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Transcript of A.R. Chamberlain oral history (copy 1, tape 1 of 3), 1975-08-25
Item Metadata
Collection: Oral History Tapes (UOHT)
Author(s): Hansen, James E., 1938-, Chamberlain, A. R. (Adrian Ramond) Title: A.R. Chamberlain oral history (copy 1, tape 1 of 3)
Date: 1975-08-25
Identifier: UOHT_0013_access_sideB Date Edited: February 2021
Editors: Victoria Lopez-Terrill, Mary Swing Transcript Provided By: Memnon
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00:00:34.930 00:01:00.670 Hansen: Let's pick up on this budget question for just a second since it becomes such a matter of controversy, about ‘66 or ‘67, when the legislature really took after the institution on its accounting procedures.
Chamberlain: On its accounting but not on its budget.
Hansen: I see. So you weren’t really involved in the accounting aspect of it all?
00:01:00.870 00:01:25.310 Chamberlain: No, I was only indirectly involved on the accounting side. I couldn't really get at that. For example, you recall, we earlier commented that CSURF ultimately maintained the records for contract and grant research because the business office either wouldn't or couldn't or both maintain appropriate records.
00:01:26.220 00:01:35.760 I never in those early years was able to get very much of a handhold on it either because the business manager did not report to me.
00:01:36.420 00:02:12.910 He reported first to the president, and also as Treasurer to the Board, directly to the board of the institution. To some extent bypassing the president also. So there was no particular role that I had other than periodically reinforcing to the president that neither my needs nor his needs were being met by the current financial accounting. And my recollection is that that concerned President Morgan a great deal but, simply in part, because there was a pipeline around him,
00:02:13.080 00:02:19.980 he was not easily able to get control of it either.
2 00:02:19.980 00:02:52.540 And the business manager of that era, Mr. Whalley, did have some
very very substantial talent, particularly in some areas of structuring bond issues for dormitories, student centers, and things of that nature. So he had a great deal of skill in some areas of business administration. But he was a firm believer that you didn't need to maintain detailed accounts beyond the minimum that the State House might require.
00:02:53.490 00:03:02.300 And he enjoyed playing Santa Claus with the budget around the president, particularly for athletics during that period.
00:03:02.370 00:03:09.100 Of course, we need to keep in mind for Mr. Whalley’s benefit, 00:03:09.120 00:03:16.750 it was only in those mid ‘60s when the public's desire for financial
accountability began to emerge anyway.
00:03:16.860 00:03:36.670 Mr. Whalley’s system was perfectly adequate in terms of the public's expectations up through probably 1962 or ‘63. But his perceptions became completely unacceptable probably around 1965, ‘66, ‘67.
00:03:37.230 00:05:03.460 And so the President was under increasing pressure during that period of time to overhaul the system which would logically extend that he would need an entirely different type of person for the next era. So my role though was predominantly on the budget side where a budget was defined in two senses. One, figuring out the request for budget that would be prepared and submitted. And then number two, allocating the resources after they had been obtained from the General Assembly.
While the president assumed primary responsibility for inducing the governor and the legislature to be responsive to the budget request, I did the behind the scenes work of preparing the requests and aligning the resources after they were prepared. Well, I also had the task of presenting the majority of the request during the formal hearings.
But the president did ninety nine percent of the day-to-day political work to get the request favorably acted on by the General Assembly and by the governor. I did very little of that till later.
00:05:03.550 00:05:10.010 Hansen: How has that function changed? I know Chuck Terrell is known to lobby.
00:05:10.570 00:05:55.880 Chamberlain: Chuck Terrell is now the primary legislative liaison for us. He in the latter years, let's say sixty-five through sixty-nine, Chuck Terrell probably devoted a quarter of his time to that, supplementing President Morgan's activities. Since 1969, Chuck probably devotes half his time and during parts of the year, two thirds of his time to the legislative liaison. I probably devote more time to it now than did President Morgan.
00:05:56.060 00:05:59.680 But that's largely not a difference in style.
00:05:59.690 00:06:18.730 It's a difference in the perceived role of the legislature as to their day- to-day involvement in the university.
Hansen: Has the utilization of groups sympathetic to the university changed, of commodity, for instance?
3 00:06:19.460 00:06:29.870 Chamberlain: There used to be called a group known as the Rump
Committee, created before I was involved.
00:06:29.870 00:06:44.570 Made up of the lobbyist representing different commodity interests who met quite frequently with President Morgan and far as I know Chuck Terrell also. But I had little to do with that group.
00:06:45.140 00:06:53.780 And during the middle ‘60s, we did not use them very much.
00:06:53.790 00:07:00.060 The system was relying more on the bureaucrats in the system. As we go into the mid ‘70s,
00:07:00.060 00:10:00.310 we are back to relying more heavily on these commodity lobbyists than ever before. In part because the number of legislative items now impacting us that introduced maybe around 70 or 80 bills a year, while in the mid ‘60s it might be four or five bills a year. Since we do not have a full-time lobbyist, the only way we can cover the
waterfront is, that is, short of having Terrill devote full time to order around these bases, is to ask these lobbyist friends to help us out by keeping track of certain items for us. In addition, the presidents of the degree granting institutions assign to one another certain bills to try and follow on behalf of the whole.
Because again, even collectively, we have trouble with the 9 colleges and universities, ten now with Mesa, trying to keep track of all the legislation that impacts us.
Hansen: How active is the President’s Association?
Chamberlain: It went through a period of being very active until 1965.
Then when the Commission on Higher Education came into being it, it in effect was dissolved. Starting in about 1972, it began to create itself under a different label, but basically the same organization.
With nominal staff assistance out of the Office of the President of the University of Colorado.
‘69, probably ‘70, is when it began to occasionally meet again and do a little bit of joint effort on behalf of all of us. To 1974 when the group concluded that we would have to meet both more frequently.
Rather than being communication sessions of just sharing
information, which was the purpose during the ‘70 to ‘73, ‘74 period, we would have to shift to being an action agency again.
We felt the stage was fairly well set for that in part by virtue of the inadequacy of the Commission on Higher Education to provide a leadership function, at least so far as we perceived it. The Commission had been in existence seven or eight years. Had
demonstrated during much of that period that it, and actually said so, that it would not serve as an advocate for higher education.
00:10:00.550 00:10:18.190 Both the chairman and the staff director repeatedly asserted that the Commission was not to be an advocate for higher education. As that ground its way into the fabric of the presidents’ perceptions, and the Commission failed to produce in many areas which where we thought it should.
4 00:10:18.190 00:10:42.230 We concluded that since it too was having some unpopularity with
the legislature, the time was right for the presidents to again step forward. And under the guise of voluntary activities as a new
President's Association, we would assert action positions rather than simply share information and that is of course what we are now doing.
00:10:42.330 00:10:55.620 Hansen: That's interesting how that cycle runs ‘cause for so many years the President’s Association really called many of the shots as far as formulating any sort of extended policy about education.
00:10:55.700 00:12:30.210 Chamberlain: It really did. There was a period of time when the old, that is the ‘50s and ‘60s during President Morgan's tenure as
president, when the President's Association really did provide a major leadership function for the state. To the extent that the legislature would accept, with a high percentage coming in attendance at an annual banquet at which one or the other of the presidents would make a presentation to the entire General Assembly on behalf of all of higher education, sessions that were as I say well attended and well received.
My predecessor, President Morgan, had the unenviable task of making the presentation that perhaps most shook the foundations of the State of Colorado when he had the assignment of conveying to the legislature the need for a long-run capital construction program of more than 100 million dollars at a time when the state legislature was inclined to still believe that five million dollars was a lot of money. It was literally months before the legislature recovered from the pneumonia induced by hearing numbers at the magnitude that these college university presidents threw out through President Morgan as their spokesman. It wasn't long after that before the Commission came into being.
00:12:30.270 00:12:33.090 Hansen: What about some of your other early responsibilities [unclear] as Vice President of the Administration?
00:12:37.620 00:13:37.310 Chamberlain: Well, probably the most important one was an intensive involvement with the Dean of Faculty in the matter of personnel selection. I'd already had some track record in the business of picking people who could do contract and grant research
effectively, compete on the national and international scene, and so on. Dean Clark and I spent many many hours together puzzling out which departments appeared to have the leadership available to, if given some supplemental guidance and assistance, in such a way as to say “Okay, if we bet on this department to gain some more people in it who would have contract and grant ability to supplement the graduate program needs that it'll probably work.”
00:13:37.370 00:13:58.890 So probably the most important function I, aside from the budget, worked on during those early years was the daily interaction with the
5 Dean of Faculties in figuring out who to hire and where to hire them within the fabric of the place to permit us to multiply our resources above what the State of Colorado was gonna give us.
00:14:01.030 00:14:12.080 Hansen: Your central objective was to build departments that would pursue research.
Chamberlain: For the purpose of converting CSU from a college to a university.
00:14:12.540 00:14:32.800 We'd been given the name university in 1957, and it was clear that much of the expectation of the Dean of Faculty and the president was to use me as the planner and salesman to help that transition come into being.
00:14:32.800 00:14:41.610 And that transition required a graduate program of much larger size which then is now, the state itself would refuse to finance.
00:14:41.610 00:14:51.650 And so that had to be done by picking the right kinds of people in the right areas and provide them the administrative tools to be
successful.
00:14:51.760 00:14:58.840 And that was my game.
Hansen: Was there a lot of concern about balance? Because engineering really carried the whole ball for a while.
00:14:59.610 00:15:36.420 Chamberlain: Yes, there was a great deal of concern about that aspect. But we went through not so much by college as we did by department, trying to figure out where could we bet on winners to make them even bigger winners until we had a critical mass. So Veterinary Medicine, of course, with Dean Jensen was a very central part of that plan. And only subsequently, did we extend it to other colleges. But with a plan, clear back in 1960, that presumed that we would shift the College of
00:15:36.910 00:15:45.330 Sciences and Arts to being not just a service college but a college in its own intellectual right.
00:15:45.990 00:16:23.380 Now in those early years, we assumed that by 1975, we would be offering the PhD in every academic department on the campus, which of course is a goal we ultimately had to retreat from. So our strategy was one of going from engineering to veterinary medicine to the other colleges with probably the last one being sciences and arts as a college. But we would take departments within it, particularly the science departments. And move them forward as rapidly as we could.
And to some extent we were successful, but we also had some failures.
00:16:25.220 00:16:38.890 And I guess one of them we could point to was sociology where only in 1973, ‘74, did we finally get leadership on the track that could get the job done.
00:16:38.980 00:16:41.660 Hansen: Do you meet a lot of resistance along the way to this approach?
6 00:16:42.950 00:17:19.350 Chamberlain: Well, we have some resistance even to this day. You're
aware that there are some departments on the campus that to this day mightily resist putting faculty time on anything other than so- called hard money. And yet it's a false presumption because the softest money the university has is state general fund money. But that misconception that dates clear back into the early ‘50s, still persists 20 years later. We not only had resistance then, we have resistance now.
00:17:19.990 00:17:35.920 Hansen: One thing I observed the more I get into the history of this institution is the way that things keep, seem to reappear. It’s almost cyclical. You have a pattern then it disappears for a while. Then it’s back again.
00:17:36.250 00:18:07.030 Chamberlain: I suspect that that's true of most human activities. That there are cyclical involvements, social trends, and so on. And maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised because you know every generation reinvents sex. So why shouldn't the rest of our social institutions go through certain reinventing of the wheel too? It's a very inefficient process but I suspect it's just human behavior.
00:18:07.050 00:18:12.570 I know, you people from your college can deal with that better than I can.
Hansen: That waits to be seen.
00:18:14.610 00:18:27.890 Alright. We've got your responsibility with the budget, the challenge of trying to diffuse a commitment of research in some of the
departments.
00:18:27.900 00:18:51.320 Chamberlain: It's a commitment to graduate programs. So the research is a means to an end of an enhanced graduate program to convert this university mission of discovery and knowledge into a reality rather than just a conversation. If you will accept that during our first many decades, we were a teaching university.
00:18:51.330 00:19:27.890 So our mission was perceived to be simply that the collegiate task of transmittal of knowledge, now when we wanted to become truly a university in fact as well as a name, we had to have a means for the fulfillment of the university mission of creation and discovery of knowledge. That required a graduate program with the human resources so entailed. The research, contract and grant research, was a means to the fulfillment of that.
00:19:28.040 00:19:32.130 Hansen: What else were you really grappling with this at this point?
00:19:32.210 00:20:13.110 Chamberlain: Well, the classical problems and management problems of an ungodly crush of new students every year. The trying to get the facilities to crowd them into and so on. In some areas, relatively sloppy recruitment because we were simply trying to get enough bodies to put in front of the students. Recruitment at times in some
7 departments where we weren't yet trying to push the research
mission was done without the benefit of even a personal interview, paper credentials. Frequently all that went into the hiring of an individual.
00:20:13.590 00:20:26.010 So I was involved in all of those activities, but they were the day-to- day management problems of survival while the larger purpose was being pursued.
Hansen: How about athletics?
00:20:29.040 00:20:30.790 Chamberlain: Well, athletics,
00:20:31.000 00:21:32.570 I guess, it's no secret that I have been labeled for many years, I think falsely some of the time, as being anti-athletic. I was one of those who demonstrated on paper in the very early ‘60s that the stadium even if filled one hundred percent five or six times a year at ten dollars a ticket would still never pay for itself.
So that in terms of economic analysis it was a loser from day one and should never be built if that were the basis on which the decision was going to be made. And my analysis was based on a presumed cost of a million and a half. The early estimates had been a million and a quarter, and I was trying to condition that with typical overage on construction, it still would not work. Well, when people began to talk about two and a quarter million, two and a half million, and three million,
00:21:32.650 00:21:36.390 of course, my position became untenably unpopular.
00:21:38.620 00:21:53.230 And so, my reports and computations didn't see very much light of day during that period. But still enough fed back through the athletic department and so on,
00:21:53.260 00:22:50.820 to strongly label me as a very anti-athletic individual. Which some people believe to this day. Your history follows you.
While I wasn't as much anti-athletic by my own perception as I was oriented to the conviction that one should lay the financial facts on the table and deal with them in that context. Not put your nose under the tent and then, once in, tear apart other parts of the university to make up the difference.
Well, ultimately there was great distress for months on end when on the operating budget I demonstrated again that it would never fly in terms of the goals and aspirations that people had.
00:22:51.310 00:23:23.790 I had two unhappy tasks during that period. One, to go back to the governing board each month for months on end, trying to get them to approve a budget for athletics. Which ultimately led to their approving a budget in April for the year that had started the prior July, in which showed very clearly when it was all said and done, that before this cycle was over, we would have a deficit approaching a half a million dollars.
00:23:23.920 00:24:15.280 The second unhappy part of this particular task was that I was assigned the task by the president of explaining the bundle of circumstances that had led to this situation to the Commission on
8 Higher Education in an effort to solicit their support for going to the General Assembly seeking public funds for assisting athletics.
The corollary part of the unhappy task was I received the assignment to make the presentation to the legislature in defense of the
maneuver. At that time, I was still so authority related that if that was what the boss said he wanted me to do, I would do it to the death.
00:24:15.820 00:24:25.750 And so far as I know, I did a good job of it. Largely got the Commission swung around but never sold it to the Legislature.
00:24:25.780 00:24:34.530 We got a flat rejection there, and so we went back home and spent the next few years digging our way out of the problem.
00:24:34.930 00:24:42.200 And of course, some of the problem caused much of the distress that Perry Moore faced when he was here.
00:24:44.290 00:24:51.790 But his was not the only hardship. We're heading into another period, Jim.
00:24:52.450 00:25:06.280 I foresee more than one hundred fifty-thousand-dollar crisis in 1976,
‘77, in athletics. The cycle as you were saying a moment ago, the cycle does repeat itself in
00:25:06.340 00:25:46.600 some areas.
Hansen: What I had some difficulty understanding was the decision to go ahead with this at the time. As I understand, Dave McComb did an extensive interview with President Morgan and I read the transcript of that interview. And he noted that at some point on that question, it was late ‘50s or early ‘60s, the number of colleges or university presidents got together, discussed this matter. There was a tacit agreement of wanting to go at this business at a rather conservative level...
00:25:47.320 00:26:02.710 Chamberlain: On a more conservative base. It was linked to the time when DU made the decision that they had to go out of business.
Hansen: That’s right. It was about ‘62.
Chamberlain: I think ‘62. But there was obviously several years ahead of that when things were getting increasingly stringent.
00:26:03.560 00:26:53.310 So our conference broke up. The one that we were in at that
particular time. And President Morgan was carrying out conversations with the Big 8 and with the then created six-member Western
Athletic Conference. I think part of what got us into the position we're in today was President Morgan's conviction that we really needed to be the member of a conference. And his perception was that as a public institution we couldn't go out of business. We had to stay in athletics because he was under such pressure from alumni and Chamber of Commerce interests and being a public institution. When coupled with his Texas A and M background,
00:26:57.180 00:27:02.300 he concluded that truly we were in athletics to stay, including football.
00:27:02.300 00:27:05.800 The only question was in what format?
9 00:27:07.220 00:28:19.120 I believe he also concluded that we could not make it as an
independent over the long run. We had to find a conference to affiliate to. And logically that was Big 8 or WAC. What I suspect in addition to this tremendous alumni pressure and local Chamber of Commerce pressure that put the vise on President Morgan, in spite of all my numbers and so on about it, was that the WAC was saying “We will not let you in until you greatly improve your facilities. That there is no way you can get into the WAC conference and certainly the Big 8 until you solve your worn-out facilities issue.” Well, that that
confronted him with a horrendous problem, and President Morgan took a horrible beating when he insisted that the library had to come before the new physical education facility which in turn had to come before the stadium.
00:28:19.220 00:28:27.250 He just took no end of abuse for several years while that battle was being worked through.
00:28:27.360 00:28:35.790 Well, in the final analysis the library and the physical education facilities were on their way. And the stadium was at the top of the heap.
00:28:36.420 00:28:48.870 And with the stadium and the physical education facility under way, the Western Athletic Conference admitted CSU and University of Texas-El Paso.
00:28:48.870 00:29:03.420 And there we are today trying to maintain a position not at the top of the conference, but of respectability within the conference. It's clear that financially we cannot compete with Arizona,
00:29:03.420 00:29:17.810 Arizona State. Beat Brigham Young University. We financially, even though this is not considered to be a conference quite competitive with the Big 8 or Big 10,
00:29:18.150 00:29:34.430 we're in the middle to lower a portion of that particular conference in athletics. And even there we're having trouble maintaining a position financially.
Hansen: How significant, we’re kind of jumping ahead here, but 00:29:34.440 00:29:46.260 how significant do you think a viable athletic program, intercollegiate
athletics, is for success of the university? In the public relations sense.
00:29:46.350 00:30:47.870 Chamberlain: My rationale says that you need a so-called respectable program which means that in say 5 or 6 sports, you occasionally have a regional champion. But not that you have a regional champion in any sport every year. If you go to the other end of the spectrum where you are putting so much into it, particularly football, is
nationally ranked all the time, I don't think an institution like ours can maintain its academic image if subordinated, and I will use example here since I don't presume I’ll read this newspaper tomorrow, like Nebraska. My perception is Nebraska is perhaps a world beater in football but intellectually it's considered a third rate
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