UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #730
ELDER, JOSEPH

ELDER, Joseph (1930- )
Professor, Department of Sociology and Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia
At UW: 1961-

Interviewed: 2005	
Interviewer: Robert Lange
Length: 7 hours
Transcriptionist: Premium Business Services (8/25/08)

	[See Index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (October 10, 2005): Tapes 1-3
Start of Tape 1/Side 1
RL:	This is Bob Lange with the Oral History Project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Professor Joe Elder, of the Department of Sociology and the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, is being interviewed on October 10, 2005. Joe, to begin the interview, let's start at the beginning, and if you would tell us when you were born and where.
00:00:27
JE: 	Okay. I was born July 25, 1930. I was the fourth child of my parents, who actually had six. They were missionaries. My father, during World War I, had gone out with the YMCA to sort of work with coffee and doughnuts with Russian soldiers, as he told me.  Arrived in Russia just as the Russian revolution occurred.  The Soviets came in.  He was kind of out of work with the YMCA, so he was transferred to Armenia, and he spent two years in Armenia working with refugees.  At one point he was in charge of a camp of 1,000-some, women and kids mostly.  And with all the problems, they had to get food for them, and there was hostility and some brutality and so on. And when he left, there were two YMCA people, my dad was one of them, they were given all kinds of gratitude by the Armenian community, because I guess they had saved a number of lives. That got my father interested in being a missionary in Iran. He already was heading into the ministry. He had grown up in a small town in Pennsylvania. He was the oldest boy in that family, and went to a small college, Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, and then he went to seminary, the McCormick Theological Seminary, working alternate years to make money so he could keep going to seminary. Worked for the Student Volunteer Movement, which was a fairly evangelical Christian student group, as a secretary traveling to campuses, trying to convince people to either become missionaries or support missions.  Met a young other secretary, whose name was Ruth [Rousch?], who was also trying to convince people to be missionaries or support missionaries, and they fell in love and subsequently got married, and decided at this point they had to be married because that's the pitch they'd been making. And they picked Iran. It was a little hard for me ever to figure out why Iran. My dad was aware of Iran, and it was almost entirely Muslim, and I think he liked the challenge of going in where there were lots and lots of potential converts.  
RL:	And his religion was?
JE:	Presbyterian.
RL:	Presbyterian.
JE:	Right.  So they went out in the mid '20s.  There were a couple of unsuccessful pregnancies, and then finally they got the hang of it and they began to produce us every two years, girl, boy, girl, boy, and then the last round was boy, girl, I had a brother ‑‑ my brother and sister. I was born at home, I was told on the kitchen table, because at that time there wasn't any hospital there, but there was a missionary doctor.  And my childhood was, you know, very protected.  Spent the first four years in a town called Kermanshah, which is in Kurdish territory, and I still have somewhere a picture of my father and mother dressed as Kurds.  My mother could pass as a Kurd.  My father, with his red hair and blue eyes, was not going to pass as a Kurd at all. It was pretty rough.  There was at least one person, a Kurd, that was converted to Christianity.  He was killed by his relatives.  It was, you know, a little tough area.
00:03:31	
Probably my first memories of the compound, there was a pool in the compound as many Iranian households have.  There's a wall around the compound and a pool, and they use it to water flowers and things.  And I must have been about four, and I remember we were eating watermelons and somehow I slipped and fell into the pool, and have this vivid memory of all the bubbles coming up and myself sinking to the bottom, and then a hand coming out from above and fishing me out of the water, very much upset.  So I was saved by a young Armenian Christian.  So it sort of circled, it went around in a circle.
RL:	It went around.
JE:	That's right.  We were near [Bisatu?], which is a cliff on which some of the old Achaemenian kings' sepulchers are, so I was aware of the ancient Durias, [word unclear], Xerxes kind of thing. When we were ‑‑ when I was five, we moved to Hamadan, which appears in the Bible as Ecbotana, it was the old Persian capital, where Esther approached the King Azuarus on behalf of the Jewish people.  So there was a bit of reality at that point.  And there were graves out there at this old ruin palace of the west side of Hamadan where ostensibly the graves and Esther and Mordecai were, so there was this awareness of biblical history. Then when I was seven, the seven years came up which missionaries had, seven years in the field and one year back, a sabbatical.  
00:05:00
So we returned to New Jersey where the churches were that supported my family, and we were very much the honored arrivals.  The church had rented a house and decorated it for us.  Life magazine had a picture of this missionary family coming in. A little taste of America, and then we returned in Iran in '38.  The trip across Europe was fascinating both times, because in Germany we did see the Hitler troops, we did see the parade in Berlin.
RL:	Do you remember that?
JE: 	Pretty vividly.  I'd never seen a big parade before, and the swastikas and the hands going up and the Heil Hitler signal.  We crossed the Soviet Union, and we were required to close windows because we weren't supposed to see things out the windows. Anyway, all the sort of stories that kids have when on those trips.
00:05:50
In Tehran, we were in the capital, and from then on my family stayed in the capital.  It was sort of missionaries would work in the boondocks, first of all, and then as their language got better, their administrative skills got better, they typically moved toward the center. And again, I was in a compound, wonderfully protected, big.  The church was there, the school I went to was there, soccer fields, volleyball courts, and being a privileged, a small American community, convinced that we were superior in all ways to everybody around us.  We had a big American flag which we'd hang out on the Fourth of July and other days.  Aware that the Muslim world was going on outside the gates, but we had very little to do with them. The school I went to had probably 20 different nationalities in it.  These were all kids who wanted to study in English.  The largest single minority were Iraqi Jews.  Their parents were working in Iran.  There's never been a whole lot of love between the Iranis and Iraqis.  So instead of sending their kids the Iranian schools where they'd have to learn Farsi, which they didn't want to learn, or the French schools where there – which were the elite schools, a number of them had figured that English was the language that was going.  So they would get into our schools.  So the majority were, of my classmates, were from Iraq or Lebanon or someplace like that. Small classes taught with any teachers they could find, missionary wives and occasionally missionaries themselves.  The premise was that when we reached the end of the school, which was sophomore year, designed for missionary kids, we would then go to the States and live with relatives or boarding school somewhere for a couple years, and then go to college. So I never met an American older than 16 all the time I was growing up, because when they reach that age, off they went, and these were the days of five-week and six-week trips to get there.  And then World War II broke out and it was hard to get to the States.
RL:	Joe, I have to ask you and look ahead, have all of your siblings been internationally aware like you ever since this childhood?
JE:	Yeah, it left a mark on all of us, right.  And I'm a little ahead of the game, but of the six of us, four became Quakers, which is interesting because we were all raised with very strong Presbyterian homes.  We had grace at mealtimes, we had morning prayers, we went to Sunday school, we went to church.  We were thoroughly in the Presbyterian world.  When the time came, each of us sort of looked our own way, and in four of our cases we ended up being Quakers. World War II was interesting.  Iran was caught in the backstage of the war.  But probably part of my cynicism about wars and the feeling that they're much more devastating than most people think was watching what happened backstage in World War II.  There was a brief battle when the British army moved in from North Africa and Iraq and the Soviet army came in from the Soviet Union to conquer Iran and dismiss Reza Shah Pahlovi, the old king, who was sympathetic with the Germans.
RL:	Oh, he was?
JE:	And he admired Hitler.  He admired strong leaders.  He modeled Kemal Ataturk, and his model was to be a tough leader.  And if he had been allowed to remain, it may – he didn't have an army to loan to the Germans, but had the Germans broken through the caucuses and gotten to Iran's oil, that could have changed the tilt of the war.  So the British moving in and Soviets moving in were to seal off the Iranian oil from the Germans. And then there was Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. became involved in the war, and pretty soon U.S. troops arrived in Tehran, a couple big bases.  And the U.S. used the Iranian railways and roads to ship a lot of military suppliers from the Persian Gulf up across the caucuses into the Soviet Union. And the so-called Persian Gulf command, in their own smug way, maintained that they we really won the war because the Germans had gotten as far as Stalingrad, and then they just ground to a halt, and Stalingrad went on for a week after.  There was a horrendous, bloody, pointless kind of killing field, and then the Germans began to retreat.  
00:10:07
And the Persian Gulf command thesis was the reason they were was that these supplies were now beginning to come in, and the Soviet troops were getting continually refurbished with trucks and tanks and the other stuff.  A military historian will say I have no idea.  But anyway, that was the sort of war we saw. And we befriended the American GIs.  They were around.  One of them got permission to teach us folk signing and folk dancing.  Some of them set up a Boy Scout troop.  When President Roosevelt came for the Tehran Conference, we knew that he was coming long before most people did, because one of the GIs was in the Army band.  And he came in one day and asked my father, does the band ever play Hail to the Chief if the President isn't here, and my dad's guess was no.  Well, do you suppose President Roosevelt's coming to Tehran?  And [words unclear] why would he come to Tehran. And then, sure enough, it was obvious stuff was coming, and there was the Tehran Conference and part of it was held within a half mile of where we lived, under great security.  So we were sort of watching World War II from age 9 to, what, age 14 or 15.  The age group was one above me. But the refugees who came through and the total disruption of life, there were bread riots, there was a typhus epidemic that went through a lot of the people, and this wasn't a real war.  This was sort of the fallout of the war, but enormous sort of chaos and disability, was people living suspended lives, wondering if their relatives were alive, would they ever get back to Poland or back from wherever they came. So it was – it wasn't a great deal of excitement and so on as the war went on.  It was just awareness of a whole lot of people suffering.  And even the GIs, you know, they were not happy with where they were.  There was – there was very little death there, there was no dysentery and things like.  But anyway, it was not – it was watching the painful part of the war, as far as a civilian.  And again, the observation of any war is so much harder on civilians than on military. But just as the war ended, the war in Germany had ended, we were able to arrange to come back to the States by being flown by the Air Transport Command from Tehran to Bombay to connect with the Swedish ship Gripsholm which was carrying refugees back and forth, the released prisoners of war and the wounded, from one side to the other.  
So we sailed on the Swedish ship Gripsholm from Bombay, ultimately to New York City, through the Red Sea, through the Mediterranean, picking up some Greek orphans on the way, arriving in New York City, being met by a fire boat with great sprays of fire to celebrate this ship coming in.  We were the only ship on the high seas that sailed with complete elimination.  We had banks of floodlights, we were painted white, we had a huge Swedish ship on the side and a Swedish flag on top, so that any submarine could know that were a Swedish ship and weren't to be hit.
RL: 	But this was after Germany had surrendered?
JE: 	Germany had fallen, but Japan was still there.
RL: 	Okay.
JE: 	And we were sailing through the Arabian Sea and, you know, and who would know.  We weren't worried, but I guess the ship had to broadcast every 15 minutes precisely what its location was so that if anybody's periscope spotted them, they would be aware that this was a neutral ship and nothing was supposed to happen.
RL: 	I'd forgotten.  Sweden was neutral in the war.
JE: 	Neutral, right, yeah.  We were still on the Gripsholm, we had to stay overnight.  There were all the complications of unloading and refugees and passports and things like that.  And my father came back on board the next day and said that a huge bomb had gone off in a place called Hiroshima that had virtually destroyed the city, and this may bring an end to the war. And so the next week, we were, you know, in – where the reports were coming about what the atomic bomb had done to Hiroshima, and then a few days later what happened at Nagasaki.  So the day World War II ended, we were on a train going from New York to my dad's home in Pennsylvania where his mother was still alive.  
And all of a sudden, the bells, the church bells, and the factory whistles and all kinds of stuff, there was really, you know, you knew right then when the war had ended, and everybody was making all the noise they possibly could to celebrate.  So that was kind of an auspicious return back to his hometown, and the people were ringing the church bells in his small town most of the night and [words unclear].
RL:	And you're how old at this point?
JE:	I was just about – I was 15.
RL:	Fifteen.
JE:	Had turned 15.  So that year we lived in New Jersey, again near the church that supported my parents.  I went to a public high school.  I learned very little.  It was not a good high school.
00:15:12
My parents then left to go back to Iran and I expected not to see them for seven years, because that was the way this thing happened.  So I went to boarding school for a year, Mount Hermon School for Boys in Massachusetts, which other missionary boys from Iran had gone to.  And I actually roomed with another missionary boy from Iran, whose father had been in seminary with my dad, so there was, you know, a little nexus of us.
And I learned ‑‑ it was a good, it was a hard year in terms of being like in a reform school or something like that.  The day was scheduled with bells and inspections and demerits, and all that kind of stuff.  But I had an English teacher who taught me English grammatical rules, which I still use.  His name was Louie Smith.  And the rumor was if you got a B or better in Louie Smith's English class, you could get – you could skip Yale's freshman year, because Louie Smith was a Yale product and they respected Louie that much. And while I was at Mount Hermon, it was a poor boy's school.  It was there, I was told, where a poor boy gets a second chance.  We all had to work ten hours in a farm or the laundry or the kitchen.  I pulled farm duty.  And my parents, before they had gone back, had decided they would make sure I was secure in college. My two older sisters had gone to Wellesley, where my mother had gone and where one of my aunts was a housemother.  So that was a nice arrangement.  My older brother had gone to Washington & Jefferson, where my dad had gone, and he had not been particularly happy, and it wasn't generally – it wasn't a terribly good school either.  And then he was going to go into the seminary.  He was very much planning to be a missionary himself.
And having heard what my sisters wrote and what my brother wrote about being in an all-male or all-female school just struck me as weird.  And so the only thing I was clear about was I wanted to go to a coed school, and Wellesley was not coed and Ivy League was not coed. So my parents worked out a deal with an old seminary friend of my father, who's now president of a small college in Indiana, called Hanover College, and I think it was a Presbyterian college.  And I was admitted my junior year from high school.  A piece of cake, you know, no problems.  So when I went to boarding school where all my classmates were taking their college boards, and most of them were heading into Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Columbia crowd, I was cool.  I wasn't taking any jabs, I knew where I was going.
00:17:48
And then one of these accidents happened which affects one's life more than one ever thinks.  It was February, and the assistant headmaster of Mount Hermon called me in, the person I didn't know, and was saying, we're checking just to make sure all of the seniors have a place to go, where are you going next year.  And I said, I'm going to Hanover College.  He said, you mean Dartmouth in Hanover.  And I said, no, it's Hanover College in Indiana. And he looked puzzled and he said, is it certified?  And I said, I have no idea, college is college.  And it was obvious that he didn't think that was a good idea.  I had done very well.  I was either valedictorian or whatever.  I mean, I had done well in grades, which startled the Mount Hermon crowd because they thought it was a very tough school and here comes this person who had never been there, and he was able to come off with one of the highest averages in the senior class.
RL:	Joe, I have to ask, was that your native intellect or had you been particularly well prepared in school over in Iran?
JE:	 Probably it was, at least in part because of the intensive small classes that we had had in Iran, because we had a lot of not very good teachers, we had a lot of amateurs who were just missionary wives and what have you. But the classes were small, and we did our homework and all the rest, so it was good preparation.  You know, we would not go to class if we had homework [word unclear] and we'd memorize French and Latin and whatever else we were doing.  So it was kind of a rigorous thing.  So it wasn't hard to get good grades, you just had to do your homework and keep up with the stuff, which I was able to do. So anyway, the assistant headmaster said, we can probably get you into a somewhat better known place than Hanover College.  Have you thought of Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth.  And I said, you know, my older brother and my sisters had just had such a weird life in these things, and I want to go to a coed college.
00:19:49
So then he mentioned, have you ever thought of Oberlin.  And I had actually heard of Oberlin, but I said, you know, we don't have any money.  My family can't afford tuition.
Then he said, well, let's – if you're interested in going to Oberlin, why don't you fill out these forms, and I'll write a letter and we'll see if we can do something.  So I did, and in a month he called me in and said, you'll be pleased to know that Oberlin has offered you a four-year full tuition scholarship.
RL:	How wonderful.
JE:	This guy didn't know me from anybody.  And a lot of my life, I think, was directed by him into a tough college with all the sort of liberal tendencies, which have been imprinted on me ever since, and where ultimately I met my wife, and it was just, it was one of those cataclysmic things which, had he not done, I would have probably gone to Hanover College, a very mediocre college, been a fraternity boy.
RL:	And what was his name?
JE:	I have no idea.  I can't remember now.  
RL:	Isn't that interesting?
JE:	He was assistant headmaster, and he was doing his job to make sure that every senior at Mount Hermon went to a good college.  But, obviously, he wrote a letter, and that made a whole lot of difference.  So this unknown person affected my life. So then I went to Oberlin, and it was just the greatest place in the world as far as I was concerned.  It was not hard to get good grades, although I did get shaken up by the history professor, his name was Harvey Goldberg.  Harvey Goldberg, University of Wisconsin, was there.  He hadn't finished his dissertation, so he had a fill-in job in the history department. And he was so exciting. Any student who took Harvey Goldberg's History of Europe described his electrical lectures, his style of filling up the blackboard with terms, and then his frenzied, sort of lecturing style where he'd stand like a horse ready to start the race, and the bell would go, and he'd start pacing back and forth and machine gun out this information. I did not do well on Harvey's first exam, and it was probably the first time that I was hit hard by a person I would call a true intellectual, and he could sort of see through the fluff, and insisted that wasn't very good.  So I decided, this is – this guy is tough, and I'm going to learn how to answer his questions.  So that was one of the first times that just the challenge of this guy is bright and he's not going to take nonsense.  You got to know what you're saying. So he had an influence, in his own way, and he was taking a Marxist perspective, so that whatever you did in history, you peel it back and there was somebody making a buck and concealing it with your religious liturgy or what have you.  And having a kind of intellectual access that allowed you to look at complex historical stuff, and then peel it back and there was this ultimate causal relationship that was there, made him just very exciting.  And he was accessible to students and so, anyway.
RL:	Did you take more than one course with him?
JE:	I just took the one-year course with him.  He was only there two years, and then he went on to Ohio State, eventually finished his dissertation, and then came and taught in Wisconsin for the rest of his life.  The rest is history.  By the time I came here, he was, again a legend, but he was a legend here as opposed to Oberlin.
RL:	Did you and he reconnect?
JE:	We reconnected, yeah.  And during the Vietnam War, we had a couple of interesting conversations, because he was opposed to it and I was opposed to it.  But I always felt that Harvey was on the top of a ladder someplace, and I was never one who could sort of sit up late at night, you know, drinking and talking about the French literary circles or whatever.  Our styles were different, but I had every bit of admiration for him.
00:23:31	
So Harvey was one person that triggered me.  I decided to major in sociology ultimately, for probably the worst reasons.  There were less requirements to major in sociology than in history or psychology or religion, the other things I was sort of looking at.  And I was taking music, I was studying church organ.  I earned some money doing that.  I played piano most of my life.  I was interested in [words unclear] I was on the soccer team, earned a letter for playing soccer.  I met the woman who ended up being my wife and so on, so it was the right place, of all the liberal colleges. I was active in campus things.  I was on the student council and I was on the, president of the YMCA.  This sort of religious thing continued all the way through.  And the thing that probably, again, switched my life, there's something that Oberlin had which was unique.  It was called the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association.  And the history of that was, in the late 1890s a band of Oberlin, Oberlinians, related to the Oberlin Theological Seminary, which was part of the college, had gone to China as missionaries, men, women, kids.
They arrived in Shansi Province just before the Boxer Rebellion broke out.  They were captured, held, and eventually all of them were beheaded. So when the war ended and the Chinese were required to pay reparations to the Germans, Dutch, French, Americans, and so on, the Oberlin people with whom they were affiliated were given compensation for what had happened, and it turned out to be a large garden in Shansi Province which was kind of payment for this. And the trustees of the Oberlin, that was the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association, decided they would build a school in memory of the martyrs, as they called them, and have something constructive come out of this tragedy which had occurred.  So they built a middle school, a boarding school, an ag school, and then sometime after World War I they had decided, why don't we send some graduates of Oberlin to be part of the young faculty.  And so these were called Oberlin reps, Oberlin representatives.
00:25:46
And I heard about that, and that sounded like just the next step in terms of college.  So I got in line to be on the committee to select people, and then when you're on the committee, you sort of learn what was expected.  I resigned from the committee my senior year and applied to become the rep to go to Shansi Province in China, as did the woman who became my wife, as did a very good friend. And three of us were selected that year from the class of 1951 to go to China, except that Mao Tse-tung kid entered the scene and no Americans were likely to go to China for a long time.  So the money was there, we were selected to go someplace.  The trustees decided to write to various schools they were aware of, I think in Thailand and Turkey and various places, and South India.  And they came across some schools in South India that said, sure, we'll accept three untrained English teachers, because we have a place where they can fit.
It worked out that these were schools loosely affiliated with the American Board of Congregational Missions, so they were under missionary supervision, but we were coming as – 
RL:	Of any particular religion?
JE:	Well, the Congregationalists.
RL:	The Congregationalists, okay.
00:27:05
JE:	Yeah, right.  So we were technically affiliate missionaries of the board, the Congregational Board of Foreign Missions, although we were salaried by Oberlin and our responsibility was to Oberlin.  We came under the rubric of their health insurance scheme and all that. So the two years teaching in India as an Oberlin in China representative probably was another major influence in which way I went, because I knew almost nothing about India.  I had read a couple of books on the voyage going over.  It took us a month to get from – 
RL:	Oh, you sailed over.
JE:	We sailed.  This was before the days where airplanes were standard fare.  We sailed on the Queen Mary to England and spent a week in England.  We bought some books, and then sailed for two weeks on the Chusan through, past Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, arriving in India on October 2, 1951, which was Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, and people in India were still sort of reveling in the fact that their ‑‑ the person who had been the thorn in the side of the British was now, had been assassinated by then, but this was now a national holiday. Anyway, there we were in India, and I discovered that almost everything I had read about India, which included Nehru's discovery of India and a couple of journal [word unclear] dealt, without telling me, just with North India.  And I would see things that made no sense, that contradicted what I had read. For example, in discovering India, Nehru describes the caste system and says that although you marry within your caste, you must be sure that when a marriage occurs, they are – the bride and groom are not related seven generations on the father's side or five on the mother's side, and this avoids the sort of recessive genetic problems that might occur. Well, at the first wedding I went to in South India, they said something like, you'll be interested to know that the bride's mother is the sister of the groom's father, or something almost as absurd as that.  And I said, but you can't do this, Nehru says.  And it took a long time for me to realize that the Dravidian kinship structure in the south is very, very different from the north, and that the sense of what is Hinduism and what has been adopted and adapted and so on has been a fascinating historical process.  Two completely different language groups.  The Tamil language is one family, and the Hindi and [word unclear] and Sanskrit are another.  Anyway, that sort of got me off on what I wanted to spend the rest of my career trying to sort out, how this whole thing worked.  
So we were in there, in South India, watching this amazing complex civilization. In the center of the city where we were, which was city of Madurai in the south, or the center of Dravidian civilization, there was a huge 14-acre temple that had all the sort of vigor of the temple in Jerusalem at a height, I imagine, crowds of people, lots of priests, and a daily cycle of ritual, a whole other world in itself.
RL: 	Were you and your wife pretty comfortable in this setting or did you feel alienated?
JE: 	We were much too privileged.  We had arrived.  And the Christian community there treated us is that we were young missionaries, and this was the one way that [words unclear].  We lived in the missionary compound.  We lived in a house that was – 
00:30:39
[Start of Tape 1/ Side 2]
RL: 	This is Side 2 of Tape 1 of the October 10, 2005 interview with Professor Joe Elder.  You're in Madurai.
00:30:51
JE:	In Madurai, that's right.  Our workload was incredibly light.  In fact, since this whole thing had been constructed by correspondence that took three weeks to go one way or another, when we arrived all set to step into a classroom, we met the committee that had been in correspondence with the Congregational Board.  And they said, well, what did you plan to come when you come here?  We said, well, we thought you might have some ideas.  They said, well, why don't we, why don't you rest for about a week and we'll come back and talk about it. So it was clear they didn't have any clear idea what to do with us.  So they – there was, there were there high schools, and each of us ended up teaching English in the sort of junior and senior class of the high schools.  But we didn't know how to teach English, and the classes were huge.  We were supposed to teach conversational English, because we could converse.  But our accent was different, so that was not particularly easy to work with. And there was a syllabus to follow.  And in an hour with, say, 45 boys in the same room, you're not going to do a whole lot of conversation.  So I don't think people learned very much English while we were there.
But there were other things that we did there.  There was a college that hadn't, a women's college that hadn't yet graduated its first class of women, and they were very eager to get us involved in training a choir and doing dramatics.  So we ended up coaching a couple of plays.  We did Antigone, we did She Stoops to Conquer with all women casts.  We – there was a choir, and if you worked hard you get the altos and sopranos to sing separate notes that sort of came out. So we did what we could.  It was like sort of [word unclear] Peace Corps.  But in the process, we were becoming more and more – we knew a little bit of Tamil.  We hired a teacher so that we could speak a little bit.  
00:32:43
And each of us gathered material for our master's thesis.  My master's thesis was on castes in the Protestant Christian community in Madurai, starting with the thesis that, which showed how little I knew about the caste system, the caste rested on the concept of reincarnation, the idea being that you were born into the caste you were because of your previous life.  Therefore, if you didn't believe in reincarnation, the caste system should end.  I mean, that would seem to be logical. Well, it was obvious that not only did the caste system did not end, it was every bit as strong among Christians as it was among Hindus.  I gathered data on about 2,000 marriages in these various, I think five different Protestant congregations, and less than 30 of the marriages were inter-caste.  All the rest were just exactly as Hindus would have done them, which indicated that it's not – the idea reincarnation plays a very insignificant part in how the caste operates.  It's much more in terms of the marriage rules and which nephew can marry which cousin, and so on. And so when you go out to arrange the marriages, you step into a kinship network that's prepared to pick and choose among the group, and line them up.  And it's something you begin doing when the kids are fairly small, so by the time they're reaching marriage age, you and your relatives have rather singled out which two young people are going to get together.  Well, that now seems pretty trivial, but it was stunning to me to discover that the caste system didn't rest on Hinduism, it was quite able to function separately.
00:34:16
And my wife did her study on high school girls' attitudes toward marriage, because every marriage, virtually, was arranged.  And to what extent were these 15-, 16-year-old girls looking forward to it, to what extent were they afraid of it, to what extent did they think they might try a career outside marriage.  So she did sort of a questionnaire type thing which they filled out.  And then subsequently, back in the States, she gathered some data from a high school in Dayton, Ohio, the same questions in English, and then compared what the American high school student girls said compared to the Tamil high school girls, which was itself an interesting study.
00:34:56
So we came back to Oberlin.  Part of our pay was to spend a year back in Oberlin with the Oberlin and China Memorial Association paying our tuition, and so essentially a free master's degree to be there.  And part of our job was to go to the dormitories and meet with students and talk up the program, and get students interested in applying, or whatever.  So that was fun.  We had slides. Our first daughter was born while we were in India, and so that was a big thrill to bring a little toddler into a dormitory.  People would get all cuddly with her.
RL:	Now you and your wife were married when?  Before – 
JE:	We were married shortly – we graduated in June of '51.  We got married in August of '51.  We sailed for India in September, got there in October, and then Shanti was born in April. So, yeah, and this, I can say now, was not part of our plan.  In fact, when – we were the first married couple to be hired by the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association.  And I remember talking with Florence Fitch, who was the woman in charge with the Board of Trustees, and she was asking us what about children.  And we said, no, no, we are modern and we have no money.  We aren't going to have children until we're pretty well established.  So we reassured her, on false pretenses, that this would be no problem.  
And we were as surprised as anybody when we discovered all we'd learned in the class on marriage and family was irrelevant to what actually happened.  It was kind of funny, because we kept it a secret as long as we dared.  And then when it was about February or March, we finally decided we'd write to the Board of Trustees and say this was happening and it wasn't part of what we planned, but we didn't think it was going to interfere with my wife's ability or teach or mine, because the cook had a wife and she could be the babysitter so that it would all work out. Well, we got a letter back from Florence Fitch, which she could have written if we'd have told her one of us had died, because it was God acts in mysterious ways beyond the knowledge of humans, and if this is what God has chosen to do, we will accept it [words unclear].
RL:	I see.
JE:	That's good, because there wasn't a whole lot we could do about it.
RL:	Not too much you could do.
RL:	So Shanti was born in the summer break.  If we'd have been planning it, we couldn't have planned it better, because the school ended early March I think, and then we went up to what's called the Hill Station, which is where it's cool, and Shanti was born the 12th of April with a private physician in a little four-bed maternity hospital.  So we had great care.  And then by the time we ‑‑ a month had passed by the time we got back down to the plains, and Jo started teaching.  She was on her feet and the cook's wife was able to be the babysitter.  We learned later that some of the girls in my wife's class had not recognized she was pregnant, because she was tying the sarong, and it just looked like she had a cumbersome way of tying it.  And then she appears two months later with a baby and they were wondering if there is some other way of creating children than the old way.
RL:	The old-fashioned way.
JE:	Where it didn't involve, you know, the lower abdomen and all that kind of stuff.  But anyway, having a baby was just great, you know.  People loved having the baby and it was a great, a great sort of device to have people become very friendly about it.
And the second year we were there, we were finally able to move off the missionary compound.  A missionary family came that was entitled to this huge, huge house, and so we were able to live in a regular Indian neighborhood with Indian neighbors on either side and so on.  So the second year we were there, we felt much more like we weren't the great white foreigners in this huge compound, but we were where we could look out the window and watch people harvesting rice, and also funeral processions going past the house, and much more part of what life was like. So we're back in Oberlin, get the master's thesis.  And that year I had to decide what my career is going to be.  I still sort of had the idea of going into Chinese studies, because several faculty members I admired had done Chinese.  And there wasn't any field of Indian studies, to speak of, at that time.  The Asian studies had been either Near Eastern studies or Far Eastern studies, and India had been left kind of in the lurch for the London School of Economics or the British School of Oriental and African Studies, the colonial enterprises.  And so people who wanted to study India typically went to London, and there wasn't much of a center here.
00:39:33
But while I was debating, again fortune stepped in.  The Ford Foundation had concluded that America desperately needed scholars who were conversant in non-Western parts of the world.  So they created something called the Foreign Area Training Fellowship Program, the purpose of which was to find people on Ph.D. tracks in humanities, social studies, whatever, and if they were willing to take time out to learn a language and see a focus outside Europe and the United States, that you might get funded through grad school. So this was absolutely providential.  The timing was perfect.  I applied for it.  Had decided, okay, I'm going to go into Indian studies, whatever that may be, and was interviewed.  And it was a one year at a time thing, about the first year, which meant that I could go wherever I wanted for graduate work.  There were – I applied at four places, two which had the beginning of Indian studies and two which just were sort of good sociology places. And I was getting some funding.  Princeton was going to give some money and Cornell I think had a little bit of money.  But I had been accepted to Harvard.  And as far as I could tell from the sociology faculty in Oberlin, with whom I was becoming increasingly impressed.  I mean, Harvey Goldberg was the first professor to sort of say, wow, this is exciting. But there was a Milton Yinger who was in sociology.  There was a George Simpson who was in anthropology.  They had written a lot of stuff on race relations, and they were very concerned about the U.S. race relations.  And then there was one, a guy named Maury Stein who taught urban sociology, and he had the same almost approach that Harvey Goldberg did.  Just, you know, very tough and very demanding. So I talked to them, and they all said, well, if you can pay for Harvard, by all means, go to Harvard.  Because at that time the leading sociology theorist, named Talcott Parsons, was in Harvard, and people either hated him or felt he was, you know, the new Newton, he was going to break through this thing.  So I went to Harvard.
RL:	And Ford paid the whole freight.
JE:	Ford paid – ultimately, Ford.  That year, the second year through prelims, two years in a village in India writing my gathering dissertation, and one year back in Cambridge writing my dissertation.  So I only had to be a TA for one semester out of that whole period, which was just great.
RL:	That's really impressive, Joe.
00:42:06
JE:	I was very lucky. And it was always, you weren't sure it was going to continue the next year. The scariest year, I guess, was when I'd been in Harvard for maybe six weeks or eight weeks and had to apply for the next year, and nobody knew me in Harvard.  I found out if I get dropped, I'm just no place at all.  I'll be an elevator operator or something like that. And the interview didn't seem to go particularly well because the person, one of the interviewers was from Cornell.  And he was saying, if you're serious about being an India specialist, you should be in Cornell because that's the only place that teaches Hindi and other sorts of things.  And I had to avoid explaining to him that one reason I didn't go to Cornell was that I had a friend of mine who was there training in sociology and he had written me and said, Joe, do not come to Cornell.  There is a split in the department which is destroying students, and it's a very unhappy place, and there's no way you could come and not get embroiled in it.  So I'm able to make it through, but I would – don't come. So to tell this person from Cornell I wasn't going to his place because I'd been told it was a terrible place was delicate.  But anyway, it worked out.  So I spent a whole lot of my time the first year doing the statistics, which everybody has to go through.  And I was not particularly good at it, but I was able to pass it.
A little bit of Indian was there.  There was a Sanskritist named Daniel Engels, who is, was, is one of the world's distinguished Sanskritists, but I wasn't into Sanskrit.  He taught a couple of undergraduate courses which I sat in on.  One was called the civilization of India and the other was called history of British India.  And my sense was that in his mind's eye, he had been reincarnated as a British colonial officer before, because he just loved the story of the British [word unclear] and all the things that happened.
So he was my India contact.  And there was one funny event which is worth recounting.  At the end of my first year of taking his classes, it occurred to me that it wouldn't be bad, if I'm going to specialize in India, to learn enough Sanskrit to recognize why it's the language it is and the sacred text would seem to play such an important part.
So I had arranged to take, I think, a directed study course with Dan Engels and meet once a week in his cell at the library.  And I sort of asked him what I thought it was bright idea, what would you think if I were to take one of your Sanskrit just to become familiar with the basic terms.  Well, I couldn't have said anything more offensive a far as he was concerned.  The temperature dropped about 20 degrees. He was already tall and he sort of went really stiff.  And he looked way down at me and he said, ten years or nothing, he said.  The point is if you're going to learn Sanskrit well enough to do anything with it, it's going to take ten years.  And if you're not, you're going to depend upon other people's translations, and don't waste my time taking Sanskrit, which was very good advice because it would have taken most of my next year, I think, to learn, because it's a killer language in terms of the amount of time you take.
00:45:20
But anyway, there wasn't a lot of India stuff there.  But there was a lot of Talcott Parsons, and he was the central theoretical figure.  He had coined his own set of terms.  He was developing the concept of sort of the nuclear cell of social behavior, and I think he really felt that he was on the brink of coming up with the atomic structure social behavior so that you could begin to have cumulated laws and regularities just as physics.  And there was sort of constant comparisons with the intellectual breakthrough where you, when the right concept comes, like mass or density, then, you know, bing , it's there, and you can begin to move. So it was a really exciting place to be.  Furthermore, I was delighted to be there because four different types of behavioral scientists had decided they would work together with the notion of since human action really has various complex dimensions, that all of us should know something about each other.  So to get a degree in – the Ph.D. in the Department of Social Relations, you had to pass a test in clinical psychology, social psychology, social anthropology, and sociology.
So we were in with people who were going to be psychoanalysts, we were in with people who were going to be, you know, on the Trobiand Islands someplace, we're in with people who are going to do, you know, personality testing, and then sociologists.  So it was just a feast all the time.
RL:	And that must have been groundbreaking.  That probably wasn't happening at any other place.
JE:	It was very, very rare, and it was the kind of thing that Harvard could pull off, and so long as they had bright faculty fully committed to this, which they did, they were sort of intellectual giants in each of these fields. I remember sitting in a seminar where the faculty would be doing a lot of the discussing.  The grad students would sit like little mice on the end, and then we'd get an A at the end of the semester for having sat in and maybe do a paper or something.  But it was, it was just very, very exciting.
RL:	Joe, do you have many colleagues to this day from your time at Harvard?
JE:	Not very many.  We were a very small cohort.  There were nine of us who came in in sociology, and about half dropped out.  And then the one I was closest to died quite young, and then the other ones sort of went off into the commercial world.  So the particular set – I know often you end up with a very close team in grad school, but mine was small and they got smaller, and then kind of disintegrated. The one person who was in the same group with me, Neil Smelser, already was, in a sense, two or three years ahead because he was a Harvard undergraduate and he was a Harvard junior fellow, which meant that he'd been singled out to be truly important.  And Neil went on to become, have a very, very distinguished career as a sociologist.  So he was really more up, junior faculty when I was there, and then all the others sort of [words unclear] disintegration. So I was surprised, because I felt these would be my friends forever.  My father's classmates in seminary, he just, you know, they were always ‑‑ we had missionary prayers every day.  And when we'd get to, you know, Pete Smith or somebody, he'd say, I was in seminary with him.  So it was this sense of this is the bonded group that you'll have. Ironically, the intellectual friends that I've developed have been largely a multidisciplinary group of people who work with India, the way my intellectual career has moved.  
RL:	Interesting.
JE:	But I was thoroughly embedded – I learned to speak [Parsinese?], as we called it.
RL:	Oh, you did?
JE:	Correct, and it was a new language.  And if you were there long enough, you could become the interpreter of the word.  Because after Talcott Parsons would talk, three-quarters of you wouldn't know what he said.  And then they'd come up and say, Joe, what was he talking about?  And I'd say, well, there are these four different aspects of human behavior, the AGIL and the sort of nuclear structure we go through.
And for probably two or three years after I came here, I would begin every sociology course with saying, let me describe the nuclear structure of social action.  And I'd take his model, which had four cells to it, lay it out.  And it was about the third or fourth year I was here, at the end of a semester somebody said, Joe, the first day, the first week you laid this model out of the way in which social interaction occurs, the nuclear structure, and you never referred to it again.  And I thought, oh, my goodness, that's true.  It's not very useful.  And it proved ultimately, you know, not to be very useful. But the intellectual challenge of trying to work this thing out and was there any evidence that there were, as with atomic structure there were parallel sorts of exchanges.  It was great intellectual fun.  And to look back on it is very stimulating, even though ultimately it proved fruitless, because human behavior doesn't work like physical behavior.  It's constantly changing and being re-created and so on.  You just don't have the regularities that you have in the physical world.
RL:	But my sense is that it really forced you at the time to push your intellectual process further.
JE:	Right, and to look for the regularities.  And if you look, you know, you're likely to find something, to define what it is that is being given by this to this. I remember one seminar where Talcott Parsons was working on exchanges.  The big thesis was that you had boundary exchanges.  And in economics, you have supply and demand, and in the electoral process you have contingent approval and electoral supports [word unclear] with. And we were in one of these exchanges and he finally said, I'm looking for a word that means precisely this.  I want each of you who speaks a language other than English to give me the word in your language that might fit what I'm after.  I thought that was pretty cute.  And we had people from Korea and people from Burma and [word unclear] trying to come up with these words that describe this particular thing that A gave to B and B gave back to A, so there was all kind of stuff like that. So it was fun, it was intellectually challenging.  The Harvard campus is very hard to beat in terms of people coming.  We were not part of the campus life.  By the time you have two kids, which we now had, you're in impoverished housing and you're meeting the mothers of other people who are impoverished.  So we did meet some grad students who were, you know, had kids about the same age that we did.  
00:52:00
Two years there, I passed the prelims, and then the money was enough to go to India and live in a village for two years, which my dissertation was the impact of a large sugar factory on this small village.  I wanted to see what happened when a whole different social formation came to a place where you had inherited patterns of [word unclear] and services and so on.  And I didn't want urbanism to get in there, because urbanism would be very messy, who lives where and so on. So this was ideal.  The sugar factory draws on sugar cane, and doesn't need to be in a city.  It just can be someplace where it can draw the cane.  So this factory decided to build at the intersection of the railroad, where there was nothing more than kind of a train station here, and a small village from which they bought the land. So I arranged to live in the mango grove of the village, and talked to people about how life had changed since this factory had come, that employed about 1,200 people.
RL:	Was this in southern or northern?
JE:	Northern.
RL:	Northern, okay.
JE:	And by now, I had studied Hindi and was able to sort of work my way around in that part of the world. I was a sociologist to the extent that I had questionnaires which I ‑‑ were interview schedules, so I had samples that I drew.  I was an anthropologist to the extent that I sat in the tent and took notes every night about what happened.
RL:	Was your family with you?
JE:	Oh, yeah.
RL:	In the tent?
JE:	Jo was with me, and two kids, right.  We were this Elder Family Robinson living out there in the [word unclear].  People wanted to visit us, so we put up a guest tent.  We were convinced the village was going to have its book on American family structure finished before I had mine finished.
RL:	That's very good.
JE:	[word unclear] on the village.  It was interesting, because when you're there and people are asking you questions, you do ‑‑ you're forced to think of the world a little bit differently.  They were puzzled about how we got married.  Well, you know, our parents had not arranged the marriage.  And that made them suspicious immediately, this was somehow a shady arrangement.  We insisted that we had decided to get married, and the parents had approved it and they'd even helped pay for it, so that.  And then the kids were legitimate.  We seemed to be sort of taking care of that.  Well, they were puzzled that we weren't having kids as often as they were. And then, but were we of the same caste.  And we said, we don't have castes in the United States, and that didn't make any sense.  Well, how did you know each other?  Well, we were in the same college.  Is college a caste?  No, a college isn't a caste. And then it began to occur to us, probably in a way college is like a caste, because who comes to visit us?  Old college friends.  Jo and Joe are living out in a tent in India and we're around the world, so why don't we drive our little Renault out to the village and stay with them for a week and see what it's like.  So we had this kind of string of classmates and other visitors come, almost all of whom were from Oberlin College. And the village began to figure out, whatever they say, Oberlin is a caste.  They marry each other, they eat with each other, they loan each other money, they stay in each other's guest houses.
RL:	Yeah, that's really interesting.
JE:	Right, yeah.  And had we stayed there until our kids grew up a marriageable age, we would have had a problem because they couldn't, they couldn't marry any of the castes that were there.  So if we were to stay living in India, we would have had to find something that was sort of the equivalent of a non-category, it probably would be liberal arts graduates generally from English colleges or something like that.  But it, you know, it just – it didn't fit any other way.  And it was very interesting, because we were relating to the caste system.  We were uneasy with the caste system.  The person that we became closest to in the village was what we called an untouchable.  He was about 12 when we got there, he was just a kid, and he offered to sweep around our tents.  And then he was bright and he could ride the bicycle, so then he would do errands for us, he'd go to the post office and get stuff.  And then he would babysit for us when we were away, we'd sometimes both want to be off to a tea party or something. But he was a Bhangis, which was the lowest group.  And at one point, we decided, well, we'll give him, along with his small pay he was getting, we'll feed him, because that takes a burden off the family.  Wow.  As soon as people knew we were feeding him, the electricity went off, and my wife was visited by a group of women, and they were saying you can't do this.  He can't – you can't eat meat off of plates that he eats off of, because they're contaminated. And so we had to set up untouchable plates and touchable plates, and his were definitely different.  Ours were stainless steel and his was plastic, and he had a plastic cup.  And then he wouldn't sit at the table.  He'd sit sort of around the corner of that.
RL:	And you had to do this in order to continue with your work?
JE:	Right.  Yeah, this was one of those concessions that you make where you feel this is, this is crummy.  And between us and [Bolay?] it was a joke.  
RL:	Right.
JE:	Well, here they come so, okay, you will take your plate and silverware and [word unclear].  But he also recognized that if he pushed it, then he would be in serious trouble or his relatives would be in serious trouble, because he was being watched to see if he was being uppity and pushing his luck.  So to that extent, we just had to accommodate ourselves to the fact that that was the way things happened. Before we left, he got married, partly because I think he was aware that his monthly income was going to end after we left, and so he was as well-positioned as possible.  And we faced something of a dilemma, because he invited us to his feast, okay.  Now, people said, if you eat his food, you're as low as he is, and yet I was not going to not eat his food because he was a Bhangi. So we solved the problem this way.  The wedding feast occurred about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, so Jo and the kids stayed home.  Jo's my wife's name.  I went to the feast, and it was clear that I was being observed very carefully, because I could hear people sitting on the rooftops coughing in the dark.  This was the biggest show going on.  There was drums and music and stuff. And then at the appropriate moment, out came the meal, and it was lentils and then this pig that they had cut up.  And it was cut in chunks about that big and it was ‑‑ there was fat on it and the hairs weren't all off.  It was pretty grizzly stuff.  But I was going to eat it, because Bolay was a friend.  And I knew that we were close to the end of the stay, and I thought, well, I have most of the information I want so if there's really a negative reaction, I hadn't lost very much. The problem for me was to get it down my throat.  It was blubber and hair and all the rest of it.
RL:	I'm sympathetic.
JE:	Well, the next morning, one of the closest high caste neighbors came around and said, are you going shopping today.  The shopping time was about a 20-minute bike ride away.  So I said, yeah.  They said, well, mind if I go with you?  So, sure.  So I knew that the message was going to be given to me as we drove the bicycles. So we're riding along and talking about one thing and another, and then he says, Bolay got married last night.  I said, yeah.  And people say he had some food.  Yeah.  Well, people said that you actually ate some of it.  And I said, yeah.  And I waited for the thunder to roll.  He said, we talked about that a lot this morning.  And we finally figured that since you really aren't from here, it doesn't matter.  And that was it.  So they forgave me for doing something which, if he had done it, he would be in serious, serious trouble.  He would have disgraced his family, and there'd be all kinds of pollution-clearing activities he had to carry out and so on. So I was very grateful the village had that level of tolerance.  But it was the reflection of the business, how do you live with people who are insisting on inequality when you feel at your gut level it's not something that you want to [word unclear] through.
01:00:13
RL:	Joe, were your children playing with local children?
JE:	Yeah, pretty much so.
RL:	And that worked well?
JE:	It didn't seem to be a problem.  And they each were picking up enough Hindi to play with the kids.  Our son was just learning English at the same time.  And what he did to solve the language problem is he'd use both the English and the Hindi word side by side.  So I'd say, there's an ooth/camel, or there's a hathy/elephant, or something like that.  So it was just a way of blending these two languages together.
RL:	Was your daughter old enough for school yet?
JE:	We'd home-schooled, yeah.  My wife had brought along the Calvert school system, which, ironically, I'd been trained with for the – when I was in Hamadan.  I was home-schooled by my mother and an Armenian lady until we got to Tehran, where there was a regular school. So I was home-schooled with my older sister, who we just were sort of – we were in the same class together with two little English kids who came over.  Their dad worked in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  And so we had a somewhat small foursome of home-schoolers. And when we were in Hamadan, this was a time that the English crown was going to, I think it was Edward and then he wanted ‑‑ didn't want the crown, he wanted to marry 
01:01:31
[End of Tape 1]
RL:	This is Tape 2, Side 1 of the October 10, 2005 interview with Professor Joe Elder.
00:00:10
JE:	So we home-schooled, and there was some funny things that happened.  Among other things, we were told to have our daughter Shanti, whom we'd given an Indian name to, to find some stones, so they do something with a lesson in stones. Where we were living was in the Ganges, well, the Ganges River area, which had been silted for centuries, and there were no stones.  You'd dig down for 50 feet before you hit any stones, because the floods would come and then silt would settle, and then more silt would settle, and more silt would settle.  So we had to settle for bricks, there were no stones in the area.  Well, I guess we found some stones.  They were by the railway where stones had been brought in to some kind of [word unclear] and other forms of adaptation. But it worked pretty well.  The only thing that I should probably throw in here was that I did become a quack doctor.  I had been advised by the three people on the faculty, who sort of supervised my departure to the field, one of them was –they were all wonderful people.  There was Talcott Parsons and Bob [Bella?] and Cora Du Bois, all absolutely distinguished scholars.  
And at one point when they were talking about my project, Cora Du Bois had said, what do you do – what do you plan to do as far as giving medical assistance to people?  And I said I'm not going to touch that.  I don't touch something I'm not any good at.  And she said, well, let me demand that you not do that. I had just gotten through a very touchy thing with one of my students who was out in the southwest studying the Zuni, I guess it was. And a woman had had a headache and had asked if he had something for the headache, and he had given her some aspirin, and then three days later she died.  And the premise was that he had either poisoned her or done some witchcraft. And so the tribe, he was given the choice of standing trial for witchcraft and murder, or just clearing out.  And he had gotten in touch with Cora and said, so what do I do.  And she first of all said, you're an idiot, you should never, don't, don't, don't, don't.  And then it's up to you if you want to, you know, you're dealing with a strange world with witchcraft.  You may be found innocent, you may be found guilty. Well, he decided that since he would lose his dissertation entirely if he left, that he would stand trial, and he was exonerated.  So they decided aspirin didn't do it.  But anyway, Cora's message was don't you do the same thing that he did.  So I didn't for months and months. We moved into the village in November in the tents.  We actually had a Brndavan priest perform the fire sacrifice, so that it was all – the village insisted there be a proper investiture.  And it wasn't until August – people would come up with cuts and bruises and stuff, and I just – I was not about to. And then in August some kid had fallen off a wagon, where a metal piece had been sticking out, and a chunk of flesh had been taken off just below the kneecap.  So you actually could see a little bit of the bone, and it was kind of a flap hanging.  And they were putting paper and stuff to try to seal it up, and I could see that wasn't the right thing. There was a Salvation Army hospital in Moradabad, the city that was about an hour away by train.  There was a German doctor, there was an English nurse with the Salvation Army, and they spoke English.  So my standard reply to anybody was, go to the Salvation Army Hospital, they're good people, they'll take care of you.  And if anybody was willing to go, I'd write a note to the doctor saying just let me know what it cost, because these were poor villagers.  And nobody would go.  They just would rather, the fear of going to the city, and then being turned down, where do you stay overnight, and all those things. So anyway, this had happened, and they brought the kid to me.  And I went through my drill of go to the city and all the rest.  It was probably mid-afternoon it had happened.  And then I went out to do something else, and came back around 5:00, and they were still sitting there with this kid and this big gaping cut in the left front of his leg.  And I said, well, what are you waiting for.  And they said, we're waiting for you to change your mind. And at that point I felt the way the British must have felt with Gandhi.  This is – this isn't fair.  And I said that I'm not a doctor, there is a hospital.  And they said, look, if your little boy had had this happen, you'd do something, and that's all we're asking you to do, just whatever you'd do for your kid.  And they had me on that.
RL:	You're stuck.
JE:	Yeah.  I didn't realize what was going to happen, but we had disinfectant and I sort of cleaned it off, and it was a pretty neat slice.  I sort of tucked the flesh back in and put a bandage around it.  And then I went through my drill again, go to the hospital, this should be stitched, it's much too big a cut. And they were back the next afternoon saying, well, you know, I told them I do want to see you, because if it's an infection, we can probably keep it from getting any worse.  And from that point on, they had me.  They were back the next night, and I had to look at it.  There was a little bit of pus, and I had to clean that out.  And then the next night they had a kid who had a runny nose, and then the next night the grandmother had an ache in her shoulder, and, you know, it was just, it was on and on.  And I was thinking, Cora, I don't know how to stop this.  I said I [words unclear]. So from that point on, I actually would set up clinic hours from breakfast until lunch, and ordered lots of quantities of inexpensive medicine from the missionary place, and dispensed a lot of stuff.  Most of it was the stuff that you could work with.  It was, you know, cuts and bruises.  The typical problem with a cut would be they'd put grass or leaves or paper on it, feeling that stuff shouldn't come out, with a result that they would infect it very often.  And so the important thing was to cleanse that off and put some kind of a clean bandage on. And once in a while, there would be a very dramatic cure.  There was a woman who came who had been bitten by a monkey, that had sort of dropped on her and gotten panicked and had bitten her in the forearm I guess.  And she came in, and her arm looked like one of those long shiny balloons, just, you know, the skin was as tight as could be.  And here was the bite with paper and grass. And as soon as I was able to get down to it, the pus just began to ooze out.  And by massaging it, I got a whole pile of stuff out, and then put disinfectant, and within two days her arm was sort of back to normal.  That's one of my great successes. I had some that weren't quite so successful.  There was one time I thought I might have killed somebody, and that wasn't good.  I never gave medicine to a person I didn't meet.  And this was a case where a man came after dark, which was rare.  People felt the grove of trees we were in was haunted by ghosts, because it was between the cremation ground and the village, and the notion was that ghosts would come and hover in the trees until they were placated, and then they would drift on out. So here was a man who was already scared.  He said, my brother is just having horrible, horrible stomach pains, and he's not had – had not been able to have a bowel movement for days.  Do you have anything to loosen things up?  And I did.  I had some stuff which was pretty good, but I also remembered that as a Boy Scout you weren't supposed to use laxatives in case the appendix had ruptured or something.  So I went through this back and forth, then I'll bring him in the morning, he's in terrible pain. So finally I just said, well, here's some pills, and they may help, because they were pretty good as a laxative.  So off he went.  I was awakened the next morning by one of the villagers who said the man to whom you sent the medicine died.  And I thought, oh, brother, this is Cora Du Bois.  And there was a funeral procession and, you know, oh, golly, it was something not pleasant at all.  And only in the afternoon did somebody come and say, you know, if your medicine had reached him, he might have lived, but he had died before the medicine ever got there.  And they had no idea how relieved I was that my laxative had not had anything to do with this poor chap dying. And my favorite misdiagnosis was I had some – there was a lot of fungus, especially in the rainy season – 
RL:	Oh, sure.
JE:	[words unclear] in their hair, and their fingers and feet, and stuff like that.  And there was some zinc [word unclear] which burned like fury.  I'd have the same problem when I put it on.  But it was good, it just really killed the fungus. And so when I would put it on people, I would say, this is – this is going to hurt, but it will be good and we'll bandage up using the break in the skin or break in hair or whatever, armpit.  Well, this guy came in.  He had, I think it was his toes I guess, and he had cracks in his toes.  And so I went through my little speech, this is going to hurt a lot.  Began to rub it on and he showed no sign of pain, I was quite impressed.  So I bandaged it up and I said, come back in four or five days and let's see how it's doing.  This is pretty good stuff. Well, he showed up again four or five days, and there was no change.  The breaks were just as bad as they'd been.  And I guess I tried one or two more applications, and I said, I don't know what this is, it's not responding to what usually works.  And I went through my drill about the German doctor, the Salvation Hospital and train, or – and he was one of the few people who did it.  I really didn't assume he was going to, but I said, you know, here's a note, give it to the doctor, because whatever it is [words unclear]. Well, he showed up about ten days later with a note from Dr. (Grumpfs?), the German doctor.  Dear Joe, this man has leprosy.  And that explained everything.  That explained the cracks, that explained the fact that he didn't feel anything.  And it was – 
RL:	Oh, sure, that's right.
JE:	Yeah.
RL:	Yeah.
JE:	And so, fortunately, the doctor had said there is a way in which we can treat leprosy, and then he checked in for these periodic inoculations.  So I think in his case he may have come out okay, but anyway, at that point I just said, well, I misdiagnosed it, you know [words unclear] to make an error once in a while.
RL:	So you and the German doctor had cordial relations.
JE:	Well, pretty much so.  I mean, he was – what I was doing was crazy.  I should not have been doing it, except that there was stuff that I could ‑‑ I did help some people, I'm sure.  I did no good for all people, I'm also sure.  I don't think I hurt very many people.
RL:	Well, do no harm.
JE:	Do no harm, right.  He was very, very bitter about Americans.  He had been taken as a German prisoner of war, had been held in an Italian war camp.  This all came out later.  He had nearly died in a toilet full of feces.  The care that was being given was horrendously bad. And I guess as the war was ending, there was just nobody doing much of anything, and he apparently was very weak and fell into essentially a sewer pit, and could hardly get out, and nobody seemed to care particularly.  And I get, whatever, then he was – it was clear that he, he really had been hurt by the way the war had operated.  But he was always civil, and several times he was a great help.  My wife developed hives at some point, and he was very quick to diagnose what it was and give her something. We did bring the English nurse out once to help me in my clinic, and she lasted about 20 minutes, because you're standing there with people, you know, holding up their hands and their eyes full of pus and stuff like this.  She was just such a sweet person, and waited for the lab tests to come [words unclear] she just couldn't handle it.  She developed a horrendous headache.  I told all my villagers that this was a birthday celebration, we ought to bring her out, have a real nurse take care of them.  And she just – she couldn't take it.  There was a mob scene.
00:12:14
So anyway, my brief period was – I would sometimes have nightmares later on that I would be required to perform surgery or something like that.  But I was – the Ford Foundation heard about it, and I was told to stop.
RL:	Oh, really?
JE: 	Yeah.  They said if anything happens, we're really in trouble.  And I said, I'm fully sympathetic with your position, and I can't stop.  I'm now in a position where it would be so profoundly resented, that it would just create [word unclear].  I'm sorry I got us bogged into this, but I'm just going to have to be a doctor all the way through to the end.
And they were – they said, well, we can understand [word unclear].  And they delivered the message, they sent some guy to tell me that I should cease and desist.
RL:	Oh, really?
JE:	Yeah.
RL:	So they were quite concerned.
JE:	They were aware that it would happen, and some people – they could have, maybe they were right.  It was just that I couldn't get out of it.
RL:	Joe, one of your background sources, Dean Joan Raducha, said to me that the hallmark of your career was truth to power.
JE:	Okay.
RL:	Would this be one of the very early instances of that, when you chose to acknowledge the Ford Foundation's concern but, nevertheless, refused to follow their dictates?
JE:	I wish it were as noble as that, but I literally had no choice, you know.  They had made me a doctor.  And if I had gone out and said, sorry, folks, no medicine from now, there would have been so much bitterness.  Because there they were with their coughs and their runny eyes and their burns and so on, and why had my heart turned this way.  It wouldn't have made any sense at all.  It could be made to sound noble, but I was trapped.
RL:	Yeah, I understand that.
JE:	The truth was, I just told Ford Foundation, you know, it won't work.  I can't not keep doing this.  And looking back, maybe if I hadn't taken care of that kid, it would never have happened.  But we're stuck with this, and we'll just make the best of it.
RL:	Absolutely.
00:14:23
JE: 	Well, in terms of the research, I probably – it probably was a useful research strategy, because I met all levels.  I was able to interview 40 village women, and there are very few American men who [words unclear] village women, and most of them had at some point, you know, put Vicks up their baby's noses or, you know, put a Band-Aid on the cut or something like that. So I think to that extent, I was seen as kind of a friendly person that they were at least willing to sit down and talk with.  So that may have been kind of a cynical payoff, but the best of all possible worlds, I wouldn't doubt it.
00:15:04
RL:	So during your two years there, though, you're gathering data.
JE:	That's right.
RL:	You're doing questionnaires basically.
JE:	Yes.  I kept field notes every night, and then near the end I had – I drew samples from five different populations, men who worked in the village, had worked in the mill, men who never worked in the mill, wives in the village, the mill elite, these were high caste, mostly educated men, engineers, chemists, bookkeepers and that, and their wives, and then would compare how they answered on a series of questions having to do with Hinduism, and the role of large factories in Indian society, and kids' education, and things like that. So it was both the anthropologist's description of what was happening, in a narrative way, and interview data.  And the computers were just coming in.  I processed my data with the old punch cards.
RL:	Oh, you did?
JE:	They dropped into slots, and we were the cutting edge of technology at that point, these little sorter, counter sorters they had, where at that point you would copy down the numbers, a little dial that was here.  And then the next year we got things that they printed them out.  I thought we were in heaven now, not realizing that by the time we're here, we're eons past that particular state.
RL:	But you were doing the data tabulation back when you were back at Harvard.
JE:	That's right.
RL:	You weren't doing any of that in India.
JE:	No, no, but I had set it up so that I could put the punches in.  I could punch the cards myself based off the interview data.
RL:	Oh, I see.
JE:	So it was all set up to, you know [word unclear].
RL:	So once you got back, all you had to do was turn the cards in.
JE:	Or punch the cards. 
RL:	Oh, you punched the cards.
JE:	On the questionnaires, it would say yes or not, or answer three out of one, two, three, or whatever.
RL:	Oh, I see. 
JE:	And then I just would go back in and punch the cards, so that when it got to this column, they'd answer three, the three punch appeared.
RL:	I see.
JE: 	It's very primitive, but it worked.
RL:	It worked, I'm sure.
00:17:09
JE:	And it was the cutting edge.  The machines were huge in those days.  So anyway, we started back to Harvard.  And by now, enough things had happened, I guess I missed a whole section there in terms of the Korean War at that point.  This came senior year.  I was already sort of in the track to – no, no, this came the end of junior year.  The war broke out in Korea, and all of a sudden, we all were eligible to register for the draft.  And I'd talked with the veterans in Oberlin.  We were the first class for a long time to have a minority of veterans.  All the classes ahead of us were GI bill, and these were guys in their 20s, 23, 24, 25.  And the faculty kept sort of being sorry that we were there.  They said it was so great when we had the veterans, and now you 17-year-olds come in and you don't know anything about anything. But listening to the veterans talk, and they were.  They were a lifetime ahead of time.  It was very interesting.  And I guess hearing them talk more or less confirmed my profound skepticism about making a point that a war achieves something great and noble.  I was struck by the fact that most of them were not happy with what they had been asked to do.  Most of them were somewhat resentful about how they had been treated, which any GI I guess does feel.
And a number of them would talk about stuff that they did which they, on second thought they just – their lives, they would never have the same respect for themselves because of what they had been asked to do.  And the story that was most poignant to me was from a guy, a classmate – a class ahead of me called Van Henderson, and Van was great joker.  He – his job had been to take care of mules going up to the Italian campaign, and he would load artillery pieces on the mules and then take them to the top of the hills where the artillery was located, and then they'd fire the artillery on the Italians or the Germans as they pushed up toward Rome.  And then he'd take bodies back, wounded people back on the trip.  So he was relatively out of danger. He described this one event when it was raining, and he had gotten himself up to the top of the hill and a couple of young Italians had surrendered.  And the officer in charge asked for volunteers to walk these two guys back down to where there was a prisoner of war camp on the side of it, and nobody wanted to, it was rainy.  And so he finally just picked two guys, you and you, you know, take these guys back. So these two guys got up, and it was obvious they weren't at all happy about doing this.  And they said, okay, and they walked around the corner.  And there were two shots, and they came back and said they tried to run away, but everyone knew they murdered these two guys in cold blood just because it was too big a bother to walk down. And Van said, I could have done that.  I was so tired about the whole thing, that I could have murdered them and it wouldn't – at that moment, it would not have struck me as murder.  It just solves a problem, and everybody knew that these guys had been killed in cold blood, and nobody said anything.  There was not going to be any hearing.  He said at some point you stoop so low that you can't believe that you would be capable of that, but he said, I'd become capable of that.  And I'm not sure that's, I would want to be in a position like that. So it was stuff like that that led me to weigh through, do I ever want to be in a position where it's me or him, you know, where I will have to kill somebody because otherwise they're going to kill me.  And I decided at this point that I could take the responsibility of seeing that I would not be put in a position like that, along with the fact that my feeling was when – the amount of devastation that wars generated was horrendous, and if you added all the pain of the civilians killed and damage and so, it was a price that was almost not worth paying.  There are other ways of achieving whatever you're hoping to achieve through military means. So I applied to be a conscientious objector, knowing that I wasn't eligible.  The requirements were that you had to be, you had to be a member of a peace church, and I was a Presbyterian.  And John Foster Dulles was a Presbyterian.
RL:	Oh, was he?
JE: 	And John Foster Dulles thought the war was great.  Furthermore, the questionnaire you filled out began with the question, do you believe in a supreme being, yes or no.  Because to be a conscientious objector, it had to be based on the belief in a supreme being's instructions to you that you were forbidden to kill.  That was the logic.  It couldn't be based on philosophy or humanism, it had to be God-derived.  And I didn't believe in a supreme being, unless it was the supreme being of something very vague and general. So I didn't check either box, and I wrote a long essay about what do you mean by supreme being, is it a – something you can interact or is this some kind of cosmic process that works with chemistry and stuff.  Anyway, I think I wrote an essay that was so confusing to the draft board, well, we don't want this sort of person in the military.
I also said, it was a long questionnaire, and you had to fill out, and I described having watched World War II from backstage with this enormously unnecessary suffering that people went through, and the fact you ended up pitting young men against each other who had no grudge with each other and with the task of killing each other struck me as absurd. I also said, I talked with people who'd been in the Medical Corps, and they often felt that they were part of an instrument that was killing people, and so they couldn't say, well, I was a medic, therefore, I don't – I'm not responsible for the fact that my colleagues are blowing people up or injuring them, and then I'm taking care of them.
So in my application I said, I will not serve in any capacity.  And ended up by saying, I realize that probably I don't qualify to be a conscientious objector, but I do want it clear that under no circumstances will I serve in the Army.  So if you choose to identify me as noneligible, then I will be in prison, but I won't be in the Army.  I just wanted that to be clear. I'm not sure what combination of factors went into the fact that this draft board did give me the conscientious objector status.
RL:	Oh, it did?
JE:	It did.  I was just as surprised as you were right [word unclear] it took me ‑‑ 
RL:	Well, I was sitting here waiting to hear about your going to jail.
JE:	That's right [words unclear].
RL:	Where was your draft board?
JE:	It was Elyria, Ohio, which is a conservative town that doesn't like Oberlin, because Oberlin is smart-aleck rich kids, and Elyria is sort of rural Ohio, basically Republican, and American flags on the front porch, all that kind of stuff.  And I knew that they had hassled other people.  In fact, I knew they had hassled some genuine Quakers with – bring them in and say, imagine your mother is being raped by a Japanese soldier.  Would you stand by and, you know, well, if you're going to use force, then why don't you, you know, the whole sort of logic [word unclear] like that.  And giving people just a hard time, you're cowards and don't you feel any sense of obligation and, you know, all stuff that comes with drafting. But I was never called in.  They just – then nine months later I got this status, and that was just fine as far as I was concerned.  Later on, when I was in India, I got a message from my draft board saying that they now had alternative assignments for conscientious objectors.  We could be – we could be required to do nonmilitary service, which had happened I think in World War II. So, first of all, I was to report to the nearest military installation for a physical exam, because I might be 4-F, in which case I wouldn't be eligible.  But if I passed the physical exam, then I was eligible for 10 or something like that, and they could tell me to work in a mental hospital or a forest preserve or firefighting or something. So I wrote back saying the nearest military place is in Trieste, and I'm in South India, and there's no way I can get there within the 30 days I was supposed to report.  And besides, I feel pretty good, so I'm sure I'm okay physically, I'm not 4-F.  So now we get to, what would you like to have me do.  I'm here in South India teaching English.  And incidentally, I'm now the father of a daughter.  Would you put that in my file. Well, back came a letter from them, the usual, you know, three weeks or these type of things, saying, well, if you have a daughter, then you are 3-A, you're a married man with a dependent, therefore, you're not eligible to serve.  So I ended up sort of bypassing that by being classified in such way that I never actually had either to serve as a CO or to go to prison, which was just fine as far as I was concerned.
RL:	Absolutely.
00:26:21
JE:	But two other things happened to make my wife and I decide we really probably were drifting into Quakerness if we weren't careful.  One was that after Shanti, our daughter, was born, everybody wanted us to baptize her.  And neither ‑‑ because there was a very strong, conservative Christian community in these ‑‑ around the schools we were teaching.  And we both felt kind of funny about this.  Neither of us was particularly deity-oriented.
RL:	Was your wife Presbyterian, too?
JE:	She was Brethren.  She was Evangelical United Brethren, which have since, I guess, merged with the Methodists.  And there's a ‑‑ and the Brethren part of it were the peace church, but she was – she wasn't any [words unclear]. But our senior year we started going to Quaker Meeting because we were in this whole draft thing, and what should we do with the war on and so on.  So we felt we didn't want to have our little daughter baptized, because then there was a commitment to church and Christian theology and so on. But we probably should do something, because people felt there was – she wasn't real until we had a name ceremony.  So we sort of anticipated, we said, well, we're sort of Quakers, and Quakers don't have these particular ceremonies.  But we do have a naming ceremony, so we'll have a naming ceremony for her.  And we'll sit in silence in the Quaker tradition, and anybody who wants to share any feeling about parenthood and children and so on, we'll share.  We don't have a clergyman who will be in charge of this whole thing, there won't be any water on her head, in fact, she won't even be present.  If she's nice, she'll keep sleeping through this whole thing. And so we had a Quaker naming ceremony for our daughter, which was totally made up.  And there were at least six or eight clergy there, and, of course, they all rose and said things that they would say at baptisms so our little daughter was surely ushered into the life of religious responsibility.  But it was not theistic, it wasn't, you know, specifically Christian in any way.
Well, we were beginning to feel a little bit hypocritical about it if somebody would find out.  So when we did get back to Oberlin, and we were – I was working – we both were working on our master's thesis, we were reconnected with the Oberlin Quaker Meeting, which there were a few, maybe five or six Quaker couples, absolutely wonderful people.  The track coach was one of them and they were building – a builder there was one of them, and somebody else was working on medical instruments, and one was a schoolteacher.  Anyway, a very small sect, plus whatever student Quakers there were.
So we decided that, okay, we really are in the company of people that are Friends, so let's go through the – apply and become members of the Quaker Meeting.  So we formally became Quakers in grad school when we were in Oberlin, but it was, you know, by then we were – it was like asking your brother and sister to let you be Quakers, because you knew them so well.
RL:	Joe, was this an issue for your parents?
JE:	They were – it was interesting, because I hadn't realized quite where my parents stood on all this.  I knew they were unhappy with my becoming skeptical about God's existence.  And they both said, we both went through that, and we got out the other side and we believe in God, so there's a faith, so they were willing to see that. They were a little concerned with my willingness, I think, that maybe Communism had a little bit to it in terms of equality and sort of planning an economy for the general good, just because they – Communism was godless.  So that concerned them a bit. Ironically, my father probably was the first intellectual to trick me out of Christianity, which is – I don't think he realized at the time.  But in the little mission school we went to, we had to study the Bible, along with everything else, and it wasn't like today in the schools where you can't do it.  This was a mission school, and so whether you were Jewish or Muslim or Christian, you studied the Bible. And when we got to, I guess it was the 8th grade, my father taught Bible [word unclear] he knows at seminary.  And I was intrigued, because it was hardheaded stuff, you know, the text and all the early text, and we did Mark right before Luke, and had to get the data and all this kind of stuff.  And I was laughing – 
00:30:47
RL:	This is Side 2 of Tape 2 of the October 10, 2005 interview with Professor Joe Elder.
00:30:57
JE:	When I learned the New Testament hadn't been constructed for about 80 years after Jesus died, I thought, how can you take that seriously.  To assume that somebody, even 30 years later, remembered word for word what Jesus said in some kind of sequence is absurd.  And I suggested that to my father.  
RL:	Oh, my.
JE:	You know, and he said, well, it seems strange, but we believe that.  That's when I – and then I thought, oh, come on, Dad, you got to be smarter than that.  This is a reconstruction or a guess or who knows what, but the whole notion that Jesus said exactly this makes no sense.  Now I didn't come out quite directly.  My dad and I always had very cordial relations.  It had to be sort of a question and then he would answer it.
And his faith was so strong, and he was – surely, he had been through all these questions himself and had come out the other end.  But from that time on, I thought this is, this isn't true, or this isn't exactly true.  The point may be there, but the notion that this is literally God's word is one of the more absurd things I've been asked to believe.
So after that, I did something [words unclear] I was supposed to read the Bible, a chapter of the Bible every night.  This was something that you did.  I had a pencil, and I think I still have the Bible.  And I'd come to a section that struck me as absurd and either would cross it out or write absurd, you know, miracles, raising the dead, the blind seeing, all that stuff.  And so big chunks of the New Testament of my Bible were being sort of crossed out as just not, you know, it didn't make sense.  Telling people we imagine that a great teacher would raise the dead and do all these things, but that's – that will happen in anything, and don't take it seriously [word unclear]. So I guess the beginning to look at Christianity through the lens of a critical intellectual was the beginning of something, which then Harvey Goldberg and all sorts of people that say, you know, you got to ‑‑ you got to look at this stuff for what it is, and whatever we may have been given has to be held up and looked at with a fair amount of critical scrutiny. So one of the things I liked about Quakerism was that there was no confession of faith.  It was the – the fact that you met in silence meant that there was no prior commitment.  The fact that anybody who felt that they had some thought they wanted to share or a prayer or hymn or just an observation, they could do it.  The sense of a continuity that somebody would say something, and then you'd be on their wavelength, and then if something occurred to you or somebody else, you might share it or somebody else would. The fact that all the decisions were made in unanimity, so that you never had a minority and met with a problem that, well, let's just vote.  It's 9-to-1, sorry 1, you lost on this one.  You had to struggle through until everybody agreed.  This was called sense of the meeting.  These were all things that I sort of liked positive, in addition to the fact I didn't have to believe in the Trinity or the resurrection of the body or any of the other things.
RL:	I did not realize that Quakers did not have – 
JE:	There's no creed at all.
RL:	– that creed and dogma and so forth.  I did not know that.
JE:	And there's a notion, it's called sometimes the continuing revelation, which is a fancy word for saying you are not obliged to hold to anything that's happened in the past if it strikes you as not being worthy of continuing. Now in the Catholic Church, the person that has a continuing revelation is the Pope, and he can make new pronouncements.  But in most traditions, there's the Scripture and there's the Sacred Text, and then you can try to interpret it.  But the notion that one could actually have a fresh insight to say I think this is more relevant than what's written there is not built into most religious traditions.  Whereas, the notion that a group of people focusing on something, you know, committed to truth may come up with something which is different from what's been in the past, and, therefore, you don't have to say, well, we have never done it in the past, or we've always done it in the past, therefore, we have to do it, that you can get a break with. So anyway, these were things, along with the fact that the Quakers I met were a combination of saints and really strange people, some very difficult people.  But the thrust was to nonviolent action.  The thrust was a commitment to the value of people, the notion that there was something sacred in each person.  It's kind of a basic philosophy, and that I felt very comfortable with.
00:35:26
So we're now in Oberlin.  I love teaching.  I worked terribly hard on the courses I had.  I never – I hadn't been a TA – well, I had been a teaching assistant, but that was just grading papers.  I never had a course to set up.  And I went to Oberlin, having had a job in the summer to earn money in India, and our third son was born – our third child was born while I was in India. Came back.  We moved to Oberlin from Dayton, where I had been living with my wife's family.
RL:	Did you have your Ph.D. at this point?
JE:	I have a Ph.D., yeah, in 1959, I think that's what it says here.
RL:	Okay.  So you got your Ph.D., and then you went back to Oberlin to teach.
JE:	That's right, yeah.
RL:	Okay.
JE:	I missed that.  The first – I got my – in the spring of '59, when the Ph.D. was in hand, the dissertation was done, I had contacted the faculty members back in Oberlin and said, I'm going to need a job.  Market, do you know anyplace I might apply?  And they got back and said, well, we have a vacancy in Oberlin itself.  Would you be interested in applying to Oberlin?  And I thought, well, that was extraordinarily – 
RL:	Fortuitous.
JE:	 –fortuitous, right.  So I went to Oberlin on a job hearing, you know, the trial.  Made one of my worst mistakes in terms of ever being interviewed, which was we had dinner in the Oberlin Inn.  And they had something called guinea fowl, or something like that, which I never had, so I ordered it.  Have you ever eaten a guinea fowl?
RL:	I never have.
JE:	It comes complete with ribs and wings.  It's about that big.
RL:	Oh, my.
JE:	And I was trying to answer questions, and pick away at this miserable little carcass, you know.  And if I had, I sort of put a little wing in my mouth, next time get meatloaf.
RL:	Or maybe don't eat at all.
JE:	That's right.  So here was this big mess I was working on, trying to [word unclear] anyway, these were old friends of mine.  I'd been in classes with each of them, and I admired each one in their own way.  So it was great fun to be hired back in Oberlin.
I would have liked to have found a place where there was a place I could teach India, because by now I had this South India experience and spoke Hindi.  I had want – it was really sort of an interesting idea of using the knowledge of another part of the world to teach.  And Oberlin was very generous.  They said, well, we can certainly give you a course on India, and maybe once in a while a seminar to do, but we do have to do the meat and potatoes, you know, the theory and the [word unclear] sociology, because it was a small, it was a four-person department or something like that. So I did teach a course called Civilization of India, on which I drew from the Dan Engels' course that I had had.  And then soc theory, which I was in the middle of with Talcott Parsons was the great theoretician, but it meant I had to do a lot of theory that I hadn't done, because everybody – everything in Oberlin – in Harvard was Talcott Parsons.  So I just worked like a dog that first year. I remember sitting down the week before classes started and listing, I guess, 3 lectures a week, 15, so 45 lectures, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 45.  We're going to give an exam every six weeks, and what we'd talk about every single lecture.  And I did that for all the courses that I was going to teach.  I had nothing to start with.  And it was just, you know, after supper, put the kids to bed, and then go to the office and try to figure out what on earth are you going to say that was intelligent the next morning at 9:00 or next morning at 11:00. It was a pace that you could keep up, but not for very long.  Fortunately, I had two sections of introductory, so I could take the same lecture for those two, but there was always another class.  So every night I had either a whole new lecture, and once a week two new lectures, starting with a blank piece of paper.  That was hard.
RL:	Wow.  Yes.  You were working quite hard that year.
JE:	I was working harder than I'd ever worked as a grad student or anything, plus the feedback, plus the exams and all the rest.  And I liked it, I mean really liked it.  A moment would come when you're working on a lecture and you'd suddenly see that's how to do it, here's the main point, here's what leads up to it.  But often it was later at night than you wanted it to happen.
RL:	And, Joe, were writing out your lectures or were you doing an outline?
JE:	Outline, yeah.  At that point, it was just an outline.  And I was always terrified that I wouldn't have enough for the 50 minutes.  And so my usual thing would be to keep one eye on the clock and one eye on my outline, and then often I'd end up with a little bitty bit left over because I was just being too cautious. But it was – it paced myself.  If hadn't done – listed the lectures, I had all the titles there, I'm not sure how I would ever have gotten through the whole year.
RL:	Did you like teaching right off the bat or did you have to grow into it?
JE:	It's very ego satisfying.  It's dangerous, it really is.  Because, you know, they sit there taking notes like what you're saying is important, and it takes you a while to get used to that.  They'll ask you questions that will hit you right between the eyes. I will never forget, I think it was – we had classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.  Oberlin went until noon on Saturday.  And I think it was almost either my first or second Saturday morning, and most of us in the world think you shouldn't be working on Saturday morning, and I was making some statement about correlation and causation are two different things. And a student named Debby Melcher said, what's the difference?  And it occurred to me, I had no clue.  I don't know what the answer is.  And I said something, I couldn't say nothing.  I thought what is the difference?  I mean, if it always correlates, doesn't that mean some sort of – anyway, these were the kinds of questions which you would think at some point in grad school you'd have to [word unclear] their philosophy of science and all this kind of stuff.
So I found myself being sort of my best teacher, because there would be these things that would hit me, and then I'd say, oh.  I read an enormous amount of philosophy and philosophy of science, which I had never touched anywhere along the line, you know, what does establish causation and what are the logical links and so on. And I thrived on the fact that people would give me these theory courses, because there you are dealing essentially with ideas and conceptualization and so on.  And the fact that I had studied with Talcott Parsons meant that people assumed I was a theorist, not realizing that after I put that box up there, I could be very much with it.  But all this other stuff was great fun.
00:42:13
So I was still in the first semester in Oberlin when Henry Hart got in touch with me, whom I had never heard of.  And Henry called up one night and said Wisconsin was starting a program in South Asian studies, and he described a little bit the area center idea of Sputnik can get up there, and now federal money was going to be available for language centers and stuff.  And Wisconsin was trying to bring together historians and political scientists and anthropologists so there would be a nexus, and then do some language stuff. Well, it was like somebody saying, Joe, heaven has just knocked.  This is exactly what I had been looking for.
RL:	Why did Henry contact you?
JE:	I have no idea, except Henry was looking for a sociologist and they were – 
RL:	Had he read your dissertation?
JE:	I think probably he may have heard of it.  You'll have to ask Henry that.  I don't know.  That's a good question.
RL:	It's very interesting.
JE:  	Because there were almost none of us doing India at that time.  There was just the first crop coming through.  Everybody else was going to London, the School of Oriental and African studies, or London University.  Berkley was beginning ‑‑ this is ‑‑ I began teaching in '59, so this would have been the fall of '59, and the money had just become available because of Sputnik for universities to set up what we called national, national cultural language resource centers, or something like that. And not just India.  It was to be China, it was to be South East Asia, it was to be Africa, and so on.  And NDEA, National Defense Education Act [word unclear] money.  The sort of thing the Ford Foundation had been doing in a pioneering way now was being conducted by the federal government with the notion this is serious. So once again, it was sort of sheer good luck that money was going to come, and part of, if the money was to be, was to hire faculty who were interested in keeping the area component.  So I came here in the winter, by now it's '60.  Coldest day I'd ever lived in, it was probably only about ten below, but it was unlivable.
RL:	Wisconsin was still cold.
JE:	That's right, you're right.  And there was faculty even wearing, you know, parachute boots and stuff like that, and parkas.  And I thought, this isn't civilized, a bunch of Eskimos.  And I remember still, I was staying in the old Memorial Union where there were some guest rooms.  And I remember coming out and just hitting this cold air, hitting it, people can't live in this climate. But there wasn't so much here as a potential.  There were a few sort of visiting Indians, somebody was teaching a course on Gandhi, and Henry was doing something on the civilization of India, but it was the potential of bringing in the historians and the political scientists, and getting something going that was just truly exciting, and the language training. So when the offer ‑‑ and the soc department was very good.  I guess the real attraction was the fact that I could teach India stuff.  I wasn't aware at that time, and the department wasn't that good at that time, it was probably eighth or ninth in the country, that now it's been number one.
RL:	Which department?
JE: 	The sociology department.
RL:	Sociology, okay.
JE:	Yeah.  There was a chairman named Howard Becker, who was a pretty painful person to work with.  The morale was bad and so on.  And he died before I met him, and almost everybody in the soc department that I met said you have no idea what a much nicer place it is without Howard Becker here. I remember talking with at least one grad student who said that he had been traumatized by Howard Becker.  That Howard Becker was a dictator, and you read his book, and you talked from his book, and so on.  And this grad student, I felt like I was talking with a person who had been released from a concentration camp. But anyway, the soc department was good, obviously, but it was the India thing that I found really attractive, because there was almost no place that I could follow up my India interests.  The only two centers that existed at that time were Cornell and Penn, and they each had a sociologist.  And so that guy wasn't going to retire for another 25 years, and otherwise I'd be doing what I did in Oberlin, you know.  Once every second semester I'd teach something on India, but otherwise it would be standard meat and potato that sociologists make a living at.
00:46:35
RL:	Joe, can I interrupt and ask you to speculate on what it was about Wisconsin?  You know, I had an interview with Harold Scheub, and I'm doing Daniel Kunen.
JE:	All right.
RL:	And they're both talking about how early Wisconsin was to develop a program in African languages.
JE:	Right.
RL:	Wisconsin, out of the entire United States, Wisconsin.
JE:	Right.
RL:	Now you're saying the same thing about Indian studies.
JE:	Right, um-hum.
RL:	What is it?  What was it?  What is it about the University of Wisconsin that allows for that?
JE:	It's probably a couple of key people, because the resources were out there, suddenly the announcement was made by the federal government.  But also, I think administrators.  I think, my sense is that it was the Henry Hart/Harrington combination.
RL:	President Harrington?
JE:	President Harrington.  I'm trying to think of who was president before him.  But the feeling Henry gave me was that the administration was looking around for money to do creative things, and here comes the word.  Sputnik has shown the U.S. is in bad shape in terms of high tech and in terms of knowledge of the rest of the world.  Money is going to be out there for those universities to move in and organize themselves, so they can hire faculty and become resource centers. And Henry was, I think, a friend of Harrington.  I'm sure there was somebody in the African studies program who also was aware of this, because these were big bucks, you could hire faculty, to supplement to whatever you had in your regular department. So it was like saying, here's free money.  And the trick is, they're going to come in as anthropologists but they'll know India, or they'll come in as historians and they'll know Africa, or they'll come in as sociologists and they'll know India.  And so it was just a real, you know, a lot of sweetness coming in.
But somebody had to be there with a receptor, as an administrator, and then somebody with the ability to say, well, here are three of us who knew Africa.  Let's come up with a proposal to have an African studies center.  So Henry played a key part with whoever the Sanskritist was here at that time, and the two of them, with I think administration help, put together the proposal that Wisconsin had Sanskrit and had political science, and if you could bring in the historians and others, Wisconsin would be a good place to have a center.
RL:	It just continues to fascinate me how this really midrange state, Wisconsin, has this university what leads the vast majority of other universities in groundbreaking work.
JE:	Right.
RL:	And has for decades.
JE:	Yeah.
RL:	I was just interested in your observations.
JE:	Yeah.  I think you can spot the people who did it, but it's – and the climate is very good for that, as you mentioned.  I know in the sociology department I picked up the theme very quickly that one reason that they built themselves to be number one, or whatever one was, they were either at the very top or near the top, was that they would go for the best young person they could find at any point, rather than picking a star someplace and trying to bring them here. So big name comes and comes with a couple of grad students.  That often backfires, because the big name made their glory someplace else and now they've got to come and sit on their laurels and want funds. Whereas, you get a bright young person, and give them space to run, give them time off so they get their publications, and you've got all this energy down there, which is relatively low cost.  And if they make it through, they may be loyal and choose to stick around here.
RL:	It's interesting.
JE:	Yeah.
00:50:16
RL:	It's really very interesting to me.  So you – Henry offered you a position in the winter of 1960 to come here.
JE:	Yeah.  Probably the phone call came in February or something like that, but I was – I had been bitten by the bug when I came here.  So I was just finishing my first semester at Oberlin, and I had a two-year contract in Oberlin.  So I said, look, I'm – I'll stay in Oberlin until I sort of round out my contract, which Henry had no objection for. And in the second year I was in Oberlin, everybody knew that I was only going to be there for that second year, and I was already sort of beginning to be attracted to things I was hearing about Marshall Clinard, who was a criminologist here, and in time he did some work on India.  And Henry Hart was here.  I met Dean Boardman, who was in East Asian studies, he was a Quaker, so there was obviously, you know, a number of things going here.
00:51:20
So we moved here in the summer of '61, and Henry had set up two things that made it instantly attractive.  One was that I had pay for the summer, and he had set up a program where there were, I think, four or five of us with area specialties who met once a week at a faculty seminar to talk about nationalism and identity. Jan Vansina from Africa, I was from India, and some guy from Berkley who was doing China, and then he was there.  And the whole issue of how do you build nationalism, how do you prevent nationalism from being super nationalism so that it absorbs the stuff.  And there was just, you know, we would have each other read things and then we would talk about it.  Well, that could never happen in a place like Oberlin. Then I had to settle in the library, got my first article put together so I could start publishing, because I had not been set up to do very much publishing when I was in Oberlin, and that had to be a shift in gears coming here.  And then the teaching, I had a couple of courses I could fall back on, so that was easier, and then new courses that I could teach.  So it was just great to be here.
RL:	When you first came, though, you were just in sociology?
JE:	No, I was two-thirds sociology, one-third what was called Department of Indian Studies.
RL:	Okay.  Right off the bat.
JE:	Right off the bat, yeah.  So there were various things.  There was a Center for South Asia, which has a federal funding, and its job is to make sure that things happen, courses are taught, visitors come, seminars are held.  And it can take some of its money to pay for faculty. And then there was a Department of Indian Studies which had to have enough integrity for deans to say, yes, you can give a BA in this and a MA and a Ph.D.  And so that requires faculty input in courses and all the rest. And Henry had done the bulk of the work on that as well, so there was a Department of Indian Studies, then there was the Center for South Asia.  And the center could take the federal money and pay bits and pieces of salaries, especially sweeteners, to get somebody here for a couple years, and then have the history department pick them up after that or whatever.  So Henry was just a very good organizer of getting this stuff together. So while I was here, all kinds of exciting people were coming in, the ground – the first team sort of here.  Richard Robinson came in, who was a Canadian, who was a Buddhologist.  I had never met a Buddhologist.  And he knew Tibetan and Chinese and Japanese, and a bunch of things.
Bob [Fricktenberg?] came here in the history department, and Bob had been a missionary kid in Andra Pradesh, so he spoke Telugu from there.  Then I enjoyed having people teaching Hindi classes.  I mean, there were linguists that – oh, yeah, Bill McCormick was here, the Canadian linguist, and he was doing stuff  with Indian languages.  So we just, you know, here was a feast, just have fun with it.
00:54:14
The very first year I was teaching, which was '61-'62, another feature that I found attractive was the study abroad program.  I'd heard that there was a study abroad program that Wisconsin had, and Henry implied that there was something in place, they were working on it. I arrived here.  I got very busy with my classes.  And then second semester I was teaching the course on Civilization of India Modern Period, and I told the class, I think there may be a study abroad program that Wisconsin is running, would anybody be interested in finding out.  And there were four or five who said, oh, sure, sure, we can study in India.
So I went to Henry and said, do we have a – do we actually have a program.  And he got this kind of funny look in his eye and said, well, yeah, we, we do have five students in India right now.  And I said, well, how's it going?  He said, we probably should find out.  It turned out that Henry, in all the stuff that he was doing, had decided there was a little bit of money.  He knew people in the Carnegie Foundation, and it was fairly easy to get money for things in India, the Ford Foundation and so on. So he had gotten some money and the idea, why don't we pick five BAs from different places in Wisconsin and give them a free year in India.  And they put this together, and they had gotten a couple from Beloit and somebody from Lawrence and somebody from [word unclear], and had given them essentially a year fellowship to travel to India and do some language training and sort of whatever else they could do.  It was incredibly unorganized. Well, there were these five people in India, these five students, and when I asked is there going to be a program for next year, Henry said, well, we probably should find out how this year went.  And so again looking back, he and Jerry Kelly, who was a linguist in the linguistics department and was chair of the department, Henry was director of the center, had lunch with me in the faculty club. And as I look back on it, it was the old pincer movement, one side, one side, and here's assistant professor in the middle.  And they were going to talk about the program.  So I said, well, does it exist and will there be a program next year?  And they said, well, we probably could get the money, but we should also find out how this last year went.  And Henry says, well, I can't go, and Jerry says, I can't go.  And this is about three weeks before spring break, to get how late in the year it was.
RL:	Oh, my.
RL:	So I said, well, I probably could go.  Oh, okay, why don't you go over and find out what happened to these five students.  So I left as early as I could and I spent my week in India.  Found these five.  Each had had a horrible year in terms of illness, lack of direction, frustration, sense of being abandoned, it was terrible. Henry had set up – Henry had set it up in conjunction with the Delhi School of Social Work, because he knew the director of the school.  And the school had internships where you'd work in orphanages, you'd work in women's homes or something like that, and the idea was that these students could do some sort of fieldwork project for this.  But it was much too complicated.
So for most of them, after they had gotten there and they decided they didn't like their Hindi teacher and had dismissed her, they were very much on their own to do whatever they could.  And when I was there, in by now March I suppose, they had mostly found something, but it was very, very improvised and not academically tight at all.
So with each one I would say at the end, well, it sounds to me as though we should just shut this down.  This is, you know, you had a horrible year, and we should apologize for the fact we sent you out the way we did with so little guidance.  And everyone said, no, no, India is fantastic.  If we can just work something out, but we just, you know, didn't have the right combination, we got sick and all the rest. So I came back with that report, and Henry was able to call somebody in the Carnegie Corporation and get money so that that late in the semester we could announce that I think 15 people can go, more or less with most of their expenses paid, on a fairly serious year in India program.  And it was going to involve language training in the summer, and then they go to three different institutions in India and enroll in classes in those institutions. And I was going to be in India that year on a research grant, I could sort of monitor what was going on.  So the pieces seemed to fall together.  We selected the – 
RL:	And you were able to get three universities to cooperate in that short a time period?
JE:	Between Delhi's ‑‑ with Henry's kind of knowing the Delhi School of Social Work, so we already had one year there.  Dick Robinson was [words unclear] university, and he was on staff there.  And Delhi, and Henry knew somebody in a Muslim institution that was near the Delhi School of Social Work. But this was, you know, when I think of the day of e-mail and [word unclear], this was, would you be able to take some students.  Sure, we'll take some students [words unclear] very, very from the hip. So we had the language training.  I got to those students.  We all got out to India sort of the end of August, I guess it was.  And I got them to their separate institutions, and felt now they're in place, they have their language teachers, they have what they're supposed to do.  They were all supposed to do independent research projects, and now I'll get on to my research, which was to be in Lucknow, which was not where any of these were.  Well, to make a long story short, I didn't get any research done – 
RL:	I'll bet.
JE:	Until about March.  Just every possible thing went wrong not once, but multiple times.  
RL:	Was your family with you, too?
JE:	Yes.  Not only my family, we now had three kids, and my mother-in-law was with us.  So we had a whole sort of unit there.  We had – I had a research grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and this was almost the first year it was set up.  Subsequently, I became president of the institute.  I was one of the first [word unclear] to go on. And among other things, they were trying to figure out how to handle the taxes.  And in January I got a letter saying, I'm sorry, but we've discovered that the tax is so high on your fellowship that you aren't going to get any more money from now, because all of it has to be paid in taxes.
RL:	Really.
JE:	Wife, mother-in-law, three kids.  How do I get back to the States?  It was very much wilderness out there.  Finally, they worked something out, because it was a joke, you know, we're not going to get any money anymore. But I learned a lot about trying to set up a study abroad program, and all the things that can go wrong, and all the things that can go right.  So it worked out, most of the students had a year they could feel somewhat responsible for.  That they could learn something.  They wrote fieldwork projects, most of them.  Most of them got moderately good with language. And in the meantime, since it was sort of working, Henry was able to get some more money here and get the next group going, so that there – the class of – I was with the class of '62-'63.  The class of '63-'64, Henry kind of super – 
01:01:42
[End of Tape 2]
RL:	This is Tape 3, Side 1 of the October 10, 2005 interview with Professor Joe Elder.
00:00:10
JE:	So we were now rolling, in the sense that we had a pattern.  We realized we had to have a faculty member over there all the time.  That year was not all that successful, but we were going in the right direction. We had a Telugu campus that time.  That one of my projects, when I was there on my research leave, was to go to Hyderabad, because Wisconsin had decided to teach Telugu as one of the non-Hindi languages.  And so I found faculty at Osmania University, and there was a professor of BH, Christian [Morti?], who was a linguist and did Telugu, so we kind of linked up there.  And between some of us overseas and some of us in Wisconsin, we were able to do the recruiting and the advertising, and all the rest. Why not follow up on the year, on the year [word unclear] because that became increasingly significant over the years?
RL:	Sure.
JE:	Finding a faculty member who could take time out and recruiting students was a pretty complicated kind of venture.  Almost none of my colleagues, including myself, wanted to be a faculty member over there, because you're not going to get anything done, seriously.  I was able to get my research done, but only after the students cleared out, and I worked like a beaver from about March until August to get a year's research done so that I could say I had accomplished more or less what I wanted.
RL:	Faculty didn't want to do it because it was babysitting?
JE:	Babysitting, and they couldn't do research.  You know, they're answering mail and taking people to the hospital and, you know, stool samples, all that kind of stuff that comes with that.  So none of my faculty members wanted to do that.  And if I'd have known it was going to be that much babysitting, I wouldn't have been keen to do it myself.  I believed in study abroad, but for somebody else. But we were lucky to find people.  The first one was an ex-missionary named Bob Holmes.  And so Bob came on, and he was the overseas faculty member for a number of years.  He had a Ph.D., but it wasn't – his real interest was not in any kind of research.  He subsequently went over to be – went on to become the head of the Fulbright program, which having shown that he could administer an undergraduate program, he could administer a major program.
Then we found faculty from Berkley, we found faculty from Rhode Island, we found faculty from Wesleyan College.  And some were better and some were worse, and one was slightly fraudulent.  One took money that wasn't his.  But, and it was okay until 1971, okay.
00:02:49
Bangladesh War breaks out.  The U.S. takes a hostile position to India.  India is aware that the CIA is all over.  The feeling is the CIA is all over the place, and that India is being played with by the United States and the Soviet Union and everybody else.  So in '72, I guess it was, the summer of '72, they announced essentially that they were giving no visas for students until they completely revamped the visa process. So we lost one of our classes.  We selected the students.  They were taking language training in this summer in Chicago.  We had a letter from the government of India saying that our program had approved for a number of years.  We watched the Fulbright go down.  We watched the Peace Corps get expelled, watched all this other going.  We held on to that letter.  And then early in August of '72, we got the message that letter means nothing.  Your Wisconsin students are not going to go to India until we come up with a new regulation. And that was one of a few heartbreaking moments I've had, because these students had worked all summer of Hindi or Telugu, cramming, getting ready, and now the summer was in a sense wasted. So the program shut down.  In November the new guidelines came out.  And among other things, they said you could not have an American director.  The students had to be enrolled in regularly given Indian courses.  You weren't going to superimpose something, come in with, you know.  And then something else, I think about the way money was processed. Anyway, we took one look at that and said, we can't keep the program going as it was.  We can't send faculty members over there.  It has to an Indian director.  The only programs I knew of that had Indian directors had had very, very bad luck.  Worcester College in Ohio had hired an Indian director, and the pressure on him from his family was just overwhelming, and the money was grossly misspent.  Ended up building a house and doing all kinds of things.  It was a disgrace and a huge embarrassment on everyone. And we didn't know anybody that could handle American students who was, you know, in a position to do it.  And here's where Joan [Raduva?] comes in, you know, to sort of reverse the play.  
RL:	Oh, okay.
JE:	Joan had been on the program the year before, and she and John had sort of become, John Grace, had become a couple.  John had been there for, sort of representing a faculty member from Wesleyan, but he knew the Wisconsin program.  And so they were ‑‑ we were in touch with each other watching the program collapse. John was willing to go back to India and take care of the furniture and books and odds and ends and things.  So we paid him to go and just put things in order so that ‑‑ the program that we thought was going to be in place wasn't in place.  And then he came back, and then came the bad news.  It looked as though we had to shut down the program, because we couldn't send faculty members.  
00:05:54
And John and Joan came up with this idea, well, why don't we have graduate students go and be the monitors of the program rather than directors of the program.  In the Indian context, a monitor is a student among students who is left to keep the class quiet while the teacher's out of the room. So in this case, it would be a student observing other students, so it wouldn't be a director and, therefore, we wouldn't be in violation of the Indian regulations.  It would be somebody who would be in the employ of the University of Wisconsin and would know American standards.  And furthermore, since they would be low cost employees, we could have a graduate student on each of the campuses where we had students.  So instead of having the problems go to Delhi where the person was, and then maybe he'd come down, you'd have on-the-spot grad student like a project assistant or TA. So we took that in to the dean, and he looked at us like we were both, all three of us were high on marijuana.  He couldn't believe that we were serious.  Look, we wouldn't send to students to Florence with a graduate student, I mean, all this stuff they can handle, and law cases, and somebody gets hurts or somebody dies.  But this was Mulvihill, who was dean at that time, but somehow he bought into the idea, because I think he saw Joan and John and saw them as responsible.  Sure, they were graduate students, but they were ‑‑ you know, the Peace Corps at that time had directors who were 23 years old, and stopped the notion of you don't have to, you know, be in your 50s before you're directors. So he finally said, okay, I will get permission for this to be done, but on condition that if and when things go wrong, Joe, you drop everything here and get out there, because we are liable up to our ears if something happens, and parents are told, well, yeah, we have two graduates students out there.  So that was the arrangement that we had.  And John and Joan were appointed students monitors and, therefore, they had to get student visas.  They weren't directors, and so we weren't in violation of the Indian regulations.  And we were able to open up the program after a one-year hiatus.
RL:	So that would be in '73.
JE: 	'71 ‑‑ '72-'73 was the year we lost.
RL:	Right.
JE:	And then '73-'74 it opened again.  And then, to make a long story short, that was the model that made it possible to open it up on a series of campuses.  So over the years, we've had graduate student monitors on the Telugu campus, the Hindi campus, the Tamil campus, and these would be short-term.  They may be gone for one or two years.
Most of them were incredibly diligent.  This was the first serious job they had, and the budgets responsibility.  I think we can say probably we got better service out of graduate students than we did out of the faculty couples who often had kids and wanted to go to school or vacation and this sort of thing.  And for the student monitors, this was their life.
RL:	And is this the model that's in place to this day?
JE:	This has been the model up until literally last year.  And over the years, we've had probably 20 or 25 monitors in different locations.  But John and Joan were the first, and they proved that it could be done. We ended it this last year.  We had the last student monitor last year, because the rules are still the same but now we found Indian faculty who are thoroughly familiar with the U.S. system.  They have their degrees from the U.S. and Ph.D.s from the U.S., and so they know what they're doing.  So what we couldn't do back in '72 we now can do, and it's a new scheme.  But the graduate student monitor entity was what held the whole thing together all these years.
RL:	Interesting.  It's just, well, it's just very impressive that you were able to pull it off.
JE:	And just as the Peace Corps found that you don't have to be all that old to administer a program, these were usually selected from the students who had been there before.  So this was like picking the best of the crop, and it was ‑‑ and we often have three or four people apply who want to be the monitor two or three years down the track, so we had this constant stuff in there, and it was a feather in the cap to be selected as the one that was going to go back and be the big brother/big sister for the next batch of students who were over there.
00:10:28
RL:	Joe, would you say that your involvement with this program, foreign exchange of students studying in India, has been closest to your heart of your work here on campus?
JE:	It would be very wrong to say that, I guess.  I certainly have put in a huge amount of time and a very little sense of regret.  You never know when something is going to go wrong.  You're always frustrated that students don't do as well as they'd like to do, and you sometimes groan that they have genitals and stuff like that, I mean ‑‑ you wish they'd never heard of marijuana.  I mean, they do really stupid things. But through the whole mess, there have been some absolutely wonderful, very bright students.  And now they're all over the place.  The one we point to with greatest pride is Diana Eck.  Diana Eck has been a professor of Sanskrit in Harvard for a bunch of years, and she has a worldwide reputation.  She's in great demand as a lecturer and so on. And she went as a junior from, I think it was Smith College, and the story there is kind of interesting, because the students, we went through the period where students didn't want to do anything if the faculty said so, including fill out forms and stuff.  And I think this is correct, that the year we ‑‑ she was started in the program.  We made a clerical error and we missed instructing her to go to Boston to be interviewed by me.  And so we got down to the end line, and here were all the people I'd met, and these were approved and these weren't, and here was this one person that we just failed to send the letter to.  And we had no good reason to turn her down, and so we let her in without ever being interviewed.  Later on, she said if she had gotten a letter saying go to Boston and meet a Wisconsin faculty member to see if he thinks you're the right person to go to India, I would have said, forget it, I'm not going to go to Boston to meet this guy I never met. So anyway, she came on.  She was good, but didn't look brilliant particularly.  Did a fascinating fieldwork project, with all the wrong assumptions that I had when I was out there, you know, Hindus can't do this kind of thing.  She talked to I think five professionals on her thesis.  How could you be an engineer, a nuclear physicist, a physician, and a leading judge, and still be a Hindu with this notion of reincarnation and life after, life after life and stuff?  Well, she learned the same way I did, that there's no problem.  It all can be fitted in perfectly well.  
And her conclusion was that they can be just as modern in terms of the way they look at technology and commitment to democratic principles and the rights of humans and all the rest, and Hinduism is just another kind of shade or color in terms of how they interpret it.  It doesn't block [words unclear] feeling you must stop being Hindus to be engineers, any more than a person would have to stop being a Christian or a Jew in order to be a nuclear physicist or an astronomer or something like that.  So a basic simple insight, when you stop and think of it, but it has to be – each one of us sort of has to find this out for herself. And then she went on to be – you know who she is, to write the definitive book on the City of Banaras.
RL:	Really?
JE:	Yeah.  It's a huge thing, and it's been a bestseller.  If anybody wants to know about Banaras, it's Diana Eck's book on Banaras.  She called me at one point, because the publishers wanted to spell Banaras B-E-N-A-R-E-S, which is the way the British did it.  And she was fighting against them, saying she wanted it to be spelled the way it's spelled in India, which is B-A-N-A-R-A-S, which is the way it's spelled in India.
	And I said, Diana, you're absolutely right.  Just don't give in, because if it's 
B-E-N-A-R-E-S, everybody will assume that this is a foreign, a British profile.  You're misspelling it the way the British misspelled it, and it's going to start off on the wrong foot.  Well, I'm not sure if I was critical in there, but it came out Banaras, B-A-N-A-R-A-S.  And it's ‑‑ I don't think there's anybody in the world who [word unclear] is the definitive book.  She went back again and again and again, and just got all the stuff about the pilgrimages and all that.  Well, we have ‑‑ I can probably name ‑‑ 
RL:	Yeah, name some of the other.
JE:	Okay.  Susan Wadley.  Susan Wadley went on the program the year after ‑‑ the year Henry – in '62, no, '63, the year I missed. So I didn't meet her on the program.  She's now dean in Syracuse.  She's been head of the anthropology department.  She's published a storm of stuff on this, and has trained a whole battery of people who sort of had gone through the Susan Wadley program. There are two more people who have been teaching in Harvard, Rich Wolf has been doing ethnomusicology.  I'm trying to think of the name of his wife.  I know she's been the Hindi teacher there.  Anyway, they're, you know, they're up and around all over the place.  Because if you get somebody bright and into the language and then started off on a career, they can very often just build on it and go as far as they want.  And that's a lot of fun, too. We had this South Asia conference this last weekend, and it was almost like the feeling of Mr. Chips, with, you know, person after person coming up, Joe, how are you doing?  One guy, Rich Wolf, said, you really got to see my kid.  And he made – he found me in the dining hall, and he brings his kid in and started showing me his kid.  This is Oliver.
RL:	So it has to be of enormous satisfaction to you.
JE:	Oh, it is.  It's all the kind of feelings you would think you would get in a small college that, you know, you know them so well, not only by name but you knew them as undergraduates, then they worked with you as graduate students and so on.  And the fact that they were all over the place means that the bond is a very personal one.  It's not quite so much an institutional one as it was a one-on-one.
00:16:32
RL:  	Joe, I want to ask you about the story that Henry Hart told me about some student over there who had been arrested for possession of marijuana.  And you went over there or were you there, I've kind of forgotten, he said, and it was sort of a misunderstanding and somewhat of entrapment.  But Henry Hart said that you advocated for the student up to the point of saying that if he got kicked out of the program, you were going to leave the program.
JE:	Yeah.
RL:	Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
JE:	I can.  Henry exaggerated a little bit, but the principle is there.  One of the students went to Kathmandu, found that he could buy marijuana relatively inexpensively at Kathmandu and come back and sell it for quite a lot in India.  And he was trying to get money, because he had a girlfriend, I think, in Israel or something like that. So he came back with a couple kilos of marijuana, walked straight into an entrapment situation.  There was a guy there who was sort of approaching people from Nepal, as though he were [words unclear].  So Michael was thrilled to find somebody who was about to buy it.  And he got in the car, and went to the police station [words unclear] marijuana, he said he had it, it was his. And the story that we got was they stripped all his clothes off to make sure he wasn't hiding any, where he spent a very cold, miserable, scary night in a jail in Delhi.  And then the faculty member was contacted who was out there, who then informed us that the student had been arrested and he was guilty all the way, and would be given a trial, and could very likely be jailed for six months or kicked out of the country, one way or the other. Well, my position was, again, how can they be so stupid.  He was the youngest of the team, and so one could sort of forgive him a little bit, and obviously a lot of people were getting away with it.  So he just happened to walk into the wrong person at the wrong person. Now the issue that came up was does he get kicked out the program.  And at that point, I think there was even a rule that if a student were discovered to be involved in drugs, they were kicked out of school, something a little bizarre, because my contention was that if you break the law, you break the laws, but it doesn't get you kicked out of school. So in the back and forth, I remember sending something, a cable [words unclear] let the police punish him, but let's continue to educate him, that was sort of my philosophy.  And at this point, one of the deans here said, but if he's found guilty of a drug offense, then we have to kick him out of school.  So I was trapped here with this notion.  So I'm trying to recall how – yeah, okay, now I remember how we did it.  So we technically disconnected him from Hyderabad, where he had been, arranged to have him take all directed study for the second semester, as though he ‑‑ as though he was on campus here.  He went to Banaras, finished the year there, and did stuff that he'd get credit, not so much as being on the Wisconsin program as being a student enrolled in the University of Wisconsin.
RL:	I see.
JE:	But the dean was really, really unhappy with this, because he had been aware that I had been dragging my feet all the way through this.  And to a certain extent, this was, you know, we said he's off the program, we'd taken care of that.  What we didn't say is we reenrolled him as a student here.  So he was able to finish his four years of college without a particular break.  And since then, he's just done fine. I don't recall ever having said that if he gets kicked out I will quit.  I don't think I would say that.  I would express as much resentment as I could, but it seemed to me it was pretty important for me to stay where I could be active.  And I think once I discovered that there was this way in which we could legally kick him out of the program but reinstall him, that ‑‑ and there's another faculty colleague who was working with me on this, Professor Dan [Madsen?], and we were both in the same corner and saying, okay, stupid kid, should be punished, but let's not wreck the year for him. And I still have the telegram that came after the trial.  He was found guilty.  He was eligible for six months in prison, and then we had written some letters saying it was a stupid kid and he should be punished, and I think he was scared, but please don't interfere – I mean, he's there to study.  And if it's any way possible for him to continue studying, we in the university would be extremely grateful for that.  And so whether that letter was or wasn't a critical factor, I don't know.  We sent it to the faculty member, who then showed it to the judge who was [word unclear].
So this letter was something like this, I still have it, saying completely, totally free, signed the student's name.
RL:	Oh, really.
JE:	After the trial.  So he didn't have to serve an prison time, and then he was able to take the credit as a, not a program student but as a Wisconsin student.
RL:	I think the point that Henry Hart was trying to make was that you really advocated for your students who were over there.
JE:	Oh, yeah.  Right.
RL:	And really to ensure the success of the program, and that's what I wanted to get.
JE:	Yeah, that's what I think he would say.  Okay, well, is that?
RL:	Yeah, no problem.
00:22:15
JE:	Over the years, we expanded the program with, you know, getting more and more students and adding more languages.  So for a lot of the time, we had a Hindi campus in Banaras, we had a Telugu campus in Hyderabad or Waltair, we moved it various places depending where students got the best language from, and then a Tamil campus in Madurai. And then in the 1980s, we opened up a campus in Kathmandu, and had a program in Nepal, where students have studied either Tibetan or Nepali.  And that was a whole other wing.  It was sort of ‑‑ John Hitchcock, the anthropologist who was here, was a Nepali specialist, and he had done an experimental semester in India where he went with a group of students back in '74.  But the more we thought about it, the more we felt, well, heavens, Nepal is just a wonderful place.  Maybe have a Buddhist studies program, there are a lots of Buddhists in Nepal. So John got the program going officially in 1980, and then he retired in '82.  And by then, since we had the program going and the model of India worked very well, I became the faculty coordinator for the Nepal program, which was the reason I spent more New Years in Kathmandu than any other place in the world.  Because every year what I'd do is, as soon as my first semester exams are turned in, I get on a plane and head out for the other side of the world to check up on the students, whom I met the summer before, often I helped select them, and then I met the summer before [words unclear].
RL:	So you go out every year?
JE:	That's right, yeah, and spend essentially between first and second semester touching base with the students.  That is truly rewarding, because you see the students when they come in not knowing the language at all, and you work with them during the summer for eight or ten weeks, orienting them and watching them get the feel of Telugu or Tamil or Nepali or whatever.  And then by the time you get there, most of them are able to negotiate fairly well in the language, and most of them are into their fieldwork projects. And the creativity of these characters, nobody wants to do the same thing everybody else did, and so they're looking for something offbeat, something that's different, something that's extremely hard, and it's just – it's the maraschino cherry on the dessert when you go over there and see what they're doing.  And they messed up and they get into trouble, and then we have faculty that aren't teaching, and we have all that kind of stuff, budgets, and the nonsense that comes with administering something. But the fun of just seeing where the students are and recognizing they still have four, five months to go before they're done, and then they're back in the States and their careers will forever be in a somewhat different trajectory because of what they did.  It's more reward than anyone deserves, I think.
RL:	Is the program in Kathmandu still in effect?
JE:	We closed it this year.
RL:	Oh, you did?
JE:	A couple months ago.  But I was there last winter, and the students were doing well.  We had had two students the year before, three last year, but we just couldn't keep the place up.  We have, you know, facilities, cooks, language teachers.  We were running in the hole $50,000 a year two years in a row.  We can't keep a program like that going.
So it's very sad, we closed it down.  We had a 25th anniversary for the Nepal program the weekend of the Fourth of July here in Madison.  We brought some of the Nepalis here.
RL:	Oh, you did?
JE:	And that was really fun.  Sitting around in a circle and having each person tell some anecdote about when I was there in '92-'93, and when I was there in '96-'97, well, when I was there in '89-'90.  Just great goodwill.  I'm sorry that we've had to shut it down, because it's not [words unclear].
RL:	So it wasn't the political turmoil over there that shut it down?
JE:	Indirectly, it was, because people, you know, parents didn't want their young people to go to an area the State Department kept issuing travelers' advisories. What you do when a country is threatened is difficult, and as countries have become more difficult, the Office of International Studies and Programs adopted different guidelines.  It used to be that if there were a traveler's warning as opposed to a traveler's advisory, then you'd shut down.  But we went through one where that happened, and then we regretted doing it. The government – and the U.S. government in the summer of '02, I guess it was, looked as though India and Pakistan might be going to do a nuclear war, and so they issued a traveler's warning, and we closed a summer program we have in [Carol?], and the students were here going through orientation.  Whereas sitting there, I knew that there was no threat of a nuclear war, but our principle was if it's a warning, we cancel it.  So we lost seven or eight people who were all set to go. Since then, as the warnings began to get tougher and tougher in Nepal, we said, let's not automatically assume that they're making the right judgment.  We'll use as much good evidence as we can.  We'll talk to the staff there, we'll talk to specialists.  We have somebody in the Brookings Institute and so on, and get multiple readings on whether this is really serious. And so we kept the program in Nepal going past a whole series of traveler's warnings with no danger.  But then last fall, the Peace Corps left and – 
RL:	Oh, it did?
JE:	Yeah.
RL:	Oh.
JE:	Under a sense of threat, shut down.  And then it was mostly just the budget thing.  We would have loved to have continued, the staff said we're happy to keep doing it, and there will always be two or three students willing to go, but you just can't run it at that kind of a loss. So we packed up the library, and sent the library to Banaras, with all the books tagged so that if and when the day comes we can go back to Kathmandu, we can identify the library and take it back up there.  Because after 20 years, you have a pretty good, highly specialized library on Nepal and Tibet and Buddhism, of the anthropology of the area and all the rest.
RL:	Are you going to continue with this program yourself or a member of – 
JE:	While I'm still active, I plan to do so, yeah, right.  I'm built in – I get one month's past 	salary for this, for the Office of International Studies and Programs.
RL:	Oh, you do.
JE:	So it's not entirely voluntary, but it's – I'd do it not getting paid.  
RL:	Well, you can restrict access to this tape, so nobody will hear that.
JE:	And for years, I did it without being paid.
RL:	Oh, really?
JE:	Yeah, I just was running it.  And somewhere along the line, one of the deans said, how come you have a faculty member traveling over there and spending all this time and you don't put him on salary somehow?  And my response was, well, we're trying to keep the cost down as low as you can.  And you toss in a one-month faculty salary and it means, you know, a few hundred more [words unclear]. But they were ‑‑ they have become much more professional over the years.  When we started the program, I think we may even have been the very first study abroad program going, and you saw how informal and from the hip it was when it started.  Oh, I think we have five people over there.  And then the French program and the German program. So sometime, probably in the late 1980s, there were regularizing this.  And they said, no, no, you should be paid for what you're doing, and I didn't kick and scream.  So it, you know, it's all year long, but then it's concentrated during the winter break when I'm over there working all the time on it.  And then in the summer, the business of working on the orientation and have the student summer campus doing language training and being oriented.
RL:	Do you see student interest in South Asia, in India and Nepal increasing or holding steady?
JE:	It's always there, yeah.  What's happened has been there are many more study in India programs than there were.  It used to be, when we were first going, that we – a student would write, I want to do studies someplace besides Europe, and yours was the only program I could find. Well, now we have 60 programs here in Africa and East Asia and Southeast Asia and so on, so we're not the only program on the block.  We're still, without any doubt, the most rigorous program.  We're the only one that lasts a year.  We're the only one that requires intensive language training during the summer.  
And so I think the quality of the experience is a whole jump higher than any of the others who'll have a semester, usually, and then you learn sort of emergency language while you're there, count to ten and where's the washroom and stuff, but not – 
00:30:39
RL:	This is Side 2 of Tape 3 of the Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder, October 11, 2005.
00:30:52
JE:	When we were wrapping up the talk yesterday, I was just about to say something about the way in which the college there in India was funded.  Since traveling to India is so expensive compared to traveling anywhere else, built into the program was a problem of how do you offer something which anyone can go on without being fairly rich.
Fortunately for us, actually fortunately for the study of India, the U.S. and India had gotten into a financial arrangement in the 1950s and 1960s which worked out to our advantage.  In the 1950s and 1960s, India did not have enough wheat, and so began to buy wheat from the Soviet Union and Australia and the United States.  The arrangement was made with India that any U.S. wheat that was sold would be paid for in rupees and paid essentially to the U.S. Embassy in India, so the money wouldn't flow out of India and lead to all sorts of deficits. So what happened was millions and millions, and eventually billions of dollars' worth of credit in rupees built up in the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, which could only be spent in India by projects approved by the U.S. Embassy.  So when the Peace Corps was there, the embassy paid for the in-country costs with these rupees that they had.  The embassy had paid for the Fulbright program, and also helped pay for various parts of the, sort of the centers that we were having. And with the money there, you could apply with an academic program.  And if you were approved, then you could receive rupees waiting for you in India to use for your project.  Well, once that came through, then I think that began probably in the late 1960s.  First of all, it was through the State Department and then it was through the Office of Education. We'd go in every year with our hand open.  There was a form we had to fill out, you know, a request, and the budget and how much was coming from Wisconsin and how much was tuition and so on.  And you could never say that this was paying a huge portion of it, but you could supplement it. So for many years, we were able to get rupee supplementary funding, which we would be in competition with other year abroad run programs and Fulbright programs and travel programs for teachers and stuff.  We almost never got all we asked for, but we got, you know, $50,000, $35,000, $70,000 each year, which helped keep the cost down for the students on the program. Well, these were called Public Law 480 rupees under the particular provision that the U.S. had.  And under one of the American ambassadors, half that loan was forgiven.  I think it was, the total was something like $5 billion which were sitting in rupees, and one of the ambassadors simply said, we'll cut it in half.  But there still was plenty of money for us.  And then in the late 1980s, the whole thing was terminated.  What was left was essentially canceled, and so there went that source of revenue which was very nice. It was also sort of peculiar, because the money was sitting in the Delhi embassy, and so we had these graduate students going out to pick up the funds.  And when you pick up, let's say they'd be picking up $50,000 worth of rupees.  Okay, you multiply that by, let's say, 30, which is how many rupees.  You're up to something like 150,000 rupees, which some graduate student is picking up in a duffel bag and carrying out of the embassy and feeling that there must crooks around and they're going clunk her or him over the head, and there it will all go.  It was not high-level banking at all.
RL:	Joe, did the embassy – did the ambassador make the decision as to where the money was allocated or – 
JE:	It went to the Cultural Affairs officer, the people who handle things like the Fulbright program.  The ambassador presumably knew about it, but he had much more important things.  The Cultural Affairs officer had to approve it, and then there was a screening committee of people in the Office of Education who would pass it on. So there were several steps that you went through, but ultimately it would be – you'd get a notification that this much – these many rupees were waiting for you, and then you had to indicate who was going to come by and pick it up and approximately what date.
RL:	But it wasn't a decision of the State Department, it was a decision of the embassy?
JE:	The Office of – the Cultural Affairs officer, who is an officer of the embassy, but his main task is cultural relations.  He would be the one over the Fulbright libraries, and he'd be the one to sit with the Fulbright programs.  He was in that dimension rather than the political end or the economic end.
RL:	So that person was a very important person to you?
JE:	That was, right.  And occasionally, it was actually a faculty member.  For a while, the Cultural Affairs officer would be a professor from Texas or someplace who was there and serving, serving as a State Department employee but also doing his or her own research, or he'd be some kind of civil servant who worked his or her way up the board. But it was an interesting kind of relationship, and it was reassuring to get that money, because it kept the prices down.  And also, it meant that in principle we were always being approved by the Indian government as well, because none of these projects could be funded if the Indian government rejected it.  So we had that sort of protection there.
And then the back protection was that the student visas had to be issued by the government of India, so that all the way along the line if the government of India had not wanted this to happen, there were two spigots that they could have turned to end it.
Well, the rupees dried up about 1986 or something, and I could immediately see the price going up probably $2,000 or $3,000 per student tuition.  And every time you do that, you realize you're losing the less advantaged students off the bottom end of it. But we were told that we could be competitive for dollar funding, we just would have much more, much tougher competition.  So long as there was rupees in India, we were competing only with programs that were in India.  And if we were competing with the regular dollars, it could be any kind of program anywhere. But we have been pretty consistently successful.  There's – under the Fulbright-Hays program, there is a group study abroad project, and it can go to various countries.  And we've sent our application in there, and almost every year we've been funded.  We keep trying to figure out some way to look like we're newer and doing something fresh and different, but the same crowd in Washington [words unclear] there. As the years have passed, there were initially a number of other college programs that were competing with us.  There was one, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest would go in for a grant, and there was other places.  So we weren't the only show in town. As the years have progressed, they've, in a sense, shortened their programs.  It's one semester, less language and so on.  And so at the moment, I think we're the only undergraduate program that's funded under groups studying aboard, because it is a year and because we do insist on two years of language in the process.  So at the moment we're, I think, in a fairly good position. We're getting about 50,000 U.S. dollars a year now, but that comes to Bascom Hill, that doesn't go to the embassy, and it gets handled through much more normal banking processes than people going into the –graduate students going into the embassy with an empty bag and coming out with a full bag and hoping – 
RL:	You don't have any bag men and women going up to Bascom Hall?
JE:	[words unclear] that is now funded through normal sources.  So that's helped keep the price down, but it still is hard because you will see students who will apply.  There is limited financial aid.  If they're already on financial aid here, the financial officer will try to increase it so that the gap they have to pay doesn't change, whether they're here or they're over in India. But almost every year we see some students who just couldn't put the package together, and it's hard, you know, to – you hate to have a program that is, that keeps people out because they can't afford it.  But anyway, that's the financial side.  
And now, it is all handled under the Office of International Studies and Programs.  So of the student fees that come in, we pay about $1,000 per student to the office here, which helps support the staff and the deans, which is important, and becomes part of the whole regularized 60 or so study abroad programs they have.  And then under that arrangement, they provide the banking services and the kind of employment contracts that you have to have, and, you know, the administrative things that something like this requires.
RL:	Quite an accomplishment.
JE:	Yeah, right. 
RL:	It really is.
JE:	And almost every year, the finances change.  One year it will be this way and you couldn't do it that way and so on.  The year they went electronic, we lost the proposal entirely because we had thought we had filed electronically, and we apparently didn't push the right button.  Only in the spring when we said, well, how did our grant application come along, they said, we never received it.  And we went back, and here we had this thing which we thought we had sent and they had never gotten.  So that was a bad year, but the next year we sort of got tuned in and made sure that, as with these electronic things, we did everything correctly and pushed the right buttons.  So I think we can now repeat that, but it was – the price of technological advancement was missing a year's funding.
RL:	A steep price.
00:40:22
JE:	That's right.  Okay, when I arrived in Madison, this was ‑‑ the difference between what I was expected to do as a faculty member here and what I was expected to do as a faculty member in Oberlin College was quite different. In Oberlin College, the expectation was that at some point I would turn my dissertation into a book, but there was no great rush about that, and I would take part in conferences and occasionally present something.  But the pitch was teaching well, you know, doing good seminar work, consulting and so on, without any great emphasis on publication.  It was an intensive teacher college.
It was pretty clear after I got here that it was important that I start having something published, because I had nothing of significance appearing in print and I had been teaching two years.  I was very glad to start all over again.  I was given the option of counting the two years toward tenure, and I was advised not to.
RL:	Oh, really?
JE:	Yeah, that you could start from scratch.
RL:	How interesting.
JE:	And I realized that with no publications at all to my credit, if I had knocked off two years, then I'd be up for tenure that much earlier, and that was not a smart idea.  So the first summer I was here, I cranked out articles from some material I had gathered while I was in the village.  I started working on my dissertation to try to convert that into a book.  
And then a number of projects got going, all with a South Asia emphasis, in which I became involved and from which the first series of publications came, not so much in sociology as they were in South Asian studies. Henry Hart had been able to get some money for the publication of a syllabus for a year's course on Indian civilization, and they needed somebody to be the chief editor of that.  So I became the editor for that with a couple of graduate students.  And we began to put together a series of altogether probably about 50 or 60 lectures on everything from the most ancient Vedas in India up to India's foreign policy. And the idea was to have specialists prepare lecture outlines, maybe two and a half pages or something, so that even if I didn't know anything about Sanskrit drama, I could give a lecture on Sanskrit drama for a course that was well-rounded, because more universities and colleges were trying to introduce India, and India's very, very complicated.  And you might have somebody who is a political scientist or somebody who was a literature person, but if you needed to teach a course that has everything in it, you need some kind of material. So it was great fun working on that.  I was in touch almost immediately with the cream of the new crop of American Indian specialists, who were in Berkley and Chicago and various places that were just getting going.  And with a small editorial group, we selected the people to do these summaries, and then my job was to keep after the faculty until they showed up, and then edit them so there was some sort of consistent fashion, get bibliographical references so that if you did give a lecture and somebody said, I'd like to do more of this, there would be some sort of required reading or recommended reading. It took us probably a year and a half or two years of pretty steady work to produce this.  It was called the Lectures on Indian Civilization, which we first called it, and it was to be almost free to anybody because it was all being funded by, again, the Office of Education money. Well, as we were preparing that, it was clear that there was several areas that there wasn't any good 25- or 30-page article on that topic.  They'd be scattered around or they'd be a long book or something had been translated from French or something like that.  So we began to pick chapters that should be written that would be kind of class bite size of quality, which could then accompany the lectures. So from the first Lectures on Indian Civilization came Chapters on Indian Civilization.  And this involved going back to people and saying, look, there's no really good 30- to 40-page article, let's say, on the relationship between the Vedas and later Hindu text, and somebody needed to this.  We found people who can do that. So we ended up with two – with a volume called Lectures on Indian Civilization and Volume 1 of Chapters on Indian Civilization and Volume 2 of Chapters on Indian Civilization.  I wrote a handful of the lectures myself, and I wrote one of the chapters myself, but mostly this was other people.  But what I was doing, which was very good here, was a lot of stuff was coming out with my named attached to it. And it was stuff that had not been done by anybody, so it was kind of path-breaking.  And I was learning a huge amount about India, because it wasn't Joe Elder, the sociologist, it was Joe Elder trying to figure out what was happening in, you know, the ancient Buddhist philosophy, and what was happening as the Muslims arrived in India, and what was happening when the British decided to introduce land taxes and all that kind of stuff.
00:45:24
RL:	But again, this was quite fortuitous.
JE: 	It was absolutely fortuitous because – and then my book was sitting there not being published, but this stuff was coming out and it was reassuring to both departments that I was being productive, I wasn't just going up. I will never forget, I wasn't aware when my tenure decision was going to come up.  It was much more relaxed in those days.  I knew at some point there would be a tenure decision, and that I should publish stuff, but there was no kind of sense.  The sociology department hadn't hired anybody for several years before I got here, so there was no big brother that I could talk to and see how you do this kind of thing.  And the Department of Indian Studies had nobody there either who was doing it, so we were all just kind of making up the rules as we went along. I wasn't aware how closely I was being scrutinized by the senior faculty.  I was going, you know, giving my lectures and meeting my students.  And then one day, probably in February, one of ‑‑ 
RL:	Which year?
JE: 	This would have been my first year there I guess, '61-'62, yeah.  A professor I knew in the department, we never exchanged anything, he sort of knocked on the door and came in the office, and I was intrigued with this guy I never talked to who was pretty prominent.  He came in and he just said, Joe, we've been talking about you.  And I thought, gulp, you know.  And we're getting very good references on your teaching, and it's obvious the students are learning a lot.  There's always students outside your office.  But I do want to make it clear that you have to publish, and whatever you to do to publish would be very good, because we can't retain you if you don't publish.  And then off he went.
RL:	That was pretty clear.
JE:	There we are, right.  But no indication of what I should be publishing, just that I should be doing something.  And that was the very first year. The second year I was in India with a research grant and these students, so I was kind of out of the fray, but gathering material from which I would be able to publish stuff.  But it takes a while to gather it, and then a while to come out afterwards.  So I was aware that I had to be doing stuff.
But these other materials, the Civilization of India syllabus, the lectures and so on, were there, coming out kind of as I was working on my own stuff.  So when my tenure decision was made, and I wasn't aware it was going to be made.
RL:	Really.  They didn't tell you?
JE:	You know, it was sort of in there somewhere.  I never had a letter saying you'll be ‑‑ now it's laid out in absolute plain black and white that at this point there will be a decision made and so on.  But I don't think I had any letters or anything that said that.  It was still kind of a very informal campus at that time. Anyway, Russ Middleton was the chair and apparently he tried to get in touch with me and couldn't, so he called my wife and said we want Joe to know that he's been approved for tenure.  We would like him to finish the book, but we feel there's enough there now so that we can promote him.  And my wife, I think she said, is that good that he got tenure.  It was just a very different relationship to this whole thing, which now has been regularized and there's been litigation and all this other kind of stuff. So I was living in kind of a golden haze of at some point you have to have something, but I wasn't clearly aware that there was an absolute deadline at which point I would be – 
RL:	So what that professor said to you your first year did not produce anxiety on your part.
JE:	No, he just said I had to do, you know, I had to do something, but it wasn't ‑‑ he didn't say if within two years your book isn't out, you better start looking for a job.  It was just very vague.  And I was aware that publishing was important, but ‑‑ and I had to do something.
But, you know, with the research year in India, I did come back with a bunch of stuff that I was able to get some articles out.  But the book continued to be difficult, partly because it had been so wrong.  After about three years, I began denying I had written one of the chapters it was so bad.  And after about six or seven years, I had really such erroneous conceptions of how the caste system worked and what Hinduism was, that it was embarrassing for me to admit that I had this many misimpressions when I created the first hypothesis. My hypothesis was that it was based on Max Weber, that the whole fabric of Hindu values systems was such that you lived in the world of tradition, you did what your caste was supposed to do, what your roles were expected, and there was a great deal of ritual involved, and a sense of contamination with lower people and so on.  And so Max Weber had argued the one reason India never developed industrial capitalism independently was the values were such that things were just hostile to it. And that was the thesis I was almost going to go out and check, it seemed kind of sensible to me.  So I was predicting that where this gigantic factory had come in, it would survive because it was big, but there'd be constant problems with labor that would be unhappy, there'd be discontent, there'd be high labor turnover, there'd be tardiness, there'd be absenteeism.  People would resent the fact that they had to work in a factory when they would rather be staying at home or working in the fields. And I'd worked out something like 15 or 16 indices of role conflict in these two systems, the sort of Western rational bureaucracy as opposed to traditional doing things as they had always done.  And it wasn't until I was sort of halfway into my time in the village that it occurred to me, you know, I'm wrong.  This is not coming out as I'm expecting.  The factory is churning away, absenteeism was practically nil, tardiness was practically nil, turnover was almost nothing.  There was constant pressure by people to get more jobs in the factory, it wasn't that people were leaving it. There were a couple of dramatic moments when I realized that I was seriously wrong.  One of the questions I had on my questionnaire was every Hindu is supposed to perform their [dotima?], which is your inherited task.  How do you know what your dotima is, and that was presumably to be what the priest told you or what your family told you or something like that. While I was asking this question of the manager of the distillery, which is connected with the factory, and he said, I know we’re not performing our dotima when all the mail that was in the inbox in the morning is in the outbox in the evening.  And I thought, no real conflict there.  There's no problem at all.
Then I talked to a local Brahman, and I said, you know, what do you think when this factory came in, because you have low caste people and high caste people.  And he said, well, I very much hope my son can get a job in the factory.  Could you help me?  And that wasn't supposed to happen, because he was supposed to be opposed to this. So the longer I was there, the clearer it became that my major hypothesis was just way, way off the wall.  Either the factory had become so Hinduized, if one can use that word, that it wasn't conflicting with people, or Hinduism is so flexible that you could just easily reinterpret whatever it was and things would just go right on doing it, but there was – all this evidence that I was looking for wasn't there. So my dissertation was still sort of based on the half-baked idea this is what I was going out to discover, and it turned out not to be so.  How do I explain it then?  And I hadn't quite worked that all out.  So to make a long story short, I never published the book, the dissertation.  It was getting more and more embarrassing, and now I'm very, very happy I didn't publish it, because there's been a whole lot of criticisms of the way Westerners have thought about India.
RL:	Yes.
JE:	This notion of they're sort of locked into perpetual stagnation because of religion and so on.  And if my name had been attached to something, even if I could say, well, look, I was a 25-year-old graduate student, forgive me, it would still be around my neck.  And so I'm very happy that book has never come out. Periodically my wife says, why don't you sort of rewrite the whole thing, and maybe at some point I will just to say how wrong I was.  But I've never worked with a graduate student whose dissertation was as totally destroyed by the evidence as my own. And so anyway, the book became more and more problematic.  There were a couple of chapters I had pulled out and tried to do something with, but even then, it, as a unit, has never appeared, and it's collecting dust way in the bottom of my desk someplace or other.  But I keep saying that probably that was the most important lesson, because since then, what I have written about how the caste system works [words unclear] is a radical attack and critique of what almost everybody was saying when I was learning it from them, and that's been important. So I'm now seeing it as sort of the new wave of scholarship that came in, and pointed out the discrepancies between the old approach, which is based largely on the Sanskrit text and the assumption if the texts say it, that's what people do.  And you don't have to argue very far to figure out what the texts says often aren't done by the people, were done only by the small elite at the top, and the rest of the people did pretty much other things.
RL:	I think that is a fascinating article that you should write, your personal epiphany in the highest levels of scholarship.
JE: 	Right.
RL:	Isn't it?  I mean, wouldn't people be interested in that?
JE:	It could probably be constructed that way.  And when I present lectures on it, I will say this is what happened to me.  I mean, here I started out with these assumptions and here's where I've just said, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, until I finally said, you know, I was quite wrong on that.
RL:	But that had no impact on your getting tenure.
JE:	No, fortunately.  The fact that – luckily, all this other stuff was coming out.  It was voluminous, you know, a volume of lectures that thick with a glossary and dates and stuff.  And there was two chapters which are, I say they're still first rate.  I think the articles were written by very, very bright people, and most of them are still very much up to the mark. So my title, my name was attached as the editor of all these kinds of things [words unclear].  And then when did bring data back from my year at Lucknow, there were a number of quite interesting articles I could get out quite quickly.  So there was no book, but there were these volumes, which I had been the editor of three of them, and then a series of small articles.  And I think the department wanted to give me tenure and they were looking for some sort of excuse to do it.
00:55:50
So it was not a crisis.  And then since then, I have continued to publish stuff as it comes along.  But what I began to get into, which has been probably to the extent I have a reputation as being a creative scholar, is the making of documentary films.
RL:	Yes.  Both Henry Hart and Joan Raducha said be sure you ask him about the films.
JE:	Right.  And as with almost everything else I talked about, it was coincidental, it was something I hadn't pictured happening. When we prepared the syllabus of the lectures, we were trying to list documentary films that could be used, and it was appalling how little stuff there was or how proprietary the people were who had them.  There was a Sanskritist in the University of Chicago who was absolutely brilliant.  He wrote several of the lectures on the Vedas and post-Vedas. He had filmed a Brahmanical sacrifice, a Vedic sacrifice, but he would not let anybody see it unless he was there, feeling that it would be too easy to misinterpret.  And so here was one authentic piece of documentary footage which I was never able to see, because I would have to go down to Chicago and all this. Then there was stuff that tourist people had put out, but this was, you know, [words unclear] kind of stuff, or plain dancers.  One series that an amateur professor of religion in Syracuse had done on home rituals, ten minutes of this and three minutes of that and stuff, and one or two documentary films on village life, but very superficial.
	So it was clear that there was a gaping need for high quality scholarly documentary film.  	So in the lectures we'd list whatever there were, but it was more and more manifest that this was a huge lacuna in materials. The break came with one of the students on the college year program.  He wanted to do a documentary film instead of the fieldwork report.  We had had one student a few years before who had wanted to do a documentary film, and in my usual sort of, sure, let's try it, I said yes.  And it had been a disaster.  He had ‑‑ he took a camera out.  He never got a good idea.  He shot a little bit of footage around the Red Fort at Delhi, came back and just said, I can't do anything.  And so there was 12 credits of zip that he gotten for all the tuition he paid.
So when this second student said it, I said, well, let me warn me.  Our first experience was not very good, but I'm game.  If you want to do it, sure, there's no reason you couldn't do it.  Well, it turned out that he produced a wonderful simple black-and-white documentary with almost no narrative on the City of Banaras. He took his father's old windup Bolex camera with him, sat on the front of some of these shops with a blanket over his knees and the lens projecting through a hole in the blanket, just filming people as they went by.  Now that doesn't sound like a great film either to you or to me, I'm sure.  And when he came back and said that's what he said, I said, you know, I don't want to be discouraging, but I don't think we have a film here. He had done enough, sort of 15 feet-to-1 that we were going to produce, so that by trimming it, he got a sequence of the morning beginning with people going down to the Ganges River and bathing and collecting water, and then various things happen during the day, the cremation of bodies as they were carried down to the river, and then as the day ended, things sort of settled down and a few people still out on the banks meditating. And there was no soundtrack, it was black and white.  He found a sarod player, which is sort of like a – it's a stringed instrument, to watch the film four or fives times, and then play accompaniment so there was a musical accompaniment that went with this and matched the scenes.  A little bit of fake sound when the woodcutters for the funeral pyre hit the axe against the wood.  He had an axe and then tape-recorded it, chopped away so there was that kind of [word unclear] sound. And for the chanting, when you carry bodies to the bank of the Ganges River for cremation, the chant is Ram Nam Ram Satya Hai, Ram Nam, the name of God is truth, the name of God is truth.  And so he got four or five of us to sit together in front of the tape recorder and chant Nam Ram Satya Hai so that we would have that sound.  So it was sufficiently deceptive, so you had – you didn't have the feeling this was all dubbed in. There was no real point to it, but you really got the feel of what life was like with people who were unaware they were being filmed doing the things that goes on all day.  Well, he graduated.
RL:	Do you remember his name?
JE:	Yes, Michael Camerini.
RL:	Okay.
JE:	His dad was in the physics department and his mom was in the Scandinavian studies program.  And he had been a neighbor for a while in Madison.  So I had sort of known him as a neighbor kid.  But I did realize how talented he was as a filmmaker, and this was his first film. He graduated, wanted to make more films.  So he came around and said that he wanted to apply for films, but as a 21-year-old BA with one film to his credit, no one was going to give him any money.  He would do all the work.  He would prepare proposals.  He would have me submit them as the producer, executive producer, whatever, and he would do whatever was necessary. So we cooked a series of documentaries that would kind of fit in with the series, the lectures, and sent off ‑‑ he scrutinized the whole sources of – 
01:01:33
[End of Tape 3] 
RL:	This is Tape 4, Side 1 of the Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder, October 11, 2005.
00:00:10
JE: 	We were talking about the documentary films and Michael Camerini.  As I recall now, the proposals that we sent in, he had conceived to shoot essentially from the plains to the intermediate hills to the high levels of Nepal or the Himalayas, with the notion that at different altitudes you had different kinds of ecology and clothes and stuff.  So not very bright, but anyway, it would be photographically interesting to do this. And that was what we had sent to all these people, these three films on different altitudes in South Asia.  The one that came back that had any hope was from the Office of Education again, and they said that although they weren't particularly impressed with the films that were laid out, they were interested in films that would be produced with some sort of guarantee that they would distributed, because so often documentary films would be made and then they'd stay in the person's garage or attic and they weren't accessible. So there were sort of two requirements.  It should be usable for people teaching courses.  [words unclear] that there was a clientele out there who would say, wow, here's a film that we need.  That would help.  And then if there was some distribution mechanism so that they would be available if people wanted it, that would be important.
RL:	Joe, what year is this?
JE:	1970 abouts I think.  I can tell you – when did the first film come out?  Okay, we were – this would have been the early '69, '70, something like that.  We began looking for money.  Then back came a letter saying we were authorized to make three films.
Well, this was just great.  We had picked the idea of pilgrimages because in the lecture on pilgrimages in India, it turned out that there was nothing that we could use, and pilgrimages are sort of spectacular.  So we were going to make these three films.  It took us a while to sort of get ourselves mobilized, and money had to come and all the rest. By that time, we had run into a graduate student, a woman named Mira Binford, who was in communication arts.  She was a little older.  She was in her 30s somewhere.  Had been to India.  She had been married to a man who was working in India, and then they had gotten divorced, and she was interested in working with the project.  She spoke a little bit of Hindi and Marathi, I think.  So Michael and Mira went out with camera and stuff to shoot a film on three different pilgrimages, and off they were. It was the – the mechanics were very complicated.  You'd shoot over there, but there's no place develop things, so they sent them here, and then they had to be developed.  And once they were developed, then you made a work print because the original print you kept in virgin form until it was time to cut it.  So we had this whole process of films coming in.  They didn't know how well their stuff was turning out.  It would be weeks or months before I would see what was coming out.  So this stuff just piled up here with these three films almost simultaneously being done. They finished in a couple of years, came back, and then were on the Madison campus editing these things.  They were trying to put them together.  We ran out of money.  We had ways underestimated how much it was going to cost.  So we crawled back to the Office of Education and apologized for the fact that we needed more money, and they came up with a little more money. They'd also shot one film just coincidentally.  They were in India when the Bangladesh War broke out, and all our sympathies were with the Bengalis because of the way things had worked out.  So even though we had money for three, if I recall, they felt that if they scrimped a little on the three and shot some of the footage in Bangladesh to get what a country was like as it was trying to identify itself, even though that wasn't in the original proposal, that would be some ‑‑ take advantage of what was going on. So they had gone into Bangladesh sort of the first year afterwards.  They talked to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the prime minister, who was the hero of the thing.  He was quite intrigued at the thought of having a Wisconsin crew come and film him and his dreams for Bangladesh and all the rest.  So we scrunched the money around so that they could get their visas and take time out from the pilgrimages, which were tricky because, you know, pilgrimages happen at certain times and don't happen at certain other times. By the time – then we ran into a problem with one of the cameras.  It jammed, and so that's what they sent us back here.  This was all old, you know, problems with Customs and what have you.  Got it repaired and it back there.  So they didn't actually begin interviewing him until about June of, this would have been '73. By then, Bangladesh was going sour.  The dream of democracy had faded, people were increasingly resentful of the Sheikh regime, the sadness of people who hoped this wonderful dream of an independent Muslim Bengal now watching it be just about as corrupt as it had been under the West Pakistanis or under the British.
00:05:12
So the film that they shot, which ultimately was one of the four that came out, dealt with perceptions of a whole lot of people of the failure of a dream.  And ironically, the Sheikh regime did not want to be interviewed by then.  He said we could film in his office, and so we have a shot of him talking with people.  But I think he was aware that stuff was going sour and it wasn't quite his great publicity show that he wanted. Several years later when the film was edited and we announced we were going to show it, the events happened where there was a massacre of him and his whole family and [word unclear].  So within the period of him leading Bangladesh to independence and our film coming out, the country had simply gone completely upside down.  People were relieved to see him dead.  There was very little reaction to the fact that he was assassinated.  But that was just one of these coincidental things. So the pilgrimage films came out.  They took more – they cost more than we had intended.  They were very well received.  People hadn't seen anything like it in terms of the color and the narration.  This was not Hollywood.  This was people talking about why they were on the pilgrimage and stuff. So we were like drug addicts, led on into doing more and more of this.  And one thing led to another, and I've been now the executive producer of some 20 documentary films with various crews doing the filming.
RL:	You did not know anything about film, to speak of, when you started.
JE:	No, I knew – 
RL:	You learned on the job.
JE:	Pretty much.  We had a family camera and had movies of the kids as they learned to walk.  I mean, that's the level of film-making that I had. On the side, we have a whole bunch of corny family movies.  We had the kids – when there was a family reunion, we'd have the kids act out Snow White and the Six Dwarfs or Ali Baba and the Four Thieves or How the Grinches Stole Christmas, or whatever it was.  So we have a little series of funny home movies.  But that's a very different league with a windup 60 millimeter camera. The serious stuff was, I felt, really fulfilling.  I mean, when you get a good shot and you're looking into somebody's eyes who's describing a meaningful experience, that's about as close as you can come to conveying to a class the kind of stuff that you're trying to convey. So Michael and Mira went out and made another series of films.  They're laid out in the whole syllabus here.  And I think to the extent that I'm invited to go to places as the visiting speaker, it's to be as the filmmaker to show clips from various films I made, you know, here.  The five that I typically show each has, illustrates a different point. One indicates action which the camera caught, which we missed entirely.  It is a case of a Brahman whose nephew is ill, and he's asked a low caste sorcerer to drawn out the evil spirit and get rid of it.  So you have this odd thing of a high caste Brahman and an untouchable sorcerer involved in this exorcism kind of activity. As the exorcist was about to touch the forehead of the Brahman's nephew, it occurred to him that he didn't have permission.  And in the flick of an eye, he sort of says okay, and the Brahman says okay, and the hand keeps going down.  Now you could describe that, but to watch it, this was absolutely built – you know, the notion that he was about to touch somebody might be offensive and to get the clearance was one of those things that the camera is smarter than the eye [words unclear] and a series of things like this where the camera enables you to do something which you couldn't have otherwise done through a sequence. So anyway to – as I say, to the extent that I'm the visiting speaker of a gathering of some kind often is to present a new film or show clips and various films, and indicate how useful these things could be.
00:09:07
RL:	And these films are still widely used, are they?
JE:	They are widely used.  We distribute them from the center now.  Two summers ago we converted them all to DVDs, because we went from film, 60 millimeter, which are big and bulky but nice, to VCRs which are easy to use but they lose 25% in clarity and stuff, to DVDs which are a little better than the VCRs but they're not the original. When I show the DVDs, it's simple.  You slip them in and they're projected on the screen.  And the comparison between that and hauling the 60 millimeter projector and putting in the plug and running the wire to the speaker, which is the way I used to do it, is the difference between night and day.
RL:	Really?
JE:	But I keep seeing the crisp, beautiful images that are there on the film, and the DVDs just don't catch it.  So I'm still making documentary films.  
00:10:01
Usually, the camera – the only camerawork I did was with one of the pilgrimage films, where I was actually in Madurai.  And there's a big fence festival every spring, where the goddess remarries the god and they make – they circumambulate the temple and so on.
Well, Michael and Mira had shot wonderful footage of the film itself – of the festival itself, but they wanted some shots of the same location when the festival wasn't on.  So on my winter trip, they gave me the camera and the set of shots to take.  And so Joe Elder, amateur cameraman, with soundtrack and all of this went out there and played with their equipment, and shot, oh, maybe the equivalent of 45 minutes of stuff, which could then be cut in, this is what this particular shrine looks like on a normal day and here's what the shrine looks like when it's in the middle of a pilgrimage. But that's the only footage I myself have shot.  The rest of it has mostly been getting the idea, getting the funding.  We've gone to practically anybody who gives money for the funding.  The Smithsonian Institution has helped out, the Office of Education has helped out.  The rupees helped out for a long time.
RL:	Oh, really?
JE:	We got a lot of money from them until they – in fact, they helped get us launched until we were such big beggars they finally said, well, back away.  One film cost $125,000, and we could give five fellowships to people that you're cutting out of the field.
RL:	Joe, when you started talking about this, you said the Office of Education said they were interested if you could guarantee or you had some sort of distribution network.
JE:	Right.
RL:	How did you address that?
JE:	We did it, and again I give credit to Michael and Mira.  We have the center, and the purpose of the center is to make the presence of South Asia visible and accessible.  So they watched how the football operation in Wisconsin occurred, how the budget was set up, and then reproduced that so that there was a separate account which could run negative balances, as the football account sometimes runs, in order to fund an ongoing project. Now I give them entire credit for searching the mechanism around here to see how you could create something like that.  So there was a budget line where, you know, you indicated each year what you thought the income is going to be and what the expenditure would be.  And if you ran a deficit for a few years, it wouldn't be the end of the whole world, you didn't want it to happen very often. So we became, the center became a distribution center, and that's still one of the big things that as you walk into our center here, and in the side room they probably have 150 copies of the film both in VCR and DVD form right now, and the constant, you know, advertising that goes out.  The big conferences we have, the stuff are laid out there, and people can order it through e-mail and all the other kind of way these things are ordered.  So we're in the business of distributing documentary films. Each one has its own story, and I certainly will not tie up the tape with each story.  But most of them were filmed by students of mine with whom I've worked, who several of them are students who went on the college year program and would do their fieldwork project as a film, and then that would become of our film series, or they'd subsequently work with me on another film.  Because we had worked together, it worked out pretty well. The most recent ‑‑ then there was one that was ‑‑ an anthropologist identified in an area of India called Mithila, where the women paint, draw very characteristic paintings of the gods and other creatures on walls and on floors.  And eventually, they started putting them on paper and selling them.  And this thing, which is now called Mithila painting, we made a couple of films on the Mithila painters, and the whole subsequent process of getting money to the women painters that we may have time to get it to later on. But anyway, the person who got me into that project, and convinced me that there was filmable material in there, left a lot of stuff which was not a film yet, and so that was one where I took the bits and pieces with some drafts that he had put together and edited that down and narrated that.  So that was one that I put in much more time in the actual creation of it. And the last two I've worked on were filmed by an Indian documentary filmmaker named Sudheer Gupta, but for Indian audiences and much longer, two hours, two and a half hours.  There was enough useful material in there for a class in the States, but somebody had to introduce it and trim it down so that it could be fit in with a 40-minute classroom.  So the last two I worked on, I've been essentially working with Sudheer Gupta's material, where the premise is that everybody knows what he's talking about, because he refers to the gods and locations in India. And there's ‑‑ I said there's good enough stuff there, so with some beginning stuff and my initial narration, then we get into his stuff, and it works out okay.
00:15:07
RL:	Joe, while this is going on, what are you teaching in sociology?
JE:	Okay.  I began as sort of the theorist.  Any department has to have courses in theory.  So when I first came, there were two basic theory courses, one essentially social psychological theory and the other essentially collective theory, and I taught both courses.  I was stronger in the collective stuff, but I could do the other, which meant that I met every graduate student in the department because they all had to take both – one or the other of those courses. Then there was a feeling that that was artificially constructed, those who deal with social psychology and those who deal with collectives.  So they were reorganized into an undergraduate course dealing with the classics, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and then a graduate course which dealt with them in much greater detail, plus another series of theorists. So for probably a quarter of a century, I taught every theory course that was taught.  Sometimes other people would teach them also, but this was sort of my backbone, which meant that I also was drafting the theory prelim exams which everybody had to take.  The fun thing was I met every graduate student, and that began to change after I ‑‑ other people began to teach theory, and then I began to teach other kinds of stuff.
00:16:34
I also taught courses in the early '70s.  We began to get interested in sort of development sociology, what was happening in the Third World, which is kind of natural for me.  So we developed a course called the sociology of economic change, and we called it economic change because development had the AID concept, that we were going to go in and reproduce in India or Pakistan or Nigeria patterns that exist in the West.  And we wanted to be free to look at the Marxist patterns and cooperative patterns and all the rest, so we called it sociology of economic change program. And so I taught the basic graduate level course there for quite a while.  And we actually got funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, if you can believe it, to set up a training program for ‑‑ this is again when money was around to do specialty training in various writers of sociology.  So this was to train people who would learn how to gather data and do research in parts of the world where you didn't have good census figures or voting records or something like that.  You sort of went out there, and there was a village and there were tribes, and how to do it. So I was the director of that for a while, and there were others who were directors of that.  One thing that we did, each year one of the faculty would take a group of graduate students to a developing country and do a research project in the developing country, which was really hands-on.  And one took them to – David Wiley took them to Tanzania, I think it was, and then John DeLamater took them to Yugoslavia, and I took my group to Nepal, and that was the way I got introduced into Nepal.  We ended up living in the dry jungle area and doing a study of land settlement there. It was exciting and fun for me, because I was taking people who would never have left the United States, probably, and putting them into a situation where they were talking with real people, through translators, and trying to figure out what actually goes on when you're dirt poor and you're trying to make certain decisions with limited finances that you could never get in the United States.  So that was another kind of specialty that I developed.  So the two areas in sociology were theory, on one hand, and sociology of economic change on the other.
00:18:49
Then in South Asian studies, I sort was given anything that I could teach.  There was an introductory course on the civilizations of India, which was a year-long course.  This was the kind of basic introduction.  And from the very beginning, I would teach the modern period of that, and Henry Hart and I would switch off.  He was a political scientist.
RL:	And what is the modern period?
JE:	Beginning about 1600.
RL:	I suspected, but I – 
JE:	Good question.  It wasn't the day before yesterday.  But the classical period would deal with the Vedas, you know, back in the misty past, and go through the Gupta period, the Maurya period, and the period when Buddhism was pretty much [word unclear] in the country, up to say 1000 or 1100 A.D., and the Muslims came in and things began to change, and so on, the Europeans came in. So that was a course I taught.  Henry and I would swap off, I'd do two years, he'd do two years, I would do two years.  And then when Henry retired, I taught it every year, sort of the modern period.  And the classical period was taught by Sanskritist or literature person.  And so a student who takes the course has a huge span from, give or take, 3000 before the Common Era up to the day before yesterday in the modern period. We turn it backwards.  We teach the modern period first semester.  Guess why?  Because we use this as a lure to get students to sign up to go to the India.  The classical period is just too far back.  And the modern period, which I'm teaching right now, I say on day one, look, my purpose here is to have a half dozen of you be in India next year at this same time. And I'm not going to conceal the fact that if you want to go to India – if you want to learn about India, you've got to go there.  You can look at the films, you can read stuff, but you really have to go there.  And so it's been a major drawing source for the course.  And the class cracks up, because I periodically sort of put in a dig. For example, they're required to read a book on village India, which is – the last chapter is written by Susan Wadley.  And I say, guess how Susan Wadley first got to India?  She went to India on the Wisconsin program.  Guess how this person who made this film got to India?  They went, so it gets to be a giggle topic after a while.  Everybody Joe talks about went to India on the Wisconsin program.  But it does work. Then I was allowed to – encouraged to put in specialty courses on India that are cross-listed in South Asian studies and sociology.  The survey course now is in sociology, history, political science, geography, and Indian studies, so people can have it listed under a whole lot of things.  A lot of the area courses, like Africa and South East Asia, will be cross-listed in a variety of disciplines, so you get quite a mix of students.
It's a pain in the neck to turn the grades in, because 16 go to geography and 32 go to history and 11 go to political science.  We can live with that. So the courses I introduced, the first one was called social structure of India.  And this is an effort to see how the caste system emerged realistically, not the way I thought it emerged, and then look at what the government of India is trying to do to introduce – to level the playing field, because there's a great deal of concern, and the government is aware that there is a caste system with huge inequalities.  And there are idealists who would very much like to level the field and even this thing out.
RL:	Is there any progress being made?
JE:	Limited progress in some places, dramatic progress in others, no progress in others.  It sort of depends how it works out.  Here's a country wrestling, realistically, it's built into the constitution, that something has to be done for the fact that about 22% of India's population has been in a despised category for centuries and how do you do something about that. So I bring it in and contrast it, at times, with what equal rights had tried in the U.S. with we can't have quotas in the U.S.  India mandates quotas.  And so it's a very different exercise that you go through in terms of how do you hire people and how do you get representatives in parliament and so on.  And so it's – 
RL:	Oh, even parliamentary seats are – 
JE:	You are – if there are 22.5% what's called scheduled castes and tribes in India and there are 22.5% seats in parliament, they must be filled by people from scheduled castes.  It would be as if we said that 10% of the Senate must be black, 10% of the House of Representatives might be black, because 10% of the U.S. population is black.  And then how do you decide who's there and who doesn't.  So it's a challenge, you know, and it's a huge experiment in its own way.
RL:	Is it working?  Is the government, is the legislature in India supportive of this?
JE:	Certainly in principle, yeah, and the representatives are.  They're there to speak for the scheduled castes and tribes, but you're dealing with where is the money and who has the power and all the rest, so that you have real forces at work, some of them blocking some others. But the thrust is always there, and the constitution mandates that this thing has to happen.  So it's, even a notion of social engineering, it's an interesting country to – 
RL:	Very.
JE:	And then the fact they have had a series of democratic elections which were more or less democratic, and few countries have managed that.  So how does that work out.  So there are a lot of really exciting stuff.  So that's, I would say that probably is the most specialty course I teach.  I don't think there's another course in the United States that quite matches that, and that's my personal focus.
00:24:06
Then early on I decided to teach a course on Gandhi, which spins out sort of from my Quaker background.  I was uneasy to get into it, because the notion of teaching somebody who's a great saint and, you know, how are you fair and accurate.  Well, Gandhi as a person and as an intellect was very, very interesting. He'd be almost impossible to live with.  I think if I were in the same washroom with him, he'd have been such a pain in the neck there would have been – but I deal with him as a real person.  He was under observation a lot.  He had some strange ideas.  He made historical inaccuracies, I mean, but his technique of active nonviolence and the way in which he exercised this and tried it, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, makes a fascinating narrative. And it's sort of like each class, now we're going to talk about the effort to do this and the effort to do that, and when he went to jail and when he fasted and so on.
RL:	Do you ever get Indian students here on campus who take that course on Gandhi?
JE:	Always.  Always, yes – 
RL:	And how does that go?  Do they challenge you?
JE:	They – well, mostly they know so much less about it than I do that they don't challenge it very much.  You know, they know – I mean, what I do is lay out as accurately as I can the things that he did, and the effect that he had, and the weaknesses that he had, and the way he irritated people, the things that he said that were wrong, as you would do if you were writing about any philosopher or any historical figure. So on the one hand, they learn much more about what he was doing.  It isn't just a very simple, you know, nonviolence says everything all the time.  On the other hand, they realize that he wasn't a wonderful person, and that he did make – in every instance, and he made some pretty appalling mistakes, often mistakes which he himself was quite willing to acknowledge.
And there's a vast amount of literature stuff keeps coming out every year, more stuff on Gandhi.  It just never seems to dry up.  So that was the second course I introduced.
00:26:06
Now the third course I introduced came after the crisis in Iran, when the American Embassy personnel were held by the Iranians.  And I was walking from parking lot 34 to the office, and somebody had spray painted on the sidewalk, nuke Iran.  There was a lot of anger about Iran.  And, well, nuke Iran was sort of, you know, the six-pack answer to Iran.  But I thought if somebody here thinks that that would solve anything, and I know something about Muslim societies, I have a responsibility to give a much broader picture of what Islam is all about. So I did get a semester's leave to read up on Islam, which I had never studied particularly carefully.  I had grown up in a Muslim country, but those compound walls pretty much insulated me from what was going on.  Plus, the training that I had as a child, the Muslims were wrong on almost every count anyway, and never ceased to be stressed to me that Muslims were permitted four wives, and that was bad, and Muslims told lies if it would serve their purpose.  I mean, there was sort of my parents' evangelical attack on Muslims, which was the reason they were out there, to bring the teachings of Jesus to these people who had it all wrong.  So the Muslims never had a fair break in our household as far as what they were talking about.
RL:	I can't think of a better person to be teaching a course.
JE:	But I had a lot of reading to do, because I really didn't know very much about them.  There had been some Muslims in the village I studied in India, and so I picked those Muslims there.  I learned more about Islam in India with my Muslim village neighbors, and then a Shiite Muslim village that was about half a mile away that invited me to come to some of their, you know, quite bloody ceremonies where they would take a knife and cut their foreheads and have the blood run down their eyes and soak their shirts, and they would ask me to photograph this.  Whereas, when that happened in Iran, my parents would, first of all, describe how disgusting and horrible it was that people would do this, and then say, don't be out on the streets because they could probably murder you if they saw you.  So there was always – so a very different approach on how do you relate to Muslim. So anyway, I decided I had to learn a little bit more about it.  So I've been teaching something called the social structure of Muslim societies every three year – 
RL:	And is that popular?
JE:	It's pretty popular, yeah.  Certainly in the last several years, it's been popular.  And it's – it deals with India and Pakistan, but with Islam on everything to Muslims in Chicago, Indonesia, North Africa, Paris and all the rest, because Muslims are all over the place.  And that was cross-listed in sociology.  So a lot of the courses I teach you can take either for South Asian studies credit or for sociology credit. And so it answers your question what did I teach in sociology.  Sometimes it was the social structure of India or sometimes it was Muslim – social structure of Muslim societies which [words unclear].
00:29:08
RL:	Joe, would you make some observations about the Department of Sociology, what you think its strengths and weaknesses have been over the years, and any other issues that belong in the historical record?
JE:	Sure, yeah.  From the very beginning, I felt sort of honored to be a member of the department.  I sensed it was good.  I sense that we could be better.  And the first – well, one of the new chairs to come in was Russ Middleton, and Russ came in in 1965 as chair.  He came in from outside Madison. Russ was a very sort of quiet, low intensity person who looked at the department and said, I think we can become number one department, but we need to do certain things.  And he did this with Bill Sewell, who was in a sense the inspiration.  Bill Sewell had replaced Howard Becker.  Howard Becker was the one that had been so difficult. And Bill's stories were that when he became chair of the department, at the first meeting they had begun to argue and shout at each other, insult each other, and he had – he walked out.  He said, I'm not coming back until we are going to be a civil department, because this is appalling.  And the rest of his colleagues, it was a small department, maybe if you counted the rural sociologists, the regular sociologists, maybe 18 or something like that.  And he said, from now we are just going – 
0030:34
RL:	This is Side 2 of Tape 4 of the October 11, 2005 interview with Professor Joe Elder.
00:30:44
JE:	So Bill changed the tone of the department.  Russ was brought in – I came in I guess as the first new faculty hire, and partly because there was money around to bring me in because I was South Asianist.  I don't think I would have been – if they just were to pick somebody, I doubt if they'd have picked a South Asian specialist in theory.  There were other – the focus was strongly rural sociology and suburban sociology and criminology, and that's where the big names were, demography. And then they began to hire new faculty.  The place was expanding like crazy.  I think when I came the faculty were about 19,000, and in the next decade or so it doubled and tripled, and buildings went up, and programs got started.  It was a really exciting time to be on the campus. So with the new faculty coming in, Russ was – Russ came in to be chair, and he said we've got to teach your classes.  We have to have more research time, because if we're ever going to be productive and creative, we can't spend all our time teaching.  So he set out to rearrange the hours so that we could get full teaching credit by doing sort of two courses a semester rather than three, depending on how you pace it out, you know, small seminar [word unclear] course and so on. And that was, I guess, the first time I felt here is a philosophy of quality and organizational idea, that it's not just bright people but it has to be bright people with resources and time.  Then the philosophy is saying, every time we have the chance to recruit, let's not say we must have a criminologist, we must have a demographer, we must have a rural sociologist, let's say we must have the best.  And let's see what comes in, and if we don't have a criminologist for a few years, so we don't have a criminologist.  But we don't want to get a criminologist who isn't the best criminologist. And that worked out just magnificently.  So these two things of reducing the teaching load and then giving research time off and stuff, and then picking the brightest and sort of saying, come here with whatever you are and be as productive as you want, if possible, take off your second or third year here for a year of research and writing, get yourself out, created a climate of sort of energy and enthusiasm of which I think has contributed to the sort of steady rise.  I'm told now that we were about eighth in the country when I came, and we're now first or somewhere right up at the top and have been for – which is over – we've been there sort of continually. Well, along with these strategies, we insisted that our graduate students be well trained, and the way we did that was to insist they had more statistics and methods courses than anyone else.  Now that's the ugly bread and butter stuff.  You hate these courses.  But you look good when you come out the other end.  You've taken two or three courses in statistics, you've taken one course in methods.  We've always had people who were very good on computer and computer methodology, and so any graduate from the center looks very good when they step out, they are well trained in the sense that they can handle the statistical kind of thing.
RL:	Joe, let me ask you, I'm not a sociologist.  Why do sociologists need three or four semesters of statistics?
JE:	Because we typically work with large groups of people.  We're trying to speak about, you know, the working class or we're trying to speak about the ethnic blacks or something like that.  And you're into sampling, you're into comparing different groups of people, and how do you do this when you can't take everybody.  And so you're into probabilities, you're into scales of one kind or another. Because when you're ‑‑ in the nature of working with collectives of individuals mean that you are making premises about the validity of your samples, and if there's a change between 1980 and 1990, could that have occurred just because of random selection, or is that something that has to have happened because it was a significant change.  So you get into things like significance and probability that become important in terms of how you interpret your results.
RL:	So your people really have to be grounded in statistics.
JE:	That's right.
RL:	They can't have just a passing acquaintance with it.
JE:	Right.  And if they're going to work with large numbers and try to make any kind of a case or comparison, they have to be able to defend their choices of samples and show that the change that occurred wasn't one that could have happened just on a random basis.
RL:	I see.
JE:	The short course on statistics.
RL:	Thank you.  That's probably all I can understand, but it's helpful.
JE:	Yeah.  And to read the journal articles and to comment on them, even if you don't use them yourself, you have to be able to look at these tables and say, this is significant or this isn't.  So part of the script of being a sociologist requires this.
00:35:28
So over the years, I'd say the energy of the new faculty, the openness of the department, there were no, sort of, people with empires.  And to the extent there were, they disappeared.  Howard Becker was an empire built there, and then he left. When I came, there were a number of prominent people who thought a great deal about themselves, but they retired fairly quickly and it became a young department.  Of course, now it gets older as each year passes.  But the sense that nobody has turf that they're protecting, nobody – there's no competition for students who come in, so if you work with that person, you're not going to take a course, or if you take my course I'm not going to allow you to do that. The absence of even theoretical disagreements, it's just been unique I think, and people keep commenting on how fortunate the department is that there aren't these divisive distinctions or turf battles that sometimes occur in other areas, partly maybe because people get their own money there.  You know, they're working in different areas, and a bunch of people get it from the National Endowment and some people get it from the National Science Foundation, and some people get it from NIMH.  And so you're not in a sense, if you got money, I don't get money kind of thing, you're all hustling for your own particular project. And the central mood of the department is get whatever you can and we'll support you, and when you want time off, we'll give you time off.  So again, it's a big enough department so that I don't think anybody who's asked could I have time off to use a research grant has been told, oh, I'm sorry, you must teach the course on manners and family.  I've never seen that happen.  They're always, if you get money, do research, it's more important.
00:37:11
RL:	And I have to assume that the various deans of the college were supportive of the Middleton approach to building sociology.
JE:	They seem to have been.  And in fact, I think in fairness, we have been blessed by the deans.  I think once we became good, we've been given advantages, which it was almost like giving to the rich.  But we've been able to get new appointments or other people can get new appointments. The dean would start the year saying, well, you might have two assistant professors.  And then we'd find three that were quite good, and he'd say, well, okay, give the third an offer and see what happens.  So it's, I felt it's a privileged department, but it's one that has earned the privilege because it has been consistently good.  I think departments that haven't fared so well perhaps resented the fact that we've done so well.  But I think it's also the dean's philosophy.  If you've got a strong department and it's doing something right, keep it and let it happen. The department always – I think there's almost – there's nobody now in the department still that was here when I first came.  I'm sort of the last hangover.  There's one who come somewhat later who's still there, who's about my age, and I think she's probably going to retire in a year.  I think I've heard her saying things like that. So it's been interesting to watch the great men move on and then another group come in, who I say are probably going to be about as great.  They're not quite of the same status with any of them, but we're – we passed through the hump of being number one and losing seven or eight or nine big names, because they retired within a three- or four-year period, and then watching our ratings not going down as the new team came in. So I sort of was holding my breath and thinking people may say, well, Wisconsin's lost all these folks, it's going to be a while before it retrieves it.  But with some middle range appointments and a bunch of bright people, I think we're, I think we're okay.
00:39:10
RL:	Joe, can you reflect on some of the outstanding graduate students that you have had or that the department has had that have gone on?  You were talking about Susan Wadley, for instance.
JE:	Right, for the India thing.
RL:	Yeah, for the India program.  Are there others from sociology that the record should 	reflect that strike you as particularly significant?
JE:	There are some who end up back on the campus in interesting ways.  Cora Marrett, who is working as the assistant to the president right now, I taught her once.  She was in my theory class.
RL:	Really.
JE:	And then she went out, and we don't hire our own, which I think is a very healthy thing.  But if our own go out and do well and get tenure or practically get tenure, we'll bring them back in.  So we brought Cora back in.  She was in complex organization, bureaucracy and stuff.  A wonderful, wonderful colleague. When the Three Mile Island disaster occurred, she was selected to be the sociologist to work on the committee to figure out what went wrong in the communications so that it wouldn't happen again if there were a similar nuclear crisis.  And then she was – 
RL:	Really.
JE:	Then she was spotted as very bright and became the director of the National Science Foundation in Washington for several years, and I had the pleasure of going into her office, and there was this big room and a big desk, and there's my former grad student with an American flag by her and director of the center. Then when she rotated out of the director of the National Science Foundation, she came back to the Madison campus and is now – 
RL:	Cora Marrett was head of NSF?
JE:	Yeah, the science section, social science section.
RL:	Social science section.  Social science.
JE:	Right.  So that's one that, you know, the trajectory was there.  Others who ended up, I could come here with a whole list of names if I had focused on them, but there were several who have come back and then have done very well on the Madison campus.
Arch Haller was a person who went through here in rural sociology, and he came back and he was on the faculty for a while.  Let me sort of make a list, because I'm sure I can come up with a bunch, rather than typing up the tape at this point.  I'll make a note.
00:41:25
RL:	Okay.
JE:	Okay, the South Asian program was innovative from the start, the fact that we had languages being taught on the Madison campus that had never been taught before.  It took us a while to sort of settle down on what we would and wouldn't teach. We would do Hindu because that's the language that about a third of the people in South Asia speak some version of.  But among the other area centers, such as Berkley and Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, should we divide up the other languages so that if somebody wanted to study Telugu they can do it in Wisconsin, and if they want to study Tamil they can do it in Berkley, if they want to study Bengali they can do it in Chicago. And there was some effort to be reasonable in the allocation there, but it's always tricky because you have somebody come to Madison who wants to work in Bengal and that's taught in Chicago, but the person they want to work with is here, so it was always a little bit rough and tumble to get this thing put together. We very quickly got a master's program in South Asian studies, and the Ph.D. program going in South Asian studies.  And then we did innovate here, and to some extent set something which I was not much a part of.  But we set up, I think, the first Ph.D. program in Buddhist studies here in the University of Wisconsin.  Now it sprung out of the South Asian program, because Buddha was born in South Asia.  And if you're learning Sanskrit or Pali, Buddhism is a major tradition from the area. Dick Robinson was brought in from Canada, and he was one of these kind of innovative geniuses who was able to bring other young faculty who knew Tibetan and knew Chinese and knew Japanese and so on.  And I can remember celebrating a party where the Buddhist studies Ph.D. program had been inaugurated through whatever the process was, and recognizing that I didn't know enough about Buddhism to give a half-hour lecture, that was not my area. But it caught fire, because we had a very good set of people, to which we added, ultimately, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, Geshe Sopa.  Geshe Sopa came knowing almost no English.  He had been in Lhasa with the Dalai Lama, and had helped give the Dalai Lama his final exam when the Dalai Lama became a Geshe, which is like the Ph.D. in Buddhist studies.  And then a week or so after the Dalai Lama fled from Tibet into India, Geshe Sopa had followed him, and then had come through a series of steps so that he was here. So we attracted a wave of very bright graduate students interested in Buddhism and particularly Tibetan Buddhism.  And from Wisconsin have come most of the Buddhist studies programs in the United States right now.  You can pick them out, and their chairs and directors have been the product of this particular group.
RL:	Really.
JE:	So that was sort of interesting to watch because I wasn't part of it, but I saw it happen as a spin-off from the program. We very quickly linked in with the American Institute of Indian Studies, which was established about the same time the center was established, by 13 universities, among them being the University of Wisconsin, deciding that rather than having each one have their institute for research in India, they would pool their resources and have a collective consortium working together.  And the consortium was kind of like a Wisconsin idea. With China and Japan what happened, there was a Yale in China, there was a Harvard in China, there was a Yale Princeton Middle Eastern studies, there was a Harvard Middle Eastern studies.  Each university sort of picked out its own turf.  
Here, learning from that model, the new team of scholars dealing with India said, let's not go that way.  Let's have a single institution.  Let's get funds from wherever we can, funnel up through this, give it to the best scholars, give it to the best Ph.D. students, and cooperate rather than compete with each other.  So it was a great idea.  Henry Hart played a key part in getting it started, and, you know, Wisconsin was one of the first ones to get involved. So they got into this Public Law 480 money.  So for a while, there was lots and lots of money for students in rupees.  You had to get to India.  You had to have somebody pay your insurance and your mortgage on your home, but once you were there, there were lots of resources. So that became a major asset for people interested in studying India.  And there's hardly a scholar who deals with India who hasn't at some point been funded by the AIIS, as it's called.  So that was a great boon for getting graduate students going, because if you have money, there's some dream that you can actually do research.
00:46:00
RL:	Joe, was South Asia at this point, or India studies, a department or a center?
JE:	We had here a Department of South Asian Studies.
RL:	It was a department.
JE:	Yeah, yeah, which meant chair and courses and how you got a BA and all the rest.  In fact, a little history there.  When I came, it was called the Department of Indian Studies, and that's how Henry Hart had labeled it.  Even the first two or three years I was here, I'd run into funny conversations because people assumed this was the Ojibwa and the Cherokee and the so on.  I remember having at least a five-minute discussion with somebody from a Rotary Club who was talking about an Indian dance program they were going to put on, and we were on completely different tracks until we got to something about he mentioned headdress.  And I said, well, no, no, Indian dancers don't wear headdresses.  And then all of a sudden we realized we were completely not in touch with each other. So partly to avoid that confusion, and I think there was a sense of getting a Native American studies center going here, the name was changed to South Asian studies.  That worked fairly well, because it also allowed you to talk about Nepal and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and so, although funny things would happen there.  When you would say you're in the Department of South Asian Studies, people would say salvation studies?  I didn't think that theology was taught on the university campus.  And you'd go, South Asian studies. To fast forward, over the intervening decades when the decision was made to teach Indonesian or teach Turkish or teach Turkoman or something like that, Tagalog in the Philippines, the dean never knew where to put these people so he would put them in our department.  So we ended up with this Department of South Asian Studies teaching Turkish and teaching Indonesian and teaching Thai, and it just got more and more bizarre as the years passed, until finally about five or six years ago, we decided we just had to be honest and describe what we were. So we reorganized ourselves into the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia.  We approached the Chinese and Japanese scholars, because everyone used the term Asia, and they obviously part of it, and they decided they had no interest at all in joining us.  In a sense, there wasn't any reason.  We weren't – I mean, they had their department that was flourishing, and there was nothing for them to gain by joining something where they were then competing for funds to teach Indonesian and Hindi and stuff. So we had this anomaly now, it's called the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia that leaves out China, Japan, and Korea, but that's only, you know, a billion and a half people, so [word unclear] about that. But that has been intellectually challenging.  The [word unclear] is now recognizing that from the point of view of my colleagues who were in these peripheral areas, it's been a boon, and we – I wanted this to happen, because now we have students coming who want to get their Ph.D.s in Turkish literature, who want to do their stuff in Indonesian politics, and so the department has a title that allows that.  And now the people who came to teach these languages can teach substance and bring in graduate students and lecturers to do the actual student instruction.
So to that extent, the department looks very different, because we have colleagues who formerly were spending almost all their time teaching Thai or teaching Indonesian that are now teaching stuff about drama in Thailand or Indonesian linguistics or something along that line.  But anyway, that's where the title of the department has changed.
RL:	Okay.
00:49:30
JE:	I was chair of the department when it was still Indian studies, I think.  As soon as I got tenure, I was nailed with it.  I was told that this was something that [words unclear].  I truly did not like it.  It was way over my head.  I had no idea how the university worked.  I had been insulated from how these things operated.  I sort of did my work and taught my classes, and once a year was told what my salary was, and that was – I was very well protected. Another thing that I liked Wisconsin for is that I was – very little of my time, until I got tenure, was spent on committee work.  It was made quite clear that, look, we'll let the tenured people worry about screening admissions and all the rest.  You keep teaching your classes and get your publications in, which I think is a very sound policy. I did watch one of my colleagues in South Asian studies, Gerry Kelly, who was an assistant professor became chair of the department before me, and Gerry didn't get tenure.
RL:	Really?
JE:	And part of the reason was he felt that he – he was a linguist, and he just couldn't get out enough publications and handle all the visits and the proposals and the kind of stuff it took.  So he – when he didn't get tenure, he went to Cornell and ended up having a pretty successful career.  But watching an assistant professor get executed was all I had to be shown that this is something you didn't do. So I was quite well protected and quite ignorant.  So when I became chair, I had no idea how a lot of this stuff worked out, and it seemed that every third day there was a crisis of some kind.  I can remember getting something from the librarian saying, if you don't tell us by Saturday or Friday, how many yards of book space you need for books on India in the next five years, we're not going to allocate any.  How am I supposed to figure that out?  And it seemed that it was constant like this. And then there was one of these sad things where two of my colleagues had gotten into a fight with each other and got quite offensive to each other and exchanged insults with each other.  And watching two scholars, who were older than I was and whom I respected as scholars act like they were kids in a sandlot, was very distressing to me.  I had no idea how to do this, and it soured the department and there were nasty charges that they went to.  And I realized subsequently, the world deals with these kinds of problems, but I didn't like having it impinge upon my chairmanship. The one thing that happened that was perhaps as significant as any during my year as chair was in December of that year – 
RL:	And which year is this?
JE:	This was the year I was chair, which was – so December of '65, I knew that salaries were going to come up somehow.  I had no idea how to work out salaries.  I knew that we had to work out courses, and I had no idea how to work out which courses were listed.  The whole thing is very mysterious. I had a phone call from the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, saying that they were setting up a team.  They wanted to have American and British Quakers go to India and Pakistan in the wake of the August war of that year, which had ended in a stalemate and a ceasefire but not a peace treaty, so see if there were anything the Quakers might do on the subcontinent as they had done – Gandhi, there was a reputation and so on. And I just said, that sounds wonderfully tempting and there's no way I can do it because I'm chair of the department, and a whole lot of decisions had to be made in January about salaries and stuff.  So I'm really sorry, but I can't do it.  And they said, well, if you change your mind, fine.  We are looking.  We have two English Quakers who are ready to go, but we feel we shouldn't have a national group because there is an English reputation and, if we had an American, it cancels it. So I turned to the secretary I had and I said something like, I just turned down a wonderful offer.  It sounded very appealing, but I couldn't do this.  So she said, well, what is it?  And I said, it was chance to go to India and Pakistan to see if there are anything a team of Quakers might do to help after this war between two countries who were a single country up until a decade ago, and then there's been all this tragic ill will between them. She said, why did you say no?  And I said, well, you know, salaries, courses, and all the rest.  And then she said something, and again one of these people that [words unclear] well, who needs you?  And I said, you mean I can leave?  She said, sure, there are two or three people here who have been chair and they can fill in for you.  I said, are you serious?  She said, of course I'm serious. So I picked up the phone.  I called them back and said, I'm coming.  So that change that got me, in a sense, within a week or two to Washington in the embassy of India and Pakistan to sort of hear them say what Quakers might do, and then in the winter break go to England and team up with these other two guys, and then go to India and Pakistan and end up ultimately carrying messages between Indira Gandhi, the new prime minister, and president, the president of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, was beyond my wildest imagination of doing anything particularly useful.  But I think of it in the context of the chair, because I felt that I couldn't do it, and then my secretary sort of said, with great wisdom, you are not indispensable.  And so that was the chance to get involved in that.  And then once having done that, it just led to a whole series of other things that I was able to do as a Quaker.  So that was probably the biggest plus of being the chair, being told by my secretary that I was totally unessential, that a lot of other people would cover and I was covered. And I think I was getting, I think the second semester I had off or something, so I was able to stay until the middle of February in a series of visits back and forth, which proved to be very enlightening for me.  I don't think we did a whole lot to bring peace to the country, but it was appreciated by people on both sides who had no other way of speaking with each other, because every channel of communication between the two countries had been cut off in August of '65.  
Prisoners were still being held, some Indians were still unable to go back across the border, mail wasn't going back and forth.  And part of what we watched happen was to begin to watch that stuff get unstuck. The Indians and Pakistanis signed the Tashkent Agreement under the sort of supervision of the Soviet Union, and then it was a peace treaty and then things began to flow.  But we still were useful to going back and forth and talking with people on either side, and then coming up with a final suggestion at the end.  Anyway, that was my brief period for one year as a chair.
RL:	So you were chair only for a year.
JE:	That's right.
00:56:05
RL:	And how did you get out of – 
JE: 	The next year I had been invited to go to the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University, so that was the great escape.  This was – President Vic Butterfield probably wanted me to come to Wesleyan and teach there.  He was a great headhunter, and we had met someplace or another, and he sort of sense that I was really a small college type person rather than a university type person. And he had the Center for Advanced Studies, which was a golden sort of birdcage to come, a year to write, to think, to do whatever you wanted, with only the requirement that you teach one seminar one semester, which is nothing, with a staff of people to type and to Xerox and whatever else you want, and then a dinner a week with the other fellows to talk about what each of you is doing. So it was the academic version of [word unclear].  So that was sitting there waiting for me at whatever my salary had been.  So the whole family moved to Middletown and we spent next year, which would be '66-'67, is that which one it was?
RL:	Yes, '66-'67.
JE:	Yeah, in Middletown with a house provided by Wesleyan University, and the companionship of a very interesting set of people who were working on various different types of projects. So actually, it was there that I finished a lot of the work I was doing on the chapters and the lectures.  We were coming out with the revised version, which was much, much more thorough and so on.  And it was just terrific to have no classes to worry about.  And the one seminar that I had in the spring with a group of bright Wesleyan men, we wrote a chapter collectively which then went into the chapters on Indian civilization. This was a chapter on what happened to Western intellectuals as India opened up, what happened to philosophers, what happened to people who studied religion, what happened to linguists, or what happened to historians, because ‑‑ 
RL:	That would have been fascinating.
JE:	It was fun.  And you'd turn a bright student loose and saying, okay, what effect, if any, did the opening up of India have on German philosophy.  And so they would read their paper on what impact that had.  And there was a lot of impact as these things began to come in and people tried to fit in notions of thought patterns and notions of power and notions of inherited genius or whatever they were talking about. So anyway, that was a very successful year.  And some of the students that I worked with I still remain in touch with, Gabriel Campbell was one of them, and later on Gabriel Campbell was director of the U.S. Educational Foundation in Nepal.  He ended up helping the students on their program, the circles within circles. So that got me out of the chair.  And then when I came back, somebody else was chair, and I kept a very low profile [words unclear].  Eventually, that year that I was chair, I was also director of the center, which meant I was handling the quarter of a million dollars that came in for general purposes [words unclear].  
00:59:05
Then in the late 1980s, pressure was brought on us to separate the role of the chair of the department from the director of the center.  It was hard to tell precisely why, because it seemed to work quite well.  As the center director you got the money, and as chair of the department you would hire Telugu teachers or [word unclear] teachers or give scholarships to students or whatever.
RL:	When you say pressure came, where did pressure come from?
JE:	Pressure came from Washington.  They said we don't want you just to be a center ‑‑ to be a part of.  You're supposed to be dealing with geographers and historians and outreach and high school classes and stuff like this. You're not supposed to be ‑‑ we're not funding a department, we're funding a center, and our fear is that you're converting it into a department, which probably we were in terms of just we need the money here, and here are the students and here are the faculty, and so [word unclear].  So we, with some reluctance, divided it, and then I became the director of the center and other people were the chair of the department. And right away we realized that there were a lots of things that we could be doing and should be doing.  The whole film's operation now became a center activity.  The conference on South Asia now became a center activity.  These are two big things.  To the extent the year abroad program was involved, it was a center activity rather than department activity.  So there was a certain amount of sorting out.
So then it didn't mean that all the money came and went to faculty salaries.  It could go into staff to engage in outreach, or actually be used to pay for films or pay for film distribution.  So it cut things in a different direction. So I remained director of the center until three years ago.  Kept looking for somebody who wanted to replace me, and there was nobody around who was the least bit interested in replacing me.  And these were competitive.  Every three years you threw your hat back into the ring, and occasionally a center would not be funded if you hadn't done well.  Washington would visit you.  Washington would send other staff to evaluate you.  So you were constantly under peer review.  You could never relax and say, well, we're sure forever that we're going to get money.
RL:	Who in Washington was funding you?
JE:	Office of Education.
RL:	Office of Education.
JE:	Right.  And they were, you know, the money came through them, and we had all the reporting process.  But again, every three years the sunset closed on your budget.
01:01:24
[End of Tape 4]
RL:	This is Tape 5, Side 1 of the Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder, October 11, 2005.
00:00:12
JE:	To the extent I made any contribution I would think was significant for South Asian studies in Madison, it was being director of the center for about 12 years.  Those were pretty bleak years.  Washington was changing its philosophy about funding centers.  For a while, we were identified as arcane.  For a while, we were seen as leftovers of the cold war.  The boundaries had been drawn in terms of the U.S. interest in stopping the Soviet Union, and that was no longer an issue, and the Soviet Union sort of disappeared in 1988, '89, '90. We were seen as having divided the world according to, you know, the West and the Marxist world.  We were spending less and less time learning languages.  We were focusing on problems in India or Pakistan.  With keeping the magnifying glass on tiny stuff, we should be stepping back and comparing, let's say the electoral process in Muslim countries and Hindu countries, or economic development in Buddhist countries, and Muslim countries or something else. So the whole pitch was get away from areas, stop focusing on the [narrow?] thing.  We want the principles of economics and sociology and politics, the generalizations.  And there's some pretty nasty things being said in Washington about centers.  Now those, the centers felt it's fine to ask comparative studies and to say, let's look at what's happening to peasant rebellions in China and peasant rebellions in Bengal, that's kind of interesting.  But if you are going to do something on peasant rebellions, you better know Chinese and you better know Svengali, and somebody somewhere has to do that. So we were – we felt beleaguered, and a number of centers lost their funding, in part because they were losing faculty and in part because I think there was a sense of cutting back, especially South Asia was no longer seen as quite so central because the Soviet Union war in Afghanistan had ended, and South Asia wasn't as important in stopping Communism or whatever, and the Islamic problem hadn't come up yet. But by keeping the Wisconsin profile strong, which we were able to do, I think we survived and almost came through the decade stronger than many of our competitors.
RL:	How were you able to do that?
JE:	We had the study abroad program, which nobody else had, and by now, all of our alumni were beginning to appear in Duke and Berkeley and Seattle and other places.  We had the annual conference on South Asia, which I think I mentioned earlier, which now became the place where, the conference to which South Asianists went every year.
We had a summer program that taught languages, built into again to the study abroad program.  We had the film distribution program, the only place that was consistently producing films and coming up with new film.  So partly our structure just meant that we were busy and doing things during this period where various centers had their backs to the wall, and some of the centers were cut out. At one point Seattle lost its funding, at one point Missouri lost its funding, at one point even Pennsylvania lost its funding.  That was scary.  Pennsylvania had been one of the first places to get started.
00:03:33
Then came the Islamic threats and 9/11, and what's bad for the world is good for South Asian studies and funding.  Money has increased for the study of languages.  We now as a center are the place in the United States to teach nine of the South Asian languages.  We are identified as the place, the only place that now teaches Indian language in the summer, so everybody comes here.  We can pick the best faculty members to teach at all levels in whichever languages we have. That's been a dream of mine from the beginning, the business of why is it that you can't have a place where people who are anyplace in the U.S. who need to study Bengali or Marathi can come one summer and do first year and next summer second year.  But it took, I think, 9/11 and the need to say we've got to systematize this and get it put together in someplace, and get some additional funding from the Office of Education to make it possible for this to happen. So the instruction on South Asian languages is more coherent now than it's ever been, and it will presumably continue for at least the foreseeable future and that Wisconsin will be the center for that.  So we sort of rode through the crest, and I think we're okay now.
00:04:46
RL:	And student enrollment is significant?
JE:	Each summer it's gone up.  It is interesting.  We thought that introducing languages that had not been taught before, we'd have a big influx of people who wanted to study Gujarati, let's say.  We had lots and lots of second generation Gujaratis here or [word unclear]. Ironically, the big class is Hindi.  We have 30, 35 people coming here to learn Hindi, and Hindi is taught almost every other [words unclear] center, but people don't take it in the summer or they'll take first year during the year and they want second year here.  And, ironically, the tuition that the students pay for Hindi helps us pay for, you know, second year Tamil and these little tiny classes that we have. It's a juggling act to figure out where the money comes from, and then teach as many of these advanced courses that we can.  I think we have a cutoff point of four.  If there are four or less, we don't teach a language, but at five or more we will.  But we've bent that several times.  And then you can't tell, if four people say they're going to take it, and two people show up.  So you end up juggling unknowns against unknowns.
00:05:55
But I feel that we're probably stronger now than we were, and then the AIIS is stronger now then it ever was.  And then if I could go a little bit to my involvement with the AIIS.
RL:	Absolutely.
JE:	Okay.  I was elected – 
RL:	And say for the record again.
JE:	American Institute of India Studies.
RL:	Okay.
JE:	I had almost nothing to do with the American Institute of India Studies, other than being funded that year I was in Lucknow.
RL:	Yes.
JE:	I was in that pioneering group that was told halfway through that we weren't going to get any more money.
RL:	Or taxes or something.
RL:	That's right.  The Indian taxes were going to take the rest, and then they worked it out.  Since Wisconsin was a member center, it got to send trustees.  I think we had, we were allowed to send two trustees to the trustees meeting because it was a consortium, and this was not my game. I had my undergraduate program.  I wasn't particularly involved with the center, so there were always other people from Madison going to be part of the trustees group.
RL:	And the year?
JE:	It began in '61.  It worked for a long time with its base in the University of Pennsylvania where Norman Brown, the great Sanskrit scholar, was the president, who was absolutely natural.  And then after Norman retired, for a couple years Ainslie Embry from Columbia University and Duke was the president, and then it came to Chicago with Ed Dimock, who was a Bengali literature person. And there were a lot of problems with it.  The funding was gorgeous.  The rupees were infinite.  You could do almost anything you wanted with the rupees.  There was always – there were always some tensions and difficulties about it, almost because there was too much money, and there was a feeling of proprietorship that Pennsylvania owned it or Chicago owned it and what have you.
Each time it was time for the president to retire, you were allowed two 4-year terms, and then, as I recall, you were supposed to – you couldn't have any more.  But each time the president was doing so well that people would say, well, let's keep him on, and then it would get more awkward, and then the feeling was, well, this person really had taken over, and the resentment built up about Norman Brown and the same resentment was building up about Ed Dimock. At one point, I was pulled in sort of an outsider to look at this structural problem, why was there always a crisis when the end of the second term arrived, and then there was always this, well, he's so good, let's keep, and then once you kept him, people. So two of us who had almost nothing to do with it, came up with – studied the thing and came up with a recommendation, which wasn't all that clever but which did resolve the problem, which was that the third year of the second term, there had to be an election for the replacement president so that there would be a training, a president in training the fourth year.  What usually would happen would be there would be nobody at the end, and the thought of we can't just start with nothing. So this was then written into the constitution.  I didn't realize that would save my life later on, because then they had to have an election, because Ed Dimock's term had ended.  And there was a person who had worked very closely with the institute who was kind of an insider, and then I was brought in as an outsider because [word unclear] nothing to do, but people knew I had worked with the college year program. And I was asked, was I prepared to add the presidency of the AIIS to all the other stuff that I was doing.  And I thought long and hard, and I said, well, the staff there is very good.  We had a whole Indian staff there in director-general and offices and so on, and my impression is that they probably could pretty much run things.  So, sure, I'll run. And then to a certain extent to my surprise, I won the election, and I was seen as an outsider.  There was a feeling that the old boys were too clubby, that, you know, the friends were giving stuff to friends and so on, which I don't think was true.  But anyway, resentment had built up over the years about the administration.  So there I was, the president elect.
RL:	And the year?
JE:	The year would have been – the president elect in '86 – '85, to become the president in '86.  It was an interesting year, because at that point then I went with Ed Dimock to India to be the trainee and to meet the government of India officials and so, and to meet the director-general, Pradeep Mehendiratti, who had risen from almost literally office boy to managing director, a very bright, very capable, very interesting, very complicated kind of person. And just about the time I became president, the Public Law 480 money ended.  It had been coming through the Smithsonian Institution.  All the alarm bells were out there that the money will dry out, that at some point the government is going to forgive – the government of the U.S. is going to forgive India the debt.  And face it, friends, the money will dry up.  This institution, which has been funding seniors scholars and Ph.D. candidates, will just go dry. Luckily, Ed Dimock and the Smithsonian had set up a reserve fund so that each year when a grant was given to the AIIS from about 1981 on, about half of that was put into a separate account, so that when the money ran out there'd be four, five years of funding waiting for them, but it would just allow the thing to sort of die a dignified death. And when I became president, I remember talking with the person in the Smithsonian who was handling the money, and she said, Joe, your job is to end the existence of the AIIS with as much dignity as possible, because there's no way in the world we're going to get the millions of dollars that it takes to keep this thing going.  Just to keep the staff going in India is a million dollars, and then where's the money going to come from for fellowships. So this was a great assignment to be president to the dying institution for which the money was about to evaporate.  And I had no brilliant solution to this thing at all, and all the old-timers, I had not been with the program that long.  I knew about the forward fund, this money that was saved, all right. And then we met a guy in the Smithsonian, Charles, last name will come, who said, if there's any way in which the money that's sitting in the forward fund could be made into an endowment, you could live off of that, but Congress never gives endowments.  The money is always on a one-year basis.  Charles Blitzer, B-L-I-T-Z-E-R, and he just was a guy who knew about the program.  He was running the Woodrow Wilson Institutes in Washington.
RL:	Had you known him?
JE:	Very casually, and we had dealt with the Smithsonian.  He was a very pleasant person, he knew some Indian scholars.  He knew my predecessors in the AIIS rather than he knew me, because I was – I was the new kid on the block. Well, Charles Blitzer, he lived for – well, he died, but he figured a way of writing into one of the Smithsonian proposals a clause, that is about two sentences long, to convert the forward fund into an endowment.  This is so undemocratic, but it's, I guess, the way these things work. And it was slipped in under some kind of appropriations toward the end of the season, and it was passed by Congress, without Congress having a clue that they had taken about $5 million, that was sitting there in the forward fund to allow us to expire with dignity, and create a rupee endowment which would, if we had harbored it right, be able to keep the thing going. So we could hardly believe our good luck that this thing had passed, and it was politics at the worst, it was never debated, nobody looked in it.  They would have killed it if they had seen it happening.  But it was what saved the institute, and it was the combination of the wisdom of Ed Dimock in setting the money aside, assuming that this would just be a dignified death, Charles Blitzer knowing the way to put something into the tail end of an appropriations bill that wouldn't  be seen by anybody because they were hundreds of extra pages, and getting it in. And then once it was in, we were terrified somebody would spot it and we'd be in trouble.  But we nursed it, kept it quiet, and then gradually transferred it into our endowment which was going to be held by the American Embassy in India, invested, essentially, in Indian returns, which were very good.  They were 15%, 16% on investments there.  So sort of chunk by chunk, we took this $5 million and transferred it, sort of bit into this endowment with which the U.S. Embassy is holding, and that got us through the crisis so that we could go on in the future with a limited [word unclear].  We don't have unlimited rupees. The next thing that happened was that Charles Blitzer died.  He had been a terrible smoker, and cancer got him in the end.  And then we learned that his estate he willed essentially to the AIIS.  Now he was a bachelor, he had no other family, and we had not expected anything like this.  But I guess he was so intrigued by a group of scholars trying so hard to set up something which would allow scholars into the indefinite future to continue – and junior scholars and senior scholars to study, that he just felt this was a good way of doing it. He had a big house in Washington and he had some other kinds of stuff.  So he gave us another $1.2 million or $1.3 million in dollars.  So now we had rupees in the embassy, dollars from the endowment, and what was to indignify death sort of became a phoenix rising from the ashes.  So there it was.
RL:	Again, I suppose we could use the word we have been using, fortuitous. 
JE:	Yes.  Yes.
RL:	Both of those items, Congress', the indifference – or actually, the request was so small, it probably was not worthy of recognition.
JE:	Right, and tucked into some bill which they just sort of saw how tiny it was, this was some appropriation of the Smithsonian which they had been giving appropriations to forever and ever.  So anyway, the timing was right, the situation was right.  And again, in my files I have that letter from Charles Blitzer saying it passed. Anyway, when my eight years were up as director of the – as president of the American Institute of Indian Studies, I could feel good about it.
RL:	I bet.
00:16:52
JE:	Yeah.  It had been incredibly volatile, the roller coasters.  I mentioned Pradeep Mehendiratti.  I have a file of his resignation letters.  He had a very sensitive ego, and I would watch my colleagues say something rather that he could pick up as denigrating.  And he's be on the phone saying, I quit.  I've taken all I'm going to take from American scholars.  And I would go through this, Pradeep, no, you are absolutely indispensable. I guess I was – I never believed he really was going to quit, because he was getting a very good salary, and he was doing an extraordinarily good job.  He had to get visas for the American scholars, and American scholars would typically write topics that would be sufficiently sensitive, so that if anybody in parliament saw that an American scholar was allowed to deal with something dealing with untouchability or something dealing with Muslims, their neck would be on the block. So it was always a case of negotiating the title of the thesis and trying to keep things moving, and periodically somebody would be turned down.  The turndown ratio was low, nine out of ten would be approved, but the tenth was always rancorous and the American scholar would be irritated, and anyway. So Pradeep was a genius in handling these kinds of things, but also had a very short temper and also very sensitive skin.  And I can recall, India's 12 hours away, in terms of phone calls, middle of the night calls where he'd say, I quit, you know, I'm done.  One more insult from Howard Gould and I'm – is one too many.  And some sort of slight thing that he might say, you know, Pradeep, I don't think you're trying as hard as you could, or something like that, bang [words unclear] off the top. So we survived.  And periodically I'd say, you've got to continue until the next thing, and pretty soon the next thing came building a building in India.  Okay, we had no money to speak of, but Pradeep had a way of squirreling away money that was left over from various kinds of grants, and then he and I got the idea of let's see if we can raise money in India for putting up a building so we don't forever pay rent to these other people. There was several occasions we went to Rotary Clubs in different cities in India and made the pitch.  We were never very successful.  We put on dance concerts.  By the time we paid the dancers we had almost nothing and we were – but the idea of an independent entity was there. And Pradeep managed to get some gifts from the government of India to put this thing up. We bought some land about 20 miles to the west of Delhi.  Got some wonderful plans for a very creative building built out there where the land was so cheap.  We had our opening ceremony with a Brahman priest and a fire, and we were sitting cross-legged on a blanket in a field that formerly had rice on it.  Now that whole area is built up with offices and our AIIS staff building is in the middle there.  It houses a wonderful research laboratory in art and archeology, it's a research lab in ethnomusicology, it's where the staff is and so on.  So that again sort of gives you sort of a feeling of coming through a long, thin period with something at the end which is quite substantial. The next president who was elected had been the person I had run against, and he and I had worked very closely because he had been the treasurer.  This was Rick Asher from the University of Minnesota.  And so Rick really deserved to be the president.  He had put in his time on the cross and had handled some very tough financial things. Ed Dimock had had cancer, Pradeep Mehendiratti had a heart attack at the time, and so nobody was running this thing, and Rick had just stepped in and done a wonderful job.  So Rick was the president for the next eight years, while we were sort of going through the growing process, and then Rick has been succeeded by Ralph Nichols of the University of Chicago, an anthropologist.  So each one has been a very thorough, careful, committed scholar that has managed to keep this thing going.
RL:	And you're still involved.
JE:	After you end up being president, you're chair of the board of trustees, and then you exit out.  And so when the eight years were up for the chair of the board of trustees, I had seen lingering academics in the past who would try to get free trips and so on. So I said, look, it's been a great eight years as president and a great eight years as the chair.  I'm now withdrawing.  If I can ever be useful, call me.  What I didn't say was I don't want to be a hangers on like these people I've seen in the past who, do you pay for their tickets or don't they, and do they get a vote or don't they, and so on.  So it was kind of a clean neat end. And I have been asked to run special missions.  The Seattle language program was [word unclear], talked to one of the campuses to see what the problems were and so on.  So a troubleshooter is fine, but I wanted it to be a clear break.  I put in my time as president, I put in my time as chair of the board, and now you guys keep doing it, and if I can be of service, great.
00:21:54
I also wrote a book.  We decided that after 50 years of American scholarship in India, there should be something that the AIIS produced.  So this was partly my idea to celebrate 50 years of the AIIS.  We ended up calling it U.S. ‑‑ I'm sure it's here.  Yeah, India's Worlds and U.S. Scholars: 1947-1997. My thought was that so many of us who worked in India were forced to rethink our basic conceptual categories as sociologists, as linguists, as anthropologists, as political scientists, as musicologists, that we should record that.  It wasn't a case of Westerners coming in and insisting that India fit our categories, because our categories weren't very good. So I became editor-in-chief, and we approached I think about 20 different academics, 20 – more than that, to say, would you write a 15- or 20-page chapter on how your studying India made you rethink the categories of your discipline.  And this was extremely interesting.
RL:	I'll bet.
JE:	The Sanskritist studies, Muslim scholars and so on.  Well, putting anything together with a bunch of coauthors is a mess, and so it landed on my shoulders, but the end result I'm really quite proud of.  The first portion of it is the history of the AIIS written by Maureen Patterson, who was the bibliographer at University of Chicago for years, and knew Norman Brown, Ed Dimock, and so on, and had kept copious notes.  She's a bibliographer of the first order, just has files and files.  And I'm helping her finish her 800-page book on the history of the institute.  But this is kind of a 120-page summary of what [word unclear]. And then each of these scholars, beginning with anthropology and ending up with, I don't know, zoology or something, and you get some sense of how another part of the world just makes you rethink practically everything you've learned here, which is scary.  Because then you think, well, I am the product of a certain intellectual heritage, which is what I've been trained in and has a certain logic to it, but I have to remain open to other systems when I get there and see how they sort things out if I'm to make sense out of the world as they look like.  And each one of these was fascinating to read.
RL:	Did you write an essay for this?
JE:	I wrote one in sociology, the impact of studying India on sociology.
RL:	Did you talk about your dissertation?
JE:	A little bit.  I think I mentioned something like I could hardly have been more wrong in my premises. I also talked about one dimension of sociology, which I think studying India has brought in.  The study of Gandhi and nonviolent activism has generated things called peace studies and conflict studies in United States campuses.  There now is an encyclopedia of peace and conflict study, and you sort of begin with Gandhi and the notion of a strategy for using applied nonactive – nonviolent activism. And now there must be 25 or 30 programs in the United States that either offer certificate programs or majors where people study the application of nonviolence for social change, race relations, women's rights, LGBT rights and so on. So that was kind of an input which I said the study of Indian society has shaped intellectual disciplines here.  For example, there's a Crock Institute in Notre Dame, the Catholic place, the main purpose of which is to look at applied nonviolence to introduce social change and justice.  And there's a trace [word unclear] Gandhi's influence on Martin Luther King, and the way in which that was applied to the civil rights movement. So that was kind of one of the kickers in the chapter that I wrote here in terms of how studying India has introduced something into Western, the Western [word unclear].  So that was kind of the swan song for my part.  This was my intellectual contribution, I guess, to the AIIS.  And the idea was to run off hundreds of copies and give them to everybody that had ever given a visa to anybody in the United States or any faculty, any Indian campus.  Every fellow has to be affiliated with an Indian campus someplace.  And it's kind of a bother to have some department chair sign on that they'll be accountable for Joe Schmoe who's coming in a six-month preempt to study something.  So anyway, this was to be the great, thank you, India, for what you've done for us.
00:26:22
RL:	Joe, switching to your work as a citizen of the university, if you would talk about your involvement on various committees and in the Faculty Senate.
RL:	Okay.  The first committee I was ever assigned to struck me as so bizarre that it seemed almost a joke.  There had been a crisis of minute proportions that was a tempest in a teapot.  Somebody who had a research project on the campus somewhere had ended up with some extra money, and so he'd have a sign that cost like $1,500 advertising the initials of his project, okay, and he had bolted it on the outside of the building in which he worked. He apparently hadn't cleared that through whatever one clears putting signs up on buildings, and some buildings and grounds people had come and seen this unauthorized sign, unscrewed it, and took it someplace else.  This faculty member came, saw the sign missing, reported to the campus police there had been a theft, and there was this mess. I was, I think, still untenured, and for some completely unknown reason I was to be the chair of a committee to deal with signs on the university campus.  What am I doing?  And this had been created through whatever the process was that creates campus committees.  And I had the director of buildings and grounds, I had somebody from the art history department, and we were supposed to begin with this question, what do we do with this sign and who was entitled to put it up, and then what should we do about signs on the campus anywhere. And in the process, whoever was organizing this thing, had taken photographs of every street sign on campus, with absurd signs every 15 feet, no parking or something like that.  So this issue began to lead to almost biweekly meetings to figure out what we do with all of these things.  Should there be a body where all signs are cleared or should it be the campus police who decide this kind of thing?  What is somebody gives a real ugly piece of art?  Who decides whether that gets displayed or not? Well, I felt this is both the best of campus governance and the worst of campus governance.  I have no right making these kinds of decisions or recommendations to whatever body we were going to make it to.  But I was certainly meeting interesting people, among whom was the campus gardener, was a person from that, who described how lovely the campus could be if he could just have a little more money to put flowers in various parts.  So it was all dimensions of the campus. Well, we came up with some series of recommendations [words unclear] were too many no parking signs, there should be some space between signs, and if you'd see a sign here, you shouldn't have a second sign there [words unclear]. In the end, the most important thing we came up with was a recommendation that the campus map be redrawn so that the miniature structure, the buildings, would be represented, because the map of the campus we had then was just of the surface.  And so there would be a building which would be, say, half a block, but whether it was ten stories high or one story high wasn't visible.  And so we recommended that the campus map be redrawn so that if it were Van Hise and there were, you know, 16 floors, it would look like that, and if it was something flat, like a natatorium, it should look like that. Lo and behold, the map was drawn and it's in virtually every publication since then.  Well, that was campus governance at its sort of weirdest and, you know, we came out with whatever the resolution was.
00:29:48
In terms of more serious things, I've never been on the Faculty Senate.  I really don't enjoy campus politics.  It's – I'm glad people do all that kind of work.  But I have served on various committees that usually had to do with the administration of various programs. The Land Tenure Center was something I was very interested in here, and the Development Studies Ph.D. program, which is an interdepartmental thing, dealing with the training of people who want to work in Africa or Asia.  So from almost the beginning, I became one of the faculty members that would either be on the executive committee or part of the group of faculty administrators [words unclear] committee.
00:30:28
I was elected to two fairly important campus committees.  One was the Social Studies Divisional Committee, where you sit and review – 
00:30:40
RL:	This is Side 2 of Tape number 5 of the October 11, 2005 interview with Professor Joe Elder.
00:30:52
JE: 	The years I served on the Social Studies Divisional Committee were 1972 to 1975.  It was a three-year term.  And I guess there you are the – you are ultimately responsible for the quality of the academy in the social studies division, because the courses need to be rigorous, they need to be defensible, they mustn't be overlapping with each other, they have to be carefully programmed.  And most of the stuff you get is pretty good, but every once in a while something comes and you look at it and say, this just needs to be thought about a little bit more. You also deal with the tenure issues.  Technically, it's the dean of letters and science who blesses the tenure process.  But the dean, I didn't realize this until I was on the committee, essentially says you go over these things.  Now these are being recommended by the departments to get tenure or not to get tenure.  I want you to give them an independent review and give me your opinion. So in a sense, we started from scratch.  And these are – the one thing you have in common is you're all in the social studies division, so you're dealing with people in anthropology, economics, political science, social work.  We also ended up with people in kinesiology or [words unclear] that didn't quite seem to fit.
RL:	Did you have history, too?
JE:	Yeah, history was in there.  That's right, yeah.  They make a distinction.  Some of them see history as humanities and some see it as social studies.
RL:	And I've never been sure.
JE:	I'm not sure how they make the break.  I think different people [word unclear] if you are sort of doing intellectual history, you're [word unclear].  If you're doing sort of economics in politics, it's something else.  I think that's how they sort it out.
But it was a lot of work, but you felt very, very ‑‑ at least I felt very, very [word unclear] the burden of establishing standards and saying hurt though it may, if people aren't capable of keeping up the standards, they shouldn't be on the campus.  And so we reviewed them from scratch, a lot of you would read the stuff that people had written.  You'd also quickly realize how there were broad areas you didn't know very much about, and you had to be a little humble about deciding whether your judgment was ultimately something you'd rest on. But you'd look at who was publishing, how much they were publishing, the length of what they had written, what their colleagues had said about them.  And sort of with this mirror image plus your own independent opinion, you'd come up with ultimately your recommendation this person seems to us to deserve tenure or not to.
RL:	Joe, would the divisional committee get – if, for instance, the sociology department denied somebody tenure, did the denial go to the divisional committee as well?
JE:	Um-hum, yeah, and you would be entitled to review whether you felt the denial was justified, so that the whole process sort of came through.  So it was reviewing the courses in the social studies division and reviewing the candidates. And occasionally, you know, you would make these hard calls. The first person I came in on the tail end of was a political scientist.  They had already made the decision.  It appeared to be touch and go.  He had only published, I think, eight articles, and the political science department felt there should be a book and stuff like this.  But the divisional committee had read the articles and said, these are really, really bright, and the quality is good enough.  So the fact that the numbers aren't very high shouldn't prevent it.  And that was Ruth [Fowler?].
RL:	Oh, wow.
JE:	Just made it to tenure.  And Ruth went on to be chair of this and that, so one of the campus' distinguished scholars, but the fact that it was kind of the divisional committee that stood by and said this is really good. We had a couple of appeals where the case looked pretty feathery, at least once the candidate came in to present an appeal.  You try to be fair and give every opportunity to whoever was being considered, to look at what they had done.  But ultimately was the sense that we have to have quality, and the whole institution depends upon having some kind of line below which things would fall. So that was very interesting.  It was a lot of work, very collegial, and you did learn how different people evaluated, did there have to be numbers, did there have to be long publications, did there have to be short publications, whether their teaching was or wasn't very good, you know, how did you balance all of these things out.
RL:	Do you think on balance the administration of tenure at the university has been equitable?
JE:	I think so, yeah, at both the departmental level and at the divisional committee level.  I know there's always the suspicion that, well, I can make some exceptions. There was one colleague in sociology that I – who published almost nothing, but he dealt with statistics, which were so elaborate that I couldn't understand it.  And my colleagues said, this guy is a genius.  I mean, this one article he wrote is like Einstein, and all I can say is I can't make any sense out of it. Now he was promoted and he's produced virtually nothing since then, and that seemed to be one of those cases where I should have trusted my judgment.  This person isn't producing anything, and although he's a nice person, we don't have room on the campus for somebody like that. I have actually voted in two instances against a person I would say was my closest friend in the department who didn't get tenured, and I voted for him not to get tenured.  Because nice though he was, and his level of performance wasn't what I thought a UW faculty member should be, which has meant that I have missed good colleagueship had either of them remained. One was in the Indian Studies department, one was in sociology. We had a lot in common, but in each instance ‑‑ in one instance, there was no way on earth I could have voted for him.  He was a terrible, terrible teacher, which is quite [word unclear].  He published a lot, but his students would walk out of his classes.  They would feel completely bored and put off.  And with that kind of stuff, you can't have a non-teacher. The other was a very nice person in sociology, an African specialist, who was very engaging, very thoughtful, very bright, had just never seemed to be able to publish anything.  And that was a little tougher, because I could see him fitting in as a guide to graduate students and so on, and a very kind of quality mind.  But if he hadn't published anything, there was ‑‑ it wasn't likely he would publish something, and how do you account for that.  Is there enough administrative skills so that you could say that he ought to get it. So those are two cases where I personally felt that there was standards that I just – that superimposed over the fact that they were like virtually my closest friends in this department, and sort of about the same age category.
RL:	How did you get on the divisional committee?
JE:	You had to be elected.
RL:	By?
JE:	All the social studies faculty. 
RL:	I see.
JE:	You vote as a humanities, social science, physical science, biological science, and so each of them has their divisional committee.  And so you have to be either lucky or well known, or just the count comes out some way.  So that was one on which I was elected and served.
00:38:26
And the other that I served on twice is called the Academic Planning Committee, and this – the deans keep calling this their kitchen cabinet.  You meet once a week, every Wednesday afternoon, from essentially 4:00 to the rest of the day, and the dean of L&S lays before you all the things he's interested in.  Rarely do you take votes, but you talk about whatever the issues are, and it's all kinds of stuff.  And that's also [word unclear].  I was on that committee from '82 to '84, and then again '92 to '95.  
RL:	So you would have – so that's a dean's committee.
JE:	That's right.
RL:	And so you would have been working first for Dean Cronin and then Dean Certain?
JE:	Dean, was it Dean Certain the second time?  Yeah, that's right.  I think there was a transition in the middle.  Yeah, Dean Certain came in about then, right. So there you do end up with – well, I think it's very useful for the dean to have a set of people where he can sort of say, here are things that we're working on.  At that point, it wasn't so much the intellectual rigor of the campus which I fully enjoy, but it was all the bureaucratic stuff that goes with, you know, decisions and administration and so on, which was useful, somebody has to do it, but often it was – the choices were difficult and the money wasn't enough to go around, and it was the kind of thing, which of these worthy programs do you turn down because there isn't enough money to go through. In each of these instances, I met wonderful faculty colleagues.  I mean, if there's ever a plus to these things, you're in with very, very interesting people who generally have a broad enough reputation so they've been elected by their colleagues.  And so you're meeting physicists or you're meeting people in French literature or you're meeting people who are in astronomy or people who are in, you know, bioethics or something like that.  And you very quickly become kind of a family, because you're each struggling with these sort of complex issues. So they were useful.  I think maybe once in a while we may have even been helpful for the dean, I'm not sure.  But a lot of work, and every time I was relieved to get off it, because once again, to have Wednesday afternoons for other things was the sort of feeling I used to have when I was out for sports in college.  I played soccer every fall.  And so every afternoon from 3:30 until suppertime was out.  And then soccer season would end and you suddenly felt, all this time, I can do whatever I want from 3:30 to 6:00.  The same sort of thing.  It would rapidly get absorbed by all the other stuff, but there was that brief moment when you felt a huge sort of thing lifted off you. And while you were there, you were also meeting the people who made the critical decisions.  And deans, deans have a tough job.  I've never, never wanted to be a dean and – 
RL:	You've never aspired to be a dean?
JE:	Never, and several times they've invited me to apply and I've just said, no, this is not – this is not something that I would either do well or would enjoy.  So I'd much rather be on an advisory group and do the kind of stuff that I do than sit there with these difficult decisions.  Here are three excellent programs, and I can fund only one of them.  Which ones am I going to say no to?  And that's, I don't like that.  Somebody else has to do it.
00:41:49
RL:	Joe, if you would comment on the university administration, particularly the various L&S deans that you've worked with, challenges that they've had, and communications that you and the dean have had.
JE:	It's been pretty much episodic.  Many times, I was barely aware who the dean was.  In fact, one of the things I enjoy about the UW is I often had to pause to think who was the president and who was the chancellor, because the place seems to run pretty well and the critical decisions are made by myself and my colleagues.  And I don't think that's true in all campuses. But anyway, the dean who was involved with hiring was Dean Ingram, a mathematician.  I never knew him well.  I always had great admiration for him, and this kind of supreme irony that Ingram Hall was named after him.  And by then it's like, here is Abraham Lincoln or something, an historic figure.  Well, I remember sitting there as a candidate to be faculty member talking to Dean Ingram, who is, you know, bright enough to ask questions about India even though this was not his area of specialty. I knew Dave Cronin relatively well.  Dave and I actually had been roommates in Oberlin.  He had come back as a veteran.  He had been a lieutenant or captain in the military police, so he was a whole jump ahead of me in terms of age.  He was a counselor in the freshman dormitory, so we were in a triple.  As a senior, who was the counselor, he roomed with two freshmen, myself and another freshman from Iran named [Qamar Mushedee?].
So we had this unusual kind of start.  And the difference between a freshman and a veteran senior are night and day, you know.  He also had a board job.  He was a waiter, so he'd get up before the rest of us got up.  And then he became very involved in campus activities.  We had a mock political convention, he was very much involved in that.  So I sort of admired him from the distance as a guy who was infinitely older.  And, you know, we got on basically well, but didn't see each other very much. His mother was a Quaker, and this was when I didn't know very much about Quaker, and at one point we had met and chatted.  Later years, we did meet and talk about things. So I was aware that he went to Yale.  He did his dissertation on Marcus Garvey.  He had been interested in Marcus Garvey because of a race relations course he took at George Simpson, there was no other faculty members interested [word unclear].  But Marcus Garvey had this back to Africa movement.  Eventually, his dissertation was made into a book, which I bought and so, you know, kept it up. Then I was aware that he came to Wisconsin.  I knew he won some teaching awards when he was in [words unclear] accounts of how he was trying ‑‑ he was teaching World War II I think, and he'd tape things from radio messages, Roosevelt's fireside chats, and the announcement the big war was over and stuff like this.  So he came with a lot of stuff I admired. When he was dean, the relationship was a little more distant.  We were still friends but he was up there and I was down here. Our philosophies collided, to some extent, because he tended to be fairly conservative and I tended to be fairly radical.  I'm trying to remember any particular instances.  On the planning committee, his tendencies seemed to be mostly to think of reasons why things shouldn't be done.  I guess that was what I kept feeling.  And that rather than exploring new ventures, he was one who was sort of showing up and saying, well, if we haven't done it, probably we shouldn't do it.  So at several points I thought it was a little bit frustrating dealing with a dean who didn't seem to be sparked by things I was sparked by.
The area that I was most interested in was international relations and study abroad, and he didn't have any particular interest in this.  I can recall at least one time where I had written a suggestion that it would not be hard to expand the study abroad programs.  We had people around and so on.  And the answer was there's just no money for it.  And I had come up with various alternatives on how things should be done.  So I guess that my feeling was that this is a dean who says no.  Now maybe he just said no to the stuff that I was particularly interested in. He was around when the Vietnam War began, and on that he was basically supporting the war, and I was very publicly opposed to the war.  So that was another place where, you know, we just collided with each other.  His wife was wonderful, and we'd periodically, you know, visit and stuff, but it was always a little a cold. At one point, he docked me some salary.  I was teaching in the summer, and the rule was that in summer you just couldn't miss a class because everything was condensed.  And I was involved, I was asked to go to Sri Lanka and be a message carrier between the Tigers and the government, something had come up.  So I taught a seminar once a week, and I got one of my brightest graduate students to cover my seminar, which he could do perfectly capably.  In fact, I felt in this area he was better – he was doing economic development.  Made the mistake of reporting to the dean that I was going to be off campus for 12 days carrying these messages back and forth.  Returned to discover that this was against the rules, and the fact that I had prepared a graduate student to cover didn't qualify, because it was a graduate course and the graduate student [word unclear].  So I was going to be penalized for not having shown up for work, essentially.
RL:	Even though you had notified them.
JE:	That's right.  The mistake was I had notified them.  If I hadn't notified them, nothing would have happened.  But since there was a rule there saying that this shouldn't be done, and I could appreciate his position, which was if you do have a rule, even if it's a friend of yours, you make the point.  I could not appreciate it because I had covered it for myself and I felt fully responsible for the person I was training. The department felt slightly agreed to the fact that I was being targeted, and they felt that what I was doing was thoroughly justified.  Hal [word unclear] was the chair of the department, and he had at one point sort of went with me to the dean and had expressed disappointment that a colleague had been docked.  It wasn't a whole – it was $800 or something like that.  
But that was one of those, you know, it happens, and I urged the department not to make an issue out of it.  Just, you know, if it serves the dean's purpose so that if somebody else comes up later and says, you know, I want to take off, you can say we take money from you if you take off, so I could appreciate that.  That was a little bit of a rough spot in our relationships with each other. With Phil Certain, there never a problem there.  Phil seemed to be much more open to a whole lot of things.  Since we were at that point getting into the study abroad expansion, he seemed quite comfortable with that.  The global studies certificate program, which I was involved in, sort of breezed right through.  Later on, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender certificate program that I was involved in sort of went right straight through. So in his case, I felt if it's a good idea and there seems to be faculty interest in it, and it has some intellectual merit, you're not going to hit a wall up there that says, well, we haven't done it so we're not going to do it. So to the extent these were the two deans I dealt with mostly, one seemed to be more on the side of saying no and no change, and the other was much more willing to be open to other kinds of things.
00:49:28
RL:	Joe, let me ask you a comparable question about chancellors you've served under, Harrington, Shalala, Shain, Ward, if you've had much to do with any of them.
JE:	The only one that I sort of had personal contact with was Donna Shalala.  The others I sort of knew about, but again, the fact the whoever's there doesn't seem to impact my life is something I like about the campus. Donna Shalala was a little bit different for a series of reasons.  She had been in the Peace Corps in Iran.
RL:	Really?  I didn't know that.
JE:	Right.  And she herself I think is from Lebanon.  I think Shalala is a Lebanese name of some kind.  And somewhere along the line, we had discovered this contact, and she was very, very open in talking with people. Early on, she said that she wanted to meet people off campus and do things.  And so my wife and I picked up on the suggestion that why don't we just have a supper together, no big deal, and we'll talk about Iran and the Peace Corps.  And at that point Donna Shalala was very interested in international studies and things that were going on in that area. So we had this incredible supper, which she came over, and it was going to be at 6:00 and then it was 7:30, and we were going to talk about Iran.  Well, to add to the party, we invited my brother-in-law, who is a Badger football fan who exceeds all other Badger football fans.  And Donna at that time was trying to figure out what to do with the football team and the coach. So we got off on the two things which we were essentially going to talk about, Iran and the Academic Staff Organization, which my wife had helped organize.  This is academic staff who have a voice and a body and elected and so on. Well, that took maybe 12 minutes.  And then she was off on football, and here was my brother-in-law, Jim Lund, and he was going back over strategies and quarterback and coaches and this, that and the other, and they were at it for the rest of the supper on what seemed to work.  And Donna had figured, I think, that it was important to have a good football team if there was to be support for the campus, and the support could be following all kinds of things. So a strategy which I thought was bizarre, you know, why put money into the football team.  We have a crummy team, and we need a library, we need all the other things that academics say are needed, and here she is trying to get them firing coaches and all sorts of stuff like this. But I could watch her mind working, that if we are going to have a football team and if we are going to get support from all over, it's important to have a winning team.  So how do you get a coach that does that?  And sure enough, she went, you know, marched straight on through and got a good football team out of it.
00:52:10
The other arena in which we ended up working was a bit bizarre.  At some point, I'll probably just talk about how I got into the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender studies.  It reached a point where there was going to be an all-faculty vote on whether the ROTC units, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps units, were to stay on campus because they discriminated against lesbians and gays, and the campus had declared that it was not going to discriminate against people on the grounds of sexual orientation. Madison said it wasn't going to, Wisconsin said it wasn't going to, so here we had, in a sense, a crisis of what we call hypocrisy with the Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC units saying if you're lesbian or gay, you can't come in.  So there was a faculty vote on whether the faculty would request the Board of Regents to terminate the contracts, because these ROTC units were in violation of the state, city, and campus statements. I had been involved in collecting the 200 or so faculty votes that we needed to have a vote on this particular issue.  I was a group of maybe eight or ten faculty who felt this was sufficiently contradictory so that we should have a voice.  And there was a provision in the way in which governance had established that, I think it was 200 faculty vote for an all – all-faculty committee, and there had to be one.  This is I think the only meeting that was every held, but it was in – 
RL:	Of the entire faculty?
JE:	The entire faculty.  We met in the cow barn.  And it was a pretty hot [word unclear].  Donna did a number of things since – I was sort of the spokesperson.  There were two or three of us who were seen as the key people. At one point she said, to the extent you need legal advice on how you put your proposal together, use the university lawyers, which was very nice.  Because when you're putting propositions up, you want to be sure the wording is correct.  So we made an appointment with one of the university lawyers, and he helped us frame the resolution so it was rigorous, and you couldn't have the various feet knocked out from under it because of the way it was framed. And I just appreciated her sort of getting in touch with us.  And I could see some other chancellor, well, this is being a big trouble and this will bring a lot of negative attention, university faculty voting on what's happening and so on.  So I had the feeling that she was kind of on our side, even though she was to be completely neutral. Before we had the debate, and I was to the first spokesperson, because I had more white hair than anybody else, she said, we are on television and a lot of people are going to watch the next two hours. I am going to be calling upon people at a certain point, we have person one, response one, person two, response two, but there are people out there who are going to have their hands up.  And I want you to let me know which of them are likely to be responsible speakers and which ones aren't, because whatever happens, we'll be public, and you and I both know that people will be standing up and make fools of themselves or say very angry things or something. So I felt her whole approach there was basically I want this to be fair, and sort of I want your side to be heard, which I did appreciate because we were, you know, kind of the minority in that particular instance. Well, the vote was held, and it came out that we won by a substantial majority.  I have the figures here somewhere or other.  It better still be in there to get it.  So I'll read from a section that was written up.  On February – no, I'm sorry, I got the wrong one.  Back again.
RL:	Okay.
JE:	On February 1, 1988, the University of Wisconsin Faculty Senate adopted a resolution stating the discrimination of the UW-Madison Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, quote, violates fundamental notions of equal opportunity and privacy, as well as violating the University of Wisconsin-Madison policy and the intent of state law, end quote. Now here's where I come in.  On December 4, 1989, at an especially cold meeting, the UW faculty voted 386 to 248 to request the UW Board of Regents to terminate the university's contracts with the Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC programs if those programs did not end discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation by May of 1993.  That would let all the students who were in keep their scholarships until they expired. In its meetings in 1990, the Board of Regents voted not to implement the faculty respect – or request, but the Board of Regents did vote to instruct UW officials to work through elected political representatives in Washington to change the anti-homosexual policies practiced in the United States armed forces of which the ROTC units were a [word unclear] part. So she played a key part, I think first of all, in encouraging us to proceed, and then, in a sense, helping us get the groundwork so that we would look good.  It was hard to tell whether she was happy the way the vote turned out not, and one could interpret what she did next as a little bit of a pull the rug out under.  There were a lot of complaints of the faculty who at the all-faculty meeting.  We're missing people who were in chemistry and engineering because they had labs in the afternoon.  So the old issue that these are – the vote came out this way, but what do the faculty really intend. So there was an effort made to take a poll of the faculty, I think, through some of phoning process or some other way, or people could send in ballots or something.  And so there was a vote taken, which the majority took the other side, just a little bit.  So you had two things.  You had the official vote in a general faculty meeting, and then a kind of survey which came out with the other side. And the survey may not have been necessary, except that had she said, well, the vote represents where the faculty are, and the faculty felt disenfranchised because they weren't at the meeting, would have felt this was not a realistic sort of thing.
Now we all knew the Regents weren't going to accept this, but at least we felt our job was to make a statement.  And if the Regents chose not to do it, we had come out on the right side of this.  So it was definitely mixed, but through that all, it was an interesting relationship which I had with her as kind of a representative of the faculty group that was concerned about the status of LGBT people on the campus. She subsequently set up a committee to work on the full issue, making the campus friendly for LGBT people, and guess who was appointed to the committee.  And sort of from then on, I've been on almost every major committee who was assigned the task of having the campus friendly to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender students.
00:59:09
RL:	Joe, let me ask.  We do want to talk about that issue, but on Shalala, as you can surmise, there are a strong range of opinions among the faculty with whom I am speaking.  What's your assessment of her?  Was she good for the campus?  Did you respect her?
JE:	I respected and liked her, and felt she made some mistakes, if that makes any sense.  I enjoyed her enthusiasm.  She was refreshingly accessible most – 
RL:	Oh, was she?
JE:	I felt so.  Now whether the fact we both had Iran as our background and was something unique there.  But I felt she knew my name.  When we would meet, you know, she would say, hello, Joe, unlike the other, you know, chancellors who, well, they can't know everybody, and obviously they didn't all know me and we lived in very different worlds. So I had a personal relationship with her which I – a closer personal relationship than with any others, and so that skews it to some extent.  She would make snap decisions.  She made a couple of mistakes.  There was one person which she had picked out to be a dean of international studies who was not qualified, and he began to make appointments in the field that I knew of people that I could see were not going to work out. In this case, fortunately for the international studies program, some women began to bring charges against him about sexual harassment.  And at first, he denied that there was any problem there.  But there was going to be a hearing, and apparently by the time there was a hearing, there was more than three or four.  It was quite a number of women who brought charges against him, that in his capacity as one of the intermediate deans somewhere he had been – he had harassed them. And so very quickly after his appointment, he resigned rather than being fired for what he had done.  And that was one of these things where I think a quick decision – had she waited a little bit longer, she would have spotted that this was a person who was in trouble.  But, heavens, as one who's made more mistakes [words unclear] deciding how people were than I can acknowledge, you know, you make one mistake. I knew that she was controversial.  I was puzzled by her football thing, because that just seemed kind of a PR stance.  But she worked very, very – 
01:01:24
[End of Tape 5]
RL:	This is Bob Lange with the Oral History Project.  Today is October 17, 2005.  This is a continuation of the Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder of the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. Joe, we want to pick up the interview today with a review of your many grants that you've held in the course of your career, and ask you to comment on the significance of them for your work at the university.
00:00:33
JE:	The first series of grants I became involved with had to do with finding support for the study abroad program in India.  It is expensive to travel to India, and we wanted to keep the program as competitive as possible, in fact, keep it even more than that so that people could go with very little money. The fact there is rupees stacked up in the American Embassy in India meant that there was sort of easy money if you could frame the thing right.  And so the first series of grants that went in would end up with the rupees being given, and then we'd have to pick them up at the American Embassy, and spend them entirely in India, and keep separate books, this money came from the rupees and this money came from the University of Wisconsin.  So the poor graduate students who were handling those things became experts at double bookkeeping or whatever is involved there. And that continued, and still continues.  The eagerness to supplement funding so the students can go to India without it being a terrible expensive project is something that I continue.  And in the next several weeks, I'll be put putting in a proposal again.  And it's the Office of Education with a Fulbright, the Fulbright program under it which encourages exchange programs. And there's a particular seminar and study abroad component there, which we are quite competitive at and which we keep going back and they keep giving us money.  So that's almost an annual event seeking money for that. The bigger money began with the film projects where, once again, the fact that there was lots of money and rupees meant that I could get fairly substantial chunks of money to handle the films in India.  When I look back at some of the figures that came through there, I was – by the time you take $100,000 and convert that to rupees, you have lots and lots of money.  But that meant that we could have teams stay over there for long periods of time.
00:02:29
When I began dealing later with professional filmmakers, I realized how lucky we were to have two things, one, ample money in India, and the other, the kind of dedicated camera and director people who would be perfectly happy to live in a village for four or five months in order to get the pace right and so on. When we worked with BBC at one point, we had to shoot an entire film in five days.  Otherwise if it was six days, they had to bring in ‑‑ they had to fly in their camera people and sound people from Britain, and the price would go right off the top.  So shooting a documentary film in five days compared to shooting a documentary film in nine months is all the difference in the world in terms of what one gets out. So that was the second series of grants, and there were all [word unclear] the Smithsonian. Typically, the rupees would come through the Smithsonian, but then the money would be sitting in the embassy, so we would be authorized by then.
00:03:22
When I became president of the American Institute for Indian Studies, then I was in the heavy grant process, because it was the institute that would apply for funding of the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Smithsonian.  You name it, we were there with our begging bowl in order to fund major offices in India and then provide scholarships for Ph.D. candidates and senior scholars. So much of the time that I was president, I was simply filling out these forms and sending them in.  Luckily, we had staff people who were very good at this kind of thing, otherwise I would have been doomed.  And at a certain point, you get kind of a format, you know, of what's expected.  But still, it was a case of the deadlines hitting you always a little bit before you were fully prepared.  And government deadlines are deadlines.  If you don't get it on time, then it's – 
RL:	There's no maneuverability.
JE:	You're back in the queue someplace for next year.  So it was a bit of a task.  But anyway, that was where during the period I was president, it's like all I'm doing is earning money from various people.  But they were set up, as one goes through, it is for fellowships, it's for the management of the American Institute for Indian Students, it's a whole series of things, each of which into this major research center. And I must say, that the AIIS is something, I think, is a model research institution.  The fact that it's being reason now by about 50 colleges and universities that share in the directorship, had sent people to the Board of Trustees, and that we have a single entity that asks for money, and then that screens all the candidates for senior fellowships and former Ph.D. candidates so there's no competition between institutions, and I think we have the very best people as a result. So that's sort of the short story of a lot of filing of applications.  And at the moment, once again, it's mostly back into funding for the study abroad program that I'm submitting proposals.
00:05:16
RL:	And was there much private grant money for the study abroad program?
JE:	The Mellon Foundation – we did get a little bit of money from the Ford Foundation at one point for one of our films [words unclear].  We went to the Mellon Foundation for a particular fund we were trying to get going. For a number of decades actually, we had been the center for the study of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States.  I may have mentioned that we were the first place, and maybe the only place, to have a Ph.D. program in Buddhist studies in the United States.
RL:	You did mention that.
JE:	And one of our major assets was Geshe Sopa himself, the Tibetan monk who had helped give the final exam to the Dalai Lama.  So I can always say, well, I know people who are smarter than the Dalai Lama, because he gave the exam to the Dalai Lama. But anyway, as he was retiring, we thought maybe there'd be enough of a clientele out there so that we could get an endowed share.  And we did approach the Mellon Foundation, because they had indicated an interest in something like this.  They did come through with money, it wasn't a whole lot, but it was something.  And once you have something, the plan was to have it matched. And here, there was a miscommunication between me and the endowment people, because I had sort of assumed that they would be the ones who would hustle the match.  They knew who gives money and so on.  And at that point, they weren't as efficient as they now are.  So it languished.  I was thinking they were doing something, they were assuming I was doing something. And then all of a sudden, we were getting threats that – saying like if there isn't matching money, we're not very interested in giving you the money in the first place.
RL:	I see. Oh, from Mellon?
JE:	From Mellon, right.  It was with the understanding that they would give some and we would give some.
RL:	And time period for this, Joe?
JE:	As I look at the grant, it's in the 20 hundreds.  It was – Geshe Sopa retired I think around 2000, and so this was at that same particular time. So in the end, we kind of bumbled through.  The total amount we got from the Mellon Trust account was $13,000.  We weren't able to match it, and so it ended up being just a very small sum of money which we used to help a little bit of the libraries and round out student fellowships and things like that. Since then, I've seen the development people become very, very good at something like that.  They know who might give and who might not, and they're much smoother.  But at that point, we were all learning how this thing went.  And I guess also they're not always dealing with people who are intrigued by Tibetan Buddhism.  We're dealing with people who are in biochemistry and all other fields that [word unclear] more better funded interest than this one.
00:07:53
RL:	But it would seem to me that there has to be a growing interest in Asia generally.
JE:	Right.
RL:	And that the prospects of raising money to support study abroad and your other projects, it would seem to me, would be brighter than it was, say, 20 years ago.
JE:	I think that's true.  And actually, the Office of International Studies and Programs has set up a Joe Elder Scholarship Fund – 
RL:	Oh, great.
JE:	For people that kicked in money specifically to go for students studying abroad.  And one of our alumnae from the Nepal program gave a fairly generous grant to do this for three years.  So the last three years we've picked since ten students going to anywhere in the world through the Wisconsin program, and they've gotten supplementary money to help with their travel.  So that's kind of a nice thing.
RL:	That's great.  Now you've become an icon.
JE:	There we are.  And there was a little ceremony last, you know, when you meet the students who are about to go and [word unclear], you know, on the selection committee and they're, you know, very, very good students. You try to pick the ones for whom $2,000, $3,000 might make the difference between being able to go or not go.  That's what you're sort of looking for.
RL:	Uh-huh.  What's your assessment of the future availability of grant money from the Office of Education?
JE:	Here the very fact that there are things like terrorism around help us.  The first funding from the government came because of Sputnik, and suddenly there was vast amounts of money, which got the center started here and played a key part in many of our lives.  We never wanted to point that studying Telugu didn't seem to beat the Russians somehow, but if they're giving us money so we're supposed to study international languages, that's fine. And now there's a new spurt with, after 9/11.  There's been an eagerness to have people learn the languages, the Pashto and Farsi and various ‑‑ and Tajiik, and languages that are spoken in that area.  So as money has become available, it's hard to find students who want to go and study it, because there's such a small market when you're all through.
But I think one reason we're able to have our summer language program comes almost directly from that, that suddenly money was available to increase the study of languages in Asia generally, in South Asia particularly.  So it sounds kind of grim.  So long as there's a fear of people in that part of the world doing dangerous things, we may be doing okay as far as money is concerned.
RL:	That is odd, isn't it?
JE:	It is odd.
RL:	I don't cast judgment, but you really, one wants to pursue knowledge because it's good for the human condition.
JE:	Exactly.  There was something of a crisis after Sputnik, because the money was being given under something called the National Defense Education Act.
RL:	Right.
JE:	And for a period of time, the people who were issuing the money required a loyalty oath to receive the money.
RL:	Really?
JE:	And you could imagine how that went over.  
RL:	Yes.
JE:	So there were people who would receive it and then be told, but you're going to have to sign that you have never been a Communist, and so they wouldn't take the money.  And gradually, we were able to bring pressure on the Washington people saying this is serving no useful purpose, and it's hurting some people who, on grounds on conscience, don't feel like they could do this sort of thing. But that's always been a tussle between money from Washington, sees this as defense and those of us who see it as a great way to explore the cultures of the world, and they aren't always synonymous with each other.
RL:	Interesting.  Anything else on grants that we should note here?
JE:	That's probably it.  I went through the way the [word unclear] was able to take money and get it turned into an endowment.  That probably is the most significant thing as far as the survival of the AIIS was concerned.
RL:	Joe, let me – 
00:11:47
JE:	Let me say a little bit also about my wife.
RL:	Oh.
JE:	She was the undergraduate advisor in sociology for years and years, and there's a small scholarship in her name.  So we actually have a Joann Elder Scholarship Fund and the Joe Elder Travel Fund, which are not terribly funded yet.  We haven't managed to write huge checks, but I'm not sure how many couples there are in the United – on the campus that have one.  This is to go to undergraduates who are financially – 
RL:	So you and your wife worked together in sociology for years?
JE:	Right.  She was with the same office.  She was – I was on the faculty, and she was academic staff.  I maintain that she had much more glory and status than I did.  She had a much bigger office.  She had a private secretary, so I couldn't get in to see her without being cleared by the gate watcher.  For years she had a view of the lake.  I had a view of Observatory Drive. She sort of helped create a job when Russ Middleton was chair of the department.  He was the one that renegotiated the hours we taught so that we could do [word unclear], and he also saw the need for undergraduates to have serious advice.  In the old days the notion was, well, give 15 students to a faculty member and they'll advise people.  Well, we faculty are really bad advisors.  We don't know the rules, we have no idea if a course in Spanish literature in Platteville would match, and we'd just be bad.  But the thesis was, students should work with faculty. And it took my wife and several other people a bit of an effort to say, this is a serious job and it requires people with other talents who focus entirely on advising.  And beginning in the mid '60s and on down, the major departments have undergraduate advisors who do this job full time, and I'm pleased, my wife feels she contributed to a new idea.  Now I think, unless a faculty ever wants to volunteer to be an advisor, we just – we're not doing it well. The other thing she came up with was seeing the need for a place where students who weren't clear about their majors could go.  She would deal with sociology majors, and the undergraduate advisor in psychology would deal with them, and somebody in history.  What about a sophomore who just doesn't know what to do?  So she and a few others came up with the idea of the cross campus advising center, where there would be a place where an undergraduate could walk in and say, you know, maybe engineering, maybe medicine, maybe business, maybe philosophy, I don't know what, and be advised how to place themselves in position.  And that is one of the inventions that she and a few others contributed.  And the other thing she contributed, the time had come to get academic staff in the university governance.  You know, initially it was administrators, and then faculty, and then students were brought on.  But for a long time, there's this vast series of administrative staff people who don't have any voice, they just come and do work.  
So she and several others organized the Academic Staff Committee which eventually began an organization, and now people in academic staff will elect representatives, and this meets as kind of a legislature, like the Faculty Sen, and on virtually every university committee you now have faculty students and academic staff sent by this academic staff council.  And that was something that she played a key part in organizing and getting going.
RL:	That's quite a structural reform, isn't it?
JE:	That and the cross campus advising, and the fact that both of them have flourished, you know.  It took a certain amount of people harrumphing and saying, I'm not sure academic staff should be involved in critical decisions, you know, all the kind of reasons people give for not having other people come in.  But I think it's comfortably settled now so that [words unclear] 
RL:	It's interesting to me.  I did not know this.  It's interesting to me, though, how many faculty that I interview speak quite highly of their various department secretaries.
JE:	Oh, absolutely.
RL:	How much many of these, mostly women I think, know.
JE:	Yup.
RL:	And how much they contribute, actually, to the substantial work of the department.
JE:	They become a memory.  They're often the human face.  No, if you get a good secretary over assistant director, you've got a real gem [words unclear] 
RL:	So they are members of the academic staff, I take it.
JE:	They'd be academic staff, yeah.  There's a clerical division, and I'm not – I can't always sort out who they are.  They're civilian servants.  But then there are the academic staff, and these are often, you know, soft money or they don't get tenure position, they get rolling horizon positions and so on.  But they're on the campus of any – live entire careers on campus.  So giving them a voice was something we felt the time had come, and it's here.
RL:	Actually, I was going to ask you about your wife, because Dean Joan Raducha had said to me, be sure you ask Joe about his wife.  I believe she said something like she is at least as significant as he is.
JE:	I would say she is at least as significant as I am.  And in terms of institutional change, if you look at both of those, you know, those are long-lasting structural features which she and a number of her close friends and the academic staff were able to put in.
RL:	Now is she still working?
JE:	She retired.  She retired about ten years ago.
RL:	Oh.
JE:	And that was kind of funny, because she had a male secretary at the time of her 65th birthday, and he was great with computers.  So when she came in, there was this huge computer sign Happy 65th Birthday, Joann Elder.  And people began to ask if her if she was going to retire.  And when she had went in in the morning, she had not thought of retiring, but by the end of the day, she couldn't think of a good reason not to retire.
So she planned a splendid retirement party next March.  It was first in row.  You know, by the time you get in April and May, there are many retirements.  So she timed this well.  There were deans and chairs of departments and alumni.  It was a wonderful [word unclear] dance overlooking Lake Mendota and [words unclear].  And then even then, she retired from the sociology department, and before long she was hired back by the history department, because they were missing an advisor for a semester.  And then she retired from that, and then she was hired to be the director of the cross campus advising center because somebody left and they needed somebody.  So I kept maintaining she just liked retirement parties.  So for several years she would, you know, be off and then back on, always very sheepishly explaining, Joe, this is only temporary, but I'm getting another job back at the university. But that finally ended.  And then what she did, she ran for school board, and she was elected on the Madison School Board and served a term there.  So she is active in many ways.
RL:	Yes, I remember when she was on the school board.  I was sorry she didn't run again.
JE:	Right.
RL:	I think she chose not to run again.
JE:	She chose not to.  Again a funny thing, how people see her.  She was interviewed by a reporter after she had gotten on the school board.  Her major reason was that she was concerned about diversity, the LGBT issues [words unclear].  And the person, there was a key vote there that was quite obstructive on things like that.  And so Jo ran against this person and won, so this person was off, and now the majority was interested in maybe even having a staff person who would work on LGBT issues and other schools and libraries and all that. So she got that, and then when this reporter asked her why she was doing this, she explained she was concerned about diversity in the schools.  And then she talked about all of her other interests, which were mostly international.  And at the end of the interview, the reporter says, I don't see why you're interested in the school board, your interests really are international.  And at that point, she thought, you know, you're right.  So she put in her time.  She learned a lot.  She saw a lot of Madison.  It's not just one night a week, you're two or three nights.  You're off to the Hispanic place and the Allied Drive neighborhood, and you're meeting this group and that group.  But she did feel that her interests really weren't in this.  And the vote having gone the way it did, she felt that she had done whatever needed to be done.  So she announced a year before she was due to retire that she was retiring, so other candidates could get lined up.
RL:	I remember when she retired.  I was sorry, because she was a progressive voice on the school board.
00:19:54
JE:	She was.
RL:	Joe, can you talk about the presence of the Dalai Lama on campus?
JE:	Sure.
RL:	How you arranged that, when it was.  It was major.
JE:	Right.  The first time he came – the mean reason he comes, I think, is Geshe Sopa.  The Dalai Lama has a personal fondness for Geshe Sopa.  And if you stand over in Dharamsala in India and look at where Tibetan studies are growing and flourishing, Madison, Wisconsin stands out.  There are other places, but Madison is there. So the first time he came was 1981, and Geshe had invited him to engage in a Kalachakra ceremony, which is a ritual in which people can be initiated at various levels of involvement in the [word unclear] community.  I was identified as a link between the university and Geshe Sopa and the Dalai Lama's office because I was in the department. And one of the ‑‑ initially, it was just when is the Dalai Lama coming, could there be a dormitory reserved, what will be involved in security, and all these kinds of things.  Among other things along the line was the need for security, since the Dalai Lama is both the head of a state and a religious figure.  And I guess nationally, there is an obligation to provide him with extra security, including, we discovered, the need to have an armed guard within a few yards of him at all times, and instant telephone communication so if anything happens. Well, I learned, to my great relief, that the university routinely provides that, that every police car has a weapon in it, and every policeman ‑‑ most policemen have some easy way of communicating.  So it wasn't as serious as that. The embarrassing moment came when after the dates had been set up.  I was informed that the Dalai Lama's astrologer had recalculated the appropriate data, and it was now going to be a month later than the one that they had scheduled for.  
RL:	Oh, my.
JE:	And I had to go and explain to the university administration.  I couldn't say the astrologer refigured it, so I just said they were going to change their plans, and we were not so far locked into it at that point. Another humorous thing was the Dalai Lama had to speak from a throne, and buildings and grounds doesn't have thrones.  We had to come up with something that would look like a throne which one has in a Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist teaching institution where the teacher does sit in a much more impressive chair than all the others.  But we overcame those particular kinds of things.
RL:	Where did you find a throne?
JE:	Somewhere in probably the costumes, I'm not sure.  Anyway, they found something.  And it went very, very well.  There was – in order – because he was coming, I think that was the one where they built a special, for months they began to build a special temple out there in Deer Park so there would be a place where he could come and have the initiation ceremony and all the rest. I happened to be out of the country in China the weeks he was here on a trip that I had planned a long time before.  We came back and had one of the most enjoyable slide shows I've ever seen, because there were a lot of people who had not been able to be there, including I think the chancellor and several other people.  So the Buddhist community had a slide show for all of us who were interested, and this included the policemen's wives and some of us who had missed things, and a few Buddhists who hadn't seen what had happened. And it was out there at Deer Park, and here were these pictures of, sort of like a family show, here's the Dalai Lama doing this, and periodically someone, there's my husband, you know, or, that's my son showing the Dalai Lama. So that was the first visit.  And then subsequently, there were a series of visits at different times, the most important of which, I guess, was when he actually received his honorary degree, and I don't have that date at my fingertips.  But the honorary degree committee sort of asked if this was something we could put together, because he had achieved a lot of prominence.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize, and this was a short while after that. So it was not hard to put together a proposal, and the fact that Wisconsin was a leading place for teaching Tibetan meant that there was kind of a justification for that, because anybody who gets an honorary degree is supposed to have some link with the university.  And the fact that by then he visited several times also meant that we could legitimately claim that he was a Badger and, therefore, could get an honorary degree. And to be a little bit sort of entertaining, the degree was given in the Kohl Center which had just recently opened up.  And the Dalai Lama was perfectly fine, speaking in English.  But to add a little touch to it, he spoke in Tibetan, and then a graduate student translated for the crowd what he was saying.  Wow, I don't even know what Tibetan sounds like, which was, you know, kind of fun.
RL:	What does it sound like?
JE:	It's a Tibeto-Berman language.  There are a few slight tones.  It is not Chinese, it is not the heavily toned sound.  And for some reason, I've heard more Tibetan chants than anything else, and those tend to be very, very musical in their own way.  They'll recite something with a very low voice.  In fact, among other things, there are Tibetan chanters who can literally produce four different tones with – from the throat at the same time.
One of our students mastered that.  He was on the year in Nepal program, came back and illustrated something, which I guess all of us could do if we practiced it, where he would introduce one tone, and another one, and another one, and move one of them around so you have four different tones coming out, one of which is in motion.  Now I can't imitate it, obviously, but anyway, chanting and Tibetan have been in hand-and-glove for a long time.  So that was kind of a nice touch.
RL:	Yeah, absolutely.  What's he like?
JE: 	Very impressive.  It's his manner, I think, that impresses people so much.  When you look at what he says, if you or I said it, people would say, well, that's obvious.  But for somebody in that position to say it, who represents kind of a mysterious tradition, who has dedicated his life to his people, who's committed to nonviolence, who has been sort of like a Gandhi in terms of world prominence, and speaks very comfortably with people of all faiths, a sense that he may be a Tibetan Buddhist but he speaks his spirituality in such a way that – and he says, whether you're a Muslim or Hindu or Catholic or Protestant, we're talking to each other on a level which transcends all of that, which is sort of a Buddhist level.  It has to be within the mind and the state of the mind.
So he's just very appealing in his willingness to appear with people and in multi-religious ceremonies.  He's completely at home when the rabbi is saying something or completely at home when somebody is singing a gospel hymn.  He's there and is absorbing it and kind of expressing joy with the whole thing.
RL:	Joe, he is still unable to return to Tibet, is that right? 
JE: 	That's right, yeah.
RL:	Do you foresee that ever changing?
JE: 	The last couple of years there have been some indications that things might change.  Now this usually – and Joe Elder is an eternal optimist, so it has to be kept very careful here. China has made a long – the Chinese position on Tibet is that this was a miserable, religiously dominated, tyrannical feudal estate with monasteries fighting against each other, with peasants desperately poor, taking their – growing crops for the monasteries and so on.  So the standard person in China reading about Tibet feels that it was very, very backward, dominated by theocracy, with the elite not doing much of anything, and the peasants not having any prosperity because everything that's produced goes into the monastery.  The Dalai Lama was pictured as a pretty selfish person who enjoys the power. I think the fact that the issue has been raised again and again on where the Chinese are in touch with the world, they are aware that their policy toward the Dalai Lama had backfired again and again.  That at some point where they are trying to win recognition in the world as a civilized nation, it may be one of those bargaining chips where they would be willing at a certain point to say, okay, bygones are bygones.
They've done some pretty devastating things to Tibet, the most devastating being moving in lots and lots of Chinese so the Tibetan is almost out of, you know, out of touch with the culture and the languages being spoken in Lhasa.  And that the Tibetans mourn, because it is an occupied country for practical purposes. But still, there might at some point be an acknowledgment that things are going to change a fair amount.  But with China changing as it is and with the middle class coming up and with people in touch with the rest of world, and a sense of human rights and so on, it just might happen that there will be some symbolic return where within an arena of the religious communication he could come back, with a clear indication that he's not in any sense a secular [words unclear] to be there for those who observe that particular form of religion it might be possible.  It's a bit of a stretch, but it's not impossible.
RL:	Yeah, yeah.  I was just interested, you know.  I haven't read an assessment of that lately.  When was the last time he was here?
JE:	He was here two weeks ago.  I was at a service with him in Riverside Church about two weeks ago.  He was here to – oh, when he comes there are dozens of things to do, but among other things, Riverside – the Union Theological Seminary is opening up more the study of non-Abrahamic phase and they wanted to have a major ceremony in which he would come and begin fundraising and so on. So as a member of the International Interfaith Peace Council as a trustee, I was one of those that helped set up the meeting and then set up the worship service that was there.  And then he met with us for an afternoon.  He is a member of the Peace Council.  He was kind of the inspiration of it, as a matter of fact.  So he's – he also – 
00:30:36
RL:	This is Side 2 of Tape number 6 of the continuing Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder.
00:30:46
JE:	There is the Tibetan office in New York City, and you approach them and they decide how much time is available and who's there.  Furthermore, especially in New York, the security was immense.  The Riverside Church, where the service was to be held at 5:00, was sealed off from 9:00 in the morning on with police cars at the various intersections, a sweep of the whole place to make sure nobody was there, sniffing dogs to make sure there was no sort of, you know, powder or explosive anywhere. How can you be a normal person when that's the way in which you have to live.  So the meeting that we had with him, I felt, was quite stiff.  There were sort of too many people there.  There were probably a half dozen security people standing around, and it wasn't quite a chat over a cup of tea.  He was good, he was helpful, he was articulate, but it was stiff.  There wasn't a meeting with him as a member of the council.  He was the person and the council was sort of addressing him, and then he was addressing the council.
RL:	Do you have yourself pretty good access to him?  If you decided, for instance, that you needed to get in to see him about a project that was significant, could you?
JE:	I would work through people I know who could do it.  I could that way, right.  Now I'm sure if I picked up the phone and said, you know, this is Joe, I don't think I'd get anywhere.  But if I would approach Daniel Gomez-Ibanez, who is the executive director of the International Interfaith Peace Council, Daniel knows him and Daniel has his phone number in Dharamsala, and Daniel was the one that, in a sense, over the years has been the contact between us here in Madison and the Dalai Lama.
RL:	That's quite significant I think.
JE:	It is.
RL:	You've had really an extraordinary life.
JE:	And not particularly planned that way.
00:32:51
RL:	Joe, I'd like to switch at this point to your role, both community service and as a citizen of the United States and as a member of the Quaker religion, to quite a prominent role that you had in peace efforts during the war in Vietnam.  If you would talk about what you did and the significance of those efforts.
JE:	Okay.  The peace activism of the Quakers began with the trip to India and Pakistan.  I think that's on the pile somewhere.  
RL:	Yes.
JE:	And once you've done that, then you sort of are on the bench for other things that may happen.  That first trip was January of '66.  Then, let's see, the Vietnam War was beginning to get pretty bad by around then.  For the summer of '69, I had volunteered to work for the American Friends Service Committee anywhere that might be useful. They had become concerned about a fact that almost all of their projects are ex post facto.  Something happens and then you respond, something [words unclear].  So at this point they decided that they would try to take some kind of initiative, because the war in Vietnam was going to end at some point, and what could be done by Quakers that would be meaningful in a situation that was badly shredded by the war. So the plan was that I would spend a couple months, probably in Bangkok, looking at what was called the Mekong River Project.  The Mekong River flows through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and branches I guess are in Thailand as well.  And there actually was a consortium of countries that included the Communists and the non-Communists, all of whom sought to take advantage of developing the Mekong River because it's so basically this area.
So my thought and the Quaker thought was, well, if there's some way in which we could plug into this, because they actually have conferences where for the day they stop killing each other.  And you have the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese and the Patet Lao and the Royal Lao and the Marxist Lao [words unclear]. I watched this happen once.  It was the war is crazy and non-war is equally crazy, to have these people come on a truce day and talk about what they might do with the Mekong River.  The meeting that I watched was one where a couple of Japanese engineers who had been, they weren't killed but they were threatened, and they said they were going to withdraw from the project.  It was all the sides had agreed that they were not going to be attacked.  So here all sides were meeting.  This was in Vientiane in Laos.  They had this meeting in a hotel, where they all said, okay, we're going to tell our boys, back off, you know, the Japanese are doing important stuff. Well, that plan was put into effect only up to the point where I was with four other Quakers in Stockholm, sort of on my way to Thailand.  The North Vietnamese had called for a conference of people who were peace activists, and the Quakers were peace activists.  We were actually the largest American delegation in Stockholm. We met, therefore, with the head of the North Vietnamese delegation.  It was Madam Binh, who was quite a figure.
RL:	I remember.
JE:	And at lunch, she had ‑‑ she was talking with the executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee. The Quaker position typically when a war breaks out is our [words unclear] for civilians on all sides, because they tend to be the ones who are victims with the least care. So when the Vietnam War broke out, we had set up a hospital in South Vietnam that was very busy, worked with amputees and burn victims.  We were able to some supplies to the Vietcong, but that was difficult because they were underground in tunnels and things.  But we had also wanted to get something to the North Vietnamese, and they had consistently said it's too dangerous to come.  The principle is somebody goes and meets people and sees what's going to happen, and then whatever is sent is [words unclear] for, there's a monitoring so one knows that it's actually being put to use at the end and it's not being used for military purposes, it's used for civilian. Well, Madam Binh at this lunch said that she had been considering the Quaker request, we would come periodically, can't we send somebody in, can't we send somebody in.  And she said it's okay, we now could send somebody.  So the secretary of the American Friends Service Committee put his hands on my shoulders and says, well, here's the person we're going to send.  So at lunchtime my assignment was transferred from sitting in Bangkok looking at the Mekong River to being a link with, between the Quakers in Philadelphia and the North Vietnamese government.
RL:	And the university was supportive of your – 
JE:	They were mercilessly – they never interfered, as far as I knew.  Now I think they caught some flak at some point.  In fact, I imagine they did, and I will forever be grateful that I never heard any voice of criticism from any administrator.  I think – I just, I'm very grateful for whoever didn't pass it on, because I'm sure they were getting flak, because here was a faculty member aiding and abetting the enemy in [word unclear] works and all the rest. So I spent most of the next month, partly in Paris, partly in Phnom Penh in Cambodia where there were embassies of the Vietcong and of the North Vietnamese.  I got my visa, which was fairly complicated, managed to fly in on one of those neutral flights.  There was a – after the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the truce arrangement, there was a plan so that every week, either once or twice, a plane flew from Saigon to Phnom Penh to Vientiane to Hanoi and back, because there was an inspection commission of Indians, Poles, and one other group, who were supposed to make sure the ceasefire was maintained.  Well, by now ceasefire was out the window, but this group is still monitoring, presumably, the peace treaty and the Geneva Accords after the fall of Dien Bien Phu.  So that was the only way one could get in, both directions.  You could fly to [word unclear] from Saigon. So I got in.  I spent a week in Hanoi.  I was met by something called the Vietnamese committee, the American – Vietnamese American Peace Committee.
RL:	And this was '69?
JE:	This was May-June of '69, yeah, right.  Actually, it was June of '69.  Let me back up a little tiny bit, because the American Friends Service Committee had been concerned about the Vietnam War.  And when Richard Nixon was elected President, he had – in the process, he had maintained that he wanted peace, and his mother had been a Quaker.
RL:	Yes.
JE:	So we used that leverage, and we wrote to him saying that maybe it would be something useful if the Quakers could say to him, could we meet with him.  He replied that he couldn't, but we could meet with Henry Kissinger if we wanted to.  So a meeting was set up with about six or seven of us from the American Friends Service Committee in the basement of the White House with Henry Kissinger, to talk about our concerns of the war. This was a strange meeting, because we were protesting the war outside in front of the White House, and then we were invited in.  And the first thing that Henry Kissinger said, is this off the record or on the record, and we weren't quite sure how to answer that.
And he said, well, if it's off the record, I can say things that I'm not free to say otherwise, if it's on the record, you can read what I say because it's all in the paper.  So we had to make a decision fairly quickly, were we going to listen to him and then go out and say we can't say what were told or we were going to hear what was said all the time. So we opted for off the record, and he then told us, in sort of veiled terms, that there was a peace plan under way that he was quite sure would be successful.  In fact, at one point he said, if we don't have peace in Vietnam by December, I give the Quakers permission to come back and tear down the gates of the White House.  Now this is May, okay, of '69.  The war went on until '75, so you get some sense of where people thought things were going.
The reason I was on the committee because I was going to go out and be in Bangkok looking at the future.  Also I guess at that time I was on the board of directors of the AFSC.  Anyway, I had some sort of position there. Well, the idea was that we had this meeting in May.  We would meet again in June – in July, I'm sorry, two months, and by then I would come back and report, and there were some people that were going to work with the Vietnamese in Paris and report.  In other words, there would be a second meeting with Henry Kissinger after a couple of months had passed. So now I wasn't going to Bangkok, I was going into Hanoi, so it was even sort of more interesting.  When I was in Hanoi, along with getting a list of what they wanted us to buy with our $35,000 of money that we raised, mostly from Canadian and American Quakers, for civilian orderly.  And since it was Canadian money now, I ran into the same problem I would have if it had been U.S. money, which would have been impossible to transfer.
They ended up giving me a list of open heart surgical equipment that they wanted us to use the money for, which was puzzling because it didn't strike me that that was the highest thing on the list.  The whole week I was trying to figure out what they wanted me to come back in with, and school supplies were mentioned and sort of basic health stuff was mentioned.  But the day I was to leave, there was a typewritten list in French with the numbers from catalogs as to which they wanted, sphygmometers and catheters and valves and all sort of things, to use this money up for. So I came back to the States.  On the way, I circled around and visited South Vietnam and was at the hospital we were running there for burn victims and amputees.  And I'm  probably one of the few people who was in Hanoi one week and Saigon the next week in a situation where that doesn't happen very often.
RL:	Yes, indeed.
JE:	Once back in the States, my job was to – and there were purchase agents who bought the equipment, so I was then to go back into Hanoi so that I had everything altogether. So we did meet with Henry Kissinger in July.  There were several messages that the North Vietnamese had asked me to convey to him.  They were curious, he was still sort of officially, he wasn't Secretary of State yet, he was – advisor to the President.
RL:	He was still the – what is it, National Security?
JE: 	National Security officer or whatever, yeah.  So they said we're curious whether he – how much – who is making decisions right now in the United States.  Is it the head of the State Department Henry Kissinger or is it Richard Nixon?  Are they serious and are they really wanting to settle things, because we are realizing publicly you're going to say certain things, but you may be privately interested in a serious negotiation. And if they are interested in a serious negotiation, we would like them to give us a quiet signal, because then we'll know that the discussions going on in Paris are real.  If they're not, and we all have pretenses, which is the nature of politics.  But if they are serious, ask them to close down Operation Phoenix for two months.  If that shuts down, then we'll ‑‑ 
RL:	Was that the bombing?
JE:	Operation Phoenix was assassination of civilians.  It's what we were doing, the assassinating of civilians that we saw on their side.
RL:	Okay.
JE:	So that was the message, the essence of the message that I came back with, and there was a great deal of interest in the fact that I had been actually to Hanoi and come on back, and a lot of curiosity of what Hanoi was like. And when I laid out this suggestion that if it's serious, then shut down Operation Phoenix for two months, Henry Kissinger said, what's Operation Phoenix.  At that point, I didn't know how to take that, because the Wall Street Journal had articles on Operation Phoenix.  It was, we know, a very ugly assassination process.  And Henry Kissinger said something about you may be surprised that we don't know everything about the war, but that seemed like it was kind of an important enough part of the war.  So he said to one of his aides, find out what Operation Phoenix is and let me know.  Was this charades?  I have no idea what was going on.  But anyway, the message was conveyed that this was one of the terms. When I went back in August to take the supplies in, I also had two bags full of letters from the relatives of servicemen who had been shot down, because the North Vietnamese had not given the names of any of the men shot down.  They were [word unclear] being these weren't ‑‑ war had never been declared, these weren't prisoners of war, they were criminals and they deserved no better treatment than criminals, so their names were being withheld. I met with relatives who didn't know whether their ‑‑ the men in their lives were alive or dead or injured or what have you.  And we did announce that if people wanted, I was going back in, and if I could carry something, I'd be happy to see if I could deliver it.  And one of the things I tried to do when I was there was either meet with American prisoners of war or exchange stuff with them. So when I went in the second time, I had these bags.  Three times I tried to get in, but the plane would take off and get about halfway from Vientiane to Hanoi and then turn around and come back.  And there would be some explanation that it was raining, there was a monsoon or something like that.  And then each time I had to get a separate visa and new tickets, so I was running through money pretty fast on this thing.
And the third time, the embassy in – the North Vietnamese Embassy in Vientiane said, could you do something for about a month someplace else?  And I said, well, sure.  I, you know, can go back to school, but could I try maybe in a couple weeks.  And they said, well, okay, why don't you come back in a couple weeks. So I flew to India, visited the Wisconsin programs, they were just getting started.  Came back, and at the Bangkok airport the mystery was resolved.  There in the newspaper was a big picture of Ho Chi Minh and the announcement Ho Chi Minh had died. What had been happening was they knew he was going to die, they knew that there would be huge state funerals, the Chinese were going to come separately from the Soviets, because at that point they were very hostile to each other, and to have one Quaker bopping around with a bunch of open heart surgical stuff was just not – 
RL:	Not high on their list.
JE:	That's right.  So at that point, I signed a condolence thing in the embassy, sorry Ho Chi Minh had died.  I said, just let me know when to come back.  Now I'm going to go back and teach, I may not be the Quaker who returns.  I was certainly allowed to come back, but other people can do it. That was end of August I guess.  About October 1st the message came through that they were – things had cleared, the real big funeral was over, and they were ready now to have a Quaker come.  And I guess they either asked for me to come or the office thought it would be nice for me to go, because I had the contacts.  
So I pulled myself out of class for a week and went back to Vientiane, picked up all the stuff I had left in the garage, flew into Hanoi, delivered the stuff to the research hospital, found out why they wanted this, because it didn't seem as though it would be high on the priority list, and did they have surgeons who knew how to handle this stuff.  Yes, there was a big oxygenator which they borrowed from the French, yes, there was staff who had done this kind of thing. And the purpose seemed to be that in a lot of [words unclear] countries there's something called rheumatic fever with its young people and that hearts are scarred, and they're more or less invalided for the rest of their lives.  If you take the scarred valve out and put in a mechanical valve, they're 90%, 95% healthy again.  So that seemed to be the target population, young people who had been crippled by this who would then become fully participants. So anyway, there were photographs taken and I got whatever data I needed to get to come back out and make a case that this wasn't just a game they were playing [words unclear] from the air.  And they said, oh, yeah, we could use [words unclear] and we're not being hurt [words unclear]. So I came back out, and when the plane landed in Vientiane, I was met by three quite different people each representing a different interest.  I had been in touch with every American embassy as I went in, so they knew who I was.  I met the ambassador, told him what the project was.  
The ambassador to Laos was very hopeful that I might have a list of prisoners, because if I had had that and he released it, it would be a wonderful feather in his cap.  He also was very skeptical about whether this was all a charade, that the North Vietnamese didn't know how to use this kind of stuff.  So he was eager to see any photographs that I might have. Then there two young Frenchmen who believed North Vietnam was a paradise, and they wanted me to sit down and tell them how wonderful North Vietnam was.  And then there was a Washington Post stringer who wanted to talk to me about what I found out.  So here were these three very separate audiences waiting to sort of do whatever, you know, find out what had happened. And I did turn over all the stuff that I had to the embassy, because they were particularly – they were skeptical.  They thought this was, the wool was being pulled over our eyes.  So the next day they sent the photographs back to me, and I had a picture of the equipment that they'd been using prior to the equipment I had brought in.  And I had said something like this was French equipment from, you know, 1965 or something like that.  And the guy said, actually, this was from 1964.  So it wasn't ‑‑ there was no doubt that they had the right equipment because the date was [word unclear]. I didn't have a list of prisoners, which would have been very nice for the ambassador.  About six or eight months later, they did release the names of the prisoners.  I had had a long talk with them about their position.  I said, I know I could understand you're wanting to make the point that this isn't a war that's been declared and that people are in their homes being bombed from the air and so on, but it's more difficult for us who are sympathetic with you to make the case that there should be some sort of peaceful negotiation when people look and interpret this as a kind of barbarism and heartlessness.  Because the families, it makes a huge difference if the man in their family is dead or alive, just simple information. Now whether that ultimately contributed to their decision, I don't know, but I think several people were going in.  Jane Fonda was in there at some point.  But anyway, they did finally list, release a list of names of – 
RL:	You did not meet with any of the POWs I take it?
JE:	No.
RL:	They didn't let you.
JE:	Didn't meet them.
RL:	Would they deliver your letters?
JE:	Some of them got through.  I met at least one person who got a letter that I had carried in, years later.  It was pretty interesting, that whole business of, you know, how do you deal with men who have been shot down bombing the area in which they're living.  But people from – that was a very touchy issue here in the States, because there was a feeling that it just showed how barbaric the North Vietnamese were to know these men were alive and not really let the families know about it.
00:52:24
RL:	Your file in Bascom shows quite a bit of press related to all your travels to North Vietnam.  Were you briefly a national figure in the popular press?  You were talking to the Washington Post.  Were you talking to the New York Times?
JE:	There was one press conference I held in Washington, which was interesting.  This was when I'd come back the second time.  Ho Chi Minh had died, and there was a lot of curiosity of what was going on there.  And there were a number of senators and congressmen there, and it was the first time I had sort of watched how this happened.  You know, the senior senator is the one who opens the press conference and the one who closes the press conference.  And I was sitting there with a number of Quakers who had their offices in Washington, the [word unclear] Friends Committee on National. Legislation which knows these people, and they had set up the press conference.
And it was basically, you know, on one hand there was this notion of how totally naïve anybody would be to go in, recognizing that what you will be seeing would be carefully doctored, and what they didn't want you to see you wouldn't be able to see.  On the other hand, there was this great curiosity about prisoners and what actually you could see.
So it was probably as much to, you know, it would be in the evening news.  It was hardly bigger news than that, because there were important figures like Jane Fonda who were much better publicized than anything I did, and I certainly was not eager for publicity because it would rebound negatively as much as – 
RL:	Did you have to testify in Congress?
JE:	Never did, no.  The press conference was the closest thing I ever had.
00:54:10
RL:	So I feel like I should ask you.  You were there in North Vietnam in 1969, and then the Sterling Hall bombing happened here – 
JE:	'70.
RL:	 — in 1970.
JE:	Right.
RL:	What was your reaction to that?
JE:	I was appalled by what happened there.  I was very active in the Vietnam War.  I think I mentioned we had this thing called Faculty for Peace.  We had a radio program Tuesday nights, would call in, and just constant rallies and protests and one thing or another. The concern was that many of the people that would appear in a protest were pretty violent.  You know, you'd be alongside people who would be shouting for victory for the Vietcong and stuff like that, which wasn't quite where I was. But when you're protesting a war, you're sort of protesting with anybody who's beside you.  The trashing was, I was always sad to see that kind of thing happen.  But the series of events following the invasion of Cambodia, which was I think early May of 1970 – 
RL:	May of '70.
JE:	That was a bleak moment for me, because I had actually been in Cambodia the year before in Phnom Penh.  And I had been flown to a place called the Parrot's Beak with an Australian Quaker senator who had been shown by the Cambodians what defoliation did to rubber plantations, and it was ghastly, you know.  We saw a rubber plantation as it should be and then a rubber plantation where American defoliants had blown in over the border or had been dropped over the border, it's hard to tell.  And they would deal with that every day, and there were no leaves on the trees and all the rest. And to watch Richard Nixon point to the map at the Parrot's Beak and say tonight I've ordered the invasion of our troops into Cambodia because it's harboring the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I just got really sick because I could envision these villages with thatched huts and bamboo sides and, you know, what happens when serious artillery and barrage comes in, I mean it was just. Well, that was followed by very, very strenuous criticism of what happened, and that was followed by the Jackson State killings, and then by the Kent State killings, and the campus just came apart.  Compounding that was a teacher, a student strike, the TA strike.  Everything went down the tubes.  So classes weren't meeting, there were protests, trashing in the evenings, all the rest.
RL:	Were you canceling your classes or were you still teaching?
JE:	I went to class because there were foreign students who couldn't not go to class.  So what I did, well, I prepared lecture notes which were available to hand out to students who didn't want to cross picket lines, and then I talked to the Koreans and Malaysians and so on who were there, so kind of double duty. The faculty did all kinds of things.  Some would meet off campus in church basements of one sort or another.  But it was a huge relief to have the year end and the instructions come down from the Chancellor's Office, just give – figure out some idea of grades and turn in your grading list, so let's just call it quits.  So that was the way the school year died in May-June. And then the services continued.  The Army Math Research Center was clearly a target.  We actually were – we had left that day for a family reunion in Estes Park in Colorado, and we heard about the bombing of Sterling Hall on the radio.
RL:	Oh, you weren't here.
JE:	We tried to figure out if we might have known anybody who was involved in that, because we had known some students who were pretty committed to the notion that nothing but, that some terrible event would catch anybody's attention. So when we came back, it was very much the aftermath of the bombing of Sterling Hall.  Subsequently, actually I knew the widow of the man who was killed.  She was in one of my classes, and then subsequently met their kids, so that that part of it was [words unclear].  And then subsequently met the people who did the bombing, but that's sort of the way Madison is.
RL:	It's interesting about Quakers.  You're really opposed to violence on all sides.
JE:	Right, which makes it easier or harder, depending on how you look at it.  But it was – it was a ghastly thing.  I could see – I understand their feeling, well, we're – somebody has to make it clear to people in America how horrible this is.  I'm convinced they didn't want to kill the grad student.  In fact, I think they did everything to avoid it. But when you walk through a place like [words unclear] in North Vietnam and realize it has just been bombed to the point that there's nothing standing, and somehow the cruelty that's being inflicted there doesn't register back here, and the people who dropped the bombs who are up at 35,000 feet and have no sense of the carnage that they engage in, you wonder, well, how do you connect the awful things that are being done by nice people.  And the bombing of Sterling Hall, although it had a negative reaction, did sort of bring into play, oh, this is really, really ugly.  When you blow up buildings, you kill people.
00:59:31
RL:	Joe, have you been back to Vietnam?
JE:	Yes.  I was back – 
RL:	When was that and how was it?
JE:	I think it was about four years ago.  Since then, there's another sort of interesting story.  Once you've been in Vietnam, you know, you never can quite get it out of your system, especially because it was such a prominent part of so many years on the campus. But in about 1990, I met, re-met a veteran of the Vietnam War named Mike Boehm, and Mike had served two terms in Vietnam.  He had been completely debilitated by it, and he said he spent the next 20 years hugging a toilet and vomiting and drinking and drugs and all that.  And then he had gone back to Vietnam with a group of veterans and built a clinic.  And that started a healing process in Mike. And to make a long story short, eventually he and our Quaker meeting have lined up to have [word unclear] Quaker and Madison Quakers Inc., and he is our link with Vietnam.  He's dedicated himself to doing good things, the two peace parks that he's helped build, there's a school, series of schools we're building in My Lai where the massacre occurred.  And now there are dozens, if not hundreds, of micro loans that are being functioned by Madison Quakers Inc. and Mike Boehm, and this odd alliance between a veteran and the Quaker, small Quaker group.
RL:	How interesting.
JE: 	And I think it was four years, two and a half years ago that several of us decided we would be in My Lai on the, whatever, 26th anniversary or whatever it was of the massacre, because each year on the day of the massacre there's a big ceremony. So we were there, and we laid a wreath in memory of all those who lost their lives.  And the two helicopter people who – 
01:01:25
[End of Tape 6] 
RL:	This is Tape number 7, Side 1 of the Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder.  You were talking about being in My Lai.
00:00:10
JE:	Right.  And the two helicopter pilots who actually spotted, saw the massacre going on, Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn were the names, and Hugh Thompson had directed the helicopter to land between where American troops were pursuing some civilians from My Lai, and instructed the Americans to stop pursuing them, and told Larry Colburn to train his gun on the Americans.
RL:	Wow.
JE:	For a 19-year-old kid, that was a strange order.
RL:	Boy, I'll say.
JE:	They called down some Huey helicopters, the bigger ones.  They picked up the seven or eight fleeing villagers and took them to Quang Ngai, the nearest province, where actually our hospital had been at that time, Quang Ngai. And then as Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn were lifting off in their little bubble helicopter, they saw some movement in a trench.  Went back down, found a little boy, maybe seven years old, who was lying under all these bodies.  Picked him up, put them on their lap, and flew him to Quang Ngai.  And then Hugh Thompson reported what he had seen to higher officials, and was given a stonewall for a long, long time. Well, eventually, just a month or so before we went out, the Army had finally recognized both of them for ‑‑ yeah, they both got a silver star, I think, for essentially doing what you're supposed to do in these situations, you know, refusing an order, which is a violation of the Geneva Agreement.  So they were feeling somewhat exonerated for what happened.  And the major event here was people had tracked down what had happened to the kid.  Now he had been orphaned by the massacre.  He had been sort of raised on his own.  He had become delinquent.  He was in prison, and they found somebody who was willing to sign, the man is now, what, 30-some years old, sign him out, give him a job, and I was there when Hugh and Larry met him.  Really something.  Yeah, very powerful.  
RL:	Wonderful.
JE:	And Larry had his nine-year-old boy with him, so there was Larry and his nine-year-old.  Anyway, the kind of thing that is hard to picture.  So that was a powerful revisit, and mostly just seeing stuff, the schools going up and the peace parks being built.  And Mike goes over almost every year for two or three months working on the Mike [Roland?] project and trying to get the schools built. So we're not ‑‑ I'm not disconnected from Vietnam, but Mike Boehm is the chief link in this 50l(c)(3) thing called Madison Quakers Inc.
RL:	Have you read David Maraniss' They Marched Into Sunlight?
JE: 	Bits and pieces of it.  It was run in the papers for a while, so some [words unclear].
RL:	Yes.
00:02:57
JE:	Yes.  And, you know, it's all, it's all there.  It was clear on the campus that I was involved in things like the, you know, the antiwar activity, and several other sorts of things I was doing.  Subsequently, I was involved in Quaker activities carrying messages in other parts of the world.  At one point, in an effort to do something with the Bangladesh conflict, and I got involved in 1984.  We carried messages between the Tamil Tigers and Tamil resistors.  The government said, well, that was an ongoing thing for a long, long time. So occasionally, stories got picked up about the kind of thing I was doing.  So I guess I was identified as a person who was actively involved in trying to do things that reduced conflict.  So when 9/11 happened, and it was stunning and shocking and appalling to all of us.  I had the same kind of sick feeling I think everyone else did at the time. So there was an announcement that there was going to be a memorial, a prayer memorial service on the Library Mall that Friday after the Tuesday, and I hadn't even planned to go.  I wasn't quite sure how that would help things at all.  And then it was Thursday I got a call from someone in the Chancellor's Office asking if I would talk to this gathering.  And it had never occurred to me, you know, to be a speaker at this.  I wasn't a prominent university official and [words unclear], and it would be the Dane County and the university, so it would seem to me the mayor or some prominent person.  So I was a little puzzled that they had ‑‑ they called me. And at the point, my response was pretty dumb.  I said, well, I have a dentist appointment.  I don't think I can make it.  And whoever at the other end says, well, do you think you can break your dentist appointment.  And at that point it had occurred to me, maybe all the stuff that I've been through could give a message of some kind. And so fairly briefly, I called and said I canceled my dentist appointment, and tried to figure out what I would say.  And I occurred to me at that point that the fact that I had been to memorial services following deaths of innocent civilians gave me kind of a story to tell.  And so in the talk which I gave in front of what was then to be the largest assembled crowd in university history, I mentioned what had happened and put it into context.  So if I just read from my statement.
RL:	Please do.
JE:	Last Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those of us watching television saw something we had never seen before, the deaths of thousands of our fellow human beings trapped inside the World Trade Center in Manhattan as the towers crumbled to the ground. We're here today to reflect upon and remember those who died in that tragedy, and the parallel tragedies in Washington, D.C. and the countryside near Pittsburgh.  The violent death of a single innocent person is a tragedy.  The violent death of thousands of innocent people strains the human heart.  Today we join with millions of others gathered today throughout the land, and overseas, to share our grief and to extend our sympathy and support to the families and friends of those who died. And here's the part that I felt my personal [words unclear].  This is the third time in three years that I have participated in a memorial service for the victims of terrorism.  Three years ago in a village in Chapas, Mexico, I stood with the relatives and friends of dozens of women and children who had been killed by paramilitary forces while they were worshipping in a nearby chapel.  There were flowers and pictures of the dead. Six months ago I was in Vietnam.  Halfway around the world, I stood with the relatives and friends of hundreds of fellow human beings whose lives had been snuffed out in a single morning of horrible violence.  There were flowers and pictures of the dead. Each of these memorial services were different in terms of loss of life.  The earlier two memorial services pale, but not into insignificance.  In each case, the lives of [words unclear] ended cruelly and permanently.  In each case, the perpetrators [words unclear] have remained at large.  In each case, the call for justice has gone unanswered. And then I sort of conclude.  Perhaps from this tragedy, we, with other nations, can build institutions that will prevent future acts of terrorism, and will apprehend and bring to justice those involved in acts of terrorism.  Perhaps from this tragedy, we can develop effective means of discovering the root causes of terrorism and address those root causes. Perhaps as an outcome of the tragedy, with the application of a reasoned patience, wisdom, and compassion, we can with the other nations of the world build cultures and institutions that will prevent a recurrence, not only in the United States but anywhere in the world, of what happened Tuesday, September 11, 2001.  Perhaps we can work together to build a world where there will be a justice. And then the section that – where I do make some sort of prescription as to what, how we will go about – okay.  Today are we remembering those who died last Tuesday.  We pray that they did not die entirely in vain.  In this tragedy, we, with other nations of the world, can build a web of information sharing that will make it impossible for terrorists to perpetrate similar tragedies in the future.  Perhaps, despite the pain of this tragedy, we can abide by our national principles that individuals are innocent until they're proved guilty, that those who are guilty are to be punished, not their relatives, not those who speak the same language, not those who come from the same ethnic background, not those who share the same religious affiliation or [words unclear] within the same national boundaries, wherever those boundaries may be. As our national leaders have repeated during the past several days, each of us has an obligation to protect from harassment, or worse, those among us here in Madison and elsewhere in the United States whose language, ethnic background, or religion makes them targets of abuse by our fellow Americans looking for someone or some group to blame and punish, and let's protect the innocent from being blamed and punished. We can understand that some among us are calling for war in the belief that a war of retribution will bring us comfort.  At times like this, we must remember that nothing kills innocent civilians like wars.  Let us not kill innocent civilians in an effort to punish those who killed innocent civilians.
00:09:38
RL:	Joe, turning to another area of service, and this was focused I think pretty much on campus, was your key role in advocating for gay and lesbian and bi and transgender students.
JE:	Right.  The first time I was even aware – well, I guess the very first time I was aware of the issue was, again, through the college in India program. I had never met a gay student.  And back, wow, probably in the early 1960s, there was a student I had selected on program.  He was talking to me, and he said he was gay.  And I sort of blinked.  I thought I knew what that meant, but he was telling me something that I thought should be pretty private.  And he was not only gay, but he wanted to study homosexuality in India.  And I [words unclear] okay, well, study whatever there is to study.  So we put him on to studying a group of men in India who dress as women, sometimes they castrate themselves, sometimes they just want to dress like women, sometimes they are polysexual, their organs are multiple or not there or something.  They're called Hijiras, and they crop up in history, and you meet them periodically.  They look – they look like men dressed like women. So anyway, he went off and he did his fieldwork project, and it was the first project [words unclear].  And he was an impressive guy, very thoughtful, very bright.  But the first, you know, person who said I'm gay. Well, after that, there were a couple other students I met in the program, and they were ‑‑ I was amazed how quickly they would come out to me and say this, because it's [words unclear] tell people about.  But they wanted me to know and wanted me to be comfortable about it, and, okay. The first time it became administratively tricky was when I was on the board of the American Friends Service Committee, and this would have been probably early 1970s or something where the issue of having minority representation on the board was becoming more and more [word unclear], we had black and all the rest.  But we were supposed to select candidates for the board, and make sure that we had at least ‑‑ we had two candidates who were gay or lesbian, and they had to be Quakers. Well, you've never seen a more puzzled executive committee in your life.  We sat there with this directive, and at that point I did not know a single Quaker who was gay, much less a Quaker of the kind of stature that you want to put onto a board that makes critical decisions with the $4 million budget and the Quaker reputation and all the rest.  It was just hilarious. We tried to think of people in every stereotype.  Well, she didn't ever marry.  Do you suppose?  And he likes music, but that [words unclear] floundering in the dark on this kind of thing.  And we to make phone calls, and then how do you find out.  Just pick you up and, you know, Jim, are you gay, or [word unclear] gay Quaker. So we eventually worked it out that it struck – [words unclear] struck, first of all, that obviously if there are people who are gay and lesbian and they are Quakers, they should have a voice in the board of directors, but how do you go finding them when it's such a huge secret and there's such a stigma attached to it. So that was, I guess, the first time.  And then gradually, I did begin to learn that there were several Quakers that often, prominent Quakers [word unclear] sort of surprising, that these were people who had been closeted most of their life, or just, you know, had been comfortably gay or lesbian themselves and just not make a big deal out of it. So after that, I was aware of people's kids coming out to them and it became [words unclear] it was happening.  And then the son of one of our close friends came out as gay.  Then [words unclear] you know, what would happen if one our kids turned out to be gay [word unclear] very abstract and very [word unclear] just fine.  If that's what they want, that's what they want. So when our son came out to us, it was not a total shock, although I had not seen the signs.  I had not been aware.  He was tall, good looking, girls were always chasing him, he was a member of a folk dance group, he had lots of girlfriends, lots of boyfriends.  But it wasn't until he finished college [word unclear] that he said that he was gay, and he figured he was gay for a long time. So it wasn't a shock at that point.  It just, well, now it's the person we really know.
RL:	[word unclear] hard for you?
JE:	It was remarkably simple.  [word unclear], you know, okay.  That explains why you don't go out with all these girls who are chasing you.  That explains it. And we began to read a whole lot more about what happened, is it related to the father's away and the mother is overbearing, and all that kind of stereotypes that were there.  We fairly quickly got involved in Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, because again it was just beginning to emerge.  And once we – so we were in this for good, then let's sort of be there for other people. So it was interesting coming out.  At one point we were going to go public here, because some parents [words unclear], and then we, you know, we better check with our son Ed to make sure he was okay.  Oh, sure, you want to tell people.  So that it gradually became increasingly comfortable to talk to people. And the final thing, I guess my parents who were missionaries, we weren't very eager to have them find out about it.  And I can remember, I dropped several hints to my mother in her late 80s or early 90s that Ed was, you know, he went to gay groups and so on.  And finally she came right out and said, well, is he gay?  And I said, yes, and told her he's gay.  And then she said, is that okay?  And I said, yeah, it's okay.  She said, well, then that's fine.  And that took care of my missionary mother when she said okay. The place I connected on campus was hearing about the ROTC unit, and the fact that it was now under fire because it refused to admit gays and lesbians.  I heard it, I guess it was – anyway, I heard it on the radio that this was being questioned.  And as soon as I found out that it was – they did discriminate on the grounds, I thought this is, in a sense, too hypocritical, because we had a state that doesn't discriminate against it, a city that doesn't really [word unclear], we have a campus who doesn't discriminate, and then we have these three federally funded organizations with all the stature and reputation they have who do. So I watched the debate.  I was not on any committee at that time.  There was a student investigation – a committee to look into what should be done, and the committee came back with a recommendation that although disaffiliation was an extreme step, at least all the people involved should be aware and sensitive and report, and, you know, the kind of stuff that committees tend to do. And that struck me as not acceptable.  This wasn't going to just go away to have this blatant hypocrisy here, and, anyway, I've always had a grudge against the military, a suspicion that ROTCs shouldn't be on campus.  We're teaching people to train – to think critically, and then they're being taught to obey.  It seems a little bit contradictory, and they get credits for what they do, and that's not the same as giving you credit for physics or for [word unclear] or [words unclear].  So I didn't have a love for the ROTC, and this was one more reason to be critical of them, but kind of on ethical grounds. So when it looked as though it was going to die with an annual report from the committee saying nothing much can be done, then there were several faculty, and I didn't know gay or lesbian faculty at this point either, who I came to know later were gays or lesbians.  They came, and we decided that we would have, try to collect 200 signatures from faculty members to have an all-faculty meeting, because the Senate takes care of decisions unless you get 200 faculty to sign, and then there must a general faculty meeting to look over the issue.
RL:	And general faculty means all faculty?
JE:	All faculty, all 1,000-plus or whatever we are.  So we discovered that it didn't take long at all to get 200 faculty signatures.  And by that time, it was fairly clear that there was going to be a meeting.  This was in spring of '98 I think, I thought she had that date somewhere.  And when there was going to be a formal meeting, it was going to be I think in December.  Why don't you kill this tape recorder [words unclear]. So beginning in essentially the spring of '89, we got together the necessary votes.  The decision was that there would be an all-faculty meeting the next fall, which was indeed held on December 4, 1989, and the vote had to do with whether the faculty would request the Board of Regents to terminate the university's contracts with the Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC programs if those programs did not end discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation by May of 1993.  The date there was that so the students who had come here planning their finances through ROTC would be all the way through, but there wouldn't be a new batch started. Since I had more white hair than anybody else, I was the person who led the debate, and I actually do have a videotape of the whole thing if anybody's interested in it.  And the vote was taken.  There was a vigorous debate.  Chancellor Shalala, I guess that's where I had drawn her in, she was very eager that it be done in a dignified fashion and that the University of Wisconsin would come out looking good no matter what happened. And the vote was in favor of asking the Board the Regents to terminate 386-to-248.  Well, the Board of Regents didn't terminate, and the decision then was to – well, the committee was set up, and at that point Donna had sort of spotted me and some others as the ones who were concerned about this.  So from then on, I've always been on some committee or other, the task of which is to make this a friendly, a friendly campus for lesbians and gays.
RL:	Joe, when you say a vigorous debate, were you surprised at the tenor in terms of was there a lot of homophobia, or was it more about ROTC?
JE:	I was surprised at how much support I obviously had.  I had gone in with two resolutions.  One was sort of a watered resolution which I thought might pass, and the other was a hard-cutting resolution.  And in my presentation, I sort of presented these two and said, we are first going to, I think I said we're first going to ask for this, which probably won't pass, and then we're going to ask for this. And almost immediately the audience said, forget the second one, let's go for the hard one.  So at that point I realized that there really seemed to be a majority or I didn't – I had no sense of taking the pulse of what was going on.  And then it was clear, as the debate proceeded, that the other side had no moral grounds to stand on. They could stand on sort of expediency, well, they were here and people have scholarships and contracts.  But at each point, the clear collision between a state, a campus, and a city that's saying one thing and somebody's violating and getting off without even having a wrist slapped just seemed impossible.
So when the vote was taken, I wasn't surprised that we had it, but I would not have bet that we were going to have it when started it.  I had no way of telling from the mood of the faculty. And the heavy hitters, the university committee, which was the elected executive board of faculty, were very much opposed to this.  Don Nichols was the chair.
RL:	Really?  Opposed to the resolution.
JE:	Opposed to the resolution.  Oh, they said this is unrealistic, you know, we need the units here.  There's something in the contract in the University of Wisconsin.  It's obliged to train officers.  And they went back to the charter, and we had come – we read the same things.  You could read that as you don't have to have an ROTC, you just have to have some courses.  So we – 
RL:	Because we're a land grant?
JE:	Land grant.  And so in the process of training students, we have to train them in some form of defense, but that could be a lot of stuff besides being in the Army, Navy, or Air Force. So it was an interesting campaign to work on.  We learned a lot about the rules of the university.  And here the fact that Donna had let us work with the university lawyer, whom I later learned was gay, which I hadn't realized.
RL:	Oh, really?
JE:	[words unclear] because they were unfolding.  So once there, then came Bill Clinton, then came don't ask, don't tell, and technically the issue was sort of off the back burner, you don't have to sign now when you go into the ROTC, but you're pretty sure that at some point you probably won't be allowed into the armed forces, although if you can conceal your identity, you still could technically do it.  So anyway, it wasn't anymore a clear issue. Then there was the faculty – the Faculty Senate appointed a committee to be concerned about the friendliness of the campus on LGBT issues, and I've been on that committee virtually from its founding.  I was chair of it for the last, oh, six or seven years I think.
00:23:16
RL:	Is there going to be or is there a gay studies department?
JE:	We have a certificate program, which we got going about two years ago.  So people can take a basic course, which I teach, and – 
RL:	Oh, you do?
JE:	That's right [words unclear] on the ground floor.  This was funny, because in the list of things that we – in 1997, we came up with a saying that we needed to do these 18 things to make the campus [words unclear].  There would have to be orientation and [words unclear] and options and this, that, and the other.  And built into it was at that some point there should be courses.  And as far as we knew, there is only one course given by a woman in the philosophy department on lesbian philosophy, and that was it. Well, Dick Keeling, who was the chair of the department and was head of the Student Health Services and himself gay, and I would sheepishly look at each other every time we said there should be courses. [word unclear] somebody to teach a course. And finally, our consciences got the better of us, and Dick had a very bright senior working for him who was a gay man.  And so Dick, Rich assigned a student to develop a course [word unclear] and all the rest.  It was Bob O'Brien, and he did a great job.  He got three credits for designing the course, because neither Rich nor I had any time to cook up a course and do a whole lot of reading. So we got it through the individual committee so that's a social science and humanities course, and it's a 200 level course so freshmen can take it.  And then the fall before we were to teach it, and I think I do have that here, we were going to start – the fall of 1999, we were all set, thinking about ordering the books, and Rich told me that he had a fantastic job offer in Manhattan where he was to be a director of a wide education program on general health and sexuality for the City of Manhattan, as far as I could tell. And so he was going to leave, which meant that I had to teach the course.  So in the spring of 2000, for the first time I taught the course called introduction to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies.  And I was running from day one.  I brought in as many specialists as I could from all over the place, especially the people in biology and psychology and areas like that which I didn't know much about. The room was filled.  We had no idea what kind of audience we'd have.  And each year, depending on the size of the room, we would fill it up, so there was no doubt that we could have any number of students.  We pretty much had decided 200 is about the number that we can work out.  So last year for the first time the sociology department gave me two graduate student TAs, which helped a lot [words unclear] session. So it certainly was a fully going course.  It's listed, cross-listed in sociology, women's studies, and Inter L&S, which is a nondepartment for everything that is a catchall that doesn't fit quite someplace else.  We introduced a certificate course by having to come up with the introductory level course, 12 additional courses of which they can pick 3 I think, and the capstone seminar and so forth. And we just barely put enough courses together.  Even as we submitted it to the next higher up, we had a feeling this is just squeaky, we need many more courses.  I was, I guess, surprised at how few courses there are when I began comparing LGBT studies on other campuses.  You would see sometimes they'd have 20 courses, 25 courses from various departments, and we were way behind the curve here with what we're teaching.
RL:	And is that academic inertia or is it a reflection of what kind of reaction the legislature would have?
JE:	I don't think it's the legislation.  I think it's the academic – when you arrive here, your big job is to get tenure.
RL:	Right.
JE:	And if there aren't sort of ongoing courses, it's a little risky to introduce something that I think is as far out as this.  So if I were coming here in the history department, I would want to teach main history courses until I had my tenure, and then I might think of the history of the gay movement in the 20th century in the United States or something like that. So I think it's a case of getting people now who are well informed and are willing to teach courses after they get their tenure, because several faculty have come in during the last five or six years who are very good, who are themselves gay or lesbian or allies, and I'm looking forward to the day where there will be courses on French gay literature and, you know, gays in the military and whatever else one wants.  There are any number of courses ‑‑ or the media.  I have stuff you can do with LGBT issues in the media that would be a wonderful course.
00:28:07
RL:	And as a sociologist, I'm interested in your observations about the climate in the country today related – when the issue of homosexuality surfaces in all of its many forms.  What is your take on what's happening in America?
JE:	We're in the process of a radical shift in attitudes. [word unclear] of these radical facets I like, but when I'm talking to students, it just is a non-issue.  I'll ask students at what point they were aware there were gays and lesbians, and typically third grade they know about it.  And almost all of them say, well, what's the problem?  If they want to marry, it's their business.  If I want to marry [word unclear] that is my business. And so the group in class is almost a whole different culture from their parents or their grandparents, who look at this thing as appalling and somewhere akin to mating with animals and whatever else one [word unclear].  So on one hand, I'm impressed like what's happening in Wisconsin right now with the legislature trying to get this bill passed the second time, and then out for a referendum which well may mean that anything that looks like even a parallel of a marriage would be impossible, you couldn't have [words unclear] really backwards from where people had moved forward, to the next generation which is ‑‑ just can't figure out why the older generation is the least bit upset about this. So on one hand I feel confident, just in case of the older generation dying that it will take care of itself.  On the other hand, the older generation can make a lot of trouble, as it's doing right now in Wisconsin, by coming up with regulations that punish people for having other sexual orientations, or making it extremely difficult, or harassing them, or making them second class citizens, a whole series of things which they seem to feel obliged to in terms of their sense of ethics or their sense of what is natural or right.
RL:	It's interesting.  Joe, I'm interested in hearing some of your observations about the future of higher education, and how you see the UW in decades ahead.  I'm also interested in your observations on how the student body has changed during your 40-some-odd years here.
JE:	Okay.  When I first came, I was coming from Oberlin College.
00:30:38
RL:	This is Side 2, Tape 7 of the October 17th Oral History Interview with Professor Joe Elder.  Joe, you were talking about when you first arrived on campus.
00:30:53
JE:	Yeah.  And I had been with Oberlin students who were very good, and found, especially in the survey, freshman and sophomore courses a lot of students who were clearly not of the quality in Oberlin.  But there were always some who were of the quality. In the intervening years, what I've noticed is that the poor students have more or less disappeared from the campus.  I think it's been a deliberate policy.  When I first came, I think it was the case that if you had a B average anywhere in the state, you could get into the UW.  It was very noncompetitive, and there was a kind of slaughterhouse the first semester where the figures that I remember were something like of the freshmen who came, less than 40% would get – would graduate.  The rest would just get chewed up in the process.  It was the great democratic approach. Now since then, the standards have gone higher.  It's more difficult to get in.  And the last figures I saw at one of these speak to the Bascom Hill Society of things was that it's pretty close to 90% or more of freshman who come will – if you give them five years [words unclear].
RL:	Oh, the extra year.
JE:	The extra year makes a difference.  So it's more selective, we have fewer casualties along the way, and where there are casualties, it's probably as much finances and stuff like that as it is a student's inability to do so.  So that just means it's – students are much less problematic. In terms of their kind of idealism, I'm sure that the kind of courses I teach and the position I put myself into means that I meet students who are ultimately optimistic, ultimately believe in sort of goodness of human nature, and believe that progress is possible, groan about bad things that happen.  And so I'm not sure there's a [words unclear].  I barely know any students who are members of the fraternities and sororities.  Now that's just a reflection of where I happen to be. There are experimental campus units.  There is the Bradley Hall, this freshman dormitory which I have been in from the beginning and encouraged to get started.  There's the international learning community which I was in on the ground floor and help get it started, so I'm faculty fellow there. So I meet these students once a week in small groups, and they are just like the best students I've had in the past, in terms of, you know, idealism and wanting to get their hands on the world, and go out and do great things, and join the Peace Corps, and all this sort of stuff. So I've never felt that kind of sagging thing, which I know some of my colleagues have felt, that the world today is full of students who are me first and just looking for professions and want the big house and the gigantic car and the [word unclear] vacation.  So I can't speak for the whole campus, but that set of students keeps coming through. And even in the Integrated Liberal Studies program, which I became involved in in the '80s, and that's been a place where I've been able to bring in certain new courses that weren't there.  These are students who choose to join the program where the effort is to make sure the disciplines criss cross.  And so you're taking a social science, but it's not just sociology.  You're taking biological science, not just botany. So I think that's, this is perhaps insulated from the great crowd out there.  But I haven't – I find there are challenges and idealism all the way through that hasn't changed a whole lot since we've been there. It's frustrating now, because with what's happening in Baghdad, there's this great sort of sense of pessimism, almost the same thing that existed for so long in the Vietnam War, where it just looked as though nothing was going to change.  You could parade, you could protest, you could do all kinds of things, but we were there for the long haul. But I have met almost no students who are saying anything [word unclear] how did we get into this mess and is there any way that we could avoid doing it in the future.  [words unclear] find people appalled that we could so quickly be, we, the United States, could so quickly be reproducing the mistakes that led us into Vietnam, you know, the dishonesty, the assumption that people were going to greet us with open arms, the notion that we have the answers to whatever is going on, and the idea that if we simply deceive and tilt things long enough, they'll work out somehow. Because the gap between what we're being told and what comes back from people who are in Iraq or in Afghanistan is just night and day in terms of what's actually going on.
00:35:21
RL:	Correct.  Absolutely.  And what about the role of higher education in society, Joe?  What do you think about it these days?
JE:	It's here and it's absolutely needed.  I didn't realize how much intellectuals are needed.  It sounds weird, but decisions are being made all the time at various levels, by national leaders, by voters, and so on, with information which often is partial or incomplete or just wrong. And the first time I felt kind of called up to be an intellectual with information came around the time of the first Gulf War.  I was out of the country at the time.  I was making my annual visit to South Asia.  And I heard there was going to be a big rally against the buildup of the Gulf War, and they wanted a professor to give a lecture on this to be the main speaker. I thought, well, I don't know much at all about Kuwait or Iraq, that's not my beat.  My beat is India.  And yet when I came back, I had about a week to prepare this thing.  There was going to be a big rally and a lot of people going out that are looking for justification for denouncing what the U.S. was doing. And at that time, as in the Vietnam War, I realized that people who think and read and organize ideas so they can be weighed in the balance are in short supply.  In Vietnam at a certain point, John [Schmele?] in the history department had sat down and put together a series of things we called position papers, about ten of them. We began with an argument by the administration for why we should be doing what we're doing, and then we'd spend about two paragraphs knocking it out.  It's a very powerful form of argument.  You take the strongest point and then you say, here, it's [word unclear]. Now I learned a great deal, because Southeast Asia was not my beat and Southwest Asia was John's beat, but it was as though we were giving water to the thirsty.  Because here were people who sensed the war was awful, but they were being given all these statements about dominoes and people are only understanding violence, and, you know, stuff that justifies doing this sort of thing, and here came the evidence that this wasn't the case. It wasn't – these weren't all dominoes, that Laos was different from Vietnam, and Vietnam was different from Thailand, and Thailand was different from Cambodia, and you can't assume these are all one thing or another.  So the role of the intellectual as a thinker, a data gatherer, and a provider of this information for people who then often are willing to write letters and protest and vote and all this, is something that I hadn't realized. And then aren't a lot of people doing that.  One time when I was amazed, we were going to have a meeting of the Madison Institute, which is a small think tank [words unclear].  And we wanted to have a presentation about Robert LaFollette, the great liberal thinker.  We couldn't find anybody in the political science department who felt prepared to give a talk on Robert LaFollette.
RL:	Really.
JE:	And that blew me – or the history department.  Oh, I don't do that period, or, no.  So who ended up doing a video on Robert LaFollette?  I have now about a 25-minute video of myself lecturing on Bob LaFollette, with pictures from, you know, him standing on stumps and so on.  And the fact that that was something that was needed and somebody had to it, and luckily I had the time and could do it, and the resources were here.  There's marvelous stuff.  But had somebody, I'd have been perfectly happy to have somebody else do it, but somebody had to do it.  And when you are in the academy and you know how to do these kinds of things, there was a call for this sort of service.  So that perhaps is a spin on the role of the professor and the thinker, which has struck me especially now as where the war is going on and where the misunderstandings are huge has to do with the world of Muslims, which I happen just to have grown up in. So probably if there's anything that I've spoken on more than anything else in the last two years or three years, it's been on Islam and Muslims, and how does one interpret what's going on, and how does one address the sort of gross oversimplifications that are being given by why we're doing this thing to Muslims or why Muslims behave as they do based on wrong information, triggered often by other motives which can be fairly sinister, like wanting to control oil or wanting to have large bases in some part of the world.  So you take whatever the facts are, and you arrange them in such a way that they could justify what you're doing.
RL:	Do you see intellectuals in America today under more assault than they've ever been, or is the fact that what intellectuals know, has it historically always been held in disrepute and then acknowledged later?
JE:	I'm not sure.  Oh, whether they are held in disrepute or not, no.  I find when I'm talking, I'm immensely appreciated.  Now again, it may be self-selective.  But as things were beginning to heat up in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were citizens groups who asked me to come out to places like Baraboo or places like Monroe. And there were would 100, 200 people who were hungry to get some sort of information about what had been happening there, and to what extent what we were being told would happen was likely to happen.  And that's very rewarding, because it is just plain information that they're looking for, because the information they're given is either distorted or left out, because, you know, we have a notion of American superiority [word unclear] the American's needs and defense and so on, and so you get into all the sorts of things that we have no choice to do and so we're going to go ahead and do them. So I felt that where I do have a map to show or data to give or time sequence, which I usually give with lectures and sort a short course in history, that just giving that, which I can give because this is a kind of [words unclear] built up, is appreciated.  And in a, you know, small way may affect how people actually end up behaving. I do lecture to the Foreign Service Institute.  Five times a year, I go in to lecture to a group of diplomats who are preparing to go to South Asia.  These are Pakistan, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.  Now I don't talk about policy.  I've been told not to talk about policy.  I'm told you are there to provide them with information.  And the two lectures which I give, one is on what is the caste system and how does it work, and [words unclear] into politics and how you need – we need to understand if you're going to function effectively in a society where caste is a big deal, and the other is on Islam and where what is, what does jihad mean, and what are the various groups of Muslims in South Asia.  And if one is dealing with that part of the world, how do you relate yourself to them and so on. And I think this is a great opportunity, for one thing, because these are people who many of them will be either making decisions or will be drawing up the reports on which decisions will be made.  And in each of these, what I try to do, and they probably sense it, is to say these are real people with set concepts of the world that make sense.  And from the way they look at things, they're acting rationally, and even in terms of broad values that we share, and they aren't the ones that we say, well, the only solution is to nuke them or to, you know, beat them into submission, because there is a rationale and a history as to what they're doing that does make sense if you stand on that side of the fence and look at it. So it may be sort of a quiet sort of slipping in there to say look at them as human beings with a somewhat different take on things.  I typically end up my lecture on Islam with jokes about mulas.  Now most people have a notion that, you know, there's Islam theocracy that mulas are telling people, you know, remain hidden and don't go out if you don't [words unclear].  The part of the [words unclear] is dozens, if not hundreds, of jokes about mulas, in which you sort of make fun of them. They're nice people and they're trying to be religious, but they're kind of [words unclear] – 
RL:	Oh, really?
JE:	And when all is said and done, they're just – it's sort of like, you know, the old rabbi or the old minister.  They're sweet people who mean well, but they're not, they're not going to tell you to go out and die, in terms of their relationship with the community. And, you know, it softens the diplomats' view of what the Muslim world is all about, that there these kinds of jokes within the group itself.  They say we don't take ourselves all that seriously.  We don't take our mulas all that seriously.  It's a little bit of a sense of these folks are just as human as we are.
RL:	You're quite consistent with that theme, aren't you, about we're all human beings?
JE:	Right, yeah.  If there were a string that I keep pulling on, I suppose that's it.
RL:	That seems to inform much of your work.  You had certainly made reference to that, what you read about your speech following 9/11.  You talked about suffering in Mexico and Vietnam, as well as in the United States.
JE:	Yeah.  And as someone said, the purpose of the global cultures course is kind of the same thing, and even the LGBT course is kind of the same thing.  These people are all, you know, they differ in some ways, but in most ways we're – we could be they and they'd be us.
RL:	That's quite a wonderful statement.  So this concludes the tape and the interview.  Thank you.
00:46:08
END