David Mears Interview

Interview of David Mears, Professor II, Bioresource Engineering (Plant Biology and Pathology); RC '58, BS Agricultural Engineering
Date of Interview: January 27, 2004
Interviewers: Bonnie McCay, Laurel, Jaime Raysick, Kristina Neoushoff, Brian Guelich
Transcriber: Jaime Raysick
Edited by Dr. Bonnie McCay October 14, 2004

Q: Were you a member of the faculty or student life?

DM: Yes. To both.

You heard my question earlier before we started of what was the use of student numbers. The reason I asked that question was because when I came in as a freshman we were using student numbers rather than social security numbers. As I recall they were 7 digit numbers….My student number started with three zeros, so that gives you a timeline. I'm not quite sure when they started using student numbers for students, but I was given my student number in 1954.

Q: What was your major while you were here?

DM: I was an agricultural engineer.

Q: Did you live on campus?

DM: I did.

Q: Where?

DM: Rutgers College Campus downtown.

Q: Why?

DM: The reason why was in those days we were two entities in the undergraduate level. There was Rutgers College for men and New Jersey College for Women. About that time, during that period, it was changed to Douglass College . NJC became Douglass.

Q: Were you involved in any activities like as a student like the papers or clubs or anything like that?

DM: As an undergraduate? Yes, I was involved in several things. One of my major involvements was earning money to pay my tuition and I worked in the ceramics department primarily, ceramic engineering. Most of my undergraduate work was in the School of Engineering . The School of Engineering was then the College of Engineering . The undergraduate activities I was involved in were with the religious organizations, which had some interesting sidelines that I might get into later. I was on the rowing team. I was involved in several other activities. Plus, we had an ag engineering student club and we rebuilt old vehicles and some of those are in the Ag Museum down the road, starting with a 1910 Maxwell which we used to run every Ag field day.

Q: What was Ag Field Day like as a student and how has it evolved?

DM: I'm not quite sure when Ag Field Day actually started. I don't really remember.

Q: When you were an undergraduate, was it on then?

DM: I guess we had something because we ran those vehicles and this was in the mid-50's. We did run…the first thing we had was the Maxwell. Then, in my senior year, we got that 1928 tractor with big steel wheels on it. We ran both of those for some event. I'm not sure it was Ag Field Day as it's currently constructed. Other people might know that. It was some sort of an open house. I guess it was some sort of field day. Of course, then it was the College of Agriculture and there were no students living here. It was simply that there was a faculty of agriculture and the students who majored in agriculture lived in Rutgers or Douglass, as we mentioned. The program of engineering was unique because the agriculture engineering was administered by the College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture . But neither of those colleges had dormitories for their students. They were just on undergraduate campuses.

Q: Did you enjoy the curriculum while you were here; something that you felt was challenging and enjoyable?

DM: I'd say it was more challenging than enjoyable. It was basically an engineering curriculum with some ag subjects thrown in. So it was one of the more demanding curricula. To give you some idea of what was involved at that time, we had classes that were on a 50 minute schedule. So a 3 credit course would have three 50 minute lectures; but in engineering a lot of our courses were laboratories which would run 3 hours in the afternoon. So basically classes were from 8-4:30 and then we had Saturday morning classes to get it all in. I had 21 credits every semester except one or two: 164 for a four year undergraduate degree. Times have changed. When we formed Cook College , we had 128 and the rest of the university was 120.

Q: Were there a lot of people in the agricultural engineering class?

DM: My class was the record holder in terms of size. We had 6.

Q: All men?

DM: All men. There were 3 women in the college of engineering, in my class probably about 600 or 700 [total]. Agricultural engineering was always the smallest engineering curriculum.

Q: You got your bachelors degree in engineering and then had gone on to training here or elsewhere?

DM: Yes, I got a masters in agricultural engineering here immediately upon leaving my undergraduate. The interesting thing about that is that my title was assistant instructor. So [I started] as a faculty member… as an employee rather than on a fellowship… so I was assigned to teach and my professor had some confidence in me because he had me teach two senior courses that I had as a senior, and the next year I was teaching them to the students that were juniors behind me.

And one thing if any of you have the opportunity…if you take courses now and you have the opportunity to immediately follow that up by teaching the course… if you got an A in a course you thought you learned in, if you're preparing your lectures and you realized that bright students can ask you any sort of a question, all of a sudden you realize you have to know a lot more than you thought you did when you took it. It's a lot more challenging to teach a course than to take one.

Q: Did you find that teaching was rewarding personally?

DM: I was more interested in my research project at the time and I worked on several of them, but, yeah, I found it fairly interesting. Obviously: I've stuck with it for a while. It depends on the students, if the students are interested in the courses you're teaching, it's fun. If they're just there because they're sort of trying to get by with the least possible effort, it's not so much fun.

Q: You mentioned the research you were doing, what type of research was that?

DM: Well, at that time, I did my masters research on drying hay and I also did some projects on harvesting asparagus and harvesting apples and designing agricultural buildings, livestock buildings used for early dairy housing.

Q: Maybe the students would appreciate some interesting student life stories from those undergraduate and masters degree days.

DM: Well, the interesting stories, like I mentioned before, I was involved in a number of activities. Of course, I was on the rowing team and that was practice every afternoon for about 2 hours plus; you get very tired out when you did that. Interestingly enough, in the spring time when we had the most intense practices, my grades tended to go up even though I was too tired to study. I don't quite know why that is…except that I think being in good shape physically helps your brain work possibly. That's a theory. That's outside my field so I'm not sure that's correct.

One of the things that I mentioned…oh, going back before that, talking about living arrangements, in my senior year and the time I was a graduate student, I lived in a little cottage down in what is now the bioresearch engineering campus with several graduate students. There was room for 3 people in that cottage so we actually lived on campus. In those days, students who lived in the living groups on campus put in 4 hours of work for the privilege of being in the student housing; … that housing system is now what we call Helyar House and [now] it isn't scattered around in lots of little places on campus [as it was then]. But that's where I lived.

The other thing I mentioned is that I was involved with the religious organizations… We had a speaker come to campus in the fall of 1957: Dr, James Robinson, who was the founder of a group called Crossroads Africa. As a result of that I went to West Africa in 1958 with a group of 60 college students or recent graduates from all across the United States . The Crossroads Africa group: one of the Board of Directors was Hubert Humphrey and it was from his involvement in Crossroads Africa that he got the idea which I think he fed to John Kennedy--that's my own theory—about forming the Peace Corps, which was based on that same premise.

My assignment in that summer of 1958 was to Liberia . Ten of us went. We built a school in the village, and during that time we lived on the campus of what I found out later was the oldest private university on the continent. Upon completion of my masters degree, I went and taught in that college for 4 years from 1960 to 64.

Q: What would the name of that college be?

DM: Cuttington College in Suacoco , Liberia . But that's not a common path for university faculty to take.

Q: What would you say your most memorable experience was here?

DM: Oh, I can't answer that.

Q: Most memorable as a student?

DM: I suspect that probably the most unique undergraduate experiences were the ones with the athletic program. One of the features of that program was that one the rowing team, on the crew, our most ____? supporter on the campus was Mason Gross, who was then the provost of the university and later became the president. Through the involvement with the crew, I got to know him personally pretty well and that led me to take my only humanity elective. ….As engineers we had one three credit humanities course. [Most] engineers took art or music appreciation because it was an easy three credit course. I took a course in the European Renaissance taught by Mason Gross, Reginald Bishop, who was in charge of romance languages in Rutgers College , Richard McCormick Sr. our current president's father, and the head of the art department. That was a challenging course for an engineer. I wanted to be taught by that man [Mason Gross], who was a very outstanding individual. We haven't had the like of him since.

Ok, just to keep the flow going, after the sometime teaching in the private college in Liberia , I then went to the University of California , Davis , and studied nuclear engineering under Edward Teller for a year [1964-65]. Then I came back here and began as an instructor and finished my Ph.D. [in 1968] in engineering mechanics, on the mechanical properties of plastic materials under extremely high pressures. Extremely high pressures. But I also began to teach in our professional agricultural engineering program here in what became Cook and to do research on a number of engineering projects related to agriculture.

…in the 60's, we had changed the name from the College of Agriculture to the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. That name change came into being when I was in Liberia so when I came back here, again as a faculty member, but also as a graduate student at the same time, that was where we were. And again, in the 60's, we were in the same situation really that the undergraduate students were: men and women [who] lived in Rutgers or Douglass. The faculty [who]… had concerns with the agriculturally related topics ..were part of the College of Agriculture . …We had added the name “environmental” to the college name but we had an environmental science program here for many, many years before that so that was still here.

Q: You were a faculty member when they started Cook College ?

DM: Yes, well before and then when we did, because when I finished my Ph.D. I became an assistant professor. That was in 1968.

Q: What was your role in the starting of the college?

DM: The idea for starting the college was basically—…you'll get this from a few other people also—but basically that Mason Gross had the idea that as Rutgers University expanded (there was a great expansion of the university in terms of its size, numbers of students and number of programs under his leadership, which was for about 12 and a half years he was president), …instead of having everything just get bigger, we should begin to break up into smaller units.

…[W]hat it was called was a federated college system. Part of that was driven by our geography because the University acquired a great deal of land in what had been the army Camp Kilmer in Piscataway . And so you had this geographical separation and we already had some science laboratories and so on on the Busch campus and, again, all the men's dormitories were on the College Avenue Campus and the women's were here at Douglass. But we had also the College of Agriculture here. Some of the engineering activities were on the Busch campus but most of them were still on the Old Queens Campus. So given the geography that we had, we were going to have different dispersed units. The other thing I think that was a part of driving that decision to go to a federated college system came out of the politics and the culture of the times. It was a period of protests of students against war and it was also a period when students of large universities felt disenfranchised. They had a major revelation at Berkeley where students complained they were just an IBM card with a 10 digit number and nobody cares about us. I think we still have a system like that at Rutgers these days. And the idea that in these smaller colleges of about 3000 students each was [….? Missing text]. Mason's vision for this. You could have a sense of community and family and camaraderie and undergraduate student life activities that were focused on the smaller group of people rather than being part of 26,000 students or whatever it was.

I thought that idea made some sense, particularly given the geographic dispersion. The other idea that came out of that was the colleges to be added would have a different focus. …[B]asically Rutgers and Douglass Colleges were arts and sciences. …[A]griculture and engineering were sort of a little bit of anachronisms in that they were professional programs but it was still part of these two colleges, undergraduate colleges of arts and sciences.

So, of course, the first of these federated colleges that was to get going was Livingston . And then there was discussion and its theme was to be associated with the urban issues more so. Then there was a discussion of how to get the next unit after Livingston going and it was called euphemistically, Livingston 2 for a while, by some people anyway. But in the planning process for that, one of the things that came out was, well, maybe the then College of Agriculture and Environment Science should play a stronger role in that planning. As I recall, there was some discussion about this college, too, with Livingston and the campus area. They focused on the biological sciences.

So, as a result of these discussions, many of the faculty on this campus had decided that we should put a bid in that the next college after Livingston should be what, in fact, became Cook and it should be on this campus rather than on Livingston . I think the fact that we had a lot of classrooms, office and laboratory facilities here, and there were budget problems at the time, as there always are, may have helped us succeed in the discussion that it should be here rather than Livingston ….[A]nother college on Livingston has never come to pass, so maybe it's good that we did what we did when we did.

Q: You mentioned that one of the goals was a stronger sense of camaraderie in the smaller schools. Did you, as a faculty member here when it started, see that? Did it seem like that was working? Did people feel that way?

DM: Yes. Again, there's a transition here because basically I think that other people will give you better number. I think we had basically around 300 agriculture majors in curricula. That's before we got to be Cook. And, of course, they were all focused on scientific programs. Our faculty were just in the Ag and environmental sciences technical departments. We didn't have the department that Dr. McCay is in, of course [ Human Ecology ]. These things all were added later, not at the time of the formation of Cook. So my sense was that as we began to get in the first large class of students who were going to be Cook students and not only those more majoring in the agriculture [and] environmental sciences. There was a much longer list and you'll get that in later documentation I'm sure. My memory's not the best source for that detailed information.

I think that started very fast to develop a special sense of identity as Cook students, which was unique. Part of that I think is driven because there was a real crunch here at the time, because we were trying to get a large number of students, we were trying to get undergraduate facilities, dormitories. There were a lot of problems getting the infrastructure of the building. We added the large number of new faculty in the non-science, non-agriculture and environmental science areas, and these new people were all told very strongly that they were going to get involved in [teaching the] undergraduate students; that was going to be the major focus of their responsibilities.

And I think there was sort of a sense of old faculty being under some pressure and fighting some attacks on us that we were not doing the right thing. That sort of drove people together. Sort of like you have a group of soldiers in war time. You're open to be buddies when you're all being shot at. And I think there was a sense of Cook community and particularly the idea that the faculty were very deeply involved in the monitoring and advising of their undergraduate students. Almost immediately, we had the sense that the student-faculty relationships were a lot stronger at Cook than they were certainly at Rutgers College. My sense was that Douglass College at that time also had a much closer camaraderie and interaction between their faculty and the ladies at Douglass than was the case at Rutgers College.

Q: Can you give some examples of the interaction between the faculty and the students? You mentioned advising; were there other activities outside of class?

DM: Oh sure. I mean…the thing is…we started senior majors. Of course, we got rid of a couple and we shouldn't have, I don't think, but most of these majors formed student undergraduate clubs and we have this to this day. There's a club affiliated with most of the majors. And so there was a pretty intense faculty involvement in most of those clubs. Another thing, of course, was the Cook College Council and I happened to be one of the faculty advisors to that council in the very early years. Several times I had a sequence of duty on that group. But in the beginning, we basically had a faculty member for each curriculum as a member of the Cook College Council so it was a faculty-student council in the initial basis I recall. There was a lot of involvement there.

Q: Do you think that involvement exists today?

DM: It's changed. I mean, in the late 80s and early 90s I think I was a faculty rep to the Cook College Council for four or five years. At that time, we there four faculty reps and the number had shrunk. Of course, Dean Schneider always goes for [the meetings]. But I remember for several of those years, I was the only one that showed up. There was some change. But another thing that has come on that I had not been much involved with was Leadership Council. It was a very large program involving students and faculty. But I don't think we have that in undergraduate colleges to this day.

….[S]ince we're on this faculty-student interaction, I think if you're looking at trends since we founded Cook College …. We were having some discussion because we formed the Founders Group of the faculty and students that were here when we started the college. W]e've had a couple meetings already. I think that students in that first few years had a more intense relationship with faculty than is currently the case. One of the trends that from my perspective I feel …is that in recent years, say the past 15 years, we've tended to hire faculty with more advice to them that they get involved in their research than their teaching. And a stronger basic science than an applied science focus and I think the involvement with faculty perhaps with undergraduate students (blank???) with clientele in the state is less intense that it was. Twenty or thirty years ago, teaching research faculty, also I think from my perspective, was much more involved going out into the community, particularly agriculture with the county agents working on specific agricultural problems. I know I did a lot in my early years as a faculty member and I don't see so much of it these days. Well, let me say, as much.

Q: Do you think that's more of a result of just the size of the college?

DM: No, the college is the same size from around since we…it's only around three thousand students so basically that transition was in round numbers. We went from 300 to 3000 students, in very round numbers. As I mentioned, how many digits there were, I mean if you have 4 digits and you go to 7 digits, you know there was an expansion. So it was basically an increase in undergraduate students and there was some addition in faculty in humanities and anthropology and some other areas, communications, but there was no addition in faculty in the science areas. So the teaching loads of faculty jumped a lot. I think actually we have less faculty now, 30% less faculty now, than we did then.

Q: Did you have any kind of advice to make the relationship better between students and faculty now like it was then? Going out into the community?

DM: Well, yes, I mean I have a feeling about it and it comes from a person as old as I am and who has seen a lot of history and nostalgia's not a useful (blank) tool. But what I see is that there is so much more pressure particularly on young faculty to get money, get money, get money and grants and to get peer review publications in prestigious journals or they won't survive. That the faculty feel they must respond to this. My perspective is it's not as much fun for the faculty as it was 30 years ago. The thing is, if you go back to when we were basically the College of Agriculture, we think in that context of doing research, or to help agriculture become more productive, faculty members having research projects on farms to develope applied methods that actually work, you can see and evaluate our results of what we do as faculty by the impact the work has on the clients that we're serving. So, if you develop a new technique that works much better than it was done before, and people adopt that technique and put it to work, when you come up for your promotion say, “hey, this guy got it done, it's no problem.” But today, if you're counting grants and the prestige of the journals, then it's quite different. I'll give you an example of that of what I'm thinking about. One of my colleagues had a major responsibility of developing this air-inflated, double plastic greenhouse that you see and for many years trying to convince them to put additives in the polyethylene to conserve energy and I finally convinced Monsanto to do that in 1981. And they did a project and supported a project here on campus and the project was successful. But they spent $500,000 on what was done on this campus. And that had a significant impact and it proved things, but that impact to the industry, to the commercial greenhouse industry, was not as big as the 50 dollar fan. They were both positive and they were both worth it, but what I'm suggesting here is that perhaps the impact of your work is completely unrelated to the amount of money you got in grants and how much you spent to accomplish that. But I think our faculty today feel that how much they get in grants is more important than what we used to do many years ago.

Q: Is that something that they have that pressure from themselves or does the university put that pressure upon them?

DM: The University puts it on them.

Q: Getting back to Ag Field Day and the community, you were talking about the community and how a group of students and faculty were very close knit. Is that what made Ag Field Day special, the way it was, because everyone was so close together? Was it really a day where people just enjoyed everybody's company, faculty and students together?

DM: Well, I think from the standpoint of the faculty and the students, it's private corporation for Ag Field Day was much more important than the day itself (DM: clarify?). And I think that's shifted a bit. The party aspects of the day are a little bit bigger in the minds of many of the students than what it was then. But there was a lot of effort, I had mentioned the clubs that we had, and, basically, the different things that occurred on Ag Field Day were mostly done by the student clubs and, to get them done, the faculty got very involved with the students. I think more than is the case today. The other thing about Ag Field Day, many years ago there was much less of the presence on campus of the commercial activity that we now see. It was almost all students, though.

Q: Was that before the New Jersey book festival (NOTE: should this be Folk Festival??) came into play over at the Douglass campus?

DM: I'm not quite sure when that started but certainly for a long time that was a much smaller thing compared to Ag Field Day than what it is today. But again, we had a lot of commercial stuff on the Cook Campus, people selling stuff.

Q: Students selling?

DM: Outside vendors, plants and things like that. It used to be just stuff we sold out of the students' projects.

Q: Why don't you talk about some of the traditions of Ag Field Day? I know the students were interested in a tug of war, cigar contest and beer throwing contest. Were you involved in any of those?

DM: Oh yeah, well, one of the things in that context that our student club, the engineers, put together was a dunking booth on Cook Campus so people would come and throw tennis balls and dunk somebody in a bucket of water. And again, that came out of one of our research projects. We had these great big round steel tanks that we used in farm and irrigation research projects and so we had this tank available so we built a frame around it and a seat for someone to get dunked. Things like that and the cockroach races and tug of war and two legged races. All kinds of things. There was a lot more, at least in my perspective and a bit of fuzzy memory, because I tended to focus on what our students were doing and not what everyone else was doing. There was a lot more student involvement in the activities.

Q: Was it primarily a college day or family day? I know today it's almost considered on the New Jersey Folk Festival circuit. The newspapers advertise it. People come and say, “What's Cook College?” How was it when you were here?

DM: Certainly, since we had Cook College, it was very much an open house for the college to show itself to everyone in the state. Many students' families would come, it's time for mom and dad to come and visit, the parking was always a problem. I mean before we had resident undergraduate students, it was more of a challenge for the student clubs. Again, we had 300 instead of 3000 students to do the work. But still we had many of those activities before we were Cook College. And certainly there were displays of the kind of departmental programs contributing to New Jersey agriculture and environmental issues were being displayed to the public.

Q: You mentioned the cars and the tractors for the parade, where did the parade drive through? Was there a specific route?

DM: Yeah we drove through. It was a little bit of a parade around campus with some of these things. And again, the first year we had that Maxwell car running. The other thing the engineering club did for many years was they would run a hay ride and bring the tractor down from the Lipman Drive area down to the bio-resource engineering buildings on College Farm Road to get people to our exhibits. At the time when my daughter was a student here in the early 90s, we were looking at these alternative energy things so we ran one of the farm tractors on sunflower oil. When you rode on the hay ride, you felt you were riding behind a popcorn machine in the movie theater because that's what the exhaust from the tractor smelled like when you burned oil. Alternative energy can work.

Q: So do you think it's unfortunate that Ag Field Day has lost the focus and it's become more of a party day rather than something where the students get involved in these projects that have a lot to do with what they're actually studying?

DM: Well, I want to try to be wise enough not to label it as unfortunate, but again from my perspective, which is so long, you see things change and you recognize they change and maybe that's not unfortunate, maybe the things students are interested these days are more relevant to where they're going. I'm not so sure. I'd be comfortable using the word unfortunate but I wouldn't want to force it on anybody else. Like I said, a very senior colleague of mine from Japan in the program that we were having to plan in the future and some of us were grumbling about how much better some things were in the past than they are now. Nostalgia is not something you should use in planning for the future, so times are different.

Q: Do you have any other suggestions of who should be interviewed? Do you know any other people that were students here or faculty?

DM: There's a short list of faculty that were here spanning that time. I guess you have that list.

Q: Who would tell good stories?

DM: Most of the people you're going to find are people like Dick Merritt and Roger Locandro and Lee Schneider who are going to tell the story as relevant to undergraduate life. I'll give you a limited perspective. Well, I haven't really talked much about the experiment station. We really focused on the student issues. That's something I think is missing from the current information.

I'm not sure because again the relationship of the experiment station and the College…because it's a three legged stool we have here, as extension, teaching and research and Bonnie mentioned my experience for a period of time as one of the deans. My responsibility was the Dean of Research. That has certainly changed in recent years from…again if you go back before we were Cook College, it was just Agriculture and Environmental issues that we dealt with and it's broadened out.

One of the things I see today is there is a tremendous pressure on this institution to involve itself in basic science. You look at our current president and his discussions with the governor for him to take this job. To merge with the medical school and for this institution…I think it's very much on our current president's agenda that this institution's experiment station should turn its primary attention away from agriculture more so and refocus on the pharmaceutical industry. I think you'll see faculty hires that have happened recently and ones that are going to happen in the near future might be directed towards the sciences and support those things. Maybe in our food science program we talk about nutriseuticals(?), in our plant sciences we talk about finding plants that have medicines, so we're seeing a substantial change in the focus on the College, driven from the top down. But as you hire faculty, the orientation leads more towards basic science, more towards biotechnology, unrelatedness is certainly changing the culture(NOTE to DM: clarify?:) You change the culture when you change the environment. The fact that my generation ….people in their early 30s are coming with a very different perspective. So if I had any advice to the college undergraduate programs, they might need to really work hard on getting some of the younger faculty involved in their activities so I think in your interviewing process, you're going to tend to the old guys, not going to see much from the younger ones. I hope I'm wrong. I'm not swearing that's the case, but that's my sense. I learned something recently that I felt that the first dean of the College and director of the experiment station was George Cook, the second one was Voorhees, and the third one was Lipman and the fourth was Martin. I used to say that I worked with all the deans or directors expect for three: Cook, Voorhees, and Lipman because Doc Martin was the one that hired me. Several faculty are still around who were hired by Doc Martin including Dr. Merritt, Dr. Hanz Fisher and Roy DeBoer. I don't think there was anyone else on the current faculty that predates Dean Merritt when he was dean. I learned recently that the first two of those weren't regarded as deans of the College, that in fact Lipman was the first dean. And if you look at the list of administrators in the College and deans of the experiment station, it gets much more dense population in recent years, i.e. the turnover's a lot quicker. No one survives very long(?).

Q: Why don't we refocus that around the 70s when Cook College changed from AS to Cook College? What was the relationship at that time between the college and the ag station?

DM: Well, I mean basically the relationship between the College and New Jersey Agriculture Experiment Station was the faculty who were in the professional agriculture and environmental areas were almost all on (?) programs. Then we added people in the humanities and this department. Many of them came in as 100% idea for co idr(?) university appointments. They had different expectations. These people came for nine months rather than full year contracts, which is another issue. So, there was a change. And again, the thing we haven't mentioned but after we formed Cook College and we added a tremendous number of people in the non agriculture areas, when President Bloustein came in after Mason Gross, he scrapped the federated college system, reorganized the university, consolidated all of the faculties into single departments in the Faculty Arts and Sciences. So in the past you had an English department at Rutgers College, and at Livingston College and at Douglass College. There were three different English departments, plus we had an English group here, when Tom Batroy? and Barbara Geoff were part and there were others at that time. The idea was to collapse all of these departments into one single excellent department instead of having them fragmented into this college system. In my view, Douglass College was the big loser in this process because their faculty basically all left.

When we did that reorganization into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, you had the engineering program, which never had undergraduate student residents and you had Cook College, well what are we? So the faculties that we had added when we started Cook College, most of those people were pulled out and put into these unified departments and were still allowed to teach courses to Cook undergraduates, but they were part of the faculty or arts and sciences. They weren't part of the Cook College faculty anymore. Of course, most of the people left and we have a few left. I mean, this department that Dr. McCay is in is one and Dr. Matro? And Dr. Geoff are others of that period who remain. So basically, we then became a professional school. It was a way of euphemistically saying we were somehow different from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and, of course, when you look at our ag and environmental related programs, they weren't departments that existed in other federated colleges like English and history and mathematics, physics and chemistry. See, so the Douglass ladies had their own physics teachers, had their own chemistry teachers, had their own math, they had their own religion, they had their own history, English--they lost all that. In our case, we lost those things that we had added, and when we go back to the planning of Cook College, one of the things that I should have brought out earlier there was a lot of, let me say, suspicion on the part of the major administration in the University about the kind of college that this faculty would put together. And there was a great concern previous to that time Dr. Weikler? (NOTE to DM: clarify?) That we become a multipurpose liberal arts college with a focus in agriculture and environmental science but we not become a professional school. We'd be basically liberal arts so we had to add all these things. And my sense was there were strong feelings in the university leadership that the faculty and the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science would resist this and we wouldn't want these things. We wouldn't want to keep pure horticulture and soils and crops and microbiology and biochemistry and ag economics and agricultural engineering, whatever we called our different programs. And again, most of the departments had the word agriculture in their titles those days. Now they're all gone. That's a trend. Agriculture's now a negative word. But the reality of it was that, I think, most of my colleagues felt that we didn't need to add those things and that if we're going to have all these undergraduate students, we would like to have faculty teaching English and anthropology and other subjects. With a sensitivity and a concern in a flavor of the technical issues that we dealt with, we're going to teach students writing, use our agriculture and environmental programs for us as a basis for teaching people how to write. And so I think that, contrary to some suspicions, most of the faculty welcomed these additions and we realized we needed the extra faculty. But there were a number of task forces put together to plan different aspects of the college and the (?) administration saw to it that all of these task forces had a large representation of the arts faculty from outside what was then the department of agriculture and environmental science to see to it that we didn't stray anymore …(?) But that process worked out in any case.

I'll tell you another story though related to that. Our curriculum at that time, that I was involved with, it was primarily what I called agriculture engineering which is a professional accredited engineering program, where you could go take your exam when you graduate to get an engineering license to practice engineering which makes you legally responsible. Also, I had a program that was originally called Mechanized Agriculture which was taught to general ag students. It was more machinery maintenance, how to fix things, how to repair things, how to operate things, rather than engineering design. So there was very little engineering, it was more practical of a course.

Similarly along the lines, in the 60s, we decided to change that to environmental technology because more of the students coming out of the program were going into environmental and technology-type jobs in support of the technical issues, like sanitation and air pollution and other kinds of things. Interestingly enough, the task force, that was a faculty that we put together that I was not on…it was to look at our curriculum, decided that that had to be eliminated because the word technology does not belong in a university; technology programs go along with the community colleges. This was in the 60s. When you came to the late 70s, our program was in what was then biological and agricultural engineering. We added the biological because so many of our students went into environmental fields we were under attack in our program by others in the University outside of Cook. That our programs should be discontinued because it was irrelevant, it was too small and a number of other things. And I remember meeting with one of the select committees that was advising on our demise, and they said, “Well, one of the weaknesses of the program is that you have no grants, money.” And I said, “What do you mean we have no grants, the past year I got $750,000 by myself.” And they said, “Oh, that's all from companies. That's easy money. Its not natural science foundation and you guys are too much into technology and not enough in science. The university doesn't need you.” Well, we survived obviously. But interestingly enough, in the early 80s jobs in New Jersey became a big issue and Governor Kean came up with this idea of offering Rutgers University the opportunity to develop high technology centers, like Camden and biotech. I got a call in from central administration, “hey you've got the most money in the industry of people in the university, you're wonderful.” Of course two years before, “get out of here,” because all of a sudden technology was a wonderful thing, we could have hi tech centers. So you see the evolution in the use of words as I mentioned the word agriculture's very much under ( NOTE to DM: clarify?) Of course many of our faculty would never be associated with agriculture. It's too common place, it's too easy, it's not hi tech, not cutting edge. Try and solve some of these agricultural problems. They can be difficult sometimes.

Q: Is there anything I forgot? Is there anything else you think we need to know before we end?

DM: Sure, maybe you need to digest what you've done. We have not gotten into experiment station politics and maybe that's for the better.