UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #324
YOUNG, H. EDWIN and SMITH, DONALD K.

YOUNG, H. Edwin (1917- )1
Graduate Student; Professor of Economics; Dean of College of Letters and Science; Chancellor; President of UW System
At UW: 1945-1946; 1947-1965; 1968-1987

and SMITH, Donald K. (1915-1999)2
Graduate Student; Professor of Speech; Vice President of UW System
At UW: 1939-1942; 1946-1949; 1973-1986

Interviewed: 1987	
Series: Merger
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 4 hours
Transcriptionist: Maureen Gaber (12/08/08)
Auditor:  Maureen Gaber/Tyler C. Kennedy
00:00:00
Start of Tape 

LS:	This is December 4th, 1986.  I’m Laura Smail with the University of Wisconsin, Madison Archives Oral History Project.  This is part of a series on merger.  We have interviewed Don Smith twice on his vice presidency of the merge system and because of his own great interest in it and your plan to write a book about merger, you thought it would be interesting to have a joint interview with Ed Young this morning, who was Chancellor under the merge system and then president of it so that the two of you could discuss particularly how the merger affected the UW Madison; what you thought you were doing about it and what you thought was happening.  But we would like to begin with the – we have some questions here.  What you thought, yourself, Ed, were the causes of the merger, the reasons why it came about?
EY:	I think there’s an underlying notion amongst state officials, whether Republican or Democrat that reorganizations is the solution to problems and concentration of authority and simplization.  The idea wasn’t a new one.  I’d been through the battle when Governor Kohler had tried to merge us years before and worked closely with former Governor Rennebohm then and others to help defeat that, so I knew something about that.  This particular – I think that Lucey was looking for some new things to do and maybe to prove that if Kohler couldn’t do it, he could – I’m not sure about that – and then he Adamany as his advisor and assistant and Adamany was quite interested because he’d been a faculty member at Whitewater and was very close, but part of it – the idea was in the air in the country.  These governors talked to each other and other places were merging and it was something to do which looked like something at no cost and they claimed you would save some money by doing it, although Lucey was a pretty smart man; I doubt if he really believed that.  
DS:	I think – I, of course, was not here when any of this was going on, but the interpretations I received after I arrived was that David Adamany was probably the sort of “intellectual Godfather” of merger, although without any particularly clear ideas about how – what a merged system would look like, and Ed’s quite right.  There were a lot of mergers taking place; a lot of state coordinating commissions were being established.  Reorganization was very much in the air, and it was alleged to create efficiencies and save money, which I think is a dubious proposition, but nevertheless, that was the charm of it.
EY:	And there were a couple of other things that were local, at least it is alleged by others.  One was that the coordinating committee was failing.  The legislature didn’t think it was strong enough.  They thought it was dominated by Fred Harrington and DeBardeleben and Gelatt and part of the university and states were getting it bad -- the state universities were getting in bad shape.  And second, that Fred broke a tacitor real agreement with the state universities about who would do what and started an expansion program in Green Bay, Parkside, which seemed to be a real threat to them and so the political support this time was there, where it hadn’t been from their side before.  This was a chance to really – these were some of the things they talked about.
DS:	You had said to me, Ed, and I don’t know that you recall it, but you said that Madison was a little bit pregnant before the birth of merger.  That it had already gotten itself converted into a system in a formal, structural way and Fred Harrington had moved into the Van Hise as presiding officer over Madison, Milwaukee, and then as they came along, Green Bay and Parkside and each of those was to have a Chancellor or a Vice President, or one or the other, who would be – report to Fred, so it was a very strong merger dominated out of Madison and by Madison by Fred Harrington, but Harrington was really in charge.
00:05:23
EY:	Some of the Chancellors that had been presidents of the state university were very unhappy that the heads of Parkside and Green Bay got paid more than they did.  There were lots – there were a great many things, but there were lots of forces and Lucey brought them together very suddenly.
DS:	It always seemed to me that – and Fred Harrington once said to me that he thought in retrospect, now, after a long time, one of his reorganizations -- the creation of UW Extension as a separate agency, separate entity, with the Chancellor reporting to him rather than through UW Madison – was probably, in retrospect, a mistake.  I agreed with him on that particular point, and that that precipitated a lot of anxiety in Madison.  It also seemed to me that he had moved to not only get very good development budgets for Parkside and Green Bay based on elaborately wrong enrollment for growth projections, but he also transferred money.  He used resources which had -- were part of Madison’s budget to see to it that there were very well treated in their development years.  Because when I – the years when I arrived, their anxiety about merger was elaborate and it never really went away.  They felt that they were not ever designed to be part and parcel of the old WSU system and, of course, the merger put them in that particular basket and it was a very painful thing for them.  
EY:	Earlier on, Fred had drawn a line from Green Bay to – down from Madison, and said that the political strength and populations east of that line and with Green Bay and Parkside and Milwaukee, which we got as a by-product of the Kohler attemptedmerger.  In Madison, we’d have the political strength to go our own way and maybe the state and university people saw that, too, and they pushed the other way.  It didn’t work.  The - Fred’scalculation on both extension and the political strength didn’t work.  But, of course, there were some other things he got caught up in; he got blamed for a lot of the disruptions that he had nothing to do with and so on.
DS:	Well, he was – he lived in the decade of an expansion and growth and everything coming up roses was in the air, and he was a very aggressive president who moved, at least from where I sat in Minnesota – I was amazed and somewhat dazzled by the speed with which he had moved some things.
EY:	Yes, yes.  He was a mover and a shaker and, of course, he made some mistakes, but I think we would not be the class of university we are if he hadn’t taken some of those chances and done some of those things.  Particularly I remember discussions about the federal funding.  The crisis was brought about by the zoology department.  They met and voted that no tenure – they would never allow a tenured faculty in their department to be supported by outside funds.  I was Dean, and I thought of myself – “you guys are going to live off of everybody else, are you?” (laughing), and Fred – we made the decision to gamble that a certain percentage of our budget could be soft, and if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have expanded.  We wouldn’t have gotten the other money that we got.  People take credit now for getting this 200 million dollars a year, but it goes back to that decision in the 60’s that Fred and two or three of us made and he was the boss, so he should get the blame, too.
LS:	I’d just like to ask you:  on the – Fred’s – you’re saying he – that he was responsible for getting Green Bay and Parkside.  I – do you think the legislature put very heavy pressure – could it be said that Molinaro and Nelson wanted them, and he went along?
00:09:54
EY:	I don’t know.  I’ve heard that, but I – see, I was away at that stage.  I left in ’65 and came back in ’68, so there was a period when I wasn’t around here, and Molinaro was very eager to get one in the southwest, but I’m not sure that Molinaro wasn’t playing into Fred’s hands rather than the other way around.  But that’s something – get the facts [words unclear] somewhere else.
DS:	Oh, yeah, Fred told me once – he’d be the best authority on that and I don’t know whether he recalls this, but he told me at one time when we were talking after I had come here that he did want Parkside.  He felt it was a – that the Racine, Kenosha area, one or other of those two communities and then, of course, they wound up with a place in between – was such a populous area of the state that it was a reasonable place to build a new university at that time when people were expanding.  He said he was not eager for Green Bay, but that politically it became necessary to create Green Bay in order to get the votes to get Parkside and the rest of what he was up to at that time in the eastern corridor, so he then moved very aggressively on Green Bay as well.  
EY:	Before I left in ’65, we were playing around with the idea of having a satellite campus out in the west side about three miles and I think I was chairman of the committee that looked at that, and then we would hold this campus down to a certain size, but that was abandoned in favor of going out in the state more.  
LS:	What about the point of money being taken from Madison for the other campuses?
EY:	Well, the thing – see, there was some of it – in the base budget -- how it got shifted, I don’t know, but the place where the faculty recognized it was that WARF money was being transferred to Milwaukee.  By the time of merger, that was $700,000 a year which was quite a big piece of the budget, and that money was going to Milwaukee – still – they still get a little under kind of a treaty we had -- and so now some of the WARF board claimed that they didn’t know that was going on.  I don’t believe that, really.  I don’t know how they could not have known, but they were quite unhappy about it, and after the merger, one of the first things I went to work on was getting that money back, because I knew I had to move fast to get it back.
LS:	How’d you do it?
EY:	I just – by getting WARF to pass a resolution to the effect that the money was meant for Madison, belonged to Madison, and that some innocuous thing on the end, I think, was that if those professors over there invented anything, they wanted WARF to manage it for them, they would (laughing).
DS:	I think, Ed, in all justice, I don’t think you really want to give credit – system credit – the merger credit – for doing any – accomplishing a great deal in higher education, but that it did re-concentrate Madison resources at Madison.  That happened due to your initiative.  It had all taken place by the time I arrived, and it was only subsequently that I found out that this had been a – had been something that happened so quickly, that there was no way in which the Regents or the system could have intercepted the appearance, yeah.
EY:	I moved rather quickly.  I don’t usually move too fast, but on that one I did.  There was a lot at stake.  
DS:	I think there was a lot at stake.
EY:	There was a great deal at stake, you see.  Well, I’ll tell you, the first meeting we – the Chancellors after merger, two or three of them said to me, “when do we start getting our money?” and I said, “what money?” and they said, “the WARF money; our share of the WARF money.  That’s what merger’s about.”  (laughing)  In the system, there were mixed feelings about this.  One of the things was that Mr. Weaver was really very strongly from Madison.  He wasn’t going to do a lot, but he wasn’t going to do anything that would hurt Madison potentially.  He really wanted to be president of Madison.  His interests were not out in the state.  They didn’t have a football team, they didn’t have Bucky Badger, they didn’t have a lot of things (laughing).  But he – no, but he – his father was a professor here and he grew up here and he thought he was coming home, you see.
00:15:11
LS:	Even though he knew that when he took the job, it was Green Bay and –
EY:	Well that – Green Bay and Parkside -- but he was would be still – see, he didn’t bother to check on much about before he came.  Most presidents never do, you know?  He wasn’t unlike other people.  I got to the university in Maine.  They told me everything about it except that they had a commission to study merger and then told me about it (laughing).
DS:	They told me everything about the system, including the budget proposal.  The only thing they neglected to tell me before I agreed to come here was that the Governor’s budget had already cut the heart out of the system proposal (laughing) and that we were going to take off in the first merged budget with an enormous financial problem and that came as something as a shock to me when after I arrived, but it was fun.  I do think you’re right.  John didn’t want merger.  He spoke aggressively and publicly against it.  I had attended a reception up at Minnesota by his old department, the Geography Department in Minnesota where he had taught and where I first got to know him, although I knew his father quite well as the chairman of the department where I took my degree.  And he – at that time, the proposals were floating, and John was absolutely apoplectic about the indignity of scarcely getting his bags unpacked when he’d come home to Madison and finding out that he had this strange, new preacher potential; although he thought at the time it was not going to pass, that it would be defeated and would not come to pass.  And then he was – I think really, at least he told me later, that he was quite uncertain in his own mind when it did pass whether or not he would accept the job; that includes an unknown quantity:  what is he going to do?  If he doesn’t accept the job, the board that appointed him was now still pretty much in control of the merge board.  Is he suddenly going to be reporting to someone else as president of the system?  This is, I think, something that he then resolved to go ahead, but it was very clear that while he tried very, very hard to be fair and equitable with his entire range of responsibilities, that he would not have intentionally allowed anything to happen which would be damaging to Madison, and to the best of his ability, would have tried to see to it that Madison’s distinction was protected.  So he was – from my point of view, he was a very easy man to work with and a very pleasant man to work with in that respect.
EY:	I’ve said – not publicly, but to a lot of the people – “we really lucked out that John was the first president of the system rather than Fred Harrington.  Because Fred was a consolidator in pulling altogether and centralizer,and he would want to run everything from up there; whereas John didn’t care about that.  He didn’t want to do that and I was able to work very hard at keeping as much autonomy for Madison, and on individual things we differed, but we both had the same interests, which was basically Madison.  He just [word unclear] was interested in [words unclear] but nevertheless, his loyalty to the – his caring about the university was very real.  
DS:	He, of course, always felt that what he wanted to do was never understood at Madison.  He sort of – from the very first, felt half-way betrayed by Madison and he sort of carried – John was a man who carried his heart on his sleeve and it was – that was a sort of difficult dimension and also in some ways, a sort of pleasant dimension to his personality, but he wanted to be recognized as the head of the entire system, as the chief academic officer which was written into it, and it was difficult for him sometimes to believe that this kind of recognition was forthcoming; that it was not –
00:20:22
EY:	He once said, “Why doesn’t the faculty like me the way they like you?”  I said, “John, they don’t know you.  They don’t dislike you.  They just don’t know you.”  I’m using his words.  Some of them didn’t like me, but by and large, I got along with them, but he really wanted the job I had, you see.  The title of “president” – that’s what he would have liked, and he was – one of the things – I don’t know if you’ve picked it up, but just before his appointment, Lucey begged the Regents to put it off.  It was just before the election, and the Regents were looking for a Republican and they had one.  They were going to go ahead with it.
DS:	Yeah.  I think John always felt that his relations with Lucey were totally frozen.  He was cordial to Lucey and he had him out to his house.  He really – the only person he really liked was Mrs. Lucey, because she was quite acerbic about her husband, so he enjoyed talking with her at dinner (laughing) because she would – she spared him the necessity of denouncing his past, yeah.
EY:	I always liked her because she was –
DS:	A very outspoken woman.
EY:	She’s say what she thought and she was bright.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	As Lucey himself, he is bright.
DS:	Oh, yes.  It occurred to me, you know, as I watch political people working, Lucey, as I’ve talked to him on a few social occasions since, will imply that he didn’t – he didn’t know whether a merger was really going to pass, and it was something that he entered into because it seemed a good idea, but that it wouldn’t have been a terribly significant thing to him if it had not passed.
LS:	You’ve heard him say that?
DS:	Yeah.  It wasn’t a major item.  I don’t really believe that.  It seemed to me that he’s like nearly all politicians.  This was a test of his capacity to bring off an unlikely vote, and he did it.  He was a very skillful man.
EY:	I was in the Joint Finance Committee room when the critical vote was taken.  George Molinaro was against it and he argued very strongly, was lobbying, and somehow he got called out just at the critical moment.  That turned the vote.  
LS:	That “somehow” would be interesting to explore.
DS:	(laughing)
EY:	Well, he couldn’t bring himself to vote for the merger, but – and if he’d been there to have stopped it and that would have put him at odds with the Governor and everybody at [word unclear].   Somebody called him out and –
DS:	Lucey was a very able and very strong Governor, and intended to be a very strong and a very active Governor.  Now, from my point of view, in the 70’s, that was not a very desirable situation.  I would have much preferred working with an amiable and rather slow-moving Governor, and the fact that he was such a capable politician, and yet I think profoundly mistaken in his relationships with higher education through that decade.  
LS:	Before you – it sounds as if you’re getting into the post-merger period, I’d like to – I don’t – we slid over this:  Weaver’s relations with the Madison campus, and I’ve never understood how the president of the system did relate to the Chancellor, and how – in what ways he was the president of the Madison campus.
DS:	He wasn’t the president.
LS:	No, he wasn’t, but did he have –
EY:	He was appointed to be president, but then – by the time – but then with the merger, that made him president of the system, you see.
LS:	But did Harrington exercise much authority over you?
EY:	Well, see, there was no legal document – he was – Harrington was the president of the University of Wisconsin.  It wasn’t called a system.  It was one university, and for administrative reasons, the Chancellor – he didn’t -- I’ll tell you why . . . maybe I shouldn’t. . . .that machine. When I came back, I came back not to be Chancellor.  I came back to be Vice President.  Fred needed help and he called me and said, “We’re going through this merger thing.  We’ve got problems . . . a lot of problems here.”  In fact, the year before, I’d been asked – offered the Chancellorship here, but I had a budget problem at Maine.  I was going through the legislature and couldn’t leave the place while going through the budget, so I stayed.  The year was up, and Fred said, “Now, come back and I want you to be the internal man and I’ll be the external man.”  Now, this I’ve never told –
DS:	Yeah, I’ve heard that.
EY:	So this is what really happened . . . and my title would be Vice President so I arrived back.  I had an office and I said, “Fred, when are you – how much of this have you told to other people?”  Well he hadn’t told Clodius.  It was [word unclear] himself as the Executive Vice President or anybody else.  He said, “You’re skillful.  You can work your way into this.”  (laughing)  That’s a great way to go about things, but I – so I just decided to decide what I would do, and about that time, Bill Sewell resigned, you see, and the question was: what was going to happen?  Well, there was a committee here; there was an old committee that reconvened.  I don’t know the exact details, but anyway, the competition for the job wasn’t very great.  The wisdom was that whoever went to Madison was going to be destroyed, and you better stay where it’s safe in Van Hise away from all that fuss and bother.  Well, I wasn’t – I didn’t see it that way.  I saw that Madison was important – that’s where the action was -- so I remember Jim Waltroustrying to persuade me that—you know, we were very close friends – that this was a foolish thing to do -- to be Chancellor of Madison.
00:27:02
DS:	That was because of the student unrest and [words unclear]?
EY:	Yeah, and there was no solution for it and whoever took the job would be the fall guy and so on.  So . . . but I took it, but I was in a special situation.  Fred needed me more than I needed Fred, so – and Fred backed me and left me alone.  Occasionally some – one of his henchmen would come and suggest something and I would either take it or leave it, but actually I had a great deal of time.  I think at another time – well, backing up a bit, when the Chancellorship was first created, I was offered it, when I was the Dean of Letters and Science informally by a person, not by written letter or anything, and I said, “well the way it’s going to work out for a while, is that the Dean of Letters and Science is more important than the Chancellor’s going to be,” because I had a budget – I know where some of the things are . . . certain things, and so, “let’s find somebody else,” and we did – found Robben Fleming, who was a law school student.  The things I connived!! (laughing)
LS:	So did Weaver treat you the same way, then?  Leave you alone?
EY:	Yeah, Weaver did.  He treated – he’d leave most everybody alone.  Well, there was --  there were little things, like a letter from Mrs. Weaver telling us what we could do socially and couldn’t do which, you know, was kind of . . .  but she’s not the only president’s wife who had written us letters and we didn’t take that too seriously.  Amanda and I are – we’re not -- I guess we never expected to get ahead in the social world and so we didn’t worry too much about that.  John spent a lot of time with Arlie Mucks with the Alumni Association.  Pom-pom girls went to the house regularly and things of that – the trappings – John loved the trappings and – but when it came to really critical issues, he never gave me any trouble.  You know, I’d go talk to John.  Now he had people working for him sometimes who were eager to get in to tell me what to do and do things, but some of them were useful things, you know?  Supposing the vice president wants to help the music school; if he finds the money outside my budget, that doesn’t hurt me.  I might say, “Well, he’s interfering, but he can have a music school as far as I’m concerned.  That was my attitude, as long as he pays for it.” (laughing)  And so we – but John – you know, I could go talk to John.  John, I think, he could agree with me, and then there would be counter pressures brought to bear on him, so it might be that he tried to com – he wanted peace and quiet, sort of.  He wanted things to go along.  He wasn’t power hungry in a sense that he wanted to – but he wanted the outside world to regard him as a president of the university at Madison.  That’s what he wanted, and – for instance, he got an agreement before he came that he would be – at the time of the merger before I could talk to anybody – that he would be the AAU representative.
LS:	Hold on, I’ve got to (break in tape) . . . yes.
00:30:31
EY:	John belonged to a small group of assistant presidents in California, Texas . . . there were three others – and they all wanted – felt the same way about this; that even though -- they wanted to be the AAU person and they got some resolution run through the AAU because they were members and they got it worked out and then they went and John came back and told his Regents – got them to agree, because they didn’t know what he was talking about, really. It didn’t mean anything to them.  But that was the kind of thing he wanted to do.  He went to the Big Ten meetings, which really were none of his business but he went there – the only thing he was involved in there that he had much interest in was the athletic program.  He’d get up and leave after that was over.  I went too, see, whereas in some – a place like Indiana, Jack Ryan wouldn’t let one of his campus heads go.  Again, John –
LS:	But Weaver didn’t mind your going?
EY:	Well . . . he didn’t oppose it (laughing).  John didn’t want to fight about things, you see.  Now, you’ve got to watch what I say, Don, because I may be exaggerating sometimes.  See, Lucey appointed a number of Regents and it wasn’t very long before I had more friends on the Regents than John did, but I never went behind his back and talked – used him for anything.  But he knew that if it came to a showdown, it might be sticky.  But we didn’t have any occasion to have a showdown.  My arguments were not with him, they were with Don Percy, and they usually weren’t tremendously big things, but the guy was – see, Don was the day to day president in the sense that he ran things and he was – he had great influence.  I recall when – you may or may not know that the faculty suggested that I be the president and John was picked over me which, you know, the Regents had their – had reasons – they wanted to get a new appearance of the university and wanted a Republican, a conservative, they were under a lot of heat for the disruptions, and that was fair enough.   As it turned out, in hindsight, was the best solution; not for the reasons they did it, but for other reasons.  Anyway, they said to John, “Now, if you ever need any advice, or have any problem, ask Ed Young.”  Well, you know, the Regents, when they appointed Connie Elvehjem as president, I was chairman of the committee, the advisory committee, instructed him to have Fred Harrington as his vice president.  So, this is not an unusual kind of a – so that John was told to consult me.  Well, the first time he really consulted me of any consequence was Don Percy was bearing down on him to be made executive vice president, because Don said we were doing it, and you got to get the title.  I dealt with Don.  He worked for me when I was Dean, so I said, “Well, I’ll tell you, John, I wouldn’t do it.”  I said, “you’re going to stir up a lot of feeling around the system and it won’t make a damn bit of difference, because Don’s going to do it no matter whether you give him the title or you don’t.  He’s going to behave the same way.”  But – so he agreed that I was right and then Don got a hold of him and put pressure to him and he – it was announced he would be the executive vice president.  Well, immediately, some of the state – some of the Chancellors out of state, got on the phone because at that time, the Chancellor from Platteville who was the – from the old system, the state university system, was the president of the Regents.  He was in Spain vacationing.  Somebody got a hold of him.  He called John and said, “You’ve got to rescind that, and for every position in your administration of any importance is that somebody from the old UW system, there’s got to be somebody from the state university system.”  
00:35:02
So Don lost his title as executive vice president.  Lynn Haas was brought down from Eau Claire to be his counterpart.  Lynn spent two years sitting around trying to think what he might do, and then his acting Chancellor died and he was glad to escape back to – it was Don Percy, see, but Don didn’t – if John had backed Don to the hilt, there would have been more control up there, more interference, because Don is a very bright and aggressive guy.  So, but because of John’s affection for Madison, in a sense, I think he didn’t really want to tangle with me, and I didn’t want to tangle with him.  See, neither of us wanted a rowel; it wouldn’t help the system, and I think – I supported the system.  I mean, not the merger, but the making it work.  I tried just as hard as I could, but I also did something else.  I tried to maintain the autonomy of the – as much autonomy for the individual universities as possible.  I kept talking about a federation of universities.  
LS:	That’s – you had some questions about Don Percy and also about the – on the issue of autonomy, so –
DS:	Yeah.  I enjoyed working with Percy when I came here.  Ed knows a good deal more about his background and what had gone on before and there is one question I do have to address to you, because it had to do with rumors that I picked up after I arrived. I was very cautioned before I took the job by Bob Clodius, who was over in Indonesia at the time and who was not – he was well disposed toward working it out if I wanted to do it because he was rather concerned about the system, as everyone was, that I should make two conditions of taking the job of senior vice president for academic affairs.  This was to be a parallel job with Don Percy’s title as senior vice president for budget and planning.  One was that I be paid more than Don because of my seniority and credentials and two, that I occupy the office, the big office that he had occupied next to the president.  Well, I took the advice carefully and was non-committal and neither of those things meant very much to me.  I really didn’t come to Madison to make money, fortunately, because I would have been seriously disappointed and I was not – actually when I did arrive here finally, the old vice president’s office that Don occupied rather depressed me.  I finally wound up in it, but it was – it’s what I referred to as the “last outburst of opulence” in an administrative building in a public university in America.  It was a very large and very well appointed office, and I much preferred being down on the next floor where most of my staff would be so that we could walk back and forth and not be separated by a floor, so that didn’t bother me, and I don’t think it was ever particularly troublesome to me.  Then, the other thing I was a little – I was cautioned a little by Irv Shain to be careful, that Don was a very quick moving man who had been in charge of almost everything and I said well, I didn’t have any particular worries about the ability to be cautious and I – personally, I enjoyed working with him.  Don has, as far as I know, never contested with me on an issue which I thought was properly the responsibility of my office where I had a position, a policy position, or a document that I wanted to push forward.  He would – we shared documents and policy papers with one another and we made comments, but he didn’t rowel with me as to whether or not anything that I wanted to do was not perfectly alright, including the one document I’m very proud of, which is the one that the Regents adopted, although I think they’ve forgotten it, stating right flatly that the University of Wisconsin system was a federation of universities, with a fundamental –
00:40:06
LS:	So that was your invention?
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	We – we both had the same view.
DS:	Yeah.  We had the same view on that, and I thought it was –
LS:	I never heard that phrase.
DS:	Yes, as a matter of fact –
EY:	I’ve used it many times.
DS:	The audit bureau discovered it in their recent audit and it appalled them.  They thought it was – it was not what it was intended.  Well, I think there’s a fair reading of the merger bill which was a lump issue, an uninterruptable document.
EY:	Yes.
DS:	And it was a very important document, and I think the Regents, when they first passed it, that the Board at the time paid some attention to it, and John believed in it.  Don was – he was an extraordinarily quick man.  The one thing that, in a way, entertained me, and in another way, sometimes made me a little bit cautious about him was the speed with which he moved.  He would be downtown, he would be back in his office, he got there early in the morning, he was enormously energetic, he produced paper voluminously, he was inventive, he had a good sense of humor, he was a pleasant man to work with.  On the other hand, he was a man of almost unlimited ambitions and almost unlimited belief in his own capacity to reach judgments and to reach sound judgments and even though I think the one thing he desired most was to be thought of as a man who had moved and worked his way into academic administration and understood universities academically.  The fact of the matter was he did not grow up in a university culture and had not gone through the long period of induction in the departmental business and departmental affairs and –
LS:	In spite of his long period on the Madison campus.  Do you agree with that?
DS:	That’s right.
EY:	Oh, yes.  See, what was he doing on the Madison campus?  He was a kind of budget officer.  He came here to be the budget officer of sorts for Math Research Center, which was – you know, could have been a hundred miles away.  Later on, it was out – to WARF, it didn’t make any difference where it was.  Then when he worked for me for a short time, he was a sort of assistant Dean, or something for, again, budget – but it wasn’t very long.  It was a short time because Clodius spotted him and saw his talent and invited him over there and he moved fast.  After I went to Maine, I asked him if he wanted a job at Maine and he thought he did, so he came out and we had a discussion and he said well, of course he’d have to be the senior vice president.  I said, “What’d you say?”  “Senior vice president.”  I said, “look these people have been here doing a good job for 20 years, and you don’t know a damn thing about it.  I’m not going to put you over them.  You’re crazy.”  Well, you know, we amicably broke off (laughing).  But, see, that was the measure of the man.  He moved in very fast.  
DS:	He was extremely ambitious for the titles.  He loved to get the opportunity to teach a course because, you see, then this would immediately push him into a different world and – but he was a very quick study.  He was, in many ways, the most -- the quickest moving man I ever worked with and he could be a public relations – he could be in charge of public relations, in charge of the budget, in charge of developing the Regents’ agenda for at least two of the committees.  After I got here, I was developer of the education committee, and it was sort of a dazzling display of just fleet footedness and analytical – very skillful analytically.  
00:44:35
EY:	But after awhile, the people who saw a good deal of him began to have suspicions about the integrity of it all, because he did a number of things.  The – Lemon and Bush would be sent downtown with the university’s position. He’d brief them.  He might get on the phone with one of the chairman of the committee while they were down there after they told what the position was and cut a deal that was different.   So he undercut them.  It was that kind of activity.  Now he might be right cutting the deal, but there seemed something sort of unethical and immoral to me about sending somebody down with instructions to say that “this is our position” and then have it destroyed.  At least if you’re going to change it, you ought to invite them up and let them go back and change it.  But he didn’t.  He did that kind of thing.  As Don said, he was very, very quick.  See, when he arrived – he – one of the things that was going on before Fred resigned for a couple of years, he was Clodius’ assistant, but he would say to Clodius, “oh, I’ll take care of that; I’ll take care of that,” and then Clodius was spending a lot of time off the campus on various projects, and Fred and I both told Clodius, we said, “look, don’t you understand that this guy is taking your job away from you?’  Well, Clodius didn’t pay much attention to that, but that’s what he was doing, so when Weaver became president, the Regents told him to get rid of the other vice presidents, but keep Percy, because Percy’s the one that was so able.  See, Percy sensed what was happening.  He’s very quick, and he began to get himself positioned, so to speak, before the change, which was a good thing to do, I guess.  That’s what people ought to do if they want to survive, but –
DS:	To what extent, Ed – when I got here, one of my staff members which will remain nameless said that – he told about the speed of what he referred to as “the Saturday night massacre”, the fact that after the merger, one morning there were something like four vice presidents who were holdovers from Harrington’s administration who were all in the system, technically, and on Monday morning, they were all gone.  It virtually happened that quickly.  I don’t know if it was quite that quick or not –
EY:	Very fast.
DS:	Very fast, and your impression was that this was an instruction of the Regents, or was Percy involved?
EY:	Not of the –
DS:	My staff member said he thought that Percy talked John into the belief that he had to start with a clean slate.
EY:	Well, I think one or two Regents made the grumbles, but there was no formal action, but could be used by Percy to further – see, John trembled when the Regents, you know –
DS:	He took them very seriously.
EY:	Word of a – any individual – he might – he took it as sometimes being sometimes the view of the Regents and many times it was not.  It was the minority view, but he got the clear distinction from the – that the whole Harrington thing was – one of the people that really got caught up in it and couldn’t believe it – he didn’t go quite that fast, but about six – shortly after this “massacre”, they – Clodius and Weaver, at least maybe Clodius, told me that Bob Taylor had to go because the Regents didn’t want him around because he’d been associated with Harrington.  I never bothered to check whether the Regents wanted him around or not.  The Regents would sometimes tell me how to get rid of certain people.  I never paid any attention to that.  If they wanted to make it an issue and have a board meeting on it, that would be alright with me, but they never did, you know.  When I became Dean, the first thing that Fred and Elvehjem asked me if I had fired those two yet; one was Doremus and the other was Bruticelli.  They disliked them intensely.  They assumed the first thing I would do would be to fire those two “no good people.”  I never fired them.  I didn’t pay any attention to that kind of stuff.  Let them make the issue, unless – see, but Don wanted to use this, and so I – they said, “We’ve got to do something.  Would you help us find something for them?”  So I went to Bob and I said, “Bob, you know, your time in that system isn’t very long.”  He didn’t know how short it was, and he said, “Why?”  He said, “I’m doing my job.”  He says, “I’ve been loyal to three presidents,” and he was.  He was just an absolutely – he’s great integrity, Bob Taylor, about things like this.  He was just as loyal to Weaver as he was to Harrington or anybody.  He worked endlessly, and his one fault was he was a soft touch.  If somebody lost a job working for the Cap Times, he’d hire him and give him a job, so that upset – so he had a staff, but he did their work for them, so I couldn’t complain.  
00:50:10
Anyway, so I explained to him that he had, you know, there’s no – he wasn’t going to work there.  He said he couldn’t understand it.  “Why were they doing this to him?”  This was the kind of situation.  They kept one guy on, though, and that was Engman.  No, Engman had to go, too, because he was the hatchet man and I found a place for him in environmental studies and then he stayed on there.  Nobody suggested that Rubin Lorenz go.
DS:	No, no, no.
EY:	That never came up.  Rubin – by the way, one of the protections that Madison had was that Rubin was over there.  Rubin was not discriminated against the others in favor of Madison, but he made sure we never got short changed.  He was a – he did his job as fairly and squarely as anybody possibly could.  But he was there always -- that was a person in the system when I was Chancellor and if I really wanted to talk it over in some system problem that was serious, I’d go talk to Rubin.  Not that he would do anything, but we just – he could sometimes point out to me the reasons why it had to be this way or why they – or what I could do about it or something.  He was one of the great citizens of this university.  So you had this kind of uneasy situation up there with Clodius – I mean with Percy – because you couldn’t tell where he was going to go, and he’d – I’d seen the way he forced other people out and undermined Clodius and so on.  Clodius had it coming to him in a way because he wasn’t doing his job at the time, he was away so much for personal reasons, I think.  But, so I’m – and I knew Percy well enough so I never really trusted him in a sense.  I wouldn’t count on him.  It was not that he would be – would lie to you, but he would find a reason for doing something different, changing the position.  It was always -- he was great at rationalization, see.   He knew a hundred ways of rationalizing and so – but it was not an easy thing.  Once or twice he threatened to go to the Regents and tell them about me.
LS:	What?  What’d he tell them?
EY:	I can’t even remember what it was.  Some issue where I was differing with him and not doing what he wanted me to do; something . . . it may have been some form of reporting or – it wasn’t any big issue, but he had a bureaucratic mind.  He liked to have everything his way, and he’d cook up some scheme.  He had a scheme for awhile that he was going to charge tuition according to the level of the class.  He would charge the freshman less and upper classmen more, and things like that, and really schemed things.  I was [words unclear].
LS:	I was just reading the Regents’ report on that particular –
EY:	And things like that.  So I just said, “Go ahead.  Try it,” and, of course, he’d, you know – I play poker, too.  I used to play [word unclear] and I was in a pretty good position, so I was – but I would say that basically John and Percy had the same – they wanted things to work.  We all did.  The Regents, the other Chancellors, were very loyal to the system.  There was no conniving about how to undercut the system administration.  We’d tell them when we didn’t agree with them, but they had the backing.  One of the things that Clodius – that Percy did which was very amusing, he told us Chancellors that we were not to go downtown and talk to legislators without clearing it with him first and then coming back and telling him what happened (laughing).  That’s one of the silliest things anybody’s ever – the result of which was he lost the support of the Chancellors because those who would have supported the administration and most of them did with the local political people, just stopped doing it.  The ones who – one or two who had  particular axes to grind went ahead and did it anyway (laughing).  So we had to rescind all that, that kind of foolishness.  See, that was the kind of thing that Don was talking about.  He’d suddenly get this idea that somebody did something that irritated him.  Now, I – you know, when we had the budget downtown, the legis – the Joint Finance Committee was as much interested in my being there and talking to them as they were John Weaver, because they thought John’s stuff was prepared for him by Percy and written up and he’d was reading it, and they could talk to me and I’d tell them what I thought.
00:55:00
LS:	Well you did go down there.
EY:	Oh, yes.  I didn’t pay any attention to that.  Why should I?  You know, Madison was more important – the legislators – if I had said to them, “look I can’t come down there because Mr. Percy won’t let me,” they would have blown their tops.  One or two of the Chancellors told them that and they were very angry.
LS:	Now this is after the merger.
EY:	After the merger, yes.  You see, because the merger came, you know, about the same –
DS:	I think that must have happened in the first year.
EY:	Yes.
DS:	After I arrived, why there was no – there really was no question about the fact that the Chancellors – a) the Chancellors were supposed to – insofar as possible – maintain a united front in support of the budget once it had been put together, but it was considered a strength that they get in contact with their local legislators and that they come down and testify if there were particular items, so I think that that had been (tape briefly cuts out) . . . I really enjoyed – see, Percy had – he was my major reason for – major way of getting fully acquainted with what had gone on in the months before I arrived.  I – when I was downtown with him jointly, we were never out of tune.  He was downtown a lot more than I was.  I didn’t regard myself primarily as a lobbyist except in major committee hearings, although I did go down and increasingly as the decade went on, I did spend more time than I wanted to down in state government.  The – he was very active on that front.  He’d – so these matters of what all of the interactions were in that first year are things that I wouldn’t personally have experienced now.  I think it’s true, too, that as I began getting a grasp on what was going on – I don’t know whether you know that one of the signals that I felt I’d begun to understand the budget process and the policy framework that had been set up was when we started producing some little known and not very significant documents called “academic budget planning papers.”  These were an effort to meld academic planning and budget planning which was a nice idea.  Prior to that time, we had two series:  one was a budget planning paper and the other were a so-called academic planning papers and they moved on wholly separate tracks which I think is the right move when you’re trying to get things under some kind of policy framework, and I would draft the one, and Percy would draft the other.  But then it seemed to me that we were going to have to begin to work the entire scene if there was to be any rationality between the budget and the academic planning; although I’m not sure to what extent that is really feasible.  Theoretically it’s a great idea, practically speaking it’s almost impossible to bring off, and the only place where that happens is in the president’s office, I think, or the Chancellor’s office.
EY:	I was kind of an irritant to the system administration.
LS:	Good.
EY:	An irritant.
LS:	I said “good.”
EY:	Oh, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.  I think sometimes –
DS:	Well, you know, I was in the system administration and we had enough irritations without Ed adding his (laughing).  
LS:	What did you do?
EY:	Well, I always spoke up, you see, in meetings, for our interests.
LS:	In the Chancellor’s meetings?
EY:	In the Chancellor’s meetings and in the Regents’ meetings.  The Regents expected me to.  In fact, they instructed the Chancellors to speak up.  Most of them never did unless they were called on by somebody, but I did.  I didn’t spend a lot of time.  I didn’t talk as much as Don Smith did.  He was the vice president (laughing).  But, anyway, in the small ways, I probably should have been more – acted more as though they were in charge, you see.  At one time, Arlie Mucks tried to explain all this to me.  He said, “You’ve got to think of it this way. . . John is the admiral of the fleet and you’re the captain of the ship and you have to do what the admiral wants.”  This was some ceremonial thing or other –
01:00:10
DS:	Arlie would – (laughing)
EY:	Well, you know that was the idea.  Well, I didn’t act like that, you know?  I acted as though I was the head of a pretty good university and I’d go along with things we had to do together, but I didn’t see any reason why I should kowtow to anybody for who they were.
LS:	So how did you feel in those Chancellors’ meetings?  I’ve looked through some of your papers and I’ve seen these endless reports you were required to file and you’re having to sit with a bunch of other Chancellors, and you really – I mean, maybe you like them personally, but you can’t have had much use for their institutions.  How –
EY:	Oh, I – see, I did have a lot of use for their institutions.  I was fortunate in that I visited most of them before, and I had a great deal of respect for them.  There were years when I was out around the state a good deal talking and visiting.  I, you know, I still have a lot of respect for them.  I know people – I probably knew at one time most people on every campus, and – no, I never had that feeling.  I had the feeling that I had to look out for Madison, but if getting them something got us something –
[End of Tape 1]
00:00:00
LS:	This is tape two of the interview.
EY:	Oh, TAUWF?
LS:	Yes.
EY:	I was opposed to it from the beginning and opposed it publicly on every other occasion, and sometimes ridiculed it and I didn’t think they were as powerful as they pretended to be and it turned out I was right.
LS:	They were very powerful, wouldn’t you say, in the way the merger legislation went?
EY:	The merger legislation’s a copy of  Madison’s practices.  I mean, the document that winds it up.  They got some things – you go through that and you’ll find it was copied, almost word for word, from the practices at Madison.  We lost the battle on merger, but we won some of it back in the implementation legislation. TAUWF wanted the merger.
DS:	TAUWF was a thorn in my side and I started out not intending to have any thorns because I wasn’t – the way I  – so I – when I first came, why,  I had the required meetings.  Ed Muzik was waiting to all upon me and Marshall Wick and so on and explain to me the history of TAUWF and how they wanted to be cooperative, but it was very clear, and it soon became clearer, that TAUWF had only one agenda, and that was collective bargaining and with TAUWF as the collective bargaining agent, although later they, of course, joined the AFL-CIO so they’re now, if they ever got their union bill through, it would be an affiliate of a larger state organization.
EY:	Yeah, AFT.
DS:	Yeah, AFT . . . I guess that’s right – “The American Federation of Teachers.”  They, I would say, were more disruptive of efforts to make the system run smoothly than any individual organization or institution or taken all by itself.  There may be an exception to that, but no one else was as consistently troublesome and it was because their agenda always seemed to them to be based on the setting up a rowel.  That is, the system had to be doing something which was contrary to the traditions of WSU institutions and therefore it was wrong; it was not a proper interpretation.  So you’d even get an agreement from the TAUWF leaders that a particular policy statement you were putting on the agenda was – they may not have agreed with it totally but that it was a reasonable compromise at the time.  And then without notification, they would show up at the Regents’ meeting and testify against it, in most aggressive terms, saying that it was a very bad document and they’d try to get it on the track.  That was the sort of constant thing, so after about 1976, I quit meeting with TAUWF representatives except when there was a state allegation, two or three of them in, and when I had staff with me and when there was a memo to the files about the nature of the discussion afterwards.  Those were very brief meetings, but it was nearly everything, you know.  The seating at the Regents’ meeting, the question of whether or not the faculty senates in the WSU institutions represent their institution, the faculty of their institution, or TAUWF represents all of them.  You see, they didn’t want the senates –
EY:	To work.
DS:	To work.
LS:	What I was really thinking of was how their pressure affected Madison.  I’m trying to keep this on how this all affected Madison, and their insistence that faculty salary should be the same.  Was that not alarming and –
EY:	Well, it was – but, you know, the faculty out there would have been arguing for it even if they hadn’t at TAUWF.  That was the faculty position.  They – one time one of them said, “Well, why do you suppose we supported a merger if it wasn’t to get the same salaries?”
LS:	One of the faculty members?
00:05:00
EY:	One of the TAUWF people.
LS:	Yep, ah-huh.
EY:	So that was their position, and Lucey did give them some money first round, you know, quite a lot of money.
DS:	Well, that was – no, that was before the merger, wasn’t it, Ed?
EY:	Yeah, it was – but yet it was part of the – at the same time.
DS:	In the ’70 budget, I figure.
LS:	But it sometimes comes across in the literature that they mean salaries equal to the Green Bay and Parkside salaries.
EY:	That – that’s what they were asking for, and I suppose over the long pull, they would have gotten them.  They got the same percent increases as everybody did.
LS:	Higher, didn’t they?
EY:	What?
LS:	Didn’t they get higher?
EY:	One year they did.
LS:	Yeah.
DS:	That was the budget before merger.  
EY:	Part of the price of merger.  But on the whole, as Don says, they were just an irritating nuisance.  They appeared on everything and unfortunately they had this Muzik as their head.  I’ve been trying to get somebody to endow him so they can be permanent there, because he’s such a bore.  But, you know, he really is, and – but, you know, I don’t start out being antithecal to unions.  I made my life about teaching about unions.
LS:	But you draw the line.
EY:	Well I draw the line at giving up something that’s better than any union ever had.  You know, the faculty runs this place.  I don’t want the AFT sending in some business agent to tell us what we got to do, whether it’s the Governor’s man in employment relations.  [Words unclear] this guy Fuller, but just got [word unclear] -- early administration making decisions about personnel policy at the university is as scary as hell.  
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	I know about collective bargaining. These – the other thing about these TAUWF people, they don’t know anything about collective bargaining; all they can do is see themselves in charge dealing directly with the legislature for the university system, and it is terrible.  It’s really – I guess people who are most opposed to it are Rosant, Barb Ash, Young, Sturen; people who really understand what it’s all about.
DS:	It was – I do think I’d have to subscribe to your view that at first I found – I used to fervently wish that Ed Muzik would be replaced, and then it began to appear to me increasingly that probably they would have had their collective bargaining bill each biennium after 1975 if it hadn’t been for Muzik’s political blundering.  He was – in a sense, he became an unwitting ally in seeing to it that collective bargaining got defeated, because he was always overreaching and seeking to get more out of the legislature than they were prepared to give, so as a result, you’d get a very divisive kind of bill, and that would sink passage.  I don’t know . . . it’s sort of a scary thing, though it remains that way.  I did want to say one thing in retrospect, John – I thought -- or, I mean Ed – I thought John was very good with the Regents.  That’s one thing that he did do consistently, he spent a lot of time on the phone with the Regents and discussed matters with them a great deal before meetings and in general, I thought he enjoyed rather amiable relations and was able to maintain a certain sense of unity in the board which, by its very nature, had been made up of the old WSU and UW boards and could have become a sort of abomination if it had great fallings out.  
EY:	That’s true.
DS:	But he was perhaps, as you suggested – a call from a particular Regent might excite him more than –
EY:	Yes.
DS:	Might have been warranted.  
EY:	That’s true of a lot – that’s the way people survive, too.
DS:	He also had one – there was one thing I recall:  that he found – this may be line with Arlie Mucks’ statement, that he found disheartening with Ed Young.  See, Ed Young would be a very difficult man to give – to do anything but grab a great deal autonomy, too, (laughing) because it’s not within his temperament to be easily malleable into an organization if he doesn’t want to be – on the frontier’s where he doesn’t want to be easily malleable and I sometimes said, Ed, that when you’re opposed to something, you accomplish a great deal by simply by the processes of making it extremely difficult for it happen (laughing).  It seems that you’re doing nothing, but in effect it doesn’t really happen if you have decided you don’t want it to happen very often.  Sometimes it does make a difference.
00:10:59
EY:	Well, it isn’t always that way.
DS:	No.
EY:	But once in awhile it turns out that way.
DS:	But John complained, he said that when a particularly difficult issue – that is a sort of controversially, rowel would break loose in the Regents, where he felt that he wasn’t the best person maybe to know to be able to answer that, and that you might be, that every time he looked over at your chair, you’d found yourself out in the hall and he could never find you (laughing) and therefore –
EY:	He’s very proud of a picture he has of me at a Regents’ meeting where I seem to be asleep, but I wouldn’t be asleep.  I’d be resting my eyes (laughing).
DS:	Anyway, your eyes would be in a condition where he couldn’t catch them.
LS:	You know, maybe this is a good time for what was – our really major question, is what is – whether you think the system took any steps to protect the distinctive place of Madison in the system?
EY:	Oh, I – well, it was sort of on the one hand, on the other hand.  The political pressure on John was very heavy towards equalization.  They had all those – they had merger, they had Regents from the old system.  On the other hand, he didn’t want to hurt Madison, so he – not much happened, really.  Percy cooked up a formula on budgeting by cost of instruction, which really was good for us, and he defended it as being fair.  I think it was fair, but it certainly protected us in a way.  There were times when, you know, you might think something was – I remember once we lent money to the system because the others were short, but that was the right thing to do.  We got our money back.
LS:	What . . what . . . you did?
EY:	Yeah.
LS:	What was that about?
EY:	Well, it was a shortfall, you know, in the budget.
DS:	The enrollment funding money.
EY:	Or something like that – and I’m for that kind of thing.  You know, they – we were part of the same system and it saved them a lot of embarrassment and so we moved it around.  They could have done it anyway, and I could – but I was – supported it rather than objected to it.  If my faculty had known I was doing it, they would have been upset, but it all came out right in the end; things like that.  So I guess . . . I’ve thought about this question a good deal.  I can’t see any good that came of merger, and it used up a lot of energy at the bureaucracy over there, insatiable, seemed to me – not so much now as it used to be – maybe it isn’t worse now, but you can talk to Irv – they’d get involved with – well, take affirmative action . . . we would have had it anyway in one form or another, but the amount of paperwork compared to the amount of good it does, you know . . . if you tested it – I think the weight of the paper is more – is greater than the people who were benefitted – the weight of the people, and this is partly in response to federal rules and partly in response to the Regents.  Now, you know, we are – at your worst moments, you blame it on the system for pushing that along on you, but then you stop and realize that you would have had it in some form or another anyway, and it’s things like – so it’s very hard to say.  In a sense, merger protected us from being out there all by ourselves.  Suppose they merged everybody but us and we stood alone and had to fight to compete in the legislature.  I don’t know how we would have come out, you see.  In some pla – Michigan does very well against the rest of the state, so to speak, but whether we could have or not . . .
00:15:00
The greatest threat, I think, hanging over us is the – one of the things that is – that bothered me, is we no longer have any Regents.  The role of Regents and trustees is to help the university.  Now they’re – they know what the system tells them and the system has to look out for everybody and so we don’t have that kind of personal interest that we used to have.  Sometimes –
LS:	You mean at UW Madison?
EY:	Yeah.  Sometimes it was interference, too, so it wasn’t all positive, but I think that’s a real loss, not having our own public representatives of people of stature such as the Regents.  
LS:	You mean you just had to hope that two or three of them are – will support Madison.
EY:	Yeah.  But, you see, as I suggested earlier, if there’d been a real rowel between Madison and the system about some fundamental issue in the second or third year after merger, we had enough Regents up there where – identified themselves with Madison and, in fact, Walter Renk used to turn to me in the meetings and say, “Ed, what do we do on our campus?” (laughing)  So, you see, but that’s gone now, and you can’t – Irv doesn’t have this protection that I had and the campus had.  Now, Irv’s very – he hasn’t lost any serious things, but it isn’t the same.  I know some of the politicking; because he doesn’t know them, he doesn’t have the access the presidents had, see, and that is a real loss, I think.  I think probably on balance, it would be easier for the legislature to distinguish Madison from the rest of the state outside of merger than in merger, but that’s only guesswork.  It could go the other way, you see.  They could gang up on us, so to speak, so that’s one thing, but the thing that really bothered me a good deal is this collective bargaining thing hanging over us, because our faculty – now, might fall – when we get a bad time we say, “well, you know, the system administration is doing us in.  You can’t get at them.  You know, we can talk to our Chancellor, we have our university committee, we’ve got everything here, but those guys up there, nobody – no one can get in.  Maybe we have to join up with this union.”  Now most of them haven’t gone that way, but what I’m more afraid of is that TAUWF will get a collective bargaining deal; they’ll get organized, they’ll bargain with the Fullers of this world – you know who Fuller was – the Department of Employment Secretary – and who was used to bargaining with the state employees’ union.  He believes – whoever has that job – that’s their job; highly, sort of control – personnel is the biggest thing in the university; that’s what it’s all about.  It all moves downtown under collective bargaining; bills . . . all these bills.  And if they bring that about, even if our people don’t join up, you see, under merger, those guys will bargain for us, so we get what they cook up.  That’s the fear I have of the merger.  I think that it’s increased the amount of overhead of the university, but not a great deal.  There are a number of people answering things and – but the bureaucracies go everywhere.  I don’t know – but as Don said, long ago I pointed out that we had some of this before merger.  Fred built quite a big staff up in the system before merger and, of course, things – how can I tell – you know, affirmative action and federal regulations just created a great many jobs and because we – and a great deal of reporting because the belief of their proponents was that somehow we could nail them if we could get more facts.  It was – the whole adversarial relationship and all these people – that’s been an irritant, but as I say, that would have been an irritant at some form or another anyway and our campus would have rushed in to it to do the right thing and we probably would have taken the leadership because – our faculty, no matter how they behave, they really believe in affirmative action.  They may not get around to do much at a given time, but –
DS:	Well, they’d probably do more if they were – at least I always contend that the faculty will do more if you make your appeal through conscience.  That is, what it is that they want to accomplish for their university and how they conceive of the university rather than through reporting and the threat of sanctions.  I think that’s been a terrible blunder in the relationship between government and the universities on the business of affirmative action, and the Regents – that was a very difficult thing I found.  
00:20:10
The Regents’ policies on affirmative action – the policy had been made almost immediately after merger.  In the shuffling of staff, we would up with two people instead of one and that was not the work of the system staff,  that was a regional pressure group.  We – I think now they have three instead of one.  I guess we wound up with three and now they have four and this is probably a commitment that doesn’t accomplish very much except increase the flow of paper.  I think on balance, Ed, most of the increased pressure of reporting came out of legislative pressure and out of the increased activism of the LFB DOA and the legislative audit and all of those things and the system was put over and over again into the position of not being able to defend anything unless it was – had available to it the information that’s being required of it for delivery downtown.  That was the process.  On the other hand, there were some areas where the reporting was a creation of the system, and was, I think, excessive.  I do think that some of the steps taken – some of them were taken before I got here, so I don’t – although – well, I’ll continue on that.  One of them was the quick creation of the clusters, setting Madison and Milwaukee into a doctoral cluster and the university cluster the other institutions.
EY:	I take full credit for that.
DS:	Do you?  O.K.  Well, that –
EY:	I worked that out with Lucey privately.
DS:	Alright, that was a –
LS:	Oh, please . . . when did you do that?
EY:	Well, after merger.  
DS:	That was a very – that had been done by the time I got here and I thought it was a brilliant and fortuitous stroke because in the absence of that, the pressures on homogenization of roles and budgets would have been almost uncontrollable.
LS:	Why was Lucey willing to do that?
EY:	Lucey was a – you know, he was a very interesting person.  He and I had a cordial relationship.  He wasn’t a pal of mine.  He knew I wasn’t very warm – in fact, privately I was quite critical of the merger business.  But I always had access to him and if I had something that sounded reasonable, or if he didn’t care, he wouldn’t get in my way.  Now, he didn’t care about this one, and I seemed to care a great deal about it, because –
LS:	This cluster, you mean?
EY:	The idea of separating in the budget.  It was mostly -- at the beginning it was fairly symbolic, but he did it.  He went along with it, and that’s something that I pushed for.  See, I was trying to find ways of building fences against – pulling Madison down – against a leveling business.  Now, I couldn’t go alone for Madison.  I had to – so I used the doctoral campuses.  That protected him politically, too, because he had to take Milwaukee with him.  I did that after taking away their WARF money which cost him $700,000.  He had to replace it.
LS:	Why did – how did you think of the idea of –
EY:	Well, you know – somebody said – Seth Johnson said that “nothing like hanging concentrates your mind.”  (laughter)  My mind was concentrated on protecting Madison.
DS:	Well, what it did for me was one of the first jobs I had to do was write mission statements because this was part of the state law, the merger implementation, that the Regents would create these mission statements for each institution.  That made it possible that the little design of that mission book, which I think is the only really consequential planning document other than the documents on the Notion of Federation and the Notion of Relationships Between the Regents and the institutions, the way policies are to be handled.  But it made it possible to create a separate cluster mission, distinguishing doctoral institutions from bachelorette and masters level institutions.  This automatically pre-empted any aspiration – it didn’t pre-empt any aspiration, but it pre-empted any possibility of approval of a proposal for a doctoral program at any of the out state universities, and then –
00:25:55
LS:	Was that – you had that in mind, did you?
EY:	I had as much in mind as I could get (laughing).
DS:	Well, you see, this is the thing.  This is the –
LS:	But it had to be backed by the mission statement, is that right?
DS:	Yeah, well this was sanctified in the mission statements in [words unclear].
EY:	The mission statements came afterwards.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	He did that.
DS:	And then the second thing was – and this was a very subtle thing which I think has been sort of overlooked recently – the only two institutions that had a research mission by name were Madison and Milwaukee.  The others had a mission of the faculty to engage in scholarly activities.  Now that’s a very subtle distinction.  A lot of them, the Chancellors, used to grumble.  They said that’s a change in the wording without a – without a change in meaning, and I always said, “no, it isn’t.  It means that categorical support for research from state budgets will not be asked for for your institutions.  So if you’re going to do scholarly work, it has to come out of faculty time or out of your success in getting grants.”  And, so that maybe a distinction which has been lost sight of as I say because of some of the recent events, but nevertheless, it was an important planning document that disciplined certain kinds of fiscal aspirations.  Then the third thing was the distinguishing between Madison and Milwaukee, one as a comprehensive doctoral and professional institution –
LS:	Was that your idea, too?
EY:	No.
DS:	And the other as a limited and urban related --
LS:	Yeah.
DS:	And that very probably a good deal of ambiguity in that distinction, but it was used for planning.
EY:	One of the lucky things, I think, from Madison’s point of view in this period was Werner Baum was the Chancellor at Milwaukee.   Werner is a first rate scholar himself and he and I were good friends.  When they were the – it was a Regents’ meeting, he stayed at our house.  When there was something in Milwaukee, we stayed at their house and we talked about everything, and when we disagreed, we disagreed privately and he was willing to stand up to his faculty when they were complaining about Madison getting something, and I was willing to stand up to people here when they thought Milwaukee was getting too much because we had respect for each other and Werner wanted this place.  He didn’t want to do anything to hurt Madison.
LS:	So he wasn’t going to undercut it.  That’s – yes, that was important.
EY:	No, no.  He was a forthright – in fact, he would stick his neck out for us, sometimes more than he had to.  So, that was very, very fortunate.
LS:	I guess I asked the question the wrong way.  I said, “What did the system do to help protect Madison?” and really it’s what did you do?  I mean, what else?  Do you remember other –
EY:	I just kept at it.  I kept repeating this federation thing.  I kept talking about campus autonomy, that these Chancellors had a right to do their thing.  They never had any rights before merger to do anything, actually.  I say – I wanted – I listed – I worked with them, and I didn’t – I helped them get things.  I didn’t – I was one of the boys.
LS:	What did you think about the Platteville Engineering College?
EY:	Oh, I didn’t even think about it much.  I thought Bernie was going to retire sooner or later and that somebody else would come along.  It turned out somebody did who shook the place up.  You know, our – we had some faculty who were quite excited about it.  See, I would – my view is maybe – is this – if somebody has access to the facts, elects to go to Platteville to study engineering . . . well, he deserves what he gets.  As long as we don’t divert resources from Madison to take care of the problem.
00:30:15
LS:	So you didn’t mind their having it?
EY:	No.  In fact, one time the system cooked up a very complicated division of the state for extension purposes and then I discovered that Stout was offering an English class somewhere in Dane County or something like that.  So I called Bob Swanson.  I said, “Bob, I understand you’ve got somebody teaching English down here.”  “Oh,” he said, “I . . . I . . . . I . . . should have told you (stuttering),” and all this kind of stuff and I said, “no, that’s not – you shouldn’t have, but let me tell you, if we can be of any help by providing office space or some classroom space or use of library, or anything of that kind in this venture of yours, go right ahead.”  See, my attitude was if somebody – I knew our own faculty.  Some of them just wouldn’t do it, and if people want to study English from people from the vocational school as against people from the university, then that’s their business, and (tape cuts out) – if we can’t compete on the quality, we’re no good.  Why should we have a fence?  Now, some of our faculty, all of them were building fences.  I want to build a fence around the money and the resources, but I don’t want to build a fence around the entitlement to do it or not to do it.  I thought we were wasting an awful lot of time talking about those things, because people, you know, look what – the way this extension thing is coming full circle, although it isn’t very good now.  It’s an awful mess at the moment, and I think there – bad form by saying I’d get rid of the Chancellor.  But something ought to be done about it.
DS:	Yeah.  It’s going to take another turn of the wheel or two before it – yeah, they – I do want to say something in defense of those districts.
EY:	(laughing)  Go ahead.
DS:	Because we didn’t have any trouble with Madison, but the turf warfare between – particularly between Whitewater and Parkside and if Parkside had – Madison had been willing to undertake it between Whitewater and Madison, they would have liked to have roweled with you, but they couldn’t quite figure out because of the way the lines were drawn and the missions were drawn.  The – between Green Bay and Oshkosh and Stevens Point and Oshkosh and Green Bay and between, initially, although that worked out very amiably along the lines, between Eau Claire and Stevens Point on certain fronts was absolutely mind boggling, and I was getting nothing but telephone calls saying, “so and so is teaching a course in my backyard that we’re perfectly capable of offering and we ought to be offering,” and then – so we drew the district lines and then we drew up a little protocol.  See, I’m proud of that protocol, because it worked.  What I said was that if any Chancellor wants to call me and say that he, and at that time, it would have all been “he”, objects to a course being offered in what is loosely defined as the service area of any institutions, that’s fine, but such a call is not welcome.  What I expect that Chancellor to do is call the Chancellor in the other campus and the two of them work it out together.  If either of them calls me without calling the other one, that first instruction you’ll get is “call that other Chancellor, and you decide whether or not this is a problem or not.”  Then I said, “If you mutually agree to this problem and you can’t reach an agreement as to what should be done about it, why the two of you get on the phone and call me,” and I said, “I’ll settle it within 24 hours.”  Well, they didn’t want that, and see they don’t want somebody up in system because there’s nobody up there who really knew enough details to make those decisions.  I wasn’t going to be along in the investigation.  I was just going a finger and say, “You either stop it, or continue it.”  And so I really never did get an appeal among those issues.  I did get a lot of people who tried to get me to take, to intervene, but then when they found out the way it was going to work, why they would stop.
00:35:20
EY:	I recalled clearing when that was being put together that Madison had a statewide jurisdiction.
DS:	That’s right.
EY:	And that nobody in the system would argue with me.  
DS:	Your service area was statewide.
LS:	Oh, is that – oh.  
EY:	I just took that position.
LS:	Even not having –
EY:	I just announced it –  but nobody, you know – well, see most of the things that – we had a lot of things nobody else had anyway.  We couldn’t be anything else but statewide because, you know, again it was my knowledge that people really wanted to get good engineering, they would come here, and also it was my knowledge that for certain things, they’d get better instruction from the state universities.  Now I have every reason to believe that that English teacher down – that was teaching communication through some business group, was going to do a more thorough job – our English department doesn’t think to teach writing.  They – they’re literary giants; at least critics if not giants (laughing).  But that’s, you know, that’s the way they feel, and so the whole thing wasn’t terribly important.  My problem was not out with the system; my problem was with my own faculty.  Some people, you know – our geography department at one time spent more time fighting for its jurisdiction than anything ever was; not only – mostly internally, against Marie Bryson particularly (laughing).  But that’s another story. Anyway, these are the kind of things – I think what people have to, you know, as I think about it over the years, actually you couldn’t point to any great evil that came out of the system, or any great good because you don’t know what would have happened otherwise; so one has to be really kind of careful.  You have to try to keep – not let it grow too much because of the bureaucracy, but they’re natural, because if they – if the legislature demands – all over the country.   I spent a summer, the year before last, in New England where there’s six universities and every legislature there wants some – they don’t like whatever they’ve got, but they want some kind of coordination, some kind of system, because they think that having it all goes through one office; there’s somebody they can get at, you know, but – so we –
DS:	Well, I think in that connection, I don’t really think in the – I’m not sure what the alternatives would have been whether or not Madison would have been better off or worse off, but it seems to me that systems with a single Board of Regents and a single budget are potentially great – are potentially a great threat to the universities, and I – and particularly to Madison.  I don’t know how that – I do think there are things that could be done legislatively or constitutionally or perhaps by very, very explicit custom supported with understanding by the Regents, but I don’t see any of those things are likely to happen in Wisconsin in the near future.  The problem is that you do have a single center of power, namely the Regents, and you have a single budget, and that invites, in the right circumstances, either the maximization of centralization by the system or by the legislature or by both or in collaboration with one another, simply the diminution of the role of campuses and the role of faculties, or whatever you want to have.  That’s a threat.  I don’t think –
EY:	Oh, it certainly -- 
DS:	I don’t think systems inherently have to be a threat, but I think what you cannot predict who’s going to be in charge or what the legislature’s –
EY:	When you have a DOA with 1,200 people downtown looking for things to do, when you have a Legislative Audit Bureau which can’t find anybody stealing money, so it’s try to find -- they become management experts where, you know, there’s no – they don’t know a damn thing about management, but who can prove they’re wrong when they make these charges?  You’ve got all this apparatus going, but it’s going everywhere.  This is why I wasn’t unhappy when we got a Republican governor.
00:40:09
LS:	No.  In spite of what he is quoted as having said this morning.
EY:	What’d he say this morning?
LS:	That the system had better not try to go out and win public support because it might backfire on them.
EY:	Oh, on this one particular issue.
DS:	On the one issue, yeah.
EY:	Yeah.  I think he’d be more supportive of the university than Earl was.  Earl was the first head and then back, you know, and stuff like that.  You couldn’t tell where he was at.  Earl was more interested in gay and women’s and minority and all kinds of – temporarily – I mean, he’s been working very successfully at keeping our lake water from getting down south (laughing).  I liked Tony, but I – and he was a great when he was – the short time he was Secretary of Administration, got along fine, but he hasn’t been an unmitigated blessing for us.
LS:	Hmm . . . no.
DS:	See, Thompson also said that he’d already made it clear the University was going to be treated fairly in the budget, that they were going to get as much as they did as much as they got last time, [word unclear] a percentage, yeah.
EY:	Yeah, he’s made -- You know, I don’t know him well, but my concern is that the Democrats are centralizers in control.  They want their activists.  The Republicans tend to be more laissez--faire, maybe a little more elitist.  A University, everybody in the university is elite – there’s no way they can – whatever legislation they pass won’t do it (laughing).  So that’s my theory.
LS:	Well that’s always been said before, that Republicans were better for the University, but one doesn’t know how long that could go on.  You think it might.
EY:	Well no, but breaking it up is better than having the same crowd all the time.  You know, take this selective bargaining thing; Earl was eager to sign it.  Now, Thompson, I don’t think, will be so eager to sign that bill.  He fought it and from my point of view, that’s great.
LS:	Do you talk to him?  Do you know him?
EY:	I know him slightly.  I don’t –
LS:	But you’re not – you don’t have his ear.
EY:	Nooooo, no.  I’m sure that if I wanted to talk to him, I could get to talk to him, but, see, I don’t think – I don’t go running downtown talking with – that’s Mr. Shaw’s job.
LS:	Yes.  No – but, sometimes one might have a chat on the telephone.
EY:	On certain things, one could do something, and – but I think I know where he’s at on that one, and I’ve met with him in a group, you know, with other people and just happened the speaker wasn’t organized for him [words unclear].  You haven’t got all your questions yet.
LS:	No.  Well, you keep looking at your watch.
EY:	You got another one you’d like to do before you break up?
LS:	What about your appointment as president?  Could you talk about the circumstances of that?
EY:	I was swimming in Arizona and I got a phone call from Bert McNamara saying, “We want you to be president.”
LS:	And that’s all you knew about it?
EY:	Yeah; because I’d gone out there assuming that Helgeson from Illinois had the job when I left.  Now, why did that happen?  I intend to ask Bert sometime, but I have never got around to it.  
LS:	Is he around?
EY:	He’s in Milwaukee.
LS:	Oh, why maybe –
DS:	He’s a person you ought to –
EY:	You ought to –
DS:	You might get some very interesting commentary out of Bert.
EY:	See, I had been out – my name was on the list of people being interviewed, and then I withdrew for two or three different reasons:  one, the chance of getting it wasn’t terribly great; second, I only had two or three years to serve under the 62 year rule; and I had mixed feelings about the system job.  I’d watched it quite closely and so the combination of things, but when the Regents asked me – when Bert asked me to do it, they accepted all my conditions and – you know, if you make a lot of conditions and people accept them, what can you do?
LS:	One of them was – I noted “keep Don Smith,” and I’m curious, was his appointment . . . did that make a difference to you when he was appointed in 1973?
EY:	I don’t know if he knows it – I don’t know if he really knows the whole story on that one, maybe I’ve told him.
DS:	Probably not.
LS:	No.  Why don’t you tell it?
00:44:54	
EY:	Well, when – I told you how the Chancellor from Eau Claire had been brought down to peoplize Percy, which was about like asking (laughing)  . . . and he took the first chance he had to go home and then there was an opening.  There was a search and screen committee.  Now, on that search and screen committee was Irv Shain.  Irv came to me and said, “Any suggestions?”  I said, “I’ve got one, but don’t let anybody ever know this came from me.  That might make some problems.”  I didn’t know Don Smith], but he was working for me in Indonesia.  We had a project over there and he elected for his own personal reasons to leave Minnesota with his wife and they went over there and the reports I got from the lines back were glowing about him and then I sat and talked to friends in Minnesota about him and I also knew that he was Mr. Weaver’s father’s student and Mr. Weaver would be enthetically inclined – he might even think that he had somebody here who would just fit right into the family (laughing), so that’s how I – that was my role.  Have I said anything that you think is wrong?
DS:	No.  I don’t think so.  It was kind of a mind-boggling recruitment.  I really was intending to – when I left – see, I was on leave from Minnesota ---
LS:	Were you?
DS:	And I intended to come back.
LS:	You told this story, I think.
DS:	Oh, did I?
LS:	I think in your other interview, so –
DS:	And then I came back and I had to face this committee.  That had to be the most outlandish search committee in the history of higher education.  The whole room was full of – there was something like thirty people on it and – so, it was all seemingly sort of [word unclear].  Everything went very quickly and then I had a meeting with the Regents and – so everything went along fine and it looked sort of interesting.  As Ed says, you don’t – when you think of presidency, you don’t really find out much about the job until you get there and about the only thing I was interested in was that I had my degree from Madison; I liked Madison.  Here was a brand new job, totally new institution, and nothing had been put on paper yet particularly and I thought, “I’m not going to be an administrator much longer.”  I really was planning to go back to the Department, so I said, “that would be fun to try.”  And it was fun, but it was – I only intended to stay for five years. I told John I would stay until he left or for five years, if he stayed any longer than five years.  And then I got sort of intercepted by the annex and the presidential search.  I do want to say that I’m proud of that search except for Ed’s withdrawal.  He withdrew from the race and I assumed that it was the end of it; that was it.
EY:	Well, I assumed [word unclear] too and, you know, I might not have gotten – there were some Regents who had other ideas, but nobody was really against me.   They just had their own candidates.
DS:	They had their own candidate and we had a very, very distinguished group of finalists.  I don’t think they’ll ever have another group of finalists of that quality in a search for president of the system because the word got out about systems.
EY:	Yeah.  They’re not [words unclear].
DS:	And they were not considered such an unattractive job at the time.  We had Helgeson who went to ACE, he was of Illinois.  We had Cliff Wharton who was at Michigan State and went to SUNY.  We had –
EY:	Hayman.
DS:	Hayman, who was vice-chancellor at Berkeley and became chancellor at Berkeley.  We had the man from Utah who became the –
EY:	Gardner.
DS:	Gardner, who became president of the California system thereafter, and then we had a Big Ten president who, I shall -- shall remain nameless, and the – they were all – there was an exceptional group of people and all of them were interested.  I don’t know how many of them could have been recruited in the final analysis but all of them were interested.  And the board did not behave as I thought boards did, or always did.  They were divided between two people.  Normally after that has been argued out and the full board and the house has been divided and the majority of the board wants to win one way and there’s a motion for a unanimous vote, so the board comes together and then they can make the new person feel welcome.  The group that was slightly behind was not about to permit that to happen, and it made it almost intolerable system in that situation.  I didn’t have anything to do.  What happened there after was Bert McNamara’s doing along with the Regents, because they were in a situation where they could not resolve the thing.  They voted and voted and voted, made speeches for about three hours.  I made speeches.  Then they adjourned, and then I don’t know whether it was the next morning – oh no, I guess it was later that afternoon, Bert came and said, “We have a caucus and we’ve arrived at a decision if we can get him,” and I wasn’t disagreeable to the person that they named at that time.  So he went out on the phone, called up Ed Young and Ed made that absurd stipulation which put me on the spot because that’s one thing I didn’t want to do was continue with the presidential search.
00:51:41
LS:	You know, I – the last – you keep looking at your watch, so I imagine –
EY:	No, no.  Go ahead.
DS:	No, no.
LS:	Well, I would like you to talk about O’Neil’s presidency, but I – you started off on who was to represent Wisconsin at the – is it the AUP?
DS:	AAU.
LS:	AAU, and you – when you became president, turned it over to Irv Shain, is that right?
EY:	I didn’t – I tried to get the Regents to.  That was my problem.  That had made it – they’d got – I asked them to change the rule.  I continued to go and I think I took Irv with me or tried to take him, but the system guide had gotten together in caucus, you see, against this kind of thing, so it was very complicated.  I was trying to get them to change, and I – finally I did stop going and sent Irv in my place for something like that.  But then O’Neil, of course, wanted to be in this club.  This is “the” club, see.  It’s a prestigious thing and the same reason that John wanted to be there and, you know, anybody would want to be there.  But it really belonged in Madison, and I resented that John was representing Madison when he should be taking care of the system.   I didn’t care about his going to the Big Ten athletic things; that meant nothing to me, because that’s all the Big Ten ever did.  They never got around to talking about anything else except athletics; terrible waste of time, it really is.  But that was one of those things.  Actually, there’s very little about O’Neil’s presidency that I could tell you.
LS:	Well, just on this AAU, that created very hard feelings between the two --
EY:	Well, I’m not surprised.  I – you know –
LS:	O’Neil and Shain.
EY:	Yeah, but not with me.
LS:	No.  But I just –
EY:	I wasn’t too involved, you see.  Well, it really belongs to Madison.
LS:	Did you talk to O’Neil about it when – I know you met him in January, didn’t you?
EY:	Yes.  I don’t think I talked to him about that.  I talked to him about the problems with systems, and he understood them perfectly, but he had been – felt that he had been very much held down by the president of Indiana.  He wanted – he respected the autonomy of campuses and wouldn’t interfere no less.  
LS:	And did he?
EY:	Not with me.
LS:	But then you weren’t –
DS:	You weren’t there (laughing).
LS:	You weren’t there, yes (laughing).  Did he with Madison?
EY:	Well, that would be a question you’d have to ask Irv Shain.  
LS:	Still, you would have a view on it.
EY:	Irv would.
LS:	Yes, yes.  He would, too.
EY:	Yes, I think he would.  No, I think that O’Neil had the same problem to some extent John did, and that is:  he really wanted to be president in Madison, you see, too.  He wouldn’t say it that way, but he insisted on being a professor and teaching the law school even though it was very – he had to have somebody else prepared to sit in for him because they usually don’t let you do that.  At social events, he was very, very, very, very – he wrote a very nasty letter once to Irv about that. When they started seeming to have a difference, I thought it was Irv’s fault.  I know Irv pretty well, and [words unclear], but I later came to the conclusion that it was just as much O’Neil’s fault.
00:55:20
DS:	I was – see, O’Neil did ask me about AAU and I told him what had to happen and that there had been a change of – a new letter written and Irv had been going and I, knowing the history of it, I said that I thought this was a wise arrangement, although I thought he should take some time to look at it and really push very hard to see if he couldn’t get for Wisconsin the same privilege that California has in having at least two people come, but certainly Madison was the doctoral institution that was the original member of AAU and the reason for AAU having somebody from Madison.  He did not follow my advice on that and I’ve sometimes said, it may be a little exaggeration, but he never asked for my advice on anything again.  He was always going to, but didn’t.   He – I don’t know what happened, but it was not an auspicious beginning.  My belief is, as I recall hearing about it, rather than even sitting down and discussing the matter, he simply wrote a letter to Irv and told him that he was assuming this particular role, and Irv took that very, very badly.  He felt – I know he was quite implosively angered by it because it seemed so formal and so – and I think it was perhaps done out of timidity, but [words unclear] is like a sense of how to go about talking things through.  I just – I didn’t – it was O’Neil’s decision to make and the board’s to make, obviously, I didn’t have anything to do with it.  I just thought it was a very bad way of starting and that he should have been given a little time to settle down.
EY:	O’Neil apparently had two – got advice on these things for two sources:  Jack Ryan, who was a great centralizer, and Fred Harrington was a great centralizer.  They both advised and take charge – “you run this place,” that’s what I’m told.  I don’t know if it’s really so or not.
DS:	Well, he did go back – for six months, he went back to the Indiana area every week and there’s considerable evidence that during those times he would confer about what he sensed to be these issues and problems here with Jack Ryan; seemed to me not to be a very wise source.
LS:	Who was Jack Ryan?
EY:	The President of Indiana.
DS:	Yeah.
LS:	Oh.
DS:	He was here in extension when he was a young man and then he went to Massachusetts and got to be the head of this campus in Boston at the University of Massachusetts, and then went to Indiana, where he’s been a long time.  But he changed the titles of Chancellors to Vice Presidents so everybody would understand that they work for him, they didn’t work for –
LS:	Oh, yes.
EY:	And he once came up and grated me for having Irv go to the Big Ten instead of the system President, that I go when I was President.  See, he and I see things completely different.  He believes that, you know, the power should be in his hands, but I didn’t want to be without influence, but I – I guess I didn’t need the trappings quite as badly as some people.  You know, it’s like playing – I like to win by about 51 percent.  That’s about all I care for is that one percent (laughing).  So, it isn’t – my morality isn’t any better than these people who we’re criticizing (laughing). It’s a – I guess – I suppose it’s a different kind of conceit, probably.
01:00:03
DS:	In other words, you’re admitting now that you’re not modest.
EY:	No, I’m not modest.
DS:	(laughing)
EY:	But the other thing is, I was interested in getting the results, you see, often.  I was interested in having the right vice-president up there from Madison, and I wasn’t interested in going around appearing to be a team maker.  I would have lost – I would have lost it if it was that way.  Well, different people do things differently, and that’s one of the good things about changing administrations every once in awhile, because [words unclear] repeating the same thing over and over again.  I’m not as dismayed as some of my faculty colleagues appear to be at the thought of losing our Chancellor.  We’ll get somebody else.  Irv’s a good Chancellor and we’ll get another good one.  I hope he’d be different as Irv and I are so different.  You know, people talk about the dangers to the University.  Killing the University would be a very difficult job.  They’re much worse than killing an octopus.
LS:	You really think so, do you?
EY:	You can damage –
LS:	Damage, well –
EY:	Over a long period, but no one person coming or going is going to make all the difference in the world.
DS:	Yeah, that – it’s a very careful –
EY:	That’s like – it’s most like when I remember one day when I was Chancellor.  The freshman president of the WSA appeared in my office and said he’d come with an ultimatum:  “either you’re going to close the University down or” . . . I forgot what the occasion was – or else I was through.  And I said to him, I said, “well, I’ll tell you something . . . you may – you can’t close the University down, nor neither can I.  We’re not going to close down.”  He broke out crying because he promised his crowd that he was going to go up there and threaten me with being fired and if I didn’t have the – (laughing) – and he started weeping.
DS:	Delivering an ultimatum and you –
EY:	Delivers an ultimatum and I told him it couldn’t work.  There was no way we could do it (laughing).
DS:	Even working together, we can’t make it happen (laughing).
LS:	Well, actually, the light’s flashing, so we’re going to have to stop anyway.  
[End of Tape 2]
Second Interview Session – January 27th, 1987
00:00:00
LS:	This is the second interview – second session of the interview with Edwin Young and Don Smith.  It’s now the 27th of January.  I spent an evening last week with Mary Lou Munts and Dick Flintrop and a couple of bottles of wine in which they talked about the legislature and the University and I would – I haven’t touched upon that very much in interviews.  You said a little bit about lobbying last time, but I – these questions are about that.  We don’t have to go in this order, but I’d be interested in what – in your version of what was happening in the legislature in – as you came in in the 70’s as merger started, because from what they said, the legislature was changing at that time.
DS:	Do you want to start, Ed, or –
EY:	Well, I’ll give you some off the top of my head recollections.  When I first became Chancellor and all hell had been loose for a couple – a year and a half, two years, really, Bob Fleming had had it and then Sewell, people downtown were getting quite restless, but they were also – began to think that it wasn’t quite so simple.  There was a committee set up to investigate the University, and that committee asked lots of questions.  I appeared before it a number of times.  I was always treated very well.  Carl Thompson was on the committee and Carl sort of made sure that the University’s point of view was represented, and he was very supportive and the committee – and then it sort of just faded away.  I don’t know if they ever even – if they reported it or not, but it didn’t make any great difference.  That was one of my impressions.  Other impressions are:  I remember the merger business at a very tense time when the – it was in the Joint Finance Committee and George Molinaro was always a very strong supporter of the University.  He was opposed to it, but he found some reason to leave the room when the vote came and went by –
LS:	You mentioned that last time.
EY:	Yeah, so that – but that was critical in what – I suppose party pressure, or whatever – but, anyway, I remember that event.  The other thing which I may have mentioned was that Klauser, who was now the Department of Administration, was the – sort of the agent for the Republicans.  He was – I don’t know what his title was, but he was – ran errands for the Republican caucus and so on.  He decided along with, I think with Froelich maybe, who was – the Republicans were in charge, was the speaker, that the University Police should be put under the then Bill Emery, Madison Chief of Police so that they’d be tough minded and we fought that very hard and just barely beat it off and so Klauser and I had an exchange of words that were pretty strong; I don’t know if we’ve ever run into each other since, but we kept the police, but no particular backfire.  My experience with the legislature – I was always treated very courteously, and I could – the people were always willing to see me and listen and talk and often they were committed in some odd thing else, but we were under the Knowles administration.  We had a very friendly administration.  Chapel had just retired as head of the State Chamber of Commerce and Manufacturer’s Association was his chief assistant and executive secretary, whatever.  He was very helpful and extraordinarily helpful when I had to have the National Guard or whatever which they paid quite a heavy political price for.  So, then after the merger, my chief appearances were at budget hearings, the budget would be presented.  John Weaver would present the budget and then I would be called upon to answer questions about Madison.
00:05:06
LS:	This was in the Joint Finance Committee?
EY:	Joint Finance Committee, yes.  And, again, I just had a feeling that nobody – they gave John a hard time because they could get him flustered, you see, and then he’d get upset.  But that wasn’t deliberate – it wasn’t really deliberately bating him.  He thought, sometimes – Don saw some of these things, too.  He may have a different view of this, but John came with a set speech, you see, and they don’t really like set speeches very much down there.  They make a lot of them, but they don’t like them.  And so they’d get him off – pick on some particular thing and instead of, you know, kind of dodging it, he’d try to give them straight reasons and they didn’t – sometimes got into arguments, but I was more – I don’t know if I accomplished any more, but I was less likely to get into a direct confrontation with them.  They didn’t – so I would say that the agenda, though, was really set by the Governor.  Pat Lucey set the agenda for the budget, and his people were working at it and they had a – when they had a majority – you know, when it’s all said and done, we didn’t get very far from that, I don’t – that agenda.  But I never felt that – I didn’t think that our legislative experience was bad.  I liked some of the older legislators better than some of the younger ones, because the older ones, if they didn’t agree with you, they said so, and they kept their word and if they were going to support you, they said so and kept their word, whereas I think some of the younger ones developed a habit of having both ears to the ground at the same time.  
LS:	Could you name some names?
EY:	No. (laughing)
DS:	I’ll be happy to (laughing).
EY:	I don’t remember – well, let me try to think . . . the Joint Chairman of the Finance Committee was Molinaro at one time and this – the Republican from up near Fond du Lac.
LS:	[words unclear]?
EY:	No.  The older man.
DS:	Fond du Lac – not the big, heavy-set one? 
EY:	No.
DS:	Oh, no.  I know the one you mean.  The rural –
EY:	Yes.
DS:	The farmer.
EY:	He was about as near a statesman as we –
DS:	Yeah.  He was very, very good.
EY:	And, again, very sympathetic; didn’t necessarily mean – but you knew exactly where you stood and he’d advise you how to change things or you’d get somewhere and -- but my impression was that the legislature wanted the University to succeed and that the newspaper reporters were so selective in their reporting because they’re always looking for some kind of confrontation; some kind of a rouse, something to stir up, and that was my impression.  So reading the papers, one doesn’t get – I never got the same impression of anything I attended as what I read in the papers.  There were some – once in awhile there was a good reporter.  Milwaukee – for awhile, the State Journal had some, but they were – and then – oh, there was one VERY good one.  He had his own column.  He came out of Green Bay.  His son just died in Washington.  His father was a newspaper man here in town, and his reporting was very accurate, but out of the whole bunch, they were mostly interested in getting something – saying something –
DS:	Some kind of argument.
EY:	That’s my impression of them, so I think anybody who searched the newspapers to get – might get the facts, but I don’t think they’d get the flavor exactly.  Because I got the flavor of friendly people, or even if they weren’t very friendly, they were cautious enough not to appear to be anti-University.  
DS:	Well, that was – there were some who were not – who were, I think, quite visibly anti-University and were quite influential, Ed, and I’d like to single out one of them, if I –
EY:	Well . . . 
DS:	Yeah, um-hmm.
EY:	Froelich was one of the –
DS:	Well no, I’m talking about Ed Jackamonis.
EY:	Yes, yes; later on, yeah.
DS:	Yeah, later on.  Not at – and he was – Jackamonis was there when you became president, and he was a, I think, very, very difficult man and a very, very influential man.  
EY:	He had an assistant who worked very hard –
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	At feeding him materials, anti-University materials.
DS:	Yeah, yeah.  
EY:	But, on the whole . . . 
DS:	Could I comment on the legislature?
LS:	Yes.
00:10:00
DS:	See, I think two things were happening in retrospect:  one was a great enthusiasm for management theory being applied to public agencies which developed in the latter part of the 60’s and as usual, was an invention of University professors who often devised theories and ideas which are – which rise up to haunt us later, and part of that was the notion of management information systems, and there were other notions that became very popular, and by the early 70’s, they were floating all over the country.  One of them was legislative oversight, and another was zero based budgeting; another was accountability.  Accountability became a “God” word to the young legislators.  Now they took their work seriously.  A lot of the new legislators who came in with Lucey and who had been coming in steadily ever since were what I would refer to as career legislators.  They were young men who had not had any career prior to their moving into politics, or if they had one it had been so intenerated and so lack luster that it was not anything that was going to bring them great fame or fortune, and they would – they were bright, better educated than their predecessors.  They had nothing to do, however, but be full time legislators and devote themselves to the political arts of getting elected, getting re-elected, and consolidating political power.  Now they were also very much interested in theoretically how they could make government more effective, and in that sense, how they could then make names for themselves and became luminous and visible.  So those things began to happen.  When I came here, the Speaker of the House was Norman Anderson, who was an excellent man and in the first session, I think Ed is absolutely right.  Pat Lucey set the agenda in the first budget session and he set the agenda for the second one.  But to the extent that that could be mediated and civilized, Norman Anderson was approachable and was extremely friendly and he would use such capacity as he had to see to it that we weren’t badly wounded and, in fact, there were two or three instances where without being publicly visible, he was helping us out with the committees.  
EY:	Somewhere in this story I want to get on the record the way the Cap Times did him in.
DS:	Yeah, um-hmm.
EY:	The dirtiest pieces of business – do you know about it?
LS:	No.
EY:	Well, there was some –
DS:	Yeah, that –
EY:	Small meeting of – to work out something behind the scenes that he would participate in or chaired, and wouldn’t let the Cap Times in.  So the Cap Times started the crusade against him and they got this dope peddling Bare from the east side elected.
LS:	Oh, that’s right, yes.
EY:	This brought Jackamonis under the scene, too, in importance. 
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	They did us more damage than all their – you know.
LS:	Yeah.
DS:	Jackamonis, then, was elected speaker, and from then on, life was absolutely miserable, in my judgment.
LS:	So what year – when is this?  When did this happen?
DS:	Well, that would have been ’75, wouldn’t it?  Or was it ’70 . . . he was re-elected in – yeah, it would have been ’75, I believe, and he was re-elected in ’77.  He had two terms.
EY:	He’s just been fired.
DS:	Yeah.  He’s currently unemployed (laughing).
EY:	He’ll pick up –
DS:	Yeah, he’ll – now, Jackamonis was a bright man, an able parliamentarian, but as a human being, I can’t say enough –
EY:	(laughing)
DS:	About him without being –
EY:	He knew all about higher education.  He taught a term or two at Waukesha Center.
DS:	One of the centers, and he was an expert on higher education, but the worst thing about him was, he wouldn’t talk to anybody.  
LS:	Why not?
00:14:55
DS:	He – his office was absolutely closed to me.   I could not see him.  I never had a conversation with him except over the table at a committee hearing when he would ask ugly questions and sneer at any answer.  Those were very brief.  He had this legislative assistant, and the only person that we could ever meet in Jackamonis’ office was this young man, who was, himself, a very strange and anti-University sort who, God knows how much influence he had, but he apparently had a great deal.
EY:	He drafted documents.
DS:	He would draft documents and Jackamonis would carry – well, you remember, Ed, that he – you tried to get an appointment with Jackamonis.  Now, this is almost unprecedented.  He wrote –
LS:	Was he president?
DS:	Yeah.  He would not see the President of the system.
LS:	Did he ever say why?
DS:	He – until we had clarified the nature of our business with Mr. White –
EY:	We were supposed to work it out –
DS:	Yeah.  We had to work things out, because he was much too busy.
EY:	Work through Mr. White.
DS:	Um-hmm.  
LS:	So it wasn’t anything to do with open meetings or –
EY:	No, no, no.  It was that he knew that we were, you know, basically we were on opposite sides, because of his wanting to run things that we didn’t want him to run, and that was part of it, but he was just mean, and it was showing his power, too, but that was – he was sort of almost an exception on this side.  I don’t – I think he –
DS:	Well, on the other hand, he was – see, he controlled the key people.  He controlled Norquist; he controlled Kleczka.  When I say “controlled,” I don’t mean he’d order them.
EY:	But he made the appointments, you see.
DS:	 He made – he turned them into powers.   They were dependent upon him for their position and their influence, and they were young, aspiring legislators, too.
EY:	I remember when he came up for re-election the second time as speaker.  Midge Miller voted for him, and afterwards said – apologized to me that she voted for him because, she said, “we need somebody from Madison in his camp.”  
DS:	Well, she –
EY:	Which was – well, I’ll even argue that way, but I never thought Midge’s judgment was the greatest.  Her heart was always in the –
DS:	I ran into that, see – I had the disheartening experience . . . I would go in and talk to Midge about Jackamonis’ treatment and about some of his cronies who were doing all sorts of peculiar things in the hearings, and she’d say I was absolutely right.  She’d be totally sympathetic and she would make all kinds of noise at the meetings of the education committee chaired by Dick Flintrop, which had absolutely no influence on joint finance, and then when it came time to vote, she voted for him, and I was –
EY:	She wanted to keep her chairmanship.
DS:	She wanted to keep her chairmanship, yeah.  And it was that simple.
EY:	You got to be a politician to be a statesman.
DS:	Ah, Jackamonis was a ruthless man, and it was well known that the way he kept his speakership was not because anybody liked him, but because they were not certain that anybody could beat him, and if you worked on the other camp – in fact, people who did work on the other camp went into limbo. They lost their chairmanships; they were out of the inner counsels, their amendments were ignored, and it was a really very ruthless sort of power control, although very marginal.  He was always in a very, very delicate situation.
EY:	He never had – he had just enough votes.  Midge and one or two other people could have defeated him if they’d have the guts.
DS:	They could have, yeah.  I don’t think there’s any question about that, but they were scared of him, and he had that kind of personality.  We had, I think, really, a combination of people who had all of this theory about how you make the University more accountable, how you shape it up, how you get it under the control of the legislature; what they call legislative oversight and how you send our representatives through the Legislative Audit Bureau out to do performance auditing, not simply to find out whether you’re honest, but to find out whether or not you know how to administer things in the way the legislature wants them administered.  It was a very strange period, and I think it’s still going on, as a matter of fact.
00:20:15
EY:	Yeah, well, obviously because the pattern of careers was established and some of these guys are emerging as candidates for governor and –
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	But – of course, you remember the Jackamonises and the Kleczkas and one or two others, but there were many very decent people, but not very effective in that they didn’t play the hard, rough games, you see, that were played by people like Jackamonis, but they were really in the minority.  Now take Flintrop, you mentioned.  He really tried –
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	Tried very hard to be helpful.  He wasn’t terribly effective because the education committee didn’t pay much attention to it, because it was friendly – it was written off, in part, because they were so friendly to us.  
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	So that, you see, it does work if you take the other side too strongly; if your friends are discounted because they’re soft-headed or something.  Then there was a senator from Oshkosh who later got defeated.
DS:	Goyke.
EY:	Goyke.
DS:	Goyke was always – was basically very friendly and tried to be helpful.
EY:	Once – I remember once some bill – the labor people were on one side, and the University on the other, which wasn’t uncommon in recent years.  Goyke explained to me that he knew we were right, but they had paid for his campaign and he was going to run for Congress, and he needed their money, so he had to vote.  But he was honest about it, see.  That’s the kind of thing I understand, you know?
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	But he didn’t say he was going to vote with us and then last minute pretend to get new evidence or something.  So there were many people like that.
DS:	Oh, yeah.  There –
EY:	But losing Norm Anderson, I think, was where we lost, and the Cap Times completely did that.
DS:	Yep.  I think that’s true, and I think that was a very, very damaging thing for us.  Now there were others that I found it difficult to deal with:  Paul Offner in the Senate was one.
EY:	He would be – he was always pleasant to your face.
DS:	Yeah, um-hmm.
EY:	But what he would do behind your back, is something else again.
DS:	And he was, again, a very, very ambitious man who was trying to engineer a sort of Proxmire type career into the Congress, but didn’t make it.  He lost out and he’s –
EY:	I wonder what he’s doing now.
DS:	Well he got a job in Health and Social Services or something in Ohio.  I heard some rumors that he might be brought back here.  A lot of them, if they do lose out in their electoral campaigns, wind up either as lobbyists or as members of the bureaucracy, which means that even though their careers seem to be terribly threatened and terribly impermanent, if they’re very loyal party people and work very hard and reasonably bright, why they sometimes wind up with very lucrative kinds of careers.  Goyke, for example, has become extraordinarily prosperous by getting defeated and becoming a lobbyist and he – I gather he’s – at least the last time I saw him, he looked very prosperous.  He said, “I’m doing very well.”  He said, “I’m a little ashamed,” but he said, “I’m doing very well.” (laughing)
EY:	Oh, yes.
LS:	I would like to know how much Jackamonis affected what happened to the University in those years, which ties in with the question of who was more important:  the Governor or the legislature?
DS:	Ah, he would make – I think it’s fair to say that the traditional wisdom, at least that I came here with and was always true in Minnesota, was that the Governor’s budget, if he is a strong Governor and if his party controls both houses, as Lucey’s did, that his executive budget is about the ceiling on what you’re going to get.  At that point, your problem is this:  you’re going to lose money in parts of his budget by legislative action and you’re going to get money in other parts by legislative action, and it’s very seldom that this is an improvement over the 
Governor’s distribution.
00:25:10
LS:	Oh, really?
DS:	Oh, no.
EY:	Once in awhile, you’ll get something.  But then, remember, the budget is more than money.  It’s where Lucey put policies.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	And some of those policies were more damaging, and you worked very hard to modify them or substitute or get them out, you see.  This is where having somebody like Jackamonis would – because if you wanted something, he was against you.  
DS:	Well, I can give you an instance.  He – and this is not dead, yet.  When I came here, the state legislature – I don’t know when, but they had passed a little law directing – or a little part of the law – directing the Department of Administration to establish a management information system.  That just showed their faith in numbers then, and that was alright.  Then they had another little law that said that they should establish a personnel management information system – PMIS – but they specified that this should apply to all state – four state agencies.  It’s very clear from the record that they meant, by state agency, everybody but the University of Wisconsin, and they didn’t mean that, and they didn’t mean the agencies that were just on local assistance such as BTAE, you’re what they call “local assistance,” or “state aided” or something.  And then in ’75 or thereabouts, they passed a bill which somehow slipped through, specifying that – and this was at the instance of DOA and, I think, therefore the Governor’s office, which included the University as a state agency.  First they changed our letter – our address, so that heads of state agencies also became the president of the University system, and then they made it clear that the state agencies to include the University of Wisconsin, I mean –
LS:	Who’s doing this?  What – is it a particular legislator?
DS:	No.  This was –
EY:	Came from the Department of Administration.
DS:	Came from the Department –
LS:	It was somebody in the legislature must have –
DS:	Yeah, and the legislature passed it.  I don’t know that the legislature knew what it was doing.
EY:	And it was tucked into the budget, you know?  Somebody brought it in.  They wouldn’t be against it.
DS:	No.  It’s –
EY:	The majority, but it’s the kind of thing that the Governor wanted or DOA wanted.
LS:	But it’s something you must have gone down and fussed about.
DS:	Well, no – didn’t know about it.
EY:	Not necessarily.
DS:	Didn’t even know about it.
EY:	It just gets stuck in and you – this isn’t such a democratic state as you may think it is.
DS:	Yeah (laughing).
EY:	If you were just an innocentcitizen.  That caucus, and that last budget dealings –
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	The whole thing – things get turned upside down and they’re done in the most ruth –frustrating manner.  It’s just buying and selling –
LS:	That’s what Mary Lou and Dick said, that it really had nothing to do with who believed in what, but just what you wanted to get for your –
DS:	Yeah, but the policy questions . . . now here’s what happens to you.  Then they – we were reporting, we had – in fact, the University Wisconsin system and Madison was the – it was really a kind of a overflow from the computer programs that had been developed in Madison about the budget system – it was the most sophisticated personnel information system I think in the United States.  It was integrated with the budget system, but there was one thing it wouldn’t do, and that was by design.  It would not read out the life history – it would not give Donald K. Smith a number that somebody could push and get a readout on my life history.  If they wanted my life history at the University of Wisconsin, it was in the red book.  You could go back through every budget book and you could find my name and find out what my salary was and what my title was, but you couldn’t get a computer to tell you that, and I think that – there were good reasons for doing that, but –
LS:	But they didn’t like that.
00:30:00
DS:	Well, no, they didn’t know what the difference was.  This was a personnel management information system.  Every month, Ruben Lorenz sent them down a report which was beautifully detailed; nobody objected.  I saw the reports that came across my desk.  No other agency in the state could give then them a tenth as much information on their personnel, but the University – then they got around to designing a system which was based on the notion that every employee in the state, including every employee in the University has to have a number.  And – (tape cuts off)  We went down, and then we had a long rowel -- I can fill in the details some other time, but finally, the DOA people went over and devised another piece of legislative language which was just about that blunt that it all had to be one system, the same system for every state agency, and the University had to comply with this, and Ruben and I went down to a meeting of the – I think it was the Joint Finance Committee where this was being put in as an amendment to the budget bill, and we had a long hearing on it, and we had lobbied very, very hard, and we got abused by almost everybody –
LS:	Was Jackamonis on –
DS:	No, no.
LS:	Oh, he wasn’t on it.
DS:	No, but he was sitting in the room part of the time, and they voted against it; they took it out.  We were successful in our lobbying.  Lo and behold, just before the final caucusing, the same language appeared at midnight at a hearing of the state operations committee.  It reappeared.  I learned later that it was sent – it was carried in by Dick White from Jackamonis’ office, passed by that committee at what was alleged to be an open meeting, but there was nobody there.
LS:	This is the assembly caucus.
DS:	No.  This is the – this is another legislative committee. It’s what they call the State Operations Committee, and I think it was the senate version of that.  And it was put back into the budget bill.  Then we went down and we had a horrid fight.  We finally blocked that final language, although as I understand, it’s coming back in – in the caucus. But, you see, it’s not so simple to be where you should be at the right time when people need you and it’s not so simple to keep people who are skillful in the legislative process from slipping in these kinds of control legislation.  They have nothing to do with the total dollar numbers, but they maybe have a great deal to do with the health and welfare.
LS:	Now you – take off that top sheet.  The next sheet gives some of the questions that have been [words unclear].
DS:	Oh . . . um-hmm.
LS:	And the final one is some quotes from – well, I’m curious as to how much influence you think they had.  Mary Lou came – they both came in 1972, Ed.  Do you remember what your reaction was to Mary Lou’s election?
EY:	Mixed (laughing).  I’ve forgotten . . . what did I say, anything?
LS:	You apparently said something about Madison is now dependent upon two women in the legislature.
EY:	(laughing) Well, you see, I – Mary Lou did very well.  She was very bright, much brighter than Midge; more thoughtful and after awhile, more skillful, but I had some – my feelings were mixed.  Her husband was an ardent supporter of the revolution.
LS:	Yeah.
EY:	And she somehow kept Ray – it turned out – but she worked for us here, you know, so we knew her quite well.
LS:	Yeah.
EY:	And she had some very strange notions about how we should run this place.
LS:	Oh?
EY:	What?
LS:	Did she?
00:35:00
EY:	Oh, she was fairly critical of the center.
LS:	Oh, I see, I see, yeah.
EY:	And she – well, I don’t need to go into that.  So, this is why I didn’t know where she was going to come out at, but as it developed, she was a very good friend of the University.  So was Midge, you know.  The Jackamonis thing was – but by and large, Midge voted for what she thought the University wanted, and so did Mary Lou.  Mary Lou worked very hard at it.
LS:	From what she said, she felt her – the only way she could exercise any authority with the University was to represent the system, and not to identify herself with Madison.
EY:	Yeah.  Well, you know, that was not a great problem for us, because – see, most of the time, Madison’s interests and the system’s were identical.  You see, I did it this – different in the legislature –
LS:	I think what she meant was –
EY:	Yeah.
LS:	She said Midge would go into the legislature and say – speak about Madison and get everybody’s backs up, you know –
DS:	I think that was part of her difficulty.  She tended to not to distinguish Madison and the system very much, but that, as Ed says, in terms of policy, I don’t think in relation to the legislature that made any difference.
EY:	The thing is that many things that happened downtown to the system really affected Madison only, because, you know, if you say the research budget is going to be cut, or the agriculture budget, that means Madison.  If you say something else, it means Madison. So often that even though it was worded as “as system” and then – but it was really – so we cared more – we worked harder at it – at helping the system, because we’re helping ourselves, and the legislative problems of the rest of the system – Milwaukee was probably like us, but [words unclear] -- so that wasn’t – I came to have a good deal of respect and gratitude to Mary Lou although, as I say, when she got elected, I wasn’t at all sure because I had been [words unclear] I had rescued from unemployment once (laughing).  Ray was really quite bitter about – you know, he thought that I was unfair to the radicals and so on.  He had a – he wasn’t well.  That was part of his trouble.   He had a quite serious – do you know them?
LS:	Yes, very well.
EY:	He seems to be better now.  Didn’t he have –
LS:	The medicine’s keeping him –
EY:	Yeah, the medicine, but, you know, when he got off that, he was – so I didn’t know, but and then they had that – of course, that terrible tragedy.  No, I’ve come to have a great deal of respect for her and she did very well on the public utility board.
DS:	She –
LS:	Still doing it.
DS:	When she first came into the legislature, she was a very able person, I think, but – and she, at various points, was helpful, but her primary enthusiasms were in the area of environment and women’s issues, and not the University. She did not – she wasn’t on the education committee at the time I was there, and she was not on Joint Finance and she was not on the sub-committees that dealt with University budget items on Joint Finance, which were very critical.  
LS:	The way they presented it which is, of course, just their story, is that they were  influential women in the caucuses in getting – in pushing the University ahead.
EY:	Well . . . along with other people, yes, you know.
LS:	Well that’s [words unclear].
EY:	Who elected Mr. Carter, the blacks or the women?  (laughing)  You couldn’t win without either of them, you see.
DS:	Yeah, that’s true, um-hmm.
LS:	Their main criticism of the University was that it didn’t lobby enough for its interests, and that’s what I – 
EY:	Yeah, but –
LS:	I’d like to know what you did, exactly, and you also, Don.  Who you went to see and how often and how important you thought it was.
EY:	I thought it was very important, but – well, in the first place, you see, I have – in two different roles:  one was Chancellor, you see.
LS:	You did say Percy told you not to go downtown.
EY:	Yeah, but that – I didn’t –
LS:	Which you ignored.
EY:	That – that word got leaked by one of the other Chancellors.  Of course, the legislators were very annoyed at that for a short time.  It didn’t help Percy any, and it was silly because the people who were against Percy continued to do it, and the others gave him license not to do anything, so we lost on all accounts is the way it worked.  But I went – I continued to go downtown as Chancellor. I didn’t pay any attention to that because it didn’t make any sense to me and nobody was going to do anything about it; nothing you could do about it.  That was a frustrating – I frustrated Percy a good deal, because, you know, there wasn’t really an easy way to get at me.  You know, if you did anything to Madison’s budget, he’d have to take on the whole – and he wasn’t going to do that.  He was supportive of Madison, Percy was, but he just didn’t like the independence that I –
EY:	And I could have behave better around him, been more subservient or more – but, anyway, I went down –
00:40:44
LS:	How often did you go down?
EY:	Well, it depends on the circumstance, but not – I didn’t go too often.  I figured that the one thing I couldn’t afford to be was to be thought of somebody who hangs around the legislature all the time, because while they’re saying to you, “these didn’t lobby enough,” other people were saying, “the lobbyists, they’re always down here.”  That’s one you never win.  When they want to criticize you, they’ll go either way on that one.  I think we had people down there a great deal.  I had great confidence in Breuscher and Lemon to keep –
LS:	You did?
EY:	To keep me informed.  Yes, I think they were both excellent.
LS:	Well that’s not their view.
EY:	Whose view?
LS:	Mary Lou and Dick [word unclear].
EY:	Well, that’s their notion, but I – now, what they could do depended on how much authority they were given, you see.  And if somebody goes down and says, “This is the University’s position,” and they get a phone call in a few minutes from another University administrator saying it’s something else, you’ve got a problem on your hands and we had that happen.
LS:	Yes.  Percy undercut them, didn’t he?
EY:	That’s my impression; pretty strongly sometimes.
LS:	It is.
EY:	Not all the time, you know, but just enough so that they weren’t – well, once Bill Young stopped representing the University downtown, we never had anybody down there regularly who had authority.  Of course, when I went down or when Don went down and when Percy went down or John Weaver went down, there was authority, but we weren’t going to – we couldn’t afford to be down there all the time, you know, because familiarity certainly breeds contempt down there and – but I was down when I first – I’d depend on Breuscher and Lemon to say, “you better come on down,” and I’d go down, and I had confidence in them and I still do, you know.  I’ve seen a lot of other people – I was advised the moment I became president of the system to get rid of everybody and get some good people.
LS:	Who advised you to do that?
EY:	What?
LS:	Who advised you to do it?
EY:	Oh, several of the Regents, a lot of the legislators – but the same thing had happened to them with the man before them and before that . . . it’s just common.  And – now after – we’ve got – is it Bernstein now?
DS:	Bornstein.
EY:	Bornstein.  He’s probably going to be a tremendous success for about a year or so, and then he’ll be old hat.  
LS:	He’s not a lobbyist or anything.  He’s the head of the – isn’t he the head of the –
DS:	Oh, he’s the major lobbyist.
EY:	What else is he supposed to do?
LS:	I see.  I wondered about that.  I mean, he’s called public relations, but in fact, he’s –
EY:	Well, it’s a higher salary, so it’d do better.  
DS:	They have more lobbyists, but –
EY:	Now, Don, you and I never discussed this because just – for one thing, you may have known my mind was made up or maybe the other side of it was that you agreed with me, but did you have confidence in Lemon and Breuscher?
DS:	Yes.  The – I don’t think either of them could carry an uncontrolled agenda of authority.  I don’t think they wanted it.  I think they needed to be counseled and to be given the University’s position, and I think they’d go down and represent it, and they were very good, as Ed said, about finding out where meetings were and they were – I had only limited time.  I didn’t come here to lobby.   I’d never been – I’d been very active over in Minnesota in going down to the legislature, but to the committee hearings where I was presumably able to testify about the items that the University had requested and also sometimes to go over and talk to friends.  And I did the same thing here, and I had found that there was an enormously complex committee structure in the Wisconsin legislature and that there were a lot of committee meetings that I had to be to and Breuscher and Lemon would let me know about those.  Now the one at midnight that I was talking about, they didn’t let me know.  They’d gone home at 11:30 and –
00:45:20
EY:	They both have a great deal of integrity, see.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	And  honest – they were honest and they were hard working.  You see, I respect integrity very highly.
DS:	But there were two things that have been consistent in my experience.  They were consistent in my experience at Minnesota and here:  one is that a legislator who is not being very influential on your behalf immediately says that the problem is that you’re not creating the political support that is necessary to get this through.  “I’m doing my best, but I don’t have any help.”
LS:	That’s their favorite saying.
DS:	Well –
EY:	We’ve heard it.
DS:	I’ve heard that for 20 years.  Now here’s the second thing:  you throw a lot of money into it, or you become extremely visible, and the people who want to do you in will immediately attack the University as a political machine which is no longer a University and therefore has to be clubbed over the head to teach it a lesson; “they shouldn’t be down here twisting our arms.  They’re supposed to be teaching students and conducting” . . . 
LS:	That’s the University’s cause.
DS:	So you get people who say, “well, why aren’t you as effective as the Brewers?” you know, and the answer’s very simple:  one is that we’ll go to jail if we start giving money to campaigns and the other thing is that we’ll also go to jail – it’s against the law for us to take people out to dinner and pick up the tabs and have parties for them.  As a matter of fact, we were criticized by people who were much more influential in determining the final outcome down in the legislature – we were criticized when we would invite key legislators over to John Weaver’s house and provide a buffet and free drinks, and they would say this is a – you know, then we’d get the rumbles downtown that, “whose money is this?  Is this what you’re using state money for, to twist our arms?”
LS:	Did you ever do that, Ed?  Have legislators out?
EY:	Yes.
DS:	Yes, but Ed –
EY:	I had them for breakfast.
DS:	(laughing) That’s right.
EY:	They were sober then (laughing).
DS:	Yeah (laughing).
LS:	Did they – was there objection to that?
EY:	No.
DS:	Not very many.  This would be a very rare thing, but the one man that you could count on for it was Jackamonis.
EY:	Yeah.  He would be – he would make  --
LS:	He was critical [words unclear].
EY:	He probably wouldn’t – I don’t know if he ever came or not.
DS:	He came once and didn’t speak to any University person.  He refused.  
LS:	Sounds like you helped organize these from what –
DS:	Well, they were – no . . . I didn’t help organize them.  I – when John was here, why Wally and –
LS:	 But I when Ed was president.
DS:	Well, when Ed was president, I don’t know, he organized it.
LS:	So who did you have, Ed?
EY:	Well, I’d try to find people, pick people that were involved with a particular issue or Joint Finance – leadership people.  I tried to avoid having cronies, you know, and not trying to have anybody – make it look so it would always be a variety of people, but I would – I would try – I wouldn’t get a whole bunch of people who disagreed with me, either, you know.  There’s no point.  It was just something to do.
LS:	Well, who were the leadership people then that you chose?
EY:	Well, who were the leadership people?  There would – Fred Risser would be one, for instance, chairmen of committees.
LS:	Who never did very much for the University, except [words unclear].
EY:	Well, sometimes he gave me a lot of information on about how to maneuver.
DS:	Yeah, that’s right.
EY:	I’d go to Fred’s office and I got a lot of help from Fred, and he was – again, he would tell me – he was a little bit like George Molinaro.  When I went to see George, I had to listen for an hour to a lecture on what we were doing that was wrong, but then he’d support us.  Well, Fred didn’t take quite an hour to tell me what was wrong, but took quite a lot of time, but it was worth it.
DS:	I’ve known him to take 45 minutes.
LS:	Is this just your gentle view of people that – 
DS:	No.
LS:	I mean, you really felt that Risser was useful to –
EY:	Yes, indeed.
DS:	I can agree.  I -- 
EY:	He’s not gentle at all.
LS:	No, I said YOU.  Oh, I see . . . 
DS:	No, I obviously have fangs, but . . . 
EY:	No, it isn’t . . . don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not the kindest person in the world, but I don’t – I’m cynical and don’t expect too much, and so when I get a crumb, I appreciate it (laughing).
LS:	O.K.  Well, who besides Fred Risser, then?
00:50:00
EY:	Oh, there was a variety of people at different –
LS:	The lobbyists –
EY:	I’d have to have a list of them to look at the names.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	They would be – and sometimes it would be – for instance, the man Autieon some things.  See, different issues.  Often we were – one of the things – our problem, we were reacting so much, and we had so many different things going, whereas he was committed to somebody because of a bridge or something or because of something was in the bill that would hurt us, but they got to him first, but by and large, Autie was friendly to education; not all the time, but there were people – you know, and I could go through – there were a lot of different legislators who –
DS:	There was a faculty member from Milwaukee who was a legislator for some years; finally went back to the faculty.  I can’t . . . I was trying to recall his name.  He was on Joint Finance.  He was extremely helpful.  Now, when I say helpful, these people, the primary thing they did for us was get rid of some of the worst of the regulatory policy business.  They were of limited help on numbers.
EY:	Another thing they did is they’d leak to us – tell us things that were happening that we didn’t know about.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	Because they’d been talked about quietly in the halls, you know, but the more of open meetings, the less democracy, because then all the deals are cut.
LS:	That’s one of the things, the points they make very strongly is that the open meetings really hurt Madison which had problems by insider dealings, and that’s true.
DS:	No, no.
EY:	No.  We profited by open –
DS:	Genuinely open meetings.
LS:	Oh, true.
EY:	That is where the legislators get together and talk without the press.  Instead of that, three or four get over in a corner somewhere and cook it all up and then take it into the caucus. 
LS:	If you were on the inside then it was –
EY:	Well, you can’t be on the inside – well, we would have known what was going on better, and people would have been more responsible.  Take – the Regents and I felt the same way.  The Regents – I hardly ever had a frank discussion about anything where they all participated because they came together and there was a press, and the ones that were serious and thoughtful couldn’t – wouldn’t speak up because the others were hogging the T.V. camera and making speeches, and so we never had a good discussion.  Whereas if we could have had – could have closed the press out, we could have really – and then when the voting came, let the press come in.  I’m not – I’m against – I’ve spoken very -- anywhere anytime against the open meeting law as being undemocratic.  
DS:	Um-hmm.
LS:	Yes, [words unclear]. Well, I’d just like – did you think of Mary Lou as an influential legislator when you said you had people out for breakfast?
EY:	Yes, she would be one of the people, if she was chairman of a committee particularly.  And the Madison people in general I would have, you see, because they were the ones that carried water for us.  You know, lots of time they did things; they did them partly because – if they came from the west side they were better, you see.  But, you know . . .
DS:	Let me give you another insight into the legislative mind.  See, Dick Flintrop used to bend my arm by the hour down there about – he needed our help.  We had not been able to put together enough pressure to get enough votes.  He had worked his head off in caucus and had lost.  And I would sit and say, “Well, you know, I wish we could do more,” and then there would be this other – we’d get – at the same time, I would know that when we tried to do more, why we would get zinged for –
LS:	But did you tell Dick Flintrop that?
DS:	Yes, I would tell him that, but he didn’t – that doesn’t help him.
LS:	So he wasn’t quite so useful.
EY:	Well, he wasn’t as useful –
DS:	I liked Dick.
EY:	I liked him, but he took it up on himself when he was chairman of the committee, he was going to run the University.  He wanted to be invited to meetings.  He came and sat in the Regents’ meeting and he was going to advise us, and there came a point when I just had to say, you know, “we aren’t – we don’t do it that way.”  
DS:	Can’t do that – yeah.  I even went up and –
EY:	When he got made chairman of the committee, he thought that gave him complete knowledge about all higher education.
LS:	And you didn’t like legislators coming to Regents meetings?
EY:	Well, I didn’t mind it if you didn’t decide to give advice to me afterwards how we should settle things.
LS:	And he did.
EY:	Oh yes, he was quite sure about a lot of things.
DS:	He very frequently had strong opinions if you –
LS:	I know he’s – well, on collective bargaining, of course, to pay the debts.
EY:	Well, that – because he was supported by the labor people.  He almost had to.  And, you know, I understand that.
LS:	So that isn’t the particular thing you’re talking about?
EY:	No, no, no.  Not that one.  But there were other things.  He just wanted to run – he wanted – once he said to me, “I wish you wouldn’t make policies without first discussing them with me.”  This is internal University rules and Regent things.   You know, that I should go to the Regents and say, “now, I’ve got to get the approval of Dick Flintrop?”
00:55:05
LS:	What do you say to that?
EY:	What?
LS:	What did you say to him?
EY:	Oh, I put him off one way or another, you know.
DS:	Ed was very good at not saying no, but –
EY:	Not saying yes.
DS:	Not saying yes, yes.
EY:	You have to be.
DS:	You have to be with legislators.
EY:	There’s lots of people.  You see, one of my shortcomings, perhaps, was that I’d heard so much of it all before so many times, that sometimes I didn’t listen as carefully to people who got sudden wisdom by getting made chairman of the committee.  They were important.  I didn’t insult them and I tried to play along with them, but I wouldn’t say, “Well look, I’m going to consult you on these matters,” because I had no intention on consulting them.  It would have been improper to have consulted them.  But he was – he was overly impressed with his own importance.
DS:	Let me give you another recent example of the beggaries of legislative opinion about lobbyists:  now this is a – see, in his last year, Mr. O’Neil put a great deal of money into lobbyists.  He hired actually a vice president and two associate vice presidents and maybe an assistant, I don’t know, but all in addition to all the staff that was already there, and so in the last year he was here, they were omnipresent, Bornstein and one of the other two.  There was one for University business and –
LS:	Is Judith Ward one of these people?
DS:	Judith Ward, yeah, and the other one was supposedly because of relations with the University industry and research relations and so on, and then we had a – I had a session last year at this training meeting I had with the academic staff, people in important administrative positions at Madison.  This was a yearlong seminar of some sort, sort of an experimental thing.  At one session, I had Tom Loftus and Tommy Thompson and Lon Sprecher and I had somebody else.  I had four people out who one way or another knew a great deal about the political process and were variously friendly or unfriendly to the University and what not, and it was a very interesting meeting, but I won’t go into that.  But at the break time, I was talking to Tom and Tommy who were sitting there chatting cordially and I said, “how are we doing down in the legislature?” and they both said, “well, I’ll tell you,” I can’t remember which one initiated it, said, “we’re sick and tired of seeing University lobbyists down there and never seeing the president.”
LS:	That’s interesting, because I thought O’Neil – or are you talking about Shaw?
DS:	No, I’m talking about O’Neil.
LS:	Because I thought O’Neil went down there a great deal.
DS:	Well, not – see, after he got to this big team, they were down there every day, all the time, and these two people said that – you know, they were in effect saying, “now, we don’t—this didn’t” – this sudden escalation of effort, you see, was being criticized in another way, so, it’s sort of a –
EY:	We failed, and I knew what should have been done and I didn’t accomplish it in this lobbying business.  The best lobbyists are where you can get individual faculty members who have a reputation to deal with legislators and keep up on contact, but it takes a lot of doing, and you run into the resistance of your staff, because staff people, particularly in the system administration, they know better than anybody about everything.  You know, they know –
DS:	That’s true, yes, it is (laughing).
EY:	And so I – but, you know, it’s the same way that we’ve got it in the University now.  The advising is not done by faculty members anymore in the College of Letters of Science.  We’ve hired people, academic staff people.  They read the book, they know all the rules and all that, but the students don’t – the students want to deal with the faculty members and it’s the same way with the legislature.  In the success – Maine had a system which I inherited.  There was a marvelous system.  Every single – the state was divided up into areas, and each area had a faculty member who was responsible for the legislators there and they cultivated them and got to know them.  I went out and had lunch or breakfast with the whole group and we got the Republican legislature to overturn the Democratic Governor’s budget and give us 25 percent more.
01:00:06
LS:	Why didn’t you institute that here?
EY:	Well, I tried to, but I didn’t get much help.  This is a bigger place.  The inertia of it is very great.  This is one of the things that saves it, you know, in the bad times, the inertia, the – because the place goes on.  Anyway . . . but it’s what I should have done more of.  I tried to do some of it, but I would talk about it and I had to get agreement from staff people, but they never did much about it, and I was too busy, and I didn’t do nothing about it.  I did on occasion, so that is the most effective way.  I’m still convinced, but it takes some doing and adding more vice presidents isn’t going to do it.  
LS:	That’s, in effect, what they did in [words unclear] had faculty meetings [words unclear].
DS:	Yes.  That was – the University committee put on a good show.  
EY:	But, you see, they can’t do that all the time.  PROFS ought to be – is supposed to be doing some of that, and maybe they will do more.  They have had some – they did a good time in there.
DS:	Yeah, PROFS has worked hard at that, but faculty members you can only shoot them down on a limited number of issues, because they’re supposed to be teaching and doing research and they – 
[End of Tape 3]
00:00:00
EY:	Because we want more than they want to give us, and it’s always going to be that way.
LS:	This tape four of the interview with Ed Young and Don Smith.  Well, let’s turn to the Regents, then, also which is a subject having to do with the legislature.  I guess to begin with, how much did Pat Lucey discuss – consult with you on his Regent appointments?
EY:	Two or three times, but it was very confidential and I didn’t go around telling people this, you know?  Pat and I were always on very good terms.  We basically disagreed on almost everything, but we were on good personal terms.  I never had to wait 24 hours to get into his office if he was in town.  I liked him personally, respected his brains.  I thought his policies were – well, I thought he’d gotten – he got this Kennedy business; anything the Kennedys do, he has to do it, and that – and I think that – just bringing in a bright, young man who’d been to eastern universities to run the state without any knowledge, that’s one of the things that got us into some trouble.
LS:	But he – did he follow your advice on Regent appointments?  Because they used to do that, apparently [words unclear].
EY:	I – (laughing) – oh, one time – I remember one – afterwards he was saying, “Well, he’s your Regent, you wanted him.” 
LS:	Who is that?
DS:	I don’t know who did that.
EY:	You don’t know this story?  
DS:	Yeah, this – was it –
EY:	DeBardeleben.
DS:	Arthur?  Yeah.
EY:	Yeah – he wanted --  reappointed; because we needed somebody who would speak up for faculty.  Now, Arthur, of course, overdid it, but you never get anybody that’s perfect, you know.  But he was a balance for some of the others, and it turned out sometimes, it was kind of fun and sometimes it was pretty disastrous (laughing).
LS:	Yes, I was going through the Regents’ report and he’s very visible. 
DS:	He’s a – he was – on balance, Arthur’s a good Regent.  In some of the issues that really count to a University very deeply, you couldn’t ask for a stronger voice.  He could be –
EY:	He was a strong voice for faculty governance, for instance, and that’s terribly important.  But he did have one – I think – he would look at an issue and he would either say, if he wasn’t very interested, “that’s something that should be left up to the administration faculty.  We shouldn’t do that,” and if it turned out to be something that the administration faculty that was doing that was interesting, he’d say, “that’s a policy issue and the Regents should do it.”  (laughing)  But we all have our foibles.
LS:	Now, did you talk to him – to DeBardeleben by phone?  Did you – did you say, “look Arthur, we want you to do this.”
EY:	Very rarely.  I was very loathe to lobby individual – I could have done it once or twice, but a great deal on – unless they were chairman of the committee on something that was coming up where I wanted to explain it.  See, I perceived, and I may have been wrong, that part of Fred Harrington’s problem was he got too cozy with too – a couple of Regents and they, including DeBardeleben as one of them, and they sort of ran things, and that alienated the others, so I guess I talked to Regents when it seemed important to do so, but I tried to be very careful not to – not to have any particular Regents that I depended – there were some I liked a lot better than others.
LS:	Well, but how were you with his appointments?
EY:	Mixed.  Well, you see, he appointed people like Beckwith and Gerrard.
LS:	Yes.
EY:	They’re different. One was a Republican and he appointed him because he had been so successful.  He was chairman of the state fair.  Lucey told me this himself – the state fair that they had reorganized and the state fair was a failing proposition; got it back on its feet and he’d done it so well, that he admired Beckwith and he was a Republican and he appointed him to the Regents.  Bill Gerrard was the man who raised money for his campaign.  He appointed him because he raised money for him.
LS:	Well, which was the good one and which was the --
DS:	Well Beckwith was a very, very good Regent.
LS:	That’s what I thought.
DS:	Um-hmm, yeah.
LS:	From looking at the minutes.
00:04:53
DS:	Yeah, he was a – in fact, he was one of the – Lucey made, as Ed says, some good appointments.  Let me make a caveat on your comment that he consulted with you.  I know he did, but he did not consult with anybody in system administration on any of the Regents, and that I found strange, because in – when I was in Minnesota, whenever there was a Regent being appointed, the Governor always conferred with the president and the vice presidents about a list of names.  They were elected by a caucus up there, a legislative caucus, but the Governor was influential in “X” number of cases, and the Governor would always meet, and usually the man who was going to head the caucus, whatever the – it would be a joint caucus for a legislative district, and whatever majority party was – was their most prestigious person would be the head of the caucus.  That person would usually confer with the president of the University and with the vice presidents, so it was very commonplace.  I always expected to get a call when there was a Regents vacancy – that somebody in the Governor’s office would call up and say, “Would you come down?  We’ve got a list of people that are under consideration.”
LS:	[words unclear]
EY:	Now what I don’t know whether – see, what went on before Lucey, because Lucey was a tremendous break in every way with the past and practice.  Knowles would have been inclined to have done that.  The only way you’ll find out is to talk to Ira Baldwin.
LS:	Well, I’ve been told that, in fact, they usually did consult with the president, with the Governors.
EY:	Yeah.  That would be my impression earlier on, particularly some – well, Warren Knowles was, you know, a very special person in being extraordinarily thoughtful of people  and considerate.  So whether how far back that went, I don’t know.  I suppose it varied.  There – I can imagine when LaFollette was rigging the Regents to fire the president, he probably didn’t consult with the president much, do you think?
DS:	That’s true (laughing).  I’m sure that he didn’t.  The other – there’s a – I think, incidentally, in the years I spent over in system, we were unusually fortunate in the board that we had to work with and the board I had to work with in Minnesota was equally good.  I don’t believe anybody was ever more blessed than two universities with the good boards of Regents.  Now that doesn’t mean that every Regent on either board was a comfort, but it does mean that they were extraordinarily able people.
LS:	You thought that Dreyfus’ appointment was good, too?
DS:	Well, um . . . Dreyfus – I was leaving at that particular time.  Who’d Dreyfus appoint?  I was trying to . . . 
LS:	Well, I didn’t bring my list in.
DS:	Oh . . . I don’t recall, no.  I was really talking about the – and the people I would particularly single out would be the chairman of the education committee, which I had to work with all the time and also the chairman of the board.  The first three presidents of the board under the system I don’t think could have been better selected:  Roy Kopp, who was ideal to try to merge two unlike boards; Jack Pelisek (transcribers note:  believe Mr. Smith is referring to “Frank” Pelisek instead of “Jack”) and Bert McNamara were two of the finest board presidents that one could imagine.
LS:	Is the president’s position on the board, it must be – it’s very much sought after.  Is it very influential, makes a big difference?
DS:	 Yeah.  Particularly if it’s a good person running it.  
EY:	Yeah, because they almost set the agenda in a way, and how the thing goes and directing the questions, getting people involved.  Ben Lawton came down here two or three times a week from Marshfield because of things coming up.  Now, if the president of the board thinks all he has to do is preside, then he isn’t as influential.  He has to know what’s going on, know who cares and know how to steer things.
00:10:00
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	In part, he’s responsible for carrying out the administration’s agenda, getting it through.  You need to be – have a good working relationship with the chairman if you’re going to get your agenda.  
LS:	Now Grover . . . was he president of the board when you were still –
DS:	He became president – no, he was – he had just been elected at the time I was leaving and I – Mr. Grover was not a useful member of the board and I think is still not, and I’m pleased that I didn’t have to work with him.  Bob O’Neil had that pleasure, which I don’t think is much of a pleasure for him of having him as his board president.
LS:	Grover was Dreyfus’s appointment?
DS:	No.  He was ex-officio.
LS:	Oh, that’s right, yes.
DS:	He was first appointed by  -- I don’t – he was appointed before he became –
EY:	Yeah.  He used the platform to run –
DS:	And then he used the Regents as a platform to run for state office, yeah.
LS:	That gets into the question of Dreyfus.  Do you want to talk about that?  
EY:	About –
LS:	The controversy over – when Dreyfus started running to be Governor?
EY:	Well, there wasn’t much controversy.  What he did was he asked to stay on the payroll and get paid and I wouldn’t let him because it was improper and he said, “well, the Governor’s getting paid, and he’s running,” and therefore I should – but, you know, it was just simple, and I said, “no.”  It didn’t seem to me – if I had done it, I would have been chastised by every legislator and probably been pulled up before the court or something; somebody could have sued.
LS:	And the Regents, how did they feel about it?
EY:	They backed me.  See, I did it and then told the Regents.  I didn’t ask them.   Isn’t that the way it was?
DS:	Yes.  They had an executive session on it because there were two or three Regents that did not agree.
EY:	They wanted to –
DS:	They were people who wanted – who were very much fascinated in the political game and they wanted to –
EY:	One of them said to me, “he may be Governor,” and I said, “yeah, that’s a risk we run, isn’t?” or something like that.
DS:	They thought it was bad politics to offend a man who might wind up winning the governorship, but no, the rest of them were very solid.
LS:	Well, were you at all influenced by that possibility?  Or did you think he wouldn’t be elected?
EY:	Oh, I didn’t think about that at all.  I only thought:  is it appropriate for me to keep on the payroll a man who’s running for Governor full time and not just – he’d been running, you know, for a year, part-time in the evenings, and I – that was his business, in a way; you lean over backwards, but when he’s going to take – absolutely leave the office and put somebody else in charge and get paid, I couldn’t – I didn’t have authority to pay – I could have put every politician who was running in the state on the payroll for the same reason.  It just doesn’t make any sense to do that.  Nobody ever had done that before, and I wasn’t going to start that.  No, it had nothing to do with whether he was going to win or not.  I was a little – I didn’t expect him to win, but that didn’t make any difference to me.  Now, I – there was always a little strain between Dreyfus and me.
DS:	(laughing)
LS:	There was a LITTLE strain?
EY:	Well, just a little.
LS:	I’ve heard there was very serious –
EY:	About what?
LS:	Now, somebody said that you couldn’t even go downtown, the two of you, and talk to Dreyfus.
EY:	Oh, yes.  I used to go to his office and talk to him.
LS:	You did?
EY:	Yeah.
LS:	That’s what oral history is for, to correct all this.
EY:	Or else find that I’m a liar (laughing).
LS:	So you did –
EY:	Oh sure, sure.
LS:	Well, where did he get this [words unclear]?
EY:	Well, people imagine a great deal. The – in the first place see, he wasn’t Governor long before I retired from the presidency.  
LS:	Yeah.
EY:	So there was only a short time, but in that time, I was in his office a number of times.
LS:	And you say there was a little bit of strain.
EY:	Oh, yes.  Well, I think it came about in this fashion:  that I never took him very seriously, and that offended the hell out of him, you know.  I just never treated him in a way – we had to listen to him so much in the Chancellor’s meetings and he was always full of ideas.  Then he got to be – we rotated the chairmanship, and he had a big agenda, was going to do a lot of things.  This group was organized originally to fight the – to act as a collective bargaining, almost, group with the director of the old state university.  And so it was carried forward into the system.
00:15:07
LS:	Wait a minute . . . I’ve lost . . .  what --
DS:	Counselor, the Chancellors.
LS:	Oh.
DS:	The Chancellors would meet.
LS:	O.K.
EY:	And they apparently had a fair amount of influence, but the system had changed so much, there wasn’t much to do.  We would meet and we’d listen to the president explain or his staff what they’d been doing, what they’re up to, and we – very rarely did we differ with the administration.  But if we did, most of us would do it privately anyway.  And so, but Lee wanted to make something of that.   I kind of “pooh-poohed” it, you know.  I didn’t say he couldn’t do it if he was chairman, but when he’d say, “well, how often should we meet?”, I’d say something like, “well, not very often, should we?” or something – “not unless we have something.”  I, you know, needle him a little bit.  I’d known him a long time.  He worked for me when I was Dean.
LS:	Yes, I suppose so. 
EY:	Yeah, and he’s a very bright guy.  He wasn’t interested in doing anything, he was interested in talking about it, campaigning.  No, I – maybe I – you know, obviously I must have been wrong not to take him seriously, but he wasn’t the most outstanding Governor we ever had.
DS:	He was – yeah, Lee was – he’s an interesting personality.  He was a man who I think was driven by an overpowering.  He was a very bright man, driven by a great ambition.  I’ve never quite understood what made Lee run, but he was constantly looking at a bigger job.  He loved the public spotlight.  He was fascinated with uses of the platform.  He was very much un-interested in the details of policy and management.  He was not – as a Chancellor, he was a very, very difficult man to work with, although always a sort of entertaining man in lots of ways, and I think he did some things that, if I understood the history of Stevens Point, which were quite constructive and useful to that institution at various times simply by the sort of pinosh and presence he had in the way of building up enthusiasm, but he was a – always had his mind on the next higher job, and –
EY:	He wanted to be president of the system at one stage, you know.
DS:	Yeah.  Well, he did want to be president.  In fact, he thought he should be.  He also –
LS:	That was when O’Neil was –
EY:	No.  When I became president.
DS:	No, when Ed became president.
LS:	Oh.
DS:	He wanted to, and while –
LS:	Was he on the list?  Was he on the search and screen committee?
DS:	Well, he was nominated, but – I think he made another push at it when O’Neil came in.  But he also made a big push at becoming chairman of the FCC and a big push in becoming Secretary of Defense.  He had all sorts of dreams of glory in Washington at various times.
LS:	How was he – was he for the University?
DS:	Ah . . . he was almost useless.  It wasn’t that he intended to do us any damage, but he was never in – he really wasn’t in charge of policy.
LS:	[words unclear]
EY:	See, he had Lindner as his administrative person, and Lindner seemed to have a – either wanted to lean over backwards to prove he wasn’t for the University or something, because they supported [word unclear] of the personnel stuff and Hanson went to work for him, didn’t she?
DS:	Yeah.  Doris Hanson.
EY:	And she was pushing that kind of stuff.  She didn’t understand it, but she was pushing it because of the power.  
DS:	It was, I would say, not a particularly good era.  His budgets weren’t all that bad; they weren’t very good and they weren’t very thoughtful, and he didn’t fight very effectively for them, but they weren’t that bad.  But then, every – his budgets were always – always fell apart before they ever got put together.  That is, they’d be passed and then within three months there’d be a deficit or something and then there’d be an improvised cut.  It was a very chaotic period fiscally.
EY:	Remember he campaigned – the surplus had been taken from the people and should be given back to them?  You’ve got to check that kind of stuff.
00:20:05
LS:	[words unclear]
EY:	Which you, of course, put – anybody that knew anything about income tax base, it was just crazy as hell.  But he was a showman. 
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	He was really a very good showman, but also a very bright person.  That is, maybe it was unfair, but I used to characterized him as if somebody heard himself talking and thought it was pretty – that that’s where he got – he heard himself and then he believed it.
DS:	(laughing)
EY:	(laughing)  Well, all of us are somewhat that way, but he was a little more so.
DS:	When I – go ahead --
LS:	Well, just . . . did he – somebody said he gave flexibility to the University.
EY:	Oh, no.
LS:	Salary –
EY:	Didn’t he put the cap back on – nobody could have a salary as high as the Governor’s?
DS:	He put – well, he didn’t give us that flexibility.  He also would – we’d get a six percent salary increase and then it would be by executive order reduced to four percent because they were in a deficit situation.  No – his budgets were chaotic as far as trying to manage the University was concerned, or the system.  No, and as far as flexibility was concerned, we really had thought that through Kenny Lindner, we could get some, but he turned his affairs over to Doris Hanson and to this guy Howard, both of whom were total –
EY:	Bureaucrats.
DS:	Bureaucrats, yeah, and sometimes you could get a little relief, but not very much.  I don’t think he was ill-intentioned, it was just that he wanted to be successful in a job he didn’t understand very well.  I believe that was his problem.  
LS:	This is –
DS:	Lindner, yeah.  And Dreyfus was – Dreyfus was really always working on the public front.  I – he was not – it wasn’t a matter of not being accessible.
EY:	No, there wasn’t any problem, no.  And we never really had any – we never exchanged any words of any kind.
DS:	He did have one – he did one strange, symbolic thing.
EY:	What was that?
DS:	I don’t know whether you remember it or not, or maybe it didn’t even – it didn’t seem to bother you at the time, which I thought was exactly the right response because – well, he had a budget hearing, and I was not unaccustomed to going into the Governor’s office, being called to go into the Governor’s office and discuss the Governor’s budget, and then the very first budget of the system, I know Pat Lucey did have a public hearing on the budget and that was sort of a disaster.  I was just an observer at that, but it was kind of a strange meeting.  I don’t think he ever repeated it, and with the rest of the time with Lucey and with Schreiber, it had always been a gathering in the Governor’s office to give us a sort of last shot at his budget which, in the case of Lucey, was totally ineffective, but nevertheless, it was kind of polite.  Well, Dreyfus had this strange set of budget hearings which he never attended and then he – we got word that he was – you remember that?  He was going to have a hearing.
EY:	No, I don’t.
DS:	Yeah.  Well, we went down to the hearing.  He was going to have a Governor’s hearing and he put it in a great, big room, the top conference room, which has a very high platform.  He sat up –
EY:	Oh, yes! I remember now.
DS:	Yeah, and then there’s a desk that sits about 18 feet below that with a microphone and the two of us were – crawled up to that desk with the microphone and Lee’s sitting up there all alone, you see, with – I guess he had a secretary with him (laughing).
EY:	Well, you see, that sort of thing didn’t bother me any, because, you know, I had enough – my feeling about the whole thing was such that I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t pay much attention to that.  
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	I thought I could hold my own with Lee.
DS:	Well, it was – it turned out to be sort of a disaster.  It was a boring thing.  Ed saw to that, you know, he’d ask Ed a question.  Ed would spin out an answer, you know, very cheerfully and it was – it’d be sort of a mean question, and Ed was extremely cordial about it.  Lee finally got tired and adjourned the meeting (laughing).  But I – the minute I saw the setup, that was the first thing I thought of:  “well, he’s going to get his pint of blood for . . . “
00:25:08
EY:	Well, maybe I wasn’t so concerned.  I’m reconstruct – that room was always arranged that way, wasn’t it?
DS:	It was that way, but no Governor had ever –
EY:	Done –
DS:	Had people in that room.
EY:	But that – see, part of it, he wanted to be treated differently, because on the salary thing, for instance, he didn’t want anybody in the state service to get paid as much as he did by about $1.  Well, that’s – that was awkward when you – see, that’s why the salaries got so out of whack around here.  It didn’t affect me very much, because I was leaving, and so it didn’t make much difference to me, but when you went to get some replacement, it made a difference.  Well, anyway . .  
LS:	Did you feel that the Regents, the Board of Regents changed and became less effective from after 1970 and the 80’s?
EY:	It did because, I think, in one respect, they didn’t know where they were coming from.  The old board knew what the University was, it worked for the University of Wisconsin, even though it did expand, and the other board worked for the state under the direction of the –
DS:	Gene McPhee.
EY:	Gene McPhee, who was a very able man.  See, Gene McPhee had the power, but he didn’t want any trappings.  He had the title of Director, but he ran that thing like that, and he had his board with him and so those Regents knew what they were supposed to do.  They – each were assigned to a campus and they represented that campus.  Then they’d come together in the system.  We had Walter Renk, who used to turn to me and say, “Ed, now what do we do with our University?” (laughing)  Walter, by the way, was a good Regent.
LS:	He was?
EY:	Yes.
DS:	The first –
LS:	So – but you say – then what happened?
EY:	Well, see so they didn’t exactly know – see, some of them had come from – the ones that came from the other side because they merged the two boards.  They thought of themselves as representatives of campuses by and large, whereas the other – our people had already represented Milwaukee and Green Bay, Parkside, the center system, and that we didn’t – they weren’t picked from location.  They were picked from the University so they –
LS:	Wait a minute . . . they were picked for their stature, weren’t they?
EY:	Yes.
LS:	And didn’t – that’s why this is a leading question:  I mean, isn’t that what changed?
DS:	Partly, yeah.  Partly what has happened, and that’s happened everywhere in plenty of boards and it’s even – it’s a problem in committee structures, is that you – we have moved into an era of constituency representation.  Now, what does that mean?  That means at one time boards are selected because of the ability of the person, unless – and in the case of the old WSU board, they were also viceroys.  They were people from a particular area.  There was a little constituency representation I think in the earlier Minnesota and Wisconsin boards as represented by the fact that it was – it was sort of good form in such states that somebody be associated with agriculture in a way and somebody be associated with labor in a way and somebody be associated with business, but that would take only three out of the board and so on.  Well then we got – then it was suddenly, why we have to have a minority; has to be – so a board isn’t right unless it’s got – somebody’s black, it’s got to have a woman –
EY:	More than one.
DS:	And – well, that’s the first step, and then the next step is – but that’s token representation.  See, we’ve got to have several women and it’s a little bit tokenism if you don’t have more than one minority, so then you’ve got the Hispanics as another minority.
EY:	Got to have them.
LS:	So that – and the governors just bought all of this.
DS:	Well, they – in a way, they’re kind of pushed into it by the –
EY:	You know, some of them go easier than others.  Now, Earl – for Earl, this was just – he just lapped it up, because that’s his – the thing that he made a great deal of, helping what he felt were the disadvantaged groups and you can’t, you know, you don’t fault him for that, but it might not – the people who happen to fit the category and who happened to support his campaign might not be the ablest people in the state, it’s just possible.
DS:	Yeah.  No, I think we’ve got – I think there is a question of whether or not you can sustain –
00:30:04
EY:	See, how many different kinds of –
DS:	Representation –
EY:	[Word unclear] are you going to have?  Obviously it’s important that there be minorities represented.
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	And that the women be there, but, of course, I’m so – my own view is that there’s been discrimination against women, but if you don’t discriminate against them, they’ll turn up there and it could affect quality, you know?
LS:	Was Joyce Erdman a good Regent?
EY:	Sometimes; sometimes crazy.
LS:	What was she crazy about?
EY:	Oh, she’d come in and start – with some brand – some idea she’d gotten or picked up somewhere at a cocktail party and start pushing it, but she was devoted to the University and I would say she was a good Regent.
DS:	Yeah.  On balance, I think she’s a very good Regent.
EY:	Yeah, but you know –
DS:	But she was –
EY:	You asked me what she was like.
DS:	She’d suddenly take off on a tangent, yeah.
LS:	Yeah.  Again, I see that she was very opposed to [words unclear] 
EY:	Well, that’s not – a lot of people were opposed to that.  You know, we took the view all the way along that we didn’t want it unless they appropriated money for it and it was done by the legislature.  The Regents – some of the Regents – other Regents were opposed to it.
LS:	Yes – (tape cuts out)  The Regents don’t seem to be very certain about how to deal with downtown and the interview the other night, they said the Regents didn’t come down very much; or didn’t do much lobbying.  Is that – did you think that?
EY:	Well, that’s one of the problems we had is that most of our Regents didn’t go downtown; two or three went down a good deal.
LS:	Lawton did, I know.
EY:	Well ,and Gerrard did and –
DS:	John Levine did.
EY:	John Levine did a great deal of that.
LS:	Um-hmm.  Were you glad they did or not?  I mean –
EY:	Well, you never knew what their agenda –
DS:	It’d depend on the –
EY:	Lawton, you knew where he was going, but the others, you never knew what the agenda – they used to have Carl Steiger – lovely, sweet, old man, but he’d vote for the budget up here and then go downtown and say it was too much.   He was a conservative Republican, but a very fine man.  He’s dead and I shouldn’t tell you this, but this is the sort of thing some of them did.  Charlie Gelatt, you never knew where he was at, and he was a very bright guy; a Regent for more than 24 years.
DS:	What – I think what they’re missing is the fact that historically, that the legis – it was the increasing power and interference of the legislators; the fact that they were writing all kinds of policy and they were getting into legislative oversight of everything under the sun, they were diminishing the importance of the Regents.
LS:	O.K. . . . that’s a good point.
DS:	Yeah.  In other words – and that, I think, has been the most critical factor is not that the quality of the boards has deteriorated, but the fact that the respect paid to the board by the government has deteriorated.  
EY:	You see, now this collective bargaining bill, they’ll have them bargaining with the faculty with the Department of Employee Relations and joker, it just wipes out – the personnel is what the University is all about.
LS:	But still we’re spared that for four years then.
EY:	We are, but, I mean, that’s the attitude downtown.  Some of them have said to me, “by God, this will give us a chance to get a hold of that place,” you see, and that inferred then, that the Regents – some of them were aware of this, but we have some Regents who just vote for collective bargaining because as labor people, they can’t bring themselves no matter what they tell you privately to vote the other way.  McNamara didn’t vote for it.
DS:	This – much of this came after my time, although not all of it, because he was also active even before I became board president.  No Regent – in all my 18 years in two states, ever spent as much time as aggressively and as well-informed as Dave Beckwith, and he knew what he was doing and he knew the policies and he was articulate and he was blunt and his reward for it was not to get reappointed to the board at the first opportunity.
EY:	That was Dreyfus’s doing.  Because he said in order to get Ben Lawton reappointed, he’d have to appoint Gerrard, which was just sheer nonsense.
LS:	Why?
EY:	Because Gerrard was a Democrat and the legislator – the Senate wouldn’t approve another.  Beckwith would have gotten approved quicker than Gerrard if anything.  But this is – well, see Dreyfus was –
LS:	You mean Lawton, being a Democrat, he’d have to appoint a Republican?  Is that what you’re saying?
EY:	No, no, he’d have to appoint another [word unclear], another Democrat, because Beckwith was a Republican, and he wanted to be sure to get Lawton approved.  It was a back – he was thinking, you know –
DS:	Yeah.  Tony was –
EY:	He was making --
DS:	Tony Earl was the one that did not reappoint Beckwith, I believe.
00:35:00
EY:	It was Tony Earl?

DS:	Ah . . . I’m not quite sure when he went off the board.  
EY:	No.
DS:	But in any event, he did not get reappointed even though he – so you see who gets – again, you see what you’re getting.  People are saying that the board isn’t very active.  On the other hand, the government is enormously active and then on the third hand –
EY:	We used to have much more continuity on the Regents.  For years and years, the Republican Governor would always reappoint a Democrat, a publisher from Sheboygan . . . Matt Werner.  Well, after awhile they said he was a token Democrat, but there was continuity.  If people did a good job, they got reappointed.  Now it’s looked upon much more as political patrons.  Although, I must say, when I first came here, Mr. Fred, in 1950, had a very difficult board.  Sensenbrenner was the chairman and he was trying to run things and we had Campbell who was very reactionary and so on, so Mr. Fred worked very hard at that to keep those guys from doing something, and he had the McCarthy period and we got through that without getting hurt, but, so we had some – there’ve been some ups and downs.  I think you’re right . . . we  had a very good group of Regents about the time you came here.
DS:	Yeah, and they had a very difficult job.  They were trying to blend two totally different traditions with the functions of the board, and –
EY:	There was a good group of Regents when Connie Elvehjem became president, because I was chairman of the committee to nominate, so I spent a lot of time with the Regents because it was done differently in those days, and by and large – and then there was a good group that selected John Weaver.  They had a notion that – the legislature was Republican and if they could find a Republican that could get along with the legislature.  Well, it wasn’t a terribly good notion, but . . . (laughing)  Because the election went the other way.
LS:	Yes, well Kozak commented that it wasn’t – it used to be the most coveted position in the state.
EY:	Yeah.
LS:	And no longer was because the board didn’t have power.
DS:	I think the board’s capacity to influence, to control or to be publicly influential in their relationship to the University has been diminished by the activity of government.
EY:	Yeah.  And by the quality of some of the appointments.
DS:	Yeah, as well.
EY:	Now, even some that people like Sensenbrenner, that – who I didn’t agree with about things, but he was a powerful person in the state.  He was an important person.
LS:	That’s right.  They had a constituency and people and legislators didn’t get to tangle [words unclear].
EY:	Yeah, and then with Cleary at one time, the Judge was very – you know, these are important people.  They made a difference.
LS:	What did you think of Lawton as a Regent?
EY:	Well, I think he worked very, very hard at it.  I think that he was man of great principle, but I think he sometimes thought that if the Democrats wanted it, it must be right.  That would be the only thing that I would say.  That doesn’t mean that he and I agreed, because I never agreed with any of the – you know, we had a good relationship, and I could disagree on one thing and agree on something else.  But I thought Ben worked as hard as anybody could, didn’t he?
DS:	He did.  He was – I was favored with a number of good presidents, or chairman of the education committee when Ben was a chairman with whom -- he worked hard.  He knew the agenda.  He would always come down to confer with me about the agenda the day before, the night before, and he was supportive.  He loved the University.  Now, the one thing I would say that sometimes in the full board meetings, I wasn’t in agreement with what he was doing.  He is a man that believes in something that you may have gathered I’m not so fond of:  namely that virtue ultimately rests in government; that is, in the voice of the people as it’s expressed through their elected representatives.  He’s a very, very strong Democrat; staunch Democrat, long-term Democrat, and I thought as a Regent, he was much too attentive to what it was that the Governor and the political leaders were telling him, that he didn’t want to get across purposes with Lucey.
00:40:00
EY:	He had a very close pipeline, you know.  His brother, John, is one of the – probably the most successful lobbyists in the state and has been for years, and [word unclear] quite Democrat, represents the labor people, very, very skillful.  He’s extremely intelligent, but so, you know – so he would get on the Democratic side of things pretty often, but he – I think he – and he would go and talk to the Governor about things quite frequently, the Democratic Governors, and as I’ve told you, I have the same criticism.  I say it a little differently, but that would be the only thing.  His devotion to the University . . . see, I measure people in – I have a couple of rules:  one is it isn’t whether somebody agrees with me or disagrees with me, but whether he’s working for the institution or he’s working for something for himself, if he’s trying to build his own career on the University or something. Ben Lawton was as devoted to the University as anybody will ever be.  
DS:	Yeah, I would agree.
EY:	And Joyce is, too.  She’s devoted to the University, except some – I think sometimes she sort of – she doesn’t think through before she jumps, but maybe that’s – I happen to like her very much.  I’ve known her since she was a student.
LS:	Tell me about this search and screen for the academic vice president.  
EY:	We must have had a committee of some kind.
LS:	Well, there was.
EY:	Who was chairman of that?
DS:	Ah, Cronon, Dave Cronon.
EY:	Dave Cronon.  You ought to talk to Dave.
LS:	 I – well, I have.  That’s why I’m asking.
EY:	Didn’t he tell you?
DS:	(laughing)
LS:	Yes, he did, but I didn’t – he didn’t – he doesn’t know – his – what he said was that their choice wasn’t accepted and your choice –
EY:	Oh . . . yeah. 
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	Something like this – we – they presented me some names, and I showed them to the Regents and one of them said, “well,” or [words unclear] with support from some others and on the special committee said, “why don’t you go back and ask them about so and so?”
LS:	Dave Adamany, is that it?
EY:	That’s right.  Your memory is good.
DS:	They were after – they wanted Adamany on the list.  They also had another – they had another person who was a black administrator who popped up a couple three times.  I’ll be more explicit . . . there were three members of the Regents’ committee:  one was Grover; another one was Lavine, and another one was Ed Hales.  The real agenda, I think, was very clearly that they wanted Dave Adamany and they wanted – to get him, they had to get him on the list from the committee that Cronon chaired and he didn’t get on the list.
EY:	And, you know, by the way, very able person.
DS:	Um-hmm, yeah.
EY:	But he had made that speech attacking all the rest of the faculty, saying that he was the only one who’d been teaching.
DS:	(laughing)
LS:	Oh, yes.
EY:	And there were two or three faculty members who thought that they did, too.
LS:	But that was Lucey’s pressure.
EY:	What?
LS:	That Adamany was on the list because of Lucey’s pressure.
EY:	Oh, sure.
LS:	Not the Regents.
EY:	Yeah.
DS:	Yeah, um-hmm.
LS:	Which means that Lucey was exerting pressure on the Regents.
EY:	Oh, sure.  See, some of these Regents hardly knew when they were being Democrats and when they were being Regents.  They thought the same –
LS:	Even though Lucey was out of power by then.
EY:	Yeah, but he’d appointed them.
DS:	But, yeah, he’d appointed John.  He appointed Ed Hales and I think he appointed Grover, too, didn’t he?
EY:	And then he also had – in addition to outside the committee, he had Gerrad, who he was very close to, you see.
DS:	Yeah.
EY:	He’d been his finance chairman, so –
LS:	But you didn’t like this very well as I understand it.
EY:	What?
LS:	This overturning [word unclear].
DS:	Oh, well they didn’t overturn.
EY:	Oh, no, I was very willing to go back to the committee and I went back.  I talked to the Regents.  They were right to ask if they really intended it that way, and with the committee it turned out – said they intended – really meant what they did.  I wasn’t surprised at that, and so I took it back to the Regents committee and they were upset, some of them, and suggested that I invite Adamany in for an interview anyway and I declined to do that.  I said, “we have a system and we’re going to follow it or not,” and I just said, “No,” and they were very upset that I would take such a high hand with them, so we –
00:45:13
DS:	There were two people on the list that Ed did recommend that they be interviewed.   They were interviewed.  I think they’d both have been very able people.  In fact, one of them’s had a very distinguished administrative career since.  Um . . . but they were – by that time, it was clear that the Regents were – or that the members were not going to accept anybody since the committee had been resistant to their desire to see a name. 
LS:	But you said there were only three Regents who were pushing for this –
DS:	This was a – there was a sub-committee of Regents.
EY:	Yeah, but they were the majority of the committee.
DS:	They were the majority of the sub-committee, um-hmm.
EY:	And they’d have to bring in the recommendation, you see, and so – and I didn’t see the need – see, there was a position that, as far as I was concerned, if we didn’t fill it, it was alright with me.  I was trying to slim the system down, so in that sense, it played into my hand.  He was doing all the work.
DS:	It didn’t play into my hands.  I was probably more disappointed because I thought I needed help, and  . . . (laughing)
EY:	Well, you could have gotten help without making him a vice president.
DS:	Yeah, yeah.
EY:	See, the word “academic vice president” means that they have something – they think it means that they run the programs and tell the – what to do out there, so it always bothered me a little.  We had associate vice presidents for academic affairs.  I used to catch them calling up  Chancellors and telling them how to run their shops.  They didn’t like that.  So in a sense, it didn’t create a crisis for me not having – it left a bad taste with these people.  So the whole thing went to a closed meeting with the board, and the board soundly sustained my position.
DS:	This is the – you’re talking about the search.
EY:	Yeah, about refusing to bring him for an interview.
LS:	Oh, I see, yes.  But they did then appoint another—
DS:	No, they didn’t.
LS:	Search and screen committee.
DS:	Oh, yeah, they appointed another committee, but it never –
LS:	Or you must have.
DS:	No.  I don’t think so.  I think about that time – 
LS:	Did you?
DS:	Or maybe Ed – I guess maybe you did appoint another committee, but it never got off the ground.
LS:	So nothing ever happened, then?
DS:	No, not –
EY:	No, we just left it vacant.  It worked fine.
DS:	I don’t agree with him that it worked fine.
EY:	(laughing)
DS:	But nevertheless –
EY:	He did the work.
DS:	I know what his objection was.
LS:	Did you get Haas down here [words unclear]?
EY:	Oh, no.
DS:	That was way back at the beginning.
LS:	No, I know, but I mean, somebody said that Haas was back here very briefly.
EY:	No.
LS:	I had never heard of it, though.
EY:	No.  Not that I know of.  After I left, Joe Kauffman came over at some stage to help or did I bring him over before I left.
DS:	Ah, no, you didn’t bring him over; O’Neil did.  When I – after you left and I left in July, and then he brought – he brought Joe over as sort of advisor, or interim, and then he was – he didn’t get around to replacing Joe and finally asked Joe to become executive vice president, which he did at the time, and then –
EY:	See, I worked out a deal with Don that I would leave the position six months before he did.  He was planning because of his age to leave in June, or something like that, so I left in January.
LS:	Why?
EY:	Why?
LS:	Why did you – I mean why did you work that out?
EY:	Well, I wanted – we had to have somebody to carry the place.
LS:	Oh, I see.
EY:	To keep the place going.
LS:	Well, why did you leave?
EY:	Why did I leave?  Well, I was illegal.  I was overage.
LS:	You weren’t illegal.  You can stay until you’re 65.
EY:	Well, but at age 62, they stopped adding anything to your retirement.  
LS:	Yes.  Yes, I know.
EY:	I lost a year out of my retirement.
LS:	Ah-huh.
DS:	I lost –
LS:	So it was purely that, was it?
EY:	Purely?
LS:	You weren’t angry at the – at this vice presidency?
00:49:48
EY:	Oh, I was angry for the moment at that.  That didn’t determine whether I left or not.  One of the Governors thought maybe I left because of him.  It wasn’t true, no.  I left – I was – I had – I didn’t really enjoy the job very much, and I saw what was happening – we weren’t in – not a very – I didn’t see anything that could happen in the next two years that was going to make a great deal of difference, and why just hang around?  And remember another thing, I had – in order to stay on, I would have had to appear before the Regents once a year and be re-appointed by them.  Well I – you know, I didn’t see any likelihood that I wouldn’t –
LS:	[words unclear]
EY:	What?
LS:	What?
EY:	But each year, if you’re over 62 –
LS:	Yes.
EY:	You have to come up for –
LS:	Oh, I see.
EY:	A re-examination.  Well, I said, “what the hell should I do that for?  I’m losing my retirement.  Why should I have to appear before the board each year to find out whether I’m fit to go on?”  They asked me to come in the first place.  I really didn’t enjoy the job terribly much.
LS:	Still, you wanted to protect Madison, and how did you know what Dreyfus might be going to do?
EY:	But there was nothing, you know – I couldn’t protect Madison forever.  It’s going to happen sooner or later, and we got somebody in and we worked to protect Madison.  No, I had – I guess – you know, I had one condition when I became president, and that was that Don stay as long as I did.
LS:	Yes.
EY:	So I made a point of getting out before he got out, and that was one of the reasons; a whole mixture.  You know, trying to remember exactly why you do things and being accurate is very difficult.  There’s no one thing that was overwhelming, but I just saw it going on more of the same and another rule, I think is a pretty good one, is to quit when you’re ahead.
DS:	Yeah, I didn’t want – I had intended to go back to the department and then a new president was appointed and then Ed created this situation where I had the terrible agony of either having the search go on forever or it seemed to be that, or else agreeing to stay on.  I don’t think I agreed to stay on as long as you did.  I think I agreed to stay on for at least two years.
EY:	The Regents agreed to keep on appointing you.
DS:	Yeah, that’s right.  They agreed to keep on appointing me.  See, I was already over age and I – it was costing me money.
EY:	Well he lost out in his retirement.
DS:	But then – so that – in a sense, the timing on all this was sort of determined at the time you accepted the appointed --
EY:	Yes.
DS:	And the conditions under – 
EY:	You couldn’t be long.
DS:	I think Bert understood pretty well that you weren’t likely to stay too long.
EY:	But I – I think the most important thing is I sized up the then situation.  It looked as though it was going to stay the same, you know the economy, the University, the Regents . . . everything was going to go on about the same, and at the end, I wouldn’t – the University wouldn’t be any better for my staying and I’d be worse.
LS:	Yes.
DS:	Um-hmm.
LS:	I want to – we’re nearing the end of the tape.  I didn’t bring three.  Ah . . . why did you let Irv Shain go.
EY:	Go where?
LS:	To Washington.
EY:	I didn’t let him go.  He went through his own accord.  
LS:	He was –
EY:	He wanted to go.  He decided to go.  He made the decision.  
LS:	Hmm . . . 
EY:	He didn’t – there was no bargaining.  He didn’t ask for anything.  I had no choice in the matter.
LS:	And what – did you have much to do with getting him back?
EY:	Yes.
LS:	Well, would you want to talk about that?
EY:	Well, there was a committee and they came in with some names and from all – as I looked at it, and as the Regents committee looked at it, his was the most promising one.  There was one other that I thought of quite seriously, and that was a man who is now head of the Vet Science.  He was right in the middle of getting that thing going and we didn’t have anybody to replace him.
LS:	Who was that?
EY:	Easterday.
DS:	Easterday; Barney Easterday.
EY:	Do you know him?
LS:	No.
DS:	Very able man.
EY:	Very able man.  Another name on the list, I guess I can say, was Ragotzkie, wasn’t it?
DS:	Yes.  Bob’s a very able man.
EY:	And he would have been a good one, but Irv had more experience and he was somebody the Regents could agree on, I could agree on and so we – I went out and visited with him and he came back.
LS:	So it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that you would get him back?
00:54:56
EY:	Oh, no, no!  When he left here, he didn’t intend to come back.  Now he intends to come back.  He says – he’ll tell anybody that he’s going to come back in four years.
DS:	Back to Madison.
LS:	Oh.
DS:	Not to the University, though.
EY:	Yes.
DS:	Oh, he wants to take up teaching, or is there something else?
EY:	No, he’s got something else in mind.
DS:	Oh, he’s got something else in mind.  He wants to resume his relations – I knew he was coming back to Madison, but I didn’t know . . .
EY:	Well, that’s what he says.
DS:	Um-hmm.
LS:	[Words unclear] president.
EY:	President of what?
LS:	Oh, we’ve got a president, haven’t we, that’s right.
DS:	That’s right (laughing).
EY:	President’s assistant.
LS:	What?  Yes.
EY:	Everybody?
LS:	No.
EY:	I think you could find a couple [words unclear] in Eau Claire.
DS:	(laughing)  If you polled around the state at the other institutions, I don’t think you’d find much – a sampling.
EY:	But he’s over – he’ll be overage, so that question won’t come up.
LS:	You know, the other day when you said that you gave some money to some of the other institutions in the system because – was this when you were Chancellor in –
EY:	At Madison.
LS:	Yeah.
EY:	Well, I agreed to it.
LS:	You agreed to it.
EY:	You know, and in fact, supported the idea of bailing out.  It was a loan.  It was a loan.
LS:	Well, did it ever get paid back?
EY:	I think so.
LS:	Well, because some of the grievances expressed by people in Madison is that the allocations were not coming into Madison according to its enrollment, but were going to shore up other –
EY:	Well, that went up for one year they shored them up.
DS:	One year, yeah.
EY:	And we got the money back.
LS:	You don’t think it ever happened at any other time?
DS:	There was another time when Madison was overfunded for the enrollment that they had.
EY:	See, the whole system was underfunded for years.
DS:	Yeah.
LS:	No, but I mean Madison for its enrollment compared –
EY:	Mm-mmm (negative response).
DS:	Mm-mmm (negative response).
LS:	For instance, I saw a letter from the Superior man to the board saying, “Superior’s – we – us little colleges ought to get more funding because we’re needed where we are,” which would mean that it would have to come out of place, presumably.
EY:	Yeah, but it didn’t, it didn’t.
LS:	It didn’t?
EY:	No.  I think that – now, some people, a lot of people in Madison, including Irv Shain at one stage when he was Chancellor, said there was an unfair allocation.  I looked into it very closely.  Ruben Lorenz was doing it, and he is the fairest, most honest person you’ll ever see, and I – he wouldn’t do anything that was improper in allocating funds.  If we changed the allocation, I would have known about it and as Chancellor, I agreed that Whitewater, I think it was, was in terrible trouble, and were we going to let them go down?  You know, I bought more goodwill for Madison with that money that we could get along without for a year and then we’ll get it back.
DS:	Um-hmm.
EY:	It was the only thing to do.  It was good politics as well as  --
LS:	Why is this notion so fixed?
EY:	Oh, because –
DS:	Because they’re – because everybody’s underfunded.  
EY:	And they keep – somebody starts some rumor like that and pretty soon it’s a fact.
LS:	They had no way of finding out, would they?
DS:	Yeeessss.
EY:	Oh, all they had to do was ask me, and I’ll tell them, or they go check the books.
DS:	They would have a way of finding out, but they don’t –
EY:	That spoils the fun.
DS:	Yeah, that’s much more entertaining.
EY:	To find out the truth (laughing).  No – you know, one of the interesting things about academic life is that the greatest scientists are the least scientific about the way they carry on their own business in universities.  They don’t apply any science to their edu – or anything they do at the university.  They learn it all by gossip and innuendo (laughing).  They don’t all, but, seriously, the fact it does rally around when it’s needed.  But the misinformation around is very great.  I think if you went over to the French Department and interviewed the faculty about what’s happening in the university, they don’t know and they got it confused with some French university that they attended in their youth, and they still think it’s the same place.  
DS:	Somebody always has a villain, and the villain is for their own distress, and the villain is usually, depending on what level you are, the next level that’s closest at hand, or the one that’s most politic, and they don’t – the budget process is extraordinarily complex.  It’s a huge amount of data and they don’t want to take the trouble of puzzling that out, so you can find – I can find people in my department who believe there is money that we’re not getting our fair share in L and S.  Well, I think we’re getting as much money as –
01:00:00
EY:	As you deserve (laughing).	
DS:	(laughing) Maybe not as much as we deserve, but as much as Cronon can find, you know, and he’s not rolling in money.  And then if you go to the L and S people – or you go over to the business school, they think it’s because the Chancellor’s giving too much money to L and S and engineering, that’s why the business school is underfunded.
EY:	All the time I was Dean and Chancellor, my department, Economics, knew that they were not getting their fair share, and there was a little truth in it.  They wanted – I wouldn’t approve their getting what they asked for.  What they were asking for was enough money to provide tenure positions for all the teaching and half of them were on leave expecting to come back at any time when they were leaving, and there was no way we were going to take that risk.  So you have to – there’s things like that which, you know, when you re-talk to them, they agree, but they really would rather go out and say, “you’re not – you’re being unfair”
LS:	Yeah, except that in the case of Madison was the enrollment funding formula, you should be able to figure out fairly accurately.  You know what the enrollment is and you –
DS:	Ah . . . what they’re complaining about, a lot of them, is the fact that in any given year, the formula is not automatic, and I was the one that invented that because I don’t think it should be, and –
LS:	Well, it’s a non-formula, then.
EY:	No, no.
DS:	Well, no it is.  It is a formula, but it was always – it was always a give back situation.  You’re going to be protected, and we had a corridor.  We said, “we’ll protect you for three years:  one-third, one-third, one-third.”  I had Milwaukee was overfunded by – if you go down to Milwaukee and ask the faculty, they always said they were being gyped.
LS:	You say they were overfunded.  Well, who was being underfunded, then?
DS:	Well –
EY:	Because of the shifts, you see.  
DS:	The shifts, yeah.
EY:	Somebody else had grown, and they hadn’t shrunk in proportion to their budget.  But you can’t make that change just overnight like that.  
DS:	You can’t say in one year, if you happen to fall a million dollars short, we’re going to take a million dollars out of your budget, unless you’re a very bad administrator.  And the – but then you protect this budget this year and three years from now, it may be the budget that’s underfunded, or is going to have to do a little protecting somebody else.  Ed was always very cooperative on that.  He understood it.  
EY:	You can’t have a tenure system and then change the budget that fast.  You can’t fire people.  The law won’t let us, you know, if we wanted to.  We have to give them years to prove that they’re –
LS:	But that still – that still bears out the possibility that Madison could be underfunded just because you had to protect somebody.
DS:	In one year.
EY:	In one year, but we got it back.
DS:	In one year, or –
EY:	But some year when we were overfunded, you see.  Now, we were treated fairly.  There just wasn’t enough money to go around.
LS:	Well, you’re still saying “we”.  I mean, right?
DS:	Yeah.
LS:	You went ahead with [words unclear].
EY:	What?
LS:	The system.  And why you said “they” (laughing).
DS:	Oh, no.
EY:	Well, when I say “we”, I mean Madison.
LS:	Yes, I know, that’s what I mean.
[End of Tape 4]
End of Oral History #324