UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #029
SCOTT M. CUTLIP

CUTLIP, Scott M.  (1915-2000)
Graduate Student; Professor of Journalism; Public Relations Officer
At UW: 1939-41; 1946-75

First Interview		
Interviewed: 1975
Interviewer: Donna Taylor	
Length: 3 hours	

	Education; Reorganizing news service; Origin of Bucky Badger symbol; University plaque; Fight for library; E. B. Fred and other administrators; School of Journalism; Mass Communications Center; State Historical Society; Military public relations program; History of Philanthropy project; Reasons for leaving UW.

Second Interview
Interviewed: 1997			
Interviewer: Steven Vaughn
Length: 30 min.

	Background; Education; History of Journalism School; Ralph Nafzinger.
			
First Interview Session (1975)
00:00:01
DT:  	I understand that you've been at the University of Wisconsin for quite a long time.  Was it 1946 you came? 
SC:  	I came back in 1946, January of 1946, to become assistant professor in journalism.  However, I first came to the University of Wisconsin as a graduate student in 1939. At Syracuse University, where I did my undergraduate work, I became a close friend of a student of Fred Merwin.  Fred Merwin, incidentally, is the uncle of Crawford Young who is here on the political science faculty now.  Fred Merwin had gotten his Ph.D. with John Gaus in the political science department.  Fred encouraged me to go on and teach and come here and study under John Gaus. This is the best advice I suppose I've ever had in my life.  
00:01:31
	I came to Wisconsin in September 1939 as a teaching assistant in the School of Journalism.  Incidentally, our life is often influenced by very small things.  Northwestern University offered me a $500 teaching assistantship; Wisconsin offered me a $600 teaching assistantship, so in the end I came to Wisconsin.  I came primarily to study with John Gaus who was the greatest teacher I ever had. My whole intellectual life exploded when I came here in September 1939. Taking courses with John Gaus, Selig Perlman, Ed Witte, Bill Sumner, and other such stimulating men opened up a world I had never known before. 
00:02:15
	But I had to cut short my graduate work in 1941 because of the war situation and need to pay off accumulated debts, sol took a job for a year with the State Road Commission in West Virginia as public relations director before going into the service. As the war was nearing its end I got a letter from Professor Grant Hyde, the director of the School of Journalism, asking me if I would be interested in coming back to teach.  I certainly was, because in the long boring hours I had to reflect on such matters in the South Pacific I had decided that Madison was the one place I wanted to live and spend my life.  So I came back in January 1946 as assistant professor in the School of Journalism at a salary of $3,000.
DT:  	Now, I'd like to hear a little bit more about the School of Journalism, but before that I know that you were almost at once, maybe a year later, made assistant to the president
SC:  I think perhaps we'd better proceed chronologically. I came back in January1946 as assistant professor and was joined by another young assistant professor, Burt Hotaling. 
00:03:51
	The School of Journalism faculty had been reduced during the war and we were swamped with loads of students.  In the summer of 1946 Professor Robert Neal under whom I served as a teaching assistant, and who was now teaching at the University of Missouri, wanted me to come to the University of Missouri, and in the course of my negotiations with the University of Missouri I persuaded Dean Mark Ingraham to help strengthen the school by offering a position to Professor Henry Ladd Smith.  The extent of my bargaining with Professor Ingraham was to get him to agree to try to get Henry Ladd Smith back here on the faculty and to reduce the School of Journalism teaching load to eight hours because of the inordinate paper-grading load that we had.  My first semester here I had had over 100 students in news editing.  These things were accomplished.  I asked nothing for myself.  I'll come back to Professor Smith later.
00:05:08
	Early in 1947 President Fred had been concerned about building-renewing public confidence in the University—the public confidence and support that had been eroded in the Frank and Dykstra years. He became more and more concerned with the University's public relations. He was prodded into action in this regard by the oncoming centennial of the University, and also by a number of incidents involving the press which created a bad impression.  These things all tie together.  Early in 1946 the U.S. Army, acting on the basis of a recommendation made by Arthur W. Page, decided to send military officers with an aptitude for public relations to universities for graduate degrees in journalism and public relations.  The University of Wisconsin and the University of Missouri—both selected on the basis of reputations achieved in the past but not warranted at present—were chosen to train—educate military officers in public relations.  The first three officers in that program, which is just now petering out, came in the summer of 1946.  One of these was a lieutenant colonel, Chester V. Clifton, known more popularly as Ted Clifton.  Ted Clifton was in my seminar and I invited Andrew Hopkins, who was a tower of strength in the Department of Ag Journal ism—ag extension editor, and a powerful figure on campus--to talk to my seminar, and in the course of that seminar he became quite impressed with Ted Clifton's intellectual capacities and work, and—during this period and subsequently it developed that Andrew Hopkins had been consulting with E.B. Fred about what to do about the University's public relations' organization and proper observance of the bicentennial.  
00:09:07
	So Hopkins recommended to President Fred that Ted Clifton be utilized to draft—write out a centennial celebration plan.  Now Ted Clifton later went on to become a distinguished military officer and major general, was chief senior military aide and public relations adviser to President Kennedy and senior military aide to President Johnson, and played a very key role in the revival of the army's public reputation and strength in the late 1950s and in the '60s.  He was a buddy of Maxwell Taylor's. Well, Ted Clifton drafted a centennial plan which included taking steps to improve relationships with the state's press.
	Well then, in early May, Professor Hyde came back from President Fred's office and said, "President Fred wants you to take charge of the University public relations at least for the centennial year, and he wants you to go to work when classes are. over in May."  I said, "There's no way that I can do that."  Erna and I had been planning to get married on May 21st, the day after classes were over, and we had not let anybody know about it.  We were keeping it secret because we didn't want a lot of fuss around the school.  Erna was the departmental secretary in political science, also in South Hall. Incidentally I got not only my education from John Gaus, I got my wife from John Gaus.  He introduced us.  That was the first time Hyde knew I was going to get married, so he went back and told President Fred that I was not available in May or through the summer.  Well, Erna and I got married and went on our honeymoon and came back and I taught in summer session that summer.  And nothing more was heard about it. That was a very hot summer, the summer of '47, and one hot July night we were up on Observatory Hill trying to cool off and enjoy the beautiful view of Lake Mendota when President and Mrs. Fred came along. He stopped to chat and said, "I thought you were coming in to see me." I said I didn't understand that I was, and he said, "Well, I want to talk to you."  So I went in the next day and he told me his concern.

	His immediate concerns were—he'd been through a very unfortunate press incident early in the year when pills compounded in the Department of Pharmacy had gotten in the wrong bottle and resulted in the death of a child in the Sparta child colony.  And they'd foolishly tried to protect the Pharmacy School by suppressing it. Eventually the story came out.  And also Professor Kiekhofer, who was chairman of the centennial committee, was pressing Dr. Fred to get a publicity program going for the centennial.  
00:12:17
	Also, I learned subsequently, President Fred was quite dissatisfied with the work of Robert Foss who was then director of the news service—or news bureau, as it was known then.  And I want to be very fair to Bob Foss.  This University has never had a more dedicated or loyal servant than Bob Foss and he, in a very real sense, destroyed his health during the war by trying to handle the University’s publicity and public relations, including handling the sports publicity; he was almost a one-man band through that war period and wore himself out.  So, President Fred then asked me if I wanted to become his assistant for public relations and I did. And he gave me two assignments.  One was to reorganize the University's public relations setup, and the other was to organize a publicity program for the centennial.
DT:  Which would have been for 1949, is that right? 
SC:  	—and as several of us remarked during the course of that year, it's fortunate you only have to live through, one centennial. But President Fred had a deeper purpose in mind and usually his deeper purposes were always held close to the vest—and that was to build renewed public interest in and public support for the University of Wisconsin.  I think one of his great contributions was to greatly increase the understanding of and support for this University during his thirteen years as president.  Bill Sarles was then his assistant— I talked to him about it and Bill said, "Scott, keep your teaching position in the School of Journalism.  You may not like university administration; particularly you may not like the fact that you can't always go out and play golf on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning when you're working for E. B. Fred.  So I did.  I continued to teach my public relations course in the School of Journalism the two years I served President Fred as his assistant. 
00:15:10
DT:  	So you remained a member of the department. 
SC:  	Yes.  So when the budget was adopted in August of 1947, I was appointed assistant to the president for public relations and promoted to associate professor.
00:16:15
	A very amusing incident which I think forms a footnote of history— on Monday morning, August whatever  it was, I think it was the seventeenth or maybe it was August nineteenth, of '47, I was in President Fred's office—it was the Monday morning after they'd adopted the budget on Saturday—trying to discuss the outlines of our work, when President Birge, then in his nineties, came in and was irate because he'd found out in the budget that he'd only been granted one research assistant when he'd asked for two.  He said, "Dammit, Edwin, I need two research assistants because I want to complete this project.  I'm not going to live forever."  He was in his early nineties at that point.
	So then I--I might say that Clay Schoenfeld, a former student of mine, had done a survey for me in the seminar that spring on the number of public relations offices on the University campus that were issuing publicity releases and had full-time people involved, and it was more than twenty.  So one of my first moves was to try to bring some coordination to the dissemination of information from the University and we did reduce the flow of releases and did reduce the number of offices issuing releases, and this led to a reorganization into the University news service, sports news service, and agriculture and home economics news service.  
00:17:40
	Now Andrew Hopkins was a giant of a man-mentally and intellectually as well as physically.  And he didn't take the coordination very well.  He maintained the autonomy and independence of the College of Agriculture and Home Economics. Arthur Lentz, who was then director of sports publicity—we changed the title to sports news service--was a very able and imaginative public relations person.  Later he went on to head the U.S. Olympic Committee.
	Incidentally I think that here's another story—footnote—that ought to be in the record.  Our much used and much admired symbol of Bucky Badger was an Arthur Lentz creation. 
DT:  	Oh, was it?
SC:  	Yes.  Bucky Badger was created to meet a public relations problem when Wisconsin's athletic fortunes were at rock bottom.  At the end of the '48 season President Fred and the athletic board realized that there had to be a change in the head football coach. Harry Stuhldreher stepped aside as football coach and remained as athletic, director and Ivy Williamson was then hired to be head football coach. He brought in a whole new staff.  Well, for the Homecoming of '49, Arthur Lentz saw the need for a symbol that would get the badger up off his belly.  And he worked with an artist, whose name escapes me, and they created—using the figure of a raccoon, not a badger—they created Bucky Badger with his jaw stuck out and his chest puffed out— this was a fighting, up-on-his-feet badger.  And working with William Sachse, a member of the crew [no relation to Professor William L. Sachse], who was chairman of Homecoming, they made Bucky Badger--they had a big original prepared at the University Bookstore.  Had Arthur Lentz copyrighted Bucky Badger, he would have died a rich man, but he wasn't inclined to try to profit  from that creation.  He was an able, dedicated person who, unfairly, got blamed for the '72 Olympic fiasco at Munich.
DT:  	Bucky Badger is all over now—on T-shirts and goodness knows what.
SC:  	That's right. That's right.  But Bucky Badger was a symbol, a public relations symbol created to meet a public relations problem when our football fortunes and fans' morale were at a low ebb.
00:21:29
	One of the recommendations Ted Clifton made to Fred was to reorganize the news service.  So I started looking for candidates, and wound up with the selection of Robert Taylor, who was then news director of WIBA.  And I brought Bob Taylor in to be my assistant for the news service.  And a year later I moved him in as director of the news service and he replaced Bob Foss, who took a lesser role. 
DT:  	Did he retire at this point?
SC:  	No.  No, he didn't retire.  He never retired.  He retired a few years ago and died recently.  A marvelous person.
00:22:26
	Then to handle the centennial publicity I recruited Clay Schoenfeld. I persuaded him to leave the alumni association and take on the job of handling centennial publicity and to work with Professor Kiekhofer, which was no  easy task.  Professor Kiekhofer was very exacting in his demands and his instructions.  He was always terribly concerned that this would turn into a publicity circus and not be a dignified academic celebration.  Clay and I had our problems with Professor Kiekhofer, and some of his committee, particularly Professor Knaplund. 
DT:  	He was on the committee too?
SC:  	Yes.  Clay and I in effect abandoned two projects we had planned and budgeted for the centennial.  One was a radio series dramatizing the history and accomplishments of the University of Wisconsin, and another was a movie.  Professor Kiekhofer was insistent— as were other members of the committee—insistent on having the scripts for this radio series and the film reviewed by the committee, and, being convinced that you cannot have creative work done by a committee, we, rather than submit to that kind of critical review and rewriting, abandoned those two projects.
00:27:48
	Then one of the first things I did to help reestablish rapport with the press in the state, which was one of President Fred's goals, was to set up a series of fall conferences, one for weekly newspaper editors, one for daily newspaper editors, one for radio station managers and news directors.  I did some fact finding and found that the weeklies and the dailies simply did not want to meet together, that they felt they had different interests.  Over the years in Wisconsin the weekly organization and the daily organization have gone their separate ways.  In fact— and they'd made it clear to me they did not want it made a joint meeting, it would not work.  Bob Taylor, in the late fifties or early sixties, did try a joint meeting and it didn't go over very well.  Now it's interesting to note in this year of 1975 the two organizations have merged.
DT:  	At long last.
SC:  	At long last.  But I set up a weekly newspaper conference, a daily newspaper conference, and a radio conference to which we invited the top people of these media to come to the campus for a day and a half.  We provided a president's luncheon for them, and dinner, and then of course we hid the attraction of a football game on Saturday afternoon.  The first year we got a large number of the faculty and administrators to meet with them, have lunch with them, have dinner with them, and we discussed the University's policies and problems in a very frank and cooperative way.  And these were most productive and they were repeated the second year and have continued down through the years.
DT:  	They're still going?
SC:  	The weekly—the fall newspaper conference is still going. It died toward the end of the Fred administration, and then the conferences were revived by Elvehjem and Harrington.  I'm not certain-there was a lapse there—I think it was towards the end of the Fred administration, maybe during the Elvehjem years.  I'm not certain. Bob Taylor would have to tell you.  When I went back to teaching, full-time teaching* the fall of 1949, Bob Taylor took over in my place as assistant to the president.
00:27:48	End of Tape 1, Side 1.
Tape 1, Side 2
00:27:52
	In retrospect, in my years at Wisconsin, I now think that E. B. Fred was the ablest president we've had in my time here.  I was not always persuaded of that at the time I was working for him. 
DT:  	Did you find him difficult to work with?
SC:  	President Fred is in one sense a very difficult man to work for. In another sense he is a very fine man to work for.  He was difficult in that he played everything close to his vest, confided little, and gave you little explicit direction.  He did everything by innuendo and indirection.  Now President Fred always gave the untutored observer—and I was untutored until I got to know him--the impression of a man who was fumbling, who didn't know where he was going, didn't know what he wanted to accomplish.  President Fred always knew what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, but he believed that you had to make haste slowly.  One time he told me, he said, "You're just like Al Peterson [vice president of business and finance].  You think that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line." And another time he told me, "You know, you've never learned enough to walk around a brush fire instead of plowing through it."  He was a cautious man, unsure of himself on platforms.  He--in a way he was a paradox as a speaker.  He was not an effective speaker.  Yet his sincerity and his dedication came through in a way that did make his presence felt, his appearance effective, even though he fumbled around in the speeches that were written for him.  Incidentally, there again it was very difficult to write speeches for him.
DT:  	Did you do this?
SC:  	Yes I did.  I did the bulk of the speech writing in the two-years I was there.  Clay Schoenfeld helped some and Bob. Taylor helped some, but I did most of the speeches during the two years that I worked for him.  His wife interfered at times to make our tasks more difficult even than they needed to be. One time we kept a log on his speeches and they usually went through about seven drafts. 
DT:  	Oh my [laughter].
SC:  	He wanted them to be polished and precise yet not to say anything of real substance.  He fussed more about the way things were said than what was said.  About all he gave in the way of direction for speech writing was from a folder in his drawer in which he dropped speeches which he was sent.  He would underline in red pencil thoughts he wanted to use.  When he had a new speech to give he would hand you this bunch of pamphlets or newspaper clippirgs or whatever that he'd underlined and say you'd get some ideas here, but he didn't give you much direction and he didn't want you to be too definitive and too precise on anything that would invite controversy.
00:32:00
	President Fred dreaded controversy; he was overly sensitive to criticism.  He was a very cautious, timid man on public stage. He much preferred to operate from the wings.  President Fred greatly enjoyed the presidency, and the power that he carried to implant and impose his ideas about research and education.  Yet he didn't enjoy the perquisites of office the way many men who seek those positions do.  He didn't care greatly for entertaining, which was one of the reasons why he never moved into the president's house.  Also he was mindful of the cost of entertaining, I think.  He never enjoyed the public spotlight, but he greatly enjoyed the politics off the public stage.  
00:33:12
	Vice-President Baldwin once told me that for years President Fred ran the American Bacteriological Society but the most uncomfortable year he had was the year he was president. President Fred did not want publicity, hence he did not seek publicity. In an effort to project the man in a way that would bring credit to the University I several times publicized the fact that he didn't want to live in the president's house.  Well this created a problem because the trust—the terms of the trust under which that house was given required that the president live there.  So we were getting in trouble.  
00:34:14
	Another time I publicized the fact that he had a Confederate flag, which his mother had given him, hanging in his home, and this later brought us problems with the sons of the GAR.  Take a look at the dedication plaque on the Memorial Sports Practice Building.
DT: [laughter]
SC:  	He did not seek publicity.  In fact the only time he took the initiative to get out a story was one time when Floyd Andre, who had been his choice for dean of the College of Agriculture, accepted the deanship at Iowa State after he'd been turned down by the regents here. President Fred asked—said he wanted to issue a statement indicating what a great loss this was for the University.  He was still smarting, because he did not get his way with the regents of naming Andre'dean of the College of Agriculture when they moved Baldwin into the vice-presidency.  Professor Vincent Kivlin was able to develop enough support in the regents to block the Andre' appointment, but Kivlin couldn't get the deanship for himself.  Dean Froker was selected as a compromise candidate at a third meeting in this deadlock.
00:35:34
	All the time I knew President Fred he only lost two battles with the board of regents—the Andre's appointment and the program for state scholarships, but let me say this.  President Fred had a very difficult, reactionary board of regents to work with, and he made that board look so much better in public than it behaved in private. He-President Fred, understood, as some of his successors have not, that a president has only two bases of power, his regents and his faculty. And these were his primary concerns and he spent—he was a patient man, a cautious man, and he worked tirelessly to achieve his objectives by informing, cajoling, flattering, consul ting—and he spent inordinate amounts of time holding the hands of regents, and trying to placate them, soothe their prejudices, and also he spent an infinite amount of time with the faculty.  As I said earlier, President Fred always knew what he wanted to accomplish but he moved very slowly and cautiously to accomplish it.  His fumbling provided a protective cover.  By the time he was ready to move he had a consensus, and unless he had a consensus he wouldn't bring something to the faculty, or he wouldn't bring something to the regents. 
00:37:54
	Very early in my service, after he had made a couple of miscues in handling the faculty meeting and got called for errors of parliamentary procedure, I suggested to him walking back to the office from a faculty meeting, "Why don't you get one of the parliamentarians from the speech department to serve as parliamentarian?"  He said, "Now Scott, you can accomplish a lot more sometimes if you don't know Robert's Rules of Order."
 DT: 	[laughter]
SC:  	And this was really an indication of the way he worked. But to come back to the speeches.  In a way it was very frustrating writing speeches for him because once he got a draft anybody who happened to ' come into the office that day would be asked to read it .and criticize it, and quite frequently Dean Ingraham would come in, and Dean Ingraham takes great  pride in his writing, in his prose, and he quite often would very severely edit a manuscript that I or Clay or Bob had worked on.  But this was one of President Fred's ways of consulting. When he had something on his mind whoever happened to come in to see him would be consulted on that matter. And as I say, we kept a log for a period of time and found that a typical Fred speech would go through about seven drafts.  
00:39:33
	Another characteristic about him were his cards. He had every known fact about the University faculty on 5 x 7 note cards and he carried these with him wherever he went.  They were designed to enable him to answer any question about the University. Again let me say he was very unsure of himself on the platform because he was not an articulate or effective speaker and he wouldn't appear in public without a manuscript.  We even had to write out remarks for the daisy chain celebration on Bascom Hill.  Yet I saw him trapped on at least two occasions where he had to speak extemporaneously and he did a very effective job.  He just lacked any self-confidence. In many ways President Fred was a very insecure man, which was strange in the light of all his accomplishments and his abilities.  But he was very nervous about--and so he was difficult in that sense that he did not give you—say, "Now this is what I want to accomplish and here's the way I suggest you go about it."  You had to pick it up by innuendo or indirection.  And another thing, of course, were his hours. President Fred drove himself relentlessly.  He'd work 'til five o'clock, go home and have supper, come back to the office and work until nine or .so, go home and be there by ten o'clock to hear the ten o'clock news. He went to bed by the ten o'clock news and got up for the six o'clock news.  He got his own breakfast. 
DT:  	I've heard he was often in Bascom by seven.
SC:  	Yes.  And he worked Saturdays and Sundays.  In fact, one of the reasons Bill Sarles left—some problem, some emergency came up one Saturday afternoon and he couldn't find Bill and he later found Bill was playing golf and he became very irked at this.  Bill, as do I, thinks that a man has time to play golf on Saturday afternoon. Very early when I was working for him, he called me one Sunday morning at about nine thirty and said, "Are you going to stay in bed all morning?"  He said, "We've got some problems up here."  He was a kindly man, though, a warm, friendly man.  
00:42:45
	The only mean thing he ever said to me in the two years I worked for him was—they'd created a state legislative council and they wanted a report which was due early January and Erna and I went to her father's home in Milwaukee for New Year's Eve and Fred had told me he wanted me to work New Year's Day.  Well, I got up the next morning and got back here by ten-thirty New Year's Day and walked in feeling very noble for giving up New Year's Day to work on the memorandum, and he said, "They say, down in my part of Virginia, that a man who won't work on New Year's Day isn't of much account."  I might say, we— President Fred and I—carried on this kind of good-natured banter over the years over the merits of Virginia versus West Virginia.  I once reminded him that West Virginia had given the confederacy its best general, Jackson, and Lee his horse, Traveller, and he said, "Now wait a minute.  I can tell you about Traveller.  My uncle raised him and he gave him to Robert E. Lee."  He said, "No, he didn't give him to him. He sold him because Lee wouldn't accept it as a gift—the horse as a gift."  
00:44:14
	Anyway—so in the sense of—because he had no family life, he never took into account that people around him had family obligations. One of the very first dinner parties Erna and I had when we were living at Eagle Heights—he called at about seven o'clock with the sad news that Llewellyn Cole who was handling public relations for the Medical School had died and he wanted me to come down and write a statement.  This was fairly typical.  But he was just—you know, he had nothing but his work.  Other than his garden at the back of the house, he had no hobby that I know of. 
DT:  He still has the garden. 
SC: 	Yes.
DT:  He grows tomatoes and says he doesn't like them.  He just gives them away.
00:45:34
SC: 	 He was a very skillful political operator, and one of the reasons he was so skillful was because he didn't appear to be a politician. For example, Frank Sensenbrenner, aided and abetted by Fay Elwell, was determined to kill the School for Workers, which was one of Wisconsin's proud traditions and accomplishments.  But this very conservative board, led by an ultraconservative, Sensenbrenner, was determined to eliminate this School for Workers. 
DT:  	Why did they want to do this?
SC:  	Because the School for Workers trained union officials to be able and articulate in demanding pay and fringe benefits from management. 
00:46:23
	So President Fred worked very quietly and cautiously with Edwin Witte and Nate Feinsinger.  And they came up with a protective shelter over the School for Workers, the Center for Industrial Relations.  That was created as a shelter that could house both the Business Management Institutes and the School for Workers, which of course made clear that the University was there to service both business management and labor leadership.  That took a lot of time, a lot of negotiating, but he saved the School for Workers.  
00:47:13
	In fact, I guess if you were evaluating President Fred's accomplishments, reestablishment of confidence in, support for, the University of Wisconsin among the people of the state would be number one, and, two, maintaining the University’s academic freedom during the very difficult McCarthy years would be another.  It was as director of the Center that Robben Fleming got his baptism as an administrator.  President Fred, by his conservative manner, ways, and thought, lent protective coloration to the University in that difficult period. The maintenance of academic freedom in the 1950s was not easy but that accomplishment perhaps sometimes gets overlooked.
DT:  	Or perhaps it's less emphasized here because McCarthy didn't actively attack the University.
SC:  	Well, that's because of the strength of President Fred and the strength of the University politically in that period.
00:48:50
	One of the things I got the greatest satisfaction from was staging the dedication of the "freedom plaque," as I tried to get it named, or the sifting, winnowing plaque, as most persons call it. 
DT:  	The one that was stolen?
SC:  	Yes. That plaque was rededicated on February 15th, 19—57? 
DT: 	 '56 or '57.
00:49:34
SC: 	 '57.  Yes.  -February 15, 1957.  Well, that's a whole interesting story in itself.  I have since—the plaque disappeared Homecoming eve-turned out it was taken as a prank—and so the Board of Visitors, and regents, and others, particularly the Class of 1915 which had put up the plaque, were pressing President Fred very hard to do something. Well, of course this was long after I had gone back to the School of Journalism. He called me up and said, "I've got this situation.  We've got an investigation going but we're at a dead end.  You can't dramatize it every time you rescue something."  He said, "These people are pressing me. Judge Duffy and others are very mad we're not doing anything to get that plaque back.  So," he said, "why don't you and Bob Taylor talk and see what you can do about it."  Well, we came up with the idea of a fund-raising event to have it recast, because the Madison Brass Works still had the original cast.  And we were all set to start the fund-raising drive late that fall when Bob Taylor called me on Sunday night and said they'd found the plaque out on Willow Drive.  And so then the question became what to do about it.  Now, we could take the plaque and have Buildings and Grounds polish it and put it back up quietly, or--. So we decided to have a little special event and rededicate the plaque, put it up in a way--in a manner that it could no longer, could never be taken down again, and this was done, and I chose the date of February 15th, 1957, because this was the anniversary of President Fred's twelve years in office.  And Mark Ingraham, who was a staunch champion of academic freedom and former president of AAUP, presided.  Helen White, who was then president of AAUP nationally, gave the main address, and we had it in the Bascom theatre because we weren't confident that we could fill the Union theatre, and then we put the plaque back up and bolted it through; and behind the plaque there is a chest with the Curti-Carstensen history, and the history of the plaque, and other—
DT:  	Oh, really?  Embedded in the rock?
SC:  	Yes, behind the plaque there is a history capsule which was sealed on the stage by the University welder to give a little drama to the occasion, but that was a useful event in honoring Fred for his dedication to freedom, and useful in reminding the present generation and the faculty and the citizens of the state how important that plaque had been in the history of this University.  It's been—this University's freedom has been always its great source of strength, and protecting that freedom from regents, superpatriots, and others Fred did very effectively, although he did it mostly in a quiet way.  I'll give you one example of his shrewdness in handling the regents.
00:53:34	End of Tape 1, Side 2. 
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:40
	W. J. Campbell was a conservative regent, an elderly man, and not too helpful in directing the University's policies.  He used up an inordinate amount of President Fred's time.  President Fred gave it to him patiently. One day he came to see President Fred and decided that what we needed was a loyalty oath such as that that had been enacted by the regents of the University of California.  President Fred knew that the man that Campbell was most dependent on was Dean Middleton of the Medical School and he said, "Billy, why don't you go over and talk to Bill Middleton and see what he thinks of that idea."  So Campbell hotfooted it over to see Dean Middleton, who was a very strict disciplinarian, a stern and able man, conservative, too.  And so Campbell said what was on his mind.  Dean Middleton said, "Mr. Campbell, the first resignation you would get would be mine." That ended Campbell's advocacy of the loyalty oath.
00:02:21
	The last thing I worked on with Fred, again was a very satisfying thing. This was the fight to get the library, Memorial Library.  Under Governor Goodland there was, I think, a twelve million dollar construction. Well, the library committee was slow in formulating the plans for a new library with the consequence that it looked like we might lose this money if we didn't go ahead and spend it.  So President Fred made the very hard decision of going ahead with the engineering building, using up money that had been allocated to the University for the library.  And he had to sell this to the faculty, and he got Mark Ingraham, whom he greatly respected and in some degree feared because he felt that the dean had more strength with the faculty than he did— he got Mark Ingraham to lead the selling job to the faculty to agree to postpone the library and go ahead with the engineering school construction.
DT:  	So the money wouldn't get lost.
SC:  	So the money wouldn't get lost.  It was a calculated risk, one opposed by Merle Curti and others.  Well, of course the people in the social sciences and the humanities wanted the library first and engineering second, and were not happy with this decision. 
00:04:49
	Well, they became even unhappier when in the 849 session of the legislature the appropriation for the library was killed.  Now Governor Rennebohm and his assistant, Professor William Young, were strong advocates of the library appropriation, and we had a conservative state senate and the appropriation was defeated in the budget deliberations.  So President Fred did what he knew he had to do—to stage a dramatic' fight to restore this appropriation of $6,000,000.  And since the—after the victory was won, of course, there were many people who took credit for getting the library, but it was a relatively small band that met up there on Saturday and Sunday and worked out the strategy for the fight for the library.  Palmer Sorenson who was then director of University personnel, a name I'm sure that has been lost in University history, was very effective.  He had many connections with the legislature.  Tony Curreri was very helpful.  John Walsh, who was then the boxing coach and a lobbyist, was very helpful.  Not helpful were the regents.  The state chamber of commerce had opposed this appropriation saying it would mean new taxes.  Not helpful was the alumni association.
DT:  That surprises me.
00:06:29
SC: 	 I had the job of talking to John Berge, director of the alumni association.  I said, "John, we're in a fight for our life here. We've got to mobilize the alumni association."  He said, "Scott, this would tear my board apart.  Many on the board are opposed to that library bin."  I said, "Well, what the hell's an alumni association for if it isn't there when you need it?"  "Well," he said, "I've got to maintain the association.  If we got involved, it would upset the board, cause a cleavage.  I'm not going to touch it."  So John Berge gave us no help. LeRoy Luberg and I and Tony Curreri and John Walsh, Bill Young—Bill Young and Governor Rennebohm did a very large share of the lobbying along with President Fred.  One of the first things I'd done was to get Stanley Allen, president of National Cash Register, a very loyal alumnus then president of the alumni association, and he turned over his public relations staff to us to prepare a booklet setting forth the case for the library.  And not only—we used the public relations staff of the National Cash Register to design and prepare it, but Stan Allen also printed it as a contribution to the University.  
00:08:11
	And it was well that it was not printed with taxpayers’ money because, in the course of the library fight, a young state senator by the name of Melvin Laird came storming up to see President Fred and put this booklet on his desk and said, "What right do you have to use taxpayers’ money to put this kind of pressure on us?"  And President Fred said that he hadn't read the last line, that it was not printed with taxpayers' money.  I worked very hard, working through editors, working through, for example, Shakes Jansen, managing editor of the Marinette Eagle Star, to get the senator from Marinette to change his vote, which Shakes did, and we finally won that fight.
DT:  Which was sort of a breakthrough, wasn't it. 
SC:  	Yes, it was.  It was a very—when you get into these problems-one senator said to me, he said, "Will you tell me why the University needs $6,000,000 to build a building just to store books in?" You find a lack of understanding.  I always got a kick out of—one of the best lines I ever wrote for Dr. Fred was in that fight!  I wrote,"I've been put in the position of a dairy farmer with a sixty-cow herd but only a twenty-cow barn."  And several reporters and legislators commented, said,'Isn't that just like E. B. Fred—talking farm language?" 
DT:  	[Laughter]  But you wrote that? 
SC: 	 I wrote that. 
DT:  	That's nice.
SC:  	President Fred did something—and again, he always underestimated how effective he could be.  We finally got him to go down and start plugging away at the legislators personally.  And he was very effective, and the fact that he would come down and do this conveyed the urgency of the situation, I think, to the legislature.  It was very effective. 
00:10:30
	President Fred, Oscar /Renriebohm, and Bill Young were the prime movers in getting that library appropriation, and Roy Luberg and I, and Tony Curreri and John Walsh, along with Sorenson and Clay Schoenfeld.  And that library fight was really a turnaround for President Fred's administration.
DT:  I can appreciate the urgency.  I've heard descriptions of the situation in the Historical Society before the library was built. 
00:11:22
SC:  	You know the University library was moved into the new Historical Society in 1900 on a temporary basis.  They almost had the library in 1927 until somebody attached a rider to the appropriation to name it the La Follette Memorial Library.  In this case we were building a memorial for the veterans of World War II and that's why it's Memorial Library—we weren't going to get into that name difficulty.
00:11:51
	Well, let me move on down to—it was very—I was in a very difficult position the two years I was working for President Fred because I had become convinced, as he earlier had become convinced, that the School of Journalism had slipped and this was one of the problems he had with establishing relations with editors in the state--they were greatly upset by the decline of the School of Journalism.  President Fred had become convinced that new leadership was required to rebuild the school and he saw the need to rebuild the school as a way of building better relationships with the press in the state, 
DT:  	Earlier you mentioned that—
SC:  	Grant Hyde was the director.  Millard G. Bleyer pioneered the School of Journalism and built a very strong school of national reputation; in fact, it was one of the strongest in the country. Journalism education's first generation was dominated by two men:  Walter Williams of Missouri, who took the trade school approach to journalism education, and Willard Bleyer who took the scholarly, research approach to journalism education.  By 1935 the soundness of the Bleyer approach had been generally recognized.  He had been a journalist--he came from a newspaper family, had a Ph.D. in English, and was a scholar by nature, whereas Walter Williams had been a country editor—had not gone to a university, although he later became president of the University of Missouri.  And these two men, Bleyer and Grant Hyde, formed the early nucleus of the school.
00:14:13
	By 1935, when Bleyer died rather suddenly, he had built a very strong school here.  Well, his assistant, Grant Hyde, who served Bleyer well in handling the clerical work of departmental administration which Bleyer had no taste for, was made director, and this led to the departure of Professor Chilton R. Bush, who later developed a very great program of journalism research and education at Stanford,  Ralph Nafziger to the University of Minnesota, and others.  So from '35 until 1947 the school had been declining and falling behind, although it still had a first-rate national reputation.
DT:  	May I interrupt just a minute?  It's my understanding that there was an effort to have Nafziger stay but there was some opposition to this. This is before he went to Minnesota.  Do you know anything about that? 
SC:  	No, I don't.  That, of course, occurred before I got here in '39 and I'm not sure of all that went on.  I know Bush made some effort to oppose the appointment of Hyde, and I'm told, made the mistake of enlisting students in that effort.  Well, as I mentioned earlier I persuaded Dean Ingraham to bring Henry Ladd Smith back, and Hank and I increasingly felt frustrated in trying to strengthen the school. 
00:16:20
	We finally reached the conclusion that Hyde had to be replaced.  Dean Ingraham was very slow to accept this.  In fact, v/hen this struggle began, if either one of us had known it was going to take two years, I'm sure we would have left quietly rather than engage in it.  But I was in the president's office and of course had to walk a very delicate line as his assistant. It was not seemly for me to interfere in internal School of Journalism matters.  I was also on the faculty of the School of Journalism.  It created some awkward problems for me, but the thing that crystallized the decision to open the revival for new leadership was when Grant Hyde brought in a proposal for a course in sports writing and--which we were able to defeat at staff meeting.  Then he—nonetheless he took it to the divisional executive committee for approval of the course even though it did not have the support of the staff.  And about the time this was occurring a student by the name of Robert Solon, without any encouragement or knowledge on my part or on Hank Smith's part, wrote a stinging letter to the editor of the Cardinal attacking the School of Journalism for being out of date, inadequate, and this, with the growing opposition of the newspaper men in the state—Don Anderson of the State Journal, Fred Sappington of the Marianette Eagle Star, Irv Meier of the Milwaukee Journal, and others. Of course, Dr. Fred realized that a change had to be made and the problem was persuading the staff, persuading Dean Ingraham to the change. Dean Ingraham was a very fair man.  He felt that Hyde was being criticized unfairly and perhaps operated against unfairly.  He at first saw the opposition as a plot on Bill Sumner's part.  He was slow to withdraw his support, but he ultimately did.  And of course Ralph Nafziger was the logical choice.  
00:19:25
	I was the one who led the fight to bring Ralph back here and persuade him to come back here.  He did so with some reluctance; he did so with some financial sacrifice.  But Ralph had such a deep sense of loyalty to Willard Bleyer and to the University of Wisconsin, from which he had earned four degrees, that he felt obligated to come back and undertake the task of rebuilding the school, which he did, and he brought it to the forefront by the early 1960s.  So, by 1948 Hyde was persuaded to resign, to step down as director, under the pressure of the president and Dean Ingraham.  And Hank Smith was appointed interim director, and then we concentrated on bringing Nafziger here, although we also interviewed Fred Merwin, whom I mentioned earlier, who was a candidate.  Dean Ingraham rightly wanted to see more than one candidate.  Fred Merwin was brought here for an interview.  The efforts to negotiate with Nafziger and to bring him here were greatly complicated by a good deal of premature publicity, something for which I was unfairly blamed.  The School of Journalism over the years had suffered from an excessive interest in the school by the news media, which was understandable but sometimes damaging.
00:21:36
DT:  	Before we go on I would be interested in knowing how your activities as assistant to President Fred compared with those of Leftoy Luberg who I think came at about the same time.
SC:  	Yes.  In a very real sense Roy Luberg succeeded Bill Sarles as President Fred's assistant for academic matters and I was added as an assistant, with the same title, for public relations.  I had the primary job of promoting the centennial, supporting the centennial observance, and of reorganizing information services on campus, trying to coordinate and supervise in a loose way, and to establish informational and public relations policies.  Luberg was concerned more with high-school student relations, with handling of correspondence, although I handled a great deal of difficult correspondence—letters that posed public relations problems were generally given to me by Lola Bradford or Eleanor Oimen to draft a reply to.  Roy and I worked together closely and never had any great problem of overlap, although he was jealous of my role in the administration.  
00:23:34
	Then, when President Fred decided to move Dr. Baldwin up as vice-president and open up the deanship in agriculture, he set forth in a memorandum that both LeRoy and I would report to Dr. Baldwin—something he hadn't discussed with us.  And something in the end that never meant very much because President Fred kept power in his own hands, he did not delegate much.  And I would go see Dr. Baldwin and he'd say, "Well, you'd better talk this over with Fred, too."  And generally I found myself going back to the president again and so did Roy.  Roy did a great deal of troubleshooting for the president, and—incidentally, President Fred, you know, spotted talent very quickly and utilized it very quickly. Nate Feinsinger had urged the appointment of Robben Fleming  as director of the new industrial relations center, which had this job of building a protective bridge over the School for Workers.  And President Fred put this all on Robben Fleming,  a very able troubleshooter, and he used him a great deal in that capacity.  But also he used LeRoy to deal with parents, to look into student personnel problems, student problems, and Luberg operated more in the student area and in the correspondence area and public speaking area than I did.
DT:  	Well, eventually, of course, he became dean of students.
SC:  	Yes.  And he was moved around over the checkerboard a great deal, before he was through.  A very personable Rotarian, with little depth. A real glad-hander.
00:26:00
	Anyway, I forgot to explain why I went back to full-time teaching. One of the conditions Ralph Nafziger set down for his coming back here was that I would return to full-time teaching.  I had not seen my career at that time as being in administration and I was anxious to help get the school back on the track.  So I went back in the fall of '49 to full-time teaching and worked very closely with Ralph in trying to recruit more faculty and get a research program going and that sort of thing, and to get our journalism institutes going.  And I worked very closely with Ralph over those years.  He was very supportive of me.
00:27:15
	In 1955 or thereabouts I had a call from Cliff Lord, director of the State Historical Society.  And Cliff said, "Scott, we have a letter here— H. V. Kaltenborn offering to give us his papers.  Why don!t you come over and ! let's talk about this and see what we ought to do about it."  I was the person at the School of Journalism that Cliff knew, and the more we t&lked the more we realized that mass communication media are basically a twentieth century development and the papers of most of the pioneers were still outside archives and still available.  So we had a couple, of subsequent conferences and out of them came the Mass Communications history center and I suppose when I look back over thirty years, anticipating its creation and development, it was probably the most satisfying thing, the most enduring thing that I've had a hand in around here.
00:28:27	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
00:28:30
	We set out to solicit the papers of pioneers, particularly those with a Wisconsin connection.  We were successful very early in getting the papers of Louis P. Lochner, who was a graduate of this University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent in Berlin, Marquis Chi Ids, who is probably the most distinguished graduate of the School of Journalism, and others.  I went after papers of public relations pioneers.  My greatest accomplishment in that regard was getting the papers of William Baldwin, Arthur Page, and John Hill.  It's been more difficult to get papers from public relations counselors than it has been from other areas of the mass media because they cherish the personal confidential relationship with clients, and perhaps fear having their deeds known.  But over the years, doing a lot of begging, a lot of letter writing, a lot of traveling, the society has built a very impressive collection of materials in the mass media—newspapers, radio, television, film, theater, public relations, and advertising.  Barbara Kaiser has been the spark-plug.
00:30:11
DT:  	Did you get the Kaltenborn papers? 
SC:  	Oh yes. Yes.
DT:  	What was his connection with the University? 
SC:  	None.  He was a native of Merrill, Wisconsin, and he thought the State Historical Society should have first call on his papers. In '57, summer of f57, one Sunday afternoon  Cliff Lord called me and said Td been elected to the board of curators of the State Historical Society. I said, "Cliff, I'm not even* a member."  He said, "Well, you've got to join now."  So I joined the board in the fall of '57 and served on it until this year—I did not stand for reelection this past June—eighteen years service, including the—
DT:  	You were president at one time weren't you?
SC: 	President from '64 to '67. And that was a very satisfying period. In that period we completed the building addition—got a federal grant of $800,000 along with a state appropriation to remodel the old portion of the building.  I appointed the first committee—the one that has eventuated in Old World Wisconsin.  But to give due credit there, I appointed that committee at the urging of Frederic Sammond, a distinguished Milwaukee attorney and longtime member of the board of curators, who was the real power on the board so long as he served on it.  I persuaded Don Slichter to go out and raise $350,000 to help finance the definitive Wisconsin history now being prepared.  We increased the society's membership and made a number of forward strides in that period of which I am, I think, justifiably proud.  Service on the board of curators, particularly on its executive committee, from 1964 on, gave me a great deal of satisfaction.  The State Historical Society was outstanding among historical societies in the nation, and helping contribute to the building-to the further building of a great American history library was very satisfying, particularly for one who is a frustrated historian.
00:33:17
DT:  	Now, from what I've learned you have decided to leave the University of Wisconsin and I would really like to know a little bit about why you have made this decision.  I'm sure you must have had offers before this to leave.
SC:  	Yes, I have.  Over the years I had a number of offers to leave. Perhaps the most tempting was in 1959 when I was offered the vice-presidency of one of the oldest and largest public relations counseling firms in the nation, offered a job that would pay me more than three times what I was making at the time.  The salary looked pretty big to a poor boy from West Virginia.  But it was when I had that offer that I finally realized that I had just sort of accidentally stumbled into the place ' that I belonged, a place where I could be happy.  That is, in a free university, teaching students, doing research, writing.  I have to be free to express myself.  So that offer helped me develop my understanding of myself, and to see why I was so happy at the University of Wisconsin. Then in 1961 I had a very attractive offer from Northwestern University to take over its public relations and news editing courses, which I declined, mainly because I didnft want to trade Madison for metropolitan Chicago.
	Why am I going to Georgia?  Of course such a major decision is based on a complex of factors.  There are two main reasons.  One was the attractiveness of the Georgia offer.  The University of Georgia offered me the thing that I need most in this penultimate stage of my career—that is, time to do research and to write.  There are several things I would like to accomplish before I quit.  And the University of Georgia offered me what it calls a research professorship, which involves a very light teaching load and thus provides a great deal of time for research and writing.  And secondly I had been growing, over the past three years, increasingly discouraged by the situation in the School of Journalism. 
00:42:03
	Under Governor Lucey's budget cuts imposed upon the University, the School of Journalism has been caught in the vise of increasing enrollment and decreasing support for staff and supplies.  Journalism is one of the three major current growth areas in higher education across the country.  Even though the staff of the School of Journalism has steadily tightened standards in order to control this steadily mounting, escalating enrollment, nonetheless the school here finds itself with too few faculty members, too little supply support, to meet the needs of students, particularly of the some 115 graduate students.  Here, the graduate student load has gotten out of hand, and the teaching load is going to have to be increased.  And this of course takes time away from research and writing. In the last few years here the teaching load, the graduate student load, has been such that I haven't had adequate time to do the research and writing that I wanted to do.  This increasingly difficult work situation has led to the departure of seven members of the faculty in the past four years.  That, perhaps, is an oversimplification because the reasons people move from one institution to another are many and complex.  In some cases it is personal;  in some cases it's a more attractive offer from another institution against the work situation here.  I am the seventh faculty member, the third sequence head of four, to leave in this Lucey period. My last semester of teaching at Wisconsin—the first semester of the past academic year—I had five students complete masters theses, and two Ph.D. candidates move pretty well along in their dissertations. Reviewing, editing, criticizing manuscripts for students takes a great deal of time-more time than the average citizen understands, I'm sure.
	Also, when I reflect on my decision to go to Georgia I realize that the stimulus of a new environment, new challenge, trite as that word may be, at my age of sixty, is an invigorating thing.  I’m happier and more highly motivated today than I have been in seven years.  I think it's an opportunity to help build a strong school of journalism at the University of Georgia.  It's the stimulus of a new, different, and dynamic environment.  The University of Georgia is a very dynamic institution. It's developing great strength and is on its way, I think, to national stature, and I find all this pretty exciting.  Of course I would be less than candid if I neglected to say that the fact I can play golf all winter in Georgia is a factor.
DT:  	[Laughter] It's a rather nice one, I can see.
SC: 	 It's not the major factor, as Governor Lucey indicated in a letter to me that he thought it was.  So I am concerned about the School of Journalism here.  Obviously with the loss it has suffered—it has lost three budget positions this year—it's not as strong as it was in 1966 when Ralph retired.  But it is still a very good school—one of the outstanding schools in the country.
DT: 	 In connection with Governor Lucey's policies, would you discuss what you consider the effect of merger has been?
SC: 	 Let me say that I worked very hard and diligently for Governor Lucey's election in 1970, as did my wife and my son.  My son drove for him, and my wife did a great deal of typing for him, and I solicited support and money for him.  I thought he would be very good to the University.  I have been consequently greatly disappointed in his policies as they affect the University.  Overall I think he has been a good governor for the state of Wisconsin.  I see merger as bringing inevitably a homogenization of the state university system which can only mean a leveling of the support with its erosion of the University of Madison campus.  In today's newspaper, for example, we see the comparison of the salaries of the Madison faculty with those in the other units in the state system— 
DT:  	They’re higher.
SC: 	—and there's some surprise that Madison professors are paid more than, say, a professor at Platteville or River Falls even though the standards are quite disparate.
 DT:  This is only appropriate.
SC:  	Yes.  But all of this is going to lead to increasing pressure for equal pay for equal rank whether you teach at Platteville or Madison, and this, of course, contributes to the erosion of Wisconsin's salary position vis a vis the strong universities of the nation—the Big Ten, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Princeton --the schools with which Wisconsin must compete for first-rate faculty.  The University of Georgia has found in the last three years that the most raidable universities in the nation are Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin.  There are two of us who were here on the School of Journalism faculty who are now teaching at the University of Georgia.
DT:  	Who are they?
SC:  	Vernon Stone and myself.  So the strong hand of the central administration in the governance of the Madison campus cannot help but lessen the autonomy and the strength of this campus.  The central administration of necessity must serve equally all units of the system. This means pressures against allocating resources on the basis of need and purpose rather than on the basis of parity.  Percentage allocations is the safe way, as John Weaver knows.  
00:45:11
	The Madison campus has not achieved the autonomy that was promised during the merger debate.  The Madison campus finds itself increasingly frustrated by the rigid requirements of the central administration.  There's been a lessening of faculty governance and erosion of the Madison campus autonomy.  These, along with the failure of University faculty salaries to keep pace with inflation have led to—inevitably, to a lessened morale situation on this campus today than it was the day Governor Lucey took office.  In many conversations that I have had with the governor, after he'd sprung merger without any prior debate in the campaign, I detect that he feels he is catering in part to the political backlash against the University because of the trouble we experienced in the sixties. 
00:47:56
	Also he is a fiscal conservative and sees a need to bring the expanded growth of higher education in Wisconsin under more rigid control.  And in this I think he has a valid point.  He is quite right when he insists that we have expanded the higher education establishment of the state way beyond the needs and resources of the state.  I fear he fails to appreciate what a great asset the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been to this state as one of the nation's top five or so universities.  It's still too early to tell what the ultimate effect of merger will be but I have seen nothing thus far to persuade me that merger was a wise move.  Yet I understand the governor's problem and the need for some central responsible body to determine allocation of priorities and resources in the state educational system.  The coordinating council was a dismal flop in that regard.
00:49:45
DT:  	What do you think of the suggestion that was made this spring possibly for closing some of the two-year centers.
SC:  	I think the proposal has merit.  We are overextended in higher education in Wisconsin.  I think we're suffering in some respects from the expansionism of two very expansionist educational politicians--Eugene Mc-Phee and Fred H. Harrington.  Particularly, I think, the former state colleges, because of Eugene McPhee's astute political leadership,, were permitted to grow beyond the needs of the state.  President Harrington certainly was motivated in part in developing the UW Green Bay and UW Parkside in trying to build a strong political base in the populous lakeshore area to offset McPhee's growing strength—to counter the political strength of the state university system under Eugene McPhee. Then, McPhee, of course, countered our development of two-year centers with development of two-year centers for the state system, such as Richland Center and Baraboo.  I think we are overextended and there has to be some contraction in conformity with resources of this state.  Wisconsin, after all, is not a rich state.  It's a state of 4,000,000 persons and no great natural resources.  
00:52:25
	Yet I'm convinced that it's not so poor that it cannot provide instruction for the number of students who want to study journalism.  To cut three budget positions from a school that has a rising enrollment, not a decreasing one, makes no educational sense to me.
00:52:41
	Returns from merger are not wholly in but there's certainly discernible evidence, it seems to me, that merger has hurt this campus more than it has helped.  Now it may have helped the other campuses more than it's hurt them although I understand some of the most fervent advocates of merger in the old state university system are now having second thoughts about it.
00:53:22
	Let me elaborate a bit on the military education program which I directed here from 1946 until I left at the end of 1974. 
DT: 	 Is this the summer program you mentioned? 
SC:  	No.  There were two programs.  As I mentioned earlier, Arthur Page, a close friend and confidant of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was asked to make a study of how the military could improve its public relationships in the postwar era.  Mr. Page wrote a memorandum to Mr. Stimson and to Chief-of-Staff Dwight Eisenhower in which he said that the primary requirement for public relations was competent public relations personnel.  And he said, "In effect, you have two choices. You can recruit a civilian public relations person from business and try to teach him about the army.  Or you can take army officers and send them to school to study public relations."  He said, "I definitely recommend the latter."  So General Eisenhower, acting on Mr. Page's recommendation instituted a graduate program for army officers to study public relations.
	Two institutions were selected—the University of Missouri School^of Journalism and the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism. And as I mentioned earlier, the first three officers were assigned here in the summer of 1946.
00:55:30	End of Tape 2, Side 2. 
Tape 3, Side 1
00:00:01
	They were Lieutenant Colonel Chester Victor Clifton, whom I mentioned earlier, Captain Kenneth Stark, and Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lay. Colonel Lay has been public relations director for Ripon College for some years now, since he retired from the army.  Colonel Clifton went on to a distinguished military career as assistant chief of army information, senior military aide to President Kennedy, and senior military aide to President Johnson, and now is Washington representative of the Association of American Advertising, and a public relations consultant.  From 1946 to 1974 some one hundred and fifty army, navy,  and air force officers earned masters degrees at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism under my direction.  The last four chiefs of information of the U.S. Army have been Wisconsin graduates.  During the Eisenhower presidency the army came upon hard times and in 1957, when General Maxwell Taylor was made chief of staff, he brought back Ted Clifton from Europe to help turn the army's public relations around, and in 1958-59 Ted Clifton and I discussed at some length the need for a summer refresher course for army officers to give them new stimulus and to increase their prestige with their colleagues. Out of that came the army summer course.  In the army jargon the master's program was always referred to as the long course and the eight-week summer course as the short course.  Each summer, starting in 1959, some twenty-five or so army officers have been sent here for eight weeks. In this eight weeks they took two regular University courses—mass communications in society and public relations—and in addition they had special courses in radio and television and army case problems.  The latter two, of course, were for no credit.  That program has continued to this time. This past summer, Professor Douglas Jones, who used to be here on the faculty and who was one of the army students sent here to get a master's degree many years ago, conducted the program.
00:03:33
	Also I might mention that in 1959, the same year we started the army summer program, I started the Public Relations Society of America Institute, which is still going.  Hale Nelson, who was an Illinois Bell Telephone Co. executive, and I developed the first Public Relations Society of America Institute—started that program here in 1959.  We also held one here in 1960.  And then because I didn't want to be tied down every summer I encouraged the society to move around to other campuses.  Because it was sort of coming apart I agreed to bring it back here in 1971 to revive it, which I did, and that program's still going on—one of the most constructive things the Public Relations Society of America does. We will have it at Georgia in 1977.
00:04:46
	The navy and the air force started sending officers here in recent years.  We've had about three air force master's candidates and we've had some twenty or so navy master^ candidates.  These officers that were sent here were of uniformly high quality.  Of some hundred and fifty I would say only a half dozen or so really were not qualified to do .graduate work.  All but one of them, however, completed his master's degree—earned his master's degree. I don't think of anything else, Donna.
00:05:40
DT:  	Well, there was one subject that occurred to me that I had meant to ask about.  Am I correct—didn't you do some work with Merle Curti on the subject of philanthropy?
SC:  	Oh yes, I was part of the history of philanthropy project. It grew out of a conference at Princeton in which Merle Curti took part--a bibliography of philanthropy, the realization that this was an area of American history that had been little studied, little written about. As a consequence, Professor Curti got a large grant from the Ford Foundation for a history of philanthropy project.  Irv WylTie, who later went on to become chancellor of UW-Parkside, was the director of the project. And I was asked by Professor Curti if I would do a history of fund raising in the United States.  And I worked on that project from 1960 to 1964, with research support at least two summers and one semester from the Ford Foundation, which resulted in my book, The History of Fund Raising in the United States: Its Role in American Philanthropy, which traces the story of mass public fund raising which has greatly altered the nature of American philanthropy.  My interest in doing the study was to show, at least in this limited area, the great impact that public relations practice has on society in the United States, an impact that generally goes undiscerned and undiscussed.  The some 75,000 public relations practitioners exert a great influence on the course of our society, and yet they—because they operate in the shadows they are not much studied or scrutinized, as they deserve to be  because of their role in our •public information system.  So that was a very rewarding association, collaboration, and I learned a great deal from Professor Curti, who is a dear friend, about historiography that I had failed to learn when I was a graduate student.
00:08:46
DT:  	You described yourself as a frustrated historian.
SC: 	I am a frustrated—the one thing about my life that I would change if I were doing it all over again would be getting a Ph.D. in American history.
00:09:28
DT:  	Well, you have worked in this area.  I read a statement that interested me to the effect that you made a proposal for a presidential commission to investigate national fund drives, and the thing that interested me particularly was that this happened a long time before Watergate [laughter].
SC:  	Well, the fact is that fund raising—so much of the fund raising operates in a very  twilight area of fraud.  The news media do not adequately scrutinize, investigate, and report fund-raising drives. The media are inclined to give publicity to every fund-raising drive in equal proportion, as a so-called public service.  Thus the public has no reliable information as a basis to judge the merit of each fund-raising appeal. If you look at our national fund drives there's no relationship between the merit of the need and the amount of money raised.
DT:  	And nobody knows how the money is disbursed.
SC:  	That's right.  There's not adequate recording of the disbursement. When I say that you can operate right on the edge of fraud legitimately, I'm thinking, for example, of the Disabled Veterans, their Idento Tags. They send these Idento-Tags out, and people think, well, it will help a veteran, I'll send them fifty cents or a dollar.  All it does is help the people in the headquarters of that effort.  A congressional investigation of many years ago Showed that something like 85 to 90 percent of money raised by the Idento-Tags goes to administration.  You see, you can't legislate that a fund must spend only a particular portion of its income on fund raising. Much of the fund raising is very expensive and wasteful.  As an example, your seal campaigns—TB seals, Easter seals—cost about thirty cents on a dollar to raise that money.  And yet, if you deny the individual appeal, you deny the individual educational opportunity the appeal offers. And then, if you get a federated fund raising, as you do with United Way, you get a business domination and rigidity that cannot help you either. I don't—I do not argue that there should be only one health fund drive or one social welfare drive, but I do argue that there ought to be closer--there ought to be federal regulation which includes federal reporting on the income disbursements of all fund drives, so that the public has more adequate information to judge the merit of an appeal, because each one of us gets more appeals for funds than we have money to meet, so I think we ought to know--The National Foundation, for example, which has tremendous assets, is raising a great deal of money to combat birth defects which is a very minor problem in terms of society, or even of health.  The model for this mass national health fund raising is, of course, the March of Dimes, which was a creation of Carl Byoir, one of the nation's public relations pioneers.  Now, infantile paralysis, while devastating to those who suffered it, and to members of the families of those who had it--suffered it, was not a major national health problem.  I think the maximum number of cases in one year was something like 16,000.  Yet this tremendous sum of money was raised.
DT:  	Don't you suppose the fact that President Roosevelt had been afflicted with this—
SC:  	Oh sure, sure.
DT:  	—had something to do with it.
SC:  	--sure.  That was conceived—he had gone into debt for Warm Springs which he paid a pretty fancy price to George Foster Peabody for, and he had to be bailed out.  Basil O'Connor was the one that saw the opportunity for a national fund-raising effort and brought in Carl Byoir, and Byoir originally started with the Birthday Ball and then moved in and helped formulate the March of Dimes,  In Wisconsin, Virginia Hart has been advocating legislation here for more rigid reporting of, and registration of, fund-raising efforts.  Wisconsin did pass a law some years ago but it was ineffective because it excluded educational and veterans’ organizations.  Veterans' organizations are—you know, they have their tag days, and Idento-Tags—
DT:  	Well, you make it sound as though there is more work to be done in this area.
SC:  	Oh yes, yes.  There's need for state regulation and accounting-may not get federal—now some states have it.  New York State, the city of Los Angeles—you can't carry on a fund drive in the city of Los Angeles unless you're registered in the city.  In order to register you have to submit an audited account of your receipts and disbursements in prior years. So they are forced to account.  There's inadequate accounting by many of the fund-raising efforts, and there's inadequate press scrutiny of many of the fund-raising efforts.  In short there's tremendous sums of money being given today for dubious causes, because of lack of adequate public information.
DT:  	I would just like to add, in addition to thanking you for taking this time, my feeling that the University of Wisconsin-Madison is going to miss you.
SC:  	Well, it's nice to be missed.  I must say there's been no great gesture of appreciation from the University.  It's also nice to be wanted in Georgia.
00:17:45	End of Tape 3