Oral History Transcript - Everette Swinney - November 19, 1991
Interview with Everette Swinney
Interviewer: Mary A. Allen
Transcriber: Mary A. Allen
Date of Interview: November 19, 1991
Location: Dr. Swinney’s Office, Taylor-Murphy Building
Ms. Mary A. Allen: I am visiting with Dr. Swinney in his office at the Taylor-Murphy Building, an interview for the history of the History Department here. Dr. Swinney would you describe the History Department when you first came to Southwest Texas?
Dr. Everette Swinney: Well, there was no History Department when I came. It was a division of Social Studies and that included various disciplines: economics, sociology, political science, geography, and history. It was chaired by Dr. James Taylor, and it remained a division until about 1963 I think. At that time the old division was divided into the five component departments most of which I think are bigger now than the division was then and let me correct that. Dick Henderson succeeded James Taylor as head of the division in 1963, and he served as chair for two years and in 1965 the division was made so it was broken into the five component parts in 1965. Cecil Hahn became the first chair of the History Department and served from 1965 to 1967, so I guess the origin of the History Department is 1965 if memory serves. A department as such.
I could go back, I haven't done any research for this but if we stumble on things that you need, I could go back and probably find documents and demonstrate the size, enrollment, class loads, some of the mechanics of the department in that period. I'd have to check my records but probably all the way from the old division days up to about or maybe well into the eighties. So, if you wanted the sort of statistical material that would show the size of the department, the people who taught here, what they taught and so forth, I could probably provide you with that.
Ms. Allen: I've been curious as to the number of history majors, how that has fluctuated over the years and the number of professors allotted to history as a percentage in the university. If that percentage has fluctuated.
Dr. Swinney: Yeah, it's fluctuated some, although in recent years. I suspect we're going to have to get the statistical stuff out and in fact, why don't you shut that off a second and let me grab a folder. Okay, I've got some data now and to get this together in a more systematic way but talking about history alone and not the other elements of the division, if one goes back to 1960 there were eight historians. At the time the department was divided there were thirteen and the period of the 1960s would be a period of rapid growth between 1966 and 1972 or 1973, we increased almost doubled from about fifteen FTE (full time employees) to almost thirty, 28.75. I think if you check more recent records in fact, I've probably got some of those, although I'd have to do some considerable digging, but you'll find probably we haven't changed a whole lot since then. We're probably in the low thirties FTE today.
Ms. Allen: Dr. Wilson can give you that exact figure.
The period of the 60's was a period of very rapid growth.
Okay you asked about majors. I don't think I've got majors per say, but you get some notion of the number of majors, the professional part of our program, as opposed to the service part if one goes back to 1960, we had enrolled in advanced classes one hundred and fifty-nine students. That increased very rapidly up to a peak in 1970 of almost eight hundred. Truth to be told we were probably doing something in the neighborhood of six hundred to eight hundred majors at that time. And then once one gets into the early 1970s it trails off again, and you have a steady decline. Same thing would be true of the graduate level. We were doing relatively few graduate seminars. These are all fall figures but often only one or two seminars a semester and then with boom in the '60s the number of enrollment in seminars shot straight up and by the early 1970s we were offering ten seminars in the fall. About like the undergraduate majors began to trail off in the 1970s and 1980s and I don't think we've ever gotten back to those peaks again.
Ms. Allen: Dr. Wilson mentioned that they were as high as one hundred and one graduate students in, I forget the year.
Dr. Swinney: 1972
Ms. Allen: They have not been back to that since. To what do you contribute this jump in the number of history people?
Dr. Swinney: Well, it was part of a national phenomenon for reasons that are partly mysterious to me. I guess ultimately it came to undergraduate choices but the period of the 1960s was a period for liberal arts generally and for history in particular. My understanding is that we had rocked along since the turn of the century with about 6% of the undergraduate majors and then the 1960s perhaps the spinoff of the Eisenhower nostalgia or whatever, that number roughly doubled and we were doing about twelve percent. Nationally we were doing about twelve percent of the undergraduate majors, and then in the 1970s the styles changed again and liberal arts was in retreat and the numbers trailed back off and would fall a long, long time before they would stabilize, and now I think they are climbing back up again, so, undergraduate career choices and at the graduate level I think the availability of teaching positions at the university and junior college level have a awful lot to do with and those things ebb and flow.
Ms. Allen: The availability of teaching at colleges and universities has an impact on the number of graduate students?
Dr. Swinney: Yeah. Part of our business, this too varies over time, but in our graduate program we've always trained two kinds of folks. First, those heading for high school teaching and then secondly those who are PhD bound. The PhD bound group are influenced considerably by national university market conditions. You may remember in the graduate course this semester when I made the survey early on of the number of your colleagues have PhD aspirations and I think that's indicative of the fact that people are saying the university teaching market is going to open up some in the mid to late nineties. For a long while after the crash in the early seventies history made no sense particularly to seek a career particularly at the university level instruction. Now it makes some sense to consider it again.
Ms. Allen: Curriculum. Have you seen curriculum change over the course of your tenure?
Dr. Swinney: Yeah, curriculum is always changing in some respect or another. The biggest change perhaps the most fundamental change in the department's curriculum probably occurred just before I arrived. In fact, it was the reason for my employment. Not only here, but elsewhere, western civ[ilization] survey course had always been the standard introductory course. Because of its breadth, it has long been favored as a general education course. In the mid-1950s the Texas legislature in its wisdom put the American History requirement into place, and so what had been a western civ requirement now became an American history requirement. And here as elsewhere the fact that the state would impose that kind of requirement was a little bothersome and so there was a brief period of attempting to continue to teach western civ but call it American history but obviously that couldn't work in the long haul. So we began to expand the faculty.
Dr. Taylor expanded the faculty some in order to meet the new obligation and that meant to some extent replacing people who had taught European history with people who taught American. The year I came, three historians were hired. One to replace Retta Murphy, one to replace Proof Greene, and then I think there was one expansion position. All three of us were American historians. So, you get a fundamental shift in the department from a European civ based department to an American history based department. To some extent that has determined the broad nature of our faculty ever since because the American survey takes such a large proportion of our energies that we have always had or since the late 1950s have had a faculty that is overbalanced in favor of the American side. So that's a fairly large curricular change.
Above and beyond that I think most of the new courses that have been added over the years or the old courses that have been deleted have largely turned on personnel. Take my own case, by the time I completed my PhD and began thinking of offering advanced graduate courses what I did was apply for courses that reflected my own interest and thus an advanced course in Civil War, graduate course in historiography and so forth were added. Generally speaking, then that is the way it has worked and continues to work that way. New folks coming in like Jim Sherow for example would get a course in on environmental history, Vikki Bynum on women's history, Black history and so forth. So I think probably the most potent moving force in curriculum change is personnel change. Over and above that of course is a guiding philosophy on what the history curriculum ought to be. For a good long while we have sought departmentally some balance between American History and non-American history. That's been in place an awfully long time and it’s been debated now and again but basically the requirements remain unchanged since.
Ms. Allen: Back in the twenties, it’s been pretty much split half and half.
Dr. Swinney: Pretty obviously, you can't give every student everything so we've operated on the philosophy that all majors and minors will take the introductory courses, the two series, the American history and Western civ or world history. We've added a World history within the last four to five years. But you get those six hours of basic broad survey and then you divide your advanced work between American and non-American. So that guiding principle of curriculum has been in place a long time. No strong inclination to change it as far as I can see. At the graduate level, we really can't maintain that kind of a division because the graduate faculty is perhaps more lopsided in favor of American than even the undergraduate, and so although we have minimum requirement it is not the equal division that you see then at the undergraduate level, and most of our MA candidates do in fact one way or another end up in American History.
Ms. Allen: It would be difficult for them to complete the eighteen hours or twenty-one hours required in European side?
Dr. Swinney: It would be somewhat difficult, easier now than it used to be but in fact I don't work with graduate advising. I used to be on top of this, but we require equality at the undergraduate level. I think at the graduate level we require that a student take a course, or we encourage them to take a course or two outside of American history or if they are European, outside of European history. This general philosophy of looking toward some balance I think flows from the notion that is probably a mistake to have people specialize too early. So, both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum have always had some encouragement to breadth as opposed to narrow concentration.
Ms. Allen: You were chairman from –
Dr. Swinney: 1967 to 1980. Thirteen years. Seems longer than that.
Ms. Allen: That's the longest for a head of the department to date. Of course, the department going back to 1965 is relatively young. What were your philosophies concerning hiring? Were you anxious to fill a slot, either European or a specialty? What were you looking for? Describe the ideal person you would have liked to have hired.
Dr. Swinney: We were shopping for people who were good with undergraduates, but that was a period of pretty rapid expansion. Let me consult my notes here. In the period we are talking about we doubled in size. It was also a period that began at least with PhD scarcity. So it was difficult indeed impossible to hire PhDs so we followed essentially the philosophy that indeed we had been hired under and that was--you hire MAs, ABDs and you bring them along. If they're good, you keep them. That all began to change in the 1970s. The PhD shortage turned to a PhD glut. Demand for historians was declining and then it became possible to hire PhDs, and we began to do that increasingly, following national trends as we moved in this direction, national searches became more common. The fact that the discipline was declining so rapidly made us acutely aware of the fact that if we weren't careful that we could get caught in an awkward situation where we might have too many tenured faculty. So, in the 1970s we slowed the tenure process down and in fact were shopping not for permanent people but for temporary people.
There's lots of ways that one can go with temporary people. Our method, it’s not perfect, but it seemed better than the alternative was to hire people on three-year revolving – folding chairs they call it – revolving door kind of policy. Since the market generally was so bad, we salved our conscience with the feeling that at least we were keeping the people in the profession for three more years and perhaps could get them placed at the end of that period. Indeed that often worked out, of course, it often didn't work out, and that period of the 1970s and early 1980s is a period filled with tragedy for young American historians because typically they would go from one folding chair to another and ultimately find that they couldn't get a job at all and end up as a bank teller or something and that is very frustrating.
But on the other hand, there were some who parlayed the position here and the experience it afforded into a tenure track and ultimately permanent positions elsewhere. So, I suppose that the period spanned by my tenure as chair was a mixed period. We expanded rapidly, we provided permanent positions for some and in hiring those we wanted people who had the PhD and who would not duplicate fields that we already had. Our notion was especially since we were doing such a big advance and graduate business our notion was to try to systematically fill out the available fields of history and by the late 1960s we were getting tolerably close to that.
We were talking of hiring an African specialist, possibly an Iberian Peninsula person, we did hire a Russian historian. We were getting the waterfront pretty well covered, and then when the market collapsed, we gradually groped toward a policy of not tenuring, not hiring permanent people and the result would be that we would go for a long period of time actually, I'm not sure when Ron Brown and Ken Margerison were tenured but a good many years ago, and although we have several tenure track faculty on the ground right now there has not been a tenured position since. Vikki Bynum comes up for the tenure position this year and she will be, if successful and I assume she will be, the first person tenured since Ken Margerison, I guess. So, there is a big hiatus in there.
Ms. Allen: Like since 1981 maybe ?
Dr. Swinney: I just can't date it.
Ms. Allen: But several years ago.
Dr. Swinney: That reflected I think a bad market situation and a certain concern that we just shouldn't be over tenured. We had at that time what seemed like a young faculty, now it looks like an old faculty, I suppose, but we felt that we ought to be cautious. In fact, we could have orchestrated that pretty much any way we wanted to, I think. There were several administrative changes at the university, and we chose to follow a fairly conservative course. In retrospect I don't know whether that was right or wrong but it seemed to make sense at the time.
Ms. Allen: When Billy Mac Jones came, he was an historian? In my research, it looks like statistically he brought several historians with him. Is that the case?
Dr. Swinney: He brought – he had clearly brought Ralph Randolph who was Dean of Liberal Arts. Ralph would come with him and would leave with him. He hired Jerry Dawson who was Dean of the Graduate School for a period. He would leave with Billy Mac but ultimately would leave for another position. But I think probably there was a connection although a bit more indirect in the department's hiring of James Wilson.
Ms. Allen: Most everyone started, yourself included, with an MA, I assume PhD close at hand, as an instructor, then assistant, and then associate professor. You see this pattern where everyone moves up the ladder. Dr. Wilson and it might have been Randolph, two or three within two years that were hired in an associate professor position. They did not start here and come up, they were put in. That was a break in the way things had been done
Dr. Swinney: It’s a good question, perceptive insight and I say it’s sort of a mixed bag. Now in case of Randolph he taught a course of two for the department, but his main responsibility was administrative. Same was true of Dawson. Tug on the other hand, was primarily a departmental member. So although on paper the three would look similar in fact there were certain differences.
Ms. Allen: Billy Mac Jones was listed as faculty in the catalog. Did he ever actually teach?
Dr. Swinney: No. He never taught. He never directed a thesis. Of course, virtually all higher administrators do carry academic rank, and sometimes they are tenured. Our present president for example, Supple negotiated tenure in the chemistry department as part of the hiring package. That was not the case with Jones. He never had retreat rights. That is, reserve the right to retreat to the department in case the administrative position did not work out. That is something Supple could exercise if he wanted to, but Jones was not a member of the department in any real sense.
Ms. Allen: Do administrative changes at that level cause ripples for the History Department?
Dr. Swinney: Sure. They can. The philosophy of the department in dealing with the outside world has remained fairly consistent since the days of James Taylor. As a young historian I can remember Jimmy expounding the maxim that [we] would keep departmental affairs within the department and this department has been blessed from that day to this with a sense of self assurance and self-containment that I think is a little unusual. We are a little reluctant to wash dirty linen in public as it were and try to take care of our problems. Higher administrative changes though can and do create ripples as you say. Billy Mac Jones came as a former chair as the department of history at San Angelo and that jump from chair to president is a little unusual in the order of things.
When Billy Mac arrived on campus the thing that he knew best, the thing he had done most recently, was chair a history department, and so he had as you might expect, a considerable interest in the department here. There was at first a very close relationship until he got a little busier and then the relationship, although it was under strain, was always quite pleasant. But it became increasingly remote. During that period when Jones, a historian, was president of the institution, Randolph, a historian, Dean of Liberal Arts, Dawson, historian was Dean of Graduate School, the department was under rather closer inspection than you would normally expect, and that created a few problems but nothing major, and I don't think affected the long-term course of events. We pretty well maintained control of our destiny through that period.
Ms. Allen: Dr. Kissler felt like the ability to reach consensus among the group here is probably the department's strongest attribute.
Dr. Swinney: Yeah, I think there is something to be said for that. We've always managed to stick together. The old line, hang together or hang separately. And that has not been true of other departments, but we've been blessed with compatible personalities that has made it possible for us to close ranks against outside threats. Generally outside threats in this context do in fact come from administrators. Probably the two most dangerous periods, and they may overlap some, or do they? I'd have to go back to the records, but the Smith presidency contained a number of threats to the departmental autonomy and the Bardo tenure in Liberal Arts also involved some threats and history survived both of those rather difficult periods relatively unscathed.
Ms. Allen: Is there a certain animosity between this department and any other department? Not necessarily animosity but rivalry on campus?
Dr. Swinney: Not that I am aware of. I think it is one of those things that's difficult to be altogether candid about but there has been, I think in fairness, an egocentric [feeling] about the history department. It goes back a good ways, a feeling that generally we do things better than some other departments. A feeling of pride and almost superiority in that. I think on some occasions that it has perhaps created some envy of the department. In other cases it has probably created some enmity toward the department. But nothing permanent, nothing I would call a rivalry. Individual historians will have favorable views about other disciplines, but by and large there has been no concerted departmental bias that I am aware of.
Ms. Allen: I asked that because I've been curious as an undergraduate. When I declared geography as a minor, and I did that because I felt like the two went together, professor asked me very pointedly when I had my schedule approved, who in the world had talked me into geography. No one did. But I wondered why the question and the way in which it was asked.
Dr. Swinney: I think probably what you ran into was one of these individual predilections. There are some historians who feel fairly uncomfortable with some of the methodology in say sociology. That's not universal, but it's an element. There has always been a tendency to be suspicious of education and that's not unique to history but academic arts and science generally have tended to be critical of education. I've known individual historians who for whatever reason, feel that the geography department perhaps had been at times over aggressive in seeking undergraduate majors and minors. I don't know, it gets down to personalities in part, and it’s almost like that if you are a professional, at least those of us who are older feel like it's unseemly to advertise. The notion of doctors and lawyers advertising for business on TV and in the university's struggle to grow some departments have been a good deal more aggressive in seeking majors and minors and growing than others, and sometimes that has involved aggressive techniques of recruiting that seemed unseemly to individual historians.
Ms. Allen: And unprofessional?
Dr. Swinney: Yeah. You know we are in a semester hours generated system. The university gets its money from semester hours, and so to some extent we all need be aware of the importance of student enrollments and so forth. So there is legitimate room for difference.
Ms. Allen: I don't understand. Semester hours generated?
Dr. Swinney: The money that the university secures to do its job, the teaching job, flows from a state level formula which provides money on the basis of semester hours generated, that is, students taught. So the economics of higher education, the more students you teach, the more money you make. So you always have had at an institution that's been in some measure underfunded a certain amount of tension between academics' natural instinct to create high standards on the one hand and to attract students on the other. From time to time depending on how people perceive what's going on, you get a tightening of standards and willingness to forgo increased enrollment or conversely a loosening of standards and a fairly aggressive seeking of enrollment. That's sort of natural in a semester hours generated system.
Ms. Allen: The history department's reputation among students is one of fairly stable standardization as for what is required to make a grade. Has that always been the case?
Dr. Swinney: I think probably−this is one area where the university does have good records. There are lots of areas where we don't but for almost the entire period of my tenure here which now, we are talking thirty years of so, the vice-president office has collected statistics on grades given each fall semester. There have been a couple brief periods in which that has not been done, but it is currently being done, and records go back for years. I think if one would examine those records you would probably find more stable situation regarding the granting of grades by this department and a few others. Chemistry would show a great deal of stability, economics. I haven’t looked at that stuff in detail for a long time but I think you have a consistent grading philosophy that’s been in place for a long time. Yeah, I think your perception is correct.
Ms. Allen: Particular incidents that have had an impact on the department. Of course, we have to ask about the McCrocklin incident.
Dr. Swinney: It's kind of difficult to separate in one's mind the department from the university, and I don't have a broad perspective, inter-university perspective. Pretty obviously I've been here a long time, and I think I know this university pretty well, but I have trouble comparing it with others. It is my impression that SWT has had perhaps more internal crisis resulting from high level leadership problems than is typical of most universities. At times I've almost thought that we've been star-crossed in that regard.
What happens when you have a crisis in higher administration leadership, the McCrocklin affair which I'll come back to in a minute, is in some measure disruptive of the whole institution. Doesn't affect how classes are taught day by day but almost anything beyond that day-by-day routine does get disrupted; faculty morale becomes a problem. In extreme cases jobs go on the line. In the case of the McCrocklin affair for example, one historian was fired, or his contract was not renewed, which amounts to the same thing, who under normal circumstances probably would have stayed and been tenured. There were some folks who got caught in the crossfire. But we have had at least three presidents in modern times who have left under circumstances that created university level crisis. The McCrocklin affair was probably the most traumatic because it involved the allegations of plagiarism which of course reached to very essence of the academic nature of the university. And yet McCrocklin in some ways was a very attractive administrative leader. It pulled a bunch of people both ways. It cut right down the middle and divided the faculty and the administration in a way I guess we had not been divided before.
The second was the Smith presidency. Smith was essentially a manager and under his leadership we experimented with all kinds of systems which seemed fairly impersonal and ultimately counterproductive. Through the first five years of the Smith tenure there was a certain discomfiture in academics and during the last two years, the crisis period, he'd clearly worn out his welcome. The faculty and the administration were absolutely at war. In contrast to the McCrocklin crisis this one was rather elongated. McCrocklin crisis, once it hit, terminated within a relatively short period of time, half a year or so. It was very disruptive, but short lived. The Smith malaise drug on for a couple of years and ultimately was relieved only with Smith's resignation.
Then more recently, the firing of President Hardesty, which didn't flow from internal problems but from external problems and in this instance put the faculty at odds with the Board of Regents, not so much on the evaluated quality of the Hardesty presidency but on the technique of the non-renewal of the contract. It just didn't seem like he was getting a fair shake. Of the last five or six presidents, you had three who were terminated under or who left under unusual circumstances. I think that's far above par for most universities. By and large I don't think those things in any real long-term sense fundamentally changed the way the department worked or its separate history folded within the more general history of the university, but they were disruptive. No lasting effects that I can tell. I thought for a while but the McCrocklin affair probably cast the longest shadow. I used to wonder whether we would ever get over that, I think we did. The systems put in place by the Smith presidency were very slow to go away, and in some measure we are still governed mechanically. If one would analyze the bureaucracy of the university, one would find that many of the techniques date to the Smith years, budgeting systems, policy, preserving mechanism and so forth. They all date to the Smith presidency. They have been modified some since but essentially, we still use them.
Ms. Allen: What about other administrators not necessarily at the presidential level that may have had an impact on the department?
Dr. Swinney: I don't think there is really. There are couple of folks that come to mind. There was one decision by a vice president for academic affairs, Richard Miller. He was in that office just a short period of time and more or less on impulse destroyed a position that the department was very fond of, our visiting professorship which was another way that we tried to avoid tenuring and still provide students with diversity and new blood. For budgetary matters one Friday night, he slashed that, and we tried for years to get it reinstated but unsuccessfully so. That's sort of an isolated example. During the [John F.] Bardo tenure and Dean of Liberal Arts there was considerable discomfiture but no real change. That would be a good example of the history department pretty well closed ranks against the outside, and I think defended our way of doing things pretty effectively. I think there was no lasting impact. Folks will long remember the Bardo period as one of some danger but those dangers by and large weren't realized.
Ms. Allen: You did your PhD work at the University of Texas but your master’s was from Penn State. How would you compare SWT with some other departments which you have some knowledge of?
Dr. Swinney: Faculty, students, combination? In comparison with a place like Penn State, a couple of things come to mind. Let's do faculty first. The university like Penn State with a PhD program had a clearly articulated research mission. Research by faculty was much more highly regarded. We've always put more emphasis on the teaching function. I suppose although there seems to be some signs of change in recent time, it would be the difference between a teaching faculty on the one hand and a research faculty on the other. The same sort of difference that you might expect to find between UT and SWT. Different mission, different philosophy. Higher teaching loads, less research production. The students, I felt like when I started teaching down here, and I guess I've never really changed my mind about it, that our best students are as good as one finds any place. We have a larger percentage of poorer students than institutions that have higher admission standards. And one would expect that. We keep some very good students because parents or people in the area connected to the area and SWT is convenient, but a large number of the really high performers are attracted, and you can't fault them for that, to the UTs and places with a little higher reputation. I think it has long been a part of our mission that we've taken the education of some of the less able students and don't mean folks who need remedial training but those who aren't A students, the B and C students, but we've taken that job very seriously and I think it is one of the things that we do very well. I have all four of my children have graduated from Southwest Texas, and I feel very good about the educational experience they had here. My family has eight degrees from Southwest Texas. My wife has one, a daughter has two, daughter, daughter and son have one, and a son-in-law has one, so we've shopped San Marcos for higher education.
Ms. Allen: When you took over the chairmanship of the department, did you have any specific goals in mind? And did you accomplish them?
Dr. Swinney: That's kind of hard to answer. I suppose in a sense I'm one and the same time am a very goal oriented person and then sort of anti-goal oriented. It is not my style to set down specific goals although usually I have a game plan in mind. So I am little bit ambivalent about that whole phenomenon. I was, relatively speaking, very young when I became chair of the department, and I was chosen chair in a little different fashion than some in other departments. It’s been our tradition here recently to do everything we can to choose our own chair and we've had some luck with that the last three times out although the mechanics have been different. But I came to the chairmanship with the support and good will of the faculty, and I always felt that my first responsibility lay to the faculty. So we attempted to operate the department as a kind of democratic entity with full participation, as much as that is feasible within a unit of this kind. I've always kind of felt that I succeeded at that, that there was basic consensus and that we moved in a fashion what was essentially democratic. I think, talking about the long-term trends in higher education, that people in these positions are always to some extent victims of circumstance. I suppose I'd like to take credit for the tremendous growth of the 1960s and the expansion of the curriculum and the eight hundred majors and so forth, but I really know that that was an essentially local phenomenon stimulated by the national trend. By the same token, when things became sour in the 1970s, I'd be reluctant to take the blame for the loss of majors, declining enrollment, and so forth, PhD blood and our policy which was very conservative about putting new tenure track on. There again I think we were responding to national forces. Well, those are some thoughts.
Ms. Allen: Pretty much just to steer the ship that was taking care of itself.
Dr. Swinney: And to do it efficiently, to be sure that the business of the department was transacted efficiently, and I've always liked detail and so I think managing things like registration, room assignments, scheduling, and that sort of thing I always kind of enjoyed, and ultimately then when I decided I'd had enough of it, it was those very things that I decided I was tired of.
Ms. Allen: I read a transcript of an interview you did in 1985 about how you were selected.
Dr. Swinney: Is that right? I don't remember.
Ms. Allen: It was an oral history thing. Dr. Brown had a graduate class
Dr. Swinney: I have no recollection of that. That’s quite interesting.
Ms. Allen: I enjoyed reading that. What would you have the average student, not a history major, the average student gain from their six hours of required history?
Dr. Swinney: I've thought about this a good deal, and I guess I've changed my mind over time. I initially taught history 1310 and 20 as if it were designed for would be professional historians, and I think that's kind of where we all start out. We assume it’s the most important thing of all, and we emphasize the detail, and we somehow have the notion they will take the detail with them. And of course, one of the things one learns is that that doesn't happen. They don't share your interest in the discipline, and of course they have absolutely no idea of becoming professional historians. The whole thing can be fairly uncomfortable.
So in more recent years as I've grown wiser I think, I've attempted to implement the view that history is a very valuable general education course, a part of general studies if you will, that makes it possible for students to begin to puzzle out who they are on a time spectrum. To sort of put their own lives and their own age in perspective and give them some feel for this thing that historians, I think, basically do is analyze problems of the time and if you can help them. As I often say in the freshman course, puzzle out how we got from there to here, I think it gives them a perspective that they don't get anywhere else. So I suppose my major objective is to give them some sense of how to think historically. I have no notion of whether I succeed in that, but that's what I try to do.
Ms. Allen: Other than money, what would the think the department most needs?
Dr. Swinney: What does the department most need? Gosh, that is something that I'll have difficulty answering. You mentioned money, and there are some things that money buys that we could use. One thing is the computers break down and higher salaries which are important. I guess what we most need, but again you can hardly separate it from money
but we need to continue to build. We are about this process, and I think it’s working pretty well but to continue to build an able department that will succeed what is in fact, if you're talking about the tenured faculty, an aging department. It's not an old department, but pretty clearly most of us who are, with the exception of Ron Brown and Ken Margerison, most of the tenured faculty are now late 1950s early 1960s and I think then it becomes a matter of trying to manage replacement faculty in such a way that the main thrust of the department is not altogether lose. Although if a new generation wants to change it that's their business, and I suspect they will. But since so many of us have been here so long I think there is a feeling that we bear some responsibility for trying to get the department started in the next century on a positive foot which we'd extend the things that we've tried to do in the last half of this century.
Ms. Allen: I asked Dr. Kissler the same thing, and she gave me basically the same answer. I did not ask her the mechanics of it, what would be aiding this process, but inadvertently, Dr. Bynum came by while I was there to gather the boxes of applications which she was going over, and Dr. Kissler explained that she, Dr. Margerison, and Dr. Bynum were a committee reviewing applicants for this hiring process. So I reflected on that some last night and decided that we had a senior professor, Dr. Kissler, and think Dr. Margerison is a full professor, but he would be junior if you're looking at how long people have been here, and Dr. Bynum who is relatively new.
Dr. Swinney: Almost three generations, not quite.
Ms. Allen: Is that being done purposely to integrate the new ones into committee work of that sort to expose them to that process?
Dr. Swinney: I don't think there is any doubt about it, that almost all of our committee reflect this cross generational influence and that of course is a very practical way of ensuring that traditions are continued. I think that's a good insight but if you look at a committee roster from Tug. There must be ten to fifteen committees, many of which are not tremendously active, but there are a good many committees and almost all of them would show that same composition.
Ms. Allen: What would you say are the biggest changes in the department since you have been here?
Dr. Swinney: Size, obviously would be one. We've been over those figures. We've gone from a handful to a bunch.
Ms. Allen: Any changes in the focus of the department?
Dr. Swinney: Research has become more prominent, and yet the teaching function has been emphasized pretty consistently throughout my tenure here. Actually, despite growth, and you see growth, and you see growth all around, growth in number of students. In the period I've been here we've increased about tenfold, university enrollment about twenty-five hundred to over twenty thousand. Increase in the size of the department, obvious increase in the physical plant of the university. The improvement in the facilities of the history department from initial quarters up in Lueders Hall [when he first came but in the 1940's it was in Old Main] which was basically falling down to sojourns in Flowers [Hall] and Evans [Liberal Arts Building] and then to a permanent home in Taylor-Murphy which is one of the more pleasant facilities on campus. I think one of the good things about the history department is Taylor-Murphy. It suits us well and is pleasant. But despite those changes I think there has been an essential stability within the department of history that has been quite remarkable that we've had curricular growth, curricular change.
We've talked about philosophically the department is not a whole heck of lot different than it was a good many years ago. There has always been a strong continuity. The discontinuities have largely been the administrative things we've talked about but generally speaking, the department goes about its business in about the same way we always have. I suppose the change is we've got more business to go about, things become more complex. The number of committees that one serves on, service activities and the like the world generates is a little more frenetic than it used to be but at root I think we go about doing our jobs in pretty much the same way we always have. And that's kind of nice in a way.
Ms. Allen: So, the greatest attribute you think is the stability?
Dr. Swinney: Oh yeah. I think that organizations need continuity and stability, and when that is disrupted then usually the institution loses. You get change but it is ordered, slow change and anytime overly rapid change is forced, as for example the attempted changes in the Smith administration and so forth, it poses problems. So I suppose I am very conservative but in this regard I like slow, ordered change rather than the bull-in-the-china-shop kind of change, and by and large we have not had that in the department. There has been stability and continuity.
Ms. Allen: The stability has probably allowed the department to weather some of these exterior winds. Better maybe than those that were not as stable.
Dr. Swinney: I think so. I believe that to be true.
Ms. Allen: Do you have any good stories that you want to share with me. I need some good stories. Good tales on some of your colleagues, not dirty laundry, but funny. Human interest.
Dr. Swinney: I'm sure that there are lots of them out there but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to come up with anything right now. You catch me sort of unprepared.
Ms. Allen: Would you share with me any thoughts you might have on faculty that are no longer here that you might have worked with, Dr. Craddock for instance.
Dr. Swinney: Well Dr. Craddock of course was for a long time one of the chief bulwarks of the department. In some measure, after Jimmy Taylor died, she and Bill Pool were the old department, the old generation. Both coming in the late forties or early fifties in Emmie's case, so she was the senior statesman of the department and very influential, very level headed, very sensible and very much a force in the department. She is one of my favorite people. Bill Pool was here for years and more recently retired than Emmie. He quite candidly, I'm not sure I'd want to be quoted on this but [he] was probably less of a force in directing events than Emmie. He was a very popular teacher but not perhaps involved. He was impatient of detail and perhaps not as influential in determining the course of events. He was a good deal more scholarly in a sense. If you look at the publications, he got a lot of stuff out, but as far as making the department work was probably not as influential. There have been so many people. I'm not sure whether or not Carolyn has a good list. I used to keep a card file on everyone who ever worked for the department and if one could get a list like that it is well over a hundred people who were here two to three years, four to five years and made a contribution of one kind or another. People like Harry Hayes, Roger Spiller, John Bullion, and the list go on.
Ms. Allen: Does that list exist?
Dr. Swinney: You might check with Carolyn. I don't know what personnel files would show. Theoretically, one ought to be able to come up with a list of everyone who had taught with the department.
Ms. Allen: I have tried to do that through the old catalogs, but I know they are not complete. There would be people who were hired just before the catalog was printed, or maybe weren't here but a year or two. Especially for the eighties, they started the catalogs every two years, so I've lost people. My intent originally was to try to come up with a list and I got bogged down. It might be a nice addition at the end.
Dr. Swinney: To show chronology and so forth. As I say, I suspect it will be a fairly long list. Of course, there are lots of folks who have been here. We've had the single death, Bill Brunson [in 1988], and of course he filled an important niche and is much missed. I think death as opposed to retirement poses a different kind.
Ms. Allen: I have an appointment to see Dr. Brunson. [Perhaps referring to Luan Brunson?]
Dr. Swinney: That left a hole, something that you don't plan for. In the case of Emmie and Bill Pool and Mary Fitz[Patrick] and Cecil Hahn you plan their replacements, and you try to fill the spots and it’s all very natural, and it’s part of an evolutionary process, and I'm sure that will continue with Betty, Frank Josserand, Jager, and myself, each in turn but then when you have a death, it’s harder to cope with.
Ms. Allen: Care to make any predictions on how many of the new bunch or which of the new bunch will be here in the year 2000? Who will be carrying on?
Dr. Swinney: Well, it’s difficult to know, and I don't think I would care to be quoted on a prediction. Let me just talk about categories. I think the newer faculty are pretty much like we were when we were young. At that point you are very career oriented and general market conditions will determine to some extent what happens. I think probably I see among the younger ones some who are in the process of putting down roots that will be very deep and others who would probably go to better jobs if those jobs materialize. Of the three people who came the year I did for example, I'm sure that there was a prediction at that point as to who would stay and who wouldn't and how the careers would go that anybody could have predicted it accurately. It turned out that two of them left, I stayed, and part of the staying was this process putting down roots and developing loyalties to the institution and to a place on the map. But you know Central Texas has certain attractions for some us that transcends money and career. I rather quickly worked myself into a situation where I really didn't have much interest in leaving and then after a relatively brief period of time effectively ruled that out as an alternative altogether. Kids in school, didn’t want to disrupt that. And the situation here has always been compatible and pleasant. So, I think probably among the young ones I could hazard some guess base on some perceptions of that nesting process but I wouldn’t want to be quoted on it.
Ms. Allen: Did you have a notion of the stability in this department when you first came?
Dr. Swinney: I had the notion pretty early on, I'm not sure when I first came. Dr. Taylor was a very strong sixty-five personality, and he and I got along very well from the first. I think I sensed that Jimmy had a game plan and that was a way to defend the department against the outside world. And clearly he was very influential. It’s quite appropriate that he's remembered with the Taylor lecture because he was certainly a key player in the evolution in not just history but in all the social sciences. See many of the folks that you'll be interviewing, Emmie, Bill Pool, Cecil Hahn, Betty Kissler, myself, Merry FitzPatrick in History, Dick Henderson who is now retired. He may be the sole one in Political Science. Clarence Schulz in Sociology. Now deceased Morris Erickson, but for years he was the Economics Department, old Miss Sterry in Geography. She was the Geography Department for a long while. All those folks were hired by Jimmy Taylor. So not just History, but the course of History was in some measure determined by also these other disciplines. So, he cast a pretty big shadow. And of course all of this, the influence of the founding fathers, it all kind of turns on timing and the juxtaposition of the beginning growth, rapid growth after World War II, the division of the department, people he'd hired in place cast a long shadow. There's no way anybody could come along now and have equal influence because the compartments are so much smaller and the possibilities are quite limited where at that time it was, the sky was the limit. We grew at a pace that was breathtaking. I was doing some numbers on that a while back and I think we trebled in the sixties, doubled in the seventies. Institutional growth was rapid.
Ms. Allen: One of the interviews that I read, and I don't remember now whose it was, but somebody related that I think Dr. Flowers had said this institution would never reach the student level of five thousand. It wasn't five years before it did.
Dr. Swinney: I can remember those early predictions and they were always wrong; they were always low. Part of that is a phenomenon of general national growth, but then in the case of Texas institutions the location, climate, corridor, there were lots of things that kept us ahead of the pattern. We probably could still be growing though they pressure us not to. Twenty thousand is a lot of folks. It’s about time to slow it down
Ms. Allen: On this hill anyway. Do you have anything you'd like to add?
Dr. Swinney: I can't think of anything. As you get further along, questions may occur to you that you want to check back with me. I'd be happy to answer them.
Ms. Allen: Thank you Dr. Swinney.
--End of Interview--