Interview with Camden Coberly

Coberly, Camden #24 (1976)

CC: The Institute of Technology, Surabaya about a year and a half ago recommended that the program -- this was a study sponsored by the Asian Development Bank in Manila. They recommended the further development of a new Institute of Technology building a whole new campus and we are being invited to negotiate to provide academic support and become a linkage university and the rest of it.

LS: Along with the economics department--

CC: And they never appreciate that it's helpful to have some advance notice on that.

LS: Have you got your visa?

CC: Not yet but we're getting them. We're expecting to leave Saturday.

LS: Is your wife going too?

CC: She is going with me.

LS: I spent three years there.

CC: Did you? Where in Indonesia?

LS: A year in Jakarta and two years in Bandung. My husband's in Indonesian history.

CC: Well, that's very interesting. You've been to Surabaya?

LS: Yes, it was very hot when we were there.

CC: We're leaving Saturday and I expect we'll be there--they wanted us Monday and we couldn't make it so we're going to have to start Tuesday. Then we run into the holidays at the end of the month with [fasting?] and so it won't delay things. It's a very poor time to be away. We thought this would happen last spring or early summer. All the people that are going to be on the program have now had to make plans about this semester. They're badly behind their schedule. It's a five-year loan that was originally conceived as a ten-year program and so we speeded it up and cut the budget back. We're trying to redo a lot of things. 00:02:00And so I'm somewhat ill prepared and because they're late they don't want us to delay coming, but it would be much better if we had another two weeks here for preparation. It would be better for them too.

LS: Things do seem to work that way though.

CC: Well, you're interested in some of the history of the Teaching Assistants Association.

LS: Well, it's not just that, that's just an entry way. I've been talking to a number of people in L&S about the consequences in the various departments--of the big expansion of the University and the TA strike was a symptom and a result of that and then what happened when the money stopped coming in, and the students, and so I want you to talk about how the College of Engineering was 00:03:00affected, and whether it went through the same process. I know you came in 1964 and whether you had a big wave of hiring in the '60s and whether this has created problems as it has in L&S, and then specifically about the TAs. Do you use them here in the College of Engineering?

CC: Yes, teaching assistants are used in nearly all the departments and they are an important part of our teaching program, but there is a different situation in our college than in the College of Letters and Science in that most graduate 00:04:00students in the College of Engineering have some sort of financial support.

LS: This was true in the chemistry departments too.

CC: Yes. Now, since we have a lot of research assistantships then there is a different approach with the teaching assistantships. They're not quite so critical in the sense that people are not under the financial pressure in all instances, the teaching assistants, so we have a number of people, and traditionally have had a number of people, that had small fractional appointments as teaching assistants. A student coming, for instance, with a National Science Foundation Research Fellowship, so called NSF graduate fellowships, might have also worked as a teaching assistant part-time, maybe a 00:05:00one-eighth appointment or a one-sixth appointment instead of a third or half-time appointment which is required if a student is really going to be self supporting, and it was used as a kind of a supplement to give people teaching experience, or they might be a teaching assistant one semester, or two semesters one-quarter time and research assistant one-quarter time. So, it was split up more and most departments would follow that pattern. Also, the teaching assistant worked very closely with the professor in a kind of one-to-one relationship. Instead of having a large number of teaching assistants handling perhaps twenty sections of a course under the direction of one professor, you'd have one professor with maybe two or three teaching assistants. So this is a 00:06:00different relationship. I think that they regarded themselves more as students and less as employees than the teaching assistants did on other parts of the campus.

LS: Did they handle a whole course themselves?

CC: No, they are assistants, they don't handle a course, and this is a matter of college policy. It varies a little bit from department to department.

LS: I wondered about that.

CC: But they are regarded as teaching assistants, not as lecturers or instructors. It's pretty carefully handled that way.

LS: There isn't the sort of--as in German or French, where the TA then has the whole course. You don't depend on them.

CC: There may be instances in the college you could find like that, but rarely.

LS: Tell me something. Are beginning math and the chemistry courses that a chemical engineer needs, are they taught--I know the math courses are taught in the math department and is--

CC: All the sciences courses are taught in the science departments.

LS: They are.

CC: This is a matter of national policy in engineering education. In the accreditation of engineering colleges it is believed that an engineer should learn his science in the science departments and he should learn his engineering in the engineering schools. So, you have basic science courses in math which are traditionally taught in the math and science departments. It's been this way for 00:08:00a long time and it's also a matter of the accreditation practice of the profession to keep it this way. They don't really think engineers ought to be taught only by engineers.

It's the same way with the required courses in humanities which engineers have to take.

LS: I was going to ask you about that later. I notice you require fifteen credits of--

CC: Yes, and again this was a matter which was established in the late '40s and early '50s by the Engineers Council for Professional Development, which is the accrediting agency for engineering colleges--that engineers should be trained in the humanities, and so they instituted a requirement of about--the equivalent of 00:09:00about one semesters work in these fields. These are defined as humanities courses so this is a requirement in all accredited programs. It does not include, for instance, courses taught by the business school, but would include economics. It would not include the social studies type thing, social work, but it would include similar things. It's really history, political science, economics. Those things which are listed on our campus by the College of Letters and Sciences as meeting the humanities needs of that college. So these courses 00:10:00must be taken there and they cannot be taught--for instance, we could not develop courses in the engineering college which would meet that requirement even though we might have courses relating to the ethics of engineering practice or the history of engineering. Unless these courses were also listed by the College of Letters and Science they would not count as our humanities credit.

LS: Was this decision made to help engineers think better or was it to have something to do with their attitude towards their work. I mean in the sense, well just--

CC: Well, I would give my personal view of this, but I think one held by a lot of other people, and that is that engineering has traditionally worked in 00:11:00technical areas but not in science areas but rather it--I was taught when I first went to engineering school that engineers were those people that used science for the benefit of mankind. So the idea that engineers worked only with machines is one which the general public may hold but not one which engineers have held. But there was a recognition that the engineering curriculum had become so full that it was probably time to ensure that all engineers are at least exposed to things in the humanistic areas as a way of ensuring that they had background, formal course work, in these areas. This is not--you know, fifteen credits which may be scattered through two or three disciplines does not 00:12:00ensure that a person is educated in these areas but at least may introduce him to it at a level beyond high school, which is the way it had been done before, and it may then enable him through his own reading in his continuing and his professional development in his profession to better understand and better work with people that were not trained in a scientific way. So the engineer has always believed to some degree, I think, at least hopefully he has, that he was working with people not just working with machines. And this is an attempt to better equip him to do that. That was the idea behind it. And it's an old development. [pause in tape]

You inquired earlier about the effects of enrollment and whether our college had 00:13:00had a great expansion in size. Enrollment in engineering is cyclic and it follows the concept of opportunity for employment that high school students have. So that if you look back since 1950 the enrollment has been up and down about every ten years in a cyclic way, hitting a peak in '50 and in '60 and perhaps in '70, going now through another rising again. That is, the size of the 00:14:00graduating classes were maximum about those years. In 1950 we had large classes graduating and some problem with our graduates finding immediate employment, because the business community, having a similar ten-year cycle, was down in the trough. So at that time, in the '50s, because people had some difficulty getting jobs, we had low freshman class enrollment. Now the average student spends about five years going through our program so the low enrollment in the '50s resulted in a small graduating class in '55, and by 1955 the business community was very active in trying to hire at a high rate, and so by '55 when we had the smallest 00:15:00classes we had the maximum demand for them and so the freshmen flocked in and by '60, when they graduated, the demand was down and we repeated this, and this is a serious problem.

LS: So it's not the same sort of swing?

CC: Yes, our enrollment currently, even though we are back up and have been growing very rapidly because of the heavy demand for engineers currently--we're still graduating small classes although the size of the graduating class is increasing--the demand for these students has brought in a large number of freshmen, but we still are not above the levels of postwar. So, we do not have a 00:16:00college which has experienced the tremendous growth the rest of the campus has since 1950.

LS: In other words you were at a low point in 1965?

CC: Yes, about there.

Well, no we were at the high point about '65. We're expanding rapidly now and enrollment in engineering colleges across the country, in freshman class for instance, has been growing at the rate of maybe 20 percent a year the last several years. Now this year our freshman class did not go up above last year. It's probably about the same size as last year for freshman, but the total enrollment in the college is up. Another phenomenon which we have which makes it difficult to talk about size of classes is that about half the students that 00:17:00graduate in engineering on this campus start somewhere else, either in one of the other units of the University of Wisconsin System or in some other state, and then transfer in at the sophomore or junior year. We've designed our programs to enable a student to do this fairly easily and so it's possible for a student to go closer to home from a smaller campus and take his basic science and math there and then transfer to Madison for Ms professional courses and his engineering courses and get his degree here. This is a good plan and it helps the student but it results in us not knowing, for instance, what size our sophomore and junior classes are going to be based on the size of our freshman class.

LS: Except by this swing that you've come to expect.

CC: Well, yes.

Now we are seeing some other trends currently in engineering education which I think are healthy. We're seeing a large number of women in engineering. I believe that our enrollment is over 10 percent women now in the college. This is very unusual. It used to be, oh thirty years ago, we might have one or two women in the college.

LS: They still don't go in for math very much but they've decided they can handle engineering.

CC: We've also had a number of transfers from Letters and Science into engineering in the last two or three years.

LS: That would be connected with the environment?

CC: No, I think it's connected with the opportunity for employment, and I think 00:19:00the difficulty of science graduates' finding employment and the greater ease with which engineers have found it has led people to reassess their opportunities. I believe there has been a trend throughout the whole University in turning toward education which is more occupation- or profession-oriented. This kind of thing. We've had a large effort in the minority program in the college in recent years and I believe it's an outstanding program and that we are now getting blacks and other minority people into the college. This is a national problem in that there are relatively few minority people in the engineering profession and so there is no way to find educated qualified 00:20:00minority professionals to teach or to practice engineering. But this has been changing. Engineering is a curriculum which requires a careful high school preparation for guaranteed success. A student has to have taken his math and ought to have taken basic sciences in high school in order to handle this kind of thing.

You asked also about hiring of professors. We have hired a number of young professors. There were quite a few professors hired in the '50s. I came here in 00:21:001964 having had fifteen years industry experience. But there are a lot of people, a lot of professors, in the same general age group that I'm in which indicates that a lot of them came into the profession about the same time.

LS: There were nine on the chemical engineering faculty in 1956.

CC: Yes.

LS: Was there a big wave of hiring in the '60s here as there was--I didn't check a catalog, I should have--in the '60s?

CC: Well there has been--in chemical engineering, which I'm more familiar with because I was in that department, there was a series of hiring through the '50s and '60s and even now in the '70s so that's a department which has brought some 00:22:00people along and has some people retiring in the next year or two so there has been a very major turnover in that department, or will be before the end of this decade.

LS: But you haven't been faced with the problem of a much too big faculty hired to handle an enormous inflow of students and then suddenly finding yourself--

CC: No.

LS: I see.

CC: Currently I would say most departments are pretty tight because of our rapid expansion in enrollment. Now the students take the courses in engineering starting in the sophomore but more in the junior and senior year so our peak, our big freshman classes, are now moving into that period, so this particular 00:23:00year the college is very tight on faculty, and because of the budget limitations we have actually reduced the number of teaching assistants we have in some instances so--.

LS: Are you free to hire more faculty.

CC: Not in the department, none of the colleges are. You don't really have any money to pay them.

LS: I see, so you have to vie for money with L&S and Agriculture. I thought maybe you might have some other sources of money.

CC: We do. We have sources of money which fund our graduate programs.

LS: But not for faculty.

CC: And we have some faculty who have been hired on non-state funds, but this is a very dangerous practice. We try to avoid it because then you are faced with a situation of keeping these people. Our graduate programs are funded to a very 00:24:00large degree with money obtained off-campus. It's possible to do this, so we have our research projects which we believe should involve graduate students, and those are funded externally, primarily. I think it would be unfortunate if we got too much of our staff on so-called soft money.

LS: Well that's been a problem wherever it's happened.

CC: If you do that of course you employ faculty to do just research because that's what you get the money for, you don't get the money for teaching, so that really doesn't help very much with the undergraduate teaching program, teaching 00:25:00loads. It does enable you to have a greater graduate program. You can have more graduate students. We have a good many more graduate students than we did in, I believe, the '50s. But you have to look at the records to see that. I don't keep those statistics.

LS: So your faculty does all teach at least an undergraduate course. You don't have people who don't teach at all?

CC: Our faculty all participate in the undergraduate and graduate program with the exceptions that you find in any college. We believe that it is desirable for a faculty person to have a research program, to do graduate teaching and to do undergraduate teaching and we encourage people to do this. We think that working 00:26:00with graduate students in research keeps the professor out at the front and keeps him alive and generates new information. This new information is then brought into graduate courses and refined, and because the professor teaches the undergraduate level this results in material being gradually fed into the undergraduate course. It keeps the curriculum up to date. Now it's true that to some degree every sophomore needs to know the same things that every other sophomore needs to know but these things change. Particularly in a technical field with rapid change its necessary to do this.

We also believe that engineering should be related to industrial practice and to the practice of engineering professionally. So we encourage people to 00:27:00participate in professional societies, to do things of a public service nature, to work with government agencies--local, state, federal,--and to also maintain contact with industry through consulting arrangements.

LS: Well I'd like to get into that later.

CC: This is a part of the philosophy of the college as to how these things are done and so another thing which people are expected to do is to have some kind of what we would group under the general title of public service activities or professional activities.

LS: I guess that's true throughout the University.

CC: I think so but I don't know how you'd do this in the classics department, for instance. Maybe you work with libraries, I don't know.

LS: Well, maybe just community welfare. I mean, it wouldn't be related.

CC: I was thinking of things really related to what a man is teaching and what he expects his students to know and how he brings information back into the classroom.

LS: Now, do you want to start talking about the build-up of the TA strike and your own involvement in the committee?

CC: Oh sure, I could go back and start on how I got involved in this. When there was first developed on the campus the Teaching Assistants Association, it was largely outside our college, although we had teaching assistants we didn't have anyone particularly interested in the Teaching Assistants Association, so far as 00:29:00we knew, but they were looking for some faculty members, people to be on the committee, to work with first the election of teaching assistants and this kind of thing and I had had experience in industry as chief engineer of a chemical company and had some interest in labor relations because I used to sit on a committee or a group that negotiated contracts in our company and did this kind of thing. And also the teaching assistants or graduate students--I was involved with the graduate programs of the college through the Engineering Experiment Station and it seemed like I was a logical representative for our college.

LS: Who knew that you were interested?

CC: The dean knew about those things and it also seemed appropriate to have 00:30:00people from different areas of interest on the committee from the University, not all from one area.

LS: You know, is this the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Teaching Assistant Association?

CC: Yes.

LS: So this was not the same thing as the Council of Ten then?

CC: No, I don't even remember the Council of Ten.

LS: Oh you will when I remind you I'm sure.

CC: Oh the--yeah, the chancellor had a committee and I was asked-- somebody mentioned my name to the chancellor--and so he said, sure we should have an 00:31:00engineering representative, and my general background in this area seemed like it was appropriate. You know not very many people worked in this kind of area around the University unless you're in industrial relations or the business school or something of that sort. Although Dean Ratner in Industrial Engineering also works as an arbitrator in things like that. Somehow my name got in and I got on the committee.

LS: This would have been--do you remember when?

CC: Whenever the whole thing started.

LS: The actual negotiations started in the Spring of '69, when the chancellor recognized the TAA.

CC: Yes, this is about when it happened. You know it might have been the Fall of '68 or sometime--I guess my files might show.

But it seemed to me that although there was a group of teaching assistants that 00:32:00were interested in forming a Teaching Assistants Association and had one--they didn't have very many members--there wasn't very much interest in it until after one of the campus demonstrations when the legislature was in session and the legislature passed a bill eliminating out-of-state tuition remission for teaching assistants. And Governor Knowles vetoed this, so that it never became law, but in the intervening period--this would have been a tremendous financial blow to the teaching assistants so they all--those in their association--got a lot of members to sign up and they saw this, then, as a serious external threat, in my view, and I think we have a Teaching Assistant Association today because 00:33:00of that action by the legislature. This then gave them a reason. We might have gotten it eventually anyway over some other thing, but certainly that got enough interest in it, and with the election, the first election, to set up the Association, because of this interest they got enough people. Now, there was not widespread interest by teaching assistants in schools like Engineering and Agriculture and other places, so a lot of them didn't even vote. A few departments did get out a vote with the idea that if you don't want a union 00:34:00you'd better vote the same as if you do want one you'd better vote, and I think there was one of the departments, the engineering mechanics department, voted a majority to affiliate with TAA and so they have a departmental unit. I'm not sure whether any other engineering departments voted. I was in chemical engineering at the time and they voted against it.

LS: Do you think there was any faculty pressure here or was it just student disinterest? Any faculty pressure against joining?

CC: No. Oh, I'm sure there were faculty members who would have expressed a view contrary to organizing into a union but I don't think there was very much talk about it at all. I think there was probably a very low turnout, even in those 00:35:00departments that voted a majority for it. It wasn't really a majority, it was just a majority of those voting, and there were a few departments--I was aware of what was going on and frankly told our teaching assistants that if they didn't take a stand on this why somebody else would take one for them.

LS: So did they go and vote against it?

CC: I don't know. I think they did. At least they didn't go and vote for. I mean there was not--of those that voted. But I don't know. I don't remember the count, if I ever knew.

LS: What was your own feeling about the TAA. Did you think it was going to be much trouble?

CC: Oh, at the time I did not think that it would serve the students very well.

LS: The students. That's the grad students as against the TAs.

CC: No, no. I meant the teaching assistants in it. The graduate student teaching assistants. I did not think it would serve them very well. I saw it as a divisive thing separating them and reducing them from a position of being colleagues with their research professors to one of being employees and I did not think this was a desirable situation.

LS: Were you aware of some of the conditions that they were protesting?

CC: No, my experience was in the College of Engineering and--

LS: But I mean on the L&S campus.

CC: No, and I say I was not aware of the kinds of things which some of them were working under. In retrospect--you asked what I thought at the time.

LS: Yes.

CC: In retrospect it seems to me that the Teaching Assistants Association has done some things which were important to have done and which might not have occurred if they hadn't had some kind of association. I feel that their association has had relatively poor leadership, particularly early.

LS: Poor in the sense--

CC: Poor in the sense that they were personally motivated to use the association for ends which I did not see as the appropriate goals for representing the teaching assistants and they were most unprofessional in their bargaining 00:38:00relationships and have been from the beginning. This seemed to change this last year, in my view. But there were some things happening which were important to have exposed to faculty and administrative view more broadly. I really think that was important and most of the things which are legitimate abuses, once they were seen were stopped or changed. Now you could say this should have been done by the individuals going and presenting their cases and all that sort of thing. 00:39:00That hadn't happened and so you can really argue that the association was a factor for good.

LS: Are you going to be specific? What are the things you have in mind?

CC: No, I'm not going to be specific.

LS: I don't mean naming names, but--

CC: There is a relationship between a graduate student and a professor which is a very strong control and the student is, to a degree, at the mercy of a particular professor and if this same kind of a relationship extends into an employee or an assistant relationship then it can lead to expecting entirely too 00:40:00much work under certain circumstances. Or in capricious or arbitrary behavior on the part of the employer in relation to a group like that. This kind of abuse which occurred in many places until the employees are forced--if it occurs, then the employees are forced to ban together and form an association. It's a matter of public policy to recognize unions in this country and to do this. It's still difficult to see how this sort of thing--whether this thing is the best way. I 00:41:00personally believe it's better to work things out with individuals, but if it doesn't happen it will lead to a unionization and an attempt through force to redress or get attention to these grievances.

LS: Do you think it was a matter of individuals or particular departments. You must have become quite familiar, once you were on the council--

CC: There's a lot of variation from department to department and to talk about a department in which there are fifty or seventy professors as having a uniform or unified approach to a thing as complex as a professor's relationship to his teaching assistant is a little difficult. Certain practices in certain departments seem to be--you know they developed that way. That was the way it 00:42:00had always been. Nobody had looked at why it was this way, and is it the same in history as it is in English or the language departments, or in chemistry and other places. You know the University didn't have a very big personnel office in those days. There wasn't anybody who had a way of looking at these things. Teaching assistantships were regarded as stipends to help graduate students get through school, and it might be a real good thing if they were still regarded that way. There might be a more--a closer relationship between professors and students with that kind of feeling but then in a sense that's paternalism which is not in style and so you go to the idea that many of the teaching assistants 00:43:00seem to have that this is an employment, this is my job, this is the way I make my living and I want to be a professional employee and I want you to recognize me as an employee, and that is the basis of the agreement with the TAA--that they are in the agreement as employees. This is quite a different relationship, quite a different approach, philosophically.

LS: Can you remember which departments in your opinion were causing the most dissatisfaction among the TAs?

CC: Well, the dissatisfaction was--I wouldn't put it in causing--I would say that the greatest dissatisfaction occurred in those departments where there was the largest number of teaching assistants, where people were not dealing on a 00:44:00close relationship, but where a professor might have a large number of teaching assistants, where there were many more applicants than there were job openings so that there were difficult decisions to make as to who got the jobs, the few jobs which existed. It was an opportunity to--I say an opportunity because I don't know whether this was actually occurring or not, though people claim that it would occur and it could happen--that graduate students were brought here for one year as teaching assistants and then after they got committed into a program and got established they didn't get another teaching assistantship. I'm sure that then they felt, oh, I'm trapped here, I have to continue at Wisconsin, I 00:45:00can't really transfer and go somewhere else. Particularly after a couple of years they'd do this, and then they'd take their teaching assistantship and go off and recruit more graduate students.

LS: I've heard this of the history department. I don't know--

CC: Yes, this is the kind of practice which was possible. I won't say that it occurred. I would say that it might have occurred in some instances and yet you could say, why that's a deplorable thing to do. This led to the guaranteed number of years of support provision which is in the contract, which was a response to that. Now in the College of Engineering, this never occurred because we had support for most all of our students, so this provision within the contract to guarantee support for a minimum number of years is no problem 00:46:00because it was always being done. It's a complex thing to administer, it results in a lot of paperwork and record keeping and a lot of other things, and in a way you can say that this is an unfortunate waste of our resources to do all this record keeping and from the colleges' viewpoint it is. It doesn't change anything for the teaching assistants, it just means extra work. The minimum appointment provision is one which is aimed at the problem of students trying to use this as a way to support a family while they incidentally go to school. Maybe I'm being unkind in that remark, but some of them look--from the number of 00:47:00years they stay here and from the difficulty people or teachers were having in getting jobs in certain fields, it looked like a person if he could stay a TA at one-half time level he'd be better off doing that than having nothing to do so it was possible to, perhaps not consciously, prolong educational programs beyond what they should be. Nonetheless, that was a way of living. You didn't live very well but you lived. You had something to do and in your own field instead of being forced totally out.

So, I think this resulted in minimum appointment provisions in the contract where you wouldn't gradually work a person down to a smaller appointment, or once you started him at a certain size appointment you had to maintain it at that level. Now this doesn't help the teaching assistant in our college at all 00:48:00because we didn't have that situation. There wasn't that situation. It acts actually in a few instances contrary to the desires of particular students. We have students who would like to have a little teaching experience but they are in a hurry to finish. Perhaps they have veterans benefits or a source of income so that they will be going on through even though they don't have research assistantships, but they might like to teach 1/4 time or 1/6 time to get some teaching experience. The department might like to hire them.

LS: But they can do it can't they?

CC: But they can't do it.

LS: But you're not under the TA. You said only one department--

CC: No, but you have to do this this year. The provision says you can't have a 00:49:00person hired less than 1/3 time.

LS: In the contract this year. You know I haven't looked at that.

CC: Yes, this is the provision which comes in from this kind of thing and it shows how in order to be sure that people are not improperly treated you introduce things which maybe don't always work.

LS: But if it were really was just one department--I think the math department--somebody said if they got somebody as a TA they always kept them on.

CC: And sometimes I can't help but feel that the teaching assistants bring up these things because they've heard from a few people in their organization who speak loudly about it and they get insistent upon doing something. Oh, I believe 00:50:00we all have benefited in one way or another from unions in that this has improved the general standard but that it is not a development that doesn't have some problems with it.

LS: Do you think it helped to shed more attention on undergraduate teaching--the TA strike?

CC: No. I think that this was an inappropriate use of their union that it--I 00:51:00think there were some teaching assistants, even some people on the committee that we bargained with who were very sincere in what they were doing, but that this was a method whereby the Teaching Assistants Association was trying to generate widespread support for a strike.

LS: You're talking about educational planning. Is that what you mean?

CC: Educational planning, class size, undergraduate instruction, and the whole bit. The whole thing. All of these were ways in which they were trying to elicit the sympathy of the undergraduate student so that when they were ready to call a strike the undergraduate student wouldn't go to class. And this then turns it into a much more effective way of interrupting the education process and that it 00:52:00was not in, truly, in the interest of the undergraduate student. I don't think they can divorce their own interests from the issue and that to a large extent it was developed for this purpose in this and was misguided. I really believe that, even though some of the people involved in it are sincere. As far as I'm concerned our teaching assistants are excellent teachers. By and large I think they really are dedicated.

LS: You have one of the leaders of the strike teaching in the College of Engineering now in remedial math and I imagine he's a good teacher.

CC: Sure. Henry Haslach, I think is his name, who you're talking of, as near as I've ever heard anyone say, is an excellent teacher and I've said this to him 00:53:00too. Yet he was one of the very difficult people to deal with in the early days. I wondered what he was after.

LS: Have you ever asked him, or talked to him about it?

CC: No. I think we gained an appreciation--I gained an appreciation of him, of what he was doing. The union has changed through--it goes through cycles, it has had different groups at different times.

LS: Have you been all along on the committee?

CC: Yes.

LS: I see. Well then-

CC: I'm the only one that has actually.

LS: This is something we should go into. I've been concentrating on the 1970 00:54:00events and it's important to find out what did happen.

LS: I'll ask you about your trip to Surabaya later.

CC: The Department of Chemical Engineering is one of the medium sized departments in the College of Engineering. It has a faculty of actively involved people of seventeen or eighteen professors. So this puts it about middle size. I 00:55:00suppose it's the third largest department, maybe fourth, in the college. But a department of that size acts as a unit in the sense that the number of people is not so great that they can't still interact in the faculty meetings. So the faculty meetings are attended by most all of the people that are in the department.

LS: How often are they held?

CC: They're held about every two weeks.

LS: Has that been true for a long time?

CC: That's the pattern that we've had for a long time.

LS: It's frequent isn't it, every two weeks?

CC: Yes, but you only meet for about an hour, an hour and a half. There's quite a bit of business if the department tries to act as a total faculty instead of working as sub-units so most of the business of the department is decided upon 00:56:00in a full faculty meeting.

The chairman--there is no fixed rule about how long the chairman serves--for many years Professor Hougen and Professor Ragatz used to rotate the chairmanship back and forth between them periodically. They were quite different in their approach to administration of the department but very compatible, so that they had different characteristics in faculty meetings, switching back and forth every three or four years, I suppose. So there had not been very many chairmen of the department. Professor Kowalke was chairman for a great many years and 00:57:00Professor Hougen and Professor Ragatz switched back and forth. Then after Professor Ragatz, Professor Bird, R. Byron Bird, was chairman for, I don't know, four or five years, I guess. Then I was chairman for I've forgotten now--three or four years.

LS: Was that when you first came?

CC: No. I had been here for about three years, I guess. I must have been chairman for about four years--three or four years. You'll have to look up the records to see, I can't remember.

LS: You were elected?

CC: Yes. Now chairmanship in all the departments--the chairmen in all the University are appointed by the deans of the colleges, the academic deans, on the recommendation of the departments. So each year in our college the dean asks 00:58:00the department professors to vote on who they want for chairman and then they agree on who should be chairman and the dean appoints them. This is done every year. Now some departments have fixed rules about the maximum number of years that a person can be chairman. Chemical Engineering does not. So it changes when the department wants to change in chemical engineering.

LS: Has there been any period when it made a difference how strong a chairman the department had. Any period when there were problems that the chairman would have had--or could have solved or could not solve? Or has it been a fairly 00:59:00smoothly-flowing department?

CC: I think it changes from one chairman to another in Chemical Engineering. In general, it's been when the chairman wanted to change. Professor Bird had been chairman for several years and then he decided that he wanted to go back into his research and teaching activities full-time and not have the responsibilities for the department direction. That's when I became chairman. And when I left the chairmanship it was to become associate dean of the college and then Professor Bowen became chairman. When he left the chairmanshlp it was to go into the chancellor's administration office not so much because the department wanted to get rid of him but the chancellor wanted him to go into that slot.

LS: He was on the Mermin Committee?

CC: Yes, then after that he was assistant vice chancellor, or associate vice 01:00:00chancellor I guess it was, and then Professor Stewart became chairman, but it has not been the case of the department getting upset with the chairman.

LS: I didn't mean that, so much.

CC: But that happens you know. That happens from time to time in the departments. But that wasn't the case here.

LS: What I really meant was, anything such as happened in some of the L&S departments where things came up a chairman couldn't handle because he wasn't a strong chairman, or where his policies affected what developed. I'm not speaking of changing chairman, but I guess I'm saying does the chairman have an important role.

CC: Well I think the early development of chemical engineering in Wisconsin was 01:01:00due to Professor Hougen and Professor K.M. Watson.

LS: Yes, we have an interview with Professor Hougen.

CC: Yes, I'm sure you do. And this was through the middle history of the department and so I think the fact that he was chairman was incidental in some respects. The chairman can have an important role in helping to bring in particular people. For instance, Professor Hougen, I'm sure, was instrumental in bringing Professor Bird to Wisconsin in chemical engineering, and Professor 01:02:00Stewart and Professor Lightfoot. And the three of them together, not when Professor Bird was chairman or when any of them were chairman, had a very important effect on chemical engineering education nationally, as well as at Wisconsin, through the introduction of a new textbook. The book on transport phenomena was introduced at a time when there was a need for a change seen here. So you can say that Professor Hougen had a great effect on chemical engineering education through bringing these particular professors to Wisconsin. But you 01:03:00don't do that through the administration of the department.

LS: No.

CC: When you think about problems in a department, I can express my views on this, I'm not sure these are facts at all, but It's my view that as departments get large you get so many people that they can no longer meet together as an effective group and they can no longer act as a unit and so they start to fall into subgroups. You can see this in departments in the College of Engineering, civil engineering for instance is organized along lines of subdivisions of civil engineering as a group, which is involved with sanitary engineering, hydraulics, there's a group with structural engineering, and a group with photogrammetry and 01:04:00surveying. Now when that happens you really have more than one department so they start to have interests which, while related, are directed towards particular goals separate from a single goal as a group. I can see in very large departments, such as Letters and Science departments, mathematics, and even the bigger ones such as English and history and some of those, where it would be impossible even to get all the faculty together for a single meeting, and so in those instances I would imagine that they have to have a much more elaborate departmental organization structure than they have in chemical engineering.

LS: Is civil engineering the biggest department?

CC: Electrical engineering is the largest department in our College. This was my 01:05:00point in saying that chemical engineering is a small enough group that it can meet with generally all the faculty there and that while they can argue and have disagreement on things because they can meet all together they can still act as a unit and as a single department. Of course it's my belief that department organization works well up to a certain size.

LS: What size?

CC: And maybe that size is around twenty. Perhaps a little bit larger than that, but if it gets much larger than that why then subgroups start to form and they fall apart. And one of the important functions in a department like chemical engineering--of the chairman--is to prevent the formation of isolated groups 01:06:00which would keep the department from acting as a unit. I think this is necessary if you want a unified program. You don't want half the group going in one direction and another part pulling in another so that you have these disruptive factors. Everybody has to know one another and has to work pretty much together. If the group gets too large then it's extremely difficult. You really have, then, a group of departments which are banded together under the same name.

LS: And only pull together when they are facing somebody else.

CC: Well-

LS: Do the nontenured faculty as well as the tenured faculty vote on promotions 01:07:00and salaries, or how is that handled?

CC: All the members of the department participate in most activities. The executive committee of the department, which is the tenured members of the department, vote on promotions of assistant professors and also are charged with salary recommendations. That's about the only thing. When you come to promoting associate professors to professors, even though they are all tenured, only the professors vote.

LS: I see.

CC: That's according to University rules.

LS: Do you normally get people in at the lower ranks or an equal amount of time get in full professors. What has been your pattern?

CC: I don't think you can generalize this. Most of our most recent appointments have been at the assistant professor level, but not all of them. Chemical engineering for instance brought in an associate professor this last year. When I came I came as a professor. It varies with what the department is trying to do. I believe now that most departments, including chemical engineering, are trying to bring people in at the beginning age level so that they will get a better age distribution.

LS: I was going to ask you about the age distribution, now, of the faculty.

CC: It's not uniform the way you might like to think it should be. There are 01:09:00three professors that will be retiring in chemical engineering this year. Then there is a fairly large group of people in the late forties and early fifties and then there is a younger group of men who have just been promoted out of the associate professor, and then a couple of younger ones, so that they're kind of bunched rather than uniformly distributed. This is somewhat by chance, I guess, but you might wish you would have them uniformly distributed so that they would move through, but most departments don't look like that. If you had twenty 01:10:00people and you found that the average length of time in the department was forty years--it wouldn't be quite that much--then you might say you would like to hire a new person every two years and have somebody retire every two years.

LS: That would be the ideal way.

CC: But it doesn't work out that way.

LS: Does the engineering college have a faculty senate.

CC: No. No it doesn't have a faculty senate but the engineering college has regular meetings as the entire faculty. They have faculty meetings but they do not have a senate which would be representative of the faculty. Every person is 01:11:00entitled and is expected to attend. The attendance is not nearly that high. It may meet as often, if there is business to be conducted, it may meet each month. Usually it does not meet that often, usually we have about five or six faculty meetings a year, during the academic year.

LS: Does it perform any particularly important function? Are there big issues that come up?

CC: Well there are functions which are specifically assigned to college faculty which they have to do. They have to approve, our college approves all course 01:12:00changes, all courses to be taught in the college, all curriculum changes and curricula. It approves all degrees to be granted and from time to time it discusses a number of quite important issues and if there are things of real interest to the faculty why we'll have large attendance. This falls a little bit after the pattern of the old University faculty meetings when we had large faculty meetings, before the formation of the senate.

LS: It is a small and steadfast group that comes all the time.

You're having department reviews, presumably. I think that's a University-wide requirement that the regents have asked for.

CC: Yes, our college, as all colleges of engineering in the United States, most colleges of engineering in the United States go through an accreditation procedure. This is performed by the Engineer's Council for Professional Development. It's a national organization which credits curricula in engineering.

LS: Like the School of Social Work.

CC: Yes, it's a similar kind of thing. Normally we would be accredited every six year. We have just had an accreditation visit and I believe that this will serve to some extent in lieu of the departmental reviews which have been requested by the regents. I expect that this will substitute. This amounts to a review by 01:14:00outside reviewers, rather than by inside people.

LS: Shall we move on to the TA strike.

CC: If you'd like to.

LS: You said you've had some experience with labor unions when you worked for a chemical plant and that was the reason you were put on the Chancellor's TAA Committee.

CC: Well, it may have been one of the factors in deciding that I was a suitable appointments a suitable person to be appointed to this committee.

LS: Had you actually been to bargaining sessions?

CC: Yes. I used to be in charge of an engineering department and included in my 01:15:00responsibilities were the overall responsibility for operating a boiler plant and the utility system for a large chemical plant so-- we had two unions in this boiler plant. The operators and maintenance men and the operating engineers were in two AFL unions and so I was the member of the group which used to negotiate the contracts, the labor agreements for these two unions.

LS: So you had a good background.

CC: I had been in a number of sessions for several years. I guess I was on that team for eight or nine years.

LS: You must have been the only one on the faculty negotiating committee that had had any experience with a union. I can't think of anyone else who would have.

CC: Oh, there may have been -- Arlen Christenson may have had, but in later years when Ed Krinsky was there he had a great deal of experience through his work.

LS: I'm thinking of the 1970 strike to begin with.

CC: I might have been the only one.

LS: Well how would you compare them?

CC: Oh, this was very different. The teaching assistants were not organized with any experience in this kind of thing and so their goals were very different from goals that I had seen in a labor union where you were dealing with people who 01:17:00were in a stable situation. They'd been employed for a long time in their jobs, they expected to be employed for a long time and they were interested in bringing about certain changes, things they really wanted. Most of them were related to wages or fringe benefits, some minor things related to working conditions or work rules type of things, but they were not trying to bring about organization or structural changes in the institution or company they were in. They were not working on philosophical or ideological points of any kind like this. There was not the feeling that they were trying to work off anger against 01:18:00anyone, and I thought there was a great deal of that in the early negotiations. Also they had a very firmly organized union. You knew that when you were dealing with their bargaining groups you were dealing with people who, if they didn't speak for the whole group, could act for the whole group. The teaching assistants' union were very different, in rny view.

LS: Did you feel that goals were clear cut or were they working them out as they went along, did they change their mind? There was a great deal of negotiating, 01:19:00months of it, and I wondered how well prepared the TAs bargaining were.

Were they up on the facts?

CC: It seemed to me they were interested in bringing about fundamental changes in the University and in the University system and that they were not particularly interested in improving the financial lot of the teaching assistant that they were very angry.

LS: Now are you talking about the negotiators?

CC: Yes and so they were not really acting in a way you would expect a union to 01:20:00act. It was very difficult to know what they really did want. To find out what they wanted. And they were asking for a lot of things which nobody could give to anyone and so this made the negotiations very slow.

They were extremely, I would term it, abusive, and personal in their bargaining.

LS: Abusive toward everybody?

CC: Abusive of the bargainers. That there was a great deal of vicious language and talk. Conditions which from my industry situation would have resulted in immediate stoppage of all negotiations.

LS: Really?

CC: Oh yes. We would have never tolerated anyone acting that way in 01:21:00negotiations. There was a firm set of rules that if people could not be gentlemanly and constructive in their discussions, recognizing that there would be no display of anger and this kind of thing, well then things would be adjourned until such time as people were ready to deal in an adult manner.

LS: Why didn't the University have such rules?

CC: I wondered this. I was not in charge of the negotiations. But you see we were not dealing with an experienced group of people. We really were dealing with some of our students. Everyone, I think, had a kind of combined feeling, or mixed feelings, about what we were doing. But, there were many times when I felt 01:22:00that we would have been totally within reason to refuse to ---well just to tolerate that kind of action. We had no desire to have a strike, we had no desire to destroy the union as such, or upset [this?]. And so we just tolerated a great deal of things which would not in the normal bargaining session situation have existed.

LS: Well, how did it come about that it was tolerated? There must have been others who --

CC: Oh, I have no doubt.

LS: Did you discuss it among yourselves?

CC: No, not greatly.

LS: You and Dormus, Bucklew, Christenson? [Loren?] You didn't--

CC: No, we didn't really discuss this.

LS: Why not?

CC: Oh this pattern had been established and it was going on before I was in the group and I didn't see any point - I didn't think there would be any way to bring about a change in this kind of thing. We were not intending to break off negotiations. It was easier to just go ahead with it. This same kind of pattern continued for a good while. Several years.

LS: I gather from what you said it doesn't exist now.

CC: It did not this last year. Not nearly to the - well, it hardly existed at 01:24:00all. People rarely had anything which you would say was abusive or anything that -- very professional kind of bargaining type thing.

LS: But this might have been due to the inexperience of the people who were initially on the bargaining committee that they wouldn't realize that this wasn't always a part of bargaining. It makes me wonder.

CC: I wrote it up to inexperience, and also the times and the anger that they had against many things.

LS: Were they indiscriminately abusive or did they single out particular members 01:25:00of the University?

CC: Oh, they had their favorites.

LS: Who were their favorites?

CC: Well I didn't engage in this kind of thing with them very much so escaped a fair amount of it. I decided that I would not say things which I was sure would make them angry. I saw this as serving no purpose. I did not hesitate to express my views but, on the other hand, I would not take up the challenge for a verbal argument for--

CC: -- argument's sake.

LS: I read through some minutes last night. You were always talking about facts when you spoke.

CC: This was easy for me because we are kind of remote from the central problems in Engineering. We're a little bit off the center of the campus. We were not involved--

LS: You must have felt a bit superior, did you?

CC: Oh, I don't think superior, maybe fortunate and, as I say, it was easier because we had not been involved in a lot of the controversies at the department level that some of the other departments had. Oh I thought for a while that Professor Doremus, Dean Doremus, was the particular object of their scorn, of 01:27:00their questions, and he saw no reason, and rightly so, not to set the record straight when somebody made wrong accusations and this kind of thing, so this leads to this kind of pointed arguing.

LS: What about Bucklew? What was your judgment of him? He was after all the chief, or the business negotiator, especially since you can compare him to Krinsky.

CC: I don't remember him very well. I don't have any strong feelings about him 01:28:00in this regard.

LS: I suppose the question is with different people, would things have turned out differently?

CC: Oh, you can never say about that. I suppose with different people on either side it could have turned out different.

CC: But no, I think we probably came to about the same position that any group given the particular constraints might have come to.

There was one thing which went into that first settlement which we might wish hadn't gone in. The class size limitation was about the only thing which went in which has been a prolonged source of difficulty. This was a compromise which 01:29:00resulted in a settlement of the first strike and you might ask the question as to whether or not it would have been better to just prolong the strike and not give in on that particular point. There's no way to answer that question to know what the result would have been, and certainly the people that made the decision regarding this, at the time it was made, felt that that was the best thing to do and there's no way of knowing whether it was--you know, there's no point in trying to speculate. But that has been one thing which has been a problem. It 01:30:00was a problem this last year. We were attempting to change this.

LS: Before getting back to the actual negotiations, you spoke of the TA negotiators as being angry. Do you distinguish among them? Jim Marketti and Hank Haslach were the principal ones, and then there was Paul [Siehart?] and Dave Burress.

CC: David Burress, yes.

LS: Burress.

CC: Oh they were all pretty much alike. They each had their own talents. You know Henry Haslach is still active in the TAA.

LS: Yes. Yes. I've interviewed him as a matter of fact.

CC: It's been interesting to see Henry's change.

LS: Has he mellowed?

CC: Oh, that's probably as good a word to use as any. He's maybe a little more restrained. It's -- things are just a different style now. But, I admired all of these people, in general, for their skill. They were all very intelligent and mostly I think they knew what they were doing.

LS: Oh I see. You felt they were well prepared--

CC: I felt they had a purpose in what they were doing. I -- well prepared, I don't know about that. I don't know how you can be very well prepared--

LS: Were they clever in picking up inconsistencies and in--

CC: They weren't always very consistent in what they were doing and this kind of thing. I don't think they were inconsistent. I don't think the University 01:32:00presented an inconsistent point and this kind of thing. I think the University had a very relatively simple kind of thing they were presenting and it's not the sort of thing where you are trying to trick anybody or anything of this sort. So, it's not a matter of inconsistency so much they would pick up. They were articulate and--

LS: Did you enjoy the meetings?

CC: That kind of activity is exciting and stimulating. It's very tense. You recognize that it's a very serious matter. I suppose there is a certain amount 01:33:00of enjoyment in it. It's not the sort of thing which you would--that I would choose to make my life's work.

LS: Fortunately you don't have to.

CC: I'm not a labor negotiator. It's not my field of work and I--

LS: Well I would imagine these sessions were more entertaining than the ordinary labor negotiations.

CC: I never regarded it as entertainment.

LS: Oh you didn't?

CC: Oh no, no. It was highly frustrating. You'd go to a session for two or three hours and you were totally exhausted, you were unable to think creatively about other things.

LS: You mean because of being tired.

CC: Mentally tired. Just mentally tired. And particularly when you were trying 01:34:00to really reach agreement. This is extremely hard work for someone who--I think it's hard work even for people who do it as a full time occupation. And particularly the early sessions-- you're continually under pressure to not lose your temper when you're being deliberately provoked. No these were very difficult sessions.

LS: Was Jim Marketti different from the others? Did you feel that he had a different approach or different goals?

CC: Well Jim was of course a graduate student in industrial relations and so he 01:35:00had training and was skillful in these techniques and I was always sorry that he had left the University without completing his degree. He would have been, I think, a very skilled labor negotiator and I think it was too bad that he didn't go ahead and finish instead of leaving. But you know they all were pretty much--pretty bright young men. And I thought it was too bad that he didn't do that. Of course, he was one of the leaders in the group, took the leading position in negotiations.

LS: You were expected to communicate the progress to the rest of the College of 01:36:00Engineering. Was there interest here? Did you--there were John Hoopes, is it? How do you say his name?

CC: John Hoopes.

LS: And Arthur Tiedemann and Millard Johnson were the channels through whom you were to spread information.

CC: I would report back as it seemed appropriate or necessary either to the chairmen during the dean's executive committee meeting or through other people. People used to call me and ask questions about things--.

LS: Were they concerned about it here on the engineering campus?

CC: Oh, they were very interested in it and concerned in a sense that they 01:37:00wanted things to go well and they wanted--but they didn't have the immediate concern that people in departments where the teaching assistants were unhappy and were about ready to walk out on strike and this kind of thing.

LS: Except in mechanical engineering--you said did have a majority in the TAA.

CC: No, I don't think it was mechanical, I think industrial engineering.

LS: Oh, industrial.

CC: Industrial engineering had a majority of their people and engineering mechanics, I think, had a majority of their people who voted to join the union. But I don't think they were very interested in going out on strike. It's hard to understand why a department's teaching assistants voted for it. I believe in that particular group they had a relatively low turnout and those that were in 01:38:00favor of it managed to get those people that were in favor of the teaching assistants to go and vote and the others didn't bother and so that a minority of the department voted and carried the election, carried the other group. This is what always happens when you don't pay attention to your own affairs and stand up and be counted.

LS: Has this affected these departments? Have they had to have the evaluations?

CC: To a minor degree. Not greatly.

The college generally, the faculty of our college generally took the view that, well, let's get rid of this union, let's get it-- if they want to go on strike let 'em go ahead and strike and we'll get somebody else to do the work. This 01:39:00kind of thing. You know a really, militantly conservative view of this kind of thing.

LS: More than L&S.

CC: Well, I presume much more so, I don't know, but you see our college in practice would have been much less disrupted by a strike than the other departments because we don't use so many teaching assistants, and also because most of our teaching assistants would not go out on strike even if the rest of the union struck. They felt they weren't members of it, they didn't belong to it, and they--.

LS: They didn't identify with the group.

CC: No, they didn't. And I think that's probably still the feeling if this were to occur. Even this last time, I don't think any of the teaching assistants in the College of Engineering went on strike.

LS: Did any go on strike in the 1970s strike?

CC: To my knowledge none.

LS: So there was no picketing down here.

CC: No. There was no picketing out here. You see this kind of thing can be successful only if you have reasonably widespread popular support.

LS: Well, among the students as well. I mean the undergraduates.

CC: Among the students. And, they didn't. And we're isolated and that's not a particular [failing?]. They may have picketed out here but no one paid much attention to it. I think they picketed, but I don't even remember.

LS: Well, you said they had accomplished some valuable changes--the TA strike in 1970.

CC: Yes, viewing it from the teaching assistants' viewpoint I'm sure they would feel these things were valuable and there probably are practices which were 01:41:00brought to attention that I certainly wouldn't support doing.

LS: What?

CC: There is a provision in the contract that guarantees a period of support for a graduate student once he is employed as a teaching assistant.

LS: We did talk about that.

CC: I think we talked about that.

LS: Yes.

CC: That to me is an important thing and it attempted to address a problem which could have existed. I don't know to what extent it did. I think also the TAA focused attention on the problem of non-uniformity of workloads in a sense. It's 01:42:00possible for a teaching assistant to be working for a professor that assigns an unreasonable amount of work for the pay that the student is getting. These people really are graduate students and if they are working 40 hours a week for a professor teaching, working on a course they are not having very much time left to do their graduate studies.

LS: Was this happening in the College of Engineering?

CC: No, I don't think so. I don't think it happens very many places. But I can imagine that on occasion it did happen. Maybe not 40 hours a week but maybe some weeks 30 or more. You know, a lot of time, and so I think that the student could 01:43:00have gotten situations like this taken care of if he had gone to the department chairman. If he had just done it. But students are frequently working for this professor as a teaching assistant who is also their thesis supervisor so they're very reluctant to go and complain about a man who has a tremendous amount of control over their future careers and success. So, there undoubtedly are occasional abuses of this type and there may still be some going on, although I don't think--but now there is a formal mechanism for them to address this problem.

LS: Through the grievance procedure.

CC: Through the grievance procedure and in such a way that they may feel that they're less at risk now.

LS: Well, what would you have to say about the subsequent history of the TAA and the negotiations, particularly last year. There was a comment in the Cardinal after last year's failed strike that this would be the end of the union.

CC: I think it's a weak union and it will probably stay a weak union unless in some unfortunate way something happens that is of serious abuse of the teaching 01:45:00assistants from somewhere. In which case they now have a mechanism of quickly drawing more people in and forming up a stronger group. There isn't much need for the union. People don't really want to do away with it. I don't see any reason to try to destroy it or get rid of it, or anything like that and people don't have any desire to squeeze the last ounce of strength out of the teaching 01:46:00assistants or to get the wages down to the bare minimum and this kind of thing. People are really trying to deal in an equitable way and a reasonably straightforward honest way.

LS: I suppose they thought they always were.

CC: They always thought they were. That's right. And so unless something happens like happened before to form the teaching assistants' union, I would expect the union to sort of go along as an organization. I don't see any indication that the chancellor doesn't want to deal with them and isn't happy to go ahead and do it. And so we'll probably have it for a long time. But I don't think it will be a very strong, powerful group in most instances unless there is some external force.

LS: The negotiations this year--you probably didn't regard as very crucial. Is that right?

CC: I wouldn't say that. I would say the that negotiations could have been conducted in such a way that it would have provided a strong incentive for them to get more members and to build up a big organization and to--

LS: So, here's the negotiators [counted?]?

CC: Well you take care in this kind of thing. This is serious business.

LS: You mean they were handled well?

CC: Well, I guess I don't like the word handled.

LS: All right.

CC: Because I don't think we tried to handle them. I think we tried to deal with them as valued professional employees that were presenting their view and we 01:48:00were presenting the University's view in what we felt was an honest, reasonable way to come to an agreement.

LS: You did say--I've forgotten the words you used--if things had gone differently there could have been --

CC: Well, if we had treated this as a trivial matter, for instance. Or if had really not bargained with them in good faith, then I think this could have resulted in their becoming sufficiently frustrated and angry that they would then have had reason to say well they don't think we're a reasonable union, we're not doing this well, we'll get their attention.

LS: I see. Well, if you have nothing further to say about the TAA--

CC: Oh, there are lots of things you could talk about--the teaching assistants in their negotiations, but I don't think of anything particularly outstanding.

LS: You have been with it for a long time so--

CC: Yes, and I've been interested to see the people come in and go and the changes, and the kinds of things.

LS: The women got much more involved later on and that's been rather an important development I think, at least for the TAA.

CC: Well, I thought this year the TAA approached their negotiations in much more appropriate way than they had in previous years, that in many instances in past years they felt, it seemed to me, that they were trying to use the negotiations as a form to publicize their views rather than to accomplish anything which could be handled in a labor negotiation session.

LS: Now, Matthew Brlnn--is that right--was the president.

CC: Matt Brlnn, yes.

LS: Oh, Mark Furst--or what's his name. He was one of the bargainers.

CC: Mark Furst was one of the --

LS: Was this because of the kind of people who were bargaining were better or--

CC: I think they just decided to do it differently. I don't know why they did it or what the change in their organization was, but they did have different people. Some different people. But their approach was different, that's all.

LS: And just this year. It isn't that it's--

CC: Mainly. There was a big change this year.

LS: That's interesting. I'll ask Henry Haslach about that.

Well, I'd like to ask you about the Institute for Environmental Studies which seems to be a bone of contention around the whole University.

CC: I think that people in engineering have had some trouble with the general group of courses which have the word "environment" in the title. It's a kind of philosophical problem in that most people in engineering would define engineering as the use of scientific principles to solve problems for mankind. 01:52:00They don't regard engineering as the study of science but rather the application of science to solving real problems. So most of us have felt that what we were doing was dealing with the environment.

LS: All along.

CC: Yes, this is not new. I went into engineering practice in 1949 working for a company that made a large number of toxic materials and one of the concerns of our company was that no one get hurt. Now that meant no one in the plant, none of our neighbors, none of the children who might pick up some empty bottles in a 01:53:00trash pile, or anything else. This was a company that felt total responsibility to make sure that hazardous material was properly handled so the idea of dealing adequately with the environment was not a new concept to me when the environmentalists came along, and certainly the dumping of untreated sewage into water courses had been going on for a great many years. It's very important that this be changed. But this didn't seem to me to be something which you make a total study of and the study of environment.

So when it comes to talking about environmental studies or environmental courses of one type or another you get troubled because people then become experts or 01:54:00are giving the impression that they are expert in dealing with the problems of the environment whereas most of the environmental solutions are either political or economically related, or they involve engineering. Now the engineering technology to solve the treatment of sewage or the treatment of industrial waste, or the elimination of sulphur dioxide plumes, etc. are engineering problems which are related with what people are willing to pay for, what they 01:55:00are really willing to do. So that most of these problems will not benefit from training people in what the problem is, in studying the problems. And so you get troubled about well what are these people going to do and where are they going to work and what are they going to be really trained for. I guess I liken this to the difference between taking a course in music appreciation and taking a course in performance. Music appreciation is a fine thing to have and I think people ought to have some appreciation of these things but if you're going to have anybody that plays in an orchestra and does anything with music he's got to study it a little more deeply. And I think the same thing occurs with engineering. And environmental courses I'm somewhat inclined to put in the 01:56:00viewpoint of a kind of an appreciation of engineering instead of a study of engineering. This is a little bit aside. This is a kind of a philosophical problem that I think engineers have had with some of the very soft sort of courses which have been offered under the title of environmental studies, or environmental engineering.

LS: Do you know that this is--I suppose you do--that this is what the geographers say. In fact, what is being done is what they do and--

CC: No, I didn't really know this.

CC: Now, this was a matter of background. It's to explain why I feel that engineers kind of react negatively. [pause in tape] To this department. This 01:57:00isn't to say that's the right way to react or that there isn't reason for courses in environmental studies because obviously you can look at things which are being done which do not take into account a broad enough sphere of activities. My experience with this particular company may not have been at all typical as to what was going on because there are still companies that dump 01:58:00things in the river and don't worry about it at all. And there are state highway departments which locate highways by starting at this point and going as straight as possible in the direction they want to go in. And you can look at people who design projects from a particular narrow purpose without regarding the total overall pattern, so there was a lack of broad enough analysis of the results of particular projects or problems, and this kind of thing. And there also was no way in which a person could reasonably understand all of these things. So there was a kind of a void and I think that things like the Institute 01:59:00for Environmental Studies came into that void.

LS: But could the College of Engineering have filled the void itself?

CC: Well I rather doubt that it could have because it couldn't have gotten people to come and study in that area. You know if you're talking about what does a college do. A college works, or a university works on very long-range--we train students to think and then those students eventually get out and they eventually move on out to where they have some influence. So there were lots of things which had to be done outside which can't be handled by the University. Now the Institute for Environmental Studies here was set up to try to pull together across disciplines a sort of program to feed information in from 02:00:00various areas so that people in the various departments did recognize what was being contributed by other people, And so it's a good idea to have interdisciplinary studies. But when you do this you immediately run into the difficulty that people are trained very broadly and in relatively surface ways because of the breadth of their training so that they may not be equipped to do anything well.

LS: Do you have engineers who are taking a minor in the Institute. Would that accomplish the--

CC: No, we don't really do that. You do not have, as an undergraduate, have a minor. You can select electlves from any area you want and we may have some people who are taking courses in the Institute for Environmental Studies. We 02:01:00have joint appointments with people in engineering who--faculty who have appointments in the Institute for Environmental Studies.

LS: Now was there objection to that say in your faculty meeting?

CC: No. No objection to that. No problems with that.

The difficulty I think that arose about the Institute for Environmental Studies was when it started to assume the aspects of a college organizationally in which it was going to be--in essence, it was going to function as a college, making tenure appointments, operating with a director reporting to the chancellor, not through any of the academic teams, and so people then became concerned that courses of study would be developed which would duplicate those which were 02:02:00already existing and no one knew exactly what the body of knowledge was which was going to be assembled into a department which was conceivably an interdisciplinary type thing which then was to become a discipline.

LS: Yes.

CC: And so, you have problems of knowing well is this a discipline. And if it is a discipline, what is it. And so as long as it remained an interdisciplinary program drawing from existing well-established disciplines based on a science or particular study and serving integrating and cross-linking function, I don't think there's too much trouble with it. But when it becomes a discipline in itself it in many instances has so little quantitative content that engineers 02:03:00are troubled by it and they want to not--

LS: Were they philosophically troubled or is it a matter of competition?

CC: Yes. Philosophically troubled. It's, well, what are the people going to do. And who are going to solve the problems. What we have tried to do I think is to just make people that we're graduating more generally aware of the broader impact of their work and of the work that they will be doing later.

LS: You mean as a counter to what the--

CC: Well, as a response to the problems that society now has.

You know, make a civil engineer think well, gee, if I'm locating this highway I should really think about what I do to wetlands and--

LS: In other words you're saying this is the function that the Institute was taking on itself but we can do some of that here.

CC: I don't know whether the Institute was taking that on or not.

LS: That, well that must be--it's really a political philosophy, I suppose, the Institute is--

CC: I think what--we are going to train engineers. The Institute is not going to train engineers.

LS: Yes. But you're going to take some of what they have in mind and apply it?

CC: Oh yes. I think the programs have been broadened out in the college. But I don't know whether it was because of the Institute or just because of the general awareness of the faculty of the college that this is what's needed.

[pause in tape]

LS: I was going to ask you whether there would have been a division among those who would have put the environment first. Well, were any of the Army Corps of Engineers trained here?

CC: Well of course. And Professor Arno Lenz who used to be chairman of civil engineering who is now retired was an advisor and worked with the Army Corps of Engineers for many years. The Corps of Engineers has a goal which is established 02:05:00by federal law. They have a function---what their function is. And I don't think they just proceed ahead on a particular course in a way that is unresponsive to their instructions from the Congress.

LS: We'd better not debate that.

CC: Yes. I really don't. Now the problem--this is political --

LS: Oh, you're saying it's Congress?

CC: This is a political problem as to what they are. For instance there's a conflict now over changing the locks on the Alton Dam. It's just north of St. Louis. The Alton Dam on the Mississippi River. And you could say, well, the 02:06:00Corps of Engineers is disregarding the environment and they want to deepen the locks and that will result in these great big barges going up and down the Mississippi River and the environmentally oriented people in the area are taking it to court and having public hearings and all the rest of this. And on the other hand I can say the cheapest way to get coal up and down the Mississippi River, which we need to do very badly, is by barge. That thls uses less energy and will have less adverse impact on the environment than hauling it by truck. And so this a matter of--you see there's two sides to this kind of thing and it is not a matter of engineering to decide this. This is a matter of politics and 02:07:00public policy as to whether or not we're going to develop our rivers, and to what extent we're going to develop our rivers for barge travel and to what extent we're going to develop some other method of transportation, be it railroads or trucks or airplanes, or whatever it is. And so this is not a matter of one group being against the Corps of Engineers and the Corps of Engineers being against another. This is a matter of the people of the country instructing, listening to the pros and cons and instructing their representatives in Congress to establish a policy for the country as to how to go ahead. So I don't see this as a conflict for engineers.

LS: In that way engineers are acting like scientists in that they have a body of skills--

CC: They have a body of skills which they can say this is the way certain 02:08:00problems can be--these are alternative solutions to this particular problem. And we do not have the expertise, the all-powered, all-seeing expertise to tell the people. The people have to decide for themselves what they are going to do.

LS: I've just been thinking of your earlier remark that engineering did have as part of its goal the--

CC: Solving problems. Solving problems. I don't think this is irresponsible. I think this is a response to this kind of--I think that the Corps of Engineers--I think many state highways departments have been high-handed in some of these things.

LS: Yes.

CC: But this is the result of our falling to recognize and falling to be willing 02:09:00in political bodies to recognize the long time that is required to do certain things and failing to commit ourselves to long-term programs. All of our legislative structure is on very short range kind of things.

LS: Sort of the trouble the University has also isn't it? That it's on a short range legislative--

CC: Oh yes. All of our society is very much hampered by this.

LS: Could I just ask you, in chemical engineering, which after all is one of the most crucial in regard to I suppose, spray cans and things like that, what is the philosophy of the faculty in the chemical engineering department. Do they try to instill ideas about protection of the environment?

CC: I think so. I think the importance of responsibly dealing with problems of all kinds of this sort are very much dealt with.

LS: This would depend very much on the individuals wouldn't it?

CC: Oh yes.

LS: On the faculty.

CC: Oh sure. Some people are more interested in this kind of thing. You look at Professor Chapman. He made a very important contribution to cleaning up the Wisconsin River through finding out where mercury was getting into it. He made a 02:11:00lot of contributions in that. He has a project which is working on a new method of getting copper ore out of sulphide ores which will make it unnecessary to roast it and get sulphur dioxide out. So there's a lot of work. Professor Koutsky has had some projects in recycling of tires and trying to figure out how to use the material, so there is--. In addition to that, I think that there is a fair amount of all of this in the courses-brought into what you do. You have to treat the wastes from industrial processes, you have to be sure of the safety of the process, and I put toxic handling of toxic materials as a part of safety.

You see the chemical industry in this country for many years, for decades, has had the best safety record of any industry group in the United States.

LS: That's very much to its credit.

CC: Well, it's--you know--an order of magnitude lower--lost time accident record--than any other industry, and you can say that part of this is due to the inherent nature of the industry but if you consider the kinds of materials that are handled in the chemical industry this is not necessarily true. I think that it's been due to the thoughtfulness of the designers, of the people who did it, 02:13:00and the management of this industry, the executive management of this industry which decide to do it. Companies like DuPont, for instance, are leaders in this as far as safety records are concerned.

LS: Is there something else that we should be saying about the Institute?

CC: No. I guess I haven't--.

LS: It's developing, you know, a program of undergraduate--trying to develop an undergraduate major.

CC: It will be interesting to see how this turns out. I can have prejudices about this. I won't say that I have any great answers to the whole thing. I 02:14:00would hope that people look at these things, that students look at these things honestly and that they are presented an honest picture. Engineers don't have any trouble finding work because they can work--most of the people that are working in environmental activities are not people that have been trained in environmental studies courses. They are people that have been trained in engineering. Because you have to have hard knowledge and hard facts.

LS: I wanted to ask you--you did talk about students and more women. I wanted to ask you if you were not getting a different type of student now, people who are politically coming into engineering, not for the science of it but in order to 02:15:00get the tool to protect the environment.

CC: We have a large number of women that are coming into it because they see this I think as an interesting career and overcoming the prejudices about women in this kind of an occupation.

LS: But I mean idealists who want to somehow help the environment.

CC: I think engineers were always idealists.

LS: O.K.

CC: See, I don't think there is any difference about that. We are getting a fair number of students transferring from other disciplines into engineering and I think this is because they see this as--because all students seem to be more occupation, job profession, career-oriented now.

LS: Well, we did talk about this earlier.

CC: And so I think this is happening in engineering too.

LS: Well, let's move briefly to the Institute for Technology in Surabaya where 02:16:00you've just been for three weeks.

CC: Oh, all right.

LS: Why is the University of Wisconsin involved and who is paying for it?

CC: We're involved in this because we have some faculty members that want to do it.

LS: There have already been some there.

CC: Yes, it's really that simple. That, we don't find in administration, don't find projects and tell faculty, you ought to be involved in this.

LS: But the Ford Foundation doesn't come to you and say would you do this.

CC: We were not approached by the Ford Foundation or anybody else. Professor Carbon through his interest in this particular area and through a project he had, found out that--I don't exactly how he did find out--that there was an 02:17:00Institute in Surabaya--a Technical Institute of Surabaya--that was considering improving itself. Eastern Java is expanding rapidly.

LS: There's a big center in Bandung. The ITB.

CC: Surabaya is the industrial city. The second largest city in Java and it is the center of industrial expansion. Eastern Java--the governor of Eastern Java a year ago received a prize for the greatest promotion of industry in this area--the greatest development. Indonesians are interested in developing their country and they are trying to do something about it. One of their problems is that they have a shortage of engineers and the Technical Institute of Surabaya 02:18:00is a large engineering school. It has about 3,000 students, it's spread out on several campuses. Each department is in a different location and they decided that they wanted to improve this. In order to do it they wanted to establish a single campus and draw all their faculty together. They wanted to find a way in which they could get--and I say they because this was the Indonesians that wanted to do this. They saw this as their problem. They wanted to get people through their school more rapidly. Many of them were never finishing. A very slow output. Poor efficiency. Some of them take six or more years to graduate. And so they obtained funds from the Asian Development Bank in Manila to run a 02:19:00preliminary study of what could be done, a feasibility study of what should be done in this Institute. Now the Asian Development Bank asked various institutions, would you be interested in doing this. And our institution was selected.

LS: Was it just in the United States or other countries as well?

CC: No, I think they inquired of--I don't know where all they got bids but I would expect that they would get them from--there was at least one English university that proposed to do this feasibility study. And Wisconsin was selected to do it. And Wisconsin then got the entire job--and they subcontracted a part of it to an architectural firm from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then 02:20:00some professors here went under the direction of Professor Carbon.

LS: Who was in charge of getting the bid and subcontracting?

CC: Professor Carbon.

LS: I see.

CC: Wisconsin had it and he was the project director. Professor Max Carbon. And so we made a study and we produced you know, an inch thick report to the Asian Development Bank as to whether it was feasible for--and this was a report to the bank--paid for by the bank entirely--

LS: How long ago did this begin?

CC: Oh, a year and a half or more ago.

LS: Did you have to get the chancellor's approval to go and do this.

CC: Sure, this is just like any University contract.

LS: Then you must have somebody up at the chancellor's office who--

CC: It has to be approved by the regents. But this goes as a proposal. It goes 02:21:00through Research Administration actually and there's an office there that looks at this. You don't enter into these things without the chancellor's knowledge.

LS: Who is--is that David Johnson's field or--

CC: He was involved in it I'm sure, but we submitted through Research Administration from our college. It was a proposal from our college. And so they made the study. We had people over there a couple of times and this was a report to the bank which said, this Institute has the capability of becoming a first-class school of engineering, in essence. It should do certain things and it will cost this amount. That's--you know--what it is. Then on the basis of that report the bank decided to lend the Indonesian government--and on the 02:22:00request of the Indonesian government that later made the loan application, the bank then approved a loan to carry out this improvement of this Technical Institute, this school. Now the total program involves funds from the bank of as I recall about $25,000,000 of international exchange-dollar value.

LS: Is this an American funded bank -- or we shouldn't get into that probably.

CC: Well, I can tell you a little about the Asian Development Bank. The Asian Development Bank is funded by donations from the developed countries. The U.S. puts money into it--Australia, Japan--contributions from all of these form a 02:23:00fund which is then loaned, at interest, to countries which want to borrow foreign exchange, and the Indonesian government borrows the money at 2/3% or whatever they have to pay, and then after a period they pay it off. They have to pay it back. So this is, in a sense, a revolving fund type thing. It's located in Manila. Its office is in Manila and it operates in Asia.

LS: O.K.

CC: So that's where it gets its money from. Some of it comes from I suppose US aid programs to the Bank but that's just the source of the capital and then it 02:24:00has to be paid back. They make lots of different kinds of loans like this--or development loans really. Well the Indonesian government then have to put in money which they will put in in local currency--Indonesian currency--and build buildings and the rest of it. So then the Indonesian government requested bids or proposals from institutions of higher education with engineering schools and also from architectural firms. And we had some faculty people who wanted to do this. And so they prepared a proposal which was reviewed through the usual University procedures and submitted to the Director of the Technical Institute 02:25:00of Surabaya project, is also the Rector of the Institute. A man named Zaki. And they reviewed their proposals and selected Wisconsin as-- actually as the number 2. Delected Stanford University. They also selected an architectural firm because they are going to build a new campus--develop a new campus and work with an architectural firm and then they'll have an academic institution as a linkage institution to provide advice in the academic area--to help them tell the architect how to design--how to big to make it--and this sort of thing. And also they are going to send their faculty people to overseas institutions for 02:26:00training, upgrading, so they are going to upgrade their faculty and they wanted someone to administer the faculty fellowships program for the Indonesians. So this is an Indonesian program, controlled by the Indonesians, for one of their institutions and the Indonesian government will write a contract with an architectural firm for the buildings. They will write a contract with us for the academic linkage concern.

LS: And some of your faculty go out to teach?

CC: Well, they will probably not teach in the usual sense but they will work with the faculty there in developing new programs, new teaching methods, new courses, and advising on establishing laboratories and building facilities and 02:27:00provide the information about this. They will no doubt give lectures and seminars. But we'll be working more with their faculty than we will with their students. Most of their students don't know English, or aren't fluent in English and so--we're not really going to be just providing the teaching, we don't have that much input into it. It's a four year program and we hope to get it started early in 1977 and finish it by the end of 1980.

LS: Do you expect to be further involved than you have been?

CC: I'm scheduled to go out there for a two-month period early in the program to--

CC: --assist with setting it up and also to provide advice and academic administration.

LS: I've heard it said that the University of Wisconsin's enormous involvement in Indonesia--and it is very big--all had something to do with the CIA.

CC: As far as I know--I don't know what it would have. I've certainly never talked to anybody about the CIA. I don't think any of the CIA people have talked to any of the group. That's, of course, always suggested, it's a kind of a popular thing. There have been occasions when I know that scientific missions visitors--going to Russia and places like that were approached by the CIA before 02:29:00they left. This was not here at Wisconsin. Years ago before I ever came here I've had friends that were members of the first scientific visiting teams that went into Russia. You know this was in the '60s when they had little if any information about those countries and they were interested in trying to get--CIA people interested in trying to assess the general technology level in the Russian scientific institutes and schools that these people were visiting. And so when a visitor would go into Russia for this kind of thing why I think they were asked after they came back to comment on what they had seen. You know just 02:30:00like any visitor might when he goes to another place. But we don't have any money--any sources--except the Indonesians actually and they get their foreign exchange from their Asian Development Bank loan. No, it's a pretty straightforward I suppose altruistic kind of motive on the part of the faculty that are involved in it. This is a--we were there for less than three weeks, 02:31:00about ten days in Surabaya and--so you get the impression that the people that you meet are very cheerful, friendly, enthusiastic, hard working. Nice people to work with. They have a lot of problems in developing their Institute. They are very interested in doing it and it's an opportunity to work with them and an exciting project, to maybe make a contribution to the development of the country that in a way will make some lasting friends. Just an exciting kind of thing. It's an opportunity as I see it for the faculty to go to broaden themselves, to 02:32:00have an experience of working in an institutional development program, seeing the problems of planning, organizing and developing this kind of thing in a very short period of time. It's a valuable experience for someone going to stay in education in this country.

LS: Yes.

CC: It's a broadening experience so in that sense I think it contributes to the professional development of the faculty people that participate. Most of the people--or a good many of the people--are younger faculty.

LS: In departments it's always quite a good thing to have a few people going off. It helps the budget.

CC: Well not that so much. We'll have some people coming in the other direction and our graduate program is good--actually it's an outstanding graduate program 02:33:00because we get outstanding students as much as for any other reason. So you have to have interaction with other places if you are going to continue to get good students. And we'll get some good students from there in time.

LS: Is there anything else you want to talk about. I know you're in charge, I believe, of the Engineering Research. What is the title of that?

CC: I'm in charge of the Engineering Experiment Station. This is really our administrative structure for research and graduate programs in the College of Engineering.

LS: You're responsible for allocating funds and accepting research projects. Isn't that right? Deciding who should get what?

CC: Well research projects come into the college because of proposals written by the faculty. I don't go out for instance and get research money and bring it in.

LS: No, but I mean of those that come in, you decide among them.

CC: No, once a principle investigator gets a research project it's his project and he decides how he is going to spend the money. We do have in our college, in the Experiment Station, some small amount of state funds which really just provides a base for the rest of the funding, and we work to try to allocate this among the programs to help departments get things started. This is pretty much faculty control all the way through. You see it's hard to explain administration in our university to someone who hasn't been involved in it carefully. Because 02:35:00you think of the dean or the chancellor--president-- as being the one who directs things--controls where it goes, how it operates, but it really isn't that way. This is an Institution which is controlled and governed by the faculty. That's the reason you asked me why we're in Surabaya. I said because we had some faculty people that wanted to do that. If we didn't have some faculty people that wanted to do it not only would we not do it but we couldn't do it because we wouldn't have anybody to do the work. And so it's the same way with research. We're involved in research projects because we had not only people who want to do it but people who have sufficient stature and sufficiently good ideas that they can get funds to do itf because we couldn't do very much research if 02:36:00we didn't have outside funds.

LS: Would you accept the definition of administration in a university, which is Jacques Barz^n's, as one of distributing the resources to the best advantage of everyone. Do you think that would cover the--.

CC: No, I don't define it that way. We have some resources which we allocate and we have some long-term control through budgeting and through the hiring of people and influencing the hiring of people, but mainly our function is to facilitate the faculty achieving its goals. We help people do what they want to do.

LS: I guess that is different.

CC: And I really believe that that's the way we operate. We have people that have sent proposals to the National Science Foundation, and we have in our Engineering Experiment Station some people who have spent many years learning and keeping in touch with people in the National Science Foundation and so when we submit a professor's proposal to the National Science Foundation we are reasonably confident it gets submitted the right way, to the right people. And if it gets turned down we can find out why, and we can provide advice to that man as to why his proposal was rejected, and if he then chooses to use that advice and rewrite it and submit it again he has a better chance than if he didn't do it. When we get a new organization in Washington like ERDA where 02:38:00everything is all scrambled upside down and nobody even down there knows what's going on we start again to study that organization and to figure out how to do that. So, in a sense, we do have I think an important role but it would be of no value whatsoever if we did not have a faculty that was interested in doing research and was very competent, able to do this work and to write proposals. But really we're more in the role of facilitating the efforts of the faculty than we are in allocating resources.

We don't have resources to allocate. The faculty get the resources.

LS: The faculty is one of the resources, and space.

CC: But the allocation there was made long ago. Space--somewhat, but you know 02:39:00after you have a certain number of people in a certain number of offices what are you going to do? Are you going to--. What is the allocation problem?

LS: You know, incidentally, I was thinking that Dean Doremus--he's associate dean as you are I believe--.

CC: Yes.

LS: Three of his offices I think would fit in yours.

CC: Would they?

LS: Yes.

CC: Well I don't think it's quite like that but--.

LS: I guess it's just a matter of chance, isn't it?

CC: Yes, there's a university standard which was established before this building was built on how large offices are to be, and I don't think this office was designed the way it should be. As a matter of fact, I was involved in 02:40:00designing the offices on this floor of this building, and this office is not designed the way I drew it on the drawing. I had this wall on this column line because I thought that space ought to be out where the secretary would have all the files and where the space would be more useful, and this office is bigger than it needs to be. But they have a rule you know about the director of a program is supposed to have so many square feet--.

LS: This is a University rule you mean?

CC: Yes.

LS: Oh I see.

CC: Construction and Planning had this--.

LS: That's very interesting.

CC: And it's related to--the whole building's design is related to this certain size cubicles so that they get it between column lines, and really this is two offices wide as compared with--out to that column--plus one window more. And 02:41:00really it would have been just as useful to have it right there. But they decided this is the director of the Engineering Research so this office must be larger than any other office in the building. You know it's really kind of ridiculous. But I use this end of it as a conference room.

LS: I suppose you do have--since you have the space you would have the conferences here.

CC: Lot's of my activity involves just talking to groups of three or four people and so we do that instead of going to a conference room. I was just out at Stanford University last week on an engineering accreditation. I was one of the people--one of the outside visitors to go--and I went through their new 02:42:00chemistry building. They are just finishing it and I was really surprised at the size of the professor's offices in this building.

LS: Are they big or little?

CC: Much larger than anything we would have--and it's a new building. It also looked like a building that was designed before we were so conscious of the cost of energy because it's going to be a high energy user.

LS: Yes, they have to cool it there don't they rather than heating it I suppose.

CC: Well they shouldn't have to but they have it all enclosed so they'll have to. It's kind of interesting.

LS: Do you do that very often? Go out on accrediting trips?

CC: Not very often. There are a lot of people involved in it so that each 02:43:00individual isn't asked too often. I've been twice this year and that will probably be all that I will make.

LS: We seem to be at the end of the interview yet I didn't ask you if you had served on other committees in the University. I have a list of committees you've been on but most of them seem to have to do with engineering but it may be an old list. Have you been on any all-University committees aside from the TAA?

CC: Well I've served on the Honorary Degrees committee, I'm on the University-Industry Research Program Advisory Committee, I'm on the Physical Sciences Laboratory Advisory Committee, I used to be on the University Space 02:44:00Sciences and Engineering Committee. I chaired our ad hoc committee--chancellor's committee--on Education Satellite Program. I'm on the all-University Oceanography Council Committee. I was on the Research Committee for four years, which is an all-university committee.

LS: The Research Committee? I don't know enough about that yet to ask you anything about that.

CC: Oh it's the committee in the Graduate School advisory to the dean of the Graduate School which allocates the funds which come from the Wisconsin Alumni 02:45:00Research Foundation. This is campus-wide.

LS: So that's a lot of money to deal with.

CC: It's a little over $3,000,000 a year usually.

LS: How long a term do you serve on that committee?

CC: Normally it's three years. I served four years.

LS: Oh, it's not an automatically rotating off.

CC: No. No, it's--but usually people are on it about three years.

LS: Is it elective?

CC: No, it's appointed by the dean of the Graduate School. I don't know if I've been on any others or not outside the college. That's probably most of them. Some of them are short time and some of them are long.

LS: Well, perhaps we should stop here. You've given me a lot of time.

CC: I've enjoyed talking with you.