Oral History Program Robert B. Smith Interviewed by Ruby Licona 31 May 2011 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robert B. Smith Interviewed by Ruby Licona 31 May 2011 Copyright © 2011 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: Smith, Robert B., an oral history by Ruby Licona, 31 May 2011, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Robert B. Smith 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Robert B. Smith. Dr. Smith served as vice president for the Academic Affairs office of Weber State University from 1981 to 1996 and was instrumental in the institution’s transition from a college to a university. In the interview, Dr. Smith recounts his experiences with the university, including changes that were made in computing, diversity, night school programs, graduate studies, and the university’s general organization. The interview was conducted by Ruby Licona on May 31, 2011 in Dr. Smith’s home in Idyllwild, California. RL: We’re meeting this morning with Robert B. Smith—Bob Smith—who was provost at Weber State from 1981 to June of 1996, and then phased out on retirement from Weber in June of 1998. We’re meeting in Idyllwild, California, in his idyllic mountain retreat that was an adventure to find, and we’re going to just talk in general about some of his experiences while at Weber, then he’ll fill us in on what he has been doing since he left Weber State. So, Bob, to start with, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your background: where you were born, where did you go to school, etc. RS: Okay, I was born in Philadelphia, of all places. At the time, my parents were living in southern New Jersey, and that was the nearest real hospital. So, I spent the first two weeks of my life in Philadelphia, then two years in South Jersey in a little farm community. My father was a minister at the local Presbyterian church. At that point, he had the opportunity to go back to Southern California, so we moved to Los Angeles. 2 My first semester of school was kindergarten in south-central Los Angeles. Then we moved to Portland, Oregon. I got most of my elementary school there. I went to the same elementary school as Linus Pauling, one of my chemist heroes. Then we moved back to Southern California and my parents settled in Vista, down on the coast in northern San Diego County, for the rest of their lives. I went through high school there, and then off to the Midwest for college at Wheaton College outside Chicago. There, the first week of my sophomore year, I met a new freshman named Adele Petznick, and we quickly started seeing each other. We’ve now been married for over fifty years. From Wheaton, I was fortunate to be accepted at Berkeley for a graduate program, and doubly fortunate that it occurred the year Sputnik went up and the money was flowing like water. I was able to work my way through a Ph.D. in three years, from the baccalaureate which, looking back from today’s perspective, is unreal. But Berkeley had a very nice program in the Chemistry Department where the first thing you did was pick your thesis advisor and your thesis topic and go to work on it, then pick up courses along the way. That saved a couple years right there. RL: Who was your advisor? RS: Henry Rapoport, in the Chemistry Department. And so I spent three years working on unpronounceable substances. Adele had to type my thesis when I got done and you could talk to her about what it’s like to type gobbledygook and try to get it spelled right. At any rate, I was awarded the degree, I think largely because my advisor wanted to clear the lab for somebody who would be productive chemically. I fashioned a thesis out of three blown experiments and, 3 fortunately, I could write. And so we bade farewell and I went off in the fall of 1961 to Las Vegas to become one of the nearly-founding fathers of a new branch campus of the University of Nevada. After half a dozen years of faculty work there—in which I taught chemistry and found myself the senior member of the chemistry faculty and recruited a new department—I suddenly found myself in the chair of the Faculty Senate by a fluke. The Faculty Senate position opened my eyes to a whole new world outside the laboratory—a world of people, very bright and sometimes strange people. It was a fascinating area. Plus, we were in a very chaotic environment at Las Vegas with a new campus that was a few hundred miles from the home campus. So, they couldn’t keep close tabs on us, although they tried to. We had lots of freedom. We experimented with all kinds of things, made lots of mistakes, learned a lot along the way, and gradually built a new campus. In 1990—oh, excuse me—in 1968, a decision was made to reorganize the campus, so they created colleges and I rather blindly got some encouragement and applied to be dean of the new College of Science and Engineering. I ended up with the job. I learned a big lesson right there. I spent the first year trying to establish my creditability with all my colleagues, who couldn’t believe that one of their number was worthy of being an administrator. At any rate, it worked out and I ended up spending twelve years as dean of what became known as the College of Science, Mathematics and Engineering, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. At that point, it was apparent that if I were to stay there I’d probably be doing the same thing the rest of my life, and I had this intrinsic urge every five 4 years or so to do something different. I’d survived twenty years in Las Vegas because the place was changing so fast. Every five years it was different, and my job became something new. There was always something exciting. The other thing was that one of the charms of administrative life is you don’t have to hold down a departmental niche. As your interests change, you can follow them and explore new areas of study. So, I moved from being a chemist to being a generalist in science, working with all the other science departments. The first thing I did when I became dean, was take a speed reading course and then read the beginning text books in each discipline of the college before the fall semester, so I’d know what they were talking about. That turned out to be a very valuable exercise. I enjoyed attending departmental seminars and learning what was going on in the disciplines. Gradually, that evolved into an interest in the history of science and philosophy of science. I studied that for a few years. But by the end of the 1970’s, it was apparent that there was nothing more for me that would be different, so I started applying for jobs. One of the interviews I got was at Weber State, which I really knew nothing about. It was a fascinating interview. I had to set it up by driving a few miles down a dirt road from our cabin to a roadside payphone to get in touch with Garth Welch, who was the chairman of the Search Committee. We checked in every day so I could keep up with developments as we set up the interview. But anyway, at the end of August 1980, Adele and I got on a plane and flew up to Salt Lake. Along the way, I somehow contracted a bad cold. By the time we arrived, I had a fading voice. I had to start the next morning at six a.m. with the 5 Board of Trustees, then called the Institutional Council. I had zero voice -- I could not talk. I’d been spending the night chewing on cough drops and hacking and keeping Adele awake. It was just a, you know, it was not a good omen. RL: You probably felt it was doomed from the beginning. RS: You know, this looked like a disaster. I already had a job offer in hand from another university. So I wasn’t too concerned about that. But by noon that first day, the world had changed. There was something about Weber State I had never known or heard of in an academic institution. There was a kind of campus culture and spirit that really grabbed my attention. We went for lunch; by then, Adele had had a similar experience. She got a little sleep after I left for the interview and when she woke up—we happened to be down at Ramada Inn, which is now an old retirement place on Adams Street, and had a room facing east—she got up, threw open the curtains, and there was the Wasatch Front. She said it was so overwhelming she just fell backward on the bed. It was like heaven after living in the desert for twenty years. So, we got together at lunch with the Search Committee and compared notes and we were beginning to see some real possibilities in Ogden and in Weber State. By the end of the interview, there was no question that this was the place I wanted to be. And I knew that they had ten more candidates to interview, and it would be at least a month before a decision was made. But, at Salt Lake Airport before we left, I called the president of the other institution and backed out of that search because I didn’t want to jeopardize my chance for Weber State. 6 And Rod Brady, who was president at the time, gave me some hints that I would be a strong candidate and he’d really like to have me stay active. So, as I look back on it, I sensed from the meeting with the Search Committee and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and others that somehow there was a spirit at Weber of people being willing to deal with substance instead of petty issues and personality wars and getting an advantage on someone else. This was new to me and very appealing. I also felt that an institution like Weber that had a built-in community college and seemed to have a fairly equal emphasis on technical training and liberal education would be a very interesting place to work. I wanted to see how that combination panned out. So, I hung on and eventually word came that I was going to be the person selected. We just had to wait for the Institutional Council to meet and verify it. Very early the morning of the meeting, the phone rang down in Las Vegas and it was a member of the board. And I won’t quote his language verbatim on the record. RL: Okay. RS: But basically, he was inquiring as to whether or not I was an adherent of the Mormon faith. Of course, an illegal question but nobody paid attention to legalities, this was 1980. I told him no, and he seemed relieved and that was my introduction to board politics. For several years after, I became the administration’s emissary to that particular board member. At the same time, it was kind of an enjoyable introduction. So, I came up and it was announced to the faculty a couple weeks later. I made a little speech, and started to get integrated. Rod Brady had me come up once a month through the fall of that year to do 7 some planning. We also came up on a house-hunting trip and so it was kind of a shuttle back and forth between Las Vegas and Ogden. RL: So, you actually knew you were going to be in the position for about five months before you actually— RS: Yeah, it was the end of September that I was appointed and I went on the job the first of January. RL: You talk about the campus culture and spirit and people willing to deal with substance. I think a lot of us recognized that spirit when we interviewed here. But how would you compare Weber with Las Vegas in terms of the intellectual climate, interaction between colleagues, and so forth? RS: Those are separate questions. First, the proper verb is contrast, not compare. RL: Normally, you say compare and contrast for an essay. RS: In this case, it was just a blatant contrast. Unfortunately, I had learned to benefit UNLV by learning to be a good corporate guerilla. I had ways of getting what I wanted and helping dispose of people who got in the way. I was not a nice guy. The first thing I learned at Weber, from Rod Brady, was the importance of teamwork. And because I so admired him—I mean more than anyone else, he’s the person that recruited me—I was willing to give that a try, and I began doing things in different ways. That was very helpful. So, that’s one thing. Another is that there was a lot of civil war at UNLV. There was no interest in solving problems. It was everyone trying to establish position and benefit themselves and so on. It was just a chaotic mess. That’s one of the reasons I decided to leave. 8 When I got to Weber, in contrast, I found a wonderful spirit, a willingness to work together, and a very thin intellectual life. Weber had grown up from a junior college—and, to be honest about it, a pretty parochial junior college. Most of the people in official positions had been in the area all their lives. They knew each other. It was a very ingrown community. That part I didn’t know at our interview. Fortunately, I…my disposition was not to come in and clean house. What I spent the first six months doing was going around and listening and getting acquainted and finding out the lay of the land. At that point in life, I thought I had learned a little bit about how people behave. I knew an awful a lot about dysfunctional academic communities and had some ideas about what a productive one would be. So, I saw some possibilities at Weber, but I wasn’t going to, you know, try to tell people what they needed to do. Tom Burton was really helpful; he was my chief lieutenant when I moved into the vice president’s office. The nomenclature of the provost changed in the last few years that I was there. But basically, the job was the same all the way through. Tom was an old-timer; he knew the lay of the land and who the key players were, and he knew the way things got done. He taught me an awful lot. It was very helpful. In some ways, it was unfortunate he decided, shortly after I arrived, that he wanted to go back to the faculty. But that gave me an opportunity to do some reorganizing. RL: What was his position? RS: He was the Assistant Vice President. RL: And your title when you went to Weber? 9 RS: Vice President for Academic Affairs. So, I learned over the first six months that there were some good people here, there were some ambitions, and there were some frustrated people. When Weber moved from a junior college to a four-year status, dreams began to emerge and people were expecting that the move to a graduate university would be right behind that. But there was no way we were prepared. We had a lot to do to build infrastructure and shore up faculty numbers and quality before we could be considered a really good undergraduate institution. But there were real possibilities. Now, I don’t know how far you want to go into detail and don’t let me get away from your leading questions. RL: No, this is fine. RS: The first thing we had to do—and I went back to some of my notes last night to refresh my memory on details and I realized how much I’d forgotten—but there were a lot of ingrown, established procedures and rules and regulations that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to an outsider like me. But I had this opportunity to reorganize and we created a couple of assistant vice president positions. One for academic support areas and that’s the job I hired Marie Kotter for. I wanted an insider on that one because I needed to have somebody who could teach me what goes on at Weber State. It was very helpful, since I came from the liberal arts background, to have a person from a professional background. So, we kind of complimented each other, I think, in a very productive way. The other position was somebody who would lead a transformation of all the petty little routines and rules and regulations involved with registration and admissions and class schedules and that kind of thing. I was impressed with Emil 10 Hansen, because he had a creative mind and could see possibilities of doing things differently. So, we had a national search on the position and ended up hiring Emil. The first thing we had to do was get registration into the modern world. There was no computerized registration at that time. It was all done by pencil and paper and everybody gathering in the ballroom on registration day, the old traditional way. He conceptualized a new registration system that we put online and got things much more efficient. The class schedules were very fixed; I mean, we were a morning campus and an evening campus. The evening campus was clearly second priority. Standards were lower and the resources devoted to it, and it was organizationally separate from the regular academic program. RL: Do you mean academic standards or just standards in general for the way it was organized? RS: Both. My first little crisis was discovering an administrator was surreptitiously giving credit to students who were a little short at graduation for courses they had completed at the Institute. RL: Oh! RS: This struck me as bizarre. And one of my first lessons was to…I discussed it with Rod Brady, and he encouraged me to take action; we couldn’t stand for this. So I did. We prohibited that practice and encouraged the administrator to retire. And word going around the community was that Rod Brady must have stopped that practice. He did a wonderful job at taking the fall for me, [laughter] and went up a little higher in my estimate. 11 A few years later, to break the habit of cramming all the classes between eight and twelve on weekdays, we tried a little ploy of moving the class schedule to the half hour instead of the hour, which automatically created more prime times. Now, 7:30 became a prime-time and we had added an hour to the class schedule. And little things like that. The other thing on the academic side—the first issue that faced me when I walked in that January was the Regents were talking about putting quotas on tenured faculty at every campus. My first instinct was to begin asking questions. “Well, what’s our history here?” “How many faculty do we tenure every year?” “How many people retire?” “How many new positions do we create?” “What can you predict about the way it will go?” “Is our proportion of tenured faculty increasing or decreasing?” “What’s it going to do in the future?” I found in Kim Wheatley, who was the Institutional Research Director, a person who loved to deal with problems like this—data collection and analysis. He and I shared a weakness; we never saw a data set we didn’t want to analyze and look for patterns. So, we started running the numbers, and predicted—lo and behold—that if business continued as normal—given the demography of our faculty—we were going to be seeing a drop in proportion of tenured faculty. There was no need of a quota of any sort. We were able to use this argument with the Regents and avoid having arbitrary quotas imposed. Well, I think this…it impressed me—the virtue of getting good data and analyzing it thoughtfully, rather than making presumptions and starting to battle over it. And I think we showed the Board of Regents that there was a better way to do things here. 12 So, that was a kind of little victory. On the positive side, one of the first things that faced me was the fact that in 1980 interest rates were up around twenty percent on savings accounts. Somebody had given the college a piece of property which had been sold. And so we had quite a pile of money sitting in the bank drawing twenty percent interest, which gave us a wonderful slew of discretionary funds. Brady gave me a million dollars to distribute for good purposes. It certainly helps a new administrator to walk in to a situation and start giving away a million dollars. One of the things we tried, I noticed right away that there was almost no involvement of computing in academic programs. This was 1980; personal computers were beginning to emerge. The whole world was going to computerization and looking for ways to use this as a tool. I was impressed from the first day. One of the things about living in Las Vegas was we had the big computer show there every year and I could just toddle over to the convention center and take a look what was going on. That’s where I first saw a personal computer and played around with it a bit. RL: An old Commodore eighty or something? RS: It was a PET; it was before the eighty. RL: Oh my goodness, okay. RS: I began to get a sense of the power of interactivity as opposed to…in those days everybody was trying to do television, you know, that was the big new technology. They played courses on TV, which was just a continuation of the old practice of passive absorption in the classroom. The possibility of getting people 13 actively involved with the computer struck me as the next big idea in higher education. When I got to Weber, I found that outside what was then called the Department of Data Processing—the computer program in the tech school— there wasn’t a computer on campus that I could see. So, I took a chunk of that money, and luckily right at that time somebody had donated a house across the street to the university and it was sitting there waiting for something to be done with it. So, I talked to Rod and said that was a way we could use that house. I’d been very impressed with stories I’d read about “Skunk Works” industrial in organizations. I said “We’ve got x number of rooms in there, let’s set up half a dozen faculty members, put them over there for a year, support them with some of this money, and let’s see what comes of it.” By being there together, they could interact with each other and this could create some cross-disciplinary… RL: Some synergy. RS: Yes, exactly. This was a hope, I had no basis for saying it would work but it just seemed like a good idea at the time. So, we picked six faculty members from six different departments. We set them up over there and they started working on things. It worked; not that I can draw a direct point-to-point set of developments out of the projects that went on in that house but they went back to their departments and started spreading the word about what you could do with computing. RL: Sowing seeds. 14 RS: Within two years we were hiring a director of Academic Computing. We were setting up an Academic Computing Center. We had a Faculty Committee created in the Senate to deal with issues surrounding use of computers and the world was beginning to change. RL: Do you remember who those original six were? RS: I remember Mike Toth. He left Weber after a few years and went to Portland State University. But he was from Social Sciences. You know, I really can’t. I could look it up. I think there was one from Foreign Languages and there was one from the computer part. I’m really fuzzy. RL: That’s fine. RS: The substance didn’t matter so much as the idea—and the buzz it created around campus. But as I said, within two years, we were getting into the 20th century of computing or the next decade of it anyway. So, the point is, I had some real advantages coming in, and tools to work with. I was willing to learn a whole different campus culture. We kind of hit it off together. The faculty was extremely supportive and, in some ways, too compliant. It spooked me. But it was just a good productive relationship. (I’ve got a cheat sheet here with some of the issues.) The first year around, I had discovered that budgets during the years of my predecessor were not very strong numbers. Budgets for the academic areas had been put together in the business section of the campus. There was no academic involvement in setting departmental budgets or college budgets. I changed that right away; I put responsibility on the deans to create budget proposals and to administer their 15 own budgets, and I didn’t second guess them. This was new and unfamiliar to some. You know, every year one dean retired, and so very quickly I was having the opportunity to recruit new deans and make it work a little better as we went. At that time, we were growing rapidly and the pressure from the Legislature in the Regents was to control growth. We had lots of money as a result of the rising enrollment and tuition and the situation with interest rates and so on. So, we spent a lot of time that first year trying to figure out ways to raise admission standards and exploring what other tools we could use to control the growth pattern. RL: Do you remember what the enrollment was when you got there? RS: Oh, it was a little under ten thousand—around nine thousand, something like that. I had a sense, and I didn’t know if this was one of these things that osmoses through your skin as a result of being in the industry for a while. But I had a sense, by then, that at somewhere around twelve thousand an institution necessarily has to change. The mass of numbers forces you to do business in different ways and the gulf begins to grow between faculty and students, and administration and faculty. So, I became an advocate early on to hold growth down below that level, and try to maintain the character of the institution, which, politically, was flying in the face of our basis of budget support. But, at this time, everybody was receptive. We had too many students. We couldn’t schedule enough courses. There were students being turned away right and left. Partly, that was a product of the course schedule; partly, it was a product of the way classrooms were assigned. Departments had hegemony on 16 individual classrooms and buildings scattered around campus, and you didn’t violate that even if the rooms sat empty. You couldn’t use it if it wasn’t your room. We got that changed eventually. We got everything computerized and centralized. We had a vocational skills center that we were running as a result of some grants. It didn’t mesh very well, unlike the programs of the tech school. The program they were doing was things like…well, laborers training and this sort of thing, apprenticeship on a pretty low level. Not really along the lines of higher education. So, it seemed like a good idea to spin that off to a separate institution. I thought and others thought that it would thrive better out from under the stifling wing of the college. I spent about a year negotiating that with the school districts and the politicians and so on. Finally, we got it accomplished and that became what is now the ATC, or whatever it is now. I guess it’s a community college. RL: No, it’s the DATC. It’s a community college in Salt Lake. But ours is still the Ogden-Weber ATC. RS: Okay. They were called vocational centers for a while and then became technical centers and now I guess they’re called technical colleges. But you know, it was a good thing to do, and it thrived and it provided a counter balance to what we were doing and we, through the years, worked pretty closely with them to make sure students could go back and forth easily. I think that there was good synergy there, too. What else did we do? The second year I was there, we faced time for selfstudy for major institutional accreditation that occurred every ten years. I had just 17 started to get involved a little more with the Northwest Association. I had trained as an evaluator and begun to go on visits to other campuses, which turned out to be a very good activity because I began to see how things were done in every institution in the Northwest. RL: And you can pick ripe fruit and steal ideas, can’t you? RS: Yup, you can steal ideas and you can see what doesn’t work. Mostly, I was going to institutions similar to ours. Marie Kotter and Kim Wheatly and I went to a training workshop on self-study that the Northwest Association ran every year. It was run by a fellow back east, who was the guru of self-study. This was the precursor to what became institutional effectiveness assessment and that kind of thing. Then, in later years, it became the popular buzz. So, after that workshop, which was up in Seattle area, we had time to kill at the airport before we came back. So, we got talking about—while it was fresh on our minds—how we could organize a self-study that would really be productive and teach us something about the nature of Weber State and do a really analytical job. I put Marie in charge of that. We did two years of self-study, which was really more extensive than usual. But it seemed to show that it was time for Weber to sit down and really look at itself. That turned out to be an extremely valuable exercise. I think we did a very credible job of self-criticism; we got a lot of ideas for setting priorities for the future. It got to the point that when the visiting team came in 1984—an auspicious year—that it was really an anticlimax. We already knew what we knew, and we knew what we were going to do about it. And they kind of blessed us and we 18 went on about it. But that was, I think, an exercise that engaged the entire campus community, both administrative and academic, and it was very fruitful. I don’t think any of the subsequent reviews were nearly as incisive and as extensive. We didn’t need it by then because we had already established the pattern that we had decided who we are and were trying to implement it. There was—in the political realm—a thing going on about accounting programs. Accounting was one of our strongest academic departments. The president took a particular interest since his background was accounting and finance. And there was a move in the state to require a fifth year of study in order to sit for the CPA exam. Which, essentially, would have put us out of business and so they would be killing one of our strongest programs. This posed a decision point for us: are we going to get into graduate study or not? And: are we going to be allowed to, if we decide it’s a good thing? Well, we started through that, I think, as a community. This, again, as an example of the collective problem-solving spirit that was reigning at the time. We came to the conclusion that, yeah, there is a place for advanced professional training in our kind of institution. It doesn’t mean we were going to put in a whole raft of graduate programs in the Sciences and Social Sciences and MFA programs at this point in our history. But some of the things we had particular strengths in could be elaborated to advanced training at the Master’s level and it’d make sense, so we began the push. Brady really worked hard at the Legislature on that one, partly because so much was at stake and partly because it was his own field, he knew his territory. And we got it through. They approved 19 the…they got the Master’s degree approved and they decided in the end to not require a fifth year. RL: But you got your program… RS: We got the best of both worlds there. It set a precedent; it was an uncomfortable precedent for me as Chief Academic Officer because it promised to open the door for all kinds of rinky-dink graduate programs. But I think we were able to keep the lid on it and focus on the fields that we really had some unique strength in, as time went by. So, those were the kinds of issues that occupied me the first five years. Getting a better handle on what the nature of Weber was and what we could do with it. Upgrading, during this time, because we had money we were able to hire a lot of new faculty and brought in some really neat people. I was recruiting a dean a year; first, in Education that first spring, then Social Sciences, then Science. We had long-term deans…oh, we had a new dean in Arts and Humanities, Sherwin Howard, who was the font of all creativity. One of my favorite people. He would come up with an idea every thirty seconds or so, and if you just kind of ignored it, it went away but every now and then he’d come up with one that would really be worth it. And he’d take it and run and we’d get some brand new thing in. When he retired—and then unfortunately died six months later—I was looking back at what he’d achieved for the college. Almost every good thing we had going, at that point, you could see his fingers on one way or another. Not just in the Arts and Humanities departments but all over the campus. Whether it was Affirmative Action programs or early college or you name it, he was in there somewhere. 20 The other big issue, and the most tangled issue I had to deal with in that era, was really…in fact, I made a case study to use in training other academic vice presidents for American Association of State Colleges and Universities. We had a pattern of…because of the separation between night school and day school—as it was called—faculty had an incentive to play both sides off the middle. They could enhance their salaries by teaching in the evening school; even if they weren’t carrying a full load in the day school and there was just…the schizophrenia in it was amazing. What it was doing was giving incentive to faculty to teach more and more and more to make more and more money because their salaries were so terrible. And this worked against the idea of building an intellectual center and building up to a good reputable undergraduate college. There came a time when one of the bright people in the Business college, Dick Alston, and Allen Simkins—whom I appointed as dean, because we had a change in deanship there in those early years—got together and came up with a plan to use a bunch of their money. Well, we had abolished the evening school and integrated the two budgets, so we took a bunch of the money that had been spent on overload teaching and rolled it into base salaries; then, in return, faculty would agree to allow class sizes to expand so we wouldn’t lose enrollment. But essentially, the motivation for doing it was that it would focus faculty attention less on teaching more courses, and more on the professional side of their life as a professor, of more scholarly activity, that kind of thing. 21 It created a real civil war between the haves and have not’s. It took two years to implement. One of the keys was when the Continuing Education division gave up a large proportion of its budget; they had state money at that time, it wasn’t an entrepreneurial organization continuing as they usually are. They gave up a bunch of their money to enhance faculty salaries. There was a lot of give and take and eventually everybody came around. The Allied Health College held out until they saw the benefits. But we were able to gradually convert the whole basis of faculty employment, essentially, and we created incentives for getting involved in better teaching, research, and working with students on undergraduate projects. You’ve seen a lot that flourish, in later years, in result of seeds of the sum. But the first thing they had to do was get people out of the classroom, just teaching the same thing over and over again. Dick Alston was another interesting person, he had a…I met him very early on while I was in my first semester—my first quarter, I guess it was then. One evening, I was working late in my office and a couple came storming in very agitated. They had just walked out of his introductory econ class, first class session. She was British and he was Latino and an army guy. Well, Dick, in his first lecture, always ruffled feathers, shall we say. And he was very articulate and had a wonderful way of doing it. Well, they were surreptitiously taping the lecture…they came running into my office at the end of class with this tape and their complaints that he was saying outrageous things. What brought it to a head was that Dick had pointed to the woman, who was wearing a sleeveless sweater, I guess, and said, “Now, here’s an example, look at this a sweater without 22 sleeves, that makes no sense at all.” He started going on about the irrational side of economic choices; he was an environmental economist and he had a different view from a lot of traditional economists. Well, anyway, they were so upset that they wanted him fired and they sent a copy of the tape off to the Commissioner of Higher Education. His response was to ask whether he could sign up to take the course. It became quite a campaign, so Rod Brady got into it. He invited the couple to come in and had me come in and we sat down. Rod had an item on his book shelf—it was a cigar that he had gotten personally form Winston Churchill when Rod was a missionary in England. RL: It’s an interesting thing for a missionary to pick up. RS: Yes, he had it in this plastic case; it was a prized treasure. Well, first he gave this couple a tour of his office, highlighting the cigar and Winston Churchill and that went over with the wife. Then he did a few more things and pretty soon he had the couple eating out of his hand. Meanwhile, we had Dick in the next room waiting and, at the right moment, Rod invited him in and we had a face-to-face discussion of the situation and what Dick was trying to accomplish with the class. Brady got everything smoothed over with this couple. It was just beautiful. Later, Dick told me it was the first time in his career he had ever seen an administrator support him in something he’d felt strongly about. That forever changed our relationship. From then on he was an ally, and even in his flamboyant way he often became very valuable in pushing change along in the institution. That was a 23 lesson to me. So, it was…there were interesting years but, with a lot of the things I wanted to do, we had to get some of the obstacles out of the way, first. RL: Well, there were a lot of things that had been, I think, traditional behavior and programs and so forth. RS: Sure. And sometimes reorganizing shook things up and changed the way of doing things. More often, reorganization is just a cop out, so I try to do it sparingly. But where the opportunities arose and we could do something productive, it was helpful. During this period, also, the dean of Student Affairs retired and Rod asked me to take over Student Affairs. About which I knew essentially nothing, so the first thing I did was call an old college classmate of mine whose name I had begun to see in the student services literature. He was Vice President of University of Southern California, and I had a long talk with him on the phone, told him what I was doing, what the problems were and got some tremendous advice from him. Eventually, I was able to snooker him into applying for the presidency at Weber State; that didn’t work out but we had a good relationship and I’ve kept in touch with him ever since. But anyway, I’d begun to learn something about student services, and we did some reorganizing with that and hired some new people and began to get an outside perspective into dealing with students where it had always been very much in the family. So, that began to make some changes, and then I was asked to take over campus computing, which was a rat’s nest that would never end. But because we had come to emphasize Academic Computing at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. I figured that Academic Computing would get a better shake if 24 we could handle the business side and the administrative side in the Academic Affairs area. On balance, it was the way to go. That was when we brought in Eric Jacobson and created the Faculty Committee. Later on, students got into that game in a very interesting way. Students had always had a strong voice at Weber. Particularly since Brady came in, he had a lot of respect for students and a lot of respect for faculty and that was one of the things that I think made him a superbly good president. He knew his limitations; he recruited somebody like me because he knew he was from the business world and not the academic world and he needed somebody who knew the academic community to balance that off. But where was I going with that… RL: You were talking about strong student voice and Eric Jacobson and computing. RS: Right, students. I got a lesson in that the first or second year. In one of the dean’s searches there was a standoff, an even split in the Search Committee over who they should recommend as the candidate. There was one bright student on the Committee who got very involved and he ended up being the swing vote. And later, he became student body officer and happened to be placed as a result of that on a Search Committee for a president when Rod Brady resigned in ‘85, and ended up being the swing vote on that. Later, he became a real estate broker and sold two houses for me, twenty years later. But that showed me the power of a serious student in certain situations. So, I got into the habit of listening to students and working closely to student leaders. I tried to keep an open pipeline to the student newspaper, to get a little different perspective in the public arena. And there came a time when students banded together when we started getting 25 in to real tough economic time in the mid-80s and began to propose that instead of a tuition increase, we could increase our fees and dedicate it to this purpose or that purpose. RL: So, that’s where the technology fees and things like that came along. RS: Yup. That was a student initiative. And that gave the Academic Computing Committee tools to work with, to start projects, build all those labs and it was just a tremendous development. So, I learned a lesson about the importance of working productively with serious students and serious student leaders. Not all of them were serious but by and large it was a pretty good enterprise. RL: You said that’s when you brought in Eric Jacobson and then got the steam? RS: Well, I brought him in back at the beginning when we first started Academic Computing, but then he was there. RL: Okay, but then he got the students involved with the fees and that developed the technology advancement on campus. RS: The students came forward after a few years. RL: Okay, now where did Craige Hall end up being over at the computing center? RS: Well, he was in charge of facilities under the business VP, originally, and after I had been responsible for computing services for a couple years or so, we negotiated moving it to Craige Hall because we had gotten some things established and I didn’t need to have control and it was an extra burden. RL: Okay, so he was over the library and over facilities, and then went from being over the library to…? 26 RS: So we moved the library back to Academic Affairs where it should have been in the first place. And we moved computing to those areas once we had the principle and resources established for Academic Computing. RL: So he had not been under you until… RS: He was never under me. He was always under the business VP. We moved computing services sideways from the Academic Affairs to the Business Affairs and Craige picked it up. RL: But the library was under you. RS: Well, about that time we moved the library under me. There was a tradeoff there. I don’t remember the exact time. RL: I’m only familiar with things from beginning of 1990. RS: Yeah, see, he was over the library because, at one time, he was the head of the library. Then he moved into Business Affairs, in charge of facilities. RL: Eventually yes, but when I first came to Weber he was the director of the library and over the computing center. RS: Oh, you were there that early. Well, maybe it was when he moved into business affairs that we moved computing with him. Now that you remind me, I think probably when I took responsibility for computing, I put him in charge of it because he was creative. RL: And then when he moved over there then the library stayed under you. RS: So anyway, I’ve talked about the first five years. At that point, my five year itch was coming up. RL: So, you needed to make some changes. 27 RS: Well, I started teaching an honors seminar for one thing, that helped. It also put me in touch with students in ways I hadn’t been before. Gave me a view point for a faculty member of how things work, which was helpful. I team-taught it with Lee Badger in the Math Department. It was…this was my outlet for teaching philosophy in that era. So, with what was going on about that time, we had been in the money. Enrollment was growing too fast. And then it turned around. This was during the national recession in the ‘80s. We were doing well, that was from the oil boom. Then the oil boom busted in the mid 80’s. The rest of the country recovered, but we had had the pick of some very good faculty candidates in those early years. And that’s when we got a lot of good new people. Then we went into poverty. Student enrollment declined. The Legislature got hard up. We had—I think we had one point—three years without faculty increase, without faculty salary increases. It was really kind of difficult and Rod Brady decided…well, he got called to be the head of Bonneville Communications for the Church and so he had no choice but to move on. Steve Nadauld came in as president. I served as acting president over the summer of 1985. And we were right in the middle of developing a new approach to student services and it had to stop and everything was on status quo when Brady left. Nadauld eventually decided to create a vice presidency which Marie Kotter took. That moved student services away from my responsibility and made life a little easier for me. Steve came in, he had been in the business world but he was still much more of an academian than Rod Brady was. But when he was out in the business world he had picked up a good idea. And that was the value of 28 strategic thinking. You remember that. He supplied me with a very interesting article about how to develop an attitude of strategic thinking informally, without a lot of super-structure and committees and what not. And it made sense to me; I always was a person who was drawn to big pictures and principles and this kind of thing. In that regard, strategic thinking was a valuable idea; we needed to set some priorities at that point because we were getting squeezed. We had been trying to do too many things. We had our mission statement that promised everything to everybody. So, we started an informal strategic planning process. In the fall of ‘85, there was a committee of people who had access to the data that put together an environmental survey of what the world was going to be like between then and 1990 and what its implications for the college would be. Through the winter, we asked every department to construct a scenario and what its aspirations were. Steve and I met with each of the academic departments at breakfast meetings, week after week after week, for a period of months—talking with them and getting a feeling for what the strengths of each department were and what their possibilities were. Then, over the summer of ‘86, we had a campus committee put together to take all of this input we had gotten—and it was volumes of plans and what not—and digest it, and formulate a strategic plan for the university. We took advantage of the summer lull to do that. Promising everybody that no decisions would be made, because one of the first things you learn in administration is never make a decision during the summer and then spring it on people when they come back in the fall. So, we got down to the beginning of fall 29 quarter. We had a plan, tentatively created for what programs would be encouraged, which would be abolished, which would be cut back and so on and so forth. Well, in the midst of that, Governor Bangerter gently suggested to every agency of government, including the higher ed. system that you plan your budgets for a six percent decrease this coming year. It was wonderful timing; timing is everything. We were already a year into it, the rest of the higher ed. system got blindsided. We were able, then, over the next few weeks before fall quarter began to put together a plan to meet with each dean and each division head and get their reaction and find out what our blind spots had been and how it could be improved and so on. So, we tweaked it at the beginning of fall quarter; we opened it up to the world, let them see what was in it, and got general reaction from everybody. Then, by mid-fall quarter we put a modified plan in place and made it clear: this is what we’re going to do regardless of whether we get a six percent cut or not; if we don’t get a six percent cut, it will free up money to get going on the new priorities. So we’re in a relatively good position. I know that Utah and Utah State ended up in years of lawsuits as a result of the actions that they took because they weren’t prepared. But I think we impressed the Regents that we had our act together and we knew where we were going. The strategic planning exercise was outlined success. In terms of actual administration, I always felt it was very helpful because it’s a set of public priorities; there are no games being played. People knew what to expect, if they didn’t like it they could decide what they wanted to do about it. 30 But it made some clear distinctions: that here are things we think we have strengths in and what we’re going to do to develop them, here are things that we really shouldn’t be messing with, here’s a two year plan for getting from here to there. Turned out that the six percent cut didn’t materialize, so we were in a fairly favorable position. We were having a lot of trouble with tuition income at the time though, so we were still tight. But when we got done with that phase, it became kind of steeped into everybody’s consciousness. You know, we’ve got these priorities but there’s no grand plan of what we’re trying to accomplish in the institution—no big sense of mission that everybody shares. At that time, the Honors program was running weekly brown bags that they called “think breaks,” in which anybody who wanted to come would sit down and talk about things. Well, we had one right at the end of fall quarter in ‘87. Was it ‘87? Yeah, it was ‘87. At that time, we didn’t know we weren’t going to get the budget cuts and that kind of thing. So everybody was kind of up in the air. But a fortuitous bunch of people got together that noon to talk. Out of it came a strong consensus that we ought to immediately sit down and start looking at our definition of mission and carve out a sense of mission for Weber State that was different from anything else in the system—unique, and something we could push with students for recruitment and that we could push with the Regents to show we weren’t trying to be cheap imitations of Utah and Utah State. So, kind of on the spur of the moment, we organized a retreat during Christmas vacation. Rick Sline got an old colleague of his, who happened to have a cancellation in her schedule just at that moment, who would be available 31 to lead this retreat. We pulled together a group of thirty faculty, administrators, students, and deans, and on very short notice set up a three-day retreat. Or two days or something, I don’t know. But the woman who led it was just remarkable. She came in without an agenda. In fact, she arrived on a Wednesday—I guess it was a two-day retreat. She arrived Wednesday, got together with Rick, Marie, and me. We worked till after midnight that night putting together a plan for what this group of thirty ought to do over the next couple of days. Then we got together the next morning and it was just kind of a transformation over the next couple of days. Many of these people who didn’t speak to each other were now talking about the history of the institution, how it got to be the way it was, why we did things in certain ways, and then…oh, and we went through a Myers Briggs exercise so everybody understood what personalities they were dealing with in the group. By the end of the day, we had a consensus that we wanted to move on the mission. We would spend the next day dividing up into four groups of similar interests that would begin to formulate alternative futures for the university. So, then Marie and I and Steve Nadauld and a couple others got together that evening with the seminar leader and worked into the night again, restructuring the next day based on what happened the first day. Out of it came these four alternative-mission scenarios. We decided at the end of the seminar to hold an all-day campus forum on Martin Luther King’s birthday because it was a holiday and everybody would be available. RL: That was January of ‘88? 32 RS: Eighty-eight, yeah. We struggled on the proposed four alternatives. I think we pulled a couple of them kind of together and created a mission statement and went through iterations of review. Finally, in the spring the Faculty Senate approved a version of it that became our mission statement. It was a long struggle. But, I think, very fruitful, because it certainly gave me, as Chief Academic Officer, a map to follow in making decisions. RL: A direction. RS: Nothing could be done ad hoc anymore. Everything we did had to be related back to the mission. We created what we called Mission Implementation Projects: MIPs. There were six of them. They were things we were going to do right now as high priorities to implement aspects of the mission statement. It structured the way we planned and did things for the next several years, and I think it was a very productive move. Somewhere along the line, I got to be known as a regional expert on strategic planning, which was kind of laughable. But it was a good experience. What it did, I think, was refocus the institution on learning as a shared activity for both faculty and students. I’ve always hated that phrase “teaching institution” because it was a negative term meant to demean in the general usage. It was not representative of what we wanted to do. It sounded like it was a passive activity for students; so we tried to put the focus on learning, and that meant learning for faculty, which means faculty vitality. It means research, teaching improvements, projects, that kind of thing. At that point, we were starting to play around with Writing Across the Curriculum and that became a focal point for cross disciplinary activity and there was a new emphasis on 33 general education and trying to get answers to whether we were accomplishing anything with it and the whole assessment move was beginning to emerge. So for the next five years we were all wrapped up in this. I think a lot of excitement was generated. The Centennial came up at that point, and it gave us an excuse to go raise some big bucks. From that came the Hemingway Endowment that provided money for faculty and creative projects. A lot of good stuff happened over that next five years. RL: I know when I came in 1990, January of 1990— RS: That was the first round of Hemingway grants. RL: And I became involved with the WAC program and it was right after that we got the university status. RS: The WAC workshops kind of became the intake channel for new faculty. And so it acculturated new people to the campus. RL: It was a wonderful introduction to the campus; and it did engender that spirit of teaching and learning. RS: Another thing I didn’t mention, but back about the second year they had always made a big deal about the opening of school. There were these big formal meetings, a speech from the president and that kind of thing. Marie and I got our heads together when we were starting the self-study and said, “Look, is there some way we can make these things more helpful to faculty?” And that’s when we started doing workshops for faculty, topical workshops, and bringing in a national name to kind of stimulate things. So we got Sandy Astin in from UCLA to talk about assessment, way back in 1983 before it hit the radar screen nationally. 34 We brought other people in like that who would kind of pin you down and say, “What about this?” RL: Are you living what you’re preaching? RS: Yeah, and gave us a lot of good ideas. Ernest Boyer, right after he published his book on the college experience that made a lot of press, we had him in and spent a day. That wasn’t opening school but it was the same kind of thing. And that is what stimulated the “First Year Experience” idea. It was when you start looking at the research on student retention which came out in the student affairs side of strategic planning. Some of the lessons about the importance of freshman year became blatantly obvious. That’s when we began to evolve the First Year Experience. Those were exciting years and then right in the middle of it, well, and then there was a key point Barry Gomberg was hired as Affirmative Action officer somewhere in the late ‘80s. It was only when we got a white male, Jewish civil rights attorney in that office—who was himself a natural born teacher and preferred to go out to teach departments what their self-interests were rather than police them—that we began to make some changes in the composition of the administration and the faculty. We also had to have a president who was sensitive to it, and it hadn’t even been an issue during Brady’s administration. We had too many other things on our plate. We couldn’t get around to it, and then we had some years in which Affirmative Action was just a no-no. But when Paul came in, bless his heart, the first thing he did as president was come into my office and sit down and say, “Well, what’s my agenda for the first year?” Right at 35 that point a lot of these things were coming up. I said, “I think it’s going to be diversity.” RL: I was going to ask you about that because I remember the beginnings of the minority faculty internships. RS: That was right when you came. Well, he came in the summer of 1990, and so he began to preach the value of diversity and there was this wonderful moment somewhere along in fall when he was catching a lot of heat for it because this was when, nationally, the backlash was really setting in. We were a pretty conservative campus. The Faculty Senate Executive Committee kind of called him on the carpet one day and asked him to explain himself. He sat there very quietly said, “Let me tell you about my experience, I grew up on a farm in West Warren, which is a suburb of Warren, which is a suburb of Ogden. I mean really out in nowhere, and I came to Weber State for a couple years, and I went to the University of Utah and then I went to Harvard. I didn’t know what hit me.” He looked around the room—I get very emotional about this because it was such a powerful moment—he looked around the room and said, “I don’t want any one of our students to have to go through what I went through.” There was total silence. And he never got another criticism after that. RL: There were rumors about that particular meeting. Any time diversity ran into any problems, it was blamed on the Institutional Committee or whatever name was current at the time. RS: No, Paul really…he just laid it out in terms they could understand as a matter of self-interest. End of argument. 36 RL: Well, no matter what major they were in, once students got away from Weber—if they left Ogden and Utah—it was a totally different cultural environment that they were facing and quite often it was cultural shock that I would imagine that they underwent. RS: In one form or another. You know, that moment taught me the power of the presidency. I had been acting president one summer. One of the things I had learned from that was that our society is screwed up in one major regard. We place chief executives on a pedestal, which accounts for a lot of the shenanigans that go on in presidential suites. Because of the way we treat them, they begin to think, “Well, I’m really special and I can do anything I want.” I saw that the instant I had the title “Acting President.” The deference I began to get from people I knew and worked with every day was just unreal. I knew I didn’t deserve it. RL: People who generally would have wanted to spit in your eye. RS: Or, just be friends or what not. There was this separation that is just absurd and you know that executive salaries are off the scale and this kind of thing. But I didn’t know how to use that productively. Paul taught me that a president has a voice that can be used for tremendous good. I think he transformed our campus in that moment. Suddenly, he was giving permission to what Barry and I and Sherwin Howard and a couple of other people had been trying to achieve. It was always swimming against the current and when Paul made it okay, that’s when things began to flow. The minority lectureships, for example. I mean, even though it was illegal, it was a lot of fun for two or three years and it brought some wonderful people 37 into the institution. And I think it was real because—you know I tracked the statistics and if you know what’s going on, it’s a powerful tool. I tracked the stats on our new faculty recruitment every year and it changed dramatically when we had those minority lectureships and began to recruit different sorts of people. The majority, like seventy percent of the new hires, were either female or minority of some sort. And then, of course, with the developments in the Supreme Court and the fact we went into another budget decline we had to cut it out because we needed the funds. I kept track with the statistics, they didn’t change. The campus culture was transformed permanently. That’s probably the thing I was happiest about from my years there. RL: And that was the voice until you left, you know there was that big emphasis on diversity at the beginning. Not just among the faculty but there was a change in recruitment patterns, too. RS: Well, Marie was pushing the same things in student services and it was…you know, ten years before I wouldn’t have believed you could change a campus culture that dramatically. RL: Well, when I arrived, I called up the recruiting people and said, “We’ve an environment of a community, that is, the schools are twenty-four, twenty-five percent Latino, the campus is one percent; why the discrepancy?” And the response I got was, “I don’t have time for regular recruitment much less minority recruitment.” And the person stating that was African American. It was like, knock your head on the wall why don’t you! 38 RS: As I said we had—until Barry came in—we really had stereotypes in that office, not functioning Affirmative Action officers. And it was cruel, in a way, to put on that kind of performance with no substance. Some of the people had some smarts, but there were people in that office that just…they were only in there because they had run a game of some sort. But it changed, and gradually all the pieces came together and then the dam broke. And it became a much more enjoyable place to work. At the same time, 1991 is when Adele decided to go into politics. We had another dramatic experience in Lithuania. I will never forget the flight back home. She was just totally silent, in her own world, all the way back. She couldn’t get over what she had experienced; particularly the day we met with the new city council of a little town in Southern Lithuania, and listened to them talking of struggle with the idea of democratic… RL: Having a voice. RS: Yeah, and she had been very much affected by stories she had heard about the plight of women in Lithuania, because of a very conservative, male-dominated Catholic society. We’d met a bunch of really bright women while we were there, because our connection had a talent for finding them and accumulating them in the little university. So, Adele finally decided she couldn’t really do anything for Lithuania; she wasn’t in a position to do that. But she could make a difference at home, maybe, by following her instincts. She’d also, by that time, learned that she didn’t work well for somebody else. She needed to be independent. It turned out that politics was an ideal match for her. She started having the same kind of 39 influence in the city that some of us were having on the campus. It was an interesting few years. RL: I think, at the same time in Ogden we got Jesse Garcia on the City Council and we had some of the administrations in the school district who were Hispanic. RS: Yeah, Jesse came…I think two years after she did. Well, John had always been there, John Ulibarri. In fact, he’s the one who had worked with us in the institutional self-study that had started a lot of this. RL: Kathy Ortega was about to be principal. Jim Gallegos, different people who had been in the system for a long time were able to move up. RS: Sandoval saved our son by encouraging us to have him drop out of school for a semester when he had health problems. RL: There’s a lot to be said for that isn’t there? RS: It was just a real exciting time to be around there. RL: You wanted to mention something about community involvement? RS: Yes…the two things that shaped and were shaped by the mission review that became institutional trademarks were our involvement with the public educational system and our involvement with the community—the Ogden business community. The teacher training issue came out of a meeting of the American Association of Higher Education. I started attending that back in 1983, I think it was, and was very taken with the concentration of ideas and people I ran into at those meetings. It became an important thing to me as a source of ideas from the outside world to invigorate and modify things we were doing at Weber. I actually 40 set up a budget line in my office budget to fund faculty travel expenses to go to that meeting. RL: I got to go to a couple of them. RS: After a few years, I was looking at statistics once and I think we were among the top five institutions in the country in terms of attendance at the AAHE meetings. We got an endless supply of good ideas out of that. One that I heard the first meeting I went to was the idea of academic alliances. Associations between liberal arts faculty and teachers in the schools as a way to reinforce the professional character of teaching in public school and to give resources to teachers who wanted to grow in their position. We’d already had a little experience in the Mathematics Department and so I brought it back and started stimulating a few projects and throwing a little money at it here and there as needed. It became a very big thing; at one time, I think we had something like eleven or twelve of these alliances between disciplines in the college and teachers in the schools. It came to a point in 1988 that we actually got a grant. We were picked among thirty institutions in the country to run a program sponsored by Carnegie Corporation. That gave us some money to do this. One of the best things that came out of that was the Teacher Academy that every year brought the teachers in the area in one discipline or another to spend the year working with university faculty and enriching their experience and their ability to teach. It was a very good thing. So, aligning Weber State institutionally, not just the college of education, with public schools became kind of a trademark at the institution. 41 The other thing was community involvement more generally, and this stems from Ann Millner’s work in the community. When she was in Continuing Education, she started a number of programs and she got involved with the community and became President of the Chamber of Commerce. There was even talk of her running for mayor at one time, although I don’t think she wants to remember that. I brought her into my office for a while as an Assistant Vice President to work on community partnerships after we did the mission review and had agreed institutionally that this is going to be an important part of our future. It began to blossom and it’s nice to see that it’s still going on; in fact, it’s proliferated endlessly. So, I thought that there, again, the mission review allowed us to establish a couple of institutional trademarks that defined our campus. About that time, also, there was a movement developing nationally—the Metropolitan University movement—among institutions that were kind of in a similar category to us. They were suburban in location and they sort of fell through the cracks, between the state universities with the land grant status and the research universities that were totally wrapped up in research, and were more inclined to serve the needs of their geographical area. Sometimes the term regional university was used but that was not felt, at the time, to be a very descriptive term. So, we got into the Metropolitan University movement. We used it when the name change came up as an identifying factor and a national affiliation to give us some ideas and backup on how to work in that context. So, those were all things that came out of the mission review. I still think the mission 42 review was probably the single most significant project that we worked on while I was in the Academic Affairs office. RL: A lot of the things that were seeded by that have gone on and become a great big program. RS: It’s nice to watch. RL: It’s nice to watch from afar. RS: Yes, I check in occasionally to see what’s going on and it’s very heartening to see how much of what we started back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s is still continuing and some of the very good people we were able to recruit then. We had another one of those good cycles in the early ‘90s. We were awash in money when the rest of the country was in recession. So, we had great pickings on hiring and recruiting faculty in those days. Have we talked about the diversity movement on the record? RL: Well, we’ve touched on it and the fact that Paul Thompson was highly supportive of it. I know that, as you said, he was challenged about it at the beginning but there were grumblings later on, too. And even though there are a lot of diversity issues being dealt with, I don’t think they’re at the forefront as much as they were in the early and mid-90s. RS: I think the significant thing was just the change in campus culture that took place as a result of our emphasis—at least before the Supreme Court declared the kind of program we were doing was unconstitutional. RL: But you said that the application process and recruiting did not go back to being as male-oriented. 43 RS: Yes, the statistics every year—the composition of new recruits the years we were specifically trying to reach out to women and to ethnic minorities—persisted after the program was over. The campus culture had been changed permanently. RL: And you mentioned in your presentation—the honorary degree presentation— that you did that in about 1991. You had determined a five-year plan working towards your own retirement. RS: Oh yeah, right. RL: Was there any one particular thing that helped you decide to take that track? Did you feel like you were finishing what you could… RS: I may have mentioned earlier the nice thing about administration is that it gives you the opportunity to explore. And during the late ‘80s I started getting interested in a different kind of writing than I could do through memos to the faculty or technical reports and that sort of thing. In 1987, the summer just before Adele and I and our son had taken a trip to the Galapagos Islands and it kind of reignited an experience I had had there several years earlier. So, I sat down and started writing about it. And, about that time, Sam Zeveloff in Zoology, Mike Vause in English, and Bill McVaugh in Psychology came up with the idea of starting a wilderness conference with people involved from all over North America. They invited me to give a paper at the first conference. So, I made a presentation on my Galapagos experience and that kind of set me to thinking and writing in new directions. I began to get involved in Writing Across the Curriculum. RL: I know you were involved with a group that was doing a creative writing 44 RS: Yeah. RS: Lee McKenzie who, unfortunately, died prematurely and was one of our really superb faculty members—she helped me an awful lot personally and she was head of the Writing Across the Curriculum program near the beginning of it. I got into a writing group with her and some others and that persisted. We continued until the time I had left town; actually, even after I retired I continued to meet with them. So, that got me into writing creative nonfiction, mostly nature writing which was a lot of fun. And it set me to thinking about doing something different for the rest of my life. RL: So that has kind of spurred you on to what you’ve been doing since you left Weber, didn’t it? RS: Yeah, in a way, but I mean…in 1991, Adele and I took a group of student leaders—the student body president, vice president, newspaper editor, and the radio station manager—on a trip to Lithuania to meet with counterparts at a little upstart University in the Soviet Union. It was another one of those very moving experiences. That caused me to sit down and think. I mean, when you watch a quarter million people drop everything to defend and fight for something they believed in, you can’t help when you’re in the middle of them…you can’t help but take notice and stop and think: what am I doing? It’s what propelled my wife into politics and it set me to thinking about not so much of the Lithuania situation as about…just in general: am I taking seriously what I want to do with the rest of my life? So I started contemplating a different sort of life as a writer and outside the academic context and discovered, when I ran the math, about five years out I 45 could afford to do that, just retire and pursue a career I didn’t have to make a living in. RL: And start your five-year cycle. RS: Yeah, it was perfect. So, I set that aside and kept it in the back of my mind and when the time came I talked to Paul Thompson. I told him what I had been planning and he was amenable to it. He supported me and got me a sabbatical with the Board of Trustees and I went on my way. About the time that I left the provost’s office, I had an odd experience. I was commuting during my sabbatical year; I actually ended up commuting every month down to the coast because my father was very ill and dying, and I was the closest responsible relative. In the course of it, I discovered a box of materials that nobody knew existed, having to do with the place in the mountains we’d being going to all our lives. There were some very fascinating documents in it that that kind of upended the family myths about how we got it and why and set me to digging into the history of this spot in the mountains, which started out actually as a sawmill in the 1870’s. That’s how I got diverted from nature writing into doing local history. After about nine years of research and lucky breaks, I was able to put together a pretty good narrative on how the place had originated and evolved into what we have today. By that time, I’d gotten involved with the local historical society here in Idyllwild for selfish reasons. I wanted a place to put all this archive material I was accumulating that was safer than our house in the middle of wildfire country. And, also, I was hoping to get some contacts with other 46 historians in the area that would help me in my research. I ended up…well, I discovered that this was a really high class organization for a small town away in the mountains, kind of a historical society. I got lured into becoming very involved with it. Ultimately, I got into the archives and learned about Idyllwild history, which I knew nothing about when we moved here. RL: Well, it’s quite a thriving community, isn’t it? RS: Yeah, it’s an amazing little community. As soon as we moved here, I got the sense that this was a lot like the town I grew up in. A little farm town on the coast in the 1950’s. It didn’t seem to have changed. And that’s proven to be true. That provided a stepping stone and context for a history of Idyllwild that I wrote that was published in 2009. So, I am very much into the archive trade and writing history, doing research, and writing a column for the newspaper. RL: Now, the arts community in Idyllwild—the music program, I know that’s what I had heard of before—that has national and international recognition, doesn’t it? RS: We have two claims to fame here. One is that big granite rock across the valley, which is one of the best known climbing locations for technical rock climbing in the world; and the other is Idyllwild Arts Foundation, which runs the academy which is a boarding high school. It is one of three of the country, and also has a summer program open to everybody. That’s been going since 1950; it coincided with the renaissance of Idyllwild after the Second World War and has had the effect of accumulating an arts community here that’s quite something. We’ve been listed among the one hundred best art towns in the country. The academy has programs in music, theater, creative writing, film, you name it. Any kind of 47 visual/performing arts, it’s all there. Students are admitted by audition only. They’re recruited from all over the world and it is a very well-known operation. RL: Some of the people who have come through here have gone on to great accomplishments and so forth. You mentioned earlier that you are involved with oral histories. Are you doing oral histories of any of the people who have come through training in the community? RS: Our organization is only ten years old. We got an oral history program started early and then it kind of lapsed because it’s an all-volunteer organization, people come and go. Last year, we got a grant to update our equipment and start a new round of interviews; so we’d been trying to get some of the old-timers to get that part of history that we were about to lose as they age and pass on. That’s where our emphasis has been mostly. But we have, I mean there are some pretty eminent people who’ve come through. Michael Tilson Thomas, who conducted the San Francisco Symphony, was a mainstay here. The faculty they had in the early days in the 1950s for the summer program was just unbelievable. One of the chief people who got the thing off the ground professionally was Meredith Wilson. In fact, he wrote Music Man here in Idyllwild. RL: Oh, okay. RS: And we have the Meredith Wilson archive down at the museum at the academy because his family agreed that one of his big projects in life was getting Idyllwild Arts off the ground. And we have had distinguished people through all the time. Every few years they get a grant and bring someone like the Juilliard String 48 Quartet in for a week to do masters classes or work with the students and offer free concerts to the community. It’s a wonderful fringe benefit of living here. RL: Now, tell me about the significance of the spelling of the town. RS: Idyllwild, well… RL: Because of it’s being an idyllic place? RS: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It was a concoction; it goes back to a gentleman who came here from Michigan in 1890. He got into the logging business. This was one big logging camp, at that point, and he’d got into a partnership with the main timber baron of the valley. He saw immediately that there was no future in logging because you work your way out of the job by taking the trees down. So, he started setting up a commercial camp, which he called Camp Idylwilde and it was concocted from the idea of an idyllic setting and the wild settings and the wild surroundings of the mountains here. RL: I know when I was first looking for your location I was spelling Idyllwild as in the airport and it doesn’t show up that way. RS: No, no. RL: Well, what’s the future for Bob and Adele Smith? It’s about time for another fiveyear cycle to start up, isn’t it? RS: Yeah, I know, I’ve actually been ten years in the present cycle. I don’t know if that will change. The big project for the next few years is taking our very extensive archive at the museum and indexing and cataloging it so that we can actually find things when we get research inquiries. We get several dozen inquiries a year about something. “Do you have information on this?” Or, “Do you know about so 49 and so?” And being the research staff of the museum, I have to deal with those. I’ve got about half a dozen volunteers working for me now to do the cataloging and indexing so we can do quick and dirty searches and detailed searches and find information. You folks in the archiving business know what I’m talking about. It was a big part of our function last year, in fact. I have to say with a little bit of self-serving pride: we were the first local independent historical society in the state to be selected for an annual award the professional society of archivists in California gives. It typically had gone to little organizations like Walt Disney, Levi Strauss, the Auto Club, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. For some reason, they got wind of what we were doing up here, and out of the blue we found ourselves receiving the award last year. I think it’s kind of a neat validation of the quality of the organization. It makes you want to double down and keep working hard and it has attracted a tremendous number of volunteers to what we’re doing. RL: You had mentioned, at one point when we were setting up this appointment, that when you first encountered this it was pretty much little old ladies working out of a garage. RS: What I was saying is that the typical local historical society is housewives—to use the stereotype—getting together and accumulating things. If you have a museum it begins to look like grandma’s garage as they pile more and more stuff in it. Our museum was created by our founding curator, who didn’t know a lot about museums or history, but she had lived here for a long time and she was a professional interior designer. We had a president who did have a little 50 experience with museums; she had started a museum down on the Caribbean island of Nevis where they had had an asset like the Alexander Hamilton birth place to build their museum in. So, she knew a little about museums and she was also a graphic artist. Between the two of them, they put together just an exquisite museum in six weeks over a summer when we decided we wanted to open. RL: You had mentioned something about a grant for the building…what was that? RS: Oh, we did a private fundraising. We got a few grants from the county, we were outgrowing our space. Well, in fact, we had too little space to begin with. Our museum is a 1930 family cabin that was very well preserved and they had a wood shed and garage out back. We converted the woodshed and garage into an office/archive facility, but it was way too small. So we worked for about seven years accumulating county grants and doing private fundraising and finally ran a capital campaign at the absolute nadir of the economic recession. It worked miraculously. So, we have a very nice archive building now. RL: In the middle of wildfire country? RS: Yeah, but it’s very well protected against fire. RL: And most of it I’m assuming is automated and backed up? RS: We are in the process of digitizing the entire the collection of documents and photos. And we have it protected in the building as we go; we’re also backing it up off-site. RL: Are you working with the state library or the IMLS as far as trying to get funding? 51 RS: Well, we got started by getting a grant for, um what do they call it? It was CAP— Conservation Assessment Program. Out of IMLS we got one of those grants and brought in a couple of consultants. They gave us the specs for the new building and we’ve kind of taken it from there. The folks who started this organization had a person who was not on the Board but who was a professional curator at the Riverside City Museum. She guided us to the right people—I say “us,” but this was before I was involved—she arranged for seminars for the volunteers in town to learn the archive and museum trade and the tools of the trade. It’s been a remarkably professional operation, even though it is done by naïve amateurs. RL: Well, some of the best things are done that way, you know? That way you don’t know what can’t be done. RS: That’s right. RL: Any thought given to the idea of maybe contacting an archival program for internships for their students? RS: We’ve looked at that occasionally, our operation is so small at this point we don’t have the supervisory capability to make that work, actually. RL: But it would be a possibility as far as— RS: It’s kind of an irony that I mentioned this when I was up on campus this spring. I got into this looking for a new life outside the academic world, something completely different. I now find myself… RL: Drawing on your academic experience? 52 RS: Writing grant proposals, scrounging private funding, cultivating the media, hiring and firing and mediating disputes among volunteers. Nothing has changed. I get to do a little research and publication, it sounds like the university all over again. RL: But aren’t you glad you have that experience to draw on? RS: It’s very useful, and I have to say it’s an experiential component that would not be here otherwise, and I think I’ve been able to contribute to it. But without the skills of these other people we never would have raised the money to buy a museum building eighteen months after the organization was formed, or gotten the museum up and running, or been able to connect with all the hundreds of people in the community who’ve donated artifacts and documents that have made it a really nice place to work. RL: So, it sounds like you’ve found your niche in the world. RS: For these five years. RL: As far as your time at Weber State, you mention the diversity programs you helped to develop there were a highlight. RS: Well, I think it was broader than that. That was a component; the satisfying thing was—as I’ve said many times—to exert atmospheric management. I tried to help create a climate that would attract really good people and keep them; in particular, the faculty people who could challenge serious students and provide the best education available in Utah while at the same time working with a wide variety of students that we get as a commuter institution. I think we’d moved from an academic culture that was focused on the past and the junior college programs. It was kind of a late-‘60s atmosphere when 53 everything was growing wildly and we learned along the way how to live within the constraints of a more steady state economy and at the same time build quality. I think Weber became a very respectable undergraduate institution and as we changed identity to a university there really wasn’t any change in substance. We were already the kind of institution that we became as a university because we’d been building the infrastructure and building the cultural change over time. RL: Well, your limit of twelve thousand students that you mentioned at the beginning, I think we’re now double that. RS: Yeah, but how did we do that? See, here was one of the interesting things from the mission project. Once we agreed on what we wanted to do, then at the end of the centennial celebration, local citizen leader Richard Myers came up with the idea that it was time to change the identity of the college to university. And, as my wife who had worked with him a lot informed me, if Richard Myers says it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. So, I resisted the idea because I had watched name changes occur all over the country and it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. RL: Things wash out. RS: We’d already had a good sense of mission, we knew who we were; we knew what we were doing by 1988 and so why mess around with all the politics with this? Once I heard Richard Myers spearheading this, I knew it was going to happen and it was just a matter of when. The job changed to securing our sense of mission—making sure the change of identity didn’t changed our sense of what 54 we were trying to do because I think we’re in a niche. It was an important and unique one for the state of Utah. And so I worked a lot with the faculty leadership between 1988 and ’90, trying to reinforce this new sense of a unified mission and make sure that it would survive the change of name. Because, once you’re called a university, then everybody is at your door wanting this and that and it could really dilute our efforts. I think one of the satisfying things we retained is that sense of identity. The way we grew after that was a new campus in Davis County, online, and distance education. I think pretty much you won’t…if you look at the statistics, I’ll bet you won’t find that the main campus population has grown that much. And that’s how we maintained the kind of institution we were despite these pressures to grow. RL: But part of what has built, some of this success, is things like the evening emphasis for the MBA programs, that people can come back to school and so things seem to be cycling…you know some of the things that you were trying to get away from come back around. RS: We were never trying to get away from evening classes or distance learning. RL: No, but you were changing the emphasis and changing some of the funding. RS: Actually, what we were trying to do there was create a mentality so that faculty saw they had a certain responsibility, and it didn’t matter whether they taught their courses mornings, evenings, or weekends, as long as they fulfilled that responsibility it was a responsible work load and everything was okay. 55 When it was artificially separated, they kind of saw one as their day job and the other as a side job to make a little extra money, there was nothing academic about it. RL: Well, you’ve mentioned several things that you’ve seen as highlights, is there any one accomplishment in your time at Weber State that stands out as the…the one thing you hold most dear or are proudest of? RS: Well, I think probably defining the mission and getting campus-wide agreement on it because that drove so many of these other things. I mean, the move for greater diversity in the faculty flowed from that because one of the things we established in the mission was responsiveness to the full range of students that we had and as the student population changed the faculty had to change with it. RL: And I think we’ve also gotten away from that “teaching institution” mentality. There has been a lot more emphasis placed recently on research and publication for faculty and accomplishment other than just teaching the same thing over and over. RS: I’ve always thought that you can view the nature of the enterprise as learning at all levels from freshman to full professor. Learning is what we do. We do it collaboratively between faculty and students. But that’s what we’re in business for. RL: It’s not just a one-way open your mouth and let the pearls of wisdom fall. For it to be fulfilling it has to be a give and take situation. Anything you want to close with? 56 RS: Well, coming back to campus this last spring kind of brought back a lot of memories, and I guess that evening in the Student Union was kind of overwhelming, seeing so many old faces and friends. But it reminded me of the good years that we’d spent in Utah, both Adele and I; she and the community, me and the university. We look back at it with both pride and satisfaction and happiness of what Weber gave to us. RL: Well, the presidential scholars, all of them were people with whom you had worked and set them on the road. Look at their accomplishments. RS: I was involved in their recruitment in a distant sort of way. But again, it was atmospheric; we created a climate that would attract people like Judy Elsley and Brooke Arkush and Yu-Jane Yang and many more. It’s been kind of fun to watch and see a lot of these people evolve into leaders in one way or another, running some of the special programs. RL: But it wasn’t just a matter of attracting them—you actually helped, too. RS: A climate that both attracted and helped. RL: And developed them and helped them. RS: We had an environment in which people mutually reinforced each other. It was a good place; when the time came to leave it, I was very pleased to be able to leave while it was still fun. RL: And shouldn’t everything be like that? RS: Yeah, I think so. It’s probably the best piece of advice I ever got. RL: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. RS: You’re welcome. 57 RL: You’ve helped to add to the voices that we’re trying to capture for our oral history program. Thank you.