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Friday, September 17, 1971
University Daily Kansan
Editor's Note: In two years as Chancellor of the University E. Laurence Chalmers has experienced problems ranging from violence on campus to financial bickering with the State Legislature. In an interview with Kansan Staff Editorial Writer Tom Slaughter, Chalmers reflects on the past and articulates his goals for the future.
Slaughter: What do you feel as your greatest accomplishment since coming back?
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unalmers: In two years time?
Slaughter: Yes.
Chalmers; Oh, I suspect it would have to be, and it's not my accomplishment because it was underway, the full implementation of student involvement in the university decision making process because of the time I was appointed. The first implementation of the Senate Code was accomplished in the first year, and then the landmark decision of last fall, to require at least twenty per cent student participation in all policy making conferences really completed the entire process.
Slaughter; Yes.
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Slaughter: The second question I have is the opposite of the first, of concerning your greatest accomplishment. What do you see as your greatest failure? Or, do you see an area, something that you would have like to have done in that time? When you've fallen behind and for one reason, not been able to accomplish?
Chalmers: I could go in several directions in response to that. Let me start with a certain amount of impatience which is inherent to my particular make up about the rate of change. I suppose, in part, I have been told that I should make more progress, that I haven't been more persuasive or been able to determine points of resistance with greater sensitivity in order to handle these. And it's the reason I feel strongly about student involvement in the decision-making process is that I believe this does speed up the rate of change. It doesn't have to filter through several different groups, reach new audiences, implement changes where it is needed at any given level, it doesn't have to come through the central administration anymore. But even so, I'm in a position to facilitate these things and I suppose a management approach that are of considerable significance, in my opinion, to the future of this University
nalmers; There are several, obviously. But the uppermost would be two. One would be to place the support of public higher education of the University or an elaborate set of criteria or factors that will reduce the amount of time that is spent pleasing for funds by the Regents, and the amount of discussion over questions that really aren't tangible question criteria or tangle criteria to relate them to. They become the airy kinds of discussion about, "Is the faculty of the University of Kansas doing too much, or too little research?" Well, until people will settle down and decide what it is they expect of the faculty in teaching, research, public services, and the like, that kind of conversation is going to cost all of us a lot of time and energy and inadequate support. So, that's one major thrust already under way, in part, because others are beginning to insist, too. It has taken the form of this planning program that was funded by the last session of the legislature. It has taken the form of the chief academic officers of the institution to sessions to consider the coordination of academic programs, and eventually course, I hope it will take the form of recognition by the regents and the legislature and adoption and implementation goals are primarily with reference to our teaching-learning function. I suppose if I
Chalmer's: No, not too static. Obviously, there has been a lot of excitement and a lot of change. Just that I think we need to press easier harder to speed up the procedures whereby we evaluate what we are doing and modify what we are doing without harm for them to discover. Getting on with the business of reordering priorities, you may have a much more frontal manner.
daughter? What long range goal do you have for your child? What you want to see in the future?
Shaunpert: Would you say then, that the University has been too static for you in college?
fall into this category as does my concern that I haven't been as effective as I thought I might be in persuading the other institutions in the regent system and the Board of Regents to accept my proposal. In a temporary techniques of budgeting, accounting, or in policy-making in higher education.
were to try to encapitate these, it would be to do as much as we can to break the mass education approach, and provide as many environments as we can possibly manage with our resources, not for individually tailored education—that will never be possible—but certainly doing so is important, doing when we have blanket requirements in various areas, when we still have a tendency to treat 18,000 students as though they were all alike in a variety of ways and we know well from all the literature for a century that they aren't all in terms of what their optimum needs are. How a university can be maximum in meeting those needs.
Chalmers; Well, I think we made better progress than most, in part, because of the incorporation of students. In part, because I think a much larger portion of our faculty is concerned about the undergraduate and graduate education of our students. It becomes more difficult with the financial status because it's a bit easier when you can provide additional resources, than when you say it's got to be done by reordering priorities and taking existing resources and creating new ones. That would be due to major threats that I could see as a goal one might hope to be achieved in the matter of a few years, rather than a few decades.
slaughter: How quickly do you see the University moving toward that goal?
Slaughter: What do you think the people would have us do here?
Chalmers: 'I'm not certain that we've provided the citizens of the state an opportunity to give expression to this. About all we've provided them with, in the last two years that I've been here, is the opportunity for them to express their opinion on the University. But there has been no real attempt to provide an opportunity for them to express what they would hope for from K.U. It's commonly accepted that research has a negative connotation right now. In speeches I've outlined about a dozen more prospective students of research in a wide variety of the areas here and asked the question, "Which of these would you have us diminish, curtail, or?!" I
Slaughter: A moment ago you talked about the expectations of the people for the University. What do you think the experience in the state now for this University?
Chalmers; I doubt.
'... I hold myself to blame that we haven't made more progress, that I haven't been more persuasive or been able to determine points of resistance with greater sensitivity . . .'
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think it was perfectly clear that the audience to whom I was speaking didn't really want us to delete any of these, but rather research much, much research and not enough teaching.
Slaughter: How do you convince them that
*is not the case?*
Slaughter: How do you react to the backyard talk about the reputation of the University when you go across the institution against the University, if at all?
Chalmers: First of all, to indicate the time that our faculty spend in teaching as contrasted with straight research that doesn't involve supervision of candidates at the university degrees. That turns out to be the median fifty and one half hour work week. That turns out to be almost exactly forty hours in instructional responsibility. This comes as a bit of a surprise to a lot of students who don't particularly indicate the full gamut of instructional responsibilities, that if a faculty member is teaching twelve hours, 12 contact hours, a week that's a very small load. It doesn't occur to them unless they are additional 28 hours or preparation of lectures, reading of term papers, preparation in grading of examinations, and on and on, on which is not typical of the way the faculty and secondary schools is distributed.
Chalmers: Well, it's interesting. I don't think the sentiment toward the University is negative at all. It's usually specific with reference to drugs, drug use, or abuse among students, which has made a headline issue last spring, one of the reasons for its lack of today. In my opinion, is related to the events of a few years ago—the agitators on the faculty. Or, in my own case, and that of my colleagues, permissiveness by administrators. Somehow, most people want to preserve the University as a favorable, positive sort of thing. The rumors are often fact rather than by opinion, are directed toward some faculty members, some students, some administrators. You get that kind of differentiation when you go out.
'I don't think the sentiment toward the University is negative at all.'
at all.'
Slaughter: Okay. Let's deal with a few of these specific issues, then. First, drugs. If you had to guess a percentage, what would you guess the number of students of the campus that have used marijuana?
Chalmers: I think the national survey that states two thirds of all college students have tried marijuana is applicable to K.U. I observe that's probably fewer than 20 percent of this generation who drank alcohol illegally before they reached the age of 21.
Chalmers: The fact though, Tom, that I carry with me is that our mental health clinic saw fewer cases of drug abuse last year than during either of the two preceding years. So those who would take the headlines as evidence of a growing drug problem at K.U. do so according to the experience at the University.
Slaughter: You.
Slaughter: Do you have any feelings about the maintenance of the illegality of marriages?
Chalers: I have some concerns because the little bit of literature that I am familiar with continues to suggest that marijuana provides some problems that even the use of alcohol does not provide. A perfectly obvious example, of course, is that smoking marijuana can be used to assist a person who has become accustomed to smoking a fair amount of marijuana on a daily basis. Whereas, there is to assist a person who has become accustomed to a fair amount of alcohol on a daily basis. Also, there is some evidence that heavy, continuous use, daily marijuana faster trip to sick row than the heavy daily use of alcohol. But these are questions that I think are going to have to be researched. What I would like to see is some effort made to distinguish between marijuana on the one hand, and virtually all other illegal drugs on the other. At the moment they are being humped, many people who consider heroin addiction and marijuana smoking as virtually one and the same thing.
Slaughter: Do you think the Attorney General is one of those people?
Slaughter: You mentioned, as another one of these rumors, the myth people have of a radical element at the University. We had a relatively quiet spring last year, and the fall was quiet except for one or two instances. Where all the radicals gone that were here two years ago?
Chalmers! In so far as he makes the point repeatedly that violation of the law, any law, is something that should be ferreted out and solved, I know personally whether he finds marjana to be of a different category than heroin, cocaine or speed. I happen to think that the others are, not the same, for three, three years trips to one's untimely death. I consider that to be a more serious problem.
Chalmer's: Well, you don't really want me to comment on that, do you?
Slaughter: Well, yes, i do. I don't know together you will or not.
Chalmers: I suspect they are all still with us, for the most part. I think the mistake that many people make is assuming that because the campus is quiet, either radical students have left, or the other students have left, we should become apathetic. It is a serious mistake. Not that I look forward to additional uprisings, confrontations or mass movements, but rather, I think we have done a lot of things at KU that are not good for students. We are institution for students who are concerned about the institutional change as well as social change. I keep harping back to several examples here. I confess that I find the information center to be very helpful, and that people just yesterday evening. I found that their rates of calls has risen 350 per cent. Now, you know my first question is naive, "What on earth is going on, because there is no evidence of any very massive, and then bad, Cambodia. The answer is that it is not related to that, it's related to the individual frustrations, anxieties and uncertainties of thousands of students, and they're fielding these. The next question is, "What in the blazes was happened?" If you're going to figure out year ago before we set this up." My guess is that they were being internalized, they grew upon one another, and they were being, then, fed mutually by other students. Quite possibly an element of trouble a few years ago was that they were not able to figure out how you relieve the strains, the legitimate stresses and strains, of individual students. Whether it's over not being able to find a classroom building when they've only got three rooms, it would be roaring through the residence hall area at three o'clock in the morning. These are tension events.
Slaughter: I'd like to ask you a few questions about that spring, a year ago. In the late summer and early fall of last year when there was a great deal of talk about people on the Regents wanting your job, what were your thoughts?
chalmers: Well. I suppose mostly, and it would have been easier to answer that question a year or so ago mostly it was a sense of frustration on my part, and I am not sure how to do—if you want to call it an administrative style—was not understood, and it was in the throes of, well, you remember what the competing forces were. One force was, as soon as someone heard you speak in the campus, bring in the National Guard, versus, no, the only way a university can really survive, the only way people can really learn, is if they are in an environment where they really want to. You can't force this. The task was to change the environment of the campus and make it more learnable to learn, but would want to defend the institution against all comers, whether they were non-students with a fire bomb or citizens who were insisting upon calling the troops. And my thrust or style, re whatever you want to call it, we were doing our best. That looked, at least last summer, as though it was going to lose.
slaughter: Did you ever feel as though you were in eminence danger of losing your job? How serious did you feel was the trouble you were in?
Chalmers: One doesn't worry about the danger of losing one's job. One worries, really, about what people do in college or at all concerned about the people at the University, you don't
make your decision in terms of what will produce longevity in this office.
Slaughter: Did you consider resignation then?
Chairmen! I gave it some very serious thought. Yes, because of what I thought for a while. Disillusionment is probably the best description of my thoughts at that point. I thought, at least for a while, until the fall got under way, there was a total absence of hope. I had to pull the University of Kansas together, not rend it asunder with force.
'... One doesn't worry about the danger of losing one's job. One worries, really, about whether one ought to stay in a job . . .'
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Slaughter: Under this pressure, do you feel as though you've had to modify your procedures of doing things in the University to fit the structures we have defined by the regents, governor, and the institution?
Slaughter: Does that leave a bad taste in your mouth?
Chalmers: No. It's part of the frustration because usually it leads to slowness of response. As I said earlier, I tend to be impulsive. If we have good and sufficient evidence, as objective, as complete and reasonable, we ought to be doing this, and we don't until two years from now, either because of lag within the institution, or constraints outside the University, that's frustrating to me because we're a lot of instances where the problem
Slaughter: One more question about that, then we'll move onto something else. Things were getting hairy in Cambodia situation, and in the context of the Union burning, did you ever feel fear for your own safety, or for the safety of your family?
Chalmers: Not really. There were two instances, where in one case a rock and in another case a bottle, were thrown through windows in the residence. The first instance angered me more than anything else because our 14-year-old son was home alone in the room where the rock came slashing through. It was a very traumatic bit of conditioning for a 14-year-old child. I resented the fact that anybody would use our children in an effort to express their resentment, concern, or what have you. But if you're talking in terms of the movement on many campuses, or perhaps most, to build a residence off the campus in order to live at home, that at this stage of the game I would say that, except for the fact that it is an abnormal kind of existence for our son, the oldest son is now off to college, so it is no longer applicable there, in the sense that he is not in a neighborhood, and that his friends have to deliberately seek him out. We are all too aware of some distance to find them. We prefer living on the campus, being surrounded by students.
Slaughter: Under what circumstances would you use campus police to break up disturbances? I can be more specific, and this is looking at all this in retrospect, if tonight a group of 300 students went down to the building and were throwing bricks and rocks through the windows, what would you do?
Chalmer's: We've been through that, have you? And you know what responses we get from them as they serve us.