CWU LIVING HISTORY PROJECT

GEORGE MACINKO

INTERVIEWER: LARRY LOWTHER

EQUIPMENT PERSON: JOHN UTZTNGER

ASSISTANT: HELEN SMITH

Lowther: Today we are interviewing George Macinko, recently retired from the

Geography Department at Central. Today is February 26, 1997. The interviewer is Larry

Lowther, and running the equipment is John Utzinger, assisted by Helen Smith.

Lowther: George, before we get into your career at Central, would you tell us a little bit about your family background, your education, where you got your degrees, and any career you might have had before coming to Central?

Macinko: OK. I was born in a little anthracite coal mining town, the oldest coal mining town in the anthracite region, Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. That’s Delaware Indian for Narrow Valley. I’m one of nine children, five boys, five girls. When I go back to my early days, I’m reminded that my wife is about a year and a half younger than me, but for all practical purposes, she’s a generation newer than I am. When we compare our childhoods, I found out I had much more in common with her father than I had with her, That is the town in which I grew up was a town, well, to give you an idea, ten children, 5 boys, 5 girls, all of us were born at home. We were born in the same house, delivered by the same doctor. I grew up in a home that had, my parents were immigrants. My father came to America when he was sixteen or seventeen. He had never gone to school a minute in his life. My mother came to America when she was eight. She went through three grades. The community was an immigrant community, small town, as we talk later on about students, I’m also reminded that the school system has changed considerably. In my home town there was no kindergarten or pre-school, 12 grades. Everybody went to school from 9 until 12 and I until 4. Everybody. There were no electives. Eighth grade, you made a choice, whether you wanted to go academic, commercial, or, I guess it was.. .1 forget what it was called, but it would be like vocational. About half the students chose academic even though at that time almost none of them ever expected to go to college, but at least half chose that career option. That was the one choice you made in twelve years at the end of eighth grade. When you did that, and all my family did this, all ten of us, you had four years of math, four years of science, four years of English, four years of language, two of Latin, two of French. You had six hours of class a day. YOU had that first grade through twelfth. After I graduated, oh, and I went to school when I was five and that was because the neighbors on each side of me and the kid behind me, all boys, all one to one and a half years older than me, so when they went to school, I went to school. And it didn’t matter back in that town, so I graduated real young, simply because my neighbors, all my best friends, and they were just one house away, all went to school when they were six. I went when I was five. I never thought I would go to school, to college, but I had older brothers (?)nine to ten kids. They went to school on the G1 Bill after the War, and that changed things immensely. Before that time almost nobody from our school went to college from my home town. After that almost half the kids went to college. A much greater proportion went to college, for example, in my wife’s hometown of Pasco, Washington. A much more affluent town than this little coal mining town, but many more of my colleagues vent to college than hers. When I got to be about a junior in high school that’s when I first had college ambitions because by that time I was playing first team on the football team, and so I started out at Columbia University, and at Christmas in my freshman year, my father, who was a World War I Vet, went into the Wilkes-Barre Veteran’s Hospital with miners’ asthma, but now called Black Lung, And he was helping me out to meet some expenses, so I dropped out of Columbia for one semester. Went to the University of Idaho on what’s called a full football ride. Subsequently, I got a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to the University of Michigan in Philosophy, John. And three credits away from my Master’s Degree in Philosophy, I took my first course in Geography, and went on to get a Ph.D.. in Geography. So when parents, particularly Mothers, used to tell me that they’re worried about their student, about their children, not having zeroed in on a degree yet, and they’re sophomores, I said, “Talk to someone else. Not to me.” Because I used to change my major almost daily.

Lowther: What was your undergraduate degree?

Macinko: Philosophy.

Lowther: Oh it was Philosophy.

Macinko: It was Geological Engineering until I was a junior at the University of Idaho. And then two weeks to the day after the formal ending of changing classes, I had taken a Philosophy of Ethics class, as an elective, and the Engineering Curriculum then was even tighter than it is now, so you almost didn’t have any electives. I took an elective in Philosophy second semester in my junior year, and I liked it better than I liked any of my Geological Engineering courses, so I prevailed upon the Provost, and I had to get his permission to change my major. I changed my major two weeks after the day of dropping and adding classes to Philosophy from Geological Engineering. And I had a bet with this man, Wally Steffens, he said, “ You’ll never make it. It’s too late in the year.” It was a milkshake, and I won. So I majored in Philosophy. Went to the University of Michigan, in Philosophy, but as I told you I changed that to Geography, and I had taken ROTC. The Korean War was on at this time. When I changed my major, the military said, “Hey, you can’t do that.” I guess they thought that I was simply trying to postpone my graduate career, so I wouldn’t have to serve, and I said, “Well, I’m doing it, and if you don’t like it, call me up because this is what I’m doing.” And they did, so I interrupted my graduate school to serve a couple of years in the Air Force during the Korean War period. I went back to Michigan, got my Ph.D. in Geography.

Lowther: You played football in college?

Macinko: University of Idaho, yes.

Lowther: University of Idaho. But you decided not to make football a career?

Macinko: Well, that wasn’t an option. And again, it came about because there were two things happening simultaneously. The Korean War was on, and I was an ROTC officer. At that time if I hadn’t been in ROTC, I could have done this, but in ROTC, since I already had my commission, there was only one thing they would postpone service for, and that was graduate school. And that’s when I went to this geography-philosophy kind of thing. So it wasn’t possible for me to try this, I’d been drafted by Green Bay and Texas and the Texas team, sort of interesting, I forget exactly what they were called, it was the Texas team that the year after, moved to Baltimore, and then moved again to Indianapolis.

Lowther: Oh, Yeah. The Colts.

Macinko: But I didn’t have a chance. When I was called up into the Service, it was August 31st, and that was two years after I had finished playing football, and then I had my military service, and then I got out on August 3 1st, and football had already started. I would have had a five year hiatus, and guys as good as Ted Williams, when they are out that long, and I was no Ted Williams, but I always regretted that I didn’t have the chance to do this. Not that I wanted a long term career, if that was possible with the pros, but I wanted to see if I could have done it. So that was the one regret.

Lowther: All right then, how did you get to Central?

Macinko: Well, my first teaching job was at University of Idaho, which was my undergraduate school, and I taught there for three years, and then I went to the University of Delaware and taught for six years. And I always, I fell in love with the Northwest while in Moscow, Idaho. I really like the Palouse, even better than I like this area. I like this area, but I fell in love with that, so I always had a hankering to come back to the Northwest, And I had known Marty Kaatz through professional, sort of, organizations. I had met Jim Brooks. And in the fifth year at the University of Delaware, where I had a National Science Faculty Fellowship, I’m missing something in that title, but anyway it was a National Science, Post Doctoral, Science Fellowship. I went back to the University of Michigan and went to the School of Natural Resources for a year, and while I was there, Ken Hammond happened to be there working on his Doctorate. This was like eight years after I got mine and I had been given a faculty office of someone who was on leave, and it was right next to the graduate student offices, and Ken’s office happened to be right next to mine, and I told him that I’d always had a hankering to go back to the Northwest. I wanted to live in a small town in the Northwest. I was getting offers at that time. If you recall, this was in 1965-66, there were lots of job offers. A couple of job offers every year, sometimes more than that, but they were all from some big place in a big city. I said I would like to move back to the Northwest, to a small town. He said, “I think we can arrange that.” And so he talked to Marty Kaatz, and Marty Kaatz talked to me and I came to Central in 1967.

Lowther: And what was your beginning rank and your academic assignment.

Macinko: I was associate professor. At that time 1 had already achieved tenure at both Idaho and Delaware before I came here.(?)

Lowther: And what was your assignment here?

Macinko: I was just a member of the Geography staff. Taught everything, namely Physical Geography. I taught physical Geography at 8 o’clock in the morning from the time 1 came here until three years ago. I would say that is the course i taught most often. And for twenty some years it was a course that had at least seventy-five people in it. Every quarter. Twenty some years at eight in the morning. Now, in 1969-70 1 took a year off from Central and went back to Dartmouth College as a visiting Professor and there I was given the entire Fall quarter off to work with the Biologists and Geologists to set up Dartmouth College’s Environmental Studies Program. When I came back here, a year later, Ed Harrington asked me if I would do the same thing here at Central, so in 1971 or 72, we began an Environmental Survival Studies, Minor program, and I was the head of that program. (?)

Lowther: And did you teach most of the Environmental Studies?

Macinko: I taught about half and half.

Lowther: Did you come here in, was it 65, or 66...

Macinko: 67.

Lowther: 67. OK. And when did you retire?

Macinko: I went on Phased Retirement last spring.

Lowther: So you’re, that would have been 96, so you’re still teaching part time?

Macinko: One course. One seminar, winter quarter.

Lowther: OK.

Macinko: And that’s so I have access to a secretary because I still want to do some publishing, and I don’t type.

Lowther: OK. All right, do you recall any problems during your career that, with classes that were significant?

Macinko: Well, I was thinking about that and... Yeah, remember I said that the most interesting things that happened to me happened a long time ago. Well, one of the problems that came about, there were two or three that came up immediately when I came here. You have somewhere in the interview agenda some problems between faculty and administration. My first year here, some time in the spring, I can’t remember when, but maybe in May, there was a little slip in my mail box and it said, “If you want to continue your insurance through the summertime, sign this and return it.” I thought that’s a strange kind of thing, but who would not want to be insured for three months during the summer if they’re insured for nine months during the school year, but that must be a very rare individual. So I went over to the Business Office, and I think I talked to Stan Bohne, but I talked to somebody in the Business Office, and I said, “Hey, this doesn’t make sense. You know you have like four or five hundred people here on the teaching faculty. Most of them must be on the insurance program, an yet you’re telling them by means of this, sort of loose arrangement here that if they want to be insured for the summer, they should sign this sheet. Why don’t we just reverse this? Why don’t we assume everybody wants to be insured twelve months a year and in May, put out a little slip, and say, ‘If you DON’T want to be insured in the summertime, sign this slip and we’ll take you off insurance.” It didn’t work until Courtney Jones came here. When I talked to him it immediately happened. So that my first couple of years here I sort of retreated to the Geography Department because I had, I wouldn’t call them run-ins, but there were just things that didn’t make sense to me and it seemed as if the Administrative procedures were such that they would say, “We can’t do that.” And I always felt it meant, “We don’t WANT to do that!” But they could do it because it was done immediately when Courtney Jones came here. There was another case, minor but it was just the kind of thing (?)...l think ... I sort of moved to the Geography Department which I found very congenial and more or less, didn’t get involved very heavily at all in the nuts and bolts (?). To give you an example, When I was at Idaho I got nine checks a year. For nine months.. .When I went to the University of Delaware I got a raise to go there, but my first check wasn’t much bigger than the one at Idaho, so I thought something’s wrong here so I went up to the payroll office and I found out, unknown to me, or maybe I didn’t read my literature that they were dividing my nine month’s salary, twelve times, I got twelve checks a year. So that first check was sort of less than I expected, it was a minor hardship, but I found that I liked that because it meant if you taught summer school that was a bonus, you know. If you got a research grant, fine, but if you didn’t your summer was covered. So when I came here I asked immediately, before we got to this thing about the insurance, I asked immediately, “Will you put me on for twelve checks a year?” They said, “No, we can’t do that.” And I knew that at that time all the Chairmen were on twelve checks a year so I said, “You know where you have Marty Kaatz’ name, just put my name right below his because you have a list of nine month people and you have a list of nine month people, put me on twelve months, Pay me for nine months, but just put me on for twelve cheeks.  They wouldn’t do it. And there were a number of things like that, that I felt uneasy, not uneasy about, but I thought they were sort of obstructionist, and so again, I tended to stay within my own Department, much more than I might have otherwise.

Lowther: You said you found the Department congenial?

Macinko: Yes.

Lowther: Who would you say are some of the outstanding members over the years?

Macinko: Well, Marty Kaatz because of the way he ran the Department. He treated you as though you were qualified. He hired you, you were qualified; therefore, he didn’t have to run herd on you and treated you as an adult individual with a mind of your own and he respected you for that. So he would be. But looking back I’m surprised that 1 come to this realization, that Central went through this development from a Teachers’ College, a Normal School Teachers’ college to a State College to a University. I came in ‘67, so I got in on the tail end of these people, but it seems to me that the most statesmen like people we’ve had here were people who were hired when we were a Teachers’ College. Now that we’re supposedly a full fledged University, I don’t think we have the same, the people with this, as great a depth because the people that I think, sort of like have a better grasp what a University might be, were guys like Harold Williams, Flwyn O’Dell, Chet Keller maybe even, you know Chet, quite audible, but people back then, I thought were people who had a broader view of the University than what we have today, and I’ve often wondered whether that might have been at least a part structural because I’ve always felt that Central’s Senate was structured the wrong way. We have a senator by decree from every single Department, or program. I felt that almost tells you that you’re representing a very narrow interest. When I was at the University of Delaware, for example, when I came here that University was about the same size as Central was at that time. Since then, they’ve grown much faster than we have, but they had a much smaller Senate, and the Senate represented, there was a couple from the College of Engineering, a couple from Arts and Humanities, a couple.. .NOT by Department. And when I look back at what Marty and others tell me was the early history at Central, it was Divisions that Central had at that time. So if you were a Senator, you represented a Division, you didn’t represent “A” Department. And I felt that that alone would tend, almost force you to have a broader view point, rather than be very narrowly focused.

Lowther: Among the Deans, the Presidents and Administrators, do any names stand out in your mind as particularly good administrators?

Macinko: Well, let me just sort of back off that, and say that this is a very highly personal opinion, it may not hold up, but I am of the opinion that Central’s faculty is, in general, better than the administration that I’ve known here. And I think that comes about not because the administrators themselves are bad people, but simply because when I look at it I see that Central has faculty from a wide range of graduate schools, some of them supposedly elite graduate schools, let’s say good schools. I don’t know of an administrator at Central in all the time I have been here, who held the position of Dean or better, at a really first rate school. Now we have faculty who got their PhD’s. at first rate schools, and we have administrators whose only administrative experience has been at something other than very first rate schools. We never had one, and so I feel that in many instances, they work very hard, they mean very well, but they’ve never had the personal experience of serving an apprenticeship at a truly first rate, well run school.

Lowther: Let’s talk about students. Have you noticed any change in the quality, kinds of students?

Macinko: Yeah, and it’s strange, and I don’t know if others feel the same way, but I keep hearing from Mitchell Hall, and from elsewhere, that our students are getting better and better because their grade point average is higher than it was before, and I don’t see it that way. I don’t think my students are as good now as they were thirty years ago. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have some very good students, but on the average, I think we have students who are, maybe less well prepared rather than they were before. Fortunately we’ve always had just enough students who are good, better prepared, you know, from, sort of, show me the power because they are quite good. But I think that the statistics that we, the data that we get, are out of accord with reality.

Lowther: Has there been much of a change in terms of the background of the students. or in terms of gender mix, or racial mix, socio-economic background?

Macinko: I’ve never really got into that, or tried to break that down. I felt that the students who show up are the students I tried to teach and deal with, whatever they may be, and that someone else is, maybe in that case I sort of, said that, that particular function of the University is someone else’s, and they should be in charge of it.

Lowther: Are you aware of, or do you remember any particular kinds of problems that existed between students and faculty during your tenure?

Macinko: Yeah, it seemed that quite often, and I don’t know if this is because some Departments are geared this way, but let me give you an example, a specific example. I was called on to go meet with the President twice. It happened to be during Jim Brook’s tenure, and at one instance it was because a girl, a young coed in my class,.., oh, I tell the students, remember I said I taught Physical Geography for a long period of time, and always large classes, so in that context, I don’t particularly like objective questions, I much prefer either oral or Blue Book type essay questions, but in that context I use objective questions. And I don’t like True-False questions. They only have.., fifty percent you can guess and get fifty percent right. I usually use best answer questions with about four alternatives so that the chance of getting them right by guess is twenty-five percent. As such, in my Physical Geography class, I’ve held to a uniform standard fifty percent, if you get fifty percent or better, you pass, if you get less than fifty percent, you fail. Now this particular girl took three exams and a final. She failed the first exam, she got less than fifty percent, failed the second, failed the third, failed the final, She didn’t get fifty percent in any exam. I gave her an “F”. Her father called up Jim Brooks and said that his daughter was a hard working girl. She goes to all the classes and therefore, how could she possibly fail? He called me in, I told him what I told you. He says, “No problem.” But I did find that quite a few Central students feel that if they show up for class, they’re not going to fail. They may not get an “A” or even a “B”, but they’re not going to fail because they were there. And I’ve always felt that it’s performance that counts. I could take analogies with a mechanic you take your car in for a tune up and it comes out worse than when it went in, you wouldn’t like that even though you might be convinced that a mechanic worked on it all eight hours, while you were gone, so 1 found that Central students sometimes feel that performance isn’t the first thing. If they show up, they’ll get at least, a so-called “Gentleman’s”“C”. But that type of thing is not by any means universal, but I felt that somewhere along the line, that kind of thing must reflect somewhat on the (?) of truth, that someone is giving them that impression.

Lowther: This student, was this a freshman student who may have been bringing a high school attitude?

Macinko: Yes.

Lowther: OK, is there anything else you wanted to comment on in terms of the students, experiences with students?

Macinko: Well, I’ve generally enjoyed them when I finally, and only over the last couple of years, got to teach some small classes. Because with almost all of my classes for about twenty-five years were very large classes where I didn’t have much personal knowledge of students. Finally I got to that, just in the last couple of years.

Lowther: Is that generally the rule in Geography?

Macinko: Oh, no. No, no, I was willing and, you know, to teach the large class, and in the Environmental Studies classes, let me back up, remember I said I started this, I was asked to begin this after I’d gone to Dartmouth, I worked there with some resident staff. At Dartmouth the students make a very sharp distinction between what they call “team teaching” and what they call “serial teaching”. Team teaching is what you and I, and let’s say John or whatever, are a team and were there every day the class meets, or maybe miss one day. Serial teaching is when you teach for a couple of weeks and then you’re gone, and then I teach for some weeks and I’ in gone. Dartmouth students don’t like serial teaching because they say, “Well, I’m teaching like they say something that Larry Lowther said this contrary to what I say. Oh, well, he’s gone.” So anyway, when I come back, and Ed Harrington asked if we’d start up an Environmental Studies Program, I was reluctant to do that because I studiously and successfully avoided all kinds of administrative work. I’ve never wanted to be a chairman. I’ve never wanted to be a Dean. I’ve never wanted to be a President. I wanted to be just a Professor, OK? And he was asking me to be a director of a program which was low level, but still an administrator. I said, “No, no.” So he prevailed on me. I says, “OK”. But I like the system that we set up at Dartmouth. I’m going to try to have some facsimile of that, and so it’s been team teaching and in order to get good team teachers, I want every person on the team to get full course credit. Right? Got that? But if you have a pretty big class and these were always big classes, it makes sense if we are seventy-five people and there’re two or three team members, you each get a fair number of student credit hours. So I don’t know where we started on this, but I lost why you asked me this even! But at any rate, we set it up that way. And as a result of that I had a very pleasant experience  because over the course of years, I taught with at least two dozen different faculty members from at least five or six different Departments. And that was very satisfying.

Lowther: Yeah, we were talking, I think, about class size, but this leads us into another question, and that is what would you say is your teaching philosophy, your philosophy of teaching, or your teaching style?

Macinko: I guess it would be a focus on competence.

Lowther: You said you teach, your experience has been mostly, at least in the early days, with large classes and you kind of enjoyed doing that. Is that because you lectured primarily, or...?

Macinko: Well, with that size class that was about all you could do. A couple of years back, right before I sort of gave up those very large classes, we got a graduate program in Resource Management and some of those students had Geography assignments to give for their duties. And I then was able to break down that class into sort of a couple hours of lecture and also discussion classes with graduate students in little in-house laboratories. So I enjoyed that. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy small classes, it’s just that somewhere along the line someone had to, you know, generate student credit hours and I was sort of pretty good at it, and I didn’t mind doing it, so I did it, in a sense, for the benefit of the Department.

Lowther: You were talking about setting up the Environmental Studies Program. This sounds to me as though this is something that originated with Ed Harrington...that is the idea of an Environmental Studies, or did it originate with you?

Macinko: No, no. It...both at Dartmouth and at Central, prior to my going to Dartmouth, and prior to Ed Harrington asking me to set one up here, there had been aborted attempts to set up this kind of a program, both here and at Dartmouth. So it wasn’t my idea, in a sense it wasn’t Ed Harrington’s idea. Someone else had had these ideas before at both of these schools and for whatever reason, they didn’t gel. So then Ed got the idea.

Lowther: Was there much debate about this program before it was actually set up?

Macinko: Well, not really. I sent around a letter, and I called every chairman at the time and I laid out, well this is what, you know, we are planning to do. Do you want to be part of this multi-disciplinary effort, and if so, you know, come to a meeting and you can help structure the program. This is the basic structure, but it’s flexible. And so people can opt in, or opt out, so in that sense, I don’t think it got too much resistance because it was sort of open for anybody’s input.

Lowther: Now, I’m kind of wondering what the stimulus would have been, I know there was a great interest in the environment...

Macinko: Well, yeah, you had.. .see this was coming like a year or two after the big Earth Day when Time Magazine and uk, and all those things had feature stories, and the public, see there’s always been an interest in the environment, but most Universities had maybe, a single course of what used to be called “conservation”, that was it. But then there was a professional interest, you know, among a small number of people. But then beginning about ‘69 or ‘70 there was sort of a mass public awareness holding, so this was just riding that particular wave.

Lowther: And usually one anticipates when you start a new program that there are going to be job opportunities out there for the graduates of that program.

Macinko: Well,...

Lowther: Did you have that anticipation?

Macinko: No, no. There were two ways to do this. You would either start up a program, or you trained almost like environmental science, or environmental scholars, in depth, that’s the field. Or you could say that it would be advantageous if, sort of, everybody had, a wide segment of society, had some knowledge of crucial environmental situations, problems, so you can train a small cadre of professionals, or else you could say, “We want to get environmental literacy spread throughout the University to the maximum step possible.” And that’s what we tried to do at Dartmouth, and that’s what I tried to do here. So that’s why I never tried, never even considered having environmental studies major. We wanted to have an environmental studies minor so people, whether they were historians, or journalists, for example, this is the approach we had. Suppose you were a journal..., in education or a journalist major, thought you were going to be a sports writer, or a drama critic and then you still had an interest in drama, or sports, but you got this developing interest in the environment and said, “Hey, maybe I could write about the environment.” OK, so you still stayed with your journalism curriculum, but you add environmental studies minor. Or conversely, you are maybe a chemist, you think you are going to work at Dupont Laboratories. As you are going through there you retain an interest in chemistry, but you ‘you’ve got some interest in the environment, so you say, “OK (?)maybe you want to do some pollution studies, you should know the context of (?) this particular desire takes place. That’s one of the matrices available and it’s sort of an environmental, as they say, some degree of environmental literacy widespread throughout the campus.

Lowther: Was it a popular program?

Macinko: Oh, yeah.

Lowther: Did it start small and grow, or did it start big and stay big?

Macinko: It started modestly, but not small, but then it grew and I would say that the basic courses, we’ve only had four basic courses, three more-or-less lecture-discussion courses and one sort of practical course where students actually take an environmental problem and try to come up with a solution, I would say that the average student-body size would have been a minimum of sixty in those three basic courses.

Lowther: George, were you in on the decision to change the name of the Geography Department from just Geography to Geography-Land studies?

Macinko: Yes and no. I was here when it was changed. I don’t, sort of, believe in cosmetic changes.

Lowther: So, was this a cosmetic change?

Macinko: Well, no not really, but I was satisfied with the word Geography, as such. (?) But people said we don’t know what Geography is at the college level, you know, a lot of people still think it is simply memorizing the capitols of the states and the longest river, the highest mountain.. .If that’s what they think of land studies, you’re not going to change their minds too much. (?) Do something more than just change the title, but there’s nothing wrong with changing the title (?) but, that’s just a personal preference.

Lowther: Before they added the Land Studies to the title, had they been training people to work in land use?

Macinko: Oh, yes. Yes, Definitely.

Lowther: So the curriculum didn’t change much as a result of that name change?

Macinko: No, but they felt it would be more descriptive of what was actually going on.

Lowther: OK. All right, George, did you serve on any of the major committees, of the University?

Macinko: Well, as I said, I tried to stay away from those, and successfully. I was on the Athletics Committee for a long time. I was on the Library Committee for again, not quite as long, but for a long time, I can’t remember now.

Lowther: OK, on the Athletics Committee was there any issue or development that stands out in your mind?

Macinko: Well, yeah, unfortunately, the Athletics Committee, typically toward the end of, several of the last several years. It’s not a rubber stamp committee, was a committee that I would find out when some hot issue came up, I found out about it by reading the Daily Record. We were not appraised of what was coming up. Like we didn’t know anything about the Dean Nicholson affair, for example. Something that important, until after the fact. You knew about it when I knew about it, and there could have been things that I believe the University could have benefited from an Athletics Committee that was IN early in the game. Several times we had to forfeit games because of something that happened that the Athletics Committee knew nothing about.

Lowther: What kinds of issues did the Athletics Committee deal with?

Macinko: Well, we were suppose to be dealing with those kinds of issues. Supposedly dealing with eligibility, with the direction the program takes, things of this sort. And to a limited degree, we did deal with those things, but...

Lowther: You were primarily a policy setting committee?

Macinko: Not a policy SETTING committee, sort of a policy watch dog.

Lowther: Did you have investigative responsibilities, to really check to see about whether they were following the eligibility requirements, and that sort of thing?

Macinko: Yeah, we did that.

Lowther: Do you think the Committee did a good job?

Macinko: The Committee did as good a job as they could with the information they were given.

Lowther: You, of course, were on the Athletic Committee because of your own athletic background and interests...

Macinko: Well, I suppose so.

Lowther: I understand that you were quite interested in the wrestling program here.

Macinko: Yeah, and I wrestled, sort of on my own, but that was my exercise. I worked out with the wrestling team until I was sixty years old.

Lowther: Until you were sixty!

Macinko: And I decided I was going to do that when I came out here when I was thirty. I would do this until I was sixty and then I would quit because it might be a little bit hairy at the end.

Lowther: Did you work out with some of the great wrestlers here?

Macinko: I. ..Yes...I was, you know, rather large. I guess some of the better big ones, but

I did work out with some very good ones. Mike Wilson, Ed, I forget his last name, from

Florida, but I missed Leroy Werkhoven, for example, by one year.

Lowther: How about Dennis Warren?

Macinko: The same thing. Dennis Warren, Leroy, and Dallas DeLay, a couple of these guys graduated one year before I came here.

Lowther: And you found that fun?

Macinko: Oh, yeah. Very much so, see 1, in that little coal mine town that I told of, where I was born and raised, they didn’t have wrestling. They do now, but they didn’t at that time, so I was, my wife said, I was always a frustrated wrestler because I got the football out of my system. I played football, OK? But Idaho didn’t have wrestling, so by the time I went to graduate school 1 had no eligibility. I began to wrestle as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, just as a hobby, and my wife said she wished that I had wrestled in college, so I could act grown up now and didn’t have to bother with those kids.

Lowther: I suppose it was kind of a relaxation thing?

Macinko: Oh, yeah. I enjoyed it immensely.

Lowther: That’s interesting. Now, getting back to the committees, I guess we were never off them, but you served on the Library Committee as well. Any particular issues there? What was your responsibility on the Library committee?

Macinko: Well, I guess I’d say that there were some procedures within the library that I think that we were able to work with, and to select library access, and I don’t know how to say this, Why would I (?). When I came here, if you ordered a library book for the library it might be three, four months before that book would come in. I had come from a school and they never adopted this thing, you know, like I told you the little story about insurance and Courtney Jones, well one of the first things that happened when I came here. I had already, before I left Delaware, I had agreed to give a talk before the Agriculture Research Service in Washington, D.C. in like about September or October, of the first year I was going to be here, so I’m working on this paper I’m going to give and I’d come out here and it’s not done yet, and there was a book or two that I sort of felt I really needed to finish this paper. When I had left Delaware, the faculty there were given little cards and you could ask the library to get a book, and the card was a sort of standard card. Author, Title, Year, maybe if you knew the price or whatever, but in the form it said rush order. Yes or No. Remember I said about the administration (?) I just want you to do it, OK? So I don’t know how they did this but at the University of Delaware if you put “rush order” I guess they called up the book company and said, “Would you send this right away?” Because you usually got that book within a week. And, of course, most of the time you put “no” because you didn’t need it. The library, you know, you felt wanted it, but you didn’t feel the need for it right now. So I came here, I ordered these books that I really needed, so I went to the library and said, “Can we get these books like right now?” And, of course, you know what the answer was. “No, we can’t.” So I sort of worked it, as you will, and I can’t remember the details of it, well, how can you get things a little bit more expeditiously. And also, I felt that maybe the library attitude, some of the books are suppose to stay on the shelves, so. ..I don’t know, it was sort of like ephemeral, but I thought there was a library at stake. The way they conducted their business work could he improved, and it has been.

Lowther: Did you have the feeling that the librarians were NOT trying to be helpful, or that they were just locked into a bureaucratic procedure?

Macinko: I think that it was because these acts were there, but almost like my comment about the administrators, never having had a good model to work with, that perhaps they didn’t really realize, from the users end, how things sort of work. Once they were apprised of this, they were more than willing to do this.

Lowther: You said that things got better.

Macinko: Yes.

Lowther: Do you recall about when they began getting better and who might have been responsible for that?

Macinko: Gee, I can’t. Just that things did get better.

Lowther: OK. That’s fine. Were there any other committees that you served on?

Macinko: Well, the only ones I remember are the ones I served on a long time.

Lowther: Yeah.

Macinko: No, I can’t really.

Lowther: You were never on the Curriculum Committee?

Macinko: No.

Lowther: Or on the Teacher Education Committee...

Macinko: No.

Lowther: .. .General Education. Now, did your Department have good working relationships with other Departments on campus, did you feel?

Macinko: Oh, I think so. I think much of this would go back to Marty Kaatz because he encouraged, even before we had something like this Environmental Studies Program, it was multi-disciplinary, formally multi-disciplinary. Marty always encouraged us to sort of, even on a spot basis, to go to other Departments and invite them in on various topics, so that particularly with Anthropology, and Geology, biology, those three, we had good and close relationships and people sort of switching hack and forth, aside from Environmental Studies. And that was because he had encouraged this very, very strongly.

Lowther: Did you have many contacts with the Education Department, if you were in the training of teachers?

Macinko: Few. Otto, when Otto Jakubek had left that almost expired.

Lowther: Was teacher training considered a big part of the responsibilities of the Geography Department?

Macinko: Well, I don’t know, I really don’t know how to answer that because I’m not quite sure what you mean by teacher training. We offered courses that...

Lowther: Did you have many students come through who were planning to he teachers, that is majoring in Geography, or minoring in Geography?

Macinko: Yes, we did in the early days. We have less now, but on the other hand we have many more Geography majors than we had early on.

Lowther: But they’re mostly, not planning to do something other than teach.

Macinko: I think so, yeah.

Lowther: OK. Let me run through just a series of things than you can respond or not, you know, as the spirit moves you. The salary schedule.

Macinko: I know...this may sound strange, but I’ve never paid that much attention to the salary schedule. Just as I felt with(?). You should hire good people and if you have them, give them free rein. Administration should administer, I told you (?) for mc. I always felt that if you have a chairman worth his salt, he should of be able to, sort of, like pretty well determine what you’re doing, and that you shouldn’t have to as a faculty member be sort of a clerk and report everything that you think might get sort of bonus points. But the chairman should be able to look around and say. “Well, look, this guy’s doing a lot better job than that guy and I’m going to give him more money than I give this guy. So I didn’t pay that much attention to it.

Lowther: Related to that, merit pay system.

Macinko: Or the lack of it, yeah. I’ve always, you know, I did have a gripe, hut I

wondered about this that if you say you want to promote excellence, for years we had a

system which, if I recall correctly, you got automatic, sort of, increases for awhile, when we had money, automatic increases until you got into the over-lap, and then when you got into the over-lap you didn’t unless you either got a, sort of, promotion to the next high rank, or something else, OK? Now, (?) that always seemed to be a strange way of doing things if you were really committed to something called excellence because if you’re very good then you get into over-lap very quickly, and you stagnate. But if you’re not very good, but keep your nose clean, then every year you get a little increment, OK? Or sort of almost doing nothing other than the minimal amount of work, and I thought that that’s not the way in which you promote excellence. So I would feel, I would give, for example, myself, personally try to get a chairman who is really worth the salt, and then give him much more discretion in salary and in many other things that we give chairmen at this University.

Lowther: Do you feel that you were adequately recognized for your contributions here?

Macinko: I think so, yeah.

Lowther: Faculty code. Academic freedom.

Macinko: I worry a little bit about the last five, ten years about, you know, the politically correct kind of situation where I feel faculty are inhibited from really speaking freely on a wide range of issues.

Lowther: Did you have many relationships with the Board of Trustees?

Macinko: None.

Lowther: OK.. .Or the Legislature? How about faculty-administration collegiality?

Macinko: Well, I think there’s a lot less of it, and as I understand it, President Nelson says he doesn’t believe in collegiality, at least that’s what someone told me that when they went over there in his office (?)that was his direct response, so I think that collegiality was something that has diminished greatly (?), not only at Central, but throughout, a different type of(?) atmosphere than we had when I started out.

Lowther: One of the things we hear a lot about is faculty morale, do you feel, what do you think has been the state of faculty morale over the years? Has it changed any? How would you describe it?

Macinko: Well, there was a certain dynamism back in the early, mid sixties where people were moving in and out (?). It looked as if you had anything going, you didn’t like it here you’d go there, you know, so that people were more optimistic because they didn’t feel they were locked in, so I think faculty morale has gone down because we’re much more, kind of, sort of stagnate situation. Well, that’s good. You must make your bed here. Try to make it as good as you can, but I don’t think there is as much buoyancy, as much optimism, as much vitality as there was 35 years ago.

Lowther: Do you think the faculty members generally feel good about what they’re doing and their accomplishments?

Macinko: I don’t know because I don’t circulate that much to know.

Lowther: In terms of yourself? Have you felt good about what you have accomplished here at Central?

Macinko: Well, I don’t know. I guess if you have any ambition you always feel you should have done more.

Lowther: What would you say was your greatest contribution to Central?

Macinko: Perhaps the Environmental Studies Program and for a while I was quite active in the Geography profession. I served as chairman of a number of commissions within the Geography profession. I was author, or co-author of a couple of books that were put out by the American Association of Geography itself, and in that respect then, I think that there’s a lot of role playing,...What do I want to say? I’ve found that there’s a lot of people who feel that when you’re at a place like Central, you’re out in academic no-man’s land, and perhaps, perhaps I was able to demonstrate to a small degree at least, that you could play with the big boys even when this is your home base.

Lowther: George, were there some things that you would like to talk about, like to mention? Maybe specific incidents, or issues that we haven’t covered, but you think should be mentioned.

Macinko: Very, very strictly, marginal notes here. I don’t know. (shuffling through notes for a short period of time.) Oh, yeah. One of the things that always sort of disappointed me was, particularly when we had a University-wide meeting, to a lesser extent when we had a College-wide meeting, sort of headed up by a Dean, or a University President, particularly at the University level. I felt that a grave opportunity was missed the way we do those things because they tend to be one way dialogue. The President comes out and he says something and we listen and then we go home. And I was struck by how different that was from my experience at the University of Delaware where there every other month you have nine months here but even so, a little bit of sleuth in the beginning (?), so you have eight meetings a year. Four meetings are your College meetings with your Dean. Four meetings are the University meetings with the President. Now, particularly at the University level, that was on Monday. The first Monday of every second month from four to five o’clock. I will guarantee you that almost nobody, no faculty member ever missed that meeting if he was in town because things got done at that meeting. This would, to give you a for instance, there would be an agenda for that meeting. There would be maybe a thing to find, to tackle a particular problem to talk about and then at that meeting there would be a very short presentation by the chairman of the committee that was addressing that problem. The president would then say, “OK, do we have any discussion from the floor?” And if you weren’t prepared because there was a very high degree of professors there, you didn’t get up and just ramble on, you had something to say, after a little bit, the President would say, “OK, let’s vote on this.” It might be like, are we going to, you know, reduce the foreign language requirement for students in the Arts and Science curriculum? And you’d actually vote on that thing. Right there. After you had this very good presentation by a committee who would give you the pros and cons. So you went there because you participated. Furthermore, after just the first year there I had a pretty good idea of who the good heads on the campus were by who spoke up on these various issues and when this guy spoke up, I listened because I knew that the last two or three times he talked on an issue, he really had the facts down, had done his homework, and... knew what he was talking about. When I came here after five or six years, I didn’t know the faculty nearly as well as I knew the faculty there. But those meetings were absolutely, don’t miss them because that was the best entertainment in town. You couldn’t have something more interesting than a University-wide faculty meeting while I was there? Once in a while the President would say, “OK.” And he’d thank the faculty for having come to this particular conclusion(?) On a very important issue he’d say, Thank you, you’ve obviously done a lot of work. You’ve given it a lot of thought; however, since I’m ultimately responsible for running the University, Hey, I’m going to do this. This is different than what the faculty voted on, but knowing this is the way you feel, I’ll be looking over my shoulder, and if it ever appears that my way is wrong, I’ll switch and we’ll do this. OK?” So the faculty meetings meant something. Here they mean almost nothing, and I’ve always been disappointed that we couldn’t do something like that. To have the faculty really participate.., almost like the New England town meetings, much more focused, much more concentrated. I think that we missed the boat by the way in which we conducted ours.

Lowther: OK. Thank you very much for this interview.

Macinko: Thank you, Lawrence

Lowther: Great.