have lots of events
for the external public and I learned very quickly that I'd better here,
this person make a presentation before I put them in front of the public.
Um because we had some people that weren't very good with the lay audience
, they might have been good with grad students, but they just really
couldn't tell their story to the lay public and we had some great
successes in that regard. Some of these people I'm talking about that
we're good researchers that were good with students and good with the
public did the first origin series. I don't know if you remember when we
started that, but I had noticed in the college that we had this theme of
origins, that
where we had unusual strength. We had Laurie lesson, who could talk about
the origins of life actually, we had Jeff hester, who could talk about the
origins of the universe and then Lori the origins of life and then um Don
Johanson who could talk about human origins and then we had a number of
people but I chose chuck Redmond because he was so good with external
audiences to talk about the rise of civil origins of civilization. And
anyway the first time we did that the nelsons up in, up in Scottsdale,
opened their home to some of their neighbors and I want to say that they
were set up for 80 and 130 showed up and it was just I mean the people
just loved it and the university, I know at least I keep reading an
insight that they've continued that notion of origins and brought in
external speakers and so on. But it's a great theme and and it's a great
story to tell and a issue of course has interesting people to do that.
I want I want to move to your sort of overall perceptions of the
university but first of all is to perhaps um what do you think you were
the your greatest accomplishments as Dean of local arts or the greatest
accomplishments of college? However you'd like to think about it. Well
I think the culture,
the culture certainly changed a great deal over
You know the 15 years that I was in the associate Dean and then Dean. Um
and that was that was due to lots of things laddies, leadership was
especially helpful in that regard I thought because where Russ? Ah And I
think each of our presidents did a good job rush seemed to be um
uh huh, focused so much on how things looked and he seemed less inclined
to worry about how things were ah um
You're saying that reputation is what people think you are and character
is what you are when nobody's looking. And you know, while Laddie
certainly one of the reputation to be good, I think he wanted it to be
good because he wanted the character of the university to be um a place
that cared about students and where where faculty and administrators cared
about each other and acted that way. Uh And we're faculty cared about
students. And
when I used to talk about this and and my talks around the country, I
would cite um Alexis de Toqueville who, in looking at early America said
that America is great because she's good and if America ever ceases to be
good, America will cease to be great. And he was talking about the habits
of the heart that early americans had. And and I while Laddie never used
those words or those phrases, I always felt like he was interested in the
habits of the heart of the campus. And
I've really felt um through all kinds of means that a sus habits of the
heart became a lot better. I'll never forget when laddie first came, he
had a meeting with the Dean's and he was astonished with one thing after
another.
Just two, just two examples. I remember him saying, do you mean that when
a student buys a parking permit it only gives them the right to look for a
space. It doesn't mean they have a space. And the other one was he said,
do you mean that, are you telling me that even though we expect every
freshman to take freshman composition that we don't have classes spaces
for all those students? And of course the answer to both of those was,
well no we don't. He was just appalled really. And I think those of us
that have been here through all those years of growth to be honest, our
view was
not so much trying to attract students, but how on earth do we handle all
these students? And I think what happened over the years is
the campus became much more concerned about the students and interested
and did more things to that.
Well, or maybe the opposite of when I went to school and when you went to
school, I'm sure. And that was in the very first college class I sat in
the professor said, look to your right look to your left by the end of
next year two of you will be gone. You know. And so they thought the
winnowing out process was one of the great things that happened in higher
education. Well, of course universities believe now that if you admit
somebody you'd better try to help them leave with a degree and not just
debt. And I think we came a long way in that regard. We came a long way in
our in our research capacity. We came a long way in our national
visibility.
Oh we you know faculty. Well one of the things that was an amazing
opportunity here and really fueled all this change with the honors college
and with the attraction of those high end students and so on was
Starting in the 70s and through Well from the 70s forward. Much of higher
education was in a period of retrenchment. And so there wasn't a lot of
hiring going on nationally. Where because we were growing and because the
university was funded by formula and because in most years we did get some
new money from the state
in all the years I was in the Dean's office we hired 30 40 50 Faculty
members a year. Some new positions, some from vacancies where people
resigned or left. But When you can hire 30 or 40 or 50 new faculty members
every year against not much competition. Huh? Um We assembled amazing
talent and ended up with a way stronger faculty I think than we ever could
have hoped to attract if Berkeley and U. C. L. A. And stanford and
michigan and Illinois and everybody else had lots of openings but they
didn't. And so people that really wouldn't have probably picked a S. U. As
their first choice. I came here not because we were their first choice but
maybe their only choice or at least the best of the ones they had and when
they came they liked it and by and large they stayed and and had wonderful
careers became very productive and and lifted the whole institution.
So the quality changed, the character changed reputation changed. You know
all the output measures that are important changed in in a good direction.
You know I think we had a very successful run and it's continued one of
the one of the really
one of the strong advantages I guess of being in a big colleges whenever
the university was dealing with something
we would discuss it in the administrative council. And so you'd have
humanists talking about it, you'd have scientists talking about it, you'd
have social scientists talking about it. You'd have some of the more
vocational oriented areas talking about it. You get so many different
perspectives and everybody would learn
and everybody would modify their views a little bit. And we would come up
then with things that then I would take to the to the d to the whatever we
call the Dean's Council or whatever. And
you know they'd already been thought through pretty well and so more often
than not what the university ended up doing was largely what what we
brought forward. Um And I think by and large those are good things.
What's your do you have something you might think of your best memory of
your time at issue? Well, the years as Dean of Arts and Sciences were
fantastic
in a college that large and that varied. There's so much going on. Um, We
had missions to MArs and we had people making discoveries and pyramids in
Mexico and
people studying that transitions in Egypt and china and around the world.
We had political science is predicting, predicting the elections and we
had historians doing interesting new interpretations of the past and
creative writers that were just inspiring whenever you heard them speak or
read their work. I mean it was just every day, it was something new and
different and exciting and uplifting and uh, those were just great years
and I always, I guess I felt very good about the fact that uh, in my 10th
year MIlt had me evaluated and 300 and 12 people responded or something in
the evaluation and 92% said that they thought the dean, the college would
be well served by meek staying on his Dean. 4% I didn't have an opinion
and 4% said throw the rascal out. So anyway, I felt like you know, if I'm
having this much fun and people are that's supportive, then that's a
pretty good deal. But no, those years were great years after we've gone
through one of the periods that universities go through where the years
have been leaner than most.
I felt like we come out of it about as good as we could have hoped for.
And I wrote a note to the faculty and I um I recounted a story that's been
told to me and I mean a true story. It was something that happened to me.
I was in, we were in china
and we fell into conversation through our interpreter with a couple that
sat across from us on the train and they were old, older chinese. And we
said you've lived in china all your lives and you've seen a lot, what is,
what, what do you think about life in china? And they said, well it
depends on if you take the horizontal or the vertical view. It's
interesting. What's that mean? He said, well, he said, we're old, we lived
through the horrible war with Japan. We lived through the the takeover by
the communists. We lived through the the upright of the Red guard
insurrection. We've been through the all the transitions. We look at life
vertically. We've got the long view and we say life in china has never
been better.
They said, the young people, I don't have that long view. And so all they
have is the horizontal view. And so they look at life in china, life in
Singapore, life in Japan, life in the United States
and we don't look so good in those comparisons. And so they say, oh, life
in china is horrible. Ah um,
so bringing it back to what I was the letter I wrote, I wrote to the
faculty and I said, you know, I don't think it matters if we take the
horizontal or the vertical view. We're lucky to be at A. S. U. Uh huh.
Sure. We've had tough times. We've had our problems, but we've improved
dramatically. We've gotten through this down spell without any real
hardship. We're getting better. There are very few places I'd rather be. I
don't know about you. But uh, so, you know, in spite of the difficulties,
this was an awfully good place to be.