Oral History Program Stan Greenhalgh Interviewed by Ruby Licona 12 May 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Stan Greenhalgh Interviewed by Ruby Licona Special Projects Librarian 12 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: Greenhalgh, Stan, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 12 May 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Stan Greenhalgh 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Stan Greenhalgh. It was conducted May 12, 2008 and concerns his recollections and experiences with Weber State University. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. RL: This is an oral history interview held with Stan Greenhalgh who recently retired, and who served as associate vice president of Human Resources for approximately thirty years. This interview is being held May 12, 2008, in the Waterstradt Room of the Stewart Library. Stan, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. If you could start out and tell us about your background: where you were born, where did you go to school, and that kind of thing. SG: I was actually born in Seneca, Kansas. I was born there because I was a war baby. My father was in the military and my mother was there with her parents. Our future home, and the place where I grew up, was in St. Anthony, Idaho. So I lived is St. Anthony until I came down to Utah to go to college. I went to South Fremont High School and graduated from there. I came down in 1964 to Utah State with the idea of making a living by writing poetry. [Laughter] I sat in a room just like this with King Hendricks, who was the head of the English Department at that time. He is a great expert and a collector of the works of Jack London; the collection is still there. His office was really housed in the collection, and so it looked a lot like this. He told me what it would take to become a writer. I started as an English major. I did write some poetry, and I edited the poetry magazine, won a few contests, and published a few things, but it became apparent that it was a hard way to make a living and that there were a lot better options out 2 there. When I finished the bachelor’s degree in English. I worked on a master’s and finished everything up but the thesis in English, with the idea that I would get a Ph.D. But while I did it, I received draft papers for the Vietnam conflict. We’d just barely gotten married at that time, Sharon and I. She is my wife. I signed up for a program and volunteered for an officer candidate program. So I went into the military and did all of my preliminary training. I went through most of it at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and came out as a personnel officer. That was a big tipping point in my life because I was then in the area of Human Resources. I spent a couple years in the active military as a personnel officer. I came out and spent some years as a reserve officer in the Army Reserve here in Utah. We moved back to Logan. I had decided by that time that I needed to pursue a secondary interest, which was business. So I went back and got a bachelor’s degree in business and then was finishing a master’s degree in business in Logan. I’d worked for a couple of companies up there. I worked for Wurlitzer Corporation which now is defunct. RL: Wurlitzer that made the jukeboxes? SG: We made pianos. It was a piano factory. I worked as an HR person, then I went over to Heston Corporation, also defunct now in Utah. They all belong to somebody else. My next position was down here at Weber State, and I was just about done with a master’s degree in Human Resources Management from the University of Utah. I’d just finished it up shortly after I came down here in early 3 1978. I did go back and get another bachelor’s degree in data processing, after a while, here at Weber State, to claim I am an alumnus. RL: So you now have three bachelor’s degrees? SG: Yes, three bachelors. RL: English, Business, and Data Processing? SG: Yes, and then a master’s in Human Resources Management. RL: And an almost master’s in English? SG: Just about finished that up. RL: Almost a renaissance man. SG: I developed an appreciation for a lot of different types of study. That ironically turned out be a great advantage to me because on a college campus, if nothing else, there’s a lot of writing. I went through engineering; my father was a contractor, and I’d been a surveyor. I came down here and surveyed all of the dams out here at the Great Salt Lake. When they first started building GSL Mineral, I was out there, and so I had those kinds of backgrounds. When I came up here, it was easy for me to relate to just about anyone. I had an appreciation for music; that was a great leveler. I was in band all the time when I was in high school. So a college campus is really the perfect place for me. So it was a real blessing to us to be offered this position down here. I had, I believe, four children before we moved down, and then after we moved down we had two more, so we have six kids. We lived in North Ogden for most of the years I was here at Weber State. When we came down, the Human Resources office had only been in existence for a year-and-a-half to two years. A gentleman by the name of Al 4 Mattson had been the director. He was a relative, in some way, of Joe Bishop; he was a nephew or something. He had left, and Joe Bishop was still the president when I came, for just a short period of time. I was thirty years old, which was pretty young to be an executive over HR. RL: Did you come in as an assistant vice president or just head of HR? SG: No, I came in as the director. RL: Director of Human Resources. SG: I came in as an executive. There were thirty executives on this campus, I believe. I think I have served longer as an executive at Weber State than anybody else ever has, or is even close. There are a lot of people that were here longer. We have people that have been here for over forty years, and there are people that are executives that were previous faculty, who were here longer, but I don’t think anyone ever, presidents, vice presidents or anyone else, has ever served as long as an executive. So I was honored to be in that position. I always felt that it was a great place to be. RL: And was the department named Human Resources at the time? SG: It was Personnel. RL: So you were director of Personnel when you first arrived. And do you remember what your employee number was? SG: Yes, it’s 157. RL: That’s pretty low isn’t it? And what drew you to Weber? I mean, yes, you had a position, but did you want to stay in the area? Were you contacted or did you apply? How did it come about? 5 SG: Well, I became aware the position was open; I don’t even remember how that happened. I’d always loved higher education. I always liked it when I was a student, and I’d enjoyed the campus and I enjoyed the environment. I’d been in the military and never intended to stay there forever, and I’d been in private enterprise for eight years. Private enterprise is its own animal, and you have layoffs. For instance, when they closed Heston down, they came to me and said, “You are to lay off all three hundred employees. You are to interface with the news media and tell them why it is wise for Heston to do this, and then you are to lay yourself off. [Laughter] So in that perspective working for a university sounded like a very good place to be. RL: Well, it’s a little more permanent isn’t it? You’re not going to have Weber State moving to Kansas or something. SG: I had people tell me that nobody lasts in those kinds of positions at universities for longer than five years, and I did obviously six times that, so I’m happy with the experience. RL: How large was the department when you arrived? SG: The department was really quite modest. It might be interesting to someone to know that, for a lot of years, Payroll took care of the kinds of things that had to happen with federal government and paychecks and stuff like that. There really wasn’t a Human Resources office, and many of the functions that existed in other entities didn’t exist here at all. At the time, Weber State had about 900 employees. That was very large to not have a fully functioning Human Resources Department. This is anecdotal, but I was given to understand that one of the 6 reasons that the department was founded, one of the reasons I was brought in, was because they had a very difficult interface with staff: the policies were not well-defined, procedures were not well-defined, they didn’t have good pay scales set up, they didn’t have good grievance procedures, they didn’t have people who understood labor laws, and so forth. Pay roll had done a wonderful job, in my opinion, for what their training was, in tying it together, but it was absolutely in need of building from the ground up. The little policy manual they had was outdated by that time, and there were many policies that had to be written. I wrote or rewrote almost every policy that exists in section three of the policy manual. The staff here at Weber, as I remember, there were about 300 classified staff and about 90 professional staff, and then about 400 or 350 faculty; something in that neighborhood. With the faculty, my interface has always been one of working with benefits. I just enjoyed meeting with them, helping them take care of whatever problems I could, but they’re self-administered in terms of academic freedom, so they didn’t need somebody to deal with their problems. But the staff and professional staff really had need of someone to both define and administer a set of ongoing problems. They were in such bad shape at that time, as I understood it, that the staff really would have preferred to have a union. The problem with that is, they could not have a union. The National Labor Relations Board has no provisions whatsoever for universities in the state of Utah, for public entities to have unions at all. In order for one to exist, a president or the Board of Regents would have to say, “Okay, you can have one.” They were not about to do that, so they turned in frustration to the Utah Public 7 Employees Association, and about 80 percent of them were members of UPEA when I came here. I don’t know what it is now, it’s probably 1 percent. It took the staff quite a while to develop confidence in the procedures we had. Here at the university, and also all of the universities at the regents’ level, policies were developing at that time. I worked with Harden Eyring, and others within the personnel groups within the various institutions, to develop umbrella policies from the Board of Regents. Then we implemented them locally along with a lot of other polices we just needed in order to be able to do things right. So my predecessor was released from his position, like I said, after a year and a half. I knew him just vaguely. I’d taken a class with him in a master’s program. As an academic exercise, I kind of wanted to go out and see what happened. When did this all fall apart? I failed to find any miscreant or less than professional behavior on that individual’s part or in all the things that they developed. I was given to understand it was probably more an issue with personality than anything else. He, of course, was linked with President Bishop, and that may not have been a positive thing at the time. RL: Well, there may have been a perspective of nepotism or something? SG: Could have been. I don’t know too much about that relationship. I actually came here to work for President Bishop, but he had already pointed his ship in a different direction. So he was only here a few months after I came, and it was already determined that he was going to leave before I came. I enjoyed his company, but I wasn’t involved at all in any of the interface that they refer to as the “Bishop” years. 8 The first president after President Bishop I worked for was President Rodney Brady. President Brady came in with a very specific set of goals and directions. So for a young person in my position, it was nice to have some framework to hang your hat on. I was used to doing planning in the private sector, and so it wasn’t new to me to have five-year plans and so forth. I had fiveyear plans years before anybody decided they wanted to have them up here, but I always felt the need to have them. My staff was small. I had Geneva Peterson who was the wife of Mark Peterson, who was over Veteran Affairs. She was the secretary. Elaine Sugihara was over employment. Elaine was also, I think, an applicant for my position; there were about a hundred applicants. Some were campus people. At the time I didn’t know, but later on they were there for review. Sue Pech, who retired just a little while ago, was here as an hourly employee, just working for lipstick money, as she referred to it. Sue probably worked for me longer than anyone else ever worked for me. She actually preceded me in being here, but she was not a salaried employee at the time. We grew fairly rapidly. Pat Kiddy, was a vice president’s executive secretary. Pat came down and took a position as compensation manager, which was an area that I was well versed in. If I had to say what I have done over the years at Weber State, one of the primary things, was to get some substance and explicable underpinnings for compensation at Weber State, which is not easy because we were working with the legislature; and so the amount of control we had was a little limited. 9 RL: Sure, but you were involved with some of the equity issues in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and so on. SG: I was involved with the programs and the pay scales and so forth. You can administer equitably, irrespective of how much money you have, but to do so you need models. The reason I lasted thirty years here is because I’ve built the models, worked the models, and tried to stay consistent with the models, whether people were happy with them or not. You know, consistency itself was very much needed here, and so was training others to do the same. Supervisors grew by the dozens up to our current situation. We probably have a 150 supervisors, at least, so we had to get people teaching them these things so they could also administer them within a framework. Then, in the long run, after you get some consistency and you train your individuals in those things, you learn to let go a little bit, so you are a little less of a policemen and a little more of a consultant. At the beginning there was a lot of policing that was necessary in order to raise the confidence levels of the staff and faculty in some areas, as to how benefits were administered, how payroll was administered, how the policies were administered, and promotions; all these kinds of things. RL: So providing for people a framework, so that they had some idea of where they stood, and where they belonged, and what they could expect with their positions? SG: Exactly. I really think their distress prior to that time (’77 is when I came, by the way, not ’78) was really around having not much of a defined structure. It was nobody’s fault, really; the surprise to me was to arrive at this large of an organization without quite a bit of structure already in place. I think that happens, 10 and I think it happens a lot in universities. It could not happen out in the private sector. They are subject to a different set of administrative bodies, and unions are out there, and so forth. So they just got forced to it quicker. So we did play some catch up for a while. Parry Wilson was the administrative vice president, and I came and worked for him. He actually had Student Services at the same time. Parry was known as a very soft-spoken, fair giant; he was big guy. He’s still alive, still around here. He just wanted to do it right, so he gave me a good explanation of where he wanted to go, and that’s where we went. I had wonderful people work for me over the years. Not a huge number because they tended to come down, and go to work, and work for thirty years. I had Dianna Hall; she was up here for thirty-five to forty years, and I had her as an employee for twenty plus years during that time. I just didn’t lose a lot of people. Some other people that came through the office are now directing other departments, Barbie Laduc is directing in the IT Departments, and a number of them who came through the office have moved up. It was always my intent, that if I didn’t have a slot for them, we could help them grow somewhere else on campus. We were very supportive of academic and personal growth. We shared a lot of information and trained a lot of individuals. We had a lot of students come through. One of our students is now running Layton City’s HR office, and wants to be a city administrator. A lot of women that have come through HR have ended up in high-level jobs. In fact, Pat Kiddy went out and was top compensation director for Berkley Labs for a time. We felt good about where our people went, as well, and what they were able to 11 do, and that they were able to interview well. Do you want to change directions on that? RL: No, whatever you can provide to us. Normally for an academic department I would ask about the intellectual climate in the department, or research orientation and so forth, but actually, with you are I’m more interested in finding out the administrative side of things; how you fit in with the other departments, how the structure developed, and so forth. SG: Let me speak a little about that because it is rather interesting. You divide your life up into periods and base them on something. My life at Weber State is probably divided into presidential periods, which makes sense, vice presidential periods, and, to some degree, maybe deans; the changes that come about because we have different programs under the academic subjects. We really do have a substantial amount of consulting for deans and department chairs on the academic side. Do you appreciate any humor? RL: Absolutely, why not? SG: They had a thing they had started one year before I came to do awards for staff. Every five years a person would come in and be recognized for that additional five-year period. Then we started some other awards, like outstanding staff and so forth. Dean Hurst had done the first of these. He had been the MC for the first of these. To my knowledge, Al Mattson never did any at all. But Dean Hurst had done one before I came. I asked Dean to do the second one, and I did the ensuing 28. The second one was when Joe Bishop was leaving, and Dean Hurst always knew the presidents very well. He was well known on campus, probably 12 born and raised on campus, but he had a rich sense of humor. We were at this luncheon, and he got up and started announcing, by way of paying attention to President Bishop and his wife Carolyn, he said, “They’re both from Delta, Utah. Delta is a town so small that the town hooker’s a virgin.” And President Bishop did well with that, but Carolyn, I noticed, didn’t see any levity in that particular joke whatsoever. [Laughter] But I did have one worse occasion at a lunch when Dave Torrez, who was my assistant for a time, and the Affirmative Action director, asked him to share the stage with me. He got up and commended President Brady, because President Brady was leaving WSU for his outstandingly executive salary. [Laughter] RL: He was not amused? SG: No, he was not amused. Each year we had an opportunity to do this luncheon and had to come up with some way to make it entertaining, and so I started collecting real anecdotes and inventing anecdotes, and treating it kind of like a roast over twenty-some odd years. Then they came up with slide shows, and I could weasel my way out of it. But I have a couple of big books with those kinds of anecdotes in them; some of them are real things, some are just there for humor. RL: What are you planning to do with that book? SG: I’ve got it. It’s just sitting there. RL: Don’t you want to put it in the archives? SG: You can have it. RL: That would be wonderful. 13 SG: But that was quite a bit of fun. The first ten years, or so, it was fun, and then it became tedious to have to get all that information together. It gave me an opportunity to get to know people and laugh with them. I had a lot of fun with that particular thing. RL: So this is like the stories they collect now for people when they retire? SG: Yes, that’s right. But what you’re trying to do is to come up with some little quip for as many people as you can. Now you can do it with slide shows. You can put everybody’s picture up there. I mean you have enough time to do it, but when you’re telling stories, you can’t tell three hundred stories, or you’d be there for three hundred days. But that’s how we did it initially, and it became kind of popular. I kept trying to get out of it, but nobody would let me out of it, until we got to the slide show era. President Brady came on board early on in my tenure. President Brady had lists, ten things that we have to do, or three things we have to do. RL: So he was setting goals and objectives before it was… SG: He was the most structured individual you would ever meet. I liked him a lot. I was thirty and he was older. He was already a self-made man. President Brady never took a paycheck from Weber State. He was a millionaire when he came here, so he just donated anything he got back to WSU. RL: So that’s where the “outstanding executive’s salary” came in? SG: No, that was just a slip of the lip. [Laughter] I don’t think he prepared too well for it. You’ve got to know Dave. I don’t think he prepared too well for it. Unfortunately Dave passed away, and I loved him, so there was a certain amount of humor in it 14 for me. And these are the things that I log in my mind. President Brady marshaled everybody in the same direction. If you remember, we had President Miller. I knew President Miller, but never worked with him. President Miller was here for twenty years. President Miller was an icon before I came here. President Miller was faculty and an administrator, who would also come up here with a shovel over his shoulder on the weekends and help the grounds people clear the ditches out in the alfalfa patch. You could see that he’s kind of the father figure. RL: Hands on? SG: Very much so. President Bishop wasn’t here long. President Brady was here for about five years. I think his whole life was separated into segments. So I think he knew he was going to be here five years. He put together a program to build this institution, to grow it physically and academically. He was a Harvard Ph.D. For a time the faculty felt very strongly we needed to become much more academic and less skills oriented. I can’t say whether that was a good plan or a bad plan. Over time things have changed. When I first came here, I was also director of Human Resources over the Skills Center, which is now ATC. As you know, we now have a whole series of them that make up an entire college within the university State of Utah. But he structured things very well. We had a plan, we had a direction, and we tried to do better every year. During those years, we were always having problems with finances. They’d give us money from the legislature and then halfway through the year, they’d take some of the money back, which was really a hard thing to do. RL: It’s hard to plan with that kind of situation. 15 SG: Well, to do that, and not to lay people off. Everybody up here hates layoffs. We haven’t had them, meaning we’ve had a couple of small ones, mostly in Grants and Contracts. But to be at a place over thirty years, and to say you haven’t ever laid off more than twenty people in that time, is wonderful. RL: So I think you had more than your share of that with the previous experience. SG: Yeah, I was the layoff king before, but nobody likes that. So my memories of President Brady are pleasant, and they are that he was very, very structured. He brought all the deans and executives together, and they used to have at least one annual meeting and hash things out with the VP’s and directors and so forth. It was a fertile environment to find out what really was wanted and what you wanted to change. And then President Brady got to the end of his five years, which I’m sure was part of his plan, and he left. The LDS Church called him to run the news media down there. I think he still runs a lot of the Church’s business operations. Again he was a Ph.D. in finance from Harvard, so that’s a pretty logical place for him to be. President Stephen Nadauld was our next president. President Nadauld was a pleasant individual, probably had the richest sense of humor of any of the presidents. He kind of delighted in things he would say. And he liked to laugh and he liked to enjoy things. He was a pleasant person, and the President’s Council moved along fairly smoothly under him. He, of course, took on the task of trying to move Weber State to university status, which he accomplished before he left. He was fun to work with. Again, he always had some financial problems with the state. He was supportive of efforts to try to improve salaries for staff, as was 16 President Brady. I never worked for a president that didn’t want to, or try to utilize whatever actions or moneys they had to try to improve the circumstances. One of the things I started, was to do salary surveys against other entities around. They’d never had a salary survey at Weber State before I came. Weber State still conducts several of them for the state because they know how to do it. So we were able to go to the president and say, ”Here’s where we think we are.” We also tried to develop targets. In fact, faculty did a similar thing in later years, but they were well after the staff in terms of finding that kind of a framework. So I enjoyed President Nadauld. President Naduald also got called to the Quorum of Seventy in the LDS Church afterward. He was here around five years. Then President Paul Thompson, who has local roots from out west of the valley, came on, and he was the longest serving of all the presidents that I have worked for. He was here for about ten years. His style was a little bit different than the others. President Thompson had expertise in some human resources areas and Behavioral Sciences from Brigham Young University. RL: He had headed up that department down there, but he was also a Harvard man wasn’t he? SG: He may well have been. I can’t remember what his degree was, but he very well may have been. He had done some international consulting kinds of things. He wasn’t an extremely “open” individual, and so you had to dig around to figure out where you were going. He had, not too far down the line, brought Ann Millner in as Vice President. She helped him a great deal on the side of the community and fundraising, and so forth. He had Al Simkin as my boss, and he was over the 17 finance area. Al was the Accounting Department chairman up here. So Al had a pretty good handle on the money. After Parry Wilson, I had also worked for Jerry Storey, who did a great deal for Weber State. He was out of the Business Department and management as well. Jerry was allowed pretty much to manage the institution’s money, until the provost switched that in the direction of allocating it out by vice presidents; and so one of the dramatic things that happened while I was here was the decentralization of funds. When I was talking earlier about HR being able to sometimes police things and say, “That doesn’t look equitable,” when you decentralize, you can’t do that anymore, and you have to become a consultant. You have to help them because they manage the money, and you have to help them to try to stay out of trouble and do the right thing. So we started building a lot of models during President Thompson’s time, trying to be more of consultants, trying to build equity models, salary survey models. What was really happening was the entity called Weber State had grown quite rapidly. It started in ’77. We had a huge bump in numbers. And that was when we’d just finished the duck pond and the Lindquist Plaza down here, and there was huge growth in the institution. Since then we’ve had steady growth, all but in a very few years. As we went through that process of growing and so forth, a lot had to change; policies had to change. There aren’t very many policies left that haven’t been rewritten four or five times to deal with that. The Board of Regents dictated that the professional and classified staff would have access to the Board of Trustees. We already had staff organizations on this campus, but at 18 that point in time they got together, the professional and the classified staff, and decided they really wanted two organizations; one being the CSAC, for classified, and PSAC for professional. Their issues were different. What’s happening here, in the meantime, is that we are getting way more professional staff, whereas we used to have, as I mentioned, 300 classified staff and 90 professionals. The current ratio is almost one to one. They’re almost equal in size. That’s because of computers and some other types of expertise. They require even upper level clericals to grow into office management and so forth. A lot of that occurred over time. So we have currently two organizations that are about equal size. They could have been one organization if they’d wanted to. had an opportunity to look at what was going on, and respond, and raise questions, and offer suggestions, and do well by their people, and so forth. They also, early on, had more work to do when UPEA really started to disappear. Those organizations still had quite a few times when they would come through and try to mentor somebody through a grievance process. Quite honestly, in the last ten years they’ve had very little to do because the processes are so well outlined. From my perspective, the confidence is there that the process will work. So they’ve changed to being more advisory in terms of benefits, especially benefits, and in terms of compensation. One of the huge differences today versus thirty years ago is what it costs to provide benefits. Most people understand the factors, but years ago it used to be kind of an afterthought. They would deal with the salaries, and the benefits would take up some little piece thereafter. We often didn’t even worry about 19 whether we could afford the benefits or not because health insurance cost wasn’t going up at rapidly. But somewhere along the line, inventiveness in the medical community started to add kinds of new medications and tests and apparatuses that could better lives of individuals; consequently we started to see double digit inflation in medical insurance. We didn’t always have dental insurance. We picked that up ten or fifteen years ago when the legislature authorized that. The PSAC, CSAC groups have been also added to by benefits committees that draw from them, and draw faculty in, and so forth, and address this issue on an annual basis now. We are controlling our medical insurance as best we can. The issue becomes very difficult as, nationally, you have issues like samesex policies. More and more we have broad groups that deal with them, and the process became one of trying to draw that information in without just passing over and saying, “Okay, you make the decision.” That didn’t work in 1977. Today hardly anything of significance happens without input from PSAC and CSAC and Faculty Senate. They’re included in those things as partners. It’s been a long time since we felt like we were fighting with anybody on those. The difficult problems require a lot of input, and the people are smart and their input is appreciated. I need to note that at one point in time Human Resources really met with PSAC, met with CSAC, and welcomed them and told them the bad news and the good news. Somewhere along the line it became quite evident that was not really a good function for HR. They needed to be more of a consultant in that, and so a vice president is assigned to C’Sack, a vice president is assigned to P’Sack and 20 so forth. So HR then really works as a consultant to anybody that needs consulting. That’s where our model really sits right now in 2008, that the Human Resources office attempts to have a lot of data, a lot of observations, stay up with the laws, stay with the trends, understand what’s happening in health insurance and watching the changes out there, and provide that to the administration in a format where they can have strategic input for their strategic planning. A couple of peripheral things that happened in the years that I was here: the institution’s Human Resources offices never used to meet. I was invited one time to meet with the vice president of Human Resources at BYU, and at the University of Utah, and at Utah State, and it was kind of a unique thing. We’d never done that before, we’d never been invited. As the other smaller institutions started growing, they had a lot of needs. Lanna Anderson, I think was her name, at UVSC, appealed one time to see if we could put a society together, so we developed an organization which is Utah Higher Education Personal Administration Council, UHEDAC. And so we, for years, would meet as a group on a quarterly basis to share information and to help each other out. That group became a tremendous asset across the institutions. We found out what others were doing. We provided models for free; you didn’t have to do work twice that didn’t need to be done. Perhaps the smaller institutions were the greatest beneficiaries of that. Weber was also a beneficiary of that because you could split the load. RL: Well, there’s strength in numbers. 21 SG: So I enjoyed that, enjoyed the UHEPAC. We also have a national organization called College University Personnel Association. Utah had enjoyed some national recognition. The association president was in Washington D. C. had come from Utah. When I first came here, we were heavily involved in that. I served on the national level on training and administrating bodies there. Utah ended up hosting a couple of national conferences out here. So we developed a lot of resources from around the country. That was fun. Another thing I did that was unique came from my interest in information technology. I think I had the first micro-computer at Weber State: I didn’t know what to do with it, but I had it. When I first came here we had CRT’s on our list and had a budget, but no one knew how to log in or could log in. That’s why I went and got a degree in Data Processing so I could talk to these guys, because the IT people were literally in a hermetically sealed building. It was glass; you could go press your nose on the outside, but you couldn’t know what was in there. Overheating was literally a problem, so you couldn’t bring body heat in there. But it was important to me to bring I.T. to the institution and nationally as well. I developed a rapport with some of the I.T. faculty here, some programs we developed became internationally utilized. We did some work for Chase Manhattan Bank, and the College University Personnel Association. I think we had a substantial amount to do with where they are now and how they’ve moved. Now, the web is the whole issue and the delivery place, but at one time if you wanted to deliver anything, you delivered it on a five and a half inch disk. We literally would do that. We were inventive in those areas; we developed 22 compensation packages, and I think we invented probably the first applicant tracking system in the United States. It would be useless now because it was not a web application, but it was quite dramatic at the time. Really, I think this stimulated me for about ten years on the electronic side producing more with less, which has to be the direction. RL: You’ve spoken about the different presidents and said that when you first got here the VP for Administration also had Student Services; now that was broken away under Nadauld, when Marie Kotter came in? SG: I’m trying to think. Toni Waite worked for Parry Wilson as well, and Kay Evans was the dean of women; I think she also ended up being dean of students. But one of the first things that I noticed when I came here is that Weber State was different from Utah State. I knew Utah State very well, and Weber State was a different type of an organization. What happened was, where you used to have the dean of women and the dean of men, they were the dean of students. Apparently a couple of things happened here, including the women’s movement on campus. There was a powerful group of women at Weber State. Pat Henry was head over Math. Pat, while raising a family, got her bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. in Math, and was very smart. There was Neila Seshachari and others that would meet, and they had a group called the “Ladies Libation League” for a while, which met frequently in someone’s hot tub. The civil rights movement in Ogden, I didn’t know anything about, because I came down in ’77. I was coming in out of the military and they wouldn’t let me go to downtown Washington D.C. because the hippies would put flowers on 23 American soldiers. Then I came out of Logan and St. Anthony, Idaho so I don’t know what happened in Ogden. I know there was a little “bus rocking,” and things like that, but it was clear to me that it was a different community, with a large minority community in particular. There were a lot of people here who wanted very specific things to happen. I think Marie was the first vice president of student affairs. Marie Kotter had an extensive vision of what Student Affairs was going to be here at Weber State. She’s largely responsible for the physical setting of Student Services. The area was much less noticeable before Marie than after Marie. So she may have overbuilt a little, I don’t know, but she clearly had a dramatic vision for it and was a hard pusher. RL: Of course, her successor is a totally different personality, not as outgoing, so I imagine things would tone down some. But I was curious, too, what you saw from your perspective as far as the campus under different provosts. SG: I’m going to have to remember them. Dello Dayton was provost when I came here. Dello was a fine man and a gentleman. He really gave the finances pretty much to Jerry Storey, and Dello was highly respected on campus as a faculty member and an administrator. Everybody liked Dello, they enjoyed him a lot. Bob Smith replaced him, I believe. RL: I think that’s right. SG: Bob Smith was a gentleman and had a lot of integrity. We went through a period where we decided we were going to be a universal organization and a worldwide organization, as opposed to a local organization, and that’s not an easy thing to 24 go through. Bob played a big part in that. I don’t know all of the circumstances but I know that he was bright. He is largely responsible for the decentralization of the funds, which Jerry pretty much held before he came in. I’ll say this carefully because I don’t know everything that happened, but this is a community that struggled with itself, both the institution and Ogden, with some people believing they were being discriminated against because they weren’t LDS, and others though they were discriminated against because they were LDS. I have always been far more worried about that than black, white or anything else. It really is the struggle. In growing, the desire was to get an international community up here, to get faculty that were international and so forth. That’s a hard struggle initially because, as you remember, Weber Academy was owned by the L.D.S. Church. The struggle was between departments depending on the mix: you could get individuals that didn’t think you could find a good brain in Utah, and others that didn’t think you could find a good brain outside of Utah. Bob Smith and Marie Kotter played a large part in hiring out-of-state employees. RL: He had the minority internships for faculty. SG: There was a lot of that. President Thompson played a big part in it. It had something to do with how you allocated resources. Zealots get things done and sometimes do things the wrong way. The Thompson years, were unsettled years in the President’s Council and across campus. They were nervous years. There were some ugly things that happened in Strategic Planning that probably never should have happened. As you look back, if you’re fair, I guess you have to say it happened because that was partly due to budget cuts and people’s concerns 25 over their own departments. It’s hard to pin anything on anybody but there were people that had motivations, just as there are in any year. If you look across campus, you’ll find maybe fifteen, twenty people really pushing all the agendas, and then they have supporters. And whatever those agendas are, they’ll work through it. Some agendas work and some of them don’t. I’ll mention one that I was integrally involved in. It was an interesting one. We had a quality movement here. I had been through the experience in industry; it was a difficult thing. We put a lot of our resources into it, put a lot of time into it. We stressed a lot of people out over it; and there is residue, some positive residue, but it didn’t prevail anyway. The Strategic Planning that happened in those years never was not a good idea for Weber State, I don’t think, anyway, and it was big waste of time and probably cut five years out of our progress. But there was some positive residue from it. If I had to say there was an unsettled period of time. I would break it down in regimes, and it was President Thompson’s regime. I don’t know if it was him pushing it or he just had to experience it. The process was fairly long; it was about a decade. We’re much more settled than we were then. We were much more settled before then than we are now. That was a tough time, but a lot of things happened, and a lot of buildings got built. People had their own agendas. From an HR standpoint you’re always watching what impacts you’re people here. You’re seeing things happen at the Board of Trustees level and so forth. RL: Weber State has undergone a lot of growth over the last twenty or thirty years: before that going from a two-year school to a four-year school, and then going to 26 university status. Did you, as an executive or as an administrator, see a difference in the way Weber was viewed statewide after the change to university status? RL: You mentioned in passing Strategic Planning. There’s some of that going on now, although I think it’s called something different. The whole Strategic Planning fiasco in the early 90’s, did that affect Human Resources or the ability to recruit staff or faculty unrest, or anything that would have affected you area? SG: We did strategic planning before that and after that at various levels. The period I referred seemed like an attempt to eviscerate ourselves. It was painful. It included substantial input from faculty. The problem is that some of the people that got heavily involved with it didn’t have to live with the results, so it didn’t bother them to rip the hearts out of other people, some of whom never left. I mean they were just eviscerated on the spot. I didn’t get attached so I don’t particularly feel that way. It was tough. It was difficult. I had to deal with individuals who were threatened by the process. My personal opinion is that the results did not justify the process. I think, actually, that our current processes are an outcome of understanding better. You know, you don’t get a family together and decide which one of the children you’re going to evict. I’d seen it in private business, it often tears businesses apart. Businesses have to do it because they’ve got to sell the product. That’s the bottom line of it. We had to do a similar thing, but you know, we don’t lay off fifty people at a time. Here’s what we did. This is what happened out of Bishop’s era, and it’s a lesson we’ve played again and again. We don’t fire people often. When we make 27 a strategic move, we after just move the individual someplace else, and for the next twenty-five years you sit over there and you bemoan the fact that it happened. The outcome of the Bishop’s era lasted for twenty years. There are still people on this campus that have bad memories and will tell you stories about President Bishop’s era. I can’t because I wasn’t here long enough to do it, but they’ve told me the stories. In my opinion, unfortunately, one of two things should have happened. Either they should have dropped it and got on with life because they had other talents. Some of them did use it, some of them got past this, and some of them didn’t and carried the stigma. The other thing is you pack up and go someplace else where they can use your genius. The biggest waste in the world is to have somebody waste their time, or feel like they will be made whole, or things will change, or truth will out. That hasn’t happened in the history of mankind and probably never will. I always tried to deal with it in the kindest way possible; you know you don’t want to leave somebody someplace where they can’t be praised. There were not a lot of circumstance like that, but that’s what the Strategic Planning did in that one period. We have way too much genius at Weber State and any other university. If you turn it all loose on the quad to decide what you are going to do, you will do nothing. You will just have a revolution. Yet you have to get just enough of that input somehow to find a direction. But that particular exercise was largely, in my opinion, painful and counterproductive to the welfare of human beings. We got past that, and people went on; they did good things. Some people left that shouldn’t have left, and some people didn’t leave that 28 should have left. It was way too much trying to impose an industrial model on an institution of higher education. And if I sound like I care. Mostly I had to deal with how it affected the individuals. RL: Your office would have been affected by things like Affirmative Action, EEOC, diversity issues, in terms of… SG: Pain and grievance and feelings of worthlessness, and redesigning jobs for people so they could move here to there. Manpower planning is really what it is. I am not against strategic planning at all. I don’t think things can just be left to lie on their own. We do it now and I think we include people in a more unobtrusive manner, but it’s still very important we listen to them. You also have to remember we were going through a number of accreditation reviews, and at the same time we did strategic planning. The two were like taking hammers and banging them against each other. I’ve been wrong before, and so I could be wrong on this whole thing, but that’s how I observed that dynamic. RL: Ogden is probably the most diverse place in Utah, but because you don’t have a large diverse population from which to draw, did you see problems in hiring, the process you were overseeing? SG: Our biggest problem has always been that we want the best people and we want to get them from whereever they are. Diversity is a term that unfortunately, when it was reintroduced, was introduced because they were getting tired of the term Affirmative Action. But diversity was meant to be a much broader term, and hopefully it will grow and have a broader meaning in the long run. In my opinion, 29 diversity has a thousand facets, and that’s a lot more palatable. However, you will always have individuals that will only want to press the button on their side. The HR office has been good for Weber State. What has been even better is the partnership between Human Resources and Affirmative Action. I’ve never, ever had a bad relationship with Affirmative Action. Greg Coronado was a good friend. One time I was over Affirmative Action when Dave Torrez was here. Barry Gomberg is a good friend. Every one of those guys liked to have an intelligent argument or disagreement and would walk away friends and go the right direction. There are individuals who were zealots, and I would have preferred not to have the zealots. There aren’t that many anymore. Most of the departments are, in fact, diverse enough so that someone will at least howl if something untoward is taking place. I think the pools of people coming into Weber State right now are well qualified and coming in worldwide. Of course the Internet has helped. It takes the same amount of time to communicate from Thailand as it does from downtown Ogden and nobody’s in the middle so you just do it. I feel largely that that’s the case. I might be little Pollyanna, but I think most of the departments have changed enough so that they really can’t have a lot of nonsense on one side or the other. I also feel that the administrators generally don’t feel that they have to shove anything down anybody’s throat. In fact, people do in general understand the value of diversity. There are areas where we have a hard time because there aren’t the people available. We may not have the level of pay that draws the 30 ones that are around here to be candidates. But I think we are in a whole lot better position. I did know that the zealotry, the overt zealotry is maybe still there, but it is much more manageable and people won’t take a risk. It used to be they felt they could take a risk on that side because it was politically correct, and everybody would champion them. The other thing I’ve noticed a lot is that, in the early days, in my early days here, Affirmative Action was much harder because sometimes you would have to stretch farther because that particular group hadn’t been involved in that career field for a long period of time, and honestly sometimes weren’t as good as some of the others applying. Right now there may be a few groups like that, but I think that, as you look at the applicant pools that come in now if you have a black candidate, or a female candidate, or a Mideastern candidate, or whatever, they’re every bit as likely to be just as good. They don’t need anybody’s help. They compete very well. So I saw a few cases, not just at Weber State, but in the community, where somebody would rise to a position, and you’d just shake your head and say, “I don’t want to go talk to that idiot who is not even literate.” That doesn’t happen much any more. By in large, they come in and compete well, and they get jobs and they don’t need Affirmative Action. RL: From your position, how would you categorize or describe or assess the relationship between faculty and staff on campus? SG: We’re getting bigger and so it’s a little more distant. The faculty care about their ownstaff, and they’ve always been somewhat paternalistic, and protective, and they still are. We’re not as much a family as we were. When Bill Miller come over 31 here with a shovel to dig out ditches, that was a family. Ann [Millner] can do some things like that, maybe, to illustrate that she’s available to everybody, but we are less that way than we were. We’re too big. Our primary constituency is the public now; it always was I guess, but right now the president has to put the best foot forward. I see at Weber State what I saw at Utah State, University of Utah, and BYU, and that is that as the family gets bigger, you don’t always know your brothers and sisters as well. You may care about as many people but not in the depth of the group because you don’t know them all. RL: Well, when you have three children in a family they can be close knit. When you have eighteen children in a family, there’s the age difference, gender difference. SG: I wouldn’t ever bill us as a family. What I would do is bill us as an enlightened, large organization with good processes and means to get your opinion adjudicated and heard. And I think we’re better than Utah State, and we’re better than the University of Utah in those areas. They’re so huge and so dispersed that it’s difficult to do that. Anybody can walk through the Affirmative Action office and does; anybody here can walk through the HR office and they do, I never saw very many shy people. RL: What about your involvement with the community. SG: I have in my own community, I give a lot of my time to my church and served as a bishop and things like that, and so I spend a lot of time around my family and so forth. So in my own community I’ve done that, but I’ve also worked with the United Way. I’ve been on the allocations committee, and the president sent me down to be on the Boy Scouts Board of Directors, kind of as the unpaid HR guy 32 for them for a number of years. I enjoyed those things, and I worked with them. I knew my compatriots in other HR things out there. I was part of a founding group of the Human Resources group, SHRM, here in Ogden. I joined NEGSA, and I joined CUPA nationally, and did lecturing, and tried to help that organization grow. In Ogden proper, I’ve served in the inner city mission on my own, so I know what it’s like to live down there in those areas, but there are a lot of things I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I think helped us out there. My staff, and you think of who they were, Sue Pash, Dianna Hall, Dave Torrez, and so forth, as a group I think we had a feeling for just about anything out there. I think that was much more important than me personally knowing everything that was out there. I’ve never been on a chamber of commerce, and I don’t care if I ever am, but I know a lot of the members. I started the Ogden area salary survey. They’d never had one in this area before and people really like that. They participated in it. We did it gratis and it was a lot of work, and they were happy with that kind of thing. I guess that’s how I would characterize that. My community was primarily Weber State. I knew the departments, knew the chairs, knew the custodians; and I think, again, coming from an extremely modest family in a farming community, and working hard., and doing labor, and being a carpenter, and so forth, that’s a leg up when you’re working with non-exempt employees. We went through a lot. I always found something interesting about everybody I ever met whether it was a handicapped individual, a night time custodian, or the highest level professional individual or scientist. I loved the faculty. I loved the idea that if I didn’t know something about 33 something and I wanted to, I could go to lunch and know quite a bit by noon. By and large I just enjoyed everybody. RL: What are you proudest of with your experience at Weber State? SG: That’s easy to answer. I’m proud that what exists now, as a reflection of them and as a reflection of me, is a good thing, is a strong thing. It didn’t get there overnight. It got there over a long period of time. It got there with mentoring, and so forth. I’m proud that they were able to replace me from right inside my own office. I think they were actually two or three good candidates. I think that’s pretty good. They gave me that Dixon Award, which surprised me to death, and it’s nice to have that kind of thing, but it’s really the people. I’m proud of Weber people, of how they pull together. And I’m proud that I might walk from here down to the bottom of the campus and see a whole bunch of people I know. I love being able to relate to those people. I really, truly feel like there are good feelings and friendly, brotherly type feelings for them. RL: Is there anything else you’d want to discuss or mention that we haven’t touched on? SG: No, you kind of wrenched out of me it all. I did want you to know that in multiple decades anybody is going to see things that they like and don’t like, and we have to somehow roll those into a ball that could make their own little novel and say, I’m okay with this whole thing. I feel like that. I feel like I’m at peace with even the roughest spots. I’ve known some really fine people, very brilliant people, and people like you that are just enjoyable to know. After we’re all done, we still talk a little bit and find something interesting. I’ve seen a lot of compassion for people, 34 and cats, on campus and other beings on this earth. I kind of like how Sesh [Dr. Candadai Seshachari] put it. I said, “What are you going to do when you retire?” and he said, “Take care of my soul.” So that’s what he’s doing. I was there when he received his honorary doctorate on top of his other doctorate. RL: I did do an interview with him, and I wish I had been able to do one with Neila, because, according to him, she certainly set some fires under some people. SG: I liked Neila; she was a pepper pot. I really liked her, and she was an interesting person. RL: She did not suffer fools in any way, much less gladly. SG: I have loved attending the in Faculty Senate and having a debate with Richard Alston in front of the faculty, and then still being friends afterwards, and things like that, because he just loves to debate. I’ve encountered people that get mad at you because you’re not taking their point of view. But I’ve encountered a whole lot of other people who will just take it and weigh it and say, “Hey, that was a nice discussion. I know a little bit more. I haven’t changed my mind,” or “ I have changed my mind.” I liked the debating. I’ve always like to do that kind of thing. I was going to tell you a little story here. This is a plumbing story at Weber State. I haven’t told it to very many people. The Administration Building, when I first came here, everybody had troubles with bathrooms. Sue walked into the men’s one day; you can’t tell because it looks exactly the same. She walked into the men’s, and Eldon Braithwaite, I think that was his name, he wasn’t all that tuned into things, and she walked in and couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she said, “Hi, Eldon.” And he simply replied, “Hi, Sue.” 35 But I have my own little story down there in the restrooms. I was going to teach a class, and I was just about to go there, so I went into the restroom. I went into one of the stalls and it’s my habit to pre-flush whether it’s been flushed or not. So I locked the stall behind me and reached over and flushed. What people don’t know is that there is about three hundred pounds of pressure in those toilets; you can hear it. Well, I pressed that button and it exploded. It erupted like Old Faithful, and it went up and started raining off the ceiling. Well you can’t get out of a stall. So I’m wet down the front; so I turned around, and then I’m rattling that lock and by the time I got out I was wet down the back. I looked just like I’d dived right into a swimming pool. I come walking out of there right in the middle of the Administration Building down there by the Veterans office, just dripping with ten minutes to get to class. So I’ve had my bad moments at Weber State. [Laughter] RL: How did you explain that away? SG: I made it out to the parking lot and borrowed clothes from my brother-in-law and went back to class. I was about ten minutes late to class. RL: Well on that note, thank you very much for taking part in this program with us. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate your stories.