Charles Hess and Richard Merritt Interview

Interviewer: Bonnie McCay
Interview Date: October 16, 2004
Transcriber: James Sylvester
Transcription Date: February 27, 2006

Edited B. McCay April 24, 2006

BM: This is October 16, 2004, and I, Bonnie McCay, have the privilege of interviewing Dick Merritt and Charlie Hess, who were there at the beginning of Cook College . Ok, Dick. You were just going to mention the context, and we can move on from there.

DM: In the early 1960's, there were several phenomena occurring. One was that we went from a tiny university in New Brunswick to a big, state university. The men's college existed through 1973. It had a College of Engineering , a College of Agriculture , which in 1965 became the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science, and the College of Arts and Sciences. We also had the NJ Women's college; that was eventually renamed Douglass College . We were Johnny-come-lately in terms of a large state university. The president, Mason Gross, put forward a plan to expand the university, the federated college plan. The College of Agriculture had 333 undergraduate students and about 100 graduate students in 1962. In 1965 under Lee Merrill's leadership, acknowledging a long history with our programs in environmental studies and environmental sciences, we convinced the Board of Governors to change the name to the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. From '65 on…there was incredible expansion of Rutgers University . Rutgers College and Douglas College in 1965 had probably 600-800 women and maybe 3000 total undergraduate men in the men's college. Today there are 35,000 students in New Brunswick .

Also, during that period of time, we also had lots of social change, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian War, and in loco parentis, minority student issues, changing from a men's college to a co-ed situation, etc. Also, Camp Kilmer , a major port of military debarkation, became available and the university was able to get 550 acres…There were many plans for the Kilmer Tract: I won't go through all of the turmoil that we went through with implementing the various organizational schemes. What eventually came out was a plan to form Livingston College…I was on the planning faculty for Livingston and helped them through their first two years of operation…During that period of time, the plan was that there was going to be at least three colleges on the Kilmer Tract. Livingston got started in the late ‘60s. They had a lot of Carnegie Foundation money. It was an era of social unrest and great expectations. Mason Gross really wanted to add new disciplines such as anthropology, comparative literature, computer science, jazz studies and urban studies, of which was Livingston College . I just wanted to set that into context, and Cook, which eventually began in '73, went from 333 students in 1962 and then to 1250 students and now over 3000 as a coed college.

BM: Charlie, you came back to Rutgers about that time…

CH: I came back in 1966 as chairman of the department of horticulture and forestry… Some of this planning was going on while I was department chair. After four or five years, Walt McLinn stepped down as director of the experiment station, and then, Lee Merrill called and asked if I – “would you be director of the experiment station?” So, I did. Then, I joined Dick in college administration. A few years after that, Lee Merrill decided that after ten years, there should be a change. He had a philosophy that an administrator should have a ten year term, five years to learn the job and five years to accomplish what you set out to do and then get out. It was sort of precipitous from my perception. I became acting Dean.

Planning was going on, and I must say, I had mixed emotions about some of the plans. I wanted to be sure that what would evolve would not diminish its ability to serve New Jersey agriculture. I had grown up in New Jersey agriculture and my father was a nurseryman and had been president of board of managers of the experiment station back some years before. And I knew that we had a very loyal support of all the counties being represented on the board of managers, and I didn't want to jeopardize that support by making them feel that agriculture was going to be lost. I think they had a little concern when the college became CAES. So this was a factor. But the reality of life was that enrollments in colleges of agriculture around the nation had been decreasing, and we had to do something to broaden the diversity of the college offerings. After all, the university's primary role is teaching graduate and undergraduate students, and if you didn't have a clientele you were susceptible to disappearing…

Then, the planning opportunities evolved. The other thing that was really quite special was that we had a president, Mason Gross, who came from Cambridge , and the concept of small, individual, residential colleges in which there could be a good student and faculty interaction and the possibility of having our own residences along with our own academic programs was attractive. As I said before, I had some reservations about this whole concept, but the pragmatics of the situation were that we had to change…In order to continue to serve the state, we had to change. As Dick pointed out, with all of the social activities, it became clear we couldn't just look at problems from a biological or environmental standpoint, you had to look at them from a social standpoint: thus the opportunity to bring in faculty who were trained in the social sciences and humanities was attractive.

The thing I think is important is that you recruit faculty and you have them in an environment where the idea of serving and taking your knowledge and using it solve problems is part of their life…In the college of arts and sciences you have excellent disciplines, but they're more into pushing the disciplines to the new levels of accomplishment, and that's fine and it's absolutely necessary…But, for a University it's important to also have faculty who are devoted to not only creating the knowledge but also seeing it put to use, and it's also very good because it tests it in the real world and so it's not just theoretical.

BM: As the Land Grant mission…

CH: I think the Land Grant thing is one of America 's greatest contributions to higher education; this whole concept of bringing together teaching, research, and extension, as we call it, or service or outreach. Those were some of the factors that gave us the motivation to push ahead. Dick's committee, Lee's committee, and Bruce Hamilton 's Committee all worked on putting the concept together. Dick did a tremendous job in terms of curricula planning and putting the plan together from an academic standpoint. Without his work in that area, it would not have been possible, and I think my contribution was, in some respects, in the political area by taking the idea and trying to get it implemented.

BM: Can you talk a bit about how you worked with the agriculture community? I would imagine that was a major challenge at that point.

CH: When I became acting Dean, we went out on a road show with Dick and other people from Resident Instruction, as it was called at that time, and Johnny Gerwig from extension, and we would put on a slide show of the things going on at CAES in terms of research, education programs, short courses, and so forth. The idea was not to ask for anything but just tell the Board of Managers and the people from agriculture and the community people. We also tried to get assemblymen and state senators. The county agents had good rapport, and we had good representation. Our whole mission was to say, “Here are the things we are trying to do to make New Jersey a better place, agriculturally, environmentally, etc.” We would answer questions, and Dick and others would talk about programs in the college, the academic programs. There were scholarships established at the county level. This I think built a base of support, which in subsequent years, we could call upon especially particularly when there were proposals to take away the budget from the experiment station. We were able to turn to the counties; this time we didn't have to ask for their help; but because they appreciated that we were a valuable entity and that we could improve their way of life, they came out and supported us very strongly.

DM: We also had the students very well organized, and we had the core group of students that are now part of our founders group who were very actively involved with the student body…They were fully integrated into what we were attempting to do, and they became a very loyal force in this period of tremendous dislocation because of the Vietnam and Cambodian Wars. They became extremely strong allies in what we were doing because they were part of the process.

CH: I think the point Bonnie was referring to was that as the Cook College concept began to evolve, we were able to talk about that. I think that helped to reassure them, and because they were part of the process, they understood why we were doing it and that we wanted to continue to serve the agricultural constituencies and the environmental constituencies…We needed to have both a viable student body and the disciplines necessary with which we could address those problems.

BM: I would imagine many in the agriculture community felt threatened by a lot of the changes that were taking place…

DM: Particularly when we called it Cook College .

CH: [Laughter] They had already seen the name change from Agriculture to Environmental Sciences, and there were many people in the agriculture community who were not enthusiastic supporters of the environmentalists because they felt as if they were restricting their operations, their way of doing business…Of course, our college is unique, having an office in each county, which was there to serve the people in the county, gave us tremendous outreach. It's something I've yet to see a university fully achieve the potential it has because those county offices can serve the total university and can broaden the way they interact with the people. Fortunately for us, it gave us a way to get feedback to know what their concerns were and address them before they became problems.

BM: Now what about the faculty and working with them…What challenges did you encounter?

DM: From my perspective, throughout the 60's to the start of Cook College, this wasn't a “top-down activity” at the university level, but the faculty representatives when we put together the committee I chaired originally we didn't make it democratic in terms of one person from each of the departments. We tried to get some of the best thinkers from all the programs, and they were all respected individuals. Because of that, I didn't feel we had any major resistance. The faculty understood we had to change. They knew what that change meant, and some of the organizational patterns that were being thrown at us in the mid-60's and up until the late 60's would have disenfranchised most of our faculty members as having participated as faculty members.

BM: Could you explain that?

DM: One of the plans, which was partially implemented was to reorganize the Rutgers College , the all men's college, Livingston College , the new, multipurpose college, and Douglass College , remaining as a women's college. The engineers and the AES were the only two professional schools ad were to be the new RC, DC, and THC. They magically came up with a faculty, which gave us 17 members out of our entire faculty that could serve on the Rutgers College faculty, and I believe it was something like two from Douglass and three or four at Livingston . When they proposed the plan in the Physics auditorium…

BM: Back up a little bit. These are people who were real faculty members?

DM: Yes, real faculty members…They were to represent the rest of the faculty…The rest of the College of Engineering faculty and the CAES faculty were disenfranchised as voting faculty members. When the plan was put forward and was being pushed very strongly, we were asked to go to the implementation meeting in the Physics Auditorium. The engineers, our 17 faculty, of which I was one, were asked to go this planning implementation meeting. I got up and spoke to it and said we would have no part of this farce. I walked out and the rest of the group walked out after us. We then had an AES faculty meeting…We said we wanted nothing to do with this, and we busted that plan. Then, we began implementing our Cook College planning activities. Our students were being placed into Rutgers, Livingston , and Douglass. Therefore, you could have students taking the same AES programs in the three different colleges. They could have exactly the same GPA and performance but because Douglass' rules were different from Livingston's and Rutgers ', you could have a student on probation or no action with the exactly same performance, so that was part of the madness of the plan.

BM: That's among the things you had to sort out…

DM: And again the enrollment was going up, and Livingston was this great experiment that had all sorts of “growing pains.” It was great that they could start all these new disciplines. And Ernie Linton, who was Dean at that time, worked very hard to do it, but it was very chaotic. That added to more of the chaos in the university. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Rutgers College group, was extremely conservative and that's why Mason Gross said, “We have to break that conservative pattern and get into the modern ages and the modern disciplines that have to be addressed.”

CH: In terms of our faculty and the evolution of Cook College, we had good support in part because had an excellent group of department chairs, and they were fully involved in discussions…I think they in turn did a good job talking with their faculty, which is the only way it works. We had good cooperation, but the thing that Dick is talking about reminds me of the fact that after we put the proposal together and submitted it to the Board of Regents, it had been approved on the campus. We were trying to get it through before Mason Gross left because, after all, this was his vision of what the future of the New Brunswick campus would be, with the individual residential colleges, each with a special theme. Livingston was the urban thrust, Douglass with the women's emphasis and our college, at that time, we could say men and the environment. Unfortunately, Secretary Carl Metzger, when he received this package thought it was too expensive to mail out, so he gave it to the Board of Governors at their meeting and, of course, the normal reaction would be: “Hey, you're asking us to approve a college, and we don't have time to read about it first?” Then, we were faced with a dilemma. Gross was leaving; in fact, he was already on leave…

The new President was announced, Ed Bloustein at Bennington College, so Dick, Johnny Gerwig, and I were discussing this, and we said you know we better get up to Bennington to meet with this new president. We had two reasons for this: one of them was because we knew once he came to New Brunswick , he'd be overwhelmed with new issues, and the other reason was this conservative Rutgers AES College faculty who had grave doubts that a group of “Aggies” could put together a new college concept. In fact, Bruce Hamilton has letters he received when he was in the planning process of the faculty who were highly critical of the “Cook Concept.” We thought before President Bloustein arrives and gets one negative side of Cook, we better get up there and give him the positive side of what we want to do. So, at least, he'll hear both sides. We went up there and had a good meeting with him, very informal. [Laughter] We went up there and this person came walking up to us in wash-pants and sneakers, and we didn't know whether he was the janitor or not, and it turned out it was President Bloustein. It was very fine; he was intrigued by what we had proposed and he said he would certainly follow through when he came, and shortly after he was here everything went through the Board and Cook became a reality.

BM: What about relationships with Douglass then…Douglass was changing too. Weren't there concerns about cooperative arrangements? I had just a little bit of that in The Green Print; DC Dean Margerie Foster was concerned.

DM: There were two levels, and Charlie can speak a lot about Margie Foster whom he worked with. The other level was operationally and what we really became concerned with when we became a residential college was how to offer not 30% of curriculum but 65%-70% of the curriculum are on our side of the town…Given that we were running a major bus line in the state, we had to work collaboratively with Douglass College . That we did from ‘73 to '81. We worked out arrangements so that our students were taking math and chemistry at DC, and we would build Physics labs at Cook so that the Rutgers College faculty taught physics at our campus…We would do many collaborative activities so that our students wouldn't have to travel unless they were taking Hebraic studies or something like that. So we had a tremendous number of meetings with the Douglass faculty, and they were also involved in the Cook College planning process, Charlotte Avers in particular, and I, were involved in breaking some road blocks that were there.

CH: In order to make Cook possible, we needed to have cooperation from Douglass College to provide some of the disciplines, and Douglas also had sort of an elitist view. They were tolerant of us, but they had some doubts about whether we could pull this off, so we had to convince them we had the intellectual capacity to do this. In the process, we made the case that this would be mutually beneficial. By having a viable residential college dealing with the whole area of the environment, the community and agriculture, there would be things that would come to that new university that would benefit Douglass students as well. As I recall, in the Higher Education Bond Issue passed about that time…There were funds that came for establishing Cook, but we worked to have funds included for Douglass…I believe part of it went to expansion of the Douglass student center and the library. In other words, what we did was say that intellectually there would be advantages, but there were also tangible, fiscal benefits that came to Douglas .

BM: Including student residents as well?

DM: Eventually. That came later when they got apartments. Like the Loree Gym… they needed, and we needed on our side of town relatively large lecture halls. We didn't have any. So the boiler system in the gym at Loree was big enough so we built essentially major lecture halls, offices, small meeting rooms, and actually the computer facilities. It was a Douglass building that became a Douglass/Cook building. Then, they were very weak in the sciences. They had a biology program; they had a chemistry program; and they had a math program; but the strength in science was ours…They thought that was great, and when it came to the discipline of English, Charlie and I agreed and were involved in discussions with the English Department. We would concentrate on writing and communications skills, and all the other aspects of English as it pertains to literature and so on would be up to them. They also provided history. They had real strengths in the liberal arts areas and not the sciences. The plan said look at the congruency that we would have with such a plan. We pulled it off, and they liked that. Margery was mostly support when she got into it.

CH: I really enjoyed the interactions with Dean Margery Foster and remember good memories of meetings in her home, right there on Nichol Avenue , a very gracious person. Her first goal was to make sure Douglass College maintained its identity and was not weakened, but when she saw there were mutual benefits, she was certainly a good supporter.

BM: When Cook replaced CAES, were there changes in the department structure? Were there any departments that were gone or recreated? What I have in mind is my impression that Cook is very special in having multidisciplinary units. What did you have in mind in that regard?

CH: I know there was growth in the environmental studies area, and the departments like agricultural engineering added environmental engineering to their research programs…

DM: We formed the humanities and communications department. We formed your department, human ecology and social sciences. We had a statistics and computer science department, which was a subset of a Rutgers College, New Brunswick-wide group. We had two or three faculty. In the physiology and animal science area, we spun off a physiology group, and it was interesting because it was a coordinate-group that represented both Rutgers College and Cook…They decided faculty would have to split appointments. Those with a major split appointments at Cook would be on our faculty and major split appointments at Rutgers College would be at Rutgers College …They worked as a unit, and that was a very successful model.

BM: What about biochemistry and microbiology?

DM: We already had a biochemistry and microbiology group…

BM: Was that coordinate too?

DM: It was coordinate with Douglass. In the early years, they worked more and more with us, and in the '81 reorganization, they essentially came to us. That was a group that didn't change. The horticulture and forestry group had landscape architecture already in it. The animal science group had the physiology split out, and at that time, the nutrition group was spun out as a separate department. We then added resource and environmental economics to the agriculture economics group. The food science group didn't change drastically, it just got bigger, and of course, it's the major graduate student training group to this day. The other group was geography. We actually had a small group of geologists, including Pete Wolf, who came over and worked with our agronomy group at that time and so we had all the disciplines represented that were key to our research and educational activities…

BM: Including philosophy…

DM: Well we did have philosophy, actually in our communications and humanities group. We kept experimenting, a lot with the appropriate disciplines we should have. We had some people in art, that didn't work too well. We had people in English literature, which sort of worked, and people in philosophy such as Bob Matthews, who later became the New Brunswick chair. Then, we decided if we had to do it all over again, we would have Ethicists as part of our humanities group, and that we got really comfortable with.

Actually, at one point, I wrote a piece on how to start a college of ours ‘De Novo', and some of the disciplines you would have in it. We definitely said we would have a humanities group, something dealing with ethical decision making and philosophers. The communications group was key, and we didn't need the English literature and because the others could do that…We had the environmental communications group, Peter Sandman and people like that, and they were major contributors as we were experimenting with what to do. In your group [Human Ecology] I think we did a superb job, but it could have been stronger had we not let the geographers leave. We should have had historians, but Ken Wheeler, the New Brunswick Provost, who was a historian, would never let us have historians. I'm sure going through the literature you probably saw all the nasty letters from Jerry Grob, who was at Douglass teaching history and would do anything to torpedo Cook, but we needed historians in your group…At the same time, we probably should have had more of the human biology, which we are now doing.

CH: I think one of the major organizational changes was not in the discipline departments, but in the way student life was handled…I think this was the real contribution of Cook College . People like Tom Concannon, Roger Locandro, and others…really integrated the students into the college, and the Cook College Council was established and lead by students, chaired by a student, really brought them in and made them feel part of the exciting evolution of a new college. The things that came out of that was a Parent's Association, which broadened the Cook family to involve all the key actors and then the alumni association, which had already been established and became the CAES, Cook Alumni Association, separate from the Rutgers Alumni Association. These were major changes, and I think part of what made Cook so attractive to students was that they were treated as a whole individual, not just working on their brain but working on their social activities, intramural sports and fiscal activities, and that helped make us the one of the most competitive colleges for new students on the New Brunswick campus.

DM: We were the first college that had apartments. Up to that time, it was all dormitories, and we had a freshmen dorm. We now have two, and we were essentially the state's apartment experiment. There was a state housing authority, and we were lumped with Ramapo and a few of the others…We had apartments, and we had freshmen dorms and apartments for the upperclassmen. People asked, “How are you going to do that,” and we had lots of failures and lots of successes…When the college started, housing wasn't ready. We had 600 more students and when we finally had some of the housing ready by January, the students voted to move on campus. Six or eight in an apartment designed for four, our kids said this was so great to live on campus and have our own campus. They took 25 acres of our land for those apartments, which we thought was rather excessive. We went through all the experiments. Roger Locandro, who eventually became our dean of students, did an incredible job with that whole residential life program.

BM: You had student planning as part of this…

DM: We had students involved heavily from 1969/1970 on and all the Green Print newspapers show how they were involved. They are all very successful people today and have very fond memories of Cook. We had very little experience on what the student life program should be and we designed it all. I picked the design out of six designs for the apartments. [Laughter] I wrote some criteria for the staff, and we said it has to be safe and so on. Then, our campus center was slated to be put right on our campus. We said that the Douglass Campus Center is 1000 feet away; it's got to be where the students live. Charlie and I had a major war trying to put the center where the students were living. We said it's not a student center, it's a campus center, and it'll be more convenient to the students. They said, “It's too wet a site.” Then, Bruce went out and did some borings and so on…Then, they said, “There's a sand outcropping there,” so we plunked it where it would get better drainage. The other thing you should know, and Charlie was very involved in, is that we started, a cooperative education program. Cook and the University of California at Davis to this day have the most viable cooperative education programs…There was federal legislation that permitted that to occur, and we applied for it and we recieved the grant funding…To this day, we still have 10% of our students out every year …We had federal funding and good leadership. When we were running out of federal funding, I remember, Charlie and I went to Washington to talk to our legislators…Charlie did a great job, but I don't remember the congressman we talked to…

CH: Jamie Whitten….also the congressman from Middlesex and Somerset counties and Milt Cowan, the county agent, I had great rapport with him. As I described we had gone to each of the counties, and we also went down to Washington each spring with tomato plants and asparagus…You may say that's cheesy, but it made an impact…They knew New Jersey agriculture. It's interesting, as you listen to the president in talking about outreach and so forth, this college has had that for years and what was Rutgers known for? Streptomycin from the agriculture experiment station, New Jersey tomatoes, the Rutgers tomatoes were internationally known, asparagus, cranberries, blue berries, turf grass, and that has even grown now to a tremendous reputation. The president is concerned about people not really fully appreciating the value of Rutgers University and he said we have to do a better job of communicating. That's not the secret; you have to do a better job of delivering a product that the people want, whether it is a student that is well trained, or research that is addressing problems in the state and making life better for the people. Then, the reputation grows, you can't just say we are doing good things; they have to see it.

BM: That sounds like a very good point at which to wrap this up. To my mind, you both have a lot to be proud of for the work you and others did at developing Cook, and I don't know if you want to add anything more….are you proud?

DM: Oh yeah…

CH: Very proud! It's part of the reason I've come back because I'm very interested to see that the new leadership that is chosen for the college will continue the “ Land Grant College philosophy.” I think other colleges say they are land-grant colleges too, but I think those colleges, who have their roots in the Colleges of Agriculture, have a special dedication of taking knowledge and applying it for the benefit of the people.

BM: Well, thank you very much.