Oral History Program Ronald Galli Interviewed by Ruby Licona 13 May 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ronald Galli Interviewed by Ruby Licona Special Projects Librarian 13 May 2008 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Galli, Ronald, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 13 May 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ronald Galli 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Ronald Galli. It was conducted May 13, 2008 and concerns his recollections and experiences with Weber State University. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. RL: This interview is being conducted with Ron Galli, a professor of physics at Weber State University. He has been here at Weber State since 1963. Thank you for joining us this morning. Ron, to begin with, tell us a little bit about your background; where you were born, where you went to school, etc. RG: I grew up in Salt Lake City. I went to school in Salt Lake and graduated from South High School, and then I went to the University of Utah. I started studying Engineering and then switched over to Physics in my sophomore year and finished up in Physics. I got a bachelor’s, a master’s and a Ph.D. in Physics all at the University of Utah. RL: You were a glutton for punishment, weren’t you? RG: Yes. During the time that I was a junior, I was nineteen years old and I was given the opportunity to be responsible for teaching some laboratory courses. I had full responsibility for those courses. That was kind of exciting because most of the students were older than I was. RL: I was just going to say, if you were a junior at nineteen, then you started there fairly early or went through very quickly. RG: I started there when I was seventeen. Anyway, I’d just taken the course the year prior to that. I had the opportunity to teach laboratories, and so I did and I really enjoyed it. I guess that is probably what got me interested in teaching physics. 2 So then I went on to get my bachelor’s degree. When I finished that, I went to work down in California for the Navy at the Naval Ordinance Test Station, where they designed and built guided missiles and such things. RL: In San Diego? RG: It was on the Mojave Desert at China Lake, California, just outside of a little town called Ridgecrest. So I spent the summers of ‘58 and ’59 at China Lake working for the Navy doing research on different things. Then I came back to the University of Utah and finished up my Ph.D. in solid state physics. During that period of time I had the opportunity to meet a famous chemist, Dr. Henry Eyring who, as all chemists and many physicists know, was the person who was responsible for discovering the equation which describes the rates at which chemical reactions proceed. As such, he came very close to winning a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work. In fact, he worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He was of the same caliber as Einstein. I didn’t know that at the time. When I went to meet him to enroll in a class, I was a graduate student. I’d passed my prelims by this time and I didn’t need any more formal course work, but I wanted to learn from Dean Eyring; he was dean of the graduate school at the time. So I went over to see him. I said I’m a graduate student in Physics, and I would like to take your course in Statistical Mechanics, which was a graduate course taught mostly for chemists and a few other interlopers, like physicists, metallurgists, and so on. RL: People who didn’t know any better. [Laughter] 3 RG: So he said, “You’re welcome to take the course.” I said, “I’ve got one problem, I don’t have the money to pay the tuition. I’d just like to sit in. I don’t need the credit.” He said, “Well, you know I’m dean of the graduate school, and you are supposed to pay tuition. But I’ll tell you what, you come to class every day and take notes and take the exams, and we’ll see how it goes.” I did that, and I got along quite well in the class. Sometimes after class I’d talk to him and ask him questions, not only about physics and chemistry, but also about his philosophy of life. He was a great man in many ways. We got to know each other pretty well. About halfway through winter quarter, I got a call from Dean Eyring. I said, “Oh, Dean Eyring, what can I do for you?” He said, “You’re taking this course, and you’re not paying tuition.” I said, “Yes, but remember we had that agreement.” He said, “Well, I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks, and I understand your thesis advisor is Pete Gibbs in the Physics Department,” (also a former student of Eyring). “I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks, and I’d like you to teach my course. Pete tells me that you are good at quantum mechanics, and that’s some of the material we’re going to be covering.” I said, “I’ll be happy to do that.” He said, “I’ll leave you my notes. In fact, I’m writing a book on statistical mechanics, and I’ll let you help me write a page or two in that book. That’s the topic that you will be teaching while I’m gone.” I got to know him quite well. I taught the course for a couple of weeks and then I got another call from him. He said “I’m going to be gone for another couple 4 of weeks. The final exam is coming up. I’d like you to give that final exam.” So I did, and I was a graduate student myself, teaching this course to graduate students. It was really a great experience for me. RL: Did you have to take the final exam also or just give it? RG: I wasn’t taking the course for credit. I took all the other exams. He wasn’t giving me a grade in the course anyway, so I was just taking it for my own information. He used to tell us a story about when he was walking across the campus with Einstein. He and Einstein would be talking, and there was a crop of some type growing on the side of campus. Eyring said, “Do you know what’s growing over there?” and Einstein said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea.” Eyring would say, “That’s a bean patch. Einstein, you don’t know beans.” You’d have to hear Eyring tell that story to get the whole essence of it. Of course, I’m talking about Henry Eyring Sr. Anyway, how that ties in to Weber State is that, when I got ready to look for a job in January or February of 1963, a man by the name of Paul Huish, who was division chairman of Math and Physical Science at Weber College came to the University of Utah looking for someone to come and set up a Physics Department. Thomas J Parmley, who was Physics Department chairman at the University of Utah at the time, sent Huish to me in my office as a graduate student. Paul Huish introduced himself and said he was told I might be interested in coming to the recently renamed Weber State College and being part of the Physics Department. I said, “I hadn’t really thought about that. Let me think about it.” They were quite interested in having me come because it was very difficult to find anybody with a Ph.D. in Physics that would be 5 interested in going to what had been a junior college. Weber’s future was totally unknown, so it was quite a gamble for me to decide to do that. At any rate, I finally decided to do it, but first, I went over to talk to Henry Eyring and ask his advice. He said, “Yes, that’s where you need to go.” In fact he said, “I’ll get on the phone and call Bill Miller; he’s the president of Weber and he and I are pretty good friends. I’ll put in a word for you,” which he did in my presence. He started losing creditability, because he was saying things about me that I thought were really nice but also generous. He followed up with a nice letter to President Miller. I still have a copy of the letter Henry Eyring wrote to introduce me to Weber State and help me get the job here. RL: You’ll have to give us a copy to put in our archives. RG: I can do that. I will attach one to this document.* RL: You came here in the fall of ’63, or that summer? RG: I was hired in March of ’63 for one month to come and help establish things, knowing that the Physics Department didn’t really exist at the time, as such. There were a couple of people teaching physics and they called it a department, but it really didn’t exist as a department. Two people were teaching at the time: Paul Huish chair of the Division of Math and Physical Science, and Charles Osmond, who was just in the process of retiring. At that time, you had to retire at age 68 from a faculty position, and Charles Osmond was 68. So in a sense I replaced Charles Osmond in the Physics Department, but I was hired with the expectation that I would build up a Physics Department basically from scratch, and that’s what I did. * See Attachment 1 6 I finished up my Ph.D. in March of ’63. I told them that I would like to come for a month to just set things up, go through the library and see what was available there, see what we needed to order for the library, see if we need to line up some other faculty positions and start recruiting, and some of those basic things. I said, “If I’m going to set up a Physics Department, I’ve got to do a little planning before I come in the fall, because I would like to have things in place.” I was planning to go to work that summer for AeroJet General in California, which I did for about six months, before I came to WSC in late September of 1963. Back to the period when I was here in the month of March to do some planning and preliminary work, I went through the library and found that the only subscriptions to scientific journals were Scientific American and maybe one other. The library did not yet subscribe to the American Journal of Physics, Physics Today, Physical Reviews, or even Chemical Abstracts. Weber had just been approved to be a four-year institution. In fact, the first senior class was the class of ’63-’64. The first graduating class from Weber State College was in 1964, and that was the year I started, so I taught the first two seniors in Physics in 1964. Kent Gilchrist and Jim Ross were the first two graduates of Physics in 1964. They were both about 10 years older than I was, but I had the privilege of teaching them their senior year. RL: It’s really impressive that you remember their names. Did you remain friends with them after? RG: Yes. We were friends for a long time. They’ve both passed away since. That was quite a building year. During that March I went through the library and ordered a 7 bunch of journals. As I recall, Jim Tolman was director of the library at that time. I worked with him to get these journals ordered, and we’ve got a pretty good collection now, going all the way back to 1963 on all of those. Another thing I wanted to do was to go to Dr. Robert A. Clarke, who was dean of the faculty, and request a couple more Physics professors. So we began hiring two additional Physics professors, one of whom was Dr. Gilbert Barton, who has since passed away. The other was Barry Parker, who we picked up from Canada. Barry Parker went on to have a very successful career. He worked with us here for a few years and before he got his Ph.D. at Utah State University and then became a professor at Idaho State for a long time. He wrote textbooks and got to be very well known. The three of us were basically the Physics Department in 1963: myself, Gil Barton, and Barry Parker. Paul Huish taught a class or two for us as well. RL: What kind of climate did you establish in the department? Were you all interested in continuing research or primarily in teaching? RG: Primarily teaching. Gil Barton was very interested in continuing his research, which he did. I think he got the first federal grant for research at Weber State. That came along about 1966 or ’67. Dr. Helmut Hoffman later criticized us for doing research. He was the academic vice president at the time and felt it wasn’t our mission to do research. Barton actually got a letter of chastisement. I wish I had that letter. I think it’s been lost, but I remember Barton showing me the letter from then Vice President Helmut Hoffman, that he should not be doing research. We are a teaching institution. 8 RL: As long as he wasn’t taking time from his teaching, what was the harm? RG: I agree with you. I think it was unfair criticism. RL: Kind of short-sighted. RG: In fairness to Hoffman, he did a lot to help build the stature of Weber State. He was very careful about the quality of faculty that he hired, and he did some good things for Weber State. He didn’t realized the importance of faculty continuing their research. So that was a little bit disappointing. The mission was primarily teaching. I started out with a fifteen-hour teaching load, and I was asked to also head the department. I didn’t have any reassigned time for that, and we didn’t have a secretary. So the climate was basically a junior college in transition to a four-year college, and the transition wasn’t complete. All of the mailboxes were down in Building 1. I suggested that we ought to have mail delivered to our departments, so I pioneered that. We got mailboxes built and we were one of the first to have mailboxes in our department. We didn’t have a department office; we had a division office. It took two or three years to establish a Physics Department office. We hired Linda Sampsell as a quartertime secretary, who was actually a half-time secretary shared between Physics and Chemistry. She came along about 1965, a couple of years after I got started here. By about that time Dr. Spence Seager, as I recall, was head of the Chemistry Department. Seager was directing the Chemistry Department, and I was chairing the Physics Department. The two of us decided we could share a half-time secretary. In the meantime we were planning the “new” science 9 building, and I was on the committee chaired by Bob Clarke. Each of the department heads, as they were called at that time, of the respective science departments were on the committee. There was Ralph Monk from Botany, Sheldon Hayes from Microbiology, Whitney Young from Zoologoy, Walter Buss, who was the head of the Geology Department at the time, Spence Seager in Chemistry, and myself in Physics. Those were the departments that were going to be in the new Science Building, the three Physical Science departments and three Life Science departments. That constituted the committee that planned the science building. It started out being one building, but ended up being two buildings; but that’s another story. RL: How did the process go? RG: We started in 1963. We had meetings that started at seven o’clock, as I recall. We met every Friday at seven o’clock to do the planning. By this time they had hired an architect to draw up the plans. Art Mueller and Tom Thliverous were the architects. I think I’m remembering that correctly. Anyway we traveled all over the western United States looking at science buildings during the fall, winter, and spring of’63-’64 to see what was out there, and we went up to Ricks College which is now BYU-Idaho. They’d just put in a new science building up there, and we visited that. We went down to California. We went over to Colorado. We visited all of the new science buildings everywhere. So we really did our homework. RL: You really had to plan for the moment, but be farsighted to plan for the future. 10 RG: We tried to be farsighted. I tried to plan for a faculty of ten, with a possibility of having a master’s program. The other department chairs weren’t thinking along those same lines. So I got labeled as being piggish when I asked for a certain amount of space, and they asked for a certain amount of space. The architect, Art Mueller, put this up on the wall as a chart. He mapped out, this is how much space Physics is asking for, and that’s the size of Texas. Here’s how much space Geology is asking for that’s the size of Rhode Island. The other departments were somewhere in between. RL: Nebraska and Iowa? RG: Yes. [Laughter] It was decided that there wasn’t enough money to have all of that space so we had to start paring down. But I thought I should ask for the space. I also included twenty percent for hallways and restrooms, which the other departments hadn’t included. I tried to think of all of our needs. We didn’t have the money, so we had to give a little bit so everybody could share equitably, and it could be done fairly, and we could come up with a nice plan. They had a planetarium at Ricks College. BYU also had a small planetarium, as I recall. I remember driving back from Idaho with Bob Clarke, who was chair of the building committee and also dean of faculty at the time. I told Bob, “They’ve got a planetarium at Ricks. Why don’t we get a planetarium in our new science building?” He said, “I don’t think there’s money in the budget for it, but it would be nice to have.” 11 In the meantime, I found out that Ralph Monk of the Botany Department wanted to have a greenhouse on top of the building. So I went to Ralph Monk and said, “Look, why don’t you support me with the planetarium idea, and I’ll support you with the greenhouse. We will see if we can’t somehow get Bob to see if he can come up with some more money so we can have these, as well as the additional space that we need.” To make a long story short, Bob Clarke went back to Washington and came up with some federal money to match the state money that was available. Instead of having one building, we ended up having two buildings. So that’s part of how we got the two science buildings. There’s a lot more to the story, but that’s part of it. So we ended up with a laboratory building and a lecture building and, on top of the laboratory building, we have a greenhouse. And on the top floor of the lecture building, is a planetarium. The way we sold this to the state building board was that we could teach astronomy classes in the planetarium. It could be used as a classroom, which we now do. So we teach all our astronomy in the planetarium. RL: And we have community programs. RG: There are lots of benefits to having the planetarium. If I hadn’t taken that trip up to Ricks College, we probably wouldn’t have a planetarium. RL: It sounds as though all of the people on the committee worked well together. In general, would you categorize the relationship in that division as being fairly easygoing? 12 RG: We really worked well together, got along well together. The faculty all had the same goal in mind and that was to have a great college. RL: So other than you being “piggish,” everyone got along really well? RG: I kind of got that label, I guess. They said, “This Galli just joined our faculty, and the first thing he does is ask for all the space in the building.” What I was hoping for was that each person would ask for what they needed, and then we could work it out. It turns out they saw it a little differently, and they weren’t planning as far ahead as I was. We’ve since expanded into and outgrown the science building. We quite urgently need more space. RL: Especially if the programs keep growing. So within your division, it sounds like there was a lot of camaraderie. Did you find that in the campus in general? RG: I think so. It has really been a great place to work right from the time I first came here. People are very friendly. They are very positive, and I found that the general climate at Weber State is really been upbeat and invigorating. It’s been a great place to be. RL: How would you compare the students you found here with those you had encountered at the U? RG: I was in a very intense graduate program at the U. By the time I got into graduate school. I’d established some study habits that went beyond my study habits as an undergraduate. I guess I anticipated that my students that I had would already have developed those same study habits. It was a shock to me that some students weren’t interested in studying and working the problems that they really needed to learn the material. I had to adjust, especially in teaching some of the 13 lower division courses, which I had never taken myself, especially the General Education courses in Physics. I needed a major attitude adjustment on my part to teach those courses. RL: There’s a difference between Intro to Physics and Quantum Mechanics, isn’t there? RG: Oh yes. But now it’s just the reverse. I enjoy teaching the Introduction to Physics more than I do the other courses, so I’ve kind of evolved downward, so to speak, but in a positive way. I mostly teach Physics 1010 now, and I thoroughly enjoy it. RL: Those fresh faces, taking in the information. RG: It’s nice to see the students get turned on to physics, and see their eyes light up, when they learn new concepts. RL: I think back to my physics course, and I was having such a hard time. I went to see the professor. I found out later that he was the graduate advisor for the star nuclear physics students at Berkeley, and here he was explaining basic physics formulas to me. All of the sudden, wow! It really makes sense. RG: That’s at Berkeley? RL: Yes. Dr. Knight. I remember him being so patient, drawing formulas on the blackboard and asking me questions. All of a sudden I could relate physics to the geometry I had learned. Like I said, all these years later I remember his patience. I was going to ask what other activities you were able to undertake. Were you able to keep up with your research from the beginning, or did you set some of that aside? 14 RG: The research that I did as a grad student and when I worked at AeroJet, I didn’t carry over to Weber State; but I did pick up some other aspects of research. I’ve since done some theoretical work on the special theory of relativity, and I’ve done a lot of work developing lecture demonstrations. I’ve invented some lecture demonstrations that are used by faculty at Weber State and some other places around the country as well. In fact, the last five years I’ve spent making movies of my lecture demonstrations, and now have about two hundred lecture demonstrations on two DVD’s. RL: Are you marketing those? RG: They are being marketed by Pasco out of California. Dr. Farhang Amirl, and I put those together. We spent about five years, finishing the project about January of 2008. I am also marketing a mechanical cat that I invented, called the Galli Cat, which flips over to land on its feet like the real cat does. I figured out the mechanics of the cat twist and have published and presented my research worldwide. RL: You came here essentially to establish the department and then, I assume, stayed on as chair? RG: I was chair for six years. RL: For six years, and then did you move up or step aside? RG: I stepped aside. It was time for me to step aside. I was happy to do that, and the department was happy to have me do that at the time. I’d done about all the damage I could do, I guess. Of those six years, three of them were spent planning the building and for the next three it was being built, so we didn’t move 15 into the building until the fall of ’69. I was one year in the building as department chair, and then I moved down the hall to a regular faculty office. I was there for about fourteen years and just enjoyed teaching physics. During that period of time, I was chair of campus committees and got involved in politics outside of the department. RL: Faculty Senate? RG: Faculty Senate and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, and a number of different things like that. I was an associate dean in Continuing Education for a year. I worked with Dean Richard Ulibarri part of that time. In the summer of 1983 Paul Huish passed away. After Paul retired, he taught for us for awhile. At the time he passed away in July 1983, Daryl Letham was teaching the summer physics program. Dr. Gilbert Barton, who was chair of the Physics Department at the time, came up to me at Paul Huish’s funeral and said, “Daryl Letham isn’t acting very well. He’s going to have to be replaced. He’s dropping his books. He’s muttering. He’s got some serious problems. We don’t really know what it is.” Well, it turned out that Daryl Letham had a brain tumor. Gilbert Barton asked me if I would teach Letham’s course and finish out the summer. I said, “Yes, I would be happy to do that,” which I did. I then went on vacation down to Cancun. When I made a phone call home to my wife, she told me that Daryl Letham had passed away and been buried. Everything was over, so there was no reason to rush home. When I came back, we’d just hired a new dean, Dennis Travis. In fact, I chaired the committee that 16 hired Dennis Travis as the dean. When I got back, Dennis Travis told us that Gilbert Barton would not be able to continue to function as department chair because he was acting strange. So Paul Huish died in July 1983, Daryl Letham died that summer, just a month or two after Huish, and now our new dean is telling us that we were going to have to replace our department chairman. He was doing a great job for us. As you recall, I hired Gilbert Barton back in 1963. In 1983, he was now department chairman, my boss, and I didn’t want to see him go. So we decided, in the Physics Department, to delegate three of us to go talk to Dean Travis to see why Gilbert Barton had to go. So David Tripp, Rondo Jeffery, and myself went to see Travis. Travis had a dossier on Barton by this time and convinced us something was wrong. They didn’t know what it was but he clearly couldn’t function as department chair, so we had to come up with a new interim department chair. Travis asked me if I would do it. I said, “I’ve had that job before. I don’t want the job, but I will do it on an interim basis, but only on an interim basis.” Of course there was more to the story. They had to poll the department. Two of us were acceptable to the department, Dave Tripp and myself. Travis asked me to be the chair but I said, “It’s only going to be temporary, I don’t want it long term.” Well, it turned out I stayed in there the next eleven years. In the meantime, Gilbert Barton was diagnosed with a brain tumor in about November. By December or early January, Barton passed away. RL: Your department doesn’t have a good record. 17 RG: So people asked, “What’s going on in the Physics Department? Paul Huish dies, then Daryl Letham, and then Gil Barton.” Three faculty members died within a period of about six or seven months. I think it was just coincidence but people speculated on a common cause. I had the job of department chair for the next eleven years. During that period of time, we hired a number of other faculty. In fact, in 1984 and 1985 we hired four or five new faculty members, and that was a major shot in the arm. We hired Farhang Amiri, Dale Ostlie, Brad Carroll, Walther Spjeldvik and a couple of others that have since left Weber State. So that was a spurt of growth for us at that time. When Cy McKell, who was dean in 1995, was getting ready to leave. I was asked to be the interim dean. I said, “But only interim; I don’t want the job long term.” RL: How long did you have it? RG: I was the interim dean for a period of about six months, but as I worked in the dean’s office, I got interested in becoming the dean. So I applied for the longterm job. First time around, I got turned down and then they decided they would reopen the search. I applied again. I was actually interim dean for the next year, for which they had a full-year search, now that I think about it. So I was interim dean for six months and then for another year. The second time I applied for the dean’s job, I thought, “I’ll do it right this time. I’ll get some people to write some letters of recommendation for me. I’ll write a nice letter as to why I want to become the dean.” By this time I was in the office and knew enough about it that I thought I could do some good things for the College of Science. I got the job 18 and was there for nine years as dean. So I was department chairman for six years, then again for eleven years, and then dean for nine years. So a lot of my time has been in the administration. RL: As chair, you helped do the building. What do you see as your major accomplishments when you were dean? RG: We had some turnover. We had a number of faculty retire. The biggest challenge I had as dean was to manage the budget when we were having budget cuts for a few years. I had some experience managing the budget in the Physics Department, and had experience with my own finances, and I felt like I’d done a fairly good job. At the same time we were cutting back in our total budget, I wanted to make sure that we could get the salary increases to the point where we could compete successfully for the best faculty from all over the world to come to Weber State. I think we did a pretty good job there. There were a couple of years where we had six percent increases in salary for the university as a whole. In fact, I was on a salary committee during that time as dean, and I helped sway the salary committee to decide against going to a salary schedule like the California system, in which salaries were based almost entirely on seniority within rank, with little latitude for rewarding merit or recognizing market difference between disciplines. Partly as a result of that, and partly as a result of the administration going to bat and getting some money from the legislature for six percent salary increases, I was able to find money in the budget even though the budget was declining. I’ll tell you how that magic comes about in just a minute - to put an additional one percent increase in 19 the faculty and staff salaries in the College of Science so that we averaged seven percent. I don’t tell too many people about that. I tell them about it now, but I wasn’t bragging about it at the time because I didn’t want it to backfire and have that money cut off. We had a couple of years with an average of seven percent salary increases. That boosted our salaries in the College of Science up to the point where we could then start to compete and get some of the best faculty. So, one of the things I helped accomplish as dean was to establish a salary structure where we then get and then keep some of the best faculty. An example of that is Dr. Kent Van De Graff who was very well known and has since passed away. Kent taught in the Zoology Department and did a tremendous job. RL: He ran the Pre-med Department? RG: He ran the Pre-medical Department, he helped get a lot of students into medical school, and he was just a super faculty member. People from other institutions wanted to hire him away from us. At one point, he was going to take a job elsewhere. I went to President Paul Thompson and I said, “I want to keep Van De Graff.” He said, “What’s it going to take?” I said, “It would probably take three things: we need to get him some reassigned time so he can have time to do the job he’s doing with the pre-medical advising; we need to get him a secretary; and I need to raise his salary.” He said, “Can you afford to do that?” I said, “I think I can.” So I did that. I gave him a significant salary boost, some reassigned time, and gave him a secretary. He stayed on. 20 Back to the budget: the way I was able to manage the budget was, we had faculty retiring, and retiring faculty had been established with higher salaries. We had a very nice benefit package of thirty-eight percent, as I recall. I could be off a little bit. This represented significant benefits. So when we had a faculty member retire, then we had that salary money plus benefits available to use to hire new faculty. So we could use part of that money to offset budget cuts, and part of the money to hire new faculty at higher starting salaries. We were able to get some of the best faculty that way. I was able to manage the budget and to help bring in some really good faculty, in addition to the excellent faculty we had at the time. I think the College of Science has the reputation of being of very high quality in terms of teaching, research, textbook writing, service to the community and the success of our students upon graduation. RL: Did the college have a big recruiting program? RG: You mean for faculty? RL: For students. RG: We haven’t had that much problem recruiting students. We offer a good quality program and students come. RL: I understand that for awhile we had quite a few international students coming to the campus. RG: We haven’t had too many international students majoring in the sciences. But we could take more and are happy to have international students. We’ve had a lot of international students in the lower division courses; sometimes if you get a majority of students from a given country, and they all get together and speak to 21 one another in their own language, then it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on. So there have been perceptions that there has been some cheating that has taken place. Little pockets have taken place, but those are easy problems to solve. It really hasn’t been a problem, even though there was a time right after I first came that we had quite a few Iranian students. RL: That’s what I was referring to. RG: I got to know some of them, and some of them got to be really good friends with me. So much so that they asked me to play on their volleyball team, and I did, and we took first place in intramurals that year. RL: Well, good. RG: I was the only Caucasian on the volleyball team of Iranians. I remember a couple of them. One of was Meddi Haghayegi and another was his brother Ali Haghayegi. At any rate, they asked me to play on their volleyball team. They were taking my engineering physics course. They were very good students, but they told me about some cheating that was going on, and I was able to nip that problem in the bud. So I concluded from that, not all Iranians are cheaters like some people thought. Of course I’ve come to the conclusion that there are good people from every country. There are good people and there are bad people. You just have to treat everyone as an individual and assume that they’re honest until proven otherwise. That’s the way I try to think. 22 RL: You’ve mentioned that you’d kept up with your first two graduates. Were there other students that you remember that have gone on and accomplished what you expected, or more than you expected? RG: I had a number of students that went on and did quite well. I haven’t kept track, in detail, of all of them, but occasionally they will come back and talk to me. I had a student come up to me at graduation a week or two ago. He said, “Hi Dr. Galli. I’m Scott Campbell.” I remember him as a student who graduated in 1973. He’s gone on to the aerospace industry and is very successful as a physicist. I’d almost forgotten about him, but as soon as he mentioned his name, I remembered who he was. Another student of mine that was graduated in 1965, Jerry Montgomery, went on to get a Ph. D. from the University of Utah in Geophysics and had a very successful career. Then when the cold fusion thing broke out in March 23, 1989, I was chair of the Physics Department at that time. Jerry Montgomery, who I hadn’t seen for many years, came to me and reintroduced himself to me. Of course I remembered who he was because I had gotten to know him quite well when he was a student back in ’65. He said, “I’ve got some ideas on what we can do with cold fusion.” At this time it was not known whether there was anything to it or not. He said, “I would like you to work with me on a research project.” I said, “I don’t know if I have time to do that. I’ll be happy to do what I can.” He said, “What I would like to do would be to find some space in the building here where we can do some research, set up a project, and do some experimenting.” He was working at the Bureau of Mines at the time. So I said, “Rondo Jeffery down the hall is a pretty good experimenter. He’s kept up 23 with some of that stuff. I haven’t kept up as much as he has. Why don’t we get Rondo Jeffery, Farhang Amiri myself, you and one of your other workers from Bureau of Mines.” We set up a team. I found some space for them down in the shop. We got some equipment and set up a research project, and we did some experiments on cold fusion. In fact, they even gave a paper or two on the work that they did. They made some advancements in that research. It didn’t really lead to anything, so we let the project go. Then it was a number of years later, when I had just become Dean of the College of Science, in fact it may have been while I was still interim dean, Jerry Montgomery came back to me again and said, “The Bureau of Mines has just been dissolved So all of the people are being let go, but we have all this research equipment. We’ve got about $750,000 worth of research equipment and we’d like to bring it to Weber State if we could find a place to put it, and set up our lab and get money to hire three researchers for two years. We could get started, and from there we could make our own salary after that.” I said, “I’m not sure where we’re going to put this equipment. We’ll find a place for it. How soon do you need a spot?” He said, “We’d like to get it right away.” I said, “Let those trucks start rolling. Bring them up here and we’ll find a spot.” I got all of this stuff stacked in the shop area that wasn’t being used that much. They brought all these boxes of equipment up here and they had truckloads of stuff. They had a truck parked out in the parking lot for a long time 24 loaded with equipment that we didn’t know where we were going to put it. Campus people were getting after us for having this big van that was almost a semi loaded with research equipment for doing work in bio-remediation. That was the project that they were working on at the time. They wanted to do some research where they go in and clean up the chemicals from mine wastes so that it doesn’t pollute the soil, and the water supply, and everything else associated with poisonous chemicals from mines. We eventually set up a laboratory for them. In the meantime the President’s National Advisory Council met a couple of times a year. President Paul Thompson organized this council with people like Bill Child, of R.C. Willey (who since sold R.C. Willey to Warren Buffet). Those are the caliber of people we’re talking about. President Thompson was very farsighted. He had a team of people that had influence and had money, and they were taking a tour of the Science Building and other buildings on campus. When they came to the Science Building, I showed them through and took them down to the shop area where we had all of these boxes of equipment. I said to them, “If we could get money for three researchers for two years, I could find a place to set up their equipment, and we could have a laboratory going in bioremediation. We could have a very nice operation, and students could experience bioremediation. We would have a chance to put Weber State’s name on the map as being a leader in microbiology and bioremediation.” 25 What they do is, feed these poisonous chemicals to microbes. The microbes render them inert by some process I don’t quite understand, but the microbiologist understands very thoroughly. I told this to these people, most of whom were strangers to me - I’d just barely met the President’s National Advisory Committee. On the way out, Bill Child grabbed me by the arm and said, “I would like to help you. How much will it take?” I said, “Probably a couple hundred thousand dollars.” He said, “Count me in.” When I went to tell Dr. Ann Millner, who was Vice President for Development at the time, I thought she would be excited to learn that Bill Child was going to give me $200,000. She swallowed kind of hard. I think she was planning on his next $200,000 to go somewhere else, but she said, “Oh that sounds good.” It took a couple of months of massaging things to where we got that money and were able to hire these people. We paid them a good salary, not quite what they were making at the Bureau. Jerry Montgomery my former student from the ‘60’s, was one of them. We also hired Jack Adams and Tim Pickett. We hired them for two years and we paid their salary plus benefits. They reported to me as dean, and we got that lab set up. It cost us a little bit of money to rearrange the shop. We took the machine shop and converted it to a bioremediation lab, and that’s what it still is today although they are no longer here. It’s under the direction of the Microbiology Department. Dr. Mohammad Sondossi runs it now. That’s how that bioremediation lab got started. 26 Anytime I see an opportunity to improve the college, I try to do it. I brought in some good people and took advantage of those opportunities. Dr. James Fletcher was president of University of Utah in the 1960’s, and then, later, became twice the top administrator of NASA. When he was president of the University of Utah, and I was a young pup department chair of the Physics Department, he had had a lot of experience in industry. I don’t remember the occasion, but I asked him, “What are your principles of management and leadership? What do you base your decisions on?” He said, “Two things. I think we should get and then keep good faculty. It’s not enough to just get them, we have to keep them.” I thought that sounded like pretty good advice. I’ve tried to do that while I built the Physics Department as well as the College of Science. I’ve said to myself, “I want to get good people, and I want to keep good people, and most things will take care of themselves.” RL: We’ve talked about the department and students. What are your recollections about some of the Weber State chief administrators, particularly as you were working with them as dean and department chair? Presidents, provosts, etc. RG: When I came, William Miller was president. Robert Clarke was dean of faculty. Paul Huish was chairman of the Mathematics and Physical Science Division. That was the hierarchy above my position. As head of the Physics Department, I reported to Paul Huish and he reported to Bob Clarke, and Clarke reported to Miller. At any rate, the administration was very conservative, but they had to be. I remember when I hired on, I told Paul Huish and Bob Clarke, “In order for me to 27 be able to come, I need to have a commitment from Weber State that I can keep up in my field. I don’t want to get behind. I don’t want to just sluff off after I come. I want to continue to go to national meetings and go to national conferences with physicists.” They said, “We’ll try to do what we can.” The first year I was here, in the fall of 1963, I flew to New York for the joint meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society. That was an annual meeting held in January of each year, and it bounced back and forth between New York and Chicago. Nowadays they have it all over the country and sometimes in Canada. I applied for that trip, and there was no thought at all of any type of per diem. It was just unheard of, and was for a number of years after that. The president and the Institutional Council were able to come up with about $300 to pay the airline fare, and I paid for all of the rest of it myself. I took about a week. I wasn’t giving a paper; I just wanted to go to the meetings. A number of things took place there that were of interest to me, including a talk by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been one of the key players in the development of nuclear energy. That was one of the highlights of my year. The administration did follow up on their commitment to support me. I think I was probably the first faculty member… RL: To take a trip that was funded by the institution? RG: That was funded by Weber State. A lot of primary work took place back in those early days. I used to go from Building 4, where the Physical Science area was, down to Building 1 where Bob Clarke was. I’d go see him on a regular basis and 28 ask for money for this that or the other, to do different things and build different programs within the department. RL: They probably thought, “Here comes Galli with his hand out again.” RG: Bob Clarke told me, “You need to be patient. You can’t always get this the first time you ask.” This was a hard lesson for me to learn. I knew that resources were limited. I learned patience, and my strategy was to plan ahead and ask for it one year; I would ask again the second year, and expect to get it the third year. That worked pretty well on most things. Some things never did come about, but I kept asking anyway. I would usually come away from Bob Clarke’s office very elated. I said, “This is really neat. We’re going to be able to do this and that. We’re going to be able to hire a new faculty member here. We’re going to be able to plan this particular aspect of the building that I didn’t think we would have been able to plan before.” So things worked out that way. Paul Huish was very supportive, but very conservative. He came to Weber State from being a high school teacher at Ogden High, I think. Weber State pulled him in because he was one of the best physics teachers in the area. He stayed on at Weber State and had a very successful career here. He did a very good job. Then there was a transition in the organization. We went from a division structure to a… RL: A system of schools? RG: I guess it was the system of schools, yes. But we had a School of Arts, Letters, and Science and Dello Dayton was the dean. Physics was one department within that large school. Of course that was the dominant school in the College at the 29 time. It consisted of the humanities, sciences, arts, and all of the social sciences, including mathematics. We were under that structure for awhile. Paul Huish was one of Dello’s assistants over the Physical Science area. Earl Smart was an assistant over the Life Sciences area, and Floyd Woodfield was an assistant over the English and Humanities and some of those areas. It was set up with a dean with three assistant deans. I had a chance to continue to work with Paul Huish some more, and I worked quite closely with Dello Dayton. During that period of time, Dello Dayton asked me to chair a committee to study the reorganization of the School of Arts, Letters and Science, which of course I did. The committee consisted of Stephen Clark, Robert Mikkelson, Richard Sadler, Earl Smart, Reed Swenson, Richard Van Wagoner, Jean White, Floyd Woodfield, and myself. The recommendation of that committee was that we consider reorganizing the School of Arts, Letters and Science into smaller schools; a School of Science, a School of Arts and Humanities, and a School of Social Science. We spelled out the pros and cons. It was decided that we break up into three smaller schools. We became the School of Natural Sciences at that time. This was, as I recall, 1974. The school included Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Microbiology, Botany, and Zoology. Geography and Geology were combined as a single department at that time. Mathematics went to the School of Humanities, for reasons that we have always wondered about. Many years later, while I was dean, we got them back into the College of Science. 30 RL: Who was the dean in 1974? RG: The first dean was Garth Welch. Dr. Joseph Bishop was president by this time. He was president for about five years, and there were some very interesting times during Joe Bishop’s administration. We grew a lot as a faculty. We rallied together. We had to, because there were forces that we all didn’t totally understand that were tending to tear the faculty apart. A number of us decided we had to do something about this. At this time, I was on the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate. Joe Bishop was in the process of reorganizing the entire institution, and we were able to pull the faculty together and establish directions. There were leaders like Tom Burton and Richard Sadler, and I was involved with it for awhile. Blair Low, and then Candadai Seshachari came on the scene shortly after. Tom Burton and Richard Sadler could tell you the full story there. The thing that they probably wouldn’t tell you is how valiant they were and how strong and dedicated they were to correct principles, to doing things for the benefit of Weber State at the expense of their own positions. I don’t think either of them really suffered from it, but potentially they could have done had not the faculty rallied together in support of the common cause. That was to move Weber State forward in unity in a positive direction. A lot of different ideas were taking shape then. For example, in General Education, there was a thought to let the students decide what they want to take for General Education. Some of us didn’t think that was the way to go. We thought students, to graduate, should be required to take certain courses outside of their particular interest at the time. For broadening 31 purposes, we thought that was very important, and it turned out that it was the right way to go, I think. RL: To turn out well-rounded students. RG: Yes, but it came very close to going the other direction, very, very close. In fact the General Education Committee, which by this time was being chaired by Seshachari, voted Plan A or Plan B opposite one another. It was a split vote and Seshachari had to vote to break the split. He voted, in what I thought was the right direction, to keep the requirements for General Education in place. Joe Bishop called a meeting over at his home one night. This is when he lived in the area just north of the campus. It was a nice home that was later badly damaged by fire, but that’s another story. He called a meeting of the executive committee over there. He needed some advice on what to do about Dr. Helmut Hoffman, whether to keep him or to let him go. Hoffman was academic vice president. Helmut Hoffman and Joe Bishop couldn’t work together. Jean Kunz came up with the brilliant idea: why not give him a promotion, why not make him research director? Ah, research director. A couple of days later, in the paper, Hoffman assumed the responsibility of being research director of Weber State. RL: This is the same individual who chastised someone for doing research? RG: Yes. But again, I don’t want to speak negatively about anyone because, as I say, Helmut Hoffman did a lot of really good things for Weber State College. But he and Joe Bishop did not get along at all. In fact, there was a meeting that Joe Bishop had in Park City before classes began in late September. Involved in that 32 meeting were all the department chairs, deans, there might have even been some student officers, the vice presidents and the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate. Joe Bishop conducted the meeting and suggested that this institution has no goals. This was before lunch. After lunch we came back and, as I recall, Joe Bishop said in the next meeting, “Perhaps I was misunderstood when I said the institution has no goals. What I meant to say, is-the institution has no goals.” Now, can you imagine how Helmut Hoffman would have taken this? He was basically the academic leader of the institution at the time. That gives you just a little bit of an indication of the conflict that developed between Bishop and Hofmann. His ideas and methods were too radical for Weber State and five years later they let him resign. RL: Did they let him go, or did he leave, or was he told, “You need to leave or we’re going to let you go?” RG: He found himself another position. But I personally liked him. In fact, on one occasion, he and his wife invited my wife and myself to play golf with them over at the Country Club. So we had a nice time. I got to know Joe Bishop quite well, and I always wanted to speak in favor of not giving him a vote of no support. The question came up in Faculty Senate, do we want to have a vote of no confidence for President Bishop? I spoke in favor of not doing that. Let’s give him a chance to show us why he’s doing the things he’s doing and tell us exactly what his side of the story is, so that we can then make a fair appraisal of it. It’s not time for a 33 vote of no confidence. I spoke against having a vote of no confidence, and that prevailed by a narrow margin. RL: But then a committee did go talk to him? RG: There was a lot of interaction that took place. I remember sitting across the table from him, like you and I are now, and advising him. He used the executive committee as an advisory committee. I advised him that if you want the faculty to support you, and if you want to continue on as president- (I don’t think I advised him quite that harshly) but I said, “If you want faculty support, and you need it to be effective as president, you’re going to have to tell the faculty that you are going to include faculty opinion in your choice for deans.” Because he had let several deans go and was in the process of replacing various deans, I said, “You’re going to have to include the faculty in those decisions.” It was at that point in time that he went before the faculty and told the faculty, “I’m going to include the faculty in my decision for deans.” I think that was one of the things that kept him on as president for another couple of years after that. From that time forward, there have been committees involving a lot of faculty and other people in the selection of the deans. Faculty don’t choose the deans, they make recommendations as to who the deans should be to the administration, and the administration makes those choices with the approval of the Board of Trustees. RL: At least there’s a voice. 34 RG: That was one of the points of transition that I recall took place back in the 70’s when we were struggling with our identity as an institution and as a group of faculty working together. Also during that period of time we changed the name of the Academic Council to Faculty Senate, and we got some reassigned time for the chairman of the Senate. Before that time, the chairman of the Senate was the academic vice president, with a co-chair being a faculty member. The way that came about was that President Bishop sent a bunch of us from the executive committee down to some California schools to see how they were organized and to come back and report. A number of us flew down to Chico State College. We visited there and then drove over to San Francisco and visited some colleges. I remember Tom Burton, Larry Evans, Richard Sadler, and I were on the tour, along with a student or two. Over at Chico State we were in a meeting with a group of people and they were explaining to us how things were done at their institution. I got bored and I left and walked down the hall. I found another meeting taking place. This was a meeting of people in the Faculty Senate. So I went in there and talked to these people, and then I went back and I pulled Sadler out of his meeting. I said, “Sadler, you’ve got to come and see what is going on.” I think by this time, Sadler was chair of the Academic Council. At any rate, Sadler and I are good friends. We go back to college days, even pre-college days. I pulled Sadler out and said, “You’ve got to see what these people are doing down here in the Faculty Senate.” We went down there and found out that they had an office for the 35 Faculty Senate chair. They called themselves the Faculty Senate and not the Academic Council. They had reassigned time, they had a secretary. Sadler said to himself, “We’d better go back to Weber State and set up something like that.” Immediately we did. It was right after that period of time that we had an office for the Faculty Senate Chair. The Faculty Senate had a secretary. We changed the name from Academic Council to Faculty Senate, and from then on we were somewhat independent of the administration. We still allowed the administration to speak at Faculty Senate, but they couldn’t vote. We rearranged the constitution a little bit to allow the faculty to have a major voice in governance at Weber State. That meeting at Chico State, I think, was one of the key points that helped to turn things around. That’s what I was doing during the period of time I wasn’t department chair. RL: You were out rabble-rousing. RG: I was doing some of these kinds of things, holding executive meetings of the executive committee where we could talk about confidential things among ourselves. We had a number of those kinds of sessions. We had to decide what we wanted to do as a faculty. We didn’t want the administration telling us what to do as faculty. We wanted to tell the administration what the administration needs to do to serve the faculty. Not to put them down, but the administration should serve the faculty rather than the other way around. Faculty don’t work for the administration; the administration works for the faculty. Of course, the administration has to have the authority to make decisions because sometimes they have to make unpopular decisions for the good of everyone. Nevertheless, 36 every time they make a decision that goes against the grain of the faculty, they need to explain to the faculty why they made those decisions. That’s the kind of structure that we put in place. I helped Tom Burton, Richard Sadler, and others put those kinds of constraints on the administration. RL: After Bishop left, was it President Rodney Brady, and then Stephen Nadauld, and Paul Thompson and then Ann Millner? RG: Brady, Nadauld, Thompson, and Millner, yes. RL: You worked mostly with Thompson while you were dean? RG: While dean I worked with Thompson, yes. I think Brady was president when I was made department chair the second time around. Then Nadauld came on board, and he was here for a short time. I think he was here during the time we became a university. And then Paul Thompson came. He was president for nine, ten years. RL: I believe it was ten. RG: I think, in each case, every president without exception did some major things that benefited Weber State. I look at the Dee Events Center. I think Joe Bishop was primarily responsible for that, especially considering the controversy over getting the land. He took all the heat on that. I wasn’t very close to that particular project, so I may be misreading that but that was my perception. That was one of the major contributions that he made. Paul Thompson did a number of good things. He steadied the ship and took a lot of heat when they did that football 37 study and talked about how the football attendance needs to be upped. We can’t continue to pour millions of dollars of state money down the tube for a losing football program. I think he helped stimulate a turnaround in that and took a lot of heat for it. RL: It was right before Nadauld left that we got the university status. RG: Before he left? RL: Yes. RG: Brady, I think, was one of the finest presidents that we had. I remember Brady standing up in a faculty meeting and saying, “I’ve got three goals for this institution. One is to improve faculty salaries. Two is to improve faculty salaries. Three is to improve faculty salaries.” [Laughter] That was Brady’s attitude. He was very much in favor of helping support the faculty and, of course, the staff as well. I got along well with all of the presidents. I worked with them and got to know them all personally and had a lot of respect for each one of them. I think Dr. Ann Millner is doing a super job right now. She is just amazing in what she’s able to get accomplished. RL: What about provosts? RG: Provosts? We started off with Bob Clarke being dean of the faculty; that would be equivalent to academic vice president and provost. He was really good, very conservative, but very honest, and very much wanting to do the right thing for Weber State. I have a great deal of respect for Bob Clarke and what he did as 38 dean of faculty and later as administrative vice president. While President Bill Miller was sick, Bob Clarke essentially ran the university for awhile and he did a nice job. Then Joe Bishop we talked about, and then Brady, Nadauld, Paul Thompson, and Ann Millner. RL: After Bob Clarke? RG: Those were the presidents. On the provost side we had Bob Clarke and then Helmut Hoffman was academic vice president. Then after Helmut Hoffman, I believe Dello Dayton was the academic vice president for a short time, then Jerry Storey. After that Dr. Robert Smith became the academic vice president. Bob Smith did a lot of good things for Weber State. During Bob Smith’s time the title changed from vice president to provost. After Bob Smith, of course, David Eisler became provost. As dean, I worked with Bob Smith. He asked me to be interim dean twice, and then he asked me to be dean based upon the recommendation of the committee. There were about fifty or sixty applicants from all over the country, and I felt honored to be the dean on a long-term basis. I served as dean for a total of nine years, replacing Cy McKell, who was an excellent dean. Deans before that were Garth Welch, Dennis Travis, and one-year interim dean, Helen James. For part of the time I was dean, Bob Smith was provost and for part of that time, Dave Eisler was provost. I got along well with both of them. RL: They had totally different styles didn’t they? RG: Different styles yes, but both of them gave quite a bit of autonomy to the colleges, and I really appreciated that. Budget-wise, if we lost someone or 39 someone retired, that money didn’t go back to the general fund, it stayed in the college, and we could manage our own budgets. Both Bob Smith and Dave Eisler respected that policy. By the way, that’s not the case in many institutions. In many institutions, when somebody leaves, the money from that position goes back to the general pool to be used anywhere in the institution where the president, or the central administration, feels it is important for it to be used. We’ve had budget autonomy and Eisler supported that. I could talk about individual cases where we disagreed on relatively minor points, but in general we both wanted what was best for the institution. In the case of David Eisler, there were some tough decisions I had to make as dean to let some people go, and Eisler supported me on that. We were able to make some transitions that were in the best interest of Weber State. RL: Did you see much of a difference after we got university status? RG: Not much internally, but I think perceptions changed externally quite a bit. We were functioning as a university before we got university status. We weren’t a research university obviously, and maybe we never will be. That’s not something that we have ever pushed for. But to have faculty that are involved in scholarship, I think, is very important, whether it’s writing textbooks, or doing research, or whatever form of scholarly work outside of just teaching the classes. I think it’s important for faculty to do those kinds of things and to stay current in their disciplines and further contribute to the knowledge base in their disciplines. Those kinds of things we’d been doing all along, at least in the College of Science and most other colleges as well. 40 RL: Were you involved with semester conversion? RG: Yes. We began teaching under the semester system in the fall of 1998. So we went through that major transition from quarters to semesters. RL: Do you see improvements? RG: I like the quarter system better. I like three start-ups a year rather than two. You get to know more students that way, and it doesn’t drag on so long for the students. I went to the university on a quarter bases and taught here on the quarter basis for a long time, and I like that better. It gives us more flexibility than the semester system. With quarters, we could have a five-hour class, meet every day for ten weeks, and take full advantage of the classroom that way. Under the semester system, you had a three-hour class, meets three days a week for fifteen weeks. That’s the same total credit, but when you meet every other day, that means you have a logistics problem in scheduling the rooms. Sometimes there is a down time in the rooms that wouldn’t be there under the quarter system. That’s one of the disadvantages of semesters. The other is that the laboratory scheduling and utilization is less effecient under the semester system, in my humble opinion of which I’m very proud. I fought the semester system, but once it was imposed upon us, I supported it. But I still feel that the quarter system would have been better. RL: Were you involved in Strategic Planning, particularly in the early 90’s? 41 RG: There have been several different Strategic Planning operations over the years. Sometimes they don’t call it strategic planning, because we sometimes consider it a negative name because it threatens programs. Back when Bob Smith was provost, and I was on the executive committee…when was it that they were talking about dissolving some programs? RL: That was in the early 90’s. It started in ’93 or so I think. RG: That’s right. Well, one of the programs they were going to eliminate was the Theater Arts program. That never really made headlines. One of the programs they were going to eliminate was the Botany major; actually, what they were going to do was to combine Botany with the Microbiology and eliminate a position or two. The idea was to save money and to come up with what was perceived as a better structure. I remember sitting over in the president’s board room, where about twenty-five of us sat around in a circle around the edge of the room because there were too many of us to sit around the table. And this Strategic Planning was presented to us. I don’t remember the makeup of the committee that came up with this plan. There were some other consolidations that were recommended to take place across the campus. Some of them I thought were good things to do, and some were done, and some good things came from that. I can’t remember the exact details of the plan, but the Theater Arts program and some aspects of the Music Department were going to be dropped, as I recall. I spoke against that. 42 At this time the Physics Department wasn’t being threatened at all. I was involved in the Physics Department as chair at the time, but I was also on the executive committee. I can’t remember why I had both jobs at the same time, but normally I didn’t allow myself to do that. This was around 1990 you say? RL: ’93 was when they started, because I was on it in the summer when they were first starting it up. RG: That was one of the controversial things that came up. The idea was that there is a budget crisis, and they had to do something to save some money; for the most important programs and not allow WSC to become a mediocre institution. The idea was that you could eliminate some programs and beef up other programs. My position on that was let’s ride it out. This is a financial crisis, but financial crises have a way of going in cycles. We’re at a down point now, let’s wait until it comes back up again. Let’s not panic. Let’s keep Theater Arts. I stood up and said something like this, that in order to be considered a prestigious institution, we need to have a theater program here. We can’t be a full university or fully constituted college without a good Arts program. RL: They’ve gone on to get us national recognition. RG: They came close. I was the primary person that spoke against dropping Theater Arts. Bob Smith later told me that I gave an eloquent speech. I didn’t look at it as an eloquent speech. I was just trying to keep the college from making a mistake. He almost thanked me for making that speech even though, I think, he chaired the committee that made the recommendation to drop it; but it may not have 43 been his decision personally. He was big enough not to say, “I voted this way, but the committee voted that way.” He wasn’t that kind of a person. He took the blame for making that recommendation, but he later thanked me for making that speech. There were some programs that were dropped at that time. I don’t remember if that was the time that Cosmetology, Welding, and a few others were dropped, or if they were dropped before that. RL: They were not here when I came in 1990. RG: So there have been times when programs have been cut and probably for the good of the institution in the long run. RL: What about in the 90’s, there was a lot of involvement with issues of diversity. I know Bob Smith, in the early ‘90s, had that faculty internship where he brought in people. Were you involved with any of that? RG: A little as dean. I worked with Barry Gomberg to try to get more diversity within our college. I think we made some headway there. In the Physics Department, we tried to hire a female faculty member for a long time and made some offers. But in the early days there were only about five percent of Ph.D.’s in physics that were women, so it was very difficult to hire a woman physicist. Just about the time I was leaving the dean’s office, we took advantage of the chance to hire a couple of women Ph.D. physicists, and we now have two very good ones, Dr. Michelle Arnold and Dr. Stacy Palen. While I was dean, I asked for and got support from the other science department chairs to postpone other hires in order to support the hiring of these two excellent faculty members. 44 My motivation was to try to improve Weber State in the best way we could. I participated with that when I was department chair and in various ways when I was dean. We always tried to hire the best possible faculty in all departments with an eye to diversifying the faculty, but never at the expense of reducing quality. RL: When you first came here, did you already have a family? RG: I was married. I didn’t have any children. My first daughter was born in 1964, a year after I came. Since then my first wife, Marcia, and I amicably separated and divorced in 1977. I got married to Cheryl in 1978. With Marcia, I had two children, and with Cheryl I’ve had three. All five of them are doing super. RL: You felt that this was a good place to raise children and have a family? RG: That’s a very good point. When I graduated in ’63 I had a Ph.D. in Physics with a minor in Metallurgy. I could have gone anywhere I wanted to. I interviewed all over the country, not only teaching jobs but also research jobs. I got an offer from Clarkson, which was the Clarkson College of Technology in upstate New York; it’s now become Clarkson University, a major university in the east. I interviewed back there and, about February or March of 1963, I met the president there. On the spot, he made an offer to me. He offered me $8,400 to come, which was big money at that time. RL: That was big money at the time, absolutely. 45 RG: My offer at Weber State was $7,600. I got offers around $12,000 up to $14,000 from industry, but of course those were twelve-month positions. I finally took a temporary job with AeroJet for a salary of about $13,000 per year but I was only there a short time. They knew that I was coming for a short time, because by then, I had decided to come to Weber State on a long-term basis. At any rate, I had offers from all over. At Weber, Bob Clarke told me, “The $7,600 is the highest we’ve ever offered any faculty member and quite a bit higher than what we just offered somebody in another department. That’s a good offer.” I came back and said, ‘I have this offer for $8,400 at Clarkson College. I would like to come to Weber State, but could you raise the salary a bit?” They said, “What would you come for?” I said, “I’d come for $8,000.” They went back to President Miller, and I was hired on at $8,000. Then comes time for me to hire a few more faculty members, and so I get Gil Barton interested in coming. I went to Bob Clarke and said,” I want to hire Gil Barton as another faculty member because I can’t do the job by myself.” He said “What do you think his salary ought to be?” I said, “I think we ought to hire him at $8,400.” He said, “Why, is he that much better than you?” I said, “Well, he’s ten years older and has had ten year’s more experience, and I think he’s worth it.” So we hired Barton at $8,400. RL: You didn’t ask to have yours raised to that same level? RG: Oh no. I was locked in. I’d signed my contract and had negotiated for my salary, and I wasn’t trying to leverage up any further than that. I found out later that I got 46 in trouble with some of my colleagues in the College of Science for being hired in at that high salary. Again, this was part of the “Galli is the guy that is trying to get more than his share of things” attitude that some of them had for a few years. I had a little trouble overcoming that reputation. My attitude on it was that if the they’d hire faculty at the highest possible salary, in a few years everyone’s salary would go up. We would all benefit. Why be jealous over one person’s salary being a little bit higher at one point in time? It’s not going to stay that way forever. It’s eventually going to pull everybody’s salary up. That was my position on it, but not everybody had that same attitude, and it probably worked against me. I was the youngest faculty member at the time. “Here’s this young punk Galli coming in here and making more salary than some of us that have been here for years, and who does he think he is anyway?” I wasn’t thinking that way at the time, but I later learned that I should have been more cautious, and I should have taken the advice of my thesis advisor Peter Gibbs (Pete did his thesis under Henry Eyring several years earlier). I’d asked Pete one time, “What advice would you give me for going to Weber State?” He said, “For one thing, don’t ever criticize anyone older than you.” Which meant, don’t criticize anyone because everybody was older than me. I was twenty-six when I came. I took the advice on occasion, and I didn’t on other occasions. I guess I established a reputation of being a rabble-rouser. I was asked to serve as chair of major committees by a number of good people, so I didn’t totally destroy my reputation. I served as department chair, and I think I did a pretty good job first time around. I think I did an even better job the second time 47 around, and I think I did a pretty good job as dean. It’s very satisfying to see the progress that came about that I maybe had a small role in. RL: You raised your family here; part of it was that this was a good place to raise a family. RG: That ties back in with New York. The reason I didn’t take the job in New York versus here is that I wanted my parents to get to know their grandchildren, and my children to get to get to know their grandparents. I thought that was quite important. New York was just a little too far away. I considered jobs in California, and took the one job in California. But the main reason I came here, I think, was the challenge of building a Physics Department from scratch. I saw that as a major challenge. We’d just become a four-year college, and the name was being changed from Weber College to Weber State College. There was a major transition, a major renaissance, in a way, of the institution at that particular period of time, much more so than when Weber State College became Weber State University. That was a change in name mainly, and it took time for that to sink in; but changing from a junior college to a four-year college was a major change. It meant that the athletic program now had a different set of competition. The students were graduating with a bachelor’s degree, and before it was just a twoyear degree, and they’d move on to somewhere else to get a four-year degree. We were offering four-year degrees, for the first time ever, beginning in 1964. RL: What about a social life? Were you able to set up the social network? Did you socialize on campus or build up a social life off campus? 48 RG: I got into physical activities like handball, skiing and golf. Those kinds of things became quite important for me to keep up my physical exercise program, and part of it became my social life. I met people on a golf course that I became friends with. I played faculty members and others on the handball court on a regular basis. I met some people I’d go skiing with. I eventually ended up on the National Ski Patrol and established a circle of friends on the ski patrol. I was on the ski patrol at Snow Basin from 1970 till about 1985. I was on the board of directors for the ski patrol for awhile. So I socialized between skiing and ski patrol, golfing and golf tournaments, occasionally getting lucky enough to win a golf tournament here or there, and playing handball. I never did get that good at handball. But at golf, I got to where I could compete locally, and I even won a statewide tournament in a championship fight. RL: You had a life. RG: That was pretty much my life for quite a few years- working at Weber State and then doing physical things otherwise, whether it was water skiing, golf, racquetball, skiing, going down to California and surfing, hiking, or ice skating. I just loved my work at Weber and I also loved physical activity. I used to like to dive as well. On the diving board, I got to the point I could do a flip with two-anda- half twists, and that turned out to be such a good point-getter in diving contests that, when we set up a student-faculty intramural swimming team, it consisted of Sadler, myself, and a guy by the name of Willie Sojourner-have you ever heard of Sojourner? 49 RL: I’ve heard the name. RG: He was a very famous basketball player and a member of the Sports Hall of Fame at Weber State. He’s since passed away. I think he was killed in an accident just a few years ago. Willie Sojourner was on our swim team. He did the crawl, as I recall. Sadler did the butterfly stroke, and I was the diver, and I forget who the other fourth member was. Darned if we didn’t win the intramural swimming contest that year. The dive I did was a forward flip with a two-and-ahalf twist. My senior year in college, I was president of a group of guys called the Betas. It was an LDS Church fraternity, and we were kind of the rowdy bunch. We used to go out to Magna High School. They had a swimming pool out there, and I’d practice diving. Sadler was still in high school at the time, and he was running that swimming pool at night. That was one of the jobs he had, and that’s when I first got to know him. We’d go swimming together and play water volleyball and water basketball together. He and I go back a long ways, so when it came time for me to apply for the dean’s job I went to Sadler, who was then a very successful and popular dean in the College of Social Science, and asked him for some help. He wrote me a nice letter of recommendation, pointed out some things that they would be looking for, and helped me be successful as dean at Weber State. 50 RL: It sounds like you’ve had a really interesting career here, and certainly there have been a lot of high points. What would you say would be the one accomplishment you are proudest of? Or is it too hard to classify that way? RG: I don’t know. Probably the thing that gives me the most satisfaction is when I see my students succeed. On the personal side, when I see my family members succeed. I think that’s the most rewarding. We talk about different programs I’ve had a hand in building, such as the Planetarium, the science building and the Physics Department. I established the procedure in the Physics Department of establishing goals and objectives, and I see that tradition is still being carried on today. Not only by the departments, but by the college, and I’d like to think that maybe I helped to get that program going. I tried to establish the attitude in the Department that we always hire above ourselves; not below, but above. We try to do that. RL: And don’t criticize anyone older than you? RG: Yes! That is good advice. As far as recruiting and hiring high quality faculty, we have been fortunate to have been rather successful most of the time. For example, when we hired Farhang Amiri, his specialty was in elementary particle physics, and I didn’t know much about elementary particles; so I thought that was a major coup to hire somebody who had some expertise in elementary particles physics, which, from a fundamental physics point of view, is really what it’s all about. The universe is made of particles, and so if you can understand how particles interact with one 51 another and what the elementary particles are, then in principle, you can understand the physical universe. We got him as the first bona fide particle physicist. We hired Dale Ostlie as our first bona fide astrophysicist, and then had a chance to hire Brad Carroll. I went to Dennis Travis, who was dean, as I was newly appointed department chair the second time around in the early to mid- 80’s, and I said, “I want to hire this other astronomer Brad Caroll.” He said, “What do you need two astronomers for? In your department you only have seven faculty.” I used critical mass. “If we have two, we could probably do more than twice as much as one can do.” RL: Synergy. RG: Synergy, right. He bought that idea and we hired Brad Carroll. It turns out that Dr. Brad Carroll and Dr. Dale Ostlie wrote the textbook for astrophysics that is now being used all over the world. People that now come to interview with us for a job in Physics are familiar with the work of Ostlie and Carroll, and they want to get their autographs on their book. The planetarium has flourished under the hiring of astronomy people, and we now have two more astronomers, Stacy Palen and her husband John Armstrong; he’s interested in life outside the Earth. We have a strong program in Astronomy now, so much so that the department is talking about offering a degree in Astronomy or Astrophysics at the bachelor level. Dale took over as department chair when I moved to the dean’s office and then became dean when I returned to the physics department to do more teaching and research, Brad has been department chair ever since I left the dean’s office. That’s been five years now (2008). He’s just doing a super job as department 52 chair. He’s a terrific guy. I could say some other good things about Brad, but I could say a lot of good things about a lot of the people that we have hired. RL: Well, you’ve said a lot of good things about the institution and certainly have shared some interesting stories. Is there anything else that you feel you’d like to discuss, or are you about ready to wrap up? RG: We’ve covered a lot of territory. I might say that, as it relates to library representation on the Faculty Senate, the question came up back when we were organizing the Faculty Senate from the Academic Council as to whether the library should be included along with faculty on the Faculty Senate. It was one of those gray areas, and I remember helping make the case to include the library faculty as members of the Faculty Senate, and that’s how it is now. We have a library rep on the executive committee and in other areas of the Faculty Senate. I think that’s a good thing. RL: I think it’s a good thing too. RG: I thought maybe you would. I’m not saying I’m solely responsible for that. It probably would have gone through anyway, but I remember speaking in favor of that when there were others who were speaking against it. RL: I’m glad you spoke in favor. That probably helped us get a voice. RG: My time here at Weber State has really been enjoyable. I dedicated myself to my career here in Physics: building the Physics program, teaching my classes, working with students, trying to elevate the level of teaching, and raising the 53 standards for our students so that they could be better prepared, get better jobs, and get into better graduate programs. It’s been very rewarding for me. So much so that when I go to retirement parties, people come up and congratulate me, and I say I’m not retiring. I’m just here to congratulate the retirees, many of whom I’ve hired myself. Almost all of them came since I came. RL: So you are planning on staying awhile? RG: I’m planning to stay awhile. I’ve decided that I want to stay on as long as I get along well with my students. I told Ann Millner the other day, the question came up how much longer I’m going to be around, and I said, “I’ll be here till I get it right, and I don’t think I’m quite there yet. I’m still working on it.” They give these five-year awards for people that have been here five years, ten years; this past year was my time for forty-five years, and they made a big issue of it over there at the awards program. Gordon Allred and I came the same year, 1963. RL: But you’ve got more hair than he does. [Laughter] RG: Gordon and I came in ’63, and at the awards program, Mike Vaughn said there are three people that have been here longer than forty-five years, and two of them are with us today. I thought to myself, “Who’s that third person?” It’s Spence Seager; he’s been here two years longer than I have. I think Spence Seager is the senior person on campus. RL: You want to make it to fifty? 54 RG: I don’t know. People ask me how long I’m going to be here. I say maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll retire tomorrow. It’s nice to have that option. I told my students this past term, “I think I’ll take a motorcycle ride up to Lava Hot Springs over this weekend.” This was just before the final exam. I forget how it came up because, usually, I don’t get that discursive in my physics lectures where I start talking about personal things; but once in awhile something will come up. I said, “But if I don’t come back, I’ve got things all set up to give you the final exam. The final exam is made up and my records are there, and somebody could take over and give you your grades just as though I were here.” They were saying things like, “Please come back. We want to have you back here.” Then one woman said, “There are some people that have been on this campus forever. They should have retired a long time ago. And can you believe that there are people who have been here over forty years?” I said, “I can’t believe anybody being here over forty years.” [Laughter] Then I winked at a student across the room who knew how long I’ve been here. I said, “That just blows my mind that somebody could be around the same institution for forty years. Are you sure about that?” RL: And that the institution would keep someone who’s ancient. RG: We just laughed about it, and I didn’t say any more. It’s been great and it continues to be. I appreciate the opportunity for this chat with you. 55 RL: I am so glad that you were here to share these stories with us, because it this kind of thing that we are trying to capture - the years at Weber from the perspective of the people who lived them. I thank you very much.