UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

	

ANTHONY S. EARL

An Interview Conducted by
Laura Smail

Madison, Wisconsin
1987

First Interview Session (January 28, 1987): Digital File

00:00:00	Background	 [begin Tape 1/Side 1]

LS:	This is an interview with Anthony Earl, former governor of Wisconsin, from '82 to '86, and a legislator back in the early '70s.  It's being done for the University Archives Oral History Project.  I'm Laura Smail and the date is January 28, 1987, and we're talking in the Oral History office in the Red Gym.  

00:00:21

LS:	I'd like you to talk about your background and your education and what were the first things that got you interested in law and politics.

TE:	Well, I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — very small town.  My father was a grocer and my mother was a homemaker.  The family was always very interested in government and politics.  My family was one of a minority in that we were Democrats in an area that was heavily Republican, so I had to learn at an early stage why I was a Democrat — why I supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt when all of my companions supported Thomas E. Dewey.  I remember the 1944 election in particular.  So I had a deep interest in government and in politics.  I did my undergraduate work at Michigan State University, and while there, worked my way through school by working at the State Capitol.  G. Mennen Williams was then governor of the state of Michigan, and that heightened my interest even further.  I could see state government in action, even though I was pushing a broom, and I enjoyed what I saw.  My appetite was further whetted.  I then went to the University of Chicago.  

LS:	Just a moment.  Had your father gone to college?

TE:	No.  I graduated in 1954 from high school with forty-nine other young men and women — there were fifty of us.  Only one had a parent who had gone to college, and I think that was probably fairly typical at that time.  I know when I went away to college, I was the first in the family, and many of my friends who were there at the same time were first in their families as well.

LS:	Why did you go then?

TE:	First of all, I was a bit interested, but secondly, this was something parents really pushed.  Parents felt very strongly that their youngsters should have a better chance than they had.  They were Depression children, and that was a feeling shared commonly by many of the parents of many of the young men and women in my class.  Whereas none of our parents had gone to school, at least half of us went away to some sort of post-high school education.

LS:	What did you major in as an undergraduate?

TE:	Political Science.  Then I went on to the University of Chicago Law School.  While at the University of Chicago I got caught up in the 1960 presidential election, and I became affiliated with the Cook County regular Democratic organization.  Richard J. Daley was the mayor, and if you wanted to get involved in politics in Chicago, you got involved through the Cook County organization.  There was a Citizens for Kennedy operation, but it was wholly ineffectual.  They did everything through the organization, so I became a precinct captain in one of the wards — the Fifth Ward in Chicago — and had a precinct that was my responsibility in the election, and had a real introduction to the nuts and bolts politicking.  

LS:	You were already then thinking of politics as a career?

TE:	Well, I knew I'd be very active in it, but I never thought I would be a candidate at that stage of the game.  I finished Law School in '61.  There was still universal military training at the time — the draft — and I was subject to the draft.  I joined the navy and spent the better part of four years in the navy, left the navy and moved to Wausau, Wisconsin. [break in tape]

00:04:09	Reasons for Coming to Wisconsin 

TE:	So after the service I moved to Wausau, and by then, a good friend of mine had been elected district attorney of Marathon County.

LS:	Excuse me, you have to say why you moved to Wausau.

TE:	Well, I wanted to move back to the Upper Midwest.  My notion had been I would write the bar exam in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and hop in a car and drive around till I found a place that struck me and settle in.

LS:	Why the Upper Midwest?

TE:	I just liked that part of the country.  I had had a bit of an opportunity to travel.  Lord knows I wasn't worldly, but I had gone to school in the lower part of Michigan, I'd been in Chicago for three years, I'd been in New England with the navy and in the Southeast with the navy.  I liked the Upper Midwest, not only the lay of the land and the climate, but I liked the people, and I wanted to go back.  So I'd written the bar exam in Minnesota and wrote it in Wisconsin.  I was going to write it in Michigan, too, but by this time I was married and had two children and my wife thought that that was a nice fantasy, that I would spend some time looking around, but I'd better find something quickly.  Well, I had a friend with whom I'd grown up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who'd settled in Wausau.  A lot of people from the Upper Peninsula are much more connected to Wisconsin than to Michigan.  It is a much closer relationship.  In any event, he knew that I was going to be looking around.  He said, "Why don't you come take a look at Wausau?  It's a very nice community."  I did, I liked it and settled there.  By the time I got out of the navy, he'd been elected district attorney, and he had a vacancy for an assistant.  There was one assistant district attorney.  He asked me if I would be interested, and I said, "Sure."  So I became the assistant district attorney for Marathon County.  Subsequently the city of Wausau decided it wanted to have a city attorney, so I became the city attorney for the city of Wausau.

00:06:13	Election to the Legislature 

LS:	That was an appointment, not an election?

TE:	Yes.  Appointed by the Common Council.  During this time I got active in the Democratic Party — the Marathon County Democratic Party — and became well acquainted with David Obey, who was the state representative from that area — assemblyman from that area.  In 1969, after the election of Richard Nixon in November of '68, Melvin Laird, who'd been a long-time congressman in that area, accepted the appointment of Secretary of Defense.  That opened the congressional district up for a special election.  Dave Obey ran.  He was very much of an underdog.  This had been a safe Republican district — a Laird district for a long while.  But Dave Obey believed he could win it, and those of us who were helping him believed he could win it, and in what was regarded as a major upset, he won.  He beat Walter John Chilsen, who was the Republican candidate for Congress.  The same day that Dave won, or the day after, he was about to embark for Washington, D.C., and he called some of us together and he said, "Now, we must get together a candidate and a campaign for my Assembly seat, and I think, Tony, you ought to run for it."  That was the first time I'd ever seriously considered running for elective office.  To make a long story short, I did run for office in a special election called by then Governor Warren Knowles, and I was elected to the Assembly in 1969 in a special election.  I came down here as a member of the minority.  The Republicans controlled the governorship, all the constitutional offices and both houses of the Legislature.  

00:07:56

TE:	It was also a very fractious time.  Father Groppi and his followers had occupied the Assembly chambers just a day or two before I was elected.  I came down and couldn't get into the building, because I had no identification.  The National Guard was blocking admission to the building.  That added a great deal to the confrontational spirit that was afoot at the time, and beyond that, there was a real fight within the Republican ranks between the conservatives led by John Shabaz, Kenneth Merkel, Russ Olson and others, and the more moderates, those who aligned themselves with Governor Knowles, including the late Jim Hazen, Stanley York, Dave Martin, who's now with the university, was among the moderates.  But it was a very contentious time.  I'll try to shorten this up a bit.  Within a year and a half of that time, the regular election rolled around, in 1970.  I was re-elected.  Governor Patrick Lucey was elected governor.  The Democrats moved from minority status in the Assembly to majority status.  After the passage of the budget that year, the then Speaker Bob Huber took an appointment from Governor Lucey.  Norman Anderson was elected Speaker.  I became elected majority leader, which was a very marvelous opportunity for me.   I'd been in the Legislature less than two full years, and I had the chance to be majority leader, in part because those who were there when they were in the minority and in part because those who came in with the new class, who were elected in '70, regarded me as one of theirs, because I had just come in a short time ahead of them.  So it was a magnificent opportunity for me, and I spent the balance of that session and the next session as majority floor leader.  In that period of time, when I was majority floor leader, the Democrats controlled the Assembly, the Republicans controlled the Senate, so I spent a lot of time not only working with my Assembly colleagues but working with the Republicans who were then in control of the State Senate, people like Bob Knowles, Ray Johnson, Walter Hollander, Ernie Keppler, and others.  A lot of issues that affected budget, the university, a host of things, came up and I worked very closely with the governor's office on the one hand and my own colleagues in the Assembly on the other hand, and on the third hand, the Republican majority in the State Senate.  Very interesting time.

00:10:54

LS:	What were your views of the university, let's say when you were in Wausau.  Did it enter into your consciousness at all?

TE:	Oh, sure.  The two-year campus at Wausau is a very strong one, and has a major influence in the community, certainly among those of us who consider ourselves liberals and Democrats.  We were closely associated with the values of the two-year campus there.  It was a campus that aligned itself very closely with Madison at the time.  It was a campus where many of the people on the faculty did not have a high regard for the WSU [Wisconsin State University] System at the time.  That was when the rivalry was quite intense.  But the university was a major part of our consideration, and I counted among my friends and among those who were my most active supporters, people who were associated with the University of Wisconsin-Marathon campus.  Beyond that, in my days when I was with the Marathon County unit of government, when I was assistant district attorney I also doubled as corporation counsel.  It was during that time that the campus was expanding — the campus at Marathon — and I had to come down here from time to time, and even after I left the county and went to the city, an arrangement was made that I could help with the dealings with the powers that be down here to make sure that the campus got money that it needed to expand there.

LS:	Here?

TE:	Here in Madison.

LS:	Harrington's office?

TE:	That's right.  And with the CCHE [Coordinating Committee on Higher Education] and with Jim Young, the Higher Educational Aids Board [HEAB].  There was a lot of federal money available at that time, but you qualified for it by going through the state, and I worked closely with Jim Young, who was then with HEAB, to get the funds.  So I had a very close professional and personal and political relationship with that campus and by extension, with the university as a whole.

LS:	You actually talked to people in Van Hise, did you?

TE:	Yes.  

00:13:13

LS:	That's interesting.  Did you form any impression of what was going on up there?

TE:	Well, it was a time when there was great competition between the two systems.  Fred Harvey Harrington was the president of the University of Wisconsin System, and Gene McPhee was the president or the head man of the WSU System.  My neighbor, only thirty miles down the road, was the ebullient chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Lee Sherman Dreyfus.  Once I was elected to the Legislature, Lee Dreyfus was a very effective spokesperson for his campus.  He used to make sure that all the legislators from that central Wisconsin area had a chance to come to his campus, to learn what was going on there, to be flattered, to enjoy his hospitality, and he did a very good job.  I'd like to point out that his was a homey, friendly operation, whereas Madison was rather elite and standoffish.  When I first came to the Legislature, in the minority once again, I was on the Education Committee, and one of the problems that the Education Committee was grappling with even at that time was the apparent failure of the Coordinating Committee on Higher Education to somehow effectively intervene in this competition, which had become an excessive competition between the two Systems.  During Warren Knowles' time the University of Wisconsin System moved into other communities with the four-year campus at Parkside and the four-year campus at Green Bay, and the WSU System got into the two-year campus business with campuses at Richland Center, Baraboo, Fond du Lac, Rhinelander which was the combination Nicolet, and everybody understood that there was something wrong here, that this was just not working out well.  When I came back in, in the majority, elected in '70, taking office in January of '71, Patrick Lucey proposed merger, which came as a real surprise to a lot of people, because it had not been a major issue in the campaign.

00:15:48	Merger Bill

LS:	It had only been mentioned once, as I understand it.  Did you know anything about it yourself?

TE:	No, I didn't know anything about it until — I knew before he publicly proposed it, because I was one of the governor's supporters, so I was privy to his legislative program.  This was before I became majority leader.  I was at this time in the majority and had won a coveted seat on the Finance Committee and was regarded as one of Governor Lucey's supporters, along with Dennis Conta, who was also on the Finance Committee.  So it first had to wend its way through the Finance Committee, and it was at Finance where the hearings were the most active, even more than the Education Committee.  At that time, even more so than now, the Finance Committee was the be-all and the end-all on issues that involved expenditure of any significant amount of dollars.  The Education Committee did not have a great deal to say vis-à-vis the Finance Committee.  

LS:	Did it have any power at all — the Education Committee?

TE:	Some, but interestingly enough at that time, two or three chairs of the Education Committees in a row had been defeated at the polls, and people were a little leery about it.  They were high-quality people.  In the election of 1970 Holger Rasmusen, who was the Senate Education Committee chairman from the Chippewa Falls area, was defeated by Bruce Peloquin, and Lawrence Johnson who was the Assembly Education Committee chairman from a very safe Republican area — Door and Kewaunee counties — was defeated.   That encouraged the people on the Education Committee to take a lower profile.  I think that was a part of it.  It was seen as a committee where you could only get chewed up if you got too active.  So I think that helped dampen what should have been a more aggressive role for the Education Committees at that time, and Finance moved into that vacuum and got very actively involved not only the dollars and cents issues but the policy issues.  

00:18:14

TE:	I have to say that my impression then was as a relatively new legislator with a relatively significant position of responsibility that something had to be done with the two University Systems to curb the excessive spending.  Everybody saw it as just getting out of bounds.  CCHE was regarded as a failure and so merger, appropriately or not, was seen by many as a fiscal matter and the policy considerations were a bit secondary.  That may have been a mistake, but at the time it had lots of influence on many.  

00:19:05	UW's Failure to Oppose Merger

LS:	You didn't question that and say, "Well, I wonder if anybody's thinking how this is going to work out?"

TE:	I talked to a good many people at the university, but the interesting thing was — and this is my recollection, it may be a bit subjective, but I think this is accurate.  The University of Wisconsin System and the Board of Regents didn't take it very seriously, it seemed to me.  The Board of Regents surely didn't like it.  There's no doubt about that.  They were almost all Warren Knowles' appointees and they were going to stick with the university.  They thought it was sort of a political kind of thing, and they weren't very actively lobbying against it, at least not directly.   The WSU System, on the other hand, had people who were very actively lobbying for it, including Lee Sherman Dreyfus, and he was a charmer.  I recall him coming before the Joint Finance Committee and he knew what was on people's minds.  I believe I have this anecdote correctly.  To paraphrase, he said, "You know what we do when we want to get more money out of McPhee?  We do something like this.  I go to a meeting of the chancellors and I say, 'Gene, I need some more money because I want to have a major in Turkish tribal codes up at UW-Stevens Point.'  McPhee will say, 'Dreyfus, are you out of your mind?'  And I'd say, 'All right, Gene, if that's the way you want it, but I have it on good authority that if we don't get that major started this fall, Madison will start it in the spring.'  'All right, Dreyfus, you can have a major in Turkish tribal codes.'"  Well, that was how many of us thought the thing was working, not just bricks and mortar.  That was bad enough, with all the competition for two-year campuses and we knew that it was getting out of line.  Every legislator wanted to bring home a two-year campus, the last two of which were Medford and Richland Center, which could hardly be justified on educational or economic grounds or access grounds.  We knew there had to be something done with the bricks and mortar, but in addition to that, just in terms of duplication of program and curriculum, we knew something ought to be done.  So the university sat back.  The WSU, though it didn't take an official position, had people who were really pushing it, the most active of which was Lee Dreyfus.

00:21:37 	Reasons Merger Passed 

LS:	As I understand it, a lot of the WSU chancellors were against it, but Dreyfus was very much for it and of course, TAUWF [The Association of UW Faculties] — the former TAUWF — was for it.

TE:	If there were people in the WSU System who were very opposed to it, I never heard from them.  I heard only from those who were supportive of it.  Why were they supportive of it?  They were supportive of it, some because of the prestige — they wanted to become a part of the University of Wisconsin; some because they thought it would mean higher pay and better recognition for them as members of the academic community; some because they thought it would indeed mean greater resources for that particular campus.  There weren't very many who were opposed from the WSU System, and I have to say I don't recall being lobbied by anybody from the WSU System.  

00:22:37

TE:	In any event, it sat there and my impression was that the University System took comfort in the notion that though Democrats in the Assembly might pass it, Republicans in the Senate would stop it.  So they didn't mount a major attack on it in the Assembly.  We took it up — I remember Bert Grover, now the Superintendent of Public Instruction, was one of the floor leaders.  I was by then majority leader.  It was a largely party-line vote, though Madison Democrats like Midge Miller and others got off.  They opposed it, because they knew the university was opposed to it, and some Republicans from WSU communities got on.  So it wasn't a straight party-line vote.  Fairly close vote, though.  It was not an easy vote.  Then it went over to the Senate, where everybody felt it would — not everybody, but where many felt it would be done.  Only at that stage did the university come out openly against it, as I recall.  When it was being debated in the Assembly it was clear to everyone that they didn't like it, but they had never taken an official position against it.  By the time it got to the Senate, they were overtly against it, but by then the ball had really started to roll.  There were too many questions about it, the whole business, and then Governor Lucey said, "Well, I'll go to the Senate chambers and answer your questions," and it was clear that he knew a lot more about what he was talking about than those who were opposed — many who were opposed were opposed simply because it was a Democratic governor's proposition — and he was going into the Republican State Senate.  He just had control of the facts and they had been put up to being against it on partisan grounds more than anything else, not on policy grounds, and they didn't have a good policy understanding, I don't think.  My view, and again I acknowledge my subjectivity here, was that Governor Lucey did very well in that setting.  The opponents looked rather bad and it really gave it a push.  What brought it over the top was that Ray Johnson, a Republican who subsequently became Republican floor leader in the Senate, came out openly for merger.  He was a highly respected younger legislator, seen as kind of the wave of the future for Republicans.  He represented Eau Claire, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.  He said that he could support merger if Governor Lucey would make some changes, fairly modest changes it seemed to me.  Governor Lucey said he'd be glad to do that.  The bill passed the Senate, came over to the Assembly, was concurred in and I think caught lots of people by surprise.

00:25:38

LS:	I'd like to ask you a couple of things about that.  The story is that in the Joint Finance Committee Molinaro left the room at the time of the crucial vote.  What's the story on that?

TE:	Yes.  George Molinaro was a legend.  His influence was apparently greater than it actually was.  When I first came to the Legislature George was a powerhouse among the Democrats.  He'd been there for a long, long time.  But even after a while it was clear that George was riding more on reputation than anything else.  When the Democrats came into the majority there was some talk that George would contest for Speaker, but he did not.  He was able to count.  He knew that Huber had the votes, but he struck a bargain.  He'd want to be the Assembly Chair of Finance and then he wouldn't challenge Huber.  Huber was willing to do that, so George Molinaro and Walter Hollander were the co-chairs of Finance, one a Republican Senator, one a Democratic Assemblyman.  What Huber did, very cleverly I think, was to name as his delegation to Finance, a number of "Young Turks" who were not overwhelmed with George Molinaro's reputation.  That included Ernie Corpola from Bayfield County, Dennis Conta from Milwaukee County, myself from Marathon County, all of us hard workers, all of us ambitious, all of us wanting to make our mark, none of us overawed by George and Walter.  It became apparent the first month or so we were on Finance that George wanted very little to do with us.  He tried to assign us off on other topics and otherwise engage our energies, including bargaining with state employees, which was at that time done by a legislative committee rather than by a department as it is now.  But we were more than up to that.  So on merger, George, who all along had allowed that he had fealty to the Democratic position, the Democratic governor, the Speaker, the whole business, had privately been telling the Republicans and his friends here in the university that he could quash it.  He didn't take it very seriously either.  George was very close with the University System, witness the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, which George and the university cooked between them — a questionable proposition at the time with Whitewater so close by, but that was what was happening at the time.  Anyway, George had a very tight relationship with the University System.  So when it came down to counting crucial votes, George was between a rock and a hard spot.  He had let the governor know, the Democrats know, "Not to worry, I'll be with you."  He'd let the university know, "Not to worry, I'll stop it."  Then he took a walk, as you suggested, which was highly unusual — for such a highly visible, important person on a crucial vote not to be there.  Everybody who was around knew what happened — that George took a walk and the bill got out of Finance because of that.  

LS:	Literally because of that?

TE:	Yes.  I think so.  His vote could have stopped it.  

LS:	Well, then the other question is — but I'll turn the tape, first.

00:29:38 	[end side 1; begin Side 2]

LS:	It's been said that Lucey bribed a couple of senators, Cirilli and somebody else.  

TE:	I don't think that's the case.

LS:	Have you heard that?

TE:	Not relative to merger.  I've heard it relative to other things.  For example, the budget that same year was tied up.  The Democratic Assembly passed it, but the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn't take it up.  It really got into an impasse.  We got into the fall of the year and the Democrats had a conference committee which was George Molinaro, Norman Anderson, and me.  I was named to the conference committee and the Republican conferees were Walter Hollander, Jim Swan, and Art Cirilli.  Walter Hollander was there by virtue of being chair of Joint Finance, as was Molinaro.  Swan was there to represent the hard-core Republicans, and Cirilli was there representing the pragmatists.  Art came from Douglas County.  There was a proposal in the budget to consolidate some judicial districts — to get rid of some, to add some.  One of those that was going to lose a judicial district was Douglas County.  Art Cirilli wanted to be a judge in Douglas County at some point.  To make a long story short, the proposal to delete the judgeship in Douglas County was stricken from the budget, so Douglas County retained the two judgeships rather than the one that the budget would have done it.  Art Cirilli joined Walter Hollander, two against one on Swan, in voting to report out the conference report on the budget.  The Democrats voted for it.  Subsequently some time hence, a vacancy occurred in one of the two judgeships in Douglas County and Art Cirilli left the Senate and became a circuit judge.  I don't think there was ever any explicit deal there, but there was certainly an explicit deal that the governor would go along with not getting rid of that judgeship, but whether there was a promise that, "Not only will I not get rid of it but I'll appoint you to it," I don't know that that was the case.  I don't think anybody is ever that direct.  I think Cirilli probably felt that he'd get every consideration for the vacancy when it occurred.  But that had to do with the budget, not with merger.  I don't recall anyone ever suggesting that the governor used any kind of technique such as that on merger.  He didn't have anything to bargain with there.  In a budget, the governor's got a lot to bargain with, but not on anything like the merger bill.  

00:33:01

TE:	I think the big point — three big points in merger.  First of all, the University of Wisconsin did not take it seriously enough until it was too late in the game, and they allowed it to become regarded as a partisan issue rather than a policy issue.  Second, when Pat Lucey appeared before the Senate, it was a real strong showing on his part and made the opposition look rather petty, from my point of view.  And third, when Johnson declared his support for it, because he was highly regarded, that made Republican support for the proposal legitimate and it really began to move from then on.

00:33:50

LS:	It's been said that what Lucey was really after was something else on the budget — something to do with tax reapportionment or--

TE:	Oh, the budget was a very ambitious one.  He was changing the tax distribution system in the budget.  

LS:	And that's what he was really after and the merger was kind of a firework or something so that people wouldn't notice.

TE:	A distraction?

LS:	Yes.

TE:	I don't think so.  I don't think that's the way Pat Lucey operated.  He wanted to get merger pretty badly.  That became a first big political test for him.  You might recall that merger no more than happened than the Board of Regents, knowing that Governor Lucey would get more appointees to the board, quickly appointed John Weaver, and it was fairly apparent that they were appointing someone who was going to be more loyal to them than to the governor and someone who was not going to be a real advocate of merger, someone who would be dedicated to making it work.  Rather the appearances certainly were that this was someone who was going to demonstrate that this was a questionable idea and "I'll give you forty reasons to see why it's questionable."  So it was a big political test for Pat and I don't think he regarded it as simply a distraction while he could push other items of his budget through.  He always had an ambitious agenda and he wanted to see the agenda completed in its entirety.

00:35:35

LS:	You've been a governor.  What's your view of the board's appointment of Weaver at that time?  Did you think that they shouldn't have done it, that they should have waited, or not?  

TE:	It wasn't so much the person as the way it was done.

LS:	It's the way that I'm wondering about.

TE:	The way in which it was done it was made to appear to everyone, most especially the governor, that the Board of Regents was throwing down the gauntlet to him, and if relationships between the governor and the university had been chancy up to that time, they became poor after that time.  As a legislator and subsequently as secretary of the Department of Administration [DOA] I had a number of opportunities to be present when John Weaver and Pat Lucey were together and there was a distinct lack of cordiality there.  They did not particularly care for one another, though by the time Governor Lucey left they had warmed up a bit.  I remember that John Weaver had a going-away event for him at — not Brittingham House; but it was when the president was at the other residence.  It was proper.  It was not very warm, but it was proper.  The fact that he had the going-away thing at all was a sign that the relationship had thawed somewhat.  But from that point on, from the appointment of Weaver on, Pat Lucey had his heels dug in about the university and vice versa.  It really set things on a bad track.

00:37:27

LS:	Yes, but still on that subject, Madison had been going through its terrible troubles.  What was your opinion of Madison itself as against the UW-System, and the merger?  Were you worried about what would happen to Madison or did you think merger would help Madison?

TE:	No.  A variety of things impinged upon my thinking.  One was that clearly something had to be done to stop this unhealthy competition between the two Systems.  They were just spending at a rate that couldn't be sustained, were building at a rate that couldn't be sustained.  CCHE had failed.  Some way had to be found to contain that.  That was a major argument.  A second and very telling argument to me was that not only was the WSU System growing in terms of campuses and bricks and mortar, but many of the campuses had aspirations to be mirror images of Madison, replete with graduate schools, in some cases professional schools, etc., and that that somehow ought to be nipped in the bud.  That this campus — the Madison campus — ought to be the graduate center, the center for professional schools, the research center, and each of the other campuses ought to have a mission statement.  That was part of the argument for merger.  To me it made some good sense.  And I must admit something strictly personal, but subjective things like this do influence people's judgment, there's no doubt about it.  When very late in the game the university came out against a System, some of their arguments really rankled me personally, and it showed that people had not done much homework.  I was a graduate of Michigan State University, a land grant school, but I was proud to have my degree from there.  When I was visited by some people from the Madison campus they'd say, "You don't want to debase the University at Madison by mixing us with these people from state schools.  Everybody knows that state schools are inferior" and all this business.  Well, it was a terribly elitist kind of argument, and not only didn't go to the merits of what we had before us, it seemed to me, but it personally offended me a great deal.  I didn't have any illusions that Michigan State University had the same academic reputation as the University of Michigan, for example, but it was an affront to be told indirectly that state schools, by definition, were inferior.  And it wasn't just me.  I know there were a lot of people who were offended by what they regarded as a kind of elitist attitude, that if a diploma said University of Wisconsin-Platteville, that would somehow demean a diploma that said University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I guess you can argue about that in theological terms if you wish, but just to cite it as being conclusive evidence of the fact didn't persuade a great many people.  Most of us felt that most people aren't going to confuse a degree from Platteville with a degree from Madison, and it isn't going to water down the Madison degree nor is it going to elevate the Platteville degree.  But that argument about what the diploma would say got far too much attention, it seemed to me, and the question of what would be the respective mission of the respective campuses got far too little.  It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that if the other campuses in the System can develop separate missions in separate areas of expertise then you can avoid a great deal of redundancy, and that if Madison is clearly recognized as a different campus, with different faculty, different missions, i.e. research, graduate, professional schools, and different needs, we're going to be all set, and the fact that the university catch-up bill a decade and a half later passed is explicit recognition of the fact that a majority of the people who are policy-makers in the Capitol recognize that this is a different campus and that it has different needs and its faculty needs a different kind of compensation system.  But we paper over that too much.  Some people try to pursue a kind of phony egalitarianism, which most people recognize isn't the case, including, from my experience, the majority of people on the old WSU campuses, though there are some who won't buy into that and they get a lot of attention.  

00:42:59

LS:	I'm glad you mentioned that because it's said that Lucey created expectations among the faculty at the other campuses that they would be getting equal salaries.  And it was unfortunate.  Somebody has said that nobody ever faced this issue when it should have been faced, and now you're saying the same thing.

TE:	Yes.  It was not faced.  My recollection is that Pat Lucey never explicitly said there would be parity in salaries, because I don't think he believed that then and it was not the kind of thing that he wanted to throw in.  He didn't want to get yet another disruptive argument going on with the bill.  But it is clear that many in the WSU System, most especially those who were active in TAUWF, thought that merger would be a vehicle which would give them parity.  And there're some in TAUWF who still subscribe to that point of view, witness the statement before the Joint Finance Committee in the last session, "You won't cram 10 percent down our throats," which was perhaps the most impolitic statement I heard in the four years I was governor.  If they weren't going to get the 15 percent that Madison got, then no thanks for the 10 percent.  Well, that statement did as much to help pass the bill ultimately as anything did.  

00:44:23

LS:	I'm glad you answered my earlier question the way you did, but what I was trying to say was that Madison was in such, as I understand it, bad repute with the Legislature because of the student demonstrations that some people thought that maybe merger would protect it, that it would have been really slammed.

TE:	Well, there were arguments made to that effect, though I didn't buy into them a great deal.  I didn't give a lot of credence to them.  I think what has occurred subsequent to the passage of merger demonstrates that those who made those arguments were more right than wrong.  Let me elaborate a bit.  There were some who argued that the excesses of the '60s in spending on post-high school education would be followed by a very constricted and narrow attitude toward post-high school education in the '70s, that there would be such a reaction to what had gone on with the explosion of campuses and the whole business that in the '70s it would go just the other way, and the university would be starved down, and that a merged System would be better able to protect itself and compete for public education dollars than would a fractious System that was going in two different directions, because what the Legislature would do under that circumstance would be to keep one sound and bleed the other white.  That they'd not be simply competing — post-high school public education would not only be competing for the tax dollar, they'd be competing with one another, and if they were competing with one another they'd just hurt themselves.  I think it's turned out that there was something to that, because part of it was the lack of a cordial relationship between John Weaver and Pat Lucey, but shortly after that, state support for post-high school public education began to decline.  There was a concomitant increase in support for the vocational system.  The vocational system became everybody's favorite for awhile, and the vocational system was getting a greater amount of dollars, relatively, the university a lesser amount of dollars, and but for the merged System they would have gotten less yet.  When the university would come in with one budget, if the Madison people had been trying to support that on their own — the people who represented Madison and the people who were friends of Madison — it wouldn't have made it.  But if they had legislators from Green Bay and Eau Claire and La Crosse and Whitewater also supporting the university budget, because you didn't know where the cuts would come out if cuts did come out, the university budget had a bit more insulation.  So I think, though I wouldn't overstate it, I do think that merger has insulated the university from what could have been even tougher economic times in the '70s, especially when the economy began to turn sour, than it would have otherwise been the case.

00:47:56

LS:	That's interesting.  I'm just curious.  Were these people who came to you and spoke this way — were they faculty?

TE:	Yes.  What happened, as I mentioned, was that very early the university didn't explicitly or overtly oppose it.  Now many of us understood they didn't like it, and that was a troublesome thing too.  If they didn't like it, why not say they don't like it and get the debate out in the open?  But they wouldn't do that, and I remember meeting with people that I had gotten to know a bit — Ray Bowen, who was a fine guy.  He was in some sort of an administrative capacity at the time.

LS:	He was on the University Committee.

TE:	Right.  He came to see me and I got to know him.  He was always very direct and I had a good relationship with him.  I talked to David Cronon, Ted Finman.  These are people whom I recall, and Midge Miller got to be one of the principal opponents to my recollection.  Yes, I'm sure, I remember it well.  Midge was wild about it, because I remember when I stood up — by now I was the majority leader — I stood up to move final passage of the bill, Midge was in the row right behind me and we had been seatmates before I became majority leader, she was just hissing at me, "How can you do this to the university?"  I remember Midge was mad as could be.  But at any event, prior to that time Midge began to organize faculty people and friends of the university to come up, but by then the train was moving out of the station.  I remember Midge was particularly angry not only at me but at Norman Anderson, who was the Speaker and whom she regarded as a Madison legislator.  Norm was a great friend of the university.  He cared deeply for the university, and still does I'm sure.  Nonetheless, he felt that his role as the leader of his caucus and as the Speaker was to follow what the caucus's point of view was, and though I'm sure he was not an enthusiast about it, he was supportive, where George on the other hand, took this very Janus-like position and ended up taking a walk.

00:50:35

LS:	So what kind of people were saying these things that offended you?

TE:	People from the faculty and people who were friends of the university.  The university's staunchest champion was also one of its bones in the throat.  That was Arthur DeBardeleben.  Arthur was wild about merger.  He thought it was the poorest idea that had ever come along and the only thing that I think Arthur would have thought was worse was if they would have instituted required chapel on the campus.  That would have offended him worse.  But he was so intemperate in his attacks on those who were open-minded to merger, much less those who supported merger, that people backed away from him.

LS:	He could turn people off, couldn't he?

TE:	Do you know Arthur at all?

LS:	I've heard about him from other people.  I don't know him, but he's been  

TE:	Well, Gaylord Nelson tells a story about Arthur DeBardeleben.  Now he's been regent a couple of times, but Gaylord tells a story that when he became governor, they were only two-year terms and he knew he'd never be governor more than two terms and he'd never get to appoint more than four regents, and at the time that was not a majority.  I forget how many regents there were.  So he knew that whomever he appointed as regents would never get in the majority, so he said, "I thought to myself if I can't appoint the majority I at least want to appoint people who will have an impact, so I said to myself, 'Who's the meanest son-of-a-bitch I know?' and I thought of Arthur DeBardeleben right away, I appointed him, and he never disappointed me once."  That's one of Gaylord's favorite stories, but Arthur would love that story, too.  He doesn't mind that and he set about on a one-person crusade on this merger problem, and in the bargain, I think, turned off some people who might have been a bit marginal.

LS:	And he wasn't even on — he was off the regents by then.

TE:	That's right.  It was just as a friend of the university.  As he got very involved on the pay issue.  He regards himself, and accurately so, as a great friend of the university, most particularly this campus.  He regards Madison as the University of Wisconsin.  All the rest are pretenders.  He doesn't have much time for them, and it shows.  The tactics of people like Arthur, I think, swung a lot of people, because he engaged in a bit of hyperbole.  And then on the other side, as I mentioned, was the charming and entertaining Lee Dreyfus, who was telling people everything that they believed was true about the System.  That is that there was mindless competition for campuses, for bricks and mortar, for courses 

LS:	And the big issue was undergraduate education, and I'm sure they were all saying it was done better at the WSU's.

TE:	Smaller classes and more one-on-one situations.  And he was very effective.  That was the first time he really came on the scene as a figure here in Madison, it seemed to me.  And as I mentioned, when I was in the Legislature he made a point of keeping in close touch with all the legislators of whatever persuasion from that central Wisconsin area.  So he had a cadre of people who knew him and liked him — very likeable man.

LS:	He was the perfect lobbyist.

TE:	Absolutely.  Many of the other chancellors weren't known from Adam's off ox.  People didn't know who they were, so they didn't have a great deal of impact on it one way or another, but he clearly did.  

TE:	And, who was the then chancellor at Eau Claire?

LS:	Haas.

TE:	Yes.  He became associated, at least in my mind, as a supporter.

LS:	Of merger?

TE:	Yes.  Not a real salesperson for it, but someone who could go with it under certain circumstances.  He had considerable stature among the WSU chancellors and became a kind of second in command under the merged System, though only for a short period of time as I recall — a year or less.

00:55:37

LS:	It's said that Ed Young had a telephone on his desk directly to Lucey's office and didn't want to oppose merger too much lest Madison be hurt by it, but go along and hope to get the best.  Is that you're--

TE:	I don't know if that's the case, but--

LS:	Did he ever talk to you?

TE:	Ed?  Gosh, he may have, but I can't recall.   If he did it was not as someone all out to stop it.  It was the worst of both worlds for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  They opposed it and they really didn't like it, but they wouldn't let on publicly that they didn't like it.  Everybody who was familiar with the issue knew that quietly they were trying to scuttle it, that they felt that their best bet was to be cozy with the Senate Republicans in the hopes that they would ultimately do it in, that Lucey and his allies might be able to get it through the Assembly but we'll kill it in the Senate, so people began to think that they were not being very direct and very honest in their public statements about it, because they took the public position, "That's a political issue, not an issue in which we'll get involved."  And everybody knew that wasn't the case.  Then, their opposition, when it finally did become overt, rested far too much on the partisan issue.  That is that the Republicans simply wouldn't give the Democratic governor this political victory.

LS:	So you don't buy — I'm under the impression that it was the regents who thought that the Republicans would scuttle it, and that Madison really thought it would be — Young thought he would be better off if he didn't oppose it so that he would get better treatment afterward.

TE:	I really don't know.  That could be the case, but the fact is  

LS:	You didn't perceive it that way?

TE:	No, I didn't perceive it that way, and the administration here was not nearly so visible as were the regents.  The regents were very highly visible on the issue, and I recall as we debated the bill in the Assembly — now this is a recollection that I hope time hasn't warped a bit — that people who represented the university were up there preparing amendments for the opposition.  I'm thinking of Harvey Breuscher and Wally Lemon and  

LS:	Was Percy there?

TE:	I think Percy was there.  Even though ostensibly the university had not taken a position against it, it was clear that they were supplying information to Midge and to others who were the opponents.  We got into huge arguments about what would happen with housing allowances, because they were rather disparate between the WSU and the UW-System, and silly kinds of things it seemed to me.  Things that didn't really go to the heart of the issue at all.  My recollection is that by the time it hit the floor, the university had its folks up there assisting those who were opposed, even though they had not yet come out against it.  But when it passed the Assembly, clearly it was no-holds-barred then.  They were all against it, but then as I say, I think it had gone pretty far down the track.

LS:	Of course, they're all from the System — Breuscher, Lemon — they're not Madison.

TE:	Yes.  Well, at the time, they were not System then.  The System was — well, there was a little bit of difference, I guess.

LS:	Yes.  There was.

TE:	But they were — the System at that time was just Madison, Parkside, Green Bay, and all that either of those brought was George Molinaro, who as we previously discussed, took a duck on the issue, and then some of the two-year campuses.

01:00:01	[end tape 1; begin Tape 2]

Changes in the Legislature 

LS:	This is the second tape of the interview with Anthony Earl.  Well, then let's move into the merged System from '71 to '74.  

TE:	Well, I had a role to play soon after leaving the Legislature.  Pat Lucey wanted to do what he had in mind with merger, which was to change the System so that Madison would be the first among equals and to squeeze out some of the excesses.

LS:	Now are you talking about after '74?

TE:	Yes.

LS:	Merger after all is more or less settled by '71.

TE:	But there were a lot of growing pains.

LS:	Yes, I know that.  I know you became secretary of DOA, is that what you were about to say?  But does nothing happen between?  For instance, Mary Lou and Dick Flintrop had come in.  They said there was a vacuum in the leadership in the Legislature for Madison or for the university.  And Mary Lou said how painful it was to hear Lucey attacking the university and that she had gotten a little QT group together without telling Midge.  I'm just curious where you were.

TE:	That indeed had happened.  There was a vacuum of leadership in the Legislature for the university at the time.  By this time the lack of cordiality between John Weaver and Pat Lucey was very visibly apparent.  Pat was trying to save dollars and he was still going after what he thought were the excesses that had taken place in post-high school education in the '60s and on top of that was smarting from the opposition that he had gotten from the regents, which he thought hadn't diminished with John Weaver on board.  So it was a fairly tough time.  And there were not lots of people speaking up for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in particular.  Midge had pretty much shot her bolt in the opposition to merger, so somebody who could just speak up for the university hadn't really come into the place.  Mary Lou did, very effectively I think, begin to build a base of support for the university and Madison in particular.  

LS:	She says she made it the System, because she knew she'd be thought of as a Madison person.

TE:	Yes.  Her reputation was, and accurately so, as being far more interested in the System than just Madison.  Midge had gotten herself painted with the brush of caring only for Madison and let the devil take the hindmost.  So Midge's credibility for the System wasn't very good, but Mary Lou had good credibility and she wisely struck alliance with people like Dick Flintrop, who represented another campus community, Oshkosh, but who had a concern for this campus as well.  Mary Lou, in that instance as in many others, demonstrated herself to be a very effective politician.  

01:03:50

TE:	But let me go ahead a bit, because what happened in '74 is a result of what was going on in the '70s, between the actual passage of merger and its implementation.  Pat Lucey felt strongly that greater emphasis ought to be placed on mission statements for these campuses that had come in, and he felt that it was time to start squeezing down on some of the excesses that had occurred, to wit, it was time to close some campuses.  So I, by now, am the secretary of the Department of Administration, and one of my assignments is to come up with a formula that will handle this issue, not just by fiat say this campus is closed.  And what we came up with in the Department of Administration was a proposal that said that a campus had to have at least five hundred students to be viable.  Lacking five hundred students then state support would disappear.  That five hundred student number — and I don't know if five hundred was the number, you'll have to indulge me — but it was a number in that range.  The number that was chosen would have gotten rid of four campuses, Richland Center, Medford, Baraboo and Barron County.

LS:	Superior?

TE:	No, this was just — Superior always had over two thousand, so it only would have hit two-year campuses.  There was great consternation about that.  I remember going over to the Legislature to testify for this and of course each of the communities involved had by this time identified very closely with their campus, and Richland Center and Medford, which were the smallest and the most vulnerable, put up the loudest and the longest and the hardest fight.  To make a long story short, not only did the language which said if a campus goes below a certain number it will fall out of existence — not only did that language not pass, the Legislature passed other language that said no campus could be closed without explicit legislative approval.  So it went just the opposite direction.  Subsequent to that time only one campus has disappeared.  That was the Medford campus, which I think never got much above two hundred students, and finally the people in Taylor County, where Medford is located, sued for peace in a way and said, "We'll let this go if you'll pick up our costs."  They had built the buildings.  The Legislature did pick up the cost from Taylor County, and the Medford campus faded into the footnotes of history.  But all the others are still there.  And my judgment is that legislative efforts to close any campus, two-year or four-year will be futile, that only time and circumstance will result in the erosion of the current campuses.  My guess is over the next several years that some of the campuses will change in their character.  Some will merge with vocational schools, some may disappear altogether, and we may end up with a smaller number of campuses, but it won't be done as a result of legislative action or gubernatorial order.

01:07:46

LS:	That's interesting, because I thought the System people were working on that — the Scope Report — that's after '74, isn't it?  '75 or '76?

TE:	Yes.  Well, we had — in the budget bill most recently passed there was a great debate over whether or not the Board of Regents ought to have the authority to close campuses or not, vis-à-vis the Legislature, and it was an enormous debate.  I regarded it as much ado about nothing, because ultimately a campus will not be closed, it seems to me — certainly not a four-year campus — without the Legislature involving itself.   They're all worried — legislators are all worried that if they let this campus go, they might be next.  So it's one for all and all for one.  I don't think that we'll see a closing of a campus by legislative action for the foreseeable future.

01:08:57

LS:	So did you work with the System in thinking about the closing or not?

TE:	Oh, yes.  I talked to people in the System but what made sense — what kind of numbers do you have to have to have viability from an educational standpoint.  What kind of numbers do you have to have to have a decent selection of class offerings — curricular offerings?  What kind of numbers do you need to have fiscal viability?  How much of a faculty can you keep there?  And as I mentioned, the Center System quickly became a focus of some of the problems with merger, because some of the two-year campuses were satellites of other four-year campuses.  The Fox Valley campus was a satellite of UW-Green Bay [GB], the Medford campus was a satellite of UW-Stevens Point.  Some of the two-year campuses, on the other hand, had retained a very close affiliation with Madison.  Even though they were a separate entity as the Center System, they were clearly associated with Madison and the notion of becoming satellites just bothered the dickens out of them, because they felt, and with some justification, that a satellite of a larger four-year campus would be the place where troublesome faculty were sent, where ineffective faculty were sent.  It would not be where the best and the brightest would go.  And indeed, that's what some people said was the end of Medford, that Lee Dreyfus, chancellor of Stevens Point, sent up to Medford less than the best.  I don't know that to be the case, and frankly I don't think that he made a judgment just to get his troublesome people up there, but the perception was there.  And the perception bothered the people in Medford who said, "How can we make a go of it?  All we're getting are the cast-offs from Stevens Point."  And young people hearing that obviously would say, "Well, geez, I don't know if I ought to go there.  Maybe I ought to go over to Eau Claire or somewhere else."  That seems to have been resolved through the passage of time with the development of the Center System as a unit again, and I think the last dean did a good job establishing the wholeness of the Center System as a separate unit, separate apart from the four-year campuses.  I think that the new dean is going to try to continue that same thing.

01:11:31

LS:	You say you worked with the people in the System.  Whom did you talk to?  What I'm after is your impressions of the staff up there.

TE:	Well, by this time Don Percy had emerged as the principal spokesman for the university, and he was highly regarded by people in the Legislature.  

LS:	He was?

TE:	Yes.  They didn't always like him, but they respected his intelligence and they would consider what he had to say even though they might ultimately disagree with it.  But he became more and more the person who spoke for the university on these issues.

LS:	And they didn't say, "Why isn't Weaver down here?  Why is Percy always down here?"

TE:	Well, most people never saw John Weaver.  I don't think John was a very effective head of the System in dealing with the Legislature.  By the time he really got in and got in place and got acquainted — by then, all the Legislature is Democratic, and his partisan allies are all in the minority — those who would be his partisan allies.  And it's not my recollection that he made any effort to reach out to the Legislature and establish friends.  Old ties die hard and the university kept very close relationships with Walter Hollander and George Molinaro.  But Walter and George were symbols of the past and they were no longer powers.  By this time, as a matter of fact, Dennis Conta had replaced George Molinaro as the chairman of Finance and George was clearly not a major player.  Walter Hollander was in the minority and had been replaced on Joint Finance, but the university still kept its major contacts with them.  After all, that had always worked in the old days and habits die hard.

LS:	Now when you say "the university", whom are you meaning then?

TE:	Central Administration here.

LS:	Not Percy, too?

TE:	Percy dealt pretty much — but Percy broke out of that and made a point of getting acquainted with me and Dennis Conta and others who he could see were emerging as the new leadership in the Legislature.  

01:14:10

TE:	Don did that, but the University System when I first came had been very indirect.  There were not a lot of direct contacts.  For example, the university kept a close tie with Walter Hollander and George Molinaro through Dr. Curreri — Tony Curreri.  When I was new kid on the block and on Finance, George saw me one day and said, "What are you doing for supper tonight?"  And I said, "Gee, I don't know that I'm doing anything, Mr. Molinaro."  I called him Mr. Molinaro.  "Join me and Senator Hollander right after the session."  So O.K., I did.  This was in January or February of '71, and I'm on Finance, but I'm still a new kid.  It was supper with Tony Curreri, George Molinaro and Walter Hollander and I was being introduced to the club.  Dr. Curreri was a charmer, and he had boxed as a young man and had boxed up in Marshfield and Wausau and we did a lot of small talk about boxing and the whole business.  Only very indirectly did we get into university matters and it was clear that there was this real channel between him, representing the university, and George and Walter.  The thing that impressed me about it a great deal was that George Molinaro had a reputation of being ethically above reproach.  He would not be seen with a lobbyist.  He wouldn't let anybody buy him a cup of coffee.  He was very sanctimonious about it, as a matter of fact — preachy about it.  But he let Tony Curreri buy him supper.  I noticed that, and I thought now this fellow must have a real relationship here, because here's George, the paragon of virtue, and Tony Curreri's buying us all supper.  

LS:	That's fascinating.

00:16:14

TE:	So the university had for a long time maintained its influence on the Legislature and the process up there through indirection, rather than by direction, and its ostensible spokespersons were Wally Lemon and Harvey Breuscher, when I was there.  And you seldom ever saw Harvey or Wally — and I know them both well and think well of each of them — unless the fat was in the fire.  They didn't maintain a regular contact.  There were all these indirect contacts that were maintained.  Now when I was down here, people who felt that I might be predisposed to be friendly to the university — going back now to the earlier conversation — my relationship with the Marathon County campus — would set up meetings with me to meet people.  Jim Wimmer at that time, for example, had a dinner party at which Fred Harvey Harrington was a guest and Dennis Conta was there and I was there and some of the comers were there.  I forget who it was who introduced me to Irv Shain at the time.  Maybe it was Ray Bowen.  Could have been.  Didn't they both come out of chemistry?  I think that Ray was in chemistry.  Well, it makes no difference.

LS:	He would certainly know him, because he was head of the University Committee.

TE:	Right.  So I met Irv at that time and got acquainted with him.  Midge of course was always setting up meetings with various people.  That was how I got to meet Ted Finman, David Cronon, and a host of other people.  But it was all by indirection.  They would search out their friends, and there wasn't a systematic way that the university got its message to legislators of all persuasions.  There was no way that that was done at the time.  And I don't know that it's done yet, to this day.

LS:	Well, this is a very interesting subject.  It's what Mary Lou and Dick Flintrop talked about, which was that the university never sufficiently lobbied for its position.

TE:	That's correct.

LS:	But it's what Ed Young and Don Smith yesterday said — if they had they would have been — the Legislature would have said, "This isn't your business.  You're educators, you're not supposed to be down here talking to us." 

TE:	Oh, I don't subscribe to that for a moment.  The Legislature as an institution, and legislators as individuals are always being opportuned to do things, most of them laudable things.  If the university isn't down there lobbying them, then Bert Grover is for the Department of Public Instruction or the School Boards Association is for the Department of Public Instruction or the vocational system is.  There are only so many public education dollars, and the university has got to compete for those education dollars or somebody else will get them.  Now it seemed to me, and I could be wrong, that the regents understood that when they decided to name Buzz Shaw president of the System, because when I talked to a number of them as to what was it that made this person an outstanding candidate for you they said, "Boy, he really knows the political system.  He's worked well with the governor and the Legislature in Illinois.  He can really establish a good working relationship between the State House and Bascom Hill."  My guess is that they understood that something had to be done there, felt that something had to be done there.  Whether it ought to be done with the president of the System, I don't know.  That's a matter of choice, I guess.  But the university has never done a very good job in my years here of having a direct communications effort with the Legislature as a whole.

LS:	When you had this dinner with Tony Curreri, presumably there was nothing specific at all.  It was just hoping that you'd say, "Oh, he's a nice guy.  It must be a good place."

TE:	I shouldn't say there was nothing specific.  I know the Medical School was in the offing, and of course he paid special attention to that, but there was nothing like, "We hope you'd be sympathetic to a greater allocation of funds."  There was nothing like that at all.  It was about the university generally, and how the university needed friends and  

LS:	Oh, so he actually said that.

TE:	Yes, and I saw him off and on during the years I was there, and it was certainly not always about the Medical School.

LS:	Would he come down and see you or invite you out to dinner?

TE:	Yes.  I didn't have dinner with him very often, but he'd come down or he would say, "I'm coming down to see Walter or George.  May I stop by and visit with you?"

LS:	I find that amazing, because his contact would be with Madison entirely.  I can't imagine his speaking for the System.

TE:	No, it was always pretty much for Madison.  I shouldn't suggest that he ever said, "Gee, the Eau Claire campus is getting shortchanged."  I don't recall him ever saying — it was for Madison.

LS:	But I wonder whether he'd have done it at anybody's behest, like Young's or Shain's.

TE:	I don't know, but I'm certain that they were aware of it.  I shouldn't say everybody, but the people who were the insiders in the politics of the situation knew that Walter Hollander and George Molinaro and Tony Curreri were great friends, and they knew that they met together and George and Walter were very close and good to the university.  George got the four-year campus at Kenosha.  Walter got a two-year campus at Fond du Lac.  Nobody thought that that was just on the basis of dispassionate educational judgment as to where we needed two more campuses.  So they got their rewards, but they also paid their dues.  They looked after the university's interests.

01:22:44

LS:	Incidentally, would you say that it was Molinaro pushing Harrington to do this or Harrington pushing Molinaro to get the Parkside campus?

TE:	Oh, I think it was George deciding that he ought to get something for his efforts.  George would go along with the university and help them out, but "I've got to bring something back home.  I can't just say, 'I'm for the university.'"  And George, for all of his reputation, was as parochial a legislator as there was.  You'd talk about vocational education and yes, he'd be all for it, but he had to bring something back to Gateway Tech, another building, a new program.  We talked about the university and, well, there had to be a new building.  Yes, he could go along with the university's budget but there had to be something — so I've got to imagine that the impetus for Parkside came from Kenosha-area people through George rather than from Fred Harvey Harrington.  It's hard to make the case for either UW-GB or Parkside in retrospect.  Neither one of them has ever come up to their projected enrollments.  Even though the University System's overall enrollment is much higher than people anticipated, UW-GB and Parkside are way below where they were projected to be.  Clearly, the first cut was to draw from Whitewater in the case of Parkside and to draw from Oshkosh and some of the other two-year campuses in the case of UW-Green Bay.  So there was a redistribution of students rather than taking care of increased needs.  And then finally there was some real unhappiness, and this surfaced in the merger debate as well, about the fact that UW-GB and Kenosha both got special budget treatment, start-up treatment, long after they had been started up.  The head of the System, then, really strongly protected that and with George there — George kept trying to keep it for Kenosha.  I think that's finally all passed, but for a long, long time after what by anyone's judgment could be called an adequate period for startup, those two campuses got an extra dollop of dollars because they were in their start-up phase.

LS:	That was over Madison's dead body, too.

TE:	Yes.

01:25:32

LS:	I'm just fascinated by this.  You were talking about Percy's going down and beginning to meet some of you younger people, and at the same time, this sort of 1950s, 1960s exchanges going on.

TE:	Yes, and they were both going on at the same time.  The interesting thing was — my recollection, my belief is that the contacts between Tony Curreri and people like George and Walter and others continued long after Walter and George were not nearly as relevant players any more.  But that had been a comfortable way to do things.  There was not nearly as broad a participation in the legislative process in the '60s as there is now, and even as there was in the '70s.  It was a much more closely held thing.  When Pat Lucey's two budgets passed, in the four years I was there as majority leader, they passed as they came out of Joint Finance.  We did not — no amendments were allowed, so the people on Joint Finance really had a disproportionate voice in what went on before.  Well, take that back a step.   When we came on Joint Finance, most of the players on Joint Finance were not particularly relevant.  It was George and Walter.  They sort of cut the deals.  So you can see how it emerged back at some time that you don't have to worry about the Legislature as a whole.  There are just a handful of people down there who are the real decision-makers.  Get acquainted with them, understand how they operate, and you can influence the System.  So I think — it's speculation of course — but I think that must have been the origin of that System.  But the arrangement continued long after the System made that archaic.  And nothing new came along to replace it.  I don't think anything dramatically different has come along yet.  

01:27:55

I know many of us up at the other end of State Street scratched our heads when Bob O'Neil hired Ron Bornstein and David Martin ostensibly to establish, at least in part, a better relationship with the Legislature.  David was a well-thought-of fellow and he had served in the Legislature, but he's seldom if ever seen up there, and Ron is not seen up there, and people wondered what Bob had in mind.  If these people were to take that responsibility so the president himself doesn't have to do it, where are they?  What are they doing?  At least during my tenure, they weren't highly visible.  It was Bob O'Neil with whom I dealt, at his suggestion and mine.  We got along very well with one another, and then when Buzz Shaw came in it was a personal relationship between the two of us.  I never dealt with either Ron or David, and I don't think legislators up there deal with Ron or David.  

LS:	That's kind of shocking.

TE:	If you were to do a poll of legislators who have talked to either one, I think you'd find very, very few who've talked to either, and fewer yet who'd talked to both.  I would bet if you went and scratched most legislators and say, "Who represents the university?" they would say Wally Lemon on some things, Harvey Breuscher on some things, and then they would really fade off.  Pardon me, that's not all correct.  Who is in the chancellor's office?

LS:	Harry Peterson?

TE:	Harry Peterson.  Now, Harry is more visible than all the others put together.  I don't say that to criticize them.  I think they take their orders and they execute them.  As I said, I've known Harvey and Wally for a long, long time and I don't think they go up to the Capitol unless somebody says, "Gee, you'd better get up there and talk to people about what's going on."  But they are not there on a regular basis.

LS:	So it is somebody on top who's not telling them to do that.

TE:	I think that's largely it, and I think, as I said, since Ken Shaw's been here, he sees that as his mission — that he's going to spend a lot of time down there, and I think that's one reason that the regents chose him.  They thought that he would do well communicating with the Legislature and the governor.

01:30:51	[end side 1; begin Side 2]

TE:	It would be curious as I talk to you to be able to compare my recollections and speculation with others who covered the same time period, because I'm sure there are some rather remarkably different points of view.

LS:	We're transcribing Mary Lou and Dick's interview.  I'm sure you could read it if you wanted to.  Would that interest you?

TE:	Yes, it would.  

The System's Approach to Lobbying 

LS:	I'm sure that would be all right.  They've sealed it, but — and I would have to ask them, but I'm sure in your case it would be all right.  They did say that they thought you thought too much like a legislator at times.  

01:31:35

LS:	Anyway, I'd just like to explore more — Percy is said to have — Young says — told the chancellors that they shouldn't go down to the Legislature without telling him before they went and reporting to him after they went, and of course, Young says he ignored that.

TE:	I can imagine Don saying that, and I can certainly understand why he would say it, because what can tear the whole thing apart, and almost did in this pay raise set-up, is when the different elements of the System start pulling against the fabric and just start representing themselves rather than the System.  So I can understand Percy saying, "Don't be lobbying on your own unless I know what you're going down for.  If you're lobbying for the System, fine.  If you're just lobbying for yourself, don't do it."  That unfortunately clearly happened on the pay raise issue.  Some of the chancellors started lobbying on their own for their campus against the System interest. 

LS:	"Against" would be the crucial thing.  It would be O.K. to lobby on your own provided you weren't lobbying against others.

TE:	Well, they were never ostensibly lobbying against the System, but they were taking a position that everybody ought to get 15 percent, which spelled sure defeat for the bill.  There was no way the bill would pass with that, and they had to be smart enough to understand that.  It really caused a lot more ruction within the System than was apparent because a fellow like Phil Marshall, for example, would take up the cause of the noisier of his faculty who said, "We deserve the full shot.  We're not second-class citizens."  And he would pound away at that.  George Field from River Falls would get in touch with me and say, "You've got to shut Marshall off, or else I'm going to get really in the wringer up here.  I am in favor of the catch-up proposal and I think there ought to be a distinction between Madison and the rest of us, but if Marshall is given free leash to run off with his radical faculty, what does that do to the rest of us?"  I would get in touch.  I would say, "George, I agree with you, but that's something that ought to be done within the University System.  I shouldn't be doing it.  Let me talk to Bob O'Neil."  And Bob always felt that sweet reason would prevail.  "Well, good, I'll get all of them together and tell them how we've all got to pull together," and I'd say, "Bob, you've got to simply tell them they cannot do this, that they cannot be spokesmen for the System, or spokesmen for their campus interest when it is against the System's interest."  "Well, I'm sure I can reason with them."  He placed a very high value on his being able to persuade them to do "the right thing."  Unfortunately, I think he placed more weight on that than he should have, because it did begin to unravel.  One of the things — the regents finally started to pull it back together, and one of the things they made very clear with Shaw, and when I met with Shaw when he was the likely appointee — we met out at the residence — they said, and it was clearly rehearsed, "If you're elected president, what are you going to do about chancellors who speak out on their own when their interests might be against the System's interest."  He said, "They'll be given their walking papers."  That was to impress me.  The regents — Ben Lawton and others — knew what a frustration this had been with some of these chancellors going off.  All of this is to say that when you heard reports about Don Percy urging this, I can understand that that probably was the case and why he would do it.  Beyond that, I'm sure that Percy knew that the chancellor in Oshkosh would talk to Flintrop, and the chancellor in Steven's Point would talk to Helbach and Gruszynski, and the chancellor in Green Bay, Weidner, would be talking to Metz.  He didn't try to put anything in the way of that, just the same as Ed Young would be talking to Mary Lou Munts and to Fred Risser and others here.  You would expect them to take care of their home legislator in their home base, but you would not expect them to be lobbying the Legislature as a whole for their interests vis-à-vis the interests of the System.

LS:	So you agree that it would be all right for them to do that — to talk to their own legislator.

TE:	Oh, yes.  I think it would be impossible to try to put any barrier in the way of that.  But that's different.  Speaking up for your campus, with your legislators, who are supposed to look out for the interests of your area, including your campus, that is considerably different than speaking for the System, and I'm sure that Percy felt, and I must say I agree with him, that no chancellor has the right to speak for the System, unless he or she is really representing the System.  What went on during this catch-up proposition were a lot of people who were not speaking for the System but were letting on that they were speaking up for a substantial part of the System.  How the System should operate. When people like Marshall and others would say, "We all ought to be paid the same," they were in effect saying, "This is or ought to be System policy."  But it wasn't.  The regents had pretty clearly said, "System policy recognizes Madison as being different from "

LS:	Yes.  We'll go, I hope, very thoroughly into that whole thing later.  They said that the Legislature was changing.  Maybe it would be interesting if you would read that and comment.  

01:38:15

LS:	What about Smith, did you have any impression of him at that time, back in the '70s?

TE:	Don?  He was sort of the gray eminence.  Not very many people knew Don well, but those whom he had identified and whom others had identified as friends of the university would get frequent visits from or calls from Don.  I think Pat Lucey eventually came to trust Don Smith more than any of the others.  The impression always was, "Now all the hyperbole aside, and all the rhetoric aside, this really is what the university needs."  I remember discussions with Don over the funding formula, which is a terribly complicated piece of business.  People like me, and I think others — I don't speak just for myself — always felt that though Don was clearly an advocate for the university, no doubt about it, he would give you pretty straight talk.  He wouldn't indulge in this kind of rhetoric, "If we don't get this, we'll be regarded as a third-rate institution by next Wednesday."  

LS:	Who was doing that?

TE:	Well, that's frequently been the rhetoric.  "Gosh, if we don't get what we want we're going to be a third-rate institution."  Irv did it in his farewell address, which I think is too bad.  I wish he'd have left on a more positive note.  I understand his frustration in not getting all the support he would like, but it not only falls on deaf ears when people say, "If we don't get what we want, we're a third-rate institution," it makes people say, "Well, then, to hell with it."  You don't need that.  I don't know if Irv knows what a bad taste he left in a lot of people's mouths with that or not.  

01:40:13

TE:	After all, in the last budget proposal that went up, I had proposed two hundred and some additional faculty to take care of senior bottleneck which is a big problem for Irv, as well as faculty catch-up.  When Bob O'Neil and Irv appeared before Joint Finance, Marlin Schneider or somebody said, "Well, you've got a choice.  Faculty catch-up or senior bottleneck.  Which is it going to be?"  Well, bang, just like that they just gave up senior bottleneck.  I thought that was a terrible mistake.  Not that they made the wrong choice, but that it appeared that they didn't really care that much about the systemic problem if they could get some more money into the hands of the faculty.  Clearly the faculty needed money.  The catch-up proposal was vital.  But they gave it up so fast that it appeared to many — those who tend to be cynical down there — that all they're interested in is getting some more faculty pay and let the problems with the System wait another day.  They should have made far more vigorous argument, it seemed to me, and I think an argument can be made.  Lord, I was prepared to make it.  I was satisfied that over the long haul you save money by getting rid of senior bottleneck.  If you can educate people in four years rather than five, you the tax-paying public are subsidizing only four years of education instead of five.  It's got to be at least 20 percent cheaper, and you can make the cost analysis.  But they opted for the faculty catch-up pay, which ultimately they should have done if they really did have only that choice, and then when senior bottleneck becomes a problem, and courses can't be filled and the whole business, they say, "Well, the Legislature didn't give us the money and now we're on our way to being a second-rate institution."  Everybody up at the other end of the hill says, "Boy, we didn't hear that.  If taking care of senior bottleneck would have kept us a first-rate rather than a second-rate institution, we could have done that.  But no, that isn't what they were interested in.  They were interested in getting the money."  

01:42:38

TE:	So the way some of these things are handled plays into the worst impressions of a lot of people up there.  As the final outcome of the catch-up bill demonstrates, a majority up there, albeit with some reluctance, understood that better faculty compensation was absolutely essential.  Further understood that there had to be a differential in faculty compensation from this campus to the others.  That's a step which is of much greater significance than most people recognize. That is a step which is a major refinement of merger.  It makes explicit what was before that time only implicit, that is that there is indeed a difference, and that that difference ought to be recognized in compensation and that that difference ought to be significant — not just a little bit.  Not just a percent or two, but ought to be significant — a third higher in this case.  As hard as that was for a lot of people to swallow, they swallowed it because they did understand that that was necessary for this campus and for the reputation of the university.  Similarly, it seems to me that if the right arguments are made and it's handled in the right way, even additional funds for the university can be argued.  But you can't come in and say that if we don't get our budget requests, twenty-seven thousand students aren't going to get in.  Nobody believes that for a minute.  It's the worst kind of hyperbole, but beyond that, it once again confirms everybody's worst fears.  Here are these guys crying wolf again.  Nobody, but nobody, believed for a minute that report that said twenty-some thousand students would be denied access if they didn't get the whole $88 million.  It's just a shame, it's just, going back—

01:44:50	1987-89 Biennial Budget 

TE:	Let me tell one other anecdote and then I will have to leave.  I felt that with the selection of Shaw and with the passage of faculty catch-up some real problems were behind us.  We had a new leader.  We had the most contentious problem behind us.  We had a chance to bring the System together again, and we had a chance to establish a much better relationship between the two ends of State Street.  So over the course of the summer I said to Buzz Shaw and to Ben Lawton — it was before Ben became ill, "Though I've sent out budget instructions that say you have to have your budget in by October or whatever it is, I want you to take a pass on that.  I don't want you to bring a budget in until after the election, because I don't want the budget to become an election issue.  What I want is to have a budget that, to the greatest extent possible, you and I can agree to, and it will be our budget rather than, 'the university's budget is this and the governor's budget is that' and go in there and knock heads and see what emerges from it."  Buzz said, "Well, I think I've got an obligation as the new president of the System to come in with a budget that's more than you can swallow.  I've got to show folks that I'm really for the System."  I said, "Don't do that.  I don't think you've got to prove yourself to them at this point.  You would make greater points with them, and with the Legislature, if you could come in with a budget that the governor could say was his budget.  I'm not talking about a real meager budget.  I'm talking about trying to meet some of your real needs.  Let me encourage you to consider that.  Not only could it be the governor's budget, but I'll try to get Tom Loftus and Tim Cullen on board as well."  To make a long story short, it was agreed that we would meet the day after the election — Buzz Shaw, Ben Lawton, Tony Earl, Tim Cullen, and Tom Loftus — to begin the process within ten days or so, to try to come in with a single proposal which we could announce and all subscribe to.  "This is the university's budget which is supported by the regents, the president of the System, the governor, and the legislative leaders of both houses."  That would make it relatively impervious to efforts to pull it apart by chancellors, by legislators, by budget shop analysts, by whomever, if we had that kind of support for it.  Would that that would have happened, for a lot of reasons.  Not only did it not happen, what happened was that not having to deal with me, the regents and the administration put out the budget and said, "We've got to go with the $88 million gap," and the whole business, while Tommy was saying, "You've got to come in with a 5 percent cut," both of which were pipe dreams.  Yet in the public's mind, the university came out with a pipe dream and Thompson didn't, because the university said, "If we don't get ours, twenty-seven thousand people drop out."  Nobody would believe that.  Thompson, asking for a 5 percent cut, which is equally as illusory, was more believable to people because people said, "Well, what kind of budget is there that you can't take 5 percent out of?"  So Thompson came out of that exchange as being believable.  The university came out of it as being incredible, and the result is going to be a tougher budget fight.  Now Buzz is busy patching that up, and he's a charming guy and he'll have a good chance to do it, and Tommy isn't going to come in with a 95 percent cut budget any more than the man in the moon.  But it's sort of business as usual where it could have been a much better situation.

LS:	And nobody can silently, or on the telephone, advise them against it?  Or I guess they wouldn't have taken that advice then.

TE:	I talked to Lawrence Weinstein after Ben became ill, and Lawrence — I don't know how well you know him — but he's feisty.  He reads Thompson's thing — he's going to cut everybody 5 percent — and he says, "Like hell you will.  We're going to come in and do battle with you," and the whole works.  The problem is that the regents don't have any votes.  It doesn't help to rattle the sabers, I don't think. 

LS:	Not any more.

01:49:49	Attitude toward Higher Education in Wisconsin 

TE:	No.  I can get into all this the next time, but I think a very unfortunate shift has taken place in the mentality of most people in Wisconsin in the last several years, and that is as follows.  For many, many years, people understood that the University of Wisconsin System was a benefit to society, a benefit to the state.  It enriched us, it set us apart, it made us different, and it also benefited some individuals as an aside.  It gave them a chance for a better life.  Now the point of view is the university provides a service just like any other service institution.  Those who get the service ought to pay for it.  Tuition ought to be higher.  Society doesn't have much obligation to support the operation, because after all, so many people we educate go out of here anyway.  Why should we sustain them?  If the individual benefits, the individual ought to pay and society doesn't have the same sort of responsibility to maintain the System.  That, at the heart of it, is what is behind the arguments for some — not for everybody — but for some who think that tuition ought to be the gatekeeper.  You're getting a service here.  It's just the same as if you're going to a tanning spa.  You pay full for that.  We give you a degree, we're a degree-granting institution.  You get a benefit — you'll earn x-amount more as a result of it — pay.  If you can't pay, tough.  If you can't pay to get an artificial suntan, tough.  And that certainly overstates it, but that is the mentality that is at work, and it bothers me a great deal.  It is certainly the mentality that dominates the point of view of Wisconsin manufacturing and commerce, and others who put the "Choices" thing out, who say, "We're educating way too many people.  We can't absorb them all.  Therefore we ought to cut it way down and educate only those we can absorb and they ought to pay the full boat."  That doesn't speak to what the university's benefit to society is — what it has done to us, at all.  It sees it as just another service institution.  And I'm afraid that in the minds of too many people, that is how the debate has been reduced.  And it bothers me a lot.  I've had talks with some people about it, and what bothers me the most about it is that there are many on the regents and many in the university System who may not buy that point of view, but will opt for higher tuition because they'd rather do that than go up to the Capitol and ask for more public tax dollars.  So those who find higher tuition is the path of least resistance to get the money they want find themselves in league with those who think subsidized tuition is an anachronism and we ought to get rid of it.  The ultimate result of those two strange bedfellows pushing for higher tuition will be higher tuition and I think we'll be a poorer society for it.  This whole thing began when you asked me where I came from.  As the son of a small-town grocer, I was able to avail myself of higher public education because tuition was, relatively speaking, not very expensive.  If I could earn enough money — and I had a job, I worked forty hours a week — if I could put a roof over my head, food on the table, and buy my books, I could go to college.  Even with inflation I could not go to my alma mater now under the same circumstances.  Michigan has gone the full route with tuition.  I think tuition at my alma mater is over $4,000 a year now.  How does a youngster from my home town right now, forty-some years later — thirty-some years later, I'm not that old — if the parents don't have wealth, how does a person in that circumstance go to college?  I sat next to Bob O'Neil during commencement this spring, and the argument always is, "Well, you can get loans."  And I said, "What do you think the combined indebtedness is of all these people?"  He said, "I don't know, but I can tell you that over a thousand of them have over $10,000 in personal debt each."  What a way to start life, and there are a lot of people who wouldn't or couldn't undertake a college education under those circumstances.  It has more class implications than race implications, but the two are inseparable to some extent, and I'm sure that there are a good many minorities who are not going to get into this situation if they think the only way they can do it is to amass an enormous debt.  Well, I'll excuse myself.  

01:55:01	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (February 27, 1987): Digital File (tapes 3-4)

00:00:00	[begin Tape 3/Side 1] Considerations in Preparing First Biennial Budget 

LS:	This is the second session of the interview with Anthony Earl.  It's February, 1987.  We're back in the Oral History office.  

00:00:16

LS:	I would like to ask you first what your contacts were on the Madison campus during your campaign and as you started off as governor.

TE:	Well, during the campaign in 1982 a number of people who were part of the campus community were supportive — Henry and Virginia Hart, Hank and Ann Rita Lardy, Ed Miller and Midge.  They were among some of the people who were the most active.  Ralph Andreano, Dennis Dresang — a number of those folks were deeply involved, and in a formal context — that is, not in a political context of helping out the campaign, but in a formal context, keeping in touch — I was in touch with people like Harry Peterson, representing Irv Shain, and I was in touch with Bob O'Neil.  I had gotten to know him a bit, but not very well, but I was in touch with him and would see him at some events.  So there were two levels of keeping in touch.  One was the political level, the effort of folks who were helping me out.  Oh, I shouldn't forget Ted and Dorothy Shannon, for example.  They were very, very active.  And on the other level were those who were keeping in touch with the candidates in a sense of making sure that whichever candidate was successful would know whom to contact once the election was over.  My strongest support in my campaign came from Madison, and a great deal of that strong support was from the university community.  As soon as the election was over, the level of contact between me and people like Bob O'Neil and then-chancellor Shain picked up considerably, because they knew that the budget was on us, and I met with them on a fairly regular basis.  One of the first meetings I had after the election, in the transition office, was with Bob O'Neil, the late Robert Knowles, and Ben Lawton, to talk a bit about the university budget.  And then we subsequently met with Irv Shain and Bob O'Neil and talked about the university budget.  

00:02:58

LS:	Were they people that you were also getting advice from?

TE:	Yes.  I got advice from them, and as you might recall, it was a very difficult time economically.  Things continued to deteriorate.  It was pretty tough in November, but it got even worse in December and even worse yet in January.  The unemployment continued to climb.  We were right at the trough of the recession, I think then.  So it was an extraordinarily difficult time, and everybody understood that it would be a hard budget — the one I was going to put together — but there was a great deal of interest in trying to make sure that it was a budget that would not endanger the university.  And it was with that in mind that I sought and received the advice of those folks.  And of course throughout the time I was candidate and governor, I remained in close touch with Ben Lawton, who was the president of the regents, who is a personal friend and someone whose judgment I respect greatly.

LS:	He was already president, was he?

TE:	I think he was.  Let me refresh my recollection.  No, he was not.  David Beckwith was the president at the time.  That's right.  David Beckwith was the president of the regents when I came into office.

LS:	I think Lawton became president in '84, just before the catch-up trouble started.

TE:	That's right.  It was David Beckwith, but Ben Lawton was in closer touch with me than David was, probably in large part because of our personal friendship.  

00:04:54

The conversations on the budget with Bob O'Neil and Chancellor Shain focused on trying to make up for some of the cuts of the previous administration.  There had been a lot of across-the-board cuts.  The style of my predecessor was to cut all programs alike, a philosophy I don't agree with.  But it had had especially damaging effects on the university, according to those who represented the university, and it's a point of view that I believed as well, so that the essential programs got cut as well as the merely desirable programs.  Bob felt and Irv felt that something had to be done in the area of libraries, that they'd really suffered some serious loss in libraries, and asked for library funding, and also asked for increase in instructional support.  We talked at that time about the necessity of breaking away from a funding formula which related directly to body count.  In the Legislature I never liked that, as a candidate I didn't like it, as governor I wanted to get away from it, and use some other measurement as to how we finance the campuses, rather than body count.  I didn't agree with it as a sound way to finance higher education in the first instance, but beyond that, it led to this very untoward competition to get bodies because if La Crosse got more bodies than Eau Claire then La Crosse would get more money than Eau Claire.  There'd be this fighting for students on that basis rather than what the areas of expertise on those campuses were.  

00:06:48

TE:	So when the budget was being put together, there was a special emphasis on instructional funding, changing the student funding formula, and libraries.  By the time we got to that point, I said, "This isn't going to leave much, if anything, for salary.  And as a matter of fact, I don't know how I'm going to be able to offer much of anything to any state employees for salary."  Now the context of this is November, December, January, 1982, 1983.  At that time it was pretty well agreed that there probably couldn't be a salary increase.  There probably wasn't money for that.  But in an effort to offer something to the faculty and something to state employees, we said we'd pick up the employees' contribution to the retirement fund, which was worth a little more than 1 percent.  And that was indeed what was ultimately our offer for state employees and faculty members.  That didn't seem to bother too many people at that time.  It seemed to be fairly widely understood.  Private sector enterprises were going down — the unemployment rate in the private sector was 13 percent, I believe.  It was only, unfortunately, when we started to come out of the recession a bit, at which time the budget was then in its final stages in the Legislature — and that's in May and June of 1983 — that the furor over the freeze began, and when that got started it really snowballed.  It was a very unpopular thing as the budget came to conclusion.  It was my most difficult time with the university community, much more difficult I think than the subsequent fight over catch-up was, because there were a good many in the university community who didn't understand or chose not to understand the origin of the freeze, which was November, December, January, when we didn't have any money, and felt that the decision was just being made in May-June, when it was apparent that we were starting to come out of the recession.  I appeared before a variety of faculty assemblages.  I appeared before the Faculty Senate, in the auditorium here in Madison.  I appeared before the Faculty Senate in Whitewater.  I met with faculty groups at Stout and Steven's Point and other communities, to explain what the situation was and why.  If you go back and take a look at the clippings, though I was, I think, respectfully received, you cannot miss the fire that was in the eyes of a lot of the people that were there.  What troubled me, and what caused me some grief, is that it was perceived by some not as a manifestation of the difficult economic times in which we found ourselves, but as a willful judgment to squeeze down the university — as if I was doing this to the university and it wasn't a part of the larger picture.  And I had a great deal of difficulty trying to persuade people that wasn't the case.  I can recall in particular at Whitewater when a faculty member got up and said, "You just don't understand that we are an extraordinarily valuable asset to the state, and we have got to be paid.  How am I supposed to make it on $46,000 a year?" or whatever it was.  I said, "My God!  To your west in Janesville there are x number of thousands of auto workers laid off.  To your east in Kenosha there's another x number of thousands.  They'd be delighted to try to make it on $46,000.  They are not working and in that they're not working they're not paying taxes, so there isn't the wherewithal to give you the kind of money that your education and your importance to the society would otherwise dictate."  Water off a duck's back.  It just didn't translate to a lot of people, and that caused a very difficult time in university relations, though I think most of the regents and most of Central Administration understood what the situation was.  There was an eleventh hour effort by Bob O'Neil to get some kind of a faculty pay raise in the budget, and it put me in a very embarrassing spot, because I had to get to the Finance Committee and oppose it, because it would have only given faculty a bump and not the rest of all state employees, and we would have just had all kinds of difficulty on our hands.  We were in the process of negotiating the 0 percent pay increase with other state employees, so there was no way I felt that we could have done it at that time.  So that was probably the low ebb of my relationship with the university.  

00:12:30

At the same time, I had pushed through a very substantial change in our unemployment compensation law.  We were terribly in deficit.  We were fourth highest in the country in benefits, and thirty-fourth, or something like that, in taxes.  And the result was predictable — we were not only broke, we were borrowing a million dollars a day, every day, seven days a week, just to keep the checks in the mail.  As a result of the change I proposed, benefits were cut, taxes were increased, and we were then and are now about eleventh or twelfth in both benefits and taxes.  By the time I'd left office, the debt, which had reached three-quarters of a billion dollars, had been paid off and we were living on our own money and everybody was congratulating themselves on how Wisconsin, unique among the states that went into debt for unemployment, had come out.  But not too many people remember that they do remember early '83.  A lot of people in organized labor remember early '83, when we went through the wrenching business of changing unemployment compensation similarly.  Some people in the university community still remember the freeze and don't fully appreciate, I think, the situation we were in at the time which dictated it.  Nonetheless, the freeze and the consequent unhappiness that some exhibited as a result of that did not seriously affect the relations between me, Bob O'Neil, the regents.  They remained good.  When the second budget cycle ran around, we were able to rectify — more than rectify — some of the problems that resulted from the freeze.  After the first budget was done, I appointed a committee to take a look at the university and how it stood with its peers in terms of compensation.

00:14:48	The Star Fund 

LS:	I'm going to stop you here, because I'd like to go into a little more detail on the freeze and the star fund, which indeed, as you say, people do remember.  Do you remember whose idea the — there were two star funds — well, the first star fund was a million dollars, wasn't it?

TE:	Yes.

LS:	Do you remember how that came up?

TE:	It came up in conversations very early with Chancellor Shain and Bob O'Neil, when we were talking about the inability to make very significant across-the-board — and the question was raised, "You know we're really in trouble.  A lot of others are in trouble, too, but we ought to have something available to hold on to the star faculty in case somebody tries to grab them off.  We have got to somehow be able to manifest our appreciation for their worth to us."  Thus the star fund concept was created.  Who actually articulated it I can't recall.  It was a product of informal discussions and so thus the star fund was established.  Well, it was a misbegotten idea — well, I don't know if it was a misbegotten idea, but it certainly was never marketed in a very — that's a terrible word to use.  It was never explained to people in a very satisfactory way.  

LS:	People outside the university, do you mean, or inside?

TE:	Outside the university and inside the university.  The interesting thing was, as so often is the case, the campuses outside of Madison all thought that the star fund was exclusively for Madison, and it was going to be largely for Madison in any event.  And the Madison faculty thought it was a pittance and an insult.  A million dollars wouldn't begin to take care of the stars here.  So it won no favors here in Madison and won the wrath of people on the other campuses.  

00:16:53	Faculty Reactions to Freeze

LS:	And then there was — from what you say there wasn't any real possibility of raising salaries at that time, but people on the campus say that there was a question of timing and that you felt you hadn't been told in time about the desperate state of faculty salaries.

TE:	No, I understood what the situation was, but as I said, when I was preparing the budget, the state's finances were in desperate shape.  We not only couldn't pay more than we were paying, we were slipping deeper and deeper into deficit.  Once we cured the deficit or were well on the way to curing the deficit, people chose to forget about it right away.  Nobody will ever know how large the deficit would have been.  That's all speculation.  Suffice it to say, it was three hundred and some million dollars the day I took office.  That very day I called a special session and said, "Make the sales tax permanent.  Add a 10 percent surcharge on the income tax."  And I put a freeze on all state hiring.  Not draconian, but pretty strong stuff, and that had begun to have a positive effect by the time the budget was making its way to conclusion in May and June.  And I certainly understood the tough spot the faculty was in.  I understood that faculty salaries were not competitive, but it wasn't a result just of the freeze.  There had been a steady, ten, eleven, twelve-year deterioration in the competitive position of the university on the salary matter.  The freeze seemed to exacerbate it in people's minds, but the freeze itself wasn't what caused the desperate faculty compensation problem.

00:19:07

LS:	I know you got awful letters from people.  Were they as much from the other campuses as Madison, or more, or ?

TE:	It varied.  I got a fair amount — Steven's Point had a faculty group that was terribly unhappy, and they used to keep in touch with me on a regular basis.  But most of the letters I think were from Madison.  The anxiety about losing faculty ran the deepest here.  The faculty that comes to this campus are the faculty who are most likely to be urged to move.  I don't mean to diminish the other campuses, but I can't imagine that there would be nearly as regular an effort to get faculty to go from say, Whitewater or Steven's Point or Oshkosh to move on to other schools as there would be from this Madison campus.  So the real honest concern about loss of faculty ran deeper here than it ran on other campuses.  Now that was used as a rubric — loss of quality faculty — to legitimatize an argument for "we'd like more money" — people who just wanted more money.  Hell, I understand that, I'm not naive, but in some places it didn't ring as true as other places.  

00:20:47

LS:	Well, then there is the little glitch that happened in the Joint Finance Committee.

TE:	Right near the end.  Yes.  I don't recall all the details of it well, but I remember it was an eleventh hour effort, as I said, on the part of the administration, to try to get something that would enable the university to get more money to more people, and the instrument that was used was the star fund, and an effort to expand it rather dramatically, so that star could be more broadly interpreted.  The star category wouldn't be kept just for the supernovas, but would cover more people.

LS:	Well, it was Feingold, I guess, who proposed 2.5 million dollars to be added to the initial one million dollars, and apparently you and O'Neil met just before the Joint Finance Committee meeting.  Do you remember that?

TE:	Right near the end, yes.

LS:	And he thought this was a permanent addition to salaries?

TE:	Oh, yes.  That's correct.  There was a misunderstanding between us.  I saw this not as an add to the base, but rather to be treated as a kind of a bonus, and he saw it as added to the base.  Yes, there was that difference between us, but it was a — I think it was simply an honest misunderstanding.  I don't think either one of us was intentionally trying to deceive the other.  I never felt that of Bob O'Neil.  

LS:	He was quite upset about it.

The Faculty Compensation Review Committee Task Force

TE:	Yes.  But always the gentleman.  He never — in the time he was here, the time he dealt with me, publicly or privately engaged in some of the purple rhetoric of his peers.  He never engaged in some of the doomsday kind of stuff that Irv was wont to do from time to time.  I think it served Bob in good stead, frankly.  It certainly served him in good stead with me and I think it served him in good stead with the Legislature.  As I mentioned previously, if those who speak for the university are always crying wolf, the people at the other end of State Street simply stop listening after a while.  To Bob O'Neil's great credit, he did not use that tactic.  He might have expressed great disappointment, he might have said, "This will hurt us in out effort to be competitive," and he would say those kinds of things, but he wouldn't say, "Well, the world's going to end Thursday at eight a.m. sharp as a result of this."  What Bob and I had talked about and subsequently did — and perhaps we'll get to this in your questions — what we talked about is, the problem is a serious one — that is, faculty compensation and competition and rating of quality faculty.  The problem has been developing over a long period of time; it wasn't occasioned simply by the freeze, though that certainly made it more visible; that it ought to be addressed in a comprehensive way.  Somebody ought to take a look at it, and that it ought to be addressed not just as it affects this campus, but the entire University System, and it ought to be addressed in a forum that isn't under the same heavy constraints to do something right now as Joint Finance is.  Take it out of the budget context and give us a chance to take a look at it.  Thus was born the Faculty Compensation Review Committee.  The people we put on it were top-notch people.  We did not, either of us, Bob or I, have a preconceived notion as to what the result ought to be.  We put people on from non-Madison campuses as well as Madison campuses, legislators, faculty, and I kept very close track of what was going on.  I know the difficulty they had establishing peer groups — most especially the difficulty with the non-Madison campuses.  But they worked at it very diligently, worked at it very hard, came up with a unanimous vote, which many of them subsequently forgot, because there were people who represented the non-doctoral campuses who subsequently disavowed any involvement at all with the compensation study.  I thought that what they did was a pretty good job, and I subsequently, as you know, adopted their recommendations, once they had also been approved by the regents, into my budget.

00:26:07

LS:	Yes.  On the Task Force, whose advice did you get on what members to appoint?  Whom did you know for sure would be on it?

TE:	Well, I thought Ben Lawton certainly ought to be on it, because this was a matter which he felt very deeply about, and I also thought it was important to have a highly visible member of the regents.  Some of the other members were chosen to provide  

LS:	DeBardeleben, you mean?

TE:	Yes — to provide balance.  

LS:	Mary Lou Munts — why did you put her on?

TE:	She was at that time the co-chair of Joint Finance, and a great friend of the university, but also someone who understood the practical limitations — how far the state could go.  Dick Coy from Eau Claire was on.  He was a faculty member who was also a TAUWF member, and I wanted him to represent that point of view.

LS:	Did you know him?

TE:	Yes, I had known  

LS:	He had health problems, is that right?

TE:	He had had a heart attack at some point.  I don't recall when that happened, but he'd been the head of the Eau Claire County Labor Council, active in TAUWF, so he had a labor background as well as being affiliated with the university.  I'm trying to remember the names of all the other folks.

LS:	Well, there was somebody — a very important person, Mary Lou said — from the southeast — a union man — an old union man — AFL-CIO — who was the person whose support for the differential position was just crucial.  

TE:	Was that Kenny Germanson?

LS:	I don't know.  She didn't say his name.

TE:	I'm trying to recall.  I think it was Kenny Germanson.  

LS:	Was he one of your appointees, or somebody who was suggested to you?

TE:	No, he was one of my appointees.  I wanted to make sure there was somebody on from labor, and I'm almost certain it was Kenny.  He's with the Allied Industrial Workers, and a very fine guy.  I'm having some difficulty recalling all the others.

LS:	Well, there was somebody from Janesville — a musician who was an old-line Democrat.

TE:	Sure.  Ted Kinniman.

LS:	Yes.

TE:	I asked Ted to be on as a representative of the two-year campuses.  He was very effective.  The two-year campuses, as you may recall, were recommended for a 15 percent increase as well as UW-Madison.  Now their increase was very clearly and very explicitly based on the fact that they were having a hard time being competitive with high-school teachers.  It was not raiding faculty, it was simply to get them up at a decent level, and to not treat the Center System as the poor cousin.

00:29:29	[end side 1; begin Side 2]

The Two Differentials Proposed 

LS:	Harry Peterson says that it was by no means a foregone conclusion that they'd come out in favor of the differential.

TE:	That's correct.

LS:	What was your view about the differential for Madison?

TE:	I certainly thought the differential was important.  There were two differentials at stake, both of which were accomplished, and both of which, I think, are far more significant than has been acknowledged.  The first differential was that for the first time in my political lifetime a judgment was made that University of Wisconsin faculty ought to be treated differently from all other state employees — a very important break, because in the past, if there was 6 percent to be made available, it was 6 percent for the university, 6 percent for the people in the mental health institutions, 6 percent for the people who work in the Capitol.  It was 6 percent across the board.  So the first important differential was that the faculty operates in a different economic environment than do other people.  Faculty are not fungible as other people might be.  That states it too strongly for the other people in state government, but the fact that you're competing in a different economic market was recognized and institutionalized, if you will.

LS:	Did you believe in that yourself?

TE:	Absolutely.  Before I get to the second differential, which is the one within the System, let me talk about it for a moment.  I believed in it, thought we ought to do it, thought it ought to be explicit, but I also felt there'd be a price, and the price, which really turned out to haunt me both ways again, was that we couldn't expect other state employees to accept this on top of their not getting much of a wage increase to begin with.  So when we entered into labor negotiations at the same time that the faculty catch-up was being debated, I had money in the budget which could get up to 6 percent for other state employees.  I ultimately got a lot of grief on the 6 percent, and the Legislature threatened not to ratify the contracts — that was too much, too rich.  Mr. Thompson, in particular, raised particular Cain about it — I was going to break the state with it.  But I felt then and I feel now that there would have been no way we would have gotten all the other state employees to accept the explicit differential which was being created between them and the university.  If we said, "We're going to give the university faculty up to a 15 percent increase in the base, and because of that, and because things are tough, you're going to have to take 2 percent," we would have had a terrible time.  It would have been a very, very difficult time, and I think, frankly, it would have been unfair.  I felt that the differential made some sense, but I felt we had to make that palatable to other state employees.  Others would have a far less charitable interpretation — I was trying to buy them off, or whatever, but you don't buy people off for 6 percent.  But that differential was a crucial one, and it'll be important in the next few budgets to make sure that's maintained.  Because there will be an effort — understandable effort — on the part of other state employees to hook their wagon to that star and to say, "Gee, they shouldn't be treated differently, and now we want "catch-up" to catch-up to the university people."  That oughtn't to be allowed to happen.  We ought to understand that the university and its faculty are in a different economic environment than the rest of us, and I count myself as a former state employee who worked for the state service.

00:33:49

TE:	The second differential, the one that got all the attention and caused all the hassle, was the one differential within the System.  What should be the catch-up for Madison and what should be the catch-up for Steven's Point?  The Madison faculty and the Milwaukee faculty were remarkably restrained during that debate.  The faculty in Green Bay, Steven's Point, Oshkosh, Eau Claire were not.  One of the very strong differences of opinion that Bob O'Neil and I had was that I felt as the president of the System, he should call the chancellors in and knock heads and say, "Come on now, you're a part of the System.  You're jeopardizing the passage of this for the entire System, because you're looking out for your campus and the rest of the System be damned."  And I clearly felt that that was the case on the part of some of the chancellors.  It got to be infectious.  George Field, who was the chancellor at River Falls, came to see me at one time and said, "My God, if somebody doesn't muzzle Phil Marshall at Steven's Point, I'm really going to have difficulty.  Most of my faculty knows, understands and accepts the fact that Madison ought to get a bigger bump than we."  And I'm using shortcut language again.  It wasn't everybody at Madison.  It was selected faculty at Madison.  But he said, "When my faculty sees Marshall raising Cain and saying that his faculty is being taken for granted and treated poorly and the whole business, they wonder where I, Chancellor Field, am.  Why shouldn't I be saying the same thing about the faculty here?  Somebody has got to bring him to heel."  And I had a meeting with Bob, and said, "Gee, Bob, you've got to call these folks together."  He's a wonderful man.  He believes in sweet reason, and he said, "Well, I'm sure I can talk to them."  I remember he was going to have a famous Halloween meeting.  He thought he could get them all down here on Halloween, and part of the reason nobody would pay any attention was because of the shenanigans on State Street.  And he was going to reason with them, and tell them, "Let's all stand up for the good of the order," and the whole business.  Well, it didn't do a damn bit of good.  That's how the thing almost became unraveled.  It became the principle of the thing for some people, as was immortalized in the famous quote by Ed Muzik, who sat before Joint Finance, and said, "Don't try to cram 10 percent down our throats."  Well, I was dumbfounded at that statement, and the Legislature said, "O.K., Buster, we won't jam it down your throats.  You can take a hike!"  It was such an impolitic thing to say.  And then they went after Ben Lawton and said Ben Lawton hadn't been standing up for the faculty, and Ben was in my office, on my phone, working with legislators and faculty indefatigably to try to get this passed, and they tried to scapegoat Ben Lawton.  And as you may recall from the history of that time, the thing was up the hill and down the hill more often than Sisyphus' stone.  It was — oh, it looks like it's going to make it, and then it was dead.  No, no way it's going to go, and — everybody had a better idea.  Representative Travis, who represented the Platteville area had a better idea.  Marlin Schneider and Dave Helbach had a better idea.  I think Tom Loftus floated a better idea.  When all was said and done, they came to the conclusion that what had emerged from the study committee and was in my budget was not so bad after all.  They sweetened it a bit — they added a percent, it seems to me, for the people on the non-doctoral campuses, but what ultimately emerged looked remarkably like what was the committee recommendation several months before.  

00:38:29

TE:	But it was a terrible scrap within the university community, and we talked about this last time.  It was corrosive of good relations between the university and the Legislature, because the Legislature did not like being put on the spot to make this decision, and it also heightened the unhappy notion of the Legislature making decisions for the university.  If we're going to resolve these things on pay, we're going to start telling you about what courses you ought to offer and not offer.  More and more of that was creeping in.  And Tom Loftus, I think, was the most articulate about this, which is not surprising.  A very articulate man, when he said that if the university is going to throw us in the Legislature the thorny problems, they should expect that they'll find us messing in their briar patch on a lot of other things as well.  And it is wrong.  We shouldn't be doing it.  We should stay out of it.  But the university by its inactivity is inviting us in or is leaving a vacuum there that we'll move into.  He spoke on that issue a couple of times.  Have you talked to Tom at all about this?

LS:	I once asked him, a couple of years ago, if he'd be willing to be interviewed, and he said he would.  I think I should.

TE:	He did a very fine job of reflecting on what this scrap meant to future government-UW relations, and his conclusion, as I recollect, was that the worst of it would be that the Legislature, having been drawn into the decision-making process, would not be easily removed from it, and that was not a good idea.  The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Urban Journalism and these kinds of things were some evidence of what was starting to happen. 

00:40:56

LS:	One thing that Mary Lou said was that if the Eau Claire representative had not had this health problem and had been able to present the TAUWF position and discuss it and have it talked about in the Task Force, that they might have avoided some of the subsequent fuss.

TE:	That wasn't my impression.  Dick Coy, the fellow we're talking about, I think knew full well what was going on and could have asked to be replaced.  In the atmosphere of the commission, what was being developed seemed reasonable.

LS:	Did you ever go to meetings or talk to people?

TE:	Oh, yes, I'd stop in every once in awhile and say, "Keep up the good work," or whatever.  And I certainly talked to people as it was going on and talked to the people who were staffing it, so I was aware of what was evolving, as it was evolving.  But what happened to Dick, I think, was that when he was sitting around with other people, what was developing appeared to be reasonable.  And he is, ultimately, a reasonable person.  But when he went back to his other environment, back with the TAUWF people — who have always seen merger really as a vehicle to get them on the same plane with Madison, especially in so far as compensation is concerned — he walked away from his involvement with the commission.  Now clearly his health problems had something to do with it, but I think, more than that, he didn't realize — this is speculation on my part — he didn't realize the depth of feeling there would be from his TAUWF colleagues on this, that once again Madison was taking advantage of the rest of them, once again Madison was being elitist, and the rest of them were being given the crumbs, and the whole business.  That was the kind of rhetoric that they used in reflecting on all of this.

LS:	He didn't have the strength of his convictions, it sounds like.

TE:	And it might have been in part because he wasn't as well as he ought to have been.  But to give Dick his due, he was in a situation where everybody was moving, and he was there moving in one direction and he did not object to it, in part because I've got to believe that he thought it probably made sense.  But then when he had to get back home it was much harder for him to defend the commission's recommendation.

00:44:00

LS:	Someone has said that you could have early on pointed out that Madison ought to get more than the other campuses, and that that would have had an effect and perhaps avoided this.

TE:	Gee, I did, when I would go to places.  And again, on this I got caught up in the whirlwind.  What I would run into is, "Gee, you're one of those folks who thinks Madison is better and we're inferior."  And I'd say, "No, I think Madison is different.  Madison has the research function, it has the professional schools, it has the graduate schools.  The kind of faculty involved in those things are different from the faculty who are teaching first-year communications skills."  I remember I used that example — God, it comes back — and the people at Steven's Point went absolutely wild.  "Well, one of our communications skills people became governor of the state of Wisconsin, I'll have you know," and the whole business.  There was just no listening.  But wherever I went I tried to make the case, and on most campuses there was a substantial number of faculty who understood and accepted that notion.  They did.  

00:45:27

TE:	What TAUWF did, and I've been using the shortcut in my language, and all of us who were talking about it were using a shortcut, and that's what hurt.  We'd say, "Well, Madison's going to get 15 percent, and say for argument's sake, Steven's Point 9 percent."  Not everybody at Madison was going to get 15 percent.  For example, somebody teaching freshman-level English in Madison probably wasn't going to get any more in terms of catch-up than somebody teaching freshman-level English at Steven's Point.  But somebody who was in the graduate program in physics here or somebody who was doing research at McArdle here, was clearly going to get more.  We didn't do a good job of pointing out that ultimately the differential related to the kind of work you were doing, and the competitive environment in which you operated.  We left people with the notion that anybody at Madison, just by virtue of the fact that he or she was here, was going to get 15 percent right off the bat, and that wasn't the case.  I was anxious to leave a fair amount of flexibility for the administration as to how to handle a catch-up.

LS:	Yes.  You wanted a person-by-person review.

TE:	Yes.  I realize those are difficult decisions to make, but I think that that's the only way to — the competition is on a person-by-person basis.  People who write about what our faculty salary levels for the econ department here versus the econ department at University of Texas may take average salaries, but if somebody's going to come up here to try to recruit someone, they aren't going to recruit the department, they're going to talk to Don Nichols or Don Hester or whomever, and that's what's important, and the university, I thought, ought to make those case-by-case judgments.  I think — here we sit in 1987 with a new president of the university — I think that he has an opportunity to smooth over the rifts caused by the compensation fight, and he has the opportunity also, and I hope he'll do it, to not only continue, but to enhance the differentials we talked about, to make them more clear and more explicit.  That isn't necessarily bigger, but to make clear that this was not simply a one-time palliative, because if that notion ever takes hold, we'll be right back into this same fight ten or fifteen years from now, and that doesn't make any sense.

00:48:33

LS:	The people in the System should have been doing more of that, shouldn't they?  Persuading — making the other campuses realize why there had to be a differential.  

TE:	Yes.  Absolutely.  I think — tonight, as fate would have it, I'm going to the University of Wisconsin-Steven's Point where they're going to give me an award of some kind.  But Steven's Point was the first one to sort of throw caution to the winds and say, "To hell with you."  And they were very noisy and visible about it.  They were the group that ran the ad in the Wall Street Journal for example.  I don't know if you recall that.  And they made lots of racket, and they made things very uncomfortable for their local legislators, who then began to have to respond to that.  And then when people on the other campuses saw what was going on and that Dave Helbach and Stan Gruszynski were saying, "Gosh, we've got to come up with something more," then the squeeze started to come on all the other people on those campuses.  I felt very strongly that that was inappropriate for those chancellors to get involved.  If some of the faculty wanted to do it, that's their business, but the chancellor's loyalty lies to the System.  They are part of management.  They are not part of a faculty group, by gosh.  I felt strongly that Bob O'Neil should have made that point more forcefully.  I have little doubt that Buzz Shaw will.  I know when I first met him, when the regents' screen committee had decided on him, they asked if I would meet with him and them.  It was my very first meeting with him, and we exchanged some pleasantries for a moment and he said, "Governor, I want you to know that if I get this job, I am the boss, and these other chancellors will be answerable to me."  Obviously some of these folks on the regents must have said, "This is a bone in Tony Earl's throat," because it was one of the very first policy things that he volunteered.  And it seems to me that he's been good to that so far.  He has made it clear that he speaks for the university and he is not just one of several.  He is at the top.  

00:51:24

TE:	His chore will be made easier, I think, by the fact that Chancellor Shain is gone, because part of the paranoia on the non-doctoral campuses has always been that Irv Shain really ran the show here, that whoever was president of the System was a paper tiger.  Now they won't have that myth to live with, and the next chancellor, whoever he is, will undoubtedly be regarded, at the outset at least, as a bit more one of them rather than someone who has some sort of special standing in getting the ear of the president here.

LS:	I wonder how Madison will feel about that.

TE:	Well, I don't know if you've followed this, but the ultimate expression of this notion that Madison runs the System has been the introduction from time to time of bills that would take Central Administration out of Madison.  Put it in Medford, put it in Rhinelander, put it anywhere so that — if you get rid of the proximity, you'll somehow restore a rough kind of egalitarianism.  Well, it is not the proximity.  I'm sure proximity has something to do with it, but it is not the proximity.  It is that Madison is such a different kind of campus from all the others.  And of course it is going to be the object of considerably more attention and effort on the part of the president of the System than is the two-year campus at Barron, for example.  Gosh, nobody should be puzzled by that.

00:53:18	Catch-Up Dispute and Its Consequences 

LS:	The task force recommended that 15 — whatever it was — 12, 10, and 4 or 5 for the catch-up.  What did you think of O'Neil's move in bringing it up to 9?

TE:	I think that he gave it away.  I think if he'd have used it to bargain with he might have gotten a better reception, and been able to get more cooperation from the other chancellors.  Let me elaborate a bit.  As a matter of political reality, they weren't going to get stuck that far down.  That end of it was going to get sweetened a bit.

LS:	Really?  You mean, the task force was just presenting an ideal kind of figure and didn't mean ?

TE:	I think so.  I think they understood that — and I think the task force was most interested in taking care of the Madison situation, but they knew that they had to address the whole System, and it's awfully hard to put together a peer group that reflects what happens at UW-Oshkosh, UW-Stevens Point.  Is it Bemidji State?  Is it Northern Iowa?  Is it Wayne State?  You don't have the same kind of framework in which to make those kinds of judgments, and it was great grist for the mill for everybody who wanted to come up with their own — you know, somebody would pick Central Michigan and then they'd pick Slippery Rock State.  There were always enough that you could get a reasonable number to make a plausible group of peers.  But the ones that they would leave out were always more interesting than the ones they'd include, but I'm getting off my point.  Their first interest was of course taking care of Madison.  That was a bit easier to do from a quantifiable standpoint.  They felt they had to do something with the other campuses.  I think they must have known that the big gap between Madison and the non-doctoral campuses would be politically unpalatable, and they'd have to bump that lower end up a bit.  That was pretty widely understood.  The mistake that the regents and the president made was to say that right off the bat, to say, "We're going to have to bump this up," rather than to have these other folks say, "Gee whiz, this isn't quite right," and the regents and the president to be thoughtful and say, "Well, maybe we can persuade the governor and the Legislature to give a bit more."  But having given it away, when that pressure came for more, they started at the higher level, and they had to get something added to that to satisfy them.  So, though I thought it was not unreasonable for the president and the regents to suggest a bit more, I don't think they got anything for it and I don't think they handled it very artfully.  And I think you'd get the same impression from legislators who dealt with it, too.

LS:	Oh, yes.

00:56:51	[end tape 3; begin Tape 4] 	Academic Staff Issue 

LS:	This is tape 4 of the interview with Tony Earl.  The academic staff issue — what did you think about that?

TE:	Well, it came up very late in the game, and I thought it was something that we should try to do separately, but the pressure got very heavy to at least begin to address it in the faculty catch-up.  In reflection I think it was probably a mistake to try to do it, because we didn't have very good data.  The thing that has always troubled me about the academic staff question is that within the System there is no constancy, no consistency, from campus to campus as to what is academic staff.   I felt that — still feel — that that group of employees who are academic staff who carry out functions related to the academic pursuit — teaching, research, and the like, ought to be made a part of the faculty catch-up.  Those who are called academic staff whose functions don't relate to the academic pursuit, but they carry out these functions simply because they're on a campus, ought to be treated like classified personnel in the rest of state service.  The university doesn't like that at all, because — and what has led, in my mind, to the abuse of the concept of academic staff, is because they are unclassified.  You don't have to go through all the processes of hiring, promotion, termination.  You can treat these people much more easily.  As a manager, it gives you great flexibility.  So under the heading academic staff come lots of people whom I don't think belong there.  If they were part of the classified state service you'd have to go through a tougher process to hire them.  It would be tougher to fire them.  Promotions and transfers and all would be a bit more difficult.  But I think that's ultimately what ought to be done.  There ought to be a rigorous review of everybody who is called academic staff, and sort out those who are really involved in some sort of academic pursuit and give the university the flexibility to treat them as unclassified personnel and give them the benefits of the catch-up business.  The other people — give them the benefits of being in the classified service.  I don't know if that will happen.

LS:	Bry Kearl sums up what's happened pretty much in the terms that it's always a question of comparing unlike institutions and that Madison is so different from the others that it doesn't work to do the same thing for Madison.  He gave many examples, but many people would say that Madison's academic staff problems are different from the others.

TE:	Well, I think that's true, but I wouldn't have any trouble calling academic staff, people who are in the research function, for example, which you wouldn't find on any of the other campuses.  I do have trouble counting as academic staff — on some campuses I understand there are some maintenance people who are academic staff, for the love of Pete.  I think there's something wrong with that.  A greyer area are people like loan counselors — people who handle the student loan business.  Is that really an academic pursuit?  I don't think so.  They happen to work in the environment of the university but I don't think that's an academic pursuit.  I think they could be classified.  There are some areas where you'd have a tough choice, but I think that can be and ought to be done.  I think the academic staff issue is going to continue to trouble people.  Witness the very quick legislative committee support for allowing academic staff to organize and bargain collectively.  One vote against it in each house so far.  Each of the committees boomed that through, even though the governor has said, "I don't like the idea much.  I wouldn't have voted for it, and I won't say whether I'd veto it or not, but I'm not very friendly to it."  Even after he said that, the committees met — Republicans and Democrats boomed through, allowing them to organize and bargain collectively.  That's because of the discontent.  Some compare themselves to their peers in the classified service and say, "Wait a minute.  I'm not being treated the same as them," and would seek the benefits of the classified service.  Others say, "Boy, I'm doing the same thing as faculty, and they're getting a 15 percent bump and I'm getting zip."  So some identify more with the faculty and there's that roiling discontent, which some seem to think will be ameliorated if they're given the right to organize and bargain collectively.  That'll just be the beginning of the fermentation, it seems to me.  If academic staff is allowed to organize and bargain collectively there will be a real fare-thee-well between the Wisconsin Education Association, Wisconsin Federation of Teachers, and I'm sure there will be a couple of independent groups who will try to organize academic staff.

01:02:49

LS:	You would have supported that, wouldn't you — the organization of academic staff?

TE:	I support the right of anybody to organize and bargain collectively, including faculty, which always was a very big problem for me here on this campus.  It was put aside and temporarily forgotten in '82, but boy, when the freeze question came up, all these people said, "Well, yes, what do you expect from the guy?  He supported faculty bargaining."  My support for that is very broad-based.  It isn't that I have a feeling that faculty ought to be authorized to organize and bargain collectively.  It is my feeling that anybody ought to have the right to do it.  I don't think it would be wise for the faculty on this campus to do it.  I think they would lose much, much more than they would gain.  I think the System of collective governance would go out the window, but I think they ought to have the right to do it.  And in this community, which is the biggest "choice" community in the state — pro-choice on matters of abortion, pro-choice on matters of life-style, pro-choice on your views about any political or foreign matters — that is an issue on which choice is not allowed.  That is an issue where people say, "No.  We should not have the choice and our college should not have the choice."  I've never understood that.  Having the choice is not in and of itself dangerous.  I don't think people here would exercise the choice, and I would counsel them not to, but I think they ought to have it.  

LS:	Well, this has all been argued in the papers.  It would split up the System, which might be a good thing, but --

01:04:43 	TA Collective Bargaining Bill 

LS:	But, what about the TA [Teaching Assistants'] collective — I mean, everybody, the president and the chancellor, all were opposed to your approving of that and feel that was a really bad thing for the university.

TE:	I think the university brought TA collective bargaining down on themselves by the way they treated the TAs.  The TAs thought they had the right to bargain, the courts said, "No they don't have the right," and the university, which had been dealing with them, and it hadn't caused anybody any grief — maybe a nuisance — to bargain with them, said, "Well, buzz off."  

LS:	That was Irv Shain's decision, wasn't it?

TE:	That's right.  "We're not going to talk to you."  It was a foolish thing to do.  They had very narrowly limited what they bargained about and talked about, so Shain in effect threw down the gauntlet to them, and they won a right to bargain on a far wider range of things because of how they'd been treated.  Very poor judgment on the chancellor's part, I think. 

LS:	Did you ever talk to him about it?

TE:	No.  I talked to Harry Peterson about it a bit.  I didn't talk to Irv about it.  It was interesting.  I would hear from different people in the university with different points of view about it, depending upon what discipline they were in.  The TAs, in their level of militancy, were as different as the disciplines are one from the other.  TAs in mathematics were far different from TAs in ag and life science, for example, so there was a real division.  I didn't feel then and don't feel now that allowing the TAs to organize and bargain is going to be the end of the world.  

01:06:30

In every case, I think the impetus for those kinds of things comes from insensitive treatment of the people involved.  I think that's what's led to this academic staff business.  I think if the university would give classified status to those who are really more akin to being classified personnel, that would alleviate a lot of that difficulty.  I may be wrong, but I think it would make a real difference.  And many of the worst abuses of academic staff don't come here.  For example, the most notorious in my memory was the Oshkosh situation, I think it was, where rather than put a faculty person in a classroom situation, they used an academic staff person for a given period of time.  Then — obviously didn't have to worry about tenure or any of that sort of business — and then when it served their purposes, just summarily dismissed that person.

LS:	That must have been that big case in the regents.

TE:	Yes.  It got to be a — but it was a real abuse, I think.

LS:	But that's again, another institution — not Madison.

TE:	Yes.  

01:07:55	Contacts on the Madison Campus 

LS:	Which comes back to — you say you got lots of different points of view from the campus.  Was there any structured way through which you got a sense of what the Madison campus — I know you met with Donald Nichols, is that right?

TE:	Yes.  I appointed Don as economic adviser and so I'd meet with him on a very regular basis.  I used to see a lot of Bob O'Neil, both  

LS:	But I'm talking about Madison.

TE:	O.K.  Harry Peterson, and I would initiate the contacts with Harry as much or more than Harry would initiate them with me.  There's a story that recently got a fair amount of attention about my involvement in the Elroy Hirsch matter.  I initiated the first contact with Harry Peterson.  I called Harry, and I was getting calls from people all over saying, "Irv Shain is going to fire Elroy Hirsch, and the poor devil's got only a year to go, and Lord, that's uncalled for."  So I called Harry and I said, "I'm getting these anxious calls" — many of them from faculty, incidentally — "from people who have heard this.  Is that true?"  And Harry said, "Geez, I think it is.  I think Irv is about to can him."  I said, "Please tell him to call me."  I have to get in touch with him."  He was out of the city or something at the time.  And I said, "And tell him not to do anything until we talk."  And I called Irv and I said, "I realize this is presumptuous, I realize that this is your bailiwick, but you'd make a very bad mistake if with one year to go you would can Elroy Hirsch.  I know that you've had differences of opinion with him, and the whole business, but you'll really cause yourself untold grief for a very minor matter.  And frankly, you are as responsible as he is for this.  You gave those people the go-ahead for this blessed raffle.  They did go to see you first.  They had that good sense.  You said, 'Go ahead,' and then when it turned into a real mare's nest, you said, 'Well, wait a minute here, let's convene a court-martial.'"  Irv did not like my involvement in it, and said as much, and he was quite brusque.  And I said, "Well, let it go at this.  If you proceed to go ahead with this and fire him, I will publicly disagree with you.  I don't want to do that, but I feel it would be a terrible mistake for the university and for you to do this.  You will bring all kinds of wrath down on yourself for no good purpose.  Let the fellow go one year and retire."  Well, then Irv said, "What if he won't retire after one year?"  I figured, well, my foot was in the door.  I said, "Let me make some inquiries to see if he would retire, given the opportunity to do so."  I called — oh, I shouldn't mention who I called, I guess — I called a couple of people and said, "What would be the situation if he were given the time?"  They got back to me and they said, "If he can retire at the end of the academic year in 1987, he'll do it.  He simply wants to go out without a can tied to his tail.  He's not interested in staying on till he's seventy."  I then got back to Irv and said, "If he's allowed to retire, he'll retire, and I think he's a man of his word in that regard, and the people who spoke to me said that."  That was how it was ultimately resolved, but—

01:11:45

TE:	I cite it — it may be a highly visible example — but I cite it to respond to the nature of your inquiry, "How was communication maintained?"  It was most often initiated by me — to Harry Peterson, first and foremost — Irv, on occasion, when there'd be things coming up about which I'd be concerned, which I thought could cause some consternation.  So there was not a real good day-in, day-out liaison.  It was not that Irv and I didn't get along — we did.  He was a rather crusty person, but we got along and I would see him on an occasional basis, and Harry every once in awhile, being the good staffer, would arrange for Irv and I to have lunch together now and again, talk about some things.  Irv did not like comparable worth, for example.  We got together and talked about that.  But we kept a good communication and there was never bad blood between us, though we disagreed on some issues.

01:12:52

LS:	Do you think your friendship with the O'Neils would have colored his attitude to you?

TE:	I'm afraid so.  And I never did understand that lack of warmth between the two of them.

LS:	You know, O'Neil did rather step in to the Madison campus and take — there's the AAU [Association of American Universities] issue, and I understand that Irv Shain wasn't allowed to entertain the regents as the other chancellors were and that kind of thing.

TE:	Oh, I didn't know that.  I always felt that was too bad, because as different as they are from one another, they're both very, very fine people.

01:13:43

LS:	Yes.  Well, so Harry Peterson, and anybody else?  Howard Temin — you seem to have been in touch with him.

TE:	I saw Howard Temin on a couple of occasions.  He was very anxious to, in a very graphic way, show me how different his teaching responsibility was from what the average lay person might think of as a teacher's responsibility.  How he might have only one or two students a year, for example, who would be with him doing very intensive, very complex research.  And I visited him in his building.  And I tried to make a couple of other visits to various schools on this campus.  People here would know that I had been at Stout, or I'd been at Parkside, or I'd been at La Crosse, or wherever, and they'd say, "Well, gee, you ought to come see us," and I'd try to do a fair amount of that.  But this is a very large community, and it's hard to get to see everybody.

01:15:10

LS:	Was Sheila an important contact on the campus for you?  I mean, did she sort of keep you ?

TE:	Well, Sheila knew a lot of what was going on here, but she tried pretty hard — she tried very hard — not to be a conduit.  She didn't want people seeing her as an extension of me.  She did not want to be a lobbyist with me, nor did she want to be an apologist for me, and I understand that.  I think she felt, and I think correctly so, that if she was ever perceived to be in that position, she'd have had no peace, and then people would have raised questions about, "Well, why is she here?  Is she here just as an extension of the governor's office, or does she have any legitimate function at the center?"  So she worked very hard not to be seen as an extension of me, and pretty successfully, I think.

01:16:16

LS:	Were there any other — well, you say Don Nichols.  He was the head of your economic advisory committee, but was he talking to you about the campus, or he was literally?

TE:	Oh, we'd talk about campus matters.  Most of the time was spent talking about economics, but we'd talk about campus matters, and then I'd see Dennis Dresang quite a bit.  Ed Schten on occasion, Hank Lardy, Ted Shannon — a lot of these people I would see in a political context, very personal context.  It was not a formal connection with the campus.

01:16:59

LS:	Do you think there should be one for a governor?

TE:	I think it would make a lot more sense.  What I tried to do as I went on — but time was always at such a premium — was to get together from time to time with various faculty members.  I did entertain on a couple of occasions some people in the area of biochemistry.  It was an area that everybody tells me was a real promising area.  We had some top-notch people, beginning with Hector DeLuca and others there — Burris.

LS:	Burris, yes.

TE:	I ought to get to know them — know what they're about — and so I did, and then I would hear from people, "Gee, there's some other younger faculty here who are really up and coming stars.  They're going to be very important in the future of the university.  You ought to meet with some of them."  And I did some of that at the residence.  I felt badly that I didn't see more of the people here — on the campus.  But time is a governor's most precious asset, and there's never enough of it to go around.

01:18:12

LS:	But should there be somebody, say, in the administration, who would meet with the governor once a week, and  

TE:	Oh, it would be a very good idea.  You know, twenty-five percent of the state budget is spent on what is called state operations.  The other seventy-five percent goes to school aids, local aids, highway aids, whatever.  Twenty-five percent is spent on state operations.  Half of that twenty-five percent is the University of Wisconsin, yet the University of Wisconsin, in terms of competing for the governor's time, doesn't get a heck of a lot more than the Department of Natural Resources, Department of Agriculture, Department of Justice, and it ought to, just by virtue of the enormous dollar impact, get more attention, much less the very significant impact it has on the state — the university as the university.  It ought to get more attention than it does.  But the lines of communication have never been well-established.  I always felt, for example — I always wanted to get better acquainted with Katharine Lyall.  I would meet her only occasionally, and I would make a mental note to myself, "I've really got to get to know her better.  Gee, she is very impressive.  She seems to know what's going on," and I'd forget about it until the next time I'd see her in some sort of a setting.  I'd say to myself, "Boy, you've got to do that.  You've got to ask Katharine to come in or perhaps set up some sort of a session," and I never did it.  And gosh, as I think about it now, I still feel it was a mistake that I did not do more of that.

01:19:55

LS:	I always say "university" when I mean Madison.  I meant literally.  Of course, you say you had Harry Peterson, and I guess that would be it.  Because I understand Ed Young as chancellor had a phone that went to Lucey's desk.

TE:	Is that right? 

LS:	Would that be a good idea?

TE:	No.  I think that's all form and no substance.  Henry Meyer had one on my desk when I got there, and I had it taken out, and nobody ever would have been the wiser, except the newspapers ran a story about it, two or three months after I was in office, that there used to be three phones on the governor's desk, one that went to the National Guard and one that went to the mayor of Milwaukee and one for all other purposes, now there's only one phone, Earl had the one to the National Guard and the mayor of Milwaukee removed.  Not for any insult, but I could call him as easily on any other phone.  I thought it was pretentious and foolish to have three phones.  Well, Henry Meyer was greatly offended, because the cord between City Hall and the State Capitol had been cut.  And hell, if it wouldn't have been in the paper, he wouldn't have even known about it.  So, no, I don't think having a separate phone there  

LS:	I'm not sure that's true, you understand, but that's really been said.

01:21:24

TE:	Ultimately — and this may sound a bit defensive, and I don't mean it to be — but ultimately if the university is going to have a good working relationship with the governor and with key legislators, much of the impetus will have to come from the university, because everybody is vying for the governor's time.  Everybody is vying for the time of the Speaker and the whole business.  And our horizons are much broader.  We've got to be worried about prisons and acid rain and unemployment and the university.  The university's horizons are the quality of the university and the future of the university.  And they ought to be a bit more aggressive in pushing their agenda, and making sure their point of view is understood.

LS:	Would this be true of Madison as well?

TE:	Oh, yes.  Oh, absolutely, without a doubt.  I think most especially with Madison.  In part because of the proximity here, people take for granted that there is a better degree of communication.  

LS:	I see, of course.  And then there isn't.

TE:	That's right.  They figure, "Well, gee, you must know what's going on down there."  And that's an assumption that shouldn't be so easily made.

01:22:46	Regent Appointments 

LS:	I have another really important subject, and that's the regents — your regent appointments — on what basis you made them.  Whom you consulted with?

TE:	The consultation was mostly my own.  I didn't talk to a lot of other people about it.  I had my own ideas.  Let me try to put them out there as best I can.  There was no formula.  I wanted people who cared deeply about the university, people I knew had a strong interest in higher education — cared about the university in particular.  I made a couple of reappointments, such as Ben Lawton, whom I thought so highly of, so those were easy — the ones I was going to reappoint.  I wanted to get some geographical diversity, and diversity in background, without picking people who would have a campus as their campus.  So I didn't want a Steven's Point regent who would feel that his or her first responsibility ought to be to Steven's Point, or an Eau Claire regent who felt that his or her first responsibility ought to be to Eau Claire.  Thus I picked Frank Nikolay from Abbotsford, Camilla Hanson from Mellen.  They represented an outstate perspective, but neither one of them was affiliated with a campus, or could be made to feel beholden to a particular campus.  And that's worked, I think, that they both represent that kind of a point of view.  I appointed Warren Knowles out of deep respect for Bob Knowles.  I had told Bob Knowles that if I ever had the opportunity I'd reappoint him.  I thought he was a fine man and a great regent.  I didn't have that opportunity.  He died.  So I appointed his brother Warren in his place, out of respect for both Bob and Warren, so the motivation there was a bit different.  And I knew that Warren was a great friend of the university, too.  I take some satisfaction from that appointment.  I appointed Ness Flores because I thought that he is the perfect example of what relatively low-cost public education can do to benefit not only the individual but society.  A migrant farm worker's kid who ended up in this state, went through public schools, up to and including the Law School, became the first Hispanic elected judge in this state, first Hispanic appointed to and ultimately to chair the Public Service Commission.  We talk a lot about minority programs, but they're all in the abstract, and I think a lot of people wonder if they really are worth the candle.  Ness is evidence that they are, and that minority programs ought to be given a fair shake.  He also is a proponent of low tuition, which is something that I agree with.  So the motivations differed from case to case.  The only common denominator was that I wanted to name people who cared deeply about the university.  Lawrence Weinstein may ultimately turn out to be one of the more controversial regents I appointed, simply because he is so strong-willed, but his concern and affection for the university is unquestioned, I think.

01:26:44	End of Second Interview Session

End of Oral History #328

Table of Contents

Background	3
Reasons for Coming to Wisconsin	4
Election to the Legislature	5
Merger Bill	9
UW's Failure to Oppose Merger	10
Reasons Merger Passed	11
Changes in the Legislature	26
The System's Approach to Lobbying	37
1987-89 Biennial Budget	42
Attitude toward Higher Education in Wisconsin	43
Considerations in Preparing First Biennial Budget	46
The Star Fund	50
Faculty Reactions to Freeze	51
The Faculty Compensation Review Committee Task Force	53
The Two Differentials Proposed	56
Catch-Up Dispute and Its Consequences	63
Academic Staff Issue	66
TA Collective Bargaining Bill	68
Contacts on the Madison Campus	70
Regent Appointments	75
Index	77

Index

Anderson, Norman C.	6, 14, 21
Andreano, Ralph	46
Beckwith, David	47
Bornstein, Ronald	36
Bowen, J. Ray	20, 32
Breuscher, Harvey	24, 31, 36
Burris, Robert	73
Chilsen, Walter John	6
Cirilli, Arthur	14, 15
Conta, Dennis	9, 13, 30, 31, 32
Corpola, Ernest	13
Coy, Richard	54, 60
Cronon, E. David	20, 32
Cullen, Timothy	42
Curreri, Anthony	31, 33, 34, 35
Daley, Richard J.	4
DeBardeleben, Arthur	21, 22, 54
DeLuca, Hector	73
Dewey, Thomas E.	3
Dresang, Dennis	46, 73
Dreyfus, Lee S.	8, 11, 22, 29
Earl, Sheila	72
Feingold, Russell	52
Field, George	38, 58
Finman, Ted	20, 32
Flintrop, Richard	26, 27, 32, 39
Flores, Ness	76
Germanson, Kenneth	55
Groppi, James	6
Grover, Herbert	12, 32
Gruszynski, Stanley	39, 62
Haas, Leonard C.	23
Hanson, Camilla	76
Harrington, Fred H.	8, 32, 34
Hart, Henry	46
Hart, Virginia	46
Hazen, James	6
Helbach, David	39, 59, 62
Hester, Donald	62
Hirsch, Elroy L.	70
Hollander, Walter	7, 13, 14, 15, 30, 31, 34
Huber, Robert T.	6, 13
Johnson, Lawrence	10
Johnson, Ray	7, 12, 15
Kearl, Bryant	67
Keppler, Ernest	7
Knowles, Robert	46
Knowles, Warren P.	6, 9, 10, 76
Laird, Melvin	6
Lardy, Ann Rita	46
Lardy, Henry A.	46, 73
Lawton, Ben R.	39, 42, 46, 47, 54, 58, 59, 76
Lemon, Wallace	24, 31, 36
Loftus, Thomas A.	42, 59
Lucey, Patrick J.	6, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 26, 27, 35, 40, 74
Lyall, Katharine C.	74
Marshall, Philip R.	38, 39, 58
Martin, David	6, 36
McPhee, Eugene	8, 11
Merkel, Kenneth	6
Metz, Sharon	39
Meyer, Henry	74
Miller, Edward	46
Miller, Midge	12, 20
Molinaro, George	13, 14, 25, 30, 31, 34
Munts, Mary Lou	39, 54
Muzik, Edward	58
Nelson, Gaylord A.	21
Nichols, Donald	62, 70, 72
Nikolay, Frank	76
Obey, David	6
Olson, Russell	6
O'Neil, Robert M.	36, 38, 40, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 62, 64, 70, 71
Peloquin, Bruce	10
Percy, Donald E.	24, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39
Peterson, Harry L.	36, 46, 56, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74
Rasmusen, Holger	10
Risser, Fred A.	39
Roosevelt, Franklin D.	3
Schneider, Marlin	40, 59
Schten, Edward	73
Shabaz, John	6
Shain, Irving	32, 34, 46, 47, 50, 63, 69, 70, 71
Shannon, Dorothy	46
Shannon, Theodore J.	73
Shaw, Kenneth A.	33, 36, 37, 39, 42, 63
Smith, Donald K.	32, 40
Swan, James	14, 15
Temin, Howard	72
Thompson, Tommy G.	43, 57
Travis, David	59
Weaver, John	16, 17, 19, 26, 27, 30
Weidner, Edward	39
Weinstein, Lawrence A.	43, 76
Williams, G. Mennen	3
Wimmer, James	32
York, Stanley	6
Young, H. Edwin	23, 32, 39, 74

Laura Lord Smail was born in 1922.  She has a B.A. from Smith College (1944), and an M.A. in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University (1956).  She came to Madison in 1961 when her husband joined the History Department.  She began working for the Oral History Project in 1975 and became director of the Project in 1982.