CWU LIVING HISTORY PROJECT

JOHN GREEN

Smith: Our interviewee today is Dr. John Green. It is December 4, 1996. It is a Wednesday. We are in Barge 410. The camera operator is Helen Smith and your interviewer is Milo Smith. Now John, would you please give us a thumbnail sketch of your autobiography, born, raised, educated, right up until you came to Central?

Green: Okay, born in 1922 in Pueblo County, Colorado. Lived the first 31 years in Colorado. Went to school at the University of Colorado. Started there in 1939 and the tuition was $66 a year. My granddaughter is considering medical school and the highest tuition in the United States for out of state tuition is at the University of Colorado, $44,500 a year. So there has been a change in the last few years. I went to the University the first year and then graduated at Greeley with a bachelors degree and got that degree just before I went in the service. In 1943, spent some time in the European Theater. Enough time to get an early discharge.

Smith: Which branch of the service?

Green: I was in the Air Force. I had a number of battle stars and citations and so forth. I - my mother and father were both teachers. My father was superintendent of schools and mother taught. I had my public school teaching in Colorado. Had one year of teaching and coached that year and won the state championship in basketball. The next year I was high school principal and so all of my experience in public schools was in administration except for the first year. I was high school principal and superintendent and assistant superintendent of Pueblo County and then went back to get a doctorate at the University of Colorado. Finished both masters and doctorate in administration at the University of Colorado and completed that in 1953 and came to the University of Idaho. Spent 15 years there and left as an associate dean in the college of education and came to Central in 1968. While there, I did write a couple books and then finished one book while I was here at Central. One of those books was quite successful ? 700,000 copies sold. I came here primarily because ? but I looked at the statistics on the college. It was about the size of the University of Idaho at that time and the state of Washington was number one in the nation in support of higher education per capita and that was a deciding factor as far as I was concerned. We have deteriorated a great deal since that time in terms of support for higher education. In passing, I might note that the tuition here was $188 a year when I came and again that likewise was accelerated while I was here. First person I met, by the way, here in the parking lot after the interview after I had already been appointed was - the two people were Louise and Larry Danton who were and have been life time friends. The student FTE a couple years after I came here reached about 7,000. So there was a period of decline during our declining support years when the legislature put a cap on the enrollment and of course it’s building back to that point again. It’s interesting to note too that we had a fairly restrictive administrative group when I came. We had only two deans in the academic area, Deans of Arts and Sciences, of Education and then Charlie McCann was overall Dean of Academic Studies which was essentially a vice president’s position and John Terry was an administrator and both were very capable administrators. John moved on to junior college. John, community college director for the state and Charlie of course is the president of Evergreen

Smith: Now John, what post were you hired to fill when you came on campus?

Green: I was hired as Dean of Education and that wasn’t the traditional dean of education that you are aware of. We had two unusual departments, the department of music with Wayne Hertz and the department of arts with Louis Kollmeyer. Then the ROTC and the physical education and the vocational programs and education and psychology which were normal in the college of education program.

Smith: Now John, in your years as dean did you ever had time or concern or interest in teaching classes?

Green: I taught - I think I taught a psych class in testing which is where I have written a couple of books. Have some expertise. I believe I taught one course in education. I don’t remember what that was but essentially I was too busy to do much teaching.

Smith: Now, did you hold tenure in the education department?

Green: Yes I came - I did not request tenure but I came with Dr. Gillam, Neil Gillam, who was Dean of Arts and Sciences and he requested tenure as one condition for coriiing. As a consequence I also received tenure in the department of education.

Smith: Now, as an experienced administrator, what is your feeling about hiring people with tenure?

Green: I would normally not do that but I wouldn’t delay their tenure over about three years before I made a decision on it. I think there is a tendency to wait too long and I would prefer hiring people as full time people and not on a professorial rank and not part time.

Smith: That subject has come up in some of our interviews and there seems to be a general feeling among those people who have held administrative positions that there really should be some period of probation when you can try the person out and see how they fit in. See how conscientious they are at problem solving and so forth and then if they simply aren’t - basically do not indicate a capability of doing the job they should be released.

Green: I agree but I don’t think it should be delayed so long as to destroy their life line.

Smith: Certainly, true.  Did you fold any oilier administrative capacity while serving at Central other than Dean of Education?

Green: I spent a year as the Assistant Vice President after I completed my tenure in education.

Smith: What were you duties in that capacity, John?

Green: Whatever Dr. Harrington delegated. I did some writing and oh, some publicity things and that kind of thing and whatever else the vice president did.

Smith: Now, before we get too far away, could you identify for us the subject matter of your three books and titles?

Green: Yeah, the two books in testing and the first book I wrote was teacher made tests for Harper Row and it was a particularly good seller. I also wrote with Harper and Row and book called Fields of Education and this was for an introductory course introducing the teacher education students to various fields in which they might have a future and what the future and prospects are and then a general measurement and evaluation textbook which I wrote with Dodd-Mead. One of these books was also translated into Spanish and sold internationally on the Spanish market and also sold copies in the English version in Egypt and Europe.

Smith: Have you done any writing since you’ve retired, John?

Green’: I’ve done - yes, I’m in the process of doing - working on a couple of books.

Smith: Good. We’re working on a couple. We may never get them finished but we’re working on them.

Green: Likewise.

Smith: It keeps the brain going.

Green: It justifies your computer.

Smith: Now John, did you participate in bringing about any significant changes at Central in education or in any other area of endeavor? Changes?

Green: I think probably a few things. The - of course in the field of education I think I had some impact. We were - when I came Central was already on the cutting edge in moving in teacher education. One of the outstanding institutions in the country

- teacher education and Dr. Potter was - Con Potter was then chair of the education department and came here before I and he cooperated in initiating a performance based field oriented teacher education program and it was really a leading edge kind of program. In fact, it was significant enough so we made a request to the legislature to add an additional half million dollars to our budget to implement a model and almost totally field based program and Governor Evans was very pleased with that and recommended it and in fact recommended we hold a hearing with the legislature and he sent legislators over. Con Potter and I held an hour long little workshop for them but the Boeing bus came along and they cut us out of the program and we didn’t get the model but we continue to be a great program. Probably also in some other areas the - one of the interesting incidents, as we moved into the early ‘70’s, the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s with the kinds of student protests began to be generated, I happened to be in charge of the president’s council the day the black students presented their demands. Dr. Brooks and Dr. McCann were gone and they’d asked me to chair the president’s council. They - Ron Sims was the spokesman for the group and they came with their demands and I said to them, “We will consider these. We will consider them as suggestions that we’ll look at but we have an agenda to complete. When the agenda is completed then you’ll have your decision.” So we held them to the end of the meeting with the regular agenda and the latter part of the agenda Dr. Brooks and Dr. McCann came in and the room was crowded so they sat on the floor and we continued the meeting and the demands were presented and - in a very nice way and they promised they would be considered and looked at in a general way as the total agenda had been.

Smith: Could you briefly summarize the nature of some of those demands, John? We don’t need to go into it in detail.

Green: I didn’t put them down and I don’t remember all of them but obviously they were pushing for equal access to education and equality in the program and they were very reasonable. They weren’t - the group wasn’t militant. They were a very reasonable group and Dr. Brooks worked very well with them and continued to work with that group to implement most of the suggestions they made - the demands.

Smith: I do recall that one of the demands that I was aware of because I had talked to Ron Sims and some of the people about it was they wanted a greater number of black faculty members men and women –

Green: And we got one as a result of that.

Smith: Yes, and I talked with Ron and asked him if he was aware that many of us who had been in positions of hiring personnel had been very disappointed that we could get a black candidate or two or three or four and they would come to campus and visit campus and discover that we had no black community in Ellensburg and a very minor percentage of our student body was black and they simply could get jobs for more money than we could possibly offer here at Central and I know the University and Washington State both hired people who we wanted on our faculty at one time but they weren’t interested in coming here. They were premium items as far as salary was concerned.

Green: Yeah, we couldn’t generally complete with the qualified blacks so we had to look at some with lesser qualifications that we had to look at. I might mention in passing that one of the lost opportunities I think that we had was initiated by Reino Randall and Dave Dillard and I worked with them. It was in Mexico City. We had an opportunity to buy the University of Americas for half a million dollars. It was a 26 acre campus on - in the Lomas area of Mexico City in the elite areas. They were moving out and building a new campus in Pueblo and we had tentatively agreed to do that. Went down to interview the faculty and the dean and so forth and Dr. Brooks who was obviously in charge of the whole institution had concerns about it asked to cancel and we withdrew from it because he was afraid of the paperwork and so forth and maybe some litigation. We had already made arrangements with Ohio State and some others to continue their programs with us if we kept that campus open. So it was an interesting opportunity and it went by the way. I’d like to say also that we had a significant influence, three of us, during Dr. Brooks sabbatical about three years after I came. Eldon Jacobsen was appointed Acting President and the three of us ran the institution essentially. Jake was a very good administrator and he did delegate very well and Dr. Martin - Bernie Martin and I were the two deans. We made the biannual budget and I remember that we were several million dollars out of balance. We went to lunch and I - it suddenly dawned on me that the summer budget had been printed in twice and that almost put us back at balance and I came back after lunch.

Smith: Good. Now as you will recall John, your question number 10 in the copy you have is the same here. Would you share the names of people you felt were especially effective in helping you to perform your duties?

Green: I’ve got down several names. Dr. Schliesman was my associate dean. Very good associate, did a fine job. Dr. Jacobsen I appreciated working with. Two or three chairman, Dr. Potter and Dr. Hertz in music and Dr. Milo Smith who was gracious enough to accept the position as director of the department of art when we had some difficulty in that department. Bernie Martin was also gracious enough to release Milo for that responsibility. I appreciated that very much.

Smith: That was an especially interesting position that I held for that five quarters, John, and then because it’s going on the record I would only like to mention a couple of the charges I was given when I went up there. Get the marijuana out of the building, get the dogs out of the building, and get the cots out of the students’ studios, and a last one, get the bicycles out of the building. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Students were riding - students and faculty were riding their bicycles in the front door, riding them over to the elevator, going up a floor and riding down the hall to their classroom or wherever. They were treating the inside of the building just as they might a street.

Green: And it was a brand new building.

Smith: A brand new building and little by little by little I was able to get the bicycles out and believe it or not the last bicycle belonged to Reino Randall, my friend Reino and I followed him to his office one day and as he was locking his bicycle to the pipe railing outside of his office I simply said, “Reino, this may cost our friendship but I am going to have to ask you to get that bicycle out of this building and keep it out of the building. Everybody has cooperated but you.” And when he found that he was the last he decided to cooperate.

Green: That was an interesting year.

Smith: Oh yes. One of the problems, of course, that I faced was the fact that there were several people in the department of art who had at one time been chairman of the department.

Green: Right.

Smith: And they felt that they should have been called on. You didn’t have any choice because there were several armed camps formed around each of those former chairmen and cooperation would have been nil.

Green: That’s why I ruled that they must take an outsider and they must seek during your tenure - seek an outside chair and they got a chair who kept with them for quite a number of years.

Smith: I was - met with the cold shoulder as one might imagine and I think within a month they were talking with me and we were working together and things began to roll and I think the nicest compliment I was ever paid up there, John, was when some of the faculty members said, “You know what you have done? We’re talking to each other.”

Green: Yeah.

Smith: Okay now, let’s move on down to that list of short subjects down there at the bottom. If you have an opinion or an attitude or a memory go ahead and release it.

Green: Okay, salary schedule was too low.

Smith: Faculty code?

Green: It was a good faculty code I thought. I thought it was - of course it was adopted during our tenure early and I think it’s still –

Smith: Did it interfere with your work as dean?

Green: No, I think it facilitated administrative faculty relations.

Smith: Good.

Green: I think it was useful.

Smith: How about academic freedom, John?

Green: Academic freedom was very good but once in a while it got us in trouble. The - you recall the suit we got involved in the Sir Herbert Read Institution where one of the faculty members chartered his own institution in Pakistan and gave himself a degree. This was a difficult situation but he was a fairly competent teacher but generally speaking we did have very good academic freedom.

Smith: I remember at the time, John, there were a number of faculty members who were very sympathetic to that man from India and they were sympathetic simply because they didn’t know the story. They didn’t know the truth. All they knew was what he’d been telling them and he was a fake from the day he came on campus.

Green: I think he was subsequently released in a number of institutions.

Smith: Yes, yes. I might indicate that when he was released from Central, he was done so officially by letter from the board of trustees but that letter didn’t ever get to him because he arranged not to have any Central mail or Washington mail forwarded to him. The man had all kinds of tricks.

Green: We actually had to have the embassy representative go to return the letter to his institution in Pakistan. They did that for us.

Smith: Sure. How about the board of trustees?

Green: The board of trustees was excellent during my tenure. We had excellent trustees. We had a lot of support from them and a lot of interest in the institution and I’ve lost the name of the lady whose husband was a doctor, Mrs. Hugh Minor.

Smith: ‘80’s?

Green: Uh huh. She was particularly interested in getting involved and looking at programs. She would spend some nights in the dorms. She’d sit in on classes and so forth. Very, very supportive to the faculty and the administration.

Smith: She was originally from the Weyerhauser family and I found her to be an

interesting person who was interested. The only time that I ever thought that she had -

that she was wrong was when she was on the board when we were seeking a president and Dr. Brooks was hired and she came in one morning to our committee meeting. I was on the screening committee and she said, “I have found our president.”

Green: That’s inappropriate.

Smith: And she came in with the name of a man who was a head master of a private boys school in Vancouver, Canada. He was a graduate of Oxford and that’s what attracted her. He didn’t have a doctors degree. He had never lived one day in the United States. Possibly would not be very conversive with the way our parents of our students made their living and it’s the only time I felt we had a total disagreement. How about the legislature during your period of administration, John?

Green: The legislature was generally pretty good. The first years were excellent. We had excellent support. Then we got declining support and then that continued for a number of years after I left administration. We did - all of us did we took a team over and attended the governor’s hearings and Dr. Evans our - not Dr. Evans - honorary Dr. Evans - Governor Evans was in charge of those and he was a very knowledgeable person about higher education and he asked some very pertinent questions during these hearings. Sometimes they put us on the defensive with that because they were very good questions. I think that you could ask a little more than what the legislature gave us. In the beginning they generally gave us almost what we requested but in the latter years we had a request budget and then that was cut and became the governor’s budget, then that was cut and became the final legislative budget. So the department chairman and deans and academic people had a lot of difficulty was they first worked with one budget, then the second budget, then the third budget. Then, finally, the actual, budget.

Smith: Now John, I recall one time while serving on the faculty senate that the word collegiality got kicked around quite a bit. Collegiatlity being interpreted generally as a cooperative spirit between bodies. Between the faculty and the administration. Between the faculty, administration, and the board of trustees, and the president’s office. What was your observation about faculty and administration collegiality?

Green: There wasn’t enough of it probably. Administration was very busy during that time. We were doing a lot of building, for example, and just too many meetings, frankly, too many committee meetings trying to deal with that. It helped a little by putting a faculty representative as an ad hoc member of the board of trustees - to sit on the board of trustees. That helped a bit. I think the collegiality also between departments was more difficult here than at the University of Idaho. We had better feeling among the departments. This was exacerbated by the faculty formula, I think, which required that we generate our positions by the number of students and credit hours we had and there was some resentment from some departments that had accumulated a lot more faculty position credit hours and had to give those to other departments to justify their positions. This caused some conflict. Attacking between departments and among them. Not so much between the administration and the faculty but I think - that could have been improved - the administrative professorial rapport.

Smith: While we’re at this point in the questioning, John, do you recall any - any major bones of contention between the faculty and administration? Specific problems that arose? Let me feed you a couple that I know.

Green: Okay, feed them to me.

Smith: In the basement of this building we started out with a very small room with half a dozen computers in it and a manually programmed computer program at that and we were told as a faculty that in order that Central will be able to start a computer program, we’re going to have to take a little bit of money from each department budget and build a pool so that we can buy some computers and I do recall that there were an awful lot of discussions in department meetings and in our own I think that I could summarize that the bones of contention that the departments were never given an option. They were never even included in the discussion. Just suddenly we came to school one morning and were told you are going to be reduced x number of dollars so that we can start putting in a computer center.

Green: Yeah. That reminds me of another problem. This is not uncommon in institutions around the country but our physical plant was - many of the positions were subsidized by department budgets. There wasn’t any specific money in departments to subsidize what repairs and replacements and so forth they might need that the physical plant could perform and their bids often were rather high compared - because I took some outside bids several times and did implement those but maybe they would be twice as high as some of the outside bids. Again, that was without department acquiescence. So you didn’t always know how much you were going to have to request from them. They didn’t - their budget wasn’t really fully accountable. We didn’t know how much money they got until after they had spent the money from the departments. That was a problem. That was resented by a number of the departments. I tried to change that a little bit but –

Smith: Does my memory coincide with yours, John? In my 35 years here I believe that almost without fail faculty got angry at administrative decisions only when they came as surprises. If they were never informed before hand, if they were never given an option to be in on a discussion always then it became a matter of anger and in the end it was going to be a certain way regardless of whether you were angry or not. I do think that there should be more consideration for warning people in advance.

Green: I agree.

Smith: How about the faculty senate, John? As a dean, did you find that any of the faculty senate decisions were especially difficult for you to solve?

Green: Not at all.

Smith: Good.

Green: No I didn’t have any problem with that at all. I consider the faculty generally to be very responsible people. Occasionally you get an irresponsible one but the faculty are very responsible and should make decisions concerning their own academic life.

Smith: How about town and gown relationships? Did you see them change?

Green: They weren’t particularly good. I’ve been used to a much better relationship at the University of Idaho. A much closer relationship. They worked together solving problems and when legislature was coming for visits the town put itself out to welcome the legislature to the community and so forth and I didn’t see as much of that here. It was - I was disappointed, frankly, when I came. Less useful relationship - somewhat forced relationship. I made some effort to eradicate that particularly with the public schools. For a while I had the superintendent of schools attend our department meetings and we - and I gave the ? some of his counsel and his principals and hoped to improve the relationship a little bit at least with the schools. Helped a little.

Smith: Now John, an area in which you would have spent a lot of concern and time was long range planning. How did you feel - it was effective or was it ever implemented to your satisfaction?

Green No, it was poor. We had some long range plans and then we would change them in a couple of years and we really didn’t have good extended goals and didn’t differentiate between immediate and extended goals. They were not very clear cut so - this is probably the greatest significant weakness in all of education - the failure to plan. If they do plan then poor planning and I think we did a poor job.

Smith: Well, as a faculty member and a department chairman, I was always confronted with the problem that we were encouraged to make changes. We were encouraged to improve but it must not cost any money.

Green: Yeah.

Smith: And you can’t make changes without there being some kind of financial support.

Green: It was rare that there was. There was one biennium when Evans was still governor in the early part of my tenure when he actually cut out special money and put it in the budgets for innovative programs. That was to be given to faculty departments to develop innovative programs and that did create some excitement and was useful but it was not sustained so the support was lost?

Smith: Now John, we come to an almost merry-go-round subject, that of academic organization or in our case reorganization from divisions to colleges to schools. What was your feeling concerning academic organization and reorganization on campus?

Green: Well, I think we went too fast and too complex. We had a very simple organization when I first came. It worked well and with approximately the same enrollment that we currently have and we had no vice presidents and now we have a whole series of vice presidents. The college of business was a significant change that was important, I think, and was necessary. The college structure I think is somewhat improved and so forth but we had sort of an unusual grouping of departments. I think that that was helpful but I think we’ve overloaded the structure with administrators.

Smith: I know the most recent reorganization has broken up a school that was far too large. The dean had far too many faculty and programs to administer and I thought that they did something very wise and took that big school and broke it into the arts and humanities on one side and sciences on the other side and I’m sure it’s going to be easier to administer.

Green: That was a useful change.

Smith: How about building name policies John, have you ever been involved with helping or making decisions?

Green Well, I sat on that committee for years and I think we’ve done a reasonable job probably with that. The - we had a little controversy on the issue of the names but generally speaking, I think we’ve done a good job.

Smith: Are you aware of the contemporary philosophy?

Green: No.

Smith: Contrary to the history of Central, the contemporary philosophy is that there shall be no buildings named for people who are still living.

Green: Yeah, we had several of those?

Smith: Yes, how about hiring policies and practices?

Green: I think they were very good. We had, of course, earlier we had lots of faculty positions to fill and I was pleasantly surprised to find that we were doing national recruiting when I came here. The first several years we broke the United State up into four areas and sent out deans - two deans and two associates deans to interview all of the institutions for all the positions we held - open and we also one year took a team to one of our national meetings on education to fill 12 positions at that time and we interviewed over 200 people with - that was very good. As we moved toward losing positions I think that we’ve done a poorer job. Subsequently tended to hire part time or instructor type people and in the long run this is not fruitful to hire people who do not quality for full contracts. Occasionally there is a consultant or someone like that who has special expertise might be a part time.

Smith: As an administrator, John and an experienced school man, what is your personal feeling concerning research versus classroom teaching?

Green: I don’t think it should be versus. I do think that we should have some people assigned to research or half time research or quarter time research. I think we do too little research in most of our departments. It would be fruitful to have even research people in education and some other areas where we don’t usually do that but I don’t value one over the other. Well, maybe I do. I guess I might value teaching over research because it’s - our business is to really teach students and research is to make that more fruitful and enhance the teaching profession, That’s the function of research. There is a tendency in most institutions, of course, to value research until certain researchers become main people and cast some glory on the institution. Same way with writing. I think research and writing are important but not the primary objective of an institution.

Smith: Now, as an administrator, I know that you were very often very deeply involved in analyzing contributions of individuals, measuring their output, making decisions concerning promotion, concerning tenure, concerning raises in pay. Did you consider this whole area of promotion and evaluation of individuals a major problem for a deanship?

Green: I considered it a major responsibility more than a major problem. In some of the latter years we did develop more participation of faculty in that process but the senate faculty - the final faculty screening group with administrators did review that. Those requests from the various deans and various departments and I think that was helpful. I don’t know whether that’s being continued or not but that was a useful way to approach it. It both supported the deans and took some of the work off and the anguish maybe off some of their shoulders. It also placed responsibility where it should be placed. Faculty traditionally are responsible for their own promotion, tenure, and behavior.

Smith: Now there is a division of faculty responsibilities that may or may not have interested you or concerned you but there are some subject areas being taught on this and every other campus in which the results of the teaching are never ever demonstrated by the receivers of the teaching. The students do not ever demonstrate what they got or what they didn’t get from a given course or a given professor but then there are others such as in art and music and drama where the faculty member is to some extent in jeopardy because his or here expertise is going to be demonstrated before the public and it’s going to be judged much easier by superiors than that person who can be a bad classroom teacher for lots of years and not many people know. Did that bother you John, as an administrator that the problem of trying to make equal judgments?

Green: That’s always a problem, Milo. One of the enigmas of education is that when we have a poor program you never know for sure how poor it was for a decade at least. This has plagued education at the public school lower levels as well as the university because ultimately a poor program will handicap the person as an adult and so we can’t get good accountability on the faculty. Consequently we need some classroom supervision, some visits and some direct information and it’s very difficult to do that both a human relations problem and a time problem.

Smith: Now one short subject that didn’t get on your copy I don’t believe John, it’s on mine, what was your feeling as a dean concerning affirmative action as it was utilized and demonstrated on our campus?

Green: Well, in my early tenure there wasn’t any affirmative action at all and this was a consequence actually of the black students’ demands some year later we implemented a full blown policy and one of the problems that we encountered with the affirmative action policy was difficulty in writing the position descriptions so they actually meant what we thought they meant. It lengthened the process for selection a great deal. That’s been a difficult situation because some time you lose qualified people in that process of maybe a whole year of seeking someone to fill a position. Even a faculty position. It’s not just administrators. It makes it a lot more difficult. I’m not sue it’s always facilitated - the whole process of equity.

Smith: Were you bothered at all, John, at your level of administration by a problem that bothered me and that was that when you were hiring there are a whole number of questions that are important to you and the position and the department and the school and the institution that you can not ask that candidate.

Green: Right.

Smith: I’m thinking, for example, that we hired a crackerjack technical director/designer a number of years ago. He was a married man. We could not ask him if he had a wife. We couldn’t ask him anything about his family. They came to town and she was unhappy with this little town of Ellensburg because she was a city girl. While he was teaching at school there was just nothing for her to do and we lost a very good man who wanted to stay except that it would mean he would lose his wife if he stayed. Maybe we could have headed that off if we had known and been able to discuss with him, “Will your wife be happy in this community?” We couldn’t mention that.

Green: Yeah, I think maybe in the current scene, in the late ‘90’s and the early 2000’s period, that we are becoming a little bit more rational about affirmative action programs and I think we may alleviate some of that problem. I hope so. We’ve gotten - are beginning to approach equity among the sexes, for example, and some equity with races so I think as we achieve that some of these problems will be diffused.

Smith: Now John, I happen to know that you have a lovely lady at home and this last question is concerned with did she ever have to serve as an unofficial hostess on the behalf of the school that you represented as dean?

Green: A number of times and she enjoyed it. At this age, I don’t think she would enjoy it but at a younger age she did.

Smith: Good.

Green: And she enjoyed the faculty - she was president of the Faculty Wives I think one year and enjoyed that very much and enjoyed that group and was - regretted that it didn’t continue all through the years, that Faculty Wives group.

Smith: I understand that it’s about to reorganize, John. In fact, I’ll even recommend to that committee that they contact her for some of her ideas because that’s where they are now, the idea phase.

Green: Now John, is there anything that you would like to leave for posterity? Subject areas that we haven’t discussed? We have five minutes of tape left. Anything that you would like to talk about? Problems you saw? Problems you anticipate?

Green: Well, I’m not sure but one of my expertise areas is the area of finance. I’m in the process of writing a book in that area. I think this isn’t just Central’s problem but I think we need to look at more creative ways of financing those services that are necessary to humanity. I certainly believe that education is our best investment in the future. We absolutely need to invest more than we have invested and it will pay magnificent dividends and one of the programs where we really invested that has paid off in just untold ways is the G.I. Bill which both you and I utilized in our education. A whole generation of professors is educated through that generation - through that G.I. Bill and we’ve really failed to support higher education and it’s been almost absurdly escalating tuition costs to the point that we are pricing even the middle class out of the market for higher education and we can not afford to do this. Just - we’ll destroy our future so we need to some way or another get our people convinced that education is a better investment than in investing in our police force, incarceration and so forth. It would solve many of those social problems but there is always a lag. When you invest a lot of money you expect immediate returns and the returns are in the next decade.

Smith: John, we’ve treated almost totally as an educator and administrator. What do you do for hobby?

Green: I do a number of things. I sometimes make gun Sticks and checker them. I’ve made a guitar or two and that’s fun. I’ve done some traveling, some golf, some hunting. I hadn’t hunted for years after I came here after being in Idaho. I hadn’t hunted in about 20 years and then I went back in recent years and had a lot of fun just out tromping in the mountains. We spent some time in the winter time down in the Palm Springs area to get away from the snow. It was very enjoyable.

Smith: Well, we thank you John on behalf of the Living History committee. We want you to know that we appreciate your giving of your time to get this on tape because there will be people in the future who will want to know about Central and your tape will help them discover what this school is all about. Thank you.