Second interview with H. Edwin Young

H. Edwin Young #117 Transcript

LS: --third, 1978. And we're in his office at the top of Van Hise. This is Laura Smail. [pause] I'm testing to find out how this sounds at this point. Well you see, I wanted to start, really, from the beginning, related to buildings. And I noticed that one question I haven't seen you answer anywhere is why you came to the university as a graduate student.

EY: Well, I had a professor at the University of Maine who had a PhD from here. [unclear] Columbia. Then the Depression came on, he went up to Maine as an instructor. Very quickly became the chairman of the department, or acting 00:01:00chairman or something, and then decided he needed a PhD and came here and got it. Went back there. I admired him very much. So as the war drew to a close, I had to make some decisions. So I applied to Harvard and Wisconsin, got offers from both, and decided for what I wanted to do, I'd come here. Yeah.

LS: Well--

EY: And good thing I did. Because I could never, probably would never have survived at Harvard and all that intellectual climate was so strenuous.

LS: [noisy, unclear] You, we would be interested to have you talk some time about the School for Workers.

EY: Oh, I'd be glad to. I've got some stories I can tell about that.

LS: Well, do you want to do that now? I don't know much about it. But if you--

EY: Well, yes. Let me--

LS: Why don't you?

EY: Well, I came here as a graduate student in fall of '45. Stayed that year and through the summer. Then went back to Maine, to a teaching position I had there. Which some other time I'll tell you how I got to that. You see, most of the things happened to me is just luck of the damnedest kind. And I'm not being modest. People think I am when I say that, but it's a whole series of chance events. But anyway I went back, and the department needed a person in labor relations. And after much discussion, they offered the position to a very distinguished man. Philip Taft was at Brown, who'd worked early with Perlman on [Perlman and Taft?], volume four of a documentary history. He's one of the most probably prolific writers, and he died about a year ago after retiring from Brown.

Because of some arguments with one or two people in the department or something, anyway, he elected not to come. Then the department decided they'd start with some very young person rather than the senior, established person. So they asked me if I would come back, even though I didn't have a degree. And I came back as an instructor in the fall of '47. And then, I guess I took my prelims in '48 or '49, and wrote my, taught full time, wrote my thesis, and got my degree in '50.

The School for Workers had been established in about '26, with the prime mover, the YWCA School for Working Girls. And they attracted, in the garment industry, LGWU, and two or three years some men's trade unionists said that this was sex 00:04:00discrimination. What about men? So it broadened.

And somewhere along the way after a while, Ernest Schwartzauer became director of it. Ernest was a devoted socialist of the Norman Thomas school. He tended to attract socialists to the staff. And they ran, and [winter's?] going along and in '48, twice I went out and taught classes for them. I mean, on an individual basis. I never taught a course, I didn't pay much attention to it.

But Ernest was getting near retirement. He wasn't well. And he brought in a man named Ulrickson. A man named Ulrickson. Older man. He must have been fifteen, twenty years older than I was. He was a trade unionist in Minneapolis and a 00:05:00splendid person. Came down to do graduate work and he wanted to be an assistant. But the only thing available was to be an assistant in the School for Workers. Well, [Vic?] took hold there. His wife had died. He was a widower. And began, really ran the place. But this, they had recruited two or three fairly militant young socialists. And the School for Workers wasn't as accepted it is now.

LS: Here on the campus.

EY: Around the state.

LS: Around the state.

EY: Around the state. And on the campus, they tried to keep themselves separate. We have to be with the university, but you know, we really are something else kind of attitude. Their offices were in an old building over where the psychology building is now. And behind was a coal pile there then.

Well, one of these young people, I guess I won't mention his name, because he's 00:06:00now a professor somewhere. And like all of us, he's grown old and more conservative, or careful, or whatever. Times have changed, anyway. He took delight in going out in the state and in the classes denouncing the employers. Saying things about them. And of course they had people in the classes who would go back and tell them.

And so Mr. Fred was president. Mr. Fred got some heat on this and called. So he called Ulrickson in one day. Mind you, this is my version of what happened. Everybody has his version. But I think I'm fairly accurate. And Mr. Fred wanted to defend the School for Workers. And Mr. Fred was a great defender of academic freedom. Tremendous. The things he did with very conservative people [unclear], 00:07:00you know, we got through that whole McCarthy period not touched here because Mr. Fred, primarily, he seemed to be bumbling, but he never bumbled one in his life. He always knew exactly what he was doing. You know him?

LS: Yes. I've met him. [unclear]

EY: Yes. Don't be deceived.

LS: No, no, I understand.

EY: Yes. Anyway, he wanted material to defend it. But Ulrickson thought he was being critical. And so Ulrickson denounced him for being a reactionary, and went pretty far, the story I have. I wasn't there. And at this point, it was so bad that the decision was made by somewhere that my God, this fellow was not going to be the next director, who should have been. By every standard, Ulrickson should have been the director of the School for Workers.

So, when this became clear, Ulrickson announced that they weren't going outside the state and bringing in a director, because he would go to the trade unions and they'd all boycott, and that would be the end of the School for Workers. Of course, that would have suited a lot of employers in the state at that time. But 00:08:00it didn't suit Ed Witte and Selig Perlman and Nate Feinsinger and Bob Fleming, who was here as director of the new Industrial Relations Research Institute.

So, they decided that something had to be done. So they put the finger on me to go over there and run that thing. So I'm half, theoretically half-time basis. But it was night and day. I became the director of the School for Workers. Wonderful example of the completely unqualified. Ulrickson was very cordial. We'd been friends. [unclear] He took me around and introduced me to labor people. And the introduction was standard. "This is Ed Young. Ed is a pretty good fellow. He just doesn't know anything about workers' education." It was absolutely true. There was no way of contradicting him.

He sort of maybe half hoped that the labor people say, "Well, we can't deal with 00:09:00that." But they all rallied around. And this is when I made life-long friends in the labor movement in the state. And they, because of Feinsinger and Witte, they agreed to give me a chance. So that's how I got into the School for Workers. And of course Ulrickson wasn't very happy. You can understand, very understanding of my [unclear] with him. Maybe if I'd been more principled, I would have let the whole thing go down the drain, not taken it in the first place.

LS: He stayed around, I guess.

EY: He stayed around. But I [did?] happen to be in Washington, and taught some people. then he was invited to apply for labor attaché. And he had a very successful career as a labor attaché and retired from that. Did very well. He would have done very well here.

Now the difference between Ulrickson and me, he identified with the labor movement as one of them. I never tended to be one of them, because I wasn't one of them. I said my job was to help the university see their needs, and see what 00:10:00we could do. But I wasn't part of the labor movement. And I made no pretense. I got along very well with [that?].

Bob Ozanne was here doing graduate work, and we hired him as an assistant. And one day somebody said, "You better watch that Ozanne. He'll have your job." And he did. He got my job within two years. And I got out. [laughs]

LS: You didn't mind, you mean.

EY: No, I wanted desperately. That wasn't my career. My friends had told me, "You get mixed up with that, you're never going to--" I wanted to be an economist. [unclear] to be an economist in those days.

Let me tell you one episode. It's typical of what happened. This can be verified. One of the few things I tell you about that can find in the press. One of the first public meetings I had was in Ashland. We went up there to talk to 00:11:00the Federation of Labor. And the staff went around. It was the first time I was going to speak. And they were, you know, we got in, you can just imagine, like any organization that brings somebody who doesn't know a damn thing. And that's where I was. So they were shivering, because [unclear] And here we were in this big room. And in those days, first thing they did was pass out their songs. Like these were "Solidarity Forever" and "Union Girl Tonight" or something, and all kinds of stuff like, just songs of a kind of.

And then, sat down. And suddenly, Vic wrote me a note and said, "There is John. John--" The one who wrote The Red Network, who's the editor who published the paper up there. Oh, I'll think of his name. "Chapel has come in." He says, "You 00:12:00can't say anything." We knew John Chapel, he was the one that wrote, I don't know if you know him, he was a great pro-Russian. He went to Russia and came back very bitterly anti-communist. He wrote a book called The Red Network, which included a chapter called "Perlman the Communist" and so on.

LS: Really?

EY: Oh, yes.

LS: I didn't know about that.

EY: No. See, that was in the early '30s, or in the '30s, before my time. Better not say anything. In fact, they would have liked to take me off the program, because they didn't trust me in that atmosphere.

LS: You mean because you were from the university and associated with Perlman?

EY: No. Because of, we were going to get bad press, the School for Workers, no matter what we said. And they couldn't trust me to say anything because that might get us into difficulties. So I got up and said that I was pleased to be in 00:13:00Ashland, Wisconsin, reminded me of Maine. Because the northernmost town in Maine was called Ashland, too. And here we were in the top of the state. it brought back memories of the farmhouse I grew up in. that one of the things I remembered in that farmhouse was a volume called Heart Throbs edited by a man named Chapel. I said that, there were many things of sentiment in that. "Curfew Shall not Rein Tonight," other such things. Very similar to the songs we've passed out here. These are not [to base it?] for action. These are part of a tradition, those things were.

I said, "I understand there's a Mr. Chapel here who may be related to the editor of that. I understand he plays the piano. Perhaps he'd play for us while we sing these songs." And by God, he did! We sang the labor songs. And the next day, for 00:14:00the only time in my life, on the front page of the paper, exactly what I said, word for word, and no editorial comments. It's the only time I've ever had an honest report. [laughter] That was my big moment in my whole career. I've never achieved it since. You can look it up in the Ashland papers if you want to.

LS: And did it just come to you?

EY: Well, sure.

LS: You must have thought very hard, what can I say?

EY: Well, I had to while I was eating, you know. It's like once in a while you have inspiration. That was the only time. [laughs] That crew that was with me, they were a little astonished. It was always fun. I was [unclear] Washington the other day before some committee. And all these Washington types were there, and they thought I didn't know what I was doing. But since I was the president-elect of the association, chairman of this committee and that, they had to let me testify. [laughs]

The hardworking, intensive, bright people--[pause]

LS: You mean the sort of management types.

EY: Yeah.

LS: I know what you mean.

EY: Well, that's the School for Workers.

LS: I was just reading Fayette Elwell, some remarks he made about the School for Workers.

EY: Oh, yes. Fay. Fay worked so hard to prevent the management [unclear] from supporting, see, Bob Fleming was brought here in '48 to head up an institute for industrial relations which would bring management and labor together. And Fay worked very hard to make sure that the management side didn't support that.

LS: But he didn't succeed.

EY: Yes he did. Bob left and went to Illinois.

LS: So it was set up?

EY: I kept it going afterwards. But we changed the direction from having labor management meetings in cooperation with conferences. We turned it into a research institute. Then later on it got turned into a degree granting, but no, he succeeded. Russ Mobley was his henchman in those days.

LS: Who was he?

EY: Well, he was a music teacher who came her during the war with some training program, and stayed on to run the management institute. He and Fay had a falling out. But he's now retired, but teaching part time at Sheboygan Center. Interesting character. Well, [unclear] about these things. That School for Workers. There was a Finnish girl there who was so loyal to Ulrickson. Just a fine girl. And to the labor movement. And she would have done anything she could 00:17:00to sabotage me. I knew she was doing it, and yet I sympathized with her. My sympathies were really with Ulrickson.

LS: You said that.

EY: These things happen. Well, what else is on your mind?

LS: Well, I was going to ask about in the Department of Economics, the chairman is, the university was getting more and more crowded. [Sterling?] about the commerce building, how you, whether you tried to, I know Elwell wanted to have the Department of Economics remain part of the college.

EY: But they never got much support for it. The department certainly didn't want it, and the college didn't want it. See Elwell, part of his problem was they 00:18:00were part of Letters & Science for a long time. And he wanted a separate school, but the faculty voted against it. But the regents overruled the faculty. Elwell was a very able man. And I think, I don't know, the records get so confused. But the story I have, and I suspect there could be a little truth to it, along about the first world war, there was a shortage of teaching staff, and he was just got his bachelors somewhere. He was a brilliant, and they asked him to teach.

Then at the end of the war, he thought he had, go on and get a higher degree. And they said, "You don't need that. You don't need that to teach what you're teaching. We don't care." And so he didn't get a higher degree, which he could have gotten without any trouble. But it was always, he always had that feeling that they looked down on him because he didn't have it.

LS: Yeah.

EY: And he cultivated the more conservative business people. And so, but then 00:19:00when he wanted to have his own school separate, the Letters & Science people voted against it. And the university faculty voted him down. So he had an anti, I read the manuscript--

LS: I assumed you probably had.

EY: I think I've only read two. That's one of them. And after reading that, I decided that these aren't worth much, because Fay was just repeating all the old, his old resentments against the university, which he had. But I don't think he should be underestimated.

I had some run-ins with him when I was chairman of the Economics Department. One day somebody came down and he had made some reference to "those communists in the Economics Department."

So I went right up and pounded the table in his face and said, "Now you either put up or shut up."

Well, that he respected.

LS: That would have gotten to him, I guess. The way he taught. I gather.

EY: Yeah. But too many good, able people respected him, not to discount him in 00:20:00the business community and so on. He's still alive. But he's blind and very ill. I think the last time he was out he came to our house to lunch. Some affair I had for some business people of his age, and people who had been helpful to the university in giving money. And he's always crotchety and complaining. But he had character. God, I like the people with character.

LS: Well, did you object to the interview because it presented him, a quarrelsome side of him that you felt was under, under--

EY: No. No, I thought what he was doing was just, I didn't learn anything new. He sort of repeated his complaints against the university. That's about all, that's about all it was, wasn't it?

LS: He described the process, actually it was quite interesting to me in view of looking at the building program of how he got the Congress money, which 00:21:00apparently didn't go through the building committee. Apparently there was some spare money lying around. I don't think that happened very often.

EY: No. No. No. See, he always worked outside the university, around it. So this influence with the regents or something. That might have been-- But I knew that anyway.

LS: See, you know that. But that's [unclear]

EY: Yeah. Yeah. But no, I didn't, it's all right. I wasn't objecting to it. But he didn't tell me much I didn't know. But I thought he was rather querulous.

LS: He was. Amazingly so.

EY: Mm hmm.

LS: Well, I suppose, well, when you became chairman of economics, towards the end of the '50s--

EY: You mean when [unclear] or it must have been '54.

LS: Well, you were chairman '54 to '61.

EY: Yeah.

LS: But what I'm interested in is there was a growing, apparently Harrington and 00:22:00[Foteus?] and Sewell and the others were concerned about money for the social sciences and the humanities and putting on a fair amount of pressure. I know you were involved in the [unclear] project at this time. And I would like to talk to you about that sometime. I hope you will.

EY: The best source of information is Lisa [Targill?].

LS: Well, yes, but you know, I've interviewed her. You mean I should go again and get some more.

EY: Oh, you've already done that. Oh, yes, that's right, of course, we went over this thing.

LS: Yes.

EY: But sometime I'll, but she's very accurate.

LS: Yes. Well you see at the time, I wasn't planning to go into the thing. I didn't know enough to really get full information. But what I'm interested in is whether you, as chairman of the Economics Department, were concerned in this, about this feeling that there wasn't enough money going into the social sciences.

EY: Well, there wasn't enough money going to economics. And I got quite, I got 00:23:00money from Ford Foundation. And then I got money from the WARF.

LS: Oh, did you get money from WARF?

EY: A hundred thousand dollars to start the, to bring Guy Orcutt on the [unclear] business.

LS: I was going to ask you about that, yes.

EY: Oh, yes. I did that.

LS: You did that.

EY: Well, I got it through the graduate school. And they gave it to me because [Connie?] didn't think that I could get him. He thought he could gamble a hundred thousand. [laughter]

LS: He thought the money was safe, because Orcutt wouldn't come.

EY: Yes. Sure. Well, that's what I believe. I can't prove that. But I think I know the game.

LS: Well where did the, what made you think of doing it? Was it you yourself? Or were others saying, "Look, let's see if we can get some good people?"

EY: Well, we had a, back up and think about it, we had a very difficult problem because the people who had made the name for the department all were retiring. 00:24:00Witte, Perlman, Groves getting on, and [Les Goodyear?], [Glazier?] and [Commons?] had died, you see. And so we were slipping into becoming a third-rate department. And I was the most junior person with tenure in the department. And [Martin?] had raised so much hell with Witte. And he forced Groves out in collusion with the Cap Times, which is one of the dirtiest pieces of business that ever happened.

LS: I've been told I should ask you about Morton.

EY: Well, don't ask me too much. But anyway, nobody could be chairman because he couldn't resist being a Machiavellian, always plotting and threatening and conniving, just the nature of the man. And he could be very extraordinarily charming, and bright. But a troublemaker. And he and [unclear] got to the point 00:25:00where the department was just torn apart.

And so they turned to me. Not because they thought I had any particular qualities, but they could agree on me, because I didn't have any enemies particularly. I'm sure Walter supported me because he thought I'd do what he told me to. And a lot of people thought that I was easy to influence. I was.

But one of the by-products was, and the department was badly torn, Walt was, the senior people rallied around. And if we could agree on a program, they'd support it. And I had people who [unclear] ideas. Jim Earley suggested some people to bring in. We got Pete Steiner from Berkeley, and Pete had ideas. And we'd talk 00:26:00it over. And a group of bright people come up with things. I wasn't, there was no one person who was the architect of it. But I was the person who did it, in a sense, because I had a little more, well, a different, I suppose they were scholars who were interested in what they were doing and saw themselves. And I had a different, I looked at the department more as a whole, and what could I do. So I was able to get some money out of Ford.

LS: I thought it was [Printingham?] for Orcutt.

EY: Oh, that was WARF for Orcutt. But maybe some [Briggingham?] money, too. But 00:27:00before that, I got a grant of seventy-five thousand from Ford to use, a discretionary fund.

LS: I see. This was prior to the [Gajamato?] grant.

EY: Oh, yes. This had nothing to do with [Gajamato?].

LS: No, I know. But I mean--

EY: Yes.

LS: You said they were both from Ford.

EY: Yes. I think it was. I'm not sure. You'd have to look up the dates. But they're complete separate, from different divisions. One was, the second--

LS: Yes, I see that. But--

EY: They had nothing to do with each other.

LS: Oh, I see. One would have been from perhaps--

EY: The economics section.

LS: --the development program.

EY: And one was the international section. Completely different.

LS: One was a fellowship. I see. So it wasn't, Mike Harris had nothing to do with that.

EY: No. Nothing at all to do with that. No. So they were quite separate things.

LS: Were they giving money to other, all over the country?

EY: To several schools. And apply for it and make a case.

LS: Oh, I seem to remember that. I used to work, I was working for Ford Foundation at that time. Yeah. Okay.

EY: In those days, they had more confidence in people. They were less eager to direct than they are now. Now they want--

LS: So they said, "Here's money, and do what you want."

EY: Well, yeah, if you had some ideas. And that money was the most useful money, because I spent it over and over again. I'd use it to pledge, somebody was applying for a grant. They wanted to plan, I'd pledge them the money, and then I'd take it back when they got the grant. I spent it over and over again.

LS: Oh, yes.

EY: I was a fairly good manager of small sums. It's the big ones that get me down. [laughter] When you've got 700 million or something like that, that's impossible. But anyway, that's, and so we got, but it was a, outside of Walter Morton, the department really pulled together very well. People who had been arguing, fighting, quarreling with each other, one of the things that happens, I think, very often, as academics get older, they tend to be competitive and are more interested in their students and their disciples than they are in each 00:29:00other. They pull apart. If you think of a department. I don't know what the history department--

LS: That's true.

EY: But I suspect it's so. But the one thing they would agree, they'd just make, they just delivered from all kinds, so I had the greatest support. And we finally had to do, finish Morton off. And when that was done, we were on our way.

LS: Was that the trip up to Fred, the whole Economics Department?

EY: Mm hmm. That was the day. And the person who turned the tide was Blackie Ellsworth. Paul Ellsworth. Who'd been a great supporter of Morton's, and a theorist and so on.

LS: Well why did he turn the tide?

EY: Because he said it's time for us to be honest and face up to what this man's doing to us.

LS: Was it a sort of paranoid, I gather Howard Becker did the same thing in sociology.

EY: Yeah. Well, Walter's paranoid. Yes he was. Well, one episode, you know, 00:30:00there are so many things, and memory is so selective. But shortly after he became chairman, Mr. Perlman, who was my major professor, and even when I was an assistant professor, I acted as his assistant because he needed somebody. And I enjoyed a tremendous amount, being around a very great intellect, that was a great joy.

He said to me, he said, "I can't stand it. I've got to vote with Walter on everything."

I said, "Why is that?"

He said, "Well, he comes over to my house every night, and he beats on me until I agree to tell you what to do."

I said, "I can protect you."

He said, "How are you going to do that?"

I said, "We're going to have an understanding. From now on, on departmental matters, I'll never pay the least attention to anything you say. And once Walter discovers that, he'll not bother you anymore." It hurt the old man, but he had to come [unclear], you see. If he couldn't stand up, it was tough. But those 00:31:00were the kind of things that happened.

Harold Gross is prince in all this. He always was. He was great. There's a very great man.

LS: And you say he was, what was the term? He was thrown out, or gotten away?

EY: Yes, but, see, Walter had an alliance--[pause] Right at the end of the war, Harold was chairman of the department. And he got some money from the CED, Committee for Economic Development, to do a tax study. So Walter got the Cap Times, front page stories to attack him for taking money from the interest and trying to sell out to the business interests and all this. I mean this is something you look in the papers and check on.

LS: Yes.

EY: Because, and it was bad that Harold felt he had to resign. For a while, the dean was chairman of the department.

Now one of the side lights of this was that as near as I could tell, no matter 00:32:00how these people quarreled amongst themselves, they never let it affect the graduate students. One man never took it out on anybody else's students. I never knew of a case. They were very honorable, all of them, in spite of their differences, on that respect.

LS: That's an interesting point.

EY: I think it's an important point. Now there may be something I don't know about. But to my knowledge, it never happened. The students didn't suffer. Sometimes they knew some things were going on, and they might have thought something was going to happen, or felt threatened. But to my knowledge, it never happened.

LS: And I gather Warden, although I gather he was not, I mean, that he was perhaps not a popular teacher, but that he was, people do take his classes, and were interested in what he had to say.

EY: Oh, yes. Well, he was chairman of the theory committee. No one dared not take his classes.

LS: Oh.

EY: And he would give them a very hard time in class. But when it came to grading, he never took umbrage, never took any--the students never knew whether 00:33:00he read their papers or not, but they took his course because they were afraid he would--

LS: I see. So this wasn't because, actually Ted Wharton would say that he heard about [unclear]

EY: Actually for a semester, it was very entertaining. Because he was a very skillful critic. He used to refer to Keynesian economics as plumbing economics. After a while, kind of it is kind of--

LS: You must have all had your work cut out for you. Sort of setting things right.

EY: Well, it was impossible. The hardest job I ever had. And if it hadn't been for Walter Morton, I wouldn't be sitting here.

LS: I gather, [unclear] but I've heard that you held the Economics Department together.

EY: Yes.

LS: Was there a reason [unclear]

EY: Well not only did we hold it together, but with some help, we built--

LS: I mean you made it, you built it, yeah. But you say you solved it, it wasn't that you got rid of him, but that he calmed down. Or isn't that--

EY: Well, we ostracized him, really. Just said we aren't going to pay attention 00:34:00to him anymore. [unclear] And he's been, he's just friendly now, cheerful when I see him. He's just active. He's still making money. He's a consultant for private utilities. He's marvelous on adverse cross examination, because he ridicules the opposition. He's very clever, extraordinarily clever man.

LS: You know, it would be [unclear] to ask you how many people there are at any one time. I know that the Botany Department had, whether over an individual, but there were similar [unclear] having a dean as a chairman in the soc department, and economics. This must go on from one department to another.

EY: Well, there's always some department that's at the lower end of the range. [laughs]

LS: But I mean with a person who is, for some reason, really creating havoc.

EY: Yes. Yes. Yes.

LS: And there's nothing you can do about it much.

EY: See, democracy is a very fragile thing. University governance really depends on a sense of live and let live, to allow the other person to do something. But if you spend your time at it, you can raise a lot of havoc. If you look at a faculty senate, the [unclear] people there, I won't name here, but keep most of the turmoil there.

LS: Yeah.

EY: And they don't add much to the intellectual life of the place, besides. In my narrow view. [laughs] I'm talking about there in their own fields.

LS: Yes. Well, oh, you were talking about the Ford money.

EY: Yes.

LS: And getting Guy Orcutt.

EY: Well, see, we decided, Peter Steiner, I think, was the one who had this idea, that we ought to get somebody in econometrics. Some first class person. 00:36:00Because we didn't have much strength. And we talked somehow, somebody got the notion that Guy Orcutt might be restless at Harvard. So I went to Harvard and saw Sumner Slichter. Sumner Slichter, his father had been the dean here. Sumner always had great affection for this place. And I was in labor relations, so I went and visited with him. And I told him about our problems. And he said, "Well, we ought to get somebody." And he named, he said, "Somebody like Dorfman or Orcutt, or somebody like that." But he said, "Of course you can't get one of those, because they're at Harvard. And nobody's going to leave Harvard and go to Wisconsin." He said, "I might if I were younger, but these people aren't."

And I said, That's very interesting. But maybe I'd visit with them and talk, get their advice. So I visited with Brown and talked to Orcutt. Talked to him about his ambitions. He was an associate professor that they hadn't promoted quite fast enough. [laughs] You see how? So he wasn't as happy. And he had this vision, a model of the American economy. Well, I'm not smart enough to know too much about modeling. But I had a feeling when he talked about it that the pieces he needed to put that together were so important to economics that whether it all came together whole or the bridge didn't quite get there, we still would have it. So I was quite enthusiastic. Came back. Then talked to our people. We 00:38:00asked for, I asked, in those days, a hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money from the graduate school. So I asked the graduate school for a hundred thousand dollars. And the story I have, and this is only second hand, because I wasn't there. That they met with the regents in Milwaukee and said, "Well, we've been accused of not giving money to the social sciences. And you know, Ed Young's pushing and he thinks he's going to do all this. Now obviously he isn't going to get that man. And so we can offer them money." And so they did. [laughs] And I got the man.

And then Guy was tremendous person, went, recruited some people, went to Ford and got a lot of money, too. And then we went on from there. And after that, the second half of that money was built with grant money that we got.

LS: That was social sciences?

EY: Social science research thing. So that whole story is fun. But there was one episode in it that really shows, that was kind of fun. In 1955, '56, I was a Ford fellow. I took a leave and went to Brussels. Because I was interested in some international things. And during that year, they used my salary to bring Bob Lampman as a visitor from Washington. And of course Bob was, everybody knew was tremendous. We'd been fellow graduate students. And he was certainly one of, if not the outstanding, he probably was the outstanding one of our group.

And so we tried to get him to stay. But he went back. But then, whatever year it was that Orcutt came, the Economics Association meetings were in Philadelphia. I didn't go that year for some reason. Bob called me on the phone, woke me up in 00:40:00the middle of the night and said, "Ed, I've heard what you're doing there and I guess I'm ready, I've talked to Guy Orcutt and I'm ready to come back." So I offered him a tenured position on the phone.

LS: [laughter] Without any of the money or anything.

EY: No money. No approval of the department. Should have been fired for that. But I was on pretty sure ground, because Bob was--[noise] go by oddly planning, very oddly. You have to know where you want to come out at. But so much of it is chance and timing, enthusiasm of people. Good, you know.

LS: So what did you do then? How did you get the money?

EY: For Lampman?

LS: Yeah.

EY: I can't even remember. Probably hired fewer teaching assistants, did something. Those were the years budgets were growing, you know. Money wasn't, money for one's salary, we thought maybe we had a position for one year so we 00:41:00could plan ahead, something like that. That sort of thing I could do quicker. I always had my Ford money. I could throw it on the line if I had to.

LS: Yeah.

EY: So that was an exciting time.

LS: Yes. It must have been. And did you, were you consciously working? Or did you talk with Sewell and Harrington? Did you all share a feeling that you've got to keep pushing?

EY: Oh, yes, yes, indeed. And Bill was the leader in pushing. He was one of, he chaired a committee in pushing for social science support. And when Harrington was assistant vice president at some stage, he was helpful. He was working with Mr. Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin's always very helpful, too.

LS: He was.

EY: Oh, I always thought so. I used to go see Mr. Fred about something, stay for 00:42:00an hour with him. And at the end, I'd be so frustrated with him, with horse racing in Virginia and all the things he talked about except the subject. So I'd finally go down the hall and I'd say, "Mr. Bowman, I don't care anymore. Just put me out of my misery. Tell me yes or no." [laughter]

LS: And he did.

EY: He did. Because he was the man who knew. He was the, action man is the wrong word for Mr. Baldwin. But he was the one who kept steady things, things steady and organized together. Never got in a, never got appropriate credit. Although later on, the university gave him an honorary degree for his work in Indonesia, which was very outstanding.

LS: And that's just a small part of it, then.

EY: Yes.

LS: Of what he did.

EY: That was after he retired. But he's been under, the things he did in those years, [unclear]. But there was some resentment around. Because the biologists had control of the whole place. Fred and Baldwin were bacteriologists, and [Connie?] was a biochemist. And they kept the hands on everything. That's how it appeared.

LS: I've heard a great deal about that.

EY: Yes. And I was one of the young Turks who didn't think this was appropriate.

LS: I wondered. I was going to ask you, and didn't know whether you would say that or not.

EY: Why sure! Why not say it? It's true. [laughter]

LS: Who knows how diplomatic you might think you should be.

EY: Oh, I'm not, I'm too old to be diplomatic. These things are, there's nothing very serious about that. We had the same thing last time we picked a chancellor at Madison. The physical scientists till [hell wouldn't have it?] to make sure they got one of their own. We got a good one. But they were not going to let anything happen to [unclear]. I mean, they thought it was their turn. Groups feel that way, you know. I don't know why, but they do.

LS: Evidently in choosing the dean after Elvehjem became president, John [Willard?], there was a very strong push to get somebody who would at least pay a bit of attention to social science.

EY: Yes.

LS: Were you in on this? Do you remember? Helen White was head of the committee.

EY: No. I wasn't very active in that. I was active in the associate deanship business.

LS: What do you mean?

EY: Well, when we were looking for associate dean, I was one of the people that they interviewed, pretending it was for some other reason. It was when [Clovius?] was picked.

LS: Oh, I see.

EY: Because I think Mr. Fred felt an ag man would be safer.

LS: Oh. Even though ag had had all the offices up to then.

EY: Yeah. But of course--

LS: Safer?

EY: It could have been on merit, too. It's just possible. Sometimes things are on merit. And actually [Clovius?] in some ways, I was chairman. I wasn't about to give up the chairmanship to do it anyway. So it was not a question of my being disappointed. But I was amused by the operation.

LS: Mm hmm. You mean not telling you what you were being [unclear]

EY: Yes. [laughs]

LS: Did you know at the time?

EY: Yes. Yes, I knew.

LS: Well could you talk a bit about the planning for the building, the social sciences building? Because that was a very bitter affair. And I--

EY: Oh, yes. Nothing bores me as much as the building program, actually. So I never, I did what I had to do, but I paid as little attention to it. Now let me see if I can reconstruct it. But Kurt Wendt is the best source of information, because he's always the most--

LS: Well, I'm interested to know what you felt about it. I know some of the facts about it.

EY: Okay. Well let me tell you what I felt about it.

LS: All right.

EY: There was a plan where there would be a building, which economics and law would share.

LS: Economics and law? Not sociology and law.

EY: Not sociology and law. And the dean of the law school at the time , this is what I believe, decided to get rid of--no, wait a minute. The priority list was 00:46:00a social science building. That's it. The dean of the law school, without consulting us, or at least I didn't know anything about it, cooked up a deal with sociology that the building priority would go to law and sociology, and economics would be shut out. And they got the thing going along beautifully. And then suddenly out of the, all the [unclear] they discovered you couldn't have a combined sociology and law school. They were just too bad, but sociology had to be pushed out.

LS: [laughs] You mean after sociology helped them get their priority in.

EY: Yes. Now remember, this is my version. And don't, I'm very shaky, what I believe, but I've spent, I don't go spend a lot of time digging up what happened, because plenty happening now. But anyway, that's what I, so I then moved in and said, "Look, not only did you steal our priority and give it to the 00:47:00law school, but now you've knocked the sociology out and we're entitled to a building."

LS: Well you're talking to [Kurt Wedder?], the--

EY: I'm talking to the administration. And anybody I could get a hold of. And they were a little contrite. Because we really, see, the sociologists got double crossed. Now we would have gotten some space out of, because sociology left the building, but not that much. So that was the basis. And then came the big argument about where to put it. And we were told we could have it over here or nowhere. And then came the whole row about [Bascom?] Woods. And all the virgin trees we were cutting down. Nobody bothered to walk out there and see the concrete that had been dumped there over the years where the old road used to be. that wasn't [unclear] woods at all. But we had the [unclear] that was first, I remember meeting one dowager woman from town, and she said, "Why are you insisting on building your building on Picnic Point?"

And I said, "How did you know that we were putting a building on Picnic Point?"

She said, "I read the Capital Times every day." [laughter]

But anyway, it was quite a row. But it got resolved. And undying line was drawn beyond which no building will ever go. And it's all to the good.

And then I was chairman of the building committee.

LS: Oh, you were. This was as chairman of the department.

EY: Yes.

LS: This was before you were dean.

EY: Yes. And then, so we had endless meetings. And of course the whole building committee scheme was a crazy one. All the people on the committee who never participated in the building before and never will again, they deal with the state but not directly, and through intermediaries. And so it's amazing that the buildings aren't worse than they are.

LS: You mean they can't really know what they could have or would suit them.

EY: No, they don't know nothing. or they try to reproduce some building they've seen somewhere, or they had last time, or something.

LS: Yeah. I should think that would be, especially with people who had--

EY: Oh, look this place is a monument to mistakes! First of all, architects aren't to be trusted. Because they're not interested in making something better; they're interested in designing something different. And then the pressure comes on them to get more space than they've got money for. So they cheat on the insulation. They put in sealed windows and all the things we've got. Bascom is such a lovely building, and functional, compared with anything they've built since. [laughs] I feel very bitter about this. But I'm not really enamored of our system building.

LS: Well if you aren't, why haven't you done something about it?

EY: We aren't going to build anymore, so why get excited about something that's past? The building's behind us. And besides that, I was always more interested 00:50:00in programs than in the buildings. And as chancellor, I had Kurt Wendt to steer the building things for me. And he did a superb job.

LS: So you don't think it was the Campus Planning Committee that was behind this. It was what the state architects were [unclear]

EY: You mean the mistakes.

LS: Yeah.

EY: It's the way the state picks architects, and the kinds of building committees we had. Faculty, and the combination of, see, the architect is picked not by any competition, but it takes turns passing it around. And we had no choice over the architects, usually. And if we did, we didn't know enough to pick them, you see? So we never, no lesson, look at Helen White, one of the more recent ones, it looks like a parking ramp. Look here. They stuck four floors on top of a building without putting any extra elevators in. That was the building commission did that at the last minute. [unclear]

LS: [Jerris Leonard?]

EY: Yeah. Yep. So, I'm not, you know, it's not one of the things that really interests me very much, the building.

LS: You say that. And that's what Mark Ingraham said, too. But I don't know if you read my letter. Did you read my letter to you in which I quoted from [David Thelman?] about the fact that whoever makes the decisions about buildings has a big say in how the campus [unclear] Maybe I should have asked you. Do you agree with that or not?

EY: No. Not entirely.

LS: Maybe you don't.

EY: No. Not that much. Has some influence. One of the interesting things I've always noticed is how much energy the ag school always put into building programs. They're always asking for a great deal. Recently I just had a whole spate of letters from every ag group in the state supporting, they wind up the machinery and the apparatus and all that. But that wasn't, you know, I sometimes ask my friends how much their productivity went up when they moved from a little 00:52:00hole in the wall over to this building.

LS: Yes. And they say not at all.

EY: Oh, they don't, won't say that. But obviously there's not much they can say because--

LS: I've heard a good deal of complaint about the difference between being in Bascom, especially in being in Van Hise.

EY: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't think it makes that much difference, you see. But it's a constant problem. Now for the scientists, the laboratory scientists, it does. But there again, it's very stupid. Because in the chemistry building, there's lots of wasted space because the chemists who use labs insist on having the same number of square feet as those who--I mean, the ones who didn't use labs, same number of square feet as those who did for their--they each had two offices. One, their private lab. It's just a waste.

LS: This must be Hugh Richardson said that what you ought to do is compare what people in chemistry had here and what they had on other campuses, instead of what they had compared to what physics had, or what--

EY: Mm hmm. Well from here, we tried to get them to be, [McArdle?] was done beautifully from a point of view of money and efficiency. I'm not talking about the outside of it. That's a matter of taste. But Hugh [unclear] worked at that in a scientific way. Tried to get the chemists to look at it. They said they couldn't. They weren't interested in looking at that. That was on eight-foot modules. They had to have ten. Why did they have to have ten? Well, because one man had a machine that was ten feet long, or some damned foolishness.

The day they opened the first chemistry building, [Newell?], I was dean. They came in, they said, well before they opened it, they had to have $100,000 to remodel it. I said, "My God, you haven't [unclear] it yet. What do you need--" Those days, that was like saying four hundred thousand now or something.

"Well, the chairman of the building committee made a lot of mistakes. You know he's not very bright." Or something like that.

I said, "Well why's he chairman of the building committee?"

He said, "Well, we didn't have anything else for him to do."

They would deny it now, but the man would do that to me. He had, it turned out, 00:54:00I discovered later, some very difficult psychiatric problems. So they made him chairman of the building committee.

LS: That happens all too often. [laughter]

EY: I don't know. I don't know. So a whole bunch of experiences. They built that math building, you know, with windows that sealed, and the sun baking in there, cooking them. So then they have to go and spend hundreds of thousands putting air conditioning in. It's that kind of stuff. So we didn't have a very good system.

Now the state gave us lots of buildings. And it said we didn't know enough.

LS: But that must be construction. I mean surely somebody around should be knowledgeable enough.

EY: Well--our planning construction people aren't architects. They never learned 00:55:00anything, either. I mean, they were living by the standards of architects, which is to get a new idea. Try a new concept, you see, rather than here's something that works. Now they aren't all like that. I'm exaggerating, of course. But I think it's a fascinating subject. But it's one in which I became very unhappy very early. Not because of any personal experience. Oh, only one. When I was on the building committee years ago, I had tried to get some shelters for, bus shelters. I talked about bus shelters. And Ed Sewell would always say well, you couldn't do that. Well, why not? Well, they might be used for immoral purposes. I said, you're out of your mind. [laughter] Or whatever. He was determined there 00:56:00wouldn't be, because they didn't fit into his concept. And he frustrated me.

When I was chancellor, I passed the word, unless we get some bus shelters, somebody's going to get fired. I had no intention of firing anybody. I never fired anybody in my life. But I finally got some bus shelters.

LS: Bless you for that. Anybody who's waiting for the bus--

EY: But they're not good enough! That isn't what I wanted. [both talking] I wanted a closed, heated place where people could go and sit and read for half an hour and not mind waiting for the bus, and be warm. And I'm going to get it!

LS: Well, I wish you would.

EY: But that was the kind of things. I wasn't asking for much.

LS: No. That's probably true.

EY: But all this talking about students now environmentalists, how they're opposed to cars and so on, the representatives, when we had a proposal about fifteen years ago to limit the cars and the parking in order to enhance the 00:57:00public transportation, it was the student leaders who joined with the parking, the car proponents in saying by God, not only should there be parking for the faculty, but we've got to have parking, too.

LS: Oh. I was thinking of the cars on campus. But that was 1953 or so, '63. When they were going to ban cars from Bascom Hill. Do you remember that?

EY: Oh, yes, we went through that. See, we tried it. We had Bascom closed for a while.

LS: Yes. Right.

EY: But it doesn't work, because you've got to have the buses in wintertime. We found it that the cost of running the buses around the hill was tremendous.

LS: Oh, really?

EY: Oh, yes. You see, the buses get paid by the hour. And the difference was the difference between, was a tremendous difference in the cost of the--

LS: I had no, you see, what I heard was that somebody had, somebody had, the secretary of the regents had gone to the old rules and discovered that you had 00:58:00to have access to all buildings at all time.

EY: To this drive out here.

LS: Yeah.

EY: But the reason we didn't fight that, really, that was under the condition, that wasn't the condition in which we accepted that drive. That was the old pleasure drive association with Madison gave us the drive, [Willows Drive?] and the whole thing. But actually the statistics, the cost, would have made it very difficult. See if we'd, running the buses, not going over Bascom, that period, we lost an awful lot of money on those buses.

LS: That's fascinating.

EY: So both reasons were involved. But the economic one. See the difficulty with this place is, in part, the bicyclists are not as vehement as they were, but they want everything turned into a bicycle path. That works until Thanksgiving. But from Thanksgiving to April, you have to have cars and buses. And so, for instance now with the handicapped rules, you couldn't close the drive. The most 00:59:00vocal group we've got, probably, to the numbers, is the handicapped. And they have to park up next to Bascom, and rightly so. So there's no, now you could get, we could get special legislation, which would limit it to buses. I think the legal side could be solved. But the financial side would be very difficult. But it seems to have quieted down for the time being. It will get stirred up again one day.

LS: You mean the cars and parking business.

EY: The cars versus no cars, and so on. But the important thing is having the buses, I think.

LS: Who was responsible for that?

EY: Buses system? I would guess somewhere behind that is Kurt Wendt's hand. Most of the good things around here that happened around campus planning and building some things are Kurt Wendt, sooner or later. One thing he's failed to do, succeed in, is get the University Avenue moved south.

LS: I was going to ask you about that. That's a most interesting issue.

EY: Well I just know, I would love to have it happen. But the city would never agree to it. See, we saved the space down there to do it. But [John Bunch of ?], and then the people downtown, there weren't, and whether it was practical or not, I don't know. But anyway, it would have been a nice thing to have done.

LS: So you think, you think Kurt--well, I could talk to him. I had heard that he felt that there wasn't any possibility and didn't even fight for it.

EY: For what?

LS: For having, well, I guess, no this is the other, having university [depressed?]

EY: Oh, that. I don't know that he fought for that because of the water level. Lake water level. You've got to worry about that. Where are you going to--

LS: That didn't, I see, no, I hadn't--

EY: You hadn't thought of that.

LS: Well, I've been reading so much--

EY: Well you look out here. That level is that. How far down can you go before you strike water? I don't know. Not very far.

LS: What a simple reason for not having it. I thought it was just too much money. I've talked to several people about it and they all said it cost too much.

EY: Well, I don't know. Ask Kurt about it. But that was, why would that be in my mind as a reason?

LS: Yeah. It must be.

EY: What if it's not? Kurt would, wanted to do something much better than that. And that was to have it go down along Regent Street, where we saved the land for years to put it down there. And have it [unclear] go down [unclear] Terrace to [Row?]

LS: [Clovius?] thinks that's his idea. Or he told [me?], that's what he--

EY: Well, the first document, the first person who, it's in the document that I've seen about changing pattern here was Kurt Wendt's undergraduate thesis. That was part of [Clovius?]. But a lot of people joined up with different 01:02:00versions of it. Ideas always have a number of authors.

LS: I'll have to go and look at it.

EY: Or talk to him about it. Because my experience with Kurt is he's very, very accurate.

LS: Well, you might as well, on this Social Sciences Building, I do wonder about whether the back of it was planned at the same time as the front because it seems to be sort of obtrusive compared to the classroom part, the research building.

EY: Yeah, I don't recall that it was.

LS: Well, I know it wasn't built at the same time, but [words unclear].

EY: I don't think, I can't recall the planning of, see, remember, right in the middle of this building, before it really got, I don't know how far along it was. I can't even remember. I went off to Pakistan --

LS: They started building in 1960.

EY: Yes. You see, and before it was finished, I was off to Pakistan. And when I came back, I was dean, '61. So, uh, but I don't remember. I don't, my, I don't believe it was planned at the time. Certainly, I didn't know, think --

LS: Anyway, it's not an issue. It's, I just, I guess, I just made it up myself.

EY: No. The issue was putting a building there at all.

LS: Yep.

EY: But we were told, it's there or nowhere.

LS: Well, when you were in Sterling, how did you feel about having all the money given for the wing for the Army Math Research Center? Because I gather that everybody was very proud of Sterling and, uh --

EY: Never occurred to have any feeling at all except that money was given by WARF for that purpose, and we wanted to get the Math Research, the University 01:04:00wanted the Math Research Center. I didn't care very much either way. But, I never, it never was an issue to my knowledge. I couldn't even tell you now when that was built.

LS: It was about, it was 1956.

EY: Yes. Rudolph Langer was [word unclear] first director and was pushing. He was the one who got the Math Research Center. It was quite a coup to get it because a lot of people were competing for it.

LS: I gather so, and that building at the Math Department, and it also meant a lot of, what is the money called when . . .

EY: The overhead?

LS: Yes, but there's another term, more of a term --

EY: Indirect.

LS: Indirect?

EY: Costs, yeah, well --

LS: Direct reimbursement.

EY: Yes, but that, it we don't make any money off that.

LS: We did then.

EY: Maybe for a short time, but by and large, taken University-wide, we don't. 01:05:00That may have been for a short time, but the real asset was to have money to hire these first-class mathematicians who would come, and then we could track them to the Math Department. That was the real thing.

LS: Uh-huh.

EY: And some fellowships, so it really enhanced the quality of the mathematics around here, and it also led, helped not only math but computing and statistics very greatly. I think George Box came in the, didn't he come in the Math Research Center first? I think so, George Box, who became the first chairman of the Statistics Department.

LS: I don't know him.

EY: Son-in-law, by the way of Mr. Fischer, of Fischer's law, a great statistician [words unclear] statistician.

LS: [words unclear]. I do, were you on the Research Committee? I sort of trying to go into things on your pre-deanship.

EY: No. No.

LS: Hmm. Never? That's surprising.

EY: Never.

LS: So I won't ask you anything about that. I am, I would be interested in your 01:06:00version of how, of the first Elvehjem's getting to be president and then Harrington. I know Harrington was the candidate of some people.

EY: Well, at that time, allegiance, when Mr. Fred announced his retirement, set up a advisory committee to the regents and selection. And it was made of two parts, an administrative side, and a faculty side. Oh, and administrative side with a dean's on it, the dean's side. And then there was the faculty side. Connie Elvehjem was chairman of the dean's group, and I was, as chairman of the University Committee, chairman of the faculty side. So we had two committees, but we met jointly.

LS: Uh-huh.

EY: And we had, and we met with the regents. Now I remember that first meeting 01:07:00with the regents, which Matt Werner who had been around for a long time, said, well, you know, this time we'd better, you know, we should level with the faculty.

That made an impression on me that sometimes they might not have. And I haven't checked into what happened when Mr. Fred was made president. But anyway, that was the beginning. We had lots of names, and at every, almost every meeting, Connie would give us a lecture on all it take is somebody willing to make up his mind, make a decision. That's all it takes to be a president. About, after about the third meeting, we made these remarks, I got him aside and said, Connie, you're so obviously the candidate. Why don't you get off the committee?

LS: Oh.

EY: Because Connie, wonderful man, did you ever know him?

LS: No.

EY: Oh, he was a very great scientist. His contribution in rickets and things, very great. But he had been graduate dean, out of, the graduate dean is very decisive, especially in those days. But he got to decide who gets the money. He hands it out to them. And they take it. And I think that's decisiveness. And the other place he'd been decisive, he had these graduate students, and they would have to be there at 7:00 in the morning, and lined up and told them what to do, and they did it. So -- well, I'm not being exact. I'm exaggerating, but, you know, there's some of this to it, as I observed it. Well, anyway, it soon emerged there were really two serious candidates, Harrington and, and, and, uh, Elvehjem.

And we, I made, very careful that we didn't try to, by this time, I was the 01:09:00chairman of the group, the Faculty Advisory Group. And we met with regents two, three times, and I made sure we didn't rate, do any rating. But they wanted several candidates. So we just added two more people. I've even forgotten who they were. But when we met, I remember what Charlie did. Charlie Gelatt was one of the regents. He says, you insult us by bringing in those other names. He didn't think much of the people we brought in. And I can't remember at the moment who they were. But I didn't, I wasn't, we weren't serious about them either. By, I think a very narrow vote, they selected Elvehjem.

LS: Yes, I gathered it was a narrow vote. So and it was they who voted.

EY: Oh, the decision was made, yes, the decision was made not by the committee.

LS: Uh-huh.

EY: The committee would have been split too. It was against, the scientific community against the social science.

LS: So what I should, that would be something to interview some of those regents 01:10:00about. Well, it's just --

EY: It depends on you know --

LS: But since there had been so many science all along, you would've thought would've been ready to have a --

EY: Well, remember, the distinction of this University in a large part came from that Ag School and the biologists. They're basic scientists. They're not agriculturalists. You know, that's, the Nobel Prize, that's where they come from. Look at the biochemistry, and so there was, there's that side to it. So, and most businessmen were a little suspicious of social scientists, who they called themselves anyway. And they felt solid.

And Connie was a very distinguished scientist and also had been a graduate dean, and chairman of a most prestigious department in the University probably at the time, certainly one of the two or three if not the most, himself a native of 01:11:00Wisconsin, you know, Norwegian.

LS: [Words unclear].

EY: A lot of things, you know, no one of which would be determining, but so one could argue whichever way. Now my own, I suppose if I had my, if I'd been voting secretly, I would've voted probably for Harrington. I would've voted for Harrington, I think. I knew him better, more my vision of where the University ought to be going. But anyway, the same time they appointed him president, they told him to make Harrington vice president, which is kind of interesting, I believe.

You know, and then, I went off to, shortly thereafter, I went to Pakistan and then came back as dean. And Connie was one of the best people you could ever 01:12:00think to work for. He left me alone. He was supportive. And he was terribly troubled. He had the Medical School around his hands. About killed him, he had very good friends no both sides in a very bad dispute, and there's no way to be decisive. There just wasn't any way.

LS: Yeah, do you still think he had himself as decisive --

EY: You know, there was a right answer and a wrong answer if you just thought it through. Well, see, many of these things, there's no right and wrong answers. You don't know what to do when, this weighed on him very, very heavily. Probably, if you can believe it, may have contributed to his death, I don't know. But anyway, let's see, when did he die? In the summer of '62?

LS: I thought it was '61, but maybe it was '62.

EY: It must've been '62.

LS: Yeah, 60-, yes, Harrington became president in '62, so obviously that's when --

EY: Yes. I was in Maine that summer of '62 with family, and I got a call from Bill Young saying that Connie had died. Bill was the chief budget officer and lobbyist and so on. By the way, Bill's version of this might be interesting. Bill doesn't -- I think Bill was also one of the people who if he tells you anything, it'll be accurate. How much he tells is another issue.

LS: It's a big if I take it.

EY: Maybe. Do you know him?

LS: I've been told that there wouldn't be any point really in talking to him because he wouldn't be likely to, uh --

EY: Oh, I don't, I wouldn't take, I'd find that out for myself

LS: Oh, all right.

EY: But you may be right, but I'd find it out for myself because if he talked to you, he'd be accurate. And some, and he called me, and so I came back. Mean 01:14:00time, Harrington had gone out to Hawaii to be interviewed for the presidency, and it was an informally probably accepted if I'm not quite sure what stages were, but he was going to Hawaii. We had a meeting in Mr. Baldwin's office. I remember Jake Fredrick's, was I think president of the board of regents. Charlie Gelatt was there, and two or three others, and I was there. And the decision was, do we start all over again with a search and screen, or do we go to Harrington? That was the issue.

And I remember one of the regents turned to me and said, Ed, I think it was Charlie Gelatt, but I'm not sure, what does faculty think? I didn't, don't you 01:15:00care what the deans think? I was a dean by this time. He says, no, you tell us what the faculty thinks [Laughs.]. I remember that byplay. Well, anyway they decided, so somebody phoned Harrington. That's how it happened. At least, that's what I believe happened. Charlie Gelatt might tell you a more complicated story. Do you know Charlie Gelatt?

LS: No.

EY: There's a man who was on the board for about 28 years, wasn't he, something like that? Youngest member and long time --

LS: Yeah [words unclear].

EY: Very bright and --

LS: One of the things I was going to ask you is which of the regents would be the ones to talk to for who would be most helpful, and who do you think would best [words unclear]?

EY: I --

LS: Steger seems, either DeBardeleben, who was there at that time --

EY: Yeah. Well, the two activists involved in everything were DeBardeleben and Gelatt.

LS: Oh.

EY: They were younger. See, most, many of the others are gone. Who else was there?

LS: In that year, [Konack?], Warner, Jensen, Gelatt, Steger, Bassett, DeBardeleben, Fredrick, and Watson.

EY: Watson's gone, and Fredrick died the other day. I went to Matt Warner's funeral in the fall. Jensen's living in New Hampshire. Konack is still down around Racine, but I would say that if I were -- people who were deeply involved in, you know, in everything, were Gelatt and DeBardeleben.

LS: Yeah.

EY: And, of course, Harrington knows a good deal.

LS: I'm going to, if he ever settles down [words unclear].

EY: I saw, I spent some time with him in Washington the other day. We see each other on the airplanes in Washington.

LS: I want to ask you, Nelson was pres, was governor at the time.

EY: Yeah.

LS: And I should imagine, I know he was concerned about the University. One thing, for instance, he said there was no long-range campus planning, and why not? Was, do you know whether he would've had anything to say about the presidency?

EY: Well, I doubt if he got very much involved in it. I don't know that he did, but I don't, you never know. See, if you know something happened, you know it, but if you don't know, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

LS: Well, that's true, but what I, you're more likely to know if it did happen than I, than many other people. That's why I asked you. But you don't know.

EY: I don't, and I doubt it.

LS: Uh-huh.

EY: I doubt it. One thing about the regents, by and large, they, no matter which party picks them, they don't keep, they may at first, but after a little while, they don't run to the governor, by and large. It's interesting. It's interesting to watch. You watch them the first year or so, and they go down quite a lot. 01:18:00Then they go less and less. But Gaylord, you know, knowing him, he would, might have made, dropped some word. But I don't think he would've tried to use the governor's office to influence, but he could have. But we were dealing with people who wouldn't be, you know, they wouldn't pay much attention to it.

LS: Yeah, yes, and I bet there would be that too. Does anything else occur to you around that time?

EY: No.

LS: You knew Harrington well, and you knew, did you know Kurt Wendt back then?

EY: Well, I knew him in --

LS: You were busy -- go ahead.

EY: Well, I'd seen him, see, I didn't really know him much before I became dean. Then we were fellow deans.

LS: I see.

EY: That's how I got to know him.

LS: But before that, you hadn't had -- I wondered when you started being associated with him.

EY: When I, as a, when I started serving on the University, I think, I don't 01:19:00think I was ever on the Campus Planning Committee as a faculty member, although --

LS: You wouldn't have been because they didn't, they only started having them in '59, and you were --

EY: Well, see, I could've been on then as a university committee representative.

LS: Yes, you --

EY: But I don't think I was. But anyway, that's where I got to know Kurt Wendt, was on there. And come, over the years, did increasingly admire him. At first, I thought he was concerned about the Engineering College, but it really turned out he was not. He was most, of all the administrators around, dean at that level, he's the most university-wide man I knew, got to know [word unclear]. The other deans were looking out, and I think they would criticize him because he wasn't selfish enough for his college. Although he did all right by it in a kind of quiet way.

LS: There are differences of opinion on it.

EY: I know, I know. But I've seen a lot of it. You know, I'm one of the people who's been around as long almost as anybody, seems [word unclear], and it's remarkable what a good group of deans we've had around here, just marvelous group. And, you know, Glenn Pound's a very good dean. He and I differ a good deal, and he's, once or twice, when I was chancellor, he threatened to resign unless I changed my ways. But I didn't pay attention to that, but very good dean. Go with him, you know, it's his last year coming up.

LS: [Words unclear].

EY: Yeah, you better, because he's going to move to the West Coast.

LS: Oh, really?

EY: Yeah.

LS: I'd better do that.

EY: He's retiring to San Diego.

LS: Oh.

EY: They have, he has very bad hay fever and can't go back to Arkansas or stay here.

LS: No.

EY: And he actually bought a condominium out there.

LS: When is he going?

EY: Well, I think he has one more year.

LS: Oh, I see.

EY: It's this year, yeah. So you'd better get him this year.

LS: Yeah. Okay. So, um, well, then you were made dean. Do you want to talk about how you, I know that there were several choices.

EY: I don't know. See, I wasn't in the country. I was in [Noise.]. The whole dean thing went on, and I didn't know what, I, I, I left the country when I was chairman of the economics department, and went off to Pakistan to work with Harvard graduate group, and, uh, when I was gone, I was selected as dean. And how it happened, I don't know, and I never inquired. It seemed to me most unlikely, and silly, but things do happen.

LS: Were you pleased?

EY: Oh, yes, you know, a college nominates you, and you're picked to succeed, after all being dean of Letters & Science is a very prestigious thing. That was a, you know, the deans of that place were something. That was the turning point. You know, before that, they'd all been there for 20 years or more.

LS: Yes, I was going to say --

EY: Yep. No, I was pleased, yes, indeed.

LS: Well, if you have time, what state, in regard to, well, what state did you find L & S, and what did you -- I know it was terribly crowded. People were desperate for space at that time. I've gone through the files, and [words unclear] the chairman. And so since I'm thinking about building, and [words unclear] what did you think you had to do about it?

EY: Well, I think it managed to get buildings where we could, but remember there were, the departments were also proponents of building, and so we had a lot, a question of getting it where we could. And they were coming along. And I pushed for them, but I didn't, you know, it wasn't, didn't, I never was life or death in the building.

But the circumstances, the evidence was so clear. And with Kurt involved, he was so, tried to be always [word unclear] now this is what people have, and this is 01:23:00what they need, and so on, and once, there was enough people around who, I shouldn't get much of any credit for any of the buildings. The, there were people pushing. Every group was pushing. Somebody in every group was pushing for buildings.

I remember, one time, Farrington Daniels took us down to the old Chemistry Building. It was an old piece of a unit built back during World War I on wooden beams, and he explained to us if an atom bomb went off in Madison how the walls would pull apart and the whole thing would come down. I'll never forget that as long as I live. And it impressed everybody, and they shook their heads, and we had a new chemistry building [Laughs.].

It was things like that [word unclear] makes you, you don't. Every time I was trying to take it seriously, something like that would happen, and I'd -- but I can't, you see, and the building things, our list was long. I don't really think 01:24:00I made much of a contribution to buildings. I helped some, and --

LS: You went to some of the meetings.

EY: Oh, I --

LS: The Campus Planning Committee.

EY: Oh, yes, I was a member.

LS: I know you were, but and, but I don't think you always had to go to meetings. I mean, you could've sent [words unclear].

EY: Oh, no, but I -- in that den of thieves, I had to be there [Laughs.]. You know, I cared enough to want to make sure the college was represented, yes, indeed. But I wouldn't say that I made a very large contribution.

LS: Well, Leo Jakobson said that he had to fight sort of on behalf of L & S. Both you and Mark Ingraham were against people like [word unclear].

EY: Uh-huh, I think he's right. We needed somebody else to, some impartial person to run interference for [words unclear].

LS: Do you remember him?

EY: Oh, sure, very well. He, this, Leo was a really, one of the best minds we had around here.

LS: Oh.

EY: Oh, he had a concept of what a university ought to be.

LS: You remember that, do you, the Sketch Plan?

EY: Oh, yes, indeed. I was always very excited about Leo. In fact, when I got, when he was in Concord, I went out of my way to visit him. I was, you know, he's kind of, frankly, he had a good influence because he tried to see the thing whole, and he had some ideas.

LS: That was my feeling, but I heard other people say other things, or that he was too --

EY: Arbitrary sometimes?

LS: Yes, and --

EY: Intolerant, and so on. Oh, hell, that's to push, when you have a concept that's a good one, a strong one, everybody's trying to cut a part here and chisel it off. But, you know, sometimes you have to be strong. I think that these problems, some people, I think they could make, confuse that period with a period when he was chairman of the department, when apparently, there were some problems.

LS: Well, and then when he was on, as a faculty member, you know, in early '70s.

EY: Uh-huh. But I remember him very warmly.

LS: Do you have any idea whether he was, he left voluntarily or was sort of edged out?

EY: I don't know. I would've guessed voluntarily. Didn't he go off to India?

LS: Yes.

EY: That's where he went, I think. The excitement of a chance to go off with [word unclear] --

LS: Yeah, I know. I just --

EY: That would be my guess. And after that, Bob Fleming brought Edsall here, or was there somebody in between?

LS: There was a man named Kinne here.

EY: Oh, yes, he was failure sort of, Bill Kinne.

LS: Which was a pretty bad time to [word unclear].

EY: Yes.

LS: You look to me as if you're getting tired of this.

EY: -- used to have lunch every once in awhile with Mayor -- much more charming person, much pleasant to have lunch with than Dyke was.

LS: He's a very charming person, isn't he? [Word unclear] well, I've interviewed him. He's --

EY: Yes. If he can get separated from things here, he'll do very well in this 01:27:00world. I think he's a little bored with people there. I should think he'd get awful tired of that city council [word unclear] and all the crew.

LS: Well, and he's still, he's young, and he has a chance at something else.

EY: Yeah, and he's got, right, he's got personality. Yes, I always kind of admired him. I've seen him under very trying circumstances a few times, and it worked out very well. The, but the state things were sporadic. I remember my first two or three years, most of my state, dealing with the state was dealing with [Loud noise.] National Guard investigations of why there were so many radicals on campus, a determination by a man named [Clauser?], who's still around and to take the police away from the University, put them under Bill 01:28:00Emory. These are the kind of issues.

LS: Oh.

EY: They were crisis issues. Warren Knowles was very supportive. Carl Thompson was great. He was on that committee to investigate the University that somebody cooked up, and before it got, he sort of steered the questions around and it all disappeared like that. In fact, my --

LS: I suppose it's very important to have people like that in this. But they're, I mean, this thing with Fred Risser, how I would be, I mean, maybe you would just want to say a sentence or two about him. I would've, I guess asked you about some of the decisions they've made in the State Building Commission, but have you not done very much with them, is that it?

EY: Oh, uh, well, at that moment, sometimes you might call Fred or go see somebody, you know routinely. Fred was always helpful. He's always been very 01:29:00helpful to the University. We've had Carl Thompson, Fred Risser, Mary Lou [Mons?], Mitch Miller, Everson, O'Malley, and Norm [Madison?], very helpful. One of the greatest blows we ever had Cap Times [word unclear], and we lost a great friend in the Legislature.

LS: Now the mayor hasn't, uh --

EY: Well, he doesn't have the stature or leadership position. Norm was a speaker.

LS: Yeah.

EY: And he could, he, you know, he could make sure we got a fair hearing on everything and do things by different interested, but it's been very, very good. I never had much dealings with [Clemback?], or but, by and large, I think he [words unclear] the University's interest. Sometimes he and I would have a 01:30:00different view of what that is, but, I mean --

LS: Seemed to be the perpetual way to do about the University.

EY: Yeah. But, no, and so I was, you know, I did another [word unclear] for many years, and one thing another, I, first, I remember the first time I appeared before the, I think it was 1948, before the Joint Finance Committee, Gaylord Nelson was a member of it. So I've been, you know, in and out for a long time.

LS: Oh, I see, yeah.

EY: For a long time. Don't, never regarded myself as terribly influential, but when we had something concerning the University, we could always get somebody to listen to us. But I think that particularly, during those, the '69-'70 period, when we had Clauser and [Froelich?] and some other people really determined that 01:31:00we were soft, and that we should be put under regimen of Bill Emory's, I was pretty active in that period. We just squeaked through that one. Then, there was this investigating committee, but when that was all through, that was, I, Carl Thompson had a lot to do with that, making that, you know, making sure the right questions got asked.

LS: Uh-huh.

EY: On the legislative, during this period, George Field, Fred Harrington's period, was downtown for Fred a good deal.

LS: I've heard his name.

EY: He's a chancellor over at [word unclear].

LS: Oh.

EY: And he's, he's a person that you might want to talk to.

LS: Hmm, okay. You know, that's another thing, is people whose names don't crop 01:32:00up so often or don't, or stand out, who do a lot for the University, I don't know, Warren [Exo?], somebody has said that he was very important to the University downtown. It's, it's interesting, I think --

EY: Uh, Wally Lemon --

LS: Yeah, Wally Lemon, I, yeah --

EY: A lot of continuity, and Bob Clodius was downtown a good deal. And Bill Young was very, very influential. Just an ordinary probably the most, influen -- at a period when we were having great success.

LS: Was he, what was his position? You said he was something to do with financing.

EY: He was the budget officer.

LS: Budget officer.

EY: Officer, and also caught a represent -- budget and went downtown both.

LS: Did he replace Peterson?

EY: No, no, Peterson was the, was vice president of finance, but --