SRU ORAL HISTORY
"SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY IN THE SIXTIES"
INTERVIEWEES: DRS. M. I. KUHR AND MARTHA HAVERSTICK
INTERVIEWER: DR. JOSEPH RIGGS
05 NOVEMBER 1990
K:

I guess about the time you came, the Phys. Ed. department had moved
down to the Field House which meant that the Speech Department had
less perception because, well, actually we replaced you in West Gym.
We took over the classrooms in West Gym for the Speech Department.
You were physically isolated to some extent from then on. When
Heffernan [Health Education] was apparently at one point the only
Catholic faculty member here. At least that is what I have been told.

H:

Marie [Wheaton] was Catholic, is Catholic.

K:

Well , I don't know how far back she goes. Tom Slettehaugh [Art] I
guess was the second, and then Tony Pagano and company came. I
don't want to charge my predecessors with bias, but the way these
schools ran , obviously having the presence of Catholic faculty members
on campus may not have been a goal of this institution. Except, of
course, the Democrats came into power under George Leader and
changed the nature of the Board. Emma Guffey Miller told me that she
was uptown somewhere and somebody said, I see you hired another
faculty member who's Catholic and she said, oh, we did? How do you

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K:

know that? He said, I saw the first one taking him to mass.

R:

This is November 5, 1990. I'm Joe Riggs interviewing Professors
Martha Haverstick and Irv Kuhr. We're going to talk fairly widely
about the history of Slippery Rock University from their recollections
and perspectives. Perhaps we could talk about the evolution of women's
participation in faculty government or women's presence in the faculty.

H:

When I first came to Slippery Rock in the fall of 1962 and for a few
years after that, thinking about curriculum now, all of the schedules
of the students were block schedules.

K:

The students were admitted according to their curriculum. Elementary,
secondary, phys. ed.--those were the three categories. Then they were
subdivided by men and women. At least over in Phys. Ed. they were
and I guess even in the other places because they took the phys. ed.
courses separately.

H:

Most of them were.

K:

So if I had a speech class it would be marked E-2 and it would be
Elementary Education, group 2.

H:

The thing was so unusual, I thought. I had taught for twelve years at
the University of Maryland and registration was pretty much an
automatic thing, while these block schedules at Slippery Rock were
prepared by the Registrar, and if you were a first semester, Physical

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H:

Education freshman , for example, you had the same schedule as all
first semester Physical Education freshman. The concept that students
had the right to choose professors or days or times for classes had not
arrived yet at Slippery Rock.

K:

We also had a six day schedule. We still had Saturday classes.

H:

Right. Certain courses when I was teaching, for example, were
always scheduled on Saturday. After a couple of years of that I said
to Dr. Meise, I've taken my turn, now it's somebody else's turn. And
somehow the scheduling was accomplished with no Saturday classes
after that. I thought that was a nice way to do it.

K:

It may have loosened up as we put up some additional buildings.

H:

It always seemed to me if I were careful and didn't lose my temper
about a thing and if I just said, well , I've taken my turn, now it's
somebody else's turn, somehow the thing would work out. Either
they really would take turns in their scheduling, like rotate rooms or
something like that if you had a particularly bad one, or they'd work out
a way to do it so that they didn't have to have their class on Saturday,
or they didn't have to have that terrible room .

K:

Wieand was the Dean of Instruction and who was the Registrar?

H:

I don't remember.

K:

Billingsly.

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Dorothy Billingsly.

K:

She basically made all the schedules.

H:

She had a real power position there, at the time.

K:

Block scheduling went on for quite a while. Until they discovered that
so many students were flunking , accelerating, going to summer school ,
etcetera, that it was just impossible to manage any more and stopped it.

R:

So failure rate had something to do with block schedules?

K:

Well, the point is that at some point they realized that 25% of the students
no longer fitted in the block. It worked reasonably well for the first
semester freshmen . What happened if you dropped the course or failed
the course or something like that? Then they had to make a personal
schedule . So before long, by the time you got the sophomores, a fair
portion of the students were out of the blocks; then by the time you got
the juniors and seniors they were even worse. So they eventually
dropped it. We didn't like it because you get a Public Speaking class
of only the elementary school students. But because, I guess, I was the
senior, junior in seniority, senior rank person in the Speech Department,
I always got the secondary education, english and speech majors in my
public speaking classes. They were used to each other. It was good for
one thing. The students knew each other.

H:

Right.

-S-

K:

But it was bad for diversity in the classroom because they only talked to
each other. Like minded students with similar backgrounds and interests.
It was an interesting phenomenon.

H:

The thing that bothers me most about it was that the students didn't have
any choices.

K:

No.

H:

Not only did they not choose the courses, they didn't choose the time or
the professors, the days or anything. It was a block schedule. You just
went to those classes.

R:

How many courses were in the catalog?

H:

Quite a few, some that probably hadn't been taught for a long time either.

K:

The core looked like it looks now, except there were no choices. That is,
every student took a year of biology, as I recall. Every student took a year
of physical science or something and every student took math. One
semester they took speech. I'm trying to think what they too the other
semester that balanced it. You know, something like that is how they
handled it. We got the Phys. Ed. students in the Speech Department in
the second semester of their freshmen year because the first semester
we got the rest of the students. It was easily managed by them.

H:

Nothing about the Physical Education curriculum required courses and
non-major courses. I was surprised when I came to se that those

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H:

activity classes were not scheduled into a facility. A faculty member was
assigned a class and he or she taught what he chose to teach and
where he wanted to teach it. Like if he wanted to teach football , that's
what the students took that were assigned him, whether they wanted that
or not. The schedule didn't show what the activities were that were going
to be offered because most of those people just decided what they
wanted to teach. He was going to be on the basketball court and she was
going to be in the dance studio. So I was left with archery because
nobody wanted to teach archery with all the targets, with all the bows,
and with all the arrows and arm guards and all the finger tabs and all
the stuff you had to worry about. So my first year there I taught quite a
bit of archery to non-major students.

K:

Were you the tennis coach when you came?

H:

No, I think I picked that up. I helped with that and then coached for ten
years after that. Dr. Nettleton and I came the same year. The women
had requested to hire a woman who would be in charge of the women's
program, although there wasn't a separate program, but so that they
would feel that they had someone to go to. I think up to that point
Slippery Rock was basically a men's institution. There were many more
men than there were women. In fact, I was the third, just the third woman
doctorate that they hired. Miriam Barker and Mary Shinaberry were there.

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I was the third one. They were just starting to look for women who, I
think, were seriously committed to education as their career.

K:

There weren't many doctorates in general.

H:

There just weren't very many.

K:

In a sense, there was almost just one per department and that was the
department chairperson

H:

Well, there weren't very many faculty members. But in the 1960's, of
course, they were hiring people like crazy. I don't know how many a
year, but remember at the faculty meetings they would always introduce
all the new faculty members and there would be just scads of people
standing up to be introduced.

K:

The year I came my recollection is, this is 1961 , that there were 14 new
hires. That was the largest group of new hires that they had ever had.
And that brought the faculty up to probably less than 100, around 95.

H:

There were no women in administration that I remember except the dean
of women.

K:

Except the dean of women who would have been Lois Harner.

H:

In fact, at the end of that first year, possibly the second year, I don't
have anything written down on date, but I was told by an administrator
that unfortunately Slippery Rock wasn't ready for a woman department
chairperson yet, but he wanted me to know that I'd really make a good

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one. Slippery Rock would be ready. That was true campus wide. I don't
believe there were any women chairs.

K:

Except Martha Gault in the Art Department.

H:

Yes, that might be.

K:

Martha, I think, was already chair of the Art Department when I came.

H:

And that was a pretty small department I don't know how many men they
had in that department, but that had something to do with it, I imagine.
But, like Physical Education, they were mostly men. To this day there
are more men than there are women. This has always been a problem
when we have to vote on issues that seem to be either threatening to
the men, or for some reason they don't like. the women will always lose
the vote. If there are 19 men and 13 women you know that it's not going
to be close. That was always a problem. Even in curricular matters No
matter what it was, there seemed to be some threat there Of course,
this is from a woman's viewpoint. We never got it. We never got the
vote. That was difficult.

K:

All I know is that one time I had to go over and observe an election
in your department and I think it may have been after you retired. It
was a very tense situation. So I guess it's still not resolved. You seem
to be even more cliquish than us.

R:

Were they secret ballot votes?

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Oh, yes. I was the teller. I was sent over there to be a teller.

H:

You can even probably count it. It probably come out 19-13. The first
year I was coaching, I remember, or close to that time, I was going to
the courts at four o'clock for the women's tennis. When I arrived there
the men's tennis coach was there, and he told me to get off the courts,
that it was 4 p.m., prime practice time, and that was meant for men's
tennis. He didn't know that Dr. Nettleton and I had been working on
rotation schedules of prime time for the practices and the games. That
gentleman left Slippery Rock, I believe, the next year. Things like that
were changed from then on through the rotation schedule, and it's
worked out very well for the facilities and for all groups ever since. But
at the beginning, it was as it was everywhere. The men's teams had
first choice of practice place and time, and the women would be
relegated to West Gym and East Gym forever if most of them had
their choice.

K:

When the Field House opened, all the men faculty and I guess all
the men's activities basically moved down to the Field House.

H:

Oh, yes.

K:

And the Speech Department got those small classrooms but not the
gym floor, but I could see what was over at East Gym. Perhaps that's
why I got to know you better than the men.

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I guess the men basically planned that field house and they didn't
plan for a dance studio, for example. I was told this. It was all finished
by the time I got there. They hadn't planned for a dance studio. That
was going to be handball courts all the way down there. And then the
state got involved. They only had one locker room planned for the
swimming area for the swimming pool, just men's. So they were making
it into a men's building. But the state got wind of that and said no, you
can't have the building unless it's going to be a coed building, so that's
what happened. They then added the dance studio and they added
another locker room downstairs. A women's locker room .

K:

But even now there's a men's locker room adjacent to the swimming
pool. The women's locker room is somewhat removed.

H:

It's down on the first level.

K:

It does double duty.

H:

But there's a varsity locker room for men. There's a men's required
physical education locker room. They still ended up with three to one.

K:

You have to understand there were always more women students at
this campus than there were men students. I don't think there had
ever been a time when the men outnumbered the women on campus.
go back to those blocks. When you were admitted, you were admitted
in a unit, so to speak. You were admitted as a student of Phys. Ed.

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or admitted as a student in Elementary and the requirements were
adjusted so as to maintain, I forget whether it was an even sex ratio,
but to keep it within some limits. It was harder for a woman to be admitted
to Slippery Rock than for a man, because there was more competition for
the slots for women than for men. They deliberately kept the size of the
student body in balance and they kept it in balance also by curriculum
and yet, as you were saying, the women had fewer faculty.

H:

Smaller locker rooms. That was always a constant battle. There was
another very discriminatory thing that happened in those days, and then
I'll quit talking about it. I certainly do remember it, as you can tell. When
men were hired, they were offered summer school teaching as part of
the deal so that they could be guaranteed a higher salary. Women
didn't teach in summer school in the Physical Education department,
that I know of, until the graduate program was established. There
weren't qualified men to teach graduate courses, so that opened the
door for rotation assignments and they have been fairly rotated ever
since. But not completely. I mean if you interview some women now
you'll see that it's still there. If a man is department chair, you are
going ta have to really struggle to get that course in the summer time
if you are a woman. And especially single women. Single women don't
need money. They don't have a family, they don't have children , so why

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should they get that extra money. That was the philosophy in those days.

K:

Do you remember what year? It may have been the first year you were
here, because I don't know for sure when all these things happened. You
were vice-president of AAUP when I was president and that was in
1962-1963 or 1963-1964.

H:

I remember you talked me into it because you said you never have to
do anything as vice-president.

K:

That was the year everything fell apart.

H:

Somebody else talked to me and said you're just a breath away from the
presidency. And it was very bad.

K:

Of course , by the time of Carter, that was 1968. Maybe it goes up that
far. Could it be that long? Maybe so. I just remember the excitement
when they pushed Weisenfluh out. The board did that. We were with

AAUP at the time. We tried to say, oh, you have to talk to the faculty,
but they pretty well left us out. We had a little more clout with the
Carter change.
R:

What about salaries? Women's salaries, promotions, sabbaticals.

H:

Well , I think at one time it would have been very difficult for the spouse
of a man to get hired at Slippery Rock. I don't know when that was solved,
but I do know I was serving on a promotion committee one time when
the spouse had been hired, the wife of a male faculty member had been

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hired, and someone on the committee had made the statement, well , you
know we really don't have to consider her because her husband's working
here, and we don't have to consider a raise, a promotional raise. You had
to speak up against that. I wasn't the most popular committee person on
campus from many people's viewpoint because I just couldn't stand to
hear things like that. So I made plenty of enemies, I suppose.

K:

But not with me.

H:

I have one little paragraph on the Carter years. That was before the
union, of course, and before contracts. We saw many unfair practices,
trumped-up charges to get rid of people. A good example of the trumpedup one, and I was there in the room when they said this, Carter was
saying we can fire that guy, he doesn't follow the rules. He parks on
the circle out there by Old Main. They got rid of him. Irv and I both
attended a Board of Trustees meeting at the Field House. Emma
Guffey Miller was incensed and said, shouted really, "What are these
people doing here?" I think that was the first time the Board of Trustees
had to go into executive session. They had never had any visitors at
their meetings before.

K:

This is before the Sunshine Law. I guess in a sense it's equivocal as to
whether meetings were open but there was nothing in the books that
said they were closed. This must have been the spring of 1968 when

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the fuss was going on with Bob Carter. We all went down, we knew
about the meeting and we walked in in large numbers and sat down
before the meeting started, and the board walked in and Guffey
Miller said, What are all these people doing here? I guess it was
George Kiester who was then chairman of the Board who looked
around and said, why Mrs. Miller, this is your faculty. She didn't know
what to say about that, but I guess they did withdraw to an executive
session at some point.

R:

And Carter was the reason for all of those folks showing up, I gather.

K:

Oh, of course. He had managed to irritate a good portion of the faculty
and ultimately the faculty had a vote of no confidence in him.

R:

Was there an agenda at their meeting?

K:

No, we didn't speak. We just sat there.

R:

But you knew what they were going to talk about?

K:

We were there to make our point, to witness.

H:

Not that we had anything to say to them or anything else. We felt
it was our right to attend open meeting which we assumed they were.
Some of us organized a protest to Carter eventually, stating in an all
college faculty meeting that we were presenting a vote of no confidence
in the president. He countered with his resignation that he had in his
pocket. It took him a long time to vacate the president's home, I

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remember. This administration I remember particularly, because it was
the first time in my life that I felt so strongly about the unfairness that was
going on that I didn't care about losing my job over it. It was time to stand
up and be counted no matter what, and that was a very good feeling. It
was the first time I experienced that. I think all of us in that group felt that
if we didn't win the no confidence vote that we would get the ax the
next week.

K:

Except we also knew there was a fair portion of the board that was ready
to get rid of him. Carter had managed to alienate not only the faculty but
the community at large. I was a department chairman and Wieand, who
had been Dean of Instruction, and then retired from that position under
Carter, and had become head of the then Philosophy Department, I'm
not sure there was anybody in it besides him.

R:

Allen Larsen.

K:

When Wieand and Bob Duncan came around with a petition protesting
Carter signed by the other department chairs, I figured if they're on board
I was at least in good company. I wasn't hung out very far because Bob
Duncan is not that much of an activist. Bob basically was, I won't say the
man is lacking in moral fiber, but he was not one to charge off on the
thing and, Wieand wouldn't do anything unless he felt that the political
situation was workable. So I figured that the earth was beginning to move

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K:

or something and I signed on. I was secretary of the faculty which meant
under that arrangement the president was the president, the dean of
instruction was the vice-president and then there was the secretary. So
I was highest elected faculty member. This question came up and we k
were going to present this vote of no confidence. I can't remember where
we met, in some quiet location, to decide who would make the motion and
the question was to find somebody who would be willing to get up out of
his seat and make the motion and the answer was in sociology. I forget
the name. Oh, yes. Norm Hawkins.

H:

I just know that as soon as he had made the motion, President Carter
reached in his pocket and pulled out his resignation .

K:

He said, are we going to have a secret ballot? And I said, yes, and
pulled out the ballots which were already printed, and he said, oh,
you've got it all set up, and turned around and said, then in that case I
resign, and walked out. Except he then went to the board and withdrew
his resignation and that created one big fuss.

R:

Yes, Marc [Selman] was acting president for a while.

K:

Of course the normal procedure would be the second in command, which
I guess would have been Jim Roberts, would be the acting president until
he stepped down. Then, of course, the board got in the act and decided
who would be Acting President and it ended up being Bob Lowry

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eventually.

H:

No, Watrel was after that.

K:

Well, Lowry was in for a few months until Watrel got appointed.

H:

Well , I know you and I served on the search committee for Watrel with
the Board of Trustee members.

K:

Oh, yes.

H:

Some of the trustees served on that to search for a new president. We
interviewed various people and Watrel. In fact, I think we met on the
Indiana campus or somewhere. We met off campus.

K:

We went over to Indiana campus one day to interview their liberal
arts dean, but what we didn't know was that he was really maneuvering
to become the president of Indiana and he wasn't seriously interested
in our position. He just wanted a little leverage.

H:

So, anyway, we settled on Watrel who was a Rhodes Scholar. We
thought we couldn't be real far off with that. We thought he was a real
contrast to Carter but we couldn't have predicted the problems that
were ahead, I don't think, not from the resume.

K:

We didn't know and, in a sense, I shouldn't do Al a disservice. Al
obviously was a local football hero at Syracuse. He had a Ph.D. in
chemistry which was perfectly reputable and I have no reason to doubt
that he earned it, although he obviously had friends.

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Well , you couldn't sneeze at a Rhodes scholar.

K:

And the thing that was appealing to us was he was serving an internship
in higher education administration at San Jose State on some sort of
grant program that they head up. Now I discovered later that the guy who
was at Cortland, Cortland that's where Watrel came from, had set this
up as he exited and said, Al , I know you're ambitious. I'll get you this
position as an intern. Which he did. But nevertheless, that is what he was
doing. He presumably was being trained to be a college president, and
that was an interesting and refreshing idea that here was somebody who
was ambitious to do the job and had some background and training to do
the job, and he had a decent academic and teaching record on paper. He
was a nice guy. Of course, I also discovered one other thing in that
committee, that the Board of Trustees didn't know whether they were
coming or going. They didn't know how to proceed. They were a gang
of political hacks. We said to them we would be happy to help you out.
We think we really ought to be involved in the search process. We
ended up, of course they didn't know what to do, doing a good deal
of it. It was we who went down to the airport and picked up Watrel and
brought him up for an interview. We did the screenings; we did the
initial interviewing and stuff. They hadn't even done that with Bob Carter.
Bob Carter apparently at some point, and I've heard this second and

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third hand, said, can I meet some faculty members before I take the job?
They called up the heads of the five biggest departments. I think it was
probably Meise and Duncan. You can ask them because some of them
are still around, and Chemistry, Carlton Dresden, who was then head
of the science department collectively. And I guess it would have been
English, and I don't know who it would have been in those days in
English. It may have been Biswanger. I guess maybe it was. Whether it
was Shinaberry or whoever, and the five of them went off secretly
somewhere and met Bob Carter. And having done it for Carter, I think
they did it for the other candidates such as they were. But that was the
first time anybody ever even asked the faculty to be involved in the
selection process.

R:

You mean Albert Watrel not Carter.

K:

No, I am talking about Carter. A very secret committee who presumably
said to the trustees, looks okay. We don't know what they said. The
story I always got is that some of the candidates said, we would like to
met representative faculty members. It wasn't the board who said meet
the faculty, it was the candidates who were ahead of the board in their
sense of what was appropriate.

H:

After that faculty was involved in one way or another. I guess they were
elected.

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We appointed a liaison committee to talk to the board. Before long the
liaison committee became the search committee.

H:

Right. Another thing I would like to mention is the extracurricular activities.
When I came we had what we called the W.A.A. , Women's Athletic
Association. I came from a background where recreation was emphasized
more than athletics. We were to provide activities for every woman on
campus, not just the talented ones. So I changed that to W. RA. ,
Women's Recreation Association, in the hopes that there were women
who would participate in more varied activities, not only team sports,
because that's about all we had. We established a student-run
organization with officers and our own constitution and all of the
scheduling of intramurals and interest groups and so on was done by
the students. That's when Carolyn Williams came. She had Y.W.C.A.
background and we felt she had the philosophy we wanted for that
organization. Later a faculty member was assigned all intramurals, men's
and women's. His office, mostly student help and secretaries, did the
scheduling. There was no more student involvement, and we thought, at
least some of us thought, that this was regression . Even though it's
slower and less efficient probably, we felt that the experience that the
students had gotten in organizing that was a very valuable one. We had
belonged to a national organization of Women's Recreation Associations

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and our students traveled to conferences with other student presidents
and so on of recreation associations, but all that went by the board. I
think there were about four or six women's athletic teams when I came to
Slippery Rock but they were on campus only, or the sport day/play day
type. No schedules, not much travel, not really intercollegiate. That came
later after Title IX and then of course when the contract arrived in 1971 .
When that first contract came out, as I remember, the women coaches
did not have the same release time as the men had and of course that
was like a bomb shell. After that there was not question that women would
have the same release time as the men, like a basketball coach or whatever. Then also they were to do the same caliber work as the men were
doing. In other words, then you started recruitment, then you started
scholarships, the whole shebang, and that changed everything after
that. That meant that if there was an interest in a team you had to create
that spot for that team. Not just we'll have six and that's all. Then, of
course, some schools matched team by team all the way through and
money by money. I don't think Slippery Rock ever did that.

K:

I don't know much about the internal administration of the athletic
program. Even things like field hockey were not intercollegiate sports
when you came?

H:

Maybe for one or two games but it wasn't a set schedule. It was just like

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a sport day type of thing. Where we played at their school and they
played at our school. Then when I started coaching and there was more
equalization of facility and practice time. We didn't have the facilities to
practice before.

K:

The men preempted them.

H:

Right. So when that started then, I think my season was about six games,
maybe at the most nine in tennis. And that was just the traditional schools
we had played before like Geneva and Chatham and Allegheny, Indiana
perhaps. But nothing far, very seldom , maybe a couple hockey games
might be from the east because there weren't enough hockey teams in
the west.

K:

Wasn't Pat Zimmerman an outstanding national hockey player? Why was
she brought on board?

H:

Right. I doubt that she was brought on board for the athletic part, that just
happened. Incidentally she happened to be the number one goalie in the
United States. I think she came here to teach.

K:

How about like Wilma [Cavill]? she has been here even longer than I
have it seems to me, and she was the swimming coach year ago.

H:

Right, and she was in Physical Education.

K:

I realize that. In those days didn't they have women's competitive
swimming?

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If it was, there would have been more. I had checked with Marie
[Wheaton] about this. I think you should talk with her if you could, Marie
Wheaton. She felt it was basically sport and play days.

K:

Okay.

H:

Now play day means you had various activities going on at the same time
and you invited a lot of schools to participate. Sport day was that you had
one activity like basketball and you all played each other.

K:

Round robin . The same thing.

H:

Right. On the same day. Tennis is nothing like it is today.

K:

A lot of activity for minimal outlay of cash.

H:

That's right, and the women didn't have the money.

R:

Have there been a number of breakthroughs since 1971?

H:

Well , with Title IX.

K:

What's the date on Title IX? This is the Fair Education Practices Act
or something?

R:

Higher education.

H:

Yes. It was equalization of monies and facilities and so on.

R:

Did we have an immediate impact from Title IX?

H:

Yes, I would say so, but we've had a lot of arguments since then too.
Right now, in fact someone just told me the other day, that she had gone
to a conference, and she said the most lawsuits are concerning men

-24H:

wanting to be on women's hockey teams. So it's the reverse type of thing.
As soon as that happens the team will no longer be a women's team. It
will be a men's team because any man can, just about, play anything
better than any woman. They have had those lawsuits ever since Title
IX was passed. But you don't hear much anymore, oh, the women don't
need any money. They don't need uniforms, They don't need shoes. Now
even in the public schools they provide them with a couple pair of shoes,
uniforms, just as they're doing for the boys. So that has changed a great
deal.

K:

Do you remember, it would be 1970, 1971? Betsy Curry was certainly a
principal who was involved in it. The names ought to come back to me,
but we were charged with sex discrimination with a hearing with the State
Human Relations Commission, and it involved Betsy's rank and salary.

H:

Watral was really out to get her.

K:

I'm trying to think there was somebody else, as an individual case and
then a general case concerning the treatment of women students. Which
was pretty much moot by the time it came to the hearing because the
school had already accommodated because, of course, it started from the
premise that for example, the women were subjected to greater supervision and control of their movement and behavior in the women's dorms.
Differently than the men were. Men were under no control actually. Open

-25K:

hours and so on.

H:

I don't know when that changed, but it was a big change.

K:

It had to be a spin-off from either a state or a federal act. I mean it already
was a State Human Relations Commission that conduct the hearings. I
recall I sat in on some of the sessions. Betsy and Steve Curry had
approximately the same credentials in terms of degrees, experience and I
guess publication. I didn't personally examine their credentials. Yet Steve
was hired at a rank higher than Betsy. That's what the origin of that case
was. Ronnie Howard, was that her name, also in the English Department
was also principal. I don't know. I think it was kind of on behalf of women
in general at Slippery Rock, both women faculty and women students. So
the school was kind of under some pressure to accommodate.

H:

Right. Weren't we in court once for that?

K:

Well , it wasn't a court. It was an administrative procedure. They held the
hearing in Butler, as I recall. The Butler County Courthouse. They had
an administrative hearing and issued orders to clean up the act. As I said,
it put the school under some pressure to change it behavior. This was
about 1970 or 1971 . It was at the point where we were just organizing and
before we had a contract.

R:

What about salaries? Did women generally come in at much lower pay
than men, and rank and all that stuff?

-26K:

I don't know.

H:

We don't know because people didn't know. We didn't have a salary

H:

schedule laid out as you do in the contract.

K:

There was a certain schedule. There was a mandated public law, 182,
I think it was, mandating the salary steps with rank. that was already in
place when I came. How generous they were in placing you on it I don't
know. My impression of Weisenfluh when he hired me was that he was
willing to give you as much as you could justify in terms of education
and experience. Knowing that the salary was relatively low, they were
doing their best to get you, but if they did that for the women or not I don't
know. Basically, that is what I observed when I was chairman. When we
were hiring we would normally get, at least for experienced people, senior
faculty members, about as much as we could justify. Of course, he would
in effect say, well, if you have a Ph.D. you ought to be an associate professor. You have so many years experience, you should be at about this
rank. You could usually predict where they were going in those days.

H:

I think it depended on what they needed at the time. I felt they were fair
with me because they gave me the highest salary they could in the rank
that I was at Maryland. You couldn't ask for more than that. I would
have been, if I had stayed there, I would have been a associate professor.
Just changing from assistant professor because I had finished my

-27H:

doctorate and he put me at the end of the associate professor rank.

K:

That's what he did with me. I mean I was an A.B.D . and he said, well ,
you'd make it as associate professor. Where are you there at Temple?
I was at Temple. He said, well , normally we would assume that we would
give you an extra increment for your moving. In those days, I think the
increments were 250 bucks or something. We'll give you a couple
hundred bucks more than you're getting there, and that'll put you up in the
associate's C or Drank or something like that and that's where I ended
up. Weisenfluh, I don't know whether it's true or not, acted like he had to
justify it to Harrisburg. I think I can get you this. Maybe that was the game.
That may have been a ploy.

H:

With him at any rate. I don't think it was whether you are a man or woman.
I think it was what he needed. What he needed in his department.

K:

This is a little aside. I came up here spring or early summer of 1961 for an
interview and Weisenfluh looked at me. Of course Wieand had done the
screening and everything, assisted by people like Carl Laughner. Carl
was with the department. They looked me over and he looks at my file,
and I guess he may have seen it briefly, and he says, you were at the
University of Missouri. That's a good school. And I thought oh, that's kind
of him. I discovered that what in practice was happening, any school other
than Pitt and Penn State was a good school because Middle States had

-28-

K:

chewed him out for having too many Pitt and Penn State graduates.

H:

And Slippery rock grads.

K:

Too much inbreeding. Too much hiring their own. Very often they went
off to the two places they could get degrees at relatively conveniently,
Pitt and Penn State. The pressure was on to hire outside.

H:

The thing that impressed me about Dr. Weisenfluh when he interviewed
me was, first thing he said was, are the pretzels still as good in Lancaster
County?

K:

He was a native from down there somewhere.

H:

That's right.

R:

He left unwillingly, I gather?

H:

Yes. They got him an acting presidency at Elizabethtown because the
man was on sabbatical or something. They were in between presidents.

K:

But getting rid of him here was a fast shuffle. Was he here when you
came:

H:

Oh, yes.

K:

And he took a sabbatical for the spring semester and he arranged to have
the then Dean of Students.

H:

Probably Edwards.

K:

Edwards, cover as Acting President. So Edwards was the acting
president. Weisenfluh was on sabbatical in Florida. Here we go--it was a

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K:

political shift. The Board, which had been primarily Democratic, became
Republican because Leader went out of office I guess, and I forget who
comes in at that point in time. Scranton, maybe. At this point I don't
remember. There had not been a compulsory retirement policy and
Weisenfluh was thinking he was going to come back. He had turned 65,
I think, that summer. He would come back and do what you're supposed
to do after sabbatical, go another year. But the feeling was he wanted to
set up Edwards to succeed him because he liked Edwards. He's in
Florida and he gets a wire from the Board saying we've adopted a new
retirement policy. Retirement is compulsory at age 65, therefore, you will
be retired as of the end of the summer.

R:

And Elizabethtown, what school was that?

H:

College. It's a small liberal arts school. Very good school. Lancaster
County.

R:

And what was the arrangement there?

K:

That was after the fact. The point is first you're out of here, and that's
where he ended up. And it was the Board that did it in this backhanded

way.
R:

He did leave and go to it?

K:

He had no choice. They retired him. They pushed him into retirement.

H:

I don't know how he got the Elizabethtown job. But, you know, you just

-30H:

can't walk right into a presidency somewhere.

R:

Edwards was in fact acting president.

K:

Well , that's another mess because this Board didn't want Edwards as
acting president. They went about trying to hire a new president in the
summer of 1963, I guess it was, and it fell apart. They couldn't do it.
So they let Edwards continue as acting president for the following year,

K:

leading to the next big debacle. Maybe I'm off a year.

H:

Was that Carter then?

K:

Carter came in. They didn't trust Edwards because he had applied for the
position and been turned down and they hired Carter. They decided not
to wait for the normal transition, not to do a smooth transition. Carter was
teaching out at Dickinson, right? Edwards is acting president here.

H:

Not Dickinson, Denison.

K:

Yes, Denison. And they put Carter in as of some point in April or something. Spring break or thereabouts. All of a sudden Carter's in power even
though Edwards is still in place. And what's more, had an understanding
that permitted him to be living in the President's house. Edwards was
living in the house. And Carter comes on campus as President and
discovers the house is occupied by Edwards. And , of course, Carter is
still under a teaching contract at Denison and he's to come down on
weekends. Then there was Mark Shiring. Shiring was the public relations

-31K:

person so he had a minimal teaching obligation, if any. And Selman, I
don't know what Selman was. He used them as his errand boys and so on
on campus in the interim.

H:

At least that's how it seemed to us. It may not be how it was.

R:

And then he cut the electricity off.

K:

Well, Edwards had said to the Board when they put him in, may I live in
the President's house? It's going to be unoccupied. And the Board had
said yes. So he moved in. And then he had said yes, he understood, but
he would vacate at the end of the year. He always said he told somebody, the Board, I don't mean the end of the school year. I would like to
stay on. I don't know the exact date, some point in June, because my
daughter's finishing up at the high school and then I'll leave. And I don't
know, somewhere there Carter decided he'd come in like the first of June
and officially move on campus. He was living, I guess, in guest quarters
or something. He wanted Edwards out and Edwards said he had told the
Board he would leave on "X" date, and leave him be. So he turned off the
utilities. Not only the electricity, the water. By the way, you can validate
this because it made Time magazine. We attracted rather unfavorable
attention.

R:

It was mentioned by Marc Selman in his interview.

K:

And, of course, the faculty as a group liked Edwards. He was a nice guy.

-32K:

Regardless of whether he would have made a good president, he was a
nice guy, and it just seemed a little much. So Carter arrived on this
campus with a somewhat, who is this guy we're being stuck with, type of
attitude on our part. The two Marks were a little heady with the power.
I say that although I'm sure Marc Selman and I are friends. Shiring and I
certainly were friendly, but power went to them and they behaved like they
were his boys. They were pulled into this orbit, and we didn't particularly
like them either.

H:

At that time, for some reason, I can't remember how it came about, but I
was acting dean. I'd been acting for quite a bit at Slippery Rock, but I
was acting graduate dean.

K:

When Carter was president?

H:

Right. Well, Edwards first. He asked me to do that temporarily.

K:

Carter came in 1965 because he remarked at the time when we voted no
confidence it was almost three years to the day. So it must have been
1965.

H:

Well whenever it was I think Dr. Edwards asked me whether I would do
that for a limited time and I said yes. So I was acting dean of graduate
school. When Carter came, one of the first things he did with anyone that
was in an acting position was to send them a letter saying if you want to
remain in this position you may, as far as I'm concerned. He also handed

-33-

H:

out Who's Who applications. You know, the president is the only one who
can do that apparently to people he thinks are deserving for Who's Who
in American Education or Who's Who Among American Women. He was
passing out these things quite a bit, and I said there that I did not want to
stay in that position, that I missed the undergraduates and I'd be going
right back to physical education as soon as everything was taken care of.
I think the Dean of Instruction was in an action position, too.

K:

George Moore?

H:

Right. Or was he the registrar or what was he?

K:

Dorothy [Billingsly] was the registrar up until the day she retired .

H:

He must have been the Dean of Instruction then.

K:

Joe Marks came then.

H:

Because his office was right next to the graduate office.

K:

Was it Moore from political science?

H:

Right. Moore. Right. I don't know about political science.

K:

Well that's where he came from .

H:

He lived up on West Water Street.

R:

Well the Carter years then were pretty stormy stuff?

K:

Oh, yes.

H:

Right. It really was.

R:

Almost from the word go.

-34K:

It started off on the wrong f oat.

H:

Because the faculty wasn't involved. It was the secret group that was
involved in hiring him in the first place.

K:

Yes, the faculty members that were involved wouldn't talk about it much
for years. Of course, I don't know that they were really involved. It's not
that they volunteered. They were dragged into it. The Board said we want
you to come have dinner with us.

H:

It really wasn't their fault but we didn't have a voice in saying who was
going to represent the faculty.

K:

Even though at this point we had AAUP. We suggested that we ought to

K:

have a voice.

R:

But it looked kind of fishy.

H:

Well, we kind of pitied the guys who where doing it, and that's another
thing, they were probably all men weren't they?

K:

Of course.

H:

Of course.

R:

My understanding was that Judge Kiester knew the Carter family or knew
some folks at Denison.

H:

I think that's true.

K:

He my or may not have. I don't know how well he knew them. But the
presiding judge of Butler County was a Denison alumnus.

-35H:

See they didn't advertise in those days. It was just who do you know who
would be ready to come here.

R:

Word of mouth.

K:

I wish I could remember his name who was the presiding judge in Butler.
George was the number two judge. He was the junior judge. When I
came to Slippery Rock in 1961 , George was still in law practice.

H:

How about Judge Murrin?

K:

No. This was before him and he was a really major alumnus at Denison.
So whether Carter knew George Kiester himself well , or whether the
connection was through his associate judge, I don't know. Marc may
know that better than I do. Marc Selman. That was presumably the
connection or at least the old school network, old boys' network, that
sort of thing .

H:

It was kind of, they say, the really rough years. But it was a growing up
time, too, for me. Because I realized a lot of things were happening in
higher education that I didn't know were happening in the twelve years
that I was at the University of Maryland, because it was so large. You
didn't get involved in things like that. You had your own department that
you were involved in, but you weren't really involved in the college or the
university down there.

K:

I think it may have represented a growing up period for Slippery Rock,

-36K:

too. Martha, my experience is a little different than yours. When I came
to Slippery Rock, the state law, that Act 182, that classified salaries and
defined how much experience in education you had to hold each rank,
also said that two years of that experience had to be in public education .
I never taught at public school. They had to get a waiver from the
Superintendent of Instruction, the state superintendent, to hire me.

H:

Well, it was a teacher training institution in the old days.

K:

It was a teacher training institution and it made sense in that context. If
you're going to teach teachers you should have some awareness of what
it is the students are teaching.

H:
K:

They just hadn't changed it.
So it had just begun in 1961 to shift to a faculty that included a significant
number of people who thought of themselves as college faculty members
rather than as public school teachers who had gone on to the next level of
public education. We organized the AAUP chapter. There already was a
PSEA chapter on campus. APSCUF doubled as a PSEA affiliate. This
was a desire on the part of faculty members who had university or college
experience to maintain some alliance that way. My recollection was we
belonged to both, as least I did. AAUP didn't bother with lobbying the
legislature for salary increases. You depended on APSCUF for that.
You depended on PSEA clout on the state level, but the AAUP chapter

-37-

K:

represented in a sense a new group of faculty members, ones who had
come out of other colleges and universities rather than up through the
ranks of public schools.

R:

Was the growth and expansion and new buildings and all the stuff that
was taking place in the Carter administration, were those all in place
before he came?

K:

Field House opened in 1960.

H:

1962.

K:

That was the first new building. The first new building since World War II.

H:

That would have had to be in the planning stages before that, because
it takes a long time for the State to get things done.

K:

Weisenfluh called me in once and said, we're talking about a Fine Arts
Center. Do you guys want to be in on it? We said, what do you mean?

K:

Well , he said, we'll put theater, art and music together. We started talking
about that because every year he talked, well every two years in those
days, he talked about the planning process. Ultimately, Carter called me
in one day and said, I don't know if we can do it. You guys still interested
in being in the Fine Arts Center? I said, what do you mean? He said, well ,
it's on hold. I can get you into Eisenberg for teaching but I can't get you a
new theater. If you want to hold out for the theater, I don't know when
you'll get into that building. And I said give us what you can get. So we

-38-

K:

ended up in Eisenberg and ultimately the theater got cut out completely
because that fine arts building got smaller and smaller as time went on
and ended up being a music building. So my guess was right at the time.
Buildings, using general state authority mechanism, and increasing
demand for space in colleges, the buildings were well under way.

R:

What was the evolution of the faculty and student morale problem in the
Carter years? Was it a thing that kind of gradually grew?

K:

Well , I'll tell you the student's perspective. Do you remember the big
demonstration?

H:

I remember the demonstration in Watrel's day but I don't know about
Carter's.

K:

Well , I'll tell you about the student demonstration in Carter's day and I
can't give you exact dates. I'm trying to think whether Carter had held a
convocation or something which was very poorly attended by the
students. It must have been in the spring. I don't think it was his
installation. It was after that. The student's hadn't turned out. Students
didn't turn out in large numbers here two weeks ago for the Honors
Convocation. He was apparently a little annoyed at that. Carter had replaced the security system. When he came it consisted of what were
essentially fire watchmen. Lockett was one of them. What's his name
that runs the Slippery Rock Auto Parts store? Kenny Lockett's father,

-39-

K:

I guess, was one of them. They didn't carry arms or anything. They
walked around and punched in at the stations in the buildings. They
shut the windows. They made sure the buildings were secure. They
walked through the dorms, but they basically were watchmen in that
sense of the word. Carter decided he wanted something more so he laid
them off or got rid of them and he hired, he contracted, with some
outside agents. I don't know which one it was anymore.

H:

Kids called them rent-a-cop .

K:

Kids called them rent-a-cop, right. These guys carried side arms and
billies, etcetera. It was a spring day. Now think of where Rhoads Hall
sits and across from Rhoads Hall is that brick wall at the top. I think it's
there for protection so you won't go down that hill opposite Rhoads and
across the embankment that runs from Maltby down toward North Hall.
The kids, as they had from the day Rhoads was built, were sitting on the
wall. The boys were sitting on the wall , of course, watching the girls walk
down the steps into Rhoads Hall, and the cops came along and said to
them, get off the wall. You're not allowed to sit on the wall. Now why anybody would issue such an order is beyond reason . The kids got upset.
So they got off the wall and they went up the hill to the President's house
and they knocked on the door and they said they wanted to talk to him.
He said, I don't want to talk to you. They said, listen, we've been ordered

-40K:

off the wall and we're going to have a rally to protest this. Come to our
rally. He said, this is how the kids tell the story, you didn't come to my
convocation, I'm not going to your rally. So they had a big rally in front of
Old Main, actually in front of North Hall, and somebody had the presence
to call the television and they set up a television camera, and, of course,
it made the news. But from that time on the kids were down on Carter

R:

Doesn't take much.

K:

It doesn't take much. He was seen as standoffish. The other thing that he
did that I think got him into trouble with the community, now again
hearsay. Butler County had decided early in the 1960's to take advantage
of the new act and organize a community college. I wasn't a principal. I
didn't talk to anybody directly involved. My surmise is that Armco and
Pullman wanted to transfer some training functions. Their drafting
programs, their metallurgical technician programs, which they did
in-house, they were happy to have the community college assume some
of that. And, of course, there was a demand for space in colleges and the
community college could help with that. If you look, Butler's only one of
some thirteen counties that have community colleges. They don't all
have them. So they organized a community college. Carter arrives after
the fact. I don't know if it's true that it was open or not, but the decision k
had already been made. He was invited to speak at the Butler Chamber

-41K:

of Commerce and he tells them they made a stupid mistake creating a
community college, because Slippery Rock could have taken care of all
of it for them. Well, he of course, in that act offended the power group
in Butler including George Kiester's friends, I guess. From then on
Kiester wasn't so sure he liked his new president because Kiester and
he ultimately had a falling out.

R:

I understand.

K:

Some were saying the Democrats put Weisenfluh in, actually they pushed
Dale Houk out. The Democrats put Weisenfluh in when the Democrats
gave power back to the Republicans. The Republicans were happy to
push Weisenfluh out and put Carter in, and at George Kiester's
succession to office replacing Emma [Guffey Miller] as chairman of
the Board represents that. When we came to the end, the Republicans
were down on Carter and Emma Guffey Miller was his strongest
advocate, because somehow or other the one group of people he was
able to get on with were the two old ladies on the Board, Emma Guffey
Miller and Mrs. Vincent, Leila Vincent, and that was his main support
on the Board. That's the political politics of it. Incidentally, in the middle
of the Carter thing in 1968, we were going through a Middle States
evaluation. Middle States had been here in the fall or in February it was,

-42H:

and done their onsite survey and had an exit interview which they
made the usual comments on, you know, you got some problems but
everything's not too bad. They had no sooner got off campus a couple
of weeks than this vote of no confidence came up and Carter resigned
and they immediately invited themselves back on campus to talk to us.
I'm trying to think who the chairman of that committee was. Lawson was
the chairman of the committee, who ultimately ended up as a vicepresident at Pitt. Although in those days he was up at Fredonia, if I
recall correctly. Lawson comes on and we call the chairmen together,
and he starts telling the Middle States committee, which I guess I was
on because I was a chairman. And he starts chewing us out, like how
could you do this to your President? We looked at him and said, hey,
he deserved it. Since that day I've had some questions about Lawson,
even though Lou Razzano is a good friend of his and if you want to know
what happened, his perceptions, you can ask Lou. Because I think he
over-reacted, and acted like, what right have you? Of course, what he
was upset about, and I guess to some extent he was right, was faculty
members going around behind the President. I think there is another
dimension, of course. Going back in the Middle States files there is
probably a long history of political interference with the state college

-43-

K:

system. Not just Slippery Rock. I've given you the Slippery Rock
perspective, but I think they saw that. We just handed them an
opportunity to come down on the state college system.

H:

I didn't feel that we went behind anybody's back, but we felt we had a
right to go to the Board in open meetings. We felt that they were open
meeting because it was a state institution.

K:

You're talking about the open meetings, but the fact is the Board
members for the most part were people who lived in town like Leila
Vincent and Emma Guffey Miller and West who owned the grocery
store and feed mill over on Franklin. They were local people. To some
extent, they still are. The result was that you couldn't help but run into
them around town. Everybody knew them. They were not some remote
group. They were around most of the time, at least some of them were.
They were friends of members of the faculty. It wasn't a matter of doing
something consciously. Maybe you took advantage of friendship maybe
to tell them what you thought, but it wasn't like you had to call up
somebody in Pittsburgh and say, can I come down to talk to you? I have
a problem with the President. It wasn't anything like that. But, I think,
that's part of what happened because Middle States was quite upset
about political manipulation in the state college system, and we got in the
middle of the act and suffered as a result of it.

-44H:

It wasn't anything new that hadn't gone on before. Many presidents.

R:

And there were a number of people who just plumb left when Carter
arrived.

K:

People didn't like Carter and went looking for jobs.

R:

And then he fired some folks along the way and closed the Lab School.
I understand that was really a mess.

K:

Some of the schools were cutting loose their Lab Schools, and he
appointed a committee to look it over. Helen, my own colleague was on
the committee, and when the committee brought in a report saying they
thought the Lab School still had a place to play in the training in a teacher
preparation institution, he said, thank you for your report, and appointed
another committee which had people who were of a different composition
and came in and said the Lab School is an unnecessary expense.

R:

How arbitrary was this man?

H:

Well, you know, that's the whole thing. If he had approached things
differently, maybe many of these things might not have happened.

K:

By the way, he was a bright and capable person. He was one of the
smartest guys I ever did business with.

R:

How could he have such lousy interpersonal skills then?

K:

He was also a professor of psychology, just add to that. I think part of
it was arrogance. I suspect that some of the arrogance may have come

-45K:

out of the fact that he was quick.

H:

It was his first job as president.

K:

He had never been more than a department chairman. He hadn't had that
growing up experience.

R:

What happened? Was there a lot of fear of the man or what kind of day
to day feeling was there about the man?

K:

I think you backed away. You stayed out of Old Main in a sense.

H:

I didn't feel I could respect him.

R:

You did have personal things you had to do around him?

H:

Well, I was in Old Main at the time acting like a graduate dean.

R:

Well, how was it like then being at Old Main in the early Carter
administration?

H:

Well , I was there just very briefly during his administration until they
appointed another person, but I knew at the time I didn't want to stay
there because I wouldn't have been able to work with him sincerely. I
think some people were afraid because they were afraid of losing their
jobs, because, I think, he was capricious in the way he released people.

K:

We had a tenure system under state law and I don't think he ever fired a
tenured faculty member. He may have pushed out some of the nontenured staff and he may have made some other people uncomfortable
enough to leave. The chairman of the English department?

-46H:

I don't know.

K:

It was a funny thing. I walked into Old Main one afternoon. Of course,
we used to pick up our mail at Old Main about four o'clock. This
happened more than once. Marc Selman or somebody grabbed me and
said, what are you doing for the next hour? And I said I was going to pick
up my mail and go back to the office and then go home. Why? Come
here, we need you. Come up to the President's house. The next thing I
know it's four or five o'clock in the afternoon, and I'm drinking bourbon
and I'm presumably a member of an ad hoc committee. One of the
committees that I was an ad hoc on just because I was at Old Main at the
wrong time, it seemed to me, was the committee that met with applicants
for what was then the Dean of Education. Turned out to be Jim Roberts,
except when all the dust settled he ended up being vice-president or
Dean of Instruction, whatever it was. Because originally he had applied
for the job as Dean of Education, and Carter came to us and said, you
recommend him for Dean of Education? Schmittlein, who was then Dean
of Liberal Arts, presumably acting as his agent, said, I guess so. I can't
even remember which of us got trapped into this deal. I think it may have
been Tony Pagano and me. Well , whoever was around Old Main that
afternoon. They had a list. I didn't know that because it's not like
someone called me on the phone and said come over. Then he said,

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what about the Vice-president for Instruction or whatever the title was at
the time, Dean of Instruction, Dean of Academic Affairs? The man hasn't
had that much experience with the system. We had some reservations.

H:

He was only 39 years old.

K:

Yes, and the other thing is he had been at the College of the Ozarks
which was on the AAUP blacklist and that didn't make him stand well
with us.

R:
K:

Before Grove City, huh?
Yes, even before Grove City. No, Grove City got put on the blacklist
when I first came here.

R:

1953?

K:

1962, 1963. Happened about the time I got here. And we said we have
some reservations about that. We hadn't met any other candidates or
something. And they kept twisting our arm. Would you agree or would
you agree? Finally, I remember, we said to Al , listen, tell the President
if he wants him we're not going to object. No, no, the question is do you
want him? Well, listen, his main job as Vice-president would be to get
along with the President. It was the funniest. We got our arms twisted to
consent to Jim Robert's appointment, in effect. That's how I felt about it,
at least. To recommend something we weren't exactly prepared to
recommend. Not that we were opposed to him. We just had some

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reservations and we hadn't seen any other candidates. We didn't know
what the agenda was. We felt like we had been had. And that's, I think,
the kind of thing that happened. You'd walk into Old Main, and suddenly
Marc or somebody would grab you. Next thing you'd know you're talking,
you're sitting with the President.

R:

Then Albert Watrel was here eight or nine years?

K:

He came when we got rid of Carter which would have been 1968 and
stayed till , he didn't quite make his ten years. He didn't stay long enough
to make his pension. I think he finished nine.

R:

Yes.

K:

Or maybe he finished eight and the ninth is his sabbatical or something .

R:

I'd forgotten what the arrangement was.

H:

I wasn't really in on what was happening on that.

K:

Watrel looked good and we brought Watrel in and we all relaxed. And
Watrel, in that sense, didn't threaten. I didn't find him a threatening
character.

H:

No. He was pleasant.

K:

Apparently Middle States, the word that was passed, I guess, to the
Trustees was, we want you to have a president. We want it to be
somebody from outside. Well , there was nobody inside that really could
have done it. We want to have a president. We want him in place by the

-49K:

first of July. Carter leaves in March and you hire a president by the first
of July. I remember, we went to the Board at the time and said, a national
search would take probably the better part of a year. You want to
advertise widely. You would want to interview widely. You want to go on
campus and talk to the people. Next thing we know, they're running
along doing their thing. They didn't even know where to advertise. We
had to tell them. Peter Bender? I'm not even sure what his job was at
Westinghouse. Marc Selman, I think, says he was Westinghouse's bag
man with the legislature. Ask Marc about that. But the feeling was that
whatever his role was it was more a political liaison role than it was an
administrative role. Peter was a war hero and wanted to have something
more on his tombstone, I guess. Unkind perhaps. He is now deceased.

R:

Watrel's removal by the governor when they locked up the office, that
was really a fairly abrupt thing?

K:

We read about it in the papers. At least I did.

H:

I heard later, now I don't know if this is true or not, but his man that took
care of the finances, like as a Vice-president for Administrative Affairs,
or whatever he was called in those days, that he had two sets of books
and that that's what got everybody into trouble. But I don't know whether
that's true or not. His name is Thompson.

R:

Don Thompson.

-SOK:

I don't think they ever proved any malfeasance or anything, that's the
point.

H:

Because everybody left.

K:

Watrel's departure is one of the few cases on record where a vicepresident succeeded in firing a president.

H:

I think that's what happened.

K:

Because the story as we have always got it, and you can ask Jim
Roberts.

H:

He won't tell you.

K:

He'll tell you something probably, but apparently Watrel had come to a
parting of the ways with Roberts. We didn't get into why he wanted to get
rid of him. Apparently he called Roberts in and told him on a Thursday,
look, I'm not continuing you as Vice-president next year. This was in the
spring. Now you have certain choices. You can go back to being a
professor. I'll support you if you want to be a professor. I'm not just firing
you out of hand but you're not going to continue as Vice-president. that
was a Thursday. Roberts went home to consider his options, and somewhere along the line between Thursday and Friday morning he called
whoever he knew then in Harrisburg. And he said something that caused
the Governor, I guess it was Shapp, to conclude that he had better
move in and take control of the situation. The charge had to be something

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of misconduct because, of course, they in effect sealed the office to keep
him from destroying records. Yet when the chips settled he was never
charged with criminal misconduct. He obviously served at the Governor's
pleasure, so the Governor fired him. He was never charged with
misconduct. He was allowed to go on for a year on a terminal leave
type of thing. The feeling was the Jim Roberts had taken the Secretary
of Education down the primrose path and told her things that didn't
prove out. One hypothesis is that he told her he knew things from
wiretaps and that Shapp and company were not about to accept as
evidence intercepted phone conversations.

H:

We don't know a thing that's true.

K:

No, we don't know.

H:

Just like the books.

K:

The other thing, of course, is somewhat plausible, and that is that
stadium press lodge or whatever it is, the Watrel's Folly which was
built, circumvented state building and design requirements. It clearly
circumvented the requirement that buildings have to be approved by the
state art commission or something. Whether it did or not, I don't know,
but there were certain projects that when you hit a certain size you had
to get approval from Harrisburg. He didn't do that and he never bid it as a
building project. It was done by the maintenance department. Basically,

-52-

K:

we're putting up a press section and then we're enclosing the press
section, and then we wait a couple of weeks, we buy some more stuff
and we're finishing it up, etcetera, etcetera. So in a sense, it's not exactly
malfeasance and you can't prove that he go any money in his own
pocket, but he circumvented some regulations governing purchases of
supplies and buildings and stuff.

R:

Is it fair to say that it's very difficult to be president of one of these kinds
of colleges?

K:

It's probably difficult to be president of any kind of college.

R:

Is it because of the varied kind of constituents you have to serve?

H:

In the old days, I don't know about now, but in the old days people weren't
trained to be administrators. They were popular faculty members or there
was somebody who just decided he wanted to apply for the presidency.
It wasn't until we got into some trouble that they decided to look outside
of the campus, but they still didn't get people that had the administrative
training. But, I think, it's more and more that, and, of course, they're
hiring economists or public relations people or whatever they need. If
they need money raised, they're going to hire that person for that job

K:

There you're talking about the change in what the job demands.

H:

Right.

K:

But faculty, I think, would still prefer that a president have a legitimate

-53K:

academic degree based on doing research and some extensive
classroom experience. They figure this is what the school is all about
and he ought to understand what we do. But if you think about it, very
few people who have gone that route, have real administrative experience
and talent. When the schools were small, it may not have been critical , I
guess maybe in a sense, for someone like Weisenfluh who probably was
school principal. He probably was a public school administrator. In a
sense, he performed both roles and he could fit in well. Watrel , of course,
was a chemist by training. His Ph.D. was in chemistry. Then you get to
Reinhard who goes up through the student affairs ranks looking at
administration all the way, program administration all the way. You begin
to wonder if he understands what a college is about, however good he
may be at the external relations end of the business. By the way, I was
told within the week, by a speech teacher who was on campus from
Frostburg, Reinhard's in trouble again.

H:

He was from Harrisonburg, Virginia, originally, Madison. Didn't he go
there?

K:

He was in Kentucky at one point, wasn't it, they got him in Kentucky.

R:

They bought his contract up.

H:

He is a big P.R. man, though.

K:

But, think of all the things a guy has to do, and I think you've got a

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K:

problem. He's got to be an administrator. He's got to manage budgets.
He's got to fund raise now these days. They didn't use to have to fund
raise in the state college system. Of course, years ago they had to be
very sensitive to political currents because these schools were to some
extent agencies, a part of a very politicized government administration,
more so than it is now. I think Middle States and the separation of the
SSHE system has gotten us out from under that. They have to be
sensitive to a political constituency and alumni contributors
constituency and yes, it's a tough job.

R:

You have to have some equanimity in your temperament because if
you're an explosive personality you're just destined for problems, it
seems to me.

K:

Well , then Reinhard had a tendency to go off half-cocked and that's
what gets him into trouble. Aebersold's a little more measured in his
behavior.

R:

The faculty is unafraid. The student body is unafraid. You don't have
anyone to run from you.

K:

You haven't got any real power either.

R:

Fear just doesn't work anymore.

K:

Rewards work though

R:

The classroom's the same way. These students are absolutely not

-55R:

intimidated by faculty. In my early years, they were kind of cowed.

K:

In your early years a C was a bad grad, huh? These are colorful people
we've been witness to in these changes. I'll tell you what's interesting.
I don't know if you feel it the same way, but to me having worked for so
many presidents, how institutions' sense of self, and how the tone, the
climate, on the campus does shift when there is a change at the top. You
say to yourself, hey, there's 350 or 360 faculty members, there are deans,
there are department chairmen, there are vice-presidents. That guy on
the third floor of Old Main, he's both physically and organizationally
removed from me, and yet somehow you can feel the difference. At
least I do. I don't know whether junior faculty members do, but the
more involved in things you are, the more you are. The Aebersold
administration is different than the Reinhard administration. That was
different than the Watrel administration.

R:

How have you felt about the years you have been here? How's it served
you?

K:

Martha has retired .

H:

I felt I grew while I was at Slippery Rock. I never had a day when I didn't
want to go to school.

R:

Unbelievable.

H:

I enjoyed my work but I also got involved in some sticky situations that I

-56H:

don't like now. But I felt that you had to solve problems, that's all.

K:

I don't think there's ever been a day I didn't want to go to class. There
were days when I worried a little about just going to school. Those were
days when situations were tense in terms of faculty-administration
relations and you wondered what was going to happen or how this was
all going to work itself out. But you go in and you close the door and you
stand in front of your students, and that's irrelevant. I mean when they
give you the classroom and the students, who's president becomes kind
of irrelevant.

R:

But the larger your role in self-government becomes, the more difficult
your job in terms of your relationship to your colleagues becomes.
Because if you're on departmental or all-college committees, you're on
promotion committees, sabbatical committees, tenure committees and all
of those kinds of things, you have to make judgments that hurt people
and help people as well , and it seems to me that those became stickier
problems as we grew with all-college committees.

H:

I think that's true and I served on a lot of committees. I was always
elected, very seldom was I appointed. I was appointed to some but most
of them are elective committees and I just felt I would do the best I could
do, and to be as fair as I could be.

K:

From the day you came on campus, I suppose initially the women on

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campus became aware of you, but it didn't take very long before you were
regarded as a campus leader. You may have been just about the senior
ranking woman. As you say, there were very few women with terminal
degrees

H:

Right. And a lot didn't want to be on college-wide committees. I wanted to
do that because that's one of the reasons I changed from a large k
university to a small college. I wanted to be more involved in the
university community than I had been able to be before. If anyone said,
why don't you run for this committee, I did.

K:

And you got elected.

H:

And I always got elected I think I lost one department committee one time
but that was about it. It wasn't because of me as much as it was because
they needed women on committees, and there weren't as many women
there to run.

K:

We didn't need women on committees. Some of us may have wanted
women on committees but we didn't need women on committees.

H:

We enjoyed working with each other. I remember one committee, one
early committee when I was first there, some man said, well , you just
don't understand that. And I said, don't tell me whether I understand
something or not. That took care of that relationship from then on.
That's how I felt. You couldn't served in groups when they were telling

-58H:

you how to think or what you understood and what you didn't understand.
I couldn't stand for that. So you get a reputation , I guess. And some like
that and some don't. But I just felt that I did the best I could. My father,
who was a teacher in a little red school house, would have to be proud of
me. I couldn't do anything that would not make him happy.

K:

I'm just laughing because I think Joe's father was a teacher in a little
red schoolhouse, too.

R:

He was in a one room school. A teacher in West Virginia. Had three
brothers in class with him at one time. At Bearsville, West Virginia.
What about the institution? I know there have been high spots and low
spots, most of those having to do with serious morale problems with the
administration, but we've had a lot of institutional achievement.

K:

When you said you were acting graduate dean that far back you must
have been the first one because the graduate programs were so new in
1962 and your department was probably the first one.

H:

I wasn't the first one.

K:

The initial push was for a Master of Ed. in phys. ed. and I guess there was
a secondary ed., one with English and social studies.

H:

Right.

K:

And I guess maybe elementary. I'm not sure whether there was or not.

H:

I wasn't first but I don't remember who. Maybe George was.

-59K:

George Moore?

H:

Yes.

K:

And when George moves off, you move in. Okay, that's what it was.

H:

Right. I didn't apply for anything like that. Dr. Edwards called me in and
asked me whether I could be that temporarily.

K:

Henson Harris was the Dean of Instruction. The day Carter got the job
Henson took a job and left town almost overnight. And I guess as I think
about it I was sufficiently worried about this worsening situation to ask
Henson for a recommendation for my file and he left town, I think, before
he could write it. I went in to see him one day and the next day he was
gone. That was when Carter came in. This guy knew that Carter and he
would not get along and he took off instantly. He accepted a job. He just
didn't accept it he left town and George got moved up as an acting dean
and you got moved up, I guess, as acting dean.

H:

I wouldn't say moved up, just moved in. I think there's no question that the
University has grown. Even though there were rocky roads, I mean, our
evaluations show that we still have a good teacher education program
and that we are a multifaceted institution that we certainly weren't when
we came in the 1960's.

K:

No. Think of the change from just a relatively small teacher training
institution, 1500 to 2000 students, to a multipurpose institution.

-60H:

There are still some problems and I think wherever you go there would
be those problems. There are academic jealousies. There's still turf
protection, I'm sure.

K:

The liberal arts revision got turned down again.

H:

Yes, see. We served on many of those committees, too. So some of the
problems that I hear of even as a retired faculty member are the same
problems I heard in the 1960's, but there are many other things that are
new and exciting and it should be that way in every institution, I would j
think.

R:

Many colleges and universities have particular departments that they
develop more strongly than they do others, and in the institution and the
student body, the reputation of those departments is considerable. Has
that been what had happened here?

K:

I have to say this, not because of Martha, our historic strength is in
physical education.

H:

I think it certainly was. I don't know if it is now. I hope it is.

R:

Has it stayed constant?

H:

I think over the years it has, but I would have to check with the people
who are working with it now.

R:

So the graduates that come out of physical education go onto become
teachers, coaches?

-61H:

Some.

R:

Some.

H:

I'm sure that you would find many, many people in totally unrelated jobs
now. Especially in certain years when it was difficult to find a teaching job
they went into other things Some hung on and just did substitute work
until they found what they wanted. I know some are in administration now
and I'm sure many different jobs One of our graduates, I know, is selling
packaged medical supplies. So it's probably entirely different.

K:

Even when we were strictly teacher training, between the fact that
probably we were accessible in terms of cost, or maybe location, or
maybe academic, but my guess is probably not much over half the kids
ever really stuck with the teaching careers. Now it's hard to judge
because a fair number of the women, after a short time teaching, withdrew
from the work force because they had gotten married and started families.
Whether they then came back as teachers or over the course of years
went somewhere else and did something different, you don't know. But
for even the male students, I think in many cases, this was an accessible
education and it was a good preparation school. That's the historic base
of the school. Over the years the thing that we do that the littler liberal
arts colleges in the area don't do is teacher preparation. We treat it
seriously and do it well. Of course not everybody did phys. ed. , but we

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K:

did it and that was our strength. That's why we did it. When you get away
from the education departments, I don't know if you can finger one as
outstanding. I think a student gets a good education in just about every
department on campus. And I suspect that every student is offered more
than he or she is prepared to take with a few exceptions. You want to
talk about the communications department?

R:

I don't know.

K:

The business school departments have done fairly well but I don't know
that they rank other business schools, if you want to be blunt about it.

R:

Sure.

K:

I have no way of comparing them to say Clarion or IUP or something like
that not to mention Thiel and Geneva and Grove City.

R:

Well, we certainly are graduating some awfully, awfully, bright folks. What
about the non-traditional movement?

K:

What a delight.

R:

It is so great for the youngsters to be there in class with 30, 40, 50 years
olds in large numbers.

K:

My guess is that the three of us started teaching school when World
War II veterans were around. Now you may have been hiding out at the
public school at the time.

H:

I was in graduate school then.

-63K:

We had them and we had the Korean vets and then things did drop off.
The Vietnam era was a bit different, but there was that return to the
classroom of male students who have had to make career changes and
female students who, I guess, in their own way are making career
changes or belatedly finishing up degrees.

H:

Well , I think it's the two-income family that changed all that. Way back,
just as you mentioned, a woman might teach for three years to get her
permanent certification and then she just knocked it off and didn't go back
and didn't have to work and didn't. But now it's way over 50 percent of the
women working, and so many of them are coming back to finish degrees
or to get another degree. That wouldn't have happened before. No need
to. I think the greatest thing about it is the uplift for the teachers. You get
awfully tired of reading papers where you're rewriting the whole paper for
the student. That would have been a nice morale boost, I think.

K:

The trouble is if there are too many non-traditional students in class it's
awfully easy to teach to them and ignore the others. They understand
your historical references. They understand your examples.

H:

Right. You don't have to repeat everything ten times.

K:

Of course, they're well motivated.

R:

What about the party school image and all of the revelry and sometimes
violence that we've had.

-64H:

I think anyone that I talk to that teaches in other places, is saying the
same things. They're a party school and they're trying to get rid of that
image. So I don't think it's just us.

K:

No. I think Slippery Rock is no different. No better, no worse than other
comparable places.

H:

If that's a party school , they're really pretty hard up for a town like
Slippery Rock. Well , how can you be partying with ten pizza shops in
town.

K:

They can have pizza and beer. That's the kind of party we're talking
about. They apparently do, obviously. I don't know whether what we see
in the classroom is the result of excessive partying or whether they stay
up and watch too much late night television or whether they're just no
there.

H:

When I'm in the college union, it just amazes me to see kids sitting in the
middle of the day by the TV watching a soap. I mean, I wouldn't have had
time to do any of the things that I see them doing, or playing those
machines downstairs.

K:

There obviously were some students like that in our undergraduate
schools. Whether they graduated or not isn't clear.

H:

We didn't have those machines.

K:

We had pinball machines. We had billiard tables.

-65H:

Well, pinball I know, but girls weren't allowed to play those. You didn't
get caught then.

K:

Did you play a lot of bridge when you were in college?

H:

Yes, bridge, most bridge.

R:

When I was Alderson-Broadus, we only had a 180 students at this little
Baptist college in Phillipi , West Virginia, and the guys sat around with
their hats on chewing tobacco. Spittin' in buckets. I was flabbergasted
when I saw that because I had gone to St. Mary's. Well, I'd gone to
West Liberty as well, but at St. Mary's University of Texas, they certainly
didn't sit around chewing tobacco at Jesuit institutions.

H:

Now you see the kids with their empty Coke cans in class for their
whatever.

R:

Smokeless tobacco.

K:

Not too much. Mostly they just sip on their Cokes. Frankly, they're
hung up on Coke.

H:

Well, when I saw them not sipping after watching them for abut 15
minutes, they were out. I mean it was either a Coke can or me.

R:

I remember at Memphis State when I was there they had a dress code
for women who were taking physical education.

K:

Oh yes, that was true here up into the late 1960's.

R:

Well, this was for women who were involved in gym, going to gym class.

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R:

If they were going from their dormitory to gym class, they had to wear
their raincoats. Did we do that here?

H:

Yes.

K:

Did they have to wear raincoats?

H:

They had to wear something over their shorts and stuff.

K:

Women had either a kilt, wasn't it, or short skirts.

H:

Well , in the early days, in the early 1960's, the women had to dress in
hose and heels to go to dinner on Sundays.

K:

Even when we shifted to cafeteria services, which we did when
Weisenfluh opened, male students had to wear a coat and tie to go into
dinner. Women students had to wear hose and skirts to go to dinner.

H:

That's a whole other thing that would be interesting for you to check. We
don't know about all the hours and all that.

K:

Well, I know, because I had to go get baby-sitters and so on and sign
them out of the dorm overnight. Things like that. If they stayed late they'd
say, well, the dorm closes at midnight. If she's not coming back at
midnight, just tell her to sleep at your house and bring her in the morning.
Oh, okay. I'd call Lois Harner and say, Lois, you got a baby-sitter? We
want to play bridge tonight. She'd say, wait a minute. She'd come back
and say, I've got one I can recommend. That was one of the things that
the place nice. It was a great place to raise kids. You could always get

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baby-sitters. The baby-sitters were sweet and competent. The town
was small so if anything happened, you could be home in five minutes. It
was a very pleasant life situation for me as a parent with young children.

R:

We have a hundred years plus teaching experience among us. How do
you evaluate teachers?

K:

You mean how do we evaluate other people who teach, or how should
teachers be evaluated?

R:

Either, or. Has faculty evaluation been a problem for you? As an
administrator and as a colleague.

H:

You mean like our teacher observations, our peer observations?

R:

Exactly.

H:

It wasn't a problem. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed visiting other classes. The
only problem was, I said it the way I saw it and sometimes the person I
was observing didn't see it that way and didn't even want to sign the
sheet actually a couple of times. When people observed me, I thought it
was very exciting and very helpful, because in our past years we could
teach for years and not one administrator or anyone would ever come in
our classroom to share or to see what we were doing. So it was just so
nice to have a colleague come in, and to talk to each other about it. So
I liked it and I liked doing it.

K:

As acting chairman, and you were acting chairman, I have to do a whole

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slew and I have more to do yet. I've been doing it. I haven't had problems
with the people, in the sense that they see it as a positive and supportive
thing. I think you're right. I mean, it's a limited instrument.

H:

I only had one in all the years that really objected.

R:

To what you had to say, not to the process?

H:

They might object to the process too, but it was mostly that I saw things
differently than he did and, you know, to me, that's natural. Everybody
sees what they do perhaps different than somebody else. That's the only
one in all those years.

K:

I think you would pick up a real problem, I'm not sure.

H:

See, the problem with it is that people will gloss over things, or they want
to give a good report so they don't really say it like it is. That's the
problem with it.

K:

That's the administrator's problem. The problem is that they take the
person aside and they say I'm distressed by this but they don't put it in
the written report. When they do begin to put it into the written report,
now you're talking to a former chairman of the Grievance Committee,
when they do start to put it in the report, it's because they have concluded
this person has real problems, and it's about time to start making a paper
record . So the first couple of times around you're not going to get it
written down. I think the observation may pick up on some real problems.

-69K:

I think occasionally it's constructive, certainly to relatively new faculty
members who are still open to change. It's constructive. And I think it
doesn't hurt the rest of us to have to stop and think about what we do
once in a while. I don't think it's a very precise instrument.

R:

I've always felt that the freshmen colleagues we get needed more help
from the people who had been around for a while. Because I saw
youngsters, and I think I may have been one of them, who went through
four or five years of very rocky times trying to acclimate themselves to
the world of teaching.

K:

I started as a grad assistant in 1949 which is a terribly long time ago. I
feel awfully sorry for those students who had me those first couple of
years. I learned my craft at their expense and I may not have learned it
well but I learned it at their expense.

H:

Going back to the three years teaching experience that were required
at one time, at least the person coming in had some teaching experience.
If you hire someone who comes without any teaching experience at all
or any education degree, which is possible, the students can suffer for
quite awhile until that person understands teaching methods and can
learn by doing.

K:

But look at some of the ones we get. Very often their experience has been
as assistants, teaching assistants, or as instructors in mass courses

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where it was fairly structured for them and supervised . Now you cut them
loose and they have to deal with students in courses other than beginning
level courses. They are expected to carry their own responsibilities. I've
just been made aware of it. Since Ted left town I've been doing some
hand holding. I guess that's what department chairmen do, right? I mean
everybody comes in to tell you their troubles including what is or isn't
going on, not everybody obviously, but if somebody is worried about
something or concerned about something you hear about it, and a lot
of what you do is emotional support for the staff.

H:

I think that's mostly what those teacher observations are is to support
each other. If you think of it as an evaluation technique, I don't think it's
working very well because people don't want to tell it like it is.

R:

And they'll say things privately that they do not put in print.

H:

Right.

R:

Yes. We've had that experience.

H:

I think they're good, but not for the reason they were originally meant
to be, an evaluative technique.

K:

They open the possibility of discussion.

H:

Or tenure and for promotion. If you just used it to evaluate the person
in your opinion and to share that, that' one thing, but when they know
it's being used for tenure applications and promotion applications, it

-71H:

ruins it right there.

R:

It seems to me that we're getting a lot more scholarship out our faculty
now.

K:

The pressure's on.

R:

It is on.

K:

Yes. There's a feeling on campus. I was at the Dean's meeting this
afternoon before I came down here, this is Mastrianna in Information
Science and Business Administration, and the Dean's talking about the
fact that granted our primary obligation is teaching , but he would also
like to see a little more of something beyond just going to conventions.
He wants to see people participating. He wants to see people giving
papers and so on. So the pressure is on, more so than ever before. And
you know when the chips are down, you go back to evaluating teachers.
Maybe when you've been on a campus for a while, you know the five or
ten percent of the faculty members who really seem to have an outstanding fell for teaching. Energize students. To explain things extremely
well. To somehow or other reach students. And you know the five or
ten percent who students have problems with, not all students , of
course. Some teachers with bad reputations may be very effective
teachers for some students. Of course, there is the question of teaching
and learning styles and how they fit. But the great masses of us are in

-72K:

the middle somewhere.

R:

A comfortable eighty percent majority.

K:

Probably. We can teach students who want to learn, and we can't teach
students who don't want to learn. I think the deans know that, and so
when the chips are down the one thing they can point to that's on the
record that separates those who perhaps are most deserving of reward or
recognition from the others is the scholarship thing. It's the one tangible
thing they can see. That's regrettable, but how do you evaluate teaching?
How do you say this person is really a very fine teacher? This person is a
good teacher. This person's weak as a teacher. The other thing, you
know, is when you teach do you tell the kids everything? What is it the
kids want to know? They want to know what do I need to know to do the
next assignment. What do I need to know to get a decent grade on the
final exam , and don't bother me with things that aren't going to be on the
exam. Well , is the good teacher the one who clearly identifies what it is
you need to remember and repeats it and makes them repeat it to the
point where they learn it and can do it? Or is the good teacher the one
who says somewhere in here are some things you need to know. If
you're bright and insightful you'll figure that out, and in here are some
things that are nice to know and you'll figure out what those are. Here's
some things maybe you need to know depending on your personal

-73-

K:

objectives. How do you teach? What are you teaching for? Are you
teaching for the first job or are you teaching for the second job the kid's
going to have?

R:

I wish I knew.

K:

Or maybe the whole person. Whatever that is.

R:

Are there any parting thoughts you would like to add?

H:

Well , I think in addition to the teaching, the actual teaching, the other
pleasurable thing for me at Slippery Rock was to be in my office more
hours than I was required to be because I always had the door open and
always had students coming in to answer questions or just to be there.
For them to see that my door was open. At least one door was open when
they came in that building for them to come in. That was the other very
pleasurable part about my job.

K:

Don't we always value the interaction with the students? I was reminded
of this today. The crew that went off to the SCA, our national meeting,
came back. And I said how was the trip, and they said we had a good
time traveling together. I like the company of my colleagues. Joe, we
miss you. In one sense you can't be replaced , but the people you work
with are people who it is a pleasure to work with. Not that you like them
all equally well , but as a group they're good company. They're people
who are companionable.

-74-

H:

That was the best part of those APSCUF legislative assemblies that
we went to for years, the trip there and back with our colleagues. The
meetings themselves were very ulcerous.

K:

Oh, I stopped going. I couldn't stand the assembly meetings. I just got
so bored at the politics, the tedium of the whole thing. The insignificance
of much of what was going on. You know we approved the contract,
don't you?

R:

No, I didn't know that. Glad to hear it.

H:

Figured you would.

K:

Sure.

R:

Thank you both very much.

H:

Nice to see you again, Joe

K:

Come up with another list of questions, we'll talk to you some more.

R:

Well , good.