Oral History Program Craige S. Hall Interviewed by Ruby Licona 12 November 2011 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Craige S. Hall Interviewed by Ruby Licona 12 November 2011 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. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Craige S. Hall, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 12 November 2011, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Craige Hall ca. 1968 Craige Hall ca. 2003 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Craige S. Hall. It was conducted on November 12, 2011 and concerns his recollections and experiences with Weber State University. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. RL: This is Ruby Licona from Weber State University. This morning, I am at the public library in St. George, Utah, in order to meet with Craige Hall, who served as the director of the Stewart Library until 1991. After that, he became Associate Vice President for Financial Affairs and remained in that position until he retired. This is November 12, 2011. Craige, why don’t we start out with a little bit of your background? CH: I grew up in Cache Valley. I graduated from Utah State and remained in the Cache Valley area to teach high school for two years. I taught a variety of classes in social studies. I was not only teaching, but working a couple of jobs to support a young family. I worked with Milton Abrams, who was the director of Utah State University library. Milt and I were good friends from the time I was an undergraduate there until after I was teaching at the high school. He encouraged me to go to library school, which I did. I went to BYU because of its proximity and my wife’s interest in staying in Utah while I completed graduate studies. While completing that degree, I ended up at Weber State. In fact, as I was graduating, I accepted a job with the Atomic Energy Commission Research Libraries. Two weeks before I defended my thesis and completed my course work, I got a call from the personnel officer I worked with at the Research Library Center. He said, 2 “Lyndon Johnson has frozen all federal hiring. That position you were going to take in two weeks has been frozen and will remain frozen until the next fiscal year.” That was going to be about six or seven months later. The following morning I called Weber State, where I had just turned down a position. I asked if the position was still open and said I was interested in it. So I went back to Weber State and talked with Helmut Hoffmann, who was the academic vice president and who I grew to not only respect, but admire and have a nice friendship with. He said, “You’re not leaving until you accept this position,” which I was going to do anyway. So I took the job and when the federal job became available six or seven months later, they called me and I turned them down. I stayed at Weber State from 1968 on. RL: What was your position when you were hired? CH: I was an instructor in Library Science and an assistant cataloguer working with Wilma Grose in the Technical Services area. RL: So the librarians had faculty status before you got there? That was not that common at that time. CH: No, it wasn’t, but Weber State was in the process of trying to upgrade its faculty in the mid-‘60s when it was moving from a two-year school to a four-year school. They had a lot of hiring going on in the ‘60s. In about 1966, they started offering librarians faculty status. I worked as a cataloguer for a matter of months and taught cataloguing as well as working in Tech Services. I didn’t intend to stay, but ended up staying more than thirty-five years. RL: You weren’t there very long before you became director of the library. 3 CH: It was an interesting set of circumstances. I went there as a faculty member on staff in March of ‘68. In the fall of ‘69, I had a phone call from Helmut Hoffmann’s office. The secretary said, “Craige, you need to be here in thirty minutes.” I walked into his office and the vice president said, “Sit down. Your boss is on his way and he will no longer be your boss.” So I sat down and the director of the library, who was Jim Tolman at that time, came in. Helmut basically said, “You’re no longer in charge. You will take a sabbatical and look for another job.” We left there and the three of us went back to the library. The faculty was called together and the announcement was made that, effective immediately, I was to be the director of the library. It was an interesting process. RL: Besides being shell-shocked, how did you feel about it? CH: I had a number of friends on the library faculty who I counseled with almost immediately. When I took the assignment, my intent was to stay in it. However, I thought well enough of my own sanity to say, “If this doesn’t work within six months or I don’t feel positive about it, I will withdraw.” I subsequently told Helmut that this was subject to change if I chose to do so. When I finally said, “Yes, I’m going to stay,” it was 1970. By that point, Jim had gone on leave. RL: So there was no search. And you were the youngest on the staff. CH: There was some animosity. There were at least two faculty members who had been there a short time longer than me and were older than I was and had more experience than I did in library science. They felt like they should have been selected for that position, but a search was never conducted. RL: Did any of the women react to the situation? 4 CH: I did not sense or ever hear about any women on the staff who were opposed to me being director. They may have been, but I never heard about it. The two fellows both talked to me individually about it. One of those people may be retired now, but he was at Weber State the whole time I was there. The other person stayed in the library for a few years and then moved on. RL: That was a time in librarianship where most academic libraries had male directors even though it was a predominantly female profession. CH: You’re absolutely right. The first female director, that I recall, happened to be a colleague of mine from graduate school. We were friends as well as classmates. She became state librarian. RL: How big was the staff when you came to the library? CH: Of contract personnel—there were about thirty-two. Faculty would have represented a third of that. I think we had eleven or twelve professionals and about twenty or twenty-four full-time staff members. RL: I know that you were highly respected as a director and I believe Sally Arway, in her essay in the Centennial History, stated that you were seen as the best academic library director in the state. In the time that I worked with you, I had nothing but respect for you and the job that you did. But as far as that state connection, you were involved in forming the UCLC? CH: The Utah College Library Council (UCLC) probably grew out of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which had started to become a powerhouse in terms of cataloguing information and public access catalogues. I think that development, as much as any other single factor, caused the librarians in the 5 state to say, “There’s something to be gained by forming a more formal union.” UCLC started in 1974 or 1975. It was primarily Milt Abrams from Utah State University, Roger Hanson from the University of Utah, and Don Nelson and his successor, Sterling Albrecht from Brigham Young University (BYU) who started that. We immediately branched out to include law libraries and medical libraries, anything pertaining to higher education in the state. RL: And now we have libraries from Nevada as part of the group. Randy Olsen is now at the Church History Library and they’ve joined. BYU has indirectly brought in BYU Idaho and BYU Hawaii. After I hired in, you were talking about the advantage in approaching the Legislature together. They have provided funds for a lot of the article databases that we currently have and a lot of things that we could not have funded as an institution. CH: To look back on it, I guess there were two primary things that we were focused on to begin with. One was budget increases. We felt that, as you said, the Legislature would be more responsive to the institutions sharing. BYU and Westminster were outside of that fundraising, but that was the first thing we wanted to focus on. More importantly, we thought funds would come from being better known as to what we had been collecting. The other focus, financially, was buildings. We had a number of buildings that were either not keeping pace with the enrollment growth or were in need of repair. In the ‘70s, we started pushing for a lot of changes related to the buildings, including what is now the second phase of the Stewart Library at Weber State, which was founded in the early ‘70s. 6 RL: So you got to oversee the building. I know that it was intended, at one point, to add a couple more floors on top. That wasn’t done, but I think it’s becoming less necessary as things become more available digitally. CH: I agree. At the time, we didn’t have all of the computer systems and digital information. The physical space required for libraries is not the same as what it was. The first building of the Stewart Library was built in such a way that it would take two floors on top. In the second phase of the building, about ten years later, we had them drive the necessary pilings so the building would take an extra two floors on top of the structure. When they drove the pilings it sounded like the Bell Tower going off every thirteen seconds for about eight months. It drove everybody nuts. RL: You mentioned OCLC and early library automation. Some of the early systems were just for cataloguing, but more integrated systems became available in about the early ‘80s? CH: During the mid-‘70s, we captured the information for new books coming in—not only title and author information, but descriptions of what was contained in the book that had been all on punch cards. We had a punch card catalogue that was built in about 1960 that was captured in our punch card catalogue from the mid- ‘60s on. It ended up being part of what we loaded into OCLC. RL: At one point, the OCLC had the CALIS system, which was the demise of the UNISYS system. That was what you were converting from in 1990. Was it about the same time when you were asked to do the library and the computer center? 7 CH: That would have been 1987 or 1988. It was almost like déjà-vu. I had a phone call at home one morning from Bob Smith, who is one of the best people I had the opportunity to work with. RL: He has a quick mind and it is still setting the world on fire. CH: A bright fellow. I worked for him indirectly because he had taken on Marie Kotter, who was equally bright. We reported to Marie, who was very supportive of the library and very straightforward. Because I developed a good relationship with her, I also developed a good relationship with Bob. He asked me if I would become a crediting officer for Northwest Accrediting Association. I subsequently joined that. The first school that I was involved with, Bob was the team leader and he purposefully wanted me to be on that team because it was a tough one. I told him once that he always put me on the tough ones—the ones when they were thinking about closing the school or withdrawing accreditation or firing the president. Well, Bob called me one morning and said, “I’m already at work and I need you here in my office.” When I got there, he said, “You are now taking charge of Computing Services; effective immediately.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “Norm Wismer,” who was the director, “will be here, but you don’t need to go through that with him here.” So I headed for the library and he said he would call me after he met with the Computing Services staff. Later that morning, Norm’s desk was emptied, and he was gone. So I took that over. It was Computing Services plus Electronic Systems and Repair. We had an engineer at the university by the name of Gail Hamp. Gail had been in the Physical Facilities and had some difficulty with the 8 university, but the university, at that time, rarely fired anybody. He was given the job of being the campus engineer, but nobody listened to him and so on, so he ended up reporting to me. So I had an interesting group. I had been working with Computing Services a lot because of the library’s needs and goals. Frankly, I had become relatively close to Norm Wismer as a colleague. It came as a total shock to me when Bob decided that Norm shouldn’t stay. RL: In both cases, you ended up having to go in and sort of mop up without having been privy to what had happened. CH: The biggest thing that I knew from Computing Services, once I’d spent a little time with the budget, was that they were far and away over-spending what they had available to them. They were considered an auxiliary, so they were supposed to make their own way. Subsequently, we had to terminate some people, which we did. We were able to help people find jobs outside of campus and say that it was because of the budget that they were being released, which it was. I made some phone calls and provided some recommendations, but we changed the staff significantly within the next year. It was probably positive for the most part, though I’m sure there were some who were not pleased to have someone brought in whose education was not computer-based. In my opinion, that was not what Bob was after. I think he was after someone who could develop a better relationship with employees and other departments and make some tough decisions. That’s what we did. RL: Did that create any difficulties or consternation in the library? 9 CH: I think the library said, “We’re happy here, generally speaking, let’s keep it going.” I never felt that there was hostility towards me in the library. It probably helped that the computer staff, if anything, became more supportive of the library. If the library needed something, Computing Services made sure it got done. I think the library benefited—if there was a time when the computers were down for some reason, the computing staff was over there in a heartbeat. But I would be silly not to say that I’m sure there were some bad feelings. RL: I don’t recall anyone being there as an automation librarian prior to my arrival. Were you overseeing this? CH: In the first year or two I was over Computing Services, I was trying to do both. The one person in Computing Services that I depended on heavily was Roy Stark who probably ended up being as close to a library automation specialist as we had. To Roy’s credit, he had wanted to be the director of Computing Services; I’m sure when Norm was released, Roy was hurt that he wasn’t given the opportunity, but he never let it stand in the way of us working together. He was a very positive person. He was probably the most influential person in Computing Services during that period. He was a good guy. RL: So you arrived in the library and shot straight to the top and stayed there for twenty-two years or so. CH: From ‘68 to the early ‘90s. RL: You oversaw the construction of the second building, you oversaw library automation, and you saw the formation of UALC. Those are all pretty big accomplishments. Are there accomplishments you would categorize with those? 10 CH: This one is unofficial, but Weber County Library was struggling during that period and Mike Marchant, who had been director of the Weber County Library before going to BYU, encouraged me to get involved with the board. It became kind of an informal, unofficial consultation for what was going on down there. Eventually, they had some changes they had to make among their directors. The library had asked several times for an outside perspective and I enjoyed doing that. Later on, after I was in Financial Affairs, I ended up on the county library board for about ten years. RL: Were there any small victories in your time at the Stewart Library? CH: I felt like we developed a staff there that had more breadth than we had had before. Candidly, Weber State was a very Mormon-dominated administration when I got there. Between the late ‘60s and the early ‘90s, that dynamic changed to the point where I think Weber State became the broadest-based school in the state. That is not to say that I specifically sought faculty and staff who were not Mormon. RL: Well, during that time, Rod Brady and Bob Smith worked hard in a push for diversity, which was also pursued by Steven Nadauld and Paul Thompson. Ogden has also become a much more diverse community. CH: When I look back, I think the university came of age in the ‘80s. It began to offer a variety of undergraduate programs by people trained all across the country and internationally. I think that has served the students very well. RL: Those international ties have certainly been continued. Now, did you come in during President Miller’s term? 11 CH: What happened was that Bill Miller had a heart attack while driving a car and was in a wreck and nearly died. He was recuperating when I got to Weber in the ‘60s. Helmut Hoffmann was the academic vice president working with him. In effect, Helmut was the president while President Miller recovered, but President Miller never returned. Around 1970, about two years after the accident, President Miller said, “I can’t return.” Helmut was acting president and vice president and had been for about two years. They did a search and Helmut was one of the candidates and did not get the position. From my perspective, retrospect being what it is, they should have hired him. Helmut was respected and admired—not loved, because he was tough, but he was admired and he was trying to push the university from the Mormon cultural base to a more diverse base. I think the Board of Trustees and the State in general weren’t ready for that yet. He subsequently left the university and went to Westminster. He ended up being president there. RL: And after that it would have been President Bishop? CH: Bishop was the person they selected instead of Helmut. Joe was not there long. He came from the LDS training school in Provo. He came in and immediately fired all the academic deans, which is a good example of the difference between him and Helmut. Helmut would think and then jump; Bishop jumped and then thought. He removed all the deans in one fell swoop—maybe they needed to be, I wasn’t in a position to know that—but he made so many enemies and had people very nervous. Then he brought in Dwight Burrill as Vice President, who everybody disliked tremendously. 12 RL: I seem to recall in my interview with Sally Arway several years ago that these were the two that did away with a lot of the way things were being taught and decided everything was going to be done by standardized kits? CH: They did all the learning kits. They had us put those in the basement of the library—they had a learning center down there. They went into a series of training programs with Marcia Galli and Dick Ulibarri. My perspective on it now is that I think Dwight and Joe had some good things they could have accomplished, but the way they went about it didn’t work. They did not build consensus, they did not explain anything. They just did things; they made changes and you’re here today and maybe your chair’s not there tomorrow. Primarily, it was transferring people to do things that maybe they were equipped to do and maybe they weren’t; paying them substantial amounts of money for these changes without any kind of understanding of why it was being done or how it was being implemented or what the goals were. Joe’s time at Weber State was limited because of that. RL: I’ve done enough interviews with people who were involved that I understand some of what might not have necessarily been on the record, but it seems to me that when you bring in the faculty and say, “You’re not going to teach this way,” that flies so in the face of academic freedom. It was about that time when the Faculty Senate was being formed and the faculty was trying to take control of that senate, rather than letting it be an organization from on high. I can see where the political ambiance would have been such that it would have been difficult for him to stay. 13 CH: That was the way in which the changes initiating his departure were made. The Faculty Senate was put together in the late ‘60s as the faculty grew and supported the changes being made. The Faculty Senate, at that point, had some really strong people on it. They were not about to have faculty governance shot in the foot. They wanted faculty to be involved in decision making. When all these changes came about, the Faculty Senate said, “What a minute, we’re not going to operate this way. We’re going to operate above-board; we’re going to do it the way it should be done.” The Faculty Senate was instrumental as an organization in seeing a vote of no-confidence being given to Joe Bishop and, subsequently, him being let go. RL: And President Brady came after that. CH: Yes, Rod Brady came to Weber State after that. He was a breath of fresh air—a bright, engaging, hard-working guy. He was meticulous, which was what Weber State needed. As I recall, he came from a pharmaceutical company out of Southern California and he was extremely well-organized. He gave stability and he gave direction. He gave preparation for change that his predecessor did not; and, as a result, I don’t know anybody who worked for Rod who didn’t love him. RL: I have never heard a single word against him and I’ve done a lot of interviews with people who were privy to his work. CH: Rod was a faculty’s president—the faculty loved him. The same with the students and the staff. It was a sad day when he decided to leave. He said, “I do things in five year increments and I am done here.” He stayed at Weber an extra year or two, even though he had his life planned out in five-year blocks of time. I 14 remember him saying that he stayed extra because he loved Weber more than any other place. RL: Did the administration’s relationship with the library change? CH: I was fortunate enough to stay close enough to the central administration that I never felt that they were going to cast us adrift, even in bad times. If there was a budget that had to be cut, they avoided the library being cut as much as possible. We took some cuts, but everybody had some downtime financially. There was never any question of whether we were being treated as well as everybody else. I’ll tell you a story about Rod Brady. When Bob Smith was in the pool of about a hundred candidates to become academic vice president, I was on the committee. We got down to the last five and Rod was in every single meeting with that search committee. We were meeting at seven in the morning and eight at night and Rod never missed a meeting and he never took control. He would ask some questions but you never felt like he was giving directions. Anyways, it got down to the last five candidates and they divided us up to go out to the campuses and talk to people where the candidates were currently working. I ended up having one of the five, which meant I went to Idaho State where he was academic vice president. I interviewed people and talked to the president. The same thing was true of the other candidates, including Bob Smith. I don’t recall now who went to UNLV to find out about Bob Smith. The last night of meetings, we sat around a table and everyone reported what they had found out at each of the campuses. Then Rod said, “I would like to ask a question. I’d like a show of hands for who you want.” The president was asking who we wanted. When the vote was 15 finished—there were about nine people on the committee—he said, “Well, this many votes for this person, and this many votes for that person. We’re going to hire this person. I’ll be back in thirty minutes.” He went out and called Bob Smith then came back and said, “Bob is taking the position.” I about dropped my chin on the table. I had never seen a president who was so open. It’s nothing against previous presidents, but Brady was the only one I’ve ever seen do that with a committee. RL: Then, after Brady, was Nadauld. I spoke with him yesterday and he talked about the process of, unfortunately, calling a strategic planning group together on Martin Luther King Day. CH: I always felt that Steve was just not prepared for the position. RL: He was very young. CH: He wasn’t coming to us from higher education; he was coming to us from, I think, having worked for a dairy association. He came, and for this culture that had been broadening at the campus, it was kind of like, “Are we going backwards?” RL: Two steps forward and three steps back? CH: Yes, and there were some questions raised in people’s minds, at least in my mind, of, “I thought we’d gone beyond this in saying it has to be a BYU graduate, it has to be a person from a Mormon background.” Rod was from an LDS background, but he never had that picture painted. The faculty, I think, came to the idea that we were going backward towards a more conservative side when Steve came in. He was here probably five years. RL: From 1986 to 1990. 16 CH: He left right after I went down to the administration. He was a good guy. Likeable person. Easy to be around. But he was a fish out of water. I just don’t think he was ready. My sense of it is that it’s a better fit where he is now. RL: I think he’s drawing on the experiences at Weber and expanding on the things that did go well. But there’s a world of difference between someone who’s forty-three, even though you have a Berkeley Ph.D. and a Harvard stamp on your head as opposed to a seventy year-old man who has now traveled the world and is using hindsight. CH: Based on just reading the paper and not much more than that because I’ve stayed away from Dixie State, but my sense is that they are very comfortable with the job that he’s doing both in the community and on Dixie’s campus and that it is a really good fit for him. RL: Craige, at about the time Nadauld left was when you left the library to go over and work for Allen Simkins, who was vice president of Financial Affairs. You went over as his associate vice president. Did you take the computer center duties with you? CH: No, at that time, Steve Nadauld—in kind of a surprise move—announced that he was leaving and it was almost coincidentally about the time that I went over there. It was a matter of weeks, almost. So, as Steve left, there was kind of this up-in-the-air feeling. Simkins was an acting president during the period of time from Steve’s departure until Paul was hired. Part of that up-in-the-air feeling was, “What are we going to do with things?” Here, in the library, we’ve not only got a president leaving, but now I was moving and the question was, “What should we 17 do with the library?” I was asked my opinion and I said, “There’s only one decision: the library stays in Academic Affairs. It should not ever be under Financial Affairs and so on.” It was not a hard sell. They had already got to that because it was Allen, Bob Smith, and Marie Kotter. They were nice enough to ask what I thought, but they had already come to that conclusion. They said, “There’s no real reason to leave Computing Services with the library, so we’ll move it and Electronic Systems.” Computing went with me, and immediately a search committee was formed and Joan was eventually employed. She is still there, as far as I know. RL: Yes, she is, with no plans to leave. She enjoys what she’s doing. CH: The interesting part is…I don’t know if you’re aware of this, I didn’t realize it until Sally Arway made me aware of it, but Joan was interested in coming to Weber one other time before. She was in the pool and withdrew. I honestly don’t remember the circumstances now except that it struck me and I went back and looked and she was on the list of candidates. She sure wanted to be here, having gone into the process twice. I was not involved in the process of her selection, and rightfully so. RL: In addition to the Computer Center, you were over Facilities and Athletics? CH: Simkins and I have known each other since about the mid-‘70s. When I went over there, he wanted me there for a couple of reasons. One of which was that my reputation on campus was pretty solid and he felt that it was time to make some changes. We subsequently changed the directorships of virtually every 18 area we were involved with. Some voluntarily, some not so voluntarily. One of my roles was to bring about change, frankly. With that background, I went over there with Computing Services and Electronic Systems in hand and immediately had a relationship established with the police department and all the facilities, including not only the Physical Plan, but Architectural Services and the campus engineer who had been working with me up to that point, as well as the Dee Events Center and part of the Athletics Department. Not all of athletics reported to me, but Allen and I were, I guess, respectful enough that I was involved in athletics all the way across the board. This was the distinction: as related to setting the budgets in athletics, as an old accountant, that was Al’s work and that was what he wanted to do and be responsible for, as it related to the NCAA and the student athlete was more my kind of my work, facilities was a joint thing because we were trying to raise money to build the stadium. So, our relationship was kind of free-flowing. He took a sabbatical for six months to be interim vice president. He was comfortable with that and I was comfortable with that. I sat in for him on a variety of things if he was out of town. There wasn’t any question of him being comfortable with me making decisions while he was gone. I was heavily involved in every department he had and every department he was involved with—there wasn’t anything I didn’t participate in. RL: Concerning the NCAA, were you involved with the national board or anything like that? 19 CH: Athletics had reported to the Academic side until after I was over there a period of time. You remember Jeff Livingston? He was the associate academic vice president and athletics reported to him. Jeff left the institution and went to work for the Regents’ office and then subsequently for the Western Governor’s Office. Upon his leaving, they moved Athletics to Allen. Within a reasonably short period of time, the NCAA came calling with an infraction. Al and I…I think if there was ever a time when the two of us looked like we’d been hit between the eyes with a ball bat, it was when the NCAA came calling. We had no inkling that we were on their radar or in their crosshairs. But we got help and education in a hurry. It meant that I had to become proficient in all the NCAA regulations and what was permissible and what was not. For about eighteen months, we were involved in the infraction. It was eventually settled, but I didn’t ever serve on the board. I got the opportunity to go with the committee from the university to defend ourselves before the infractions committee in Atlanta. RL: Were there alumni involved or was it strictly Athletics? CH: There was little, if anything that I can remember as far as community people overstepping their bounds. It was mistakes made by our basketball program as related to extra benefits—some of which were totally understandable, some of which needed to be removed. My role at the NCAA was more of, “What do you need me to do?” It was an interesting time. RL: Of the areas you were involved in, what was the most challenging? I imagine that working the campus police, the shooting that took place in the Union Building would have left you shell-shocked. 20 CH: The campus police were reporting to me at that time. I was involved, but it was a pretty cut-and-dried situation in terms of: it happened, it was god-awful, and there were steps that needed to be taken immediately. RL: When you have someone who is injured on the job like that, I imagine it creates a certain level of anxiety and uncertainty, even after the incident. I imagine that might be one of the low points. Were there other things that you found challenging with the departments you worked with? CH: It’s always hard when it comes time to change somebody’s lot in life and one of the things that I’ve been asked to do was to enact change. Almost exclusively— except for in the library—I had to terminate employees. Part of Alan’s role in Financial Affairs was to make change and to ask people to leave. Those were low points, because you know what you are doing to people’s lives. Those changes were hard, but we did what we felt we needed to do and I think the university was better off because of it. RL: If your responsibility is to act on behalf of the institution, then you do the job. CH: It strikes you differently—personally. I sometimes looked in the mirror and said, “You must be a real S.O.B. because you’ve been asked to do this more than once.” RL: Maybe it was easier for people to get it from you than someone else. CH: I’ve heard that said. The changes weren’t pleasant and they weren’t fun, but the university benefited long-term. Then, I left the university and went back to work. Norman Tarbox replaced Allen Simkins and I said to Norm when he arrived that I would serve if we wanted and if he didn’t, I would leave. He said he wanted me to 21 stay at least a year. So I did. At the end of the first year, I said, “I’m ready to leave.” He said, “Okay, give me another six months.” So I left in the fall after I turned sixty-two. He said, “You can always go back to the library.” I said, “Those people are way ahead of me by now. I would be the fifth wheel.” [Laughter] I would be absolutely no good to them. Besides that, I’d been at Weber for more than thirty years. RL: What was the date when you left Weber? CH: I left September 1, 2003. RL: The following March I went to lunch with Ann Millner and she asked me if I’d like to work at the Bookstore. I said, “You’ve lost your mind.” [Laughter] I’ll tell you how I feel: Rod Brady and Ann Millner were the two strongest presidents that I think Weber could ever hope to have. They’re terrific. So with that sort of opinion, when Ann took me to lunch and asked me to do something, I wasn’t going to turn her down. She knew that. So I went to the Bookstore that April and I stayed through December and then left again. My role there was to get the budget under control because it was way out. To do that, we needed to let people go. We made dramatic changes there and now I know for a fact that—because I kind of keep tabs on the Bookstore—that they have implemented a lot of stuff that we put in place to start with and it’s a different place now compared to what it was when I got there. RL: And when did you leave the Bookstore? CH: January of 2005. 22 RL: You went over to Allen Simkins’ office at about the same time Paul Thompson came to campus. How do you feel about his presidency? CH: Paul was on campus. I went over there initially…the door swings out with Steve and it swung back in with me. I had a chance to work closer with Paul than with any president. At that point, which was around ‘90 and ‘91, until I left in 2003, I was in his presence for most of the work I did. RL: Part of the inner sanctum. CH: Yes. I think Paul was a good president. I don’t think he commanded the respect across the campus that Ann and Rod did. From that respect, you draw the ability to do things, so I don’t think he could accomplish as much as those two could. I like Paul as a person. He was very good to work with. His downside was that he was as stubborn as hell. If he made up his mind, you could talk for three weeks and he’d go right past you. If it was a topic he hadn’t made up his mind about, he’d listen, but if he’d already made up his mind, he was done. He made some good decisions and some bad decisions, in my opinion. I think Paul’s great strength was his ability to understand the community. He was darn good with the community, that includes the Regents and the Legislature. Anything outside of the campus central he did well with, and I think he was highly respected and influential. He made some progress for the institution. RL: From there, Ann would have come in as president at about the time you left campus. Or was she already president when you left the first time? 23 CH: She was already president, and she had not been president for very long. She was there as a vice president for a long time and she’d been with Allied Health and with Fundraising over in Development for years. RL: And Continuing Education for a while. CH: I’d known her all those years. Of course, Bob Smith was long gone by then. Bob had applied when Paul was selected as president and that didn’t work. From where I was sitting, he was the natural person to become president and would have done a terrific job. RL: That would have been a great leap from the BYU graduates previously selected. CH: I thought the university had finally reached where I was hoping it would get. Ann was female, divorced, and non-Mormon. When she became president, I said, “Hurray!” That doesn’t show my opinion, does it? [Laughter] On top of that, she’s damn talented. RL: I understand you still have some contact as far as Athletics. CH: A little. It is funny—for more than thirty-five years both Ann and I—we had known each other that long at campus—it was our life. Our cultural life revolved around the Browning Center, our athletic support was obviously at Weber State, our friends and the people we spent time with were all tied to Weber. RL: I remember my first couple of weeks on campus, you guys invited me to a women’s basketball game and we went to Sue Pech’s house afterwards for a little party. CH: For my wife and I, in those thirty-five years, we had neighbors but they were not our friends. Your neighbors are people of all different ages and professions going 24 all different directions. But when we left Weber State, we came here and this became our family. We have closer friends here than in Ogden. Part of that is the over-fifty-five community. Within two or three months, we had six couples that we were closer to than anybody in Ogden outside of our Weber State connection. The Weber State connection broke and it wasn’t anyone’s fault, it was just natural. For us, it was time to distance ourselves from Weber State. I watch the basketball scores and I watch the volleyball scores and I check he newspapers and those kinds of things. I occasionally call a couple of friends and ask how they’re doing. The personalities have changed and that causes some distance, which is natural. Almost all the people I was close to are no longer there. They’ve either retired or moved on. In Athletics, it was John Johnson who was a dear friend and he’s now at Pullman in Washington State. I could go through the whole group. I talk to Ann now and again. But outside of a few, I’ve closed that door and gone on to other things. RL: Leaving the library and still being on campus, you did the same thing I did a few times, which was to make a concerted effort and decision not to do anything that is going to look as though you are trying to influence a previous position. I believe you came to my farewell reception and that’s the only time I remember seeing you in the library after you left. CH: I purposefully did that. There were a couple of people who said, “Are you mad at us?” Sally was one because she was a dear friend who I talk to once in a blue moon. I said, “No, I’m not mad, but I’m not going to get any closer because it’s not fair to me or anybody else.” The same is true with all of it. 25 RL: You don’t want to be looked on as someone who’s trying to infringe on old connections. CH: Correct. RL: Are there other things we need to talk about that were really good or really bad at Weber? You stayed for thirty-five years, so it couldn’t have been too bad. CH: No. I was fortunate enough that in that thirty-five years I was given opportunities for change and that was probably what kept me there. I had a couple of times when I was approached by some colleagues that said, “We’d like to put your name in to move to such-and-such a position.” They were possible positions as library directors—one was in Montana, one was in Hawaii, one was at Utah State. I said, “Why? I’ve not found anything at Weber State that would cause me to want to leave. I’ve had enough change in my life and enough opportunity and enough good people to work with. It would have to be a really special job for me to want to apply.” Thirty-five years went by in a hurry, in a way. In another way, it felt like a century. I wouldn’t change it, even if I could. 26 RL: I think you left your stamp wherever you went. I think when you left, you were highly respected and regarded. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it? CH: No, it doesn’t. RL: We appreciate you taking the time to do this. This becomes a part of Weber State history and the Weber State collection and you were a part of that. Thank you. CH: You’re welcome.