i Oral History Program Merlin Cheney Interviewed by Ruby Licona 9 February 2012 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Merlin Cheney Interviewed by Ruby Licona 9 February 2012 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Merlin Cheney, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 9 February 2012, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Merlin Cheney ca. 2012 Merlin Cheney ca. 2012 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Merlin Cheney. It was conducted on February 9, 2012 and concerns his recollections and experiences with Weber State University. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. Mark Woodring, Sarah Gawronski and Megan Rohr are also participating in the interview. RL: Good afternoon, I’m Ruby Licona from the faculty of the Weber State Stewart Library. I’m interviewing Dr. Merlin Cheney who is going to be retiring after forty-six years on campus. We are going to be talking to him about some of his adventures on campus in general and specifically about the last six years and the Master’s of English program that he dreamt up and developed. Also in the room is Mark Woodring, who is the Fiction Editor of Aelurus, the new Master’s of English student journal; and Sarah Gawronski, who is also on that staff. Megan Rohr, who also works for the Aelurus, is going to be our videographer today. We are in the Waterstradt Room of the Stewart Library. Today is February 9, 2012. MC: Thanks, I’m glad to be here. RL: Why don’t we start out with a bit about your background? Tell us where you born and where you went to school. MC: I grew up in southeast Idaho, about twelve miles out of Rexburg. My father owned a little piece of land along the Snake River; not enough to really make a living as a family, but that setting did a lot to shape who I became and why I’m sitting here today. That river bottom country is stunningly beautiful. It has vibrancy and a kind of power to it—any big river has that—and I lived a lot of my childhood in that environment. We didn’t have any money, but we had this 2 marvelous time and place to live. Because we didn’t have any money, we did what poor farm kids did and we learned how to make everything work. We learned to fix it ourselves and invent it ourselves. I went to the local high school in Rexburg and then to the University of Idaho in Moscow. It was the only university in the state of Idaho at the time and you couldn’t get there without going out of state because there was no road up to the panhandle. You could either go through Montana or Oregon and Washington. RL: As a southern-Idaho boy, where did you go from there and how did you end up at Weber? MC: That’s a long story, but maybe what is important in it is that I knew that I wasn’t going to fit into that farming community. I loved that marvelous setting. I loved the land and I still do. But I discovered something that took me away from that land and that brought me here, eventually. I discovered that in spite of the myths that I grew up with that farmers are these wonderful romantic figures attached to the land; they really spent most of their time mucking out the barn and cleaning it off their shoes. They didn’t see that marvelous world that was sitting right there. I determined that I was going to do something different and I went off to the university as a pre-med student. I loved the sciences and now you’re really wondering how I got from there to where I am. [Laughter] I started college early—I’d barely turned seventeen. I started in the sciences and didn’t know enough to know what else there was in the world. I knew I was good at science and I knew I liked it. I was even good at math— which makes me kind of a suspicious figure in the English Department even 3 today. I dropped out of school and worked for a while because my dad had severe health problems. At that point, I began to realize that I loved everything there was at the university. I was a pre-med student, but I was taking classes in psychology, sociology, and literature. In one literature class I was having the time of my life and I thought, “You can get credit for this?” [Laughter] Towards the end of the class, the professor said, “Ever thought of being an English teacher Cheney?” I said, “No, I haven’t, and I’m certainly not going to now.” I was thinking of my ninth grade English teacher who was really just a barbarian with a degree in English. She had taught us that if you don’t run the diagramming line right to the line, you’d get two points off. I don’t know that she taught me anything about literature. But this university professor hooked me and got me started taking classes. I didn’t know much about literature though I’d been a reader all my life. But that lead me to a whole different world. RL: So, in addition to opening your mind to new vistas, your education also helped you to re-envision where you had come from and where you were going. MC: Absolutely. As I started to get more and more of the tools from the arts and humanities, I got the tools to look at and understand the world I valued so much at an intuitive level. I had family and associates who wanted me to go back to the farm, but I knew when I left that that couldn’t be my home any more. I loved the earth there and a lot of the things there, but there wasn’t enough there. RL: At an early age you learned that you can’t go home again. MC: You’re right. I hadn’t read Thomas Wolfe yet, but I learned the idea. When I read Wolfe, I knew that he was right and that I couldn’t go home again. When I went 4 back to school after those years I spent working, I declared an English major and finished up my chemistry minor. I was kind of a weird student. RL: I think that makes you a Renaissance man. MC: That’s a polite way to put it. There are other people who describe it differently. But I got into English and I loved it. I loved language and linguistics. I loved how language worked. I married and went on to Master’s work and was offered a position in Missouri at a new community college just as I was finishing my Master’s. You have to remember that in the era when I was finishing my Master’s, there weren’t many PhDs in anything but the most elite schools. I thought we were all set to go to Missouri, but they called me at the last minute and said there had been problems with opening the new college and the job wasn’t there for me. I looked around for another job and Weber County schools had a job in an experimental school. I came to Weber County and I didn’t know there was a college here— neither my wife nor I are from Utah. Before our first year here was over, I was teaching as an adjunct at Weber. In the spring of ’65, Leland Monson called me. Leland was the head of the Division of Humanities—there was no English Department. He said, “Would you be interested in a job with Weber State College?” I’d just been offered a job in Samoa in the South Pacific. [Laughter] RL: What a choice. MC: And they would come at the very same moment. Hiring was simpler in those days. I came up and met with some people here and I took the job they offered. I’ve been on leave a few times since then, once to do doctoral work. 5 RL: Where did you do your doctoral work? MC: Bowling Green, Ohio. At the time, it was one of the top twenty-five universities in the nation. My doctoral chair was an international scholar and they had quite a number of people at that level. And it was a student-friendly place. I went there for three years and did doctoral work—I stayed on leave from Weber State—then I went back to Bowling Green when my wife was doing doctoral work. We didn’t plan it. But while she was doing doctoral work, I was a visiting professor, which is a really great-sounding title for an adjunct. They thought it was strange that I wanted to teach freshman writing courses, but I was the director of the freshman writing program here. RL: What was your doctoral chair’s area of expertise? MC: He was a Thomas Hardy specialist. SG: Those of us who know you know that your Ph.D. dissertation was on Thomas Hardy. What was it about Hardy and his work that made him so appealing to you? MC: There are a lot of kinds of answers to that, but I think the thing it comes to is that yes, he’s a great artist and he’s stood the test of time. Beyond that, Hardy was a realist, he was a great humanist, and he cared about people. He had a tragic vision, but he couldn’t stop caring—he couldn’t lose hope. By the time he finished writing, the writing movement had become a very cynical one, but Hardy wasn’t a cynic. I guess that connected to me and my attitudes and I think that’s probably why I stayed with Hardy. I considered seriously a dissertation on Algernon Charles Swinburne, the poet, arguably the most gifted poet in terms of skill with 6 language. But finally I just didn’t want to live the rest of my life in the world of decadence and retreat from responsibility that Swinburne often offered. SG: You said that Hardy has stood the test of time. Why do you think he’s still relevant today? MC: Because Hardy understood human nature and he paints it for us in a way that we can see ourselves in it now as well as we could in 1867 when he wrote his first novel. His poetry was collected right after he died in 1928. By 1930 there was a complete poems of Thomas Hardy printed and it’s been in print continuously since, which is a pretty good trick. They had to finally throw the typeset away because it was falling apart. SG: What about Victorian literature as a whole appealed to you and led you to want to teach it? MC: I’m going to back up a little for that question because part of it is about me and part of it is about that period of literature. That literature was the literature of a time that was, in some ways, the most dramatic and cataclysmic time in history up until that point. Even though change is accelerating in our own time, we’re at least used to the idea—we expect change. But the nineteenth century started out with people living the way they had, more or less, for the last thousand years. Technology increased a little but not a lot and they all still lived in their little villages. But suddenly the whole fabric of society has changed and they’ve got to invent a new society. Well, the things that attract me the most to that were that I, too, started in a very different society. I remember when we got electricity in our home when I 7 was a child. We were rural and out quite a ways. Now I’m in a world where I’ve been on every continent in the world except Australia. I, too, lived in a time of change and had to watch for how much difference that would make—how do we invent a new society? The Victorian era collects some of the brightest and most capable thinkers and writers in one time and place. Hardy knew that Matthew Arnold was right—Arnold says of the Victorian Age, “The old world is dead and the new powerless to be born.” They had to invent the new one and they did. As they invented the new one, the major foundation pieces for the twentieth century and for our culture were invented by the writers and thinkers of the Victorian Age. So we’re them. The Victorian word has kind of taken on bad press because when we think about them now, the first thing we think is that they were prudes. But John Fowles, a twentieth century novelist, said that when he set out to write The French Lieutenant’s Woman, “I set out to expose them for what they were and give them a good thrashing. By the time I finished, I realized they were us.” MW: Well, Dr. Cheney, we’ve gotten up to your time at Weber State. At what point did you feel that Weber State needed a Master’s of English program? MC: I’ll be just a little facetious and say: About the second year I was here I thought we needed one, but nobody was interested in evening thinking about that. But let me go back a little because this has a lot to do with what I think a university should be about. I think universities have been inventing themselves in ways that don’t meet the idea of what they should be. I think we’re all aware that universities have become their own separate world too much, but I want to start 8 with the idea that the human mind is not just a resource to be strip-mined—we don’t say we want the coal and take it all out and leave the mess when we’re done. The mindset right now, if you go to the Legislature, is: “What job does this get you?” But they want that in pretty narrow terms. The bigger and the more important question, long term, is: “What kind of human beings should make up our culture and how can we make that better with education?” Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, said the mind is not a vessel to be filled—it’s a fire to be ignited. That’s what makes a human community. Maybe I read too much Tennyson. One of Tennyson’s poems from Idylls of the King is “Merlin and the Gleam.” Merlin, who was the mentor for Arthur, the greatest idyllic king that England has ever had, becomes this incredible myth that permeates our entire culture because Arthur understood human values and pledged, “Might for Right.” He was saying he would cultivate the very best that makes human beings their very best. Merlin was the one who taught him the difference between getting by and getting a job, and becoming a great humanist. In Tennyson’s poem, “Merlin and the Gleam,” Merlin is talking about that great fire that Plutarch talked about. In the opening of the poem, he’s looking to a young mariner and he says, “Young mariner, I’m old and I’m dying and I can’t go any longer but I’ve pursued that dream my whole life and now you have to put the sails on your ship and go and chase it yourself.” The poem closes by him saying, “After it, follow it—follow the gleam.” He makes it clear that he’s talking about that fire of the mind, that light that comes into people as they grow not just in knowledge but in their human capacities. 9 Well, that’s a philosophy discussion, but we had wanted a Master’s degree but with no thought that it was a possibility. Twelve years ago, Dr. Dohrer became chair of the English Department. He was a great guy to work with. He knew he didn’t know enough about everything and he was okay to let somebody who knew do things. We got out of a meeting after he’d been chair about two months and I said, “You know, we need to get going on a Master’s degree.” He said, with that kind of innocence and goodness in him, “That’s a good idea. Why don’t you get going on that?” I thought to myself, “Merlin, you darn fool, what have you said?” I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, it just came out. I’d created a lot of programs at Weber State by then—that’s the tenth major program that I created at Weber State and I knew what I was in for. I knew that if Utah State and the University of Utah didn’t want us to have it, then we wouldn’t have it. I’d watched the fight to get an MBA and they got it on the Davis campus and the U still ran the one on this campus; they’d pulled in every marker they had in the state to get that MBA program and that was business—I knew no one was going to do that for English. People would say, “Do you think we can really get this?” I’d say, “Oh sure, let’s keep going! If we hit setbacks, we’ll just work around them.” I’d go home and night and say, “Not only am I darn fool, but now I’m a liar—I’m telling everybody this story and they believe me.” MW: So the thought did cross your mind that this was never going to be allowed to happen? 10 MC: If the U had said we weren’t going to get it, we wouldn’t have gotten it. This was the first Master’s degree in Utah that was anything but education and business and not at the U or Utah State. Nobody else had broken that barrier. Twenty or thirty years earlier they had gotten the Master’s of Education by a backroom deal where Utah State ran the program on this campus. Those who have power love to keep it. It took six years but we got it. I took a sabbatical the semester before we got the program; I was going to finish up some writing. That was the semester that we had to do the final push with the Regents and I spent every day here and I didn’t touch the writing once. There was a series of delays and then we were scheduled to meet with the Regents in Cedar City on July 28. We didn’t know what they were going to say. I took a little comfort in the fact that we were meeting in Cedar City and I could at least go see Hamlet and watch somebody else killed for his efforts. [Laughter] Well, we went in to talk to the Regents and they asked quite a few questions and we answered them. I didn’t know what they thought. They deliberated for a little bit and then brought us back. The chair of the Regents said, “I just want everybody here to know that in the time that I have been on this Regents board, this is the finest proposal for a Master’s program that’s ever come before us.” I thought, “Well, they probably say nice things when they approve things.” They approved it and we went out of the room and the president and the provost were gasping: “They never say anything good about anything!” So I went and saw Hamlet and didn’t care. 11 RL: In light of that positive feedback, did you feel that the delays that had taken place were backroom and political? MC: No, I knew what the delays were about. These days you go online and everyone gets to respond and plan. At that time, the delays were scheduling problems of one kind or another. I’m sure there was talk, and I had been afraid that there would be backroom politics, but that doesn’t seem to have been the problem. The interesting thing is that the whole attitude shifted. Dr. Dohrer did the contact with the other universities and he got a letter back from the U saying, “This looks great; we think it’s a great idea.” I thought maybe he’d sent it to the wrong university. And then Utah State basically said, “We’re doing a doctorate in tech writing; we don’t care what you do.” And Utah State wanted all their students to be resident students. You see, we were filling a niche. We built a program for working people and they come at night. The U doesn’t even offer graduate English classes at night or in the summer. We have students coming from below Provo to take classes here and that has stunned us. MW: With all of the expectations of the program, has it developed the way you would have liked and hoped for? MC: Yes. I said earlier that I’ve developed a lot of programs. This one comes the closest to achieving the ideal of anything I’ve done. It’s just sort of that magic combination and I’m not taking a bow for that because all of the pieces and people have to be there for it to work. But I can go to faculty and say, “Pick something you’ve got a passion for and design a class.” We’re trying to cap classes at fifteen and the professor will have fifteen students who are hungry to 12 learn and who want this. And these classes are not a kind of hoop that you jump through; we go and we work and when we finally go home, we go home high. We talk about literature and the humanities being a great power in the community, but we usually talk about that in public speeches and then the legislature says, “Yes, but we’ll fund the engineering.” But this one is really doing that. Half of the people in this program have no plans to teach. They’re not teaching now. They’re doing all kinds of jobs where research and scholarship and critical analysis and writing skills are valuable. But they want this for their own fulfillment and they take it back to the community and their own families. So yes, I can’t imagine anything coming closer to what I’d imagined it to be. MW: With all the work you put in to get the program established, did you expect to be made the head of the program? MC: I did, but not for the reason you might think. Nobody else was willing to do that kind of work. The first four years of the program—I have a half-time assignment to run that program—and that half-time assignment averaged forty-five hours a week. Nobody else wanted to do that. And in fact, as we’re changing the program director now, it was interesting who didn’t want to apply for it because it was too much work. It’s a lot less work now that it was. Dr. Shigley has been on the Steering Committee and she made an interesting comment the other day; she said, “We got on the train as it was moving and now we’re inventing the track.” It was a tremendous amount of work to get it running. SG: Are there any other projects or expansions that you wanted to introduce but have not yet happened? 13 MC: Yes. That has not always made me a popular person because I keep seeing more we can do. Maybe it’s that farm kid in me. But every program I’ve created has been because I saw we needed something and I saw things we needed to be doing for students. One of the pieces that have gone through the senate but hasn’t gotten going is a TESOL strand of the Master’s program. It’s a program to train people to teach English as a foreign language. Our most productive contact right now is China. We have the contacts and the universities there, waiting, but it’s a horrendous task in terms of logistics to get from that stage to the point where it’s operating. The biggest challenge now is that we don’t have the faculty, which has put that project on hold right now. I think the most important thing we’ll ever do internationally is people to people. Politicians can’t solve problems because they’re all under pressure from some interest group. But we’ve had students in the Master’s program from Oman, from Jordan, and from Mongolia. They’ve been superb students. The student from Oman—and that’s not an oil-rich country—was a woman who wore a headscarf and she was careful and I was careful not to touch. She had two young children and a neat husband and when she left here she said, “It just tears a part of me out. I’m leaving a part of me here.” Then she put her arms around me and hugged me and I was just dumbfounded. She said, “Anytime you come to our country—if you’ll just get there, then once you’re there you won’t have to pay for a thing. We’ll show you the country and we’ll put you up and we’ll feed you.” She is now in the Ministry of Education for the country. These are the things that I want international things to build on. 14 RL: In relation to that, were you involved in the ‘90s with the program to teach the Japan Airlines students? MC: I started it. I started the ESL program and worked with it for some time. We started working with Japan Airlines and then Korean Airlines. Frankly, we’d still be doing it if a greedy administrator hadn’t sucked the money out of the program. My interest in international things goes a long way back. I took a trip to Taiwan in ‘86 and we were trying to get some collaborative things going then; for political reasons, it died. RL: Well that gets the undergraduate and the graduate kind of together because of your interests. MC: You see, I still can’t decide what to be when I grow up. I’m all over the map with it. RL: My son asks me how to decide what you want to be when you grow up and I tell him I still haven’t decided whether or not I want to grow up. SG: What is your proudest moment with the Master’s program? MC: It’s hard to pick a moment. In terms of development, that moment with the Regents was a great moment, but that was just the green light to move. In terms of the program, I think the best answer I can give is a moment that recurs: there is that moment when students walk across the stage and we put a hood on them and we throw our arms around each other and we try to pretend we’re not weeping. We’ve connected in a way that will have a part of my heart for the rest of my life. I know that sounds kind of schlocky but it’s why it all matters. I’m proud of students who have papers in regional and national conferences and 15 students who write original things and get them published, but it still comes down to that moment that represents that culmination. SG: Do you have any regrets about the program? MC: Yes—that I got old. [Laughter] Well, I could wish that more of the faculty had the broad vision of what this is about. I could wish that it ranked higher with administrators in terms of why we’re here and what we’re doing. But we go into something like this knowing that these will always be issues and we’ll have to work around them the best we can; then we nurture interest in faculty and administrators. SG: Overall you’re proud of the program and how it’s turned out? MC: It’s the greatest professional thing I’ve done. If I were going to finish with something great, this would be it. There are now about one hundred and twenty-five students in the program. We’ve graduated almost eighty. I don’t remember the numbers. There may be a few more graduations this semester because of students saying, “Let’s get out of there before Cheney’s gone.” [Laughter] But yes, I’ve loved it and it was a great way to finish up. I didn’t know I was going to finish now, but I’m ending with two writers that I love: John Fowles and Thomas Hardy. MW: You talk about that moment at graduation when students walk across the stage and you give them a hug: Who’s your favorite student in the program? MC: Oh don’t go there! [Laughter] But I have an answer for you: it’s whatever student I’m holding on to right that minute. RL: That’s the perfect response. 16 MW: When the idea was brought to you of starting a graduate journal for the Master’s program, what was your first thought? MC: I thought this is a neat thing and we need to do it. My second thought was what you’d expect: “Okay, what are the obstacles? What are we going to have to overcome to get this to happen?” Since my plate was kind of full right then, I looked to Ryan and the staff he has assembled. But this is the marvel of the program—these are adults with tremendous initiative. If you run a program and say to the students, “You’re in charge of making things happen and you’re free to do it,” then they do. They do more than I could ever possibly do by myself and they do better in a lot of ways. I was worried about the obstacles of money and time. I know you all put a lot of time in, but I don’t know how Ryan has survived. But the journal is a great thing. Papers aren’t just to satisfy a teacher, they’re part of the ongoing conversation. The great literature is what we study and that’s the best that’s been thought and written. We read it and we talk about it and we write about it and then we write some of our own. That’s the real thing. SG: What are you going to miss most after you retire? MC: The students. That’s an easy answer. MW: What are you going to miss least? MC: The administrative bureaucracy that doesn’t respond to real needs. I’ll try to keep it generic. It’s the obstacle of any endeavor human beings do that has any social element. I won’t miss endless department meetings where people wrangle endlessly with something that didn’t matter to being with. SG: Any thoughts of trying to teach a class or two after retirement? 17 MC: Not right now, for two reasons. One of the terms of this retirement is that they don’t want us back on campus for any reason for a year and a half. Another reason is that I’m struggling with some health things and that makes it harder. I could still do a class. I could come out of a grad class and still be high no matter how bad I felt going in. But the other thing about that is that it’s hard to have your fingers on every piece of this that moves and suddenly stand on the side and be the elephant in the room for the new guy taking over. Besides the fact that the new guy may not do a good job and I may want to go and scold him about it. So I may not go back to teaching any time soon, but I do want to go back to that writing. SG: What projects do you have planned after your retirement begins? MC: Three books. All of which are under way and all of which have not made much progress in the last six years. Once of them is a collection of poetry that will involve some that I’ve published and some that I’ve done at presentations and some others. That was pretty near finished six years ago. Another is a piece of writing called, “Scenes from the River.” It’s sort of creative non-fiction of my own background—it’s both literal and metaphoric. RL: Getting you back to the Snake River? MC: That’s the literal part. Then you discover that the real river is the river of time that flows by. The third project is a book that I have finished pieces of. I spent eight years at Weber County Jail developing programs there for inmates. Other than the things we’ve talked about today, that time at the jail is probably the most powerful thing that I’ve done. I want to write about that. The working title right 18 now is “Confinement.” What happens with it? What should we be trying to make happen with it? I had eight great years of doing that. When I left, we had twenty-five volunteers working there. My wife one day saw me come home from there and collapse into a chair and said, “Can’t you just ever go in and do what’s already there?” I started to answer and then she laughed and said, “Of course you can’t.” RL: So, you started here in 1965— MC: I started as an adjunct in the 1963-1964 year and went full-time in ’65. RL: And here we are forty-six years later. I’m sure you probably didn’t envision being here this long, but I’m sure that from what you’ve told us, they’ve been very successful years. The last six years have been very fruitful years and we don’t know yet what you will garner, but I think you’ve got an appreciative audience looking on at what you have accomplished. MC: Thank you. This is the last, crowning moment in a lot of ways. But as I’ve been thinking about this interview, I’ve asked myself, “What have you done?” I started the first computer lab on the campus. Dan Rhodes and I started the first Learning Center and now we call them all kinds of other things. I started the Writing Center in 1972. I started the first computer lab. I started the ESL program—I was talking to Sherwin Howard one day and he said, “I’m making you in charge of the ESL program.” I said, “Sherwin, there isn’t an ESL program.” He said, “I know, get on it.” If you know him, you know he had a sense of humor. And I spent every day of the summer here and by fall we had an ESL program with twenty-five students in it. I started a great program called Developmental Studies that isn’t here anymore 19 because some people were elitist and decided we shouldn’t be doing it. But most of these are now worked into the fabric of the institution. When I came in 1963, we were only just doing a few Bachelors’ graduations. So I’ve been here during a time of transition and I’ve been able to help shape who we became. I got to help insist on the idea that we still belong to the people and that the people are why we’re really here. [END AELURUS SECTION] RL: We mentioned a moment ago that when you came, you were part of a division rather than a particular department, but since you came here to teach English, can you tell us about that particular area and maybe some of the people you worked with? What was the intellectual climate in that area when you arrived? MC: When I arrived, it was more like family than we are now. Mostly because of the size. Leland Monson was head of the Division of Humanities and Carl Green was the director of writing. Robert Clarke was the vice president who interviewed me for the job. It was a lot simpler process in those days. They called me and asked me if I would be interested. I came to campus, they talked to me for a few minutes and then we walked out. Leland Monson had a very deliberate way of talking and he said, “You’ll be getting a contract in the mail in the next few days. We’ll make it as much as we can.” It was $5,500 for the year. Times are certainly different. We had bought a house in what would now be inner-city Ogden. It was a great house that we bought for $11,800 dollars. When we moved to be closer to the college, we moved to a home on Mitchell Drive and Tyler, which is just south 20 of 32nd Street. There was a lovely home there for $46,000 and we were just gasping at the price. But back to those early days at Weber State. There is a moment I remember that is just one of my great memories. William P. Miller was the president of the college at the time and the Millers had a home just on the other side of Harrison Boulevard. They were having a Christmas social for the faculty and we went to their home. There was a crowd and we could see they were busy; we had young children we’d left with someone else, so we thought we would just slip out. As we left, President Miller saw us and came over and put his arm around me in a very fatherly way and said, “Merlin, I’m sorry that we’re just so busy and I haven’t had much time to talk with you, but I want you and Donna to know how appreciative we are that you’ve joined us. If there is anything we can do to make your time here more enjoyable, please let us know.” And he meant it. It was just like hearing my father talk to me. I went out of there and I thought, “I don’t care what they’re paying me—I’m staying here forever!” That was the early days and that’s what it felt like to be here. It’s hard to maintain that. The bigger you get, the more machinery of operation you have to have and that gets in the way of a tight group. RL: Even today, I think there’s a great deal of emphasis on students and service to the students as individuals. MC: Yes, that is part of the reason that I have stayed here. I can leave my door open and students come to see me—they don’t have to have an appointment. There’s 21 a connection between students and faculty here that has made the difference for me. RL: You mentioned that when you came, not many people had a doctorate. Did you notice a time of demarcation when the emphasis became more focused on publishing and activity rather than student-orientation? MC: Yes, and I can kind of mark that time. I know what drove it and I think we should have resisted it more than we did, but it was certainly the trend around the country. In the ‘60s, we had a kind of paradigm shift in the country that said everyone should have access to a college. Before that it had been pretty much an aristocracy: if you’re good enough, you can go, but college isn’t for everybody. It didn’t take very long in our culture before it changed from, “Everyone should have access,” to “Everybody should go.” That changed a lot of things and not all for the good. Giving access is one thing, but it’s another to say everyone should go whether they’re interested or prepared. Suddenly college enrollments boomed and as colleges cranked up to meet the demand, they decided they needed Ph.Ds. to teach. I could see by 1968 that if I wanted to make a career in this and wanted the power to help shape things, I was going to need a doctorate. In 1967 my wife and I chose between going to Europe and going to start doctoral work. We went to Europe for our first trip. Everyone who knew us thought we were at least irresponsible, if not demented. In ’68 I went back to start doctoral work. By 1981 we could not advertise a tenure track position without asking for a doctorate. We’re seeing some of the same thing happen now in a different venue but it’s going to affect the universities a lot. We’re seeing the workforce expect 22 people better prepared for their discipline, which means a Master’s degree. That shift is coming into the high schools and that’s going to mean increased programs like the one we’re running. There are a lot of graduate programs around the country that teach their graduate students like the only thing they’ll do the rest of their lives is read and write literary criticism. That’s an in-bred problem we’ve let happen in our universities. But our program says, “We don’t care if you’re even teaching. If you want the enrichment, we’re going to study language and literature.” We’re going to see a new need for doctorates because they’re going to be running Master’s programs for people teaching in the schools. That transition is happening now. It hit kind of suddenly. When I left here in ’68, we had two people with doctorates in what had, by then, kind of emerged as an English Department. By the time I got back, they were asking for doctorates. During that time, we broke into departments and there came a point—I don’t know the dates—when we really added another layer of administration. You have to do that as it grows. People complain we have too much administration—especially the people who have never followed an administrator around for the day and seen that administrators don’t spend all day going out to lunch. RL: Some of that happened when Bob Smith came; then, in the ‘70s, there was the Faculty Senate and more faculty involvement. But to get back to your earlier days here at Weber and when you came back from your doctoral studies: how did the atmosphere and your interaction with colleagues and students compare with your previous experiences? You’re experiences in Idaho and also in Ohio. 23 MC: Each setting has its unique qualities. Certainly the environment I was in Idaho was not primarily an intellectual one. I didn’t have the terminology to talk about it, but I realized early that I wanted to live in the world of the mind in a way the people around me didn’t. My wife teases me that I’m bilingual—I speak a different language when I’m with my family at reunions and such. They resent the world that I’m a part of. I can’t talk about this world with them; they don’t want to know. RL: They don’t want you putting on airs. MC: They don’t want me thinking I’m better. The truth is that they’re probably a little afraid I might be. I’m not better but the world I’m in is pretty alien. Then, when we came here to Weber, it was still very much a community college. We did have a baccalaureate program but it was pretty new. By the time I got back in ’71, I would guess we weren’t at 8,000 students yet. But those of us who were really engaged with the institution were keenly aware that it was a time of growth and change. Growth not just in terms of the number of students but growth in terms of what the operation and the institution did and what we needed to do if we wanted to be a part of that. A lot of the programs that I either developed or helped to develop were a response to that: how do you meet the new definition of what a college is? When I first came, we were really just accommodating the old two-year school. Most people were looking behind and staying with what we used to be. A good example of that now is the Davis campus. When they started to talk about that, I was really pushing it because I saw what could come of it. I spent at 24 least four years teaching three-quarters of my load out there. I thought, “That’s the future.” There are still a lot of people who don’t see that. But that was a factor when I came back from doctoral work. Among those who were trying to make things happen, there was a keen sense that, “We’ve got to develop whole operations that we don’t have if we’re going to meet the needs.” It was an exciting time and it was a time I enjoyed if I didn’t think about salary. When I got back—I’d been gone for three years and I had a doctorate—people with Master’s degrees who came after me were making more than I was and they were put in charge of my tenure committee. I went to Dello Dayton to complain and he said, “Don’t complain to me. When we found out you had the doctorate, we scraped up another hundred dollars for you.” There was that element but you worked with it. RL: I think the university underwent growing pains throughout the ‘70s. MC: And the ‘80s. We were trying a whole new set of things in the ‘80s. Some of them are not here now and some are, but the growing pains got acute in the ‘70s. RL: You’ve mentioned that you were involved in the development of programs on campus. What were some of those? MC: One of the first ones that morphed into others was a program we started for students who really weren’t prepared for college. We got a federal grant for it and it underwent name changes, but eventually came to be called Developmental Studies. It was a program that helped adults that didn’t have the tools for college. Because we had a federal grant, we could fund it. It was tutorial because that was how you could really move those students. We worked with them in reading 25 and writing. It was a lot of students—at its peak, it was about four hundred and fifty students. They changed their lives if they would come and participate in that. If you can’t read, even in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, there weren’t many jobs. That program morphed into a full-fledged reading tutorial for adults who couldn’t read. Later, it also moved into a program for deaf students. At one time, the deaf program really had a chance to expand. Because I had a linguistic background, I understand language and how language works. I had a translator that the state provided and we had whole classes of deaf students. We hit a lot of flack. The deaf school didn’t like what we were doing. They saw an implied criticism of them. There was no implied criticism. I didn’t care where the students came from; if they were an adult and couldn’t read, we were going to help them learn to read. We never made any comments to anybody, but if they graduated from high school in the deaf school and now they can’t read, it doesn’t look good. At one point, there was a Region 8 conference held on this campus for the deaf programs. They wanted me to speak at it and I talked to the assembled group from the region about what we were doing. When we got through, one of the directors in charge of Region 8 asked for a few minutes with me. He said, “I want you to write me a proposal for a grant. We need to make Weber State the Intermountain College Center for Deaf Students.” I knew what he wanted was more of the same. I looked at it and said I couldn’t do it because of my workload. He said, “Just write the proposal!” But I looked around and I was running three programs with no relief in teaching load. At that time, we had a man who had been appointed director of the Center for the Handicap. He had been given that 26 job because everyone he’d ever worked for on campus wanted to fire him. He’s the one who went to the deaf school and told them stuff that caused problems. I would have had to work with him every day. I never did it and I’ve always been a little sad we didn’t get the program running because it was a neat thing to do. But everything I did, he would have been in the way. RL: Some of those early programs like the writing lab have kept on. MC: The writing lab is now called the Writing Center and it’s become a campus-wide service. That’s gone beyond where I started, but we intended to make it available. It was better for the university that the English Department not be the ones who had to administer it, but we still work close with Claire Hughes. RL: And your Development Studies has become some of the remedial work that we do with English and Math. MC: The tutorial and the grants went away because when Sesh became chair of the department, he wanted it gone because he was an elitist and he wanted it gone because that was not what a university does. That was silly. We’re not elitist and we still belong to the community. I was in the regional and national leadership of the learning systems movement. I’d been on the campuses of places like Stanford and Berkeley and they had learning centers and tutorials. But because there wasn’t good support for it, a chair could just shut it down and he did. So that part of it went away, but of course, I couldn’t behave and I said, “We’ve got to get some help for these international students. We get them here and we take their money unfairly. They’re not prepared and we don’t tell them that until they 27 come.” I told you about Sherwin Howard saying, “You’re the new director.” The English Second Language (ESL) program is still going. RL: That’s moved out of the English Department, hasn’t it? MC: Yes, and I was sad to see that happen. They weren’t funded accurately—those students bring in a staggering amount of international tuition and the ESL program wasn’t being given any of it so they could run. Every year they’d be told they didn’t have enough money in their budget to run over the summer. The question was, “We’re making all of this money, how do we not have the money?” For twelve years we didn’t have an administrator in the English Department who did any work for the ESL program. One day, Gianna said to the provost, “I’m tired of being the stepchild. I’m bringing in tons of money and can’t afford to run a summer program. I don’t want to hear that anymore.” So they moved it out of English. Bruce Davis is over it and they’ve got money and they hired three new people immediately. When ESL had started, it was a separate institute run on soft money. As soon as they started making money, they were taken over into the English Department. The work we did with Japan Airlines and Korean Airlines were moneymakers, but we lost them because the department chair raided the money. Nobody in ESL was tenured. When I hired them, I hired them on the agreement that after a suitable probation period, they would be given permanent status. It was a non-tenure alternative. But when I went on leave that year and Sesh became chair, he dumped all of that and nobody kept that promise. He made the contracts and contracted things they couldn’t really fulfill. The ESL 28 instructors told him that and he’d say, “If you don’t like it, you can be gone tomorrow.” By the way, those instructors came from international experience— all of them but Tim Conrad. Kathy Price was running an ESL program in England; she was traveling and stopped her to see some friends, saw the advertisement and applied. Mark Peterson was teaching and doing curriculum for Pavlova University in Iran. It wasn’t a matter of them not knowing enough to run the program. The administration just looted the program and eventually they lost their contracts. RL: What other kinds of programs did you undertake? MC: Those are the important ones. We started a program for study abroad in England and we ran that for a long time. We didn’t try to make any money and it generated credits. We could take students for two weeks for $1,800 when we started. We did that for a long time. Most of them were English majors. We took small groups so we could all fit in the van. We’d go to three or four places, including London. RL: Did you ever serve as department chair? MC: No, I served as associate chair for a while. I served as the writing program director. The bigger it got, the less I wanted to be chair. There’s too much of your time just fulfilling bureaucratic kinds of things. I wanted to still be where I could make things happen. I’m relieved, frankly. At this point, the English Department is bigger than two of the colleges. We’ve got a hundred teachers, including adjuncts. When I’m frustrated with leaders, I have to be fair and say, “You can never feel like you’ve done your job.” 29 RL: The ‘70s saw a big change in faculty. Were you active in any of those activities? MC: Yes, I was. I wanted to see things happen. I knew people like Helmut Hoffman and we thought he was an absolutely brutal man. He would call somebody in his office and say, “You’re fired,” without due process. RL: Was he the one who started the learning kits? MC: No, that was somebody in education. That was another of the really silly things we tried for a while. It was an experiment, but experimenters need to have some practical sense. The kits were not successful. They freed faculty up and the faculty then did not do the work for students that they could have done. I think in a different way John Thaeler has something going now with Developmental Math only I think it does work. He’s using computers, not kits. John and I worked in development for a long time and he’s one of those people who made me think, “If John and I are both still doing this, then it must be okay.” I was in the Faculty Senate. It took a while for that Faculty Senate to really get some muscle. Administrators were used to calling the shots and faculty doing what they were told. When faculty governance started to come in, part of it was personalities. A lot of people weren’t willing to face people like Helmut Hoffman. I walked into Helmut’s office one day and gave him notice that I was going to sue him if he didn’t release my check by Monday. They decided they didn’t like something and they held my check even though they didn’t have any legal right. He got away with that with people. The story behind that is I was officed in the building over by the Institute and there was heavy equipment coming in so they’d put quite a bit of dirt down over the road so they wouldn’t 30 destroy the road with their equipment. When it got wet, you’d sink to your calves. There was a place by the Fine Arts Building that was a parking lot but wasn’t lined at all. We’d been parking in there so we didn’t have to cross the muddy road in order to get to our classes. One day someone decided we shouldn’t be parking down the center of that lot and they started ticketing. The campus police weren’t deputized. I said, “Get me a place to park so I can get to my classes,” and they blew me off. So I blew them off. So they held my check. Helmut just did whatever he felt like and thought you should just live with it. It was an interesting time and it wasn’t all good, but there was an excitement. Three times in my time here between 1971 and 1987 I was offered jobs elsewhere. Two of them had sought me out. Each time, right at the last minute, something would go wrong. I wasn’t disappointed. The money was terrible here but everything else was great. You can find a way to live with the money—I taught a lot of extra classes. A university in Florida offered to double my salary and I was set to go; then they had a citrus freeze that year and they couldn’t hire me. That’s the story in all three of those cases. RL: Maybe it was serendipity. MC: It certainly has that element. You can look back and see things you can’t look forward and see. But I do think you have to kind of trust something in the core of yourself that says, “Yes, this is what I need to do.” A fourth job came along in the late ‘70s. I was building houses during the summer because we needed the money. I got working with a guy who had just set up his own business and needed someone in money management. It was a 31 perfect job for me. I thought I was going to take that job. I was making $15,000. When I didn’t take the job, he went on and made $90,000 a year. I stayed because I knew that this matters more than making money. It’s for the students. That’s why it’s still hard, after all this time, to say goodbye to it. RL: How would you assess the difference in the students here from other places you have been? MC: Some very positive things that I don’t think our folks here always know. I went back from ’68 to ’71 to Bowling Green, then in ’86 I went again. Ohio has a three-tier system: community college, state college, university. If you get into a university you had to have come in pretty well-prepared. I was at the university, one of nine universities in the state, but they didn’t know how to work. They didn’t have any allegiance to college because they came from anywhere in the state and the college didn’t have any allegiance to them. I couldn’t wait to get back to our non-traditional students. All I have to have is one student over thirty in the class and it changes the entire nature of the class. In Ohio, they were bright but they were lazy. I taught two classes of freshman that year and I only had one student who had been out of high school for more than a month. Most of them had never had a paying job in their lives. They all had a car and a refrigerator for their dorm room—and this was 1986. The students here are the best-kept secret we’ve got. The best and the brightest here are the best and the brightest anywhere they go—and I’ve tracked them. 32 RL: Would you say that students have changed over the years since you came here? MC: More students come with a sense of entitlement; they don’t know how to work. It isn’t all their fault, they’ve come from an environment where there was nothing for them to do that was productive. There’s an awful lot of freshman who are ill-prepared and want to argue with you because they got A’s in high school. We saw the same kind of shift in the ‘60s, but now we’ve got young people who are almost completely idle and have a whole bunch of games they want to play. They’re less prepared to be productive. I think they’re as smart as they’ve been. But that’s a culture-wide problem, that’s not a Weber State problem. And it’s worse other places than it is here. I’ve got a friend who retired early from Michigan. He was a top-notch researcher and said that in their major, students wouldn’t work, but the administration was saying he couldn’t flunk them. RL: The work that you’ve done with the international students…how would you compare their expectations with our own students? MC: It depends on which part of the world they came from. The Asian students overwhelmingly expect to work hard. The Middle Eastern students have typically come from wealthy families and they have paid others to fix their problems. There are exceptions, but they are typically not good students when they start. The South American students that we’ve had have typically had a strong work ethic. Sometimes they come to us well prepared and sometimes not. We don’t get many European students. 33 RL: We’ve talked about the students, so now what are some of your recollections concerning some administrators here on campus? MC: I’ve worked closely with a lot of them. In general, I think they have been incredibly hard working people and there has been too much work for them to do. Sometimes they’ve been in over their heads. Even if you get somebody with good-looking credentials that can happen. But in early times, if you’d been here a while then you got a job. Sometimes that worked great and sometimes it worked really badly. Overall, my biggest frustration has probably been with focus. The focus has increasingly been on a kind of job training in the simplest form. I’m not opposed to us doing job training but I want us to do more than that. Nowhere else in our culture do we have a system that trains human beings to function better as members of a community, family and larger society. That’s part of the role of a university. Some administrators have had a good vision of that. Many administrators have had to push against outside pressure because the state wants what they can measure—jobs and commerce. But jobs and commerce don’t make a civilization. RL: It’s the difference between training people and educating them. MC: Yes, thank you. Weber State has done a pretty good job with pretty thin resources. I’ve been really frustrated with people who had the strongest voice but weren’t interested in educating. RL: Are there some that you would distinguish that way? 34 MC: I would say one of the great people that I have worked under would be Sherwin Howard. Bob Smith finally kind of got tired of Sherwin having all these good ideas. I remember Bob saying, “The ideas are good but we can’t do all these things.” Bob introduced me to a group of people and tried to describe what I did and finally said, “Merlin’s in charge of everything that moves in English.” I was doing quite a bit of that under the leadership of Sherwin Howard as dean. That later became a problem because we got a chair who was offended that I was introduced that way. But Sherwin was one of those people who had the vision of what we ought to be able to accomplish. He was very bright and he nurtured creativity in other people. Sherwin was one of the great ones, I think. Towards the end, he did some things that I was really disappointed in, but he really just got beat down until he wore out. Arts and Humanities was forty percent of the campus and he had about fifteen percent of the budget. But he was an incredible administrator. I thought, in some ways, that Rodney Brady was an extremely able man. He was bright and he knew how to make things work, but you couldn’t work around Rod Brady very long without getting a sense that he was looking forward to what he was going to do when he got done with his five years here. His career was what it was all about for him. You can’t plan for only five years. He stayed a little longer, but only because he was waiting until the right thing fell into place for him. Right now, the dean of Arts and Humanities is one of the greatest administrators I’ve seen. It’s a really difficult task. I don’t think her percentage of 35 the budget has increased much, but I don’t know that. At a dean’s level, I think Bob Mikkelsen was good in that he was a shrewd politician. He kept the politicians off our backs and let us do some things. Under his leadership, some of the earlier things I had started were able to take place. Bob let us do things without having to call the shots and he managed them with humor and a sort of grace. I remember when everybody was upset with a couple of faculty members for things that we clearly weren’t proud of but didn’t make too much of a difference. Bob made it all kind of a laugh. He was good with people and didn’t hold grudges. Kay Brown started as a department secretary in English and is now a secretary for the senate. She was a wonderful person anywhere you put her. There was a secretary who worked with that mammoth developmental studies program—Janell Poole. She was one of the really able people. I’ve got a secretary right now who just saves my life. When I started the graduate program, I had to steal time from the two department secretaries. We got Susie, then the dean stole her and I can’t blame her. But then we got Genevieve Bates and my gosh, that woman doesn’t need any direction. She knows how to do everything that she might possibly be asked to do. She’s cut my workload in half. She could be doing any job on this campus and she’ll do it better than the faculty she works for. [Laughter] We’ve had many women who were unsung. Ada Hardenbrook in ESL came into that program part-time, then she started working full-time and nobody would ever be able to say how much she’s been worth. 36 When I went on leave for a year, Sesh wanted to take over ESL and he’d appointed someone who wasn’t tenured so he could tell them what to do. When Ada was working under me, we got her an office specialist position and it was fairer because she wasn’t getting enough pay for what she did. When he took over and I was out of his hair, he cut her back to being a secretary, yet she’s the one who’s been the lifeblood of the program. Sesh was brilliant by the way, it’s just that appearance was always more important to him than the actual work we were supposed to be doing. RL: Part of that might have been cultural expectations. MC: I’m sure it was. RL: You mentioned Gary Dohrer. MC: Gary has been a wonderful chair. He’s in Teacher Education and he knew that he didn’t know some of the other things. You could talk him through it, “Here’s what I want to do and here’s why,” and he’d let you try. A lot of things happened under that kind of leadership. We’ve had a long string of department chairs and most of them have had their strengths. Some of them have had weaknesses that made them pretty hard to work with. RL: Did Kathy come after Gary? She’s also in Teacher Education. MC: Yes. She doesn’t trust anybody who knows more than she does and that’s nearly everybody because you can’t have that kind of a specialty. She worked hard at administrative things, but she believes in the bureaucracy, which is a serious problem for me in terms of the way you do business. We’ve got to have the system, but the system has to have enough flexibility to deal with real needs. 37 You can ask across campus about the complaints from students who were a half credit short in gen ed and she made them take a three credit class. I’m being candid and I don’t want to hurt feelings because I know she’s worked very hard. But getting a new graduate program started was twice as much work as it should have been because she had no vision and opposed everything that I did. She wasn’t a good chair to start a new program. She had no administrative experience. She’d run a teaching and learning center but that’s not a big operation. She took over in July and the grad program was approved the end of July. She was terrified of budgets and opposed every move we made and opposed my autonomy to make it work. She didn’t know how to work with administrators under her. That’s part of why we lost ESL. They came to her over and over and she did nothing at all. At the same time, can you imagine scheduling for a hundred faculty? So I‘m speaking candidly about what I think the crucial weakness is. The other thing is that we have not rewarded anybody for doing that level of work so why would anybody want to do it? I think there’s a little stipend, but it’s like $3,000 a year; you could teach a graduate class for more than that. She got into a job that she wasn’t prepared to do and her default was to resist and to say no. The department is not better because of that, but what we are rewarding right now is scholarship. We now have people come to campus two days a week and they’re belligerent in saying, “You can’t make me come to campus days I don’t teach. I’m doing my scholarship.” I don’t know if they’re really doing any or not. That’s not an English problem, that’s all over. But if you’re not going to 38 reward the people who teach and the people who make things happen, there aren’t many people now who would step up to do things. When I stepped down as the grad program director, people weren’t real happy with who applied for this position, but nobody wanted to do it. The people that I encouraged to apply didn’t want to because it was too much work. RL: Sometimes you have to make a decision about the rewards that you get for doing something MC: I agree. I think what we can do is sell the engagement. Don’t just bribe people to take the job, we could offer more money and people would take it and we’d be sorry they took it, but if we sell the engagement and invite them to be a part of the department—be engaged in the educational goals—we can sell that. One of the things I think I have done well at was reaching out to people who didn’t want this and selling them the satisfaction. You can nurture that satisfaction and make sure that it is satisfying. When we started, people didn’t want to teach the grad classes because they’d done a doctorate but hadn’t done any work above an undergraduate level in twenty years. I spent a lot of time talking to people and then they went and did something really fun and we came back and talked about what worked. Literature is something that has a lot of joy—you get to read great things and talk about them—but we need to be selling that. It isn’t just about what they get paid. We need to stop saying, “We don’t care how well you teach as long as you’ve published something.” One of the people who applied for this job took the full seven years to get tenure and he didn’t get good enough student scores to 39 be tenure but they found a way to kind of fudge it and get him tenure. That’s one of the people who applied for this job. But we need someone who is enthused themselves and then sells that. We’re never going to have any money—I’m not kidding myself. We have to sell the intrinsic rewards and make sure that it is rewarding. Shannon Butler is a colleague that I really respect and she’s one of those people who does three people’s work all the time while looking for more to do. I wanted Shannon to apply for this job because she has that sense of intrinsic value. I think I’ve been pretty successful in my career with nurturing the best out of people that others didn’t think you could get much out of. RL: As far as our top administrators, we did have someone who was asked by the faculty to leave. Were you part of that movement? MC: I was, but I wasn’t out doing a snake dance on the campus. I thought he should go, he just was not up to the job. I didn’t despise the man, but I thought he was doing a terrible job. Instead of fixing things, he tried to assert his authority to go on doing bad stuff. I was on the faculty senate that gave the vote of no confidence. By that time he’d done things that were just foolish—he hired a man without telling anyone else he’d done it. Dwight Burrell got a bum rap out of it— he didn’t know that he’d been hired in a sneak move. He was a bright man and had a lot of to offer. President Bishop was in way over his head in terms of how you lead something of that size. Stephen Nadauld became president next. He was a good guy but I think he was a little inexperienced at the time, but he did know how to work with people. He had a lot of enthusiasm and you never felt 40 like he had an agenda that you didn’t know about. Those were times when we were really trying to get some things accomplished. I think Dixie is going to be glad they’ve got him. He knows a lot more now than he did then. RL: What were your impressions of Paul Thompson? MC: He was afraid to move. He was a genuine guy. Anyone could talk to him, but almost nothing happened after you talked. I didn’t see as much of what he did behind the scenes as I did with some of the others, so maybe he accomplished more than I thought; but I got the feeling that Paul was willing to take the risks and push when he needed to. I know other leaders that were feeling the same kind of thing. RL: Going from a campus, as you mentioned earlier, that did not hire females in higher positions, you’ve seen changes in that aspect as well. MC: I’ve worked under several female deans and a female department chair. The idea that women are being given the same shot as men has made a lot of things better. One of the things that embarrassed and annoyed me was to go into a room and have the men sitting in there—no women—and they start in on, “All these women want this and this.” In fairly early days, I made some enemies over that. The guy saying it is usually the dumbest guy in the room. But I worked with President Millner when she was working in Continuing Education. I got pretty well acquainted with her and I’ve been pleased with the work she’s done as president, but considering the size of that job, I don’t know how she does it. Sherwin Howard offered me a job as associate dean and I told him I didn’t want to do it. He said, “But I really need somebody.” I said, “Then look around and if 41 you can find anybody else, don’t come back and ask me again.” I couldn’t stand to work at the level that President Millner works at. I think she tries very hard and I think she’s a bright, capable woman, but I also think it’s aged her thirty years. RL: What do feel was accomplished by the change to university status? MC: I think even though there were a lot of constraints, everyone still knew that that was a turning point in the state where we would now be acknowledging that the state was getting bigger and that the University of Utah and Utah State would not be everything anymore. Our status change was recognition by the legislature and the two flagship institutions preferred to ignore—that there were different roles to play. When we got the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program after we got university status, the president of Utah State at the time, went to the Regents meeting and harangued for a half hour about how Weber State should be a trade school, not a college. RL: I think we’ve overcome some of that. MC: We have, but at the time we got it, that was still the attitude—not justified. That was the attitude: looking backward instead of forward. A day will come, I’m pretty sure, when there will be more students on the Davis campus than on the Ogden campus. I also think the change to university status changed how we felt about ourselves. It changed how we brought people in from outside—it changes who you can hire and how students fare after leaving. All of that is an appearance but it still matters. 42 RL: Another change also took place in response to having the students out and competitive like the U,BYU and Utah State was the change to the semester system. Do you see that as a positive change? What has that garnered for us? MC: There are some pros and cons to that. I’ve been a student under both systems. I don’t think it was done just so that we could compete with the other universities, I think it was done because somebody at the state level believed it was saving a lot of money. Two terms and all of the work that goes into starting a term was mostly being done by a machine, but it meant less man hours. My job is easier on semesters, but you can do some wonderful things on a ten-week block. If I were in the sciences, it wouldn’t make any difference when the semester started. But for instance, I can do a single author class—I started the eminent writers program for the undergraduates—and I could do a class in Charles Dickens and we’d meet for two hours a week for ten weeks. But I don’t want to read Dickens for three hours a week for fifteen weeks. That’s more Dickens than I want. We got to do a lot of little specialty classes. Another factor that we lost was that we would meet five days a week for ten weeks and that kind of immersion did something that you don’t get when you meet one day a week for fifteen weeks. Those aren’t crucial things. It’s a little easier on me to do two sets of classes a year instead of three. So, semesters are a good system for old men and quarters are a good system for young men. [Laughter] Putting all the universities in the state on the same system did make sense. BYU was kind of the elephant in the room that they didn’t talk about, but they had been on semesters for years. If you transferred credit back and forth, it 43 was hard. But in the process, we shifted a lot of curriculum. Some of that was good, in some of it we lost some really neat stuff. RL: In the ‘90s, we had more of an emphasis on diversity issues. What were some of your experiences with that? MC: Every issue that becomes a movement gets partly into the hands of extremists. No matter what movement you’re talking about, that’s a factor. With that aside, the world is shrinking and you can’t live in the world successfully without dealing with diversity. I’ve seen a lot of harm because people were stuck in the mindset of, “My own culture is all there is.” I saw that in the community I grew up in. We had someone move in who was from Sweden and they were driven out—he was just a kid who came to live with some people there. Everything we have done and all the positive things we have done with diversity have been important things to do, I think. You always get a little extremism here and there or someone who wants to warp it for personal advantage. Look at the women’s movement. There are some voices in there that I really wish had kept quiet, but nobody with any ability to think is going to say women should be cut out of this. In many ways, they’re a lot better thinkers than men; they tend to be more humane. Diversity of any kind: what does it mean? If you go back to a Christian base, it means love God and love the people around you. The fanatic can turn everything to hate, but any fanatic, I don’t care what their cause is, if you look them in the eye and said, “Who do you love and how do you show love?” They can’t answer. They may try to say, “I show love by killing them.” I’m sorry, they’ve just lied to themselves as well as to me. That’s 44 what diversity is about. I want to go to Oman. I’ve been to China twice. I’ve had the marvelous opportunity to go over the world and stay in people’s homes. We had complete theological differences, but the bottom line was that we were human and we enjoyed our time together. RL: Speaking of human outreach, that has been the biggest development on campus in the last ten years. What do you think that’s getting for us? MC: I think that’s great. It’s not nearly blossomed yet. I’ve been talking for a year with Bruce Davis about a community outreach program. When he found out I was returning, he said, “I’m not sure if I can pay you.” I said, “Bruce, I don’t care if you can pay me. This needs to go on. Let me help you create a literacy program in the community and then we’ll move them onto this campus along the way so that they’re comfortable enough here that they begin to feel they can go to college. If you can’t be any part of the established society, the idea of stepping on the college campus is terrifying. They will make excuses and they won’t go. So you have to start tutoring them at other locations, then you say, “I will go with you and I want you to go up to the campus. You can ride the bus free and there’s a place on campus to get comfortable.” That culture of the have-nots does not believe it can ever be part of the other culture. But the work I’ve done for years in developmental was the same thing. They would deny for years that they couldn’t read, but I can tell in five minutes. RL: Well, in regards to outreach to the community and programs to help those efforts, I understand that you have worked with the Weber County jail. Will you tell us about that? 45 MC: My involvement there is linked back to the work I’ve done here with developmental programs. It’s the same population. My involvement there was under a church umbrella. I didn’t even know where the county jail was when this started. My Stake President wanted me to go and work with the people out there. I’ve referred to this a few times, but there are some times in your life when something just hits exactly right and you know you’d better follow it. So when he asked, I said I would go out to the jail and work. I worked for about a year and half, and then I became the LDS bishop out there. We started to expand what we were doing because we found that most of the people in there had few of the skills they needed in order to function in society. They had physical or mental problems and were often addicted to drugs. The drugs were the second stage of something that already existed, though the drugs were often the most difficult thing to help them with. I saw things that outraged my sense of humanity. They’d let people out of the jail at any time of the day or night—it might be two in the morning in January and they would wear the same clothes out of the jail that they had worn in. We needed a system that helped these people with the immediate needs of food, clothes and shelter—by the way, if they get out of jail and go stay with someone who is a known criminal, they can be sent back to jail. RL: Was your charge to go in and teach or to go in and reinvest the people in society? MC: I was expected to go teach a Sunday School class. When I started, they were teaching three hours a day on Sunday. When I left, we were teaching eight 46 hours on Sunday and we were teaching a group of Spanish speakers. What we were always doing was starting with basic counseling: What do you want and what do you need to do in order to get it? By the time I left, there were twenty-five volunteers and I had a pair of service missionaries called. Their job was to follow up with people as they left the jail. We would take them to the church employment center. I’d write orders for food and clothing. We had to help with the things they needed immediately. But we also ran classes during the week. These people didn’t know how to manage a check register or how to budget. They don’t know the simplest things about looking forward and taking charge of their lives. I would go out one night a week for five hours and just do one-on-one. Our whole purpose was to help people to get a life. I had one or two people who were a little worried and asked me if I helped people who weren’t LDS. My answer was, “I don’t ask them.” As far as I can tell, being hungry is not exclusive to a certain group of people. Being cold is not exclusive. But with this program and with everything else, it’s the same clientele. How do we help them get out of the cycle? Let me tell you a story. This woman had grown up on the streets because her father was sexually abusing her. Her mother knew it. She ended up on the streets and she’d had an awful life. When she left the jail, we followed up with her, helping her get some furniture and food. She had a couple of kids who were living with her mother and that worried her. She had an old car and she got stopped because a taillight wasn’t working and she didn’t know that. The cop told her she had to have it fixed. She didn’t have any money to fix it and ended 47 up in jail—she lost her home and her job and everything she’d gained since being out. Another lady was fifty years old and when she got out of jail she got a job working for a landscaper. One day she was trying to clean some crevices in the landscaping truck that were full of dirt and the guy gave her a little knife off his key chain. She used that to clean the stuff, then wasn’t thinking and she put it in her pocket and later went home. Her parole agent showed up to check her. The lady had to empty her pockets—there was a knife in there and so she went back to jail. But this time she went to maximum security because she had a deadly weapon. RL: So you weren’t just planting seeds of hope, but you also had to overcome some societal problems. MC: We have to educate our society so they’re not doing knee-jerk reactions. I’m working with a man who went to jail for white collar crime. He’s very bright but he was a federal prisoner and the felony is on his record. He was making $200,000 a year and now he’s making $8 an hour. He’s got a wife and two daughters. I tell those stories partly to show what drove me. But we have to do for that community—the have-nots are multiplying in our community and are at a level most people don’t even have a glimpse of. I went to the home of an eighteen year old young woman who had a two year old child and was expecting another child. She’d never had a boyfriend; she just belonged to who wanted her in the ghetto where she lived. Her mother was in jail, too. I went to 48 the home at one point and the front door had been kicked in, so someone had just nailed a plank across it so you couldn’t go in the front anymore. No one should have lived in that house and three families lived there. They weren’t always bright, but they were capable and they could do things. They were able to be members of a community, but they had no ticket into it. That’s why I still want to work with Bruce Davis and I don’t care if he can pay me. RL: What you do under the auspices of the church charge, how does that get incorporated into a university charge? MC: What Bruce is trying to do is a lot of the same kind of things. As an LDS bishop I could write a food and clothing order and help them that way. The charitable resources can be drawn on by the university, as well. In this community, the LDS community is a resource for that. RL: Is the intent to get these people so they can function in society as well as an academic approach? MC: There has to be. That’s where the university comes in. I’m involved with another group that is all church people but it isn’t a church operation. They are all experienced administrative people—one has done consulting for big companies like GM—but we’re trying to get a state-wide program for mentoring inmates while they’re incarcerated and when they get out. We’re starting to get some housing lined up, and that’s the hardest. Maybe you marry the university to something like that—you get a house, some resources for food, shelter and employment, but as part of that, you say to this person, “There’s this eight-dollar- an-hour job, but here are some routes to the kind of job that will pay you 49 enough to live on. Here are connections to the Applied Technology College and Weber State University. But before you start any of that, if you don’t read at least an eight-grade level, we’re going to work with you on that; if you can’t write, we’ll work with you; if you can’t use a computer, we’ll train you.” I ran some tests twenty years ago, or maybe more, and the median reading level for freshman entering Weber State was beginning eighth and ninth. Once they get above a fifth grade level, then they start to use it as a learning tool and the more they use it, the better they get at it. I did some consulting work in Kentucky coal-mining areas for a while. They have people who can’t read and write but have been hired by the industry for generations. Now the industry is becoming more automated and we were trying to get a program going to help people learn to read. The railroad I was working for wanted to create a program and I said, “No, let’s look around.” There was a community college in the next town and I went to them and said, “We’ll fund it if you can expand. We’ll pay the tuition.” You don’t want to reinvent anything you don’t need to, just connect to what’s there. By the way, these people have to learn a whole different existence than they’ve known. These people don’t know how to function in what we think of as respectable society. RL: The naysayers will say it’s not our job. MC: I’ve heard that many times. My answer is, “whose job is it, then?” Some will say, “It’s the high school’s job.” Well, no it isn’t, you’re not going to put these guys back in high school and everybody knows it. What you’re really saying in effect 50 is, “Throw these people away.” And I’ve accused people of that on this campus because they weren’t thinking and they didn’t want to think. I have students in my literature classes who want to go volunteer in a third-world country. I say to them, “That’s great! All you have to do is go four blocks this way and four blocks that way.” I don’t say it lightly. There are people here living like they live in a third-world country. There’s something glamorous about going off to a country in Africa instead of Eccles and 31st Street. We need to look at what’s around us and say, “We want to help you so that you and your children aren’t criminals.” I’m excited to see how many people out in that community love poetry—they’re not going to get a degree in it, but they’d love to come and work with someone in the summer who will teach them about poetry. It’s a little thing, but it’s enrichment and it gets them reading some more things. We’ve got a lot of people over sixty who are doing nothing but watching whatever is on TV right now and who could be teaching classes. My worst nightmare in the world is to find myself confined to home with nothing to do. And if I get to where I can’t read. But there are a lot of people at the top end of age in our community who could be doing things that are financially self-supportive. We can go to retired people like the other Dr. Cheney and say, “Why don’t you do this little Shakespeare class and we won’t pay you.” She wouldn’t do it for the money. I don’t care about the money any more. I’ve been working in development for forty years and I want to do something to use this experience for the good of other people. RL: It’s been a very busy career for you and very full of those intrinsic rewards 51 MC: It is its own reward. It’s what lasts. RL: I think you’ll have a great deal of appreciation and a grateful institution for your many years of service and dedication. We also thank you for taking the time to do this interview. MC: Thank you. I didn’t set out to do any of this so that my name would appear somewhere and I don’t really care a lot about that now. It was the students whose lives I wanted to better. It was the community. I’m part of that community and I’m part of the lives of the students and I’ve had my thanks. RL: That’s what it all comes down to. Thank you.