Creator: Lester Mandersheid, Jeff Charnley

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Description:

Lester Mandersheid came to MSU in 1956 after earning a BS and MS from Iowa State (1951 and 1952) and a PhD from Stanford, highlighting the topic of corn pricing and the influence it had on government policy. He served as assistant professor in agricultural economics from 1956-65 at which time he was promoted to associate professor.

In 1968, Mandersheid began serving a dual assignment in agricultural economics and the Educational Development Program. He was promoted to professor in 1970 and became associate chair of agricultural economics in 1974, progressing to department chair in 1987, a position he held until 1992. Mandersheid taught graduate courses in econometrics, economics and agricultural economics, and undergraduate courses in statistical methods, program evaluation, and agricultural marketing. His research centered on the area of curriculum development. Mandersheid was honored in 1977 as teacher, scholar, adviser and academic leader during President Wharton's State of the University Address.

Throughout his long career at the university, he served on numerous committees including CREW which revitalized undergraduate education, rethought the basic college and promoted education of the whole student. A member of the Academic Council, he was instrumental in revising bylaws, reducing the number of university committees, changing the idea of the different levels of participation, and standardizing university committee procedures. Mandersheid also served on several national and local committees and directed AID projects. He retired in 1994.

Topics/People Covered in the Interview include: Art Adams; Walter Adams; agribusiness; American Agricultural Economics Association; Jim Anderson; Athletic Council; Lawrence Boger; Jim Bond; Jim Bonham; Rye Brown; John Bruff; Dick Burnett; John Cantlon; College of Ag and Natural Resources; Cooperative Extension; John DiBiaggio; John Donnath; James Dye; Carl Eicher; Dave Fischer; Darrell Good; Jack Gresmond; Gordon Guyer; Doug Hall; Larry Hamm; John Hannah; Steve Hansen; Edgar Harden; Cliff Hildreth; E B Hill; Glen Johnson; Hunter Kyle; Warren Lee; Long-Range Planning Council; Cecil Mackey; Dean McKean; M Peter McPherson; Academic Council; Alumni Association; Athletic Council; MSU Board of Trustees; budget issues; Channel 10 & 23; College Curriculum Committee; compuerization; curriculum development; Dem Hall; Educational Policies Committee; fire on 12/31/1999; Provost Selection Committee; racism; student unrest; tenure issues; University Faculty Tenure Committee; NASA; Jake Nevel; Gwen Norrell; Chris Peterson; Fred Poston; remote sensing; Dave Schweickart; David Scott; Jim Shaffer; Henry Silverman; Willard Sparks; Lansing State Journal; Scott Swenton; Bill Taylor; Cherry Ulry; University Club; USDA; Warren Vincent; Larry Wedd; Wharton Center for Performing Arts; Clifton Wharton; John Wilson; Lee Winder; Mary Zingers

Date: May 30, 2000

Format: Text/pdf

Original Format: Word Document

Resource Identifier: Mandersheid, Lester.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, May 30th. We’re in East Lansing. I’m Jeff Charnley interviewing Dr. Lester Mandersheid for the MSU [Michigan State University] Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial of the university to be commemorated in 2005.
As you can see, Dr. Mandersheid, we’re taping this interview today. Do you give us permission to record this interview?

Mandersheid: Yes, I do.

Charnley: I'd like to start first with some personal and educational background. Would you tell us where you were born and raised?

Mandersheid: I was born in eastern Iowa, on a farm. I was raised in Iowa. I went to Iowa State University for a bachelor's in 1951, a master's in ’52. Then I went to Stanford University in California for a Ph.D. My first job after graduate school was here at Michigan State University.

Charnley: What year did you come here?

Mandersheid: My first trip to Michigan was in March of 1956, and I joined the faculty August 1st of ’56.

Charnley: And you have been here since that time?

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: That’s amazing. That's one of the things we’ve discovered, is the whole loyalty, where people came to Michigan State thinking that it would be just one stop, and then they ended up their whole career here. It’s an interesting feature, I think. Did you have any military service?

Mandersheid: Only in reserves. I was in an intelligence unit in the Army reserves at Stanford.

Charnley: What was it that attracted you to Michigan State?

Mandersheid: The major attraction was the strong agricultural economics department that was emerging. It was a young vigorous department. My mentors at Stanford said, “If you don’t make tenure there, you can go anyplace, because it’s going to be strong enough and recognized in five years that it’s a good base to start with.” The other aspect, as I got to know the university more broadly, was, this was a university, not a cow college, as the way ag schools were often viewed. There was a strong program in music. There was an interest in a whole range of university studies. It provided an opportunity to meet people from almost any discipline you can think of, from art to zoology.

Charnley: What do you remember about that first impression there back in 1956, when you first came on campus? Do you remember anything that sticks in your mind?

Mandersheid: When I came for the job interview, the only plane that landed in the state of Michigan that day was the one I was on. It was a very foggy day. It snowed that night. When we came back in August with the family to start a paid job, we were impressed with the beauty of the campus and how easy it was to get to know faculty not only in your own department, but in other departments. So it was a friendly place.
At that time John [A.] Hannah had a party at the beginning of the school year for all the faculty. He took over the Union Building, and your department chair was expected to escort you to the receiving line, introduce you to the president, and then you had the run of the Union for food and bowling, dancing.

Charnley: That’s interesting. The number of faculty nowadays would overwhelm that facility.

Mandersheid: That’s correct. But that created a togetherness, a familyness that didn’t exist in a lot of places, and would be hard to recreate the day. The University Club was started as a faculty club, to try to capture or recapture some of that family feeling. It’s a very different feeling today.

Charnley: Did you have any personal contacts with Dr. Hannah?

Mandersheid: Yes, I did, not only at the annual receiving line and party, but the primary contacts I had with him were in the early sixties as I was involved in some college curricular work and then I was appointed as one of ten people to serve on a committee on undergraduate education. We met, I think it was 1966, if I recall correctly. That committee included some people, a lot of MSU faculty, Art Adams, who went down to Ohio State as dean. John Wilson went on to be the president and provost of various schools. Jim [James L.] Dye, who is in the National Academy. Those are some of the people that I worked with. Of course, it was important that we interact with provost and president at the time. As we were reaching conclusions, they never tried to tell us what to do. They only gave us questions. “Where are you coming out on this issue?”

Charnley: Was that report issued in ’66, or was it the following year? Do you remember that?

Mandersheid: I don’t remember. If we served in ’66--

Charnley: It sounds like a pretty comprehensive committee.

Mandersheid: It was ’67. We were nominated [unclear] colleges, but President Hannah decided who would serve on it.

Charnley: Do you remember what the main result was of that committee, or the recommendations? Do you remember any of the features that came up?

Mandersheid: I think it was a call to revitalize undergraduate education, to rethink the so-called basic college or university college emphasis on learning units and trying to make those work better, education of the whole person, not just a chemist or an economist. Those were some of the themes. I’d have to go back and look at it.

Charnley: That’s probably available at the archives.

Mandersheid: It’s available in the archives. It’s available in my office. I’m sure it’s available in the main library. I know that all the people served on the committee called CREW [phonetic] years later got a copy.

Charnley: The generational change or generational review of what another group had done. Very similar. We’re reviewing it now, I think.
Talk a little bit about your own research and teaching. What was your dissertation on?

Mandersheid: My dissertation was on corn pricing and the influence of government policy on corn prices. My research was basically in the area of price analysis. You will find that I do not have a large number of major publications. I have a lot of little things that I did over time. I spent a lot of time working with graduate students on their dissertations.

Charnley: So you’ve directed quite a few.

Mandersheid: I was on forty to fifty committees.

Charnley: As chair, or as a member?

Mandersheid: As a member at almost any given time.

Charnley: Wow.

Mandersheid: And the reason was that I had knowledge of statistics and econometrics, that a lot of other faculty did not have. They would ask me to be on the committee to make sure that we didn’t make any foolish errors of that sort. That was consistent with why I was hired. I was hired with the understanding that I would do a lot of that kind of work. Cliff Hildreth [phonetic], who here at the time, later president of the American Statistical Association, would be the person I would go to when I ran into a roadblock, and then he knew people around the country he would call.

Charnley: Did you teach courses in that area or was it just an aspect of your overall teaching?

Mandersheid: I taught graduate course in econometrics, both in economics and agricultural economics. I taught undergraduate courses in statistical methods. I also taught program evaluation for a number of years, agricultural marketing.

Charnley: In what areas were you an administrator within the ag economics department?

Mandersheid: I became associate chair in charge of the graduate program and some other aspects of the department about 1973, and was named department chair in ’87, served a five-year term.

Charnley: What were your main duties as associate chair? Do you remember your main responsibilities?

Mandersheid: My major responsibility was managing the teaching program, both undergraduate and graduate, but I also was in charge of the library and the computer services team.

Charnley: In that time in computers, were you using mainframes or IBM?

Mandersheid: We were using primarily mainframes. Toward the end, we were gradually getting more and more PCs. I’ve watched that evolutions take place where people put a PC on their desk that did more than the mainframe did when I first came to Michigan State.

Charnley: Amazing. And handheld calculators were as large as some of the INIACs [phonetic] and some of the original computers.

Mandersheid: When I was a graduate student, I used the old mechanical calculators to do statistical [unclear]. You didn’t even have an electric motor on it.

Charnley: I can remember a slide rule, so that might date me a little bit. So the ag econ department had its own specialized library?

Mandersheid: Yes, it was in conjunction with the main library, but we had a half-time professional librarian and a collection of materials readily accessible to faculty so they didn’t have to walk to the main library or wait for a faculty delivery or something like that.

Charnley: Scholarly journals, field-specific were there.

Mandersheid: Scholarly journals and the USDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture statistical publications and research publications. Very few books.

Charnley: Very specialized. In terms of your role as chair, what do you remember in terms of that five-year period, from ’87 to ’92? What were the highpoints, lowpoints? What do you remember about when you were chair?

Mandersheid: The high points was being able to hire some faculty, even though we had fewer faculty at the end of the period than we did at the beginning. We had a lot of retirements and resignations. I think you get a lot of satisfaction, as chair, out of seeing, especially after you're out of the chair, seeing these young people take over and do the things you wished you had been able to do.

Charnley: Did many of those stay at the university?

Mandersheid: I believe that all but one stayed.

Charnley: Who were some of those hires, do you remember?

Mandersheid: Chris Peterson in agribusiness; Dave Schweickart, ag policy; Scott Swenton in farm management production economics; Steve Hansen, agricultural finance.

Charnley: When you first came or, let's say, in the first ten years, who were some of the colleagues you worked with? Who was chair when you first came?

Mandersheid: Larry [Lawrence L.] Boger. Larry later went on to become dean of agriculture and then provost, and then president of Oklahoma State.

Charnley: I hope to be interviewing him this summer. He was chair when you came?

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: Any of the other faculty that you recall at that time?

Mandersheid: The two faculty that I really knew before I came to interview were Larry Wedd [phonetic], who was editor of the Journal of Farm Economics, as it was known at that time.

Charnley: What is it now?

Mandersheid: The American Journal of Agricultural Economics. And Warren Vincent, who passed away this spring. Warren had a year’s study at Iowa State working on his Ph.D. while I was working on my master's. And there were a couple of others that I had met, but didn’t really know well. But I worked a lot with Cliff Hildreth in statistics; Glen Johnson; Jim Shaffer [phonetic]; Jim Bond [phonetic] was an office mate; Dean McKean [phonetic] until he left for John Deere and Company; John Donnath [phonetic]; Hunter Kyle; Rye [phonetic] Brown.

Charnley: You remember them all.

Mandersheid: E.B. Hill; Cherry Ulry [phonetic]; Mary Zingers [phonetic], still in the community. Because of my being hired to help consult on statistical activities and that was announced to everybody, I had a chance to interact with a lot of people, if not with a faculty member directly, through a graduate student. Of course, we had to sit there and do an oral exam together.

Charnley: You were the statistical expert.

Mandersheid: I was the working statistician, and Hildreth was the expert.

Charnley: Did you do joint research with many of your colleagues, in terms of your own research at that time, in the fifties and sixties?

Mandersheid: I did relatively little personal research as a faculty member except through students. If you looked at what some people would say was my publication record, you'd say, “How did he get tenure?” I did a lot of research in the area of curriculum development, which wasn’t published, but I served on a number of national committees as well as local committees after the experience of [unclear] and the College Curriculum Committee. I was on a number of national task forces or committees.

Charnley: Assessing teaching and curriculum issues are something that take a lot of time and effort and scholarly expertise, I know.

Mandersheid: The first national exposure was to a committee on undergraduate education in biological sciences. The basic charge that the commission had was to shorten the time from a research, being in the undergraduate curricula, and they were thinking that it was taking thirty years for research to get down to undergraduates, and they wanted ideas of how that could be shortened and also wanted us to think about what really was relevant in the biological sciences for an ag economist or other people in agriculture.

Charnley: How was it you go appointed in that committee, do you remember?

Mandersheid: I was appointed, I think because I had gotten known in ag econ circles as a person who was doing a lot of curricular work, had chaired a college committee that had eliminated half of the courses in the college. Not only that, but I think on a net basis we eliminated at least a third. So this got around the profession, and they called a person at the University of California, who was a name, and he told them, “The person you really want is an unknown at Michigan State, because he’s got the interest and he will take the time to do it. I’ve got too many things on my platter out here in California.” So when they called me, it was based on his recommendation. I’m sure they did some other checking, but--

Charnley: Talk a little bit about teaching and your teaching. What was it you liked? What had appealed to you most about teaching as a profession or the classroom?

Mandersheid: As a person who is interested in people, not corn prices, the effect of corn prices on people, I saw teaching with a classroom or curricular development, or whatever, academic advising as well, as ways to put a stamp on the next generation. I was arrogant enough to believe that I knew what they needed more than some others did. And if you want to influence people, you can do more, I think, that way, than you can by publishing another journal article that’s never read.

Charnley: Some of your graduate students that you remember that went on, maybe stayed in the field? Do you remember any of those students who achieved any prominence or that you were particularly proud of?

Mandersheid: Willard Sparks did a dissertation with Cliff Hildreth as his major professor. But Cliff had asked me to be the day-to-day person for Willard. Willard went on to a business career. He ended up with a firm in Memphis, Tennessee, trading soybean futures. In retrospect, he had the right econometric model and had the price predicted correctly, but the Hunt boys in Texas were on the other side of the market, and they had more money than Willard’s firm had, and his bank pulled the plug on him. Now Willard is in charge of his own company. His sons are part of the company. He has cattle ranches, he has cow-feeding operations, he has I don't know how many employees in Memphis doing what he was doing before. So he has done very well.
But there are a number of people who’ve done well. Warren Lee at Ohio State. The danger in this is that there are so many that I’m going to miss. Darrell Good [phonetic] at Illinois.

Charnley: And they’re teaching on the faculty?

Mandersheid: They’re on the faculty. A number went with USDA and the Economic Research Service. A number of them went overseas. We had a number of international students.

Charnley: Who studied with you.

Mandersheid: Yes. My wife and I are going to the International Ag Economics Association meetings in Berlin in August because of the dozens and dozens of former students there.

Charnley: Something to look forward to.

Mandersheid: So that’s a very enjoyable trip. We have a Michigan State party.

Charnley: What countries were some of those students from? Not expecting a catalog of all of them, but do you remember any that--

Mandersheid: We had a number of Europeans. More from Africa than any other continent. We had several projects out of South America. We had a number of students out of Asia.

Charnley: So really worldwide.

Mandersheid: Worldwide. At that conference we’re going to honor a colleague who’s just retired, Carl Eicher, who was on the faculty when I came here, a temporary appointment, went off to Harvard and got his Ph.D.

Charnley: He came back.

Mandersheid: He came back on the faculty and worked in Africa a lot.

Charnley: So did you teach overseas at all?

Mandersheid: I lectured for ten days in China. I've given seminars in Zimbabwe. We had a project for about ten years in Senegal, French West Africa, and I made an annual trip there to interact with our team and help them with statistical questions and so on. I was campus leader for the program. We had a person in the field as a field leader. But that was teaching of a different sort.

Charnley: You were doing some international program development?

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: A lot of your contacts were with foreign students who were here on campus?

Mandersheid: Correct. But some of them were brought here by our projects. Some of them I interviewed when I was in Senegal and helped the U.S. Agency for International Development team decide what would be the best school for this person, given his or her interests and abilities. Not to take them all at Michigan State, but get a team with some diversity as part of the research team out there.

Charnley: Did you have any other contacts in the federal government? You mentioned USDA and AID.

Mandersheid: I directed a couple of AID projects, three, I guess, at one time or another. One was just the Sehel [phonetic] master's training program, which was campus-based, and we recruited students from Senegal.

Charnley: That’s in West Africa.

Mandersheid: West Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly French-speaking. We have a Sehel library project that Carl Eicher started, and I filled in for Carl when he was overseas. And then the Senegal project. Other than AID and USDA, I had a contract with NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. That had an interesting history.

Charnley: What was that?

Mandersheid: I was called into the chair’s office one morning, and he said, “I want you to serve on a committee on remote sensing.”
I said, “Well, I thought you had a person on that committee.”
He said, “Well, I want you to go on it.”
I said, “You know my plate is full and running over.”
He said, “Tell me what you have to drop, and I’ll help you drop it.”
About two hours later, I got a phone call from [unclear] Winderson [phonetic], who was chairman of the committee, saying, “Will you have your proposal in this afternoon?” The chair hadn’t told me that they were putting together a proposal.
So by Monday--this was on a Friday--by Monday, I’d written a proposal, the main stipulation was that it be for 50,000 dollars and be a sensible proposal from a scientific point of view. But it ended up, after a number of iterations, that Michigan State got a letter saying, "Your proposal has not been accepted."
I got a call from a NASA official saying, “Why haven’t you responded to the Houston letter?”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
“Well, you’re part of the team in this project and we want you in Houston these dates.” So I became PI, after having been drafted at the last minute to get involved. I’m speculating, but I believe NASA wanted a social scientist because most of the people that were doing the research were geographers or physicists, and for someone to propose an economic analysis, the feasibility of estimating crop acreage from satellites, sounded pretty good to them.

Charnley: Interesting. And MSU did develop that as a field or an area, didn’t they?

Mandersheid: Now we have a big center for remote sensing.

Charnley: Do you think this was the start of it, or had it been earlier?

Mandersheid: No, this was really being done more in Ann Arbor. Huron [phonetic] was the name of the organization, Environmental Research Institute at Michigan. And they had the computer power to analyze the tapes we got. So the project was joint with them. Again, I hired a temporary faculty person to do the day-to-day work. I worked with a colleague in forestry who was a photo interpretation expert, because we had to find out what was out in this plot and then compare it with what the computer said was in that plot.

Charnley: Knowing whether it was cornstalks or trees.

Mandersheid: Right. Then we had to make estimates of what it would cost to go gear this up from just a cloud project to a full-scale project, and compare that with what the USDA was spending for crop acreage estimation.

Charnley: What year was that, do you remember?

Mandersheid: That was in the seventies.

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Charnley: When the tape ended, we were talking about remote sensing and the NASA grant that Dr. Mandersheid was working on. I think the years that you mentioned were 1972 to 1976.

Mandersheid: Correct.

Charnley: After the initial contract, did you continue with that area of scholarly research?

Mandersheid: I was involved with several conferences, but that kind of research takes bigger money that most ag econ departments have. And since we concluded that it was not economically feasible to replace USDA’s crop reporting service, NASA wasn’t interested in putting big bucks in. They shifted to an emphasis on larger fields and things that the CIA was interested in, which I couldn’t participate in.

Charnley: Let’s go back to when you were chair. At what point did you retire?

Mandersheid: I was chair ’87 to ’92, and then I went back to teaching and working with students. At that point I decided that I was sixty-two and I wasn’t going to get a research program on my own under way that could really produce some things, so I continued to work a lot with students and to do teaching.
In ’93, the university came out with, “We need to reduce faculty in some areas. If you are interested in making a proposal and if you can get the support of your chair and dean, you can retire for one day and then go back on the payroll.” Legally, they had to retire you for one day and then you could start drawing retirement benefits if you wanted to.
I went in with a proposal to retire July 1, ’94, and then for that day, and then July 2 I went on a part-time appointment with a phasing-out, saying I would try to be out of the department by the time I reached sixty-five. I was kept on at the department for an extra three months to fill in for somebody on sabbatical, but officially I've been out of the department, in terms of faculty status, since ’96. I’ve helped on some special assignments for the department chair, but those have not been in a faculty role. As you may know, [unclear] a wing which was settling, and the university finally agreed that it was time to take that wing off and replace it.

Charnley: And that was on the east side?

Mandersheid: East side. The chair asked if I would, on an hourly basis, work with him, in terms of construction, avoiding as many problems as we could avoid, and I said, “With a couple of conditions. One, I do not discuss office assignments with anyone. And, two, I do not make any budget decisions. I report to you and you decide whether or not you want to spend the money.”

Charnley: And what stage is the project now?

Mandersheid: Right now they’re in sort of the clean-up stage. They’re finishing parking, putting in the sidewalks. The building is occupied, the interior is finished.

Charnley: I know that the situation of the fire that occurred in January of this year affected you.

Mandersheid: December 31st.

Charnley: That’s right. I have to get my dates right. December 31, 1999. What can you tell us about that? Was your office involved?

Mandersheid: I was first told about it at the New Year's Eve party in Orlando. We were down there for the Citrus Bowl. I saw Vice President [Fred L.] Poston and his wife, and we chatted briefly. He said, “You're going to have some unpleasant news. The fire started in the Institute of International Ag, and has gone to the roof.”
I said, “Well, my office is between the Institute and the roof.”
He said, “Well, I can’t tell you how much damage there is, but Larry [G.] Hamm, your department chair, is on the scene and it’s under control now.”
So I came back and I found they had a lot of smoke damage, some water damage, but no significant loses of materials, and just a lot of time lost in moving to Will’s house and trying to set up over there. And now, in the next month or two, we’ll be moving back. They’re working on repairing the damage still. They keep finding new damage because of the water.

Charnley: It went into areas they didn’t anticipate.

Mandersheid: Right. And it soaked under carpets, and now they’re finding health problems from mildew and molds. So they’re having to take out carpeting and the floor and sub-floor. The water migrated.

Charnley: But some of the research you had done over the last thirty years, it was still there?

Mandersheid: Yes. What I had that was water-soaked was put in the freezer over at Stores [phonetic], by the university, and after several months there, it pretty well freeze-dried, so it was quite usable when you got it out.

Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about any involvement you had in academic governance?

Mandersheid: I had a fair amount over the years. I was involved in department, I was involved in college as chair of the curriculum committee and some other things. At the university level, which is probably our main focus, I was elected to the Educational Policies Committee and served on it 1970 to ’73, and chaired it for a while. I chaired the sub-committee that made the decision to give up half of Channel 10 in exchange for enough cash to put Channel 23 on the air in color, which was a board decision, but we pushed the board to go that way. Served on the tenure committee at the university, the University Faculty Tenure Committee.
I was a member of that committee when the first recommendation for dismissal from the faculty committee went forward, which was time-consuming and not a task you ask for. It was a dismissal for cause.
I served as chair of an ad hoc committee to review academic governance, and that is a group that basically rewrote the bylaws, many of which we still operate under. It was a small committee. We worked over the summer, basically, and in the fall went back to academic council and studied trying to sell the ideas. After we sold the concepts, we then had to reconvene as a committee and write the bylaw language. It’s a little different than—

Charnley: It’s a lot of detail work.

Mandersheid: It’s a lot of detail work and more of a legalistic document. I was elected to the steering committee and served as chair of the steering committee of academic governance for three years as chair, four years as a member, and in that role I was also chair of the so-called executive committee. That included the chairs of the standing committees as well as the steering committee.
When I finished that process, I went to Athletic Council for four years, 1981-’85, served as vice chair of that for eligibility. I served on the President’s Long-range Planning Council.

Charnley: Was that President [M. Cecil] Mackey.

Mandersheid: Which was started under [Clifton R.] Wharton [Jr.], reported about the time he left. I was on the search committee for a president, that had a lot of starts and stops. It ended up with a recommendation of Cecil Mackey. That was a long, involved process.

Charnley: Was it more that a year?

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: And Dr. [Edgar L.] Harden was interim president at that time.

Mandersheid: Correct. I served as secretary to the Provost Selection Committee when David Scott was hired.

Charnley: What do you see as any lasting legacy of that extensive commitment that you made to the university service? Anything that you can point to?

Mandersheid: I thought we made some real progress when we revised the bylaws, not as much as I had hoped, but a couple of aspects of that. One, we reduced the number of committees, clarified who was responsible for what. Probably more important, we got the board and the administration to accept the idea that there were different levels of participation. It was important for them to accept it as well as for the faculty to accept it. There is participation where the faculty vote, except under unusual circumstances, is final, delegated authority. That primarily is in the area of curricular development. Then there are things where the faculty role is advisory and you take votes and advise the appropriate administrator, but the administrator considers the vote, but is not bound by it. Then there’s the less formal mode of consultative work. You sit around and discuss it, but you never take a vote.

Charnley: I doubt there are any committees now that deal with that, or still exist in that consultive role.

Mandersheid: Many of the advisory committees to the library, the dean of international studies and programs, operate much of the time in a consultative role. They’re called advisory consultative committees, so they can take votes, but they try to reach agreement with the administrator without saying, “Well, it was thirteen to one.”

Charnley: I served on the ROTC Committee, the Military Education Advisory Committees. That's one of those.
What would your advice be to a new faculty member? Let’s assume that they had tenure. Should they get involved in university committee work?

Mandersheid: The answer is yes, but, I think we have to be selective of our committees. Some committees, like the Committee on Academic Governance, while it can be important, spend an awful lot of time talking about who to appoint to what, and you get to read a lot of résumés, but you sometimes wonder how important that committee is, because you tend to get résumés from people who want to do it. They have some important assignments or recommendations to make, like Athletic Council. But a lot of them are to committees that don’t do a lot.
So I think you have to select a committee that is listened to by an administrator, a committee that considers issues that are important to you and/or your department or college, and a committee that is adequately staffed. By that I mean, is there someone that can make the phone calls, write a report for you, who is keeping up and can advise you on where you can find the information you’re talking about?
The big plus is you get to know people from different parts of the campus. You get to understand university decision-making. It takes you out of your little enclave and you see that what happens in mathematics may be important to what happens in ag econ, or engineering. Probably less so in arts and letters.

Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your experiences with some of the presidents and provosts? You mentioned John Hannah a little bit. Did you have any additional contacts with him after that 1956 meeting and reception? What do you remember about President Hannah?

Mandersheid: Well, we interacted with him on our committee on undergraduate education. I was at the State of the University Address that he gave as he was leaving for his Washington assignment, and I remember the demonstration that was taking place.

Charnley: Student demonstration?

Mandersheid: Canceled the reception following that. We were meeting in Fairchild Theater, and Kresge Art was set up to hold the reception. There were so many demonstrators around, the decision was made to lock Kresge and avoid damage to art objects. The doors to Fairchild were locked, in the sense you couldn’t come in from outside after the speech started, and you could hear pounding and shouting. And at the end of the ceremony, the chair of the steering committee announced that the reception had been canceled and that we would leave through the auditorium. Fairchild and the auditorium had back-to-back stages. We went out, and there were demonstrators lined up, and they apparently had been told that they had to maintain a three-foot walkway or they would be arrested.

Charnley: Sounds like a gauntlet, almost.

Mandersheid: Yes. It felt that way.
Hannah would always speak to you if you met him on campus. He was always accessible. Jake Nevel worked with us a lot on the Q Committee.

Charnley: He was provost?

Mandersheid: He was provost at the time. Among the provosts, of course I knew Larry Boger from the department. By the time he got over there, I was the chair of a university committee at the time, so we interacted. Lee Winder and I interacted a great deal. When John Cantlon was provost, he was selected under Walter Adams. I always considered Walter a good friend. John and I interacted a lot, especially in the early days of Cliff Wharton’s administration. As you may recall, Cliff was elected by a five-three vote, and we all knew that at any given board meeting he could be asked to resign. I was on Educational Policies Committee at the time and I was getting calls directly from trustees, and the bylaws of the board of trustees clearly states that they communicate with the faculty through the president.

Charnley: Not directly to you.

Mandersheid: So I went to John and said, “What do you want me to do?”
He said, “You can’t refuse a phone call, but here are some guidelines. Can we agree on these and not make any commitments, and you will keep us briefed on what they're talking to you about.”

Charnley: So President Wharton faced a very critical board or a vocal minority?

Mandersheid: At least a vocal minority. And there were some very delicate issued being discussed. The day we met with the board to present out report on Channel 10, Channel 23, we were invited to be there at breakfasttime. At that time the meetings were not open. We were invited to go over to the board room with them and observe the meeting and then come back and have lunch and make our report over lunch. When we got in the room for lunch, President Wharton said, “Some have been critical at the way we’ve been handling some demonstrations on campus. I’ve asked Dick Burnett, head of DPS, to brief me in front of the rest of you, just as he would brief me in the office, at this time.”
He gave his briefing, estimated number of people in Dem [Demonstration] Hall etc., etc., etc., then he opened it up for questions, like how long would it take for the state police to get here. Dick’s response was something like, “So many people could be here in such and such a time, but you have to remember that within ten seconds of the call going out, the demonstrators will know it’s gone out, because they’re monitoring the state police radio."

Charnley: And the headquarters wasn’t far away either.

Mandersheid: So that was an interesting time. Then I was involved in hiring Cecil Mackey. He and Claire were married in northern Illinois on the same day Dorothy and I were married in northern Illinois, as coincidences occur. I had less interaction with [John A.] DiBiaggio because I wasn’t as involved in governance issues.

Charnley: Were you just on the search committee, or did you chair?

Mandersheid: I was on the search committee that brought Cecil in. I was not involved in the hiring of DiBiaggio. I was a staff person in hiring Scott. I had a lot of interaction with Lee Winder over the years. He was a member of the committee that rewrote the bylaws. We were neighbors geographically. Gordon Guyer was interim president. He had come out of the College of Ag. I'd known him since shortly after arriving here at MSU. We didn’t have a lot of interaction while he was president. And I happened to be filling in for Henry Silverman, who was secretary for academic governance while Henry was on sabbatical at the time [M.] Peter McPherson took over and brought [unclear] in. So I had several Academic Council meetings where I sat on one side of Peter. Plus, several of the governance issues where we were in meetings. I don't think they were ever one-on-one. Three to four people, up to twenty or thirty people.

Charnley: So, you had mentioned, I think, previously in our discussions either on the phone or whatever, that you had maintained a friendship with the Whartons.

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: And that went back to the time they were here.

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: Did you have professional contact with him or as an economist or ag economist?

Mandersheid: Yes. I first met him when he was still with--I think it was Rockefeller Foundation. He was organizing a conference at Stanford University on some economic development issues. I had sent some ideas in the air about an issue of measurement. I don’t know who decided that Cliff would call and ask me to present those ideas at the conference.
He’s spoken a number of times at the American Agricultural Economics Association meetings. He was elected a fellow of that group.

Charnley: He was well known in his field.

Mandersheid: Correct.

Charnley: Do you remember at all how his name came up?

Mandersheid: For president of the university?

Charnley: Were you involved in that in any way?

Mandersheid: I was involved at the far fringe. A friend of mine was on the committee, but things were much quieter then. As I recall the history, there was a big push on the part of some people in the state, primarily of one party, to name Walter Adams. There were some others from the other party that thought Jack Gresmond [phonetic] should be the next president. We got into some interesting exchanges and so on. And when Cliff’s name got to the top of the pile item I’m not sure. I just know that at some point he was presented as the recommendation of the search committee, and it was accepted by the board.

Charnley: So you had some positive things to say about his work to the committee?

Mandersheid: Well, I was positive in terms of my relationship with him professionally and as a person.

Charnley: So he wasn’t a total unknown.

Mandersheid: No. What was unknown was how good a president he would be in a large organization as opposed to a person who had great diplomatic skills and a great intellect.

Charnley: How would you assess the problems that he faced here at the university in the post-Hannah years?

Mandersheid: There were a number of problems. One, we had the Vietnam episode going on, which led to a great deal of activity, let’s put it that way, the need to decide on dismissing classes for a long weekend, hoping that some of the demonstrators would be talked to by their parents, trying to maintain the campus as a place for open dialogue, not allowing any group to shut the place down. The narrow vote of the board as it came in, he was always looking over his shoulder to see who might be wavering.
There were great concerns about--I think with lettuce at that time, and farm workers. One of the more interesting episodes in a board meeting, which I did not personally witness, but a friend told me about it, was the impassioned speeches about the need to support farm workers, and that the university should not serve these products in the dormitories and Kellogg Center and other places.

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Charnley: This is tape two. Dr. Mandersheid, at the end of tape one, was speaking about Dr. Wharton and one of the student protests dealing with the lettuce boycott, student support for the United Farm Workers.

Mandersheid: Yes. It was interesting that when the last speaker finished, arguing that the university should support the farm workers and not the lettuce growers, Dr. Wharton responded in almost perfect Spanish, which so flustered the previous speakers that it ended the discussion, not permanently, but for that afternoon.
Another problem, these were sort of on-campus problems, let's face it, there was still a fair amount of racism in many parts of Michigan, and there were some taxpayers who couldn’t really accept an African-American or person of color, as president of a or the major university, depending on whether they were from Ann Arbor or East Lansing. So that was something that I think lurked in the background. I don’t think it affected him on campus as much as it did off campus.
And then just following the giant John Hannah was going to be difficult for anybody. Walter Adams served for a while in there, but the comparisons were always, “What would John have done?”

Charnley: Overall looking at his presidency, how about athletics? Were you involved at that time on the Athletic Council, or was this before?

Mandersheid: I was on Athletic Council after this occurred.

Charnley: Some of the athletic difficulties or scandals that broke during his administration, did you--

Mandersheid: I suffered through those days, along with a number of other Spartans. What I appreciated about that was his sense of humor. He obviously spent a lot of time on it and a lot of thought on it, what to do about the situation. But he had a great sense of humor, because he talked about being under investigation because of the way he was hiring faculty and paying them under the table and promising them two extra pieces of chalk. [Laughter]

Charnley: In looking at his presidency as a whole, how would you make an overall assessment?

Mandersheid: I thought he was a very good president. I think he had a lot more support when he left than his early days. I think the fact that he could move on to SUNY and the larger challenge suggests that he had the administrative abilities, and he really showed them later when he went to TIAA-Crep and really changed that organization a great deal. He was viewed as very paternalistic. He made it into much more of a user-friendly operation.

Charnley: In terms of the overall economy during that time, do you remember any particular economic pressures that he had to face or that maybe you faced in the ag econ department? Looking at President Hannah’s experience was basically one of boom in terms of the building in the university, expansion, and then Wharton, obviously, either the economic boom, or the building boom ended, the seize of students, did you see any relationship between Michigan economy or national economy and then what in the seventies--

Mandersheid: As I recall, ’72 was sort of a turning point, where Michigan support for higher education was no longer growing, that there was more emphasis on consolidation, not adding new buildings or programs. President Hannah had appointed a committee to look at a potential law school. That report was made under Adams and was left for Wharton to deal with. And it was pretty obvious there was no point in pushing that after ’72.
I think, in general, Hannah had had a much easier time, although we had under Hannah a year when there was essentially no pay raises. In fact, Hannah had arranged to borrow money to meet the payroll because we were close to the end of the month and did not have money from the state to meet the payroll. So it wasn’t always--

Charnley: Did that surprise people at the time, the fact that we were if not broke--did it just illustrate--

Mandersheid: It illustrated what two political parties interested in making points can accomplish. There were a group that thought that Williams was running for president, and they were going to torpedo that. Since they controlled the legislature, they eventually gave in. But Hannah had made contingency plans.
The real sour economy, of course, came later, when--well, it was under Mackey, who pushed for the semester system. We went over to the university auditorium for an Academic Senate meeting, as it was called at that time, all tenured faculty, and that was like three o’clock in the afternoon. About noon, the governor announced a major pullback of funds from what had been appropriated. Cecil got up and announced that and said, “In view of the projected cost of making the conversion to the semester system, I don't see a point in trying to proceed.” And that’s when we got into the 7 and 14 percent reductions in college budgets and the closing of Justin Morrow College.

Charnley: The University College at that time, too, or was that earlier?

Mandersheid: That was earlier. And there were literally buyouts where faculty were offered money to leave, retire early, or re-tool in another discipline.

Charnley: President Mackey, the issues that you talked a little bit about or mentioned, when you said you were on the Hiring Committee, do you remember any of the problems associated with the delays, what took so long?

Mandersheid: The committee was large, but for a large committee, it moved, I think, rather expeditiously, and recommended a set of candidates to the board. This was, as I recall, in November, an election year.

Charnley: So it would have been ’78?

Mandersheid: ’78. Yes. And the board, I think, saw the candidates somewhat differently than the committee did, but that was their prerogative. We were not saying, “You should hire X.” We were saying, “Here are X's strengths and weaknesses. On balance, we believe X could be a good president.”
They did some things to ensure they got involvement of any new trustee who would be working with the candidates. They interviewed candidates. Then there seemed to be a leakage of names. In the end, they went back to the committee. There were trustees on the committee. They came back to the full committee and said, “The board has rejected the full list of recommended candidates and asks that you do some further searching.” So that was started.
At some point, I’ve forgotten exactly when, because of the leaks, when a reporter meets outside of the meeting room and says to a person, “Is this the candidate? Would you introduce me?” you know what’s going on. So at that point, John [B.] Bruff was chairman of the board, convinced enough other board members that they should put together an ad hoc committee of three faculty and three trustees, three faculty off of the search committee, and this ad hoc committee of six should be in charge of the search until they were ready to recommend a candidate to full committee, at which time the full committee would interview the candidate and make a recommendation, yes or no. The six then started doing their [unclear].

Charnley: Were you on the ad hoc committee?

Mandersheid: Yes. I remember leaving one Saturday morning about 7 a.m., getting back between 2 and 3 a.m. Sunday morning from one of those trips. At the same time the State Journal was writing editorials about why weren’t we moving faster.

Charnley: You were. Just moving in the middle of the night.

Mandersheid: One of the trustees said, “Where is the State Journal reporter when I need him?”
In any case, eventually, Cecil was brought in for a full committee interview. I was designated as the person to call the secretary of the board to post the board meeting if it looked--we calculated the hours, and at such and such an hour, we had to give notice if we were going to have a board meeting. And so I was the one to call, and after checking with some of the key people on the committee, “Are we going to say yes or no?” And so then Cecil was interviewed on one day and the board voted to appoint him the following day. He had been interviewed off campus by the ad hoc group. He had visited the campus and had a chance to see it. He was escorted around by a committee member on a weekend when very few people were in town. So he and Claire knew something about what they were getting into.

Charnley: And you knew him through economic groups, too?

Mandersheid: No. I first met him in one of these airport meetings.

Charnley: He was at Texas Tech [University], right?

Mandersheid: Correct.

Charnley: And he was president there.

Mandersheid: Correct.

Charnley: Going back to some of the candidates, what did you see why he might have been a good candidate at the time?

Mandersheid: One of the trustees characterized him as having an iron fist and a velvet glove. In other words, they were looking for somebody who would provide rather strong leadership. I’m told by a trustee that one candidate was rejected because when they asked a question about, how would you react if the board said such and such, he said, “I’d do what you told me to.” And they wanted somebody that would say, “That’s stupid. Let’s talk about it. So they were looking for somebody that would keep the board from shooting itself in the foot.
Another trustee commented that after the first round of candidates had not succeeded, “We now understand what the problem is. And the problem is not the committee; the problem is the board.” And that doesn’t mean all of them, by any means. It was simply some of the chemistry that existed at the time.

Charnley: Did that ratio of five-three between Republicans and Democrats, did that continue after Wharton?

Mandersheid: I don’t remember the exact make-up during his years.

Charnley: But the political partisanship was a factor?

Mandersheid: Was a factor. I think it was less so when we got to Cecil, because the board had realized that partisanship under Wharton had hurt the university, and I think Ed Harden came down on him pretty hard on some of these issues. So I think they were ready for some strong leadership and were willing to pretty much make a commitment, “We’re going to back you until we really are convinced you’re wrong.” It may be seven-one, it may be six-two.
One of the things that he did early on was ask the board why certain things were going to the board for action, and why they didn’t have a policy handbook of previous actions. He wanted something he could say, “The policy on this was established by the Board of Trustees April 13, 1969, and modified on these dates.”

Charnley: Standardization of procedure.

Mandersheid: Standardization of procedure. And he asked that a number of personnel actions be delegated to the president and through the president to the provost. We had a silly situation where if we had a faculty member overseas and USAID said, "We’d like another week of this person’s time," we had to send a form through the board to approve a leave without pay. Officially, it was not a legal document, but the board approved it. But you aren’t going to fly somebody back from overseas and then send them back for a week a month later.
There are other things we argued very strongly with Cecil on, and that one was that the tenure decision should rest with the board. That makes it clear that the board approved tenure and the board can take away tenure. But the president can’t dismiss a tenured faculty member without board review.

Charnley: And you had had some experience on that committee.

Mandersheid: Right. Under the previous rules, there was not question it went from the president to the Board of Trustees for final action. The president could recommend, but the president could not do it.

Charnley: Did you have contacts with Dr. Mackey while he was president?

Mandersheid: Because I was so involved in governance, yes. Athletic Council during part of his time. I was still on the Steering Committee when he came in. So I was with him at Academic Council committee meetings. We had occasional social contact. I remember one night we walked into what at that time, I believe, was the Cave of the Candles Restaurant on the corner of Abbot and Grand River. It was down in the basement, and our eyes were still adjusting from the bright sunlight to the dim place, and I hear this familiar voice saying, “Do they let everybody in here? Don't they have any standards?" Cecil and Claire were celebrating their wedding anniversary and we were going in to celebrate ours. [Laughter]

Charnley: That’s interesting. Were you surprised when he resigned?

Mandersheid: I would say yes, although in retrospect, it wasn’t as surprising. I believe he misread one or two board members and thought that some of their arguments were being made in a way that suggested they would not support him, whereas that isn’t what they were saying, they were just demanding a deeper consideration. But Cecil had that determination that he was going to do what he thought was right after reflection, and not what somebody else wanted. This was illustrated, I think, with his fights with the Alumni Association. I remember he made a presentation to the Academic Council one day about his side of the story on the Alumni Association.

Charnley: That was one of the controversies?

Mandersheid: Major controversy. It dissolved the old Alumni Association. Cecil argues that the Alumni Association should serve a variety of interests and needs, not be an athletic booster council, and that it was appropriate for them to hold study tours and academic-type programs as well as athletic events. Again, an elegant, or eloquent--both, probably--fifteen-minute presentation to Academic Council on the issue.
The State Journal reporter came in right afterwards, and I told the State Journal reporter what had happened so far. After the meeting, he asked for an interview to discuss it with Cecil. Cecil said, “It’s on tape. You can listen to it tomorrow. I’ve got another meeting to get to tonight.”

Charnley: That's interesting. How about President [John A.] DiBiaggio? Were you involved in either his selection or anything like that?

Mandersheid: No, I was not involved in that selection. I did not have a lot of interaction with him because I was getting out of the governance at the university level at that point, college and departmental activity. I spent an evening with him with a group of young agricultural types that were on a special two-year study program that ag econ sponsored with outside funding. They were invited to have dinner with him and then an evening of discussion, and he handled that very well. He was an excellent representative of the university. What he needed was a person on the inside to run it while he went off to have dinner with Brouge [phonetic] in California or various other donors. I think he went over very well with alumni groups and was able to bring the new Alumni Association along that was started under Cecil.

Charnley: Do you think that the position of president at a large university like Michigan State, do you think that demands a scholarly mind or does it demand a manager? A professor or an administrator? What do you think?

Mandersheid: I used to put more emphasis on the scholarship than I have in more recent years. There’s a saying that in selecting popes, they alternate between a theologian and a manager or administrator. And I think you can get off balance if you always got for a banker or if you always go for a person who's a great scholar, but maybe doesn’t know how to control budgets and keep things on line. So there is some rare individual, I'm sure,that can do both of those. But there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
I think that in [M. Peter] McPherson's case and in DiBiaggio's case, they’re wise enough to listen to the deans and provost and carefully consider what they’re saying. I'm sure some of the statements that have come out of the fourth floor of the Administration Building have been inspired by Peter [unclear]. But the tuition waiver, which may or may not have been a mistake, certainly got a lot of political payoff. His going around to college meetings and suggesting heavier teaching loads did not win a lot of friends.

Charnley: Not a faculty-driven idea.

Mandersheid: But he does act more like a political animal than a scholar.

Charnley: Some of the interesting attacks on tenure, or attempts at tenure, even though they don’t call it directly that, but what’s your position on that? How important do you see tenure as an institution, more or less, in academia?

Mandersheid: The reason we have tenure, I’ve always argued, is academic freedom protection and not job tenure. There have been several Ag economists who have been fired at land-grant schools because they took a stance unpopular with a major farm organization in the state. With tenure, it’s more difficult for the university to get rid of that person. When the person becomes non-performing, then I think we need to have a faculty that will stand up and say, “You've got two years to retread and start producing," or three years, some reasonable time, "and if you don’t, we as a faculty will be willing to put you up for dismissal for cause.” And I think that’s important in defending it.
I think there are a lot of people who criticize tenure because they think it’s job security, and they forget that you don’t get tenure at General Motors. There have been a lot of handshakes, and there’s been a lot of gold exchanges in some of those handshakes. And which is better? The academic freedom is a key. I am aware that also as a faculty have an occasional buyout where somebody was offered two years' pay to stay away from campus.

Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your longtime experience in the College of Ag and Natural Resources? It seems to me an important theme in the post-Hannah years especially, has been the relationship of the College of Ag and Natural Resources, Cooperative Extension. We didn’t talk about that yet. Could you talk a little bit about where you see the nature of the College of Ag in relationship to the other colleges within the university? Is that different from when you first got here, today, or what did you see during your tenure? Did you see any changes?

Mandersheid: Well, picking up on Cooperative Extension, I had some role in that as an administrator and did a number of Extension meetings without being paid by Extension. I think that concept has spread to other parts of the university under the title "outreach." I think there’s more concern about outreach, both in the Administration Building and in the colleges, whether it’s music for children, or the Wharton [Center for Performing Arts] activities where they bring school busloads in.
The College of Ag and Natural Resources is probably less dominant than governance system in the thinking of people on the campus now as compared to 1956. I think agriculture and natural resources has shifted within too much more of a natural resource orientation, much more of an environmental orientation. I think it’s continued and perhaps expanded its relationships with some other colleges. We’ve always had relationships with natural science, always with social science.

[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]

Charnley: Dr. Mandersheid was talking about the relationship between the College of Agriculture and other colleges or groups within the university.

Mandersheid: I think the college is making more use of courses from other units. This being driven more by grants and contracts than it was at one time. We know what it means to be state-assisted as opposed to state-supported. But in general, I think there’s less jealousy on the College of Agriculture and part of the faculty of the university than existed when I came, when the common attitude was, "You folks have the money. We have the brains." There’s much more of a collegial relationship, an appreciation that certain environmental issues are being addressed. The change in title helped a little in that. We went from the College of Ag to the College of Ag and Natural Resources.

Charnley: Who were some of the--you mentioned Larry Boger--some of the other deans of the college that you worked with?

Mandersheid: I was hired under Tom [unclear], who was an ag economist. And he was followed by Larry Boger and Jim Anderson.

Charnley: He was dean for quite a few years, wasn’t he?

Mandersheid: Yes.

Charnley: What was his field?

Mandersheid: He was an ag engineer. Fred Poston, an entomologist. And now Bill Taylor is acting or interim dean. He’s out of fisheries and wildlife. I worked a lot with him when I was department chair. He was chair of fisheries and wildlife.

Charnley: In your own field of ag econ, what do you see as some of the biggest changes in the course of your career, especially in statistics or econometrics?

Mandersheid: Well, when I finished my stint as department chair and went back to teaching econometrics under the semester system, I thought about how do I design a course now that I have an extra five weeks, basically? I reviewed the literature and it was amazing to me how many things had changed to an even greater mathematical depth. I have a student who's just finishing off a master's thesis, and she’s using techniques that weren’t developed until ’97.
But, in general, in ag econ there is a push for agribusiness, much more than the lip service we gave it in the late fifties and early sixties. Agricultural policy is now much more food-policy oriented with more of an international flavor, more food-safety flavor, less price and income policy. In some ways there has been attention between what we would call institutional economists and more mathematically oriented theoretical economists.
Institutional economists put a lot of stock in the structure in which pure culture operates, and more recently has been a lot of emphasis on what’s called social capital. A couple of our faculty have been leaders in trying to develop a social capital group across a number of colleges. They’ve had two national conferences now. Social capital is concerned with how you organize institutions and build relationships among people, so that you’re not competing in a zero-sum gain, but you can be in a win-win situation. And if you do it wrong, it’s a lose-lose.

Charnley: The risks are great. Any major changes in the role of the national boundaries or the international from when you first started, or the importance of the international economies versus--

Mandersheid: We did not use the term "global economy" when I started. Now we use it daily. With computers and communications the way they are, you can look up the price of corn in Buenos Aires today, you can trade corn in Buenos Aires today.

Charnley: At your desk.

Mandersheid: From your desk, which is quite different. So the world has gotten much smaller and this affects a lot of things, not just agriculture. The emphasis on development at Michigan State has always had an emphasis on assisting in the development of agriculture and universities in developing parts of the world. That was a strong concern of John Hannah and was always important in agriculture.

Charnley: The importance of education.

Mandersheid: The importance of education and developing educational institutions, developing research institutes. Because what we call poverty here is not real poverty when you get to some of these other countries.

Charnley: Only one cell phone in the family.
In looking back at your career, or looking back at Michigan State, did you expect, when you came in 1956, that you would be here your entire career?

Mandersheid: As I indicated earlier, some of the mentors at Stanford said, “You can always move from Michigan State, even if you don’t get tenure there.” So we came with the idea we would build a house, or buy a house, and if we had to leave after five years, or decided to leave after five years, we could recoup the sales commission with inflation. So we always had a flexible attitude. I looked at some other alternatives and universities and elsewhere. I never could get serious about them.
When I considered the interactions I had with faculty and students here and what I perceived that there mi