UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #273
BOLLINGER, JOHN G.

BOLLINGER, John G. (1935- )
Undergraduate and Graduate Student; Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Dean of College of Engineering
At UW: 1953-1957; 1958-

First Interview
with RATNER, Robert A. (1921-1989)
Professor of Industrial Engineering; Associate Dean of College of Engineering
At UW: 1954-1986

Interviewed: 1983	
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 1 hour	

College of Engineering and Wisconsin industry; Role of Extension Engineering; Origins of University-Industry Research Program; Choice of W. Robert Marshall as dean; Loss of Engineering's role in licensing and consequences; Changes in College faculty; Division between basic science courses and Engineering courses and consequences for Engineering.

FIRST INTERVIEW (1983)
WITH ROBERT A. RATNER

00:01:10

LS:	One of the major issues in engineering, at least Harrington spoke of this is why engineering hadn't done more with industry in the state.  He had an explanation of this.  
JB:	Did he have an explanation of this.  I'd like to hear it.
LS:	All right. He said that because WARF had given so much money to chemical engineering that chemical engineering was able to go way ahead, but chemical engineering graduates went off to the east and got jobs in New Jersey and therefore didn't share their knowhow with the state.  And that the other departments not having gotten this kind of money weren't able to do as much as they might have done otherwise.  
JB:	That may be plausible, but I don't think chemical engineering was that well endowed.  I don't have any facts but today--we definitely had a very distinguished faculty and they in fact did a lot of work with industry, Olaf Hougen, and others.
LS:	Here?
JB:	This was in Wisconsin, so there are some facts that would sort of tone that down to say well if anybody twenty-five years ago was active with industry in Wisconsin it was our chemical engineering department, much more than some of the others.  Electrical was small, mechanical had some very active people with industry, but I think that frankly there's a much more fundamental answer to that question and that is that because of the nature of the land grant school and the opportunity particularly in agriculture to establish a far reaching system of Extension and county agents there was far more natural interrelations developing.  They were helping the small guy, the little business men do things that there was no other collective resource to help.  On the other hand Wisconsin industrially was based essentially along the coast of Lake Michigan.  It was heavy industry, it was very profitable and it was managed conservatively.  There was little interest on the part of industrialists in the '30s and '40s, or even before, particularly before, to support a university.  Milwaukee industry was built at the turn of the century on imported technicians from Germany.  And secondly there was a natural competition, and that is still alive today, between the Milwaukee business community and the Madison political community.  I see it at hearings I sit in on. It's very vivid when people start talking about where shall we build a research park and it invariably comes out that the best compromise would be halfway between here and Milwaukee.  So I think from a geographic, political and business point of view it was virtually impossible for my predecessors to create any kind of an active Extension program.  Then when Extension did get started in technology it was started separate from the College of Engineering, and has remained so since.
LS:	As part of General Extension.
JB:	Yes, so while we interacted well with them for many years, there was a long and continuous growing separation between Extension and Engineering--there was a separation in tenure.  They developed their own faculty, graduate engineers, and we developed ours, and (the two groups?) at best talked together once in a while, and they'd come and ask us to participate when we had people that were more well known in technology than they did.  So there's cooperation but it's really two separate operations.  So we don't get any visibility in the state from Extension services vs. agriculture which gets all its exposure from Extension.  So that's another current problem, and the systemization of the University made things even worse for engineering, because in the '60s our faculty managed the graduate program in Milwaukee.  I spent--it was part of my regular teaching plan to spend one semester a year teaching my graduate course at night in Milwaukee, and I met with Milwaukee people and it was a marvelous experience, because these were different kinds of students.  When we started the engineering program on the Milwaukee campus, the advanced degree program, and this thing became systematized, everything got split up and that sequence of events destroyed practically all of our educational interrelationship with the Milwaukee campus.  So that further separated us from the major portion of the industrial complex of Wisconsin.
00:07:37
And it isn't until now that--I'd say that if there's anything that revives our visibility in the state, and particularly in Milwaukee, it's the trend to high technology. We were the guys over in the political seat who were spending all our time on cloud nine doing advanced research and thinking about all these things that were way out and weren't of interest to people, and now we're the best looking girl on the block because we've got the people that if you want to talk about thin film technology,  you know, equipment and material utilization, we've got the people to do that, the only ones in the state.  You talk about microelectronics, we've got the only facilities in the state; you talk about fusion energy, we've got the facilities, you talk about manufacturing engineering at advanced levels, we've got the capability.  So suddenly all these hot topics that are coming up in the press--oh my heavens, you mean there's something going on in the College of Engineering at Madison, and the answer is, absolutely.  We're famous around the world more than we are in the state of Wisconsin, in many areas.
LS:	And does industry use these sorts of things?
RR:	Well, they're beginning to.  In the past we haven't felt that--they were successful at doing what they did, and I guess that's one of the reasons they're having problems now, and they saw no need to change, and now they're seeing a need to change and now as Dean Bollinger pointed out they're turning to the college.  But I think you're being a little modest, John.  When did you begin your A.O. Smith research.
JB:	1963.  
RR:	So that's nineteen years ago, and you had some pretty significant research projects with them (?)
JB:	Yes, but that didn't help the University get much visibility, because they didn't--I think in the whole twenty years I've dealt with A.O. Smith they've really not cared about recognizing the University.  They were over here to find individuals that could contribute to their technology. It wasn't the visibility of the University, it was the visibility of a specialist in an area that they could draw upon, and today we're talking more than we did in those days about the visibility.  
00:10:19
But remember that was the same time that we started UIR.  Prior to '63 there wasn't any University-Industry research program. And I met the people at A.O. Smith as a result of the fact that when I came back from Germany in '63, Gerry Rohlich who was the new director of U.I.R. said hey, wouldn't you like to be associate director and work with me for a couple of years and get to know the industry mistakes.  So that was really the beginning of engineering getting involved in industry.  So I said, sure that sounds exciting.  I had just been in Germany and had spent a year and a half in a research institute that worked almost exclusively with industry.
LS:	This was a research leave?
JB:	Yes. I had a Fulbright and I went to Germany and I was at the Technical Institute in Aachen for manufacturing technology and machine tools, and when I came back, I had all kinds of ideas --because I'd seen how they ran their industry. So Gerry asked me to do that.  There was a meeting set up with A. O. Smith and the University, talking about what research was going on in the University and when I met someone from A.O. Smith and got talking about welding, and that led to some projects. My association there was a result of really the first major attempt on the part of the Madison campus to communicate to industry what we were doing here as a University.
LS:	Do you know how that started?
JB:	UIR? I don't remember whose idea that was. I just remember that the Dean of the Grad School had decided to do it.
LS:	What year was this?
JB:	1963
LS:	Was that Alberty?
JB:	Alberty, I think.
RR:	It must have been Alberty.
JB:	It was Alberty. And he and others must have decided this was a good idea.  And Gerry Rohlich was probably at the time one of the best known of the engineering faculty.  He had worked all over the state, in the system, in water resources--pollution control, waste disposal systems.  And that has a lot of history, too. Because the one area that did deal a lot with the public domain and industry was water resources.
LS:	Oh Yes.  Many people refer to that--
RR:	Danny Mead.  Danny Mead was a famous civil engineer on this campus, Daniel Mead, and his family is still in Madison.  His son is the owner of Mead and Hunt, an engineering company.  And his son, the grandson, is editor of Wisconsin Trails Magazine.  But none of the family after Harold Mead kept in engineering.  But Danny Mead's laboratory remnants are still down in the lake lab.  We're trying to get rid of them, but it's a project and that was from the turn of the century.
LS:	Are they going to put them in a museum?
RR:	Around 1920.  Those cement tanks down there, vats.  Those are Danny Mead's honey buckets.
JB:	They are?
RR:	Sure they are.  That's left over from Danny Mead, 1920.  Shows how far back our construction program goes.
LS:	Where are they?
RR:	Down in the Hydraulics Lab, by the lake, next to the Union.
LS:	The red one.
RR:	That's right.  The basement of all these old civil engineering structures.  Lake water--water supply tanks.  Those are all big concrete tanks in the basement.  Now there was an example of a lot of state interaction.  But mostly with public utilities and water and sewer districts.  Well, Gerry was a logical choice because he knew everybody.  I don't think I've known anybody that knew more people in Wisconsin than Gerry I mean anywhere we went, a luncheon, a reception, or wherever I went with Gerry Rohlich, he knew everyone.
LS:	He was a candidate for something, wasn't he?  Didn't he run for something?
RR:	Political office, I don't think that's what happened.
00:15:14
JB:	I don't remember that.  I think he might have thought of himself as a candidate to be dean.
RR:	Yes. I think he thought of that. 
JB:	And it wasn't long after that he didn't get that he left for Texas.  He became director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Center for Water Resources.  He just passed away last week.
LS:	Who didn't make him dean?
JB:	That was when Bob Marshall took over twelve years ago.
LS:	I see.  And do you know why they chose Marshall over Rohlich?
JB:	Bob Marshall had been associate dean for research for twenty--fifteen years, fifteen anyway, and he was sort of the number one candidate whom everybody expected.
RR: 	He had a distinguished career on his own.  His work on spray drying is probably the classic work in that field.
JB: 	He's won many awards all over the world, Germany--the Chemical Engineering Society gave him a distinguished award.  Gerry had tough competition
LS:  	Are you saying that Gerry would have been more of a go-getter in the state?
JB: 	Oh no. Well, that takes speculation.  Here you had two distinguished people.  Gerry Rohlich, with a very distinguished career.  Local--knew everybody in the state.  He was a civil engineer in Wisconsin, and if there was any engineering that was related to the state's industry it was civil.  The others were all more superficial, or less.  Bob Marshall was a chem engineer with an international reputation.  So his focus was more the country and the world than Wisconsin.
LS:  	And more academic, perhaps?
JB: 	Perhaps, more academic.
RR: 	Because of his relationship with the Experiment Station too, I suspect, he was inclined more toward research than application.
JB: 	On the other hand, Bob Marshall did a lot of things to try to stimulate.  He started the Industrial Liaison Council for the College.  There was never any group of industrialists that came to the College on a regular basis and Bob Marshall initiated the Liaison Council, made up of company presidents and vice-presidents.
LS:  	Was this at all related to the UIR?
JB: 	No. It was quite separate from that. It was just started about four years ago.
LS:  	Oh, it's recent.
JB: 	Yes, it's very recent.  In fact, I think in the last two or three years of Bob Marshall's tenure as dean, he became more and more interested in communications with the state.  There are a couple of things that he did that probably hurt, or deemphasized, state relations. It wasn't that he did them, but they happened.  The dean of the college was, by state law, the chairman of the Registration and Licensing Board of the State of Wisconsin.  That puts this place, this institution, in a very special position within the state government.  And when Bob Marshall became dean, they changed the law.  And I think he didn't really care to have the job.  So to my knowledge, he didn't really oppose it.
RR: 	I think he was grateful.
JB: 	Yes. Kurt Wendt liked it.  Maybe Kurt Wendt saw it as his line to the professional engineers in the state.  And we lost that channel when Bob let that thing die.
LS:  	That sounds like a severe loss, I should think.  It must have given the college---
JB: 	It was a lot of work and it was a lot of administrative work, and maybe there was a lot more political work to be done that wasn't recognized as important at the time.
RR: 	Well, at the time this occurred I suspect that the college was not concerned a lot with the politics of the situation, because the college in the '70s--Bob Marshall became dean in 1971--was not experiencing enrollment increase, it was experiencing enrollment declines.  We didn't have serious budget problems, that we recognized, anyhow--
LS:  	In the early seventies.
RR: 	In the early seventies.  And we weren't concerned about too many students.  In fact we were concerned about not enough students.  So we---
JB: 	This college is about a third of the size it is today, in '72.
LS:  	Was this one of its ten-year swings or is it something else?
RR: 	It's more related to the times, because people were recognizing the need--that engineers have a greater place in today's economy than they'd had in the past.
LS:  	Was this loss of the licensing--this was the licensing for engineers--
JB: 	Well it wasn't a loss, it was simply that the dean here was no longer by law the head of the licensing bureau.
LS:  	Was somebody else in the college?
JB: 	No. It was totally divorced from the educational system, and it ends up a political appointee.
RR: 	And they make it into the State Department of Regulating and Licensing, and engineering became part of the department, like cosmeticians or barbers or whatever.  They're all regulated and they're all licensed, and it was all organized as an efficiency measure under one individual.
LS: 	 So it wasn't anything--I was thinking of the Wisconsin Bar Association.
JB: 	Well, in a sense, it had that flavor, earlier.  And we lost that uniqueness.  And thereby lost some form of statewide visibility, I'm certain of that.  Because subsequently we saw the creation of engineering colleges in other places around the state, without any logical economic justification for it at all.
LS:  	And you relate that to this change in losing--
JB: 	Oh, yes.  All these things happened.  And then when the System came along, there was a Council for Higher Education--Commission on Higher Education, an engineering subset of that.  And they made a bunch of recommendations--most of which made good sense, but none of which were ever implemented.  And then the System came along, and we haven't cooperated since.
RR: 	Wouldn't you say, John, that the difference really is that when the dean was the head of the registration board, then the dean had statewide knowledge of engineering.
JB: 	And visibility.
RR: 	And visibility. And when the dean was no longer head of the registration board, this then just became a college with no particular relationship to the state or to the state government.
00:23:42
JB: 	That's right. And the next blow was that it wasn't part of just the University of Wisconsin, it was just a little pinch of the system.  So in the course of twenty years we lost what little visibility the College of Engineering had as a unique body.
LS:  	Was this under Lucey that this happened?  The loss of the licensing.
JB: 	No, it had to be before that, because that was back, twelve years ago.
RR: 	When was Lucey governor?
LS:  	1970. 
JB:	 Yes. This had to be around sixty--'69.
LS: 	 I just wondered whether it was a political thing. 
JB: 	I think it probably was political.  It was in a period, if my memory serves me right, when the Milwaukee campus was developing engineering, in the late sixties.
RR: 	I don't really remember, but I was thinking, John, that this was all a part of the state's efficiency measures.  And I recall that part of the efficiency measure was the formation of the System, and this came about the same time.
LS:  	Lucey was governor in 1970, Knowles was governor in '64.
JB: 	It was right at the end of Knowles's period, and maybe the start of Lucey's.  Either one or the other, or both.  Because they both were actually supportive of the System concept.  Knowles had discussed that.
RR:	 It continued through Kurt. Kurt was still head of Registration when he retired. '69 or '70. '70 I thought.
JB: 	Well then Lucey had just become governor.  So Lucey probably did it as part of his efficiency--
RR: 	Yes. It seemed to me that it was started before '70 because I don't think that Bob--he may have been involved in it one year--
JB: 	But really those trends were actually counter to any development of a base of communication between engineers and Wisconsin.  Everything that took place up until recently---
00:26:49
RR: 	Let me put in a comment and say something controversial on the tape.  It just occurred to me, so it's not a well thought out opinion.  This state has been anti-engineering –period - for at least ten or fifteen years.
JB: 	Well, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say anti-, but not cognizant of the value of technology to the society--
RR: 	I'll go even farther than that, now that I think about it. I'd say--it shows how paranoid one can become--the state and the campus have been anti-engineering for at least ten or fifteen years.
LS:  	You're saying that before that they were, pro-engineering, are you?
JB: 	Well, let's take a look at the biennial budget process.  The campus has recognized that Engineering has grown to about twelve percent of the campus, and yet we have much less percent of the budget.  And our chancellor worked with me and we made a case for engineering needing to catch up.  It wasn't a question of taking over, it was a question of taking a long look and saying, hey, things are not going right down there in the engineering school and we have to have more faculty.  We can't teach engineering subjects at a professional level like they teach econ, in lectures with hundreds of students with T.A.s, we just cannot do that.  I picked on econ because that was the biggest lecture I ever attended in my school.  And it was a very effective course. 
LS:	Who taught it?
JB:  	Kiekhofer. Anyway, we can't do that in the same way.  We can do things approaching that, but nowhere near.  So we were faced with people viewing us as being very expensive, and we are expensive.  We have special equipment, and a very high percentage of our activities are laboratory oriented.  And our curriculum is extremely difficult, and requires a lot of attention from the students.  Well, we went ten years of growth without any increase in faculty.  In that same ten-year period, our relationship in salaries to the Big Ten kept decreasing to the point where the chancellor said, to the Senate, "In a few years, we'll be at the bottom of the Big Ten."  Well, College of Engineering has been at the bottom of the Big Ten for--.  We're way ahead of everybody.  We have managed to create a pretty decent environment in a lot of areas for people to work in, good critical masses, so we have good faculty, regardless of the salary.  People to consult, and that opportunity has managed to take the place of salary.  
RR:	But, this has been a scientific humanist campus. We've been the guys on the other side of the tracks.
JB:	Yes, that's right.  
RR:	And after all you're just applied and that doesn't really mean anything.  You don't win Nobel Prizes for being applied and that's what Engineering is. 
JB:	I think that I detect that and for us to have credibility we have to really dig hard and do quite a job in order to come across with some credibility, and every time I do something, it's looked at with suspicion.
RR:	I'm sure that--well, maybe I shouldn't name names but I was thinking, John can contradict me, but I suspect that Bob Bock doesn't view Engineering in the same way that he views microbiology or anything of that nature.
JB:	Some of engineering he does. I think he has a lot of respect, much more now than Grad School deans of the past, I would think.
JB:	We've had very good contacts with Milwaukee industry in the past couple of years.  We're developing a base of communications.  Last fall, we initiated what we call our Graduate Outreach Program which using videotape instruction allows practicing engineers around the state to get graduate credit.  That will increase our visibility. We've just been very successful in obtaining a major industrial grant for a new degree program.
LS:	What industry and what program?
JB:	$4.3 million from IBM and that's going to provide computing equipment and money for new course development and money for revitalizing--about a million dollars for new lab equipment.  So that's going to help us because the program is of great interest to industry.  I get letters almost every week from people that read about it--company presidents from around the state that are interested.  We have been talking to Extension about the idea of integration.  That's something that's politically a new concept that brings Extension back into the academic colleges.
LS:	Engineering Extension is still going on then?
JB:	It's still going on separately.  And this latest regent resolution that paves the way for Extension and the Madison campus to integrate could conceivably offer some tremendous new opportunities.  Third, I think the greatest thing that's going to help us is the technology itself. I'm of the opinion that our whole concept of higher education has an opportunity to change.  It will change. The idea of needing campuses to do similar things at all these locations is an absolutely obsolete concept. It's just a matter of time before technology changes it. For example it's possible to transmit lectures by satellite, and the very most famous person in a given subject to all campuses.  And it's not economical to do that
LS: 	Is anybody doing that?
JB:	Yes, there's an experiment with federal money to attempt to do that in Colorado, and you'll find catalogs of courses.  Five of our courses are now available on videotape, with communication to Madison--they come here to take exams, and that's it. No lectures. We've had students on our campus taking courses with no lectures in the classic sense. And their learning curves, grade points, the statistical distribution of student performance.  And you go from semester to semester and just switch technique and everything remains the same, results remain the same, it's very encouraging. 
RR:	There are no lectures, but there is a lot of faculty input into the course.  
JB:	The faculty makes the tapes and sees the films.  In engineering we do a lot of homework grading, which is one of the time-consuming things. There's no substitute for letting the students know they've done it right.
LS:	Is that something a T.A. can do?
JB:	Yes. A lot of it.  So, we're changing a great deal.  I can see, looking ahead a decade from now, when we could offer the first introductory courses to engineering--on campuses all around the state.  And all we'd do is manage the information systems. The whole concept of a System is going to be different in the next decade.
LS:	 Is this something that engineers would in a way be in charge of even if it was happening on the L&S campus or Agriculture because it would take--
JB:	No. The people who do this are audio-visual people.  We just need the management mechanisms, the technology is taken care of by the technicians.  And we need the faculty who have the expertise to create the subject matter.  So we would logically become more of a focal point because we would have more of these faculty in a broader area than other campuses.  I think that the other campus’ are worried about this.  I offered our tapes to Milwaukee last spring and said, "You can use them for your courses, and we'll just have our students come to your library and look at them, and enroll in Madison."  And they said, "Keep your tapes off our campus.  We can't stop you from doing this, but we don't want any part of it."  Their argument was, nobody wants to watch a videotape, they'd rather see a live professor.  My point is I'd much rather see a videotape of the most famous guy in this field than listen to someone who was just learning the subject himself, teaching something that he doesn't know all that much about. And that's what you get at a lot of campuses.  We try to do these new things, work the same people.  We can't do it.  So, I think technology is going to revolutionize the way we look at least technical education, because we don't have the base around the state to do it.  We can't afford three engineering colleges in Wisconsin paid for by the taxpayers.  
LS:	Are there three now?  You said four.
JB:	Actually there are three fairly full-blown ones. There's here, Milwaukee, Platteville, and then there are some engineering programs on other campuses.  Civil engineering, is it up at Stout?
RR:	Well, Parkside had sort of an engineering program for a while.
JB:	But that's not really--
RR:	No. I don't think they've got industrial technology at Stout.
JB:	It's technology.
RR:	Yes, but not engineering 
JB:	They have something at River Falls, too.  Maybe that's the civil engineering.
RR:	That's right.
JB:	So we're going to see a lot of changes.
LS:	I'd like to get back to your point about the general hostility to engineering, or at least not paying as much attention, and whether that might have been merely to not having aggressive enough deans, because I've heard that those---
JB:	No, I think it was more typical of the profession.  You know, engineering started here as railroad engineering, didn't it, in 1884, 1883?
RR:	I think that's right.  And then we had mining engineering--
JB:	And these were the dirty, practical--
LS:	But I mean recently--
JB:	Well engineering didn't even provide Ph.D.s until the thirties.  We're a hundred years behind other basic sciences.  In Europe, it's even more obvious than here. In Europe, two whole, totally different university systems emerged because engineering wasn't considered a university subject.  So you had the universities in Germany and you had the technische hoogscholen ??, which were the technical institutes.
LS:	That's how M.I.T. started too, isn't it?
JB:	M.I.T. is the Institute of Technology.  And in England it's even worse.  In England, one of my engineering friends won't even admit to his mother that he's an engineer, never has.  He's an applied physicist to her.  He has his degree in applied physics and he's an engineering graduate from Columbia.  But, you know an engineer in English society is very low as compared to law, medicine and political science.  So it's historic.  It has very deep-seated historical roots.
RR:	There are so many "engineers", aren't there.  There are railway engineers, from the word "engine." There are sanitary engineers--
JB:	Garbage collectors, sanitary engineers in New York City.
LS:	Yes, it must be a bit galling to have the word taken over--
JB:	And until the sciences found a use for it--we now have genetic engineering.  When genetics ran out of sexy things to talk about they invented engineering.
LS:	That must be a step in the right direction.
RR:	And now it's gained respectability on the other side of campus, because now they've found a use for the word.
JB:	We can joke about it, but there is a lot of historical precedent for the engineering being, particularly in academia, not held in the highest regard. 
RR:	Or even the college?
JB:	And it isn't until 1960, well into the sixties that the majority of the faculty in this college had Ph.D.s.
LS:   But I've heard it said that both Wendt and Marshall didn't push the engineering college enough, and that that was in fact a reason, one of the reasons, for changing the age limit of retirement.
JB:	I don't know. Certainly neither of those deans pushed the University in industry. Kurt Wendt was hands-off in industry.  You were welcome to go out on your own but he did not aggressively pursue it.  He wasn't interested.  I remember asking him when I was travelling around on accreditation, and I found other universities with industrial consulting boards, and I said, "Dean Wendt, why don't we have one here?"  And he said, "Well, if you have one and you hold a meeting, and you ask them a question, and they give you an answer, you've got to take their advice."  And he didn't want to take anybody's advice.  
RR:	We've had some very conservative deans in the sense of, as you say, not being very aggressive.
[Changing batteries then discussing what topics to choose for a series of interviews with Engineering faculty.  Bollinger suggests a discussion of why faculty choose to stay at UW]
00:44:21
JB:	We have an extremely good faculty today.  We must have done something right.  Now, we're having trouble keeping them--
LS:	You don't think it's just the lakes?
JB:	No, I don't think it's the lakes, I think it's the environment of opportunity that this university created.
LS:	So that way we'd have to compare it with other universities.
JB:	Yes. Right. I mean why did I stay here?
LS:	Well, Why did you?
JB:	Because of the opportunity, and the mentorship that went on around here, and the collegiality of groups of people.
RR:	A lot of people don't understand that Wisconsin is different from other institutions in that faculty governance really means something.
JB:	My relationship to this college, not the university but certainly the college, has been more like a love affair than a job.
LS: 	I've heard, not in those words, but people do say that.
JB:	I've found it just marvelous to work here.  I didn't care what I got paid as long as I had the opportunity to do what I felt was important, and if I needed more money, and went out and got it, fine.  We've operated on sort of a star system.  Everybody can act as an entrepreneur if he wants to be that.  When this campus loses faculty governance, that's really the end.  It's all done, it's all over.  We're out of business.  With our salaries, take away our freedom, impose on our private lives in consulting and outside activities, and you can wrap this place up and forget it.  And it'll only take two years to do it.  
RR:	Because you're not going to get good people coming and you're not going to get good people staying.  We lost twenty people this year already.
LS:	Oh, that's what Mr. Washa was saying the other day.
JB:	We rest very heavily on the environment that we create, the opportunities, our willingness to go out and raise money, invest it on behalf of some of the faculty and see them turn around and do something with it.  And really what's made me come back all the time was, every time I came along with a good idea, Kurt Wendt had the money to say, "I think that's great, go ahead and do it." And I'd do it.
00:47:00
LS:	You know, we really should talk more about Kurt Wendt.
JB:	He was a tremendous inspiration for me personally, because he would listen carefully, he would debate it if he doubted it.  The minute he believed in it, we could do it.  Now I can't do that today with faculty.  I can believe in it, and I can say I can help you try to do it, but I haven't got the checkbook to write out, like Kurt had.
LS:	But those were good times.
JB:	Those were good times.  
RR:	And that's the reason he had the checkbook.
JB:	Sure.  I have to go out and help the faculty write the proposal to somebody else.  And then we may win a few, like the IBM thing, we won.
LS:	Yes, all the deans in the 1960s were wonderful, because they all had money.
JB:	And Bob Marshall was sort of the same with me, not quite as generous, because his interests weren't so much down my line. He was very supportive of young faculty in chemical engineering doing the kind of thing he used to do.  But he was always supportive, he had a lot of carryover of Kurt's approach.
RR:	Well, we had limited resources even then.  But you put your money on who you thought were winners.
JB:	That's right.  And you had some to put it on.
RR:	John, you were one of the winners.  Everybody didn't get that kind of support.
JB:	I'm sure that's true. But I also took the attitude, just sitting there talking with him, you knew you had to pull it off.  I mean if he expressed the confidence in you and you were able to do it, you had to make it very successful, there was no other way.  I mean he made you feel that way.
LS:	This is interesting.  I've heard so many different things about Kurt Wendt, I'd love to be able to pull together a portrait of him.  People working with him on the Campus Planning commission, for instance.  
JB:	He was a very good politician.  
LS:	That's agreed, evidently.
JB:	He was a very good politician, and he was very fair.  In fact, he was so fair that if there was any criticism of Kurt Wendt not pushing the college it was because he didn't want to take unfair advantage in the Campus Planning Commission.  That may have hurt us.
LS:	You mean the Engineering Research Building or the library?
JB:	He got the Engineering Research Building, that was thirteen years ago, the last building we had built short of the library.  But he got that building.  But he got it not by taking all the $5 million? $4 million?
RR:	$4.5 million
JB:	--$4.5 million from the campus. He went and got the faculty working like hell. And Vince Rideout, I remember he was bugging me.  He wrote proposals for the computer floor.  And we wrote proposals.  We wrote proposals coming out our ears.  We raised half of that $4.2 million.  He was just like my dad.  My dad would let me have anything I wanted when I was a kid, but I had to work like hell to get it.
00:50:19
RR:	That's part of what I mean by engineers being conservative.  Now there are some other areas of the campus that I view as big spenders who--
JB:	Just get people convinced that's the thing to do and then the coffers open up.
LS:	Who do you have in mind?
JB:	Now let's not throw daggers.
RR:	I have the social sciences more in mind.
LS:	Yes, they're very good at getting money.
RR:	They're very good at spending money.
JB:	The argument would be that they have no other resource.  I've come up against recent attitudes--I heard the president of the Board of Regents at an open meeting suggest that for every dollar for those engineers brought in and raised, that they raised in matching dollars for the humanities.  So that things don't get off one side.  Well, that almost made me fall off the chair, you know.  First, I want fifty cents on the dollar of what they get.
LS:	That was the problem with the physics department.  Ingraham wouldn't let them hire the people they needed because he wanted to keep the humanities salaries equivalent. And of course, they couldn't get big physicists if they couldn't pay more.
RR:	Ah, this has happened before.  I think that the physical sciences have not been a strong aspect of this campus administration thinking.
LS:	They wanted to join you for a while, didn't they?  The physics department. Did you know about that?  I think it was after the war.  They were quite keen about it.
RR:	It would have been great.
JB:	I don't know. I look at it as maybe a lost opportunity, others feel the other way around.  But in Minnesota they have the Institute of Science and Technology, which includes all of science and technology, including engineering.  And here we have all of the basic sciences--mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science and statistics--all in Letters and Science.  And the Engineering College is sort of an add-on, which tends to make us as a unit look more applied and far less desirable, than if we had in our midst physicists, chemists, mathematicians--
LS:	That's interesting. It was a very strong push, and Harrington--well he said, "When Young is dean, he'll be better to you."  Because their feeling was that they'd be better off in engineering, get more money, because they couldn't get it under Mark Ingraham.  
JB:	Sure, but they wouldn't let that happen, because they didn't want to see the technologies massed together.  They got half of us over in L&S where they can take care of them, and control them.  And the other half down here where we're no threat.
LS:	Well, it might have gone the other way.    
00:053:13
END