Interview with Raymond Munts

Raymond Munts #74 (1976)

LS: This is an interview with Raymond Munts, professor of social work and formerly director of the School of Social Work, that is, from 1972 to -74. We'll be talking about the School of Social Work and particularly about the report issued by the committee of L&S which reviewed the School of Social Work in 1976. The interviewer is Laura Smail and we are talking in the Oral History office in the Old Red Gym. This is November 9, 1976. Would you to begin with give me an outline of your life history before you came to the University.

RM: Well, after the war--

LS: Yeah, but wait a minute. When and where you born?

RM: I was born in Alia, Illinois, in 1923, lived in Morris, Illinois, until 1941, went away to college, then, to Deep Springs Junior College in California on a full scholarship, joined the Air Force in 1943 and served half of the tour in the Pacific flying 825s. After the war, in January 1946, I entered the University of Chicago.

LS: To finish your degree.

RM: To, and I didn't have a B.A. but we had an arrangement there where you could take an examination and if you passed it you in effect enrolled directly for the 00:02:00master's degree, which I did. And I enrolled in political science and was given a master's in political science in 1947. I completed my master's thesis by going to Paris for a year. I was married in 1947 and I went to Paris to study at the Institut d'Ecole Politique, which was part of the University of Paris then. In 1947--

LS: You had a French mother, didn't you?

RM: Yes, this was my first acquaintance with France, except through my mother, and it had a very formative influence on me, but the academic work there was studying French party structure that evolved after World War II when we had for 00:03:00the first time in France a disciplined political party structure. That is, a real political party structure, instead of, as we Anglo Saxons think of it, as opposed to a multiple collection of small groups, such as had characterized the Third Republic in France. So that was of great interest to me. That was my master's thesis at the University of Chicago. I made a very basic decision when I was in France -- to not enter professional life but instead to enter kind of a political career by way of the labor movement, so I spent some six months trying 00:04:00to find a Job in the labor movement and eventually landed in the Textile Worker's Union of America.

LS: As what?

RM: As an organizer and developer of education programs in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. So I learned about the grassroots of the labor movement from three years in that capacity and it was just right for me at that time of my growth. I developed a lot of respect for the toilers in the vineyards of the labor movement, and when I left it was only due to an impossible situation that had developed in terms of a political battle within that union between the Boldanzi 00:05:00and the Rivi forces over the succession. And when the Boldanzi group lost out I felt it was a betrayal of the so-called intellectuals in the labor movement and spelled a kind of an end to the efforts that had been made for a long time to keep that union relatively democratically controlled. So I decided to leave and found a position in Extension here at the University of Wisconsin, in the School for Workers, where I was able to continue my interest in workers' education.

LS: You were teaching?

RM: Yes. The School for Workers here then, as now, was unique--is unique almost 00:06:00in the country in that it has a fairly unfettered relationship to the labor movement in the state. That is, its programs don't have to be conceived as joint management-labor programs so it can really relate to the unions and their interests and the interests of their members without any kind of overtones of trying to establish industrial peace, which is kind of an underlying theme in some extension programs.

LS: There's an equivalent School for Management, isn't there?

RM: Yes, and operated independently, and their strength is the fact that they are operated independently. So you don't have to impose any false notions of common interest if such don't exist.

LS: Was this the School--Robben Fleming was the first director?

RM: Yes. And when I came Robert [Ozanne?], who is the current director, had just been made director. Ed Young, in the economics department at that time, was sort of the person on campus responsible for the program for a number of years after Fleming left to go to the University of Illinois. But those were good years for me, too, because they made me acquainted with the state, with labor and industry in the state, with the problems of industrial development in the state.

I continued what had been a lifelong interest--a kind of concern with the rank and file and interests and how they are or are not met by their organizational 00:08:00structures. So I decided while teaching in the School for Workers to see if they had anything to teach me here about labor or unions or industrial relations, and I made the mistake of taking a course with Selig Perlman, and I discovered that he was able, due to his powers of imagination, to identify with the leaders at a lower level in the labor movement in a way that I had never found anybody outside of the labor movement able to do. What I mean by that is that he understood the motivations, the problems, the kind of daily concerns that 00:09:00characterized our work in bargaining, in labor education. And he was able to articulate these with his magnificent scope of international understanding of the aspirations of workers in, well, really almost two continents, or almost three continents. So that was very exciting, and it sort of hooked me on the possibilities of an academic career for myself, which I had really not taken very seriously until then.

I also found other professors who were congenial to me. Ed Witte, for example, 00:10:00due to his experience in the practical affairs of running the wage-hour division, and his experience as an arbitrator, and his experience as executive director of the Committee on Economic Security which gave us the Social Security Act. Out of talking with him I also got that sense of involvement with political forces that I had enjoyed also with Perlman. So I became an enthusiast of the Per1man-Witte type of economics department here and decided to get a Ph.D. in 1955, and when I completed that work I took a job--

LS: Wait a sec. You were still teaching at the School for Workers while you were getting the degree. Did you come in contact with Nathan Feinsinger, also?

RM: Yes. But not so directly. I think Nate had his bad accident about 1954. He was sort of out of commission for a year or so. But he had been traveling on a School for Workers' assignment when he had that accident. You know, a drunk pulled out from that glorious Wisconsin institution, the neighborhood bar, about twelve o'clock at night, and ran into him head on.

LS: I hadn't heard exactly how it happened.

RM: So whenever I drive around this state when the' bars are closing I'm always looking out of both windows at the same time.

LS: There had been, earlier, a joint seminar, or there had been earlier--and I wonder if they were still giving it--I guess just after the war. Did you have it with Witte and Perlman and Elizabeth Brandeis. Did you take it?

RM: I was never a--maybe so. I don't ever recall being in a group with all three of them. I did some work with Harold Groves whom I liked because of his earthy qualities.

LS: Who was your major professor?

RM: Ed Witte. When I first came to the School for Workers, Witte was one of the people who interviewed prospective staff, and knowing his reputation as executive director of the Committee on Economic Security, I expected to find an 00:13:00executive type faculty member. Instead I found an old man sort of slouched over, reading his mail, and I was very disillusioned. And I think as I talked he seemed to go to sleep. I thought he went to sleep. So I droned on about what I'd been doing, and he stirred at one point and started to talk, so I stopped talking, and he proceeded in ten to fifteen minutes to tell me the background of Rivi, the president of the Textile Workers Union, from his beginnings in Milwaukee, what the issues were in the Textile Workers' fight that I'd been involved in for three years, and numerous other things about the controversy on which I thought I was the world's best authority, and I guess more than one 00:14:00person has had that experience with Ed Witte. His command of details, and his ability to explore a complex subject with all the nuances was just simply amazing. In the course of writing my dissertation I had some opportunities to talk with him about his experiences on the Committee on Economic Security--why we didn't get health insurance, for example, in 1935, and why Altmeyer picked him rather than somebody else, and what some of the pressures were on the 00:15:00committee from labor and management.

LS: I wonder if this is written down somewhere. I know there has been a biography.

RM: Yes, he wrote--subsequently he published his diary, or memoirs, on the committee experience. And of course Altmeyer, subsequent to that, about 1964, also published his version. So we have two rather good official accounts.

LS: You didn't get any inside bits that are not in the--

RM: Oh yes, I learned how they both hated Abraham Epstein who was the big proponent for using general revenues in the social security program, as against the Wisconsin people who wanted to keep them pure social insurance payroll type 00:16:00programs. And Abe Epstein was their bete noir, but the Wisconsin people had Roosevelt on their side, so Abe Epstein lost out. But it's still an issue today whether there should be general revenues in the social security system.

LS: There was an article about it in the paper this morning.

RM: Yeah, well--this might be interesting -- I think that -- I didn't realize it at the time, but to some extent my exposure to our distinguished figures in the economics department at that time--I didn't realize the degree to which I was kind of taken in to the Wisconsin viewpoint. It was only--you know, they had a point of view. Commons had a point of view on issues such as the structure of unemployment insurance and experience rating and so his students had a point of 00:17:00view too, which happened to coincide [laughter] strangely enough. So I didn't really get exposed to some of the other thinkers in the country who really were prominent in the social insurance field until I started reading on my own, somewhat later.

LS: Was this a handicap then?

RM: No, it was fun to discover--to have worked one's way out of the Wisconsin viewpoint, so to speak. [pause in tape] I think now that probably the greatest scholar in the social insurance field did not come from Wisconsin. I didn't know then, but I'm convinced that Rubinov of Columbia was probably the leading light 00:18:00in acquainting scholars in this country with the social insurance concepts, and with the possibilities from the European experience.

LS: And was he teaching at the same time as these men were?

RM: He was writing at the time of the First World War--

LS: Oh I see

RM: --and subsequently--I don't know, I've forgotten when his first book came out, but--

LS: So he was a contemporary of Commons, then?

RM: Yes, and I regard him as--my view now is that he was the intellectual, and Commons was the man who was able to take the intellectual ideas, the concepts, 00:19:00and make them acceptable to the parties that had to live with it--labor and management. In other words, Commons played the role of academic midwife, or of liaison with the real world, with the employers who would have to accept the ideas of social insurance for them ever to be enacted.

LS: So he knew the ideas of--what is his name? Rubinov?

RM: Oh yeah. Rubinov. But Commons had this gift of inventing certain gimmicks that would appeal to the employers, such as experience rating, which fit the 00:20:00ethos of the time which was that employers had the responsibility for making the industrial system work. If there was unemployment it was simply mismanagement. And by having a tax incentive system in unemployment insurance, that prodded the employer to do good, to stabilize his employment. You were feeding into the ideals of the outstanding leaders of American industry, who wanted to be responsible but couldn't really without this kind of help. In these Keynesian days that sounds terribly quaint because we don't believe employers can control these things, we don't try to do it by manipulating at least their unemployment insurance. We try to manipulate their investments and so on through tax incentive devices, but we use macroeconomic fiscal measures and so forth, 00:21:00monitoring measures, to control the economy. But in those days there was a real idealism in the employer community, and Commons had the sense, if you will, to try and latch on to that as a way of introducing these European ideas of social insurance and pay for not working, which are difficult for Americans to grasp. Anyway. But also from my talks with Witte and Raushenbush and Elizabeth Brandeis I picked up a lot of little stories about how things came to happen in that very formative period of 1930 to 1935 in which the ideas of the social security 00:22:00system were being thrashed out.

LS: Have you written these up? Or down?

RM: No.

LS: Do you remember them?

RM: Yeah. Maybe I will someday.

LS: Maybe we might have a separate tape on it sometime, I mean if you can put them all together. Interesting. Well, you finished your degree?

RM: Yes, and then I accepted an opportunity to work at the AFL-CIO in 1957. The situation at the AFL-CIO was that they needed somebody to work particularly in 00:23:00the area of unemployment insurance, but social security generally--social security with a small s--to coordinate the work of the state AFL-CIO units in these social security fields of unemployment insurance and workmen's compensation and health. So I went to work for Cruikshank, who was the AFL person, who now headed up the social insurance department of the AFL-CIO, and developed this educational program, working with state legislative leaders in their lobbying programs.

LS: This is in Washington, isn't it?

RM: Yes, working out of Washington but working with the states around the 00:24:00country, all the way to Alaska, as kind of an expert in unemployment insurance. I was really learning about unemployment insurance in the process of doing it, as so many other things--you become an expert--you're an expert before you really know the subject. And then when the recession of 1958 came along, the next year, I had to concentrate on our legislative program at the Congress, and we had two main things going. The Medicare bill, the Frann bill at the time, which was a first draft bill on Medicare, and standards in unemployment insurance, because it was clear to us that unless we could get some benefit standards, the business of working states one-by-one towards proper levels of 00:25:00benefits and unemployment insurance, was a hopelessly tedious task, and time didn't permit putting all our eggs in that basket.

So we worked for a unemployment insurance standards bill from 1958 to 1966, and never got it, although we came within a hair's breadth. I remember, finally we got through the House a bill without standards, and we got through the Senate a bill with benefit standards, and it went to the conference committee, and Wilbur Mills, of course, was on the conference committee, and he didn't want standards, so through our White House contacts we had Lyndon Johnson call him up and say that he had to put standards in. So Wilbur Mills told him to go to hell. Johnson 00:26:00called him from Hawaii, I think it was. And Wilbur Mills told him to go to hell. So that was the end of that 5-year, 6-year effort to get benefit standards in unemployment insurance. In the meantime, we'd gotten through the Medicare Act. I spent some of my time on that, but most of it was on the unemployment insurance fight.

The Medicare bill passed in a different form than the original Frann bill, of course, in 1964, So I thought that I'd been through enough of the Washington scene. I was ready to go back to Wisconsin. And when the poverty program, in which I had had a good deal of interest in Washington--I have a nice letter from 00:27:00Sargent Shriver thanking me for my help in developing the poverty program--so when the Institute for Research on Poverty opened up here, through Barbara Newell and Bob Lampman, I expressed an interest and transferred out here in 1966.

LS: Yes, I discovered that, that you hadn't come to the School of Social Work but to the Institute, and I hadn't realized that they had people who were exclusively for the Institute. I somehow thought most of their research people were in different departments. But you were just with the Institute that first year, is that right?

RM: I hadn't been socialized to academic life yet.

LS: They were breaking you in?

RM: It seemed to me a very good job that I could do exactly what I wanted to do. 00:28:00And the fact that I didn't have all the status attributes that go with a departmental appointment didn't occur to me as particularly important.

LS: It took you just a year to find out?

RM: Well, eventually it became clear to me that this wasn't a long run opportunity, but was a short run opportunity.

LS: You were writing? Was that what you were brought here to do?

RM: Yes. And it was very good for me because it got me thinking in analytical ways, which I had not experienced since student days. In the labor movement, one is always an advocate rather than an analyst, and those are two different worlds. Just to dramatize the difference, I was once leading a seminar at the 00:29:00Institute on the Social Security Act, and we were concerned at that time that the Social Security Act was falling behind because of the inflation, and I was discussing all the possibilities for changing the Social Security Act that would make it possible for the social security system to surmount the gradual erosion in the value of the benefits. And one of the academics at the Institute said, "Well aren't you operating on the assumption that it's desirable to liberalize social security?" And I said, "Yes, what other assumption is there?" So we had a neat little go around about that. But that kind of symbolizes the different worlds. Certain questions you don't ask in one world, and certain questions you 00:30:00do ask in the other. Certain things are taken for granted in the world of action just because you might dispute the means but you don't frequently dispute the ends.

Well, I had very, for me, fruitful years there at the Institute writing and developing my analytical skills. I got several things published and that pleased me, and I'd learned that there was a position at--there didn't seem to be any position in the department here for me, so I made some inquiries around the 00:31:00country and I found that my friend, Eve Burns at Columbia said that she was retiring and that they were looking for someone in her areas of interest. Well, her areas of interest were my areas of interest and she was attached to a school of social work, so I stopped thinking in terms of economics departments and started thinking in terms of that possibility, because schools of social work were shifting their interests from case work to systems, to working in larger systems--community systems, national systems--and were interested in my area of specialty, namely social security, income maintenance type programs.

So I went to Columbia and was offered a job there. Before I could accept the 00:32:00word got around here and I was approached by Martin Loeb to see whether I wouldn't rather stay here, and in a very short time they came up with an offer that was quite attractive. I decided also that I really preferred Wisconsin to New York City. My one day in New York City there was a snow storm and I spent six hours getting from I think it's called New Lennox, on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, to the school. They can move around better in snowstorms in Wisconsin than that.

LS: Had you paid any attention to the School of Social Work before then?

RM: Yes, but they hadn't paid much attention to me. I don't think.

LS: But you knew [unclear]? But why did you?

RM: Pardon me?

LS: Why had you paid attention to them?

RM: Well, originally the governing committee of the Institute was made up of several disciplines--economics, social work, sociology--and the chairmen of those three schools were instrumental in the formation of the Institute, but the 00:34:00economics department was the closest of the three. I had gotten to know Martin Loeb through that connection. I wasn't really aware that the School of Social Work was interested in people with an economics background or with social security specialization.

LS: One can't tell from looking at a bulletin how many of the faculty do have degrees from other disciplines.

RM: Well, most of them do. For example, Loeb, himself, is an anthropologist. Another one of our faculty is a political scientist.

LS: What's his name?

RM: Joe Heffernan.

LS: Oh, I see. And [unclear]?

RM: Yeah, I think he has a social work degree.

LS: Is this partly because there weren't many Ph.D.s in social work programs?

RM: That's right. You see schools of social work were originally part of 00:35:00departments of sociology. But then some pressure was put on schools around the country in the '40s to establish separate social work degrees, and this school began in 1946 when the regents established a master's degree in social work. And they began accrediting schools of social work about that time and we've been accredited ever since then, maybe with one or two years' exception. The Council on Social Work Education is the accrediting body and it now accredits undergraduate schools of social work, also.

LS: We'll be getting into that because that's been one of the big problems, hasn't it. So this was 1966-

RM: 1966. I came here the fall of '66, and I think I got my appointment in the School of Social Work in 1968.

LS: '68, I see. Now, this was a fulltime appointment, or were you split with the--

RM: No I was split with the Institute, which was a very satisfactory arrangement. I could both teach and continue my research.

LS: Did you give one course?

RM: No, the standard load was three courses so I'd give two courses one semester and another the second semester. Another thing that made it possible for me to 00:37:00enter academe was the fact that my book on Bargaining for Health was published in 1966, 1967 rather, and this was a book I'd worked on for quite a while, while at the AFL-CIO, and got sufficient recognition that it kind of put me in the 1eague.

LS: And you were hired as a full professor, weren't you?

RM: Yes.

LS: There were twelve new people that year.

RM: Is that right?

LS: I believe so. You were the only full professor--

RM: It was a period of rapid expansion for the school. The period from 1965 to 1973 was a period of rapid expansion. In 1973 when I became director of the school we began a period of stabilization, specifically at the request of the chancellor.

LS: Where was the money coming from? I know that mostly was outside money.

RM: Well, you see with the passage of the social security amendments of 1962, there was a renewed emphasis on service to clients as a way of diminishing the number of people on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and on relief programs in general. And to implement this service emphasis, Congress made available during subsequent years large amounts of money to schools of social work to develop programs, to train people to provide those services. And this money had the effect of rapidly expanding the whole production of people for 00:39:00social work positions. You can see for example in the membership of the National Association of Social Workers, from-- [pause in tape] The membership in the National Association of Social Workers in 1956 was about 22,000. By 1975 it was three times that, and that gives you an idea of the rapid development of the --

LS: How many schools of social work are there? One in every state?

RM: Oh, at least. More than that.

LS: I see. So you started teaching in '68 and you became chairman in, I thought 00:40:00it was '72 that you became chairman, or was it '73? Doesn't matter, I suppose.

RM: Well, you've read the vitae. My vitae?

LS: Yes, but you don't put a date on here.

RM: It's on that. I can't remember. I didn't date it?

LS: No. Well, it doesn't really matter. Well here it says 1974.

RM: '73-'74 was my first. The summer of '73 I think I was appointed.

LS: Were you finished by that time with the School for Workers?

RM: Oh yes, I would be called on for some of their programs, but when I came 00:41:00back to the University in 1966 I had no formal relationship with the School for Workers.

LS: What about the Industrial Relations Research Institute and the Center for Public Policy and Administration? Were they things for which you were merely an advisory person, or were you a split appointment?

RM: Well, I've been on the executive committee of the IRRI since about 1967. My first Ph.D. student was a student of industrial relations and I continue my interests there.

LS: Incidentally, while we're still in the '60s, were the students in the School of Social Work very much involved in the student protest movement, the antiwar movement?

RM: Oh yes,

LS: Were they particularly active?

RM: Well, let's say they were particularly vulnerable, because they wanted to do good, but they didn't have much idea, like most of the rest of us, how to do it. So we had our militants, and we had our frustrated, well-meaning people like everybody else, I suppose. I can't think of any of the prominent campus leaders who came out of the school of social work.

LS: The militants in the school, were they invading faculty meetings?

RM: Oh, yes.

LS: What were they after? More say in how things were done?

RM: Yes, and we responded to that as positively as we could. As a matter of fact the School of Social Work was probably the first department in the University to 00:43:00allow students on the admissions committee, and this wasn't, I don't think, well regarded by the University administration, but we got inquiries for many years about what our experience with that was like. And we had to explain that it wasn't horrible, that students are responsible, too, did behave responsibly, they didn't go blabbing private material all over to their fellow students, and--

LS: Were these undergraduates or graduates that you're talking about?

RM: Graduates.

LS: That is the militants and the people--

RM: On all committees--I just mentioned the admissions committee because it was regarded as the most sensitive by most of my colleagues everywhere. And actually we found them very helpful. They never had a controlling say in it, of course, 00:44:00but they would always ask difficult questions, and that's what we needed.

LS: Do you still do it?

RM: Yeah. Yes, on all the committees of the school except the executive committee we have student representation. And I do think we probably went further with that a lot faster than just about any place else on campus.

LS: Were you a fairly liberal faculty?

RM: Yeah. And social workers by virtue of their training are very sensitive to interpersonal relations and social processes, and they felt it a normal extension of their relations with students that this should be the case--some participation in the governance of the school. We wanted to avoid a climate 00:45:00where the students are the prisoners and the faculty are the guards, and I think the faculty believed in meritocracy, essentially, but valued the input of the students who either benefitted or would have suffered from the mistakes.

LS: The faculty was expanding very rapidly. Did this mean that there were still a few of the old guard faculty from the '40s and '50s, and a great many new ones--was there a division on those lines, at all, for instance in the decision to admit students?

RM: No that division was not prominent. In the first place the school had grown 00:46:00from such small beginnings that new people in a way were easily the majority voice on the faculty.

LS: Did that mean that the older ones sat back grumpily?

RM: Yes--but on the whole I think the older faculty members-- I think of Lee LeMasters and Art Miles and Al Kadushin and Martin Loeb--Martin began about 1960--they didn't have much trouble with swinging with the '60s.

RM: We did have trouble with some students, particularly graduate students whom we had nurtured along, who got very radical, so radical that they would disrupt 00:47:00any meetings we would have. We had one of these in particular--he was on our faculty, actually, had been put on the faculty--and he became such a problem that we more or less had to prepare ourselves in advance for every meeting because we knew that we'd be taking him on.

LS: Who was it?

RM: He left for Philadelphia and I can't remember his name right now. I've got a block on it.

LS: He was on the regular faculty or the clinical faculty?

RM: Clinical faculty. He was one of our first Ph.D. students, one of Martin Loeb's students, and it was almost as though it was the son turning on the father kind of thing. He was absolutely impossible.

LS: What about the TA build up and strike? Was the school involved in that?

RM: Yes, our TAs went on strike and this posed particularly difficult problems for me because I was still -- I was of two minds about the strike. On the one hand, it did seem to me like a legitimate labor organizing effort and I supported the students' efforts to organize the TA Association. So I faced the dilemma of what was I going to do under the circumstances. At the same time I 00:49:00felt an obligation to teach my students, who had paid their tuition so I solved the problem, to my satisfaction, at least, by avoiding crossing the picket line by having the class off campus, over here in the church. In that way I could have my cake and eat it.

LS: Did your students mostly come?

RM: Yes, and we'd have to talk about the issues of the strike--everybody did in the course of the class.

LS: You had the dilemma also, you were with United Faculty and their position. They were very ambiguous about the strike.

RM: That's right.

LS: I guess what your saying is what their position was, generally. They supported it but didn't support it. Did you ever have any subsequent grievance procedures, or did you change your ways with TAs? Were your TAs overworked, or 00:50:00did they say, "We're fine, we're just working on behalf of other departments"?

RM: No, our TAs were subject to erratic treatment the way all TAs were, in the sense that they could not make any plans longer than one semester in terms of a commitment, and that did not suit me as a way of dealing with TAs. I did feel by forcing the faculty to make longer range decisions we could keep the TAs from being--instead of having to bob for the apple, so to speak, they could make their plans on the basis of some kind of financial commitment from the University. And the system for judging their competence and renewing or not 00:51:00renewing their contracts I think is very satisfactory. So I think the institutionalization of the TA system, which is really what that was, was forced by the union and it was a good thing.

RM: Some departments evidently already were for instance hiring TAs for at least three years, but some weren't.

RM: Well, social work wasn't. It was very happenstance.

LS: Were they mostly assisting or were any of them taking ful1time courses? Were they merely grading assignments and taking discussion sections, or did they have real responsibility at times?

RM: Oh, they didn't have full responsibility ever with us, but they were used in 00:52:00different ways and it depended on--there were no standards for use, there was nothing a TA could expect. It depended on the whims of the individual faculty member, how he worked with them.

LS: Did you ever discuss this, do you remember, in faculty meetings? Did anybody ever say, "I understand that so and so's TAs are being misused"?

RM: Well, at least informally. We were aware of the problem. It was an institutional problem and it took an outside force to correct. I mean you can be aware of a bad situation but not able to do anything about it, and that to me is what unionism is all about. I was very pleased that the chancellor recognized the TAs. I think it may have been his last act in defense of trade unionism. At 00:53:00least he learned something from Perlman too. By which I indicate my unhappiness that since that time the chancellor has decided that unionism is not appropriate on campuses.

LS: You still think it is.

RM: I still think it is. I think the chancellor felt burned by that experience of recognizing the TAs.

LS: Do you think he did it because he wanted to be recognized as sympathetic to labor, or because it's something one does in Wisconsin, or what do you think his motives were?

RM: No, ITm sure he had sounder reasons than that. I really don't know what they were. I didn't discuss it with him at the time and I don't know what prompted 00:54:00him, but I know he took an awful lot of political flak from the regents and from a lot of people in Wisconsin.

LS: Your TAs were just M.A. candidates, weren't they, for the most part?

RM: Yes, we didn't have a Ph.D. program until 1966 and we didn't have any notion at the beginning that we would use Ph.D. candidates for TAs, which we subsequently have done. We almost exclusively--

LS: Well. Martin Loeb had been chairman for a long time. Why had he been chairman for so long?

RM: Well he was very effective as chairman in raising money for the school, and 00:55:00the University of Wisconsin got its big share, more than its share, perhaps, of these funds that had been available through the SRS and the National Institutes of Mental Health and other parts of HEW, as a result of that 1962 amendment to the Social Security Act. Martin's trips to Washington were famous for their bringing-back-the-bacon quality. Consequently, he was in an excellent position to develop the program as he saw fit. He raised--at one time over half of our 00:56:00budget was this kind of soft money.

LS: The University didn't object to this?

RM: No, they encouraged it. And in a fairly short time it raised this School of Social Work to a level of national prominence, because not only was it a question of bringing in money but Martin was successful in reorganizing the composition of the faculty to provide a maximum educational and professional thrust. See the usual pattern in schools of social work has been to have a 00:57:00combination of classroom teaching and sort of internships in an agency, so-called field work, and to have the field work supervised by a member of the outside agency's staff. We did that here, too. But it had the effect of introducing a kind of schizophrenia into the students' educational life. The faculty didn't know exactly what the student was learning. The field work 00:58:00supervisors didn't really understand what the relevance of academic training was, anyhow, and Martin, and particularly his advisor on this, Virginia Frank, who is now dead, conceived of a system of using a combination of faculty-some faculty with academic training and some faculty with career social work training, the career social work faculty to be responsible for the field 00:59:00instruction which would be conducted in an agency but where the accountability and the supervision would be by that educator/practitioner--that faculty member who was an education/practitioner as opposed to an academic educator/researcher. So this conception was the rationale behind what had become a clinical faculty-legal faculty structure.

LS: And you're the only school that does this?

RM: Well, we were one of the early ones to do it in such a large scale. And in 1973 when I became director I found that about half of our faculty was one type 01:00:00and one half was the other type. So that was a pretty big commitment to [me?]. And it happened rather fast and it didn't really sit very well with the rest of the academic community. They didn't understand and it looked like a downgrading of the faculty.

LS: Did they have--you mean he would have proposed doing this and since he was so good at getting money, they wouldn't raise a protest.

RM: Well actually as I reviewed the correspondence there was actually discussion with Dean Epstein of Letters and Science at the time, and there was kind of a passive acceptance.

LS: Oh I see, you were talking about the whole college not just the school?

RM: Yes, the whole college. It didn't sit well with some of the departments of 01:01:00the college--old professors who didn't understand what was happening, or why it should happen this way. But as I reviewed the correspondence, which we made available to the dean's review committee on this issue, why we started out with the clinical faculty, it did seem to me that Chancellor Sewel1 and Dean Epstein had both, in effect, while not saying, "Great, go ahead," did accept the facts, did accept the existence of the clinical faculty. So I'm not sure that if there were subsequent complaints about it, that Martin should be the target.

LS: How did the rest of the faculty of the school feel about it?

RM: Well, I remember the first executive committee meeting I attended. There was concern about the fact that we had two types of faculty, and wouldn't that lead to some problems, and what should be the role in the governance structure of the clinical faculty. And all I can say is that those discussions have gone on ever since. I mean it has not been an easy job to figure out how to run the school, with both the traditional academic faculty and these career social workers.

LS: Did they come to faculty meetings?

RM: Oh yes, but the more sensitive question was whether they should have any role in the executive committee.

LS: Were they given one?

RM: We finally settled that they should have representation, have a spokesman at the executive committee meetings.

LS: This information is all in the files, is it, of the review committee? The minutes of the meetings, I suppose.

RM: The correspondence on the background of the clinical faculty--early appointments for the clinical faculty--is in the files, yes. One of the first issues that came up with regard to clinical faculty was their desire to teach in the classroom, in addition to doing their field work assignments. And of course they were hired to do the field supervision, but it did seem that there were 01:04:00certain specialized courses -- I don't think it was ever cleared with the Graduate School. Oh, I guess it was cleared with the Graduate School, but the dean's review committee when we got to the issue was somewhat concerned that the clinical faculty were still teaching some of the advanced courses at the 800 or 900 level.

Well, do you want to discuss the specifics of the dean's review committee report 01:05:00which kind of came into being--the dean's review came into being because of these issues surrounding the clinical faculty?

LS: Yes, and of course it all started because the regents demanded that every department be reviewed once in ten years. Social Work was one of the first three to be done. Well, I would like to know--I think we might just go through it; questions will come up as we go along. To begin with, how did you feel, you personally and as director, and the school generally, when you heard it was to be reviewed.

RM: Well, I was interested in why the school, of course, and I guess I had part 01:06:00of the answer because there were these concerns in the college about the role of the clinical faculty. It seemed to me that--there was the fact that we had a new dean who professed to know nothing about the school, and wanted a competent group of professors to kind of study this school as advisory to him. Then it was of concern to everybody, including those of us there, that this soft money was no longer available in the quantities it had been heretofore, and it did seem that we were going to have to consolidate and redefine our objectives, to set 01:07:00parameters for school size, which was of great concern to the dean. So my attitude was, we'll cooperate with this. We know it's going to be done in good faith, and we'll be the beneficiaries of the process as well as the college, and I did not feel threatened by it. I felt the program was basically a good program, although I was worried that people not acquainted with professional education would have a lot to learn and have to accept some new norms. We did ask the dean if we couldn't suggest some people from graduate schools to sit on 01:08:00the committee, I mean the professional schools, to sit on the committee, and he agreed to that.

LS: Yes, you did have one medical man, I noticed.

RM: Yes, and also someone from the Library School.

LS: Yes, and do you think that did make a difference?

RM: I think so, yes.

LS: And of course Bob Lampman had had something do with the school--must have known a good deal about the School of Social Work from his position. It says here that they looked for analogues in the University and on other campuses and didn't find any. Did they mean by that--are they talking specifically about the clinical faculty?

RM: Yes.

LS: It says it was a particularly difficult time for the school's faculty and 01:09:00mentions the accreditation dispute. Can you tell me what that was?

RM: Yes. The Council on Social Work Education began accrediting undergraduate schools for the first time in 1974, and we had every reason to think that our program as we had developed it would be accreditable, so it was a great shock 01:10:00when we received the letter saying that based on their review of the school on their site visit they found we were deficient in four respects. What was especially shocking was that we had never had the site visit. They were referring to a site visit of two years ago when we had--and we had never received a current site visit since we had put into effect our new undergraduate major.

LS: Could I interrupt you here to ask--because in the Tripp Committee's recommendations in 1956 they had particularly emphasized the need for a strong undergraduate program, but then here it speaks of a new undergraduate program. 01:11:00Had that recommendation not been attended to?

RM: No, the characteristics the Council wanted in a program beginning in 1974 was training of a professional.

See, out of the 1960s experience it was felt that what was needed was more trained B.A.s, baccalaureate graduates, to fill jobs in welfare agencies. There was a great shortage. They were using people with no social work skills in those agencies. This caused the Council to say, we will meet this need by greatly increasing the number of professionals, but we will get them out of the bachelor's program. The undergraduate majors will be professional social 01:12:00workers. That means they will have to have field training, they will have to have the skill training. So this effort to upgrade the undergraduate education is what was the content of the accreditation process after 1974, it was an effort to develop a professional social worker at the baccalaureate level. And we worked very hard at that, and we had a very good program. So it was a shock to find that they really hadn't considered--. We went around and around with them about this egregious error. It was a terrible mess. We had to get the 01:13:00University attorney involved, and so on. It took us the next year to straighten out the confusion that was created both by their procedural failure and new submissions on the points that they had raised.

LS: When you say we, do you mean the whole faculty?

RM: Yes.

LS: You were all united in this.

RM: Oh yes. But we just had to go through an awful lot of mickey mouse to satisfy the Council of Social Work Education, and I must say that I do feel that the accrediting body is very hardnosed, and from my experience understaffed, and tries to do too much and tries to do what they do with too much arbitrariness. 01:14:00Instead of advising schools about where they're deficient, they take a stand-back attitude as though they were judges. They do practically no consulting on how you can meet their standards. The whole process seems to me deficient.

Anyway. The points that they scored on us were that we hadn't made sufficient efforts on affirmative action, that one of our sequences was inadequate, that we didn't have enough advisors for the undergraduate students. The whole dispute 01:15:00with the Council -- the record of correspondence is at the School of Social Work and in the office of the chancellor's attorney, but it was all resolved. Last summer, in July, we finally got full accreditation.

LS: Oh you did finally get it. I see, because they imply here--oh that's right, this is April so the accreditation was given after this. Well, that's good, that that problem came to an end.

RM: However, in the process of trying to solve that problem, we at the same time were faced by the fact that we were overloaded on this undergraduate program. 01:16:00That is, to try to provide--to try to make professionals out of every undergraduate who comes along and elects the social work major was just simply beyond our capacity. Last year we had to find some 420 field placements in and around Madison, if you can imagine.

LS: To give them experience?

RM: To give them experience. And there just aren't that many good placements, so it was recommended by the dean's review committee and we were wholeheartedly in agreement, that we had to cut down on the size of this program, and now we've got a program plan that will be fully in effect next year, in which only fifty students will be training for the professional degree at the undergraduate 01:17:00level, and the rest of them will continue under the old arrangement of more general social work.

LS: As a basis for starting the graduate course.

RM: Yes.

LS: Incidentally, I suppose the job market has gone down for social work the way it has for everyone else.

RM: Of course. The full thrust of the need that was felt in the middle '60s--by the time the whole process of the accreditation organization had cranked out to do it, the whole thrust had passed, and there's absolutely no reason why we should such a large outpouring of baccalaureate professionals. So we've 01:18:00appropriately retrenched on this. And I hope other schools are doing the same.

LS: I wanted to ask you also whether there's still a school of social work in Milwaukee.

RM: Yes

LS: That was an issue, in 1956, I think it was, as to whether that would be--

RM: It's the only other graduate school in the--

LS: Presumably they have no problem giving their students field work.

RM: Well, they have a bigger urban area, that's true.

LS: The next phrase here is "an impending turnover in the directorship". We didn't finish as to why Martin Loeb ceased to be chairman.

RM: Oh, that's correct. Well, he'd been at it a long time. I think he felt he'd made a contribution, he was discouraged by the prospects of the new regime that 01:19:00was coming with tighter funding and more accountability within the University, and I think among the faculty there was some dissatisfaction with the kind of freewheeling way he'd been able to change and develop the school. He was an entrepreneur, essentially, not a tidy administrator.

LS: Was it a painful experience? He'd been a director for a long time. Did it cause trouble in the department?

RM: I don't know. You'd have to ask him. He took it very well. He was not defeated in an election, he chose not to run.

LS: I see. Was there then an election. You were nominated, or were there other candidates?

RM: They had a search and screen committee, and I was the only recommendation of 01:20:00the search and screen committee. Dean Kleene was unhappy that I was the only recommendation. He would have liked to have had a series of people to choose from. So consequently he delayed my appointment, but eventually it came through.

LS: You didn't insist that there be any--

RM: I guess not

LS: And then the turnover that led to your ceasing to be director --

RM: Well, it was my hope, when I became chairman, that I'd be able to consolidate, and perhaps maybe tidy up is a better word, the governing structure 01:21:00of the school--the relations of the clinical faculty, the quality of the program, and to search out the proper size of the school, get better estimates of our resources to do some long range planning. And it was rather difficult to shift to this modus of administration, because instead of it being a kind of one-man show, hiring people and assigning them and so forth, it became more of a committee function, more involvement of the executive committee in the 01:22:00decisions, more long-range planning, efforts to anticipate needs, to make hard decisions.

LS: This would be a good point to ask you how decisions were made when you were chairman, how often you had the executive committee meet, and what advice you sought from them, or how much they had to do with decisions.

RM: Well, we would meet monthly in the fall of the year. Then maybe late in the fall, when the promotions committee recommendations started coming in, we'd meet more frequently. But in the spring we'd even have to meet weekly to stay on top of budget decisions, promotion and hiring decisions, as well as other kinds of 01:23:00personnel matters. So the executive committee had to work rather hard. We succeeded in stabilizing the size of the school and got off of the notion that we had to be expanding all the time. Little by little we made some improvement in our grading procedures, in our review of syllabi, course qualities.

LS: What had been wrong with the grading procedures?

RM: Well, there was too much looseness and too much grade inflation. But I discovered that it's something you have to stay at all the time. If let the pressure off, the trend goes back up again.

LS: This is even though you don't have to turn out a whole lot of social 01:24:00workers, which would be one reason for giving higher grades, I should imagine. And also when you had so many applications you didn't have to worry about not getting students.

RM: Well, we found that even though we'd made a decision to stabilize the size of the school, the number of applicants began to go up substantially. Maybe that was as a result of the reputation of the school which--in one independent study we were classed among the top ten in the country. Well that was the first time that we had even aspired to that rank. We were seventh among graduate schools in the country by the count of some fifty-seven deans. So we kind of achieved a position that was appropriate for a graduate school in the University of 01:25:00Wisconsin. So maybe this accounted for--

But we began to run 700, 800 applicants for 100 openings. We'd never had that before. So even though we had stabilized, the demand for social work education from us, to us, continued to go up. Which made a lot of changes in admissions procedures possible and necessary. The inflation in grades that we experienced was going on elsewhere in the University. It was just a question of whether we were going to lead the pack, stay in the middle, or lag, and my impression is that we stayed about in the middle, but kind of had to fight not to lead. I 01:26:00think we were susceptible to the same basic influences that were working in the late 1960s as anybody else. Our position right now is that among comparable social science schools we're about a third from the bottom, that is, the most liberal in terms of grading. I'd be happier if we were nearer the middle rather than the bottom third.

Anyway, monitoring this kind of--this is a quality dimension, careful review of syllabus, an effective curriculum committee, a rigorous promotions committee, 01:27:00these were all things that we worked on. Of course standards for promotion were going up in the University. The divisional committee on which I had served for a while got tougher and tougher, and people on our staff who might have made it five years earlier clearly would not make it now. And these were hardship cases, and difficult cases to live with, and to do anything constructive for the people involved. So a lot of bad news began to come into the school in terms of what it was necessary to do to face a period of rising standards, decrease in available 01:28:00funds, more accountability from the University hierarchy, and in the middle of all this bad news I had a heart attack that put me out of commission for six months.

LS: Did you think of resigning then?

RM: I wasn't thinking of anything at the time. We had an associate director who took over the job as acting director and did a superb job of it.

LS: Who was that?

RM: Mary Wylie. I guess as a result of that experience she has declined our offer to be--our desire to have her take on the job on a regular basis, but she learned enough from the experience that she won't have anything to do with it. 01:29:00Which is too bad.

LS: She's on the faculty?

RM: Yes. She would have been the first female director of the school if she had taken it. Well anyway, I struggled with the job for the next year after I came back and finally last fall, a year ago, I made the decision, after consulting with my colleagues, that I would not run again. I didn't think it was good for me, and they thought a new face would be in order after my three years, anyway. So it was kind of a mutual decision, by the faculty and myself, that we should not only consolidate a little bit, that we were ready to--and solved some of our 01:30:00problems, that we were ready for a new director, either an inside person or an outside person. The faculty would have liked to look for an outside person, and actually is currently doing so, because we couldn't find an inside person who would take the job. So Martin Loeb agreed to act as interim director for a year while we continued our search. So that's the current status.

LS: Most departments change the chairmen every three years automatically, but the School of Social Work doesn't function that way.

RM: Well you see, a professional school has to relate to more constituencies. It's got the community agencies that help in the field training program, it's 01:31:00got the alumni who are a professional group, the National Association of Social Workers, Wisconsin Chapter, it's got an outside accrediting body--all of these things seem to suggest that a longer period is more appropriate, but I'm not so sure. I guess I don't know how I come down on the question of a long-term person. Dean Cronon raised the question of whether we should have a five-year directorship, and we decided three years was long enough.

LS: So you are going to change every three years, then?

RM: Well, we're going to subject the director to a review every three years. See, he serves just at the pleasure of the dean, anyway. Incidentally, while 01:32:00we're talking about this, it's not the pattern. Wisconsin is different from most schools of social work of our status, in that usually a school is an independent professional school, not part of a college, and there is some feeling in this school, and it has a basis in fact, that we would be better if we'd had an independent status like the Law School and the Medical School.

RM: For example all of these schools we compete with--the University of Michigan, University of Chicago--all of those are independent schools and report directly to the chancellor.

LS: Why aren't you independent?

RM: Well, I don't know. I guess we've thought we found the college a fairly, at least up to this point, a fairly benign supervisor. It gives us some close relations to other departments.

LS: It makes it easier, does it, to work with them?

RM: I think it may, yes. It doesn't follow that they wouldn't take our students and we wouldn't take theirs if we were independent.

LS: Would it cost more, or less?

RM: I can't see that it makes any difference. It would give us an advantage in 01:34:00one important respect in that I think we would have more independence in the selection of the faculty. See, we really have a problem in that the divisional committee thinks in terms of traditional academic positions when it reviews faculty for tenure, and if, as is the case now, our clinical faculty has to go through that kind of review, they really don't stand a chance. One of the Important recommendations of the dean's review committee is that until something 01:35:00is done for so-called academic faculty, which means non-legal faculty, until these rules are promulgated, we should have an independent review body.

LS: The report speaks of great variation in course loads and work assignments. Does this mean that some professors were teaching some number of courses and other professors were teaching much fewer?

RM: Well, the number of hours of work required for supervising the field study 01:36:00is quite high, and the clinical faculty has borne the cross for a long time that their number of student contact hours is greater.

LS: Oh I see, so this is as between the faculty and the clinical faculty. It isn't a difference among individuals

RM: Incidentally, the clinical faculty did sort of organize, my first year as director, '73~'74--they more or less presented the school with demands. So I spent much of the year meeting with them.

LS: I wondered if they wouldn't get around to that pretty soon.

RM: And they lost some of the support that they'd had from the legal faculty as 01:37:00a result, but their leadership was quite effective, and not expecting the impossible. We did succeed in getting them some more money.

LS: For individual salaries?

RM: Yes.

LS: Their pay was lower than that for the faculty?

RM: Yes, and it looked like it was going to be--the gap was going to be substantial if we continued the way we were, so we were able to get an additional pot of money of $4,000 to distribute among the clinical faculty from the University.

LS: Incidentally, if there's anything you'd like to add. I've just been leafing through here and I had some question marks. If there's anything you want to 01:38:00expand on? The admissions, which they recommend only be made in the fall--what had been happening there?

RM: Well, we had been admitting three times a year.

LS: Meaning you had to go through 700 applications three times a year?

RM: No, that 700 was annual, but we did admit three times a year. The problem that created for us was that we had to run our basic courses, our required courses, three times a year--

LS: Oh, I see, yes, that would be quite a difference.

RM: --and it was a big drain on us. So we're completing the process this fall of 01:39:00working toward one-time a year admission. And this is part of the stabilization, or retrenchment if you want to call it, of using our resources more efficiently. But more efficiently means that we're less accommodating to what the demand is. There are lots of people who want to come in at odd times and who are in a hurry to get through, and we're just not going to be able to respond to that. So it's a reduction in the service dimension of the University.

LS: Do you feel that's wrong?

RM: I feel it's necessary.

LS: It's a luxury that can't be afforded any longer? The Pincus-Minahan model 01:40:00which they speak of--they say some features have been more successful than others. Apparently the field work section in it is more successful than others. Is the implication here that the academic side of the program isn't up to snuff?

RM: I don't know whether the committee really understands the Pincus~M1nahan model. Pincus and Minahan don't think so. This is one of the problems of review of one part of the college by another part. They seem to get into the same fights that we have all the time, but they're more comfortable fights when we're in them. When outsiders start making judgments, or suggesting what the content of the program should be, it's kind of sticky. That's all I'm saying.

LS: Would you like to present the Pincus-Minahan version of the thing.

RM: No, I wouldn't. I can't do it either.

LS: Oh. You feel on the whole they're right that they haven't been properly understood by the review committee.

RM: And we said this in a subsequent document to this one, which you haven't seen, which is the school's reaction to this. [pause in tape]

LS: We're starting the interview again, a couple weeks later. You want to talk about the difficulty of an outside committee's looking at the work of the school.

RM: Yes, because it's related to the problem of a college in a University 01:42:00reviewing a subdivision within the college that is geared to professional education, unlike the rest of the institution. The selection of the individuals who are doing the review is of course crucial, and the school did secure a couple of people on the committee who had experience with professional schools. But the other three members did not, and it came as a big surprise to one of them that the school was doing--was as large an institution, since he had remembered it as a small subdivision within the department of sociology.

LS: That must have been Bill Sewel1.

RM: Yes. And it was necessary to move Bill Sewel1 along twenty-five years to get 01:43:00him to think about what we were really up to. The real feeling about the people in the school was, about this whole review process, that they didn't like it, and officially and in every respect we tried to be good soldiers, but there was a lot of resentment, really, about this whole process-- about our being selected, about the fact that the new dean chose to use this method to acquaint himself with the school rather than studying it himself, being singled out in this way, in part because of problems that we were already working on, such as the clinical faculty. So the little committee that we put together within the 01:44:00school to work with this outside review committee felt that it had a lot to do to inform the committee. We proceeded to do that by writing a report, which is on record.

LS: I would like to ask, I know you had some say, but did you say personally that you would like Margaret Monroe or--

RM: The dean asked us to suggest a list of names, which we did, and then made the decision from the list of names. But the list of names we submitted did include some people from professional schools. And these people on the committee were from that list of names.

RM: Yes

LS: You announced this in an executive committee meeting, did you? Do you 01:45:00remember you said there was a general feeling of anger.

RM: Earlier we had had--the dean had talked to our executive committee about this

LS: Personally? He came down to a meeting?

RM: Yes, and the timetable was that--this was in December that he informed us he was going to do this and the timetable was that the committee would be appointed immediately, that they would have their report ready in February so we could implement it before the end of the academic year. Actually, the report of the committee never was delivered until towards the end of the semester, so its implementation, particularly on the clinical faculty portion, was not achieved 01:46:00that semester.

LS: Did he--what reasons did he give at that meeting when he came to discuss it?

RM: Well, it was that every department was going to go through a fourth-stage review. He didn't elaborate on the reason why he selected us to be among the first three, but it's clear to me that he did pick among those first three departments where he thought he had particular problems, because in a subsequent memo from the dean's office they have decided not to be selectively negative in their future choices.

LS: Yes, you said that in your letter. I think the phrase was that a thriving department would be included.

RM: It might be helpful to enumerate some of the different attitudes among the 01:47:00faculty toward this review. In general our legal faculty consists of three tendencies--to use a French expression, le_tendence--points of view. Maybe three or four of the faculty represent a very hard-nosed view of the role of the school as being very academic, and really would not object a bit if much of the field program were washed out, although they too know that given the constraints 01:48:00imposed by the Council of Social Work Education that's impossible. The middle group is very friendly, unlike the first group, works with them and tries to hold a balanced relationship between clinical faculty and what I would call in quotes "academic minded faculty", purely academic faculty. The third group among the legal faculty, tenured faculty that is, uses the clinical faculty as its power base within the school and professes to see in the field work the core 01:49:00meaning of the school's program. Then lastly there's the clinical faculty themselves whose interests, who tend to be more identified with this last group of legal faculty, but who also work with the middle group, and fear the first group.

LS: Who is in the first group?

RM: I would say this group is represented by such people as Irving Piliavin, Irv Garfinkel, primarily. In the second group I would include myself, Jack 01:50:00Lefcowitz, John Flannigan; and in the third group I would include Anne Minahan, Alan Pincus, primarily. Some of the faculty vacillate between but these tend to be the people who are kind of at the poles of those groups.

LS: Where was Martin Loeb?

RM: It depends whether Martin is administering the department or not. When he's administering the department he has been very close to the clinical faculty. I would say generally he's in the middle group. But when he was not administering the department he got very tough with the clinical faculty a few times, 01:51:00especially when they organized themselves to put demands on the school.

Now in terms of these groups, what's the attitude of the faculty towards the review? The first group, the purely academic types, really hoped that the dean's review would tend to diminish the status of the clinical faculty, or even eliminate them. And there were even some representations to the dean encouraging him to do so. In other words there was some politics going on that was outside of the official channels.

The middle group, in which I should include, by the way, a very important 01:52:00person, Mary Wylie, hoped that the dean's review committee would result in our developing a system of a career line with many of the Issues resolved once and for all, to the satisfaction both of the clinical faculty and of the University. In particular, Mary Wylie took the initiative as chairman of the promotions committee, to work, independently of the dean's review committee, at our end to establish what would be, we thought, a satisfactory career program for the 01:53:00clinical faculty. The strategy of this middle group was more or less to outdo the dean's review committee and to keep the initiative, rather than react passively. The third group, the faculty in the group, regarded this as a boxing match in which they would wait and see, roll with the punches, but essentially do only what was necessary to do.

LS: What the dean insisted upon, you mean.

RM: Yes.

LS: Where was Al Kadushin?

RM: Al I would put in the middle group. I should have mentioned him because 01:54:00while his academic credentials are excellent, he also is very committed to the professional part of professional training.

LS: I wondered if the people who were the hard core--would you call them academics--were they social work trained, or were they from other disciplines.

RM: They tend to be other disciplines. Garfinkel and Heffernan, whom I would include in the first group also-- Heffernan' s got a political science degree and Garfinkel has an economics degree. However Piliavin does have a D.SW. - Doctor of Social Work degree.

LS: What about LeMasters, isn't he in the School of Social Work?

RM: He hasn't been very active in these internal affairs.

LS: He's on the staff though still?

RM: Yeah, I really don't know where he stands on these kind of questions.

LS: Well there must have been--you say, some politicking, it must have been even more than that.

RM: Well, perhaps I should say more about the reactions within the clinical faculty itself, because some important roles were played by some key people. The leading spokesman for the clinical faculty at the time when they were putting 01:56:00their demands on the legal faculty was Dean Schneck , who was a very strong leader in this regard, but essentially a person whom every one could work with, and who was a very effective person in terms of raising the outstanding issues and getting some response from the legal faculty on them. With regard to the 01:57:00dean's review committee, Nancy Kelly was very effective in working with Mary Wylie, in terms of trying to develop a tenure track program that we thought the school could live with and that we hoped the dean's review committee would accept as an appropriate career 1adder.

LS: How long had she been here?

RM: She's an old timer and well respected by all faculty, and her prestige and willingness basically to accept and speak to the University standards in terms of academic performance, scholarly performance--she understood them, she accepts 01:58:00them, and she spoke to them, so she was very valuable to the committee, the promotions committee', in developing its recommendations.

LS: Were there differences among the clinical faculty in how they viewed the review.

RM: Oh yes, Nancy at one end, and at the other end some faculty who more or less regarded this as a big plot that should be jettisoned at the first opportunity.

LS: Against them, the clinical faculty.

RM: Against them and the school, and against the school because they were in and of the school.

LS: It's very hard to get an impression of their relationship to the academic faculty, as to what extent they identify with the school. I gather they do.

RM: Oh they identify with the school and they identify with the profession, but like many people practicing social work they think primarily in terms of the overriding importance of the field training. They tend to take more of a vocational school attitude towards professional training.

LS: So in effect perhaps they regard the academic faculty as the people who 02:00:00shouldn't be there.

RM: Yes.

LS: I see. I thought of them as an attachment that was dispensable, but obviously they feel it's their school, perhaps.

RM: Yes, that's right, and they feel that some of the academic faculty, in terms of what the school is doing or ought to be doing, are kind of peripheral.

LS: But have they never worried about their status--not being on tenure?

RM: Oh yes, this has been a constant subject of discussion. I remember the first discussion in 1968. So this surfaced early. There was great awareness in the early days that we were departing on an uncharted route, and Martin Loeb seemed 02:01:00confident of this direction but I'm not sure everybody else shared his confidence.

LS: The route of taking on faculty that were not on tenure.

RM: Yes, that's right. And we did it with very little understanding and the most passive kind of acceptance by Dean Leon Epstein and Bill Sewel1 , who was chancellor at the time--

LS: Yes, you did mention that earlier, that they were not enthusiastic but~~

RM: They knew of it, but there's nothing in the communications that seems to indicate any more than their awareness. But I think some of the negative 02:02:00attitudes about the school developed subsequently when L&S faculty began to see the full implications of a school in its midst here, part of L&S, hiring a large number of people without Ph.D.s, and for whom the standards of promotion were not the same kind of scholarly activities that was expected of everybody else. And I think that's where all the trouble started.

So part of the objective of Mary Wylie's promotions committee last year was de novo to impose those kinds of standards for advancement of clinical faculty. And she succeeded in doing that, and the school as a whole, including the clinical 02:03:00faculty, adopted them. But it has been--and the tragedy is, I think, that it's been held up because of the inability or the unwillingness of the dean to finally give approval to what we've done.

LS: It hasn't been solved, then, finished yet?

RM: As far as we're concerned, we've done what we could, but it has not been finally solved because the dean decided that he wanted to wait until Cyrena Pondrom's group working on academic staff rules had its house in order, its regulations on academic staff rules adopted by the regents. So what we've done, and did with a great deal of internal travail, kind of went into a cold freeze this summer awaiting in my opinion the University catching up.

LS: And some people left.

RM: Yes. Imogene Higbie left

LS: Was she a particularly valued member of the staff.

LS: Yes. Her strength, however, is not in this area of scholarly production, but she is an extremely effective social worker, and a very fine person. So she had good relationships with most of the academic legal faculty.

LS: I was just wondering about the first group--whether they would personally have anything to do with the clinical faculty or try to stay away from them as completely as possible.

RM: Well, in general I think that the thing that's always been remarkable about 02:05:00the school, and the reason I've enjoyed it, is because in general the personal relations among the faculty have been good and positive and cordial. They're very social people, social workers. It's true. They're interested in people as part of their training, and there's always a great amount of humor at meetings, and so on. There are strains at the extremes. Fortunately there are enough others of us to--see, it would have been very easy for the school to dichotomize, to split on these issues, and to become a very horrible place, such 02:06:00as economics was in the early 1950s when you couldn't even talk across the 1ines.

LS: Have other schools of social work done that? I mean, it must be an issue in all schools of social work.

RM: Well, no. You see, this is important to realize. Our clinical faculty structure is almost - is very rare in the United States. It's what has brought us up to national prominence, that we have been able to make so much of people with professional as well as people with academic training. [pause in tape]

LS: One of the criticisms of the school by the committee was that the legal 02:07:00faculty didn't exercise enough supervision over the clinical faculty--enough control.

RM: Was it that so much, or was it more a criticism that they didn't work together jointly as scholars in their work. This certainly is a justifiable criticism--that the community of scholars in the school is sometimes a rather thin activity, with people tending to go on on their own, do their own thing in their own way. I think that the school has got to be seen in this respect. 02:08:00Although I think we're guilty of that, I think there's not a department in the University that doesn't have the same kind of problem of really meaningful interaction among academic people. The things that tend to constrain this sort of interdisciplinary relationship with the school are--well, there are a number of things.

Clinical faculty are very hardworking people in terms of the number of hours a 02:09:00week that they have student contact hours. It's hard for them to add to their burden of keeping their classes going, their meetings going, meaningful research projects associated with their activities. And yet I think that's where the area of future innovation in the school has got to be, that the faculty who know how to do research, for whom the real interest of academic life is the opportunity to do research, have got to pair up, or team up, with clinical faculty, who are closer to the institutional life of the community, and who actually face on the 02:10:00line, so to speak, the problems and programs that need evaluation and need the service of research people.

LS: I can't see that it would ever work. Isn't it always that the people who are in the field turn up their noses at the people who are sitting behind the desks, and vice versa. Can you imagine any program that could be developed that could get them together. Although this is what the committee recommends.

RM: I think that's what they're talking about.

LS: But you don't think it's possible.

RM: Well, it should be possible. I guess I do believe it is possible. For example, right now we have a new breath of fresh air in this state in the Department of Health and Social Services, whose activities have always been important to the school. There hasn't been much innovation and new program ideas. Now with the new secretary in the Department of Health and Social Services, already there have been some consultations with that department at the top level that didn't exist before. We're being drawn into consultative activities with the department, which is new.

LS: Is we the whole school, or the clinical faculty or--?

RM: Some individuals, some of each. And it may be that out of these new programs that Secretary Carbballo has in mind, we will be able to develop the combination of clinical and research expertise that is necessary.

LS: Has anybody this year tried to work on a program of working together with the clinical faculty. Can you give an example in the school?

RM: I can't give an example, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'd have to review what's going on before I could comment on that.

LS: Another thing the report suggested was that the legal faculty should have more control over the students, monitoring their progress, counseling and advising, monitoring grading practices, particularly in field work courses, which suggests monitoring the clinical faculty.

RM: Well, that's a very sensitive area because the clinical faculty take the same view of their role in the courses that they are responsible for, namely autonomy in terms of judging the effectiveness of the teaching and the progress of the student, as the tenure track faculty do in their courses.

LS: So you think--

RM: I think the monitoring has to be done in a general kind of way rather than putting up somebody as Big Brother to every clinical faculty member. That would really destroy the clinical faculty's image of themselves.

LS: On the other hand, if they are giving too easy grades, then that's bad for the school.

RM: Yes, but the way to handle that is to make explicit what the criteria for grades are, to insist on grading processes, let the clinical faculty handle it as a group. In other words--it is a difficult job to grade in the field. It's an 02:15:00especially difficult grading problem. And because it's especially difficult, sometimes it's not done with rigor, but there are ways of doing it, and we have some clinical faculty who are very conscientious about that, and others who are not. So it's just a question of seeing that the best standards are applied.

LS: But has this been done since--?

RM: But this is different, you see, from having each legal faculty kind of take in hand a clinical faculty member.

LS: Has anything come out in an announcement.

RM: Well, the dean's review report was given complete circulation and extensive 02:16:00study since its release. It's had a very profound effect on the school, I do believe, though I think we are still reacting to--the one strong point that the dean seized on most was with the size of the school and the limitation on the size that he wants to impose, of thirty-seven full-time equivalents.

LS: Down from forty-three?

RM: Well, more than that. We have almost sixty full-time equivalents, about ten of whom are not on our teaching payroll. And of that fifty or fifty-one who are 02:17:00on the teaching payroll, thirty-seven only are so-called hard money, so it's that gap between the thirty--seven and the fifty--two or the sixty that worries the dean, in terms of being a potential commitment for the future growth of the 101 monies.

LS: Well now what has happened? This is a new year.

RM: We're deeply engaged in planning how to manage the school, how to meet our required courses, how to structure the order of courses, how to admit students in a sequence that would permit the most efficient use of faculty, and then 02:18:00trying to decide really how many students we can handle with the kind of commitment the college is willing to give us.

LS: But I mean, these people who are not on--what is it, 101 funds, are they going to be--do you know yet whether they will be supported?

RM: Well, the terrible side of this is that you never know until very late in the summer whether the grants have come through that you applied for.

LS: So they came through this summer, is that right?

RM: Some of them did and some of them didn't. To meet our present needs, we have some appointments that the dean has agreed to, but only on a one-year nonrenewable basis. So we're sitting on a kind of time bomb.

LS: So some people who are on tenure know, this year, that there won't be funds 02:19:00for next year.

RM: Well, they're not on tenure

LS: Oh, they're not, none of these people are?

RM: No, none of these people are on tenure, and they tend to be at the clinical professor level.

LS: Oh I thought there were some people on tenure whose--part of whose salaries were--

RM: Are soft money? Yes, that's so, but the University has an obligation there. You see, we've never used 101 monies and soft money according to rank. We've always used it according to the purposes of the grant.

RM: Well-known professors who are tenured professors can attract money, so they have to be on the grant that they attracted. Part of that money on the grants that they attract can go to other people too, but you can't simply attract money 02:20:00and then have it be used for somebody else. So it's always been kind of a difficult job for the administrator of this school to decide who shall be partly on what funds. Everybody is partly on some funds, but it is not necessarily according to the rank or status, and it would be disastrous if that were ever imposed, because that would cut you off from your ability to raise outside funds. So really, in a way, you can't make the whole system orderly. You can't have the ranks, the duties, and the source of funding all be neatly in order.

LS: And you feel that's what somebody's trying to do.

RM: Yes (laughs). I sometimes have that feeling.

LS: They did propose that you drop the undergraduate professional degree, and 02:21:00said that there were eight other campuses offering such a degree in Wisconsin, and therefore wouldn't that be a good place to cut down.

RM: Well, we found that the undergraduate degree we had designed was just much too much for us so we had, already at the beginning of the year, started studying how to relieve ourselves of that burden and we really wanted to invest so much in the undergraduate degree, and very quickly there was a consensus that we should not, that we should have a very small undergraduate degree program. So we have designed a program that distinguishes between students who will get an 02:22:00undergraduate professional degree, and limits that to about fifty, and students who will take courses but not particularly the field type program, which is an essential for the professional degree, but we're going to dispense with in a major in social work.

So you see we're trying to trim our sails in numerous ways, but a different kind of approach to the undergraduate degree is admitting students just in August rather than three times a year, encouraging the use of large classes for certain 02:23:00beginning courses. And also the big decision we have not yet made is whether or not we should use the methods courses on a large group basis. Our present limit on the methods course is fourteen, and that's a pretty small course, and may be too rich for our blood at this time. But this is terribly important to some of the faculty who teach in these areas and who feel they can't do a good job with larger courses.

LS: Now would this be clinical faculty or academic faculty?

RM: It could be either but tends to be clinical faculty. The methods course is 02:24:00where you learn an awful lot of the specifics of being a social worker.

LS: It makes me think of my social work days in Chicago-- being advised not to sit on upholstered chairs.

RM: One of the problems of evaluating schools of social work these days is that it's not clear to anybody what constitutes the education of a social worker. 02:25:00There's disagreement within the school, there's disagreement within national organizations such as the National Association of Social Workers, and the Council of Social Work Education. The profession itself has gone through a kind of identity crisis since the middle sixties when the War on Poverty tended to emphasize activism and community roles rather than traditional social work roles--the walk-in-and-be-advised-and-counsel1ed kind of roles, as opposed to community organization. So there's a residue of the War on Poverty, still, in 02:26:00social work thinking.

On the other hand, there's been a kind of backlash also, because established agencies like family service agencies have difficulty recruiting people who are competent at taking histories, people who have the skills to diagnose complex family situations well. And these more traditional activities of social work probably aren't emphasized as much. Case work, for example, is not emphasized as much as it used to be. Now the position of the school here has been that we try to train a generic social worker who can function under a variety of institutional situations, but it's not at all clear that we do this well because 02:27:00the sectors for which students are trained, whether it be a medical sector, a school sector, a family agency sector, a mental health sector, each has their particular demands that they would like to make on their new employees, and sometimes their new employees are equipped for these demands and sometimes they're not. To try to respond to the need for a balance between generic social workers and some degree of specialization, we're trying to develop what we call areas of concentration. A student can voluntarily select a group of courses that have been designed in advance as constituting not a specialization but an "area 02:28:00of concentration", and this is still in the developmental stage. We've been working on it for two years.

But at a very important national level, at the Council of Social Work Education level, where schools are accredited and disaccredited, there is not now a very clear notion of what makes a good social work program, and this is very serious I think because to some extent the numbers of schools and the politics of the 02:29:00Council of Social Work Education militate against high academic standards, in the sense that it's much easier to sell or to get approval for sort of survey type courses that give you a social science education in one semester, as opposed to real academic work in the social sciences, which is what we try to emphasize here. We try to use the resources of the College of Letters and Sciences and the human behavior departments, drawing into our program the best 02:30:00that they have to offer. Now we get criticized by the Council of Social Work Education for not doing enough to integrate this knowledge.

LS: They don't mind the knowledge but--

RM: They want evidence that it's integrated. Our stand is that it's better to have a good course in something, to have really worked at a topic, that in time it will integrate, rather than to run a survey course that attempts to integrate everything without really touching on anything. This was one of the issues that we had with the Council in their delay of our accrediting of our undergraduate 02:31:00program until July.

LS: What about the teaching of administration, which the report asks that you do more of, says there isn't enough of preparing students to go right into administrative jobs.

RM: Well, we've been enthusiastic about that, but we're beginning to have some doubts about whether our enthusiasm is well placed. The pressure for this was coming from a variety of sources. It was evident that our graduates, after two or three years, would have administrative responsibilities.

LS: This is your M.A.s

RM: Yes--for which they weren't well equipped. They had to evaluate programs, they had to develop new programs, they had to account for grant monies spent in 02:32:00terms of hard evidence--hard program evaluation. They may have had other kinds of responsibilities working with boards, or community planning responsibilities. So we thought, a few years ago--three years ago--to develop some more capacity in these areas, and we developed our faculty with this in mind. The paradox is that while the pressure comes from employers of social workers, this is not the interest of students that come into social work. They have their inspiration because of their desire to work with people, particularly individuals or small groups. They want to at that stage of their life relate to people intensively, 02:33:00and they have a kind of traditional image of social work. Or maybe, if they were inspired by the activism of the sixties, they will come into social work with the idea that they're going to change the world, and you don't change the world by writing reports or making evaluative research studies. So attendance has not been dramatic at our offerings in administration, program analysis, research evaluation, unfortunately. Because that's where we have a lot of capacity in 02:34:00terms of faculty, but it has been like pulling teeth to get students into those courses.

LS: How many faculty about are there for that--?

RM: Well, we have--in administration we have two or three; in research evaluation we have half a dozen.

LS: That is a lot.

RM: Well, I said they're not being used. They're being used, but it could be--there's more capacity there than there is interest. So I don't know what we're going to do. One way out of this dilemma is to try to catch these students when, after they've graduated, in their work life, they suddenly find new responsibility thrust on them, and then and there, when they have the appetite, 02:35:00to make it possible for them to go back to school. Now the University's efforts to develop more of an outreach program for the University fits in with this possibility, and we have offered our administration and policy and evaluation courses--we have begun to offer them at these extended hours, in the evenings or on weekends, so that they will be able to take in people in the community, or from government agencies, who are really ready for this kind of education.

LS: Are you getting them?

RM: Yes, we've got two or three courses now.

LS: I mean are you getting the people?

RM: Yes, they've come to us. The problem is that this is happening at the very time that our campus enrollment is under pressure from so many applications. We used to get 300 or 400 applications, we now get 700 and 800 applications, and we're having to turn down seven out of every eight students who want to come to our graduate program on the campus, so it's paradoxical to be offering out-student programs at such a time, but I guess our dilemma is probably the 02:37:00dilemma of other parts of the University too. Except that we're still on this phase of a great deal of interest in professional education.

Maybe this is beginning to turn. I've heard reports from the east that the decline in enrollments is beginning in medicine and law, for example. I don't know about social work. But the number of students registered for pre-med in all the Ivy League schools sometimes is half the student body. It's unbelievable. But as I say, there are some indications that maybe this is beginning to cycle the other way. It hasn't hit here, it certainly hasn't hit social work. And we're being besieged around the state by our hardnosed attitudes toward admissions. We're excluding people with 3.4 and 3.5 grade point averages.

LS: It's fine in a way. You must get very highly qualified people.

RM: Well, if grade point average is what makes a social worker, and I think that's a very questionable criterion on which to judge as sole criterion--it's used as a criterion for weeding out many people. Of course we also keep a reserve 10 percent for lower grade point average people, either from minority groups, or from people who have special evidence of work histories that are very good.

LS: It occurred to me, you say that you have applications around the country so you get a lot of out-of-state students.

RM: Oh yes.

LS: How do you solve that. Do you take a proportion like 15 percent or 20 percent?

RM: No, no. We try to judge on the merits regardless of whether the candidate is out-of-state or Wisconsin.

LS: How does it work out? Do you have any idea?

RM: It works out that the Wisconsin students don't do as wel1.

LS: Does anybody complain about that?

RM: Oh yes, to us, to the Graduate School.

LS: This wasn't covered in the report.

RM: No, not in the detail in which it should have been. It's getting to the point where we know nothing to do except refer them to the governor.

LS: There are other schools they can go to.

RM: Yes, and I suppose they do, but--and maybe they'll transfer here after they've been somewhere else for a while. There's always been pressure, you know, 02:40:00for another school of social work in the state. There was some pressure for Eau Claire to have a graduate school of social work, in addition to Milwaukee and Madison.

LS: But there are-- Well, these other schools that offer undergraduate--if there are eight, why--

RM: Well, I'm talking about a graduate program. I think this undergraduate social work has just gone haywire. I think that the Council of Social Work Educati on has accredited schools that should not have been accredited, and really has by the large numbers of social work students that are graduating with a B.A.-- the job possibilities are limited, a situation unlike the middle sixties when this was encouraged and needed, but that time has passed and we're now in a position where the need is more for longer and better training.

You might be interested in some of my experiences with the executive committee of the social science division which passes on promotion to associate professors and the question of tenure. I felt very ill prepared when I was elected or appointed to that.

LS: When?

RM: 1972, and I guess I served about a year and a half before I had my illness, and the last half year I was chairman. That experience, though, did make me a 02:42:00believer in the University system of promotions. I really felt that it was not politics that decided who got promoted. There was at least a large element of decision based on merit.

LS: Has there been much question about that, do you think?

RM: Oh I think so.

LS: Do you think that if the ordinary faculty member were asked what she thought prevailed?

RM: There are many who think it's politics-- that is, who knows who, and who 02:43:00promotes who. And it probably is true that an individual who isolates himself from the University, that that fact will become in one way or another a negative factor in his success here, but that doesn't mean that a decision is political, it simply means that his colleagues do not have the basis on which to make a judgment and therefore feel reluctant to be positive. The standards were in the process of being severely tightened during that period in the divisional committee, and it was quite painful for the members on the committee who 02:44:00realized that the standards on which they had been selected were much weaker standards than the standards they were asked to apply. I mean there was a psychic problem about doing that. But there was also enough pressure from deans and the administration wanting that to be done that it was done. The big problem, though, that I want to mention is the unsuitabi1ity of a divisional committee to make judgments for faculty of professional schools.

LS: This would be journalism, library, social work, law.

RM: Law was included in--

LS: Oh I see, in the social sciences division

RM: --in the social sciences division.

RM: The committee does not operate with a different set of criteria for such appointees, but in fact does attempt to allow for the difference in these institutions. Now maybe that's the way to handle it, but it can also lead to a lot of confusion in the minds of new members of the divisional committee who see the same sets of criteria being applied differently when different kinds of institutions are up for judgment, and who may not be able to understand well enough that a different application is necessary. For example, a lawyer makes 02:46:00his mark as a writer of briefs. The briefs that he has written, the briefs that have won him eminence are the important kind of activity for a professional person in law and the law school has got to give weight to that kind of activity. It's a more telling kind of activity than writing articles for law school journals which in a way are notoriously easy journals to get your articles into. Unless you are aware of that, unless you have a person from the law school who can ex plain that stuff to you, you're in the dark about what to do or how to apply the criteria.

LS: But doesn't somebody at the beginning of the year, when the committee has 02:47:00Just formed, say, "Look you're going to have to think differently about these cases"?

RM: No, they do not. You learn it through your pores and you learn it probably by voting wrong in some instances when those kinds of cases come up. Because it's not an explicitly--I'm describing my conclusions about it. It's not even as explicit as I've made it. It's a gray area.

LS: Well you wouldn't know how to judge the brief for one thing, I suppose.

RM: No, of course not. As a matter of fact, I don't believe the briefs are submitted, even.

LS: They were hired because they had written the briefs, but.

RM: Sure. But that's not the kind of material that the committee would spend much time with. They would regard it as a cook sending in her dish rather than 02:48:00sending in the cookbook that she'd written.

LS: How many are on the divisional committee?

RM: I've forgotten exactly.

LS: Or who was on it when you were on it, do you remember?