Fifth interview with H. Edwin Young

H. Edwin Young #117 Transcript

JC: This is a oral history interview with H. Edwin Young. It is February 6th, 2006 and Judy Craig is doing the interviewing. Now, I was -- I interrupted you. You were starting to talk about Arlen Christenson being the person who recognized the TAA and kept track of all of the times.

EY: Well, I don't know what he kept track of, but actually I wouldn't, at this point, put this on the record. He did it without my approval.

JC: Well, now, let me . . .

EY: Oh, I do want to say, my memory isn't very good, and I didn't keep very good records and if there's some dispute, I'd be glad to --

JC: Disavow it?

EY: Well, no, I won't go that far, but I'll negotiate it.

JC: O.K., O.K. Alright, well, you were talking about Arlen Christenson and so we're talking about the days in 19 -- well, 1968.

EY: That's about right.

JC: You became Dean . . . no, you came back as Chancellor in 1968, so if we're talking about Arlen, that would be at that time.

EY: I think he recognized them before that. They were recognized -- when were they first recognized?

JC: Well, they started getting organized -- their first meeting was in 1966 and they were working at getting organized during '66/'67; '68 they had a meeting and you met with them and according to the records I have, you indicated that you weren't going to recognize them at that time, and Arlen -- you had a very 00:02:00small group of people who were --

EY: Working with me.

JC: Advising you.

EY: Yes.

JC: And Arlen was one of them, so --

EY: Well, somehow, Arlen agreed to recognize them without discussing it with me, but since he was speaking as my agent, I felt it was inevitable sooner or later. I happen not to believe in collective bargaining.

JC: Yes, yes.

EY: And that made me seem like a strange one to be doing it. Well, anyway --

JC: Well, actually, I think there are a lot of people who think that that's one of the reasons that the TAA got started here, because you do have a background in collective bargaining and you do believe in it. That's not the case, huh?

EY: No, I think it's because -- well, it might have been, but I didn't have a chance to say yes or no.

JC: O.K., O.K.

EY: See, I -- some years later, when the proposal in the faculty for the faculty to have collective bargaining, the two principle speakers against it were Jack Barbash and me.

JC: Oh, really?

EY: Because, see, you have to think about what I meant. You see, the faculty had been running things. The faculty decides when you hire, really. They don't hire anybody that the department doesn't want. You don't promote anybody that -- the promotion through the salaries by the department, they'd give all that up, you see.

JC: Well, you took a lot of criticism in the case of the TAA.

EY: Oh, yes.

JC: For recognizing them and for doing that without having very much faculty involvement.

EY: Yes, and you might want to ask Arlen (laughing) about it.

JC: I talked with him back when I was doing research on this topic. I don't remember him admitting that he was the one who really did it, but we mostly talked about what happened, then, after -- can you explain why, for the tape, here, why it was that it was necessary to have a structure agreement? First you had to bargain about the terms of the bargaining, is my understanding, what it was that you were going to talk about, and --

EY: Well, I think this was Arlen's doing. He wasn't behind my back. I was off to 00:05:00campuses doing something. I don't know what.

JC: Well, you were just here, and you had a very busy year the first year that you were here.

EY: Well, that's the other problem. My memory wasn't perfect, and it's certainly is very imperfect, and the details of it -- I'd trust Arlen's memory better than my own. But, see, I was a TA for Selig Perlman for many years.

JC: In the Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin.

EY: Yes. And we had a good relationship. He wouldn't have liked to bargain with me. He didn't like controversy anyway. He turned everything over to me when I 00:06:00was just a new TA. I hired the TA's. I hired David Johnson, who was my own --

JC: Who hired me.

EY: I did?

JC: He did. No, David Johnson did.

EY: Do you ever see Dave?

JC: Um . . . not (tape cuts out)

EY: My wife died. I bought one of the new apartments and paid him some money and then my daughter, who was living in Georgia, wanted to come back to Madison because of the schools for her children. She didn't have a very high opinion of Georgia's schools, so they came back to live with me and take care of me, so I cancelled. I took back most of my money, but I still have money at Oakwood. For 00:07:00awhile I was on their foundation board, so I know of Oakwood pretty well and I guess Judy Heidelberger was living there. She was a close friend of me and my wife and she lived there before she went to the hospital the last time. Her husband was -- invented 5 Fu.

JC: Yes. In fact, as I told you, I was reviewing the Cronin Jenkins volume that covers this period of years that we're talking about, and it did mention the Heidelberger --

EY: It mentions some problem with the federal government.

JC: With the patents and -- yes, it did, and maybe we can talk about that a little bit, but --

EY: Well, I think Bill Young was one of the ones that got that straightened out 00:08:00eventually, but when he got through, he had a low opinion of Charlie.

JC: Oh, well, he certainly did come up with something that has been very important as a medical --

EY: Yes, he did. Well, while he was developing that, Charlie and I sometime sailed together and we socially -- see, we lived near each other in the university houses so he talked to me about it, but I didn't know enough chemistry to understand what was going on.

JC: Yeah. University houses were a wonderful --

EY: Invention.

JC: Blending device for faculty. So many faculty members became good friends and colleagues and trusted each other. In the time that we're talking about with the TA strike, those relationships were very important, I think.

EY: Yeah. E.B. Fred was the one who promoted university houses. He got the 00:09:00foundation to build it.

JC: I don't know that junior faculty members lived there as much as they did in your day. There are more housing alternatives for them, probably. A lot of international post-docs and so on, researchers, live there. But let's go back to you and the TAA and -- so you were -- you'd been a teaching assistant yourself.

EY: Yes.

JC: Did that help in your discussions with the TAA, or did that --

EY: Well, it colored it more than helped, because I knew what it meant to me to have the personal relationship with the professor a great deal and I wanted that 00:10:00-- I didn't want to get some organization -- see, I knew enough about unions to know that whether statewide or people in the top of the union that they were affiliated with, wanted to do something different, it's likely to happen.

JC: Yes. So you were convinced that either Arlen Christenson had gone ahead and maybe let the horse out of the barn, or else it was evitable in any case that you were going to be bargaining with the teaching assistants.

EY: Well, that was irrelevant. I -- when I discovered that Arlen had done it, I went along with it. He was working -- he did it in good faith, but I think he 00:11:00believed in it, because the lawyers make a lot of money out of collective bargaining (laughing). No, he wouldn't do it for that reason, but, you know, a lot of people, well meaning people, thought: If the janitors have it, why shouldn't the TA's?

JC: And what would your answer be to that? If you were not having to defend the fact that we were in a teaching, a bargaining relationship with the teaching assistants, why do you think that isn't applicable to teaching assistants? I guess you started to say, to talk about your relationship with your major professor.

EY: Well, what I didn't -- I think the unions do a lot of things good, but one of the things they push for is uniformity, and that is not a very easy thing 00:12:00when you have faculty governance. Some of the faculty wouldn't want to be governed by the union if they could help it. It hasn't turned out too badly, I guess. I don't know. I haven't done any checking.

JC: Well, it doesn't exist at the UW Madison at this point, although --

EY: For the TA's, it does.

JC: It does, yes, yes.

EY: But Jack Barbash and I killed it at the --

JC: Yes, for the faculty, although I see that a Republican leader in the legislature now has indicated that he supports a bill to make it possible, so enabling legislation for the faculty.

EY: That may come, but I hope not.

JC: But there was no enabling legislation -- no legislation that allowed for the 00:13:00teaching assistant to bargain with the university.

EY: Not at that time.

JC: So what was the mechanism that you came up with?

EY: Well, [the darling?] came up with it.

JC: O.K. (laughing)

EY: Well, whatever -- I don't recall exactly, but anyway, they did get some bargaining and obtained probably a pretty civilized way. They did get agreements and it wasn't channeled through the TA's that felt they had nothing to say to get -- had something to say.

JC: It was. I guess I would -- if we weren't on tape and talking about your recollections of the times there, I would probably argue with you about how 00:14:00civilized it was, and how good it was. I do think that it has done some good things, but for a long time, it didn't and I'm not sure, actually, that -- I think that it's been better since we're not working with the structure agreement that Arlen and others at the time worked out, and one of the reasons is that the structure agreement that was the basis for the bargaining for ten years allowed the TA's to bargain about educational issues and it was something that you all tried very hard to keep from getting into the contract, but some of it was in 00:15:00there, and of course, some of it still is. But when the university bargained -- alright, here's my theory, and this is not supposed to be on your tape recording, but the university thought of its teaching assistants as junior colleagues, the way you thought that you were with Professor Perlman.

EY: Some did.

JC: Some did.

EY: Others thought of them as students.

JC: Yes, yes, that's true. But the people who were on the bargaining team during the years between 1970 and 1980, many of them thought that they should be nice to the teaching assistants because, after all, they were our junior colleagues and we let them get into more issues than we were willing to have them take all 00:16:00the way to conclusion by bargaining and so there was a lot of acrimony and a lot of unhappiness. When Chancellor Shain withdrew from that structure agreement in 1980, the result was that the TAA worked to get enabling legislation and now the TAA bargains under the eages of the state, and the state treats them just like any other union, and doesn't let them get into things that aren't legitimate terms of the bargaining relationship. So I think it's less acrimonious now than it was.

EY: Well . . .

JC: Hmm . . .

EY: Well, something occurred to me. They had a picket line out on the west side 00:17:00of campus and I used to go out there and walk along and talk to them. So they had a meeting and everybody was instructed not to speak to me (laughing).

JC: Because you were being too friendly with them.

EY: Yes. I was undermining them. It wasn't that I was giving them too much, but I was willing to discuss things with them and wasn't trying to pull any rank. No, I -- the problem was I didn't really want -- no avoiding it, I guess, in the long run because they could promise everything and I couldn't promise only the things I could deliver. I think there's a difference.

JC: Why -- and maybe you've just given the answer to that, but one of the things 00:18:00that was not bargained about in those days was wages.

EY: Yes. Well, the state wouldn't let us.

JC: O.K. But you didn't ask the state if you could bargain with the teaching assistants in the first place.

EY: No.

JC: But did you ask them about -- did you talk with people at the state about this while it was developing?

EY: Not very much, because my position was much more -- I had not decided to recognize them at that time. I think Arlen jumped the gun a little bit, but I don't know. It's hard to tell. You don't know what you'd do unless you're absolutely faced with it.

JC: Was -- do you recall if John Weaver was at the system at the time, or at the presidency -- it wasn't the system -- at the presidency of the university at 00:19:00that time?

EY: I'm trying to think . . . I don't know.

JC: I guess I have the answer to that. I think he wasn't there before 1970. He came in the spring of 1970, probably around the time that the strike was taking place. I was wondering what the -- you were in a really interesting situation at that time, because you had a president who -- I guess it was Fred Harrington at the beginning of the time. Now he was somebody that you could talk to about the situation that was going on and probably you were able to consult with him.

EY: We were more in agreement than any disagreement. I think he agreed with me 00:20:00that the longer we put it off, the better. John Weaver, I couldn't talk to about it.

JC: And the interesting part about that is that you were the head of Madison, but he didn't have much else to be head of in his role as president at that time, because the system wasn't really in existence yet.

EY: No, but we tried to be ahead of things. He didn't try too hard. John like to pomp and circumstance. He was a lazy man, really.

JC: Well, there was -- instead of pomp and circumstance, there was a lot of acrimony and descent at that time, and he had to -- I guess in many ways, he was 00:21:00the public face of the university more than you were at that time.

EY: Yes, um-hmm.

JC: In reading accounts, he was -- newspaper accounts and so on, he was out there in the public and -- well, do you remember particular instances of faculty, UW Madison faculty, reactions to what you were into? Whoever got you into it.

EY: Well, I don't. There were some. They blamed me for their problems, and I understood why they did, and so I -- you know, Arlen did what he thought was best under the circumstances at the time, and he was working for me and I 00:22:00thought I ought to back him up. I had a great deal of respect for Arlen as a person, so I didn't choose to denounce the thing, but --

JC: I came across something that indicated that Jack Barbash thought that the TAA was a revolutionary TAA -- a revolutionary union; that it was not really trying to improve the worker lot. It was trying to reform the university. Do you think that that's what was going on?

EY: Well, it was mixed up, see. Some people were using it as a tool for their other purposes, but this is where we got in trouble. Whenever there was anything national or international going on, the TA's were very active, but some of them 00:23:00-- but not all of them; many weren't. Yes, I think that probably was true.

JC: And I also saw that some of the faculty members, particularly in the foreign languages, they weren't your biggest supporters in this issue, were they?

EY: No, they weren't. They were -- they wanted to keep the master/servant relationship.

JC: Well some of them argued that all of this was because the university overreacted to the Dow situation the spring before the strike. Do you think that that had much to do with it?

EY: I don't think so. I don't think -- the people I knew, they didn't blame the 00:24:00TA's for that.

JC: No, I think what they were arguing is that if the university hadn't been so awful to the people who were rioting, who were protesting the war and so on, if the university had been more understanding to them and had treated them better, there wouldn't have been a teaching assistant -- there wouldn't have been a need for a union. Did you hear that argument?

EY: Um-hmm (negatively). I don't recall hearing it. I don't think it had very much to do with it.

JC: O.K., O.K., Well --

EY: It could have. Of all the groups that I think never understood what was going on, the people in the languages were -- my son-in-law is a professor of Romance Languages at Harvard, and his understand of the world is one (laughing) --

JC: So he shares the -- he could have fit into the languages here at that time?

EY: No. He would have if he had been here. But there was one -- I suppose there were many, but there was one faculty member in the languages that was very helpful and very understanding, and that was Bob Mulvihill.

JC: Yes, yes.

EY: I counted on him a great deal.

JC: He was in Spanish and Portuguese.

EY: Um-hmm.

JC: And he actually was -- his name goes with the report that studied the TA situation and recommended many of the features that eventually got included in 00:26:00the contract, like long term support guarantees and so on. He was a good man.

EY: His interest was with the university. He put loyalty to the university above -- and I found him very helpful. He had some people in his department who raised hell with him all the time, but they were about departmental matters and I -- but the understanding of the current political scene anywhere, I don't think -- there are a few exceptions -- the language people, pay much attention.

JC: What about, say, the mathematicians. They also had vivid reactions.

EY: Um-hmm. Different ones had different reactions; that's right, I guess. Well, again, you know, what bothered me was how little they knew what they were talking about. They didn't know -- it's easy to hear the TA's tell them the great advantage to them, but it wasn't the fact that their faculty didn't understand what it meant, many of them.

JC: What about your colleagues in the Economics Department? Now, you hadn't been in the Economics Department as a full time faculty member for quite some time by then.

EY: I don't -- well, for instance, Jack Barbash and I would have the same view. Probably the man -- Jerry Summers --

JC: Oh, yes.

EY: And Bob Lampman, they understood what was involved and they'd probably share my views pretty closely. We had a strong group in the department.

JC: Yes, yeah. Before we were on tape, we were talking a little bit about Jim Stern, who was in the Economics Department, also in the Industrial Relations Research Institute, which was a graduate program and trained many people to be labor organizers, or to go out into the labor world. Do you -- what about Jim? What about his role in all this?

EY: It wasn't very large, I don't think. And, again, his attitude -- I think Jim's would be, "Well, they've got it so good. Why should they mess it up with 00:29:00collective bargaining?" See, Jim had worked for the auto workers. In fact, I can tell you how he got to be on the faculty even.

JC: O.K.

EY: Elizabeth Brandeis was in that department and she came in one day and said, "Ed, I heard a man named Stern talk and we'd love to have him in the department, and he's giving a talk up at Wau . . . " not Waupaca, but it's up a little farther east.

JC: Wausau?

EY: Near Portage . . . "and you ought to go up and listen to him," so I did. I just got in and walked in the back of the room and sat down, and I was quite impressed with Jim. I've not changed my mind about that. He was more -- maybe a 00:30:00little more pro-union than I am, but he wasn't -- he didn't go overboard. See, a lot of the people that got into the labor movement found that not only did you get our things, but there was some strait jackets, too; some things you couldn't do. One time, Bob [Osan?] came -- he was running the School for Workers at the time -- came into my office and said -- I don't know whether I was -- I was probably the [word unclear] director. See, I wore a lot of different hats.

JC: Yes, I know you have, and I'd love to have you talk about them a little bit.

EY: And said, "There's a couple of people being fired by the unions, amalgamated unions -- would be good people for our faculty"; one was Kibbitz, and what was 00:31:00the other fella's name . . . anyway . . . and so, "we should try to hire them," and I said, "well, go ahead. Bring them out and let's talk to them." We did decide to hire. Two weeks later, this chap came into my office and said he was from the -- (tape cuts out)

JC: One side two of the interview with Ed Young in February, 2006. O.K., go ahead.

EY: And said, "You can't hire him." I said, "Why can't we?" "Well, the union doesn't approve of them." They were fired for insubordination or something, and I said, "Well, it just happens that I don't work for that union," (laughing) and 00:32:00they became very popular with the labor people in the state -- Kibbitz, the other one was.

JC: Hiring faculty members was a little less by formula at that time. I mean, you had a lot more authority to do things on your own then.

EY: Well, yes. But there was a committee, but their attitude was, "Go ahead and do what you need to do." The more difficult part of it was when you tried to bring somebody like Jack Barbash, because he wanted an academic position, but had to persuade the department.

JC: And you were -- so you brought Jack in. He was quite an impressive addition 00:33:00to the department. In fact, I see that you really turned the department around from -- now, this is Economics that we're talking about now, but I'm tempted to get off onto that a little bit, but I think maybe we should go ahead and talk about the TA situation a little bit more, and then if we want to come back to things like your coming into chair the department, we can do that.

EY: Which I know more about (laughing).

JC: Oh, well O.K. Um . . .

EY: But, anyway, yes, what more do we need to talk about about the TA's?

JC: Well, let me ask you . . . well, let me just look at my notes, here. One of 00:34:00the things that was an issue early on in the bargaining was as soon as the TAA was recognized and had that election -- recognition election, or representation election, a lot of departments wanted to start settling things with the TA's in their departments. They wanted to have departmental bargaining and you and probably the committee -- you had formed by that time a committee of faculty who were doing more advising -- didn't think that was a good idea. Can you talk about that a little bit?

EY: Well, I don't think it was a good idea because you couldn't have TA's in adjoining offices having different relationships with the university. That would be my reaction. I don't remember it being very [word unclear]. When did I go to Maine?

JC: You had come back from Maine by that time. We're talking now about the period from beginning in 1968 and -- actually we're talking about 1970 when you were involved in the bargaining for the first contract and in 1970, you'd been back almost 2 years by that time, and you had had in your first year, you had a -- in 1968/'69, there was the black student strike in the spring after you came and then the next fall, there was the TA and all of the fuss about that and then there was the strike for the teaching assistants and so it was while that was 00:36:00going on in probably your second year back from Maine.

EY: Now, what was the question?

JC: Well, we were talking about the difference between departmental bargaining and bargaining at the campus level.

EY: Now see, to me that wouldn't seem an incredible wrong way to do things, just automatically.

JC: Letting, say, some of those foreign language departments set up their own terms?

EY: They would have to go through the bargaining committee. We wouldn't allow exceptions for -- only some department needed and especially if they agreed with it, but we wouldn't turn them loose, particularly the language people (laughing).

JC: Yes.

EY: But that's where Mulvihill was very useful.

JC: You had a committee that had representatives from different parts of the campus, but most of them were from Letters and Science, weren't they?

EY: Yes.

JC: Yeah. And was the graduate school involved in --

EY: Well, see if you involved the Letters and Science faculty, you involve the graduate students.

JC: Yes.

EY: Same people really.

JC: You had -- was Arlen -- I'm trying to think of the people you had involved: Neil Bucklew became involved in the process soon, and I'm thinking he was really administering the bargaining relationship. Arlen Christenson was a faculty 00:38:00member and he was teaching and doing the other things that a faculty member does.

EY: He had made the big decision and went off and left it, more or less.

JC: O.K. But two names that come from around that time are Ed Krinsky and Neil Bucklew. Can you talk a little bit about what their roles were?

EY: I can't remember exactly what they did. They probably picked up and did -- if you have a contract, you have to keep following it. But I really don't -- see, I was running back and forth to Asia and --

JC: Oh, O.K. You were still doing that. You were not very much involved in the bargaining, then. I believe that the teaching assistants tried to get you involved.

EY: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

JC: The university was really breaking new ground, because there were no other 00:39:00unions of this sort; no graduate student unions anywhere in the country at that time, so this was something that was relying on your knowledge, you and your advisor's knowledge, of labor unions and you meshed it together with what the university was all about.

EY: Yes. Well, I think so. See, those of us who knew something were not as excited about this as the solution to the problems, such that there was no real problem, you see. Some TA's wanted to have more authority. One of the demands was that they choose the textbooks.

JC: Oh, O.K. That probably was not very well received by the faculty.

EY: No.

JC: In some ways, didn't you need the TAA to come up with some outrageous proposals like that? I mean if they had been -- if they hadn't tried to get things that challenged the faculty authority, it would have been harder for you to resist the things that they wanted to do.

EY: Probably. But, see, I -- they wanted to do what the faculty -- make the faculty decisions and actually some of them do, but I was Perlman's teaching assistant. I hired David Young and, you know, it wasn't a bad choice, but so I 00:41:00had in mind a different model, but I'm sure it was quite different from the way the Math Department or the Language Departments treated their TA's.

JC: Probably. Can you comment on -- after the strike ended, after there was a contract that had been approved by the university and the TAA, you had to get the Regents and the legislature to approve this first contract. Can you comment at all on what that process was like?

EY: No. I don't remember it at all.

JC: O.K.

EY: But I guess I had enough ships, you know, I have good relationships with the 00:42:00Regents and the legislature personally, so I don't -- I think they went along and particularly some of the leading people in law school thought was desirable.

JC: And Nate Feinsinger was involved at that time.

EY: Yes.

JC: Would he have been one of the people who got things approved by the Regents?

EY: He might have, but I don't think we had a problem. I think at that time the Regents were saying, "Well, you do what you have to do."

JC: O.K. How was it when you -- and this was quite a few years after that -- when you were at the helm of the system and it was a system by that time. It had many other universities as a part of the system, and the system president dealt 00:43:00with other universities and not just Madison. Do you remember how -- was that difficult to make that transition for you?

EY: Well, to summarize, I didn't enjoy being president of the systems as much as I did being Chancellor, and I enjoyed being Dean more than Chancellor,

JC: I'd tend to think that being the Dean of L and S is probably the best job on campus, but --

EY: You can do many good things and you can stop some bad things.

JC: And you have less opportunity for both of those things when you're at the system, do you think, or at that time?

EY: Yes. Well, the system, you can't have Deans and Presidents of the universities and tell them what to do and take responsibility so that as far as 00:44:00the collective bargaining was concerned, as I recall, that was turned over to each individual campus. There was more -- among the faculty on the individual campus, there was more interest in doing it than at Madison because they wanted some authority and they were run from the top down, most of them.

JC: Well, I guess that situation is still the way it was when you were in the system, but the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has a teaching assistant -- teaching and project assistant bargaining and they may have had that when you were a system. I don't know. But it would have been delegated to the university. Can you talk a little bit about how you came -- you were at the University of 00:45:00Maine as president from 1965 to 1968 and you came back to Madison in the spring of 1968 while Bill Sewell was Chancellor. He was Chancellor in 1967/'68. How is it that you came back to the system? You were a vice-president and you fortuitously were here when the Chancellorship at Madison came open. How did that happen?

EY: I don't know all of it. I'll tell you what I know.

JC: O.K.

EY: When I was president of Maine and there was some serious talk about having a 00:46:00system in Maine and the legislatures who were promoting it were telling them that everybody would get the same level of salary that you got . . . or, no . . . Maine didn't have that kind of money, so I argued against that. Then one day I got a phone call from Fred Harrington. He said, "Ed, how would you like to come back to Madison?" and I said, "Do what?" and he said, "Be the inside -- run the campus, the university. You'd be the inside person while I would be the outside person." I said, "Well, I'll consider it," and so I -- faced with the problems that the legislators were making for Maine for the future, I didn't want to be the person to have to cut [word unclear] in order to build up some small place. 00:47:00So I -- although it's worked out better than I thought it would -- not Madison. Anyway, so I came back and I found an office waiting for me, I guess, and I --

JC: Was that in Van Hise?

EY: In Van Hise, and I -- then I went into see Fred, and I said, "Fred, have you told Bob Clodius that I'm in charge around here?" and he said --

JC: And Clodius was vice-president then also?

EY: Um-hmm (affirmatively). He was -- had been the principal vice president, but I don't know why Fred didn't promote him. But, anyway, he said, "Well, he'll 00:48:00find it out, won't he?" (laughing) That was a hell of a --

JC: That's reassuring.

EY: That was a hell of a spot for me to be in.

JC: Yes, yeah.

EY: So, I tried to play down my authority, roll. I didn't even want that. Then I got relieved when somebody -- maybe it was Fred -- remembered that I had been nominated for Chancellor when the first -- before it had been taken or something happened, so I'd cleared the committee. I'd been on the list the last time. Well, he acted a little bit like our president of the United States is acting now: don't need any clearance if you've got it from way back (laughing) so he 00:49:00called in -- he visited with the University Committee and they agreed that I would be a good Chancellor and they approved that and the Regents went along. But it was a very -- and then, of course, then Clodius was half way my boss because he was the vice-president, but Bob and I got along pretty well. We saw the world differently. See, I helped get -- established who go the first Chancellor, Bob Fleming.

JC: Also, with the labor background and --

EY: Yes.

JC: Yeah.

EY: And a very good arbitrator. Bob is very ill now. He's got Alzheimer's. His wife died last year. He was one of the steady people around; very good.

JC: And he was probably at Michigan during the time that --

EY: No, he was at Illinois, then he came here, and then he went to Michigan.

JC: Right, right. When you were in -- when you were the Chancellor in Madison --

EY: Yeah. I succeeded him as Chancellor.

JC: Right. Well now, you don't suppose that Fred Harrington brought you back because he could see the way things were going with Chancellor Sewell, because he tried to resign several times, according to things that I've read, during the year, and Harrington persuaded him to stay. So you don't suppose that he was just bringing you to have you there?

EY: I don't know. I never -- I thought he really wanted me to relieve him of a 00:51:00lot of things he was doing and he and I would get -- got along well. We weren't pals of sort, but we traveled together in Asia and places and done things, so I never knew exactly what was in his mind. It seemed like a strange way to do it, but --

JC: Well, it worked.

EY: Things moved faster.

JC: Yes, yes.

EY: And then I was Chancellor without much scrutiny.

JC: Well, but you had had a lot of scrutiny in the past, but --

EY: Yeah.

JC: So you were Chancellor for almost ten years, I guess, and then you went to the system president, but you didn't enjoy that as much you said.

EY: No. Well, I --

JC: That was still early days of the system.

EY: Yes, but nobody's ever asked me what bothered me the most. The thing that bothered me most was some problems in the Regents. We had a couple of Regents who were trying to do what Pat Lucey wanted done. For instance, one of the -- the person who wrote the merger bill was, at that time, a professor at Wayne, I think?

JC: Oh, David Adamany.

EY: Yes. And they were determined that there was a vice-presidency open, and they were determined to bring Adamany, and we submitted his name to the faculty twice and it was turned down, because Adamany had made that speech that if they 00:53:00don't do research, it's killing time.

JC: Now Adamany was a product of the university. He has a Ph.D. in political science.

EY: And a fine person. If the faculty had approved him, I gladly would have brought him. But, see, I was fighting for faculty rights. I told the Regents, "If you have a committee and you ask their advice and then you turn and don't take it, how many people are going to serve on committees?" No, I admired Adamany and he did a great job at Wayne as president there.

JC: He was there a long time.

EY: Yes. He had to deal with a very tough union, the Auto Workers.

JC: Yes.

EY: They had the legislature and the union and other things under their control, so Adamany is a person -- I don't know where he is now.

JC: He's at Temple. He's the president of -- or the top officer at Temple University.

EY: Well he deserves it. I have a high opinion -- I was caught in a jam between the faculty. We had a committee system, but they said no on two different occasions; maybe they were narrow-minded when they said no, and then two people on the Regents who supported him were doing it because they were close friends of Pat Lucey's and I got a little tired of their coming in with brilliant ideas that -- they were -- for instance, one of the things, we had a committee to establish goals for affirmative action and they wanted to pass that. I said, 00:55:00"That would be impossible." He said, "Oh, don't worry about that. They'll keep the faculty on their toes." They were not really -- they were quite out of -- the best Regents I had were older and more experienced than the two best together were, on the same time, were -- I think Jake -- was Jake Fried . . . a Regent? No.

JC: I don't know about that.

EY: Burt McNamara was -- see that picture over my head over here?

JC: Not there, not there.

EY: The still white?

JC: Oh, yes, yes.

EY: If you went to his house in their dining room, all around the wall are those.

JC: That's what he's doing now.

EY: Yes.

JC: He was in labor, so was --

EY: He was, yes. He was in steel workers.

JC: So he was the laborer person on the Regents. I mean, you know, they have kind of seats, and --

EY: They always had one, and yes, he was fit, but he didn't act for labor. He acted for the university. See, I had wonderful Regents who put the university as their primary concern, and the two: Odie Fish --

JC: Yes.

EY: Was the national chairman of the Republican committee and he and Burt McNamara were two of the best Regents we've had.

JC: Well now, the faculty, the Madison faculty, many of them still haven't gotten over the fact that we're part of the system, but back in those years, the 00:57:00reaction must have still been very, very strong of the Madison faculty against being part of a system.

EY: Well, they didn't do much about it. They might talk against it.

JC: O.K. So it didn't make -- you didn't have problems much from that.

EY: No. Well, ah, I had -- there was -- some of the problems came from the campuses. Some of them were arguing with some of their Chancellors that they weren't getting their fair share of the money and so on. Well, I had, as my vice-president at that time, Ruben Lorenz.

JC: Yes.

EY: And there never was a fairer, more honest man in the world, and so they could never find anything (laughing) and he -- it was all there, so I was very 00:58:00fortunate with Ruben. If he said, "This is their share," I would have said, "That's their share," because I know he's done his homework. He was trained by a man named Cafferty.

JC: Neil Cafferty.

EY: Neil Cafferty. He was a great one. We had some wonderful people around here.

JC: Was Don Smith involved at the time that you were there?

EY: Yes. Don Smith -- I brought Don Smith in the vacancy that -- I guess that Adamany didn't get.

JC: O.K.

EY: I got Don Smith in a back handed way. He went to -- he was at the University of Minnesota.

JC: Yes.

EY: And he went to Indonesia to work on a big project we had over there, and he did such a good job that I wanted him to be a candidate and it turned out he did 00:59:00a wonderful job. He did the work and I took the credit. You can't get a better deal than that (laughing).

JC: That's a very good situation.

EY: Yes. No, Don loved to sit at the typewriter and write out long descriptions. He was quite an extensive talker. If something came up which he knew something about, he would say to the Regents, "Now, let me explain this to you," and they would say, (laughing) "Oh, God, again?" but they liked him, even though he explained it more fully than they really wanted. Oh, well. His widow is here.

JC: Yes; Ilene, yes. She and I were on -- have been on some activities together. I don't know -- they're things that don't relate to the kind of discussion that 01:00:00we're having, but she's a good, pleasant person to work with.

EY: Yes, and she seems to have done well at her difficult job of dividing up his money.

JC: Well, that's a good thing; that's a good thing. Did -- are there other things or people in the system that you -- you said nobody had asked you what bothered you most before, so are there other things that you wish people would ask you about your days at the system?

EY: No. I think -- I just got tired of it. See, I've been an administrator for so many years.

JC: Well, the way I would recollect it, you were Dean of Letters and Science here from 1961 to 1965; actually you'd been chairman -- do you count that being 01:01:00an administrator?

EY: It was then.

JC: O.K.

EY: What I did in the Economics Department is why I became president of the system.

JC: O.K., alright. You chaired Econ from 1952 to 1961, Dean '61 to '65, President of Maine, '65 to '68, Chancellor, '68 to '77 and then system president '77 to '80, so I guess you were entitled to think you wanted to get out of it.

EY: It's better for an organization if they aren't waiting around for somebody to retire and lose it than have a Chancellor replace him.

JC: Well you had a wonderful opportunity to see things from -- the same thing from different perspectives and that must have been fascinating to --

EY: Well, I guess so. I tried not to make Maine a little Wisconsin. I tried not to make Wisconsin Harvard which, by the way, I wonder why you -- I was on the Harvard visiting committee from this period, so I knew how to --

JC: O.K.

EY: And my son-in-law is a professor there, so I know something about Harvard, and I admire it very much.

JC: It's not Wisconsin.

EY: No, we're not it. I think Wisconsin gives more opportunity to people who haven't shown how good they are yet.

JC: Yeah. I think that probably --

EY: People like Charlie Isleberger, for instance, and a lot of the scientists, particularly.

JC: Do you -- you were (tape ends)

EY: Joined the chorus of people that --

JC: I'm going to stop you a second and say this is tape two, side one of the interview, February 6th, 2006, with Ed Young. Your son-in-law --

EY: Joined in the chorus against the new president.

JC: Ah, yes, who said some things about the hiring and support of women? Is that the issue that --

EY: I think so. I think that was the issue and it wasn't a wise thing to say, 01:04:00but probably true.

JC: Well, that was at the National Bureau of Economic Research, wasn't it, that that comment was made?

EY: I don't know.

JC: I believe that it was, and the president made some remarks, he said and afterwards it was said in a kind of brain-storming session and that got taken and used in ways that he hadn't intended and I have to say that I was at an NBER conference about 3 years ago. It was about collective bargaining for graduate students, or graduate assistants, and the Dean -- graduate Dean from Illinois and I were the only two who were from the -- maybe university perspective -- of 01:05:00these issues, and we were sandbagged by -- there were graduate student union and they were having a fuss at the time about whether NYU and other private universities could bargain and, you know, we got into some discussions that you are brainstorming and thinking about possibilities and not expecting that what you're saying is going to be taken out in the rest of the world, so I had felt some sympathy for the men even though it was a woman's issue that I should have been less --

EY: But there was some other issue, another issue, the black issue.

JC: Ah, O.K.

EY: He invited one of the leading black professors in to tell him about his research.

JC: Yes; Gates, I think.

EY: What?

JC: Gates.

EY: Yes. Well, anyway, Harrington didn't think too much of that and told him so, but he united the black professors around the country against him.

JC: Right, right.

EY: I think -- I don't know him personally, but I know him by work, and a good, solid economist and not as discreet as he might be (laughing).

JC: Well, that raises the issue of women's rights and so on and those are things 01:07:00that were going on. That movement is something that was going on while you were Chancellor.

EY: Yes.

JC: Title IX was passed, I think, while you were in office. Can you -- do you have anything to say about what happened and what was going on?

EY: I applauded it. My training in women's roles in the university was by Elizabeth Brandeis.

JC: Ah-huh. She was quite a woman.

EY: She was, and she sort of took my under her wing, and me and my wife went to her house frequently and, for instance, I told you she was the one who --

JC: Who got you interested in Jim Stern's hiring, yes.

EY: So I've been always in the women's camp. I don't go out and make speeches 01:08:00about it, but they can make their own better than I can. I had a mother who was very strong and able.

JC: I think that I recall that you appointed a committee -- the first efforts under Title IX were in sports, in athletics, and you appointed a committee to make some recommendations about what we should do, and Kit Saunders -- do you remember Kit Saunders?

EY: Yes.

JC: She was the first -- you appointed her, I think, as Director of women's athletics.

EY: Maybe. I don't recall. It's a tough situation there, at every major 01:09:00university, because it's the division of the money. Why waste money on women? They don't get an audience.

JC: They do pretty well at getting audiences here. It's been a --

EY: Well, they've been pretty well treated here, and I believe in that and of course I pushed for it.

JC: Now, was Cyrena Pondrom's appointment part of that general area of effort?

EY: Yes. She was -- I was looking for somebody, and I think it was Dave Johnson who recommended her and I appointed her in affirmative action.

JC: Was she in the -- was she a faculty member at the university?

EY: Um-hmm (affirmatively).

JC: In the English Department at that time.

EY: Yeah. Her husband was in the English Department.

JC: He was in the Physics Department.

EY: Yes, Physics, Physics.

JC: Yes, yes.

EY: I [words unclear].

JC: And they're both still there, so.

EY: And she wins awards. She -- list of things. She and Irv didn't get along too well -- Irv Shain. They were bright people and --

JC: Both strong personalities. So she was a -- was she a Vice Chancellor? Irv was the --

EY: She was never a Vice Chancellor.

JC: O.K.

EY: I've forgotten her title, but she worked on affirmative action issues.

JC: And pay -- well, that was a -- she did equity pay studies and so on, I think?

EY: I don't recall that.

JC: Yeah. O.K. Well, you wanted to talk a little bit about the days when you moved from being in the School for Workers -- or directing the School for Workers, to chairing the Economics Department.

EY: Well, I didn't move. I [words unclear]

JC: O.K., alright. That's the Wisconsin way, I think. You just take on more.

EY: Well, coming to the department, that was an interesting thing. I was the most junior tenured faculty member when I became chairman. The man who made me chairman was Walter Morton.

JC: Oh.

EY: Because he raised so much hell that people -- he drove Mr. Witte out of the 01:12:00chair because he couldn't stand it. He was a very distinguished person.

JC: Both of them, actually.

EY: Both?

JC: Both Witte and Morton were distinguished.

EY: But Witte was much more, much more.

JC: O.K.

EY: Witte wrote the Social Security law.

JC: Yes, right.

EY: And other things, and I think Morton was psychological -- when you think everyone's against you?

JC: Ah . . . yes . . . paranoid.

EY: Paranoid. He was paranoid and so for some reason or another, the department thought I could -- I was the junior member -- could handle it, or maybe they thought they should sacrifice me to the fire (laughing).

JC: Well I noticed that you came to the department as a teaching assistant.

EY: The first time.

JC: O.K. And then you came back as an assistant professor in 1947.

EY: With the promise that -- maybe you're interested in how I came back?

JC: O.K.

EY: I got a letter from Professor Witte who was the chairman, and he said, "We're looking for somebody to carry on the labor history and the top man in the country has turned us down." That was Ted Taft at Brown and he got his Ph.D. here and working with Perlman in the four volume History. And he said, "We talked it over and we decided we better -- we'd get somebody and train him, and 01:14:00if you're interested in this . . . " I'd been in Europe before for years as a graduate student . . . "would you go to the American Economics Association Meeting in Atlantic City in February and meet me then and we'll talk about it," and I did that and we talked about it, and so I came back with the understanding that I could finish my degree -- see, I didn't have a Ph.D. and when I got finished, I'd be a full member of the department as an assistant professor. So that's how I got back in the [word unclear]. The chances of things like that happening are very rare.

JC: Yes.

EY: And I came back and Walter Morton was carrying on. He had a great ability at 01:15:00denouncing people, ridiculing people. He made a lot of money at that working for public utility corporations against regulators. He could make fun of them and ridiculed them. He did that to some of his colleagues, but he -- when any new person was appointed, he immediately explained to them why -- what was wrong with everybody else and why they were against him and so on. Well, he -- the issue that set things off was that -- I don't know how they do it now, but the faculty recommends the pay increases, and he was making a big fuss because: "Why give an increase to Elizabeth Brandeis? She doesn't need it. Her father left her 01:16:00a lot of money and her husband's got a job working for the state," and he was carrying on in that vein and Mr. Witte was chairman, but it was killing Mr. Witte, trying to manage with this guy raising hell with him. So they made me chairman.

JC: I heard that Mark Ingram had to chair some meetings for awhile, because --

EY: Yes, that's right.

JC: Everybody was so split, and --

EY: So I -- I stood so much of Morton, and I said, "Walter, if you don't behave like a normal citizen, don't come to the faculty meetings." I practically -- I threw him out. See, I didn't have a lot to lose (laughing).

JC: Well, you had tenure by that time, at least.

EY: Yeah, let's see . . . did I?

JC: You finished your -- you got your Ph.D. in 1950 and you became chairman of the department in 1952, which was a pretty short period of time to --

EY: Yes; too short.

JC: Yes.

EY: Anyway, and so the result was that Morton went up to the president's office and complained that I was mistreating him and so on and so on. So Mr. . . let's see . . . who was the president at that time . . . Fred -- E.B. Fred.

JC: Oh, yes.

EY: He was always a -- he liked peace and quiet. This wasn't peace. So he decided to settle it, so he invited all the department members to come up and meet with him and anyway, Morton's indictment for me was [word unclear] disgust 01:18:00presented, and Paul Ellsworth got up and said, "Let's be sensible. Ed is doing the best he can and we'd better back him, and I'm voting we give him unanimous support."

JC: That turned the tide and --

EY: Yes; gave me some authority, and then I think that's what made me Dean because I -- Morton was notorious over campus as difficult and somebody couldn't get a handle on him and it was sad. He had a very nice wife, and he raised hell. Her life was hell. His son is living in Madison and has some kind of business and then his father's money -- Walter made a lot of money working for the public 01:19:00utilities and the son gives a lot of it to the university.

JC: Well there's a conference room in the Economics Department that's called The Walter Morton Conference Room and I always -- I knew that that was a gift, but I didn't quite understand this background. It's interesting that the department named a conference room after him.

EY: Well, maybe they felt that we'd done wrong by kicking him out.

JC: Well, he stayed around.

EY: Oh, yes.

JC: And I remember him coming in every now and then and he was still a little bit off putting, but not like this description, so.

EY: Well, he got on with department business.

JC: You liked being department chair.

EY: It was interesting. There was something different. I did a lot of -- was able to -- and I believed in the system, of the senior faculty discussing things and coming to some conclusion. See, that would have gone out the window with the union.

JC: Yes, yeah. You did a lot of hiring while you were department chair.

EY: Yes. I raised quite a lot of money, but we had nobody that was doing mathematic economics, and Pete Steiner suggested we -- that I go to Harvard and see if we could interest Orcutt from leaving Harvard and coming from there. I knew the chairman at Harvard, and he said, "Ed, you know, you're just wasting 01:21:00your time. Nobody's going to leave Harvard to go to Wisconsin," but I had inside information that Orcutt felt he'd been mistreated in the previous -- didn't get promoted as quickly as he thought he should.

JC: Egos are wonderful, aren't they?

EY: Yeah (laughing); but he wanted $100,000 to start with -- what he wanted to do -- he had in the back of his mind a model of the U.S. economy and he wanted to do it right. He wanted to hire some people. And so I went to the graduate school and asked for $100,000 for him.

JC: That was a very large sum.

EY: Yes, and E.B. Fred -- then they went to E.B. Fred and told him that I wanted this kind of money and E.B. Fred talked to somebody, I'd forgotten who, and, "Ed Young wants all this money. What should we do?" "Well, give it to him." (laughing) I can't remember who we sought advice from, but E.B. Fred was kind of tight with money, you know. His salary at the end was $12,000 a year, but he kept a house down by the lake.

JC: Wonderful house.

EY: I used to go down there to see him. My wife and I were fond of both of the Freds and we'd go over there frequently. A dozen times I remember he came taking 01:23:00me out to show me the brick work up there, the quality of it. I liked the old boy. One time he was in the hospital and I went to the -- that was the old building, old hospital. We were talking, and he said, "You can't guess what I did last night," and I said, "well, what did you do last night?" and he said, "see that wastebasket over there?" He said, "A mouse came in and I got that wastebasket and put it on top of him and sat on it until somebody came and took him away," and he said, "That reminded me when I was a young man growing up in Virginia. They had a barn raising, and when they had a barn raising, they had a 01:24:00dance, and during the dance, this lady grabbed her leg and she said, "I've got a mouse," and he said there was a stream of water running down, too." (laughing) He was telling me this and he didn't hear very well, so he spoke quite loudly, and outside the nurses were laughing. We've had some real characters around this place.

JC: Yes, we have, we have.

EY: Time [words unclear].

JC: Um . . . let's see if I made any notes on some that I wanted to ask you about. Do you want to -- do you have any comment on Bob Doremus?

EY: Yes. I liked Bob very much. I inherited -- he was meticulous. He liked to 01:25:00say "no" sometimes, but a very hard worker, and a very bright person. I think he had a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard, or something like that?

JC: Well, he was an English professor, so --

EY: I know, but he had --

JC: He was a meteorologist. He became a meteorologist in World War II.

EY: That was probably it. I knew he had some science.

JC: He was fascinated by it.

EY: I liked him very much, but a lot of the faculty thought he was kind of bumbling, but he wasn't bumbling. He knew them inside out (laughing).

JC: He trained me.

EY: What?

JC: He trained me.

EY: Did he?

JC: I worked with him in South Hall and so I have quite an imprint of him.

EY: Did you work there when the elderly ladies worked for the Dean down on -- 01:26:00before I was Dean?

JC: Which?

EY: [Fran and Bergen?] or -- well, they lived together.

JC: No, um-hmm, nope. What about Reed Bryson?

EY: Oh, I had a personal, cordial relationship. He sends me his poetry. Every Christmas he writes a poem. I liked Reed. I never thought he should be running a university, but he never tried to, as far as I know. I just kind of liked him. He was egotistical, I think.

JC: He built quite an empire in the --

EY: Meteorology.

JC: Meteorology area.

EY: Um-hmm, he did. And see, there were a lot of empires around this university built by people who knew what they were doing; look at biochemistry.

JC: Yes, and I'm blocking on his name . . . but he's still very active.

EY: Yes, he was the last --

JC: DeLuca.

EY: DeLuca. He was the last student in -- what was the great man before him?

JC: Steinbach?

EY: No.

JC: No?

EY: Steinbach, yes; Steinbach's last student. And the reason I know this is that when we came -- before we came to Madison the first time, we negotiated by mail to get a place to live -- this was '45, and we shipped our furniture and everything to this -- when we got there, we went to see the landlord and he said, "I'm sorry you had to tell me something I wouldn't like." He said, "We 01:28:00play bridge twice a week with another couple, and they live on the east side and it's quite a problem for me to come over here. It would be much better if they -- so we let them have the apartment.

JC: So they could play bridge (laughing).

EY: Yes.

JC: Alright.

EY: We were out in the cold. The housing people helped us find a summer place on the east side of the lake which was not winterized. So with winter coming along, we moved to Badger, and spent every year at Badger Village. We met a lot of -- got acquainted with a lot of people.

JC: I --

EY: Oh, I was telling you why I knew about the Biochemistry Department --

JC: Oh, yes.

EY: Steinbach. We rented a place one year -- maybe our first year, not our second one, a little house on -- there's a grocery store on the west side where they have good meat and things that people go to.

JC: Knocke's.

EY: Knocke's. Well, just up that road from Knocke's. We lived there and down the street a little further was an M.D. from Minnesota who was getting a Ph.D. with Steinbach so I used to ride into school with him and so I'd wait for him at the department so I picked up a lot of the gossip. The gossip amongst the graduate 01:30:00students was that Steinbach was over the hill and -- what's the current one?

JC: Hector DeLuca?

EY: Hector DeLuca was kind of second rate (laughing).

JC: Oh, well.

EY: Hector was the last student of Steinbach's. He managed to survive it.

JC: I guess, I guess. I hear of people who are looking for the Nobel Prize designation for him.

EY: Yeah, well I don't know about that. See, I don't know enough about the science to know -- he certainly is a successful administrator and politician.

JC: Yeah, well --

EY: I worked with him and liked him very much, but it wasn't because of his size.

JC: I was looking -- while you were Dean, there were -- well, there was a lot of growth going on at the university.

EY: Yes, yes; remember that people coming back from the war and classes were getting larger.

JC: Yes, yeah, and the faculty size was increasing but it was also getting more -- we were getting more subject areas and more fields that were coming into existence and I see that you were Dean when Urban and Regional Planning was created as a department and African Languages and Literature and Computer Sciences.

EY: If you want to turn off the machine for a moment, I'll tell you about them.

JC: O.K. (tape cuts out) Urban and Regional Planning and African Languages and Literature and Computer Sciences. Do you have any --

EY: [Van Cena?] came. He was a great one.

JC: He came to the History Department, or did he come to --

EY: Yeah, History, but for African -- he was an African Historian, and what was the other . . . computing --

JC: Computer Sciences, yes.

EY: And we got this chap there from somewhere. Mark Ingram spotted him and told me he was good. He came for that. I think he was the one who was head of the Masters --

JC: Ah . . . John Nowell?

EY: No.

JC: No. [Barkley Rosser?].

EY: [Barkley Rosser?]. He was the head of the computing and also the Math Research Center and what a terrible job he had there. That damn Cardinal lied 01:33:00day in and day out about the research that was going on there. There wasn't any. I had a firm understanding with every faculty member who was offered an opportunity to do research with government money that they had to clear it with me. I turned down quite a bit of it; didn't want to defend it. But the Math Research Center was kept spotlessly. Now, that doesn't mean that some of the professors, on their own, didn't go off and talk -- and didn't report to me that they went on their own time on vacations and did things, or went to conferences and met people. I don't know how much of that went on. But, of course, they were working on problems that the military used. That's why the military financed the whole Math Research Center.

JC: Now you were Chancellor at the time of the Sterling Hall bombing.

EY: Yes.

JC: Which was, of course, was aimed at the Math Research Center.

EY: Yes.

JC: Do you have anything that you want to say about that?

EY: I probably shouldn't say it, but I think it was promoted by The Cardinal. They wrote so many stories about the research and that's why it was picked on, and the man who wrote those stories is now their chief editorial writer for The Milwaukee Journal.

JC: O.K. Well, people move into different --

EY: Things.

JC: Different activities, so --

EY: I can imagine a lot of people would never have predicted I would be sitting here telling you about so many things.

JC: Right, right. What about (tape cuts out) -- Side two of Tape Two and continuing the interview with Ed Young on February 6th, 2006. You were just --

EY: I like most people and, you see, if I were a genius, I would have higher standards, (laughing) but I'm not a genius and so I respect other people for what they do and I think they understand that. This is why my colleagues put me the most junior person of the faculty [words unclear]. They felt I would probably do the right thing.

JC: Now, you don't -- do you think that your professional training, your labor relations background helped you with that kind of thing?

EY: Oh, see I didn't study collective bargaining. I did some of it and arbitrated. The arbitration -- I learned quite a bit from arbitration, but 01:36:00generally, people like to get credit for what they do, and I tried to give people credit without flattering people undeservedly, and that helps and I never pretended to know how to do -- what they were doing better than they did (laughing). That's a serious mistake.

JC: You spent a lot of time overseas when you were --

EY: Yes, I have.

JC: Still when you were Chancellor, were you doing some of the --

EY: Um-hmm (affirmatively). In fact, when I was at Maine, I was managing a project from here, an overseas project.

JC: And I saw that you were in Pakistan when you were named Dean of L and S, or --

EY: Yes. I was part of the Harvard Group advising the government on economic policy. We enjoyed our time there. My wife would have wanted to go back, but the place is going to hell.

JC: Oh, yeah. So that the two places that you were mainly were Pakistan and Indonesia, would that be --

EY: Well, I did some things in the -- had one group in the Philippians. It was really kind of a branch of the Indonesian activity, but I spent some time teaching in Kuala Lumpur.

JC: Were you involved in the MUSEA Project?

EY: Not -- only indirect.

JC: I'm just remembering that in my early years in the Economics Department, that was an active project.

EY: Yes. I think they supported me in one of my overseas activities. I've 01:38:00forgotten which it was, but I enjoyed -- you know, I was thinking about my family, my children. The best thing we ever did for them was to get them overseas so they could discover that being different doesn't mean being less. See, we lived in Pakistan and --

JC: Were you teaching at universities there, or what kind of activities were you doing?

EY: They had a national planning group which Harvard had to contract to supply the people. Harvard asked me to go over and help with the planning and dealing 01:39:00with the economist often trained in this country. We enjoyed ourselves very much and became very fond of some of the -- made good friends with most of the Pakistanis, too. I don't know who -- I think one of our former students promoted me to go to Kuala Lumpur; suggested me to the government. The Indonesian thing came about in this fashion: one day I got a call from a professor at Yale whom I knew because of a meeting -- Lloyd Randalls, and he said how would I like to -- 01:40:00"How would Wisconsin like to have a project in Indonesia? Ford financed and a chance to do all these things," and I said, "Lloyd, if it's such a great opportunity, why doesn't Yale do it?" He said, "Ed, I'll tell you. Our president believes that the world ends at the English Channel." (laughing)

JC: O.K.

EY: [Words unclear]. I set that up and got quite a lot of people involved. Have you met Mary Woodward anywhere?

JC: Yes, I have. She was working with Lloyd Mc -- ah, Wayne McGowan, and I met her when she was working with him.

EY: Yeah. She lives just down the street on the other side of Midvale. After a year experience over there where we helped select students to come to the United States for graduate work and we brought them here and so on, after awhile [words unclear] took them all and took charge of them (laughing). She was a great woman. I liked her very much. She knew the difference between what was significant and what wasn't. She didn't bother me with trivial things. She made the decision. Nothing was trivial.

JC: Can you talk a little bit about the Center for Development? You had a long involvement in that.

EY: Yes, I was -- ran that, too. See, I ran several of these things simultaneously. When I had a good person doing the work, I took the credit.

JC: Now Mary Woodward was not involved in that.

EY: No, no. Well, wait a minute . . . let me tell you.

JC: O.K.

EY: I decided after visiting the project in Indonesia and seeing what was going on and some experience to bring the students, it would be useful if there -- over there, a professor was way up there. Nobody -- you don't approach them really,very much. So there wasn't very much exchange between the professors and the students. Well, I felt that the students ought to know what they were going to get into when they got here, and so I had the idea we'd send one of our own graduate students over there. So I asked the department who I should ask to go, and one of the names was George Betts and I don't know who the other one was . . . anyway, George -- the other fella maybe dropped out. Anyway, George was a very 01:43:00good student. He had been a Rhode scholar, or pretty close to it. So I sent him to Cornell to learn Indonesian. It's the only place in the country where they were teaching Indonesian at the time and I got a phone call from him and said he had a personal matter to talk to me about and I said, "What's that George?" Once you're Dean, anybody that says, "I got a personal matter," you wish they'd go away! (laughing) "Don't tell me!"

He said, "Well, I was talking with my girlfriend, Mary," who was the editor at Time magazine in New York, "about my plan to go to Indonesia for a couple of years, and she said that if I go there, go off for two years, forget about her." I said, "Well, what do you want to do?" He said, "I want to marry her and take 01:44:00her over there, but . . . " I said, "Well, what do I have to do with it?" He said, "Under my contract with you, you pay for one person, but married people, you pay for both," and I said, "George, call her up and propose," and he did and they went over there and she was the more successful one than he was, because she prepared the wives of these graduate students -- some -- they could bring them -- how to work that out with the board, and told them about what to expect and what the university was about and what they could do in the community. Now, I had this happen to me in another case -- in the Music School, there was a 01:45:00distinguished French horn player that had been at one of the big -- the Philadelphia Orchestra before he came here, I guess. I've forgotten his name now.

JC: I'm not going to be able to come up with that one.

EY: Well, I got a call from him and said he had a personal matter and wanted to talk to me, and I said, "Come on up." He came up. His matter was that he was -- he and a woman member of the faculty in Music were thinking of getting married, but it was a rule that when two members of the same family couldn't have tenure without permission from the Dean at some point. He was a very proper man, almost pompous. So I said, "You put me on the spot." He said, "How is that?" I said, 01:46:00"Well, if I don't approve it, you'll be living in sin." (laughing) and so I said, "Go ahead."

JC: Well, those were probably pleasanter questions or issues than many of the ones that came to you as Dean when somebody said, "I have a personal problem I'd like to talk to you about."

EY: Yes, well, see I was thinking students. When students have personal problems -- I had one thing when I was Dean that nobody else I think, ever had. I had fund provided by, I think the Rennebohm Foundation, I'd forgotten, where I could -- if a student needed some money that badly, I could write them a check. I had a checkbook; very extraordinary thing and probably illegal and all of that. But, 01:47:00anyway, see, students who were dropping out for a variety of reasons often used the financing as an excuse for dropping out, so I could write them a check to cover small amounts that kept them in school. They didn't have any other excuse not to (laughing) and it was probably -- and sometimes it was true, too. I know something about the cost of education. I've got a number of grandchildren in college.

JC: Yes. You were going to tell me something about the Center for Development, and I --

EY: Oh yes, the Center for Development. How did we get that going . . .

JC: Well, Bill Young was involved in it.

EY: Yes, Bill Young.

JC: And I think you first had a group of --

EY: It was a group of --

JC: Officials or bureaucrats from some country, but I'm not sure what the early country was.

EY: Well, the Indonesian group was in the -- the money from Ford supported it. See, we charged Ford's administrative costs. Lisa Tackle worked for that.

JC: Ah, yes.

EY: And -- well, it seemed to be useful because we were able to help some of our own graduate students get jobs and we had the program in Indonesia and the Philippians and I think that's about all, but --

JC: Then it moved in later years to an emphasis on Asian: Japan and -- I'm not sure.

EY: Let's see . . . when I was associated with it, we had people in it like Dave Johnson, Singapore, and we had -- I went to spend some time teaching in Thailand and so it went where there was an opportunity and opportunity meant somebody was going to pay for it.

JC: And there were a lot of people going then.

EY: Yes.

JC: Quite a lot.

EY: Now probably the Land Tenure Center has a longer record of doing this kind of thing, but they had some very good people.

JC: I'm just looking to see if there are particular things that I wanted to remember to ask you about. I have been asked to tell you that your furniture from the office that you had in Helen C. White Hall, the teak furniture that you had, is very happy in South Hall now. Chris Bruin -- I don't know if you remember Chris, but he was the person who's doing space activities for L and S now and the furniture and some of your old Badger yearbooks and other things like that are in his office and --

EY: See, I left rather suddenly. I was ill. In fact, I've got a -- I found a 01:51:00folder the other day. I came home and it was marked "Ed Young, Personal," which really meant personnel matters, and I'd never read it. I'm wondering whether I could give it to the Archives. I probably should.

JC: Well, they'd probably be interested in taking a look at it.

EY: Maybe let Dave Cronin look at it and see if there's anything useful in it. Well, now this teak was put in that office by -- I think Bob Clodius.

JC: Ah-huh. O.K.

EY: See, he'd had it before.

JC: I think that's right. Yes, I do remember that.

EY: Bob was more apt to spend money than I was.

JC: O.K. Well, Chris says that it's very happy, that the room that it's in in 01:52:00South Hall is one of the few that has its original, or at least long time tin roof, tin ceiling, and he's kept some of your records of -- I don't know, dating back a ways, like the Badger yearbooks and he said anytime you're interested, just let him know.

EY: I'll take the furniture and let him keep the stuff.

JC: Well, is that something that --

EY: I didn't mean the furniture, just my furniture.

JC: O.K.

EY: That would be called corrupt.

JC: Alright. Well --

EY: I moved out ill and they moved my stuff out and it got scattered pretty much, but if it's being put to good use, that's fine, but if it cost anything, I didn't buy it (laughing). My money is the university's money.

JC: O.K. Well, it's being put to good use right now, so. Well, I think that's 01:53:00probably all that I have to ask you about right now and if you think of anything else, you could give me a call, and I'd be glad to --

EY: Give me a piece of paper with your name and --

JC: O.K.

EY: Telephone numbers.

JC: I will do that, and I am going to call you (tape cuts out).