Oral History Program Barry Gomberg Interviewed by Kandice Harris 24 January 2024 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Barry Gomberg Interviewed by Kandice Harris 24 January 2024 Copyright © 2025 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: Gomberg, Barry an oral history by Kandice Harris, 24 January 2024, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Barry Gomberg conducted on January 24, 2024 in the Stewart Library with Kandice Harris. Lorrie Rands, the video technician, is also present during this interview. Barry discusses growing up in Ohio, moving to Utah, working in education and law, and his time as the Director of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity at Weber State University. KH: Today is January 24, 2024, and we are with Barry Gomberg, who will be talking about his career at Weber State. The interviewer is Kandice Harris, and the audiovisual technician is Lorrie Rands. When and where were you born? BG: I was born in Akron, Ohio, June 29, 1951. KH: Okay, and would you talk a little bit about growing up and up to like, your college time period? BG: I would describe my upbringing as middle class, eventually, probably upper middle class with very few disadvantages. I think that I and probably the rest of my family, were fortunate enough to enjoy great privilege in many respects, some of which I know we'll talk about as we proceed. This also touches on a point I think we'll get to later, but the most significant kind of rub I had was growing up in a conservative Jewish family. Conservative in the sense of the denomination, not our politics. In a community where there was a sizable Jewish population, but which also generated some division and tension. I think that the reason that I was drawn to civil rights was an outgrowth of that experience and more particularly, a keen awareness of being the generation immediately to follow the Holocaust, which was burned into our consciousness through the religious training that we had growing up; where, among other things, we would be brought into auditoriums to watch films that had been made during the liberation of the concentration camps. Very graphic, awful stuff. So, the unfairness 1 of treating people in a particular way because of a characteristic over which they had no control, you know, their heritage, just struck me as so unfair. Then seeing that tension play out in reverse to some degree, in the Akron community in which the Jewish community had been ghettoized because of restrictive covenants in Akron, as many other northern cities where AfricanAmericans and Jews were both prohibited from buying real estate in lots of other areas prior to the 1950s and 60s. When those restrictions were found to be unconstitutional, those with the financial ability to move out of those ghettos, when they had that ability, did so. Those who didn't have the financial wherewithal, African-Americans, remained. The Jews who had moved out retained the businesses in some instances that they had owned. So, there was a clash between the African Americans in the 60s who felt very much oppressed, and for whom the most immediate symbol of that oppression was the businesses owned by the Jews. The allied nature of the relationship between Blacks and Jews dissolved, and it was replaced with virulent racism on the part of some of my parent’s friends. That made me crazy. So that, I would say, was probably as much as anything responsible for the orientation I had later in life towards civil rights kinds of issues. I promise I'm not going to be that long winded in all the answers. KH: Oh, please feel free. Did you live in Akron all growing up? Into high school? BG: Until I went off to college. At 18, I went to Indiana University and although I spent one more summer back in Akron during college, I think that right after my freshman year, that was it. KH: Do you go back to visit, or do you prefer that Akron is no more in your mind? BG: When I had family there, particularly my mom, who was experiencing dementia, I would go back ever more frequently to try to help out. I had some other family there, 2 but many, if not most, have moved on. Coincidentally, I will be going back in early April, because it just so happens that that's where the total eclipse is going to pass through. KH: That's amazing. BG: Yeah. So, it was a nice excuse to kind of touch base again. KH: You mentioned that there was animosity between the Jewish community and the African-American community. Do you feel like the rest of the Caucasian community accepted the Jewish community, or was there still that separation? BG: No, I remember probably fourth grade, third or fourth grade. I used to either get beat up every day after school or run fast enough to avoid it with a couple of bullies who would sling antisemitic slurs as they were having their way. KH: I'm sorry. BG: Again, I think that, you know, that just intensified kind of, the broader notion of antisemitism left over from the Holocaust. KH: Okay. Did your family encourage you to pursue an education? BG: Yes, completely. There was never a question as to whether I would go to college. The only question my parents would ask was, “Where?” There was never any question that they were going to support it financially. So, when I talk about privilege, that's a huge part of what I'm talking about. LR: You mentioned that the experience in the third, fourth grade. Did that change over time as time went on? Did it get easier to go to school with the Caucasian community, did that diminish a little bit? Their animosity towards the Jewish community? BG: Well, probably so, although I think it more likely became subterranean rather than more overt. You know, there were three country clubs, for example, in the Akron community, or at least in the western part of the city where I grew up. The particular 3 country club right across the street from our house, a block away, accepted no Jews. Another country club, a little bit further away accepted no Jews. But the third was a country club, that was Jewish. It did accept non-Jews, but it was for decades, primarily, Jewish. So, part of that may have been by choice, the segregation. There were probably members of the Jewish community who might have liked to join one of those other two, but knew that they wouldn't be allowed in. It always felt odd if there was a party at one of the clubs that excluded Jews. You know that some kid from one of those other two areas had to go into that area always felt really uneasy or make me feel uneasy. But it wasn't all that explicit. KH: I actually have a second follow up question that it made me think of. Your parents, let me think of how to ask this. Did they maintain a separateness, or did they try to integrate with the greater community, or how did they work with where they were living? BG: So, my father fought in World War II, married my mother almost immediately after. They moved into a neighborhood that had actually been like a reserve military area that was developed into just a regular residential neighborhood. There was no segregation there. Two neighbors across the street were Jewish. One kitty corner was Jewish. There were more Jews around. It wasn't by any means a ghetto. They were still a minority, but there was plenty of mixing. I was prohibited from dating non-Jews for several years when I started dating, until my parents discovered that I was sneaking around. KH: [Laughter]. BG: So, they realized that they weren't going to prevent it and so they just stopped trying. But as part of that upbringing, during that period of time, there was, at least from our rabbi, a very powerful call to avoid blending in, to avoid assimilation and to retain a Jewish identity. I had trouble with that, for a lot of reasons, one of which 4 was a fundamental skepticism about all religions and other skepticism about any kind of higher power. I didn't know. I mean, there was a longing, I think, to fit in, that staying separate seemed antithetical to, but the woman that I married in 1973 was about as non-Jewish as you could imagine. A farm girl who grew up, raised in Indiana as a Methodist, whose father was Mormon from Utah and a Church of the Brethren mother, which is a very fundamentalist foot washing kind of Christian creed. You know, my parents cautioned against the cultural differences that such a union would bring and that would add challenges to the relationship. But I'm happy to report that last month we went to Lake Placid to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. KH: Congratulations. BG: You know, maybe it was just sort of stubbornness. It's like I'll prove them wrong. KH: Okay. So, after you left and went to Indiana, what was college experience like for you? BG: It was a wonderful time. So, Indiana University is in Bloomington, Indiana, which is just a quintessential, college town. But better still is the fact that it's a college town with one of the finest music schools in the world. There was always cool stuff going on. I, for a nanosecond, thought I might be a pre-med major. Thank you, chemistry. KH: It wasn't anatomy that did you in? BG: No, I didn't get that far. It was the very first semester and when I was going to be required to get the bachelor's degree to learn a foreign language, which I'm hideous at, I opted to go into an Independent Learning Program, ILP. I don't believe Weber has ever developed a similar program, and I'm not sure how many other institutions have such a program where you could completely design your program as you wish. You know, you'd get a faculty mentor and so I did that, and kind of melded interest in psychology and sociology and education to focus on political 5 socialization, how it is that people develop the political attitudes that they have. That was a wonderful opportunity because Indiana University has been a huge institution for a long time with amazing resources. But the ILP program allows you to develop very individualized, one on one relationships with the faculty. You know, there's nothing better, I think, for learning and so that program really set me free, I guess, and enabled me to pursue these interests that I had. Again, an indication of the privilege that I enjoyed was my parents never questioned. “Well, what are you going to do with that, Barry? How are you going to support yourself?” It just didn't come up, and I was allowed. That's an amazing gift to have. For the end of that process, I was encouraged by one of the mentors in the program, Meryl Englander, to get practical and to develop a salable skill, specifically social studies teaching. He was running an experimental program based in two Indianapolis high schools. So, for a fifth year, I participated in that program and finished up the undergrad requirements and got some master's level credit and became a certified social studies teacher. That experience taught me the very best, and we had one of the pioneers of the new social studies, Shirley Engle, teaching the social studies curriculum. Meryl was a psychologist, and we had James D. Anderson, an African-American education historian. Those three faculty would come up and lavish this little cadre of a dozen students with about one, two, three, or four faculty days per week. Phenomenal. What we came to realize was, the very best teaching scared the shit out of the administration in the schools in which we were based. If you wanted to really be a good social studies teacher, chances were you're going to have to hide your best stuff. So, that was discouraging regarding education. 6 I had two other potential career ideas, one of which was to become an organizer, like a labor organizer, like Cesar Chavez or whatever. I went and applied to Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, which trains organizers. I mean one of his books is Rules for Radicals. That scared me. I didn't have the courage to be an organizer, I'm ashamed to say. The third was to go to law school and figure out how to use that as a vehicle for social change. That was what I ended up doing. I went back to Bloomington. My wife finished up her undergraduate and then became interested in a master's in alternative ed. Because I had sort of lost a year, there was a program at IU's law school to get me through in two years. I did that. So, three summers and we were out. I came to Utah anticipating staying a year or two at the most. That was in 1977. LR: Quick question. BG: You bet. LR: About the social studies teaching: You mentioned that you'd have to hide your best material. What do you mean by that? BG: So, the new social studies curriculum is very democratic. Small “D” democratic, and it's coincidental that you ask about it, because having no expectation of this coming up here, but my next meeting is to talk about the school district's discipline policy and one of the exercises that I have done with my students. I taught a concurrent enrollment class for Weber State's political science department for 20 years at Ogden High School. The title of the class was Freedoms and it was a focus on the Bill of Rights. One of the early exercises is to have kids define what they think a good citizen is. Then, I asked them which of these behaviors are behaviors that they associate with good citizens. [Shows Kandice the exercise] KH: I like number four. BG: Which is? 7 KH: Follow all the rules without questioning them. BG: Yeah, that's the point, and you'll notice that some of these are very oriented towards critical thinking and questioning and being involved and not necessarily being completely compliant. Then I asked the students to rate this list. [Shows Kandice the list] More and more I have to explain who these people were. KH: Oh, sad. BG: But I said, “Which of these are good citizens and why?” You know, many of these are individuals who buck the system. This is an example of the kind of teaching that I think would be very difficult for most administrators to have going on in their schools. I'm raising this because the next meeting that I've been referring to is to go over a student conduct code, which includes a description of Student Conduct Guidelines and the following criteria will be used in determining the student's citizenship grade: “Attends scheduled classwork regularly; comes to class on time; comes to class with necessary materials and desire to learn; completes assignments; meets deadlines; completes his or her work when independent work is required; exercises care of public property, including school property; shows respect for others; does not disrupt class work; resolves conflicts with others in an appropriate and respectful manner.” It just seems to me that this is very akin to that kind of 1950s mentality: the attempt to instill obedience to the order and not raise radicals. Not raise questions. So, I think perhaps we see what the logical outcome of that is, right? You see Ron DeSantis in Florida attempting to prohibit teaching facts that are inconvenient or uncomfortable. Well, I don't consider that education. That's what I mean. LR: Okay. Well, thank you for clarifying. BG: Thanks for asking. I made it be quiet. 8 KH: That's fine. You mentioned that you have the Individual Learning Program. What did you get your undergraduate in? What was the title for the degree? BG: Well, the senior project that you had to have, was Actualizing Democracy in America. What I liked about that was that inherent in that was the recognition that we haven't yet, or that there's at least further we could go. Now we are moving in the opposite direction and it's just tragic. I understand pendulums, but it's heartbreaking to see voting rights that were so hard fought and won being eroded, and books being banned because the ideas are considered to be upsetting emotionally to some people. KH: What degrees and certifications do you have? BG: So, a bachelor's degree. Partial work towards a master's that was never completed. Teacher certification in secondary social studies and a JD degree. KH: Okay. What were some of the challenges you faced while obtaining your degrees? BG: Well, I mean, I worked all through college more because I chose to, I think, than because I had to. My parents never questioned that they would continue to support my education. I didn't even realize what an incredible gift that was. I worked a lot of jobs and I worked pretty hard, but it was more, again, it was more by choice than of necessity. I was never desperate. KH: So, with all of your degrees, and you kind of talked about this a little bit, but what were some of the career options that you thought of as you were graduating and planning the next step? BG: Well, teacher, organizer, some kind of law related using that combination of interest in education and law in some sort of integrated way. KH: When you moved to Utah in 1977, what did you do? BG: So, the Indiana University School of Education had an alternative education master’s program, which placed, as a major part of the program, students in 9 yearlong internships where they would receive half salaries of starting teachers. You could do your coursework the summer before, and the summer after. I really wasn't interested in the master's program, but my wife became interested, so we went through the recruitment process. Ogden School District had a handful of administrators that were looking for teachers who would come in and bring change and innovation to the alternative ed arena in that district, which was, up till that time, quite staid and conservative. Debby quarrels with me about this, but they really wanted her for the Young Mothers, Pregnant Teens program. She had Home Education undergrad degree, and this Alternative Education interest. I was sort of a, you know, a fluke, an enigma. But I didn't think that I would ever teach if I started practicing law. I saw that that would just sort of be a black hole from which I'd never escape. You know, we were young, again, we didn't have debt, what privilege. I thought, “Well, we'll try it for a year.” So, I came out and they stuck me over in a program called the Learning Center, which was a dropout prevention program. I said I would take whatever students the other teachers in the school didn’t want to teach. Ogden High and Ben Lomond High would send to the Learning Center, students that didn't fit into those high schools. I told the principal, Glenn Collins, I just wanted a group that I could work with all day. You could give me any students that the other teachers didn't want in their program, as long as they could read on grade level because I didn't have remedial reading training then. So, we did that democratic teaching and that was so fun. I met a fellow by the name of Brad Roghaar who taught upstairs. I don't know if you know Brad. You should get his history. KH: What's his name? Brad—? 10 BG: R-O-G-H-A-A-R. He was working at Weber before me, and Brad was an extraordinary teacher. He and his wife, Sharon, and Debby and I became fast friends. That was that first year in Ogden. Brad and I developed a design for a program for gifted underachievers. Right, because one of the things that became apparent working with the self-contained group that could read was that there were very bright students in that program who just weren't clicking in the high school. They all brought some sort of challenge with them, but it wasn't because they weren't really bright. So, this Gifted Underachievers program, the program eventually developed the acronym, The NEW School, Nonconformists Entitled to Wisdom, and indeed they were nonconformists. But to my chagrin, Brad and Sharon took jobs with Aramco in Saudi Arabia and moved away for three years. So, Debby and I moved into their house, I started the NEW School, and I continued in that program for a couple of years. Then the affirmative action, no, then I came into contact with a program at Weber State University that had a federal grant called the Mountain West Educational Equity Center. They hired Debby and me as consultants in 1979 to help with the desegregation of the Denver school district, which had been under court order to desegregate after it was found that they had a combination of de facto and de jure segregation. KH: What year was this? BG: 1979. So, that was the first paycheck that we got from Weber State. That was 45 years ago. As an outgrowth of that, that center offered me a job in 1980, which I did until 1984, doing equity related work with school districts in six states: North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and Utah. What we would help those districts with was sex equity under Title IX, and race equity under Title VI and of the 11 1964 Civil Rights Act. We would go into state education agencies and do training on what the law was, but why also it was good education. Just fly all around in the Mountain Region. That was great work. Didn't have kids at that time and well, we had one. During that time, we had our first child. My wife was more understanding than she should have been in the sense that she, too, had a career, and yet she was always the one that was the default care giver. Again, I have regrets, but that enabled me to do that work for a while and to become extremely familiar with Title IX. The funding for that center became shaky because it's a competitive process every three years, so I started moving into a law practice with an attorney in town by the name of David Bert Havas. H-A-V-A-S, and Bert, or as our younger daughter would say as she toddled into the law firm, “Where is Bertie boy?” I had met Bert through the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. He was doing employment law on behalf of employees as opposed to employers, meaning, in my opinion, the good guys. Right? Because employees who felt their rights had been violated needed an attorney often times to vindicate that right, and Bert was, at the time, the only attorney who did that kind of law in this area. One of the very few in the state at that time. So, I practiced with Burt for three years or so, three and a half years. There was a slight overlap where I was halftime at the Deseg Center, and halftime with Bert. Then, the previous Affirmative Action EEO Director at Weber State took a position at the University of Nevada, Reno, and I applied for the position. LR: What year was that? BG: 1979. No, I'm sorry, I probably applied in ‘87 and started the position in ‘88. So, the first part of the 80s was doing deseg work, where the middle part was doing civil rights law, and I finished up the last of that decade at Weber, starting a 33-year stint 12 in that position as Affirmative Action/EEO Director. It was the combination of Title IX work and the race equity work and the practice of civil rights related law discrimination that enabled a white guy to get a job as the Affirmative Action EEO director, because that was almost always filled at institutions by either a woman or a person of color, or someone who was both. LR: Okay, one quick question. Going back just a little bit, if you don't mind. When you first moved here to Utah. What was that like for you going from Ohio, Indiana to—? BG: Here's what I like to say. Growing up Jewish, wine was an integral part of our religious practice. Right? Every Friday night, you said Kiddush over a glass of wine. It was there during grieving, mourning periods. I mean, there were just times, and at that time, the statistics were that Jews were rarely abusive of alcohol. I think largely because if you were going to rebel, that wasn't going to be the way you did it as a kid. It was one who couldn't have a drink at all that, once they were able to figure out how to do it, splurged. During college, I became aware of the environmental movement and became a supporter of ZPG, as we called it. Zero Population Growth: a belief that the best way to protect the environment is not to overcrowd the Earth with individuals who are going to exploit resources. So, my wife and I came to Utah believing that alcohol is good and big families are bad. KH: [Laughter] Okay, yeah. BG: Next question. Now, let me say, let me not be so flip. Well, that isn't going to happen. KH: That is a very good representation of what Utah is. No alcohol, big families. BG: When we started raising kids, of course, that was rumored to be the worst part about being a non-Mormon in Utah was if you had kids they were going to be 13 ostracized. We were fortunate to live next to the Linfords, Keith and especially Diane, who made sure that our kids were always included but never proselytized. KH: That's great. LR: That's amazing. BG: “Santa is going to be here Saturday, and all the other kids in the neighborhood are going to be having breakfast with them. If you would like your children to be a part of that, they are more than welcome.” That was it. So, there was, in fact, at least the first decade or two that we were here, this relationship that the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would speak of, whereby there were members of that church, there were Gentiles, and then there were Jews. The Jews held some sort of special status that was different from being a Gentile. There was a recognition of a common ancestry, and there were also obviously examples of antisemitism and such, but I experienced far more virulent antisemitism growing up in Akron than I think I ever experienced here. You know, I remember the assistant superintendent walking down the hall with his arm over my shoulder when I was a teacher in the first or second year. He said, “Barry, when are you going to convert so we can make you an administrator?” Well, I mean, I could resent that. But he said it kind of chuckling, and yet I knew that there was a certain truth to it; that if I wanted to advance administratively within the district, I would have an easier time of it. There were non-LDS administrators, but far fewer than there were LDS administrators. But growing up, I mean life, and again, a long-winded answer to your question. The experience of being a Jew in Utah has been pretty positive and I have to say that you know I'm not proud of this, what I'm about to say. I recognize the deep, cultural roots that my Jewish heritage has provided me, but I don't practice Judaism very much. You know, we have Passover Seder because I like the 14 symbolism of the holiday that celebrates human freedom from bondage, and we've successfully passed that along to our kids, who do their own Seders beautifully. But, you know, it's inescapable. I'm thought of as someone who's Jewish whenever the university had problems that related to Jews. It’d be Eric Ansel or Sam Zeveloff or me or all three of us who would tend to get the call. What do we do here? You know, help us avoid the landmines. I also recognize that it is that experience of growing up a Jew in a country where, you know, we're a small minority; helped sensitize me to the injustices that I've been fortunate enough to try to work to eradicate for my career. KH: You mentioned what it was like moving to Utah. What was it like at Weber State when you started? You can answer that any way you want. BG: I have to tell you that my first experience at Weber State was actually in ‘77 when we first got here, because the Ogden School District had its opening institute here, and it featured a continental breakfast. Debby and I get here and we're looking around for the coffee. There was no coffee to be had and I thought, “You know, it said continental breakfast. Where's the coffee?” Anyway, I think when—So, which time, right? Because I came here twice. I came here in ‘80, and I came here in ‘88. I may have applied in ‘87, hired in ‘88. In the first of those, we were not very well integrated. The Deseg Center, you know, was operating on a grant that had been won by Continuing Education and although we were in the Social and Behavioral Sciences building, we didn't have much to do with anybody else. There was an exception to that, and that was that the Teacher Ed department got dinged for its lack of diversity, I think both in curriculum and in personnel. They came to our staff and asked if we would help participate in an assessment of that department. That was probably about the closest that we got to involvement on the campus as a whole. 15 I guess that based on that and then how the campus struck me four years later when I came back was that it was a much more homogeneous place religiously, but certainly not exclusively. But there, too, I felt the same kind of pressure. “Well, Barry, you know, when are you going to convert.” I didn't feel pressure to convert, but it was not a place that really, I think, valued diversity as it came to do so later. I remember we were hiring a vice president at one point under the very first president that I work for as an EEO guy, and that was Steve Nadauld. Vice presidential searches are quite definitively prescribed in the policies and procedures mandate for the university, which I think is mandated by the Board of Regents. They had to have a big committee with representatives from deans and, you know, all different areas, and I asked for the opportunity to come in and train as I was beginning to do with a lot of committees around. I started talking about EEO kind of stuff, nondiscrimination. No reaction, and I started talking about affirmative action and what that means. Nadauld interrupted me and they said, “No, no, this position is way too important for affirmative action.” I thought, in one fell swoop he just cut me off at my knees. What he communicated to everybody in that room was that when it really matters, affirmative action doesn't. So, that's how it was back then. He left two years later, went to one of the utility companies, and was replaced by Paul Thompson. Paul Thompson, who I was so disappointed, was hired. The university doesn't hire its own president; they're hired by the Board of Regents, and here was another white LDS guy from BYU. He had been the Vice President for University Advancement or Development or whatever, and I thought it's going to be more of the same. Before he even got here, he called Mel Gillespie and me. Mel was first head of the what is now, I think, referred to as the center for Multicultural 16 Excellence. He said, “Tell me what you guys do.” He said, “Because we're going to hit it hard.” Turns out, while he was at Harvard as a student grad, doctoral student and then faculty member, he got bit by the civil rights bug, and he wanted to move. To my astonishment, the next decade plus, I think, was a period of such rapid almost revolution, beyond evolution, where you know, we started the minority lectureship program, which brought faculty to the university for a year, funded by the provost's office. It didn't require any sacrifice of departmental or college funds, and if the individual worked out and the department wanted, they could move that individual into a permanent position. There was a parallel program we started a year or two later in student affairs. In the faculty and in professional staff we really boosted diversity. The Affirmative Action Advisory Committee became quite active and meaningful under the leadership of Sherwin Howard, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at that time. Boy, he was a mover. It was, you know, hang onto your hat, we're going. I think one of the very most gratifying things about the work of being a part of that process was seeing the faculty come to recognize the benefits that were brought about by truly diversifying that marketplace of ideas by bringing in lots of different perspectives. To recognize, in addition to that, the benefits of affirmative action planning, which most people don't understand. It's a management tool. It's a human resource tool that requires you to study the statistics of who's applying by demographic groups, who's being offered, who accepts, who starts, and how long do they last. When you see selected groups dropping out of that pipeline, you're required not to change that necessarily, but to try to understand why and to see if there is a bias operating, which is almost always unintentional. To develop strategies and apply strategies to correct so that you get 17 the very best. Not that you settle for unqualified or underqualified, but you get the very best people that you can because you've eliminated or reduced, at least, the bias that causes them to wash out unfairly, inappropriately. So, that was really a very meaningful part of the work. KH: Okay. You mentioned that Nadauld didn't really seem to support affirmative action. Do you feel like that was the same feeling across campus when you first started? BG: With all respect, I think my predecessor had several other responsibilities. I don't think that—I don't know how to say this gently, but I didn't see his role as having been a real advocate, and so it's hard to know how people really felt about it because they weren't really pushed. KH: How do you feel campus has changed in relation to affirmative action throughout your career on campus? BG: I will say one more thing about the way campus was when I got here. There were areas of the campus where I think it was very difficult to get hired if you were not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, there were areas of the campus where I think it was hard to get hired if you were a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There were these little islands where in some instances, I assume in most instances it was unintended, but nonetheless effective. You know, my brother's boy needs a job, so there was, the recruitment was not necessarily seen as a tremendously important or valuable tool to fill positions. If you knew somebody who needed a job and they could do it then just hey, move him in. I think that one of the ways that we've changed over the years is that there's a much greater adherence to a process by which we really cast our nets broadly and try to bring in highly qualified applicants and screen them in ways that will yield the very best qualified individuals. I would like to think that part of the reason Weber 18 State's reputation for excellence has grown to what it is, at least in part, is because of that. When I would train hiring committees, I would often say, “This is probably the single most important decision that you're going to have in your career here, is through hiring, because there's nothing that will impact the future quality of this institution more so than who else you bring in,” and the hiring process at any university almost. Weber State is extremely decentralized, which means that some departments may not hire anybody for a year or two or more. Other departments, larger departments, may have a higher turnover and may have a couple hires, but oftentimes those larger departments wouldn't necessarily have the same committee doing the hiring so they don't get good at it. They don't know what they're doing as well as they know how to teach or how to do research and writing. It's just not a significant enough part of their jobs that they get muscle memory. So, you have to provide training just in time to help guide that process. Part of what you battle against, I think, is the feeling that you should know how to do this. Well, no you shouldn't. Hey, you weren't trained to do it when you got whatever training enabled you to get the job here, and you haven't done it often enough to be expected to know how to do it well. Recognizing that and not beating people up, but giving them the support they need to do it well, can have a tremendous impact on how an institution improves over time or not. I don't even remember what you asked. That may have in some way glanced against it. KH: No, that's great. What did a typical semester look like for you? BG: Well, you're going to ask me what my favorite memories are? KH: Yes. BG: Teaching, adjunct teaching. I mean, there were certainly, as I've said, fulfilling aspects about the EDI and affirmative action work. But the best part was teaching, 19 and I got to do a lot of it in a lot of different departments. Daley Oliver and I taught the History of the Civil Rights Movement in the Honors area for years. I taught in the Teacher Ed department Master's program: Education law, probably a half dozen times. I mentioned the concurrent enrollment class in Political Science. I taught several other political science classes as well. I taught the Criminal Justice Diversity in Law Enforcement and Corrections class with the now retired department chair, faculty member, Judge Michelle Heward, who interestingly was the legal secretary in the law firm that I had worked in before she ever went to law school back in the 80s. Oh, and the Business classes. They were always fun. Labor Law, Labor and Employment Law, and Human Resource Management. But the best was Business Ethics. Why the sigh? LR: I'll tell you later. BG: Don't want it on tape then? LR: It's irrelevant right now, I'll tell you later. BG: But I probably taught that class 25 times. It was Business Ethics and Environmental Responsibility, and I adored it. I never understood, nor do I now, how they entrusted a class in the College of Business to, you know, kind of a “pinko leftist,” socialistleaning guy. But they did. So fun. Those are really pleasant memories. Related to the EEO work itself, there were instances where an individual would complain about having been discriminated against, harassed, and in some instances that individual was able to reclaim a sense of control over their lives. That was enormously fulfilling. A few would come back years later and say that was really a turning point. They would say, “I realized I didn't have to put up with whatever it was.” So, that was that was great work. KH: How did you balance your adjunct teaching with being a director of a department? 20 BG: Again, a lot of credit goes to my spouse, who for a long time gave me permission to work more than I should have. Which also meant, particularly during the work week, bearing the full responsibility for rearing our kids, caring for our kids that I should have done. Part of it was once you develop a course you don't have to go through that process again, immediately. Another big help was that I trained teaching assistants. I had a lot of writing in the classes, but I trained the brightest students from previous classes on how to evaluate written work, so that was a huge benefit. I was getting a good salary on my own, so whatever it was that I got for adjunct teaching, which is peanuts anyway, I would just distribute to the aides and that was sufficient for their needs. I think they really liked it. I really think they felt good about being able to help, you know, those students who followed them to improve their writing and thinking and so on. I shortchanged my job; I have to admit that. I could have done more better EEO work, I think, if I hadn't had the teaching stuff too. But my bosses never, you know, seemed dissatisfied. That, by the way, was another nice thing about EEO work and affirmative action. That office is responsible for helping to shape policy and then train so that people are aware and are given the tools they need to actualize those policies. When I practiced law, by contrast, you're stuck with whatever the laws are, and you're also not brought into a situation until the conflict has already escalated to a level where people are mad as hell and they're going to hire a lawyer. So, to resolve conflicts at that point was quite hard. Whereas the EEO office has the wonderful good fortune to often get involved early on where conflicts are just beginning to escalate. Towards the end of that legal period, I got trained as a divorce mediator. This was like in ancient history. There were very few divorce mediators at that time. Since then, it's become popular because it's often mandated by states. But back 21 then, it was pretty rare. But the skills transferred so wonderfully to EEO work to find win-win solutions. Back then, we weren't saddled with a lot of administrative restrictions that the Trump administration imposed when they tried to gut Title IX. That bled over into other kinds of discrimination. It was very satisfying to be able to solve problems, to get people to workable solutions that sometimes they'd be disappointed because they had invested a lot emotionally in the fight. You have to help them see that that's not really in their interest. Boy, but when you get there, it's wonderfully gratifying. KH: Would you talk a little bit about your experience of working with the annual diversity conference? BG: Happily. What I remember most about that was the planning part of it, which brought together groups of individuals who were interested in various aspects of diversity. Ruby was an important part of that committee for years. That, in and of itself, was fun, probably because of the teaching experience I had; I was really comfortable with students. I was for years, asked to facilitate the student panel, we always had a student panel. That was probably my most frequent active role in those conferences. What else would you want to know? KH: Were you part of it from the start? BG: Yeah. KH: Okay. Who else? Who helped form the annual diversity conference? BG: What I remember are the youth conferences. The very first of those was probably in the early 90s, and it would have been at that point, a Hispanic youth conference. We had a student hourly employee by the name of Ana Ayala, who really was a force of nature that insisted that we do that. That was operated for several years out of the EEO office, which you wouldn't normally think of as a programmatic office. 22 But it wasn't, you know, nobody else was stepping up. I don't remember this clearly, and I may be mistaken, but that may have been where the Holocaust commemoration also started. I'm very much less certain of that. But certainly the EEO office often played a supportive role in all those related kinds of programmatic activities. The Hispanic Youth Conference later became the Multicultural Youth Conference and then became absorbed into the student affairs area and was a major form of student recruitment for underrepresented students. That was, I think, a beneficial role that the EEO office played, kind of being flexible enough to engage in those institution and community-based programs. They certainly made the work more interesting. KH: Are there any other favorite memories that you'd like to share from your time at Weber? BG: Well, there's goo gobs. It's a term of art. You can weigh goo gobs. I mean, I really touched on a lot. There were fabulous relationships. You know, I remember pretty vividly the education I underwent when we finally transformed. I had no responsibility in this, when the institution transformed the Women's Center from a place—I've nothing against handicrafts, but the Women's Center was not, for decades, a very pro-feminist organization. Let me say it that way. It certainly was not, I wouldn't say, a very firm advocate for LGBT. We brought in Paige Davies and Stephanie McClure, Paige’s predecessor, who had hired Paige. These women had experience doing victim advocacy, to which I had been all but clueless. They taught me so much about how to do my job better than I had been doing it. To understand the whole dynamic of believing and the kinds of supportive measures that would be so immensely helpful. You know, from fundamental emotionally connecting to very practical kinds of things like did the 23 abusive respondent ever have access to your phone? Because if so, he may have planted software on there that can trace you and on and on and on. We can have that scanned and detect whether or not that's on there. We can give you another phone. I mean, that was all new to me. I'm so grateful. The work with Stephanie Hollist, who's now university legal counsel. Oh, my gosh, the Herculean struggles that she and I loved to try to reason through, these incredibly challenging situations where there were all these countervailing threats and risks and things that could go wrong. How do you chart a course, through those rocky waters? That ability to work collaboratively with such great minds was, again, hugely helpful, beneficial and rewarding. You're going to ask me about what I've done since retirement. Well, I've continued doing this kind of work with other institutions, you know, if they get into a personnel bind where they lose their affirmative action, the EEO person, they may call me in as a consultant. You know what is now muscle memory, I don't even have to think about it because they've trained me so well. The other people at those institutions, just their jaws drop. It's like, “Well how did you know that?” “Well, because I got taught,” and that has been very fulfilling as well to think that, you know, you worked for decades to build up that repertoire and it doesn't, it's not just going to waste. There's still some use for it. I love that. Although I have not been doing any lately. I wish I were, but I'm not going to go out and sell myself. It's if somebody is in need and they ask around, then they may get my name as a referral, but I'm not going to push it. KH: I'm going to change tracks a little bit. You talked a little bit about your experience working with Nadauld and Thompson. Would you share your thoughts about, I don't know if there are any thoughts or memories you want to share about those two, but about the other presidents that you worked under? 24 BG: Thompson was fabulous. It was just such an exciting time to see the supertanker change directions because that's really what a university is, right? It doesn't turn on a dime. But he had a huge impact, and maybe there was a bit of a pendulum swing back when Ann Millner took the helm. What's interesting is that I had worked very closely with Ann back when she was at Continuing Ed back when I was employed at Weber the first time. She took a sabbatical for a while and became a like, in-house visiting expert at Smith's in their management team. She brought me in to do training, and she and I did training through Continuing Ed around the state for groups like Rocky Mountain Power. You know, their line-people were kind of notoriously sexist and so she and I would go out to these outposts, and we got to know each other pretty well. So, when she became president, I offered her my resignation because she knew me well, and I didn't know whether or not she would want the person that she knew. I was going to give her the opportunity to hire whoever she wanted. She said, “Don't be ridiculous.” KH: That sounds like Ann. BG: Yeah, so we continued to work together. But she was not, you know, as bold as Thompson was, nor her successor, Chuck White. Both Paul and Chuck were very progressive, Ann has a philosophy of preserving her ability to influence by never straying too far from a position that is defensible given the political climate of Utah. Gentle. At that time, LGBT rights were emerging elsewhere, let's see, she was in the 2000s. So, I’m trying to remember when our daughter came out. Even before our daughter came out, I had come to realize maybe this is of value. I'm going to go off on a tangent. When it comes to civil rights, I had huge inertia at each step of the process. I've described the early influence, but I was not initially willing or able to embrace the idea that Native Americans deserve comparable consideration to African Americans. I saw civil rights as a black/white 25 issue, and one of these Native Americans, you know, it's like it doesn't fit my paradigm. Obviously, the cause is so compelling that eventually you break through that. I think that the next barrier after other ethnic minority groups was gender. I thought, “Well, that's ridiculous. Men and women are different. You're right.” I couldn't see it. That was when I went to work for the Deseg Center. Almost all the other staff who work there were women, and they pounded into me to where I came to understand, “Well, I'm doing Title IX work,” recognizing how girls in school in K12 settings were so systematically discriminated against, how their curricular opportunities were limited, and how counselors steered them away from science, technology, engineering. We were working Expanding Your Horizons workshops all over the region and so, again, reluctantly, I came to embrace gender equity. But it was not an easy, I mean, I sort of had to be dragged kicking and screaming. Well, dragged, anyway. I think that the next kind of awareness came around disability issues. “Well, I don't get it; they're disabled! So, I went through an exercise where the group was facilitated to think about which of five disabilities you would most want to avoid if you had to have one of them and which you would most be willing to accept if you had to have one of them. The reasons why each direction, you put it up on the board and what was inevitably the outcome was that, let's say blindness. People would choose not to be blind because they couldn't be independent, because they wouldn't be able to work, because they wouldn't be able to see their loved ones. Then why others would choose blindness as the condition they'd be most willing to have, because they could still be independent, because they could still work. I mean, it just was like lightning to realize that the way we treat disabilities is so much a function of what we think you can or can't do if you have that disability. Mostly 26 what you can't, and what the ADA requires is that you think about what you can do and that you be given opportunities based on that. Once you get there, it's like, “Okay, I was screwed up, I was wrong.” Then LGBT. Not sure about the order of those two, but I think LGBT was probably the most recent, maybe with the emphasis on transgender most recently. I went through that same process. I went to a workshop where I'm not going to be able to pull up his name, but he has the whole audience; all the participants do this mind walk where all the presumptions in the world that you're growing up in are homosexual. You're expected to date people your own gender, you're expected to marry people your own gender and then there's this aberrant few who are attracted to members of the other sex. He goes through this whole thing and I'm crying at the end of it, as many in the group were. It's just, you realize that the predispositions you grew up with are just so screwed up. So, when our daughter did come out, thankfully, I was better prepared than I would otherwise have been. When she said, "Dad, I just want you to know I have a girlfriend." My reaction was, “Yeah, I know, that's Liz and Shelly. I mean, you know, a lot of girl friends.” She said, "No, dad, I have a girlfriend." “Oh. Who's the lucky girl?” So, it was immediately comfortable. That was a bridge that was pretty far for Ann, to get back to your question. I think that she had a sense that beneath the surface, in the state that she was in, and she, to her credit, I mean this is before she was involved in elected positions. She recognized that to garner the resources to make Weber State as effective as it could be in carrying out its mission, she didn't want to alienate legislators. She looked down at the U, I think, and saw how the state legislature there felt oppositional, and sort of wanted to trim the sails of that institution. Too liberal. So, 27 she avoided that. Then, as I said, the pendulum swung back with Chuck. I have to say, I don't think it's swung back at all with Brad. I think we're really fortunate to have had a number of the presidents that I've worked for, who are really progressive forces and embrace deep within them the beliefs that are based on, boy, does that make for a more fulfilling work environment for an affirmative action EEO person. You can imagine. KH: Yeah. Okay. I'm going to turn the tide again. What are your memories from the Olympics when it was here in Utah? Told you, changing tracks. BG: Yeah, that was a big one. So, the men's semifinal curling match. We had a house in Forest Green, which is immediately adjacent to the Dee Events Center. We'd walk around and come somewhere near the fence of the Ice Sheet, and the police would converge on us. “What are you doing here?” “Just walking the dog.” But we decided to see if we could get tickets, and we ended up, the tickets that were available were for the men's semifinals, which was Norway and who knows where or something like that. Of course, it had been the brunt of all the jokes. All the late-night comedians were, you know, making fun of curling as an Olympic sport. I was just ready to go and be terribly bored, but it was so exciting. It was just shocking. So, that's probably—also, did you ever see the movie Awakening? KH: Is that the one with, Robin Williams? Then yes, I have seen that one. BG: Yeah, he's a psychologist working with dementia patients who take this medication. Based on, I guess, an actual experience. They come back to life, so to speak, but it only lasts for a short period of time. I liken the Olympics in Utah to that. For a while there was this moment, and we were so cool, and maybe that'll happen again. I just heard today that the legislature's grappling with the request from the Olympic Committee to clean up our air if we want to host the Olympics. 28 KH: Oh, dear. BG: I thought, well, they're going to get pissed off. They're going to just reject that as, “You're not going to tell us what to do.” Well, they didn't. They want the Olympics bad enough that this may actually be an opportunity for another one of those awakenings. KH: That would be nice. BG: Wouldn't it? KH: I'd like to be able to breathe without struggle. BG: Even if for a couple weeks. KH: So, what mentors did you have throughout your career? BG: Forrest Crawford was actually on the. . . he and I had been part of that Denver Deseg team. He knew my work and he was on the search committee when I was hired. I don't think I would have been hired had he not felt okay about my coming on. He certainly mentored me in terms of how to introduce myself and carry myself in a higher ed setting. You know, I mentioned Paige Davies, and Stephanie Hollist. I think it's fair to say that Stephanie and I kind of grew together, teaching each other a lot. She approaches issues from a very conservative legal perspective, and I'm much more comfortable advocating, taking risks. I remember with some regret, having recommended to Paul Thompson that we drop football, as a sport, because there was no way we were going to be able to actually comply with Title IX if we continued to play football with its mammoth squad and its huge budget. He took the advice and tried to cancel it and nearly lost his job because of that. KH: Oh, wow. BG: Oh, yeah. The football coach at the time, Dave Arslanian, went out to the community and raised hell and really caused a huge backlash. Other mentors, I 29 think EEO wise, there were certainly zealous advocates of diversity who created a space in which it was my less confrontive style. One acceptance. If you're going to try to do social change, I think it's easier if you have people who are further out, that kind of make you look less radical. There were certainly those individuals who were willing to crash and burn, if need be, for the cause and they, you know, helped legitimize the more modest or moderate direction that I tried to sell. KH: What do you view as your greatest accomplishments? BG: Well, I think we touched on that earlier. Solving problems in ways that—I mean, Weber State University's record, if you will, of litigation and even of the complaints administratively outside the university too. For example, the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or the office for Civil Rights or the Department of Justice or any of those. So, courts, administrative agencies, the conflicts at Weber State almost never leave the institution and almost never left the institution. There were almost no lawsuits filed based on civil rights complaints. I would like to believe that the reason for that was that we were able to resolve those conflicts short of people feeling the desperate need to get satisfaction such that it drove them outside the university to seek that redress. I think, being able to work in an office that was viewed as helpful. As opposed to you know, no vicious inner meddler or worse, a dictator. The process that the EEO office followed in handling complaints, and investigations and such, was extremely transparent. There was a lot of resentment, no resistance, to bringing an attorney into that position. I think a number of faculty felt that if the EEO officer is a lawyer, that they're all going to be prosecuted. It was just sort of this visceral fear. Reshaping that to the point where, I would like to think, people felt comfortable contacting the office when they had a question, you know, instead of screwing up and creating a situation that required all sorts of cleaning up, 30 that people would seek at least input from the office before they ventured forth across the land mine field. I think that we avoided a lot of situations that would have been disastrous. Those are aspects of the work that felt really fulfilling. KH: Okay. What recognition have you received for your accomplishments? BG: You know, one of the byproducts of resolving problems before they get really bad is that there isn't much recognition. I remember telling Ann, and maybe Paul, “I don't want you to hear about my work. I want the office to operate in such a way that EEO problems never get to you.” Because everybody who feels aggrieved, you know, if they can't get satisfaction some other way, then they want to talk to the person in the President's office. I considered it a success if they really didn't know what I was doing and it didn't come to their attention. That meant that, unlike most of the rest of the universities in the state, and I imagine in the country, which, you know, can see their—Risk Management will share their litigation records, right? Because one of the biggest expenses in that realm are attorneys’ fees to defend the institutions against litigation from their own faculty and staff or students. Weber was a bargain. Risk management, I think, for a long time looked very approvingly of the ability of the institution to resolve its own conflicts short of forcing them outside. That was a philosophy that I had. Don't take a hard line such that the individual who feels aggrieved has no alternative but to go outside because you're just asking for trouble. Try everything you can to resolve it internally, if possible. KH: How have you become a mentor to others in your field? BG: Oh, I don't—who cares? [Laughter] Well, you know the work I mentioned earlier, the consulting, that's certainly mentoring. I've done that in a couple of different settings, including here. But also, you know, I don't know if I would say mentoring so much as supportive. When I see an Adrianne Andrews or a Paige Davies or a Stephanie 31 Hollist, I just want so badly for the institution to utilize their talents and their incredible abilities. Hopefully, that makes them feel supported as well. But it's, you know, selfish. It ain't for them, it's for the university because they bring so much. I could bring lots of other examples too, but those are the individual with whom I worked most closely the last 10 or 15 years that I was here. What was interesting is that we met initially, completely ad hoc, informally. We would get a sexual assault complaint and it would involve the police, so we'd bring over Dane LeBlanc and obviously the Women's Center. University Legal Counsel Representative understood well the potential risk, liability wise, reputation wise, etcetera. So, Stephanie Hollist would come in, much more often than Rich Hill did. We would bring in, you know, Dean Jeff Hurst, from the Dean of Students office; we would bring in Dianna Abel from the counseling center. That group eventually formalized itself, became embedded in policy and continues, I'm sure, to this day, to handle those sorts of situations; where not only are civil rights being violated, but also potentially criminal conduct or other seriously harmful conduct. KH: Okay. What advice would you give to students starting in your field? BG: Tell me what you mean by that. KH: You can see that as civil rights, as law, as teaching. What advice would you give for them today if they were to start in this field? BG: That was the most troubling of the questions, I think, because those are really different questions, right? Teaching would be something different from [pauses]. As a student, I'm not sure I've got a good answer to that. Make sure you really love the work. I believe that the single most important skill in that whole area is being able to see the world from the perspective of the individual with whom you're interacting, and not to force your perspective on that situation. That is certainly true in, you know, the discriminatory harassment area. It was so often the case that people 32 would respond to an accusation of discriminatory harassment with, “But I didn't mean…” and that may well be true in most instances. I don't think people very often are intentionally mean. You have a certain political leader contemporary right now who would be an exception to that. But I think for the most part, people are hard wired to do that which they believe is right. What they may have difficulty doing is recognizing that intent doesn't necessarily mean that their treatment of whoever they're interacting with perceives it that way. To be able to understand how they're perceiving that situation is the most crucial skill in avoiding discrimination and harassment, particularly harassment, which is a subset of discrimination. KH: Okay. When did you retire from Weber State? BG: Well, as a full-time employee, I think I retired at the end of January '21. But I have continued in an hourly capacity. I mean, speaking of mentoring. I've tried to make myself available to handle complaints that the EEO office may find challenging for one reason or another, but also to do that in a way that sort of shows how it had been done before, to whatever degree that might be useful for whoever's in the position. KH: Did you have any other questions? LR: Not at the moment. KH: Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to share? BG: I beat you into submission, didn't I? LR: No. It's, I have so enjoyed just listening that—well, okay, I'll ask this, because I love this question. What do you hope your legacy is? BG: That's a great question. Well. I think I'd have to say that there's a tremendous amount of backlash towards affirmative action and equal opportunity these days. I would hope that seeds have been planted here at Weber that would resist the 33 temptation to try to rein it in. To, you know, rid the university of that influence, because I obviously believe that it's important and beneficial. And so, to whatever degree, it becomes resistant to that backlash that would that would be very pleasing. KH: Is there anything else you'd like to share? BG: I think not. KH: Okay, great. Thank you for your time. BG: Thank you. 34