Excerpt from second interview with Irving Shain on Sterling Hall bombing

Irving Shain (#323) Transcript BT: We've talked about the students involved in the protest movement. But the faculty, several of the faculty members we all know, were opposed to the Vietnam War. How did they express their views to the administration about this subject? IS: Well, more than a few faculty. Lots of faculty were opposed to the Vietnam War. Lots of them were very sympathetic to the students' position on it. But a few of them were so concerned that they allowed their better judgment to [laughs] take a backseat. And they participated in the marches, and they called off their classes, and they did all kinds of things. Well, even though many of us in the administration felt that their motives were right, we felt that their actions were wrong. And closing down classes and going on little mini-strikes and things like that were inappropriate. I took the position on many of these that if they weren't going to do their job, they ought to be docked. [laughter] They ought to pay for it. They 00:01:00 ought to have the willingness to fulfill their convictions in the paycheck. So I took a rather strong position that people should be willing to, should be willing to accept their responsibilities as faculty members and carry on their academic responsibilities, but at the same time, if they wanted to protest and write letters to the editor and do all the kinds of things that people in an academic community do to express their position on issues, that was great. But I couldn't put up with people that wanted to disrupt the university as a way of demonstrating their concern. So there were always a few of those people. And quite frequently they would get elected to the Faculty 00:02:00 Senate, where they could have a forum for raising hell. And that was okay. We had a period there where Ed Young, for a variety of reasons, liked to have me preside at the Faculty Senate meetings. Occasionally. I don't know how frequently I did, but often enough so I was comfortable in that role. And frankly, that was good training for when I became chancellor. BT: I'll bet. [laughter] IS: But a lot of times these issues would come up that were very controversial, where Ed was really being attacked by certain faculty members. So I would preside at the meeting. And by and large, these were a fairly small group of faculty members, mostly from the, a few of them from the humanities, and a few of them from social sciences. And they would do whatever they could to embarrass the chancellor, to undercut the administration. They weren't 00:03:00 very effective. BT: You mean just verbally, just bringing up motions and what not? IS: Just verbally, yeah. Just sort of harassing Ed Young, mostly. They didn't harass me nearly as much. I guess that was because Ed was the chancellor, and he was the symbol of the public image of the university. Whereas I was, I suppose, viewed as being a guy that just shuffled papers. [laughter] So when these things came up at the faculty senate meeting, my recollection is that we would always have three or four people get up and make these impassioned speeches telling us what terrible things we were doing, and how we ought to reorganize the university. And then there would be some sort of a vote on either cutting off debate, or a summary from a university committee that had some sense would get up and make a motion to limit the debate or to do something like that. And it would be overwhelmingly approved. A lot of the issues had to do with whether we were going to give students an opportunity to speak at the Faculty Senate meeting. And I was 00:04:00 usually in favor of giving them some five minutes or ten minutes and letting them speak. But frequently that wasn't enough. They wanted to take over the whole Faculty Senate meeting. And so then we would have a debate over whether we would let them speak. There were always some faculty members who didn't want them to speak at all. And I was always in favor of letting them speak for some limited period. And usually my position would prevail. Because university committee position was usually about the same as mine. And then, of course, they'd get up and they'd want to continue on and on and on and on. And Ralph Hanson would have to escort them off the podium. BT: Oh, no! [laughter] So students would attend the meetings where the students spoke. IS: Oh, yeah! These were public meetings. These were public meetings. BT: Were they in the stock pavilion as well? IS: No, no. They were in B10 Commerce. BT: Commerce. Yeah. That's 00:05:00 a nice big one. IS: And the back half, the back fifteen or twenty rows were reserved for visitors. And we would allow faculty members to, who were not senators, to enter first. And then five minutes or so before the beginning of the meeting, any empty seats that were left could be taken by students. BT: And did students attend pretty- IS: A lot of them. BT: A lot of them? IS: Well, it depends on the issue. BT: On the issue, of course. Yeah. What was I going to ask? IS: [unclear] BT: Were there ever any issues, that you can recall, where the Faculty Senate really went against the administration and challenged the administration regarding Vietnam policy? IS: I can't remember any where the majority went against the administration. BT: What about the University Committee? I interviewed Ted [Finneman?] and he said that Ed Young really, he'd stop in all the time and chat and everything like that, and there was a real good relationship there. How about them during this period? IS: Well, that was the key to it. You see, the University Committee was the executive committee of the Faculty Senate. And the chairman of the University Committee was the person that was the key individual in 00:06:00 presenting faculty position papers to the Faculty Senate. And it's absolutely essential that communication with the University Committee had to be maintained. And Ed Young's relationship with the University Committee was relatively informal in that he would wander in--you see, they meet every Monday afternoon. I suppose they still do. BT: I believe so. IS: The whole afternoon. And Ed Young would wander in and talk to them for an hour or so, and then leave. Sometimes he'd stay only fifteen minutes. But he always, every Monday, he made it a point to stop in and chat with the University Committee for at least a few minutes, and to give them an opportunity to talk to him about things that they were concerned about. And they would allow, that would give him an opportunity to develop a strategy for how they were going to handle the next Faculty Senate meeting. Because coordination between the chair of the meeting, the chancellor, and the University Committee, was essential if you were going to get anything done in a Faculty Senate meeting, taking into account all of the screwballs that were going to be making speeches at one point or another. I shouldn't use that term "screwballs," because people, some of the people were very dedicated and conscientious people who made very eloquent speeches on both sides of the issues, and, for the most part, when the University Committee and the chancellor's office had done their homework properly, everybody got a chance to speak, everybody got a chance to voice their opinions. And then when their vote came, it was really a well, a well considered sense of the faculty that was expressed. Sometimes the votes were fairly close. And occasionally you would have to have a count. You'd get a voice vote and you couldn't tell, so then you'd have to have people raise hands. And we'd have people designated to run up and down the aisles and count. But that happened relatively so. But I can't remember the close votes being on issues where the administration had a particular position. The close votes were on changes to faculty governance. Those kinds of issues were frequently hotly debated. Now, at the same time that Ed Young dealt with the University Committee on sort of a political basis, I dealt with them on sort of an administrative basis. I spent much more time with the University Committee than Ed Young did, in that I would go in there and spend most of every Monday afternoon with the University Committee. And there we would talk about administrative issues. We would review decisions on the budget, for example. Uh, we would review 00:07:00 strategies for faculty compensation proposals. I would share with the University Committee our decision item narratives, the infamous DIMs. BT: DIMs, yes. IS: That had to do with, well, actually, all of them. Everything from the building program to the academic program, the physical plant, everything. I would go over those DIMs with the University Committee so they knew what we were proposing. And lots of times I got feedback from them that changed my priorities for establishing budget requests. So I found it an extremely valuable thing to be in close communication with the faculty through the University Committee. And I think that that was one of the keys to our being reasonably successful. I think during the two years that I was gone the people that succeeded me in the vice chancellor's office did not communicate with the University Committee the way I had. And certainly when I came back as chancellor, I just blocked off every Monday afternoon, and spent every Monday afternoon with the University Committee. Unless some emergency came up, I was there. BT: Well when we talk about your chancellor days, we will discuss the University Committee. And I will have a list for you of the different people who served on the committee during those years. I didn't realize we would be talking about it today or I would have brought a list. Are there any people during your vice chancellor years, any members of the committee 00:08:00 that stand out in your mind as particularly, I know those were very strong years for the University Committee. Are there any people in particular that leap out in your mind? IS: Well, there are a lot of them. But the problem is, I can't differentiate between vice chancellor and chancellor. There's a lot of overlap. BT: Okay. What I'll do is I'll bring a list. I can't expect you to remember all these things. IS: Like Phil Cohen, Jim Bowers in business, very, very [unclear] guy. BT: Yes. Jim Bowers. IS: And that was a vice chancellor period. But I would have to look at a list. BT: I'll bring a list for you. No problem. We've talked about the Dow movement, protest movements when you were in chemistry. We talked about Kent State right away and your chancellorship, the black students thing. And then we move to Sterling Hall. Is there anything between the black students and the Sterling Hall bombing regarding the 00:09:00 student unrest that is of particular note? IS: Well I think the black student unrest came after the bombing. BT: After the bombing. Okay. IS: My recollection is it came after the bombing, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure about anything anymore. [BT laughs] But the bombing, of course, just was, at that point, the entire administrative activity changed direction so enormously. Ed Young just didn't spend any time at all on anything other than the bombing, and the repercussions from the bombing. And those repercussions were more than just the explosion itself, let me tell you. BT: I'll bet. IS: The regents were very unhappy. The legislature was unhappy. The governor was unhappy. You see, the fallout was not just the bricks and mortar. The fallout was budget issues, more bureaucratic control over the university, an intensification of internal, of auditing, by the legislative audit bureau. All kinds of things like that were, I think, catalyzed by the bombing. So we were completely 00:10:00 distracted from doing anything constructive for a period of a year or more. BT: Oh, my. IS: Because we were so busy responding to demands for more accountability on every conceivable issue you could imagine. BT: Give me some examples of that. IS: Well, reports on drugs in the dorms. Why does it cost so much to run the university? What is your cost per credit in the law school? These kinds of demands came up continuously. Yet at the same time, we had some very good friends in the legislature who helped us a lot. A couple of people that I can remember that I worked with very closely. One was Anderson, oh, God. I'll think of his first name. Um, Walter Hollander. Molinaro from Racine or Kenosha or someplace. BT: Yeah, one of those places. IS: Rough, tough 00:11:00 guy. Always on the Joint Finance Committee. Always, he frequently used very rough language. He was always cussing at people. And I got along with him just fine because I would go talk to him and the first thing he would do was cuss me out as being one of those academic types, one of those-- BT: Pointy heads. [laughs] IS: Yeah. It was worse than that. And he used really foul language. And when I first met him, I was intimidated by that. And I spent a lot of time in my youth on the Seattle waterfront. So I've been in places like he talks about. And I was raised during the Depression in a very poor family. Finally one day I got really upset with him because he'd called me some nasty names and made some terrible comments about the university. And I just said, I thought to myself that, you know, I'm never going to get anything out of this guy anyhow. He doesn't like me, he doesn't like the university. And he doesn't like teaching, he doesn't like research, he doesn't like anything. And so I let him have it. And I cussed him out using exactly the same kind of 00:12:00 terminology that he had used on me. And all of a sudden, we became friends! And he was great. He would invite me into his office to have lunch with him. I didn't usually bring my lunch, but he would have his lunch. And he had ulcers. And so you know what this guy would have for lunch? He would buy a sack of peanuts, salted peanuts-- BT: Oh, you told me about this. Yeah. IS: And drink milk! And have milk and peanuts. And he and I would sit there and we'd talk about what was coming up at the Joint Finance Committee, and he was extremely helpful. Norm Anderson! BT: Norm Anderson. There we go. IS: Norm Anderson was very, very helpful. Walter Hollander was very helpful. And Mrs. Hollander was the sweetest lady you could ever imagine, and she was always sitting in his office. She was not exactly his secretary, but she was his assistant. I don't think she was paid, but she was lonesome sitting up in that Roseville or wherever he lived. So she would be in his office all the time. And she was just the sweetest, nicest lady you could imagine. And she and Walter were very, very helpful. BT: So during the post-Sterling Hall mess, they would come to the university's defense? IS: Yes. Yes. Occasionally. They would help out. BT: Were there any legislators that you can recall who were leading the charge against the university? IS: I blanked those out of my memory. [laughter] BT: I guess I can understand that. When I was talking to Gordon Orr about a month ago, he said that the day after, the morning after, or the day after the Sterling Hall bombing, he remembers going through Sterling Hall, walking through the rubble with you. IS: Yeah. BT: Do you remember that at all? IS: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um, 00:13:00 there's a very, it was a very embarrassing day for me because it seemed to me that everybody in the United States had heard the bomb go off and rushed to the campus in the middle of the night. I didn't hear it! [laughter] I had been in a sailboat race with one of my kids on Lake [Wingra?] that day and we'd actually won. And I was absolutely exhausted and had gone to bed fairly early and I was sound asleep. And we lived on the far southwest side of Madison. And I did not hear the bomb go off. So I blithely drove into work the next morning and had a, as I got close to campus, I turned on the radio. I hadn't had it on earlier than that. And they were talking about streets being closed, and police action. BT: [laughs] Oh my goodness. IS: I couldn't figure out what in the world was going on. So I got to the office and found, when I looked and saw what had happened, and realized all the glass was gone--there was a lot of broken glass on the ground. BT: Oh, yeah. Right. The buildings all around. IS: That was when I first figured out what was going on. And I didn't really learn about it until about eight o'clock in the morning. And by that time, Jim Edsel and Gordon Orr were around, and of course the police all over the place, reporters all over the place. And I did go through with Gordon. And I think there were other people with us. BT: Probably, yeah. IS: And trying to assess the damage. Looking at the old chemistry building right across the way, which we were absolutely astounded that it hadn't collapsed, because Joe [Hershfelder?] had made calculations decades earlier that showed that if an explosion of less than a kilogram of maybe half a kilogram of ether were to go off inside that building, the building would collapse. And 00:14:00 use that as a way of justifying why we ought to have another chemistry building. BT: Very clever. IS: The result of that was that the building was condemned, but we still stayed in it for many, many year. [laughter] But in any event, the building didn't collapse. The bomb went off right next to it, and all it did was blow out a lot of glass. But we went through it. I remember that I was interviewed by one of these roving reporters from CBS News. And I was on national television that night. And I got letters from people all over the country, former students, and people I had known, saying that they had seen me on television. And I'll remember eventually the name of the reporter, but he's a very well known national CBS reporter. BT: That must have been very interesting, all of a sudden Madison being the center of the national news media. IS: And we stayed there for quite a few weeks, I'm afraid, as the chase for the, as 00:15:00 the search for the bombers continued. It was a pretty devastating period. And of course it happened around the 22nd of August, as I remember. The 21st or 22nd of August, on a Sunday night. We were just starting to get ready for the beginning of the new school year. and it just threw everything into chaos. And we had started a whole series of new administrative crises. For example, the, what was called the Army Math Research Center, which was the target, had to be moved. And we moved them out here to the WARF building. And the, the, the director of the Math Research Center was a guy named Barkley Rosser. And he was very upset that we refused to protect the Math Research Center, and we were moving him out to the WARF building. They'd be isolated from the math department, and they were no longer gong to be a viable organization, and being in the WARF building was a disgrace worse than banishment. BT: Really. IS: It was, I must have, I had more trouble with Barkley Rosser, I think, than with the regents. And here we were trying to provide space with Barkley Rosser and his mathematicians where we could provide some reasonable security. And we had guards in the front of the building here until fairly 00:16:00 recently, we had guards on duty all the time in this building. BT: I would suspect that the occupants of WARF were not exactly happy to have the Army Math Research Center moved out here. [laughs] IS: No. But I thought that things would be, that this was, that they would be quite safe wherever they were. Because once the bomb went off, people were so upset at this extreme violence that even the Army Math Research Center wouldn't be the subject of another attack in the near future. And furthermore, I was always concerned about the fact that it was misnamed, that the Army Math Research Center was a 00:17:00 math research center, but a lot of their funding, in fact, I think more than half of their funding came from the National Science Foundation rather than the army. And a lot of the army research, all of the classified research that was going on there was conducted off campus. We wouldn't allow the classified research on campus. And so faculty members who wanted to do classified research as part of the Army Math Research Center activity didn't do it. They would stay on the payroll, but they would have to go to some army base and do the work there. And the papers were there, the work was done there. Nothing classified was ever on campus. BT: So the name was just very unfortunate that contributed to it, certainly. IS: I just remembered that I was involved early on in the decision to remove all classified materials from the campus. When I was chairman of the Chemistry Department. BT: In the late '60s. IS: Yeah. At that time, the university had a classified repository. It was left over from World War Two, where 00:18:00 some faculty members were working on classified projects for the military, for the Defense Department. And there was a big safe. Originally it was in Bascom. And then they moved it to the top of Van Hise. And it was full of classified documents that were left over from previous research projects. And the secretary of the faculty's office had the responsibility for guarding all those documents. And there was a guy who was the assistant or the associate deputy secretary of faculty named Joe Holt, who, remarkable man, wonderful guy. And he had decided that it was pointless for us to continue to be the guardian of these classified documents. And that furthermore, we shouldn't have any classified research on campus anyhow, because our policy was to publish everything. And therefore we weren't allowing classified research on the campus through another mechanism. Therefore we ought to get rid of all the classified documents and not have any classified depository. So I was appointed to a committee--[laughs] BT: I'll be darned. IS: --to justify this decision. And so there was a, I don't remember who else was on the committee. But I remember that Len Van Ess was on that committee with me. And there was somebody from engineering. And I don't remember who that was now. It could have been Bob Marshall, the dean of engineering, or he was the associate dean at that time, because Kurt Wendt was dean. And there as somebody else on there. And we sat around a table and we had only one committee meeting. We sat around a table in Van 00:19:00 Hise, at the top there. In front of the safe, which was locked. [BT laughs] And decided that we ought to get rid of everything, and that no more classified documents. So we authorized Joe Holt to negotiate with the military and get rid of all the documents. And we closed down all of the classified research on campus as of about the 1967 or eight. BT: And that was right before the student thing really heated up. That's interesting. IS: And so, and that was one of the early times when I got to know Len real well. So anyhow-- BT: Hmm. That's very interesting. IS: It's amazing how these things come up floating out of my memory, when other issues come up like that. BT: [laughs] So we're back at Sterling Hall now. IS: We're back at Sterling Hall. We have the problem of finding space for the displaced physicists, who really, really took the brunt of the bomb. BT: They took the big hit, yeah. IS: The math people were not really hurt very much, but we moved them out of there anyhow because for security reasons and because the building had to be rebuilt and there was going to be a lot of noise and stuff. So a lot of the physics stuff was moved out to [Stoat?], to the physical science laboratory there. Are you familiar with that? BT: I've heard of it, but I don't know anything about it. IS: It's out there, oh, about fifteen miles south of--you go out the city, you go straight out [Arc?] Street towards Oregon. Before you get to Oregon, you turn left and head over towards the lake. And there's the physical science laboratory there. And I've spent a lot-- [End of Tape 16/Side 1 Begin Side 2] BT: You were saying when you were a young faculty member, you used to do their computers to do research. IS: Yeah. I used to go out to physical science laboratory to do research out there. It's just a big barn of a place, but it's now the site of a lab, the Synchotron Radiation Center. And when we get to be chancellor, I'll tell you about that, too. That was an interesting episode. BT: 00:20:00 I'm writing that down. IS: But we had a lot of problems associated with that bombing. It blew out al the windows, not only in the old chemistry building, but in the new chemistry building. My office in the new chemistry building, which was a block away, over on Johnson Street, faced the campus. It was on the north side of the building. And for years afterwards, I was pulling glass, broken glass, out of my computers, out of my chemicals, shelves, out of my filing cabinet. It was just terrible. But it did a terrible amount of damage. BT: One of the things Gordon Orr said is, he said be sure to talk about the fact that it wasn't just Sterling Hall that got bombed. I mean, that took the brunt of it, obviously. But that buildings for blocks around, the windows were 00:21:00 shattered. IS: And interestingly enough, the shock waves skipped some buildings. And some buildings were completely, then, there's that church is between the old chemistry building and the new chemistry building, on University Avenue, there's that church there on the corner of Charter and University. They didn't have any damage at all. But the shock wave went right over the church and got the chemistry building. BT: Oh. [laughs] Interesting. IS: So it was a very interesting phenomenon. I was always going to go look at this to see if it was really true. But I heard that the bumper of the van that contained the explosives was found somewhere two blocks away in the swimming pool of Lathrop Hall. And that it had gone up in the air, and it had come down through the roof of the building. BT: [laughs] I've never heard that. IS: I can't verify that. I was going to run down and look at that and see if it was really true, but I never got a chance to do that. But that was one of the stories that was going around at the time. BT: Well I think in the book Rads that came out about the bombing incident recently, it turned out that the Armstrongs were in a minibus, and they were taking a left hand turn on Park and Dayton when the bomb went off, and their truck literally left the ground. Levitated a foot in the air from the explosion. And they said it surprised the hell out of them, because they never expected that it would be that monstrous a thing. IS: That was terrible. BT: It was just awful. And as you said earlier, it certainly changed the whole context of, not only in Madison, I believe, 00:22:00 but-- IS: The entire country. BT: The entire country. IS: I think that was the incident that really woke up everybody to the, to what was going on in the [Southeast??] and our social fabric was coming apart as a result of it. BT: Now you mentioned earlier that this was on August 22nd, and school opened when, right after Labor Day? IS: I think in those days, it opened after Labor Day. BT: Yeah, I think it was pretty early, like the fifth of September, something like that. IS: But we had registration and things like that before Labor Day, I think. BT: How did that, in light of the bombing, what was that like on campus? IS: I don't remember, except it was just chaos. I was running all over the place, doing all kinds of things, running from one crisis to another. One incident, a guy escaped from the psychiatric ward in the hospital right in the middle, within a couple of days after the bombing. There was still broken glass all over the place. The police, the fences were up everywhere. You couldn't get through. And this guy decided he wanted to get into the area there where the police had blocked it 00:23:00 off, and he couldn't. And so he came up to Bascom trying to find somebody who would give him, who would let him into the limited access area. And he couldn't find anybody in the first office that he came to. So he had a brick in his hand, and he started breaking the windows on the inside doors of Bascom Hall. Well, we heard this noise. Peter Bunn and I were talking there in the vice chancellor's office. Heard breaking glass. And Peter ran out there. And the guy ran out the front of Bascom. And I, Peter was chasing him, and I was chasing Peter, running down toward [Birge?] Hall. And he came up against one of these snow fences that had been constructed to keep people out of there. And we captured him and sent him back to the hospital. People did things like that. Well, that took up a whole morning, because I had to talk to the police about it, had to talk to people in the medical school, or in the hospital, about him. Then we had to go worry about getting the windows fixed, and all these doors he had broken on the 00:24:00 inside of Bascom. And it was just one incident like that after another that screwed up our ability to deal with day to day issues of keeping the university going. BT: You also had not only the police, but didn't you have the FBI in there? IS: Oh, yeah. Ed was the one that handled most of this. BT: Oh, he handled most of that. Along with Hanson, I suspect. IS: Hanson, yeah. BT: Oh, boy. [laughs] What a period. IS: Yeah, it was a difficult period. The thing that you have to also recognize was that while that was going on, we were working on the medical school task force, you see. Our report came out 00:25:00 in December of 1970. BT: That's right. IS: So while I was trying to do that, I was holding meetings with the task force people and trying to get organized to get the money for the new hospital. All those things were going on simultaneously. BT: How much more difficult did that make your task? Not only logistically, of course, but in terms of fund raising and things like that. Did that-- IS: I don't remember it being-- BT: Like with the legislature or the governor or anything like that. IS: That particular issue, you see we didn't really come to grips with getting more money for the hospital until a couple of years later. So that had pretty much died down. But what it did interfere with was our ability to get our own work done on campus. I had to get committees going to do the planning for the new hospital. Well, you couldn't get faculty members to sit down and talk about a new hospital when they're still talking about the bombing and the police and all that sort of thing. It was very difficult to get people focused on keeping the university functioning. By December, of course, it had calmed down considerably. But we still had a lot of work to do. We had to get the money to rebuild Sterling Hall. And-- BT: Where did you get that? IS: Well, the state government. I think a lot of that came out of an insurance fund that the building 00:26:00 commission has. But nevertheless, we had to prepare new documentation. We get new plans. We had to put together proposals for the legislators to look at. It didn't require legislative approval in that sense, but it had to go to the governor. People downtown got involved in it. It was time consuming. It just took up a lot of time. BT: Now we look back now and it's easy to say that the Sterling Hall bombing certainly changed the whole tenor of the protest movement. But when did that become evident? Did that become evident? Were you concerned when it happened that it was going to escalate into something worse? Or what? IS: Initially I think the fear was that this was just the tip of the iceberg. That was why we moved the Math Research Center out to the WARF building and put guards in the front hall. BT: Right. Of course. IS: But we did not, we were working in our own microcosm. We didn't look at the national picture until much