Oral History Transcript - Ronald C. Brown - December 10, 1991
Interview with Ronald C. Brown
Interviewer: Mary A. Allen
Transcriber: Mary A. Allen
Date of Interview: December 10, 1991
Location: Dr. Brown’s Office, Psychology Building
Mary A. Allen: This is December 10, 1991, and we are visiting with Dr. Brown in his office in the Honors area [Psychology Bldg.]. Dr. Brown, you started working at SWT in 1973?
Dr. Ron Brown: No, 1975. I came here to interview in early July of 1975 and brought my wife with me because the only part of Texas we had ever seen before coming here was Amarillo and we were apprehensive about what it might be like. My advisor's wife had taught here back in the early fifties. Her name was Mary Lee then Nance and now it's Spence and so she was familiar with the area and taught at this school. She said, “Oh, you'll love it, it’s got lots of interesting features, even palm trees in San Antonio”. Her family lived in Kyle and some of them still live in the area, so she was very familiar with this area. So Judy came along, and we decided after looking at it that we'd like to come down here. There weren't very many history positions open at that time in the United States generally, so I felt fairly fortunate that I was able to get an appointment here at SWT.
Ms. Allen: What were your impressions of the department when you first came?
Dr. Brown: My earliest impressions are intriguing ones. I was given over in the interview process to several different people. At one point I interviewed with Ron Jager, Everette [Swinney], and Tug Wilson. And they spent most of the time asking about my teaching experience and my training background. It wasn't exactly what I would call an intense interview but obviously they had certain kinds of concerns and interests. Then the next part of the interview process [they] put me in the hands of Merry Fitzpatrick, Betty Kissler, and Emmie Craddock. I can't remember everything we talked about but I'm sure reflecting that we talked about their good friend, Mary Lee Nance Spence. We also talked about teaching and what kind of an institution SWT was. Everette Swinney was the chairman at the time and he was genial. When we got off the plane, he was kind of a good-ol’-boy type, had a slight accent which in those days I could distinguish.
I don't think any more I can distinguish an accent at all. But from having lived in Central Texas since the 1950s even though he had grown up in eastern Ohio and attended school at Penn State he had lost that distinctive Northeastern or Mideastern accent by the time we met him. It rained terribly hard the day we came.
Ms. Allen: Did you fly into Austin?
Dr. Brown: We flew into San Antonio, so we saw palm trees when we got off the airplane. (We arrived in the evening and the lunch reference probably meant the two meetings described above.) Then after that we went to lunch. It was kind of interesting, I was coming right out of research-oriented institution with heavy emphasis on publication and Judy was with me. She had spent most of the morning in a frustrating search for housing. Hadn’t found anything that appealed to her at this point until we went out for lunch at the Quail Creek Country Club with Jim Pohl and Everette Swinney.
I'll never forget in retrospect one of the funniest things at the time. Judy turned to the two of them and said after we had been talking a little bit and said, “Well what exactly have you published lately?” I guess one could think that it was a great faux pas, at least because neither one at that point had any significant publications. Everette had an article or two, and Jim Pohl had published a junior high textbook. Judy was thinking of the sort of thing that historians in Illinois were doing and so that was kind of interesting. It was a real luncheon conversation stopper, as they tried to explain why at SWT we didn't publish.
Ms. Allen: What was there their explanation?
Dr. Brown: If I can reconstruct it, that this was primarily a teaching institution and that there was a heavy teaching load and that of course research was encouraged but it was frequently difficult to do, and they themselves had not been able to publish as much as they had hoped to since they had been out of graduate school, and that sort of thing. There weren't the kind of incentives that there were at a large school or a major research institution. And then after that I interviewed in the afternoon with Ralph Harrel, who was then one of the deans, and Henry Norris, who later became the academic vice president.
The Henry Norris interview was particularly interesting because absolutely nothing of any consequence transpired. He asked if I had any hobbies. I said I played a little racket ball, and he played a lot of hand ball. I indicated that I had played some golf as a kid and hadn't played a lot recently. So I guess that persuaded him that I was, though bearded, not some kind of a dangerous person coming to campus because Dr. Norris was basically pretty concerned about the character of the faculty, and I think he was interested in having a conservative faculty. So, by far the most interesting conversation I had was with Ralph Harrel when I interviewed. He really seemed to be interested in my research. He'd read my resume, had some questions that I thought were pretty provocative. More so than any of the discussions I had had with the department which were primarily; can you teach, this is the kind of courses that we have, this is the kind of students we have, this is the kind of grade distribution that we have, and this sort of thing. We found some housing and came to campus. The first event that we attended was a party at the end of registration which was held in Dr. Swinney's back yard. All the history faculty came together and mingled. It was Dr. Swinney cooking bar-be-que hamburgers and a big keg of beer, and it was clear that the history department drank a little bit in those days.
Ms. Allen: Was this the party with the cow?
Dr. Brown: No I don't think so, well there may of been. He always had some animals around. One time one of his dogs ripped one of my shirts at a party. We used to have parties in those days, both in the fall and then usually there was some kind of a Super Bowl party while Everette was chairman. We'd meet over at his home and have bar-be-que brisket and beer, soft drinks. One time, he had a new young puppy and it had sharp teeth, and it just decided it wanted to gnaw on my shirt, ripped a hole in my shirt. (This first party at Ev’s house was) when I met Bill Pool and Ken Margerison. I don't think I had met Frank Josserand. Dennis [Dunn] had been gone in the summer when I came so I met Dennis then. I met Elston Hill and Jim Broussard and John Graves all who were part of that group that was terminated the first year that I was here. I met John Bullion who was a UT product on a temporary appointment and is now teaching at the University of Missouri. I met Roger Spiller who was an SWT undergraduate and maybe a master student, too and then he went off to Louisiana State and was working on his PhD with T. Harry Williams who was in those days one of the preeminent southern historians and biographer of Huey Long and also a military historian.
The other two people who came in at that same time I did were Rex Polser who had gotten his degree at Nebraska and now works in the corporate world as a records manager, and the other was Tom Riddle who was ABD from Washington State University. He was working on populism and a newspaper editor who was a populist in the late nineteenth-century. Tom and I were about the same age. For me and for him, I think, it was okay but I think for both Judy and for Tom's wife, Linda, I think there was always a kind of ‘well one of us might stay and the other might not.’ Tom got a job eventually at Hastings College in Nebraska. I think that was a factor in the department deciding to give me tenure or make that option available even though I came here on a terminal contract. Tom was an interesting fellow. Politically he was a sixties radical. He smoked some marijuana.
Ms. Allen: New left historian?
Dr. Brown: Yeah, kind of a new left historian with that interest in populism. Handsome fellow really wowed the young coeds. He had a nice handle-bar mustache, was a runner, very thin and trim. After he got to Hastings, he became disenchanted with Nebraska and eventually left there after about five or six years and went to a junior college.
I think it’s the College of the Sequoias in Central California where he now teaches. In the beginning not so much but later on I think there was some tension particular between Judy and Linda. He said as much, in fact we had both applied for the job at Hastings and when he left he said that he sort of hated me because I might be able to stay because he was taking this other job although I would have taken the other job if I had been offered it. So we were friends and sort of not friends at the same time.
Ms. Allen: In competition?
Dr. Brown: Yeah, although there really wasn't any competition up until after he left because the department never led any of us to believe that we had any option of staying here.
Ms. Allen: How long were you here before they offered you tenure?
Dr. Brown: The second or third year I was here I did a fairly extensive evaluation of a country music course that Kent Finley who is the local bar owner and country music aficionado taught for the department as a non-history major upper-level elective. In thinking about how I could evaluate this and determine whether it was really a history course or not I decided that the only way I could really do this was to go to every class.
So, on top of my regular twelve-hour load, I went to ninety percent of the classes that Finley taught. The result was a report that I suspect was the most thorough report that's ever been done on any kind of a course at SWT. I think that and the fact that I also agreed to work on the university history persuaded the department or at least Everette Swinney. I don't know this for a fact but I think he became convinced that I was somebody the department ought to keep around. Of course Merry FitzPatrick and Emmie Craddock, as old friends of Mary Lee Nance, no doubt bore some desire to try to help their good friend's husband's student. How that all came to work out, I wasn't in on any of the deliberations but I think there is a story to be told there. I think they actually planned it.
At some point I think they had decided they were going to try to tenure me. I think about the fourth or fifth year they sort of implied without ever saying specifically, Everette did, that tenure was a possibility. It actually didn't come until the sixth year when they changed the terms of my contract so I was promoted to associate and tenured in the same year. I came here actually with a PhD and was hired as an instructor so they could get me cheaper. That affected my pay and probably still has to some extent from that time until the present because it started me out at a lower, probably about two or three thousand dollars lower.
Ms. Allen: Is that pretty much how they –
Dr. Brown: No since then they have not. Only that one group. Only Rex Polser and I. Both of us came with a PhD and we both were hired as instructors. Usually, a PhD would be hired as an assistant. After that I think they decided that was not really fair and just didn't do that.
Ms. Allen: I am interested in the course evaluation. Did you determine it was a history course?
Dr. Brown: Yeah, I think Finley did a pretty good job. There were a lot of things that were really hilarious. One of the funniest things that I remember was – he began with a discussion of the emergence of country music from old time blues and things like that and the development of folk music, the movement of folk music across the country. None of which was terribly new but by the second week he had recordings and as he began to talk about early Texas country music, he played different kinds of it. But the Texas country music was, from my perspective, almost totally indecipherable. I couldn't make heads nor tails of what was being sung. I've been close enough to kind of a Kentucky and Tennessee type of country music that I could pick up the drawl there but the old time Texas drawl I couldn't make heads nor tails of. Maybe it was the recording quality, but I think it was also just the heavy drawl of the old-timers.
Mrs. Allen: Wasn't there a SWT person, Malone, that did a –
Dr. Brown: Right, Bill Malone did a book on country music. He was a good friend of Swinney's. That was the book that they used as a textbook so there was a good solid textbook as the basis for the course.
It was sort of the end of the second week or maybe the first of the third week, I didn't understand one damn thing they are saying, I was totally befuddled sitting there in my seat thinking everybody else understood everything that was going on. Finally this one student, a little bit more brazen than the rest put up his had and said “Mr. Finley, what the hell are they saying?” Then it became clear to me that the modern Texas accent or the modern students were no more able to decipher the old Texas accent than I was. That was one of the things that struck me when I first came here was how soft or how muted the accent in this part of the state really is. It's not a heavy drawl. The only time I could really discern it, of course ya’ll is a southern or southwestern expression.
The other thing is when I went to football games you could always tell ‘first and ten, do it again’. The rhyming of ten and again that would not have been there had I been listening to a football game in the Midwest. Otherwise, I really wasn't able to distinguish a very heavy accent at all. It was fascinating. The course was clearly a history course.
Ms. Allen: How long was that taught?
Dr. Brown: It was taught a think three different times, maybe twice. It was only evaluated the first time. There was a lot of internal dissension in the department. We were at I guess at the early stages of the big decline of the seventies. Concerns about majors, at that time the university president, Lee Smith, was trying to force the university budgeting process into one in which semester credit hour generation very clearly affected departmental funding. The department was losing positions.
Ms. Allen: It was a period of declining number of majors?
Dr. Brown: They went from probably four or five hundred, I don't know what the peak was, in the very early seventies to at one point around seventy-nine or maybe eighty in that academic year I think there were less than fifty history majors. Everyone was a business major. When I came here the School of Business was at a plateau, just ready to take off. They brought in some new administrators and faculty in the School of Business. Within a few years there they were graduating fifty percent of all the undergraduate students. So they just boomed through the 1980s. They have a large number today but they sort of peaked and plateaued now because a lot of accounting and computer information systems graduates tend to get jobs but management and marketing people are really probably no more attractive than a history major.
There has been a lot of emphasis in the public press and in some of the corporate circles employing people who can relate to the customer. It’s not so much a matter of what you know as how you handle people. How you show an interest and whether you can learn a buying division in a small corporation. That period of time was one in which history was experiencing a sharp decline and it was hoped that if Finley's class appealed to students we might get thirty or forty or fifty additional advanced students. That was also the time in which they allowed Dr. Pool to teach his course on the Kennedy assassination, showed the Zapruder film over and over and things like that. I think he taught that about two or three times. Again, it was a course primarily designed for the non-major to increase advance course enrollment at a time if we weren't able to do that we were likely to be cut even though we continued to teach a very disproportionate number of students with probably the least support of any department on campus at the time.
Ms. Allen: Is that the case at this point?
Dr. Brown: Yes, history is the most understaffed, not faculty, of course they do have a large number of student graders, but in terms of actual staff personnel, secretaries and that kind of support staff, they don't have that. When I first came here every faculty member had I think seven or eight hours a week of student grader time. You could send them to the library for books, they could help correct little quizzes and that sort. That's been gone for ten or fifteen years. Now if you have a large class of course you have a graduate assistant, but new faculty don't have any kind of support at all. There is less and less support from the office as the amount of work that the chair is expected to do is increased. The secretary is really the secretary of the chair and doesn’t do anything accept run a few tests and things like that.
Ms. Allen: Is the budget for the department tied to the number of history majors now?
Dr. Brown: Not any more. It really was a fiction at any time. The university gets a certain amount of dollars based upon a number of factors part of which is semester credit hours generated and the number of students enrolled the amount of fees they pay, etc. But it doesn't really any near pay the cost of running this institution. There is a subsidy beyond that comes in from the state. Students don t pay any real proportion at all of the cost of their education.
Private school costs more clearly reflect what it really costs to educate someone. A student at SWT is probably getting – well what did your fees run in the course of a year?
Ms. Allen: Around two hundred dollars a course not counting books.
Dr. Brown: So if you took twelve or fourteen hours.
Ms. Allen: A fifteen [semester] load will run twelve hundred to fifteen hundred dollars a year.
Dr. Brown: Basically you are paying about one-tenth of what it costs or less of what it costs to educate you.
Ms. Allen: How would you characterize the personality of the department as a whole?
Dr. Brown: When I came it was an interesting time because of the Friday night massacre, the decision not to tenure any of the 3 people, John Graves, Elston Hill, and Jim Broussard. Broussard was a Republican and had ruffled some feathers because the department was primarily Democratic. Elston had done some pretty esoteric research on a fellow who was a homosexual and couldn't get his work published and John Graves had not finished his dissertation. So each in their own way had liabilities. When the department decided that as a defensive strategy, and also I think in my own opinion, as an expression of their unwillingness to try to sort out the three, that each had liabilities. Maybe each had their own supporters and their own detractors on the faculty. Be that as it may, I wasn't privy to any of that at the time; I think the department assumed at that point a sort of ‘hunker down’ mentality, closed society. I guess what distinguished me from some of the other people was I came here from Illinois. Judy and I had been real active, involved in the community, church, university.
When we came here we just decided we were going to fit in, temporary position, not more that three years, it didn't really matter. While we were here we were going act as if we were really people. One of the problems, Rex Polser was not married so that posed a problem for him. The faculty was predominantly married although Emmie and Betty were not. Emmie, Betty, and Merry, because Merry's husbands had died, tended to go as sort of a group frequently or Emmie brought her mother so they operated as sort of de facto couples. [This] meant that for somebody single it was kind of a difficult environment. We just invited people over; we thought nothing about it. We were trying to make sure we had good recommendations, if it didn't work out, for someplace else. We decided we might as well enjoy it. We found friends, Bill Liddle, Ken Margerison. There were things that were disconcerting. Bill Liddle said at one of the very early parties, “Gee, I like you, and that may be kind of traumatic for me, since you may not be around” or something like that. I can't remember exactly how he phrased it, considerably nicer than that, but the implication was 'gee I like you but you may not be around and this is kind of an investment in someone who many not be around'. Bill and Ken, Booty Clayton at that time had not been promoted. The senior staff system at the time excluded everybody below the rank of associate professor. Of course, Mr. Clayton didn't have a PhD so therefore he couldn't be an associate at the time. Merry had been made an associate even though she didn't have a PhD. But they were the only two that were. Bill and Ken were really outside of the circle of people. Indeed they were the ones who fought hardest to try to get some genuine consideration for Elston and Jim Broussard. They tried to press the department not to close it off even though I think the year before there had been some talk of stopping tenure. So for the next, really until I was tenured, and really continuing on beyond that the department had kind of a closed mind set.
Ms. Allen: Are the number of slots for tenured professors left to the department?
Dr. Brown: Now, probably not. At the time, sort of. What the history department decided to do was to ensure that none of the people that were here would ever have to be retrenched if there was a continuing decline in student enrollment. One of the things that offset that was the fact that in Texas freshman have to take US history. So there was a large demand for actual fact of teaching that, but there were growing restraints on advanced and graduate courses. So for example, the first real graduate course that I taught, I did teach a course some years ago in oral history under the Texas history seminar number, but really the class that I taught this fall in the frontier is, after seventeen years, the first real graduate class I taught. That says something.
People like Jim Sherow have taught a graduate level course before I have because they were anxious to try to exploit his expertise with environmental history. So I have existed in an interesting realm with the department. In some ways I guess of the older group of people except for Dennis, I had a good publication record, not outstanding, but I got a book out pretty quickly and it got good reviews. I did the university history so I have a relatively good scholarly reputation but I was never considered good enough to teach in the graduate program or they didn't want to share the wealth of the graduate program. So I was closed out, as was Ken. They had to bring Ken in a little bit earlier because they needed more diversity in their graduate program. Everette and I had put a lot of pressure on Tug [Dr. Wilson] to really begin to let Ken teach at the graduate level. So Ken started teaching about a year or two before I did although I actually taught that one course before he did.
Ms. Allen: Do you expect to teach that again?
Dr. Brown: Well, I hope so, but who knows? I've submitted a proposal for a course on the history of business. It may be that's what I'll end up doing because some of my own research interests weave in that direction, but I'm also interested in the frontier.
Ms. Allen: How far in advance does the faculty know?
Dr. Brown: Now we are scheduling about a year in advance. Right now they are making out the schedule for next fall. When I first came here it was sort of, they made out the spring schedule in October or November. There was nothing like the long time that we have now.
Ms. Allen: What changes have you seen in the curriculum?
Dr. Brown: Not a lot. There have been some in the last few years and they've always been produced by the hiring of new faculty, the tenure tract ones. The fact that the department has been sort of prodded and forced into making some accommodation for these people's skills. See, I didn't have a real class until after I was tenured. It was interesting; I taught the western history course once. Tug let me teach it when he could have taught it. Then when I was tenured, that year, they decided at that point that the two modern US history courses would be Mr. Clayton's. So it wasn't until Emmie retired at the same time that I was being processed for tenure that courses were available. So to me fell Emmie's two courses. Nobody suggested that I develop my own course title. I had developed a course once, the West in Film and Fiction, that was topics course.
There was no interest in solidifying that as an ongoing offering in the department. So I cast about for things to do. That's how I got really involved in the Honors program because I thought, “well here is an avenue”. Emmie was really receptive to let me teach in the honors program. So she approved the course that I now teach in the Honors Program which is a course on the sixties. That goes back to a visit I made to the National Honors Conference at Kent State. Some students were sitting there and saying why isn't there a course on the sixties. This was about 1979, I guess. A kid about nineteen had raised a legitimate question. Why isn't there? There's lots of stuff around. Why can't the sixties be studied? So that's really the origin of the course in the Honors Program but we still don't have a course in history on the sixties.
We have a kind of modern US course which starts with WWII and comes forward but that's has always been the special domain of Booty Clayton.
Ms. Allen: I had that course and as I remember the bulk of it was on the Viet Nam era. When did you start teaching Honors courses?
Dr. Brown: I think I taught my first Honors course in the fall of 1977.
I came here in '75; I know I didn't teach one the first year; I don't think I taught one the second year but I might have. Then I taught one in the third year. That course was called 'Christianity, Materialism, and the Work Ethic in the Making of Modern America'. Basically, it looked at the ideas of materialism, particularly in our society. The acquisition of things and also religious ideas and the work ethic as intellectual factors that spoke to who Americans were.
Ms. Allen: When did you take over as director of the Honors Program?
Dr. Brown: That's an interesting question. I think it was about the same time I was tenured. In 1981, I think, I was appointed acting director. Actually Nancy Grayson, the English Department chairman, was, I think in the minds of most people, the heir apparent but Nancy had been denied promotion because she didn't have any publications and the university would put more emphasis on publication so Emmie asked Nancy if she wanted to become Honors Director and she said no. She wanted to concentrate her efforts on producing some publications. So I had been made chair of a committee that was studying the Honors Program at the time and making some recommendations for it. I can't remember, Nancy may have been co-chair. Certainly, the files would reflect what was actually going on. But when she chose not to, Emmie recommended that I be made Honors Director on a provisional basis.
Keith Loven, who was then Dean of Liberal Arts, endorsed that. I remained Acting Honors Director for a year, maybe a year and half. There were recommendations that I be made permanent, but the university was in flux. Dr. Smith was nearing the end of his administration and actually I didn't become Honors Director until after Hardesty got here. It was about six months after Hardesty came here.
Ms. Allen: Do you think that had a direct impact on your being made the permanent director? A new administration?
Dr. Brown: It's possible. It's hard to know about Lee Smith. He was a weird person, the strangest person I've ever dealt with.
He had a horrible reputation; allegedly a wife-beater and he was mean and small in lots of ways. He had no understanding of the English language at all. He once told me in a conversation much like this, and I had in my lap a little tablet like you have, I was then an assistant professor while I was working on the university history, he said “Ron let me tell you that everything I have touched (since he went to UT Dallas) has literally turned to gold”. Now if you were just a little bit cynical, as I am, there was a overwhelming compulsion to reach my little eight or ten ounce tablet across and say “Oh please Midas, one little miracle for me”. But I didn't do that. A person who would say that he didn't really have a[n] understanding of words. And to be president of a university and not understand the meaning of language is utterly incomprehensible. And that was a large part of his problem. But he was also mean and vindictive. So it’s hard for me to know. He liked what I wrote about him in the history of SWT, but if you read that, there is a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek. Lee Smith comes across as a not terribly nice guy, as a bit of a simp. In fact, Everette Swinney cautioned me that that could be my undoing but Lee Smith at a signing party for the history we had at Homecoming in 1979 or 80 just raved about how wonderfully I had portrayed him. Of course what I had done was to quote him and quote his foolish ideas so he liked that. But it read critically so you could say my gosh this guy's an idiot.
Ms. Allen: Would it be fair to say that his career as president here is generally looked on with disfavor?
Dr. Brown: I think so. There are some people who feel that he had some important insights. They believe that he had an understanding of the way in which the legislature appropriated money and that the school was terribly run down and that his emphasis upon bricks and mortar and renovation was something that the institution needed, desperately needed at the time. And also some of his policies, although most people at the time detested them, he constantly had change. He was one of these change agent types who always brought something new to create turmoil. It was a very counter productive environment. Terribly unsettling. We had big faculty meetings where the people were hooting and hollering at the academic vice president, well the acting one, who was Dr. Young in the School of Science, that was held over here in Flowers Hall in the coffee room. It was crazy. But he had all these procedures; he had job procedures for how to answer the telephone. They had OLs on the most inane things. And they had super-level OLs that people didn't even know about at the time. He was very secretive on that. And he probably shredded or carried off all the documents and I am convinced that there were probably things to hide. How much or how extensive I don't know but he was not a nice fellow. I really thought that the place was governed by kind of a lunatic at the time. Although it’s funny, people that I knew, including Everette Swinney, had indicated that they thought Smith was an interesting, bright fellow. The moment that I really saw Smith as a complete fool, because I didn't have that much time with him, I was a lowly assistant professor, instructor most of the time, I didn't have a lot of contact with him, maybe once or twice a year I saw him, shook his hand, 'nice to see you President Smith' but when I had that interview with him I did something that normally people didn't have to do. Sort of what you are doing right now. You can sit back and you can think: what is this person really saying?
What's really going through their mind? What are they telling you? And most people who dealt with Smith had their own agenda, they had their own concerns; they were trying to protect the interests of their department or they were trying to expand their own interests and so in that context it was kind of like sword play, intellectual dueling, trying to thwart him here, whatever. I was just sitting there and I thought, my gosh, this guy is an idiot.
Ms. Allen: Did the history department, as a whole, weather that fairly well?
Dr. Brown: Yeah, it weathered it pretty well.
Ms. Allen: Would you classify it as more insular?
Dr. Brown: Yes, very much. The history department was on the hit list I think. It was awfully difficult. Swinney is a genius when it comes to functioning as a committee leader. He always defines the terms of the discussion. He always does his homework and so as chair he responded to OLs and JPs and he called it to their attention that some of these things were foolish and crazy. And he probably wrote some himself that clarified things. At least he rephrased them so they didn't seem so foolish. He protected people from their own idiocy. At least if Smith had had the sense to pick Everette Swinney as his academic vice-president or in a position such as Supple has put Swinney now, he might still be president but he didn't. He put people in there who were going to try to impose his will. These were the people who had the truth. They didn't see that things were going to be changed over time and that nothing has real permanence. His last speech to the faculty was just bazaar.
The guy was talking about SWT being the twenty-first century equivalent of Harvard and Yale. And that people were going to come here to see how to govern an institution. Even as he spoke the grave robbers were digging at the roots of the mighty pyramid waiting for it to fall. He had already lost his job; they could hardly wait until they could get rid of OLs and JPs and all the rest of it. So he had no sense of proportion. But had he had the sense to put somebody like Swinney in there, he might well have carried it off. Everette's dedication to the institution is so great that he would have protected the institution and Smith in the process. That's my own opinion. The department did begin to take on a kind of defensive personality.
At one point, this is a hilarious little event, in the summer that Smith was fired, I actually was gone, and assumed he was fired. He resigned, but I think it was under duress. There were several meetings and Smith was planning a big shake up. The assumption was I've heard it said that Betty Kissler, who had just been made chairman of history, was on the hit list. Whether she was or not we won't know. At one point that very summer, Smith had said of the faculty, that we were buckets of shit. Referring to the faculty in general. Well this is a pretty crude statement at its very best and certainly inappropriate for a university president to be mouthing about. So, I think Dr. Jager did it, one morning as I went into the mail room. It used to be sort of in the middle of the hall way, there was a bright shiny new bucket there with a little thing saying 'make your contribution' or something like that. Then there was a big meeting and at that time there was an administrative decree from Smith that a certain number of faculty – there was a huge pay raise that had been legislated by the Texas legislature, and it was overall about a twenty or thirty percent pay raise across the board over a two year period, which makes a tremendous difference in people's salary. Smith had already targeted all the faculty senators; none of them were getting pay raises. Many of them actually left the university as a result of this. A number of them were bitter. A few faculty were notoriously bad teachers but Smith charged every department with identifying four or five percent who were going to black balled which meant they got no pay raise at all – that they were the dead wood of the higher education and they should be dealt with accordingly. And then there were to be the super stars, the models, the pacesetters who were to be given thirty percent pay raises as opposed to twenty percent like the rest of us were getting.
Ms. Allen: Wasn't that considered very divisive?
Dr. Brown: Oh, it was. Every department except history agreed to go along with this. There was a meeting; I'll never forget this meeting as long as I live. I wasn't here when Smith actually resigned but I was here for this meeting. Betty came down and said “I can't chose, I don’t think any of you deserve to get the black bean, no pay raise. So she said I'm coming to you for your advice. As a single person, the faculty said, 'we're not going to recommend anybody for the black bean and if one of us is targeted we will collectively contribute our pay raise to create a legal defense fund to fight it and hire attorneys and take on the whole university administration. And it was really kind of heady stuff. It was one of the first meetings after I had been tenured and promoted so I was on regular faculty meetings. It was really heavy stuff. That was an interesting time. I think the time that the department became most insular was when John Bardo was the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts which was a few years later. Bardo was, to my way of thinking, one of the few truly amoral human beings I have ever met. He wasn't immoral; he was just without scruples at all. It was his intent to divide the entire faculty and to mold them into his own notion. He particularly encouraged people to come and tattle on one another and he gave a real precedence to rumor and innuendo and all that sort of stuff.
There was a young student who was in the graduate program at the time, Laura Bounds, who had been a student of mine as a freshman. Laura had said a couple of things, I didn't know about this until much, much later, but had said a couple of things about a history course she had taken that caused Bardo and she said this in an offhanded way, Bardow’s wife had been questioning her about this on a trip to Russia that Dennis Dunn had taken a group of faculty. Laura went along and she was talking about this and I thought, my gosh, that's where that information came from. Bardo had called Betty Kissler on the carpet and said how can you have a faculty member who has these kinds of unrealistic expectations of students. Laura had just mentioned the person was hard; yeah it was difficult to get an A from them. I don't remember who it was, it may have been Jager, but I'm not sure. As I was saying, Bardo called Betty on the carpet for a casual reference that one of the graduate students had made to his wife who was a student at the university at the same time and who was asking sort of leading questions in order to get at the faculty. The departments that were most severely hit were Political Science. Ted Hindson was the chairman, Wendell. We used to bring in Randy Bland who briefly served as chairman. Of course he fell understandably with the same kind of pressure and so then they had gone though several chairs in the course of a year and a half or two years. It was symbolic of this sort of thing that Bardo tried to do. History just said, in fact I remember another meeting. We kind of jokingly responded to what we should do with regard to Bardow. Well we said we ought to just invite him over here and take him into the back room and work him over with some rubber truncheons or something. [laughter] It was clearly a fortress mentality.
By that time we had moved to Taylor/Murphy and if anything I suspect the building itself and the isolation it provided offered a kind of an additional incentive. But the department was never a department that aired its laundry outside of its own circles.
Ms. Allen: It seemed to weather external threats. What about internal threats? Can you think of any examples?
Dr. Brown: The internal problems I think largely were the problems that you can associate with Bill Liddle and Ken and I. There may have been others. I think there were always some resentments internally. I think there was some resentment against Swinney probably by some segments of the old faculty. I don't think I fully perceived this until much later but I think Woody Anderson and Ron Jager had some apprehensions about Everette and his capacity to manipulate things. I mean it’s not hard to see how. He works so effectively, always does his homework. He defines the parameters of the discussion. Things tend to go his way because that's really the way he is. He's always willing to make compromises but in the process he keeps the substance of what he wants. Whereas Jager I think is more ideologically committed to a particular truth. So that was one thing. There were some controversies I think as well between. Jim Pohl I think felt that he was better than or something of the other faculty in those days. His relationships with people in history tended to atrophy in the Seventies and early Eighties. He was faculty senate chair at one point. He always has kind of a peculiar manner about him which he tries to make people feel ill at ease or whatever. I think that was something amplified in that period.
Ms. Allen: What about currently? Is there any internal conflict right now?
Dr. Brown: Yeah. I think the issues have really come to the surface as we move. See, the decision to establish tenure was a very divisive one. As we were talking about it in the late or mid-eighties, as we began to puzzle out what was going to happen, one of the things that we discussed was the retirement pattern and the need to bring in new people who can begin to shoulder some of the responsibilities. Ken and I were certainly pushing on this as we were approaching forty, getting in our upper thirties and we didn't want to have to do all the work all the time. We frequently got it, Bill and Ken and I got it. The older people had already done their stint; they didn't feel like they had to do it. There was some inequity in terms of who had to work registration and so forth. If you taught graduate classes then you didn't have to work registration, those sorts of inequities sort of grated. So as we began to push for reopening tenure, there were people like Pohl who said he expected history as a discipline to become less and less appealing to people and that he intended to stick by his standards until the time arrived that he might be the last living historian at the institution, a real kind of almost a sacrificial or martyr type mind set. Then as we began to move into tenure some really important divisive issues surfaced.
One was the question of women. How many women should be on the faculty? Betty and Emmie were two of the older faculty; they were going to retiring early. Certainly, for some of us, that was an important consideration that we had lots of really fine women undergraduate and graduate students. In fact a disproportion number of our best students have always been women. We felt that they needed some role models, professional role models. Well, some people in the faculty didn't believe that that was appropriate. There were some people, Jager for example, who was really wanting to have known quantity. The known was always better than the unknown. Taking a risk was always dangerous, so for him that was a special concern. We had some very divisive battles over the early tenure slots, over who was to be chosen. When Leah Shopkow was chosen, she was black, Jewish, a woman. Was there racism or other kinds of discrimination there, I don't know. Her opponent, her principal oppositionist was kind of slick, devious fellow who had really scouted out the whole faculty. He had a book coming out from Oxford, and he told Frank Josserand, who had at that time never published anything, and Jager that he was just dying to get their assistance helping him with whatever his manuscript was. A person who has had a book accepted by Oxford doesn't need the editorial assistance of anybody at Southwest Texas, in my humble opinion. It was intentionally designed to curry favor. He was the preference of a segment of the faculty, particularly Jager and Woody Anderson; I don't know how Booty voted, Frank Josserand, Bill Brunson I think. But Leah got the job in a very close race.
The next one was the hiring of Lou Gomolak and again there was a woman this time from Georgetown, not that it just a woman but she was the person that best met the criteria which was somebody who was in China and the U. S. Through some interesting voting patterns, we usually have three candidates coming up. When you have three candidates come up, who you rate second really has a lot to do with where the ranking works. They ranked Vikki Bynum second. The woman from Georgetown, Vikki Bynum and Lou Gomolak were the candidates at that time. So some of them ranked Vikki second, several people ranked Vikki first. She was really outstanding. Others of us ranked her second or third. But the net effect was to make Vikki second, Lou Gomolak first and this woman from Georgetown third. It was an interesting strategy, and of course it made for some bitterness because we sort of subverted our intent. I think in the long term the department has been better off for it because we were able to ultimately hire Joseph Yick and have a real Asianist and I think that's probably desirable. Gomolak has not been successful. He is still here but he's not been very effective.
Ms. Allen: Will he be tenured do you think?
Dr. Brown: Personally, I don't think so; I wouldn't want to be quoted on that.
Ms. Allen: Dr. Bynum?
Dr. Brown: Yes, I think she will be. She is up for tenure this year and I don't think there is any reason that she won't be tenured. I can't imagine any.
Ms. Allen: Who is over there now? Greg Andrews, Sherow?
Dr. Brown: The issue now is the department went all these years without anybody. Ken, Bill Liddle and I were just dismissed. We really didn't matter. Now of course, the junior faculty, the department needs junior faculty, it has to go for the future and so how do you do this? I think the big issue has really been the need to make concessions to the junior faculty, involve them in the decision making process to give them a stake and a role in the department. This has not always been easy. For some people it hasn't been easy at all. I think for people like Tug, it’s difficult because he wants to manage the department.
Ms. Allen: Does he not have a definitive long range plan? Within ten years they are probably going to lose half of the tenured professors they've got over there.
Dr. Brown: Right, but they don't think that way. Even though they are historians and should think that way. You know, you want to hold on to what you've got. That's one thing I have to say about Emmie with the Honors Program. Emmie walked out, and I inherited the program. She continues to ask me how things are going but she has never once come over here and tried to suggest how I ought to run it.
Ms. Allen: She asked very pointed questions about it. And is very pleased to find out that it’s not just a departmental thing.
Dr. Brown: That I think is important. We've made a lot of changes that Emmie wanted to make and Emmie's problem as director was when Emmie was appointed director she was really at the core of what was happening in the university. But over the course of the next eight or ten years she basically became one of the older senior people so she didn't have the contacts and didn't make any effort to establish contacts with new and younger faculty. Not that she didn't want to, she just didn't do it. That's one thing I really try consciously to do is to make myself meet new young faculty. They are the people who have ideas for new courses. They don't have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. They have a vested interest in trying to explore some of their own interests and I think that's a part of the problem.
Ms. Allen: Do you actively solicit their ideas for courses?
Dr. Brown: ¶¶Not just history faculty, but all over the university. Don Olson wants to do the physics of how to shoot a water balloon over the JCK building. I thought that would be a great course. He thinks it could be done. Build a catapult that will launch it with enough speed and so forth. And how do you get a balloon that's strong enough to hold the water, but it won't immediately break. It strikes me as an ingenious course.
Ms. Allen: His enthusiasm in his courses is what is striking.
Dr. Brown: Yeah, he's brilliant. He's brilliant and multitalented and here is somebody then that ought to be teaching in the Honors Program.
Ms. Allen: When the university went to a nine-hour course load, did that hurt the Honors Program?
Dr. Brown: Yes, very definitely. Well, it either became a reality or an excuse for curtailing support. I think Tug has been much less supportive of the Honors Program than his predecessors, Everette and Betty. They really wanted to see it go. I think Tug has no vested interest in it and so it’s been a lot more difficult for me to get faculty from history for example but also from English, the same thing has happened. Now Philosophy has been more supportive. They didn't have anybody teaching in the Honors Program until the last couple of years. Some other parts of the university continue to be supportive but I think History, which used to carry about half the weight of the Honors Program, now offers one or two faculty per semester instead four or five as it did in sometimes past. So I think that's important. To return to your earlier question, I think the department right now is going through more tension than it has in a long time. It’s had to approve a bunch of new courses in order to placate the interest of the junior faculty. It’s had to make opportunities available to them. Traditionally they used to say things to new people, particularly Pohl, “after you've grown gray of beard and long of tooth, then you will have an opportunity to teach a graduate class”. Well for me or for Ken that's true. We were gray and long of tooth by the time we got to teach graduate level courses but there was no reason that should have happened.
Ms. Allen: With the declining number or relatively small number of majors you would think the diversity of courses available would increase rather than
Dr. Brown: You'd think that would be what you'd want to do, get more of your faculty out there but they wanted to hold on to what was theirs. One of the things that I think is interesting as we look at the department is that the first department, the old department, the modern old department were a group of people that are all about the same age. They were a club. They came about the same time, they had the same interests. Tug is the one exception because he came from outside with Billy Mac Jones so he's a little bit of an outsider which means that he is a little bit of an uncertain component in terms of the departmental policy and decisions, and who he'll defend, and what issues he'll take a stand on. But the rest of them really had a kind of club mentality. Then there were Ken and I, I guess, Dennis has always been sort of unto himself. Bill Liddle will usually support Ken and me but we have sort of existed in kind of a never, never land. Bill is part of the old department but he’s so radical in his fundamental thinking, he’s so unwilling to be a conformist, he’s such an individualist that he cannot do other than follow his own conscious. Of course, now we’re going to have something not unlike it.
Ken and I have joked about the fact that maybe we will never be a part of the real department because we'll be too young for the old department and too old for the new. So, we'll be kind of on the periphery vote and maybe that's how we'll live out our careers here, not that that is bad, actually. We'll have a lot of people in the same time frame who are going to be coming in and constituting the new department. One of the real challenges is – are we going to be able to keep these people? Are they going to go on someplace else? So I think that's one of the real big issues that rule in terms of this internal tension about the curriculum and changes in curriculum and course offerings and so forth. You know people are signing up for courses like Vikki Bynum's Women's History and Black History.
Ms. Allen: Even non-history people?
Dr. Brown: Surely. And that's you know, what we should have been doing all along but
Ms. Allen: If there are interesting courses that people sign up for, after a student takes six or nine hours of interesting courses, they consider becoming a major if the diversity is there.
Dr. Brown: I think one problem that I've seen is that many of the old faculty are people who trained at schools not unlike SWT and went off to get their PhDs at places like UT, most of them do have UT degrees. So they tended to see history as kind of professional training. They themselves perhaps trained as teachers. Betty trained as a teacher, Bill Brunson trained as a teacher, Everette trained as a teacher. I don't know whether Woody did, Jager clearly didn't. But a number of the old timers did. And that's one area I think where Ken and I were always a little different and maybe Bill, although Bill did go to Peabody which wasn't unlike a teacher training school, but you know, our notion was never I didn't go into history because I was going to be a school teacher. I never envisioned being a public school teacher nor did I ever question the value of history, the importance of history simply because it was temporarily out of vogue.
I was absolutely confident it would become something we'd be interested in again and that we could interest students in again. That this business fad of the seventies and early eighties was something that too would pass. But I think for a lot of the older faculty, they really had gone into history at a time it was at the thing to do, they liked it obviously, but that was also a kind of job security and kind of focus. I think with that in mind then their own confidence maybe in themselves or in their choices began to weaken or waver so their defensive posture may have been related to how it is that they end up being college 'history professors. Of course for Ken and for me and to a lesser extent for Bill it was something we did didn't go into it for the money. If it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out.
Ms. Allen: What was your goal at the outset?
Dr. Brown: In the beginning I wanted to be an astronomer, but I ran into calculus. Once I started on history, I was going to go to law school. I went to a private liberal arts college. I never thought about anything else. I wasn't even until the spring of my senior year; one of my advisors said “have you thought about going to graduate school?” I said no, the thought hadn't crossed by mind. What do you do? I knew lots of lawyers who had history degrees. He said you could become a college professor like me and talked to me about what it might entail and so forth. It was fun, I loved history. It was doing history that I liked to do, research. I don't know in those days whether I liked the writing. I not sure that I wasn't fairly close to plagiarizing, not literal plagiarism, but taking ideas. They weren't all that good. Hopefully I make my own students do a better job than I did in some of the undergraduate classes I was in. I had good faculty. They were trained at good schools, Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton. So I decided, why not go to graduate school. The Viet Nam War was pressing, and I didn't want to go to Viet Nam either. So I went to the University of Illinois and really found it exciting and interesting. So I got out and then what am I going to do? Judy had a good job. If I hadn't been able to get a job as a college professor I could have tried administration at the university or gone into banking or something else. I was never that tied down to the belief that it was a kind of professional training that I was going to.
Ms. Allen: You mentioned to me in an earlier conversation about one of your goals for your students. I can't remember the exact words you used, something about being able to take material and work with it, interpret it, rather than just history by rote. I think you mentioned you and Dr. Margerison
Dr. Brown: I think one the things that I'm confident that we both believe in is that history isn't a small body of knowledge, that really it’s a kind of skill. That it is not what you know but what you can do with what you know and how you can gather information. I don't think we are unique in that sense although there are some people in the department who believe in a small body of knowledge; you've got to have these particular facts and got to be able to regurgitate them on an exam if you're going to get an A. I never believed that. It's a process, history is a process. And the student must be able to see and understand this process, try to figure out ways to get the information that they need to answer the questions. What are the major questions that we face in trying to solve a problem in a paper or in an essay. I like creative thinking. Someone who has sort of a creative bent about them, because I think that raises some new questions, new ways to look at the material. So that's one of the things that I've always been concerned with. A good history major should be able to ask some fundamental questions, puzzle out a way to try to resolve them, then set about gathering information to solve it as he or she sees fit. So that's my notion of history. There is no specific event that you can't live without knowing.
Ms. Allen: Do you think the students now in the history department are required a higher level of thought processes than they were twenty years ago?
Dr. Brown: I don't really know. At the survey level, in the old days there were fewer of us that required papers. Most people had abandoned them. General Studies forced everybody to start putting papers in their class. Lots of people still do book reviews at the advanced undergraduate level. I've never been too taken with book reviews although they can be useful when they begin to cultivate critical skills. But I guess Ken and I were two of the early advocates of papers. We devised some real interesting papers on things like the Blithedale Romance and Giants of the Earth that students couldn't plagiarize very easily. That made the students think and come to grips with the books. I think that was, even though we don't use those assignments now, I think they were really good assignments at the time. So it’s hard for me to say whether the students are really being pressed further now.
Ms. Allen: In the earlier conversation you talked about A and B students versus
Dr. Brown: When you’re talking about someone in history, if you are talking about someone who can do what we say which is to ask questions to gather information, to synthesize it, to make legitimate generalizations, you're talking about A & B students. Those students can do whatever they want within broad parameters depending upon how good they are. But a C student, a student who can just remember some information put it down on a test and they are not terribly clear, and those who are even worse, D & F students they don't understand history really. They're like your typical high school history teacher.
Ms. Allen: And these are the students you'd rather cultivate as history majors?
Dr. Brown: Yeah, I see no reason why you'd want to attract large numbers of mediocre students as majors. A student should be entitled to major in whatever they want to and right now I'm working with a student who has a lot of limitations, and I cannot tell you how many hours I've spent with this student this semester, probably almost the equivalent of another class because he'd taken an incomplete from me last year, he had disposed of his books, tossed away his notes but he still wanted to finish the course. There is a nice, well-intentioned young man but he is not and never will be able to do the things that we are talking about here. He may eventually get a B- in the course because he worked hard this semester because I tried to spoon feed him to give him the sense of success but he really can't do that sort of work. Maybe he will understand a little bit more about history by the time he's finished but I think that's what we are talking about. I think the A and B students are the ones you want to have in the class.
Who wants a bunch of sort of sluggards. That was one of the nice features about it when Bill Pool was here in the department. He attracted all the athletes and all the air-headed strutter types that didn't want to invest much work or effort. They knew they could get a C from Bill Pool and that's what they wanted. Whether they could or not I don't really know but that was the rap that he had or the general assumption.
Mrs. Allen: Dr. Pool's 1320 was the first history class I took here, and I had a question and I didn't get it answered. It was a large class, a hundred and twenty plus people in there. My absolutely first course on campus to begin with and the first day of class was “here's the syllabus, here's what I expect, don't come to me, talk to my grader, get your books, we'll see you next time, you people that are athletes, football players, whatever, ya’ll wait and come down here to the front when everybody else leaves, I'll talk to you”. Those people didn't come to class. I watched. Those people rarely, if ever were in class. Even on test days, they were not there. I always wondered what happened to them. This was like twenty to thirty people.
Dr. Brown: I know there were some kids who used to show up from UT. Dr. Pool was and still is a devout UT fan. Periodically some UT kids that were in trouble with their grades used to pop up here in the summer to take some courses. They invariably showed up in Bill Pool's 1310 or 1320 or enroll in his Texas History classes. I think the general impression was that he was, in addition to being an alleged womanizer, beyond that he was alleged to be an easy touch.
Ms. Allen: I always wondered about that, and I asked Dr. Pool and he skipped over it just beautifully.
Dr. Brown: I guess the person to interview on that would be some of his graders who would know if that actually happened. If you could reconstruct that, that might tell you.
Ms. Allen: Predictions for the future of the department?
Dr. Brown: If the department can keep a substantial portion of the young faculty that it has I think it has the potential to remain one of the two or three best departments on the campus. The department has consistently been one that has prided itself on its integrity and I think for the most part they have been people, within the parameters of their own minds, people of integrity. I think they expect a lot out of students. I think they deliver a lot to students that want to push them and interact with them. I think that we send a lot of good students on to either work in a workplace or to graduate school. We've had students admitted to some pretty good programs, including some major university programs.
Ms. Allen: And do well? Is there a follow up on them?
Dr. Brown: There is a little follow up. Some of the students were not as strong as we might hope. I think our best students go on and do very well indeed. I think in the last few years we've had better students and those are the students that are now going on into some of the PhD programs like UT and some of the other major state universities. So I think that bodes well for the department.
Ms. Allen: It’s been suggested that the department, even though there is internal conflict t, manages to settle it democratically, and everyone works toward the same goal. Would you comment on that?
Dr. Brown: I think there is sort of a grudging respect that grows out of this notion of one's sense of respect for the standards that one's colleagues – that plays an important role. We don't go back and refight the battles, although it’s been done once. I made the department do it once because we sort of perverted something that we ought to do and I think I bought a lot of ill will for doing that. But none the less I think for the most part, yes, people go on after the decision has been made and try to make the best of it.
Ms. Allen: Work with the consensus?
Dr. Brown: Yes I guess. I don't quite see it as consensual like some people do. I think it is more out of respect. Even though I may not like certain people or agree with their interpretations, I have respect for the way in which they reach those decisions. So for me to be divisive, to go back and refight every battle would be to say that I don't have any respect for you as a human being and I don't really want to do that. So if I lose one friend, I lose one and I'm not going to worry about it. You lose a lot in the course of a lifetime.
Ms. Allen: And gain some too.
Dr. Brown: Yes, you win some, and lose some. That's the way it goes. You can't win them all.
Ms. Allen: I think time, if nothing else, is going to bring new people. Twenty years from now, looking back, there will be a whole new set of people.
Dr. Brown: Its already changing. None of us will be here. Twenty years from now if I'm still around, I guess I'll be in my late sixties and I'll be one of the old curmudgeons and people will probably be wanting to know how many more days until I retire.
Ms. Allen: So they can have your position?
Dr. Brown: Yeah, right!
Ms. Allen: Do you think the basic personality, the insular?
Dr. Brown: I think it’s a much more cosmopolitan department now than it’s ever been. Insular in the sense that it may see itself at odds with other parts of the university, that it has the capacity to pull in and protect and defend itself. I think that probably will be carried on even though people are frustrated with the department the way it is now. I think there is something about the discipline of history that's intrinsically conservative. Henry Adams said something to that effect. It’s difficult for historians to be really radicals because they can't believe that all change can accomplish the utopian ends that one may hold. I think that is probably true but I think the department is markedly more cosmopolitan than it was when I came here, much more diverse in terms of the backgrounds of the scholars and their interests and ages. I think it’s totally different now. We have a Frenchman, a Chinese scholar from Hong Kong, a young Cuban scholar. We've had a black woman in the past. These say things about our capacity to be responsive to changes, more sensitive to the changes than we were. That people like Vikki Bynum and Greg Andrews can get jobs.
Ms. Allen: So while we stay a traditional department as such, we're diversifying?
Dr. Brown: The tradition is part of the discipline. We seem to be open enough or at least some of us are open enough to really have diversity in a way that we haven't in the past.
Ms. Allen: Any other comments? I did want to ask who picks the Taylor lecturer?
Dr. Brown: Usually some faculty member is chosen to do that. It’s never really been well structured, interestingly enough.
Ms. Allen: Does the Taylor lecturer come from any liberal arts discipline or is it historians?
Dr. Brown: Normally, historians. The money is controlled by the history department. There have been some exceptions now. Jim Pohl brought C. P. Snow here, the great English scientist and philosopher.
Ms. Allen: Have there been any women?
Dr. Brown: Yes. Mary Lee Nance Spence, my advisor's wife. There may have been others but she I know. I didn't bring her although I suggested that she be brought. But Merry Fitzpatrick wrote her.
Ms. Allen: What do you see as the strongest attribute of the department today, and is that different from when you came?
Dr. Brown: There are two. One is the same. Generally, it is the same high standards. The second one is a real commitment to scholarship and to research and that probably was less clearly defined when I came here.
Ms. Allen: You think there is a growing emphasis on research?
Dr. Brown: Yes, I think the people we've hired are interested in doing something with their research and I think that's going to be ultimately beneficial to the students because you are going to get an opportunity to sort of participate in some of this research process of some of these young historians. Of course, it’s been made possible by big changes in the way that we do things. We have more big survey classes, we have more graduate students, we have more research funding, and we have more support for people doing things. We have a nine-hour load. I think these are things that all point toward the expectation that there will be more research going on.
Ms. Allen: But teaching will remain important?
Dr. Brown: I think teaching and standards are going to remain important. The commitment to teaching and to the high standards for students, I think those are going to remain the same.
Ms. Allen: All right, Dr. Brown. Can you think of anything else I need to know?
Dr. Brown: No I really can't, if I think of anything else I'll let you know.
Ms. Allen: Any good stories you want to tell on somebody?
Dr. Brown: The best stories are the ones that I told you.
Of course, Bill Pool the masher, I guess. We had been warned about Bill Pool, sure enough at this very first faculty party where we all came together, Bill tried to sort of grab Judy so that vindicated the suspicion that people we knew had when we came down here. No I really don't think so. Of course, one of the really fascinating people in the department is Bill Liddle. A person who is so intense about whatever he's done. Unless you've gone fishing with Bill and really experienced work at fishing you really haven't experienced that peculiar kind of intensity that is his personality. I think that's why he is really so able in some ways. He has the capacity to focus almost his entire intellect on a particular concern at a particular time. Sometimes it's politics, Democratic county chairman, sometimes it’s his research, sometimes its his leisure fishing, whatever it may be and really almost everything else pales. He's almost oblivious to other things when he has that power of concentration. It’s really quite unique and makes for a kind of a fun environment because he is a tremendous klutz when it comes to technological things and so forth. He's always muddling up things because he is just caught up in what it is he's doing. He is totally obsessed with it and in that sense he's quite amusing.
Ms. Allen: I've gotten tickled at him a couple of times in the computer room.
Dr. Brown: I remember one time several years ago when we were over in Medina Hall. Everette Swinney and I walked in one day and we found a piece of the computer printer broken and we looked at one another and said “it’s gotta be Bill”. And sure enough, he said “the damn printer wouldn't work yesterday. I was just pounding around on it”. Of course pounding around on it isn’t going to make a wits worth of difference. Well for Bill, it’s sort of like the coke machine. The thing won't give me my coke, if I kick it a few times I don't know what he did; he never explained it. We both just immediately thought of him and sure enough. [Laughter]
Ms. Allen: Thank you Dr. Brown, I appreciate it.
---End of Interview---