Oral History InterviewNovember 9, 1983John Howell, IntervieweeUnknown interviewer[BEGINNING OF SIDE 1]JH: (0:03) I never did teach any history courses, but a lot of the historians taught political science courses. And I taught government in the advanced courses, Kay Stokes, and I did, she didn't teach the history either. He said, we can't divide it. We don't have enough money, and list the people all time together. And I said, well, you know, you've got people in the history department who are capable of heading the history department. And you know, you don't have to pay us all that much. To begin with, it will cost all that much money. And I said, I tell you, I would take it, but I would be spending all my time trying to separate those departments. I want you to bear that in mind before you appoint me. I said, so. He said, well, think about it. I said, you think about it too, [John laughs] because, you know, I think that's what y'all do first. And I went across the hall and told Holt, who I knew a whole lot better than I knew Jenkins, because I'd worked with him on this, and it was Holt who had to told him to offer it to me. Now I knew [unintelligible] Holt's the one that said that's the person [unintelligible]. And, I told him, I said, you know, we just had this conversation. He knew it, you know. And I said that this is what I told him, and I said, I think that's the way it ought to go. And he said, well, you know, I think so too. And so Holt came along and talked him into it. And the next thing I knew of it, Herb Paschal came up to see me and said, you know, they just offered me the chairmanship of the History Department. He said it just gives me a headache to think about it [John laughs].Interviewer (1:46) Sounds like it.JH: (1:47) [John laughs] So they had decided to split it. But Jenkins was open, you know, he didn't, he, we went into that, you see, he had his plans laid. Interviewer (1:59) Yeah.JH: (2:00) And when I said, don't do it that way, do it a different way, that's the way you ought to do it, he'd listen to you, you know.Interviewer (2:06) He's a very, very capable administrator. It seems to me that that's one area that's not been appreciated, andJH: (2:14) It was, you know, a good idea Interviewer (2:16) Yeah.JH: (2:17) To split as things developed. You know, you were saying he wanted to get the structure, and that, you know, that rang a bell back with something that he had in mind. You know, he did want a fully developed university. And those two department sectors made more sense than a history and [unintelligible]. And then in the same way, you see, they established the department, the School of Arts and Science. People said, no, you ought to, you ought to do that. I didn't realize it was in the self study report [unintelligible].Interviewer (2:53) I think it was, and I'm gonna go back and check without because I read it a few months, a while back, but I was had put it down as one of the significant areas of development. JH: (3:11) Well, maybe if it was then the proposal for College of Arts and Sciences came before Bob Williams, and I told him that at that Phi Beta Kappa meeting, if it was in the [unintelligible].Interviewer (3:29) I may be wrong on that, I'll check and see, it looked like it was working for it. I'll, yeah. I mentioned one other different thing. We talked once before about the publication, and I told you, I talked with Richard Ferris, a man in Chapel Hill, and I've talked with him. A couple weeks ago, I just called him to let him know we were still very much interested. Is that, and he said he would still be on hold and be very much interested, too. So is that good to keep it? JH: (3:52) Yeah.Interviewer (3:52) Okay, that's when I get to the point, like on the med school and things like that. I was planning on doing it just like I have, or have to do the other schools, of not really going in internally right now and into the history of each one of those schools I just can't, in this is that same, once we get established. I mean, the focus I was going to have on the establishment of the med school, and the fight to get it and then, then just a very generalized statement of it.JH: (4:48) You know, we were battling two things at the same time there, the authorization to award PhDs,Interviewer (4:58) And the,JH: (4:58) And the authorization to attach the medical facility.Interviewer (4:58) Yeah.JH: (4:59) And I didn't work on the medical school as much as I did before that, because I was busy on the PhD thing.Interviewer (5:24) That, is that when they shifted you to the graduate school to work up the PhDs after we got the university status?JH: (5:37) And Ed Monroe then was the one who had been forward by then, pushed the med school.Interviewer (5:44) And was the resident one on, here on campus that was working.JH: (5:49) You see, he started off when we first proposed the medical school, and I was in on that side, Bob Williams, especially because he was the assistant, and I finally ended up saying, what you ought to do instead is to set up School of Allied Health. And we did that, and Ed Monroe was [unintelligible]. And then it was from that, Interviewer (6:15) Started again.JH: (6:18) Started again, to set up a medical school.Interviewer (6:24) That med school, that's what I've been trying to get it nailed down.JH: (6:29) And Ed Monroe could know what, would know all that.Interviewer (6:31) All that, except it really started back in '63, '64,JH: (6:37) Yeah, that's right.Interviewer (6:39) When they began the initial thrust for that.JH: (6:47) And then you see, we had to try for university status.Interviewer (6:53) Yeah.JH: (6:55) And that was before the General Administration and the university system was set up, the Board of Higher Education was in charge then, and Cameron West, was it Cameron West? Anyways, whoever was the Executive Director of the School of Higher Education, Interviewer (7:17) Yeah, at that time it was Cameron and then,JH: (7:29) Had appointed a blue ribbon committee to come in to determine whether or not we should have university studies. And he appointed Alan Carter, who was the dean of the graduate school at Duke in the past but was on somewhere else by then, to be the chairman of that committee. And when I read that in the paper, I remembered an article that had been in the News and Observer, oh, six months before something like that. It had been written by Alan Carter, he's an economist, who was making the point that none of these colleges should be made into universities. It was published in the Southern Economic Review or something like that, because, you know, they would put a glut on the educational system. They weren't needed, you know, he gave economic reasons for not doing it. And I said to Bob Williams, you know, I recall an article this man wrote, he said, I do too. And so he and Elizabeth and Gladys went over to the library. And started reading the back issues of the News and Observer just as fast as we could to find the reference to that. And we had all of the machines going. [Interviewer laughs] I would, I got sick from, get motion sickness from it and we went through and didn't find it. And Bob said, you know, I think we've missed it. It was definitely in the period we've looked at. And I said, well, I haven't missed it. I had been looking more careful than that. And he said, well, I'm going to start over again. And I said, all right, but I'm going to continue with it, it must have been further back than I thought. So he started over again. And he was right. He of course was the one who found it. It was about 10 o'clock at night, I think, and we just about took the library apart when we found it [Interviewer laughs]. And the the article made reference to the journal. And we ran into the reading room, and I got off the shelf and ran out of room saying, I gotta have this, you know [Interviewer laughs]. And he called Dr. Jenkins, who was sitting up waiting for it, but he knew we were looking for it, and he said, well, okay, call Robert Morgan and read that to him. And Robert Morgan took it down, called newspaper wire service and gave a public statement that night, damning Cameron West for deliberately picking a chairman of the committee who was opposed to making any more universities, and Alan Carter withdrew his name very quickly [John laughs].Interviewer (8:15) I had read the other part, but didn't know the background. I just knew that there was some question, you know.JH: (9:03) You know, Morgan really laid out a blast for the underhanded way. And, you know, it just really irritated me that they thought that we would be so, so podunky, you that we wouldn't know who Alan Carter was and what he had said. It was really brazen of Cameron to pick somebody who had recently been publicized in the state as being opposed to what he was asking him to come in and give an objective study of. And a few quotes from the article, you know, in the journal, really didn't, and it, you know, that sort of shell shocked that committee from the beginning.Interviewer 1(1:57) Sort of put them on guard, you reckon?JH:(12:08) [John laughs] And he picked the person who was fairly objective committee. And we, you know, we got the [unintelligible], Interviewer (12:17) Yeah.JH: (12:25) After that [John laughs]Interviewer (10:00) Since in that, when Dr. Jenkins said, we are already a university, on one hand, that strengthened the argument to go ahead and do it, but it put us in a,JH: (12:25) That was Herb Paschal's lineInterviewer (12:25) Is that it?JH: (12:25) Herb Paschal was the one who said, "here stands a university." [Interviewer laughs] Why not? Interviewer (11:11) Why not call it?JH: (12:25) Call it.Interviewer (12:25) But that also created a great problem, didn't it, because we were not really ready to offer the doctorates, and that's what they kept hitting us with. I mean, we weren't even saying we were ready.JH: (10:47) But you see what, what we, what we see, we went for university status first, Interviewer (12:25) Yeah.JH: (12:25) What we said there was, there are a lot of universities that don't offer the doctorate and we listed them all, you know,Interviewer (12:38) Yeah, but, but that's where they made their great, that's where they hit us, wasn't it? JH: (13:13) Yeah.Interviewer (13:13) Because they didn't recognize that there was a difference between, that you could be a university. And they said, well, you can't really offer this.JH: (13:21) But then, of course, you know, as soon as we got university status, we went right ahead then and proposed the doctorate. Interviewer (13:27) Yeah.JH: (13:27) We were not completely innocent at all that [John laughs].Interviewer (13:34) Was, was that really then shot down because of the economics, JH: (13:38) Yeah.Interviewer (13:38) And the consolidation?JH: (13:41) Both. Interviewer (13:43) Of course history was the one they were pushing and that had the least need, I mean.JH: (13:46) That's what, that's what happened, you see, we went about it, maybe in too deliberate a way. We spent a year, you know, deciding which one of you,Interviewer (13:59) Yeah.JH: (14:00) Being very careful about it. And by the time we were in any position to say, you know, here we want to offer this, the, it was clear that there was beginning to be a flood on the market in some fields. And they were the very fields that we were prepared to propose the doctorate in. And then, you know, they reorganized the University of North Carolina system, and I think one of the reasons they did it was to undo that authorization and to put some restrictions on North Carolina University status.Interviewer (14:54) Have more control.JH: (14:55) You see, Robert Scott made a speech, which he hammered away, and Cameron West wrote it, at the needless duplication of programs on the state and how we had to do something about that. That was pretty much the our argument that was used in the legislature as a means for setting up the University of North Carolina system with a board that had the power to prevent this. And of course, when they picked William Friday to be president of the system, instead of Cameron West, they picked a person who is an expansionist in education, rather than a conservative, contracting, withdrawing person. And I suppose Cameron West thought that he would become the president of university system, and he would have carried that out. Interviewer (16:17) Yeah.JH: (16:17) But you see, in the past 10 years, it has not been the policy of the Board of Governors and William Friday to curb programs. Interviewer (16:31) Yeah.JH: (16:31) If you've had good proposal anywhere, here, anywhere they've proved it, they have had less and less money to give you to put them in, but they said, you know, you have to show that the program is needed, and you have to show that you have capacity to do it, offer it without a lot of new money, but within that which is reasonable enough. Now you wouldn't want to offer a program you couldn't get students for anyway. You know, there was a time when all you had to do was offer a program and there would be new students. Interviewer (16:31) Yeah.JH: (17:13) You had new money, you didn't have, with the expanded enrollments of the '60s, you could just offer almost anything and you get students in it. But we were coming to a period when you couldn't do that anymore. And I suppose every institution would have recognized that, whether they were whether a governing board was set up or not. But initially, they made Friday president, and then Cameron West was senior vice president, but he had complained a lot. I suppose his philosophy was quite different. It was the same thing is true of the medical school. That was one of the last big battles, I guess, in the establishment of a program that the board really didn't want to affect, and once it was settled, William Friday had done everything he could to be sure it was a successful program.Interviewer (18:12) That's a very interesting development. Once it's a part of the university, then it has been,JH: (18:20) He doesn't want it to fail. Interviewer (18:21) Yeah.JH: (18:21) He doesn't want anything under his jurisdiction to be a failure. And once the med school was established, his position was, we're going to support it and do whatever has to be done to get it accredited and make it a successful school. He's been a very good educational leader, unusually good, outstanding's not a good word. Outstanding means you're outside in the light.Interviewer (18:50) [laughs] Yeah he does and it's a, I've been trying to figure,JH: (18:58) And you know, you, we have not suffered in the system.Interviewer (19:01) I don't think we have, I think,JH: (19:03) We thought we would, and we watched it very fast,Interviewer (19:05) Well, we fought so, of against it back in '66, '67, because I think we probably would have suffered, if we had,JH: (19:13) See William Friday was not that much in favor of it then either.Interviewer (19:15) Yeah.JH: (19:17) You see because he didn't know whether he'd be president of it, or whether Cameron West would be president of it. Interviewer (19:23) Yeah.JH: (19:24) And as the signs were, I guess, that Cameron West would get that. And I think Cameron West is still bitter about it,Interviewer (19:41) Lot of bitter battles in that.JH: (19:42) The, you see, he's the head of the private college organization in the state now.Interviewer (19:48) I didn't know that.JH: (19:50) He's the executive director.Interviewer (19:51) He's the one that's doing all that,JH: (19:52) He's the executive director, he's doing all that, that's right. [Interviewer laughs] And that's not for the book, but don't quote me on that, Interviewer (20:00) No.JH: (20:02) But I expect there's some of the really dirty fighting that we had some private schools this year was engineered by Cameron West, and part of it was an old grudge against Bill Friday for getting that job [John laughs].Interviewer (20:17) Very likely [laughs]. Oh, dear, that's,JH: (20:22) You see that, I think that NC State and Chapel Hill may have been a lot more conservative about their expansion if it had not been threatened from here. And, and you know, the thing that I was telling you about, Wright started that immediately when he came in and Vickers really, Messick did too, but they continued that aggressive push here. And it forced the educational leaders in the state to respond to it, when we began to talk about the need for medical school here so to be family practitioners, Chapel Hill put in their family care program. They had not really been all that interested until we began to threaten. Duke had not been interested in it. Duke, you know, wanted to train the specialist who would be the professors of the med schools all over instead of practitioners, they were not hurting, and to some extent, it still does, but, but the big emphasis on family care and the A hat program and all that that came after we began to threaten to set up a medical school, yeah, for that purpose. And you know, when we first proposed university status, it was a law to make East Carolina college a university.Interviewer (21:11) Yeah.JH: (21:11) And it was introduced by John Henry, and I think it was written by John Sanders, at the request of Terry Sanford.Interviewer (21:11) The regional.JH: (21:11) That's right. It was a funny, Sanford, of course, would probably deny that now.Interviewer (21:11) I've seen reference in the, I think the Charlotte Observer said that he was behind it.JH: (21:11) He was, he got it. John Sanders, who was the head of the Institute of Government at the time, was later vice president of the system, at the National [unintelligible], the right for practice. He sent it to Leo, Leo gave it to me. I checked it out, and Leo had me deliver it to John Henry. He didn't want to, because it was a hurry, he didn't want to do it. He didn't want Holt to do it. He wanted somebody who wasn't very well known in the Legislative Building to deliver it [John laughs], and John Henley introduced it, and that's an irony, too, you see, because he became head of the private College Association for a while.Interviewer (21:11) I didn't realize that.JH: (21:11) Yeah.Interviewer (21:11) I hadn't gotten into the private. Well, now the original bill had only East Carolina, Appalachian and Western Carolina.JH: (21:11) The original bill had only East Carolina in it.Interviewer (21:11) As the regional.JH: (21:11) As a university.Interviewer (21:11) As a University. But then when it was failed, JH: (21:57) But then you see, they came along, you see, and in the bargaining, hoping to kill it, hoping to get us to back off, they began to add all these others, including the black institution, and they were a little bit startled when we said, we don't care. Go ahead, you know, we still want the bill and let them be universities, too. And when our supporters took that position, the thing went right through. And so the attack they had taken to kill it really assured its passage.Interviewer (24:20) And really it had a tremendous impact on all of higher education in North Carolina.JH: (24:26) And we weren't doing anything all that revolutionary. There are hardly any colleges left in state university, in state systems anymore, Interviewer (24:36) Yeah. But I was,JH: (24:37) And they're all universities, there are hardly any colleges left.Interviewer (24:37) That are, yeah. But usually, isn't it, there's been one aggressive school, I know, like San Francisco State, it went for California, and different ones who's done it, and the others have come in on the coat trails, JH: (24:51) Yeah, yeah.Interviewer (24:53) And we were the dynamic. So in that respect, that's just one of the things I was going to bring in. That's sort of the last of, while we were a regional university, we've had a tremendous impact on state educational development in this way directed and because they thought it so much, you can't say they would have done it by themselves if [END OF SIDE 1][BEGINNING OF SIDE 2]Interviewer 0:12 This is a problem. How much can we say? How much do we?JH: (0:08) Not a lot. [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] Interviewer (0:12) Yeah.JH: (0:14) And the educational leader, [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] who had a strong input into the executive branch, into some legislation, there's a lot of legislators then were on the Chapel Hill border, Interviewer 0:26) Yeah.JH: (0:26) They didn't, they didn't want it to happen. But, see, Jenkins had an unusual rapport with like, well, the majority, I suppose, especially people from the east and he just could muster the vote against in the legistator. So that's what happened. And, so it's a political battle, and it was partly between two factions, the executive leaders and the legislature and [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] gone outside.Interviewer (1:13) Affected then,JH: (1:13) So you could say to it very quietly, we hope you win. We know what you're going through because we've gone through it too.Interviewer (1:31) We really benefited them in '66 is, when there was talk of deconsolidation and state was interested or threatening to be and it was at that time that Friday gave them the go ahead to develop a full university program [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] patterns, and he said, develop to full when they put in that liberal arts in education [unintelligible] had an impact all the way.JH: (2:06) Yeah, [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] that's sword head sort of stuff. And every time I saw somebody claiming that they wrote what Kennedy said or something, you know I,Interviewer (2:19) Yeah.JH: (2:19) You know, in any, any, any modern day organization, people are going [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] work those things out. There was another document that I had made. That's not it. That was finally what came of it, but initially, I had presented something to him, and I think he may have made a public statement, [unintelligible] He had any other stuff?Interviewer (2:59) I have another one here, that's a real fuzzy copy, and it's about the, has about the thistles in there. I don't know if that's, it came through under the other.JH: (3:49) Oh, He said this here about the cow. Okay. Yeah, I remember that too, but that was still [unintelligible - crosstalk] I had a conversation with him one day when I first told him, you know you're going to, you're going to get yourself in a bind if you don't, I had some wind that he was going to make a difference [unintelligible] get in a bind, and I reminded him of that, and I suggested that, I had worked out an argument, in which I had, as I recall, I made the point that we didn't invite [unintelligible name]. And I sort of spoke ugly about [unintelligible name] in general, you know. And then made the point that nevertheless, you would [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] and I had put the, you need to listen to them first, at some length, and then I had made the, but, you know, they're bad scoundrels and so forth. And he wanted to reverse the order of it, and sort of buried that, nevertheless you need to listen to them down below, you know. And I had said, well, you know, that's going to weaken it very much, and you're going to get, if they take the first part, you know, you're going to be out on the Morgan side instead of the other side that you've already had a public statement on. And so he said, how about doing it this way? [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] Scoundrel first, but you have to listen to them, and then you can put it in your order, in the body of [laughter],Interviewer (6:35) So we had him both ways.JH: (6:37) That was the way he would work. He'd compromise an issue that way. Okay, we'll leave it in the body of the information, you know, that you have to have an open mind on campus and listen to the communists, but they're scoundrels, but in the introductory line, you say the communists are scoundrels, but you need to listen to them on a college campus. [laughter] And that was, there was a press release that came out that way. So this is not the [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] and I was thinking I would see in that board of trustees thing. But it's not in that either. That was what went to the board.Interviewer (7:24) To the board, yeah, and that was, I think that was the one that was officially read at the, at the hearing.JH: (7:30) And, you know, all the time that they began to, and I've seen something fairly recently claiming that Chapel Hill did this. They were the ones who conflicts there. At the time it was happening, we were not all that anxious to have credit for it. We wanted to do it, but we really, you know, we still, you know, down here in eastern North Carolina, Interviewer (7:58) Yeah.JH: (7:59) We didn't really want to make a big deal about how we have done this. Interviewer (8:03) Yeah.JH: (8:04) And so if Chapel Hill wanted to claim it, you know, okay. And the last time I saw it, it really did sort of metal me. But I had lost all my, I don't know what I did with all my files on that. I don't anymore. But where, where did you find, what file is that in? Interviewer (8:21) Okay, we've got one over there on the Speaker Ban, one of a file that came out of Jenkins', obviously on the Speaker Ban. And then we've got scrapbooks over there on clippings, newspaper clippings, and they're a couple old clippings that I picked out, also ECU proposal being studied. And then it's a one about Gordon Haynes. 'I feel if the clouds have opened up and the sun is shining through' on that so that's what gave me the idea that East Carolina had been much more significant in working out the proposing the compromise solution than generally recorded.JH: (9:08) Of course, they, this, this makes it sound as if the UNC proposal supported by us, you know, [laughter] but see here's key to it, Robert Morgan, was the key to it,Interviewer (9:25) That when he agreed,JH: (9:26) When he agreed to do it, because, you see, he was very influential in the General Assembly at the time.Interviewer (9:34) And really the spokesman for the Conservatives with this,JH: (9:37) Yeah, so, and he took, you see, I got Jenkins to come around. He got Morgan to come around. He got the Conservatives to come around. Interviewer (9:45) Yeah.JH: (9:47) Is what it boiled down to.Interviewer (9:50) And East Carolina was in a unique situation to influence there, the, issue.JH: (10:00) Of course, the ECU proposal was the bottom, even to using the same language. You can have them in if they, if it serves an educational purpose. Interviewer (10:11) What was,JH: (10:12) Now that was the,Interviewer (10:15) The compromise that was passed.JH: (10:16) 'I feel as though the clouds have opened up and the sun is sparkling free' yeah. [laughter] Dr. Jenkins said, that since the Speaker Ban was passed, the very state school boards of trustees have gotten religion. We knew that religion would finally get into the [unintelligible] 'Let's go Carolina,' Carolina or East Carolina? [laughter]Interviewer (10:50) Now this is in the News and ObserverJH: (10:52) The paper, yeah.Interviewer (10:54) From, that. Well, let me ask you, one, are you? JH: (10:59) No.Interviewer (11:00) Got a few minutes?JH: (11:02) Yeah.Interviewer (11:02) I was gonna ask you more, a couple other things, one, that came up a little earlier, an assignment that you had gotten on the human, developed the humanities program, which I believe was a study that was going on right at the end of Messick's presidency to strengthen the liberal arts curriculum and they brought in an outside advisor from Emory, I forget his name right now, the former president of Emory, and you were chairman of that which carried over into Dr. Jenkins' era in developing the liberal arts is that? Is that valid? I didn't review it just before it came over, but he was, he was here on campus and studied our, and that was right in the transition of Messick. And it carried over.JH: (11:02) And Messick was still president when we started that. Interviewer (11:02) Yeah, it was under his,JH: (11:05) I remember coming over here to talk to him about it, he was in Jenkins' office, and we went in there and talked about it up there.Interviewer (11:30) And that carried over into Jenkins', in developing the liberal arts. That's what I wanted to focus on under Dr. Jenkins, how he continued strengthening the humanities program in the early years.JH: (12:35) You know, I don't know that I had a whole lot of influence on that initial symposium. I think Messick or Jenkins had already picked the speakers and made arrangements with them, and what they asked me to do was sort of be the chair of local arrangements. I and I suppose they did that because I had been chairman of a committee that had been handling several outside speaker engagements. There was a committee, Interviewer (13:31) A sort of humanities committee, I think. JH: (13:34) Was it just the humanities committee? I think that's,Interviewer (13:39) I think that's what it, it had been set up in the early '50s, and it had sort of changed its shape at times. And I have a little information on the early period, and then it came up again in the late period, with you. Jim Poindexter, had been earlier, JH: (13:56) Yeah, that's right.Interviewer (13:57) And then you,JH: (13:57) Then me.Interviewer (13:58) Were listed,JH: (13:58) Yeah.Interviewer (13:59) In the late '50s. JH: (13:59) Yeah.Interviewer (14:00) And the, and that's what I wanted to focus in the early years of Jenkins as part of strengthening a academic program, which is my impression, is what was going on with it in the early Jenkins years.JH: (14:16) Yeah. And somewhere along there, we decided to set up the College of Art and the Schools of Art and Sciences.Interviewer (14:29) Arts and Sciences, yeah.JH: (14:35) There's a silly story that goes with that. Somewhere before that, we had organized an alumni chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Lawrence Brewster had been instrumental in it. He was the local chairman of the chapter for a long time. Bob Williams was in it, some other people, Tyler Price, Joe [unintelligible name]. And we had done it mainly, you know, to provide some sort of recognition for the good students. We didn't really have much thought that we could get a chapter here, by the way, but Bob Hope came to a meeting one day and urged us to try to get a Phi Beta Kappa chapter here. And after the meeting, I said, you know, we wouldn't have any chance of getting a Phi Beta Kappa here, Phi Beta Kappa chapter here. And the main reason is we don't have a unit that would house a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. At that time, they'd begun to establish professional schools, but we didn't have a school of arts and sciences. We just had professional schools and departments in East Carolina College. And I said, you know, we don't have an arts and sciences unit. And you'd have to have a liberal arts college or an arts and sciences unit to even begin to think about a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. And he said, well, propose one, and we'll see. [laughter] Part of the evidence was showing that at all institutions that had a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. They either had, they either were a liberal arts college, or they were a university with a college of arts and sciences. And so they said, you know, that was back in the days when all you had to do was snap your fingers [laughter].Interviewer (17:16) And it was easily,JH: (17:16) Someone would set it up. And I guess that was the first formal thing we did do much about it. We'd had, though, a humanities offering in the curriculum when I came here.Interviewer (17:20) Yeah, that didn't come,JH: (17:24) And there were three or four courses in there and Cleveland Bradner came in, you know, and set as the director of that program.Interviewer (17:53) Cleveland Bradner, I don't know him.JH: (17:57) He was not still here when you left. He ended up in the Department of Philosophy.Interviewer (18:01) No, was he was here in the '50s?JH: (18:02) He was here later than that. Well he may have left about that time, but,Interviewer (18:11) They were trying to set up a philosophy department, or that was part of the problem, or focusing on the humanities committee I think too, and the philosophy [inaudible �?" recording cuts off]JH: (18:33) Not in Statesville. It's a mixture of religion and trying to sell phonograph records and all that stuff. I just sent it over to Bob Hope, kidding him [laughter] about it. Interviewer (18:44) Oh yeah.JH: (18:45) And he starts off each one of them, and he says to me about how way back, there's a professor here who said that God was dead, and that was Cleveland Bradner. Cleveland Bradner used to just shock life out of his students by saying that God is dead, and if he were alive, he would strike him with a bolt of lightning for doing what he was getting ready to do. And he put, throw the Bible down on the floor and then jump on it. [laughter] Now, and God didn't strike me down, so he's dead. He ought to strike me down if he's alive. And it just, you know, the parents would write in and complain to Leo and all that stuff like that. [laughter]Interviewer (19:27) Imagine in those, [laughter] I have somehow overlooked him in our list of characters.JH: (19:38) He was a real character. Interviewer (19:39) Yeah.JH: (19:39) He didn't do a lot for the development of the university, [laughter] but he was a real character.Interviewer (19:45) I came across LeBaron but I haven't found [unintelligible].JH: (19:45) Now, you wouldn't, you didn't know LeBaron either? Interviewer (19:45) No, I didn't know him. I have not been included, but I just come upon him in this stuff. And yes, well then, the 1963 self studies was a very important, seemed to me, [unintelligible - crosstalk] kind of pulling it together.JH: (20:01) That was really where I got acquainted with Hope. For reasons I don't know, he asked me to be on the executive committee of that self study. He, Jim White, Doug Jones, and I were the ones who sort of honchoed that self study.Interviewer (20:03) I that was a very significant one, it seemed to me, because it was a planning document, in a way.JH: (20:16) Well it was the first that we ever had of any significance.Interviewer (20:32) Yeah, that really served a significant purpose for the university, for the College of a,JH: (20:37) Well the [unintelligible] Associated had just begun, I guess, to do them that way.Interviewer (20:41) Oh, and that's why it was a, such,JH: (20:45) We've been accredited before. Interviewer (20:46) Yeah.JH: (20:47) That was the first time they wanted us to go through an elaborate placement.Interviewer (20:52) Study. JH: (20:53) It was to be organized by the faculty and written by the faculty, and that's why Jim White and I were on it. We were faculty members, [background noise]Interviewer (21:15) You were faculty.JH: (21:16) I was a faculty member. Interviewer (21:17) And Jones.JH: (21:17) Jones was already chairman of the Education Department, I think.Interviewer (21:21) Well, it seems to me, it was really an effective planning document, wasn't it? Because a lot of the things that then developed, well, they advised us, college too, then working on the College of Arts and Sciences, and the development of position that Williams and a dean and a separation, and seemed like there were a lot of things in there. JH: (21:43) Was that mentioned in there? Interviewer (21:44) Yeah, that they needed a different, another administrative officer than Hope, because it was too much for one and seemed like it was very significant in sustaining the development. My theory, see, if this sounds valid, is that what I'm presenting is during the first five years that Jenkins was president, there was tremendous work in developing all areas, as well as the arts and sciences, but that's when the schools were then named and developed: education and business and music and art as well as inthe nursing, and that he really, by the end of that time, had developed a structure that would support a human [humanities] [inaudible �?" recording cuts off] ability when he then went to the,JH: (22:48) He was very open suggestions that, you know, started off by calling in on the chairmen. I was not a chair at that time, and asked them if there were any areas here that we could develop that would be unique to the state, areas where we could take a leadership of all the institutions in the state and use our head at this time by two people who were very aggressive. Said, yes, you know, we could develop a creative arts program and a performing music program that was not duplicated anywhere else in the state. And somebody else told him, we could do that for drama too. So he went out and hired Ed McLean to do that. And he and he funded those programs very well. I remember later on being irritated that they were doing so well, and I was struggling with what my budget, you know? Interviewer (23:55) Yeah.JH: (23:56) Then he called me in one day and asked me if I wanted to be chair of the Department of History and Political Science. They had moved economics to Business because Elmer Browning said he needed to get that school growing. Interviewer (24:25) Yeah. JH: (24:26) He said, okay, you know he needed for accreditation and all that. He wanted that. So he moved economics there. It was in old Social Studies, and he would decide to set up sociology as a separate department. And he had to go out and look for somebody to run that too, that's when he hired Merrill Williams. He was very much interested in the sociology department that would emphasize rural sociology. That was the plan. And there again, we thought this was something where we could be unique. That was a difficult one for him, because there are not many sociologists who are interested in rural sociology. The urban was the problem at the time. They're swinging back around to it. And so State got ahead of us in that they have a strong rural program, but Jenkins wanted to. This didn't ever quite come off. And so there was just history and political science left in the Social Studies Department. He was getting ready to reorganize that Paul Murray, who was reviving it, he came in, told me and asked me if I [unintelligible], and I had just flunked that star football player in my government class and it was Thanksgiving holiday and Agnes Barrett called me and said Jenkins wanted to talk to me. And as I left, I said to Patty, you know, if he gives me any flack about flunking that football player, I'm going to resign. [laughter] He didn't mention it.Interviewer (26:04) Cause it wasn't what he,JH: (26:05) He didn't say whether I had flunked him or not, is the size of it, I didn't know it. [laughter] And he asked me if I wanted to share the department. I said, well, I really would rather share a Political Science Department, history and government.Interviewer (26:25) Yeah.JH: (26:25) And that's the way you ought to go. You ought to have, you ought to split it right now. And he said, well, we don't have enough money. And anyway, we've got all these professors teaching both history and political science, and we can't divide it. It's tied up. And that was the way it was. [END OF SIDE 2]