Creator: Clarence Winder, Jeff Charnley

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Description:

Clarence Winder first came to Michigan State University in 1961 when he became director of the psychological clinic and program director for the doctoral program in clinical psychology. In 1967 he was appointed Dean of the College of Social Science and in 1974 he left that position to serve under John Cantlon as Associate Provost. He became Provost in 1977 and was instrumental in moving the university in the direction of providing an excellent undergraduate education while encouraging research, scholarship and graduate education. Dr. Winder also contributed to regularizing procedures so program and budget planning and the administrative process were improved. He left the Provost position when Dr. John DiBiaggio became president and retired in 1991.

Date: September 20, 2000

Format: Text/pdf

Original Format: Word Document

Resource Identifier: Winder, Clarence.pdf

Collection Number: UA 3

Language: English

Rights Management: Educational use only, no other permissions given. Copyright to this resource is held by Michigan State University and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the University Archives & Historical Collections, Michigan State University.

Contributing Institution: University Archives & Historical Collections, MATRIX, Office of the Provost

Relation: Sesquicentennial Oral History Project

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections

Text File: Download

Transcript: Charnley: Today is Tuesday, September 20 of the year 2000. We're here in East Lansing, Michigan. I am Jeff Charnley interviewing Dr. Clarence Leland D. Winder for the MSU [Michigan State University] Oral History Project for the Sesquicentennial. The institution will be commemorating this event in the year 2000.
As you can see, Professor Winder, we're taping this oral history. Do you give us permission to record?

Winder: Yes, I do.

Charnley: Let's start first with your educational and personal background a little bit. Where were you born, and where did you go to school?

Winder: I was born on June 16, 1921, in a farmhouse in Kansas. At the age of five, my family took me off to Southern California. So I started school in Pasadena, California, and eventually graduated from high school in Santa Barbara. After that I did my undergraduate work at UCLA, took a little time out to participate in World War II, and came back on the GI Bill to Stanford [University], where I did my master's and Ph.D. in psychology. I got my Ph.D. in 1949.

Charnley: Where did you serve in the military?

Winder: I was in what in those days was called the United States Army Air Force. I was a pilot. I did a combat tour in the Mediterranean theater.

Charnley: Were you a bomber or a fighter pilot?

Winder: Pilot of a bomber, B-25, Billy Mitchell bomber.

Charnley: I know Fred Williams [unclear].

Winder: I think he flew B-24s. Fred and I occasionally relive a little bit of World War II.

Charnley: He was my mentor here as a undergraduate.

Winder: Fine, fine academic.

Charnley: What interested you in psychology as a field of study?

Winder: Well, probably two things, generally. One, psychology seemed to me to be a discipline that had, as it was defined in those days, a broad scope. There was everything from what in these days would be called genetics to social psychology bordering on sociology, a term that's fairly frequently used now as biopsychosocial as the scope of the discipline. So it was an opportunity to learn a lot of things that seemed important and interesting.
The other was that I became interested in a reading clinic that was operated by the psychology department at UCLA in those days, and I found that kind of work, that is, work with individuals who had goals, but problems in achieving those goals, both instructive and challenging. So it was broad scope of intellectual interests plus an exposure to application and principles.

Charnley: When you started as an undergraduate did, you intend on majoring in psychology, or was there someone that had an influence on you?

Winder: No. When I went to college I was a chemistry major first of all, and after that, I tried math for a while, and as I took courses in different areas, as I say, my attraction primarily was the intellectual scope of the discipline of psychology.

Charnley: What was it like attending university under the GI Bill? What was the milieu like at that time?

Winder: Well, I was in graduate school by that time. We had an entering class the year that I started, 1945, at Stanford of probably about two dozen returning vets, and it was a combination of a lot of camaraderie, but a lot of intense competition. So it was a good show.

Charnley: How was it that you ultimately came to Michigan State?

Winder: Well, in about 1959, I think it probably was, Stanford engaged in a rather intensive self-study aimed at defining its mission for the next fifteen, twenty years as a higher education institution, and the decision, the institutional decision, was to emphasize what was termed in those days as theory and basic research. So it was a place that not going to commit a lot of its resources or interest to applied areas, with a couple of notable exceptions. Engineering, business, and law were sort of protected from the mandate to become committed to basic theory and research.
So I reviewed my interests. I could have stayed at Stanford. I was tenured and I could have stayed, but I really believed, if I were going to be honest with the institution, that I'd have to shift out of clinical psychology into either child development or personality psychology. And at that point in my career, I was very much committed to graduate education in clinical psychology. So I wasn't really looking for a move, but when Michigan State came knocking on the door and said they were looking for someone to try to refocus and energize their graduate program in clinical psychology, I decided it sounded like a good move for me, and I moved.

Charnley: Who made that contact with you?

Winder: A fellow named Lou McQuitty [phonetic]. Lou McQuitty was the, as they were known in those days, the head of the Department of Psychology here. He and I met at an American Psychological Association conference on graduate education in psychology along about 1959, '60 time frame. He and I shared some interests in trying to keep a very close interactive stance between theoretical psychology and applied psychology. His area in those days was called industrial psychology. These days it would probably be called organizational psychology.
While we were in different applied areas, there was some overlap in the areas. For example, psychological assessment was important in both industrial and in clinical, but the main thing that we shared was this sort of axiomatic belief that if psychology was going to be as strong a contributor to the general welfare as we thought it could be, that there had to be the preservation, as I say, of this interface and interaction between what one might call the principles and theory of psychology, basic research related to those issues, and applied psychology.

Charnley: So you came in the early 1960s?

Winder: I came in 1961.

Charnley: What were your impressions of the campus when you first arrived? Quite a contrast from the West Coast.

Winder: Yes, though it certainly was a beautiful campus. I visited in the summer of 1961. It was obvious that it was very attractive. But the thing that really impressed me about the institution was the combination of John [A.] Hannah and a whole cadre of very vigorous, strongly intellectually committed faculty. For example, in the College of Social Science, before the Department of Social Psychology came to be administered in 1961, it was still part of the general Arts and Sciences College. We had people like John Eucene [phonetic] and others in sociology. We had some excellent people in political science. There was really a very fine Department of Probability Statistics. There were just a lot of intellectual attractions to the place.

Charnley: Was there a lot of collaboration across the disciplinary boundary lines at that time?

Winder: That was one of John Hannah's themes, that he believed, as he told me, that higher education needed to struggle with the problem of keeping the boundaries between disciplines and among professions as permeable as possible, because, from his perspective, a lot of the things that were accepted as organizational givens in higher education could become impediments to programs, to progress, to advancements of a variety of kinds. Of course, he was very much committed to the idea that you needed strong research and strong applications working together, the tradition of agriculture, the basic research in animal sciences, plant sciences, biology, zoology, all those things interacting with applications through the ag experiment stations and the Cooperative Extension Service. It was a very congenial general concept, as far as I was concerned.
The other thing about John Hannah was that it was clear that he was ambitious that Michigan State would become a genuine research-oriented institution.

Charnley: Did you have much personal contact with him, either in psychology or--

Winder: No, but I had a very pleasant, informative, long interview with him when I was here, when they were looking at me and I was looking at the university. After that, I had very little contact with him until I became Dean of the College of Social Science. Then, of course, I was in the Council of Deans, and he met regularly with the Council of Deans.

Charnley: The College of Social Science, when you assumed the deanship, was there a reorganization prior to that?

Winder: Yes. I'm not exactly sure of the date. I think it was at the end of the 1961-'62 academic year. There was a major reorganization, and the previously existing general College of Arts and Sciences was divided into three parts and became the three colleges: Arts and Letters, Natural Science, and Social Science.

Charnley: Did you have an interest in becoming an administrator when you became dean?

Winder: I find that a very amusing topic in retrospect. I left Stanford because I didn't see much future there for the graduate program in clinical psychology. So I came here as the director of the psychological clinic and the program director for the doctoral program in clinical psychology. Actually, I was here one year and I went off to USC for a year, and I came back to be department chairperson. And from there on it was a slippery slope. [Laughter] Chairperson, dean, associate provost, and provost.

Charnley: Let's talk about some of that slippery slope that your career was involved in. You became Dean of the College of Social Science in 1967, is that right?

Winder: Correct. Yes.

Charnley: What were some of the issues, key issues? Obviously the sixties were a turbulent time generally on campuses, but at Michigan State it wasn't in particular. Did any of those affect the School of Social Science?

Winder: Oh, sure. The main focus of the faculty and, I would say, most of the student body was on the improving academic quality of the institution. We became, as you note, one of the sites where there was a lot of expression of so-called student activism, but we managed to run institutional development, as I call it, parallel to student activism. We had to deal with the issues of student activism, obviously. We managed, I think, pretty well not to let that really get us off message, as they say in the presidential campaign. The message was, Michigan State University is going to join the elite circle of research-oriented universities, and we worked at that pretty consistently.

Charnley: When was that accomplished, do you remember?

Winder: Well, has it been accomplished? [Laughter] That's the question that comes to mind.
One of the really tremendous achievements along that path was election of Michigan State University to membership in the Association of American Universities in 1963, and it was about the same time that we were chartered to have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Now, my view of higher education institutional development is that it's a multi-generation project, and I think we're still about the business of making sure that we take opportunities and expend the effort and resources when we can make improvements in academic quality, and I think that's been a guiding principle ever since I arrived on this campus. It's gone through several administrations and a number of crises, but that's been a pretty consistent commitment.

Charnley: How was it that you became associate provost? You worked first with John Cantlon, was it?

Winder: While I was dean of the College of Social Science, of course, John Cantlon was provost, and we found that we had a lot of shared both goals and ideas about process as to how to advance academic enterprise. There came a point in time when Herman King, who had the title of assistant provost--there were several assistant provosts--Herman King's responsibility was focused on the academic budget, and Herman King decided that he really did not want to continue to have that responsibility. So John Cantlon approached me and asked if I would be willing to take over that job.
I thought about that long and hard, and my response to John was that I wouldn't take over the job as an assistant provost, but if he and President [Clifton R.] Wharton [Jr.], wanted to establish the position of associate provost so it was clear that I was number two, would be number two in the provost's office, that I would do that. They did, and I did, and that was 1974.

Charnley: So there was a reorganization at that time.

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: What were your main duties at that time?

Winder: Well, my main duty, really, was to do program planning and program budgeting for the academic area, of course under John Cantlon's oversight. I did a lot of the meeting with the deans and occasionally with deans, chairpersons, directors, and individual colleges such as Arts and Letters or whatever, and worked through the development of some different procedures for departments, schools, centers, etc., to use in formulating their plans for the future, their programmatic proposals, and the associated resource stipulations that were needed, and that included obviously the annual budgets, but also space and various other things in the way of resources.

Charnley: What was it like working in the Wharton administration?

Winder: I'd have to say it was--I don't know which word to offer first, which description to offer first. It was challenging and pleasant. Cliff Wharton is one of the most civil people I have ever known, but he's also one of the brightest and most intellectually demanding people I've ever known. It was a good experience.

Charnley: What were your main dealings with him? Did you deal with him on a weekly basis?

Winder: Not really. Again, the Council of Deans was an important vehicle for interaction between the deans as a group and the provost and the president, and most of the times when I had more of less direct exchange with Cliff was in the setting of the Council of Deans. Now, in addition to that, John would involve me in meetings with Cliff when they were discussing possibilities for programmatic collaborations, changes in one or more of the colleges. I had some direct contact with Cliff, but it was mostly the setting of one kind of meeting or another.

Charnley: You became provost under Dr. Wharton, is that right?

Winder: Yes. I tell Cliff he recommended me to be provost and the board made the appointment, he realized what he'd done, so he went off to [unclear]. [Laughter]

Charnley: That was your take on why he left. [Laughter] He knew he was leaving it in good hands. So he did leave not long after?

Winder: Very shortly. I've forgotten the exact date, but it was like October or maybe November.

Charnley: Of 1977?

Winder: Yes. I had been appointed effective July 1 as provost.

Charnley: So the first president that you dealt with for interim was Ed [Edgar L.] Harden, is that right?

Winder: First Cliff. Ed Harden came as interim.

Charnley: Were you surprised that Wharton was leaving?

Winder: I was amazed. He didn't ask me for my advice on that. [Laughter] Well, you know, candidly, Cliff had a kind of albatross because he was elected president on a five-three vote of the board, and that really never changed. It was always right there, ready to manifest itself. So it was a tough duty.

Charnley: What were your workings with Dr. Harden?

Winder: Ed and I had lots of fun, as you--I don't know whether you knew Ed Harden or not.

Charnley: I never met him.

Winder: He was sort of the prototypical extrovert, and I'm not perhaps the prototypical introvert, but I'm certainly not all that extroverted. Ed and I had--I say we had lots of fun because we intended to have--what? Again I use the word "parallel views" of things. It wasn't that we were really at odds very much, but we tended to make different assumptions, we tended to bring different objectives to a situation, we tended to be interested in different parameters of what was going on. So it was an interesting time. Ed chose to involve me somewhat in interactions with the members of the legislature, so that was a learning experience.

Charnley: Did you have to testify at the legislature?

Winder: When we went to meetings of the higher education subcommittees of the House and the Senate, I was present and participated to some extent, but with Ed, hardly anybody on the university side besides Ed participated.

Charnley: That was Nick Jacobeti's [phonetic] committee, wasn't it?

Winder: Yes. He was on the House side. Early on there was a man named Zoller. I can't remember his first name at the moment, but he's from the west side of Michigan someplace, such as Holland or Zeeland [phonetic] or some such place over there, and that was an interesting contrast, too, between Jacobeti and Zoller, because they had very different world views.
Ed was--I need to be careful how I phrase this exactly. One of the instruments that John Hannah used deliberately in the process of good institutional development of this institution, this university, was to continue to expand the enrollment. If you think of it in simplistic budgetary terms, if you added an additional 500 freshmen each year, expanded the size of the freshman class, the tuition from those 500 enrollments was an add-on, and it was flexible money because you could usually assimilate, because you were adding faculty in the total process, you could usually assimilate those additional enrollments without very much additional direct expenditures, so to speak. So it was an interesting tactical program that Hannah and Phil May, the vice president of finance, had put into place.
I would say that Cliff Wharton saw important alternative ways to enhance academic quality and was somewhat, in my perception, cautious about additional expansion of the size of the student body. Ed Harden came in, and he was very much like "John Hannah, Jr." in the way he viewed things.

Charnley: "Bigger is better."

Winder: Well, "bigger" permitted you more flexibility, but "bigger is better" is also part of it. I think that's fair.

Charnley: Were there any notable issues that you recall that we had to deal with under his administration?

Winder: The enrollment issue was a major issue. I remember quite well the day that I walked into--

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Charnley: When the tape ended, we were talking about key issues during Dr. Harden's presidency and interim presidency.

Winder: I was saying that enrollment was a major issue. I was commenting that I remember vividly the day I walked into this office and told him I was closing freshman admissions, and I really thought that he was going to be apoplectic. It was not part of his game plan. But again, in fairness, I have to say that Ed, as president, clearly singed on to the institutional goal of continuous academic improvement, and I think he came to understand that what I was talking about was sort of exemplified by closing those freshman enrollments that year was that we had to be able to do a high-quality job of instruction of each freshman class, among other things. So he eventually accepted that we were going to do it that way.

Charnley: Was there any indication that he might be interested in becoming the permanent president, or did he ever not discuss that with you, or did he ever discuss that with you?

Winder: I don't recall that he and I discussed that explicitly. I would tell you that my opinion is that he really did want to be named as the continuing president, but at that time there were still these sort of cultural myths that chronological age somehow or other put limitations on what people could do.
The other part of it was that I think there was probably an agreement within the membership of the board of trustees when Ed was named to be the interim president that he was not going to be among the candidates for the next regular appointment as president, thought I do believe that they finally took the "interim" off of his title.

Charnley: A symbolic gesture.

Winder: Yes. These things are often both complex and a lot of symbolism.

Charnley: In the selection of the new president, did you have any input in that, or were you not part of the selection committee or anything like that?

Winder: No, and honestly I don't remember. I think probably some members of the selection committee talked with me about what I thought were attributes that should be looked for in candidates, but I really was very comfortable with a very minimal role in relationship to the search and selection process.

Charnley: Do you remember the first time you met Dr. [M. Cecil] Mackey?

Winder: Yes. He was very gracious. He was obviously preoccupied, appropriately, with things other than us having a long conversation. He was here to accept the appointment and did so, and then as soon as he came on a regular basis, obviously we had lots of long and deep conversations.

Charnley: So you got to know him well?

Winder: Oh, yes.

Charnley: And he asked you to continue on as provost?

Winder: You know, I don't know whether he asked me or not. [Laughter]

Charnley: He expected you. He must have been satisfied with what you had been doing.

Winder: I know that I told him that I thought that anyone coming in as a newly appointed president had the prerogative of saying that they would like to replace anyone who was in central administration and that I was prepared on a daily basis to shift my time and attention to regular faculty duties. It didn't happen.

Charnley: So you continued right through his entire administration.

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: What were some of the key issues that you had to deal with under President Mackey?

Winder: Well, of course, the key issue was the so-called budget crisis.

Charnley: In the early 1980s that developed.

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: What did you see as the main problem? Did it relate to the size of the class diminishing?

Winder: Not really. My take, especially in retrospect, on why that was a crisis was that Millikin [phonetic] was governor at the time and in Millikin's budget proposal he was proposing an increase of the order, I think, of nine percent in the higher education appropriation, eight or nine percent, in that range. That was in either late January or early February, the regular time for the governor to make his annual budget presentation. Between that time and, really, early summer it became apparent that we were going to have a decrease in higher education appropriation in Michigan. So the suddenness with which we and the other public education institutions were confronted by the prospect of going from a nice expansion to serious retrenchment, it was the suddenness with which that happened and just the dismay all over the institution that state's economy had collapsed and that we were in deep trouble.

Charnley: Difficult to deal with.

Winder: Yes. We had extended and heated public meetings of all kinds on how to cope with that situation. Eventually we formulated something called the modified coordinated proposal, an interesting euphemism for how are we going to continue to invest in improvements in academic quality at the same time that we are accommodating to a cut in budgetary resources.

Charnley: How was that carried out or how was that implemented?

Winder: As I say, there were proposals from throughout the institution. The academic governance system made the decision that they wanted to appoint a special advisory committee to advice on the way in which the institution would accommodate to this crisis. I met with them, I guess weekly, maybe more frequently than that, on a whole array of proposals that had to do not only with the academic aspects to the institution, but support services. We just went through a series of iterations of proposals to change programs and to reduce budgets or increase budgets. Among other things, there was severe inflation. We had to decide what we were going to do about trying to keep our salaries for faculty competitive.

Charnley: Was there a break in the general Michigan economy where it changed, or was it gradual?

Winder: From my perspective, it was a gradual change in the state's budgeting practices and commitments and a gradually improving economy.

Charnley: Was there any talk at the time about the difficulty of not having a separate endowment of any significance at that time, in contrast to some schools? Was that an issue then, or was it just simply how to raise money when there was very little money?

Winder: My memory of what was really a major institutional policy change was that that came about really in part initiated by Ed Harden, but really fostered by Cliff Wharton, that Michigan State University would institute a so-called development program, would create a vice presidency for development, and would go into the arena raising private funds, gifts, grants, for the institution.
But the nature of that kind of an enterprise is that it's like a learning curve. You know, if you begin to learn a foreign language, it's a long time before you have a vocabulary of fifty words. Once you get the first fifty, then it starts improving more rapidly. Well, raising private money is a lot like that. It takes a long, long time before the people who are interested in the institution really begin to understand that this is necessary in the total climate of higher education for their institution to be competitive. So fundraising, number one, the economy of the state was in shambles. Number two, we didn't have the history. So that was really not a very helpful alternative at that point in time. I think that's responsive.

Charnley: Yes. [Tape recorder turned off.]
We stopped the tape. There was too much street noise, so we stopped the tape temporarily.
We were talking about some of the budget cuts that went on in the early 1980s and the development fund and that sort of thing. How was Dr. Mackey? How would you characterize his leadership style as president, administrative style?

Winder: Cecil was very orderly and organized in thinking about the institution, so that much of the discussion that was initiated out of his office was framed in terms of, "This is a goal that we're considering, these are the objectives that can lead to that goal, these are the resources that will be needed," sort of direct and open and very forthcoming with both proposals and in responding to questions, comments, criticisms, whatever. Open, direct, organized.

Charnley: Was he easy to work with?

Winder: He was easy for me to work with. I'm not sure that was true of all the people that he dealt with. Yes, he was a very open and direct person, and I find that congenial. But then, I would say the same thing about Cliff Wharton and Ed Harden and, for that matter, John [A.] DiBiaggio. I think they were all admirable in that you could make proposals to them, you could make inquiries as to what they were thinking about a particular problem or issue of opportunity, and they'd be responsive. So you can't ask for more than that.

Charnley: How would you characterize Dr. Mackey's relationship with his board of trustees?

Winder: I think his relationship was really very good until Bobby Crim came on the scene.

Charnley: And that changed it?

Winder: Certainly did. I don't know if you have an impression of Bobby Crim.

Charnley: He came from politics.

Winder: He's a very influential state legislator, and he came on the board and was very intrusive. The institution, a whole lot of people had worked very hard to try to establish an understanding that the board was concerned with selection, evaluation of the president as CEO of the institution, and the board was a policy board, that implementation and the initiative in modifying programs in the institution was really a matter for the administration and the faculty collectively. My perception is that Bobby Crim just came in and said, "I have a lot of good ideas, and I'm going to insist that they be accepted."

Charnley: So the micromanaging on the board, you see that as starting with him?

Winder: Yes. My impression is, the real crisis was Bobby Crim asserting that he was going to decide on the admission of some applicants. That was not accepted by the administration or the rest of the board, but there was a lot of blood on the floor.

Charnley: So the board became politicized under Wharton with the five-three, that ratio, and then this was a continuation of that.

Winder: This was a regression.

Charnley: Under Dr. Mackey, did the issue of athletics and academics, did that come out to play much then? Obviously Cliff Wharton had to deal with that.

Winder: No, I don't remember offhand. Cliff, of course, had a major, major problem to deal with. We had a very, very severe penalty imposed by the NCAA. I think that, to personalize it, Cecil Mackey and Jack Breslin managed to work harmoniously, and Jack Breslin really had a very good grasp of the intercollegiate athletic scene, and he had a very fine reputation nationally in that arena. So I suppose we may have had some problems, but they weren't big enough to get my attention, for whatever that's worth.

Charnley: Dealing with other issues like putting people in the classroom.

Winder: Right.

Charnley: The issue of the reorganization that occurred was certainly the cost cutting--some people saw it as cost-cutting--phrases that I'd read in doing some of the background research was, one being college returned to a large College of Arts and Sciences, similar to what it was when you got here, and then another issue was the abolition of University College that occurred during that. Could you talk a little bit about some of those things?

Winder: Yes. I guess I am kind of a heretical character when it comes to university organization. I have long believed, probably too strongly, in a very flat kind of organization. My interpretation of that is that most of the really important academic work goes on at the level of the faculty and the first organizational level of the faculty, namely the department schools, centers, institutes. I've never been greatly impressed by the cost-effectiveness of having a big middle-level management in higher education. So a bias that I brought to the scene when I became provost was that we had too much middle management, and I spent quite a bit of energy and time and effort trying to solve that.
The first step was the reorganization which brought University College to termination and moved the four departments into the Colleges of Arts and Letters, two departments, and that's the College of Natural Science and College of Social Science. Again, I go back to what I said about one of the things that I believe John Hannah stood for, which was to minimize boundaries that limited interactions across the faculty for those individual faculty or groups of faculty who wanted to engage in innovative associations, and the college organization, in my perception, tends to interfere somewhat with that.
So if you combine my bias that you don't need very much middle-level administration and my bias that the most important thing that happens on a university campus is what the faculty decides to do with its time and energy, you get fairly quickly, I think, to the conclusion that if you reduce the number of colleges, you're apt to, number one, get a marginal decrease in costs, but more importantly, you're apt to get flexibility in the academic enterprise.

Charnley: Reduce the number of meetings to attend.

Winder: Among other things.

Charnley: Not that meetings can't be productive.

Winder: Right.

Charnley: In your term as provost, are there, in advancing the institution, any things that you can point to that you see as a real positive accomplishment that happened under your tenure or on your watch?

Winder: Well, of course, I believe that the reorganization that ended University College as a part of the institution and the termination of the small college--the name of it escapes me at the moment--

Charnley: Is it Justin Morrill?

Winder: Justin Morrill. I think those were important signposts that said that we're becoming an institution that does a responsible job, and hopefully a fine job, of undergraduate education. We're also an institution which is trying to make sure that it encourages research, scholarship, and graduate education at the same time.
One of the other things that I think I contributed to is regularizing procedures so that all of the members of the university community, faculty, departments, schools, centers, colleges, had a fair and hopefully even-handed opportunity to put forward their case in a way that was organized so that you could look across the institution and say, okay, well, you know, we could give priority here or here, and we could reduce priority here because of the following reasons and considerations. So I think that program planning and budget planning and administrative process were improved while I was provost. Now, I don't think I did that single-handedly; I think I was one of the contributors.

Charnley: Were there any technological issues that came up under your tenure that were important? Vice President [Albert] Gore [Jr.] has indicated he invented the Internet. Were there any that you were directly involved in?

Winder: Interesting question. I don't think that's quite what he said.

Charnley: You're right. He's getting blamed for saying that, or approximately saying that.

Winder: Yes. As an aside, in fairness to Gore, I think that he does have a record of having supported the development of the technology that has become the Internet. There were lots of important innovations. The change from, if you will, from primitive use of electronics to a rapidly advancing and rapidly more sophisticated use of electronics was a major thing. We went from having a central computer on this campus that almost filled, almost literally filled the so-called Computer Center. We had hundreds if not thousands of vacuum tubes chugging away over in that building. To the desktop PC, Apple-type computers that are now out of date. But that was an amazing transformation, and it was something that fortunately we had a growing cadre of people who were really at the advance changing pioneering level in the world of electronics. So we moved along in pretty good shape.

Charnley: Do you remember the circumstances under which Dr. Mackey left? Were you involved or aware at that time of what the circumstances of why he left the presidency?

Winder: Well, my private, personal belief is that the difficulties that Cecil began to encounter in relating to the board I date from the time that Bobby Crim decided that he was going to be a member of the board and did become a member of the board, was really pretty much the story. There were other things that one can point to, but from my perception, that was a very profound crisis in the governing of the institution.

Charnley: Would you say that that micromanaging or attempt to do so on the board's behalf, has that continued, or did that continue beyond President Mackey?

Winder: Oh, yes. We've had episodes of that. We had them before, we had them later, but the thing that I believe happened with Cecil was that Cecil was, in his usual way, very direct and refusing to accommodate what one of two or three board members wanted, and it just became close to impossible for the board and the president to function as a coherent governing focus of the institution under those circumstances, and Cecil decided that he would step out.

Charnley: I'm going to stop the tape here and start the second tape.

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Charnley: We're talking about the end of the Mackey administration here at Michigan State. Dr. DiBiaggio as president, how long were you provost under--

Winder: One year.

Charnley: And then you were running into the university's mandate of sixty-five and out? Is that policy still in effect?

Winder: I don't know.

Charnley: I don't know either.

Winder: I had really pretty much made the commitment to myself and also to my wife that I was going to accept the concept of leaving the position of provost when I became sixty-five. I probably would have left earlier if it hadn't been for the fact that there were smoke signals that things were going in an unfortunate direction toward the last year or so of Cecil's presidency.
Anyhow, when Cecil announced the he was going to be leaving the position and when the search and selection process proceeded and resulted in the selection of John DiBiaggio, again I don't remember the time line exactly, but it was at least a few months before John was to come and become the president, that he got in communication with me. He and I had some meetings and talked about the future of the Office of Provost, and I indicated to him that under the policy I should leave that position and that, as a matter of fact, it would be a congenial thing for both my wife and me to have that change.
John indicated that he would not want to have to conduct a search for a provost as an immediate challenge, so he thought that that was all a very fortunate coming together of several different parameters. So he and I agreed that I would leave. Actually, I was going to leave at the end of the fiscal year, but David Scott didn't want to have to do the budget presentation with the board and board subcommittees and one thing and another, so I stayed on an extra month.

Charnley: Was David Scott your association provost?

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: So there was a natural progression.

Winder: There was a national search and all that, but David Scott is such a talent that it was sort of a foregone conclusion, at least as far as I was concerned.

Charnley: A pretty strong resume.

Winder: Tight. He was an internationally renowned nuclear scientist who had been brought here as a professor and eventually agreed to be associate provost. Who was going to be a stronger candidate than that?

Charnley: That's true, especially in the intellectual things.

Winder: But the search was honest. There was nothing phoney about it.

Charnley: After you left as provost, did you return to teaching?

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: Back in psychology?

Winder: Yes. As I became fond of saying, I was promoted from provost to rank-and-file faculty member. [Laughter] Walter Adams used to talk about the rank-and-file faculty members. I took up his phrase.

Charnley: Had students changed in the duration from when you--

Winder: Oh, yes.

Charnley: Did you teach at all when you were provost?

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: As you were provost, did you teach some classes? Not that your time wasn't busy enough.

Winder: I suppose in the technical sense I can say I did. I supervised some graduate students in the psych clinic. I didn't teach courses.

Charnley: So you did keep some research activities going?

Winder: Graduate education activities.

Charnley: So how would you say that students changed in the duration from the twenty years or so you were involved in administration?

Winder: Let me go way back. My first faculty appointment was at Stanford, and the undergraduate student body at Stanford was small and extraordinarily highly qualified. Their freshman class would have something like eighty or ninety percent high school class valedictorians. In those ancient days at Stanford, there was the concept of the gentleman's C. A lot of grading was on the curve for undergraduates, especially freshmen and sophomores. Sort of the lore that goes with that is that these people who had been so intensely high achievers in high school came to Stanford and they decided that they were perfectly capable of going out and commanding a desirable career and a high income without excessive expenditure of intellectual effort. [Laughter] So there was a certain percentage of even that elite undergraduate student body who really did not show much interest in things intellectual or in a high level of learning achievement. It had this flavor that "I can do what I want to do in life without going through that," and obviously it was tough. I mean, if you were going to be in the top ten percent of that undergraduate study body there, you really did have your work cut out for you. So there were students who were truly intrigued by learning as contrasted with students who were not investing very much in learning, they were learning enough to pass, to get the C, but that was about it.
When I came back to being a rank-and-file faculty member after leaving the position of provost, the thing that surprised me more than anything else was the intense focus of, I would say, a clear majority or maybe the overwhelming majority of undergraduates in getting the certificate, of graduating from college.

Charnley: The ticket, yes.

Winder: That was it. And they would do whatever was absolutely necessary in order to be able to earn the baccalaureate degree, in order to receive the baccalaureate degree. That was really somewhat dismaying to me. But I want to add immediately that there was another percentage that varied depending on the particular course, the particular semester or quarter, there were fifteen or twenty or thirty percent of the students in each class that I taught who were interested in learning. They really were intrigued by getting to know more. And that was enough.

Charnley: I had a similar experience. It had been quite a few years when I started here where I hadn't taught an honors course, and when I taught an honors course, it was like night and day, not that we didn't have some in the regular courses that worked, but I was pleasantly surprised by that, too.
What courses did you teach when you came back?

Winder: I taught not the introductory course, but the first-level course on personality. In those days it was Psychology 225. I taught a senior level course on theories of personality, a 400-level course.

Charnley: Did you have a favorite teaching technique that you preferred to use and that always worked well?

Winder: Well, I always sort of stuck with my own personal history. I really firmly believe that significant learning can occur--I'll say it in extreme form--sort of regardless of the teaching technique. When I was an assistant professor just starting my career at Stanford, I taught what in those days was Psych 1 in the education auditorium, which was the largest seating arrangement used as a classroom on the Stanford campus, to groups of 350 to 450 students, without a microphone, with a chalkboard that rolled onto the stage, and a chunk of chalk that was about an inch in diameter.

Charnley: No teaching toys.

Winder: [Laughter] And I think a lot of those students learned a good deal about psychology under those circumstances. Now, they had to put in more effort, but in those days they did it and it worked. My favorite teaching technique--well, I taught fairly large enrollment sections of 225, you know, 150, 200, 250, and the senior-level course, I did ask them to limit that to forty. That way we could have some amount of sort of Socratic dialogue. I guess when it's all said and done, the most enjoyable and the most instructive teaching for me was graduate seminars where we had eight, ten, fifteen graduate students, and we all sat around a table, and I came in with my three-by-five index card that had the list of topics that I wanted us to discuss during the meeting that day, and we talked.

Charnley: As a seminar should be.

Winder: That's right.

Winder: One of the things in this project that we're trying to do is not just administrative, but we're dealing with some of the faculty and their experiences and how it changed in the last fifty years. It seems like that is an important theme of the last fifty years of MSU, how the faculty have approached the issue of teaching, what they've done. So that's why I've been asking consistently favorite teaching or successful teaching techniques.

Winder: The research on teaching and learning that I know about, which is not necessarily up to the minute, but the strongest variable in terms of student achievement is the orderliness and organization that the instructor brings to the classroom, whatever the so-called teaching method. That's my bias. It's not really overwhelmingly important whether it's a large, medium, or small enrollment course or it's beginning, medium, advanced, but the main thing that the instructor can bring to the situation is, first of all, expert knowledge and, second, careful advanced planning.
In the elementary level they're always talking about lesson plans. A good lesson plan in that sense, knowing what you're going to emphasize, thinking about the cognitive strategies for helping people to understand the concepts and how those concepts apply to events. That's what really makes the difference, in my opinion.

Charnley: When did you finally retire?

Winder: When did I finally retire? My official retirement date?

Charnley: That's what I'm interested in.

Winder: June 30, 1991.

Charnley: Have you been active in any activities since '91 for the university or special projects?

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: What are some of those things that you've been doing?

Winder: Well, before I retired, after I had become a rank-and-file faculty member, I was enjoying myself and the peace and quiet of my Olds Hall office. The provost came knocking on my door and said, "Jim Peters has decided he's retiring as manager of the Office of Facilities Planning and Space Management, and we've got to have somebody to run that show for a few months, so will you do it?"
So I became the interim manager of Facilities Planning and Space Management before I retired. By the time I actually retired, the process had run its course enough so that the person who was going to be the next regularly appointed manager of that office had been selected and was ready to go to work in that arena, but she was not entirely comfortable with walking in there cold. So the decision was made that I would be appointed ten percent as a consultant and I would sort of mentor her for a while as she learned how to deal with the issues.

Charnley: Is she still in that office?

Winder: No, she left that and became part of the Office of Planning and Budget, and then she became an assistant provost, special assistant to the president or something or other, Marty Hesse [phonetic]. So I did that for a while, and things would come up in the purview of the provost where they'd want a little extra staff work done, and so I'd be asked if I'd be interested in doing something or another, you know, drafting a position paper or something or other on this or that or the other thing.

Charnley: That was Provost [Lou Anna K.] Simon was asking you that, or David Scott had already left by then, or he did, too?

Winder: It was really pretty much both David Scott and Lou Anna Simon.
Meanwhile, when I retired I decided that I wanted to continue to supervise graduate students in the psych clinic. So year by year I became a volunteer adjunct faculty member, doing that. I still am supervising two graduate students who are learning to do clinical psychology in our psych clinic.
In 1995, I'd gone through the process, actually, of mentoring a second person heading up the Facilities of Planning and Space Management Office. The first was Marty Hesse. The second was Bill [unclear].
And along came the decision to establish the affiliation between the Detroit College of Law and Michigan State University. That was done, and then the problems began to arise as to what does this affiliation entail and how do you do it? So [M.] Peter McPherson and Lou Anna Simon asked me if I could take an interest in what I called being liaison between the law college and the university. So I did that. That's pretty much winding down, has wound down as of this last summer, when the new dean of the law college arrived, and we had some administrative restructuring within the law college that made it more rational.

Charnley: Did it help or hinder that you didn't have a background in law in doing that?

Winder: Candidly, I think it was an advantage. I claim to have had a bit of a background because I had served on two or three study committees over the years, a fairly intensive study committee, actually, back when I was Dean of the College of Social Science, to present a proposal and analysis of what it would take to establish a College of Law at Michigan State University.

Charnley: Those discussions have continued on.

Winder: So that's waxed and waned over the years, but I did learn enough about academic law and law colleges as academic administrative units in the process of trying to do a decent job as a member of those study committees so that I had some idea of what the academic law scene looked like in sort of broad strokes. So I had that as sort of a general matrix within which I could begin to think about issues and problems.
The advantage was that I could say to people, "Look, you know, I've had no direct experience either in a college of law or administering an institution that has a college of law. So you have to explain things to me." And that's a very good process for getting people to think more intensively and more analytically and with sometimes some more knowledge of the things they're responsible to do that they were engaged in up to that time.

Charnley: In these informal things you've had some contacts with our current president, of course. How would you evaluate President McPherson?

Winder: Well, my first comment in evaluating Peter McPherson is that he was an excellent Director of AID. This university awarded him an honorary doctoral degree in, I believe it was, 1984. So I had some acquaintance with him by reputation. I met him, technically, when he came and got his honorary degree. John Cantlon and I hooded him. [Laughter]
I was prepared for Peter McPherson to bring political sophistication, a strong sense of management and administration, and a considerable knowledge of an important slice of American academia to his service as president. I opposed the process that resulted in his appointment, for what little that was worth. [Laughter] I suppose he knows that, but it never seemed to be an issue with him, and it isn't an issue with me. The Constitution of the state says that the board of trustees shall appoint a president to serve as CEO, and they did. I don't think they did it in the way that was in the best interest of the institution, but it was done. He came, and he has served with, I think, very considerable distinction, not the least of his accomplishments is that by persuading the state political system to give us a 10.4 million-dollar increase in the so-called base appropriation, he accomplished the equivalent of about a 300 million-dollar endowment.

Charnley: Does that continue year after year?

Winder: Once you get it in the base, unless you have a crisis like the early eighties, it's pretty much perennial. If you figure that an endowment should pay some current costs but also you keep investing enough of the income so that you keep the purchasing power of the endowment up, a minimum of 200 million, I think more realistically about 300 million dollars in endowment would be necessary to produce that as a steady, reliable revenue stream. So that's important.
Peter has been willing to listen with great understanding and with great respect to those of us who have argued in favor of what I consider to be appropriate and sophisticated academic enterprise, particularly academic governance. He's been very effective in moving the development program forward. There was a good base in existence when he came, but he has built on that effectively. So I think Peter's been a strong plus for this institution.

Charnley: And now he's broken the pattern of the seven-year presidency after President Hannah. He's now beyond that benchmark.

Winder: Yes.

Charnley: As you look back on your career, did you anticipate when you came here in the early 1960s that you would end your career here or that you would be here entirely during all of your academic career?

Winder: I don't think I really thought in those terms. When I decided to come to Michigan State, to me the decision was I was going to continue to invest my time and energy in developing and managing the best possible graduate program in clinical psychology that I could imagine. I was very surprised when I decided that I would become department chairperson. I thought, you know, "What the heck do I think I'm doing?" But my colleagues seemed to want me to do that, so I did it. But even after I moved primarily into academic administration, I wasn't really thinking about, "Will I stay here or not?"
As a matter of fact, along the way, I will tell you, immodestly, that I turned down the opportunity to head up the graduate program in clinical psychology at the University of Illinois. Before I was provost here, I had an offer to be provost at the University of Georgia. I was offered an endowed chair at one of the Arizona universities. So it isn't as though I had done anything that would suggest to others, at least, that I was necessarily going to stay here forever. On the other hand, it's been a good place for both me and my wife and our family, and each year it seemed to me that what I was doing was important enough to give it my fullest possible effort.

Charnley: Sounds like an interesting place to end our interview. I want to thank you on behalf of the project for the time we've spent and your sharing your insights. I appreciate it.

Winder: Well, I hope they're insights.

Charnley: Thank you.

Winder: You're welcome.

[End of interview]