UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #88
RIDEOUT, WALTER B.

Narrator:  Rideout, Walter B.
Interviewer:  Laura Smail 
Date:  1976
Location:  Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History:  #88
Subject: Background; Early teaching; Women in English; English Department in 1960s; Hiring policies; TA training; Course requirements; TAs in English Department; Mathematics Research Center; TA Strike of 1970; Job market; Funding; Course evaluation; Non-tenured faculty.  
Transcriptionist:  Premium Business Services (10/11/09)
Auditor:  

First Interview Session (July 28, 1977): Digital File

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session [Start of tape 1]

00:00:09

LS:	Just before we begin, you were answering my question about a relative of yours, Edith Rideout, and the theory about --

WR:	Oh, yes.  Well, I was trying to explain that Edith, whom I liked very much, and is still alive, was a, one of these very bright, straight laced but understanding women, who appeared in such numbers in high schools, I think probably from around 1900 to whatever time it was that women began to go to graduate schools in considerable numbers.  And I simply have an hypothesis, not even a theory yet, but an hypothesis that many of these women, if they were young now, would go to graduate school and go on to teach in a university.

LS:	And would be lost in the schools.

WR:	Yeah.  And but not having either financial access or not conceiving it as a possible choice, it would look too much of a challenge to them because women simply were not accepted on the same grounds as men for many years, decades, that they went into high school teaching instead.  And as a result, you got some absolutely marvelous high school teachers of tremendously high caliber, many of whom were interested in literature, sometimes contemporary literature, and in writing.  This is true of a teacher, two teachers of Earnest Hemingway at Oak Park.  It’s true of at least one teacher, William Faulkner.  And I strongly suspect that students of American literature ought to look at this phenomenon.

LS:	It’s fascinating, yes.

WR:	And I don’t know how one would go about it this time, but I’m sure there is something there to look into.  Do you think this is coming through all right?

00:02:04

LS:	Yes, I, well, we can listen -- much of a Maine accent at this point.  Well, tell me just briefly about your background, how you got here and why you went into English.

WR:	Well, I went into English because it’s --

LS:	And start off with where you began.

WR:	It’s a kind of family disease.  Everyone in my family had taught at some time or other.  I had originally thought that I should go to West Point and be a military aviator when I was in high school until my principal pointed out that I was absolutely incompetent in math, and that my eyesight was highly imperfect.  So the very next day, I decided I was going to teach English.  And I went to college, fortunately, got a fellowship in 1938 to Harvard, and did my graduate work at Harvard.

LS:	You went to Colby.

WR:	Well, I went to Colby first.

LS:	And you were brought up in Maine, were you?

WR:	Uh-huh.

LS:	Where?

WR:	Well, I think my hometown is a place called Dover-Foxcroft, hyphenated.  And, uh, I went to Foxcroft Academy, which sounds terribly posh, but it was the town high school.  They’re all academies with, dotted all through Maine.  And I loved reading.  I like teaching.

LS:	Did your father teach?

WR:	My father had been the superintendent of schools, and he had taught.  My mother taught grade school out in a country school, where there were eight grades in the same room.  She started teaching at 15, and so it’s, as I say, it’s like cancer running in the family.  And my brother had gone to Colby, and he went on first to get a Rhodes scholarship at, uh, went to St. Edmund Hall at Oxford, and then got his Ph.D. at Brown. 
	 And meanwhile, I was getting mine at Harvard.  Well, let’s see, I got my MA in 1939, did not get my Ph.D. until 1950 partly because the war intervened.  I was involved in that ’42 to ’46.  And then, before that, instead of finishing my dissertation, I was busy acting as a teaching, I guess it was an assistant, a reader in a number of classes.

LS:	At Harvard?

WR:	At Harvard.  I remember in ’41-’42, I made $900 that year, academic year, and lived like a prince.  I don’t think I’ve ever lived quite so well since.

LS:	Sounds good to live at that time.

WR:	It was marvelous, when you could live off $1 a day if you were reasonably cautious.  And then after the war, I returned to Harvard in ’46 with a teaching fellow there, which is the same as the teaching assistant from ’46 to ’49, and finished my dissertation and went on to Northwestern, and was at Northwestern from ’49 to ’62.  

00:05:12

WR:	And then Helen White persuaded me to come up here for a year, ’62-’63, as a visiting professor.  And then I stayed on after that.  So I’ve been here since ’62, but I’ve been on the faculty technically only since ’63.

LS:	I see.

WR:	I mean, as a faculty appointment, not a visiting.

LS:	So you were here while she was chairman.

WR:	Yes.

LS:	I have very little on her, though she’s a name that keeps coming into --

WR:	Well, she was an absolutely remarkable person, very complex, extraordinarily capable, a very good administrator, a very good scholar, fine teacher.  I think she did too many things.  She almost literally wore herself out.  And one of the saddest things of the time that I was chairman, I was chairman after her, from, she was chairperson or chair, as we now say, from ’61 to ’65.  And it, the responsibility just began wearing her down.  And within two years, she had died after she ceased being chair.  And unfortunately, she simply became senile in the last year, pathetic.

LS:	Hmm, how old was she?

WR:	Well, she must’ve been, she must’ve been 68 in 1965.  I’m quite sure she died in 1967 almost, I think, within a day or so after the commencement, when she would have been 70 years old and would’ve retired.  

LS:	Which is still very young for someone . . .

WR:	Oh, yes.  

LS:	Goodness.

WR:	But she had just done what normally eight people would do now.  And it was a tremendous strain on her, and, of course, she was here at a time when it was very difficult being a woman on the faculty at Wisconsin.  She took it with great serenity, at least outwardly, though, I’m sure inside, it was a strain.  But she made a really remarkable career.  I mean, she’s worth a book, for example, as --

LS:	Well, I had suspected as much from what I hear.  I don’t know if there’s anybody written one, but --

WR:	Yeah, and certainly, there ought to be a dissertation on her.

LS:	Uh-huh.

WR:	Perhaps partly in literature, partly in social psychology, the position of a high-powered, capable attractive woman maintaining herself and becoming a central figure in the university, really quite a story.  I have tremendous respect for her, even liked her.  

LS:	Is that unusual?  I mean, was she difficult to get along with?

WR:	Oh, no, no --

LS:	Okay.  You’re just saying that?

00:08:20

WR:	No, I don’t mean that.  She was liked very much.  She was an imperial person.  It was hard to get to know her.  I never felt that I was close to her.  Of course, I knew her only during her last years when she was quite a bit older than I.  But she was a presence, sometimes almost intimidating.  She’d learned to be serene and tough.  No, I simply mean that I did admire her a great deal.  And I think this is probably one reason that a lot of people in the English Department are not bothered by having women colleagues.  
	They’ve had Helen White and Ruth [Coons] Wallerstein, who I never did know.  She died before I got here.  But Madeleine Doran, then people like Edna Thomas, who was not well known, but was a remarkable teacher was devoted herself to freshman English for decades, just first-rate people.  And so the department has always tended to think of women as professors, so to speak, rather than women.  

LS:	Would you say it was field that [words unclear] tended to go into?

WR:	We have our hang-ups, but that’s not one of them

LS:	Uh-huh.  They tended to go off, more often into English in any case than --

WR:	Yes, yeah.  It was like nursing in a way or it’s all right for a woman to be a nurse.  It’s all right for a woman to teach English.

00:10:02

LS:	Uh-huh.  Well, let’s –

WR:	Well, then I was, came here in ’62.  Then in ’65, I became chairman.  It was September 1st, succeeded her.  And my term strictly speaking was an original appointment of one year, and then two one-year appointments, reappointments.

00:10:26

LS:	Do you remember the size of the English Department then?

WR:	I’d have to look at the records to be exact.  And it’s, whatever I say might be accurate or might be a very bad guess.  I doubt if it’d be over 40.  That would be full-time faculty members.  Now it might be 45, say, it might be 38.  But I think it was about that, and we, from roughly 1965 to 1970, we built it up to about 75 full-time members.  So it increased at least 50%, I would say.  

LS:	And that’s what I’d like to talk about is how that happened.

WR:	Yeah, sure.  Well, that happened for all the historical reasons that you know.  The Wisconsin simply reflected in its experience what happened elsewhere.  But there was a tremendous demographic bulge in the number of students, for example, who were going to college in the first place.  The Vietnam War drove people into college.  
	To be blunt, a number of people who really weren’t interested in college came here because otherwise, they might be drafted.  It’s not a large number, but it’s a significant number.  But there was increasing wealth in the country.  People were able to come.  There were funds available, fellowship money, NDEA funds, funds from private institutions, Carnegie.

LS:	These were even going into English.  They weren’t just for the sciences?

WR:	Yes, yeah.  We had something like 800 majors in ‘69 I would guess.  And we now probably have around 300 majors.

LS:	Oh, goodness.  Yeah.

WR:	Some of these were not people who were interested in majors in English.

LS:	Well, I had a --

WR:	It was a way they could, you know, you can always read a book.

LS:	Yeah, I had a statement from somebody I was interviewing the other day who said he wondered why so many aggressive, active people became good, or, yeah, graduate students in English.  Well, you’re talking about majors. 

WR:	Well, these were undergraduate majors.  For graduate students, I would guess, and here, I don’t have the, I simply don’t remember the facts and the figures or where we stood when we came.  When I came here in ’62, or even ’63 when I began to get involved in the department, but, oh, perhaps 300 students, graduate students.  
	That, I may be off, but I do know that in 1969, we had at least 600 graduate students, which is the size of a small college, in this one department.  So it was simply an enormous number of people.  We had 200 teaching assistants in 1968, I believe.  Then it began to drop off slightly.  So I think in 1969, we had 185 teaching assistants.  This would be in addition to the 75 full-time faculty, which would include some visitors each year.

LS:	Yeah.  Is there any, which is cause and which is an effect?  I have gathered that in some departments, they got, let’s see, how did it work out?  They wanted to get graduate students and, therefore, had to make them TAs in order to support them.  And, therefore, had to turn more work over to them, and also they were getting faculty members.  And in order to attract them, they offered them less teaching hours, fewer teaching hours, which then, the TAs were able to take over.  Do you see what --

WR:	There is some accuracy there.  I wouldn’t, I realize you’re quoting someone.  There is some truth in that.  The number, well, it was a fairly complicated set of reasons, and I’m not sure how I can separate cause from effect.  For example, it was assumed widely that the universities were going to have more and more people in them anyway.  Therefore, you had to have more teachers to teach these people.  
	Therefore, you would have to have more full-time faculty as well as teaching assistants.  So as I say, we probably went up 50% in a matter of five years in numbers of faculty.  I’m perhaps being a little bullish on that.  But it was, I think the numbers were roughly within that ballpark.  At the same time, the undergraduate body, the number of admitted freshmen, was growing.  It was literally impossible for the full-time faculty to teach the freshmen English.

LS:	Yeah, but that, you had no control over. 

00:16:06

WR:	And so teaching assistants were employed more and more.  And more money was made available to teach them, since, at that time, sources of money were much more available.  The Legislature was supportive.  It added money each year.  Money was coming from various kinds of research funds, fellowship funds and so on.  And but the effect was that more, there were more undergraduate introductory courses being taught by teaching assistants than by full-time faculty.  The full-time faculty were, and this is true, being drawn more and more into upper division and graduate work, since with, if you go from 300 graduate students to 600, you’ve got to have people to teach the graduate students.  

00:17:14

	Along with this was the assumption of the assistant professor that since he was a valuable commodity, he would go to a place where he could get most attractive kind of teaching.  So he would want to teach within his specialty.  And in order to attract competent people, you’d have to say that, well, you don’t teach freshman English.  

LS:	Yeah, I guess that’s the crucial --

WR:	Yeah, this is one of the things.  Now it’s not simply that the assistant professors wanted to do this, but this was one of the factors in it, a huge growth situation in which each factor acted as a kind of, what do you say?  I don’t, the right physical term’s not reciprocating.  It’s reinforcing.  

LS:	Yeah.

WR:	It becomes an effect, and each effect, thereupon, becomes an even stronger addition to the cause. 

LS:	Transform it.

WR:	Yeah.  

LS:	Well, what, was there any –

00:18:25

WR:	Oh, and by the way, the assumption in the department here has always been that every full-time faculty person with very few exceptions, those, uh, who have primarily an administrative set of duties, for example, but most faculty people must be expected to teach undergraduates and graduates, both.

LS:	Hmm, that’s required, is it?

WR:	Well, it’s simply understood that this is the way to do it.  We feel very strongly that it’s better to have people aware of both rather than teaching solely undergraduates or solely graduate students.

LS:	And this was true then as well as now?

WR:	It became more and more so, that the assistant professors then were beginning to teach graduate students at a much earlier time in their careers than, say, ten years earlier or even five years earlier.  Well, now let me see.  I don’t know the percentages of how many freshmen and sophomore, sophomores were being taught by teaching assistants and how much by faculty.  And obviously, it would be wonderful to have these facts at your command.  I just didn’t have time to prepare them, and didn’t know really what we were going to be talking about.

00:19:53

LS:	Yeah, do you know what was done in the way of supervision or guidance of TAs or how it compared to less stressful times?

WR:	Yeah.  Well, yes, and there’s a wonderful irony of history where the teaching assistants now are beginning to ask for what they’re helped to get rid of earlier—an earlier generation.  When I came here, there was a very carefully articulated program for, particularly for new teaching assistants, which involved not only the regular staff in freshman English, faculty people, Mr. [Edgar] Lacy, Mr. [William] Lenehan, Mrs. [Ednah] Thomas, then later, Mrs. [Joyce] Steward.  Those are the, particularly the people involved here, all of whom had training in the teaching of freshman English, understood it, knew how to deal with it, felt that it was important for the students in the classes to get a more or less equal kind of education.
	And with them, they, along with the faculty, they worked out what I thought was a very good system, which they called the master teaching assistance.  I think this probably developed just before I became chairman and was an arrangement whereby, as I recall, ten experienced teaching assistants acted as partly formal, partly informal guides to new teaching assistants.  It being felt that since they were closer in age, obviously, to their fellows, they might be able to pass on information, which would be accepted more readily from them than from these older people, who are frequently regarded as the old guard.

LS:	Yeah, was this done in weekly meetings or --

WR:	Sometimes they were, I can’t remember the exact schedule.  Probably it was biweekly.

LS:	But it was a formal --

WR:	It was a formal arrangement.  They would meet with their groups, say seven or eight new teaching assistants or five or six, whatever the split would be.  And then there would be meetings of the whole freshman English staff, which would involve the full-time faculty involved plus the master teaching assistant, plus all the teaching assistants, experienced and non-experienced.  It was a very carefully worked out program, which would lead the inexperienced teacher into classes and prepare him or her for what they’re going to need.  

00:22:57	

	I was particularly pleased with this because like most teaching assistants, I was, well, I won’t say I was thrown into a class, but we had a very astute head of freshman English at Harvard, a remarkable man named Ted Morrison, from whom I’ve learned a great deal, and I’ve been living off the intellectual capital ever since in many ways.  He gave a good deal of help.  But essentially, you were thrown into the class, and you sank or swam.  And it could be pretty nerve-wracking.  They had at Harvard then, a number of instructional devices, I mean, ways in which they could pass on information.  
	We’d have theme reading meetings, for example, where Ted Morrison would get together, say, three brand new teaching fellows and three experienced ones.  We’d all of us read several themes, grade them, and make comments on them.  Then we’d read these off and see how close we came as a group and whether we spotted the major defects, whether we were over correcting, for example, whether we were bothering with details rather than central matters.  And this was the system that was involved here, the theme session.  So there was a great deal of guidance for classroom presentation of materials, for theme correction, and so on. 

00:24:35

	Now as the number of teaching assistants grew greater and greater, I suppose, well, a number of things were happening at the same time, of course.  There was the feeling among the teaching assistants that they had an almost unlimited future, that when they got their Ph.D.s they could go out and pick one of six offers.  And in many cases, this was true, a very ebullient kind of feeling.  There was also a feeling, which I’m sure I had as a young person, that I knew at least as much as most of the older people about teaching.  I knew, I’d been in their classes.  I felt I could teach as well as they, and I’m sure that there was a good deal of that feeling.

LS:	Oh, that’s interesting.

WR:	That this is typical --

LS:	Well, I suppose too, yeah --

WR:	-- of young persons, and each generation gets it.  And this is the way each generation is avenged, so to speak, by having been snotty to the previous generation as one, as the child is to the parent.  You have to break away.  So in a sense, they were establishing themselves as professionals, and they felt they could do it earlier than the previous generation of graduate students could do, teaching assistants.  Along with that, there was a feeling among the students themselves that they did not wish this full year of freshmen English.  
	They had been well taught, they felt, in high schools.  They’d been caught up in the speedup of education, the intensified education that occurred after Sputnik in ’57.  And in many cases, these were, they were very well trained.  And, of course, with so many students wanting to get in, one could be more selective.  You couldn’t be so selective in Wisconsin students, but you could be more demanding about the out-of-state students, and you could insist that you pick from the top third rather than the top half or something of this sort.  
	So that the students that we tended to get in those days were better trained probably in the sense that they were the, close to the top-level students.  And since they had, at that time, had more writing in high school, they felt that they didn’t need to go through a course which, for the best of them, wasn’t their kind of recapitulation of what they’d already done.  And again, one could understand their feeling.

LS:	Yeah.

WR:	So the, what was happening, you see, was a whole set of pressures in which freshman English as a requirement went into a stage of attrition.  And I would have to say that the course that we taught when I came here was a relatively conservative course, educationally speaking, began with grammar and rhetoric.  Gradually, the grammar and rhetoric were dropped.  And then it was decided in the ’68, let’s see, February 20-, well somewhere in February or March of ’68, it was agreed that the department would no longer require two semesters of freshman English, but simply one semester.  

LS:	This was agreed in the English Department?

WR:	In the English Department, yeah, on the grounds that the students were improving, and there was a considerable score’s evidence to this effect, that we were getting better students.  They were better trained.  They could write better.  There were still plenty of professors who said, my goodness, look how they write at their senior level.  But the fact is that they seemed to be more articulate and more articulate in writing as well as oral.

LS:	I gather also they didn’t get so, all that much more out of the second semester of English.

WR:	That’s right.  The first semester was perceived as just a review of stuff that they either knew or were not interested in at all.  And it’s hard to say which was which there.  Then, but there was a great pressure, of course, to drop requirements in general at the time.  You recall there was a pressure against language.  Required languages were being threatened.  And the math requirement was being threatened.  This was --

LS:	This was a push from students mostly.

WR:	This was a push from students, and it represents a tendency in the ‘60s, I suppose, toward the older people would’ve called permissivism, and which was simply a feeling that they would like to guide their own lives more.
	And one would have to admit that some of the requirements were outmoded.  I don’t think a course in writing is outmoded.  I have my, I think it can be taught better than the method that we were using.  But at any rate, it was a push from the students to get rid of the requirements.  And first one semester of freshman English went, and then in, when was it, 1969, the fall of ’69, the second semester was wiped out.

LS:	Oh, I thought that happened after 1970.  Do you mean all of freshman English was dropped before --

WR:	That’s right.

00:30:33

LS:	What happened to the TAs that were teaching these courses?

WR:	Yeah, well, we worked out a course called English 200.  What was it?  The, originally, the freshman was to take, let’s say in 1962, when I came, a six-credit hours of freshman English were required.  So it was English 101, which is the first half of freshman English, which is primarily rhetoric-oriented, and 102, which is primarily literature-oriented, with the writing on the literature.  Then the fall semester was the first one to be dropped, 101.  And it was, 101 was changed to be a course only for students who had real difficulty with the language.  
	And this was a completely separate development.  102 was capped until the fall of ’69.  Then the department voted, I’m quite sure of that.  Let me check this to make sure.  Yes, in the fall, November 18th, 1969, it was voted overwhelmingly by the Department of English to drop 102.

LS:	So this had nothing to do with TAs at all then did it really?

WR:	Well, it did in a way, yes.  

LS:	Oh, what did it have to do with them?  

WR:	Okay.  

LS:	I said --

WR:	I’m trying to tell you everything, but there’s so much to tell, that I may be confusing you.  I may be even confusing myself.

LS:	I was puzzled that you checked --

WR:	I’m sure the tape recorder is puzzled at this point.

LS:	[Words unclear].  

00:32:33

WR:	Well, on, part of the thrust for change, for dropping freshman English, first one semester, and then the second semester, was the feeling of the students themselves.  And we put it in this document, I forget, it was tactfully placed, tactfully stated, that, well, that this was all, one semester was all that the students, it wasn’t would accept.  It was much more tactful than that.  But in essence, it was, it was admitting that there was a tremendous irritation about the somewhat old-fashioned first semester.  And then they – the attack went on the second semester.  

00:33:35

	We then worked out a course called English 200, which specifically was designed to focus on literature with some writing included.  But it was not a writing course with some literature included, if you can see the distinction.  Okay.  The emphasis shifted very sharply.  English 200 was to be taught primarily almost in exclusively by teaching assistants, just as mostly 102, the composition, second semester of composition had been taught primarily by teaching assistants.  There were a few full-time faculty involved.  But it couldn’t have been more than, say, 5% of the total number of sections.  

LS:	Much more fun for the TAs I’m sure, English 200.

WR:	Oh, yes, yeah, yeah.  So it was taught, they were taught in separate sections of, I suppose, anywhere from 15 to 25 students, depending on how many were, stayed in a particular section.

00:34:51

	But it was felt very strongly by the departmental committee, or let’s say, a majority of the departmental committee, though there were a number of people who dissented, from the full-time faculty, that there should be some kind of overall control, for two reasons.  First, the faculty was charged legally, with supervising the education of the students.  And we’d have looked like fools and scoundrels if we hadn’t recognized that obligation.  So in the first place, the faculty then had to exercise ultimate control over these courses and be responsible for them, which meant that we had to take the complaints as well as them, as the occasional compliment for this new coursing, this 200 as well as the previous course.  
	But also, we felt that in many cases, I would guess perhaps as many as 30% to 40% of the teaching assistants were not teaching the course as it was intended to be taught, first 102 and then English 200.  Now I have to make a flexible estimate there because we didn’t want to do a gumshoe and shotgun method of checking up on each course, but we could tell fairly well that a considerable number of the teaching assistants felt that is was much more important to liberate the students from old-fashioned ideas, to argue against the Vietnam War in the classroom, than to proceed with literature and writing as such.  
	I think if I had been a graduate student in the 1960s, I would have been very much torn about this.  And I’m not suggesting that these were evil people or anything of this sort.  These were people who themselves were under the gun, so to speak, who might themselves have to be in Vietnam, which certainly the majority of the faculty was very much opposed to.  We felt the Vietnam War was unwise from any standpoint and immoral from any standpoint.  
	So there was a great deal of sympathy in general with the graduate student.  But we felt -- or the teaching assistant, but we felt that if a course had been advertised as a course in literature and writing, then one had a kind of quasi contractual obligation to teach such a course.  

LS:	Now the same mechanism hadn’t been set up for 200 as existed for the earlier course for training the TAs, did it?

WR:	No, because by this time, the teaching assistants had begun very much to resent this kind of teaching guidance.

00:38:13

LS:	What, do you remember when they began to resent that, or --

WR:	Oh, I would say in the mid --

LS:	Was it during your chairmanship?

WR:	Oh, yes, certainly, they’d begun to resent it by then.  It was within my chairmanship I guess, probably started earlier in a small way and became very much outspoken by the time Mr. Heninger, Tim Heninger had succeed me in the fall of ’68.  By this time, the teaching assistants simply would not attend staff meetings.  Well, I will take that back.  A very large percentage of them would not simply --

LS:	Do you know whether, were you, was this happening more to the English Department than to other departments, that they were not teaching the course material?  I haven’t picked that up --

WR:	I don’t, I don’t know.  I don’t have the information on that.  I would guess that history and sociology might have had as much difficulty --

LS:	But at the time, you weren’t aware of, you didn’t talk about it much with others?

WR:	I couldn’t -- we may have talked about it informally.  I just don’t recall.  I know that history had a good deal of difficulty in general.  Whether this was one of the problems or not, I just don’t know. 

LS:	But it was here?

WR:	But it certainly was a very strong resentment by the teaching assistants, I would guess, well, at least, a very close to a majority if not a majority of teaching assistants who thought that this was an imposition on them.  They were professionals.  They were old enough to take care of themselves.  They didn’t want to be bothered with it.  They could teach their own way.  

LS:	Uh-huh.  I --

WR:	Do you want to check the tape?

LS:	No, it’s all right.  I just, I had to --

WR:	Am I talking too much?  Am I taking up valuable tape?

LS:	I just, I’m, I have to keep an eye on it, so it doesn’t cut out.

WR:	Sure.

00:40:27

LS:	I had two questions.  One was did English 200 take up enough of the TAs who had been teaching the earlier course, or --

WR:	Yes, it did because by this time, the teaching assistants were teaching very frequently the first semester.  They would teach 102, freshman composition, and were acting literally as assistants in lecture courses.  When I first came here, a lot of assistant professors were acting as assistants in lecture courses.

LS:	You mean, they were taking the sections, the quiz sections and the exams --

WR:	So, yeah, they would take the, uh, I guess the notion of the assistant professor was taken literally.  And when I came, a very large number of the courses were staffed by --

LS:	Oh, that seems, that late?

WR:	Oh, yeah, and this, as a matter of fact, was one of the difficulties in recruiting when I first began in ’65 because no new graduate student wished to come in and be an assistant to anyone else.  They wanted to start teaching themselves.  First undergraduates and then very rapidly graduate students, so they too wanted to control their own classrooms.  

LS:	But there had been TAs before, but what had they been doing?

WR:	Well, they’d been teaching the full -

LS:	Oh, just the comp, the freshman English?

WR:	Yeah, most of the freshman English, with some exceptions.

LS:	I see.  

00:41:59

WR:	So that the shift came, of course, when the assistant professors ceased to do this.  And teaching assistants began to assist in the big lecture courses.  

LS:	I see.  So there were two groups of, well, two kinds of jobs.  One was teaching the freshmen, and one was teaching, assisting the lecture courses.

WR:	Yeah, and the teaching assistant load was rationed out between these two obligations.

LS:	Was there, was there a status attached to it as to what you did?

WR:	Oh, very much.

LS:	Which was better?

WR:	Very much, it was when we were down to one section of freshman English, and this was something else.  No one wished to teach composition.  

LS:	They preferred being an assistant --

WR:	They preferred to be in assisting in a literature course because this was their primary interest.  And this is --

LS:	Was it less work or more work would you say?

WR:	Well, I think it was less work to teach writing, and a composition course is very demanding.  You have constant theme work coming in, correction of themes as well as preparation for classes as well as special conferences on individual themes or groups of themes.  So it was very demanding.  I know.  I’ve been through this system, and it can absorb all the time that you can give it or will give it.  Teaching literature is more exciting.  
	There were not so many themes coming in.  The, when the papers came in, they were more interesting.  They were on literary subjects if you like that sort of thing.  And you felt much more as though you were a kind of junior assistant professor.  So again, I don’t blame them.  But there was a real status feeling about that.

LS:	What, and the first-year graduate students got the composition, and the second-year --

WR:	Well, we had no, anyone who taught had to have a master’s.  This was a requirement.  We had no persons who were not, who did not have the master’s degree.  

LS:	But I mean, the first year --

WR:	The first year on staff, as we’d say, the new teaching assistant usually was assigned to the teaching of composition.  And, I suppose, they began to learn very quickly that is they wanted status, they ought to move into the literature courses.  

LS:	Yeah.

00:44:37

WR:	But at any rate, when we got to English 200, this was primarily a literature course with some writing attached.  And what then happened was that the teaching assistants, who by this time had organized themselves into the teaching assistant association, wanted to control English 200 on the ground that they taught the course, and therefore, they should be the ones who decide what would be taught.

LS:	You don’t happen to remember when this was -- I was just wondering if perhaps the English Department was the first place where this, where the educational planning issue began to take shape.

WR:	Uh, yeah, the, the real outbreak of this was in the early fall of 1969.  

LS:	Hmm, so that’s, that’s before the union, before –

00:45:28

WR:	This I can document because at that time, this was for a, well, it’s dated October 20th.  It’s a long communication from [Simeon] Heninger detailing a meeting, at which the teaching assistants had presented essentially to him a demarche or demand that the, which they had previously voted on in their own meeting, that the teaching assistants control the course.  
	If I remember correctly, there’d be a guiding committee of seven teaching assistants with one faculty advisor, who’d conveniently be outvoted, I would assume.  I’m not even sure that that person would be allowed to vote.  But they would then prescribe what was to be taught in the course or prescribe what, if there was one could teach any.

LS:	Yeah, and what, and what happened to this demand?

WR:	Well, the department eventually refused to accept it.

LS:	Uh-huh.

WR:	And again, on the grounds, the two grounds that, first, we were legally required to be in ultimate charge of every course.  This was our -- I would assume.  I’m not even sure that that person would be allowed to vote.  But they would then prescribe what was to be taught in the course or prescribe what, if there was one could teach any.

LS:	Yeah, and what, and what happened to this demand?

WR:	Well, the department eventually refused to accept it.

LS:	Uh-huh.

WR:	And again, on the grounds, the two grounds that, first, we were legally required to be in ultimate charge of every course.  This was our constitutional duty, our laws and regulations governing the University of Wisconsin’s duty.  And second, we felt that many of the students were not getting as good an education as they should.

LS:	Did any students complain?

WR:	Yeah.  We would get complaints.  I wouldn’t be able to say how many.  But there was, there were complaints that their teaching assistant would talk only about the Vietnam War or poverty or something like that, which are admirable subjects to talk about, but were not what the course was in the, uh, in the catalog said it was to be about.  And we felt that, again, that there ought to be some kind of overall agreement as to what the course should be, and that granting that people taught in different ways, that within that, there ought to be a comparable amount of work, comparable amount of reading, comparable kinds of reading, comparable amounts of writing.  
	That otherwise, if a person said, well, the requirement is six papers, but all you have to do for me is one, this meant that he or she had a much easier job of teaching, but also shortchanged the students themselves.  It made it very awkward for those who were continuing to teach by the so-called guideline.  We recognized that there had to be guidelines, or we assumed there should be guidelines, and, in fact, acted that way.  And we felt that the guidelines should provide a kind of core of agreement as to how, what we should teach.  

LS:	Okay.  So when did you start, when did you present your side of the students to the grad students? In . . .

WR:	Well, essentially, the big confrontation occurred in the fall of ’69, when --

LS:	They presented their demands, you said, when, in October, and then you answered them--

00:50:03

WR:	Yeah, it was roughly October, and our meeting must’ve been late October, early November, that we simply said no --

LS:	So you said, said no way?  Yeah.

WR:	-- that we will not accept this.  And this was perceived by a large number of teaching assistants as an infringement on their freedom to teach.

LS:	And what did they do about it?

WR:	Uh, well, this, I suspect, had a good deal to do as far as the English Department went, with support later for the strike, that this was, the strike was perceived in part as a way of achieving freedom to teach.

LS:	So in the mean time, they did, they did give in and follow your plans, did they?

WR:	Uh, it’s a question I can’t answer because no one has the facts.  

LS:	You could, didn’t really feel you could go and visit classes?

WR:	No, we felt that, uh, and indeed this had been one of the reasons why we had dropped 102, finally, the second semester.  The feeling that the teaching, that a considerable number of the teaching assistants, and I always, putting it this way, will make a very large number of teaching assistants look bad from our standpoint.  A very large number of them continued to teach in, within the guidelines for whichever course they were doing.  And on the whole, I would say that a very large percentage of teaching assistants spend more time than they’re required to do.  I’m convinced they, they teach now far more than they’re supposed to under contract.  

LS:	Really?

WR:	Uh, because as individuals, they feel that they have an obligation to their students.  I think a very large percentage are, well, most teaching assistants always were highly conscientious people.  Maybe 10% were no good, real bums.  But --

LS:	How did they get appointed?

WR:	That’s not too bad.  Uh, well, they got appointed, sometimes you didn’t know they were bums.  Second, you had to go further down in the barrel in order to get people to fill the number of sections --

LS:	Oh, I see.

WR:	-- that had to be taught, so that you were no longer able to skim off the absolute cream.  You had to take some of the top milk.

00:53:03

LS:	I see.  But you must’ve had students here on fellowships too.  You, was there, were there enough fellowships so that you, the best students would take those?

WR:	I suppose, yes, we had NDA money.  There was more fellowship money in general available.  Though many people very sensibly wanted a teaching assistantship to, so they could have it on their records as having taught.  And it was very wise because it gave them a very good training subsequently.  And we did always try to get the very best people.  And occasionally, you would get, get some unfortunate ones.  If I could --

LS:	Yeah.

WR:	Could I backtrack here for a moment?

LS:	Yes.

00:53:51

WR:	Um, if I seem less than enthusiastic about the, this development of the TAA, my own experience goes back to a traumatic one, or my own attitude goes back to a traumatic experience in May of 1968.  I checked the dates on this one.  This was at a time when the TAA had been formed, but had not been formally recognized.  We had on staff a person who need not be named, but I did find out his name.  I’ve completely forgotten it.  It was a man who was, had been selected, whose academic record was reasonably good and as far as we could tell, probably could teach adequately, but who turned out, unfortunately, to be almost totally incompetent in the classroom.
	So incompetent that 19 of his students, which must’ve been pretty close to most of them, signed a very good-tempered, very polite request, petition, that this person be given special training, not that they be transferred to another section, but that he simply be helped.  It was a terribly mild request.  And all of the people on the freshman English staff, the full-time faculty, put in a tremendous amount of time just pulling this person through the semester, the first semester.  And then in the second semester, we agreed that he should not be reappointed for the following year.  
	Since he’d been such a terrible disaster and had just barely managed to squeak through the first semester, this seemed to be, to us, the most terrible way to short-change students in a Wisconsin course.  So we did not extend him a, extend his appointment another year, whereupon, this appointment was grieved, as they say.  Now technically, the TAA couldn’t, had no legal status as the group that could bring his grievance to us.  But I agreed since I was chairman at the time, to talk with him through our regular grievance procedure, which we did have.  And we checked with Abner Brodie in the Law School.  I described the situation, and he said, you’re in the clear legally.  You have a --

LS:	Is this the committee you were, the --

WR:	No, it’s something else.

LS:	Oh, okay.

WR:	No, I had got to know him.

LS:	I’ll ask you about that later.

WR:	And so I knew that he was a clear-headed, liberal, honest, intelligent, well-informed lawyer or teacher of law.  And asked if, what our legal obligations were, and he said, if you have a reasonable grievance procedure, you’re in the clear.  Well, we had a reasonable grievance procedure, we thought.  And he agreed.  But this is not what the TAA wanted.  In essence, the person went to the associate chairman, Mr. Lacey, then went to me if he was not satisfied, then went to the entire department.  And this could be grieved further up if necessary, though usually the departmental decision was final.
	Now I did meet with a, with three members of the Teaching Assistant Association.  I put in writing that this must be informal, that I would talk about our appointment procedures, I did not, would not discuss an individual case, feeling that very probably this was being used as a device by which the Teaching Assistant Association could claim that they had been de facto recognized by a department.  I was told afterwards by a member of the Teaching Assistant Association, whom I trust, a very honest, bright radical, that indeed I had been right.  This was precisely what was being schemed.

LS:	Yeah, hmm.

WR:	Uh, I don’t like to play games.  I like to have things out on the table.  If that’s what they wanted, they should’ve said so.  And I found it a pretty repulsive situation, frankly.  I’d have had much more sympathy with them if they’d come right out and said, this is what we want.  And I didn’t mind their recognition.  I felt that they had to be recognized because, obviously, they had the vote.  And otherwise we looked like union busters or something of this sort.  
	But I don’t like conniving.  So it frankly gave me a very bad view of the Teaching Assistant Association.  And I guess I’d have to say that I’ve not recovered from that traumatic experience.  I still have a very dim view of them.

LS:	Was the actual meeting of one, a hostile one, or was it --

WR:	It was an extremely hostile meeting.

LS:	Oh, it was?

WR:	Yeah.  

LS:	Was it, was [Bob] Muehlenkamp already a, one of, a leader?  Was he involved in the meeting?

WR:	He was not at the meeting.  These were people outside, very carefully selected being outside the department.

LS:	Oh, do you remember who they were?

WR:	No, I literally don’t.

LS:	Oh.

WR:	But it was a pretty unpleasant confrontation.

LS:	What was the decision finally, or didn’t --

WR:	Well --

LS:	There wasn’t, I mean, you had decisions to --

WR:	Yeah, there was, the decision that we’d made held on this particular person.  And, frankly, my fear was that if we did go to grievance on this, A, it would constitute a de facto recognition, which at this point, the University was not prepared to give.  And I did not wish to put the university as a whole in a kind of legal jeopardy by my act.  
	And furthermore, I felt very strongly that if this kind of incompetent teacher was grieving his status, then we might very well be faced with a situation where a teaching assistant in effect could be given tenure as soon as he was appointed, that you couldn’t get rid of an incompetent, or that you could get rid of him only through such a long and unpleasant grievance procedure that you wouldn’t go into it.  And this person was just hopeless.

LS:	So you got rid of him as a TA and as a graduate student, or just as a TA?  What happened to him?

WR:	I think he left.

LS:	Oh.

WR:	We simply did not continue the following year, finish that year of his appointment.  

LS:	That’s interesting; I . . .

WR:	So I suppose from the TAA standpoint, this is fair game to do.  When you’re trying to build an organization, I suppose perhaps one tends to shade certain moral niceties.  But I’d rather build my own obligation, I mean, my own organization on an open statement of what I’m after and have it out in the open.

LS:	I guess this sort of thing happened in many places where people who would recognize the legitimacy of the organization would be so turned off by the tactics.

WR:	Yeah, and indeed a lot of the teaching assistants were turned off.  Many of them felt that they were being caught between the faculty and the TAA.  Or even before the TAA appeared, some of them were perhaps politically or socially rather conservative.  Many of them were, just felt that this was not professional conduct. 

LS:	Did you, did you get to know some of them yourself?

WR:	Uh-huh.

01:02:32

LS:	Did you have TAs yourself?

WR:	Oh, yeah, yeah, and I got to know them personally through, you’d have them in your courses, so that --

LS:	Yes, that’s right.

WR:	I had Bob Muehlenkamp in a course.  

LS:	What was he like as a student?

WR:	Well, he was, uh, fairly bright, but not one of the best.  He was rather truculent, I have to say.  He was never truculent toward me, personally, not at any time.  I felt that we could always talk about anything.  But he would be truculent toward another student who wouldn’t argue that, wouldn’t admit that the Vietnam War was bad, for example, if this question came up.

LS:	He’s, it was . . .

WR:	Or if, I remember he wrote upon, wrote on Dos Passos.  It’s not the best paper I’ve received, not the worst.  I think Muehlenkamp is a very gifted guy.  I think he was superb as a union leader.

LS:	Yes, I gathered that.  I’ve --

WR:	I have a great deal of respect for him.  I didn’t agree with him, but I think he handled himself well.  He was, if you’re a union leader, you have to be tough.  And he was tough.  You have to be able to inspire others, and he was able to inspire others.  So I had, as I say, much respect for him.  I don’t think all the people who came after him were as gifted as he.  

LS:	In the English -- or you mean as TAA leaders.

WR:	Well, in general, in the organization. 

01:04:14

LS:	Were you teaching a course in the Radical Novel then?

WR:	Uh-huh.

LS:	I got your book out, just out of curiosity.  I imagine this would’ve attracted a great many of the radicals.

WR:	Yeah, it did.  Yeah.  And I found that many of them were capable, and many of them were not.  I felt a great deal of sympathy many time with their attitudes.  I felt enormous sympathy with their concern over the war, the Vietnam War, which I very early protested against in a decorous way.  

01:04:57

	I felt that probably a better way to bring about the end of the war was not to protest on college campuses, but to go to Washington and protest there or to try to make some kind of connection with working-class people who were the ones who were suffering.  It was the working-class kids and the blacks who were sent to Vietnam.  And the middle-class young person, because he had money or was bright enough to get a fellowship, could come to the University and escape –

01:05:50	[end tape 1; begin tape 2]

LS:	If, finish off what you were saying about the Army Math Research Center.  You just --

WR:	Oh, okay.  I felt myself that the Army Math Research Center should not exist on the campus.  At the same time, I did not want to get into a position where that particular feeling was being manipulated for other reasons.  I was opposed to the Vietnam War, and, in fact, I meant to look up when I signed my first petition against the war.  And I think it was somewhere around March 1965.  

LS:	Good for you.  You were one of the early ones.

WR:	The only petition available, I realized after the names came out, were filled mostly by ex‑Communist Party people or the old party hacks, who still kept on.  It was hilarious since I wasn’t a party member.  But it was the only thing available at the time.  And I felt, I’m getting a little off the subject, but I felt very much concerned about the young man who essentially had three choices if he was opposed to the war.  And you could go presumably and endure.  Or he could become a conscientious objector and go to jail, which if you don’t have to do it, may sound terribly romantic, but 24 hours in a jail ought to cure one of thinking that this would be an easy solution.  Or one could go to Canada.  
	And this was three of the lousiest choices, it seemed to me a young man ever had to face.  So I was very sympathetic with them.  On the other hand, I was not sympathetic with many of the methods used to oppose the war, and it did seem to me that many of them were, in fact, counterproductive.  And I just felt that one could stop the war faster by other methods.  And indeed, I think one could make a case that Nixon was able to prolong the war himself partly by making working-class people and middle-class people think of student uprisings, as they were called on the campus as an awfully good reason for believing that the war was okay.  

LS:	Yes, I know we, many of us felt that way.

WR:	And I just thought that this was bad tactics.  And I guess also, I’m a middle-class liberal, who doesn’t like to go out and picket and throw teargas bombs and so on.  So –

LS:	I raised the question because it was one of the things the TAA was against was the whole use of the University as a, there’s a “multiversity,” sort of a  --

WR:	I would agree with them on that, but it seemed to me that much more was at stake than the Army Math Center, that this was simply, you made this demand, then you make another demand, then you make another demand.  I didn’t want to do the TAA’s work for them.  I was perfectly willing to argue against the Math Center informally or tell Ed Young that I thought the Math Center ought to go, which would be the only way that I could, I felt I could properly bring influence.
	But now to get back to relationships, is that where you’d like to go between teaching assistants and faculty?

LS:	Yes.  All right.  I had another question there, which has now slipped my mind, but I really do want to talk --

WR:	Well, the English Department was very much perturbed about the Army Math Center, about all kinds of things.  

01:10:30

LS:	Yeah.  I guess you had said something.  I just want to ask you, do you think the TAA, the TAs were overworked or in the, or misused in the English Department?  Would you say that because --

WR:	Not in the English Department.

LS:	Because they evidently were in some departments.

WR:	Yeah.

LS:	Okay.  I just --

WR:	Uh, I think it was, they earned their pay, for the most part.  And I don’t think most of them, I don’t think even the activists were lazy.  They were active.  But I think most teaching assistants were working hard and as I say, earning their pay.

LS:	But they didn’t have too big classes or --

WR:	I do not think that their classes were too big.  They were paid somewhat more than in other departments on the grounds that there is so much work involved in teaching freshman composition or even teaching a course in which there’s considerable writing as in English 200, that this should be recognized.

LS:	The dean’s office authorized this?

WR:	And the dean’s office authorized it.  We always did give a slightly higher rate of pay, so that, and I felt that though perhaps the department was paternalistic in and 18th century sense toward the teaching assistants, that nevertheless, a very large number of faculty people were concerned about the teaching assistants, and would go to their defense.  
	For example, just recently, a couple of years ago, when the graduate school wanted to have the teaching assistant take not six hours but nine hours of work plus teaching half time, we argued that this was, many of us from the English Department went to this meeting, argued that this was simply an imposition.  This was slave driving.  We couldn’t get good teaching, uh, for the student, the undergraduate student, and that it was an imposition on the graduate student.  We lost on that particular issue, but we made such a noise, that we got a special dispensation from the graduate school.

LS:	For the English?

WR:	For the English Department so that they continued at the course load and teaching load as before.  I know why the graduate school wanted this, and it was a perfectly honorable thing that they wanted.  We wanted to make sure that we got the special dispensation.  So we argued, hoping that we would get that, and we did.  So that in many ways, the department has gone to bat for the assistant, for the teaching assistants.  This may not be recognized for the teaching assistant.  And, of course, it assumes a paternalistic relationship.

LS:	Which they don’t welcome.

WR:	That you represent the teaching assistant rather than the teaching assistant on his or her own.  So there’s a difference in philosophy there.  

01:13:43

LS:	So we were just talking about the relationships between faculty and TA before the strike, whether how close they were, whether there were chance social mingling at all.  

WR:	Well, one of the problems as the department grew was simply sheer numbers.  It was very difficult to know how many students you were responsible for.  If there are 600 graduate students out there, you can’t be responsible for 600.  You can’t even get to know them.  And there was a, another kind of numbers and expansion problem that one brought into the department, or I had to do this mostly because I was in the period when we were expanding so rapidly.  
	I had to bring in large numbers of new assistant professors.  I remember in the fall of ’66, I hired 13, I believe it was 13 assistant professors, or it may have been 11 plus 2 tenured persons, so the assistant professor would be non-tenured.  It was at least 11.  I think it may have been 13, but this is an enormous number of people. 

LS:	And just getting to know them was a problem.

WR:	So what happened, the sociologist would describe as an acculturation problem.  We had so many new people coming in, that we simply couldn’t acculturate.  From the assistant professor’s standpoint, we couldn’t impose upon them our outmoded ideas.  That’s the way they might define it.  I’m being a little ironic.

LS:	In other words, you ought to know them or what?

WR:	Or as, well, they would assume that many of our ideas were old-fashioned, and that they knew better.  But they were being constrained to act in these old-fashioned ideas.  So they resented this.  This was whole source of resentment quite in addition to the Teaching Assistant’s Association, resentment.

LS:	Oh, you had a bit, a split between the --

WR:	Yeah, this was the point I wanted to get to.  It became very serious in the department, and certainly, there was, it did develop a split roughly along old/young lines.  The associate professors in between might go either way.  And, of course, there were a few full professors who felt very strong in sympathy with the assistant professors.  There were a few assistant professors who identified with the older people.  So it wasn’t an absolute cleavage.  But roughly, it was an old/young cleavage.  
	And having lived through a similar experience at Northwestern, and seeing the damage that this had done, I spent a great deal of time trying to bring these two factions together, and I would say, wasted a great deal of time.  I wasted most of my leave year trying to bring factions together when I should’ve been selfish and just said, the hell with you people.  I’m going to go off and write my book.  

LS:	What was the particular issue?

WR:	Well, a variety of issues, it was partly how to treat the teaching assistants.  The younger people tended to identify with the teaching assistants since they were very close to being, I mean, they were just one year away from having been teaching assistants themselves in many instances.  Sometimes, it was a lifestyle matter.  The young person let his hair grow, wore sport shirts when he lectured rather than the collar and tie of the older person.  Sometimes it was a feeling that one would prefer to, one would more readily accept unionization if one were a young person.  
	Sometimes it was a feeling that the older persons were too gentile in their protest against the war, that it should be more dynamic, that we should all be out on picket lines, that we should not teach.  In fact, I remember one motion in the English Department, which was to the effect that at the time of the, must’ve been the TAA strike, yes, in ’70, that, uh, for the rest of the spring semester, the English Department refused to teach except to try to point out the error of the ways of the University and the government and so on.  Well, this seemed to be preposterous.  But the motion was made.  I don’t think it passed.  
	But there was, some of these were the sources of -- and then, of course, there was a feeling, and again, I recognize this from my own [word unclear] that the older person is really very old.  A person in his 40’s is frequently perceived as in the 50’s, a terribly old person.

LS:	Yeah, I heard that too.

WR:	The old guard, antiques, who are out of it, sexually inactive, incompetent, impotent, uh, look at all those briefcases, those tight neckties.  They can’t relax.  They’re not with it, and so on.  And conversely, the older person tends to look upon the young person as a kind of undisciplined pup.  Look at all that long hair.  Look at the fact that they sit on their desks when they lecture and so on.

LS:	Were you sort of in the middle of this?  Did you feel that -- 

WR:	Well, I tended to be a bit in the middle, although, I’m certain I was perceived as well over on the side of the old guard.

LS:	But, I mean, in your sympathies.

WR:	In my sympathies, I suppose that, functionally, I was with the old guard because I felt the university must continue, that it must not be shut down during the strike.

LS:	So these differences were coming to the floor over issues such as the Dow demonstration and the strike, and those --

WR:	Yeah.  Yeah.

LS:	It was when something like that came up that --

WR:	Uh-huh.

LS:	I see.

01:20:27

WR:	Would be, that certainly was a powerful split in the department.  And again, it was the younger people who tended to be most violently opposed to the administration, for example.  

LS:	During the strike, it’s position?

WR:	Yeah.  And most, most in sympathy with the Teaching Assistant Association -- with exceptions, but this, our, I think this was probably one of the reasons that the English Department was in such a turmoil, that literally, we had, we had a lot of members of the department, I’d guess at least 40% to 50% who were at least 40, who were definitely involved in the strike, perhaps more, in the strike itself.  And there was a great deal of sympathy for them among the younger people.  And the question you wanted to ask --

LS:	You say 40 teach, how, what was the figure?

WR:	Forty percent.

LS:	Forty percent of the teaching assistants involved in the strike?

WR:	In the English Department.

LS: Hmm.  Is that all?

WR:	Well, there may have been more.  I say 40% to 50%, and it may be when the strike actually occurred, there were more.  But I’m going here from the number of people who wished to be continued on the staff payroll.  You recall that this was, uh, required by the dean’s office, that teaching assistants certify whether they wished to be paid during the month in which the strike was to occur.

LS:	How was that handled?  Do you remember when --

WR:	It was handled through the individual departments, and –

01:22:17

LS:	I mean, how the English Department, whether they, somebody actually checked up on who was teaching or would they conveniently overlook it, or --

WR:	No, the, uh, this particular matter was done by the chairman, Mr. Heninger, who simply sent out a broadside mimeographed request for explanation to the, all of the teaching assistants in a request.  They certified whether they wish to be paid or not.  And the assumption was that, uh, if they did not wish to be paid, they certainly were going out on strike or were ready to.  Those who, some of those who certified they would like to be paid, or they intended to be paid, probably would go on strike.  

LS:	Did anybody check up on them?

WR:	Uh, I can’t remember.  

LS:	Was Heninger one of the younger --

WR:	He was, unfortunately, caught right in the middle.  He was a, and is, a remarkably good teacher, a remarkably good scholar, and extraordinarily honest person, who had very strong commitments to academic freedom, to the profession, who also had a strong commitment toward youth, so to speak.  And, of course, it was his job as chairman to try to keep the two factions together, or probably six factions, but the two main groups together as much as he could.  But he actually had a kind of emotional commitment on either way.  
	He was very much opposed to the war.  He was, he felt that people should be treated decently.  He was, though he came from Louisiana, or perhaps I should say, he came from Louisiana, and he was very strongly in favor of black students, very liberated in that sense.  And so that he had obligations, emotional obligations on both sides, and it was a hideously trying time for him, very destructive.  He barely survived emotionally.  He did, but he quit at the end of two years.  It just almost burned him out.

LS:	What was the session where the TAs came in and took over a meeting?  This apparently was ‑‑

WR:	Well, this must’ve been --

LS:	-- a turning point.

WR:	I think it was this meeting early in 1969.

LS:	Oh, I see, that early.  

WR:	Yeah. 

LS:	They actually took over the meeting.

WR:	I think that is correct.  I’d have to check to make absolutely sure.  But it’s, if I’m, if I’m correct on this, it happened about this time.  

LS:	It was at this point, apparently, that he lost his sympathies with the TAs.

WR:	Oh, I would, yeah, I would say so because they were really very unjust to him.  Some of them were dishonest in their charges against him.  And others were simply stirred up because it was a very unpleasant time.  It was very hard to be young in those days.  It was easier to be middle aged.  You saw your function a little more easily.  For the young person, assistant professor, you were torn between wanting to strike a blow for justice and freedom and a feeling that if you saw justice and freedom as staying with the department, so to speak, then you were a copout, and Uncle Tom, a conservative, a war monger.  It must’ve been very difficult.

01:26:23

LS:	Yeah.  Did it happen in this department as in others, I gather, that the young liberals, some of the young liberal faculty, were the ones that the TAs were most bitter against because they didn’t actually come out and support the TAs?

WR:	Uh, it may have been in certain cases, though I would guess most of our more extreme assistant professors stuck buy the TAA.

LS:	They really did?

WR:	Yeah.

LS:	They, for instance, they improved the educational planning that demanded --

WR:	They would’ve argued in favor of letting the teaching assistant teach anything he wants to.

LS:	Huh, oh, I see.

WR:	Though, again, there were a number of young people who did not agree with this.

LS:	Yeah.

WR:	And a majority of the department were against absolute freedom of the teaching assistant in class.

LS:	But there were some who actually were willing to --

WR:	Yeah, we had some who were, I guess I would say, saw their duty as radicalizing the University, and as their first job, and the second job, teaching in the, teaching substantive courses.  Several of them, in effect, quit teaching what they were supposed to be teaching and primarily spent their time in activist activities.

LS:	Which are they, and are any of them still here?

WR:	Well, I suppose the most famous of them was Frank Battaglia.

LS:	Oh, yes.

WR:	Although, there were others.

LS:	He’s not still here, is he?

WR:	No.  Oh, that was a ghastly business, not continuing Frank Battaglia.  David Siff was a very articulate, quite brilliant person, who led the fight against the Army Maths, or was one of the leaders of the fight against the Army Maths Center.  I had voted in the department, along with a number of other people, to continue him for another year on the grounds that we try to get to him and if he was not teaching in his classes what he was supposed to be teaching, point out to him that he at least should be doing this, whatever he did on his own time, which was up to him.  We were outvoted on this.

LS:	When did this come up?

WR:	Oh, goodness.

LS:	After the strike?

WR:	I can’t remember.  I could find out the exact date.

LS:	Well, it doesn’t matter, but it was after the strike, wasn’t it?  I mean, he was --

WR:	I’m not sure.

LS:	Well, that sort of thing, you know, is in The Cardinal I’m sure, and it’s --

WR:	Yeah, well, I’ve got a folder on that.

LS:	Are any of them still here who, that were particularly radical?

WR:	No, most of them have left, like Battaglia, simply, A, did not continue to teach as effectively as they should have, and, B, simply dropped their scholarship completely.  And we argued that one should teach, and one should perform scholarship both.

01:30:00

LS:	What happened to him, do you know?

WR:	He went to Staten Island Community College, and I’ve seen him since, and we’ve maintained a reasonably pleasant relationship, though I had to be the one who led the, well, simply presented the arguments at a mass meeting for his not being continued, one of the less pleasant things I’ve had to do.  Technically an individual may request an open meeting when his case is being brought up.  And I gather that Frank had urged all of his students to come because there were about 300 or 400 students jammed into the big lecture room opposite the chancellor’s office.

LS:	Up in Bascom?.

WR:	151 Bascom, I guess.  And I had to explain that here was a person who had come to Wisconsin with great promise, who was no longer teaching effectively, and who simply had dropped scholarship completely.  And we could not continue.  And he was voted out.  Others, some left.  Some were not continued.  

01:31:25

	And one instance, Joel Roach, I defended and tried to keep since it seemed to me he had done what he was supposed to do, even though he was a terribly irritating person, ready to lead the troops in any direction.  But I lost on that one simply because a number of people felt that his scholarship really wasn’t very good.  I thought it was good enough for him to keep him, that he showed real promise.  Others did not agree.

LS:	Was he one of your graduate students?

WR:	No.

LS:	I know he wasn’t a graduate student.  I mean, one of your –

WR:	He was in the, our particular area, yeah.  

01:32:12

WR:	By the way, I haven’t mentioned something that probably ought to go on the record.  And that is that when I first came here, we had a system whereby in a sense, everyone in the department was responsible for all graduate students.  Now this is not, I’m putting it awkwardly.  
	It’s not true because people would work, for example, with Helen White in medieval studies or Renaissance studies or another person would work with Harry Clark in American literature or Henry Pochmann, but we had a system of preliminary examinations, which is the last thing to be done, you know, before the dissertation is written, which, in which we had, each student had to pick five areas out of nine possibilities.  And I forget whether any were required or not, but at any rate, it was very difficult not to pick five that didn’t include Renaissance and contemporary and so on, though you didn’t have to take either one.
	I think this was true.  But we were not getting good examination results.  We were getting examinations that seemed to be at the undergraduate level written by people, who we discovered, were, when the names became known, were not, the papers were not nearly at the level of seminar papers that these people had written.  And this disturbed us.  There was something wrong with the prelim.  
	And as the number of graduate students increased, we were simply losing, losing track of them so that students might simply be lost or not be, uh, guided properly, directed properly in what they should be doing.  So we, after two years, well, I’d hoped that the first year, we would reorganize the whole graduate operation.  But the first year was – there were so many other things to do that --

LS:	This is the first year of you chairmanship?

WR:	Of my chairmanship, that it wasn’t until the second year that we completed, though we had started it in the first year, that we completed a reorganization of the graduate program and of the department itself.  It was a very complicated and time-consuming process.  But we reorganized it into what is now called the Area System, whereby, we broke the department up into seven areas, six of them by literary historical period.  So we have an old English and Middle English group, that’s Area #1, the renaissance, Area #2.  Number three is the 18th century.  Number four is 19th century British and so on.  
	And the arrangement was that each graduate student should concentrate his work fairly early in one of these periods, would take a prelim examination of eight hours, two four-hour exams in that particular period, but would have a so-called adjacent area examination of four hours in an area which was contiguous in terms of literary history or made sense in terms of what this person was doing.  For example, if he was studying drama in the 20th century, you might take as your adjacent area, the drama of Shakespeare’s time.  

LS:	Yeah.

WR:	And this was to provide the kind of concentration that was being required of our students when they went to teach because when they went to other expanding universities, they were being thrown into teaching immediately, courses in, let’s say 20th century drama.  But at the same time, we didn’t want them to be totally specialized because they’d be helpless if they suddenly had to teach a survey of American literature or so on.  So we had, the adjacent was a kind of, one way in which we broke down the successive specializations.

LS:	And you had greatly cut down on the width of what they had to –

WR:	Yeah.  And, whereas, previously, the examinations were 5 four-hour exams, they now had 12 four-hour, yeah, 5 four-hour exams, they had 3 four-hour exams.  And before it had been almost a kind of survival test.  So that at the end of three days, if you could still write anything, that made sense, you got through.  

01:37:00

WR:	We think this has improved the quality of specialization in the department.  Now there’s a great deal of feeling against the Area System as being too restrictive.

LS:	I was wondering if now, with fewer jobs, it, you had to change it.

WR:	Yeah, now, we have a committee set up specifically to examine how the program now ought to be rethought, but it’s very complicated because if you change the graduate program, you change the structure.  You change all kinds of things, how the undergraduates are taught, for example, gets into it.  You have to think about what your graduate students are capable of teaching.  So it’s, you can’t do it a little bit here and a little bit there.  It’s a whole big ball of wax as they used to say.  And you’ve got to cover the whole thing.  
	So one of the reasons for doing this was to get a graduate program, which made more sense in terms of what was going on in the middle ‘60s.  Another was to cut down this big department into manageable groups so that the students in 20th century, for example, would have more chance to get to know the people in teaching in 20th century.  There’d be closer contact.  And I think, on the whole, there has been closer contact that way.  
	So you don’t have to make a contact if you’re in the 20th century primarily, let’s say, with a friendly person in Chaucer, teaching Chaucer.  And another reason for it was to bring together the tenured staff and the non‑tenured staff with like interests, so that we felt that this might break down some of the hostilities that had grown up.  

01:38:46

LS:	And has that worked?

WR:	To some extent, it has, yeah.  

LS:	And are there, are there places where these groups meet at --

WR:	Oh, we have to meet to carry out the graduate program, pass on candidacies and so on.  We have to meet to decide what courses would be taught in the following year.

LS:	This is in each of the sections.

WR:	In each of the so-called areas.

LS:	Areas, yeah.

WR:	And, uh, it’s, it has worked in many ways very well.  It has been somewhat restrictive.  It’s been restrictive, perhaps, more from a perception than an actuality.  The students see this as very rigid, whereas, actually, anyone in any area can get a student untangled and a special situation worked out much more easily than the student thinks.  The student sees those instances where an individual program has not been successfully worked out, which I would suspect would be one out of six, much less frequently than solutions have been found.  And they tend to focus on this, and perceive the restrictions more than the flexibility.

LS:	Has this been an issue that the TAs have worried about since the strike?  Have they bargained on it, or has it been anything --

WR:	No, this is outside their, their particular, I mean, this is the way the department is set up.  They may grouse about it, but it’s not part of the contract, since it totally within the competence of the faculty itself.  There has been some feelings by them as students that they prefer more flexible system.  And as I say, this is being, being examined at length now.  And I think it should be.  In fact, I’ve been urging, though I was urged the original change in ’65, and I came in, I’ve urged the chairman now to have a complete reexamination.

LS:	Well, certainly, conditions are completely different.

WR:	Sure, and for that reason, you’ve simply got to, to make sure that we’re doing it reasonably right, given the present market and intellectual and pedagogical situations.

01:41:17

LS:	Well, do you want to talk about the strike itself?  Do you remember incidents about it?

WR:	Sure, I don’t remember, I don’t remember incidents about it too well except amusing little vignettes.  Lots of vignettes were not so amusing, of course.  I guess the pleasantest is being in my office on a Saturday afternoon, and having at separate times, two of the picketers, who were my students, come in to get warm and to talk in my office.  I’d furnish them some coffee.  It was a kind of truce, as it were, in which we could talk amiably about anything.  
	And as a matter of fact, one of these people I remain in correspondence with, and the other person has simply disappeared with, I guess, with Bob Muehlenkamp into organizing hospital workers.  She was a very gifted person.  I liked her a lot.  We got along okay, and she was going to do her dissertation with me.  But then she just threw over graduate work completely.  The other person did his graduate, did his dissertation with me, and is now teaching at San Francisco State.  I tried in my classes very hard, and sometimes the classes went on, and sometimes the strikers attended their own classes.

LS:	I know --

WR:	While they did not teach the class other students might’ve attended, which struck me as a moral problem, which they had to settle.  But I wasn’t going to get involved.

LS:	One TA realized with great shock that she was going to have to miss her own courses, and she hadn’t thought of that at all.  

WR:	There were ironies that, I guess, an older person like myself could appreciate more than the person caught in the bind.  But I felt very strongly that whatever went on outside the class, within class, the class itself had to be kind of an oasis.  You left, you checked your gun at the door, so to speak.  Within the class, you discussed the matter at hand.  You kept hostilities to a minimum.  
	I would refuse to consider that a person who came to my class would, came off the picket line to my class, I simply refused to assume that this person should be treated in any other way than a person who was loyally teaching.  Since I feel very strongly that in the class, you should be protected in your classroom, that if you start picking on students or treating them differently, you get into a moral quagmire, to say nothing of pedagogical.

LS:	Well, they were in their own anyway.  You didn’t need to add to it I suppose.

WR:	They had their own problems.  And I felt also, well, you just had to be fair.  They were under pressures that we were not under.  And it was tough for them.

LS:	Did you meet in homes at all, was there anything like that in this department?

WR:	Uh, I think at the height of the strike, when there were, wasn’t the National Guard on campus at that time, or was this with the black strike?  I’m trying to remember.  

LS:	I don’t think so, no.

WR:	Perhaps not.  I guess it was during the black strike that I met with my class in an apartment that had been volunteered by one of the persons.  But the rest of the time, I mean, this is simply because it was dangerous.  And, in fact, I smelled my first tear gas after that meeting and realized that we’d been clobbered if we had tried to be in a, in our regular meeting place.  But the rest of the time, I insisted on the, on the particular classroom.  And I guess I insisted that I was, my obligation is to teach.  I, and this was not a contractual matter.  

01:45:47

	It was a, you’ll forgive me if I sound corny, but I’m old fashioned.  I went into teaching as a kind of call, as a minister would say.  I believe profoundly that if you agreed to teach students, you teach them.  You do the best you can.  And that’s your obligation.  And this is why I’m, I would be very unhappy to have a strike of faculty on this campus.  I would feel obligated to continue to teach my classes unless, you know, the Legislature just said, we’re going to pick the textbooks in your class. 

LS:	Yeah. 

WR:	And then, I must confess, I would be one of the leaders.

LS:	Uh-huh.  But you wouldn’t join United Faculty.

WR:	I could not in good faith join United Faculty, and this, of course, colors all of my interview here.  I recognize in many ways this kind of conservative stance.  But I think of it as a professional stance.

LS:	Well, the TAs were very opposed to the United Faculty.  I think they were more sympathetic with it.

WR:	Well, I think the United Faculty screwed them, to be blunt.

LS:	Yeah, yeah.

WR:	And this is another reason I don’t have much respect for the United Faculty.  I think they, in many ways, many of their positions have been two-faced.  

LS:	Yeah, well, that’s the TAs, that I’ve talked to all seem to far -- more respect the faculty who stood by what they believed in than, than the United Faculty, who were saying one thing and --

WR:	Yeah, I, I would agree with them.  Uh, if you have a union on the campus, then you ought to support other people who are striking.  And, but again, I just feel very strongly that it’s important for students to be educated, that it was important for the University to stay open during the strike, that one should not close it at the time of Kent State, that awful business, that somehow the war could be brought to a conclusion, but it was important that Wisconsin continue, very important to continue as an institution and it not be torn apart, which is a professional, I mean, this is a professional, moral attitude.  And I’m sure I’d be considered old hat by some of the younger people that we used to have.  

LS:	Hmm.  Well, it’s, I, somebody in the Math Department made the distinction of the soft liberals and the hard liberals, and he said that there were many who sympathized with the TAA, but when it came down to the fact of educational planning and what the function of the faculty was, that they drew the line completely. 

WR:	Yeah.

LS:	And, uh --

WR:	Well, this is essentially what happened in the, this past year, when there was a threat of a strike, as you know.  And I think they, though there was a feeling that, there was some faculty sympathy with the teaching assistant position.  And then when what seemed to be a fair offer was rejected by the teaching assistants, we felt that, essentially, the TAA was trying to exclude it from our classrooms and prevent us from teaching, and prevent students from being taught.  And the students were being used as pawns in a situation.  
	This is what makes me very unhappy about teacher strikes in general.  I guess I’d be more favorable for them in high schools than here, simply because I, the high school teachers’ lot is much more difficult than the professors’ lot.

LS:	Yes, that’s true.  

WR:	They don’t have the freedom to teach that the, the faculty person has.  The faculty person leads an extraordinarily protective life.  It’s a privileged life.  We ought to recognize this and do our best to improve the lot of others, so to speak.  But it’s, we should be very grateful for what we’ve got and should try to extend the beauties of the situation about us.

01:50:47

LS:	Did you, uh, do you think the strike did accomplish anything on campus?

WR:	The original --

LS:	The TAA, yeah, the 1970, or was it worthwhile, let me word it that way?

WR:	I guess I’d say in the long run, it didn’t accomplish much.  In the short run, it produced a contract that was probably better than the contract they might’ve got otherwise.  The details are sort of hazy in my mind, I must confess.  

LS:	I wasn’t thinking of specifically for the TAs, but for the campus generally, for the, making people aware of issues and thinking about them.

WR:	Uh, I guess, on the whole, I would say that it was a bad effect rather than a good effect if you take everything into consideration.  I don’t think that in the long run, it helped the teaching assistants.  It may have helped to bring certain grievances to light in certain departments.  I’m perhaps smug in thinking that the English Department on the whole has treated its TAs decently.  And most of the TAA people that I’ve talked with in the department feel the same way.  Many of them were torn in the last ruckus because they felt that they couldn’t strike against the department as such, but that other departments, in other departments, there were genuine grievances.  
	I believe that they’re correct and that, therefore, they felt that if they went out on strike, so to speak, strike against the other departments rather than this one.  I think that if it’s a matter of truly grievable issues in the other departments, this is the most awful breach of professional obligations on the part of those other departments.  Again, I suppose this is paternalistic, but I don’t think departments ought to exploit their graduate students or the teaching assistants.  I feel very strongly that way.

01:53:20

LS:	Was this ever brought up in faculty meetings, anybody reproach departments where --

WR:	I don’t think, well, I think the Teaching Assistants Association had not been very adept at pointing out, at making distinctions among departments.  Their propaganda has tended to make every department look as bad as every other department, and though this may be a great way to arouse anger on the part of a teaching assistant, who’s on the line, so to speak, I think it’s tended to lose them allies where they might have got allies, who might have worked in a non-strike situation to improve the lot of the teaching assistant.
	Um, for example, I gathered there were some departments in which there were very small appointments, in which the person doesn’t get much money.  And the appointment’s for a very limited amount of teaching, and that it’s, the probability of reappointment is very slight.  It just seems to me that it’s up to the deans or the divisions to go to work on those departments, bring them in line, so to speak, make them see their professional obligations.  

01:54:58

LS:	Was there, were there grievances and negotiations in the English Department after the strike in 1971, do you remember?

WR:	There must’ve been.  I don’t recall many.  

LS:	There was quite an uproar in the History Department.

WR:	Yeah.

LS:	But you didn’t have anything like that here?

WR:	No, because I think the feeling was that, uh, in changing over from one kind of course to another, and you brought this up an hour or more ago.  I’m in no hurry, by the way, but I don’t want to overstay your time.  There was a very strong feeling, and it was written into the departmental decision that in changing, dropping 102 and going to 200, that no teaching assistant on staff should be allowed to suffer in terms of appointment.  In other words, they must not suddenly be, have their appointments halved. 
	That this was unethical, and besides being bad business, bad publicity or just something you couldn’t do to people, so that everyone on staff as far as I know is taken care of in some way.  And but it did mean that there probably would be fewer teaching assistant positions thereafter.  But this would be for new people coming in, but not for people on the staff. 

LS:	So it’s just a question of not getting as many graduate students, which in any case, the numbers were coming down.

01:56:42

WR:	And the numbers were coming down for a variety of reasons, of course, in ’69 all of a sudden, the market collapsed for Ph.D.s And I was in on that very much because I was starting January 1st of 1970 I was on the executive council of the MLA, Modern Language Association.  So I was in touch with what we going on all over the country.  And it was ghastly, and it remains ghastly.  Though we’ve found, by the way, that our Ph.D.s, the people who have Ph.D.s are a much more likely to get jobs than those without Ph.D.s., whatever the folklore may be.

LS:	Well, I would expect that.

WR:	Well, you’d expect it except there’s a feeling that the Ph.D. is a kind of drag on you, that you aren’t a good marketable person.  But actually turns out that the person with the Ph.D. is more likely to get a job by quite a bit than the person who’s all but the dissertation.  

LS:	Oh, I see, uh-huh, you mean, on the way to the Ph.D. but not with it.

WR:	Yeah, but not with it.  So the Ph.D. still becomes something of value to have in terms of even a bad market.  

01:58:07

LS:	Have you made it, has the department made a policy of only permitting as many graduate students as they think they can get jobs for?

WR:	No, because we don’t have any firm sense of how many can be placed, but the situation is simply too fluid, so we don’t have an assigned group number.  Our numbers have dropped for two reasons.  One is the slow increase, and sometimes not so slow increase in tuition, so that it’s no longer inexpensive to become a Ph.D.  And connected with this, of course, the badness of the job market in general.  And so we have many fewer graduate students than we used to have.  I think now we must have about 250 including those who are off somewhere teaching, but are working on their Ph.D. dissertations.  

01:59:11

LS:	Well, what shape is the department in now after this schism that described in the around 1970?

WR:	Well, I would guess that it’s in, as far as that goes, there is not the intense old/young faction that they used to be.  There are a few people who still feel strongly one way or another, but I think that has been erased.  I think if, I would say that on the whole, the department actually is in quite good shape in terms of the people that we have here, that we’ve been able to keep.  We have, of course, lost Mark Eccles and Madeleine Doran, who are national figures, extremely good.  But we also have some very good people still here.  It isn’t as though an absolute collapse has occurred, though we’re going to miss those particular people.  

02:00:18

	There is, I think, in this department as in humanities departments across the country some sense of question of what the hell we’re doing at the present time, not in the sense that we don’t know what to teach from day to day.  But what are the really appropriate responses to whatever the conditions may be.  The conditions are not clearly perceived.  The responses are not clearly thought out.  And I don’t think that this is, represents a failure of nerve or particular stupidity in this department any more than in any other university in the country that I know of because nobody does know.  
	The projections, for example, of fast and sudden drops of enrollment have not occurred.  At Wisconsin, we’re going to be bigger next year than ever.  And though there may be a drop-off in the 1980s demographically, this seems to be what projections are.  We’ve been fooled before by thinking we were going to go up, and all of a sudden, we went down in terms of money.  The students continued to appear.  This would not have been predicted four or five years ago.  It had been assumed that we’d have dropped back to our total population of 35,000 or even 30,000 at Wisconsin.  But now, we’re up to 38,000.  I don’t know what the projection for next year is.  
	But the projection for the University as a whole is about 4,000 more students.  We don’t know, for example, the effect of older people coming back or continuing in education.  We don’t know the effect of bring minorities in as we should more and more, certainly one of our obligations.  

LS:	Well, I suppose it’s the dean’s office, business of the dean’s office to figure out that sort of thing, isn’t it?

WR:	Well, we’re involved too as part of the educational process.  The problem is that nobody knows.  I use the size growth, the continued growth as an indication of how we can be fooled.  I must say I think it’s pretty rotten of the Legislature to cut out growth funds when we’re still growing.  You know, this is like picking up your marbles and going home after you’ve lost the marble game.  I can see why they do it.  The University budget is a big hunk of money.  
	And if you’re trying to find a way to keep down the taxes, this is a wonderful sponge as they see it to squeeze water out of.  I don’t think it’s as much of a sponge as they think.  But I do think that the department is, or a number of people in it certainly are still very much concerned with the whole problem of what we should teach, how we should teach it, what are the demands of the future?  The very fact that we have a committee actively studying the whole graduate program and structure of the department is indication that we’re not just sitting here waiting for, for us to become like the Classics Department of ten years ago.  The Classics Department now is booming, I gather.  

02:04:04

LS:	What about, you said that you had required undergraduate teaching of all faculty members.  
Is this still true? 

WR:	Uh-huh.  Well, in fact, more and more so because we have so few graduate students, that more and more people have, full-time faculty simply have to teach undergraduates.  And as far as I’m concerned, that’s just swell.  Doesn’t bother me in the slightest. 

LS:	I think that’s one of the big issues in the university is the dearth of undergraduate teaching.

WR:	Yeah, uh-huh.  I have always been very suspicious of this as a --

LS:	You don’t think it’s really true?

WR:	As a criticism, yeah, I think it’s, there are certainly people who don’t teach well.  And it may be that other departments are hit by this more than we simply because poverty has kept us virtuous, so to speak.  We don’t have large numbers of people who can set up big research experiments involving vast numbers of people, and therefore, must be directed by someone who can’t be bothered to teach anymore.  

LS:	Yeah, yeah. 

WR:	We have, oh, Fred Cassidy is working on the Dictionary of American Regional English, which is, I guess, our biggest operation, but Fred handles graduate students from time to time, and he’s involved in the work of the department.  He’s very much interested in education.  But we don’t have that -- is working on the Dictionary of American Regional English, which is, I guess, our biggest operation, but Fred handles graduate students from time to time, and he’s involved in the work of the department.  
	He’s very much interested in education.  But we don’t have that kind of money.  The humanities simply don’t work that way.  If we had the money, perhaps we would be less virtuous.  But as I say, we’re kept virtuous by poverty.  

LS:	Are these, are you talking just about large lecture courses, or do most faculty give some small –

WR:	I’m sorry.  I left out a, probably a key point.  Most of the faculty that I’m aware of here are very much involved in teaching as well as in their research.  They’re not, they don’t say, go away, I want to do my research to the students.  If anything, they spend too much time with their teaching.  They have office hours, they’ll see students outside.  I know very few faculty people who will not put in extra time with students.  

02:06:47

WR:	Perhaps this is because we have instituted a system of course evaluation and have had this for some time.  

LS:	Oh, really, for tenured faculty?

WR:	Everyone.  Every course, in every course, the teacher and the course itself is evaluated.  

LS:	By the students.

WR:	By the students.  These are partly a degree kind of thing.  The material was presented clearly.  You choose one, very clearly mostly clearly, clearly about half the time, never clear, and so on.  And part of, this part of the evaluation is computer, and you can get computer results, so you get a statistical result.

LS:	And you trust the evaluations that the students make?

WR:	Not entirely.  But they’re at least some evidence.  If you get a person who’s teaching very badly, it shows up.  On the whole, the evaluations probably rate us better than we are.

LS:	Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard, that students are not really prepared to criticize faculty and don’t think of them critically or --

WR:	The, uh, except for a few bitter remarks that you’re always getting.  What Mr. Rideout needs is four new teaching assistants and a toupee, I remember one wry person remarked.  And some of them are vituperated, but very few.  On the whole, the faculty gets off pretty easily.

02:08:26

LS:	Any, any faculty evaluation of, any step in that direction?

WR:	Uh, yeah.

LS:	Among tenured faculty, I mean,

WR:	Well, we’ve always had, this, by the way, is material that’s accessible to the chairman, who makes use of it in raises, so that, I mean, it’s his business, but one can, we know the chairman, and we can trust him, and they do consider that.

LS:	Does the chairman decide on the raises?  It’s not a committee?

WR:	Yeah, in our, in our department, it’s always been done by the chairman.

LS:	Oh, that’s interesting, quite different.

WR:	Yeah.  Some departments have committees.  Some departments have the whole gang, there must be enough for all.  It’s always been done by the chairman, and the check on him or her has always been that he or she has to get promoted back to being a full professor again, so to speak, and if they’ve dealt unfairly, they may find themselves dealt unfairly with in turn.  It’s a prudential check quite in addition to the fact that we trust these people, and on the whole they’ve, as nearly as we can tell, they’ve been fair.

LS:	And is, are his decisions based on, do you think, more on research or on teaching or --

WR:	They’re based a very considerable amount on research, but also a, there was a healthy amount on teaching. 

02:09:50 

WR:	And these evaluations are part of the evidence used in deciding whether to promote a non-tenured person.

LS:	Yeah.

WR:	And they’ve been used.  And people have been denied tenure on the basis, not simply of that, but also of our system of class visits, which is, we’ve had for a long time.  A non-tenure person is visited three times, once, during the first three semesters that person is on staff, and visited by a tenured person.  The first time is informal, simply to see if the person is having any problems, whether the person’s voice can carry, whether there are some idiots who are cutting up or something like that.  
	But the second two times, and the second semester of the first year, and the first semester of the second year, there’s a formal report made, which goes, a copy which goes to the individual, who can protest it, ask for a revisit, and another copy goes to the chairman and to the area committee, the tenured people in the area.

LS:	And are these polite reports, or are they genuinely --

WR:	They tend to be fairly exact with evidence.  They tend to be complimentary, but they aren’t always that.  They tend to be complimentary simply because we hope we get people who can teach.  But we’ve had instances in which, well, I had to write a report on the person whose class had been a failure – [end tape 2]

02:11:43	End of First Interview Session

End of First Interview