First interview with Richard Knowles (January 23, 2007): Tapes 1-2

Richard Knowles (#841) Transcript RL: This is tape number two, side one of the ongoing oral history interview with Professor Richard Knowles. January 23, 2007. I was starting to ask you about returning to Wisconsin, the subject of Wisconsin. So you're invited in the 1960s by a former professor at Pennsylvania to start working on the [unclear]. And it's this work that is essential, I assume, to your finally receiving tenure? RK: I think probably so. I was working on As You Like It when I got tenure. But I had published a number of articles, and that was enough in those days. You didn't really need a book in hand then. RL: Oh, you didn't. RK: It was good if you did. But a series of articles would have done it. As I say, we were teaching ten hours a week. They didn't expect quite such rapid production then. RL: Did you have to appear before the tenure committee? Or were you just awarded it? RK: There was no communication from the executive committee at all with me. One day they met, and I heard by the grapevine that they were meeting, and I was up for consideration. And the old rule had been that if the committee gave you tenure, that the chairman called you that night. And I was not called that night. And I said to my wife, "I'm sorry. I've done the best I could." But I was called in the next morning and told I had tenure. [laughter] RB: I suppose it's funny now. RK: It was a tense time. [laughs] Yes. RB: So that was 1968. RK: That's right. Yes. RB: That, perhaps, is a good segue into asking you to reflect, if you would, on that time period on campus of the late '60s up to and including the Sterling Hall bombing, which was a very challenging time, as I understand it, on campus. RK: The Sterling Hall bombing killed a 00:01:00 good friend of mine, actually. Bob Fassnacht. He was the student who was killed. RB: Yes. RK: We were (offices?) on a chorus in town. We both sang in it. And we were good friends. His wife later worked with my wife in the Ag School. So I took that very personally, actually. Well, what can we say except that things were bad all over the world at that time, and the badness came home here, too. And it was a time about which all of us on the faculty had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, we realized that the war was a foolish war, and a destructive one. And we realized that if we failed a student and he had to leave college, that he was probably going to be inducted and would die. And that was on our minds. On the other hand, the students often behaved very badly. The trashing and throwing stones at the policemen and so on, and fires on State Street. And essentially bad in attempting to shut down the university. We were the authority figure that they had to deal with besides the police, and they took it out on us. It was a difficult time when students came into your class and took over the class and demanded the debate on the war. Or actually, in one or two cases, carried the professor bodily out of the classroom and spirited him away somewhere. RL: Did that happen in some of your classes? RK: Yes, I had groups come to class and demand a debate. And I was usually willing to debate, and then they'd go away. There was a great 00:02:00 waste of opportunity, young faculty who came a few years after I did got very much caught up in the student movement and spent a lot of their time with the students in political marches and rallies, and made themselves very visible as supporting the troublemaking of the students. And very often didn't do any work of their own. And then when they came up for tenure, they always claimed that they were being denied tenure for their political beliefs. And it could certainly look that way. But in fact, they were being denied tenure because they hadn't done anything. There was a great waste of time and opportunity. And, of course, no one likes to go into a classroom having to cross a picket line of chanting students, or having to cross a line of soldiers with bayonets, which we sometimes had to do. RL: Were you, surprised is an inadequate word. But when you thought about your life up to the point of the mid '60s, were you surprised or stunned or accepting of the change, of the campus coming from being very quiet to a radical center? RK: Well, I knew that Wisconsin had always been a center of liberal thought. Not necessarily this kind of political activity. And it was not a pleasant kind of thing to find oneself caught up in. I think all of us were surprised at the violence that developed. Our kids went to a daycare center in the basement of a Congregational church at Breese Terrace and University 00:03:00 Avenue. And that was right across the street from the ROTC building. And quite often, my wife would have to go in the middle of the day and retrieve our children who were sitting on the steps with their eyes streaming with tear gas. They came to think that the word "student" was a dirty word, because the students had caused this to happen. It was a time when we didn't have a lot of leisure to reflect how this was different from the old days. We simply had to try to get by from day to day. My job was to try to give an education to the people who had worked all summer to make the money for this education and pay their tuition, and deserved to get an education. And here were all of these things impeding that. And I guess I was on the side of authority, trying to keep things going, when that was not always pleasing to either some of my colleagues or to the students, some of the students. RL: And just how difficult was that within the Department of English? Was there serious contention? RK: Oh, the department was ruined. It was split right up the middle. There was bitterness. There were groups of students invading tenure hearings and chanting. There were people marching around with 00:04:00 bullhorns. Oh, yes. All normal academic order broke down. And great schisms and hatreds that never healed. There were lawsuits brought against the faculty by some of the younger faculty, for instance. It was a very destructive time. RL: Did, now I noticed that you had a chance to go to the Folger in the late '60s, it must have been during this time. Why did you stay and not go to the Folger? RK: I did go to the Folger. RL: But to not take a permanent position there? RK: Oh, this was a fellowship. RL: But weren't you encouraged to apply for a permanent position at the Folger? RK: Later on I was offered a directorship of the reading room and the editorship of Shakespeare Quarterly, which is the leading American journal in Shakespeare studies. But they were offering me less money to live in Washington than I was being paid to live here in Madison. [laughs] RL: Oh, I see. RK: There was no way I could take that. But Washington in '68 was also troubled. Martin Luther King was shot while I was there. RL: Yes. 00:05:00RK: And there was a black church right across from the Folger where there were great demonstrations. The Folger had to close sometimes for fear of rioters coming inside the library and starting fires. And also, later that spring, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. In fact, I got to sing in Robert Kennedy's funeral cortege. With a chorus I was with. Yes. RL: Really? RK: And they were troubling, unsettling times everywhere. RL: So you didn't, you and your wife didn't seriously entertain moving from Madison during the difficult years. RK: We love Madison. Despite Jean's doubts about coming here. When we came here and saw the parks and the excellent schools and the cost of living and so on, nice neighborhoods, we couldn't think of a reason to leave. So we stayed. RL: And when Sterling Hall bombing happened, were you surprised that that happened? Or had it seemed, perhaps, inevitable? RK: No. I saw no inevitability about that. It was surprising to be awakened in the middle of the night 00:06:00 with a terrific boom. I mean, I heard it here. And then to learn that several students who were friend of another, student friends of mine, were involved. It was a crazy business. The following summer, it was, I was teaching a creative writing course. And one of the students in the class was writing a story about how to bomb the Baraboo Munitions Factory. And you know that the people who blew up Sterling Hall had actually tried to bomb, from an airplane, the munitions factory. RL: Yes. RK: And they had it, in the story, this student had found a railroad track that went underneath a chain link fence into the munitions factory. And the plan in the story was to put a Volkswagen on which had been welded train wheels, and to load this Volkswagen with explosives and send it chugging into the Baraboo factory. And we worked on this story and talked about the ins and the outs of the plans, and so on. And the summer session ended, and I went to Door County. And when I was in Door County, I learned that there had been an explosion in the Baraboo Munitions Factory in which a man had been killed. And I thought, oh, boy. What do I do now? Do I turn my students in to the FBI on suspicion of murder? Or what? I 00:07:00 could believe that it actually had been pulled off. There was that much ferment and excitement. As it turned out, it turned out to be an electrical short in one of the buildings that had caused the explosion. I saw the student who wrote the story later on in the following fall and I said, "Now, Lee, you didn't actually blow up anything, did you?" He said, "No." And he said, "You didn't turn me into the FBI, did you?" And I said, "No. It was somebody else and not me." [laughter] I remember walking down the campus with a visiting French scholar, a very famous Malory scholar named Eugene Vinaver who was here in his retirement to teach for a couple of years. And we were talking down, and I mentioned to him as we walked down the hill that there had just been a killing at Kent State, that the militia had shot and killed students. And he stopped and turned pale. Because he had seen the Paris Riots of '68. And he knew what this meant. It meant the whole country was going to explode. And it did. It certainly did. RL: Now following the Sterling Hall bombing, my sense is that that ended the days of turmoil on this campus. RK: It showed the student agitators where they were going. They were killing each other. They were killing innocent students. And they drew back. It was no longer quite so heroic. In the early days of the confrontations with police, in which the police behaved very badly as well as the students, it was easy for students to pose as heroes. To walk around with their arm in a sling and with a bruise on their head and so on. It was sexy to have been injured in the conflict, and heroic to have been engaged in it. But after the Sterling Hall bombing, they said, what are we doing? We're becoming our enemy. And that really was, I think, all over the country, the turning point of the movement. RL: Talk now, if you would, post-Sterling Hall bombing, about the Department of English and life on this campus in the 1970s. Where was the department headed? What were some of the issues that you were dealing with? By the fall of 1970, you're an associate professor. You have tenure. You are a respected scholar on work on Shakespeare. What's happening now in the decade of the 1970s? RK: Well, personally, I'm now cast as the Old Guard. I'm part of the establishment, and so distrusted. I'm 00:08:00 over thirty. RL: By students or your colleagues? RK: By my younger colleagues. One had to work very hard to go to parties, give parties, mingle, show that one was a human being. But even so, one was in a position of power to grant tenure now to the younger people coming along. And great distrust. As for the students, they wanted to engage the faculty much more on their side than the faculty was willing to be engaged, most of them were. And we would be summoned to meetings by the students to vent their grievances. And we would come and they would simply pour vitriol over us and excoriate us for what terrible people we were, and so on. And try to get us to do things for them. It was mixed up, eventually, with all sorts of other movements. With the movement of the TAA to get more power as teachers. More guaranteed rights, a union, contracts, and so on. Black Power was coming in, and there were marches and demonstrations all around campus in favor of Black Power movement and a Black Studies Department. And, eventually, of course, women's studies, but that was much more peaceful. But it was a whole decade of one kind of turmoil after another Judy Craig has written a whole dissertation, book-length dissertation, on the TAA strikes and all of the turmoil that that caused. And I mean, the TAA at various times, really wanted to shut down the university, and succeeded in doing it for a while. And to stop all research, they stopped trucks from delivering chemical supplies to the Chemistry Department so that experiments had to be discontinued. One group of students went one night. They learned that liquid nitrogen was important to experiments, and so they took a gun and tried to shoot holes in the 00:09:00 liquid nitrogen tanks outside the chemistry building. Luckily they did not pierce the tanks. Because if they had, they would have been covered with liquid nitrogen and frozen instantly. [laughs] But they didn't manage to do that. So it was a very unhappy time. I was working very hard on As You Like It. I was spending sometimes evenings all the way up to midnight in Memorial Library and coming out at closing time. One night I came out and a group of students were gathering on the mall, and a group of police gathering by the University Club, facing them down. And some kids in front of the Historical Society were beginning to pick up rocks and throw them at the police. And I knew that a policeman had had a vertebrae broken by a rock just a few days earlier. So I went up to the kid and I grabbed him. I said, "What are you doing? Stop that!" And he looked at me in astonishment that anyone would question his right to throw rocks at the pigs. And we argued and wrestled about it. And essentially I had stopped this group of kids from throwing rocks at the police when the police tear gassed all of us. And it hurts. That stuff really burns the eyes. And we all ran into the buildings and 00:10:00 washed our eyes out. But it was as explosive as that from moment to moment. Very bad for studying for finals. RL: And if you're willing, I'd like to have you talk a little more about the impact on the Department of English. Who was leading the department then? Who was chair? And who were the key players, pro and con, or on different sides of the issue? And what was happening to the reputation of the department at this time? RK: When the real trouble began, I think I've mentioned that there was a stalemate between Carl Crober and Mark Eccles as to who was going to be chairman. RL: Yes. RK: Lucky for Mark, he was never chosen, because it would have killed him. He was an old man, and an old styled scholar. And he was not trained to deal with any of this kind of disruption. The stalemate resulted in the choice of a man named Tim Heniger. A very, a recent senior appointment to the department. Very famous historian of ideas in the Renaissance. And he tried to solve problems by talking endlessly. He had departmental meetings every week. Week after week after week. Thereby earning the resentment of all the faculty, who had other things to do. And he kept promising the 00:11:00 students that he would deliver some sort of accommodation for their wishes, which the faculty never let him do. And so the students turned on him. And it destroyed him. He resigned the chairmanship and left the department. The department was taken over by Charles Scott, who is, if you know him, six feet three and muscle. And he took no nonsense from these kids. And with a strong hand, returned order to the department as well as anybody could have done. And he did that for three or four years. What else? RL: The reputation of the department? RK: The younger scholars, of course, as I say, were not producing anything. And they were very unhappy and let their unhappiness be known worldwide. And the reputation of the department began to slide, of course. Distinguished older people like Mark Eccles and Madeleine Doran and Meritt Hughes and Ricardo Quintana, who retired. And then there were these middle grade people like myself, who were just coming along, and an unhappy group of younger people. And we slid down two rankings from first to twentieth, or something like that. So it was destructive. And 00:12:00 also, the department here, like the library here, is something of a miracle in that this is not a rich state. And we have here one of the best libraries in the country, and one of the best faculties in the country. And we've done it on a shoestring much of the time. It's only recently that money has been raised in large amounts through government grants and private donations to support us on a fairly even keel. The legislature, of course, has taken advantage of that. Whereas it used to be the University of Wisconsin, now only about 23 percent of our operating costs are paid by the state. The rest is grants and tuition. RL: During the 1970s, are you working with good graduate students? RK: Very good graduate students, indeed. RL: Can you talk about that a little bit? Who some of them were, and what they were doing? RK: The very best student we ever had, I lured here. I was director of graduate studies with Stan Henning, jointly at that time. And we had a new invention of the federal government called NDEA 00:13:00 fellowships. And these were fellowships that we could choose to give to individual students that we wanted to bring here. All of the other fellowships in the university were offered competitively from a small pot of money to all the departments on campus. And departments usually couldn't offer more than one or two in a year. But these NDEA fellowships were just plums. And we had a very bright, a young woman who had applied and had not won one of the regular fellowships. And I offered her an NDEA and brought her here. And she went on to be very distinguished as a Renaissance scholar. Jane Donawerth, her name is. Teaches now at Maryland. Did her dissertation with Madeleine Doran, wrote a book on Shakespeare's language. Has gone on to write editions of women writers in the Renaissance, to talk about women's science fiction writers, talk about rhetoric and the teaching of rhetoric. She's really first rate, just a jewel of a mind. Oh, yes, we kept getting good people here. The trick was not to let them get sidetracked by all of the other activities. One of the things that happened in the graduate department was that we were flooded with applications of students who wanted to stay out of the draft. And we tended to be generous about accepting them. Especially because a man at Johns Hopkins had written a book about who we were going to 00:14:00 need thousands of new PhDs in the coming decade. So we, one time, when I was running the graduate division with Stan Henning, had seven hundred graduate students in English. RL: That's a huge number, isn't it? RK: And we had to see each of these twice a year to approve their course choices and sign off on their schedules. [laughs] Great lines. People standing unhappily for hours. But they were staying out of the draft, of course. It became obvious that most of these were never going to find a job, and it was immoral to be encouraging them to go on for masters and PhDs when there were no jobs. So Stan and I began gradually to cut back the admissions. Now we take in only fifteen or so a year. That's all there are jobs for. RL: The NDEA, is that National Defense? RK: National Defense Education Act. Yes. RL: Where did that money come from? RK: Well, it was from the feds. I'm not sure which department of the feds it was. It must have come through the graduate school and was apportioned to departments. We each got one or 00:15:00 two in the department. RL: Now during the 1970s, how active are you in the life of the university? Of the governance structure? Faculty Senate? University Life committees? College of Letters & Science committees? RK: Well, it was expected that everybody pull his weight. I served for several years on the Graduate Fellowships Committee, reviewing applications for fellowships for all the departments in the Humanities Division. That took quite a bit of time. RL: Did you like that? RK: Very interesting work, yeah. Interesting to see what people were doing in other departments. Towards the end of the '70s and early '80s, I got involved more and more in library work. I mean, this is one of the great libraries in the world. Especially for Shakespeare. It has an almost incomparable Shakespeare collection. RL: Really? RK: Yes. Towards the end of that decade, the, I got elected to the University Library Committee, which was a subcommittee of the Faculty Senate. And was in charge of changing the library for the better, making new committees, bringing library staff onto the committees, so it wasn't an elitist faculty committee only. And in the process, I got caught up in 00:16:00 the firing of the then library director, Joe (Traze?), who had offended people both in the department and the faculty, because they were running out of room. And he tried to please everybody, and pleased nobody. And was besieged, and finally gave up. And I was running the library for a while, essentially. I was meeting with the committees of the bibliographers and apportioning money and all the rest. And finally he left and we had to find a new director. And I became the president of the Friends of the Library. And began the process, which had never been thought of before, of raising money for the library. The Friends at Harvard were bringing in millions a year, and we were bringing in nothing. RL: Yes. RK: So the book sales and little things began under my watch. RL: Oh, that's quite wonderful! RK: I never actually got a book sale going, because we were dealing with state laws that said you could not sell state property without putting it up for bids from the whole state. And you can't do that with a thousand volumes. RL: Yes. RK: So they found a way around that eventually. But we started that going, and we began charging real dues for the Friends, and to raise money, and sponsored lectures, 00:17:00 and bought gifts and books. So that was useful. RL: So if you're supervising the library, you're also, I'm assuming you were not getting release time from teaching. RK: No. No. We never did for any of this kind of thing. RL: So you were carrying your full teaching load and working on the [unclear] RK: Yes. And, let's see, I would still have, for some of this, been directing graduate studies in our department. I was still doing that through much of the '70s. And then, towards the very end, I got made chairman of the committee to add several floors onto the existing Memorial Library building. And you remember the fuss that that caused. In the process of building it, the zoning laws changed and they had to add a couple of feet onto every floor for greater headroom. And that raised the top floor up another whole floor, and obscured the view of part of the dome of the Capitol. So we had to cut the top floor off and reconfigure the whole building. So that was very time consuming. RL: Now I've not had anyone talk about the library before, or the addition or the other issues. You must have been quite a major player, then, in the late '70s and early '80s in the library. RK: I was. One of my proudest achievements is getting the new rare book 00:18:00 accommodations on the top two floors of the addition. The rare book collection, which is a distinguished collection, probably the second best history of science collection in the world, the very best small magazine collection in the world. One of the very best Shakespeare collections, and so on. It was all in one cramped vault, underneath a flat roof, which kept leaking. And it had steam pipes going through the vaults, and they kept bursting and spraying the books with steam and water. And I said, you know, this can't go on. And eventually I had to deal with the library staff. Everybody knew this new space was going to open up, and they all wanted a part of it. And everybody wanted those two top floors with a nice view of the lake and the Capitol. And I said no, we're going to have a decent rare book facility here. And I fought for it and won it. We had to fight with the legislature, of course. They wanted us to build a barn up near Wausau and just put most of the books up there. And if you ever needed one, well, we'll bring it down by truck within a week, and so on. RL: They wanted to put the rare books in a separate facility? RK: They didn't want to add anything onto the library. No new floors at all. They just wanted to leave it as it was. Leave things in the old vaults. And just put the overflow into a storage space. And that's what 00:19:00 we're going to do now, of course. We've run out of space once again. We currently have many books stored in the old Middleton Medical Library opposite Van Hise. And there's talk of building a new facility on the outskirts of town, which we will have to spend an hour to get to and an hour to get back from each time we want to look at certain books. They've already taken many miles of bound journals out of the library stacks, because now those journals are online. And online journals are much less convenient to use. They're cumbersome, they're slow, and it's really impeding your search in the humanities. We're just running out of space. RL: And if you were running the university today, how would you address that issue of space? RK: Well, I'm sorry that our chancellor, whom I admire immensely in most ways, and who's reconfiguring the whole lower campus with all sorts of new building, he's going to tear down the humanities building and put up something prettier, I'm sorry that he can't find the money and the will to put more library space down there where it really ought to be. But he's expressed no interest. In fact, 00:20:00 the argument is this is such high prized real estate, we don't want to waste it on storage. But of course a library is more than storage. It's a research space, a study space. I wish that money would be raised as was raised to build the Elvehjem, now the Chazen, to build a rare book library like the Beinecke at Yale, or something of the sort. Like the Firestone at Princeton for the rare books. RL: Yes. RK: And that would open up again, two floors of library space here. RL: Would you explain how it was that Wisconsin, of all places, got such extraordinary rare book collections? RK: This way and that, I guess. The history of science collection came from Chester Thordarson. Do you know about him? RL: No. RK: He was a man who came here from Iceland as a young man with a few cents in his pocket and a great gift for inventing things. [pause] [End of Tape 2/Side 1] RL: This is side two of tape two of the ongoing oral history interview with Professor Richard Knowles. You were speaking about the origins of the history of science rare books collection. RK: Chester Thordarson came here from Iceland when he was a young man and settled in Chicago. And with no money at all, began an electrical business. He invented electrical motors and transformers and that kind of thing. And when the gasoline engine needed starters and coils and so on, he allied himself with major 00:21:00 manufacturers and made a fortune. And he poured his money into a passion of his, which was old books, especially old books about science. And by old I mean sometimes inconovia, things from the very beginning of printing, in the 1460s and '70s and '80s. And he amassed a tremendous collection. Not only of scientific texts, but also of other literary texts from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. And he stored them on an island that he bought up off Washington Island, Rock Island, and built himself a great Nordic lodge. Like something out of Beowulf of stones and glass windows and logs and so on. And he had his collection largely in storage up there, which was not ideal conditions for him. And towards the end of his life, he decided to dispose of it, not give it to the university, but to make it available at a very reasonable price. And they were wise enough to snap it up. RL: So this would be in, when, '50s? RK: I don't know the exact date. That would be about right. The new building was put up in the '50s. I don't think that those books went to the old historical society. I think they went to the new, new building. The Shakespeare 00:22:00 collection is an even more interesting story. A man living in Zanesville, Ohio, named Joseph Crosby, was some sort of a clerk by day. But he was an amateur Shakespeare enthusiast, and began to buy editions of Shakespeare and commentaries of Shakespeare, in the nineteenth century, late nineteenth century. And began to correspond with some of the leading Shakespearians of the day. And got too big for his boots, began to think that he was really an important Shakespeare scholar and should buy everything. And he began signing his father-in-law's names to checks to buy some of these books. And his father-in-law discovered this and sent the law on him. And he fled to Canada and lived the rest of his life in exile. And his superb collection of Shakespeare editions and commentaries was put up for sale. And the then director of the historical society saw the bargain and snapped them up. And this was the undergraduate reading collection. They were reading from the very earliest editions of Shakespeare, 1709 Rowe and Alexander Pope, 1725. And Lewis Theobald 1733. RL: Undergraduates, too? RK: Yeah. RL: Any undergraduate? RK: Yes! This was the reading collection in the historical society. 00:23:00 When the collection was moved over to a new building in the early 1950s, these books were pretty much out of date. There were newer editions now with better annotations. So they were put into drawers in the cellar, the old cutter bins, metal bins, where they were just moldering. And people were pulling out the drawers and standing on them to climb up and get books up above and stuff. And I discovered them and I said, "Good lord! This is, Harvard doesn't have a collection like this! The Folger does." And so I talked Floyd Griffin into giving me a small tin room in the middle of the stacks to put these things in to keep them safe and to make them available for my use. And there's still a separate Shakespeare collection. But every major edition of the eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth centuries is sitting there with all the major commentaries and dictionaries. It's wonderful. Ideal. When I retire and the Variorum goes somewhere else, they won't be used the way they're used now, I'm afraid. For the moment, it's ideal for me. RL: Isn't it odd that it's in Wisconsin? RK: Yup. But the Variorum is in Wisconsin. But in fact, in recent years, the Variorums have been As You Like It, Mark Eccles' Measure for Measure, Robert Turner's Winter's Tale, he was at Milwaukee. Stan Henning's Comedy of Errors is coming out. The general editorship has been here. And the university's been very generous with their WARF research funds to support this. RL: Oh, you've had WARF support for your Variorum work? RK: WARF. I've had a Guggenheim, a Folger Fellowship, an NEH fellowship. You know, you usually apply for whatever you can get. We don't have the money in the humanities that the sciences have, of course. RL: Yes. RK: But WARF has been very, very wonderful aid. RL: Are there other special collections and rare books that are particularly extraordinary that should be acknowledged? RK: Yes. The small magazines, the little magazine collection. This was 00:24:00 a collection originally begun by a rich psychoanalyst in Minneapolis. And he collected cheaply printed chapbooks of poetry. Do you know what a chapbook is? RL: I don't. RK: Well, "chap" is related to the word "cheap." The chapman was the person who haggled at the stalls and sold you things at cut rates, and so on. And chapbooks were cheap books of poetry, often printed by the poet himself or by a group of students who started a literary magazine. And this is the place that people like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and so on got started, and all sorts of other people. And this psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, amassed a collection of several thousand of these, and I think gave them to the university so that they would be maintained in proper condition. And they've been adding to it ever since. So it's a collection that people come from all over the country to use. We have developed recently a women's writer collection. But also a nineteenth century American authors collections. First editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain and so on. It's a nice collection as well. There's a collection of nineteenth century French revolutionary tracts and 00:25:00 pamphlets which people come to use. Just astonishing wealth here. We have an Audubon folio, bit Elephant folio, one of the few in the world. RL: Did you get that from Dick Anderson? RK: I have no idea where it came from. Sorry. RL: You know, you made reference earlier, and other people that I have interviewed have talked about how truly extraordinary, and there's no other word for it, that the University of Wisconsin should be in the state of Wisconsin. Can you speculate on why that has happened? RK: Some stubborn men of vision, I guess. I mean, people like Bascom. During the Roosevelt years, of course, we were a source of ideas for the New Deal and for social security and all that. We became politically important. And I think people in the state took a certain pride in the importance of this place in the middle of the cornfields being such a major player in the country. Of course, after Sputnik, everybody wanted to pour money into education. In the physics teaching that I did in the '50s at Tufts, I did it in really ratty, shabby laboratories. There was no money for science, either. After Sputnik, of course, it just came pouring in. [laughs] It began to be conceivable that professors would make a living wage. And I never expected to be one of the richest people in the world, which is what I really am. I remember Albert Imlah at Tufts, distinguished head of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, professor of history, inviting guest speakers and bringing them to his house and having to feed them leftover cold cuts and things because he didn't have money to entertain. It was a very different world. And Sputnik, of course, changed all that, and changed this university, 00:26:00 too. RL: This is a move back to something that you said earlier about how literature in English was being taught, how it changed from the study of literature to sociology. Would you expand on that? How the courses changed in the department. And I assume that that started in the '70s, and is continuing to this day. RK: Well it came about as a result of many causes. One was the troubles, the Vietnam War. Because the students demanded that they not simply study literature for the pleasure of literature, but that it should somehow be relevant to the society that they were living in. And I would have groups of students invade my classes and say, "What are you teaching today?" And I would say, "I'm teaching Shakespeare's sonnets." "Why are you teaching those? They're not relevant. You can't make those politically relevant." And I'd say, "I agree. That's right. But is political relevance the only kind of relevance there is?" But in a time of national upheaval and war, it seemed that that was very important. So that was part of it. You had to make literature relevant, and not something that aesthetes dabbled in for sheer pleasure. Part of it was the advent of departments who had a political agenda to change the world, like Black Studies, African American Studies at it's now called, and Women's Studies, and so on. And they were interested in the political power of literature and were quite frank about it. I had a (rather mad?) colleague named Annis Pratt who had a 00:27:00 sign on her door, "If I had to choose the ten greatest writers, Shakespeare would not be among them." But who would be there? Well, Anais Nin and such people. [laughs] And it was an attempt to make people rethink the purpose of literature, and to make it more of a weapon in political and social struggle than something to be enjoyed as an imaginative experience, life enhancing experience of its own special kind. And then, of course, in the late '70s, and throughout the '80s and '90s, the passion for French theory, the Deconstructionist theory, came in. And this was largely Marxist theory, and the emphasis was on not the literature itself, but on its context. What made the literature what it was and what the literature did to society in turn. And so great emphasis on gender, race and class and imperialism and colonialism and such things. And that is what many people limit their courses to. I was on the divisional committee once when a couple of courses came up from an English Department faculty member. And the committee looked at them and said, "What department is he in? This 00:28:00 course should be taught in the Sociology Department." I mean, he assigned Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen and so on, because that was the interest, in the sociological import of literature. And I think it's still the dominant one in our department and in most departments in the country. RL: Is there, do you assign any value to that evolution? Or do you think that it was an incorrect turn? RK: Well, I think it's a matter of proportion. The study of the social relevance, and the social roots of literature, has been going on as long as literary studies have been going on. Vernon Parrington wrote History of American Literature, oh, seventy-five years ago, which talks about such things. And William Empson was always talking about the political import of literature. But now it's become almost the only thing that's talked about. And people who talk about form and style are considered retrograde, hopelessly old fashioned. And the Variorums, of course, are interested very much in dealing with the text as a literary work, and with its style and with its structure. And it's considered hopelessly Victorian by probably most of the people in the profession. Things are coming around. People are beginning to write in traditional verse forms again, and beginning to talk about structure again. They're beginning to ask themselves why are we teaching these works and their sociological significance, rather than some other work? How is it we are talking about War and Peace instead of something much more minor. And so we're getting back to talking about the greatness of the literary qualities, 00:29:00 rather than their social importance. But it's gone so far in one direction that it's very hard, for instance, for a person who wants to work in traditional literary study to get a job. It's better if you have a flashy theory of some kind. RL: Is that still true for the department today, in terms of whom you all are hiring? RK: Yes. Much of what's written in the department and in other departments is simply incomprehensible to the older faculty. We don't know what they're talking about. It's not what we used to talk about. It's a two-tiered faculty of a different kind now. It's not the Old Guard and the Young Turks. [laughs] It's the Young Guard, who have all the cachet these days. And the old people saying, "Well, we'll retire soon." RL: How should I ask this? But it sounds like, for instance, that there's still student demand for Shakespeare and classic theory. RK: One of the things that I find in my classes is the students are astonished at the novelty of what I'm doing. I'm teaching them from the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and I'm teaching them about meter. How to read verse, and so on. And no one's ever shown them any of this. RL: Meter is new to them? RK: They don't know what blank verse is. They can't tell blank 00:30:00 verse from prose or any other verse. The idea that a poet would spend all his life polishing the rhythm of the lines. Why? Why bother? So when I teach them this kind of thing, they are astonished by it very often. Many of them find it absolutely irrelevant. It's unlike anything anyone has told them, so it can't be too important. But others say, "Wow! No one ever told me this before." And I usually, several times a semester get letters from students who say things like, "You've restored my faith in literary study." So there is some kind of hunger there, I think, for approaching the literature in its own terms, rather than in sociological terms. RL: If you were to speak to your colleagues in the department today about what you have just said, would the validity of your position be acknowledged? RK: Oh, no! It would be attacked, of course. RL: It would be attacked. RK: Oh, of course. Yeah. This is just a geezer. I heard a new verb the other day, "to geeze." "Oh, he's just geezing." He's being a geezer. And anyone who complains that the new approach to literature is leaving something out is simply out of it himself, and doesn't understand where the truth is. And in fact, many of the people who retire from the department, and other departments, retire bitterly. Because they feel that they have been simply marginalized and disrespected in ways that they never deserved. RL: You must have been active, clearly you were, in the Department of English at the time that the writing requirement was dropped. RK: Mm hmm. I was. RL: Can you talk about that? How 00:31:00 did that come about, and what was the position of English versus the rest of the university? Well, I'm only vaguely aware of it, but I know that the requirement was dropped at some point. RK: Yes, we had several meetings with deans and lawyers and everything else before we did this. Essentially it was a self protective measure on the part of the department. RL: And this happened when? RK: Well, it happened in the late '60s and early '70s. The requirement was dropped in the early '70s at some point. It was all part of the same student power movement. And the TAs were given their sections of writing to teach, and their recommended texts and readers and so on. And what we discovered was that many of them were teaching anything but writing. They were turning them into political cells. They were teaching Marxist doctrine. And the parents were learning this and saying, "What?! I'm paying my money to turn them into little communists?! There in Mad Town?" And they threatened lawsuits and everything else. And we said to the students, "If you're not going to teach what you're supposed to teach, you're not going to teach anything." So we just ended the requirement. RL: I see. Do you still think that was a good thing? RK: I 00:32:00 don't know how else we would have saved ourselves from scandal and lawsuits, except for doing that. I mean, teaching of writing came back. We had other mechanisms, like the writing laboratory. And we gave graduate students teaching positions there under supervision and so on. I was hired by the department, appointed by the department, to write a teaching assistant's handbook for the English Department. And it begins with several sections on state law about what the rights of instructors and the rights of TAs are and are not. And the TA does not own the course; he is an assistant to the full professor who supervises the course. He must do what the course says it's going to do. And eventually we brought some kind of order back to what had been a free-for-all, anarchy, essentially, under the guise of writing. Now many people were teaching writing. But many people were not. We survived. We saved enough sections so that people who really needed remedial work got it. And we also instituted more creative writing courses. And we even had some upper level writing courses which I taught once or twice, the English 315 course. So it wasn't as though no one was teaching any writing any more. But we got rid of what was a real trouble spot in the department. RL: Were you, what was your reaction to the introduction of black studies literature or 00:33:00 women's studies literature. The study of literature that came out of a political perspective. Was there some value in it? Or was it simply self indulgent to the times? RK: Um, at the time, it seemed to me wrongheaded. Because it was the opposite of everything that I went to literature for. I didn't go to literature to take a partisan position. I went for all the variety of life that is in a work of literature. And it seemed to me that to focus on themes and the utility, political utility of literature, although it's always been there, I mean, literature has always been applied-- RL: Yes. RK: --for political purposes, was to lose the thing that literature essentially was. Which is the widest possible imagined experience of life. Obviously both black studies and women's studies has produced very useful work. And it's made us look at literature in a very different way. Whether we needed whole departments to do that, I still don't know the answer to. I suppose, I suspect that probably we did. Because we were a fairly conservative institution, and we don't change easily. 00:34:00 But when you have the department, first a program, and then a department, and then star professors in the department, and then money coming into the department for this purpose, then you gain visibility and power and influence. So I'm sure it's helped. When my wife came here, she came with everything but a doctoral degree in American history. And she went to the History Department, hoping that she would be given some kind of adjunct teaching here. And the History Department at that time had a grant from a former graduate of the university, a woman, who had given them a great endowment to hire a woman professor to teach in the History Department. RL: Ah. (Edwards Rollinson?). RK: And the History Department simply chose not to use that money for something like thirty-five years. And I suspect it was, well, Jean went and was interviewed by them. They said, "Oh, we have a woman already." (Margaret Bolg?) or something, who's written histories of the shores of Wisconsin or something like that. And Margaret was there. And, "Don't we already, Margaret?" "Yes, we do," she said. "And that's all we need." [laughs] Finally the curators of the endowment said, "You either use it or lose it." So they hired Gerda Lerner, who was a master at organizing power in her area of the History Department, and built a very strong and very good women's history department. RL: Interesting. RK: So I think without the kind of organization of black studies and so on, it might never have happened. the same thing has been struggling in gay studies, gay and lesbian studies, too. It's not quite succeeded 00:35:00 yet. RL: Should it? RK: I think that gays themselves feel mixed about this. My closest and dearest sister is a lesbian, lifelong lesbian. And she snorts at the idea. "I don't want to be studied like some kind of freak," she says. "I want to be like everybody else." But other people think that gays have a special experience which deserves to be studied and advertised. I have no strong feelings about it. I've always taught gay literature. I've never needed a department to do that. But other people seem to think, again, it would give them visibility and power. RL: We've talked about life in the department in the '70s. Any significant differences going into the 1980s? Both in terms of your role in the department or directions that the department took? RK: Well I think that the early '80s late '70s and early '80s, were largely a period of healing. There had been such bitterness and such violent confrontations in tenure hearings. And people leaving meetings, and leaving the department in anger. And as I say, we were riven between the old and the young, that we just sat stunned for several years. Brought in people and tried to be friendly to them and so on. It was really, I think, a transitional period as I remember it. RL: Uh huh. And as you think, who are the key players in English in the 1980s and '90s? Who's instrumental in, as I am, in assuming the reputation of 00:36:00 the department resurfaced? RK: Well, the most distinguished division of our department was the least political. And that's the eighteenth century. You have Phil Harth, who had been brought here from the University of Chicago as one of the most distinguished scholars of the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. Eric Rothstein, brilliant person who came the year before I did from Princeton. Howard Weinbrot, who was brought in from outside. And a couple of other people who were here temporarily, one of whom went on to become a dean at Georgetown. And that nucleus was the most distinguished eighteenth century department in the world, I mean, no question. And stayed so for several decades. Phil Harth is retired. Rothstein has just retired. Howard Weinbrot will stay on for another few years. But that's gone now. But that was, that was a powerful attraction to really good students. One of the other areas that we were very good in was twentieth century studies. When I was at Penn, twentieth century literature was something that you tried not to notice was there, because it wasn't classic yet. And we had here, under Larry Dembo, an excellent magazine, Contemporary Literature, which is still going on. Probably the leading scholarly magazine in its field. And we had some very fine teachers of twentieth century literature. Paul Wylie, an early champion of Ford Maddox Ford, for instance. And we attracted people, because we were teaching things, new, new literature, very aggressively, Phil Herring as a Joyce scholar. We had several people in the Irish Renaissance teaching Yeats and O'Casey and Joyce. So that was a powerhouse for a 00:37:00 while. And we were also branching out into things that were to become very important. And one was English as a Second Language. We brought many students over from China and Japan and Korea. And we learned how to teach them English as a Second Language. And we are still a very strong department there. So I think our strengths came from diversity, eventually going into several different kinds of teaching of writing, teaching of creative writing. Where originally, we had been this monolithic giant in literary history. And the fracturing of the department, this idea hasn't occurred to me until now, but it might have had some good effects in that way, sending us each in our own way. RL: Hmm. Interesting. And what is the status of the department today? RK: It's usually rated around fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth. There have been schools which have poured immense amounts of money into becoming first rate. Like Duke, for instance. They got a lot of tobacco money and hired away star faculty from every other university they could do that from. We've never had that kind of leverage. So we try to hire young people, try to bring them along, try to keep them. And it's hard to keep them. The attraction of New York and San Francisco, of the coast, is still 00:38:00 very strong. We had a young couple just yesterday announce that they're leaving our department. They've had everything here. They've had one fellowship and teaching relief after another. But they just want to get back to New York. So they're leaving. In my first, after my first decade here, I made a list one day of people that I had become friendly with in the department who had then left and gone somewhere else. And the list got to be more than a hundred names, and I stopped it. I just couldn't stand it. [laughs] This has always been a transient department. A good place to start. An excellent place to start. And because we do things so well, a good place to raid if you're another university. RL: Ah, I see. But you had several opportunities yourself to leave here. And you never did. You talked about Folger. They wanted you, but not enough money. RK: Not enough money, certainly. No, I've had, as everybody does, feelers from other departments. "Would you be interested in applying for a job?" And I would always say, "No. I have everything I want here. It would be disrupting for my family, for my children. I have one of the best Shakespeare libraries in the world. I have adequate research funds. Why would I leave?" I have good students. I'm not out for a huge reputation, star 00:39:00 reputation. If you want a star reputation, you have to be able to jump from school to school, be very saleable. That's not my style. I want to get some scholarly work done here, and I'll stay here. I've never regretted it. RL: This concludes