Oral History Program Warren Hill Interviewed by Ruby Licona 21 June 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Warren Hill Interviewed by Ruby Licona 21 June 2013 Copyright © 2013 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: Hill, Warren, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 21 June 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Warren Hill 2011 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Warren Hill, conducted by Ruby Licona on June 21, 2013. Dr. Hill discusses his experiences before coming to Weber State University as well as his experiences at Weber and his thoughts about the University. RL: Good afternoon, today is June 21, 2013. I’m Ruby Licona and I’m on the faculty in the Stewart Library at Weber State University. Today we are talking with Dr. Warren Hill, who retired two years ago as the dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology. He came here originally in 1990. Why don’t you give us a little bit of information about your background and then we can talk about your experiences in the 20 some odd years you worked here? WH: I think the operative word there is “odd” years. I am an electrical engineer by training with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska, which is where I was born and raised. After I graduated, I went to Detroit for my first job out of college as an electrical engineer. I worked for four years at the Detroit Edison Company, which is the electric utility in Detroit. While I was at Edison, they paid for my master’s degree, which I received at Wayne State University. Then, the boss called in three of us, who had all got our master’s degrees in December, and said, “It’s really great you got your master’s degrees, but I can’t do anything for you in terms of salary or anything.” By spring, all three of us were gone. I went to work for Eaton Corporation in the Detroit area. I worked ten years for Eaton and while I was there they paid for my doctorate at the University of Detroit. I don’t have a Ph.D., I have a Doctor of 2 Engineering degree. At that time, it differed itself from a traditional Ph.D. in that instead of having to have a foreign language, I had to pass a computer language exam which was a five hour test. It was a real bear. The second difference was that with most Ph.D. programs the coursework is in narrower fields, whereas this degree was designed for people working in the industry and not academicians, so we took broadening courses. The third difference was that the dissertation topic had to be a real problem from industry and we had to have an industrial sponsor. RL: Did you have to do a dissertation and go through all the hoops? WH: Yes, we still had to do a dissertation, but by now it’s obsolete. While I was doing that, I started teaching at a local technical school called Lawrence Institute of Technology. I taught electrical engineering for them as an adjunct and they made me an offer to become full-time, which I accepted and I taught for them for three years. Then, my wife and I had a child and decided we wanted to get out of Detroit, so I started looking around and that was an interesting process in itself. I ended up with a job teaching electronic engineering technology at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, Colorado. RL: Would that have been in the late seventies? WH: It would have been 1981. I taught for them for nine years and in the last three years I was the department chair for engineering technology at Colorado State University at Pueblo. I wasn’t really actively looking for another position, but I saw the position advertised for dean here at Weber State and I applied. I got in the finalist group and my fellow faculty member who I had listed as a reference got a 3 call on me and he said, “Man, I didn’t have to lie about you one time. You got the job.” I met all of the qualifications they were looking for because they were looking for someone with not only a strong academic background and teaching experience, but someone who had industrial experience as well, and I had 14 years of industrial experience. Then, I got a letter from Bob Smith, who was the provost then, which said I was no longer a candidate. I thought, “Well, that’s the way it goes.” I’d been on enough job hunts to know that these things happen. If I recall, I got the letter on a Tuesday and on the next Wednesday I got a call from Bob Smith’s office saying they wanted me to come interview. I said, “That’s funny because I just got a letter from you guys saying I was no longer a candidate.” He said, “Oh that was a mistake. That letter got in the wrong pile.” Then, of course, you wonder if you really want to go to work for an institution that can’t keep their correspondence straight. RL: Or maybe they were just making up a weak story to cover a situation. You never know. WH: I came for an interview and the rest is history. I finished my career here at Weber State. RL: Was it a bit of a change coming in as an administrator and having to wear a totally different hat? WH: Somewhat. I had been department chair over a multidisciplinary department, so that part of it was not so different. The fact that the College of Applied Science and Technology is really an eclectic collection of programs was a little bit different. You have everything from automotive to technical sales to 4 telecommunications and interior design plus the technical programs like computer science. That part was different. Otherwise, it wasn’t. Although, I had to move from being a department chair as both an administrator and a faculty member to just being an administrator. RL: Did you do any teaching while you were here? WH: Yes. The PPM says that deans will teach a minimum of one course a year unless excused by the department in which they have tenure. I taught, but it’s kind of ludicrous because being a dean is a full-time job. It really wasn’t fair to my students to try and teach as well. The other thing I was going to say is that I was told that I was the first dean to come into Weber State from the outside and get tenure. RL: You got tenure as you came in? WH: Yes. I think it’s ludicrous to try and expect deans to teach. Particularly where at Weber State, there’s been a tendency to run very lean administratively, so I never had an assistant dean or an associate dean or anything. It is a full-time job and to teach on top of that, particularly in a discipline that is rapidly changing where you have to do a lot of work to keep up with the discipline. Some disciplines, such as history, don’t require the level of preparation because the discipline does not change effectively. RL: No, but with technology it’s constantly changing. You start out with a textbook at the beginning of the semester and by mid-semester it’s out of date. WH: Once you move past the fundamentals, what I used to teach is obsolete. It’s not used anymore. 5 RL: You said that when you got your doctorate you used computer language instead of spoken language, was that in the old Fortran days? WH: Yes, I took the test in Fortran. RL: Well, it obviously worked out successfully. WH: This was in the old punch card days too. I got a problem and I had to program it, get it to run, and come up with the right answer in five hours. It took me the whole five hours. RL: It must have been successful for you to end up here as dean. When you came, you said that you were the first dean from the outside to get tenure, but you were not the first dean to come here from the outside. WH: No. RL: So you didn’t get stonewalled by the faculty as you got here. Had there been any in-house candidates for the position? WH: As I understood it and as I was told, there were, but they didn’t make the final cut. There were five candidates interviewed. RL: How did they feel about your coming here? Were they a welcoming group? WH: Well, I think they were pretty welcoming because I had met all the criteria they were looking for at the time, particularly the industrial experience. As far as I remember nobody had any real heartburn about my coming here. All five candidates were from the outside, so they knew they were going to get somebody from the outside to begin with. RL: In that particular college, they would have had some of the programs that eventually got moved to the ATC. 6 WH: Those programs had been moved before I got here. RL: Were the faculty old timers? We’ve got people that have been here 30, 40, or 50 years. WH: Some of them were. RL: What was the gender split in the college? I figure you would have had women in sales and service and in interior design. WH: But that was it. Well, there were also women in business education. RL: Was there anyone who stood out as being particularly welcoming or helpful? I realize you were in a position where you wouldn’t have necessarily been mentored from any of your faculty, but certainly orientation and friendship. WH: Carl Grunander was one. He was chair of the search committee when I was hired. There was not a lot of mentoring going on from above for this job. Bob Smith was pretty much an academician. RL: Yes. He had a very attentive to detail and intellectual approach to many things even though he had come out of the sciences. He was also president of the arts. WH: He was not a real strong supporter of technology as I recall. RL: That is surprising because coming from the sciences you would think he would have been. WH: Well, there’s a big difference between science and technology. When people talk about STEM, for instance, they lump science with technology and engineering, but there’s a big difference. RL: So you weren’t getting a lot of mentoring from Bob Smith, but what about the other individuals on Dean’s council? Was anybody there particularly helpful? 7 WH: The way Bob ran it, the colleges were pretty autonomous. So, there was not necessarily a lot of interaction with my fellow deans. Cyrus McKell was one that I could talk to, along with Reed Stringham and Sherwin Howard. They were all interesting guys. There wasn’t a lot of mentoring. I’ll never forget my first summer here. I started July 1st at the start of the fiscal year and the college at that time didn’t do a lot with summer classes. There were very few summer classes and there’s a reason for that. I was organizing my desk and learning where the coffee pot was and so on—the important things, you know. I thought, “Man, this job is a snap. There’s nothing to it.” Until fall semester came along of course. RL: At that time there would have been about ten or twelve thousand students and they all arrived on the same day in your office. WH: I did not see a lot of students except those that had complaints. Even then, I always tried to solve those kinds of problems at the lowest level. If they had a problem with a faculty member they’d go talk to the faculty member, then the department chair, and then come to see me. If there was a program coordinator in between they’d talk to them. As you know, some of those complaints had to do with grades, and according to the PPM, a dean had no authority to change grades. So I’d say, “Sorry.” There is a person, I don’t know if it’s still Frank Alooza, but there is a person they could go talk to, but I couldn’t do anything about the grades. RL: A lot of the time, even if you could, you probably wouldn’t have because many of the complaints really aren’t that justified. So you came in right about the time that 8 we switched from “state college” to “university.” Was Stephen Nadauld still president while you were here or had he just left? WH: I came in July and he left in September or something like that. RL: You would have been here as Paul Thompson arrived and that means you really only served under two presidents, Paul Thompson and Ann Millner. WH: Yes, and the few interims that were in there. RL: Were they alike as far as relating to them, or was one totally different in style or approach? WH: I think they were fairly similar. They were both quite open and very approachable. I had more dealings with Ann than I did with Paul simply because of the timing of things that were within the college. I think their styles were quite similar. RL: I believe that the whole philosophy of having an educated workforce and having students find employment in Utah started under Paul and was really put into place by Ann and her administrators. I would imagine that whole philosophy and direction would have had quite a bit of an influence on the direction that your college took. WH: Well, to some extent. Again, their philosophy was just like the philosophy of the provost in that the colleges were pretty autonomous. You kept those people informed and in the loop, but you kind of did your own thing. I didn’t see that the approach of educating people for the job market got any more support from Paul and Ann than any of the other things that were going on in the university. RL: In 1990, when you got here, it was shortly thereafter that we had the whole strategic planning… 9 WH: Fiasco. RL: Well, I was trying to find a polite word to replace that, but, yes. WH: Snafu. RL: Yes, snafu fits. What are your impressions? Were you part of that whole process? I started out in the process, but I got out of dodge and went back to school. I came back two years later and by that time everything had blown up and then been tamped down. From a first-hand view, what do you remember of it? WH: What happened, at least from what I can recall, is that some good ideas were put forward, but nobody had the balls to do anything about it. There were things that needed to be done. There are things, in my opinion, that still need to be done in this institution, but nobody wants to fight the battle. We have 235 or 240 baccalaureate degrees. That’s simply idiotic for an institution this size. Texas A & M University, which is twice as big as Weber State, has got about a hundred baccalaureate degrees. So, we’ve got a whole bunch of programs that produce less than ten graduates a year or have fewer than ten undergraduates enrolled in the program. RL: Some of them could be melded into single degrees, couldn’t they? WH: A lot of things could be done. I can count on one hand the number of bachelor of philosophy degrees we’ve given since the program was started. Does that make sense? No. I can list a whole bunch of other programs in the same boat. It just doesn’t make sense because what happens is you dilute your resources so the programs that are strong and the programs that are in demand don’t get any 10 more resources than anybody else, which is another problem we’ve had around here, in my opinion. We’ve gone through budget cuts how many times in our history and they make cuts across the board. That makes no sense whatsoever. RL: Faculty positions don’t get filled whether it’s a department of four faculty or twenty faculty. WH: Believe me, I knew it as dean of COAST because we had the third largest department in the university with ten faculty and 600 undergraduates. It makes no sense whatsoever. RL: Of course, each of those departments also has associate’s degrees because of the tiered program. WH: Well, associate degrees in our college were not a problem because they were the first two years of the baccalaureate degree, so you weren’t doing anything special just offering an associate degree except making sure that the general education lined up so they could get the associate degree. It didn’t take any additional resources to offer the associate degree. RL: Well, in addition to the number of baccalaureates that we give out, what other kinds of things do you feel need to be changed? WH: I would drop football. I would drop football in a heartbeat. RL: Doesn’t that bring in a lot of money, or does it just get expended within the program? WH: Do you know how much football costs this institution every year? RL: I have no idea, and I don’t know that I want to know. 11 WH: Three or four years ago it was taking a million and a half out of the general fund. See, one of the things about strategic planning, during that process we said, “If the football program is going to be viable, it has to bring in at least 12,000 people for every game on average.” Last fall, the last game of the year brought in only 5,000 people and probably half of those were complimentary tickets because students get in free. It’s a big money hole. RL: So, what about the money that we’ve been given that goes into things like building the stadium? WH: The stadium, as I understand, was mostly donations, but to run the program it’s a big money pit. It doesn’t take in enough money for it to pay for itself. RL: How about basketball? WH: Basketball is a lot cheaper. You have fewer players, fewer coaches and you don’t have the equipment needs. RL: And it’s not very often, but they do compete nationally. WH: They have more games, so they can bring in more revenue. Another thing with regard to faculty positions, I ran a check the last year I was here and 85 percent of faculty in COAST was teaching overloads. Sometimes it was significant amount of overloads at five or six credits a semester. Why not hire adjuncts? Well, you don’t hire an adjunct off the street to teach thermodynamics. A lot of courses in that college are highly specialized and you don’t easily find somebody to teach those kinds of courses, particularly during the daytime. The reason that those faculty are teaching overtime is because we haven’t been able to hire faculty, so what the overtime situation does, in my opinion, is prevents those 12 people from doing the other things that faculty are expected to do in terms of scholarship and service because they spend all of their time teaching. RL: Of course, during that time period all of the expectations and requirements had changed. I know when I first came here I was told that I did not need to do research and publish, yet over the years our tenure documents have been redone and that story has changed. I imagine it’s changed for a lot of departments, but if you’re strung out with overload… WH: You don’t have time to do those other things. RL: One of the things you hear Weber priding itself on is the smaller student-teacher ratio. Was that true in your area, or did people have to carry more? WH: It was mostly true. Remember that with the exception of the computer literacy requirement, there is no general education in COAST. You don’t have classes of 75 students because of the specialization. The second thing is that you can’t have classes of those sizes and run laboratories. A lot of the classes, particularly in the technical areas, have labs associated with them. RL: Were you able to make the changes in your own college? You say there are other things for the institution that should be changed, but were you satisfied with the changes you were able to make in your college or were you hamstrung by budgeting and so forth? WH: Well, you’re always hamstrung by budgeting and that goes back to the faculty positions, but I was able to facilitate some changes. I didn’t make them necessarily myself. One of the things we did, going back to the associate degrees, when I first came there were a lot of stand-alone associate degrees or 13 the associate degree in a discipline was not tied closely to the baccalaureate degree. What I was able to do was make all of the degrees two plus two, so that the associate degree became the first two years of the baccalaureate degree. Students weren’t handicapped if they went on. RL: It wouldn’t make any sense to give them an associate degree in automotive technology if they didn’t really have the coursework and they were just filling out general requirements. It really doesn’t qualify them in that field until they take the advanced classes. WH: Well, it qualifies them at one level, but not at the next level. The second thing was that the college was teaching its own math courses and I had problems with that for a couple of reasons. The first problem was that our faculty wasn’t trained to teach math, they were trained to teach in their discipline. The second problem was that it was duplicating a lot of what the math department was doing, so we looked at the situation. I had a committee started and said, “Give me a recommendation of what we need to do.” So, we got rid of teaching math and let the math department teach it, as most schools do. Another thing I was able to do was change our promotion and tenure documents. Our college promotion and tenure document was a joke when I got here, so we totally re-wrote it. They still use it in the form that I created when I had it revised. It’s really a pretty good document. RL: In the departments in your college, is there a doctorate available for all of the different disciplines? WH: No. 14 RL: Okay, so you probably had to make a case for terminal degrees and so forth. WH: They were there already. RL: When I came here, they did not have that ruling yet for the librarians, so we were not able to promote beyond a certain level until we went back and made the case. WH: In almost all of the disciplines, master’s is still the terminal degree, but on hire with a master’s you have to have at least five years of business or industry experience and with a doctorate, you have to have three years of industry experience. We feel that’s very important. RL: Well, the nature of those departments is such that they have to know what they’re talking about. It’s not all theory and research. It’s a more hands-on kind of thing. We talked about strategic planning. Were there other changes and developments on campus that you were involved with? We had that planning for 2030 program. Did you see that as any different? I felt that it was just a different name for strategic planning. WH: I’m not sure that I would even go that far. It was just a way to say, “Oh we’re looking at the future and here’s what we’re doing.” I’ll never forget, I was in a meeting when they were talking about “Vision 2030,” in the Wildcat Room and they were laying out all the main points of the vision. Ken Wheatley was running that and he was a consultant that the university hired to facilitate this process. I said, “Okay, this is fine, this is mostly stuff we’re doing now.” As a dean, I thought, “What should my college be doing right now to ensure that these goals are achieved by 2030? When 2030 rolls around I’ll be 90 years old, so am I going 15 to give a damn about 2030? I couldn’t care less about 2030. What do I need to be doing now?” RL: Were other people asking the same question? WH: No, because I’m a bit of a bomb-thrower. What’s the point of doing all of this unless you can give people specific guidelines about what they need to be doing this year, next year, and five years from now? I wasn’t impressed with that whole thing. RL: Was that program being directed by the president? WH: Yes. RL: You said that when Bob Smith was here, you felt that he left things to be fairly autonomous as they had been. What about Dave Eisler, was he more hands-on? WH: He was more hands-on and I really liked Dave Eisler because he was a strong supporter of our college. He felt that it was one of the places that Weber State could really make a mark. We have programs like nobody else had in the state. History is history wherever it’s taught and math is math wherever it’s taught. RL: He was from music, wasn’t he? WH: Yes, he was actually a clarinet player. He was a musician, but interestingly enough went on to become president of a technological college. RL: I knew he had left to go back to the Midwest. WH: He’s at Ferris State in Michigan, a technical school. They have automotive and manufacturing. RL: The kinds of things that are found in your college. WH: Yes, very much so. 16 RL: After Dave, we had Mike. Did we have an interim before Mike? WH: Cathleen was interim and I think Jeff Levingston was interim also. RL: What about Mike as an administrator? WH: No, I don’t think Mike’s a very good Provost. Not because he’s not smart enough or that he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he’s a terrible communicator. RL: He’s an economist. WH: The dismal science, right? How long did I work for him, eight years? When did he become Provost? RL: It was about the time I came back on campus, which was in 2005. WH: So, I would have worked for him for six years at least and in that time I can count on one hand the times where he sat down and said, “Let’s talk about your college and where you think things are going.” Never. The other Deans got treated exactly the same way. RL: So he’s even more hand-off than Bob Smith? WH: Yes. No guidance or direction. When I retired after 21 years, he never asked me in to say, “Thanks for doing a good job (or a lousy job) or where do you think the college needs to be going?” Nothing. RL: Was he at your reception? WH: Yes. RL: Well, that’s something. In terms of direction for your college, it mostly had to come from within, you didn’t have guidance. WH: It had to come from within. 17 RL: What other programs, other than the strategic planning and Vision 2030 were you involved with during your time here? WH: I was on a number of committees. I was on the committee that re-did the section in the PPM regarding when students need to declare their majors and what catalog they should go under. I also got involved on the committee where we totally re-wrote the hiring process. RL: Were these faculty senate committees and you were a liaison? WH: Two of them were Faculty Senate committees and I was the administrative liaison to those committees. RL: Was that for academic standards? WH: Yes. The faculty evaluation committee was Appointment, Promotion, Academic Freedom and Tenure (APAFT) and the group that rewrote the hiring process was an administrative committee. RL: Other than being a liaison on some of the senate committees, what was your working relationship with the senate? Were there ever any issues between you and them? WH: Oh yes. RL: Good or bad? WH: Both. I tried to work with them. We had to work within the system and sometimes I disagreed with them and thought they were totally in left field. In fact, it was really funny because before we switched to semesters, we were talking about some changes I wanted to make to the general education requirements for COAST students. It was a change that had already been approved by the senate 18 for College of Education students. It came down to a vote in the senate and that was when Tom Burton was chair and he had to cast the deciding vote because it was a tie. He voted against what our college wanted to do. RL: What was the change that you wanted to make? WH: It was a change in the science requirements. Within a year, we switched to semesters and we changed all the general education anyway. I thought the senate did a couple of things that were just wrong. One was that they passed a recommendation that all students that came into Weber State be required to have two years of foreign language. That just didn’t make sense for our student body. The other thing they did that I thought was wrong was allowing the philosophy course to count for quantitative literacy. They’re not the same. That’s gone by the wayside now, so I was proven right. RL: I did appreciate the movement on campus for critical thinking, because I do think we have a lot of students that just slide by and don’t know how. WH: I have never been a fan of a smorgasbord general education program. I think general education needs direction. Now, it’s picking one from column “A,” two from Column “B” and three from Column “C.” The problem I have with that is that there’s no relation within a given area. For instance, in social sciences you pick six hours for a bachelor’s degree, but there may be no relation between the two courses that you pick and no relation between those courses and the courses you take out of arts and humanities or science. I’m in favor of general education. I’m a technical person, but I know that technical people can get very narrow and need to see the bigger picture. We need a plan that provides a framework for that 19 bigger picture for students. Picking courses at random because they fit your schedule or you heard the instructor is good is not a general education program, in my opinion. RL: During your tenure as dean, were there faculty problems that had to go through review? WH: Oh yes. RL: Did you feel that those were handled well? WH: Not necessarily. RL: Especially if you lost. WH: No, not that so much. To me, it’s not a matter of winning or losing, but a matter of doing the right thing for the individual and for the institution. For instance, I think Dale Ossly got a raw deal. RL: I’ve never understood that situation. WH: Some faculty complained and Mike didn’t even give him the opportunity to try and fix the situation before replacing him. RL: Was there a vote of no confidence? WH: There was a vote of no confidence, but it was not done correctly and not all of the people in the college got to vote so it was kind of a meaningless thing. There were enough people that were unhappy and Mike felt that Dale had to go without giving him a chance to fix the situation. I felt it was wrong. We have a promotion and tenure process where we allow people to rectify things if the interim review is not good. You don’t just get rid of them on the spot. I was just relating this story to a member of the faculty earlier this week. 20 Shortly after I became dean in about 1992 or 1993, I had four people up for final tenure review. I denied them all because they didn’t deserve it. They hadn’t been doing anything, they were just sliding by. Two of them left and Bob Smith gave the two that stayed another year and they did just enough. That may have been under the old promotion and tenure document too, but they did just enough to get tenured. In their whole careers, they were mediocre faculty. Again, I had made the right decision, but I didn’t get the backing. Those are judgment calls and you win some and you lose some, which is the way it goes. RL: Did you feel that COAST was treated fairly in relation to the other colleges on campus? WH: Yes. I never felt that we were getting any special treatment or being maltreated. The problem I had was that nobody had the guts to say, “This is a program that is growing and has a lot of potential, we need to move resources to that program.” That may mean taking away resources from somewhere else. I could make that decision with the resources I got, but I didn’t get enough resources to do those kinds of things except in terms of equipment because that came out of a different pot. With regard to hiring faculty or anything like that we didn’t get those resources. I didn’t feel that any college got treated better than we did or vice versa. Other colleges might look at that differently. It could be not so much in terms of the money we got from the general fund as the money we were able to get from other sources. RL: You were here in the early nineties when I believe we go some kind of a large contract from Toyota. Wasn’t there some funding from Toyota to help develop? 21 WH: We got some help from Toyota to put their program in place, but that was a quid pro quo thing. RL: It was at the same time that we were doing things like taking Japan Airlines and setting up programs to train their students and so forth. Were there large contracts and donations that you were able to get for your college? WH: Not large, no, but there was some. RL: Was it expected of you? WH: Not so much in those days. It’s much more of an expectation on the deans now to do fundraising than it was back then. That’s another problem because when you run so lean administratively, you don’t have somebody to do the day-to-day stuff or who can go out and do fundraising. RL: Some of the colleges do have an assistant dean, don’t they? WH: Some do. RL: Did they just have to find the money within their budget for that? WH: Yes, and if I had the money for that I would have hired faculty. RL: I think some colleges were even getting rid of secretarial staff and just finding money wherever they could. WH: We paired some secretarial staff and combined some programs, but there was a problem because COAST still is in five different buildings including Davis. It’s really hard not to have a point of contact in each of those locations and that’s usually the secretary. We did reduce some staff, but that’s a hard thing to do. RL: In the early nineties, Bob Smith was running a minority faculty internship program people in and if the college wanted to keep them, they had two years to work out 22 the money. Did you have any people in COAST that were brought in under that program? WH: No. RL: I thought that might be a little more difficult to do than in humanities or social sciences. WH: I did hire the first minority in COAST. I hired the first female in a technical area. RL: Who was that? WH: It was either Jilly McKully or a woman in computer science, who unfortunately left because her husband took a job in Iowa. We have a female in electronics and we have a female in design graphics. We did have a female in computer science, but she was only there for two years. We also have a female in construction management. I started that program. RL: What about ethnic minorities? There weren’t many in that college, were there? WH: No. RL: What about the students in the college? What was the makeup of the students? WH: Well, we are in Utah, so ethnically they’re pretty white. We are getting more females though and making a concerted effort to get more females into the technical areas in particular. RL: That would put a big push in terms of recruitment. You mentioned earlier that you had not had a lot of involvement with students unless they were coming to complain. Did that remain the same throughout the time you were here? WH: Well, one thing I did was try to at least once a year and sometimes once a semester was to get to the student organizations and do a “talk to the dean” hour 23 with those students so that they got a sense that they were a part of something bigger than just their own program or department. RL: A sense that they belonged to the institution. WH: Right—to the college and the institution. RL: Did you see any trends or changes among the students during your time here? WH: Yes, but I think those trends, or the one trend I’m thinking of mirrored what was happening in the institution as a whole. When I got here, we had a large number of nontraditional students. Students were working and going to school part-time. That number has come down and we have more traditional aged students, but the college still has a lot of nontraditional students. RL: I think that’s partially the nature of Utah in the fact that individuals marry fairly young and the thinking is that they don’t really have the money to afford going to school full-time and they have to work. WH: Yes. RL: Of course, by the time they’ve gone off for a couple of years and come back, they are reaching that nontraditional age. WH: When I started in 1990, I think the college had about 1,600 majors and now they’ve got 2,800 majors. RL: And the same number of faculty. WH: Roughly the same number of tenure track faculty. The programs I started were the construction management program, which has 160 majors, and the electronics engineering program, which has over 200 majors now. RL: These are also programs that are not available elsewhere in Utah. 24 WH: Well, engineering is available, but not engineering in the evening. RL: Right. WH: BYU has a program in construction management. RL: But not in other state institutions. WH: No. RL: We talked earlier about this whole philosophy of preparing students for the job market and creating an educated force for the state of Utah. There has been more emphasis on that in the last five or ten years. Do you think that’s a good direction to go? WH: To a point. RL: I think to a certain point it’s a survival thing because we want to be seen as being productive, but not necessarily in competition with University of Utah or Utah State University. WH: I think that we have to be careful that we don’t create a trade school either. We want to make sure that these students are broadly educated, not narrowly educated. RL: Right. We want them educated, not trained. WH: Training is part of that education, but… RL: It shouldn’t be the “be all, end all.” WH: No. Employers of COAST students are very happy with the people they hire. They are extremely happy with our graduates. 25 RL: You talk about the construction management and electrical engineering programs. Are there other things that stand out in your mind as major accomplishments for you as dean or things that you are particularly proud of? WH: Yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s all my doing. RL: Well, no. You have to get teams together and get people on board. WH: There are some really good people in that college. They are really good people and good teachers. RL: Didn’t I read just this week something about sales and service program being selected by U.S. News? It was a large group and Weber State came in really high considering, but then we tend to get a lot of little awards and the rest of the state doesn’t pay any attention. WH: One of the things I’m still relatively proud of is our promotion and tenure document that I primarily authored. I can’t take the entire credit for that because I followed a lot of what we did at the University of Southern Colorado and modified it to match our situation here. When we get the outside reviewers they say, “This is so nice to use because everything is spelled out.” It’s still a judgment call, but there’s a process that’s very clearly laid out. It’s a numerical process so people can follow it and it’s based on a four-point scale, which everybody’s used to. Another thing I think about is just the growth of the college, 1,600 majors to 2,800 majors is significant. We have been able to hire some really good faculty and get rid of some not so good faculty. The other thing we were able to do is keep the equipment and labs up-to-date and modern and very well-equipped, which is tough to do because that stuff isn’t necessarily cheap. 26 RL: Was that general fund money or did you get donors for that? WH: As you may recall, back in the nineties when we went through that budget crunch, they dropped all capital equipment funding for all of the colleges and never restored it. There is no capital equipment budget for any college. So, COAST had been able to get capital equipment funding from other sources in sufficient amounts to keep things fairly up-to-date. I also modernized all the classrooms. Every classroom in COAST has an LCD projector, computer, white boards, tables and chairs. There are no armchair desks and most of them are carpeted. Compare that to the social science building. RL: Yes. They don’t even have straight hallways there. We had a building at Berkeley and we used to joke that once you knew your way around that building, you knew enough to be able to graduate. As many years as I have been here, I go to look for a room in the social science building and I can’t find it. When you do find the room there’s a sign saying, “This meeting has been moved to such and such,” and by that time you figure, “Oh heck, I’m going home.” Now, because of the majors in that area, do you get industrial support from the surrounding communities? WH: Oh yes. RL: Do they put in special requests for how it will be used? WH: Every program in the college has its own industry advisor committee and whenever that program looks at making changes in the curriculum that are significant, they will normally run that past the industrial advisor committee, or 27 ask the industrial advisor committee what changes we need to be making in the curriculum. There is a lot of industrial input that goes into what’s being taught. RL: Was that already in place as you got here? WH: No, it was sort of ad hoc and we tried to formalize it so they meet at least once if not twice a year. RL: Did that help as far as developing faculty attitudes and involvement? WH: Yes. For instance, there have been a number of faculty in COAST that have gone to work for an industry either for the summer or sabbatical and frequently in industries that are involved in our advisory committees. RL: You mentioned in the very beginning that you don’t have a lot of summer classes in that college. Is that because students are out doing internships or finding work in those areas? WH: No, the major reason is that the curriculum in most of the technical disciplines is structured. You have to take “A” before “B” and you have to take “B” before you can “C”. If you offer “B” in the summer, and offer “B” again in the fall, you just end up splitting your enrollment and you pay extra to have it taught in the summer because it’s not part of anybody’s load. RL: So, if everybody knows up front what the program is, you have more continuity. WH: Yes. The only courses that we will teach in the summer are those courses that have multiple sections or because of the demand, or scheduling has made it such that we need to offer a summer section. Otherwise, outside of computer and information literacy, we don’t teach a lot in the summer. 28 RL: With regard to your jump from 1,600 majors to 2,800 majors, do the students come to campus and then select majors in that area or are they pretty much determined before they get here and recruited? WH: It’s both. Some students come in and they know exactly what they want to do and go right into that major. Other students will start over here and end up over there. There are also a number of transfers, particularly from Salt Lake Community College. RL: I know that over in the health sciences, things like nursing or radiation technology, students have to apply to get into the program. WH: Yes, the health sciences are different because they do have to make applications. COAST is open enrollment. RL: So, if you want to do that major you just start taking the courses. I would imagine that makes life a little easier. WH: Yes, but Weber needs to have required advising. RL: Do you have advising in your college? WH: Oh sure. The college has a college-wide advisor and then each program has its own advisor or advisors. We strongly recommend that all students go see their advisor at least once a year, but we can’t force them to. RL: No, you can’t. We were talking about the computer and literacy requirement in your college. Now that we have a universal requirement in information literacy, I don’t know how many students come in every semester asking the director to waive the requirement for them because, “Nobody ever told them about it.” As a 29 student, I was poring through the catalog making sure I had all my T’s crossed and I’s dotted. WH: Well, our students don’t do that. RL: We do have advisors in general pool and then in each of the schools. I went through a system where your advisor was someone in the department. Which of those is preferable? I couldn’t sign up for my classes without seeing my advisor. WH: Neither could I. I think that once a student declares a major they should have required advising from that program. RL: That not happening? WH: No, it’s not a requirement at Weber State. RL: Okay. Going back a little bit as far as accomplishments, is there anything else that you want to share? WH: Well, one thing that Weber did for me that I am very appreciative of was that I was able to take a sabbatical in 1997 and spent a semester in Melbourne, Australia as a visiting professor. That’s just one of the perks of the job. I was very grateful that I was able to do that. It was a marvelous experience. RL: Were you able to take your family? WH: Yes, I took the whole family. We have two daughters and they both went to school over there in ninth and eleventh grade. I have to say, it was a better school than here in Utah. The school they went to was a public school three blocks from where we were living, so they’d come home for lunch. This school restricted classes to 25 students, period, no exceptions. That was the maximum class size. This was a school that was held grades 7-12. They only had 600 30 students. It was a neat place. It was great and we saw a lot of neat things. Australia is a wonderful place. RL: What were you a visiting professor for? WH: Electrical engineering. I team taught several classes in electrical engineering. RL: Did you do any research or publications that came out of the experience? WH: Not really. RL: As an administrator, I would imagine you probably didn’t do a whole lot in research. WH: I have written about half a dozen papers and presented at least half a dozen papers dealing with administrative issues. One of the things that Weber allowed me to do was be very active in accreditation. I am an accreditor for ABET, which used to be called the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. I’ve made 25 accreditation visits. RL: Fun places? WH: Some fun, some not so fun. Weatherford, Oklahoma I wouldn’t call the garden spot of the country, but I have visited some interesting schools both two-year and four-year because ABET accredits both two-year and four-year programs in technology. I visited a community college in Greenville, South Carolina that was a gorgeous campus. They had trees, grass, and a stream running down through the campus, it was a beautiful place. I’ve been all over the country from Connecticut to Oregon on accreditation visits. RL: I think we had a candidate for a position who was from Weatherford. He was a librarian. 31 WH: Northeastern Oklahoma State University. RL: Yes. He wanted out. WH: I can see why. In Weatherford, the trees never grow over two feet high because if they do the wind blows them over. ABET has four commissions and each commission accredits different kinds of programs. I was on the commission that accredited engineering and technology programs for eleven years. I got on the executive committee and two years ago I was the chair of the engineering and technology accreditation commission. They made me an ABET fellow, which is the highest honor they give their volunteers because they’re all volunteers. I’m also an ASEE fellow, the American Society of Engineering Education. RL: It sounds like your time here was pretty successful then. WH: Well, you should talk to the faculty about that and see what they have to say. RL: Are there any regrets? WH: Like the song goes, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention.” Well, sure, both sins of omission and sins of commission. It’s like, “Well, why did you marry your ex-wife?” “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” RL: And the answer might have been different depending on what age you were. WH: Yes. I made a few hires that I wish I hadn’t. In general, most hires turned out pretty well. There were cases where I probably should have had people seek employment elsewhere that I didn’t. You always have those kinds of things because you’ve got to remember, higher education is a very labor intensive business, so that means your key to success is in your people. I’ve been in universities or colleges where the physical setting is pretty crappy and yet if you 32 have the right people in there it doesn’t make any difference. The students still get educated and learn. You have to hire, encourage, mentor and support the good people that you have. That’s a real key in my opinion. RL: That’s hard to do with budget cuts, etc. We talked about your relationship with provosts and with presidents and other deans and so forth, but as far as other administrators, or other vice presidents that might have had an influence on the college, is there anybody that stands out or anybody that you’d like to run over? WH: I felt that I got along pretty well with my fellow deans. I always felt that even in my working relationships with other institutions in Utah, my view is that we’re all in this together and our goal is to try and educate students to the best of our abilities. So, anything that we can do to help each other is to our mutual benefit. I remember I gave space to Dean Sadler when he had to have his forensics lab remodeled. I gave space to arts and humanities when they were remodeling there and to the College of Science. I tried to work cooperatively with those folks. I got along with the other vice presidents too, that wasn’t an issue. RL: What about Alan? WH: I really didn’t have that much to do with Alan when he was in that position. I worked mostly with the physical plant people directly. RL: Did you work much with Craige Hall when he was heading up computer science? WH: Yes, somewhat. We didn’t do that much with the computing center directly because we did our own thing. At last count, COAST had over 800 PCs and we roll them over every three years. 33 RL: In the library I think we only have about 200, but that’s more than a lot of places have. Are there other individuals or ideas that you’d like to bring up and expand on? WH: The problem with that is you might forge someone who really deserves it. I’ve got a memory like a steel sieve. RL: Well, at least it doesn’t rust. WH: I’m not sure of that either. I’m trying to pickle it. One of the real strengths of Weber State University is what happens in the classroom. I’m talking about every college. They have some really outstanding faculty members that are just superb teachers. I think that if the institution loses sight of what that strength is, it would be a major tragedy. This is a teaching institution and the institution should take every opportunity to not only take advantage of that fact, but to stress that fact that our real strength is in the classroom. There are just some really good folk out there. RL: There are a lot of things happening on campus that are faculty led, but improving things for the students, like the undergraduate research program and bringing conferences here. WH: One of the problems with the undergraduate research program in a college like COAST is that the students come to class and then go to work. They don’t necessarily have the time, inclination, or proclivity to say, “I’m going to stay in the lab for three hours and work on this project,” because they don’t have the time to do that. Or they go home and babysit so the spouse can go to work. 34 RL: I think some of these projects that have been done probably started out in the classroom and were encouraged. WH: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be doing that, it’s just that for some of our students that is not a viable opportunity. RL: We talked a moment ago about regrets and whether you had any. Not thinking so much in terms of regrets, but maybe looking at the idea that hindsight is 100 percent, are there things that you would go back and change? Things that you did or said or acted on that you might do differently? WH: Probably. There aren’t any specific examples that come to mind, but sure, there always are and there are some things that I didn’t get done that I wanted to as well. One of the problems we have in this institution is that we don’t, even though we take pride in our teaching, I don’t think we have a good method of both assessing how well teachers are doing in the classroom and providing help for those that need it to be better teachers. Teaching is not only an art, it’s a science. Helping faculty understand how their students learn and what they can do in terms of how they teach their classes to address their students learning styles to help them learn better and more quickly. RL: They had some programs like that on campus, but I think they’re more readily accepted by people in the arts and social sciences. WH: You have to remember too that for those faculty in almost every case have come up the traditional way – undergraduate, grad school, into a faculty position. COAST faculty have come out of industry and they’re not teachers. So, they typically could use some help in the classroom. 35 RL: Are they taking advantage of programs like the teaching and learning forum? WH: Some do and some don’t. Again, if you’re teaching 16 credits a semester, you don’t have time to do that. RL: Well, if you don’t have any other topics that you care to discuss… WH: I would add that it’s very easy to be critical and it’s very easy to be negative, or as I asked someone earlier this week, do you know the story of the three bears? RL: Which one? WH: Where papa bear comes downstairs and says, “Who ate my porridge?” and baby bear comes downstairs and says, “Who ate my porridge?” and mama bear says, “Oh, bitch, bitch, bitch, I haven’t even made the porridge yet.” RL: So there’s not some sneaky little blonde in the room eating all the porridge. WH: What I was going to say is that overall, for me, it was a good place to work. RL: It had to be an improvement over Pueblo. WH: Yes. The other thing I was going to say is that just before I went on my sabbatical, I got the seven year itch or whatever term you want to put on it and Bob Smith was not very communicative to say, “Warren, you’re doing a good job or you need you improve here and here.” So, I looked at some other dean positions. I didn’t want a provost position, but I sent out four applications for dean positions and got three interviews and two job offers. Then, I was asked out of the blue to come to another interview. So, I had four out of five interviews, but none of them were any better and in some cases worse than what I had right here. 36 RL: It’s amazing to me how many people have left the campus and then turned right around and come back. I think that’s happened in all of the colleges. People think, “There are greener fields,” and it turns out to be astro-turf. WH: The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence; it’s just a different shade of green. I was involved in putting together the self-study for the Northwest visit five or six years ago. We looked at faculty turnover and the turnover is something like three percent. Not counting retirements or anything like that. There is very low faculty turnover at Weber State because, in general, people are happy. RL: When I left it was merely because I thought I was going to my dream job, it was a big step up for me and a big salary increase, but the dream turned into a nightmare and I was so grateful to have the opportunity to come back. It is a good place to come back to. WH: It was a good place to work for me. RL: Did you feel that this was a good place to finish raising your daughters? WH: It had pros and cons. RL: One has stayed here and one has moved on, correct? WH: Yes. The one that stayed here it was because her husband’s job is here. Our older daughter is in Wiesbaden, Germany with her husband. He wanted to go to Germany and she said, “Why not?” RL: Is he from Germany? WH: No, he’s from Layton. RL: What is he doing in Germany? 37 WH: He works for the Department of Defense in grants and contracts. Both our daughters, both their husbands, and my wife all have their degrees from Weber State. Our youngest daughter had a hard time here in school here because we’re not L.D.S. and so for her in particular it was hard. RL: I can imagine that would be a sticking point, although even that’s changing. WH: Yes. She enjoyed college much better. RL: Well, Warren, I think I mentioned we are trying to get the perspectives of different people in this program and certainly you’ve taken things in a different direction than other people that I’ve spoken with. I appreciate you taking the time. WH: I’m not afraid to be candid. I don’t have any ax to grind, or any dog in the fight, to use the old euphemisms. RL: It does help to have an institutional overview from different perspectives. WH: I think this institution could be a lot more than it is, but that may require some really hard decisions. I don’t know if anybody is willing to make these kinds of decisions. RL: You started out saying that people aren’t willing to make the decisions that need to be made. I guess it all comes back around to that, doesn’t it? WH: Ann, for all her abilities, she did some really good things with respect to fundraising and her good relationship with the regents and legislature, but she did not make some hard decisions that in my opinion could have and should have been made. She was afraid of backlash from alumni, supporters, faculty, and the community. My view from my somewhat narrow field of vision is that 38 there were things that could have been done or should have been done that would’ve made this an even better institution. RL: “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.” WH: Yes. RL: I think from what I’ve known of faculty in your college that I interacted with, people respected you and appreciate what you’ve done here and I think you can leave the institution with your head held high. WH: Oh I think so too. RL: Well, thank you for coming in today and spending time with us. WH: You’re welcome.