UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #210
HAVEMAN, ROBERT

HAVEMAN, Robert (1936- )
Professor of Economics; Director of Institute for Research on Poverty
At UW: 1970-2002

Interviewed: 1982		
Series: Poverty Institute
Interviewer: Laura Smail  
Length: 1 hour
Transcript: 26 pages

	[See Index for Key Words]
First Interview Sesssion (1982): Tape 1
Tape 1, Side 1
LS:  	—1982.  This is Laura Smail, and we're talking in his office.  You were talking about where you were before you came here.
RH:  	Yeah.  I was on the faculty at Grinnell College, and I think in 1968 was the first time I really had very much contact with Wisconsin and with the Poverty Institute.  It was at that time that I was invited to Wisconsin to interview for a position in the department, but probably with some affiliation with the Institute as well.  And while I received the offer for that position, at that time I didn't accept it, and chose instead to take a two-year leave of absence from Grinnell, and I was a senior staff economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress.
00:00:50
LS:  	Okay, tell me first who invited you here in '68, and what you had that they wanted here.
RH:  	Well, I think the primary people that I knew a little bit and who knew of my work were Burt Weisbrod and Gene Smolensky.  They were both public economists—that is, concerned with public finance issues—and that was my area as well.  And they felt they had need for expansion in that field, and I was one of their candidates.  So they invited me out.  
00:01:24
	In any case, I then spent two years on leave from Grinnell at the Joint Economic Committee.  And it was during that time that, again, contact was made with me, this time by Harold Watts, who was then director of the Poverty Institute.  As I recall, we met at one of the American Economic Association meetings in New York, at which time he told me he was thinking of leaving the position of directorship—he'd been in it for a while—and wanted to know if I would like to be a candidate for that position.  I thought about it some and agreed to become a candidate.  I then came back out to Wisconsin.  I gave a seminar, and ultimately was given the offer for the directorship position, which was a joint position then with a professorship in the economics department, and ultimately accepted that.
LS:  	There was a search and screen committee for that position.
RH:  	Well, I think it was very informally done.  I think that Harold had a number of people, who he worked with closely, meet me and talk with me.  This included Bob Lampman and Lee Bawden at that time, and some people who were in the Institute but who weren't economists.  I remember having dinner with Ray Munts from the school of social work, for example—that, and then there were a number of contacts with people, again in the economics department—mainly the public finance group.
00:03:06
LS:  	Did they want you because you had been in Washington?
RH:  	That's a good—I don't know.  I think that, one, Harold knew that I was a person who could get acceptance by the economics department for [a] professorship.  That's often not easy, especially at the senior level.  So that was a kind of plus.  I'd already been through the mill once before.  He knew he could get it past the economics department.  He knew I had done some research on poverty and negative income taxation.  He knew I had government experience.  And probably all of those things were enough to ask me if I'd be interested in the position.
LS:  	I see.  That's interesting because what I put together—looking at what was going on then—was that OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] was dissatisfied with the amount of contact there was between Madison and Washington.  And since you had been in Washington that they maybe had put some pressure on to get somebody—but that doesn't sound like it either.
RH:  	I don't think so.  See, there has always been that tension—the inclination of the academic is to sit back here and do their thing, and OEO always wanted more policy-related activities.  So that tension always existed.  I think that probably a better way of putting it would be that Harold and other people here wanted someone who would support and appreciate academic research, but at the same time would be sensitive to the need to stay in touch with people in Washington.
LS:  	And they didn't have somebody on the faculty here.
RH:  	No, not much.
LS:  	Because that was a time when it was hard to hire people already.  Wasn't it?  1970—
RH:  	Yes.  Although I think that—yes, it was.  It was certainly not as difficult to hire people as it is now.
LS:  	No, but it was—Lee Hansen, I think, was chairman then.
RH:  	No, let's see.  That's not true.
LS:  	Oh, because he's '71.
RH:  	Jerry Somers was chairman when I came.  And then Lee became chairman in '71 or '72, right in there.
LS:  	So my version isn't correct.  
00:05:31
	Had the evaluation been done?
RH:  	The evaluation was in progress when I was being talked to about the job, because I remember after accepting the job, I then attended one of the meetings of the National Advisory Committee of the Institute.  At that meeting, the chairman of the evaluation committee came and talked to the National Advisory Committee about their preliminary results.  So I was not interviewed by the evaluation committee.  And essentially they had done their work prior to my coming.  But they had not reported on it.
LS:  	So you hadn't seen what they had to say.
RH:  	No.
LS:  	You don't have to wait for me to ask questions.  I'll ask as they come.
RH:  	No, you should ask questions because I'll answer whatever line you want.  Is it your purpose to have me sort of trace my history as director?
LS: 	Well, I'm anxious not to close out something that I might not have thought of asking.  I mean, there are things that I would like to know, but if you—
RH:  	No, if they come to my mind, I certainly will say them.
LS:  	Okay.  Because it—the point is to find out how the Poverty Institute functioned and what it contributed to the University and how it affected the University.  That's largely what I'm interested in. 
00:07:03
	 I haven't asked anybody about the Advisory Committee, how much of an effect they had and how often you met with them, and how much—
RH:  	The National Advisory Committee was made up of really prominent people in the field.  I guess we've had a couple of Nobel Prize winners on it in the past, including James Tobin and Paul Samuelson.  They meet typically twice a year—the fall and the spring.  And those meetings have really been sounding boards for the director; if there were problems or issues that he was confronting, he would feel free to go to the Advisory Committee and ask their advice.  And secondly, they were good occasions for people at the Institute—especially the director—to get together with people from OEO and then later HEW [Department of Health, Education & Welfare] because they always attended these meetings as well.  So it was a mechanism whereby the Institute stayed in touch with the federal government.  But they did it in an arena in which there were prominent people sitting around to talk about these issues, too.
00:08:19
LS:  	Did they act as umpires?
RH:  	Well, on occasion they did.  In fact, it was, I guess, during the time that I was director that the Institute sort of encountered a touchy situation with OEO in which—at that time we had two or three very big projects that people were proposing and we were unable to fund them out of our regular budget.  So we went to OEO with special requests for money during that year.  And that special request sort of triggered the question, "Well, why isn't there enough money in the regular budget?  What are you spending your money on?"  So OEO did a rather informal and quick review of what we were working on, and came to the conclusion that we needed more justification for what we were spending the money on, and the kind of issues we were researching, and the kind of results we were getting.  And, in general, the Institute needed more structure.  That was the sort of term they were using.  We needed a kind of organization that they didn't see.  From the point of view of a university, trying to impose organization on a group of independent researchers is always hard.  They're all prima donnas in their own right, and they want to do what they want to do and not sort of fit it into some overall scheme.  So that created tension—that is, to what extent we were going to respond to what OEO wanted, and at the same time be consistent with the way a university works.  So we had several meetings here, some communication with OEO.  But then we sort of had a final "shoot out" on this with OEO before the National Advisory Committee.  And the Committee was terrific during that.  They were able to see OEO's point.  They were also able to see the constraints of the University, and a lot of really helpful suggestions were made, and that whole set of problems was gotten over and accommodated.
LS:  	How?
RH:  	We established, as I recall, seven informal seminar groups here.
LS:  	Oh yes.  That was the solution, wasn't it?  Because I've heard about those.
RH:  	Right—the seminar groups.  And each seminar group committed itself to getting together some kind of research agenda—at least a delineation of the important issues in the area, and to write a paper that would delineate the issues and describe the program of research that the people in each seminar would do.  We put that all together in a document, which was our research plan, then.  And it was informal enough so that academics could feel comfortable with it, but it was a step toward having some structure built into the Institute.
LS:  	Do you remember—what year was this?
RH: 	 '73, '74, somewhere in there.
LS:  	So you had already been director for—
RH:  	Yes.  All of this happened while I was director, right.
00:11:29
LS:  	But I mean, it wasn't something that you brought in when you started?
RH:  	No.  I, in fact, welcomed it.  I, in fact, had never been a part of either a large university or a research institute like this.  I did my undergraduate work at a liberal arts college.  I did my graduate work at Vanderbilt University, which is a small place.  Well, I had real trouble—I don't think so that anybody could see it, but myself—coming into a place this size, into an institute that was as amorphous and non-defined as this one was, and sort of trying to figure out what was making the place move, who the players were, what the players were doing, how they were to fit together and stuff.  So that in my first year—which, by the way, I wasn't director—I came in for the first year as an associate director.  Then I took over in—
LS:  	Yes.  While Watts was teaching, you were—
RH:  	That's right.  And then I took over as director my second year here.  So it wasn't like I was saying to OEO, "Get off my back."  I was saying, "Well, let's see if I can't use the kind of inducement by OEO to get started here some kind of process whereby people would sit back, and say, 'Look, this is an institute.  It has a purpose.  There are issues that you can put your finger on that need to be delineated,' and build some kind of structure.'"  
00:13:02
	So I would say that in general, over the long haul, the person who I was working with at OEO and myself ultimately saw fairly eye-to-eye.
LS:  	Who was that?
RH:  	His name is Ned Gramlich, who since has himself become a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, and himself is now director of a research institute there.
LS:  	Not the old one?  Not the—whatever it is—social assistance—
RH:  	No.  He's the director of an institute called Institute for Policy Studies, or Public Policy Studies, I guess it's called.
00:13:40
LS:  	What was the Poverty Institute like when you came here?  I know it was involved in the Negative Income Tax.  What did you think about it?
RH:  	Well, like I say, I found it hard to get a handle on what it was.  Looking back on it, I can now tell you what it was.  It was two distinct things.  One was that there was a set of researchers that were closely working at and supported by Negative Income Tax Experiment monies.  They met, they talked, they tried to get stuff done.  They managed that experiment and did research on it.  And Harold Watts was important to that group of people.  And that was his thing, pretty much.  
LS:  	That's what I heard.  He was really wrapped up in it.
RH:  	Sure.  That was his thing.  And then there was another group which one way or another managed to get money from the Poverty Institute to support their research.
LS:  	Him, it had to be.
RH:  	That's right.  I mean he had a bundle of money.  There was this core grant every year came floating through.  You know, a million dollars.  He had to spend it somewhere.  And so people made proposals of what they'd like to work on and if he and people upon whom he rested for advice thought they were good, they got money.  Well, these people very seldom met.  Most of them didn't have offices around here.  They were scattered all over the campus.  It was hard even to figure out who they were.  They never came around.  So it was difficult to sort of figure out what that part of the Institute was.
LS:  	Did you feel free to go and talk to them?
RH:  	Oh yes, sure.  That was exactly—part of the first-year task was to figure out who they were, what they were doing, and why they were never around.  Yes, I had lots of lunches and talked to people.  Right.  
LS:  	I heard you weeded out a lot of people.
RH:  	You did, did you?
LS:  	Yes.
RH:  	Yes, some people that were on the staff for a long time.  In fact a couple of people who, in fact, were brought to Wisconsin for the purpose of being on the staff ultimately were phased out.
00:16:00
LS:  	So that it was more people on the staff, then, than people doing research projects.  Well, I suppose you couldn't—
RH:  	No, no.  They were the same.  Be clear.  When I say people on the staff, I really mean researchers.
LS:  	I find that puzzling.  They were called—it was said that they were on the staff if they were doing research?
RH:  	Well, there were two kinds of staff people.  One were administrative staff, and the others were research staff.
LS:  	But you're talking about research staff.
RH:  	Right.  So, for example—I'll give you just two names and two examples.  Jack Lefcowitz, who is currently a Professor of Social Work, was brought from OEO to the University and to a position in the school of social work largely by Harold Watts.  His allegiance was really to the Institute.  He was one of the few people in this group of amorphous researchers I was talking about, that you did see around.  I mean his office was down—he had a part-time office down on the third floor.  But ultimately, after two or three years with soaking up a lot of research money and not seeing any output, his research support was phased out.
LS:  	Is that difficult?
RH:  	Oh yeah.  For sure.  I mean he was angry.  And people who liked him were not happy.
00:17:30
LS:  	But you had a committee.
RH:  	Yes.  I did things a little differently than Harold.  Harold ran things, I think, pretty informally.  He made his own judgments, and consulted informally with people who he trusted, and then did it.  I guess my effort, first of all, was to try to formalize decision-making a little bit.  He had a research committee.  It was called a research committee.  It very seldom met—I think once a year, maybe.  And I maintained the committee.  I replaced its membership.  But then I regularly had meetings with them in which issues having to do with policy or personnel that were important, I discussed with them.
LS:  	You could clear something like that with the committee.
RH:  	Well, clearing is the wrong word.  The way the Institute is structured, the director is the boss.  And this was really, technically, an advisory committee, and I treated it as such.  That is, I looked to them for advice, and I think probably usually followed it.  Certainly not always, though.
LS:  	So that had to be your decision, then.  Getting rid of somebody like Lefcowitz—
RH:  	Right.
LS:  	But people must have seen that as a salutary development, I should think.
RH:  	I think on the whole people welcomed the fact that there would be somebody in the directorship who would try to make something of the Poverty Institute—give it visibility and a structure and try to make decisions such that the value of the output would be going up.
LS:  	Because the Negative Income Tax wasn't giving it enough visibility?
RH:  	It gave the Negative Income Tax visibility.  But it didn't give much visibility to this million dollars a year of research money that was being spent by the Poverty Institute for doing just basic research on the nature, causes and cures of poverty.
LS:  	You mean they were actually getting other money for doing—
RH:  	Oh yes.  Sure.  
00:19:31
	Now be clear on this.  This is an important point.  The Institute started with the notion of there being an annual, unrestricted grant of money, building up to a million dollars a year to be used, essentially, at the discretion of the director, quote, "to study the nature, causes and cures of poverty."  That was a single grant every year.  Then OEO, when it decided to do a Negative Income Tax Experiment, involved the Institute in that for planning and design.  That work was supported by a separate set of money.
LS:  	Yes, I hadn't really realized that.
RH:  	In fact, it's more complicated than that.  Ultimately the federal government, OEO, gave a contract for the Experiment to a research firm called Mathematica.  And Mathematica then made the Poverty Institute a subcontractor.
LS:  	I've heard that's because the government didn't want to appear to be giving money to an Ivy League institution, and therefore brought the Poverty Institute in on it.
RH:  	Well, I don't know their motivation.  And I wasn't in fact privy to the decisions at that time, so I don't know.  But that was a separate bundle of money.
LS:  	I see.  So this million was sort of going out with nobody's paying much attention to it.
RH:  	That's right.
LS:  	Was anybody complaining about it here on campus?  Say people in the economics department or deans?
RH:  	I don't think so.  No.  I mean, look, it was pure slush for the University at that time.  People were getting research money for doing their thing.  Couldn't be better.  In the long run, I think, that has problems.  Somebody's going to ask for accountability at the end.  And I guess it was for that that I really became most interested in that part of the Institute.  I mean, that is the Institute.  It's that core grant that really ultimately matters.
00:21:53
LS:  	How much of a role did Bob Lampman play at this time?  Did you consult with him?
RH:  	Oh sure.  Bob is and has been a very important person in the life of the Institute.  I spent a lot of time with Bob when I was director.  He was always on the research committee.  Whenever anything of importance came up, I would always chat with him.  I viewed him as having a serious and substantial commitment to the Institute as an institution, and just a lot of wisdom about how universities work and about how research is to be done.  He's a very important person.
LS:  	Did he ever object to anything you did?
RH:  	Oh sure, yes.  But I mean, he's a very nice objector.
LS:  	Yes, I'm sure he would be.
RH:  	I mean, he doesn't ever object by way of pounding on the table or anything.  But he's a very skeptical person at the same time.  I think he's typical of the kind of person who is wise in the sense that they see that there are no right answers or wrong answers.  There are advantages to what you're doing, and there are disadvantages to what you're doing, no matter what you're doing.  And he points out the advantages and disadvantages.  It's clear, on occasion, he probably would have done things differently if he were inclined to do things.  But he never is inclined to want to do things.  He doesn't want to be a director.  So I'm sure he has different judgments on things.  But his role is really one of sort of pointing out the pitfalls.
LS:  	Well, is he seen as sort of a granddaddy that various directors—I mean, it's hard to picture his role.
RH:  	Not a granddaddy.  I think a senior person who was important in the formation of the Institute and who thinks that what the Institute is doing is important.  And a person that has good judgment.  Not a granddaddy.  No.  Just an important—
LS:  	I didn't mean in terms of age, but just because he'd been in on things from the beginning.
RH:  	An important senior person who had your and the Institute's interest at heart.
00:24:18
LS:  	Felicity Skidmore was very important when Harold Watts was here.
RH:  	Yes.  Felicity was his administrative assistant.
LS:  	What would you have to say about her role?
RH:  	Well, let's see.  For some reason I don't think Felicity and I ever got along very well together.  Perhaps it's differences in style, or what.  But I don't know.  It was clear both because of her tastes and mine that she didn't want to continue on in the position of the assistant to the director when I became director.  So she did something else.  I think, as I recall, she went full-time on the staff of the Experiment with Harold.  And as far as I was concerned, that was okay.  Felicity is a strong-willed person.  She's outspoken.  She, I'm sure by her own admission, has alienated a number of people as she's gone through life.  On the other hand, she's a very able person.  She's an outstanding writer.  She understands research issues, even though she's not a researcher herself.  And she was a very valuable person to have around the Institute.  Then after the Experiment phased out, and was completed, she still stayed on the staff of the Institute in various roles—largely editorial, but not in a kind of decision-making role that she had when Harold was the director.  I think that she had more power than she otherwise would have when Harold was director, in part because Harold was spending a lot of time in the Experiment.  There was this whole other half of the Institute out there; if it wasn't tended to by Felicity, it wouldn't have been attended to very much.  And she played that role.
00:26:29
LS:	Was the SSRI [Social Systems Research Institute] thing also by the time you came here?
RH:	Yes.  That was not an issue.  I didn't deal with it at all.  I didn't even get in the middle of it.  I just heard the bad stories about it.
LS:	And computer usage—no fuss—
RH:	Didn't have any problem.  See, the Institute always had its own computer budget, and we had our own computer staff which we put together.
LS:	Yes.  I guess people in SSRI thought that the PI [Poverty Institute] should have used—
RH:	Yes, right.  But that was a solved issue by the time I came. 
00:27:11
LS: 	So the evaluation came out, and one of the things they said was that the Institute should have long-range funding.  It shouldn't have to live year to year.  And I wondered how—that you're very insistent upon it—but how, really, did it affect the work of the Institute?  
RH:	Not much.  I don't think that fact affected it much.  What we did—and it's not clear to me, Laura, at this point whether it was in direct response to that evaluation report or not—but we managed to find a new funding arrangement with OEO, [a] funding arrangement whereby we, in effect, would be given a year's worth of funds a year ahead of time.  So we had a long lead time there.  If at any point in time they said, "We're going to cut you off," it would have been two years before the money would have stopped.
LS:	You mean that hadn't been that way before, then?
RH:	Yes, that's right.  We altered that arrangement at that time to give us more lead time on any change in policy that they might want to make with respect to the Institute.
LS:	Was that your idea, or theirs?
RH:	I can't recall.  But I know that I was involved in the negotiations on that, together with Jack Sorenson downstairs, who is the associate director of the Institute.
LS:	He's the financial advisor?
RH:	Yes.  He's really the administrative head.  I think you ought to interview him.  He's been around a long time, and has passed through now three directors, and at the same time worked with Harold Watts while Harold was doing the New Jersey Experiment after he was the director.  You ought to talk to him.
LS:	So I can get the straight-through view.
RH:	The straight-through view, right.
00:29:16
LS:  	Were the seminars your idea?
RH:  	Yes.  Well, it was an idea that grew out of the need to do something in response to OEO's wanting some structure to this place.  Right, that was my idea.  Now you know, in some sense, that's not fair either, Laura.  We had a problem with OEO at that time.  And they were not happy with this output, this amorphous glob of research papers, some of which were good and some of which weren't.  So they had me come to Washington.  I went with Jack Sorenson and talked to them about this problem.  And it was clear they had pretty strong feelings.  Well, I didn't know what to do when I came home.
LS:  	Who's “they”?
RH:  	Ned Gramlick—this is a person I mentioned—the director of research at OEO.  So I came home and immediately called a meeting of the research committee and told them we had a problem.
LS:  	Would they have stopped your grant, do you think?
RH:  	No, I don't think they would have stopped it.  They weren't very happy.
00:30:25	End of Tape 1, Side 1
Tape 1, Side 2
00:30:26
RH:  	All I'm saying is that it wasn't fair to say that the seminars were my idea.  I came back from that meeting concerned because they clearly meant business.  I called a meeting of the research committee of the Institute at that time.  We talked about it.  I had some ideas on what to do.
LS:  	How come you're teaching more than—teaching four courses?
RH:  	Yes, well, I'm jamming up—I didn't teach during the fall semester, and I have some research support.  Okay, where were we?  
LS:  	Did you answer the question of whether they might have discontinued the grant?  Were they that dissatisfied?

RH:  	No, I don't think they would have done that.  They were going to put enough pressure on so that something happened.  Because I think we would have endangered our relationship with them if we'd have said, "Come on, we're not going to do anything."  It was clearly a political situation.  We had to negotiate and find some middle ground whereby they would be happy, and we could live with it.
LS:  	This is the Nixon administration, isn't it.
RH:  	Let's see.  Had Nixon already taken over?  I think he had, right.  No, he took over in '72.  I think it was the Nixon administration, then.
LS:  	Because somebody had read one of those reports.  I guess that wouldn't matter much.
RH:  	That was another dicey period.  When Nixon was elected, I certainly wasn't optimistic about the future life of the Poverty Institute.
LS:  	You weren't.
RH:  	No.  Especially when he decided to phase out OEO.
LS:  	That's what sort of deprived it of its administrative clout.  
RH:  	That's right.  So when the agency goes, the question is, "What's going to happen to an institute that is directly reporting to that agency?"  So I was worried about that.  But we successfully made the transition to HEW [Department of Health, Education and Welfare] at the time.  And that really was done because we had, in my view, such good working relations with the research staff at OEO.
LS:  	So this was after you had solved this problem and started the seminars.
RH:  	Yes, right.	
LS:  	So they were convinced that you were going in a direction that they could go along with.
RH:  	Right.  So when they, themselves—when that research staff was transferred to HEW, they were very instrumental in having the grant to the Institute transferred along with them.  So in some sense, that transition wasn't that hard.  At HEW, we were working with pretty much the same group of people that we were working with at OEO.
LS:  	You say it wasn't that hard.  But so it was a bit hard.
RH:  	Well, it was the thought of OEO going out of business that was the hardest thing to cope with.  That is, it was uncertain.  We didn't know what ultimately would be our disposition.  It was the uncertainty that was harder to cope with than the transition to HEW itself.
00:33:38
LS:  	You got the post-docs in, too.
RH:  	Yes, I think that looking back on it, that's the most important thing that I did.
LS:  	Why did you do that?
RH:  	I think I've already given a clue about it.  That is, it was hard coming into the Institute to figure out what the Institute was.  Most of the money from the core grant was spent on people who were faculty members in some department or school elsewhere on campus.  Some were in the law school, some in the school of social work, some in political science, some economics, and sociology.   There was no Institute.  There was a group of people who were getting money from a money-dispersing organization.  I had spent time in the past at another research organization, Resources for the Future in Washington, and at Brookings Institutions.  And in my view, what gave those places unique intellectual life was that there were people there who interacted with each other.  They talked with each other about what research ought to be done, about what their own research was about; they were an institute.  Now how in the world was one, like myself, going to take these people who were scattered around the campus, all of whom had central allegiances other places—political science, law school, school of social work—and get them to have some kind of allegiance to the Poverty Institute?  Now I framed the judgment early on that it was impossible to do that.  These people like the Poverty Institute because they got money from the Poverty Institute.  And they liked the money because they didn't have to teach.  Besides, they could do research and make themselves known.  So it was all plus for them, but they had very little interest in being around here and talking with their colleagues.  Well, there was only really, as I saw it, one way out, and that is to find people who were quality researchers, who would be at the Institute, who would be the Institute.  Well, that proposal runs into a lot of opposition.  There were a lot of people on campus, including Bob Lampman, I think, who believe it's very dangerous to begin hiring people in an institute who don't have ties to a regular department.
LS:  	Yes, he did talk about that somewhat.
RH:  	And I sympathize with that.  That is, I wouldn't want to hire anybody who thought they were going to stay around here forever to be only at the Institute.  So I think one kind of compromising way out of that was the research associate program, in which the people that we were looking for were people who were finished with their Ph.D.s, who had had research experience on questions related to poverty, probably through their Ph.D. dissertation, who would be hired for a two-year period, and who could be given an attractive arrangement—namely, they could be told they were coming to this University, to be integrated within their own department, primarily economics, to be given 100 percent research support for two years for doing research of their choosing, provided it had to do with the nature, causes and cures of poverty.
00:37:17
LS:  	So you didn't call it a post-doc fellowship.
RH:  	No.  We called it a research associate position.  And I think it was a—you know, we got good people.  And they were fun to have around.  They added intellectual and social life to the place.  They were around all the time.  We finally had seminars that met lots.  People were looking out for the Poverty Institute.  It was an organization that they had allegiance to.  And that was nice, and I liked that a lot.  
LS:  	So presumably all these people who were scattered around the campus, in fact, were very glad to have a chance to talk to each other.  Weren't they, or not?
RH:  	No, not much.
LS:  	You don't think so?
RH:  	Some of them were.  But a lot of them took the money and ran.  They ran back to their offices and—
LS:  	Well, but they might have run because there wasn't anything—anybody here to talk to.
RH:  	Well, that's part of it.  There was no core research staff.
LS:  	But I should think they would have liked it once—
RH:  	Oh, absolutely, and maybe I misunderstood your question.  Once the research associates were here, and the Institute was forming a group, then they liked it.  They came to the seminars, too.  And they participated.  That was good.  The one way in which they didn't like it was that they realized that every dollar that was spent to bring in a research associate would be one dollar less unrestricted research money that they might be able to glom onto.
LS:  	So, you were responsible for that?
RH:  	Right.  But again, I didn't do this unilaterally.  I had lots and lots of talks with the research committee, and they were involved in this decision.
LS:  	This is a small thing, but it's curious—a newspaper item about the black coalition that you met with.  Did that ever come to anything?
RH:  	There were two newspaper stories that are sort of notable during the time I was director.  One was in the State Journal at the time I became the director.  The headline was, "UW Prof Licks Poverty at Home."
LS:  	That's right.  I remember that article.  I just read it.
RH:  	It reported my salary.  The outstanding figure of $20,000, I think.  That was funny because I got a call from the guy at OEO who is sort of the boss of the Institute at that time.
LS:  	Listen, hold on.  Let me record this, then we can go back to that.
00:39:56
RH:  	One Institute issue that you ought to be sensitive to is a really sort of unfortunate set of interactions when Irv Garfinkel decided he wanted to stay on as director after his five-year term.  There were a number of people that didn't think it was wise that the director should become quasi-permanent.  That was dicey.  Second issue is that I think Irv tried to lead the Institute into a more advocacy position than I did.  I really tried to maintain a commitment to doing good basic research.  And Irv, I think, wanted to—
LS:  	That's right.  Somebody said that you were pushing the idea of pure research as against applied.  Is that right?
RH:  	Well, I guess advocacy kind of writing.  Right.
LS:  	Did Irv do this because he was in social work, do you think?
RH:  	Well, I don't know.  I think he did it because he thought that it was important to be done.  So those are two kind of fun issues that you ought to probe.
LS:  	Anything else?  Anything connected with the economics department?
RH:  	Well, there was antagonism to the Institute coming out of the economics department when I was director.  But none of those people are around anymore.  Dick Day, Dennis Aigner, both those people.
LS:  	But why?
RH:  	Well, they saw the Institute as biasing the research program—biasing the economics department.  We were getting too many people that were doing applied work.  We were getting too many people that were doing public finance type things.  Not enough pure theorists.  And stuff like that.
LS:  	And, from what Martin David said, not contributing to the University, and to the—for instance, building up computer programs that everybody could use.
RH:  	Right.  You got it.  But those people are all gone.  I don't think there is any antagonism to the Institute nowadays.  If it is, it's mild.  Because everybody thinks it's going out of business soon, so—
LS:  	Do you?
RH:  	Fifty/fifty chance.
00:42:12	End of Tape 1, Side 2. End of Interview
END