UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

ROBERT M. O’NEIL

An interview conducted by
Laura L. Smail

Madison, Wisconsin
1985

This interview with Robert O’Neil is Restricted until 2001 Except with the explicit written permission of Robert O’Neil

Introduction

	Robert M. O’Neil was born on October 16, 1934, in Boston, Massachusetts.  A graduate of Harvard University and the Harvard Law School, he began his academic career as an instructor in speech at Tufts University in 1956.  He was a teaching fellow in American history and a research assistant in law at Harvard in 1961, and visiting instructor in speech at San Francisco State College in 1962.  In 1963 he joined the law faculty at the University of California-Berkeley and remained there until 1967, when he took the post of executive assistant to the president of SUNY-Buffalo.  O’Neil became vice-president and provost of academic affairs at the University of Cincinnati in 1972.  In 1975 he became vice-president and chief academic officer of Indiana University, a post he held until he was appointed president of the University of Wisconsin System in 1979.  O’Neil served as System president until 1985, when he became president of the University of Virginia.  
	President O’Neil has occupied a number of important positions outside the academic field, including that of law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan of the U.S. Supreme Court.  He has served on several national committees, including the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education and the Committee on Educational Policy of the American Bar Association, which he chaired.  He is also the former general counsel of the American Association of University Professors.  President O’Neil has produced more than fifty publications, including “Free Speech: Responsible Communication Under Law,” which is in its second printing.  
	This interview took place in February 1985 and is part of a series of interviews on the merger of the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin State Universities.  The second session of this interview was conducted almost literally on the eve of President O’Neil’s departure.  Its principal purpose was to find out how he regarded the position of UW-Madison within the System. 
	The interview was transcribed by Nancy Westrum of the Office of the Executive Vice-President of the System and was edited by the Oral History Project staff.
	
Laura L. Smail
Oral History Project Director
Madison, Wisconsin
June 1987

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #390
O’NEIL, ROBERT M.

Narrator: 	O’NEIL, Robert M.
Interviewer: 	Laura Smail
Date: 		1985
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	309
Series: 		Merger

First Interview Session (June 26, 1985): Digital File

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session [begin tape 1/side 1]  
LS:	This is an interview with Robert M. O'Neil, president of the University System.  We're talking in his office in Van Hise Hall.  The date is the 26th of June, 1985.  I'm Laura Smail, and the interview is being done for the University Archives Oral History Project. 
00:00:24
RO:	What I thought I might do is just start in the order in which your questions appear and move down through them, expecting that you would interject at various points as you see fit.  
	Your first question was to what extent I was briefed in anticipation of either accepting the position or of coming here.  Having served for five years as the campus chancellor of another Big Ten institution and having also been during that period a member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which is the chief academic officers of the Big Ten and the University of Chicago, I did in fact have a considerable amount of information.  There is a difference, I suspect, between information and briefing.  In fact, there was very little opportunity for briefing, either before I accepted the position or before I assumed it.  The regents conducted their interviews in the second weekend of December, 1979.  The offer was made to me the following Thursday, by which time the names of all five people interviewed were widely publicized and the need for moving with dispatch was obvious.  Under any other circumstances, I would have asked the president of the board for an opportunity to come back and talk with him or with several members or all regents and raise with them certain residual questions and lingering concerns, but under the circumstances, with the five names already public, the regents desiring to meet the next day and wrap up the search, I felt it would not be helpful or even feasible to ask for that kind of time.        
	The second time period is between December 13, roughly, and the time Ed Young was scheduled to leave office.  February 1 was the official date.  In fact, Ed left in the last week of January, and at that point I was certainly willing and ready to assume office.  Such briefing as occurred thus came to some extent in that interim period between December 13 and January 27.  But much of it perforce came in the weeks and months which followed my actual assumption of office.  Now, as I said earlier, I did, from my general perspective of a neighboring state and participation in a number of regional and national higher education groups, have a fair amount of information, but not as much as I think would have been helpful for someone coming from outside—completely from outside—into such a position.  
LS:	Is it possible that you wouldn't have taken the job if you had had a chance to find out more about it?  
RO:	 No, I think I certainly would have been willing to take the position, and when asked, “Were there many surprises?”, my answer is, “No.”  There is very little that I found that I wasn't prepared for; it's just that I would have liked to have had certain understandings.  For example, I well knew, at that time, that the Madison chancellor had been designated as the official representative to the Association of American Universities, even though no other state university system at any time ever designated the flagship campus chancellor rather than the system's chief executive.  It's the one and only time in the eighty-five year history of the AAU that that has ever been done.  It was considered once or twice in other states but never actually done.  I was well aware that that step had been taken, though I do not believe the regents were aware that it had been done.  
LS:	 It had just been done.  Is that right?  
RO:	 It had just been done, even though authorization to do so had been, or at least the acquiescence on the part of the AAU executive committee had occurred, sometime earlier.  But nothing had actually been done until a few months before I assumed office.  Now, knowing that and some other dynamics in the relationship, I was certainly prepared to deal with those issues.  But it would have been very helpful to have been able to say—before formally accepting the position—say to the regents, “I assume I will have your support in changing the AAU relationship and others back to their traditional structure.”
LS:	 Were there others besides that?  
RO:	 There is some awkwardness in other national organizations, some lack of consensus, I would say, on who speaks for what part of the university system.  My view has always been that the system chief executive and the campus chancellor both speak for the flagship campus, that they must do so in accord if not in unison, and that having been for five years myself in the other position, I was not unfamiliar with the dynamics and the occasional difficulties of the position.  But in my case, before accepting the position at Bloomington, I had extensive discussions with the president, and I think for most of the five years that followed we had a very good and clear working relationship, and there were few times when I felt that my role was made awkward by his.  There was simply no opportunity or occasion for that sort of discussion here.  I think that was unfortunate.  
LS:	 Before you accepted—not even during the—what about the period between, until February 1?  
RO:	 I did have a chance to call each regent individually, but talking one-on-one was not really satisfactory in terms of the kind of consensus that I think is necessary from the . . . .
LS:	 So they didn't support you, necessarily.  Is that right?  
RO:	 Oh, they did.  They did, but after the fact.  No, I finally did raise this issue in February, the first time the board met after my appointment.  Not meeting in January, there was no opportunity; some of them were away in January, so really the first Friday in February was the first opportunity that I had to raise it with them.  And even then it was rather awkward because it's not something one wants to discuss in public, though it is not by that time clearly a personnel matter of a kind that permits discussion in closed session.  It was discussed briefly in closed session but with some discomfort.  So there really never was an opportunity for what I think would ordinarily be described as a briefing except for the contacts that I initiated in the roughly six weeks between the time I was appointed and the time that I actually assumed office.  During the period from late January to mid-June, I held both offices and would spend between two and three days a week here and the rest of my time in Indiana.  I think I was here every week but one, though there was only one week when I was here for the entire week.  Looking back, that was a somewhat awkward arrangement, but it was the only one that seemed to be satisfactory on both ends.  My salary actually was split sixty/forty during that period, so I got two paychecks—later discovered, when I came to put together my income tax return, that I'd paid the full social security to both states.  That's the kind of thing that can happen in a split period like that.  
LS:	 Well, whom did you talk to?  For instance, I know you talked to Harrington.  
RO:	 Not for some time.  It was a good many months later.  And actually it was probably more at his initiative than at mine.  He was not around, as I recall, during the winter.  So I probably didn't meet him until later in the spring.  I had met him once or twice in years earlier.  But Ed Young I did have a chance to talk to several times during that period.  And he was very helpful.  I'd known him a good many years earlier.  He was helpful.  
00:11:00
RO:	Don Smith, of course, was the then-senior vice-president, though he had just had open heart surgery and was not back in Madison until well into February.  Joe Kauffman had been the chief of staff of the presidential search and screen committee.  He was, of course, extremely helpful—very knowledgeable about the transition—and had defined the role as clearly as one could. There are always special circumstances that complicate life—in my case, one that has never really been noted but I think may have contributed to the difficulty of transition.  Joe Holt, who had been secretary of the board, died just two weeks before the regents met for the interviews.  Thus, during those critical six weeks or so, there was no secretary of the board.  Some of those functions were performed by Joe Kauffman in his search and screen committee role; others were performed by Bob Winter, who had been assistant secretary.  But it was not until the following summer that a permanent board secretary was appointed.  So it was not an easy time for a transition.  
LS:	 And so there was no one there who knew exactly where papers were and things you'd like to look at.  
RO:	 Just in terms of protocol and things of that sort, it was more difficult to get at materials.  I think if Joe Holt had been alive—continued in office during that period—it would have been somewhat easier in the early months just to get one's bearings.  So it was the combination of Don Smith's surgery and recovery; Joe Holt's death; the making public of the names, which greatly compressed the timetable; and the very short time between the end of one term and the start of another.  It was clear to me that if I were going to be able to seize the reins at all, I had to be prepared to step in in the last week of July.  The experience in Virginia is an interesting contrast.  My predecessor there had been all along scheduled to remain in office until September 1.  I was appointed in mid-January.  That allows ample time for transition.  So it's a difference, really, between six weeks in one case and nine months in the other.  
LS:	 That's going to be happening again, too, isn't it?  Then you won't be around . . . .
RO:	 I will not be here, although Katharine Lyall, having been designated as acting president, will be able to carry on through the transition.  In effect, Don Smith was de facto but not de jure acting president in 1980, but his absence and the fact that one of the campus chancellors, who has since retired, was designated as the acting vice-president created a further complication.  So that was not an easy time for--
LS:	 You mean because he wasn't here?  
RO:	 That's right.  Don was recovering in California.  
LS:	 What I mean is this other chancellor--
RO:	 Oh, Warren Carrier.  Well, he was back and forth between here and Platteville.  But I think we all learned, Warren Carrier as much as anyone else, that that's probably not a wise arrangement.  But again, it was a decision that had been made before I came.  
00:14:50
LS:	 Would Don Smith have stayed, do you think, if he hadn't had the heart surgery?  
RO:	 No, no.  He was sixty-five at that time.  He had served long and well in many roles and I think he was simply awaiting the completion of the transition to retire from administration.  
LS:	 I would have—I've been very impressed with his observations about the System.  I should think he would have been a big help to you.  
RO:	 Yes, he certainly was.  And of course I'd known Don for years through the CIC.  Increasingly, I think Don's perspective had become that of a Madison campus faculty member.  He had had some difficult and I think rather painful experiences with the former state universities.  He at one point—though by others he was greatly admired—but he had at one point urged the elimination of the UW-Whitewater graduate school.  I think that left some scars.  So that by some people . . . .
LS:	 Oh, so he might not have been a good person for you to have . . . .
RO:	 By some people he was viewed not strictly as a Madison person but more as a Chapter 36 person.  He was, for example, especially admired and appreciated at Green Bay and Parkside, more so than at Oshkosh or Whitewater or Stevens Point.  But I think he was the one person who, at that time, had a complete sense of the System, even more, I suspect, than Ed Young, because Don had served for a much longer period in the System administration.  In fact, in 1977 Don had called and asked if I would not be willing to consider the presidency at that time.  And he was quite persistent.  I explained that I had only two years earlier gone to Bloomington and did not see myself taking on a role of that sort at this time.  Now, what I cannot remember is at what stage of the 1977 presidential search that was.  I might just add, under the heading of background or briefing, that in fact the contact made in connection with the presidential search was either the fifth or sixth approach that I had had for a University of Wisconsin administrative position.  The earliest was the position of provost for University Outreach, which was filled by Wilson Thiede, and most appropriately, I had contact with Matt Holden in 1973 in connection with that search.  I had been approached about the presidency in '77, the academic vice-presidency in '78, and the Milwaukee chancellorship in '79, each of which I had declined, so that would make the presidential search in 1979 the fifth contact that I had had about Wisconsin administrative positions.  And I just think that's an interesting background, which I've made no attempt to conceal, and once or twice I've mentioned publicly—but further evidence that I was, in fact, reasonably familiar with circumstances here.  
00:18:41
LS:	 I'm curious.  Did anybody say, “This is a really very difficult situation, and you're going to have your hands full?” 
RO:	 I'm not sure anyone needed to say very much because I was well aware of those things that proved to be difficult.  Actually, some of the things that people identified as difficult turned out to be less so than I might have anticipated.  For example, I'd had very little previous legislative contact, although my mother had been a political campaign organizer and had done a fair amount of legislative work.  The legislative contacts developed fairly easily, and, though I know we'll have something to say about those later on, I think the anticipation of certain functions in this office did, if anything, exaggerate the difficulty and complexity of the issue.  As far as the internal structure is concerned, I had considerable exposure from a conference in Indianapolis in the early fall of 1979, at which both Ed Young and Irv Shain were present and described in a very candid way their views of what the presidential office should be.  Now, that was before I thought there was any likelihood that I might be involved in the search, but I listened with the interest one has, and it was, for example, at that time that I knew of the change made in the AAU representation.  So if someone had said, “Do you know thus and so?”, I would have said, “Yes, I do.”  I then would have gone on to say, “Now that's a potential problem.  It's the kind of problem I think ought to be ironed out with the regents before somebody takes the job, but it's certainly not an insuperable obstacle.” 
00:20:56
LS:	 So you didn't start off with any sense that you couldn't handle everything you needed to.  
RO:	 No.  And I guess neither did I start nor do I end with that sense.  People sometimes describe it as unmanageable, and my immediate response is, “Well, I've been here for five and a half years, and if this were, as some allege, an unmanageable position, I don't think I would still be here after five and a half years.”  As this report will indicate, there are some things that I would like to have accomplished that I haven't, but there are a great many others that I feel eminently satisfied about and look back with a real sense of achievement in many areas.  So it's always a mixed experience, I think, but there is this strange notion that it must somehow be unmanageable or ungovernable.  That's certainly never been my sense, and it wasn't at the outset.  
LS:	 Yes.  Well, you're right.  Many people do think it is.  
00:22:15
RO:	 And I fear in some way I may have contributed to that impression, although I don't think anything that I've ever said has suggested that.  I also think that people may lose perspective.  Just take one example:  In all the discussions about the salary issue—and anyone with any sense would know that establishing that kind of a differentiation would cause some serious unhappiness in some parts of the University System—people seemed to lose sight of the few times that that has happened elsewhere and the almost impossibility of making it stick.  It did happen in California.  And it's happened in a few other states, but usually as a result of collective bargaining.  In Nebraska, for example, the Lincoln faculty got, I think, 11 percent; the Omaha faculty got only 8 percent.  But that's the result of collective bargaining.  The same with Duluth and Twin Cities.  The few times it's been tried elsewhere without collective bargaining—once in the University of Illinois in the late '70s, Jack Corbally, who was then president of the University of Illinois, went before the—what was then just the Circle, without the medical center—and explained why he was recommending a half percent more for Urbana than for Circle, and was practically physically dragged off the stage.  He said something about, “Well, Urbana faculty exist in a national market,” and they booed and shouted and practically wouldn't let him get out of the auditorium.  In Indiana, the Higher Education Commission recommended a half percent higher increases for Bloomington, West Lafayette, Terre Haute, and Ball State-Muncie than for the regional campuses.  I think that survived, after great anguish, but that was only a half percent.  
LS:	 Were the campuses that different?  As different as they are here?  
RO:	 Oh, yes.  In some ways maybe more so, in that the difference between ISU-Terre Haute and ISU-Evansville is not as dramatic as most of the differences here.
LS:	 That's interesting because I've heard it said—I'm going to use this phrase “heard it said” a great deal; it will be useful—that you might have managed to get the chancellors and faculties of the Cluster campuses to agree to the 4 percent if you had talked to them—that you might have laid down the law.  But you must have already had an expectation that even what you did get was most unusual—that amount of difference.  
RO:	 Yes, I think if we had asked them to accept, as some part of a negotiated agreement, a differential of this magnitude, they simply could not have accepted it.  So it seemed to me the fairest and most rational and kindest thing to do was simply to make the recommendation without asking them to accept it, because I don't think there is any conceivable way in which they could have accepted it.  The California experience is the only one that's at all analogous.  But the answer—if you ask people, “Why did the California state universities tolerate a 9 percent increase when the University of California faculty were in for 13 percent?”—the answer is, “We're two completely different systems and everyone recognizes that.  Besides, 9 percent looks pretty good to us.”  And I must say, looking at the Cal State faculty structure after their first round of collective bargaining, 9 percent does look pretty good.  But the first answer is the more important one:  “Oh, we're two completely different systems—always have been.”  And I happen to be one of the very few people who, having taught for a number of years at Berkeley, was also, albeit for a brief time, a faculty member at San Francisco State, so I'm in an unusual personal position to comment on that.  I don't think the analogy would have been at all helpful here.  
00:27:15
RO:	Now, there was some suggestion that if we could recommend a—well, there were two figures used.  One was a 5:3 ratio in resulting dollars; the other was a $3,000 per University Cluster faculty member increase.  Then it would have been acceptable, but those figures are 11.5 and 12.2 percent, respectively, and there is no conceivable way for anything other than pure politics that I could have recommended.  I even had difficulty recommending 9 percent.  I thought that was high.  I could in good conscience have recommended—well, I did in good conscience recommend 9 percent, and I have certainly lived with it.  I'm not even troubled that the legislature went to 10.
00:28:16	Tape 1, Side 2  
RO:	There is no way in which in good conscience I could have recommended 11 or 12 percent alongside the Madison and Center 15.  And that is the smallest differential that we had any indication would have been acceptable.  I'm not even sure that that would have been acceptable.    
LS:	You mean if you'd given them that . . . .
RO:	If we'd gone in at 15—it would have been something like 15, 14 and 12.  Legislators would immediately have asked, “On what conceivable basis do you recommend 12 percent when the study committee recommended 6?”  And it was difficult enough to explain to people how we went from 6 and a fraction to 9 percent, although, as I say, I could always live with that, and I fully expected that the legislature would modify whatever we came in with.  Indeed, what always startles me in the last month or so is how close in the end the legislative process came to where we began.  
LS:	You mean going back to the original figures?  
RO:	Well, there was never much support—I think there were three votes on Joint Finance, at most, for going back behind the 9 percent.  No, I mean going to 15, 12 and 10.  It seems to me that's remarkably close to where this process all began.  That's what I expected would happen.  I expected that along the way there'd be a good deal of unhappiness because unfortunately it comes off sounding like a multi-tiered and second-class structure.  And people are not comfortable in being reminded that in the years between 1967 and 1973, the overall rate of increase for Chapter 37 faculties was 9.6 percent above the rate of increase for Chapter 36 faculties.  So in an interesting way, what the catch-up and its differentiation now serve to do is to right the balance, with the interesting exception, and it's a very small one, of the three Chapter 37 centers—Fond du Lac, Rice Lake, and Richland Center—who, in a sense, got the benefit of both worlds.  But no one seems unhappy about the fact that they, in a sense, were on the right side twice.  No, I think that's the forgotten factor, and if there's one disappointment that I have about the whole process, it is that less was made than I would have expected of the historic—or the correction of this—historic reverse catch-up, if you will, which must have had some political explanation in the conditions of the late '60s.  
00:31:57
LS:	Was that something that you could have spoken about?  
RO:	Oh, many times.  Every legislator knew it and so on; it's just that it was viewed as ancient history.  I think two problems—one, it was viewed as ancient history.  Second, it was viewed as a circumstance which in a sense merged into merger.  It's a little like a faculty member we once had charged with, and eventually dismissed—one of the very few tenured dismissals in which I have participated.  It was on the ground of admitted and extreme plagiarism, but the claim was that the plagiarism had occurred before he was given tenure and thus merged into the tenure, so that you couldn't go back behind the granting of tenure.  It was sort of [a] collateral attack or something.  Well, that argument was not persuasive.  It was ingenious and interesting.  Now the argument with the pre-merger Chapter 37 catch-up is a little bit the same.  I think people said, “Yes, but merger was designed to start everybody off from scratch.  We don't want to be bothered with what happened in '67 through '72.”  But in fact it is a very interesting circumstance.  
LS:	Yes.  That's hard to think—that people won't pay attention to history.  
RO:	It appeared in a few newspaper reports.  It was part of my report to the Board of Regents, but I did have a sense that people wanted to put that out of mind for whatever reason.  
LS:	Except the Madison people must have brought it up.  
RO:	Yes.  Yes, they're well aware of it.  And we also translated that in terms of percentages.  For example, the ratio of Madison to Chapter 37 in the mid-'60s was 132:100, or 1.32 to 1.  It dropped to 120 in the last year before—well, '83-4, I guess.  The 15 and 9 proposal would have brought it back to about 129—less than 130, or as against 132.  I'm not sure.  I haven't done the calculations to see where 15 and 10 brings it, but it's certainly less than the 132, which was the historic ratio—not that anybody set about to establish ratios.  Now, having said that, I would have to acknowledge that 132 is high.  There are a few states, of which Virginia is one, with a ratio higher than 132.  Illinois, interestingly—Urbana to Governor, Sangamon, Eastern, Western, and so on—Illinois is also higher than 132 but there aren't many states with a percentage differential that is greater than 132.  And it was pointed out by some of the University Cluster faculties, and I think quite fairly—this is a valid point or valid response—that if we were to go back to 132, that might in fact have been second only to Virginia at the full professor level.  When you aggregate ranks, it's less dramatic, but we tended to focus, for a variety of reasons, on full professors' salaries.  Anyway, this is all part of the context.  The question was, what would one expect of such an issue?  And the answer is, you would expect it to be a very tough issue.  But there was never any alternative.  And see, it has all turned out for the best, and I think with relatively few scars that won't be completely healed by next fall.  
LS:	You don't feel scarred by this.  
RO:	No, no.  One illustration of—this is the kind of thing it's hard for people outside the academic community to understand.  Last November, at the height of all this controversy, there was a conference at Green Bay on teaching about nuclear war and the alternatives.  Ben Lawton and I had both worked very hard to encourage the group that put this together.  It's partly Dick Ringler's project here, but it was indeed a System-wide conference and it anticipated a System-wide initiative, which has now come to pass.  Just within the last week, I think, we've got the institute or center underway.  There was a faculty member who was actively involved—I forget; I think he was from Stevens Point—and he had a copy of a letter on the salary issue, which was indignant in tone and spoke in outraged terms of demeaning comparisons and second-class citizenship.  Attached to it was a handwritten note which said, “Bob, I'm delighted you came to Green Bay last Saturday.  It really meant a lot to all of us.  Sorry I didn't have a chance to give you this in person.”  Well, I think that's the way the academic community works.  And I think people outside look at some of the things said on the salary issue and assume that this is lifelong enmity.  That's not so.  There are some very strong feelings—deep divisions over the salary issue.  In the end, the University Cluster faculties know perfectly well that they will get about 10 percent more than they would have gotten if they'd tried to carry this issue by themselves, and most people will, I think, be very appreciative that they're coming out 10 percent better off than if the issue had never surfaced.  So I think it was inescapably a difficult but also a transitional issue.  I think one of the things that I've tried to impress on the presidential search and screen committee is that a successor will now come in with that issue essentially resolved and, one hopes, not needing to be reopened for quite some time.  And to the extent that there are any scars, they will—they're tied to people who won't be—for the most part—won't be around and are not seen as involved.  
00:39:11
LS:	Somebody said there would be some fuss about the distribution.  
RO:	Oh, well, there is an interesting problem.  This is something of limited interest to future historians, but I'll just mention it.  It is not yet entirely resolved.  There is a problem between University Cluster campuses.  Stout, Stevens Point, and River Falls have low average salaries.  Parkside, La Crosse, Green Bay and, to some extent, Superior, have rather high average salaries, and Oshkosh.  Particularly the Oshkosh people are quite concerned that none of their catch-up go to make amends for what they believe were unwise personnel decisions made at Stevens Point, particularly.  So it's really—ultimately it's an Oshkosh-Stevens Point issue, which has nothing to do with the doctoral institutions or anybody else, thus illustrating—one of the things that I discovered when I first got here was that divisions within the University System were not, as I had supposed, so pronounced in Chapter 36/37 terms.  There were some of those; people would ask at River Falls, “Why can't we have nine-hour teaching loads as they do at Parkside?”  But more pronounced were east/west divisions.  I vividly remember the bitterness of a group of faculty at Eau Claire about a colleague of theirs who had gone to Oshkosh—and this was at a time when the Eau Claire enrollment was rising rapidly and Oshkosh had declined though recently recovered—and they were just outraged that he, for the same or a higher salary, had about half the number of students and had much more secretarial and other support.  So one of the first things that I did, and one of the western chancellors reminded me just Monday, when I was visiting him, of this—I'm just noting it here for my final report—one of the first things I did was to wipe out those old debts.  And I said, “We're going to pay the western campuses and Madison for their enrollment growth, and we're going to settle the debts owed by some of the eastern campuses, including Milwaukee.”  You see, it wasn't even a doctoral/nondoctoral thing.  Madison had been—had prospered; Milwaukee, especially at the master's level, had had a couple of very difficult years.  So Milwaukee was in debt and Madison was in credit at that point.  And I said, “We're going to wipe all the debts clean and start over.”  That probably was the time to do it, and it was something I felt very strongly about.  This western chancellor, just the other day, reminded me that that really had been very helpful in terms of getting everybody to look to the future and not keep focusing on their composite support index and funding level and so on.  
00:42:36
LS:	Just one more question.  Karen did say that she felt unhappy that the chancellors with whom you had worked very hard, whom you had befriended and enjoyed, suddenly were angry about the situation.  She seemed to feel that it went on.  
RO:	I don't think that was solely over this issue.  I'm afraid it is endemic in the structure of a multi-campus system.   A chancellor is primarily beholden to a campus constituency and looks at a system administration only in terms of what the system administration can do to help the campus.  There is not much gratitude given nor, I suppose, reasonably expected.  I think that's an inescapable built-in disappointment in the dynamics of such a statewide system.  I think anyone--
LS:	Disappointment to the president.  
RO:	Yes, I think anyone who has been in such a position will express it.  And then I think back, how many times did I invite John Ryan, who was president of Indiana, to my faculty senate meeting?  Once in five years.  How many times did I invite him to meet with my deans?  I'm not sure I ever did.  Finally, because somebody in his office asked, I sent him agendas for the deans’ meetings, but--
LS:	Although you said you were on good terms with him.  
RO:	Yes, personally I was, but I didn't welcome the prospect of his addressing my faculty senate or dealing with my deans.  It’s unfortunate, but having seen it from both sides, I realize that it’s a built-in dynamic.  And there is often perceived, rightly or wrongly, a zero-sum game that the only way the system administration can look good or make progress is at the expense of the campus.  Now, intellectually, I knew that wasn't true in Bloomington, although I can't say I always acted that way.  From this perspective, I know it's not unavoidable, but from the previous five years, I can well appreciate how it happens.  So that's why I think it is endemic, if regrettable. 
00:45:34
RO:	Should we talk about regents?  
LS:	Yes.  
RO:	The Board of Regents, both as a group and as individuals, I think, have been remarkable people.  I have been extremely fortunate in the quality, particularly of the Dreyfus appointees; the Earl appointees have included some excellent people, but it hasn't been quite as even a group as I found the Dreyfus appointees.  I am not sure what qualities affected the Dreyfus appointees but I would mention two without—because I don't think I should identify the people; they're two different people.
LS:	Well, why not?  
RO:	I'm not sure it would actually serve any purpose, and they may still be living when the time comes; but they were among the earliest of the Dreyfus appointees.  One of them, whom I knew was close to the governor, I had to call on the day of my inauguration and read to him a draft of a very nasty statement I felt I had to make about the governor's view of the University budget during the revenue shortfall period.  He had said something about whining at the time of the 4.4 percent reduction and said “Well, there's more to be taken.”  I called this regent, who, as I say, is a close personal friend, and he listened to the statement and said, “I would change one word.”  He said, “I don't think you ought to use the word ‘whining,’ but the rest of it,” he said, “I think is fine.  You go ahead and make the statement.  I'll support you completely.”  That was a very courageous thing to do, because he knew, as I did, that this statement would not sit well with the governor and that the Capital Times would feature it, as they did, in the evening headline.  The headline was, “Dreyfus Plays Politics with U-O'Neil.”  That was on the day before my inauguration, or actually came out the day of my inauguration, and that regent has been good to his word in terms of that kind of support ever since.  
LS:	So you're praising this regent.  
RO:	Yes.  I also praise the governor for having appointed people of that kind.  He told them when he appointed them that he wanted them to be independent and not to accept his bidding.  There was one occasion on which—I can't even remember the particular issue—letters were apparently sent only to the Dreyfus appointees urging their support for the governor's position on thus and so—a University issue.  At the luncheon the day—Thursday—of the regents' meeting, one of those who had received such a letter pulled [it] from his pocket; he said—with what happened to be mostly Lucey appointees, he said, “Did the rest of you get this letter from the governor a couple of days ago?” [Of] course, they all looked blank.  He said, “Well, I didn't much appreciate it.  The governor told me when he appointed me he wanted me to be independent.  And I didn't much appreciate his telling me how to vote on this thus and so.”  This was another person who was close to the governor—conservative Republican.  I'm sure that word got immediately back, and never again was there any attempt to interfere.  The quality of those people, most of whom are still on the board—all of whom except the two who—the one who died and three who served on short terms, two as VTAE presidents and one for an unexpired term—Mary Podlesny—they're all just excellent people in very different ways.  Now, in so saying, I don't mean to draw any pejorative comparison to the Earl appointees.  It's just that they're not quite as consistent a group.  I've found them no less supportive and no less responsive.  Incidentally, neither governor ever really consulted me about regent appointments.  Lee Dreyfus sometimes didn't even give notice before an appointment was announced, and frankly that didn't bother me.  
LS:	Did governors used to?
RO:	Well, apparently there was a time, yes.  And I'd been told that the farther away you can stay from regent appointments, probably the better off you are.  Now, the Earl administration has been a little closer, and occasionally the governor or somebody else will call and say, “I would like to appoint so-and-so to the Board of Regents.”  And there's a pause.  Now, I suppose if I felt very strongly and had darn good reasons, I could say, “I think that would be a terrible appointment,” but it's pretty clearly a courtesy advance notice.  So in fact I don't think the two administrations have addressed that issue significantly differently.  And frankly I am just as happy not to be involved in either the appointive process, as long as it comes out as well as it has, or in such other internal matters as the choice of officers for the board, for example, which in the past, I guess, has been rather sticky and at one time was potentially sticky here when there were several eight/eight ballots between Dave Beckwith and Ben Lawton—finally resolved in favor of Beckwith, who served for two years.  Then, of course, the governor changed, so then came enough Democratic appointees that Ben Lawton was elected president.  Everything came out just fine.  But at the time, it looked as though Lee Dreyfus would run for re-election, so that that was the last opportunity for either of them to serve as board president.  That was why it was so hard fought. 
LS:	I guess they really treasure that position.  
RO:	Yes.  Otherwise, they would have said, “You take it for two years and I'll take it for two years.”  But they didn't see the—what they didn't see—nobody saw—was Lee Dreyfus's decision not to run again.  And that, I must say, of the events that have occurred in these past five and a half years, that's certainly one of the most significant events, although that isn't to say that things would have been better, worse, or significantly different.  But just that it was a very significant event.  
LS:	I guess that's—we'll talk about that when we get to governors.  Yes, I have heard that Dreyfus made good appointments, because they were universalists rather than representatives of particular regions, which, what I understand about Earl's appointments--
RO:	The Dreyfus appointees are cussedly independent.  One—again, I won't mention the name, but it's yet a different person—was appointed who had close ties with the Madison athletic program.  He'd been a varsity athlete when he was an undergraduate here and a strong supporter—goes to all the games and so on.  Early in his term, he said, “I got a call from some of the athletic people wanting me to intervene on a particular issue.  How should I respond?”  He said, “I want to make very clear to them at the outset that I'm not going to be their spokesman on the Board of Regents, even though I'm a deeply loyal and devoted supporter of athletics.”  So we worked for a time on a way to answer it, and he was absolutely just unequivocal.  He said, “I'll be at your games, I'll give to all the booster clubs and so on, but don't get me to carry your water in the Board of Regents.”  That's another example of this cussed independence, which I think has been of great value.  
LS:	That's what a Board of Regents is for.  
RO:	Yes.  
00:54:14
LS:	Did it ever work against you?  
RO:	I don't think so.  I think the only issues on which I might have had them act a bit differently have transcended any recognizable lines, and the only really, I think, mistaken decision that they made was to authorize two doctoral programs in nursing. 
00:54:45	[end tape 1; begin tape 2]  
LS:	Well, I was interested in that.  That's generally thought a sign of weakness in a board.
RO:	Well, there were many circumstances—extenuating circumstances.  I can't be terribly hard on them.  It [the doctoral nursing program] became—it was seen as a women's issue.  It was seen as an issue of an aspiring, developing profession looking for its place in the sun.  It was seen somehow as a Madison versus Milwaukee issue in which they didn't want to get involved.  We believed at the time—I say “we” meaning Katharine Lyall and I—that if the board had insisted that a single joint program of some sort be developed, that it could and would have been done.  And we were actually prepared to make a choice, if necessary.  But we would have preferred a strong regent pressure to force a joint program.  And failing that, for us the less satisfactory alternative would have been to disapprove both, which is what we recommended.  The least satisfactory alternative, the least intelligible alternative, was to approve both.  Now, I don't mean that either program will do great harm to the field of nursing or nursing education.  It's just that there's no conceivable justification for two programs.  But some of the best and strongest regents ended up voting that way, and I think for reasons of their own, either because they saw it as a deeply significant women's issue—I think Ben Lawton saw it that way.  Jerry Veneman voted in the end that way.  I think he was very apprehensive about forcing us to decide between Madison and Milwaukee.  So in the end, some of the strongest and best regents went that way for reasons that I think are unique to the issue.
00:57:10
RO:	The other issue in which the regent position is less than clear is the veterinary school.  But, again, some of the strongest regents supported the veterinary school, and the divisions are fascinating.  I said that the major issues transcended party and place and so on.  I will never forget the day that Joyce Erdman and Jerry Veneman were down there trying to argue against it, while Ben Lawton and Bob Knowles were both supporting it.  There's no logic to that.  There's a little bit of urban versus rural alliance, but again, I think it's—the veterinary school issue is best understood in terms of Mary Lou Munts saying, “In all these years, Harland Everson has never asked me for a favor but once, and on this issue he came in tears to my office and he said, ‘Mary Lou, I've got to have your help on the vet school.’”  So she said, “How can I, in good conscience?”  Well, you see, she wasn't going to work against it.  So, under those circumstances, it was an idea whose time came in 1947—came and went.  It's not something that—I've often drawn the distinction between a legislative mandate to build a school of veterinary medicine, which I could carry out in good faith and clear conscience, and a legislative mandate to build a school of chiropractic medicine or even maybe a school of osteopathic medicine, about which I would have had some real difficulty—certainly in the case of the chiropractic.  I think I would have said, “No, we won't do it.  It's simply not an accepted discipline.” Osteopathic—that would have been a tough one.  But veterinary medicine is an honorable profession; it's a humane profession; it's a profession for which university education, and good university education, is needed.  So what I said is, “If we're going to do it, let's do it right.”  And we went back and got all the money to support it at the full level, and last fall, we had a reception at the house for the now nearly complete faculty of the School of Veterinary Medicine.  I have not encountered a brighter, more promising, more energetic young group of scholars anywhere around in my travels than those people.  So that's what we did.  We said we were going to do it; we recognized that we had to do it.  In so doing, we then set about to do it right.  And we got all the money for it at no cost to any other program.  That was the only alternative.  
	Which reminds me, I think I better put that in the annual report.  Well, enough about regents, I think, unless something specific.  
01:00:17
LS:	Well, so you think that they've supported you?  
RO:	Oh, yes.  
LS:	A former regent comments that they didn't. He isn't a regent now—hasn't been a regent under your term.  Why would he have said that?  
RO:	I'm not sure with respect to what, other than the nursing issue.  Doctoral nursing is the only issue on which—and this is a fact which can be verified from the records—it's the only time in which a recommendation I made was not followed by the board in five and a half years—the only time I felt any lack of confidence.  And I must say, the night before the meeting, I’d had my sons out skating for what turned out to be the last evening of skating in the winter of 1983-84.  Ben Lawton called when I got home and he said, “You're prepared for what's going to happen tomorrow?”  I said, “Yes.  I think I'm doing the right thing.  I know you've got your reasons for doing something else, but sure.”  Well, it's the one and only—they told me.  I was forewarned.  Now, what should I do?  I should make a fuss?  No, I think they were wrong; I think they did something which many of the regents themselves who voted that way now may believe is unwise, but it was done; it was done in good faith and for good reasons.  What can you say?  No, that's the one and only time.  I say this is not a judgment.  This is a fact.  It's the one and only time that I did not have full support from the board.  Oh, there may have been some refinements.  They may have wanted us to do more in the study of academic staff, for example, than we were inclined to do at the outset.  But that's at most a matter of degree and subtle shading within a range of what was general support.  And sometimes they've pushed—the development of the statement of expectations for college-bound students, for example.  Neither Katharine nor I were planning to do that.  Bert Grover started and then eventually other regents really pushed us, but once it was clear that that's where they wanted to go, I must say I've had the zeal of a convert about that whole business and am delighted they did push us.  It wouldn't have got done otherwise.  
01:03:04
LS:	The other thing is, are they becoming impotent?  Are chancellors going around endrunning them to the legislature?  
RO:	No.  The two issues that might suggest that in this session are issues in which frankly the chancellors are not culpable.  It's legislators, in the case of the physical education building at Stout.  It was not the chancellor's doing.  The chancellor was embarrassed because the mechanism used—taking it from one campus and giving it to his campus—is the last thing that a chancellor would do if he were acting on his own.  So that's the tip-off that it came from the legislator, not the chancellor.  He was very embarrassed.  The other one is the so-called School of Urban Journalism in Milwaukee.  Again, that's not the chancellor's desire.  He's not anxious to make more of journalism than now exists.  That's the Milwaukee media pressure.  They independently marshaled legislative support.  I saw that in Indianapolis, too.  It's an urban journalism problem.  
01:04:20
LS:	But this does sound—and we know it's happening—that the legislature is taking on more than it should—more of what the regents should be doing, which would be perhaps a justification for that.  
RO:	Yes.  Every couple of years I think there is a natural tendency to do that.  I came shortly after the Milwaukee delegation had managed to mandate the starting of a program in Polish studies at UW-M and had greatly expanded the School of Architecture beyond what the chancellor and the regents wanted to do, and had mandated three very detailed studies of Extension.  A couple of those were in the '77 biennium; the Extension studies were in the '79 biennium.  Along with those were the mandated studies of support levels at Superior and the centers.  And then not much happened for the next four years.  I think when legislators become exercised about some University-related issue—in the late '60s it was student protest and disorder; in the mid-'70s it was scale access, program array and so on; in the late '70s it was costs and differential support levels; in the mid-'80s it was faculty salaries.  They then come along and do a few other things.  You go back to the late '60s, and you'll find all kinds of things, only tenuously related to student political activity and campus disruption, that were done simply because the legislature became more fully involved in things that otherwise they would stay out of.  And so for the '81 and '83 biennium we had virtually no legislative intervention, once you put the veterinary school aside, and that really grew out of the '79—also out of the '79 biennium.  
LS:	I suppose they were feeling terribly uncomfortable about pay, in any case.  
RO:	Well, there were other things going on, and I think the higher education issues just simply didn't get much attention.  Now, in this session, some things do get attention, but then look at the things that don't.  Where, for example, is the bill that we all feared mandating public disclosure of faculty consulting and outside activities?  That one never got to the top, and I could name from our—one has a wish list; you also have a fear list—a lot of other things, including collective bargaining, that we thought might well come to pass at a time when the legislature was concerned about other things.  And it never happened.  
01:07:46
LS:	So you don't think this is a danger?  
RO:	No.  I just think that when they get stirred up on some University-related issue, then they're likely to go after a few others.  What we've got now is the calendar issue, which is partly a way of responding to a beleaguered but very vocal tourism industry, which believes that this will be helpful.  I know, as I've said to legislators and committees, as someone who ran a summer hotel, I know it's not the answer.  I think the tourism people know it themselves, but it gives them something to grab hold of.  
LS:	You ran a summer hotel?  
RO:	Yes, a small summer hotel in New Hampshire on Lake Sunnapee.  
LS:	Does it show up on your--
RO:	It's not something you put in a résumé, but I've said often on the calendar issue, this happens to be one of the few things around here that I really know something about, because I know where you go for summer temporary employees and I know whose calendar it is.  It's the high school calendar; it's not the university calendar.  They know that, too.  The legislators from that area have been so stirred up about the calendar issue that they felt now this was the time to deliver it.  And I think they have, although the session isn't quite over and the chance for a veto is certainly not past.  So I guess my feeling is that legislators in this state do far less meddling on the whole anyway and do become involved for reasons that really reflect some other catalytic event or circumstance—that the rate of turnover in the legislature virtually ensures that the legislative leadership will not stay after the same issue over a long period.  I have been here what is in some ways a relatively short period, and yet there are only two remaining members of the sixteen who were in the legislative leadership positions when I came.  Fred Risser and Tommy Thompson have longevity, but the one that I always ask about, who can remember who was assembly majority leader at that time?  It was Jim Wahner.  Now that takes one seemingly back a long time; senate minority leader was Tiny Krueger.  That position has turned over three times since then.  So the rate of turnover—the fact that the assembly members elected in '78, who had only been in office a year when I got here, are now eighteenth or nineteenth in seniority in the assembly.  It's an indication of how fast things move.  It's not quite so fast in the senate, but about two- thirds of the senate has turned over.  
LS:	That reminds me of a question about the board—the turnover on the board.  Does that bother you?  
RO:	No.  Actually, it's not that bad.  Of the regents who were here when I came, five out of the sixteen are still on the board—two only still in their initial terms, two having been reappointed, and one having moved from ex officio—from appointed to ex officio elected position as state superintendent.  So that makes up a curious group of five.  Now, but for circumstances, that number would have been slightly larger this spring, but the two regents who were appointed in '78, Ray Majerus and Tom Fox—both left the board some time back.  Had there been no change—and in fact the labor slot held by Ray Majerus has gone through a considerable cycle, and that is a bit disruptive.  He was succeeded by Jim Jesinski, who died, who was succeeded by Catherine Conroy, who only wanted to serve two years—finally succeeded by Joel Vattendahl, who I hope will now be on the board for the full seven-year term.  
01:13:03
LS:	What was your opinion of Dreyfus?  
RO:	I guess I'm one of those who rather liked and admired him.  I thought he was a person of considerable strength, not necessarily that which was best suited to governing the state or to a university campus either, but someone that I admired, from whom I learned a great deal—an extraordinarily energetic and lively and engaging person, and someone who was, I must say, very supportive and helpful to me on almost all issues.  I was sorry to see him leave.  Shortly before he left office, I went down one day and I said we'd like to give a small dinner.  This is one of those things that's a little hard to say with all the reporters sitting around, because that was his style.  One of the reporters noted that I had extended an invitation to him for a small dinner, which made absolutely no sense in the story, so I figured it did no harm.  We got together a small group of close friends and a few former colleagues—the Habermans, for example, because Lee often spoke of his fondness for Fred Haberman, who was kind of a mentor in the department.  And we just had a very pleasant evening, and then they went off to Stevens Point.  So I really rather liked him.  I thought he was somewhat maligned by others and perhaps by the political process itself.  
LS:	That's most interesting.  I heard about him from Mary Lou—rather the opposite. 
RO:	Yes, that may be a somewhat governmental perspective.  I'm sure he must have been a difficult person to work with, both at Stevens Point and in state government.  My relationship with him was such that those difficulties did not cause us serious problems.  
LS:	So you didn't feel it as a blow when that first 4 percent, 4.5 percent cut . . . .
RO:	I didn't think he had much choice.  The revenue shortfall was a drastic problem; it happened in lots of other states.  No, I don't think he had much choice.  I do think that later in the fiscal year their approach to revenue reduction was a bit heavy-handed.  I did point out, at the time of the 1.4 percent reduction, that we had been more harshly dealt with, that for various circumstances, we ended up with about 20 percent of the total GPR base, absorbing some 60 percent of that last 1.4 percent reduction.  I thought that was unfair.  So at that point, there were some negotiations, and they let us use other sources.  
LS:	What about Earl, then?  
RO:	Well, I have a rather—he's more—for one thing, he's much more closely contemporary.  There isn't all that much difference in the chronological ages, but to me Lee Dreyfus is a person of a different generation.  Tony Earl is a person of my own generation, and that's been a very congenial relationship.  There are other kinds of similarities.  We both have great fondness for the upper part of the lower Michigan peninsula.  I don't fish exactly, and my bike riding isn't exactly the moral equivalent of his jogging, but I do find him a very congenial person and an easy person to work with.  I guess there's only been one issue on which we've really been at odds, and I still really cannot understand it—nor, for that matter, can Mary Lou—and that is the small supplemental appropriation that was to have gone in the '83 budget for faculty salaries.  Everyone had expectations that he would acquiesce, and then, under what I can only assume to be great pressure from other quarters, he ended up vetoing something which had been passed by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations, who certainly wouldn't do something like that unless they had reasonable assurance that the governor would accept it.  
LS:	This led to the pay freeze.  
RO:	Well, this was the last attempt to get something else other than the faculty recognition fund into the '83-'85 budget, and he certainly had indicated that something like that might be possible.  In the end, he stuck to his original position, which would have been okay if that had been clearly understood.  It's just that I was one among many who had a very different understanding.  
LS:	And he doesn't later clear this up with you in friendly conversation.  
RO:	No.  And I've never pressed it.  No, I just think it's best to put that kind of thing aside and go on.  But I must say, it was for me a unique experience, even after years of observing Boston and Cambridge politics with my mother.  I had never encountered a situation like that, where an expectation, and not mine alone, could be so at variance with the outcome.  Something went very wrong between--
LS:	It would be interesting to find out.  
RO:	Some day I'm sure it will be unraveled.  It may have been a complete misunderstanding; if so, Mary Lou Munts misunderstood, Tom Loftus misunderstood, Fred Risser misunderstood.  We all did.  And we misunderstood exactly the same circumstance, so it would be strange.  And we misunderstood from different sessions, so something went awry.  That's all I can say.  I have never wanted to accuse anyone of anything less than good faith.  It's just a very strange experience.  And that's the only time that I've felt at variance with the current administration.  They've been most—both Tony and Sheila have been most personally gracious and cordial and supportive in many ways, quietly and privately as well as publicly.  But publicly, he's been extremely supportive also.  It so happened—I said this at the time, but it's the kind of thing that gets lost.  We got back from Charlottesville after the appointment was announced in January of this year, and by curious coincidence, the first letter that was waiting for us at home when we got back was from Lee Dreyfus, and the first phone call was one that we got in Charlottesville from Tony Earl.  
LS:	Saying they were sorry you were leaving.  
RO:	Yes, yes.  And very sympathetic, very friendly.  
01:21:28
RO:	That's something that I will miss.  Even though I do have for the next few months, at least, the prospect of a very good and cordial relationship with the Wisconsin alumnus in the governor's office in Richmond, it's not the same.  You're one of fifteen people, each of whom is called university president; well, one is called superintendent, I guess.  The general who is in charge of the military academy is a superintendent not a president, but the others are presidents, and if the structure is simpler on the inside, which it surely is, it's much more complex on the outside.  
LS:	Because they can go directly to the governor.  
RO:	On some issues, yes.  On other issues, they're supposed to deal with the Council for Higher Education, which has an executive director, who in turn reports to the Secretary of Education, who is a member of the governor's cabinet—just vastly more complex on the outside.  And the stark simplicity of the external structure is to me one of the very reassuring things here—the ability to step forward—this is not my style—but to step forward and say, “I will now speak for Wisconsin, at least public higher education. Unless Father Raynor wants to countermand, I'm willing to speak of all Wisconsin higher education.”  And most of the time Father Raynor doesn't care to say otherwise, or he and I think somewhat alike, so you can do that.  If anybody in Virginia came forward and purported to speak for all of higher education, they'd be committed, I think.  It's just not the same.  And that would be true in most states.  
01:23:26
LS:	I'd like to get on to Madison—your relations with Madison. You've mentioned already the— [end side 1; begin side 2]--the AAU situation, but were there ever reasons for the tensions between you--
RO:	Not on my part, no.  I had no problems.  I gather, from both personal contact and things said by others, that he must have had some very serious problems.  People will report to me.  They say, “Why is the relationship between the two of you so strained?”  My reaction always is, “Well, you didn't hear that from me.  I've never said that to anyone.  So if that is your impression, you must have heard it from a different source, because I've certainly never said anything to that affect.”  And it strikes me that one does not advance one's own interests by describing a relationship of that sort as troubled or fraught with conflict.  But apparently that has been done, and I think it hurts the University as well as the people involved.  I say “apparently” because I can't trace it.  But I only draw this inference that if a number of people—across the country, not just here—believe that it's a troubled relationship, that information or impression must have come from elsewhere.  And I'm mystified at the notion of what purpose is served by so describing it to others.  When I am asked by a colleague from another institution, my answer always is, “Well, we meet frequently; we are usually in accord on most issues.”  And both those statements are absolutely correct.  Our values and attitudes and views on higher education questions are pretty similar.  There are some structural difficulties, but I don't think they're inherently any more serious than you have in North Carolina or Texas or California or any other multi-campus system.  But apparently—again underscoring the “apparently”—it is perceived as a much more troubled relationship on the other side.  
LS:	Well, historically, ever since Fleming and Harrington, which was the first of the provost/chancellor and the president, it has never been a good relationship between the president and--
RO:	Well, I gather.  I remember in the summer of 1970 I was here for my first visit to Madison, doing a kind of postmortem on the TA strike for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I was here really under Willard Hurst's auspices.  Willard took me over to Bascom Hall; we picked up Ed Young, we went out for lunch, and, as we were driving by this building, which couldn't have been more than about three years old, I remember Ed—this is, now mind you, 1970, long before merger—Ed Young pointing and saying, “That's where the central administration is.”  And the tone of voice suggested no great fondness.  I do find it somewhat reassuring to envision a pre-merger difficulty.  I have scrupulously avoided, though I spent all day yesterday with Bob Fleming and much of last . . . .
LS:	Was he here?  
RO:	No, at the Johnson Foundation in Racine.  And two weeks ago we spent much of the day together at ETS because he chairs the Visiting Committee for ETS; I reported to the board.  I've never wanted to ask him and I never wanted to ask Fred Harrington.  I probably should some time, just out of curiosity.  Why didn't it begin—apparently John Weaver's perception was that if he succeeded Fred Harrington as the president of a six-unit system, assuming that the centers and Extension were by then separate units in addition to Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay and Parkside, everything would all come together.  I guess the—well, Ed had just recently been appointed chancellor, hadn't he?  Bob left in '68; Bill Sewell was in office.
LS:	'67, and then Sewell '67-68.
RO:	So Ed had been in office maybe a year and a half when John Weaver was appointed.  I gather John came with some considerable optimism about that relationship.  But obviously that didn't work out.  I don't know why.  I don't know the details; particularly do I not know what the difficulties were in that brief pre-merger period, which may already have been so colored by the prospect of merger that it was never completely clean.  And then you'd really have to go back to the Harrington/Fleming period.  
01:29:07
LS:	You don't think it's just that a university that's a hundred and fifty years old and has its traditions and its name, and suddenly has this taken away from it and applied to some above institution that is new and has--
RO:	Oh, sure.  
LS:	And hasn't earned its own--
RO:	Oh, sure.  I had colleagues at Berkeley who absolutely refused to use the initials UCB.  They said, “There is no UCB.  There is a University of California, and then there's something down south called UCLA.  We understand that, and you can call it UCSD or UCI or UCSB, whatever you want.”  But they absolutely—and strike it out on the letterhead—will not use the initials “UCB.”  So I've seen it elsewhere, and I've seen in Indiana—one of my senior colleagues went up to a former president in an airport—the president who had really developed the erstwhile extension centers into regional campuses with chancellors and freestanding faculties—went up to somebody he hadn't seen for almost ten years, grabbed him by the collar and said, “How could you have done this to us?”  And the poor man said, “What?  What?”—just expecting an old friend.  He said, “Those regional campuses that you created and foisted on us.  How could you have done that to us?”  Well, my reply was that he had done them more good than harm by recognizing that communities like Fort Wayne and South Bend and Gary and the Louisville metropolitan area and Kokomo can't forever be relegated to having extension centers to which Bloomington faculty go riding circuit or whatever, and that either you accept those communities and their universities as part of a larger entity, or you'll end up with what you've got in Ohio, which is twelve state universities with seven medical schools and seven state-supported law schools.  That's the alternative.  And with eleven of the twelve awarding doctoral degrees in American history.  That's the alternative.  
	Ohio is only about twice the size of Wisconsin, but there are seven state-supported medical schools, seven state-supported law schools, eleven Ph.D. programs.  That's the only alternative.  Each university has its own governing board.  Compare Wright State, with its own medical school and its own Ph.D. programs, to, let's say, Oshkosh or Eau Claire and ask, Which state gets better value for its higher education dollar?  And then ask, Is The—you always have to capitalize the “t”—is The Ohio State University at Columbus better off in that environment than UW-Madison?  I think the answer is very clear.  Look at the condition of that library.  I don't know whether you've had occasion to use it or have people who've visited there and so on come back, but tell me, in what academic discipline—maybe this is something I ought not to say, but I've said it almost publicly and it's today—in what academic discipline is The Ohio University really preeminent?  Now, Michigan is different because Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State do have constitutional status and a rather different history.  
	The point that I've always made is not that merger has helped or hurt any more than non-merger has helped Michigan and hurt Ohio State, but rather that the structure is largely irrelevant.  I think one can argue that Madison, as part of a multi-campus system, has fared less well than Michigan, as a freestanding institution, but also less well than Berkeley, as a very much merged institution, or in recent years, perhaps less well than UT-Austin.  And that's a better analogy because the University of Texas System really is a merged system.  Arlington was once a state teachers college, for example.  I don't think it's—or turn it around to say that UW-Madison, as a merged institution, has fared better than Ohio State or Iowa, as essentially freestanding institutions, although that's not quite true of Iowa.  Again, I don't think that's accurate.  I think structure is largely, if not totally, irrelevant.  But I do think—
LS:	What's relevant?  
RO:	Well, I do think that given the resources of the state, Madison is a great deal better off having somebody able to declare, and make it stick, that there will not be doctoral programs at Oshkosh or at Eau Claire.  In Ohio there are people who have that authority, but they won't exercise it.  So along comes Wright State.  I've seen it.  I've seen the Ohio Board of Regents do this.  I saw the Indiana Higher Education Commission vote the first doctoral degree at Ball State, which has no business awarding doctoral degrees, and in this state wouldn't be awarding doctoral degrees because there's somebody who would say, “No” and make it stick.  I see it also in Virginia.  There is no need for six state-supported universities in a state with a population almost exactly the same as that of Wisconsin to be awarding doctoral degrees.  And I think the University of Virginia in some ways suffers because Old Dominion and George Mason and James Madison and Virginia Commonwealth all award doctoral degrees.  If the model prevailed, only the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech would award doctoral degrees, period.  And that is essentially the model we have here.  It's hard to prove, but I feel very strongly that structure is, let me say, at worst irrelevant and at best, if you follow into the long-term future the consequences of eleven doctoral programs in Ohio and six in Virginia—in the long term, I think structure is helpful.  Even in the nursing situation, it was only the two already doctoral institutions that got the programs in question.  It didn't serve, as it might have in some of these other states, to proliferate graduate education in nursing.  So I think Fred Harrington was correct in pursuing overtures with Eau Claire in the '60s.  I don't know whether he's even said that, but Leonard Haas told me.  
LS:	I've heard it was a possibility.
01:37:26
RO:	You may—I don't think anybody else is aware of this, but—incidentally, I hope you do Leonard Haas at some point.  
LS:	That's a good idea.  
RO:	Because he lived in a way that very few others did through merger.  And he's a marvelous historian, literally by profession.  He teaches Wisconsin history, or did until he retired last year.  And one of the fascinating things that he told me, at the time of my first visit, was of some active conversations—this would be in '68, '67-8-9, thereabouts, and I think even going back earlier.  Fred came to give a commencement speech in the mid-'60s and broached this possibility, so that there was an alternative.  Of course, there was an alternative way back in the '40s, when merger was first seriously broached.  And that, incidentally, is a striking difference between Wisconsin and other states, in which—states like Maryland and Nebraska, to take two in which complete merger is now under serious discussion, didn't have the antecedent of the Kohler concept of merger in the '40s.  
LS:	'50s.  
RO:	Or '50s—whenever it was the first time it surfaced.  There is that antecedent here.
LS:	I guess I've heard that Harrington perhaps thinks that if Eau Claire had been part of this system that merger wouldn't have happened—something like that.  
RO:	It would have been very interesting, because it would have put Marshall Wick on the other side, probably.  And the strong—it would have created a very strange political dynamic.  And of course, it would have put Leonard on the other side.  And they're two of the strongest people at that time.  So it's fascinating to speculate.  
LS:	Actually, Harrington and I didn't talk at all about Extension yesterday.  We talked only about the System and the background of it.  I'll ask that again on Friday.  
RO:	Well, this is Leonard's version, but Leonard described what he perceived as fairly active overtures, which might in time have led to a five-campus University of Wisconsin.  Now, I'm not at all sure that the legislature and McPhee and so on would ever have permitted this to happen, and if all the legislators representing the other eight WSU campuses had tried to block it, they might have succeeded.  It would have been a fascinating stand-off at least.  If you posit Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Racine-Kenosha, and now Eau Claire all on one side, and McPhee and his troops on the other side, I don't even want to speculate.  But that's probably the only circumstance that would have averted it.  
01:40:42
RO:	Go back to that salary history that I described earlier.  Some say, “Oh well, that was in contemplation of merger.”  But I've gone back time and again through those percentage differentials, and they begin to break out significantly at least three years before any serious discussion of merger, during the Knowles administration.  
LS:	So it would have something to do with Harrington's building up . . . .
RO:	No, no.  I think that may have been as much a legislative reaction to Madison student politics as anything.  I think there are a couple of factors.  One is a perception that the WSU faculties were indeed seriously underpaid.  I don't know whether a study like our governor's commission was undertaken, but there was a perception that WSU faculties were seriously disadvantaged vis-a-vis what were coming to look like prospective Green Bay and Parkside salaries.  It was one thing for them to be disadvantaged vis-a-vis Madison and Milwaukee, but now here were nondoctoral faculties at Green Bay and Parkside.  The second factor, I assume, from my visit in the summer of 1970, may have been just simply punitive reaction to student riots.  
LS:	Could be reason enough in itself.  
RO:	And the first year in which this process begins was '67.  So it's conceivable that—was the spring of '67, the first Dow demonstration, just down here.  I remember seeing the films in Buffalo.  But that's one question that people ought to ask—extrapolate those two lines and ask where the salary situation would be today if those trends had continued unabated through the '70s.  At least, once merger occurred, that stopped and everybody got the same from then on.  
LS:	So you're saying that's another reason for saying that Madison is better off.  
RO:	Well, at least it's a reason for arguing that structure is no worse than irrelevant, which is the most that I will claim.  I think that I said one can draw a more favorable inference, but I wouldn't ask that.  All that I've asked--
LS:	You know, I don't think I quite understand.  You say structure is irrelevant.  I would have—it seems to me as if the structure is relevant.  
RO:	Well, I think it may have been protective against certain forces—both the proliferation of doctoral programs and the salary differentiation.  And that is in fact what I believe.  But the charge is made that in fact Madison and maybe Milwaukee are worse off as a result of merger.  And I'm satisfied to convince people that at least things are no worse than they would have been without merger, though in fact I think there's a fair case to be made that these protective forces have come from the current structure.  In that sense, structure is better than irrelevant.  But that I don't have to prove.  
01:44:35
RO:	And there's a lot of talk about collective bargaining.  In fact, there are three multi-campus systems in which the enabling legislation has led to collective bargaining at other campuses without affecting the flagship campus.  
LS:	It's thought if it happens here, it'll split apart the merger.  
RO:	It hasn't happened in Minnesota; Duluth, Crookston, Waseca and Morris have a bargaining unit which has no bearing on the Twin Cities.  Omaha has this bargaining unit which does not affect Lincoln.  Now Santa Cruz, I agree, is a bit extraneous because it's hard to imagine a Santa Cruz tail wagging a University of California dog.  But campuses the size of Omaha and Duluth are sufficient to begin wagging the dog and they don't.  They simply go—in fact, as I mentioned earlier, in Nebraska at least, the Lincoln faculty have probably fared better and the Omaha faculty less well because of this bifurcated structure.  It's unusual.  Those are the only three examples I know of.  
01:45:58
LS:	Have you had enough chance to get to know the Madison faculty?  
RO:	As a matter of fact, in some ways, I've been more involved here than I was in Bloomington.  I've served on several doctoral committees here, for example, which I never did in Bloomington.  Last time I served on a doctoral committee--
LS:	In history or in law?  
RO:	One in history of science, one in mass communications, and in two utterly different subspecialties.  The one in history and philosophy of science was on creationism, and the doctoral candidate was in fact—already had a law degree and wanted to do a kind of legal policy historical view of the creationism controversy.  I happened to be the person on the law faculty who's done the most with that.  The other one was Dave Pritchard in mass communications, now teaching at Indiana.  And because he was doing a comparison between prosecutorial discretion in media coverage of the criminal cause célèbre, Bill Hachten thought he should have a lawyer, and it could have been either somebody with my interest or Gordon Baldwin's, say, or it could have been somebody like Herman Goldstein or Frank Remington out of the criminal law side.  But Dave opted for someone from the First Amendment side.  There was only room for one lawyer on the committee.  So in many ways that are reflected in these seven or eight books of speeches out here, there's been a lot of contact.  I've taught individual classes in many other disciplines, probably again as many as I—twice a year I've given--
LS:	There's a record of that, is there?  
RO:	Well, I've done some of it, but I guess the point that I'm suggesting is that you're not necessarily cut off here.  You're cut off administratively, but the administrative isolation, which I think is unavoidable, somewhat reinforced by geography—it's a long way down from here to there—is not necessarily matched in terms of one's academic identifications.  
LS:	These are individual encounters.  
RO:	Pretty much, although even before I got here, the physical science division executive committee asked if I would be the speaker at the spring dinner of the Division of Physical Sciences, which I was delighted to do.  I talked some about some things that I was doing on confidentiality and accessibility of scientific research; there's an interesting crossover.  I've done several things for life sciences, mostly, again, on creationism.  I've actually taught a class in political science that Joel Grossman didn't want to teach.  Political scientists never like to do the unit on commercial speech, so I took Joel Grossman's class one evening, teaching the very same casebook that I use in the law school.  I couldn't believe how differently Joel approaches it from the way I approach it, but it was a sobering experience for both of us.  And in fact, there's been as much of that kind of contact here as I think one would have in a campus administrative position.  In fact, I think I've done more teaching the last five and a half years than most of the Madison campus administrators, partly because my discipline is an easier one to keep up with.
01:50:07	[begin Tape 3, Side 1] 
RO:	I suppose when Fred [Harrington] moved up here, there was sufficient value in just getting away from people marching around the building and chanting and so on.  
LS:	Well, no, that was Ed Young.  When Fred moved up here, he was therefore parted from whoever it would have been—Fleming, I guess.  
RO:	Yes, yes.  
LS:	Which is just as well.  
RO:	I've often wondered: Where was Bob Fleming's office before the System offices came up here?  
LS:	Good question.  It must have been right there on the . . . .
RO:	Maybe where the vice-chancellor is now or something.  It was not a long period, I guess, between, but there must have been a time—a year or two—when they were all down there in Bascom together.  
LS:	It’s a good question.  I'll ask Fred tomorrow.  
RO:	Yes, I'm just curious.  I think, by the way, this is a marvelous office.  They keep talking about dividing that conference room  
LS:	What's in there?  Oh, that's the conference room.  
RO:	It's a conference room, although at the moment it's where my student research assistant has his materials and it's all this stuff back here.  He just spreads it out on the table.  Pretty plush office for a student research assistant.  We more and more have had meetings elsewhere in the building, but this floor, the seventeenth floor, really is a fine place for administration.  I feel very strongly that the worst thing we could do would be to build a separate building that would say “University of Wisconsin System Administration.”  They have University Hall in Berkeley; they have a building in downtown Austin; one in Adelphi, Maryland; there's one in Chapel Hill.  I think we're much better off having people scattered.  
LS:	There was an issue in the beginning of merger--
RO:	And apparently there was even a question of moving the System administration downtown and treating it like a state agency.  I think that would be catastrophic in terms of all these kinds of contacts that I've described, which have been so important and valuable for me.  To be downtown in a state office building would just destroy that relationship.  And yet that is what happens in Austin and some other—and Massachusetts—most extreme case because the office is in Boston rather than Amherst.  So there's no tie with any campus.  That, I think, has been a very important factor here, apart from the other advantages of the view and everything else that comes with this.  
01:53:13
LS:	One of the questions has to do with the autonomy granted to chancellors, which apparently Young pushed and which some people had felt had dangers for the System.  
RO:	Yes.  I once remember in Indiana, where chancellors were not supposed to act much on their own, being at a legislative hearing and having a legislator say to the university system president with respect to a new building for the Kokomo campus, “Well now, the three floors in this building will serve the following purposes.”  John Ryan stopped and said, “Senator, did you say three floors?  This is a four-story building.” He said, “Oh, no, Dr. Ryan.  Chancellor Bogel has told us this is a three-story building, and under those circumstances, if the chancellor says all he needs is three stories, that's what you're going to get is a three-story building.”  I've never had an experience like that—never had anything approaching that kind of a disagreement.  There are times when, as part of the total budget, chancellors will use their own resources to support things that are of particular interest to them. But I've never had the experience of going around and appealing for a four-story building and then finding out that the chancellor only wanted three stories.  To the contrary, when the North Carolina people were here a couple of weeks ago as part of their presidential search, they asked about legislative representation, and I said that we encourage each chancellor to work with the local or regional delegation, as long as they're all working toward the same issues.  We find out pretty quickly if they aren't, because we get a call from the legislator or staff member, who'll ask, “What's going on?”  And we can straighten it out if there is disagreement.  But when we are all working toward the same ends, I think it is pointless not to mobilize that relationship between the local legislative delegation and the local campus, and I can't imagine doing it otherwise.  Apparently John Weaver was somewhat resistant to that view.  Now, on this I think Ed was absolutely correct, and I've tried to continue that policy of encouraging chancellors to work with their local delegations.  At other times, if they have—let's say there are alumni.  This is not just a Madison issue; there are Whitewater alumni in the legislature all over the state.  Occasionally, they will call upon the Whitewater chancellor.  Jim Connor happens to be very much of a team player, so it's not an issue, but again, I think there's a relationship which you're foolish not to take advantage of.  
LS:	Except what happens when—do the alumni split up?  They must.  
RO:	Yes, they do, but . . . .
LS:	And become a divisive voice.  
RO:	Only when there is an issue, and the salary catch-up issue is about the only one I can think of which does have that capacity.  Virtually everything else I think I can say we have been and are all essentially on the same team.  
LS:	Was it Marshall who got up and offered some alternative pay plan?  
RO:	Yes.  He loves to work with his calculator, and he will go endlessly through options.  I think he made things at times difficult for himself and for his area legislators, and, to some extent, with his fellow chancellors.  
LS:	But it didn't bother you.  
RO:	It was annoying, and we did—I have tried to explain to him my concept of functioning as a team, but as I say, in five and a half years, I've never had anything, in my view, approaching the embarrassment of that Kokomo building.  And no issue, other than the salary catch-up issue, which, as I'd said before, we knew was going to be a tough one from the beginning—no other issue in which there'd really be any incentive to go separately, because legislators, having created a single state university system to prevent their having to deal campus by campus, will often call us and say, “Chancellor so-and-so says he'd like a whatever-it-is.  Is that part of your budget?”  And if the answer is no, that's the end of it.  I'd say, “Oh, no, Phil.  For years he's—I understand but it's way down on our priority list.  We just can't.  We're not really opposed to it, but we can't put it up high enough.”  And they'll drop it.  They'll explain to their chancellor that it's not on the regents' priority list.  
01:59:12
LS:	It's ten after five.  
RO:	Let's see if there's anything else on—we really haven't specifically addressed the question of whether my views on such issues have changed significantly in this time.  I think I said earlier that I always believed in and appreciated solidarity, harmony, whatever you will, in my campus role in Indiana.  I have come much more clearly to understand the importance of it in this role, though my intellectual views are probably the same in both places.  It's just that it's a bit more urgent here in this position.  But at the same time, I have always been very sympathetic with a chancellor who feels that he or she is really on the line and needs to establish a kind of relationship with alumni, with legislators, and so on that may not always include the system administrator.  
02:00:47
LS:	How do you feel about the quality versus access?  
RO:	Again, it depends somewhat where one is.  One of the reasons that the University of Virginia has by far the highest SAT scores of any publicly supported university—much higher than Michigan or Berkeley—is because it's so selective and so small.  And the charge of elitism is sometimes heard in regard to that very small, very limited access, particularly for Virginia residents because 40 percent of the undergraduates are nonresidents to begin with.  Well, I think that policy in Wisconsin I would find somewhat troubling.  I do believe that this campus is too large and that enrollment ought to be cut back to maybe somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000.  
LS:	Let me interrupt you.  What did happen to Irving Shain's proposal to have that—to stop the enrollment funding formula?  
RO:	Ted Finman is still—Ted is still working it through in his committee. 
LS:	Oh really?  Because that was in 1980 or '81.  
O'NEIL: That led to the instructional funding study, but that was System-wide; there were no campus implications.  
LS:	He specifically proposed it for Madison.  
RO:	But without any mechanism.  And it couldn't be adopted for a single campus.  
LS:	I think he hoped it could be adopted for Madison and the others would go on with the enrollment funding formula.  
RO:	The enrollment funding formula, meanwhile, was simply eliminated by both governors and the legislature for everyone.  Meanwhile, there has been no incentive—with the enrollment decline somewhere out there in prospect, there's been no incentive for any campus to reduce enrollment.
LS:	Including Madison.  
RO:	Yes.
LS:	So they don't want to.  
RO:	They're ambivalent.  They complain about all the students, so I will say from time to time, “Okay, why don't you set a figure?”  In fact, this was a question asked of us during the last or next-to-last session that we had with the select assembly committee—the so-called Loftus Committee.  And Irv's answer, I think quite understandable, is, “First of all, if you start limiting people, where do you limit them?  And who's to decide?  On what basis?  And second, who's going to answer all the complaints and questions of people not admitted?”  There are answers.  The University of Virginia, in a state of roughly the same population, wouldn't be a third the size of Madison, which it is, unless somebody long ago had made that decision.  I'm beginning to see some of the painful replies that one has to make to everybody from legislators through wealthy alumni and so on, and you have to get them to buy into the concept of a relatively small and highly selective state university.  But that has a long historical antecedent.  I think Irv's point, which is well taken, is that if you suddenly now, after having, to be quite honest, admitted almost anyone with an academic diploma in the top half of any in-state high school class—if you suddenly now reverse that expectation and start becoming very selective, you then create problems that Virginia and, to some extent, Michigan, and Berkeley, certainly, and UCLA never faced.  
LS:	I can see that.  
RO:	Nor did Boulder ever face it.  There's only one institution that is really trying to grapple with it and that's UT-Austin, which reached almost 50,000.  They were 48 and something and they are now desperately trying to turn things down with, I must say, somewhat limited success.  But we're watching the Austin experience very closely to see how much of that might be transportable or translatable here.   
LS:	When do you have to leave?  
RO:	Now?  I should probably head downtown about 5:30 or 5:35.  
02:06:04
LS:	Oh.  Well, then let's get off of this.  I would like to ask—Karen said in the last eight months or year you have worked very hard and you hadn't felt good enough about what you were accomplishing.  
RO:	I think it's just the question of whether it is worth expending that much energy on what is essentially a procedural issue.  It's also true, as people found most dramatically in the late '60s and early '70s, that if the media and others are focusing on one issue, you can deal with a hundred other things but little will come of it.  I always felt so sorry for people in the '60s who—university presidents and chancellors—who really did accomplish many other things.  But all of that could be wiped out if there were one riot in which an arrest was made too soon and blood was shed; you can forget about everything else.  Now, my experience today is nothing like that, but it is true that I've had some difficulty getting people to focus on some of the other twenty-five things in this list.  Now my hope is—for example, even in terms of faculty—what do I feel best about in terms of faculty welfare?  Not the catch-up; it's the removal of that absurd limit on sabbatical leaves.  I looked at the statute before I came here.  I said, “How can anybody limit sabbatical leaves to 1½ percent of the tenured faculty?”  That means that you get one sabbatical leave in a lifetime.  That's absurd.  So, we went to work and last year, partly out of a sense of legislative guilt over the salary issue, almost unnoticed they removed completely the restriction on sabbatical leaves.  Now that doesn't mean that everyone will in fact get a fully funded sabbatical leave every seventh year.  But at least that's theoretically possible.  State law no longer precludes it.  But I'd have to say that there hasn't been a whole lot of attention paid to what seems to me a profoundly important change in faculty welfare, simply because the salary issue has had center stage.  The difference between the '60s and the '80s is that the issues of the '80s do get solved and, as of tomorrow, unless something drastic happens in the next fourteen hours, as of tomorrow, the average Madison faculty member and center faculty member will be looking toward a nearly 30 percent increase in the next biennium.  Now people may be more inclined to think again about alcohol abuse in education, teaching about nuclear war, uncapping sabbatical leaves, and any of the couple dozen other things, but I think that's the sense in which it's meant—that when one issue kind of drives everything else away, you do have a sense of spinning wheels or walking a treadmill at times.  
02:10:00
LS:	Are you sorry, then, that you decided to go?  
RO:	Oh no.  No.  I've said several times, and I think Kay Schultz may have made more of it, although she was not incorrect in perceiving it that way.  I think this is a kind of position in which one would not want to spend one's entire lifetime.  
LS:	But when you came, everybody said, “He's only 45.  He'll be able to stick around for a long time.”
RO:	I think that somewhat misconceives the nature of the position.  If you look at—with the sole exception of Bill Friday, who really built the University of North Carolina System from Chapel Hill to its present proportions—everyone else has, in fact, served somewhere between five and seven, or at most eight years in positions of this kind.  That's about it.  
LS:	That's true.  That's also said from another—I guess there are articles about that.  University presidents don't last long.  
RO:	System presidents, multi-campus.  Yes, it's very different.  Clark Kerr's nine years may be about the longest time that anyone has served.  You take Texas and you go back through Don Walker and Mickey Lamader and Norm Hackerman and so on, you find people there serving on an average five, seven, or at most eight years.  Clark Kerr's successors have served between five and seven years, even in relatively tranquil times.  So in fact I think that's a reasonably accurate reflection.  There aren't many.
LS:	It's just not rewarding enough.
RO:	I'm not sure.  I think there are various factors.  Some positive, others negative.  In a way, the issues are maybe more ultimately important than those with which a campus administrator deals on a daily basis.  But they also tend to be more process-oriented.  The relationship, being so largely external, is subject to very rapid turnover.  Imagine what a campus administrator would do if 80 percent of the senior faculty turned over in a period of five years.  I think you'd tend to feel somewhat the same way.  So, as I went back through the people in this position, Fred Harrington dealt with four biennial budgets, John Weaver with three, Ed Young really with one and I with three.  You have to go back to E. B. Fred to find somebody who dealt with more than four biennial budgets.  That's an indication.  Dykstra dealt with three.  And then, of course, you're back to Glenn Frank.  
LS:	I think you said something like this in a newspaper interview.   
RO:	Yes.  I think there's almost a built-in time limit, and so I said to the search and screen committee, “Don't ask somebody to come and stay for twenty years.  If someone is willing to come and stay for five to eight years, that's not an unreasonable commitment.”
02:13:50
LS:	What kind of problems is the next president going to have?  
RO:	Well, this is part of what I'm trying to put together here.  
LS:	So it's going to be written.  
RO:	Yes.  I'm not sure how much I'm going to say on that issue because I really don't want to preempt the next generation.  
LS:	Say it now and then we'll know.  
RO:	I had, in fact, in January, written a report outlining a lot of things that I would like to do in the next five years, and they're mostly quite hopeful things.  Some of them we haven't even talked about.  For example, there is a real responsibility and opportunity which comes with this job-to-be, and this is in capital letters: the State Higher Education Executive Officer—part of a national network.  I just simply haven't been able to do much with that role.  Joe Kauffman goes occasionally to the meetings.  North Carolina never even attends.  I think we in Wisconsin ought to participate, because these are people who in many states have enormous power for coordination and more.  And we have this funny role.  For example, federal Title I funds for private as well as public institutions come through UW-Extension because the president of the UW System is the State Higher Education Executive Officer.  There's some very funny things that happen in a state with no coordinating board.  The question, who’s in charge here? is one that, in a very limited way, I've tried to poke away at, but somebody in this position really could, I think—save only for Father Raynor, who is always an entity unto himself, and I'm sure his successor will be, too—could do much more with coordination of voc tech, Higher Educational Aids Board, educational communications.  I am ex officio a member of the Educational Communications Board, for example.  I've been to one meeting in five and a half years because they usually meet at the exact same time the regents meet.  But that's one of many examples.  I think we can do a lot more in terms of national and federal relations than I've been able to do.  The whole area of minority recruitment—we're not doing any worse than anybody else but I think we ought to be doing better because we start from such a . . . .
LS:	But these are nice causes.  
RO:	Yes.  Yes, those are the . . . .
LS:	Are there any burning issues?  What about the legislature?  Are there fences to be mended?   
RO:	I don't think significantly.  No.  Marlin Schneider is a little out of joint, but if I were staying on, I would do what I did exactly a year ago yesterday.  I'd go spend a day in Wisconsin Rapids, going around and seeing his constituents and giving some speeches for them, and I think everything would be all right.  He's really the only person who's annoyed.  Dave Helbach is a little troubled, but he is a very anxious person anyway.  I think when you take care of the two of them—in fact it'd be hard pressed to quote anyone else who has said anything that is even mildly negative.  
LS:	And do you talk to them enough so that you can tell?
RO:	This spring, unfortunately, I haven't.  One of the most difficult—Karen may have mentioned this—one of the most difficult experiences we had was having a reception for all the new legislators on January 14 or 15 at our house, when I had accepted the presidency of the University of Virginia on the 10th.  But it wasn't going to be acted on and announced until the 24th.  Now, how can you get up these really wonderful new people—and they seemed so to appreciate being invited—and how can you begin cultivating a crop of new legislators when you know, but nobody else knows, that you're not going to be there in six months?  It's almost like somebody with a terminal disease who can't tell anybody else.  This fortunately is not analogous, but it created that same sort of ambivalence.  And so for the ensuing two weeks, the last thing I did before I went to the airport was to go to Crestwood School, where Benjamin's—well, it wasn't just his class, but they started a program this year of bringing in parents of Crestwood School kids who had interesting jobs, and they asked me to come in.
LS:	Yes, I'm sure.  
RO:	It probably ought to end here.  In fact, I'm not sure historians will find much interest in this, but it is germane.  I explained what I did and what the University System was all about.  I brought with me a road map of the state and circled the campuses as we went around—tried to describe, in a sense—and I can't say I really felt like a hypocrite, but I did have a sense of sadness because I knew at that moment it was all over.  It was all downhill from there.  About that I do have a real sense of sadness, and I think it's possible to feel sadness without feeling regret or without feeling it was the wrong decision—but sadness in the same sense.  It would be very comfortable just now to think of coming back in the fall, after vacation, to what will be a really very quiet time to go on with some of these longer-term initiatives.  But then again in another year and a half there'll be another set of issues, so it's not as comfortable.  It is a calm before or between the storms, I think.      
02:20:15	End of First Interview Session 

Second Interview Session (July 25, 1985): Digital Interview
00:00:00	[begin Tape 4, Side 1] Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
[From timecode 00:00:00 to 00:00:46, Smail and O’Neil prepare sound equipment and do a sound check.]
00:00:46
LS:	Well, I was thinking of doing a human interview with one of the administrators, but I realized—I talked to John Ross on PROFS, and I realized we really hadn't talked about how you felt about Madison’s position in the System.  
RO:	You weren't at the final regents' meeting?  
LS:	No.  
RO:	You would have no reason to be there.  I did something there that I had been planning for some time, and I think it came off as I had hoped.  I had two old prints, which I'm going to bring in tomorrow; they’ve been framed.  One is a remarkable print of Bascom Hall, then I guess called University Hall, and North and South Hall—and that's all it was—in 1851 from a Boston picture magazine called Gleason's Pictorial Weekly from September 1851.  It has marvelous text.  I'll give you a copy of the statement, because it has—I quoted the text in there, and since the print is now at home I can't get to that directly, but I think you'll see what it does.  Then the other is from a print or a picture magazine from the 1870s or '80s, which has two Madison pictures.  Science Hall by then was up.  That would be early '80s, I guess.  But [it] also has pictures of State Teachers College-Platteville; State Teachers College, or Normal School, I guess it was still called; Normal School River-Falls; Normal School-Whitewater; and Normal School-Oshkosh—all on the same page in the 1880s.  And I said, “These two prints really capture for me the essence of how I see the whole University System—that there is a preeminent research institution at Madison which”—this text is marvelous.  I don't want to go get it now, but I will later.  The text says—bear in mind this is 1851—“With the prospect of reasonable support from the state legislature, this promises to become the premier institution of the Northwest.”  Now, bear in mind that Indiana University was founded in 1820 and the University of Michigan in—was it '44 or '46?  So this was not by any means the oldest, but in a sense the first of what were—one of the first of what eventually became state universities.  And that's really the point that I tried to convey.  I'll give you a copy of the text and you see if that fits at all.  
00:04:23
LS:	And that is about UW-Madison?  
RO:	Well, but also the relationship that—it is now, and really has been since 1956, a multi-campus university.  There is a little joke which I think someday somebody may appreciate.  In January 1981, we learned first of E. B. Fred's death.  Someone looked out the window after news had come; the flag on Bascom Hall was still at full mast.  Someone called over to the chancellor's office and said, “Why have you not lowered your flag?  Do you not know of President Fred's death?”  Answer: “Yes, but he was a System person.  You lower your flag.”  E. B. Fred retired thirteen years before anyone really thought seriously about a multi-campus system.  But, in a technical sense, that statement is correct because it was during his administration that Milwaukee developed as a separate campus.  Thus, by the time E. B. Fred retired, the critical decision to make this a multi-campus institution had clearly been set in motion.  And I think that point is sometimes lost.  The second set of critical decisions, of course, were made about a decade later by Fred Harrington, not only to enhance the stature of Milwaukee by having there a chancellor to match the chancellor at Madison, but also to develop Green Bay and Parkside and to create a separate Extension.  In some sense, the decision to separate Extension from the Madison campus may have been more significant in terms of developing a multi-campus system than the decision to develop Green Bay and Parkside.  I say that because, even in multi-campus systems, there is only one other in which all of Extension is possibly separately administered, and that's Maryland.  The University of Maryland has a chancellor for University College, and University College is all continuing education. But even at Maryland, Cooperative Extension is a part of the College Park agricultural education program.  There is no other multi-campus system with the degree of separate identity for Extension which existed here from 1966 to July 1, 1985.  
	So you see, one of the significant things that we have done just this month is to reintegrate aspects of Extension which in 1966 were totally separate.  Now that reintegration is not quite as centripetal as some might have hoped.  For example, much of the Management Institute went to Milwaukee, as I think most people agreed it should.  These are people who provide continuing education for the Milwaukee business community.  Not all of Management Institute went to Milwaukee, but most did.  There were small degrees of integration with other campuses.  The bulk of the people—people beyond co-op, beyond agriculture, home economics, and the few other fields where there is now Cooperative Extension—that is, basically a continuing education—professional continuing education people—are Madison-based and therefore Madison integrated.  But I do think it is important and often missed that the decision in 1966 to create a separate Extension statewide had profound implications in terms of structure, just as the decision in '56 to create a separate Milwaukee campus had profound implications.  Those are decisions that the single campus—the truly single campus institutions, of which there are very few—never made.  But they're also decisions which were never made by the single state university campuses with satellites—for example, Michigan, Ohio State, Washington, Oregon—there aren't many—Michigan State, Iowa State, Iowa—that's pretty near the roster of completely freestanding state universities—never made.  At that time, of course, a few, like Virginia, went the opposite way and spun off formerly separate branches.  And a few—Oregon, Washington—never had them.  Michigan and Ohio State are what I would call the satellite structure—Flint and Dearborn, Mansfield, Marion, Piqua so on don't really complicate the picture.
00:11:18
LS:	This wasn't done, however, at Madison's behest.  I don't think they were ever very much in favor of it.
RO:	Probably not.  It would be fascinating to go back to '56.  I've always wanted to do this, and to see how much consciousness there was that a major urban campus was in the making, which would some day have doctoral programs, would eventually have the only School of Architecture in the state and so on.  I don't know how much of that was appreciated.  There were some lessons which were important, the most significant of them being Colorado.  One of the great ironies is that the president, who refused to develop—and to this day there has not developed—a strong Denver campus, was Quig Newton, who was for many years mayor of Denver and then became president of the University of Colorado.  Despite his years as mayor...
LS:	What Dreyfus says what you can't do is go backwards and...  
RO:	Yes.  Quig Newton is for me one of the really fascinating figures of public higher education.  But a person as perceptive in all other ways as Herman Wells was very slow to develop Indianapolis.  Frank Rose was very slow to develop Birmingham, and what you have to this day in Denver, Birmingham, and Baltimore—those are the notable examples—are rather stunted, partial, urban campuses.  
LS:	Like Milwaukee.  
RO:	No.  
LS:	You don't think so?  
RO:	No.  On the contrary, no.  Milwaukee, Chicago, UCLA—I won't try to name them all, but those are the prime examples of comprehensive urban campuses that were developed right.  
LS:	But from the point of view of Madison, Milwaukee is not—perhaps “stunted” is too strong a word, but it's not a strong university, is it?  
RO:	No, no, but last week the president of Fu Dan—the only woman among the Chinese university presidents, a person with a master's degree from Smith and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1951—now, how many American women were getting Ph.D.’s in physics from MIT in 1951, let alone Chinese?  She's now in her mid-sixties, of course, but she's one of the real survivors in Chinese education, and her university is clearly one of the major forces.  She was very pleased to have a delegation from Milwaukee.  Frank Horton, Norma Rees, and others went to sign an agreement with Fu Dan.  Most of the agreements are with Madison, but she said, “No, for us at Fu Dan it's very useful to have the agreement with Milwaukee.”  She said, “We recognize it's not Madison.  We've had ties with Madison for many years.  But we value the relationship with Milwaukee.”  Now, this is somebody who is very savvy about American higher education.  I would also argue, in political terms, that with one exception there is no state university which is either not located in a principal city or has a branch in the principal city that has faired really very well, and the exception is the University of Michigan.  Some would say Ann Arbor is close enough to Detroit that they are able to take advantage of that proximity.  But if the University of California had decided to turn its back on Los Angeles, I think the Berkeley campus today would be about half what it is, in fact.  And that's something that eventually people like Quig Newton and his successors in Colorado—Herman Wells in Indiana, Frank Rose in Alabama—began to realize—that with the advent of reapportionment of state legislatures, among other forces, that probably only the University of Michigan was going to be able to maintain that kind of momentum without strong ties to a principal city.  In Washington, in Ohio, and in Hawaii, you don't have to worry about it because the state university is in the principal city.  Some might say Cleveland is, but Columbus is a very large state capital.  So I think it's a political necessity, if nothing else.  Even E. B. Fred in 1956 saw that political necessity.  Fred Harrington saw it even more clearly and greatly enhanced the role of Milwaukee.  Now, as I'm sure you know, Fred Harrington—I think I mentioned this last time and I hope some day somebody can follow it up—Fred Harrington also saw the importance of developing stronger ties in the west, and that was why the Harrington-Haas connection is so important.  
00:17:38
LS:	Well, my questions today have to do with Madison specifically and its position—how you actually view its position in the System.  The reason I ask this is that there's a great deal of pussyfooting—people hesitating, not wanting to say “second-class universities.”  On the other hand, there are the remarks of Madison’s being elitist and arrogant.  The fact is that we're all used to inequality and in particular contexts, and that Madison is different from the other colleges.  Is this something that you accept and agree with?  
RO:	Oh, I've said that many times.  
LS:	I'm sure you have.  
RO:	In fact, most recently at the regent meeting, I said we have at the heart and center of this University System one preeminent research university, and then we have other institutions, one of which also offers doctoral degrees and has considerable eminence.  I do think sometimes—not on a rank-and-file basis but on a collective basis, there is difficulty coming to terms with Milwaukee because nobody knows quite where it stands.  When I say, “not on an individual basis,” I mean that people in the Madison English department, for example, recognize that Milwaukee—while the English department is a strange collection of interesting people, it adds up to being an English department that is rated nationally higher than Vanderbilt, Tulane, University of Missouri at Columbia, and three or four other AAU university English departments.  Now that's something that--
LS:	That's fine, and I don't deduct from Milwaukee.  I'm really talking about Madison, and you do say it's preeminent.  
RO:	I think in most fields it has been and remains—there are some fuzzy areas like architecture, but when we were developing the Ph.D. in architecture, we went to Steve Born and others here to make sure that they were comfortable having the professional graduate degree in architecture in Milwaukee.  And there was no difficulty.  I suspect there might be areas in which—well, I'll give one.  I have strenuously resisted—I hope my successor does—converting the degree, “Doctor of Engineering,” which Milwaukee has given for some time, into a Ph.D. in engineering.  That's a distinction with which everybody seems quite comfortable.  That's one of the reasons why I resisted the Ph.D. in nursing.  We tried very hard to get the Milwaukee people to accept a Doctor of Nursing or Doctor of Nursing Science.  There is such a degree.  Unfortunately, the momentum in the profession is all the other way and a lot of D.N.S. or D.S.N. degrees have been converted to a Ph.D. in nursing.  So we were really swimming upstream on that one.  But the analogy that I used is engineering.  And that's a distinction which I believe the Madison engineering people are entirely comfortable with.  The Milwaukee engineering people chafe somewhat, but I have told them on several occasions that I think it is appropriate to have a Ph.D. in engineering at Madison and a Doctor of Engineering at Milwaukee, implying that it is a more applied degree; it is not intended as a research and teaching degree in the same way.  And that's where things came to rest.  Several years from now I think that issue will be reopened, and eventually there may be pressure on regents and others to make the change.  Educationally, I think this is the right way to have it.
00:22:22
LS:	I'm curious as to whether it ever occurred to you, when you were starting off the job—you were the first non-Madison-based president, and you could come in here as somebody not identified with Madison—whether you could have, in your inaugural address, for instance, said, “Here we are, a state system with a preeminent research university and other four-year campuses,” and somehow persuaded the regents, the chancellors, that it wasn't going to always be them fighting for equality with Madison, because it wasn't legitimate.  
RO:	I think that's essentially what I said, with one exception.  I said that Van Hise was wrong in trying, as he did quite vocally, to prevent the state teachers colleges from offering any degrees outside education.  That was as wrong as Quig Newton not being willing to recognize the reality of the city and county of Denver.  And that's the only thing I think I said in the inaugural address that's inconsistent with what you're--
LS:	You never mentioned Madison in your inaugural address.  You spoke of the proud tradition, but you didn't say anything about--
RO:	I had said, on other occasions, and I'm not sure why I did not see any particular place for that statement in the inaugural address, but I guess I would look at this issue more in terms of actions and results than in terms of statements—for example, some of the things we had to do on the salary issue.  I had to go to every one of those campuses and to say—and people would ask, “Is the differential justified?”  And I said, “Yes, it is justified, and it may increase.” 
LS:	Did they understand?  
RO:	No.  No, and finally, just to illustrate the kind of thing that happened, as someone stood up and started shouting at me at Oshkosh, he said, “You don't understand about teaching, which is what we do here.  I'll bet you have never taught twelve hours a week.”  I said, “When I was a full-time law student for three years, I taught fifteen hours a week.”  And that ended that discussion.  But then I went on to say, “As a matter of fact, I happen to be one of the few people around here who, before serving ten years as a faculty member at Berkeley, actually taught at San Francisco State, when it was still San Francisco State College.  So I am one of the few people around here who knows something about both sides of the street.”  And I have some feelings that both kinds of institutions can and, for the most part, do co-exist.  That's one area.  The second area, if you will look at the biennial budget—this is one of the kinds of things that I think ought to come to light some day, but I'd just as soon not have it put forth tomorrow.  We have rather carefully shaped the biennial budget requests in terms that de facto give strong Madison preference.  For example, we put a lot into libraries.  Now the ratio of current budget support—Madison-University Cluster—far exceeds any ratio of numbers of people, or even of total budgets.  So, if you emphasize library support, then you have de facto a calculus which will yield differential Madison benefits, and that's a very conscious policy that we have used in shaping the biennial budget requests.
LS:	I don't think anybody argues that you haven't done a great deal for Madison.  All I meant was, wouldn't it be possible for the chancellors, at least of the other institutions, not to feel that they're being put in second place?  Or maybe they don't feel that way.  
RO:	They will privately acknowledge—one remarkably lucid moment, during one of those salary discussions—David Jowett, who is the faculty rep from Green Bay, turned around to his colleagues, in the presence of Peter Eichman, who, I must say, played a very statesman-like role in all this during the past year, and he said, “Look”—this was addressed to his University Cluster colleagues—“we ought to stop this beating up on Madison.  Most of us got our degrees there; that's where we go when we need library materials; that's where we send our best students for graduate school.  Let's face it.”  And a lot of people, in the privacy of a closed session, nodded.  And that sort of stopped the discussion.  But then the moment a reporter asks one of those people outside the room, “Did you accept a differential?” they have got to say, “No, we are not second-class,” and so on.  In the privacy of that room, that's what they are able to acknowledge, but they can't do it outside.  
00:28:22
LS:	Strange that it can't be done publicly.  
RO:	I have often wondered, why is it so difficult?  I've asked people in the California State University system, for example, “Why did you so readily accept a thirteen and nine differential in salary catch-up?”  I've gotten this answer from a number of people.  They say, “Well, we aren't two separate systems and we recognize they have special needs; besides, as long as we get our 9 percent, we're doing okay.”  So I think that's part of the context. 
00:29:02	[end side 1; begin side 2]  
RO:	But I think publicly it's very difficult for University Cluster people in this state to accept those differentials.  I assume that in some way they were actually told, in the period 1970 or '71 to '73, that they would be made at least equal to Green Bay and Parkside, if not equal to Madison and Milwaukee.  Now, no one in California ever told the state college and university people that they were going to be equal in any way.  That was never an expectation.  So I guess I would say that I know of no other state in which that expectation has ever been created, as apparently it was.  I don't know who created it, whether it was Pat Lucey or Lee Dreyfus or who created it, but somehow, much more when I first went around on my first set of visits in the spring of 1980, I got a great deal of that.  They said, “When will our teaching loads be reduced to nine?”  And I had to say, “They will not be reduced.  It's not in the cards.”  Then later I could point out to them that Green Bay by that time had moved the teaching load up close to twelve.  Parkside never did.  Parkside remains at nine.  But Green Bay actually has gone up to twelve.  It's partly their eclectic curriculum and having one course in hundreds of different areas.  But Parkside never exceeded the nine.  
00:30:57
LS:	Well, I have some questions having to do with specific issues.  This one is the amount of equalization that should be done by the System and specifically the case of academic staff.  I guess people on the Madison campus feel that there's a sort of will to law and order up here which doesn't take into account the functions that—I'm sure you've heard all of this argued, but I'd be curious as to what you do think about it.  It may not be your policy.  
RO:	Whoever made the decision—to put the clinical health science people in academic staff, for example, is madness.  And that's a lot of what creates the problem.  Many of the Madison academic staff—in fact, those who have been, I think, most seriously disaffected—are people who—certainly not the clinical physicians—I don't think they're the research staff by and large.  They're the librarians and the counselors and so on; in other words, the people who perform academic staff functions very much like the academic staff functions performed at the other campuses.  
LS:	Well, I'm thinking of the faculty—their feeling that they have to have a flexibility in hiring academic staff and in what they pay them and how long they have to keep them, and that if this all . . . .  
RO:	No, no.  The impetus for all that is legislative.  There was signed last week a bill which mandates a structure—not only a study but in effect a structure.  We've resisted that as strenuously as we could.  
LS:	All of you did, or just you?  
RO:	We testified against it.  Oh, sure.  
LS:	And Katharine Lyall also?  
RO:	Oh, sure.  But you see, Howard Fuller believes that all academic staff should be classified.  He has some support from the governor and a lot of support from legislators.  
LS:	Well, why is it the perception in the faculty—Madison—that the System is involved in this?  Is this wrong?  
RO:	Because we did a study trying to explain to the regents that there were enormous—go back and read Katharine's studies.  It was in six parts, and a theme that runs all the way through that study is that there are great differences in the functions and responsibilities of academic staff which justify differences in job descriptions and so on.  But we've had two kinds of pressures: one is from outside people who served on the Academic Staff Salary Study Committee.  We had two personnel managers from outside.  They were just shocked.  They said, “You mean it doesn't mean the same at River Falls?  You don't have the same salary and the same hours and everything you do at Madison?” They said, “That's crazy.  You can't justify that.”
LS:	This is your committee—a System committee.  
RO:	Yes.  People from the—not WP & L—I think it's Madison Gas.  Very good personnel people.  
LS:	Who put them on?  
RO:	We appointed them because we thought we should have a couple of private sector people from outside.  But as they look—I think you’d get this from any personnel manager from anywhere—they find absolutely indefensible such differences. 
LS:	It's too late to throw them off, I suppose.
RO:	Some regents—well, they're just two voices.  I think many regents feel that way.  And I must say, in terms of those who have raised most of the problems, you can justify different treatment of a, let's say, an East Asian or Slavic cataloguer, but a person who works at the reference desk?  Can you really treat that person differently at Madison and River Falls?  I think that's questionable.  A departmental undergraduate advisor?  A financial aid counselor?  
LS:	You think there'd be no difference--
RO:	I think justifying--
LS:	--between somebody in the economics department here advising students and--
RO:	Advising undergraduates—I think it's hard to justify.  The differences come in what are the bulk in numbers of the Madison academic staff who do perform functions unique to a research university.  
LS:	Well, but also the size of the departments they're dealing with—I mean, you have sixty faculty and thousands of students.  
RO:	But I think that's just a matter of scale, if the ratios are roughly the same.  And when it comes to libraries, the cataloguers, the subject and area specialists are unique to a large research library.  But the public service people?  I think that's questionable.  
LS:	Will the categories that are unique—will they be kept so, do you think?
RO:	Oh, I think so, although the solution, which I have urged time and again on my Madison campus colleagues—I have even used the analogy of the seizure of the embassy in Teheran—I have said, “Get those people out of the embassy before they become hostages!”  And by that I meant the clinical health science and as many of the research staff as possible.  
LS:	Where would they put them?  
RO:	They'd have to create a separate category, which wouldn't be all that difficult.  Call them “clinical professor.”  
LS:	I see.  Which is just what was being suggested, in fact.  
RO:	The decision—the treatment of the clinical health science as—or what always seemed to me the most extreme case:  visiting faculty, holding tenured appointments at another university—they become academic staff while they are here.  Now, the answer is, “We only have three categories.”  I don't read the statute as being quite that restrictive, and I think that if they had . . . .
LS:	So you think they can help themselves, then.  
RO:	Well, yes.  I've never had a good answer to that suggestion.  
LS:	And to whom have you made it?  
RO:	Irv Shain, Bry Kearl, Bernie Cohen.  If any of them are honest, they will acknowledge the analogy to the hostages.  That goes back three, four years.  Now, I don't mean that it would be easy.  But if there were real concern—for example, about their being trapped in a bargaining unit—I'm not just worried about classification—but in a bargaining unit.  I think collective bargaining for academic staff is fairly likely.  I think we—all of us—tend to feel uniquely put upon by the tripartite classification.  In Virginia, there are only two classifications—there are classified and there are faculty, so that everyone who is not classified must be faculty.  Now, in a sense, that creates one set of problems, but it also solves another, so that a financial aid counselor, for example, has to be given the title, “Assistant Professor, General Faculty,” if the position is not classified.  That turns out to create fewer problems than it might seem.  I just don't think there's been much creative analysis of academic staff problems.  And I have been singularly unsuccessful, despite what I thought was a fairly dire threat of having visiting faculty, ROTC, clinical health science—I guess we don't regard emeritus faculty as academic staff because there's no salary.  But having those three categories locked into a bargaining unit—I guess that's been one of my—one of the few things that I feel is a failure is to get people to face up to the inadequacy of the taxonomy of academic staff and then—more particularly with reference to the former state universities, although not exclusively—to get them to face up to the status of academic staff.  I don't know how many times I've said, “Try treating them like human beings for a while and see what happens.”  And, as I say, that is much more addressed particularly to Stout and Eau Claire, where the second- class status is acute.  There are departments at La Crosse, a majority of the full-time teaching members of which are academic staff.  And that to me sounds like South Africa.  
00:40:51
LS:	All right.  I want to get back to Madison now.  Madison has faculty governance, which other campuses don't have, to that extent, anyway.  
RO:	No.  I think that is a false impression.  I have attended faculty senate meetings at every campus, and I think there's a lot of mythology which goes back to McPhee's time.  I gather the old WSU presidents really did not tolerate much faculty governance.  
00:41:22
LS:	But I'm leading, or maybe it's mistaken, but it leads up to the point about whether the System imposes policy, as for instance in the subject of athletics, on all the campuses or leaves it, in the case of Madison, to the faculty, which is used to handling this.  Have you had anything to do with this?  
RO:	Of course, there's got to be some balance.  Actually, the source of faculty governance in athletics is not the faculty senate at all.  It's the original charter of the Western Conference, which is the Western Conference of Faculty Representatives.  
LS:	But the faculty here feels that it can be in charge.  
RO:	Yes, but that's not—it doesn't come from the faculty senate.  That was actually imposed from without by the original charter.  For example, there are many universities—University of California, for example—I served many years in the Berkeley senate.  I was chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee, and I would put Berkeley faculty governance up against anybody else's.  In fact, in personnel matters the Berkeley senate plays a much stronger role than do the divisional committees here.  But the Berkeley senate has next to nothing to say about intercollegiate athletics.  Why?  Because Pac 10 simply has a different structure.  The chancellor or somebody in the chancellor's office did all the intercollegiate athletics, and that never bothered me.  My point, in other words, is that the source of the strong role—this is not an opinion, this is a fact—the source of the strong role of faculty governance in intercollegiate athletics has nothing to do with the faculty senate here or at Michigan or Illinois or anywhere else any more than the rather small role represents any abdication on the part of Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, SC.  It's just a difference in the structure of the conference.  
LS:	Should I drop the question, then?  
RO:	No.  I think it's--
LS:	Because as I understood--
RO:	No.  It's an interesting one because it represents a misperception.  
LS:	As I understood it, and I don't think this had to do with the Hirsch, but it may have—the whole Elroy Hirsch problem—is that the faculty is in charge of the Athletic Board and could say, “Shape up.”
RO:	Oh, I think that's true, but--
LS:	And they feel that the System is imposing a different kind of rule.  But I'm very hazy on this.  
RO:	Yes, I think that all that I ever did in that area, at the direction of the regents, was to propose the creation of a committee of chancellors to review policies on fund raising.  And fund raising has very little to do with—no, I'd like to know where that came from, but what I've pursued is a more basic misperception.  I would be willing to bet that 90 percent of Madison faculty believe that the faculty senate is somehow the source.  The other 10 percent are people like me, who've taught at Berkeley or Stanford or UCLA and realize that Pac 10 is quite different, even though I hope everyone here would accept the notion that Berkeley and Stanford and UCLA faculty governance is as healthy as it is here but has almost nothing to do with athletics.  It's just a different approach, which comes from the basic charter of the conference.  The Western Conference is a conference of faculty representatives.  The Pac 10 is a conference basically of chancellors and athletic directors.  There are apparently faculty reps in the Pac 10, but their role is very different.  
LS:	All right.  How long do we have?  
RO:	Well, I'm hoping to finish up a little more this afternoon.  Could we go to five?  
LS:	Oh, good.  That’s fine.  I was just watching this clock creep around to 4:30.  Let's see.  At least it keeps time, I suppose.  
RO:	Yes.  As long as the Chinese battery still works.  
00:46:03
LS:	You mentioned fund raising.  There's no connection, except to do with fund raising, but there was a just a little brief flurry, was there, of possibly taking some of the money raised in Madison and using it elsewhere?  For Milwaukee?
RO:	Somebody ought to ask Bob Rennebohm about that, because until 1981 or '82—first of all, the UW Foundation was the vehicle for fund raising for Parkside, Green Bay, Extension, and, until about that time, for Milwaukee as well.  In fact, by agreement between Werner Baum—this is a very complex issue.  I don't know how much you want to go into it.  
LS:	Is it written up?  
RO:	I don't know, but Werner Baum and Ed Young had an agreement when they were both chancellors, which Ed continued into the time of his presidency, that a small amount of what I guess could be described as Madison funds were used for specific projects in Milwaukee.  Now that's one example.  The only other one, to my knowledge, is the one Vilas Professorship, which the Vilas trustees granted to Milwaukee some years ago and is held by Hassan, who's a comp lit person.  Oh, no, the Vilas trustees also provide a small amount for summer music programs at Milwaukee.  Beyond that, it gets very complicated.  Most gifts and bequests to the Board of Regents, to the UW Foundation, or quite often simply to the University of Wisconsin, period, are assumed to be for Madison use unless there is some evidence to the contrary.  For example, occasionally you will get someone who lived in Milwaukee all of his or her life, was a graduate of the Milwaukee State Teachers College, and will leave a small bequest to the University of Wisconsin, and then there'll be reference to a Milwaukee-based program.  A decision is made, in that instance, that it was meant to go to Milwaukee.  But the assumption or presumption, rebuttable with some difficulty, is that an unspecified gift or bequest goes to Madison.  As a matter of fact, before merger some WARF funds did go to Milwaukee, Parkside, Green Bay, and even to the Marathon County Center.  As a result of merger, all the WARF money was limited to Madison.  That's just a fact of life.  But except for the one Vilas Professor and the Vilas summer music grants and this residual relationship between Ed Young and Werner Baum, the last installment of which was paid after I got here, and it was used, actually, for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of UW-Milwaukee, which was in a sense a Madison function, historically—certainly a UW Foundation function.  From that time on, there's absolutely no transfer of any kind.  I think I can . . . .
LS:	And you don't think there should be?  
RO:	I think, to be quite honest, the UW Foundation supports—this office, our entertainment and so on comes from a fund, most of which is from Madison alumni and friends.  But in order to create a sense of System, every couple of years somebody—not I, but usually the executive vice-president—at Bob Rennebohm's suggestion, writes to the other chancellors and their foundations to make small contributions for the use of the president's office.  Not much, but it gives them—now, in return, I think we have, over the years—I guess it'll be about $15,000 that we have given to the UW Foundation for Madison use.  
LS:	Who's we?  
RO:	Karen and I personally.  We have given $500 to Milwaukee, $200 to Platteville, $100 to Whitewater, $100 to Stout, $100 to Stevens Point, I think—again, feeling that a small amount should go to the others.  That's obviously, again, something that I don't mind having opened up in—whenever it is that the Archives will be open—but I'd just as soon not broadcast right now.  That seemed a fair apportionment of—what it really is is honoraria and so on that I don't feel I can accept, so most of it I just turn over to the foundation.  But I've also felt that a small amount should indicate our support of the other foundations.  And that's roughly in the same proportion in which it comes in.  Incidentally, there is only one sizeable source of support which comes directly to the president's office and that, interestingly, is from the Kikkoman Company.  They grow most of their soy beans in—so there we were, somewhere between the Aleutian Islands and Tokyo, opening a little packet of soy sauce on the Japan airlines a week ago Saturday, and it came from Walworth County.  Well, they've been very generous, and they now provide—I think it's $10,000 a year for unrestricted purposes.  But that's the only—other than the UW Foundation, that's the only substantial income we have.  In Virginia, incidentally, all that comes through the alumni association, including the car, of all things.  The alumni association owns the president's car.  
LS:	That would be hard to achieve here, I imagine.  
RO:	Here it comes from the Madison campus motor pool.  It's very interesting.  The System administration has a fleet of station wagons and so on, but, I suppose for historic reasons, the president's car is a part of the Madison campus motor pool.  
LS:	And what about the president's bike?  
RO:	No.  That's mine.  I hope I can get it back into the moving van before they lock it up tonight.  That's one reason I have to get home.  But I'm not aware of any other—well, let me say I'm not aware of any other use of foundation funds.  But I also vividly recall the outrage of my colleagues at Berkeley, when in 1969 or '70 a new vice-president was hired in the system administration who had been a vice-chancellor at Davis, and they bought for him this—well, it really was a—never seen anything so much like a Venetian palace on dry land as this house on Gayly Road in Berkeley.  After buying the house, they spent something like $150,000 to fix it up, all of which came from Berkeley alumni and friends.  There was great bitterness about that.  I didn't have that much of a hangup.  But some of the Old Blues among my colleagues really took that very hard.  There was quite a protest.  That wouldn't happen here.  Actually, on those issues, I must say people are much more relaxed here than they were in California.  
00:55:14
LS:	I'm just looking through—one of the things that John Ross raised—I don't think he'd mind my saying this—is the difficulty that they've had—the Madison campus has had—getting figures from the System.  As an example, he gave—when the committee was working on faculty pay, when the University Committee first set up a subcommittee, and they couldn't get what they needed from the System . . . .
RO:	John never mentioned that to me—never asked me for any information.  
LS:	Well, I wondered if you were at all involved with this.
RO:	I tend to think—well, let me give what I think may be the explanation.  It sometimes comes from not asking a question which is meaningful to a budget person.  I will sometimes ask Gene Arnn—he'll say, “I don't understand.”  Or he'll say, “We don't have that information.”  Then I'll try and we'll probe for a while: “Oh, that's what you want?”  And we'll get it.  It's just very difficult sometimes to translate those questions.  Now, if I knew what John's particular problem had been, I think we probably could have got it fairly easily, because there are darn few figures around here that aren't a matter of public knowledge, so that John Ross is no different from Matt Palmer or Kay Schultz.  If they want the information, we just give it to them.  That surprises me.  I think it must have been a lapse in communication.  
LS:	He also spoke of a System-wide committee he was on that needed figures on retirement and again couldn't get them from the System.  
RO:	I think, again, it's probably a matter of not asking the right question.  
LS:	Or not asking the right person?  
RO:	Yes, or not really knowing what it is you want.  For example, this morning Bob Alesch, the System personnel director, was in here, and the question was whether I should take my retirement accumulation out, which you can do any time before age fifty-five—leave it in until age fifty-five and then take it out, or roll it over to an annuity at age fifty-five.  There was certainly no unwillingness on his part to give me helpful information, but it wasn't until almost the end that I finally asked the right question.  I said, “That formula-based benefit seems awfully low.”  And we went around and around that. 
00:58:14	[begin Tape 5, Side 1]
RO:	If I had in the beginning asked, “What would it be if the payout began at sixty or sixty-five?” I would have got the answer immediately.  But it took me the better part of an hour.  He knows everything.  Somebody asks me for an opinion on a--
LS:	Who's this?  
RO:	Bob Alesch, the personnel director.  Somebody comes and asks me for an opinion on a constitutional law issue and I'd probably give them a lot of information which may or may not be useful, because I'm not thinking in terms of that person's need.  I think that's simply a problem of specialization in large part.  But I would go on to say that I can't recall anybody ever asking me to get information from somewhere in the System files that I couldn't get, unless it was legally privileged.  There have been times when a reporter would ask for a personal letter and I would say, “No.”  And they'd say, “Well, okay.  You've got a right—it's up to you.”  End of discussion.  I figure it's better to be honest.  And 98 percent of the time I'd give it to them, but there’s 2 percent where it is, in my view, no more a proper subject of public consumption than a reporter's notes, which I as a lawyer have fought to keep confidential.  I often use that analogy with a reporter.  And that tends to end the discussion.  
01:00:01
LS:	You don't think that there's anything in this proposal of Tom Loftus to steer students—bright students—to under enrolled campuses, do you?  
RO:	I think the basic premise is sound.  We talked a little bit last time about size and so on.  I think 44,000 is somewhat too large, but at the same time, I don't have any magic formula by which to reduce that size.  Berkeley and UCLA never faced the problem because the master plan froze all University of California campuses at 27,500.  
LS:	But this is a bit different, isn't it?  This was specifically bright students.  
RO:	Yes.  UCLA redirects almost 15,000 applicants a year, some of whom—now UCLA is not required to redirect randomly, and one has the sense that—well, it depends.  UCLA has no undergraduate business program, so in a sense they automatically redirect the best of their students who would be interested in studying business because they don't offer it—one of the very few state universities that does not have any undergraduate business program.  They go to Berkeley, which does have an undergraduate business program; they go somewhere else.  I don't know what Tom is really—I'm not sure he knows what he's proposing . . .
LS:	It sounds preposterous.  
RO:	--except that he believes, as I do, that 44,000 is too large.  He also believes, perhaps more strongly than I do, that some measures should be taken other than simply awaiting the natural demographic downturn to reduce this size, and apparently he also believes that, in the process, some of the cream as well as the milk should be taken off.  
LS:	That's the crucial statement.  
RO:	Yes.  Well, you remember Lee Dreyfus--
LS:	That's the logical way to go, would be to put the cream here.  
RO:	Yes.  Yes.  And I think that's what most people would argue.  Lee Dreyfus once seriously proposed that Madison should be an upper division or at least a sophomore-up campus—no freshmen.  
LS:	What do you think of that?  
RO:	I thought that was madness, and I said so in my speech to the Bascom Hill Society in the fall of 1981.  I didn't mention the governor by name, but for somebody who once taught some of the largest and most popular undergraduate courses on this campus, he should know better.  I think he does.  I think he had a marvelous capacity for trying out interesting ideas, often just to see what would happen.  Well, that one got shot down.  So he never raised it again.  I think Tom Loftus's approach at times reminds me of Lee Dreyfus and the trial balloon approach.  
LS:	What do you think of Tom Loftus?  
RO:	I think he's a very bright, energetic, able person.  I don't know where he sees himself going.  He can't remain speaker forever.  I don't think he'd be satisfied going into the state senate, but where that will take him, I don't know.  
LS:	Is he a friend of the University?  
RO:	Oh, yes.  
LS:	Completely.  
RO:	Yes. 
LS:	He doesn't have any misguided notions of what friendship consists of?  
RO:	I don't think so.  I think he's pretty nearly as supportive a person as you could ask for, both publicly and privately.  
01:04:08
LS:	What other legislators would you pick out that have been particularly helpful?
RO:	A point that Mary Lou Munts appreciates, and I think I may have mentioned last time, that in the ’83 session a lot of what was necessary and helpful happened through a coalition of four people, of whom she was one.  The other three were Dick Shoemaker from Menomonie, who has recently, I think, tarnished the cause somewhat by his support of the eventually vetoed and unapproved physical education project for Stout—that created more animosity at River Falls than it did anywhere else, but I think annoyed—disturbed a lot of people elsewhere; Dick Flintrop, who, of course, is now director or commissioner of the juvenile justice unit, was then representative from Oshkosh; and Dave Helbach.
LS:	You did mention him last time.  You didn't talk—I mean, I don't think you had spoken of these four last time.  
RO:	Yes, I wasn't thinking of this coalition.  
LS:	But you spoke of Helbach as being disturbed--
RO:	Yes.  For whatever reason, he was—some people are more helpful in one house than the other.  Helbach, for whatever reason, was more helpful in the assembly than he has been in the senate, although he's still, at times, been helpful and supportive, and I think was crucial in cutting through some of the rhetoric about the salary issue.  But in the senate he has a rather complex district.  His own seat has been very unstable since he left it.  It had for a time—who was the guy who was defeated in the primary by the chicken man last fall?—Gruszynski—is now in that seat, and I've even forgotten the fellow's name who served not much more than a year—Don Hasenohrl from Marshfield, who's relatively quiet, and then Marlin Schneider.  I think one of the problems with Helbach's senate seat is that he has to represent Marlin Schneider as well, so he's been somewhat more difficult to deal with than he was.
LS:	But he had been--
RO:	In the assembly, he was one of the stalwarts, yes.  It was those four.  Now since then, some of the slack has been taken up by Jeff Neubauer, who is extremely helpful.  He's one of the people that you really admire—is a Stanford graduate, grew up in Racine, came back to Racine, and is now in his third term, I guess.  There are quiet people like Marv Roshell, the senator from Eau Claire, who is almost unfailingly supportive but doesn't make much noise about it.  There is running through particularly this session a point that I think I made last time but would underscore—that if you had to build a coalition consisting solely of Madison area people and Madison supporters in other parts of the state, you wouldn't have very much.  
LS:	Is that because the area people aren't very strong?  
RO:	In this session, of course, you try to build a coalition consisting of Spencer Black, Becky Young and Sue Magnuson, all in their first terms.  Seniority and so on, they're nowhere.  And what support did they get from Dave Clarenbach out on one side and Dave Travis on the other?  And then Dale Schultz is only in his second term on the—and then somebody else down south—but no seniority except for Clarenbach, who does, by and large, have his own issues, some of which are helpful and others are not.  In this session, almost unnoticed, he put in that bill, which may have been vetoed—I know Ben Lawton tried very hard to get it vetoed—which would forbid AIDS testing in blood donations.  Now, ostensibly that has nothing to do with the University, but when you think what it does to University Hospital or any large hospital with a heavy surgery caseload—in the end, the last few days, Ben Lawton was more upset about that issue than any which directly affected the University.  
LS:	And you don't know yet.
RO:	You see, I was in China when the vetoes came down, so I don't know, and we were not directly interested in that issue.  Ben Lawton was interested more as a physician than as a regent.  But that's an example of the kind of a Clarenbach issue that may not only not be supportive but, in a sense, is inimical to University welfare.  
LS:	How much of a help is Fred Risser?  
RO:	To the extent that he can be.  I think he's been around so long that he's above it all in some way.  But, as much as he can, he certainly is helpful.  He also, as presiding officer--
LS:	What do you mean, “as much as he can”?  
RO:	Well, the presiding officer can't be as much a partisan for causes as others can.  I think that may be somewhat of a problem with Loftus as well, though apparently the speaker is better able to take partisan roles than the senate president.  
LS:	But that wasn't true for Mary Lou when she was co-chairman of--
RO:	Oh no.  Joint Finance, that's different.  Yes.  I think the president of the senate—I don't know when it was that they changed over from lieutenant governor and president pro tem to president, but with that office goes a degree of responsibility that I'm not sure anyone else—any other legislator—bears, and I think that's something of an inhibition.  Russ Feingold has been extremely supportive, and because the senate has turned over fairly rapidly, Russ is now moving into a level of seniority where he can be extremely helpful.  Gary George, at times, is a very bright, able person and, at times, he will just drop a hint—a very subtle person; you've got to get the hint.  When he does so, it is extremely helpful, but his constituency and his role are sufficiently complex that he can't always be that way.  Some new people:  Barbara Notestein, who represents the UW-Milwaukee district, is extremely helpful, and in some ways seems to have gotten her legislative sea legs or whatever it is a little faster than the new Madison people.  She was on the Audit Committee, for example.  We went through that reserve balance stuff, and she was the only person on the Audit Committee we could really deal with.  So there are lots of people who are helpful in different ways and different places, but so many of the people that I really looked to and depended on in the first couple of years are gone.  I think I mentioned if you open the '79-'80 Blue Book, you'll see only two familiar faces, and that's Fred Risser and Tommy Thompson, both of whom, in different ways, have been extremely helpful.  Also, it depends somewhat on the issue.  You get to collective bargaining, you're not going to get a whole lot of help from a large number of Democrats.  You've got to depend heavily on Republicans.  And that's where a person like Tommy Thompson was absolutely crucial.  He really led the troops on the collective bargaining.  You've got to get every Republican and some Democrats—the only way you're ever going to defeat a bargaining bill, and we did that, I guess, four times since I've been here.  And that, I may say, involves a great expenditure of energy, time, goodwill and political capital.  I don't question that it's worth it; it's just that it's a very wearing experience.  
01:13:43
LS:	You said that you had less difficulty dealing with the legislature than you had expected.  
RO:	Yes.  
LS:	I've talked to Fred Risser, who said that you went down a great deal—more than any other president—and it meant a great deal to legislators.  Did you expect to do that much?  
RO:	I think I did.  I expected that the reception would be much less cordial than it was.  I'd just come back from Virginia and we had a reception—one of the first things that happened after my appointment was announced—a reception for legislators who represent or are close to two-year centers.  It turns out to be almost half the legislature—at least they'd like to be so identified.  And I looked around the room and first thought to myself, and then I said to them, “This is a group of friends.  These are people you might invite to dinner, or you might just chat with on a personal problem.”  That I had really not expected, because legislators in other states, with the possible exception of California, are not like that.  And even in California I found it much tougher.  Of course, my role there was as law professor testifying as expert witness on particular legislation, and I got some—I testified on obscenity legislation, I testified on insanity bills, I testified on anti-Vietnam War resolutions and things like that.  
LS:	That can't have been as popular.  
RO:	No, and I—that was not an altogether happy relationship.  Even with the Berkeley area—the East Bay delegation—in fact, the senator in whose district I actually lived was one of the most hostile people—introduced a trespass bill that the universities couldn't possibly live with; it was passed in a slightly modified form.  We really tried—here I'm now talking from the John Ross point of view—when I was on the executive committee of the Berkeley senate, we used to try to entertain the East Bay legislators several times a year.  And that was no fun, even though we were faculty representing a good many thousand voters.  That was tough.  So I came here and I must say it was, on the whole, with a very few exceptions, an extraordinarily cordial relationship.  
01:16:39
LS:	I don't know whether this—for one thing, I want to know if there is some thing, or things, you would like to discuss.  And I also have a question.  I was puzzled as I listened to the first session.  You seemed to show a great deal of detachment, and your awareness of other campuses and other problems allowed you to look at this system and say, “It happened this way elsewhere, and not so bad here.”  But at the same time, you clearly felt very deeply about some of the things you had to deal with—most of them.  Which prevailed?  The detachment or--
RO:	I'm not sure I made last time this point.  Occasionally a reporter will ask, “Gee, is the salary issue the toughest issue that you've dealt with?”  And my answer always has been, “In some ways I wish it were, but no.  It was not an easy issue, but it's far from the toughest.  The toughest issues are all personnel issues, and now, having been in university administration for—well, full-time for almost fifteen years--”
LS:	What are some examples?  
RO:	One night I had to participate in the firing of a black woman affirmative action officer that we'd brought all the way from San Diego, and then know that not only her own wrath but the entire black community would come down on us.  And it was not until I got here that the multi-million dollar lawsuit that she filed in Cincinnati was finally dismissed.
LS:	Oh, this is there.  
RO:	Yes.  This was Cincinnati.  
LS:	But what about here?  
RO:	Oh, no.  I've had nothing like that.  That's why I may sound detached.  I don't mean to say that the last five and a half years have been a picnic, exactly, but by comparison to some of the problems that I've faced in other roles, frankly, this has been relatively very straightforward—relatively easy going.  And the same as I look at problems in other universities during this time, because personnel matters tend to be, for one thing, no-win.  The best that you can hope is eventually that the lawsuit will be settled or dismissed or something.  But all the bitterness and rancor and so on will go on and on for years.  The second thing is that really nobody does win.  Does the department that kind of timidly recommended tenure for somebody they didn't really want, and then—
LS:	I see.  This is more the kind of things that deans get involved in.  
RO:	Yes.  But it's unavoidable at the—certainly, when I had responsibility for the whole campus in Indiana, I got a lot of these, and I ended up dealing directly with department chairs on personnel matters.  Now, the system president did not.  I don't think I ever sent—oh, sometimes the people would go to him, but at that point, he'd say, “No, these are campus matters”—all decided at the campus level, which is what I do here.  And it's very easy, on some terribly messy, nasty issues, for a person in my position to smile and say, “We decide those things at the campus level,” and that's pretty much it.  
LS:	Okay.  We have, as I gather, about five more minutes.  Have we covered—is there something that we've left out?  
RO:	Did you get a copy of my final reports to the regents?  
LS:	No.  I'd like one.  
RO:	Yes.  We'll get those both today.  What I tried to do there is two things.  One is simply a chronicle or account of the last five and a half years, touching on the things that I felt best about and a few that I have felt incomplete or unfulfilled.  The other is an attempt to look ahead and to answer some of these questions:  Where are we going?  Where should we be going?  Do we have a long-range plan?  And so on.  And there's nothing very startling in there—so unstartling, in fact, that as far as I can tell, only one regent has read either of them.  But I did it as much for myself and for the record as anything.  
01:22:11
LS:	Do you think any future president could wreck UW-Madison?  I mean, I look at some of the candidates on the list and I wonder.  
RO:	First of all, a person likely to be harmful or deleterious won't be chosen.  So you can be sure on that score.  I think the wrong person could upset the balance in either direction in ways that could be quite harmful.  That's probably the most difficult and delicate part of this job is maintaining some kind of reasonable balance, because at any given time, on almost any issue, somebody will think that the balance is tipped.  I'll just give one little example.  The MacArthur Chair, which is a million dollar endowment from the MacArthur Foundation, was awarded to, I think, ten universities.  In the case of California, it was specifically given to the Berkeley campus, and all the communication was with the chancellor.  And I think the same was true in Illinois; it was all with the Urbana campus administration.  Here, for whatever reason, and I never knew why, the communication was with me and the award was to the University of Wisconsin System.  I was asked—no, it wasn't even I; it was Harvey Breuscher—was asked, “Where will it go?”  And the answer was, “The regents have to make that decision.”  My good friend Tom Brock took that as an indication that maybe it would go to Milwaukee or Whitewater or something.  Tom called when he was—or I guess he wrote and I called him.  I said, “For heaven's sake, Tom, of course the MacArthur Chair will be at Madison.”  But the technical answer is correct—that technically, since the grant was made to the University of Wisconsin System, the regents will have to designate not only a holder but the location.  But of course it's ridiculous. 
	Well, that's a degree of sensitivity that I certainly appreciate.  I appreciate it partly because I spent ten years as a faculty member at Berkeley, seeing all those system problems from the flagship campus perspective, so that the enemy was not only in University Hall, the enemy was also in Westwood—much more so than the enemy here is in Milwaukee.  Bear in mind that, in many respects, UCLA has actually overtaken Berkeley years ago in total budget because of the medical school—more recently in a number of areas in the ranking of individual programs.  So that's a much more difficult problem.  Thus, the Old Blues would say, as I think I mentioned last time, “I will not use the initials UCB.  There is no UCB.”  You don't get anybody here who says, “I will not use the phrase UW-Madison.  There is no UW-Madison.  There is a UW, and then there are these other places.”  For whatever reason—it may be partly the passage of time.  Most of the Old Blues have retired.  There isn't, in fact, a corresponding phrase.  One doesn't speak of “Old Reds” or anything like that here.  But I don't even know that there's a concept that is comparable to the Old Blues, who were mostly themselves Berkeley graduates and then went back on the faculty—spent their whole lives in Berkeley.  And they say the enemy was just as much in Westwood as in University Hall.  That is in part endemic to a state university system.  	My own experience, I think, is helpful, if not indispensable, for a person coming into such a role.  But it was also helpful to have spent that time at San Francisco State, and having gone, as I did while I was a Berkeley faculty member, up and down the coast to virtually every one of the state colleges, organizing workshops on law-related education and getting to know people there and realizing that, if most of the first quality doctoral education was at Berkeley and UCLA, not all the wisdom nor all of the commitment to sound academic values was there.  Two of my best friends—and on this I'd better conclude—with whom I served over a long period on the ACLU Board in San Francisco—one was the chairman of the faculty senate at Sacramento State and the other was a former Berkeley faculty member who had resigned over the oath and gone to San Francisco State.  Actually the executive director of the Southern California ACLU had once been a tenured member of the UCLA faculty who resigned over the oath.  The oath produced enormous differences in California, and as far as I know there was never anything comparable here that just drove people by the dozens out of the university.  Well, one place you could go was to the state colleges, because they had the Levering oath but they never had the regents' oath.  The regents oath—thanks to Mr. Nyland, who was president of the Board of Regents—the regents’ oath was much worse than the state colleges’.  But that's David Gardner's doctoral dissertation so I won't get into that.  No, I can't think of anything that I would add.  I think really we've covered the essentials, although there are a couple of questions in there that have funny reference points.  They don't ring bells, in other words.  So I tried to answer them in a . . . .
LS:	I'll have to check back.  
01:29:05	End of Second Interview Session
End of Oral History #309

INDEX

Alesch, Robert A, 59, 60
Arnn, Gene, 59
Baldwin, Gordon B, 34
Baum, Werner A, 56, 57
Beckwith, David, 18
Black, Spencer, 62
Born, Stephen M, 48
Breuscher, Harvey, 67
Brock, Thomas D, 67
Carrier, Warren, 8
Clarenbach, David, 62, 63
Cohen, Bernard C, 54
Connor, James, 36
Conroy, Catherine, 24
Corbally, Jack, 10
Dreyfus, Lee S, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 46, 51, 61
Dykstra, Clarence A, 41
Earl, Anthony S, 25, 26
Earl, Sheila, 26
Eichman, Peter L, 50
Erdman, Joyce, 20
Everson, Harland, 20
Feingold, Russ, 63
Finman, Ted, 38
Fleming, Robben W, 28, 29, 35
Flintrop, Richard, 62
Fox, Thomas P, 24
Frank, Glenn, 41
Fred, Edwin B, 41, 44, 45, 47
Friday, William, 40
Fuller, Howard, 52
Gardner, David A, 68
George, Gary R, 63
Goldstein, Herman, 34
Grossman, Joel B, 34
Grover, Herbert J, 21
Haas, Leonard, 31, 47
Haberman, Fred, 24
Hachten, William A, 34
Hackerman, Norm, 41
Harrington, Fred H, 6, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 41, 45, 47
Hasenohrl, Donald W, 62
Hassan, Ihab, 56
Helbach, David, 42, 62
Hirsch, Elroy L, 55
Holden, Matthew, 8
Holt, Joseph, 7
Horton, Frank E, 47
Hurst, J Willard, 28
Jesinski, James, 24
Jowett, David, 50
Kauffman, Joseph, 7, 42
Kearl, Bryant E, 54
Kerr, Clark, 41
Knowles, Robert, 20
Knowles, Warren P, 32
Krueger, Clifford W "Tiny", 23
Lamader, Mickey, 41
Lawton, Ben R, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 63
Loftus, Thomas, 26, 38, 60, 61, 63
Lucey, Patrick J, 17, 51
Lyall, Katharine, 7, 19, 52
Magnuson, Sue, 62
Majerus, Raymond, 24
Marshall, Philip R, 31, 37
McPhee, Eugene, 32, 54
Munts, Mary Lou, 20, 26, 61
Neubauer, Jeffrey, 62
Newton, Quig, 46, 47, 49
Notestein, Barbara, 63
O’Neil, Karen, 3
Palmer, Matt, 59
Podlesny, Mary, 17
Pritchard, David, 34
Raynor, Father, 27, 42
Rees, Norman S, 47
Remington, Frank, 34
Rennebohm, Robert B, 56, 57
Ringler, Richard N, 14
Risser, Fred, 23, 26, 63, 64
Rose, Frank, 46, 47
Roshell, Marvin J, 62
Ross, John E, 43, 58, 59, 65
Ryan, John, 16, 36
Schneider, Marlin D, 42, 62
Schultz, Dale W, 63
Schultz, Kay, 40, 59
Sewell, William, 28
Shain, Irving, 9, 38, 54
Shoemaker, Richard, 61
Smith, Donald K, 6, 7, 8
Thiede, Wilson B, 8
Thompson, Tommy, 23, 64
Travis, David M, 62
Vattendahl, Obert Joel, 24
Veneman, Gerard E, 19, 20
Wahner, James W, 23
Walker, Donald, 41
Weaver, John C, 28, 36, 41
Wells, Herman, 46, 47
Wick, Marshall, 31
Winter, Robert, 7
Young, H Edwin, 4, 6, 8, 9, 28, 35, 41, 56, 57
Young, Rebecca, 62