Oral History Program Michael Vaughan Interviewed by Kandice Harris 5 & 6 August 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Michael Vaughan Interviewed by Kandice Harris 5 & 6 August 2021 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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: Vaughan, Michael, an oral history by Kandice Harris, 5 & 6 August, 2023 WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Michael Vaughan Circa 2012 Michael Vaughan Circa 2021 Abstract: The Following is an oral history interview with Michael Vaughan, conducted via Zoom on August 5 and 6, 2021 by Kandice Harris. In this interview, Mike talks about growing up in Arkansas, pursuing his education, and his time as an employee of Weber State University as a professor, economics chair, dean of the School of Business and Economics, and provost. KH: Hello, my name is Kandice Harris, today is August 5th, 2021, and I am with Michael Vaughan. We will be discussing his time at Weber State. When and where were you born? MV: I was born in 1954 in Springdale, Arkansas. KH: Great, would you talk a little bit about your early life and some historical background? MV: What do you mean by historical background, Kandice? KH: Where you grew up, if you were into anything in high school, where you went to college, that sort of thing. MV: I grew up in the town where I was born, Springdale, Arkansas. It's in the northwest corner of the state. In a lot of ways, I was a typical baby-boomer kid along with a lot of other baby-boomer kids. The family right across the street, had three boys and a girl. The family two houses up, had a boy and two girls. In all those households, there was a kid within a year or two of my own age. There were also kids who were the same ages as my younger brother and sister. It was a typical baby-boom neighborhood of the 1950s. I tell people that in some ways, if they wanted to get an idea of what my childhood was like, they should look at the old television series, Leave it to 1 Beaver. It was a Leave it to Beaver neighborhood, and I had something of a Leave it to Beaver childhood. However, that is the perspective of a child. That's what I saw when I was five or six or seven. It's not what I see now as an adult looking back on things. As an adult, when I look back on things, I realize there were a lot of problems and issues in the neighborhood. There were problems in school. There were things going on in the city. Still, I was isolated from many of the bad things, and I was privileged to enjoyed some of the good things. I had a good childhood. One of the unique things about the town where I grew up is that it was only a few miles away from the University of Arkansas; and that was a huge positive for me. When I was in grade school, my father would drive us to the university on weekends and we would walk around campus, and he would make us familiar with the campus and what a university was about. He might say, "This is the architecture building, this is the art building. This is the library. This is what people do in those building. The students that are studying in the architecture building are preparing themselves to do this kind of career when they graduate. The students in the civil engineering building are preparing themselves to build bridges and dams. As children, we just thought it was a pleasant place to walk. It was park-like; it had a lot of trees. That is pretty common for a university campus. In retrospect, I think my dad really had an intense desire for all of his kids to go to college. He went to college for a few years, but did not complete his degree. I think that was always something of a regret for him. My mother never went to college. My father entered college before 2 WWII, interrupted his studies to go into the Army Air Corps during WWII, and when he came back, he tried to continue his studies but ultimately stopped. As he described it to me, he was older and just thought he needed to get on with life. He didn't feel like he could spend more time preparing for life. He needed to start doing. He withdrew from college and never completed. Still, he wanted his kids to go to college. I went to college, and my brother did, and my sister did. All the children in the family earned college degrees. KH: What started your interest in business and education? MV: I'm going to ask you a question. What do you mean by education? Do you mean in pursuing education and being employed in education? KH: Being employed in education. MV: Being employed in education? And what do you mean by business? KH: I know that you taught economics. So, what drew you to that major in that profession? MV: My first degree was in industrial management, which was a joint program of industrial engineering and business. I went through the program and I liked it from a curricular standpoint. I don't know what you know about industrial engineering. At that point in time, it was...I'll describe it as an unusual profession. Hundreds of thousands of people are industrial engineers and they do just fine. I'm not going to bash on industrial engineers, but the industrial engineers at that point in time were the efficiency experts. We literally took classes where they would give us a clipboard with a sheet of paper outlining a very specific way where we could record notes about what people were doing on their jobs. The 3 clipboards would have a stopwatch at the top. We would go into some type of factory environment and we would observe people, and we would take notes, "Well, that person spent a few too many seconds doing this. They spent far too many seconds doing that." Then, our job was to figure out how to make the entire process more efficient. We'd say, "Well, you know, if you cut that out or did that task first and you could shave a few seconds off the production process." As we learned this, I hated it. I mean, the part of my studies that I enjoyed the most was the theoretical part. That was essentially the first three years. In our senior year, we went out into real businesses and actually did real efficiency studies, and the workers hated us. I mean, nobody wants somebody watching what they do for every second and criticizing you, particularly a college kid who's never actually done what they're doing. They were being watched by a student who has never actually worked on an assembly line and put things together. Still, this student is going to watch me and tell me how to do my job. At that point, I thought, "Well, you know, that was a fun academic experience, but I'm not going to do that for a career. That is not the career path I'm going to go down." Then, I thought, "What am I going to do?" I thought, "Well, I'll get a master's degree, I will retool, and that'll prepare me for different job opportunities." I chose to get an MBA, and I really liked the entire program. My favorite classes were in economics. To the extent that I had any choice and could choose elective classes, I specialized in economics. At the conclusion of my master's degree, I thought, "Well, I'm going to get a doctorate in economics." 4 KH: Okay, great. What were some of the challenges you faced while obtaining your degrees? MV: You know, that sends my mind off in unusual directions. One answer I would give you is to say I didn't have any meaningful challenges. Looking back on things after actually dealing with some of life’s challenges, going through graduate school in my early 20s was easy. It was a piece of cake. On the other hand, because I'm an economist, I've gone back and looked at data. One of the things that I teach in economic classes is poverty. Based on the data, I now know more than I did when I was 23 years old. During the last year of my Ph.D. program, I was married. Based upon our income, my wife and I were living below the poverty standard. We were really broke. We were literally getting by on five or six thousand dollars a year. At the time, it did not seem that way. I mean, it seemed like we had all the money we needed. It seemed like we had money for frivolous things. If we wanted to go to a concert, we'd go to a concert. To sum things up, I would say I generally encountered no challenges beyond what students normally have. I guess I would also qualify that... Because an important dimension to how I'm answering that question was my age; I had completed my PhD when I was 25. Many things are easier when you are young. KH: Oh, wow. MV: I will also mention that even though I was married, we didn't have any children. It's a different set of circumstances for students with children. I remember in my PhD program, there were people who were much smarter than me and much more dedicated. They were more mature; but, in the end, they never finished 5 their degree because they were trying to get through a PhD program with three kids and balance all of that with passing comprehensive exams and writing a dissertation. Many of those folks just got to a point where they couldn't do it anymore. So, the fact that I was young made it easy. KH: Okay, what career options did you consider once you had your degree? MV: You know, I think I was utterly focused on an academic career. I interviewed with lots of different organizations. I interviewed with government agencies, I interviewed with the International Trade Commission in Washington D.C. I actually got an offer from them. I did some corporate interviews. I mean, I cast a pretty wide net, but I always gravitated back to the academic jobs. I would have liked some things about the government jobs, but I didn't want to move around a lot and someone gave me a piece of advice at that time and said, "As an economist, Washington is a great place to be for four or five years, but you don't want to spend 40 years in Washington." For that reason, I didn't go in that direction. I thought, "You know, I don't want to do something for two or three years and then pick up and move cross-country." They also advised me that it's much easier to go from academia to government than from government to academia. KH: When did you start working at Weber State University? MV: 1981. KH: What drew you to Weber State? MV: You know, a story that I've told numerous times goes back to when I was in my graduate program. I was at the University of Nebraska, I had a friend named 6 Steve Hickerson and he interviewed at Weber State, I think it was in 1979 or 1980. It was probably the spring of 1980. He came back and just praised Weber State, and he said, "You know, it's beautiful." He talked about the snow-covered mountains. The folks on campus told him that the skiing was good. In the end, Steve did not get a job offer from Weber State. The following year, 1981, I applied to numerous schools, probably more than a hundred. If there was a job opening, I probably applied for it. One of the schools was Weber State. They invited me out for an interview. I recalled that Steve had visited WSU and thought it was pretty nice, so I thought I'll go out and see what it's like. KH: What was Weber State like when you started? MV: Weber State is always in transition, and I think universities are always in transition, At the time that I joined Weber State, the school was shedding a lot of the vocational programs. It was growing into its role as a four-year institution and subsequently a masters institution. It was clearly at a transition point. When I came to Weber State, most of the people in the Department of Economics had a Ph.D., but a great many faculty across campus did not. Weber State started granting bachelor's degrees in the 1960s, almost two decades before I arrived. Yet, if you think about academic careers, they can span 40, 45, maybe even 50 years or longer. When I arrived in 1981, there were faculty members who had joined Weber in the 1950s. At that point in time, Weber State was different. There were people on the full-time faculty with only a bachelor’s degree. I mentioned vocational programs. Weber had a cosmetology program at that point in time. They had a barber training program. They had massage therapy. Those were 7 among the group of programs that were eventually phased out. Weber State was transitioning. It had grown rapidly and it continued to grow rapidly. It was for the most part, a one-campus university. There was no presence in Davis County and no talk about a presence in Davis County. There was nothing online. However, some programs were offered remotely. At that time, health professions was offering programs in southern Utah, the Blanding area. Health professions also had a program up in Alaska. There was a distance education presence, but it was different from what it is today. KH: What positions have been held in your career? MV: I came as a faculty member and then I was department chair. As chair, you have some administrative duties, but you're still a faculty member. You're still primarily a faculty. Then, I was appointed associate dean. Following that, I became dean of the business school where I served for about a decade. Then, I was appointed Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. KH: How has the Economics Department or the College of Business, whichever way you want to take it, and the campus, how did they change over time? MV: So the question I'm looking at says the Economics Department and the campus. KH: I know you had a lot of roles that you want to talk about, the college and the campus or all of that. I'd be fine with any of those. MV: That would be something that maybe we should come back to later. I'll say a few things now, but that is a pretty involved question. Some of the academic colleges are radically different than they were when I arrived. The college that is now called Engineering, Applied Science and 8 Technology was previously called the School of Applied Science and Technology. That was the tech college that offered the cosmetology program, the drafting program, and the other vocational and technical programs. Now that college has several engineering programs, including a graduate program in engineering. The Health Professionals College has undergone major changes. The one-year degree in nursing was a huge degree for Health Professions when I came. They moved beyond the one-year degree, and the college now offers associate, baccalaureate, master's, and a doctorate in nursing. There is a much larger graduate presence on campus. Shifting away from the transition to more advanced programs and graduate programs, the distance education role at Weber State is greatly increased. A moment ago, I said that when I came, virtually everything Weber State did was on the Ogden campus on Harrison Avenue, unless Weber State was doing a short-term program in southern Utah or Alaska or something like that. If you had broken out the enrollment numbers, you would have said, well, gee, 98% percent of our enrollment is on the Ogden Campus, on Harrison Boulevard. The last time I looked at the headcount numbers, the Ogden Campus, on Harrison Boulevard accounted for less than half of WSU’s total enrollment. In recent years, I mention that a lot in President's Council meeting, when I was Provost. People still think of WSU as an Ogden university. I mean, when they conceptualize what's happening on campus, they still think of the center of gravity as the Harrison campus. The Harrison campus is still pretty big. Indeed, it accounts for almost half of the headcount enrollment, but roughly half the 9 campus is somewhere else. It's in Davis County. It is online, It is concurrent enrollment. It is at the West Center. Weber State’s enrollment is really dispersed. That has been a really big change that I have witnessed. KH: Great. What resistance or battles did you face as you progress in your career? MV: You know. I read this question in advance, so I'm not pausing because I'm unfamiliar with the question. One of the things that I did during my administrative career was dealing with different governing groups, primarily the Board of Regents and the Board of Trustees. In the past couple of years, they've changed governance a little bit, and the names and roles have changed, but people will still be able follow my remarks. When Weber State proposes new programs, those proposals need to go before one or more groups and sometimes there will opposition. In many cases, we wouldn't get a lot of pushback or resistance on new programs. On other occasions, especially, if we were moving into new areas, there might be opposition from one or more governing groups. As an example, we had a huge fight for the MBA program. That was a big one. The first engineering programs were also a huge fight. In retrospect, it makes no sense on either count. I mean, the people that were opposing those programs said a lot of things with regard to their opposition that simply were not true. One of the things they said is, "Weber State will never attract students to these programs." The MBA program and all the engineering programs are very successful in terms of student enrollment. Opponents would say things like: "They're never going to be able to get these programs accredited." Again, the programs sailed through the accreditation process. 10 Dealing with governing bodies is a part of an administrator’s job. In the end, resistance from the governing bodies is interesting and it just delays things. It delayed the MBA program, eight months to a year. Opposition delayed the engineering program probably more than a year. Those are interesting experiences. Sometimes they're fun. You have to make them fun to continue to do your job. Still, if you had your preferences, you wouldn't choose to deal with opposition, but you make the challenge parts of the job fun in order to do the job. When we were getting some pushback on the undergraduate program in electrical engineering I was talking to Dave Ferro, he was, and still is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and Technology. Dave asks me, "What are we going to do about this?" I said that given we have to deal with this opposition we may as well try to get everything we want I said, "Not only are we going to get a degree in electrical engineering, we're going to get a graduate degree in engineering. In the end, we did get a graduate degree in engineering. When, I proposed the LGBT center to the Board of Trustees, which is a different governing body from the Board of Regents. As an aside, I need to say that the Board of Trustees were very supportive and helpful with both the MBA program and the engineering programs. In any event, the Board of Trustees needed to approve the LGBT Center and we got a lot of pushback on that. That response really surprised me. A few of the Trustees were opposed to the LGBT center, but eventually they came around. After we made the initial presentation, it was not approved; however, it was not formally denied. They just said, "We're not going to approve it at this meeting." After the initial meeting, I thought, "You 11 know, we may not get this thing done. It may not happen." That bothered me a great deal. Nevertheless, we persisted. The thing that changed the Trustees attitude the most was when we brought in a group of students to talk about the creation of the LGBT Center and what it would mean for them. The students spoke about their own challenges and experiences, and those testimonials carried the day. After the Trustees heard the students speak, it changed a couple of votes and that center was ultimately approved. KH: Okay, you just mentioned three programs that I want to know more about. So what was the process of starting the MBA program? MV: When I was dean and provost, the process for starting any new program was that you took the proposal through Weber State’s its own internal process, which is department, college, faculty senate, and the provost. If a faculty member wanted to add a class in European economic history, they would need go through that process. So a single proposed class would go through the curriculum committees at the department level, the school level or college level, depending on what the unit is designated – the faculty senate, president, provost. If it's a new degree program, at the time I was provost, the proposal also had to go to the Trustees and the Board of Regents. You would write the paperwork up, and you'd send it to the Trustees and then you would send it to the Board of Regents. The Board of Regents is a body that's appointed by the governor. They look at the proposal; and at that point in time, the Board of Regents had to approve new degrees. That's changed a little. Some new degree proposals now, stop with the Trustees. They don't go all the way to the Regents. For the MBA 12 program, it went all the way to the Board of Regents. We got a lot of opposition from Utah State. The opposition can come from other institutions, or it can come from members of the Board of Regents, or it can come from staff members who work in the Office of Higher Education, or it can come from all three. In the case of the MBA program, the president at Utah State, at that point in time, was prepared to go to the mat on the MBA program. He didn't want us to get it. When that happens, the Regents always listen to the criticism, and many times the criticism sways their opinion. The Utah State University president was able to sway some opinions on the Board of Regents. Like I said, it slowed down the process for the MBA program. Engineering was an even harder fight, that was tougher. KH: What was the process for starting the LGBT Resource Center? MV: At the time I was Provost, the proposal was required to be approval by the Trustees. It was not a degree program. In the case of non-degree centers, unless there were huge budgetary implications, the Regents are not deeply involved. Their approval was necessary, but that was not the stumbling block. It had to go to the Trustees before it went to the Regents, and several members of the Board of Trustees had concerns. That was the resistance that we encountered. KH: From first idea to when the center was created, how long did it take? MV: I'm going to give you a detailed answer. The process might have been as long as a year. I would say that it was not longer than a year. It could have been seven or eight months. However, I'm going to qualify that by saying that a person in the position of provost, or a person in the position of president, tries to be politically 13 astute about these things. If we know that there is no way that we are going to prevail, we just don't send a proposal forward. At one point in time when I was provost, a faculty member in political science said, "I'm going to propose a law school for Weber State." I said, "Don't even think about it." We're not going to do that. The reason we wouldn't do it is because it would not be approved. I mention that is because many people had a desire for an LGBT center on campus for five years or a decade before we got the center approved. I know there were people that were wanting to see that happen, I mean, the desire was there, so the timeframe I gave you doesn't include the timeframe for that desire. You know, a decade before we proposed it, we would just have said, "We can’t do it because an LGBT Center is not going to be approved. We are not to expend the effort for something we know will fail.” One of the reasons that I was so frustrated with the Trustees is that the president and I had talked about this, and we said, "You know, the time is now.” No one's going to oppose this now. The environment is different. People have different attitudes than they did 20 years ago. This is not going to shock anybody. We are not going to hear the old arguments that people would have pulled out 20 years ago." The thing that was so frustrating is we brought the proposal forward and a couple of members of the Board of Trustees voiced those same old arguments. I mean, we heard people saying, "You're going to recruit students and convert them to the homosexual lifestyle." A staff member, came to one of the Trustees meetings where it was discussed, a Weber State staff member came to oppose 14 it. She said, "This is immoral. If you have a center like this, you might as well start a pornography center." We thought we wouldn't hear stuff like that, but we did. KH: Wow. That just boggles the mind. So a couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with Susan Hafen and she talked a little bit about starting the program. About starting the center and how when the meetings first started, it wasn't "We're going in with the intention of starting the resource center, we're going in to see how best to help the students." So from that starting meeting, how did you go from being, "We need to help these students" to, "The resource center is the best way to help them."? MV: At that point in time, I knew that my time as provost was coming to an end. My timeframe for stepping down wasn’t measured in days, but I was thinking, "I'm going to step down as provost in two years to two and a half years." I was getting in the mode of, "What do I want to wrap up while I'm still Provost?" Chuck Wight came in as president and Chuck was receptive. I guess it was the intersection of those two things, I'm was at a stage in my career as provost and I didn’t care if I got beat up because I was not going to be in this job much longer. Chuck was receptive to the idea, so I thought, you know, "We ought to go with this. Chuck may leave and we may get somebody in here who says, 'Not while I'm president.' That could push things back a decade." It just looked like, to some extent, the stars were aligned and we ought to run with it. KH: You mentioned Chuck Wight. Would you share your thoughts about each of the presidents that you worked under throughout your career? Just your thoughts or fun anecdotes, anything like that. 15 MV: You know, I really liked Rodney Brady, and Rod was a really good president. The first president that I worked with was Rod Brady. Rod followed Joe Bishop. Joe Bishop was universally hated. He was hated by the faculty. He was hated by the staff. If you went out with the lantern and looked high and low, you might find somebody that would say something ambivalent about Joe Bishop, but for the most part, he was universally hated on the Weber State campus. People in the community didn't like Joe Bishop. He had burned bridges. Since he left Weber State, interestingly enough, almost 45 years after he left, he had some developments in his life that reveal even deeper insights into why people did not hold Joe Bishop in high regard. Those things cast a giant shadow. There are structures and policies at Weber State, right now, that are in place because the policies were enacted in response to Bishop’s presidency. When people look at certain things and say, "You know why do you do things that way?" The answer is that people were so concerned that somebody might follow Joe Bishop and try to do similar things, that we needed to enact safeguards. Those Bishop years cast a giant shadow. Rodney was the right person at the right time: very personable, deeply appreciated, good in the community, and I think that's why he was appointed. He had a very good understanding about what presidents should do and what the vice president for academic affairs should do. He let his administrative people do their things. Since he left, I have an even a deeper appreciation of what Rod did for the university. So, my memories are very positive about Rod. 16 Rod was followed by Steve Nadauld. Steve Nadauld was at a point in his career where he was something of a new “up-and-comer.” Steve has never told me that, but I think Steve probably came to Weber State with the intention of being a five- or six-year person. In the end, that's what he was, give or take a couple of years. The important thing that Steve did for the university is an interesting case study in leaders and the kinds of things that they do. At some point during his presidency, and I view his presidency as a rather brief presidency, not as long as Ann Millner’s and not as long as Paul Thompson’s, Steve decided to make Weber State a university. Steve was the guy that changed the name of Weber State from Weber State College to Weber State University. He fought that battle, and he got a lot of resistance from the Board of Regents. Steve fought that fight, and it was a good fight to take on. You know, like some other things. it was the right time become a university. It was on Steve's watch that Weber State College became Weber State University. Steve was followed by Paul Thompson. When Paul came, I was at a different point in my career, so I had been a department chair. I was associate dean when Paul was hired, and I became a dean after Paul was appointed. The positions that you hold at a university influence your interactions with other people. That, in turn, influences your perceptions of other people. I will give you an example. Before I came to Weber State, I had a one-year appointment at Bradley University, which was a private school in the Midwest. Somewhere along the line, early in my stay at Bradley, somebody said the provost said such and such. I said, "Who is the provost and what does the provost do?" As a new 17 faculty member, I didn't know. A more senior faculty member said, "The provost is a worthless son of a bitch, and consider yourself lucky if you never meet the guy." So that just illustrates how your position influences your interactions. I don't recall having any meaningful interactions with the provost at Bradley. When you're in different positions, you interact with people differently. That is all a segue into saying that, before Paul came to Weber State as president, he had been dean of the School of Business at BYU. After he arrived, Paul took it upon himself to frequently give me advice when I was Dean of the School of Business. He would pull me aside and say, "You know, when I was dean of business at BYU, we did this or we did that. You might think about doing this." It was a different kind of relationship than I had experienced with any other president. I appreciated the advice that Paul gave to me. He was very much involved with the business school because he had been a business dean himself. I learned a lot from him. Paul was followed by Ann Millner. I would say Ann is probably the best president that I worked with. I've spoken positively of all of the presidents, and I have a very high opinion of both Rod Brady and Paul Thompson. Still, I think Ann was the best president that I worked with. I talked with Ann when she was applying for president, and I said, "Ideally, you want a person as president that's willing to do things that are good for the institution even if the action is bad for themselves personally." A great leader will put the well-being of the group above their own well-being, Ann did that on numerous occasions. That was a trait that she had. The first engineering program, the one that kicked down the door for 18 subsequent programs, was the result of Ann’s hard work. She got that program for us. However, she took some criticism from the Board of Regents, because she got it for us. I don't know how fully that history will be written, but it needs to be fleshed out and not lost. Do you know what I'm talking about, Kandice? KH: I hadn't heard that there was pushback from starting the engineering program. This is the first I've heard of it. MV: There was so much pushback on starting the first engineering program that technically the Regents did not approve it for us. The legislature approved it. Which is almost never done, but the legislature passed the law directing the Board of Regents to approve it. The legislature actually usurped the Board of Regents, and many members of the Board of Regents were upset about that. One member was so upset he resigned over it. Chuck was relatively a short-timer. I think of him more as someone like Steve Nadauld. He was here a relatively short time, but he did some important things. I hope Chuck would agree with that assessment. One of the things Chuck wanted to do as president was further the mission of inclusion and diversity, on campus. One example of what he did for that was the LGBT center. When we got that initial pushback from the Trustees a different president would have said, "You know, it's not the time. We're not taking it back to the Trustees for approval, we're just going to table it and wait a decade and see what happens." Chuck didn't do that. Finally, we come to Brad. I have a high regard for Brad. I worked with Brad as a contemporary. Brad was a vice president when I was a provost. I was 19 not provost when Brad was appointed president. I had returned to the faculty when Brad was appointed, so I was a faculty member under Brad. I was glad to see Brad get the appointment. He's early in his tenure, and he's relatively young for a president. I think he's well into his 50s now, so he's not, you know, young in the scheme of things, but he can easily have a decade or more as president, if he wants it. One reason that I mention that is that he's had the misfortune to be the COVID president. COVID-19 is going to cast a fairly long shadow on lots of things, and even when the fear of infection subsides, it'll be interesting to see what happens to enrollment. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the delivery of instruction. It'll be interesting to see what happens to higher education. To give you an example of that, as we are doing this interview, there are a lot of shortages in the labor market, and organizations can't hire people to do various things. I was listening to one of the business channels over the radio the other day, and an executive was talking about the labor shortage, and she said, "We're giving up on this bachelor's degree thing, we're not going to require degrees any longer. We just have to get people in here if people can do what we need them to do. We're going to eliminate the degree requirement. We will hire people who can do the work even if they don't have a bachelor's degree." I think you may see things changed along those lines as a result of COVID, so it'll be interesting. That was all just the lead up to saying I hope Brad gets a normal five years or six years during his presidency where he can do what he wants to do. KH: That wasn't one of the questions, I added that after I sent you the list. I'm sorry for adding a new question. 20 MV: The question was great. The existing written history of Weber State, and I'm talking about the Sadler/Roberts book, stops right around that Joe Bishop and Rod Brady time period, and the book doesn't go much farther. Someone needs to rewrite the history. Whether they focus on the past 50 years or whether they go back to the start and just redo the history and include the most recent 50 years is an open question. There are a lot of things that need to be captured, and looking at things from the perspective of presidencies is an interesting way to slice things up. KH: I agree. So what did a typical semester look like for you as a professor, a dean, a provost and now, well before you retired as a staff member, and a faculty member? MV: What are you trying to get at with that question? KH: As a faculty member, what did a typical semester look like for you? Were you teaching six classes? Were you on five different committees? Were you expected to publish 20 papers a year? What was expected of you as a faculty member? MV: In order to answer that one, I'm going to meander into a lot of different stuff, but it is good you asked that question. When I came to Weber State, we were on the quarter system. I believe we taught three, four-hour classes each quarter. That would have been nine classes a year, so we taught 36 quarter hours, which would equate to 24 semester hours. Each academic year, we taught 24 credit hours. KH: I was going to say that is a lot of hours to teach in a semester. 21 MV: We taught 36 quarter-hours in a year, which would equate to 24 semester-based hours in a year. It's interesting that you bring that up because it allows me to talk about another thing that has changed at Weber State. When I came to Weber State, faculty taught a lot of overload. In addition to their base teaching, they would routinely teach one or two extra classes every quarter. I don't remember if during my first year here, I did an extra class every quarter, but I did a lot. In addition to the base teaching load, I would do an extra class for overload. In general, the faculty wanted to teach summer. Summer teaching was something that was very sought after. The first two or three years that I was here, I taught probably two classes in the summer. There was a lot of teaching. Over the years, the amount of overload teaching has gone down. Before I moved into some type of administrative role, I had stopped doing the overload teaching, by and large, I had stopped doing the summer teaching. The other thing should be mentioned is that the quarter system has a really different feel to it. When I started at Weber State, we wouldn't start teaching until the last week in September. That’s when the term started. I think the semester system is better academically, but there are a lot of things that are nice about the quarter system, and I don't think it's vastly inferior academically. One of the nice things about the quarter system is that whenever the fall term started, the weather was cool, the leaves were starting to turn. It kind of felt like, well, you know, now it's fall. It's time for colleges to resume classes. It is like the old Rod Stewart song, “It’s late September and I really should be back in school.” As it is right now we start fall semester classes in the summertime, so that's a 22 different feel. I had a friend who was a Weber State colleague. He bought a timeshare condominium up in Jackson Hole, I think it was for the second week in September. We used to go up there and rock climb in Jackson Hole. The move to the semester system totally knocked that out. Jackson Hole was especially nice in early September. The summer crowds had died down a little, and it wouldn't typically freeze up there until the second week in September. So that was nice. The semester system has a different rhythm. Now, the flip side is at the end of the year, we taught into June, and ending the academic year in April is much better than having a commencement ceremony in June. KH: Oh, gosh. That would be so hot. MV: I'm trying to recall the heat. There were buildings on campus that were not air conditioned. I was in Building One. Technically, Buildings One, Two and Three were air conditioned, but it was only window air conditioning units. There was no central air in those buildings. So, moving back to an earlier question. When I started as a faculty member, I was fortunate enough that people pulled me aside and said, "You're going to have to do research. This is how you do it." The primary person who mentored me in that regard was a guy named Jim Smith from the Economics Department. We would work on a regular basis. Both Jim and I, and sometimes other people, came in every Saturday. I would say for the first three years that I was at Weber State, I was in the office almost every Saturday, not for an hour or two, but for six or seven hours on a Saturday working on research. Jim was there, and that was very valuable to me. 23 When you're a junior faculty—and I'm meandering over into question you asked about what we typically call service or committee work—when you're a junior faculty member you're told you need to do this or that. To a great extent, you do it because somebody told you to. The longer you're in academia, the more you work on projects you're deeply interested in. It's not so much an obligation but it's an opportunity. If you want to make a difference with regard to sustainability on campus, you can become involved in committees that allow you to do that. If you want to make a difference on LGBT issues, you can find a committee where you can do that. In the early stages of your career, you are more inclined to do what people direct you to do. In the later stages of your career, you can do what you want. When I returned to the faculty after being provost, I didn't need to serve on any committees, but I served on committees because I was interested. I did some work with the Women's Center, which was really interesting. We brought two of the women that were involved in the movie, "The Hunting Ground" to campus to give a lecture. I don't know if you're familiar with that movie or not. You ought to check it out. It is very compelling movie. I probably have a DVD and I can you loan you. KH: I have a Blu ray player. I could totally do that. I still do old school. I still have VHS. MV: I got rid of my VHS, which is unfortunate because I had some things on VHS I don't have otherwise. But, you know, in the course of bringing speakers to campus, you learn a lot things. KH: What was a semester like as a dean? 24 MV: I don't know if there is a typical semester as dean or provost. You spend your time on whatever issues need attention. If you're trying to get a five-million-dollar donation, you're working on that. If you're trying to get an MBA program started— and I used the term started because once you get the program approved, you got to get it off the ground, actually do it—if you're trying to get the MBA program started, you're working on that. If you're looking at taking a five percent budget cut, that takes your time and attention. The work varies a lot. It doesn't follow the ebb and flow of a semester calendar. One of the observations that I have made more than once, is that for a dean or a provost, the first two weeks of the semester are kind of down time. You've done everything you need to do to prepare for the start of the semester, new faculty orientation, all the pre-semester retreats and that kind of thing are finished. Then, the faculty and staff get involved with the actual work of teaching during the first couple of weeks of the semester. For an administrator, the first two weeks the semester give you a chance to catch your breath. The administrative rhythm is different from the faculty rhythm. KH: Okay so what were the job duties of a dean? MV: You know, one of the things that I have said many times is that during my first three, four or five years as provost, I would tell people that being Dean of the School of Business was absolutely the best job on campus, and being Provost is a pretty crummy job. Over the years, I came to appreciate the provost job a little more, but being dean of the School of Business is still a really nice job, and one of the best the things about it is that you've got a lot of discretion with regard to 25 how you spend your time. What you want to do in any administrative position is to accomplish something. You want to make a difference of some kind. If you want your primary accomplishments to be in academics, if you want to focus on starting new programs, if you want to focus upon developing enrollment, you can do that. On the other hand, if you want to focus on community relations and being active in the business community and involving people in the business community and alumni in the school of business, you can do that. You can't totally turn your back on either one of those things or you're going to have problems. But, if you want to spend 30 percent of your time doing academic things and 70 percent of your time doing external things, that probably will work, and you can probably reverse that ratio and it will also work. I had periods of time when I was Dean that I was spending almost 100 percent of my time working on academic matters and internal work. One of the things that I did as dean was to achieve the initial accreditation. The School of Business and Economics had never been accredited. I worked on the initial accreditation for the school. That was clearly an academic project, and it took a lot of time. There were other periods of time where I spent a lot of time externally. You can be engaged with donors and work on that. I started some programs which the School of Business has not carried on. I was just talking to the current dean last Thursday and he said, "We ought to try to revive that program you started and get it going again." I called it the Wall Street Fellows Program. I made contacts with Weber State alumni who were working in New York on Wall Street. Every year I'd take a group of students back 26 to meet with the alumni and get their perspectives on Wall Street. When we went to New York, the students had a lot of fun. I also took students to corporate annual meetings. To sum up, the dean's job is very nice in the sense that you got a lot of discretion with regard to what you do. KH: What was your favorite thing about being the dean? Or is there a favorite thing that you accomplished or activity that you were really excited about? MV: I'm proud of the initial accreditation for the business school. The school had spun their wheels for twenty years in failed attempts to get accreditation, so to lay that thing to rest and to be successful was something that needed to be accomplished, and it enabled the school to move on to greater goals. Now, if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have done it. At the same time, I can easily envision that they could have spun their wheels for another 10 or 15 years before getting accreditation. The school needed to get that goal out of the way so that they could turn their time and attention to something else. Prior to getting accreditation the business school was in a mode of “all accreditation all the time.” It seemed as if 99% percent of every faculty meeting was talking about accreditation, and the faculty didn't have time for anything else. That's why it was important to get it out of the way. Moving on to something different, it was really rewarding to start the MBA program. Subsequently, I taught in the program, I made a point to teach the very first class that students would take in the early years of the program, and I wanted that class to be an exceptional class for the students because I wanted to set the right tone for them. There were many other things I did when I was dean. 27 I especially liked working with donors. I have many fond memories of working with the generous people who supported Weber State, and those experience were very rewarding. KH: What was the process for getting the school named after the Goddards? Did you approach them? Did they approach you? MV: Paul Thompson was president at the time. Paul Thompson approached Jack Goddard about the naming and things fell into place. After we received the donation, Paul talked to me and said, "We're going to have a problem because when Jack makes this donation, he wants an MBA program." At that point in time, Paul did not want to start an MBA program. Paul was of the mindset that an MBA program was going to get a lot of opposition from the Regents and it did. Initially, he didn't want to fight that battle. He said, "You know, we're going to have a real challenge to talk Jack out of that MBA program." I left that meeting with Paul and I thought, "Hell, we're not talking him out of it." I immediately talked to Jack and said, "We're going to do it. We are going to get the MBA program. If you want it, we'll do it.” I really liked working with Jack Goddard on the MBA program. Jack Goddard is the reason Weber State has the MBA program. In the absence of his donation, if I had gone to Paul and said I think we need an MBA program, he would have told me to forget about it. He would have done that. The Goddard donation is the reason that we've got the MBA program. Jack was very supportive. I couldn't have asked for a better relationship with a donor. 28 At the same time, I need to say that as the process moved along, Paul Thompson quickly became extremely supportive. Paul fought hard to get the MBA program. I can tell you lots of stories in that regard. To continue about the relationship with Mr. Goddard, his donation came in the form of a charitable remainder trust. The charitable remainder trust contained shares of common stock, and before the gift was fully realized the value of that stock fell. Most donors, I would say 99 donors out of 100 would say, “You know, I gave you the stock. The stock went down in value, but it was your stock after I made the donation to you. That's the way the stock market works." Jack didn't do that. He said, "I'm going to give you an additional donation to restore the value of that trust to what you thought it would be worth at the time I made the initial donation." Jack Goddard was a great guy to work with. Here is another story about a different donation, When I was Provost we named the school of music, and it's not named now. We had a donor that was very interested in music, very interested in the piano program, very interested in what the faculty were doing to recruit exceptional students, very interested in what the piano students were doing when they left Weber State. He made a significant gift to the piano program. He was well into his 90s when he made the gift. Like most gifts of that kind that there is going to be a trust or there's going to be a bequest or something like that. He passed away and when he passed away, the family said, 'We're not doing it. We don't think the family is legally committed to the donation. You're not getting it." Those last things that I just said are a very terse summary of a lot of legalese, but in the end, we didn't get the donation. We 29 had held a large ceremony in the Browning Center and announced the donation with lots of fanfare and printed materials and said, "From this day forward, the school of music is going to be the "______ school of music" you know, on and on and on. It didn't happen. I tell that story because there are plenty of examples of where things don't fall into place as you envisioned. KH: What are the job duties of a provost? MV: You know, for the most part, no one knows what a provost does. When people outside the university hear the title, they generally have no idea what a provost does. At the same time, the people inside the university, the faculty and academic affairs staff, have got some idea of what a provost does. I use a couple of different ways that I explain it. One of the ways that I explain it is to say that when you think of a university, you probably think of faculty and you probably think of students and you think of degree programs. You think of a commencement ceremony where students get degrees. Those things are a huge part of the university. In terms of personnel, if you were to look where people work in the university, if you were to look at budget at Weber State, students, courses, faculty and degree programs make up about 60 to 70 percent of the university. Yet, that leaves an open question. If the academic programs are 60 to 70 percent, what is the other 30, 35, 40 percent of the university? My response is to say a university is a small city. I mean, Weber State has tens of thousands of students and faculty on campus on a regular basis. As a small city we have to supply water, we need roads, we need to get power to buildings. That is also a really big part of university. With regard to the first set of things, the degree 30 programs, the faculty, the students, that is what the provost is in charge of. The roads, the parking lots, the electricity, that's what the vice president for administrative services is in charge of. That explanation bifurcates the university. Then, I go on to say with that basic image in mind, consider other elements of the university. Information technology has grown to become so important that we broke that off from administrative services. We have a different vice president that's in charge of Information technology. We have a vice president that's in charge of alumni relations and fundraising. Still, the two biggest parts of the university --taken together it's over 90 percent -- are administrative services and academic affairs. That's one way that I explain it. The other way I explain what a provost does, and I don't know if it's better or inferior, but it is a little shorter, I say the provost bosses the deans. You have a dean of engineering. You have a dean in business. You have a dean of social sciences. Somebody is their boss. That person is the provost. A decade ago, I was at a conference, and I met a guy from an eastern college who introduced himself as the Dean of Faculty. I thought, what's the dean of faculty? He said, "It's provost." So that is another title for provost, and I think it is kind of a cool name. To some degree, it is more descriptive because the provost is the head boss of the faculty. So, at this person’s particular university, the provost was called the dean of faculty. That title is a bit of an anachronism, but I like it. KH: I want to say before we became a four-year university that the provost was called the dean of the faculty. I can't remember when they switched the title though. 31 MV: If you are talking about Weber State, you are going back a long time. Thirty years ago, the provost was called vice president for academic affairs, and then that changed. So I don't know if Weber State ever had a dean of faculty or not. It's kind of a counterpart. They had dean of students. I don’t know if Weber State ever had a dean of faculty. KH: We also had a dean of men and a dean of women. But I think that was more like the 50s. I want to say, when we became a four-year institution in the 60s that they became more mainstream or just changed the names or something. MV: This guy that I alluded to, the dean of faculty, was at a private institution. I now recall that he was at Vassar College. KH: So, changing gears a little bit, what has been your experience during the pandemic and how did your job duties change because of it? MV: The answer to that question is going to be a mix of what happened with me and what happened with Weber State. The last day of March 2020 at about 7:30 at night I started exhibiting symptoms, and it appeared that I might be having a stroke. I couldn't talk. My right arm was paralyzed, and my face was distorted. I went to the E.R. and they did a number of tests. One of them was a CT scan. They said, "Well, the good news is you're not having a stroke, but the bad news is you have a hematoma that's pressing on your brain. We need to cut your skull open and get that thing out of there." Which they did about seven hours later. That was major surgery. I mean, the surgeon said, "You're lucky you're not dead." Where I'm going with that is that because of the pandemic, it was even more interesting. For one thing, I didn't even tell my 1010 class about the surgery 32 because at that point Weber State had moved all classes online. I mean, I had probably a 24-to-36-hour period where my email responses were sparse. In fact, my email was non-existent when I was in the ICU. Still, I had corresponded with the students on Wednesday. Surgery was first thing Thursday morning, but by Friday night or Saturday, I was back to responding to email again. If WSU had been in face-to-face mode, the surgery would have been a major disruption in how I was teaching. As it was, Weber State had already gone into lockdown mode. For that reason, I didn't miss a beat in my online teaching. Moving away from that story, the pandemic certainly changed, but I don't know if I have any particular insights that anyone else wouldn't have about how the pandemic changed things. Now, as an economist I think the pandemic is going to change things for 10 years or so. I alluded to that earlier in our interview when you mentioned the pandemic in passing. I think, higher-ed may be a lot different as a result of a pandemic, but we haven't fully digested those changes. KH: Okay, so when you stepped down as provost, did you go back to teaching full time or were you more adjunct or what was your transition? MV: I was full-time faculty. I split across the Economics Department, the Honors Program and the MBA program. I would teach several economics classes and an honors class and an MBA class. KH: In spring 2020, when COVID hit, were you mostly face to face and the class transitioned online before we came back from spring break, or were you mostly online to start? 33 MV: Everything was face-to-face. Of all of the classes that I mentioned, the MBA class, which was a fall class for me, was a hybrid class. In that class there were face-to-face meetings, but there was an online component. Everything else was face-to-face. KH: So when we went into lockdown, did you transition into kind of a hybrid class or was it more online? MV: Online. KH: I guess when I say hybrid, I mean, did you have classes in Zoom and you had everybody's face on your screen or was it more of you record lectures and put them up? Or how did you teach your classes? MV: It was not Zoom. I used what you would call kind of the old school asynchronous online model. I had previously done Econ 1010 as an asynchronous online class, so moving my face-to-face version of that class online was easy. The honors class was planned as a totally face-to-face class, I had to transition the remaining five weeks of that class, and that was done on the fly. KH: How did your department change, because of COVID? I mean a lot of us working from home, did you guys meet regularly? Did you just say, "I hope you're all well and good luck." How did that go? MV: The department chair, Brandon Koford did Zoom meetings, and Brandon did those meeting with the frequency that he would have done regular departmental meetings otherwise. The dean did zoom meetings. Again, I think the frequency was the same as regular meetings. Otherwise, I'm just thinking about how to answer you. Well, what are you trying to probe for? 34 KH: Nothing in particular. So, for example, the Stewart Library, we completely shut down to the patrons. At one point we did start doing deliveries on the dock, but we didn't allow patrons to come in until January of this year. Staff could come back to campus but unless they were required to be there, they were encouraged to stay home and work from home. And then I'm not entirely sure. I can't remember when, I want to say, it was around March. If people were comfortable they can start coming back into the office. And then in June, it was the expectation that they would be in the office unless they had an alternate schedule set up. So was it a similar experience for the economics department or did guys go a different route? MV: They didn't direct people what to do with regard to on-campus activity. By and large, after the campus shut down in March of 2020, and for the remainder of 2020 and for most of the spring term 2021, I think people handled their oncampus activity however they wanted to. For me, if I needed to be in the office to accomplish something, I would try to do it on a Saturday or Sunday. I would try to come in when no one else was around. I didn't see very many people on Saturdays or Sundays, but on occasion I'd see somebody. So, other people were coming in on a Saturday or Sunday. If I needed to do something during the week, I would come in, and I noticed that other people were coming in too. I went to Special Collections two months ago and my impression is the library was more locked down than a lot of other places on campus. That was June, 2021, so quite a few places had started to open back up a little bit. My impression was the library was more locked down than a lot of places, and that's fine. The times I 35 went in the bookstore, there was not a lot of student traffic, but it seemed like the bookstore was operating in a quasi-normal fashion. The traffic in the union was clearly light. I guess the other thing I would say is you're just going to see little changes, like we are doing this oral history interview over Zoom. I wouldn't be reluctant to meet with you face-to-face. We could certainly have done that, but this is easy. I've have utilized Zoom for other meetings where safety was not a concern, but it is simply easy for some meetings. It works fine. Also, my wife and I attended quite a number of Browning concerts in a Zoom-type format. We said, you know, some of these events are concerts which we wouldn't have attended if we couldn't have done it online. We also have season tickets to Salt Lake Acting Company and for the next production, they're doing it live. Yet, they gave everybody the option of seeing a Zoom performance or going to the live event. We talked about it and we, "Let's just do the Zoom option." That worked fine, and that was before the most recent uptick in infections. At other universities, I have attended a number of their lectures over Zoom, as well as Weber State lectures. One of the last things I was doing before Weber State shut down was attempting to bring an author to campus. I did that type of thing on a very regular basis. The author was the woman who wrote the book, Educated. We never fully connected to schedule that event. As an aside, when you and I are not recording, I can give you more detail about trying to book her. Subsequently, I noticed that she was talking on two other college campuses during the prior academic year. One of those was St. Mary's and the other was Utah Valley. I watched both those 36 lectures on Zoom, and they were both worth watching. St. Mary's did an incredible job with that online lecture. It was first rate, and it's a model for how you want to do online lectures. The Utah Valley event was fine, but it was not up to the standard of St. Mary’s. KH: Okay, well, just about hit the two-hour mark, do you want to keep going or would you like to pause and reschedule to get the rest of the questions. MV: So we're down to committees, memories. Let's do another one. KH: Okay. MV: If you're willing to. KH: Oh, happy to. I've had a blast. Day 2 KH: Hello. Today is August 6, 2021 and this is the second day of our interview with Michael Vaughan. So where we left off yesterday, what committees or organizations on campus or otherwise have you or are you a member of? So you can kind of speak about throughout your career. MV: You know, I don't know what to say about this. At one time or another, I served on virtually all of them. KH: Okay, so could you give a couple examples of the committees you were in as a faculty member and a couple as dean or provost? MV: As a faculty member, a lot of the committees are overseen by Faculty Senate. So I was on Faculty Senate when I was a faculty member, I served on a number of committees. I chaired a number of committees. Supposedly, one of the more important Faculty Senate committees is the Salary, Budget, Benefits and Fiscal 37 Planning Committee. At one time I chaired that committee. I'm trying to think of other various committees. I'm just trying to think if there was anything unusual, that stand out, as a faculty member. I served on a Centennial Committee and that was a one-time committee to organize a celebration for Weber State University's centennial. I would need check the date for that committee to determine if I was a faculty member or a dean when I served. I think I may have been a faculty member when I served on the Centennial Committee. I also served on a number of committees in the community. Early on in my career as a faculty member, some of those committees had something to do with economic development. Later, it went in a little different direction. One of the more interesting ones, again this is still during my time as a faculty member, was connected to Utah Power and Light, which is the old version of Rocky Mountain Power. Utah Power funded a number of economic development studies. I did a number of studies regarding which industries would make attractive candidates to try to bring to Weber County. That is a brief summary for my committee work as a faculty member. I'm sure you've got all the stuff for that Centennial Celebration. KH: I hope we do. I don't know if we actually do, and I think we have about three banker’s boxes of information. MV: I don't know where it would have been stored, and it may have been thrown away. As part of that celebration, they did a university timeline up until the point of the Centennial. It was the first hundred years, but it was very large because it was displayed at some type of gala. It was six-foot by four-foot panels; and when 38 the panels were aligned, it probably was 20 or 30 feet long. It was a pretty detailed history. It may not exist in that form, but I hope somebody captured it in a different form. KH: I hope so too. I don't know that I ever heard about the timeline. MV: Now, I will say a few words about committee work after I left the faculty. When you leave the faculty role, generally the committees you are involved with are the committees that you call together. You serve on Faculty Senate committees in an ex officio role. There is normally a dean on every Faculty Senate committee, but campus-wide you would spend more time on committees like the strategic planning committee. I'll allude to that committee later on. You organize a lot of administrative searches. I was on the search committee for all of the academic deans because I was overseeing those searches. Also, at various times, the president would ask me to chair a search committee for administrative position outside of academic affairs. For example, I chaired a search committee for the Vice President of Development and Community relations. That search resulted in Vicki Gorrell's appointment. I also served on the search committee for Vice president of student services, and that resulted in Jan Winniford's appointment. KH: Okay, what professional organizations do you belong to? MV: You know, it ebbs and flows regarding what you're doing. As a faculty member the organizations I worked with were typically economic organizations. When I entered administration, I got tagged for a number of assignments because of my role at the university. I was on the what is now called the Utah Technology Council. When I served on the committee, it was Utah Information Technology 39 Council. There were other groups I worked with in the community. After I returned to the faculty in 2015, I continued to serve on some boards, both corporate boards and nonprofit boards. KH: What are some of your favorite memories at Weber State? MV: I would say the favorite memories are things that unite the faculty collectively. The name change from Weber State College to Weber State University was one of those. The number of faculty supporting that initiative was huge. I would say 99 percent of the faculty supported the name change from the start. There were a couple of naysayers; but in the end, I think even some of the naysayers came on board. Everyone was generally united in that effort. The Board of Regents—a group that I've talked about before—was something of sore loser when it came to giving Weber State the status of a university. In the end, Weber State prevailed, but even though we had a majority vote, there were members of the Board of Regents that were still unhappy that we got university status. Literally, the key reason we got university status is that in the year where that vote took place, the student regent was a Weber State student. The Regents typically tag a student from one of the campuses to be a full voting member of the Board of Regents, but the student is from only one of all of the campuses in the system. For that reason, it's not often that Weber State has a student regent, but that year we had a student regent, and the student regent voted to grant university status and the motion passed by only one vote. If we had not had the student regent, it wouldn't have passed. 40 Some members of the Board of Regents were unhappy about it. Even though the Regents had granted university status, they said, "Well, you're not a university immediately. We're going to push it back to a date in the future." They picked January 1st just because that was the start of the next calendar year. In hindsight, that worked out great because the fact that they delayed it six or eight months was not a big deal. It also allowed time for the campus to plan a huge celebration in conjunction with New Year's Eve. That year, the New Year's Eve celebration for the entire city was on the Weber State University campus. There were fireworks at midnight. There was a lot of fanfare because when the clock struck 12:00, that's when Weber State was officially a university. That is a fond a memory because it was a collective celebration. I am going to take this in a slightly different direction and mention some things that are memorable, but I'm not sure you would attach the word favorite or fond to them, but it does align with what I was saying about collegiality and people coming together for a common purpose. At one time they used to give eulogies for deceased faculty members in a Faculty Senate meeting. A colleague would stand up and talk about someone who had passed away recently. Typically, they would invite the family to come, and I think some family were almost always represented on those occasions. I look back at that now and I think that was a good thing to do. It was nice for the faculty to get together and share collective memories of someone that had passed away. Now, having said that, I played a role in the abandonment of that practice; even though I now look back on the practice with somewhat nostalgic feelings. 41 Why did the practice stop? We had a couple of occasions where it was really awkward. That led some faculty members to say, "Do we want to continue to do this? Is a regular Faculty Senate meeting an appropriate place to do this?" It's certainly appropriate to remember family members who have passed away, but do we want to do it in a Faculty Senate meeting where there is routine business to conduct? One of the key things that happened that led to the abandonment of that practice was that we had two faculty members who had both passed away since the last Faculty Senate meeting. As a result, there were two eulogies in one Faculty Senate meeting. One faculty member got up to deliver the eulogy and he was not an accomplished public speaker. The eulogy was fine, but he hadn't gone to a lot of time to prepare his remarks. His remarks were very brief and didn't give a great deal of insight into the deceased faculty member. Then for the second departed faculty, another person got up to deliver the eulogy. That speaker was a stark contrast to the first. He took great pride in his skills as an orator, and he had spent hours on his remarks. He delivered a terrific eulogy. People were laughing. People were crying. I mean, it was a tremendous eulogy. At the conclusion, the disparity was apparent. It was awkward because members from both families were there. I remember very clearly that Frank Guliuzza from the Political Science Department was chair of the Faculty Senate. Frank got up and stood at the podium and said, "I just want it noted for the record in the event that I die, I want Dick to give my eulogy." The person that had given the eloquent eulogy was named Dick. 42 KH: So you talked a little bit about the centennial. Could you talk a little bit more whether certain events that stood out or planning that took place to make that happen? MV: The planning for the Centennial Celebration occupied the campus for more than a year. As I'm prone to do, I tend to describe events with some positive comments and some negative comments. The celebration was certainly nice. On the other hand, at the time, I had questions about the timing for the event. You may say, "What's the right time for Centennial?" The issue is that Weber State has existed in many different forms, so we chose to celebrate the centennial at the first point in time that an institution with Weber in the name had existed in any form. The celebration did not take place on 100th anniversary of Weber College. It was certainly not the 100th anniversary of Weber University. It was not the 100th anniversary of Weber State existing as a degree granting institution. The centennial planners went back to a time where Weber was an academy, which is something akin to a high school, or a high school with some additional education. In any event, that was the occasion for the centennial. One of the thoughts I had is, "You know, you're burning this opportunity. If you do this you can’t do it again. I actually think next year, 2022, is going to be the true 100th anniversary of Weber State existing as a college, I remember thinking at the time, are you going to diminish future celebrations by doing this? Apparently, my concerns were well founded, because I haven't heard of anything in the works to celebrate the true centennial of Weber State College. 43 KH: No, it’s true. For when Weber became a university, you said there was a big party. Were there a lot of former faculty, were former presidents there? Were there a bunch of alumni or was it more of just whoever was in the community who came? MV: It was primarily people who were currently at Weber State, but anyone was welcome. I don't have a memory of people traveling back for the occasion. Now, the current president always does an event once a year for former presidents, so there are other events where they get together. I don't think the university celebration attracted a lot of people that were not currently affiliated with Weber State. KH: What are your memories from the 2002 Olympics? MV: I have many memories of the Olympics. I think anyone who attended any of the Olympic events has memories of the Olympics. I do have memories of what happened at Weber State. I don't remember it as being terribly disruptive for the campus. I mean, it bumped the academic calendar a little bit. There was a period of probably longer than two weeks, maybe three weeks, where we didn't have classes, but it was not hugely disruptive. The memories I have of the Olympics are not necessarily Weber State memories. They are Olympic memories. A lot of Weber State faculty and staff volunteered. They worked at various Olympic sites all over the state. There were volunteers on the WSU campus. There were volunteers as far away as Soldier's Hollow. The alumni center was given over to the Olympics. The ice sheet is on campus because of the Olympics. That's why the ice sheet was constructed. There were Olympic events on campus, and there 44 were a lot of Olympic events at the Snow Basin ski area. The campus was used as a transportation hub. A large number of people attending events at Snowbasin would catch the bus from the Weber State campus, but that was not the only location for catching a bus to Snow Basin. You could catch the buses at various other places. You couldn't transport yourself. Because the Olympics were in 2002, my memory of the Olympics gets conflated with September 11, 2021. Because of the 9/11 attacks, there was increased security and that security was increased to a totally different level because of the Olympics. Having mentioned that, I have memories of September 11th and what was going on campus on September 11th. I also have memories of all of the additional security around the state in conjunction with the Olympics. Again, those are not necessarily Weber State memories. I did go to a number of Olympic events and experienced the security at those events. I also traveled outside of state during the Olympics and that was interesting because they had additional airline security during the Olympics. Not only in the airport, but also in the air. One of the things that I remember is that when you were getting ready to land in Salt Lake—not immediately before getting ready to land but a full hour before you were in Salt Lake airspace—they would say: "Because of the Olympics, we're not going to allow anyone out of their seat. Once we cross a line and we're an hour outside of Salt Lake airspace you will not be allowed out of your seat. If you need to get up, get up now. Other than that, buckle in because you're not going to get out of your seat for the next hour. So those are some general Olympic memories. 45 KH: I'd never heard about the airplanes. That's really interesting. MV: Mitt Romney spoke on campus in the business school shortly before the Olympics. It was part of the business school’s Nye Lecture series. He gave a terrific speech. He talked about the preparation for the Olympics. I was dean of the business school at that time, and we had speakers in every week for the Nye Lecture Series, and Mitt came to my office, which he was instructed to do. Normally, I chat with the speakers for just a few minutes before their lecture. Then, I would walk with them over to the auditorium where they're going to deliver the lecture. I've got a clear memory of Mitt’s visit. Mitt Romney showed up on time. I invited him into my office. He was extraordinarily personable. He was extraordinarily kind. About 5 or 10 minutes before the lecture, he said, "Don't we need to get going?" I said, "No, the auditorium is just 20 steps from my office, we will get there in plenty of time." He responds, "Auditorium? I'm not speaking in the auditorium." He said, "I'm giving a devotional at the institute." The thing was that people from Weber State had not talked directly to Mitt Romney. We had talked to Mitt's people, and no one from the institute had contacted him. Somehow, he got the impression that he was giving a devotional at the LDS student institute. Just minutes before his talk, I said, "No, you're not going to institute. It's not a devotional. This is a talk to business students. I want you to talk about your business experience. I want you to talk about your time at Bain." He didn't blink. He just said, "Oh, I can do that." He walked into a large auditorium filled with business students, and he gave a great lecture on his business career, even though he had not prepared to do that. He is a great public speaker. 46 KH: I don't know if I could flip the switch that fast. So what are your memories of what campus was like on 9/11? MV: People were at different places. Some people had access to a television set. Some people had access to a radio. Some people saw the planes actually fly into the towers over some type of media. Some people didn't see the event in real time. Then, there was the reaction of, "This is really hard to believe." When people realized what had actually happened, many faculty members made the decision that their lecture plan for the day had gone out the window. Somehow the word got out through the grapevine that faculty, if not encouraged, to deviate from whatever their lessons plans were that day. They should feel free to let students talk about whatever they were feeling and thinking. The folks in the Student Union put up of white boards where students could write down whatever they wanted to write down. I think people had a collective sense of grief and a collective sense of purpose in the days and weeks following 9/11. A different 9/11 memory relates to something that I was talking about yesterday. I was talking about one of our student trips to New York. This story relates to one of our visits to New York City in 2002. We were going to see the chief financial officer for American Express. One of the memories of that visit is that it was just months after September 11th. 9/11. There was incredible security to get into the American Express building. They were even more secure than the TSA security you would go through in an airport. I mean there was an incredibly high level of security to get into the American Express building. 47 The students and I got through all the security, and once we were in the building, they took us over to the elevator and the person operating the elevator said, "What floor do you want?" I told him, and it was the second floor from the top of the building. I recall one of the students saying, "This guy must be pretty important." Yes, he was very important. We went to his office, and the person we were meeting with was a man who grew up in Ogden, Gary Crittenden. At that time, he was the chief financial officer for American Express. He was very gracious and very kind to students. Subsequently, he has also been back to campus to talk a number of times. He talked in the Nye lecture series. In any event, he was very good with the students. One of the students got up and walked around his office and looked out the window and said, "This is an incredible view. You must have one of the nicest offices in New York City because, you know, looking to the north, you can see for miles." Mr. Crittenden said, "The reason I've got that view is because that's where the Twin Towers were. We were right next to the Twin Towers when they came down." The student then looked down and saw a giant hole in the ground. Gary Crittenden told a story about watching the airplanes fly into one of the Twin Towers, thinking it was going to fly into his office. It was that close. KH: That must have been so terrifying, I can't even imagine. So mentioning the Wall Street fellowship, what did that entail? When did you start it and how long did it last? We'll start with that question first, so when did it start? MV: Even though I began the comments by mentioning the 9/11 attack, our first trip back to visit New York began several years before that. We had made a couple 48 of trips before 9/11, and we may have done a trip after. I left the position of Dean around '05. That would have been about the time the trips ended. There was a new dean in the position. Now, in addition to my departure as dean, we had a finance faculty member named Kyle Madsen. Around the time that I left the position as dean, maybe a year before, maybe two years before, Kyle died of cancer. Kyle had been very involved in those trips. At that time, there was a disruption in the dean's office, and you also had a disruption in the finance program. This was not a case of someone looked at the program and said, you know, "We don't want to do this. We think it's outlived its usefulness.” It was a case where you had new faces coming in. The final thing I will mention beyond the fact that the Wall Street Fellows program was experiencing some challenges just because of turnover; is that in 2007 and 2008, a lot of the alums that had positions on Wall Street lost their jobs. We had people at Lehman Brothers, and we had fantastic visits to Lehman Brothers. They were very kind to us. Around that time, Lehman Brothers ceased to exist. So, Weber State was having a little turmoil, and Wall Street was having a lot of turmoil in 2008. That was a challenge. KH: Yeah, a rough couple of years. So who could participate in the Wall Street fellowship program? MV: We focused on students that wanted to work on Wall Street. To the greatest extent possible, we tried to ascertain how serious the students were in actually getting a job on Wall Street. The students could have any major. It typically was a 49 business major, but we would have considered any student. It would have most likely been students in finance, accounting, and economics, but the students could come from any major because the investment banking firms hire all majors. The firms will hire sociology, psychology, math and other majors. Their selection process and their interview process is different from what our students would normally encounter. Making our students familiar with that process was one of the purposes for the program. The program was designed to give students some exposure to that. That interview process is not unique to investment banking. It is also used in large consulting firms like Bain or McKinsey. Some tech firms are somewhat similar, but the tech firms are also a little different. For example, if you went for a job interview at one of these companies, you might get some questions that you would expect, but that they might ask you how many manhole covers are in New York City? The interviews use questions that requires you to do some informed mathematical calculations. The type of person that they don't want is the type of person say, "What the hell kind of question is that? I don't know." The type of person they are looking to hire is that person says, "Okay, The New York streets are numbered this way and they go this far north and they go this far east and west. I would guess there are two manhole covers in every block.” Based upon that, the interviewee would come up with some estimation, even if it's not terribly accurate. Some corporations use a lot of questions like that. The students interested in those jobs needed to prepare for a different type of interview, and they needed to prepare a different resume. 50 As part of the program, we asked alumni at the firms what was the first thing they looked at on a student's resume. Frequently they told us it was the SAT score. Unless you are applying for that kind of job, a lot of people don't even put their SAT score on their resume. The firms wanted to see the SAT score close to the top of the resume. It is a different kind of procedure. KH: Yeah. So how long was the fellowship? How long from when they got there to when they left? MV: How many days did we spend in the city? It depended upon who we were talking to. We would typically get into New York City on a Tuesday. We were done with the academic part of the trip on Friday, but students could stay over. Kyle typically stayed over. If they wanted to spend the weekend in New York City, that was up to them. We could typically meet with all the professionals we wanted to meet with over two or three days. KH: So changing gears a little bit, as you were Provost, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, which started under a different name, was started. Would you talk a little bit about that program, that department? MV: There was a strategic planning effort. At the university, strategic planning is ongoing, but you recall different strategic planning retreats. At different points in time, you will be at a certain point in the ongoing strategic planning process. There was a strategic planning process probably in 2003. It could have been 2004, I'd have to go back and look. As you typically do in a lot of these processes, you get a broad cross-section of campus together. They spend several days, maybe multiple meetings, maybe separated by a number of weeks, 51 talking about the direction the campus should go. Out of the 2003-04 strategic planning effort, one of the things that emerged was that people said they wanted to create more opportunities for high impact learning opportunities for students. Now, I know that is a jargony phrase—high impact learning. It is not a phrase that Weber State cooked up. In the higher education literature, people have examined things that contribute to student success. The likelihood that a student will persist from their first year to their second. The likelihood that they will earn a degree in four to six years. Using those benchmarks of student success, researchers have looked at certain factors and found that students who are engaged in high impact-practices are more likely to be successful. Researchers have a specific list of high impact practices. It's not a case where they make an ad hoc judgment about whether something is right. They have said these are the 10 or 12 high impact practices that consistently correlate with positive student outcomes. As a result of strategic planning effort, we said we wanted to increase student success at Weber State. In order to do that, we sought to create additional high impact practices for students. One of those was undergraduate research, and that's actually the first one we ran with. So we created an Office of Undergraduate Research. John Cavett was appointed to that position. We created an undergraduate research symposium. We got funding for undergraduate research students to actually carry out the research, collect data, or acquire equipment they would need to do the research and go to meetings and disseminate that research. We hosted a 52 conference called The National Conference for Undergraduate Research on our campus. Students from all colleges and universities across the United States came to campus. Undergraduate research was the first high-impact practice that we ran with. Community engaged learning, or service learning—it goes by different names on different campuses—is another high impact practice. That was one of the other practices that was in line to receive special attention. Community engaged learning was on the list, and other high impact practices that were also on the list. As we do in many cases, we will start different initiatives and we'll see what gets traction. Some things get traction, other things don't get traction. What we now call Community Engagement Learning got a lot of traction. In short order, it equaled or surpassed undergraduate research. As I mentioned yesterday, Brenda Kowalewski led that effort. I don't recall if we were aware of what the Carnegie Foundation was going to do when we started our strategic planning effort, but about that time, either concurrently or shortly after we decided to focus upon community engaged learning, the Carnegie Foundation said, "We're going to come up with a classification that designates certain campuses as community engaged learning campuses. Universities and colleges can apply for this designation and we'll decide if they pass muster." Campuses were required to complete an extraordinarily detailed application. It's not four or five pages. It's 250 pages, and universities try to make the case that they are deserving of this designation. We applied in the first cycle where universities could apply, and we 53 were successful in getting the designation. Brenda led that effort. That's some background on how the center came about. KH: What did the Carnegie Designation do for the university? MV: You know, they publish a list and say, "These are the community engaged campuses." It's not the same, but it's somewhat akin to U.S. News rankings. If you're a top tier U.S. News institution, what does that do for you? Some people place a great weight on those kinds of things and other people don't care that much about those types or ranking and recognition. KH: You mentioned that some high impact ideas kind of fell to the wayside. Could you talk about one or two of those? MV: One is capstone experiences, and we put a group together to look at capstone experiences, I think there are a lot of capstone experiences taking place on the Weber State campus, but we just didn't get traction with that one. I can't put my finger on exactly why. I think if we did a careful inventory of all the capstone experiences that our students have, it would be very impressive. Again, I think our students are engaged in a great many internships. If somebody wanted to focus on internships as a high-impact practice and quantify and assess what was taking place, they could do it. That has not been done in any organized way. KH: Would you talk about Dream Weber? MV: At some point in time, we were discussing retention and graduation rates. Now that I'm retired, it seems unusual to say that because we are always concerned about retention and graduation rates. Anyway, we were having some conversation… 54 KH: Who is "we"? MV: It was some members of President's Council. It's probably Ann Millner and I. There is an educational center at the Indiana University, and a researcher named George Kuh was involved with that center. George Kuh has written extensively about high-impact practices. Kuh did a book--he did numerous books--but in one of his books he examined a group of universities that he believed were doing things well, universities that were having success. Kuh described all those universities. At some point, we got the idea of going out and looking at some of those universities, taking a careful look at what they're doing. The purpose was to find some ideas that we could implement at Weber State. One of the universities described in the book is the University of Texas, El Paso. It was decided that we would go there and see if we could learn anything from them. Jan Winniford was Vice President of Student Services, and Jan said, "I know somebody at UTEP. I'll give him a call and see if we can go down there." Jan and I made a trip to UTEP, and they were extraordinarily gracious. They gave us lots of information, and they went into great detail about various programs they had. One of the programs they described to us was a program that they called the UTEP Promise. The UTEP promise was a program where students from households with an income of $25,000 of less could have their tuition at UTEP covered. This is more than a decade ago. UTEP told students, "We've got a program where if your household income is less than $25,000, you can attend college for free." 55 We thought, "Wow! That's a great program. How in the world do you guys fund it?" They said: "Well, here's what it is. We use federal financial aid because if students fill out the FAFSA, they probably qualify for federal financial aid. Then, our promise is that if they don't qualify for enough aid to completely cover the cost of tuition, we bridge that for them out of private donations or other funds, but students can be assured that if they have a household income less than $25,000, and they fill up FASFA, we cover the tuition for them." I remember very clearly, I said, "I'm stealing that idea." I said, "I'm going to go back and Weber State is doing this." I said, "We'll call it something different. We won't call it the Weber State promise, but we're doing that." Anyhow, this is another example of UTEP being gracious. They said, "Go for it. We don't care." They also said: "We stole it! We heard about a program called the Kalamazoo Promise, and we thought that's a pretty good idea. Can we adapt that to a program down here at UTEP? So if you want to steal it, go for it." We stole it. I brought the idea back to Ann Millner. Ann thought it was a great idea. Then, we looked at what the details would mean for Weber State. Our concern was, what is this going to cost? We didn’t know the total amount to funding we would need to bridge the gap between federal financial aid and WSU tuition for all the students who would qualify for the program. We would be jumping off into an abyss and making this promise to students. At the time, I believe we started the program for students with household incomes of less than $25,000. We have increased that threshold quite a bit. I'd have to check on the current amount. 56 I am thinking we pushed the current threshold to $50,000. Anyway, one of the things we talked about is how much money is this going to cost us? Something that was interesting is that in coming up with an informed estimate about what it was going to cost us, we had to say how many people in our service area have incomes below 25,000. You know, at that time in Ogden, it was almost a 1/3rd of the households that were below $25,000. I mean, it was a lot of households; it was surprisingly high. Now, wages and incomes have risen since then, so I think the appropriate benchmark to use would be the $50,000 benchmark. Still, I would think that if you looked at the numbers today, you would find a 1/3rd of the households in Ogden city below $50,000 household income. We thought we could have a lot of takers for the program. It was something that we really, really wanted to do. Nonetheless, we were concerned about the cost. What's it going to cost? Do we need to cut it down even more and say, Household income below 20,000? Doing that would give us a smaller pool. Do we need to qualify it in some way and put more restrictions on it? We didn't want to do those things, but we thought the financial demands might exceed our capacity. Now, I am going to talk about some things you probably didn’t anticipate. This gets us into a really interesting, and largely unknown, part of Weber State history. Exactly at the time when we're having these conversations, Ann Millner calls me into the office one day and said, "We just got a three-million-dollar donation." I said, "For what?" She essentially said, "Anything we want." I said, "From who?" Ann responded, "We do not know and we cannot make any 57 attempt to find out. It's anonymous. All I've got is a letter from an attorney in Colorado that says we are going to get the money." We did get the money. Now we come to the fork in the road. We decided to use that money to start the Dream Weber program. Our thinking was we don't know how quickly we'll burn through this money, but it gives us an opportunity to see how much the Dream Weber program is actually going to cost us. If we burn through it in three years; and then, at that point in time, we have to announce we're stopping this program. That is not what we wanted or planned to do. Still, we would not be backing away from any commitment made to the students who had entered the program. We knew we would be able to fulfill that commitment for the students who had entered the program. The donation gave us enough cushion that we were comfortable starting the Dream Weber program. In retrospect, what I would call the “burn rate” on that money has been fairly modest. I believe the Dream Weber program is a permanent part of Weber State University. Now regarding the anonymous donation, we never made a deliberate effort to find the donor. However, in subsequent weeks saw some news stories in major papers across the country, and reporters were trying to figure out a mystery. Universities across the country were getting these anonymous donations. There were something like 20 universities that all got the same letter Weber State received. They got different amounts. Some got less. Some got quite a bit more. Yet, it was the same letter, same time. The universities all got these anonymous donations. Some reporter connected the dots and said, "The common trait that all of these universities have is a female president." So Ann 58 Millner was the president and we got this anonymous donation that allowed WSU to create a transformational program. KH: Wow. MV: Do you have any of that documented? KH: I don't think so. MV: You should have something on that. It is so interesting. You could find the news stories, so I'm not suggesting you do more digging and try to figure out who the donor was. There is public information about the universities that received these anonymous donations at the same time. KH: Do you remember what year that was? MV: You know, I can see when we went back to UTEP. I would say 2008 or 2009. It was at the midpoint in my time as provost. It wasn't my first couple of years, it wasn't my last couple of years. KH: I'll see what I can find. So after you step down as Provost, you became the director for the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. Would you talk a little bit about that? MV: This is somewhat related to the discussion we were having about community engaged learning. WSU was involved in an initiative called the American Democracy Project, and it's a national program. Other universities are members of the American Democracy Project. Leah Murray could give you current information on that. Leah headed up our role in the American Democracy Project, and still does. Unless the American Democracy Project has morphed into something slightly different with a different name. It is a national initiative, and 59 because we were involved in the American Democracy Project initiative, the national office would start certain specific projects and they would invite campuses to become involved in these projects. They have a project called Stewardship of Public Lands, and they would say, "Any university that wants to be involved in stewardship of public lands, this is your opportunity to sign on." We did sign on to that one. So at some point in time, and this is probably 2013 or 2014, they said, "We're going to start an initiative on economic inequality. If a university wants to become involved in this initiative, now's your opportunity to sign on." I thought it would be good for us to sign on. We were working to support the American Democracy Project. Also, I was getting ready to step down as provost. I knew that I would enjoy working on the project when I returned to the faculty. WSU became involved with the initiative for those reasons. As part of this effort, I taught a class in the honors program. One of the exercises I used in the class was something I referred to as the philanthropy project. I would go into the class and divide students up into groups and I would say, "I'm going to give you a $1,000." In some classes, I gave the students $2,000, but more often than not, I did a $1,000. Sometimes I would do it for the whole class, sometimes I would do it every group. I did it in different ways in different semesters. Nevertheless, I always told the students, "I'm going to give you some money. This is real money. It's my money. I'm going to make a donation to a nonprofit. You get to pick the organization that the donation goes to and your grade is going to be determined by your due diligence in looking at different nonprofits and determining the one that you think would have the 60 greatest impact on the community." I think it was a great exercise for the students. The comments that I got on the project were very positive and we dispersed money to a lot of local non-profits. I also learned a lot about local nonprofits in the process. That was another thing we did. The reason the center was called the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality is that I was trying to make the point that we're not going to provide social services. The center was focused on educational opportunity like the literacy project and the philanthropy project. Along the way, we may provide something to nonprofits, but there are plenty of people out in the community that are providing social services. Weber State is not going to get involved and compete in that arena. If we can learn things that help the people that are working in that arena do their jobs more effectively, that's what we'll do. KH: Okay, is it more research or more curriculum-based? Or is a little bit of both? MV: Both. At the point of my retirement, I was trying to morph it in the direction of economic research. I was trying to increase the research capability of the center, and whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. I talked to the dean of the business school just last week about this. Apparently, the provost hasn't decided if this is something he wants to continue or not continue. KH: Would you talk about how Weber became an all Steinway school? MV: Over 10 years ago, a professor, Yu-Jane Yang, came to me and she said, "I've got this student from China. Her name is Miranda. I really want to recruit her. She's going to need a scholarship. If we can give her a scholarship, she'll come to Weber State." I said, "How much money do you need?" She had some funds 61 from different sources, and she told me the amount she wanted. I said, "I'll give you the money, but what I'm telling you is that I will give you the money as Michael Vaughan. I'm not going to give you money as provost because it wouldn't be appropriate for you just to walk in here and for me to make a provost's decision." I said, "I'll make a contribution. I donate my own money to Weber State on an ongoing basis, and this time my money will go for a scholarship grant. I'm okay with that." She was able to recruit Miranda. I went on to say, "If Miranda comes here and is as talented as you say, and she's successful at Weber State, and she graduates and goes on to bigger and better things, are you going to be back here asking for more money?" Yu-Jane said, "Yes." I said, "That's the wrong answer." I remember that really clearly. Well, anyhow, all those things happened, and Yu-Jane did come back, and she asked for more money. Yu-Jane, recruited a lot of very talented students into the piano program. I don't know if you've heard any of the students perform. Fan-Ya Lin may have received more attention than some of the others, but there are a lot of talented students in the piano program. Sometime later, Yu-Jane had invited me to come to the Browning Center for a concert to hear one of the student performances. I went and I was sitting next to Yu-Jane. It may have been a performance by Miranda, because this was fairly early on in the effort to recruit talented students into the piano program. At some point, I turned to Yu-Jane I said, "What would you need to recruit even more students like this?" She said, "Steinway's, I need lots of Steinway's. WSU needs to be an all Steinway school." To kind of make a long story short, I said "Really? Every piano has to be a 62 Steinway?" The response was, "Yes. Every piano has to be a Steinway." I asked, "Well how many is that?" So, "Let's put a pencil on things and see what that's going to cost." We did it, and I remember saying something to Yu-Jane to the effect that, "We can do this, but this is not going to be a one or two-year thing. This is going to take longer than that." It did take longer, but we did get there. In addition to recruiting students as first-year students, on at least one occasion, Yu-Jane, for a lack of a better word, poached a student away from Oberlin, and Oberlin is very well known in the realm of music. I remember that student coming here and saying, "You know, Weber State has better facilities. The practice rooms and pianos are much better than what they have at Oberlin." We have sent students who graduated from the music program at Weber State to Cleveland and Minnesota and Juilliard and Eastman for their graduate studies. They all say, "Weber State compares very well in terms of facilities with what these other schools have." One student who went to Cleveland said, "Cleveland is a dump. Weber State has much better practice rooms than what Cleveland has." KH: A great endorsement right there. So what do you view as your greatest accomplishments? MV: I mean, there are different ways to take that question. The thing I think that gives me the most satisfaction is to look at someone, whether they're a student or whether they're an employee who was at a certain place and has experienced some success, and to think that I played a small part in that person’s success. I can think of numerous instances. I'll talk about one. Years and years ago, there 63 was a student who earned a certificate in cosmetology, which is a program that I mentioned the other day when I was talking about vocational programs. The student earned a certificate in cosmetology from Weber State. Later, she found herself with five kids, and she was a single mother because she went through a divorce. Her circumstances were especially challenging. She told herself, "There's no way I can support my family doing cosmetology. I need to go back to Weber State and get a degree in information systems." When she was a student. I said, I'll give you a job. We'll hire you as a tech assistant.” She was hired as a tech assistant and she ultimately completed a bachelor's degree. She went on to complete her master's degree at Weber State, and she has continued to work at Weber State. She has a full-time job and she is a fairly high-level administrative person. Looking at what people like that have done and seeing them achieve things that are important to them is very rewarding. Moving on to a different source of satisfaction, in this interview I have talked about some things that I sometimes call trophies. I am thinking of things like the accreditation for the business school, or starting the MBA program, or starting the engineering program at Weber State. Those things are rewarding. I am not dismissive of those accomplishments, and I take some degree of satisfaction in those accomplishments. Those are trophy accomplishments. Yet, it is a totally different type of satisfaction to look at what individuals have accomplished. There are multiple people in the Utah legislature today that I remember as students, and I remember talking to them as students about what they wanted to accomplish. There are people that went on to earn doctoral 64 degrees, and are now teaching at various universities. Those folks started their careers as students at Weber State. Seeing people succeed is very rewarding. KH: As provost, how much interaction do you have with students? MV: As much as you want to. If you want almost zero, you can have almost zero. If you want a lot, you can have a lot. If you teach a class, you're going to have interactions with the students you teach. Those classroom experiences are similar or identical to the interactions that any faculty member would have with students. Fundamentally, I enjoy being involved with the students. A moment ago, I was talking about the piano students. To some extent I would try to assist Yu-Jane in recruiting those students. I remember an occasion where she was trying to recruit a student, and I said, "Let's take her up to Snowbasin. I'll buy you lunch at Snowbasin." This was during ski season. We took the student up the Snowbasin, and I think it was the first time she had ever seen snow. I didn't take her skiing because Yu-Jane will not allow the piano students to ski because if they hurt their wrist they are going to be out of commission for quite some time. Nevertheless, I let her get on my skis to see what it was like to stand on skis. I enjoy helping to recruit students, helping to place students in graduate schools, just interacting with students. I alluded to the American Democracy Project a moment ago. When I was provost, I would attend the annual meetings along with other faculty from Weber State. Typically we'd have three of our faculty go back. I would go back, and we would have eight or nine students attend the American Democracy Project meeting. I always took the students out to eat at a place that I thought was acceptable, and my standards for acceptable are pretty high. I can 65 be a rather picky guy. The meetings were typically in a big city. If the city had a major league baseball team and they were playing in town during the course of the conference, we'd go to a major league baseball game. I'd take students to a baseball game, and many of the students had never been to a major league game before. KH: That's great. MV: I really enjoy interacting with students in different capacities. KH: Okay, and you kind of talked about this a little bit. But what topics have you written about? MV: You know, economists are maybe second only to philosophers in thinking they know everything about everything. I have written about lots of stuff. The fact that I don't know too much about a subject doesn't stop me from writing about it, so I've written about a lot of things. I'm going to answer you in two or three different ways, if I'm an expert on anything it is the field of antitrust economics. About the time I earned my Ph.D., people lost interest in antitrust. I wrote in that area. I think the very best stuff that I wrote was in the area of antitrust, but it is a somewhat obscure area, and it fell out of fashion for several decades. Now, it's back in fashion. If somebody was starting their career right now, that would be a hot field. People want to break up Apple and Google and Facebook. When you talk about doing that you are talking about antitrust laws and the economic consequences. When someone says, "We're going to go after these tech monopolies and we're going to control them and break them up,” that is what antitrust legislation is about. That was one theme in my research. 66 My most popular work in terms of citations—the most popular article I ever wrote— dealt with what economists think. It is in a totally different vein from antitrust research. Then, when I was provost, to get visibility for the university, I did a regular column for the Standard Examiner. I wrote 110 to 120 pieces for the Standard. That was interesting because my learning curve for doing that was pretty quick. I came up to speed fairly quick in terms of writing newspaper pieces. Still, I remember that the first article that I wrote. I think it was John Kowalewski that I showed it to, but it could have been Allison Barlow-Hess. One of those two, looked at it and they were very kind; so I'm paraphrasing their language, but they said, "This is no good. You're writing like you're writing for an academic audience. That's not the people who read the newspaper. You've got to write like you're talking to real people." I learned to do that fairly quickly. The nature of the writing is totally different. This question could get us off into a different area that would take hours to explore. I will try to be brief. I think there is a problem with the incentive system at universities that pushes the faculty to focus almost exclusively on writing for other academics. For that reason, faculty sometimes become frustrated when the public doesn't embrace their message. Academics will often lament, "Why is the public doing this or not doing that? I don’t understand it because the scientific evidence is clear." Well, the answer is because the faculty tend to communicate with other academics, and the general public are not academics. One example that I use to illustrate that point is the decades-long history of trying to get people to stop smoking. When the scientific community discovered that cigarette 67 smoking was very harmful to your health, they started to communicate that message to the public, but the message was communicated as if they were talking to scientists. The effort failed. People continued to smoke. The tobacco companies actually subverted the message by getting their own scientists to convey a contradictory message. After a couple of decades, health professionals went in a different direction and they simply put a skull and crossbones on a pack of cigarette. "If you smoke, you’re going to die.” Don’t worry about the science, don’t worry yourself with the data. If you smoke, you're going to die. See the skull and crossbones. That worked. Now, it isn’t my intention to disparage traditional, peer-reviewed academic research. That research is critically important. Yet, there is also a role for communicating research results with the broader public in a way that promotes responsible behavior, and the incentive system at many universities does not recognize that role. KH: For the columns that you write in Standard-Examiner, what would the topics be? MV: You know, to some extent, the pieces are all personal essays. Some of them were about experiences I had growing up. I remember a column about my father. Some of them were political things. I wrote about things that were taking place in Ogden or the state or across the nation. Some of them were kind of frivolous. There were a lot of different topics. Some columns attempted to distill economic principles down and make them accessible. That was the type of thing I was just talking about. I wrote a column about why debt is bad, and I remember that column because it resonated with a few people. I would get stopped in stores and people would say, "Oh, I saw that column. You're really right about 68 that." I wrote columns that ticked people off. One of the ones that shocked me was because of the negative feedback, both the fact that the negative comments came, and the fact the comments were so intense, and the fact that it persisted. That criticism surprised me. I wrote a column that said some nice things about a group called Weber Pathway's. By the way, they've recently changed their name. I think it is now the Trails Foundation of Northern Utah. In any event, I said some nice things about Weber Pathways. One guy took offense and said, "Why didn't you talk about this other group? This other group is doing good stuff, too. In fact, this other group is way better than Weber Pathways. You got no business talking about Weber Pathways without mentioning this group." He was really upset about it. KH: Did you get a lot of feedback from all of your columns? Or responses? MV: Generally I heard something. I seldom got negative feedback. Most of the pieces I wrote got a response of some kind. I seldom got an overwhelming response from any single column. The one piece that probably got the greatest response was a column on how to pronounce Weber. People really liked that column. It was at a time when Siri was new. If you spoke Weber State University into Siri, it corrected you and interpreted it as Webber. That was the preface for the column. The responses came from the Weber State community, people that work at Weber State or students or alums. KH: I like it. What recognition have you received for your accomplishments? 69 MV: All I deserve. I don't know exactly what more to say. I mean, I can list them, but I don't want to recite a list. I don't know what direction to take this question. I don’t want to recite my resume. KH: I guess it kind of does. I know that at the recent commencement, you became a presidential distinguished professor. Has there been any award that you've received that you're especially proud of? MV: You know, that award was gratifying for me because I worked with Rod Brady to set up that program. Rod had the idea for that program, and we worked out the details together and that gave me an opportunity to get to know him a little bit better. I talked about him yesterday when we were talking about his presidency. The Brady award was an opportunity to work with him post-presidency. I hold him in very high regard. The fact that I would get an award that he established was very meaningful for me. When the president, our current president, Brad Mortensen, told me I'd been selected for that award. I think the very first words out of my mouth were, "I'm not the kind of person that this award was intended for, but I'm not going to turn it down." That's true because one of the things Rod wanted to accomplish with the award was to retain faculty at Weber State. To get faculty who might be looking at other opportunities and induce them to stay. That certainly wasn't my case. I'm about as late-stage career as anyone could be. That is what I meant when I said I'm not the type of person Rod had in mind, but I'm not going to turn this down. Being selected for the Brady Presidential Professorship was meaningful. I received an award called a Plater Award from the American Democracy Project group. That was meaningful because it was a 70 national award. It was also revealed to me that people at Weber State had nominated me for that award, and that was important to me. I should also mention that in conjunction with the Brady Award. A group of people nominated me for the Brady Award, and that was meaningful for me. KH: What mentors or resources did you have available to you in your program and your career? MV: I talked about Jim Smith yesterday. I met Jim when I was in the early stages of my career, when I was trying to learn how to publish academic research. Jim was invaluable. He literally gave hundreds of hours of his time to me. I'm very appreciative of that. Now, one of the presidents that I talked about yesterday was Paul Thompson. One of his areas of expertise, one of his areas of academic research, was mentorship or mentor-protege relationships. My interactions with Paul make it somewhat difficult for me to answer this question, because one of the things Paul drilled into me is that people misuse the term mentor. Paul would say: “That's not a mentor-protege relationship. You can't do that. You can't assign anybody a mentor. That doesn't work.” Paul had a specific concept in mind when he spoke about mentors, and that concept was informed by his research. He had a very specific idea about mentor-protege relationships. Based upon Paul's definition, I would say that I have not had very many mentors because there is a specific standard for what qualifies as a mentor-protege relationship. If I step back from that and use the term the way that it's commonly used, I will answer differently. 71 I learned a lot from Bob Smith when he was vice president for academic affairs. I think Bob may be the best vice president for academic affairs that Weber State ever had. If I was lucky enough to be compared favorably to Bob, I would hold that as a very high compliment. I learned a lot from working with Bob. The fellow that I just mentioned, Paul Thompson, taught me a lot. He would call me aside when I was dean of business and give me advice. That was very helpful. I learned a great deal from Ann Millner. If I had followed her example more closely, I might have been more successful, but I didn’t always follow Ann’s example. I remember on one occasion when I was provost telling Ann, "You know, every year I take the Academic Affairs budget and I divide by the university overall budget, and I get a percent. Let's say the academic affairs budget is 60%." I said, "My goal is to make that number go up. I want academic affairs to get a larger slice of the pie every year." Ann thought that was terrible. She said, "Oh, you need to be a team player. That's the wrong attitude. You work for the university. You don't just work for academic affairs." After that conversation, I kept doing it the same thing. KH: Because you want the best for your department. MV: Ann was, in my view, the epitome of a team player that would want the best for the entire organization, the community and probably the state of Utah. KH: How have you become a mentor to others in your field? MV: I think I talked about that when you asked me the question about accomplishments. It is very satisfying to help someone out along the way. It is rewarding to see people develop. It is also challenging. A little over a year ago, I 72 had a conversation with a supervisor who had an employee who needed some help. I remember telling the supervisor, "You need to get a mentor for that guy.” The employee was in a position where I could not serve as a mentor, but he would certainly have benefited from a mentor. Still, it was a challenge to find someone who could serve in that role. KH: What advice would you give to students starting in your field? Whether it's economics or academia. MV: Are you intending for this to be kind of question that I take in any direction? When I read this initially, I keyed in on the “in your field” part of the question. I'll talk about that, but we can talk about other things too. I chose an academic career and it worked out well for me. When I talk to people who are considering an academic career, one of the things that I tell them to do is to think about what kind of life they want to live and to visualize in fairly specific detail: where they want to live, when they want to get up in the morning, when they want to be home at night, what they want to do on weekends. Once you get that image in your head, start to work backwards and to ask yourself the question, "Is an academic career a career that's going to allow me to do those things?" The academic career has got a lot of things to recommend it. You've got a lot of flexibility with regard to some things. For a faculty member, I would say if you never wanted to teach an eight o'clock class, that's probably not a deal-breaker. You might have to say no to a department chair at some point in time, but you can probably have an academic career and never teach an eight o'clock class. If 73 you never want to work on Sunday, you can probably avoid doing that. What I am saying is there is a certain degree of flexibility in academia. One of the things that I find that students don't consider is the entire picture. I will talk to students and I will say, "Okay, you go away and you get this Ph.D. and now you want to get a job at a college or university. Where do you want to live?" Many students that I talk to will say, "Ogden, Utah. I want to come back and get a job at Weber State and teach." I say, "If that's your vision, if you have to live in Ogden, Utah, to be happy, don't go into academics because there's a good chance that's not going to happen." Then I explain. The economics department is about 10 people. The department can easily go five or six or seven years without hiring any new people. They have the number of faculty they need, and they're not growing. You come out as a new PhD, and you want to come back to Weber State and live in Ogden, but the department is not hiring and they're not hiring the year after that. They're not hiring three years after that. Then you are 10 years into your career, and you're at a different place because most faculty get hired in as new PhDs, assistant professors. The number that get hired in as more senior faculty is a much smaller number. Going back to what I was talking about just a moment ago, flexibility. Academics careers are flexible in some regards, but in other regards academic careers are not flexible. Academic careers are not flexible careers in terms of location. It's not the kind of career where, you know, you can say, "I really want to live in Des Moines," and be confident that you can find an academic position in Des Moines. Locational flexibility is less, so that's one of the things that I talk about with 74 students. I try to get people to reflect on the whole ball of wax in terms of what they want their life to look like. Does it line up and coincide with an academic career? If you go to any department at Weber State University and talk to the faculty, you're going to find people that never thought they would find themselves in Ogden, Utah. The reason they're in Ogden, Utah, is when they got their Ph.D. and went on the job market, that's where the job was. They were not able to stay in New York or Iowa or wherever they would have preferred. They came to Ogden, Utah, because there was a job in Ogden, Utah. You would find that story among the political science faculty, the economics faculty, the accounting faculty and the performing arts faculty. KH: I have one more question. This isn't on the list, I just thought about it, so I apologize for not giving you an advanced warning. What was it like transitioning from building one to the business building? MV: It wasn't a major deal. The Wattis Building was a newer building. Well, to the extent that you can rewind your tape, I am going to give a different answer. There was one big change, and this was incredibly positive. Building One at the time we occupied it, was 25 years old, and it had been constructed to meet one set of needs, but the needs had been changed. Building One was no longer a classroom building. Any classrooms that were once in the building had been converted to offices. We didn't teach in Building One, so we did not have a classroom building. During my first couple of years at Weber State, I would have a class in the Lind Lecture Hall and my very next class would be in the Social Science Building. Like a student I would have 10 minutes to get from the Lind 75 Lecture Hall to the Social Science Building; but unlike a student, somebody would probably stop me after class to ask a question about the day’s lecture. As a result, I might have five minutes to get across campus. We couldn't leave anything in a classroom before or after class because we didn't have ownership of any classrooms. The idea of going down to a classroom and thinking, "I'm going to give a lecture on such and such tomorrow, and I want to go down to the classroom and leave this there so I will have it in the classroom tomorrow wasn’t something you could do. With the Wattis Building having classrooms in the same building as your office was an extraordinary improvement. That was the positive. The offices were newer but not immensely nicer. My office, because I was a junior faculty, was not one of the better offices in Building One, but there were senior faculty in Building One that had huge offices, and they were reluctant to give those offices up for a smaller office. The offices were fine in the Wattis Building, but the offices were fine in Building One. To have meeting rooms, to have classrooms in the same building, that was a big positive. Also, when we moved into the Wattis building, there was money left over from the construction of the building. The opening of the building coincided almost exactly with IBM releasing the 8088 computer, IBM's first personal computer. The dean used the extra money from the building to buy all of the faculty, IBM 8088 computers. Everybody got a new personal computer. It was not every faculty' member’s first introduction to a personal computer, but it was my first introduction to a personal computer, and that was true for many faculty members. It was the first time you didn't have to type things in on punch cards 76 and take your punch cards to a different building and dump them off and come back two hours later and pick up a dot matrix printed output that would tell you what punch cards did. Getting personal computers was something of a new world. KH: Those are all the questions I have, is there anything else you want to share? MV: No, that was everything I wanted to share. 77 ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW AGREEMENT day(s) of August 2021 This Interview Agreement is made and entered into this 5th by and between the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program (WSUSLOHP) and Mike Vaughan hereinafter called "Interviewee." Interviewee agrees to participate in a recorded interview 1 commencing on or about 2Pm, Augu5t 5, 2021 time/date, with Kandice Harris This Interview Agreement relates to any and all materials originating from the interview namely the recording of the interview and any written materials 1 including but not limited to the transcript or other finding aids prepared from the recording. I In consideration of the mutual covenants, conditions, and terms set forth below, the parties hereby agree as follows: 1. Interviewee irrevocably assigns to WSUSLOHP all his or her copyright ! title and interest in and to the interview. 2. WSUSLOHP will have the right to use and disseminate the interview for research, educational, and other purposes 1 including print, present and future technologies, and digitization to provide internet access. 3. Interviewee acknowledges that he/she will receive no remuneration or compensation for either his/her participation in the interview or for the rights assigned hereunder. 4. WSUSLOHP agrees to honor any and all reasonable interviewee restrictions on the use of the interview, if any, for the time specified below, as follows: Interviewer and Interviewee have executed this Interview Agreement on the date first written above. (Signature) (Signature) /Vire- I V. v\ (Printed Name) 3921 Central Campus Dr Dept 2901, Ogden, UT 84408-2901 Kandice Harris (Printed Name) ® 801-626-6403 © 801-626-7045 l1badmin@weber.edu