-UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #701
MILLER, RICHARD U.

MILLER, Richard U. (1932- )
Professor Emeritus, School of Business and Industrial Relations Research Institute; Director, Industrial Relations Research Institute
At UW: 1966-1971, 1972-1996

First Interview
Interviewed: 1987	
Interviewer: Amy Fried
Length: 1 hour, 29 minutes

Educational and career background; Teaching; Industrial Relations Research Institute (IRRI); Assistant directorship and directorship of the IRRI; Relationship of the IRRI with the economics department and the business school; Attempts to departmentalize the IRRI; Student participation in IRRI committees; Minority recruitment; Directors of the IRRI; Fortunes of industrial relations programs.

Second Interview
Interviewed: 2004			       
Interviewer: W. Lee Hansen
Length: 1 hour

Industrial Relations Research Institute; Departmentalization; Gerald Somers; Quality reinvestment; Closure of the IRRI.

First Interview (July 14, 1987): Tape 1

Tape 1/Side 1

00:00:23	Richard Miller talks about his graduate work at Cornell University and his teaching at the University of Buffalo.  While conducting dissertation research on Mexican unions, he met Phil Glade of the University of Wisconsin, who persuaded him to come to UW in 1966.

00:02:38	He focused on Latin American economic development and taught in Latin American studies and the School of Business.

00:03:38	He became assistant director of the Industrial Relations Research Institute in 1968.  During his tenure as assistant director, he assisted James Stern in overhauling the IRRI curriculum in order to integrate students from various fields.  Drawing from the model in use at Cornell, this resulted in four areas of manpower, personnel, collective bargaining, and international relations.

00:07:25	After RM and Stern left UW in 1970, James Jones, Jr. served as interim director.  RM, having returned in 1971, served as director from 1973 to 1977.

00:09:14	RM describes the process by which the IRRI appointed directors.  He viewed his appointment, along with his assistant Harry Graham, as an attempt to bridge the IRRI with other departments:  Graham was from the School for Workers and RM was the first director of the Institute not to come from the economics department.

00:12:37	He talks about the physical space that housed the IRRI.

00:14:59	RM discusses the IRRI's relationship with the economics department, which had always been the predominant force within the IRRI and its executive committee.  However, the economics department underwent a transition in which institutional or applied economics diminished in importance; as a result, the economics faculty who had formed the core of the IRRI were not replaced.  The connection between economics and the IRRI gradually weakened.

00:20:49	By contrast, the IRRI's relationship with the business school has grown stronger over time.  RM, Donald Schwab, and Herbert Heneman all bridged business with the IRRI.  The business school frequently hired IRRI students to work as TAs and faculty often supervised IRRI students.

00:26:15	The IRRI benefitted from the support of industrial relations "enclaves" within the economics department and the management department.  However, these departments on the whole were not supportive of the IRRI, in part because many faculty identified the Institute with TAA activism.

00:29:39	RM discusses his advocacy of department status for the IRRI.  Despite the Institute's strong reputation, it had no physical presence on campus, a minuscule budget, and no tenure-granting authority.  The IRRI drew up a proposal for departmentalization in the early 1970s.

00:36:34	IRRI faculty were divided on the issue of departmentalization.  The committee appointed by the dean of the College of Letters & Science recommended that the Institute look for other means of hiring than through departmentalization, which it saw as a last resort.

00:39:30	RM speculates that the contraction of the L&S budget contributed to the dean's resistance to departmentalization.  Moreover, the pooling of resources really led to the further immiseration of the IRRI.

00:42:31	Robert Lampman opposed departmentalization because he thought it would create a second-rate program; he favored interdisciplinarity.  There is still no consensus among IRRI faculty on departmentalization. 
		[End side 1]

Tape 1/Side 2

00:46:07	Richard Miller discusses the procedure used by the Industrial Relations Research Institute (IRRI) to evaluate tenure.

00:49:01	The IRRI was unique on campus in permitting student participation in its executive, curriculum, and admissions committees.  The university legislated that the executive committee should be limited to tenured faculty, and the dean’s office threatened to take over the committee unless the IRRI removed students from it.  Eventually, students were permitted to attend but could not officially vote in the executive committee.  The IRRI also set up an administrative committee on which students, junior faculty, and academic staff could serve.

00:59:08	RM relates controversies over the recruitment of minorities to the IRRI and discusses a joint venture among US industrial relations programs to provide fellowships for minority students.

01:07:31	He describes the admissions requirements for the IRRI’s MA and PhD programs.

01:13:57	RM cites Gerald Somers as having the greatest legacy of any director of the IRRI, in terms of fundraising and intellectual impact.  He thinks that James Stern was a significant director because of his administrative success in changing the structure and curriculum of the IRRI.  Lee Hansen was also successful in working with the dean of L&S to recruit faculty under precarious circumstances.

01:20:01	He sketches out a cycle of the fortunes of the field of industrial relations: after coalescing as a field of study after the Second World War, industrial relations lost its popularity, particularly in the discipline of economics.  IR reached a low point in the early 1970s as a result of its narrow concern with trade unions and collective bargaining, but the field has since revived by adopting a wider theoretical and empirical basis.

01:25:30	RM talks about the state of industrial relations programs across the country.  He remains optimistic about the fate of the IRRI at UW.

1:28:57	End of side.  End of tape.  End of interview.

Second Interview
(December 29, 2004)

Tape 2/Side 1

00:00:32	Richard Miller describes his interest in international industrial relations and his early involvement in the Industrial Relations Research Institute.  He became associate director of the IRRI in 1968.

00:03:07	He talks about the “golden age of industrial relations” from the 1950s to the 1970s.

00:04:08	RM describes the involvement of IRRI students in the protest movements of the late 1960s.

00:09:35	He describes the compromise offered to the IRRI after Dean David Cronon rejected departmentalization.  The IRRI received budget lines to be shared with other departments.

00:12:47	He thinks that the death of Gerald Somers extinguished the “spark” of the IRRI at a time when the program needed his vision and administrative and argumentative skills to stave off budget cuts and maintain intellectual links between the program and the economics department.  

00:20:03	RM discusses his service as director of the IRRI for a second time in 1990.  Overall, he felt that the program was in good shape.

00:25:41	However, Dean Donald Crawford’s quality reinvestment scheme weakened the IRRI.
		[End side 1]

Tape 2/Side 2

00:28:17	W. Lee Hansen narrates some of the history of the Industrial Relations Research Institute in the 1990s.

00:33:20	Richard Miller talks about how the IRRI lost some of its supporting faculty due to turnover in the management department.

00:34:00	The IRRI’s failure to recruit a new director contributed to the ease with which the College of Letters & Science closed the program.

00:36:44	Hansen and RM talk about the abortive attempt to have the business school take over the IRRI.

00:37:54	Although he hoped that the IRRI would survive, RM knew this was not realistic: there was no longer any support from campus departments and the field of industrial relations had changed drastically.  He thinks the only means of survival would have been to move the IRRI into the business school.

00:42:14	Hansen enumerates the factors contributing to the closure of the IRRI.

00:46:53	RM talks about the drift of the economics department away from the IRRI. He and Hansen proceed to discuss the difficulties met by the IRRI in replacing retired faculty.

00:55:02	End of side.  End of tape.  End of interview.

END