Morey Wantman

Morey Wantman

1975-08-18

This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

The views expressed in the recordings and transcripts on this website are those of the speakers, and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the University of Rochester.

Oral histories

Morey Wantman was associated with the University for sixteen years, beginning in 1941 as assistant director of research, Committee for the Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots, National Research Council. In 1946 he was promoted to Associate Professor of Education and named director of the University’s Bureau of Educational Statistics, serving in that capacity until the student welfare office was created in 1954 in the College of Arts and Science. When the Office of Instruction and Student Services was established in the College in 1954, Mr. Wantman was named associate dean, serving as chief educational counselor to coordinate the academic counseling program for undergraduate students, direct the development of special skills and abilities and general assist Dean Margaret Habein in matters of student welfare. When he left the University in 1957 his title was Dean of Instruction and Student Services. (Information for this introduction was gleaned from the Rochester Review, May 1957, p. 7 and the Campus Times, April 9, 1957.)

In this interview, he speaks about the merger of the Prince Street campus and the River Street campus, and about the prevailing social trends in education during his time. Wantman reminisces that his wife, Susan G. Wantman, along with the wives of other faculty members would prepare brownies and popcorn to boost the morale of students before examinations. He spoke about the University’s efforts to get more African-American students on campus. He also speaks about the lack of career opportunities for women once they graduated from colleges adding that there were some whose sole purpose was to find a husband while still at school.

35 minutes

Bergeson, Helen Ancona

Wantman, Morey

HB: This is a tape recording for the Oral History Project for the Friends of the University of Rochester Libraries. This is Helen Ancona Bergeson and I'm interviewing Morey Wantman, former Associate Dean of Instruction and Student Services at the University from 1954 to 1957.  Morey is presently professor of psychology in City University of New York.  We are in his summer home on the shores of Lake Ontario in Pultneyville, New York, Monday, August 18, 1975. Morey, you've been through many chairs in the University since your first entrance here and you have many interesting and exciting reminiscences that you have agreed to share with us. Would you tell us when you first came to the University and under what circumstances? And then you carry on from there.

MW:  All right. It's a long story but I first came to the campus in the period 1938 to 1941, and I was then working for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. They were sponsoring a project at that time in which they were trying to discover what a student knew when he finished his four years of college. And they had just founded what was called the Graduate Record Examination, which at that time consisted of eight so-called profile tests. Later it was expanded to include what is now called Advance Tests. These were given as experimental tests to the graduate students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia. Not too long after the project started Brown University asked to be included in the project but they, knowing the purpose of the project, initially asked to have their undergraduates tested and so we tested their sophomores and their seniors. Very shortly after the University of Rochester requested the same type of service and Mr. Valentine[1], the then president, got in touch with the Carnegie Corporation people and we agreed to do it at Rochester. The result of giving the tests, Charles R. Langmuir,[2] who was the one who named the examination, and I, made a number of visits to the University of Rochester campus; we talked to departments in departmental meetings; we talked to administration; and we talked to the faculty as a whole in the old faculty club on the River Campus. And the impressions we had of the University of Rochester were rather vivid ones in terms of the caliber of the institution.  The faculty members impressed us as being as good as the faculty we had seen at Amherst, Dartmouth, Brown and a good number of colleges in the northeast. And then later we went out to the Midwest and talked to the faculties at the University of Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin. 

The Women's College was not visited nearly as often as the River Campus, and when we talked to the University administration, the Women's College was not cited very frequently and our impression was that it was not an important institution in the College of Arts and Sciences, as we saw it as outsiders. Faculty members reported to us that they were advised to spend their time on the River Campus if they expected to be judged scholarly people. If they spent much time on Prince Street the notion they had was that they weren't going very far up the academic ladder, that they were not likely to get tenure, not likely to get promotions. The result is that there was very little scholarly or research work done on the Prince Street Campus.   

The testing results that we got from the students on the graduate record examinations showed the UR student to be really as good as these other colleges that I have already mentioned and the women students were just as good at least as the men students on the River Campus in terms of their performance on these profile tests. They were about the same caliber. That was not the impression that the faculty gave us and I'm saying that – as an impression - because there was obviously some faculty people who said otherwise, but the overall impression was--the women students, we have them, but they are not nearly as good as the men students. And this was false.

        One of the other things that I recall about that period was that the University of Rochester was planning to augment what is commonly called its student personnel program. And this was also restricted to the River Campus. The Prince Street Campus was not included in its thinking. They got a grant from the Carnegie Corporation for $75,000 to do this, and as far as we at the Carnegie Corporation were concerned, it never was implemented, and this was a damaging thing for the University of Rochester in the eyes of the Carnegie Corporation people.

        The other impression that I recall about visiting the campus was the lack of emphasis on athletics and the high academic ability of those athletes who did participate. I recall attending a football game on a Saturday afternoon and whoever was with me pointed out that there were about six Phi Beta Kappas in the starting lineup on the field just at kickoff time, and one of the people that later became a very good friend of mine, and still is, was Dick Wade.[3] He was then an undergraduate and a Phi Beta Kappa, later became an outstanding faculty member and colleague at the University of Rochester and who is now again a colleague with me at the City University of New York.  

Let us stop for a moment (inaudible) or rather I - the memory I have is related to the conferences we held with the faculty at the various colleges. We often brought the administrators, presidents and deans and vice presidents of the campuses to New York City and we would put them up in hotels in Manhattan and then have meetings and discussions for two days on educational philosophy and educational curriculum, methods, and what the various colleges were doing so that they could exchange information. We got the brainstorm one time that bringing them to Manhattan was not the greatest thing in the world because people - by five o'clock they scattered to the various hotels and we were losing the time between five o'clock and eleven o'clock. And if these people could all live together and be together, we might get more out of it, and they might get more out of it. So we decided that we'd like to hold it on the campus, and when we brought the idea up, the University of Rochester volunteered to have it on their campus, the first one of its kind on University of Rochester campus rather than in New York City, and the Carnegie Corporation was paying the bill so everybody was all for this and we went ahead with the plan. About a week before the conference date I got a telephone call from Rochester because they wanted to give us some details, and to my amazement, I discovered that we were all going to be housed in the Seneca Hotel.[4] Knowing the Seneca Hotel myself, I said, "I'm not sure this will wash." And I told Rochester that I would have to call them back. I informed the people at Carnegie Foundation what was up. They decided to tell them to cancel at Rochester. "We're going somewhere else. They are defeating the whole purpose of this. We might as well hold it in New York if we are going to be in a hotel." And so we quickly made new arrangements and went to Mohawk[5] House and there everybody was together and the meetings went on morning, noon, and in the evening, and we all had our meals together and so both sessions went on. We achieved our purpose. The University of Rochester, as far as the Corporation was concerned, had let us down and this was not a wise move, and probably should not have been done.

HB:  Now where is the Mohawk House?

MW: On the Hudson River.  I’ve forgotten exactly the town--it may be Mohawk. It's on Lake Mohawk and it's an old Victorian type hotel. It's still operating, a delightful place--no possible distractions such as theatres and that sort of thing. There were walking paths and tennis. There was a free period in the afternoon when people could have recreation for an hour or two, but we worked day and night virtually, and people felt that we got a lot more out of it because an awful lot went on outside the formal sessions.

HB: Sure, a resident situation.

MW: It was very good.  One final impression that I -comes to me -a memory rather of what happened in those years was the vivid - the outstanding - meeting we had with the Biology Department at which two people who later -- three people who later became among my closest friends were there and they were Janet Clark,[6] Dave Goddard[7] and Don Charles.[8]  And Janet Clark is the only woman I can recall who stood out at these meetings we used to have with departmental people and Janet way back then impressed me as a real scholar and when I got to know her later, when I came on to the faculty, this was all born out.

In 1941 Jack Dunlap,[9] who was on the faculty at that time, in Catherine Strong Hall, was working with the National Research Council in Washington on a project that was going to be involved in research on the selection and training of pilots. And Jack asked me to join him on the project and Mr. Valentine encouraged me to come and I decided to come to Rochester to work on that particular project. My salary was paid for by the National Research Council but the University of Rochester, because Mr. Valentine insisted, appointed me to the faculty although I was not going to be doing any appreciable teaching. I taught one course per semester. This project involved research on projects in other institutions besides those at Rochester such as Harvard, Purdue, Wesleyan, Ohio State, University of Tennessee. We consulted with the people there. We got all their data into Catherine Strong Hall.  We were one of the first institutions to have a free installation from the IBM Company. Mr. Watson[10] let us have an installation because we were using the machines for educational purposes. And the project kept getting bigger and bigger so that by 1942 we were running a national testing program where we had people from about 400 colleges working for us, working on their Air Force pilots. I should say that at the time the pretense was being carried out that this was civilian pilot training, but that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's idea of getting an air force started in the back door, because he knew that if we ever got into this war we'd better have some pilots. So they were all trained as if they were civilian pilots but they really were headed for military work. This was just a dodge that was used to get the money from Congress.

HB:  That’s interesting.

MW: Then we did a job for the Army Air Force who were operating out of Nashville, Tennessee, because they anticipated that it would take them two years to complete the research project and they figured that because we were not Army and did not have the red tape, we might do the job in six months. We actually did the job in about four and one-half months, traveling around the State of New York to colleges all over the state and we were able to turn out a report within six months so that it tends to illustrate again that civilian control sometimes is a lot more expedient or a lot more efficient than military control. The project received strong moral support from Mr. Valentine and we received all kinds of support from E. B. Taylor[11] who at that time was the head of the Education Department, and Henry C. Mills.[12] They gave us space whenever we needed it, they gave us facilities. Buildings and Grounds of the University were most         helpful. As I said, Mr. Valentine treated us as if we were regular staff. They called inviting all of us to the - I and my staff - me and my staff - to the annual faculty Christmas party at Eastman House. And we were working seven days a week, and day and night, and the staff just said,  "Coach, we can't go. We have work to do." Feeling I had -somebody had - to put in an appearance socially, I went over, and when I got to the door late, Mr. and Mrs. Valentine[13] were there to greet me and they asked for the staff immediately, said, "where are the rest of the fellows?" I said they were working and Mr. Valentine asked me to please give them his personal thanks for what they were doing, that he had seen them working there at 2, 3, in the morning, all hours of the day and night every day of the week. And I stayed at the party for about 15 minutes and left, and Mr. Valentine ran after me as I was leaving the door to be sure that I conveyed that message a second time. When I got back and told the men that this had happened well, they worked like beavers even more at that point. It was great. It was good to have the President remember them and know they were there and they all felt very good about it.

The project was useful to the Women's College in that we employed women students on the project. We had besides the professional men on the staff, we had about 40 people working at various jobs and some of the women students learned quite a bit and went on to work in this field after they left college. One of the men students that I recall there was a sophomore who at the time we decided was on the verge of being a genius, a fellow by the name of Mark Rosenzweig,[14] and he has proved to be that. He is one of the outstanding psychologists at Stanford today--made it at a very young age. And the UR really gave that fellow quite a good training. He got a lot of research experience working in our project.

The project had many outstanding people on its staff. I left it in 1943 but the project continued to the end of the war and it had people on the staff such as David Keaterman who ended up as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Leon Festinger[15] who later went out to Stanford to become a full professor, and still later was president of the Social Science Research Council, Seymour Wachner who today is chairman of the psychology department of Clark, Leonard Kogan[16] who was professor of psychology at the Graduate School of City University, Dave Backan, Henry Offit--there were a number of outstanding people who were on the campus, and I am sure contributed a great deal to the Women's College campus when they were there, but they all left.       

In 1943 I left the Prince Street Campus and went over to the Medical School to join the staff of what was called the Manhattan Project. Now

Everybody knows that the project was concerned with the atomic bomb. The Rochester part of the atomic bomb project was to do research into the effects of radiation, in case the enemies got the bomb first and dropped the bomb on New York City or Rochester - what would we do with all these sick people we would have? And the project still continues as far as I know at the University as the Atomic Energy Project, in the little red building across from the Medical Center on Elmwood Avenue.

I had very little contact during that three-year period with the Women's College. I saw some student now and then at special request of friends on the faculty but really didn't get involved with the Women's College until again - until 1946 when I took the position in the Education Department and the Psychology Department.  I ran the - what was then called the Bureau of Educational Statistics. The Bureau's name was changed later because of its functions to the Testing and Counseling Service. And when the merger took place in 1954, the Testing and Counseling Service, rather than being under the Education Department was merged into the office of the Dean of Instruction and Student Services. In the Bureau of Educational Research and Testing, we tested all the freshman students each year with a large battery of tests which we used both for placement of students and for counseling them in terms of choosing courses. That is, when the question was should they take Math 1-2, or Math 3-4 or Math 7-8, on the basis of tests that were already established and tests that we developed, we were able to place the students in the various sections - various levels of freshman mathematics, and this helped somewhat to cut down on the mortality of the students in the math courses. The test results showed clearly each year that the women students were at least the same caliber as the men and every year, as we tested freshman men and women the trend was there that the women students were getting better and better with each incoming class, so much so that by 1954, the year  before the physical merger took place and after the administrative  merger took place, the women students were superior to the men. And that was really a matter of severe selection.  There was more selection going on among the women applicants than there were among the men applicants, that is, we took in the freshman class about half the number of women as we took of men. And by that time the University had established such a strong reputation that the women students were coming from many parts of the country, where when I first arrived in Rochester in 1941, you could pretty much say that the bulk of the students were from New York State, a large proportion from the Rochester area. But by 1954 that picture had changed. The Women’s College as an institution was quite different from the Men’s College in that 8-year period as I observed it, 1946-1954. For example, the women students had a code of honor. They had certain rules that they concocted - not   the Dean’s office - and they enforced it. And the girls handed out the punishment, and the girls abided by it. And the situation was so healthy that I can recall that before merger, about 1952-53, the faculty were talking about going on an honor system in the Women’s Campus. Once they merged, the whole idea had to be abandoned completely because the River Campus was nowhere near ready for an honor system. One had to proctor examinations and we just knew we couldn't even try it on the River Campus, while if the Women’s College had remained on Prince Street, I would guess that an honor system would have been put in--we were that close to it.

The classes that I taught on the Women's Campus - I taught on the River Campus as well - but the classes that I had on the Women’s Campus, the students were really a joy to teach. But I was personally aware that whenever I had just a handful of men from the River Campus to sit in my classes on Prince Street, I just couldn't get the women to participate in discussion – they just wouldn’t speak up when there were men in the room.  I talked with some of the girls about it after class. They just made it very clear that they didn't want to shine in front of the men. They just felt that it would hurt their social life. They would rather have a date Saturday night than get an A from me, and obviously that's more important, so that I always wondered what happened after the merger because I didn’t teach after the merger.  What happened after men and women were in class together on the River Campus? Did the women continue to sit back let the men do all the talking or did it change when there were greater numbers of men? I just don't know about that.       

The esprit de corps on the Prince Street Campus was really high, both among the students and among the faculty who were based there.  The one example I can think of is the freshman camp. It was always fun to go out to the camp there in the Bristol Hills and the girls and their little skits they put on the last night - the skits were horrible and they knew they were horrible, but we all got a big bang out of it. And the junior sister scheme they had -the junior sisters really took seriously the business of having freshman sisters and saw them during their freshman year periodically. Some of them had specific appointment dates and they always met at least once a week, and this was a very healthy thing on the Women's Campus.

Another thing that comes back to my mind is the Women’s Faculty Club which was great from the standpoint of the faculty.  The Women’s Faculty Club was the black house right behind the chemistry and the Eastman building. And when you went in there for lunch, there was a long table you sat down and had lunch. It didn’t matter who was sitting there, you took the next empty chair and the result was that you would sit with different people every day practically. And we used to have marvelous bull sessions. There weren't small conversations - there was one big conversation going on and it was a lot of fun and I missed that when we got to the River Campus. We went to a better facility in a sense but people tended to eat in little groups of four and you missed that whole camaraderie that we had at the Women’s Faculty Club. On the other side of the coin, the women students didn't like it at all. I remember walking down the path with two women students one day and they said "see that black house. Some day we’re going to burn it down.”  And from their standpoint, it was a horrible thing because they didn't want us eating by ourselves in the faculty club. They wanted us to come over to Cutler Union and eat with them. So they were dead against this place but we as faculty people kind of enjoyed it, and even though we did go to Cutler now and then, most of the time we felt that we wanted the relief from the work load for at least an hour at lunch time. So we tended to go to the faculty club though the students weren't that excited about it.

The other problem I can think of was the one I had often with the seniors who used to come to the counseling service because they didn't know what they were going to do when they got out of college. They    just didn't see any careers ahead of them. Many of        them were really disappointed with what had happened in college, particularly those who said, "Well, I didn't get my man." Those who got engaged or got married, they were perfectly happy, but many of the others who majored in social science and the humanities just didn't have any notion at all what they may or might do. Those who had gone into teaching were all right, but many of the others -many did not. And in those days not too many were going  on to graduate school so this was a problem. Some faculty people tried to do something about it. I remember Dorothy Bernstein[17] talking to me about it, and we worked out the idea that some of her math majors who were very good might take some of the measurement courses that I was teaching. And this field is a very applied field and one of the girls - Dorothy's majors -a very bright girl, after having taken two courses with me -and only two course went down to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton and applied for a job, got the job, and in six months was head of the test development section in mathematics, and she was running the whole show. So that perhaps more could have been done in terms of that kind of thing, encouraging students to take their liberal arts training but at the same time pick up some tool that might be useful to them when they got out of college so they could get their foot in the door. Along that line, E. B. Taylor thought up the idea of introducing commercial subjects for the girls – the girls were complaining about getting their degrees and then having to go to Katherine Gibbs[18] for training in secretarial work. E. B. got staff together who was teaching shorthand, typing, and business machines methods.  But of course, as everybody knows, the faculty would not give credit, and as far as I know, that program died very early in the game. It didn't last too long at all. He also, with Harry Mills, introduced the teacher-training program in elementary education. When I first came to the University of Rochester, the University did not train teachers for elementary schools because there was either a rule or an unwritten law that the state teachers colleges would train elementary school teachers and the universities would train secondary school teachers. By 1946 the powers-that-be in Albany decided that it was all right for universities to train elementary school teachers, and the Education Department introduced that program, which as far as I know, has turned out to be highly successful. I do know that our girls graduating out of that program were placed in elementary school jobs long before any of the girls in teachers colleges got the jobs. Once our supply was exhausted, then principals of schools would start looking at graduates of state teachers colleges. We drew a very good group of girls in that program.

The Education Department at that time, even though on the books there was a bachelors degree in education - one could major in education - just absolutely discouraged it. I can only remember one student in all my years at the University of Rochester who took the degree in education.

Taylor and Mills's philosophy, and I agreed with it completely, was that the students should take the minimum number of courses in education in order to be certified, but he jolly well better learn something--that he can't go into a classroom just knowing a whole lot of methods - he better know some history, he better know some math, he better know some physics. And we followed that philosophy all during the years that I was there and again as a result of that, we found it much easier to place our students in jobs in secondary schools because our people tended to know the subject matter, which was not true of a whole lot of other graduates in other institutions. I still feel that was the way to train teachers, that methods are important, but if they don't know anything, all the methods in the world aren't going to help them any in the classroom.

The personal counseling - I use the term personal as opposed to straight academic counseling - which I maintain must be done on a college campus, and that you can't just assume that you are in business just to handle the one side of the student just as (inaudible) persons, and particularly, I think this was maybe more true of the girls, though I would say that as the years went on, I felt just as strongly about it with the men, namely, that they've left home - the shock thing to leave home for first time - they're in strange surroundings. There's got to be somebody to talk to and all kinds of issues come up - I prefer to call them issues rather than problems - in that they're not psychologically sick. They're perfectly normal people but there’s got to be somebody that is going to listen. And of course in that respect the Prince Street campus was in a tremendous position with Ruth Merrill[19] in Cutler Union. Ruth spent hours and hours with these girls and her official title was not that of a counselor - she was the director of Cutler Union - but she probably did more counseling than twenty people on that campus.  Not only did she do counseling for students, I happen to know that she did a lot of counseling for just citizens of the City of Rochester who heard that Dr. Merrill was in Cutler Union and she never turned anybody away. She just did it all the time, and it's no wonder that so far as I know, Ruth Merrill today has got more friends among alumnae certainly of the University of Rochester and people of the City of Rochester than anybody I know. Some personal counseling was done by the Bureau of Educational Statistics, later called the Testing and Counseling Service. And that was an interesting phenomenon because I was aware that there was this need - there just weren't enough places for people to go.  We were handling students but then we had the classical counseling, just as Ruth did, and Ruth did an awful lot of it. We decided we had - we had a small staff - that we would try to do it too.  The University was committed to the town and we felt that we owed something to the town--we would just offer this service. Well, that was a mistake and we were swamped, absolutely swamped. There was no way that I could possibly manage it, so we thought, well, because it was free, that was why we were getting all these people, and so we decided to charge the $2.50 per hour fee. The University was not interested in making any money out of this. The President, Mr. Valentine, knew about this and he agreed that we should do it. Harry Mills thought it was a good idea.  We all agreed that we weren't going to try to make money  out of it.  Well, the $2.50 fee didn't do one thing.  We raised it to $5.00 and eventually we got it to $25.00, and it didn’t stop them from coming.  We had to abandon it. We just couldn't cope with it.  At that we would have had to hire more staff to do this, and another reason we abandoned it was by that time RIT had started an official counseling service. I think their fee then was $75.00 per session and they had an excellent staff so they could do it - we shouldn't try to do this on a shoestring so we gave it up. But the fact that there a need for this was unquestioned, and I would assume there is still need for it today and I don't know who is doing it today.

During the - somewhere in the - and I've forgotten the time, 1946-1954, we had two different evaluations of the advising system in the college. By the college I mean both the Women's College and the River Campus. And I know that Kay Diez[20] was on both committees, as I was, and Willson Coates[21] was on one, I'm sure, and maybe he was on both too. Those two committees in each case - and these committees were subcommittees of the Committee on Educational Policy - these reports were wide apart in time -I've forgotten now, maybe six years, seven years. Both cases the recommendations included the principle that personal counseling and academic counseling should never be separated at the University of Rochester. The University of Minnesota had separated these years ago and they had a large student personnel program - personal counseling and then they had a separate academic situation and the friction between the two groups was just too great, and we decided at Rochester that we would never go that route. We tried to get ideas from other colleges on what our advising system would be like, colleges that we thought were like us. We wrote to them, we didn't get too much help. In fact, one Dean wrote to us and said, "No way would we want you to imitate us because our system is horrible – we have nothing.  I’ll be interested to hear what you people do. Maybe we’ll do something along that line." But the point I wanted to make was that the principle that the personal counseling and the academic counseling should not be separated was the crucial thing, and that was in the forefront of the thinking when the merger of the two campuses took place. Once the decision was made to merge the Women’s Campus with the Men's Campus there were many subcommittees appointed by the President, by Dr. de Kiewiet,[22] and the committee that looked into the advising system again at that time came up with the same recommendation that the personal counseling and the academic counseling must be kept together and the same people that were going to advise on instruction and learning, instruction and counseling on student services from the dormitories help advise on stages, radio station on campus, all the various activities. These would be the same people when the merger took place and that is exactly what happened, and that's how the title came about, to indicate that the two would never be separated.  And Margaret Habein,[23] when she became Dean of the merged campuses, was called Dean of Instruction and Student Services, and that is when I went in as the Associate Dean of Instruction and Student Services.

HB:  Morey, would you clarify one point for me about the merger decision? At what point and how was that decision made to merge the two campuses?

MW:  To my knowledge, the President decided very shortly after he arrived on campus as the president, that having the Prince Street Campus and the River Campus was very inefficient, a waste of time and money and talent, and it was much healthier for everybody to be in one place and he immediately started to try to make the change. It was not discussed at faculty meetings. To my knowledge, it was just decided by Dr. de Kiewiet and I assume, approved by the Board of Trustees, and the first the faculty heard about it was when the President announced it to a faculty meeting, and announced that he was appointing various committees to try to facilitate the merger and plan ahead as to what the structure might be curriculum-wise, or at least, student personnel services. And the committees were expected to assume that the merger was already approved. And that's how we went ahead, and I served on a good number of those committees. Sometimes the committees were expected to call in consultants and I think some probably did - I don't recall all that. Although I do remember one humorous incident in that there was a committee on University School and we were to get a consultant. And I was on the committee and I really thought this was just ridiculous that we call in a consultant because the Dean of our University School was the No. l consultant for university schools all over the country. Every time the national organization had a request for a consultant, our Dean was the one who went to be the consultant. But they didn't believe me, so the chairman of the committee did contact the national headquarters and asked if they had a consultant who would come and help them on this, and the man on the other end of the phone just roared and said, "Consultant, you've got the consultant. It would be ridiculous for us to send anybody to Rochester to consult. You've got him right there, your own Dean. He's your consultant."

HB:  Who was that?

MW:  Henry Mills. And so that committee did not have a consultant. We did not have a consultant on that committee. So they were finally convinced that we didn’t need to get one there but other committees did have them and I don't recall exactly who they were but there were other ideas - outside ideas – picked up. 

As far as the Dean of Instruction and Student Services organization, the main point, as I have already said, was that this would emphasize the fact that you were dealing with the student as an individual and not separate or put into compartments his academic life and his personal life and his student activities. They were all to be into one and the organizational chart was drawn up that way. Attempts were to be made to strengthen the faculty advising system but retain it. One way to strengthen was to cut down the number of students assigned to a faculty adviser. Just at the time of the merger one faculty  adviser had as many as 200 students, and it was obvious to everybody, including the advisor himself -- there was no way he could handle the students -- just too many of them. We began to cut back so that we would even have 20 students to a faculty adviser although I think the average was probably closer to 40, and the faculty adviser could see student more than registration day and having his program approved. In fact, some faculty advisers, because the numbers became smaller saw their students regularly at appointed periods, possibly every two weeks, and a good number of them also started having their     students at home for Sunday night suppers and this created a really great morale on campus.  Students were really pleased with this. Faculty advisers became very much involved with student activities, and I recall that a number of us got involved with Stagers.[24] In fact, there was a joint faculty-student production I think almost every year and they were well done. Faculty -I was a great actor--I never could utter a line – and I was good at being backstage pulling ropes, moving furniture around and doing all physical labor. That was about as far as I got in Stagers. But it was good fun.

        In that connection, I might mention that when the new student services program was put in, there were faculty who were a little bit skeptical about all this.  A number of people said to me, “Morey, you're going to spoon feed the students.” And that was the last thing that crossed my mind.  We didn't intend to spoon feed the students or hold their hands or make life just a bed of roses. In that connection, I had a girl come into my office one morning and ask me to excuse from her geology exam.  The professor in the course I didn't know at the time was Ed Hoffmeister[25] who, of course, was the Dean of the College and she had already been to see Ed and he wouldn't excuse her. But she said, "One of the other Deans might excuse me," so he sent her down to see me or Margaret Habein. Well, she happened to come see me and I said “Why should I excuse you from the geology exam? What's the reason?” And she said, “I’m in Stagers, you know that. You and I have been working backstage there.” And I said “Sure, I’ve been working backstage and getting home at one o’clock in the morning, and still I have to get to the office every morning whether I work at Stagers or not.  You made your choice. You want to spend that time on Stagers, that's good - I'm all for it.” And she said, "You approve of that?" I said, "sure I do but you still take your geology exam.”  She walked out and she took it. Ed came down to see me. He said "Lord." He couldn't believe it - he was sure I would excuse her -he was tickled to death. He said, “Boy. I’m convinced of it – you guys mean business." And we did make it clear to the students that we would try to make concessions to them when they had a case but this was an institution where they were supposed to learn, and Stagers were important to it, yes, but that wasn't going to be the tail that wagged the dog. And that girl took her exam and failed it - it was only a mid-term exam and she did get through all right. But that was the kind of message we tried to convey to the students and to the faculty and we tried to it. I think we did the best we could. Maybe we didn't always succeed but we certainly tried to.

The activities of the dormitories were strengthened. We had the feeling that fraternities were dominating the campus far too greatly and so we tried to promote social functions in the dormitories, and as the new dormitories were built, there were social halls or lounges where they could hold some dances in the dormitories as well as in the fraternity quadrangle. And Frank Dowd[26] did a lot of work there on the men's halls, and Barbara Lewis[27] of course was doing a very outstanding job in the women's residence halls, and the interchange between the women's residence halls and the men's residence halls during the merger was an interesting phenomenon in that before the merger took place, the men of course were in general opposed to the merger. The women were not that enthusiastic - there were some women who were opposed to it. But I'd say a majority of the women students thought it was a good idea. When the women finally got over to the River Campus – We had had trouble that first year before we moved physically with the men in terms of their dress and their behavior in the dining halls. We had been criticized by the higher echelon, the Vice President and higher - the fact that our men students were not acting like human beings - that they were sloppy and didn't eat their food properly. When the women came over the men very often got invited over to the women's residence halls for dinner. They went over there and it was kind of nice to have it quiet and pleasant and sit down to dinner, and it looked like kind of a civilized type of situation and they also thought they would like to invite the women over to the men's dining hall but they didn't dare because they knew what their friends would be doing, and they didn't want that kind of behavior. So they talked to us about it and eventually we advised them to have the women over and see what happened. Once the women were invited over, and they were invited in groups of 8 to 10, they had tremendous impact on the men students and they began to reform. And the men's dining hall got to be a more and more civilized place as time went on. The women had a great influence on what happened in the men's dining halls, and I think in general - general behavior on the campus as a whole. It certainly improved the whole esprit de corps on the River Campus.

I’ve rambled there but going back a little bit, I might bring up the point that there were a lot of fears and doubts about the merger. As I said earlier, some of the women students wanted none of it. The men students - I would say a majority, although I didn't poll them - were opposed to it and I would hear arguments such as “women are stupid - they will come over to our campus, they will lower our standards, and we will just have a lousy institution. We've got a fine college now - the women will ruin it." And little did they know that the women students were already far above them and I didn't have any fears at all but that when the women came over they would outstrip the men, and they would have to eat all their words. And time proved this to be the case, so much so that the men finally realized that the first year of the physical merger the men recognized the ability of the women, even though they were outnumbered

almost 2 to 1. I believe that the Editor-in-Chief of the college paper, the merged paper, was a woman, the director of the radio station was a woman, and the President of the Student Association was a woman.[28] And there the thing turned out just the opposite of what many people predicted. I certainly wouldn't have predicted that event, but the men proved to be a lot wiser than they led us to believe when they made those foolish about the stupid women coming over to our campus. It worked out pretty well.

When the student merger took place and the Office of Instruction and Student Services was created, I would have to say that Dr. de Kiewiet gave it tremendous support. He was a staunch supporter of it and really believed in it. If we hadn't believed that, none of us would have taken on the job - none of us would have tried to do it. Interestingly enough, he didn't like the name “Office of Instruction and Student Services.”  His own choice for the name of the office was the “Office of Student Welfare,” and he thought the word “welfare” conveyed the notion that we were going to be concerned with the well being of the student in every possible respect. Others on the staff didn't like that word “welfare” because of the connotation the word has, and I suspect that de Kiewiet didn't realize what the connotation had for many people, having come from South Africa, that word wouldn't have the same connotation as it has in this country today. But he did refer to it as student welfare time and time again in speeches he gave about it, when he boasted about what he had in terms of this particular setup, he did use the term student welfare because he liked it. We didn't object to the word in that context but we didn't think it was a good title for the office.

The other thing that I could cite about the setup of the Office of Instruction and Student Services - there were 10 of us that were full time - there was no way that 10 of us, even though we were all working at this full time - could have done the job. The faculty advisers - there may have been as many as 45 or 50 - were the ones that really carried the ball. The way it worked was that they handled the students rather regularly, and then if they got a problem that they thought was going

to take a lot of time, that is, an hour of discussion wasn't enough, that you might spend a lot more time with the student, then they would refer the student to one of the Deans, and that seemed to work out pretty well.

And we could either keep the case and handle the student ourselves, or we could refer the student to some member of the clinical psychology program, and send the student to psychiatry. Sometimes we might send the student over to Bob Beaven, the Chaplain.[29] We used as many people as we could. The people in the Athletic Department were very helpful on a number of situations.    

  Which reminds me that during the three years of the merger, when a student decided to withdraw from the University of Rochester, he had one

heck of a time withdrawing, in that he had to get almost up to ten signatures.  I remember one youngster who decided to leave, and I talked to him for about an hour and I couldn't convince him that he ought to stay in college - nothing wrong with the student academically; he had some things heating up, but we really didn't want him to go because we felt that if we had a little bit more time, we might be able to save him. So I sent him off to get his proper termination - he had to get all these signatures. He came back after he had about 6 signatures and said, "God, Dean, it's harder to get out of this college than it is to get in,” and

he said, "I'm weakening." And eventually he did not go.  He finally came back without all the signatures and he said “I’m staying.”  And that was part of our thinking about it – we felt that maybe Wantman couldn’t keep a student from leaving, but maybe MacLeod might, maybe Dowd might, or maybe Beaven might. Somebody might get to this youngster and find out what was eating him and so he might stay.  I say he - it could be she -the same way with the women.  And we did make it hard for them to get

out, I must say.

The other thing that turned out different from what we thought was when the original plan for the office was created, there was not going to be an Associate Dean, but Margaret Habein was just going to be Dean of Instruction and Student Services, and a Dean of Men and a Dean of Women under her. But Margaret thought that possibly since she was breaking new ground - as far as I know she was the first woman in the country who ever was the Dean of both men and women. I know it has happened since, but I think this was the first time a woman ever was Dean of a coeducational college which had a majority of men students, by the way, rather than women students. And the assumption was there would have to be a man there to take care of the men students, and  that's really probably the reason that I went into the job as Associate Dean, and to our amazement, it just didn't work out the way we had anticipated.  The bulk of the students sex-wise who came in - the women students tended to turn right into my office and the men students tended to turn left into Margaret’s office. And our roles were just reversed from what we’d thought when we started. I would say that of about 700 students a year – I counted them up one time - 500 were women and 200 men, and Margaret’s ratio was the opposite. Perhaps it tells you something that we have missed here, that maybe the women students need a father image and the men students need a mother image. It was certainly not what we had expected.

        We also found that the principle that is enunciated often that the person who         is going to do counseling cannot be the disciplinary officer and that just proved to be false. I was certainly on the staff, and I objected to the idea that I would have to discipline students and also have to counsel. So I volunteered to be the bad guy and hand out the discipline and let the other two do the counseling, and my colleagues said, "no way. We're all going to do it all." And it turned out really that I did most of the discipline work, that is, to tell the students that they were going to be punished. But I didn't find that it interfered with my personal counseling one iota. The students somehow or other believed us -felt that they got a fair hearing and we didn't get into trouble on that at all.  The  theories said that we should be in trouble, but I can recall all sorts of things that I am not going to repeat here -confidential things students told me that sometimes led to disciplinary action against them and they knew when they were telling me this that it might happen, and the theory said that they won't tell you if they know you might punish them, but they did. They did tell us practically everything. And we had a number of cases where the students were wiser than we were in terms of discipline. I recall our deciding to discipline two particular students and the next morning, I had a group of fraternity men in my office, and I thought, "Here it goes now. We're going to catch it for this one." And they just came in to tell me that they wanted to, in a sense, pat us on the back that we did the right thing. They wondered when we were going to get around to doing this.  In

fact, the situation was a lot worse then we knew. And we had uncovered some of the things these boys had done, but they had done lots worse things so that they wanted us to know they were not against us. That was kind of refreshing to get that kind of report.

Again, the students were - felt - pretty informal with us even though we had what I said earlier, fairly strong disciplinary measures we handed out.  I recall one thing along an ethnic line. We had the rule that no dormitory proctor could be married (inaudible) holding it were old fashioned, so that any time a dormitory proctor married, he would have to move out of the dorm.  And lo and behold, one of our dormitory proctors decided to get married in the middle of the first semester and he had to go.  And then I was given the job of finding a head of the dormitory in the middle of the academic year, which was not easy to do.  My thought went to a chap by the name of Bernie Harleston[30] who was then one of the assistants in the dormitory, but at that time Bernie Harleston was black and he was a graduate student in psychology. I knew him very well, a great person, who, by the way, is the Dean of Tufts University now. I thought, "Boy, I ought to put Bernie in that job but not a black student in that dormitory, I just can 't do it. We’ll        never get away with it. The staff talked about it and they said “Yes, we'd sure like to do this but we can't do it." So the students were smarter than we were. I got into the office the next morning and there was a student there with petitions signed by over 200 students demanding that Bernie Harleston be made head of the dorm. In fact, there were three students there; they were all men students and I said, “Boys, if you were girls, I would kiss every one of you." That    solved our problem but that to me was a very rewarding day, and I really feel that the Rochester students were ahead of a lot of other people in terms of their understanding and their tolerance of ethnic groups and they were distressed way back then in the 50s that we had too few black students. They just felt very strongly.

Chuck Dalton[31] and I talked about this and Chuck came up with a solution one day about getting more black students. He called in all the black students we had on campus at the time, early December, and appointed each one of them assistant director of admissions, and told back to go back to their home towns and recruit for us. If they came up with qualified black students he would guarantee that they would be admitted to the UR. They came back the second semester and couldn't get any. We were in competition at the time with Yale, Princeton, Harvard, even way back then and we didn't have the large scholarship funds that they had, so when I left the campus we had a very small number of black students.   

The Chapel program on the River Campus became very strong after the merger when Bob Beaven came on as the Chaplain. I think probably chapel attendance may have been 50 to 70 students per Sunday morning. By the time I left I think Bob must have had 600 to 700 students at the chapel service. And he was quite a person and did a great job in counseling, and ran a program that was really very good. In that connection, by the way, we had trouble on the religious side, and the group came up with the idea that we would not have a denominational religious service or any religious groups on the campus - we would not have any Episcopalian counsellors, or Presbyterian or Catholic, or just none at all. And I, of all people had to go to see the Bishop[32] in Rochester with Bob McCambridge[33] who is a Catholic, and he was nervous as could be, thought the Bishop would be dead opposed to this. And he wasn't at all, thought it was a great idea as long as all the denominations were do this, and that would be fine and the Catholic Church would not put a chaplain on the campus, and everybody went along with this. Much to our amazement, the Episcopalians were the first to violate it and they killed the whole idea. They bought a house or rented a house near the campus and put a man in there, a minister, and he used to visit the dormitories. And many people felt very strongly that he should not be allowed in the dormitories but we couldn't stop it, and once he did it, we had all the denominations.  And the idea of not - Bob Beaven did not object to it as I recall. He just thought he could still carry on his college life program in spite of the fact that these various denominational groups would be represented. He said he succeeded, but I would have liked to not see - I would have preferred it to - if the Episcopalians had not gone against the agreement and not put a counsellor on the campus.

The women on the staff got involved with everything that the men did. We shared everything alike, so much so that when the athletic board - or whoever decides these - yes, it was the athletic board, I believe I was serving as a representative at the time - decided to renew the athletic relationship with Hobart, after the break that came during the Valentine years, when the decision was made to renew the relationship with Hobart, the game as everybody knows, was to be scheduled in Geneva. One of the explanations for the trouble we had each year was that the game was always at Rochester, and Hobart students always came up to the big city, and they would literally paint the town red. The game was to be held in Geneva, and there was a lot of planning going on between the two staffs, the Deans at Hobart and the Deans at Rochester, and we took just about every precaution that we could that nothing would happen. We talked to our students, and they talked to their students. And the day of the game, Saturday morning, poor Ruth Merrill and Isabel Wallace[34] had to go to the Hobart/UR game in Geneva because their girls were going to be there, and we were just going to have to - all of us - the whole staff went down there to see the football game and they were good troupers - they went. And then we met with the deans (inaudible) and we agreed we'd meet again at the hotel at 5 and we would also - the Hobart deans and I were going to talk at half-time, and everybody was in the stands and we were all keeping our eye on our kids because we didn't want them thrown out of college. Of course nothing happened, everybody knows, but the women didn't even bat an eyelash. We decided that we were all going to the Hobart-Rochester game and they said, "We'll go, we'll go." And off we went.[35]

HB: Oh, that's great. Morey, I'm going to break for a moment and change the tape. Morey, a moment ago you alluded to Ruth Merrill and Isabel Wallace as being on your staff, could we get on the record the complete personnel that was on the staff of the Office of Instruction and Student Services?

MW: Yes, if can remember all the names. But I might say this before I call off the names that I do recall, that we always felt that the Office of Instruction and Student Services included everybody, all the faculty advisers, the registrar, the admissions office, the chaplain - everybody who participated in this thing and without all these people, the thing could never have come off. But the people met regularly as a staff at least once a week for a 3-hour session to sort of sum up what had happened last week and what was ahead of us next week and try to anticipate problems - that staff consisted of about 10 people. And that was of course, Margaret Habein was the Dean, and then Ruth (inaudible) student services, Ruth Merrill was the Dean of Women and Isabel Wallace was the Freshman adviser, Barbara Lewis was the director of the women's residence halls, and then we had another gal, Fran, who in charge of a lot of the housekeeping work in the women's residence halls. And among the men, there was myself and then there was Pete Atkins[36] who was the Dean of Men, Frank Dowd who is now with the University again, was then director of residence halls, later became the Dean in the college before he left and went to Lincoln University as Vice President, Joe Cole[37] who eventually became - Joe Cole took over my old job as director of the testing and counseling service, and after I left, he became a Dean, and maybe a Vice President of the University, I don't know.  He is now back to teaching in Cleveland, and Cliff MacLeod[38] was Director of Todd Union and he left after I did and went out to become a Dean of Students at one of the Claremont colleges in California where he still is. Those nine people though were the ones who were full-time on this program, but again, I repeat, that without these other people, obviously the student body, small as it was by most standards - a little over 2000 students then, probably much larger now - it took a lot more people than just nine to carry this program out.

Incidentally, one of the faculty advisers that we had was John Russell, the University Librarian, and he was first-class. As University Librarian he couldn't take on too many students, but John was interested in students.  The President wasn't happy with me when John took it on, but John wanted to do it, and he took 20 students every year and did a bang-up       job, a really great job. I cite John as an example of the kinds of people on the faculty who really were interested in this kind of thing, and did it and did it well, did it very well, and did it genuinely because they wanted to do it. Early in the game some of the faculty advisers before the merger before this office was set up, very often the job would fall to younger members of the faculty who more or less felt pressured into having to do it. But after the merger that no longer happened.  We got to be selective and if a man or woman didn't want to do it, we just said, "Fine, we'll get somebody else." And if we didn't feel that they were doing what we felt they ought to be doing, or if their heart wasn't in it completely and they were doing it just because - whatever their reasons might be, once their appointment was over with, we didn't renew it, got somebody else instead. Comes to my mind a man like Ed Wiig[39] who was an outstanding man in the Chemistry Department, first-class faculty adviser, excellent person. And there were many like that I'm just citing the name that just occurred to me right now, whose attitude was just super. People were aware of the fact that she was always interested in students (inaudible).  Ethel French[40] had been an adviser, and my friend in languages - well, I'm bad on names - that's what it boils down to - she's retired now.

HB:  Oh, Dr Hill. Alfreda Hill?

MW:  Alfreda Hill - Fritzy Hill.[41]

HB:  Yes.   

MW:  Well, the - I really believe the merged campus was a success from the students' advising side of it and (inaudible) student personnel program, academic and personal, but as the years went on, some of us felt that the President was not as supportive of it as we had thought originally, and it was because of disagreements which I started to have with him on certain aspects of the student program. I began to feel that maybe I would have to leave, and eventually I did when certain events took place which made it uncomfortable. The difficulty started almost the first year of the physical move to the River Campus in that the Admissions       Office, any admissions office, runs a lottery within its students. They really can't honestly anticipate how many students will come. They admit more students than they have places for, and they base this on past experience that if they take three students, they will get one because students apply to many institutions. In 1955, the year of the physical merger of the two campuses, the Admissions Office, as usual, was operating on the ratio of say one out of three will come, so they admitted possibly 600 students, and expected to get 200, and none of        us could foresee this. We were swamped with students - we had more takers than anybody could possibly have anticipated. And oddly enough, that same year there had been pressure by the President on the Director of Admissions to increase the admissions. And the President really felt strongly that the Admissions Office should be recruiting more and more students and it turned out that when we had to move to the River campus – move the women onto the River Campus – we did not have anywhere near enough spaces for the women students in the residence halls. The solution, we thought would be to have the President and his staff remain on Prince Street - 15 Prince Street. The original plan was for the President to take over two wings on second floor of the residence hall. The straightforward solution we thought would be for - no hurry for the President and the Administration to be on the River Campus and they could wait until their building was completed. I got sarcastic remarks about this in an unpleasant tone that I didn't appreciate, where they wouldn't even discuss the problem with me. And they said, “That’s a college problem. So face it -- we're moving." And they wouldn't even consider staying on Prince Street. That, I must say, created many different problems for us and, as a matter of fact, there were other problems too which they were insensitive to that bothered us, in that they were in two wings in the women’s dormitory and they were supposed to leave the building by certain doors to go to their cars which, of course, were parked right by the building. But NO, that was a little bit longer to get to the car so they would see fit to walk right through the other two wings of the dormitory where the girls were living and the girls objected to this, and I felt that they were right. They didn't like having these strange men walking through their dormitory corridors when they might be walking out of their rooms to the shower in their slips or possibly just in their panties and bra – they just didn't like these strange men and the administration were completely unsympathetic. Their argument was that we've got daughters older than they are and what difference does it make? But to the girls it did - was – back in those days it made difference - they just didn't like it. But we lived through it, and it was a minor thing, but it was in a sense an indication of their insensitivity to the problems of the women students. The women students, as far as ability is concerned, their ability, as I have already said, was increasing and kept getting better and better every year, because of this artificial restriction on the number of women who could be admitted, in that the construction of that residence hall, I assume by action of the trustees to limit the number of women that could contaminate their campus, we just couldn't take any more residents than that building could hold. Somehow, since that time, somebody convinced them to build more women's residence halls so that limitation has been removed, but back in those days, the limitation was there. Hence the women students coming into the University of Rochester kept getting better and better all the time and they just passed the men by a big margin. And that should have been foreseen, but nobody paid any attention to it.

The whole student personnel or the whole instruction and student services idea on the UR campus I look back on as one of the outstanding things in the University of Rochester, and I could only hope that they continued it, but I don't know whether they or haven't. When I left I had the feeling that there was too much tampering with this institution. I remember telling Dr. de Kiewiet one time when we were having one of our many disagreements, as we had that last year, that he reminded me of a comment that Curt Stern[42] made. Curt Stern, at the time, was head of the Biology Department, in genetics, and he left us and went to Cal Tech. But at a faculty meeting there was a discussion about some kind of a change.  Somebody had brought up the analogy that you can have mutations, and mutations don't have to be bad - mutations could be good.  And Curt said to the faculty, "Look, I'm a geneticist and what you say is true that you could have mutations that are good. But   all I can tell you is that if I have a Swiss watch that is keeping perfect time, I'm not about to take it apart to see if I can make it run better." And I said that to Dr. de Kiewiet that he was doing the same thing.  To me, personally, the University of Rochester was not the University of Iowa, and he said to me, "You have always been a supporter of State institutions." And I said, "Yes, I was and I am. I think they are great institutions, but the University of Rochester is a unique institution as I see it, and it is running very well, and there is not another institution in this country that I know of that is like it, and I this country could use one University of Rochester as it is running now. And I don't see any point of tampering with it. Now you can say I am too conservative but I just don't want to see things that are going well meddled with, and you're about to change them." And he did want to change them and did make changes. He appointed in the last year committees to do various things on which Ed Hoffmeister, Margaret Habein and I were not members at any point, and when we questioned this, we were told that we would be consulted by the committees, but we were never consulted to amount to anything important.  As far as I was concerned it was - either had been written before the committee ever met - the chairman of the committee pretty much knew what the president wanted in that report, and that's what       was in the report.  And that type of thing was what - I give one example of the kind of thing that finally in a sense led to the resignation of all three deans, Ed in 1956, and Margaret Habein's and mine two months after Ed Hoffmeister’s.  I gave the college one year’s notice so they could find a replacement, then Margaret Habein resigned sometime in the middle of 1957, and went out to the University of Wichita as their guest, and then she (inaudible).[43] But I look back on my days at Rochester with great fondness, made some great friends. I enjoyed the students – I missed the classroom in the last two years, and for almost 16 years after that I was out of the classroom, and so two years ago I went back to the classroom, getting a big kick out of it.

HB: Oh, that's great. Morey, just to help me recall – after you left here, did you go to Princeton?

MW:  No, I went to the Far East.

HB: Wasn't there a connection with the College Entrance Board or was it for the government?

MW:  No, this was a project that the Educational Testing Service at Princeton was approached on by the Carnegie Corporation.   The Educational Testing Service is the organization that was formed from the merger of the graduate record examination and the law school exam and the college board exam. The College Board continued as an organization but the actual building of the tests, and administering the tests was all done by this new organization.  All of this done to save money, to stop the duplication – there was too much duplication - the Carnegie Corporation was putting money up for testing work and the American Council was, and the College Board was spending a lot of money and they decided that they put too much money in and let's just stop all this and organization (inaudible). The ETS, Educational Testing Service, was approached by Carnegie to send somebody out to Singapore, Malaya, to see if they couldn’t do something about the educational system out there through the device of examinations again.  Again the examinations often used a lever for changing the curriculum, changing what people – how people were teaching and so I went out there for the Educational Testing Service, I thought originally as an employee.  Before I left the plan was that I would go as an employee of the Educational Testing Service. That didn’t work out for a number of technical reasons so they just trusted me and gave me money in my pocket and said, “go do it.”  And I went out there for three years so I wasn’t working for anybody.  They just assumed that if they gave me the money I would go out there and do the work and so I did go out there and – stayed out there for three years - and on the way home – the Carnegie Corporation sent me home via Africa – I went to India for the State Department and to Pakistan, and stopped off in four countries in Africa.  The Carnegie would try to tell the people in these four countries in Africa what I had been doing in Malaya. And then I came home to work for ETS in Princeton, and after I had been there a year we  sort of got an international program going and I continued to travel around the world for six years, and this time to report on it. I was on the staff of ETS then, and then in 1967 I joined the Graduate School of City University, and now I’m back teaching at one of the Brooklyn colleges, the Undergraduate School of the City University. I’m about to retire.

HB:  You can retire with some wonderful memories. You've had a fascinating experience.

MW:  Well, it's been fun. I've liked it.

HB:  Oh, I can believe it.

MW:  I’ve liked it. It's – I just like the matter of working with young people and Sue[44] and I used to say over and over again, "Boy, they’re keeping us young.”  And the students just force you to think the future and you don't look back, and you don't say, “There’s nothing ahead.”  Because we tend to live vicariously through these youngsters - we watch their careers. We used to, when she was living, we kept in very close touch with many students.  

HB:  Yes, Sue had a way of just worming her way into the hearts of -

MW:   There again, I've left that part of the story out but that’s a bad omission because this whole story I have been telling you – the faculty wives - I'll never forget the coffee klatch thing that somebody came up with, I think it was Polly Atkins.[45] Students always panicked at examination time and they wouldn’t eat well and so on. So Polly got this thing organized, baked stuff and got other faculty wives to bake stuff, and they all gathered every night during examination period from 6 o'clock on and the faculty wives would serve the students coffee and cake and so on until 9 o'clock at night.  And faculty people were invited to come if they had an examination the next day so students could come in and have a bull session with them. The students always thought they were going to worm questions out of them, but they knew they weren't going to get them, but they liked the idea of the security of getting a pat on the back from their instructor.  That was a great institution that Polly introduced. I don't know if it died or not but it kept up for a number of years. There were a lot of faculty wives that helped – Bill Clark's wife[46] - and I can name them all - they all helped. And Sue used to have the girls out for a brownie session in the afternoon. She'd get other friends of hers - not necessarily faculty wives, but alumnae, and they would pull up to residence halls in two or three cars and would holler out in there, “Who’s for popcorn and brownies?"  The girls would pile in -  as many girls as could gathered in cars and drove out to the house, do nothing except lie on the floor and pop the popcorn and tell stories, and then they'd drive them back to dorm. I'm sure it was done by other people and this helped - the students loved the idea of getting out of the dormitory now and then and into a home. It seems like a little thing, but apparently it was important to them.

HB:  Well, it just emphasizes the caring - genuine caring for each other - that we were talking about earlier - an example of it. Do you think of any other amusing or warm personal reminiscences that come to mind? You mentioned a faculty meeting with Dexter Perkins that I thought was kind of amusing.

MW:  Well, we used to hold our faculty meetings before the merger -meetings were held on a stated Thursday every month, scheduled meetings that were listed in the catalog. One month the meeting was on the River Campus and the other month it would be in Anderson Hall.  And we all assembled in Anderson Hall one Thursday, and the people had all come from the River Campus, and Mr. Valentine opened the meeting and the minutes were dispensed with so the meeting was in session in thirty seconds.  And he called for business and committee reports, and there were no committee reports, no business to be discussed, and in fact, there was no point to the meeting. Mr. Valentine was more than a little bit irritated, and he didn't want to see all these people gathered and wasting their time coming there to no purpose whatsoever. He said, “Well, what do you suggest we might do?”  Whereupon, Dexter Perkins[47] sitting in the front row said, “Well, we could have a sing-song.”  At that point Mr. Valentine adjourned the meeting, and made it clear that no more meetings should be called unless there was business to be conducted."

HB:  Oh, that’s great.

MW:  He was a – most people knew that he was a chain smoker but he enforced the rule that there would be no smoking in the classroom ever.  And different from other institutions I have been in since I was at Rochester, I had student smoking in my classroom and the rule against it - there was no way you could enforce it because nobody enforces it. But at Rochester, as far as I know, it was enforced always and I was a heavy smoker myself but it would never have occurred to me ever to smoke in a classroom.  And when we held our faculty meetings, the same rule applied - you could not smoke in faculty meetings.  Mr. Valentine wanted his cigarette – we were in Morey Hall that time for the meeting.  The meeting went on and on and on and it got to be a quarter to six or so and it was clear that the meeting couldn’t be adjourned because we to had to finish whatever we were arguing about, and at least get a resolution of mind on it. Mr. Valentine was shaking his foot which he tended to do when he got real irritated.  You could see his leg rocking back and forth and you knew “watch out now.”  He was a little unhappy with what was going on here because people were repeating themselves and so on. Finally he said, “If somebody would make a motion to adjourn, we could adjourn the meeting and continue the discussion and then we could all smoke.”  So somebody did make a motion, and the minute the motion was made, he didn’t even call for a second, he lit up a cigarette and said, “Now we can go on with it if you want.”  There a rather amusing things like that – on a different occasion there was one faculty member that tended to be very long-winded, and he had spoken maybe twice, and was speaking again and kept repeating himself.  Finally, Mr. Valentine said to him right in the middle of a sentence, “Crisp it up, Bill, crisp it up.”  This was very good because the faculty had gotten a little tense about it too.

HB:  Well, Morey, you've been a lot of fun in this pulling your memories together here and I am certainly grateful for all the time you’ve given   it and the delicious avenues we've wandered up.  On behalf of the Friends of the University, I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing all your thoughts with us.  It’s going to mean an awful lot to  -

MW:  It was good to talk to you again.

HB:  It has been. I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly.  I hope it’s the start of more time – golf included.

MW:  OK.