SRU ORAL HISTORY
"SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA,
APSCUF: 1957-1991
INTERVIEWEE:

DR. RICHARD HAZLEY

INTERVIEWERS:

DR. JOSEPH RIGGS AND LEAH M. BROWN

10 JUNE 1991

R:

This is Joe Riggs and Leah Brown interviewing Professor Dick
Hazley at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana,
Pennsylvania, June 10, 1991.

The flow of topics are all

suggested topics, so it's sort of random selection and
whatever suits you or you can pick and choose and then we'll
get in with a question here and there.

If your narratives

are fairly long, that's good.
H:

Okay.

I think one of the reasons I came to Slippery Rock was

proximity.

I didn't start teaching until I was 30 years old.

I had finished my graduate work at Columbia and, frankly, had
had enough of the academic environment, and I made the mistake
of thinking that I would go into the world of reality, the
world of business.

I took a job with National Biscuit Company

as a management trainee.
of my life.

That was one of the many big mistakes

I found out that there was no more reality there

than there was in the academic world.
kind of unreality.

It was just a different

I mean, you had to devote your life to the

Premium Saltine there.

I spent six rather unhappy years there,

each year getting unhappier.

I had reached a point where I

(2)

H:

wanted desperately to get out of there, but I didn't know how.

At that time, you may remember, there was a kind of five acres
and independence move in the country, where you would have your
own piece of ground and raise your own food. I got caught up in
the idea of maybe becoming a farmer which was insane but seemed to
me very reasonable at the time.

So I bought a farm in southern

Butler county and started very methodically and systematically,
the way insane people do sometimes, to start a dairy farm.

After

a couple of years, I had the farm on the verge of becoming a
working operation.

It occurred to me that I might want to

substitute teach while the farm was getting on firm financial
footing.

So I set up an appointment with the superintendent of

the South Butler County School District.

I met with him one

summer evening, which I'll never forget because I owe him my life
in a way.

His name was Lawrence Derickson. I took my credentials.

We sat and talked for about a half an hour.
wanted to do.

I told him what I

Finally, he looked at me and he said, no.

He

said, "I don't want anyone with your background substituting.
How would you like to be chairman of the English department?"
I said, "But I have no education credits."

He said, "Well, that

may be a great advantage, and besides you can pick those up in
the evenings.
ment.

11

We need somebody like you in the English depart

That was in 1957 and he hired me.

The first two years,

(3)

H:

I think, were among the happiest years of my life.
was in heaven.

I thought I

I was getting paid for reading books and for

talking in a classroom.

At the end of the second year, I realized

that while I really enjoyed this, if I stayed in the high school.
I was going to be repeating myself for the next 25 years. The
curriculum would not change and I would get stale.

I decided to

apply at Slippery Rock.

In those days, a lot of the students from this area that I taught
in, some of them marginally poor in a rural area but very bright,
some of them, who wanted to go to college had only one place to go
and that was Slippery Rock because it was near and it was cheap.
At that time at Slippery Rock, you had to take a writing exam and
a grammar test.

That was part of the admissions policy.

I had been such an enthusiastic teacher and I had so much energy,
which I wish I had now, that in my academic class the students
had a grammar test every day and wrote a theme every week.
The consequence was when they took those tests at Slippery Rock,
they always scored in the 99th percentile in grammar and did very
well on their written tests.

So Carl Spotts, I think was the name

of the chairman at the time, knew me.
knew me.
teacher?"

He'd never met me but he

He would say to the students, "Who was your high school
Because some of them even got exempted from English I.

(4)

H:

So he hired me really without much of an interview at all.

I

remember a friend of mine and I went fishing at Pymatuning [Lake]
at six o'clock Saturday morning and on the way back we stopped at
a gas station and I changed and then went in for my interview with
Dr. Spotts. I had the job.
Rock.

So that's how I arrived at Slippery

I'm happy I did that.

I think at that time the department was much, much better than I
expected it to be.
institutions.
Rock.

All of my education had been in private

I really didn't know what to expect at Slippery

I found that, at least then, it was a place that attracted

people who were not always the conventional academic types, but
who were very good and very bright.

There was Jack Marken and

John Huzzard and Al Schmittlein, who's still there I guess, and
myself and some other people. I thought it was a very, very solid
and very good department.

I enjoyed it very much.

I think one of the things I wasn't prepared for was the kind of
tone of some of the old timers in the administration.
the Dean of Women, Lois Harner.

I remember

She was, I guess, almost a

stereotype of the old time dean of women.

On our new faculty

orientation day, I remember she explained to us that the
students were required to dress for dinner--the girls in
stockings, heels and skirts, the men in shirts, ties and
jackets. "Because many of our students," she said, "come from

(5)

H:

homes where they don't know the social amenities, and it is
part of our mission to teach them those social amenities." That
was a little bit shocking.

Later on I heard from several female

students a story of how Lois Harner used to check everybody in at
night.

All the female students lived in North Hall at that time.

I think the student population was only around 800 or 900 when I
started there. I think they had to be in, if I remember correctly,
at eleven o'clock on Friday night and twelve o'clock on Saturday
night. She would check them in. There was only one door they could
come through. She would be seated at the desk there with the
check-in sheet and and as they leaned over to sign in, she would
say, "And did you have a pleasant evening?'' They would have to
answer, and when they answered she sniffed, and if she thought she
smelled anything on their breath, they were immediately suspended
for a week. There was no due process. They went home for a week.
So those kinds of things I wasn't quite used to, but they changed
over the period of time that I was there.
Maybe my initial disappointment was my first freshman English
class, because at that time they had block scheduling. All of
the people in each of the disciplines went together. My first
freshman English class consisted of about 35 males who were all
Phys. Ed. majors, who knew less than the tenth graders in the
high school I had just come from. That changed, too. I think

(6)

H:

I remember, and it's a good memory, that over the period of the
five years that I was there, there was a constant improvement in
the quality of the entering freshmen.

But that first day was a

shock. I remember when I asked them to name the parts of speech,
I think they wound up with thirteen or something of that sort.
I enjoyed the teaching.

I still had a great deal of energy.

schedule was very heavy.

The

In my first semester, I taught three

sections of freshman English and three sections of literature.
Each of those, of course, was three credits so that was an 18 hour
load.

Entering faculty were expected to keep a six day schedule,

so they would spend more time on campus and be more available to
students. That meant that I taught Saturday mornings in addition
to the five other days.
schedule at that time.

That was a very, very heavy teaching
I didn't mind it at all. I enjoyed it very

much.
I enjoyed my colleagues a great deal, particularly, Jack Marken.
I doubt if you have had a chance to talk with him. Probably not.
I think he's somewhere out in Wisconsin or Michigan, somewhere out
in that area.

Jack had been very active in the AAUP.

came there {SRU) at the same time.
older than I am.

He and I

He was maybe five or six years

Jack got me interested, and together we formed

an AAUP chapter at Slippery Rock, although I should take very
little credit for it.

I was kind of tag-along on that, helping

him out, and he was the one who was interested.
chapter formed there.

We did get a

That brought about a little bit of change

(7)

H: in the University because at that time the only active organizawas PSEA in the school. I had had what I thought were some disappointing experiences with PSEA when I was teaching high school and
I was not inclined to join them, although Dean Nelson Hale tried
to put a little pressure on me. I don't know if Nelson is still
around or not.
B:

He's still living, but I haven't seen him for a while.

R:

Was the AAUP seen as a threatening move?

H:

No. I think there was really no reaction. No administrative
opposition. No support but no opposition. That was fine.
I think it would have been difficult in those days to oppose the
AAUP.

The reputation was very high and we formed a fairly active

chapter.

Although when Carter came, and I left the same year

Carter came, Jack told me that he (Carter) came in and adjourned
summarily a meeting they were holding in a classroom saying they
had no right to meet in a classroom. But that was five years
later.
R:

Can you tell us about the subject area in which you taught and how
it declined or prospered?

H:

In those days, I think, we were expected to be kind of jack-ofall-subjects.

I did manage to get established, which they hadn't

had prior to that time, a course in Contemporary British and
American Poetry, which was my particular field.

I think it was

in my third or fourth year that I started teaching that course.

(8)

H:

Up until then, I taught, in addition to what we think of as the
nuts and bolts subjects which all of us taught, Advanced Composition and Creative Writing and Modern British and American
Poetry and a few other things.

History of the Drama.

We were

expected, I think, to handle a lot of subjects in a lot of
particular areas.
R:

English majors were also education majors?

H:

Everybody at that time was an education major.

Of course, the

market was very good for English education majors at that time,
so that was fine.

I remember a few funny things.

At that time,

each of the institutions, each of the fourteen, had a particular
area of emphasis and Slippery Rock, of course, was physical
education.

One of my colleagues in the English department,

John Huzzard, told me this story which I will never forget.
John had been hired, I think, two years previous to my hiring,
and he was a fine man, very shy, introverted, but a good
scholar and a good teacher.
Lorre.

He looked a little like Peter

He told me that when he was interviewed for the

position by Dr. Weisenfluh, he was sitting in Weisenfluh's
office and he said the interview was going very well.

He

said, all of a sudden in the middle of a sentence, Weisenfluh
leaned as far across his desk as he could and looked at John
very closely and said loudly, "your one eye's askew, isn't it?"
John did have one eye that was not quite right, and poor John who

(9)

H:

was shy and very timid said he didn't know what to say, but
Weisenfluh hired him anyway in spite of his one eye being askew.

I think, generally speaking, my professional satisfaction at
Slippery Rock was very high up until the last year when
all the turmoil in the administration began. The only bad experience that I had again concerned Dr. Weisenfluh, but in spite of
this, I still like him.

He was, I think, by nature a kind of

autocrat, but he believed in democracy so he forced himself to
conduct things in a somewhat democratic way.

I guess in the

middle of the second semester of my first year I took over as
sponsor of the literary magazine, and I think we put out some
pretty good issues of that magazine for a couple of years.

I

would frequently take pieces from my Advanced Composition
class, little set exercises that I thought were good and
put them in the literary magazine.

This one, somewhat

older, student, a married woman, I can't remember her name
now but she was very bright.

Kathy Luchs, that was her name.

She wrote this tremendous sketch, I thought, of a homosexual
man.

It wasn't done satirically.

It was just straightforward

and it was just a character sketch and nothing licentious
or scandalous about it in any way.
a lonely, homosexual man.
came out in the spring.

But it was clearly about

That's what it was about.

That

My family and I went to Florida to

(10)
H:

visit a friend for a week or so, and I came back from Florida and
I thought I would go up to the office and check my mail.

I think

it was a Friday or Saturday and I hadn't bothered to shave or
really wash up. I was looking a little bit scruffy.

Biswanger

was chairman at the time and he said, "Dr. Weisenfluh wants to
see you." I said, "Now?"

He said, "Yes, right now." So I went in

and Weisenfluh had copies of all of the literary magazines that
I had been sponsor for and he was clearly upset.

I sat down and

he started to talk to me about decency and morality and finally
he opened the magazine, he had a marker in it, to the sketch of
this homosexual man and he said, "I can't see where this is about
anything except homosexuality." I said, "Well, you've got me
there."

It turned out that at that time there was an automobile

dealer in town who owned an automobile agency, I won't say his
name, who was a self-appointed moral mentor for Slippery Rock.

He

had students reporting to him on what they thought were immoral
statements by faculty.

Then he would call up the President. I was

teaching the Graham Greene novel The Heart of the Matter in my
Contemporary Literature class.

It was the second run-in I had

with Weisenfluh. I remember going into the class and saying in my
lecture of the novel, "Now the central problem in this novel is
adultery."

And that really is what the central problem of the

novel is, but Graham Greene, a good Catholic, is really a very
moral novelist. The next day, Weisenfluh called me in and said

(11)
H:

that he had some complaints that I was advocating free love.

I

was relieved of the sponsorship, although Raymond Biswanger, I
have to say, really yelled at Weisenfluh.

He backed me up

very, very strongly which I have always appreciated.

I

guess those were my biggest disappointments and they're not
particularly grave or serious.
After Weisenfluh was relieved, one of the reasons I left the
college was that I, along with a number of other people, were
very active backers of Dr. Edwards.

I don't think Dr. Edwards

was the most dynamic kind of person.

I don't know what kind

of a president he would have made.
in his ways.

He, too, was a little set

I remember him calling in a fat, male student and

telling him that before he could go into practice teaching he
would have to lose 30 pounds.
when those things happened?
accessible.
faculty.

That's true.

Do you remember

No. But anyway, he was always

He was open to faculty and willing to listen to

A number of us backed him quite strongly and I had

the sense that when Carter was selected that he would be
vindictive because of that, and so I decided that it might be
time to leave.

Besides that, I had several good friends who

taught here [IUP] and Indiana was just about to become a university at that time, 1965.
the ground floor.
Carter.

I thought it might be good to get in on

So I took my departure.

I was wrong about

I predicted that he wouldn't last more than a year.

lasted two.

He

(12)
B:

How about the role of the dean?
chair supported you then.

You said that your department

Was there a dean between the chair

and the president?
H:

As I recall that incident, I don't think the dean was involved.
There was really a lot of direct contact between Weisenfluh and
the faculty.

I say that to his credit.

I have no recollection

of any intercession, one way or the other, on the part of the
dean.

It was directly between Weisenfluh and me and Raymond

Biswanger.
R:

About your leaving, Carter was only a part of the reason.
You had compelling reasons for coming here [IUP] as opposed to
staying there.

Carter just made it a little easier for you

to exit the premises.
H:

Right.

Great turmoil followed in the English department

after that, high turnover rate.

I think Jack Marken told me,

and I kept in touch with him and Al Schmittlein for a while,
that I guess in the next three or four years there was a
hundred and fifty percent turnover or something.
R:

I came there in 1971 and they lost a lot of folks immediately
after that.

A very young and bright group and they're

mentioned in other tapes, who had a very strong student
orientation and they had a very sincere, liberal bent.
They were extremely popular among students.

That doesn't mean

they were easy teachers or anything of that sort.

But I know

(13)

R:

we lost a lot of folks in the early 1970's and mostly from the
English department. A lot of people came there with the promise
of a Ph.D. program. I think that was one of the things they were
talking about in the late 1960's and some of those things never
happened, of course.

Ken Edgar.

He left at the same time that

you left.
H:

No, he left one semester later.

I left at the end of the spring

semester in 1965 and he came here [IUP] in the beginning of the
January semester in 1966.
Edwards. Very strong.

He too had been a strong backer of

I know that Carter did some things to

try to prevent even his transfer to Indiana.

That he invented

some scandalous stories about Ken. He was a vindictive man.
Ken told me, as a matter of fact, that he fired a policeman
because the policeman gave his daughter a parking ticket.
R:

City or campus police?

H:

campus police.

That's secondhand but Ken would have no reason

to lie to me about that.

I know about the AAUP meeting.

Jack

Marken had convened an AAUP meeting in which they were going to
discuss ways to take their concerns to Carter.
about the tenor of the institution under him.

Their concerns
He just came

right into the room and summarily adjourned the meeting.

He

said, "You have no right to meet in a classroom.'' He threw them
out.
R:

Did you have a personal confrontation with President carter?

(14)
H:

No.

The only time that I talked to him at all was when I

came in to tell him I was leaving.

At that time when you went

from one institution to another in the state, for the accepting
institution to accept you, you were supposed to have the
permission from the institution you were at.
gave it.

He reluctantly

I don't know why, but he wanted to know why I

wanted to leave and all that sort of thing.
Slippery Rock are very good.

My memories of

There was a sense of small

timeness about the institution but it's still, I think, very
solid in its education.

I remember when I applied for promotion

to associate professor.

I didn't have my Ph.D.

I'd finished all

the credit hours required for a Ph.D. but they didn't quite meet
the required number of credit hours under Pennsylvania statute.

I

forget now what that required number is, but I was three credits
short even though I had all the credits I needed to get the Ph.D.
I had a kind of certificate from the University of Florence which
I had attended in 1950 in Italy.

So I went in to see Dr. Weisen-

fluh and I explained the situation to him.

As I say, even though

he might have been by temperament an autocrat, he believed in
democracy.

And he believed in listening to faculty.

the story.

Well, he said, get me a copy of the certificate and

I'll see what I can do.

I told him

So I got him a copy of the certificate

and brought it in the next day and handed it to him.

He looked at

it and said, "University of Florence. Well, that's a good school."

(15)

R:

One of Alabama's finest.

H:

Right. But I got the promotion. "Well, that's a good school," he
said.

B:

The students were under pretty rigid rules you talked about under
Carter.

How would you characterize the students?

pretty passive?
H:

Yes.

Were they

Any activist groups?

I think that's a thing I enjoyed about Slippery Rock more

than I enjoyed here, or an experience I didn't have here or
haven't had here at Indiana. Just as you, I think, sometimes got
faculty who were not in the conventional academic mold, you got
students there who were, in the good sense of the word, kind of
oddballs. Some very bright and came from maybe lower middle class
backgrounds.

They came to Slippery Rock and suddenly all the

doors started to open up for them in their minds.

There was that

sense of excitement. As a matter of fact, they formed a club and I
can't remember the name of the club now, but it was a club of
students who were just interested in ideas and they asked me to be
their sponsor. We used to meet at my house or sometimes in the
basement floor of Old Main. They would meet once a week and each
week they would decide what topic they wanted to talk about the
next week. One of the things I remember is Walden Two, for
example, which was very big at the time. Then they would decide on
the topic and then it was the duty of every member of the club to

{16)
H:

go read up on that topic and to come back the next week, and we
would invite a faculty member who we thought had some expertise in
that area.

He would come and address us and talk to us.

Now

these were not the mainstream students but there was that group
there that was really alive.
There was one who later became the Pennsylvania state chess
champion, John something.

He had Nelson Hale for education.

Everyone took education courses.
to the class most of the time.

Nelson was accustomed to reading
He came to a part in the text

where he read, "Generally speaking it is not a good idea to read
from the text in class."And John who couldn't stand it any longer
stood and said, "Don't listen to this man, everything he is
telling you is wrong."
them delightful.

So you got that kind of student.

I didn't find that here [IUPJ.

I found

Here, when I

came, I think, most of the students came from an upper middle
class background.

A little more economically advantaged.

You

didn't get that kind of freshness here where the doors were really
opening up for them.

When they were discovering.

One student

named Bob Dixon, maybe I shouldn't tell this story, had determined
for himself that most people in the world pay no attention to
anything and don't see anything.

So he wrote "Fuck" in lipstick

across his forehead and walked around campus to prove that people
didn't see anything.
students very much.

That's a little extreme, but I enjoyed those

(17)
R:

I heard about a student on campus who wore a black box over
his head and didn't identify himself and went to classes and wore
this box.

People got used to it and he became a part of the

scenery.
H:

Another thing they did in Nelson Hale's class and this fellow
John was responsible for this.

When they filled out the class

list the first day John wrote at the bottom of the list
Charles Roast.
Roast.

For three weeks Nelson kept calling Charles

He didn't see that the nickname would be "chuck roast".

He didn't make that connection and he wondered where Charles
was.

Charles never showed up for class.

R:

Good story.

H:

I had very little connection with the Board of Trustees when I
was there.

Oh, George Moore.

I see his name here.

Is George

still around.
R:

I have no idea.

Marc Selman mentioned George Moore.

came from West Virginia University.

George

Marc did his doctorate there

and so he was selected by George Moore and then Marc became
assistant to the president.
H:

I think after Wieand left, George was briefly the academic dean,
too.

I liked George very much.

little sardonic but very bright.

He was a very bright guy. A
We had a married team at

(18)
H:

Slippery Rock at that time.

Charles and Mary Shinaberry.

wrote a beautiful poem in rhyming heroic couplets.

George

I just

remember the first couplet which was, "These are the Doctors
Shinaberry,/Doctor Charles and Doctor Mary," and it went on like
that.
R:

That must be in your archives, Leah.

B:

We'll try to find it.

Mary Shinaberry is still living in a

nursing home but pretty bright and once in a while comes to visit
and attends graduation.

Sits in an honored seat and is still

connected with us.
H:

George was, I think, a very bright person.

I had heard that he

died but that was again hearsay.
R:

Well, he pops up in an interview.

H:

He and I were very good friends.

R:

Yes.

Bob Duncan, George Moore.

We're going to interview Bob.

He's in Florida and is

back to Slippery Rock once in a while.
H:

R:

In those days, we used to have a once a month party group.
Sometimes at Bob Duncan's.

Sometimes at Al Schmittlein's.

We would all get together.

Sometimes at Ray Biswanger's.

Duncan applied for the presidency.

He was interviewed along

with Edwards and carter.
H:

Yes, I think he did.

Of course, we made Time magazine when

Carter turned off the electricity.
R:

No.

You probably have that story.

It was mentioned but I didn't get the story.

(19)
H:

Oh.

Carter was, I think, if I remember the times correctly,

Carter was hired in March of 1965.
occupying the presidential home.

At that time, Edwards was
Carter was not supposed to

take possession till the end of the spring semester but came
in and decided he was going to live in the presidential home,
and Edwards refused to get out.

I think along about the end

of April or very early in May. Carter then had the water and the
electricity turned off to try to force Edwards out.
refused to leave.

Edwards

They carried water in by candlelight.

was written up in Time magazine.

It

Just a little squib.

R:

Certainly newsworthy.

B:

Wonderful example for the students.

H:

Yes. Right.

You think of this place as intellectual.

My

mother-in-law who had no education but who always thought of
the university or college as a kind of cathedral of learning was
so shocked.

She could not believe that when she read it in Time

magazine.
R:

Are there other personalities that you remember particularly
from those years.

H:

I wrote some names down of people.

Well, I remember Mark Shiring, of course.
tration very quickly after he got there.
much of him.

I didn't see

I didn't have much contact with him then.

Lowry I remember.
R:

He went into adminis-

Bob is in Florida.

Bob

(20)

R:

We're going to interview him.

H:

Good.

R:

No. Another faculty member is going to interview him.

H:

Al is still there.

R:

He's the golf coach.

H:

Is he golf coach?

B:

And in the English department.

H:

And his blood pressure hasn't given him a stroke or anything? He

You going to Florida?

Al Schmittlein?

had terribly high blood pressure.
R:

Oh, yes.

When he was Dean.

H:

Yes. Even before he was Dean. He told me he used to be able to
hear it bubbling in his ears. Wieand conducted my initial interview. I remember him very favorably. I was impressed with him.

R:

What about after you came here [IUP]? You became the first president of APSCUF?

H:

No.

I was the second fulltime president.

B:

After Marty Morand?

H:

No.

Marty Morand was Executive Director.

Up until that time

the president, a faculty member, had been the nominal head of the
organization.

I was preceded by John Watson who is now the

President of California (University of Pennsylvania). Then Pat
Johnson from West Chester who took over when Watson had to

(21)
H:

resign because he took the administrative post at California.
Then Bob Winter.
of APSCUF.

Bob Winter was the first fulltime president

I succeeded Bob.

serve for more than one term.

I was the first president to
When I came here, of course,

APSCUF was not active in the sense of being a union.
it certainly was active as an organization.

Although

I was shocked when

I came here [IUP] to find that in some ways the faculty were less
organized than they were at Slippery Rock.

At Slippery Rock we

had at least the beginnings of a faculty senate.
that it was called a faculty senate.

I don't recall

But the faculty used to meet

once a month with Weisenfluh and with other members of the
administration.

It was the kind of forum where we could voice our

concerns and I think was very good.

I don't know what happened

under Carter, but certainly under Weisenfluh we had that, again
because he believed in a democratic government.

I came here and

found that there was no faculty organization at all.

There was

PSEA which wasn't really active as an on-campus faculty organization.

So we did form a faculty senate here.

instrumental in helping do that.

I was

I think it began around 1967.

But until then there had been less of a faculty organization here
than there was at Slippery Rock.
R:

In those years in the late 1960's while you were here and the
early 1970's when Watrel was president at Slippery Rock, you
were on and off our campus from time to time as a speaker and
just giving your state of the union messages. Do you have any

(22)

R:

reflections on the impressions you had about Slippery Rock in
that period of time?

H:

Of course, my impressions during the Carter years were almost
uniformly bad because the contacts I did keep up with kept
telling me all of the unbelievably horrendous things that were
happening there.
generally.

The turnover.

The destruction of morale,

Actually, I think the second week of my APSCUF

presidency was when Watrel was ousted from office.

Treated

as though he were a dictator in some banana republic or
something.

You know the state police came in and locked up his

office and threw him out.

Since I was in APSCUF at that time and

president, we took a very active role in protesting that kind
of action.

I don't know what a man could have done to justify

that kind of treatment.

We did get an apology later from the

Department of Education but the damage had been done.

Who

was it then who took over temporarily?
R:

Jim Roberts.

H:

Roberts, right, who wanted very much to be president.

I guess

he never quite made it.
B:

He was his Academic Vice-president.

R:

I think through all of Watrel's years, through the nine years
or so.

B:

Probably wanted to be president all through those years, also.

(23)

H:

Yes.

And frankly because of the APSCUF sentiment at least

expressed to us in Harrisburg at that time, we took an active role
in opposing Roberts as president.
R:

How is that translated, an active role?

H:

Well, lobbying with the Department of Education, primarily,
because at least the APSCUF leaders at that time felt that
Roberts was certainly not the man to take that office.

I don't

want to say anything against him because I didn't know him at
all.

I did try to reflect the views of our constituency.

B:

So that the lobbying had to do with?

H:

Pittenger.

B:

Okay.

H:

Right.

B:

That's why it was appropriate to do that.

H:

No. Definitely.

Because of faculty concerns?

Not pro Watrel?

I had no brief for Watrel, simply again

because I didn't know him.

The only position I took was that

regardless of what the reasons for dismissing him were, it
should not have been done in that fashion.

I think it was

important. I remember a couple of years later when we felt
that the then current president of Edinboro really ought to
be replaced, a man who had done, I think, very good things
very early in his career, but who had developed some problems
at that time.

I kind of liked him.

But we went in to see

the then Secretary of Education, Caryl Kline, about him and

{24)

H:

made her aware of the situation.

She said, well, whatever

we do, we are not going to humiliate that man.

I think that

was the proper attitude and she did get him to resign, but
not certainly in the way Watrel had been treated.

He left

with dignity.
B:

What were the years of your presidency in APSCUF?

H:

The state presidency was 1976 to 1980.

R:

That was two terms?

H:

Yes. Two terms and I'm not boasting but I could have stayed
there as long as I wanted to.

R:

I got that impression.

B:

That's true.

H:

I was away from my family five days, sometimes six days a week.
It just got to be a burden.

R:

Do you remember Emma Guffy Miller?

H:

I had very little personal contact with Emma Guffey.

She

spoke on one or two occasions on the first day of school in the
fall.

I had a friend, Don White, who taught in the Philosophy

Department at that time.

That was after Wieand left, I think.

Don liked Emma Guffey very much.

She was a martini-drinking,

cigarette-smoking, Vassar graduate, I believe.
R:

And an Eleanor Roosevelt buddy.

H:

And a Roosevelt buddy and, of course, I think, really the first
woman nominated for the presidency of the United States in spite

(25)

H:

of reports of other women.
go out to her place.

I think she was.

Some faculty would

Don White went out one or two times to her

farm and talked to her.

The only real story I know about her is

the story of the dismissal of poor Norman Weisenfluh who left for
vacation one summer and came back to find out he no longer had the
job, or was fired while he was on vacation.
Slippery Rock to be her fiefdom.
at will.

She did consider

She hired and fired presidents

There had been all kinds of stories that I heard about

that you would probably get from other people.

One president had

to leave because he was selling sides of beef from the commissary.
R:

I don't think we've gotten that story.

H:

That I think was in the forties.
affair with a student.

R:

Ordinary stuff.

Another president who had had an

So there's that kind of stuff.

Well, if we could talk about APSCUF for a while

and the evolution of the union.

I guess you were considered a

prototype.
H:

I wasn't really in on the ground floor.

When APSCUF began to

organize, it was, of course, an affiliate of PSEA and NEA.

As I

mentioned before, I had had some bad experiences with PSEA when
I taught in high school.

They had asked me to take a position in

the PSEA in high school and I had said that I would, but if I did
I would try to make the organization do something.
faculty had almost no benefits at all.

At that time,

No hospitalization.

No

encouragement from local school boards to further their education,
or that sort of thing.

(26)

H:

So I had organized a plan in the high school in which I taught
and met with the school board who I think were kind of shocked
by the proposals which I thought were very moderate.

I suggested

that they should share in the cost of health insurance and that
they should above all be willing to pay tuition for faculty who
wanted to go on and further improve themselves in their fields.
They listened to me politely and then said, no.

So I wrote to

PSEA and said that we are trying to get the following things done
in our school district, and I'm sure you have had experience in
this sort of thing and I'd appreciate whatever advice or help
you could give.

I got a letter back from them which said, "We

are very interested in what you are doing.

Let us know how

things go."
R:

Good luck.

H:

Yes.

From that day on I had very little to do with PSEA.

so when

we got the rights under the Shapp administration to organize, I
voted for AFT and was not active in the local APSCUF organization
in any significant way for about two years.

I was very active

in the faculty senate at the time but not in APSCUF.

Then it

seemed to me that there were some things that the local leadership could be doing and they were not doing.
a more active role.

I got elected to the delegate assembly and

then became the local president of APSCUF.
a one year term.

I decided to take

At that time we had

I was local president from 1974 to 1975.

Then

(27)

H:

I had a sabbatical from 1975 to 1976. During my sabbatical, I
chaired the negotiations team which was renegotiating the
affiliations agreement with PSEA/NEA. It was at that time
that it seemed to me that PSEA didn't really want an affiliation.
They wanted to absorb us. So I recommended at the end of a
year, kind of a fruitless year of negotiations, that we sever our
ties with PSEA. That was in March or April of 1976, which was the
same year in which I was elected president of APSCUF. Of course,
my very active role in APSCUF went from 1974 to 1980. At that
time, I chaired the NEA/PSEA affiliations team committee. I was
chairman of the presidents' crisis committee in 1974 when it
looked as though we might have a strike over the contract. I
chaired the committee that wrote the statewide promotions policies, because when the contract was completed in 1974 it was open
ended in the sense that it provided for the development of a
statewide promotions policy and a statewide tenure policy. There
were three committees and I was on the promotions committee and we
developed statewide guidelines for promotions.

B:

Those guidelines came back and I was chair of the Slippery Rock
promotions committee and I came to Harrisburg.

H:

I don't remember you there.

Do you remember me?

B:

I wasn't the star.

No.

that conversation.

It was a fine document.

Watrel was the subject of a lot of
It presented a

lot of problems but people really wanted it to work.

(28)

H:

We needed some kind of policy so people weren't promoted by
whim and caprice.

R:

That's still going on in private institutions, of course, and
in some of the southern public institutions.

H:

Bootlicking and that kind of thing.

I remember the husband of

a former student of mine here took a job at the University
of West Virginia, Morgantown.

He told me that whatever you

wanted you negotiated directly with the department chairman for.
If he liked you, you might get it, and if he didn't like
you, you didn't get it.
everything.

That included raises and promotions and

So we felt it was necessary to have some kind of

objective policy that would try to get rid of that sort of
bestowing of favors.
R:

You taught at Knoch?

H:

Knoch High School in Saxonburg.

Speaking of the APSCUF years,

I think the most important thing I did was to combine the jobs
of executive director and president so that the faculty-elected
president became truly president of the organization and did not
depend on staff for the real leadership.
had been a very, very strong leader.

Marty Morand, of course,

And with all of his faults,

and he certainly has them, was a good and dynamic leader. But when
he resigned I incorporated his position into the position of the
presidency. Then there was the establishing of our status as an
independent union, free from PSEA and NEA. Then affiliation with
AAUP and AFT.

(29)

H:

That was a true fraternization of equals and not what PSEA wanted
to make it, so that we are free to leave them anytime we want.
I hope we don't.

We have already left AAUP. The establishment of

our independent headquarters and that sort of thing.

Then, of

course, it didn't begin in my term and didn't end in my term, but
the establishment of the SSHE system.
that during the four years I was there.

We worked very hard for
Didn't get it until the

year after, but all the ground work had been laid in those years.
I think many people today don't realize why that was an important
thing.

The reason it was an important thing is that the 14 state

institutions, unlike any other higher education institution in
Pennsylvania, were under the aegis of the Department of Education.
For years, not during the later APSCUF years, but for years before
that, particularly when Charles Boehm was the education secretary
and he was education secretary it seemed like decades (Superintendent of Public Instruction).

For example, at Slippery Rock

I think the second or third year I was there, Charles Boehm
became enamored with television teaching. Teaching by television.
He got caught up in these ideas.

He, by fiat, took a fifty

thousand dollar appropriation that was supposed to go to the
Slippery Rock library, and God knows they needed it, and instead
decided it would go into television teaching.

He had cables

dug across the entire campus and television installed in

{30)

H:

classrooms all over the place.

I was interviewed along with

a number of other people to see if we wanted to teach via television.

Then the television sets, after about a year, were being

carted away and stored someplace and all those cables are still
there.

I don't think they are using them, are they?

But we were

subject to that kind of thing from the Department of Education.
Since their major constituency is the public schools, that's where
most of their people are, they didn't have a lot of time to be
advocates of the higher education system.

So we felt we had to

form an independent system just to get out from under the
Department of Education which, understandably, had to devote most
of their energy to basic education. So that was an important
thing.
R:

When that switch was made, was that when the other schools became
universities?

H:

No. What had happened here [IUP] is that we had a very vigorous
president here, Dr. Pratt, and a very strong state senator whose
home was in Kittaning: Pechan.
in the Pennsylvania Senate.

Pechan was very, very influential

In those days, whatever the state

institutions got, they got through influence in the legislature.
Whatever any education institution got, because you know we have
this mad hatter's method of funding education in Pennsylvania.
I forget how much state money goes to the state School of Podiatry
in Philadelphia, for example, simply because at one time they had

(31)

H:

a strong senator backing the School of Podiatry.

Anyway, Pratt

and Feehan got together and Feehan just used all of his consider
able influence to have Indiana designated a university. And he had
to do that against a very strong opposition, particularly the
University of Pittsburgh who saw this as a threat to them.
R:

Not so much the smaller schools such as Slippery Rock, but the
hierarchy of Pitt and Penn State.

H:

Yes.

Right.

So Indiana became a university largely because of

the influence of Charles Feehan and the influence of Pratt.

Pratt

had been somewhat debilitated by a stroke but he still was a
very influential man.

Indiana became a university in 1965, and

then the move to make all of the institutions into universities
really didn't get a lot of steam for a number of years after that.
I think it began to pick up a lot of force primarily, or in large
part, because of the strong advocacy of Jim McCormick who was
president of Bloomsburg at the time, and a number of the other
presidents who wanted their institutions to be universities also.
They felt it would be easier for them to get grants and they woul d
attract a better grade of students and that sort of thing.
R:

Even though some of the schools that have become universities
are a little suspect.

H:

Right.

R:

It has something to do with PR.

H:

Right. It has to do with PR.

I remember when Bob Wilburn

(32)

H:

was president here [IUP], a person whom I admire a great deal,
and was, of course, a very influential president on the Board
of Presidents.

It was his attitude that while some of them

should be universities, some of them simply didn't qualify
because of their complete lack of graduate programs.

Lock

Haven, for example, he didn't think should be designated a
university.

But it very quickly became an all or nothing

situation.

I think it was better to have the all than the

nothing.
R:

Yes, because of the size of the support.

H:

Right.

One shot deal.

You had to have the all or the nothing.

It was

amazing how fast the university signs went up once the bill
was signed.
R:

It was as though they had been in storage.

H:

Right.

B:

It was a little hard to get used to saying the word.

R:

It was done in the summertime, I think.

It was long about

the fourth of July and we got all the firecrackers in town out
in Slippery Rock and blew a hole in the sky or something.
I was interested in the acquisition of Morand and Macey.
H:

Morand had been an employee of NEA/PSEA.

Originally

he was with the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers
Union).

He went from the ILGWU to AFSCME and had been with

AFSCME in Washington, D. C.

Then he was hired by NEA to

(33)

H:

organize the 14 state institutions here in Pennsylvania.

So

that's how he arrived in Pennsylvania, as an organizer for
NEA/PSEA.

Now when he had been with the ILGWU, he had been

stationed in Harrisburg.

That had been his first job out of

college really when he had been a young man.
1950's.

That was in the

At that time, there was a fellow living down near

Shippensburg who had held a number of important positions with
TIME/LIFE magazine.

His name was Ramelle MaCoy. Ramelle had

decided to give up that life and become a dairy farmer.
like I had in some ways.
had problems, too.

Much

Then he found that dairy farming

So he decided to run for the state

legislature from that area and the ILGWU was backing him and
they had sent Marty Morand down to organize his campaign. Which
is how Marty Morand and Ramelle MaCoy became friends.

Ramelle

later went on to AFSCME, giving up the dairy farm, and then to
another union in Milwaukee.

So Marty came to APSCUF

after the successful organization drive and became the
executive director of APSCUF, largely at the urging of a person
who later became an enemy of Marty, Dick Keller, who hired
Marty as executive director.

Marty was very anxious to bring

Ramelle here because they were close friends.

So he brought

Ramelle from Minneapolis to Harrisburg and that's how that
connection was made.
R:

The early direction when APSCUF came here, there wasn't a

(34)

R:

prototype here.

Was it one of the early ones or first ones

of its kind?
H:

As a statewide organization, yes.

Of course, one of my

accomplishments that I'm most proud of, is being able to get
people to say the word union.

When I was president of

APSCUF, it was still an association and there were a lot
of people who would not use the word union.

Unions were not

things for faculty members.
R:

Professionals don't do that.

H:

That's right.

B:

We were not going to be Teamsters.

H:

Right.

And if it's going to be a union, I'm not going to

belong to it.

That was the attitude of a lot of people.

I

very deliberately used the word union at every opportunity
in all our correspondence and when I spoke.

Eventually, we

became that dirty word.

It was a prototype

We became a union.

in the sense of it being statewide.

Of course, New York state

had had SUNY (State University of New York) prior to us.

The

thing that we were first in was the dual affiliation with AAUP
and AFT.

Except for one very small individual union somewhere

out on the west coast, I forget the name now, we were the only
organization that had managed this.

It was the hope and the

dream of a lot of us including people in AFT and people in AAUP
that this would start a kind of big movement so that that

(35)

H:

internecine warfare between AFT and AAUP, and NEA could be done
away with and we could form a national union.

That never

happened but the idea was that APSCUF would be first.

Once APSCUF

pulled it off, then SUNY AND CUNY (City Universities of New York)
would then follow suit and then would have the dual affiliation
with AAUP and AFT. Those two places fell into place in the way
they should and then the idea was that it should continue.
was some internal opposition in APSCUF.
financial.
unions.

There

Mostly, economic,

People complaining about the cost of belonging to both

Then one of the reasons it failed, I think, was because

of the schizophrenia in AAUP itself. AAUP could not decide
whether it wanted to be involved in collective bargaining or
whether it wanted to have that old traditional position of the
professoriate.

For a while, it looked as though the collective

bargaining half, and it really was a half or piece, was going to
prevail.

But in the long run it did not. Most of the people that

I knew who were very strong in AAUP and in collective bargaining-an example is Leroy Dubek, who was the treasurer of AAUP and very
influential in AAUP at Temple University which has now become AFT
and abandoned AAUP entirely--Dubek and a lot of those people just
left AAUP entirely.

They (AAUP) couldn't make up their minds

about what they wanted to do.

(36)

R:

The time frame for action in the AAUP was so lengthy.

Any kind

of grievance process over a firing in particular, the investiga
tion took a year, year and a half, two years.
H:

Right.

The things they did in the forties and fifties were

invaluable, I think.
R:

Clearly.

H:

Clearly. But I think they got trapped in that particular place.
Jerry Bledso, who was their staff member in charge of collective
bargaining, very bright guy, a former historian at some southern
university, left them and went to NEA.

R:

Too much waiting for something to happen.

H:

Right.

They could not decide what they wanted to do.

So it was

this schizophrenia that I think caused this whole idea that
we had of an organization that would eventually envelope all of
higher education to collapse. Where you wouldn't have people
fighting with each other over representation rights.
didn't succeed finally.

It really

We couldn't have a real united nations of

higher education.
B:

How about a united nations of the state institutions?
come together in APSCUF?

Did they

Was that a real union of people or were

there splits and factions?
H:

As you know, there were pronounced factions, and I guess the
reasons for that are kind of interesting.

Partly, it has to do

with the personality of Marty Morand, of course, who had his very,
very strong supporters and his very , very strong detractors.

(37)

H:

So you had Edinboro and Slippery Rock and Shippensburg and
Bloomsburg, primarily, who supported Marty very strongly.

Then

you had those people who wanted very much to get rid of him,
primarily at Millersville.

And I think Millersville was the real

focus of opposition to Marty and to Ramelle MaCoy and the
alliances they could pull together from West Chester, from Lock
Haven.
time.

Clarion was kind of, I think, on the fence much of the
So there was that factionalism.

I think when I became

president it was a very fractured organization.

Bob Winter, of

course, was the kind of personality who promoted factionalism,
too.

He didn't mean to.

He's a very sweet guy but he comes off

as bellicose. So the factionalism was very pronounced and it was
primarily along the lines of for or against Marty Morand and his
buddy, Ramelle MaCoy, as people saw it at that time.

So it really

took me two years to get any kind of support for myself from
places like Millersville and Mansfield.

I remember going to

Mansfield to speak once and being almost hooted at.
part due to the local leadership.

When Winnie Neff

became local president there that changed, too.
was a lot of factionalism there.
from 1978 to 1980.

That was

So, yes, there

I think it quieted somewhat

Then when Terry Madonna became president

in 1980, he, of course, was from Millersville and some of that

(38)

H:

factionalism was renewed, particularly the opposition from many
of the western schools against Madonna.

I think Jim Tinsman

has done a pretty good job in putting oil on the troubled waters
again.
R:

Is there a way to estimate how valuable APSCUF has been to the
academic community, to the impact on students in terms of
quality of service and to the taxpayer?

I guess we have

gotten a lot of things done that would not have been done had
we not made that move.
H:

I think first you have to talk about something that may
sound non-academic, and that's money.

We had a study done,

and from 1974 to 1976 or maybe 1972 to 1975, but somewhere in that
area, there was an average faculty increase of 110 percent in
salary which was the product of collective bargaining of APSCUF.
Not only did they get substantial, really very great, increases
for faculty, but they did it, I think, responsibly, in the sense
that they felt if they were going to get the increases for the
faculty, they had to get substantial increases in the budget from
the legislature.

So the budgets for the state institutions, even

though we always seem to be in a budget crunch and particularly in
this year, but the budgets for the state institutions were
increased enormously and a large part of the credit for that has
to go, I think, to APSCUF and the lobbying efforts that it made
on the behalf of the 14 institutions.

Of course, with the

(39)

H:

increase in pay to the faculty with the salary schedule with the
seven steps and the addition of steps, and then the rather regular
increase in the steps themselves, there came an increase in
compensation for administration.

Theoretically, at least, you

should have been able to attract better administrators.

Then

there was the enormous untaxable increase in fringe benefits which
constituted about 27 percent of salary then.

I can remember

every summer when we received our last paycheck we then had to
write out a summer paycheck for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
remember that?

Do you

Because we were not on the regular payroll.

We

were paying our Blue Cross/Blue Shield out of our pockets prior to
the union.

So with the hospitalization, the life insurance, the

health and welfare benefits, you created an environment that was
conducive to better faculty.

In 1975 and 1976, faculty salaries

in APSCUF were comparable to the best ivy league institutions
except on the professorial level.

The professorial level did

not quite match them, but we were higher paid on the assistant
and associate level than almost all the institutions.

It was

our theory that these 14 state schools don't have some of the
cultural amenities that you get if you teach in New
York City or someplace like that, and in order to attract faculty
you need to pay them well and to offer them teaching loads
also that are not so burdensome they can't really teach well.

(40)

H:

As I say, when I started at Slippery Rock, 18 hours was the
standard load.

That was a pretty heavy load to bear.

So in

terms of salary, fringe benefits, teaching load and then
later on in the standardization of policies for the granting
of tenure and promotion, I think we created an academic
environment that was much better, much greater than it had
been before.

Then, I think, it follows that you should have

better faculty and better instruction in the classroom.
think there has been an improvement.

I

I think. I don't know

what's happening in Slippery Rock, but along with any improvements
come certain problems.

I think one of the problems we are

facing in the English department at Indiana is too much of an
effort to emulate the traditional institutions, so that now
we have new faculty here who are put under tremendous pressure
to publish, to certainly get their terminal degrees before they
have any opportunity of getting even tenure, so I think we have
gone a little too far the other way in some respects but the
academic environment has increased enormously.
There's the fact of very real participation. I've never thought of
myself as a very efficient person, but when I became the local
president of APSCUF I was amazed at the lack of accountability

(41)
H:

in administration.

These people, and good people, but they had

been accustomed to doing things as they pleased and not
answering to anybody.
what had happened.

The Board of Trustees were just told

They really had no active voice in any

thing that happened.

The faculty had had no power to really

say, why don't you do this or that.

If the president wanted to

ask your advice, he might, but otherwise the president and the
administration did as they pleased.

I think one of the things

a good faculty union can do and do responsibly is make the
administration accountable for its actions.
going to promote a person, why?
reasons are good, fine.

If you're not

What are the reasons?

Don't promote him.

If the

But if it's because

you don't happen to like him or you hadn't noticed him before,
that's the wrong reason.
tenure, why?
B:

If you're not going to give a person

I think that improves the academic environment.

It's hard to explain some of those things to new faculty to
justify why they ought to be union members.

They don't remember

what the situation was.
H:

That's right.

Ideally, unions ought to make themselves obsolete.

B:

And start again.

H:

No. A union is a response to a bad condition.

The reason I think

it was relatively easy to organize the 14 institutions, is
that they had been under the capricious thumb of the presidents
for generations.

So the union is a response to that.

The union

(42)

H:

is certainly not perfect.

It has made a lot of mistakes, but

faculty unionism when conducted properly should help to install a
rational process in what goes on in the university and a shared
rational process.

We had a president here [IUP], not a bad

person, Dr. Hassler, who simply could not adjust to the idea
that he had to explain his actions.

You would give him a list

of people to be promoted, and he was accustomed to saying, well,
promote him, him, him, him, him, and him.

But when you say,

no, these are the people we think deserve to be promoted and
if you don't think so tell us why, he could not adjust to that.
He was not a bad person.

He simply couldn't adjust to the

idea of sharing any of his authority and to being accountable.
R:

The conditions on promotion, sabbatical, tenure, and all of that
varied widely among the 14 institutions.

H:

It was incredible.
really did.

At California they promoted everybody.

They

That was literally true.

R:

We had a shot at that at Slippery Rock once upon a time.

H:

At West Chester they promoted almost nobody.
enormous difference.

So you got that

It had nothing to do with any rational

process and nobody could do anything about it.
R:

Go west young man from West Chester.

H:

When we were on that promotions committee, I forget the figures,
but the number of full professors at California was absolutely

(43)

H:

astounding.

They were shocked that we questioned because it

was tradition there, everybody got promoted.
B:

The only criterion was how long have you been there. Three years.

H:

Right.

R:

It's not easy to get promoted at Slippery Rock now.

H:

No.

In some ways I think it's getting too difficult, and I think

one of the failings of faculty is that they get on these committees sometimes and they act like administrators.
R:

They forget how hard it was for them.

B:

It's their chance for power.

H:

That's right.

It's the exercise of power.

to stick it to their fellow faculty members.

They suddenly want
There's the idea

at Canadian institutions which I like very much, and Marty told
me this because he did a study of them last year.

He said, there

is the assumption on the part of faculty, at least at the Canadian
institutions that he was at, was that if you hire a person, that
person is worthy of being a full professor. And if he's not, then
it is not he that has failed or she that has failed, but it is
the committee that hired that person that has failed.

so you

look forward to getting your full professorship and you will.
R:

Every time they fire a president in Pennsylvania, they don't
retrace those steps to find out how he got there in the first
place.

Which is an interesting question.

(44)

H:

Right.

There's an old story, I think about Bloomsburg or

Lock Haven, back in the 1930's where the presidency was vacant
and the son of one of the legislators wanted the job but he
hadn't quite finished his degree, and so they held the position
open till he finished his degree so he could become president.
So I think that has been one of the chief contributions of the
union.

You get people within the union who want to simply oppose

the administration for the sake of opposing.
bound to happen.

That's not very productive.

here [IUPJ on this campus frequently.

Those things are
That's happened

I think that if you

get an administration that is willing to work with the union,
that it can be a very productive relationship even though it
sometimes is a relationship with one side opposing the other side.
But it can be a productive opposition. We had a president here
[IUP], Worthen, who was a total disaster and I think the university is still recovering from him.

He came after Wilburn and

wanted to have nothing to do with APSCUF.

He wouldn't say that.

Finally we had a vote of no confidence in him and there was
tremendous turmoil on campus.

Kind of a Carter summer.

He went

to Ball State and I understand that he is having the same problems
there.
B:

But presidents always get jobs as presidents.

(45)

R:

I was telling Leah that Allan Oster protects them, the executive
director of the Association of State Colleges and Universities.
A wonderful guy.

B:

You said, ideally unions ought to make themselves obsolete after
they get things settled.

H:

That won't happen.

That's ideally.

B:

Do you see any new directions for APSCUF?

Is it just going

to continue as it always has?
H:

I really haven't been that close in the last couple of years.
I think they got a very good contract this time.

Maybe a

better contract than they thought they were going to get.
was surprised by the amount of opposition to it.

I

I spoke to

some people, and in part I think it was opposition to the
present executive committee rather than to the contract itself.
I don't know.
to that is.

I just have to say, I don't know what the answer
In some ways I think under Madonna who is

not interested

in other unions or other institutions there

was a kind of coming in on one's self.
politicking.

He was interested in

He likes that in Harrisburg, but he was not

interested in relationships outside of Pennsylvania particularly.
So I think we kind of pulled in on ourselves a little.

I

think that Jim Tinsman is a very bright guy who is primarily
interested in things running smoothly.
doing that.

I think they have been

I really don't see any new directions right now.

(46)

R:

I wanted to ask about part-time teachers. Is that okay?

H:

Oh, yes.

That's a very good subject.

We prided ourselves

when I was president on having the smallest percentage of
part-time teachers in the United States.
several memoranda.

We got that through

First the Ziegler memorandum and then the

memorandum subsequent to that by the then secretary for higher
education. I can't remember his name, in which we had an agreement with the Department of Education that any part-time faculty
had to have the approval of the union.

It was our hope that that

requirement would keep the number of part-time faculty very, very
low.

I think part-time faculty are an exploited class.

practically no fringe benefits.
They get no promotion.
the coolie class.

They get

They get no tenure protection.

They get no increase in salary. They are

They come in to teach, and because of those

conditions, studies have shown that they take almost no active
part in committee work or in other campus governance organizations, and that's understandable.

I think the increase in

part-time faculty began in 1980 under Terry Madonna's presidency
where we did not exert the authority we had through agreements.
The administration saw it as a way to save money.

They were faced

with a budget crunch, so one can understand what they were trying
to do but it doesn't mean you should let them do it.
the whole part-time situation is now very bad.

I think that

It should not have

been permitted to happen and may have reached a point where it is
going to be very difficult to do anything about it.

(47)

R:

Are community colleges an exception to that?
place like Pittsburgh.

Especially in a

The Allegheny County Community College.

H:

What do you mean by an exception?

R:

Exception to the massive use of part-time faculty.

H:

You mean in the sense that they don't use them or they should?

R:

That they use so very many of them.

H:

Yes.

That's what I thought. It may be that they have to.

It's a real problem.

I remember that we tried to hold some

nationwide faculty union meetings when I was president. I remember
one in New York where the part-time faculty had their own representation.

You know, got up and told us some of the conditions

under which they work. And here they are without representation,
without advocacy, and they're constantly exploited.
true that the community colleges need to do it.

It may be

Our original

agreement with the Department of Education which should have been
held to, is that any time a person is in a position for two years,
that that itself is warrant that it is a permanent position, and
therefore, the person will not be part-time.
full time or the position will go.
that we wouldn't have this problem.
being used.
R:

Are you a PAC enthusiast?

H:

Not particularly.

They will be hired

I think if we had stuck to
We have people who are simply

(48)

R:

Nor I.

H:

No.

I can see how PAC got started and I don't think they were

bad to begin with, but I think they have become bad things.
R:

The sooner we chuck them the better off we will be across the
board?

H:

I think.

Yes.

B:

Including the APSCUF PAC?

H:

Yes.

R:

When collective bargaining takes place for a new contract, are
there predetermined outcomes that the leadership in APSCUF and
whoever is bargaining for the state is aware of?

There are no

hidden agreements or anything of that sort?
H:

No.

I think the best negotiators are those people who are

creative and flexible.

You may go in and say that unless we get

15 percent we are going on strike, but you're lying. You may
know that you're going to settle for an approximate figure or
you're going to try to, but I think all of the conditions in
negotiations are subject to a kind of balance. They are tradeoffs between this and that.
to give that for it.

You want this but you are willing

I think the best negotiators are those

who are creative in that regard, and who can say well, all right
you want this, we'll give this if in return you can do this for
us.

I think some of that creativity was lacking in the 1980's.

I

(49)

H:

don't know how they got what I think to be a much improved
contract this last time, but I think they did a very good job.

R:

Is the grievance process working well?

H:

Well, it was.

It was very expensive.

I think it was expensive

largely because, particularly in the early years, the
institutional presidents still hadn't gotten the message.

They

still believed that if they thought they were right, by God, they
were right.

And the idea of being taken to arbitration and

being told they were wrong was not something they really
believed in for a long time.

Even when they were told several

times, they still felt they could act arbitrarily.

So I think

the grievance process has been generally successful, not one
hundred percent but generally successful.

Again, I don't know

what's been going on in the past couple of years.

We had a

fellow here [IUP], this didn't even reach arbitration, in the
Business Department who was not granted tenure, dismissed,
because he wore a dashiki to class one day.

I wrote a letter

to John Pittenger, I was local president, and pointed out that
the whole evaluation process had not been followed according to
the contract, and that this was not reasonable cause, not just
cause, for firing. And Pittenger just on his own wrote back and
said, you can't fire this person.

You ain't done it right.

So

in terms of faculty protection, I think, one failing of the union
in the past decade has been a loss of protection to new faculty.

(50)

H:

One of things we have done that I think is bad is to make a
contract that at least has the appearance of favoring the old
guard to make it look like a colonels' club almost.

At one time

we had due process for new faculty members who were fired.

You

had a hearing with the due process panel and you had a lawyer
representing the faculty.
extreme at that time.

Now I think that was a little

So a person who had only been on campus

three months or six months or something had all of those built-in
protections. Maybe they were a little too much but I don't think
we should have thrown the whole thing out.

I think we should have

said, after two years, you are entitled to this.
you have absolutely no protection.

As it is now,

You can get fired before you

get tenure with very little protection.

Very little due process.

I think that's been a very bad thing that has happened.

There are

some other things that I don't think have shown proper regard for
new hires.

I think when people come in they should be protected

a little.
R:

So they become a part of the community, the faculty.

They are

either a colleague or not.
H:

Right.

We have had faculty here [IUP] who have been on the verge

of nervous breakdowns wondering whether or not they will get
tenure.

I've seen that happen at some institutions, but that's

no justification.
B:

We should be more careful in the hiring as the Canadians do.

(51)
H:

A friend of mine and I once decided we would try to make a
chart to show the extent of state funding to private institutions
throughout the United States.

This is before Pitt and Penn

State and Temple and Lincoln were officially named staterelated.

They were still nominally private institutions.

We

found we had to make a chart this big in order to get
Pennsylvania in, because Pennsylvania was the only state
in the union who had this kind of massive funding that went
into a whole series of private institutions. Then, of course,
in the 1950's, Litchfield at Pitt who anticipated Lockheed and
the railroads, realized that if he spent Pitt into bankruptcy
that it wouldn't go under, that the state would have to bail it
out.

Which is exactly what happened. He spent Pitt into

bankruptcy and the state bailed him out.

The trade-off was that

the governor of Pennsylvania would get to appoint a certain
proportion of the membership of the Board of Trustees, which
is all they got.

The idea was that the state would fund Pitt

and Pitt would then lower the tuition dramatically and make it
available.

Pitt did lower the tuition dramatically for about

two years and then it just steadily escalated upward.

Anybody

who looks at the system of state funding for higher education
in Pennsylvania is amazed.
historical.

It has no justification except

That where the state dollars went to educational

institutions for fifty, sixty, seventy years depending on who

{52)
H:

was influential in the state legislature.

So that if you had

an influential legislator, you were quite likely to get some
funding from the state and once you got it, it became locked in
and would continue into perpetuity. And that's the way it has
happened.

I can't remember now the proportions that go to

Pitt and Penn State and Temple and Lincoln but they are enormous
in terms of what happens in the other 49 states.

MIT is

considered state related and it gets $20,000 a year from
Massachusetts.

Some almost miniscule figure.

I think the

other very bad thing about this is that that is money that
is not accountable.

Maybe the whole Posvar incident at

Pitt will finally bring some accountability.

But they get

all these millions and they are not accountable for them.
The 14 state-owned get their funding and they are
accountable for every dollar.
accounted for.

Every dollar has to be

Before we became a state institution, free

of the Department of Education, if you broke a beaker in the
chemistry class, it didn't pay to have the student pay for that
beaker because the money didn't come here.

The money went

right back to the Department of Education.

If it was $2.75,

it went to the Department of Education and there was no
guarantee that you would get a beaker back anyway.
accountable for every dollar.

So we were

So I think it's an unjust situation

with these state-relateds and the state-aideds who are only state-

(53)

H:

aideds because they get a little less than the state-relateds,
and none of them are accountable at all for the state monies
that they receive.

It's an injustice to the taxpayer and

I think, an injustice to the 14 state institutions.

We have

never developed in Pennsylvania what I would call a system
of really good red brick educational institutions.

That is,

state-owned institutions that had the full support of the
state and where the excellence was developed as much as it
could be.

Certainly one of the things that Rockefeller did

in New York state was to improve those state institutions
enormously.

He gave a commitment to them during the time

he was governor.

Certainly, where you have the land grant

tradition in the western institutions you have that.
Pennsylvania has always been a bastion of private education.
Traditionally, we have had many, many small private
institutions.

There has never been a commitment on the part

of government, a full hearted commitment, to creating an
excellent state wide system of higher education.
B:

It's a sad note to end on.

R:

We need a better benediction.

H:

Well, it's not as bad as it used to be.

B:

That's true.

R:

Thank you very much.

H:

Oh, boy, I enjoyed it.

I haven't gotten a chance to sound off in

a long time.
R:

That's what we were counting on.