UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1087
BROMLEY, DANIEL W.

BROMLEY, DANIEL (1940-)
Professor Emeritus of Agricultural and Applied Economics 
At UW: 1964-2009

Interviewed: 	June 3, 2010
Interviewer: 	Marsha Cannon
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	2 hours, 8 minutes

Abstract: In his June 2010 interviews with Marsha Cannon, Dan Bromley discusses his career as a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After explaining some of the influences that led him to study the environment and economics and leave Arizona, he recounts his path to UW and the reputation of the department upon his arrival.  He details controversies within and without the department of Agricultural and Applied Economics over teaching, the naming of the department, the conflict between practical and theoretical economics, and other issues. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.

Key Words: Utah State University; Oregon State University; Emery Castle; Vietnam; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Land Tenure Center; environmental economics; graduate students; University Bookstore; University Club; [now Nelson] Institute for Environmental Studies (IES); Agricultural and Applied Economics department (AAE); Edward V. Jesse; Philip Harris; the Sudan; Brad Barham; Ken Shapiro.

First Interview Session (January 21, 2010): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:20	Question: Talk about your background. Answer: Bromley talked about being born in 1940 in Phoenix AZ, “a rather dreadful place” from which he couldn’t wait to get out. He talked about his home life as a typical middle class environment in which there was little pressure to succeed, not encouraging but not abusive (to both he and his sister). Because his mother’s family had deep roots in Arizona’s pioneer tradition, it was hard for her to understand why he would want to leave. Even as a young man, he said, he was interested in environmental things.

00:05:40	[no question] He discussed his early college career, first a year at Arizona State and then at Utah State University to study forestry. He worked his way through college, partly with a professor researching in the Utah desert.

00:06:57	[no question] After graduation from USU, he went to work for the Bureau of Land Management and then decided to pursue graduate education under Emery Castle at Oregon State University. He described graduate school as “interesting”: while he had to do remedial work in math, he enjoyed it immensely and graduate school came easy to him. He spoke glowingly of his relationship with Castle.

00:09:18	[no question] During the early 1960s, when the war was heating up, he avoided the military staying “one exemption ahead of Vietnam. While not initially politically liberal, by the time they came to Madison they had become highly opposed to Vietnam and found the environment there invigorating.

00:12:47	[no question] He explained how family concerns factored in the move to Madison (rather than the other offer he got to Cornell). This suited him well, though soon after this his marriage began to go downhill.

00:14:30	[no question] He talked about the lack of mentorship he received upon arriving at UW. Expected to be self-starting, even his tenure case was less obvious than it should have been because it wasn’t composed well.

00:16:19	Question: Talk about your hiring. Answer: He explained that he was seen as being too theoretical, though this was a function of the debates of the time. While the hiring process was congenial, Midwesterners were unsure about the need for a fisheries economist in Madison. 

00:18:22	Follow up: And the position? Answer: He explained that he replaced natural resource economist Bill Loomer, who taught Principles of Conservation, which were required for all students wanting to go into teaching. Thus it was a large course for the department. They talked about the chair of the department and his office space.

00:21:55	[no question] He reminisced about the dean of Agriculture “General” Hughes, who was a former Air Force officer, “ran the show” in Ag Hall, and tried to run a very tight ship, which generated some rebellion from professors.

00:23:46	[no question] He talked about how “there weren’t any issues in those days,” the foremost concern being with spending the supply money given to the department. The department administrator’s parsimonious-ness with this budget, he noted, backfired when the next dean used actual departmental usage to lock in future budget allocation.

00:25:25	Follow up: The department’s reputation? Answer: He observed that it was the first agricultural economics department in the country, which positioned it strongly in the country and in the university. But it was at a time of transition and a time when the theoretical and practical (largely Extension) sides of the department had begun to fight. Additional factions were the Land Tenure people, but he was labeled as solidly a theorist who was concerned not only with service, but with graduate students.

00:30:28	[no question] He discussed a move at the time to split the department, creating a sepa-rate Land Tenure Center that could grant tenure. He also described an “unpleasant experience” in which John Schmidt, who had been chair, was elbowed out of the chairmanship by the “Young Turks.”

00:32:29	[no question] He went on to recount political strife in the department at a time when Vietnam protests ramped up—on one occasion John Schmidt bullied his way through a crowd of protestors, which he found insulting.

00:35:07	[no question] He talked about teaching Environmental Economics, which he enjoyed and found popular.  He reflected on the negative way teaching was viewed in the department, as something handed to young professors as a rite of passage. His teaching and research concerned water resources, and he said that there was great interest in natural resources—water resources and land economics—even before environmentalism emerged.

00:40:47	Question: Talk about funding for your research. Answer: He said it wasn’t, just in dribs and drabs. He thought this strange, but observed that all he “needed was a yellow tablet and a pencil.” He encouraged graduate students who wanted to work with him to find their own funding, which he described. He mused about his worries over the relationship between graduate education and funding, which today too often attracts students to do projects “to pay the bills” rather than to forward their interests.

00:45:08	Follow up: Notable graduate students. Answer: He noted that “you remember [grad-uate students] all for different things,” listing a number of influential ones—Basil Sharp, C. Ford Runge (whom Bromley steered out of politics), and Richard Barrows.

00:47:47	[no question] He continued by talking about his research, which moved from fisheries to research on common property. He explained how this combatted “fetish for private ownership” encouraged by Garrett Hardin’s tragically flawed 1968 Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons.” This research, he noted, had won a colleague a Nobel prize.

00:53:50	[no question] He turned to talk about university service. Reviewing how the Sterling Hall bombing took the wind out of the sails of protest on campus, he explained how he’d been invited in 1970 investigating whether ROTC should be allowed to stay on campus. He came around to the perspective that it was better to have a more broadly (university-) educated military than an uneducated one.

00:57:07	[no question] Continuing to talk about university service, he remembered “fussing” about the proliferation of centers on campus, which he saw as his way of advocating for teaching before “undergraduates made their way back on the radar screen.” He also remembered being appointed to the board of directors of the University Book Store, the major issue for that term being the effort to privately license Bucky Badger. He also served on the faculty compensation committee.

01:02:26	[no question] Continuing to talk aobut university service, Bromley discussed his service on the library committee. The major issue with this committee was the sky-rocketing price of journals, which he explained in terms of pressure libraries fell to keep full runs of journals. 

01:04:31	[no question] He discussed his service on the University Club, which was in trouble at the time, both from the fear that the Elvejhem Museum was advocating for the UC to be demolished and also from its own “checkered history”—when its manager quit an it was losing money, he brought in managers from successful university clubs to give advice about how to turn it around. He proposed to turn the 2nd floor of the club into a reception space, but these ideas “came to nothing,” which disappointed him.

01:08:40	[no question] He went on to talk about the Institute for Environmental Studies, which had experienced difficulties which Bromley traced back to the abrasive personality of Reid Bryson and the lack of faculty leadership after he retired (which caused IES to devolve to an academic staff member with aspirations to become a dean, Arthur Sachs). When Shalala fired Sachs, IES suffered from further antagonism between it and the university (he compared this to the case of LaFollette Institute [now School of Public Affairs]). He said he made two mistakes with IES, which he’d been asked to lead by Shalala—1) he claimed he could come in to “fix this thing,” which caused a backlash and 2) applied to be the director of IES, but only part time. He talked about  trying to make IES more intellectually credible, noting frankly that the students in IES were better than its faculty.

01:14:22	[no question] He discussed his chairmanship of the AAE department, which he took in 1981. In 1982, he said, the interns’ dormitory became available, and the university gave it to AAE without offering any resources to fix it up. He recounted how they raised money from private sources with some help from the UW Foundation, though he thought that there was much more money out there.

01:19:32	Follow up: Other major issues? Answer: He talked about the fiscal crisis of the mid-1980s, during which Extension faced major cuts which affected AAE significantly. They addressed this “crunch” by converting to 9-month salaries, which appeared to make the department more entrepreneurial, though less collegial.

01:22:58	[no question] He discussed issues under successive chairs after his chairmanship, when he went to Cambridge for a sabbatical (1986) and Ed Jesse became chair. When he returned, the graduate students were outraged at Jesse’s apparent pressure on anyone not studying WI agriculture that UW wasn’t the right place for them.

01:24:15	[no question] Continuing to discuss issues under successive chairs, he discussed the 1995 election of Phil Harris (the Extension candidate), who, facing enormous pressure to change the name of the department, nearly had a nervous breakdown and decided to step down.  Bromley was at the time in South Africa, but department members asked him to take over from Harris, which he consented to do. While Harris reconsidered his decision at the last minute, Bromley refused to pull out of the race (having understood why he resigned initially) and became chair in 1995.

01:28:22	[no question] He talked about controversies surrounding the reconsideration vote half-way through his second chairmanship. The Extension faculty, unhappy with Harris’ not finishing his chairmanship, voted as a block and seemed to want him out. While he consented to this, Bruce Jones turned out not to be electable, which led to the eventual election of Richard Bishop, who tried to make peace.

01:30:07	[no question] Continuing to talk about difficulties after he stepped down from the chairmanship, he observed that while Bishop tried to make peace, the Extension faculty weren’t really mollified. Thus, while Michael Carter was the obvious successor to Bishop, the Extension faculty blocked this vote though they could not push their candidate through. He concluded this section by observing that peace came to the department not because people changed their minds, but because some of the older Extension faculty retired and new faculty were able to settle things down.

01:35:02	Question: Talk about collaboration. Answer: Bromley noted that he’d not had close writing collaboration with faculty in AAE, primarily because his intellectual interests were just different.  He talked about writing projects he’d done with colleagues as widespread as Finland, the Sudan, and Zimbabwe. He said this “global virtual deparment” was becoming the norm.

01:39:02	[no question] He expanded on his work in Sudan, which started in 1983 when Ken Shapiro sent him there to investigate possible collaborations there. After some collaboration at the University of Khartoum, in 2004 he was asked to go to there to help John Garang set up a new government. He talked about how strange it was for him as a liberal to represent the Bush government at the table with high-level military officers in Sudan. He expressed his opinion that the civil war started over the Saudi-funded Islamist regime, but was now simply about oil.

01:44:18	Question: The centennial? Answer: He explained how the department was created in 1909, had a great heritage (including being the largest producer of Ag Econ graduates), and how the leadership felt they should make the centennial a healing process. Thus, they decided to try to get interviews from current and former faculty, but when this proved to generate little cooperation, they simply “planned a big party.”

01:48:03	[no question] Abandoning plan A and going to plan B on the centennial, he explained, they planned a program that tried (unsuccessfully) to bring back undergraduates, but was a great success with faculty and graduate students. He talked about the sessions they planned, how the thing was funded, and the good time it was for everyone.

01:53:41	Question: What was the impact of all of this? Answer: While he said his knowledge was only second hand, he lauded the work of Ken Shapiro there, who knew the department but wasn’t “of it.” He thought this was an excellent opportunity for their graduate students as well, who got to see some of the most respected agricultural economists in the country and the world speak.

01:58:25	Question: What are you known for the most? Answer: He said he was known for his work on property rights, as a critic of capitalism, which he felt had conspired to impoverish billions of people across the world. He noted that this wasn’t a particular political stance, observing his mistrust in communism and how Clinton’s globaliza-tion policies had done more harm than many others to promote capitalism’s damage.

02:00:38	[no question] Giving examples of work he was proudest of, he cited his advocacy for the Maori in New Zealand over the expropriation of their fisheries and his advocacy for American Indian issues in Wisconsin, which he described as simply shameful. While he didn’t agree with gambling, he saw it as the only way American Indians could make money off of whites, which he encouraged.

02:05:46	[no question] Continuing to give examples of work he was proud of, he talked about taking on Fred Mohs and Lee Hansen to defend affirmative action at UW. He called his article in defense of affirmative action the one he was most proud of.

02:08:24	End of First Interview Session

End of Oral History #1014