UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #220
FELLMAN, DAVID

FELLMAN, David (1907- )
Professor of Political Science
At UW: 1942-1943; 1947-1979

Interviewed: 1982		
Interviewer: Donna Hartshorne
Indexed (time code) by: Alexis Puzon
Length: 2 hours, 41 minutes

[See Index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (April 20, 1982): Tapes 1 & 2

Tape 1, Side 1

00:00:01

DH:	Mr. Fellman, I think maybe it would be nice if you began at the beginning, and tell me something about your early life, your childhood, your parents and what kind of family you grew up in.
DF:	All right. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska on September 14, 1907. My parents were immigrants from Russia. They came from the western-most province of Russia known as Volhynia. And they lived in what was known in Yiddish as a shtetl, meaning a small town. As a matter of fact, I think that the first time my parents ever saw a railroad was when they left Russia to come to the United States.
DH:	Oh really?
DF:	They lived in a little village way off in the middle of nothing, I guess. They lived close to the old Austro-Hungarian border.  And my father was a member of a large but very poor family.  I think the family made its living running an inn. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, was an innkeeper, which was not an unusual occupation for the Jews in the Pale of Settlement in western Russia. My father was also a Chassid, a member of the Chassidic sect, which means that he was a member of that branch of the Jewish faith which was most emotional, most excitable, and given to rather loud prayers; and not as intellectual as other branches of the Jewish faith. The Chassidim were also the most orthodox. Well, I wouldn’t say the most orthodox, but they were certainly orthodox.  In any event, my father served his four years in the Russian army, which was required.  Then he got married, he married a woman ten years his junior from a near—by town, their marriage being arranged by a marriage broker. I think my father never saw my mother until he married her.
DH:	Oh my goodness.
DF:	My mother must have been a beautiful woman. I have pictures of her, of course, that go pretty far back. And I once asked my father, “What if, when you got to her town, you discovered that the broker had misrepresented things, and that you were going to marry an ugly woman, would you have married her?” and he said, “I think I would, it was all settled.  Marriages were arranged between families.” But I said, “Weren’t you a little relieved when you found that your wife-to-be was a beautiful young woman?” He said, “Yes I was.” Which means that my father was a normal human being. In any event, he served his four years, then he got out, and got married, and he had two sons quickly.  And then the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1905 and since he had no feeling of loyalty to a government that oppressed his people, he, as many others did, simply headed for the border.  He told me he got on a white horse and went across the Austro-Hungarian border. I might say that in those days you didn’t need travel papers, passports were unknown, you simply went about as you liked, you didn’t need identification papers, and he had none. But he didn’t have enough money to take mother and my two older brothers, so he came alone. This was not unusual among the early immigrants.  He came to Omaha because a couple of uncles had preceded him there, and one just followed another; and he worked very hard for a year and made enough money to send for mother and the two boys. They came over in the steerage, as he did.  
00:04:19
And I gather that that trip from this little town, this little shtetl in western Russia to Hamburg, then to Liverpool, then in the steerage to New York, must have been a terribly difficult experience.
DH:	It certainly sounds it.
DF:	They often talked about it, and of course, the immigrants’ experiences have been discussed in many books by historians and sociologists.  It was a psychological burden to move from one culture to another.  My parents didn’t know a word of English when they came here.  My mother didn’t know many more words when she died many years later.  But they came to Omaha and I was the first born in Omaha.  There were in all seven children in my family, of whom six are still alive.  There were six boys and one girl.  I was the third in line, third from the top, but the next older one, Lou, died many many years ago (suicide), when I was still a student in college, so in effect there were six of us, over the years.  And we’re pretty well scattered around, though we get together once in a while.  We’re very much a family.   
00:05:42
My father never had very much in the way of worldly goods; he was very religious.  He was very reluctant to let me go to college.  My two older brother didn’t even finish high school because he needed their earnings.  But my father was reluctant to see me go to college because he thought it would undermine my religion.  My father’s culture was entirely religious and very orthodox and very old worldly.  In any event I was always a stubborn person.  Since I was on my own and worked my way through, I was able to do as I pleased and I went to the University of Nebraska.
DH:	Now, I have a question about this. Two questions. First, what did your father do when he was in Omaha?
DF:	Oh, he was a grocer, he had a little store.  He started out with a very small Mom-and-Pop sort of store and then as the boys grew older and could help him he graduated and later in life he had a rather nice, rather large grocery story, and did pretty well at it.  Never made a lot of money, but he made a living, and supported us.  But we all helped too.  I might add that I had the great good fortune of going to what was then regarded, and I’m certain that it was correct, one of the very best high schools in the United States, Omaha Central High School.  It was a famous high school in those days, with very high standards.  I’ve always believed, and I still believe, that the high school years are critically important for a young person’s educational and cultural development.  And it was my great good fortune to go to a first class high school.  I think I learned more there than I learned in college.  I had four years of Latin, four years of English, four years of history, it was real good solid stuff, none of this beginning and intermediate badminton, or anything like that.  I graduated from high school in 1925; it was a big high school, my graduating class probably had 600 people in it.  And I then went to the University of Nebraska.
DH:	Now why did you, is it because of the high school that you think you went to the university, when your parents had not this kind of education and your brothers didn’t go?
DF:	Well, I would say that my father discouraged me from going, although I think I would have gone anyhow, but I’m merely saying that he didn’t encourage me to go.  It was not his idea.  He didn’t say to me, “Well, you must go to college and get an education.”
DH:	Why did you want to go when your brothers did not?
DF:	I just enjoyed going to school, I guess. I had a fine high school record. Gee, I hope I don’t sound boastful when I tell you that in my four years in high school, and this was one of the most demanding high schools in the country, I had all A’s.
DH:	Very great.
DF:	It was a good record, and it just was expected.  And then I was a member of the state championship debating team, and I also won the stat extemporaneous speaking contest, both in my senior year.  So everybody thought, as I did, that I’d just have to be a lawyer since I was a good public speaker. So I went to the university, and I went to the University of Nebraska because somebody came in from Lincoln to interest me in going there.  I had never thought I could afford to leave home, and there is a university in Omaha, a Jesuit school known as Creighton University.  It has a law school and many Omaha lawyers were graduates of Creighton.  That’s where I intended to go, but at the last moment I was offered a job because a new fraternity was starting up and they needed some pledges.  This was a fraternity for Jewish boys.
DH:	At Nebraska?
DF:	At Nebraska. And the rabbi of the conservative synagogue in Lincoln, who was interested in the group, came in and offered me a job teaching in his religious school.  I had a very good religious training, I went to what we call Hebrew School, which is a school after the public school is over, through age 15, so I, as a matter of fact, read the whole Old Testament in the original Hebrew, and I was well into Talmud by the time I quit.  So I had a pretty good background; I had enough background to teach youngsters how to read the prayer book.  So that’s how I worked my way through college, I taught every afternoon and Sunday mornings in their Sunday School at the conservative synagogue in Lincoln.  And it was very convenient.  I taught from four to six, which means I could take a normal program of courses at the university, since there were not many classes that met after four in the afternoon.  And that saw me through four years of college.  I always had a sense of guilt about making my living that way, because I never thought I knew enough to teach Hebrew and related subjects, but in any event I was in no position to be a chooser, these were times of great economic distress and I was lucky to get any job at all.  But it saw me through college.  
00:11:33
I majored in political science.  I went there with the intention of being a lawyer and after three years of arts and science work I went to the law school in Lincoln, at the University of Nebraska.  I had a full year of law, the first year, which I did not enjoy at all.  And I simply changed my mind and since I had always enjoyed political science, in which I took my major, I went back to do graduate work in political science.  And I remember writing a letter to my father telling him.  He was in no position to advise me.  I simply told him that I’d changed my mind and that instead of being a lawyer I think I’ll try to have a career in teaching.
DH:	Was he disappointed?
DF:	My brothers told me afterwards that that was probably the happiest letter he ever received.
DH:	Oh, you mean, happy from your point of view?
DF:	Well, from my father’s point of view.  You must understand that an immigrant like my father, with his background, tended to regard the word ‘lawyer’ as synonymous with the word ‘crook.’  This is a typical peasant attitude that he regarded lawyers as a pack of crooks.  And on the other hand, he had great respect for teaching and of course, for scholarship.  And so my brothers told me that I really made him about as happy as I could, when I wrote that fateful letter and told that I had switched over into teaching rather than to stay in law.  
00:13:15
But while I didn’t enjoy the law, I did well in law school. The courses aren’t particularly difficult, and my grades were high, but I just didn’t think I wanted to spend my life doing that kind of work, so I pulled out and took my degree in 1929, my B.A. degree, with Phi Beta Kappa honors.  Then I took the master’s degree and I had the good fortune, of writing a thesis, then required, about the constitutional law of Nebraska, in fact.  Indeed the subject was “Due Process of Law in Nebraska.”  And I guess it was a pretty good job, it was better than my Ph.D. dissertation, I might say.  And the editor of the Nebraska Law Journal, who was a law professor, saw my thesis, at least I showed it to him, he liked it so much that he published the whole thing as four leading articles.  Four full-length articles.  So I guess that when I went away to Yale for my Ph.D. work, I already had about 200 pages in print, which was a pretty good start for a young man.  It gave me a feeling of security that I could do the work.
DH:	Now, why did you choose Yale for your Ph.D. work?
DF:	Well, I spent one year on an M.A. and got my master’s degree in 1930, and then I stayed on at the University of Nebraska.  The Political Science Department was very short-handed and they needed somebody to teach elementary course.  So I was an assistant instructor, which is about the lowest creature in the educational world, for one year.  I remember I taught nine hours, three courses each semester, large enrollments, no reading help of any kind, and they paid me the magnificent sum of $900 for the whole year.  They didn’t throw their money around.  
00:15:21
But I taught one year, and then I knew that I didn’t think a Nebraska Ph.D., which I could have for the asking, would be worth the bother, and I wanted to go to a quality school.  Well, that was 1931 and we were into the Depression and I just had to have a fellowship.  My choices were first Harvard, second Chicago, and third Yale.  But while I got cordial letters from the chairmen of the departments at Harvard and Chicago, they said they just didn’t have any money.  If I’d come there on my own for a year and make a record, maybe they could take care of me in my second year.  But Yale, which was way down on my list, was really a – Yale’s political science department, which is now very eminent, was a very poor department in those days.  But they did make an offer of a university fellowship for the magnificent sum of $600, and they took $325 back for tuition.  So it, well I—
DH:	What did you live on?
DF:	Well, I borrowed from my older brother who had a store in Omaha, and was in business for himself, and he was very nice about helping me.  I repaid him later on.  And I also taught in the religious school of a downtown synagogue in New Haven, and I had three years there.  I had a university fellowship my first year.  Then, my second year I had a good fellowship, known as a Bloch fellowship, B-L-O-C-H.  He was a rich moneybags from Philadelphia, as I recall, that gave Yale some money.  My third year I had a Sterling, which is, I guess, like a Vilas here.  So I had a Sterling fellowship my third year, and so in my second and third years I made enough to live on.  I got married at the end of my second year in New Haven to Sara Dinion.  And she insists that I always make it clear that she spells her name S-A-R-A, no H.  She was one of five children, and when I met here she was teaching in a public school in New Haven, and had been teaching for several years.  And it was from this life that I rescued her by marrying her.  In any event, we were married during my dissertation year, which was my third year.  
00:17:57
Then there was a problem of getting a job, and there weren’t any jobs in 1934, when I got my Ph.D.  The only offer I had was from my old school, Nebraska, they needed an instructor.
DH:	They were still shorthanded?
DF: 	Oh yes, and they knew me, and I knew them, so that’s the job I took.  And I went out there in 1934, taught twelve hours each semester, large classes, no reading help, no assistance of any kind.  My opening salary was $1500, which was pretty rough; it wasn’t a lot of money, even though things were much cheaper then.  And my wife stayed on in New Haven, moved in with her parents, and during my first year as a full-time instructor, she taught in New Haven and saved her money.  We didn’t even have enough money to bring out our belongings to set up house in Lincoln.  So we were separated for a year, except that I saw her during the Christmas recess.  And then she came out the next year, and we got an apartment, and set up house. And while I never made much money, it was very important during the bottom of the Depression to have some job.  It really didn’t matter an awful lot whether you made a lot of money or not, because some job with some salary coming in regularly was just desperately important. And I always had a position.  We didn’t suffer, we lived modestly.  It took us seven years before we could afford a used Chevy, our first car.  And we waited seven years for our first child. But we always had a decent roof over our heads and we didn’t starve and we had a very pleasant life.   Lincoln is a very attractive town, it’s very much like Madison, same size, white collar, state capital, state university, very much alike.  The only thing is that Lincoln doesn’t have any hills, they have an artificial pond now, but we had no water then either.  
00:20:11
But I stayed in Lincoln for thirteen years and my promotions there were very slow.  I had a problem with my department head, who was deeply prejudiced against me, I think because of my religion.  In any event, nobody cared much for him, but my promotions were very slow; it took me about eight or nine years, I recall, before I became an assistant professor.  Promotions were slow during the Depression, generally speaking, and then later on I was made an associate professor with tenure.  This is as far as I got at the University of Nebraska.  
00:20:59
In 1942 we’d gone to war and the department here in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, just fell apart, most of the members of this department left.  But there were still students and they needed people to teach them and I was invited to come here as a visiting professor for one year.  I and another friend of mine, Jasper Shannon, who was teaching at the University of Kentucky and who had a Wisconsin Ph.D.  Jasper and I came here in 1942 and we taught for a year.  And then two years later, when the war was over and the G.I.s began to stream back into college, the University of Wisconsin went on a three-semester plan for a short time, which means they had a summer semester, not a summer session, but a full semester.  It began around June 1, and ended around September 1.  And I was invited to come in and teach in that summer semester.  That must have been the summer of 1946, I think.  By then I had two children, we had a daughter, Laura, in Lincoln in 1940, and our son, Michael, was born in 1943 at Madison General when we were here during that visiting year.  As we were driving back to Omaha and crossing the state of Iowa, I said to my wife, “Well, we’re never going to do this again; if we ever make this trip again it’ll be for good, or not at all.”  We’d traveled back and forth twice.  
00:22:59
Shortly after I got back I was invited by letter to come back here as a professor, and since they knew me and I knew them, I didn’t come in here for the usual interviews, there was nothing to learn.
DH:	Didn’t have to make the trip for that?
DF:	No. So, I simply waited until I got a telegram telling me that the regents had confirmed the appointment.  I resigned my position at Nebraska and came her in the fall of, well it was in the summer of 1947.  And I remember vividly that summer, it was the hottest summer I had ever lived through.  I thought it would never end; that terrible heat continued; we came here in August and it continued through September and October and well into November. It was a very, very hot summer.
DH:	I’d be interested in knowing what recommended the University of Wisconsin to you.  Why you decided to leave Nebraska?
DF:	Oh, the decision to come here was probably the easiest decision I ever made.  I don’t think I even gave it five minutes of thought.
DH:	Why?
DF:	Because this is a very distinguished university.  
00:24:17
And, in fact, I would say that coming here was the result of an accident, that somebody in the department whom I had known in Nebraska, was teaching here, and I’m sure he put up my name.
DH:	Who was that?
DF:	That was Harold Stoke.
DH:	Harold Stoke.
DF:	Yes.  Harold W. Stoke.  He died just a couple of weeks ago.  Harold was a professor, he was a colleague of mine in Lincoln, we were very good friends.  And in 1942 he was a professor of political science and he was E.B. Fred’s assistant graduate dean.  And I’m sure when they had department meetings and they were wondering whom to invite, that Harold must have recommended me.  So that gave me a chance to get my foot in the door, and when a real position opened up here they thought of me and already knew me.  But, no, that decision didn’t cause any pain at all.  It was a very easy decision to make.  
00:25:23
	The University of Nebraska is a nice place, and we did not have a bad life there, but it’s not a first-rate school, and it isn’t a first-rate school today.  Its chief claim to fame is in football.  Although, actually, during my years there we had a pretty fair political science department; it was really quite good.  I think it was much better than it is today, the people who gave it its quality have all since gone to their respective rewards.  I think I’m the only one still alive.  Harold Stoke was the last one to go, but we had a rather strong department.  
00:26:02
But as you probably have learned, many professors have come here from Nebraska.  Dave Cronon is an example, we had a librarian here who was the Nebraska librarian, Gilbert Doane, who was here for many years.
DH: 	Oh yes, he was involved in the archives early on.
DF:	Yes, and then Bob Reynolds in history came from Nebraska and there was a very popular professor of comparative literature, I forgot his name, who came here from Nebraska.  And John Hicks, the famous historian, came here from Lincoln, so there’s been a continuous hemorrhage of faculty people from Nebraska to Wisconsin.  The University of Nebraska was one step on the academic ladder, but it was not near the top.  So I have never regretted coming here; I think it’s the best single thing that ever happened to me professionally.
00:27:04
DH:	Well, the fact that you stayed here until retirement suggests that you weren’t unhappy hers.
DF:	Oh, it was no suffering being a member of this faculty and it was a great joy to come here.  And I had the added experience of helping to develop or redevelop the department that had fallen apart as a result of the war years, and we really started from scratch.  We have about thirty-five people now, but I thing when I came here we had only seven or eight in all.  And as I came here two of our best people left, Bill Ebenstein went to Princeton, and John Gaus who was a very prominent person on this faculty, left to go to Harvard, and Frederick Austin Ogg, after whom Ogg Hall is named, was an old man almost ready to retire.  So the department had a lot of rebuilding to do, almost from scratch.  We started out with very few veterans, and Bill Young, William H. Young, came here just a few weeks before I did, and Jim McCamy came here before I did, and then I came, and so I had a hand as a professor in helping to develop what I think has become a very strong department.  
00:28:37
We always rate - for whatever the ratings are worth - our department almost invariable rates among the top ten in the country.  And it was an interesting experience to have a hand in the recruiting of a strong faculty for this department.  And that’s been a source of great pleasure to me.  Now the other great advantage of Wisconsin over Nebraska is of course the fact that we do serious graduate work here.  We were authorized to give Ph.D.’s in Lincoln, but during all the years I taught there we never gave a Ph.D.
DH:	Not one?
DF:	Not one.  I always thought if the student was any good he ought to get a Ph.D. in a school that had more prestige.  If he wasn’t any good who wanted him?  So during my long stay there, thirteen years, we never had one.  There have been a few Nebraska Ph.D.’s since I left, but I have always disapproved of a weak department like that giving Ph.D.’s; you don’t have much when you have it.  This sounds a little snobbish, but this is an aspect of academic life that we can’t ignore.  
00:29:54
But I had a lot of Ph.D.’s, especially in my early years here, among the returning G.I.’s, who did very good work and who made places for themselves in higher education, and whose successes have given me a great deal of satisfaction.
DH:	Now along in there, I note at some point that you taught in a G.I. school in Florence.  How did that come about?  Was this in this period of time?
DF:	Yes, when the shooting stopped in Europe, the army set up what we called G.I. Universities, largely just to keep the boys busy while they were being regrouped and retrained for the war in the Far East, which was still going on.  So they had one school in England at Shrivenham, and one in France at Biarritz, and they had a third school in Florence, Italy.
00:30:49	End of Tape 1, Side 1
Tape 1, Side 2
00:30:51
DF:	I was in Lincoln at the time and just out of the blue somebody called me from the War Department in Washington, and asked if I would like to fly over to Florence and teach the G.I.’s in this G.I. University, as we called it.  I think I was invited because a friend of mine had already been invited, the same Jasper Shannon that I’ve mentioned before, who was already recruited since he had been living in Washington and had access to the people who made the appointments.  In any event, I had to leave my family and I flew over alone.  And that was in the summer, late summer of 1946.  We had a school with about 2,500 students at a time, these were soldiers who were flown in from various posts in the Mediterranean area.  They came all the way from Gibraltar and Cairo and I think they were brought there as a sort of reward for good behavior.  And it was really a rest and recreation experience more than an educational experience.  They came for a month; each student had four weeks with us; every class met every day.  I taught a class, I remember, at 11 o’clock every day, that was my teaching load.  I taught a course on American government; one semester I taught a little course on constitutional law.  We were required to take roll, and with three unexplained absences the students went back to their outfits.  I mention this because that was the best attendance I’d ever had in my life.  One of the curious things about teaching at the University of Wisconsin is the poor attendance; you get used to the empty seats, but there’s a cavalier attitude about coming to class, and during the last ten years of my teaching here I didn’t even bother to take roll.  I don’t think very many professors take roll anymore.  I think it’s unfortunate, but that’s how things have developed.  But I certainly had good attendance in Florence.  But at the end of four weeks all our students were sent back to their outfits and we had a week free to pot around.  One week we spent in Rome, one week we spent in Bologna, the army was very nice to us.  And then we’d get a new student body.
DH:	Start all over.
DF:	And we’d start over.  The school folded up in December as I recall, December ’46, and I was transported back to the United States on an aircraft carrier, called the Randolph.  It was a major aircraft carrier.  We sailed out of Naples and it was used as a troop carrier, much to the annoyance of the sailors.  They packed some six to seven thousand returning G.I.’s in the deck below the flight deck, the hangar deck; it was an enormous ship and that’s how I came back to the United States.  I remember it was a very stormy crossing, and I was the only one in my part of the ship who wasn’t seasick.
DH:	How do you account for that?
DF:	I’m not really a very good traveler, I don’t know, I just managed to get by.  One morning when I went down for breakfast, I was the only one there.   But that was my so called G.I. University experience.  We gave exams, we had textbooks, and we made a record of their grades, and some American universities allowed some credit for that work.  It would be up to each individual school whether it would pay attention to it, but it’s my impression that most schools gave some credit to the G.I.’s who had a record of grades in our program in Florence.  But it was easy work I only taught one course a day.  They were really over staffed when I got there.  And I taught a class at 11 every day, and then the rest of the day I spent sight-seeing.
DH:	Well Florence is a nice place to be.
DF:	I went sight-seeing every day for four months and I must say there are many things I haven’t seen yet in Florence, and I’ve been back twice since then.  It is one of the world’s great cities and the heart of the old city is a great outdoor museum; don’t even have to go into a building.  It’s a wonderful, wonderful city.
00:35:57
DH:	Then you came back and began your serious career here at the--?
DF:	Well I was serious before I left, but—
DH:	Oh, you had started before you left?
DF:	Yeah, I started in ’47. No, no, I beg your pardon. No, I came here, the following here I came to – that’s right.
DH:	I was wondering about the dates.
DF:	Well, all I’m trying to say is that I was serious at Nebraska, too.
DH:	On, I didn’t mean that you weren’t serious, I mean—
DF:	I began my Wisconsin career the following year, when I came here and began teaching in September 1947.  
00:36:28
And I think my great good fortune here was that many years later I was given a Vilas chair, and I had the Vilas chair for my last fifteen years.
DH:	Fifteen?
DF:	Yes.
DH:	Well, that’s a good long time.
DF:	Well, you have to hold a Vilas chair fifteen years to be eligible for a Vilas pension, which I now have.
DH:	I didn’t know there was a Vilas pension.
DF:	Oh yes, there’s a Vilas pension. It’s provided for in the will, but you have to hold the chair fifteen years.  I’ve often warned the chancellor that no one should be appointed to a Vilas professorship if he’s over fifty-five.
DH:	Otherwise he hasn’t got it.
DF:	Because he won’t make the pension, and he’ll be sore about it.
DH:	That’s quite true.
DF:	Well, it certainly sweetened up my life here. The Vilas chair meant that I had a light teaching load, lots of free time to do my scholarly work, and I think the greatest single advantage of the Vilas chair was that I had money to pay for a part-time secretary of my own.  Professors badly need secretarial help, and it was great, and I had the good fortune of having a very fine, efficient young woman working for me all fifteen years.  I didn’t need a full-time secretary, I didn’t generate that much work, but I certainly made use of the half-time.  And there was enough money for many years to hire an assistant as well; I used him mainly as a paper-reader and helper in my big course.  But that was a nice bonus which I enjoyed through my declining years at the university. 
00:38:20
DH:	I was wondering, looking at your publications and your committee work and all, how you managed to do all that and I can see this has been a big asset.
DF:	Well, I was a very busy man, and I think—I don’t want to sound boastful, but I think I worked at my job.  I always wanted to be a participant, I never was happy to be a bump-on-a-log; if I was going to be a member of this faculty I wanted to be an active member, and I had a great deal of interesting positions or chores or functions to perform during my years at Wisconsin.  Would you like me to summarize?
DH:	Well, you summarize and then I might like to go into details on some.
DF:	All right.  
00:39:20
Now let me see, I was elected to the University Committee, which is our prize committee, for a three-year term in 1960, I think it was, and during my third year I was chairman of the University Committee.  I regarded that as one of my best years.  I think the chairman of the University Committee has a wonderful experience.  Ed Young often told me that his year as chairman of the University Committee was the high point of his career at Wisconsin.  And I can’t say that for myself, because in those days the University Committee wasn’t nearly as busy as it is now.  In fact, during my chairmanship the only serious question we had to settle was whether we should accept the Rose Bowl invitation.
DH: 	Well that was a big issue at that time, wasn’t it?
DF:	It was a big issue, but since the six of us would have been lynched if we had said no, we had no real choice but to tell President Harrington that, in our opinion, as long as we’re a member of the Big Ten we should accept our responsibilities, one responsibility being that whoever wins the title, has the number one spot in the Big Ten, goes to the Rose Bowl against the first team on the West Coast.
DH:	Now this issue’d come up before, I think, too.
DF:	Well, that was the first time we had a Rose Bowl invitation.  But President Harrington, who was a very shrewd operator, didn’t want the onus of accepting that invitation on his own responsibility, and he didn’t want a special meeting of the faculty to haggle over it, and there wasn’t time for a faculty meeting, so her merely asked me to convene the University Committee and to advise him whether he should accept the invitation.  Of course we advised him to take it.  But I don’t think we had any real choice in the matter.  That was the big even of the year, as nearly as I can recall.  
00:41:40
The other big event was during an earlier part of my service on the University Committee, the Medical School dean got into trouble with his faculty, and there was a great to-do about that.
DH:	Which dean was this?
DF:	I forgot his name.
DH:	There were several of them.
DF:	Well, he was really let go.  But he took his case to us, and we were involved, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.
DH:	You don’t mean Middleton do you?
DF:	No, no, no, it was the first dean after Middleton.  He was a short fellow, I remember, I forgot his name.
DH:	We can check that.
DF:	Yes, but he had a great run-in with the surgery department, as I recall.  Tony Curreri and he were at each other’s throats.  We were involved, although there was not much we could do, and there was not much that we accomplished, but we did get involved.  
00:42:40
But in those days being on the University Committee was largely concerned with symbolic events.  I represented the faulty, for example, when we had the dinner for the new president, Fred Harrington.  I was at the speaker’s table as chairman of the University Committee, simply because somebody had to be up there to represent the faculty.  That sort of work went with the job, but it wasn’t demanding.  Nowadays it’s terribly time consuming, a very demanding job, but it wasn’t in the early ‘60s when I was there.  
00:43:28
Well, later on, I got involved, when I left the chairmanship of the University Committee, I wrote President Harrington a letter and I told him that it was about time that the university had a decent set of rules and regulations.  Alden White, our perennial secretary of the faculty had done his best to gather together whatever rules he could dig out from the regents’ minutes and faculty minutes, and he had a so-called Red Book that was used, but it was a hopeless compilation of things.  Many of the provisions there were no longer followed, much of it was obsolete. And I always thought a well-run university ought to have some well established rules, at least on things that matter to the faculty.  And I advised him that he ought to set up a committee to codify the rules, restate and modernize—which is what we mean by codification—the rules and regulations of the university faculty.  And as I should have anticipated, but didn’t, his reply was, “That’s a good idea, I appoint you chairman,” which taught me the price of opening your mouth is that you get involved.  And then he appointed several people to work with me that I recommended and then I asked him to have a member of his staff serve on the committee with us so that there’d be some liaison with the president’s office.
DH:	Do you remember the members of the committee?
DF:	Oh yes. Well, I remember Don Percy was there, he was on the president’s staff and Don often told me that he first learned the rules of the university through this experience with us.  Abner Brodie of the Law School was on the committee and, Vernon Carstenson in the history department, who later went to the University of Washington in Seattle, was a member of the committee, and my memory is now running out of names. There were at least two more. Oh, there was another law professor who’s recently left, John Conway.  John Conway had been for many years the statutory reviser downtown in the capitol building, and of course, he was very valuable for his expertise in framing concepts in general terms.  I think that was about it.  It was a small group.  It was kept small so that we could meet frequently.  
00:46:25
And we worked very hard, we worked for about six years, as I recall, I would say roughly from 1964 to 1970.  The president asked me if we would make our first order of business the restatement of the rules will respect to tenure, including such matters as faculty tenure, academic freedom, and faculty dismissals.  And that’s what we worked on first of all, and ... 
00:47:07
Our completed work was submitted to the regents, the Regents were very enthusiastic about our rules, which are really model rules; they’ve been copied all over the country.
DH:	Oh, they have?
DF:	And, in fact, I got a formal letter of commendation from the Board of Regents for our work on the faculty tenure rules.  These rules are still in the rules and regulations, though they’ve been touched up several times since then by later changes.
00:47:40
DH:	I was under the impression that sometime in the late ‘70s there was something done on this.
DF:	Yes, there was an overhaul of the rules not very long ago, about four or five years ago, as I recall.  But I think rules are always subject to change, and there are some changes with respect to some aspects of the faculty committee system, now pending before the Faculty Senate.  One of the institutions that our committee created was the Committee on Faculty rights and Responsibilities, the so-called R&R Committee, which has now become a terribly busy committee listening to appeals from the denial of promotion to tenure.  And there is some legislation pending to take some of the enormous burden off of the committee by at least permitting it to sit in panels so that not all eight of them have to sit on every case all the time.  It’s an elected committee, and I was elected to the first committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities and was re-elected once; I served as chairman.  I think I was chairman for about six years.  But we had nothing to do, we had no case at all.  The business of that committee came later.
00:49:16
DH:	Well, if there wasn’t this much to do, why was it felt necessary to have such a committee?
DF:	The original idea of the R&R committee was to have some committee available to protect professors who were subjected to disciplinary measures short of dismissal.  For dismissal we had already worked out a very careful set of procedures.  But there was nothing for disciplinary actions taken short of dismissal. And that was the original idea.  But later on, and I thought it was proper, the R&R committee was made the hearing committee for dismissals as well as for other disciplinary cases.  And its powers were further extended by other legislation dealing with the denial of tenure.  So that it’s become a very important and very busy committee.  But in my day, we were required by the written rules to report to the faculty every year.  My report was—each year I was happy to say that we had nothing to do.  And we never did meet and we never did anything.  That’s my idea of a good committee, one that does nothing.
00:50:45
DH:	Well, of course, the faculty, early on anyway, wasn’t anything like as large as it is today, was it so?
DF:	No, and there’s a certain tendency toward litigation which had developed throughout the country in higher education, which goes back only about ten to twelve years.  And this tendency to fight for your rights is altering the face of faculties around the country.
DH:	What do you think is involved?
DF:	Well, I suppose faculties, professors, are like other people, they don’t enjoy feelings of helplessness, and when they’re in trouble want to be judged by their peers and they want to be judged according to some fair procedure.  And the whole tendency of our rules and regulations has been to assure due process, what we call academic due process for professors on those things that matter to them, such as the imposition of discipline or dismissal, or denial of tenure, or anything else which is considered to be negative from the professor’s point of view.  And we’ve gone pretty far here because faculty opinion has always been unusually important at Wisconsin; we had more faculty self-determination, and more remedies vis-à-vis administrators, than are available to most faculties around the country.  
00:52:34
I know I was busy—I shall come to it in a moment—for many years with the American Association of University Professors, and I have spoken about academic governance problems all over the country.  Whenever I’d tell a college president, “Well, at Wisconsin this is the way we do it,” I always get the same answer, the president would throw up his hands and say, “Oh, Wisconsin isn’t like the rest of us.  There’s something special about that school.”  I think that from the point of view of faculty involvement in their own fate, this is an unusual school.  There are very few quality universities where faculty opinion is as significant and as decisive as it is here.
DH:	Now, I think this is what Dean Ingraham has referred to as, what he calls, faculty governance.
DF: 	Yes.
DH: 	And it’s been my impression that Wisconsin prides itself on this.  
DF:	Yes, indeed.  And it has every reason to.  There are very few schools that are as thoroughly committed as we are to peer review and peer judgment, which means that we’re not at the daily mercy of administrators.  And that has the advantage, I think, that it reduces the perennial state of warfare which exists on so many campuses between professors and administrators.  I think we get along better here.
DH:	Richard was telling me something about this, about a situation where a group of people were sitting around the table and it turned out that younger men were grumbling about, or complaining something about the administration and it turned out that they’d never been anywhere else.
DF:	That’s right, and it’s quite true that there are many people on our faculty who do not realize how well off they are because they have nothing with which to compare their experience.  I’ve often said that when I go on a trip to other campuses, when I come back here I want to get down and kiss the ground on which this university stands, because it’s a good place in which to live and to teach.  
00:54:59
Now, one of my long-range activities, I got into it—I have forgotten how I got into it—was my long service on the Honorary Degrees Committee. I was appointed to that committee in 1966, I think by president of the university, and I remained on the committee until I retired.  That was in 1979.  So I had a long service.  And I was chairman of the Committee on Honorary Degrees from 1971 to 1979.  And I rather enjoyed that, I enjoyed having a hand in selecting our candidates, I enjoyed helping entertain them when they came, and I enjoyed presenting them at the annual commencement.
DH:	Would you tell me a little bit about how you went about your work on the Honorary Degree candidates?
DF:	Well, the committee on Honorary Degrees is the largest committee we have here in terms of members; the president appoints ten people, and he usually puts a few deans on it, which I think is a good idea.  And each divisional committee elects several, it’s quite a large committee, it has about twenty-five or thirty members.  It’s all spelled out in our rule book, and an awful lot depends on the chairman; he has to assemble the material and digest it and present it to the committee in an understandable way.
DH:	By material you mean--?
00:56:51
DF:	Well, when a department recommends somebody for an Honorary Degree it submits supporting data, a bibliography, a vita, some account of the person’s life.  The idea of the Honorary Degree is to confer an honor, that is, to confer public recognition, upon someone who did something which is of great value to society.  I never believed that the Honorary Degree should be limited to academic people.  I always thought, for example, that a person who had a long honorable career in the legislature, or a person who served us well as governor, might well be awarded an honorary degree.  I got into a lot of trouble with some of my academic colleagues on precisely that ground, for they thought that politicians are lowly creatures who don’t deserve that honor, and this always annoyed me.  It seems to me that public service in the legislature or as governor is an honorific sort of service, and that it was quite proper to recognize and express our gratitude to people who had been important figures in the state government.  The message I always got from the regents was that they didn’t want to limit our honorary degrees to academic people.  And they were always very pleased when we recommend a man who had a great career in business or in law or medicine or some other profession.  I agree, for I thought that the honorary degrees should not be limited to honoring people like ourselves, professors in other schools.  We are limited here at Wisconsin by the rule that, although there are some rare exceptions, we will not award an honorary degree unless the individual had some connection with the University of Wisconsin or with the State of Wisconsin.  So we’re not free simply to look around, pick a distinguished person, and ask them to come here and get an honorary degree.
DH:	We don’t have the whole country at our beck and call?
DF:	No, we don’t, we’re limited to a Wisconsin connection.  Now, we construe that very loosely, and several times we were at the margins of the rule, but that has been our way of doing things. It’s written into our rules and has always been the case so far back as my memory goes. This took a lot of my time, over the years, and was sort of an interesting little hobby that I had developed; I spent many years on it.  I kind of miss the experience now.  
00:59:52
I served one year as chairman of the Committee on Nominations, which is an elected committee.  That was in 1964.  That’s a very important committee because in this big faculty you don’t get on a committee or even get a chance to be elected to a committee, unless you are nominated by the nominating committee, so that in effect the nominating committee chooses most of our committee members and the faculty functions largely through the instrument of committees.  So that was an important assignment, though I had it only one year.  People are rarely elected to the Committee on Nominations more than once.  For a while, when President Harrington was in charge, we had an experiment with a faculty assembly which represented all the units of the university system.  There were six chancellors under Harrington.  We had a unified system here before Governor Lucey forced a merger upon us of all the public colleges of the state.  But in Harrington’s early days we had six units.
DH: 	There were four, I think.
DF:	Well, there was a university here, there was one in Milwaukee, there was Extension with a chancellor, there was the Center System with a Chancellor, and there was Green Bay with a chancellor and there was Parkside.  There were six chancellors.  And while we had a faculty here to speak for us, we did not have a system faculty.  And since it was impossible to have an effective system faculty—though theoretically, any member of any one of these six units could come to a faculty meeting, it was very unusual for anyone in Milwaukee to come all the way to Madison—
01:01:59	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side 1
1:02:00
DF: 	And the professors in Milwaukee, for example, were very reluctant to make the long drive to Madison just to attend a faculty meeting, most of which didn’t deal with very important matters anyhow.  But since I thought that there ought to be some faculty input at the system level—this is before the merger we now have.
01:02:22
I through the codification committee, we devised a statute setting up a university system assembly.  It was, in effect, a faculty senate for all six units.  And membership was roughly apportioned to the size of each of the sis faculties.  So that a majority, I think, of the members of the faculty assembly were from Madison.  It turned out to be a mistake.  The faculty assembly was not a successful body.  And it gradually died.  No one ever killed it, we simply stopped calling it.
DH:	Would you explain why it wasn’t successful?
DF:	It wasn’t successful because it didn’t have enough to do.  There wasn’t enough system-wide business, which was of faculty concern.  The main function, I think, of the system president is to deal with the governor and the legislature with respect to the budget.  This is not a faculty function.  We were in no position to be of any help.  It turned out that the assembly meetings, after the excitement of one or two, simply petered out.  The kind of faculty business the faculty should be concerned with is a little more local and not system-wide.  This is what we learned.  That’s why since merger we’ve been very reluctant to set up a university system-wide senate; we have no such body.  And the president of the university system, today, has his problems in communicating with the various faculties because he doesn’t have an agency through which he can communicate conveniently.  
01:04:25
I don’t want to sound boastful, but reorganizing the university faculty was on my mind, and as chairman of the codification committee I was in a position where I could influence events; it was my thought to set up a faculty senate for Madison.  And I wrote the original statute creating the Faculty Senate.  It was worked over at many general well-attended faculty meetings, but it was basically on my initiative.
01:05:00
DH:	Will you tell me something about your thinking.  You said you’d been thinking this, why you felt that this was a good step to take?
DF:	Well, I observed much during my many years here.  I went to faculty meetings regularly, as a matter of duty, I guess.  I observed that if the faculty didn’t have very important things to discuss, very few people came.  With over 2,300 faculty people invited, there were many meetings that had no more than fifteen or twenty.  On the other hand, in a period of great excitement, as during the years of upheaval over the Vietnam War, we had faculty meetings that filled the Student Union, and they were almost as bad as the tiny ones.  You can’t have a decent meeting with a thousand people packed into a big hall.  And the floor on those huge meetings would soon be taken over by the show-offs and the people who like to talk to large audiences.  A faculty meeting of a thousand is not a deliberative assembly.  So that the turnout was either too small or too large, too small to be representative or too large to be effective.  So I thought if we had a representative system, an elective system with senators, that they could speak for all of us.  I was surprised at the amount of resistance I ran into.  I had always assumed in my naiveté that if anybody is familiar with representative institutions, it’s Americans.  We’ve had representative institutions at all levels of government, all through our history.  But there were many professors who were very, very reluctant to give up their right to attend a faculty meeting if that’s what they were of a mind to do.
DH:	Even though they might not have been going to meetings?
DF:	Yes.  They wanted the right to go.  I forgot to make another point.  Another objection to the old faculty system, the “come-if-you-like” system, was that it was a sure way of any determined minority having its way.  You simply called out your troops.  I remember when the dean of the College of Agriculture wanted to change the name of the college to its present name, he had his troops there.  I looked around, and I saw people there I had never seen before.  But, through his assistant deans, the dean had drummed up his faculty and they were all there to make sure they’d have their way.
DH:	Would this have been Pound, or before him?
DF:	It was, I guess Pound, yes, I think it was Pound.  In any event, there were objections to calling it the College of Human Resources and some people thought that sounded a little puffed-up.  In any event, the old faculty meeting system was a guarantee that any determined minority could have its way by simply coming out.  I remember on another occasion the physical education people, and there are a lot of them, all turned out.  I forget what the occasion was, but there was something they wanted, and they had their way because they were all there.  So, how the faculty would vote would depend on the happenstance of who happened to drop it.  And this troubled me a great deal.  I didn’t think that was the way representative institutions should function.  
01:08:42
The faculty had many long and anguished meetings to set up the senate.
DH:	Now was there a committee working on this?
DF:	It was my codification committee.
DH:	Oh, it was the same committee?
DF: 	We kept working on it.  We wrote the statute and then brought it to the faculty, and it was changed.  I lost about three battles in the course of that long struggle over the Senate.  My major disappointment was that I wanted the deans to be ex-officio members of the Senate.  I always thought that the deans are important resource people here who ought to be at Senate meeting because of what they know.  They have more command of the facts than most people do.  But, on the other hand, I thought that no dean who had had any sense would offer himself to an election because that would put his career on a referendum basis, and that would not be a very intelligent thing to do.  We just don’t run that kind of system of responsible government.  Thus, I thought the deans should not be required to go through the hazards of elections that they might lose.  On the other hand, I thought they ought to be there, so I wanted them to be ex-officio members.  I got voted down on that; the argument was that this was to be a faculty Senate, and that the deans were not members of the faculty.  I even disagreed with that, I always thought that one of the finest elements of the Wisconsin system was the close cooperation that we always had between deans and faculty.  I wanted to encourage that, and I didn’t want to build barriers between them.  But I lost that one.  I was very annoyed at losing it, and I still think that it would have been a good idea; the Senate is a large body, and we have about ten deans.
DH:	They can attend and listen, can’t they?
DF:	Yes, and I was going to say that it’s to the credit of David Cronon, the present Letters and Science dean, our most important dean, that he’s always there; he sits in the back of the room and once in a while he’s called on to say something.  He has the same right of any professor to speak there.  But he does come, he doesn’t let his pride stand in the way of his coming.  And I think it’s to his credit.  But some deans were annoyed by the way the thing was set up and have declined to come.  I think that’s unfortunate.  Secondly, I thought very strongly that the senate was much too large, it has about 240 members.
DH:	Even the senate was too large.
DF:	Yes.  The Senate as a whole is too large.  Again, many faculty people seemed petrified over the thought that maybe they wouldn’t be properly represented.  I don’t know why we’d have to have a Senate which is two and a half times the size of the United States Senate, which represents over two hundred million people.  But in any event, I got beat on that, and they came up with a ratio of 1 senator for every 10 faculty, or any major fraction thereof, and that comes to about 240 people.  I think the senate is too large; it’s too big a group.  Too many people over-awed by the size of the group are silent members, and it’s not of a good size to exercise the functions of deliberation, in my opinion.  I’d still like to see it cut down.  There was a provision that the Senate would be reviewed after a certain number of years, and this question was canvassed and it was clear that the faculty likes a big senate, and it was permitted to remain the way it is, the way it was set up.
01:12:42
	The third battle I lost was over the size of the quorum.  The quorum rule is a majority of all the members, and I was worried that there would be difficulties in making a quorum.  When I thought back at the poor attendance that we had at most faculty meetings, I was concerned that there was the possibility that in meeting after meeting we wouldn’t get 120 people there, and therefore you couldn’t legally conduct any business.  Well, on this point my fears turned out to be unfounded.  What I’ve learned, what we’ve all learned, is that if the members of a department designate one of their colleagues to represent them in the Senate, he feels an obligation to go.  And attendance has been very good.  There have been two or three rare occasions when a quorum was not present or when a quorum was dissipated or people left because it was getting late.  But I cannot honestly say that the quorum problem has been a serious problem, I wanted some simple rule like 50 or 75, something less than a majority.  But I think on that point I’ll have to confess that I was in error.  But on the other two points I still regret losing the fight.  But we had some very tense meetings, in the faculty over these matters.  The faculty was terribly afraid they were giving up precious rights, and they wanted to make sure they would be no worse off than they were then when we set up the Senate.
00:14:34
DH:	How do you think they feel about it now?
DF:	I think the Senate has been a great success.  And I also think that most professors feel kind of relieved that their consciences are clear, they don’t have to attend faculty meetings because they’ve got somebody they elected to represent them to do it for them.
DH:	And I can see your point that the person who’s elected to do this has a responsibility to others, whereas before, his responsibility was just to himself.
DF:	Just to himself.  That’s right.  And attendance has been very good and there’s been no serious quorum problem.  As a matter of fact, I think the Senate has saved the University from a lot of heartaches, which I’m very reluctant to discuss for any kind of a record.  We now have a real cross-section of the faculty present.  There are a lot of people in the medical faculty, and engineering, and other schools who in the old days rarely attended; now they’re there.  And the university Senate is an assurance that you’re going to get a good cross-section of the whole faculty, and its various segments and its various points of view.  And, without being very specific, I’m deliberately vague on this point—
DH:	I wish you’d develop this point.
DF:	No, I’d rather not.  But I think that the very representative cross-sectional character of the Senate has saved us from many screwball decisions that might have been made by a small group of determined people who come to a meeting early and stay late, and pack the meeting to get what they want.  And it’s to avoid the packing of the meeting which was my major concern in setting up the Senate in the first place.  And without being very specific, I do think, especially during the difficult years where we had serious student problems and faculty problems, that the very cross-sectional character of the senators gave us some protection against what I regard as screwball decisions.  This discussion doesn’t help much, but some old hands out here know what I’m talking about, I’m sure.
DH:	Well—
00:17:10
DF:	Well, I had other assignments.  I was a member of the honors committee of the Letters and Science College for three years.  I served for a number of years on the executive committee of the College of Education.  And for quite a few years I was a member of the Meiklejohn Lecture Committee, I served on it until we ran out of money.
DH:	What was that?
DF:	Well, some of Meiklejohn’s former students, who were proud of their experience, got some money together to pay for a lectureship, and a committee was set up to administer the money and to invite speakers to come.  I remember we had Justice Thurgood Marshall one year, Justice Abe Fortas one year, Justice Goldberg one year.  We had some very interesting people who gave Meiklejohn lectures, but we had a limited sum, and we finally ran out of money, so the committee was disbanded.  But it was kind of fun serving on the committee and meeting these people.  
00:18:14
I served one year as president of the Phi Beta Kapa Chapter of the university.  I served as president of the Wisconsin Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.  I took my turn as president of the University Faculty Club, and served as president of the Round Table Luncheon Club one year, so I had a number of chores over the years that involved me in the university’s affairs.  
00:18:52
I was a member of the Faculty Senate for four years and I might say that it was my idea to have a question hour; I borrowed that from the English House of Commons practice.  Each Senate meeting begins with a question period.  First questions are directed to the chancellor; they may be written out in advance and submitted, which is the desirable thing to do so that the chancellor can prepare his answers.  But anybody can get up and ask a question without warning.
DH:	This is not the same kind of material that gets onto the agenda?
DF:	No, no, this is outside the agenda.  And then when the chancellor is through answering whatever questions there may be, questions may be directed to the chairman of the University Committee.  So we have a question period which starts each meeting.  I think that’s been very successful.
DH:	Roughly, how long is this period?
DF:	It varies a great deal from one question answered in two minutes to questions that run for a good part of the period of the Senate sitting.  It varies, depending on what’s up and who’s doing the questioning.  We also permit supplementary questions, that is, one may ask a question, the chancellor answers, and if the questioner doesn’t like the answer or has something else to ask, he can get up and put a supplementary question.  The problem is to prevent that from degenerating into a debate, and that’s the business of the president officer; he’s been advised not to permit the question period to become a debating period.  So it’s a period for, in which faculty members may get information from the administrative head of the university.  I’m rather proud of the concept, I think it’s a good idea and I think it’s served us well.
DH:	Was this one of your ideas?
DF:	It was my own personal idea, yes.  I wrote the rules for it, too.
DH:	You did?
DF:	We have some written rules, bylaws, for the question period.  They’re in our rule book, I think.  
01:21:09
During my years here I had the pleasure of serving as a lecturer in a number of universities and this was part of my life.  In 1959 I was the Brown and Haley lecturer at the College of Puget Sound.
DH:	Where is that?
DF:	In Tacoma, just south of Seattle.  They have a well-known lectureship, the Brown and Haley lectureship.  It was endowed by a rich family that makes candy, the Haley family in Tacoma.  It carries a very good stipend and the lectures are published.  One of my books called The Limits of Freedom was the three Brown and Haley lectures that I gave in ’59.  I followed Merle Curti, he preceded me by a couple of years.  All this was a long time ago, but it was an interesting experience.  And then in 1964 I gave the Bacon Lectures at Boston University; the Bacon lectureship is a very ancient and reputable lectureship.  My three lectures were published as a book, Religion and American Law, as I recall the title.  And I was a visiting scholar at Western Michigan University one year, for one period of time.  I was also a visiting scholar at the University of Houston.  One year I gave the Sperry-Hutchinson lecture at the University of North Carolina.  Sperry-Hutchinson is the Green Stamps outfit.
DH:	Oh, yes.
DF:	The Sperry-Hutchinson lecture, University of South Carolina.  And I think my last one was the Charles Dillon Hall lecture in Law and Government at the University of South Dakota in 1969.  So I flitted about in this fashion.  
01:23:36
In my own profession of political science, I was always quite active.  I was once a member of the governing council of the American Political Science Association, and in 1959 I was elected vice-president of the Association.  And I was on the board of editors of the American Political Science Review.  I was also active in our regional association, the mid-west association, and I was president of that, and that’s the largest of the American regional associations, in the year 1959-1960.  And then following that in ’57 I was the founding editor of the Journal of the Mid-West Political Science Association.
DH:	Well, I wanted to ask you about that.  That was the Mid-West Journal of Political Science:
DF:	Yes, and it was renamed.  Over my vigorous objections a couple of years ago it was decided that the word, the term “Mid-West” sounded too provincial, so it was changed to the American Journal of Political Science.
DH:	Why did you object?
DF:	Well I thought that “Mid-West” described us, for it was a journal of the Mid-West Association.
DH:	And how did you happen to start this?  I know you were the first editor.
DF:	I was invited by the governing board of the association.  It was very funny, for the decision to launch a journal was made at the annual meeting of the Mid-West Association in 1956 when I was presiding as president.  And I was opposed to another journal, I just didn’t think the profession needed one.  It’s another one of my mistakes.  There plenty of need for journals, for we have an enormous profession and not enough outlets for publications.  But though I was opposed to it, I didn’t ever say I would have nothing to do with it, and when the officers and the governing board invited me to start the journal, why I accepted the invitation.  I thought it was an interesting challenge.  So I picked its name and its format, and I had quite a time assembling enough articles for the first issue.  I simply wrote letters to some fifty or sixty people around the country and asked them.  Oh yes, and I finally got enough articles together to get an issue out and from then on it was easy, for then I was overwhelmed with articles; there are plenty of people eager to get things published.
DH:	What kind of things were published?
DF:	These are professional political science articles.
DH:	Over the whole spectrum of political science?
DF:	Oh yes, yes.  It was an interesting experience, that’s when I learned that if you want to make enemies rapidly, you just get yourself appointed as editor of a journal, because you have to say “no” to most people.  You turn down most of the things that come in.  And most professors think (a) that they’re geniuses, and (b) they do you a great favor by sending you an article, and if you turn them down it’s just a sign that you’re feeble-minded and/or evil-minded.  And in any event you have to say “no.”  I tried to say “no” as graciously as I knew how, for I couldn’t possibly publish everything that came to me if they were all good.  And a lot of the stuff wasn’t any good at all.  So it’s a very demanding job and I got it started.  It’s now doing very well, it has a good circulation and it has standing as a reputable journal, and one of my most important satisfactions was getting that thing off the drawing boards and getting it into some kind of real life.  But that was in ’57 to ’59 that I was editor, and then I was glad to get rid of it, it was a terrible time-consumer.
DH:	It must have been.
DF:	Yes, I had to do all the work myself.  Proofread everything myself.  I had no secretarial help, noting.  I was reimbursed for the postage.
DH:	That was nice.
01:28:04
DF:	Oh, and I also served on a number of committees of the American Political Science Association.  I was the first chairman of the committee on professional ethics, which was set up not too many years ago, and I served on that committee for about five to six years.  That was an interesting assignment; our job was to frame ethics rules in response to queries that came to us from various people around the country.
DH:	What kind of ethics rules?
DF:	Oh, I remember we drafted a rule about the submission of articles to learned journals.  And we said for example it was unethical to submit an article to more than one journal at the same time, or to submit a manuscript to more than one publisher at the same time.  Multiple submissions, we were opposed to that.  We also have a rule on the misuse by the officers of the association of their positions, for political reasons; we figured that this is improper since that isn’t what their offices are for.  We have quite a few, I think we have about twenty-four more rules now, and very recently got a restatement of them.  But I was on that, I think I had a hand in drafting most of those rules.  We have a lot of ethical problems, we have some rules about tenure and, well, I just don’t remember off-hand I’d have to refresh my memory.
DH:	Well, you’ve given me some idea.
DF:	Yes, we have quite a few and I could give you the whole set, I have them here some place.  
01:30:25
Over the years, in addition, I suppose my major activity was in the American Association of University Professors.  I got into it almost accidentally.  A nominating committee put my name up for election to the council of the AAUP, that’s the governing body.  They elect ten people every year for three-year terms.  And given my background on American constitutional law, the chairman of Committee A, which is the heart of the Association, the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the committee that makes the investigations and makes judgments about violations of academic freedom around that country.  I was invited to join the committee.  Robert K. Carr, the chairman of the committee, later for many years president of Oberlin College, taught constitutional law at Dartmouth, knew me and knew my work and I knew him, and I guess he suggested me.  Since the association had to pay for the expenses of the trip to Washington for the council and since the committee always meets just before the council meets, they could get me for one expense account instead of two.  So they would put as many council members as possible on standing committees just to cut down on expenses.  But I happened to fit this committee, so I served on Committee A beginning 1957.  Then Bob Carr, the chairman, became president of Oberlin, which made him ineligible to hold an office in AAUP and, to my astonishment, because I barely knew my way around, I was asked to assume the chairmanship of Committee A, which is a very demanding job.  It took a great deal of energy and time and heartache.  But I was chairman of Committee A for five years and that’s the major position in the association.
DH:	Now what kinds of situations came up?
DF:	Committee A deals with complaints made by professors that they were mistreated by their administrations.  And then the committee appoints 
[Audio ends]
a small investigation committee to make an on-the-spot inquiry as to the facts. The investigating committee then reports to Committee A.  The question is whether 
[Audio resumes]
--accepted principles of academic freedom and tenure were violated.
01:32:50	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
01:32:52
DF:	Committee A then proposes to the annual meeting that the offenders be put on a list of censured administrations; censure is our form of pronouncing anathema on an institution that mistreats a professor in terms of academic freedom and tenure.  And I think that, even though AAUP is now pretty deeply involved in trade unionism, Committee A is still the heart of the association.  That’s what it’s all about, academic freedom and tenure.
DH:	How do the various institutions who are censured respond to this?
DF:	Oh, they vary, some couldn’t care less and others are very worried about it.  It doesn’t help the school to be on what is often called, mistakenly I believe, a black list.  And our censured list is widely distributed, we publish it frequently in all our publications, but so do many learned societies publish it.
DH:	The same list?
DF:	The same list.  So the word gets around.  Well, governing bodies begin to worry, they don’t like to see their school listed as a place where it’s undesirable to teach, and parents begin to wonder whether they’re wasting their money sending their children to a school of which AAUP formally disapproves.  It’s a powerful moral weapon, and we know it does happen, it has an enormous impact on the president, who’s usually the guilty party and who usually carries the onus.  And you don’t help the career of a young president to censure him.  He gets tagged as a man who is unreliable.  So that while it’s only a moral weapon it’s a powerful weapon, and we exercise it with great care.  But it carries a great deal of weight.  
01:34:29
Perhaps before we conclude, let me mention a few other things that are related to what I was talking about before in connection to my activities as a member of my profession.  I had a senior research Fulbright fellowship, in Great Britain, for the year 1961-1962.  I had an office at the London School of Economics and I had a wonderful year in London.  Things were then inexpensive; we could see a fine show for one pound.  But it was nice, I wrote a book on English law while I was there.  In the year 1957 to ’58 I had a research award from the Fund for the Republic, that was the Hutchins outfit, and I wrote a book during that year, my book The Defendant’s Rights.  And in the year 1959-1960 I had a research award in governmental affairs from the Social Science Research Council, and that gave me a free year.  Those were my three free years.  I don’t want to sound boastful, but during my whole career in university teaching I really never asked for anything.  Those three grants, the Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council grant and the Fund for the Republic grant were simply offered to me; somebody called me or wrote to me and said “how would you like one?”  Maybe I’m not very skillful at the art of grantsmanship.  It’s an art that I don’t appreciate and don’t practice.  But I never sought these things, they came to me and I was very glad to get them, but I didn’t have to resort to any of the fine art s of grantsmanship in order to get them.  Perhaps we might discuss next time some of my activities in the state government which took a lot of my energies, and probably shortened my life considerably.
DH: 	Yes, well, I’m very interested in that. 
01:36:44	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (April 23, 1982): Tapes 2 & 3
Continuation of Tape 2
00:00:01	Start of Interview
DH:	Before we go on to your activities with the state government, there are one or two things that I’d like to return to.  One was the ethics committee.
DF:	Yes, for some six years I was chairman of the new Committee of the American Political Science Association, on professional ethics, rights and freedoms.  And this was a rather interesting assignment, the committee was not an adjudicative body, it merely gave advice when its advice was requested.  And the advice took the form of rather formal published advisory opinions and over a course of time, since 1969 when the committee was founded, the committee has now published about eighteen advisory opinions on a wide variety of subjects.  Without going into too great a detail the subjects included such matters as: multiple submission of manuscripts, open access to documentation and data, permissions to reprint, the academic marketplace.  We had several advisory opinions on job-seeking and job offering; appraising manuscripts and reviewing books, fraud in claiming advanced degrees, books and articles stemming from doctoral dissertations, promptness in appraising manuscripts, association electioneering, public statements involving the name of the association, recommending candidates for faculty appointments, and so on.  So over the years—the committee is still functioning—we did try to state and to codify some basic rules of professional ethics for the political science profession.  Perhaps I should add that this is now characteristic of many learned bodies, many associations of scholars have set up ethics committees to do this sort of thing.  There’s a great deal of sensitivity to ethical problems these days, and a strong desire to spell out in formal language what’s right and what’s wrong.
00:02:43
DH:	Well, sort of connected with this, you were talking about your activities with the AAUP I was wondering just what role the AAUP has played here on the Madison campus?
DF:	Well, there’s an old saying, it’s an old saying for me at least, that every university president gets the AAUP chapter he deserves, and while we always had a large chapter in Madison, it had always been inactive, because the things which AAUP stands for we do here anyhow, without any pushing on the part of AAUP.  You get an active chapter where you have serious problems of academic freedom and tenure which stir the faculty to action.  So that the relative inactivity of the AAUP chapter here is a reflection of the fact that our university community is already committed, which means that the regents and the administrative officers are already strongly committed to those standards which AAUP seeks to promote throughout the country.  So it’s very hard to say how much influence we’ve had.  I think we’ve had a lot of influence in the sense that the basic rules and regulations governing the faculty and its relations with the administration here follow AAUP guidelines, and indeed some of our rules follow AAUP language taken from its documents.  The great achievement of AAUP over the years has been the adoption of documents which spell out specifically what are proper and what are improper practices in higher education.  It has spelled out a standard according to which we can make judgments as to whether administrations of our colleges and universities are acting properly or improperly.  So I would guess that on the one hand our AAUP chapter is not engaged in warfare with the administration, but on the other hand, the administration’s already doing what AAUP has long since set out to accomplish.
DH:	It sounds, from what you just said, that perhaps some other campuses may not have this happy situation.
DF:	Oh my, the American Association of University Professors will never run out of business.  They get about a thousand complaints a year from professors, of allegations of some sort of mistreatment, some violation of what AAUP regards as proper procedures.  And I don’t see any evidence that the AAUP office is ever going to run out of work.  They have a tremendous number of cases now.  This doesn’t mean that all those thousand complaints are meritorious, many are looked into and dismissed out of hand as lacking totally in any merit.  But the AAUP does process hundreds of complaints every year.  There are a lot of schools that are very badly run in this country.  We had one case, when I was chairman of Committee A, where the president of the college involved admitted that he had never heard of academic tenure.  He was in a backwater school, he just didn’t know; we had to teach him.  It’s like teaching a kid the alphabet.  But we had to teach him the basic facts of life about academic tenure.
DH:	That does surprise me.
DF:	He was not familiar with the concept.
DH:	Oh my.  
00:06:38
This might be a good time to answer a question of mine.  The subject of tenure which I had long taken as absolute fact and definite has been coming under scrutiny in the last year or two, maybe longer, and I’m wondering what you see in this relationship?
DF:	Are you referring to our campus or generally?
DH:	No, well the system perhaps.
DF:	Oh, I think that especially since the pinch came in with inflation and with diminished financial resources more and more colleges administrators and governors are looking longingly at the faculties to see if they can’t figure out some way of getting rid of the high-priced faculty people who have academic tenure.  And every now and then we have a case where some college administration actually seeks to abolish tenure.  I don’t think it’s all that common, I was the head of an investigating committee just a couple of years ago, which looked into the practices of a college president in northern New Jersey who actually did seek to abolish tenure; he sought to cut his costs by firing about a dozen tenured professors and hiring young non-tenured people at a lower salary level.  But we took him to court, we made a lawsuit out of it, and we won our suit and vindicated the principle of tenure, I’m glad to say that this principle has survived at this college in northern New Jersey.  Oh, I don’t think we’ll ever run out of problems of that kind but on the whole, I think that the principle of academic tenure, which is firmly respected here at Wisconsin, is in a pretty healthy condition nationally.
DH:	Well, that’s good to hear.
DF:	You can’t have academic freedom if a person has to worry about whether he can have his job or keep his job or have it renewed because he says something that is unpopular or that the governing board or the president or the governor of the state doesn’t like.  The ultimate case for academic tenure is that it protects our academic freedom.  It also gives us job security and like most normal people professors like job security.
DH:	Of course.
DF:	They probably function better with it than without it.
DH:	Well of course it’s been suggested, I guess, in the press that there are people with tenure who don’t really deserve it and all sorts of arguments of this sort that you see.
DF:	I suppose that every school makes mistakes and confers tenure upon people who turn out to be unworthy of it.  On the other hand, AAUP sanctions a probationary period of seven years.  I don’t know of any profession that has as demanding a probationary requirement as we have, seven years is an awful long time, it’s a good piece of a person’s life and the school ought to be able to make a reliable judgment about a professor after having him around for seven years.  But even so, mistakes are made, sometimes a hard working professor eases up and decides to make an easy job of it once he has tenure.  I would simply say that the advantages to higher education as a while, accruing from the tenure system, are so great that the occasional mistake we make is well worth the price.
DH:	That’s good to know.
DF:	Well, I just don’t think we’d be better off if everyone was insecure about his job all the time and had to live on his knees so far as his administrators are concerned.
DH:	That might be.  
00:11:09
Another matter you just touched on briefly was the University Club, and since you did say, I think, that you were chairman of that committee at some point, I was wondering what your responsibilities were and what was going on at the time.
DF:	Oh that, being president of the University Club’s an easy job.  There is a little board of directors which meets once a month.  The University Club depends entirely on, almost entirely, on the ability and intelligence and willingness to work of the director.  And we had a wonderful woman who was our director for the club for, I think, some forty years.
DH:	Is this Mildred Lindquist?
DF:	Yes.  Mildred, I think that was the only job she ever had; she worked at the club for her whole adult life.  Now we have a new director who’s very good and I’m sure that the president doesn’t have much to do.  He presides over the monthly meeting of the board and keeps an eye on the budget and helps to prepare the budge.  I suppose, in a sense, the president is the liaison between the club and the university administration; somebody has to talk to the chancellor once in a while to make sure that he knows what’s going on.  The University Club can’t function without some subsidy, some support from the university, and therefore it’s important that the club keep its channels of communication with the administration pretty open and clean.
0012:53
DH:	Were you involved with it at the time when there was talk of moving it to the top of, what, Helen White Hall?
DF:	Oh yes.  I was not as active then as I became later, but when we built Helen White there was the thought that we might add two stories on top of what they have there now, and make that the club, it would be a wonderful location with parking downstairs.  Great central location.  But it got hung up on the question of whether we would be allowed to have a bar there and—
DH:	You mean because it was a university building?
DF:	University building.  I always thought it was a kind of phony issue.  Liquor is sold in the University Club now, which is houses in a university building on State St.  But I guess our professors aren’t big drinkers, I never see anybody drinking there, a few people like a glass of wine with their lunch but certainly they don’t make much money from their liquor business there.  We had a chancellor, Bob Fleming, who was a little reluctant to carry the issue to the regents and to get them to approve of a club with a bar on top of a classroom building in the center of campus.  And it may be that with some other chancellor we might have been able to pull it off.  It’s a pity, that would have been a beautiful place for a faculty club.
DH:	Yes, it would have.  With the view of the lake and everything.
DF:	Yes, and right in the middle of things, good location and parking downstairs for those who have to come from far away.  And so we’re pretty well stuck with the building we’re in now.
DH:	Well, there’s talk even of doing something about that, I guess.  I don’t know how soon that might happen.
DF:	I don’t know, it’s not a live issue as far as I know
DH:	I was just curious.  
00:14:54
Now do you want to get on to your work with the state before we talk about the political science department or the other way around?
DF: 	Well, let’s go to the state government.  I had six very interesting years.  I’m not by nature deeply involved in active politics, but during the four years of Gaylord Nelson as governor—Gaylord Nelson was governor from 1960 to ’64—and then the two years of John Reynolds, who is now a federal judge in Milwaukee—during those six years of these two liberal Democratic governors, I guess, I had my major political experience.  They were both very close personal friends, they invited me to their parties out at the governor’s mansion and I was in the circle of discussion that surrounds a governor, whoever the governor may be.  
00:16:03
My main function for both governors was to write speeches for them, and I did a lot of speech writing especially for Nelson.  The governor of Wisconsin is terribly under-staffed, and these two governors did not have sufficient help upon whom they could rely for the preparation of good speeches.  So my main usefulness to these two men was to write some of their major speeches.
DH:	Now this was done on a voluntary basis?
DF:	Oh yes, I wasn’t paid for it or anything just done in my spare time.  But I enjoyed being part of their administration and it was interesting to meet with them and talk about the problems of state government from time to time.  
00:16:58
But in addition, I’ve had a number of other experiences with state government.  In 1959 I was appointed to the Governor’s Commission on Human Rights and I remained on that commission for nine years.  As I recall I asked not to be reappointed in 1968.  So that from 1959 to 1968 I was a member of the commission.  That was an interesting experience, though how much we accomplished I don’t know.  I think we raised the right questions and people who had a complaint to make on civil rights had a place to come to.
DH:	What kind of questions did you raise?
DF:	We did have some access to the governor.  I suppose that largest number of issues involved discrimination, discrimination against blacks more than any other form of discrimination.  In fact, one reason why I was quite willing to get off the commission was my conviction that since most of the problems confronting the commission involved black people, that the commission itself would be more credible if it had black members and that the black community didn’t look to people like myself for any particular leadership.  But that’s how it developed.  But I’ve been away from it for so long that I don’t know what’s going on right now.  I think it’s less active than it used to be.  
00:18:46
When I was on the commission the spark plug that really made it run was Rebecca Barton, whose husband was a member of our faculty.  Becky Barton was, as many people in Madison know, a remarkable woman, and she was the real spark plug of the commission and kept it moving along.  She had a great deal of imagination and great intelligence and great commitment to civil rights.
DH:	Did you deal with such issues as housing, for instance?
DF: 	Yes.  We had a lot of housing questions.  And employment questions, all turning on the issue of discrimination.  
00:19:40
Then Governor Nelson thought that the Wisconsin constitution was getting out of date and needed revision and appointed a commission on constitutional revision in 1960 and put me on it.  It consisted of several professors, I remember Willard Hurst of our law faculty was on it, and a number of members of the legislature were on it, I remember Walter Hollander, the eminent state senator, was a member of the commission.  I’d be hard put to remember who else was on it, there were about fifteen or twenty of us.  We made a number of basic recommendations and, to my surprise really because I didn’t expect it to happen, while we had no authority except to recommend certain amendments to the constitution, over the years they’ve been adopted.  And as I look back we did not waste our time.  The things that we approved of and recommended, reported on, have eventually been adopted by the legislature and by the voters as constitutional referenda and are now part of the law of the State of Wisconsin.  For example, we recommended that we go from a two to a four-year term for the governor and for other statewide officers and although it took a separate amendment for each officer, one for the governor, one for the lieutenant governor, and so on, all of that has been approved by the legislature and the voters and is now part of the constitution.  
00:21:24
Governor Reynolds appointed a second commission on constitutional revision in 1964 and we sat during his two years—he made me secretary of the commission—and we made some additional recommendations and repeated some of the recommendations made by the earlier commission.  We had a very lively debate as to whether we should recommend that we have a constitutional convention, but we were sharply divided on that issue, but the legislature didn’t want a convention and I’m glad they didn’t call one.
DH:	Are you glad?
DF:	Well, you never know, a convention is a very iffy thing, you don’t know who’s going to be elected to it, and what they’re going to do.  You may lose more of your constitution than you may gain.  
00:22:32
So, the lesson I drew from our experience between 1960 and 1966 is that piecemeal revision of a constitution is possible, and there’s another batch of amendments which have just been approved that have really eliminated from the constitution many provisions that were completely out-of-date, had no relationship to anything now going on.  Constitutions tend to get obsolete.  I mean, some provisions tend to get obsolete, and have to be touched up.  The section on voting, which we had until the last constitutional referendum—our section on voting was completely out-of-date, it was unconstitutional as far as the federal constitution is concerned, and it’s been revised to make it conform with the law of the land.
DH:	I certainly see the need for that.
00:23:22
DF:	Yes.  And just three years ago I was appointed to a committee of the legislative council, a special committee on constitutional and statutory review.  I see I have a note here that we worked during 1978 and ’79.  Midge Miller, the local representative in the Assembly, was chairman of that committee, and most of the committee members were members of the legislature, selected by the legislative council.  But they had a few lay members and I was one of them.  And it had several lawyers on it.  We recommended a number of changes in the constitution which would have at least eliminated obsolete provisions or updated provisions that were no longer proper, constitutionally speaking, and we had very good luck.  We also recommended substantial revisions in our statutes.  One of the things we did was to take out as many Latin phrases as we could; our thought was that the constitution should be, I mean our statutes should be phrased in the language of the land, which is English and not Latin.  So we de-Latinized our statute books, we took out a large number of phrases, wherever we could.  We also tried to de-sex some of our statutes by making it clear that the statutes include women as well as men.  The old assumption was that the word “he” meant “she” by inference, but it’s now “he” or “she” and so we sort of se-sexed the statute book to some extent.
DH:	Well, that will make a lot of people happy.
DF:	Yes.  And we gave marching orders to the statute reviser as to what we thought he should be doing to continue the process of revising statutes.  The collected statutes of the state need constant attention and it’s very wise to have an occasional committee set up to have a fresh look at the documents that we live with to see if they’re still consistent with the facts of life.  
00:25:48
I also served the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court of Wisconsin was asked by the television and radio people if they would permit a change in the rules of court to permit the use of electronic broadcasting equipment in courtrooms.
00:26:13	End of Tape 2, Side 2
Tape 3, Side 1
00:26:15
DF:	This happened in 1970, and I was asked to serve as chairman.  It consisted of judges and lawyers and a few lay people and included people from the media.  And we were very sharply divided, as I recall we recommended against the introduction of television cameras in the courtroom by a margin of one vote.  I think we were divided eight ot seven or nine to eight, something like that.
DH:	What were the reasons against?
DF:	Well, let me finish this story.  And then it went to the Supreme Court and they were divided.  And I think their final vote was, there’s seven of them, they went four to three against the use of electronic equipment in the courtroom.  Television and radio are not permitted in any federal courtroom by U.S. Supreme Court rules, but many states now permit the media to come in.  The main objection to having television cameras is the fear that the presence of the camera would exert a distracting influence on the parties that are involved; on witnesses, the witnesses might be over-born or over-awed by the fact that a camera is on them, by the thought that the whole community may be watching.  There was even a fear that lawyers would grandstand in front of the cameras, that judges would misbehave or grandstand because they have their eye on the next election.  But I think the main problem is the problem or the fear of distraction, that you are bringing into the courtroom a factor that has a distracting potential.  Well, the media people kept at the court, and in 1978, the court established a new committee to report on the use of cameras in the courtroom.  I was asked to serve as chairman, and this time I think we were unanimous, or almost unanimous in recommending that television cameras be permitted, and we also drafted the rules which the court had to adopt to make them official and binding.  We drafted the rules, some twenty different rules, governing how many cameras there could be in the courtroom and how they should be positioned and so on.  And we also drafted rules for radio and for still photography as well.  And the Supreme Court in ’79 accepted our report after a hearing in the court, at which I spoke for the committee, and now we are one of, I think, about half the states in the union that permit cameras in the courtroom.  It’s still a lively issue and it’s being debated around the country, and it’s still being debated in Wisconsin.  I had a hand in that problem over the years.
DH:	Well, now this represents a change of view.
DF:	Well, I was opposed to it ten years ago, I just changed my mind.
DH:	I see.
DF:	I decided that the television people are in the news business, just as newspapers are, and they ought to have a right to do what they’re equipped to do.  I might add that there’s been a remarkable improvement in the quality of television cameras.  They don’t make the noise they used to make, they’re noiseless, and you don’t need any bright lights.  We forbid bright lights, you have to use whatever lights the courtroom has.  But our courtrooms are better lit now than they used to be, and furthermore, the cameras are so much more sensitive that you can get a pretty good picture without any bright light.  You wouldn’t want to permit the bright lights of the camera people in a courtroom, that would certainly be distracting.  So I just changed my mind, I guess but I think some of the facts changed over the last ten to fifteen years.
DH:	Well, I imagine that, of course, in terms of news it reaches a larger audience than an article in a newspaper, for instance.
DF:	Oh, indeed.  As I often have said, television is here to stay, and you might as well face the fact that—my guess is that more people rely on television for the news than on the newspapers.  It would be a close question but that would be my guess.  In any event they’re in the news business up to their eyeballs and why they should not be permitted to cover the trials when reporters are there to cover them for the print media is a fair question.  In any event, we’ve now had the cameras in the courtroom for a couple of years and I don’t see any great tidal wave of opinion that would like to get them out of there.  I might add that one objection to television in the courtroom is that they televise only the few sensational trials and thus call attention to them, but that’s equally true of the newspapers, they only cover the sensational trials, they don’t cover routine litigation; maybe they should but they don’t.  So what’s sauce for the goose, it seems to me, is sauce for the gander.
DH:	Well, it seems to be working okay, in other words?
DF:	As far as I know, it’s all right, I think it’s probably an improvement.  And people learn about their courts by watching the snippets that come out on television.
00:32:56
DH:	Well now, is there anything more about your state or national activities that you’d like to get into?
DF:	Well, I was just thinking, I just finished an assignment.  We have in Wisconsin an integrated bar, by court order.  In 1956, I think it was, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin adopted rules which created an integrated bar.  An integrated bar means that in order to be licensed to practice law in Wisconsin, the lawyer must belong to the State Bar Association and pay dues.  And this is a very hotly debated subject all over the country, although I think a majority of the states now have integrated bars.  But the Supreme Court of the state gave notice a couple years ago that in 1982 it was going to review the desirability of an integrated bar. There’s still vigorous opposition from some lawyers who simply don’t like the compulsory character of bar membership. 
00:34:03
And the Bar Association, in anticipating the appointment by the court of a court committee, appointed its own committee, about two years ago, under the chairmanship of the dean of the Marquette Law School and it consisted entirely of lawyers, plus three laymen, and I was one of the lay members. We worked very hard for a whole year on a report which we completed not very long ago and in which we recommended that the integrated bar be retained.  Just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court appointed its own advisory committee and I think just this weekend it’s going to have a public hearing and those who wish to appear and speak for or against the integrated bar are invited to come.  It’s a very lively issue and I found that a very interesting assignment. I had no doubt myself of the desirability of an integrated bar, the compulsory feature didn’t trouble me very much, I just don’t like to have free-loaders who have all the advantages of the organized bar without helping to pay the cost.  That is the way I look at it.
DH:	Now by integrated bar, just what are you talking about?
DF:	Well, as I said, the integrated bar means that in order to be licensed to practice law in Wisconsin, the lawyer has to be a member of the State Bar Association and pay dues to the bar association.  That is what is meant by an integrated bar.
DH:	I see.
DF:	As distinguished from a voluntary association.  The main objection I might say, and it’s not without weight, the main objection to an integrated bar, aside from a somewhat abstract dislike of compulsion, is that the bar association often lobbies at the legislature for legislation of special interest to lawyers and many lawyers argue that they should not be required to pay dues to finance lobbying for bills to which they are opposed.
DH:	And their dues supposedly go for this?  Some of it?
DF:	One of the permanent employees of the State Bar Association is a full-time, practically a full-time lobbyist and his salary comes out of bar association dues.  I would say, I was persuaded that the board of governors of the bar association is very reluctant to engage in lobbying, they’re very careful not to get involved in legislation concerning which lawyers themselves are divided.  So that we recommended in our report that they try hard to avoid getting involved in lobbying for highly controversial legislation concerning which members of the bar may be in disagreement.  But, it’s a real problem, I don’t pooh-pooh it, I just think the arguments for an integrated bar outweigh those against it.
DH:	Well, are the dues very high?
DF:	No, right now around a hundred dollars a year, that isn’t very much, not considering the earning power of lawyers these days.  Dues were never very high.
DH:	I see.  Now is it still true, as it used to be, that graduates from the Law School here do not have to take a bar examination:
DF:	That’s right.  There are, I think, seven states that still have what is called the diploma privilege.  This means that if you have a law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School here in Madison, or the Marquette Law School in Milwaukee, that you’re admitted to the bar without a bar exam.  It’s called the diploma privilege and I think it exists only in about seven states now, and it’s rapidly disappearing.  The concept is deeply-rooted here and when the law dean goes to the court and assures the court that the men and women that he presents are qualified to practice law, the court is inclined to take his word for it.
00:38:49
DH:	Well, shall we go on now to discussing the Political Science Department?
DF:	Well, let me mention one other thing.  We had a long debate in this state on the reorganization of our court system and I think as is well known, just recently we amended the constitution substantially to provide for an intermediate level of appellate courts, to take some of the burden of review off of the hands of the seven Justices of the State Supreme Court.  We also had dual courts, a dual system of courts at the trial level, with county courts and circuit courts.  And there was a long movement to, first, introduce intermediate appellate courts and limit access to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and secondly, to have a unified trial court at the local level.  And this, of course, we did with very important amendments to our constitution. Well, I was deeply involved in that whole movement.  We had a Wisconsin citizens conference on judicial organization which worked on the problem and developed the data and a great deal of the public education necessary for it, and later on we had a steering committee, on court modernization in Wisconsin, on which I served.  So I had a hand, I wouldn’t exaggerate the weight of my own hand, but I did have a hand in the modernization of and the very serious reorganization of the Wisconsin court system.  Now we have a unified trial court, instead of having both county and circuit courts, we have a single circuit court and we have four appellate courts around the state with our Supreme Court here in Madison.  So, I think, that was my last bit of good works as a concerned citizen.
DH:	How has this worked out?
DF:	Oh, I think it’s worked out very well.  I also think that we don’t have enough data yet, and I’ve been urging my friends in the Law School to get some law students, or someone over there, to work on what has happened since court reorganization.  Especially, we don’t have very good data on what difference the appellate courts have made, how many cases go, for example, from the appellate courts, from the appeals courts, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  We don’t know and it’s time, I think, to evaluate how the court reorganization or modernization has worked out.  I’m just guessing when I say that I think it’s worked out pretty well, as far as I know.  It has relieved the Supreme Court of an impossible burden of appeals and has provided a cheaper and quicker review to parties who wished to have their cases reviewed at least once by an appeals court.
DH:	Sounds like a very good idea.
DF:	I think it is and it’s something that’s going on all over the country.  
00:42:24
Now you want to talk about our department?
DH:	Well, sooner or later I do, yes.
DF:	I’ve been thinking about what to tell you, Donna.  I probably was less active in the department than I was in the general faculty over the years.  I never wanted to be a chairman, was never asked to be chairman, and never served as chairman of the department.  And I was not even very active in the committees of the department.  But I did attend department meetings faithfully, I didn’t shirk my duties as a member of the department.  I suppose the most important single thing that’s happened to the department since I came here in 1947 was its growth.  When I first came here we had about seven or eight people in the department, we now have around thirty-five, which is a very considerable change.  And one of the most time consuming chores of tenured members of the department is to select young people to come in at the lower levels who will someday be seniors themselves. And all of us devoted a great deal of time to canvassing the country and reading correspondence and documents and publications and interviewing candidates and then arguing about them at department meetings.  But my guess is that the most significant single function I performed as a member of the department for some thirty years was that I had a hand, no greater hand than anybody else, but I had a hand in the growth of the department by the selection of new personnel.  
00:44:22
At the University of Wisconsin there’s a tendency not to interfere with the way an individual teaches his courses and certainly in our department, in the Political Science Department, no one tells a professor how to teach his course or when to examine students or what books the students should read, there’s no supervision of the individual professor.  No matter what his rank, an assistant professor has the same freedom to plan his courses according to his best judgment that a full professor has.  So that we haven’t spent any time over the years in that respect.  On the other hand, what does consume a lot of department time is the care and feeding of graduate students.  The University of Wisconsin is the number one producer of Ph.D.’s in the country, speaking of the university as a whole, and if we’re not number one we’re always in the top three.  We produce about 700 to 800 Ph.D.’s a year here at Wisconsin.  
00:45:33
And the Political Science Department in the last few years has produced around twenty Ph.D.s a year.  And they’re a matter of deep concern, there’s constant discussion about the examining system, for the so called prelim examinations, and we’re always being importuned by graduate students to change the way we do things.  And we have over the years made many changes, for example, after long and anxious debate we dropped the foreign language requirement for the Ph.D., unless a foreign language was necessary for the person’s research field.  For example, if one wants to get a Ph.D. in Latin American Affairs he would have to know Spanish.  If a graduate student wants to sit in Prof. Armstrong’s seminar on Russian government he must be able to read Russian.  But unless the foreign language is related to the student’s major academic interests, we no longer require languages, just to require them.  I shall never forget how at Yale, during my graduate years, I sweated through German, I needed German like I needed a hole in the head.  I don’t think I’ve looked at a German book since I passed my prelim and I still blush at the thought of the miserable performance I gave to the professor who examined me.  But I was in constitutional law and American political theory and I didn’t need German, and to require German of me was just an empty historical gesture.  At one time Germany was the heart of scholarship, of the scholarly world and that’s why we required German, but few look to Germany nowadays for scholarly ideas.  The heart of advanced scholarship in the modern world is right here in this country and English will get you by just very well indeed.  
00:47:43
But we spent a lot of time over the years debating how to examine the graduate students, whether to give them a second chance if they fail, whether they have to take all their exams within a single week or can take them one at a time, these are very time-consuming problems, and the department also devotes a great deal of energy to placing the graduate students.  These young people don’t have connections around the country, and they rely upon the professors to find their first jobs.  So we have a very active, very successful placement service.  I might say that it’s been a joy that while it’s terribly difficult to find a position in history or English these days, political science is still a good field for job placement.  It’s still an expanding field, and we have managed to place every year, including last year, every graduate student who is in a position to request placement.  So we’ve done pretty well.
DH:	I was wondering about that.  It was going to another question, but you’ve answered it already.
DF:	Yes.  
00:49:02
I think that as a department the major energies of the members of the department, as a group, are devoted to personnel problems, recruitment and promotion of people in the department, and what I call the care and feeding of graduate students, take an awful lot of our time.
DH:	Well, that’s important.
DF:	Beyond that, we have the normal problems that all departments have.  We are an assemblage of human beings, we have problems relating to each other, but there’s nothing special there to report.  Actually, as departments go, the Political Science Department, during my tenure here, was a very good natured and amicable place in which to work.  Relations among members of the department are quite friendly and it’s been a very pleasant place in which to spend one’s years as a teacher.  I can’t say that for all departments around here.  
00:50:19
Oh, I forgot to say, something that’s bothering me.  There’s been an increasing interest in political science with the rush to the law schools.  As everyone knows, there’s been a tremendous rush to the law schools in the last ten years or so, and pre-law students, quite correctly, judge that a political science major is probably the best preparation for studying, for a law school program.  And it’s the great increase in law school enrollments that has had the effect of increasing the enrollments in political science courses.
DH:	Well, of course if you increase the enrollments, I imagine this has meant increasing the staff and faculty.
DF:	Yes, although in the last few years, the financial constraints being what they are, it’s meant larger classes too.  We have a large number of very large classes, larger than they should be for maximum effectiveness; it’s an unfortunate thing.
00:51:29
DH:	Well, it’s also been suggested to me that there’s been an increase in the number of, oh, area studies specialties in political science.
DF:	Yes, that’s quite true.  And that’s a post World War II development.  We’ve had specialists here in African studies, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Western Europe.  And for the communist countries, Eastern Europe, we have two specialists on Eastern Europe right now.  That’s quite true, and there’s been a great deal of interest among graduate students in area studies. But, I think it’s beginning to taper off.  I think one of the attractions for area studies was that it held out to graduate students the chance of foreign travel, that you can’t prepare a dissertation on Chile unless you go to Chile, and so you figure out some way of getting there.  But I think there’s been a falling off of interest in area studies and a growth of interest in what we call American studies.
DH:	Oh, that’s interesting.  
00:52:41
Has there been any interest in using studies in psychology and sociology and bringing them to bear on political science?
DF:	There certainly has, to the point where I’ve often said that political science is a discipline in search of a subject matter, because some of the things that pass for political science today amaze me, I just don’t understand why they’re called political science.
DH:	What are you thinking of?
DF:	Well, we have a Ph.D. field called political psychology and I don’t know whether the people, the faculty people who work on political psychology are political scientists or psychologist and I don’t know whether—I don’t think they know themselves.  And there’s been a tremendous development of arithmetical or quantitative methods of political science to the point where I’m no longer able to read half the articles that appear in our journals.  It’s a very sobering thought that after fifty years in the profession I take the American Political Science Review, and half the articles I can’t read at all, I don’t understand the complex mathematical formulae that they embody.  I’m not sure that these quantifiers are getting all that much of an achievement out of what they’re doing.  Usually when I look at their conclusions they’re proving something that we’ve always known.  
00:54:35
But, in any event, many people in political science are not distinguishable from psychologists or sociologists or economists or historians, I have a vague feeling that we’re drifting toward the recreation of a unified social science.  Something like the old political economy that we used to have before we separated economics from politics.  And I don’t know how long I will live, but it may well be that someday we’ll have a unified social science instead of these specialties that we now have.  I think it would be very unfortunate, for I think much of the progress in scholarship in this country in the amount of knowledge we have available is the result of specialization.  But, it wasn’t so long ago that political science was split off from history.  When I attended the University of Nebraska as a freshman in 1925, they just that year separated psychology from philosophy; these were in one department.  Now I think both the philosophers and the psychologists are much better off in separate departments than to go on the pretense that they have so much in common that they belong together.  And I think that political science made progress by being split off from history and from economics.  But the drift is in the other direction and an awful lot of people, including members of my own department, are doing things that I don’t even recognize as political science and don’t understand.
DH:	You think they belong more properly back in history or economics?
DF:	Well, I just regret the fact that the discipline is no longer a discipline with parameters.  A lot of them are doing things, they’re doing good things, but they’re doing things that I don’t recognize as political science.  So I repeat that I think we’re a discipline in search of a subject matter and that, at the moment, things are in a terrible state of flux.
00:56:54	End of Tape 3, Side 1
Tape 3, Side 2
00:56:56
DH:	I want to ask about the student protest movement, what effect it might have had on this department?
DF:	That’s a question which is very difficult to answer.  It did not disrupt the department.  As a matter of fact, the graduate students in political science have behaved quite well during the time of troubles.  It, the enormous uproar on the campus, had serious impact on us as individuals more than on us as a department.  It had a tremendous impact on me.
DH:	Will you explain?
DF:	Well, I was just ready to quit.  If we had had one more bad year, I think I would have simply have accelerated my retirement.  Here you can retire at age 65 without penalty, and I was getting close to that.  Those were the worst years of my life, the years when we had the militia here on the campus to keep order, and when I walked though rows of armed soldiers to reach my classroom.  I was tear gassed three or four times, a lot of the excitement was right outside my window here in front of Bascom Hall.  That was a miserable time.  I didn’t suffer any personal indignities, but it just bothered me to see what was going on, and the students were in a state of perennial excitement and indeed in a state of uproar much of the time.  It was a bad time and it’s a commentary on how tough the university is as a institution, that it survived at all.  We never closed our doors, but we had periods of time when we weren’t doing a very good job of educating our students.  To answer your question, while it had a profound impact on me, I don’t think it had any special impact on the department as a department.  I don’t recall that the department ever had to take a stand as a department, we were not confronted with the kind of issues that some other departments had.  A lot depended on the nature of the make-up of the graduate student group, and we had a pretty good group here I guess.  Maybe political science by its very nature is a sort of law and order discipline, and the graduate students understood that.
00:59:34
DH:	How about TAs?  There was a TA strike in about 1970.  Did this create a problem for your department?
DF:	The president of the TAs was one of our students, for one year as I recall, and—
DH:	Who was this?
DF:	I forgot his name.
DH:	Oh, we can look that up.
DF:	It was a chap I didn’t like very much, but I forgot his name.  And I have no idea what’s happened to him.  But we had our share of difficulties.  There was one big strike and I think all but one or two of our TAs joined the strike.  I had a TA of my own, that is I selected him on my Vilas allowance, and we had a few tense moments.  I felt badly for him because he felt that if he didn’t go on strike the other graduate students would look down on him and he’d lose standing among his peers, poor boy.  But I told him “I’ve treated you as a young colleague, but if you want, if you insist that I treat you as a hired hand, I’ll treat you as a hired hand,” I said “Go ahead and strike.  But if that’s the relationship you want with me, so be it.”  I said “I’d rather have a collegial relationship rather than a master and servant relationship, but that’s up to you.”  And after much agonizing—he was a very delightful young man from California—after much soul-searching, he decided not to join the strike.  He stayed on my good side.  It wouldn’t have bothered me very much, I just used him to grade exams and wasn’t giving an exam at the time.  But that was the only direct experience that I had since I didn’t make much use of TAs.  But the department, as a whole, had its problems, because all our TAs, I think with one or two exceptions, did go on the long strike.
01:01:37
DH:	Well, some departments, I’ve been told, had serious problems.
DF:	Oh, indeed.
DH:	Others escaped rather lightly.
DF:	We had some unpleasantness.  One of our TAs specialized in writing insulting things about the professors in the department.  I remember his sneering at my office library, and saying it’s just full of old books.  Well, not all my books are old but you’d have to be some kind of a ignoramus not to recognize that even old books can be pretty good.  Not all the good books were written in the last few months.  They pestered us a little, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t live with.  But the turmoil on the campus as a whole was shattering on our nerves and on our sense of well-being and it simply robbed us of the great pleasures that are involved in university teaching.  We had a bad time here at Wisconsin.  And I don’t think I could have taken more than one year, I was determined not to.  But things quieted down, and while we never got back to where we were before, it hasn’t been too bad in the last few years.  
01:02:57
Incidentally, my golden years at Wisconsin were the years with the returning GIs right after World War II.  Those were very good years, the students were older and had more experience with life, better motivation, a lot of them were married and had responsibilities, and they did their work very well.  And the budgets kept growing, we weren’t short of money, deans could be generous, salaries were rising.  And in the ‘50s for a short time I think we were even ahead of the inflation, actually improved our standard of living.  In the last ten years we’ve lost in terms of the standard of living but in those golden years, I’d say roughly 1948 to about 1960, was the high point of my life as a professor.  I call that the golden age for the university.
DH:	Well, form everything I’ve heard, I think this opinion is shared by many.
DF:	Yes, those were very good years.
01:04:08
DH:	Now, there’s one other thing that is not really connected with the department, but it is connected with the university.  I came across mention of the fact that in a faculty meeting you made a motion to abolish boxing.  And I’m wondering about the circumstances.  I know that it was precipitated finally by the death of a student.
DF:	Yes, it was a very nice young man who was hit on the head in a boxing match down at the Field House and died.  And he was a good friend of my daughter’s, who was then a student at the university, and she felt very badly about it, and I felt badly about it.  I’d never approved of boxing as a college sport, I don’t even approve of it as a professional sport.  I just don’t think the brain case can take the poundings that boxers have to take, and not be damaged.  I always thought it was an inappropriate college sport.  I went to one of the boxing matches, just to see what it was like, it was at the Field House, and in one match the Wisconsin boxer had the other boxer from the other team on the ropes, that is, he was obviously beating him up, and all around me people were standing on their feet and screaming, “Kill him, kill him.”  And I said to myself that this is a heck of a college sport where you shout “kill him, kill him.”  That’s inappropriate in an institution committed to better things in life.
DH:	Doesn’t sound much like sport, does it?
DF:	It doesn’t sound like higher education either.
DH:	No.
DF:	And I’m not a crusader, and I’m certainly not a crusader against athletics, I’m not opposed to the athletic program.  Although I have some reservations about some aspects of it.  But I just thought boxing was an improper sport.  I might add that the University of Wisconsin was the only quality university in the country that still had a boxing team.
DH:	Oh, is that so?
DF:	Yes, and we kept it alive because of the sheer weight of our influence and reputation.  But we had to go all the way to the west coast and the east coast to find a team to box against, it was such a rare sport among colleges and universities.  Most of them did not have boxing.  But I got involved quite by accident.  I was sitting around a big table at the Tripp Commons where the faculty used to eat in the old days, and I made some remark to the men around the table that it was a shame about this boy being killed as a result of a blow to the head in a boxing match.  And somebody taunted me by saying, “Well look, why do you just sit there and talk, why don’t you do something about it.”  And since I’m an activist by nature that’ something no one must say to me because I can’t resist the temptation to rise to the challenge.  So I said, “Well I will.”  I took my placemat, turned it over, and I wrote a motion addressed to the Secretary of the Faculty abolishing boxing.  At the University of Wisconsin the faculty has control, complete control, over athletic policy, even the regents couldn’t overrule us.  That’s a condition of membership in the Big Ten, that the faculty control all athletic policy.  So I had everybody around the table sign that motion to abolish, and then I spotted a few other gray beards around the room and I got about twenty signatures.  I sent it to Alden White, who was then Secretary of the Faculty, and it went on the agenda the next meeting.  I remember we met in the Music Hall, that is to say, we needed a large room, we had a huge turnout for a faculty meeting.  That was a well-attended one; there must have been 500 to 600 people there.  And since I had filed the motion I had to get up and say something.  I made a brief statement as to why I thought it was an inappropriate college sport and it was voted down by an overwhelming margin.  And it may interest you to know, for the record, I still have my file on that case, that our abolition of boxing made the world press, there were stories about the action of our faculty in Europe and Asia and Australia; I got letters from all over the world.
DH:	My goodness, how did that come about?
DF:	The farther away the letter came from the more favorable it was to me.  There’s a worldwide movement against boxing; there’s a worldwide movement which would like to abolish professional boxing.  And our act in abolishing it at Wisconsin made the world press.  I got a lot of nasty letters nearer to hand from local people, especially from former boxers who boxed on our teams.  And I also had some nasty phone calls for about a week.  I had a bad week after that happened.  But if a letter came from Paris or from Hong Kong, then I knew it would be favorable, somebody who thought we did the right thing.  And may I say in conclusion that our abolishing boxing resulted in the collapse of boxing as a college sport in the United States.  That was the end of it.  We kept it alive because of the sheer prestige of the institution, and we abolished boxing as a competitive inter-collegiate sport we pulled the rug out from under that so-called sport, and there is no more college boxing as a sport.  It’s an intramural activity now; we still have a boxing coach here, the same one we had before.  But they are not engaged in inter-collegiate contests.
DH:	Well, I can’t say that I’m sorry.
DF:	Oh, I’ve never regretted it, I think it was the right thing to do.  I just think it’s such a brutal sport that doesn’t belong here, and it brutalizes the audience as well, it just doesn’t belong, in my opinion, in a quality university.  I was warned by some of my knowledgeable friends that some of the jocks, as we call them, would never forgive me, and this has been a monkey on my back over the years, for I don’t think the jocks have really forgotten or forgiven.  But it wasn’t a personal act; the faculty as a whole was opposed to boxing, and adopted my resolution by an overwhelming majority.
DH:	Well, there had been an effort prior to this that couldn’t go through.
DF:	Yes, Prof. Walter Morton of the Economics Department had campaigned for years.  He thought boxing was an inappropriate and dangerous sport and had raised the issue many times.  But he never did get anything more than a motion to look into it or to investigate it or to study it.  But I was advised that that’s what I should do, merely move to have another study made of boxing.  My objections to boxing wouldn’t have changed depending on what a study would turn up, because I thought it aesthetically and morally improper too, as a college sport. 
DH:	It is too bad that it took the death of a student before this—
DF: 	Well that’s often the case, isn’t it, something bad has to happen to energize people to do something?
DH:  	Well, I have another.
DF:  	I’m mortified at the thought that my reputation will depend on the fact that I made the motion to kill boxing.  I didn’t think it was all that important.
DH:  	Well—
DF:  	It had many followers, it was a very popular sport and we did pretty well in it, but since we don’t do well in sports generally there was some added animus directed towards me.
DH:  	Well, I don’t really believe that your reputation is going to stand on that issue.  It just happens to be one detail that I was interested it.  
01:12:47
And there’s one last thing on my mind.  I came across a statement, this really is about the general society I guess, and I quote something you said in about 1950, which is, you made a prediction that “state welfarism will become a permanent part of society” and generally more government control in the next fifty years.  Well its thirty years later now how do you feel about that?
DF:	Oh, well that was such an obvious prediction that I can make no claim to any particular insight in having made it.  I don’t remember saying that, but I could have said it because that has certainly happened, and welfarism of some kind is here to stay.
DH:	How do you see Reagan’s activities in this area, in this connection?
DF:	I think the country will survive Reagan, he’s only got a four-year term and there’s only so much harm that he can do.  And we can pick up again when he’s out of office.
DH:	So you think that this state welfarism is going to go on?
DF:	I think government, and government activity, are here to stay.  It’s not a fly-by-night matter, but a matter of permanent concern to all of us.
DH:	Well, I’ve pretty much run out of questions, unless there’s something else you have on your mind—
DF: 	That’s fine, I’ve run out of gas.
01:14:25
DF:	As I think back over my years here at Wisconsin, I think one of the most interesting experiences I had repeated was the opportunity to speak on other campuses.  I’ve done a lot of lecturing in many universities.  I’ve never added them up but I suppose I’ve lectured now in over a hundred universities in the course of my lifetime and this has been a very valuable experience.  Above all, it’s heightened my pleasure in being here, because I’ve always had a better basis for comparison.  We have professors here who’ve never been any place else, and they have no idea how well things are managed here because they don’t know how they’re managed at other schools.  And in order to appreciated an institution you have to have an opportunity to compare it with other institutions in the same field.  And I think that my satisfaction in being a professor at the University of Wisconsin was heightened by the fact that I never ran out of opportunities to compare how we conduct our affairs here and how other schools conduct them.  This is a spinoff partly of, though not entirely, but partly of my activity in the American Association of University Professors.  But in any event, when I make judgments about the quality of academic life at Wisconsin, it’s in the light of what I’ve seen in other institutions around the country, large and small, public and private.
DH:	Well it’s nice to hear that about our institution, isn’t it?  
01:16:21
There is one last question that did occur to me, that I didn’t when we were talking about the TAs and the strikes and so forth, I was wondering what you would have to say about their legal position now in their dealing with the university. 
DF:	Well, there’s no statute that requires us to permit the TAs to organize a union and there’s no statute that requires the university to bargain collectively with the TAs as a union.  The decision to bargain, to go through collective bargaining with the TAs association, was a decision made by Ed Young when he was Chancellor, and I dare say for very good reasons that persuaded him.  But as far as I know anything about labor law in this state there is no statute law or case law that holds that the TAs have a legally-protected right to engage in collective bargaining and the university administration and the Senate in its recent action, by setting up a new system, indicated that they didn’t want to engage in collective bargaining.  As far as the law’s concerned, I don’t see any problem there.  I think it’s mainly a political problem, not a legal problem.  Now the legislature came very close to passing a law which would have permitted collective bargaining on the campus, but it was not enacted, it was killed.  The matter comes up every two years, when the legislature meets for its biennial session and it’s voted down, they keep on voting it down.
DH:	Well this isn’t just for the TAs, it’s with faculty.
DF:	With faculty, yes.  But, certainly a collective bargaining statute would have included TAs, however you write it.
DH:  	Well, I was curious about that.  
01:18:36
I realize that I haven’t asked you what your current activities are or your plans for the future.
DF:  	Well, I must say that this is my third year of retirement, and I haven’t yet come to terms with retirement.  I don’ know what to make of it, and I’m really a little curious to see the direction in which I will move.  I would say that I’m doing about everything I always did except I don’t teach students or give grades and am not involved in handling graduate students, who take up a lot of time.  I’m still invited by editors of learned journals to review books, and this I enjoy doing, and I’m doing quite a bit of book reviewing.  And I’ve written some articles; I am sure I no longer have the energy to write another book.  I spend much of my time just sitting here in my office—I come down here almost every day.  And I’ve written a few articles since I retired.  Some are for an encyclopedia of constitutional law which is going to come out in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Writing of the Constitution in 1887.  I’ve written some articles for an introduction to law recently, and I keep my hand in.  I spend much of my time just sitting here in my office reading books.  I do enjoy having lunch with various colleagues from around the campus at the Faculty Club at noon.  I think that’s mainly why I come down.  But just what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, I don’t know.  I’ll do whatever comes along in the way of opportunities.  Next Friday, for example, I’m going down to Milwaukee to sit on a panel of the Mid-West Association of Political Science, discussing the future of research and constitutional law, the sort of thing I used to do when I was active.  So I suppose I’m doing about everything I always did except I’m not involved in the instruction of students or grading them or examining them.  And above all, and for this I’m most thankful, I no longer have to attend department meetings which I found very vexing.  But just where this all leads me, I don’t know.  I am reading books, famous books that I should have read years ago, and that I always put off reading.  For example, I have right in front of me—I’ve never read Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the French Revolution.  It is one of the great classics of the English language, but I just never got around to reading it; now I’m reading it.  So I hope that I can make up for some of the past in that way.  I’m also reading new books that come out, especially in the field of constitutional law such as the book on Felix Frankfurter that was just published.  But that’s how my life drags on.
DH:  	Do you find you miss teaching, miss having graduate students?
DF:  	No, I was awfully tired of teaching, I had forty-seven years of teaching and I really got tired of it.  Teaching is very, very hard work; teaching university students is far more exhausting than most people realize who’ve never done it.  There is nothing that drains your moral energies more than to walk into a room full of people and try to speak to them seriously when half of them aren’t paying any attention at all.  This is very hard.  And you have to keep reminding yourself that there’s a minority there that’s going to get something, and that that’s what you have to settle for.  But the amount of energy one uses up in simply one hour of lecturing to university students is absolutely incredible, and people who’ve never done it have no idea.  Don’t let anybody ever tell you that teaching college students is a soft job, it’s not if you care about your job, if you care about whether you’re getting through to them at all.  It’s a nice question.
DH:  	How about graduate students?
DF:  	I kind of miss them, I enjoyed them, I got to know them.  And I knew, I had a hand in their development I could see that I mattered to them.  But to have a class in American Government, a beginning course with 150 students, of whom 140 are completely unknown to you, you just never know, you don’t know whether you’re having any impact, at all.  But all your graduate students you know.  Some of my best friends, to this day, are former graduate students of mine who took their degrees and went out and had careers of their own.  Just last week I had lunch with a former graduate student of mine, one of my earliest students, who just retired himself from the University of Montana.  We’ve had a very nice relationship over the years; these are the students that you get to know best.
01:23:58	End of second interview session
END