Fifth Interview with Fred Harrington (1985)

[0:00:00] SMAIL: This is an interview with Fred Harvey Harrington. The date is June 25, 1985. We're talking in his office in Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R" Hall. It's the fifth session of interviews with him, and this time we're discussing Extension--the merger of General and Agricultural Extension in 1965. I'm Laura Smail. I'm doing the interview for the University Archives Oral History Project. SMAIL: Well, we decided not, after all, to talk about Extension today. SMAIL: So we're going to talk about the background, in effect, of merger, which is your relations with the state university. HARRINGTON: Yes, although it doesn't come to merger because I wasn't here when merger took place. SMAIL: No, I know that, but it's part of the history of merger. HARRINGTON: Okay, you want me to talk about my relations with the state colleges and state universities? SMAIL: Yes. HARRINGTON: When I came to the University, of course, I didn't know anything about the state colleges, and they were then emerging from the old normal school days into being state teachers colleges. I did come to see some of them because I made speeches in my field of American foreign relations out at some of the state college campuses, and I can remember going to some of these campuses quite early in my teaching career. Actually, when I was still altogether in the history department, before I had gone into administration at all, I remember going to the La Crosse campus and seeing--there it was: one building, Old Main, and really kind of a two-bit operation. And I remember going to Oshkosh, for example, which was not only a same kind of a thing--just an Old Main--but really headed by a person that represented the old school-superintendent kind of management, so that naturally I, like lots of other people, didn't think much about the state colleges in those days. SMAIL: What period did you say this was? HARRINGTON: I came here in 1937. SMAIL: This was before the war that you're talking about. HARRINGTON: 1937, 1940, and then when I came back, 1945 to 1947, before I really got much involved into statewide things. State colleges seemed to me to be pretty inferior. Of course, I felt the same thing about Milwaukee, which was a two-year university center, and the university centers, so I didn't have much to do with these. But as I came into administration, I could see that the state colleges were getting to be quite important. They were still called Wisconsin State Colleges, but they were fairly impressive. Actually, the most impressive of them was, of course, Milwaukee. I had known Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", who was head of the Wisconsin State Teachers College, and that became the Wisconsin State University-Milwaukee in that period, and it seemed to me to be an institution of some standing. I guess I got to know it first in the 1940s when I was at Arkansas and came up for a meeting at Milwaukee, which Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" ran, of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. So it did seem to me that these places--I got to see that they were better. When I went into administration, of course--that was in 1956--I then got to know the state colleges better, because they'd already become Wisconsin State Universities by that time, and came to see that they were improving rapidly. Of course, it was after World War II that they began to get large numbers and began to be more than teachers colleges, and actually began to more than prepare--well, many of them just prepared elementary teachers originally, and they got into the high school preparing business. But they became liberal arts colleges as well, and schools where you could get some commerce courses and so on, so that I probably came to see the quality of the state colleges and their strength earlier than most people who were tied 00:03:00 to the Madison campus. My big experience, however, was in connection with the Milwaukee state university, because from 1953 on I was heavily involved in the Milwaukee question--that is, Should the University be merged with state colleges, or should Milwaukee be developed as a separate university connected with the state colleges or with the University? Of course, it was in that connection that I got to know the Milwaukee campus very well, and then could see the strength of the other state colleges. We were testifying. I was faculty representative on the Milwaukee question--the integration question or coordination question--before I really got into the administration, and then came to know the presidents of the state colleges. I could see that some of these people were quite capable. Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" for example, and Rex Mitchellxe "Mitchell, Rex" of La Crosse were the people who spoke for the state colleges. While there were others who were first-rate, like Haasxe "Haas, Leonard" of Eau Claire, those two were the two that I got to know best because they were talking for the state universities, usually against us. But along that way, from 1953, when we got into the Milwaukee question, on to the time when I became vice-president in 1958, I came to see something very important: that the key to the whole thing was McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", who was a master politician and who had the good sense to have his office right in the capitol. Now, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was not academic in the sense of the Madison campus faculty academics. He had headed the Teacher Training School--a practice school, I guess it was--at Eau Claire before he came to this top job. I guess his title was nothing very significant. I think he was secretary of the State College Board. But he was a master politician, and he took advantage of all the opportunities that came up after World War II--for example, the opportunity to borrow money at a very low rate to build dormitories. So he built an enormous number of dormitories, and he got into the legislature and got money, because, of course, as the state colleges, the state universities, increased their enrollment, they had the right to have buildings. And he was very good at arranging this--very good at working with individual legislators, working with the Joint Finance Committee, working with the legislature. So obviously I came to admire him. I did not know him well then. The University political representative in those days, at the end of the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period and through the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" period, when I was assistant to President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" and then was vice-president under Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A", was Bill Youngxe "Young, William H". Bill Youngxe "Young, William H", who was, of course, a professor of political science and himself a very capable politician, was very close to McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". They worked together, and they made common cause on most questions with reference to the budget. Generally, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" 00:06:00 was better at delivering legislators than Bill, but Bill was very good too. He had connections with some legislators that were very close indeed, as, for example, with Fosterxe "Foster, Edwin" Porterxe "Porter, Foster" and with Mel Lairdxe "Laird, Melvin R", who was in the legislature before he went to Washington and who said how good Bill was when he came here to get an honorary degree. Bill and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" were working together, and one could not help but think well of them. And certainly in talking to Bill, with whom I was very close in those days, I could see that his admiration for McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", and his feeling that McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" knew the political thing well, was enough to make me respect McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and regard him well. Some way or other, however, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and I never hit it off personally the way that Bill and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" did. One could put that, if one wanted to, saying that Bill deferred to McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" quite a bit. Some critics of Bill would say that what Bill did was to take the university budget and work with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" as to what they could get, and then came back and sold that to the University in his position as the budget assistant to the president. That's a rather unkind statement, I think, because what Bill did was to take the university budget and see then how much he could get, and by working with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", he could see how they could get the thing through. He operated as a separate person, of course, but at the same time he was in touch with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" all the time. I suppose I wasn't altogether in tune with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" rather for another reason--that I was pretty much an academic type--a faculty representative, if you like--but after all a little stiff as compared with Bill, who was much more of a person to get along--a political scientist who at the same time understood not only the budget process, because the budget process was where Bill was at his best, but also had a personal relationship to McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and to the people with whom McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" worked in the legislature that I never was able to get and recognized I couldn't get. So that when I became president, in selecting a person to work the legislature, since I felt we probably needed a change from the old days, I selected George Fieldxe "Field, George R", who was able to mix in a way that I wasn't. But that's a different thing, you see, and therefore my relationship with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was, I suppose, cool--cool partly because it was not as warm as Bill's was, partly because McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and I were different kind of people, which he always recognized. And I'm sure he always respected me and thought well of me, and has many times said publicly that I was a capable president. He could see that I was more forceful, certainly, than Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A", and initially Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" told McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" that I was a person he should have some respect for. On the other hand, 00:09:00 McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" recognized always that I was not the informal kind of person, and here McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" made his pattern and did it with great skill, because in addition to working right in the state capitol--having his office there in the state capitol--he played poker and went fishing with a group of prominent persons. This reached out beyond Wisconsin to include Mel Lairdxe "Laird, Melvin R" after Mel Lairdxe "Laird, Melvin R" left here, but it was essentially a Wisconsin group, because McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was a Wisconsin politician and didn't go out of Wisconsin--didn't go to academic meetings out of Wisconsin or anything like that. It was another point of our difference because I felt, Well, we're on the national scene. You're playing the state scene only. Those are all points that might be made with reference to my relationship with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". At the same time, I suppose, we should say that the real conflict came on the interests of the University as against the interests of the state universities. And from 1953 on, the state university system wanted to develop Milwaukee as a major institution--wanted to have in the state university system one towering institution. And the University didn't want that. What the University had, of course, was a two-year center in Milwaukee, and the state colleges, or state universities, had a four-year--I guess a master's degree, too--that was much bigger and had a person, Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", who I suppose had more statewide respect than the head of the two-year center at the university--Parkinsonxe "Parkinson, George A" [inaudible], who, however, was a power in Milwaukee. He later became head of the vocational school down there--not nearly as nice a guy as Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", either. Well, the desire of McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and his regents to control Milwaukee--after all, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was a political person; he knew politics. And he knew that with his state universities scattered around the state, he had voices in the legislature, not only because he was in the capitol, but because his campuses were all over the state and were important to the legislators, and they could reach the legislators. He always insisted his chancellors were in touch with the legislators. He always insisted that his regents--they came from each of the state colleges, state university towns--that the regent work with the chancellor and with the state legislator to have some power. After all, you put Milwaukee into the picture--that's a powerful thing, because in the same way he had had a Milwaukee regent and had Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", who was perhaps more powerful than any of the other chancellors and a little more independent of a regent than some of the chancellors. In most places the regent told the chancellor what to do, but in Milwaukee--well, who's going to run Milwaukee with some confidence? Therefore McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and the University were at odds, and this was long before I became president. But the University was lined up against McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and defeated the first effort to put the whole thing together. That was the Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" effort to combine everything, and the University was bitterly opposed to that and fought it by saying--a good many of the University 00:12:00 spokesmen said--that those state universities or state colleges, they weren't much good anyhow. Mark Ingrahamxe "Ingraham, Mark H", for example, had made a functions and policies report in which he suggested closing out some of the state colleges. This was before they became as powerful as they became in the full McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" period. But there was some bad feeling there, and bad feeling because the state colleges, on the whole, would have liked the merger at that time--to have the whole thing together. Well, when the merger was beaten, then the question was what was going to happen to Milwaukee, although Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" kept on feeling that the merger ought to take place. The University did beat that, and that was President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" and his political people, not me. It was actually before Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" came onto the scene. Roy Lubergxe "Luberg, LeRoy" and Jennell Olsonxe "Olson, Jennell", and the regents like Regent Sensenbrennerxe "Sensenbrenner, Frank J" and so on, were the people that won that one. That made for some friction between the state universities and the University, and of course a consequence of that was that Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" did a great deal of patching up so that he and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" could work together. But that was not the end of the conflict, because once the merger troubles of the Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" period gave way, still in the Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" period, to what was going to happen to Milwaukee, because once the merger of the whole thing didn't work, then Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" was in favor of developing the Milwaukee area as a big thing. And of course Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" would have been willing, probably, to have it as separate from either one of us, but obviously McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" wanted it for the state universities, and the University wanted it for the University. This was in the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period and on into the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" period. Well, it was really in the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period; it was all decided in the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period, wasn't it, because in the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period the University decided it wanted--if you're going to develop Milwaukee you ought to have it under the University. University regents ultimately came to this, although some of them originally were in favor of giving Milwaukee up to the state universities. But ultimately the University regents came around to feeling that we ought to have Milwaukee--some of them because they wanted to hold Milwaukee down, not have it be a rival of Madison, others because they came to recognize that Milwaukee should have a place of prominence. This was quite a fight, and while I was not yet president or even vice-president, I was spokesman for the faculty. SMAIL: You were on the committee, weren't you? HARRINGTON: I was on the Integration Committee, and part of the time I was chairman of it, because the original chairman, Bunnxe "Bunn, Bob", went on leave. So I was the spokesman even while Bunnxe "Bunn, Bob" was chairman. I often was the spokesman to the 00:15:00 legislature, so that obviously I was the guy opposing McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". And McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" didn't talk to these legislative committees. He had Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" do it, or he'd talk behind the scenes for it. But he had Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" or Rex Mitchellxe "Mitchell, Rex" do the talking. SMAIL: Who is Rex Mitchellxe "Mitchell, Rex"? HARRINGTON: Rex Mitchellxe "Mitchell, Rex" was the president of La Crosse, who was a speech major and kind of a talker. In this period, then, the University and the state colleges really almost came to blows, you might say, because who was to get this? It was a serious business for the state universities--the control of Milwaukee. Actually, the University and the state universities agreed that one of us should have it. It shouldn't be a separate university. You could understand that. And ultimately a deal was made. I wasn't involved in that, because I was overseas by that time; I was in Denmark when the boards of regents made a deal. Gelattxe "Gelatt, Charles D" and McIntyrexe "McIntyre, William D" made a deal--the presidents of the two boards of regents. This has been handled before in other connections, but is part of this story of the relations of the state colleges. The deal was that the University would get Milwaukee, keeping Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" as the head of that institution--he would be the provost; he had been the president of the state universities--and that there would be a coordinating committee which would do, on a big scale, substantially what Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" did on a political scale, so that the Coordinating Committee came into connection with that. That still meant that the University and the state colleges were at odds, because they were at odds in the Coordinating Committee and on from then, because the Coordinating Committee came into existence at the end of the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period and through the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" period and on into my period. And the question then was, "Well, suppose you do something else? Suppose you develop some additional degree-granting places in [the] Kenosha-Racine area and then in Green Bay?" They were the obvious places where the University had two-year centers as we had in Milwaukee, the difference being that in Milwaukee there was a Wisconsin state university, and in Kenosha-Racine all there was was the university two-year centers. In Green Bay all there was was a two-year center, but of course there was a state university quite close to Green Bay at Oshkosh, and there was a state university quite close to Kenosha-Racine at Whitewater. So that when, in the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" period, the question was, "With all this great enrollment, should you do something in these places?" and the University began to propose our doing something--really, the pressure was from the legislature. Just as I became president, then the question was, "Well, what about it?" The week I became president, I went down to the legislature for the Joint Finance and they said, "What are going to do about this demand for additional campuses?" I said, "We're prepared to develop a four-year campus in Kenosha-Racine by combining our two-year campuses, and let them have third and fourth-year work. We'd done it already a little bit--offered some third- and fourth-year work--right after the war, and we're ready to do that." I didn't say we would develop one in Green Bay. Ultimately, there was a political compromise, so that the Democrats said we should have a campus there and the Republicans said we should have one in Green Bay, and of course the politicians like Governor 00:18:00 Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" went along with that. But obviously, this meant that just as I was becoming president, I was taking a stand that the University was going to be in charge of the development in the big cities, because Kenosha-Racine and Green Bay were the big cities when you get out of Milwaukee, except for places like Eau Claire where the state universities were already established. Obviously, the state universities didn't like that, and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" didn't like it, so that when this got into the legislature with our proposal that we go ahead in Racine-Kenosha, and then with the ultimate proposal that we go ahead in Racine-Kenosha and with Green Bay, I at first said, "No, we'll not go ahead with Green Bay." But I had to give way on that. I went up to Green Bay and made a speech, saying that, "Green Bay is not ready. We do not have enough students here," which is right, but that's not political. So that ultimately it came that we developed both places. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", of course, thought that this was most distressing, and naturally looked on me as an imperialist taking over. SMAIL: Was it your idea to begin with? HARRINGTON: No, it was the pressure. The pressure was there. I readily grabbed it. SMAIL: Yes. But you didn't initiate it. HARRINGTON: No, the pressure came--well, really, the pressure came from Molinaroxe "Molinaro, George" in Kenosha. He was thought of as a very prominent Democrat. That was his one idea. He was going to have a campus down there that would be a big campus and would play Notre Dame in football and that kind of stuff. SMAIL: And they wanted to have the prestige of the UW-Madison. HARRINGTON: Yes. So when it came to the legislature, even though the Wisconsin state universities had become quite something, the University's name was the big name. And this had shown up in the Milwaukee question. That's why the University got Milwaukee, not only because it was a deal, but because, generally speaking, the thought of being connected with the University--the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee--instead of just taking the Wisconsin State University-Milwaukee, which people remembered as a normal school, and Golda Meirxe "Meir, Golda" went there and all that, and developing that--the difference was great, so that the answer to this was, of course, that the legislature chose the University. In any case, Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" was in the very end of his legislative period; he was on that side. This was settled that way, except that when it got into the legislature--McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was obviously a much better politician than I, and I had moved a little away from Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" and towards an inexperienced kind of person, George Fieldxe "Field, George R", who, however, was real sharp. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was obviously a better operator than I. He put his man, Dezoniaxe "Dezonia, Robert", lobbying to see if they couldn't get those, because after all, they were going to be undergraduate colleges like the state university. And the University 00:21:00 shouldn't have everything and all this kind of stuff, and they were more logically like Wisconsin state universities. Of course, we had not only [the] University name, but we also had--we were on the ground. We had the two-year campuses in Kenosha-Racine, and we had the two-year campus in Green Bay. And communities were all for the University, with the University alumni in those areas pushing it, so McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" didn't win that. I say this because McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was obviously a better political operator than I was, and he could have won if it had been an even contest, as it were. Naturally, this didn't make us all that friendly, but we maintained what you'd call an arms-length friendship. We were always polite to each other. We often were involved with each other because, of course, in the Coordinating Committee--you had both to appear before the Coordinating Committee. The Coordinating Committee really wasn't involved at all in this question of who was going to get Racine-Kenosha and who was going to get Green Bay. It turns out, in the long run, not to be very important. It all came together. But it was important with reference to the University's relationship with the state universities. In all of this, obviously, I had support of the regents, who were all University-connected--University of Madison-connected--and if there was any difference--that there were some people in Milwaukee, for example, who felt that instead of developing a new university in Kenosha-Racine, one ought to develop a branch of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee towards the south, or maybe move the whole campus. Some of the regents felt that we ought to give up that campus down there by Shorewood and move it all out to some rural place and then we wouldn't need anything further south. But more particularly, it would be a rural university. Rennebohmxe "Rennebohm, Oscar" as a regent was very much of that view. But in all of this, in relationship to the state universities, that was the thing. Well, I went out of my way to try to be friendly but at the same time be tough in terms of getting what we wanted. During the period when I was president, I guess I spoke on all the campuses. I gave many of the commencement addresses. You know you need an outside person, and here's somebody you can get free because I didn't take any fees, or if they gave me some--some of them gave--I gave them back to them for their scholarship fund. And it was friendly enough. I got to know all these presidents because they were all at the Coordinating Committee, and some of them I could get along with very well, maybe even better than McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" could, because some of them were chafing a little under McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene"'s hard-line hand, and some of them were academic types, increasingly. As the Wisconsin state universities got to be more important, the faculties began to speak up a little, and the presidents became a little more academic than they had been before. You can understand how this would happen, so that my relationship with these presidents was such that it was not an unfriendly relationship. I did not, however, try to deal with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". I did not try to make deals with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" in terms of the budget. I worked through George Fieldxe "Field, George R", and George Fieldxe "Field, George R" got to be close to McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". But the relationship between McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and George Fieldxe "Field, George R" was never as close as between McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" because George, being a younger person and coming in late--McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" didn't quite recognize him as an equal. He was a person below him, you might say--a lower level. Well, you know that's how it would be. However, he thought very well of George and indeed got George to be a state university president--that is, he took George away from me and made George president of one of his institutions. That 00:24:00 wasn't to be hostile to the University; that was to get a good person to be head of his campus. HARRINGTON: In this connection, one of the questions you asked is, How well were McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and I acquainted? We were acquainted well enough, but we didn't have what you might call social relations. I don't think I was ever at his house, and though we may on occasion--I think we did--have him or him and Mrs. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" at receptions at our house, it was not dinners of the cozy sort or this kind of thing. Therefore it was not a close personal relationship, and obviously McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" would have felt that I looked down on him as an academic because, of course, I always did have to have the position of being the head of the University, and the University was often a little haughty so far as the state universities are concerned. The Madison faculty, of course, was outrageous in this respect--of looking down on the state university faculties--absurd--and indeed, looking down on the Milwaukee faculty, as far as that goes. So McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was, I suppose, a little sensitive on this. And I became increasingly active on the national scene, and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" probably was under some pressure on the part of his people to be active on the national scene, but he never was. He allowed his presidents to be, and his presidents were involved in this Association of State Colleges and Universities--American Association of State Colleges and Universities--Allan Ostarxe "Ostar, Allan"'s organization. And some of them became somewhat prominent on the national scene. Dreyfusxe "Dreyfus, Lee", for example, was one who became quite active, particularly through the business of broadcasting and what not. But McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" also, I think, looked on me as a little humorless, as being a little more serious than I should be. I didn't mix. Obviously, I wasn't going out fishing or joining his friends, because I would have been out of place there. That's true; I'm not a good mixer. I'm not good at the saloon business. I'm not saying--McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was not a drinking man of that sort--I suppose we both drank, as far as that's concerned--but he was a better mixer than I. Indeed, on one occasion when asked about me, after I'd left, one of his statements about me was that, "Yes, he was a first-rate president and very able person, but I never heard him tell a story." And this was what McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" did. He had a lot of stories, quite often long-winded, I thought, and pointless. If I was to say anything humorous, which on occasion I would, it would always be a one-liner kind of thing, or it would be something that fitted the circumstances in which I tried to make a joke on. But yes, there was a difference in personality here. But the relationship was good enough so that we tried to get along, and as we found the Coordinating Committee developing and trying to get a little strength, obviously it was to the interest of both of us to keep it from being strong. And it was certainly a weak organization at first, because it was made up initially of representatives of the University and representatives of the state universities. Baldwinxe "Baldwin, Ira L" represented the University and was, 00:27:00 of course, always talking University, and they had their state university representatives. SMAIL: Rungexe "Runge, Carlisle P" first? HARRINGTON: No, no. The first University one was Baldwinxe "Baldwin, Ira L" on our side, and Dezoniaxe "Dezonia, Robert" was the first person they had on their side. Those were regular state university representatives, so that obviously they were in our camp, as it were. Later on the feeling was, and the legislature felt, This Coordinating Committee ought to slap down these two systems and ought to stop them from getting everything they want and be a little careful and save a little money and so on. So ultimately the thought was that the Coordinating Committee should be a little more powerful. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and I obviously agreed that we didn't want it to get very much more powerful, but ultimately, however, it did. Rungexe "Runge, Carlisle P" came back from Washington--he was Assistant Secretary of Defense--and when he came back from that, he worked with Baldwinxe "Baldwin, Ira L". And then he took over. That was the transition, so that he was supposed to be independent. Well, coming from the University, he leaned to us, but not conspicuously. And also they brought in people, and then ultimately, of course, they brought in a person, after Rungexe "Runge, Carlisle P" and Dezoniaxe "Dezonia, Robert", who was from the outside--this chap who, after that, went to Arkansas. He wasn't very capable, and I can't remember his name. SMAIL: You had a man from Superior who was very dynamic and vigorous. HARRINGTON: Oh, Jim Dan Hill. That's right. Jim Dan Hill came in, but that's a separate question. That's a question about the Coordinating Committee. Jim Dan Hill was the state university president who was closest to McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" personally, and he was a member of McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene"'s dining clubs and all that kind of stuff, because he was that kind of a chap. He didn't use Jim Dan much to make speeches because Jim Dan--well, Superior wasn't all that important, and Jim Dan had enemies too, though he was a great power in the National Guard and of course became a major general in the Second World War. It was after that that he came into the Coordinating Committee, and the other Coordinating Committee later tried to be a little more independent. But in all of this, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and I obviously stood together because we didn't want the Coordinating Committee to . . . . SMAIL: It isn't that you would phone each other and say, "Let's keep this Coordinating Committee down." It was just a mutually understood--or you actually met? HARRINGTON: We would meet at the time the Coordinating Committee met. We'd go out to lunch and stuff. Sometimes we met separately, but usually it would not be McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and me. It would usually be McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and several of his presidents, because when he met with me he always wanted to have one of his presidents at hand. Of course, initially it would have been 00:30:00 Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" if he had stayed with him, but he wanted Haasxe "Haas, Leonard" or Rex Mitchellxe "Mitchell, Rex", usually. I suppose this was because they were more academic and they would be more likely to persuade me or something; I don't know. So I always had somebody, too. I had somebody like Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L", although I'd usually do the talking, and I would usually have as many as he would. And I would always bring George Fieldxe "Field, George R" in while he was still with me, because he headed into the political stuff. This then leads to the next question: "What did you think of the decision to call the state colleges 'Wisconsin State Universities'?" They were Wisconsin State Colleges until the time I became president, and during the first part of my presidency they were still Wisconsin State Colleges--1965, maybe? When they became . . . . SMAIL: Well, '63, then, I think it would have been. HARRINGTON: I think it was a little later than that. It seems to me it was a little later than that. But you can check that. After all, it's a matter of fact. SMAIL: Yes. It doesn't matter. HARRINGTON: The important point, the thing I could contribute here, is that we had a meeting. We had one meeting I remember quite well, in which McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and quite a few of his state college presidents, perhaps all of them, met with me and some of my people. By that time we had Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" in our system, so that Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" was meeting on our side of the thing. The thought [was], Maybe he could persuade the state colleges to do something, although once he was in the university system they kind of resented him being the kingpin of the state college presidents anyway, I suppose. But we had a meeting in which we were supposed to let our hair down. I remember Haasxe "Haas, Leonard" saying, "Well, why don't you tell us what you don't like about us?" I said, "Well, you can tell us what you don't like about us." Of course, what they told us they don't like about us is that we took on airs, which of course is true--that is, we always took advantage of the fact that we were the ones that had the reputation--the name and all that. But on the whole it was very friendly because we were getting together for [inaudible]. So what were their ambitions and what were our ambitions? I said, "We're not after any more, you know. We were already moving on the matter of Kenosha-Racine and Green Bay." They resented that, and they indicated that they should have had one of them, especially since they cut into the Oshkosh and Whitewater business. We shouldn't have gone that way or we should have--they weren't as hostile to us as, let's say, Marquette was for our building the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but they were hostile. And they said, "What were the ambitions?" I asked what their ambitions were. "At some point, we want to be called 'Wisconsin State Universities.'" And I said, "I personally have no objection to that," which was perhaps a mistake, but probably you couldn't have stopped it unless one had made a big fight out of it. We had been 00:33:00 using up our fight in order to get the new campuses. Besides that, it didn't seem to me to be all that important, because in the California state colleges--well, they still call the Board of State Colleges out there--some of them had become state universities. They are now--Long Beach State University and all that. I knew it was going to happen, and we were trying to be friendly and all that. And the difference between Wisconsin State Universities and the University of Wisconsin--that's still the difference. So that what I did there was to give them the green light, and I don't think they would have moved to use the term "Wisconsin State University" if we had said we were bitterly opposed to that. I don't think they would have moved at that time. They would have been a little more careful, did it a little more slowly. SMAIL: Did you go into what the definition of a university is? HARRINGTON: Well, "university," of course--it's a simple thing. The university is a college which is more than one college. They were two by this time, because they all had degrees not only in teaching but in liberal arts and in business and . . . . SMAIL: But a university has graduate degrees; isn't that . . . . HARRINGTON: Well, they did too. They had a master's degree. The university can have master's degree without having a Ph.D. No, the definition of a university is not that it has the Ph.D. You get into that, you have to be one of the major universities like the fifty that belong to the Association of American Universities. The term "university" is used by some very tiny places, and is used by some places that don't have any graduate work to speak of. And of course, many places that give the Ph.D. are hardly universities. But here, right in this state, Lawrence College had become a university because it had the Paper Chemistry Institute connected with it and therefore gave a degree--gave a Ph.D., in that case. One can fight this a variety of ways if one wants to. The American Council of Education, A.C.E., has tried to define what's a college, what's a university, and has found out that there are over 500 names that they use for all these things. What degree do you use? and all this kind of thing. It doesn't add up to anything, because private colleges, anyway, are able to use any title they want, and they're a law unto themselves, really. Nobody is going to stop them from calling themselves universities if they want to. Some of them don't want to because they play on--a place where they take care of your little girl and stuff like that. In the state university field, state universities are state universities, and every state can decide what it wants to do, so that this is not a matter that it's all that consequential. Was it a mistake for me to do so? I don't know. I don't suppose it was. SMAIL: Well, I see your point. You had to give something having--because of Green Bay and Parkside. HARRINGTON: They were quite pleased with that. I was surprised at how pleased they were that I was not opposing it, because after all we had defeated them in face-to-face clashes: first, on the integration question back in the Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" period, then on the Milwaukee question, and then on the Kenosha-Racine and Green Bay questions. That last one was not really much of a defeat for them, because it looked like we had it all our own way and only at the very end did they come in with a last-moment effort--political effort--to try to get one of them or to get them from the state universities. It was an ill-advised political move on their part. If they were going to move on it they should have moved much earlier. So that was a peacemaking effort. It wasn't as though we were in bad shape. We always talked pleasantly and they were always inviting me to give commencement addresses. And we had their presidents in to give speeches. We had Jim Dan Hill come to the Madison campus and give a talk on military matters, which was his specialty. His Ph.D. was on the Texas navy, and he was a ranking officer in the National Guard and what not, and a person of some interest--amusing. So that we made some effort to do these things both ways. But we wouldn't ask McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" to give a speech at the University 00:36:00 because he didn't give speeches. He had his people give speeches. The relationship, then, remained reasonably good, and it was not until I left that the question of merger came up. It did not come up while I was president, and at that point the University was pretty well understood to be against this. It just wasn't mentioned, and it wasn't mentioned by Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" until he became governor. When he became governor he mentioned it, but he told me that he would have not gone for merger if I had still been president. SMAIL: He said that in his interview. So that is true, is it? HARRINGTON: True. SMAIL: Because somebody else commented, "Well, he's a friend of Harrington's, so he's going to say that." HARRINGTON: He told me in the summer of 1973, when I was back to teach summer school. SMAIL: That's horrifying. HARRINGTON: What? SMAIL: I said, "That's horrifying." HARRINGTON: That he would not have done it? Yes. It wasn't because he was a friend of mine, I don't think. We were friends all right, sure, and I have had dinner at his house--had to during the campaign--but it isn't just that. Friendly to me--it wasn't so much that. He was hostile to the regents. SMAIL: No, I meant it's horrifying that it might not have happened. And it did, that's all. HARRINGTON: Yes. It really reflects on me for not staying on, as far as that's concerned. See, Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" was very hostile to my Board of Regents, and my Board of Regents were forcing me out, as he said, or making it so that I left. I could have fought it out. SMAIL: Could you have? HARRINGTON: I could have fought it out, and I could have gotten fired. After all, you have a choice. SMAIL: But you knew it was going to be one thing or the other? HARRINGTON: I don't know, because how would I know I was going to get fired? I might have fought it out. They would have had to have a hearing and all of that--didn't like the Glenn Frankxe "Frank, Glenn" stuff. But that's a separate question. Let me consider the Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" question. Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" was very hostile to our board because it had become an all-Republican board, which is of course absurd--except for maybe one, Maury Paschxe "Pasch, Maurice J". And Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" sat in on a regents' meeting--I may have told you this before--sat in on a regents' meeting that we had up in Green Bay, I think. This was a regent meeting at the time of the student troubles, and the regents at that time were very hostile to me because I was taking the soft line on students, whereas Ed Youngxe "Young, H Edwin" was taking the hard line, which was somewhat agreed between us. But the result was that the regents were very hostile to me. And there was a little regent committee which Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J" headed, and the regent committee was to discuss, "Should you allow bullhorns on the campus? Should you allow the amplifiers?" The regent committee came in with a recommendation that you should not allow amplifiers, which of course the protesters all were using, unless it was for a rally for a football game or for a spring get-together--something of this sort. And then when Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J" brought that one in I said, "Regent Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J", do you mean that you can use bulldozers and you can use"--not bulldozers, bullhorns--"you can use bullhorns 00:39:00 or these amplifiers for fun and games, but you can't use them for a discussion of the great social issues of the day?" This, of course, made Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J" furious. He then said, "Well, Mr. President, the people of the state are getting sick and tired of you," in Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J"'s presence. Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" was getting ready to run for governor, and he was very much impressed with this and talked with me about it several times. SMAIL: You mean at Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J"'s speaking like that, and so openly? HARRINGTON: He thought it was outrageous, even though Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" was a little tougher on students, maybe, than we were being at the time. But his hostility toward the Board of Regents, and his anger at them for appointing a president before he became governor--it doesn't altogether reflect well on Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J", because Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J", when he appointed regents, wanted them to take his orders on how to run the University and so on. But nonetheless, it was much more that than any feeling of friendship toward me, because we weren't all that personal friends. In fact, I was, of course, much closer to Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J"'s local enemies, like Gaylord Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord", than to his friends. We were friendly but not friends; I suppose you could put it that way. As to our being friendly--no, I suppose that Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J"'s mind, among other things, was that, Well, Harrington would be a tougher person to handle in the legislature than any new president even if he was competent, which it turned out he wasn't. And this was certainly in that picture. So that my relationship to merger is nothing but that. By leaving so soon--in fact, if I had been sure that Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" was going to get elected governor, maybe I would have stayed on, because he then could have appointed some regents who would have a little different point of view than some of the ones I had--not that all the Republican regents were against me, but that's a question which comes up on quite a different matter, of the general relationship of my presidency rather than the matter of merger. But the matter of merger comes into it. SMAIL: So the Kellettxe "Kellett, William" Commission was meeting at about that time, or was it just after you . . . . HARRINGTON: The Kellettxe "Kellett, William" Commission met; it advised the Coordinating Committee. SMAIL: Of course, it was Republican, but it seems to have been a fairly . . . . HARRINGTON: Kellettxe "Kellett, William" was not advising the University. He was appointed to advise--he was advising the governor of the Coordinating Committee. Yes. And he tried to get along with everybody--made quite an effort. SMAIL: Weren't his recommendations something that might have worked out and been a more comfortable solution than the system? HARRINGTON: The merger question, of course, is quite a different question when Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" went for the merger. The state universities favored it. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" favored it, and Dreyfusxe "Dreyfus, Lee" was heavily involved in advising Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J". In those days he was president of Stevens Point, a state university. He was at that time a 00:42:00 Democrat, and he was the main advisor at that level. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was careful not to be out in front--out publicly. He never was out in public on anything like that, but he was operating on it. They wanted it. They thought that that would improve their image--not that there weren't some University people, and this political scientist . . . SMAIL: Adamanyxe "Adamany, David". HARRINGTON: Adamanyxe "Adamany, David", who is going to be showing up on the presidential hopeful list, I suppose--he was for it, much to the horror of the Madison campus. SMAIL: He is said by some people to have been the progenitor of the whole thing. HARRINGTON: Yes, I suppose. Well, I suppose that's right. He was, of course, very political and all that. But that was not in my time, and it didn't come up in my time. The regents--it was the same regents that had to deal with the question--the regents in my time--and of course they made the decision that they would fight it in the senate, where they had a one-vote majority or something. They would kill it there. The fellow who advised them was Ody Fishxe "Fish, Ody", and he said that we could beat it in the senate. Of course, they couldn't, because Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" swung Tiny Krueger over and carried it--by the simple device that Tiny wasn't going to have very serious opposition next time, if he ran. But that's beyond the period I know anything about. I was in India when this happened. SMAIL: It's been said that if Green Bay and Parkside had been made part of the WSU system that this wouldn't have happened--really wouldn't have happened. HARRINGTON: Maybe so. And there were those who said, after the merger came about, well, the person chiefly responsible for the merger was me, by developing Green Bay and Parkside--that led to this. But all I would say would be this--and who knows? I don't need to defend myself. I'd rather be on the offensive than on the defensive. But supposing I had wanted to give Green Bay up to the state colleges, I could not have done that, because not only those institutions were already university institutions, but they would have fought very hard, and the legislators from those areas wanted the University. You can see that this was the case, because I was president and I was saying, "Yes, we're going to develop something in the southeast. That's where the numbers are going to be, and we're not going to develop Green Bay at this time." I said this. I went up to Green Bay and said it. I said, "Maybe later." But they went ahead and did it. See, that was Green Bay pressure. That was Green Bay political pressure--the Green Bay people, who were of course rather powerful politically--and it was the Republican Party. Get something for the Republicans, we'll have something for the Democrats. So that I couldn't have stopped that. I could have slowed it down, I suppose. I could have said, "The whole thing is absurd. We should continue the way we are," but I don't know if I could have made that with Gaylord Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" out making speeches--he was running for the senate that year, 1962--out saying that he was in favor of having new campuses. So I don't suppose that I could have done it. My political strength was such that all I could do was direct things our way. At that time, of course, I was over-optimistic about the future of getting money from the federal government to enable us to build up campuses, to do research and extension activities. Then that money began to dry up about that time. SMAIL: You are said to have projected wrongly the number of students that would be at Green Bay, but from what you say that doesn't sound right. HARRINGTON: No. These projections were all made by the Coordinating Committee, and the Coordinating Committee developed figures which certainly showed . . . . SMAIL: 20,000 there were going to be, they said. HARRINGTON: The big need was going to be in the southeast. They knew that. But at that point Carl Rungexe "Runge, Carlisle P" was the chief figure in the Coordinating Committee--certainly the most powerful person--and he told me, "Well, you know, the Coordinating Committee's got to recommend something here, and we've got to have something for the Republicans as well as the Democrats." He said, "We're going to have to stretch the Green Bay side of it." But it is true that I overestimated the size of Parkside, yes. SMAIL: No, Green Bay is what I specifically . . . . HARRINGTON: And Green Bay, too. Well, after we were stuck with having the two campuses, and we were going to have a campus up there, I certainly intended to have it because we had had many years of that two-year campus, and it sometimes offered junior work up there. Yes, in talking about the figures, I said, 00:45:00 "We're going to have a big campus up here in the long run, and a big campus at Parkside." And in both cases I suppose I was wrong, except that in the long run I was more right than they are now, when they're talking about not having enough students and they keep on growing. So that ever since I was an assistant to the president, even before I was vice-president, I was talking about all these people who were wrong in saying that we were only going to grow slowly. And only for a few minutes--back in those days they were saying, "Well, the GI crowd was going to be big and they were going to shrink down." I said, "They're never going to shrink." HARRINGTON: As I think of McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", looking back on it now, and even thinking of it the way I thought about it at the time, it must be said that McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was one of the best, and I think the best, of all the persons who were in an administrative position in the old state teachers colleges that became state colleges and became state universities all over the country. Everywhere in the country, the old normal schools became state colleges, state teachers colleges, state colleges, state universities, and they're usually in clusters, so that they had somebody who had to take charge of them and work the legislature and work the national scene for money. Of them all, and I came to know a great many of them before I was through, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was obviously the best. The present difficulty that the old state university campuses and the Madison campus have with reference to salaries of professors and such can be tied to this, in that McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" got salaries of his people up--better, really, than the University did in those days. This goes back to the days of Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", when they worked together, and when McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" recognized that the University was going to have higher salaries--management would have higher salaries than the state colleges--but that they would go to the legislature and that they would get an equivalent dollar amount to the University raises. Now of course, when they have lower salaries than the University has, an equivalent dollar amount is a higher percentage amount than the University would be getting, so all those years when the University was getting raises--and they were pretty good in the '50s and '60s--quite good in the '60s. It was in the '70s that they got to be less so. The University was doing pretty well with reference to raises, with the state colleges getting dollar equivalents. They were getting more in percentages. SMAIL: You mean for buildings, or for what do you mean? HARRINGTON: No, for faculty salaries--the amount of increase in the faculty salaries for the next biennium. If the University was going to have a certain percentage, that would mean an average of a thousand dollars per professor, which would be a thousand dollars for the state university faculties, and that would be a higher percentage, because their salaries were lower. So this indicates McPheexe 00:48:00 "McPhee, Eugene"'s talents, and maybe our fault for not pushing him a little harder. But McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was extremely capable. He was capable on the state level and he was very capable with the legislature. You have other states in which the state college people are good--California is one of those--but he was the best, I think. SMAIL: But you're saying capable of getting things for the--but how about the quality of the state universities? Was he interested in that? HARRINGTON: They did improve in quality very substantially, but he did not himself take as much interest in that as he might. I say capable politically--capable of building the institution, and as the head of the system--that was his role. It was perhaps his role to have somebody on his staff who could take care of making sure that quality moved up. He did not have. He left that to the presidents of the institutions. He said he would run the institutions and he would see that they got money, and it was up to the presidents to make sure they got good people. SMAIL: And he made good appointments to presidents? HARRINGTON: They were a lot better towards the end than they had been at the beginning. They moved up in quality. However, I would not say that that was his interest. I would not say that he was very good at that. I would not say that he was good enough at it, and in his period the Wisconsin state universities, retaining the tenure system of the schools, made a mistake in adding a lot of people whom they kept, whereas they did not screen them much. Part of that, however, was the very rapid growth that came after World War II, and they grew so rapidly that what could he do? But his talents were unquestionably great, and certainly I appreciated that. You asked me, "Did I ever tell him that?" Well, no, not really, but after we were both--towards the end of my time, at least, Mrs. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" died. We then had a period of personal relations. We went to Mrs. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene"'s funeral and all that, and exchanged pleasantries, which were personal. A little after that, when in Washington, we met at the Adams Hotel. He was in Washington for a meeting, or going out fishing probably with his friends like Mel Lairdxe "Laird, Melvin R" and so on. He and I then had a chance to talk, and we exchanged pleasantries, and he called attention to the fact that one of the reporters had said that when comparing McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" and Harrington, they were both good, but neither of them dressed very well. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was very much amused by that. And we indicated that we had both done pretty well, as indeed we had, in working things in the 1960s. In other words, I was a good university president; he was a good head of the state university system. I think that he established an ability there, or he demonstrated an ability, and established a standard for moving forward that state colleges, state universities all over the country ought to admire more than they have. In the various books about the state universities, state colleges--that is, the institutions that are connected with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities--and they're below the great university level, below the Ph.D. university level in terms of image--McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" isn't given credit because, of course, he never was one to get out and see the heads of other systems. He didn't have meetings with the heads of other state college or university systems. He may have known a little bit the people at Minnesota and Illinois. He didn't mix nationally with them; he didn't work with the associations and work with the American Council on Education, so that he is a more important person than he has recognition for. Now there is a history of the state university that is written by Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" which gives him recognition, but probably not enough. Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" was one 00:51:00 of the state university presidents who had troubles with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene"--serious troubles with McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". Actually, he got fired, ultimately, because of it. Let's say McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" didn't want Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" to become a state university president. When the Democrats controlled the state university board, they made Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" president of the Wisconsin State University-Whitewater. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" almost certainly didn't want that, although he wouldn't fight these; he went along with it. But when the board changed again, and Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" didn't satisfy McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene"--wasn't all that great a president; he was a first-rate scholar and all that--then he moved back to being a professor, so that maybe Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" wouldn't have appreciated McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" as much as he might, although he knew McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was good at his business. All right, I can say other things against McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", too, if I was called upon to do that. Certainly in the academic freedom business McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" didn't have the kind of view that we had, and the troubles he had at Whitewater were troubles--not Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker"'s troubles--Carter's troubles, where McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" acted in what we would consider an arbitrary fashion--so that one would say we would have to have some qualifications about him. But I think the thing--if one is going to work on McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" is the kind of person about whom a biography ought be written--one ought to use the McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" tapes, which are on record and part of the University System now, in the La Crosse archives. SMAIL: It can't have been all that good for Wisconsin to have this many state universities growing rapidly, can it? HARRINGTON: It's to be remembered that the period of the great growth of the Wisconsin state colleges and universities was a period when everything was growing, and when the problem inside the University, many people thought, was, how are you going to keep them out? And one of the reasons why University people in Madison were willing to have Milwaukee is because it takes some of the pressure off Madison as far as growing, because it looked like Madison might grow to 75,000 if you took all the people that wanted to come to Madison. It should be remembered that Madison, in those days, would admit anybody who graduated from high school. It was only recently, more recently, that the 50 percent--you had to be in the top 50 percent--came in, and you could squeeze them out if they were a little higher than that. But the growth was such that--everybody was growing all over. There was therefore room for everybody, and the general thought was, well, we developed the Ph.D. business and the specialized professional businesses, and that the state colleges would grow the teachers. There was a lot of need for teachers and just general education. However, of course, in that period they began to develop the specialized work with what was originally business teaching--teaching of business subjects at Whitewater. They began to develop business administration and physical education teaching at La Crosse. They broadened it a little bit and added a little bit more than that, and so on down the line. Each of these state universities had a specialty which they then--conservation at Stevens Point, which was to be teachers of conservation, but then they became people who wanted to be in the conservation field--so that yes, it became a matter of rivalry. But 00:54:00 the University was sufficiently proud of itself, and I think properly, so it didn't think that there was any need for rivalry in the quality departments since, generally speaking, we didn't feel the state universities were emphasizing quality as much as they might have. They weren't fighting us--certainly not for grants from foundations or from Washington; they weren't good at that. They could get grants with reference to borrowing money for dormitories or for student loans, but not beyond that. So we really didn't see it as a rivalry, and I don't still, as far as that goes. SMAIL: Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J" in his interview called some of them, "high schools with ashtrays"--Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J", who was a regent. HARRINGTON: Yes. And he was against the merger, but they were wrong about that. And I never tried to run down the state colleges--universities--when I was president. I went out of my way to say that they were pretty good. However, of course, that doesn't necessarily mean I didn't give the impression that I thought we were better, because I was all the time saying that we were one of the three best universities in the country or in the world, and therefore I was obviously playing us up. And I was saying Milwaukee was going to be one of the hundred best universities in terms of getting grants from the federal government, which it has become. This was a matter of two sides, but I always felt that the University--many of the University regents and many of the University faculty people, not only in Madison but in Milwaukee, too--looked down on the state colleges. And of course, when the University took over the Milwaukee state college--the Wisconsin State University-Milwaukee--and merged the University Extension with it, quite a few of the faculty members, and particularly the lower level administrators, left the University and went and took jobs in the Wisconsin State University System where they felt more comfortable, because we were making the point we were going to make this a university of the top rank. Of course, we didn't really pull to that direction until I became president. But even before that, people were fleeing from the Milwaukee campus if they could get jobs in other places because they had introduced the question, "To get raised to get to be a partner, you had better do some research." I suppose all of that would cause some dissatisfaction, because a person who was at the Wisconsin State University-Milwaukee, and wanted the Wisconsin State University-Milwaukee to be connected with the State College Board--if he wanted to have it that way--and it didn't work out that way; it became part of the University--and then they left and went to one of the state universities--obviously, they weren't very friendly to the University. So that the sneering at the state university campuses, which was indulged in by Madison faculty--and is to this day--was matched by a sneering at Madison by the people out there who were saying, "Well, you know they don't do anything but pay attention to graduate students and so on, and the undergraduates are taught by teaching assistants and so on," so that there's something in both positions. There is yet. And it is a very difficult thing to take care of, and it isn't taken care of in most states. You run into the same problems everywhere. Madison people still don't think very well of the University 00:57:00 of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee people are still sensitive about the way they're talked about by the Madison people, and the cluster campuses, as they're called, feel that they are looked down upon. And this salary question, of course, brought that right square to the fore. It's, I suppose, natural, and what it requires is some soothing. And in this particular matter I think O'Neil was just the kind of person you need to do some soothing with the troubles you ran into. The salary question, which divided the places, although he went to great pains to visit the cluster campuses, which his predecessors had not done--Weaverxe "Weaver, John" never went to them to speak of, and Ed Youngxe "Young, H Edwin" didn't have time to go to all of them; he was associated with Madison in their minds anyway. And in the O'Neil period, O'Neil has gone to them with every chance he had. He would talk to faculty--in fact, in the state university campuses, the faculty had been pleased to talk with him, where he hadn't talked to the faculty at the Madison campus; he hadn't been welcome. He wasn't welcome because of Madison administration, I think, not because of the Madison faculty. It's a difficult question, and if you look at it all I guess you might say that even in the old days we got along better with the state teachers colleges or state colleges than in lots of states. The hostility towards central campuses that you run into at Southern Illinois University, which was a state college--Carbondale--and their feeling towards Urbana is worse than the feeling you have towards Madison in the state colleges. Rather generally, I think, this is the case. It wasn't so bad. Now a very bad period was the period when Ingrahamxe "Ingraham, Mark H" brought up this business of, "Well, these teachers colleges, some of them ought to be dropped out." SMAIL: It was 1947. Is that right? HARRINGTON: Yes, and they hadn't really become much, but he--some of them should be reduced to two-year. SMAIL: That was what started, as I understand it, the whole furor. HARRINGTON: Well, there always was the feeling, but it was naturally aggravated by that. Now the Functions and Policies Report was never adopted by the regents because of the sensitivity and whatnot, but the Madison faculty thought that was just great; you should get rid of some of those places or turn them into two-year colleges or something like that. He had no business making such a recommendation, because it was a different system. SMAIL: Of course Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" suggested that too. HARRINGTON: But that's something else again. That's just that parts of the University ought to be reduced to two-year. SMAIL: Yes. All right. But it was still those particular cluster campuses. HARRINGTON: Well, yes--part of the University then, but that's a different matter. It didn't involve this question, and he might very well have thought that it might, to that degree. And then, he was just talking, and certainly when he got to the crunch and dealt with the local politicians, he wouldn't have done anything about that. The University at one time tried to get rid of some of its two-year campuses, or said it was trying to get rid of them, but local pressure was to keep them. But that's Baldwinxe "Baldwin, Ira L"'s story, not mine. This feeling--natural enough--I think, in the period of the state colleges' greatest growth--the period when McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" took hold and got them lots of dormitory space and when they got great numbers--it grew very rapidly--the feeling wasn't so bad, partly because the two weren't paying much attention to each other. They were both getting great crowds of people, and there was no real objection to the state colleges, state universities, getting lots of students, from the point of view of the University, because most of the 01:00:00 University faculty thought they were having enough students anyway. And the state colleges, state universities, they were building faculty quickly. A great many of them were from the Madison campus. It's only recently they have been taking care not to get many Wisconsin Ph.D.'s on their faculty. But they still have a great many. The feeling was pretty good, on the whole, in spite of some bad feelings--better, really, than between the University of California and the state colleges of California, where they have fought in the legislature for funds and so on, and in spite of the fact that the state colleges in California, some of them, are really powerful places--so that I don't think one should overemphasize this conflict, even though it was very sharp sometimes and even had some bad feeling in it. The fact that you could get to an agreement, as Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" did, and then later on that Gelattxe "Gelatt, Charles D" and McIntyrexe "McIntyre, William D" were willing to come to an agreement, and the friendly feeling of some of the state college regents, state university regents, towards us when we met in the Coordinating Committee, because we let the regents in, too. Certainly McIntyrexe "McIntyre, William D" was extremely friendly towards the University, towards us personally, and our University regents got to be more friendly towards the state universities when they were on the Coordinating Committee--most of them. Pelisekxe "Pelisek, Frank J" may not have, but most of them did. Therefore, it was not an unfriendly relationship when one compares it with what one has in a great many other places. The attitude of Madison--the Madison faculty towards these other campuses--it intensified, just as their attitude towards us intensified now, but it's not beyond redemption. Actually, one must recognize those were pretty good places. Moreover, they are better now since the McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" day. Not because McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was against quality--he was in favor of quality, except he wasn't that kind of a person, and he had his own job of building up the appropriations and all of that--better because of--in the period since 1970, professors have not been so mobile. And therefore the old idea was that if you took a job in one of the state colleges or state universities, then you would move on. You might go to one of the state colleges before you had your Ph.D. or just as you got one, and then you would move on to a better place. I remember one of the members of the Madison campus faculty telling me just recently--he was at Northern Illinois University--he was there; it was a pretty lousy place to be. It was actually a pretty good place, but he was glad to get up here. Well, if he went to Eau Claire or Stevens Point in the days of the '50s and '60s, when you could get a job anywhere, then pretty soon you would expect to move on to Northwestern or the University of North Carolina or something. But of course that has slowed down, and therefore, a great many of the people who have gone to those places have had careers there. This, of course, means that to some extent they will become attached to the place and want to fight for 01:03:00 it, and tied to the local legislators more than if they were just on the run. Another point is that it is a better quality because those are the good people that are staying on, instead of being at Wisconsin State College-Oshkosh for a while and then going to North Carolina or Duke or something. There they are at Oshkosh, and they're pretty good. Some of the business administration people at Whitewater are really good people. Some of the people in these various fields--conservation people at Stevens Point--are good people. Now, there were good people in the old days of the state teachers colleges--a few. Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" is an example. Walker Wymanxe "Wyman, Walker" is an accepted historian and really an historian of some consequence. He was a professor at River Falls and he did a great book, Wild Horse of the West, and was a prominent historian of the frontier. But that's very uncommon--practically alone. I think he may be one of the--maybe he is the only distinguished professor at River Falls with a title. Maybe he is the only distinguished professor in the System; I don't know. But there could be some now, and it has improved. It has improved and those are good people. The Madison campus people are reluctant to admit that, so that a poor quality person--a person who got in the Madison campus and managed to stick for a variety of reasons--may not be as good as a person in the cluster campuses, so that nowadays one has a different situation. Now, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" would not have thought in those terms because he was thinking you ought to be a good teacher and he favored a high teaching load, and he thought the professors ought to do what the president of the state university thought. On the other hand, he is the guy that got the salary levels up. He is the guy that got buildings so that there were laboratories, so that there were libraries, although he maybe wasn't as good on the library business as he should have been. And therefore there are all kinds of people it takes to make a university, and he happened to be the kind of person they needed at that particular time. We wouldn't have had the controversy now. We probably wouldn't have had merger if the person in McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene"'s spot had been the kind of person his predecessor was. His predecessors were the kind of person that the presidents of the state teachers colleges were--old dogs of that day. Those were considered to be a--it was like being the head of a school system. In fact, Phil Falkxe "Falk, Phil", who was the superintendent of schools in Madison, had been president of Stevens Point, the teachers college, and left that to become Superintendent of Schools in Madison. That is unimaginable now at a state university--a Wisconsin state university, let alone--I mean after all, that was the job that Dreyfusxe "Dreyfus, Lee" had. So Dreyfusxe "Dreyfus, Lee" kept talking about he was a university president, and yet one of his predecessors--not his immediate predecessor--left to be head of the Madison schools. And I don't think Phil Falkxe "Falk, Phil" left because he was held down as the head of a normal school or whatever it was then; it was because they were that insignificant, that you would take a job like that. Well, it's one of these things, and you have to have historical perspective to see these things in their light. But nobody should play down McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene". The difficulties people have often lead others to point out their faults. One can do this with President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B", for example, because he had such peculiar ways, so that you could say he was a hard man to pin down and all this. And yet his qualities, like developing the research side of the University from the science side--even if you didn't like the social sciences and the humanities very much, he was a person who made a mark. And presidents who made a mark--that's what counts. And McPheexe 01:06:00 "McPhee, Eugene" did make a mark. Well, so did I; I don't want to run myself down. SMAIL: This is a continuation of the interview with Fred Harrington which we started on June 25, 1985. It is now July 1. I'm Laura Smail. The interview is being done for the Oral History Project. HARRINGTON: I suppose that really, you know, you don't cover everything. If I go ahead and write a book, it will be a short book, and it won't begin to cover everything. But sure, this is the kind of stuff. In fact, one of the reasons I've been willing to talk is because it kind of clears my mind some. SMAIL: I'm glad you have an incentive to do it. I have some leftover questions from the session before. Did you make any overtures about getting Eau Claire into the UW system? HARRINGTON: No. There was never any overture. We never moved on it. The only point in which that comes into the picture in my administration was that we obviously were expanding--or, our critics would say, "imperialist"--in those days, and in setting up the Green Bay and the Parkside campuses, there was of course talk about whether the whole thing ought not to be in one system. This was not a new discussion, because Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" had pushed one earlier, but it was not desired by the University, and my entrance into this kind of thing was partly fighting integration--fighting the Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" merger. That was one of the things that I came into the politicking on, so that there was no thought, in my administration, of a combination of the whole. However, on more than one occasion, I did indicate that at some point there might be a total merger. We did, after all, have the Coordinating Committee, which is kind of a step towards merger, you might say--as a compromise in connection with the University taking over the Milwaukee thing. After we had developed Milwaukee, after we had started Green Bay and Parkside, there was some talk about, "Well, shouldn't we take over one or two best pieces of the state college system?" This was talk, however. We never moved on it in a political sense. We never moved on it, so far as I know, in a newspaper sense, and in such discussions Eau Claire was generally considered to be the best quality part of the state college system. And there was some talk, which I would have to call idle talk, about this because we were not politically strong enough to take anything away from the state college system, and we recognized that we had hurt the state college system by taking over their best place, other than Eau Claire, in taking over Milwaukee. And when we had set up Parkside and Green Bay we of course aroused some antagonism because of the proximity of those two campuses to Whitewater and to Oshkosh. Therefore, we did not at all think of moving, even though some of our people may have talked about it to their friends and so on. We didn't think of moving to take over Eau Claire. We recognized that this was one of the prizes of their system, and we had further reason for being careful about even talking publicly about that kind of thing because we were having a conflict over the development of new two-year campuses. And after the development of 01:09:00 Green Bay and Parkside, right at the very end, the state colleges tried to move in and get them. When two-year campuses were set up, and there was talk about it in the Coordinating Committee and in general, the state colleges--state university system--then laid claim to the new two-year campuses that were being suggested at this time, and managed to get some of those. And one that we were interested in getting--Fond du Lac--we were interested in getting Fond du Lac because it was the kind of place that could develop the kind of two-year system that we had developed. We didn't put up much of a fight with reference to Ricexe "Rice, William Gorham" Lake or Richland Center. Those were a little out of our area. They were over in the western part of the state, which was state college territory. But all of this means that we wouldn't have moved to take over anything from the state colleges. As for the question as to whether what we did by developing Green Bay and Parkside moved the state of Wisconsin toward merger, it could be said that it did. John Wyngaardxe "Wyngaard, John" said, after I had left the presidency and then merger came, that you could thank Fred Harrington for the merger, and he said this in a hostile way. He was generally hostile to me, quite often hostile to the University, although sometimes very friendly to it. But Wyngaardxe "Wyngaard, John" said it was my taking over of the Green Bay and the Parkside degree campuses that was the background of the merger. Well, I don't really buy that, because I think the merger came out of Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" and Adamanyxe "Adamany, David" and would not have taken place so soon. I guess I was feeling, towards the end of my presidency, that some sort of a closer relationship than the Coordinating Committee was going to happen in the long run. I didn't think it was going to happen right away. But I, and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" too, were rather unhappy about the Coordinating Committee, and had I stayed on as president for a good many more years, I'm sure I would have explored the question of some kind of a closer relationship. That is, we would have preferred to go to the legislature with the state university system, or in competition to them, than having a third party. The Coordinating Committee worked for the legislature, because the way the Coordinating Committee legislation was set up, the Coordinating Committee was supposed to go to the legislature and was supposed to do it all--go to the governor and then the legislature. But the Coordinating Committee was never strong, and the members of the Coordinating Committee, while they included some public members, always included state university regents and University of Wisconsin regents. So what it came down to was that the Coordinating Committee went to the governor and to the legislature, but we had to go too, and so did the state universities. We had to deliver. Moreover, the legislators were always coming to us, not the Coordinating Committee, to ask questions about student protests and other things that they didn't like, and this of course means that the question was getting complicated. But I guess that answers your question about, were we after Eau Claire? No, we were not. SMAIL: I'm actually bringing up things that other people have said just to straighten them out. The location of the Green Bay campus on the east side of Green Bay--somebody said that it was because you were an historian and there had been an historic event there. Is there anything in that? HARRINGTON: Nothing in that. I don't even remember what the historic event was. SMAIL: I'm sorry. I don't either. But it was somebody who landed there. HARRINGTON: I suppose French explorers landed there. No, that wasn't it at all. When we got the legislation through to raise the two-year campuses at Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha to degree-granting campuses, and we were out to develop substantial campuses, a committee was set up--a committee of the regents and of legislators was set up--to establish the places where we were to have the campuses. This would have the state architect on it. No, the state architect--was it the state architect?--I guess it was the state 01:12:00 planner--was on it. The state planner, legislators, and university regents were on it, and I volunteered to go on it. I thought I should be on it to watch the matter from the point of view of the operating people. The point here is that one of the conditions of setting up the new campuses was that the vicinity, the locality, would put up the land. We were not to buy the land; it was to be put up by the locality. This, of course, was the tradition that was developed from the two-year campus period, because in the two-year campuses, not only did the land come as a gift from the locality, but the buildings too. This was not to be the case with the new campuses. They were to have buildings provided by the state, but the locality was involved. So obviously the locality had to be considered. There really wasn't all that much of a problem about Green Bay. The Green Bay campus was the result of one city's two-year campus growing up. It wasn't a matter of two competing cities, as in the Kenosha-Racine situation. Now in Kenosha and Racine, the two cities were both struggling for the location, and the city of Racine proposed that the campus be put down on the water in Racine. Naturally, the Kenosha people didn't like that. The Kenosha people recommended that the campus be put in Kenosha. Well, this would have caused trouble either way. Moreover, the localities were suggesting that maybe the campus wasn't going to grow up to be a great big campus. Here I suppose I was wrong. I said that the campus was going to be quite big--the Kenosha-Racine campus particularly--not the Green Bay one so much. Therefore, the downtown Racine campus wasn't suitable because it wasn't big enough--the one out on the water. Actually, I guess that would have been big enough for the campus that was developed. In any case, it was impossible to have a Racine campus or a Kenosha campus. I felt from the beginning that the new campus had to be in between, and this was my role in that location committee. Actually, I was the one that selected the Petrifying Springs site--a site right next the Petrifying Springs--and persuaded the other people that that was the right one. This was particularly displeasing to the Kenosha people because, after all, it was Molinaroxe "Molinaro, George" from Kenosha who had pressed hardest for the big campus down in that area, and even after we moved forward we of course were selecting Kenosha land rather than Racine land for this, and Molinaroxe "Molinaro, George" felt it ought to be called the University of Wisconsin-Kenosha. But the first chancellor obviously recognized that this would be a problem and selected Parkside, next to Petrifying Springs Park, as the proper solution. Therefore, my role in this persuading the committee that this was the location--that was my role. In Green Bay I did not have the key role. The key role was the legislators. The legislators chose this place up on the water as being scenic. There was some suggestion in Green Bay, and I think the Green Bay local people would have preferred, if the campus was on land and to the south. I think I and some of the others may have felt, well, that's moving us closer to Oshkosh, which would have caused trouble. There were some suggestions outside of Green Bay that the campus could be located in one of the small towns outside of Green Bay, but the 01:15:00 proposal for the campus, as it turned out, was definitely made not in terms of historical value but in terms of aesthetics, I think. SMAIL: I see. Not yours, anyway. HARRINGTON: It was not my choice anyway, and probably the credit ought to go to the key legislator in this particular case. SMAIL: Did you ever consult the Madison faculty about any of this expansion--adding Milwaukee and the others? HARRINGTON: Adding Milwaukee, sure. Because, of course, after the Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" merger failed--that was back in 1953, I suppose--the University set up a committee--the Integration Committee. SMAIL: All right. So maybe this question does not apply to Milwaukee. I guess that is . . . . HARRINGTON: And the committee was essentially a Madison campus committee. It had one member from the two-year Milwaukee campus, Joe Beierxe "Beier, Joseph G.", who was on the University of Wisconsin Extension Center in Milwaukee as a member of the committee, which was essentially a Madison committee because it was headed by Bob Bunnxe "Bunn, Bob" of the Law School, and I was the vice-chairman of it. It was a Madison committee. Therefore, in order to sell our position on this, we had to go to the Madison faculty. Now, theoretically that was an all-university faculty and had members on it from the extension and what not, but actually it was the Madison campus. So not only did we have to sell it, but we had to sell it against some opposition in Madison toward doing much in Milwaukee. The big thing in Madison was that Madison was concerned about too rapid growth of the Madison campus, and ultimately became concerned about the state colleges taking over Milwaukee--the regents were concerned about this too--and developing it as a Michigan State-type rival to the Madison campus. It was on that ground that it was sold. However, in talking to the Madison faculty, I made the pitch that Milwaukee deserves a first-rate campus, and we shouldn't take it over in order to keep the state colleges from getting it; we should take it over in order to develop it as a first-rate place. It should be our UCLA rather than a Michigan State-political opponent of the University. That sold pretty well, and I must say it was somewhat difficult, because the first victory for this was unanimous on the part of the faculty--no opposition. So when it came around to doing the final job I was then the spokesman for the committee. I said, "I want a unanimous vote." And I got one, although one person, William Gorham Ricexe "Rice, William Gorham" of the Law School, gave me a hard time on it but finally acquiesced because he's a nice guy. It wasn't a very important question at the Madison campus. Yes, we did that Milwaukee business with the full approval of the Madison campus, though the Madison campus was thinking in different terms than I was thinking; I was a faculty member then. As for the Parkside and Green Bay development, by this time the Madison campus was increasingly concerned about size. This was the period when there was talk about, "Are we going to have so many undergraduates that we're going to have to establish a second undergraduate campus out now where they're going to develop this industrial park? And will we have 75,000 people here?" So there was a 01:18:00 lot of interest in shifting students elsewhere. Moreover, the Madison campus had always liked two-year centers because the power people on the Madison campus found these centers as a place for putting their Ph.D. candidates before they got their degree. All of their dissertation people rotated out as teachers there. It was a good placement. That was one factor. Besides that, a lot of students came into the Madison campus from the two-year centers, and they were, on the whole, good students, because the teaching at the two-year campuses was an effective kind of teaching in preparing people to do junior, senior work. So the two-year campuses were regarded quite well. Thus the Madison campus did not have any objection to our retaining the Kenosha-Racine and the Green Bay campuses--didn't have any objection to it because they would certainly not have wanted our two-year centers to be taken away by the state colleges and state university system. The state university system was very badly regarded--improperly badly regarded--by the Madison faculty. As to whether this went to a vote by the Madison faculty, I guess it didn't. I guess the question was, we already had the two-year centers and what we were going to do was to make these degree-granting campuses. If it went to the Madison campus, maybe it was discussed by the University Committee. It is not now in my recollection. That would be something I would have to look up. But the essential problem was not a problem of the Madison campus, because the push for it was a political push. The main push came in 1962, when Gaylord Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" was leaving the governorship to run for the senate and was pushing new campuses. Therefore, it was a political question, and it was in the legislature rather in the campus. There was no opposition; there was no fight on the Madison campus. I can't recall a single expression of opposition to this. There may have been. SMAIL: I suppose they were all too busy. HARRINGTON: Yes. Well, we hadn't yet come to the student troubles, but we were in a period of rapid expansion. And it was a very heady period because it was the period when federal money was coming in big and when the Madison campus was thinking of itself as developing as a great research campus and so on, so that minds weren't on this. Maybe they should have been. SMAIL: Of course, they did mind your using WARF money for the other campuses. And overhead--that's one of the painful subjects. Apparently overhead was used to develop Green Bay and Parkside. HARRINGTON: Not much of it; it was mostly connected with Milwaukee. There's more talk about that. Yes, of course, the overhead question, in any case--we should discuss that at some other time, I suppose--is not by any means only a question of other campuses. It's not even basically a question of other campuses. The overhead was a question whether the department should get the overhead that they used. Should be it used for social sciences or humanities . . . . SMAIL: Yes, there was that within the University, but there was also a feeling, It's not even here at 01:21:00 all. It's going . . . . HARRINGTON: Yes. That developed late in my administration, and of course much of the talk about it came after I had left. SMAIL: Was that your idea--to use the overhead for Milwaukee? HARRINGTON: The overhead--a little bit of it. Well, it was totally University money--that is, the question of who controls the overhead is a question of whether it is in the president's office, or is it controlled by the colleges? Certainly it was my view that the president of the University and the central administration should have the say with reference to where one puts this. Obviously, a good deal of it goes back to the campuses that develop it, but it is a clear point, entirely obvious, that the problem of developing overhead, and the reason why overhead is given, is because of the administration of the University. That is, the business office has much more expenditure with reference to overhead than anybody else, and obviously the business office wants to control it. So when I got into the overhead business, because I didn't know very much about it until I became vice-president, not really much about it until I became president, the business office was the operation that wanted to make sure it was held in the central part of the University. SMAIL: Yes, I can see that held in the central administration, but not used for other campuses. I mean, that would be a real grievance, I should think, on the part of Madison. HARRINGTON: It wasn't a real grievance. It wasn't much of a real grievance at the time. It came to be talked about later, particularly after merger, and I think the point was when I left and we had merger, the Madison campus then was concerned about the spreading out of overhead and everything else, and all the gift money to all the campuses. And Ed Youngxe "Young, H Edwin", who ran the Madison campus, then got as his main advisor Bill Youngxe "Young, William H", who had been in the central administration and had been one of the people who favored using overhead generally--who wanted everything brought back to the Madison campus. So it was really after I had left that this question got . . . . SMAIL: Oh, was it? I thought it was at the end of your period. Or maybe people's memories are inaccurate, but when they talk about it, I think they hold you responsible for all of this. HARRINGTON: They could probably hold me responsible; I did use some of this. However, the money that was obtained to build the Milwaukee campus was not so much developed in that way as developed through the legislature. That is to say, we did, for example, during my administration, after we had gotten Milwaukee, get the legislature to agree that fifty dollars more per student for Milwaukee students should be a part of the 01:24:00 appropriations. That was Bill Youngxe "Young, William H"'s idea. He was my budget advisor. SMAIL: Fifty dollars more than here in Madison. HARRISON: No, not more than Madison. It would be less than Madison, actually. After all, as a state university, it didn't get anything like as much per student, but in the money for Madison was partly because Madison was a research campus. So we did persuade the legislature to provide more money for Milwaukee. The concept of a university, though--that a university should be developed from the top as well as from the bottom, and that a university is not made up of separate units but is made up of the totality of the university--is one that I believe in greatly. And of course this ties in to this overhead business, and of course results in some of the conflicts. I came into the picture in conflict, of course, because I felt that the funds of the university should be used for the social sciences on the Madison campus as well as the natural sciences, and believed that overhead money should be used--overhead money given to the running of the whole university--should be used for developing the social sciences and humanities. Thus my first moves with reference to using overhead were connected with things like the research center for the humanities and the development of money for the social sciences, because I was, like other social scientists, upset and irritated that not only was the University budget predominantly used for the social sciences; and the Graduate School money, some of which came from the legislature; and the WARF money. And the money-raising of the University was heavily moved in that direction in the period of E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"--not so much Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A", but E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B". But you see, after all, E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"--when funds were given to the University, they were then put into the science field. So that this is part of the whole thing. It's the concept of the total university, and it fits into the question of the merger very much because it is my view that the University, whether a merged university or not, should be a total university. It isn't now. It's a collection of universities, so that it is not proper to compare the University in my day with the University after merger, because the University in my day was Madison and Milwaukee and Racine-Kenosha and Green Bay, plus Extension, plus the two-year centers. It was all one university. I do agree that in a total university, particularly when you begin to add state colleges to it, you do have to segregate your fund raising. And I suppose that I talked too much about a total university, with all parts of the university being of equal value. But it is to be remembered that long before my time, in E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"'s time, as the head of the Graduate School--he as head of the Graduate School felt that it was proper to give grants to people in the two-year centers. He felt that it was proper to give WARF grants to someone in the two-year centers if he was a natural scientist. SMAIL: The word "university," which used to belong to Madison and suddenly, without their control really, belongs to Madison and Milwaukee, and then suddenly it belongs to a whole lot of other places. HARRINGTON: I must disagree with that, and I 01:27:00 guess maybe this puts me into the kind of subject that I ought to be interested in when I write my book, because the term "university" did not refer just to Madison. The importance of this university is statewide importance, and the fame of the University is associated with things like the Lincoln Steffensxe "Steffens, Lincoln" article, which said, "This is a university which belongs to the whole state." And Lincoln Steffensxe "Steffens, Lincoln", in talking about the role of Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R" as a university president, said that the importance of Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R" is that he reaches all parts of the state. And how did he reach them? He reached them through Agricultural Extension, which is a part of the University. He reached them through General Extension, and of course later on we reached the whole state through radio. These are all parts of the University. They're not separate parts. SMAIL: But they were part of Madison. HARRINGTON: They were out from Madison; that is true. They were under--the top official in Madison, the president, was also president of these things. But the important point here is that the concept of a university is the concept of a statewide university--Madison, it is true, being the heart of it, and the head of it, but it being statewide. And the current concept of a university, with the--whatever it is--eleven universities, is one that gives Extension kind of a problem, and gives the two-year centers kind of a problem. And the Madison position, that Madison is Madison but it also controls the Extension systems and controls the two-year campuses, raises some questions, especially since television is now taken away from the University. But that's another matter. It leads us into Extension in a way, I suppose. HARRINGTON: Let's go back to the opposition to my using Madison overhead for other parts of the University. The degree to which this happened needs to be worked out so that one can find out what the truth is of it, in terms of factual questions, and I can't at this time state it but will later on. The question is to whether the controversy came up while I was president or was mostly afterward, looking back on it, and is part of the controversy connected with merger--all of that is worth looking at, and I guess maybe I'd better look at it so I can talk about it later. But the question of terminology is of some consequence here. While I was president, and until merger, I was president of the University. And this meant that it was a university; it was one university. I'm not the person that made this up. This is very deep in the tradition of the University of Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin, of course, was developed in Madison, but from the very beginning it was more than Madison, because the importance of Agricultural Extension, and University Extension, both of which go back into the nineteenth century, is the heart of the University, really, as much as Madison is. That is, out from Madison, one did have contacts with every part of the state. SMAIL: But they were still--I think maybe that's on the other tape--they were still part of the Madison campus. HARRINGTON: The headquarters were in Madison. And Agricultural Extension was a part of the College of Agriculture. University Extension reported to the president of 01:30:00 the University. Nonetheless, the fact that University Extension and General Extension, later radio and television, belonged to the University and were part of the University--they reached the whole state. Moreover, as we developed the two-year campuses, they were also part of the University. And to some extent they were under the Madison campus, in that the various departments of the University had a little way of supervising the departments out there. They were under Madison, as it were. But the concept of the University was one which--when we developed Milwaukee--when we took the two-year center in Milwaukee and added to it the state college and developed then a very substantial new campus, the question was, Was this going to be separate, and was it going to have its own extension?--urban extension kind of thing. Was it going to have its own radio and television, or were these all going to be part of the University? Well, it seemed to me that the tradition of the University being one university, and a president who would have some role in every part of the University, was of consequence. And therefore, in restructuring the University by having provosts--a provost in Milwaukee that was appointed immediately after the merger, before I became president--and turning the provost over to being chancellors--after the merger, before I was president, there was a provost in Milwaukee, but there was no provost in Madison. The president of the University, in other words, handled the Madison campus directly, and this included some oversight of the two-year center and of the Extension divisions, but Milwaukee was handled through a provost. When I became president, and as the University became more complicated, it seemed to me that Madison needed some more attention than it was getting from the president, especially since we were pulled out to do more in other parts of the state. So we appointed a provost for Madison--first, an acting provost . . . . SMAIL: Why did you use that term? HARRINGTON: Well, it was used in the E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" period for the position of the head of the Milwaukee campus. SMAIL: I mean, do you know why he chose that rather than . . . . HARRINGTON: And I should suppose it was chosen because it was a title of less consequence than "president," which had been the old position of the state university president Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", and of less consequence than "chancellor," because the chancellor term was quite often used for the head of a system, as, for example, in Texas, and the term "provost"--provost was a lesser position than the presidency or chancellor job. So that following this up, when we decided in the central administration that it would be a good idea to have the Madison campus have a little more freedom from the orders of the president, shall we say, we appointed an acting provost for the Madison campus. That was Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin"--no, that was Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L", my vice-president, who for the moment took on the acting provost job, the understanding being that we'd look for a provost. We looked for one using search and screen--brought Bob Flemingxe "Fleming, Robben W" in as provost. And the feeling then was that the provost term might not be high enough for a position in the 01:33:00 headship of the Madison campus under the president. The big example here was California, which had a president of the system and chancellors of the campus, upside down from the Texas thing. But certainly Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" and Flemingxe "Fleming, Robben W" wanted to be chancellors, and at this time we were then separating the two-year campuses and developing the Green Bay and Parkside, so it seemed like a good time to move towards the chancellor system. And we moved towards the chancellor system with chancellors being appointed in Madison and Milwaukee; in Green Bay and in Parkside; and a chancellor for the two-year campuses, and a chancellor for the combined Extension. Now this, in a way, structurally, meant that there was a separation of the two-year campuses and of Extension from the old type of Madison control. SMAIL: That's where the first painful thing happened. HARRINGTON: Yes. This was not protested very much on the Madison campus because the Madison campus actually--well, except for the College of Agriculture, which is a point that we'll come to later on. The Madison campus was so busy with its own development at that time that it did not have as much time as it wanted--as it previously had had--to devote to the two-year campuses. This was particularly significant at that time, because in the '60s you could place your Ph.D.'s anywhere, so there no longer was the need to place them in the two-year centers, and they were glad enough to have two-year center appointments made from the outside. In fact, the members of the center staffs, who were also members of our departments in Madison, found that it was very difficult to get the departments to send people out. They wanted to go ahead and take the Ph.D. and go get a job somewhere else. So the separation did not cause much pain on the Madison campus. Moreover, it was not a complete separation because the two-year campus--the heads of the departments on the two-year campuses--remained members of the Madison departments. This also was the case with Extension--University Extension--and Agricultural Extension in different ways, because under E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B", University Extension was developed with the prominent people in University Extension having appointments also on the Madison campus--with the head of University Extension, Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", having an appointment in political science, and the other person was doing this too. That remained the case after Extension was set up under a separate chancellor. And of course Agricultural Extension was another example of the same thing. It was, in fact, Agricultural Extension which was the model. And E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" wanted University Extension to have this connection with the campuses because Agricultural Extension, which he knew did have this connection--the county agents were connected with the campus through persons who were members of the departments on the agricultural campus. However, it is quite true that the setting up of the chancellor system does mark, to some extent, the taking away from Madison of control of the two-year campuses and the Extension system. SMAIL: Yes, and the crucial thing is that you now have to say "taking away from Madison," whereas at that time you were taking it away from what had been "the University." HARRINGTON: Yes. SMAIL: That's where the issue is. HARRINGTON: Part of the theory of it is that the president of the University--it happened to be me at that time, but you could put it back in E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"'s 01:36:00 day or anything else if you want to--the president of the University had to have some relationship to all of these things. That is, the president had to have a very close relationship to the chancellors and to the faculties of the various campuses. Now of course that's extremely difficult when you add all of the state colleges. It became difficult even in my period, when one developed the new campuses. And we knew it would be difficult, because it was difficult in California when they developed UCLA and the other campuses. But it still seems to me that the principle of the thing--that the president is a figure of consequence on the campuses and deals with the faculties of the campuses--for example, on principle, the University Committee of the Madison campus, which sets policy, recommends policy not only to the chancellor of the Madison campus but to the faculty--that it should have a relationship to the president, because it ought to push policy to the president too. The alternative to this, of course, is to have some kind of a union organization of the faculties that put pressure on the president. But it seemed to me that the apparatus of the campuses--the various parts of the University--should be directly related to the president. Thus it was my feeling, and it remains my feeling, that what we should have is a university and not a university system, and that the various parts of the University should all relate closely to each other and to the president of the University. Thus the creation of the University System, which brings about the feeling that there are many universities, is what separated Madison from the two-year campuses--well, it isn't altogether separated yet--and from Extension, though it isn't separated at all, really, from Agricultural Extension. So that we are dealing here with something of great importance, yes. I'm perfectly willing to grant all the difficulties of running things through a presidency for all parts of the University, and the necessity of having autonomy, but I think the concept of one University is of great importance. It's to be remembered that the Madison campus was what developed the Bascom Plaque. This was done in the 1890's, when there wasn't much of anything except the Madison campus plus Agricultural Extension and a little university extension activity, although the University Extension division hadn't been developed yet. So that the Madison campus was the campus that developed the Bascom Plaque, the academic freedom position, and it's interesting that it was called the State University of Wisconsin in those days, not the University of Wisconsin. Well, the unity of the Plaque was shown by desire of the two-year campuses and Milwaukee. After Milwaukee was developed, copies of the Bascom Plaque were put on the Milwaukee campus and on the two-year campuses. This is a concept of what belonged to the Madison campus in the 1890's belonged to the whole University in the 1960's. SMAIL: Yes. Well, I think . . . . HARRINGTON: And that's of some consequence. SMAIL: And I think it did, on the whole, work up until merger. But you were then saying, and you said Shainxe "Shain, Irving" was saying--how did it work out?--that the person who is the president now doesn't in fact need to be much of anyone, and doesn't need to get this hundred thousand dollar salary. HARRINGTON: That's post-Harrington. SMAIL: Yes, I'm talking about the merger. HARRINGTON: Shainxe "Shain, Irving" is not now saying that we shouldn't have . . . . SMAIL: We're still talking about titles and names and how it works out. HARRINGTON: Shainxe "Shain, Irving" didn't say this. Shainxe "Shain, Irving", of course, wasn't chancellor until after 01:39:00 the merger. SMAIL: Well, I'm talking about today. HARRINGTON: Yes. SMAIL: Presumably you're quoting him or somebody as having said, today, that money ought to be going to the Madison chancellor. HARRINGTON: No, no. I'm not saying that; I'm not saying that Shainxe "Shain, Irving" said that the hundred thousand dollars should go to the head of the Madison campus--no, not at all. What I am saying is that in the change of presidents--the presidents of the University system after merger--Shainxe "Shain, Irving", privately at least, was saying that the headship of the system ought not to be all that important--that the universities were practically independent, and that the Madison campus was the important thing, and that the system head could be a person of less consequence. SMAIL: This is where words became important. HARRINGTON: Yes. SMAIL: What was called "president" and what was called "chancellor," I guess that's . . . . HARRINGTON: And among the words that are important is the word "system," too. SMAIL: Yes. HARRINGTON: That is, I don't think it should have been called a system; it should have remained a university. But I can understand this and it's not only--and my position is certainly a minority position now, because obviously all these state university people wanted it to be a system so that they could be independent, so they could have universities rather than--oh, a University. You can't turn it back now, I don't suppose, although who knows? SMAIL: Yes. HARRINGTON: But I think we are dealing with matters of some consequence here. SMAIL: I wanted to ask you whether you had any say in the choice of regents. HARRINGTON: I guess I would say no, I did not have. The relationship between the University and the governors was very good in the latter Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" period, and in the beginning of my period under Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord", and under Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard" and under Knowles. The relationship was very good, but we were not consulted about the choice of regents. It is true that University and University-connected people pushed for certain appointments. The Alumni Association normally had a candidate that it pressed to the various governors, and this was a University push, I suppose, but since the Alumni Association is separate from the University administration and pushed for the person they wanted, not necessarily the person we wanted, that was not a connection. What the governors did, first Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord"--although Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" was gone by the time we came to more regent appointments in my day--and under Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" and then under Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard", and to some extent under Knowles, there was a discussion of regents. SMAIL: With you? HARRINGTON: Yes, with me. SMAIL: Oh, I see. HARRINGTON: But it was a discussion that went this way: The governor would say, "I plan to appoint so-and-so. Do you have a feeling about this?" This was the case under Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard" and then under Knowles. Indeed, I may be putting it too strong: "I plan to appoint such-and-such a person regent. Do you have any feeling about this? Do you have any objection to this?" Normally one would not have had an objection or would not have voiced it unless it was a violent objection. I was rather hoping, since this was the case at the very beginning under Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard" and under Knowles at the start, that this would be continuing, that Knowles would ask--Knowles and whoever his successors might be--would ask for an opinion as to what we thought about particular nominees. Or if the alumni was pushing somebody, would the governor then say, "Well, here's a couple people, what do you think?" But actually Knowles never asked me for an opinion. Neither did Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard", as far as that's concerned. Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard" appointed only one regent. He wasn't confirmed, but he did tell me about the appointment before he made it and asked if I had 01:42:00 an objection, which I did not. Knowles mentioned his appointment of some regents to me, but I did not object to any. SMAIL: Did you know them? HARRINGTON: I knew who they were. SMAIL: You did. HARRINGTON: And did not raise objections. In fact, it's a somewhat uncomfortable position for a president should you object to one. I thought that in these cases when the matter was mentioned to me, unless I thought such an appointment was outrageous, I would not say anything, because it's a governor's position. In fact, the distance between the governor and the University ought to some extent be maintained. Thus the right to appoint a regent is the governor's right, and I would not suggest an appointment to the governor. I did not feel one should, nor would I object unless my objections were violent. And I never objected to any of the appointments, although it turned out that one or two of the appointments were rather unfortunate, from my point of view. SMAIL: I should think you . . . . HARRINGTON: In one case, the Alumni Association was pressing a medical man for an appointment at the time that Knowles appointed a medical man, Nellenxe "Nellen, James W", to the board. SMAIL: John Nellenxe "Nellen, James W" was the one. HARRINGTON: And I would much have preferred the person whom the Alumni Association was pressing, Dr. Becker--Norman Beckerxe "Becker, Norman", who is head of the Alumni Association. But I did not press that, no. Actually, I didn't know Nellenxe "Nellen, James W", so I raised no objection to him. SMAIL: He was a very violent member of the regents; I mean, his opinions were violent. HARRINGTON: Yes, but he was not hostile initially. SMAIL: Oh, is that right? HARRINGTON: No, he was not hostile until the student question came up. In fact, he was rather an agreeable regent at the beginning. Ultimately he became quite strong in opposition to the administration, but the thing comes down to the fact that . . . . SMAIL: Well, I guess I read that he and DeBardelebenxe "DeBardeleben, Arthur" didn't get along very well. HARRINGTON: That's true. He didn't care much for DeBardelebenxe "DeBardeleben, Arthur", although they did not always disagree. This is part of the story. One doesn't want to object to the governor's appointment of regents--that's his right--unless there's something that is absolutely improper about an appointment. And there were appointments that turned out to be not that fortunate from the point of view of the University administration. They weren't always appointments by the Republicans. So this is a matter in which the University president ought to be reluctant to interfere. If he's asked, he's apt to give an opinion, but he would rarely be asked, and it would likely be in the kind of way that I was asked: "Do you have a violent objection to this person?" or, "Do you have any objection to it? What do you think about this appointment?" Well, what can you say? I feel that the difference ought to be maintained there, just as I feel that the governor, once he's appointed a regent, should not then give orders to the regents. And we did have some objection to governors showing an interest in 01:45:00 telling the regents what to do--not under Knowles, rather more under Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" than under Knowles. Of course, I was not president then. Actually, I have no complaint about the governors when I was president, and the governors were--I came in at the very end of the Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" period, and then Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard" was governor and then Knowles was governor, and they were all very good to the University and had a good relationship to me. And when I had my retirement party we invited those three governors--the governors who had been governor while I was president. Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" wasn't able to come because at that time he was gone with the Wilderness Foundation, chasing around the country, and couldn't come. He would have liked to have come, I think. But both Reynoldsxe "Reynolds, Robert Leonard" and Knowles showed up, which was pleasant. SMAIL: The recent pay raise has a history, which O'Neilxe "O'Neil, Robert M" mentioned--that is, that in the beginning of 1967 a pay differential apparently began to develop between Madison and the state colleges, Madison suffering from it. HARRINGTON: No. Well, yes, I suppose you could say that. Maybe I should refer back to what I said when I was talking about McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" before, and about the politicking in the period before the merger--actually, before I became president. While E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" was finishing his presidency and during the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" period, the political operator for the University was Bill Youngxe "Young, William H", and McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene", of course, was head of the state college system. The state colleges were beginning to rise, and of course their pay level was far below the pay level of the University, so that McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" could not have asked for parity with the University, and he did not. But in that period--which was the period of the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" administration and then on into my administration, and it includes the beginning of the Coordinating Committee days--McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was not asking for parity with the University. But when the University was asking for a certain percentage each biennium, McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" did not ask for the same percentage--far from it. What he asked for was for the same amount of money for raises that the University had. This pre-dates the period that I guess O'Neil was talking about. SMAIL: Yes, which specifically has to do with student unrest and a kind of punitive action against the University. HARRINGTON: No. It does not refer to that. It refers to McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" as an able operator, looking for the best way to get these state teachers colleges--state colleges, state universities--up, and the best way to do it, the University being very high, but the University now developing some new campuses, one of which had been a state college campus, Milwaukee. And as soon as the University got Milwaukee it began to push the 01:48:00 Milwaukee salaries up. McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was then saying, "Well, we are not really asking for parity with Madison, and we understand Milwaukee is moving up too, but what we want is the same amount of money for raises for our faculty that Madison is getting per level." This, of course, meant he was asking for a higher percentage. Since McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" was better than we were in the legislature, he got it. And since the state colleges were a long way behind, it did not bother the University much, and it did not cause us much difficulty. When the Coordinating Committee was set up and began to move in on salaries, it took over this rule. And it's to be remembered that the raises in salaries were not handled directly by the University and by the state colleges after the Coordinating Committee came on. The University and the state colleges--state universities--went to the Coordinating Committee, and the Coordinating Committee then pushed the salary business. So it's a Coordinating Committee question; it's not a question of the ability of the state universities and the legislature. The Coordinating Committee was the one who came forward with the salary points. As to whether this damaged the University, it's the Coordinating Committee that would be the factor here, not the McPheexe "McPhee, Eugene" pressure in the legislature. SMAIL: Well, O'Neil's point was that at that point the Madison campus, from '67 to '70, lost the kind of lead over the other campuses that it ought to have had. HARRINGTON: Oh, you mean of the other campuses of the University. SMAIL: No, of the . . . . HARRINGTON: Country. SMAIL: No, of the state colleges. HARRINGTON: Oh no. I think we have to put that in a different direction. The period of the '60s actually is a period when the salary levels at the University--and we'll talk Madison if you want to--went up; went up when the University gained ground compared with its competition around the country. SMAIL: No, this is . . . . HARRINGTON: As far as they--no, let's put it this way. The period of the '60s is a period of real gains for the University--Madison campus, Milwaukee campus, too--as against the competition in other parts of the country. It is a period when the state colleges gained substantially with reference to their salary levels, yes, but of course they were improving. They were moving from the state teachers college position to the state university position, and of course they went up. It was not done to the damage of the University. The University continued to move forward and it was a period of substantial gains. It is true that in the '70s--in the Luceyxe "Lucey, Patrick J" period and since, and of course down to the time when Earlxe "Earl, Anthony" wouldn't allow any raises at all--that the University suffered with reference to the national competition. I think this can be done factually if one looks at the position of the University with reference to its competition around the country and see what happens. Did the University suffer with reference to the rise of Milwaukee? Well, that could be argued. I don't know. The decline of the University from the '60s on, though, was not owing to the rise of the state teachers colleges or the state universities. If O'Neil said that O'Neil is in error, and O'Neil was not here then. SMAIL: Yes, he is 01:51:00 specifically talking about three years: 1967 on to 1970, and he is . . . . HARRINGTON: And you think he puts this in connection with the programs. SMAIL: And he speaks of a--it's one to thirty-two, and I didn't understand the figure. SMAIL: I have two questions about your staff. One is about Camilla Hansonxe "Hanson, Camilla", who's now a regent. I was just curious about her. She was on your staff? Somebody said she was. HARRINGTON: No. SMAIL: Well, you'd certainly know. The other is about Don Percyxe "Percy, Donald E"--how he got started with you. Why did you choose him? HARRINGTON: I didn't choose him. If I were going to talk about Percyxe "Percy, Donald E", it probably ought to be a substantial discussion. SMAIL: All right. Well, will you do that sometime? HARRINGTON: Sometime. Not now. SMAIL: I would like to make just a statement. It seemed to me that Extension did--the reason I wanted to talk about it was that it was related to the merger--of the University, I mean--part of Extension history in the 1960's. HARRINGTON: No. SMAIL: Well, in this sense, that there was . . . . HARRINGTON: Not related to the merger of 1971. SMAIL: No, I don't mean actually, but I mean the hostility of the state colleges--part of it developed because of the rise of Extension. And there's this eloquent letter from Platteville talking about that and accusing the university of being imperialist. HARRINGTON: About the new campuses, though? Not about Extension? SMAIL: I think about Extension. My only point is that . . . . HARRINGTON: I've never seen the Platteville letter. SMAIL: Oh. I'm not sure I have it with me. HARRINGTON: What was it about? Extension classes? SMAIL: I'm not even sure it's to you. Two extension people, Dave Shannonxe "Shannon, David" and somebody else, had gone down to Platteville to talk . . . . HARRINGTON: Not Dave Shannonxe "Shannon, David"--Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore". SMAIL: Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore" had gone down to talk to the Platteville people about doing some courses--extension courses--and they protested later. HARRINGTON: Well, that's quite a different question. I'm willing to talk about that. SMAIL: Here it is. We're now ready to turn to Extension. I had sent you a list of questions. HARRINGTON: I'll talk about the questions, but I really should talk first about my interest in extension, which, after all, you do state in the letter you sent me in February of 1985--my interest in extension goes back quite a long time. I was interested in adult education, and extension is a part of adult education, although it's also something else, too. I became interested in adult education when I was teaching at New York University before I came out here, because they taught evening classes, and was quite interested in finding that older students were pretty good students--better than my undergraduate students, I thought. They were undergraduates too, but they were older than my daytime undergraduates. So I came out here with an interest in adult education, and when I came out to Wisconsin--I had always been in private schools before--Cornell and New York University--and I was immediately struck by the fact that the University of Wisconsin, which then was Madison only and the two-year centers in Milwaukee and around the state, and that the University, in addition to these two-year centers, also had contacts all through the state and sent speakers out all through the state. While I was a young member of the faculty, an instructor and then assistant professor, I did some of this speaking around the state for starvation wages--fifteen dollars each, it seemed to me, plus expenses in going--and this seemed to me an interesting activity. One went out 01:54:00 and talked to various people, usually at the two-year centers, but sometimes at high schools. You talked about questions of the day. You know, as a historian I was talking about foreign relations questions, usually. But other people, of course, talked about education questions--a good deal of the extension was education. This interested me. I was interested, as I read about the history of the University, that the University prided itself on being a statewide university and on doing something for people all over the state, much of it through agricultural extension. And certainly I'd read Lincoln Steffensxe "Steffens, Lincoln"' article that said that this was the university that taught the people of the country that higher education was a part of their lives, and that the life of the University was a life of the people, and that the University would teach people how to farm, and would teach people how to develop business, and would give correspondence courses to people all over the state. This interested me because, of course, I had been connected with liberal arts programs at Cornell and at New York University, and except for the evening classes, there wasn't much adult education--there wasn't much extension activity--that is, going out and helping people solve problems--till I got out here. So I was interested in this. And this gave me some idea of what the University was like. When I left Wisconsin to go down to Arkansas, I found this was the same thing down there. And I did some teaching away from the campus down there, and I got acquainted with agricultural extension down there. It was highly politicized down there--much more so than up here. So that, coming back to Wisconsin before I went into administration, I had this importance of extension very much on my mind. When I went into administration, I went in first as a special assistant to President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B", and then as vice-president before I became president. I then became very much interested in extension, because it did seem to me that we were changing our extension program in that we were planning--we were hoping--to build from the two-year program in Milwaukee into a four-year campus. That is, my involvement with the Milwaukee question was an involvement with the Extension division, which was then a two-year extension, and I became more and more interested as I got into administration. This interest in extension increased, of course, as I got to know the extension people. I got to know Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" very early. And Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", in those days--back in the day of President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" and President Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A"--Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was the head of the University Extension, which meant the courses taught around the state--the non-credit courses around the state. And also he was the head of the two-year centers; they were combined at this time. Thus, as his friend, and as the friend of other people connected with extension, like Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore", who was Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"'s assistant, I naturally came to see this as an important part of the University. And when I became a sub-administrator, I got further involved. I did not know much about agricultural extension in those days, but when I got into university administration I came to see that this was of some consequence. Actually, I saw a great deal of value in the connection of extension with campuses, because it was under President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B", but before I became his assistant, that University Extension became close to the campuses by having the head of political science for extension appointed--a member of the Department of Political Science, Jim Donoghuexe "Donoghue, James R.". Well, the matter came 01:57:00 to a head in my case when, as vice-president of the University, I was asked by the Carnegie Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, to write about adult education. This comes about in a peculiar way in that as a University faculty person here, and at Arkansas and then back here, I could see that the state university was something that spread out around the state. And I gave extension lectures, so that this was a matter of interest to me. And then along came the proposal from the Carnegie people that I write a book about university adult education. This came about because the Carnegie Foundation was asked, Wouldn't it finance the writing of a book about adult education in universities? The proposal came from the University of Chicago, from the Center for the Liberal Education of Adults, which had been set up at the University of Chicago, which was a private university, after all, and was headed by a man named Liverightxe "Liveright, A A \"Sandy\""--A. A. Liverightxe "Liveright, A A \"Sandy\"", who was always called Sandy Liverightxe "Liveright, A A \"Sandy\"", although his name was A. A. Liverightxe "Liveright, A A \"Sandy\"". I don't even know what the A's stand for. Sandy Liverightxe "Liveright, A A \"Sandy\"" had come up out of labor education, which is a bit odd for private universities, but he then developed this Center for the Study of Liberal Education of Adults, and went to the Carnegie Foundation and said, Couldn't they get some money to write a book about university adult education? He went to the Carnegie people because the Carnegie people had written a whole lot of books about liberal education of adults, and they had financed books during the 1920s and '30s which dealt with different aspects of adult education. And notice it was liberal education for adults; it was letters and science education. It was carrying out the courses that were normally taught in philosophy and economics and so on and allowing people who were adults to come to campus, or you could go out to teach them, or you could teach them by correspondence. University of Chicago was a pioneer in correspondence study. Mr. Harperxe "Harper, William Rainey"--William Harperxe "Harper, William Rainey", first president of the University of Chicago--came from Chautauqua and was a correspondence enthusiast, and felt that half of education should be correspondence education. He developed from the University of Chicago the best correspondence courses in liberal education anywhere in the country. Well, this meant that the University of Chicago was a likely candidate for writing a book about university adult education. But notice that this was liberal education for adults. Meanwhile, while Chicago and Harperxe "Harper, William Rainey" had been developing this liberal education for adults and correspondence courses in English and whatnot; history and so on; even, to some extent, recreational courses for people that were interested in the great books and so on--the public universities of this country had begun to develop extension. And this was double--it was adult education through university extension, which meant professors on campus went out and taught courses, some of them liberal courses and some of them practical courses; and agricultural extension, 02:00:00 which was started around World War I, went out teaching farmers. So that the public universities became very active in the adult education and in correspondence courses. They were much more practical than Chicago, and much less interested in liberal education than they were--well, they would do accounting more than they would do economics. They would have courses that would be useful to people more than for intellectual assistance to people. Therefore, when Carnegie was asked, Would they finance this book on liberal education for adults?--university adult education--John Gardnerxe "Gardner, John", who headed Carnegie, felt, "Well, sure, we ought to do that, but we ought to get somebody that knows the public side as well as the private side." So he asked me to do it. I was already working the foundations and I was known to the foundation people, and I was from Wisconsin and I was interested in adult education. In fact, I had talked to Gardner about, Couldn't he do something more for adult education than he was doing? He was already financing public television, and he had a fund for adult education--well, he had been connected--Fund for Adult Education was a Ford fund--but he had been interested in adult education. So I was talking to him and then along came this proposal from University of Chicago, so he asked me, wouldn't I write this? So I said I'd write it, sure, because he wanted someone who wasn't in adult education to write it--like when he does a book on athletics, he asks someone who isn't in athletics to write it. And I agreed to do this, provided it would be public as well as private. And he said, "Sure." And the money went through the Center for Liberal Education for Adults, but I wrote the book without following their liberal education for adults. I didn't write a book on liberal education for adults; I wrote a book on adult education, and that's my book, which ultimately came out many, many years later. And I hired Don McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" to be my deputy on it, so that he helped me, and that's how he got involved in . . . . SMAIL: I see. HARRINGTON: He was in adult education because he had been in the Historical Society, and that's adult education. Well, I went ahead and did the study. Obviously, I did this while I was vice-president, and this was of interest to me. I was doing it and obviously getting more and more interested in adult education, because when I wrote the book on adult education, I said adult education had better include university extension, agricultural extension, radio and television, as well as these courses that are given in English to housewives and such. And as I wrote the book, I got more and more involved because I went for meetings of adult educators--the university extension adult educators, the agricultural extension people, the radio and television people. I ended by attending these meetings and giving speeches at these meetings and hearing what these people had to say. So obviously I was something of an expert, one might say, on this area--perhaps with views that didn't agree with everybody, but at least I was very active in this area--so active in it, in fact, that I was known to the adult educators around the country. And I got to know agricultural extension, general extension, radio and television better than most people who were moving up in university administration. It was indeed my main interest in writing about education in those days. So that even while I was vice-president I was active in the administration field. As vice-president you naturally have a few special assignments, and my assignments under Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" were to handle the social sciences and handle Milwaukee, and handle the two-year centers and handle extension, although he didn't think of me as handling agricultural extension, I suppose, since that was pretty much handled by the dean of agriculture. So I came into the presidency with a very substantial interest in adult education--indeed, an interest that was involved in my writing a book about it, which by reason of my becoming president I didn't write at that time. I didn't finish it until after I had left the presidency, but I was already heavily involved in it and had interviewed a lot of people, so naturally I had lots of ideas about it. And also I had became connected with the adult educators--for example, I had spoken to the Agricultural Extension people while vice-president--to the university extension people. Inevitably, I suppose, I was closer to the University Extension people because the Agricultural Extension was connected with the College of Agriculture. I hadn't had many connections with that. I'd had some, but not very many, so that they naturally assumed, I suppose, that I'd be a representative of University Extension rather than Agricultural Extension, and it was that feeling that stayed with the agricultural people, I think, all the way through. They felt that I didn't do as much for Agricultural Extension as for University Extension. However, when I got around to writing my book, I said that Agricultural Extension was the best example of university adult education in the United States and probably anywhere in the world. So I do praise Agricultural Extension, and you then said it ought to be a model for other kinds of extension like [inaudible] extension and university extension, and so on. My interest in 02:03:00 extension was very active during my vice-presidential period, because that was the period that we were developing Milwaukee, and it was at that time that it came to me that we ought to have in Milwaukee an urban extension. This was not just my doing, not by any means, because all through the country there was the feeling that the urban universities were rising. Everyone was interested in this, and Joe Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", who headed the Wisconsin State University and then the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, wrote a book on urban education. The Urban University Association existed, and there was talk about doing things for urban institutions. They were the rising institutions, public and private. But during this period when I was vice-president I was involved in the responsibility for Milwaukee. The interest of Milwaukee in doing something around the city was clear. The old state university hadn't done much. It had educated: It had given night classes, it had done some educating of the municipal administrators so that they could get advanced degrees and so on, but it hadn't done very much. When it became part of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the question was, If you are going to develop the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, how do you develop it? Obviously, you develop it as an urban institution. And this had a fine arts side, which interested Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" a great deal, but it seemed to me it had a great deal of interest in, How do you work with minorities and how do you work with city government and so on? Therefore, during that period as vice-president, when I was still working the foundations, I obtained a grant for the University for a million dollars--the first million dollar grant we ever got from a foundation--from the Ford Foundation to develop urban extension. The Ford Foundation was interested in this--doing something for the cities--and began talking about it during the period when I was covering the foundations as an assistant to President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" and then as vice-president. And of course I got acquainted with the Ford people and talked to them about what ought to be done, and said to them, "Well, you know university extension, agricultural extension, is not just teaching classes--it's also solving problems, because the agricultural people go out into an area and say, 'If you've got a problem with disease, we'll show you how to fix it. If you have a problem of increasing production, or moving into new crops, we'll help you do it.' And in the city, too--you have these problems in the city of poverty and prejudice and getting rid of urban blight and all this kind of stuff, and we ought to do something." So I was talking to the Ford people while they were getting interested in urban extension, and talked about the agricultural model as being a good model. So that the Ford Foundation then announced it was going to have a program of urban extension--money for urban extension--and Paul Ylvisakerxe "Ylvisaker, Paul" got the mayor of New York to say that we ought to go into urban extension the way that we'd gone into agricultural extension. So obviously I was enough interested in this so that I got the grant. I got the grant by personal friendships with the Ford people and by the Ford Foundation, and through Paul Ylvisakerxe "Ylvisaker, Paul", who's now Dean of Education at Harvard. Paul Ylvisakerxe "Ylvisaker, Paul" had a Wisconsin background, since his father was a Lutheran minister in Wisconsin, so he had ties here. And he and I hit it off. He was a minor figure, perhaps we might say, in the Ford Foundation, but he was given charge of developing this urban extension stuff, and he and I really hit it off because it seemed that this was something in which we ought to be involved as a strong university with an extension background, but more particularly--because when I became assistant to President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" in 1956, I was assistant to President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" for the social sciences and humanities. In fact, I wasn't even his assistant at first. I was initially the social science representative in the central administration. Later I became special assistant to President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin 02:06:00 B". And I was told by the Social Science Executive Committee that we ought to develop the social sciences; we ought to get some money. It was all going through WARF to the natural sciences. And we were agreed--the Social Science Executive Committee and I--that we ought to get some programs in. And we decided we'd have a few and one of them would be urban studies. We'd develop urban studies, we'd develop international studies in South Asia, and we'd develop this as a program that needed money from the foundations, needed money from WARF, needed money from the university budget. So that I had instructions, as the social science representative in the central administration, to go ahead and do something about urban studies. Since we were at the same time developing the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I was agreed with the people who were pushing urban studies on the Madison campus that we ought to develop Milwaukee, too. The main person here was Jacob Beuscherxe "Beuscher, Jacob" of the Law School, who was a first-rate person, who was interested in going somewhere and to recognize that Milwaukee ought to be involved in this. He was much more of a Milwaukee-centered person than most members of the Madison campus faculty. So that when I got the million dollars in the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" administration--and I say I got it because I did. It was done in this fashion: that when Ylvisakerxe "Ylvisaker, Paul" decided he was going to give some million-dollar grants to universities to develop urban extension, he decided he was going to give them to the public universities, not to private universities. And he did this to Rutgers, for example, in New Jersey, and to Wisconsin. He came out here, and he and I went together to President Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A", and he asked President Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A", "Would you accept a million dollars for urban extension?" Of course, Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" put a light on me for this, and I said, "Of course we should do this, and this should be a grant not only for the Madison campus, but for Milwaukee as well." In developing urban studies, we had made some appointments even before this; we had supplied some money from the central administration--Madison administration--to the departments to appoint some urban people. We had brought some in. The idea was we'd develop in Madison some urban studies. And this would be a way in which Madison would be turning out people who would be urban planners, and it was to be a Madison operation at this time. But from the beginning, the Madison people who were developing this recognized that we ought to develop Milwaukee, too, because that's where the people were. Therefore Madison, which was working closely with Milwaukee at that time--in fact, the Madison departments were telling the Milwaukee departments what to do--that we would go forward and appoint some people in Milwaukee. So we did go forward and appoint some people in Milwaukee even before the Ford Foundation came in. So when the Ford Foundation began working in urban extension, we said, "Here we are. We've got urban studies going in Madison; we've got it going in Milwaukee. We could use a million dollars, which ought to be not only to develop research operations, but to develop urban extension in Milwaukee." HARRINGTON: Obviously, this began to give us some problems, because if Milwaukee was going to develop urban studies and urban extension, should it be developed out of the Milwaukee departments or should it be developed out of Extension? University Extension felt it should be developed out of University Extension, and maybe in cooperation with the Milwaukee departments. In fact, you could cooperate with the Milwaukee departments the same way you cooperated with the Madison departments. The general feeling, though, of course, with the extension people who were tied to Madison, was that they would be the ones who would have the say, and it would be quite proper for them to go into Milwaukee apart from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee--just as, with some friction later on with the state colleges, when University Extension began to go more actively around the state. Of course, this began to make Extension be a little more complicated than it had been before, because we got a 02:09:00 million dollars from Ford. Well, how should you divide it? Where should the money be placed? I decided that there should be a committee to get rid of the million dollars and that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" should be head of the committee. He was head of University Extension, and he was a political scientist with an interest in this kind of stuff. But the Madison people weren't as happy as they might have been about this. They felt that the money should be primarily to build up the Madison urban studies field, not to develop an extension operation. That is, the Madison people interested in urban studies said, "It's going to take a long time to build up a mass of people who are capable of handling advising in the cities and who are capable of turning out city experts. You have to have people who can turn out political science experts; you have to have people who can do urban planning, to get you into architecture kinds of things; and you therefore need to have individuals developed. You need to have a substantial body of people on your campus." They gave the example: when San Francisco--University of California--got into urban studies, what they did first was to turn out a lot of studies. In other words, they made studies of the bay and of the city before they decided what should be done; these were research studies. So the feeling here on the Madison campus was that that's what you should do first. But this is not action. This is research, and research ahead of action. And it was my feeling what the Ford Foundation wanted, and what I wanted, was that you should get into action right away. We're already beginning to get into the period which became the Great Society, in which it was felt that universities ought to be doing things. And therefore I wanted to have us get into action right away, and so did Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". After all, picking University Extension, which moves into action--ties to the people--is a little different from making studies of urban problems and putting them on the board. There are serious problems, of course, about all of this. One thing is that University Extension never had done much of this kind of stuff. It had a little bit of advising of small cities on how they should handle their finances or how they should work out planning. They had a man named Colbertxe "Colbert, Roy J." who did small city planning, but when you get into Milwaukee this is something else again, because to what extent can you advise a city as big as Milwaukee, especially a city that's a little sensitive about University advising? What the city of Milwaukee felt was that the University ought to give master's degrees to its city officials, including the mayor, who got one from UW-Milwaukee. And then let the city . . . . SMAIL: Honorary, or worked for it? HARRINGTON: Worked for it. SMAIL: Oh, really? HARRINGTON: No, no--honorary master's degrees at the University. There are some places that give honorary master's degrees--Oxford does and Yale does, but we don't. The city of Milwaukee, of course, feels that the University--well, it might give some advice once in a while, but it ought not to run things, whereas the general concept of agricultural extension is that the University really gets in here and does things. And we had rather thought that we'd do this; we'd develop an urban agent kind of thing. And obviously Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was interested in doing this. The problem is, University Extension had taught classes mostly, and a little advising. It had never done things like what Agricultural Extension had. It had never 02:12:00 pitched in and organized the local people to do something. But of course, out in the agricultural sections of the state, you pull the people together and they make agreements on new crops and do all kinds of stuff. They do demonstration work for how you introduce a new crop or get rid of a disease, or how you impress city government and so on. So that that was the model that University Extension was supposed to do. Well, University Extension was interested in this, of course--getting into problem solving, doing like Agricultural Extension. Agricultural Extension wasn't any too keen on the University doing this through University Extension because Agricultural Extension thought it was the problem solver. Why shouldn't it go into the cities? It already had agents in Milwaukee. They planned gardens for people in the cities, you know, and worked with flower manufacturers--agriculturally related--and worked with florists and this kind of thing, but they felt if you're going to do city problem solving, it ought to be the agricultural agents who get in there. See, it wasn't called Agricultural Extension; it was called Cooperative Extension, so that they're the ones who ought to do it, not the University Extension, which had no experience in it. All they could do was teach classes, and generally taught credit classes; University Extension taught credit classes, taught some non-credit classes, but mostly credit classes. And Agricultural Extension never taught credit. It taught non-credit; it went person to person--taught people how to do things, you see? So that Agricultural Extension looked with some doubt upon this, and the more so since Agricultural Extension was the model which the Ford Foundation was using--we ought to do for the cities what Agricultural Extension had done for the farm. We ought to have urban agents and so on, and this kind of stuff. In fact, there had been some bills in Congress that we should have urban agents. And President Johnsonxe "Johnson, William S", in 1965, just as we were getting into this kind of stuff--President Johnsonxe "Johnson, William S" made a speech out at Irvine, California, in which he said, "In agriculture, we've used the universities to solve the problems of agriculture." He'd been very closely connected, because in Texas, agricultural extension is a political operation, and you make political appointments as county agents. He said, "Now let's go to the cities and have urban agents." He made this speech in 1964, I guess it was, in Irvine, California. And he put that in himself. President Johnsonxe "Johnson, William S" put that urban agent stuff in himself. He came out of agricultural extension, so that even when he was vice-president, he noticed who got appointed county agents in Texas, so he was very close to this. He probably had in mind that you should develop an urban agent system which would be political, the same as his agricultural extension agent in Texas. Agricultural agents in Wisconsin weren't political to the same degree. You tend to be political if one agricultural organization runs extension, like Farm Bureau Federation did in Illinois, which ran extension, or in Texas. But here in Wisconsin we have the two organizations--the Farm Bureau Federation and Farmers Union. We have a third one too--the National Farm Organization--for the very small farmers. But we have a balance, Republicans and Democrats--Farm Bureau Federation, Republican; the Farmers Union, which is Democrat--so it wasn't politicized to the same degree. And therefore we were interested in this, obviously--using the agricultural mode--but of course that didn't mean we'd use the agriculture people to do this kind of thing. All right, we had the million dollars, and we went ahead and decided we'd do some things in the city. A million dollars isn't much when it comes down to it. You'd need some federal money. This is obvious, because here is Agricultural Extension getting federal money, great quantities of federal money, to do the kind of thing it wanted, and here was this million dollars. It was nothing at all, you might say, from the Ford Foundation, but it got things started. And we did begin to get things started. It was pretty complicated because--should it be run out of Madison Extension, with the Madison departments, which were heavily in Extension, telling what should be done? Or should it be done from the Milwaukee departments? Or should Extension do through its own people? And should Agricultural Extension have a piece of it as against the University Extension?--Agricultural Extension not only being in Milwaukee then, but it was already working in Milwaukee, on gangs, for example. It said it could 02:15:00 work with the poor people--get them to plant gardens and so on. So this was a complicated thing from the beginning. Well, of course, obviously my interest in it was very substantial, and I pretty soon found it was pretty complicated. But my interest in it was in getting federal money, because I was already active in the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, and indeed had become the legislative chairman--that is, the person who worked with Congress. What I said was, "All right, we've got a committee, and they'll work on various things." And I had different people on my committee work on different things, like water resources and business finance. But I said I'd work on getting the money for University Extension for urban extension. And I did, and we got money. The Higher Education Act of 1965, Title I, is money for University Extension. We had hoped to get money so that we could have something equivalent to Agricultural Extension, Agricultural Extension having $60 million or so for the country--a million dollars or more for each state that way. We thought we'd get the same amount of money and we could then begin to get into this urban stuff. And we got authorizations for rather large sums, but we didn't get appropriations. The authorizations were for quite a bit of money, like $25 million, but we got only $10 million for appropriations. So we really never did get enough to get going. Moreover, it got further complicated, because in agricultural extension, all the money goes to the land grant college--that is, to the state university that has the county agents, and in university extension--well, a lot of people do university extension--not only public universities, but private universities do it. And in the cities most universities are private universities--Marquette and so on; New York University, where I first got into this stuff myself. So that the private universities--very strong in Congress--they wanted in on this. So the money, when it was offered, was offered both to public and private, and there would have to be state bodies to hand it out. And so a state body was appointed to each of the states. Of course, since we're the power in Wisconsin, we'd get most of it. In some states, where the private universities had most of the enrollment, they would tend to get most of it. Well, we got some federal money for this--1965. Of course, obviously my interest in this was substantial since I was writing the book. I was lobbying for extension money nationally, and I was in touch with a lot of other people that were working on these problems. Well, to summarize it, we didn't get as much money as we wanted on the public thing, so University Extension--urban extension--never got the money that Agricultural Extension did. Moreover, there were those who felt this was a rivalry, and when we began working on money for University Extension and this urban stuff in Washington, people connected with the White House said, "Okay, let's take it away from Agricultural Extension and give it to you," so that we had some friction there that we tried to straighten out and work out, only partly successfully. There was a feeling between Agricultural Extension and University Extension . . . . SMAIL: But it was already merged then, here. HARRINGTON: No, not when the--it was just getting merged. SMAIL: In 1965? HARRINGTON: It was just getting merged at that time, yes. I'm talking about from '64--'63-'64--on. It was '64 that President Johnsonxe "Johnson, William S" said we ought to have it. SMAIL: Yes, in '65 the act was passed. Yes. HARRINGTON: In '65 the act was passed. No, wait a minute. You're talking about the regents deciding on the merger of Extension. SMAIL: No, the national--financing extension. HARRINGTON: Financing extension nationally was in two pieces. Title I of the Higher Education Act of 1965 was to finance university extension. Agricultural extension still was financed through Agricultural Extension, and it went through the Department of Agriculture, whereas university extension went through Health, Education and Welfare. Therefore, they're separate things. SMAIL: The Higher Education Act . . . . HARRINGTON: The Higher Education Act of 1965 did not merge agricultural extension and university extension. It just appropriated money for university extension. SMAIL: You were talking about merger here. I'm merely bringing up the point--you said there was competition between Agricultural and General Extension. HARRINGTON: I was using that on the national scene, but I could move it to the local scene, of course, easy enough. SMAIL: Oh, okay. I see. I didn't realize that. HARRINGTON: There was conflict even here, because the White House was suggesting, "Okay, we'll take money away from agricultural extension and give it to general extension." Of course, we wouldn't have any part of that. We had to 02:18:00 support Agricultural Extension, which I thought was terrific anyway. It had its faults, but it was terrific. And therefore we were in a period of great activity, nationally and locally, in extension. All right, now let's move from the Ford Foundation grant of a million dollars, which was later supplemented, and the national financing of this kind of thing, back to our own situation. When I became president, I was already concerned about getting into the cities, although the Agricultural Extension people--1962--were telling me, "Well, Agricultural Extension is the one who ought to do this. We're the problem solver, we can go into the cities." But of course, even though they called it Cooperative Extension, you take these farm people and put them in the cities, who in the cities is going to pay attention to them? The mayor certainly isn't going to say, "You county agents are the ones who can tell us what to do." It didn't seem right to me, and the University Extension, anyway, seemed to be the better channel for this kind of thing. SMAIL: And it wasn't in their vision to put in city people--Agricultural Extension? HARRINGTON: Agricultural Extension has city people, but these were city people . . . . SMAIL: But I mean, you said they put in farmers into the positions. HARRINGTON: They're agriculturally-related people. They were advising how to market farm goods; they were telling people how to plant gardens. SMAIL: So they had nothing to do with what you were after, really. HARRINGTON: Well, when you get into what they tried to do with the gangs, for example--and they worked on nutrition through the home agents--it gets in fairly close. It gets in fairly close, so it really comes to be kind of one thing, you might say. In any case, working on my book, it certainly became clear to me that we had something rather special here at Wisconsin. And in fact, the name of the University of Wisconsin was connected from the very beginning with extension, in that we had the strongest university extension in the country--no doubt about that. We had appropriations for it. The National University Extension Association was established here on this campus in World War I by Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R". He was the national head, and we were the strongest university extension in the country in that we had very large appropriations for university extension from the state and we had almost 100 percent support--very small fees. So that we were the one known for extension. In fact, Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R" was the nationally-known extension--first president of National University Extension Association, and known for this. And that's what he talked about. We were also known as one of the strongest agricultural extension operations in the country, because we had research here on the campus, and you take the research on the campus and you put it out in the country. So here we had something unique, really. We were extremely strong in university extension, and extremely strong in agricultural extension. We were the strongest in the country, really, in both, you might say. There were other places that were strong in each, but I think you could hardly say that there was a university that was as strong as we were in both, unless it was University of California. And there were some others that were pretty good, like Minnesota and 02:21:00 Illinois. But in any case, this certainly appealed to me, especially since I began to think about Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R". And why was Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R" important? He was important because he developed both agricultural extension--he was not an agricultural man; he was a geologist--and because he developed university extension, and because he talked about university extension in a broader way, even, than the extension people did. They talked about teaching classes all around the state. He talked about it--he used the term "social welfare." He said, "University extension ought to be used to raise the level of the people, in the farm as well as the city." Quite an extraordinary man, really, and one whom I much admired, although I'm sure he was kind of a cold fish when you come down to it. He was so important a person that I demanded his name be used on this building. I shifted it from the eating place over in the dormitories. That was named after Van Hisexe "Van Hise, Charles R"--the commons over there. I shifted it, much to the irritation of the feeding people, to give it to this building, and giving it to this building because this was the building that would have University administration at the top. This was the statewide building. This was very much in my mind, and I think proper in the sense that it was the right name for the building in this connection. Well, obviously my interest in doing something in extension was fairly clear. I was writing a book about it--a book financed by a national association, and a book that was getting to be more and more known, even before it was done--long before it was done--because I talked to everybody around the country about it. And I was interested in this, and this was the logical place to do something. Other universities were combining agricultural extension and university extension before we did, and this was of great interest to me. The one that really interested me was the University of Missouri, where they combined agricultural extension and university extension, and both reasonably, in what you'd call a second-rate university system. SMAIL: Did they have such a long tradition of the two? HARRINGTON: The central university at Missouri was not as good as the Madison one, but they did have a long tradition, yes, and they had done pretty well in both. And they had very able people as president and as head of agricultural extension. The president of the university, Elmer Ellisxe "Ellis, Elmer", a historian like me and an old friend of mine--obviously, this has something to do with it, too--and the head of agricultural extension was Price Ratchfordxe "Ratchford, Price", who was a very able fellow. And he was made head of a combined extension. He came out of agricultural extension, but he became head of the combined extension, not only to handle Missouri agriculture, but also to handle Missouri cities. They have two big cities--St. Louis and Kansas City. He was chosen to head this--came out of agriculture. But he was chosen to head a combined one, and Ratchfordxe "Ratchford, Price" believed and told me--because I knew Ratchfordxe "Ratchford, Price" well; I used him as one 02:24:00 of my lobby agents in Washington to work on industrial money from industrial advice--Ratchfordxe "Ratchford, Price" said, "The key to a combined extension is not to have it under the dean of agriculture." Well, maybe Ratchfordxe "Ratchford, Price" didn't like the dean of agriculture; maybe he felt that urban extension was something different. Although he came out of agriculture, he insisted that it be independent. And he was made head of Missouri united extension, but not reporting to the dean of agriculture--reporting to the president. And he developed urban agents. In fact, what he did was to take agricultural agents and retrain them to work in the cities. And this seemed to work pretty well in Missouri. It wouldn't be quite as satisfactory here, because Milwaukee wouldn't like this idea of bringing agricultural agents in and retraining them. It's a city with a great deal of pride. I don't know; it seems like Kansas City and St. Louis would have pride too, but anyway, they didn't object to it the same way as it would have been objected to here. I was interested in that; that struck me. I knew Ellisxe "Ellis, Elmer" well--old historians together--I knew Ratchfordxe "Ratchford, Price" well because I used him to get this industrial relations act through in Washington when I was head of the committee on legislative action. And I was interested also in West Virginia. HARRINGTON: Extension was one of the matters which I gave a good deal of attention to while I was vice-president from 1958-1962, Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" having asked me to handle that side of our University operations. I had known something about extension before I became vice-president, but now I learned a great deal more, and in fact quite actively discussed extension questions with the administrators and talked a good deal at meetings of Extension people--that is, University Extension people, General Extension people and Agricultural Extension people--so that this is a period in which I became heavily involved. At that time, Extension was headed by two different people. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" headed General Extension as well as being head of the summer session and the two-year centers, and Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was head of Cooperative Extension. Both of these people were outstanding, actually, in national terms--for I came to know the national picture--they were regarded as the leaders in the field. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" had been head of General Extension for a long time, since Dykstraxe "Dykstra, Clarence A"'s period, actually, and had made a reputation for having developed General Extension with a minimum of support. I say a minimum of support in terms of the situation as compared with Cooperative Extension. Actually, the legislature supported general extension in Wisconsin, really, probably better than general extension was supported in any other part of the United States. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was an able administrator, and I emphasize the administrator point. He was not much of a promoter. He spoke rarely, and he did not even talk up in meetings very much. We had meetings in those days of all the deans and directors, and in those he was generally silent. However, in his own field he handled things extremely well--not with 02:27:00 bluster, not with orders, so much as in a quiet fashion of handling the people under him. He had subordinates to whom he delegated important matters; for example, on the two-year centers which he handled, he had Bill Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" doing the detail work--working with the county governments and this kind of thing. And on the rest of extension he had Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore", who worked with him. And he seemed to be telling these people to run things and often had them do the speaking. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was, however, quietly effective. He always had his whole shop very much in mind, and of course Extension was a very complicated shop. And he had the goodwill of everybody in Extension and on the campus, and even the goodwill of people in Agricultural Extension, although there was some friction between these two groups. The stature of Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" can best be stated if I point out that in 1958, when there was a search for a president to succeed E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"--Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" ultimately being selected, of course--there were four inside people who were nominated by the search and screen committee, the faculty search and screen committee. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was one of those. Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" was another; I was another; Wendtxe "Wendt, Kurt F" of engineering was a fourth. This indicates Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"'s position, even though Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" at that time was overseas. He was on his Turkish mission at that time. Thus we have a very good extension division headed by a very able man. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"'s main importance, as you look at the whole history of extension, is that he tied extension, which is of course statewide and even goes beyond the state--has an international dimension, too--he tied this to the departments in Madison--Madison, of course, being most of the University at that time. He developed a relationship with the Madison campuses by having joint appointments. This started under E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"--E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" wanting to do for General Extension what had been done for Agricultural Extension--but it was Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" who carried it out. And it was carried out extremely well, so that when I came on the picture, in my vice-presidential days, Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was running a good shop and was running it well. But there was this problem about it--that in terms of legislative appropriations, it was not getting the additional support which Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" would have liked. After all, if you are to have support for extension, the legislature must support some percentage of what it costs to run extension. Since extension has fees, the fees will take care of some part, say 50 percent, but the legislature would take care of the rest. Now, the legislature kept on giving money to extension, but kept on giving extension the same amount of money as before. And since Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was expanding extension at this time, this meant that state support was decreasing in terms of the percentage of support. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" perhaps did not fight as hard as he might; after all, I have said he was a moderator and an administrator rather than a fighter. But one might say that General Extension needed more support than it was getting. SMAIL: It was supposed to earn 60 percent of its costs, apparently. HARRINGTON: Yes, it had earned--in the early days, back after World War I, it wasn't expected to earn anything like that. But it was 02:30:00 earning 60 percent; I think you're correct in that. SMAIL: It wasn't earning--it was supposed to be, but it wasn't. HARRINGTON: Supposed to be earning 60 percent--did not earn that. Well, of course it depended on the part of Extension--the correspondence was supposed to support the whole thing--the whole of its operation--and then other parts less. Well, this was a constant fight, but the legislature was reluctant to give more than a fixed sum of money. It was not willing to increase the percentage. Thus Extension, while it was flourishing and even famous--known around the country--made some real gains at this time. At this time we picked up the University of Chicago correspondence courses. Chicago had been a pioneer in correspondence courses, particularly leisure correspondence courses, and was known for this back in the days of William Rainey Harperxe "Harper, William Rainey". It was one of the great extension, or great correspondence universities. But the new leadership in Chicago felt that this was not the kind of operation that they wanted, and the University of Wisconsin took over these courses. So Extension did expand at this time, but had a continuing financial problem which was quite apparent to anybody looking at this particular picture. SMAIL: And it would have been Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" who should have lobbied the legislature, in fact, for more money? HARRINGTON: Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" did not himself lobby directly with the legislature. SMAIL: It is Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", is it? HARRINGTON: Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". SMAIL: I see. HARRINGTON: What did you think it might be? SMAIL: Well, I've always thought it was Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". HARRINGTON: Well, maybe it was. But I always called him Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". SMAIL: Yes. HARRINGTON: I don't know. I used to call him by his first name, but even that is a problem because it isn't usually Lorentz; it's usually Lorry we called him, or Adolf we called him, too. But it's Adolf, so we called him Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". Well, it doesn't really matter very much. I think it might be said that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" did not work the legislature himself. He worked through Bill Youngxe "Young, William H". He and Bill Youngxe "Young, William H" were members of the same department--political science--because he had an appointment in political science as well as in extension, Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" did. And he relied on Bill. Bill did not press for this additional percentage for Extension. Bill Youngxe "Young, William H"'s feeling about Extension was, well, maybe lukewarm--maybe warm, but certainly not hot. And thus we see Extension doing well but perhaps not flourishing. Of course, when one says that Extension was supposed to put up 60 percent of its support, in most parts of the country it was 80 percent or 100 percent. In the rest of the Big Ten there was nothing as good as what we had, so that any legislator looking at this--and this is the period in which legislators are beginning to exchange information with other states--the University of Wisconsin seemed to be supporting Extension very well. Now, Extension did have a good reputation around the state. It was perhaps a reputation based on the past; it didn't seem like a very dynamic sort of reputation. That is, we didn't have people from around the state coming in and demanding that more money be given for 02:33:00 Extension. We did have that on radio; we did have the Cooperative Extension people pushing. But we did not have it for General Extension. I do not, however, wish to suggest that Extension was in bad shape; it was in very good shape. This, as it turns out, was one of the problems which we had when we came to merger during my presidency. But let's turn to Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". SMAIL: All right. HARRINGTON: Unless you have something more to ask about Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". SMAIL: Well, I was thinking about--the center system has to be thought of as part of Extension at that time, doesn't it? HARRINGTON: It was then part of Extension, yes. SMAIL: So was it Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" who chose Hanleyxe "Hanley, William"? HARRINGTON: Yes, I should say so, although I can't be positive about that. But I should say a word or two about the two-year centers. The two-year centers, of course, go back a long ways. I guess the two-year center in Milwaukee goes back to World War I. But in any case, the two-year centers were there and were successful at the time that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" took over, but were not tremendous places. They became tremendous places during the GI period. You have to remember that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" took over in l944, right at the end of World War II. Almost immediately after that the war ended, and the two-year centers were of great importance because there was such a flood of students they could not be taken care of on the Madison campus, and this was the only degree-granting campus we had at that time. Therefore, the overflow was taken care of at the two-year centers, of which we had perhaps eight or ten at that time. And we expanded the number to perhaps thirty, although it's a little hard to call them centers when some of them were just a place where you could have classes in high schools or something of that sort. In any case, the expansion was very great. Now it occurs to me that it was at this point that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" brought Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" in, and Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" was very good at developing these things. This was a successful program--this expansion of the two-year centers and this insistence that they be quality centers and that they prepare people to transfer to the Madison campus if they were successful. This is one of the points at which Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" showed himself to be a good administrator, because this was the place which the University needed in its expansion period. While there's a great deal of talk about how the Madison campus expanded--and so it did, to take care of the problems--the problems of the centers were even more acute because of course it was a matter of creating new centers. After the GI Bill, the group declined. It was natural that we should close some of these centers. Some of them were opened only for the purpose of doing things in the emergency, and President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" felt that everything would be going back to what he called "normal." He always talked about World War II being a period in which you had to bank the fires and stop a lot of things, like some research activity, but you'd come back and do everything afterwards. Well, of course things never did 02:36:00 come back, because the GI period, which encouraged families who had not sent their children to school to get into that pattern, so that we were having a bigger university anyway. We therefore had to keep the centers, and while we did reduce the number, we never reduced them to zero, or never did they get back to the way they'd been before the war. Indeed, when suggestions were made that the two-year centers be dropped out, or some of them be dropped out--this was done in the l950s when Kohlerxe "Kohler, Walter J" wanted to cut the University budget--the University administration proposed that some of the centers be closed. This probably was the proposal of vice-president Baldwinxe "Baldwin, Ira L", mainly, and it probably was not intended to succeed. I think we may have talked about this before. SMAIL: I think so, yes. HARRINGTON: Because the plan was to get the local people around the state to be interested in supporting the centers, and they were. Again, notice Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was not himself out in front on this, in saving the centers. He wasn't fighting the administration. Well, perhaps he understood that the administration was trying to rally local support for keeping the centers. Anyhow, the local support did come, although the legislature, in insisting that we keep the centers, did not give us any additional money to keep them. That was a bit of a problem. In this, Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" managed these ups and downs quite effectively, really. His hand is seen in the general overview. And in those days the centers were run from the Madison campuses--the Madison campus departments. That is, the Madison campus departments took care of providing people to do the teaching, and generally used people who were graduate students at the University. And Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" supervised this. Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", you see, was in charge of appointing the people in the departments who were jointly in the departments and in extension. He handled this very well. He left to Hanleyxe "Hanley, William", mainly, the politicking out around the state. And this was important, this politicking out around the state, because the main feature of the two-year centers was that the locality would support the two-year centers--build the buildings and provide other support with utilities and so on. It was this that Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" handled--handled for Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" under a delegation, which sometimes seemed almost complete. This is partly because Hanleyxe "Hanley, William", who was quite a big talker, always talked about him doing it. And indeed, on occasion I heard him talk that he was going to do something even though Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" didn't favor it. This is one of the reasons why my view of Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" was none too good, and I didn't favor Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" taking over the two-year centers after we had the merger. But Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" was efficient, even if not always entirely loyal, it seemed to me, and the whole point of it is that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" had a shop that was going. It did not seem to me that Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" was anything like as efficient as Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"'s number two man in the extension side--that is, the courses taught around the state. That was Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore", 02:39:00 who was extraordinary and extremely capable and worked very closely with Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"--was never insubordinate, was always willing to give the credit to Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". Now, I may be moving into territory here that's a little sensitive, because Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" had to deal with the localities. He was forever talking about getting in with the power structure in localities, which seemed to me that he was working a little too much on the elitist type of people rather than on the general people of the area. Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore" did not have anything like that same responsibility. He didn't have to get money for the local buildings or anything of that sort. He did, however, have to run a very complicated shop, because Extension was made up of all sorts of odds and ends, and at this period, with some decline in the percentage of state support, it was necessary to get courses that would produce some income. The Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"/Shannon group was quite sensitive on this point and did not want just to offer courses that brought in money. This is one of the enduring questions about extension or adult education anywhere. Should you just offer accounting? Should you just offer courses that can be used for credit, as for education credits that would give the school teachers some extra pay or move them up in their tenure positions? This was a problem always with Extension, and I must say that both Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" and Shannon tried to offer courses across the board, including some that were not likely to make much money, and to make these courses attractive enough so that they could bring in enough money to keep those courses going. It's a problem, of course, if you want to offer a philosophy course. But if you offer a philosophy course with reference to--with using a title like "Modern Living" or something, sometimes you can make this go. And I think they did this extremely well. I saw some of this in operation and considered it well done--particularly considered it well done when I saw other states running their extension services, and running them mainly in terms of support. Of course, they didn't even have the 40 percent that we had to support us. SMAIL: I don't know who used the adjective "disaster" for Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" when there was a question of firing him; Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" refused to fire him and you were the one who finally did. HARRINGTON: I don't think "firing" is the word. Didn't we move him aside? SMAIL: It seems to me "firing" was used. HARRINGTON: I think we can talk about the Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" business a little bit, even though this moves us ahead in the game, because we don't have to come back to it when we talk about merger generally. SMAIL: All right. HARRINGTON: When merger came, the two-year centers were set up separately and would have a chancellor. SMAIL: A 02:42:00 "serious problem," excuse me. Not "disaster"--a "serious problem." HARRINGTON: Yes. Well, when the two-year campuses were set aside from General Extension and from Cooperative Extension and radio, all of those were to have an Extension chancellor; it came to be McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R". The two-year centers were to have a chancellor of their own. Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" felt that he should be the one to be the two-year campus chancellor, because he said he'd run them. And of course it's true that he had done the handling of the local people--worked with the county committees and so on--and thus he knew the details of extension out in the centers a little better than Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" did. Moreover, Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" was the kind of person who felt that he was running things, and Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" let him think that. When we decided on the merger--when the regents voted to have the merger--and we set up the question of deciding on who should be chancellor of the two-year centers, Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" mounted a campaign. When I announced that this was to be done, when I announced we were going to have the merger, right after the regents had voted it--I announced it at a dinner meeting of the Extension people--the Extension and two-year center people--and after the meeting Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" came up to me and said, "Well, how are you going to select the chancellor for the two-year campuses?" I said, "We're going to gather names and give people an opportunity to be heard with reference to their leadership possibilities and so on." He said, "Fair enough." And then he mounted a campaign and got a lot of people to write in supporting him to be the two-year center--he did not think of this as fighting Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", who later got the job, because he assumed that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was likely to be made chancellor of Extension. And yet, even if Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was going to be considered for the two-year center job, then he wanted to be the man to have it. Hanleyxe "Hanley, William", being the kind of person he was--capable, certainly, but very on the "push" side--had a lot of people write in who didn't really want to write in; that is, he went to all the campuses and pushed the people who were heads of those campuses to write in for him. In several cases, the people who wrote in privately sent the word that they were not all that keen on Hanleyxe "Hanley, William", who, after all, tended to be a dictator in relationship to them, or so they thought. They felt that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"'s hand was a little too light, and Hanleyxe "Hanley, William"'s hand a little too heavy, so that we had a problem here. The solution of the problem was to make Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" head of the two-year centers. This was a double solution to the problem, because when merger came, if you were going to have Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" be head of the total Extension, including Cooperative Extension, what were you going to do with Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."? When you have two things merged--or three things merged, since radio was merged, too--if you take any one of the people who previously headed the system then you have a real problem, because you have . . . . SMAIL: That goes without saying. HARRINGTON: Goes without saying. Thus, it did seem to me that it would be difficult to make either Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" or Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." head of the System, and thus the whole new Extension. And thus it was logical that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" should have the other job, which was head of the two-year campuses. And this was a solution of the Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" question, because Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" not only had persons from the two-year centers write in, but he got a lot of politicians to write in, persons with whom he'd worked in the localities. It was 02:45:00 a pressure campaign, and pressure campaigns tend to upset people in any case. Well, Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" and I talked this over, the double problem, and it was Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", actually, who came up with the suggestion that he would be very happy to be head of the two-year center system. He rather felt that he, not being a pushing type in any case--he had not pushed himself for the presidency when he was on the list--that might have been difficult anyway since he was in Turkey--he didn't press himself to be the man chosen to be head of the combined Extension. He rather thought that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." would have more support than he, and he didn't want to be number two under a Cooperative Extension person. Therefore, this seemed to him a satisfactory way out. He was not an old man by any means, at that time; I suppose he was in his middle fifties, probably. But he felt this was a good solution, and he recognized the Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" question because a good many people were coming to him and saying, "Please, let's see that Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" doesn't have the headship of this." Hanleyxe "Hanley, William", of course, was very upset by all of this and made his dissatisfaction known, and tried to get a letter-writing campaign--I understand he tried to get a letter-writing campaign started; perhaps it was spontaneous. Anyway, we got very few letters, really, about this. Now, Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" did have other interests while he remained in this system--of being number two person--he could have stayed on as number two person under Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". He had other interests outside. He was very active in the Holstein Breeding Association, and indeed is quite a cattle raiser himself and was, I think, head of that association, Wisconsin branch. In any case, it was an active interest of his, so that he was not shut out from activity. And he still, within the two-year center system, could have maintained the same position he'd had before, because he had not worked on Extension to any extent. He had worked on the two-year center system. But he was disaffected, and this was a continuing problem. And at some point, I guess, he pulled out. He was not fired. He was not told to leave, but he was not given the job that he very much wanted. And he felt badly used because he had made so conspicuous his desire for that particular job. For this I don't blame him; for this I understand--he being the kind of person that he was--but at the same time I think it should be understood that the University administration did not want him to be head of the two-year system. SMAIL: Well then, what about Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."? HARRINGTON: We're going back now from the merger to the period when I was vice-president. We're going back to the period from '58 to '62. SMAIL: When you were in Cooperative Extension. HARRINGTON: Cooperative Extension. Of course, Cooperative Extension had never been very close to the Letters and Science part of the campus. Cooperative Extension had been very close to the College of Agriculture, but not too--this is necessary to say--it had not been close to Letters and Science, so I had not had any very close connection with Cooperative Extension while I was still in the history department. But when I became vice-president and simultaneously was writing the book from Carnegie, I did, of course, relate to Cooperative Extension and had to, very closely. Moreover, since I was vice-president, and since the people in Cooperative Extension knew that I was writing the book, they showed some interest in me and had me talk several times, during the period of my vice-presidency, to meetings which they had. SMAIL: You mentioned that the other day. HARRINGTON: Yes, and this is of real 02:48:00 importance, because I came to know these people. Moreover, I told them I was putting them in my book on adult education, even though most books on adult education do not include cooperative extension; they have nothing to say about it. But I made it clear that I was interested in this, and came to know not only the Cooperative Extension people on campus, but the cooperative extension people nationally. Therefore, in this period, I came to know Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." quite well, and Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." became a personal friend and is yet. And Mrs. Harrington became personally friendly with Mrs. Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Mrs. Henry L." and is yet. Mrs. Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Mrs. Henry L." has always been very active in campus matters and so on, and city matters, and Nancyxe "Harrington, Nancy" and she get on very well indeed. And the personal relationship was very close. I of course admired Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." because I knew he was an exceptionally able person. And it is to be remembered that at this time he was advisor to Nixon in the 1960 campaign. Therefore we have a relationship that was a little better than you might expect it to be, since I came out of Letters and Science and was understood to be closer to University Extension than to Cooperative Extension. I certainly felt that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was one of the better people in the agricultural administration complex, and so did President Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A". President Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" was very close to Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", and this is worth stating because Agricultural Extension, although a vital part of the College of Agriculture, does not rate as well as agricultural research--this being a great agricultural research institution and at the same time a first-rate agricultural extension institution. Well, the research people have the top position; after all, it's a research person that got the Nobel prize in this period and so on. Thus Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." felt that although he himself was a research person, and in the soils area that he had operated in--agronomy, I guess--was a person of stature--still, he had given his career to Extension. And he somewhat felt that Extension was looked down upon by the campus people. I think it clear to say that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." would have like to have been dean of agriculture, but this relationship problem was one that kept him from having the chance to be a dean of agriculture. I think this is correct. Now, I'm not talking here about things that are of my certain knowledge, but I'm talking about the relationship of Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." to the College of Agriculture. Naturally, he was part of it; he had a warm relationship there. But his feeling about the deans of agriculture--that they weren't quite strong enough in favor of Agricultural Extension--has something to do with his willingness to work with persons who were not in the College of Agriculture, like me. And of course he was willing to work with Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" too, so Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" and I had a good relationship to Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". SMAIL: This is a continuation of the interview with Fred Harrington. We started the interview on the 25th of June. I'm Laura Smail. The 02:51:00 interview is being done for the University Archives Oral History Project. This is the 8th of July, l985. HARRINGTON: It's a continuation of our discussion of Extension. We were talking about Cooperative Extension during the period when I was vice-president, from l958-l962, and I was stating that Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" and I had a close relationship with Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". And it's proper to say, I think, that Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" tended to view Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." as the kind of person from whom he could get the straight goods about agriculture. He regarded him much more favorably than he did the then dean of agriculture, Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K", perhaps because they were closer in fields--they were both in life science fields, whereas Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" was in agricultural economics--perhaps because of the personalities, because Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" had a personality that was a little more on the remote side than did Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". There is, however, one other point that I must make--that one of the key features of Agricultural Extension at this time was the setting up of the Kellogg Center here. The Kellogg Center for advanced training of cooperative extension personnel all over the country was an important element at this particular time. In 1958 to 1962, when I was vice-president, persons were being brought in from all over the country to get their Ph.D.'s here, so that they could go back to their own institutions. They had come from county agent positions or agricultural extension specialist positions. By taking the Ph.D., then, they could move up in agricultural extension. Thus we had on the campus a great many of these nationwide people from agricultural extension and thus it must be said that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was a leader, in the national sense, of agricultural extension, as well as being a leader in agriculture because of his relationship to Nixon's presidential campaign in 1960. Obviously, then, I'm mixed with these people, and since I told them that I considered Agricultural Extension to be a model for adult education generally and for extension generally, I got along quite well with these people and formed a relationship that carried over. I make this point and I make it with some importance because one would not expect a person from my background to be getting along very well with the Agricultural Extension people. I did have my problems with them later, and they were serious problems, but it started out with a friendly relationship. And it was in this period, of course, that since I was making these speeches to their visiting groups that we got along very well indeed. I was interested in expanding the Kellogg Center to include General Extension, and a good many of them were, too. We were not able to do it, but they were willing to make an effort at it through the Kellogg Foundation. SMAIL: You knew about this study criticizing Extension--Cooperative Extension, did you? HARRINGTON: You mean the Carlsonxe "Carlson" study? SMAIL: Well, I don't think it's the Carlsonxe "Carlson" study. He reported it. It has to do with criticizing Extension for not foreseeing the long-term needs of farmers. HARRINGTON: Could you give me the title of the study? SMAIL: I unfortunately can't. Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." talks about it, too, I think. HARRINGTON: Was it a national study? SMAIL: No it's specifically about UW--Cooperative Extension, yes. And I think it was an in-house thing. HARRINGTON: I guess I shouldn't talk about this now, unless you want to say a little about it and I can comment on this. SMAIL: Well, if you don't really know about it . . . . HARRINGTON: It doesn't come back to my mind. I almost certainly saw it, but I do not remember it. SMAIL: Oh--saw the report, you mean. HARRINGTON: And saw the weaknesses, too. In fact, I recognize that agricultural extension, nationally as well as . . . . SMAIL: Maybe it is Carlsonxe "Carlson". I do have--he writes a history of Extension. In any case, it was also urging the farmers to concentrate on production, which, if you remember, turned out to be a disastrous mistake, and then moving more and more into suburbs and cities, and not concentrating on the . . . . HARRINGTON: He was criticizing them for not doing it or for doing it? SMAIL: Doing it--for moving into the suburbs. HARRINGTON: I can just say a word or two because of my close recollection of Carlsonxe "Carlson"'s master's thesis. It was not all that great, but I knew Carlson; he interviewed me quite a bit. And he later wrote a rather unfavorable review of my adult education book. Not that I object too much to that, but it did seem to me that Carlson, who was teaching in Canada at the time he 02:54:00 reviewed my book--he may have been a Canadian; I don't know--in any case, Canadian extension, you must remember, is quite different from American extension, because American extension is connected to the universities but Canadian extension is connected with the government, so that his Canadian experience was one not to lead him to be altogether appreciative. Carlson has made his reputation on criticism of existing organizations, and his criticisms of agricultural extension are to some extent well-taken, because agricultural extension, nationally and in Wisconsin, has had its faults. It's tied generally to the big farmers, to the Farm Bureau Federation, to the Republican farmers, rather than to all the farmers--the middle farmers--and the agricultural extension people. It was extremely good on production. It made a pretty good shift over during the Depression, when you were taking land out of production. They worked quite well on soil conservation and so on. Its effort to move into the cities, which came later, was not nearly so successful. And of course the agricultural extension always had its problems because the number of farmers was decreasing all the time, and yet it was getting a good deal of support--getting increasing support from the federal government, from the state governments, and from the localities. And thus it was open to some criticism. I certainly came to know these criticisms. Actually, in this particular period, Cooperative Extension was complaining bitterly here in Wisconsin, saying that in most of the states of the union the support of Agricultural Extension was very strong from the state. The state and the federal government provided the essential support for Agricultural Extension, whereas here in Wisconsin the state did not give nearly that much support in terms of percentages. In this state the support tended to be from the federal government and from the locality. This was a different picture from most places, although it is to be understood that the local money came partly from state aids, and that our particular form of government, with a strong state aid to the locality, explains away a great many other things. But Cooperative Extension was all the time interested in getting more money from the legislature, and was pushing in the legislature. And Agricultural Extension and Cooperative Extension pushed in the legislature much more than General Extension did. I've told you that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was kind of stand-off, and insofar as Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" was politicking it was on the local level, whereas Cooperative Extension was active in the legislature and active through the local representatives of Cooperative Extension, who worked with our local legislators. Since Agricultural Extension works with the agricultural committee in the counties, it has connections with a good many of the local politicians, who of course are connected with the legislators, so that there was complaint that Agricultural Extension was pushing hard on the legislature; University Extension was not. And this is important when one comes to what happened at the time of the merger. But I have nothing but praise, really, for both Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." and Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", and in just one second I may add that praise also was due to the radio people who come into the merger story later. And this also is an Extension activity, because insofar as we must praise Wisconsin's Cooperative Extension and General Extension as being the best in the country, really, we may also praise Wisconsin radio as being a pioneer and as being the best in the country, and being very ably headed by McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B", who, however, did have one thing that we on the campus considered a fault. He intended to run radio by himself, and while he had a campus advisory committee, while he used University professors to put on his courses, he intended to run it. He did not want the campus to be running the radio, and indeed he was under the president--radio was under the president directly, which of course means 02:57:00 he's not under anybody. If radio/television is under a president, the president will assign the job of supervising it to an assistant who gives it virtually no attention at all. And I suppose most of the time it was under Lubergxe "Luberg, LeRoy", probably, as President Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B"'s assistant, who didn't give much attention, and McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B" was able to do things pretty much as he wanted--handled the politics by himself, too. So that with difficulties, when they came up, about supporting FM radio--we had a very good FM radio network, the best in the country--McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B" could call the people from around the state to come in and politic, and they did--the listeners--in a big way. We were not nearly as strong in television. McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B" wanted to get into television, but he was essentially a radio man and did not get into it with both feet, and thus, in a way, was asking for support before he was fully in television and made the error--I think it was McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B"'s error--of having a statewide vote on whether we should move into television in a big way. And that vote was defeated. I don't know if that was McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B"'s fault or if somebody else pushed him into having the referendum too soon, but we did not become the national leader in television that we were in radio. We had just a little piece of television at this particular time. But it did seem to me that this being a part of our outreach--that is, if you take the position that the University reaches all the people in the state--it reached as many through television, or radio, particularly, as it did through University Extension and Cooperative Extension. So these are the three ways in which you reach the state. And thus I want to put them all together with praise for all the leaders. And it's honest praise, although I'm sure that each of these people felt that I was interfering with them a little when I took a stronger hand as president. Do you want to get to the merger? SMAIL: Yes, I do. It was clearly going to be very thorny. I mean, you talked last time about your theories as to why it should be done, but within the two organizations, were you aware of how much trouble it would create? HARRINGTON: Well, I did understand how much trouble there would be, how much opposition there would be if we brought all the outreach operations together. I had seen indications of this opposition in other places, although where it was done in other states, it was done with a minimum of difficulty--in Missouri for example, and in West Virginia. And therefore I came into this picture feeling that probably there would not be as much trouble as it turned out there would be. I later found out that when other states started to do it--when other universities started to do it or looked into doing it--they backed away from it. Two examples are Illinois and Minnesota, both of which set up committees to look into it but decided finally that they'd better not do it--that there would be lots of trouble if they did it. This, of course, leads us right into the way in which we did it. When I became president, I came in strong as president because I felt that it was important that the University take a strong position in everything at a time when the whole of higher education was moving rapidly. And since I had been working heavily on extension, it seemed to me that this was an area in which we ought to give some attention. I was impressed with what Missouri had done, and I was interested, of course, in this new dimension of urban extension, which was coming up at this time. So it seemed to me that 03:00:00 we ought to do something to bring these people into a little better coordination. It's to be understood that while these were all strong operations, they really had nothing to do with each other. Radio had almost nothing to do with University Extension, although the relationship could have been very close, and about the only connection was that the county agents did work radio, but normally not University radio; they worked very often through the local commercial stations. And University Extension and Cooperative Extension went their separate ways. SMAIL: Except that they were very competitive--not competitive, but General Extension was seen as looking down on the Cooperative Agricultural in the places where they were together. HARRINGTON: Well, General Extension always made the point that it was academic, and that it could give courses for credit, and that it was tied to getting a university degree and all that. However, in looking down on Cooperative Extension it often said, "These county agents just work with the farmers. They don't teach classes or anything of that sort." But of course that looking down went both ways, because the Cooperative Extension people looked down on General Extension. Cooperative Extension was free, and Cooperative Extension could make the point that this was the people's operations. So there was bad blood, you might say, but they weren't really competing for anything because they didn't do the same things. And they should have worked together in such matters as problem-solving for Wisconsin counties, because the Extension operation was a problem-solving operation. It got into problems not only of production, but the questions of development of new things like the tourist business and soil conservation. And this calls for moving out beyond, really, the agricultural community. In like fashion, here we have General Extension with some pretty good political connections with the local people--never with the same county committees, but pretty good connections nonetheless. And thus they should have worked together, but they did not. Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." and Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" respected each other, but I guess they were not the kind of people who could work together--could work together very well. And yet I guess it has to be said that nowhere in the country did the two work together. Their sources of support were different; Agricultural Extension had this strong federal support and General Extension 03:03:00 had none. And Cooperative Extension had local support--money support from the localities--which the General Extension did not, except for a little bit here and there. General Extension did, however, have state support, which the Cooperative Extension people felt they didn't have enough. So that the way in which they looked at each other was, of course, unfortunate. It seemed to me that something ought to be done to attack that and to bring these people together. Well, bringing them together--how are you going to do it? Are you going to set up a committee with members from both sides and do it, and thus have a long discussion? I decided it would be done by direct action, not by consulting the two sides, or the three sides. In this, radio did not put up much of a fight, because radio was already under the president and did not have autonomy, really. But I decided to do this by action, and chose this method because these things had always been handled from the top. In Cooperative Extension the county agents did not constitute what you might call a faculty that developed policy. It is true that they were members of the agricultural college faculty, but generally speaking, the whole of the agricultural operation on Extension--experiment stations, too--was run from the top. So it did seem to me that consultation was not necessary here, although consultation with the top administrator was necessary. SMAIL: You talked with Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", then? HARRINGTON: Yes, I talked with Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." and I talked with Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". But I talked with them saying, "We're going to do this." And while neither of them thought this was an altogether desirable thing, they were getting along with the new president; they were willing to try it. They felt that they could retain their strength within an operation of this sort. Something else may be mentioned in connection with Cooperative Extension. Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was not all that happy with his superiors, who were the College of Agriculture--a dean struggle. Therefore, Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." could see the new Extension as being a method of reducing the influence of the dean of agriculture or Agricultural Extension. And so it did, because the funds which the dean of agriculture took from Extension--for example, for secretaries and this kind of thing--were ultimately pulled out. With Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", therefore, who would be the person who would put up the biggest fight, because he was a fighter type, and, I suppose, nationally more prominent than Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" and certainly a more vigorous person in these University struggles--he chose not to fight. Maybe personal friendship with me was part of it; maybe his desire to be independent of the College of Agriculture was part of it. Perhaps he thought he'd be head of the combined Extension. SMAIL: He'd just gotten out of a higher title, hadn't he? Or it wasn't that? HARRINGTON: After merger, I suppose. No, that was not . . . . SMAIL: Not a factor. HARRINGTON: If his title was changed before merger, this was not a factor in the merger. SMAIL: And what about Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S"? HARRINGTON: Adolfsonxe 03:06:00 "Adolfson, Lorenz" was less of a fighter, anyway, than Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", and was willing to accept this and did not put up much of a fight. Now, there is a little difference here, that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" had under him--in Extension and in the two-year centers, but particularly in Extension--faculty members who were Madison campus faculty members and who might very well have put up a fight if we'd put this into a committee structure. As to Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S"--well, Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" was not appointed when we decided to do this. Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" was appointed as dean after we had made the decision to have the merger. SMAIL: I see. You recommended it in 1963 and he becomes dean in 1964; is that it? HARRINGTON: Yes. SMAIL: Was it a condition of his that you . . . . HARRINGTON: Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" was dean, but Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" was ill. This was the end of Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K"'s period, and Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" was never an effective spokesman in these college meetings. Perhaps I should say, with reference to what kind of a fight could be put up, was that in the meetings we had then, the president met with the deans and directors of the Madison campus. This was before we set up the chancellor system so that the chancellor was the one that would handle this. And in these meetings the dean of agriculture was present, but not Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was present because he was head of Extension, and therefore Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was present but Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was not. If Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." had been present, perhaps in these discussions he might have spoken up more. But Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" was not an effective spokesman. Indeed, we might say, I suppose, that neither Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" nor Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" was particularly strong as a spokesman, and therefore, when we move toward the merger, Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K", at the end of his period, was not able to put up the fight which he might have otherwise, if this had been a general statewide discussion question--if there had been a committee and we would discuss it. As for Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S", Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" was appointed after the merger had been decided upon--not yet effected, but decided upon and voted on by the regents. And when we chose--we had a search committee for a new dean after Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" stepped aside. I guess Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" stepped aside before he died. I don't think he died in office, but I'm not sure I remember this. In any case, we had a search and screen committee, and Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L" and I chose from the list Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" as the most effective of the people. We both had known him. Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" and I had an Arkansas background, in both cases. He came from Arkansas and I had been there quite a long time. So we knew Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" and knew him to be a vigorous person. And my vice-president, Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L", was from the College of Agriculture and wanted a strong person. We felt that since Frokerxe "Froker, Rudolph K" had been from the social sciences we should select, this time, a person from the hard sciences, and that's where Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" was, so he was the logical person. When we asked Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" if he would be dean--Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L" and I interviewed him together--his first question was, "Well, can we reconsider the question of Agricultural Extension being taken away from the dean of agriculture?" I said, "No, it's been decided," and he then accepted the deanship on that understanding. This did not mean that he was in favor of it. He was not; he was very much against it. This did not mean that he promised he would not oppose it and try to kill it off as a dean. But it meant that he accepted the deanship knowing that merger was being set up and would go forward. Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S", of course, was a man of great vigor and a fighter, and had he been dean when this first came up, he would have made all kinds of a fuss. So that merger was effected in part because of the personnel, I suppose. It was possible to move it through because of that. SMAIL: So why did you choose Don McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" to be the head? HARRINGTON: I think we may move one step in between. After, well, I decided on it, and drew up a document on it and went to the regents with it--talked to very few people about it ahead of time, although Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." and Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" were both informed and so was the head of radio. This meant that in talking about it to the regents, I talked at great length--and that's of record--and then asked the regents 03:09:00 to go forward and do it. The regents approved this. They might not have approved it in all times in the past or in the future, because there usually is a person on the regents who is drawn from agriculture. Regents are not supposed to represent any particular point, except the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but they do in fact draw the regents from particular areas and particular fields, and there's almost always an agricultural regent. The agricultural regent at that time had been appointed by Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord", and Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord" was a Democrat and associated more closely with the Farmers Union than with the Farm Bureau Federation. Normally, I suppose, the Republicans having been in power in Wisconsin for much of the time, the agricultural representative on the board of regents would be from the Farm Bureau Federation, who would represent that particular point of view. And that particular point of view is a point of view very close to Cooperative Extension, because the Farm Bureau Federation and Cooperative Extension were always very close. And you can understand this, because the Farm Bureau Federation generally represents the larger farmers and Agricultural Extension has the same clientele. We thus were in a peculiar position in that we had on the board of regents, not a person close to the Farm Bureau Federation, but the head of the Farmers Union. SMAIL: Oh, who was that? HARRINGTON: Gil Rohdexe "Rohde, Gil", who was the head of the Farm Bureau Federation. His son later became director of agriculture in the state and is now the agricultural dean at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Rohdexe "Rohde, Gil" was an active regent and an able regent, and he was immediately in favor of the merger because he thought this might well be a way in which what he thought was the Farm Bureau Federation's stranglehold on Cooperative Extension could be done away with. His strong interest was in not having Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", who had always been close to the Farm Bureau Federation and to the Republicans, and indeed had advised Nixon on agricultural policy--he did not want Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." to be head of the thing, but that's another matter and comes later. He was glad to have Agricultural Extension and Cooperative Extension taken away from the College of Agriculture because he felt the College of Agriculture was heavily involved with the Farm Bureau Federation. Thus the farm spokesman on the regents was very much in favor of that particular point of view. The regents in general would look to Rohdexe "Rohde, Gil"; there was a Democratic majority on the regents at that time. In any case, the regents, including the Republicans on the regents, at that particular point were following my lead. They had been a little unhappy sometimes in the past not to have a signal from the administration as to what should be done. Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" was part of the time unwilling to push a point, and in any case was ill towards the end of his administration. E. B. Fredxe "Fred, Edwin B" had had a peculiar way of operating that was quite different from mine. I was at that time setting up a program for the University, and the new campuses were one part of it. The more vigorous style in moving into the legislature was another, and this merger was another part of my program for the University, and the regents tended to support me. Thus the regents approved merger without dissent. Now, it would not have been without dissent, probably, if there had been a long period of notice. Obviously, what I was doing was taking hold and pushing this. There was no immediate outcry; there was no statewide protest at this being done. There were some agricultural people saying, "Wait and see; wait and see." And a good many of them felt that, well, there's a possibility that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." might be made head of Extension. They all knew Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."--the 03:12:00 Cooperative Extension people and people around the state. They did not know Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" nearly as well, and thus they would assume that it might well be Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." who would come out as the head of this. So therefore there was great protest. The opposition to merger, from the point of view of Cooperative Extension, pretty much came later. I do not want to suggest that all members of the agricultural community would be in favor of Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". For example, I'm not saying that Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" would be, because relationships between Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" and Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." were not always of the best, so that I'm merely saying that when merger was set up, I think it might well be said that it is surprising how little opposition there was to it. There was some statewide commentary, but the opposition to it developed later. And it developed as the farm people came to wonder what was going to happen, and was it going to be moved away from farming towards the city, and this kind of thing. Thus I suppose we get to the question of the appointment--of who is to be head of the thing, when we come down to it, though I could do that if you like. HARRINGTON: When merger occurred, of course, the next thing to do was to set up the structure. And we set up the structure by committee, with members from both Cooperative Extension and the University Extension as well as radio. And this was a committee which we brought in an outsider to head. It was Ralph Huittxe "Huitt, Ralph", a political scientist who was close to the administration. In fact, he was a member of the administration, because he was spending part of his time representing us in Washington; he was our congressional agent. He didn't operate in the state; he was not our state political agent--that was George Fieldxe "Field, George R"--but he was the agent in Washington. He was thus spending quite a good deal of time with me and was a member of the central administration, and was outside of the picture, although I suppose it might be said that since he was from political science, he might be understood to be a lot closer to Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", who was also in political science but not active in the department. And we then set up a committee with members from the various systems, and this was to work out a system. And they did work out a system; they worked it out. It was difficult for them, but they did work it out; I suppose you'd call it, "hammer it out." And then, of course, the question was who was going to head it. The problem was to make the selection, and to make the selection in such a way as to have it be reasonably acceptable. It should be remembered that no head of Agricultural Extension had been chosen through a faculty committee recommendation. No head of University Extension had been chosen through a faculty committee recommendation. No head of radio/television had been chosen through a faculty committee. It had always been done from the top in these divisions. Part of that is because of the appointments involved--McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B"'s in radio and Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz"'s in University Extension were made long before the faculty committee system of nomination came forward. And Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."'s, too, was quite a ways back. In any case, the tradition of the College of 03:15:00 Agriculture--and generally speaking, around the country the colleges of agriculture and universities that are based on colleges of agriculture--the land grant, the separated land grant colleges--are not really as strong on the faculty nominations. Faculty nominations were coming in. We had the first one with reference to the Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" presidency, and then we followed one with reference--well, that was the only one, I guess, on a University-wide basis, because when Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" died they didn't set up a new committee but just brought back the old one. And it had nominated me earlier. Thus the question of how you would select the head did not bring us to feel that we should have a committee, since in any case the pulling and hauling here was going to be difficult, we recognized, and if we had a committee, how could we ever do it? The obvious problem was, Should we make Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." head of it, or should we make Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" head of it? And in this case I ruled out Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", although he was a friend of mine and I liked him and felt he was capable of handling this kind of job. I did it, really, because by this time I learned a great deal about the question nationally, and in a few places extension and general extension had been pulled together--had been pulled together and had been given to the agricultural cooperative extension man. This had happened in Kansas State, for example. In all of these places where it happened, the agriculture became dominant, and in all of these places where it happened, you were in universities in which agricultural extension was strong and university extension was weak. That was not our picture, and to have Agricultural Extension dominant did not suit me. I felt it ought to be two things. We were already working at this time--1964--we were already working on getting national funding for University Extension. So what I had in mind, clearly--and I was the key person in this. I don't want to seem all that egotistical, but I do say, clearly, that obviously it was my doing. I felt that University Extension could get national funding--and it got some in 1965--and that if it got as much as Cooperative Extension these would be equal things. And to have the agricultural person made head of this would be difficult, especially since Agricultural Extension nationally was now saying it could go into the cities because it was the problem-solving unit and it could do this. We were developing the point that University Extension would be the operation that would go into the cities because Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" had been made head of the Ford committee to spend the million dollars that we were getting from the Ford Foundation to set up urban extension. Thus I eliminated, in my thinking, Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." as head of the thing, and I eliminated Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" because I didn't want the head of either one. And Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" solved the problem himself, in any case, by being willing to accept the two-year center chancellorship. SMAIL: The committee favored Shannon. HARRINGTON: No, there was no committee. SMAIL: Well, the committee proposed--there was a committee. HARRINGTON: There was the Huittxe "Huitt, Ralph" Committee. SMAIL: And they were thinking about who should be head, and they proposed eight names. HARRINGTON: Yes. Here's what happened. When we decided--when I decided we weren't going to have a faculty 03:18:00 committee to nominate people, we would merely use the same committee that had been set up for the specific purpose of organizing the merger. That committee was not set up to decide if there should be a merger, as was the case at other places like Illinois and Minnesota. It was given the charge that there was to be a merger, and how were they going to set it up? It was not set up to nominate a head for the merged institution. But when they had made their report on how merger should work, then I did ask Huittxe "Huitt, Ralph" to give me a list of persons who would be acceptable. And he did consult the committee but, as I understand it, consulted it by telephone rather than by having a meeting. He was very busy with the Washington affair at this time; this was when we were getting into the national physics operation. In any case, he then brought me a list of names which included Don McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R", which included Shannon and included Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", included Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" and others. Perhaps it included number two people in Extension and Agricultural Extension. Maybe it had Vandebergxe "Vandeberg, Gale" on it, too. SMAIL: Vandebergxe "Vandeberg, Gale" wanted the position. HARRINGTON: Yes, he was on the Huittxe "Huitt, Ralph" Committee, though, so perhaps he . . . . SMAIL: But he apparently particularly wanted to be head of the merged Extension. HARRINGTON: Oh yes. Well, so did Shannon. SMAIL: I imagine Shannon did, yes. HARRINGTON: I knew Vandebergxe "Vandeberg, Gale" a little bit because I'd been mixing with the Cooperative Extension people in this period of my vice-presidency. I knew Shannon very well because Shannon was a close personal friend of mine, and Shannon, in his thinking of the possibilities of his having the job--a very able and vigorous person with a Ph.D., no less, from Yale in adult education--it's true that Yale later dropped adult education--but he was a man of stature and had shown himself to be capable as number two person for Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz". And as my personal friend he might think I'd lean towards him, although of course I was a personal friend of Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." as well. But my feeling was, one should not take the head of Agricultural Extension or the head of University Extension, nor should one take their number two people, because you're taking one from [inaudible]. So that I looked for a person on the outside. And McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" had been head of the Historical Society, so he'd had something to do with an extension-type operation, and he had then gone off for freelance writing. And I had brought him back as a special assistant to the president, and he was also working with me on the book. He had started working with me on the book while he was still a freelance writer, and he was thus well-acquainted in the adult education and university extension community generally. But of course, neither the Cooperative Extension people nor the University Extension people felt that he was one of theirs, any more than Huittxe "Huitt, Ralph" would have been considered one of theirs if I had brought Huittxe "Huitt, Ralph" back to have this kind of a job. What I did was to look for somebody outside of this. SMAIL: Did you think he had enough administrative experience? HARRINGTON: Well, his administrative experience was not very great, that's true, but the administrative experience of the other people was limited to one particular line. It is a proper criticism of my selection, but I don't know how I could have selected a person with administrative experience in both Agricultural Extension and General Extension. And if I had wanted a person with administrative experience, maybe I should have taken McCartyxe "McCarty, Harold B", who was not on the list. So the criticism of McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R"'s appointment, of course, has a point. It was, 03:21:00 however, my nomination, and I chose McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" because my analysis of him was that he'd had some administrative experience running the Historical Society, which, after all, is an operation of substantial size. It's the biggest state historical society in the country. He'd been number two on that and then he'd been number one. He could have stayed on as number one, but he chose to leave and went into freelance writing. So he had some administrative experience. More particularly, though, I chose McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" because he was a promoter type, an enthusiastic person with a great deal of zeal and vigor and willing to try to take on a difficult job, willing to work politically, and had a respectable academic background. He had a Ph.D. under Bill Hesseltinexe "Hesseltine, William Best" in history. He'd done a book, although not a book in the extension field; it was in dentistry. He thus struck me as the kind of person I wanted, even though obviously not ideal. You could not have had an ideal person for this because there weren't such. What I could have done was to have selected one of the persons from either side, then tried to make that work. SMAIL: What about somebody like Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L"? He was in agriculture, but he was a social scientist. Did you ever think . . . . HARRINGTON: Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L" by that time was vice-president. He wouldn't have thought of taking this job. SMAIL: Oh, I see. It would have been a step down. HARRINGTON: What Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L" was thinking of at this time as vice-president was that possibly he might become a university president somewhere else after a while, because it's not long after this that we appointed him acting provost of the Madison campus. He could have been permanent provost of the Madison campus and then later chancellor, but he chose not to have that because he thought the vice-presidency was a more important job. He was, after all, not only the vice-president, but he was the budget officer. He had a very important position in the University. So, yes, he was a possibility, although it has to be said that he had had less experience in extension-type things than McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" had had. SMAIL: McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" was ambitious; is that right? He wanted to be a college president sometime? HARRINGTON: McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" was ambitious. When he was a freelancer, and I asked him to come back, because what I wanted McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" for when I was president and decided I needed some more strength--some more assistance--I brought McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" back because I wanted somebody to go after the foundations--the kind of work I had done myself--to get foundation money for the University, and particularly to start working on minorities, which he did very effectively, as it turned out. I wanted somebody with a great deal of push. When I brought him back he wanted to be a vice-president. He said, Couldn't he be a vice-president? I said, "No, you can be a special assistant. I can't make you a vice-president." And he was unhappy about that. He wanted to be a vice-president, because he was certainly very ambitious and very much on the make. And indeed, if a person was not on the make in those days, I tended to be rather suspicious of him. In fact, I would tend to have a more favorable view of a person like Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", who was pushing and on the make. His goal was to be dean of agriculture rather than to be a university president, or maybe Secretary of Agriculture, because he probably would have been if Nixon had been elected president 03:24:00 in 1960. He later became Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. And Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" didn't seem to have that kind of ambition. He was surprised when he was on the last list for president of the University in 1958. He was astonished when he came back from Turkey and found that he had been on that list, and he was not the pressing kind of person. I would tend to favor the pressing kind of person, being that kind of a person myself, I suppose, rather than the person who is satisfied to be an administrator or tries to be a moderator. There are persons with a perfectly good background, but I was choosing a person who had to move into something and build it. Notice I had to inherit some people of another sort. I had to inherit, in Milwaukee, Joe Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", who had been head of the state teachers college--state university--and then was head of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee--Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", an able fellow--a smart fellow and an able fellow--and a nice fellow, but certainly not a pushing type--that is, a moderating type and not a driving sort. Obviously, my interest in Milwaukee was that Milwaukee be built into something special, and it was necessary, it seemed to me, to have push there. I myself provided the push when I was vice-president. I pushed for Milwaukee, and Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" accepted this because he wasn't a pusher himself. He knew that I had connections with the foundations and I was in a prominent position in the University. Elvehjemxe "Elvehjem, Conrad A" let me do with Milwaukee what I wanted to. So that in choosing these things, one doesn't always have the choice one wanted. In this case, I did have a choice. I chose McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" because he was a pusher. SMAIL: That's why you eventually got rid of Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin". HARRINGTON: I didn't get rid of Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin". Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" survived me. I did not get rid of Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin". I did bring in some other people to push. I brought in Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles" as an assistant to me to push Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", and then as vice-chancellor over there in Milwaukee. But I never got rid of Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", no. This can be discussed in other connections, but I might as well discuss it now. When I became president I . . . . SMAIL: I'm just quoting somebody. It's been said that you wanted to dump Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" and eventually did. HARRINGTON: No, I never did. Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" remained president after I resigned--remained chancellor in Milwaukee after I resigned as president--and he continued on into the '70s. He was president under Weaverxe "Weaver, John"--chancellor under Weaverxe "Weaver, John". SMAIL: Well, that certainly seems decisive. HARRINGTON: But it does require this explanation, and since--this is not exactly an Extension question, but it is part of the problem. When I became president, I was very unhappy with the deanships in Milwaukee, and I felt we needed a push from the top level. But Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" was not the kind of person you could dispose of easily, because he was very well tied-in to the Milwaukee community and extremely well tied-in to the regents. SMAIL: And friends with Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord", too. HARRINGTON: And a close friend of Nelsonxe "Nelson, Gaylord". So I had no immediate intention of getting rid of Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin". What I felt was that we had to have a push 03:27:00 in Milwaukee and therefore we needed new deans. And whereas I was reasonably satisfied with the Letters and Science dean, Joe Beierxe "Beier, Joseph G.", who had been brought over from the two-year University Center to be dean, I was quite dissatisfied with the other deans and worked with Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" to get rid of them. I told Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", "Well, let's get rid of these and let's get some more vigorous people." And that's what we did. When that was done, Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" then came over from Milwaukee and came in to see me and said, "Well, you wanted to get rid of all these people. Do you want to get rid of me, too? Do you want me to resign?"--Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" being a gentleman--really a very nice person, a rather sweet person. I would have done it, probably, and--I don't know. Conceivably I should have, because I did want a stronger person, and I said, "No, no, you're an asset." And indeed he was an asset in the Milwaukee community. It would have been very difficult to get rid of him in connection with the regents, so that I said I'd handle this in other ways. And what I did was to use my assistants--my assistants like Engmanxe "Engman, Charles Jr", for example, and McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R"--and appointed a special assistant from the Milwaukee campus, Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles"--and ultimately Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles" became vice-chancellor over there with those people--to push. The selection of Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles" was probably unfortunate because Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles", while a pusher--just the kind of person McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" was--was also a very difficult person to get along with, and caused all kinds of trouble and didn't work out. But I did not try to drop Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin" at all. SMAIL: All right. HARRINGTON: I had extension trouble with Milwaukee. And it was not with Klotschexe "Klotsche, J. Martin", really; it was because the faculty people in Milwaukee wanted to run their own extension. They didn't like the idea of being under University Extension, and they didn't like McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R", who pushed pretty hard. SMAIL: I imagine you've covered that in your Milwaukee interview. Thinking of Madison, Bridgeman is said to have complained that the University Committee should have been a search and screen for the head of Extension. HARRINGTON: Yes, that's right. Not only that, but there was an appearance before the regents. After the appointment of McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R", there was maybe a pickup committee--I don't know how it was formed since I had nothing to do with it--which came before the regents and objected to the fact that the head of the merged institution was not selected by a search and screen. And this pickup committee was headed by Gus Eckhardtxe "Eckhardt, August G", professor in the Law School, but also extension law, and made a very vigorous pitch, which was obviously directed at me and was very critical of me, to such an extent that Eckhardtxe "Eckhardt, August G" was convinced that I would be his enemy forever. He had an ambition to be head of the Law School, perhaps even to be head of a combined Extension; I don't know. But in any case, later on when the question came up of, 03:30:00 Should he be on a list for deans of the Law School?, he told the people that were pushing him, Well, he certainly wouldn't do because Harrington wouldn't want him, because I was irritated at him for having criticized me for not having a search and screen. Actually, that kind of thing doesn't bother me, really, very much. Indeed, if people have push, that strikes me that that's better than rolling over dead. SMAIL: That points in the wrong direction, yes. HARRINGTON: Yes. Even Hanleyxe "Hanley, William", although I never liked the way he pushed--even Hanleyxe "Hanley, William" had some spirit, which I always admired. The push, or the complaints as to not having had search and screen, were by and large supporters of Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore". They were not the people that wanted Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." to be head of the combined Extension, but the people who wanted Shannon to be--who wanted the person to be selected out of General Extension. And if it couldn't be Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz", then they thought that Shannon was the obvious person. So they made a presentation to the regents, and the regents on the whole were rather puzzled by this, because the regents at that time were not at all inclined to think in terms of search and screen. And when you talk of a new outfit, something new--well, it didn't occur to them that this would be the kind of thing. Moreover, my strongest supporters on the regents really went after Eckhardtxe "Eckhardt, August G". And of course, DeBardelebexe "DeBardeleben, Arthur"n was my strongest supporter, although he's about as Democratic as you can get and a very strong supporter of faculty rights. He, feeling he was supporting me, jumped all over Eckhardtxe "Eckhardt, August G" in the regents' meeting, which must show in the regents' minutes. SMAIL: Yes. HARRINGTON: Well, there's a point to it, but we have to put it in the same category as, Who was to be head of the new campus in Green Bay? Who was to be head of the new campus in Racine/Kenosha? Who was to be head of Parkside? These were new campuses set up at this time, and you could have had a faculty committee in each of them because there was a two-year campus in Green Bay, there were two-year campuses in Kenosha and Racine, and you could have set up a search and screen committee. I did not, and did not for specific reasons. Since this is all connected with the choice of Extension chancellor, I suppose I might as well mention it at this particular time, although I may have mentioned it at other times. I could not have thought of setting up a search and screen committee made up of the heads of the two-year campuses, because they were thinking in terms of the two-year campus being what would go on and become a full campus. There were candidates from the campuses--the two-year campuses, particularly from Racine/Kenosha. SMAIL: It would almost appear that they should have . . . . HARRINGTON: And they were not the kind of people--they were estimable people; Almay from Racine, for example, was estimable. On the other hand, not only did I feel you should not take a person from the two-year because you were changing the whole thrust of things, as indeed you were with Extension--you were doing something 03:33:00 different, and you didn't want to take the old people--not only that, but how could you take somebody from Racine? How would Kenosha people feel about it? Those two places were at each others' throats. And therefore I made those selections myself. I could have set up committees, sure. There was some thought that I should set up committees, and there were people on the Madison campus who felt I should set up committees in which Madison campus would be dominant, because Madison campus had always been dominant in the two-year centers. And when I appointed the people who were heads of these two new campuses, there was criticism from the Madison campus of my selection for the Green Bay campus--the selection of Ed Weidnerxe "Weidner, Edward W", who is still chancellor of the Green Bay campus--a political scientist, whom political scientists on the whole didn't like because he had done a number of things that they felt were improper when he was at Michigan State and in his overseas Vietnam things. And they didn't like him much personally because he was a terrible pusher, which is why I selected him, although I offered the job first to a person who wasn't as much of a pusher--Eck Muselabechxe "Muselabech, Eck", president of Minnesota. In Kenosha/Racine, the Madison campus raised no objection because I took one of theirs. I took Wylliexe "Wyllie, Irvin G.", who had been in the history department. You might have criticized that appointment because it was my old department; why should I be selecting people from my old department for this kind of a job? But there was no objection raised, even though it was just as arbitrary a decision as my Extension decision or my decision with reference to Green Bay. We can get back to Extension, if you like. SMAIL: Well, I don't know how much more there is to say about Extension. HARRINGTON: There's a little something to say about it, and I think that--we are on tape still? SMAIL: Yes we are, because I would like your observations about what's happening today. HARRINGTON: I can't give them quite as well as I might because I have not been following them. But I can say a little something about what happened in between, and this has reference . . . . SMAIL: This is something that will not be written? I haven't really looked into that as much, so I don't know. HARRINGTON: No, it won't be written. It's a matter of judgment on my part. The combined Extension, I thought, got off to a pretty good start, although McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R"'s not an easy man to get along with and was viewed with distaste by some when he came in--distaste from the Agricultural Extension side because he had no agricultural background, and distaste from the University Extension side because he was not easy to get along with the way that Adolfsonxe "Adolfson, Lorenz" had been. The radio and television people seemed to take it fairly easily. They thought they were going to run their own things anyway, and pretty much did, I must say. The point with reference to all this, though, is that McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" immediately started to be active, and started to push in extension where it hadn't been pushed so much before. And his main push was in urban extension in Milwaukee, where he was interested--after all, you remember that he had been working in foundations for minorities and what not. So he began to work minorities in Milwaukee and began to work them pretty much from state headquarters. Since we had been building up Milwaukee on the urban side by setting up an urban studies department and had been pushing urban matters all over Milwaukee--urban education and everything else--the faculty people in Milwaukee thought they ought to run urban extension. SMAIL: Now is this in your tape with Milwaukee, do you think? HARRINGTON: Probably not much. In any case, I'll finish it right there, because the view of McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" from University Extension and from Agricultural Extension could be in part that here he was pushing Milwaukee, which didn't interest them very much. And this brought him opposition from UW-Milwaukee, which never did get to like him, and particularly after Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles" became active in Milwaukee. Vevierxe "Vevier, Charles" pushed very hard for Milwaukee Extension as against Extension being run from Madison. That never was solved--hasn't been solved to this day, except by virtual autonomy or independence now. McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R", then, had his troubles, but I think he got on pretty well. He went out speaking to agricultural groups, meeting county agent people, and he went out talking to the University Extension people. He was viewed with a great deal of reserve by the people who had wanted Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore". He moved in and made Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." and Shannon his assistants. Actually, it turned out that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." worked better with him than Shannon did. Though Shannon and McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" reasonably well liked each other, Shannon certainly did want that job, and he was not happy about not getting it. While Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." might well have wanted it, Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."'s ambitions were in a little different direction, as to be dean of the College of Agriculture or Secretary of Agriculture, so that he tried 03:36:00 to make it work. The trouble on the Agricultural Extension side was really around the state, because all the people who had been accustomed to going to the College of Agriculture, not only for Agricultural Extension--through Agricultural Extension to the professors--but also through the experiment station, looked upon this as a little doubtful and McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" as not really quite the right person. And in fact there was a rather special problem about McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R", which I don't think I've put on tape before, in that the federal legislation on Agricultural Extension says that Agricultural Extension should be headed by an agricultural person, which McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" was not. So the question was, Would Agricultural Extension nationally--would it accept McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R"?, because, oddly enough, the federal government had always passed on the appointment of the head of Agricultural Extension. This, by the way, is highly improper, and it's a violation of states' rights and a violation of University rights; the University ought to appoint whomever it wanted. But the question there arose: Would the Washington people accept McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" as the head of the combined Extension, whereas they would have wanted an agricultural person to be in it? Well, they did accept him. But they did so because we could say that, after all, here was Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." as number two, and he would have primary responsibility there, but more particularly because Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L" went to Washington, and the head of Agricultural Extension in Washington--the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture--was Clodiusxe "Clodius, Robert L"'s Ph.D. major professor from California. So it was a national precedent of very great importance, the more so since other combined extensions, as in Missouri, took the ag [inaudible]. SMAIL: This is the end of the tape. HARRINGTON: All right. SMAIL: This is tape twenty-one of the interview with Fred Harrington. HARRINGTON: Yes. Now I do feel that while at the beginning Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." probably worked more enthusiastically with McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" than Shannon did, in the long run the merged Extension seemed to be more accepted by the Extension people--that is, towards the latter part of the McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" period--whereas the opposition from agriculture grew. It was opposition around the state--opposition from the county agriculture committees, from agricultural organizations. And I think it very well may have been Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S"'s influence--although if not his influence, Poundxe "Pound, Glenn S" certainly did not try to stop it. Thus by the time McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" left to take the presidency of Maine, the opposition inside agriculture was substantial. However, to succeed McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" I selected Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". I wanted Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". I thought that by this time you could select either Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." or Shannon. When McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R" left, obviously the University Extension people wanted me to select Shannon--the very same group that had objecting to my naming McNeilxe "McNeil, Donald R". On the other hand, I felt that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was the right person for the job. And 03:39:00 I also felt that I would have had great trouble if I had not appointed Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."--if I had appointed Shannon--with the regents, because the term of Rohdexe "Rohde, Gil" having ended, the new governor, Knowles, who was a Republican, appointed Walter Renkxe "Renk, Walter" as the agricultural person. And Walter Renkxe "Renk, Walter", certainly a big farmer, was tied to the Farm Bureau Federation rather than to the Farmers Union, and would certainly have objected to having anybody except Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.". Not only that, but other regents were very much aware of the fact that Ahlgrexe "Ahlgren, Henry L."n was a very prominent Republican as well as a prominent agricultural person, and they certainly would have been persons who would have listened to the agriculture push from around the country. SMAIL: So you really didn't have much choice. HARRINGTON: I didn't have a great deal of choice. But it's to be noted that I again did not select a search and screen committee, although by this time--by the separation of a few years back--search and screen committees were much more common by this time. And I could have appointed a search and screen committee which, however, would have simply posed the problem. SMAIL: What do you mean? HARRINGTON: It would have posed the problem, because suppose the search and screen committee had not come up with Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."? If it had come up with a list that included Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." I could have selected him. SMAIL: Then you could say it's the search and screen committee who was remiss. HARRINGTON: I could have said that but it might have been somewhat difficult. They might have come up with Vandebergxe "Vandeberg, Gale"--number two person in Agricultural Extension--who was not to compare with Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." in terms of talent. In fact, I thought that Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." might do very well--that he had somewhat absorbed the general viewpoint and was particularly interested in developing aid for small business as a part of merged Extension, using the agricultural demonstration method in small business demonstrations; he wanted to do that. It turned out that when he became chancellor of Extension and tried to push this over on the regents--we put it in the budget--the regents didn't like it very much. The businessmen on the board didn't think that was very good, and Gordie Walker from southeast Wisconsin, although a great friend of Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", said, "Oh, this is terrible. We don't need anything to help the small businessman." SMAIL: They didn't think it would work, or they didn't want to help small business, or what? HARRINGTON: They didn't think that was the University's job. They didn't see it that way, so that my feeling about selecting Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." was that it was better to do it without a search and screen committee--that I wouldn't have all these difficulties. And I wanted Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L."; I thought he was the right person anyway. It is true that this also upset Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore", and although we continued to be friends and are to this day, and indeed I'm a closer friend of Ted Shannonxe "Shannon, Theodore" than of Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", although I've seen them both a good deal in their retirement--this 03:42:00 was a problem. It made Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." head of the combined Extension, and I would have hoped that that being done, then the combined Extension would be successful. What it ran into, of course, was what came with the merger, because what came with the merger was that in the old state colleges, state universities, extension was an individual campus matter--mostly teaching of graduate courses in education. And thus the autonomy principle from the new campuses--the new state university campuses--combined with Milwaukee, which was determined to be autonomous and to run itself, and Madison, which always wanted to be running Extension--still does want to run Extension--it posed situations that were different from the situations when I was here. In any case, by this time Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." had decided to leave to go to Washington to be Assistant Secretary of Agriculture and, as he tells me, his decision to go to Washington was because the regents wouldn't buy the small business demonstration system. He tells me that I had asked him into the regents meeting to push for this part of the budget--that he was to push for small business demonstration. By this time I was losing some of my punch with the regents, and I thought that he would be capable of doing this. In any case, it was his idea and he was pushing it very well, and the regents were unenthusiastic about it. He tells me that he had a phone call while the regents were discussing this. He went to the phone call right after the meeting was over, when he had been "kicked in the face," as he says on this point, and it was an offer to go to Washington as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, which he did. And I think if Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." had stayed we may have had a successful merged Extension, which we have not had, of course, since that time. I can leave it at that, because I think that a further discussion of what's happened since is not in my province, since I don't know much about it. And in any case, it's not a part of me. But I guess I should say that in the latter part of my administration, I was fading in influence because not only were the regents critical of me for not handling the student question a little more vigorously, maybe having been too close to the Democratic regents in the early part of my administration, but around the state the opposition to the student protests on the campus made me less acceptable than before. I did, however, continue to go out to agricultural meetings and even talk to agricultural committees in the counties, and did this with a great deal of help from Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L.", who introduced me--gave me the opportunities to talk to these people. And I do feel that if Ahlgrenxe "Ahlgren, Henry L." had stayed, which he did not, and if I had stayed, which I did not, that maybe merged Extension would have been successful, although people tell me no, that it never worked anywhere. And certainly one of my great points was that the federal government should supply money for University Extension equal to Agricultural Extension. It didn't work out. The Title I of the Higher Education Act of 1965, for which I was responsible, never got the funding for which it was authorized, and the appropriations of course then faded rather generally when everything began to go down, 03:45:00 at the end of the Johnsonxe "Johnson, William S" administration and the beginning of the Nixon administration. SMAIL: Yes. HARRINGTON: That's enough.