12 research outputs found
Harold Goldwhite oral history, "The Academic Senate in Transition", Oral History Project on the Origins of The California State University System, Phase II, 1996
No full textInterview focus on Goldwhite's experience as chair of the Academic Senate from 1993 to 1995.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History on the Origins of the CSU System, Phase II
HAROLD GOLDWHITE
The Academic Senate in Transition
Interview Conducted by
Hal Charnofsky
December 18,1996
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1998
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright c 1998 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master’s level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor’s Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor’s Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor's Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
into higher education in the 1950s and '60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System's historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Karen Jean Hunt
Judson A. Grenier CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
Donald R. Gerth
Judson A. Grenier
James Highsmith
Gloria Lothrop
Ellis McCune
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stern
Tom Träger
Brad Wells
Helene Whitson
IV
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This oral history interview of Harold Goldwhite was taped at the Office of the
Chancellor in Long Beach. It is part of Phase II of the ongoing Oral History
Project of the California State University Archives.
HC: Good morning. This is Wednesday, December 18, 1996. My name is
Hal Charnofsky. I'm the secretary of the Academic Senate of the
CSU, and I'm sitting in the office with Dr. Harold Goldwhite, who is
presently the director of the Institute for Teaching and Learning, but
he is also the immediate past chair of the Academic Senate of the
CSU. In addition to that, he is a professor of chemistry at California
State University, Los Angeles. We are here today to interview Dr.
Goldwhite, and we are particularly interested in his impressions of the
years he spent as chair of the Academic Senate. So I'll begin by simply
asking Harold to talk for a few minutes about his experience as chair
of the Academic Senate, and then from time to time perhaps interject
a question. Harold?
HG: Thank you, Hal. This is Harold Goldwhite, and as Hal said, I was
chair of the Academic Senate CSU during the period of June 1993
through May of 1995. I had two successive one-year terms. Let me
just give a little bit of background about my involvement with the
Academic Senate CSU, as it were, my preparation for the office of
Chair, and then I want to talk a bit about what I think were some
significant accomplishments of the senate during my period as chair,
some changes in the senate, and what I see for the senate in the near
term.
I had been a member of the Academic Senate CSU, I think, for a little
over six years when I became chair. I had previously served as both
vice chair and chair of the Academic Affairs Committee, and I had two
successive terms as a member-at-large on the Executive Committee, so
that I knew something of the workings of the senate. But interestingly,
I had not been an officer of the senate before I became its chair. That
was just one of those things, the way the senate functioned in the
matter of its choices for chair. But I had seen enough of the operation
of the Executive Committee under the previous chair, Sandy [Sandra]
Wilcox, so that I was fairly comfortable with and familiar with the
mode of operation of the senate under its officers.
GOLDWHITE 2
The senate was at a very interesting time, I think, when I became chair.
We had effectively a quite new management team in the CSU— it had
only been in place about a year— a new chancellor, a new executive
vice chancellor, changes in the senior vice chancellor [for academic
affairs] and so on, so that the whole atmosphere in the CSU that I
think characterized the period when I was senate chair was really one
of change.
The new chancellor had come in with a mandate, largely stemming, I
think, from his own interests but also probably from some
encouragement by the presidents of the campuses, with a mandate for
decentralizing the CSU. There was a strong feeling that too many
operations had become too firmly fixed, too embodied in tradition and
so on within this central office, and so the chancellor was committed
to downsizing the central office, which came along with substantial
reductions in the funding and the budgeting for all the units in the
central office— and we'll comment about the impact of that on the
senate in a moment. He had come in with a mandate for downsizing
the central office, for dispersing as many functions as possible back to
the campuses, for doing whatever could be done on the campuses
rather than here in Golden Shore.
Now, for budgetary purposes, the Academic Senate CSU is treated as
a unit of the Chancellor's Office. And it's an interesting tension, really,
because the Academic Senate is, after all, a centralizing function, in a
way. It's the one group that represents centrally, for governance
purposes, the whole of the faculty of the CSU. And so there was an
interesting contrast there between the chancellor's interest in devolving
power back to the campuses and the fact that the faculty of the CSU
had chosen to have, in a sense, a central overarching Academic Senate
CSU that would represent them at the central office. And so we did
have some discussions— many discussions— with the chancellor about
appropriate roles for the Academic Senate CSU. He had said frankly
in some public settings that he wasn't sure what an Academic Senate
CSU was doing in an era of decentralization. So part of our job, I
think— and I mean our job, the job of the Executive Committee while
I was chair, and of the senate as a whole— was to legitimize the
function of the Academic Senate CSU in the eyes of the new
chancellor. That is, to show that it had important roles that it had to
play, that it was in fact the voice of the faculties, and that it spoke for
the faculties in certain areas— curriculum and faculty-related policies
in particular. So we had to, as it were, reinvent that role for the
Academic Senate CSU, justify its existence, justify the continued
GOLDWHITE 3
funding that would go to the Academic Senate CSU to perform that
function.
HC: That’s very interesting.
HG: In the course of that restudy of the role of the Academic Senate CSU,
two very important enterprises were undertaken by the senate. They
were initiated by the Executive Committee and were endorsed by the
senate, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The first, during my first
year as chair, was the self-study of the Academic Senate CSU. That
was a job that was undertaken by a committee, including senators, nonsenators,
including chairs of local senates and faculty from the
campuses, chaired by a highly respected past chair of the Academic
Senate who had also served as faculty trustee, Bob [Robert] Kully.
The Self-study Committee, for which I also acted as secretary and
recorder, undertook interviews with all interested parties, with the
chancellor, the senior vice chancellor, the executive vice chancellor,
with trustees, with presidents, with senators, with faculty, with
students— you name it, the Self-study Committee met with them. It
met over, I think, about a six- or seven-month period, starting in the
fall of 1993 and going through the spring of 1994, and produced an
extensive report back to the Academic Senate.
HC: What were the findings?
HG: That report had a number of recommendations which the senate then
began to examine and scrutinize. Among them were some suggestions
for rearranging the committee work of the senate, and some of that
happened. There was a recommendation for a role for a budget
committee, that is, a fiscal committee, which took some time but
eventually was implemented. There were suggestions for a committee
on technology, and an ad hoc committee on that subject was set up.
There were rearrangements of the work of the Teacher Education
Committee, which were tried as an experiment for a while. The
committee was recommended to be a subcommittee of Academic
Affairs. That was a short-lived experiment, it did not work, and
eventually the senate rejected that and gave an even more substantial
role to the Teacher Education Committee.
And also some recommendations for a restructuring of the constitution
of the [Academic Senate of the] CSU. There was a lot of concern
about the steady growth in the senate as campuses and as the CSU
grew. We added a couple of campuses during those couple of years
GOLDWHITE 4
that I was senate chair, and of course that meant under the old
constitution four more senators. There were more campuses coming
on line, and so there was some concern about the growth of the senate
itself and the necessary growth in funding. So the second year was a
year in which we restudied the constitution of the Academic Senate.
I want to return to the funding question, because I think whether a
body like the Academic Senate exists and has credibility is tied, to a
considerable extent, to the way in which it is supported by the central
office. And there were long and extended discussions during my first
year as chair with the chancellor over the nature of the funding of the
senate and whether we could be continued at pretty much the same
level as before.
The upshot of that was a compromise in which the senate actually was
maintained at its prior funding base, with the decision that benefits for
senators— this is getting a little technical but it's worth commenting on
just briefly— the benefit portion of the reimbursed time for senators
would be picked up by the campuses. This idea was run by the
presidents, they had no objection, and that in fact was a compromise
position that saved the senate . . .
HC: A lot of money.
HG: Yes, about a quarter of a million dollars, it turned out in the end, and
enabled the senate to continue to support the work of senators with
reimbursed time. As salaries go up steadily and benefits go up steadily,
we could have supported senators to a lesser and lesser extent if we
hadn't worked that out. And that has indeed become the norm for the
senate now, because I think we're in about the third year— no, the
fourth year— of that arrangement, and the campuses seem content with
it. It hits individual campuses only to a modest extent, between 10,000 or so, but it means an enormous amount, in terms of how
much the senate can provide support for senators to come and do their
work.
And there was an education job there, too. First we had to convince
the chancellor, as I say, that there was a legitimate purpose for the
senate; second, we had to simply educate the people in this building to
the fact that you cannot ask people to come down several times a year,
six times a year, spend three days in this building working, plus six
other times spending a day working, and not give them some relief
from the specific teaching load that they have on their home campuses.
GOLDWHITE 5
So that education process went on, and I think was fairly successful.
And as I point out, the funding for the senate has been maintained at
pretty well a constant amount, plus the benefits being paid by the
campuses.
The other activity then that followed that first year of self-study was a
study of the senate's own constitution during the second year. By the
way, I will get to lots of other things that the senate was doing during
that period, but I want to touch on matters that I think were really
crucial to the survival of the senate, and its prospering, in the last years
of the twentieth and the first years of the twenty-first century. And I
think that the structuring aspect that we undertook was very important
for that.
Well, another committee was set up for the constitutional review.
There was some overlap of membership, and indeed the chair was the
same person, and once again I was the recorder and reporter for the
committee. On constitutional questions we interviewed, again, pretty
much similar kinds of constituencies. But here we also listened much
more to the senate itself and had a number of open debates,
Committee of the Whole meetings, where we discussed constitutional
questions, and so on. The committee brought in a report that had in
it some relatively radical recommendations— considerable slimming
down of the size of the senate, an opening up of slots to make the
senate more diverse, more representative of the new kinds of faculty
that the CSU had been recruiting over the past few years— that if the
senate had gone along with those recommendations, would have led,
I think, to really substantive and striking change in the nature of the
Academic Senate and the people who made up the senators.
The constitutional changes were dealt with in a number of very
extended and, I think, very good debates within the senate itself, and
the most radical of the suggestions were rejected by the senate, [for
example] the idea that there should be some at-large slots that would
be filled after the senators were elected by the campuses, and there
would have been fewer of them [elected] by the campuses. These at-large
slots would have been filled by a mechanism that was to be
worked out but might have been appointive by the Executive
Committee or an election by the senate itself from slates, prepared by
the campuses, of carefully selected candidates. Anyway, the details are
not significant because the senate was not ready, was not willing to go
along with those suggestions.
GOLDWHITE 6
The changes in the constitution that were made eventually I think came
as a disappointment to many members of the Constitutional Review
Committee. I know personally that they came as a major
disappointment to the chair of that committee, who communicated with
me about that. I think they also came as a disappointment to the
chancellor, who had hoped for more radical change. Again, I think a
time of education is needed and is currently underway, because the
changes actually were quite dramatic. But since they were not as
dramatic as the report had recommended, the audience outside was not
as impressed by them as I think they might have been if we'd just come
in with the proposed changes that actually were endorsed by the senate
and were carried out.
Let me indicate what I think were the two most radical changes, and
I think that they were very important for the future of the senate. The
first, the most radical, was [that] the senate is now pegged at a
maximum membership. The number is fifty-one. There is a slight
possibility of variance upwards by one, depending on the status of the
immediate past chair of the senate, but basically for the near . . . for
the foreseeable future, there will be fifty-one total senators, period.
That means whether we have twenty-two campuses, or twenty-three, or
twenty-four, there will not be more than fifty-one senators. That, of
course, means a lot of redistribution of senate seats. Campuses that
used to have three seats will now only have two. That's already going
to happen at the end of this current academic year. That will be the
first implementation. And I think that's something that hasn't quite
sunk in to the outside audience, that in fact there will be radical and
drastic change in the number of senators, at least, because of this.
HC: Well, if I might interject. . . ?
HG: Of course.
HC: Most of the senators thought. . . Well, I shouldn't say most, but many
thought that we should slim down to thirty-five. And so suddenly we're
going to stay at fifty-one, they thought that was too large, of course,
and I'm sure the chancellor did as well.
HG: Yeah, I think that that is a perception. But really, when you think
about a CSU that will have apparently twenty-three campuses as of
another year or so, and maybe we'll be going up to twenty-four or
twenty-five by the early days of the twenty-first century, that's down to,
on average, two senators per campus. That doesn't seem to me to be
GOLDWHITE 7
over-representation. I think there still is an argument that a big
campus like a San Diego or a San Francisco or a Northridge really
should have more than a single senator, and this present arrangement,
I think, is not an unreasonable compromise.
The question about the diversity of the senate that kept coming up is
clearly one that needs to concern us. We must search for ways to
encourage the campuses to make sure that they send a diverse
senatorial body forward to serve here in Long Beach. And I think
that's beginning to happen. I think that as the CSU has a more diverse
faculty, more
Caribbean Report 15-09-1997
No full text1. Headlines (00:00-00:33)2. Montserrat's Chief Minister goes to Downing Street and gets a new airstrip for the island. From Downing Street Mr Brandt went to the Royal Albert Hall to attend a benefit rock concert for Montserrat. Chief Minister David Brandt is interviewed and Emma Joseph reports (00:34-03:52)3. Britain has announced millions of pounds as aid expected to benefit the poorer members of the Commonwealth groupings. The government is willing to cancel debts provided that the results are used to benefit the poor. Oxfam International has called on governments in developing countries attempting to promote economic growth to also pursue policies to reduced poverty. Kevin Watkins, Author and Harold Brown of Oxfam International are interviewed (03:53-06:27)4. There has been growing discussion around the region about the wider implications of last week's World Trade Organisation ruling against Europe's banana import arrangements. The ruling is expected to impact on the export trade which has been one of the mainstays for the Windwind Islands economies. However, the St. Lucia Chamber of Commerce has responded to those comments asking Caribbean countries not to panic in response to the WTO ruling, Brian Louisy, Executive Director, St. Lucia Chamber of Commerce and Rupert Gajadhar, Chairman of St. Lucia Banana Growers Association are interviewed (06:28-10:21)5. Concerts for Montserratians at the Royal Albert Hall, London and Gerald's Park in Montserrat. Emma Joseph reports (10:22-15:27
Caymanianness, history, culture, tradition, and globalisation : assessing the dynamic interplay between modern and traditional(ist) thought in the Cayman Islands
Get PDFThe research undertaken for this largely qualitative dissertation draws on newspaper articles, oral
histories, historical documentation, open-ended interviews, and to a lesser extent, questionnaires, in
the effort to ultimately confirm the extent to which the benefitting forces of globalization have
fractured any existing traditional-historical cultural body of knowledge and expression among the
Caymanian people. Indeed, by 2009 some Caymanians had long been verbally denouncing the social
and cultural ills of globalization – inclusive of multiculturalism – on their so-called traditional,
unassuming way of life, some of them clamoring for an extensive purge of the many foreign
nationals in “their” Cayman Islands. Yet, other Caymanians have become somewhat invested in the
idea of multicultural “oneness” ostensibly for the sake of peaceful coexistence, harmony and
prosperity as these work towards the promotion of a global, borderless cultural awareness.
This dissertation relies on theoretical frames centred both on the discrete natures of, and the
dualistic struggle between, these two opposing ideological-cultural forces. That this struggle is taking
place in the present age, I anticipate the ways in which more modern understandings, which are
potentially open to liberating subjectivities, must clash with “historical”, xenophobic and
nationalistic viewpoints, viewpoints which have constantly proven contradictory given their
adherents’ complacent acceptance of, and participation in, a localised economic prosperity
substantively dependent on foreign input. Thus in aggregate terms, this dissertation pinpoints the
various effects of an evolving scheme of values and counter-values on an ideologically torn
Caymanianness whose contradictory traditional half is especially fighting for its “cultural purity” in
an era where its ‘reinvented’ logic is being more and more regarded as anachronistic and somewhat
irrational
Ellis E. McCune oral history interview, "Development of the Hayward Campus", 1995
No full textMcCune was the former president of California State University, East Bay (Hayward)Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History on the Origins of the CSU System, Phase II
ELLIS E. McCUNE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE HAYWARD CAMPUS, 1967-1990
Interview Conducted by
Lawrence B. de Graaf
May 5 and 6, 1995
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1995
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright c 1996 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master's level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor's Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor's Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor's Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
in
into higher education in the 1950s and '60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System's historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier Acting CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
Donald R. Gerth
Harold Goldwhite
Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier
David E. Leveille
Gloria Lothrop
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stem
Helene Whitson
Samuel Wiley
IV
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This is an interview of Dr. Ellis McCune, former president of Cal State
Hayward and interim Chancellor. It is occurring on May 5, 1995. The
interviewer is Lawrence de Graaf.
LD: Ellis, we usually begin these with a background. You were bom in
Texas?
EM: Yes, through no fault of my own, I was bom in Houston, Texas. Do
you want the date?
LD: Yes.
EM: July 17, 1921, which means I'm seventy-four this year. We left Texas
when I was a baby, I guess about a year and a half old, and went
through Iowa, a visit that I obviously don't remember, where my
father's parents lived, and then to Tacoma, Washington, where my
mother's parents lived. So my sister, who is two years and three
months younger than I, was bom in Tacoma, Washington, although I
had been bom in Houston, Texas. We then, when I was very small,
moved first to Glendale, and then to Culver City, both in Southern
California, and lived there until 1930,1 think it was, and at that time
the Depression had really set in. My father was a carpenter doing
contracting, and he was completely unable to find work. He became
convinced that if he went back to Houston, which in those days was
relatively well-off, he would do better. So the family sold the house
that we had and set off to Houston. My father left and went directly
to Houston.
My mother, my sister, and I took a coastal steamer, one of those old
coastal steamers that ran up and down California— I remember being
very seasick— up to Tacoma to pay what I guess was supposed to be
sort of a last visit to my grandparents. It turned out that my
grandparents and one uncle, my mother's youngest brother, decided to
go to Texas with us. So we got into two old cars, a 1927 or '28 Dodge,
and I forget what the other one was, and drove from Tacoma,
Washington, to Houston, Texas. And this was in December, as I recall,
December or January. That was quite a trip. I have very vivid
memories of that, the torrential rains in Arizona, slipping off the road
McCUNE 2
and so forth, the car breaking down on Mount Shasta with a broken
crankshaft, (chuckling) It was quite a trip.
Then we finally got back to Texas, and we lived in Houston. Well, let's
see, we got there, I guess, in— I don't remember now whether it was
1930 or 1931 that we got there. I think it may have been January or
February of 1931 when we actually arrived, and we lived in Houston
until 1942, at which time my parents came out to California and I
entered college in Texas.
LD: At Sam Houston?
EM: At what was then Sam Houston State Teachers College. It's now Sam
Houston State University, quite a different school. No, I'm sorry, that
was in 1940. In 1940 that happened, because in 1942 I enlisted in the
United States Air Force and I was in an Air Force band. (It was the
United States Army Air Force then.) I spent the war playing Sousa
marches, (laughter)
LD: Oh, my heavens! What instrument did you play?
EM: Well, I really played the bassoon but, you know, bassoons aren't very
good in marching bands. A marching band marched much of the time,
so I usually was . . . because I was tall, and I guess had a good sense
of rhythm, I got to play the bass drum or the cymbals or something like
that. I also took up the baritone sax and did some of that, not very
much. But I spent the war years in Texas, for the most part mostly in
Waco, two different air fields in Waco: Waco Army Air Field and
Blackland Army Air Field.
LD: Out of curiosity, what were the functions of a band during the war?
EM: Mostly the entertaining of troops and to play for formal ceremonies.
We played, as I remember, a retreat ceremony every day, lowering the
flag, and sometimes a morning ceremony. We had occasional formal
. . . what do they call, parades? Some visiting somebody or other
would show up and everybody would be out. We did a lot of just
incidental music for this, that, and the other thing. We'd load a jazz
band into the back of a truck and go up on the line where the aircraft
mechanics were slaving away, you know, and try to cheer them up.
Mostly morale boosting, that kind of thing. Played for some social
functions. It was not a difficult life, I'll tell you that, (laughter)
McCUNE 3
LD: Were you in for the duration of the war?
EM: I was in and I got out in 1946. I left Waco and went to Perrin Field,
which was up between Sherman and Dennison, Texas, for a period of
time in 1945, and then I went to work in an Army recruiting station in
Akron, Ohio, for six or eight months, I guess— well, I guess maybe a
little longer than that. I got there sometime in the fall of 1945 and was
there until May or June of 1946. I was discharged a t . . . what's the
old camp that was up near Marysville, Camp Beale in California, in
1946. I was sort of a first sergeant in the Army recruiting station.
That was an interesting set of experiences.
LD: It sounds like it.
EM: We were mostly trying to talk recent veterans into enlisting in the
reserves, which, in retrospect, was not a good thing to do because most
of the people who enlisted in the reserves wound up being called to
war in Korea. I imagine there were a few people who cursed us.
(laughter) I don't know what I left out along the way, but that will give
you sort of a thumbnail account.
LD: Well, that's very interesting, yes.
EM: And amongst other things, in high school I worked for my father in the
summertime when he had work and did everything from rough framing
to running cement mixers. I worked for a grocery company for a long
time. My father became very ill, and my sister was still in high school,
so I really supported my family for a couple of years working in the
grocery store. I remember my elation at being promoted to be first
checker and I made the astounding salary of 15 a month.
LD: Fifteen a month? (chuckling)
EM: And the reason I was able to go was that I was able to live in a
cooperative house at the college, where the room and board was
miraculously $15 a month, (chuckling) So, by doing some extra work,
working in the local theater and things like that to pick up change, I
managed to make enough money to stay in school. We lived pretty
simply in those days. Nobody had cars, of course. At any rate, that
was the first government program. The NYA job made it possible for
me to go to college to begin with— that and considerable sacrifice by
my mother and family. And then the GI Bill made it possible for me
to complete undergraduate and graduate degrees later. I'm a great
believer in government programs, (chuckling)
LD: Yes, I can see that. Now, at UCLA you went straight through a B.A.
and then right into a Ph.D.?
EM: That's right. I was going to get an M.A., but the department adopted
the policy that you didn't have to take an M.A., so I was well through
the M.A. process and decided that because I was getting older and
time was getting short, and by then I had a child, that I would skip the
M.A. and go directly on to the Ph.D.
LD: Any prominent scholars that you studied under at UCLA?
EM: Well, I don't know; UCLA did not have as distinguished a faculty then,
I think, as it probably had subsequent to that. The major influence on
me at UCLA was J. A. C. Grant, James Allen Clifford Grant, who was
McCUNE 7
a professor of public law, and it was through Grant that I took
constitutional law and legal history. He was an inspiring teacher and
a man of great vision. He was a pretty good scholar, too. He did a lot
of work, articles in legal journals and that kind of thing, on
constitutional issues. Tom Jenkins, the political theorist (now
deceased) who subsequently became an administrator, I think at Irvine,
UC Irvine, he was vice chancellor at Irvine, I believe, when Jack
Peltason was chancellor, the man who has gone on these days to be
President of UC. There were some new people who had come who
were pretty good, b u t . . . Oh, and Winston Crouch, the co-author of
the text on California government. Probably Grant, Crouch, and
Jenkins, and Russell Fitzgibbon, who was the Latin American person.
Politics was under the aegis of Charles Titus, who was an eccentric,
odd individual. I took a course in politics from him in which we read
Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses, and Gratian's Manual o f Worldly
Wisdom, and listened to a lot of opinions from Titus, but we didn't
learn much about politics, (chuckling) or at least not partisan politics
in the United States. There was another political theorist, Nixon,
Charles Nixon. I can't remember who else. Oh, Ivan Hinderaker
(later chancellor at UC Riverside) was there in those days. I was a
teaching assistant for Ivan, and also a teaching assistant for David
Farrelly. No, I was a reader for Farrelly. I was mostly a teaching
assistant for Hinderaker and for a strange fellow . . . Englebert? Yeah,
Ernest Englebert, who was in Public Administration. He wore a hat.
He was the only faculty member at UCLA with a hat. (chuckling)
That was a long time ago, Larry. I don't remember all those people
now, but the man who made the greatest impression on me— the
two— were Grant and Crouch. I think they most affected me.
LD: Did you have a particular field of specialty within poli sci?
EM: Yes, pub
Judson Grenier oral history interview, "Recollections of the Academic Senate: The Early Years", Origins of The California State University, 1986
No full textOral history interview with a primary focus on the origins of the California State University System and the 1960 master plan for California higher education.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History Project on the Origins of the CSU System, Phase II
Adjunct Interview
JUDSON GRENIER
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE:
THE EARLY YEARS
Interview Conducted by
Anne Frank
October 17, 1986
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1995
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright c 1996 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master's level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor's Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor’s Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor’s Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
into higher education in the 1950s and '60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System's historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier Acting CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
David E. Leveille
Gloria Lothrop
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stem
Helene Whitson
Samuel Wiley
Donald R. Gerth
Harold Goldwhite
Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier
IV
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This is an interview with Dr. Judson Grenier for the California State
University Chancellor's Archives Oral History Pilot Project, by Anne Frank,
at the California State University Archives, located at California State
University Dominguez Hills Library, on Friday, October 17,1986, at 1:15 p.m.
AF: Dr. Grenier, would you tell us your impressions of the effectiveness of
the statewide California State College Academic Senate when you first
came to California State Dominguez Hills in 1966?
JG: Well, we were so busy in getting the college off the ground, finding
proper facilities, and getting to know our students that most of us
didn't pay any attention to the Academic Senate when I first got here.
As a matter of fact, I think the first academic senator that represented
our institution was Don MacPhee, who was already an administrator.
So, my first impressions, at least during the first year or so, are not
really very strong ones of the Academic Senate. Then, shortly
thereafter we began to get involved in the student problems— such as
the Free Speech Movement— that swept the university. I guess the
entire University system became politicized, and we all then became
very much aware of what was going on at the statewide level. So, at
any rate, the first year there was very little interest, but after that our
interest more or less took off. My impressions of the statewide
Academic Senate were that it was not very effective or influential.
AF: When do you think people began to notice it and take an interest in
the statewide Senate? Was it in the 1960s or in the 1970s?
JG: Well, again it may just have been my taking little interest in the first
year or so, but I generally feel it was true of the faculty as a whole.
When Ronald Reagan ran for governor and defeated Pat Brown and
assumed the governorship, he almost instantly began to take actions
which he had promised he would do during his campaign. That helped
politicize the institution. For example, he cut the expenses of all state
agencies 10 percent. He froze hiring of new faculty and all state
employees for that matter. Here we were, an institution just trying to
get off the ground with the core faculty, and it was quite a problem for
us to continue to function with a freeze on hiring. He proposed
charging students tuition, and we were fearful if that proposal was
GRENIER 2
enacted our student enrollment would be cut in the bud before we ever
got started. So, there were many issues that came up almost
simultaneously when Reagan assumed the governorship. I think that
is probably the moment when we all began to take a much greater
interest in politics, generally.
AF: In 1966, too, the statewide Academic Senate took a poll of the faculty
on collective bargaining. What were your perceptions of faculty
attitude towards collective bargaining at that time? Was there much
interest in it or an awareness of any need for it?
JG: Again, this was the year we were all getting started and most of our
focus was on local matters. I feel that there was a general sense
already in 1966 that the Academic Senate statewide and the faculties
locally were not being consulted to the degree that they should be. I
have forgotten the results of that first poll on collective bargaining, but
I think it was defeated.
AF: Yes, as I recall it was defeated, but there was a feeling that the trend
was towards more interest in collective bargaining.
JG: Right, there was more interest, but as I recall our faculty voted against
it on our first go-around. Later, after all the confrontations and the
student troubles and two years of salary freezes, collective bargaining
became much more popular. But this first time around it was
defeated.
AF: Whom do you remember as being the dominant members of the
statewide Academic Senate during the 1960s? You have answered this
to a certain extent, but what would you pinpoint as the major issues
that were discussed during the sixties?
JG: There are certain issues which have been with us since the very
beginning and probably still are to some extent: essentially, what the
role of the faculties are in the system and on the individual campuses,
to what extent authority should be formally delegated to faculty, and
the faculty be made solely responsible for those particular areas.
The Academic Senate, of course, felt that there should be particular
areas delegated to faculty, most particularly, responsibility for
developing the curriculum, the academic programs, for determining
standards for granting degrees, for determining admissions
requirements for entering students, things of that sort. We felt these
GRENIER 3
were traditional faculty roles and should be formally delegated, but
they never were. The Board of Trustees and the Chancellor refused
any kind of formal delegation of authority. I think this was in part
because our system was so new, and it was created by the Legislature
and the Legislature was looking at it very carefully. I don't think the
Board of Trustees wanted to do anything that might cause the
Legislature to say, "Hey, you sold out the store," or, "You aren't
performing your responsibilities the way we intended you to."
You see, the University of California, which has a history that goes all
the way back to the 1860s, is a mature institution. It is self-confident,
it knows where it is going. It doesn't have the Legislature looking over
its shoulder as we did. I feel that the Regents of the University of
California have had long experience in working with faculty, had trust
in them and were willing to make that kind of a formal delegation of
authority. But the University of California has constitutional status.
That is, it is an entity independent of the Legislature. Its whole reason
for being, its whole governance mechanisms are spelled out in the
constitution. So, it has that much of an independent authority that if
it wants to delegate authority to whomever it wants to, it can do so.
But this system being relatively new and coming out of the tradition of
teacher education just didn't have that kind of security and self-confidence.
So, throughout the sixties and into the seventies, and I
would suspect even to some extent today, that is the principal issue
that is at stake.
Now along with formal delegation of authority, such as being
responsible for the curriculum, the faculty also wanted to be consulted
on the things that it considered critical to the existence of itself and of
the state universities and colleges. Now, there is nothing more critical
than who will be a president of an institution and who will be the vice-president
of an institution, and who will be deans of an institution and
who will be department chairmen in the institutions. The faculty
wanted a consultative role in all those cases.
On the lowest level, on the departmental level, the faculty wanted the
right to select departmental chairmen. They wanted department
chairmen to be one of themselves, to come out of the ranks, to think
like themselves. They wanted it to be considered to be something like
a caretaker role, where the chairmanship would be rotated regularly,
every three years, say, so that no one member of the department would
become accustomed to governing, would become accustomed to being
the authoritarian figure in that department. They wanted it more of
GRENIER 4
a collegial system where everyone has a responsibility of serving for a
particular time and then that's it. Then you become a teacher again
because that is what you primarily are. They also wanted to be able to
select, or at least participate, in the selection of deans of schools and
ultimately all the way on up to the selection of the president itself.
Because the president is the principal faculty member of every
institution, they wanted someone who thought like themselves, with the
same standards and values, who was steeped in the academic traditions.
They didn't want some president imposed on them from outside, like
someone from a foundation or a government agency brought in from
Washington to head up the university who knew nothing about
traditional educational values. So, at any rate, that is still a continuing
struggle all the way from our own selection of presidents down to how
you choose a departmental chair. Those issues have been with us since
the very beginning.
AF: Any others?
JG: Other things that have been with us since the very beginning are
obviously what might be called the benefits or the fringe benefits of
being a faculty member. This can range from something as simple as
how much you earn, in other words, faculty salaries, or, how a person
is promoted into a given rank, what the standards and criteria for
promotion are, what the standards and criteria for gaining tenure at an
institution are, to what extent is it necessary to publish in order to be
promoted. These are supposed to be teaching institutions, that's what
the Legislature would have us believe, with promotion depending on
how well we teach. Yet as professionals, we have been taught that we
should practice what we preach; we should work in our fields. We feel
you can't teach well unless you're constantly doing that thing that you
are teaching. So as professionals we have been brought up and trained
to believe in research and publication. Now, these two things can
come in conflict. If these are primarily teaching institutions and we are
not given any money to do research, should we then be promoted
based upon the research we do? Or should it solely be on how well we
teach? That's been an ongoing issue.
It is more than just one issue, because according to the act creating the
California State University system, we are encouraged to do research
in areas related to teaching. Now that was written into the legislation
by the University of California lobbyists, essentially. They did not want
the California State Universities moving into high-level research. But
frankly, there isn't any research that I can think of that isn't related to
GRENIER 5
teaching if people are doing research in their own fields. And yet,
from the very beginning, the Legislature has refused to fund research
in the California State University system. So there we have it. We are
encouraged to do it. If it's related to teaching we should be doing it,
but we are not being funded for it. Every year the Academic Senate
would request funding for research-related teaching, and every year the
Board of Trustees would agree, and every year the Legislature would
turn us down. After a while we just stopped doing it. But the issue is
still a live one.
Another thing that has been with us probably almost since the
beginning is that faculties feel that there should be a distinction in the
staffing formulas, that is the relationship between students and
teachers, for teaching classes on the undergraduate level and on the
graduate level. We feel that classes on the graduate level should be
smaller, to begin with, and we feel that faculty should be given greater
unit load credit for teaching graduate classes because it involves much
more individual supervision than teaching a large lecture class of
undergraduates. Teaching on the graduate level demands supervising
internships, independent studies, and all sorts of kinds of things that
traditional staffing formulas do not provide. So that is another issue
that has been with us since the 1960s, and is still an issue today. Early
on in the system we were given greater recognition for teaching
graduate courses than we are now.
Another related topic is to what extent faculty should be given time
away from teaching to pursue their field, either to improve themselves
or to catch up with new developments in the field. Or to complete a
research project that has been underway for some time. Now, the
traditional way that this is done is through sabbatical leaves. On the
University of California level, as I recall, in the 1960s, faculty members
got a sabbatical about every four years. I mean they would get a term
off, at least every four years, some of them even more frequently than
that. Naturally, we wanted to have the state legislature provide funding
so that faculty in this system as well could have periodic sabbaticals.
Well, they adopted a procedure instead that we would be eligible for
sabbaticals every seven years. But the funding was not provided to
make that a very workable system, so that even today there are many
more faculty who are eligible to receive sabbaticals than are funded to
receive sabbaticals. So, this whole sabbatical question is another issue,
a 1960 issue that has been with us for more than twenty years. Those
are some of the things we talked about when I first joined Cal State
Dominguez Hills back in 1966.
GRENIER 6
Very shortly thereafter the student crisis seemed to overshadow
everything else. It took the spotlight. Not as much here at Dominguez
Hills although we did have student disturbances. But at places like
Berkeley and at San Francisco State and at other institutions within
our system there were crises of various kinds. The presentation of the
play, The Beard, at Cal State Fullerton, as I recall, was a lively topic,
and the student-faculty sculpture show down at Long Beach presenting
nude figures in various poses got everybody upset, and the trustees
upset and the governor upset.
But more important than anything else were pressures by students
around the state for more relevant curriculum, for nontraditional
grading methods, for ethnic studies programs, particularly Afro-
American or Black Studies. This, coupled with increasing pressures
against the Vietnam War which grew after Lyndon Johnson escalated
the bombing of North Vietnam, became the focus for politics in the
presidential election of 1968. You may remember Eugene McCarthy
ran against Lyndon Johnson in the primary in New Hampshire and
came very close to defeating him, after which Johnson withdrew from
the race and it became essentially a three-way race between Robert
Kennedy, McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey. That whole political
situation, with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, became an
extremely hot topic here at Dominguez Hills as it was everywhere else.
When in the spring of 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated, and
then shortly thereafter Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the eve of
winning the California primary, both of those disasters.brought things
to a halt here on campus. We held memorial services and canceled
student honors convocations and things of that sort. At any rate, what
I'm saying is all the traditional issues were overshadowed by the
confrontations that blossomed in the late 1960s.
AF: I see what you mean. You mentioned earlier about delegation of
authority being an important issue. It's probably a theme one can see
throughout the history of the California State University system. You
mentioned department chairmen. When you came to Dominguez Hills
how were department chairs chosen? Has this changed?
JG: There weren't any.
AF: There weren't any? Oh.
JG: As a matter of fact, as I recall, the first year there weren't any. There
were very few of us all told, and we were organized essentially by
GRENIER 7
schools and we met by schools. There were no department chairmen.
Then, slowly but surely the larger departments,
Kathleen Carlson oral history interview, "A Student Trustee View", Oral History Project on the Origins of The California State University System, Phase II 1994
No full textCarlson was the first student Board of Trustee member of The California State University.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History Project on the Origins o f the CSU System, Phase n
KATHLEEN CARLSON
A STUDENT TRUSTEE VIEWS CSU
Interview Conducted by
Judson Grenier
November 22, 1994
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1995
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright (e) 1995 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master's level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor's Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor's Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor's Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
in
into higher education in the 1950s and ’60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System's historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of her time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier Acting CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
David E. Leveille
Gloria Lothrop
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stern
Helene Whitson
Samuel Wiley
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
Donald R. Gerth
Harold Goldwhite
Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier
IV
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This interview of Kathleen Carlson, who served as the first student member
of the California State University Board of Trustees from 1976-78, and
currently is president of the Equitable Foundation of New York City, was
done at the Office of the Chancellor in Long Beach, on November 22, 1994,
as part of phase two of the ongoing CSU Oral History Project. The
interviewer is Judson Grenier, Professor of History Emeritus, at California
State University, Dominguez Hills.
JG: We usually begin with some biographical information. I think every
one of our thirty-four interviews thus far have about three or four
pages of "who are you?" kinds of things, and I have a little bit on your
background from Glenn Dumke's introduction of you to the board.
KC: Oh yes.
JG: I think I sent a copy of that to you.
KC: Yes, I have it here.
JG: You were born in Minnesota?
KC: I was, I was born in Minneapolis, lived there until I was ten, came to
Long Beach with my family in 1960, and then I was educated in the
Long Beach Unified School District from the age of ten through
graduation from Woodrow Wilson High School, just a few miles from
here.
JG: Oh, that's true.
KC: And then I went on to get my bachelor's degree from the University of
California, Irvine.
JG: Why did you choose Irvine?
KC: Proximity.
JG: It's not as close as Long Beach State, though.
CARLSON 2
KC: Oh, well, I had chosen the University of California as a system to
attend, and that was the one that was the closest to us.
JG: And what was your major at Irvine?
KC: History. I also did a one-year junior honor’s course in history at
Edinburgh University as part of the Junior Year Abroad Program.
JG: How was that?
KC: It was superb, absolutely superb. It was academically first-rate, and the
experience of living in Scotland was wonderful, just on an exciting,
international cultural-exchange level apart from the academics, and
then of course there was also the opportunity to travel on the
continent.
JG: Right. Did you study British history largely when you were in
Scotland?
KC: Actually, if you can believe it, I studied American history.
JG: There?
KC: Yes. (chuckling)
JG: Well, that's great. So you graduated from Wilson High School, you
graduated from Irvine. There was a note in the biography that while
you were at Irvine you worked for three years in the administration.
Is that right?
KC: Yes.
JG: What was that?
KC: I graduated from UC Irvine and I became the Assistant Dean of
Students for Student Affairs, and I worked in the areas of student
orientation, counseling. Those were the years when higher education
was just beginning to think in terms of recruitment. Before that, of
course, there were waiting lists and we didn't think of recruiting
anyone, so I got involved in some of the earlier efforts there.
JG: Weren't those years of turmoil? Not at Irvine? No, they were gone by
then, weren't they, the years of turmoil?
CARLSON 3
KC: Yes. Yes, that would have been . . . I graduated in 72, so that would
have been from 72 to 74. It was actually a period of incredible boom
in Orange County. It was the beginning of that time when there was
such tremendous construction of housing, and the whole development
of Irvine as a city, extension of the San Diego Freeway, which up until
then had stopped at MacArthur Boulevard.
JG: Right. And now they're putting a tollway through Orange County.
KC: Oh, I didn't know that.
JG: I think it will be our first here in California. At any rate, so you did
have a lot of experience in student affairs before you became a
graduate student.
KC: Yes, I did. And when I then went on to become a graduate student at
San Francisco State, it was natural for me to gravitate toward student
government and student affairs as both an extracurricular activity and
also an opportunity for some part-time work; because along the way I
earned some money through various student affairs, part-time jobs and
so on, before I got involved in student government.
JG: Let me ask you why you chose San Francisco State for your graduate
work.
KC: Well, at that time— let's see, that was 1974— I had wanted to get a
Ph.D. in American history and teach. That was my career goal at that
time. I had applied to and been accepted at UCLA. That was my
initial thought, but I was very eager to live in the Bay Area. I wanted
to experience that and move to another part of the state and so on,
and I decided that San Francisco State would be a good alternative,
although it meant going for a master's degree and then transferring
someplace else. I think I also at that time was still a little unformed,
and as it turned out, did in fact go in another direction in terms of
what I wanted to do for my career. So I was happy at the time to
decide to go for the terminal master's degree and then see what I
would do after that as the next step.
JG: Irvine does have a good graduate program in history, too. I know
many of the faculty there, but they do suggest that people take a
master's degree often first rather than going directly for the Ph.D. So
you moved to San Francisco. And did you know anybody at San
Francisco State before you went there?
CARLSON 4
KC: Not a soul, no. I had many friends in the area, especially because
when I had lived abroad at the University of California Junior Year
Abroad Program there were many students in that program from other
branches of the University of California, and among them Berkeley.
So I had friends from that time in my life, and I was not alone from
the point of view of the social end, but academically I started out from
scratch.
JG: Who was president of San Francisco State, do you recall, when you
went there?
KC: Yes, it was [Paul] Romberg.
JG: Romberg. So [S. I.] Hayakawa had become a senator and had gone on
to greater glory by that time.
KC: Yes, that's right, although it was quite extraordinary because San
Francisco State, even though this was by now six years after the 1968
riots, San Francisco State was still a real hotbed of revolutionary
activity.
JG: That late?
KC: Yes. Well, actually, it had evolved at that time much more toward a
black militant student body. The politics, by the time I got there, were
very much dominated by a militant Black Student Union. And just
prior to my coming there, there had been quite a few scandals around
student money being directed toward the purchase of guns, and several
of the students had been indicted. And I had no idea of this. I had
come from lily-white Orange County and just stumbled into this world
with my sort of idealistic, rather naive assumptions about how things
ran. (laughter)
JG: That's really funny. So that was as much of a cultural change for you
as going to Scotland, probably.
KC: (chuckling) Yes, I think it definitely was.
JG: So then you became involved in working for San Francisco State, as
well as going to school there.
KC: Well, what happened was, very soon after I arrived, there was
advertised a position for a corporate secretary. And weirdly
CARLSON 5
enough— I don't know if it's still this way or not— but weirdly enough,
the Corporate Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Student
[Association] Government was the one position that was not elected
but was appointed by the president. And I remember it paid 600,000, if I remember
correctly. That was the result of all the student fees that were
collected at San Francisco State, and they were used to pay the
manager of the student union and some of his staff.
JG: I'm surprised that they had that much autonomy, control of that much
money.
KC: Me, too, I was completely shocked. And it was a great conflict. Dr.
Norman Heap was President Romberg's Vice .President for
Administrative Affairs during those years.
JG: Is that H-E-E-P?
KC: No, I believe it's H-E-A-P. And he, I recall, participated in several
meetings, as did the Dean of Students, a woman whose name I have
forgotten, to try and see if there weren't better ways to organize the
student administrative functions rather than have the students keep all
of the autonomy. And, of course, the students were completely
opposed to this. The students were making really very extreme
decisions about what student organizations would get what funds, and
for what purpose, and it was really a totally politicized environment.
JG: How did you survive?
CARLSON 6
KC: In retrospect, I don’t know how I survived. I think I was just a fly on
the wall, to some degree. I was watching what was happening, I was
doing my job, I was collecting my $121 a month.
JG: What did a Corporate Secretary of the Board of Directors of the
Student [Association] do?
KC: Well, took minutes of the meetings, voted on things such as the
allocation of dollars to student groups. It seems I had some sort of
quasi-supervisory role of some of the student union people, but that's
a little vague in my mind. I don't remember what all my specific duties
were at the time, (chuckling)
JG: But you do remember your salary.
KC: Yes. (laughter)
JG: Well, now, when did you first get involved? Did you get involved in
the state student government while you were corporate secretary?
KC: No.
JG: You had no association with the student presidents?
KC: None whatsoever. And in fact, my student president, Lemond Goodloe
was his name—
JG: Could you spell that for me?
KC: L-E-M-O-N-D G-O-O-D-L-O-E. He was rather disaffected and really
did not play an active role. I was very surprised when I attended my
first meeting— well, really my only meeting— of the Statewide Student
Body Presidents, which was when they elected me— or rather, selected
me— to be one of five candidates [for student trustee]. I was very
surprised to see how earnest they were and how white they were and
how businesslike and corporate, because in our environment at San
Francisco State it was, except for myself, all black and very radicalized
and certainly disaffected from, shall we say, the expected corporate
procedural operational kind of way of doing things.
JG: So you knew really little about this organization before you went to the
meeting in which you were chosen as one of five?
CARLSON 7
KC: That’s correct, I knew nothing. I had responded to the notice, which
had come across my desk in my role as corporate secretary.
JG: What did the notice say?
KC: The notice announced that the state legislature had approved this
enabling legislation to allow a student to serve on the board of
trustees, and that one could now apply, and applications,
whatever— there was an essay or what have you, I don't recall
what— could be sent to such and such a place. I fired off my
application, and then a certain amount of time later was notified that
I was invited to come to Chico, which is where they [student
presidents] were meeting at that time for an interview. Then I went off
to Chico and had my interview.
JG: Well, what made you think you might enjoy serving on the board as the
first student trustee?
KC: Well, I'm not sure that I had a very clearly articulated idea in my mind
at the time. I think that I've always been a person who was fascinated
by organizational dynamics. My whole life, in my career patterns, I've
always ended up in the middle of large corporate bureaucratic-type
organizations. It's my nature, and it fascinates me. I think that
because perhaps I had worked as the Assistant Dean of Students at
UC Irvine I did have a fairly good idea of what the Board of Regents
of the University of California did, and what the Board of Trustees of
the California State University System did, and I think I was curious
and just saw it as a potentially wonderful experience.
JG: Great. So you went to Chico. Was your own president, Mr. Goodloe,
at that meeting, do you recall?
KC: I don't remember, but I think not.
JG: So what happened? Were you invited in for an interview, and all these
student presidents sat around and got to know you, or . . . ?
KC: Yes, exactly. It was one of their regular meetings, and I remember
being very shocked when I came into the room to see that I was
surrounded by eighteen white nineteen-year-old males, (laughter)
And I don't remember now the line of questioning.
JG: You don't?
CARLSON 8
KC: No. I'm sure that it centered around: "Why do you want to do this?
What do you feel you have to contribute? What do you know about
the California State University system? How do you feel about student
government? What do you do in your role in student government?"
I mean, I think it was those kinds of generic questions.
JG: Right. I don't think the term "political correctness" had come into
being at that time.
KC: (laughter) No.
JG: I notice that the president of the Student Presidents Association at the
time that you came in was a man named Thomas D'Agostino. Anyway,
you don't recall him?
KC: No, I don't. However, there was working in Sacramento at that time
a paid lobbyist for the Student Association, who I believe was himself
a student, a young man by the name of Scott Plotkin.
JG: Who became our legislative liaison.
KC: You're kidding.
JG: He went on to take over Jim Jensen's post.
KC: You're kidding!
JG: No, that's so.
KC: Well, that's wonderful.
JG: Yes, it's nice.
KC: That is really wonderful, because he does stand out in my mind, and
the only one really who stands out in my mind. I think it often
happens with student government organizations that the person who is
paid to be there, who isn't worried about his .. . I don't remember if
Scott was a full-time student or not at the time, but the sense was that
he was not under so much academic pressure. He had a job and
therefore he could devote more time to the effort, and he was very
articulate and he made an impression on me at the time.
CARLSON 9
JG: At the time that you went for this interview, Governor [Jerry] Brown
had already signed the legislation appointing a student to the Board of
Trustees.
KC: That's correct.
JG: Were you aware of the fact that the Board of Trustees didn't want a
student?
KC: I don't know if I was aware of it at that time. I certainly quickly
became aware of it after I was appointed. I don't think I really had
thought about it up until then. Or maybe they told me and maybe—
I guess it would have been very soon after I started to meet and talk
with the [student] presidents, because I would have read the legislation
and seen that it was opposed by the board.
JG: How do you suppose they successfully convinced the legislature to take
this fairly radical step for those days?
KC: I think that it was a part of the mood of the times. After I joined the
board, I had occasion to participate in quite a few meetings of the
Association of Governing Boards— I'm sure you're familiar wit
Louis V. Messner oral history interview: The Office of Budget and Fiscal Affairs, Oral History Project on the Origins of The California State System, Phase II, 1995
No full textOral history interview with a primary focus on the origins of the California State University System and the 1960 master plan for California higher education.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History Project on the Origins of the CSU System, Phase II
LOUIS V. MESSNER
THE OFFICE OF BUDGET AND FISCAL AFFAIRS, 1967-1990
Interview Conducted by
Lawrence B. de Graaf
February 8,1995
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1995
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright c 1996 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master's level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor's Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor's Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor's Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
into higher education in the 1950s and ’60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System's historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier Acting CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
David E. Leveille
Gloria Lothrop
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stem
Helene Whitson
Samuel Wiley
Donald R. Gerth
Harold Goldwhite
Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier
IV
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This interview of Louis V. Messner, was done at his home in San Pedro,
California, on Tuesday, February 8,1995, as part of phase two of the ongoing
CSU Oral History Project. The interviewer is Lawrence B. de Graaf,
Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton.
LM: I came to the California State Colleges in 1967. Vice Chancellor
[Harry] Brakebill actually interviewed me, and Glenn Dumke was the
chancellor at the time. Mr. Brakebill had me fly down to L.A. to
interview with Dumke. Actually I spent about three minutes with
Dumke. He basically said whatever Brakebill wanted he would
support, and it was a very simple hiring. Actually, at that time in the
system there was no searching or competition or tests or structure, in
terms of the recruiting process. I know with the State it was very rigid.
You had to take tests and get on lists and compete both orally and on
written tests. I’d been accustomed to that, but this was sort of like I
was handpicked, and it worked out in terms of my career. I think I
was fortunate at the time, being picked.
LD: Excuse me, let me just make sure everything is coming across. Now let
me introduce this thing. This is an interview with Louis V. Messner for
the CSU Archives Project. It's being done on Tuesday, February 8,
1995, in Mr. Messner's home in San Pedro.
All right, Mr. Messner, sorry to interrupt you, but let's go back to your
pre-Department of Finance days. Where were you born?
LM: Actually, I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was a Canadian citizen;
my family came down during World War II years. My father came to
work in the shipyards in Richmond, California, and so we all came
down, a rather big family, eight children, and my parents.
LD: You were just a child then?
LM: I was about thirteen. The whole family just picked up and moved.
Father worked in the shipyards; ultimately, my father and mother
became naturalized, and I became naturalized under them while
growing up. I went to a minor seminary for five years with my older
brother to become a priest. Both of us dropped out. One of my
MESSNER 2
younger brothers also went to the seminary and is a priest today, so I
had sort of a religious seminarian training, which I thought was pretty
good in terms of educational background that has served me well.
After the seminary I went to the University of California and majored
in accounting. But that was during the Korean War and they were
drafting people, and I was going to be drafted, so I went into the Air
Force and became an Air Force cadet in navigator training and served
my time as a navigation instructor during the Korean War. And then
I got out. I still hadn't completed my college, so I debated going to
UC Berkeley or San Jose State. Because I could get into married
student housing easier, I went to San Jose State and obtained my
degree.
LD: What year was that?
LM: Oh, that was 1957-58. I interviewed with a number of companies. I
had excellent grades at that point. I was more mature, you know,
going back after your service. I had accepted a job with Del Monte
Packing Company. But I had also taken an interview with Sacramento,
the State Department of Finance, for less money. I wanted the job in
Sacramento, I wanted to work for the Department of Finance. So I
called them and I said, "I've got to know within twenty-four hours.”
They sent me a telegram two hours later offering me the job. So then
I had to call back and tell Del Monte that I didn't want to take their
job. They couldn't believe it. But I saw the possibility for
advancement with the Department of Finance much better than with
Del Monte. So I went with the Department of Finance, and I've never
regretted it. It's been very good.
At the time when I was working on the colleges, and the California
State Colleges were going through a tremendous transformation, the
starting of a system not under the Department of Education. They
started off with [Buell] Gallagher as their chancellor. He just didn't
have rapport with the legislative and executive branches of government
on the campuses. I mean, he had done a lot of things, such as moving
the office out of Sacramento in the dead of night, that alienated him.
So then they brought in Dr. Dumke, who had been the president of
San Francisco State and one of the architects of the Master Plan for
Higher Education, and made him the chancellor. Of course, he was an
outstanding academician. And Dumke brought Brakebill from San
Francisco, where he was his vice president, and made him the Vice
Chancellor for Business Affairs. The other problem with the
MESSNER 3
Chancellor's Office is they had very little rapport with the campuses,
very bad alienation: central office versus decentralized institutions.
LD: You could see this from the Department of Finance?
LM: Oh yes, it was evident. In the Department of Finance I developed a
tremendous rapport with the campuses, as well as the Chancellor's
Office, and Brakebill saw that and thought that that would be good.
He also saw that I had some good background, in terms of institutional
budgeting, in terms of formulas and dealing with ten institutions in
Corrections, and eight institutions in Youth Authority, and trying to be
equitable with those institutions on the allocation of money and budget
for them. He liked that, so that's basically why he picked me. And so
I came down to Los Angeles. I was more of a technician to start with,
and I basically designed the system of budgeting. First of all it was a
manual system. Then I hired people that were computer-oriented, and
we computerized the formulas. We developed what is called the
Orange Book, and that became sort of the bible for budgeting for, I'd
say, twenty to twenty-five years in the California State University.
Initially I was not involved with the decision or policy hierarchy of the
Chancellor's Office. I was hired as the Chief of Budget Planning, and
then there was, you know, assistant vice chancellor, vice chancellors,
and then the chancellor. I didn't necessarily relate to the trustees
initially. Brakebill did that. I related to the colleges, and I developed,
I believe, an excellent rapport and credibility with the campuses.
Because of the dissatisfaction with Chancellor Gallagher, Dumke and
Brakebill came into the Chancellor's Office to change the attitude of
the central office towards the campuses. Brakebill had been on a
campus, and he brought several people in from the campuses. Of
course, I looked at Brakebill, you know, as an idol, really. He was a
gentleman all the way, and very, very intelligent and knowledgeable.
And so basically as I developed the budget the need for funds grew
over the years and the role of the budget became a central issue. After
a number of years, they made me an assistant vice chancellor.
LD: What year was that?
LM: It was in 1979 that I became Assistant Vice Chancellor, and then I
became Acting Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs in 1991. In 1992
they made me Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs, and then I retired
when I contracted lung cancer. I'll give you that as sort of a
background. The system that we developed in budgeting was
MESSNER 4
outstanding nationwide. Many other campuses requested it. Of
course, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, with
Dumke as one of the architects, theoretically became a master plan for
many other states, as you're well aware. They picked up what
California had done and implemented it in Michigan, Illinois, Florida
and, you know, just literally a number of states, and it became the
master plan for the country almost. Then towards the end of my
tenure, when we started getting into major funding problems, the
formulas didn't work. Because irrespective of the formula, they didn't
have the money, and so the formulas became meaningless.
Initially the formulas provided the funds necessary to do the job. But
then when they didn't have the money, then they started moving things
all around, and eventually the formulas became meaningless. So
actually the Orange Book went out of existence and was replaced with
a straight allocation accompanied by greater flexibility. The California
State Colleges, when they started off, had always been treated or
considered as another state agency— you know, a controller's office or
the state libraries or whatnot— and so the legislature always treated the
system as if we were another state agency, and they refused to give us
the flexibility to manage our own funds and control expenditures as
they did with the University of California. Of course, the University
of California had a constitutional exemption, and so they had a rather
broad authority and flexibility and we always had to go back to the
legislature to get little tiny pieces of authority to bring to our board of
trustees. And so, during my career, and Brakebill's too, we were
constantly trying to get our independent authority over not only
academic issues but also for the budget itself. We were successful, but
really complete flexibility came at the end of my career, but at that
point they didn't have the money. Present Chancellor [Barry] Munitz
says, "Well, we know you don't have the money, just give us what you
can. Let us spend it the way we want." And with that a number of
significant changes occurred.
So right now there's a tremendous evolution that's going on in terms
of basics and basis of budgeting. It's essentially taking last year's
appropriation and adding 1 percent or 2 percent or minus 3. But
they've lost any semblance on the basis of all detail, and they're
struggling to find an equitable rationale for future projections and
needs. Because they threw out the Orange Book completely, they had
nothing. They had to go through a change. I don't fault that at all.
But the Orange Book was based on enrollment drives and workload
MESSNER 5
drives,1 and it was developed to be equitable to all the campuses.
Through regression analysis, we set up the formulas and standards, and
we thought it treated everybody the same. Of course, the smaller
campuses thought the larger campuses fared the best; the larger
campuses thought vice versa. I think overall it was equitable, but to
show how equitable it was, even people in my own budgeting office
were unconvinced who fared the best, large campuses or small
campuses. So the Orange Book formulas had always been a bone of
contention over its bias, even though no one could prove it to be
unfair. It served the system well through a period of growing
enrollment. Of course, the enrollment topped off and then literally
dropped with the cutbacks and lower fee revenue. So now they're
struggling to find a way to budget. They haven't come up with a
solution yet. And they'll probably come up with some modification or
alternative to the Orange Book. They won't come up with another
Orange Book because it developed such an animosity between staff and
administration due to the way people used it. For instance, a dean of
students saw that he was entitled to get one administrative assistant
and one clerical position, and for every 200 FTE students he would get
one counselor, etcetera. So he could read the Orange Book and he'd
go to the president and say, "This is what I'm entitled to," and the
president would say, "Well, we don't have enough money," and neither
would end up satisfied. So it started setting up internal problems on
the campuses. A major executive decision was made to just get rid of
it completely. But to this date they haven't been able to find an
acceptable substitute.
LD: This is a very good introductory overview. Now I'd like to now pull out
some specifics and have you elaborate on them. First let's go back
briefly to your work in the Department of Finance. You said earlier
before we had the tape recorder on that you came there about 1958,
and at first you worked on various institutional projects?
LM: Initially they assign analysts to a number of agencies, and I was first
assigned to the Departments of Agriculture, Highway Patrol, Motor
Vehicles, Justice, and you handle their budgets. You worked with
those departments, assist them in developing their budget, presentation
to the legislature, etcetera. And then they'd move you around every
couple of years so that you didn't become too friendly and become an
lAny three or four pages from the Orange Book would illustrate the staffing of a given
office.
MESSNER 6
advocate for those agencies. So I moved around. My first move was
actually to a Methods and Procedures unit for the whole Budget
Division developing methods and procedures for the state budget. I
worked under an individual named Dale Hanner there. That was my
second assignment, and he was, in my mind, an outstanding individual,
in terms of his knowledge and ability, and he taught me quite a bit.
Subsequently, in 1970, when Brakebill was promoted to Executive Vice
Chancellor, he started searching for a vice chancellor. I recommended
Hanner, and he got it. Of course he had moved around. He had been
the Chief of Audits and had held other positions. So Hanner became
the Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs, to the discernment of a
number of people internally, because they thought that they were
entitled to move up to it, and he was an outsider. I think he was an
outstanding vice chancellor. He stayed there for twenty-five years, and
then he retired, and I sort of followed in his footsteps. So, in a way,
I had a link with him that went back over my entire career.
LD: That's interesting.
LM: After my stint with him, I went on to Corrections and Youth
Authority. I spent eight years in the Department of Finance, and I
probably spent five of those eight years with Corrections and Youth
Authority. That was a time when they were building a number of new
institutions and staffing these new prisons— of course, they still are
today. It was similar to the California State University because we
were building and staffing new institutions, so there was a correlation
there and I just happened to fit in. I always maintain that your career
sometimes was based upon a lot of luck, being at the right place at the
right time. I happened to be there, I thought, with Mr. Brakebill, and
it just worked like magic.
LD: Now, when you did these stints at the Department of Finance, were
you essentially helping agencies develop what would become the
Governor's Budget?
LM: Yes. Basically agencies would submit their budget, and we would
analyze their budget, make recommendations to the Department of
Finance, meet with the director of the department and iron out all the
differences, and then come to some conclusion on their budget. Then
that would become a component of the Governor's Budget. The
Governor's Budget would then be introduced to the legislature.
Legislative analysts would attack it, we'd go to budget hearings and
resolve differences. Ultimately the legislature would pass the budget
MESSNER 7
and it came back to the governor for approval. It always happens that
you're working on three different budgets all the time: the current,
past, and future budget. And you also worked with the agency
administration on the day-to-day needs, transfers, etcetera. At one
time, the Department of Finance used to approve all the documents,
all the personnel transactions, equipment purchases, and a numb
Clark Kerr oral history interview, California State Unversity Archives Oral History Project on the Origins of the California State University System, Phase II, 1995
No full textOral history interview with a primary focus on the origins of the California State University System and the 1960 master plan for California higher education.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History Project on the Origins of the CSU System, Phase II
CLARK KERR
GROWTH OF THE CSU SYSTEM
Interview Conducted by
Judson Grenier
February 22, 1995
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1995
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright © 1995 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master's level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor's Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor's Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor's Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
in
into higher education in the 1950s and '60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System’s historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier Acting CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Judson A. Grenier
Donald R. Gerth
Harold Goldwhite
Tim Gregory
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
David E. Leveille
Gloria Lothrop
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stern
Helene Whitson
Samuel Wiley
IV
Dr. Clark Kerr, at the time he became President of the Umversi
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This interview of Dr. Clark Kerr, President Emeritus of the University of
California, took place at the University's Institute of Industrial Relations in
Berkeley on the afternoon of February 22, 1995. The interviewer is Judson
Grenier. Although part of Phase II of the CSU Oral History Project, its
principal focus is the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education.
JG: Let us start out with some biographical information. You were born
in a small town west of Philadelphia?
CK: Actually, I was born in a hospital in the county seat of Berks County,
Pennsylvania, which is about fifty miles west of Philadelphia, a little
north. We lived in a little village called Stony Creek— "crick," we
called it— we had a hillside farm. My father was a combination
teacher and farmer. On the hillside farm we raised chickens, fruit,
vegetables, and things like that. He'd take them into town when he
went in to school to teach, with a black bag over his shoulder, and sell
them in one of those old-fashioned stores. He'd get credit, and on the
way home he'd buy salt and sugar and things we needed. When I was
about ten we moved to a regular farm, a 140-acre farm, in what was
called the Oley Valley, which was east of Reading. That's where I
really consider my boyhood home to be. I was raised as a farm boy,
really, in both situations, but particularly there. I had my own team of
horses when I was fourteen years old.
JG: That's a responsibility.
CK: We still worked with horses. A neighbor had a tractor, but the farming
in that valley was done by horses.
JG: You had three sisters . . .
CK: I had three sisters, yes. They all went to Oberlin, and I went to
Swarthmore, the reason being this: My mother had very little
education— I think only to the sixth grade. But she became a rather
well-known milliner, making the old-fashioned hats— with broad brims
and flowers on them— to order. She was in the business of going from
store to store, and they'd put her in the front window, and some lady
would say, I want this or that, and she'd sit there making these things
KERR 2
while a small crowd gathered outside. So she made a fair amount of
money. Somehow— I never knew how, I wished I'd asked her— she
got the idea that all her children should get an education. So she
refused to marry my father— she put him off for five years— until she
saved enough money for schooling, which then resulted in my going to
Swarthmore and my three sisters to Oberlin.
JG: That's really something. Were you older than your sisters?
CK: Two were older and one was younger.
JG: And you were a Quaker family?
CK: No, we were not. We were in an area of eastern Pennsylvania where
there were lots of religions. About a mile from our farm there was a
Quaker meeting, so I knew Quakers from the very beginning. But on
the corner of our farm, which had once been part of the farm, there
was a combination church— one Sunday Lutheran, one Sunday
Reformed. My father was Reformed— we called it Dutch Reformed,
actually it was "Deutsch" Reformed, for German Reformed— and then
the church was Lutheran the other week. I went both weeks. My
mother was agnostic. But then I went to Swarthmore, which was a
Quaker school. By that time I was kind of fed up. The Reform
minister one week would talk about how the only way to get tp heaven
was through the Reformed church, and the Lutheran minister would
say the only way to heaven was the Lutheran church. And the
language was different— do you "trespass" or, what was the other
word?
JG: Be a "debtor"?
CK: It seemed to me there was a lot of quibbling going on. So when I got
to Swarthmore, after a couple of years I became a member of the
Swarthmore Friends Meeting. Incidentally, I spent three summers as
a "peace caravaner" for the American Friends Service Committee. We
were talking about joining the League of Nations and the World Court,
we were talking against the Smoot-Hawley isolationist tariff and against
rearmament at that time. So anyway, I became a member of the
Society of Friends at Swarthmore. Also, as a participant of the
American Friends Service committee I went once a week into north
Philadelphia to a black school and prepared breakfast for starving kids,
and I really mean starving. In those days there was a lot of extra food
around in somewhat damaged shape, and the Quakers would collect it.
KERR 3
They would collect apple butter— the top of the apple butter crock
tends to get dry after awhile and unsalable— we would use apple butter
and bread and week-old milk and things like that.
JG: That was in the depths of the Depression, too, wasn’t it?
CK: Yes, I was in the class of '32. Then a man by the name of Ruff, who
was a trainer for the teams at Swarthmore— I was involved in three
sports— was a lay preacher, and he took me around from one black
church to another on Sundays talking about the same things I did with
the Friends Service Committee, about peace and international goodwill.
JG: Now, after you got your degree from Swarthmore, you came out west
to go to Stanford?
CK: Well, I didn't come out to go to Stanford. I came out to be a peace
caravaner in California. I think that I was in the first activity of the
American Friends Service Committee on the West Coast. I was going
to go to Columbia for law school, where I’d been admitted, but I rather
liked California. I hadn’t seen San Francisco— I'd been in southern
California— so I came up, I wanted to see Stanford. I happened to get
there on registration day. So I thought, gee, maybe I’ll go to Stanford
for a year and then I'll go to Columbia. I had no application, nothing.
I had my Swarthmore transcripts which had been sent to me during the
summer. I got in the registration line, and I got to the head of it, and
I said I'd like to register. "Well, where are your papers?" "I don't have
any, but I have my Swarthmore transcript." The lady at the head of
the line said, "Over under that oak tree, sitting, is the registrar, whose
name is Mitchell— you go over and talk to him." So I went over and
said I'd like to register at Stanford and gave him my Swarthmore
transcript. He looked at it and said, "You're admitted." (laughter) So
much for bureaucracy.
JG: What field did you study at Stanford?
CK: Economics.
JG: And then you went on and spent two sessions over at the London
School of Economics?
CK: Well, I first went to Berkeley, briefly, because there was a professor at
Berkeley by the name of Paul Taylor, who married Dorothea Lange,
a photographer.
KERR 4
JG: I remember they collaborated.
CK: Taylor was interested in the Self-Help Cooperatives of the
Unemployed, groups of the unemployed— some were tailors, some
were barbers, some collected vegetables in the field and they'd trade
around. He was interested in that, and nobody was at Stanford, so I
went over there. But I barely got there when the cotton pickers strike
of 1933— the biggest agricultural strike in American history— broke
out. He was interested in that, and we later wrote a history of it.
President Roosevelt and Governor Jimmy Rolph appointed a
Commission to try to settle the strike, and Ira B. Cross, who was also
in economics at Berkeley, asked me to go along as their field agent.
So while they were holding their hearings in Visalia, I was out in the
field talking to people. The growers were offering 50 cents a pound
for picking cotton, and the strikers were asking 100, and I told the
commission privately that if they came up with 75 cents it would be
acceptable. Which it was, incidentally, to the Okies and Arkies, who
were there under the leadership of their lay preachers who came out
with them various Pentecostal sects. The Communists, who were
leading the Mexicans, turned it down, but they were in the minority at
that time it was mostly Okies and Arkies. So the strike was over.
There was a document, which I don't think Paul and I ever used
because we couldn't authenticate it, purportedly a directive from the
Communist Party saying: "Don't settle this strike. The workers in
America have to learn that you can't get anything from capitalism.
Prolong this strike as long as you can." But it died out once the Okies
and Arkies went to work.
JG: That's how you got involved with the University of California at
Berkeley program.
CK: Actually, I did register for some classes, but I was gone all the time in
the San Joaquin Valley. So then I worked for the state Relief
Administration for a little while. Then I went to Europe on an
American Friends Service Committee fellowship, and my wife and I
studied in Geneva and London at the London School of Economics.
Then I taught for a year at Antioch. I really only was a graduate
student here for two years, 1937-38 and 1938-39, and during those two
years I took all my examinations.
JG: So you got your Ph.D. in economics in 1939. And then, after teaching
at Stanford for a year, you went up to the University of Washington
and were there for five years?
KERR 5
CK: That's right, but mostly on a part-time basis because I was working for
the Office of Price Administration and the War Labor Board.
JG: I was intending to ask you how you could teach at the University of
Washington and be down here in San Francisco working for the War
Labor Board.
CK: Well, I was on leave most of the time. With the War Labor Board, at
a very early age, I was in charge of Wage Stabilization originally for
the eleven western states and Hawaii. Then I became vice chairman
when they started a War Labor Board in the Northwest— for Oregon,
Washington, and Alaska. That's how I got really very deeply into labor
relations, because we were settling all the strikes and keeping the labor
peace.
JG: You have an amazing career in arbitration, truly amazing.
CK: I've done a lot, yes.
JG: What brought you back to Berkeley after the war?
CK: Well, when the war was over, they were starting an Institute of
Industrial Relations here at Berkeley which was under the auspices of
Governor [Earl] Warren. I think he got the idea from Governor
[Thomas E.] Dewey in New York, who had started such an institute.
Before that time, in the late thirties, there had been lots and lots of
strikes and bitter battles, and they anticipated many industrial relations
problems and thought there had ought to be some unit in the
University looking at it. I think Warren also realized that the
University dealt with everybody in California except the trade unions.
And he advanced politically with trade union support. So anyway, this
Institute of Industrial Relations was being set up, and after canvassing
a lot of people, I got invited back to be the first director.
JG: You were the first director. So you helped build it from the ground
up?
CK: Right. I was the first employee.
JG: You must have a great paternal feeling about the Institute and its
success.
CK: Well, it's been fifty years.
KERR 6
JG: Then you became Chancellor of the University so early on— 1952.
CK: Yes, it was early, and it was all by accident. There was the oath
controversy— the major conflict between a faculty and its board during
the Joe McCarthy period, anywhere in the United States. There was
nothing equivalent to it. I got involved as a young faculty member.
Along the way there was an alumni committee under Steve Bechtel of
the Bechtel Corporation which came up with an alternative: if you
didn't want to sign the oath, you could go before the Committee on
Privilege and Tenure and state your reasons for not signing and satisfy
the committee that it was a matter of conscience and not a matter of
membership in the Communist Party. Actually, a Communist would
have signed immediately; they weren't about to catch a Communist that
way. Then I was on the Committee on Privilege and Tenure as its
junior member. So at a very early age, I got involved. And, it's a long
story, but the next year around, there was some faculty disenchantment
with the Committee on Privilege and Tenure, and they appointed a
new committee, of which they made me chairman and the only
continuing member.
Anyway, in the course of being on the Committee on Privilege and
Tenure, and then being made chairman at a very early age of their
reconstituted committee, I came to the attention of the faculty. I had
never been a dean, I had never been a department chairman, I had
never been head of an important Senate committee, except Privilege
and Tenure. Yet the faculty was asked for nominations, and I was
nominated to be the first Chancellor at Berkeley. And President
Sproul passed the nomination on to the Regents, and for some reason
I never understood, they accepted it. I think the reason they accepted
it was that they kind of wanted to make up with the faculty and accept
the faculty recommendation. Also they knew that Sproul was going to
run the Berkeley campus; it didn't make any difference whom they put
in. [Provost] Monroe Deutsch, you may remember, had been
seventeen years without any responsibilities, and they may have thought
I'd be another Monroe Deutsch. As it happened, fortunately or
unfortunately, I was not another Monroe Deutsch.
JG: I read somewhere that Mr. Sproul was asked why he didn't take the
title "Chancellor" and let the local campus executive be "President," and
he said something like, "I'll never give up the title of President of the
University of California."
CK: He was very strong on that.
KERR 7
JG: So you became Chancellor, and this was a very heady time in American
education, the mid-1950s. There were still some World War II
veterans on campus.
CK: There were some. We were getting ready for the population tidal
wave.
JG: The tidal wave was being anticipated. The McCarthyist thing was
coming to an end.
CK: Yes, but it came to an end slowly in California.
JG: Because of Senator Hugh Burns’s committee?
CK: Because we had to deal with Burns’s Un-American Activities
Committee.
JG: He kept hounding the University, didn't he?
CK: Right. Berkeley was expected to go down after the oath controversy.
We were blacklisted by the AAUP and the American Psychological
Association and others. But we made up our minds to go up. So
there was heavy recruiting in those days, particularly because right at
the end of World War II a lot of people were hired not very
carefully— they were called "warm bodies"— to teach the GIs. We
eliminated a lot of them. But we also were getting ready for the tidal
wave. I got involved as Chancellor in helping to recruit this faculty,
and during the time I was Chancellor about half the Berkeley faculty
got recruited to fill the new positions and those of the people who had
been dropped after the GI rush. Then we set our sights higher.
Berkeley and Michigan were the two best public institutions. We
began setting our sights on being compared to Harvard and Yale. And
when the 1964 ratings were announced, we got rated ahead of Harvard.
JG: So there was a lot going on.
CK: There was a lot going on. California was expanding rapidly. There
was a lot of money available. And I got involved in all of that.
JG: What kind of relations did you have with the state colleges when you
were Chancellor, before you became President?
KERR 8
CK: I had very little relations with them, although Sproul did ask me to
attend some sessions of the Liaison Committee so I knew what was
going on. There was one session where I
Tamba-Kuii Bailey in spotlight with activist icon Angela Davis for \u27Great Conversation\u27 Feb. 6
No full textTamba-Kuii Bailey in spotlight with activist icon Angela Davis for \u27Great Conversation\u27 Feb. 6
University of North Dakota Assistant Professor Tamba-Kuii Bailey will share the Chester Fritz Auditorium stage with an icon of civil rights activism at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 6, when Angela Davis comes to campus for the latest installment of the University\u27s Great Conversations series.
Bailey has been chosen to be the facilitator for the upcoming conversation, which is sponsored by the University Program Council (UPC). He\u27s been working this week to compile a list of questions for Davis, a leading voice of opposition, since the 1960s, on issues such as war, racism, sexism, the prison industrial complex, the death penalty, and a champion for gay rights.
I am thrilled and honored to serve as the facilitator of the \u27Great Conversation\u27 with Angela Davis, Bailey said. It is a rare opportunity to interview one of the great intellectual minds and human rights activist of 20th and 21st centuries. Angela Davis has influenced a generation of activists and continues to stand on the front lines fighting against oppression and disenfranchisement of marginalized people.
Bailey has served four years as a faculty member in the UND Department of Counseling Psychology and Community Services. His background and research interests make him uniquely qualified and the perfect designee to interview Davis. His studies broadly defined, are in the areas of Black Psychology and Multicultural Psychology. More specifically, his research interests focus on racial oppression, internalized racial oppression, liberation psychology, and multicultural competencies development. He also studies racial identity development and the impact of racism.
As a child, I grew up with parents who were actively involved in the civil and human rights movements, Bailey said. While attending planning meetings, painting picket signs, and marching in demonstrations, I was exposed to the works of Angela Davis and many other activists and freedom fighters.
Those early life events fueled Bailey\u27s desire to explore and understand the impact of racism on African Americans and other people of Color. His graduate training in African American Studies and Counseling Psychology afforded also him the opportunity to examine the psychological impact of racial oppression and internalization of racial oppression within the African American community and develop ways of addressing these phenomena.
I view these life-shaping experiences as instrumental in my preparation to take on this role as the facilitator of the Great Conversation with Angela Davis, he said.
Bailey also teaches courses in multicultural counseling, counseling methods, ethics and Black psychology, as well as co-advisor for the UND Black Student Association.
The Great Conversation with Angela Davis is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception and book signing with Davis at UND\u27s new Gorecki Alumni Center, next door to the auditorium.
UND Great Conversations traditionally have been done with a fairly intimate flair in which the facilitator and the interviewee sit closely, across from one another, on stage before an audience. The facilitator sets the tone for the conversation with a series of questions before opening it up to the public.
The conversations, which have featured well-known people such as UND alumnus and legendary NBA basketball coach Phil Jackson, UND alumnus and Hollywood character actor Sam Anderson, and JFK speechwriter and historian Ted Sorensen, have provided UND students, faculty, staff and the Greater Grand Forks community the opportunity to see, hear and interact with live history. The next conversation, with Davis, will be a rare chance for the public to interact with someone who was involved in areas of social activism including the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, Communist Party and was the third woman to appear on the FBI\u27s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List.
More about Angela Davis
Born on Jan. 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis is best known as a radical African American educator and activist for civil rights and other social issues. As early as 1969, Davis began publicly speaking, voicing her opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, the prison industrial complex, the death penalty and her support of gay rights.
As a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, she joined the Black Panthers, but spent most of her time working with the Che-Lumumba Club, which was an all-black branch of the Communist Party.
In 1970, Davis purchased the firearms used in an attack that killed a judge, juror, prosecutor and three prison inmates that attempted to escape after holding a courtroom hostage. Because of California State Law, Davis was charged with aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley and a warrant for her arrest was issued. Four days after the initial warrant was issued, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made Angela Davis the third woman to appear on the FBI\u27s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List.
Soon after, Davis became a fugitive and fled California. Upon catching her, President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its capture of the dangerous terrorist, Angela Davis . After spending 18 months behind bars, Davis was acquitted of all charges.
Angela Davis also ran for Vice-President along with the veteran party leader of the Communist Party, Gus Hall. However, several years later she separated from the Communist Party, leaving it to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Davis has continued a career of activism, and a principal focus of her current activism is the state of prisons within the United States. Considering herself an abolitionist, not a prison reformer, Davis was one of the primary founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison system.
In 1997, she declared herself to be a lesbian in Out magazine and is now an activist for GLBTQ rights.
Today she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on the history of consciousness. Dr. Davis is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class (1980) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).
About UPC
The University Program Council (UPC) is a division of Student Government whose objective is to educate, entertain and challenge UND students through entertainments as well as cultural and educational programming. In an effort to achieve this goal, the UPC presents to the campus community a variety of events including, but not limited to: music events, performing arts, speakers, Union and special events, cinema events, and diversity events. All funds received and used by the UPC are from student fees.
Kate Menzies
University Relations student write
Norman Epstein oral history interview: The Development of the Office of General Counsel, California State University Archives: Oral History Project on the Origins of the California State University System, Phase II, 1995
No full textOral history interview with a primary focus on the development of the General Counsel.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History Project on the Origins o f the CSU System, Phase II
JUDGE NORMAN EPSTEIN
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE OFFICE OF GENERAL COUNSEL
1962-1975
Interview Conducted by
Judson Grenier
June 1,1995
Processed in cooperation with CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
1995
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the California State
University Archives under a grant from the Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of the transcriptions
without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the
interviewee, interviewer, and the institution sponsoring the project. All uses
of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain permission
from California State University Archives before making more extensive use
of the transcription and related materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by any party except
the California State University Archives. However, because it is the goal of
this project to preserve and make accessible significant documentation relevant
to the history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted transcriptions
may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU Systemwide Archivist at
California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California 90747.
Copyright c 1996 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of Phase II of the California State University Oral History
Project is to record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who participated in
development of the CSU system.
Creation of the California State Colleges in 1961 united fifteen formerly
independent colleges into a single identifiable system, with its own Board of
Trustees and a Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a formula
that stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of resources and programs,
the California State Colleges sought to offer Californians quality higher
education at reasonable cost. Key to the success of the State Colleges was the
decision to implement a Master Plan adopted in 1960 that divided higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. The State Colleges were
mandated to emphasize undergraduate and master's level programs, while the
University of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education, and
the Community Colleges vocational training and college preparation.
The present California State University, starting from a base of fifteen
campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to where it provides a wide
variety of innovative programs to more than 320,000 students on 22 campuses.
It is the largest system of higher education in the United States and is known
as one of the strongest institutions of higher education in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the California State
University Historical Archives, to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus.
Since its establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
supported by the Chancellor's Office through the funding of a professional
archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials from a variety of
sources. These include the Chancellor's Office, the CSU Academic Senate,
and private individuals such as former Chancellor Glenn Dumke and former
Trustee Paul Spencer. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal
papers as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its collection
policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to gather individual recollections
and oral histories of the system.
Phase I of the CSU Oral History Project, conducted from 1986 to 1989, and
funded by the Chancellor's Office, covered the formation and early years of
CSU through 32 interviews with participants within and without the system.
These interviews, housed at the CSU Archives, have proven useful to research
in
into higher education in the 1950s and '60s. A major quality is their
standardized format, developed at the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton.
Phase II is an ongoing oral history project that is decentralized but
administered by the CSU Archives. Its intent is to assure that the
reminiscences of retiring chancellors, principal staff members, Academic
Senate chairs, Student Association presidents, trustees, and local campus
presidents be recorded as closely as possible to their retirement date and that
this be done routinely as a regularized process. Phase II also seeks
information on the growth of the CSU during two mid-decades, 1964-85.
The project has three long-range purposes. First, it will help to increase
interest in the history and accomplishments of the California State University.
Next, it will be a tool in aiding the acquisition of additional materials
concerning the System now in private hands. Finally, it will create needed
documentation for understanding the System's historical role in state and
national education; many issues it has confronted have become matters of
national concern, such as meeting the needs of a multicultural student body
and finding adequate resources in a time of scarcity. Oral history can provide
background information on these developments that is not available in
bulletins, brochures, and minutes.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Barry
Munitz. We thank the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the pioneering work of the CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
in providing a model. Transcribing was performed by Garnette Long, who in
the process contributed many wise editorial suggestions.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier Acting CSU Archivist
Project Co-directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Betty J. Blackman
William D. Campbell
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Robert C. Detweiler
David E. Leveille
Gloria Lothrop
Barry Munitz
Lyn Olsson
John Pfau
Teena Stern
Helene Whitson
Samuel Wiley
Donald R. Gerth
Harold Goldwhite
Tim Gregory
Judson A. Grenier
IV
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This interview of Justice Norman Epstein was conducted in the judge's
chambers in the Ronald Reagan Building on Spring Street in Los Angeles, on
June 1, 1995. The interview is one of a series in Phase II of the California
State University Oral History Project. Principal topics were development of
the Office of General Counsel, a position held by Mr. Epstein, and
development of the system during the years he was there, 1962 to 1975,
including references to specific events and people. The interviewer is Judson
Grenier, Professor Emeritus of History.
JG: We like to start out with a little biographical material to provide some
consistency to our interviews. You're a native of Los Angeles?
NE: Yes.
JG: When and where were you born?
NE: Well, I was bom in Saint Vincent's Hospital on April 9, 1933.
JG: That's just at the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, isn't
it?
NE: Yes.
JG: Did you ever consider yourself a "New Deal baby”?
NE: Never thought of it in those terms.
JG: What did your parents do for a living?
NE: My father was a pharmacist and my mother helped him.
JG: What part of town did you grow up in?
NE: West Los Angeles. We lived near Third and La Cienega when I was
a little boy; there had been other places before that. Then we moved
to Westwood and we lived in Westwood until I married.
JG: Oh, and you went to what high school?
EPSTEIN 2
NE: Fairfax.
JG: Fairfax, and then to UCLA?
NE: UCLA.
JG: What made you choose political science as a field?
NE: Oh, it just seemed to be a logical field. I thought I might want to be
a lawyer and, in my thinking at the time, that discipline seemed to be
the most logical for law. As you know, there is no prelaw major as
such. Looking back on it, I think if confronted with the same situation,
I probably would have made the same choice because the department
at UCLA was especially strong at that time. But were that not so,
looking back, I might have selected some other major. Anyway, that’s
what I did.
JG: And then after you graduated, you went on to law school?
NE: Yes.
JG: Did you have any favorite law professors that served as models for you
or anything like that?
NE: Yes, I did. There were two. One of them is Arvo Van Alstyne, who
passed away about ten years ago. I took every class he taught, or at
least audited every class he taught at UCLA Law School. Just a
magnificent person. He taught constitutional law, administrative law,
and several other courses. And the other one is Dick Maxwell, later
dean of the law school and now dean emeritus, and emeritus from the
faculty at Duke. Dick Maxwell is one of the finest, perhaps the finest
person I've ever known.
JG: What were your special interests in law school? Were there any
particular fields you concentrated on?
NE: No, I can't say that there were. My task was to get myself through the
discipline.
JG: Did you have any siblings?
NE: No.
EPSTEIN 3
JG: You were an only child.
NE: Yes.
JG: And you passed the bar, as I recall, January of '59.
NE: Yes, that's right.
JG: And went to work for the state fairly quickly.
NE: My job right out of law school was with the attorney general. It's kind
of interesting about that. During my third year I had an appointment
to work on a team to rewrite the Education Code. The head of the
team was a professor at UCLA, but I got the appointment through
Professor Van Alstyne. The head of that project, as I say, was a
professor, but next to him the assistant director was a young graduate
student getting his doctorate, by the name of Charles Young, later
chancellor.
JG: Yes.
NE: Chuck Young took a congressional fellowship in Washington, and the
professor in charge of the project had apparently checked me out with
the legislative counsel where I had worked during the summer between
my second and third year, and he decided I was his boy, to be assistant
director of the project. Well, in the meantime, I had been offered a
job with the attorney general, which is . . . for whatever reason, that
was the only place I wanted to work, and they required that you work
during the summer. The program was that you spent half your time
working, actually working, the other half studying for the bar. And the
professor wanted me to spend all the time I could working for him. I
couldn't do both, and it was really a difficult situation for me.
Professor Van Alstyne solved the problem. He talked to the most
senior civil assistant in the attorney general's office and worked out a
deal by which I spent half my time working on this Education Code
project and the other half working for the attorney general. I was able
to study for the bar at night and on weekends, and I had the last two
weeks before the bar to study for it. And that worked it out and that's
what I did.
JG: So you actually went to work for the state before you passed the bar.
NE: Yes.
EPSTEIN 4
JG: So you were there probably during the time of the election, the Pat
Brown election in '58?
NE: As a matter of fact, when I was interviewed for the attorney
general— by the assistant in charge in Los Angeles— at the beginning
of the interview the phone rang and it was obviously Pat. They were
talking about the campaign and were talking campaign strategy. And
they must have talked for about twenty minutes because I remember
the clock on the L.A. Times Building was right outside the window
behind the assistant in charge. And I have always felt that by the time
that conversation was over he could not afford to let me leave,
(chuckling) But in any event, yes, I went to work for the Attorney
General's Office, probably July 1,1958, after I graduated.
JG: Those were kind of heady times in education, too, weren't they? There
was an awful lot going on, new colleges starting up and . . .
NE: Yes. Now I didn't have involvement in it then, in 1958 when I went
with the Attorney General's Office. I came on board right after the
Master Plan.
JG: So Pat Brown came into office in January, which is the same month
that you were admitted to the bar.
NE: Correct.
JG: And then you went up to Sacramento.
NE: I'm sorry? He went to Sacramento.
JG: Yes. His education advisor was a fellow named Don Leiffer of San
Diego. Did you ever run into him?
NE: Oh yeah, sure. Don was . . . his title was Vice Chancellor, but he was
the acting, in effect, the acting chancellor during this interregnum we
had after Buell Gallagher quit. You know about that?
JG: Yeah, I'm going to ask you about that.
NE: Until we got Glenn Dumke. Glenn Dumke is the man who hired me.
JG: Oh, I see. So did you have something to do with revising the
Education Code then? Were there major changes in that?
EPSTEIN 5
NE: No, the phase of the project on which I was involved while in law
school was a rewrite of the code, and it was essentially a technical
rewriting without substantive change. The professor in charge had the
ambition of writing the Education Code in lay language so that
anybody could understand it, and anyone who's attempted serious legal
drafting knows how difficult that is. The first phase worked, and it was
actually enacted. After that the project came to grief, but I was gone
by then.
JG: What did you do in that period of time after you passed the bar? I
noticed that one of the fields that you did specialize in was education.
NE: Yes, I was working for the state attorney general, and for most of that
time, well, I was doing criminal. I represented various state
agencies— Social Welfare, Mental Hygiene, the various tax agencies— I
was in the tax section for a time, and toward the end of it I was doing
some work for educational entities. I did a lot of work for the
Department of Education, and at that time, as you know, the state
colleges were housed under the State Board of Education. I did some
work for a couple of the colleges. But it was pretty eclectic. I did
work for a lot of things at the AG's [Attorney General's] Office.
JG: Did you know people like Buell Gallagher, even though you didn't
work with him?
NE: Yes, I knew him. He was the chancellor when I was in the AG's Office
and assigned to the state colleges. What happened is that when the
agency was created and moved to Inglewood— it originally was in
Sacramento for a short time and then moved to Inglewood— it didn't
have a lawyer, and needed one. In the meantime, the attorney general
was their lawyer. Louis Heilbron met with the attorney general, the
attorney general, Stanley Mosk, and they wanted independent counsel,
and Mosk said "No.”
JG: Why? Why would he react that way?
NE: Well, that's the traditional response of the attorney general, that "We
are the lawyer for the state," and nobody . . . thou shall have no other
lawyer before me, unless the legislature so ordains. And it's their
policy, the Attorney General's Office, generally to urge the legislature
not to so ordain. It would have been a big political fight to overcome
that, so what Lou did was to say, "Well, at least for the time being we
would like to have . . ." he described the kind of deputy that they
EPSTEIN 6
wanted, and the assistant AG in charge of the Los Angeles office
assigned me. That was actually a part-time assignment to act as
attorney for the trustees at that time. And for a very short time after
that, Gallagher was the chancellor. You heard the story about his
aborted inauguration, didn't you?
JG: I don't believe I have, no.
NE: Oh, they had planned this enormous inaugural event. They were going
to have an academic procession from the L.A. Philharmonic to some
other major facility, and they sent out invitations all over the world.
They were getting these responses that, for example, the University of
Coimbra will be represented by the Portuguese Consul General, and
so on. Just as the formal invitations were going through the post office
cancellation machine, Gallagher in New York announced that he quit
and was returning to his position as chancellor of CCNY, as it then
was, soon to be CUNY. He was never comfortable here, as I
understood it. He was attacked by some political groups. He thought
he had been promised a residence and he didn't get one, and it was
this or that, so he really left the system in the lurch, as I understood
it.
JG: I wanted you to see this position announcement that was adopted by
the trustees in January of '62.
NE: That's the original job spec [for CSC counsel].
JG: That's the original, right. And I thought it was kind of an interesting
statement.
NE: As a matter of fact, I remember that it called for five years' experience,
which I didn't have.
JG: Okay, I was going to ask you about that, (chuckling)
NE: So I considered that I wasn’t eligible for the job. And my boss in the
AG's office, the assistant attorney general in charge of tax, later a
judge, was trying to get the job for his best friend, and he wanted me
to do what I could to get the job for this guy, whom I'd never met. So
I did. I talked to the chancellor, now Glenn Dumke, on this guy's
behalf. I told him, ''I don't know the man, but Dan Kaufman, who is
my boss, and for whom I have a lot of respect, says this and this and
this about him.'' And Glenn met with the guy. And then Rudy
EPSTEIN 7
Michaels, who was Administrative Advisor for the Department of
Social Welfare wanted the job, and I spoke for Rudy. And somebody
else wanted it, and I made some comments about him, and it turned
out to be a John Alden situation.
When that came up I raised the point, I think with Mansel Keene, that,
well, I'm not eligible, you know, it requires five years' experience, what
you really need is somebody with fifteen years' experience or so, and
that's what they were looking for— a seasoned lawyer. "Oh, don't
worry about the five years. We can waive it." And that, as it turned
out, they could. That is one of the pieces of birthright that the trustees
got under the Master Plan. They had, and still have, a classification
authority which is almost unique in the state government. As you
know, the State Personnel Board has the classification power for
almost the entire government. The regents are exempt, the trustees
are exempt, the governor's office I think is exempt, and there are
probably a couple others, but it's very, very rare. But the trustees had
it and that's what they did.
When Glenn offered me the job, I told him I wanted to think about it
and could I have a week to do that and meet with him again? He
agreed to that. And I thought about it and drew up this list of all sorts
of things that I was concerned about, that my main concern is that the
chief and the chief counsel see eye-to-eye on what the job is, because
if not, it's going to be awful. So I went in there with this list. Looking
back at it, I don't know why he didn't throw me out of the office
because I was going down this . . . oh, this whole long list of
particulars. And all the answers were just fine, from my point of view,
so I accepted the job. That weekend we went away on a planned
vacation to Newport with another couple, and I was telling my wife
that I really have buyer's remorse over this, that I think I made a
terrible mistake. It was about time to leave the Attorney General's
Office; I'd been there three years. But, you know, I'm going to be
sitting there just reading these contracts and going over fine print. Of
all the problems the job had, and there were a lot of them, it never
had that one. I was anything but confined. That was the most exciting
thing I could have done. I was just so incredibly lucky.
JG: Well, the job didn't exist, did it, before you? So you were really the
very first one.
NE: I was the first. There was a fellow named Jan Stevens who was in the
Attorney General's Office who was assigned to the trustees when they
EPSTEIN 8
were in Sacramento for the first few months until they moved the
office to Los Angeles. So there was somebody in the AG's Office who
was doing some work for them before I did in the AG's Office, but in
terms of an attorney employed by the trustees, yes, I was the first.
JG: Let me review the growth of your office and the change of title.
According to our archivist, this was your first title, ''Assistant Vice
Chancellor and Administrative Advisor."
NE: And incidentally, the term "Administrative Advisor" was a euphemism
used in the state government because the attorney general objected to
a job with the word "counsel" or "attorney" or something like that.
JG: Okay. Then, in October of 1963, you were named Chief Counsel.
NE: Right.
JG: And in February of '68 you were named General Counsel, and then the
following year you were named Vice Chancellor.
NE: Vice Chancellor and General Counsel.
JG: And General Counsel, right. That's sort of the lineage of the office as
we could best determine it.
NE: Right.
JG: So you settled into the office down there in the "Imperial
Headquarters" [because it was located on Imperial Highway in
Inglewood].
NE: Yes, that's right.
JG: As it was dubbed. And your job didn't exist, the office didn't exist.
Tell me how you created it. How did you go about it?
NE: I regarded it then, and looking back I still do, as a tremendous
opportunity: to start with a clean slate, not to have any baggage to
worry about, and the assignment to do what I wanted with the office.
The chancellor's attitude the entire time was that I could do anything
I wanted— you know, within reason— within state governmental
rules— but I could run the place any w
